REDBACK

CHAPTER TWO

Marquez checked Billy for a pulse he knew wasn't there and then drove the mile and a half back to the pueblo. In front of a whitewashed adobe church, he pulled over. His hands shook. He looked at Billy with his mouth wide open, head tipped back, the seat around him wet and glistening. He checked the street, the rear view mirror, the wooden church door just barely open and now shut again.

He waited for the Mex Feds he knew weren't coming to show up now. He wiped Billy's blood off the side of his face, ears still ringing from the gunshot, the town still and silent, each minute large. They weren't coming, yet he still waited and didn't call in. Instead, he retrieved his gun from the back, checked the clip, turned the car around and started back toward the bull ring.

He got halfway there before making a U-turn and driving back through the pueblo and back up in the mountains. He pulled over where he'd called in last and asked for Sheryl Javits.

"We got burned. The Mex Feds never showed and Miguel Salazar shot Billy. He's dead. He's in the passenger seat. He's with me."

She didn't seem to get it. She repeated that she had been talking to the Mex Feds all afternoon.

"They picked you up when you crossed the border. They tracked you the whole way and they had a team outside the bull ring and in the pueblo."

"They weren't there."

"Where are you?"

"Parked off the side of the road up in the Juarez mountains."

He looked over at Billy. He'd pushed Billy to make the meeting happen.

"Just stay where you are. I'll call you back. I've got to talk to Boyer."

Marquez knew what Boyer, their ASAC, the Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge, would do. He'd kick the decision upstairs to the Special Agent-in-Charge, Jay Holsten, who ran the LA Field Office. Marquez could guess Holsten's reaction. After hanging up, he worked the seatbelt so Billy's body wouldn't slide down anymore. He made sure Billy's door was locked. Then he got out of the car until the phone rang.

"Holsten does not want you to move the body. That's an order, John. You're to wait there. The Mex Feds are on the way."

"Tell Boyer and Holsten I'm headed to Tijuana. Ask our agents in Tijuana to drive toward me. I want witnesses when I turn over the car and Billy's body."

"You're just going to make it worse."

"Make what worse?"

"Moving the body. Everyone is asking why you didn't stop in the pueblo. You need to stay where you."

Tell Holsten and Boyer I said it was too dangerous to wait."

The fuck if he was going to sit here and wait for the guys who'd already burned them once today. He pulled back onto the road and Billy slid down in the seat. As he did, his bowels released and Marquez turned the air conditioner on full and lowered the windows. He drove out of the mountains thinking about Billy.

Billy Takado lived alone. He didn't have any children. He didn't have anybody. He was the son of a Japanese father who'd immigrated to the U.S. and a Mexican mother who lived just long enough to see her son do a five-spot for cocaine trafficking. She missed the next bust and Billy cutting a deal with the DEA.

He drove with a hot dry wind flowing through. The wind carried the smell of mesquite, creosote, and sun-baked desert rock. He kept checking the rear view mirror. The rear window was spidered from the bullet that had killed Billy and ahead the sky purpled with dusk. He was on the phone with Sheryl again when he ran into a Mex Fed roadblock.

They came down hard on him, ordered him out at gunpoint and were determined to handcuff him. When he resisted, they got angry. But they were angry anyway. The big gringo didn't know what they were up against or what it was to fight the narco trafficantes. Americans only cared about Americans and what they called American interests. Nobody liked the DEA cowboys, the agents who couldn't even speak Spanish, and came from a country full of drug users yet complained about drugs.

The way the Mex Feds treated him now told him that Sheryl hadn't pulled any punches. She'd gotten on the phone and laid into them, which was like her. They shoved him into a car and left the doors of the Cadillac open, let the flies settle on Billy.

In Tijuana they interrogated him until after midnight and barred anyone from the Tijuana DEA office from seeing him. Tonight, he was a possible suspect in the murder of Billy Takado, not that anyone believed that. It was simply a matter of principle. It was about working together, so this could be solved and then forgotten. The issue was how to deal with the miscommunication. A mistake had occurred and right now it looked like the DEA had given them bad information. Naturally, for the American DEA it was complicated to coordinate operations in a country where the DEA didn't belong.

A Mex Fed captain explained that to him in English, though Marquez was fluent in Spanish and he didn't really need it explained anyway. As he finished, the captain reinforced the central point. "It was not the fault of anyone. It is the difficulty that sometimes happens working together. I'm sure you can understand."

If he accepted that, they would let him go tonight. But Marquez wouldn't accept it. They put him in a cell and at dawn let him use a toilet and then a sink to wash Billy's blood off his arms. They returned his badge and gun, but couldn't find his Rolex or sunglasses, although the captain in charge promised to get them back to him. The captain carefully copied down an address.

The Cadillac would get returned after the investigation. The investigation was already underway and they would communicate as there was information. There was none yet.

They drove him to the San Ysidro Puerta and he walked to Customs with the copies of the 52s. Two of his squad, Ramon Green and Brian Hidalgo, were waiting at U.S. Customs. Hidalgo drove and Marquez told them how it had gone down, but nothing about what it felt like to see Billy killed. This was on a bright clear June morning in 1989, the same day the world watched a student in China face down a tank in Tiananmen Square.