Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

“Benny the bus driver,” Larson finally said. “Christ almighty. The Romeros?” Hope rose in his thoughts again. Hope and her long history with the Romeros.

“We can’t be sure,” Rotem said, but his heart obviously wasn’t in it.

The medical examiner had written up Benny’s sliced throat as a precision cut intended to sever the trachea while simultaneously laying open the carotid arteries. An extremely efficient cut for someone wishing to both silence and kill a man. Benny had bled out while drowning in his own blood, his larynx cut and inoperable. Larson hadn’t seen anything like it in the past six years.

“Can’t call it a signature cut,” Rotem continued.

“Can’t we?”

“But I wanted you to see it.”

“Scott, maybe I’m punchy because it’s four-thirty in the morning, or maybe it’s from all the chitchat with the two wonderful conversationalists you sent to abduct me, but I’m squatting by this pile of stink looking at what it is you brought me here to look at, and I’m telling you it is a signature cut, which must be exactly what you want to hear, or why would you bring me? So if you know something else, would you just fucking say it?”

Larson wanted out of there. He wanted to find Hope-tell her the Romeros were on the move again. On the move? They had Leo Markowitz! Good God .

“Leopold Markowitz wrote the code for Laena .”

Larson had assumed as much. Laena was the name given to WITSEC’s master witness protection list, the most carefully guarded database in the Justice Department. Larson’s insides did another little roll. Anything and everything to do with the identity and location of Hope Stevens was contained in Laena .

“ Laena became inoperable yesterday afternoon at around four, eastern. They can’t open it; they can’t access it.”

“So they’ve got the list,” Larson said.

“The list, but maybe not the names on the list.” Seven to eight thousand people, including dependents-women, children, spouses and relatives. “The encryption’s a significant obstacle.”

“Not for Markowitz, though,” said Larson. “Right?”

“Even for Markowitz, decrypting Laena will take time.”

“We’ve been tapped to find him.”

“You have. By me. Yes.”

Larson held his breath, disentangled himself from the toilet paper roll, and leaned forward to study the cut more closely. There was too much rot and decomposition for him to determine if a razor blade had been responsible, though he knew this would ultimately be the judgment of the coroner or medical examiner. It all proved a little overwhelming. He stood, hurried out of the bathroom, down the hall, and outside where he gasped for clean air, or what passed for it in New Jersey.

Rotem was right there behind him, more agile and quick than Larson might have given him credit for.

The treetops fluttered and stirred in a breeze, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir.

Larson coughed up a clam and spit it into a nearby shrub and heard it glob down from twig to leaf and finally trickle into the sodden mulch. The taste lingered at the back of his throat, hanging barely above his retching point. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“Judging by this, he has a two-week head start on us,” Rotem said. “Three at most.”

“So does he have the names or not?”

“I’m told by WITSEC that it’s possible but doubtful. Not yet, but any day now. Not only is the master list encrypted, but each individual record within it as well. Think of it as a safe-deposit box inside a bank. Markowitz not only has to break into the bank, but then open each and every safe-deposit box in order to win a protected witness’s identity. Three weeks to a month, and only then with the fastest computers out there-the Crays and Silicon Graphics. Gives us a week to ten days more to find him.”

“Which means finding the Romeros. I thought they up and vanished after Donny checked into our federal facility.”

“We know better than most, Larson,” Rotem said, “that no one ever fully disappears.” He paused. “Excepting maybe Hoffa.”

With Donny’s initial conviction on fraud charges, Pop, Ricardo, and others had gone to ground. If the government knew where to find them, it was news to Larson. The remaining Romeros had never been prosecuted, leaving Larson wondering why. Hope’s testimony would be enough to convict; she remained a living threat to the family.

Rotem added, “Any one of the big families would kill to have that list. Pay millions. Why not the Romeros? If Markowitz gives them Laena-every assumed identity of every protected witness in the WITSEC program…” He let it hang there. Then he said, “That’s a lot of motivation.”

“But the point of making the list digital was to make it bulletproof,” Larson said.

“Right. And the Titanic ’s unsinkable. Listen, WITSEC is reassembling the list through paperwork, but it’s a hell of a lot of paperwork.”

“There’s got to be some kind of backup, right?”

“I suppose they might get it back online. What do I know? We’re supposed to find Markowitz. Period.”

“We do this in secret?”

“You do everything in secret,” Rotem said.

“Yeah, but something this big… It’s gonna be a task-force effort, right? FiBIes, us, ATF… who else?”

“Us.”

“I said us.”

“Us,” Rotem repeated, the light from his butane lighter now catching his oversized eyes and throwing two noses onto his face as he lit a cigarette. Larson didn’t know this about the man-that he smoked-and he found it disconcerting to have served five years on the Fugitive Apprehension Task Force and only now learn this.

His head was spinning. He still couldn’t get that taste out of his mouth. Then, as Rotem coughed, Larson understood the cigarette. It was Rotem’s way-as a nonsmoker-to purge the lingering taste from his own throat.

“Does that really work?”

“Yeah,” Rotem answered.

“You mind?”

Rotem passed Larson the burning cigarette. Larson took it between his thick fingers, looked down at his own hand, and then passed it back. He tried a stick of gum instead, and for a minute it worked, but when he swallowed he thought he might upchuck.

The panic hit him again, ran right through him like venom. Hope-first in line for execution by the Romeros.

“Donny Romero,” Larson said.

“Is coming up for parole. Yes.”

Larson had heard only rumors. “How does he pull off a parole hearing if he’s still a suspect in capital murder investigations?”

Rotem sized him up, sucked on the cigarette. “Government lost its star witness. No witness, no prosecution. The other Romeros are in the wind.”

Larson cringed. “Lost the witness… to spoilage?” The service’s euphemism for killed witnesses.

“AWOL.”

“This is Hope Stevens we’re talking about?” So she never had testified-the rumors were true.

The look that came back from Rotem was paralyzing. Rotem knew the connection. He nodded.

Is that why he picked me for the job? Larson wondered. Rotem wanted as much added motivation in his men as he could find.

Some kind of critter scampered through the undergrowth. A rat, Larson thought, though he didn’t get a look at the thing.

“Markowitz could be bent,” Larson said. “This could be some kind of ruse.”

“One hell of a ruse. My gut says Romeros. Yours?”

Larson’s silence signaled his assent.

“We’ll bring in forensics,” Rotem said. “But I guarantee you that cut’ll end up matching Benny’s.”

Larson wondered, with the master list gone, with Hope AWOL from WITSEC, how he would find her before the Romeros did. No matter what Rotem assigned him, that was the task at hand. With Donny’s parole on the line, the Romeros wouldn’t want a witness as potentially damaging as Hope changing her mind and stepping forward. In fact it didn’t seem out of the question that they’d gone after the list specifically to find Hope and prevent her from testifying.