David Ellis - Breach of Trust

The irony is that Ernesto Ramirez didn’t know that Hector was the bad guy. Ernesto and his friend Scarface assumed it was Delroy’s former brother-in-law, Joey Espinoza, who got Delroy the contract. Ernesto had no idea about a gay relationship between Delroy and Hector. He thought the “connection to Delroy” that Bert Wozniak was going to expose was the ex-brother-in-law relationship between Delroy Bailey and Joey.

But Hector didn’t know that. All he knew, thanks to me, was that there was a guy out there who seemed to know something about the murder of Bert Wozniak, which included-again, thanks to my speculation-the involvement of the Latin Lords street gang, Kiko’s gang. Hector would have been desperate to silence Ernesto. And he used another person who would be just as desperate, Kiko, to carry it out.

Greg Connolly might not have known every detail but he would have known enough. If he had any brains, he’d know that Hector had Wozniak taken out. Same for Ernesto Ramirez. So what was Hector to think when, one day, he discovered that Mr. Gregory Connolly was wearing a wire for the federal government? I mean, killing an aide to the governor is no small thing, but murder to cover up two other murders is less of a leap. What did he have to lose at that point? If Greg was flapping his mouth about Adalbert Wozniak and Delroy Bailey and Ernesto Ramirez, then on a risk-reward calculation, the pros of killing Greg Connolly far outweighed the cons.

Charlie Cimino, of course, was all around the PCB back then, too. Surely he knew all about the Delroy Bailey contract. He and Hector were two of the main pigs feeding at that trough. So one of them figured out about Greg wearing a wire-I don’t know which-and told the other. Then they jumped Greg and did a little water boarding routine on him to find out what he’d told the federal government before they killed him and dumped him on Seagram Hill. Had Greg told the feds about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez? I didn’t know. But either way, Hector couldn’t let Greg just walk away and carry on as a snitch for the government. Greg had to die.

One of them-again, I didn’t know which-also decided that I might be a threat, and treated me to the same fun-filled question-and-answer session. Only I managed to pass and live another day. They’d have been far better off killing me that night.

Regardless, it was Hector calling the shots, not Charlie. That was clear to me now. I didn’t know where he got those guys working me over, but they were his guys, not Charlie’s.

I never thought of Hector as “above” Charlie, and in many senses he was not. But he had the ear of the governor, and even if he wasn’t respected by anyone else in the inner circle, he was probably feared because the governor seemed to listen to him as much as anyone.

My fingers formed around the gun in my pocket. I looked up at the bedroom on the third floor, where Hector Almundo was sleeping peacefully next to Delroy Bailey. My entire body-every limb, every muscle-ached from the tension, the flowing rage.

“Have a nice sleep, Senator,” I whispered. Doing this right now, it would let him off too easily.

I released the grip on the gun. I headed back to the car and drove off, mindful of the speed limit, focused now on the last stop I would make tonight.

To the home of the man who carried out Hector’s wet work, who killed Adalbert Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez, and Greg Connolly.

The skies eased up as I drove, the pelting rain turning to soft drops. The roads were empty and I was making good time, not that it mattered. I was doing math that didn’t add up, logic that had no linear path. The law does not permit unlimited cause and effect. A guy commits a crime, you can’t blame his mother for giving birth to him, even though if she hadn’t, the crime wouldn’t have been committed. The law talks about “proximate cause,” meaning reasonably foreseeable cause and effect. But there was probably nothing reasonable about my thinking right now.

It was a song I’d been singing, I realized, since this whole thing started. If he hadn’t killed Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez wouldn’t have mattered. And if he hadn’t killed Ernesto, I would have taken that trip with my wife. Different parts of my brain were battling this out but it was clear who was winning, who had won in a knockout.

By the time I pulled up in the alley that ran behind a line of houses including Kiko’s, the rain had stopped. My chest was heaving. Everything was dark. The rain in my hair, on my wet coat and collar, felt like ice water.

I got out and closed the car door, which made a recognizable noise but probably one so familiar as to be innocuous, even at two in the morning.

I moved down the alley, thinking about obstacles. Probably a guy at his rank in the Latin Lords had a security system. Probably a guy like Kiko had several weapons at his disposal, too.

I stopped when I was positioned in the alley so that I could see the back of Kiko’s house. The light downstairs was on. Through a sliding glass door I could see him, sitting on the carpet, his back against the couch, alternating lights emanating from a television set. So, even if he had an alarm system, it probably wasn’t armed. And he seemed to be alone, consistent with my intel from Joel Lightner that he lived by himself.

I didn’t have a definitive plan, and nothing particularly effective. Misdirection always works. Ring his front doorbell, maybe have something outside his front door-a note or something, to make him actually leave the house, occupy his attention on the front porch-while running around to the back of the house and breaking in, ready to surprise him when he returns. There was a side window, as well, probably to a bedroom, as an alternative point of entry.

All of those made sense, until the calculator started tabulating in my head again, as I watched Federico “Kiko” Hurtado lazily stretched out on his floor watching something on the tube. The man who took everything from me, from Essie Ramirez, from Adalbert Wozniak’s and Greg Connolly’s families, was resting in the comfort of his own home watching some inane sitcom or infomercial or soft-core porn.

Those other ideas would work, the misdirection. But other ways were effective, as well, especially if you had nothing to lose.

My walk was steady, one deliberate step after the other, but I found myself picking up the pace as I crossed his backyard and removed the gun from my pocket. I took an angle head-on toward the sliding glass door, out of his sight line, seeing only his outstretched legs. I raised the gun as I approached. When I was within about ten, nine, now five yards, I started shooting.

The bullets splintered the glass in five spiderwebs, one of them wildly apart from the others but the other four close enough to compromise the glass’s integrity. I lowered my shoulder and crashed through, just as Kiko’s feet began to move. I kicked out my leg with everything I had to complete my entry, to get my legs inside. I had the gun trained on him before he’d had the chance to react.

He looked up at me. His matted hair and puffy, unfocused eyes told me he’d been asleep. The multiple beer bottles lying sideways and the odor of cannabis told me that it had been an intoxicated slumber. Good for me. A guy quick on his feet might have had the chance to at least get some headway toward another room and, at that point, a real chance at escape. But none of that mattered now.

He didn’t speak, though his nonverbal communication-the widening stain in the crotch of his gray sweats-told me I had his attention. Here was the most notorious assassin on the city’s streets, in a t-shirt and urine-stained sweats, frozen in place with both palms planted on the carpet and one leg bent, as if he were just on the verge of bouncing up.