TWELVE
Liquida picked up one of the gold coins, what collectors called a cob, an irregular hand- stamped Spanish escudo. He flipped it over and noticed the numbers and letters stamped on the other side. From a small book he had taken from Pike’s house the night of the murder, he knew that the coin had been poured and stamped in Lima, Peru, probably three hundred years ago.
He dropped it into the bubbling crucible knowing that he had just dissolved several thousand dollars of its value. The risk of fencing the coins was too great. The authorities would be looking for them in every pawnshop in the country. For this reason he had decided that he could save only one of them, a single coin worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, so rare and valuable that he could not bring himself to destroy it. He set it aside on the table as he continued to work.
Liquida was huddled all alone inside a dingy auto-body shop a few miles north of the Tijuana border station at San Ysidro. It was a front for a “chop shop” owned by an acquaintance, a place where they cut up and sold parts of stolen cars, or changed out VIN numbers if it was a high-end boost destined for some rich mogul in Asia.
For a few dollars, the owner gave Liquida the keys and let him use the chop shop at night when the place was closed.
Liquida stood next to the steel table of a forge, holding the torch in one hand as he fired the bottom of the small crucible with oxygen. He used only an occasional spurt of acetylene to speed things up. He wanted to avoid cutting up the crucible in the process.
Every couple of minutes he dropped a few more coins into the brew. Six shiny small ingots lay steaming in their little molds, cooling on a table a few feet away.
He looked at them admiringly, as if they were freshly baked pies on a windowsill. At the same time he was beginning to understand the saying that being rich doesn’t mean you’re happy.
He goosed the acetylene one more time and tried to digest the latest veiled e-mail from his masters down south. He’d decoded it on the small computer earlier that day. They were beginning to drive him crazy. The latest was another frantic message, this time with another job, more pressing than the last. Of course there would be more money. They gave him a name and an address and again instructions on things to look for after the wet work was done. They had found something on Pike’s laptop, the one Liquida had grabbed that night and sent south in a box filled with plastic packing peanuts, along with the photo from the desk and the woman’s camera.
Liquida informed them that he had not yet had time to cut the head off the serpent. He wished they would make up their minds. They told him the serpent could wait and sent him scurrying to Travelocity for an airplane ticket.
As if this wasn’t enough, Liquida was discovering that killing the woman now locked away inside the female section of the county jail was like dealing with affirmative action, ladies only. If you were a man trying to do the deed, you had to go to the back of the line and wait.
If she were in the men’s side of the jail, she would have been dead four times by now. A single phone call to a number in Tijuana by nine in the morning and she would have been suicided all alone in her cell before noon.
But the women’s jail was something else. This would require him to make his own arrangements directly with some angel of suicides at the jail, and Liquida drew the line at this. It was one thing to kill people for a living; it was another to talk directly with some idiot inside a jail about having it done, especially a woman.
If she was facing serious time, she might give Liquida up just to get a little slack on her term. And if she tried to choke the snake and screwed it up, she would roll over on him in a Mexican minute. Liquida would go down for something that he didn’t even dirty his own hands on. This was against his religion.
No, it would have to be done outside the jail, between there and the courthouse.
Fortunately, there was only one jail that took women in San Diego County and it was located almost twenty miles from the courthouse. She could die of old age just getting there on the sheriff’s bus, unless the bus was hit by a train or a spaceship on the way.
Liquida was beginning to wish that he hadn’t stopped to wash the knife that night. If he had followed her directly up the stairs right after seeing her, the woman would be feasting with her ancestors by now. And instead of sweating in some security line at TSA and doing the morning cattle call on the Jetway, he would be down in Cancun with a calculator and a scale trying to time the next spike in the price of gold.
Liquida remembered something. He walked a couple of steps to his jacket, hanging from a nail on the wall. Liquida reached into the inside pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
Using just the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, he slid the pieces of the folded paper against each other until it opened up. He looked at it, slowly weighing all the options, whether at some point in the future he might have a use for it, an opportunity to turn it to his own advantage. But he could think of none.
He held the paper up by the bottom corner and set the torch to the top, then held it as it burned down past the letterhead with the name on it. The flame had raced almost to his fingertips before he released it. The final glowing ember consumed the last trace of Katia’s note to Emerson Pike as it lifted tiny specks of hot ash into the air. Liquida watched as the last of these cooled and fell like dust to the cold concrete floor.
THIRTEEN
You say that Pike’s first meeting with you was no accident. You believe he was looking for you. Why?” This morning I am out at Las Colinas in Santee, the women’s detention facility in the county, meeting once more with Katia.
“It was a feeling,” she says. She sits at a table in the small conference room, running her hands through her hair, which now looks knotted and stringy. The jail comb and the harsh shampoo are taking their toll. She tells me some of the other women are giving her trouble. The Latinas inside are mostly Mexican. Many of them know each other from street gangs. One of them in particular, a big Mexican woman with a scar on her face, is friends with one of Katia’s cell mates. The two of them are giving Katia trouble. Katia’s youth and good looks, the fact that she is from a different culture and has tried to distance herself, have made her the object of the usual jailhouse frictions and jealousies.
I ask if any of them have threatened her.
She says, “Only a little.”
I try to explain to her how it works, the jail pecking order.
“I don’t know what to do. I am afraid,” she says.
“I’ll see what I can do. Talk to someone in the sheriff’s jail unit.” This will have to be done carefully, with an eye toward a housing change. Otherwise, the wrong kind of intervention will only make it worse. “But for right now, let’s talk about how you and Emerson Pike met, down in Costa Rica?”
“I was going to school. I am a student at the university in San Jose. I did some modeling on the side to make extra money, mostly clothing and makeup. My photographs, a set of them with my name, were on the modeling agency’s website, in their gallery of models. Emerson telephoned the agency. He said he wanted to hire me to do a photo shoot. He said he wanted to do some local advertising for his coin company. That’s what he said.”
“Did you do it?”
“Of course. He was willing to pay a lot of money, so I was happy to do it. The ads with my pictures were to appear in newspapers and magazines. But I remember thinking it was a little strange.”
“Why was that?”
