Then, from Cho’s perspective, it got interesting. The Latino started yelling at Mr. Magoo, waving his arms around, pointing to the surveillance camera. Mr. Magoo yanks the darts out of his chest and then swings the assault rifle up, giving the camera an excellent view of his face, and pulls the trigger, spraying a burst of bullets at the camera.
At that point the image goes black.
Quijano doubled over laughing.
“Oh my God, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Cho thought about the murdered guard and decided it wasn’t that funny, not really. He shook his head at Quijano.
“You’re a sick fuck, you know that.”
Cho had a queasy feeling in his stomach that was unrelated to the In-N-Out Double-Double animal style he’d demolished for lunch. Preliminary ballistics had tied the handgun that the Latino male had used to dispatch the security guard with the same one that killed the EMT, the painter in the river, and wounded Miro. This was the shooter. Now he just needed to put a name to the face.
…
Ted sat in his car and waited. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he planned to do, but he was sure that, somehow, Fran’s death had something to do with the skateboarder. Or maybe not. Maybe he was wrong. It was a hunch and he didn’t have any other ideas. The police hadn’t been helpful. They didn’t know anything about any backpack—Ted hadn’t found it in Fran’s apartment or her locker—and they weren’t interested in the stolen painting from her living room wall. They were pretty sure it was an open-and-shut case of breaking and entering gone haywire. So instead of pursuing leads, the Glendale Police Department was squabbling over jurisdiction with the LAPD, trying to keep the case with them even though ballistics had proven Fran’s murder was connected to several others in Los Angeles. And when they weren’t bickering with each other about that, the sworn officers of California law enforcement were spending their energies coming up with jokes, punch lines, and double entendres involving a firewoman with a strap-on and a hapless burglar. At least they’d figured that much out: crime scene investigators had found evidence that the front-door lock had been jimmied.
Ted knew that if it’d been him, Fran would’ve tried to get to the bottom of it. They might not have been the best of friends but they were partners.
Ted spotted the skateboarder a block or two away. The kid was wearing a sling that was rigged to be a shoulder immobilizer, meaning he must’ve cracked the shoulder joint or his collarbone when he wiped out, but he was still riding his board.
He didn’t mean to tackle the kid. But the little fucker didn’t stop when Ted asked him to. He’d just kept rolling, flashing his middle finger from his good hand as he rumbled past. So Ted ran after him and knocked him to the ground. It wouldn’t be good for that shoulder joint, Ted knew. The kid knew it, too, because he writhed on the ground in pain.
“Motherfucker.”
“Take it easy. You’re only going to make it worse by moving around.”
“Fuck you. I’m going to sue you.”
“I asked you to stop.”
The kid stopped moving when Ted showed him the gun. He had to do it discreetly; he didn’t want anyone driving by to notice it.
“Don’t kill me, man. I’m not holding.”
Ted hadn’t thought about killing anyone. The gun was just a prop, a visual aid to keep the kid from screaming, but now that the subject had been broached, Ted figured he should use it to his advantage.
“Holding?”
“Yeah. I don’t got nothing.”
Ted nodded.
“That’s too bad.”
“If I had anything, dude, I’d fucking give it to you.”
“What was in your backpack the other day?”
Ted saw a flicker of recognition flash on the kid’s face.
“Who are you?”
“Just answer the question. What was it? Coke?”
The kid shook his head. “Weed.”
“Who were you taking it to?”
The kid shook his head.
“Dude. Do yourself a fucking favor and drop it.”
Ted reached out a hand and gently poked the kid right where the acromion connects with the clavicle. The kid screamed in pain and scooted back.
“Who?” Ted asked again.
“He’ll fucking kill you. Then he’ll kill me.”
Ted reached out again, positioning his finger, ready to tap the spot on the collarbone. The kid couldn’t help himself, he blurted out a name.
“Shamus. Shamus Noriega.”
…
Looking for trouble is a lot like shopping. You go from place to place, location to location, looking for that special something. Sometimes nothing looks right, other times they just don’t have anything in your size. But when you find the perfect fit, when you can just erupt in an explosion of blood and fists and full-on balls-to-the-wall mayhem, well, for Shamus it was better than any drink or drug he’d ever taken. It was better than sex. And sometimes he felt that he enjoyed the shopping for trouble as much as the havoc itself.
But as the day wore on and they still hadn’t come across any Mormon missionaries, he was starting to get grumpy.
Shamus turned to Guillermo.
“How come you see these Mormon kids every fucking day and then when you want to find one, they’re nowhere?”
Guillermo turned the car off San Fernando Road onto Eagle Rock Boulevard.
“It’s like with cops. They’re never around when you need one.”
Shamus made a face.
“What do you need a cop for?”
Guillermo shrugged.
“It’s something my mom says.”
“Why does your mom need a fucking cop?”
“It’s just an expression. You wanna stop at Tommy’s or something?”
Shamus scowled.
“Keep driving.”
Now was not the time to stop for lunch.
…
Cho held a printout of the security camera footage from the herbal cooperative. It was a perfectly clear picture of a neatly dressed Latino holding a .45. Cho didn’t know who the guy was—Quijano kept calling him the “weed whacker”—but he was going to find out.
Cho slid the picture across his desk and sighed. It was drugs. Of course. It’s always drugs. Always. It was so predictable. Drugs were the irksome gas bag at the party, sucking the air out of the room, boring the shit out of law enforcement—a waste of time and energy, a stone fucking brain-drain. Cho wished the government would get off its ass and legalize drugs. At least decriminalize them. If the crumbs couldn’t make any money dealing them, well, organized crime as we know it, the entire criminal underground, would find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Counterfeiting, prostitution, extortion, and trafficking in human beings only paid so much. Drugs were the moneymaker. Take that away and suddenly being a criminal isn’t such an attractive lifestyle. No bling, no Hummers, no more bottles of Cristal and stable of foxy hos. The gangbangers were right, it was all about the Benjamins. Take that away, and you suddenly have a more civil society.
Cho leaned back in his desk chair and wished he could investigate a crime that wasn’t connected with drugs, like a good old-fashioned gem heist or a payroll robbery, but that was a fantasy stuck in his brain from reading too many old detective novels, that wasn’t reality. The truth was all drugs, all the time. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Twenty-four seven. Even a bank job was connected to drugs 99.999 percent of the time. It took all the fun out of being a detective. Not that every case was connected with drugs; there would always be an assortment of parasites, leeches, and bloodsucking freaks feeding off society, but legalizing the shit would go a long way toward emptying out the prisons and letting law enforcement concentrate on real crimes.
Detective Cho had been a logic machine since he was a little kid. It was just the way his brain worked. He had a knack for linking A to B to C, for following a thread from one end to the other. It wasn’t like he was a genius, he jus
t understood that things happen for a reason: every action is connected to something. It’s the law of karma. There is always a motive. Sometimes the motive was stupid, like the time the guy chopped up his neighbor and tried to flush his body down the toilet because he’d borrowed a hedge trimmer and neglected to return it. The Roto-Rooter guy who had come to clean out the backed-up toilet discovered an intact jawbone blocking the pipe. Of course they discovered a meth lab in the murderer’s house. How could they not?
Sometimes the motive was complex. This particular mess looked complicated but Cho was certain that underneath it, at the core, it was something very simple. Something like award-winning marijuana.
Cho’s cold was gone but it had been replaced by a burning indigestion that put a vice grip on his stomach. He knew what his wife would say: that his career caused lifestyle choices that led him to be stressed out, undernourished from fast food and alcohol, and susceptible to illness. She wanted him to study Tai Chi or yoga and learn to relax; he wanted to learn karate and put his fucking head through a concrete block.
…
Shamus saw them first. A pair of missionaries pedaling down York Boulevard in Highland Park.
Shamus turned to Guillermo.
“Hit ’em.”
“What?”
“Run ’em down.”
Guillermo looked at Shamus.
“It’ll kill them.”
Shamus shrugged.
“Try to be gentle.”
Guillermo checked his rearview, saw that no one was behind them, and angled the SUV so that he cut the missionaries off and forced them to crash into the curb.
The Mormons swerved in a futile attempt to avoid getting mashed but they only succeeded in colliding with each other and went tumbling onto the sidewalk.
Guillermo pulled over and Shamus jumped out of the SUV. A casual observer might’ve thought he was stopping to offer a helping hand or to give his insurance information to the unfortunate young men sprawled on the pavement. Maybe he was even going to give them a ride to the emergency room.
But that’s no fun.
One of the Mormons was young and looked like a twelve-year-old reject from Junior ROTC. He had reddish hair buzzed military style and lay on the ground holding his wrist, which was bent at a strange angle, the bone broken and forming a lump where his wristwatch should be.
The other Mormon was older, his face flecked with acne, his hair glistening with Brylcreem. He glared at Shamus.
“What the hell, man?”
Shamus walked over and kicked him a couple times in the ribs. The Mormon holding his broken wrist shouted.
“Hey!”
Shamus turned to him. “My friend has gun. Now shut your mouth and get in the fucking car.”
…
Miro watched as the party continued. Somehow, Daniel and the famous singer had gotten cozy, sitting in the corner talking about various interpretations of the Old Testament versus the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. Next to Miro, pretty girls with dark bangs and designer eyewear perched on the edge of the sofa as they drank wine and talked about music and restaurants and real estate with shaggy boys wearing cardigans over T-shirts logo’ed with names of obscure bands. Everyone wore cool shoes.
No one danced. They were all too self-consciously cool for anything that looked remotely passionate. Instead, they mingled and flirted, ate minisamosas and pot stickers from Fresh and Easy, dug into slabs of mediocre brie from Trader Joe’s, dipped chips into salsa, uncorked wine, stepped outside to smoke cigarettes—even though smoking pot was perfectly acceptable inside the house—and basically postured the night away.
Miro looked at his watch. Guus’s flight would be arriving in about an hour.
Miro walked up to Daniel and Aimée.
“I’ve got to go to the airport.”
Daniel seemed torn. He looked at Aimée, staring at the outline of her left nipple peeking through her shirt, then looked at Miro. But before he could say anything, Aimée turned to Miro.
“I’ll take care of him.”
She said it in a way that made Daniel gulp. Miro nodded.
“Okay, then. I’ll be in touch.”
…
Cho drove alone. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his partner—in fact, he thought that if Quijano would stop posturing and pretending he was some tough-guy cop he’d seen on television, he’d make a fine detective—but the man he was going to see wasn’t the type who suffered fools.
Cho found a space on the street and pulled into it. He killed the engine and sat there for a moment, letting everything go quiet, allowing his brain to spin. That’s how it worked for him. Some detectives need clear motives and hard evidence. They need to have all the ducks in a row—a murder weapon, fingerprints, eyewitnesses, and confessions—before they figure a case out. But that wasn’t the way Cho was wired; given enough information, his brain would turn into a logic machine, start parsing and processing like a kind of intuitive computer, connecting the dots, seeing through the bullshit, unraveling the lies, waiting for that one moment of clarity when everything lined up and he saw the truth.
Cho got out of his car and walked halfway down the block, past a botanica and a store that sold piñatas. Brightly colored figures of Batman, Sponge Bob, and the Powerpuff Girls dangled and danced from the awning and he had to fight the impulse to bust one open just to watch the candy fall out.
When he got to Chilango’s Body Shop, he stepped over a puddle of motor oil and walked past a dozen or so cars scattered around the lot like heaps of crumpled laundry. He went to the office door and opened it slowly, acting casual. His coming here was surprise enough, he didn’t want to get shot.
The office was what you’d expect. Piles of invoices and paperwork dumped on a metal desk, boxes of specialty paint stacked against a wall. An air conditioner thrummed in the window and an older Latino man chatted in rapid-fire Spanish on his cell phone. When the Latino saw Cho standing in his doorway, he snapped the phone shut without saying goodbye. His eyes narrowed and he glared at Cho.
“Detective.”
Cho didn’t expect a smile or a handshake, so he didn’t offer one.
“Got a minute?”
The Latino nodded and sat up. He adjusted his guayabera, revealing faded neck tattoos under the collar.
“Your car need a custom paint job?”
“Something like that.”
Cho stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. There was a Siamese cat asleep on the only other chair in the office so Cho didn’t bother sitting. He pulled out the picture of the gunman in the herbal cooperative and handed it to the old man.
“Know him?”
The old man burst out laughing.
“You think this is funny, pendejo? You’re fucking with me?”
“Why do you say that?”
The old man stroked his bushy gray mustache and adjusted the Dodgers cap on his head. “You looking for him?”
Cho nodded.
The old man chuckled. He smiled up at Cho.
“Nothing would make me happier than to see this pinche puñatero go down.”
“So he’s not one of yours?”
“He’s nobody’s.”
Cho was surprised. He’d assumed the perp was affiliated with one of the gangs in the area.
“Why not?”
The old man shrugged.
“Mala leche.”
“He got a name?”
The old man became suddenly serious. His eyes locked with Cho’s and his voice turned hard.
“One thing. I tell you his name, you gotta bury the motherfucker. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Cho spread his hands in a noncommittal gesture.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
…
“These handcuffs are gay.”
Shamus looked at the two Mormon missionaries sitting next to each other on the little bed. The one with the broken arm—and it was really swelling now—had his damaged limb handcuffed to the
bed frame, while the other one, the one who thought he was tough, had his hands cuffed in front of him.
“Gay?”
“They’re furry.”
The tough Mormon kid held up his cuffs and showed Shamus the leopard-print fur handcuffs.
“They’re only gay if they turn you on.”
Shamus saw the Mormon’s face flush bright red. He stroked his goatee and considered his options. While it would be easier to get the young kid with the broken arm to talk, it would be much more humiliating for the kid who thought he was a hard guy.
“Would you be more comfortable if I stripped you naked?”
The boys shook their heads.
“We’re fine.”
The young one, the one with the broken arm, finally said something.
“You can let us go. We won’t tell anyone about the accident.”
Shamus nodded.
“That’s very generous.”
The older one glared at Shamus.
“Why are we here? You ran us over.”
Shamus punched him, hard, in the face. The kid caromed backward, blood spurting out of his nose. The Mormon with the broken wrist began crying. Shamus rubbed his hand and spoke calmly.
“Let’s talk.”
…
“No fucking cucumber cups.”
The caterer looked at Vincent. “People love cucumber cups.”
Vincent shook his head.
“They’re like mini quiches. They cheapen everything.”
“What about skewers? Like a Thai thing with a dipping sauce?”
“I don’t know. You gotta hold a skewer in one hand and then a glass of champagne in the other. How can I shake hands? What if I want to point something out? I either spill my drink or I blind somebody with the stick.”
The caterer pushed her hair back behind her ear and shoved her glasses up on her nose.
“Why don’t you tell me what your dream appetizers would be and we’ll work from that.”
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