A Tooth for a Tooth

by Ben Rehder

  But, of course, now that I’d worked up the nerve, I could tell from her breathing that she’d dozed off. It was not even eight o’clock, but I had a suspicion Mia would be out until the morning. That was fine. The conversation could wait.

  19

  He’d had a bad dream, but it was all too real.

  Waking in a haze, unsure of his surroundings. In a bed. Dim light. Staring at a window to his right, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. Near sunrise? Near sunset?

  Where the fuck was he? What the hell had happened?

  Was it a hospital? Sure smelled like one. Fucking gross.

  He rotated his head to the left and something popped. Jesus effing Christ, that hurt. Sore as hell. Moving was not a wise idea.

  But now he could see a door. Partially open to a hallway. Hospital for sure. Late at night? Where were the retards who ran this place?

  Still couldn’t focus.

  His neck hurt like a son of a bitch, so he straightened it again and stared at the ceiling.

  He tried to call out, but something was wrong with his mouth. It wouldn’t move. He couldn’t open it. His teeth were clenched. Something wrong with his jaw. He tried to raise his right hand to probe his face, but he couldn’t lift his arm. Too heavy. Same with his left. He could shift both of his legs an inch or two, which was great news, but he couldn’t move them any more than that.

  Out of the corner of his left eye he could see some kind of tall electronic machine near the bed, not far from his left elbow. It had various gauges and digital readouts, but that’s all he could tell.

  There was a TV mounted high on the wall in front of him, but it was not turned on.

  Was it a car wreck? He seemed to remember a crash. Couple of men in a black truck hassling him—pointing a gun?—and then a crash.

  Then this. Being here.

  He wished he could focus and look at his phone. He might be able to figure things out. Wait, where was his phone? What had these retards done with his phone? Morons. No telling where it was right now. Or his wallet. Or his clothes. Maybe the ambulance driver stole it. Or some nurse in the emergency room. What about his frigging brand new car? Those fuckers at his insurance company better not give him any trouble.

  He must’ve dozed off, because suddenly a nurse was standing beside the bed. Or maybe a doctor. Somebody. A visitor?

  Lennox tried to turn his head toward the person, but the pain was too sharp. Whoever it was, they’d closed the door after they’d entered.

  Then the person leaned in close, smelling of whiskey and garlic and body odor, and whispered into Lennox’s ear from an inch away.

  “Listen up, fuckhead. I’m done screwing around. Time to stop playing your silly games, you got me? Or next time you ain’t gonna be so lucky.”

  Fucking Jankowski. That retard. “This is lucky?” Lennox wanted to say, but he could only grunt.

  “I’m a reasonable guy, but if you keep it up, you’re gonna force my hand, know what I mean? Make me get creative—like maybe paying a visit to Kerri and Jack. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Lennox wanted to scream, to jump from the bed and beat Joe Jankowski to a bloody pulp, but he could only lie there. He couldn’t even yell for help. He could only nod.

  “You change your mind later or try to warn your sister, Jack’ll disappear one day. Poof. They won’t find a single hair. Same thing if you talk to the cops. You know by now that I mean what I say. Am I making myself crystal clear?”

  Lennox nodded again and the pain was nearly unbearable, but he wanted to make sure Jankowski saw that he was ready to cooperate.

  20

  I prefer to have Mia beside me in bed when I wake up, but if she isn’t there, that disappointment fades a tiny bit when I smell the aroma of bacon in the air, as I did the morning after she’d gotten back from Miami.

  I got out of bed, and as I made my way down the hallway, I could hear music playing lightly from the living room stereo. I had to grin when I realized it was “Rhythm is Gonna Get You” by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine—one of their early singles in the mid 1980s. Old school.

  I found Mia in the kitchen, wearing a red satin kimono and cracking eggs into a tall glass. And dancing. She saw me coming and put on a show, moving her hips and arms and shoulders and thighs in a very smooth and practiced salsa dance, which is possibly the sexiest dance ever invented. Did I mention she was wearing a red kimono?

  “Looks like you picked up a few moves,” I said, watching from the other side of the pass-through bar.

  “I practiced for hours, just so I could come back home and give you a show,” she said.

  “Liar,” I said. “But I’m not complaining.”

  “I think I heard more Miami Sound Machine by the pool at our hotel than I did in the preceding twenty years,” she said. “And I heard that song ‘Despacito’ about a thousand times.”

  She finished her dance and leaned over to give me a kiss.

  “How do you want your eggs?”

  “Over easy—just like last night.”

  “As you wish,” she said, and she poured the glass of eggs into a skillet heating on the stovetop.

  “I woke up early this morning and began to think about this mess with Jankowski,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Part of the job,” she said. “Anyway, I came to the conclusion that there are only a couple of options.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “First, we could simply talk to him, tell him what we suspect, and then mention that we have no intention of probing any further—as long as he leaves you alone.”

  “He’ll deny everything,” I said.

  She grabbed a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator.

  “Of course he will. But if he has any sense, he’ll leave you alone.”

  “What if he doesn’t have any sense?” I said. “He may think he needs to take us both off the board.”

  She looked at me. “Did you just say ‘Take us both off the board’?”

  “I’ve been reading a lot of James Lee Burke lately.”

  “He can get away with it. You can’t.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Anyway, that brings up option number two, which is probably the way we need to go.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  She filled two glasses with juice and set one on the bar for me.

  “We dig up enough evidence to get him charged with something and thrown into prison. Whatever we find will almost certainly implicate Damon Tate, too, and so we’ll be killing two bad guys with one stone.”

  The smell of the bacon was making me salivate. She was baking it in the oven on a cookie sheet lined with foil—a cleaner, easier method that I’d somehow never discovered until I’d met Mia.

  I said, “My first reaction, off the top of my head, totally going with my gut, is that we should choose option number three.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, it’s exactly like option two, except we eat breakfast and then take a shower together first.”

  She pointed the spatula at me with approval. “You are nothing short of a genius.”

  So much of what we do is rooted in research.

  Learn as much as you possibly can about your subjects before you take action. It’s boring, tedious, and time-consuming, but it almost always pays off in one way or another.

  I’d already researched Joe Jankowski, Lennox Armbruster, and Brent Donovan extensively, but now Mia took a shot, intending to dig up anything interesting or relevant I might’ve missed.

  Meanwhile, I looked into Nathaniel Tate—and I was immediately unsettled by what I found. Randy Wolfe hadn’t been kidding about this lunatic.

  His first arrest as an adult had come on his 1
7th birthday. That was literally the first day he could commit a crime and have it reflected in his adult records. In fact, if he’d committed the crime just three hours earlier, he would’ve been considered a juvenile.

  That arrest—the first of many—was for aggravated assault against his own father. I managed to find enough court records and newspaper articles to piece it together. Young Nathaniel glued shards of a broken Mountain Dew bottle all along the barrel of a wooden baseball bat. Not large shards that might puncture an eye or lacerate a major neck artery, but smaller shards designed to puncture and tear flesh and leave a bloody mess, but without being fatal. Then he approached his dad, who was watching a football game, and clubbed him all over the head and face with it.

  Just for grins, I checked the father’s record and discovered that he had been arrested twice for domestic abuse against his wife and four children, including one daughter. I guess Nathaniel had decided enough was enough. If he’d only committed the crime a little earlier, perhaps he wouldn’t have served a year for it. There was no word on how badly his father had been injured in the attack.

  Other arrests followed, of course, as you would expect for a kid raised in those conditions.

  Drunk driving.

  Possession of a controlled substance several times.

  Terroristic threat.

  Aggravated assault.

  Passing a bad check for more than $500.

  Criminal mischief several times.

  Most of the charges had been dismissed or lowered in a plea deal, which explains how punks like Nathaniel Tate manage to return to the street time and time again.

  On one hand, it’s easy to feel empathy for someone like Nathaniel Tate, who likely never had a decent role model or any incentive to behave like a rational, respectable person. On the other hand, he had free will and the ability to make his own decisions.

  Plus, he’d intended to kill me, which always earned a negative mark in my book.

  If he’d ever held a job for longer than a year, I couldn’t find any evidence of it. He didn’t own any real estate. He’d been married at the age of 23, divorced after ten months, with the wife alleging verbal and physical abuse. His credit was terrible. He was four months behind on the loan for the truck he drove. It was a black GMC Sierra. No big surprise.

  Mia, seated at the kitchen table with her laptop, said, “Did you ever find Lennox Armbruster’s Instagram account?”

  “I did not.”

  “It appears he uses the same screen name for all of his social media, and he posted a photo of his Alfa on Instagram with the caption, ‘Just drove this sweet ride off the lot.’ And he added a hashtag ‘better than the lottery.’”

  “What’s better?” I was seated on the couch, working on my own laptop.

  “He didn’t say. Let me keep looking.”

  A minute passed.

  Then she said, “You know those really obnoxious rich kids who spend all day posting status symbols showing how wealthy they are? Yachts, private jets, jewelry—stuff like that? Armbruster started doing the same kind of thing, but on a much smaller scale, obviously. I’m looking at a photo he posted of a pile of cash.”

  “How much cash?”

  “Looks like at least ten or fifteen grand, or maybe more, depending on whether all of these bills are actually hundreds. He could be staging it—putting some singles underneath the hundreds. Hey, counterfeiting could be better than the lottery, if you didn’t get caught. Maybe that’s what he was talking about.”

  I was skeptical.

  Mia added, “Then again, there’s nothing in his background to suggest he’d have the talents for that, and it would be very difficult for a guy like him to launder large sums of cash.”

  I was still researching Nathaniel Tate, but I figured I’d found everything useful I was going to find.

  “You know what else could explain a wad of cash like this?” Mia asked.

  “Bank robbery. Armored truck heist. Kidnapping. Being a really good gigolo.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Some other low-end scam,” I said. “Armbruster seemed to like fraud. Say he does a good old-fashioned slip-and-fall routine inside a mom-and-pop store, and they decide to pay him under the table instead of getting sued.”

  “Possibly,” Mia said.

  “But not what you were thinking,” I said.

  “No, I was thinking blackmail.”

  “Okay, but who’s he blackmailing?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “And for what?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe Joe Jankowski. He seems to be the troublemaker lately. Everything seems to lead back to him.”

  I stopped what I was doing on the laptop and focused my attention fully on this potential scenario.

  I said, “If Armbruster was blackmailing Jankowski, that would mean Jankowski hit him with his SUV on purpose…right?”

  “I would think so, yeah. He didn’t just happen to run Armbruster down by sheer chance.”

  “You know what? I like this idea.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It explains a lot. Well, maybe not a lot, but more than I figured out so far on my own. Well done.”

  “My mind is rested,” she said.

  “And your body is tan, and it has some very—”

  She waggled a finger back and forth at me. Don’t get sidetracked.

  I said, “If Armbruster was blackmailing Jankowski for some as-yet-unknown reason, and then Jankowksi ran him down—ostensibly to end the blackmailing—it would make sense that Armbruster wouldn’t tell the cops what had actually happened, because he’d be exposing himself to a felony charge in the process and giving up any future payments. So, instead, he just kept his mouth shut.”

  Mia was nodding. She said, “And then Jankowski remembered he had a dash cam in his SUV, so he lied about it. Otherwise, that video would’ve been evidence against him, because I’m betting he sped up or swerved to hit Armbruster.”

  “And he was going to take off afterward, except he saw Sarah Gerstenberger on the side of the road and realized there was a witness. So he pulled over.”

  “We need to figure out where Armbruster was going that night,” Mia said. “And did Jankowski know Armbruster was going to be in that particular location? Maybe he was waiting in his vehicle for Armbruster to show up and cross that street in that exact spot.”

  “Maybe, but what would—” I stopped talking for a moment.

  “What?” Mia said.

  “It just occurred to me that a golf course, especially at night, would make a great drop spot for a bag of cash from a blackmail victim. And then Jankowski could look at a map and figure out where the blackmailer was likely to park and cross the street. Is that a stretch?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mia said. “But in order for Jankowski to run Armbruster down, he—Jankowski—would have to know who Armbruster is and what he looks like. Which means Armbruster never worried about concealing his identity—pretty damn stupid—or Jankowski figured out who he is. You agree?”

  “I do, and Armbruster must not have known that Jankowski had identified him or he wouldn’t have needed a drop spot. He could’ve just met him face to face. But Jankowksi identified Armbruster without Armbruster knowing it.”

  Maybe all of this was wrong. We knew that. But brainstorming had value, because it could help us see possibilities we’d overlooked before.

  “Could’ve been as simple as tailing him after a money drop,” Mia said.

  “Or tracking his IP address, if they were exchanging emails,” I said. “I’m guessing Jankowksi has some IT guys on his payroll.”

  Neither of us needed to mention that fraudsters like Armbruster weren’t typically Rhodes Scholars. They were the type of people who made mistakes and got caught.r />
  Mia said, “Maybe we should go look around the golf course and see where it takes us.”

  I said, “Good idea, but we’ll stay off the fairways so the golfers won’t get…teed off.”

  She looked at me and shook her head.

  “Hey, will you be my driver?” I asked.

  She groaned.

  “You have no sense of humor. That’s your handicap,” I said.

  “Well, don’t let it drive a wedge between us,” she said.

  “Oh, you’ve outdone me again,” I said.

  “Par for the course,” she said.

  “I’ve created a monster.”

  It was a nice moment. I had no idea that two hours later I would open my big mouth and ruin the day, and perhaps the rest of my life.

  21

  We parked in the lot outside the Randall’s grocery store, which is the same place Lennox Armbruster had parked the night he’d gotten hit.

  The intersection of the two roads—Lake Austin Boulevard and Exposition—formed a V that pointed due south. Nestled inside the lowest point of that V was the green for the second hole of Lions Municipal Golf Course. I’d lived here all my life, and until now, after having checked a course map online, I couldn’t have told you it was the second hole that ran parallel to Lake Austin Boulevard. It was the second hole that made drivers clench up a bit when driving past, hoping some duffer didn’t shank a shot high and wide and crack a windshield. A little higher in the V, just above the second green, was the tee box for the eighth hole, and just above that, the green for the seventh hole.

  “If Armbruster was using the course as a drop spot,” I said as we waited to cross Exposition, “I think he’d want the money fairly close to the street—someplace where he could just hop the fence, grab the cash, and then get the hell out of there.”