New-and-improved Dallas wasn’t going to have any current information on the Russian mob, but until Charlie could return to run down information on her hapless assailant, I’d take what I could get.
I went out on the porch and sent my text. It was short and sweet: Call me, C. I didn’t want written evidence of what we were going to talk about, as much for his safety as for my own peace of mind.
I didn’t have to wait long. The phone rang. “Clarke,” he said, “it’s been a while.”
“You still going by Dallas, or do I get to call you ‘Irving?’”
“My wife doesn’t even call me Irving,” Irving, er, Dallas replied.
I laughed. “I admire your commitment. Had a question for you, if you’ve got a minute.”
“Anything for the former cop who used to dangle the threat of prison over my head every waking minute.”
“Harsh but fair,” I said. “I’ll make it quick: Have you ever heard the name Steranko in connection with your, let’s call it, ‘past life’?”
Dallas paused long enough that I momentarily thought we’d been disconnected. “Where did you hear that name?” he finally asked.
“Is that important?”
“It might be,” he said. “On second thought, I don’t really want to know.”
I sat on one of the porch’s camping chairs and said, “You’re starting to make me think I shouldn’t have contacted you.”
He exhaled uneasily. “Sorry, it’s just … that name brings up a lot of memories. Most of them bad.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He’s Russian mob,” Dallas said. “But I assume you knew that. Got his start fighting in the Second Chechen War.”
“Oof.”
“Yeah, nobody’s really sure what his exact role was, but he came out of it with a reputation for brutality, even by the standards of that particular conflict.”
“When did he come to Houston?” I asked.
“Not sure. I first remember hearing his name … 2004? 2005? It was before my second bust, I know that.”
I thought about it for a second. “That’s when I was still in patrol.”
He chuckled without much humor. “Right, I hadn’t had the pleasure of making your acquaintance yet.”
“Do you remember anything specific, or was it mostly boogeyman stories?”
“Let me think,” he said. And then, after a bit, “There were rumors he was behind Juan Cortez getting whacked, but neither the Mexicans nor the cops could ever prove it.”
I remembered that. “Hard to confirm anything when you can’t turn up a body. But the Cortez thing opened the road for the Russians, though. Especially on the south side and the coast.”
“It makes the most sense,” he said. “And that’s when you really started hearing more about him. Us poker guys weren’t really caught up in that world, but people talk.”
I said, “Y’all had a regular coffee klatch going.”
He laughed. “It was easy to fancy ourselves outlaws, sitting around smoky card tables and committing petty crimes, but nobody knew anything that important. Poker is fun, but it’s not really worth getting murdered over.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Not sure what else I can tell you,” Dallas said. “Are you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong again?”
“You know me too well,” I said. “Take care of yourself, Irving. And say hi to Jennifer for me.”
“I’ll consider it, Clarke. Watch your ass.”
I put the phone down and watched a few cars roll by. I had about as much info as I did before my phone call, which wasn’t exactly jack shit, but wasn’t too far off, either.
Meanwhile, Mike was still missing.
Three days into this and I still didn’t have any solid leads. Garcia was in the wind, and likely to stay that way as long as his masters at DHS felt he was a risk. Steranko may play a role in all this, but how big or small, nobody could tell me. And the unpleasant suspicion that kept nagging at me said if he was more than peripherally involved in this, Mike wouldn’t turn up alive. If he wasn’t being digested in a bull shark in Galveston Bay this very minute.
It was easy not to go down these rabbit holes on a regular case. Even the handful of missing kid jobs we’d taken hadn’t hit me like this, not coincidentally because we found all of them. And almost all of those were in the company of one of their recently separated parents. Want to really freak children out? Tell them that they’re less likely to be kidnapped by a guy in a panel van than they are their own mom or dad.
Given my own (admittedly brief) history as a cop and subsequent experience in the PI business, people are often surprised to find I’m not a terribly pessimistic person. Maybe I quit the force before the horrors of the job really had a chance to take up residence in my subconscious, and perhaps my tenure in my current career taking long-range sexy time photos and running down meth dealers who skipped out on their $750 bond hasn’t sufficiently awakened me to the depravities of mankind. Whatever the case, I’m generally upbeat, if occasionally (okay, often) too sarcastic for my own good.
Which is why my fatalism regarding Mike’s fate wasn’t sitting well with me.
It had been three days, but then again, it had only been three days. This wasn’t some toddler wandering into the woods; Mike was a decorated Marine, accomplished with small arms, hand-to-hand combat, and could generally find his way home with nothing but the sun and a wristwatch. Assuming nobody got the drop on him, he’d be more than capable of handing a wide and varied selection of humanity their asses. Still, like the man said, anybody can get got.
And that left the more intriguing — but no less frustrating — proposition that he went off the grid of his own free will, leaving behind a wife and kid in the process. That seemed almost as implausible as the other alternative, but until I got to the bottom of all of it, I couldn’t assume anything.
Charlie returned as morning turned into afternoon, and immediately disappeared into her office to return to the dead guy’s phone. Mom, for some reason, still hadn’t called off tonight’s gathering, and after an hour or so of bookkeeping, I decided I had to get the barbecue and attempt to drag Charlie away from one of her few true loves: forensic data recovery.
As if she’d read my mind, she came out onto the porch with a look I can only describe as incredulous on her face.
“Come in here. You’re going to want to see this.”
Chapter NINETEEN
SportsCenter was on as I came back inside, and even though I didn’t think it had anything to do with what Charlie was talking about, I asked, “Did the Astros sign Clayton Kershaw or something?”
“Ha,” was more a programmed response than an actual acknowledgement of anything I’d said. Charlie walked into the kitchen and sat back down at the table. Her hard drive was hooked up to her MacBook Pro and she positioned the laptop so I could get a better look at the screen as I entered.
“This the dump from dead guy’s phone?” I asked.
She nodded. “Some of it. Looks like it was a burner, so there wasn’t a ton there.”
“I don’t guess there’s an email from whoever ordered the hit on here?”
“You never were the lucky twin,” Charlie said. “There was a reminder that just had the name ‘Clarke’ and our address, nothing in contacts, and two calls from unknown callers.”
I frowned. “Well, that doesn’t sound helpful.”
“Ordinarily I’d agree with you,” she began.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“You know what I mean, and I admit at first glance, it looks like a big fat zero, but look closer.”
I leaned in to get a better fix on the screen. “This is a bunch of numbers, which is all Greek to me.”
Charlie said, “The numbers were named ‘Unknown Caller’ in the contacts, but whoever was calling wasn’t doing any concealment. The shooter just created a contact called ‘Unknown Caller,’ most likely hoping it would get overlooked
in a cursory check.”
I stood up. “But that’s …”
“Stupid,” she finished. “You don’t need any special tools to figure that out; you just need to check the details of the number.”
Shaking the carafe to see if there was still coffee (there was), I thought for a moment. “You said there’s nothing else on the phone? No pictures or apps that might give us something?”
She said, “It had the factory-delivered apps, but no media, browsing history, or even basic settings changed.”
“How sure are you this was a burner?”
“As sure as I can be without the actual phone,” she said with a shrug. “If I could hook it up to my software or desolder the chip I could be certain, but there are precisely two chances of that.”
“Slim and fat,” I said, completing one of the Clarkes’ many family proverbs. “So this is a burner.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered, “Out of the box iPhone 9, which looks to have been used for exactly two phone calls and to find our house on the map app. He was probably going to pitch it down a storm drain when he was done.”
“Who spends seven hundred dollars on a burner?” I asked, more pissed off than I cared to admit that the dead guy was carrying around a phone that cost more than half my monthly mortgage payment.
“Maybe seven hundred dollars, maybe more,” she said. “We don’t know if it was a Pro version or not.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Russians?” Charlie offered.
I shook my head. “Dropping nearly a grand every time they send a guy out for an op? That’s bad business.”
“Maybe they’re just better at maximizing profit than a guy who routinely does pro bono work for down-on-their-luck clients.”
I didn’t feel like arguing her point, mostly because she was right.
“We’re not hurting that much,” I said, more defensively than I’d intended.
She held her hands up. “I’m not complaining, just pointing out our line of work doesn’t generate the revenues necessary for that kind of overhead.”
I still wasn’t buying the Russian angle. “The cartels have money, too. And they make a hell of a lot more geographic sense.”
“The guy I shot wasn’t Mexican.”
“Mexicans can’t hire gringos?”
She turned back to her laptop. “You know as well as I do the cartels don’t farm out hits. At least, they don’t farm them out to guys Central Casting calls when they’re doing a period piece about the Norse conquest of America.”
To quote Peter Cushing in Star Wars, this bickering was pointless.
“Want to come with me to Burns?” I asked. “I’m sure Mom wouldn’t object to her favorite son and daughter showing up to the house early.”
“You mean Jim’s actually going to be able to make it?”
I pantomimed laughing while she disconnected her hard drive and stuck it and her laptop in the messenger bag she carried everywhere. Shadows lengthened across the kitchen floor and I paused in the doorway.
“You think this is the first time anyone’s died in this house?”
Charlie shouldered her bag and looked around the room, “Oh, I doubt it. This house is almost a hundred years old. People dropped like flies in here all the time, especially before they invented air-conditioning.”
For some reason, that response didn’t comfort me the way I’d hoped.
“Worried about ghosts?” Charlie asked. “I don’t think a guy entering a house with the intention of committing foul play is allowed to haunt it.”
“Ghost code?”
“It’s in the Bible,” she said, “Deuteronomy. Right after the part about how you can’t get into heaven if your dick’s been cut off.”
“Guess you won’t be seeing any of your exes up there,” I said.
She gave me what amounted to an affectionate kidney punch and we walked out of the house. I made sure to lock the door behind us.
Burns BBQ was one of the older joints of its kind in north Houston, which was a testament to its quality, given the competition. The owners hadn’t done much to sweeten up the facade aside from adding air-conditioning. The corrugated roof always seemed to have the same amount of rust no matter when you visited, which led the conspiracy theorist in me to believe it was painted that way to engender authenticity while the Burns family laughed it up on their BBQ-financed yacht.
Most of my conspiracy theories involved people making more money than me.
The concept of “rush hour” in Houston is fairly nebulous. Commuters in the city’s far-flung suburbs may depart for downtown as early as 4:30 or 5:00 A.M. in order to beat traffic. Meanwhile the evening rush begins at 3:00 P.M. and goes until 7:00, the next morning, as the joke goes. Whatever the case, the return of workers on any given afternoon meant there’d be a line out the door at Burns, and today was no different.
I don’t normally stand in line for food. Houston simply has too many options to justify wasting the time, especially when the hip joints rotate out every few months. If you didn’t care about being “seen” — and I honestly hadn’t had a reason to care in that regard for over a decade — you could wait three weeks until the new hotness was no longer desirable.
Just don’t wait too long. The average life of a Houston restaurant was only slightly more than that of a mayfly.
I’d violated my own line policy a few times for Burns' sausage and pulled pork before, but Charlie and I sauntered in breezily this particular evening and walked straight to the take-out counter. We were the only ones there because they only took phone orders if you were ordering at least five pounds of meat. I loved sausage, but not enough to gorge on it solo to the point of spontaneous heart attack.
Had to save something for retirement, after all.
After a bit, an improbably large fellow wearing a Cowboys baseball cap and stained tank top approached the counter. This was Clifton, eldest scion of the barbecue clan.
“Help you?”
“Pick up order for Clarke.”
He pawed through the slips next to the registers and came up with ours. “$78.50.”
While I was digging through my wallet, he nodded to my sister, “Hey, Charlie.”
“Hey, Cliff.”
He smiled until I handed him four twenties and he was forced to acknowledge me again.
“Be out in a minute,” he said, pocketing the change without asking and disappearing through a door into the back.
“Cliff?” I said, in mock scandalous tones.
“Can I help it if I’m more memorable than you?” Charlie said.
“I’m just grateful I’m not his type.”
“Attractive?” she offered.
“Dallas fan.”
Clifton (“Cliff” to his friends, apparently) emerged from the back and brought us our order. I hoped four pounds of sausage and a quart each of potato salad and baked beans would be enough, then realized Mike wouldn’t be there to share it and grimly realized it was a good possibility.
I thanked the guy, and Charlie and I returned to her Audi (you didn’t think we were taking my POS all the way out to my mother’s, did you?), and set off for Mom’s.
Chapter TWENTY
Houston’s a big city. This much is obvious, if you’ve ever spent time here other than cooling your heels in one of our airports. Thanks to a combination of agreeable terrain, municipal manifest destiny, and an almost pathological aversion to public transit, the metropolitan area sprawls out from a network of endlessly expanding freeways.
A few years back, someone superimposed the area corralled by the 88 miles of Beltway 8 (the second of three highway loops encircling the city) over various other metropolitan and geographical areas. For example, the distance from Mill Valley, CA, to San Mateo, or New Rochelle, NY, to Elizabeth, NJ, is easily contained within Houston’s environs. So is most of the Big Island of Hawaii.
You spend a lot of time in your car here, is what I’m saying. And that’s just if you’re drivi
ng around Houston proper. Once you decide to move to the sticks, all bets are off.
The Woodlands is one of Houston’s northern suburbs, about a 25-mile drive from my and Charlie’s neighborhood, and is where our mother currently resides. Depending on weather, time of day, and whether or not you’ve sacrificed the requisite number of goats to the transit gods, the subsequent drive time can be anything from 30 minutes to the director’s cut of The Godfather, Interstate 45 being one of the last remaining local freeways that, for a variety of reasons, hadn’t been expanded to 15 lanes.
Fortunately, there is an HOV lane that takes you almost the whole way, and we sped up I-45 with little delay.
I don’t really remember much of the process involved in convincing Mom to move up here, but it happened with what seemed to me surprising swiftness. One day she was still in the same Heights home she’d raised us in and shared with my dad for what seemed like (and actually was) decades, the next she was paying an HOA for the privilege of checking the height of her lawn and making sure she didn’t decide to open a backyard alpaca farm.
This all came at the tail end of my detective career, and my mind was clearly on other things. Otherwise I might have more assertively stated my aversion to master-planned communities and white flight evangelicals. Still, she was in a gated community and I did my best to balance the peace of mind that came with my mother being in a safe neighborhood with the hypocrisy of my having railed against such communities for most of my adult life.
Charlie drove us in silence for a good portion of the trip. Unlike me, she enjoyed driving. Having a functioning car was only part of it, since she’d developed the habit when we were teens, borrowing Mom’s old pickup and ramming the roads until the wee hours. She said it was to “clear her head,” and I had no reason to doubt that. Charlie rarely drank in high school, and I could count the number of boyfriends she had on one hand with three fingers removed. She also suffered from insomnia, which she described as the result of being unable to turn her brain off. Barreling down a highway at 80 miles per hour while blasting Fear or Black Flag was pretty cathartic for a kid as off-the-charts brilliant as my sister.
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