John Lescroart - Damage

“I told her she should stick by her guns and support you. The mayor wouldn’t dare fire her so soon after bringing her on. Of course, I may be wrong. I haven’t been right in so long I forget what it looks like. But I told her he’d look like a complete fool for making her his choice for chief in the first place.”

“He threatened to fire her?”

“I think it was more understood than stated. But the message was clear enough.”

“So I should quit?”

“I won’t lie to you, Abe. That’s an option, though not a good one. Better would be to get something real on Ro.”

“I thought I did that last time.”

“Yeah. Well, we saw how that played.”

Glitsky took that in silence for a beat. Then, “Well, in any event, I’ve got my case file and notes from the original investigation, which I’m reviewing for the retrial. With Nuñez gone, we’ve still got her testimony from the first trial, but reading it to a jury is not going to be anywhere near as strong as hearing her would have been. Which leaves the one other witness, Gloria Gonzalvez.”

“But she’s disappeared, too, hasn’t she?”

“I haven’t really started looking. She may turn up. Plus, I want to go see the other rape victims again, the ones who got bought off, if they’ll talk to me.”

“Why would they do that now, after all this time?”

Glitsky shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they won’t. But maybe it’s bothering one of them they didn’t do the right thing.” He held up a hand. “I know. Long shot. But worth a try.”

“It’s your time.”

“Speaking of which, we’re still looking at August for the retrial?”

“Minimum. Unless you get something sooner on Nuñez, or this latest woman.”

“If I do,” Glitsky said as he stood up, “you’ll be the first to know.”

From the early years of their social and business prominence, the Curtlees had staffed their homes and some of their businesses with Guatemalan or El Salvadoran help. Rather than gamble with undocumented aliens, they could hire on site down in Central America and provide work visas, medical insurance, and an almost unbelievable standard of living for those lucky enough to be chosen. In return, they found their employees from these countries to be honest, hardworking, loyal, grateful, and-perhaps most important-fearful of being returned back to their homelands.

Just at about the end of Ro’s trial, one of their talent scouts in El Salvador had been approached by Eztli. In Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica (meh-SHEE-ka), the people who white men call Aztec, eztli means “blood.” As is also the common custom among his people, Eztli had only one name. It fit him well.

Thirty-five at the time, he already spoke excellent, unaccented, and idiomatic English, courtesy of an American father who’d disappeared when the boy had been twelve. He had been in the regular El Salvadoran army for a decade beginning when he was sixteen. Connections he’d made in the service paved the way for civilian work as a majordomo for Enrique Mololo, one of the country’s drug lords. Mololo, unfortunately for himself, had decided that he did not want to share his profits or contacts with Mara Salvatrucha, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world. This decision had proved fatal for Mololo. If Eztli had not been on an errand to pick up one of Mololo’s new cars when the military-style raid on his boss’s compound took place, he almost undoubtedly would have died that day, too.

But as it was, he had missed that party. Instead of going back home to Mololo’s place, he had called on the Curtlees’ procurer, for whom he’d supplied the names of several young women over the years.

He needed to get out of the country. He had skills. He was willing to work.

And the Curtlees were only too glad to have him.

Now, on an overcast Sunday afternoon, Ro sat in the passenger seat of the 4Runner while Eztli drove south along the ocean on Highway 1. Ro’s left arm was still in its cast, but other than that, he bore little resemblance to the man he’d seemed in Judge Donahoe’s courtroom only six days before. He was clean-shaven, well-dressed in khakis and a black silk Tommy Bahama shirt. He wore expensive Italian loafers with no socks. He’d lost the bandage he’d been sporting over the bridge of his nose. The swelling around his mouth had gone down, and only a slight yellowing remained where the black eye had been.

Ro’s idea when he woke up that morning was that he’d go down to the O’Farrell Theatre, get his ashes hauled by one of the girls in the booths-couldn’t get too much of that after being inside nine years. After that, he didn’t know. The afternoons tended to drag as a general rule. Maybe he’d go back to bed.

But then, coming back home from the O’Farrell, he found Eztli waiting for him. The butler reiterated how he’d been feeling terrible about not being there when the cops had come to get Ro. Okay, he had an excuse-he’d been out with the parents, doing bodyguard work. But protecting the family-all of the family-that was his job. He should have been part of it when Glitsky and the other cops came by. Now Eztli wanted to make it up to Ro somehow, show him a good time at least.

Sunday was his day off and some gamecocks were fighting at a place he knew down near Pescadero. Maybe Ro would like to go? It was a hell of a show. Girls watching it, getting into it, it made them hot.

Given his prejudices and predilections, Ro normally wouldn’t have gone out of his way to accommodate or hang out with one of the household help, whom he generally viewed as stratospherically beneath him.

But Eztli was different.

First, of course, he was a guy-strong and experienced. He could handle himself, and this was always a plus.

Second, and much more important, was the fact that while Ro had been in prison, Eztli had suggested to Cliff and Theresa-worried sick about their son’s safety behind bars-that he network amidst the greater Hispanic community and put out the word among the prison population, particularly the violent Mexican gang EME, that Ro wasn’t to be molested; that, in fact, protection for him would be rewarded.

The two men-butler and convict-had met in the prison’s visitors room several times before Ro’s release to negotiate rewards and payouts and in the course of these meetings had developed an easy bond if not yet a true friendship. But in any event, Ro was inclined to relax his usual standards-for a day at least-and see what kind of fun the butler could provide for him.

So here they were, sharing a doob, just passing Half Moon Bay, the golf courses, the Ritz-Carlton there on the right.

“No,” Ro was saying, “I’m not going back in. They’ll have to kill me first.”

Eztli took a hit and passed the joint across. “Your mom and dad believe it won’t come to that.”

“That’s what they keep saying, anyway. But I don’t know. They told me starting out they had that prick Farrell on board with them. That didn’t work out so well.”

“Yeah, but look what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re out.”

“No thanks to Farrell.”

“No?” Eztli shrugged. “Okay.”

Ro held some smoke in his lungs while he looked over at his driver. Suddenly now he got the strongest sense that he’d intuited several times in the prison’s visiting room that there was more going on inside the man’s brain than might immediately be apparent behind the stony, expressionless exterior. His parents had kept Eztli on for the better part of ten years, and they were very smart and shrewd people who did not much let sentimental attachments get in their ways. If Eztli were just muscle, he would have made some mistake and been long gone by now. But not only was he very much still a presence, he actually lived in the big house with the family. Clearly he had an agile brain and contributed on other levels as well.