‘No fucking way.’
‘Yeah, well, Serrano, I can say yes and you can say no way until you have to take a crap. But wouldn’t it make sense just to ask him? ’Cause if you don’t and you take me out, Lamont and his crew lose their one connection to CBI and points beyond. DEA, Customs and Border, Homeland. And I wonder which dry well you and your mother and sister will be sleeping out eternity in.’
‘Fuck. Wait. I hear something. A month ago. Some Oakland crew was getting solids from Sacramento.’
‘That’s me.’ Foster seemed proud.
Dance looked out of the window. Stemple, still gazing away into the waving grass. She growled to Foster, ‘You son of a bitch.’
He ignored her. ‘So, call him.’
The Latino looked him over, not getting too close. Foster was much larger. ‘I no got his number. You think him and me, we asshole buddies?’
Foster sighed. ‘Look, I’m taking my phone out of my pocket. That’s all. My phone.’ He did. ‘Ah, Kathryn, careful there.’
Her hand had dropped toward a table on which a heavy metal lamp sat.
‘Serrano? Could you …’
The young man noted that Dance had been going for the lamp. He stepped forward and roughly pushed her against the wall, away from any potential weapons.
Foster made a call.
‘Lamont, it’s Steve.’ He hit the speaker.
‘Foster?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What you calling for?’ The voice was wary.
‘Got a situation here. Sorry, man. There’s a hothead, from one of the Salinas crews, with a piece on me. He’s out of the …’ Foster lifted an eyebrow.
‘Barrio Majados.’
‘You hear that?’
Howard’s voice: ‘Yo, I know ’em, I work with ’em. What’s this about? Who is he?’
‘Serrano.’
‘Joaquin? I know Serrano. He disappeared. There was heat on him.’
‘He’s surfaced. He doesn’t know who I am. Just tell him we work together. Or he’s going to park a slug in my head.’
‘Fuck you doing, Serrano? Leave my boy Foster alone. You got that?’
‘He with you?’
‘The fuck I say?’
The gun didn’t lower. ‘Okay, only … any chance he undercover?’
‘Well, he is, then he’s the only undercover took out a Oakland cop.’
‘No shit.’
Howard said, ‘Asshole show up at my place unexpected. Foster, pop pop, took him down.’
‘Steve, no!’ Dance whispered, dismay in her voice.
Howard called, ‘The fuck’s that?’
‘Another cop, works with Foster.’
‘That’s just fucking great.’ The banger in Oakland sighed. ‘You two take care of her. I got shit to do here.’
The call ended.
‘Serrano,’ Dance began, ‘what I was saying before. You need to be smart. You—’
The Latino snapped, ‘Shut up, Kathryn.’
With a cold smile, she said to Foster, ‘The story you told me before. You don’t have a son, do you? That was a lie.’
He turned to her, offering a nonchalant shrug. ‘I didn’t know what was going down. Needed you on my side.’
Dance sneered, ‘You can’t be running a network on your own. You’re not that smart.’
Foster was indignant. ‘Fuck you. I don’t need anybody else.’
‘How many people’ve died because of what you’ve done?’
‘Oh, come on,’ the man said gruffly. Then: ‘Serrano, let’s get this done. Do her, I’ll get the asshole outside in here. We take him out. I’ll tell the response team I got out the back and hid in the hills. I’ll say it was somebody else here, not you. One of the crews from Tijuana.’
‘Okay with me,’ was the matter-of-fact response.
Then Foster was squinting. ‘Wait.’
‘What?’
‘You … you said, “Kathryn”. You called her “Kathryn”.’
A shrug. ‘I don’t know. So?’
‘I never used her first name here. And I was at the interview last week between you and her. She never said it either.’
I’m Agent Dance …
A grimace. The Latino accent was gone as the young man said, ‘Yep, I screwed up on that. Sorry.’ He was speaking to Kathryn Dance.
‘No worries, José,’ she said, smiling. ‘We got everything we needed. You did great.’
Foster stared from one to the other. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
‘Serrano’ who was actually a Bakersfield detective named José Felipe-Santoval, aimed his weapon center-mass on Foster’s chest, while Dance, relieved of her weapon but not her cuffs, ratcheted the bracelets on.
Adding to Foster’s shock, the agent who’d been pretending to be the deceased Pedro Escalanza hopped to and dusted off his jeans, drawing his own weapon. He’d been lying face down, head hidden from the trio in the hotel room.
‘Hey, TJ.’
‘Boss. Good takedown. How’s the blood?’ He glanced at his legs, spattered red. ‘I tried a new formula. Hershey’s syrup and food coloring.’
‘Big improvement,’ she said, nodding at the tiles.
Foster gasped, ‘A sting. The whole thing.’
Dance pulled out her cell phone. Hit speed-dial five as she glanced down and noticed her Aldo pumps had a scuff. Have to fix that. They were her favorite shoes for field work.
She heard, from the phone, Charles Overby’s voice: ‘Kathryn? And the verdict is?’
‘Foster’s our boy. It’s all on tape. He’s the only one.’
‘Ah.’
‘We’ll be back in a half-hour. You want to be there, at the interrogation?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
CHAPTER 90
Disgust overflowed in Foster’s face as he looked from Al Stemple to Dance to Overby. They were in the same CBI interrogation rooms where Dance had held the phony interview of the phony Serrano last week.
TJ was elsewhere; the faux blood was good, yes, but it stained far more than he’d thought it would. He was presently scrubbing hands and ankles in one of the nearby men’s rooms.
Foster snapped, ‘Jesus, you wanted Kathryn unarmed and demoted to Civ Div but still talking her way onto the interviews with the suspect to track down Serrano. So I wouldn’t feel threatened by her.’