Miguel's Gift Read online

  Still, Hayden had shown that he was equal to the physical challenges of the job. Most recently he’d sprinted a quarter mile to chase down a massive Greek ship-jumper, who’d thrown an agent off a tannery loading dock and fled with a wild look on his face. Hayden had used a wrestling technique he’d picked up in high school to drop the man to the ground with a dramatic thud and, after a struggle, had somehow been able to get cuffs around the Greek’s huge wrists before backup arrived. As the Greek outweighed Hayden by seventy pounds, it had meant something to Kane and the other agents.

  They continued south on Halsted Street, the heavy, boatlike Fury rising and dipping as though absorbing swells on Lake Michigan.

  “It would be easier to just pick them off the street than going to the job sites,” said Hayden, nodding at yet another bus stop cubicle filled with young Hispanic men.

  “Yeah, but headquarters wants us to go to factories so we can show we’re opening up jobs for Americans. Most of the wets on the street are working someplace, though, so in reality it doesn’t make any difference,” said Kane. “The whole enforcement program is a mess.”

  “What would you do to fix it?”

  “Simple. You need to prevent them from getting jobs by making them produce valid immigration documents—not the phony ones they use now. The law passed last year requires employers to check the documents of their employees, but it doesn’t require verification. If the documents and numbers are checked through INS before they’re hired, there’d be no way for them to work, and bingo!—the game’s over. If you cut off the jobs, you cut off the wets. They wouldn’t come. But the powers that be won’t do it because they know it would work. They want everybody to think it’s really complicated and almost impossible to resolve. The Republicans want cheap labor, and the Dems want the votes of the tonks who will eventually vote Democratic. All the new law did was lay the groundwork for a booming counterfeit document industry that everybody ignores. We’re stuck in the middle—you, me, and the tonks.”

  “What about the argument that they only take jobs nobody else wants?”

  “That’s bullshit. Sure, the restaurant workers, but look at the people we pick up. Meat-cutters and drywall workers are making good money. They get jobs in the trades—teamsters, construction workers. The wets are easier to control than American workers.”

  Judy Svoboda, one of only two female agents at the Chicago office, was leading this morning’s raid of a furniture factory on the South Side. Kane, following Svoboda and four other vehicles, turned off Halsted Street into an area of small, dreary-looking factories. A smoky discharge clouded the sky, and the pungent odor of industrial chemicals came through the car window. Kane grabbed the transmitter off the dash.

  “Where do you want us, Judy?”

  “Cover the back parking lot and the alley,” she said.

  Kane pointed up the street to an old brick warehouse. “That’s the place—usually loaded with Jamaicans.”

  As Svoboda and the other units pulled in front of the building, Kane drove through a side alley and parked in the nearly empty rear lot, where they could clearly view the only door at the back of the building. It was quiet, and the summer air was hot and gritty.

  “We’ll give them a few minutes,” said Kane. “They usually dig in here instead of trying to leave the premises.”

  Hayden was just as wary of working with Kane as the other way around. Like Willis, Kane had a giant chip on his shoulder, which Nick assumed was a defensive measure designed to conceal vulnerability. In fact, it seemed to him that many of his new colleagues had insecurities they chose to bury because it would be devastating to acknowledge doubts or inner turmoil that might be construed as weakness, and weakness could not be tolerated in this line of work.

  “How long have you been in this unit?” asked Hayden.

  “Four years. They like me here because I produce. But I wouldn’t mind a permanent assignment to Stark’s unit.”

  Hayden had heard a lot about Richard Stark’s fraud investigations unit, considered the most prestigious in investigations. The agents in fraud and the antismuggling unit were often seen moving purposefully through the hallway in sweatshirts and jeans, some of them sporting beards and long hair. They worked undercover criminal cases, using informants and sting operations to set up their targets. Almost all agents aspired to join the unit, if only to position themselves for a higher grade. But it was difficult to break into the unit because senior agents filled most of the positions.

  “You married?” asked Hayden.

  “Nope. You almost can’t be married and do the job right. You try to do both and you’ll be like a wad of silly putty—stretched in every direction. If you look at the real producers, they’re all single, or they’re headed in that direction. Better just to have girlfriends and don’t get trapped.” Kane spoke in a clipped staccato as if reciting indisputable facts.

  They sat quietly for several moments, and then Kane spoke. “Judy is probably going through the song and dance with the manager. He always stalls around to give the Jamaicans a chance to dig in. Let’s go.” He yanked the keys from the ignition.

  “Don’t we need to wait for her to give us the OK?”

  Kane glanced at Hayden with a playful look in his eye. “We saw a guy come out, see us, and run back inside. He was wearing braids to his shoulders and a T-shirt that said I LOVE JAMAICA. There’s our probable cause.”

  They left the vehicle and advanced toward the building. Kane opened the back door, looked inside, and motioned with his head for Hayden to follow. Hayden went in, shut the door behind him, and engaged the heavy chain lock.

  The two agents found themselves in a large room with brick walls, which was connected to the rest of the warehouse by an open gangway. The room was lit softly by lights high in the rafters and appeared to have been suddenly deserted, as music was playing on a portable radio at a large table and several workstations were strewn with tools and wrapping materials. Kane turned off the radio, and it became eerily quiet. Set back from the table were rows of cardboard boxes on pallets, stacked about fifteen feet high.

  “They’re probably hiding inside the boxes at the top,” said Kane, heading down one of the aisles. “I’ve found them here before.” He pulled a long, black metal flashlight from his belt.

  Hayden went down another aisle and began climbing a column of boxes, using the openings in the pallets as a ladder. He had almost reached the top when he heard a crash, the clatter of the flashlight, and Kane cursing loudly. Hayden jumped to the ground, raced toward Kane’s voice, and saw a black man with dreadlocks, clad in a blue work shirt and jeans, dashing toward the rear exit. The man had just disengaged the door’s chain lock when Hayden took hold of his shirt collar and pulled him back.

  “I want no trouble, man,” the Jamaican shouted. He held his hands out in front of him to show that he had no weapon.

  “OK, just get your hands up on the wall,” said Hayden, gripping the man’s arm.

  Before the man could turn around, the large hand of Tom Kane was pushing Hayden aside to grab the Jamaican by the throat. He flung the man against the brick wall and drove his fist into the man’s mouth. The back of the Jamaican’s head struck the wall, and he let out a groan.

  Hayden instinctively grabbed Kane’s arm and shoved him, sending him backpedaling awkwardly.

  “What the hell are you doing?” shouted Hayden, and then caught himself. He was on probation and had openly defied a senior officer.

  Kane quickly righted himself and was glaring at the exit door, which now stood open, a mild wind blowing through it—the Jamaican nowhere in sight. Hayden ran outside into the parking lot and scanned the area, but there was no sign of the man. He ran to the edge of the building and looked down the alley, but all was quiet there as well. He stood silently for several seconds, hoping to see or hear something that would give away the Jamaican’s escape route, but there was nothing. Finally Hayden turned back toward the factory door to find Kane leaning his elbow again
st the doorway, still breathing heavily.

  “Nice going, Chief,” said Kane, his eyes aflame.

  “The guy was scared. He wasn’t going anywhere,” said Hayden calmly.

  “He knocked me to the floor and you’re worried about him?”

  Kane clenched his fists and strode toward Hayden. Just then Charlie McCloud appeared in the doorway behind Kane.

  “You guys all right out here?” asked McCloud.

  Kane stopped and spun toward McCloud.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” said Hayden, who relaxed his defensive posture.

  “We just lost a runner, that’s all,” said Kane, whose rumpled shirt was pulled out in front over his belt.

  McCloud paused and looked at them, waiting for the real story, but neither spoke. “OK,” he said finally, “we could use your help inside. They’ve got eleven Jamaicans in the lunchroom.”

  “Sure, Charlie,” said Hayden, walking past McCloud and through the door.

  McCloud, who was familiar with Kane’s unorthodox methods, looked at him suspiciously.

  “I’ll pull our car around front,” Kane said.

  “Yeah, you do that,” said McCloud. As Kane turned toward his car, McCloud shook his head and walked back into the factory.

  * * *

  It was a cool autumn morning, still a bit dark outside the Polish restaurant. Willis sat rigidly at the table, coffee cup in hand, engrossed in the newspaper. Hayden perused the sports page and looked up the aisle whenever the waitress with nice legs rushed by. Occasionally he would check on Willis, observing him as a person might watch a tropical fish, more a curiosity than a threat.

  All the senior agents had plenty of Joe Willis stories, like the time Willis “arrested” a new agent, Arturo Santos, who’d been sitting innocently in area control on his first day on the job. Willis had unceremoniously thrown Santos into the crowded lockup, ignoring Santos’s claim that he had not yet been issued a badge and identification. When the truth emerged, instead of apologizing, Willis excoriated local management for not warning everybody that they’d hired a new agent who looked wet. “They should have put his mug shot on the damn bulletin board,” he declared angrily.

  Though Willis was entertaining in his way, Hayden had hoped for a new partner when he returned from the academy. Unfortunately, nobody other than a trainee would put up with Willis, so they were stuck with each other for the time being.

  “This so-called war on drugs is a loser,” muttered Willis, staring down at a Chicago Tribune story about the mountains of federal money spent to fight drug lords.

  “I suppose it can’t really be controlled,” Hayden offered blandly.

  “You want to legalize drugs, is that it?” grumbled Willis, without looking up from the paper. “What a charming idea.”

  It didn’t matter how hard Hayden tried. Willis seemed to enjoy twisting anything Nick said to spark an argument or emphasize the gulf between them. Hayden knew it wasn’t really personal, that he would give any trainee a hard time, especially one who hadn’t been in the Patrol.

  Willis himself had gone through rough times when he’d started with the Patrol thirty years earlier in Brownsville, Texas. Born and raised in a lower-middle-class suburb of Chicago, Willis, with his strange accent and fast-talking intensity, had been treated as an outsider, especially during his first year on the border. If he’d had to go through it, so should everybody else.

  After finishing his fifth cup of coffee, Willis looked at his watch, winked at the waitress, and threw a dollar bill on the table. “Let’s go to work, trainee,” he said coolly. Willis pulled sunglasses from the pocket of his sport coat and marched into the emerging sunshine as if he didn’t care whether Hayden followed him or not.

  As Hayden pulled the Ford Torino onto the Stevenson Expressway, Willis rifled through the glove compartment as though looking for something to read, wiped an undetectable layer of grime from the inside of the front windshield, and spent several minutes on the radio making important-sounding but thoroughly unnecessary calls to other agents involved in the day’s operation. Finally he settled down and began a lecture on the true merits of various federal law enforcement agencies as opposed to their public images.

  Hayden had already heard several versions of this narrative from Willis, and his mind drifted. Peering out the window, he wondered whether the white cloud that hung over the sleepy town of McCook was mist rising from the nearby canal or pollution from smokestacks that stood inelegantly in the distance. He recalled playing a baseball game in McCook as a teenager and losing a fly ball in the opaque, misty sky. His mind fell deeper into the past, until a name jolted him like a strong whiff of ammonia.

  “Buck Tatum,” declared Willis, who tilted his head up as if scouring his memory for an image of Tatum. “Only federal agent in Chicago to smoke a guy in the last fifteen years. FBI in Chicago hasn’t in years, even with thirty times the number of agents we have. The average citizen thinks FBI agents are out there risking life and limb on a daily basis. Hell, most of ’em never make arrests. How can you develop any street smarts if you’re not out there making arrests and getting into fights and all the shit we have to do?”

  “So Tatum was an immigration agent?”

  “Yeah—an INS agent, not FBI, not DEA,” sputtered Willis.

  “Were you there when it went down—the shooting?”

  “No, I wasn’t there. But we lost a good man because of the trainee.”

  “What happened?”

  Willis sighed and paused a moment to pull up the details in his mind. “Well, a guy named Frank Kelso was working with this rookie . . . Landau, I think was his name. Smart kid, but not cut out for police work—had no Patrol experience. Kelso and the trainee were riding together somewhere on the North Side, Tatum following them.”

  Willis picked bits of lint from his polyester slacks as he continued.

  “Kelso had a great nose for wets—could pick ’em out of a crowd as well as anybody I ever knew. He sees a guy who looks suspicious—a big guy from Argentina it turned out. So Kelso jumps out of the car and he’s talking to him, but before he can cuff him, the guy starts fighting.”

  Joe lit a fresh Lucky and cracked the window open. Hayden had become rigid behind the wheel.

  “So they’re both struggling with the wet, trying to get him under control. But the wet goes for Kelso’s gun and manages to fire a round—right into Kelso’s heart. He’s dead, or will be in a few minutes. Tatum shoots the guy in the head, killing him. But Landau never gets a shot off—never even gets his gun out. If he’d reacted like he should have, Kelso would still be here. Guess he didn’t have it in him to kill a guy, even when his partner’s life was threatened.”

  “Is that what Tatum said?”

  “Tatum was pretty closemouthed about it. Whole thing upset him—wouldn’t talk to anyone. But they did an investigation and that’s what came out.”

  “What kind of a guy was Buck Tatum?”

  “He was in the Patrol for sixteen years. Good man, until the shooting. Then he was different.” Willis took a long drag from the cigarette and sent a billow of smoke out the window.

  “Different how?”

  “Shooting seemed to hollow him out—walked around like a fucking ghost. He retired about a year later. Disappeared. Might be dead, for all I know.” Willis paused a moment and then turned toward Hayden. “Why you so interested in Tatum?”

  Hayden had to concentrate to prevent a shake in his voice. “It’s not Tatum. It’s the shooting. You don’t hear about stuff like that very often. Maybe I can learn something from it.”

  Willis spit out a piece of loose tobacco. “One thing you can learn is if your partner’s life is threatened, you act without hesitation.”

  “Right,” said Hayden. His heart was thumping and perspiration covered his forehead. He was grateful when a garbled radio transmission came through the speaker. Willis grabbed the mic and bent over to listen to the scratchy voice—somebody asking for their location and ETA. Hay
den used the distraction to take a deep breath and wipe the sweat from his forehead. Willis gave a lengthy response and put the microphone back in its holder on the dash.

  “To get back to my point, the bureau would have us believe that Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who shot a guy every week on television, is a realistic portrait. That’s what they tell them at Quantico, and like a bunch of Boy Scouts, they believe it.”

  By now they had left the scented mist over McCook behind and the sky had cleared, but Hayden had retreated deep into his thoughts and was oblivious of his surroundings. Though Willis spoke with authority about the shooting, how reliable was his account, no doubt tainted by personal prejudice and the passage of time? Willis had seen nothing himself, so anything he said was suspect, and crucial details were missing. That calmed Nick a bit. He took another deep breath and tried to push it from his mind. He had no choice. In a few minutes, they would begin another roundup of wets.

  2

  He often shambled down Twenty-Sixth Street, smiling at everybody as if he were running for political office. Standing six feet two and weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, Marcos Ortega was a commanding presence. His large, round face was dominated by a hooked nose and a thick, black mustache that curved around his mouth bandito-style. Some were drawn to him by his sunny disposition; others were intimidated by his size.

  Mesmerized by stories of unlimited opportunities in America, Marcos had left his remote Mexican village at the age of twenty-five, slipped across the Rio Grande, and headed straight to Chicago, where he’d been welcomed into his uncle’s home in the largely Hispanic Pilsen area on the South Side. Ambitious by nature, he’d taken an English course for Spanish-speaking immigrants, augmenting what he’d already learned at his Catholic school in Mexico. Without legal papers or connections, he’d not been averse to starting at the bottom of the economic ladder, and took a job as a dishwasher at a busy Mexican restaurant on Eighteenth Street. There he’d met a waitress by the name of Connie Salinas.