Cash Burn

by Michael Berrier

  The plea bargain for manslaughter was no bargain for Flip. Eleven years. He started off at the Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino and at twenty-five graduated from gladiator school to the mainstream population in Lancaster, where he had no choice but to arm himself. When he got into a fight and used a shiv he’d fashioned out of a bar from an oven rack, he nearly took his second strike, but the DA decided it wasn’t worth prosecuting. His second strike didn’t come until he was released from Lancaster the first time. A little job for Diane, but he got caught.

  By then he had someone waiting for him.

  He reached down and gathered up the bills. He wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed the bundle in a duffel bag. The zip of the bag ripped through the room. He sat on the bed. He’d set the papers from Mr. B’s desk to one side to concentrate on counting the bills. Now he reached for them.

  As he read, daylight faded beyond the thick drapes sealing off his motel room. The hanging lamp provided him with all the light he needed. One page after another, he laid the sheets to one side, their contents drawing him into what Mr. B had kept in his safe.

  It turned out that this information might be worth a lot more than thirty-two thousand and change.

  36

  Jason held his finger over the icon on his cell phone that would delete the message. The voice of a mechanized woman asked him again if he wanted to delete the message or replay it. His finger drifted between the one and the seven.

  He pressed the one. The man’s message repeated. In a tone that reminded Jason of glowing embers in a fire pit, Pastor Miles Gates’s voice told Jason that he wanted to buy him a cup of coffee. Jason was welcome at Miles’s office, or they could meet someplace. Miles rumbled out an area code and then a series of numbers.

  Jason repeated the numbers silently and ended the call without deleting the message. Miles Gates’s voice would be stored in his voicemail. He sat at his desk looking at the rectangular face of his iPhone, wondering why he would return this call of all the ones awaiting response.

  But he entered the numbers on the keypad and pressed the phone icon and listened to the distant rattle that told him the line in Pastor Gates’s office was ringing.

  The third ring was cut short. “Pastor Gates’s office.” A woman’s voice.

  “This is Jason Dunn. I’m returning his call.”

  “Hi, Jason. He’s in a meeting, but let me tell him you’re calling. Can you hold on a second?”

  “Okay.”

  A click, and angel music sifted through the phone line, a chorus meant to make him feel like he was lying down in a grassy field. He rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, held the phone just away from his ear so he didn’t have to succumb to the ethereal pace and tones.

  The music stopped, and he heard his name spoken in a deep voice.

  He hesitated. “Yeah, hi. I’m returning your call.”

  “Yes. Thanks for getting back to me. Sounds like you’re busy too. I’ll get right to it. When we met at Kathy’s house, we talked about getting together. I’m calling to set that up. How’s tomorrow at 7:30 for coffee?”

  How could this guy remember a ten-second conversation on a doorstep weeks ago? Jason heard Brenda’s fingertips hammering at her keyboard outside his door. His mind went to the feel of her beside him, the touch of her. “Well, no offense, but things are pretty hectic right now. I don’t think I can get away.”

  “Let me level with you, Jason. Kathy is concerned about you. She’s been trying to reach you. Can I tell her you’re okay?”

  Kathy? Wasn’t she still in Montana? Jason shifted in his chair. “You don’t have to tell her anything. I’ll call her.”

  The pastor said nothing.

  “Look, I appreciate you checking in.”

  “Jason, we need to get together.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Kathy called you four times and you never returned her calls, but I called you once, and you got back to me within the hour.”

  He was about to say that meant nothing, but for some reason, he didn’t want to lie to this guy. He went to his calendar. “All right. But tomorrow morning doesn’t work.”

  Three hours later, Jason left his jacket hanging on the back of his office door and walked through the cool fall air along Wilshire Boulevard to the corner of Santa Monica. He had no desire for coffee, but as he entered Starbucks, he couldn’t help but enjoy the shift from the air outside into the same spiced, scented warmth of these stores everywhere. His banker’s mind went to the company’s business model, the refusal to franchise, the replication of every process in every store.

  Miles Gates sat in the corner. His size made the table before him look like it belonged in a doll house. He watched Jason through round, gold-rimmed spectacles.

  Jason went to him and held out a hand. The pastor gave him a slight smile and reached up to shake.

  Jason sat. “So here I am.”

  Pastor Gates lifted the paper cup to his lips and blew across the top of the cup and sipped. He returned the cup to the tabletop and kept his fingers on it. He’d removed the lid, and it sat face-up on the table, a residue of coffee pooled against the white plastic.

  “Here you are.” All the time in the world, this guy. No rush. He sat like a statue in a museum. The plaque next to the ebony carving would read, Large Man with Coffee.

  The only life in his expression was in the way his eyes bored into Jason.

  “What are we going to talk about here, big guy?” Jason said.

  “It’s your party.” He lifted his cup again. Another blow across the surface of the drink, another sip.

  “I really don’t know why I’m sitting here. I don’t know you. I don’t have time for a staring contest.”

  “I think you know why you’re here.”

  Looking into the pastor’s eyes, something inside Jason began to crack. Ice fractured, tentacles extending across thinning sheets, threatening to crumble and break down. Walls of ice, floors and ceilings he’d forced up to barricade himself from Serena, from Vince and the pressures of failure, from his family—he could feel all his weaknesses beginning to creep through the crumbling and breaking ice within him.

  The room itself seemed to shift. He started to speak, but his first words were uncertain. “I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Everyone calls me Miles. Except my kids.”

  “Right. So it’s my party, Miles?”

  “Your party.”

  Jason leaned forward. The scent of Miles’s coffee drifted up to him. Jason could have named the blend without looking at the chalkboard, even with the sugar and cream diluting it.

  “Everything’s coming apart, Miles.”

  Miles scratched the side of his nose. His hand stayed at his face, cupping his chin.

  “My marriage, my job. The whole thing.”

  Miles swirled his cup in small circles on the tabletop. The contents lapped up to the lip but didn’t spill. “What do you usually do when things start to fall apart, Jason?”

  “What anybody does. I try to fix it.”

  “But that’s not working this time. Is that right?”

  “Turns out some things can’t be fixed.”

  “There’s an old saying: ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight.’”

  Jason thought of his brother stepping out of the shadows in the darkness of Jason’s home. “I guess that depends on how crooked something is.”

  “There’s another old saying: ‘With God all things are possible.’”

  “Yeah, well. I’m not really with God.”

  Miles drained his cup. The empty cardboard clapped onto the table. “That’s your choice.”

  “I don’t need one more thing right now.”

  “Is that what you think God is? One more thing?” The pastor’s hands withdrew to clasp together before the orb of his abdomen.

  Jason took the pastor’s smile for smugness. He felt the walls of ice reforming, the cracks receding, filling in. The atm
osphere of the room returned to its normal state. “If you’re going to give me a hard sell on this God thing, we can end the conversation right now.”

  “No hard sell, Jason. But don’t expect me to hold back the truth.” Miles tilted his head down like a ram ready to smash heads. But his mouth held that smile for a moment longer. Then something altered it before he spoke again. “I guess I should tell you that your wife called me.”

  Jason straightened.

  “Relax. Kathy couldn’t reach you, so she called your wife to make sure you were okay.”

  “Then you called her.”

  “No. She called me. We met—day before yesterday. At her request.”

  The scene in his kitchen this morning flashed in Jason’s mind. Serena’s resolve as she reinserted herself into his life in spite of what she’d done. Serena, Kathy, Gates . . . it was the same way things worked at the bank. Build your case, get consensus around what you want, pressure the outliers until they have no choice but to fall into line or until everyone thinks they’re not only wrong but obstinate.

  “Now I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “It makes sense. Kathy and Serena stick together, get you to talk sense into me.” Jason leaned over the table, wanted to shove it into the big man’s belly. “She cheated on me first. I gave her the benefit of the doubt as long as I could, believe me. Until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

  “First?”

  “What?”

  “You just said, ‘She cheated on me first.’”

  “No, I didn’t.” Jason’s feet itched to shift underneath him, to gather his weight on his soles and stomp out of there.

  “I’m not judging you, Jason.” Miles’s hands parted, and he brought them to the bottom of the spindly wooden chair that somehow supported him. He scooted in until his face was a foot away from Jason’s. “It happens. I see it all the time. The grass is always greener. But no matter where you go, there you are.”

  “I’m not trying to run away from myself. Like I said, she cheated on me. Period.”

  “She says she didn’t.”

  Jason snorted. “Right. Somebody forged a letter in her handwriting. It’s a vast conspiracy to destroy our marriage. Well, I’ve got news for you, Miles. Our marriage wasn’t exactly a bed of roses even before I found her letter.”

  Miles was so close that Jason could see the pores on those wide nostrils. “I understand. Audrey and I have been married twenty-three years. You got to weed that garden. Got to pull out the weeds, turn the soil. It lies fallow, and it doesn’t produce anything.”

  “So it’s my fault.”

  “Fault’s got nothing to do with it. Not right now. You are where you are. You can accept it and sacrifice your marriage to some new thing you like better right now, or you can go back to your wife and get things right.”

  “It’s all on me, huh?”

  “Your life? Yes, Jason. Your life is all on you.”

  37

  Tom spotted the club’s unlit neon sign sticking out over the sidewalk and eased off the gas. A block ahead, he saw an Acura edging away from the curb, and he slapped on the turn signal. The cars in his rearview mirror slowed obediently, and heads behind windshields turned to see if they could maneuver around him. The Acura up ahead shot out, and Tom came to a stop next to the car just beyond the empty space and turned around to find that the idiot in the Toyota behind him had ignored the turn signal and followed him to a stop so he couldn’t back into the space. Tom waved to direct the idiot around him, but the cars in the second lane filled it, boxing them in.

  He cursed. Hathaway glanced over his shoulder, snapped his gum, and snickered. “There ought to be an IQ test for people to drive.”

  Tom waved his arm again, but the Toyota behind him had nowhere to go. “Aww . . .” He cursed and shifted back to drive and punched the gas. At the corner he turned right. One more block farther away from the Ragtop Club, he found a place to park.

  “This is probably another huge waste of time,” he told Hathaway.

  “Yeah, you said that already.” Hathaway levered his door open. Tom couldn’t get out before Hathaway slammed it shut. The thud resounded behind the lump on his forehead and spiked the pain deeper. He stepped out into the street and elbowed his own door closed and thumbed the remote, and the horn sounded a sharp toot against the muffled traffic noise draped behind every sound in the city.

  They rounded the corner onto Venice and approached the front door of the place without saying anything else about the Ragtop Club or its owner, Shawn Barnes, or the self-defense he had claimed in the beating death of Elwood Peavy two nights ago in the back room of the club. It was a long shot, and Tom wouldn’t let Hathaway forget it, but the homicide dick assigned to Peavy’s case suspected a connection, and it was worth checking out anything that looked remotely like something Flip might do. Or that was what Hathaway thought, anyway.

  The door was locked. A sign on it told them the club’s hours of operation.

  Hathaway pounded on it. He stood back, and a breeze rolled down Venice Boulevard to balloon Hathaway’s print of palm trees and hibiscus away from his chest. This shirt was mostly blood-red. It was supposed to be the color of sunsets.

  Hathaway stepped forward and hammered on the door again. Tom was just about to tell him to give it up when the latch clicked on the door and it swung out.

  A tall guy with a bruised face held on to the edge of the door. The arm away from the door was in a sling. He looked from Hathaway to Tom. “What do you want?”

  Hathaway had his badge out. “Are you Shawn Barnes?” He pocketed the badge.

  “No.”

  The tall guy hesitated a moment, his hand still on the edge of the door, and Tom thought he was about to slam the door. He pulled out Flip’s mug shot and flashed it in the tall guy’s face. “We’re looking for Flip Dunn.”

  The guy leaned down to get a better look at it. He said, “So that’s his name. Come on in.”

  Hathaway smiled and gave Tom a smug wink before he ducked inside.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” Tom said to his back.

  A couple of brooms were being pushed around the room by guys who seemed to need them for support. Stools scraped the concrete floor as they made room for tidying. Somebody was behind the bar counting bottles. The tall guy led them among the tables toward the back.

  Hathaway said, “When’s the last time you saw him?” They were in the hallway leading to the bathrooms.

  “Two nights ago.”

  The night Elwood Peavy was killed. Hathaway looked over his shoulder. Another wink. Tom said, “Shut up.”

  Through the door at the back of the hall marked Employees Only, they moved into another hallway. The fragrance of fried food, sugar, and oil made Tom’s stomach turn. He realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  The tall guy knocked twice on a door and listened. Pretty soon someone answered, and he opened the door. “Two more cops to see you.” He nodded them in. He was about to head off, but Tom stopped him.

  “Hang around.”

  Behind the desk, the man who must be Shawn Barnes got to his feet, standing a shade over six feet tall. Above a carefully trimmed beard, his nose was bandaged and his eyes were bruised. His skin was creased and tanned, like a worn-out brown leather jacket Tom had owned once. He wore a short-sleeved black shirt that revealed spindly arms. The shirttail hung over black jeans, and a thick gold chain peeked out from underneath his open collar.

  Hathaway stuck his hand out. “So. The giant killer.”

  Barnes took Hathaway’s hand. “My lawyer told me not to talk to you guys anymore without him here.”

  Hathaway plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. “Fine with me. We can wait.”

  Barnes measured Hathaway for a moment before turning his eyes to Tom. Hathaway popped his gum and drew Barnes’s attention back.

  Tom turned to the beat-up tall guy. “Why don’t you close that door?”

  He looked at
his boss, and Barnes must have given him the okay, because he closed it and put his back to it. He probably would have folded his arms if not for the sling.

  Barnes was in his chair when Tom turned around.

  “Aw, who needs lawyers anyway?” Barnes said. “I got nothing to hide. Where do you want me to start? I said it so many times I could repeat it in my sleep.”

  “We read the report,” Hathaway told him. “I really just wanted to meet you. See the guy who did Peavy.”

  Barnes rolled his tongue around in his mouth like he was trying to get at something stuck in his teeth. He switched his eyes from Hathaway to Tom and kept his mouth shut.

  “I mean, come on. Guy with a rap sheet like that? Big, too. I mean, hey, Tom, did you see the mug shots of that guy?” Hathaway craned around in the chair to make his point to Tom, and then swiveled around again to Barnes.

  Tom let Hathaway go on.

  “You wouldn’t know this, Mr. Barnes, but they only got him on like a quarter of the stuff they brought him up on. And they probably only brought him up on this much of what he really did.” Tom held his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart. “He was one bad dude, man. But you took him out, didn’t you?”

  Barnes shrugged. “I’ve been in a few scrapes myself.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet. You must have been. I mean, look at you.

  You could’ve spent Thursday night out there dancing instead of mixing it up with a guy like Elwood Peavy.”

  “You want to go ahead and make your point?”

  “What do you go, one-seventy? One-eighty?”

  Barnes’s eyes narrowed. The creases around the eyes in his leathery face deepened.

  “Couldn’t be one-eighty-five. I’d guess six-foot, maybe one-seventy-five. Tom, you remember Peavy’s stats?”

  Tom folded his arms.

  Hathaway didn’t wait for an answer. “Peavy was six-six, two-sixty when they took him into P-Bay three years ago.” He snapped his gum, shook his head. “Shoot, man, you must be some kind of black belt or something. That it?” He held his hand palm up over his head and gestured to Tom for the picture of Flip.

  Tom gave it to him. Hathaway held the picture and looked at it. “Now Flip Dunn here—” he ticked it with his middle finger—“this guy I could see pulling it off. Maybe.” He tossed the picture onto Barnes’s desk.