Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

Sam followed him around the block and watched as the cop parked his car beside a FedEx truck idling beside a CVS pharmacy, but with an easy view of Ozzie’s. Sam parked in the same lot and pretended to be very busy with the machinations of his phone, but really was just watching to see what Prieto was seeing.

It wasn’t until three more cop cars pulled up, sirens blaring, that Prieto finally backed up his cruiser and drove away. Sam had a pretty good idea what was going to happen next, so he kept his vigil in the parking lot. Sure enough, a few seconds later, Prieto’s cruiser came screeching around the corner, siren blaring.

You sneaky bastard, Sam thought. He opened his phone and called Michael. “Mikey,” he said, “we have ourselves a company cop.”

When you’re a spy, it’s bad business to put your faith in anything you can’t control. Everyone and everything becomes suspect.

Whom do you trust?

Yourself and maybe your gun, but even your gun can run out of bullets or jam.

When you’re a spy, a day might come when your government disowns you, your partners turn out to be your enemies and the world you once knew to be true ends up being a terrible, terrible lie.

Your only opportunity for survival then is what exists between your ears. That means tamping down impulsive behavior in favor of well-planned counteraction. Can’t shoot your gun? Then use it as a blunt-force weapon. Or trade it for money or shelter or food, because if there is one thing that is true, it’s that there’s always a market for a gun. And there’s no more lethal weapon than a man who is willing to wait for someone else to make a mistake.

This was wisdom I was well acquainted with and, as I explained to Father Eduardo Santiago, a strategy that would work well for us. All he had to do was wait, and Junior would trip up and we’d be ready to pounce. In the meantime, we’d put into place all of the nets that would ensnare his fall.

It took three days of waiting. Three days of watching Junior’s every movement in his office. Three days of listening to his every phone call. Three days of reading his e-mails.

And three days of me actually going into an office every day, which was far more taxing than I could have ever imagined. Each morning, I picked up Eduardo from my mother’s and drove him to his office, where he conducted his business as usual. This meant keeping all of his appointments, which typically started at eight A.M. (which automatically excluded Sam from duty).

Father Eduardo taped his part for the community news program on Thursday morning, spent Thursday afternoon having lunch with two city councilmen who wanted his opinion on a new land deal that would give jobs to inner-city kids and on Thursday night, it was a charity dinner where he served as the MC. And then there was the actual managing of the day-to-day business of Honrado and the business of being a priest: the cafe, the auto shop, the job placement services, the people who need not just a word with you, but a lifetime with you.

And then it was Friday.

For three days, Father Eduardo conducted this business with me standing very near to him.

“He is writing a story on me for a magazine in Nevada,” he told the news program people and the charity organizers who noticed my presence.

“He is here to oversee the architectural development of our new buildings,” he told the Honrado employees who noticed me in his office day and night.

“He is here to protect me,” he told himself and, when Leticia called Fiona, it’s what I told her to repeat. It was Saturday morning and Father Eduardo was at my loft, along with Sam and Fiona, while we piled through all our surveillance of Junior. Barry was busy upstairs snoring through the important discovery process, which was fine. There was plenty of incriminating evidence, none of which Barry needed to see or hear, since a lot of it mentioned how they were going to kill him as soon as they had the opportunity. My mother had been kind enough to offer him a few of her horse tranquilizers to help him calm his jitters, and now he was on hour number eleven of sleep. We’d wake him when we needed him, which would be soon, as we had to make our moves today.

Saturday was to be a big day: Barry and Sam would train Junior’s men on how to operate the printing press and utilize the money plate. Sam had no actual facility with this skill set, but sort of wanted to learn, and also happened to be pretty good about shooting people who needed to be shot… even if he’d sworn to Father Eduardo that he’d only shoot them with a paintball gun. And that meant today would also be the day I had Junior’s men pull the job I wanted done at Harding Pharmaceutical, so that by Sunday, if everything worked according to plan, Father Eduardo might just have his day of worship.

But then Leticia called.

She’d been missing since Sam and I showed up to Honrado three days earlier, which meant she likely saw her boyfriend Killa and Junior arriving in one condition and leaving in a slightly different version, and knew that this might be her only opportunity to steal away with her son. But she could only go so far-a fact Fiona had predicted too well, so that when Leticia phoned her, she wasn’t all that surprised.

After she answered the call, Fi put her hand over the phone and whispered, “It’s Leticia.”

“She’ll want to talk to you,” I said to Father Eduardo. “You ready for that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Let her know Father Eduardo wants to speak to her,” I said to Fiona. “And make sure she knows he’s not angry with her.”

Fi spoke with Leticia for just a few moments and explained to her what had probably grown to be obvious: it wasn’t an accident that they’d met up that afternoon earlier in the week, and that it was all part of a larger plan to disrupt a conspiracy she’d been unwittingly pressed into, one best explained by Father Eduardo. Fiona handed him the phone and he spoke with the girl as calmly as possible.

“They are here to protect me,” he said to Leticia. “They are here to protect you and your son. Whatever you might have heard that is the contrary is rumor and innuendo. They will protect my brother, too, if it comes to it.”

Father Eduardo looked at me when he said that. It wasn’t something I was entirely certain was possible, not because it was physically impossible, but because it might be morally and ethically impossible. I’d already hobbled him, which would likely preclude him from taking part in anything involving standing for a few weeks, effectively keeping off the production line for the money and out of the heist, too. The rest? That would have to be up to him.

But, in that particular moment, there wasn’t a lot of space for nuanced thought. I just nodded my assent.

“Pardon me,” Father Eduardo said to us, “but I need some privacy to continue this conversation. I’m going to continue this call outside.”

We waited for Father Eduardo to step outside before we continued our previous conversation-which was just how we were going to position Junior to fail.

“You think he’ll be able to keep it together?” Sam asked.

“Right now? Yes,” I said. “If we keep him out of the lines of fire, he’ll be fine. But when we turn this information over to the authorities, and they call Father Eduardo as a witness? Well, that will be up to him. But my feeling is that he’s led a dual life before. A little white lie here and there to the police will be fine.”

The bugging of Junior’s office, just over the course of three days, had provided all the information needed to get Junior put back in prison and people like Peter Prieto into prison for the first time. There were phone calls, all recorded, between Junior and Peter. There were e-mails between Junior and “clients” in other countries ensuring delivery of product as soon as production was resecured. There was video of all of this, too.