WE DROPPED BRUNO at my old house on Nord and then headed back to our hotel to read Noble’s book, get something to eat, and make a plan. I told Bruno I’d call him with the time and location where we’d meet Mack, a meeting Bruno insisted on joining. Mack didn’t get off shift at the jail until three.
I drove us through Taco Quicky at the corner of Century Boulevard and Atlantic, an old haunt from my patrol days. Marie didn’t speak, she just kept her nose buried in the book. I ordered taquitos with guacamole, her favorite, and ate them for her after I finished my burrito. She wouldn’t answer whether she wanted them or not. I took her silence as a tacit agreement and knew, when I put the last morsel in my mouth, that I would pay dearly for the error in judgement.
She looked up from the book as we traveled north on Atlantic headed downtown. “This is an amazing story. No wonder it hit the bestseller list.”
“Let me just say that a good portion of it could be a fairy tale.”
“Don’t be a hater, it doesn’t become you.”
I stopped at a red signal and looked over at her. She smiled and twitched her cute little nose as she sniffed. She glanced down and saw for the first time the wadded-up papers and empty cardboard carrier box from Taco Quicky. “Hey, hey! Where’s my lunch?”
“I asked you if you wanted it and you didn’t answer. It was getting co—”
She slid over close and took hold of my ear.
I pulled away with nowhere to go. “Not the ear, not the ear. I’m driving, for crying out loud.”
She gave it a twist and a yank anyway. Not as hard as she gave the guy in the hallway back at the jail. After all, I was her husband now, but it was still a yank that hurt like hell and turned my ear red hot.
The light changed. I put my hand on her breasts and gently moved her back to her seat. “Take it easy, Tonto, I’ll get you something from room service when we get to the hotel.”
“Tonto? Now, I’m your Indian sidekick?” She moved her hand up to her mouth and again spoke into the mock digital recorder. “Subject now appears to suffer from some form of testosterone poisoning. He touched my breasts and immediately hallucinated seeing me as an American Indian by the name of Tonto.”
“Hey, Professor, why don’t you read to me from the book?”
She leaned over and gave my ear a lingering kiss, cool and soothing. “Okay. You want me to start at the beginning or someplace else?”
“Check the table of contents, see if there’s a chapter title that sounds like the dope deal with Papa Dee.”
“Nope, but here’s an interesting one: “A Spook in the Wood Pile.” And right below that, “The Double Cross.”
I wanted to hear about the double cross. In all likelihood that one would explain how some historically dormant revenge had been awakened and now reached its long arm into the future to ruin lives. But the setup for the double cross could prove just as important. “Read ‘A Spook in the Wood Pile.’”
“Got it.” She thumbed through the pages. “Chapter Twenty-Seven. In 1988 Ronald Reagan—”
I interrupted her. “Are you serious, my brother’s really going to try and pull the President of the United States into all his mess?”
Marie said nothing. I looked from the street to her. She gave me that expression that telegraphed that, if I wanted to keep my ear attached to the side of my head, I needed to be quiet. “Okay,” I said, “I gotcha.” I put index finger and thumb up to my lips and mimicked zipping them closed.
She gave me the laser beam a second longer, then looked back at the book. “In 1988 Ronald Reagan tried, without much success at first, to put out the fire The San Jose Mercury News had uncovered with the story about guns for the Contras. The CIA had assisted Nicaraguan nationals in smuggling tons of cocaine into the U.S., the profits of which went to buy weapons to fight communism in Central America.”
“Are you shittin’ me?” I jerked the wheel, pulled over to the side of the road, and grabbed up my copy of the book. “What page are you on?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes moved down the page as she rapidly devoured the words. “Son of a bitch, Bruno, you’re not going to believe this.”
I checked the table of contents, found the page, and flipped over to it.
… smuggling tons of cocaine into the U.S., the profits of which went to buy weapons to fight communism in Central America. Upwards of a billion dollars and maybe more. There are no hard numbers available for how many tons were smuggled in with the help of the CIA. The CIA, with purpose and deceit, introduced the concentrated form of cocaine, “base,” or “rock cocaine,” the most addictive narcotic on the street today, with only one purpose in mind. They wanted to hook the blacks in the lower socioeconomic areas in Los Angeles, make them slaves again, slaves to the glass pipe, the most unforgiving master of masters. Harsh and cruel and in most cases, even deadly from the side effects: theft, prostitution, robbery, and violence. Violence against each other, violence against society.
The CIA seeded their little cancer and it grew nationwide. Billions of dollars. I can’t imagine they understood the full ramifications of their actions, but maybe they did. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost to this treacherously evil narcotic. They might as well have unleashed a fatal germ with no possible cure. America lost a generation of its people, a group or class squandered for the ‘better good’ to protect democracy.
I can’t hope to make you believe I knew about what was happening. I didn’t, not all of it, anyway. Not at first. I initially got involved for reasons of my own. I did it for a woman. A woman I loved more than life itself, my precious Sasha (God rest her soul).
I went to work for Papa Dee selling the rock. Not for greed or avarice; I did it to work my way up in his organization. I did it with one purpose in mind: to bring Papa Dee down for what he’d done to my precious Sasha.
Once in the upper echelon of his organization, I inadvertently stumbled upon the link to the CIA and the horrible program they had instituted, corrupting and squandering the people I grew up with. So when Papa Dee came to me and asked me to run security on his biggest cocaine deal yet, four hundred and fifty kilos, I said hell yes. From that moment on I started planning to rip off Papa Dee, to save the people from all that cocaine, those four hundred and fifty kilos slated to be sold to them. And more importantly, to expose the federal government that continued to lie and deny to the American people their involvement in their ongoing criminal conspiracy.”
I stopped reading, put my hand on Marie’s leg.
She looked up at me. “Bruno, this isn’t a big complicated dope conspiracy; it’s a love story.”
I nodded. “Beyond that, I think my brother’s grabbed a tiger by the tail, and he’s just handed it over to us.”