Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  For my own sake, and for the sake of solving a couple of murders that seemed to matter more than a lot of others, I had to keep moving. What I did wasn’t important; I just had to do something. Anything.

  That took some of the pressure off. Surprisingly, I felt a little better. I felt so much better I was hungry again. I went downstairs, got in my car and drove to Norm’s down on Sunset. I had a ham and cheese omelette, whole-wheat toast, and orange juice. It tasted pretty much like it was supposed to taste. I decided that was a good omen.

  I used the phone book outside the restaurant to look up Doyle and Chismond. Most of the book was missing, ripped out by people with no pencils and short memories. The page that would have listed Chismond was gone, but I found Doyle’s address.

  Okay, I thought. Another sign. This was my day.

  I drove over to Hancock Park, where Doyle had one of the beautiful Tudor homes they grow there. It sat behind a high hedge, with a couple of big trees in the yard. I could just see the top of a tree house sticking up. Doyle wasn’t married; maybe it was from a previous owner.

  I pulled in under a tree across the street and looked at the house for a minute.

  It was a very quiet neighborhood. All the lawns were neatly mown. There was no litter in the gutters. No traffic passed through on the way to somewhere else. In fact, about all I could see or hear was one mockingbird, sitting on a wire a half-block away and warbling with measured dignity.

  Doyle was almost certainly at work. I wasn’t sure what I could expect to get from looking at his house, but in a way it was out of my hands. I had been led here by a good breakfast and a savaged telephone book.

  So I looked at the house. I had been looking at it for about five minutes when my car door was snatched open and something cold pushed into my ear.

  “Neighborhood Watch,” a soft voice said. “Can I help you with something?”

  Out of the corner of my eyes I could see the gunman. He was in his thirties, big, with short dirty-blond hair and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked very fit. He’d moved up on me quietly and smoothly and I was caught.

  I was more pissed-off than scared. I hadn’t heard a thing. I was supposed to be street-smart and I had let this goon into my lap without noticing anything.

  And now he was leaning his weight on the top of the car door and moving the tip of his gun against my ear with a nasty grin.

  So I did something stupid. I jerked my hands up in front of my face, as if I was scared. I mumbled, “Oh, please—” while I half-turned and got my foot on the door. Then I kicked at the door as hard as I could.

  It was a bad idea. If somebody has a gun in your ear it’s generally good form to ask politely what they’d like you to do, and then do it.

  But I was mad. This was supposed to be my lucky day. Things were supposed to go my way this morning. If you can get a decent breakfast in L.A., anything can happen. So I moved without really thinking.

  What happened was that when I kicked the car door it caught him squarely on the chin and the Neighborhood Watch clown went sprawling on his butt. I was out of the car as he fell back and clunked his head on the pavement.

  He lay there for a moment, dazed. I moved to him quickly, plucking the gun from his fingers. I shook my head in surprise when I saw the weapon. It was a Glock 9mm with a fifteen-shot magazine and something that looked an awful lot like an illegal silencer on the end.

  If this guy was Neighborhood Watch, what was in this neighborhood? The Corleone family’s summerhouse?

  I checked the chamber on the gun. Sure enough, he had a round in it. The maniac could have blown my head off. I pumped the round out and into the gutter.

  I leaned over and grabbed a handful of Hawaiian shirt. I pulled him to his feet and shoved him up against my car. As I did, I felt something under his shirt, so I gave him a quick frisking.

  I came up with a large bronze medallion on a chain around his neck.

  His pockets were empty, except for a wallet and a set of keys on a large ring. There was a small silver sword hanging from the keychain. On the blade were some tiny characters. As near as I could make out they said, Is Thusa Mo Thua Chatha.

  I opened the wallet. He had a driver’s license in the name of Phillip Moss, and an Orange County address. “I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood,” I told him as he grunted and shook his head to clear it.

  He glared at me. “Who are you?” he demanded, with a very tight-lipped snarl.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. You had your chance. Now it’s my turn.” I held up the gun in front of him. “It’s not polite to stick your gun in a stranger’s ear. But I’ve got your Q-tip now. So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing wandering around with a cannon?

  “It’s my weapon,” he said.

  “I’m sure it is. So what was it doing in my ear?”

  “You have no right to take that weapon.”

  I sighed. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s not about the weapon anymore. It’s about you, Phil. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he nodded slightly as if something finally made sense. “Zog,” he said, in a tone of voice like he was saying Eureka.

  “Well, you’ve got me there, pal,” I told him.

  “Z-O-G,” he said. Maybe he figured that anybody who moved fast enough to get the drop on him couldn’t spell.

  “I’ll need a receipt for the pistol,” he said.

  I gave up. L.A. was the kind of town where any damned fool could show up and put a gun in your ear, and this was getting me nowhere.

  “Here,” I said, sliding the clip out of the handle. “Take the damn thing,” I told him, and put the pistol in his hands. “Go play with your acorns.”

  He just looked at the gun in his hands, then looked up at me again. His eyes narrowed. “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “It’s a Glock nine-millimeter,” I told him. “I’m keeping the clip.”

  “Just like that, huh?” he said. I could see now that he had the gun back he thought he was going to get tough again. “I don’t think so—” And he raised the gun up, pointed it at my nose, and pulled the trigger.

  He had obviously not seen me jack the round out of the chamber, but I was still shocked. Neighborhood Watch was getting damned unfriendly.

  “I don’t think so, either,” I told him. I slapped him hard and fast on the face. His head rocked to the side and met my left hand coming across for another slap on the other side of the face. His head swung the other way and I gave him one more.

  “I don’t like guns in my nose, or my ear, or any other body cavity. If I ever see you again I’m going to pull your head off and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be looking out your own neck. Now get moving.”

  He put a hand up to his face. It was the hand with the gun. It looked like it hurt. “Your day is coming, you filthy—”

  I held up my hand again like I was going to hit him. He tried to step back and ran into the car. So he slid along the car and scrambled onto the sidewalk, grabbing for his dignity.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this, mud-boy,” he said. And then he turned and marched off, disappearing around the corner without looking back.

  I climbed back into my car. I suddenly had a lot to think about.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “He called you mud-boy?” Ed asked me, his inverted V eyebrows climbing up until they were almost lost on top of his head.

  “And Zog,” I said. “He called me Zog twice. He even spelled it for me.”

  “Damn,” said Ed. He let his eyebrows slide back down into position and fired up a Kool. “What you make of that shit?”

  I shook my head at him. “I don’t know what to make of it. I never heard any of it before. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might mean something. You can take coincidence only so far.”

  “And you already there, Billy.”

  “Yeah. Past there.”

  Ed leaned back. He reached his hand all t
he way around the back of his head and scratched the other side, puffing on the Kool that dangled from his fingers of his other hand. “So you think maybe he wasn’t really Neighborhood Watch, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he’s with Pinkerton’s and he thought I was Jesse James. But there was something about this guy.”

  He gave me a lazy smile. “Uh-huh. Must be something, he get his gun in your ear like that.”

  “That’s part of it,” I admitted. “The guy moved pretty good. He looked like he was in very good shape, knew how to use the gun, all that. But—” I stopped talking, because I couldn’t figure out how to say it.

  I didn’t have to figure it out. The Kevin Costner lookalike sauntered over and dropped a folder on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, then looked at Ed.

  Ed stared back without touching the folder. After a few seconds Kevin shrugged and walked away.

  Ed sighed and opened the folder. After a moment he gave his head a slight nod. “Well, well.”

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a third well? So it goes, ‘Well, well, well’?”

  “Billy, you can have all the wells you want. You just hit a gusher.”

  He flipped the folder over to me. It was a rap sheet for Phillip L. Moss. I scanned it.

  Phil was a very busy guy. When he wasn’t helping out with Neighborhood Watch he was spending a lot of time eating public food. He’d been inside for assault, aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, attempted murder, and public nuisance more times than the whole local chapter of Hell’s Angels. He was also a known former member of CSA.

  I looked up at Ed. “CSA? Like Confederate States of America?”

  The famous Cheshire grin appeared. This was making Ed happy. “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.” He said it like it was the tag line for a sermon. “I’m not sure if they still in business, but we can find out.”

  “I’m sure we could,” I said, “but why would we want to?”

  Ed looked at me and shook his head sadly. “What we gonna do with you, son? You gettin’ all pathetic on me. CSA was one of the original white racist gun clubs, Billy. You know, crawling ’round in the mud with an AR–15 pretending you shooting at evil niggers trying to integrate your wife. Survivalism mixed with racism. You never hear about that shit?”

  “Oh,” I said. I had a vague memory of something like that. “They had a commune in, uh, Mississippi or something.”

  Ed pointed a finger at me and dropped his thumb: Pow. “Arkansas. Had a big spread up there to train for the survival of the pure white race.”

  He turned and punched four digits into the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he said and he didn’t tell me. But a minute later a guy strolled over.

  He was a very impressive-looking guy; about six-three, with the kind of silhouette you get only from a lifetime in the gym. He had a shaved head, an eyepatch, and a diamond in his left ear.

  “Billy,” Ed said, “this is Detective Braun.”

  I gave him my hand. He didn’t rip it off and eat it. But it throbbed for a while.

  “Detective Braun here is our expert on the survival of the pure white race.” He showed Braun some teeth. “He don’t look Jewish, does he?”

  “I was undercover last year,” Braun told me. He had a very soft, high voice. “You know the Stompers?”

  I said I did. They were a bunch of smelly, overweight yahoos on Harleys. Even the other bikers avoided them.

  “We got word they were in on a bank job. I hung out with them.”

  I was impressed. I looked at him a little harder.

  Braun smiled. “I washed since then.”

  “Point is,” Ed cut in, “Stompers got down with Aryan Nations. Must of caught it in jail. So Detective Braun got to go to the convention.”

  “The what?”

  Braun nodded. “All the right-wing God-and-gun nuts get together every year. They swap guns and knives and books and pictures of Hitler. You get to see who’s coming up and what ideas are going around.”

  “This guy called me Zog. Then he said I was a mud-boy.”

  Braun nodded. “Aren’t we all. Zog is Z-O-G. Stands for Zionist Occupation Government. Means a fed, or a cop. They believe America—and the world—has been stolen away by the Jews and their puppets.”

  Ed couldn’t let that go. “’Scuse me, boss, but could I borrow Montana?”

  Braun ignored the interruption. So did I. “And mud-boy?”

  He smiled. “That’s a little nastier. Anybody who isn’t one hundred percent pure Aryan has tainted blood. They’re mud-people, not really humans.”

  “What about that keychain, Billy?” Ed asked me.

  I nodded. “He had a sword on his keychain. It had an inscription.” I closed my eyes and pictured the sword. I’ve always had a good visual memory, and in a moment I could see it. “Is thusa mo thua chatha,” I said.

  Braun whistled. Now he looked impressed. “This guy keeps fast company,” he said to Ed.

  He turned back to me. “‘You will be my battle ax,’” he said. “It’s Gaelic, it’s the motto of the Brothers of the Righteous Sword.”

  “Oh, my,” said Ed.

  “Can I take it that the Brothers are not a fencing club?”

  “And they ain’t brothers, neither,” Ed tossed in with a cackle. Braun turned his one good eye on me. I could see why the Stompers let him hang around. It was like looking into a cold dark well.

  “Die Bruders are an elite group of shock troopers. They call themselves Aryan Warriors. They’ve taken all these oaths to God about death before dishonor, defending the white race to the last drop of their pure white blood, and so on.”

  “The usual shit,” I said.

  “Nope,” Braun told me. “So far, these guys mean it. We never took one alive. And they always take down a couple of ZOGs when they go.”

  “So how does Moss go from CSA to the Bruders?”

  Braun smiled. He had a gold tooth in the front with a small diamond set into it. “There’s only so many of these guys to go around. The feds bust one bunch, the leaders go to jail, and the troopers need to find a new outfit.” He shrugged. “I’d bet most of the soldiers in Die Bruders were in two or three other groups before this one. It’s what they do. They’re professional racists.”

  “My, my,” said Ed. “What you into now, Billy boy?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just a mud-boy. What would this guy be doing hanging around that neighborhood?”

  “These are not the kind of guys that go for a walk in the park,” said Braun. “If he was there, it was for a reason.”

  “Bingo,” said Ed.

  I shook my head. “We still don’t know what that reason is. Okay, he’s a member of a racist group—”

  “A racist paramilitary group,” Ed butted in. “Which ought to make you feel better ’bout him cleaning out your ear. Man’s had some training.”

  Braun stood up. “One last tip on these guys,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  He winked that single cold eye. “Don’t fuck with ’em.” He nodded to Ed and strolled away, back to his desk.

  “All right,” I said. “So either this guy was following me—which is possible, considering how rusty I am. Meaning he picked me up when I was tailing Tanner. Or else—”

  “Or else he was already there when you got there. Which means somebody in the neighborhood got a very unusual security system.”

  “Or it’s a complete coincidence. The guy is a nut case, and he just happened to go off while I was around.”

  Ed looked at me sadly. “Yeah, Billy. I think I could buy complete coincidence. You probably right, let’s go for a few beers. How ’bout those Dodgers, huh?”

  I watched him look at me. Neither of us had anything much to say for a few moments, so we just stared.

  Ed didn’t believe it was a coincidence. Neither did I, but I hadn’t believed it was going to be this easy, either. I realized I had been looking for a difficult task—
no, a quest.

  I needed a quest to redeem me—something tough and pure and close to impossible. If I could work through a long fight against overwhelming odds, it would help make all the heartache and night sweats mean something. It wouldn’t bring my family back—nothing would. But it might give some focus to a reason for going on, something beyond fishing.

  And I realized, too, that fishing wasn’t enough anymore. After just a few days and one medium jolt of adrenaline, I realized I needed to do this. I needed the feelings that only this kind of work gave me.

  But it had to mean something. And it had to be tough. I needed penance. I needed to work for it, work hard, not have some geek in a flowered shirt fall into my lap waving a pistol.

  If it was too easy, it wouldn’t count.

  I smiled at myself, at the games Billy played with Billy. Silly, yes, but true anyway. I had to do this, and—

  And what? Hope it got harder?

  Ed cleared his throat. He was just waiting for me. I wondered how much of this he had figured out.

  I let out a long breath. I knew I wasn’t giving up. “Let’s take a look at who else lives in that neighborhood.”

  Ed nodded, like that was all he was waiting for. He made a small note on a pad. “I can get that easy enough.”

  I reached over and took the pad and pencil that had rolled up against his Out basket. “Here.” I sketched out the street as I remembered it. “I was parked here—Doyle’s house was here. So these five houses ought to do it.”

  I pushed the paper across the desk at Ed. He glanced at it and nodded. “Okay, Billy. Meantime I’ll put out a BOLO for Moss.” He waved the paper at me. “This take me a couple of hours. Say this evening?”

  “Sure, uh—” It suddenly dawned on me that today was Friday. And Friday night was my date with Nancy Hoffman. I tried to sound casual, knowing how good Ed’s radar was. “Make it easy on yourself. Let’s say tomorrow morning.”

  It didn’t work. His eyes fastened onto me immediately, and the old Cheshire cat grin spread across his face. “How about I call you this evening?” he said, pretending innocence.

  “I’ll call you in the morning, Ed,” I told him. I could feel a blush spreading across my face, like a teenager caught holding hands.