Hacienda Gentlemen’s Club
Northwest Highway near Lemmon Avenue, Dallas
Sunday, November 16, 7:45 P.M. Texas Standard Time
The two-year-old dark gray Chevrolet Tahoe, coated in road grime and with mud caked to its wheels and fenders, sat in the parking lot of Juanita’s Tex-Mex Cantina. The lot was adjacent to the Hacienda strip club, the building of which in a former life had served as a Sears & Roebuck home appliance store. The restaurant, despite its garish colors and Spanish-language signage, still somewhat resembled the Burger King that it originally had been.
The Tahoe wasn’t the only vehicle in the parking lots lining Northwest Highway that looked as if it could have just driven in from the sticks. There were plenty of dirty cars and trucks, some of them farm and ranch pickups, but most advertising some type of service—plumbers, electricians, welders.
Odds were heavy, however, that the Tahoe was without question the only one with red-and-blue emergency lights behind the grille, a fully automatic Heckler & Koch UMP .45 ACP submachine gun in a concealed lockbox in back, and, in a rack mounted in the headliner, a Remington 870 Tactical twelve-gauge shotgun.
Sergeant James O. Byrth, of the Texas Rangers, sat behind the wheel, his right elbow on the armrest as he held a cell phone to his ear. In his left hand, at the knuckles, he repeatedly tumbled a small white pinto bean from pinkie finger to thumb, then back again.
Byrth was thirty-one years old, six feet tall, a lithely muscled 170 pounds. His thick dark hair was neat and short. He had on gray slacks—the cuffs breaking over a pair of highly polished black ostrich-skin Western boots—a white cotton dress shirt with a striped necktie, and a navy blue blazer, single-breasted with gold buttons. Pinned just above the shirt pocket was his sterling silver badge, a five-point star within a circle engraved with DEPT. OF PUBLIC SAFETY—TEXAS RANGERS—SERGEANT. A white Stetson rested brim-up on the passenger seat.
As he listened, Byrth’s dark, intelligent eyes stared out the wiper-smeared windshield, intently watching the traffic at the Hacienda’s front door. The façade of the strip club had been painted a bright canary yellow and had posters of half-naked girls in suggestive poses stapled to it. Above the black door, which was swung completely open, a red neon sign flashed ENTRADA. A bouncer, a swarthy rough-looking Hispanic, sat on a backless stool in front of the door, his arms crossed as he eyed the cars circling the parking lot and the approaching customers.
“Hold one, Glenn,” Byrth said into his phone as he heard the growing whine of twin turbofan jet engines. “Here comes another damn plane.”
He looked across the street to where an elevated line of airport runway approach lights blinked into the distance. A moment later a Boeing 737—the medium-range passenger jet’s bright orange belly illuminated by its landing floodlights—flashed overhead with a deafening roar. He watched it descend over the runway lights, then land at Love Field, Dallas’s municipal airport.
After a moment, Byrth said, “Okay, Glenn, give it to me again. What’s the kill count up to?”
—
Texas Rangers Sergeant Jim Byrth had spent most of the day with Hunt County Sheriff Glenn Pabody, after Pabody had put in the call around seven o’clock that morning. Since the founding of the legendary Rangers in 1823—making them the United States’ oldest state law enforcement organization—the relentless lawmen had earned a reputation for taking on extraordinary cases that others didn’t have either the resources or the authority, or often both, to handle. Such was its importance that Section 411.024 of the Texas Government Code stated: “The Texas Rangers may not be abolished.”
“I ain’t sure what exactly this is, Jim,” Pabody had reported. “But it ain’t just another Hunt County meth lab. It’s a helluva lot worse. Definitely some kind of organized crime. Maybe cartel? You need to see it to believe it.”
Byrth had headed toward Lake Tawakoni, an hour’s drive east of Dallas. As he drove along Interstate Highway 30, the city gave way to suburbs, then that turned to large spreads of horse and cattle ranches, some of which were dotted with towering rigs drilling for natural gas in the vast shale. Exiting the freeway, he picked up two-lane farm-to-market roads, following them through country that became increasingly rugged and heavily wooded.
Near the lake, finding the entrance to the property had not proven a problem. It was just past a wide spot in the road—the tidy little town of Quinlan, population a thousand or two—and had a Hunt County Sheriff’s Office patrol car parked on the shoulder of the road. The white Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, even with its emergency lights dark, stood out in the middle of nowhere.
A uniformed deputy sheriff, who looked to be maybe thirty and apparently hadn’t missed a meal in all those years, stood in the middle of the dirt road, his thumbs dug into the black leather Sam Browne gear belt just below his well-rounded gut.
Byrth hit his wig-wags and the enormous deputy, now recognizing the Tahoe as an unmarked vehicle, stepped aside.
“It’s a ways back, sir,” the deputy sheriff said with a pronounced drawl, after Byrth introduced himself. “But you sure as hell can’t miss it. And it is hell—I ain’t seen nothing like it. Ever.”
Limbs from bushes and trees scratched and thumped at the Tahoe’s sides as Byrth navigated the narrow dirt road. It was muddy and deeply rutted, and he was convinced the SUV might at any moment slide into one of the oak trees that edged the road.
He then passed open fields with barbed-wire fences. And, after a good ten minutes of bouncing down the road from rut to rut, the Tahoe bottoming out twice, the narrow road turned sharply.
Around the bend there was an iron pole, rusty and bent, pushed to the roadside. It had a sign wired to it, a wooden board crudely hand-painted PRIVATE! DONT ENTER!
He rolled past and saw that the road now widened, opening up onto a sleepy ramshackle property that looked to have been hacked out of the wild by hand.
The first thing he saw, also standing out in the middle of nowhere, was a white Ford F-150 four-door pickup truck with the same HUNT COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE markings as the Crown Vic. It was parked beside a beat-up Chevy Malibu and an old moss-covered fifth-wheel camper. The boxy aluminum-sided trailer, its four tires long ago gone flat, leaned sharply. To the right of it, ringed with barbed wire, was a small corral, at the back of which he could make out a two-stall stable that had been patched together with mismatched boarding.
Jim Byrth rolled to a stop beside the pickup and got out. He saw Sheriff Pabody, in his tan uniform, stepping out from behind the trailer.
Pushing sixty, Pabody was tall and fairly fit, with weathered skin and a bushy head of white hair. He had his right hand on the grip of an almost new matte black .30 caliber Springfield Armory M1 carbine. It hung by a black nylon sling from his right shoulder, next to the older Springfield Armory tactical 1911-A1 .45 ACP holstered on his hip. His left hand held a folded red bandanna over his nose and mouth.
As the two men approached each other, Byrth called out, “Glenn, I thought I told you that cutting out those greasy fried mountain oysters would stop that foul gassy problem of yours.”
Pabody grinned as he stuffed the bandanna in his back hip pocket. He let the carbine dangle, and held out his hand.
“Sure good to see you, Jim,” he said sincerely, meeting his eyes. He then nodded in the direction of the corral and added, “It’s pretty damn nasty back there.”
Byrth knew that Pabody, once an Army reserve major, had seen his share of gruesome scenes as a Green Beret fighting the Taliban. He recognized that for the understatement that it was, and nodded.
“So, what the hell do we have here? You said a game warden found it?”
Texas game wardens, like the state troopers under the Department of Public Safety, were peace officers with the power to enforce laws statewide, on and off the pavement.
Pabody nodded. “Luckily not just any game warden. I thought you knew Gerry Bailey.”
Byrth shook his head. “Should I?”
“There’s good guys in the business”—he pronounced it bidness—“and there’s really good guys.”
“Don’t tell me. Another of you Green Beanies?”
Pabody nodded. “Fifth Special Forces Group. Led assault sniper teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. Put in his twenty years, then figured he was pushing the odds of meeting his maker after four long tours in the Sandbox. Good ol’ country boy. Nothing makes him happier than hunting and fishing—and, okay, to hear him tell it, that and fucking.”
Byrth grunted and grinned.
“And now Bailey gets paid to be around it,” Pabody went on. “The hunting and fishing, that is.” He paused in thought, then went on, “I meant that crack about fucking as a joke, but maybe that, too. Man, this was the last thing that he—hell, any of us—expected to find out here.”
He sighed audibly, then went on: “Anyway, Bailey was making a routine patrol early this morning looking for poachers. He was on his all-terrain vehicle when he crested a hill not far from the lake and came across the guy. This Mexican was big and beefy, maybe thirty. He was dressed all in black and carrying a nice Mossberg pump, a twelve-gauge. He took off running. When Bailey ordered him to stop, then pursued him, the guy stopped and took two shots at him.”
“Hit him?”
Pabody nodded. “Got grazed by some pellets. Birdshot. Nothing bad. I made him go to the ER—he was able to drive himself.” He paused, shook his head, then added, “But wouldn’t that be a bitch? Do four years dodging raghead bullets and IEDs only to get blown away by an illegal Mezkin damn near in your own backyard?”
“Yeah, a real ironic bitch. Did Bailey bag him?”
Pabody nodded again. “So the guy takes off into the bush. Bailey gets off his fancy four-wheeler, grabs his Car14, and takes off after him. Bailey gains ground on him, shouts for him to stop. Fucking idiot then tries to take another shot—and it’s game over. Bailey says it wasn’t intentional—blames not hitting center mass on his heavy breathing, but that’s bullshit because he’s such a good shot he could drive nails at a hundred yards with a .22, and he had the selector on single, not full auto—he puts a round right above the bad guy’s right eye. Top of his head explodes like a ripe cantaloupe.”
“Nice shot. You said he was an illegal. Any ID, background?”
“Not a damn thing on him—just my gut feeling that he’s illegal. We’re running down property records to find who owns this place. Anyway . . . when Bailey comes up on the guy, he gets a whiff that’s overwhelming. Since it’s not Bailey’s first rodeo around a mess of gray matter, and he knows that that’s not what he’s smelling, he can’t figure it out. So he recons the area—and bingo.” He nodded toward the corral. “Hell, come here. I’ll show you.”
—
Jim Byrth smelled it before he saw it. The combination of odors was that of rotten eggs and putrid meat. It was oddly familiar to him, in an unsettling way.
“Behind the stable there,” Pabody said, pointing to what was the edge of an eight-foot-tall open-air shed. “That’s where Bailey found the drums.”
Pabody put his bandanna to his face as they stepped back to it. Byrth fished out a handkerchief from his pants pocket.
The shed was roughly twenty by thirty feet, with a floor of bare earth and, atop what looked like four old telephone poles, a low, flat roof of rusted sheets of corrugated metal. It held eight fifty-five-gallon high-density polyethylene drums more or less in two lines of four. The blue plastic—with SULFURIC ACID CAUTION! HIGHLY CORROSIVE! stenciled in white—was faded and stained.
Six of the drums were covered with blue plastic lids. The lids for the other two were missing, and when Byrth looked in the nearest one, the disfigured face of a teenaged girl stared grotesquely back.
“Jesus!” he said from behind his handkerchief. “You never get used to seeing something like that.”
The flesh on her cheeks and chin and forehead—all the parts above the surface of the murky fluid in the drum—was blue-black. What little hair she had left was ragged stubs of blonde along the top of her forehead.
Under the fluid’s surface, the body was simply bony skeleton. And what was left of the skeleton—there was nothing below the waist—was in various degrees of disintegration.
Byrth felt Pabody’s eyes studying him.
“Pozole,” Byrth said, shaking his head and turning to look at Pabody.
“What?”
“South of the border, that’s what they call this process of getting rid of bodies,” he explained. “Pozole is actually a Mexican stew. Apparently, the Cártel del Golfo has its own gallows humor. I first saw this in Nuevo Laredo, then outside Juárez, a couple years back. Those Zetas are ruthless sonsofbitches. They’re literally liquefying anyone in their way—the cops and soldiers and reporters they can’t buy off—just making anybody they don’t like disappear. Their rivals they behead and stack ’em in town like cordwood to intimidate everyone else.”
Los Zetas was made up of deserters from commando units in the Mexican army—units that were trained and armed by elite U.S. forces in the war against the very drug cartels they joined. Los Zetas had acted as the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before breaking off on their own. Battles over routes for the trafficking of drugs and guns and humans across the United States border—the areas leading to Interstate 35 at Laredo being highly prized—became an endless bloodbath.
“Juárez is the murder capital of the world,” Pabody said. “Six thousand killed in the last two years.”
“That’s just counting official deaths,” Byrth said. “No telling how many more get murdered. The Mexican government acknowledges that almost thirty thousand of its citizens have simply disappeared. Cases get opened when family members report someone’s gone missing. Someone who just never comes home, or was abducted from their home, or even ‘arrested’ by uniformed police or military.”
“There’s a lot of cops on the take.”
Byrth nodded. “Theirs and ours. Then there’s also the fact that Zetas and others not only got trained as cops or soldiers before joining the cartels, they kept the uniforms and weapons. How the hell is the average abuela going to know that the ‘official’ hauling off of her son or grandson in front of her very eyes ain’t legit?”
“And when she goes down to the police station asking questions, there’s no record of arrest.”
Byrth nodded again.
“No body means no murder, no nada,” he said. “That’s very effective intimidation.”
Pabody’s eyes grew. “It’s not just girls here, there’s evidence men were also . . . liquefied. You figure this is some of Zetas’s work?”
“For lack of better words, it damn sure smells like it. But out here? It could be someone copying them. Sinaloas, Knights Templar, any of them. Fucking cartels and their splinter cells can be anywhere.”
Pabody’s eyes went back to the drum. “It looks like he just stood the dead bodies in there.”
Byrth nodded. “And as the acid ate away at them, they slowly sank lower.”
“Until they were completely gone,” Pabody added.
“In Juárez, they did the same with sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide—”
“What’s that?”
“Lye. Caustic soda. Much easier to get than acid.”
“At least a couple of these barrels have got labels that show they were sold to Tyler Oilfield Services,” Pabody said.
“Probably stolen from an oil- or gas-drilling site,” Byrth said. After a moment he added, “Lye requires heat. And it’s not as thorough. This acid, however, dissolves it all, including dental fillings and such.”
“How quick?”
“Tissue’s gone away in about half a day, bones and everything else in two.”
Byrth looked around the immediate area.
There was a fire pit that had a scorched black metal ring about four feet in diameter. Byrth recognized that it was part of a wheel from a big-rig tractor trailer. Inside the ring were smoldering ashes and the remnants of charred logs. Just outside the ring was a swath of partially burned fabric from a pair of blue jeans.
“The guy was pretty sloppy about getting rid of evidence,” Pabody said. “That is, if he even cared.”
Pabody reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small plastic zipper-top bag. In it was a business card.
“This is just a tip of what I saw when I stuck my head in the door of that shithole of a RV.”
He handed the bag to Byrth. He saw that it was a cheap generic business card, white with black type, for the Hacienda Gentlemen’s Club. It showed its address and a “hotline” phone number. Under that was a box with flowery handwriting that read: “April. In town Nov 11–15 only!!! Call me to reserve my dance room!!! 561-555-4532.” The “i” in April, instead of being dotted, had a heart drawn over it.
“That’s a South Florida area code,” Byrth said.
“Yeah, and when you call it, the auto voice-mail message says her box is full.” He grunted. “So to speak.”
Their eyes met. Byrth smirked.
“Sorry, Jim. More of that gallows humor. This girl—none of these girls, hookers or whatever—didn’t deserve whatever happened to get them here. Anyway, I called in this April’s phone number to the office. They got the process started on getting her records from the phone company. And I’m having a flatbed tow truck come fetch the trailer so forensics can go through it after they’re done doing the scene here.”
“Good idea.”
“With the exception of what’s left of this body, we ain’t getting any DNA off any dissolved bodies. There’s nothing left but acid in those covered drums. But there’s a shitload of panties—those string ones? ‘thongs’ mostly—and some bras in the trailer that could give us something. And Lord knows what they’ll find on the mattress.”
Byrth pulled out his cell phone and, using its camera function, took a close-up picture of the business card through the clear plastic bag.
“November eleven through fifteen?” Byrth said, handing the bag back and checking the date window on his wristwatch. “Today’s the fifteenth.”
“You reckon April was missed at work last night? Or if she’s expected tonight?”
“One way to find out.”
—
“Well, it’s entirely possible she could have a cell phone with a Florida number,” Texas Rangers Sergeant James O. Byrth said into his phone as he looked through the Tahoe’s windshield at the front door of the Hacienda. “But it’s a Pennsylvania ID you found?”
“Yeah,” Hunt County Sheriff Glenn Pabody said, “a DOT non-driver ID issued to one Elizabeth Cusick, age twenty, five-one, one-ten, blonde, blue eyes, a Hazzard Street address in Philadelphia. That’s Hazzard with two z’s. Last name spelled Charley Umbrella Sierra India Charley Kilo. What kind of name is that?”
Byrth was writing that down as he heard the turbine engines of another jet approaching.
“Maybe Polish?” he said. “Lots of Poles in Pennsylvania. And Italians and Irish and Germans and Latinos . . . Would you pop a shot of it and send it to me?”
“Sure thing. Didn’t you say you were just up there? In Philadelphia?”
“Yeah. Running down some mean bastards who thought they were going to be the next Zetas.”
“Maybe you can pull a few strings then, get some answers quicker.”
“I’m damn sure going to try.” He paused, then, his voice rising, added, “Here comes another jet. I’ll call you back later.”
Byrth broke off the call as the roar overhead drowned out whatever Sheriff Pabody had begun to say. It wasn’t as loud as the 737 had been a few minutes earlier. He looked up to the approach lights and saw that this aircraft was a corporate-sized jet, white with elaborate red artwork.
Nice. Are those gambling dice painted on it?
His eyes then went back to the Hispanic bouncer at the front door of the strip club.
That boy looks friendly as fire ants.
Wonder what my odds are of getting any answers in there—a million to one? Worse?
Byrth’s cell phone then made a ping! sound. He looked at it and saw that Sheriff Pabody had sent him the photograph he’d taken of the girl’s Pennsylvania Department of Transportation identification. He tapped the image and the ID filled the screen of his phone. He dragged his fingers on the screen, enlarging her head shot.
“Wow,” he heard himself softly say aloud. “What a beautiful girl.”
Framed in rich chestnut brown hair, the energetic, youthful face with a bright sensual smile seemed to stare out right at him.
Then his mind flashed with the horrific image of the blue-black blotched flesh of the face that stared back at him from the drum of sulfuric acid.
Could it be the same girl?
That one was blonde. Or maybe bleached-blonde.
And Glenn said the toll is at least ten.
God help them . . .
Byrth, as was his ritual, reached down and double-checked his .45s—the full-frame Model 1911-A1 in his hip holster and the smaller-framed Officer’s Model on the inside of the top of his left boot. Then he grabbed his Stetson and stepped out of the Tahoe.
Society Hill, Philadelphia
Sunday, November 16, 8:57 P.M.
“I’m sure the police will solve this soon, Mrs. McDougal,” Michael J. O’Hara said after shaking hands with the sad-faced silver-haired elderly woman and stepping to the sidewalk in front of her townhome. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Nice to see you again.”
The woman nodded wordlessly, glanced up and down the narrow tree-lined cobblestone street, then quickly shut her front door. He heard a solid clunk-clunk-clunk as she locked the three new dead bolts she’d had a handyman install only hours earlier.
O’Hara looked six doors down the street to where yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape roped off the sidewalk in front of Margaret McCain’s fire-damaged home. Arranged against the wall under a soot-covered window was a small makeshift memorial. It consisted of more than a dozen long-stemmed flowers and a bouquet of balloons floating above a pair of plush two-foot-tall teddy bears embracing each other.
The night air had a heavy acrid burned smell to it, and that clung to his nostrils and the back of his throat.
O’Hara felt his cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out.
“Where’s my cameraman?” he said into it, answering without introduction. “I’m going to do my live shot here at the scene.”
The phone began vibrating again.
“Hold on a sec, damn it,” he said.
He looked at the caller ID. It read MARSHAL EARP.
Finally! he thought.
O’Hara put the phone back to his head, snapped, “Just get him here now,” then touched a key that broke off that call and answered the incoming one.
“Matty!” O’Hara said into the phone. “You really must be embracing island time if ASAP means four hours. Just how the hell is life as a beach bum?”
“Well, it was fucking great, Mickey,” Payne said, his tone bitter, “until Philadelphia raised its ugly head down here.”
“Whoa! What do you mean?” He paused in thought, then added, “This wouldn’t have to do with the McCain girl, would it?”
Payne was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What do you know about that?”
“Screw you, buddy. The question is, What do you know about it?”
“Not a damn thing. I wish I did, though.”
“Oh, come on! Matty—”
“I’m out of the loop, Mickey. Even Jason Washington won’t tell me what the hell is going on. All I know is what Daffy Nesbitt told Chad: that it was a home invasion. Amanda has been trying to reach Maggie for the last hour.”
“The Black Buddha—the best homicide detective on the East Coast—is working a home invasion case? I don’t buy it.”
“I agree. And I didn’t say that. Because I don’t know. I just got off the phone with him. For whatever reason, he says I can’t ask about it.”
“That’s interesting.”
Payne grunted. “That’s one way to put it. All I know for sure is that it’s starting to screw up what began as an amazing trip down here.” He paused, then added, “Why are you playing journalist? You’re supposed to be the boss now.”
“I am the boss. But once a journalist, always a journalist, Matty. Write that down. It’s in my blood to chase a good story, just as it’s in your blood to chase bad guys. And when the home of a scion of a Philly family is firebombed and she’s missing, I’m personally going to cover the story.”
“Did you say firebombed?”
“Yeah. The accelerant was gasoline. One of the guys in on the crime scene—you can guess who—quietly told me Molotov cocktails.”
“No shit . . .”
“And I’ve got the scoop on whose house it is because my so-called competition hasn’t figured that out. It’s listed on the property records under a generic named trust, and neighbors aren’t talking to the media for fear they might be next. Old Lady McDougal just had three—count ’em, three—new dead bolts put on her front door. She said she wouldn’t have opened her door if she hadn’t known I was ‘a nice laddie.’ So, I know it’s Maggie’s, and I like Maggie and want to help.”
“How do you know her?”
“I can’t believe you just asked that. I know damn near everyone. It’s my job.”
Matt grunted again. “Point taken. So, how?”
“About a year ago she called me about my CPS stories, and said because of Mary’s House she wanted to continue our talks. . . .”
—
When Michael J. O’Hara had been the lead investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, he wrote “Follow the Money,” a series of articles that blew open the City of Philadelphia Department of Human Services. O’Hara had spent months digging, and uncovered gross incompetence and graft. His front-page reports led to a wholesale revision of the department, including the resignation of long-entrenched top administrators.
It also won O’Hara a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Curiously, his winning the prestigious award had been the beginning of the end of O’Hara’s long career in newspapers.
The owners of the Bulletin had put their public relations flacks to work overtime, boasting that the Pulitzer proved their newspaper offered the highest caliber of reporting anywhere. Mickey’s redheaded mug was plastered on the sides of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority buses and practically every billboard in town. But all that—and the perception of the PR having gone to O’Hara’s head—had created more than a little animosity among certain colleagues in the newsroom.
A great deal of the friction was the result of petty jealousy on the part of the managing editor, Roscoe G. Kennedy, who took enormous pride in having earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Kennedy knew that O’Hara was equally proud of having, as Mickey put it, attended the School of Hard Knocks.
Mickey’s first job with the Bulletin was at age twelve, when he pedaled his rusty bicycle on a West Philly newspaper route, slinging copies of the afternoon edition at row house after row house.
By the time Mickey was sixteen, one of his best buddies at West Catholic High School convinced him to add a sideline to his route—running numbers slips for Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo.
That had worked out reasonably well, until Monsignor Dooley, who had made absolutely clear that he would not tolerate any immoral act, caught Mickey with the slips at school. The monsignor offered to go lenient on him if Mickey would confess his sins—and assist the monsignor in cleansing the school of the unholy filth that was gambling.
Mickey, embracing the code of silence that was omertà, refused to rat out his buddy. And he damn sure knew better than to even mutter the name Frankie the Gut.
Accordingly, the monsignor booted Mickey to the curb, telling him not to come back until he was repentant and prepared to make amends.
Mickey, turning to his Bulletin job to fill his now extra time, discovered that a newsroom copyboy position had opened. He was told that it was little more than a gritty gofer job, but it sounded like the best job on earth to someone who was looking at another bitter winter throwing papers from a worn-out bike.
Against all odds—including being evasive about his proof of having graduated from high school early—he got the job and survived the ninety-day probationary period.
Mickey had found the newsroom a fascinating environment. He not only did the lowly tasks thrown at him, he made sure he was conveniently in the line of sight when the assistant city editor looked around for someone to do last-minute work no one else wanted—research, fact-checking telephone calls, et cetera.
Proving himself competent and reliable, he soon was given small writing assignments.
Everything was going beyond his wildest expectations until, days shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was called into the managing editor’s office.
The assistant city editor was there, and Mickey was convinced that this was the end of his run. But when he was shown the front page of the edition just off the presses—and the byline Michael J. O’Hara at the end of a very short article he’d researched and written—he found himself accepting a job offer as a very junior reporter.
Then, twenty years later, looking at his proud mother seated at the front table in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, O’Hara found himself giving an acceptance speech after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
He did not think life could get any better—he was being paid to do a job he loved, and one he did damn well, while helping those who couldn’t help themselves, such as the orphans and the abused stuck in the morass of Child Protective Services.
Then, mere days after returning from New York, he was told in no uncertain terms: “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you.”
The giant of a black man delivering this news—one Casimir J. Bolinski, Esquire—happened to serve as legal counsel and business agent to heavy-hitting professional athletes.
Casimir “the Bull” Bolinski had also been Mickey’s coconspirator at West Catholic running Frankie the Gut’s numbers slips.
If Mickey had given in to Dooley the Drooler, Casimir would have found himself also booted out of school—thus ending the Bull’s path to a Notre Dame scholarship and, more critically, his career playing for the Green Bay Packers. And without that high pay of pro ball, Casimir would not have been able to afford to study law in the off-seasons, then become a sports agent after retiring his helmet and shoulder pads.
A highly successful agent, he represented the best of the best. He was ultimately earning far more off the field than he’d ever been paid to play.
And for all that, the Bull said, “I can never adequately repay you, Mickey.”
The Bull, however, did try—by taking him on as a client. And the post–Pulitzer Prize employment contract that Bolinski negotiated for O’Hara with “those bastards” at the Bulletin was far beyond anything Mickey thought possible. It included compensation consistent with, the Bull announced, what he found other winners of the Pulitzer were being paid, as well as a fat expense account, a new company vehicle, and more vacation days than Mickey thought he could ever use.
The contract also included language for an exit clause—one that would prove critical.
Roscoe Kennedy and Mickey O’Hara had been having what euphemistically could be described as “creative differences” over the treatment of Mickey’s exclusive that was about to be the Bulletin’s lead story. It was about Sergeant M. M. Payne having shot two robbers after they almost killed a couple in a restaurant parking lot. It was accompanied by a photograph O’Hara had taken of Payne—wearing a tuxedo, cell phone in one hand and .45 in the other—standing over a dead robber.
Kennedy had written a snide “Wyatt Earp of the Main Line Shoot-Out” headline, defending it by saying that the photograph made Payne look like the bloodthirsty gunslinger he really was. O’Hara called him out for twisting the moniker Mickey had given Matt as a compliment, then for using the story in an attempt to publicly ridicule a cop who was doing his job.
And then he punched Kennedy.
Bolinski, who happened to witness the whole incident unfold, carried Mickey out as Kennedy yelled before the whole newsroom unflattering descriptions of O’Hara—and that he was fired.
The contract, however, proved solid. It provided Mickey with a paid thirty-day break, one he decided to use by traveling to France. A fugitive from Philly—Fort Festung, who’d been found guilty in absentia for murdering his girlfriend and leaving her body to mummify in a trunk—was enjoying the French’s refusal to extradite anyone sentenced to death. O’Hara felt that the outrage warranted a book. He needed research, and dragged along Matt Payne, who after the shooting also found himself with time on his hands.
When the Philly courts allowed Festung’s sentence to be reduced to life behind bars, France gave in to the extradition—and Mickey O’Hara got a picture of Sergeant M. M. Payne arresting the fugitive Festung.
While Mickey wrote his book, the Bull found him new employment as the publisher and chief executive officer of an Internet start-up venture—CrimeFreePhilly.com—backed by very deep pockets. It not only allowed O’Hara to be in charge of doing what he did so well, it also gave him a platform and an audience far greater than anything the Bulletin ever could have. And it had allowed him to develop other news reporting properties.
—
“Okay, Matty, I’ll give you the journalist’s Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Here’s the lead of my story tonight: ‘Margaret McCain, the twenty-five-year-old scion of one of Philadelphia’s founding families, remains missing tonight following what Philadelphia Police are calling a home invasion that left her Society Hill town house engulfed in flames late last night.’”
“That’s pretty straightforward.”
“Wait. There’s more. Last sentence of lead: ‘Police are withholding comment as to whose body was secreted from the scene after the medical examiner’s van was parked in the closed garage of the McCain residence.’”
“Really? I hadn’t heard that detail either. That’s curious.”
“Yeah. Curious. My source did say it was a female.”
“Okay, look, Mickey, that reinforces something I thought. Which is (a) I agree with you that if Jason is on the case, it’s being treated as a homicide—if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, et cetera, et cetera—and (b) because Jason wants to know if we hear from Maggie—and is being quiet about it—then he’s saying that she didn’t die in her home. Other than that, I have nothing.”
There was a long moment’s silence, then O’Hara said, “Okay. Thanks.” There was another pause, and he added, “Then who do you think it is the ME bagged and tagged?”
“I have no idea, Mickey. I wish I did. I could call Dr. Mitchell—he has to have finished the autopsy by now. Or even Javier, his tech. They might tell me. But then that’d probably get me in hot water with Jason. He specifically told me no questions.”
“When the hell did you start caring about getting in hot water, Matty?”
“Hold one. I’ve got a call coming in. It may be Amanda.”
O’Hara listened to silence as Payne checked his phone screen, then heard him say, “When it rains it pours.” O’Hara then saw movement across the street. When he looked he saw Detective Anthony Harris leaving a town house. Mickey knew Tony well, including that he’d worked in the Homicide Unit years longer than Matt’s total time with the police department.
Bingo! Mickey thought.
Then he heard Matt back on the phone: “Okay, Mickey, where were we?”
“More proof it has to be a homicide,” O’Hara announced. “Harris just appeared down the street, coming out of a residence.”
O’Hara started walking in that direction.
“Tony!” he called out, then said into the phone, “I’ll call you back, Matty.”
No sooner had O’Hara ended the call and slid the phone into his pocket than he saw a glow from the phone in Harris’s hand, and then Harris putting it to his head.
O’Hara heard him say, “Hey, Matt. What’s up?”
I’ll be damned, O’Hara thought.
Harris made eye contact with O’Hara as he said, “That puts me in a tough position, Matt. Jason said everything goes through him. Everything. Period.”
Little Palm Island, Florida
Sunday, November 16, 9:12 P.M.
Matt Payne looked at the phone number of the call that had just rolled into his voice mail. It was from area code 713. He tried to place it as the voice-mail message began to play.
“Howdy, Marshal . . .”
Jim!
“. . . If you can break free from that beautiful better half of yours, I’d appreciate you calling me. I’m following a lead in the Miami area right now, then another up your way.” He paused, and there came an overwhelming whine, what sounded like a jet aircraft passing nearby. He then went on: “I’m giving you a heads-up, Matt. It’s gotten worse—beyond CATFU. Call me.”
Beyond Completely And Totally Fucked Up? Payne thought.
What the hell could that be?
About two months earlier, Texas Rangers Sergeant James O. Byrth had come to Philadelphia—with his huge white Stetson that Payne had dubbed The Hat—hunting a vicious drug-cartel member who was trafficking in young girls, guns, and illicit drugs. Deputy Police Commissioner Coughlin had assigned Payne to work with Byrth.
Juan Paulo “El Gato” Delgado and his ring had left a trail of dead bodies from Texas to Philadelphia—and there kidnapped Dr. Amanda Law, not knowing she was in any way connected to Payne—before a shoot-out that found Delgado dead and Amanda rescued.
Payne regularly recalled one of the last things that Byrth had said when Payne dropped him at Philadelphia International Airport: “Come visit us in Texas, Marshal. We’ve got plenty more bad guys like Delgado. And it’s only going to get worse.”
—
Payne pushed the key on-screen that read CALL BACK.
Jim Byrth answered on the first ring.
“Howdy, Matt. Thanks for getting back so quick. You must be sitting around bored to tears. How are things in Philly?”
“Hey, Jim. On the contrary, I wish I was bored. Look, I may have to break off this conversation, but I wanted to at least return your call. What’s going on?”
“I just walked out of a titty bar—”
“Lucky you. Congratulations,” Payne interrupted, sharply sarcastic. “You called to tell me that?”
Byrth was quiet a moment, then said, “What’s crawled up your ass, Marshal?”
“Sorry. I am a little pissed right now.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Not right now. I have to get back to dinner. You go.”
“Okay, I’ll make this quick. Can you run some Philly names and addresses through your system for me?”
“Sure. What’s it in regard to?”
“I reckon it’d be a long shot if I asked you if you knew what Pozole was,” Byrth said, and before Payne could reply, he added, “It’s a Mexican stew.”
Payne grunted. “So you called to talk about food?”
“You remember your buddy El Gato?” Byrth said, ignoring that.
The Cat.
Payne’s memory flashed with an image of a defiant Delgado, his hands and feet taped to a chair in a hellhole of a Philly row house.
Having just found Amanda captive there and cut her free, Matt had put the muzzle of his .45 between Delgado’s eyes. He wrestled with the impulse of blowing Delgado away, if not as payback for kidnapping Amanda, then to honor all the young Hispanic girls he had raped and tortured—including cutting off the head of one teenaged Honduran. In the end, Payne had decided against “shooting them all and letting the Lord sort them out,” and allowed the Cat what turned out to be at least his ninth life.
“Where’s this going?” Payne said. “The bastard’s dead. You saw to that.”
You tossed a black bean at Delgado’s bound feet—then turned a blind eye when our informant put a bullet in his head.
Not that the sonofabitch didn’t deserve what he got. Especially considering what he no doubt was going to do with Amanda, whether or not he got a ransom for her.
You’re probably tumbling another bean across your knuckles as we speak.
Is it white—or black?
—
Byrth had told Payne, also on their way to the airport for Byrth’s flight back to Texas, about the Mier Expedition, led by Texas Ranger John Coffee Hays in the 1840s.
Hays and Big Foot Wallace had pulled together a group to invade Mexico. South of the border, however, they found that they’d severely underestimated their target.
They were captured.
“The order came down to execute every tenth man,” Byrth explained.
Black and white beans were put in a pot to determine who lived and who died. A man drawing a black bean was shot. Those who drew the white beans lived to carry the tale back to Texas.
Byrth had then explained why he had no remorse for the informant’s “self-defense” killing of Delgado. Beyond the unspoken fact that it had been what Payne considered payback for all those whom the brutal Delgado had harmed, it also eliminated paying for courts and prisons.
“El Gato getting himself killed saved taxpayers at least a million bucks.”
—
“Los Zetas,” Byrth now explained, “makes El Gato’s little gang look like choirboys. And I may have just found evidence here in North Texas of their handiwork that I’ve witnessed in Mexico.”
“Zetas? The former enforcers of the Gulf Cartel?”
“Yeah. Now on their own and worse than ever. If it’s Zetas or someone copying them, it gives new meaning to ‘Don’t go digging up more snakes than you can kill.’ Ergo, CATFU.”
“What’s worse?”
“Liquefying young strippers-slash-hookers.”
“What? How the hell does that happen?”
Byrth began, “In the woods by a lake we have found a ratty camp with more than a half dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of sulfuric acid. . . .”
—
“And,” Byrth finished five minutes later, “Sheriff Pabody, a really good guy, showed me this titty bar’s business card he found in the trailer. It’s got a girl’s handwriting that says when quote April unquote would be working and her phone number. I’ll send you a shot of it and forward the shot that Pabody sent me of her DOT ID.”
“That’ll work,” Matt said. “So, you went to the strip club and—”
“Yeah. The card said she was supposed to work there just these last three nights.”
“And let me guess—nobody knew nothing.”
“‘Nada,’ as it’s said in ol’ Ess-pan-yole. It took me some time to get anyone to even admit they could speak English. Finally I was handed a napkin with a phone number written on it. When I called, sounded like a white guy who answered. Identified himself as Todd Lincoln and said that he was the owner of the club. And he of course offered to cooperate completely. He might have some local Dallas cops bought to look the other direction but knows that I can really bring in the heat.”
“And?”
“And what else? I got the usual BS runaround. Anyone can get ahold of those cards and write whatever they want on them. He said he would ask his managers about any girls named April. ‘But it’s probably a stage name, if she exists at all.’”
“And since you don’t know what she looks like . . .”
Byrth’s mind flashed with what was left of the face of the girl in the barrel.
“Not unless she’s the one pictured on the ID. Even showing everyone in the titty bar that image blown up on my phone I came up with zilch.”
Matt felt his phone vibrate once.
“Well,” he said quickly, clearly trying to wind up the conversation, “send those to me, and I’ll get them right up to Philly.”
“‘Up to Philly’? Where are you?”
“In the Keys with Amanda. But some shit’s just hit the fan, so I don’t know what’s next.”
“Is she okay?”
Matt could hear genuine concern in the Texan’s deep voice.
“Thanks, man. She’s fine. Someone we know is missing after her house was firebombed last night.”
“Damn. I’m sorry. I won’t hold you up any longer. Get back to me when you can.”
“Will do.”
“Good luck, Marshal.”
“You, too, Jim.”
Matt broke off the call, then checked the screen:
Oh shit, he thought as he typed: “Meet in bar?”
Is this good or bad?
Either way, I’ll need a drink.
Then maybe we can get back to dinner . . . and everything else.
He hit SEND, and another message box popped on-screen:
As Matt smiled and nodded appreciatively, his phone vibrated twice. Each of the messages contained only an image. He studied the Hacienda business card, then the girl’s Department of Transportation ID.
Beautiful girl . . .
Hazzard Street? That’s in Kensington.
He hit the FORWARD key, found Tony Harris’s phone number, and typed: “Our brother-in-arms the Texas Ranger needs whatever we can find out about this girl. Can you have someone run it ASAP? Maybe Kerry Rapier can crack it open beyond the obvious. Thanks.”
The girl’s bright eyes seemed to stare out at him as his finger touched the SEND key and the image went away.
He then looked out past the palm trees and the groomed white sand beach to the Atlantic Ocean, and the majestic moon and blanket of stars above it. The wind was picking up. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the cleansing feel of the salty air, then exhaled and shook his head.
So much beauty in this world. And so much hell.
You never know what’s coming next.
As Amanda’s friend Carl Crantz said just before his lungs gave out: “Live every day like it’s your last.”
He turned and started to walk up the tiki-torch-lined path toward the bar. Another message came in with an image.
A third?
He read it:
And then he tapped the image.
“Oh shit!” he blurted.
He stopped and stared at the photograph of the acid-burned teenage girl’s face looking up from inside a blue barrel.
Love Field Airport, Dallas
Sunday, November 16, 8:55 P.M. Texas Standard Time
The manager of Lone Star Aviation Services—a tall man in his late thirties, with almost a military buzz haircut and dressed in slacks, well-shined brown loafers, knit shirt, and a brown leather A-2 flight jacket—walked with purpose over to the medium-dark-skinned man who stood stiffly, hands on his hips, staring out the bank of windows that overlooked the busy airfield.
Lone Star was a fixed-base operator—an enormous limestone-faced steel building that was the hangar, and a limestone two-story building that served as its corporate offices and lobby reception area, and a concrete pad that could hold fifteen to twenty jet aircraft and two big red fuel trucks—in the northeast corner of the airfield, in the general aviation section. It was separate from the airport’s main terminal building, visible in the distance with orange-bellied 737s lined up at the gates.
“Tango Romeo is on the ground, Mr. Badde,” the manager of Lone Star Aviation Services announced.
H. Rapp Badde, Jr., thirty-two years old, was a city councilman-at-large with a well-earned reputation in his native Philadelphia for being alternately arrogant and charismatic. Somewhat fit—he had a bit of a belly rounding out the fabric of his white silk shirt—Badde stood five-eleven and two hundred pounds. He wore a custom-cut two-piece black suit and his trademark narrow black bow tie. A brand-new roller suitcase, a cheap counterfeit Louis Vuitton, black with pink accents, stood at his feet.
“Tango Romeo?” Badde automatically repeated. “What the hell is that? Sounds like some kind of Roman lover’s Latin dance.”
He flashed his politician’s bright cap-toothed exaggerated smile, his belly shaking as he chuckled at his own wit.
“My apology, sir. I should have said Mr. Antonov’s aircraft has landed.”
“Then what’s Tango Romeo?”
“The aircraft’s identification number is N556TR. In the language of aviation, ‘T’ is said ‘Tango’ and ‘R’ is said ‘Romeo’ for clarity, to avoid confusion in radio communications.”
The look on Badde’s face suggested anything but clarity.
The manager pointed out the window at a Cessna Citation X.
“There it is now,” he said.
The twin-engine jet aircraft was turning off the runway onto the taxiway. On the side of the engine that was visible Badde saw: N556TR.
The aircraft’s paint scheme featured a pair of undulating bright red ribbons. They ran along its gleaming white fuselage, ending on the T-tail, which had two bright red dice, the face of each showing two rows of three white pips.
“Railcars,” Badde automatically said aloud to himself.
He had been more or less studying the various games of gambling since becoming involved with the ongoing development of the new Lucky Stars casino, and was quietly impressed with himself for remembering.
“Excuse me, Mr. Badde?”
“Those dots on the dice,” he then said loudly, with authority, “those are called railcars when there’s twelve of them.”
The manager hesitated before replying, “If I’m not mistaken, I believe, sir, that it’s boxcars.”
Badde turned his head in thought, then said, “That’s what I said. Boxcars.”
“Of course. My mistake.”
“Wonder if there’s any significance to their being boxcars?” Badde went on. “It’s not a train, it’s a plane. Guess it probably just looks good.”
The manager didn’t reply.
“What kind of plane is that?” Badde then said. “One of those Boeings?”
“Boeings are much bigger, sir.” He pointed toward the 737s at the main terminal gates. “Those are Boeing airliners.”
“I came here on that.” Badde pointed to the nearest business jet parked on the pad with eight others, a couple at least twice its size. “It’s a what?”
“A Hawker.”
“And this one coming in?”
“Tango Romeo is a four-month-old Citation Ten, the latest version. It’s a midsized jet, a little bigger than the Hawker.”
“And faster?”
“Yes, sir. A little. At flight level four-nine-zero it cruises around four-sixty, four-seventy knots.” He paused, then added, “That’s an altitude of forty-nine thousand feet, and speed just over six hundred miles an hour. With the headwind light tonight, it made the trip from Key West in right at two hours. And that included a stop, a brief one, in New Orleans.”
Badde nodded as he wondered, What did they do in New Orleans? Their casino downtown is at least a half hour from the airport.
“Had to stop for gas?” he said.
“They weren’t on the ground long enough for that. Besides, the Citation’s range is around thirty-five hundred miles. Depending on winds, that’s New York City to Los Angeles and halfway back again.”
“You’re just full of interesting flying facts,” Badde said. “How do you keep up with it all?”
“It’s my job, of course. But aviation is addictive.”
“Yeah. So I’m seeing! This Citation, how many can it hold?”
“In addition to the two crew, up to twelve passengers, depending on the cabin configuration.”
“What’s one worth?”
“New, around twenty million—”
“No kidding?”
“—but there are plenty of nice older ones to be had for eight, ten. We have a couple for sale in that range in the hangar, as well as others.”
Badde nodded, impressed. There had been plenty of general aviation airplanes at the fixed-base operator at Northeast Philadelphia Airport when the Hawker arrived that afternoon to pick up Badde. Most of the ones he’d seen, though, had propellers, not jet engines, and were much smaller than the Hawker.
There had to be some.
Maybe, like the Russian’s here, they’re gone somewhere.
The giant doors on the hangar began sliding open. The interior was brightly lit, and Badde could see even more aircraft inside. Enormous red, white, and blue flags—one of the United States of America with its fifty stars and one of the State of Texas with its Lone Star paying homage to when it was its own sovereign nation—hung in the middle from the steel beam rafters. A tractor tug drove out and connected to the Citation’s nose gear.
Looks like what they say about everything being bigger in Texas is true!
And this place is cleaner than the one today in Philly. That glossy floor looks clean enough to eat off of.
“Well, Mr. Badde,” the manager said, “welcome again to Texas. And please let me know if there’s anything else that we can do for you and the City of Philadelphia. Particularly if you’re in the market for a fine aircraft.”
“Now, that would be a very nice thing to get!” Badde said. “And none of that TSA security nonsense. Just hop onboard and go. I can get used to this kind of lifestyle.”
The manager smiled, then left.
H. Rapp Badde, Jr., watched with almost childlike fascination as the impressive Citation rolled up to near the limestone-faced hangar and was wanded to a stop on the well-lit pad. He heard the whine of the engines winding down.
Idling nearby was a highly polished black Cadillac Escalade ESV with darkened windows and shiny chromed wheels. The big SUV’s Texas license plate read Y-ROSE-5. It began moving slowly, then stopped alongside the aircraft as the jet’s stair door opened and rotated downward. The driver’s door swung open and a clean-cut brown-skinned young man in a two-piece black suit and collarless white dress shirt stepped out. He opened the door behind the driver’s.
Jan would like this kind of living large, too, Badde thought.
It’s a shame she already had the meeting set up for tomorrow and couldn’t come. But Santos assured Jan there would be more opportunities.
On paper, Janelle Harper, a graduate of Temple’s Beasley School of Law, was Badde’s executive assistant. In reality, the curvy, full-bodied (five-six, one-forty) twenty-five-year-old with silky light brown skin was his paramour.
Although Badde adamantly denied that they had a relationship that was anything but professional, the truth of the matter was not exactly a well-kept secret in Philadelphia. Months earlier, for example, a photograph of them on a Bermuda beach had appeared in the local media. Thus, it was known—though mostly ignored—by Wanda Badde, Rapp’s wife of six years.
He had spent the previous night with Jan, in the luxury Hops Haus twentieth-floor condominium he provided for her, after a furious Wanda had thrown him out of their house.
When Jan got the call that the Hawker would pick up Rapp at Northeast Airport that afternoon, he’d had enough clothes at the condo for the trip. But he’d found it necessary to borrow the counterfeit Louis Vuitton suitcase he had bought on the street in New York City for Jan as a surprise, not expecting she could tell it was a fake.
She had never touched it.
Talk about things being bigger in Texas! Badde thought when he saw the first person appear in the open doorway of the aircraft.
The nicely tanned, long-legged blonde had a full figure with impressive breasts. She wore a short, tight white dress and glittering silver high heels. He guessed she was around Jan’s age.
With all the skill and ease of a runway model, she smoothly descended the steps and went across the pad. As she hopped into the backseat of the Escalade, swinging in one long leg at a time, her dress rode up her thighs, and Badde watched with great interest as she rotated her hips and tugged it back down.
My God! That is a good-looking creature!
Badde then heard the peculiar ring tone of one of two cellular phones that he carried. He had selected the sound of a klaxon, thinking the annoying repetitious note was appropriate for what he called his Go To Hell phone. He gave out that phone’s number—listed as belonging to Urban Shelters LLC—only to his accountant, his three lawyers, and a select few others who were friends or business associates. When any of them called it, the odds were that something was going to hell—or about to.
He pulled it from his coat pocket. The caller ID showed 3040201.
Last time a weird number like that came up, it was Yuri.
And I don’t want to talk to him now.
He waited for the call to go to voice mail. When there was no message left, he quickly turned off the phone.
Whoever it was, I can blame the phone being off from still being in flight.
He looked back to the aircraft. A second passenger had appeared in the doorway.
Another stunning woman!
She started down the stairs and was followed by four more fashionably dressed, long-legged women, all but two of them blondes. They also climbed into the Cadillac.
Is there a mold that these girls come out of, or what?
The clean-cut brown-skinned young man got back behind the wheel as the shiny black Escalade’s doors closed. The SUV began to move toward a gate that was being opened in the chain-link fence that surrounded the airfield.
Wonder where they’re going?
He looked back to the aircraft. Next off was a tall light-brown-skinned man who looked to be in his thirties. He wore crisp slacks and a white dress shirt and a navy blazer. With the exception of a neatly trimmed goatee, his head was almost cleanly shaven. He waved once toward the Escalade. The driver waved back as the SUV began pulling away.
Now, Baldy here looks like someone important.
A tall black Ford F-150 four-door pickup with six-inch-high chromed badges on the front fenders that read KING RANCH EDITION then drove onto the pad. It pulled to a stop at the aircraft’s wingtip. Its driver, a beefy Hispanic with wavy black hair and wearing faded blue jeans, black pointed-toe Western boots, a snug black T-shirt, and a dark blazer, hopped out. He looked younger, maybe in his mid-twenties. He was talking into his cell phone, gesticulating angrily with his free hand, as he went to the foot of the stair door.
I wonder who the chunky cowboy is?
And why didn’t that important guy go with the hot girls?
As the tall man came down the steps, the cowboy broke off the call, then held out his right hand and smiled broadly. They shook hands and then walked toward the pickup, talking and nodding as they went. The cowboy then glanced toward the building where Rapp stood watching, then started in that direction as the tall man went to the pickup.
Well, Santos’s executive assistant called Jan about the airplane picking me up and told her that I’d be met here.
Guess Cowboy’s the guy.
There was a pair of plate-glass doors on tracks next to the reception area. They had a motion detector, and when the chunky cowboy approached, the pair slid open. The cowboy looked around the lounge and found only a black man standing there.
“Excuse me,” the cowboy said. “You’re waiting for Santos, yes?”
Badde was expecting to hear a strong Mexican accent. It was, instead, surprisingly American.
Well, like my old man made a point of teaching me when he was mayor, immediately establish the power structure.
“Yes, I’m Rapp Badde, and I’ve been waiting for a Mr. Santos.” He nodded toward the suitcase. “You want to grab that?” Then he looked out the window toward the important man. “I assume the boss is expecting me.”
The cowboy glanced toward the pickup and chuckled.
“Excuse me. Did I say something funny?” H. Rapp Badde, Jr., snapped.
“Oh, no. Meeting El Jefe is always the highest priority. I’ll fetch your”—he paused, looking at the bag—“is this a knockoff? I’ve never seen pink Louis—”
“I don’t know what it is,” Badde interrupted, clearly annoyed his luggage would be called into question by anyone, much less a cowboy. “I had to borrow it out of necessity, not that it’s anyone’s business.”
“It happens, I suppose . . .”
Badde, not knowing what to make of that, ignored it and walked toward the automatic door, leaving the cowboy to tend to his suitcase. The door whooshed open, and Badde started for the tall Ford pickup.
As he approached the bald, natty Hispanic, the man turned and had what to Badde looked like a somewhat surprised look.
“I’m Rapp Badde,” Badde announced formally, offering his hand.
The man shook it as he wordlessly looked beyond Badde. The cowboy was quickly approaching. The plastic wheels of the suitcase had seized up, and they were grinding noisily across the concrete.
Badde glanced back, then ignored it.
The cowboy said, “Hey, Jefe, you want to put this in the back? Is there room for it?”
“I’ll get it,” the man began, looking at the cowboy curiously. Then he looked at Badde and said, “I’m Robert Garcia, Mr. Badde.”
What? “Garcia”?
“I expected to see Santos,” Badde immediately said, as they broke their grip.
Garcia looks like he’s a twin of that Wop who’s head of the Center City business district.
Well, Jan did tell me that they call Italian immigrants WOPs because it means With Out Papers. And illegal beaners don’t have papers.
But this guy’s accent doesn’t have any Mexican in it.
The man nodded in the direction of the cowboy.
“I thought you did meet Mike.”
Badde looked at the cowboy, who was holding out his hand.
“Mike Santos,” he then said, grinning as he firmly squeezed Badde’s hand. “Pleasure.”
He’s the one in charge? Damn it!
“I didn’t know,” Badde began, his arrogant tone making it more a statement than an apology. “I thought Mr. Garcia here . . .”
“Completely understandable. Happens to us all one time or another,” Santos said evenly. “Please call me Mike. And this ol’ Tejano is my lawyer. You can call him Bobby.”
“Tay-hawn-oh?” Badde repeated.
Santos nodded. “A Texan of criollo Spanish descent. His family was here when they still called the place Tejas.”
Spanish descent!
That explains why he looks like the Center City Wop’s twin.
“Me,” Santos went on, “I’m just a wetback. I set foot in Texas only after swimming across the Rio Grande.”
Badde stared back.
Garcia laughed out loud.
“Don’t believe that bullshit,” Garcia said. “He was a snot-nosed thirteen-year-old. The real hardship of his arrival here was having to fly coach on Delta Airlines from Rio de Janeiro. Then, after prep school, he spent four years at TCU chasing ass while pretending to be a business major.”
Rapp looked between them.
Prep school?
I don’t know what to believe.
They’re treating me like we’ve known each other for years.
But I know enough to be damn careful—they didn’t get around all this money by being stupid shit kickers.
And what about those women? I want to ask what that was about, but they haven’t said a word. . . .
“TCU?” Badde said.
“Texas Christian,” Garcia explained. “In Fort Worth, thirty miles from here, aka ‘Cowtown, Where the West Begins.’ And, Rapp, for the record, I know that about Mike because I was there every step of the way. We were even in the same fraternity. Then I came to Dallas for law school. Southern Methodist is, if it’s possible, probably more out of control than TCU.”
Santos then laughed, and slapped Badde on the back.
“Oh, hell. It’s true. I was in the ranch management program.”
“Ranch management?”
Santos nodded, then gestured at the pickup.
“Let’s get rolling. I need a drink. We can talk on the way.”
—
The gate in the chain-link fence rolled opened, and the tall black Ford pickup truck roared through it. Mike Santos was behind the wheel.
“My family,” Santos explained, “has spreads in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Cattle, mostly. My father wanted to get something going here, so he sent me to boarding school in San Antone—where Bobby and I met in eighth grade—then college. Big ranches are big business, and that ranch management program is like an MBA—an MBA in cow shit.”
Santos, grinning, glanced over at Badde, who was in the front passenger seat. Bobby Garcia had taken the seat behind Santos, so that he could see Badde when he turned to talk.
Badde was impressed with the truck. It rode surprisingly comfortably, and its interior had heavy leather and wooden panel accents throughout, giving the cabin the rustic feel of a lodge. There was stitching in the leather that, like the badge on the front fender, read KING RANCH EDITION and had the “Running W” brand that had been, among other things, seared into the hides of countless herds since the ranch’s founding in 1853.
“Like this King Ranch?” Badde said. “What’s up with that?”
“King’s is one of the biggest spreads in the world. Takes up damn near all of South Texas. My father wasn’t looking for that—just something big enough down along the border. I oversee my cousins who run it.”
“So how did you go from that to what you’re doing now?” Badde said. “The private equity?”
Santos grunted. “You ever smell cow shit, Rapp?”
Badde, looking out the windshield at the dramatic colorful skyline of downtown Dallas in the near distance, had to think about that. After a long moment he shook his head, then looked at Santos. “Maybe once, as a kid, out in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. If I did, I don’t really remember it.”
“Well, you’re not missing a damn thing.”
Badde then snorted.
“What?” Santos said.
“I just remembered I did. It was in Lancaster County. In a tiny town called Intercourse.”
Santos laughed.
“I’m calling bullshit on that,” Bobby Garcia said from the backseat, but Badde saw that he was grinning.
Badde turned on his politician’s big toothy smile and shook his head. “No. And get this: Intercourse actually isn’t far from a place called Blue Ball.”
Garcia now laughed.
“You’d think it would be far the hell away,” he said.
“They were dairy cows,” Badde said. “It was a long damn time until I drank milk again after that trip.”
“There you go,” Santos said. “I decided that I didn’t want to spend a lifetime smelling shit—especially back home. But because I was still a Colombian national and my student visa was all but expired, I had to find something fast so I could legally stay in the States. I wanted to go into venture capital and that got me—got Bobby and me, after starting OneWorld Private Equity Partners—introduced to the Fed’s EB-5 green card program.”
OneWorld funded a huge part of the casino, Badde thought.
And is funding part of the new sports complex.
Each of those to the tune of a hundred million.
I’d like to get more than the crumbs I’m getting. . . .
“Speaking of that,” Garcia said, “Yuri says you’re doing good things in Philly with PEGI.”
Hearing the Russian billionaire businessman’s name always made Badde uncomfortable. Especially in the same sentence as PEGI.
And he just pronounced “Peggy” right.
How much do these guys know about Yuri’s involvement? That is, the intimidation beyond the money. He’s made it clear that there are consequences for failing to meet his high expectations.
“PEGI is working,” Badde said, trying not to overplay it.
It’s been a pain in the ass. But it is looking like it will work.
If no one pokes their damn nose in it. . . .
The Philadelphia Economic Gentrification Initiative was a special program developed—and solely administered—by the city council’s Housing and Urban Development Committee. Specifically by its chairman, one H. Rapp Badde, Jr. He had conceived it after attending an urban-renewal conference with Jan in Bermuda.
PEGI was helping pave the way for new projects—including those of Yuri Tikhonov. The first had been the Lucky Stars Casino & Entertainment. And soon to begin construction was a new indoor sports and live music coliseum that could fit sixty thousand fans under its retractable roof. It was owned by Diamond Development, forty-nine percent of which was in the hands of Tikhonov. The rest, the fifty-one percent majority, belonged to minority-owned companies such as Urban Ventures LLC, of which Badde quietly had a piece, one much smaller than he preferred.
“And,” Santos added, “that as mayor, you will make even better things happen. But first you have a hotel to build, yes?”
Badde met his eyes and said, “I certainly hope so. About being mayor, I mean. And I’m definitely going to build the hotel. Just takes money.”
And I’m not going to deal with Yuri having a piece of this project.
“I don’t think there’ll be any trouble finding that money,” Garcia said.
Santos slowed the truck. Badde saw that they were just shy of downtown proper. A towering stone-faced complex loomed ahead. Before it, centered in a large berm of lush green grass, was a block of granite the size of a city bus. Chiseled in four-foot-tall black roman lettering was: TWO YELLOWROSE PLACE. Badde then saw individual signage for street-level high-end retail stores and restaurants and for a hotel, clearly a luxury one, he’d never heard of.
Across the street from the complex was an equally impressive high-rise residential building.
Santos steered the truck into the high-rise’s cobblestone driveway and pulled to a stop before the enormous well-lit front doors. Doormen on either side of the doors were swinging them open, and out marched three stylishly dressed women. One was olive-skinned, one cocoa-skinned, the third ivory-skinned—and all looking like stunning fashion models. They seemed to float across the walkway as they headed toward the revolving door to the bar of a chophouse next door.
Philadelphia City Councilman H. Rapp Badde, Jr., could not stop himself.
“Is there not a single ugly woman in this town?” he blurted.
Santos and Garcia laughed.
“It’ll take a second to get you your room,” Santos said, “then we can head over there for a little something liquid to cut the trail dust.”
Their doors were opened by valets in red blazers.
“Welcome back, Mr. Santos, Mr. Garcia,” one said, and to Badde added, “Welcome, sir.”
“Yeah,” he replied, flashing his well-practiced politician’s smile.