The Notebook of Carlos Moore

Needed to speak to Justin Laboa. Figured the best thing would be to smuggle a phone in somehow. Ilana hit on the idea of a garbage truck. Laboa pushed the dumpster out for pickup, pulled it in after pickup. We got some filthy gray jumpsuits, headed out on trash day, and Ray gave the sanitation engineers a nice tip to let us borrow the truck. Ilana had a good time driving it, and she let Solana play with the forks. Ray and I hung on the back.

Sure enough, Laboa pushed the dumpster down. Security — a rent-a-cop also not allowed to leave the site — asked where the regular guys were, we told him stomach flu. Ray chatted up Barney Fife while I helped Laboa push the dumpster back. I told him I was a Federal Agent and was going to get him out. Was afraid he was going to start crying and hug me and blow it right there. I slipped him a phone with text and camera and told him to contact me later. He held it together.

This was coming together.

Had Solana whip me up a perfect fake Immigration and Customs Enforcement ID, using the name Charles Palin. No relation. Wanted to play to Corazini’s sense of citizenship, and when I paid her a visit in her office it paid off. Told her she wasn’t under investigtion, we know all of her staff are legal, but we were investigating a neighborhood in the Foothills where illegals had been reported.

She gave me all the info on the staff assigned to the Intentionality Meditation compound. Three people, all live on site, all have their paychecks sent there. Two of them have no family listed, which figures. No one to notice if they vanish. One has a sister, but when I checked her out she said they don’t talk much and it wasn’t unusual that she hadn’t heard from him since Christmas.

He was the guy that looked nervous when he was taking out the garbage, though.

Changed out of my Fed suit and back into BDUs, surveilled the compound some more. Justin Laboa, the garbage man, was the key, Just needed to find a way to talk to him.

Things are moving quickly, so I’m not finding myself with a lot of time to document recent events. I investigated Intentionality Meditation some more, because we’ve traced the Unborn Venom to their compound in the Foothills. It’s in a wealthy neighborhood, the home of some real estate mogul. We know there’s construction going on inside, to retro-fit it into dorms for cult members.

I spent some time surveilling the place from out front, and watching MDO people watching the place in shifts as well. There are 4 MDO guys in rotation, and they always park in the same spot, which means they’re either sloppy or they don’t care if they’re spotted.

I headed up into the hills above the place to get a better view, and to avoid any issues with the MDO. The only people that come and go are cult members, who all wear khakis and polo shirts. Very yuppie for cultists, but this is the Foothills. I saw a guy in jeans taking out the garbage, and he looked terrified, like he didn’t want to be there at all.

A little research and I was able to track down what agency the cult is using for its labor staff. A place called Tucson Maid and Landscape, local employment agency. Teresa knows the owner a little bit, a Chamber of Commerce member named Susan Corazini. Not a place we’d use for job placement, Corazini is apparently a good upright citizen, a staunch Republican and a McCain supporter in the last election. She’d never hire an illegal in a million years.

Need to talk to her. Need to find out more about the staff inside, see if they could be a way in, or a way to get more intel about the inside.

Since I’m playing true confessions and reflecting on my personal lack of guilt and remorse, I might as well write about Little Frankie.

Francisco Mendez, Little Frankie’s father, is a legendary coyote. They guy allegedly broke someone out of a prison in Mexico, got him across the U.S. border, and deposited him in an American prison without any prison guards on either side having a clue. In a normal world, I’d write that off as a big fish story. Having seen too much of this occult stuff for me own personal tastes, it just makes me want to load up on silver bullets and holy water before doing any business with the Mendez family.

The Gomez family cut a deal with Francisco to use one of his routes. I don’t know the business details, but Francisco is retiring and turning operations over to his son Reynaldo. This route is a tunnel, what looks like a natural cavern, with entrances on either side of the border. It starts deep inside Mexico, far from the border, and comes up probably 30 miles inside the U.S. The freaky part is that when you’re in the tunnel, it’s only a mile or two walking distance from one end to the other. There’s something occult about it, obviously. We used it exactly once, and that’s where we picked up the guy that had escaped from the monster. That’s where that whole line of trouble started.

I’ve already written about the monster getting pissed off about us stealing its toy and wanting to take Solana instead. Well, the information we got from people who know about this demon shit is that it can only move around outside the cave because it cut a deal with someone, and that someone was Little Frankie. He wanted to be the legend, he was jealous that his father was giving the reigns over to Reynaldo, and who knows what else was wrong with him. He made some kind of deal with the thing in return for power.

I swear more when I’m writing than I do when I actually speak. I don’t get that.

So Ray and I grabbed him. Little Frankie was laying low, but I used to be a cop, I find people, that’s what I do. Found out that the Mendez family has a long-lost junkie sister, a meth head, and she and Frankie were what passes for close among junkies and demon-dealing scumbags. I think I already wrote about that, months back. Anyway, Little Frankie just laughed at us. He wasn’t afraid. He had a badass demon on his side. So I told him that based on the information we had, this monster can only move around because it had some kind of contract with Little Frankie. The way I saw it, no Frankie, no contract, no monster. If I cut Frankie’s fucking head off, problem solved. He didn’t think I’d do it, so I shot him in the knee. When he stopped screaming and bleeding, he still gave me lip, so I shot him in the other knee. At that point he was willing to share some useful information. The thing wasn’t able to move around because whatever deal Frankie made allowed it to. The thing could move around because it was bound to the area of the cave but Frankie had set it free. Killing Little Frankie wasn’t going to stop the monster.

Little Frankie told us other stuff, too. about how he’d feed the thing sacrifices, kids between 12 and 16 years old, to keep it happy and get it to do him favors. Now, there’s no physical evidence of that, obviously. demon sucks kids down to hell. No court of law’s going to lock someone up for that. I could go through all sorts of hoops to find evidence of other crimes to convict Frankie of and put him away, but that requires faith in the legal system that i just don’t have. So I was ready to put a bullet in Little frankie’s head and be done with it.

Ray talked me out of it. Not that Ray disagreed with me, but he was the one with the level head in that moment. People had seen Little Frankie snatched. It wasn’t prudent to be dropping bodies in our own back yard. And things could get messy with Reynaldo. So Ray talked to Reynaldo, explained what had happened and why, and explained that if we ever saw Little Frankie again he wasn’t coming back. Reynaldo sent someone around to collect Little Frankie. I don’t think things went much better for him once his brother got ahold of him, but you never know. Family makes people do strange things.