Page 123 of Nightshade

“Well, he—”

He stopped when Juarez’s phone started buzzing. She took the call, listened, then responded that she would come get her visitor.

“Here we go,” she said as she headed toward the door. Her voice sounded shaky. She was nervous and Stilwell knew why. Terranova had already marked her for life. There was no telling how he would act if things didn’t go his way in the next hour.

The room was unlike any interview room at a sheriff’s station. It was used mostly for negotiations between prosecutors and defense attorneys. The table Stilwell sat at was unscarred wood that had been polished with Pledge and not the sweat and tears of accused suspects.

The door reopened and Juarez entered first, followed by Oscar Terranova, dressed in bleached white pants and an untucked Tommy Bahama shirt with blue parrots on a field of yellow. But two steps into the room, he saw Stilwell and stopped dead.

“What’s he doing here?” he said. “This ain’t the island.”

“I told you I would have an investigator in the meeting,” Juarez said.

“Yeah, but not him,” Terranova said. “This ain’t happening.”

As Stilwell had predicted, he turned back to the door.

“Sit down, Oscar,” Stilwell said. “You leave, you break the agreement. I’ve got deputies outside that’ll grab you up and put you in a cell. You want that?”

Terranova turned back and looked at Juarez for confirmation.

“Oscar, sit down, please,” she said. “I think the only way you walk free today is if you keep our deal. So sit down and tell uswhat you’ve got. If it’s as good as you said it was, there won’t be any problem here.”

“Fuck this,” Terranova said.

But he went to the table, yanked out a chair, and sat down opposite Stilwell.

Juarez sat in the chair next to Stilwell.

“So, as we agreed, we’re not going to record this,” she said. “We’re just going to talk and listen to each other. You told me you had nothing to do with the crimes that occurred recently on Catalina and that you could prove it. This is your chance.”

Terranova sat back in his chair, one arm on the table, fingers tapping the wood like he was contemplating a bet in a poker game. Finally, he spoke.

“Okay, so what you’ve got to know is that I’m totally clean on Gaston and what happened with your girlfriend, Stilwell. It was somebody else callin’ the shots and not telling me shit. That Spivak motherfucker is his guy, not mine.”

Juarez looked at Stilwell and nodded slightly, giving him the lead.

“Who was calling the shots?” he asked.

“That’s my ace card,el jefe. I don’t reveal it till everybody’s all in.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I want a guaranteed no-incarceration deal. Like you were going to give Henry Gaston to get to me.”

“We’re not making a deal until we know what you’ve got. Stop dancing, Oscar. I know your silent partner is Mayor Allen and your corporate lawyer’s fingerprints are all over the Big Wheel deal. Why don’t you start by telling us how you and the mayor connected.”

Stilwell kept his eyes on Terranova, looking for a reaction.Terranova showed no surprise that Stilwell knew about him and Allen.

“Yeah, we’ve got business,” he said. “I made a little money back home and came out to Catalina to invest it. I wanted to start a legitimate company, you know, so I did my homework and saw they needed more golf carts and tours out there. I applied for a license to operate and that was when I met him.”

“Because of your application for a business license?”

“Yep. I met him pretty quick about that and he told me it could take three years or three months to get the operator’s license, depending, and how did I want to handle it?”

“He wanted a bribe.”

“I just call it doing business. Everybody always wants a piece of a good thing. I don’t begrudge that, you know. I say go along to get along.”