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  “Like the cat scratch fever video didn’t tell them we’re serious,” Curtis said.

  The Colonel addressed his men after their evening meal. “Our next incursion will take place the morning after next. To throw the guards in the houses off balance, our methods for the next half-dozen operations will rely on deceit rather than brute force.”

  “Will that not increase our exposure, Commandante?” Arturo asked.

  “It might add a few minutes to each mission, but their countermeasures are going to get more sophisticated. We’ll need to catch them off guard to avoid the chaos of a firefight in the middle of these peaceful neighborhoods. The law enforcement response times are quite efficient,” the Colonel said.

  “How will we trick the drug house sentries into letting down their guards?” Diego said.

  The Colonel outlined the first plan. The roles for each man were precisely delineated, as usual. He had plotted the timing windows for each phase, complete with acceptable margins for safety. Once the plan was fully briefed, Barros left to begin the necessary changes to the appearance of the vehicle. Luis went to a wholesale men’s clothing store to purchase four sets of the uniform shirts and pants they would need, along with the boots in the appropriate sizes.

  Confident that this change in tactics would throw Otis’s organization off, the Colonel nonetheless kept going over the minutiae in his head. He knew that the lives of his men depended on his being able to anticipate their adversary’s moves. Their objectives would become harder to take with every mission.

  He stripped and cleaned his sidearm, more out of habit than necessity. He reassembled it without looking and jacked the slide, listening to the action with satisfaction. As he holstered it he made a silent oath that he would not let his men down, just as they had not let him down when he was rotting in the basement cells of the secret political prison set up by their country’s new government.

  They had rescued him just one week into the “deprogramming” regimen the new Prime Minister’s secret police had arranged for him. The men had worried that they might be too late, but the Colonel was as hardened as a man could be. His scars had healed. His mental acuity was unimpaired. He didn’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder; he inflicted it. There were no nightmares from his time at the hands of the government-sanctioned torturers. He had put the ordeal behind him and focused on the goal at hand.

  When their country had fallen, the democratically elected leader and his cabinet had been imprisoned. All military commanders loyal to the old regime had been taken to a prison camp. Many had surrendered their beliefs, fallen into line with the policies of the new government, and been posted elsewhere. The Colonel and a few other senior officers had been defiant. The cost of the defiance was jail, and the brutality that came with it.

  Conditions in the jails were disgusting. Poisonous centipedes and cone-nosed assassin bugs came through the cracks in the stone cells at night and kept the prisoners from sleeping. The men were sleep-deprived, taunted, malnourished, and physically tortured.

  The Colonel still remembered the morning he had gained his freedom. He had no idea what day or time it was. He was awakened by the sound of gunfire. He assumed it was the execution of one of his fellow prisoners or another sleep-deprivation tactic. Only when Luis and Hector appeared at his cell with two of his jailers did he understand.

  The men were shocked at his appearance. They had never seen him less than perfectly turned out in his military uniform. When they opened the cell door he reached for Luis’s sidearm. He looked at the two jailers and said, “I forgive you.” Then he shot each of them in the center of the forehead. He still remembered the delicate patterns of the powder tattooing.

  They fought their way out of the jail, then highjacked a truck. From there they drove hard to the border. When the border guards asked to see their papers, they handed over eleven thousand dollars in cash. Eventually they made it to the coast and ended up as part of the crew of a cargo ship headed for the United States. The ship put in to Salento, and the Colonel and his men made their way into the city.

  Soon, the Colonel vowed, they would return to their country and begin an insurrection. The only things standing between them and their objective were Otis Gaverill and the Salento PD.

  24

  Mya returned to her building at seven forty-five p.m., exhausted from the planning efforts for the Zealot Jeans campaign and various other projects she’d been asked to consult on.

  As she entered her condo the smell of fried mushrooms, garlic, and onions tantalized her. Fortunately, she reflected, Mitchell loved to cook. He called out as he heard the door close. “Hey, I’m in the kitchen.”

  “I can tell you’re in the kitchen,” she said. “What smells so good?”

  “I’m sautéing three kinds of mushrooms with some garlic and sweet onions. Then I’m going to grill two filet mignon that I’ve marinated in black tea and spices. To accompany this masterpiece, we have spicy oven-baked yam frites with a Dijon mustard and chili flake glaze.”

  “Oh my God, Mitchell, you have no idea how much I need this. I’m so fucking starving I could grab a fork and eat right out of that pan!”

  He seized a chef’s knife and pointed it at her. “Stay back!” he said melodramatically.

  She eyed his gun, sitting in its concealed-carry paddle holster on the kitchen table. “I think you underestimate how desperate I am.”

  He opened the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of margaritas. “Perhaps you’ll find this more tempting than mortal combat in close quarters.”

  Mitchell cut a lime and rubbed the rims of two glasses with it. Then he rimmed the glasses with coarse salt. He poured the margaritas and handed one to Mya. Clink.

  “Made with fresh lime juice, just for you,” Mitchell said.

  “Mmmm,” she sighed. “Very tasty.”

  “Sit down and take a load off while I finish this off. Then we can try to one-up each other with how bizarre our days were.”

  “Deal,” she said.

  As Mitchell cooked, Mya told him about the latest Garrett Lawrence escapade. Mitchell spared her any more details about the Rammi Vargas Siberian tiger incident. The steaks took ten minutes on the grill. He let them sit on a cutting board for five minutes so the juices would permeate the meat, then nestled them on plates with the sautéed mushrooms, garlic, and onions. He took the pan of yam fries from the oven, sprinkled some sea salt over top with a little chopped Italian parsley, and carried both plates to the table.

  Mya got up and gave him a long, languid kiss. “I’m a lucky woman. And later you’re going to be a lucky man,” she said.

  “I’ve always said, the way to a woman’s bed is through her stomach,” Mitchell replied.

  “Not sure if it would work on some of the models we were casting today, but it works for me,” Mya said.

  They sat down and attacked the dinner. A half hour later Mitchell was eyeing the last morsel of steak on Mya’s plate. “You gonna eat that?” he said.

  “You better believe it,” she said defensively. “The ad business makes you more of a carnivore.”

  “Not that you were a vegetarian before,” said Mitchell.

  “True.”

  “What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into the ad industry?” he asked.

  She speared her final bite of steak and put it in her mouth. Mitchell watched her chew. He wondered how it was possible for someone to look sexy while chewing. Mya thought about his question for a minute. Finally she answered.

  “I never set out to be in the ad business,” she said. “My dad wanted me to go into finance with him in the equities game. My mother always thought I’d make a great crusading lawyer, helping the underdog against big business. I was thinking about both those things. But one day I was walking downtown, on my way to an interview with a consulting company, and I saw a billboard in Mackenzie Square.”

  “The one on the side of the old Fairbanks Theatre?” Mitchell asked.

  “That’s
the one. On the billboard there was an ad for dog food. Big bowl of this meaty looking stuff—you know how they make it look better than the steak we just ate. But all around the billboard were these really lifelike models of dogs—there must’ve been twenty of them—positioned to look like they were literally scaling the walls around the billboard to get to the big bowl of dog food in the ad. There were dogs perched on top of the board looking down. One was lowering another by its paws. And this huge fake Great Dane was dragging its owner up the brick wall by a leash. I stopped and laughed out loud. It was so funny.”

  “What did the rest of the pedestrians think? Did you notice them crossing the street to avoid walking close to you?”

  “Not at all. Every fourth person would stop and have the same kind of reaction. Some people even took photos of the ad and they were sending it to friends. It really made me realize, ‘Hey, there are some people out there who are having a lot of fun going to work in the morning.’”

  Mitchell drank the last mouthful of his margarita and smiled. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Pretty much. I loosened the top button of the starched white blouse I was wearing with my suit, found out which ad agency did the ad, and went and pestered them for a job until they caved in and hired me,” Mya said. “How about you? What would you have done if you hadn’t become a cop?”

  “Dunno. Mebbe become a doctor? They seem to get the best tee times.”

  “Seriously.”

  Mitchell thought for a moment. “I never really considered much else. As a boy you always say you want to become a fireman or a cop. I guess I never outgrew that.”

  “Didn’t you tell me once that you knew a cop who got killed?” Mya continued.

  “I didn’t really know him. When I was seventeen and about to enter my final year of high school I showed up at the local municipal golf course one day and they had paired me up with a guy who had just joined the police force. He and his wife were expecting their first kid, and he was stoked about what it meant to be a cop. Having the ability to make a difference in the world. We had a great game. Easy guy to talk to. Two days later I flipped open the newspaper and saw his picture. He’d been shot by three guys leaving a bank after a robbery. Pure chance really. He wasn’t even responding to the call. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Or at the right place. He was a cop after all.”

  “I s’pose. Anyway, after that, instead of being put off police work I was drawn to it. Don’t know why.”

  “And your mother got over the fact that her Salvador wasn’t going to become an artist or a sculptor?” Mya said.

  “Yeah, it was a bit of a shock. She knew I had a creative streak, like her. But mine seems to mostly be in the kitchen.”

  “Drinking to that!” Mya said, laughing and holding up her glass.

  “But Ma came around. About a year after I graduated from the academy she came with me one day to the pistol range. She’d always wanted to fire a gun. Weird hey? Sixty-three years old. Accomplished artist. Of all things she wanted to come to the range with me and blaze away at some silhouettes. The old bird was a pretty decent shot too. My Glock .40 looked huge in her hands.”

  “I can just picture that. How’d she do?”

  Mitchell smirked. “She went through a couple mags and had a pretty good center-mass grouping going. Asked if she could keep the target as a souvenir, so I hit the switch and brought it forward. Took it down and rolled it up for her.”

  “Does she still have it?” Mya said, puzzled.

  “That’s the funniest part,” Mitchell said. “She took the target, and using découpage and acrylic paints, she created this abstract piece of art she called ‘Going Ballistic.’ She sold it during one of her showings for eleven thousand dollars.”

  Mya burst out laughing. “That was probably about three months pay for you at the time.”

  “Oh easily,” Mitchell nodded. “That’s my ma: number one with a bullet.”

  “Have you been to see her lately?”

  “Yep. Went last week, the night you were doing that all-nighter with your team on the blue jeans account. She made me some broiled salmon and risotto, kicked my ass at Scrabble, then sent me on my way.”

  “Can’t put anything past Mama Mitchell,” Mya said.

  “No, that’s for sure. She put the word ‘quart’ down on a triple word score. Joined it up with a z I had used in the word zero and she made quartz. Seventy-two points.”

  “Ha.” Mya said.

  Mitchell stood up and cleared the plates from the table. “Ha indeed. It’s tough having two beautiful and intelligent women in my life.”

  Mya stood and started to undo his shirt. “Well let me school you in one of the fringe benefits of having this one in your life.”

  “Hallelujah,” Mitchell said as he kissed her.

  25

  The next morning Mitchell arrived at the precinct early to hit some golf balls while the park across the street was still placid. It was as clear a sky as he’d seen in months. The sun was barely up, and there was no wind at all. A squirrel did a high wire act on the telephone lines.

  He stretched his shoulders and hips, working the big muscles that made a golf swing look easy. His first shot was wide to the left, but respectable. “An easy left-to-right breaker for birdie,” he said in a low, vaguely British golf announcer voice.

  The rest of the two dozen balls he hit were all decent. No sign of a consistent flaw. The highlight was his final shot of the morning, which overflew the duck decoy by just a couple of feet. He knew that it would spin back on a real putting surface, so it was a nice way to close.

  Mitchell took a hard-bristle brush to the face of his wedge and cleaned the grooves. Then he looked over the grassy roof. The turf was in good shape, considering what he had to work with. He and Sandovan replaced divots when they could. And they had an old bleach bottle filled with a seed, soil, and fertilizer mixture that they could use to fill the holes when the divots flew off the building. The tough part was getting the fertilizer and seed up to the rooftop without arousing suspicion. The roof wasn’t supposed to require a lot of maintenance, so he and Sandovan had to be covert with their ongoing manicuring of the grass.

  Mitchell was mulling over a new method for sneaking the maintenance materials up to the roof when a thought occurred to him. If he and Sandovan found it difficult to grow a plot of turf on the roof of their building, how would a criminal organization be able to hide the inputs for large numbers of grow houses?

  With a thousand or more plants per house, the high intensity bulbs, fertilizers, fungicides, ventilation, and soil or hydroponics would require a sizable supply chain and budget. To keep that kind of scale a secret, the organization would have to have some legit front. Probably one that could also help them launder the money they made from the drug trade.

  He walked down the stairs into the building, still thinking about possible fronts that the shadowy pot corporation might be using. The obvious ones were garden centers, florists, and hydroponic vegetable operations. Maybe it was a combination of all three.

  Ryerson was already at his desk when Mitchell came down from the rooftop. “Wow, I’m impressed,” he said to Mitchell. “Didn’t know you got up this early.”

  “Geez, Ryerson, this is nothing. Sandovan and I are sometimes teeing off on the back nine by this time.”

  “Never saw the attraction,” Ryerson said. “Maybe I’ll have to go to the driving range some time and hit a bucket.”

  “Let me know when you’re going, and I’ll join you. Give you a few pointers,” Mitchell said.

  He paused for a moment, then scratched his chin as if unsure how to broach a subject.

  “What?” Ryerson asked.

  “I have a delicate question, and I don’t quite know how to ask it.”

  “Bi-curious?”

  “Nah, don’t get your hopes up. Okay, might as well just spit it out. You know my girlfriend Mya?”

  “Of course,�
�� Ryerson nodded. He turned from his desk and faced Mitchell.

  “She works in a big ad agency. It’s a bit of a fucking circus, to be honest. Hormones and tempers flaring all over the place. If you’re not getting fucked figuratively you’re probably getting fucked literally. Some like to do both.”

  “Tell me about it. Phil worked as a graphic designer before he became an architect. He said it was like a sexual Olympiad.”

  Mitchell went on. “There’s one guy at the company who Mya thinks is sexually harassing some of the more vulnerable women. Tries to parlay his vertical position on the corporate ladder into horizontal positions.”

  “What do you want to do? We could get one of the guys in traffic to pull him over in his car. Apparently Dan Stevenson can find a reason to impound a car that just rolled off the lot,” Ryerson said.

  “Nah. I think I’d like to give him a taste of his own medicine. If you know what I mean.”

  Ryerson thought for a second, then it dawned on him. “Ohhh. Well, since an aggressive woman would probably turn this guy on, I’m guessing you’re wondering if I know any bull queers?”

  “More or less. Yeah.”

  Mitchell told Ryerson the rest of his plan. Ryerson grinned in admiration. “You are one devious bastard, Mitchell,” he said.

  Mitchell laughed. “I prefer to think of it as an innate sense of justice.”

  “Well I don’t really move in the same circles as the real badass bulls, but you might not want to involve one of them anyway. It could easily get out of hand. I think between Phil and me we might know someone who could fulfill all the prerequisites you need. I’ll ask him tonight.”

  “I appreciate it,” Mitchell said. “Oh, and by the way, I’ve given some more thought to that pot corporation Hernandez was telling us about. What if we started looking for businesses that might be possible fronts? Places that could launder the dough as well as cover the orders for fertilizer, grow lights, and all the related stuff?”

  “Damn, Mitchell. You’re not just a pretty face,” Ryerson said. “Not a bad idea. How about we spend the next hour searching for possibles, then cross-reference our notes.”