by Sheena Kamal
Brazuca curses himself silently. “I didn’t mean to imply that Cecily’s death was—”
Lam holds up a hand. “She hated being called that. It was her grandmother’s name, and she couldn’t stand the old bat.”
“Sorry.”
“How could you know? So tell me, who’s the dealer?”
Brazuca shrugs. “Can’t rightly say. Saw someone leaving Clementine’s condo but couldn’t get an ID. Followed the trail and it led to this bar. Made the connection.” He’s not sure why he’s protecting Priya, but suspects that it has to do with Lam more than anything else. Lam doesn’t seem like the type to lay a hand on a woman, but Brazuca spent enough years in law enforcement to know that you can never really tell. Plus, Priya didn’t have to give up the bar, and by keeping her out of it, he could use it as leverage if he needs more information from her later.
“You never saw this person again?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Lam says, frowning. “Can you find out more?”
More? Unlikely, Brazuca thinks. “I think it’s time to let this one go, buddy. Before it was the Triple 9s, that gang was led by someone else. Now they’re diversified, and this time they’re smart enough to stay under the radar. You could be spinning your wheels for years looking for someone to hold accountable. I found her dealer and traced it to the Triple 9s. Now you know.” He lowers his voice. “I think it’s time to move on.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Lam snaps, reminding Brazuca of Grace. He buries his head in his hands. “You know what I never understood?” he says, after a full minute of silence. “Why she turned to drugs.”
“Hey—”
“I gave her everything. She had everything, Jon. Somebody took advantage of her and I want names. I want to know every fucking person involved. These Triple 9s or whatever they’re called have got to get their supply from somewhere.” Gone is the devastated lover. Lam doesn’t raise his voice, but he is almost shaking with anger.
“Then you’ve gotta find someone else because this is above my pay level.” Brazuca has already been shot once on account of Lam. Friendship does have its limits.
“I’ll pay you more,” says Lam. Then he names a figure so absurd that Brazuca has to sit down to absorb it.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Plus expenses,” Lam continues, as if Brazuca hadn’t spoken. “You dig up the supply chain and then take your money and go live your life however you want to do it. Buy a cabin in the woods or a condo in Seattle. Point a giant telescope at the sky. Whatever floats your boat. And you’ll never have to do this again.”
Lam senses Brazuca’s wavering, his growing interest in the sum named, and his voice becomes urgent.
“You’re the only person I can trust, do you know that? Everyone else is connected to my father or his business in some way. This . . . this is for me. I want to know every single fucking person responsible, Jon. Because I swear to God, Clem wasn’t an addict. Someone did this to her. Took advantage of her and messed with her mind. She was happy.”
If that were the case, neither of them would be here. The love of his life wouldn’t have needed to relax with a little synthetic bump. Wouldn’t have relied on a deadly combination of chemicals to trigger her brain’s opioid receptors. Artificially spike her dopamine levels. But Lam isn’t yet ready to accept this. Which is likely what has inspired his sudden generosity.
Brazuca stands and tries to hide the pity in his eyes. Women have divorced him, drugged him, tied him to a bed, broken his heart, walked away. But none of them has ever killed herself to get away from him. He thinks of his bad leg. Of his new leaf that is withering right in front of him. Of selling out and cashing in, because opportunities to become set in life are few and far between.
Who is he to look a gift billionaire in the eyes and refuse?
17
I wake up to the sounds of Gary Clark Jr. playing softly in the background and my phone vibrating, almost to the bass line. “Just a sec,” I mutter to Simone, to the strains of “If Trouble Was Money.” Through the open bathroom door, I can see Nate asleep in the tub with his coat rolled up under his head. His uneven snoring is a testament to the truth that sometimes even the best vocalists can be pitchy.
I pick up my things and leave as quietly as I can. “Yeah?” I say into the phone, once I’m out of the room.
“Well, hello to you, too, sunshine.”
So she’s still a little bit upset with me. I wipe the sleep from my eyes and sit on the bottom step. The staircase isn’t lit. Given the headache building at my temples, I’m grateful for these small mercies. “How’s Terry?” I ask.
She laughs. Even though with the time difference she’s three hours behind, she seems to be far more awake than I am. Probably hasn’t even gone to bed yet. “Nora, you are something else. Let’s talk about Terry when you get back. I’ve managed to track down a couple family contacts for two of those names you sent me. If you want to go that route. Texting them to you now, but not sure how far you’re gonna get with these. They’re landline numbers. Who has a landline these days?” She is unable to keep the scorn out of her voice.
“I’ll try them anyway. Thanks.”
“How is it going so far? Any other developments?”
I could tell her about the stolen car and the attempted robbery last night, but I don’t. It would only worry her—or worse, annoy her—and I need her on my side right now. So I tell her about Kovaks instead.
“What are you gonna do until he gets back?”
“Been thinking a lot about tattoos. Might be looking into one.”
“Right,” she says skeptically. “Make sure you get a piercing or two to go with it. I hear nip rings are making a comeback.” Then she hangs up on me. Within seconds her texts come through.
I leave the house as quietly as I came in, stepping over the detritus in the kitchen on my way out, left over from the party the night before. Despite the headache, I feel strangely well rested. I have been thinking a lot about tattoos, to be honest. About how distinctive it is to have one at the base of your neck, like a barcode from a sci-fi flick. And how when you describe it to a cop and he pauses for a split second, a flicker of recognition on his face, maybe it means something. That he knows something about the man who was rifling through my stuff.
And, just like a motherfucking cop, he left it up to me to figure out what that something is. If trouble was money, indeed. I’d be a millionaire.
18
I have no luck with the first number that Simone sent me. The number, with an Atlanta area code, has been disconnected. The phone continues ringing with the second one, but there’s no answering machine to pick up. Cory Seaper’s family is still living in a landline era, somewhere in Florida. At least their phone is still connected and, while I wait at Mark Kovaks’s bar for him to return, calling it is as good a way as any to pass the time. It is hard to stay sober, recovering alcoholic that I am, but I’ve got the barman’s attitude to keep me in check. Whenever I think of adding a splash of vodka to my fruit cocktail, his obvious angling for an upsell keeps me on the path to sobriety.
After the initial flurry of response from the veterans website, interest in the picture has died down and there are no new suggestions in my inbox. Seb has been suspiciously silent, as well, and has ignored all my calls since I’ve gotten here. He texted Everything is fine to me last night, which means that it isn’t. He knows full well that if I give up looking for information about my father’s death, it would be for him.
The man sitting next to me at the bar has been giving me the eye, watching me make call after call and leaving no messages. “He stand you up, doll? Man don’t deserve the honey, he does you like that.”
I stare at him, then at the phone in my hand, and see the connection he’s made.
“Yeah,” he continues. “You can do better, baby. If you’re feeling lonely, I could be a friend. When was the last time you had a friend take care a you?”
I have a fu
nny feeling he’s not talking about just a friend, and his interpretation of “taking care” probably wouldn’t be similar to my own. But I decide to play along anyway. “Last month,” I say, with a morose shake of my head. I tell him about the ex just out of jail and the dog. “But all he wanted was old Brutus in the end. He was just trying to butter me up by using his body.”
The man becomes grave. “My Opal just passed last year. Cancer. Still can’t get over it. I didn’t even know she was sick.” He stops to wipe a tear from his eye. “How’s a man supposed to live without his dog, you tell me that?” He knocks back his whiskey and stumbles out of the bar. All thoughts of improbable friendships have disappeared.
When he leaves, I try the Seaper number once more and am about to hang up after the seventh ring when someone on the other end picks up, muttering a breathless “Hello?”
I’m so thrown by hearing another voice on the line after repeated calls that I don’t reply immediately. She says it again and is on the verge of disconnecting when I suddenly say, “Yes, hi. I’m calling about Cory Seaper.” I put some money down on the bar for my drink and make my way outside.
“He’s dead,” the woman on the line says flatly.
The late morning sun shines on the overgrown lot next to the bar. A group of teenagers ride by on bikes, on their way to school, no doubt. Better late than never. “I know that. I think he might have served with my dad. There’s a picture of him with three other men. I’m trying to identify them to see if maybe anyone remembered my father. If maybe any of the families remember his name mentioned in conversation?”
She is silent for a long moment. “Can I see the picture?”
I have a photo of the photo stored on my phone, so I hang up and text it to the mobile number she gives me. She calls back from the new number within a few minutes. Her voice, when she speaks, has lost its impatient edge. There is a catch to it now. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s my dad, alright. Third from the left. God, he looked so happy. And young.”
They all did, in that picture. Cory Seaper was shorter than the rest of the men but heavily muscled, with close-cropped blond hair and a wide grin. “Mine is on the far right.”
“He was good looking.”
It’s the first thing that comes through in the picture, how attractive my father was, with his dark hair and dark eyes. Like mine. His smile that was shy and sweet, not like mine at all. He still looked like a teenager here. Young and hopeful. “Yeah, he was. His name is Samuel Watts. Does that ring a bell? Did your dad ever talk about him?”
“No. My dad was private about the time he served. He was at the barracks bombing in Beirut.” According to Seb, Beirut had stood out during the tumultuous eighties. Not in the public eye, because the public memory is shit, but in history. A suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives through a security checkpoint at the marine barracks located at the Beirut airport. He killed close to two hundred and fifty American soldiers and service personnel. Another truck targeted the French soldiers, killing over fifty French peacekeepers.
“Was he hurt?”
“No. He wasn’t injured, but my mom always said he lost something that day. He used to be a pretty happy guy, before. He got out of the military not long after and did sales for the rest of his life. Cushy desk job was all he ever wanted after that.”
“Was there any kind of trouble that he was part of before that? Something that he let slip?”
“He was there when a fucking barracks blew up! How much more trouble do you want?”
Neither of us speaks for a moment. “Sorry,” she says finally. “Guess it’s a lot to deal with right now.”
She talks a bit after that about how she’s sure her mother was a little bit frightened of her father, and for him, too. That he flinched at loud noises, but kept a robust gun collection regardless. He’d slapped her once as a child, very hard, and then never allowed himself to get too close to her afterward. That she’d grown up with him cold and distant, except at her wedding, when he walked her down the aisle. He was even quiet in his heart attack, which happened one night when he’d gotten up for a glass of water and her mother found his body the next morning, not having a clue that he’d fallen during the night.
I wonder if I should tell her about how I found my father, but I can’t get a word in edgewise. Then she says, “I’ve got to go. Sorry I couldn’t be much help. Thanks for the photo.” She ends the call before I have a chance to respond.
Back indoors, the barman continues to ignore me. I wave a twenty at him. He exchanges glances with a man at the other end of the bar, shrugging nonchalantly as he takes his sweet-ass time coming over. The baller attitude turns quickly to astonishment as I write my number on a cocktail napkin and hand it over, along with the twenty. “Can you call me when your boss gets back from Jersey?”
A look of relief crosses his face when he realizes that I’m not hitting on him. It’s not totally out of the question that our intense mutual dislike could lead to potentially explosive sexual chemistry. But he is grateful nonetheless not to confront it face on and gives me a terse nod before walking away. The day drinkers in the room cast curious, if slightly glazed glances my way before turning inward again. There’s nothing sinister about the way that they look at me, nothing like the feeling I had before I confronted the veteran, but I still feel the weight of their eyes. I have reconciled myself to the fact that this feeling of being stared at is here to stay. Like a persecution complex, but the stares feel more judgmental. A woman can’t live like this. Senses heightened at all times. Constantly playing defense.
19
“You’re not trying to get in my pants, are you?” says Detective Christopher Lee, from the deck of his North Vancouver house. The lights of Vancouver are in the distance, surrounded by the dark, calm ocean. The view is incredible and almost makes up for the fact that the house itself is structurally unsound and one winter storm away from collapsing around the grumpy homicide detective who lives there. “Because it takes more than a couple beers to hit a home run with me, dude.” Lee belches quietly and opens a second can of beer.
“That’s not what I heard.” Brazuca takes a drink of his own and grins over at Lee, who, with his designer clothes and well-used gym membership, is known as something of a ladies’ man.
“You been talking to my ex-wife again?”
“Nah, your priest.”
“Don’t bring him into your sick world, you fucking heathen. Why are you here?”
“We’re talking about gangs. In Vancouver. Lala Lair, remember? I’m working a drug overdose with a connection to the Triple 9s?”
“Jesus. Anything but that shit. You realize that this is my day off, right?”
“Look at you, taking the Lord’s name in vain. Who’s the heathen now?”
Lee waves his hand, as though magically dismissing the thought that he, with his alcoholism, womanizing, and profanity, could ever be considered anything less than God’s perfect servant. “What the hell do you know about it? I’ll go to confession next week. Did you tell your client that an overdose is a blessing, that his junkie can exit without stringing him along for life?”
Brazuca is careful to keep his expression blank. “I tried to tell him there was no point in going down this dark alley, but it was the love of his life. She was pregnant.”
“Ah, fuck. Fentanyl?”
“Cocaine mixed with Wild Ten.”
“And you figured that my experience in Homicide would help out?” Lee looks at Brazuca for a long time. “For a PI, you got shitty contacts on the force if I’m the sum total of them.”
“You were in Gangs for a while,” Brazuca says easily, masking his anger. He used to have great contacts with the police department—when he’d been on the force himself. But after he’d gotten shot, he flamed out spectacularly and nobody but Lee wanted to have anything to do with him. Not even his wife. Which was something that no amount of stargazing could smooth over.
Lee sees past the deflection and takes
pity on him. “Well, hasn’t changed that much. You got the bikers, the mixed gangs, the Latin cartels, the Eastern Europeans, the Asians, the South Asians . . . They’re all here, man, and they’re all into real estate and drugs. Apart from some low-level street squabbles it’s been pretty quiet lately. They’ve got their systems down pat. Violence is bad for business.”
Brazuca nods. The surprisingly thorough files on Grace’s flash drive suggested the same thing. The streets have seemed calmer, but that doesn’t mean there was nothing going on. “Can you find out about the Triple 9s?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Drugs came from them, so who’s their connect?”
“I heard . . .” Lee looks away and frowns. He finishes his second beer and opens a third can.
Brazuca watches him for a moment. Grows impatient as Lee makes no attempt to continue. “What?”
“Jesus. This is between us.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Brazuca says, unexpectedly offended. Lee has never hesitated to share anything with him before.
“I mean it.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Hey, this is serious. Need to hear you say it, man.”
“Fine. What you tell me is between us.”
Lee raises a brow. “And you keep my name out of it.”
“And your name is nowhere near my report, as if it would ever be, and I won’t even put this in my notes. Plus, I’ll take it to my grave and have it written on my tombstone that you and I officially never had a conversation on this lovely day in October, this year of Our Lord, et cetera.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it? When I was in the Gang Unit, I had a source who swears that someone from the Triple 9s met up with Jimmy Fang’s second. Triple 9s were connected, but we didn’t know they were connected like that.”
“Jimmy Fang . . . as in Three Phoenix triad Jimmy Fang? Jimmy Fang who disappeared ten years ago?”