An Absence of Principal by Jimmy Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

before beginning a story that was hard to tell.
    “Full disclosure now,” Alex began. “I recently spent some time out of the country, Mr. Trask. Cocaine follows a very distinct life path and it doesn’t care who gets killed along the way. The people who handle it, farm it, process it, transport it, store it and deliver it care even less. What I’ve seen you couldn’t make into a movie, and you wouldn’t believe, even as seasoned as you are in your job defending these two-bit users and killers and street sellers, what happens out there beyond this country.”
    Garrison dabbed at his mouth after finishing the last swallow of his coffee, his eyes staying on Alex as she spoke.
     
     
    She had provoked a reaction from Garrison. Just a small tilt of the eyebrow, but Garrison began to wonder just what kind of a background his new employee brought with her.
    “I’ve heard a few stories,” he said. “But I probably don’t know as much as I should. We’re fairly insulated here in West Texas. We like to think we’re frontier-living, modern-day cowboys. But that’s not the case.”
    She nodded to the server who refilled her latte cup with a decaf. She again nudged her hair back out of her face with a move of her left hand, a nervous habit Garrison thought, then poured sugar into her cup, stirred, and began her story.
    “Two years ago I told my husband that I had been transferred to a remote part of South America because of my job. We were going through a rough spot, but he never much liked my work even though he knew what I did when he married me.”
    “What kind of work did you do?” Garrison asked.
    “I was a field agent for DEA. You may or may not know this, but you go where they send you, or you lose your job or get stuck on a desk in some remote part of the country, and you also lose any feeling of security against the narcotic underworld that you felt the agency might have somehow been providing for you. Anyway, my transfer as I called it, was a bit of a lie to Pierce, my husband. In all the time I had put in with DEA I had always been fascinated with tracking one or two single kilograms of coke, step by step. I thought it would help me understand my job better, and frankly it had always fascinated me since I was young and would turn on the TV and see the stories about smuggling and how it was responsible for so much of our crime here. I wanted to learn what all went into two kilos, from when it is planted all the way through the end-game scenario, when someone puts it up their nose, or lights it, or shoots it or flushes it down a toilet. And I did that. Most of the way. I convinced DEA to let me take it on. And it was good for them because I was excess baggage. And they looked at it as an opportunity to collect more intellectual property on the enemy, if you will — the narco-terrorists of the Latino underworld. So what I did was quite simple: I followed two grams of cocaine from harvest onward.”
    Alex took a drink from her cup of decaf, careful to wipe away a spot of it from the corner of her mouth with an extended pinky.
    “I met a woman named Maria in the Aguileres region of Argentina in 2001. I’m fluent in a number of Spanish dialects. I think you can probably see that with a little brown hair coloring I could pass for a Latino if I had to. Maria and I became good friends in the short time we knew each other.”
    “I’ve heard of the Aguileres region,” Garrison said. “Learned about it during some training with the feds early on. It’s been targeted by the narco cops for a number of years, I know. I apparently don’t need to tell you that. It’s small, fairly remote as I recall. So, did you just wander into town one day? Weren’t there some suspicions about who you were?”
    “It’s small, but not so small that people would notice you just because you come into town one day. Maria was my age, thirty-five. Beautiful woman. Some of the villagers would often confuse us; some thought we were