by Joel Goldman
Another nod.
“You sell him dope?”
He shrugged. “I know he gets high.”
“Did he ask you to hook up his cousin, Frank Crenshaw, with a gun?”
Mendez shook his head.
“Did Crenshaw come to you for the gun?”
He shook his head again.
I didn’t see any of the tics or twitches that Kate relied on as signs of deception. He was looking at me straight on, not ducking. His answers were all gestures except for one spoken reply that didn’t answer the question directly, making it hard to assess his honesty and even harder for me to testify against him.
“Did you sell or give the gun to Crenshaw?”
Mendez smiled, his lips closed. “No.”
“Then where did Crenshaw get the gun?”
“He stole it. Now where do I find Brett Staley?”
At first, I thought it was another non-answer, and then I realized he was telling me the truth, the whole truth. I ignored his question.
“Of course. You didn’t want to send your people to gun shows, especially in places where they’d stand out. That would’ve made it too easy for ATF to put you in the mix. Better to contract it out with guys who’d blend in, look like every other redneck with a confederate flag. But I’m guessing they didn’t deliver. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You don’t have the guns. What happened? Did they want more money or get a better offer?”
“Brett Staley, where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Mendez raised his gun an inch from my eye, preparing to squeeze the trigger. “Wrong answer.”
Chapter Seventy
Headlights appeared at the top of the hill, a car rolling our way, one of Mendez’s men trotting toward it, looking back at him.
“It’s Luis—he’s here.”
The car followed an arc, stopping when it was perpendicular to the driver’s side of Quinn’s SUV, engine off, high-beams washing over us. Luis stepped out, clinging to the frame of the open door.
“Kill the lights,” Mendez said.
Luis ignored him, stumbling toward us, cradling his left arm with his right, his head down.
Mendez lowered his gun, turning toward him, shouting. “What’s the matter? Are you deaf? I said kill the fucking lights!”
Luis didn’t answer, falling to his knees, then flattening out on the ground. Mendez and the two men who’d been holding me up rushed to his side, the driver of the Lexus hesitating, holding back, his gun aimed at me. The rear door on the driver’s side of Luis’s car opened. It was Quinn. The driver of the Lexus followed my eyes and saw him, ignoring me, yelling, and taking aim.
I hit the driver in the throat with my elbow, folding him in half, hitting him again, this time on the back of his neck, dropping him to the pavement, a kick to the head putting him out. I grabbed his gun as Quinn drew down on Mendez and the others.
“On the ground, on your face and spread out,” I said.
Quinn retrieved his canvas bag from the SUV, sifting through the contents for plastic handcuffs, binding each of them and emptying their pockets. He scooped up their guns, cell phones, and car keys, throwing them over the chain-link fence protecting the abandoned steel mill while I gathered our guns.
“What about the other two?” I asked Quinn, “the guy who was in the car with you and the one at the top of the hill.”
“They’re resting uncomfortably.”
I handed him the orange with the knife still embedded in it.
“Mendez didn’t want this after all.”
Lying on the pavement, Mendez shouted at us. “You’re dead men, both of you!”
Quinn walked over to him, pulled his hair, raising his head, and crammed the orange in his mouth. “Not today, amigo.”
“So all that win-win, expand-the-pie bullshit,” I asked Quinn as we left Mendez behind, “is that just bullshit?”
“The basic principles apply across the board, but the board is a big place. Works great with two neighbors fighting over whose dog barks louder, but not so well with gun-running drug dealers used to getting their way the hard way. Mendez didn’t give it a chance, so we had to use a zero-sum strategy he understands. I hope you got what you came for.”
“All that and more. Mendez didn’t steal the guns. That was Frank Crenshaw, Nick Staley, and Jimmy Martin. Brett Staley had to have been part of it. They were supposed to sell the guns to Mendez, but something went wrong, the deal didn’t go through.”
“Maybe they got greedy and wanted more money,” Quinn said.
“That, or maybe they found another customer and decided to let the market set the price. Nuestra Familia isn’t the only cartel buying guns north of the border.”
“So Mendez or his competition upped the ante, killing Crenshaw and Nick Staley and going after Jimmy Martin.”
“Probably to convince them to sell at the right price. And, right about now, I’d say that the best offer Brett Staley is going to get is his life for those guns.”
“That will be the last deal he makes,” Quinn said. “No way do they leave him alive after taking out the others. And that means Jimmy Martin is doing time on borrowed time. But why kill Eberto Garza?”
“Eberto Garza was an accident, a victim of friendly fire if it was Mendez or mistaken identity if it was someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. All I do know is that Brett Staley is the key now. He’s on the run, and I’m not the only one chasing him.”
Quinn nodded. “Where do you want me to drop you?”
“Had enough?”
“I told Kate Scranton I’d get you to a meeting with Mendez and bring you back in one piece. It wasn’t pretty, but I did my thing.”
“I envy you.”
“Why?”
“You know when to quit.”
“In my business, that’s the name of the game.”
“You ever look back, wonder if you should have stuck around or ask yourself if there was something else you could have done?”
Quinn shook his head. “That’s the difference between you and me. You’re a crusader, and I’m a mercenary. You have to feel that way, or you don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But that’s a luxury I can’t afford.”
“Understood. You can drop me at Roni Chase’s house.”
“What are you going to do if she stiff-arms you again?”
“Offer her an orange.”
Quinn’s cell phone rang when we pulled up to Roni’s house. He answered and handed me the phone.
“Are you okay?” Kate asked.
“Never better.”
“I tried calling you on the phone Simon gave you, but you didn’t answer.”
I checked the phone. “Dead battery.”
“Lucy has been trying to reach you too.”
“Tell her I’m fine, and tell her I’m getting close.”
“You should call Joy. She’s worried.”
“You talked to her?”
Kate hesitated. “She called Lucy when she couldn’t reach you. Lucy told her about Quinn. She called to thank me for making sure you didn’t go after Mendez alone.”
“Call her back, tell her I’m okay, that Quinn’s taking good care of me, and that I’ll be home late.”
“It would be better if you called her.”
“I don’t want to lie to her,” I said and hung up.
I shook Quinn’s hand, thanked him, and got out of the SUV, watching from the curb as he drove away. He jolted to a stop halfway down the block, brake lights flashing, backing up to where he’d left me, his window down.
“One man’s trash,” he said, handing me the wastebasket I’d taken from Roni’s office.
“I hope is another man’s treasure.”
I turned on my cell phone. Joy had left me a text message asking if I was okay. I answered, telling her that I loved her. The superintendent at the Farm had also sent me a text message with the names of people who had visited Jimmy
Martin, one name raising more questions than it answered.
The front porch light was on. I did a quick sort through the contents of the wastebasket, most of which was mail addressed to Roni and her clients. A collection agency was threatening to file suit against her grandmother, who guaranteed payment of her mother’s medical bills. The county sent her a notice of a tax lien that had been filed against the house. There were complaints and demands for a host of other creditors for amounts long since past due.
The mail was no different for her clients, most of them up against the same wall. There was one piece of mail different from all the others. It was a monthly statement showing an account that had been paid on time and in full by a client who couldn’t, reminding me again not to confuse the improbable with the impossible.
I rang the doorbell and waited, grabbing the heavy brass knocker on the front door and pounding it against the hard oak when no one answered. Lillian Chase opened it long moments later.
“Where’s Roni?”
“Out. She didn’t say where.”
“I need to borrow your car.”
Chapter Seventy-one
She was wearing a warm-up suit, no makeup, looking weary and worried, the lines creasing her drawn face hard won and honest. Her green eyes were cloudy, her red hair brushed out, gray at the roots. It was the first time I’d seen her look her age.
“If you don’t have a car, how did you get here?”
“A friend dropped me off. I don’t have a lot of time.”
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to the wastebasket.
“Roni’s mail.”
“What are you doing with it?
“I need to talk to her.”
“You’re carrying a gun. Why?”
I looked down, forgetting that I was holding the wastebasket under my arm so that my jacket was pulled back, exposing the holster on my hip. I switched the wastebasket to my other hand, holding it at my side.
“It’s been that kind of night.”
“Is it a good idea for a man with your condition to carry a gun?”
I took a deep breath, considering and rejecting the possibility of pulling the gun on her.
“It’s a very good idea.”
“I see. Then you’ll have to tell me what this is all about before I’ll let you go running off after my granddaughter with your gun and my car.”
I followed her through the receiving area and the living room and into the kitchen. Terry Walker was sitting at the rectangular kitchen table, a pair of glasses slid halfway down his nose, a mug of coffee in one hand, a pen in the other, studying a crossword puzzle laid out in front of him. Lilly ran her hand across Terry’s back, pausing to caress his neck. Terry didn’t look up from his puzzle. She took a seat at the far end of the table, motioning me to the chair opposite her.
“I’d rather you just give me the keys.”
“Sit. Talk and then we’ll see,” she said.
“There isn’t time.”
She folded her hands on the table. “I won’t let you treat me like you’ve treated my granddaughter. If you want my help, you’ll tell me what this is all about.”
I was out of options, so I set the wastebasket on the floor and sat down.
“Nick Staley, Frank Crenshaw, and Jimmy Martin were broke or going broke so they decided to get into the stolen-goods business to make ends meet. Jimmy stole construction materials, and Frank resold them as scrap. Nick ran the show, and Brett helped out.”
Terry glanced up at me and returned to his crossword.
“Is that all?” Lilly asked.
“No. That’s the least of it. There’s a drug cartel in Mexico called Nuestra Familia. Cesar Mendez runs a gang in Northeast by the same name. It’s basically a subsidiary of the Mexican cartel. Their main business is drugs, and they’ve got a lot of competition with other cartels in Mexico. Lately, the competition has gotten pretty rough. The cartels are practically at war with each other and the Mexican government. They need guns, and Mendez is part of a network to smuggle guns to Mexico.”
Terry put his pen down. Lilly clutched her robe around her throat.
“Go on,” she said. “Finish it.”
“Mendez shopped at Nick’s grocery. He got to know Brett, probably sold him drugs and probably talked about how he was in the market for guns. Brett must have told his father, who figured out a way to cash in. He and Brett and Frank Crenshaw and Jimmy Martin robbed five gun dealers in the last three months. They had a deal to sell the guns to Mendez, only the deal fell through and now Nick and Frank are dead and so is a kid named Eberto Garza. Jimmy Martin is in jail too scared to talk, and Brett is on the run.”
“I’ve known these people all my life,” Lilly said. “That’s not who they are.”
“It may not be who they were, but it’s who they’ve become,” I said. “They were going broke, losing everything they ever worked for or hoped for. I guess they didn’t see another way out. So they took a chance, and things got out of control.”
She sighed. “I still don’t believe it, but I suppose it’s possible. What went wrong?”
“They backed out on the deal with Mendez. Could be they wanted more money or they found another buyer. Either way, they made the wrong people mad.”
“What does my granddaughter have to do with any of this? Why are you looking for her?”
“I think she knows where Brett is hiding. I think she’s trying to protect him. It will be better if I find her before the police do.”
“And you know where she is?”
“I’ve got a good idea. Nick Staley had a couple of rental properties.”
“In Forgotten Homes,” Lilly said. “I handled the sales. He put them in a company I think he called Forgotten Homes LLC.”
“Where is Forgotten Homes?”
“A Northeast neighborhood roughly bounded by Prospect Avenue on the east, Paseo Boulevard on the west, Fifteenth Street on the south, and Ninth Street on the north. All pretty rundown but a few worth rehabbing and renting if you can get decent tenants. I tried to talk Nick out of buying them, but the prices were right and he saw the houses as a way of paying for his retirement.”
“The houses are in foreclosure, but the bank hasn’t taken them over yet. I think Brett is hiding in one of them.”
“I’ll get you the addresses,” Lilly said, getting up from the table. “Terry, come with me.”
Terry shoved away from the table and followed her. A moment later, Lilly came back in the kitchen, Terry right behind her carrying a gun at his side. I came out of my chair, reaching for my gun, knowing I was too late.
“Relax, Jack,” Terry said. “It’s Lilly’s gun. She wants me to go with you.”
“I don’t doubt your desire to help Roni,” Lilly said, “but I can’t leave my granddaughter’s safety in the hands of a man who shakes. I’m sure you understand.”
Chapter Seventy-two
The houses were next door to one another on Eleventh Street east of Brooklyn, narrow, deep, and close, brick resting on exposed limestone foundations. They shared a driveway, one smaller, on the corner and sitting in the shadow of the other, its second-story windows shuttered with plywood. The lots across the street were vacant, the houses that once filled them long since decayed, destroyed, and bulldozed. A lone streetlight cast dim light on the pavement, the rest of the block dipped in pitch.
There were no cars parked in front of Nick Staley’s houses. The records I’d seen on Roni’s computer showed that they were vacant. The greater surprise would have been if the lights had been on and the driveway full.
I told Terry, “Circle the block. If they’re here, they probably parked and walked.”
He made two circles, the second one covering a two-block radius. We passed apartment buildings, a church, an elementary school, and houses alternating with vacant lots like jack-o’-lantern teeth. Dozens of cars were parked on the street, in driveways and parking lots.
We found a Ford Fusion in an alley behind an apar
tment building that looked like the one I’d seen Brett driving when he left Roni’s office on Monday, a Staley’s Market bag on the floor of the backseat enough confirmation for me. A Toyota Highlander was parked on the street a block away, the license tag a close match to my memory of the one on Roni’s car.
I told Terry to park on Brooklyn. He rolled to a stop fifty feet from the intersection with Eleventh beneath a heavily branched elm tree that hid us while providing a decent view of both houses. He settled back in his seat, drawing his gun from his belt and resting it against his thigh.
I pointed at the gun. “You know how to use that?”
He racked the slide, confirmed there was a round in the chamber, put the safety in the on position, and returned it to his lap, the muzzle pointed at the gas pedal.
“Learned in the Army. It’s like riding a bike.”
“Range practice is a lot different than hitting a moving target in the dark, especially when the target is someone that’s shooting back at you.”
“Don’t doubt that for a minute. Must be even harder if you’re shaking.”
“Everybody shakes when the shooting starts.”
“Some more than others, I imagine. You been in a shooting fight since you got the shakes?”
“No. I’ve been shot at, but haven’t had to shoot back.”
“You scared what’ll happen if you do?” Terry asked.
“Never been a time when I wasn’t before or since.”
“If that’s supposed to make me feel better, it don’t.”
I nodded. “Me neither.”
We had a better view of the house on the corner, the one with the boarded-up second-story windows. Ten minutes in, the front door opened. A man slipped out, trotting to the house next door and letting himself in. I couldn’t see his face, but his size and shape matched Brett Staley.
“Let’s go,” Terry said.
“Not yet. Let’s wait and see if he’s coming or going.”
A minute later, the man left the second house, carrying two large duffel bags, straining under the weight.
“What do you figure is in the bags?” Terry asked.