GODCHILD

The Land Rover headlights drill through the early morning desert darkness, two fiery eyes burning on the silent horizon barely an hour before the sun rises over Monterrey.

She’s been waiting for them, per instructions from her LA contact. The halogen signal promised just last night in Houston when finally, over caviar, Dom, and cocaine, she signed on to do the deal.

Her first and last (although that “last” bit will remain her little secret).

She is a writer by trade. But this morning, she is more like an actor, playing the role of the burrier. A border burrier (a bastardization of burro and courier), all packaged nice and neat in the guise of a beautiful woman. For the sake of the assignment, she has assumed the role of the in-between girl—the paid runner who takes the risk not just for the money, but for the sheer thrill.

According to her phony bio, she doesn’t have a family to feed, a brood of shoeless children living in a one-room shack with no hot water and no father to help carry the weight. What she’s supposedly got instead is a two-bedroom town house in the Hollywood hills, a loft apartment in Manhattan’s Tribeca, a six-figure modeling contract with the Ford Agency, and a two-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit.

As a burrier, she can savor the elation of slipping into a skintight leather jumpsuit and motorcycle boots. The sheer power of firing up a Suzuki GSX1300 Hayabusa equipped with leather saddlebags and a CD/stereo combo with enough lethal amperage to scare off even the most rabid coyote.

The burriers are as beautiful as they are dangerous, and they are the only gringos the brothers will deal with these days.

She is, as they say, drop-dead gorgeous standing out there in the middle of the desert with cropped auburn hair, blue eyes, and black leather jumpsuit, the zipper running from breasts to navel. Like something out of a Bond film. And right now, as the headlights shine in the near distance, she can feel her heart beating, her throat closing, that little tingle shooting up her spine telling her, It’s time, baby.

There is a sweet, dry, desert smell. And a slight hum that comes from the insects you never see in the dark of night. There is the bone cold and the occasional burst of wind to make it even colder, to send the fine granules of sand up into her face, make them stick to the red lipstick that covers her heart-shaped mouth.

When the doors on the Land Rover suddenly open, one at a time, and the silhouettes of two men appear—one tall and thin, the other short and stocky—both packing shotguns, she knows she’s reached the proverbial point of no return.

She cannot deny the fear any more than she can deny the thrill of it all. She’s the method writer, after all. She’s not interested in facts so much as discovering what it actually feels like to experience something. What are the specific sights, sounds, tastes, and emotions that come together to create an experience? How do you translate these sensations and dimensions to the page so that the experience becomes more real for the reader than if the reader actually participated in it? That’s method writing, and there isn’t a soul on earth who can come close to her ability to convey a true life-and-death experience.

Now, with every step they take toward her, with every shell they cock into the metal chambers of their pump-action shotguns, she knows she is coming that much closer to death. The real thing. So she rubs her hip up against the saddlebag. Just to make certain that the money and her life is still a viable option. Because if the money is not there, she knows she has no choice but to hand over her life. No questions asked, no excuses, no “Oh crap, I left it on the kitchen counter.’’

She’s done the research, so she knows what these brothers are capable of, even on a good day. How they strip you, strap you down naked on your back, all four limbs tied to stakes, baby oil poured over the skin, the hair on your head and sex completely shaved, eyelids taped back against your eyebrows so that when the desert sun also rises, the eyeballs fry while your skin bubbles and broils. What they find of you later—if they find you at all—stands as a coyote-chewed warning, a fleshless message not to fuck with the Contreras Brothers and their Mexicali turf.

But this morning, she has nothing to worry about as the two men in cowboy boots and Stetsons close the gap. She can feel the bulge that the cash makes in the saddlebag when her thigh contacts it. The sensation is oddly sexual. She swallows hard when the two men stop dead in their tracks, as though on cue (obviously, they’ve been through the routine dozens of times before). One of the men—the shorter—takes four or five steps forward, meets her face to face, so close she can smell the tequila and cigarettes on his breath.

“Oooohhh, I like that. A beautiful woman who answers a simple question with a stupid question. Makes my job so much easier.”

“Well, what do you know. Beauty, brains, and—if you’ll excuse the expression—balls.”

He reaches out with his free hand, uses his dirty fingers to pull down her zipper. As much as his touch repulses her, she allows him to do it. Because it’s all a part of the act, a small price to pay for the method writer.

And it proceeds like that. She standing there, he breathing on her, touching her, while his partner looks on in horny amazement. Until business must be tended to and the saddlebag is opened to reveal its cargo of cash, and then the tail¬gate on the Land Rover is opened to reveal its payload. As the sun begins to show itself red-orange on the easternmost horizon, the whole deal goes down smoothly.

That is, until another set of headlights appears. And another and yet another, the bright white lights clearly visible a split second before the trio hears the telltale wail of the sirens.

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) - U.S. and Mexican authorities have resumed their search for bodies in the desert where at least six corpses have been unearthed. FBI informants claim as many as three hundred victims of a powerful drug cartel could be buried in the desert country between the city and the Texas border. Forensics experts, in cooperation with Mexican soldiers and ski-masked police, have been systematically searching the vast area as well as two known desert ranches in Monterrey, once the undisputed territory of the Contreras drug cartel, at one time Mexico’s most powerful and most violent drug-smuggling family.

I was sitting inside Bill’s Bar and Grill in Albany, New York, listening to the hard wind that whistled through the cracks in the picture window embedded in the brick wall behind my back. The one held together with duct tape and striped neon piping that spelled out Bud Light and Rolling Rock. I had been kidding myself all afternoon, thinking it was possible to make myself invisible by hoarding a stool in the far, dark corner of the South End bar, all dressed up like a clown in my wedding-day blazer, charcoal pants, and virgin loafers with tassels.

It was March 21, according to the folded newspaper that sat ignored on the bar beside my right elbow.

Instead, I’d been hiding out in the corner of this old bar, counting down the minutes until the happy-hour crowd left me alone and Bill the bartender dimmed the lights to make ready for some serious drinking, serious disappearing. If only vanishing were possible.

After five slow hours inside Bill’s I could tell you exactly who came and went like clockwork. An old man who called himself Kenny P. C. (“P for Pretty,” he slurred, a toothy vampire smile on his ruddy face. “C for Cute.”) and dressed himself in blue polyester slacks, a matching blue jacket, and a white rayon shirt. A man far older than his years, he sat five stools away from me toward the middle of the bar and drank bottom-shelf scotch. Until the head bob began and the space between the bar and his forehead became narrower and narrower. Until the bets were placed for which one final bob would send his skull bouncing off the hardwood. At which time he was escorted to the door, stage right, a taxi already warmed up and waiting for him just outside the picture window.

Then there was the woman in cheap Sears jeans and white cotton T-shirt who’d come in sometime around one-thirty. She had a pockmarked face and frizzy gray hair. She smoked Pall Mall 100s, one off the other, and carried on one hell of a conversation with herself in a South All-benny accent. On three separate occasions she found her way over to me, set her hand on my thigh, told me how sad and lonely I looked, and then offered her body. All three times I told her no. Finally, I flipped her a twenty from my honeymoon bankroll, just to shut her up.

And then there was the young Mohawk Indian kid who sat four stools down from me, whose hands shook so bad he had to use them both to lift his whiskey glass off the bar, bring the rim to his thick lips.

I’d gotten to know them all during my disappearing act at Bill’s. I had no way of knowing if my fiancée, Val Antonelli, or my best man (and lawyer), Tony Angelino, had attempted to contact me. No idea if they wanted to contact me. As I removed the pinned carnation from my breast pocket and set it down on the bar, I knew that by now I had to have been recognized. That I wasn’t invisible. And if I had been recognized, then I was also sure that Val and Tony knew exactly where to find me.

Maybe I had no idea what their names were or what precinct they worked out of (though Albany wasn’t that big). But as a former maximum-security warden, I’d had gained enough experience over the years to be able to sniff out a cop at twenty paces. It was never the uniform that gave them away. No cop would dare enter this or any other bar for a drink dressed in his on-duty blacks.

The cops who came into Bill’s were almost always young, almost always dressed in generous-cut Levi’s jeans, immaculate running shoes, maybe a pastel-colored polo shirt or Notre Dame sweatshirt pulled over broad, iron-pumped shoulders. They wore gold Irish Claddagh rings on their middle fingers, and their flattop hair always had that wet, just-out-of-the-gang-shower look.

But if all this were not enough to convince me that the young dude ordering a pint of “Half and Half” was one of Albany’s Irish finest, then I could be certain when he wrapped his arm around Kenny P. C.’s shoulder and ad¬dressed the drunk by his first name. Naturally, Kenny would ask the cop if he could spare a couple of bucks. But then the cop would pull out the empty pockets of his jeans, allow them to hang there like little white wings. He’d hold his hands in the air and say, “Kenny, even Jesus Christ himself could touch only so many lepers.”

You could always spot a cop at Bill’s Bar and Grill, because everybody knew cops drank for free.

As a former lawman, I knew that the cops must have come and gone immediately after the eight-to-four shift or right after the four-to-midnight action shift. Just in time for last call. I’d seen quite a few of them during my afternoon inside the bar. Maybe I’d gone a little out of my mind by then, but I knew they spotted me just as easily as I spotted them. I also knew that it was only a matter of time until one of them placed a call to Tony’s downtown law practice to let him know where the hell I was. Tony, in turn, would tell Val. On the other hand, why should she waste her time looking for me? Why even make the effort? I was the one who had left her standing at the altar all alone. I was the one who, for five long hours, had been pissing away our honeymoon money on beer, whiskey, and regrets.

THE WIND WHISTLED. Even with my blazer on, I could feel the cold March air on my back. I sipped beer from a long-neck bottle, fired up a smoke, and for the hundredth time that afternoon, hit the playback button in my brain.

It had just started snowing as I’d passed the stone pilasters marking Albany Rural Cemetery’s south-side en¬trance. Snowing hard in mid-March. I had pushed on past the old iron gates, feeling stiff and cold in the brand-new wedding-day blazer and loafers. Shuffling toward the plot that had been home to my first wife, Fran, for almost three years now.

In less than fifteen minutes, my best man would require my presence in the brick rectory behind Saint Mary’s Cathedral on Eagle Street. According to tradition, Tony and I were expected to “sweat it out” in that back room among the spare chalices, bags of communion wafers, and the same Boone’s Farm wine I used to sneak sips from back when I was still an altar boy. Sweat it out amid the smell of burning candles and incense, until my fiancée (and former Green Haven Prison secretary), Val Antonelli, began her long slow march down the church aisle on her way to a second marriage.

In my right hand, collecting snowflakes, a weightless bundle of wildflowers wrapped in baby-blue tissue paper. Under my left arm—hidden by the blue blazer—a leather shoulder holster that cradled a 2½-pound Colt .45.

The low midday clouds showered the sloping landscape in wet snow. The white stuff came down fast and furiously as it fell against the crooked, leafless branches of the trees, against the bleached marble headstones and miniature churchlike mausoleums.

I stood over the five-by-ten plot with the granite marker at its head inscribed with Fran’s birth and death dates.

Setting the bundle of wildflowers on the plot, I watched the petals begin to disappear in the falling snow. But what I saw was a battered black, four-door Buick sedan with tinted windows slamming directly into the passenger side of my Ford Bronco at fifty miles per hour; Fran’s head and shoulders going through the windshield, the jagged edge of the glass taking her head clean off as though it were a razor blade; her body slumping back into the seat like nothing at all had happened. Like her life hadn’t slipped away in the split second of time it took for that windshield to shatter. Then the screaming of the witnesses and the spattered blood and the sight of that black Buick tearing away. But not before the driver rolled down his window, just long enough for me to get a good look at his bald head, hoop earring, and the thin mustache that covered only half of his upper lip.

I stood in the falling snow and I recalled the two full years I’d spent in search of the Bald Man, only to come up empty. There were the endless hours spent sifting through mug shots, photographic kits, evidence folders, and case files. There were the posters printed with the Bald Man’s likeness—the likeness I viewed for only a split second but committed to memory—that I stapled to telephone poles all across the state. There was the ten-thousand-dollar reward offered for any “verifiable information” leading to his whereabouts.

The entire two-year effort now resided in my brain, neatly categorized under FAILURE with a capital F. I knew that with my marriage to Val only a few minutes away, I had no choice but to once and for all give up the search for good; call it another unsolved mystery, just like the Albany cops did less than a year ago. All that was left was to move on with my life, remember Fran the way she had lived.

The wildflowers were gone now. Completely covered over. I had barely ten minutes left to make it—you guessed it—to the church on time. Ten minutes to put the past behind me for good.

If it hadn’t been for the battered black Buick sedan that drove in through the cemetery gates.

It was the car I remembered. The car that rammed into my Ford Bronco, sending Fran to her death.

My black Buick with the tinted windows, just sitting there idling, the engine running, exhaust smoking out of the rusted tailpipe gray-black in the falling snow.

Here’s what I should have done: pulled out my .45, blasted a couple of rounds over the roof of the car. Or maybe blown out a rear tire.

I just stood there, as stuck to the ground as Fran’s marker, while the driver of the Buick backed up, spun the front end around, and drove back out the same way he’d come in.

But at some point I forced myself up off my knees, made my way back to my 4Runner through the snow and ice to place a call to the APD, South Pearl Street Division, the precinct that had originally spearheaded Fran’s hit-and-run. I sat inside the SUV, drinking sweet whiskey from the emergency fifth I kept in the glove box, fighting off the tremors, waiting for the cops to arrive, knowing I should have been calling Saint Mary’s rectory to explain what had happened. Explain why I hadn’t shown up yet for my own wedding.

I just sat there, watching the snow fall, drinking from the bottle, feeling my body shake and my brain buzz. It was all I could do to swallow the whiskey without bringing it back up. And that was that.

By the time the cops pulled up, I was already ten minutes late for the ceremony. The two black-and-whites that parked outside the cemetery gates made me think of the black-and-white taffeta gowns Val had chosen for her bridesmaids to wear. I pictured the dark blazers and white button-downs my best man and ushers were wearing at that very moment. I imagined their blank expressions and their wide eyes staring into watch faces that didn’t lie. From where I sat shivering inside the 4Runner with the heat blasting against my wet shirt, I saw the small beads of sweat that had begun to form on their foreheads when the guests who had filled the church pews started whispering to one another, “I’ll be damned, Keeper’s not coming.”

It was the tinny drone of a cop radio that broke the spell as a tall, black-haired detective by the name of Ryan tapped on my windshield. Ryan claimed he was a new guy, having just been transferred from the New York State Office of General Services to South Pearl Street’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. Together we walked to the spot where I’d seen the black Buick. Wearing a leather car jacket with wide epaulets and buttons, this thirty-something Detective Ryan checked my PI license along with my laminated permit for carrying a concealed weapon. He then questioned me calmly and methodically while we walked, sometimes asking and re-asking the same question two and three times to check for “accuracy and consistency of testimony.” But then, sometimes cops forget that former wardens know as much about due process as they do.

It all went as smoothly as something like that can on a snowy day in March. That is, until we came to the spot near Fran’s grave where I’d first seen the Buick. The problem, if you want to call it that, was that no sign of the Buick remained. The ruts that its tires had made when it peeled out were gone, wiped smooth by the still-falling snow. Or, in the words of Detective Ryan, “Just maybe, Mr. Marconi, the tire tracks, along with the Buick, were never there to begin with.”

I slipped and skidded my way to Fran’s plot. I dug my hand through the snow. I pulled up the bouquet of wildflowers, shook them off.

Ryan stood there, studying the white flakes collecting on the tops of his black lace-up shoes.

He let out a resigned breath. “You’re that ex-warden,” he said. “You lost your wife some years back. I’ve been over the file at Division.”

“All I’m saying,” he went on, “is that in times of emotional stress and turmoil, it’s only natural to imagine things. Especially in a spooky place like this.” He pinched closed his leather collar, cocked his head in the direction of the gates.

I took a couple of steps toward him. “Is this what a Behavioral Science cop is supposed to do?” I asked. “Con¬vince me of what I didn’t see?”

He walked up to me, brought his face to within inches of my own, sniffed me up and down with his nose. Like a police dog.

Because he could smell the whiskey on my breath, I knew exactly what he was thinking, although neither one of us said anything about it. In fact, the D word never came up. Not even in passing.

I cleared my throat. “I took a couple of shots.” I said. “You know, to ease the jitters. After I saw the Buick.” But I could tell by the furrows in his brow that he didn’t believe me.

“Tell you what,” he said finally, his gray breath mixing with the snow. “I’ll have an officer take down your testimony. And if we see a black Buick matching the description, we’ll pull it over, question the driver. How’s that sound?”

Back at the south-side gates, he called over another plainclothes cop to take my statement.

The beefy cop dressed in uniform blacks asked if I got “a good look at the supposed black Buick in question...enough to create a composite image, that is.”

He was trying so hard to hold back the laughs that he was making little raspberry noises through clenched lips.

“Sorry I wasted your time,” I said as he was about to get back inside the cruiser.

I was standing right beside him, the passenger-side door to the cruiser wide open, his left foot already inside, a wave of hot air blowing out of the dashboard heater onto my legs.

“You did the right thing,” he said, taking hold of my forearm, giving it a sympathetic squeeze, as though the cops were still my fraternal cousins-in-arms. “Go get married,” he said with a grin. He got in and closed the car door, smiling at me through the lightly fogged glass.

As I walked slowly back to my 4Runner, I couldn’t help but look into the faces of each cop as I passed them, one by stinking one. I couldn’t help but pick up on the way they whispered into one another’s ears, thinking I had to be out of earshot when they referred to me as “one paranoid bastard.”

I WASN’T SURE HOW LONG he’d been staring at me. Christ, I wasn’t sure how long the entire crowd had been staring at me. But when I came out of my trance, Bill the bartender was standing across from me, his chubby face somehow tight, his receding hair slicked back, his customary white bar rag slung over his right shoulder.

My hands were wrapped tightly around the empty beer bottle to keep them from shaking. The bottom of the caramel-colored bottle made a clickety-clack sound against the solid wood bar.

There, I thought. He said it. My name: Jack Harrison “Keeper” Marconi. He knew who I was. Just like everyone else probably knew who 1 was—Keeper Marconi, former maximum-security-prison warden turned unemployed pri¬vate investigator.

I’m pretty sure it was then, when Bill went for the phone, that I pulled out my Colt. Come to think of it, that’s exactly when I got a good look at my sad face in the mirror behind the bar, pulled the piece out, and emptied the entire eight-round clip, blowing away Jim Beam and Jack Daniels and even managing to nail some Wild Turkey in the process. It was a damned shame, too, having to waste good booze like that. But I suppose, in the end, it would have been a worse shame to have wasted me.

The cops had to have been on their way before I decided to blow away my reflection in the mirror. Not those off-duty cops scamming free beer. But on-the-job cops in black uniforms who stood out in the white light of the aluminum-and-glass entryway, black 9mm automatics drawn and poised—combat position.

It was the sudden appearance of Tony Angelino that came as the real shocker. He stood square at the head of the pack, dressed in a camel-hair overcoat and a blue blazer, just like mine. His dark gray slacks had been cut and tailored for his medium but stocky build. His white wedding carnation was still pinned to his lapel, and the wide-brimmed fedora on his head matched his threads.

He just stood there, staring at me with those deep-set brown eyes of his, the rhythmic flash of red, blue, and white cruiser lights streaking across the wall.

I stood up then, on the rungs of my stool, towered over the entire bar, the faces of all those regulars looking up at me, their hands gripped around their drinks even now.

But Bill never moved a muscle. He was still on the floor, covered in spilled booze and shards of glass.

He raised his fists to chest height. The fists were covered in brown leather driving gloves. He rubbed them together, like a boxer waiting for the bell to sound.

But I guess Tony didn’t have the time for stupid questions. He simply raised his right fist high and knocked me cold.

I fully expected to wake up inside the county lockup. But when I opened my eyes there was no concrete plank ceiling to close me in, no bright overhead lamps to sting my retinas. There was no concrete floor, no iron bars, no Plexiglas shield. Instead, I saw a white vaulted ceiling and a long wall of glossy black bookshelves filled with colorful volumes.

Without having to look too much further, I knew I’d come to on the leather couch in the living room of Tony’s downtown condo.

Facing me directly: a long, winding staircase that accessed the second and third floors. Embedded in the bottom of the stairwell: a two-way fireplace. I didn’t have to turn over to know that behind me, a wall of windows looked out over Eagle Street and the governor’s mansion, which almost never housed the governor and his family (who preferred to reside “where the action is” in Manhattan). After all, I’d been inside this room a hundred times over the years. Maybe a thousand.

For now the windows were covered in dark, floor-to-ceiling drapes. And had I not closed my eyes again, I might have screamed out in pain from the splitting hangover. But I suppose there’s something to be said for self-control. Because when I opened my eyes once more, a very stiff-looking Tony was standing in the center of the white-and-black-checkered marble floor.

I knew without asking that he had been responsible for keeping the heat off, keeping me out of lockup. Now he stood there with arms crossed at his chest, staring at me with distant, glassy eyes, as though I’d never woken up on the couch at all but had died in my sleep.

“Morning,” I groaned, the back of my throat feeling like it had been scraped with a razor.

He had dressed down since the night before, when he’d knocked me cold. Now he wore only the dark gray slacks, along with the white oxford, sleeves rolled up neatly, all the way to the elbows.

When Tony returned, he was carrying his leather briefcase. He laid the case flat on the lid of the grand piano, thumbed back the spring-released latches, pushed open the lid. He pulled out a number-ten envelope, tossed it onto my lap. When I looked down, I could see that my name had been written on it in Tony’s unmistakable, loopy handwriting.

“Don’t open that yet,” he said, while stepping behind the couch, pulling hard on the drawstring that opened the drapes and let the blinding sun shine in.

Maybe that’s why the panic alarm sounded, the little voice inside my brain that told me to get up and head straight for the door. No bothering with good-byes or It’s been swell, Tone. Just get up and get the hell out.

But when I stood up, I felt a hand grab at my collar. The hand yanked me back down onto the couch. That’s when Tony made a beeline for his briefcase. He reached inside, pulled out a Colt .45.

“You can have it back,” he said, “after you listen to what I have to say.”

“Who are you to talk about friends,” Tony said, “when you don’t give a rat’s ass about standing them up?”

He stood straight and stiff, right foot planted on a square of black tile, left foot on a square of white. His heavy forearms were crossed at his chest. He was just five-foot-eight, but from where I was sitting he looked big and powerful.

He went back to his briefcase, pulled out an envelope with a Key Bank logo printed on it. The kind of envelope a bank statement usually comes in. My bank statement.

“You’ve got a couple of C-notes to your name. That’s it. How the hell did you expect to pay for a wedding?”

That hard sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I already know that,” I said. “I should have known.”

“One of my clients has an emergency,” Tony explained a minute later, after handing me a mug of coffee. “Man by the name of Richard Barnes.”

I recognized the name, and said so to Tony. But that didn’t stop him from telling me a whole lot of what I already knew. Barnes was a rich guy, a producer who ran public-relations campaigns. Mostly for politicians, if I re¬membered correctly. And the only reason I remembered correctly is that I recalled how his Reel Productions worked on the governor’s campaign during the last election. During a time when any employee of New York State worries about job security. Or the lack of it. Which I used to do. Until I lost my job: suddenly, elections meant nothing to me.

I asked Tony to give me the short of it. So I could get back to my motel, get a shower and a shave. Maybe a nap before I headed south to Stormville. From there, who knew where.

Tony looked directly down at the tops of his tassel loafers. Loafers identical to my own. “Richard’s wife, Renata, was busted by Mexican police for attempting to smuggle cocaine out of the country,” he explained. “From a border town called Monterrey into Brownsville, Texas.”

“I thought Barnes’s wife was a writer,” I said. Tony went into the kitchen and came back out with his own cup.

“That’s part of the point,” he said, blowing into his cup with pursed lips.

I made a time-out T with my hands, shook my head from left to right and back again. “Maybe I’m missing something here, but anyone with half a brain knows the penalties for running dope across the border.”

Tony drank some coffee and set the cup down on the grand piano beside the briefcase. “She wasn’t interested in selling drugs so much as she had an interest in experiencing the process of selling drugs.” A bewildered wave of his hands. “At least, that’s Richard’s story.”

“There are two kinds of drug runners presently operating in Mexico,” Tony explained. “There are the so-called burriers, a term derived from burro, or mule, combined with courier. The burriers are usually rich women who like to move cocaine not for the money, but for the sheer thrill of it.”

“The second group,” he said, “is made up of poverty-stricken women who have no choice but to move small amounts of cocaine paste.”

“If the burriers are rich already,” I asked, “then why risk taking that kind of chance? They need the rush that badly?”

“I suspect Renata was on her way to answering that question, paisan, before she was nabbed at the border.”

It all came back to me in tidal waves: Renata Barnes. A petite woman with short auburn hair and wild blue eyes. I’d seen her on the Today show a while back when her best seller Godchild had just stormed the country, thanks to Oprah. I recalled how she was forced to respond to allegations about the suspicious drowning death of her own kid. How it mimicked in absolute detail the fictitious drowning death of the child in the novel—a drowning death that was the result of murder. In my mind, I saw Renata once more, storming off the set of Today in tears.

When Tony went upstairs I got up from the couch, stretched. I felt silly and somehow dirty, still dressed in my wrinkled wedding blazer and slacks. I wanted a shower and maybe a drink. Both would have to wait.

I stood by the window wall. Outside, a clear blue sky. A layer of fresh snow covered the front lawn of the governor’s mansion. The snow contrasted sharply with the black parking lot directly beside it. It hurt to look at the snow when it reflected the sun. I ran my hand over the small bruise on my chin. It must have formed when Tony walloped me. I looked down on the guard shack at the mansion gates and the tall, wrought-iron fence that ran the perimeter of the property. Despite what Tony had told me about Renata, he never once had pressed the matter of my walking out on him and Val. Not really.

While I fingered the business-size envelope folded up inside my jacket pocket, I half wanted to blurt out what had happened. How the black Buick had just shown up. Then maybe beg forgiveness, as if Tony were in the business of forgiving. But I knew that he was smarter than that. In his own way, I knew he’d get to what went wrong with my second wedding in due time. For now, the thing to do was concentrate on the business at hand, absorb all he had to tell me about Renata, regardless if in the end I decided not to take on the job.

When Tony came back down, he was dressed in a clean blue suit. He was fixing the sleeves of his jacket by tugging on the cuffs with the tips of his fingers.

“Just outside Monterrey,” he said. “Far as we know, she’s locked in a holding cell in the basement of the town’s maximum-security prison, where she’s awaiting trial.”

“I have a communication from the Mexican attorney general. Man by the name of Jorge Madrazo.”

“Full indictment will result in a very lengthy prison term. A lengthy prison term could very well be a death sentence.”

I looked out the window once more. A limo was pulling out of the gate beside the guard shack. Probably the governor himself, hightailing it to New York City and civilization.

“Barnes is a powerful guy,” I said. “Why doesn’t he strike a deal with the attorney general, negotiate her out? At least try and have her extradited?”

“Richard’s business has already suffered plenty over the negative press that Renata received when she published Godchild.” He was putting on his camel-hair overcoat. “The DA was prepared to indict her for second-degree murder in the death of her own baby boy, Charlie. Only he couldn’t find enough credible evidence to substantiate an accusation of murder by forcible drowning.”

“Then get the magazine to confirm her side of the story. Have them prove she was on assignment in the desert.”

“What magazine? There is no magazine. She was going to sell the piece on spec.” Now he was putting on a blue fedora, pulling the wide brim down over his forehead, cocking it just slightly over his right eye. “Besides, sounds like a weak attempt at a false alibi.” Outside the window, yet another limo pulling up, the electronic gates swinging open. “Barnes fears that if it gets out about Renata being busted on Mexican soil, he’ll have to go through the same kind of public shit storm all over again.”

“If Renata is such a great author,” I said, “why risk writing an article about smuggling drugs? Why not hang out by the beach, pump out a novel once a year or so?”

“Renata is a hands-on writer. Apparently, she needs to be in the middle of a battle if she’s going to write about war or in the middle of a homicide if she’s going to write about murder or in the center of a drug-trafficking operation if she’s going to do something on drugs and the women who smuggle them. She’s not content to write a piece based upon outside observations, third-hand accounts and the Internet. What she wants is the real experience.”

“She’s what they call a method writer, Keeper. Meaning in order to accurately translate the experience on paper, she must in some capacity participate in the experience.”

“Save those remarks for me, paisan,” Tony said. “Your future client will not find them the least bit amusing.”

Then, “What Barnes wants from me is to find a way to get her out. Is that it?”

“What he wants is for you to go down there and use any means necessary to break her out. And he’s prepared to pay extremely well for it. Two hundred thousand cash, plus expenses, no questions asked, absolutely no press. Plenty of money to repay me for the repairs at Bill’s and for keeping you out of the joint and for protecting your license.”

I turned back to the window. The two guards who manned the shack were standing outside in the cold, smoking cigarettes and laughing. I was thinking about risk. How I didn’t stand a chance of getting past the visitor’s gates of a Mexican prison without getting shot to pieces. A plan like Tony’s would require connections inside and out, not to mention maps, layouts, guns, ground and air transport, and a safe house. Just for starters. I was certain Tony had to have considered all this and more even before asking me to take the job.

I turned back to him. “This rescue in Mexico,” I said. “It’s a crazy idea.”

He took a breath, secured the closers on his briefcase, and picked his keys up off the grand piano. “I know it’s dangerous. But besides the payday, it could be just the thing you need to put Fran’s death behind you. For good.”

Outside the window, across Eagle Street, the two guards stamped out their spent butts.

“At least talk to Barnes,” Tony suggested. “Then make your own decision.”

“And Val,” I said, facing him again. “Can you arrange for me to see her?”

Tony suddenly lost the color in his face, like the blood had simply drained out of it. And it had. “There’s something else I have to go over with you,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

I pulled the number-ten envelope out of my pocket. “It has something to do with what’s inside here, doesn’t it?”

Winner of the 2015 PWA Shamus Award and the 2015 ITW Thriller Award for Best Original Paperback Novel, Vincent Zandri is the NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than 150 novels and novellas including THE REMAINS, A picture containing building, person, outdoor, person

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MOONLIGHT WEEPS, THE SHROUD KEY, and THE EMBALMER. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, Zandri's work is translated in the Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, and Japanese. Recently, Zandri was the subject of a major feature by the New York Times. He has also made appearances on Bloomberg TV and FOX news. In December 2014, Suspense Magazine named Zandri's, THE SHROUD KEY, as one of the Best Books of 2014. A freelance photojournalist and the author of the YouTube podcast, The Writer’s Life, Zandri has written for Living Ready Magazine, RT, New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, Strategy Magazine, The Times Union (Albany), Game & Fish Magazine, and many more. He lives in New York and Florence, Italy. For more go to WWW.VINZANDRI.COM

All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

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Author Photo by Jessica Painter

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to a real person, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published in the United States of America

The author is represented by Chip MacGregor of The MacGregor Literary Agency

GODCHILD

A Jack “Keeper” Marconi PI Thriller

Vincent Zandri