Breach of Trust Read Free Page B

come and gone.
    He picked the towel up off the weight bench and wiped his face. He said something in Spanish to the guy spotting him, who was just as short as him but much stockier.
    “I told you,” he said before he’d even reached me, “that I got nothing to say to you.”
    “You have something to say to me. You just don’t want to say it.”
    Fresh sweat broke on his forehead. He wiped at it with his hand towel. “Either way,” he said, “I’m not talking to you anymore. Don’t contact me. Leave me alone.”
    “Whoever killed Bert Wozniak is going to walk from it,” I said. “You okay with that?”
    “Not my problem.”
    “Your whole life is worrying about other people’s problems.”
    “Well, not this one.”
    “You stay quiet, everyone blames your friend, Eddie Vargas. That okay with you?”
    “Now you got me worrying about a dead man’s problems.”
    I nodded slowly, watching him. He looked over his shoulder. All four of the other weightlifters, especially his spotter, were watching me. Ernesto was scared. I could read it all over him. And that was meaningful. Ernesto was clearly a proud man. Nobody who puts up vanity reps at a weight bench is anything but proud. You work out, at his age, to stay in shape. You choose weights that you can press eight, ten times. You don’t go for your max weight unless you take some pride in how much you can press. Nothing wrong with that, but it meant he wouldn’t want to show anyone his fear, and he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it right now.
    “I can protect you,” I said.
    “Oh?” He laughed at me without humor. “Who you gonna protect me from?”
    “Whoever.”
    His eyes narrowed. “You know anything at all about my world?”
    “Then tell me confidentially. I won’t disclose you as a source. Give me a name—give me something—and I’ll take it from there. Nobody will ever know.”
    He was quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my proposal or considering the best way to blow me off. Finally, he squared up and spoke to me in what he intended to be a conclusive statement on the matter.
    “They’ll know,” he said. “Now good-bye.”
    I called after him, my heartbeat escalating. “Who’s they ?”
    “Excuse me,” said some muscle-bound guy wearing a Y t-shirt that was two sizes too small. “If you’re not here to check out the facility, we need to ask you to leave.”
    “Who’s they, Ernesto?” I tried again, speaking to his back as he returned to the bench press.
    “Sir, c’mon, now.”
    I worked my arm out of his grip. But there was no sense making a scene.
    They’ll know, he’d said.
    There was something there. I knew it.
    My cell phone rang. I fumbled with it, revealing some nerves. I might actually be onto something big here.
    The caller ID said the call was coming from home.
    “My water broke,” said Talia.

5
     
    ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY CHRISTOPHER MOODY, lead prosecutor in United States v. Almundo, stood at the prosecution table, leafing through some papers. He had about five years on me—roughly forty—and his tightly cropped reddish blond hair and boyish features struggled against the sober demeanor required of any federal prosecutor. He had the look of someone who had just finished a stressful assignment.
    In fact, the government was all but done with their case now. They’d put on more than thirty witnesses. Eleven members of the Columbus Street Cannibals, each of whom had pleaded guilty, had testified to shaking down local businessmen. Nine intermediaries, “straw” contributors who pocketed the extorted cash and then wrote a check in the same amount (minus a small fee for their troubles) to Citizens for Almundo, all had taken pleas and testified as well. There was no doubt about the extortion; the defense, in fact, had agreed to stipulate to it, but the federal government, in its typical flair for overkill, had scorched every last plot of earth, calling many of the shopkeepers