I tried to stop for a better look. “Wait!” I said. “What was—”
But he put his hand on the top of my head and pushed me into the backseat. Unable to use my arms, I had to roll over to get seated the right way. I must have looked like a whale on the beach. It took me forever to get my feet into the foot well. It was a pathetic display.
“Watch your head,” he said, and slammed the door on me.
*
I got feeling pretty sorry for myself on the way down to the jail. Staring at the end of things will do that to you, and I was about to kiss my seventeen years as a cop goodbye. I was so wrapped up in my own misery I didn’t even notice that we’d pulled into the prisoner off-loading dock behind the City Magistrate’s Office. One minute I was swaying along with the motion of the car ride, the next I was looking up at Officer Robinson’s broken nose.
“Step out,” he said. “Watch your head.”
I did like he ordered. Everything hurt. Having your hands cuffed behind your back is murder on your shoulders, and my feet felt like they had weights tied to them.
I looked around.
A prisoner under arrest for nothing but warrants goes directly to the county jail, but those with fresh charges, like driving drunk, have to stop first at the City Magistrate’s Office. That’s where you see the judge and get told the formal charges against you. In the San Antonio Police Department, we call that first stop “the Mag’s Office.” Though we claim it as ours, and City employees work as detention guards inside, the Mag’s Office actually services all thirty-eight law enforcement agencies in Bexar County, not just the SAPD, so on the weekends it’s crazy busy. The parking lot is so packed with police cars that sometimes officers are forced to park outside the security fence that surrounds the lot. But this was a Tuesday night, or rather very early on Wednesday morning, and the parking lot was nearly empty. The few police cars present were parked up near the metal doors that led into the holding cells.
We were parked way off to the right of the entrance.
I’d investigated a few cases that used evidence gathered here in this parking lot, and I knew from reviewing the video on those cases that the security cameras above the entrance covered most of the parking lot, but not all of it. Where we were parked the cameras didn’t reach.
“What gives?” I asked, gesturing with a nod toward the doors.
He didn’t answer. Once again he flipped me around like a rag doll and searched me, and this time he emptied my pockets and put the contents on the hood of his car. When he got to my wallet he opened it and turned to my agency credentials, where my badge and peace officer license were kept.
Like most cops with kids, I’d put pictures of my two children over my license. The trick is to position it just so, to hide the personal information. The public has a right to see my credentials, but they don’t have a right to know my home address. I’ve seen beauticians do the same thing at the barber shop.
He turned my wallet so that I could see Nicole and Andrew’s school pictures. “Your kids?” he asked. Seeing them smiling at me was like a knife in my heart. I missed them so much my legs nearly folded beneath me. I barely heard what he said next. “You know,” he went on, “the rules say you’re not supposed to cover up your credentials like this.”
It took a moment to register. My thoughts, and my heart, and my soul, were still hanging on those pictures.
“Hello?” he said. “Detective Becker?”
I snapped back to the moment. I stared at him, suddenly so angry I wanted to kick his teeth down his throat. “You don’t know me,” I said, and I did not slur my words. Not one bit. “Don’t ever think you have the right to talk about my family.”
He studied me for a moment, frowning, then let the matter go with a shrug.
He put the rest of my things down on the hood. “You won’t be allowed to keep this Swiss Army knife. It’ll have to go in the Property Room along with your handgun.”
I didn’t respond. At the time it didn’t occur to me that the Rules and Regulations required him to call a uniformed sergeant to the scene to seize an arrested officer’s weapon, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I just looked away, my anger still at a boil.
“Of course, there is another option.”
That got my attention.
“You’ve had a rough time of it lately, haven’t you? What’s it been, a year since the crash?”
Exactly a year, actually. Two days from now, Friday, marked the one-year anniversary of the death of my wife and two children. One year, I thought. It sounded like a long time, but it still hurt like it was yesterday.
No, scratch that. It hurt even worse.
Every day was a fucking hellhole without them. And lately, with the one-year anniversary looming, it’d been absolute murder.
I couldn’t drink enough vodka to make the loneliness go away.
I didn’t tell him that, though. It’s a common police interview tactic to suggest that you know more than you’re supposed to know. A lot of times, at least with the inexperienced offenders, dropping a few informed guesses and passing them off as concrete evidence is enough to get them to take the bait. But I wasn’t buying it. Drunk as I was, I’d been doing the suspect interview thing for a long time. Maybe even longer than this boot had been on the job. News of what happened to my family was more or less common knowledge around the Department. A cop loses his wife and kids in a hit-and-run accident, word gets around. I didn’t begrudge him knowing my business, but I wanted to strangle him for trying to use it as leverage against me.
He organized my belongings on the hood of his car. He was meticulous the way he laid everything out, all my credit cards in one column, my pictures in another, my money in still a third. He counted my cash twice, out loud both times.
“Sixty-three dollars,” he said. “Do you agree?”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”
He ignored my question. “I’ll take your silence as an agreement to my count. Your cash will be in the Property Room once you bond out. Do you understand?”
“Guy, the only thing I understand right now is how much I want to kick your ass.”
The smile never left his face.
“Okay then, sixty-three dollars it is.”
I watched him make notes to himself in his pocket notebook. “Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m Officer Robinson, badge number three eighty-three.”
“I can see that, asshole. I mean who are you? Why are you doing this to a fellow cop? Do you have any idea the kind of retribution that’s gonna come down on you? No one is going to cover you on your calls. You get into trouble, nobody is going to put down their hamburger and run Code Three to bail you out. No one will sit next to you at roll call. You’ll become a pariah. You arrest me, you end both our careers.”
“Does any of that change the fact that you have sixty-three dollars in cash in your property?”
I stared at him, utterly dumbfounded. “No,” I said.
“Okay then, do you want to know to how to make all this disappear?”
My eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Robinson reached into his shirt pocket and took out an expensive-looking cream-colored business card. He put it on the fender.
LIMBUS, Inc.
Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?
Call us. We employ.
1-800-555-0606
How lucky do you feel?
“What’s that?” I said.
“Exactly what it looks like. An opportunity.”
I looked at the card again. How lucky do you feel? I didn’t like the sound of that. “If you have a point, you should make it.”
“Okay. In addition to the San Antonio Police Department, I represent Limbus, Inc. Sort of my off-duty job, you know? Limbus is an employment agency. People come to us with jobs that need doing and we find the right person to do that job. And we’ve got a job for you.”
“I already have a job.”
/> He gestured toward the door that led into the Mag’s Office. “Not after I take you in there you don’t.”
Somewhere along the way a shred of sobriety came back to me. Maybe it was the car ride. Maybe it was this new twist he was giving me. I wasn’t sure either way, but I did know the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.
About four or five months into my first year as a patrolman, a group of eight San Antonio police officers got caught up in an FBI sting operation. They were paid a pittance, a few thousand dollars each, to escort what they thought were drug shipments through the city. Turns out it was sheetrock ground up to look like cocaine. The eight were arrested and dragged through the mud on the news, but it was a huge disgrace for everybody wearing the uniform. I was working the day the news broke, and I happened to be going to lunch at a Taco Bell when I heard some sixteen-year-old peckerwood in line behind me tell his girlfriend, in the loudest stage whisper he could muster, “Did you hear about those eight San Antonio cops who got busted dealing drugs? Didn’t I tell you all those guys are corrupt?”
It put my blood to boil hearing that. I wanted to pop that kid across the mouth. Instead, I forced myself to stay calm. To think about the integrity and honor I’d learned at the Academy.
I did the same thing then, while staring at Officer Robinson.
“If you’re about to ask me to do something illegal then just lead me inside. I won’t ever soil my badge by doing something illegal.”
“You mean except for driving drunk?” he said. His smile grew wider. “I mean, you know, except for that.”
I looked down at the hood of his car, at the Limbus, Inc. business card and the rest of my belongings spread out on display. My mouth was set in a frown. I wanted to lash out at him; I wanted to lash out at the whole world, but instead, I focused on controlling my breathing. A slow pull in, a slow exhalation out.
After a long moment I said, “Just take me inside and be done with it.”
His smile faded. I thought I saw pity on his face, and that pissed me off. I looked down at my feet and tried to breathe.
“You deserve better,” Robinson said. “You deserve better than to drown yourself in vodka. You were a good cop once, and you can be again. I know how bizarre this must sound to you, believe me I do, but what we’re offering you is a good thing. And I can assure you there’s nothing illegal about this deal. In fact, if, in the course of doing this job, you come across anything illegal or even unethical, you should consider yourself free from your relationship with Limbus, Inc. and encouraged to make whatever arrests you see fit.”
I didn’t say a word, just went on staring at my feet.
“Really,” he said, and leaned against the fender of his patrol car. The scar across the bridge of his broken nose looked pale under the sodium vapor lights. “You’ll find nothing illegal in what we’re asking you to do,” he said again. “I promise you that. In fact, you might just save a life.”
I didn’t trust him. I’ve been a cop for seventeen years. I’ve learned to trust my gut when it tells me something is not right, and my senses were telling me that something was very wrong here. My mind kept turning back to that image I’d seen in his takedown lights, that slowly rotating globe with the belt of stars around its waist, and I couldn’t help the feeling that it was familiar somehow, like I was supposed to know what it was. It was that vague sense of familiarity that kept me from telling him I wasn’t interested.
He caught me looking at his lightbar and said, “Something on your mind?”
“Why me?” I asked.
His eyebrows went up and his smile grew even wider. “You’re interesting,” he said. “That’s not why Limbus picked you. That’s just a personal observation. Here I’ve been talking all around this job we’re offering you, and you haven’t once asked what it is. Rather, you go to the more important question of why you. I find that interesting.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“True. And you won’t get an answer. Not from me, anyway. But I can tell you that Limbus, Inc. has a special knack for pairing up available talent to do the job at hand. Nothing Limbus does is random. You were picked because you’re the right man for this job. That’s really all you need to know. And, really, it’s all you’ll be told.”
“So what’s the job?”
“You’ll find that on the back of that business card. There’s a name written there. We need you to find that man.”
“And do what?”
“Nothing. We just need you to find the man whose name is written there. Do that, and the job is finished.”
“What’s going to happen to the man once I find him?”
“I’ve already told you, nothing illegal. I will tell you this, though. There is some sense of urgency to this job. There are others looking for this man, and when they find him, they won’t bother with questions of legality. They have their own brand of justice.”
“People are trying to kill this guy?”
“I told you, doing this just might save a life.”
“So…what happens next?”
“I let you go.”
“No DWI?”
“And you get to keep your job. Consider it half your payment. An advance, if you will.”
“Half my payment?”
“Limbus pays very well. Not always in cash, but always very well.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
He shrugged.
“How do you know I just won’t walk away from here?”
Robinson nodded like he’d guessed I was going to ask that. The scar across the bridge of his broken nose seemed to shine. “It’s like I told you,” he said. “Limbus, Inc. has a knack for finding the right person to do the job at hand. You won’t walk away. You’ll want to finish this job once you get started.”
And with that, he turned me around and undid the cuffs.
Still facing away from him, I rubbed my aching wrists and thought of laying him out with a punch. I had forty pounds and about three inches on him. Wouldn’t be that hard.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Robinson said, and I could just picture the chuckle that went along with his smile. “I was a Golden Gloves champ for the San Antonio Area Conference from the time I was sixteen till I was nineteen. Chances are I’d knock you on your ass before you landed a single punch.”
Fuck it, I thought, and spun around on him with a half-cocked roundhouse ready to fly.
A moment later, with two hard left jabs to my ribs and a right-handed uppercut to my chin, he made good on his promise.
Stunned to find myself on the ground, and unable to work my legs, I watched as he swept my belongings from the hood of his car, got behind the wheel, and drove off. When at last I could move again, I crawled on my hands and knees toward the business card and read the name written there in red ink.
I shook my head in disbelief.
For all the buildup, I’d expected some big name, somebody famous, somebody I’d recognize.
Instead I found the name Gary Harper printed there in a firm, masculine script.
I spit blood on the ground and rubbed my aching jaw. It felt like I’d taken a bite out of my tongue. But the name had me in a state of disconnect. How many Gary Harpers were there in the world? Probably a hundred or more in the San Antonio area alone. And with no identifiers, no race or date of birth or last known address, what he was asking of me sounded even more absurd than when he’d first described it to me.
Yeah, I thought, fuck this. Robinson and his Limbus crew could kiss my ass.
*
The downtown substation is right next door to the Mag’s Office. I went there and used their locker room to shower and try to look presentable again.
I halfway managed it.
On the way out, I found a patrolman I knew and he gave me a ride over to Headquarters. I sat through roll call in a haze, turned down offers to join the guys for breakfast, and went back to my desk with a case of acid indigestion that made me
feel like somebody had tried to scrape the inside of my throat with a metal barbeque grill brush.
At my desk I fired up my computer and ran the Active Duty Officer Database to see what I could learn about Officer Robinson. He’d said Limbus, Inc. wasn’t into anything illegal, but I didn’t buy that for a second, and the fact that I couldn’t find any Officer Robinson working for the Department only confirmed my suspicions. He’d no doubt used an alias, which wouldn’t be all that hard to do. Go to any cop shop and you can buy the needed indicia of authority to pretend you’re a cop.
But it did make me wonder how he had managed to target me the way he did.
Surely he hadn’t just happened upon me.
I’d been asleep at that light for probably an hour, maybe longer. Had he been watching me, waiting for the right moment to approach me?
That bothered me a lot.
I went to Google and tried to find information on Limbus, Inc., but that was a dead end, too. I tried the FBI’s Online Law Enforcement Database and the SEC’s Law Enforcement Online Directory for strikes two and three. The company didn’t seem to exist, at least under that name.
I took out the business card and looked it over. At first I thought Limbus spelled backwards was SUBLIM, which might be short for subliminal. It was weak, but maybe. I tried that and was asked if I meant SUBLIME instead. I didn’t. Then I realized I’d transposed a letter. SUBMIL seemed less intriguing.
The other references for Limbus were to a hotel and a CGI studio, both out of France.
Neither seemed likely.
I did find that the word “limbus” meant something in Latin. In anatomy it meant the border between one part of the body and another, like in your eye where the cornea changes to the white part.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 14