by David Freed
“The fucking LAPD’s saying I shot my own father!” he shouted over the phone. “Some detective named Czarnek. I already told them I was in school that night, but he says everybody they’ve talked to was too wasted to remember me being there. It’s fucking bullshit, man!”
“Why tell me all this? I’m the guy you told to go perform a particular carnal act on himself, which, by the way, I’m fairly sure is impossible.”
“Look, I’m sorry, OK? I was pissed. You jumped me and choked me out. What was I supposed to say?”
Micah Echevarria said he’d had time to reflect. We’d watched meerkats on TV together. He liked meerkats. I seemed to as well. Perhaps it was possible that I wasn’t the complete turd he thought I was upon first impression.
“Anybody who likes animal shows can’t be all bad,” he said.
“My cat loves animal shows and he’s beyond bad.”
“Yeah, but he’s just a cat.”
“Good luck telling him that. He thinks it’s his world; we all just live in it.”
“I need you to talk to the cops. Get ’em off my fuckin’ back.”
“They say they have witnesses who saw you at your dad’s place the night before he was shot.”
The kid cleared his throat. “So what? Don’t mean I fucking shot him.”
“You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time. You lied to me.”
“I lied because you came fucking busting into my house! Plus, you said you and my old man were friends. What was I supposed to do? Give you a fucking hug? He abandoned us, OK? He abandoned my mom.”
I told him that I’d seen the clip he’d posted on YouTube. His poem about Echevarria struck me as heartfelt, I said.
“So you’ll tell the cops I didn’t do it?”
“You drove all the way down from Oakland to LA to see your father the night before he died. I need to know why.”
“I wanted to talk to him about a business proposition.”
“What kind of proposition?”
“Are you gonna help me or not?”
“What kind of business proposition?”
He blew some air. I waited.
“A weed dispensary,” Micah said.
“You wanted your father to bankroll a pot shop?”
“For medical purposes. Dude, it’s perfectly legal. Prime location, low overhead. You can make serious bank. He was good for it. He had the coin. That fine bitch he hooked up with after he dumped my mom, she was fucking rich, man. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He said it was a stupid idea.”
I toyed with the notion of setting the kid straight—that “fine bitch” who married his father used to be married to me—but what would’ve been the point?
“So you argued with your father,” I said.
“Yeah, we argued. But that don’t mean I capped him. He told me go talk to my mother if I wanted money. I told him I already did. She thought it was a stupid idea, too. For once, they agreed on something. He tells me I need to get a job, go work for a living for once in my life. Same thing she said. I told him he could go eat his fuckin’ money and rode back up to Oakland. Couple days later, my mother calls and tells me he got shot. I fucking partied all night, man.”
I could hear a diesel engine behind him, revving, and the hiss of air brakes. He was outside a truck stop somewhere. I asked where he was calling from. He said Nevada.
I glanced up in my rearview mirror. A small white car was coming up fast in the left lane. A Honda. With a rear spoiler.
“If you’re innocent, why are you running?”
“I ain’t running,” he said. “I just don’t want to be trying to clear my name from inside a jail cell, that’s all.”
“No such word as ain’t,” I said. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”
I set the phone down on the center console and watched the Honda converge. Adrenaline sluiced through my veins, a metallic taste on the edges of my tongue. I reached under the driver’s seat where I’d stashed my revolver and wedged it for quick access between my right thigh and the seat cushion. I needn’t have bothered. The white car whizzed past me—a Honda with a yellow Lab riding right seat. The dog yawned as he motored by. I grabbed up the phone. By what manner, I asked Micah Echevarria, did he propose that I get the police off his back?
“My old man said something that night I went to see him,” Arlo’s son said, “something I didn’t tell the cops.”
I waited.
“He said a friend of his got killed. Some guy he used to work with.”
“I need a name, Micah.”
“He didn’t say a name. The guy was from Arizona somewhere. That’s all he said.”
“Did your father mention anybody named Bondarenko?”
“No.”
“What about a guy named Pavel Tarasov?”
“He didn’t talk names, OK? Just that some friend got killed. He said he couldn’t give me any money because he had to pay for a plane ticket to the funeral. But, see, what I’m saying is, if his friend gets killed, then he gets killed, it ain’t me doing ’em both, you know what I’m saying? It’s more like a, you know, one of those things. What do you call it?”
“A conspiracy.”
“A conspiracy. Exactly.”
I told him I’d talk to the police and see what I could do.
It was hard for Micah Echevarria to say thank you. He did anyway.
SEVENTEEN
I washed out the petrified Tuna Feast in gravy that Kiddiot refused to eat while I was away and refilled his dish with Chicken Feast in gravy, the last can of cat food I had in the house. I knew he wouldn’t eat that, either. I wish I could say that his refusing to eat, like other cats, was his way of punishing me for my having left him alone, but I knew him better than that. I was barely a blip on Kiddiot’s feline radar. He watched me refill his water bowl, flicked his tail a couple of times, and left.
Buzz was working on a plate of lasagna when I phoned him at his home in suburban Maryland. He excused himself from the dinner table and took the call outside.
“This better be important,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off out here. My goddamn testicles have shrunk up so much, they’re now ovaries.”
I asked him if he’d heard of any other former members of Alpha aside from Echevarria who had died in recent months under mysterious circumstances. I told him what Micah Echevarria had said about his father planning to attend the funeral in Arizona. Buzz drew a blank.
“Could’ve been the funeral of somebody he knew before he went to Alpha,” Buzz said.
“Possibly.”
Buzz said he’d call around and see what he could find out. His teeth were chattering audibly. I urged him to go back inside before he froze to death. He asked me what the weather was like in California. I told him he didn’t want to know.
“It’s, like, fifty below zero out here,” Buzz said. “My next door neighbor’s a vice cop. He said the hookers downtown are charging twenty bucks just to blow on your hands.”
I needed cat food and craved a cold beer. Not drinking anymore totally sucked.
Kang was on duty behind the register at his grocery store, as he always was, arms folded, as they always were. “Some cop came in the other day,” he said. “He ask a lot of questions. Says you bad mo’fo’. I tell him get lost. Logan good guy.”
“You’re the man, Kang.”
I pulled a bottle of cream soda from the freezer, set it on the counter, and fetched a half-dozen cans of cat food off a shelf in the back, not bothering to check which flavors. Kang uncapped my soda with an opener tethered to the counter by a shoestring and loaded the cat food in a plastic bag.
“So what you do, anyhow,” he said, “kill somebody?”
“If I did, they deserved it.”
I handed him twenty bucks and sipped my soda while he rang up the purchase. He handed me my change.
“LA cop right. You one bad mo’fo’,” Kang said, then slipped a Slim Jim into the bag, on the house, “but you still Kang number one custom
er.”
“Rock on.”
We slapped a high-five. I grabbed my bag. As I turned to go, a good-looking blonde who wasn’t watching where she was going ran into me. I bear-hugged her to break her fall.
“Any landing you can walk away from,” I said.
A smile of recognition replaced Charise MacInerny’s startled expression.
“Cordell Logan, what are you doing here?” She looped her arms around my waist and hugged me back. She was wearing tan cargo shorts and a pink tank top and smelled like lilacs.
“I live right around the corner,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
She said she and her fiancé, Louis, were going on a picnic when Louis realized he’d run out of smokes. “I’m trying to get him to stop,” Charise said, “but you know how pig-headed lawyers can be. So I said I’d buy him a pack of cigarettes—low tar. Better than nothing, right?”
“Next best thing to quitting.”
Louis was slouched in his Lamborghini parked across the street, stereo bass thumping to some rap tune, watching us from behind his Ray-Bans. Mr. Cool. The same guy I’d seen waiting outside the airport for her the week before. I waved howdy. Louis just stared. I wondered how long their relationship would last.
“Been flying lately?” Charise said.
“Every chance I get. My soul is in the sky.”
Charise cocked her head like a poodle trying to comprehend what you said to it.
“Shakespeare,” I said, “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Right. Of course. Shakespeare.” Charise nodded like she got it. “I love Shakespeare. Especially in that one movie he was in with Gwyneth Paltrow.”
I nearly said something caustic but didn’t. Call it maturity.
“Me, too, Charise.”
I asked her if she’d found any new recreational activities in lieu of flying that sparked her passion. She said she was getting a tummy tuck.
“I wouldn’t have the stomach for that,” I said.
Charise smiled. “Well, anyway, it was just so great seeing you again, Cordell.”
“Take care, Charise.”
A goodbye hug and I was out the door, heading home. When I looked back, her boyfriend was engaged in a heated conversation on his cell phone, no doubt negotiating some outrageously exorbitant fee—more money than I’ll probably ever earn in my life.
With apologies to the Buddha, I wanted to slap his lawyerly ass.
I was in bed that night, on my stomach, trying to sleep—hard to do with a tomcat on your back giving himself a bath—when the phone rang and startled us both. I rolled one way. Kiddiot, who’d dug his claws reflexively into my skin at the sound of the phone, rolled the other.
“You malicious pelt. What did I ever do to you?”
He hopped off the bed onto the floor and stretched like he couldn’t have cared less, head down, butt high, flexing his front paws. Blood trickled down my back. I could’ve sworn in the darkness that he was laughing at me. The phone was still ringing. The digital clock on the nightstand read 3:02 a.m.
“Hello?”
“I can’t sleep,” Savannah said.
“You and my stupid cat.” I wondered how early the Humane Society drop-off window opened in the morning.
“I just wanted to say I was sorry,” she said. “I know you were only concerned about my safety. You weren’t trying to be a control freak. I overreacted.”
I was tired and bleeding and in no mood to placate my former wife at three in the morning.
“Anything else?”
It was hardly the magnanimous response she had anticipated.
“Yeah, there’s something else. I need my car back.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“What do you mean, you’ll see what you can do? What kind of crap is that? I let you borrow my car, you self-centered jerk, and now you refuse to give it back?”
“I said I’d see what I could do.”
“I want it back, Logan. Today. This afternoon. Or I’m calling the police and reporting it stolen.”
“Gee, I’m glad we could have this little chat, Savannah. Thanks for calling. Always a pleasure talking to you.”
The line went dead.
I got up, switched on the light over my bathroom sink and angled my back facing the mirror. There were three, two inchlong gouges on my left shoulder where Kiddiot had nailed me. I unrolled eight inches of toilet paper, wiped off the wounds as best I could, killed the light, and laid back down on my stomach so the blood wouldn’t stain the sheet. I was still awake three hours later when the first gauzy rays of morning sun came stealing through the gingham curtain shading the garage door window.
I showered, inspected Kiddiot’s food bowl to make sure he still had plenty not to eat, then drove to the airport to check on the welfare of my airplane. Planes are like boats. As many bad things can happen to them standing still as moving. Not this time. Except for several large birds that had used the Duck as an outhouse, all was well. I fired up the engine, contacted ground control without having to smack the audio panel to get the radios to work, and received clearance to taxi to the wash rack on the other side of the field.
After I hosed off all the guano, I taxied back to Larry’s hangar. Larry was sitting cross-legged on the tarmac outside, fixing the nose gear on a Glasair III. He was flashing an inordinate amount of butt crack, even for Larry. The back of his T-shirt said, “My life is a very complicated drinking game.”
I shut down the Duck’s engine and got out.
“Nice ride,” Larry said, nodding toward Savannah’s Jaguar parked in the lot. “Nice ride.”
“A loaner. Ex-wife’s car.”
“Your ex drives a Jag? Brother, you screwed the pooch. Sugar mama with that kind of bread, you don’t throw back.”
“Wasn’t me that bid adieu.”
I cinched the Duck’s tie-down ropes.
“FYI, some guy came by looking for you this morning,” Larry said. “A real dick. Starts yelling at me from the other side of the security fence, ‘Where’s Logan?’ I tell him, ‘What do I look like, his babysitter?’ He tells me to eat shit and stalks off.”
“Was he driving a Honda?”
“Didn’t see his car.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Dark hair, dark skin. Thirty. Jeans. Sunglasses. Could’ve been Mexican. Hard to tell.”
“You just described more than half the male population of California, Larry.”
“What you want me to do, Logan, take a picture next time I see him?”
“Might help.”
“The guy looked pissed, that’s what I remember.”
“Probably one of my many satisfied former students.”
“Not this guy. I’d watch my back, Logan. He didn’t seem quite right in the head. Just my gut.”
“Of which you do happen to have a generous supply, Larry.”
Larry flipped me off. I took it as a loving gesture.
The red light was blinking on my office answering machine. Six new messages. Four were hang-ups from a “private caller” with a blocked number. The fifth message was from Buzz asking me to call him back on his cell. The last call, less than an hour old, was from Eugen Dragomir. The five grand from his father had arrived. The kid said he wanted to drop off the money and start flying as soon as possible. Given his obvious eagerness to get in the air and monopolize my oh-so-busy schedule, I decided it might be prudent to take care of ancillary matters first. I called Buzz. He was in his basement, he said, enjoying the warmth of a new space heater. The spy who’d come in from the cold. Literally.
“The Amish make ‘em—the cabinets, not the heaters. The heaters, the gooks make,” Buzz said. “Anyway, the fucking thing cranks out about a billion BTU’s. It’s like goddamn Miami Beach down here.”
“Nobody says gooks anymore, Buzz, unless they’re wearing robes and burning crosses.”
“Hey, I don’t need you schooling me on political correctness, Logan. I get all I need from t
he wife. She’s so liberal, she wears progressive lenses. That thing you asked me about, former co-workers checking out prematurely? You want the skinny or not?”
“Ready to copy.”
“I checked open-source databases on every name I could think of,” Buzz said. “You remember a guy named Rob Emerson, joined the group in early 2003?”
“Who?”
“Robbie Emerson. Went by ‘Herman Munster.’ Looked like he free-fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”
Robbie Emerson. Herman Munster. A face floated faintly up from the swampy reaches of my prefrontal lobes. He’d left Alpha less than a month after I rotated in. The story I remembered was that he’d been cashiered for flunking a polygraph.
“He was a Ranger. Got the Silver Star in Mogadishu.”
“Not bad, Logan. At least we know you don’t got the Alzheimer’s. Anyway, the weekend before Echevarria gets it, Emerson drives into the desert outside Phoenix and eats his gun. That’s according to local law enforcement. His wife told some newspaper out there he had no reason to kill himself.”
His fall from grace, according to Buzz, began after Emerson and some Navy SEALs he’d been training with in Little Creek, Virginia, stopped off after work at a dive bar popular among the frogmen. He’d had a few beers and gotten cozy with a woman who worked as a receptionist in the Washington office of a European trade group that brokered international arms deals. The SEALs suspected that the woman, a Bulgarian, was a “floater,” someone used sporadically for intelligence gathering. Emerson had failed to report this contact during a later polygraph exam (those of us in Alpha were routinely polygraphed every six months). Echevarria, who’d been instrumental in bringing him into the group, defended Emerson, arguing that he was being railroaded—Emerson claimed he’d simply forgotten having met the woman. Moreover, there was no evidence he’d passed along any sensitive information of any kind to her—but the command staff didn’t want to hear it. He was stripped of his security clearance, relieved of duty and ultimately forced to retire. He’d bounced between civilian jobs, construction mostly, boasting to acquaintances that he didn’t have to work because he was secretly wealthy, before landing a part-time gig at a Home Depot in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale.