by David Putnam
“You really got it goin’ on, big man. The whole twenty-two is too much, though. Let’s not quibble about the price. What’s your bottomdollar offer to do this thing? And keep in mind we’re also throwing in your father.”
Had I even taken a half step into his morally bankrupt world, I’d probably have done it just to get my dad off. He didn’t know that because he didn’t feel the same way about his father. He’d shot and killed his father.
I stood. “Right now, I got somewhere I have to be. I don’t think you know how to find Mo Mo, so twenty-two five is my number. Let me know if it’s good for you.”
“You know how to find Mo Mo?”
“That’s right, I do. I grew up on these streets.”
He smiled. “All right, big man, you can have the whole thing, but you have to get to Mo Mo first if you want the money. I just unchained Dirt, told him he could have his original split for the job and the whole skim if he takes Mo Mo down fast. This needs to be done in a hurry. Don’t underestimate Dirt; he’s very resourceful.”
“I want the money up front.”
“Not gonna happen. And . . . and for that kind of money, I want Mo Mo to disappear, no resisting arrest bullshit. I want him the kinda gone that’s like, poof, into thin air. I want proof, too—photos of him dismembered if you want that kinda money.”
“All right, you got a deal.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
I DROVE IN and out of side streets for forty-five minutes. In and out of the housing projects, the Nickerson, and Imperial Courts to check for a tail. Then I pulled into Stops, the hot-link place across from Nickerson Gardens. The sweet barbecue aroma wafted on the warm summer air and made my stomach contract. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now it was almost lunchtime.
Wicks waited for me around back of the restaurant and stood by the trunk of his car with his arms crossed, angry enough to chew nails. Johnny Gibbs sat in the passenger seat watching me in the side mirror. Wicks had brought the team in on the investigation—just not the whole investigation. What must Johnny think of me? Bruno the rat. Maybe Johnny didn’t want to get out of the car and eat lunch with the likes of me.
I parked away from them, got out, and walked to the front of the restaurant. Wicks hurried to catch up. “Hey, hey. Where do you think you’re going, mister? Get your black ass back here.”
I got in the long line of people waiting to be served lunch at the counter. Wicks came in and stood right beside me.
“You think this is a good idea?” I asked. “Being seen together like this in public?”
The black man and woman in line ahead of us turned a little to see who’d said it. The woman looked me up and down. Her eyes lingered on the gun on my hip and the badge clipped to my belt before she ruled me safe and turned back around.
Wicks took a twenty from his wallet. “Get me the usual.” He left.
I made it up to the counter in another ten minutes and said hi to Nancy, who gave me a huge smile. I gave back the same smile, only a little tarnished. I couldn’t get Chelsea out of my head, and needed to. I needed to focus.
I paid, left the rest of Wicks’ money as a big tip for Nancy, picked up the tray with the food, and headed out.
“Thanks, Bruno,” Nancy yelled.
I set the tray down on the picnic table around back where we stood and ate.
“I picked up an extra sandwich for Johnny.”
Wicks calmed some, nodded, and took a long drink from his Coke.
“I told him to stay in the car and listen to the radio for me. We’re still up on the trailer in back of the station.”
I nodded and chewed.
“What happened back there? Was that a gunshot?”
I nodded again and didn’t want to talk with a mouth full of chili fries and hot-link sandwich.
“Wait, it was a gunshot?”
I waved a hand and spoke around the food. “It was nothing. An AD, that’s all.”
“An AD with a handcuffed suspect in there? I can only imagine.”
Wicks really hated Blue.
He said, “We saw Thibodeaux bring Jaime Reynosa from the jail back to the trailer. Did Reynosa tell you where to find Mo Mo?”
I shook my head and continued to eat.
“Come on. Knock it off, Bruno. Talk to me.”
I swallowed. “Did you find out about Chelsea, where she transferred in from?”
“No, and I’m the lieutenant here, and you’re going to answer my questions.”
I took another bite of sandwich and shook my head “no.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? You’re—”
“What did you find out about Chelsea?”
He gave me the stink eye and let the moment hang. “I’m hitting a roadblock with that. Human Resources says they lost her file.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It happens.”
“What did the chief say about her?”
“I’m not going to ask the chief a question like that, question his integrity. He’s a chief, for crying out loud.”
I nodded again as if I understood, but I didn’t, not when so much was at stake. Wicks probably wanted to make captain and didn’t want to confront someone as powerful as a deputy chief, force him into a corner. Then again, captains no longer got to go out in the field and hunt dangerous men.
“We got until tomorrow morning to kick this thing in the ass and get it moving, then IAB will stick their oversized noses in it, and we’ll lose the whole thing. We won’t get squat on these guys.”
“On the phone, you said you figured out the next target.”
“That’s right, but it came out in their usual word play, all jumbled, and we can only make an educated guess.”
I said, “It’s Lucas Knight—it’s Mo Mo, right?”
Wicks had started to put his hot-link sandwich to his mouth for a bite but now let it sag. “That’s right. Hey, did Blue and Thibodeaux bring you in?”
I chewed and nodded.
Wicks slapped me on the back, his smile huge. “Excellent. Excellent. What happened? Give it to me word for word. Wait, let me get my notebook out.”
I nodded and spoke around the food in my mouth. “First I need to know something.”
He froze. “Bruno, you don’t get to call the plays here.”
“You were the one who initiated the black bag wire on Blue. You’re the one who started this whole mess, right?”
He took a step back and threw his sandwich on the table. “Goddamn you, Bruno. You’re not running this op, I am. And when I tell you to do something, I damn well expect you to do it. Now tell me what happened. Tell me right now what that son-of-a-bitch Blue told you.”
I continued to chew and watched him. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’re too close to this thing and you should conflict out. You should hand over the lead to someone who doesn’t have a vested interest.”
His face bloated with rage. “What difference does it make? It doesn’t, not in the whole scheme of things. So, leave it alone.”
I dropped my sandwich and took a step closer to him. “It makes all the difference.”
He brought his hand up and poked me in the chest. “You will tell me what I want to know right now or—”
I grabbed his finger and inverted it in a pain-compliance hold. I moved my face right up next to his as he grimaced and tried to pull away. “I know about Gale Taylor, your ex-wife, the woman Blue took from you. Now, was it you who came up on the black bag wire?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
HIS EXPRESSION SHIFTED from pain and confusion to fear. I had yet to see fear in Wicks and had come to believe he didn’t own any part of that emotion. “Let go.”
I shoved him away. “You played me right from the beginning,” I said, “and I’m not happy about it.”
He rubbed his hand and stared at me. His expression transformed back, right before my eyes. His pride and hubris returned stronger than before. “So what? It doesn’t matter now. I was right: Blue and Thibodeaux are
the worst kind of criminals and that wire only proved it. I’m going to take them down with or without you. Now tell me what happened.”
“You’re really something.”
“Spill it.”
“We take them down according to policy and procedure. What we’re not going to do is take them down the Robby Wicks way. You understand? They get the same benefit of the law just like everyone else.”
“What you must think of me. Of course, we give them every chance. But you have to understand these guys aren’t like your regular desperate criminals who don’t want to go to prison. These guys are trained the same way we are. They think just like we do. You give them one blink of a chance and they will take your own gun from you and stick it up your ass. So we’ll give them every chance, but you just keep that in mind when you’re backing me up on the takedown. Now, tell me.”
What he said made a lot of sense and also made me realize how far out of my depth I’d ventured.
“Blue turned Thibodeaux loose to find and take out Mo Mo. Blue said that if I got to Mo Mo before Thibodeaux, he’d not only take care of the case against my dad, he’d also give me the skim. Blue doesn’t want Mo Mo taken out in some kinda mocked-up, justified officer-involved shooting. He wants him to disappear. He wants photos of his dismembered body as proof. He wants a finesse job, something he knows is beyond Thibodeaux’s capability.”
Wicks nodded, his eyes off somewhere else. “Yeah, all that backs up what we got off the wire. Now it all makes sense. You didn’t tape this conversation with Blue, did you?”
“What do you think?”
“I liked you better when you were respectful.”
“Then give me something to respect. You broke the law with that black bag wiretap and—”
“Grow up. And if you want a piece of me for that great self-initiated piece of police work, go ahead and try and prove it. Until then, we need to work together to take these two off the board.”
Couldn’t he hear his own words? He broke the law with his illegal wiretap to chase someone else who broke the law. What gave him the right?
Moreover, as Blue had shoved in my face, how the hell could I accuse him of violating the law when I was no better? I’d meted out curbside justice on those two prior occasions: the hit-and-run driver with the cowboy hat who’d run down the little girl, and Maurice Tubbs, who’d beat his parents near to death. I had no right to sit in judgment of Wicks. I didn’t want to believe it, but maybe we were built more alike than I wanted to accept.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out of line.”
“That’s okay.” He offered his hand.
I took it and shook.
He said, “None of this gets us any closer to the dog heavy. And there is a dog heavy. I confirmed it with that last phone intercept. There is a third person. We just don’t know his name.”
“Don’t get mad, but I have an idea about the dog heavy.”
“Who?”
“It’s kinda way out there.”
“Don’t yank my dick, Bruno. Give.”
“What if, like you said, the chief inserted Chelsea into this game as a backup to oversee what’s happening?”
Wicks didn’t show the slightest bit of anger. “What do you mean? Talk me through it.”
“The chief could’ve put Chelsea in to keep an eye on Blue, Thibodeaux, me, and even you, through me.” As I talked, my mind spun out ahead, checking known information against everything that had happened so far in conjunction with the chief’s role.
“Okay, and what would the chief’s motive be?”
“Ah, shit,” I said.
“What?”
“I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“Something you said the first day the violent crimes team met.”
“I said a lot of things. At times, I can be a real gas bag.”
“You said that the team had full autonomy to go after any target of our choice.”
“That’s right.”
“We were all set to go after Damien Frakes Jr., the Holly Street Crip wanted for the jewelry store robbery.”
“Yes, and I did go after him.”
“But you said the chief pulled the team off him and gave us Pedro Armendez.”
“Ah, son of a bitch.” Wicks eased down and sat on the picnic table bench as he thought it through. “But how could he know that you’d put Armendez down? That was just a lucky fluke—the way Armendez cut his own throat like that. You said yourself you weren’t going to shoot him.”
“Not if the chief thought you’d be there like you were supposed to be. You’d have dropped the hammer on him, right? Remember that little conversation you had with me after everyone left? You wanted to make sure I’d do the right thing and pull the trigger.”
“Damn it, Bruno. No way do I think this is right, but I’ll look into it. I have to now. We got some time, still. You can’t do anything until we get a line on Mo Mo.”
“I know where to find Mo Mo.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, but I need to talk to someone first.” I started to walk off.
Wicks said, “All this is coming to a head. Be sure to answer your pager. That’s an order.”
“I forgot it at home.”
“Bruno?”
I lifted an arm over my head, waved, and kept walking to my truck.
CHAPTER SIXTY
I DIDN’T GO back to the house to get my pager. And “short on time” was the first excuse that bubbled up to act as a smoke screen for the real reason that I didn’t want to go home. In reality, I didn’t want to see Mrs. Espinoza or the woman from CPS at the house, a reminder of the painful issue with Dad.
So instead, I sat in my truck on Old School Road in Downey, watching the location described on the greasy cheeseburger wrapper:
Bof
DoubleD
Aqua Glasshouse
Downey
Blue had just transferred to Lynwood. I didn’t think he could’ve translated the note even if he still had it in his back pocket where Chelsea had lifted it. I’m not sure I could’ve had I not been friends with Patrick Hickox, a guy I’d worked the street with who now worked at headquarters narcotics. On several occasions I met him halfway between Lynwood and HQ at a donut shop called The Donut Dolly. Pat was sweet on the owner, Eva. A real looker. The kind of woman who had the power to make a guy do anything she wanted. And I worried about Pat. I now saw that do anything she wanted look in Pat’s expression every time I met with him. Not a big deal, if she loved him and didn’t screw him over. Only I didn’t know Eva well enough. Pat said Eva was on parole.
Not good.
She was an ex-con that owned a donut shop that lots of cops frequented. The odds for a favorable outcome for Pat didn’t bode well.
As soon as I left Wicks at Stops, I’d driven over to Chelsea’s apartment in Torrance to talk to her. When she didn’t answer her door, I waited outside for a while. I stood there staring at the door, wishing it to open, or I paced back and forth like some kind of lovesick puppy.
In one of the passes, I caught my reflection in her window and froze. I didn’t like what I saw. The same as Pat Hickox, I, too, carried the do anything Chelsea wanted look. Carried it like some kind of virus.
And it scared me.
So I left and headed to Downey.
In Ollie’s note, DoubleD stood for The Donut Dolly. Bof stood for back of. And Aqua Glasshouse? Well, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but figured it out as soon as I drove down the street directly behind The Donut Dolly. A ’73 Buick Riviera, painted metallic aqua, sat in front of an upscale condo. The ’73 Buick was called a glass house on the street because of the long and wide back window.
Out in front of the condo, just down from the ’73 glass house, I sat in my truck and checked my watch every few minutes as the hours eased on past. I continually reached for where my pager should’ve been clipped on my belt, and found it missing.
Dad referred to my pager as an elec
tronic leash. With the pager, the Sheriff’s Department could yank my chain, make me roll over and sit anytime they wanted. At that moment, without it, though, I felt disconnected from the world.
I’d come to depend on the pager to keep me informed not only for work but with my personal life as well. I worried about how Dad was doing. How Olivia was doing.
I sat scrunched down in my seat with sunglasses and a ball cap, surprised with every passing minute that one of the neighbors hadn’t called in the black man sitting in his truck in a predominantly white section of town.
I didn’t take action and only watched. I didn’t know if Mo Mo was in the condo. If I knocked or forced entry, and he wasn’t there, that was it. The place would be burned just like the rock house on Peach. So there I sat, incommunicado, with anxiety continuing to build and darkening my soul with each passing minute.
Who knew what could be going on? What Blue or Thibodeaux were doing? If Blue had been trying to page me, or if Wicks found out something important and couldn’t tell me? Hell, for all I knew, the whole thing could be busted wide open and nobody knew where to find me.
I waited and waited, and that left plenty of time to go over every last detail of what had happened since I accepted the undercover assignment from Wicks: the briefing the first day at Lennox station, Wicks assigning me as the team leader while he went after Damien Frakes Jr.; the foot pursuit and capture of Pedro Armendez, his blood all over me, that horrible taste of copper; the long debriefing by homicide afterward; Wicks showing up at the crime scene on Holt that next morning and—
I bolted upright in the seat, my heart racing. Wicks showed up at the crime scene on Holt, the place where Pedro Armendez bled out and died.
Wicks had been paged again and again the night before and never answered. He’d been busy, tied up in his own officer-involved shooting debriefing over the killing of Damien Frakes Jr. But then he just showed up on Holt, right out of the blue, said he wanted to back his team. Said that he wanted to help me out.
And he’d been the one to find the bloodied X-Acto knife blade.
How did he do that? When did he do that?