From the top of the overpass that spanned the Otay Mesa Freeway, I spied the sign for the burger joint the four FBI agents had gone to—the oddly punctuated Carl’s Jr.—as well as a closer, higher sign for McDonald’s. To my left, the freeway’s six lanes curved northwest toward San Diego; to my right, they ran due south for a quarter mile to the border checkpoint. As the trucks rumbled beneath me, I noticed that the southbound trucks—heading for the border—rattled and clattered, their cargo trailers empty. The northbound trucks—fresh from Mexico—thudded and groaned beneath heavy loads.
I turned down the street toward the burger joint. I glanced inside, looking for the FBI agents, but I saw no sign of them—not surprising, given that they could have ordered and eaten and driven away a half hour or an hour before. I was reaching for the door, my stomach rumbling in earnest now, when something caught my eye and I spun in my tracks. Directly across the street was an IHOP—International House of Pancakes—and IHOP was hardwired to some of my fondest memories: Throughout my son’s childhood and adolescence, he and I hit the IHOP almost every Saturday morning. Happily I headed across the deserted street and into the IHOP. By now it was nearly nine, the posted closing time, and the hostess station was vacant. Wandering into the dining room, I found a server, a sturdy young Latina. “Am I too late to eat?”
“You made it just in time,” she said. “Have a seat”—she motioned me toward a high-backed booth along one wall, beside a hallway that led to the restrooms—“and I’ll bring you a menu.”
“Don’t need one,” I told her. “I know what I want.” She nodded, pulling an order pad and a pen from her back pocket. “Waffle combo,” I said. “The waffles with fruit and whipped cream—extra fruit and extra cream, please. Two eggs over medium. Bacon. Orange juice.” I thought for a moment. “And an extra side of bacon, please.” Kathleen wouldn’t approve—in fact, Kathleen would be appalled—but Kathleen was fifteen hundred miles away. I knew some people who indulged in alcohol or even adultery while on road trips. Me, I indulged in bacon.
I slumped down in the booth, suddenly dog-tired; I must have nodded off, because in what seemed mere moments, I heard a thunk and opened my eyes to behold a huge helping of food. “Looks great,” I said. “Smells great, too.”
“Let me know if you need anything else.” If we’d been in Tennessee, she’d have punctuated the sentence with a darlin’ or a hon, but we weren’t, so she didn’t. She simply smiled and walked away.
The first bite of food—if the word “bite” can be applied to the microcosmic feast I hoisted mouthward, the fork flexing from its load—filled my mouth with layer upon layer of flavor and texture: the warm, still-crisp waffle; the sweet, juicy berries; the smooth, rich cream; the satisfying substance of the egg. My mouth was practically overflowing, but I couldn’t resist cramming in half a piece of bacon for the sake of the smoky, salty crunch.
I was only beginning to comprehend the gap between how much I had bitten off and how little I could chew when I heard a familiar voice behind me: Special Agent Miles Prescott’s voice. My inclination was to stand up and say hello, but my mouth was far too full to speak, so I sat, slumped and unseen in the high-backed booth.
Prescott’s voice was low, but I quickly realized it had a steely edge to it; in fact, as I chewed and listened, I realized that he sounded furious, and I wondered if he was chewing out one of the other agents. Surely not Kimball or Boatman—they were too lowly to inspire such ire—but McCready might have angered him by allowing us to work too slowly. “You know the goddamn rules,” he practically spat. “We had the intel first, so it was our operation.”
“It was a penny-ante, pissant little operation,” said another, unfamiliar voice—a voice so raspy and wheezy that the speaker was close to coughing out the words. “If you had let this thing play out just a little longer, we’d have taken it a lot higher up the food chain. Maybe—maybe—even gotten Goose Man. We were this close.”
“In your dreams.”
“This close,” the second man wheezed again. “But no, the Bureau had to come charging in like the Seventh Fucking Cavalry—flags waving, bugles blowing—and scare everybody back into their hidey-holes. Do you realize you sabotaged a three-year investigation?”
“Do I look like I give a damn?” snapped Prescott. “It was our operation. Our call. Janus got a good agent killed two weeks ago—”
“You don’t know that,” interrupted the other man. “Your agent was in way over his head, playing three guys off against each other. I don’t think Janus fingered him. I think your guy just fucked up.”
“Janus got one of our agents killed,” insisted Prescott. “And when one of ours gets killed, we don’t just stand by and—how’d you put it? ‘Let things play out’? We come down like the wrath of God. Maybe that’s the reason we don’t lose as many agents as you guys do.”