dove naked into the water. His new, raw tattoo shot pain up his ankle all the way to his knee, but he ignored it and kicked hard to the bottom. Just for the hell of it, he retrieved a Titleist 4 golf ball with a huge smile cut in the side, then he frog-kicked the length of the pool under water. When he came up on the far end, he dropped the ball on the deck, and it rolled slowly to a stop between two patent-leather high-heeled pumps. He glanced up, looking into the jade-green eyes of a blond woman in a black-striped business jacket and matching skirt. A world-class beauty, she was standing at the edge of the pool, holding an ostrich briefcase, smiling down at him with open delight.
'Jose said this place was well stocked,' she mused, studying his nude body, 'but this is almost too good to believe.'
'Jesus, lady… Where the hell did you come from?' Shane blurted.
'Panama City,' she replied, deadpan. 'And you would be who? The famous but mysterious La Quinta Water Nymph?'
'Funny. You wanna turn around so I can get my robe?'
'Not on your life.'
A man's voice called out: 'Lisa, let's go! We're late! You can meet these people later.' Shane looked over the pool deck. Standing in the doorway of the lit living room, about twenty yards away, was a short but powerfully built dark-skinned Hispanic man dressed in a black suit. Despite the Palm Springs heat, he had an overcoat draped on his right arm.
'Coming, Jose,' she called to him, then turned back to Shane, kissed her fingertips, and wiggled them seductively at him. 'I guess, as the man says, we're going to have to meet later,' she said, smiling. Then she turned and walked away, making a show of it, her calves flexing, her short, tailored skirt flipping playfully against sculpted thighs.
Chapter 24
COME ON, WE need to talk,' Jody said, startling Shane. He had just dressed and spun toward the open door, but Jody had already left.
He grabbed his wallet off the bed, stuffed it into his pants, and followed.
Shane found Jody standing behind the house by the golf course, on the edge of the sixth fairway, staring out at the moonlit grounds. As Shane approached, Jody handed something to him in the dark. 'Here.'
Shane couldn't see what it was, but when he took it, he was surprised to find his Beretta still in its Yaqui Slide ankle holster.
'Figured after what happened in Mexico, maybe you shouldn't wander around without that. I reloaded it for ya. Full loads.'
The gun that killed Alexa.
Darkness hovered, but Shane pushed it away. He sat on the grass and strapped the holster to his right ankle, which thankfully was not the one with the throbbing tattoo.
Jody squatted down beside him on his haunches, Indian-style. 'Okay, Hot Sauce. You won't be much help to me if you don't know what's going on, so here's the deal. I already told you about these Mexican bankers, the ones we lost to the Justice Department…'
'Yeah…' Shane waited, and finally Jody continued.
'Well, hiding out at the edge of that bust was this little guy we couldn't identify. Name was Leon J. Fine. Turns out he was an L. A. bail bondsman. He was trying to write some paper on one or two of these Mexican bankers. I got a friendly judge to shut that down fast. All of those guys were big-time flight risks-white-collar crooks with no priors. These Mexican bankers were all sitting in jail having anal-penetration nightmares. The judge agreed that if they ever bonded out, everybody woulda been back in Mexico before the first siesta. Anyway, so here's this little shitball bondsman, L. J. Fine, hanging around the edge of my bank case. Maybe he pissed me off, or something about him didn't add up. Either way, I got interested. After Justice took over our case, I had some time on my hands, so I put one or two days in on the guy just to see what his story was… And guess what this schmuck was doing?'
'Beats me.'
'He was going out to airports, getting on private jets that belonged to Fortune 500 companies, and flying all over the place like he was Prince Abu Dabi or somethin'. So I'm saying to myself, What does my little low-rent L. A. bondsman have on these big corporations, and why are they flying him around in their twenty-million-dollar corporate jets?' Jody smiled at him. 'Wanna guess?'
'Why don't you just tell me.'
'You ever hear of something called the parallel market?' Jody asked.
'No, I haven't.'
'Don't feel bad, neither had I. It's a little confusing till you get the hang of it, but basically, a lot of big Fortune 500 corporations are using their product to launder Colombian drug money. And it's bigger by a bunch than the Mexican bank bust, 'cause hundreds of these U. S. companies are doin' it… And have been for over twenty years. Any company with a product that's worth a lot, but doesn't weigh much-like cigarettes or booze or electronics- is prime for the hustle.'
'You're shittin' me,' Shane said, thinking he must have heard wrong.
'That's what I thought at first, but it's true. The deal we're working right now is with Ail-American Tobacco. I guess it's not enough these guys are killing us with their cancer sticks, now they're also laundering Cali cartel drug money.'
Shane asked, 'How do cigarettes or liquor products wash drug cash?'
'It took me a couple a'months to figure it out, but here's the headline on how it works. Let's say my little schmendrik-my bail bondsman, Leon Fine-wants some money to buy a new house, or a speedboat, or some other damn thing. He calls around to drug dealers he knows-guys he's written paper on, and he asks, 'Hey, Pedro, how much money have you got stored up?' Let's say, for easy math, Pedro has ten million in an L. A. collection house, and it's Cali cartel money, and he needs to get it laundered for his patron in Colombia. So he says to Leon: T got ten cartwheels, but I gotta do the deal with a black marketeer in Colombia, 'cause my jefe wants the cash to end up in Colombia. Then Pedro, the drug dealer, puts Leon in touch with some Colombian black marketeers. Actually there are six families in Medellin who specialize in parallel-market goods. After Leon sets up his deal with Pedro and the black marketeers he calls the Blackstone Corporation-'
'Who?'
'Blackstone. It's a big Swiss free-market trading corporation. There are a bunch of foreign trade companies who do this shit. Blackstone is one of'em. They're the guys who run the duty-free shops in airports-they also run duty-free zones all over the place. And, Shane, you won't believe this, but these foreign duty-free corporations are running the biggest drug laundries in the world, and have been for two decades.'
'How could that be? I been a cop for twenty years and I never even heard a'them.'
'Me neither,' Jody said. 'Anyway, my bondsman, Leon, says to his contact at Blackstone: 'I got ten million in drug cash from Pedro in L. A. to buy cigarettes, and I have a deal set with Colombian black marketeers, so I need the smokes delivered to Aruba.' Aruba is inside the Caribbean duty-free zone and it's legal for All-American Tobacco to ship as much product there as they want.' He paused. 'Got it so far?'
Shane nodded.
'Okay, good… The Aruba duty-free zone stretches from Aruba across to South America, specifically to Caracas, Venezuela, which is, lo and behold… Right on the Colombian border. Leon's black marketeer has his smuggling business in a little border town out in the desert, called Maicao.' Shane remembered that Maicao was one of the towns circled on the map he found in the noise abatement house on East Lannark Drive. Now everything's set up and ready to go.' Jody continued, 'Blackstone calls All-American Tobacco and says: 'Ship ten million dollars' worth of Virginia Fives to Aruba for the parallel market.''
'Virginia Fives?'
'Yeah… Top-quality Virginia tobacco. See, a lot of the product sold in South America is shit: Turkish leaves or
