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Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Seattle
Joe Dunbar decided April 1st would be the perfect time for his housewarming party. He’d come home from Vallejo with letters of appreciation for his undercover work that had resulted in the arrests of five major drug dealers, and the exposé of a local police captain and a DEA agent on the payroll of Mexican drug cartels.
He said he was considering using them for wallpaper in his bathroom for all the good they were doing for his career at the Seattle PD. No one argued. Lt. Joe Dunbar’s jacket was already stellar. And he would never make captain — not in Seattle. And being part of yet another sting that arrested cops wasn’t going to help him win the trust of his fellow officers.
“It’s not fair,” Angie fumed. Mac looked at her incredulously. He was in love with a woman who believed life should be fair? Shit.
Craig Anderson didn’t come back. He and Jesse McBath were trying things out, he said. If it didn’t work, he’d be back to work with Wilderness Outfitters in the summer. Ben McBath was already planning on his summer job with Ken. Rand and Angie were signing up as guides as well.
“You work odd shifts, as it is,” Mac observed. “Now you’re going to abandon me and go play in the woods?”
“He’d hire you in a moment,” Angie said. “And we could play in the woods together.”
Mac grimaced. That wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t want to ever go back to the North Cascades. Ever.
Angie looked at him seriously. “Mac? Promise me? You won’t do something like this without me? Next time? We go as a team. I hated it, being here, waiting, helpless. If you take on a story in the future? I do too.”
Mac grimaced. “This wasn’t really a story,” he hedged. She just looked at him steadily, and he realized how hard this had been on her. Those phone calls had been strategic. She knew she was his lifeline back to Seattle and a normal life. He was suddenly grateful that she hadn’t snapped under the strain he was putting her through.
“Fine,” he said. “We’re a team.” He would be sticking to routine stories in the future anyway. Angie was usually the photog they assigned to his pieces. So he wasn’t lying.
Not exactly.
Toby and Keisha were buying a house on Queen Anne, not far from Mac and Angie. It wasn’t far from the Rodriguezes, Youngs, and Dunbar enclave either — but Toby had no desire to hang out with cops. And the cops were fine with that.
But Toby had made peace with his mother. Keisha and Lindy got along great — add in Angie, and those three were a riot. Mac just sat back and watched them with a smile. Toby was talking about college in the fall.
Michael went home, and called Mac to say what the hell did you do to my apartment? Mac laughed until he lost it completely. That seemed so long ago, and so trivial compared to what happened afterwards. He’d forgotten that first fight altogether.
Mac and Janet went to coffee his second day back. “Tell me,” she said simply. And he did. “I’d like to write a piece about the village and its desire to be autonomous,” he said. “But I don’t really have a news peg that ties it into Seattle.”
Janet considered that. “Since we’re getting the piece for free, more or less, I’m good with it,” she said. “Do you have art for it? And I want a travel piece about Mazatlán as well.”
“I do have photos of the village,” Mac said slowly. “I didn’t take them — a friend did.”
“He know you were a reporter?” she asked.
Mac nodded. “On my good days, I was.”
Janet smiled at him. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” she admitted. “I just kept telling Angie, remind him. Remind him he’s a reporter.”
Mac smiled back. “She did too,” he said, but he didn’t admit how close it had been. There was still a pull there. There might always be. He thought of his father silhouetted against the night sky. Of Chuy standing over his dying grandfather. Of his other siblings on the patio by the swimming pool, joking and teasing. Of the camaraderie with Pedro and Nacho and all the rest.
Chuy had emailed him regular updates. Well, why not? Didn’t everyone have an email relationship with an heir of a drug cartel?
His grandfather survived, but recovery was slow. Mac had known it would be — that knife went in at a point where it would do the most damage. He still wondered why the old man had lunged forward onto the knife. Rage, he thought. Pure rage and determination to get his hands around Mac’s neck.
But Mac had been right: Losing a fight like that had lessened his authority and prestige. Hector Del Toro was now firmly in charge of the cartel. Not that there weren’t problems. Sonora cartel had made a run at two of their manufacturing plants. And they had been cut off from that route to the States. Chuy said that was fine, they were focusing on Dallas right now until California calmed back down. Sinaloa cartel was having its own problems. They weren’t looking to take on anyone.
Chuy convinced his father that Chuy was better suited for a government job in Mexico City. He would start May 1 as an assistant to the director of marketing for the tourism bureau. He was excited. Nona was interested in going to the University of Washington. What did Mac think?
Mac put her in touch with his aunt. Lindy had been skeptical — “another drug lord, Mac?” — but she’d responded to Nona’s email, and they’d struck up correspondence.
Good enough.
He didn’t hear anything from Mateo. Chuy said men had gone after the village that night, but they’d been repelled. “The villagers had a cache of weapons no one was expecting,” he wrote.
Mac laughed. And every time he thought about it, he laughed some more. He had a new car, a tan-colored Jeep compact SUV. It got 30 miles to the gallon and was easy to parallel park. Angie was negotiating a vehicle exchange for her trips to the mountains. “Are you sure you don’t want to work for Ken?” she wheedled.
He was sure.
Stan Warren was still in Vallejo, helping the alphabet agencies clean house. Ryan Geller had a hell of a story — maybe a Pulitzer prize story. And there might be more indictments coming. Stan was in charge and it was what he did best, Mac thought, but Janet missed him. She got her way with the contractor however — there were bookshelves on every available wall in her new house. She was still in Stan’s apartment, but the move-in date was set for May 1.
Angie was excited about Joe’s housewarming party, and they had a gift for Joe — some of the pottery he’d bought in Mexico. Chuy had shipped it to him — “We’ve got an export license, after all,” he wrote. It seemed so mundane after all that went down.
His father hadn’t contacted him. Mac found he was fine with that. He had a flash of that image again: his father silhouetted against the sky, watching him beat up his grandfather. He shook his head.
Angie was talking excitedly with two women who had been part of the takedown last fall. Mac looked at Joe Dunbar speculatively, wondering which one of the two he was seeing. Maybe both? He grinned.
But Mac had an O’Doul’s in his hand, and he was sitting next to Shorty and Nick Rodriguez on the edge of things, watching everyone. Still weirded him out to be in a room with this many cops. He would have thought it would have taken handcuffs and an arrest warrant.
“So are you going to take Noble’s offer?” Mac asked. Noble had been impressed with Nick’s ability to run a complicated investigation and coordinate all the various parts. He’d offered him a job.
“Thinking about it,” Nick admitted. “Being a part of Internal Affairs is a better job than I expected. But working in Noble’s operation would be interesting.”
“Nice to have choices,” Mac said. Noble had offered Shorty a consulting contract, but he’d turned it down. Noble could call him on a job-by-job basis, Shorty said. If it was interesting, he might take it.
“You hear anything from Mateo?” Shorty asked now.
Mac shook his head. “I sent him a text with a link to the story when it ran,” he said. “But he didn’t respond.” Mateo had been credited as the photographer. Angie had been impressed with the photos he’d taken. No higher praise, Mac thought amused.
It was late when they finally got home. Mac checked his email one last time before shutting it down for the night. He’d gotten as addicted to it as the rest of the world, he thought sourly. But he still unplugged the computer from the internet connection when it wasn’t in use. Someone might really be out to get him.
But tonight there was an email from an unknown address and it just had a link to a news story in the Patzcuaro newspaper. In Spanish. Mac grimaced and called Shorty.
“Send it,” Shorty said. “I can translate it. Not perfect, but it will do.”
Mac did and waited. Took nearly an hour before Shorty sent him a translated story. As he figured, it was about the village. He read the piece and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Angie said. She wrapped her arms around him and looked over his shoulder at the screen.
“The village is now an autonomous indigenous village,” Mac said, reading the story again. “They are free to govern themselves as they wish.” Erandi Tariaran was quoted throughout the story — identified as the village mayor. But what really amused him was the village had decided to join with some other villages in the area and send a representative to the Congress of the Union as they were permitted to do. Mac gathered that they hadn’t before, preferring to focus on local life only.
Their first representative would be Mateo Tariaran, who had led the defense of the village during a recent attack by local drug cartel members.
Mac grinned.
“Ready to go to bed, now?” Angie asked.
Mac shutdown the computer and unplugged the ethernet cord. “Bed,” he agreed, and he draped his arm around her shoulders. “And maybe we should talk about that guide job.”
Angie kissed him. “Talk later,” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am,” he teased. He gave one last thought to Mateo as Rep. Tariaran from Japunda and laughed. Then he focused on more important things — like the woman beside him who had brought him home.
“I love you,” he said roughly.
She kissed him.