Godchild Read Online Free PDF Page A

cup.
    “That’s part of the point,” he said, blowing into his cup with pursed lips.
    I made a time-out T with my hands, shook my head from left to right and back again. “Maybe I’m missing something here, but anyone with half a brain knows the penalties for running dope across the border.”
    Tony drank some coffee and set the cup down on the grand piano beside the briefcase. “She wasn’t interested in selling drugs so much as she had an interest in experiencing the process of selling drugs.” A bewildered wave of his hands. “At least, that’s Richard’s story.”
    “She took a chance like that for a book?” I asked.
    “For an article, actually. But that’s not important.”
    “What is important?”
    “There are two kinds of drug runners presently operating in Mexico,” Tony explained. “There are the so-called burriers, a term derived from burro, or mule, combined with courier. The burriers are usually rich women who like to move cocaine not for the money, but for the sheer thrill of it.”
    And the second kind?
    “The second group,” he said, “is made up of poverty-stricken women who have no choice but to move small amounts of cocaine paste.”
    I drank some coffee. It was getting cold.
    “If the burriers are rich already” I asked, “then why risk taking that kind of chance? They need the rush that badly?”
    “I suspect Renata was on her way to answering that question, paisan, before she was nabbed at the border.”
    It all came back to me in tidal waves: Renata Barnes. A petite woman with short auburn hair and wild blue eyes. I pictured her on the set of the Today show a while back, when her best-seller Godchild had just stormed the country, thanks to Oprah. I recalled how she was forced to respond to allegations about the suspicious drowning death of her own kid. How it mimicked in absolute detail the fictitious drowning death of the child in the novel—a drowning death that was the result of murder. In my mind I saw Renata once more, storming off the set of Today in tears.
    When Tony went upstairs I got up from the couch, stretched. I felt silly and somehow dirty, still dressed in my wrinkled wedding blazer and slacks. I wanted a shower and maybe a drink. Both would have to wait.
    I stood by the window wall. Outside, a clear blue sky. A layer of fresh snow covered the front lawn of the governor’s mansion. The snow contrasted sharply with the black parking lot directly beside it. It hurt to look at the snow when it reflected the sun. I ran my hand over the small bruise on my chin. It must have formed when Tony walloped me. I looked down on the guard shack at the mansion gates and the tall, wrought-iron fence that spanned the perimeter of the property. Despite what Tony had told me about Renata, he never once pressed the matter of my walking out on him and Val. Not really.
    While I fingered the business-size envelope folded up inside my jacket pocket, I half wanted to blurt out what had happened. How the black Buick had just shown up. Then maybe beg forgiveness, as if Tony were in the business of forgiving. But I knew he was smarter than that. In his own way, I knew he’d get to what went wrong with my second wedding in due time. For now the thing to do was concentrate on the business at hand, absorb all he had to tell me about Renata, regardless if in the end I decided not to take on the job.
    When Tony came back down, he was dressed in a clean blue suit. He was fixing the sleeves of his jacket by tugging on the cuffs with the tips of his fingers.
    “So what is it you want from me?” I said.
    “Renata was busted three days ago.”
    “In the desert.” A question.
    “Just outside Monterrey,” he said. “Far as we know, she’s locked in a holding cell in the basement of the town’s maximum-security prison, where she’s awaiting trial.”
    “You’re sure of this.” Another question.
    “I have a communication from the Mexican Attorney General. Man by the name of Jorge