by G. M. Ford
Lamar could still hear the guy on the phone’s voice, telling him to not let Chub go it alone. And these bastards were just crazy enough to come after him if he fucked this up too bad. Spending the rest of his days looking over his shoulder, waiting for a couple of Brotherhood banditos to put out his lights, didn’t appeal to Lamar one bit.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” He pointed west. “That way.”
Just before eight in the A.M., Mrs. Google navigated us to the SDPD’s cop house on Gaines Street. The Western Division of the SDPD was a windowless stone building on the corner of Gaines and Friars Road. Gabe and I parked in the visitors’ lot, followed the signs to the front desk, and asked for Sergeant Saunders.
Gabe knew something was up the minute two uniforms appeared from behind the desk . . .
“Won’t you, er . . . you two come this way,” the older of the two cops said.
We followed them down a long hall, turned left, and stopped in front of what the plastic sign said was INTERVIEW ROOM FOUR. One of the cops opened the door and gestured for us to step inside. “Sergeant Saunders will be along in a sec,” he assured us.
We walked into the room only to find a couple more uniforms already in attendance. When Gabe hesitated, the first set of cops bellied into the room behind us, bumping both of us forward a couple of steps so’s they could close the door.
“Put your hands on your heads,” one of them said.
Gabe and I shot each other a disgusted glance and complied. Two of the cops patted us down. “Have a seat,” another one said after they’d satisfied themselves we weren’t heeled.
About three minutes later, Sergeant Saunders opened the locked door and stepped inside the room.
“You want to give me a hint as to what’s going on?” I asked as she closed the door.
She didn’t waste any time or energy. “You two don’t check out,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gabe asked.
“My IT techs say neither Leon Marks nor Gene DeGrazia exist prior to five or six years ago. They say it’s like you were created straight out of the ozone. They also say it’s one of the finest hacking jobs they’ve ever seen, and that nobody without the kind of resources police departments have these days could possibly have found you out.” She showed her palms to the ceiling. “Tell me how they’re wrong about this. How it’s all just some crazy mistake.”
Pin-drop moment.
“Can I borrow your pocket pad and something to write with?” I asked.
She hesitated. Threw a look around the room at the other four cops and then reached gingerly for her back pocket. She came over to the table and put a small red notebook and a ballpoint pen in front of me.
As I picked them up, one of the cops started to sidle over so he could see what I was writing. Gabe stood up and got in the way.
“Goin’ someplace?” Gabe asked the cop.
“It’s all right, Officer Phelps,” Saunders said.
Nobody moved an inch. I pulled the pad up tight to my chest and began to scribble. Took me a minute or so to write it all down, at which point I closed the pad and handed it and the pen back to Sergeant Saunders, who sauntered over into the corner of the room, thumbed her way back to the page, and began to read.
We watched as she read it a second time and then a third before she tore out the page, balled it into her fist, and turned to the uniforms. “Officers Roman, Sutter, and Dryscol, you can report back to regular duty. Officer Phelps, you will remain here,” she said as she followed the uniforms out the door.
Twenty-eight minutes went by before she poked her head back into the room.
“Thank you, Officer Phelps,” she said. “That will be all.”
We all waited for the sound of his heels to fade to nothing. She looked from one of us to the other. “Let’s take a walk,” she said.
Gabe and I followed her out to the parking lot and then out onto Gaines Street, past the Resolution Church, where we crossed the street. We walked up Gaines for another couple of blocks before she stopped under a eucalyptus tree and said, “These days there’s so much technology I can’t say for sure whether or not we’re being recorded at any given moment.”
“Nothing’s private anymore,” Gabe offered.
“Captain Eagen of the Seattle PD explained the situation to me,” she said in a low voice. “According to the captain, you two are your own personal witness protection program. Why’s that? The Feds usually handle that sort of thing.”
“You know the Feds,” I said. “They don’t end up with the glory, they get all pissy about it.”
“So they decided to use us as bait,” Gabe threw in.
“They put out a press release with our names in it,” I said.
“Sounds just like ’em,” she said with a wan smile.
She looked over at me. “You used to be a private investigator.”
“Yep,” I said. “I quit a while back.”
She threw a hard glance Gabe’s way. “And you . . . Gabriella Funicello. I pulled your file. I’d have brought it along, but I would have needed an officer to carry it for me.”
“No felony convictions,” Gabe said quickly.
“You’re a professional leg breaker.”
“Security consultant.”
Saunders put her hands on her hips and looked at us hard. “And you two were the ones who took that whole Conway, Washington, white supremacist thing down?”
“Feds had been working on it for a couple of years when we just . . . sort of . . .” I searched for the right word.
“Bumbled in . . . ,” Gabe filled in. “And then were stretchered out.”
I gave Saunders the Reader’s Digest version of the Matthew Hardaway story. “We were expecting to find a bunch of hayseeds yelling yee-ha and shooting ARs at tin cans out in the woods. Turned out to be a bunch of dangerous white supremacist assholes looking to start a race war.”
“Forty some-odd dead,” Saunders said. “Over a hundred people arrested and charged, as I recall.”
“They’d been stockpiling military munitions for a couple of years. Had guys working in armories all over the West Coast, stealing a little here and a little there, shipping it all up to Conway, waiting for the big day to arrive.”
“He said they burned down your house?”
“With a handheld missile,” I said.
She paced around in a tight circle.
“The captain says you guys probably saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives . . . so how come this Ben Forrester kid ended up getting all the credit?”
Gabe and I passed a painful look back and forth a couple of times.
“Ben didn’t make it out,” I said quietly.
“Which was totally our fault,” Gabe added.
“How so?” Saunders asked.
“We got sloppy. He was an amateur. We were professionals. We should never have taken him in there with us,” Gabe said.
A red-and-white Metro bus roared by. Gabe patted my shoulder.
“And how in God’s name did you manage to get yourself officially declared dead?” Saunders asked me.
“My former girlfriend is the King County medical examiner. She and Tim Eagen thought maybe it would be better—at least for the time being—if I was officially dead.”
She pursed her lips and whistled. “That’s one hell of a chance for a big-time county medical examiner and a high-ranking police officer to take.”
I shrugged. “They must have thought I was worth it.”
Her face said she wasn’t altogether sure they’d been right.
“How do you know Eagen?”
“He was in love with my girlfriend too.”
“The medical examiner?”
I nodded. She nearly smiled.
“And that brought you two together?”
“Yeah . . . ,” Gabe said. “Right after she dumped the both of them.”
I smiled. “I seem to remember a line about how those who suffer together end up having
stronger connections than those who should be most content.”
She thought it over. “Captain Eagen wants you to call him at what he called the usual time and the usual number. I assume you know what that means.”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s go look at some mug shots.”
Lamar plopped down into the plastic chair and watched Chub lumber up the sidewalk in search of a place to take a dump. The homeless onslaught had made Ocean Beach one tough place to find a communal commode. RESTROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY signs adorned nearly every window like merit badges. Lamar knew from personal experience that it was like the old song said: nobody loves you when you’re down and out.
That’s when he set his hands down on his lap, fingered the bump in his pocket, and knew right away what it was. The burner phone from Tecate. Without hesitation, he dialed the preprogrammed number. Same voice answered.
“Don’t be givin’ me no damn lectures,” Lamar rasped into the phone before the guy could say anything. “I got me a serious problem here.”
He checked the street in both directions. “That Chub Greenway motherfucker is bound and determined to off this Waterman guy on his own . . .” He waved his free hand in the air. “And don’t tell me how I oughta talk him out of it neither. That motherfucker’s the size of a porta-potty.”
Two clicks and a new voice. Pinched and high, like he had real clean nasal passages. “You must not let him do that.”
“What in hell am I supposed to do about it?” Lamar’s rising voice echoed off nearby buildings. He stood up and checked the street again. “That asshole from the Mexican bank says he’s usin’ the name Leon Marks and is living in Ocean Beach.”
“You may have to neutralize him,” the voice said.
“Waterman?”
“No, Greenway.”
Lamar’s lower jaw headed south. “What? . . . You gotta be . . . Yeah, man,” he said sarcastically, “I’ll get my ray gun and get right with the program.”
“You don’t want us as enemies, Mr. Pope.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. Our reach is long, and our hour has come round at last. You don’t want to be the enemy of a white America. Do your duty. Mr. Greenway cannot be allowed to bring attention to us. By whatever means necessary, you must not allow that to happen. We’re depending on you, Mr. Pope.”
“And how in shit’s sake am I supposed to do that, man?”
“I believe we can provide you with the resources you’ll require.”
“I’m not a killer, man. That ain’t what I signed on for. I’m more of an idea guy. You want to kill that motherfucker Greenway, you better find some other motherfucker to do it for ya, ’cause I ain’t no killer.”
“As I said, Mr. Pope. Our reach is long.”
“Yeah . . . I got something that’s long too.”
“Call back on this number in an hour.”
Lamar stood up again. He could see Chub now. Block and a half up the street. Head and shoulders bobbing above the rest of the crowd. Walking his way. Looked like he was walking quite a bit easier too.
When Lamar brought the phone back up to his ear, the line was dead.
Now you’d think identifying a homeless guy with an Afro the size of a beach ball and a bar code tattooed across his forehead would be easy. Not so. We stayed at it for the better part of three hours but came up dry.
The old uniform who’d kept supplying us with mug books came shuffling back to the room. “They’re highly transient; most of ’em aren’t in the books,” he said after we’d thrown in the towel.
“I worked Mission Beach for eighteen years, and I’m tellin’ you, patrol doesn’t like riding in the car with them. They stink to high heaven, they piss and puke and try to kick out your car’s windows. And, most of the time, the paperwork you gotta file isn’t worth what they end up being charged with, so mostly patrol just takes ’em from wherever they’re making a pain in the ass of themselves and leaves them someplace else where they ain’t bothering nobody. In O.B. it’s up the north end of town by the dog beach. Along the river there. Long as they don’t cause no trouble for the local merchants, we try to be as accommodating as we can.”
Sergeant Saunders got to her feet and stretched. “I’ll put a BOLO out for him,” she said. “He’ll turn up again. Those guys always do. O.B.’s the only place that’ll put up with them, so sooner or later patrol will come into contact with him and . . . you know, we’ll see.”
“See what?” I asked.
She eyed me hard. “See whether or not he’s willing to be tested . . . because short of a formal complaint of some kind, nobody can legally be forced to have an HIV test.”
“We’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” Gabe assured her.
She looked like she believed it.
Chub slammed the photocopy down onto the plastic table.
“Goddamn picture ain’t no good. That’s how come we’re not gettin’ anywhere.”
“Shit,” Lamar said. “Most of these folks I showed it to were so fucking stoned they wouldn’t recognize Bugs Bunny if he came hopping up with a carrot.”
“We need a better picture of this guy,” Chub insisted.
“Ain’t no such thing,” Lamar said. “That’s the only picture there is. And like I keep tryin’ to tell you—ain’t no one guy responsible for what happened up in Conway. This Waterman guy is just a symbol. Either the brass has gotta fess up about how they blew it, or they gotta find somebody else’s ass to blame it on. They’re just using Waterman to focus everybody’s attention someplace other than at them.” He spread his hands. “It’s just human nature, man—when in doubt, blame some other motherfucker.”
Chub wasn’t buying it. He stomped around the sidewalk in a rage, forcing the constant flow of locals and tourists to navigate around him.
Across the street, half a dozen Harleys filled the air with roars as they angled their machines to the curb, backing in, dismounting in front of Cheswick’s, the two-wheeled leather set’s preferred watering hole. Above the deep throb of the engines, the scrape and grind of skateboards suddenly rose above the rumble as a couple of locals came shredding by on the sidewalk, the first just barely managing to avoid Chub on the way by. Chub threw out an enraged arm, trying to clothesline the second skateboarder to the sidewalk, but the second guy squatted on the board, allowing Chub’s massive limb to slide harmlessly over his back.
“Hey, man . . . chill,” the guy shouted back over his shoulder.
For a long second Lamar thought Chub was going to start running down the street after the guy. Looked like lightning bolts were about to erupt from his head.
Lamar rose from the chair. “Hey, man . . . hey, man . . . take it easy. We ain’t done yet. Let’s keep on trying here.” Lamar grabbed the picture of Waterman in the bank and shook it in the air. “We covered most of this street here. We could probably cover more ground if we split up.”
Took a few minutes but eventually Chub came around. They’d do the streets together. Opposite sides. Working south to north. Then do it again and again till they got up to the far end of Ocean Beach, someplace up by that Voltaire Street. And then they’d see if anybody in that big park knew this guy.
Lamar watched as Chub tromped up the stairs in front of the O.B. Surf Club and disappeared inside.
Rather than step into the bikini store on the corner of Santa Monica and Abbott, Lamar hustled half a dozen steps east and slid into a narrow alley between private houses. He craned his neck out over the sidewalk and checked the street. No Chub.
He pulled the phone from his pocket, checked the street again, and pushed the button. Not a person. Just a recording this time. Giving him an address. Forty-four seventeen Muir. The electronic voice repeated the address three times and then broke the connection.
Lamar was incensed. His hands were shaking. He jabbed the button and missed. Again. Hit it. Same electronic voice. Mailbox is full. Not taking messa
ges at this time. Lamar brought the phone up high, as if to dash it to pieces on the ground, but changed his mind and stuffed the burner back into his pants pocket.
“Forty-four seventeen Muir,” Lamar murmured to himself. “Forty-four seventeen Muir.”
The phone rang three times before he answered. “Yeah,” was all Tim Eagen said.
I could hear the frigid Washington wind hissing like cold static. “It’s me.”
“Sergeant Saunders told me what happened. You okay?”
“I’d be okayer if people stopped asking me how I’m feeling every ten minutes.”
I heard him sigh. “Not to add fuel to the fire, but I’ve got some bad news.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“You know, Leo . . . ever since Conway, we’ve had those Brotherhood assholes under some serious-ass surveillance. For once everybody’s on board with this thing. Local, state, federal, all of ’em. I mean judges are standing in line to sign the warrants for us. We’ve tapped into every computer and phone line they own. We’re listening to their families. They fart, we hear it.”
“So?”
“So . . . it’s been real quiet; these guys have more or less gone underground—mostly—until lately.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So three days ago, one of their supposedly covert numbers gets a call from Tecate, Mexico. Your name comes up on the tape. Seems the IT guy at that Mexican bank you use . . . seems he flagged your account for potential money laundering activity, and just about the time he was wondering who this gringo with seemingly unlimited access to cash was, the bank gets an under-the-table inquiry about this same guy—this guy being you. Anyway, he puts two and two together and starts to think there might be some money to be made here, so he contacts the inquirer and says he’s got some info and wants to sell it.” The cold Washington wind hissed louder. “He won’t come over the border, so they send a couple of guys down to Tecate to pay him and get the info.”