As the message began to play, all I heard was random background noise—doors opening and closing; metal chairs scraping on a concrete floor; a staticky, scratchy sound that I finally recognized as the rustle of fabric against a microphone. Decker must have pocket-dialed me, I realized, accidentally hitting “redial” as he’d slid his phone into his shirt. Through the rustle and static, I suddenly heard Decker speaking, and then—to my horror—I heard Satterfield answering. His voice came across the miles and the weeks in a soft, sinister hiss, taunting Decker about his brother’s death. Weeks after their bloody fight, I found myself eavesdropping on their confrontation, as mesmerized and terrified as if I were actually in the room with them.
I expected to hear Decker respond with threats and violence, but he didn’t. Satterfield kept it up—kept goading Decker with cruel details about the agonies his brother had suffered—but Decker wasn’t taking the bait. Suddenly I felt a jolt like an electric shock, as Satterfield said my name. “I’ve got unfinished business with Brockton. I’ll be back to deal with him. All of them. And I’ll take up right where I left off.”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Decker. “I should’ve shot you last time, but I let Brockton talk me out of it. I won’t make that mistake next time.”
“Here’s the thing, asshole,” said Satterfield. “You won’t be around next time. You’re about to bleed out on this floor.” All at once the message erupted into noisy chaos: crashing furniture, thudding bodies, and a strangled shriek of pain. Then, in midshriek, the phone went silent. Two seconds later, a computerized voice prompted me: “To replay this message, press one. To delete it, press three. To save it, press two.” My fingers shaking, I carefully pressed two. Then I dialed Steve Morgan, the former student now working for the TBI. Not surprisingly, I got his voice mail. “Steve, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’m about to forward you a message—a recording of what went down between Captain Decker and Nick Satterfield. I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with Agent Fielding. And I’d appreciate it if Fielding would get off my ass. If he really wants to do the right thing, he might also drop by Vanderbilt Hospital and apologize to Decker. Who knows, Decker might actually hear it. Might fight a little harder to pull through.”
I ended the call, then returned to my voice mail and forwarded the recording to Steve. That done, and my decks clear, I got back to the business at hand. The business that had brought me back to California, back to Otay Mountain, and back to this seedy motel and this rough-edged border crossing.
Somewhere nearby, I heard a loud bang: gunshot, or backfiring engine? Out here, I was having trouble telling the difference.
THE OTAY MESA BRANCH OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY was just ten minutes west but a world away from the seamy-underbelly freight district where I was staying. Instead of the dilapidated warehouses and rusting shipping containers of my neighborhood, the library nestled amid neat houses, tree-lined streets, baseball fields, and basketball courts. The library’s reference desk occupied a back corner of the main reading room, flanked by low shelves of encyclopedias on one side and bound volumes of old Life magazines, decades’ worth, on the other. “Excuse me,” I said to a reference librarian whose steel-framed spectacles matched the silvery curls of her hair. “Do you keep files of news clippings about local stories?”
“Vertical files? Oh, yes,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Some of them are a bit out of date, though. The Internet, you know—it’s making newspaper clippings obsolete.” She pointed to a set of chest-high filing cabinets, which appeared to be approximately the same age as my own venerable self. “The files are there. Can I help you find something specific?”
“I’m interested in several topics,” I said. “A San Diego man named Richard Janus, who founded a charity called Airlift Relief International. He’s been in the news lately.”
“Indeed,” she said, her radiant smile giving way to a pursed, prunish expression. “Most unfortunate.” I didn’t know if she was referring to the plane crash or the drug-running allegations. Perhaps both.
“I’m also interested in a man who runs a Mexican drug cartel,” I went on. “His name is Guzmán.” I spelled it for her. “El Chapo Guzmán. I seem to remember hearing about some sort of connection between his drug trafficking and Otay Mesa.”
Her mouth had gone from slightly pursed to tightly puckered, and not in a kissing kind of way. From the look of prim disapproval, I might have been asking her to help me find pornography. “The files are arranged alphabetically,” she snipped. “You can try looking up the last names of the two . . . people. I believe there might also be a file called DRUGS.” I got the distinct impression that not only did she disapprove of drugs themselves, she also disapproved of news coverage that mentioned them—and of anyone who might have the brass to read such coverage.