I hesitated a moment and then looked at Earl in the rearview.
“Go ahead, Earl. But stay close. Where I can see you.”
What I really wanted was for Earl to be able to see me. I wanted a witness because I didn’t know what Marco was about to pull.
“You sure?” Earl asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Earl got out of the car and closed the door. He walked a few feet forward and leaned against the front fender of the car with his arms folded. I looked across the seat at Marco.
“Okay, what do you want?” I said. “Are you following me?”
He seemed to ruminate on the questions before deciding to answer.
“No, I’m not following you,” he finally said. “I came to check out a lawyer who’s been trying to paper me and here I see you. You and him, working together.”
It was a good answer because it was plausible. It avoided confirmation that Marco had been the one who had jacked my car, and he seemed pleased with it, even though he had not convinced me. I put Marco in his midforties. He carried an aura about him, a sense of confidence and knowledge, like a guy who knows he’s two moves ahead of everybody else.
“What do you want?” I asked again.
“What I want is to help you avoid fucking up in a major way.”
“And what way is that?”
Marco proceeded as though he had not heard the question.
“Do you know the word sicario, Counselor?”
He said it with full Latin inflection. I glanced away from him and out the window, then I looked back.
“I’ve heard it said, I think.”
“There is no real English translation for the word, but it’s what they call the cartel assassins down in Mexico. Sicarios.”
“Thanks for the education.”
“Down there the laws are different than we’ve got up here. Do you know that they have no legal code or provision that allows a teenager to be charged as an adult? No matter what they do, no charges as an adult and no incarceration beyond the age of eighteen for the crimes they commit as children.”
“That’s good to know for the next time I’m down there, Marco, but I practice law right here in California.”
“Consequently, the cartels recruit and train teenagers as their sicarios. If they get caught and convicted, they do a year, maybe two, and then they’re out at eighteen and ready to go back to work. You see?”
“I see that it’s a real tragedy. No way those boys come out rehabilitated, that’s for sure.”
Marco showed no reaction to my sarcasm.
“At sixteen years of age Hector Arrande Moya admitted in a courtroom in Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa that he had tortured and murdered seven people by the time he was fifteen. Two of them were women. Three of them he hung in a basement and four he set on fire while they were still alive. He raped both the women and he cut all of the bodies up afterward and fed the remains to the coyotes in the hills.”
“And what’s that have to do with me?”
“He did all of this on orders from the cartel. You see, he was raised in the cartel. And when he got out of the penta at eighteen he went right back to the cartel. By then, of course, he had a nickname. They called him El Fuego—because he burned people.”
I checked my watch in a show of impatience.
“That’s a good story, but why tell it to me, Marco? What about you? What about the—”
“This is the man you conspire with Fulgoni to set free. El Fuego.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only person I am trying to set free is Andre La Cosse. He is sitting in a cell right now, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. But I’ll tell you this much about Hector Moya. You want to put the motherfucker away for life, then make the case fair and square in the first place. Don’t—”
I cut myself off and raised my hands, palms out. Enough.
“Just get out of my car now,” I said quietly. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll talk to you in court.”
“There’s a war, Haller, and you have to choose which side you’re on. There are sacrifices that—”
“Oh, now you’re going to talk to me about choices? What about Gloria Dayton, was she a choice? Was she a sacrifice? Fuck you, Marco. There are rules, rules of law. Now get out of my car.”
For five seconds we just stared at each other. But finally Marco blinked. He cracked his door and slowly backed out of the car. He then leaned down and looked back in at me.
“Jennifer Aronson.”
I spread my hands as if waiting for whatever it was he still had to say.
“Who?”
He smiled.