The sun was high, it was hot. I looked around, wheat fields and fences and farmhouses in every direction. I looked in the direction of the one the van with the Mexican man had been headed toward. Across two, three, four plots I could just see the house, a brown structure with white trim, in the distance. And now I could see a second structure, a barn, sitting behind it.
I leaned on the Passat, looking over its roof out into the fields. What next, what next?
I got back in and drove farther down the road I was on for about another mile, until I got to another intersection. I took a right, so I was now on the road that was behind, far behind, the farmhouse the van had gone to. I drove down this road, a lonely, desolate stretch, until I thought I’d be roughly behind the farmhouse, roughly in line with it. Two small houses sat right up close to the road, with small backyards that bordered the backs of the big farms. Just two little country houses that looked like they’d been there forever.
I drove three hundred yards past the houses, swung a U, and started heading back toward them. Twenty yards away, I pulled off the side of the road and tucked the Passat behind a wall of undergrowth.
And then I waited. Waited for the sun to drop.
When it did, it got dark, and I mean dark. The little houses up a couple hundred yards or so emanated some light, but not much. And there were no streetlights, and just a sliver of moon up in the sky. I unzipped my carry bag. I changed into a black long-sleeved shirt to go with my black pants and black Adidas running shoes. I holstered my Colt on my belt and my Sig on my ankle. Then I put on a lightweight black windbreaker that zipped up the front. In the front right pocket of the windbreaker was a black ski mask. I left it there, for now.
I got out of the Passat and walked up the road to the two little houses, my markers—in line, across a big field, with the farmhouse I needed to go to. I quietly walked behind the first little house, then quietly climbed over the little wooden fence behind it. I stood there in the big field, in the waist-high wheat. I could see a distant light, and as I heard a distant dog bark, I headed toward it.
29
I walked fast and steadily across the field. The farmhouse, the lights on inside, and the dark barn behind it got bigger and bigger as I got closer and closer. When I was about three hundred yards out, I crouched down low, and stayed that way until I was at the edge of the property. Right at the edge, the field gave way to manicured grass. I stayed just inside the field, got down on my chest, parted the wheat, and looked around. The farmhouse was two stories, maybe four bedrooms, and well maintained, nice. Lights on both upstairs and down. The barn behind it sat in near-total darkness, but I could see, with my adjusting eyes, that it was in good shape too. There were no animals around, no livestock; maybe some horses in the barn, but I doubted it. There were two vehicles in a parking area between the house and the barn. The van and Graves’s Tesla.
I didn’t see any activity in the windows of the farmhouse, so I got up, still staying relatively low, and very quickly and quietly ran over to the house. Glued to it now, in a section of darkness between what appeared to be a lit kitchen window and a dark window next to it, maybe a bathroom. I took the black ski mask out of my front right pocket and put it on. Then, very slowly, I lifted my head up and looked through the kitchen window. A nice, remodeled farmhouse kitchen, but no one in it. I moved past the dark window to a big window with light coming out of it, on the same side of the house as the kitchen window I’d just looked through. I stood next to it, then very slowly moved my head over to look inside.
This is where they were. The dining room. Burgundy walls. A chandelier. An antique-looking rectangular dining-room table. At the table: Graves, the Mexican man, and another man I’d never seen before. A thin, pale, almost sick-looking older man with long gray hair. He wore what looked to be a blue velvet blazer and a crisp white shirt. He was at the head of the table, Graves on his left, the Mexican man on his right.
The three men were drinking red wine. Each man had a glass in front of him, and there were three bottles on the table. They were chatting, smiling, having a cordial conversation. But it didn’t look like everyone had an equal voice. The man with the long gray hair was doing most of the talking. And the body language of the other two suggested that they were giving him respect. Long Gray Hair was in charge.
I ducked out of the frame and moved down the side of the house, then across the front of it, then down the other side, looking in windows, taking in what I could quickly. The house was nice, high end, but not lived in. It looked fake. Like a set. Decorated to achieve an effect: a farmer who had done well. Dark colors, chunky wood furniture, big beige couches, a fireplace the size of a small country.
There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house. No aquariums either. Not a clarion angelfish or a Chinese high-fin anywhere.
I was back at the rear of the farmhouse now. I moved away from it and walked between the Tesla and the big empty van back to the barn, which sat twenty yards away, at the edge of the field I’d come through. There were no exterior lights on the barn, but the sliver of moon and the glowing farmhouse gave me enough light to operate.
I began to circle around it. There were three entrances. Front, side, back, all locked up tight. The windows were blacked out from the inside by a dark tarp. I went around to the side of the barn farthest from the house, where one of the entrances stood between a row of blacked-out windows.
I had my lockpicks with me, but the lock at this entrance, at every entrance, was above my skill set. Way too serious.
I looked along all the windows, at each window, until I found what I was looking for. The interior tarp blacking one of them out had stretched, was billowing a bit, giving me a little slice to look through.
I put my eye up to it but found only more darkness.
I pulled a mini Maglite flashlight out of my pocket. Where I was, I was pretty sure I could turn it on and not be seen. I clicked it on and shone its beam through the sliver in the tarp. I could see a section of the wall opposite me. Neatly lined up in rows were filled glass liquor bottles, looked like tequila bottles. Next to them were rows of opaque white plastic containers that might or might not have been filled with something, I couldn’t tell. I was only getting a partial view of what was there, but there had to be hundreds of bottles and hundreds of containers. And if there were as many on the other walls as there were on the wall that I could see, we could be talking thousands.
I clicked off the light and stood there in the darkness.
A dog barked. Maybe the dog I’d heard earlier as I’d walked into the field behind the little houses. The bark didn’t come from Graves’s property, sounded like it was coming from the field in the next farm over, maybe a hundred yards away. Was it reacting to me? Or was it just a dog doing its dog thing in a field behind a farm on a nearly moonless night?
It barked again. Then it stopped. Quiet again. Good.
I heard the back door of the farmhouse open and shut.
Shit.
I pulled away from the barn, quickly crossed the grass, and entered the chest-high field.
The light at the front of the barn went on. I dropped down to my chest, flat on the earth. The barn light was helping me hide. It put the areas outside its range in black contrast.
Still down on my chest, I made my way back a bit, just a bit, toward the barn, back to the edge of the high stuff, toward the patch of cut grass. My eyes were trained to my right, to the front quarter of the barn that I could see. A man stepped to the side of the barn and faced me. Two hundred feet away, a silhouette. Graves, for sure. He moved his head in a way that suggested that he was looking into the blackness, right toward me, like a bird zeroing in. Focusing. He pulled a gun sheathed between his belt and his back and held it at his side.
I pulled my Colt, held it out in front of me, pointed at Graves. He looked to his right and jerked his head. He was telling someone else, someone I couldn’t see, to make a move.
I pulled my Sig and put it in my left h
and.
Thirty seconds later, at the back corner of the barn, to my left, I heard a noise. And then a flashlight went on, a big, bright ray of light moving around, searching, searching for me. It was the Mexican man holding the light. He held it in his left hand, because his right hand held a gun.
The light beam swept toward me, then stopped, shining brightly on the grass directly in front of me. If the Mexican man moved the light just a bit deeper into the field, he might make me. And the guns would start firing. Theirs and mine.
I was okay with this happening. I had felt that this might happen. I just didn’t want it to happen right now. Not yet. I had more information about Graves, but I didn’t have a direct line from that information to Keaton Fuller. And that’s what I wanted.
The light moved off the patch of grass. Then the Mexican man walked right in front of me, rounding the corner of the barn where I’d found the sliver of undraped window.
Now Graves and the Mexican man both stood in the pool of light just to the side of the barn’s front. And now I had two guns pointed at two silhouettes.
The Mexican man clicked off his flashlight and said, “Nothing. We’re clear.”
Graves didn’t say anything, but I could see his silhouette nod. Then the light at the front of the barn went out and the two men walked back toward the farmhouse.
I could hear Graves unlock the Tesla with his key fob, open a door, then shut it. Graves didn’t lock it, though, didn’t set the alarm with the fob. Which gave me an idea.
Ten minutes after I heard Graves and the Mexican man reenter the farmhouse, I stood up, walked back over to the front edge of the barn, carefully looked around it back at the farmhouse. Nothing doing. Graves and the Mexican man were probably back at the dining-room table, sipping some red, listening to their boss.
I walked over to the Tesla. Made my way over to the side-view mirror on the driver’s side. I pulled out my flashlight again, but I didn’t turn it on.
Instead I got low, right next to the mirror, and popped it with the butt of the steel flashlight, breaking it, a little spiderweb appearing instantly. It made a noise, but not much of one. It didn’t create any action in the house. I slid the Maglite back into my pocket, then slid out of there, back through the big field, back to Nancy’s Passat, back to L.A., and finally back home.
30
Next morning, early, I went to my office, got out my computer, and started adding to, and of course refining, my case notes. I then looked at them, at each crisp line, from the beginning up to right now.
So how had my story progressed?
Well, Keaton Fuller was a bad guy, we all know that, it’s been confirmed by everyone in his world. And Keaton Fuller was assassinated, probably by a person who does that kind of thing, a person with some experience. And then there’s the Prestige Fish folks, who, I had now confirmed, were part of a Pendella Situation. And who almost certainly had access to someone, or had someone in their employ, who could put a bullet in a guy with a Smith & Wesson M&P pistol from seventy-five yards.
So why was I sure Prestige was a Pendella?
Because of the tequila bottles and the plastic containers. That liquid I could see inside the tequila bottles? Well, it looked like tequila, same golden color, but it wasn’t tequila. It was meth. Yes. Pure methamphetamine. Dissolved into a liquid solution, put into bottles and containers to disguise it, and carried over the Mexican border.
Okay, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was meth. In that I hadn’t taken one of the bottles to the cops and had them run a test on the liquid. But this was a smuggling technique I was familiar with, so I was ninety-nine percent sure. And that was good enough, by a long way, for me.
So where was the lab here in California where they mixed the liquid with acetone and turpentine, where they iced it, where they turned it into white, sparkly crystals ready for the street? Well, don’t know. They could be using a second Pendella business as a cover for that. An auto-repair shop somewhere. A carpet installation company. And how big was Graves’s operation? How deep did it go? How far did it reach? Not sure of that either. But I can tell you this: Just from what I saw, all those bottles and containers, their operation was into the many millions. And roles? What was everyone’s role? Graves, the Mexican man, the man with the long gray hair? My guess? The guy with the long gray hair was the one connected to the cartel in Mexico. Was the one who’d been in business here in the States a long time, knew how to run it, set up the Pendella businesses, bring in shrewd new people like Lee Graves, who could learn the operation and one day run it on his own and who, most important, was comfortable with really dangerous illegal activity if it meant making a shitload of coin. And the Mexican man? I’d say a lower-level guy who ran between Mexico and the United States and had the trust of both sides. And who, by the way, had probably killed a lot of people.
So, Keaton Fuller? Right, Keaton Fuller. Where does he fit in? Graves had said that Keaton was an investor in Prestige Fish. Maybe that was a version of the truth. Maybe Keaton had given Graves some money to buy equity in the drug operation—“all businesses need capital”—but then did something stupid and got popped. Sure. These guys, meth guys, they don’t care that somebody came from Hancock Park. They kill people all the time. They just pull out a gun and shoot you. Punch in, kill guy, punch out, go home.
And you know what? That mentality just might end up helping me.
So what next? What next?
Back to the Valley. I had a few stops to make. I closed up my laptop, closed up the slider, got in the Focus, and headed out.
31
First stop: the Firing Line shooting range in Northridge.
Again I went through twenty-four rounds on the Colt and twenty rounds on the smaller Sig. But this time I took the whole process slower. Not much slower, just a touch, just a second or two longer between shots. And I focused, intensely focused, on my stance, on my breathing. And I took the shots, all forty-four of them, like there was something on the line.
I looked at my targets. A nice, tight cluster of holes at the head and the heart on both the Colt target and the Sig target. Getting really close to being ready—ready for action.
I got back in the Focus and headed toward my second Valley stop, Craig Helton’s office. I pulled into his horrible little parking lot, and just as I was about to get out, my phone buzzed. Gary Delmore.
“Hey, Gary.”
“The Darv!”
“You got the paddle.”
“I got the paddle. Thanks, dude, like it a lot. Looking forward to using it to kick your fucking ass.”
“You know how silly that comment is, right?”
“I’ve beaten you once.”
“That’s right, once. How many times have we played, how many games? A thousand? I bet we’ve seriously played a thousand games.”
“Yeah, I know, but that’s what makes it so great. Because every time we talk about our Ping-Pong history, whether it’s to each other or to other people, that fact comes up. And it puts this little kernel of doubt into the overall story. Like, hmm, Darvelle is beatable. Maybe he’s not that good. That one victory does that. It probably affects your sleep from time to time. I bet it really does. I bet you toss and turn every now and then, just lying there in the dark, thinking about it.”
I’d never admit it, never, but he was right. He really was.
I said, “Whatever. Listen, thanks for giving Ott’s niece a part. Really helped me out.”
“You know, she’s pretty good, I have to say. Turns out I might have cast her anyway. I was wondering, though—”
Before he finished his sentence I said, “No. Gary, I’m serious. No. Off-limits. Just get it out of your head.”
“John. Chill. You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say what you thought I was going to say.”
I had to laugh.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Just thought I’d
check one more time. Thanks again for the bat. Let’s seriously play soon.”
“Yeah.”
“Or grab a beer or a bite.”
“Yeah. All of the above.”
“Hey, actually, some really cute girls I know are getting together soon—I know, I know, you’re with Nancy—I’m just saying, come with me, you’ll want to just look at these girls. Gorgeous actresses. And believe it or not, gorgeous actresses with personality. Fun, funny. Anyway, we’re all getting together for, like, a boozy brunch soon. Want to join?”
I could feel an anger rising up within me, just like that. But not because Gary knows I’m with Nancy. For another reason entirely. “Gary, I don’t go to brunch, you know that. Brunch? You actually think I’m going to go to one of those places with a line out the door on the weekend? With a bunch of people standing around outside, starving, waiting to be seated in some horrible, loud, bright, hot-as-balls restaurant. To get some poorly made lukewarm eggs Benedict? With tables of couples everywhere, and terrible fucking service. Dude, really? You’re really asking me that?”
“Darv, chill. Jesus. I forgot, you hate brunch. Or maybe I thought you’d calmed down a bit about the whole thing.”
“And also, did you say the term ‘boozy brunch’? Did you really just say that? Are you going to start saying the term ‘foodie’ next? Fuck.”
I had raised my voice. Involuntarily. I just couldn’t control it. I was yelling at Gary Delmore. “You know what, Gary, send me the paddle back. Just put it in the mail. You know my address. Just put it in the mail and send it back.”
Now he started yelling. I guess he couldn’t control it either. “No, I’m not going to send it back. It’s mine now. And you know what else? Go to therapy, John. Just do it. Just, wherever you are right now, just drive to a psychiatrist’s office and get started. And go every day for years. You need a name? I’ll give you my therapist’s name. I might even pay for it. Whatever it takes to help you.”
The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin Page 17