Harbaugh was back at Santa Anita in time for the penultimate race. All that remained of the crowd was a smattering of old Mexican cowboys in faded jeans and Chinese men and women perched over stat sheets in front of the bank of televisions. She got a tallboy of Budweiser (Bud Heavy, full flavor, no lite shit today) from the enormous bar on the club level. The California sun glowed pink on the mountains, and she plopped down across from Childs right where she’d left him. She chugged the beer. He looked at her with a little alarm.
“Goddamn,” he said. She grinned. He called the waiter over for a club soda. A father of two, Childs had a gorgeous, witty wife who was awfully grateful he wasn’t a soldier anymore, yet he remained too vain to let a beer calorie pass his lips.
“I’m in the penalty box,” she said, burping and grinning. “OPR got me by the dick.”
“The hell for?”
A twentysome-minute monologue explaining the whole thing to Childs. From the very beginning. At times she felt like a fool explaining it all, circling back into background, like some idiot who didn’t know how to tell a story, how to start a story, but screw it, she told it anyway, there was no way to understand if she didn’t give every detail.
Every detail except the shady stuff, the Brady violations, the end-around-the-federal-court wiretap applications. She did tell about her coming over to DEA at Dufresne’s urging. And about the buttonhole moment in the coat check, the work crush of it all, the double standard of it all. Then onto the things he already knew: Michigan, Bronwyn, that suicidal piece of shit Oscar. And finally telling how she ended up crying in the stall alone, foolish and panicked that she’d never be able to work again.
Childs sipped his drink the whole time, listening sincerely, as far as she could tell.
“I’m not perfect in this,” she said, burping like a codger, “but what the actual fuck?”
“The actual fuck?” He waited for Teetering Bridges to beat Beekeeper at Play by a half-length, the horses urging one another forward, oblivious to anything but each other. “The actual-actual fuck is that when superiors and subordinates have any kind of thing, the subordinates are the ones get screwed over. Just like the army.”
“Dufresne, though?”
“Dude is cool. But a boss is a boss, covers his own ass. Don’t forget that.”
She drank her beer and looked over the track, the shadows of the infield stands lengthening, the San Gabriels as dry and angled as folded butcher paper.
“You didn’t bet, did you?”
“I should’ve. You were more right than wrong.”
“Told you. Let me see your program,” she said. “Gotta get in on the last one.”
He looked at her beer, the cash she already had in hand, and shook his head. “Girl, you pretty much a hot mess. Go home, get some sleep.”
She grinned and took the program. “Oh, but we haven’t even talk-talked yet.”
At the upstairs bar she scanned the names and odds. A guy on the phone next to her was doing a pill deal, loudly announcing to some bro that he had five Percocets “not fifteen minutes from there.” She slapped her badge on the bar for him to see. He looked annoyed, and then his expression slackened in sudden understanding. He edged away, the idiot.
She ended up choosing the two odds-on favorites, Cheshire’s Smile and Scarlet Street, both at 3 to 1. And an Irish long shot by the name of Molly’s Revenge. Not one a mudder, from what she could divine from their past races, all clean and fast horses.
When she returned with her slip, she inquired after Lima.
“Only seen a couple white boys in fedoras getting manhandled out of the Champagne Room. He’s got a suite at the Langham. We’ll put eyes on him tomorrow. So what’s this other thing?”
She sipped her new beer.
“Remember when I was just starting out, how I’d give my card to everyone got pinched?”
“Yeah, seed the room.”
“Right, give ’em all the same line: ‘Look, man, one day you’re gonna want to talk to someone. It should be me.’”
“Heard you with that bullshit a billion and one times.”
“Well, that bullshit worked.” She took the binoculars out of their case and watched for numbers 3, 5, and 8. Her ponies. “One of those dudes called me.”
“Really.”
“Remember that raid in La Palma, like, five, six years ago?”
“Those Mara motherfuckers.”
“Right. But there were a bunch of dudes we picked up that day, non-Mara, had nothing on them. Weren’t on the list, no priors, no cause, we couldn’t keep them without calling ICE.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember that proud motherfucker would only give his name as El Capataz? The Foreman?”
She slid a printout of the file from the deconfliction database. Set up by Homeland Security shortly after 9/11, TILLER cross-referenced data from every federal agency.
“Fuuuuuck. He’s basically a number two now? In the CDG? Is this for real?”
She nodded, and Childs whistled at the image of a very high-up man in the Cartel del Golfo—El Capataz, Gustavo Acuña Cárdenas.
“I don’t know exactly where he sits on the org chart, but Acuña is El Capataz. It was a bitch to find him, though. I had to get deep in the manila, but I remembered seeing ‘El Capataz’ in some wire transcript. I finally found it—he was ID’d there as Acuña.”
“But there’s no mention of Acuña as El Capataz in TILLER?”
“That’s the weird part. He doesn’t have a jacket here or in Mexico.”
“A guy that senior?”
“So he’s managed to stay out of trouble, he’s connected, whatever. But then I saw that no one has searched his file. Not once. I mean, isn’t the whole point of TILLER deconfliction? So we can know who else has been watching a guy like this?”
“Right, there should be a dozen DEA agents listed here, at least. ATF, FBI . . . even the Coast Guard could’ve pinged his file at least once.”
“But look here.” She pointed to the Date Created field.
“His file was created two days ago? Well, that explains why no one’s searched it.”
“But it doesn’t say who created it. He calls me out of the blue two days after he mysteriously appears in TILLER? Something’s going on.”
“It’s weird,” he said, sliding the printout to her. “But there could be a lot of explanations.”
She watched the horses being led out through the binoculars. Scarlet Street was a feisty bay taking lunging steps. A promising sign.
“So what’d he want?”
She watched Cheshire’s Smile surge sideward like he might sunfish like a rodeo bronc. “Me,” she said.
“What do you mean, you?”
She pulled down the binoculars and gave him a get this look. “To meet him in Tampico,” she said. “Alone.”
Childs blew out a considerable breath and laced his hands behind his head. “Alone?”
“By tomorrow.”
“That’s—”
“Impossible. I’d have to get Dufresne’s okay, just for starters.”
“That ain’t happening. Not after today.”
“Right.”
“Besides, Dufresne’d have to clear it with the ASAC,” she said. “Who would then go to the SAC.”
“And the SAC in Mexico City would have to get the State Department’s okay.”
“And Mexico City would have to notify our ‘Mexicans partners.’ Federales. Local policía.”
She looked through the binoculars again. Spotted her other horse, Molly’s Revenge, an angry filly tossing her piebald head, skittish. Good girl.
“I have a feeling El Capataz doesn’t want this done the normal way,” she said. “He doesn’t trust the Mexican cops, so he’s going way back to an old connection with our side.”
“I buy that,” Childs said.
“But why’s his TILLER file brand-new? And why can’t we see who created it? Something’s up.”
She resumed watching through the binoculars, the horses entering the starting gates, the jockey struggling to get settled on Molly’s Revenge. She had a feeling these were the right horses. When she put the binoculars down, she saw that Childs had slid the printout back to her. Like he didn’t want to touch it.
“So, what? You want to go?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Even if Dufresne didn’t hate me now, there’s no way we could set this up inside a week, let alone a day. And if I just popped down there on my own? On top of all this trouble I’m already in?”
Bettors filed down to the fence along the track to watch the last race. The air had cooled some. Beer in hand, she shivered in the shade.
“Oh, don’t play,” he said as the race started.
“What?” she asked.
“We both know what you’re gonna do!” he said over the staccato barks of the race announcer.
She looked at him to say more, but the magnetic valence of the race pulled their attention back to the track. She took up the binoculars, the horses vibrating in her shaking hands. Cheshire’s Smile and Scarlet Street dashed out to a competitive lead in the first three furlongs. Molly’s Revenge was stuck somewhere in the back third, and Harbaugh found herself losing heart as she fell farther after the turn. Maybe she was wrong about the filly.
“I’ll just call Mexico City myself and let them handle it!” she shouted.
Molly’s Revenge was dead last, but surging around the second turn. C’mon girl, Harbaugh urged. The horse sped into the middle of the pack, finding her rhythm as Cheshire Smile and Scarlet Street traded the lead.
“The hell you will!” Childs yelled.
The PA blared, the crowd roared and pleaded and swore, but Childs was as clear as a church bell. She let down the binoculars from her eyes to look at him, to make him repeat it. But then Molly’s Revenge suddenly surged in the thronged middle of the final lengths, riderless and wild, finishing somewhere near to third. All around them erupted alarm and surprise and questions. She couldn’t make sense of it.
“What the hell happened?”
“A horse lost a rider,” he said, and she followed everyone pointing at a commotion of trainers and officials running on the dirt, some trying to catch the loose horse, some directing the ambulance rolling toward the jockey, others waving and talking in walkie-talkies. She took in everything, all at once, the confusing spectacle.
“You’re going down there,” he said in the buzzy stillness, and for a moment she thought he meant the spectacle before them. “You’ll see what this guy has and be back before supper. And if you come back with a little something Dufresne can’t resist, something that’ll smooth over this Oscar bullshit, well, all the better. I know you. You’ve already looked into flights.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“When are we leaving?”
He was serious. It was sweet of him, but she couldn’t allow it.
“Oh partner, you can’t go AWOL too. Can’t have Dufresne gunning for both of us.”
“You’re not going to meet a cartel underboss without backup, Diane.”
“I need backup here. Dufresne and OPR are gonna have questions. For you. Besides, this Capataz wants me to come alone.”
“I’ll wait in the goddamn car! He doesn’t have to know—”
“Russell. Enough. You know you gotta stay.”
She expected more resistance, but a shout went up as the final announcement rang out. He looked at her ticket and then the scoreboard. He shook his shaved head.
“You won,” he said. “And one of your goddamn horses didn’t even have a jockey.”
“I’m having a helluva day,” she said, watching the replay on infield monitor. She finished her beer and stood. “I better go get my money.”
He grabbed her wrist.
“Every one of these fool gamblers has days like this.” He wasn’t looking anywhere else, though. Just right at her. “There’s no telling which way your luck’s actually running till the whole thing’s been played out. And by then . . .”
“By then what?”
“It’ll be too fucking late.”