“It hurts you know me so little, Ted. I know we have to do this. For Danny. Which one of us do you think is worried about Danny?”
“Not you,” Demoines bet.
“Of course me! Do you think Adrian cares about Danny, or you, or anyone? He doesn’t. I am the one who cares. I’m a people person.”
“You don’t care about people,” Greggs intervened. “You’re attracted to people. The loyal one is Adrian.”
“Yeah, keep talking about me like I’m not here, bitches.”
Greggs turned back to the road. The most frustrating thing about A. Z. Kimrean was not that they were two people, but that both of them were among the most intractable people she had ever met.
* * *
—
In a random point of the desert, perhaps to mark the historical spot where some frontier settlers were forced to resort to cannibalism in the 1800s, a candid soul had erected a gas station and diner for their art school project on streamline moderne. Greggs pulled over at the sleeping neon sign and sneaked the Toyota among the large ruminant eighteen-wheelers in the parking lot.
All four got out of the vehicle, squinting at the sun-reflecting sand. Kimrean once more stretched their cuffed hands like a beggar, although their expression wasn’t as much a supplication as an invitation to kiss their derriere. The detectives tried to ignore them.
Adrian commented, “So you guys want to take me into a crowded restaurant in cuffs, then let me walk out with one of Lyon’s top men?”
The wind set a cloud of dust on them. Greggs fished the key out of her pants and tried not to acknowledge the orange-brown eye as she unlocked the cuffs.
It was peak lunchtime in the diner—a place that had recently expanded from trailer truck stop to modest roadside tourist trap by virtue of one flattering review that everyone had failed to read in the sarcastic spirit that was intended. Two different VW Camper enthusiast couples, along with two old ladies on the toll-free route to Vegas, completed a cast of background extras made up mostly of lonely men in denim. Greggs and Demoines avoided the booths by the large panoramic window looking onto the parking lot and picked an inconspicuous table near the counter, far from the corners. Greggs ordered coffee. Demoines checked his watch.
“We’re late. Danny will be here in ten.”
Greggs confirmed it and looked down at Kimrean, who was already sitting. “Can we trust you’ll stay?”
“Sure.” Kimrean looked up from the menu. “You’re taking the car with you, aren’t you?”
“That’s the spirit.”
“I’ll need money for the coffee.”
“Danny will pay for it.” She read the P.I. for the last time, her jacket folded under her arm and a well-rehearsed mother look on her face. “Please try and behave, will you?”
“I’ll be fine, Mom. Go take care of your real toddler.”
“Bye, A.Z.,” said Demoines. It was the shortest form to embrace both Kimreans on a first-name basis.
The bell over the door jingled them good-bye.
As soon as they were gone, Kimrean intercepted a waitress in violet uniform and perm.
“Forget the coffee—I’ll have the steak, blue rare; chili cheese fries; and a beer.” Adrian gave the waitress a quick scan, then added, “What happened to the girl who used to work here?”
“Oh, she’s fine,” she said, laying a place mat on the table. “Her surgery went well, I’m told. But I’m not sure they’re holding the spot for her.”
“Don’t take it for granted, you’re just a stopgap. They should’ve given you your own uniform by now; this one’s not your size, the blouse is mended up, and you’re too cheerful for a Cecilia,” Adrian said, pointing at the embroidered name. “You want her job, work for it, Frenchy.”
The waitress hesitated for a minute, fact-checked the story, then said, “Thank you?” and she hurried back to the kitchen.
Kimrean tucked the napkin under their tank top and passed the time studying the desserts.
* * *
—
Outside the air-conditioned capsule of the diner, the desert bustled with the voices of busy insects and happy cheering vermin frying in the sun. Every now and then a big dumb rolling tumbleweed crossed like a bouncing beach ball between them on its migratory route for the coast.
Then a Firestone tire scraped the living earth off the continent as it burst on-screen, obliterating the microfauna. The coarse sound of scorched rubber faded into the lower, softer sabertooth purr of a V-8 engine while the dust storm slowly scattered to unveil the calm horizon mirrored on a shiny metal bumper, then the sky gleaming off the azure bodywork and yellow racing stripe of a 1969 Camaro Z28.
The engine shut off, a metal click opened the door, and a pair of black leather dress boots stepped down with a crunch of ground dirt.
A couple of truckers in the diner excused one brain cell apiece from their sandwiches as the doorbell announced the newcomer. They both noticed the shirt open at the neck, the curly hair, the sideburns, the sunglasses, the hat—all in black. Without appearing to have recognized anyone, the man walked across the restaurant, past the inviting window tables and the noteworthy collection of state car plates, and stopped in front of the weakest-looking patron, like any troublemaker in the school cafeteria.
Kimrean ignored him for another two spoonfuls of strawberry pie, until the brown and green eyes granted him a second of combined attention.
“I’m eating here. Can’t you put a hairnet on that chest?”
Danny Mojave removed his sunglasses. The eyes and brows below didn’t spoil the overall black motif.
“Ade. Glad to see you too.”
“Glad to see you three,” Zooey sang, raising their voice pitch to identify herself. There was whipped cream on their nose.
“I’m ready when you guys are.”
“Get the check,” A.Z. instructed, relocating the last of the dessert from their face to a napkin. “And an iced latte for the road.”
* * *
—
The landscape for the rest of the trip offered as few sidenotes as the first half. Danny drove with the patient air of Muhammad waiting for the proverbial mountain to pop up on the horizon. Kimrean sat back with their feet on the dashboard and a cigarette between their teeth, head tilted toward the open window, wind flapping their blond hair like the national flag of Bhutan. California dashed past them, roaring like Hurricane Irene.
“So. I heard you took a sabbatical,” Danny icebroke. “Where did you stay?”
“Pennhurst Asylum, then Claymoore.”
“Nice?”
“Ritzy. In Claymoore I was even allowed to shave my legs. With tweezers.”
Zooey was trying on Danny’s hat. Mojave took the chance for a full body shot.
“You look good.”
“Yeah, yeah. Easy on the compliments; I don’t want to ruin your seats.” Kimrean examined him back. “You don’t look bad yourself. For someone who’s been undercover for eighteen months, carries a gun under his jacket and another one on his ankle.”
Danny conceded a sporting smirk. “Anything else?”
“Not much, except that you beat off twice a day, and you should have that rib checked out.” Adrian waited until Mojave looked in his direction again to explain. “You winced when you got in the car. Could be a fracture; you should get an X-ray.”
Danny felt his right side with his left hand, not hiding the discomfort. “And the beating off?”
“Everybody beats off twice a day,” Zooey said. “Don’t they?”
Danny almost laughed. Zooey had a knack for brightening up the mood. Adrian delved into business while the spirits were light.
“How deep in shit are you?”
“Chin-deep. And sinking,” Danny answered. The smirk showed how seriously jokingly serious he was. “What do you know
about Victor Lyon?”
“Not much,” Kimrean said. “AKA ‘the Lyon,’ sixty-six, white, born poor in southern Florida, where he started flirting with gangs. Worked his way from zero to protégé of street legend Fat Jim. After the latter’s death, he fled to California to escape the Miami-Dade police. He pops up in Los Angeles with a humble opiate start-up, then he orchestrates and executes the simultaneous extermination of three rival families in one night—the infamous Hostile Takeover of ’74. He kept a low profile while his territory spread through Southern California. He began buying property here in San Carnal, where he married Evita Durango, Miss Guatemala 1982. His heroin empire weathered the crack epidemic of the eighties and meth in the nineties. In recent years, his influence has declined in L.A., but he still owns the Mexico border. He doubled down in San Carnal through several abusive deals with other cartels and the occasional blitzkrieg against young upstarts. After divorcing Miss Guatemala, he married Elizabeth Omahira, British-born merchant attorney in the Cayman Islands, twenty-five years his junior. Three children, zero grandchildren, Catholic, Lakers fan, triple bypass in 1996.”
“Yup, not much indeed,” Danny evaluated. “You missed the daughter from his second marriage; she’ll turn twelve this year.”
“I was counting her; I wasn’t counting the son that died on your watch. Tell me about the others.”
“The eldest is Xander Lyon. He’s the apple that fell closest to the tree. Raised in the streets, educated at Stanford; the wisdom of a fifty-year-old and the energy of thirty-three.”
“Energy and diplomacy are a rare combination. What does he think of his father’s deals with the Red Mums?”
“If he opposes the alliance, he’s too smart to share. His entourage is just as discreet; he surrounds himself with the best. When he’s not doing business in Mexico he’s fortified in his penthouse on the thirty-seventh floor of the family hotel on Palm Avenue. He’s married and separated; she lives in Santa Monica.”
“Bor-ing.”
“Frankie is the second born; I’ve only met him a few times. He handles some of the cartel’s legal businesses in San Carnal; his henchmen are a squad of accountants who do most of the work. He just shakes hands, buys drinks, and entertains the VIPs at his club on Palm Boulevard.”
“Is there any place in San Carnal whose name doesn’t contain the word Palm?”
“Not that I know of. Frankie is the black sheep of the Lyons. Thirty-one years old, bad student, terrible gangster; his father keeps him away from the tough work and he doesn’t care. He’s nice enough, but bland. He can’t find his place. Middle kid syndrome, you know.”
Adrian and Zooey consulted with each other, then stared at Danny inquiringly.
“Okay, maybe you don’t know,” he concluded. “Anyway, Mikey, the third son, was more involved. Twenty-seven, graduated from Princeton two years ago, but I don’t think he spent much time in the library. Very interested in the family business, but too much hubris. His father saw in him the same kind of reckless soldier he’d been during the Takeover days; the kid’s idea of diplomacy was two gorillas with shotguns and a sack of grenades. Officially, Mikey was in charge of the military arm of the cartel, but in practice, he was limited to territorial disputes. His lieutenants knew they answered to the father, not the son. This was cause for frequent family drama. Deep down Mikey was just a moody teenager—add armed, coked up, and always one tequila shot away from full-blown psychosis. He’d been antagonizing his father ever since he divorced his mom, but the Lyon still hoped to see him mature. He loved Mikey. Putting me in his inner circle was a proof of trust. That is, of not trusting his son, but trusting me.”
“Great call,” Kimrean rated. “What did you do—leave him watching a SpongeBob DVD while you talked boys on the phone with your girlfriends?”
“He got hit in the pool house,” Danny related, a hint of exhaustion in his voice now. “That used to be Mikey’s lodgings. I thought I could leave him alone for a minute. It’s Villa Leona, for God’s sake—must be the safest hundred acres in the county: CCTV, armed guards, dogs. I sneaked out for a smoke. This was Monday night—Tuesday, really, after midnight. In the main building, everyone was asleep. Then I heard the gunshots.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“How far apart?”
“Close. One second. Me and half a dozen guys ran to the pool house. Mikey was dead on the floor with a red flower on his chest. The window was open. The dogs tracked a scent, but they lost it near the fence on the north side.”
“Where had you been smoking?”
“On the north side.”
“And you didn’t see anyone?”
“No. That part of the garden is in the dark.”
“Cameras?”
“There’s only one on that fence; it’s easy to dodge.”
“Dogs?”
“They don’t patrol that side; Mikey complained they pissed on his azaleas.”
Adrian closed their eyes. “For the safest hundred acres in the county, I know of French vaginas that are harder to sneak into.”
“Yes, we realized that. We’d gotten lazy; no one thought anyone in San Carnal would be crazy enough to try this.”
“Weapon?”
“Nine millimeter, probably Mikey’s.”
“ ‘Probably’? How long does it take to match a gun?”
“We don’t have the gun. Mikey kept a Beretta in the pool house; we can’t find it.”
“Hmm.” In Kimrean’s personal argot, hmm could mean anything in the range from Very interesting to I just remembered a particular photo shoot in GQ with girls in lingerie holding fishing rods. “Tell me about the flower; I couldn’t see it properly in the picture. Your phone camera sucks.”
“It was a chrysanthemum. Red.”
“You can identify a chrysanthemum at a glance?”
“Well…” There was a second of hesitation. “No, but someone said it was.”
“Surely one of Victor Lyon’s in-house henchmen slash botanists.”
“Whatever; we kept the flower—the Lyon put it in a vase. You’ll see it in a minute,” Danny promised. It was beginning to dawn on him that he might have cried wolf too early. “Maybe it wasn’t a chrysanthemum.”
“Nah, I’m messing with you; it probably was. How about motive—the shoot-out with the Japanese? What happened there?”
Danny lit up a cigarette. Kimrean noticed the slightest tremor in the cop’s hand when it wasn’t gripping the wheel.
“That happened the night before, Monday after midnight. An exchange gone wrong. A trade in neutral land.”
“What makes you all think the diner we just left is in neutral land?”
Danny cut himself off, this time definitely impressed.
“I recognized the parking lot from the pictures on Greggs’s board,” Adrian expanded briefly. “And the panoramic window looking onto the parking lot is brand new—it still had the sticky labels on.”
“It’s far enough from everywhere, but it’s still in Gran South County Sheriff’s territory. That guarantees that whatever happens there will be swept under the carpet,” Danny explained. “It was a routine deal; I’ve done this many times with Xander. But this time they sent Mikey. Xander was abroad for the week attending some meetings.”
“Thanks, hadn’t heard that euphemism for ‘banging my mistress’ since 1992. Why did Daddy trust Mikey?”
“Good faith. The kid had been begging for a chance; he was given one. It was a mistake. Mikey showed up high, acting out. He strutted into the diner for a burger while we waited, flashing his piece around. When the Japanese arrived, they were intimidated. They don’t speak good English; Mikey’s hypergesturing didn’t help. He got impatient, they got impatient. He insisted on counting the money. Stupid paranoid kept saying they were ambushing us. Suddenly one of his Cuban thugs, Hilfi
ger, spotted a sniper on top of a truck, and Mikey opened fire.”
“Was it a real sniper?”
“Yes, but we drew first blood—under gangland law, it was our fault. From that moment on, every decision we took was bad: we lost Hilfiger, started shooting toward the restaurant; we hit a civilian, blew her tit off. We made the Chronicle front page.”
“Any more casualties? Apart from Hilfiger and your rib and an extra’s tit?”
“Not on our side. I didn’t see any on theirs either. I wasn’t even aiming to kill.” He put the cigarette back in his mouth; it’d been burned to ashes long ago. “This is not my trade.”
“You should leave,” Adrian advised. Zooey added, “Can I come with you?”
“I’m not quitting now. Not after eighteen months. I’m not letting this whole op go to hell because a spoiled brat screwed up an exchange. I need to fix this. You two have work to do.”
“I could have solved this case from Claymoore: it was Chrysanthemum-san, in the pool house, with the nine millimeter. Greggs and Demoines and Carlyle are wrong: the yakuza just declared war on you.”
“Don’t tell that to Lyon. Don’t even mention Japan. Don’t mention I mentioned Japan.”
“But it is Japan.”
“Say anything else.”
“I’m a P.I.—I don’t get to randomly pick who the murderer is. That’s the screenwriter’s job.”
“Adrian, forget about the war—if you come in and tell the Lyon that the Red Chrysanthemum killed his son because an operation I was supervising went awry, I won’t live long enough to drop you at the station,” Danny stated. Not as distressed as the line called for, but close enough. “I can convince him it wasn’t the Japanese, but I can’t pull the story out of my ass; I need to bring an expert. And you’re the best P.I. I know.”
“But you don’t need a P.I., you just need a pretender.”
“Well, you’re also the best pretender I know,” Danny said, facing both.
Kimrean gazed out the window. A wall of slate clouds approached from the north.
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