Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

Janie picked up the hollowed-out book lying on the floor.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I had Lalo arrange to smuggle in an extra gun in case I got caught breaking in. It’s got my fingerprints on it. Take it.”

After they searched the file cabinet, Donnally called his father’s cell phone. The helicopter rumbled in the background.

“Where are you?” Donnally asked.

“Are you okay?”

“I guess you could say that I’m healthy as a sunrise.”

“A what?”

“I’ll explain it later.”

“We’re on our way to land,” his father said, “so we can strip the lettering off this thing before we return it to the rental company. And then we’ll catch a charter flight back to the States before anyone figures out who we are.”

Donnally heard the scream of police sirens, rising in volume like incoming mortar.

“How soon can you get back here?” Donnally asked.

“What do you need?”

“I’m going to leave my backpack and a box of documents on the roof, on top of the air conditioner. Can you get close enough to snag them?”

Donnally heard a quick interchange between his father and the pilot, then his father’s voice.

“We’ll figure it out. How soon?”

“Two minutes.”

“I’ll have them waiting for you when you get back to California.”

But the twisted expression on the angular face of Captain Joaquin Felix sitting in his office an hour later told Donnally that their going home might not happen for a very long time.

Or it would happen by sunset.

Donnally had recognized the captain’s name when he’d introduced himself in the doorway of Sherwyn’s office at White Sands. He was one of the government officials whom Corazon had accused in the press of protecting sex traffickers.

Felix folded his arms on his desk and looked first at Janie, then at Donnally.

“Officer Cruz was not the self-sacrificing type. I can’t imagine him risking his skin to rescue anyone.” Felix’s face relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Picking bodies clean of valuables afterwards, now that’s something Cruz would do. It is not by chance that his nickname was La Buitre. The Vulture.”

Donnally didn’t smile back. “Sometimes true character is revealed in a time of crisis.”

“Perhaps crisis is also the explanation for why his brother disappeared.”

Donnally shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

The smile remained fixed on the captain’s face. “Of course you would.” He then removed a printout of a San Francisco Chronicle article from his desk, spun it around, and slid it toward Donnally and Janie. It was the account of Donnally’s shooting of an unidentified Hispanic male on Janie’s doorstep. “What do you suppose we’ll discover when we send the fingerprints of Jago’s brother to San Francisco?”

“When you send them?”

Felix laughed. “Very shrewd. You’re right. If we decide it’s in our interest to send them.”

Donnally fixed his eyes on the captain’s. “My experience is that people usually find what they expect to find.”

“You’re just full of homilies, aren’t you?”

“It’s the wisdom of the ages. I’m merely its vehicle.” Donnally glanced at the news article. “There’s no way you’ll send the prints to the U.S. The last thing you want to see in the media is a report that one of your officers was moonlighting as a hit man.” He pointed upward. “You’ll have enough trouble explaining to CNN what happened at White Sands this morning.”

Felix rose from his chair and walked to the window, his narrowed eyes telling Donnally that he was imagining how the fiction of the rescue attempt would play in the Mexican and U.S. press.

Donnally became conscious of the traffic passing by on the street two floors below and thought of the U.S. president arriving in a few days. Perhaps what would’ve been a sex-trafficking expose could be transformed into a victory of the police against the traffickers.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Donnally said.

Felix turned back toward him. “You’re not in a position to bargain.”

“That depends on what I have to offer.”

“Tell me what you want, and I’ll decide whether there’s anything you can do to pay for it.”

Donnally pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward the door that led to the waiting room where Corazon and Lalo waited under guard.

“You drop the defamation charges against Corazon and I’ll give a press conference describing Cruz as a hero who died rescuing Janie and me from Sherwyn.”

Janie gripped his arm. “Don’t do it.”

Donnally laid his hand over hers, then looked from her to Felix and said, “We’ve got no choice. It’s the only way.”

“W hat did you mean it was the only way?” Janie said to Donnally as she walked into the Cancun airport terminal where he was waiting for her. It was less a question than an accusation, and it was the first time they had spoken since Donnally had gone with Captain Felix to the press conference and she had returned to the hotel to pack for the flight.

And the accusation tore at him.

Janie stopped and gazed through the windows at Corazon pulling away from the curb. She seemed lost amid the streams of passengers flowing past her toward the ticket counters, as though she was feeling submerged in the tide of events.

“She wanted the case dropped,” Janie said, “but not by misleading the Mexican people about what’s really happening here and who’s responsible.”

Donnally wanted to say, No one was misled. Mexicans aren’t stupid. They may not have understood why I told the lie, but they’ll know that’s what it was.

But he didn’t because he knew she was right, and in that moment understood where he’d gone wrong: He’d been swept away, caught in the updraft of his father’s brilliant deception, and it had seduced him into committing another.

Corazon had deserved better. Just as Mauricio and Anna had deserved better-

And he cringed at his arrogance.

It wasn’t up to him to take Corazon’s life out of her hands. It was hers to decide what sacrifices to make and what risks to take.

“You’re right. It wasn’t my place.”

Donnally paused as a fragment of an idea came to him to set things right, but it dissolved under the pressure of the countdown toward their flight’s takeoff. He turned to her and said, “We’ll find a way to fix it.”

Janie looked up at him and nodded, then she smiled and said, “And maybe we can fix something else at the same time.”

Donnally stared at her for a moment, until his mind caught up with her, and he smiled back. “That, too.”

Then his smile died and he looked toward the check-in counter. “There’s just one thing we need to do along the way.”

“What’s that?”

“Go after the man behind White Sands before he makes a run for it.”

But Albert Hale wasn’t running.

Donnally found him wrapped in a wool blanket, sitting on the veranda of his Hillsborough mansion. He was gazing out at the cloistered garden, the high walls on either side covered by avalanches of vines and the far end cushioned by a private forest of oaks and eucalyptus. The Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on the old man’s face and neck made it seem that AIDS was pummeling him to death, not draining the life out of him.

“How’d you get in?” Hale asked, after turning toward the sound of Donnally’s footsteps behind him.

“Over the river and through the woods,” Donnally said, using a children’s rhyme to take a first jab at Hale. “How else?”

“Ah, yes.” Hale half smiled and then added a line, “Spring over the ground like a hunting hound.”