The Famous and the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

liar. You want to believe a prison snitch over a second-year deputy? When did you sell your soul?”
    â€œEasy now.”
    â€œThere’s nothing
easy
about this. Can’t you just figure out what you’re doing, then do it?”
    â€œWe’re close. I do appreciate your cooperation.”
    â€œYou want me to just walk away from the job? Well, I can’t, because I have a pregnant wife and a son I’d like to feed. Oh, I made your watchers weeks ago. The new ones, the two men so bland looking I’m not supposed to know they’re following me.”
    Warren looked over the screen at Jones and shrugged, then tapped something on the keyboard. “You’re friendly with Eme and Florencia people here in L.A. Such as Rocky Carrasco. Whose son you rescued from kidnappers on your first day as a patrol deputy.”
    â€œI should
apologize
for that?”
    Warren studied him. “You knew exactly when and where Herredia’s men would try to buy a hundred machine pistols up in Lancaster. The Love Thirty-twos. One of the runners being Octavio Leyal.”
    â€œI was working an informant, a damned good one. All of it came from him.”
    â€œBut you could never deliver your informant to us for questioning.”
    â€œHe did what people under pressure do, Jim. He vanished. I’ve told you a hundred times, too.”
    Warren tapped the keyboard again. “Tell me about those two weeks you took off last October. Four months ago.”
    Bradley sighed and picked up his hat and slouched back down into the chair. The hat was the Corazón Espinado, a shantung Panama designed by Carlos Santana. His wife had given it to him. Bradley loved the graphic of the guitar stabbing through a human heart and considered the ninety-five-dollar cost a bargain. “One last time? I took Erin to Mexico. She was pregnant and exhausted from work and we wanted to relax. You’ve seen my passport with the customs stamps on it, so you know I’m telling the truth.”
    â€œYou fished for tarpon and snorkeled.”
    Bradley looked at Warren for a long beat, then turned his attention to the hat in his hands. Finally he nodded and closed his eyes.
Think up something pleasant,
he thought. He imagined Erin, pregnant with his son and lovely. He imagined her onstage, belting one out. He imagined his home in Valley Center, the barn and the big oak tree. He imagined Carlos Herredia’s compound, El Dorado, and its sprawling adobe house and casitas, and the pool that shimmered with cool salt water, and the golf course upon which Herredia happily cheated, and the thoroughbreds and the food and wine and the time Herredia had thrown Bradley’s gift—an expensive fishing reel—into the air and blown it to bits with one round from a .50-caliber Desert Eagle handgun.
    â€œSnorkeling and tarpon fishing in the Yucatán. You live large, Bradley. Don’t you?”
    â€œYou exhaust my soul.”
    â€œExplain your riches.”
    â€œMy mother left me a bundle and my wife is a popular performer. You know these things. I’ve told you. You’ve seen my tax returns—good enough for the IRS, I might add. If you don’t believe my answers, make up some of your own.”
    â€œYou know, Bradley, when IA kicked this investigation up to me two months ago, I was pulling for you. I’d followed your ups and downs. I figured you were a spirited deputy, young and lucky. But the more I talk to you and the people around you, the more I think you’re in it up to your eyes. Carrasco and Florencia, the North Baja Cartel. Your arrest and interview reports—ninety percent of your narcotics contacts comes from Mara Salvatrucha and Eighteenth Street, both lined up with the Gulf Cartel. Then suddenly you vanish for two weeks to the Yucatán with two more of my deputies, on a so-called fishing trip, and who dies in a gun battle five miles from where you’re fishing? Benjamin