area, but none of them were Prieto’s. Ozzie’s was considered a neutral spot, on account of the food and the fact that Ozzie himself was still behind the counter, eighty years old and known to be one of the sweetest men alive. Well, sweet provided you didn’t make him pull his sawed-off shotgun from beneath the counter. His restaurant was given the ultimate respect: There wasn’t a single tag on the outside walls, nothing even on the sidewalk.
If something jumped off at Ozzie’s, it was usually some tourist making a complaint about his pork chop or some such thing. Ozzie didn’t care much for people complaining about his food, and that included the grave offense of asking for salt. But gangs? No. They liked his food, too, and Sam could even remember an occasion when he’d dined at the counter between a Crip and a Blood who had both decided to make the drive in for some lunch, and found themselves separated only by an ex-Navy SEAL. Sweet, really.
If Peter Prieto was what he appeared to be, he’d be the first responder to any Latin Emperor situation here on hallowed ground. So, after his meal, Sam walked back to his car and made a call to 911. “There’s about fifteen Latin Emperors getting ready to storm Ozzie’s in Little Havana. Yeah. I’m sure. I just saw them out front with guns and everything. Heard one of them say it was time Ozzie got his for giving his mama congestive heart failure. My name? Aldrich Rosenberg.”
Sam closed his phone, pulled out the SIM card and replaced it with another, and then sat back, swallowed a Tums-thanks to Ozzie’s spice predilection-and waited for the sirens to begin wailing.
Four minutes later, a cruiser came screeching down the block but with no siren. Sam sat up and took notice. The car came to a halt in front of Ozzie’s, and Sam made note of the car number and plate, and then when Peter Prieto hopped out, he wasn’t all that surprised. Tall and lean, Prieto moved like a cat when he stepped from the car, all coiled energy and spring-he was looking for something, anything, but also seemed nervous. He didn’t pull out his gun and he didn’t even bother to go inside Ozzie’s. He just swept the area quickly, checked the ground a couple of times and, presumably, upon seeing nothing amiss, immediately got back into his car and pulled away from the curb.
Sam followed him around the block and watched as the cop parked his car beside a FedEx truck idling beside a CVS pharmacy, but with an easy view of Ozzie’s. Sam parked in the same lot and pretended to be very busy with the machinations of his phone, but really was just watching to see what Prieto was seeing.
It wasn’t until three more cop cars pulled up, sirens blaring, that Prieto finally backed up his cruiser and drove away. Sam had a pretty good idea what was going to happen next, so he kept his vigil in the parking lot. Sure enough, a few seconds later, Prieto’s cruiser came screeching around the corner, siren blaring.
You sneaky bastard, Sam thought. He opened his phone and called Michael. “Mikey,” he said, “we have ourselves a company cop.”
17
When you’re a spy, it’s bad business to put your faith in anything you can’t control. Everyone and everything becomes suspect.
Whom do you trust?
Yourself and maybe your gun, but even your gun can run out of bullets or jam.
When you’re a spy, a day might come when your government disowns you, your partners turn out to be your enemies and the world you once knew to be true ends up being a terrible, terrible lie.
Your only opportunity for survival then is what exists between your ears. That means tamping down impulsive behavior in favor of well-planned counteraction. Can’t shoot your gun? Then use it as a blunt-force weapon. Or trade it for money or shelter or food, because if there is one thing that is true, it’s that there’s always a market for a gun. And there’s no more lethal weapon than a man who is willing to wait for someone else to make a mistake.
This was wisdom I was well acquainted with and, as I explained to Father Eduardo Santiago, a strategy that would work well for us. All he had to do was wait, and Junior would trip up and we’d be ready to pounce. In the meantime, we’d put into place all of the nets that would ensnare his fall.
It took three days of waiting. Three days of watching Junior’s every movement in his office. Three days of listening to his every phone call. Three days of reading his e-mails.
And three days of me actually going into an office every day, which was far more taxing than I could have ever imagined. Each morning, I picked up Eduardo from my mother’s and drove him to his office, where he conducted his business as usual. This meant keeping all of his appointments, which typically started at eight A.M. (which automatically excluded Sam from duty).
Father Eduardo taped his part for the community news program on Thursday morning, spent Thursday afternoon having lunch with two city councilmen who wanted his opinion on a new land deal that would give jobs to inner-city kids and on Thursday night, it was a charity dinner where he served as the MC. And then there was the actual managing of the day-to-day business of Honrado and the business of being a priest: the cafe, the auto shop, the job placement services, the people who need not just a word with you, but a lifetime with you.
And then it was Friday.
For three days, Father Eduardo conducted this business with me standing very near to him.
“He is writing a story on me for a magazine in Nevada,” he told the news program people and the charity organizers who noticed my presence.
“He is here to oversee the architectural development of our new buildings,” he told the Honrado employees who noticed me in his office day and night.
“He is here to protect me,” he told himself and, when Leticia called Fiona, it’s what I told her to repeat. It was Saturday morning and Father Eduardo was at my loft, along with Sam and Fiona, while we piled through all our surveillance of Junior. Barry was busy upstairs snoring through the important discovery process, which was fine. There was plenty of incriminating evidence, none of which Barry needed to see or hear, since a lot of it mentioned how they were going to kill him as soon as they had the opportunity. My mother had been kind enough to offer him a few of her horse tranquilizers to help him calm his jitters, and now he was on hour number eleven of sleep. We’d wake him when we needed him, which would be soon, as we had to make our moves today.
Saturday was to be a big day: Barry and Sam would train Junior’s men on how to operate the printing press and utilize the money plate. Sam had no actual facility with this skill set, but sort of wanted to learn, and also happened to be pretty good about shooting people who needed to be shot… even if he’d sworn to Father Eduardo that he’d only shoot them with a paintball gun. And that meant today would also be the day I had Junior’s men pull the job I wanted done at Harding Pharmaceutical, so that by Sunday, if everything worked according to plan, Father Eduardo might just have his day of worship.
But then Leticia called.
She’d been missing since Sam and I showed up to Honrado three days earlier, which meant she likely saw her boyfriend Killa and Junior arriving in one condition and leaving in a slightly different version, and knew that this might be her only opportunity to steal away with her son. But she could only go so far-a fact Fiona had predicted too well, so that when Leticia phoned her, she wasn’t all that surprised.
After she answered the call, Fi put her hand over the phone and whispered, “It’s Leticia.”
“She’ll want to talk to you,” I said to Father Eduardo. “You ready for that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Let her know Father Eduardo wants to speak to her,” I said to Fiona. “And make sure she knows he’s not angry with her.”
Fi spoke with Leticia for just a few moments and explained to her what had probably grown to be obvious: it wasn’t an accident that they’d met up that afternoon earlier in the week, and that it was all part of a larger plan to disrupt a conspiracy she’d been unwittingly pressed into, one best explained by Father Eduardo. Fiona handed him the phone and he spoke with the girl as calmly as possible.
“They are here to protect me,” he said to Leticia. “They are here to protect you and your son. Whatever you might have heard that is the contrary is rumor and innuendo. They will protect my brother, too, if it comes to it.”
Father Eduardo looked at me when he said that. It wasn’t something I was entirely certain was possible, not because it was physically impossible, but because it might be morally and ethically impossible. I’d already hobbled him, which would likely preclude him from taking part in anything involving standing for a few weeks, effectively
