by L. J. Martin
I'm still in sweatshirt, untucked, with tail to mid-butt for good reason, Levi's, and combat boots so I'm not more than glanced at as I thread my way though the grungy muscle fucks. Most of them armed with pool cues, and very likely much more dangerous weapons kept out of sight.
I mount a red Naugahyde-covered barstool with horsehair showing through and trying to escape a split, and eye the bartender who's eyeing me in turn but not moving my way. His arms and what shows of his neck under a wife-beater tee shirt two sizes too small, are covered with one color prison tats. He's leaning against the back bar, arms crossed, hands tucked under his biceps to make them look even bigger than they are. The fact is they need little assistance.
I'm wondering if he's going to completely ignore me when he reaches up and takes a well-chewed toothpick from between yellowed teeth, and tucks it behind his ear, then with obvious disdain covers the dozen feet to park in front of me. Hands in fists, leaning on the bar. I can't help but smile when I note his fingers are tattooed as well. F U C K on the right fingers Y A L L on the left.
“You must be a southern boy?” I ask.
“You want to drink or to lollygag about the place of my birth?” His voice rumbles like it's coming from deep in a barrel.
“The y'all on the left. Where from? Alabama, or Georgia maybe?”
“Leavenworth, not that it's any of your fucking business. You want a drink or an education in geography?”
“Jack rocks. Tony around?”
“Who the fuck wants to know?”
“Jack Meoff.”
“Very funny. You the heat, or what?”
“I'm a guy who wants to shoot the bull with Tony Patrino...so how about you fetch him up.”
“He's in the back, but he don't want no visitors. And I don't like the way you walked in here, hotshot, so I may just usher your dumb ass out after I shove a bottle of Jack where the sun don't shine.”
I can feel the heat creeping up my backbone...he's pissing me off and I'm busy and have lots to do. But I don't show it, having, many years ago, learned to smile when pissed. There's no sense in telegraphing your punch. As he's talking he leans forward over the bar, which is his mistake. His lip is curled like a pit bull, so it's time to split it.
“You ever see this trick?” I ask with a stupid disconcerting grin, reaching out with my left so it's only six inches in front of his wide mug and snapping my fingers. Snap. Snap. Snap.
He frowns and furrows his brow as I bring the right hand out to the side and snap those fingers. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Of course he cuts his gaze to that hand, and I sink the left behind his neck and slap his face down on the bar. The crack of his face smacking the bar rings out and all the no-necks at the pool tables stop and turn to us as he reels back against the back-bar, only this time with both hands covering his face and blood working its way between his fingers.
“What the fuck....” a big redheaded dude yells, and flips his pool cue so he has it by the narrow end planning to put the fat end across my skull. He strides my way but my Glock, from the small of my back, is out from under my sweatshirt and centered between his eyes before he manages a half dozen steps.
“You got a problem with me, Butch? You looking to get a third eye?” I ask.
That stops him short. “Fucking A, that's my brother.”
“He's way prettier now with that bend in his nose. He'll live...and you don't want to die for his broken nose. Back off before I have to defend myself from assault with a deadly weapon.” As I speak I dig my wallet out with my left hand and flash the brass, my bail enforcement officer's badge. He can't read it from his distance so he has no idea it carries about as much authority as the thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents it cost to buy...unless I have a contract with a bondsman and my target's a skip. The Glock, however, is authoritarian enough.
He backpedals a little and gets wide-eyed, and they widen even more when I hit the button on the laser sight and that ominous red dot dances around his nose. His eyes almost cross as he tries to focus on it.
He begins to back up, so I turn to his broke-nose brother. “Now, hotshot, fetch Tony out from the back. I need about five minutes of his time.” I fish a hundred out of my wallet. “Buy the house a drink on me, as soon as you fetch Tony.”
Still with one hand covering his nose, blood now covering the front of the too tight tee, obliterating the Sturgis Rally stenciled there, he pushes through a swinging door and disappears. As soon as it's closed I vault the bar and position myself beside the door, and it's a good thing I do as I hear rapid footfalls and the door is slammed aside and a guy about five foot five tall, and the same wide, comes steaming through carrying a sawed off. But he's coming too fast and even as short as the shotgun is, he can't swing on me. I have my left hand on the barrel and the Glock pushed up under one of his cauliflowered ears.
“Tony, what kind of welcome is that to your fine establishment. Had your man been more polite this would have gone a lot easier.”
“Who the fuck—”
“Richard Head,” I say, using one of my many aliases.
“Dick Head. That figures.” He spits. He's thinking pretty fast for having a 9mm pressed to his headbone.
“Let go the scattergun before I have to scatter your brains all over the wall, and let's you and I go over to that table in the far corner and get chummy. “ I push the barrel into the knot of bone behind his ear, hard enough to leave an imprint.
As I suspected, when I look back at the boys in the barroom, half of them have filled their hands with revolvers and pistols.
I keep Tony between me and them as best I can. “Tony, tell your loyal customers to put away the hardware before you become a casualty of said admiring customers. I'd hate to see how many of them I could eviscerate with these two barrels of double ought after I scatter your gray matter.”
He's beginning to recognize the gravityý of the situation, takes a deep breath, then asks, “You want to go over to the corner and talk?”
“That's all I wanted since I walked in the door.”
“What the fuck does eviscerate mean?”
“To gut.”
Tony shrugs his fat shoulders and yells across the bar. “Thanks for the thought, boys, but this here is an old friend, just fucking with us.”
So I yell out, “Dipshit, the bartender, owes you all one, on me.”
7
They begin returning hardware to wherever they had it it hidden; guns and knives disappear beneath shirts and into boots. With Tony's shotgun in one hand and my Glock in the other I let him move down to the end of the bar and out to a table...and we find a seat that's twenty-five feet from the pool tables. As distant as I can get.
But I rest the shotgun across my thighs, generally aiming at the leather-clads. They, slowly and suspiciously, go back to their games as the bartender comes out of the back and yells at his brother who moves over and helps stuff toilet paper in the nostrils of ol' broke nose.
Tony eyes me. “What's your problem? I don't owe no fucking money to no-fucking-body.”
I laugh. “I'm not collecting, Tony. All I want is some information.”
His eyes narrow. “Information is valuable. You paying, or just playing the tough guy until me and my boys rub your nose in the pavement.” I don't respond as we sit and so he growls, “Okay, what the fuck...I got work to do.”
It's time to screw with his head. “You lost a friend in that bus explosion.”
“Friend? Cogburn? No fuckin' friend of mine. He worked for me a couple of times months ago. I canned him. The dickhead was boning Juliet and we don't allow none of that between employees.”
“The way I hear it that rule didn't apply to you.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“The way I hear it you were boning her...to use your description.”
He gives me a smirk. “I am the friggin' boss.”
“So, I guess it pissed you off that Cogburn was hitting some spots you couldn't reach?”
>
“Fuck you. You been hanging out in the pisser judging who's got the big dick?”
I have to laugh. “Nope, just the word on the street is that Cogburn said you were a pencil dick and your lady wanted some real meat...that's what she told him.” I'm trying to piss him off and it's working as he's turning red in the face.
“That's horseshit.”
“Is Juliet around? Let's ask her.”
“I canned her ass. Hear she's hustling keno at Sam's Club.”
I'm silent for a minute, then look him straight in the eye and ask, “So, you didn't bomb the bus just to kill old Cogburn?”
He gets even redder. “That's what you came to ask? You're a dumb fuck, ain't you? She was nothing but gash, and not good gash at that. I wouldn't stuff a cherry bomb up her ass and set it off, much less bomb no bus.” Then he smiles. “That would have been the only cherry in one of her holes since she was twelve.”
“I'd say you were pretty pissed at Cogburn for getting past the gash you used.”
He's silent for a minute, then gets reverent. “I'm a Catholic. There was nuns on that bus. And I handle my own problems and don't drag no outsiders into them.”
“Okay, makes sense to me.” Then, just a wild hunch, I ask, “so, you know anyone else who bought the farm in that mess?”
He seems to think for a minute, the snaps, “Fuck no. Cogburn is it, and I could give a shit less about that prick.” The reverence turns back to gritted teeth and bowed neck. “Get the fuck out of here and don't come back.”
“No problem. I can give up a class joint like this. First, tell me if you have any thoughts about who killed all those folks?”
“Sand niggers, who else?”
That's a term I heard daily in Iraq. “Did you serve, Tony?”
“Drove truck in Desert Storm, many years and many pounds ago. Infantry grunt. IED filled my ass full of scrap metal.”
“Semper fi.” I hand him a card with the number of one of my throwaways. “Call me if you have any thoughts. You know what's going down on the street and I'd appreciate your help.”
“Maybe. You'd owe me...you're a jarhead I'd guess.”
“Guilty. I'll owe you big time.”
“Cogburn was in the wrong place, wrong time. He got caught in the overflow.”
“As did many others, but somebody was likely the target.”
I rise and give him a half-assed salute, and head for the door, waving over my shoulder. The Glock back in its small-of-back holster, the shotgun still in hand.
“Hey, fuckhead, my shotgun.”
“It'll be outside leaning on the wall.” I pass through the door and pop the shells out and throw them as far as I can, and, as promised leave the shotgun leaning on the wall.
He's standing in the doorway as my truck slips onto Warm Springs Road.
Pax is at his desk reading the pile of printouts Sol has continued to lay on him.
“Any exciting revelations?” I ask as I top the private stairway from the rear parking.
He glances up from his reading. “Baddovic had a Facebook page. I'm sure he was an unknowing dupe if his duffle bag was actually the source of the bang. The guy was a member of the Moose Lodge, for Christ's sake. A regular guy, if on his ass broke. Retired from maintenance at Harrah's a few years ago—forced retirement with a bad back—but had a gambling habit. He's has been doing all kind of odd jobs since retirement. He was a regular at a couple of east side clubs...played lots of video poker, or so his Facebook page claims, and bet the Sports regularly. Sandy's and Rosco Rules were mentioned, so we should check them out.”
“That's all you got out of that pile of crap?”
“Sol's stuff is extensive, as usual. You take half and I'll take half, then let's pick up a Subway before we meet with Merrick. We'll read his background on the way over.”
“Ten-four. Lay it on me.”
We've each got a stack two and a half inches deep.
Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Agnes Anne had short rundowns, one coming to this diocese from Boston, one from Louisiana. However, Agnes Anne and the church were negotiating with the FBI over her testifying against a prominent Vegas player, Tobias Roth, owner of Maximillian’s, a small club under a seven-story hotel out near the second airport in Vegas on the northwest side of town. He also owns a number of cathouses around the state but not, of course, in Clark County where they are illegal.
It seems Agnes Anne overheard a confession and made the mistake of confiding in her cousin...warning him...a cousin who'd moved to Vegas and was scheduled to go to work at Maximillian’s. One thing led to another, and the FBI and federal prosecutors are claiming there's no priest-penitent protection. Most of this came from news reports, so it's common knowledge.
Would Roth risk eliminating the good sister? Who knows, stranger things have happened.
He's a way better suspect than Tony Petrino.
But we've got lots of paperwork to peruse.
8
Pax looks up from a folder, “Here's something I missed when when first reading the file Butch Flannigan laid on us....”
“And that is?” I ask.
“Lena Rashad was not supposed to be on that bus. She was normally delivered to school in a Majestic chauffeured limo.”
“Interesting.”
“Iver Brown, the chauffeur, was fired because he took her to a bus stop so she could ride to school with her friends. So, in my mind, that eliminates her family and any supposed honor killing.”
“I never bought into it,” I say. “He's a smart guy with a great job and that archaic belief of some radical Muslims was, I'd wager, put aside by him long ago, if he ever was taken up by it.”
“Let’s hit Subway then head out to see Merrick.”
An old and still-dirty-from-desert-dirt-roads Crown Vic parks in front of a rundown club, and a big man with a gut hanging over his belt and a button missing on his soiled white shirt extricates himself and wanders in under the Sandy's neon sign with the missing 'y'. He slips into a bar stool and Paula Sanduski, the round-bottomed bartender with a flat chest, flat face, and eyes that look as if she's been toking or snorting for the last half of her forty years, goes to the tapper and draws him a beer without bothering with a hello or go to hell. Obviously he's a regular.
“And a shot of Crown,” the big man instructs and she turns back and pours him one that she has to carefully deliver as it's filled to the brim.
“You come into an inheritance?” she asks.
“You mean 'cause of the Crown?”
“Yep.”
“Nope, had a gig this week that paid pretty good.”
He reaches for the beer and she notices his hands. “Jesus, Det, you get an honest job? You got blisters.” She laughs a cackle.
“Hell no, uh....uh...playing softball.”
“Bullshit,” she says. “Jacking off is more like it.”
“You're a regular card, Paula. I ain't jacked off since I was fourteen.”
“So, where's Vic?”
“Fuck if I know. I ain't seen him in a month.”
“Bullshit again. You were in here with him yesterday when I came to work at three.”
Det actually flushes. He left, not thinking anyone but the day bartender had seen he and Vic together.
“Oh, yeah. Yesterday. I had a beer with him and we parted ways. He said he was headed back to Michigan.”
“No shit. That surprises me as the other day he told me he was getting on with security at Maxmillian's.”
“Guess not. He headed home.”
“You seen that dipshit Duane? He owes me twenty bucks and didn't mind buying some little bitch a half dozen drinks last night, then slipped out with her.”
“Why would I see that pimply little prick? I don't like him and he knows it.”
“Just wondering...” she says, and wipes the bar going away.
“Turn that TV to the cage fights.”
“You don't like the news?”
“Just turn the fucking
TV, Paula.”
After finishing off a Subway Italian sausage sandwich, after stopping at my ministorage where I keep a unit full of stuff I don't ever want the acronyms to discover, and my camper, and donning a pair of slacks, a decent shirt, and a sport coat and pair of loafers, we roll up to the FBI building.
Even at this hour there's a guard on the door, and he glances at a clipboard after we give him names, and the door is opened. He ushers us to a second floor break room and pours us a cup of stale coffee, leaving us with an instruction not to leave the room until Merrick comes to escort us. As the place has more video cameras than the local bank, I know we'd be unwise to wander.
The guy who busts through the door after we've been seated for ten minutes is tall, gray, clean-cut, and dressed well enough to be in GQ.
He offers a stout handshake and pours himself a cup and joins us at the break table.
“Butch Flannigan asked me to fill you guys in. I will, as much as I can.” Then he's quiet.
Pax asks, “How about telling us where you are in the investigation.”
“Progressing,” he says, and that's it, as I suspected.
I laugh. “Well, thanks, Agent Merrick, that helps a lot.”
He smiles. “Okay, you guys are local muscle, in an obtuse sort of way. No affiliation with any law enforcement—”
I interrupt. “Not that you would be a lot more forthcoming with local cops.”
“Not true. Although, as there was a federal judge killed, this is our investigation. Without question, we are first in line. Of course the locals are going to do their own thing...but this is our baby. I understand Alex Pointer's interest and enthusiasm in seeing these perps caught, and it seems he's hired you two to help out. But, fellas, you need to stay out of our way. We have a major task force--”
“A hundred agents or more?” I interrupt again. “Plus others, ATF&E, and others.”