I Can’t Let You Go 3

::THREE::

There were two more heroin overdoses late Sunday night, bringing the total to ten, in less than a week, and still no official interest in the case. Alvarez got tipped off by the coroner, first thing in the morning, which meant he was banging on my window for me to get up at around six. I toss my house keys out the window to him, while I get dressed and pull myself together. He puts the flower, the pink daisy Jeanette left for me, back down on the coffee table when I get out, and doesn’t say anything about all the boxes. I couldn’t really answer either of those questions. I’m definitely not ready to explain Jeanette.

“Come on, we’re going for breakfast. I took a look in your fridge, nothing but ketchup packs and ice cube trays in there.”

“I’m not really domestic.” Not domestic anymore that is.

“I noticed. I’m going to have to get Adriana to make more sandwiches. You need a woman to take care of you, Sean, before you starve to death.”

If it was anyone other than Alvarez, that might have annoyed me. Him and his wife have been trying to set me up with someone since I got here. I had to take him aside, when we were having dinner at his house, and tell him I just wasn’t ready. He knows about Stacy.

Breakfast is coffee and danishes, sitting in a nondescript company car on the street outside Brubaker’s house at around six thirty in the morning. The two million dollar house four doors down from Brubakers is a LOT smaller. The man made lake seems more than a little out of place, here in the middle of the desert, but it does say money. We stay out of the sweep of the security cameras at the front of the house. I didn’t need to point them out to Alvarez. I’m guessing he’s been here before.

“Tell me about Brubaker.” Alvarez looks over at me, before taking a deep breath, a mouthful of danish. Like he’s debating whether it’s safe to confide in me or not. I wait.

“Brubaker was part of a DEA team in 1993 that was sent to intercept a shipment between a Colombian cartel and a company calling itself Civil Aviation.”

“Civil Aviation.” It’s hard to hide the disgust in my voice, Alvarez didn’t need to explain. Civil Aviation, Civil Air Transport, any one of a hundred different names. All of them interchangeable, all of them meant one thing. CIA. Air America. Running drugs, guns, counterfeit money, anything else that would sell. To anyone.

“Brubaker ordered the backup to hold back, in a central location, and, with three other agents, they approached the meeting place. This is where the official version and the unofficial version part ways.”

I had read the official version, when Alvarez first mentioned Brubaker. The official version had Brubaker and a small team move forward to intercept the trade. Brubaker claimed the Cartel started shooting first, but it turned into a firefight pretty quick. The rest of the Cartel’s men then moved behind, and killed the backup DEA agents. Civil Aviation then got away with what was rumoured to be close to $270 million in heroin and cocaine. Brubaker and his three fellow agents, being the only survivors of the shootout, were afforded hero status, once they returned home from Colombia. Their stories became untouchable. Even to question it was to ensure censure. No wonder Alvarez was so cagey.

“I read the official version.”

“Unofficially…” That wariness comes over him again. Watching me, watching the house, the street. “Unofficially, we have this.” He’s pointing to the multimillion dollar home by the side of an artificial lake. At a boy in a parking lot, dead of a heroin overdose. Needless to say, a DEA agents salary and pension aren’t going to cover that. I’m sure he had all his ducks in a row and it looked legitimate for the IRS, but dirty is dirty. “I don’t know the real facts of what happened with that intercept, everything I’ve got is guesswork. The deal was worth an estimated $270 million. That was just the estimated value of the heroin and cocaine based on an informant’s best guess.”

We rarely have hard numbers to deal with. When you’re dealing in speculation, when you’re never going to have to account for a difference between an estimate of $270 million, and, say, $200 million, there’s a lot of room for some agents to start lining their own pockets. Alvarez was talking about a high ranking agent killing his own men for $270 million. Probably a lot more than that figure, once it got into the country.

Alvarez continues. “The $270 million was it’s value, in Colombia, uncut. Double it, triple it, if you want, when you get it to the US, provided you can get it here, and you have the people who will move it for you.”

Even here, I can’t ignore the sight of the mountains behind us, of the Rio Grande between us. “I get the feeling we’re not talking moving the stuff in the false bottoms of cars. It’s too much for drug mules, no matter what they’re driving. That leaves flight.”

Places like Mena, Arkansas, and who knows how many other tiny airstrips around the country. Technically, they don’t exist. If people knew how many planeloads of drugs, weapons and who knows what else came into their country every night, it would cause panic. There are no borders, not anymore. No real security. Definitely not when the very government that’s supposed to keep it out is letting it in.

‘Controlled deliveries’ we call them. The DEA allows those planes to land, allows drugs into the country, so that it can track where it goes, and trace back where it came from. When it’s actually used to that end, it works, and that particular pipeline will close down. It doesn’t always work that way. Things go wrong, and sometimes things go wrong on purpose.

“Brubaker, and the three agents that came out of Colombia with him, claimed that the Cartel members were dead, that the Cartel had shot the DEA agents. There would be no ‘controlled delivery’, or at least not one controlled by the DEA.” Alvarez continues talking, as he smoothly pulls away from Brubakers house. “He claimed that Civil Aviation made off with the drugs, plus whatever they had brought with them.”

The CIA didn’t fly empty planes. They would pay for the drugs with cash, most likely counterfeit US dollars, or weapons. “You think Brubaker had a deal with the CIA to take that delivery?”

“Brubaker didn’t have the agents for a legitimate ‘controlled delivery’ anymore. If he did do it legitimately, he wouldn’t have complete control over the shipment, and there was a good chance the entire shipment would have been simply destroyed.” Alvarez goes quiet as we pull into the DEA’s parking lot.

“So he got it into the country, clearly. It still doesn’t explain why his son is dead, or why there’s a flood of nearly pure heroin hitting the streets like this. The last time I saw that was in the middle of a drug war.” Alvarez just gives me a knowing look, as he gets out of the car. Neither one of us speaks about it at the office, but the questions are burning in me, and I don’t like where the answers are taking me.

—

We worked right through the day. I think it was the longest either one of us had stayed at our desks in the entire time I had been at the office. I felt more alone than I had in a long time. I always knew there were dirty agents, I’m not naive, but in LA, in my unit, we knew each other enough to know who was dirty. We knew who we could trust. I look across the desk at Alvarez, knowing in my gut that I can trust him. I have no idea who else I can trust, I don’t know anyone else here.

My mind flashes to the pink flower on my coffee table, to Jeanette.

…

“Yeah, that’s what I thought….” Alvarez, his hip leaning against the desk, a smile on his face. How a man can look smug in a bright green shirt with yellow pineapples, I couldn’t tell you, but he does. I’m pretty sure he just asked me a question, maybe more than once.

“I’m sorry, what?” Which makes him grin at me even more.

“Come on, Vetter, this is going to make Adriana very happy. Maybe now she won’t ask me every day if you’re seeing anyone.”

“I’m no….”

“Don’t bullshit me, Vetter, I’ve never once seen you smile like that, in the entire time I’ve known you. And you’re sleeping too, I was knocking on your door for five minutes, before jumping your fence to knock on the window.” The thought of Alvarez jumping over my fence has me grin a little wider.

I couldn’t deny it, but I couldn’t really explain it either. He waits until we’re outside, I guess it’s his way of being discreet. “Does she work in the office?”

“No.”

“I never see you go anywhere else, where did you meet her?” He’s genuinely puzzled, I really don’t go anywhere else, and he’s not going to give me any peace until I tell him something. Alvarez can be persistent.

“If I told you, you’d have me in front of a psych evaluation team tomorrow.” Which is probably the last thing I should have told a guy that hangs around in the morgue for fun. Who knows what he’d do with that bit of information.

“Oh come on, you can’t leave it there.” He asks over the hood of his car, before we get in.

“The cemetery.” He just looks over at me, wondering maybe if I’m joking with him. It sounds strange once I’ve actually said it out loud. It is a pretty strange place to meet a woman, I guess.

“The flower..” He says it like it’s just dawned on him.

“Yea.”

“You been seeing her long?”

“Once, no twice. Once…I don’t know.” The sharks are circling. Alvarez is grinning at me. Just thinking about her is making me grin back.

“Am I dropping you off at home, or are you coming to have dinner with us? I should warn you, Adriana is going to read you like a book….” He’s asking as he pulls up to the edge of the parking lot.

“Drop me off at the University.” A strange look, momentarily wary, and, given where our day took us earlier, maybe I can’t blame him. “The bookstore.” Which puts him at ease again, even if it gives him more to grill me with.

“Where you went to get coffees…Was that the second meeting?” It’s a ‘when did you stop kicking your dog’ kind of question. He has me cornered. I get the feeling he’d keep circling the block, not letting me out of the car, until he got it out of me.

A nod.

“She works in the bookstore?…”

Another nod. Alvarez is slowing down, just a little. Maybe he won’t drive around the block, maybe he’ll just drive really slow, until he pulls it out of me. Even Hicks was never this relentless.

“This mystery lady have a name?”

“Jeanette.” I fight against the softening of my voice when I say her name. I don’t hide it very well.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it? Adriana would never let me sleep, or anything else tonight, if I didn’t get a name out of you.”

We’re pulling up to the bookstore, I fight the urge to look at my watch, and lose. It’s three forty five. The bookstore closes at four, on a Monday. Alvarez swats my arm before I get out of the car.

“Watch your heart, Sean, but don’t watch it too close.”

I can’t help but smile at him. “Thanks.”

—

The lights are already off in the bookstore, the coffee pots are all empty, the chairs up on the tables. My heart sinks, at the thought I’ve missed her. The teenage kid with the purple hair sticks his head up from under the counter, and answers me, smiling, before I get a chance to even ask about her. I’ve never thought of myself as being so easy to read.

“Jeanette’s at the back, in the stacks.”

I mumble my thanks, and head to the back to look for her. She’s standing, stretched, on a step stool, putting books on the shelf. A short sleeved black blouse, untucked. A fleeting glimpse of the pale skin of her hip, her belly, before her arm drops again, for another pile of books.

When I came in here it seemed so clear what I had wanted to ask her. Looking at her now, I can’t imagine what that was. My chest feels tight, and I know that anything I said right now would be in a voice I would never recognize as my own. ‘Watch your heart, but don’t watch it too close’, he said.

“Jeanette?” I wouldn’t have thought it would be so hard to say just one word. She turns, looking back over her shoulder at me, balanced on the step stool. A flicker of surprise, before her her face breaks into a huge smile, caught off guard. My breath catches, her alluring posture wasn’t intended, but, once seen, can’t be taken back now.

“Sean.” The smile is in her voice too, not just her face. She’s as glad to see me as I am to see her.

I move forward automatically, to offer my hand as she turns to climb down from the stair. Neither of us lets go.

“Thank you for the flowers, I… I didn’t really know what to say, at the time.”

“Thank you for the one you left me.” Her dark eyes widen in surprise, just a little, before she blushes, smiling.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get that one.”

“Will you go to dinner with me, Jeanette?”

She squeezes my hand for a moment. “Let me get my coat.”

copyright © 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

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