“Right. We might be able to use that.” He glanced at his phone and checked the time. “It's almost lunchtime,” he said. “How about we pick up some tacos and head back?”
“Sounds good to me,” Sarah said. “I know we had breakfast, but I'm still kind of hungry. Look, there's a taco stand right up the street. One of the benefits of being in a Mexican neighborhood, I guess.”
Moose was back by the time they arrived at the warehouse, but Noah had anticipated it. They had brought back plenty of tacos, nachos and burritos for everyone, and Neil told Noah what he had learned as they ate.
“This Holy Death thing, it's really weird,” the skinny kid said. “From what I've been able to learn, a lot of people involved in the drug trade are into it. They pray to this skeletal figure in a long dress, kinda looks like a wedding dress, and they ask her to keep them safe from the police. The weird thing is, they'd rather get killed than arrested. I guess they believe that if they get killed while they’re working at the drug trade, it gets them some kind of special spot in Heaven.”
“That sounds about right,” Noah said. “I've known guys in the Army who were into it, and that were convinced that if they died on patrol they'd go straight to paradise.”
Neil nodded his head. “Yeah, exactly. Well, all of these people seem to be into it, according to the DEA. If their intel is correct, each of those houses has several small shrines in it.”
Noah pursed his lips in thought. “Hmmm,” he said. “That might not be much help, after all. If they've already got shrines...”
“Don't jump so fast,” Neil said. “I stumbled across one thing that you might find pretty interesting. About three months ago, one of Armando Rodriguez's brothers was killed. Guess what happened right after that.”
Noah shook his head. “No guess, just tell me.”
“The whole freaking bunch of them, I mean all of them, every aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, sister, the whole bunch, they all showed up at Alejandra's place. They gathered there to pray to Saint Holy Death for the dead guy to get a special place in Heaven, since he was killed in a drug robbery that went bad.”
Noah sat and looked at him for a long moment, then began chewing his lip again. “So, if something happens that they consider an emotional blow to the entire group, they all get together in one place?”
“If it's something they need to pray to Little Miss Skeleton about, then that's a pretty safe bet. Now, the DEA says they have a bunch of these little altars, right? Well, from what I read online, they like to worship at the biggest shrine they can find. I bet you can figure out what's going through my mind, can't you?”
Noah cocked his head to the side, and actually grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “You're thinking the same thing I am. We need to make a fair-sized shrine to this thing and give it as a gift to one of our targets, and then give them a reason to hold a prayer meeting.”
Neil was smiling and nodding. “Exactly,” he said. “I'll get started on a design for the shrine right away, okay, Boss?”
“That'll be perfect. All I've got to do now is come up with a good reason for delivering it to them.”
FOUR
It was Sarah who discovered a solution to Noah's dilemma that afternoon, as they worked at the warehouse. Intrigued by the entire concept of the Holy Death cult, she had begun googling it out of curiosity, and that led her to stumble across the Wikipedia page that was dedicated to it. On that page, she learned that one of the most famous shrines to Santa Muerte had been a gift, one that a man gave to his mother as a way of thanking the folk saint for the fact that he had been rapidly released from jail after an arrest.
She pointed it out to Noah. “I was thinking about this, and it hit me that it might be the answer. What if you said it was sent by one of their people who had gotten arrested, like part of a prayer to keep them out of prison? They'd probably accept it without a problem, then, right?”
“That's an excellent idea,” Noah said. He turned to Neil. “Can you get a list of their dealers that have been locked up? See if you can find one who's looking at a long sentence.”