Mortal Faults

by Michael Prescott

  “Yeah, so what? You never bagged a fed before?”

  “I only ever killed anybody that one time, Ron, and you know it.”

  “Yeah, well, today you get to go again. Don’t act like you got a choice about this. You signed on, Biscuit. You would’ve been dead in stir if our boys hadn’t adopted you. Those Mexishit assholes were just waiting to take you down. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

  “No.”

  “White man kills a cholo in a bar fight, ends up in jail with a bunch of other cholos breathing down his neck, and only the Scorpions could save him. Pull up your shirt, you’ll see a prison tat on your goddamned flabby-tit hairless chest. You’re in the crew. We looked out for you in Soledad, and now we’re calling in the favor.”

  “Ron, a thing like this can bring down a world of hurt on all of us.”

  “A world of hurt is what you’re gonna be in if you don’t follow orders.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s no big deal to zipper a fed. They act like they’re ten feet tall, but they bleed like anybody else. And this one’s a woman. That makes it double easy.”

  “I’m not a killer.”

  “You are today.”

  “Can’t you get somebody else?”

  “It’s you she made contact with. If you set up a meeting, it’s you she’ll be expecting. So you get to pull the trigger on her. Nothing fancy, just one round in the head. You can nail her before she knows what’s happening. Okay?”

  “Okay, Ron. Okay. God damn, I never thought I’d have to do this shit again.”

  “It’s like riding a bicycle, Biscuit. It’ll come right back to you. Just make sure you drop her before she gets a chance to drop you.”

  Shanker ended the call, hoping he’d made the right decision. When McCallum turned up dead, every law enforcement officer in southern Cal would be hauling in suspects. It would get ugly. The situation might spin out of control.

  But maybe he could start to set things right in a few hours, when he met the Man at the hotel.

  He decided he’d better bring that sawed-off shotgun, and whatever else he had left in his wall safe.

  Shit, bring it all.

  39

  Tess had returned to the crime scene and was thinking of reinterviewing the tenants when her cell phone rang. Caller ID showed a number with a local area code.

  “McCallum,” she answered.

  “It’s me.”

  She heard the growly voice of the bartender from Fast Eddie’s, the last person she’d expected to hear from.

  “Hey, Biscuit,” she said warily.

  “I gave it some thought. Maybe I can help you out, after all.”

  “Okay. So did a woman hook up with Dylan last night?”

  “Yeah. They left together.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “I’m no good at descriptions.”

  “How about if you look at some pictures?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. But not in the bar. The place is already starting to fill up. People can’t see me talking to you, looking at a six-pack.”

  A photo six-pack, he meant. Police terminology for a cluster of mug shots shown to a witness or an informant. She wasn’t surprised he knew the term.

  “Is there someplace private we can meet?” she asked.

  “There’s an alley out back, behind Fast Eddie’s.”

  “Would you be willing to meet me there?”

  “Yeah, okay. I can’t leave the bar now, though. There ain’t nobody to cover for me. By three o’clock a couple of waitresses will be here. They can handle things while I step outside.”

  “I understand.” Tess needed time, anyway. She didn’t have any other photos to show him. “So three p.m. is okay?”

  “Three, or a little after. In the alley.”

  His hedging on the time made her suspicious. “You’re not going to stand me up, are you, Biscuit?”

  “I bet you’re not a lady who gets stood up too often.”

  “And I don’t want to start now.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  ***

  Tess drove to the resident agency on Civic Center Drive in downtown Santa Ana. She showed her ID at the door to the third floor suite and brushed off an offer of assistance from a bored duty agent. In a back room she used a secure computer connection to access the California DMV database, where she found Abby’s driver’s license. She printed the photo, then trolled the database at random for female names, compiling five photos of other women who bore no resemblance to Abby. The six printouts would make a decent collection. If Biscuit selected Abby’s picture out of the six, there would be no doubt that she had been to the bar.

  Ordinarily the photos would go in the pockets of a display sheet, but Tess didn’t have time for anything fancy. She dropped the printouts into a manila envelope from a supply cabinet, then did her best to clear the history of her searches from the PC.

  The duty agent checked on her as she was finishing up. “You’re certain I can’t be of help?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. Is Agent Crandall around?” Enough time had passed that she might be able to smooth things over.

  “Crandall? No, he left. Went back to L.A.”

  Tess frowned. “He couldn’t. I’m his ride.”

  “He hitched a ride with one of our guys who was heading up there about an hour ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve got his cell number if you need it.”

  “No, that’s all right. I just thought ... Never mind.”

  I just thought he would wait for me, she almost said.

  Apparently he hadn’t wanted to be in the same car with her during the long ride back to the L.A. office. Either that, or he hadn’t trusted her to pick him up.

  The Bureau car felt lonely and too big as she headed over to Fast Eddie’s. She wasn’t looking forward to the drive north.

  She arrived at the bar shortly before three and parked near the alley. It offered privacy, all right. A little too much privacy, perhaps. On one side loomed the rear wall of the bar, on the other the windowless backside of a strip mall. She wasn’t thrilled about the situation. There was a reason FBI agents normally worked in pairs.

  She removed her Sig Sauer 9mm from its crossdraw holster and placed it in her jacket’s side pocket. In Denver she customarily wore a trench coat with a special side pocket for her weapon, but L.A. in summer was too warm for the coat. Even so, she felt safer with the gun at her side. In an emergency she could draw from the hip faster than from the shoulder.

  She entered the alley, carrying the envelope in her left hand, leaving her right arm unencumbered. As she walked, she let her right hand brush against the jacket, feeling the weight of the gun. It printed against the fabric, but she didn’t care.

  A few minutes after three, the back door of the bar opened, and the bartender appeared about five yards from her. Instead of coming forward, he just stood there in an angle of shadow thrown by the wall. It seemed odd that he would stay in the shadows. Maybe he was just afraid of being seen—but there was no one to see him.

  And he was wearing a nylon jacket, unzipped. The day was warm. He didn’t need a jacket any more than she did. She wore hers to conceal a weapon. He might be doing the same.

  “Biscuit,” she said.

  “Hey.” He sounded more affable than before, and that was another thing that bothered her.

  Her senses were heightened. She was aware of details that would normally escape her notice. A scrap of plastic scudding along the alley floor. The chatter of a bird. The heat of the sun on her face as she walked toward him, and then the coolness of the shade.

  Above all, his hands. The hands were what could get you killed.

  His hands were empty and open, at his sides. He made no move to strike when she came within range.

  “I have some photos for you to look at,” she said.

  It would have been natural if he’d moved out of the shade for more light, but he stayed put, as if he wanted
the additional cover the building’s shadow afforded. “Okay, no problem.”

  “Why’d you change your mind about helping me?”

  “I thought about what you said. How we’re on the same side. If some bitch offed Dylan, I want to help nail her for it.”

  This was plausible enough, but the way he said it wasn’t convincing. It seemed rehearsed, mechanical.

  And he was calm. Too calm. Like a man who had switched into the mode of an automaton, shutting down his feelings. A man who might be readying himself to kill.

  “Well,” she said, her voice level, “take a look.”

  She handed him the envelope. This was a moment of risk. He could grab her by the arm, grapple with her, try to get her in a choke hold.

  But he merely took the item from her. He undid the flap, then shifted the envelope to his left hand and reached into his jacket.

  She tensed. He saw her reaction and hesitated, smiling. “Need to get my glasses,” he said. “Okay?”

  His reading glasses. She’d forgotten.

  “Okay,” she said.

  His hand went inside his jacket. Went low.

  Last time he’d taken out the glasses, they had been in the vest pocket of his shirt.

  He wasn’t getting them out now.

  She closed the distance between them and brought the flat of her palm down hard on his wrist, and something clattered on the ground. A gun. With a swipe of her foot she sent it spinning into the sunny part of the alley. She grabbed his hand and yanked his index finger back, cracking bone. His face twisted. He doubled over. Her knee caught him in the gut before she kicked his feet out from under him. He fell on the asphalt, and then she was kneeling on his back with her chrome-plated Sig Sauer in her hand, having drawn it without conscious intention, and she was saying very quietly, “Don’t move.”

  She held the gun to his head while she patted him down. He was clean. The gun, now yards away, was the only weapon he’d been carrying.

  “You’re on my fucking kidney,” Biscuit complained.

  She dug her knee harder into his back. “Why’d you try to draw on me?”

  “I wasn’t, I swear.”

  “Answer the question.”

  He groaned. “I don’t like feds.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Not much of a reason to kill somebody.”

  “Who says I was trying to kill you? I never drew down on you. You can’t prove a fucking thing.”

  “I can prove you were in possession of a firearm. I make you as an ex-con, Biscuit. Owning a gun is a felony for you.”

  “It’s not my gun.”

  “Doesn’t matter whose it is. Doesn’t matter if you just borrowed it. You’re not allowed to even handle a firearm.”

  “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe you planted it on me.”

  “Very original. I’m sure that’ll hold up in court.”

  “You got any witnesses to say different? You got a partner to back you up? My word against yours.”

  The hell of it was, he wasn’t wrong. As a veteran criminal he would know how to game the system. He would know more tricks than the public defender they assigned to him.

  And if she took him in, he might not give her anything.

  “I came here for information,” she said. “Was there really a woman in the bar, or were you just feeding me a line?”

  “There was a woman.”

  “You willing to ID her if her photo is in that envelope?”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Getting back on my good side.”

  “You saying you’ll let this go if I help you out?”

  “I’m not saying anything, except that the only way you can help yourself in this situation is if you help me.”

  He thought about it. She gave him time. She even eased up on his back a little.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  Tess reached over and retrieved the envelope, then spilled its contents on the ground in front of his face. “Is she one of these?”

  He blinked at the pictures.

  “Gotta have my glasses,” he said a little sheepishly.

  She pressed the gun to his head. “I’ll get them. Don’t try anything.”

  “I already tried everything I’m gonna try.”

  She reached under him and pulled the glasses from his vest pocket, then flipped them open and perched them on his nose. One lens was cracked.

  “Shit,” he whined, “you busted ’em.”

  “I’m crying for you. Look at the pictures.”

  He squinted through the good lens, surveying the printouts. She waited, breath held.

  “The third one,” he said.

  Tess pointed at the photo. “Her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  It was Abby.

  Tess felt a sudden sinking sadness, as if something inside her had died. Only then did she realize how much she had wanted to be proved wrong.

  “Are you sure you could see her well enough?” she pressed.

  “I only got trouble with close-up stuff. I can see anything at arm’s length or further just fine. It was her.”

  “All right.”

  She got off him and gathered up the photos. He remained prone on the ground.

  “So what happens now?” he asked.

  “I’ll let you off with a warning,” Tess said.

  “Appreciate that. For a fed, you’re all right.”

  “Is that why you tried to kill me?”

  “That wasn’t personal.”

  She shook her head. “You’re a disappointment, Biscuit. I thought you were a better man.”

  He crooked his neck to look up at her. His eyes were cold. “Ain’t no such thing.”

  She didn’t react fully to the encounter until she was back in the car. Then she began to shake all over as a wave of nausea rolled through her. She knew what it was—the combined effect of her adrenaline rush and the revelation about Abby. Of the two, she wasn’t sure which hit her harder.

  All along she’d been hoping her suspicions were groundless. Now she knew she had been right from the start. Abby had lied about hooking up with Dylan Garrick, which meant she had lied about everything else. She had left the bar with him. She had gone to his apartment. She had pistol-whipped him with his own gun, and then she had shot him in the face—shot him twice, first taking time to wrap the gun in a pillow to muffle the reports.

  She had gone rogue. And she had to be stopped. Had to be taken off the street. Now. Today.

  There was only one way to do it. Bring in the Bureau. The secrets Tess had been keeping for more than a year would have to come out. She didn’t know what it would do to her career or her life, but she couldn’t think about that now. Sometimes it was necessary to do the right thing. She had put off doing it for too long.

  And Abby ...

  Abby would be put under arrest. If things went well, she would go quietly. If she resisted—well, Tess didn’t want to consider that possibility.

  For a last moment she hesitated. She didn’t want to start a chain of events that would end with Abby either dead or in custody, facing a life sentence. There ought to be another way.

  “I could talk to her,” she murmured.

  A copout. She had tried talking. She had asked Abby to open up last night at the Boiler Room, and again this morning at Palisades Park. Both times she’d been lied to. Abby was beyond help, perhaps beyond redemption.

  But not beyond punishment.

  Tess pulled into traffic, heading for the Santa Ana Freeway, which would take her north to L.A.

  40

  Abby couldn’t say exactly what brought her to Vic Wyatt’s apartment in Culver City at three thirty. She had a little time to kill before she had to sneak Andrea away from the FBI, but there was more to it than that. She knew Wyatt would be home—he was working the night watch this week and usually slept till midafternoon—and he was always
up for a roll in the sack. But that wasn’t it, either. Not entirely, anyway.

  What she needed from him—well, she couldn’t quite say. She needed something, though. Something more than sex, but of course the sex came first, as it always did between them. He greeted her at the door in his underwear, and without a word he led her into the bedroom, where a neighbor’s TV, tuned to a game show, was audible through the thin wall, and he stripped her down with unsmiling efficiency and mounted her fast and hard as the bed creaked and a contestant played the lightning around. A lightning round was what it was for them, too, no foreplay, nothing complicated, none of the rococo contortionism on display in late-night movies and teenage fantasies, just a single-minded mission, carried out in a rush of sweat and heat, and concluding with a burst of applause from the studio audience.

  Then they were done, and Abby lay beside him, strangely unsatisfied.

  “You’re wound up tight,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “I thought you would have climbed down off that adrenaline high by now.”

  “Maybe I like it. The adrenaline, I mean.”

  “Do you?”

  “Ordinarily, yes.”

  “But not this time?”

  “This time it’s different. I’m kind of—I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She did, of course. He waited.

  “I’m in sort of a tight situation,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Can’t.”

  This was only partly true. She could tell him some of it, but she didn’t think he would understand. She knew she would tell him, anyway.

  He didn’t coax or pressure her. He just reached out to stroke her hair, a slow, loving gesture that soothed her.

  “Things are falling apart,” she said. “I mean, not completely, but ... enough.”

  “How?”

  “I have to rely on myself. And I’m not sure I can.”

  “You always have before.”

  “Maybe not this time.”

  “What’s different?”

  “Me. I’m different. I’m losing it.”

  “Losing what?”

  “Control.”

  “We all feel that way sometimes.”

  “Not me. I’ve never felt it. Not until now.”