::FIVE::
I kissed her last night. It was just a little kiss, but I haven’t kissed a woman in over a year and a half, not since Stacy. I haven’t wanted to, either. I had thought that part of me died with her, and I didn’t think I’d ever feel that way about anyone, ever, again. I didn’t think I’d ever want to feel that way again.
I dreamt of Jeanette last night, another thing I didn’t think I’d ever do again. It was pretty mild, as far as those dreams go. Necking, a little heavy petting, but it still took me by surprise, waking up soaked in sweat, feeling flushed and guilty at the same time. The water turns ice cold, as I shut the hot tap off, a welcome shock. I stay under as long as I can stand it, my teeth chattering and my skin blue when I get out. I can kiss her, I can dream of her, but some thoughts I’m not ready for. Not just yet.
The knock comes at a little before six thirty in the morning, as I’m getting out of the shower. Alvarez, with coffee, holding up a bag of something up to the window. Breakfast. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I didn’t eat much last night, and my dreams took what little else I had. I let him in, wearing nothing but a towel. The corner of his mouth turns up in a grin, my skin still blue from the cold.
“I’m going to have to give you a key, Alvarez. Although….the thought of you jumping the back fence….”
“Hey, I almost got mud all over my new shirt doing that.” Alvarez says, from the kitchen, as I get dressed, having to open another box to find a clean shirt. My room is a mess, I hadn’t realized that until now.
“How would anyone know?” I yell out from around the bedroom door. Alvarez, true to form, is wearing a black Hawaiian shirt with green palm trees.
“Very funny, Vetter.” He’s laughing as he says it, handing me a cup of coffee, as I come back into the kitchen. “You’re in a good mood. I take it the date went well?”
It’s not something I talk about, but I can’t hide my grin when he says it, I feel like a kid. “It was just dinner.” I rummage through the bag he brought with him, finding a muffin. I needed something to do with my hands, probably something in my mouth to keep me from talking non stop about her too.
“Just dinner, huh…” He’s grinning back at me as he says it, not believing me for a second. I doubt I was very convincing. “You going to see her again?”
I cram the rest of the muffin in my mouth before I can answer, Alvarez is just going to have to settle for a nod. I’m not fooling anyone, least of all Alvarez, who looks into the bag, digging out a danish, before walking out the back door to sit on the porch. I follow him out, a little curious, taking a seat on the stairs across from him. I figured he was just picking me up early.
“You know, Adriana’s going to get it out of you, when she sees you next. That woman is relentless. Part of the reason I came out this early. First thing she says to me when I woke up. ‘Rrrrramon!’ ,” I laugh around a mouthful of coffee, spluttering, as Alvarez launches into an imitation of his wife’s voice. Adriana speaks in a rapid fire Spanglish, and her hands are even faster. Alvarez waves his danish at me. ” ‘Choo are going to ask about Sean’s date with that girl’. She just kept asking, and asking, and once she got her name out of me…She wants to know when you’re going to bring her over.”
I must have looked like a deer in the headlights. “I know, I said she’d have to wait awhile. She took a deep breath,..” I laughed again, knowing what that meant. Alvarez was going to get it with both barrels. “I grabbed the keys and said I had to pick you up early. I’m a dead man when I get home, Vetter.” He finishes the rest of his danish, most of it crumbs now, after his Adriana impression.
“So.You’re seeing her again?” Alvarez can be relentless too.
I nod. Alvarez waits, smiling at me. “I’m going to see her again tonight, after she gets off work.” I look out across the brown grass of my untended yard, knowing I’m grinning again, and not being able to stop it.
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe a movie. She works until around seven tonight. I guess I should have been paying attention when you were driving. I have no idea where I’m going.”
He’s grinning at me, as he gets up, brushing the crumbs off his shirt. “Come on. We’ll drive by on the way to work. Maybe buy you a map.” His grin turns to a laugh, as he walks back into the house. “You might want to do something about this…” His hand sweeps around my living room, still littered with unopened boxes. “If you’re going to have a woman in your life, Sean. They can be funny about guys living out of cardboard boxes. She might take you for a bit of a flight risk”
It’s a lot of boxes. I hadn’t really looked at it before, maybe I just hadn’t seen much of anything in the past little while. There are boxes everywhere. I’ve never been a slob, but I can’t imagine any woman coming here, seeing this mess, and not running right back out the door again. I had just noticed my bedroom, and my yard this morning, like they didn’t exist before today. Maybe, for me, they didn’t. It’s probably just as well I haven’t been cooking here too. Who knows what the place would look like then. I haven’t cared about anything, I hadn’t even noticed any of it. When I sold the house in LA, I just bought this one. I didn’t even look at it when I bought it. Just paid for it, had whatever boxes I had left after getting rid of almost everything delivered, and haven’t done a thing since. A layer of dust covers everything in the house.
“It’s not that bad, man.” Alvarez is patting me on the back, laughing at my stricken look. “Adriana, the kids, me, we’ll come over tomorrow, help you fix it up a little.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet. If Adriana’s here, it means she gets to ask you instead of me.”
I’m laughing as I lock the door behind me. “Thanks anyway. Tomorrow?”
“Yea, we’ll come by after work, bring some pizza, unless you have something hidden in that fridge, maybe hiding under the ice cube trays?”
“You think maybe I should go shopping too?”
“You want to make her go hungry?”
He just laughs at me, as I get in, and he pulls out of the driveway. I’ve been a mess for a while, there’s no getting around that. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve wanted it to be different. That I wanted to be something other than numb. When Jeanette and I left the restaurant last night, I thought about more than just dating her, more than just dinner. I liked how that felt, it felt right.
Alvarez is doing a slow drive around the theatres, so I’ll know where to go later. “Adriana’s not the only thing that had me leaving early. We had another one last night.” He doesn’t need to explain. Another overdose.
“Let me guess, still no official interest.” This isn’t our case. This isn’t anybody’s case. When we run into cops, it’s the usual rivalry, but it’s because we’re DEA, not because the case has been taken off of them. Alvarez is interested because it’s the way his mind works. There’s no way he could leave this alone, seeing connections where other people see nothing at all. I doubt, now, whether a lot of people in our office even want to see it.
“The coroner tipped me off about it, this morning, We’re it, as far as interest goes.”
“That’s eleven dead, that we know of, in less than a week now. The purity in the last one is the same?” Alvarez nods, taking a lazy route around the downtown area of El Paso, not really going anywhere. “I did a little reading yesterday. Heroin here, until recently was around ten to twenty percent pure before this. Nowhere near this lethal. I’d say someone new just showed up, and is looking to cut into someone else’s territory.” This thing has a drug war stamped all over it.
“Not trying to cut in. Trying to take back.” All the good humour has gone from Alvarez’s face again, leaving cold hard intellect behind. I’m struck again by the almost careful disguise of his clothes, his posture. He’s not sloppy around me, but it changes, the moment he’s in the office. He expects to slide under the radar. I think he does it deliberately, so he’ll be left alone, to do what he really wants to do. Alvarez has the mind of a detective.
“Take it back…back from who?” A half formed idea in my head. “…From who ever stole it in the first place.”
“That ‘small’ fractured cartel that Brubaker ripped off in 1993 is now the third largest cartel in Colombia, after the Cali cartel was disbanded. The smaller franchises picked over the bones, with a man named Vega taking the reins of the cartel Brubaker stole from. I doubt Vega ever forgot about who ripped him off. He views this territory as his, and he wants it back.”
“You think Brubaker’s been running heroin out here, using the 1993 theft as start-up?” A man with Brubakers’ connections, with the money to buy in, could own the whole state of Texas. At least. And Texas is a gateway to shipping through a lot of the US.
“You’re smart, Vetter. Cocaine and heroin, worth $270 million. He could easily have turned that into double, even triple that, once he got it to the US. Minus whatever cut the CIA took of it, that is. Probably kept the CIA on the payroll. Keep the planeloads flying in.”
“So Vega floods the market with nearly pure heroin. Drives down prices, and takes a big chunk out of Brubakers business.” The level of Brubakers’ involvement still floors me. There’s dirty and then there’s dirty. Brubaker crossed a line when he became a drug lord himself. “Would Vega kill Brubaker’s son?”
“It seems a little subtle. The new cartels are extremely violent, as you know. Vega is known for his brutality, especially towards people that have crossed him. Two deaths made up to look like OD’s?” Alvarez passes the entrance to the DEA building, circling around again, not wanting to talk about this at the office. “If it had been a drive by, or a car bomb, I’d say yes, but this is something else.”
“An assassination.” Brubakers’ CIA connections come to mind. Provided he still has them. I wonder if he crossed them too.
“Not the first, either.” Alvarez stops for a light, and continues. “Two of the agents that were in on the drug bust with Brubaker were killed before Brubaker’s son was killed.”
“So it’s just Brubaker, and one other agent left. Where does the CIA figure in all this, Alvarez?”
“The CIA can get the drugs into the country, and the CIA were definitely part of the first double cross, of the cartel.”
“Maybe Brubaker figured he could double cross the CIA too. Hell, maybe the CIA went back to Vega, when it found how things were going in Colombia. No matter what, I think we just soared way out of our pay grade, Alvarez. With Brubaker tied in here, where can we really expect to take this?”
Alvarez’s knuckles are white on the wheel. “I don’t know how high this mess goes in the DEA, Vetter, I just don’t know. I’ve been putting together a few things, what the hell I’m going to do with it, I don’t know. You know what’s going to happen here if a full scale drug war hits the streets, you know how bad it can get.”
“L.A., Miami, New Orleans. That bad.” It never ends with the drugs, that’s just the beginning. Pretty soon, you’ve got ten year olds with mac-10′s shooting each other in the streets. Paramilitary police forces make things even worse, with a spiraling crime rate. War zones are nicer places.
“My kids live here, Sean. My family. Sure, we could pick up and leave. And leave. And leave again. You probably joined the DEA for the same reasons I did. I can’t leave here, Vetter. I can’t just pack up and go and pretend nothing’s happening.”
“So where do we go with what we’ve got so far?”
“We don’t go anywhere with it. Yet. If Brubaker ends up killed by Vega, there may be a cleaner way to do it. If not…” He’s pulling into the backlot of the DEA’s parking lot, going quiet as we pass security. “If not, then we go to OPR, and let them deal with it.”
The Office of Professional Responsibility. The DEA’s answer to Internal Affairs. Strange that having the cartel, hell, even the CIA, just kill off Brubaker would be the cleaner option. Then the DEA might step in, as long as it could cover up the fact that a high ranking former agent became a drug lord right under their noses, and they didn’t do anything about it.
—
I had Alvarez sign off on my request for a company car. He told me to try not to get myself lost, and then handed me a map he bought from the magazine stand around the corner. Laughed pretty hard over it too. We didn’t talk about our nonexistent ‘case’ for the whole day. Not that we could ever talk about it at the office anyway, but we definitely couldn’t do it now.
That wasn’t really all that hard for me, I couldn’t get Jeanette out of my mind, and transcribing tapes was exactly what I needed. Something mindless I could do, while I thought about her. Our date last night running through my head, our kiss, my waking dream of her. I wonder if she’s doing the same thing at her work.
I picked up a coffee maker, and whatever else I needed, on my way home from work. A couple of coffee mugs. It dawns on me when I leave the store that I bought two. My luck, I probably have a coffee maker in one of these boxes somewhere. It’s the first thing, other than beer, that I’ve had in the house since I moved in, and definitely the first thing I’ve ever made here. I sit outside, in the shade of the back porch, drinking coffee, thinking of Jeanette, and trying not to keep looking at my watch.
copyright © 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx