“I knew a lot of boys like that,” says Billy. “Hell, I was one of them when I was nine.”
“I was a little old by 9/11, but I remember watching Saigon fall on TV when I was a kid. In my little suburban living room in Dayton, Ohio. I wanted to fight back but didn’t know how.”
A beat of silence for boys called to war.
“Did anyone ever refer to him as Roman? Or ‘the Roman’?”
“Well, no. But he drove a new Ducati Monster S4R, so maybe he liked Italian things.”
“A recent high school graduate with a new Ducati,” says Billy. He remembers Strickland’s moneyed upbringing, and his sleek Italian Maserati.
“Officer Crumley, I know you’re a cop, but it’s about time you told me what’s going on. Why are you here? What has Strickland done? Happy to help you, but you do owe me answers.”
“I’ll buy you another beer and tell you what I know,” says Billy.
Billy’s back in the Viewridge Avenue DEA building in San Diego at eight sharp the next morning, watching Arnie’s confederate Dale Greene digitally enhancing one of El Gordo’s switching yard photos of the Roman and Joe.
It’s a Sunday but Greene has opened up the forensic lab to do his magic on the picture. Billy has brought doughnuts.
Greene seems not at all put out to be working today, patiently cropping and enlarging, cropping and enlarging again, adjusting filters, zooming in and out on the Roman.
“This had to be shot on the run,” says Greene. “The angle is funny, like the picture shooter isn’t looking through the viewfinder, just firing away with his phone before he has to duck for cover. His motion accounts for the blurring.”
Billy watches Greene slide the color control.
“It may look like it was shot in black and white,” says Greene. “But that’s the weak light. The shooter probably didn’t want to use the flash. So, we’ll add some color and see what happens.”
“Nice,” says Arnie, working on his second chocolate-on-chocolate with peanuts.
Billy watches as the seeming black-and-white photograph becomes, chameleonlike, colored. The hues are faint, but the Roman looks more like a man and less like a blurred sculpture.
“Now for some clarity,” says Greene.
He slides the clarity control to the right and Billy watches the Roman, drawn into better focus. Billy recognizes his gun, a .40-caliber semiautomatic Glock 35.
“I’m going to peg the clarity, then the color,” says Greene. “But this might be as good as it gets.”
“Light-skinned,” says Billy. “Look at the sliver of his left wrist, between his glove and his shirt.”
“And pale eyes behind the mask,” says Arnie. “Blue or gray.”
Greene cues up the IPSC Young Talent video on the monitor, splits the screen and hits play.
Billy moves his eyes left and right, vetting the clip against the photo. He reaches into the doughnut box without taking his eyes off the screen. Takes a bite of what turns out to be a maple bar.
When the Young Talent clip ends, there’s a moment of quiet, Billy guessing that all three of them are thinking the same thing.
“We can’t ID Strickland as the Roman with just these,” says Greene.
“No,” says Billy. “But he’s working with that cartel in Mexico, right? So at least a few of them have to have seen him without his commando costume. They’d know what he looks like, maybe even his name.”
“They won’t give him up to us, that’s for sure,” says Greene.
“But we have our Jalisco informants,” says Arnie. “Get them the Strickland video and the Roman pix, and the stills from our files, and let them ask around. No guarantees, but worth the time and expense. Someone at least knows what he looks like. If we’ve got a San Diego self-defense teacher and a former DEA dog making money for Jalisco, we need to know.”
“The Sinaloans have Joe now,” says Billy.
“Kind of beside the point,” says Arnie. “The Roman probably already has another dog.”
“Helping the fentanyl pour into these United States,” says Greene.
Billy thinks of Bettina’s brother. The way she teared up talking about him.
“I’ll take this plan upstairs,” says Arnie. “I think I can get them to bite.”
Greene checks out, leaving Billy and Arnie with the coffee and doughnuts.
“You’ve got it in for Strickland,” says Arnie. “All the way to Scottsdale to try to nail him down. All this. Is he cutting into your time with Bettina Blazak?”
“That’s exactly what he’s doing.”
“You shouldn’t mix professional with personal. What if this Strickland clown isn’t the Roman? What if he’s just who he says he is?”
“Then she can have what she wants.”
“Big ocean out there, full of great fish.”
“Sure, Arnie. Sure it is.”
“You really do like her.”
“I do.”
41
The Sierra Madre Occidental is as forbiddingly beautiful as when Bettina saw it five years ago with a girlfriend — a college graduation gift from Mom and Dad. These rugged mountains are drier than her Sierra Nevada back in California, boulder strewn and not so green. Massive canyons and far horizons. The oaks and elms lean and twist. The red-barked manzanitas send their gnarled roots down through the rocks. Pines struggle up through the granite. A tougher world here, she thinks. She watches a Copper Canyon vintage Pullman train like the one she’d taken, gliding into a mountainside tunnel like an enormous steel snake, lit by the setting sun.
She steers the rental Chevy through the steepening switchbacks behind Los Mochis. Strickland sits beside her, regarding the fading orange evening through sunglasses, his Padres cap tipped low. From a friend in San Blas, Strickland has managed to obtain a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and shells, which is now in the glove compartment under which Strickland’s knees barely fit. Bettina had watched him lift the rag-shrouded weapon from a rusted steel trash can behind a Pemex station, a cold chill running down her back.
With a nod to Mexican propriety, they take adjacent rooms at the rustic Creel Lodge. After dinner they retire to the nearly empty lobby and sip tequila under an immense, cascading chandelier of deer antlers. The fireplace burns hard against the cold Sierra night.
Strickland pokes the logs and adds another, then returns to his pine-and-cowhide chair and takes her hand.
“How are you feeling, Bettina?”
“Eager to see my dog. Anxious that I won’t get a good story on Godoy. Afraid that something will go wrong. My nerves chilled when I saw what you did at the Pemex station. I thought: a gringo in Mexico is euthanasia.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Carlos.”
“In the heart of Sinaloa? Maybe not.”
The fire crackles and throws light onto the antlers massed above them.
“I have a favor to ask,” says Strickland. “Don’t shoot any pictures or video of me tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be seen down here. It could be misconstrued.”
Which strikes Bettina as mysterious, maybe paranoid. By whom, she wonders, the cops he says he knows, on both sides of the border?
“No pics. No video. You have my word.”
“Thank you.”
She squeezes his hand. “It’s so much colder here than I remember.”
“It’s still March,” says Strickland. “Twenties at night. That’s a good strong fire.”
“What if my story flops? What if Godoy freezes up on camera? What if Felix has been abused or doesn’t want to come home with me?”
“With us,” he says.