The word got to the Mobile police a little late. The clerk of the court handled the paperwork, and when information leaks from a courthouse, that is usually the hole. In this case the clerk was outraged. He saw the cases come and go. A man in his middle fifties, he’d gotten his children educated and through college, managing to avoid the drug epidemic. But that had not been true of every child in the clerk’s neighborhood. Right next door to his house, the family’s youngest had bought a “rock” of crack cocaine and promptly driven his car into a bridge abutment at over a hundred miles per hour. The clerk had watched the child grow up, had driven him to school once or twice, and paid the child to mow his lawn. The coffin had been sealed for the funeral at Cypress Hill Baptist Church, and he’d heard that the mother was still on medications after having had to identify what was left of the body. The minister talked about the scourge of drugs like the scourging of Christ’s own passion. He was a fine minister, a gifted orator in the Southern Baptist tradition, and while he led them in prayer for the dead boy’s soul his personal and wholly genuine fury over the drug problem merely amplified the outrage already felt by his congregation…
The clerk couldn’t understand it. Davidoff was a superb prosecuting attorney. Jew or not, this man was one of God’s elect, a true hero in a profession of charlatans. How could this be? Those two scum were going to get off! the clerk thought. It was wrong!
The clerk was unaccustomed to bars. A Baptist serious about his religious beliefs, he had never tasted spirituous liquors, had tried beer only once as a boy on a dare, and was forever guilt-ridden for that. That was one of only two narrow aspects to this otherwise decent and honorable citizen. The other was justice. He believed in justice as he believed in God, a faith that had somehow survived his thirty years of clerking in the federal courts. Justice, he thought, came from God, not from man. Laws came from God, not from man. Were not all Western laws based on Holy Scripture in one way or another? He revered his country’s Constitution as a divinely inspired document, for freedom was surely the way in which God intended man to live, that man could learn to know and serve his God not as a slave, but as a positive choice for Right. That was the way things were supposed to be. The problem was that the Right did not always prevail. Over the years he’d gotten used to that idea. Frustrating though it was, he also knew that the Lord was the ultimate Judge, and His Justice would always prevail. But there were times when the Lord’s Justice needed help, and it was well known that God chose His Instruments through Faith. And so it was this hot, sultry Alabama afternoon. The clerk had his Faith, and God had His Instrument.
The clerk was in a cop bar, half a block from police headquarters, drinking club soda so that he could fit in. The police knew who he was, of course. He appeared at all the cop funerals. He headed a civic committee that looked after the families of cops and firemen who died in the line of duty. Never asked for anything in return, either. Never even asked to fix a ticket – he’d never gotten one in his life, but no one had ever thought to check.
“Hi, Bill,” he said to a homicide cop.
“How’s life with the feds?” the detective lieutenant asked. He thought the clerk slightly peculiar, but far less so than most. All he really needed to know was that the clerk of the court took care of cops. That was enough.
“I heard something that you ought to know about.”
“Oh?” The lieutenant looked up from his beer. He, too, was a Baptist, but wasn’t that Baptist. Few cops were, even in Alabama, and like most he felt guilty about it.
“The ‘pirates’ are getting a plea-bargain,” the clerk told him.
“What?” It wasn’t his case, but it was a symbol of all that was going wrong. And the pirates were in the same jail in which his prisoners were guests.
The clerk explained what he knew, which wasn’t much. Something was wrong with the case. Some technicality or other. The judge hadn’t explained it very well. Davidoff was enraged by it all, but there was nothing he could do. That was too bad, they both agreed. Davidoff was one of the Good Guys. That’s when the clerk told his lie. He didn’t like to tell lies, but sometimes Justice required it. He’d learned that much in the federal court system. It was just a practical application of what his minister said: “God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”
The funny part was that it wasn’t entirely a lie: “The guys who killed Sergeant Braden were connected with the pirates. The feds think that the pirates may have ordered his murder – and his wife’s.”
“How sure are you of that?” the detective asked.
“Sure as I can be.” The clerk emptied his glass and set it down.
“Okay,” the cop said. “Thanks. We never heard it from you. Thanks for what you guys did for the Braden kids, too.”
The clerk was embarrassed by that. What he did for the families of cops and firemen wasn’t done for thanks. It was Duty, pure and simple. His Reward would come from Him who assigned that Duty.
The clerk left, and the lieutenant walked to a corner booth to join a few of his colleagues. It was soon agreed that the pirates would not – could not – be allowed to cop a plea on this one. Federal case or not, they were guilty of multiple rape and murder – and, it would seem, guilty of another double murder in which the Mobile police had direct interest. The word was already on the street: the lives of druggies were at risk. It was another case of sending a message. The advantage that police officers had over more senior government officials was that they spoke in a language that criminals fully understood.
But who, another detective asked, would deliver the message?
“How about the Patterson boys?” the lieutenant answered.
“Ahh,” the captain said. He considered the question for a moment, then: “Okay.” It was, on the whole, a decision far more easily arrived at than the great and weighty decisions reached by governments. And far more easily implemented.
The two peasants arrived in Medellín around sundown. Cortez was thoroughly frustrated by this time. Eight bodies to be disposed of – not all that difficult a thing to do in Medellín – for no good reason. He was sure of that now. As sure as he’d been of the opposite thing six hours earlier. So where was the information leak? Three women and five men had just died proving that they weren’t it. The last two had just been shot in the head, uselessly catatonic after watching the first six die under less merciful circumstances. The room was a mess, and Cortez felt soiled by it. All that effort wasted. Killing people for no good reason. He was too angry to be ashamed.
He met with the peasants in another room on another floor after washing his hands and changing his clothes. They were frightened, but not of Cortez, which surprised Félix greatly. It took several minutes to understand why. They told their stories in an overly rapid and disjointed manner, which he allowed, memorizing the details – some of them conflicting, but that was not unexpected since there were two of them – before he began asking his own, directed questions.
“The rifles were not AK-47s,” one said positively. “I know the sound. It was not that one.” The other shrugged. He didn’t know one weapon from another.
“Did you see anyone?”
“No, señor. We heard the noise and the shouting, and we ran.”
Very sensible of you, Cortez noted. “Shouting, you say? In what language?”
“Why, in our language. We heard them chasing after us, but we ran. They didn’t catch us. We know the mountains,” the weapons expert explained.
“You saw and heard nothing else?”
“The shooting, the explosions, lights – flashes from the guns, that is all.”
“The place where it happened – how many times had you been there?”
“Many times, señor, it is where we make the paste.”
“Many times,” the other confirmed. “For over a year we have gone there.”
“You will tell no one that you came here. You will tell no one anything that you know,” Félix told them.
“But the families of -”
“You will tell no one,” Cortez repeated in a quiet, serious voice. Both men knew danger when they saw it. “You will be well rewarded for what you have done, and the families of the others will be compensated.”