“What do you want?” I asked again.
“What I want is to help you avoid fucking up in a major way.”
“And what way is that?”
Marco proceeded as though he had not heard the question.
“Do you know the word sicario, Counselor?”
He said it with full Latin inflection. I glanced away from him and out the window, then I looked back.
“I’ve heard it said, I think.”
“There is no real English translation for the word, but it’s what they call the cartel assassins down in Mexico. Sicarios.”
“Thanks for the education.”
“Down there the laws are different than we’ve got up here. Do you know that they have no legal code or provision that allows a teenager to be charged as an adult? No matter what they do, no charges as an adult and no incarceration beyond the age of eighteen for the crimes they commit as children.”
“That’s good to know for the next time I’m down there, Marco, but I practice law right here in California.”
“Consequently, the cartels recruit and train teenagers as their sicarios. If they get caught and convicted, they do a year, maybe two, and then they’re out at eighteen and ready to go back to work. You see?”
“I see that it’s a real tragedy. No way those boys come out rehabilitated, that’s for sure.”
Marco showed no reaction to my sarcasm.
“At sixteen years of age Hector Arrande Moya admitted in a courtroom in Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa that he had tortured and murdered seven people by the time he was fifteen. Two of them were women. Three of them he hung in a basement and four he set on fire while they were still alive. He raped both the women and he cut all of the bodies up afterward and fed the remains to the coyotes in the hills.”
“And what’s that have to do with me?”
“He did all of this on orders from the cartel. You see, he was raised in the cartel. And when he got out of the penta at eighteen he went right back to the cartel. By then, of course, he had a nickname. They called him El Fuego—because he burned people.”
I checked my watch in a show of impatience.
“That’s a good story, but why tell it to me, Marco? What about you? What about the—”
“This is the man you conspire with Fulgoni to set free. El Fuego.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only person I am trying to set free is Andre La Cosse. He is sitting in a cell right now, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. But I’ll tell you this much about Hector Moya. You want to put the motherfucker away for life, then make the case fair and square in the first place. Don’t—”
I cut myself off and raised my hands, palms out. Enough.
“Just get out of my car now,” I said quietly. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll talk to you in court.”
“There’s a war, Haller, and you have to choose which side you’re on. There are sacrifices that—”
“Oh, now you’re going to talk to me about choices? What about Gloria Dayton, was she a choice? Was she a sacrifice? Fuck you, Marco. There are rules, rules of law. Now get out of my car.”
For five seconds we just stared at each other. But finally Marco blinked. He cracked his door and slowly backed out of the car. He then leaned down and looked back in at me.
“Jennifer Aronson.”
I spread my hands as if waiting for whatever it was he still had to say.
“Who?”
He smiled.
“Just tell her if she wants to know about me, she can come right to me. Anytime. No need to sneak around the courthouse, pulling files, whispering questions. I’m right here. All the time.”
He closed the door and walked off. I watched him as he went down the sidewalk and turned the corner. He didn’t go into Fulgoni’s office, even though he had claimed that was the reason he was in the vicinity and had spotted me.
Soon Earl got back in behind the wheel.
“You okay, boss?”
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
He started the car. My frustrations and feelings of vulnerability got the best of me and I snapped at Earl.
“How the hell did that guy get in the car?”
“He came up and knocked on the window. He showed me the badge and told me to unlock the back. I thought he was gonna put a slug in the back a my head.”
“Great, and you just let me jump in the back with him.”
“There was nothin’ I could do, boss. He told me not to move. What did he say?”
“A bunch of self-deluding bullshit. Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. Head toward the loft. For now.”
I immediately got on the phone and called Jennifer. I didn’t want to scare her but it was clear that Marco knew of her efforts to background him and check other cases he had been involved in.
The call went straight to message. As I listened to her recorded voice, I debated whether to leave a full message or just tell her to call me. I decided it would be best and perhaps safest to leave her the message so she got the information as soon as she turned on her phone.
“Jennifer, it’s me. I just had a little visit from Agent Marco, and he is aware of your efforts to document his history. He must have friends in the clerk’s office or wherever you’re pulling records. So I’m thinking you might want to keep what you got on that but switch back to Moya. I’m going up to see him tomorrow in Victorville and I’d like to know all there is to know by then anyway. Let me know that you got this. Bye.”
Cisco was next and this time my call went through. I told him of my encounter with Marco and asked why there had been no heads-up from the Indians who were supposedly watching me for a tail. I wasn’t too pleasant about it.
“No warning, Cisco. The guy was waiting for me in my fucking car.”
“I don’t know what happened but I’ll find out.”
He sounded as annoyed as I was.
“Yeah, do that and call me back.”
I disconnected the call. Earl and I rode in silence for a few minutes after that, with me replaying the Marco conversation in my head. I was trying to figure out the motives for the visit from the DEA agent. First and foremost, I decided, was the threat. He wanted to put a chill on my team’s efforts to research his activities. He also, it would seem, wanted to steer me away from the Moya case. He probably felt that Moya’s conviction and life sentence were relatively safe with the inexperienced Sly Fulgoni Jr. at the helm of the habeas petition. And he was probably right. But hitting me with the description of Moya as the worst thing this side of the devil was just a front. Marco’s motives weren’t altruistic. I didn’t buy that for a moment. All in all, I concluded that Marco was trying to spook me because I had spooked him. And that meant we were pointed in the right direction.
“Hey, boss?”
I looked at Earl in the rearview.
“I heard you telling Jennifer in that message that you’re goin’ up to Victorville tomorrow. That true? We’re goin’ up?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, we’re going. First thing in the morning.”
And in saying so out loud I also sent a silent fuck-you to Marco.
My phone buzzed and it was Cisco, already back with an explanation.
“Sorry, Mick, they fucked up. They saw the guy arrive and get in the car with Earl. They said he showed a badge but they didn’t know who he was. They thought it was a friendly.”
“A friendly? The guy has to badge Earl to get in the car and they think he’s a fucking friendly? They should’ve called you on the spot so you could call me and stop me from coming out with my goddamn zipper down.”
“Already told them all of that. You want me to pull them off now?”
“What? Why?”
“Well, it seems pretty clear we know who jacked your car, right?”
I thought about Marco’s claim that he had just happened to see me while he was checking out Fulgoni because of the subpoena. I didn’t buy that for a moment. I agreed with Cisco; Marco had jacked my car.
“Might as well save the dough,” I told Cisco. “Pull ’em off. They weren’t much in the early-warning department anyway.”
“You want us to pull the GPS off the car, too?”
I thought about that for a moment and my plans for the next day. I decided I wanted to taunt Marco, show him I was unbowed by his little visit and unspoken threat.
“No, leave it. For now.”
“Okay, Mick. And for what it’s worth, the guys are really sorry.”
“Yeah, whatever. I gotta go.”
I disconnected. I had noticed out the windshield that Earl was cutting through Beverly Hills on Little Santa Monica Boulevard on the way to my house. I was starved and knew we were coming up on Papa Jake’s, a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter that made the best steak sandwich west of Philadelphia. I had not been there since the nearby Beverly Hills Superior Court was shuttered in the state budget crisis, and I had lost business that would bring me to the area. But in the meantime I had developed a Legal Siegel–type craving for a Jake steak with grilled onions and pizzaiola sauce.
“Earl,” I said. “We’re going to make a stop for lunch up here. And if that DEA agent is still following, he’s about to learn the best-kept secret in Beverly Hills.”