“ALL RIGHT. ALL right,” I said. “Marie’s not gonna like this one damn bit. I’m gonna have to lay the whole thing off on you.”
He smiled. “Go ahead.” Then he grew serious again. “I’m sorry about this, Bruno, but this operation is too important. There’s a lot at stake here.”
Yeah, but I was the one with the most skin in the game, not him. I wanted to throw down the pregnancy card, but that wouldn’t have been right.
“I said all right.” I held up the phone he’d given me. “But this idea won’t work at all. They’re not dumb; they’ll just pull the battery.”
“Let them. In fact, do it yourself, show them so they won’t take the phone from you. With this phone, there’s a secondary GPS with an independent power supply. All you have to do is find out when the trade is going down—the money for the drone and the Hellfires—that’s it. Then you get that info to me. We’ll handle the rest.”
“Really, that’s it? That’s all?” He didn’t bite on my sarcasm.
My mind spun trying to figure a way out of this mess. What choice did I have?
None.
Right at that moment, all I wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. Sleep for another two or three days with Marie snuggled up beside me.
The sun seemed brighter than I ever remember it being, and I had to continually focus to keep the contents of my stomach down, the pretzel and orange soda no longer my friends.
He didn’t mention Disneyland, the largest soft target in the Western States. Everyone in law enforcement stepped easy around that one. If you didn’t talk about it, maybe it wouldn’t happen.
All those children visiting. The happiest place on earth.
What would four Hellfire missiles do to a crowded theme park? The symbolism—and worse, the exposure of America’s vulnerability—would strike terror in every household for a generation. No, I truly didn’t have any choice, not this time.
I started to walk away.
“Bruno?”
I stopped and turned, no more than five feet from him.
He lowered his tone as he closed the gap between us. “There’s video of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The CHP patrol unit shot video; a unit cam was running during the whole incident. The cop was wired with a microphone linked to the camera, got the whole thing.”
My knees went weak. I swayed and might’ve fallen if Dan hadn’t grabbed hold of my arm. “Steady, pal.” I thought I had a little more time before the investigators processed the scene for trace evidence and the fingerprints I left behind.
My mouth hung open as I nodded. “Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say as I worked through the shock of it.
My dirty little secret wasn’t a secret anymore. Dan knew and hadn’t said anything right up front when we’d started our conversation. He knew exactly how this information would impact what I had to do—infiltrate the Visigoths. He held this card to throw right at the last, after I’d already agreed to do his little blackbag job. I’d been manipulated by a pro and didn’t like it, not from someone who I thought of as honest and loyal, a friend. He had been all of those things, just not to me but to his job. I tried to think if I’d been that ruthless back when I worked with informants. I hadn’t, not even close. What Dan did, the way he withheld vital information concerning the operation until he got what he wanted, mirrored exactly what Robby Wicks would’ve done. I liked Dan a little less for it.
I didn’t have any argument left in me and resigned myself to just getting the thing done so we could go home.
“How’s the cop doing?” I asked.
“She made it. She’s going to be okay.”
“Good, that’s good.” I swallowed hard. “What’s her name?”
I didn’t know why I had a need to know that. Maybe putting a name to her face would help a little with the guilt over the kid getting tossed out into traffic.
“Clevenger, Kris Clevenger. Her husband is a member of LA County Sheriff’s prison gang task force.”
I nodded, let that sink in a little. “Have I been identified yet, I mean by anybody but you?”
“No, but it’s just a matter of time. Clevenger’s husband has a lot of juice, and I can’t imagine him being deterred too long. The CHP made copies and was going to send it around to every law enforcement agency in Southern California to try and identify you. They know you’re an ex-cop by the way you handled yourself.”
“Damn, why are they even looking? I didn’t break any laws.”
“You know why, for their investigation. They need a statement to wrap it up nice and tight. Come on, think about it, you shot and killed someone. So, of course, they’d need your statement.”
“That shooting was absolutely justified.”
He held up his hands. “No question about it.” He hesitated, and then said, “There’s something else.”
“What? What else could there be?”
“They want to thank you.”
“They’ll wanna thank me, alright, until they find out who I am. Then they’ll throw my sorry ass in prison for the rest of my life. I didn’t get involved with that whole mess so someone could thank me.”
The irony of the entire situation—standing next to an FBI agent while I had a load of warrants in the system, my wanted poster in every post office in the U.S., and me worrying about being outed—wasn’t lost on me.
I thought about it for a second more and then said, “You know how that hangs me out on this thing, if any of the Visigoths see the video? They’ll plant my ass in the desert. And you and I both know it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when that video gets leaked.”
“I know. And I know this is an understatement, but I’ll say it anyway. You’re going to have to be careful. And you’re going to have to work fast.”
“Understatement? You’re sending me into the lion’s cage without even a chair or a whip. Can you at least put a lid on this video by declaring it a matter of national security? Delay it a little, keep it from going public at least faster than it would normally? If it goes public, your op is blown, too.”
“I did put a lid on it as best I could, but like you said, it is going to go public no matter how hard we try, so you have to push this exchange with Bobby Ray and the Arab, make it happen, and get out as soon as you can.”
Another tick against him. He’d suppressed the video before he even asked me to help him. He knew me. He’d known up front that I’d do it. What kind of chump was I?
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“I know you will, Bruno.”
I again turned to leave, more disheartened than before I met with him.
“Hey,” he said, “that was a hell of a thing you did. I saw the tape. You stuck your neck out when you didn’t have to, when you had everything in the world to lose.”