Killer Swell

by Jeff Shelby

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, you’re not, Noah,” she said. “You’re never sorry.”

  “Well, this time I am.”

  “Whoop-de-doo.”

  We passed the old Rohr Industries plant, across the way from where Ernie said he’d found me. I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask him more about the phone call he’d received and how to find me. It was starting to sink in how lucky I was to be alive.

  “I got some information,” I said.

  “I could not care less.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I told you not to go near Costilla,” she said, glancing at me, her disgust apparent. “You ignored me. And now I’m the one taking shit for it.”

  I felt the car speed up, her anger moving into the gas pedal.

  “I had to go see him, Liz,” I told her.

  “No, you didn’t,” she shot back. “You needed to talk to me first.”

  “Why? So you could’ve told me to stay away again?”

  She shook her head. “Look, I didn’t bust you on San Ysidro or the thing with Carter and leaving the scene. In fact, I defended you and kept everybody off of you. And in return you go behind my back and do the one thing I asked you not to do.”

  It was like being chastised by a parent.

  It worked.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Whatever,” she said, waving a hand in the air, ending the conversation.

  We drove the rest of the way to the station in silence. She cuffed me loosely before we got out of the car and helped me up the stairs to the building.

  She took me down a flight of stairs, past the processing office, and waved at a short, thick uniformed officer at a desk. He stood quickly and walked with us. We made a couple of turns until we came to a quiet hallway with several empty cells.

  “What are you charging me with?” I asked.

  “Being an asshole,” Liz said. “You’ve been guilty for a long time.”

  The officer stopped in front of the first cell and unlocked it as Liz removed my handcuffs.

  “You can’t just keep me here.”

  “Watch me.”

  “I get a phone call then,” I said, as the guard opened the empty cell.

  Liz nodded. “In a little bit.”

  She put her hand in the small of my back and guided me in.

  “Not in a little bit,” I said. “Now.”

  The cell door clanged shut, and I turned around. Liz had her hands wrapped around the outside of the bars. She nodded to the guard, and he disappeared down the hall.

  “I’ll get you your phone call,” she said. “How about you tell me what you think you learned.”

  “You wanna let me out of here?”

  “Not particularly,” she said, smiling. “This is the most attractive you’ve looked to me in a long time.”

  “Then screw you.”

  “You did that and it wasn’t much to rave about,” she said, the smile getting wider. She was clearly enjoying this position. “You don’t wanna talk then?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  She shrugged. “Fine with me.”

  Standing in a jail cell to call my own, I felt dumb, frustrated, and tired. Her explanation of what she’d let me get away with to this point had hit home. I’d been way outside the lines and she’d basically covered for me. I’d made her look bad by getting near Costilla again. I couldn’t blame her for being angry with me.

  She turned to go.

  “He knew, Liz,” I said.

  She stopped. “Who?”

  “Costilla.”

  “He knew what?”

  I turned and walked over to the bench next to the wall and sat down gingerly. She may have been right, but it didn’t mean I liked being locked up.

  “You figure it out,” I said.

  I heard her shoes click down the hallway.

  39

  “Braddock. Get up.”

  The voice startled me, and I opened my eyes. I’d laid down on the bench and dozed off. As I tried to sit up, the stiffness in my joints and muscles slowed me. If the aspirin Ernie had given me had kicked in, I wasn’t feeling it.

  Detective John Wellton was standing outside the cell. He wore an olive-green dress shirt, tan slacks, and a silver tie.

  “Having a good time?” he asked.

  “The best.” I managed to push myself to an upright position, but my back was arguing that it wasn’t a great idea. “Where’s Liz?”

  “Trying to explain to the lieutenant why she’s got a private dick locked up down here with no charges filed,” he said, frowning.

  “Am I out of here then?” I asked.

  “In a minute,” he said, leaning back against the bars of the cell behind him. “Listen to me for a second, okay?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I don’t know what’s between you and Liz,” he said anyway. “And I could give a shit. But she’s covering your ass left and right and seems to care that you don’t die. Me, I think it would be easier if you were dead.”

  I stood up and walked awkwardly over to the front of the cell.

  “And you know what she gets for all her hard work? Nothing. A fucking headache, maybe, but not much else,” Wellton said. “You run around, pretending to be a tough guy and all, and she ends up picking up behind you. She wants the same thing you do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He stepped toward my cell door. “To find out who killed your friend, you dumbass. You think she doesn’t feel guilty about what happened to her? You think it’s not keeping her up at night? Jesus. Everyone keeps telling me you’re a pain in the ass but a smart guy. Well, I see the first part, but I have yet to see the second.”

  His words hung between us, as heavy as the iron bars I was holding on to.

  “Why do you care?” I asked, not having anything else to say that seemed worthwhile. “I mean, about her.”

  “Because she’s my friend,” he said. “And she’s my partner. You think it’s easy being partnered with a black guy the size of a sixth grader? She’s never said shit about it and never taken any shit from anyone about it. I mean, they tried to give her shit, but she wouldn’t have any of it.” He paused, staring at me. “I’d go to the wall for her because I know she’d go at least that far for me.”

  I slowly began to feel like that guy in the cartoon where his head morphs into that of a jackass. I could feel the buck teeth and long ears sprouting.

  “Get her,” I said. “I’ll tell her what I know.”

  Wellton pointed at me. “Goddamn right you will. And then you’ll stay the hell out of her way. And mine. Because if you don’t, I’m going to make it so that the only thing I care about is seeing you go down.”

  He stalked away, his angry footsteps echoing down the hall.

  40

  A guard came to the cell and escorted me to a conference room down the hall from the cells. I sat there for about fifteen minutes, staring at my hands, before Liz came in.

  “Before we start, I want to get something straight,” she said, sitting down in the chair on the other side of the table. “If you want to play around, I don’t—”

  I held my hand up, interrupting her. “I’m done messing around. I promise.”

  She studied me for a moment. “You just said you promised.”

  I nodded. “I did. And I mean it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, leaning back in the chair. “I know you do.”

  When it comes to women, I’m admittedly not too hot in the communication department. I don’t especially like to talk about serious things or philosophical situations. They make me uncomfortable. When Liz and I were together and we did talk about those things, Liz sometimes doubted whether I was being honest with her. When she wanted the truth out of me, she made me say, “I promise.” I had never once compromised that understanding between us and didn’t intend to do that now.

  “Costilla knows you’re watching him,” I said.

  She frown
ed. “No way.”

  “He said that he did. Does.”

  “Why’d he tell you that?”

  “Because I asked him if he killed Kate,” I said. “He said he didn’t, that he was using her to feed information to you guys.”

  Liz squinted at me. “Maybe he said that because he didn’t want to admit to her murder.”

  I laughed. “I was patted down twice. They knew I wasn’t wired and had no weapon. He could’ve killed me if he wanted to. He wasn’t lying to me, Liz. No reason to.”

  “Guy like that doesn’t need a reason to lie. It’s what he does.”

  “Okay. Did anything that you heard via Kate pan out? Meetings, deals, locations?”

  Her eyes fluttered, and she looked away. I knew she was running the possibilities through her head.

  “He told me the truth,” I said. “I’d bet everything I have on it.”

  She leaned her elbows on the table. “Maybe. What else?”

  I told her about how I was picked up in TJ and tried to describe where we’d met, and about Costilla’s missing money.

  She tapped her index finger on the table. “She took that money, he killed her.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Costilla planned on killing her. But someone else got to her first. Which leaves us with two questions. Why did she take the money, and who killed her?”

  “Another deal on the side that went bad,” Liz suggested.

  “Could be,” I said. “I feel like I’m chasing a person I never met.”

  She smiled briefly. “In a way, you hadn’t met her. She wasn’t the Kate we knew in high school.”

  “Not even close, apparently. Can I ask a question?”

  “Might not answer it.”

  “Why was she inside, Liz?” I asked, looking for what seemed like one of the biggest missing pieces. “I’m just not seeing it.”

  She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. I knew she was trying to decide whether she could trust me. I stayed quiet and hoped that what I’d told her so far had counted for something.

  “She fit,” she said finally. “She was a big-time user, Noah. She may not have looked like it, but she was. She knew the lingo, she knew what to look for, and she knew how to get close to the big guns. And she came to us.”

  “Isn’t that unusual, though? Put a civilian in a spot like that, even with her history?”

  She folded her hands on the table. “Maybe. But the DA knew about our operation, knew that she needed a deal, and knew that if it worked, he’d get some credit for brokering it.”

  “So it wasn’t just for her to get off with probation, then?” I said. “It was political, too.”

  She spread her hands out in front of her. “Isn’t everything?”

  I shook my head, angry. “I guess.”

  “Noah, still. She put herself in the situation,” Liz said, leaning across the table. “You carry that much heroin, you’re asking for trouble. She wasn’t innocent.”

  I considered telling her about my conversation with Ken Crier, then thought better of it. I knew the cop in Liz would be skeptical that Kate would’ve taken the blame for her husband.

  “She didn’t deserve to die, though,” I said.

  “No,” Liz agreed. “She didn’t.” She reached into the breast pocket of her blouse, produced a small strip of paper, and slid it across the table to me.

  “What’s this?” The strip was wrinkled and torn at the corners. I unfolded it. CHARLOTTE T. was written on it.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Thought maybe you could figure it out. It was in the car with Kate’s body, wadded up in the backseat. Scratch paper, most likely. Thought it was just trash at first.” She paused. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

  I stared at it and tried to decide if it was Kate’s handwriting. I had no way of knowing.

  Liz leaned across the table again. “The only way her murder is going to be solved is if you keep poking around. Everyone here and at DEA wants it quiet. They’re content to blame it on Costilla.”

  I looked at her. “You don’t think he did it then?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m just saying, if someone else did do it, it won’t be anyone around here that figures it out. I still think Costilla probably did it. It makes sense, no matter what he told you.”

  “I don’t think so, Liz.”

  She stood and walked toward the door. “Then prove it.”

  41

  I found the Blazer out front, courtesy of Liz having it towed. I headed straight for the hospital to see Carter.

  It surprised me that Liz had shared as much with me as she had. She took her work seriously and, most of the time, didn’t take me too seriously. Telling me about the politics involved and handing me that scrap of paper weren’t things that she normally did. It felt like we’d cleared a small hurdle in our relationship.

  I took my time moving up the highway toward UCSD, staring aimlessly at the lights on Fiesta Island and Mission Bay as I moved by. I wanted nothing more than to take the exit at Grand, head straight west toward the water, grab my board, and hide from all of the crap that had entered my life by riding the water until my body went numb.

  But I knew that I couldn’t, so I passed the exit at Grand and tried not to think about it.

  Carter’s eyes widened when I walked into his room.

  “Did you fall out of a building?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” I said, pulling what I’d started thinking of as my own personal chair next to the bed.

  “What the hell happened?”

  I sat down in the chair and told him about my visit with Costilla.

  “You said you wouldn’t do that without me,” he said when I finished.

  “I forgot,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Surgery was fine. I’m ready to go.” He looked at me. “Jesus, I look better than you.”

  I rubbed my bruised cheek. “Thanks.”

  “Listen to me next time.”

  “When are you out of here?”

  He dropped his head back on the pillow and heaved a pissed off, exasperated sigh. “Two days is what the doc said. I’m gonna push him on it, though.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “They know better than you do when you’re ready to go home.” I pulled the paper Liz had given me out of my pocket. “Here’s something to keep you occupied.” I handed it to him.

  He let it rest in his palm. “I get shot and this is what you bring me?”

  “Shut up. Liz gave it to me.”

  He raised an eyebrow, surprised. “The Ice Queen gave you something other than the finger?”

  “We made peace.”

  He looked back at the paper. “‘Charlotte.’ The city?”

  “What about the T?”

  “I don’t know. Where’d Liz get it?”

  “The car they found Kate in.”

  “The ‘T’ could be an initial,” he said, running his finger over the paper, trying to smooth it out.

  “A last name,” I said. “That’s my guess.”

  “What does Liz think it is?”

  I shook my head. “She’s not sure. That’s why she gave it to me.”

  He handed it back. “That doesn’t sound like her.”

  I told him what she’d said about finding Kate’s killer.

  “Still,” Carter said. “Doesn’t sound like Liz.”

  “I think the guilt is working her over pretty good.”

  “I suppose,” he said. “But a crappy piece of paper that may have been just trash isn’t much.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s not. But at least it’s something.”

  The door to the room opened, and an older nurse with a gray afro stuck her head in. “Visiting hours end in five minutes, gentlemen.”

  I waved at her, and Carter made a face.

  She smiled and shut the door.

  I stood up. “I’m gonna head out. I’ll come see you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Don’t knock yourself o
ut over this, Noah,” he said, a note of caution in his voice.

  “What? The paper?”

  “That and everything else. It’s not worth getting the shit kicked out of you. Again.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, tugging at the blankets that barely covered his long frame. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to see Costilla.”

  I turned toward the door.

  “Even if you figure this out,” Carter continued, “what’s gonna happen? Ken and Marilyn are going to give you a fat check? I know you could care less about that. Kate’s not gonna be able to say thank you. No matter what you find out.” He paused. “It won’t bring her back.”

  I waved at him and left.

  42

  Carter’s words stung me.

  I didn’t think I was doing this to make amends for Kate, but maybe I was fooling myself. The police and the government didn’t want it solved. In all likelihood, even if Kate’s murder was solved, it was going to be done quietly. They would prefer that Costilla did it because it gave them one more thing to hang on him. I still wasn’t convinced, and I kept turning everything over in my mind until I pulled up to Emily’s.

  I wasn’t quite sure why I’d gone to her place. I tried telling myself that it was because I wanted to ask her more about her sister and Randall and also to see if she knew anything about the piece of paper Liz had given me. But, somewhere, in the recesses of my brain, I knew it was because I needed to settle whatever had happened between us.

  I parked my car in front of her garage and walked up the stairs. I was getting used to the stiffness and soreness that permeated my body. I tried to pretend it was from a really difficult workout. And if that workout had included being used as a heavy bag, maybe my body would’ve bought it.

  I pressed the illuminated button next to her door. After a moment, I heard her muffled voice, then footsteps. The door opened, and she stuck her head out. “Noah.”

  “Hey.”