“What do you want to do? I can’t just give it back to Escabar.”
I had to sit down. It was all too much. There we were, sitting in the police department, but unable to get any help from them. In fact, they had done absolutely nothing to keep us safe and planned to do nothing at all. My breathing started to become labored. I felt like I was going to pass out.
“Chase, we have to go to your father. Maybe if we give Escabar the money and continue to tell him we don’t have his book, he will let us go. Or at least pay him the money, and we can take off out of town or something.”
“Do you think if we pay him the money he won’t come after us? He knows it was me who took the black book, Jordan. He’ll come after me.”
“Okay, don’t get mad…” I said calmly, as I reached into my bag and pulled out an exact replica of the black book.
“What the hell is that?” Chase said as he grabbed it.
“It’s just a book that looks like Escabar’s. I got it when we were at the courthouse. Remember when I said I saw a huge spider?”
“Shit, that looks just like it.”
“I know. I had hoped to copy down the information in Escabar’s book onto this one. But I guess if they kept the book, we won’t be able to.”
“No, we can do it. I’ll ask them to see the book. It’s not theirs. I brought it in. We will copy the information over.”
“Chase, they aren’t going to give it to you. We need to think of a different plan.”
He just looked at me with worry in his eyes. Neither of us had a plan that seemed like it was capable of working. There just wasn’t any way we would get out of Escabar’s reach. He wanted us dead, and he wasn’t going to stop until it happened.
“I don’t know if this would work or really how it might work, but what if we turned Escabar’s boss against him?” I suggested.
It was something I had seen in one of the shows I watched. The police couldn’t get the local bad guy legally, but they could get his own people to turn on him and kill him. It was totally a shot in the dark, but at that point, we needed anything we could get in order to try and save our asses.
“So, you think we should go to Ramos, the drug cartel leader, and turn in Escabar? What exactly would we say in order to get him to go after Escabar?”
“I have no idea.”
Chase and I both laughed at the suggestion. Although I could tell he was thinking about it, just as I was. There would be a certain kind of irony in it, if Jose Escabar ended up getting killed by his own boss.
“I’ve got an idea, but I really don’t know if we can pull it off or not,” Chase said tentatively.
“What?”
“Well, what if we brought the fake black book to Ramos and told him that we overheard Escabar saying he was going to the feds and getting out of the business? Maybe we could fake some entries. I remember some of the names. We could just make the rest up. The key would be getting Ramos to believe that Escabar wanted out.”
“Wouldn’t they just let him out of the business?” I asked.
“No, not someone as high up as Jose Escabar. He’s in it for life. But I could say I had been working with him, maybe like Marco does. There is no way Ramos knows all of Escabar’s employees. I’ll just say I was concerned I was going to get turned into the feds. I was concerned that Escabar wanted to retire and would give us all up to the feds to get a cushy deal.”
Chase’s idea didn’t seem totally unreasonable. It was dangerous as hell, though. Neither of us knew this Ramos guy or how much he knew about Escabar and his operation in Atlanta. For all we knew, the two guys could be very close friends. If that were the case, we would both be killed the second we tried our plan.
“If we are going to do this, how the heck are we going to get hold of this Ramos guy? I’m sure his number isn’t listed in the yellow pages.” I laughed.
He stopped to think out his idea.
“Perhaps we could flip Marco? Or maybe we could get that friend of yours, Salina, to turn and give us the information?”
Just the mention of Salina made my skin crawl. I had thought she wanted to be my friend, and she was truly just a goon who worked for Escabar. The last thing in the world that I wanted to do was try to talk to her.
“I think Marco is just too close to Escabar. As much as I hate to admit it, a meeting with Salina would probably be best. If we could offer her some money for the information, I’m sure she would be much more willing.”
Money, it always came back to money. I knew that Chase didn’t have any money, and I certainly didn’t have much of it. But we needed to figure out something to get Salina interested in meeting with us, without Salvador.
“I’ve got ten thousand dollars stashed in my safe back at the house,” Chase said with a disappointed face. “Do you think that will convince her?”