by Dave Stanton
“She’s pretty amazing. But I needed a break.”
“Cody,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. “A woman like her can make a man, well, irrational. Aren’t you curious why she would want two investigators working this case?”
“We talked about it. She just said she thought having us work as a team would result in finding Jimmy quicker. Two heads are better than one.”
“I guess it doesn’t bother her to pay double the fee.”
“I guess not.”
Cody swigged his beer and ordered another. Mine was still full.
“So what happens when we find Jimmy? And he tells his stepmom to get lost when she asks for a cut of his Lotto winnings?”
“Christ, Dan, you have a suspicious mind. Let’s just do our job, and we’ll get paid, okay?”
“Our job is to find Jimmy Homestead, not force him to give money to Sheila. Those are two entirely different things. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Dirt.”
“Don’t let her use you.”
“What, you mean I couldn’t get a classy woman like her unless she was using me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It sure sounded like it.”
I drank my beer and took a cigarette from Cody’s pack.
“I just don’t want to be sucked into any more than I signed up for,” I said.
“Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Maybe I left it at that stream last year, when we nearly froze to death.”
Cody laughed. “That was nothing, and you know it. You’re just being paranoid.”
He shouted at the bartender to bring me a shot. I stared into the brown liquor and raised it to my lips.
“Now, loosen up, let’s have a good time,” he said, his big mug shining in the light, his eyes laughing at a joke only he knew.
• • •
When we rolled into the Nugget, it was around midnight. “Damn, I hope Sheila is still awake,” Cody said. “I’m horny as a three-peckered billy goat.” He lumbered toward the elevator, and I went to the bar for a last drink, to contemplate the folly of men, the power women held over us, and my owned damned weakness.
I only saw Cody once in the next two days, when I ran into him and Sheila in the lobby. “We’re going shopping,” he told me. “Hold down the fort.”
I checked on the Lamborghini twice daily, worked out at the local gym each morning, and read most of a paperback novel about a Louisiana cop who saw ghosts from the civil war. Despite enjoying the book, I was bored shitless, but that’s an occupational hazard. Spending hours doing nothing but watching and waiting is a part of investigation work not realistically portrayed on TV or in the movies. It’s neither glamorous nor exciting, but it’s part of the job. No doubt the waiting was less tedious for Cody, sharing a bed with Sheila.
With too much time on my hands, I spent empty hours at the Nugget’s casino bar, nursing slow beers, trying not to think about anything. Of course, the opposite happened. My mind wandered to my past, to the day the phone rang when I was thirteen years old, and a voice told me my father had died. He had walked out of his law offices on a pleasant summer evening, not knowing a man released from prison the week before was waiting for him in the parking lot. I imagine my dad’s thoughts as he walked to his car were of legal nuances and arguments, and also of beating the traffic and getting home to have dinner with my mother, my sister, and me. I never knew exactly what transpired in the last minute before he was shot to death. If there was any conversation between him and the man who swore vengeance when my father convicted him three years previous, it went with my dad to his grave.
As a district attorney, Richard Reno was a man of strong and often inflexible principles. He had many friends and inevitably made his share of enemies. He could also be a strict parent, but there was a fun loving and easygoing side to him that I often felt he saved for me. When my mother was sometimes having a bad day, he would sneak me into his car, as if we were perpetrators of a grand scheme. Then we would drive around town running errands, maybe stopping for lunch, or at a place that had pinball machines. Once I remember we even drove forty miles, on a whim, to the Oakland Coliseum to watch the A’s play the Red Sox.
There were some rocky times for me after my father’s death. On my first day of high school, I fought a bully who chose a smaller friend of mine as his target. In a blind rage, I knocked out two of his teeth and dislocated his shoulder. His parents filed suit against my mother. A year later I did a few days in a juvenile detention center for my part in a gang brawl, after being accused of breaking an older boy’s jaw and fracturing another’s skull. My mother sent me to a therapist who talked in circles and charged a hundred dollars per appointment and said it might take years before he could resolve my issues. I stopped going after two sessions and joined my high school football and wrestling teams.
My thoughts drifted to later in my life, to the five men who’ve died by my hand during my career as a private investigator and bounty hunter. I’ve spent a lot of time regretting those killings, even though every man I shot deserved to die. Recently though, my remorse had lessened. Killing is like anything else, a psychologist friend once told me—with enough repetition, you get used to it. He also told me I was probably subconsciously justifying the killings as vengeance for my father’s death. I’m not sure I believed him, but a strange quiet now replaced the guilt I used to feel.
Back in South Lake Tahoe, my home needed some touch-up painting before the weather set in. It was the first and only home I’d ever owned. The street I lived on was deep in a sparsely built residential tract bordering national forest land. A stream ran within rock throwing distance of my driveway, and when the wind blew through the pines in the front yard, it always sounded like a big storm was on the way, even if the sky was cloudless. In the summer I’d sit and enjoy the breeze and the scent of fresh pine while having coffee on my deck. Every other day after breakfast, I’d throw on a weighted backpack and jog through the meadow behind my house, and up a steep switchback trail into the mountains, a workout I learned from a die-hard deer hunter who was strong enough to haul an eighty-pound carcass from ten miles deep in the forest without stopping to rest.
But though the warm months in Tahoe are beautiful, my strongest affections were always for the winter. When the first snow fell, typically in November, the town would be abuzz with predictions for the upcoming ski season, which many residents relied on for their livelihoods. For me, it meant chopping wood in my shirt sleeves in twenty-degree weather, then warming myself by a roaring fire with a heated snifter of Grand Marnier. Or walking a mile through a snowstorm to the nearest bar, Whiskey Dick’s, and beating the elements with stout boots and a good jacket. And it also meant tackling the steeps and mogul fields at Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts, especially on powder days when the snow would blast into my face with every turn.
I went to bed that night and dreamt of streets blanketed in snow, icicles hanging from my roof, and wide, unblemished fields of powder, the edges of my skis raising wisps of cold smoke, my breath frozen against the blue skies. But the images were interrupted by my car in a traffic jam, an appointment I was late to, and some vague notion of a job interview in San Jose.
A little before noon the next morning, on my fifth day in Vegas, my cell rang again with the alert code for the tracking device.
18
To avoid the expense of dining out, Mort had bought groceries and a Styrofoam cooler from the supermarket. He bought the least expensive provisions he could find; he intended to not spend a penny more than necessary until he found Jimmy Homestead. His $7,000 stake was now more than half gone.
After the woman at the Mirage VIP desk said Jimmy was traveling out of the country, Mort called Joe at the security company in Reno and asked if it was possible to get airline flight details. Unfortunately, it was not—due to increased security in the post-9/11 era, the airlines were required to keep all travel records confidential.
When his mobile phone rang a few minutes before noon, Mort had just arrived at the Mirage and was sitting at a slot machine near the lobby.
“This is Tim at valet parking at the Mirage. The guy you were asking about is here. The one with the Lamborghini. He’s asked us to bring his car around.”
Mort raced out of the casino and sprinted to the lot where he’d parked his Toyota. He spotted the Lamborghini pulling up to the reception circle, and saw a figure walking toward it. The tires of the Toyota squealed as Mort whipped his car into a tight U-turn and floored the gas toward the road leading to the front of the hotel. He saw the valet attendant watching him, and caught himself. If he did not pay off the attendant, it might give the kid reason to take down his license plate number. He hit the brakes and pulled the two half-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet.
“Thank you, young man,” he said, and pulled away slowly. He was now close enough to recognize the man at the car. It was Jimmy, taking his time loading his suitcase.
A minute later the Lamborghini was on Las Vegas Boulevard, with Mort’s silver Corolla two cars back. Mort’s right hand rested on the cardboard box in the passenger seat. The box held a three-ounce lump of homemade plastic explosive. He had bought the ingredients in Sacramento and mixed the batch in his hotel room. The box also contained a pair of electrodes and a battery-powered remote activator, to serve as a detonation system. Next to these items he had neatly arranged a roll of duct tape, plastic ties, a small bottle of chloroform, and a rolled hand towel he took from his hotel.
As he drove, Mort felt oddly disconnected, a sensation he’d experienced often since his release from prison. Though he was a free man, he still felt the weight of the five years of incarceration, as if his jail term had been burned into his brain. He couldn’t shake the feeling that all he’d achieved in the years previous to his arrest had been negated, wiped clean from his record. His past successes now meant nothing. The prison sentence had taken his identity, leaving him destitute and with no potential to reestablish himself in the business world. But Mort had retained one key trait from his past. At the center of his being, he was still relentlessly driven to get what he wanted, what he felt the world owed him. It meant nothing to him if his actions caused others to suffer. It was this singular element in his character he always came back to. All he had been through couldn’t strip him of it.
When he was a child, his father, Earl Homestead, worked at the Ford plant in Detroit, and his mother was a barmaid at a local tavern. He was six years old when he overheard his parents arguing late one night, when he should have been asleep. Mort had been sent home from school early that day, after a rock throwing incident on the playground put a boy in the hospital.
“Your kid is turning out to be a real angel,” Mort’s father yelled. “I should have divorced you and put you out on the street as soon as I knew the little bastard wasn’t mine.”
“Tell me you’ve been faithful since we were married. Try to tell me that,” his mother said.
“That doesn’t matter and you know it. I didn’t get pregnant and bring that strange kid into our lives. You did.”
“He’s my son, you son of a bitch. What do you want me to do, abandon him?”
His mother started crying, and Mort plugged his ears and hummed so he would hear no more. A year later, he and his mother moved from Earl Homestead’s suburban home to an apartment in a black neighborhood in Detroit. The hot water heater often didn’t work, and rats left their droppings on the kitchen counter at night. He slept on a cot next to his mother’s bed in the single bedroom, listening through the open window to the ceaseless noise from the street below. A woman plunged to her death from the top of their building shortly after they moved in, her body flashing by the window as Mort ate cereal and watched cartoons on a Sunday morning. On another occasion the man next door shot someone dead, the bang of the pistol there for an instant and gone, followed by silence and screaming and turmoil and then silence again.
He sometimes saw his brother John on holidays, back in the big house where he used to live, but Earl Homestead was always absent on those occasions. John treated Mort with indifference, as if he was oblivious to the fact that Mort lived in poverty while John enjoyed the relative comfort of a middle-class upbringing. Mort refused to visit again after a Christmas party one year when John rode up and down the sidewalk on a new red bicycle, honking a horn attached to chrome handlebars that sparkled in the cold sunlight. Shortly afterward, Mort’s mother started coming home at dawn a couple of times a week, reeking of booze and cigarettes, her clothes a mess, her eyes as hollow as the empty pint bottles in her purse.
Mort grew to understand his world was one in which he stood alone. He told himself his parents were strangers, and he internalized his anger and never conceded to the slightest vulnerability. By the time he was ten, adults considered him withdrawn or possibly autistic. But inside the walls of his façade, Mort channeled his rage. He had no doubt the day would come when he would prove to the world he existed on a plane reserved for a special class of people.
Finding escape in his schoolwork, he soon realized his intelligence and ability to focus far exceeded his peers’. He saw no reason to develop relationships with those beneath him, at least not until he needed underlings to serve his greater agenda. He left high school early, without a single friend, when he was declared academically gifted and granted a scholarship to a small university in upstate Michigan. By this time, his determination to become rich and reverse the disadvantages of his childhood drove every facet of his personality. But there was also an underlying motivation behind his desire for financial success, one that he didn’t fully understand until he was older—the need for absolute control.
After graduating at the top of his class with a degree in business in three years, he was accepted into the MBA program at Harvard Business School. Two years later he graduated from Harvard with honors, but there were two incidents not reflected in his transcripts.
During his undergrad studies, he attended a fraternity party where he planned to introduce himself to a coed he’d been watching on campus. But she was the object of constant attention from a group of beer-drinking frat brothers and seemed particularly enamored with one in particular, a handsome, blond-haired man. Mort finally approached her when the man left to use the bathroom. She was polite, and her smile made Mort’s heart skip, but their brief conversation ended when the man returned. He led her away as if Mort’s presence was of no significance, and took her into one of the bedrooms. The events of that evening would have been wholly unremarkable, save for one fact: the blond man was found stabbed to death a week later, his bound and gagged body left in a drainage ditch on the edge of campus.
The second incident involved a tenured professor at Harvard who disagreed with a case study Mort submitted discussing the future impact of the personal computer on the banking industry. The professor felt Mort’s view was exaggerated and imprudent, and gave him a failing grade. Mort visited the professor in his office to discuss the matter, but the grade would not be changed. Within a week, a fire consumed the professor’s Tudor-style home and burned it to the ground. He barely escaped with his life, resigned his post, and relocated out of state. The younger teacher brought in to replace him thought Mort’s paper was brilliant and awarded him an A.
Though the police considered Mort the prime suspect of both crimes, they were unable to produce any evidence, forensic or otherwise, that was strong enough for an arrest. After weeks of interrogation following both episodes, they finally gave up on Mort, who then th
reatened to sue for harassment. He was told to not leave town, but the day after graduating he drove west, having decided that the thriving technology arena in Northern California was the best place to launch his career.
He made only one diversion as he drove across country toward San Jose. It was midnight when he stopped in a small suburb outside of Detroit. Despite the hour, it was still so humid his clothes began sticking to his body as soon as he left his car. The house where he lived the first eight years of his life looked shabbier than he remembered, the paint peeling and the lawn overgrown. A braided rope that once held a tire dangled from the oak tree in the front yard, its end frayed and rotted with age. He went into the dark house with the key he had kept all those years, and crept silently up the stairs.
The man asleep in the bedroom barely knew what was happening before he was gagged and hogtied. He sat staring in mute horror at the strange man in the room. But now that the moment had come, Mort was surprised to find he was at a loss for words.
“You’re really just a loose end I need to clean up,” he said finally. He tore the duct tape from Earl Homestead’s mouth. “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”
“Who are you?”
“The real question is who I’m not.”
“What?”
“I’m not your son, remember? I can still hear you telling that to my mother.”
“My god,” the man whispered hoarsely, sweat beaded on his forehead. “She died a month ago.”
Mort looked at the person lying helpless on the rumpled sheets of the bed. “You can go meet her in hell, then.”
“You’re out of your mind, no, you can’t do this…”
But Mort was already resealing Earl Homestead’s mouth, wrapping the duct tape tightly around his head. Then he took a spring-loaded clothespin from his pocket and placed it over his father’s nose, locking the nostrils shut. He stayed in the bedroom for a few minutes, watching Earl Homestead’s face turn purple and his eyes bulge as he suffocated. When his head fell forward and his body stopped jerking, Mort went downstairs and grabbed some cold cuts and a loaf of bread from the refrigerator, then walked to his car and drove away.