The Fall Moon Read online

  I gave my head a little sideways twist. “That kind of thing can be very valuable to them. I know Julio Camacho. It’s exactly the kind of thing he would play on. They came for you?”

  “Never. They never came close to me. But they took Daryl. They beat him and tortured him for a week. Then they dropped him outside our front door. I called the office and they came with the ambulance. He was a month in the hospital and six months without working, receiving medication and counseling. They told him that what they had done to him, they could do to me anytime they wanted. If we tried to run or hide, they could find us. The only way to be safe was to provide them with information about drugs operations.”

  I frowned. “Nobody ever noticed?”

  She wagged her finger again. “No, no. They are very smart. He is more useful to them if they can play him for ten, twenty years. So let the feds have a small success here, a small success there. A hundred thousand dollars here, two hundred and fifty here. To them, it is nothing. Because what is getting through is worth millions. If they get advance information about surveillance operations, raids, busts, patrols… they can plan everything so that Daryl’s position is never compromised. I know these people very well. I spent five, six years living with them, eating with them, sleeping with them. I know how they think.” She held my eye for a long moment, then added, “But I am not one of them.”

  “I believe you.”

  “And if Daryl told them about the operation, he did not expect them to kill those agents. They have never done anything similar. I can promise you that he expected them to abort the delivery, nothing more. He would not have sacrificed those men. He loved Brad like a brother.”

  It made sense. It made sense of D.C.’s reaction when I spoke to him in the car. You can fake surprise, but you can’t fake turning pale.

  She said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What time is your flight?”

  “Ten thirty tonight.”

  I frowned at her. “How long have you had this escape plan in place?”

  “Ten years…”

  “I have to tell you, it’s not a great plan when you have to spend seven hours in a public place where just about everybody can see you.”

  She shrugged. “I know. We used to stay on top of it, modify it—even talk about escaping and faking our own deaths. But the crisis never came, nobody ever got hurt, eventually we just kind of settled and grew complacent.”

  “Where is your baggage?”

  “In left luggage. It’s a long time to be carrying…”

  She trailed off and I got to my feet. “OK, Penny, let’s go.”

  There was fear in her eyes. “Where are we going?”

  “To see Daryl. Then we’ll decide what to do. Where is your car?”

  “In a parking garage in town. I took a cab.”

  “Good.”

  I left the Buick for the cops to find in the parking lot. I was pretty sure that if there wasn’t a BOLO out for it already, there would be before very long. I hired a car from Hertz instead and drove back south toward the Saguaro Garden. By now, the heat was fierce and there was a dead, dusty stillness to the desert as it slid past outside the windows.

  As we passed Red Rock, she spoke, looking out at the rusty flats, scattered with gnarled, exhausted bushes. “Is Brad dead, then?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “He has a girlfriend, Susanne…”

  “I know.”

  “I read once, nothing ever happens in isolation. Whatever you do, if you touch one person, really you are touching five, or ten. You cannot isolate yourself, ever.” I glanced at her. She was talking in a monotone, almost droning, looking at nothing. “She told me they were thinking about having kids. Now they never will. So they killed Brad, and they also killed his unborn children.”

  Five minutes later, I told her, “We’re here.”

  I pulled off the road at the intersection, turned back up the frontage road and finally came to a halt outside the room at the motel. When I opened the door and Penny stepped in, D.C. went pale and stood up, shaking his head, saying, “No! No, no, no! You can’t do this!”

  Penny went to him and put her arms around him. They clung to each other. His eyes were squeezed tight. Dehan was watching like I had just pulled a white bunny from my holster. I made a ‘whatcha gonna do?’ face and put my ass on the windowsill. After a moment, D.C. opened his eyes and stared at me. “They’ll kill her. She has to go. She has nothing to do with this. You don’t understand.”

  “Her flight is at ten thirty tonight, D.C. Unless I learn something completely unexpected before then, she’ll be on it. But the worst place in the world for her right now is the airport. This right here is about as safe as it gets.” I gave that a moment to sink in, then I went on. “Now, you need to listen to me, Daryl. Because we have no idea where this is going to go, or how it’s going to play out. So you need to focus. You need to stop trying to be smart, and you need to tell me exactly what happened.”

  He drew breath and I interrupted him. “I told you, don’t try to be smart. Penny already told me about the beating and Camacho’s threats. The only way out of this for you is to come clean with me and Dehan.”

  He stared at Penny for a moment. She held his face in her hands and said, “He had already guessed it, Daryl. We have to face this now. We should have done it before.”

  He sagged. All the air seemed to hiss out of him and he sat on the bed. Penny sat next to him and held him. Dehan was in a chair by the door, frowning and sucking her teeth.

  He spread his hands a moment, then let them drop on his knees. He wouldn’t look at me. He spoke to the floor. “I’ve been giving Camacho information for about ten years. Not him personally, but his organization down here, based at the ranch, mainly Cesar. In exchange, they agreed to stay away from my wife. If I didn’t cooperate, they would do to her what they did to me.”

  His face crumpled like a small child’s. His bottom lip curled in. His eyes puffed up and tears spilled down his face. Dehan got up and went to the bathroom. She returned with a roll of paper and gave it to Penny. She pulled off a handful and gave it to him. He took it in his hands and buried his face in it, leaning against his wife, sobbing convulsively, like ten years of pain and toxic fear were all spilling out in a torrent in that moment.

  Eventually, the convulsions stopped and his breathing, though still tremulous, became steadier. Finally he stood and went into the bathroom, where he blew his nose noisily and splashed his face with water. When he came back out, he stood a while, holding the doorjamb and looking at me.

  “I have never told anyone what they did to me, not even… especially not Penny. But if you know anything about the Camachos, I don’t need to tell you. There was no way—there is no way—that I am going to allow that to happen to her. I don’t care who I have to betray, or who I have to kill.”

  “You don’t need to kill or betray anybody, D.C. Let’s not make this any more complicated than it already is. Just answer me a question. Until today, has anybody ever been hurt as a result of the information you have given—and remember this can and will be verified.”

  “No. Never. I was useful to them. As long as nobody got killed or injured, they could use me indefinitely. They knew that as soon as anybody got hurt, my days would be numbered.”

  I sighed and rubbed my face. The weariness was getting to me. I looked at Dehan and she nodded. I said, “How good is your information on them?”

  “It’s pretty good.” He nodded a few times to himself. “Over the years, they’ve grown to trust me. They pay me.” He looked up at me like he was ashamed. “You have to accept or they get offended. It’s like you think you’re too good to accept their money. In the end, they were paying me a lot. I put it all in an account in Belize. My idea was, we could use it if we ever had to escape. It’s still there. I never touched it…” He dithered a moment. “My point is, they’ve grown to trust me. We’ve become kind of… friends…” He said it
like the word made him nauseous. “I drive down at least once a month. We talk. They tell me what’s going down, and I tell them whatever they need to know that’s relevant to their operations.”

  “So they keep you in the loop so you can select what information they need to know.”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t like that in the beginning, obviously. But like I say, it’s been ten years. More.”

  “So you can provide names, dates…”

  “I have enough information to sink the whole operation, take down the Camacho brothers and maybe a dozen or more of their lieutenants.”

  “Then you know as well as I do what you have to do. Do it right and it might actually pay off for you. You make a deal with the Bureau. Like you said, we talk to Washington. You offer them the Camachos, Cesar—everything from Mexico all the way to the East Coast. You give them Julio and Feliciano, and all their head honchos…”

  “Eighteen agents died because of the information I gave, Stone.”

  “And they are not going to forgive you for that. But there are mitigating circumstances and the bottom line is, you did not expect the Camachos to take the action they did. When you found out what they had done, in retaliation, you were prepared to give the feds the whole operation. Their choice is, punish you or take down the operation. It’s obvious, they will cut you a deal.”

  He nodded a few times, then looked up at me, and across at Dehan. “But Penny boards that plane tonight.”

  I jerked my head in a question at Dehan. She shrugged. “Makes sense to me.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him and added, “But there is one more thing I need from you.”

  TWENTY

  Outside the window, the desert was turning gold. The sky in the north was turning a darker shade of blue and there was one, huge saguaro whose shadow was stretching long across the dust. I was trying to estimate the height of the cactus, and the length of the shadow. I figured it was at least fifteen feet high and the shadow had to stretch for at least thirty or thirty-five feet.

  I zoned back in and realized that Special Agent in Charge Pat O’Leary had been talking to me. I narrowed my eyes and tried to look like I’d been thinking about D.C., then lost interest and said, “What?”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. I wasn’t sure if it was irritated or skeptical. It may have been both.

  “I asked you, Detective Stone, if you had anything to add to what Detective Dehan has told me.”

  That would have been an easier question to answer if I had been listening to Detective Dehan.

  “Not really, Special Agent O’Leary. In fact, given that we were both almost killed because of intelligence that was leaked from this field office, you will understand that I, we both…” I trailed off, having made spaghetti of my grammar. “…We are both reluctant to say too much. No doubt Washington will be contacting you in due course.”

  He sat and jerked his eyes around my face for a bit, then shook his head like a man who is having trouble understanding something. “This attack, that you allege, occurred at shortly before seven o’clock this morning.” He spread his hands. “Where have you been all day?” He gestured out the window at the lengthening shadows that had been distracting me moments before. “That was about twelve hours ago.”

  Dehan smiled, and it was actually a nice smile, which made what she said next all the more jarring. “Well, Special Agent, there were the few hours that we were escaping through the desert attempting not to get disemboweled. After that, we were continuing the investigation which brought us here in the first place. And, as Detective Stone pointed out a moment ago, given that a leak from this field office led to the deaths of some eighteen agents, and almost cost us our lives, we were somewhat cautious about coming in, so we contacted Washington instead.”

  He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment, he opened them again and asked us both, “Has either of you any idea of where Agent Daryl Collins or his wife are?”

  “As Detective Dehan has already explained to you, first we called the field office and were given the runaround, then we called Daryl. We met him at Wendy’s Burgers, at the Pilot Travel Center at Rio Rico. He then drove us back toward Tucson. After that, Detective Dehan and I continued to conduct our own investigation. Where Agent Collins is now is impossible to say.”

  He drummed his fingers on his desk, eyeing Dehan. “You were here as observers. You have no jurisdiction in Arizona. So what is the nature of your investigation?”

  “We were making unofficial inquiries.”

  He studied her for a long moment, then asked, “Are you being deliberately obstructive, Detective Dehan?”

  She thought about the answer for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, and I hope you understand why. There is a leak in your office, and right now we don’t know who it is, though the pool…” She made a circle with her hands, indicating a pool. “The pool of possible suspects is very small. So I am afraid that with all the due respect, we are not going to be very cooperative with this office. We will cooperate fully with Washington and New York.”

  He gave another big, deep sigh. “I guess that makes perfect sense.”

  After that, we’d risen and left his office. We’d collected my Jag from the parking garage and headed south, out of Phoenix, toward Tucson on the I-10, with the windows open and the desert air battering our faces. I kept it to a steady seventy and Dehan stretched out in her seat with her shades up on her head and her eyes closed.

  “Man,” she said, “I am tired.”

  “It’s been a long two days, and a long week.”

  She nodded, then asked, “Are we OK, Stone?” She half-opened her eyes to look at me. “What happened, does it change… us?”

  I didn’t answer straight away, glanced at her and saw that she looked a little sick, worried. I said: “I thought about that. I almost went back to New York. What you did goes against everything I believe in, Dehan. You have to know that. But no, it doesn’t change us. I can’t imagine life without you.”

  She grinned, made a ‘tss!’ sound and looked away. “You’re such a sissy.”

  “But don’t do it again, Dehan, not while you’re working with me. You understand that?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You’re a cop, not a vigilante. You can’t use the NYPD as a means to exact your personal vengeance.”

  “I get it, Sensei! No more vengeance. I’ll behave.”

  She closed her eyes again and afternoon moved to evening. We passed through Tucson and took the I-19 out, moving south toward Rio Rico and Nogales. The sky was turning dark overhead and the first stars were beginning to poke through the translucent, dark turquoise dome. Headlamps were coming on and I was beginning to feel the first stirrings of hunger.

  “I have to say,” I said, and she opened her eyes and turned her head to look at me. “I do like the arrangement we’ve made for tonight. Do you know they’ve been making wine in Arizona since the 16th century? That’s Henry the Eighth, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, five or six hundred years.”

  She grunted and closed her eyes again. “I don’t know much about wine, but Arizona? Really?” She did a passable generic cowboy accent. “Ah sure do like the boo-kay from that thayah Cabernay, Slim. Think I’ll git me some a’ that they’er wine, give it to mah dogies.”

  “Ha! Do I detect an East Coast snob in my car? I’ll have you know…”

  She opened one eye. “You’ll have me know?”

  “I will. I’ll have you know Arizona is producing some of the best wines in America.”

  “Yee-haa.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to it. The food sounds good too.”

  “OK. Just let me sleep for an hour or too and I’ll probably sound as much like Frasier as you do. Or Niles. Which was the gay one?”

  “Funny.”

  “By the way, did you buy me panties and a bra in the end?”

  “Mm-hm, they are black lace with strategically placed strawberries on them. I thought you’d like them.”

 
I glanced at her, but she was smiling and snoring softly.

  Just outside Nogales, we took the exit for Grand Avenue and followed it as far as Kino Park. There I took the exit for the West Patagonia Highway and pretty soon we were past Beyerville and climbing into the Patagonia mountains. Meanwhile, behind us, the sky caught fire across the horizon and ahead, the darkness closed in.

  We arrived in Sonoita a little after eight. There wasn’t a lot to see. The last of the sunlight had drained out of the west and, aside from the light cast by a few, scattered buildings, there was no illumination in the town. I say town, but I use the word in the loosest sense. Sonoita is a crossroads with a gas station, a hotel and two excellent restaurants. There is little else besides a handful of houses and a couple of wineries that make wine from the vineyards to the west of the town. One of those wineries, the Dos Cabezas, Daryl had told me was highly respected in oenological circles, competing with the best that California had to offer.

  The other, Bodegas del Diablo, was a relatively new enterprise, barely five years old, but it was starting to produce some wines that people who said things like, ‘shy but with a cheeky hint of vanilla and bags of fruit’ were beginning to talk about. The Bodegas del Diablo had bought up a number of local vineyards and had also converted an old ranch, north of the town, into a bodega in the Spanish tradition. They also had a big warehouse for distribution, right on the main street. From what Daryl had told me, they were distributing wine to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, which was pretty impressive for a wine producer that had not, as yet, been written up in any of the major wine industry magazines. Given that the Camachos had invested heavily in it, that made us both wonder whether they were distributing more than just wine.