Naturally I had trouble following along when -- in a series of stolen asides -- my friend Atti spelled out the truth behind his dual identity. I'd known him as a celebrity photographer back in Hollywood, and now he seemed to be running a hard core Baja fat farm. "I can do a better job ensuring your safety," he whispered. We paused to stretch during a punishing nature hike, escorted by muscular gauchos on horseback. "But I'm going to need your word that you won't blow my cover."
"Okay, but which is which?" I asked, letting a group of overprivileged, overweight guests plod past. "Let's go, smile another mile," Atti said, cracking a whip in their wake as they sputtered up hill wearing forced grins. He'd been a really scary celebrity stalkerazzi but he was just but as believable as a weight loss guru, equal parts revered and reviled."Let's just say the global stabilization business requires a surprisingly diverse skillset."
"Global stabilization?" I whispered. "Are you saying you're some kind of government spy?" It was one thing for Rita to have gotten herself mixed up in some twisted police conspiracy around dirty dealings with the local mob -- but obviously intelligence gathering hadn't been either one of our specialties. "Don't tell me any more," I said. "I've told you a hundred times I'm not smart enough to end up knowing too much."
"You still want the diamonds, don't you? Maybe you should know who they really belong to."
"They belonged to Rita," I said. "She paid for them with her life."
"She paid for half of them with her life. The other half belonged to Mo K."
"Mo K? Her dead landlord?
"And business partner. Remember all those prescription drugs the two of you were running over the border?" He went on to explain how Mo K liked the sound of that, since he was trying to get some illegal gemstones into the hands of al-Qaeda. "You couldn't move conflict diamonds any farther than Mexico once our guys got so good at freezing terrorist assets," Atti added.
"MoK was a terrorist?" I asked. "Wow. I thought he was just another pervert."
"Rita must have been skimming a rock here and there, hoping he wouldn't notice. Then she goes and double-crosses him working for the FBI -- makes the mistake of letting him know she's got the goods on him either way. He needed her gone and gone fast, but not before he got his product back."
"So that's it? Mo K was the one who killed Rita?"
"Guys like that don't do their own dirty work. Whoever he sent that night didn't find what he was looking for because --"Because I had the diamonds. In the dirty laundry. Oh my God." I sank down on a rock. All this time I thought I was never really in this, when I was the one who started the whole mess, even if it was only by happenstance. "Take the diamonds back," I said. "I don't want them. And I don't want any of that evidence Rita was collecting, whoever it may or may not implicate."
"Don't look at me," he said. "In a sense, I'm just as much of a ghost as your friend Rita. As for your gal at the FBI, she's still has all kinds of reasons to discredit your entire story -- what with the potential implications for the captain."
"You mean the late captain."
Is it possible for your heart to rise and sink at the same time? As desperate as I was to get back to town and make things right with the man I loved and almost killed, I also wanted to turn around and run -- and keep running, as long and as fast as I could. "At some point, somebody's going to come looking for what's theirs," Atti told me. "I can get you back over the border, but after that, you're on your own." He lowered his voice even further. "I'm working on a very high level project down here, what with the new administration taking on the old drug lords."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
He chuckled, grabbing me by the shoulders for one last push. "If you want to stay alive, you're going to have to go back to Hollywood and finish what Rita started," he said. "You ask me, all roads lead to Starbutts."
