Gone (Michael Bennett)

off his sister when Cristiano idly mentioned that a new Irish priest had been handing out cans at the food bank with three kids, one of them an Asian girl.
    Right away, he put it together with the cartel APB. The Mexicans were looking for a large, strange family with adopted kids and an old Irish priest, hiding in or around Susanville. A half-million-dollar purse was being offered for information. Might even be some negotiating room there, too, he was told. The Mexicans wanted these people bad.
    It didn’t take too much asking around to hear that the priest had also been spotted filling in for Father Walter, and that the family had driven to church in one of Aaron Cody’s beaters. Now here they were. Thirty feet away. All five hundred Gs’ worth of them.
    He’d been one of the first to understand the wisdom of partnering up with the cartels when they started moving into the Central Valley, four years before. He was no brain surgeon, but he was smart enough to know what men who truly didn’t give a shit about killing people looked like. Smart enough to know that getting on the wrong side of folks that serious was not an option if you didn’t have a second set of eyeballs in the back of your head and liked waking up alive every day.
    He’d become involved in the marijuana-growing business about a year after getting back to his hometown, Susanville, from an ’05 stint in Iraq with the army. He’d traded in the M1 Abrams tank he’d been driving for a beer truck and had applied to the huge state prison nearby, like every other sucker in town, when he bumped into some old buddies who had a grow house going. He’d helped them expand and organize it, ramp up production and sales until they were the biggest outfit around. Heck, he hadn’t even had to kill anyone. Just put a few guns to a few people’s heads.
    But now, squatting there in the dark like some Peeping Tom, he actually felt a little bad. He had a few rug rats of his own, and it was doubtful that the cartel wanted to find these people in order to deliver a Publishers Clearing House prize. But the problem was, half his crop had been seized by the state park rangers a month before. He owed a lot of dangerous people a lot of money he didn’t have.
    Here’s an opportunity to make everybody happy and then some , the man in black thought. Expand or, even better, quit altogether. Get out while he was young and rich, with his head still connected to his neck.
    It wasn’t his idea, the man in black finally decided with a sigh as he sat there, listening and recording the family’s laughter on his iPhone.
    It wasn’t his fault that God made the world so dog-eat-dog.

CHAPTER 73
     
    SIX HUNDRED MILES TO the south, Vida Gomez was lighting a bath candle in the guest powder room when her cell rang.
    She stepped out and opened a sliding door to take it on the balcony. They were in the Hollywood Hills now, the lights of Los Angeles spread out below in the huge bowl of the valley, white on black, like cocaine on black velvet. The new safe house was pretty much bereft of furniture, but it actually suited the place. It was nothing but sterile stone and glass, clean and cold, just the way she liked it.
    “Vida, I have news,” Estefan said excitedly. “I just received a call. We have a lead.”
    Vida blinked. She had sent Estefan up to Susanville to see what he could see immediately after they’d dumped the agent at Venice Beach two days before. Already he had made progress. This was good news.
    “OK, slow down,” she said. “Is it credible?”
    “It can’t be confirmed, but I’ve been speaking to our people up here, getting them to put out the word about the reward, just like you said. One of the locals just called me directly. He claims to know the exact location of the Bennetts. There’s a problem, though.”
    “What is it?”
    “The informant wants more money. He wants a million, and he wants half up front. What should I do?”
    “Sit by the phone. I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.
    She went back inside as Manuel came out of the bedroom in a short silk robe. Most crime lords got fat when they got rich, but not the Sun King. He worked out like a madman with weights for an hour every day and ran for another on the treadmill. He was a health-food nut. Though he was in his mid-forties, he could easily pass for thirty-five.
    She couldn’t help but stare at his broad shoulders as he went into the kitchen and took some pomegranate juice out of