Baca

by Billy Kring

  Landman said, “This is Robert Landman.”

  I recognized the voice from a dozen movies. I said, “Are you sure it’s you?”

  He sounded tired, “Yes, I’m sure. I don’t know you, but they say you’re going to help us if I cooperate.”

  “I’m working on it.” I heard his phone disconnect, then Bond was back on the line.

  “Is that enough for you? We’ll meet you at the dock for Dry Bulk shipments. It will be away from most eyes. Wait at the loading slip just north of the US Borax terminal, sundown tomorrow.”

  “You bet, sweetcakes.”

  “I could have been, you know,” Bond said, then hung up.

  I checked on Hondo, but he was asleep. It was four PM in LA, so Hunter’s time was three hours later. I called her cell phone and got the recording. I left her a message to call me. I twiddled my thumbs, wrote and scribbled on a notepad, and was using a rubber band to shoot paper clips across the room at a bull’s-eye superimposed on a photo of Osama Bin Laden.

  I’d just bopped Osama on the beak when the phone rang.

  “Deadeye Baca, Private Investigator.”

  “Baca, you change your name?” It was the body man at the auto repair shop. He said, “Well Deadeye, you got wheels again. I did it up special.” He sounded proud. “You’re gonna shit you’ll like it so much. Come get it.”

  **

  He was right, I almost did. I got out of the Yugo and stared as he stood by my truck, arms folded across his chest and smiling like a proud father. He said, “Pretty good, huh?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I put a little class on her, gave her some pride.

  Won’t be any others around LA like this baby.”

  I was speechless. There was my truck with a huge, black dorsal fin on the roof. The body man wiped his hands on a red rag and patted the top of the Ford. He said, “I got to looking at it and felt it was incomplete. I had this fifty-seven Chevy out back was just junk, and it came to me.”

  “It came to you,” I said.

  He nodded like I got it, “Yeah, take the fifty-seven’s fin and weld it to the roof, lengthen and customize the shape and add some metal here and there, paint it black to match, and...tah-dahh.”

  My head hurt. “Can you take it off?” He looked like I’d slapped him. I said, “It looks uh, like nothing I’ve ever seen, something out of my dreams,” Nightmares is what I was thinking, “But I work undercover a lot, and everybody’d recognize me this way.”

  He frowned, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I have to make a living,” I shrugged as if I was sorry.

  “I hate to.” He rubbed his chin and thought for a good thirty seconds, “Okay, bring it by in a couple weeks. I’ll take it off.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “It’s the best I can do. My customizing work is backed up.”

  “You can’t slip me in?”

  He shook his head, “I’ve got my ethics to think of.”

  “Well, can I drive the Yugo until then?”

  “No can do. Somebody else is taking it this afternoon. They’ll have it for a month.” He smiled, “She’s a starlet, got like forty first names, Mary Annie Billie Bobbi Ulysses Johnson, something like that. She was in that big teen slasher movie showed last month, said she’s in a very turquoise mood and wants me to paint her Beemer turquoise and inlay the dash with silver and rhinestones. In the meantime she wanted to drive something people wouldn’t pay attention to and I told her she could take the Yugo.”

  Well, she had it there. I tried one more thing and pointed at the big fin, “Are you sure that’s legal?”

  “Yep. Had some CHPs drop in to make sure. They were so impressed they called their buddies to come by and take a look. Must have been twenty or so stop by in the last two days.”

  Great, my days of driving over the speed limit and whizzing through the pack was over. I imagined a trooper watching traffic coming at him on the freeway and seeing the black dorsal fin knifing through the cars like an orca chasing seals on a National Geographic special. Be hard to miss.

  I surrendered, “Are the keys in it?”

  “Yep. I’ll send you the bill, no charge for the extras.”

  As I drove down the highway people in every vehicle within a quarter mile, coming and going stared with big eyes and often, open mouthed laughter. I sympathized with every zoo monkey I’d ever ogled.

  It wasn’t over when I pulled into the parking lot because Arch and his girlfriend were on the steps. Arch pointed, grabbed his stomach and laughed so hard he had to sit down. He sent his laughing girlfriend inside to tell everyone and before I could find an empty space, get out and run to my office, forty or fifty people came out and joined Arch. I parked and tried to remain dignified as I walked to my office. Once inside I pulled the shades and didn’t answer the knocks on the door.

  The knocking and hoots of laughter stopped after ten minutes or so. I waited another minute, then went out the door and into Archie’s apartment. Waylon was there and gave me a nod. I asked, “Is he awake?”

  “Yeah, I had to push him back in bed, tell him I’d give him an enema if he didn’t behave.”

  “I’ll bet that worked.”

  “Always does.”

  I went into the bedroom where Hondo was sitting up, reading Macbeth. He looked good, with color back in his face.

  “Don’t start talking like that,” I pointed at the book.

  He put it down, “I hadn’t read Shakespeare in a while. It still holds up.”

  “Yeah, old Willie could write.”

  Hondo said, “What’s up?” I told him about the upcoming trade. Hondo said, “You know where they’re talking about?”

  “I do. They’ll come in by Angels Gate Lighthouse and pass under the Vincent Thomas Bridge, then through the turning basin and into the center channel. It’s out of the way.”

  Hondo smiled, “That’s to our advantage. How do you want to play it?”

  “I’m going to call Deco Martinez.”

  Hondo nodded, “I can hardly wait.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I didn’t sleep well. It was like pre-game jitters. The morning, though was perfect Southern California. No inversions were trapping the smog and the sky was clean and clear, with a slight breeze off the ocean that brought the smell of salt and fish and hints of faraway places.

  Hondo came in the office’s front door laughing so hard he couldn’t make coffee. He wiped tears from his eyes, “Ohhh, nice fin,” then started laughing again and had to sit down at his desk holding his chest.

  “Go ahead, get it out of your system,” I said. Hondo chuckled, wiped his eyes again and finally got some self-control. He looked almost back to normal, except for the dark circles under his eyes.

  I said, “You must have bionic lungs. Nobody else could be near death one day and ready to go fifteen rounds two days later.”

  “Maybe four, no way fifteen. I guess I’m getting old.”

  “Oh sure. You still get carded at liquor stores.”

  He bit into a donut and said, “Probably just my clean living. Put some cream and sugar in my coffee will you?”

  We talked to Hunter at mid morning and she told us about a spectacular theft within the last year of Russian jewels from the collections in Moscow. Interpol and the Soviet government were conducting a joint investigation. Total value of the stolen artifacts was over four hundred million dollars.

  Hondo said, “Using that stuff for trading cards is risky.”

  “Uh-huh, but we told Mickey we’d find Landman.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t mean it wasn’t worth it, just that it’s risky.”

  “Aren’t you the one who told me ‘Live on the edge every once in a while, feel a little adrenaline rush.’”

  Hondo grinned and finished his coffee, “Yeah, that was me.”

  I said, “I thought it was.”

  **

  Deco called right before noon and said he had taken care of things. To cel
ebrate, Hondo and I went out to eat at James’ Beach on Venice Boulevard. For a day like this, we sat outside and people-watched as we chowed down on some delicious peppered Mako. Afterward we walked along Venice Beach and talked about the sundown meeting. Every once in a while, I lost my train of thought as an exceptionally beautiful woman or two or three caught my attention. I tell you, some of those bikinis are so small these days.

  We went back to the office an hour later and both of us took a nap. When we woke up, Hondo said, “This investigator work sure takes a lot of discipline.”

  “Hey,” I said, “We do it by the book.”

  The rest of the afternoon, we cleaned our pistols and loitered around the office, reading books and magazines or turning the radio to different stations. Waiting is always the hardest part.

  **

  When it was time, we drove in Hondo’s Mercedes to San Pedro and Los Angeles Harbor. The glowing sun was a finger’s width above the horizon when we parked behind the enormous US Borax warehouse. We walked past it to the next loading dock. The smell of the sea was fresh and strong and sea gulls made their sounds and flew overhead. I looked up and saw their undersides turn glowing white as the feathers caught the sun.

  Near the water’s edge were several thousand stacked forty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer being moved by a half dozen Hispanic men, with one driving a forklift. Another Hispanic man stood by a large piling at the water’s edge, holding a fishing rod with one hand and watching the line where it entered the water. The other hand was at his side, a forty-ounce bottle of beer hanging from one finger inserted into the neck.

  Somebody whistled from far off and the forklift driver turned his ball cap around so the bill pointed down the back of his neck.

  “It’s showtime,” Hondo said. I could feel the sun warming my shirt and the heat settle into my skin. Small beads of sweat tickled my upper lip and I felt one drop run out of a sideburn and slide by my ear and down my neck. I glanced at Hondo but he wasn’t sweating. He probably had a towel secreted on his person.

  We could see into the turning basin and watched as a long, sleek white yacht angled toward us. Soon the sun was directly behind it, turning the water an orange red and making the yacht appear to be churning through an ocean of copper and blood.

  Hondo and I stood forty or so feet from the dock’s edge, with the workers and the pile of fertilizer on our right. The Americas came in and with the grace of a beautiful ship and a good captain, settled against the dock cushions. Two men hopped off and slipped ropes fore and aft around two old, rusted dock cleats. The Hispanic fisherman had to move a bit to his right to have his line clear the bow of the yacht.

  A gangplank slid over to the dock and we watched people moving about on the Americas deck. Rakes crossed to the dock and I almost snorted at him. He was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt open down the front, with an oversized collar and puffy sleeves, like something out of an old pirate movie. I figured he was a closet Fabio fan.

  Bond and Frank were the next two off the yacht. The two men who tied off the boat moved to flank the others. I noticed one of them was missing the top half of an ear.

  In my head things got very still. I could see everything in perfect detail, from Frank’s twitching eye to the two hard nubs pushing out the front of Bond’s silk blouse; hear every sound from the creak of the ropes to the lapping of the waves against the pilings underneath us.

  The men working at the fertilizer sacks paid us no attention, and the forklift moved pallets of the stuff from back to front in a never-ending cycle some twenty feet on our right.

  “You have de trade?” Rakes said.

  I held up a plain green gym bag.

  Rakes said, “Open.”

  I opened it, took out the egg, the crucifix and the necklace one by one, then put them back.

  “Bring it to me.”

  “Nope.”

  Rakes said something in Russian and the two outside men started forward. Hondo made a tsk-tsk sound, pulled two Glock forty-fives from the back of his waistband, and let the pistols hang at his sides. “The man said, ‘Nope’.” Hondo glanced at me, “I get that translation right?” I nodded.

  The men stopped and looked back at Rakes.

  The men working the fertilizer glanced over, but didn’t change anything they were doing. The fisherman yawned and took a pull off the forty, like he saw people carrying weapons in each hand every day.

  Bond said, “Give him the jewels, Ronny. It’s best if you do what he says.”

  “Nope.”

  Carl and Bond murmured to each other and Frank moved toward them, only to have Carl put his hand in Frank’s chest and shove him away, hard. Frank staggered back five or six feet, his face flushing red. He stood there shifting weight from foot to foot in an awkward, antsy rhythm.

  Bond went below deck and several minutes later we saw Landman and two small women appear. Their hands were tied behind them and even from here, I could see Landman’s face had been worked over as bad as if Mike Tyson in his prime had pinned him in the corner.

  Rakes said, “Dey are here. Now give chew-els to Carl.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  Hondo said to me, “You’re just a little chatterbox today, aren’t you.”

  Carl and Bond conferred some more, this time with Carl animated, swinging his arms and pointing at us. Bond touched his arm and he slapped her hand away. She sighed then turned to us and said, “So, we have a stalemate. We won’t turn them over without the jewels, and you won’t turn the jewels over without them. Do you have a suggestion?”

  “In a minute. First, I want some things cleared up.”

  Bond said, “Go ahead.”

  “Frank and Carl were in on it from the first, when you hired us to find Bob. Your little scared act was to keep me off balance, and the play by Frank and Carl at my house when you were there was to reinforce that. Am I right so far?”

  Carl and Bond conferred. Bond said, “You’re right. We’d been searching for Bob, but it was as if he’d vanished. We asked around and heard you were very good, but that you were even better when you had an emotional attachment. So I used myself to pull you further in, with Frank and Carl pushing you and keeping you off balance so you wouldn’t catch on.”

  I turned to Bob. “What made you take off?”

  Bob looked at Carl and Bond then said, “They’d been using me as a patsy when I discovered what they were doing: smuggling in undocumented women and stolen treasure taken from Moscow. I dug a little deeper and found the women were forced into nude dancing, prostitution and selling drugs, and the Romanov treasures were being sold on the black market to keep Americas Studios afloat.

  “I was approached by an agent of the Russian government and told him I would help.”

  I said, “Valdar.”

  Bob nodded, “Yes. He was a legitimate artist, but also worked for the Russian authorities. I let him stay at my home in Malibu while we tried to dig further. When they found out, they killed him.”

  I asked Bond, “Where’s Valdar’s body?”

  Carl answered for her, “Chum for Sharks.”

  Bond said, “I didn’t know.”

  I asked Bob, “How did Deco fit in?”

  “He’s my friend. Valdar and I talked to him about the situation and we agreed to play along with Carl and the others until there was enough to hang them. But we tried to get too tricky.”

  I said, “Deco helped you save the women, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. We had been meeting at a motel where Carl and the others would bring the women and I would act as the mutual friend between them and Deco, whose reputation made him believable as someone who would buy women and farm them out to clubs. He was good and made the Russians see it as a beneficial thing, with him riding herd on the women after the Russians brought them in. Deco convinced them he could guarantee the women danced at the right clubs and didn’t skip.”

  I said, “But you started intercepting the groups after they were dropped off.”<
br />
  Yes, after we found out at our last motel meeting that a Russian named Simon Mortay murdered one of the women at his club because she wouldn’t prostitute herself. Deco took the two women at the motel and hid them in another state, then told the Russians they ran out on him. Deco and I talked it over and knew we couldn’t let any more women die, so Deco found out the route and drop-off location and I gathered the last group, five women, and led them to a different place.”

  “Why on foot?”

  “Because Carl’s men were watching me by then, watching my cars and my house. It happened very fast and frankly was the only thing I could think of. I took them up a canyon to an area near the trail where I rode my bike. I felt it would be easy to keep watch on them that way and not be followed.”

  “And that’s when Carl found out about Valdar.”

  Carl growled, “Yes. Ve take care of him.”

  Bob said, “I called Deco when I heard. We were going to get the women out of the canyon and to a place of safety, then we planned to hide out, too. I rode my bike, and figured to take the women out one by one, but I saw Carl and some others on my back trail, coming on dirt bikes. I left my bike and climbed down on foot. Two of the women weren’t there but I couldn’t wait, so I led the others away to a place I knew, Chumash Cave.”

  “There was a lot of food left there, so you’d planned on using it before and stocked the place?”

  “Yes, as an alternate plan if I couldn’t get them out on the bike. I did it in a hurry, grabbing whatever was at the house and taking it there. I drove and used a dirt road to get close, then walked in and cached the food. I drove back home and immediately got on my bike and went up the trail to the women.”

  I looked at Carl, “But you didn’t throw his bike off the cliff until the next day.”

  Carl said, “Stupid Baca. Ve tink he return for pretty bike. Next day I know he runs. I throw bike from cliff.”

  I wagged my finger at him, “You should learn to control that temper.”

  Carl’s voice turned icy. “Enough talk. De chew-els or I kill Landman.”

  I said, “Okay. Let someone neutral hold the bag until we trade.”