Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries)
Page 3
Once I got inside the house I reactivated the portion of the security system that controlled the doors. It was sensitive enough that it had gone off once when an overly enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness had tried to rattle my front door. It didn’t rattle, of course, but a siren loud enough to knock the dead out of their graves had gone off. The poor guy hadn’t stuck around to apologize. He’d dropped three copies of his Watchtower magazine on the ground and hightailed it back to his car. I’d watched him go from the front window. Poor guy. But then again, maybe the experience had taught him that it’s rude to try to rattle people’s doors.
My living room was devoid of furniture. I’d stacked the boxes that contained my old Laughing Man case files against one wall, and every now and then I sat on the carpet and went through them, but I hadn’t done that in months. I had them virtually memorized at this point, and I hadn’t come up with anything new. Whatever insight I’d been hoping to find wasn’t in there.
In my kitchen I had a small folding table and two chairs. I sat at the table and read the news on my laptop as I ate a microwave dinner. I had pots and pans in the cupboard, but I hadn’t actually cooked anything in as long as I could remember.
Also in the kitchen, in a cabinet above the stove, was an unopened bottle of Grey Goose vodka. I hadn’t had a drink in over a year, and had no intention of starting up again, but having the bottle on hand provided a strange kind of security that I’d have been hard pressed to explain to anyone else. I wasn’t tempted to drink it, but not having it around would have sat on my mind like an itch I couldn’t scratch. Some people needed security blankets. I needed security vodka. There are things that defy explanation.
I’d never bought a bed; I slept on an air mattress that had basic sheets and one blanket. That was where I spent most of the next three days, trying to stay off my feet as much as possible. Every time I tried standing up for more than a few minutes my ankle began throbbing. I unwrapped it once, marveled at the impressive bruising that had developed there, and then wrapped it back up. By the third day I could hobble around at a pretty good clip, but I was also popping Advil every four hours.
My stitches gave me a nightmarish Frankenstein’s monster appearance, but I didn’t have much of a social life and I had enough food in the house that I didn’t need to go out. At the hospital I’d been told it was too early to tell if there would be much scarring, but scars didn’t really bother me all that much. I had plenty of them already. They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and a lot of things had tried to kill me over the years. Some of them had left marks, though, and I wore those like badges of honor.
On the fourth night after my encounter with the art gallery window I was sitting at my kitchen table watching Netflix and eating a cup of instant noodles when I remembered the phone number Dan had given me. I found the paper it was on in my jacket pocket and looked at it again. Who the hell was Blueberry? I thought about throwing the paper in the trash, but unanswered questions had a way of keeping me up at night. That was the last thing I needed. It should be an easy enough question to answer, anyway. I went to a kitchen drawer that held a half dozen prepaid cell phones I’d picked up at a convenience store and opened one of the packages with a pair of kitchen shears. I plugged it in and waited for it to acquire a signal, then went through its activation sequence. I checked the clock. It was 10:35 pm. Late, but anyone who had been trying to reach me probably wasn’t in a position to complain about the hour.
I dialed the number. After three rings someone picked up and a woman’s voice said, “Who is this?” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Who is this?” I asked. “You called me. Well, not right this second, you didn’t. I called you. But you called my line at the police station.”
There was a brief pause and then I heard a deep sigh that sounded like relief. “Oh, god,” the woman said. “Nevada. You’re my angel, Nevada.”
That seemed excessive. I was pretty certain I knew the voice now, though. “Is that Krystal Harris?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Didn’t you know from before? I told them my name was Blueberry.”
“I’ve never called you Blueberry in my life, Krystal. I’ve never called anyone Blueberry.”
“That story I told you about when I was little, I crushed blueberries between my fingers and tried to use them as lipstick?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I didn’t really want to admit it. It must have meant something to her. “Sure,” I said. “Blueberries. What is it you need, Krystal?”
“Hang on,” she said. “I need to make sure I’m alone.” I heard her cover the phone’s mouthpiece with her hand. A moment later she was back. “I’ve got something you need to know.”
Krystal had been a very low-level member of a very low-level gang that had a very low-level business selling meth to bikers. I’d worked homicide and couldn’t have given a shit about drugs, but Krystal was considered so pathetic by her own peer group that nobody thought twice about talking in front of her. She also spent a lot of time in drug houses and bars frequented by very unsavory people who talked more than they should have. That made her valuable to me. Tips solved a lot of crimes, and every now and then she overheard some tidbit that she knew would be useful to me. I’d paid her out of a fund the police department had set aside for exactly that purpose. All told, she’d been one of maybe a dozen informants I’d had around San Diego while I’d been a cop. It wasn’t an unusual situation. A lot of detectives had similar networks.
In the end Krystal’s gang had been busted, a feat on the part of the narcotics department that wouldn’t have exactly required Encyclopedia Brown-level work to take care of. Krystal had received word of the raid half an hour before it took place from a certain homicide detective that believed in taking care of her people. The guys in narcotics didn’t care. She really was that unimportant.
After that I’d lost track of her. I’d assumed she must be dead by now; Krystal liked the meth her gang had sold as much as the bikers they sold it to did. Nobody with a taste for that junk lasted long.
“Tell me why you called, Krystal.”
“I said I know something. Can you pay me for it?”
“I’m not a cop anymore. If you watched the news you’d probably know that.” I’d been listening to the tone of her voice and didn’t like the note of desperation I heard in it. I’d heard it before. “You trying to get a fix?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, not right now. Sometimes I am.”
“You’re just a casual meth addict? Great. I’m sure that’s not a problem, then.”
“Look,” she said. “What I know is big. It’ll be worth something to someone you know, but I need money.”
“I don’t really feel comfortable supporting your drug habit,” I said. “I mean, I’m not judging you, but I don’t want to contribute to it, either.”
“I need the money to get out of here,” Krystal said. “I have to get as far away from here as I can.”
Now I was less sure the desperation I was hearing was about drugs. “Has someone threatened you?”
She didn’t say anything at first, but her breathing sounded almost panicked. “I screwed up, Nevada. I was trying to…blackmail, I guess…I guess it’s blackmail…but I got greedy and now there’s a target on me.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. It was possible Krystal was paranoid because she’d been drugged out of her head for the last several years. But then again, maybe there really was more to it than that. “Krystal, if someone is after you then you need to go to the police. It’s what they’re there for.”
Krystal made a high-pitched noise like a caged bird. “Do you really think they’d take me seriously?” she screeched. “I know what I look like to other people, Nevada, but you always believed me. My angel, Nevada. You always believed in me.”
I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I got the point. “You never lied to me,” I said. “That meant something to me.”
If I’d been wondering if she was high right now, after that last sentence, I didn’t need to wonder anymore. She was messed up out of her damn mind. “You have to give me something first,” I said. “What is it you know about?”
“Come see me.”
“Tell me what we’re dealing with first.”
She went silent again, save for the heavy breathing, and I waited. Krystal had always liked to do things in her own way. I could tolerate it for another few minutes. All I had on my agenda for the evening was Netflix and bed.
“I know about a murder,” she finally said. “Three murders, really, but it’s the last one. The last one was the wrong one, Nevada. Can you believe that shit? It was the wrong fucking one.”
I shook my head, and then took a minute to feel like an idiot because I’d wanted her to see that and of course she couldn’t. “What does that even mean?”
“That’s all you get,” she said. “Three murders. Come see me and bring money.” She rattled off an address I recognized as being in a particularly bad part of the city.
“No,” I said.
She screeched again. “I’m telling the truth!”
“I believe you,” I said. “At least I believe you’ve got something worth hearing. But I’ve got a bad ankle and I’m not going out tonight. Certainly not to that shithole block.”
“Come tomorrow, then.”
I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll come tomorrow and listen to what you have to say. Listen, Krystal, I always liked you, but you really need to not be wasting my time here.”
“I’m not.” She sounded both relieved and even more frantic now. I didn’t know how that was possible. Really good drugs, maybe.
“At the least I’ll get you a bus ticket out of the city,” I said. “Or…don’t take my head off for suggesting this, but I can get you into a rehab.” Her breathing stopped. “I’ll pay for it. I have the money. You get in a car with me and I’ll drive you up to Hope Springs. It’s a clinic in Anza-Borrego. The admin up there owes me a favor. If he hasn’t got a bed, he’ll know someone who does.”
She didn’t say anything, but I could hear her breathing again so I knew she hadn’t hung up on me. “You’d do that for me?”
“Yes.”
She made a small sound that might have been a chuckle, but I wasn’t sure. “You really are an angel, Nevada.”
“I can guarantee you’re the only person on Earth who thinks so,” I said. “Will you go with me?”
I already knew the answer, but I pretended I didn’t while she deliberated silently. “I…I don’t think so,” she said. “If I get out of here, maybe I can get clean on my own. I want to, Nevada. I really do. I just have to get out of here.”
I wasn’t going to push it. Rehab had been a longshot. And it wasn’t like I’d ever gone to one. It wouldn’t have worked for me. Some people swore by it, though. “Will you at least talk to me about it tomorrow?” I asked. “I won’t force you to go. If you decide not to, I’ll drive you to the Greyhound station instead.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s a deal. Bring money, though. Is…is a thousand bucks okay?”
That wasn’t the most I’d ever paid a confidential informant for information, but it was close. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the money, though. “I can do that,” I said. “If you tell me something interesting, anyway. I really want to believe you’re not wasting my time, or…” I stopped. I’d nearly said setting me up to be robbed. I wanted to believe Krystal would never do that, but I wouldn’t have put it past her. “Anyway, I just don’t know.”
“I’m not wasting your time,” Krystal said. “I promise. Angel Nevada, I promise.”
That kind of talk was getting old in a hurry. “2:00 pm tomorrow,” I said. I’d never been a fan of getting up early.
“Okay. I’ll be here.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to your place.” I couldn’t ignore the possibility that this was a robbery plot that was both desperate and imaginative. I thought about it. “There’s a McDonald’s about five blocks south of there. Across from a laundromat. They’ve got a big sign with a happy washing machine or something. You know it?”
“Yeah. I know it.”
“Meet me there at 2:00. I’ll buy you a hamburger.”
“Okay,” she said. She hesitated. “Um…that’s on top of the thousand, right?”
“The burger’s on me,” I said. “We good?”
“Yeah.”
“See you then.” I hung up and looked at the burner phone. I had a habit of throwing these away after one use, but that call hadn’t been anything that was going to come back and haunt me later. I had every right to call Krystal. Dan Evans had given me the number himself.
I threw the phone away, anyway.
Chapter 4
I woke up late the next morning, which was as per usual. There were advantages to not having a real job. I could sleep as late as I wanted. My ankle was still sore, but not bad enough that I’d probably have trouble getting around. I popped two Advil anyway and washed them down with a Diet Coke. I’d never been big on eating breakfast. My stomach had never tolerated food early in the morning back in my drinking days, and my appetite had never really recovered from that.
After an hour of screwing around on the Internet I went into my bedroom and opened the closet. I had two suitcases in there. Both were full of cash. Some had come from working for the gangster I’d done a job for last year. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t wanted to pay me with a check. The rest had come from Anita Collins, my client on the last “job” I’d had. That had been an unmitigated disaster. Anita had screwed me over, killing a man she’d paid me to find for her. She’d promised me when I’d taken the job that she’d let the legal system take its course, but she’d been lying and I’d fallen for it. She’d tried to make up for it with money, but I was still angry about it. Anita was currently under house arrest, her murder trial having been stalled with every legal trick her high-priced lawyers had been able to engineer. She’d probably walk, in the end. I didn’t have much faith left in the justice system. The money came in handy, though. I’d never have to work again, so long as I didn’t lose my mind and start buying myself fancy cars. Or maybe a private jet or two.
A thousand dollars meant next to nothing to me. I counted ten hundred-dollar bills into an envelope and stuck it in the pocket of my damaged leather jacket. If Krystal actually let me get her into a rehab I’d need more, but that was fine. I’d been making small deposits into a bank account I kept for nearly a year now. They were never big enough to raise questions with the IRS, but they gave me a way to deal with larger expenditures. Most places didn’t want to accept an envelope full of cash as payment, but a wire transfer would do just fine.
I waited until 1:30 and then left the house, arming the security system behind me. My Glock was in its holster under my arm. Each time I left the house I took a moment to scan the cars outside. I’d memorized the make, model, and license plate of every vehicle owned within a two-block radius. Those I expected to see. Anything else I took note of. Strange cars in the neighborhood weren’t anything I worried about, unless I saw them more than once. Then I wanted to know who was in them. The Laughing Man had staked out my house before. Admittedly, one time that had actually saved my life. I’d have to be sure to thank him for that, right before I put a bullet in his head.
I drove an old Mustang Cobra that was in need of a good washing, if not an entirely new paint job. One of these days I’d get around to doing that. I might also get the engine souped up a little. I didn’t need to drive the fastest thing on the freeway, but if the day came that that ever changed, it wouldn’t hurt to be ready. I’d already taken a precision driving course six months ago, just so I’d have the skills to handle myself if
the Laughing Man ever showed up and tried to run me off the road. I didn’t expect he ever would, but then again, it seemed like he never did what I expected him to.
Krystal’s neighborhood was in the southeastern part of the city, in an area where things tended to be a little…dicey. That was putting it mildly. There seemed to be a liquor store with bars on the windows on every corner, and gang-related graffiti was everywhere. There were places in San Diego where people felt fine walking around without shoes on. Around here doing that would probably give you tetanus. And that was if you didn’t manage to stab yourself with a discarded needle. Who knew what you might pick up then?
I found the McDonald’s I was looking for and noted that the laundromat with the smiling washing machine sign I’d described to Krystal was still there. That was useful. I didn’t know if there was another McDonald’s nearby; most big cities had a huge number of them, but realistically, how many could be right next to such an unusually happy laundromat?
At 1:55 I got out of the Mustang, fed a couple quarters into a parking meter, and headed inside. My ankle was starting to complain a bit, but it wasn’t that bad. I was limping, but not enough that people were likely to stop me and ask if I was okay. But then again, in this neighborhood, what were the odds of anyone doing that?
The interior of the McDonald’s itself was surprisingly clean and tidy, which seemed odd given the neighborhood it happened to be located in. It looked like any of the other of the franchise’s billion other restaurants, save for the presence of a large, uniformed security guard stationed just inside the front door. He had a shaved head, tattoos that suggested he’d done prison time, and an expression that said if you did anything out of line, he was going to take you out back and introduce you to Grimace. You didn’t want to meet Grimace. Nobody wanted to meet Grimace. What the hell was Grimace, anyway? He looked like a pile of grapes that had been involved in a chemical accident and grown arms.