Dark Ice: A Hard-Boiled Crime Novel: (Dan Reno Private Detective Noir Mystery Series) (Dan Reno Novel Series Book 4)

by Dave Stanton

  “A light beer, and how about the fish tacos?”

  “Great choice.” She took our menus and pranced away, her ass swaying under her skirt.

  “Fish tacos?” Cody chuckled. “Is that a Freudian slip or what?”

  I smiled. “Who knows what lurks in my subconscious?”

  “I do—a horn dog. Maybe we should bag this and go on a trim hunt.”

  “I’ll pass. Besides, I thought you were gonna take it easy on the broads for a while.”

  “I said that, what, two days ago? I think that counts as a while.”

  “I’m sure for you it does.”

  “You’re right. And I remember the days when you were no different.”

  “That was when I was in my twenties.”

  Cody started to say something, then stopped. He stared off, flames from the fireplace dancing in his eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “Those were good times back then. And you tore off more pieces than I could count. I couldn’t keep up with you.”

  “That was right after I got divorced. I was drunk most of the time.”

  Cody sighed, a sadness taking hold on his face. I suppose he missed the days when we used to drink and chase women together. Those had been wild, irresponsible days, drunk and hungover and broke and confused and the sordid cases we worked in San Jose often soaked in blood. I knew how many men I’d killed, but I doubt Cody kept his own accounting. If he did, he never spoke of it. He’d certainly killed more than me, among them rapists, child molesters, drive-by murderers, cartel assassins, and devil worshippers. All scumbags the world was better off without, but that had not absolved us from certain legal entanglements. Over the years, I’d used up more than my fair share of favors, from both my father’s ex-law firm partners and a handful of sympathetic cops and public officials. Whether or not I’d run that well dry was something I hoped not to find out.

  “You might as well read up,” I said, handing Cody the file Albert Bigelow had provided on the Blood Bastards and the War Dogs. I kept the page listing the known members of the War Dogs and began entering their names into a site I subscribed to. I started with Jake Massie. An address for an apartment in south Stockton came up. I wrote it down and entered the next name on the list.

  The waitress brought our beers, and by the time our food arrived, I’d compiled a list of addresses for ten War Dog members.

  “Entertaining stuff,” Cody said, handing me the file. He took a long sip off his beer. “Not much of a stretch to imagine either gang buying off a corrupt cop if it allowed them to expand their business.”

  “It’s possible.” I shook an inadvisable amount of Tabasco on a taco, took a huge bite, and washed it down with half a beer.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough.”

  “I don’t think talking to Massie is going to help us get to the bottom of anything,” I said.

  “The guy’s a shitbag ex-con who tried to extort you out of thirty grand. Who said anything about talking?”

  “Three War Dogs are in jail because of me, Cody. I don’t want to rub salt in the wound, right?”

  Cody tilted his beer, drained the last of it, and wiped his mouth. “Ten-four, good buddy.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “I realize busting him up won’t help us solve the murders, okay?”

  The waitress came by, and Cody ordered another 24-ounce beer. “You see my handsome friend here?” he said to the waitress. “He may look like the all-American boy, but he’s the most bad-ass bounty hunter you’d ever want to meet.”

  The waitress turned to me, her eyes shiny. “Really?”

  “Not a word of that is true,” I said.

  “He’s modest. Cute, huh?” Cody winked, and she smiled and bent lower, affording him a view down her low cut blouse.

  I shook my head and concentrated on my food, and when she left, I told Cody to do the same. “We got work to do,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later we drove off in my truck, leaving Cody’s conspicuous red rig at the restaurant. We headed south for ten minutes and found the address for Jake Massie’s apartment just off the freeway, on the edge of Stockton’s black and Mexican ghettos. Gang graffiti was everywhere, scrawled across fences and stucco walls and covering a derelict Ford sedan resting on its rims. A group of cholos on the corner stared us down as we drove past, their pants baggy and low on their hips, red bandanas tied around their heads.

  “Not exactly where you’d expect a white supremacist to live,” I said.

  “Not unless he has a death wish.”

  I stopped in front of a row of apartments facing the street. The window for unit 190 was dark.

  I didn’t know if my conversation with Massie at Zeke’s had convinced him to abandon his notion I would pay him. Criminals are an unpredictable lot. I had no way of knowing if I’d ever see him again. But he said he knew where I lived, and that was something I couldn’t ignore. Taking an idle approach to Massie’s threat was an uncertain approach, or at worst, a weak approach. Massie was a predator. Had I invited him to escalate his game? Letting Massie walk away may have been stupid on my part. I could have followed him out of Zeke’s and taken him down, hurt him bad, let him know he’d never get a dime from me, and made sure he understood that if I saw him again I’d kill him. What then? Would that be the end of it, or the beginning of something worse? Factor in Massie’s ties to the Aryan Brotherhood, and the potential for trouble was exponential. But the AB, like any gang, exists primarily to make money. Would they come after me just to avenge a one-on-one beating?

  I sat staring at apartment #190, and for a moment, I regretted ever mentioning Massie to Cody. He would not tolerate Massie’s threat against me, and I knew this when I told him of the situation. So whatever happened next was of my own design.

  We got out of my truck and knocked on the door to Massie’s unit. I stood to the side, my lead-filled sap in my fist. Cody had his hands in his pockets and looked no more concerned than a neighbor looking to borrow a cup of sugar.

  When no one answered I peeked through the window, but it was entirely blocked by a curtain. I tried the doorknob and it was locked.

  “You want to go in?” Cody said.

  “Let’s try a neighbor.” I walked to the next door, where a light shone in a window.

  A Mexican woman as wide as she was tall answered my knock. Her face was acne scarred and she wore an apron over a print dress. Her feet were crammed into flats that looked ready to burst, and her ankles were the size of softballs.

  “Stockton PD,” I said, flashing a badge. “We’re looking for Jake Massie.” I jerked my thumb to the right.

  “You not the police,” she said.

  “Why don’t you think so?” Cody said.

  “Because the cops know that creep moved two months ago.”

  “You know where to?”

  “Maybe. What’s in it for me?”

  I produced a twenty. “You have an address?”

  She reached out a pudgy brown hand, took the bill from my fingers, and left us at the door, then returned with a scrap of paper.

  “Peters? Where the hell’s that?” I said.

  “East. Take Highway 4.”

  “How do you know where he moved?”

  “My husband drives a tow truck. The city told Massie to get his car off the street.” She pointed behind us at the junker Ford at the curb. “He called the company my husband works for. He wanted the car towed to his place in Peters.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “My husband told his boss he wouldn’t go out there.”

  “Why not?”

  Two high-pitched voices rose inside, a skirmish between children. She barked at them in Spanish, then said, “I have to go.” The door closed.

  We walked back to my truck. “Not much east of here. Farmland, mostly,” I said, and entered the address into my GPS.

  I drove back out to 5 and cut over to Route 4, and within a few minutes the city lights disappea
red behind us. It was a dark night, the moon a sliver in the black sky. The narrow two-lane rose and fell, and there was no one on the road except us. Ten miles out a low split-rail fence appeared on the left, and a mile later, I turned at the dim sign for Hewitt Road, drove north for a couple miles, past a gas station and a few closed stores on the main drag. Another couple turns and we were out in the farmland. My GPS said the destination was on the right. I pulled onto the dirt shoulder and parked under a large tree. Cody and I squinted at a house perhaps a quarter mile out. The windows were lit, and I could see where a gravel road led from the house to near where we’d stopped. There were no other lights visible from our vantage point, just blackness.

  “Typical,” Cody said.

  “What?”

  “White trash criminals love these type of small town, remote areas. Cheap land, small police presence. A perfect place to get off the grid.”

  “We’re only twenty minutes from Stockton.”

  “Might as well be a hundred miles. I bet Stockton PD is drowning in gang activity.”

  I started my truck and drove a mile up the road to the next intersection. There was one other farmhouse, but that was the only building we saw. We turned around and drove back.

  “Park here,” Cody said, pointing to a clump of oaks off the road.

  I stopped, and we got out and waded into the trees, to a spot with a clear view of the house where Jake Massie supposedly lived. I peered through a pair of binoculars at a row of Harleys and a couple cars parked in the dark driveway. Shapes moved inside the windows. I adjusted the focus and saw it was mostly men, but at least one woman.

  “You hear that?” Cody said.

  “Music?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like Guns N’ Roses.”

  “Here,” I said, passing him the binoculars. “Looks like they’re having a party.”

  Cody studied the house for a minute. “It’s seven o’clock. Wonder how long it will go on?”

  “Maybe all night.”

  “Someone will probably leave sooner than that. Go on a beer run.”

  “When they do, let’s hope they turn toward town. We’ll look mighty suspicious parked here.”

  He grunted and handed me the binoculars. In the dim light, I saw peeling paint around the windows and the warped garage door and a plastic tarp covering a section of the roof. Further back from the house I could barely make out a separate building, possibly a shed made of aluminum siding.

  An hour went by. I called Candi and told her I was three hours from home, and to not wait up.

  “I’m on surveillance. It could take a while.”

  “Are you with Cody?”

  “Yeah.”

  She paused. “Just come home in one piece, okay?”

  “Don’t worry, doll.”

  “Call me when you’re heading back. I don’t care what time it is.”

  “I promise.”

  When I hung up I balled my hands in my coat pockets. The thin daylight heat had left with the sun, and the night air was sharp with cold. Not a single car came down the road. It was dead still, no rustling wind, no crickets chirping. The only sound was the faint bass notes coming from the house. We stood in the trees, passing the binoculars back and forth.

  “They’re coming outside,” Cody said, the lenses pressed to his eyes. I saw light from the front door and heard a brief shout, then more voices and the shrill of a woman’s laugh.

  “They’re getting on their bikes.”

  A moment later, a motorcycle headlight pierced the dark, followed by the rumbling throb of its engine. Another headlight flashed, and soon the open land in front of the house was crisscrossed with beams of light. A car backed up and made a Y-turn, its headlights scanning the field just short of us. Within a minute, eight bikes and two sedans caravanned up the gravel road leading from the house. They rolled onto the street a hundred yards from where we were hidden in the lee of the trees, then they hit the throttles and roared off, black figures hunched on mechanical beasts, some steering one-handed, others low over the bars and accelerating, the sedans following behind as if relegated to the rear.

  “We could follow them,” I said as their taillights faded, “but this is too good to pass up.”

  “Great minds think alike,” Cody said on his way back to my truck. He grabbed his gear bag and I did likewise, then we set out at a jog toward the house.

  No one had bothered turning off the lights—the place was fully lit. We came to the front door and stood in the yellow light from a naked bulb. The door was locked, so we went around to the back door. Also locked.

  “Let’s try the garage,” I said. Along the side of the house was an obstacle course of strewn junk, the rusting guts of a dishwasher, car batteries, particle boards from a destroyed book case, dented propane tanks. The ground was soft, and I tried to stay on the weeds and not muddy my boots.

  We came around the front, and I pulled on the corner of the garage door. The wood was rotted with termites and the paint flaked off in my hand. Cody walked to the opposite side and heaved, and with a wretched screech the door swung partially open. I clicked on my flashlight and ducked inside, where a gray Chevy pickup was parked. Around the truck were unpacked boxes, motorcycle parts, an upended bed frame, and a garbage container overfilled and reeking of spoiled food.

  I looked into the open window of the pickup and saw dusty seats and a maze of spider webs strung between the steering wheel, dashboard, and door handles. “Is it open?” Cody said, pointing to the door to the house. I reached forward and turned the doorknob. Light spilled into the garage. Cody pulled the garage door shut and followed me inside.

  My concern over leaving footprints became moot when I saw the old linoleum flooring was a mosaic of muddy tread marks and scuffs. The walls were in worse shape, the paint battered and streaked with grime around a series of fist-sized holes in the sheet rock. We walked into a kitchen and were greeted by roaches skittering across the floor and around the beer cans and overflowing ashtrays on the counters.

  “A real five-star kind of guy,” Cody said. “You see a telephone in this shithole?”

  “Over there.” I pointed to a room where a couple torn of couches faced a television.

  Cody opened his bag. “I’ve got four bugs left,” he said.

  “I’m gonna see if I can find a computer.” I walked down the hall and opened the door to a bedroom where a mattress lay on the floor and the only furniture was a dresser with drawers half opened. Dirty clothes littered the room, and next to the mattress was a scattering of porno magazines, Butt Fuck-o Rama, Anal Intruder, and one titled, Grab Your Ankles, Bitch!

  “What we got?” Cody’s shadow fell over me from the doorway.

  “Someone just can’t get that prison sex out of their system, looks like.”

  “Nice,” Cody said. He knelt down and stuck a bug under the dresser.

  Across the hall was another bedroom, and this one was a bit less dismal. Someone had made a half-assed effort at making the bed, and the worn carpet was clear of laundry. A pair of black boots was tucked under a desk, atop which sat a notebook computer. I pressed the enter key with my knuckle, and the screen came to life. A shirtless Jake Massie on his Harley, his muscled torso covered in blue ink, a topless woman in cut-off jeans posing next to him.

  I unzipped my bag and removed a wallet-sized black box with a thin USB cord attached at one end. I plugged the connector into the port on Massie’s computer.

  “What’s that?” Cody said.

  “External hard drive, software rigged to download the entire content on the PC.”

  “And I thought you weren’t a gadget guy. How long will it take?”

  “Depends. Twenty minutes, maybe longer.” I opened the desk drawer and began leafing through a pile of papers. Bills, coupons, a white power pamphlet, a default notice for failure to make payment on a 2004 Chevy truck.

  “I’m gonna go check on that shed in the back. Stick this under the desk somewhere.” He handed me a tab not much
larger than a penny.

  “All right.”

  When I heard Cody go out the back door, I stood and scanned the contents of a closet on the other side of the room, found nothing interesting, then walked out to the main room. The carpet was stained and the fireplace was filled with broken beer bottles. A bong sat on an end table next to a small glass pipe. I lifted the couch cushions and found bottle caps, a cut soda straw, and a used condom stuck to the frame.

  In the kitchen, a window above the sink had a direct view to the two-lane highway. All was dark, the low horizon indecipherable from the fallen sky.

  I went back out to the garage and shined my flashlight over its entirety. There was nothing to suggest Jake Massie or whoever else lived here had any interest in wilderness activities. No skis, backpacks, ropes, nothing of the sort. The only thing of interest was the gray pickup. Saint Alphonso had said a man in a dark, medium-sized pickup had dumped Terry Molina’s body at Kiva beach. Problem was, this truck probably hadn’t been driven for weeks, based on the spider webs coating the interior.

  The single bathroom in the home was comparable to a construction site outhouse for cleanliness. I held my breath and checked the medicine cabinet. Nothing.

  Just as I was wondering what was taking Cody so long, the back door banged open. “We got company, Dirt,” Cody said. “Let’s move.”

  “Shit.” I quick-stepped over to the kitchen window and saw two bikes turn from the highway onto the gravel road. They hit the gas and the low rumble of their motors became audible. Swearing, I hurried to Massie’s desk, disconnected my device from his computer, then ran out the back door behind Cody.

  Staying low, we moved to a cluster of trees near the shed in the back. Once safely out of sight, we stopped and waited. But the two bikes did not continue to the house. Instead, they halted halfway along the gravel road.

  “What are they doing?” Cody said.

  I pulled my binoculars from my bag. I couldn’t see much in the glare of their headlights, but then I saw one point with his hand, and they began turning around.

  “I think they saw my rig.” They had approached on the highway from the same direction they had left, so it was possible that, through the trees under which I’d parked, they’d caught the reflection off a taillight.