Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

Neves did some more flopping around and moaning.

“Shit, shit,” he said.

“You in the shit, all right, Tomás,” Bassman said, loudly palming Neves’s head. He banged it back loudly against the floor of the hot tub. “You heard of quicksand? Well, you just stepped in quickshit.”

“He’s in Mexico, OK? He was here in LA. We set up some houses for him, but he’s gone now. I swear to God. Perrine went back to Mexico early this morning. One of my guys got him over the border.”

“To where?!” I said. “Where did he go?!”

“I don’t know. You think he’d tell me? I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer,” Diaz said, squealing open the tub’s tap full blast.

“No! It’s true! It’s true!” Neves yelled out over the water splattering loudly off the side of his face.

We stood there as Neves screamed, lying flat on his back, and the water rose. In thirty seconds, it was up to his earlobes. After a minute, the water had reached his cheeks. He strained his neck, trying to raise himself up. Covered in the segmented weight vests, he looked like an overturned turtle trying to pull himself unsuccessfully out of his shell.

“He went to his summer place near Mexico City,” Neves finally said, sputtering, the water now at his lips. “I’ll tell you exactly where on the map. Just turn it off! Turn it —”

Diaz put a hand to my chest as I reached in to grab the criminal who was screaming bubbles now under the rushing water.

“Give him a second, Mike,” Diaz said. “He needs to see how serious we are.”

“Exactly,” Bassman said, taking out a smartphone and thumbing it. “Let this guy soak his weary bones for a minute in peace, Mike. Can’t you see he’s had a hard day?”

CHAPTER 88

THOUGH HE HADN’T BEEN to it in over a year, the estate in the Sierra de Pachuca, fifteen miles outside the central-eastern Mexican town of Real del Monte, was by far Perrine’s favorite.

Built around a once-flourishing silver mine, the twenty-plus square miles of his property had been part of one of the original haciendas given by the Spanish crown to one of Cortés’s captains. The original grant was hung in a frame above the fireplace in Perrine’s office. At parties, Perrine made a point to show his guests the section on the yellowed parchment that granted the landowner not only the acreage and natural resources, but full ownership of all the area’s inhabitants as well.

The beauty of a good ranching hacienda like Perrine’s was not just its plush main house and gardens, but its complete self-sufficiency and sustainability. On the twelve thousand rolling acres, they farmed massive herds of cattle and sheep, countless chickens. They even had corn and soybean fields and several freshwater resources, including a fish-filled mountain river. The staff who lived on the hacienda all year round was in excess of forty people. They were mostly vaqueros, whom Perrine took great pleasure riding with whenever he was in attendance.

In summers past, in exchange for the local governor’s discretion and friendship, the hacienda often ran a children’s camp for local charities. But the last two weeks of August were reserved for Perrine’s expansive family’s dozens of children. The last time he had attended, two years before, eleven of the children were Perrine’s own. The children’s eight different mothers also stayed.

Perrine fondly remembered eating dinner with them poolside, night after night, flirting with them as the endless courses and wines were brought by an army of waiters. After the fifth course, he would have trouble putting names to faces. After the seventh, he’d stop caring.

He smiled at the memories. Had he ever been happier than during those two weeks, playing with the bands of his happy, screaming children all day and with their mommies all night? Had anyone?

But as his plane touched down on his airstrip late that morning, the estate was empty of all guests. Though he had sold the hacienda to a dummy buyer years before, he knew that it was possible for the Americans to know his connection to it, so he very rarely and briefly visited it these days. He’d come now only after a trusted source high up in the local policía had assured him there were no special directives to watch the place, no suspicious gringos suddenly filling the local hotels.

Even if there had been any chatter, even with his current American project under way, Perrine would have been hard-pressed to cancel the affair that he was putting on tonight—it would have been unthinkable to shutter the event. He lived for the cartel’s annual bonus party, a formal dinner for himself and his top one hundred captains, resplendent with speeches and toasts and culminating in waiters carrying valises filled with cash on silver trays.

Perrine sighed wistfully along with his Global Express’s whining jet engines as the plane taxied down the runway behind his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion.

What a life, he thought, taking off his sleeping mask and handing it to the new, blond American stewardess, Marcia, with a wink. He was truly a blessed man.

CHAPTER 89

OLD BETO, PERRINE’S HEAD vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs.

“Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t tell me she foaled?”

Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and smiled, the laugh lines around his bright eyes like cracks in brown glass.

“Show me immediately.”

They walked along the front of his massive, marble-stepped mansion and around the pool to the air-conditioned barn. Though he had several Thoroughbred raceh