Arthur Meehan, prisoner number E17073 at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, California, had set up the deal between Gloria Ocampo and Semion Gurevich. Gloria and Arthur had sold drugs and stolen goods to each other for almost twenty-five years; their relationship was professional, friendly, and mutually wary.
Arthur first mentioned this deal to Gloria on a call placed from prison, made on a smuggled phone. Someone, he explained, had approached him looking to unload a regular shipment of ecstasy. “Regular, meaning every damn month. Big, too. Thought of you right away.” Gloria was suspicious, but she was willing to listen.
“Here’s the thing,” Arthur said. “You’re gonna buy it from these Israelis, and then you’re gonna sell it to another dude I know, Shadrack Pullman. You never heard of him?” At that time, she hadn’t. She jotted his name down on a piece of paper.
Her eyes, like she was looking for a snake, moved back and forth over the floor in front of her as she listened. The deal, as Arthur explained it, didn’t make sense. Why wasn’t he setting his Israelis up directly with this other man, Shadrack?
“They’d never do a deal with a man like him,” he said, when she questioned him. “They need a professional—someone like you.” The phone cut out for a second. He had a way of speaking that made him sound country, like a cowboy.
“And you?” she asked. “What do you expect out of all of this?”
“Ten points on what Shadrack pays you.”
“Have you lost your mind?” she said. “Ten percent? This is what we call a finder’s-fee deal.” She tapped on her knee with her hand.
“Look, you’re gonna get this shit from these Jewish fellas, you’re gonna hold it for a night, two nights, and then you’re gonna flip it to Shadrack. You could damn near double the price. They’re gonna want to do this every damn month. Shit, you should be happy I’m not asking for twenty-five. I’m handing you this thing wrapped up like a damn Christmas tree.”
And how, asked Gloria, was she supposed to know that Shadrack Pullman wouldn’t snitch if he got pulled in? She didn’t know what kind of spine the man had. She didn’t know anything about him.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” said Arthur. “That’s why you gotta pay me them points. The dude’s gonna understand that you’re working for me. He’s gonna understand that speaking your name is as dangerous as speaking mine. And trust me, he knows how dangerous that is. The boy served time with me. He knows it like a cock knows the sunrise.” Gloria stayed silent. “It’s natural law,” he added.
It sounded intriguing, she had to admit. Get it, hold it, double the price. Arthur told her to call the Israelis’ man in San Francisco, David Eban, to set up a meeting. He gave her a number and explained that when Eban answered the phone, she had to say, Hello, I got your number from Uri. He would ask, And how is Uri? And she had to answer, Sadly, he’s sick.
“You gotta say it exactly like that,” said Arthur. “He’ll give you an address after that.”
They had dinner at Harris’s steak house. She left the meeting feeling impressed by Eban’s intelligence—certainly a step up from the normal crowd. Over the next few years, she bought every shipment of MDMA that his partners brought to her. Each month, after the deal went down, she’d have one of her sons drop Arthur’s 10 percent at a woman’s house in the Sunset District. Depending on the particulars of the deal, Arthur’s cut usually worked out to somewhere between forty-five and sixty thousand dollars.
It was a good arrangement. Everyone was making money. And it all worked smoothly until, without good reason, Arthur pushed himself further into the equation.
He would call occasionally to see how things were going. It was standard stuff: the man wanted to keep abreast of the situation. She would tell him every time that things were fine. On one of their calls, though, about a month before Raymond Gaspar showed up in San Francisco, Gloria mentioned that Shadrack was becoming a little eccentric. She didn’t ask for help, didn’t say it was a problem; she just mentioned it.
A few days later, Arthur called back. He told her he was going to send someone to check in on them. He said his man was going to straighten Shadrack right out.
“No, no need for that,” said Gloria. “All I’m saying is that the man is strange. I don’t need your help.”
“The boy’s just gonna look in on y’all, smooth things out,” said Arthur. Gloria could hear the sound of prisoners shouting in the background.
She took a moment to formulate what she was going to say. This was the last thing she wanted. Finally, as firmly as possible, she spoke. “No, Arthur. We don’t need him.”
“He’s a good old boy,” Arthur said. “He’ll be there in three weeks.”
Gloria hung up the phone and sat staring at it. She knew what this meant. Wars didn’t always start with cursing and screaming. They didn’t always start with bullets flying. Sometimes they started calmly. He’s a good old boy. He’ll be there in three weeks.
He was preparing to move on her. It was obvious. He wanted to control the whole thing.
The next day she called Tom Roberts. She’d already used him a year earlier to figure out who David Eban was working for. Roberts broke in and bugged the man’s Oakland apartment, followed him everywhere he went, dug through his trash, poked around on his computer, read his e-mail, and did God knows what else until he had it settled: David Eban’s connection was a man named Semion Gurevich, a club owner. Gloria had looked at pictures of Semion on the Internet. He didn’t look like a gangster, even in his flashy suits. He looked soft and sad.
Now she decided it was the perfect time to hear what Semion had to say for himself. Not that she would be calling him directly. But soon, if she was lucky, she’d be listening to him unwittingly telling her exactly what Arthur’s plans were. Even if he did nothing more than mention Arthur’s name, that in itself would tell her something.
She told Roberts she’d pay four thousand dollars a day, and sent him to Miami to bug Semion’s apartment.
Gloria was sitting in her living room watching television when Roberts called.
“The shit has hit the fan,” he said.
“Tell me.” She raised the remote control and muted her celebrity dancing show.
“I swear to fucking God, so help me, it sounds like someone went into your boy’s apartment and he had a—um—he had some kind of serious accident.” Roberts always assumed his calls were being recorded. He spoke accordingly.
“What happened?” she asked. She shut her eyes so she could listen more closely.
“Your boy had an accident. I’ll tell you more in person.” His excitement made her feel annoyed. He sounded like a child. He dropped his voice to a lower register and continued.
“There’s going to be a sale coming your way, too. It sounds like you could get ten times as many cases of wine for your party. At least two hundred—”
“Tom, do me a favor, please—listen—” She sounded out her words like a special education teacher explaining a complicated theory to a student. “Put the message in a folder, and I’ll check it tomorrow. All this talk about wine—I’m not in a mood for wine, okay, sweetheart? Thank you.” Putang tanga, she cursed him in her mind. Did he actually think she wanted his help interpreting things?
Later, when she listened to the audio he’d uploaded, she felt sick to her stomach. It was disgusting to hear someone get killed, to hear his gasps. Her ears perked up when they called her a bitch, though. I am a bitch, she thought. The kind of bitch that has a microphone in your home. The kind of bitch that hears what you say.
She let her mind process it all: Semion Gurevich was dead. He was dead and the Israelis were going to continue moving their drugs, only now they would be sending ten times more. Arthur’s man, she felt certain, was coming precisely because of this increase. Insulting, she thought. Send someone, then. Send someone and see what happens.
Two days later, David Eban called and asked to set up a meeting. They went to Harris’s, as always. Eban had lost weight and grown his hair out since the last time she’d seen him. His clothes sparkled. He looked wealthy. He kissed her on both cheeks when she came in. A few minutes later, he leaned forward and asked, “Do you want to buy more stuff?”
She acted confused.
“Ten times more,” he said. “Between four and five hundred pounds.” He seemed nervous, almost desperate. Gloria pretended to be surprised. She played it out like an actress, shaking her head, pursing her lips, then told him she’d have to think about it. But before the meal ended, she said, “I’ll do it. We’ll do it. It’s on.”
He told her the price. She didn’t fight him on it. They shook hands across the table. Eban looked very pleased. They ordered another drink to celebrate.
“We’ll be rich,” he whispered.
Two days after that, she called Shadrack Pullman and told him to come to her office on Mission Street.
On the corner of Mission and Twenty-Third was a Laundromat. A stairway in the back led to a locked door. A camera pointed down at any callers. Twelve electronic poker machines stood inside, almost always occupied by Filipino senior citizens. The cost to play was a dollar a hand. The machines took credit cards.
In the back of that room, a second stairway led to another locked door, monitored by another security camera. Shadrack Pullman had never been invited to visit Gloria there before. He wondered if he’d done something wrong.
The door swung open before he reached it. A young Filipino man, wearing jeans and a sweater that made him look like a student, nodded and gestured for him to come up. When Shadrack passed through the threshold, the young man said, “Hands up,” and motioned for him to put his hands on the wall. Shadrack did as he was told, and the man patted him down.
“Let me hold on to your phone,” said the man.
Shadrack handed it over.
“Sorry, homey,” the young man whispered as he slipped the phone into his pocket. Then he led Shadrack down a linoleum-floored hallway to an office.
Gloria Ocampo sat behind a plain wooden desk, facing the door. She looked like a lawyer in her glasses, beaded necklace, and suit. A stack of manila files sat on the desk, and a pair of file cabinets stood against the wall to Shadrack’s left. The room was warm and smelled like cardboard. Shadrack stood blinking in the doorway.
Gloria looked up and smiled. “Pullman,” she said. “You never visit anymore!”
He had never visited her at all. When she wanted to speak to him, or vice versa, she picked him up, drove him around the block, and dropped him back off. Until a few hours earlier, he hadn’t even known she had an office in San Francisco.
She rose from the desk, walked over to him, and took his hands in her own. They stood facing each other like dancers. Shadrack’s forehead became warm. He wasn’t used to dealing with people in the light of day, and he certainly wasn’t used to holding hands with Gloria and looking her in the face.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“Nothing to say. Everything’s good. Shit, you know.” He shook his head, gently freed his hands.
“Sit, sit, sit.” She pointed at a chair.
Shadrack—after smoothing his pants and wiping his nose with his knuckles—sat. “You had me all scared, calling me in,” he said. “I thought you were about to yell at me for something.”
“Why would I yell at you?” asked Gloria, sitting back down behind her desk.
“Nah, just like yelling at me to change something.”
“Well, now, see”—she pointed at him, raised her eyebrows—“you’re not so wrong there. You’re not so dumb as people say.” Her accent made her sentences sound percussive. “Maybe you’re smarter than they imagine.” She smiled at him, lifted her chin. “So, tell me then, Shadrack, in an ideal world, what would I like to change?”
She’d raised the price last year. If she tried to increase it again, he’d have to argue. He didn’t want to do that. He shook his head.
“Stop being so nervous, man,” she said. “This is a friendly call. You’re all”—she imitated a man holding his fists up, clenching her arms and shoulders, tightening her face like a child—“you’re all tense. Relax.”
Shadrack took a deep breath. He tried to relax.
“So tell me for real,” she said, smacking her lips, “For real, for real, as my boys say, what would you change, if you were me? Not you. Me.”
An idea occurred to Shadrack. He didn’t like it. He sure as hell wasn’t about to utter it. He reminded himself, as he had many times before, that the best way to deal with this woman was to play dumb.
“I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “I really don’t. I’m clueless here. Everything’s cool, you know. I wouldn’t wanna guess in terms of what you would or wouldn’t wanna do.” He raised an arm, let it drop. “I trust you.”
Gloria took her glasses off and rubbed the area between her eyes. Bass noise from the speakers of a passing car reached the third-floor window: boom-boooom-boom-boooom. Shadrack waited.
“How did we meet?” Gloria asked.
“How did we meet?”
“I’m asking you, how did we meet?”
“Arthur hooked us up.” He couldn’t avoid saying it any longer: Arthur.
Shadrack stayed silent.
“I have an offer for you,” said Gloria. “You’re acting too scared to speak, so I’m going to make it simple, explain everything, and afterward, you can say yes, I like it, or no, I don’t.” She sat looking at him for a moment, and then continued. “Arthur is sending someone to look in on us. This man is supposed to arrive soon. I don’t know when, but soon. Three times I said to Arthur: ‘Don’t send a man.’ And three times he insisted. So what does it mean?” Gloria’s gaze went from Shadrack’s eyes to his lips, and then back up. The space between her own eyes furrowed sympathetically, as though she was about to deliver a painful prognosis. “It means he wants to replace you. I’ve known him for almost thirty years. I know how he thinks, and right now, he’s sitting there locked up in his little cell, thinking: My ten percent is not enough. I need the whole thing.”
Shadrack shook his head involuntarily.
“He told me that rumors of your eccentricity are reaching him in Tracy,” Gloria said. “I said, ‘No, Shadrack is fine. We do business every month. He’s reliable.’ He tells me: ‘I just want my boy to take a look at him.’ I tell him again: ‘No, no need, don’t send anyone.’ He says, ‘I’m sending someone to help you deal with fucking Shadrack.’ He wants to make a move.”
“So maybe he wants to replace you,” said Shadrack. His mouth had gone dry.
A hint of anger moved across Gloria’s face, then transformed into a look of slight amusement. A silly idea, it seemed to say. She shook her head.
“I’ll ask him,” said Shadrack, trying to project calmness into his voice.
“Do that if you want,” she said. “You’re a free man in a free country, but I wouldn’t if I were you.” She rested her elbows on the desk and watched his reaction.
Her words sounded like a warning. Shadrack felt anger spread through his body. He wiped his forehead and cursed.
“No, no, calm down,” she said. “Listen to me. My father used to tell me it’s easier to walk in the dark if you close your eyes than it is to do it with your eyes open. You know what that means?” Shadrack shook his head. “It means that if you admit that you’re blind, you end up taking the appropriate steps. Get it?”
Shadrack still didn’t understand. Apparently sensing this, she changed tack. In a soothing voice, she asked whether they could agree that Arthur sending someone was a bad thing.
“Sure,” said Shadrack. He flicked his hand up as though chasing a fly and nodded again. “But let me ask you a question,” he said, pointing at her. “If he sends someone out, how do I know this dude’s not going to push me out right away? Throw me on my ass?”
“You don’t,” said Gloria. “Nobody does. You never do, right? But I’ve made it clear to Arthur, I’ve told him again and again, that any act of aggression against you will be considered an act against me. Against my organization.”
Shadrack didn’t know whether to believe this or not. He warned himself not to feel flattered. Listen to what she says, he told himself. Take it in, but don’t give anything back. He studied her face: she looked perfectly unbothered.
“One must take normal steps to protect oneself,” said Gloria. She put her hands behind her head, elbows out, and leaned back. “If a man comes to your house, you check if he has a gun. If he has a gun, you turn him away. Do you have a gun? Maybe you’d be safer if you did. Look, at the end of the day, he’s only sending one man, not an army. But you’re playing with sharks now. You’re not in Humboldt County anymore.” She dropped her voice all the way down to a whisper. “We are about to be moving ten times more. It’s a lot of shit. Arthur’s not going to come in shooting. He’s not going to come in and kill you. He’s sending this man—probe, poke, sniff—see what he finds out, see if he can find an advantage, and then, once he knows, then he’ll make his move.”
Shadrack watched her, wondering what advantage she was pushing for.
She went on. “If Arthur wants to send someone to look in on us, under the false pretense that you and I”—she waved her hands back and forth in front of her as though drying her fingernails, pointed at him, then set them down gently on the desk—“that you and I have a problem with each other, then here is what I propose: instead of denying any beef, we should exaggerate it.” She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She continued, “Fine, we don’t get along. We play this man—this rude interloper—off each other. Keep him engaged in petty conflicts.” Shadrack’s face showed concern, but she waved him off. “I have ways of handling men. Let me worry about that. But as soon as he arrives, we start handling him: give him drugs, keep him awake, don’t let him sleep. We keep him busy, running this way, that way, and then—only then, when he’s ready—we really begin to play him.”
Shadrack sat silently, studying her. Her face remained serious, but underneath it, in her eyes, Shadrack could see that she enjoyed this stuff. It made her feel high. She loved it.
“Listen to me,” she said. “If Arthur wants to put his nose in our business, then it’s time for him to go. This ten percent deal is no good. Who pays for it? You do! No, no, no, no good. But you can’t just push a man like Arthur out.” She raised her hands from the desk, rubbed them together. “Let me ask you a question. What if the man that Arthur sent decided to rip us off?”
“Why would he do that?”
“I’m saying, what if it looked like he did? Couldn’t we say, then: ‘Sorry, Mr. Big Dick, but no more points, ‘cause your man stole from us?’”
“And how the hell you gonna make it look like that?”
She squinted. “You make him do things that a man preparing a rip-off would do. Make him get a fake ID. Make him buy a plane ticket to Mexico. Make him buy guns. I don’t know. Make him stop communicating with Arthur. Make him tell his family to move to a safe place. But finally, most importantly, the both of us—two separate camps—we both tell Arthur that his man stole our package. And even more to the point, if the Israelis have a problem with us pushing Arthur out, then we now have a reason. We have good cause. We can show them why we did it.”
“So where would that leave me, exactly?” Shadrack asked. He couldn’t hide his anger. “You want me to play Arthur? Next thing I know there’d be a contract on my ass! I’d wake up in the morning and find some Aryan Brothers sitting in my bedroom with condoms on their dicks and knives in their hands. Shit! You got no idea what you’re talking about. Cut Arthur out? Nobody gonna cut Arthur out.”
“Calm down,” said Gloria. “Nothing happens to you. You’re just being you. Normal you. Crazy Shadrack. Doing LSD, changing your cash into jewelry. Wearing dirty clothes. Not showering. Everything you’re already doing. He can’t kill you for that.”
“And what about the man he sends?”
Gloria held her right hand up in the shape of a gun, dropped her thumb, and made a popping noise with her mouth. “Buried. Bottom of the bay. Never heard from again. He flew to Mexico with our shit. He’s gone.”
They sat staring at each other for a long moment.
“And so what the fuck am I gonna do? You want me acting all crazy? I’m not a damn actor.”
“All you have to do is blame everything on me. Just blame me. Use all that anger that you feel in your heart, right this second, and push it on me. Ice cold, you can curse me up and down. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
“Nah,” said Shadrack, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I gotta take a pass on this one.” He put his hands on his knees as though preparing to stand.
“That’s fine,” said Gloria. “No hard feelings. But that means that you and me, we’re done. I wash my hands of your dirty scent forever. I can’t sell you anything. Deal over. No ten times, no nothing. You can go fuck yourself. Maybe you can go back to growing marijuana in Eureka. It’ll make it easier for me. I’ll just give your spot to Arthur’s man.” She sat there breathing hard. Her face darkened.
“You are one coldhearted lady. You know that?” he said.
She smiled.
Four days later, Arthur called Gloria to give her final notice that his man was coming.
“His name’s Raymond Gaspar,” Arthur said. “He’ll be there in less than two weeks. He’s done some good work for me. He’s my partner. You understand?” She could read the threat between the lines. “He’s a good kid. Smart. I want you to welcome him with open arms. You can trust him. He’ll help you deal with Shadrack.”
Gloria thought about telling him, one last time, not to send anyone. But he’d already been warned. The fact that Arthur was sending the man right before the first big shipment had all but proven her case for her. He was making a move; she was sure of it.
Jackie Santos began watching Gloria as soon as she returned to San Francisco. The woman wasn’t hard to find. She owned five different homes in the Bay Area, but she lived in a modest two-story house in Daly City.
One of Jackie’s occasional boyfriends, a man named Johnson Lake, was a war vet. He’d been with the Special Forces in Afghanistan; he had that time memorialized above his heart with a tattoo that read: THE QUIET PROFESSIONALS. He had been honorably discharged for medical reasons after being arrested in Kabul carrying a pound of heroin. He avoided prison by making a single phone call to an associate at the CIA. The associate had shown up within the hour and had the whole misunderstanding cleared up within the day. Johnson Lake returned to California with a beard and a nasty heroin habit. He told Jackie all of this in bed the first night they met, two years before her trip to Miami.
When Jackie presented him with the hypotheticals of the Gloria job, he said he could put together a team of three other soldiers in exchange for 50 percent of the take. It was painful, but she agreed to it.
She spent the next few weeks tracking Gloria. She watched the woman from her car, following her from place to place. She stared at doors and waited for them to open. It was a time characterized both by dullness and a desperate hunger. Jackie wanted to pull things off so badly that it felt like a physical craving. But what was the plan?
The truth was she didn’t know. She would wait and watch, and see if an opportunity presented itself. For fifty million dollars’ worth of Molly, it seemed reasonable enough.
On the twenty-third day of her surveillance, at 7:52 p.m., Gloria left her office and got into the minivan that normally drove her home. Jackie was prepared to follow the van south, to Daly City, but instead it circled around and headed in the opposite direction, toward downtown. It was almost two hours later than Gloria’s normal drive home, and that, coupled with the change in direction, made Jackie’s pulse quicken. This is what she wanted to see: change, variance.
She followed the van down Mission Street, staying a few cars behind. At Nineteenth, the driver pulled a U-turn, passed a parking spot, and backed into it. Jackie continued driving, and then double-parked. She turned in her seat just in time to see Gloria and the driver get out of their vehicle and buzz the front entrance of the Prita Hotel.
Jackie found a parking spot on Eighteenth, fixed her hair in the mirror, applied red lipstick, and walked toward the Prita. A black guy trying to sell her drugs said, “Wassup, mama? Outfits, outfits, outfits. I got two-for-ones.” She ignored him. At the Prita, she buzzed the bell and ascended to the second door. It looked to her like a third world jail. Jackie pressed the second buzzer. Behind the front desk, a bulletproof box with a ticket slot on the bottom, sat an Indian woman. The smell of Indian food filled the air.
“How much for a room?” Jackie asked.
The female clerk stretched her neck to see Jackie. “Thirty-five,” she said without smiling.
A guest sign-in sheet sat on the other side of the glass. Jackie could read it from where she stood. Gloria had signed in to visit someone named R. Gaspar, in room 32.
“Who’s in thirty-two?” asked Jackie. “Is that Robert Gaspar?”
“We don’t give out information,” said the woman, shaking her head.
Jackie took out forty dollars from her back pocket, held it up for the woman to see, and then slid it through the slot. “There’s a man named Gaspar that used to stalk me,” she said. “I don’t want to stay with him if it’s the same one. He’s dangerous.”
The woman got out of her seat and took the forty dollars. “His name’s Raymond Gaspar,” she said.
“What’s his date of birth?” asked Jackie.
The woman stood there. Jackie slipped another twenty through the slot. “He might be my stalker’s brother,” said Jackie. “Come on, woman to woman.”
The woman looked through a box of notecards on the desk. “March twenty-second, nineteen eighty,” she said.
After warning the woman not to mention anything, for her own safety, Jackie thanked her and left.
Later that night, she looked Raymond up on the Internet. A private investigator database that Roberts had installed on her computer revealed that the man had a criminal record, but it didn’t give any details. She switched to the California Department of Corrections Inmate Locator Site and entered his name. He had been released from prison just that week. An almost narcotic feeling of excitement filled Jackie’s chest.
She called in Johnson Lake for another set of eyes. She began following Raymond Gaspar, while one of Lake’s men stayed on Gloria. She followed Raymond to Shadrack’s house on Colby Street, and followed the two of them to the house near Dolores Park. After seeing a few other people enter the party, she joined a group and went in. She tried to listen as Raymond spoke to the people near the fire. The man was clearly high on something. When he kicked over a glass of wine, she helped clean the floor. The next day, she had Lake put a man on Shadrack, as well.
At night, when she went home to rest for a few hours, she had trouble sleeping. Her excitement felt like an infection. They were getting close. The shipment was coming. But that excitement had to be filtered through the drudgery of twenty-four-hour surveillance, and a near constant state of anxiety. But she couldn’t stop. She learned to pee into a bottle—not an easy thing for a woman. She brought her meals for the day with her each morning. Her back ached from sitting so much. It was hard to stay awake. The days started to blend together.
She arrived on Gloria’s block at 7:15 a.m. The man she was relieving, Johnson Lake’s man, was parked three houses in front of her. He tapped his brake twice to signal his departure before driving off. Gloria typically left at twenty minutes past eight, and things proceeded as usual that morning. The tan minivan was parked in the driveway, as it always was. The driver came out first; he sat there alone for a while, maybe three minutes, with the engine running. Finally, Gloria emerged and stepped into the van. The driver backed out of the driveway and pulled away.
The moment Jackie turned her car on, she sensed something was wrong. It was like a vague premonition, something in the air. She sat there for a moment and considered whether she should follow them as planned or whether, today, she should just let them go. The van was disappearing around the corner in front of her. She counted to three and made up her mind.
When she rounded the corner, she was surprised to see the van sitting there, stopped in the middle of the street. Jackie stopped twenty yards behind it. Another car stopped behind her a moment later.
Nobody honked. They all just sat there.
Jackie watched as the door of the van popped open. The driver stepped out and began walking toward her. She still could have driven forward then, swung hard onto the sidewalk and made her way around them, but she didn’t want to show her hand yet. It was a suburban Bay Area street; it wasn’t illegal to be there. She decided to sit tight and feign innocence. She breathed in deeply and arranged her face into a look of friendly confusion.
The man wasn’t Gloria’s normal driver. Jackie had seen him coming and going over the last few weeks; he looked to be nearly sixty. He was skinny, and wore sunglasses. His cheeks were pockmarked. His pants were silky, and he walked with a friendly gait. Jackie looked in the rearview mirror and saw that a young Asian man sat waiting in the car behind her. Gloria’s driver had reached her door. She lowered her window a few inches, smiled, and asked if she could help him.
The man returned her smile. As he did, the reverse lights on the rear of the van lit up. It was backing toward her. Now her car was truly pinned in. Her eyes went back to the man at her window.
“What’s up?” she asked.
The man reached out and tried to open her door but it was locked. Jackie, in a panic, rolled her window up. The man removed his sunglasses and hung them from the top button of his shirt. Then he put both hands against the windshield and lowered his face to it. It was the kind of gesture a joking grandfather might perform for a child, but the effect was not the same. He smiled, and she saw that one of his front teeth was capped in gold.
She could ram the van, she thought, but she told herself that she could still act her way out of this. She held both hands up near her head in confusion.
“Open it,” the man said. He produced a black pistol and tapped her window with it. It made a horrible sound, cold and hard: tap, tap, tap.
Everything blurred from there. The man, after looking all around to confirm they were unobserved, began screwing a silencer on to his gun. When he was done, he pointed it toward her head. She unlocked the door.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, when he’d pulled it open. “What’d I do?”
“You’re not police?” asked the man. He had a Filipino accent. His face looked genuinely concerned. He held the gun loose at his side now.
“No, I’m—what? I’m driving to work.”
“Ah—and your work involves what?”
“I work at a school,” Jackie said. “I’m a teacher.”
The man used the gun to point at the watch on his left wrist.
“It’s a little late to be teaching, right? Teachers go to school at seven thirty. It’s after eight thirty already.”
“I don’t know who you think—” She willed authority into her voice. “It’s not acceptable to go around and …”
“I’ve never met a teacher who follows a woman for days on end.”
Jackie’s mind went blank. “No?” she said.
He bent down so that his face was close to hers. The scent of cigarettes, coffee, and the soap on his skin drifted into her car. “I’m going to sit down in that seat,” he said. He pointed at the passenger seat with his gun. “I’m sure it’s a little mistake, a simple misunderstanding. You can explain everything, and then we’ll have you on your way, back to your classroom. Please, don’t do anything stupid.” With that he closed her door and walked around the back of her vehicle.
She watched him in her rearview, and then turned and watched him approach the passenger side. She could still lay on the horn, ram the cars. But she didn’t do anything. She couldn’t. He opened the door and sat down.
“Good,” he said. He leaned toward her and pressed the horn gently. The car behind them backed up.
“Drive back that way,” he said.
“I have no idea what you think is happening,” she said.
“It’s fine—nothing—back up, back up,” he said.
She had to turn halfway in her seat so she could see. The man with the gun stayed facing forward, a dreadful look hung on his face. As the car reversed, she spoke slowly, sounding out each syllable to emphasize her innocence: “I don’t know who you think I am. Please, I’m begging you. I wasn’t trying to follow you. If it seemed like I was, I apologize.” She used her American accent. She sounded like a girl born and raised in California.
“Back in there,” the man said, pointing at a driveway. “Back into it and then turn around. I’m sure it’s fine. I guarantee you, no problem.” He pointed his gun at the van in front of them. “But she wants to talk to you before the police are called. You know? Normal business. Go.” He pointed toward Gloria’s house.
Jackie, unable to stop her hands from shaking, steered the car back toward the house. Her chest clamped shut with fear.
“Please pull into this driveway,” said the man.
Jackie turned into Gloria’s driveway, the same one she’d been watching for weeks. The car that had been behind her parked on the street. The tan minivan pulled behind Jackie, boxing her in. Gloria sat in the driver’s seat.
The man next to Jackie rubbed his forehead as though he had a headache. Jackie looked at his gun, imagined snatching it out of his hand, but couldn’t bring herself to try. The front door of Gloria’s home sprung open and a young man dressed like he’d been asleep came out. He was talking on a cordless phone. He walked right up to Jackie’s window and looked in at her. He spoke Tagalog; Jackie couldn’t understand him. She looked at her rearview mirror and saw Gloria speaking into a cell phone. They were talking to each other.
“This is so stupid,” said Jackie. She shook her head and held her palms up.
“I know,” said the man with the gun. His expression made him seem as annoyed as she was.
“I’m going to be late, and I’m fucking pissed,” said Jackie. She banged on the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.
The man standing outside ended his phone call. He leaned down and studied Jackie’s face for a moment, as though trying to recall if he’d ever seen her before.
“I have no clue what you want,” she said, speaking loudly through the closed window. “This is insane.” She ratcheted up her anger. “I’m going to call the police, I’m going to sue each and every one of you for false imprisonment, and I’m going to get really fucking pissed off if you don’t let me go. You hear me?” She sounded genuinely aggrieved.
The man outside her window straightened up and looked around at the neighboring houses. He opened Jackie’s door and motioned for her to get out. Jackie didn’t move. The man in the passenger seat pulled her keys from the ignition and dropped them into her purse.
“Please. No sound. Silence. No talking,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her out of the car. The man in the driveway had been joined by the other driver. They held their hands toward the front door of the house.
“Please,” said the one in pajamas.
Jackie turned and looked at Gloria. The woman was watching everything from inside the minivan; the expression on her face remained flat. It appeared her thoughts were elsewhere. Jackie again considered screaming, but fear of being hit, or worse, kept her quiet. The street was empty. She walked toward the front door.
“This is beyond unacceptable,” she said. “It’s fucking bullshit. My father is a top attorney in San Francisco. Do you understand? Lawyer!”
“Please,” the young driver said again.
The one in pajamas hurried ahead of them and held the door open. Jackie stepped into the house. The place smelled, not unpleasantly, like chicken porridge. The man with the gun pushed Jackie gently into the living room. Pictures of young children hung from the walls. She registered a bookshelf, a liquor cabinet. A doomed feeling spread over her. A moment later, Gloria stepped into the room.
“Hello,” the older woman said. She said something in Tagalog after that, and the man with the gun frisked Jackie. He searched her roughly, untucking her shirt, pulling it up, and rubbing her back and belly. He circled her waistband with his fingers. She pulled away from him.
“This is fucking bullshit,” she said, turning toward Gloria. “Ma’am, I don’t know what you think—I have no—this—” She breathed in deeply. “Please, I’m sorry. I have no idea what you think happened.”
Gloria waved for her to be quiet. The young driver walked into the room carrying Jackie’s purse. He dumped its contents onto the table. Jackie heard loose change falling, heard her keys fall out. “Give me that!” she yelled. She started walking toward the man with the purse, but the one with the gun grabbed her arm.
“Jesus,” she said. “What the fuck?”
“Shut up!” said Gloria.
The man at the table found her license and brought it to Gloria. Gloria took it and read the name aloud: “Candy Hall-Garcia.” She said something about Candy in Tagalog and the men chuckled.
“You can’t do this,” said Jackie. “It’s kidnapping. You could be in so much trouble. California does not—”
“Final warning,” said Gloria. “Shut up. No speaking until spoken to.”
The man searching through her purse handed Gloria her phone.
“Password?” Gloria said.
“I’m not—”
“Beat her until she says it,” said Gloria.
The pockmarked man lifted his fist like he was going to hit her.
“Okay, okay, fine, Jesus: One-nine-eight-five.”
She remembered too late that she’d been exchanging text messages with Johnson Lake. They’d used Gloria’s name. They’d texted about Raymond and Shadrack and John. A dark clarity settled over her. Gloria stood silently reading from the phone for a very long time.
The expression on her face, when she finally looked up, suggested icy hatred. She spoke a long sentence in Tagalog, and one of the men disappeared down a flight of stairs into the basement.
“Sit,” said Gloria, pointing at the couch. Jackie sat.
“Move her car into the garage,” Gloria said.
“I can pay you,” said Jackie.
“The next time she speaks, I want you to break one of her fingers,” said Gloria. “This one.” She pointed at her own fourth finger. “Snap it.”
She set a wooden chair in front of Jackie and sat down, pressing her hands together in front of her face like she was praying. The man with the gun stood by silently. Jackie, no longer able to maintain eye contact, glanced at Gloria every few seconds. The other woman didn’t look away. She stared and stared.
Tears trailed down Jackie’s face. She sniffled, quietly. The sound of a dryer tumbling clothes could be heard in a distant room. Finally, breaking the silence, the young man downstairs called up, “Okay!”
Gloria leaned back. She exhaled loudly, clapped her hands once, and pointed at the stereo. “Turn it on,” she said.
The man in pajamas walked to the stereo and turned it on. The sound of a loud commercial filled the room. Gloria shook her head, and he changed the station. She shook her head again. When he found a station playing hopeful Christian rock, she nodded.
“Turn it up,” she said. He did. “Louder,” she said.
He made it very loud. The music blared from the speakers: He will walk with you. He will sing with you. He will dance with you. He will battle for you.
Jackie began sobbing quietly.
“Get up,” said Gloria.
Jackie stood up and shook her head. “I told the police. They know I’m here.”
Gloria stood and stepped closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “I told you I was going to break your finger if you talked,” she said. “You’re acting very stupid.” She stared into Jackie’s eyes. “Come on,” she said.
The man with the gun grabbed Jackie by the shoulders. He was stronger than he looked. When they got to the stairs, he guided her down. She didn’t resist. The music blared.
At the bottom of the stairs, the floor became gray concrete. The man pushed Jackie through a doorway into a large, fluorescent-lit basement. Random furniture cluttered the space. Boxes filled with toys and books sat on the floor. The other driver stood near the center of the room, where a metal beam stretched from the floor to the ceiling. A chair had been placed in front of the beam; on the ground, spread under the chair, was a painter’s plastic drop cloth.
The young man held his hand out to the chair. “Please,” he said.
A wave of uncontrollable crying swept over Jackie. She heaved for breath.
“Sit, sit, sit,” said the man with the gun.
She was guided to the chair. The young man took a green garden hose and began wrapping it around her torso. He yanked on the hose and pulled it tight, then tied it behind her. It forced Jackie to sit straight.
Gloria spoke in Tagalog, and the older driver pulled his belt off. He stepped toward Jackie and used it to tie her head to the beam, so that the back of her skull pressed against the metal.
“Please,” she said. “Please.” The man tied the belt tight.
“I’m going to ask you one time,” said Gloria. “Who you are with?”
“I’m not with anyone,” Jackie said.
Gloria spoke in Tagalog and one of the men walked to the far side of the basement. He disappeared from Jackie’s view. She heard him rummaging around in what sounded like a metal box. Muffled Christian music could be heard from upstairs. When the man reappeared, he carried small pruning shears. He handed them to Gloria. She stepped toward Jackie and snapped the shears open and closed in front of her face. They made an awful metallic cutting noise: schink-schink-schink.
“No,” said Jackie. “Okay. I’m done playing.”
“She’s done playing,” said Gloria, turning toward the man with the gun. Jackie’s eyes went to him. He looked genuinely scared. Her own fear ratcheted up even further.
Gloria reached toward Jackie’s face with the pruning shears and tapped her gently on the nose. She smiled coldly. “Final chance,” she said.
“I’m on my own,” said Jackie, crying. “I’ve brought in three other men. They work for me. They’re not here, but we’ve been watching you, watching all of you—Shadrack, Raymond Gaspar, everyone. It’s all stupid. So stupid. I’m sorry. I promise—” She breathed in deeply. “I promise it will never happen again.”
“These are the men you’ve been exchanging text messages with?”
“Yes.”
“And what is it you are looking for?”
“I’m trying to steal your shit,” said Jackie. “It was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“She’s sorry,” said Gloria.
Jackie looked at the man with the gun. He nodded at her, as though in encouragement.
“And how did you come to know about this shit you want to steal?” Gloria said.
“Roberts,” Jackie said, pausing for a moment to cry. “Roberts. He brought me to Miami to help get him into an apartment. He didn’t tell me about you, but I stole his phone. I looked on his computer. It’s me. It’s all me. Seriously, I’ve never done anything this stupid.”
“Ah! Tom Roberts,” said Gloria. “We spoke once on the telephone, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” said Jackie.
“I see,” said Gloria. She nodded, cleaned her top teeth with her tongue. “Roberts. Call him,” she said to one of the young men. “Tell him to come here. Tell him we have an emergency.”
Gloria bent down near Jackie’s face. “See? Honesty and respect, that’s all we ask. We can’t move forward if we don’t learn how to be good to each other. Right?”
Jackie tried to nod.
“Can I get you some water?”
She nodded again, as much as she could.
When the water came, the woman poured it into her mouth. Then she patted her head and left her alone with the man with the gun. He sat down on a heavy armchair, pulled out his cell phone, and began playing a game. The stereo upstairs went silent. Jackie strained her ears, but besides occasional footsteps and muffled voices, there was nothing.
Her eyes grew heavy, and she let them close. The quiet beeping of the man’s phone filled her mind.
At some point the Christian music came back. When she opened her eyes, Gloria was stepping into the basement. She was followed by the two young men and Tom Roberts.
Roberts’s face changed when he saw Jackie: his mouth dropped open, and his head shook. Apparently, he hadn’t expected to find her there.
“No, no, what is this?” he said, turning toward Gloria.
“You tell me,” she said.
“What the fuck is this?” he said again, and then he turned to Jackie and asked the question with more anger. “Jackie, what the fuck have you done?”
“Your friend here has been following me,” Gloria said.
“Oh, no, no, no—I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said. Jackie stared at him. The man was panicking. His face was deformed and ugly with rage. He pointed at her. “I didn’t know you were—what the fuck have you done? What’d she do?” He turned back to Gloria.
“That’s it,” said Gloria. “That’s all we know.”
Roberts looked back at Jackie. “You stupid bitch, you have no idea how much trouble you’ve gotten yourself into this time. What were you thinking?” He turned away again. “I don’t know anything about this girl,” he said, raising his hands. He looked around wildly at the other men in the room. “Nothing. You’re on your own on this one, Jackie. Fuck! Do whatever you need to do to her,” he said, looking back at Gloria.
Gloria smiled thinly. She nodded at the younger driver. He stepped toward Roberts and held out a black handgun.
“Take care of it,” said Gloria. “Show us you have nothing to do with it.”
Roberts stood holding the gun for a moment. His shoulders slumped.
“No,” Jackie said. “No, please.” She tried to rock against the hose and belt, but they held tight. “Please,” she said. “I can do so much for you. I can—”
Gloria put her finger to her mouth and hushed her. Jackie felt a strange sense of resolve take hold. She was stuck. This was it. The end.
Roberts’s face looked somehow broken. His mouth frowned unnaturally. He muttered something as he approached her, maybe a prayer. He lifted the gun and pressed it against her temple.
“Oh my God, Jackie, I’m sorry,” he said.
Jackie closed her eyes. A thousand sirens blared in her mind. She heard the sound of a click. Nothing happened. She opened her eyes. Roberts squeezed the trigger again. Click. The gun bumped against her head. He squeezed it again. Click.
“You need to have bullets in your gun,” said Gloria.
The young man next to her held up a single brass bullet between his finger and thumb. The wave of panic that Jackie had been riding crashed. Language returned. She prayed: Oh God, if you help me on this one, just this one, I will forever be your servant. Oh, Jesus Christ in heaven. Allah. Jesus. Buddha. Mom. Help me.
The young man beckoned to Roberts with the bullet. Roberts, defeated, went to him. The young man took the gun, turned his back for a second, turned back, and pointed the gun at Roberts’s head. Roberts stood there with his shoulders slumped. His back was to Jackie; she couldn’t see his face.
The young man pulled the trigger. The gun clicked again. Gloria’s men laughed. Roberts’s body quaked.
“I wouldn’t waste a bullet on you,” Gloria said. “You’re an imbecile, but if your disgusting white body was shitting blood on my basement floor you wouldn’t be able to pay me back the money I gave you for your little Miami vacation. Sixty thousand, plus expenses. Look at me.” He turned and looked at her. “You have forty-eight hours to bring that money back to me. Get out. Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind.”
Roberts turned toward Jackie. His face showed pure animal rage, but it was shame, not rage, that he was feeling. He’d tried to kill her and failed. Every moment from his boyhood through right now, all of it, had been a failure. He wasn’t going to go to hell. He was already in it.
“Go,” said Gloria.
Roberts walked upstairs. The two young men followed him. The Christian music grew louder for a moment as they passed through the door.
Gloria walked to Jackie and untied the belt around her head. She brushed the hair out of her face. Then she put a hand on her shoulder, leaned down, and whispered: “Okay? Just us, now. No more playing around. No more games. You’ve seen me. You know my face. You’ve been following me. You know who I am.” She stood staring at Jackie for a long time. “Tell me, it’s you and four men and no one else?”
“That’s right,” said Jackie.
“And these men don’t know that you’re here with me right now?”
“No.”
“And you hired the men? They work for you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you sleep with the men?”
“No.”
“They’ll follow what you say?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about these four men,” said Gloria. “Tell me everything about them.”
Two days later, Raymond Gaspar was shot and killed in Hercules.
Gloria’s young driver pulled the trigger. Shadrack shut his eyes when it happened.
He had gotten to the house an hour before anybody else. He carried in 5.6 million dollars in two separate bags, which he hid in the closet of one of the bedrooms. He set the plastic on the floor just like Gloria had instructed. Even as he did it, it hadn’t seemed real. He kept telling himself that there would be some way out of it, that the killing would be called off.
The house didn’t have any furniture. After Shadrack spread out the plastic, he walked around the place, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror and checking the refrigerator. It was empty. He lay down on his back on the living room floor. He stared at the ceiling and waited for everyone else to arrive.
The Filipinos got there first. Two of them came in together, the older one with the pockmarks and the younger driver. They smelled like they’d been smoking cigarettes. The driver had his gun out already and was screwing a silencer on to it. Both men were breathing heavily, like they’d run from the car.
“Where we doing it?” asked the young one. He seemed amped up. Shadrack pointed him toward the back room. He didn’t know the men’s names, and he didn’t want to. They scared him.
John and Raymond arrived a few minutes later, right on schedule. The look on Raymond’s face when he entered the house nearly broke Shadrack’s heart. It was pale, sad, doomed, and weary. He looked like he knew exactly what was coming.
Shadrack had been around death before: he’d seen people stabbed and killed in Eureka; he’d had friends overdose on heroin. But he’d never been this close to it; he’d never been so much a part of bringing it about. The house seemed to shake for a moment when the gun went off.
Dark red blood pumped from the hole in Raymond’s head onto the plastic sheet. His eyes stayed open, one arm bent up near his chest.
“Jesus, Lord forgive us,” said Shadrack. He looked at John, who stood shaking his head. He looked like he was fighting back tears. The house, quiet as it was, seemed filled with noise.
The young man who’d shot Raymond bent down and poked at his body. “He’s gone,” he said. He checked Raymond’s pockets, pulling out his phone, some money, and his license. He looked at the ID and tossed it to Shadrack. Raymond’s face, in the picture, had a hopeful look. Then the young man found the key and the piece of paper that Gloria had given to Raymond, and held them out to Shadrack, too.
“Here,” he said.
Shadrack was afraid to come close. The man must have sensed it. He straightened up and brought the key and the paper to him.
“The money’s in the other bedroom,” said Shadrack. He looked at the piece of paper. Handwritten on it was an address on Lemon Street, in Vallejo. The unit number had been underlined twice. Shadrack put the note and the key in his pocket.
“There a guard at this place?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said the young man. “He knows you’re coming. Just sign in, show him your license, and go to the unit. Just like always.”
The older man came in and looked at the body. He spoke Tagalog to the younger one. “Are we good?” Shadrack asked. Nobody answered. “You better make sure that body don’t ever get found,” he said. “Unless you want Arthur coming for your ass.”
Nobody said anything. “We good?” he asked again.
“All the money there?” asked the older man.
“Yeah, go on. Count it,” said Shadrack.
In the other room, Gloria’s men—two more had come in after the shooting—were taking the money out of the bags, looking it over, and counting stacks. When they finished they stood up straight, brushing the knees of their pants. The oldest one stepped forward and shook hands with Shadrack, putting a hand on his shoulder like he was comforting him. He shook hands with John, as well.
When they were safely in John’s SUV, Shadrack said, “Man, the apple don’t fall far from the tree with that lot, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” said John.
“They are a nasty bunch,” Shadrack said.
“Give me that address,” John said. “I’ll put it in my little map, here.”
Shadrack gave him the slip of paper. His hands were still shaking. John sat typing the address into his phone.
“They had the young kid do it, too,” said Shadrack. He exhaled, then looked out the window at the stars in the sky. “Raymond was a good dude, man. Shit.” John nodded. “I feel sick about it.”
“His ass just got caught between a rock and hard spot,” said John.
“I liked him, though,” said Shadrack. “It gives you a damn pause, man, no joke. I mean, what the fuck we doing here?”
“He was a good kid,” said John, shaking his head. “A good kid with bad luck.”
At the storage facility, the guard stared at John’s license for a long time before handing it back. He returned to his booth and raised the gate. John parked in front of the unit, a garage-sized one with a roll-down door. They sat for a minute, watching the area, making sure they were alone. The place appeared to be deserted.
“Give me that gun,” said John. Shadrack opened the glove compartment, pulled out a handgun in a holster, and handed it over.
They unlocked the unit and pulled the door open. In the back of the space, pushed up against the wall, sat six plastic tubs—thirty-one gallons apiece.
“Pull that door closed,” said Shadrack. “That is a lot of shit.”
The tubs were sealed with packing tape. Shadrack pulled a knife from his pocket and flipped it open. He cut the tape at the corner of one of the tubs, pulled up the lid, and looked in: vacuum-sealed loafs of Molly stacked up in blue kilo packs. It was a beautiful sight.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” whispered Shadrack. “That’s what the fuck I’m talking about.”
John moved the SUV so that the back of it faced the door. They put the backseats down, loaded the tubs in, and covered them with a wool blanket. Shadrack pulled the door of the unit closed and locked it. The guard watched them from his booth as they approached. John held up a backhanded peace sign as they drove past.
“I wish you’d let me play some music,” said Shadrack.
“Daddy told you he’s gotta focus,” said John.
“Oh come on, not this daddy shit again.”
“Daddy coming home!” said John. “Daddy hungry!”
“Go to the damn drive-in, then!” said Shadrack.
“Shit,” said John. He smiled and looked in the rearview mirror.
They traveled east on Lemon Street. It was twenty minutes past midnight; there were no other cars on the road. Dark warehouses stood on both sides of the street. Fences topped with razor wire appeared here and there. The streetlights cast an orange glow over everything. Fog had started to roll in.
Shadrack had just begun to say something—he’d gotten the first two words out, “All they”—when a violent boom interrupted him. The car jumped hard.
“What the fuck?” yelled Shadrack. “What happened?”
The men sat there in shock. Smoke was coming from under the SUV. When John pressed the gas pedal, the car made a terrible noise and didn’t move at all.
“Shit!” said John. He was looking in the rearview mirror. Shadrack turned and looked that way: A black van with a red siren spinning on top had stopped fifteen yards behind them. A spotlight from the van lit them up.
John took the gun out of his pocket and handed it to Shadrack.
“We gonna shoot?” Shadrack asked. John tried to move the car again, but it was no use.
Two lights hit them from the front, then. Both men looked that way at the same time. The lights were attached to large guns, held by two hunched men closing in fast. They were right on top of them. John and Shadrack raised their hands. There was nothing they could do.
“Turn your phone on,” said Shadrack. “Record this shit. This ain’t no legal stop.”
John was too scared to move. One of the men outside stepped to his window and smashed it with some kind of tool. Shattered glass fell in on them. A second later, Shadrack’s window exploded, too. Guns pointed in through the broken windows.
“Open the back,” said the man on John’s side. They were dressed in black and had black balaclavas over their heads, but they were white men; Shadrack could see it around their eyes.
“Okay, okay,” said John.
“Three, two—”
John leaned forward and pulled the latch for the back door. The man beside him raised a fist, and the spotlight on the van went dark. Shadrack could hear it begin to turn around. For a moment, he thought it might drive away, but then it backed up so that the rear ends of both vehicles faced each other. The back doors of the van popped open, and a third man jumped out. He pulled open the back door of the SUV. The men in the road held their guns pointed at John and Shadrack.
“Ten seconds!” said the man on John’s side.
“They ain’t cops,” whispered John.
“Clear!” said the man in back.
“Careful,” said the man on John’s side. He looked in at both of them. “Wouldn’t want to kill you.”
The men in the road jogged to the van. John and Shadrack watched them in the side mirrors. They jumped in the back, the doors slammed shut, and the van took off.
“What the fuck was that?” asked Shadrack.
“They just took our shit,” said John.
“What the hell happened?”
“We got jacked!”
“They hit us with a damn land mine!”
“I thought they were gonna kill us!”
“Fuck me,” said John.
They sat there for a few seconds, then unfastened their seat belts and stepped out of the car. Both of the front wheels sat bent out at an ugly angle. The fenders had been blown off.
“You better get rid of that gun,” said John. “Cops probably gonna be here in a minute.”
“You know who that was?” said Shadrack. “You know who masterminded that little operation?”
“No,” said John.
“Arthur,” said Shadrack. “I guarantee it.”
Gloria knocked on the door, waited a moment, and then entered the room. Jackie, lying on the bed, pushed herself up. A small television played quietly on the nightstand.
They’d been holding her for the last three days. Except for being handcuffed to a chain locked to the bed frame, she’d been treated civilly. They fed her regularly, let her use the restroom. She’d even taken a couple showers. Still, she found herself in a constant state of fear. She was sick with it.
On the second night, Gloria had come into her room after midnight. She wore a white sleeping gown, something a grandmother might wear; it was loose, and looked expensive. Her face had a distant look to it. Jackie had sat up and waited for the older woman to say something. Gloria’s breath had smelled strongly of white wine, and her eyes were bloodshot. Instead of speaking, she’d sat down next to Jackie and taken her sweaty hand in her own. Then she’d painted Jackie’s fingernails with clear polish.
Jackie let her do it. What else could she do? When Gloria gestured for her other hand, the handcuffed one, she held it out. The older woman began to speak as she continued applying the polish. She said things that were supposed to sound soothing: Don’t worry, everything will be fine. You’ll be okay. You’ll see. Good, good, good.
When she was done, she squeezed Jackie’s hand, looked her in the eye, and asked if she was all better. Then she stood back up, said good night, and left.
They hadn’t spoken about it since then. Jackie spent most of her time watching television or sleeping. Her mind had spun itself into a mess of repeated thoughts. She felt like she’d aged ten years in three days.
Gloria was in a pantsuit, now. “Good morning,” she said. She went to the television and turned it off. Jackie tried to read her body language for any signs, but beyond a new perkiness, she didn’t see anything. She sat up and let her feet rest on the floor. The room she was being held in had been, it seemed, a girl’s bedroom; the colors, cream and peach, didn’t speak of any boy having lived there.
“Did you eat?” asked Gloria.
“Yes, thank you,” said Jackie.
And then she saw it: Gloria seemed happy. She stared at Jackie for a moment, smiling with her eyes.
“He texted,” she said. She held up Jackie’s phone and shook it like a baby’s toy. “Shit is salt.” She looked at Jackie meaningfully. “That’s all he said: ‘Shit is salt.’”
Jackie nodded her head. Gloria came to the bed and sat next to her. “You did it,” the older woman said.
“They did it,” said Jackie, feeling embarrassed.
“Yes, but you made them do it,” said Gloria. “That’s the secret of these things.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Make them do it.”
“So?” asked Jackie, trying to find the most charming and beautiful version of herself. “Will you let me go?”
“That was the deal,” said Gloria. She pulled out a key and unlocked the handcuff. Jackie rubbed her wrist. The possibility of escaping with her life began to seem real. She exhaled, and had to stop herself from crying.
Gloria had written the messages to Johnson Lake. She texted him from Jackie’s phone, in Jackie’s presence, showing the younger woman the messages before she sent them. Later, she made her call him. Jackie explained that she’d found out exactly when the package was coming. Lake pressed her for more, but she told him—acting breathless and excited—that she still had to confirm a few things.
When she hung up, Gloria, taking the phone back, said, “Well done.”
Over the next few days, she sent a steady stream of texts to him from Jackie’s phone: Happening soon. Get men ready. Tuesday night. Pickup will be from a storage center in E Bay. On the day the deal went down, Gloria made Jackie speak to him again. Jackie told Lake that her info was real, that she’d flipped one of Gloria’s boys. She told him that she couldn’t meet up with him because she had to stay with her source. To assuage his skepticism, she said, “If anything doesn’t feel right, just pull back—but it feels solid to me.” She put as much seduction in her voice as she could, realizing that she felt good doing it.
Gloria watched her talk, smiling, and then took her phone away again.
Later that afternoon, Gloria came back before sending the address. “Is that how you would phrase it?” she asked, holding the phone up for the younger woman to examine. Jackie read the message over twice, trying to project helpfulness, and told her it sounded right.
The message laid out all of John and Shadrack’s movements for the night. It described the car, the men, the house in Hercules, the storage unit in Vallejo. It suggested that Lake’s men hit them directly after they’d left the storage facility.
The soldiers trailed the car to Hercules first, setting remote-controlled C4 under the SUV’s wheel wells while Shadrack and John were inside the house watching Raymond Gaspar get murdered.
But Gloria was playing the soldiers, too. The packages waiting at the storage facility in Vallejo had been fake. The vacuum-sealed packs contained nothing but salt.
The real stuff was sitting in Gloria’s basement; it was going to be driven to Las Vegas in two days. She knew a man there she could sell it to. She’d even raised the price: $6.2 million.
$6,200,000 + $5,600,000 = $11,800,000.
Shadrack wouldn’t suspect Gloria: in his mind, she would never send a bunch of white men to do a job like that. But even if he did suspect her, there was nothing he could do about it. He was outmatched, and he knew it. As soon as the next shipment came in, he’d be waiting to buy it. He might be more careful next time, he might even have to ask her for a loan, but he’d still buy it. The cycle would continue. The scramble would start up again.
As for Lake’s men, Jackie would have to explain to them that she’d been played just like they had. What more could she do? She’d given them the same information she’d been given. You win some; you lose some. Gloria hadn’t told Jackie that she was going to have the four men killed. They knew too much. But there was no point in explaining that. Not yet, at least.
Tom Roberts—now perfectly under Gloria’s control—would handle the investigation of Raymond. He’d find the fake ID, the plan to move his mother, the ticket to Mexico. Gloria would bring all this information to Arthur, along with Shadrack’s story about Raymond disappearing with the money. Shadrack would go along; he didn’t have a choice. And what was Arthur going to do? Go to war over 10 percent? It occured to her that maybe he never knew the deal had become ten times larger. He might never find out. He’d get out of the hole—Gloria still had to pay off the prison guard she used for that—and find that everything in San Francisco had changed. The world moves fast. Hard to keep up, from prison.
It was a perfect situation. She just had to keep the men in Miami happy, and they’d start it all up again next month.
She smiled at Jackie again. “You know,” she said, “I moved to America from the Philippines when I was twelve years old. I never went to school. Even here, I went straight to work; I washed dishes at an Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin for five years. And look at me now. I have a family. I’m surrounded by people that love me. I have nine grandchildren. I own property. I get awards from city hall for my community work. I pay my taxes. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” said Jackie, even though she didn’t. She concentrated on matching her breathing to Gloria’s; when the older woman inhaled, Jackie did, too.
Gloria studied the younger woman’s face for a long time. “We started off on the wrong foot, you and me,” she said. “I’d be willing to bet that we had very similar lives, growing up.” For a moment, her eyes seemed to fill with tears. “Too many problems in this world, you know? Too much hatred. Too much violence. When I was young, I was like you: beautiful. I only cared about dancing. It’s all I wanted to do. Disco, you know—” She shook her shoulders. “Dancing, flirting, drinking, singing. Things change, though. Things happen. You can’t dance every day. You have to make money, too.”
Jackie nodded. Her nervousness faded. She couldn’t help herself; she liked this woman.
“Women need to help each other,” said Gloria, as though she could read Jackie’s mind. “It’s the most important thing. Men are dangerous. They ruin everything.” She raised her eyebrows.
Jackie nodded her head. Her own eyes filled with tears. It was exactly what she’d been thinking.
“I have a job for you,” said Gloria.
“What is it?”
“Someone told me that Shadrack Pullman didn’t even pay with his own money. You know that? The five million, it came from a new partner of his. Some rich techie, an idiot, a white devil. He wants to pretend he’s some kind of drug lord. So, we show him. We say, Welcome to San Francisco.”
Jackie had a good guess who Gloria was talking about: Brendan Moss, the host of the party that Raymond and Shadrack had attended. She’d already started a file on him.
“The same little bird told me that Shadrack took a bag of jewels to this man,” Gloria went on. “A big bag, left it as a deposit on the money.” She counted on her fingers: “Diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies.” She dropped her hand. “All of it.”
Jackie smiled.
“That’s your thing, right?” asked Gloria. “Getting into men’s apartments?”
That same morning, Gloria Ocampo’s older driver, the man with the pockmarked face—Salvador Luis Macaraeg—arrived at the Wolf Point Yacht Club, in San Mateo. He parked the minivan on the south side of the lot and rummaged around in the glove compartment until he found some sunscreen. He dabbed a little on his nose, forehead, and the bald spot on the crown of his head. Then he got out of the van, looked around, and walked to the clubhouse to borrow a dock cart.
When he returned to the van, his nephew—the younger driver, Mario Ocampo—opened the back door, and together the two men lifted a 250-pound manhole cover from the back. The manhole cover was wrapped in a large black trash bag. Next, they opened the side door and pulled out a large green canvas Christmas tree bag. It was heavy, and they struggled to balance it in the cart at an angle. Inside the bag, wrapped in a blue tarp, which itself was wrapped in packing tape, was Raymond Gaspar’s body. The manhole cover was going to sink it, and keep it sunk.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was perfect weather. Salvador Macaraeg was a firm believer in doing his dirty work in the light of day. Nobody sees you, he liked to say. You can do anything in the daytime.
Together, the two men wheeled the cart through the front gate of the club and onto the dock. They wheeled it all the way to slip C-17, where the New Moon, a 26-foot Farallon Walkabout, was docked. Its diesel engine was already running. The captain of the boat, Chi Xingyou, a sixty-one-year-old fisherman, sat shaking his head disdainfully as the two men approached. He didn’t like doing these jobs, but they paid him a thousand dollars each time, and, besides that, he didn’t know how he was supposed to refuse a request from Gloria Ocampo.
He greeted the men with a nod as they carried the heavy bag onto the boat. A sunburnt white man accompanied by a blond woman walked by and waved; Chi Xingyou waved back, pasting a fake smile on his face and nodding his head uncomfortably. The two Filipino men returned to the cart and lifted the manhole cover out, straining and bent, breathing with their cheeks puffed out. They carried the thing onto the boat and set it near the bag. Then they opened the bag up and struggled to get the manhole cover inside, so that it rested on top of Raymond Gaspar’s wrapped body. Salvador Macaraeg zipped the bag closed. It resembled a snake that had swallowed something too big for its belly.
Both men dragged the bag to the back of the boat’s work deck. Salvador borrowed a pocketknife from the captain and began poking holes in the bag; when the time came, it would fill with water.
Mario told him to call him when he got back. He didn’t like going on the boat; it made him seasick. He waved once, then took the cart and wheeled it back to the clubhouse. Chi Xingyou and Salvador began pulling in the lines and anchor chains. When everything was clear, Chi Xingyou went to the bridge, and they began motoring out. Salvador sat on the work deck and watched the view recede behind them. The bay was too shallow for this job, so they motored past the airport and under the Bay Bridge, passing Alcatraz on their right and crossing the Presidio Shoal. After piloting under the Golden Gate Bridge, they headed due west, out into the Pacific Ocean.
After forty-five minutes in open waters, Chi Xingyou killed the engine. The boat drifted and rocked on the little waves. The water, here, was a perfect shade of navy blue. The captain joined Salvador on the deck, and both men looked around. Except for a large tanker some distance west, there were no other ships in sight. Salvador took off his sunglasses and placed them in a cup holder. He moved toward the Christmas tree bag, and the captain joined him. They didn’t speak as they bent and strained and lifted the heavy thing up, rolling it over the back of the boat and into the water. Afterward, the captain went back to the bridge and closed himself in. In the water, the bag—straining between the downward pull of its contents and the upward push of trapped air—looked like it might float. Salvador watched as it slowly began to fill with water, until finally, without spectacle, it sank under the surface of the sea.