Hector drew again on the cigarette, sucking the last residue of crack from the tobacco. Then he dropped the half-smoked butt on the tile and ignored it. His good eye flickered open. He grinned drunkenly. He looked at Grace’s breasts like a boy who had just discovered girls were different.

“So you have un amado, like su esposo,” Hector said.

“My ex-husband has many women.” She shrugged. “I stopped caring a long time ago.”

“Ah, but your husband mus’ be ver’ angry. Tha’s why he no care for his son. Maybe he punishes you?”

“He stopped caring a long time ago, too.”

Faroe thought fast and mean. At the rate Hector was blazing through crack cigarettes, they didn’t have much time left to work with even a marginally sane man.

“We saved your life,” Faroe said, “because we have a deal to offer you. You interested?”

Hector’s hand paused on the way to his cigarette case. “Digame.”

“We’ll trade you Ted Franklin for Lane. Straight across. No side deals.” Faroe’s voice was calm. The rest of him was on red alert. It was make-or-break time, and he didn’t know how well Her Honor could lie.

It had to be good.

Hector looked skeptically at Grace. “You can do this?”

“Give you Ted?” she asked.

“Si.”

“On a golden platter, with a roll of hundred-dollar bills in his mouth.”

It was good.

37

TIJUANA

SUNDAY, 10:41 P.M.

HECTOR LAUGHED ROUGH AND loud. “Aiee, a ball-breaker.”

“You’ll never get the chance to find out,” Grace shot back, her face a cold mask.

“No, no, Your Honor, I say it con respecto,” Hector said.

“Bueno, jefe,” Faroe said evenly. “Now speak to me, because I’m the one who will cut off Franklin’s head and carry it south in a box. ?Comprende?”

For several long seconds Hector studied Faroe. Then he nodded. “Usted es un hombre fuerte y formal. We make deal.”

“Good. Why do you want Franklin?” Faroe asked.

Hector didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “The judge? She don’ know?”

“She was never part of Ted’s business. He was never part of hers.”

Hector squinted at both of them for a long time. He pulled the leather case from his pocket and stuffed another cigarette into his mouth. He toyed with the lighter like a pipe smoker buying time to think.

“?Es verdad?” he asked Grace. “Is true?”

“I tried to tell you that the other day,” she said. “Ted’s business with you and Carlos is his own.”

Hector made a face, as if hearing Calderon’s name left a bad taste in his mouth. “He is un hijo de la chingada,” Hector said bitterly. “Carlos cause this, him and todos los jefes politicos. Strong men like me take all the bullets and los politicos sit clean and pretty and collect la mordida-the bite, you know?-for the plaza.”

“I understand,” Faroe said.

Hector hissed through his teeth and stared down the hallway toward the counting room.

Faroe wondered if the explosion had finally found a fuse.

“You are politico,” Hector said to Grace. “How much you take for the rent of the plaza?”

“Bribery?”

“Si, si,” he said impatiently.

“We don’t do business like that in America.”

“Boolsheet! All government like that. How much you take from men like me?”

Grace looked at Faroe. What now?

Fortunately Hector kept talking. “Los politicos in Tijuana and Mexico City bite me good. That room has more than twelve million gringo dollars, if the smugglers and facilitadores don’ cheat me much. You hear me, Judge?”

“Yes.”

“That is-?como se dice? Loan?”

“Rent,” Faroe said, hoping to defuse Hector’s rage.

“Rent. Two weeks.” Hector’s voice rose. “That is what the plaza de Tijuana cost me. Two focking weeks.”

Grace’s eyes widened. She looked at Faroe.

“That sounds about right,” Faroe said evenly. “The politicians charge Hector six million a week so that he can risk his life and the lives of his family running a dangerous, violent business.”

“Si, si. ?Exactamente! I pay todo el mundo. Guns and men and food and women-these not free. I am a great milking goat,” Hector yelled. “And then they put horns on my head and fock me in the ass. ?Aiee!”

Grace tried to look sympathetic, but doubted her acting skills were up to it. Hector screwed the men beneath him and the politicians screwed Hector.

She wouldn’t give a pile of dog turds for any of them.

“Where does Ted Franklin fit into this?” Faroe asked.

“He stole from me, the pinche money los politicos don’ take!”

With that, Hector erupted into the kind of Spanish Faroe didn’t want to translate for Grace. Instead, he provided a running commentary on the core of Hector’s rant.

“Carlos and Jaime talked Hector into buying a bank from Ted,” Faroe said softly. “Hector didn’t want to. He has a cash business, so he ‘don’ need no focking bank.’”

Hector took a breath, spotted Jaime, and yelled, “Jaime, Jaime, ?andale pues!”

Jaime spun around in his high-backed executive chair. He looked angry but he kept his mouth shut. Obviously he had experience with his uncle’s drug-fueled rage.

Hector gave his nephew a one-eyed glare. “Jaime, tell your plan grande, the plan you make with that cabron Carlos and his cabron amigo, Franklin. Tell how el Banco de San Marcos feex everything.”

As he spoke, Hector made moist, scornful noises and pumped his hips to demonstrate his contempt for his nephew and his big ideas.

Faroe had been watching Grace. She’d ignored Hector’s crude sign language, but her eyelids flickered at the mention of Banco de San Marcos.

Jaime came to his feet like a feral cat. He glared at Faroe, then at Grace, but when he turned to his uncle, his face was neutral, blank.

“This Jaime here, he genius,” Hector went on sarcastically, his accent getting thicker the madder he got. “Beesness degree. Aiee, cabron. He need machines to make a beesness I make out of my head.”

“Times have changed, jefe,” Jaime said evenly. “We can’t compete with other organizations if we don’t-”

“No,” Hector said, waving his cigarette wildly. “You want to own this beesness I shit bullets to make.”

“I simply want to rationalize it,” Jaime said. His eyes said they’d been around this track as many times as any greyhound.

“Boolsheet! Beesness is blood and fear and power!”

“I don’t think our business should be discussed in front of strangers, people who do not wish us well,” Jaime said.

Hector turned a torrent of Spanish on his nephew.

Faroe translated the meat of it for Grace. “Listen, pendejo, you don’t have any problem talking about our business to Carlos Calderon. Who are you to tell me who I can talk to?”

A man hurried into the room, a burrito in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. He circled the shouting Hector to put the paper on Jaime’s desk.

“You talk to that cabron Ted Franklin,” Faroe continued translating. “These people-that’s you and me, Grace-aren’t dangerous to ROG. We have what they want. They have what we want. So tell them our secrets, just as you have already told our enemies.”

Jaime looked uncomfortable. “Uncle, you are tired. Your judgment is-”

Hector drew his pistol and fired four times at the man armed only with a burrito. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Grace made a choked sound.

Faroe grabbed her and pulled her away from Jaime, who had the look of a man marked for immediate death.

Armed men poured into the room.

“Uncle, I swear to-”

Hector backhanded Jaime across the mouth, sending the younger man staggering.

Faroe went back to translating Hector’s words in a voice only Grace could hear. “Don’t, burro. Don’t presume to talk to me. You are very bright. You have a very good education that I paid for. Someday you might make a good man in our business, but you are not ready yet to take over from me. Until you are, never again question my judgment. Never.”

Faroe waited.

So did everyone else in the room.

Hector shoved his pistol back into his belt and gestured toward the body on the floor.

Faroe murmured along with Hector’s words. “Take that cabron and dump him with the garbage. A little warning for other traitors who walk past me to do Jaime’s work.”

Flushed, all but choking on rage, Jaime waited for whatever came next. He watched Hector with the eyes of a man looking for the best place to slide in a knife.

While the body was hauled away, Hector dug out the leather box and stuck a new cocaine cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“You okay?” Faroe asked Grace very softly.

“No.”

“Can you keep it together a little longer?”

“Yes.”

He squeezed her arm and wondered if she understood the dynamics of cocaine intoxication. Irritability and irrationality were just the beginning. Paranoia and delusions followed close on.

Then things would get ugly.

Hector turned toward Grace and Faroe and said in English, “So, wha’ you think?”

“You’re very efficient,” Faroe said, ignoring the trails of blood on the white marble floor and the grim humor of the men dragging out the body. “Shall we set up the details of our trade?”

“Si, but first, you come with me. I show you efficient. Then you know don’ fock with Hector Rivas Osuna.”