by Dave Stanton
We both still wore shoulder holsters. Cody pulled his .357, the big bore oiled and shining in the moonlight.
“Go,” he said, then we sprinted out of the brush, leapt a narrow culvert, and ran full out down a faint trail bordered by tall grass. The highway was a quarter mile away by my estimate, a distance I ran in just over a minute in college.
It didn’t take us much longer than that to reach the trees along the road. The two motorcycles had pulled up thirty seconds previous, their lights facing down the highway in long streaks. Through the branches I saw the silhouette of one man, still one second, holding a blade the next, then he was gone behind my truck.
I pulled my Beretta as I crunched through leaves and twigs, then fired into the sky. A second later Cody fired, the blast from his pistol shaking the ground.
One of the bikers had not dismounted, and bent low over the bars, he grabbed his throttle and roared off. The second man, who I suspected was about to slit my tires, rose into view and ran for his bike. Just as I reached my rear bumper, his motor choked to life and gravel spit from his rear tire. He hit the paved road, and I fixed him in the sights of my automatic and felt my finger tighten on the trigger.
“Whoa there,” Cody said behind me, panting. He reached out and pushed my straightened arm downward.
8
We headed away from that small town toward Stockton and ran into no bikers on the way. Wherever they were, we saw no sign of them. Good for us, I suppose. Confronting Jake Massie alone was one thing. If he was surrounded by his gang, a different story. Maybe bad for us, maybe bad for him and his gang. Probably bad news for everyone.
“You weren’t going to blow that guy off his bike, were you, Dirt?”
“I considered shooting his tire.”
“Best you didn’t. Better to wait and see what we learn from the bugs and that computer.”
I took the entrance to 5 heading north. “Do I hear the voice of restraint?”
Cody lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. “It’s a matter of choosing which tactic makes the most sense. I don’t get in anyone’s face unless there’s something to be gained.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, really. That’s the difference between us. You’re just as violent as me, maybe more. But you need to get mad first. And then you’re out of control.”
I glanced over and Cody was staring out the windshield. “And you have perfect control of your temper?”
“Nope, never claimed that.”
“What are you saying, then?”
“Massie threatened you. It’s only natural to be pissed.”
“I wasn’t going to shoot the biker.”
“You had that look on your face.”
I shook my head. “Next subject,” I said. “What did you see at that shed?”
“It was locked up like Fort Knox. No windows. Smelled like ammonia and rotten eggs. So thick I could taste it. Made my eyes burn.”
“A meth lab.”
“No doubt.”
“You get a transmitter down?”
“Yeah, in one of the shrubs near the house. I’ll e-mail you the audio files tomorrow when they come through.”
Cody rolled the window down farther and flicked his cigarette into the slipstream. His hand was covered with dried mud, dirt caked under the fingernails.
“What did you do, bury it?”
“Huh? Bury what?”
“The transmitter.”
“Oh. No, I just hit some mud when I planted it.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes, the freeway a swirling river of red and white light. “You want to stop for a drink?” Cody said.
“No. I’ve got a long drive in front of me.”
“So do I. Why don’t we get a hotel, drink some beers, blow off some steam? You look like you could use it.”
“Not tonight.”
“Why not? You worried if you get drunk you’ll want to go back to Massie’s house and wait for him?”
I shot a sharp glance at Cody, and he looked back and chuckled. “I know you better than you think, Dirt.”
I shrugged and widened my eyes, trying to relieve the tension across my forehead. He reached out and patted my shoulder. “Go home and be with your woman tonight. Get a good night’s rest. And if you see Jake Massie in Tahoe again, call me.”
I pulled into the restaurant where Cody’s truck was parked. He collected his gear and got out.
“You promise me that. If you see him, call me.” Cody stood outside my window, peering in, his head like a buffalo’s. His amused expression was gone, his eyes hard as rivets under the V of his brow.
“Okay, partner,” I said.
• • •
By the time I reached Sacramento, my eyes kept closing and I turned the radio up loud and drove with the cold wind blowing in my face. Finally I pulled off the freeway to a gas station and bought a large coffee. I sat in the parking lot sipping from the steaming cup. The painkiller the doctor injected hours ago had worn off, and the wound on my arm was a stinging ache.
I closed my eyes and felt myself drifting off. I didn’t fight it, and sleep came quickly. Almost immediately, I dreamt. Twenty minutes passed before I woke, the dream still vivid in my mind. I was in a bar, my ex-wife on the edge of my vision silently chiding me, and at a table sat a doctor, my father, and Cody. I felt their conversation was of little consequence, then my father was next to me. He didn’t look distorted as he sometimes did in my dreams. His face was just as I remembered it, his nose broad and straight, the mustache below black and just beginning to gray. When he spoke, his dark eyes became almost square where the skin creased at the sides.
“Never let them get behind you, son,” he said. I waited for more, but he was gone.
Fully awake, I spent some time staring out my windshield at nothing. Then I gulped my coffee and hit the gas into the black night. I drove hard, and my mind was clear. I did not invest myself in conjecture over what the bugs Cody planted on Mike Zayas and at Jake Massie’s house might reveal. Not did I worry about the threat Massie and the Aryan Brotherhood posed. As if a child, I felt safe and secure by my father’s presence. For reasons I wouldn’t consider, I no longer felt grief over the fact he’d been ambushed and murdered. Instead, a quiet calm replaced the sense of loss. And behind that, something else, something deep and relentless and ugly and accessible not at my request but accessible nonetheless, and waiting, always waiting.
• • •
When I woke the next morning, the bed was still warm where Candi had been sleeping. I sat up and saw it was past eight o’clock. From the kitchen I heard noises, then Candi walked into the bedroom. She was wearing tan slacks, low heels, and a purple turtleneck sweater. Probably pretty standard apparel for a teacher, but on her it looked sensational.
“Waking up, sleepyhead?”
“Yeah.” I yawned and swung my legs out from the blankets.
“I made coffee.”
“Thanks, babe.”
“You’re really putting in some hours.”
“I know. I could use a break.”
“My god, what happened to your arm?”
I touched my forearm where the bandage covered the stitches. “Nothing. Just a little cut.”
“Are we still going skiing tomorrow?”
I stood, pulled on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, and remembered it was already Thursday.
“Absolutely. Then I’m taking you to dinner.”
I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, and when I came out to the kitchen, she had gathered her purse and coat and was on her way to the garage. She stopped and set down her things down and wrapped her arms around me, her head on my shoulder. Then she looked up, her eyes on mine, and said, “I know you said not to worry about you. But I do.”
“We’ll have fun this weekend, I promise.”
I walked with her to her car and watched her back out and drive away. When she was gone, I took a cup of coffee and walked the perimeter of my property. I hike
d through the snow along the fence bordering my neighbor’s house and followed it past the meadow and to the opposite side of my home where I’d stacked cut firewood under an awning I’d built. I continued through my side yard out to the driveway and picked up the plastic-bagged newspaper lying there. A few flakes fell from the sky. The air was gray and heavy. Two houses down a truck backed from a garage and drove past where I stood. Once the sound of the motor faded the neighborhood was quiet. After a minute I went inside.
Two cups of coffee later, I was lifting weights in my garage, alternating sets of bench press and curls with a ninety pound bar. When I went back inside, my cell was ringing.
“Check your e-mail,” Cody said. “I sent the audio files. I’m on my way to the courthouse. Didn’t have a chance to listen to them.”
“Okay.”
“Any sign of Massie?”
“No, but I wouldn’t expect there to be. He’s probably at home sleeping off a hangover.”
“Keep your eyes open. Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I’m not.”
We hung up and I went to my desk and saw the e-mail Cody had sent. There were two attachments, one titled Zayas and the other Massie’s dump.
For the next two hours I listened to the sounds picked up by the bug Cody had stuck to the back of Mike Zayas’s belt. The program allowed the option of skipping past periods without decipherable voices, but I decided to just let the tape play. I listened to Zayas display his proficiency at both Spanish and English profanity as he ripped into his hired help for letting a couple of gringo amateurs kick their asses. He fired one of the men, who I suspected was the big fellow Cody had put in a bear hug and squeezed nearly unconscious. A few minutes of silence went by, then there were some clinking noises followed by loud gaseous eruptions punctuated by splashes and grunts and sighs. This went on for what seemed like a long time, until I was laughing and drying my eyes and thinking how I might use the section for a prank phone call on Cody.
Finally the toilet flushed, and thumping music replaced the bathroom comedy. Then a door closed, and the music became faint. Next, the distinct beep of a cell phone.
“Have you sold your inventory yet?” Zayas said.
The reply came back scratchy and barely audible. Zayas had the phone on speaker mode. I paused the program and adjusted the volume and tone controls, experimenting until I could just make out the other voice on the call.
“The market’s flooded with cheap drugs. The spades downtown are stocked up and not buying.”
“What about Del Paso Heights?”
“Same story there, and in south Sac.”
“And you think it’s coming from Stockton?”
“Pretty goddamn sure. Two different sources report seeing them in town. My brother made it clear last time we talked he’d fuck me any way he could.”
“A big shipment arrives tomorrow, and one more next week,” Zayas said. “We need to keep the cash flowing. That’s what I committed to the cartel. You understand what that means, don’t you?”
“We need to fix the problem.”
“That’s right, my friend. And fix it permanently.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“No, Virgil, you do what you have to do.”
“I hear you. As a plan B, we also know some people in the Tahoe-Reno area.
“Good, but don’t let that distract you from fixing the problem here.”
“It will be taken care of.”
“It better be,” Zayas said, and the conversation ended.
A few minutes of dead time passed before a knocking sound broke the silence.
“Come in.”
“Senor Zayas,” a male voice said.
“Si?”
The voice continued in Spanish. “I want to let you know about the biker, Roscoe.”
“What about him?”
“He was talking with the men who were here. Before the trouble, Roscoe went with one into the VIP room. After, he spoke with them outside, before they left.”
“You saw this yourself?”
“I did.”
“What did he say to them?”
“I don’t know, boss. But I think it’s about Valerie who used to work here. That’s all he talks about.”
Zayas grunted. “Is there anything else?”
“That’s all.”
“Go then.”
The door closed, and the cell phone beeps sounded again.
“One more thing, Virgil,” Zayas said. “Your boy, Roscoe.”
“What about him?”
“He got all sweet on one of the dancers here. Then she went missing. Turns out she was murdered up in Lake Tahoe.”
“So?”
“A couple private investigators came here asking questions. Roscoe’s been talking to them.”
“So what?”
“So since she’s got killed, Roscoe’s been worthless, and he’s got diarrhea of the mouth.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“No, you retire him. I can’t afford to have anyone with a big mouth involved in my business.”
“You won’t see him again.”
“Good.”
Zayas sighed and papers shuffled for a few minutes before I heard a clunking sound and a different style of beeps.
“Send Celestina in here,” Zayas said.
Thirty seconds later a quiet knock and Zayas said, “Come in.” A pause, then, “Such a pretty little thing. Come here, around my desk.”
“What would you like me to do?”
The sound of a zipper. “I want you to wrap your pretty red lips around my cock and suck it. And then I’ll take you to the couch and spread your legs wide and I’ll fuck your tight pussy. Are you ready to get fucked?”
“I…if that is what you wish.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic, Celestina.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Zayas. I’m on my period.”
“I don’t care. Get on your knees.”
I didn’t have it in me to listen and began fast forwarding. The program stopped at small bits of voice. At one point Zayas instructed her to lick his balls, and at another told her, “Don’t just lie there, wrap your legs around me.” After twenty minutes the recording ended abruptly. Maybe the bug fell off Zayas’s belt and was damaged, or perhaps the battery died or the time maxed out.
I rose and checked my watch. It was noon. The air in my office felt fouled, and I was struck with a sudden urge to be outdoors. I went out to my deck and stood on the redwood planks and looked out over the meadow. The day was crisp with cold, and the sky had cleared above the 5000-foot tall, snow-covered ridge circling the valley. After a few minutes, I locked my house and drove out to 50 toward Zeke’s.
The lunch crowd looked good for a Thursday. Waitresses hurried in and out of the kitchen, juggling plates of barbequed chicken and brisket sandwiches smothered in hickory sauce. The dining room was noisy, and folks were eating at the bar and the small cocktail tables. The big TV in the corner was tuned to a basketball game, the drone of the commentators lost in the hubbub.
I said hello to Liz and Ron, a young bartender I skied with occasionally. He brought me a nonalcoholic beer, then I walked back to the kitchen and waved at Zak Pappas, who was still carefully sober and drug free and working hard running the place.
“I’m gonna look over the bar receipts,” I said.
“Go for it.” He moved sizzling meat around the grill with a pair of tongs, his motions fluid and precise. The fire-pit smoked and crackled, the fan above sucking the smoke into an aluminum cowl.
I retrieved the ledgers from Zak’s upstairs office, the furniture and cluttered shelves unchanged from when his father Zeke owned the establishment. Down the creaky stairs and back at the bar, I took a seat in the shadowy nook under the TV and spent fifteen minutes checking the numbers.
Satisfied the tills weren’t being tapped to any large degree, I rubbed my eyes and watched the lunch crowd. A group of several out-of-towners w
ere sitting at tables on what used to be the stage. The men were clean-shaven and boisterous, the women pretty and wearing designer coats and scarves. Liz and another waitress brought out their lunch order, racks of ribs and burgers for the fellows, salads for the ladies.
After a minute, I went and asked Zak to throw a chicken breast on the fire for me. Then I sat on a chair in the back of the kitchen and thought about what I’d learned from the recording. I had hoped taking a break from it might allow my subconscious to hit on some angle relevant to Valerie Horvachek’s murder. Something between the lines, a hidden clue. Because at face value, the tape revealed very little I didn’t already know or suspect.
That Zayas was involved in cartel drug trafficking was neither surprising nor particularly illuminating. I was also not surprised he used his female employees, at least the ones from south of the border, as his personal sex slaves. More meaningful might be the escalating conflict between the Blood Bastards and the War Dogs. Roscoe, whose standing in his gang would now be marginalized, or worse, had tried to convince me the War Dogs may have killed Valerie for the drugs Roscoe fronted her, or simply because they knew Roscoe liked her. Neither premise held water. Valerie had not been robbed, and no gangbanger would kill a rival’s girlfriend just because the gangs were feuding. If the War Dogs killed Valerie, there would have to be something else involved. Maybe a personal vendetta or some other motivation.
There were a few more scraps, things that might provide direction. Zayas spoke to a man named Virgil, who I assumed was Virgil Massie, Jake’s estranged older brother. Virgil claimed he knew people in the Tahoe-Reno area, which could suggest a connection with Nick Galanis. Pretty thin, but something to keep in mind.
“Dan, what else you want?” Zak placed a piece of chicken in a Styrofoam container.
“Baked beans, coleslaw, and throw in some steamed broccoli.”
“You got it, buddy.”
I thanked him and walked outside with my go box and drove home, where I ate and then cued up the second recording, the one from Jake Massie’s house. The first voice was time stamped at 8:30 P.M.