High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  “Fuck mmmfff…”

  Cartwright pulled the secondary safety pin and slipped it in Bogdan’s mouth as he started to curse.

  Next Cartwright rattled off a long sentence in Russian—the only word I could make out was “Apache”—and Bogdan’s shoulders stiffened. He frantically struggled against the shackles, getting nowhere.

  “Yeah,” Cartwright said in English, “You cocksuckers didn’t know the red savage could speak Russian.” He looked at me. “I told him he’s about to get some high-tech Apache justice. When I let go of the safety, we’ll have enough time to leave and then Bogdan’s manhood is going to be turned into pudding.”

  This was not the Reid interrogation technique. A very long half-minute passed in silence. Bogdan’s face shone with a layer of sweat.

  “Go to hell.”

  He spat out the little metal triangle.

  I looked at Cartwright and mouthed, What are you doing? He ignored me and pulled the primary pin.

  It hit the floor, making a sound reminiscent of a tuning fork. Cartwright used one hand to hold the Russian back against the seat, while the other, slipping out of the blue sling, inserted the grenade between his legs.

  “That’s it, Bogdan. It’s live. Look on the bright side. You’ll never have to worry about prostate cancer.”

  To me: “Take down that poster. I wouldn’t want to lose it when this thing burns down and the gas tank blows up. Do it!”

  I pulled the poster down and rolled it up. Loudly.

  Cartwright said, “Time’s up,” and started to flex back his arm, letting go of the grenade.

  “Stop, stop!” This from Bogdan.

  “Why?” Cartwright said.

  “I’ll tell you. Get that thing away from me. I want to have children! Get it away.”

  He slowly pulled out the grenade.

  I picked up the primary pin and handed it to Cartwright, who inserted it. He smiled and tossed the thing at me.

  I caught it.

  The grenade was wet with Bogdan’s urine.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “They’ll kill me if they know I talked.”

  It was ten minutes later, after Cartwright had redone the Russian’s handcuffs so his hands were in front, in his lap. A little reward for cooperation. He was stretching his arms and rolled his shoulders. But he remained shacked to the floor, blindfolded, and buckled in.

  “You’d better worry about your nuts staying attached to your body,” Cartwright said. “Nobody’s going to know about our conversation. I killed your associates.”

  “You say. There are more. And they always know.”

  “They don’t have your ass right now. I do, you commie.”

  “Why do you keep calling me ‘commie’? We’re capitalists. If we were a bank on Wall Street…”

  “Stop,” Cartwright commanded. “Right now your job is to prove to me you’re more than a shestyorka.”

  “Hey, fuck you, red man!” His arms became animated and I worried he might undo the seatbelt and make a move. Instead, he thumped his chest with both manacled fists. “You think an errand boy has these? These are earned.”

  “How did you know about the rough?” Cartwright opened a notebook balanced on the top of his right thigh and sucked on a pen like it was one of Peralta’s cigars.

  The Russian shrugged. “There’s a man who signs off on the shipments for the Jews in New York City. He has a gambling problem. He’s working off his debt to our organization.”

  “He works for Markovitz?”

  The Russian nodded.

  “So he received the rough and placed it in the suitcase.”

  A slight nod.

  “Where did he get it? Those diamonds came from somewhere.”

  “I don’t know and I swear to God. I’m Orthodox, so that means something.”

  Cartwright gave me a tight smile. “Bogdan, here, is a religious man, you hear that?”

  “You’re gonna need religion, Indian,” he said. “My people believe you used the Mexican to steal the diamonds. They’re coming for you.”

  “Ooooo, I’m scared.” Cartwright wrote some more, about what, I couldn’t tell. Then, “Why do it that way, sending the shipment all the way here? Why not steal the diamonds in New York?”

  “Too much heat,” Bogdan said. “If we stole them there, it would be too obvious. The security is too much around the Jews, the Diamond District. I know. I used to live in Brighton Beach. And you want us to rob the jeweler while he’s at JFK?” He laughed. “It would never work. The cops, the FBI…too much heat. Better to get it down here.”

  Even in the shabby confines of the RV, with this dangerous character no more than six feet away, I couldn’t escape Lindsey. I remembered a trip we had taken to New York, going to Brighton Beach and eating at a Russian restaurant. I noticed the many made men like Bogdan. Lindsey, who had learned the language in the Air Force, had ordered for us in Russian.

  Cartwright’s voice snapped me back.

  “What next?”

  The Russian grunted.

  “What the hell next?” Cartwright pushed a finger into the man’s sternum. “What if I had gotten the rough and given it to you? What were you going to do with it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  He reached his cuffed hands up, rubbing the dozens of little wounds on his face where Ed had ripped off the duct tape. “They never told me.”

  “Oh, bullshit.” Cartwright’s natural squint narrowed further.

  “Real shit, man. I don’t know.” His voice rose, and then dropped to a near whisper. “They don’t tell me everything. That’s the way it works. They compartmentalize information.” He leaned forward, wrinkling up all the stories told on his chest.

  Cartwright pushed him back, made a few more notes, and let the silence accumulate like heavy weights.

  “You Americans know nothing about the world,” Bogdan finally said. “Five million people have been killed in Congo since 1996 and all you care about is going to the mall. Five million!”

  He worked his jaw. The tongue was still in pain. But he continued. “You go to war over three thousand dead from Arab jihadis that you armed in the first place, back in Afghanistan in the eighties, but you know nothing about the genocides that bring your diamonds. The diamonds on your wives’ fingers probably came out of those wars and you’d never know it. Your wives have blood on their hands. Diamonds aren’t even that rare, you know? We invented a machine that makes synthetic diamonds, as good as what comes out of a kimberlite pipe. But people give them such value. I don’t get it.”

  “The man’s a philosopher,” Cartwright interrupted. “So let’s say these stones came out of Congo.”

  Bogdan paused and let out a long breath. “Sure.” He smiled. Movie-star teeth as white and even as keys on a new piano. “Let’s say.”

  “That’s still not a who,” Cartwright said. “Who gave the rough to the guy who packed it in New York? Where did he get it?”

  The smile went away. “I. Don’t. Know.”

  “You know the Mexican who shot me.” Cartwright said, his voice rising. “You hired him. Where did you find him? Why did you set me up?”

  “If he’s not your partner, then he stole from us!” Bogdan said. “Nobody betrayed you.”

  Cartwright sniffed. “Do you believe him?”

  “Nope,” I said, speaking for the first time.

  “I don’t either. I’m gonna take him out into the desert and blow his nuts off and leave him for the coyotes.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “Goddamn you!” Bogdan said. “I’m telling you the truth. Why would we hire you and then have somebody shoot you…?”

  “Because you’re Russian mafia scum, “ Cartwright interrupted, although he continued writing in the notebook. “Your Mexica
n probably agreed to do the deal for a quarter of what you were going to pay me. Probably an illegal alien. For all I know, this helped conceal the robbery so that whoever was expecting that rough thinks I took it. You threw suspicion off yourselves.”

  “No…no…” Bogdan gesticulated wildly. “Don’t you read the papers? This man was the sheriff here. I am telling you, my people think you set this up and you have the rough.”

  “All the more reason to leave you for the varmints.”

  Bogdan dropped his hands heavily into his lap. “Then do it. Be a fool.”

  This was when the fury that had been building in me for days broke down the door of my discipline. I sprang on the Russian and gripped him by the throat. He tried to bring his arms up but I was too close, leaning on him with my knee in his crotch. He flailed and made guttural sounds. I stared at the blindfolded face, blind myself.

  “The woman.” My voice was a snarl. “Red-blond hair, Southern accent, professional killer. Give me her name and where I can find her…”

  This was not the lateral vascular neck restraint, as the police euphemism goes for a chokehold that can disable an adversary and sometimes accidentally kill him. My hands were out for pure murder, crush the windpipe, devil take the hindmost.

  I let up the pressure enough that he could breathe and talk. He inhaled with the desperation of a man who had been chained to the sea floor and suddenly reached the surface. But then he tried to ram his arms upward to break my grip, a good martial arts move. It was what he should have done in the first place. Except that I was ready for it and moved back. His fists and arms connected with air.

  Cartwright tried to pull me back but I pushed him away. I slammed the fleshy part of my hand into Bogdan’s nose. He screamed in pain and his muscles went slack. I used the interlude to handcuff him tighter, jamming the metal into the flesh of his wrists. Then I leaned back in.

  I could smell the cigarettes and stale food on his breath but I wasn’t really seeing him. All the literature showed that torture was ineffective in interrogations, in addition to being immoral. I wasn’t seeing that, either. My mind’s eye was where Cypress Street met First Avenue, Saturday night, Lindsey bleeding out, my blazer as a hopeless trauma dressing. Hearing her voice, Don’t leave me…it hurts…hurts…

  I put the vise of my hands snug around his neck and again began to apply pressure with my fingers. My fingers are very strong.

  “Tell me about the woman.”

  “What woman?” He croaked a whisper.

  “Give me a name or I’ll crush your windpipe. I don’t care…”

  But by this time my rage had subsided and I let Cartwright pull me back. He brought my face close. “Stop this,” he whispered.

  I slumped into the opposite bench, watching the bright red blood stream out of Bogdan’s nose.

  “My associate is excitable,” Cartwright said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “You’re all savages!” Bogdan sounded as if he had suddenly contracted a head cold. “When Russia conquered Siberia, the Cossacks exterminated the natives!”

  I didn’t have the energy for a history lesson.

  Cartwright pulled a cold pack out of a first-aid kit, struck it with his hand to mix the chemicals, and held it against Bogdan’s face.

  “We’re looking for a woman,” he said. “Thirty years old. Good looking. She’s a professional killer. Does she work for you?”

  “No.”

  “Did any of your people recently commit suicide?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’d better take good care,” Cartwright said good-naturedly. “She seems to think those diamonds belong to her. She likes to kill people by making it look like a suicide.”

  “Suicide is a sin,” he said.

  “So Matt Pennington is in hell?” I said.

  “Pennington?” Bogdan almost pulled off the blindfold but didn’t. Maybe it was a survival mechanism. He knew who Cartwright was, but not me. The fewer faces he saw, the better his chances he might get to live.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Bogdan said.

  “Do you use him?” Cartwright asked.

  The Russian shook his head. “He works with the Zetas. Our partners are Sinaloa. I’m telling you what I heard. He’s a good fence. Patient. Discreet.”

  I said, “Now he’s got a lot of time to be patient because somebody hung him from a doorknob with a necktie. My bet is the woman did it.”

  Bogdan spoke some words in Russian. The expletives weren’t difficult to translate.

  Cartwright loosened the handcuffs and put the cold pack in Bogdan’s hands so he could hold it in place across his nose. His wrists were bruised from where I had notched up the cuffs.

  Ed eased himself onto the bench beside me. For the first time, I saw his notebook. He had been sketching the tats on the Russian’s chest.

  “Bogdan doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the woman. He doesn’t know what his bosses were going to do with the rough. I believe him. Probably give it to one of the cartels for drugs or to settle debts. You can move diamonds easily. They hold their value in cross-border transactions. They can’t be traced back to the source.”

  Suddenly Abba was singing “Dancing Queen.”

  It took a few seconds for me to realize it was a ringtone. By that time, Cartwright had taken away the cold pack and pulled the cellphone from Bogdan’s pants. He placed it in his bound hands. Then he produced a Beretta Storm subcompact pistol and ran it across to the man’s face before nudging it into his crotch.

  “You’re going to answer, Bogdan, and you’re going to be a good little commie. Remember…” The phrase that followed sounded like Ya gavaryu pa roosky.

  The meaning was clear enough: I speak Russian.

  Abba stopped singing and Bogdan said, “Da?”

  He listened and answered with more words, many more, but Cartwright didn’t seem perturbed.

  “I found the Indian.” Bogdan switched to English. “He fought pretty well for an old man but I got him…”

  Cartwright winked at me as we listened to unintelligible chirping from the other end of the conversation.

  “No, I didn’t kill him. He didn’t have the diamonds. He thinks we have them, that Peralta is working for us…”

  More from his interlocutor.

  “I believe him. Peralta is working for himself and he has them…” His face reddened. “You don’t tell me what to do! We know where to find the Indian. He’s not our problem…I know it’s fifteen-fucking-million!”

  Then he switched back to Russian and the conversation went back and forth for another two or three minutes. Cartwright listened carefully but never removed the pistol from the Russian’s jewels.

  After the phone went dead, Cartwright holstered his weapon and returned the cold pack to Bogdan, who once again held it against his nose with two cuffed hands.

  “Very good,” Cartwright said.

  His slid the cellphone into his pocket with difficulty.

  The Russian’s voice came beneath the cold pack. “What kind of deal are you prepared to make with me?”

  “That depends,” Cartwright said. “You’re handcuffed and blindfolded. That’s a pretty weak hand.”

  “I play blackjack,” Bogdan said. “Out at Talking Stick and Fort McDowell. I count cards. They never catch me. Stupid Indians. No disrespect. The trick is knowing when to leave.”

  Cartwright shrugged. “You’ve still got a weak hand and you can’t leave.”

  “You let me live,” he said. “You never tell what happened here. And I’ll give you information.”

  I felt Cartwright’s hand touch my leg. Don’t answer. So we sat in silence. Whatever resort temperature was outside, here it was getting stifling.

  Finally, Cartwright said, “If your information checks out
, we have a deal.”

  He was about to say more but Bogdan started laughing. It began as a muffled giggle completely out of proportion to his powerful build. It turned into a mix of hilarity and hysteria that filled the dim interior.

  “You are fools.” He pulled away the cold pack. “That rough was taken from the FBI. That’s right, genius. FBI diamonds. So when they catch you, they’ll send you off to be tortured in the American gulag. Unless this woman you are afraid of catches you first.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Cartwright followed me outside, closed the door.

  Whatever the particulate matter counted by the weather service today, the air around us smelled as sweet as Eden compared to the prison cell-like odor of the RV.

  We walked a few paces, close enough to the door for security’s sake and far enough away to speak in low voices and not be heard by Bogdan.

  The sun was high now, the intense glare spooling down on us, the asphalt magnifying the heat. It was a reminder of what was to come starting in May.

  I slipped off my jacket, exposing my holster. Sure, Arizona had a national reputation as a land of gun nuts, but you rarely saw someone open-carrying in the central city. So I slid my badge onto my belt. If it didn’t keep a cop from drawing down on me, at least it might make civilians less nervous—or less reckless.

  “Thanks for not killing my Russian,” Cartwright said.

  “You were going to blow his testicles off.”

  “That was a planned interrogation technique. You were running on emotion when you need to run frosty.”

  “That’s what Peralta says.”

  He looked down. “It’s good advice. Emotion won’t help you. You know that.”

  I did. I still wanted to strangle the Russian or anybody else who could lead me to Strawberry Death.

  He kicked the asphalt with his expensive boot. “You know, even with all the bullshit I went through in the war, when I joined the FBI I was so starry-eyed that I thought I’d become the first American Indian director. I was that naïve.”