“Ricci,” Lathrop said in a calm voice. “Not so fast.”
He kept walking.
“You owe me, remember?” Lathrop said from behind him. Again calmly, softly. “Big time.”
Ricci took another couple of steps forward, slowed, and finally halted. He stood there for almost a full minute, his back to Lathrop in the deserted parking lot. Then he turned around to look at him.
“Damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”
Lathrop smiled his enigmatic smile.
“I’ll buy the coffee,” he said, his long coat ruffling around him as he led the way off into the deeper shadows.
FOUR
The waterfront at Alviso was not much more than a drainage slough for the Guadalupe River, but then the Guadalupe itself amounted to little more than a glorified creek as it snailed through downtown SanJo, and then out of the city to deposit its sewage overflow between Alviso’s dirt levees and reeded banks before wearily petering off into San Francisco Bay.
From where Lathrop had parked at the end of Gold Street, Ricci could see nothing in the fog and distance besides some aircraft warning lights on the power transmission towers across the slough. Pale beacons under the best conditions, they gave the illusion of flickering on and off now as the high, slow mist dragging past them over the marshes began to gradually mix with light rain.
Behind the wheel of his Dodge coupe, Lathrop reached into the 7-Eleven bag he’d stuffed into a molded plastic storage compartment on his right side, produced a Styrofoam coffee cup, and handed it across the seat to Ricci. Then he got out a second cup for himself, peeled open the sip hole on the plastic lid, and raised it to his lips.
The two men sat quietly, as they had throughout the entire ride on the freeway to the extreme northern edge of San Jose, their silence uninterrupted even when Lathrop had pulled up to the gas station convenience store for their coffees.
“So here we are,” Lathrop said. “Like a couple of old friends.”
Ricci drank from his cup.
“No,” he said.
Lathrop shrugged.
“Here we are, anyway,” he said.
They sat looking out across the ugly mud flats. Lathrop had driven from the club with his wipers set on intermittent, and now that they’d been turned off, the windshield was smeary with an accumulation of moisture.
“Too bad about what happened to you,” Lathrop said. “Enforced leave… I might have figured.”
Ricci’s remote stare didn’t move from the windshield. “How do you know they’re calling it that?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged again.
“They can call it anything they want, doesn’t matter,” he said. “Somebody phones the switchboard operator at UpLink to ask for you these past few weeks, she connects him or her to your voice mail. Somebody asks the operator why you aren’t returning messages, her answer’s that you’re on leave of absence. Somebody asks how long you’ll be gone, she just says indefinitely.”
Ricci sat watching the inconstant tower lights through the haze. “Could be that’s my own choice,” he said.
Lathrop shook his head.
“There are newspaper stories about an incident at that chemical factory outside Manhattan, and UpLink security being involved, and how the Feds are crying foul because they didn’t get invited to the party,” he said. “Knowing you called the party, it’s easy to dope out the rest.”
Ricci still hadn’t turned from the windshield.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I heard you the first time in that parking lot,” Lathrop said.
“Then get to it,” Ricci said.
Lathrop nodded.
“In a minute,” he said. “First we need to finish up with New York.”
Ricci didn’t say anything.
“I tipped you about the Dragonfly laser,” Lathrop said. “I know what was supposed to go down at the plant. There wouldn’t be an available grave plot in the city today if it was up to the people who want your head on a pole, and they’d have swallowed that a lot easier than you doing what you did. It’s all about control for them, and they hate losing their hold on it to a guy like you.”
“Good that you’re so sure,” Ricci said.
“Don’t let yourself believe anything else,” Lathrop said. “I’d love to hear them talk about it behind closed doors. Seriously, Ricci. I would love it.”
They were both quiet for a while as the mist and drizzle began intensifying to a steadier rainfall against the windshield. Lathrop leaned back in his seat and drank some coffee.
“Quick story about an acquaintance of mine,” he said. “Special agent, counter drugs, deep cover. Doesn’t matter which agency and I probably couldn’t remember it to tell you. But what I do remember is he wasn’t interested in the rule book. Didn’t follow the rule book. Too many other guys did and it got them killed or burned. Because the players on the other side were smarter and meaner and knew how to turn the rules against them.”
He paused, sipped.
Ricci kept staring out toward the glints of distant light on the electrical towers.
“This guy any good?” he said.
“From what I know he got the job done,” Lathrop said, and shrugged. “If he rubbed his bosses wrong, they left him alone. The main thing for them was he delivered for a long time. And that meant they could stay posed for the television cameras behind piles of seized dope and guns.” Lathrop fell silent a moment. “Doesn’t matter who the bosses are, it’s the same. They don’t have to get their hands dirty. They don’t deal with the snarling dogs. They never get bullet holes in their foreheads, or have their dead bodies dumped in weed fields with their privates stuffed down their throats. From where they sit in their pressed suits and white shirts, everything’s risk free, and that’s exactly how they want it to stay. Gives them a chance to act like winners every once in a while without ever taking the hurt when they lose.”
“Tell me the rest about your friend.”
“Acquaintance,” Lathrop said. “Like the two of us.”
Ricci grunted but didn’t comment.
“I hear a federal judge took exception to him giving a Big Willie drug dealer rough treatment, made some noise about looking into how he’d handled some other investigations,” Lathrop said. “His bosses started to worry about what might turn up, wanted the problem taken care of before stories started leaking to the press, and cut him loose. Erased his name from their employee records, wiped out every mention of him in their case files.”
“Just like that?”
Lathrop snapped his fingers.
“Got it,” he said.
Ricci grunted. “Where’d that leave him?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged.
“Far as who or what?” he said. “He didn’t go away, he was going down. There were some things about his tactics that would have gotten the kind of publicity nobody up the line appreciates. Things he did that wouldn’t jibe with what your ordinary citizen hears is right and good at his Sunday morning church sermons.”
