by Tom Pitts
“I’m in the middle of a pinche crisis here and you’re flitting off to hide and do your cocaine, that’s what. I need you to draw on your resources and find someone for me.”
“Resources?”
“I need you to find a reporter. Seth Friedlander. Are you writing this down? He works for the Chronicle. You think you can do that one small thing without fucking up and fucking off?”
“Sounds like a job for Gutiérrez.”
Alvarez’s voice jumped an octave. “Gutiérrez is gone. He went to get the girl. Fucking Manuel is out chasing that old cop. I’m sitting here alone babysitting the useless cop.”
“What cop?”
“The ones that were at the restaurant. I got the young one here in front of me.”
“Where are you?”
“I want to hear from you in thirty minutes. Comprende?”
“Sure. Seth Wheelender.”
Now Alvarez’s voice doubled in volume, making the tiny speaker crackle.
“Seth Friedlander. Mierda, can you fucking pay attention? Stop drinking and doing blow for five fucking minutes and find this piece of shit before we all end up in prison. Half an hour.” He hung up. The call was over.
Tremblay took a few short steps back to Carl who was leaning on the door of his car.
“Looks like your friend is still alive.”
Carl expelled a long breath that felt as though it’d been trapped in his chest for the last several hours. “How do you know?”
“Alvarez’s got him.”
“Where’s Alvarez? At his restaurant? Let’s go get him.”
“Slow down there, pops. We need to think about this a minute. I seriously doubt he’s at the restaurant. Ol’ Richard is smarter than that. I know that greasy fuck, how he deals with trouble. If he gets spooked he’ll off your friend and make him disappear.”
“What do you mean disappear? He’s a cop. You can’t go around killing cops.”
“You can if you’re Ricardo Alvarez,” Tremblay said. “We just need a bit of a plan.”
“Plan? I’ll tell you a plan. I make a phone call and bring in the goddamn cavalry. I must be out of my mind chasing around this town without back-up. Now you’re telling me I’ve jeopardized my partner’s life?”
“Just hold off for a minute. Let’s think this thing through.”
“A kidnapped police officer? A string of dead bodies? There’s nothing to think about. We’re going to have the SFPD raid and ransack every conceivable place where this character could be and we’re going to find Peters.”
“I’m telling you, don’t do it. Alvarez has been up against this kind of shit before. He’s prepared and he don’t cave easily. He’s got friends everywhere. You start shaking the bushes and your friend will be gone forever. Alvarez is as close to untouchable as they come.”
Carl stood in front of him, chest out, breathing hard. He was trying to read what was behind Tremblay’s eyes. What was this guy’s real motive? Everything about him was no good. Christ, Carl thought, he works for the man who kidnapped your partner.
Carl opened the driver’s side door and asked Steven to hand him the cell. He went straight to missed calls and hit the first one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Where the fuck are you, Bradley?”
Carl started to tell him, but Panzer cut him off.
“I’ve been calling you for the last hour steady. You said you were going to meet me here at the scene. What the fuck is going on? What would possess you to fuck with me and my department?”
Carl said, “Peters is missing.”
“What?”
“Missing. Actually, not missing. He’s being held hostage.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Richard Alvarez has him.”
“Who the fuck is Richard Alvarez?”
“Richard Allen. C’mon, Panzer. You’re the one that told me about him.”
“Why would he grab your partner? You’re not making any sense.”
“He took him at his restaurant on Geary Street. While I was on my way down to the first scene.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Carl. What the hell aren’t you telling me? You better get your ass over here and straighten this shit out. If Alvarez has anything to do with the whereabouts of your friend, we’ll find out. But first, you better get your ass over here. In fact, fuck that. I’ll come to you. Where are you—exactly?”
Carl looked up and saw Tremblay getting into his car.
Panzer went on, “I’m gonna remind you of something, Carl. You are not a cop, not anymore. This is a murder investigation. You’ve been afforded every courtesy by this department, but enough is enough. At this point you’re obstructing, probably tampering, and who the fuck knows what else. If you don’t haul it in here quick, I can’t promise you won’t be arrested.”
“Arrested?” Carl was watching Tremblay sit behind the wheel of the Ford Focus. “If that’s the case, then how do I know I won’t be arrested when I come in?”
Panzer made a sound that was half sigh, half growl. “Honestly, I can’t promise you that either.”
Tremblay started his car and pulled around Carl and Steven. Carl held up his palm, signaling for Tremblay to hold on. But Tremblay wasn’t looking at Carl; he was taking a last glance at Steven.
Steven looked back at Tremblay as he drove by. Although it was through two car windows, it was the closest Steven had been to Maurice Tremblay. Tremblay’s face was forced into a pathetic excuse for a grin, but Steven wasn’t looking at his expression, he was looking at his eyes. Dark and buried behind purple bags and a heavy brow, the eyes frightened Steven. It was only for a quick passing second, but those eyes told Steven everything he needed to know about the man. He was evil.
Carl told Panzer, “I’ll call you right back.”
***
Tremblay now had the name. He recognized it, but didn’t know Seth Friedlander. Maybe he’d seen in it the paper’s bylines over the years, maybe he knew it from somewhere else. A reporter. Quinn was finally playing his ace card. He called Pino on his cell and told him to meet him again at the All Star Donuts on 5th Street.
“Good,” Pino said. “I got some shit to tell you, too.”
No way was Tremblay going to sit around while Carl Bradley talked with his detective friend from the SFPD. That would be like sticking the cuffs on himself. It was a mistake to talk to the police; he knew this from personal experience. This thing was unraveling faster than he expected. He rolled down the windows and let some of the cool afternoon air in the car. Night was on its way and the wind was picking up. He decided he had enough time to pull over for a quick blast before meeting Pino.
This time a parking spot would suffice. He found one on Folsom near 10th Street and pulled over. He rolled up the windows and dug out his bag of coke. He took the keys out of the ignition and stuck one straight into the bag, digging down near the bottom where the powder would be finest. Two keys into each nostril and then a hit from the Maker’s Mark. Instantly he felt better. But not quite enough. He took a credit card from his wallet and crushed a rock of solid cocaine on the back of a CD case. He used the card to chop it up into two fat lines. He carefully sat the CD case on the seat beside him while he searched his jacket for a piece of paper to roll into a tube so he could snort the lines. He found one, a numbered receipt from a recent fast food order. He rolled it up, took another long pull from the whiskey, and then picked up the CD case and sucked in the lines.
***
Seth Friedlander lived under the freeway in an underdeveloped, underused part of Oakland. His neighbors were mostly warehouses and industrial shops. That and vacant businesses. The freeway above him had collapsed in the 1989 earthquake and most of the residents never came back. The structure over his place was sound and secure, but after the quake, the idea of living under a freeway had lost its appeal. What appeal it ever had.
Seth had always considered himself an outlaw journalist. His heroes were the Hunter S.
Thompsons and the Tom Wolfes of the world. He considered himself kin to the innovators of the New Journalism, a natural heir, especially to Thompson, who’d also written for a San Francisco paper during the eighties. But, really, the only thing he shared with Thompson was an insatiable appetite for drugs. First it was weed and acid as he tried to glean some sort of glow from the embers of the sixties, then came cocaine and heroin. Somewhere along the line he’d learned to smoke his cocaine and that’s when his life really began to unravel. He lost a wife, a house, his car, and most of his possessions, but somehow managed to hang on to the one thing that gave him his identity—his job.
He decided to reel in his life, getting off the rock. It wasn’t that hard, he used a unique detox method: he began smoking crystal meth. As the twenty-first century rolled in he was also able to make the switch from cheap Mexican heroin to prescribed opiates. Vicodin, then Percocet, then, for a while, Oxycontin. Nowadays he got by on the hydrocodone from a narco script his doctor reluctantly kept filling. He wasn’t above smoking a little black tar heroin when things got rough, but from where he stood, he was miles away from the pathetic man he’d been. He had his life together, manageable at least, and he was poised for a comeback. And Quinn McFetridge was going to make it happen.
When he hit bottom in the late nineties he’d spent a short period of time in state prison. He was sentenced to eighteen months, but he hoped to be out in less than half the time. The newspaper gave him a leave of absence, treating it as though he were in an extended-stay rehab. It wasn’t tough for them to do; the Chronicle was shrinking and they were happy to lighten the payroll. Although the experience wasn’t dramatic enough to force him to change his ways, there was one great caveat: He met Quinn.
They weren’t cellies, but they managed to spend some time together at meals, the yard, and eventually at a job they both held making mattresses in the PIA. It was only for a few months and Quinn lost his job before Friedlander was released, but the bond they formed was forever. Gossiping by the industrial sewing machines, Seth found Quinn to be as funny and charismatic as anyone he’d met. He was fascinated by Quinn’s stories of the criminal underworld.
As soon as Quinn learned Friedlander was a disgraced journalist, he began cultivating his new friend. First he encouraged him to stick to his guns and become the man he always wanted to be, the man other newspaper men hate with a jealous passion. Success is the best revenge, he told him. All it takes is one great story.
“Look at that guy who broke the CIA crack connection for the San Jose Mercury. What was his name?”
“Gary Webb,” Seth said.
“Yeah, that dude has it made. One good story. The kind of stuff that people crave. They love to hate their government. They love finding out they’ve been had. I don’t understand it, but I don’t need to. It’s a fact. Look at Watergate or any other story that they stick ‘gate’ on the end of.”
“What the hell can I do from behind here? I’m all fucked up, man. I probably won’t even have a job when I get out.”
“You get out and hang on to the job. Any decent reporter job. Then, I can help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Help you with that one great story.”
To Seth, it sounded like a con. He chuckled. “What do you wanna do? Make probation and become a cub reporter? Is that something you’ve always dreamed of doing?”
“No,” Quinn had told him. “I already have the story. All you need to do is tell it.”
After Seth was released, Quinn began to call him collect once or twice a month. He only told Seth parts of his story, bits of the puzzle, but it was enough that Seth became convinced it was the one thing that would punch his ticket to immortality. He began to see himself not as a Hunter S. Thompson knock-off, but the next Bob Woodward. When this piece broke, he’d be a household name in the Bay Area and beyond. He’d be able to work for any news organization in the country. He only had to keep getting Quinn to filter out the tale.
Their phone conversations morphed from teaser interviews into Quinn instructing Seth to run errands. Seth knew he was helping Quinn build a case for his release, but he didn’t examine it further than that. He set aside his journalistic curiosity at Quinn’s request and kept his eyes on the prize, the big story. Soon he was meeting with a young lawyer Quinn had working on his case. Seth ran evidence and envelopes all over the city with the cloak-and-dagger secrecy of a spy.
Now the fruits of his work, and his patience, were about to pay off.
He knew Quinn was out and had been for almost two weeks. After a couple of cryptic phone calls, he decided to hole-up and wait. No sense in worrying; all he could do was prepare. He sketched out the parts of the story he already knew, did some qualifying research on the people whose lives he was about to disrupt, and stayed good and high.
The knock sounded as upbeat and joyful as Quinn himself. Shave and a haircut, two bits. Seth leapt off the couch and swung open the front door. There was Quinn, looking more tired than he ever did in prison, and a pale young girl at his side. The girl looked half-dead. Quinn was smiling. The girl wasn’t.
“Come in, come in, come in,” Seth said. He swung his arm toward the interior of the house and ushered them inside. As soon as the girl stepped over the threshold, he saw that Quinn had a large and shiny automatic pistol pointed at the small of her back.
Quinn watched Seth’s facial expression change when he saw the gun. He reassured him with a wink. “Just a precaution. Everything is fine, just fine.”
When Quinn and Teresa were seated on the couch, side by side, Seth asked if anyone wanted a drink. “Soda? Beer? Water?”
“I’m okay. How about you, sweetheart?”
“I’m not feeling too well,” Teresa said. She looked at their host. He was small, skinny. He wore greasy sweatpants and a dirty sweatshirt. His eyeglasses were taped together in the corner and looked opaque with fingerprints.
“Well, our friend here is no stranger to drugs or needles, so there’s no need to go hiding in the bathroom. You can set up shop right here. Isn’t that right, Seth?”
“Sure, sure. Whatever you need.”
“Thanks,” Teresa said, bitter and sarcastic. “I think I’ll hold off for now.”
Quinn said, “Suit yourself. Time is a murderous bitch, as they say. Maybe we should get started. Seth, tell us what you need. Blood, urine, what?”
“Pretty simple really. It’s just a cotton swab in the inside of your cheek.”
Teresa made a face. “Cotton swab? What the fuck for?”
“DNA,” Seth said.
Quinn leaned in toward their host. “Here’s the beauty of the thing, Seth. Teresa here doesn’t know the whole story. She’ll be learning it as this thing unfolds. That could be an angle for your article, right? Talk about your human interest.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” agreed Seth. His eyes were already lit up with ideas for the piece that’d not yet been written. “Totally. It’ll flesh it out, give people a hero and a victim.”
“What the fuck is he talking about?” Teresa asked.
“You’re sure your boy can get these results back quick? I’m always reading in the newspaper this shit takes weeks, even on the big-time cases.”
“Aah, newspapers. You can’t believe everything you read.”
At this, Quinn and Seth broke out laughing.
***
It was Tremblay’s intention to go into the donut shop and grab a quick bite, but the coke and whiskey had quelled his appetite, so when he pulled into the parking lot and saw Pino sitting at a table near a window, he just bleated his horn.
Pino frowned at him and got up and hurried outside to the car.
“C’mon,” he said, signaling Tremblay to follow him.
Tremblay rolled down his window. “Get in.”
Pino shook his head. “Fuck no. That car is hot, let’s use mine. And hurry up before someone sees us.”
Tremblay’s first impression was Pino must be dipping into the evidence roo
m for his own personal use. He powered up the window, grabbed the bottle of Maker’s, and got out of his car. By the time he reached Pino’s car, an unmarked Ford Taurus, Pino was already in the front seat looking over his shoulder. Tremblay got in on the passenger side and unscrewed the Maker’s for another pull.
“Let’s take a drive,” Pino said.
With the burn of whiskey still in his throat, Tremblay rasped, “Sure. Where we going?”
“Anywhere but here.”
Tremblay didn’t waste any time. “I need a favor. There’s a guy—a reporter—I need you to run. I’ve got to find this asshole double-time. His name is Seth Friedlander. Ever hear of him?”
“Shit, Tremblay, what’re you in, a cloud? You’re a wanted man. Don’t you know this? Panzer over in homicide has the whole fucking force looking for you.”
There was that name again, thought Tremblay. “Me? What for?”
“He’s got an all-points out for you. Your car is on the hot sheet. You’re a wanted man in a big way.”
“You better not be driving me in, Pino. You and I have a history.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not bringing you in, but I definitely don’t want to be seen with you. If I were you, I wouldn’t get back in your car, either. It’s a magnet right now. Slouch down in the seat a little and put that fucking bottle away.”
Tremblay took another hit and screwed the cap back on the bottle.
“What the fuck is going on?” Pino continued. “There’s a string of murders in town and suddenly you’re on the most wanted. You and these two wannabe cops from Calistoga. The two that reached out to me? What’re you guys now, friends or enemies?”
“You sure about that? The two cops? Are they still wanted? Can you check?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I don’t need to check. Persons of interest. This shit is coming over the radio every five minutes. You want to explain why I’m risking my ass talking to you?”