Paul Levine - Illegal

"What?" Javier Cardenas wasn't sure he had heard the lawyer correctly.

"If a rat comes across some strange food, it will only take a nibble. That way, if it gets sick, it won't die. If the rat doesn't get sick, next time, it'll eat the whole damn thing."

At the moment, Cardenas was eating his own lunch, his customary B.L.T., as he sat on the redwood bench under a bonsai tree outside the Rutledge Police Department. The phone call from Whitehurst did not improve his appetite.

"Simeon's like that rat," the lawyer continued. "If he poisons a neighbor's well and nothing happens, next time, he'll divert a whole river. Hire a few illegal aliens one day, pretty soon he's running stash houses and whorehouses and paying off half the legislators in Sacramento.

He thinks he's invincible. Then one day, he wolfs down that poison."

Whitehurst's sharp tone shocked Cardenas. The lawyer never would have spoken like that in front of Uncle Sim.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Cardenas demanded.

"A sealed indictment. Racketeering. Bribery. Human trafficking. A hundred seventy-two counts, thick as a phone book. United States of America versus Simeon Rutledge."

"Jesus!" Cardenas tossed his sandwich into the stream. Koi jumped for the bacon, miniature whirlpools stirring in their wake. "What can I do to help?"

"I'm hoping he'll listen to you, Javier."

A realization then. Though the chief had met Whitehurst dozens of times over the years, never had the deep-carpet attorney called him by his first name.

"Simeon respects you and trusts you," Whitehurst continued. "You're the son he never had."

"I'll do anything for Sim. You know that."

"The U.S. Attorney offered a deal. Simeon pleads to one count of racketeering and does a token amount of time at a country club prison. Six to nine months. He pays five million in fines, plus steps down as president of the company. The court will appoint a trustee to oversee the operation."

Cardenas laughed, but it was as bitter as hemlock. "The trustee better have a thick hide, because Uncle Sim will take a bullwhip to him."

"That's pretty much what Simeon said, except he mentioned a shotgun."

"What can I do if he's already rejected the deal?"

"Help me sell him on it."

Cardenas shook his head. "You know Sim. He'll fight to the end. He'll never surrender."

"Then he'll lose what it took three generations to build. The ranch. The farms. All the businesses. Everything forfeited to the government. He'll die in prison. His only wish interred with his bones."

"What wish?"

"For you to take over the business when he's gone."

"Jesus." Cardenas sucked in a breath. "I thought Sim wanted me to be governor or a senator. He never mentioned the business."

"You're the sole heir."

"You're sure?" Cardenas blurted out.

Whitehurst laughed. "I better be. I wrote the will."

For a moment, the only sound was the hum on the line.

"Just to be clear, Javie," Whitehurst continued, "if Simeon Rutledge dies tomorrow, you inherit everything."

Cardenas shook his head, resisting the notion. "And the crimi nal case, what happens to that?"

"A very astute question," the lawyer praised him. "In the untoward event of Simeon's death, the criminal case dies with him. The government will move on to other cases of notoriety, and you'll take over the company."

Cardenas was aware of a tingling sensation, an electrical impulse sparking up his spine. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

"While it hardly needs to be said," Whitehurst continued, obviously believing it did need to be said, "rest assured that I will always be your trusted advisor, Javie. Just as I have been to Simeon."

Cardenas stayed quiet. He sensed Whitehurst wasn't finished.

"But if Simeon's convicted," the lawyer started again, "there'll be nothing to pass on. The sad fact is, the only way for your uncle Sim to achieve his fondest wish is for him to die."

Javier Cardenas discovered he was holding his breath, his throat dry as sand. He exhaled, a hot wind rustling dried leaves. "Neither of us wants that to happen."

"Of course not," the lawyer assured him.

"What do you mean you're going out tonight?" Tino asked.

"Something I gotta do, that's all." Jimmy keeping it nonchalant. No way he would tell the boy he was setting out to kill a man.

"So you're leaving me alone in the hotel?"

"You want a babysitter?"

"Not unless she wants to watch the titty channel with me."

They had just finished dinner at a barbecue joint, attracted there by the hickory smoke wafting over downtown Rutledge. Ribs, chicken, tri-tip, baked beans, and sweet potato fries. For a skinny kid, Tino could pack it away. Now they were walking back to the hotel, their conversation interrupted by frequent burps and the occasional fart.

"How long till you're back?" Tino asked.

"It'll be late. You'll be asleep."

"You hooking up with that waitress?"

"What waitress?"

"Ay, Himmy. The one you were hitting on, the one whose hair smelled like carne asada."

"Nope."

"Why the big secret, vato? You afraid I won't understand?"

"Exactly."

But that was a lie. Tino would surely understand. He'd expressed the very same emotion a number of times when confronted with someone who would hurt his mother. Tino knew very well the driving force of bloodlust and the bone-deep need for revenge.

I'm not like Simeon Rutledge.

Sure, we're both members of the human race, but that's where the resemblance ends.

Still, Payne was on his way to kill a man. To snuff out a life with what the law calls "premeditation and malice aforethought."

A nice phrase. "Malice aforethought." He'd surely aforethoughted a truckload of malice in the last year.

An hour after sundown, Payne drove past fields of cotton and alfalfa, swarms of gnats committing suicide on his windshield. There had once been a large lake in these parts, fed by the Tule River, but it had long ago been drained by Ezekiel Rutledge's ambition to go from merely rich to incredibly wealthy. Nothing changes. The rich get richer, Payne thought, and the poor still live in Weedpatch Barracks.

He skirted the town of Corcoran with its massive state prison, home to Charles Manson, among several thousand other miscreants. Powerful lights curdled the night sky into a sickly shade of green. Payne couldn't fight off the notion that someone who committed a murder in these parts might himself spend the rest of his days inside those walls.

He fiddled with the radio dial. The strongest signal was an oldies rock station, and he picked up Link Wray's "Rumble" with its slow, tantalizing guitar licks. Another few miles and Payne found the side road Rutledge had described. A dusty, one-lane, unpaved path through tomato and onion fields. Darkened shacks, propped on cinder blocks, abandoned and forlorn. The road grew bumpier and narrower, the fields smaller and less tended. The Sierra Nevadas were silhouetted to the east, the Diablo Range to the west, the stars a countless sprinkling of sugar on a black velvet cake. He spotted the Big Dipper, traced a path upward from the two stars that formed the cup's far end. Found Polaris, the North Star, glowing more fiercely than it ever did in the city.

He looked back to the road just in time to avoid a waddling possum, then swerved again, barely missing a rough-barked sycamore encroaching on the narrow road. Then he saw it. A small aluminum trailer, one end protruding from a thicket of scrub oak trees.

Payne pulled off the road and killed the engine. From somewhere in the darkened fields, birds cried like frightened children, and insects played a hundred different symphonies. Sounds came from inside the trailer, too. Voices with a metallic edge. Judging from the cathode glow on the porthole window, a television set.