by David Grace
THE WRONG SIDE OF A GUN
By David Grace
Copyright David Alexander writing as David Grace 2016
Published By David Grace at Smashwords
To visit David Grace’s website, DavidGraceAuthor.com, CLICK OR TAP HERE
Novels By David Grace
The Accidental Magician
The Concrete Kiss
Daniel
A Death In Beverly Hills
Death Doesn’t Care
Death Never Lies
Death Never Sleeps
Doll’s Eyes
Easy Target
Etched In Bone
Fever Dreams
The Forbidden List
Shooting Crows At Dawn
Stolen Angel
The Traitor’s Mistress
True Faith
The Wrong Side Of A Gun
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the people, places, businesses, and events portrayed in this novel are either based on the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Even though the names of real locations may be used in certain parts of this book, none of the people, places, businesses, or events referred to in any of those locales are intended to represent any relationship with any real events. Any and all occurrences in this book are completely unrelated to the actions of any real persons, places, businesses, or events and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real businesses or institutions, or to any actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter One
LOS ANGELES, MAY, NINE AND ONE-HALF YEARS AGO
Virgil Quinn parked on Manchester in front of a worn-down cinder-block building wrapped in stucco and lime-green paint. The sign over the front door read, “Fireside Bar” in sputtering red neon, but inside there was no fireplace and never had been. The Fireside looked neither clean nor friendly, and it wasn’t supposed to.
It was almost midnight when Quinn pushed through the door with barely a look around. Half a dozen pairs of eyes checked out his untucked black shirt and faded jeans then drifted away when he appeared to ignore them as much as they pretended to ignore him.
A moon-faced bartender with a shaved head gave Virgil a little nod.
“Bourbon with a beer back.”
Another nod and half a minute later the barman served Virgil a shot glass of brown whisky and an almost headless beer. Quinn dropped a creased ten and swallowed the bourbon in one gulp. After taking two pulls on the beer he rapped his knuckles on the scarred mahogany. The bartender refilled his shot glass almost to the rim. Virgil drank down half the beer, then glanced into the corners and booths in the back.
Gray-blue smoke glowed in little islands around the pool table, the juke box and the entrance to the hallway leading past the bathrooms to the back door. People weren’t supposed to smoke in bars anymore, but neither were they supposed to snort coke, play poker for money, sell stolen credit cards, hire prostitutes, or do half a dozen other things that happened in the Fireside Bar on a more or less regular basis. Why else would its clientele of crooks, drunks, hookers, thugs and thieves come here?
Virgil checked out half the customers then turned back toward the lighted shelves of bottles and drained his beer. He tapped the empty glass and threw down another ten before turning lazily toward the four men in the far corner near the fire door.
“Looking for somebody?” the bartender asked.
“Looking to mind my own business,” Virgil said softly without moving his head. The bartender drew him another glass of cheap beer and shuffled away. The men were playing some kind of a game, alternately shaking then dumping three dice from a purple leather cup coated with a film of human grease. From the corner of his eye Virgil caught a glimpse of a barbed-wire tattoo around the bulging left arm of one of the men as he reached across the table. Willie Ray Stark, Virgil thought.
“How you like that!” Stark crowed, and grabbed up a handful of worn-out fives and tens.
“Screw you, asshole,” the man across from him muttered, showing a missing tooth halfway toward the back of his mouth. “Give me that fucking thing.”
The dice made a hollow clacking noise as the toothless man twirled them around inside the cup.
The way he was juiced up, if Stark didn’t suddenly go bust Virgil figured it would be a couple of hours before he quit for the night. Quinn waited until the bartender was looking the other way then quietly poured his bourbon on the floor.
“Hey, you got any food?” he called out when the guy turned around.
“Pretzels and chips, two bucks.”
Virgil gave his head a tiny shake. “Any place around here where I can get a burger or something?”
“The Jack In The Box down at West Florence is open 24-hours.”
Virgil thought about that for a couple of seconds then chugged the rest of his beer. “I’ll be back,” he said and headed for the door.
Outside, the night had gone damp and a thick overcast blocked out the stars. Someplace overhead a 767 or an Airbus whined but Virgil couldn’t locate it, the plane’s engines muffled by a layer of clouds like cotton wool. His informant had told him that Stark was driving an old piece-of-shit Taurus, green, gray, black or brown. He glanced at the cars on the street then circled around to the parking lot in the back. He spotted a likely candidate in the second to the last row between an F150 and a five-year-old Escalade with a crumpled rear bumper.
Virgil had requisitioned a black Lexus ES they’d gotten a month ago from the DEA, and he now parked it on the far side of the Escalade. He waited a couple of minutes to make sure that no one was watching him then he got out and jammed wooden kitchen matches into the air valves of the Taurus’ front left and right rear tires. Stark wasn’t going anywhere in that POS tonight, assuming Rags had gotten it right and it really was Stark’s car.
Virgil returned to the Lexus and settled in to wait. It would have been easier if he’d played this by the rules, but the book said they’d need two teams for the takedown and that meant at least a day’s worth of meetings and paperwork, besides which the rules said that he couldn’t drink whisky on the job even when he was undercover, and not drinking at a bar like the Fireside would totally mark him as a cop. Or, he could just come out here on his own and grab the guy up, which seemed altogether a better plan.
Virgil pulled a salami and cheese sandwich out of the glove box and followed it up with a couple of sprays of Binaca. With any luck, by the time he brought Stark in, between the Binaca and the salami he’d have destroyed the smell of the bourbon and the beer.
The Fireside’s back door belched a cloud of smoke and the glare illuminated two figures heading for a Dodge van at the far side of the lot. One of the hookers and a John. Virgil watched them climb through the van’s sliding door that opened and closed without any light coming on. Blowjob or fuck? he wondered idly. If Janet had been here she’d have made some comment about the kind of man who’d pay to screw an anonymous woman in the back of a beat-up van in a parking lot behind a sleazy bar. Five seconds later his phone buzzed.
“Speak of the devil,” Virgil muttered, paused for a couple of seconds, then pressed “Accept.”
“You find him?” his partner asked.
“Still looking,” Virgil lied. Across the lot the van started to rock. Not a blowjob, he decided.
“What�
�s your plan?”
“I’ll give it another couple of hours. If nothing turns up I’ll crash at the office.”
“You want some company?” Janet asked.
“No thanks. I’ve got it covered.”
“Did you tell Helen you weren’t coming home tonight?”
“She knows,” Virgil said, remembering his latest screaming match with his wife.
The phone went dead for a couple of seconds and Virgil wondered if he’d lost the signal.
“You know, Virgil, anything you want, all you have to do is ask,” Janet said in that throaty voice she used when she was working herself up to something. Virgil pretended not to notice.
“It’s all good. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and disconnected the call.
Janet stared at her dead phone for a moment then her eyes tightened and she tapped in a new number.
“Hello?”
“He’ll be gone until the end of shift tomorrow.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Do you still want to do this?”
“We’re already on the road. We’re already gone.”
Janet closed her phone and allowed herself a thin, hopeful smile.
* * *
Willie Ray Stark began his criminal career at thirteen stealing bicycles, and by the time he could drive he’d moved up to wallets, watches, TVs, cars and pretty much anything else that wasn’t nailed down. After his first six-month bit in the Lake County, Indiana jail and then a two-year jolt in the Southwestern Illinois Correctional Center, Stark graduated to other crimes, first commercial burglaries then, more recently, as paid muscle for a bunch of Chicago pimps who were into everything from sex trafficking to kiddie porn.
With the help of a couple of bent Border Patrolmen they brought Thai and Filipino girls over from Canada through the Port Edward crossing then on down Interstate 69. That worked for about a year until one of the crooked ICE agents beat up his wife and she ratted him out. After that it was every punk for himself and Stark fled Illinois one step ahead of the Law.
The L.A. Marshals’ office received information from a cooperating witness that Willie Ray Stark had fled to L.A. which put him in the cross-hairs of Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Quinn.
Virgil reclined his seat until his eyes were barely above the line of the dash and settled in to wait. In a half daze he thought about how he’d ended up in this crumbling parking lot, waiting to snatch up a piece of scum like Willie Ray Stark.
* * *
“I don’t go for that kiddie-porn stuff,” Spottswood “Rags” Brown told Quinn over plates of chow mein and mu shu pork.
“I know you don’t,” Virgil said. “Walter told me you’re a straight-up guy.”
“Damn right. It’s only the ganga for me. You hear what I’m sayin’? I ain’t hardly no crook at all. Hell, half the state of California’s doin’ same as me. Am I right?”
“Glaucoma’s a terrible thing,” Virgil said. Rags cocked his head to one side for a moment then snorted a laugh.
“Yeah, that’s it. I’m like those fancy drug companies. I’m curing disease one toke at a time. HA!” Rags slapped the table then stuffed his face with more noodles.
Virgil gave him a friendly smile and smeared plum sauce on a crepe.
“They call him ‘Rags’ because of how he dresses,” Brown’s handler, DEA Agent Walter Washington, had told Quinn.
“Old clothes?”
“Eclectic,” Walter replied. “He likes to layer up with whatever comes to hand when he gets up. Half the time he looks like a blind man who’s dressed himself out of the Salvation Army donation bin, but he claims it’s deliberate.”
This afternoon Rags was wearing a navy-blue cotton vest over a tie-dyed t-shirt topped off by a pale yellow sport coat and shiny black pants.
“You like your mu shu?” Rags asked through a mouthful of noodles.
“It’s very good.”
“For a while there I couldn’t eat that stuff. I turned Muslim a few years back, but it didn’t take.” Rags mixed a mound of pork into his chow mein.
“What can you tell me about the kiddie-porn guy?” Virgil asked.
“Well, I can’t rightly say he’s personally into that stuff, but he’s pals up with some guys who are. That’s why I called Walter. The world would be a better place if Satan took those punks now instead of later.”
“And Satan not being available . . . .” Quinn said.
“I figured Walter and you all could do the job for him.” Rags cackled a laugh. Quinn waited but Rags just smiled some more then stabbed another forkful of noodles.
“Walter and I, we appreciate your civic attitude. I’ve got a little something for you, but you never know who’s watching,” Virgil told him.
“Just slip it to me under the table.”
A moment later Rags peeked inside the envelope he held against his lap.
“You know,” he said a minute later, “usually Walter’s appreciation is a Benjamin more than this . . . .” Virgil just stared. “But, seeings how this guy is a real piece of crap with that kiddie porn and all, this’ll do just fine.” The envelope quickly disappeared down the front of Rags’ pants. “Most nights he hangs out with another bunch of low-lifes at the Fireside Bar over on Manchester near the airport.”
“You know this how?”
“A man’s gotta work. Lots of ganga customers in there.”
“And you’re sure it’s him?”
“Hey, Walter shows me a bunch of pictures every Tuesday and I keep a watch out for ‘em. This guy, I recognized him right away. He wanted a free sample. I don’t give no free samples. Fucker grabbed some product right out of my hand! That’s when I saw that barbed wire tattoo on his arm.”
“Which arm?”
“You think I’m shitting you for a lousy couple of hundred bucks?” Virgil just stared. “The left arm. I know my shit. Ask Walter if I don’t.”
“No need. Walter told me that you’re a stand-up guy, vouched for you all the way. He told me, ‘You can trust what Rags tells you. He’s one sharp dude.’“ Rags nodded and smiled. “I just had to ask, that’s all,” Quinn told him.
“Yeah, OK. Walter’s the same damn way.”
“Anything else you can tell me?”
“He drives an old POS Taurus.”
“What color? What year?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Those Taurus, they all look the same. And the color. . . .” Rags gazed briefly at the wall above Quinn’s shoulder. “Dark’s all I remember. Green? Maybe brown?”
“Maybe black?” Quinn added.
“Sure, maybe.” Rags slurped down a swallow of Coke. “So, are we good?”
“Good? Hell, Rags, we’re great. I’ll tell Walter you came through for me, solid gold.”
“Well, all right!” Rags said and held out his arm to bump fists. “That son of a bitch pervert gives you any trouble, you mess him up, OK? World don’t need no more kiddie rapers, that’s for damn sure.”
“That’ll be up to him. Thanks. . . . I gotta go,” Virgil began to slide out of the booth.
“You want the rest of your mu shu?”
“It’s all yours.”
Rags smiled and scraped the plate clean on top of his chow mein.
“I’m glad I ain’t no Muslim no more,” Rags said as Virgil escaped the booth. “This here is mighty tasty.”
* * *
Around one-thirty the Fireside’s customers began to wander back to their cars. By then the hooker had processed two more guys, and at around ten to two she packed it in as well. By then only the Taurus, the F150, the beat-up Escalade, and Quinn’s Lexus were left in the lot. The string of blinking Christmas-tree lights tacked around the edge of the roof flickered off a couple of minutes after two and a few seconds after that three figures pushed through the back door. A skinny man with a face like a lumpy wedge of cheese climbed into the pickup and tore out, spitting bits of cracked asphalt behind him. The stocky man with the missing tooth headed for the Escalade t
hen stopped and stared at the Taurus’s front tire.
“Looks like you got a problem,” he called out, pointing.
Willie Ray bent over and peered intently at the tire as if staring at it might suddenly make it whole. “Shit!”
The toothless man laughed and climbed into the Escalade.
“JT, give me a ride over to the ARCO.”
“I’m going home.”
“Hey! I need a ride man!” Stark shouted and yanked on the Escalade’s locked passenger door.
“I can’t hear you . . . . asshole,” the toothless man shouted and pulled away, dragging Stark a couple of feet before he finally let go.
“Fucking bastard!” Stark shouted at the disappearing tail lights, then scowled at the Taurus’s sagging front end. “Fuck!” he muttered and looked hopelessly around the lot, empty except for Quinn’s car. Stark took a hesitant step toward the Lexus, peered inside, and jerked when he spotted Quinn’s pale, sleeping face floating in the darkness above the leather seats. “Hey!” Stark called out and slapped the Lexus’ fender with the flat of his hand.
Virgil made a show of stumbling awake and staring into the darkened lot.
“Hey, buddy!” Stark called again and waved his hands. Virgil rolled his window down a couple of inches. “I got a flat.” Stark pointed to the sagging Taurus. Virgil turned his head to follow Stark’s hand. “Can you give me a ride to the gas station?”
“What time is it?” Virgil asked as if half asleep. “Where’s Shelly?”
“Who?”
“Shelly. I was supposed to meet up with her after her shift.”
“Hey, man, I don’t know about no Shelly. The bar’s closed and everybody’s gone home except you and me, and my fucking car’s got a flat. So, how about it? Will you do me a solid and help me out here?”