[Chauncey Means 01.0] A Hard Place

by Sean Lynch

“I work for a pimp,” she said. “It pays pretty good.”

  “I know. I won’t hold it against you.”

  “I’m touched. You gonna arrest this guy?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “That’s what I thought. When’s the meet?”

  “Tonight. In Alameda.”

  Kathy rubbed out her cigarette in a tray on the desk. Then she ran her hands through her hair; it was almost as short as mine.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m in. But it’ll cost you ten, not five.”

  “Deal. Half up front okay?” I pulled out a fat roll of cash from my pocket.

  “You aren’t even going to negotiate?” she asked, as I counted currency.

  “Nope. Money’s not mine; belongs to somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy who tried to kill me.”

  “What’s he got to say about you spending all his money?”

  “Nothing. He’s dead.”

  “That would explain his approval,” Kathy said.

  Chapter 32

  The headlights grew brighter as they got closer. I shut my right eye and looked down, using my left eye’s peripheral vision to track the car’s approach. It was coming towards me on the main runway road.

  I was standing near the water’s edge at the easternmost point of the former Alameda Naval Air Station. The San Francisco skyline loomed large behind me, only a couple of miles across the choppy, frigid waters of the Bay.

  The Alameda Naval Air Station, closed in 1997 during the Clinton-era military base reductions, was probably the most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate between San Diego and Seattle. It was sandwiched directly between Oakland and San Francisco, in the center of the San Francisco Bay, and was supposed to have already been converted to retail shops, condominiums, and a high-tech business park. At one time even the Disney Corporation looked into purchasing the former U.S. Navy property for construction of a theme park in Northern California.

  Unfortunately, the combination of inept municipal leadership, toxic waste clean-up, and economic downturn left the former Alameda Naval Air Station property, now re-named Alameda Point, an undeveloped wasteland of abandoned buildings, unused ports, and decaying runways.

  I was currently standing on the remotest part of what was once a busy military runway. There was nothing around me for several hundred yards but cracked concrete, pot-holes, weeds, seagull, and sharks. It was cold and windy as hell; as a Midwesterner, I’d never truly acclimated to the damp chill coming off the Bay. A steady rain was falling; just like the radio weather lady had predicted.

  I wasn’t complaining. The rain, wind, and the crash of the waves dampened sound and limited visibility; infantry weather.

  My rented Ford Mustang was parked to my left and a little in front of me. I’d backed it against the rocks at the water’s edge, with its nose facing out the way I’d driven in. I was wearing a long black unbuttoned raincoat. My hands were empty.

  The car pulled up to within twenty feet of me and stopped. It was Al Quintana’s black, slick-topped, Crown Victoria. I shielded my open eye from the headlight glare with my hand. The headlights flashed their high beams for an instant and then shut off. It’s an old cop trick to ruin a person’s night vision. I’ve used it myself.

  The Crown Vic’s engine shut down and the headlights extinguished. I opened my aiming eye. The driver’s door opened and Sergeant Alvero Quintana got out. The passenger door opened also. I had Russ Dijkstra’s Les Baer .45 in my hand a fraction of a second later. I thumbed down the safety and held at low-ready.

  “I told you to come alone,” I said.

  Quintana showed me his palms. “Take it easy, Chance. I’m not playing any tricks.”

  “Then why didn’t you follow instructions?”

  “Come on?” he said. “You can’t blame a guy for wanting a little extra security. This place you chose to meet is remote as hell. Why couldn’t we do this someplace indoors? I hate standing in the fucking rain.”

  Another man stepped out of the car. He was a heavy-set white guy a little younger than me with a 49er’s baseball cap on. He was dressed like Quintana, in a raincoat which undoubtedly covered a ballistic vest. He was obviously a cop. He was holding an M-4 carbine at low-ready. The weapon was adorned with a custom butt-stock and vertical fore-grip attachment favored by soldiers, S.W.A.T. cops, gear queers, and tacti-cool types.

  “Goodbye,” I said. I began to move sideways towards my car, keeping both men in view. The Caucasian guy moved from behind the passenger door to his right, paralleling me. He didn’t raise the muzzle of his weapon from where it was pointed at the ground, and neither did I, but we were both on the brink.

  “Hold on,” Quintana called out. “I didn’t come to jack you. I came to deal.”

  “Then why bring Rambo? Where’s your sidekick Bo?”

  Quintana laughed. “That’s a good one, Chance. Like you don’t know.”

  I stopped moving. So did my shadow.

  “Did you bring money?”

  “I did,” Quintana said.

  “How much?”

  Quintana slowly reached inside his car and pulled out a medium-sized paper grocery bag. He held the bag in his right hand and kept his left up and in view.

  “There’s one-hundred, twenty-one thousand dollars, and a bindle of dope, in this bag,” he said. “It’s all I could come up with on short notice.” He set the bag on the hood of his car.

  “I was hoping for more.”

  “We can talk about that,” he said.

  “What are you buying?”

  “I want whatever recordings you have to disappear. I want Belicia gone. The bindle will take care of that. Slip it into her drink and dump her on the Track. It’ll look like an overdose. The investigation will be suspended; I promise.”

  “Just another dead whore on the streets of Oak-Town, huh?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “What makes you think I’d be willing to do that?” I asked.

  Quintana laughed again. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Chance. I checked you out. You play rough; you’ve done in more people than the plague.”

  “What about your nephew?”

  “Leave Efren to me.”

  “You still have some explaining to do,” I said. “How do I trust you won’t keep coming after me?”

  “I told you,” Quintana said. “It wasn’t me coming after you. Bullock wanted you dusted for taking out two of his soldiers. I’ve never killed anybody in my life. Not even in the line of duty. I swear.”

  “And Bo? I’m supposed to believe he was acting on his own?”

  “His business with Bullock was his business,” Quintana said. “I’ve got no knowledge of what he was doing on the side.”

  “And the two gangsters who followed me out of the Yucatan? Toby Soares and his pal Chingo? You’re telling me you had nothing to do with it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And you didn’t kill Marisol Hernandez?”

  “No way. I told you, I didn’t kill anyone. It was Bullock, or one of his crew, who did Marisol Hernandez in. Probably one of the guys you shot on Bancroft Avenue. She’s already been avenged, Chance. It’s over. Your job is done. Stand down.”

  Quintana took a step towards me with his arms open in a conciliatory gesture. “Chance, you have to believe me. You’ve got it all mixed up; you’re confusing me with Drop-Dead. I like you, bro; you’re my kind of guy. You ain’t afraid to get your hands dirty. We could do business, you and me. Why would I want to kill you?”

  I didn’t say anything. Quintana took another step towards me, his hands still above his elbows. The Caucasian cop with the carbine kept his eyes locked on me. His feet were a little more than shoulder width apart and he had pivoted slightly, so that he was at a forty-five-degree angle to my position.

  “When do I get the recordings?” Quintana asked.

  “Right now,” I said. I removed my left hand from my pisto
l and took out my cell phone. I tossed it to Quintana. He caught it with both hands.

  “Everything’s on it,” I said. “There’re no other copies.”

  “Then I guess our business is done for tonight,” Quintana said. He pocketed the phone.

  “Not quite,” I said. I whistled.

  The sound of the shotgun blast was muffled under the Mustang. The Caucasian cop fell to the ground instantly. He struggled to bring his M-4 up and to bear on me. I heard the pump action of my Mossberg shotgun cycle as I stepped towards Al Quintana and stuck my pistol barrel within a foot of his face. Quintana’s right hand was already partially inside his coat.

  The second shotgun blast came on the heels of the first. The cop with the carbine stopped writhing. It’s difficult to writhe with most of your head above your nose missing.

  “Your hand comes out with anything but air, you’re done,” I told Quintana. His teeth clenched and his eyes tapered to slits.

  Kathy rolled out from under my parked car and stood up. She was dressed all in black, including a wool watch-cap, and shrugged off a dark-colored blanket she’d been wrapped in. She was holding my Mossberg 590 military shotgun loosely at her side. She walked over and gave Quintana’s downed passenger a kick.

  “Had to go for the pelvis on the first shot,” she said. “Below the vest.”

  I nodded without taking my eyes off Quintana. The only thing that’ll drop a man faster than a central nervous system hit is a pelvis shot.

  “Lose the gun,” I said to him.

  Quintana slowly pulled out a .40 caliber Glock from under his coat with two fingers and dropped it.

  “We can still do business,” he said. “Nothing’s gone too far. Let’s talk.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” I said. “But if you know any prayers, now would be a good time.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “It’s in your interest to let me live. I can explain.”

  “Explain what? More lies?”

  “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  “Sure it was,” I said. “All along. You showed up on the Track the night Marisol was killed, even though it was your night off. You were on me like a cheap suit after I met with Holly; she was hardly out of the car before you and Bo pulled me over. Again, on your night off. You’re supposed to be the Oakland Police Department’s expert on street prostitution, yet when I asked you about Drop-Dead Bullock, one of the biggest players on the Track, you played dumb.”

  “It isn’t like that-”

  “Shut up,” I cut him off. “Within seconds of getting clear of your traffic stop, I picked up a two-vehicle tail with missile-lock on me. When their ambush went south, and I survived, you showed up at the scene within minutes; Johnny-on-the-fucking-spot.”

  “You’re wrong,” he implored. “I swear.”

  “Oh yeah? After the shooting, when you were driving me to the station to be interviewed, I borrowed your phone to call my lawyer, remember?” Quintana’s face went pale. “I checked your outgoing calls. You never called Matt Nguyen to verify my story. I know Matt’s number. The number you called belonged to the phone being used by the dude in the white hat I smoked on Bancroft Avenue; the same dude I paid forty bucks for the services of a B-girl named Holly. And during the ride, you never once asked me what happened on Bancroft Avenue? That’s because you already knew; you were the guy who set it up.”

  “You’re not giving me a chance to explain,” he said.

  “I’m not finished,” I said. “I bootlegged the phone from the dude in the white hat’s body before the cops showed up.” Quintana’s eyebrows lifted. “The two numbers listed on his phone’s SIM card as his last received calls were your number and Bullock’s.”

  Quintana shook his head.

  “When I met you at the Yucatan, you neglected to mention that Efren Campos was your nephew. And you somehow magically had Drop-Dead Bullock’s address. First you don’t even know him, because he’s so far underground, and then all-of-a-sudden you know where he lives?”

  “You’re fucking wrong,” he declared. “All wrong.”

  “Besides,” I went on, “You claim to be moonlighting as a bartender at the Yucatan to pay off your alimony and child-support, but you only work on youth night when the club doesn’t serve booze; underage kids don’t tip. You use the Yucatan exclusively to scout vulnerable girls for your crew of Romeo pimps to target. Not only do you get to supply Bullock with turned-out teenaged girls, you get to fuck them yourself during the turning-out process. Very efficient; business and pleasure all-in-one. And if all that isn’t enough to point the finger at you, the last call received on Toby Soares’ phone, before he and his pal tried to take me out after I left the Yucatan, was from you.”

  “You’ve got to listen to me,” Quintana pleaded.

  “It was a slick operation, Al; you deserve some credit for cleverness. You supply Bullock with a steady stream of teenaged girls, freshly turned out, and run interference for his street operation in your capacity as the supervisor in charge of the Oakland Police Department’s Vice and Child Exploitation Unit. Child exploitation? Talk about irony? It’s genius. How much did you rake in each night? Five grand? Ten? Twenty?”

  Quintana wouldn’t look me in the eye. He was staring at the ground. Kathy was staring at Quintana. She didn’t blink in the rain. Military trained shooters often don’t.

  “It doesn’t matter how much money you were making,” I said to Quintana. “Because I don’t care. I don’t care about you selling out your badge, or your crew of Romeo pimps, or even that you tried to kill me. I only care about what I was hired to do.”

  “If you think I’m going to beg, you can kiss my ass,” Quintana said. “I’m a businessman, same as you. We both work the hard side of the street. And you’re right about the money; it’s more than you can imagine. You’re forgetting the dope angle, which Bullock handles; or handled, until you punched his card. It’s lucrative as fuck.”

  “Don’t expect me to grieve for Bullock,” I said.

  “I don’t. He was a big boy; he knew what he was doing.”

  “So do I.”

  “Hear me out, Chance,” Quintana continued, looking first at Kathy and then back to me. “There’s a lot of money to be made; you can be in on it. You just have to drop the holier-than-thou attitude. What I do isn’t anything new; it’s the world’s oldest profession.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s the world’s second-oldest profession. War is the first.”

  “Have it your way; you’re a warrior and I’m a pimp. Whatever you call yourself, we’re in the same business, you and me.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “People pay us to deliver a service,” he said. “Neither one of the services we deliver is strictly legal.”

  “I’m not a pimp,” I said.

  “No, you’re a killer; a hired gun.”

  “I’m a detective.”

  “How many cases you work where nobody gets killed?”

  “Everybody I ever dumped was an armed adult, or claimed to be, and they were in the process of trying to do the same to me. I don’t prey on kids.”

  “I already told you to lose the holier-than-thou routine, Chance. No matter what you think, we’re the same; we’re businessmen. Guys like us get paid to do things others can’t. Hard things.”

  “I was hired to find Marisol’s killer.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” he persisted.

  “You didn’t intend to. But when you pulled up in your car, on that rainy night on the Track, to verify if Belicia Hernandez was on her corner like you told her to be, it wasn’t Belicia, was it?”

  “No,” he said, after a pause.

  “It was Marisol. A fifteen-year-old, high school, sophomore who was out on the Track dressed like the whore you and your Romeo pimp nephew turned her younger sister into. It was an honest mistake; Marisol and Belicia look a lot alike. Marisol was there in Belicia’s place. She brought a gun to save her baby sister the only way
she knew how. They couldn’t go to the police, because you are the fucking police.”

  “I didn’t know it was Marisol,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  “Of course not. You, ‘hate to stand in the fucking rain,’ so you didn’t get out of your vehicle. When she reached into the car you saw the gun and your police academy defensive tactics training automatically kicked in. You did a combination gun take-away and reaction shot with your service pistol. In the process you wrenched her shoulder and busted up her hand.”

  All Quintana could do was nod.

  “It was an accident,” Quintana said. “Bad luck.”

  “Sure it was. You accidentally spotted Belicia at her sister’s Quinceanera at the Yucatan last November. You accidentally sent your shithead nephew to romance her. Then you accidentally got her hooked, beat her, raped her and turned her out. It was a complete accident that Belicia was supposed to be peddling her ass to strangers on a corner of the Track you accidentally assigned her to. A total accident. And bad luck that Belicia’s big sister accidentally tried to snuff out your miserable life and ended up paying with hers instead.”

  I kept the barrel of my .45 a couple of inches from Quintana’s nose while I spoke.

  “Can we be done now?” Kathy asked. “I’m getting wet. I’ve been laying in a pot-hole, under a car, in the rain, for the better part of two hours.”

  Kathy wasn’t lying; we’d arrived early to set up. The early bird not only gets the worm; it usually gets to keep breathing.

  “Give me a minute,” I said over my shoulder to her. “We’re almost finished here.”

  “You’re the boss,” she said.

  “You can’t kill me, Chance; I’m a cop. That’ll bring down a lot of heat. Heat you don’t want.” Quintana sensed the conversation was drawing to a close. He wanted to keep us talking, so he’d keep taking in air.

  “I killed seven men already in the last twenty-four hours,” I reminded him. I pointed my chin at his partner’s body lying in the rain. “Two of them were cops. Anyway, you’re not a cop. You’re a cold-sore with a badge.”

  “I have a family,” he pleaded. “I’ve got children.” His upper lip started to twitch.