Chapter SIXTY-THREE
The puppeteer walked the floor, pacing back and forth, rigid with anger. That fool Perez had gotten himself arrested. Had he figured out that his life was about over? He’d thought himself so clever, stashing a getaway pickup truck in North Miami. A truck. What the hell was he thinking? Did Perez know that the family was on to him? Knew about his plans for a new life? If he was planning to run, he would have to take the family’s money with him. That couldn’t happen. He was a dead man as soon as the family figured out where all the money was hidden. There were no second chances in this business. Even a hint of disloyalty was rewarded with a death sentence, carried out without trial, without mercy.
Had Perez arranged his arrest so that he would be safe from the family? He should have known better. He’d be dead before the night was over.
The first break came when the idiot hired a Mexican to keep the truck in running condition. He didn’t know that the man he’d hired was one of theirs. The puppeteer had known about the truck within a day of the time Perez hired the driver.
The family hadn’t yet figured out all the ways Perez could flee, or where all his secret bank accounts were, but they did know his escape route, or at least the first leg of it. They knew about the pickup and they’d know when Perez decided to use it. The bomb had been rigged months before. If he started it without activating the switch that disarmed the bomb, he’d be blown to hell. Only the Mexican driver knew where the switch was located. When he needed to drive the truck, he simply flipped the switch to the off position and the bomb was rendered inert.
If Perez had arranged his own arrest, it’d been done without much preparation. The family had a mole in the U.S. Attorney’s office, and if any deals had been struck, or even if Perez had contacted the U.S. Attorney, the family would have been told. They had the same coverage at the state prosecutor’s office, even though the state wouldn’t be involved in the Perez case. Their cartel, small as it was, was of interest only to the feds.
Fuentes, the crazy don, had reacted to the news of Perez’s arrest with a lot more heat than the puppeteer had expected. The don had exploded in anger. He’d trusted Perez with the family’s money, with his own money, with secrets that no one else knew. Perez had been his childhood friend and now he’d turned on him. Word had already come back to them that some lawyer was trying to reach the U.S. Attorney in Miami to make a deal, to put Perez in isolation until they could work out an agreement for Perez to testify against the don. Perez had to be killed.
The don, against the advice of the puppeteer, had ordered the murder of the U.S. Attorney and sent word to the Miami-Dade jail, to inmates on their payroll, that whoever killed Perez that night would receive one million dollars upon his release from prison. The puppeteer was afraid that the murder of the U.S. Attorney would bring down the family. You didn’t just go around killing government officials. The system reacted violently. If one of their own was vulnerable, all of them were. It was therefore in their interest to find and kill those who would kill them. Because of this, there had long been a truce of sorts, a tacit agreement never spoken of, between the cartels and law enforcement. Don’t kill us and we won’t kill you. It had worked for years, but the crazy don was now about to breach the agreement. It could bring ruin to the family.
Fuentes had decided it was necessary to kill the U.S. Attorney because he knew that none of the other people in that office would take a hot potato like Perez and give him any kind of deal. If it backfired, it was their careers. Not so for the U.S. Attorney. He was a political appointee and if he were fired, he’d go back to a very lucrative private practice. If the headman was dead, there would be weeks before any deal could be put together for Perez to testify. Cut off the snake’s head and the body would be ineffective. If the don’s men missed Perez in jail on the night he was arrested, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. There’d be weeks to get him before another prosecutor could be brought in to make decisions. Or so he thought.
The puppeteer hadn’t agreed with the don, argued against the murder as a violation of the rules of the war against drugs. It didn’t matter. The don had crossed a line that moved him from just plain crazy to absolutely insane. The puppeteer had always known it, lived with the threat inherent in the don’s insanity. There had been a lot of killings that did nothing for the family’s organization except instill fear in the subordinates. But the don’s bloodlust had never before so threatened the cartel and the family.
By now the top federal prosecutor in South Florida was floating face down in the Miami River with a gunshot wound in the back of his head. The die was cast, the puppeteer thought, and Katie bar the door. The shit storm was about to hit them full force.