Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

Corazon propped her elbows on the desk and rested her chin on her folded hands. She thought for a few moments, then said, “What happens to these children later, in the months or years it takes for your Justice Department to extradite and convict Sherwyn? If their parents had enough money to care for them in the first place, they wouldn’t have ended up on the street. I don’t doubt your intentions, Mr. Donnally, but you’ll leave here in a few days and this will remain a children’s prison.”

“Isn’t there someplace that will take them in?” Donnally asked. “Some kind of children’s shelter.”

“It’s more complicated than that. These are teenage boys who have become accustomed to abuse. Not only do they need to be protected, but other children need to be protected from some of them.”

Donnally realized that she was right. There was a tomorrow he hadn’t thought about. He spread his arms and glanced around.

“How much does it cost to run a place like this?” he asked.

“Forty thousand pesos a month. About thirty-five hundred dollars.”

He nodded. “I know somebody who’ll cover it.”

“That’s over forty thousand a year,” Janie said. “In ten years that’s almost half a million dollars. I can contribute some and I know you will, but who’s got the rest of the money?”

Donnally smiled to himself as he watched the circle close.

“Mauricio.”

“H arlan, this is Will.” The voice coming through Donnally’s cell phone was just a whisper. “A Mexican guy just came into the cafe looking for you.”

His employees didn’t know he was in Mexico. He’d led them to believe that he was steelhead fishing on the Trinity.

Donnally set down his just-purchased video camera on the hotel room table. Janie and Corazon would use it to tape the kids’ statements about Sherwyn.

“What did he look like?”

“A pit bull. Heavyset. Dark skin. Strong accent.”

Gregorio Cruz’s brother, Jago.

“What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t have a chance to say anything. Deputy Asshole was sitting at the counter waiting for his father. He told the guy that you weren’t around. Then it was like a lightbulb went off in Pipkins’s head. First the news article about the Hispanic guy you shot in San Francisco and then a Mexican shows up. I had some ham about to burn on the grill and by the time I looked again they were sitting in a booth, talking. Real friendly.”

“Where are you now?”

“Still in the kitchen.”

Janie interrupted her unpacking of the camera and cast Donnally a questioning look.

He mouthed the words “Will” and “Jago Cruz.”

Her lips went tight.

“What should I tell him if he asks me again?” Will asked.

Donnally’s cell phone beeped with an incoming call. He looked at the screen. A Mount Shasta telephone number.

“Is Pipkins making a call?” Donnally asked.

“Let me take a peek,” Will said, followed a few moments later by “Yeah. He’s got his phone to his ear.”

Donnally let it go to voice mail.

“He just disconnected,” Will said, “and now they’re walking toward the door.”

“The Mexican is probably the brother of the guy I killed.” Donnally thought for a moment. “But Pipkins is so single-minded that he must think he showed up in Mount Shasta because of something to do with Mauricio.”

“Hold on,” Will said. “Let me get to the front window.”

Donnally heard the whoosh of the swinging kitchen doors, then footsteps.

“Be careful,” Donnally said. “If they see you on the telephone, they’ll guess that you’re talking to me.”

“They’re over looking at Mauricio’s house. Got their backs to me.” Will chuckled. “Deputy Asshole looks like a hog sniffing around a sty for a piece of corn. He seems to be trying to pry information out of the Mexican, but the guy is just standing there, real stiff.”

“You got Harlan on the line, Will?” It was the voice of his waitress, Marian, in the background.

“Let me talk to her,” Donnally said.

“You still up at the river chilling out?” Marian asked.

“Chill is right.” Donnally forced a laugh. “The steelhead are coming up frozen right out of the river.”

“What do you want us tell those guys about where you are?”

“The truth. I’ve got nothing to fear. But tell them that they won’t be able to reach me by cell phone because there isn’t service in some of the canyons I’ve been fishing.”

Marian laughed. “It could take them a week to find you.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

B efore breakfast the next morning, Donnally transferred to Corazon’s office computer the video files of Corazon and Janie’s new set of interviews with Sherwyn’s victims. He cut out the names of the boys and dates that would allow Sherwyn to identify them, then copied the audio portion of the interviews onto a CD.

Donnally’s cell phone rang as he pulled the disk out of the drive.

“Nothing happens in this place that I don’t find out about,” Sherwyn said, his words slurred, sounding like he had a hangover. “And not only will those kids recant, but their parents will say that you paid them to lie… in fact-”

Donnally heard muffled conversation in the background.

“In fact… the first ones have just come in.” Sherwyn laughed. “You’ve been a bad, bad boy, Donnally. They’re claiming you threatened them, and their children.”

Sherwyn’s voice hardened, like caffeine was kicking against the weight of last night’s alcohol.

“You still don’t have a clue about how things work around here, do you? This won’t be any more successful than your gimmick to link me with Gregorio Cruz. The U.S. Attorney will have no use for recanting witnesses and the Mexican police will dismiss your little tapes as frauds. They may even charge you with witness tampering.”

Sherwyn laughed again, but this time in a jittery way, as if he was an adolescent boy watching a horror movie and not comfortable in his desire to witness a horde of ax-wielding zombies disemboweling a victim.

“That’s assuming, of course, that Gregorio’s brother doesn’t get to you first, and that could get quite messy.”

Donnally sensed, underneath Sherwyn’s arrogance, a racket of thoughts suppressed by techniques perfected while living a double, triple, and in the murder of Anna Keenan, a quadruple life.

He looked at his watch. Janie and Corazon were driving to Merida, the inland state capital, to hide the boys in a hotel.

“It doesn’t make any difference what the parents claim,” Donnally said, “you can’t get to the kids.”

“Eventually they’ll come to me. They always do. They’re part of my world now. They don’t fit into yours anymore, and there’s no going back.”

For a moment Donnally thought Sherwyn had gone delusional, but then realized that Sherwyn’s fantasy was just the distorted reflection of Corazon’s prison analogy.

“It’s out of their hands,” Donnally said.

“Only if you intend to hold them as prisoners.”

“If I have to, but it won’t come to that.”

Donnally decided to bring at least one of Sherwyn’s fears to the surface.

“Aren’t you wondering how I figured out you were down here?” Donnally asked.

Sherwyn didn’t answer right away, almost as if the question hadn’t crossed his mind because the answer would be too obvious. Donnally suspected that it was because Sherwyn had spent so many years expecting to be caught that he was no longer capable of surprise.

“And aren’t you also wondering why SFPD hasn’t released Cruz’s name to the press? You think maybe it’s to give the Justice Department time to negotiate a deal with the Mexican attorney general to cut out the local police and bring in the federales to haul your ass to jail?”