Strip

by Thomas Perry

  “Hey, you know, I’m not some kind of gangster. I’m a victim.”

  She shrugged. “When one of you shoots, the other one is a victim. Next time you’ll get to shoot, and he’ll be a victim.”

  “I’m hurting bad.”

  “Sure. You got shot.”

  “Can’t you get me something?”

  She stepped in, looked at his chart, and allowed a bit of compassion to show in her eyes. “I’ll get you something.” She hurried out.

  He wasn’t sure if he had dozed off for a few seconds waiting for her or if she had shot him up, but he woke, and it wasn’t as bad. But then the door filled with the shape of a man. Guzman said in Spanish, “Hey, my friend. Thanks for coming back.”

  An unfamiliar voice said in flat, toneless English, “I’m not your friend.” He stepped close to Guzman’s bed. “I’m Lieutenant Slosser, LAPD.”

  “Did you catch them?”

  “Not yet, but we’re looking. You and I need to talk a little.”

  “I talked to the cops a while ago, and so did my friend. I told them everything, just the way it happened.”

  “Yeah. You did fine. Nobody is saying you lied about it. But they didn’t ask you about what happened to your guns, and where the keys are for the car you took to the bank.”

  “I don’t own any guns.”

  “I see. And the car?”

  “They must have took my keys after I went down. They were thieves.”

  “So there wasn’t a third guy with you who took the guns and split so the police wouldn’t find them?”

  “No.”

  Slosser was tall, with square shoulders and thick arms, so his body looked younger than his face. One of his big hands touched Guzman’s temple and Guzman reflexively pulled away and turned his head, so his tattoo was visible. Slosser nodded to himself. “You and Corona are the last of the Mohicans, huh?”

  “Mohicans?”

  “The last two from your gang. The Sombres.”

  “We are.”

  “I remember that. It must be what? Eighteen years? I was working up in Devonshire then, but that night they called every division for extra men. So I’ve seen a lot of tattoos like that one, but until tonight, not on anybody alive.”

  “I got shot, and I don’t feel so good. Is there some reason why you want to talk about eighteen years ago?”

  “Maybe. It explains what your doctor gave us for a preliminary report—that you have three other bullet scars.”

  “He didn’t look hard enough. I got four.”

  “I’ll correct the record in case we have to identify your body sometime.” He stared into Guzman’s eyes. “How long have you worked for Manco Kapak?”

  “About five years.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “Security. We check IDs, protect the talent, bounce the guys that get crazy, take money to the bank, that kind of stuff”

  “And you drove the car to the bank. That means Corona carried the money, right?”

  “I’m finding it hard to remember. I think he had it this time and I drove, but that could have been last time. You should ask him. He didn’t get shot or anything. He’ll remember.”

  Slosser didn’t move his eyes from Guzman. “When I found out who you are, it occurred to me that maybe I could talk to you. Of all the people involved in this, you and Corona have the best reason to know that getting into a war is a bad idea. If you know who did this to you tonight, I’d like you to tell me. I’ll do my best to protect you and your friends from whatever is happening. It won’t be you and a dozen friends against a hundred this time. It will be nine thousand cops against them.”

  “Why would you give a shit about Manco Kapak?”

  “I don’t care about him in particular. But I’m a cop, and I can’t have people getting shot down on my streets. I don’t want him dead or you dead, and I don’t want either of you shooting anybody else. So if you know anything else about the robbery, I’d like to hear it.”

  “I told you everything I know. The thing happened so fast I was down before I saw anything much. It was a guy with a mask over his head and a gun. Then behind us there’s this girl, and she opened up and hit me with her first round, and I was out of it—didn’t see, didn’t care. The pain just took me.”

  “Okay,” Slosser said. “I’m leaving my card on the table. If something comes back, call me.”

  “Joe Carver.”

  “What?”

  “Joe Carver,” said Guzman.

  “Who is he?”

  “Just a name. There’s a rumor that he was the one who robbed Manco. People say he’s the one. I don’t know if you can find him. But what happened tonight was almost the same, except for the girl. She’s new.”

  Slosser patted Guzman’s shoulder. “You did the right thing to tell me. I’ll see what we’ve got on him, and what we can find out. You talked to me, so I’ll talk to you. I’ll let you know what I get. Don’t be in a hurry to get out of the hospital for now. There’s nothing out there that you’d like, and nothing you can do.”

  Slosser walked out of the room. After a few minutes, Guzman began to wonder whether he had imagined him. Guzman was so tired, so completely used up by this long, hard day, that he knew he was slipping in and out of consciousness. He remembered now that the nurse had returned and added something to his IV. Or maybe that was a dream too.

  He floated in the bright morning sunlight to the chicken yard outside his little house in the village in Guatemala. He could feel the sun’s warmth on his back and his neck as he squatted in the dust tossing feed to the chickens. Their copper bodies and emerald green tail feathers and bright scarlet combs glowed in the morning light. The world seemed so beautiful, and so safe.

  12

  JOE CARVER FELT good in Kapak’s guesthouse, his sense of well-being dramatically improved by the fact that he was resting in comfort unseen within two hundred feet of his enemies. He wasn’t completely sold on the style that Manco Kapak had chosen—or more likely, just paid a decorator for—to furnish his guesthouse. There was a heaviness to it. The sideboards, dressers, and nightstands all had a curvy line to them, so they were narrow at the top, then widened like bass fiddles, and then went inward again near the bottom to sprout legs. Carver couldn’t name the style, but his prime suspects were the French. Being in a room with that furniture was like standing in a crowd of elderly, fat women dressed in pastels. But he liked the bones of the house—the solidity of the doors and placement of the windows.

  The guesthouse had a very good shower in the bathroom, and the linen closets had a generous supply of soft, thick towels. If he had wanted to cook, the kitchen would have been more than adequate for a dinner party. The living room had a big set of bookcases, but Kapak’s decorator had chosen to fill them with questionable Chinese pottery to play off the view of the bamboo through the windows on this side. Like all the pottery he’d seen in southern California, it was stuck in place by a gummy puttylike substance intended to hold it still in an earthquake.

  Carver had studied everything closely. There was no dust on the pottery, no scent of unwanted moisture in the shower that might cause mildew. At some point during the week, the place must be visited by a serious cleaning service, so he wouldn’t be able to really move in and live here. He would have to sleep somewhere safer. This could only be a forward observation post he could use to watch his enemies.

  This evening, he had lain down in his clothes and dozed off on the big couch in the den. Now he was lying on the couch slowly returning to full consciousness. Suddenly, he was surprised by the sound of an engine. He opened the shutter to see a moving glow of headlights on the far side of the house. He watched two more sets shoot into the sky as the cars came up the driveway, then lower as they reached flat pavement.

  He moved quietly through the living room and out to the yard. He assumed that Kapak came home late every night from his clubs. But something more must be going on tonight. He walked up toward the main house along the narrow path th
rough the bamboo grove.

  He emerged from the bamboo and stepped quietly through the tropical garden to the side of the house, trying to listen for voices but not hearing anything through the closed doors and windows. He kept moving until he was beyond the edge of the tropical garden, where he could see in the large back window.

  Kapak walked across the room, his hair curly black and wild tonight. It looked as though he had been tearing at it. He went to the bar, poured himself three fingers of vodka, drank some too fast, coughed, and put the glass down on the bar. When he called, “Spence!” it was loud enough for Carver to hear through the glass.

  The man who came in from another room was thin and seemed to be about three inches taller than Kapak, but still shorter than the big Russian, Voinovich, who arrived after him. Spence was wearing his sport coat open, so Carver could see the butt of a pistol protruding from the inner pocket. Kapak shouted, “Everybody get in here.” Men began to walk into the room.

  Carver started to move toward the next, unlit window. He hurried to the French doors outside the living room, used his knife to flip the latch upward, and opened it a half-inch so he could hear.

  “All right,” Kapak said. “So, Jerry. You got there and the guy in the ski mask asked for the bag. Did he seem to know who you were?”

  “I couldn’t tell. He just said to give him the bag. I said there were three of us and one of him. He said ‘Look behind you,’ and I did. It’s this girl, and she opens up and hits Guzman. Corona goes down next. I toss the guy the bag, and the two of them run around their corner of the building. Nobody said names or anything.”

  Kapak said, “You know what was in that bag. I lost thirty-eight thousand to these two tonight. In two tries they got about sixty-one thousand just for waiting around the bank at three in the morning.”

  “You think this was the same guy—Joe Carver?”

  The sound of his own name jolted Carver. What did they think he’d done? It sounded as though somebody had taken more of Kapak’s money.

  “It could be,” said Kapak. “Or somebody else who just read in the paper that people are stupid enough to make deposits at three A.M. How do I know? But I’m going to put a stop to these night deposits beginning now. Each night we’ll put all the cash in a safe until daytime. We’ll leave that son of a bitch waiting at the night deposit forever.”

  Spence said, “I think you shouldn’t stop sending people to the bank. You can stop sending money with them.”

  “There’s an idea,” said Kapak. “We’ve got one guy thinking, anyway. We’ve got to keep trying to get this robber, but we don’t have to keep losing money.”

  “I’d like to be on that one,” Jerry Gaffney said. “All we’d have to do is have a couple of guys in that parking structure before he gets there, and then send in the guys with the fake deposit.”

  “But you wouldn’t want to be the one holding the bag again, would you?” Spence asked.

  “No, I think it’s your turn.”

  Kapak waved his hand in front of his face as though to clear away the irrelevant chatter. “Who was it in the first place who said Joe Carver was the one who robbed me?”

  Jimmy Gaffney said, “We were all asking around for two, three weeks, and two different girls mentioned him. They said he had arrived in L.A. about a month before, didn’t say much about where he came from, and he was in the habit of spending a lot of cash. They said he might be the one. Nobody said anybody else might be.”

  “Who are the girls?”

  “Just regular girls we met. One is named Sandy Belknap, and we met her in a club. The other is Sonia Rivers. We found her in line waiting to get into a concert at the Roxy.”

  “So you don’t really know either of them.”

  “No. We were just asking around, giving out cards. Jerry and I said we were private detectives working for the bank. We took their names and numbers.”

  “I can’t believe you two sometimes,” said Voinovich.

  “You can find them again?”

  “Sure,” said Jerry Gaffney.

  “Good. I want an update on Carver. Have they heard from him or seen him since the last time? Find out where he is and what he’s doing. If you need it, take a thousand each from the jar on the bookcase and take them out to dinner and all that.”

  “We’ll get on it.”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Morning?”

  “I meant when you wake up. Go get some sleep.”

  Jerry and Jimmy Gaffney stopped at the big urn on the shelf in the hallway. Jimmy reached in and brought his hand out with some money. He counted it as they walked outside and closed the door.

  Voinovich said, “Do you think he robbed himself?”

  Kapak shook his head. “I could believe he did it. But Guzman wouldn’t let himself be shot in the leg for a third of thirty-eight grand. That’s not even thirteen thousand bucks. The hospital bill just for tonight should top that.”

  “I guess that’s right. So what do you want me to do?”

  “Tonight we’ll let the cops try to solve this for us. Corona is still hanging around the hospital to keep Guzman company. Give him a call tomorrow and we’ll get him to tell us what he thinks happened in the robbery.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. See you tomorrow.”

  Voinovich turned and went toward the door. As he passed out of the living room to the entry, he ducked his head to get through the doorway.

  The only ones left now were Kapak and Spence. “Tomorrow you and I will make an arrangement with one of the armored car companies.”

  “Maybe they’ll have some kind of deal to lease safes for Siren and Temptress that they open and close, so we’re not responsible.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Kapak. “I don’t want a bunch of strangers to have the combination. There’s a pretty good safe in Siren. We can use that for now.”

  “Whatever you want to do about money, it shouldn’t involve any of us carrying it around in cash. That’s primitive.”

  “Cash is an opportunity, and it’s a problem. We just have to handle it right. Do you have the videotapes from the clubs?”

  “They’re in the screening room. You want to see them now?”

  “I’ll take a look at them before I go to sleep. The bar receipts at Temptress looked a little light tonight. I want to see if the camera picked anything up.” He walked to the small room off the same hall as the master bedroom, inserted the first tape labeled “Temptress,” and then sat down on a big leather chair before he pressed the remote control and started the video. He pressed Fast Forward so the people on the big high-definition screen went back and forth in quick, jerky movements. At one point he slowed the action to normal speed and watched carefully. “Spence!”

  When Spence came in, he was rewinding the tape. “See something?”

  “Watch this.” He started the tape again, and the camera showed the second assistant bartender, a man named Coulton. “He’s making a drink. Gives it to the customer, takes the money. Rings it up. The register drawer opens. He makes change, hands it over. All okay so far. Now see the waitress? While he’s still at the register, she comes in with the money from a round of drinks. He takes her money, gives her change, and she goes away. He never closed the register after the first sale, so hers didn’t get rung up. He’s still got it in his hand. He closes the register and his hand goes to his pocket. You only have to do that a couple of times a night, and you’ve got an extra hundred bucks.”

  “Is that all he does?”

  “No. Near closing time, he’s running tabs for some of the guys at the bar. When a couple of them get up and go, they leave a big bill to cover it. He picks up two or three at a time and rings up one. It’s enough for me.”

  “You want me to have the manager do it?”

  “No. We’ll do it ourselves, Voinovich and me.”

  “Voinovich?”

  “Yeah. When this guy goes, I don’t want him thinking about talking to the cops about anyth
ing he saw, heard, or imagined, or to say something to the people who are still there. I want him to take a look at Voinovich and be really glad that he gets to leave at all.”

  “Want to look at more tapes?”

  “No, I’m going to bed. Lock the doors and windows and turn on the alarm.”

  Joe Carver closed the door he had opened and moved onto the path through the secluded garden. He would have to drive to a motel he’d found a couple of miles from here to think before he slept. Now that he knew what his enemies were doing, it was time to work out how to get rid of them.

  13

  CARRIE SAT in the lotus position on the bed and Jeff lay across from her with the pile of money dumped on the sheet between them. The rules at the start were that one of them would pick out a hundred-dollar bill and say “A hundred,” and the other would take a hundred-dollar bill and put it at his side. But now they had gone through most of the big bills, and they were down to saying “Twenty” or “Ten,” or even “Ten ones.”

  Carrie yawned. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m really getting tired of this.” She looked at the pile of money beside her, stood, and began stuffing it into a dresser drawer.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve got enough. You can have the rest.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. I didn’t come out tonight to make money. I wanted to have fun. More money than this doesn’t make it more fun.”

  “All right.” He stuffed the rest of the money back into the bag while she closed the dresser drawer and went into the bathroom. As soon as the door closed, he reached under the covers where he had been hiding bills since they had started, and stuffed those into the bag too.

  She came out of the bathroom, crawled onto the bed, and kissed him. “It’s really late.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is. Almost morning.”

  “This is the best date I ever had in my life. So much happened—we pulled a robbery and I shot some guys. We picked up some money, had sex about a million times.”