Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  “Well, definitely not a butt-ugly Reaper-with-a-gun-tat anywhere on my body…”

  “Definitely.”

  “Oh. Nothing creepy like an anarchy A in a bloody circle.”

  Lucky froze. Did he hear her correctly?

  “Well, don’t stop now,” said Gonzo.

  “What’d you say about anarchy?”

  “Was talking about a tat. You know. Capital A in a red circle.”

  “Yeah but why that one?”

  “I dunno. Cuz it was on TV?”

  Lucky sat up and showed her his face. It was as if he were a question mark afraid of the answer.

  “The suicide bomber,” continued Gonzo. “They showed it with the FBI Identi-Kit rendering.”

  “The tat.”

  “Distinguishing mark on his—”

  “Inside left wrist?”

  “Yeah…”

  A hand went to Lucky’s head. He first rubbed his face and then the stubble on his scalp. Worry began to leak from every pore.

  “You sure that’s what they said?” asked Lucky. “You didn’t dream it?”

  “Just ten minutes ago. Before you woke up.”

  “I think I met him.”

  “Who? The suicide bomber?”

  “Not suicide. I met him after.”

  “After what?”

  “Whaddayou think after?”

  It was as if gravity had hit Gonzo like a fifty-pound brain freeze.

  “I need to make a call,” said Lucky, spinning out of her bed and into his denim pants with remarkable alacrity.

  “You need to call the FBI.”

  “Reapers first. Then everybody else.”

  Gonzo already felt as if she was ten steps behind. Lucky appeared to have accelerated from zero to a thousand miles per hour in a matter of seconds—dressing, holstering his pistol, and lacing up his shoes. Gonzo was still organizing her thoughts around the entire situation and what to do with Travis when she realized that Lucky was mere moments away from leaving without her. That’s when she snatched Lucky’s car keys from her bureau top and angled out of the bedroom. He half-chased her, nearly spilling to the floor as he hopped on one foot while pulling on his other shoe. Gonzo calmly speed-dialed her neighbor Kyle, instructed him to please finish off his night’s sleep on her couch, then spun about to face her houseguest, pointing his car keys at him.

  “Whether you like it or not, I’m your partner on this,” she affirmed. “I’m with you until the books close on this thing or I get orders to cut you loose.”

  “On one condition,” said the Kern cop.

  “Gotta hear it first,” she said, arms folding across her chest.

  “You put on some Goddamn panties and move.”

  As it was, Gonzo was well aware of her half-nakedness. And in the moment she couldn't have given ten rips. She leveled both eyes onto an imaginary spot on the man’s forehead, let her gaze linger long enough to be certain he felt her incredulous stare, then thumped her bare feet back to the bedroom to find some cop-appropriate garb.

  Lucky hadn’t expected her to keep the car keys.

  Once the situation with Travis was squared away, Gonzo climbed behind the wheel of Lucky’s Charger and turned over the throaty engine. Her argument was simple enough. Lucky needed to burn up the cell towers between his Reaper pals and the FBI while somebody else’s hands were on the wheel.

  Only Lucky never phoned the FBI. While Gonzo carefully busted through every red traffic light between her duplex and the Pasadena freeway, Lucky woke up Bledsoe, verbally walked the big man to the nearest empty pad of paper and performed a machine-gun reportage of his day, from picking up his LAPD escort at her Pasadena domicile to the moment he’d learned of the terrorist’s distinguishing tattoo. In turn, it was Bledsoe’s chore to pass the information on to the authorities without the feds, in turn, throwing a chop-block on Lucky and Gonzo’s westward trajectory. Their target was the northern San Fernando Valley suburb of Granada Hills. There they expected to find the home of pool contractor and eyewitness Rey Palomino. Lucky’s pal Lopes provided the address while watching the continuous loop of “live shots” from TV news puppets lined up on the sidewalk outside Rey’s house.

  Lopes’ simple directions to the “pool dude’s casa” were little more than “go west ’til you smell all the TV gasbags on the dude’s lawn, then north ’til you step in their bullshit.”

  Thank goodness for GPS. The smartphone app blinked green and, second by second, counted down the distance to the Granada Hills address. Gonzo slowly lowered the accelerator, keeping the speedometer floating near ninety miles per hour as she split the lines of the HOV carpool lane. The traffic they streaked past paid little notice. It was past midnight on a Friday. And the flashing blue and red lights that pulsed from behind the Charger’s grill could’ve told any kind of short story. Drug bust. Officer needs assistance. Or plain-clothed cop wants to get home before his wife figures that he’d dipped his wick into some local brown sugar before high-ballin’ it home to her and their sleeping kids in Simi Valley.

  Road noise crept up from the asphalt to the tires, transferring through to the torsion bar and into the steering column. The sweet vibration reminded Gonzo of the feel encountered when gripping the stick of a helicopter in flight. The training choppers she’d worked out in were especially sensitive, teaching new pilots to rely on their senses as much as the aircraft’s instruments. Gonzo craved the airborne sensation and the lift provided by every thump of the rotors.

  Then again, as cop moments go, she wouldn’t have traded her current spot for just about anything. She was smack in the center of something significant. Life changing, even. Yet she hadn’t a glimmer just how those changes would manifest themselves.

  Gonzo forgot if she’d ever actually asked Lucky if he had some sort plan for when he finally arrived at Palomino’s house. Or if she’d already been able to assume that his plan was as unformed as wet papier-mâché.

  “It’s going to be a mob scene,” she recalled saying. “Cops. Feds. He’s the one man who can put a face to the worst terrorist act on U.S. soil since 9/11.”

  “Those your words? Or a Fox News Alert?”

  “Just tellin’ you that we’ve stepped into something massive. Bigger than your brother. Bigger than any Reaper-payback-street shit you’ve cooked up in your head.”

  “Noted.”

  “Lucky?”

  But Lucky’s phone buzzed. It was Bledsoe passing along that powers in the Department of Homeland Security were ordering the unlikely duo to peel the Charger off at the nearest freeway exit where they were to park and wait for the feds to pick them up for an immediate debrief. So important was the directive that DHS did not want to risk any kind of detour or fender bender.

  “Feds say jump and expect us to drop our pants before our feet hit the ground,” moaned Lucky.

  “So we didn’t get the order,” braved Gonzo. “Not directly.”

  “I was on this motherfucker before the feds were. The PD. Everybody. Nobody’s gonna pull me off again.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Not even you.”

  For the briefest second Gonzo took her eyes off the freeway to glance at Lucky. His voice told her he was as serious as a heart attack. But she needed to get a look at his eyes to underline his full intent.

  “Yeah, I meant what I said,” said Lucky, meeting her flickering gaze. “No more stunts like you pulled in Long Beach. There’s no more getting between me and however this ends.”

  She could’ve argued. Even briefly wrestled with her conscience over his sudden and intractable stance. Instead, she bit her tongue and kept her foot on the accelerator. The immediate future was a blank slate. How history would record their actions in the next two hours was a total and complete unknown.

  32

  While much of America, especially those living in Southern California, were hooked to their televisions in hopes of hearing just one more nugget on the terrorist attack in Long Beach, Garvin Van Der Berk was tha
nking his lucky stars. For a month he’d been attempting to corner a stalker who’d been harassing a celebrity client. The pervert had been successfully trailing the famous model all over the hemisphere, edging closer and closer to the object of his obsession all while cleverly avoiding local authorities and a chorus line of ineffective restraining orders. The model’s hedge-fund-honcho boyfriend, exhausted from living under constant precaution and sharing his house with a woman who was quickly slipping into becoming a beautiful nobody afraid of her own shadow, had at last pulled the trigger. He quietly hired the famed private detective to deliver a “gift basket” to the stalker.

  And God bless those gift baskets.

  Garvin’s secret sub-specialty was a cash business. And because it involved the illegal use of force and he risked a mandatory prison sentence, he employed zero contractors whatsoever. All he required was a bit of planning, sixty seconds of alone time with his target, a stun gun, and a retractable steel baton. Stalkers, who nearly always lived alone, would answer their door to a bearded white man in thick glasses wearing a gas company work shirt. They’d find a stun gun driven into their ribs. The next thing they knew they’d be prostrate on the floor inside their own threshold with a fistful of gauze stuffed into their perverted pie-holes. Maybe they’d hear the snap-click of the baton locking into position a split second before their left kneecaps shattered from the impact of heavy steel on bone. The bearded man would kneel, whisper the name of the current woman who kindled the stalker’s obsession, and vanish.

  Garvin’s sideline gig had a remarkable success rate. Stalkers were loath to call the police, terrified any investigation would lead to the dirty truth about their favorite pastime. And by the time the stalker rehabbed from a premature knee replacement, his mojo for that one famous feline had usually waned to something close to nil.

  For over three months, Garvin had been having unusual difficulty hand-delivering the gift basket from the model’s boyfriend. Though the stalker in question kept a small apartment near Malibu’s Latigo shores neighborhood, he rarely seemed to sleep there. His job as a traveling nurse kept him moving from city to city, filling in wherever there was a health care shortfall.

  But thanks to some luck and an act of domestic terrorism, Garvin’s stalker decided to spend his evening noshing on take-out Chinese while staying plugged into the breaking news story of the year. Garvin had clocked the locale and timed his approach. With the hour closing on midnight, the hillside apartment complex appeared as if it and most of its occupants had buttoned up for the night. Marine fog was forming around the outdoor lights, a certain sign that the high barometric pressure was beginning a retreat and the heat wave would soon be abated. The windows of his borrowed Land Cruiser were wide open and his ears tuned to his surroundings. Between the beats of the distant waves crashing and the crisp air filtering through his nostrils, Garvin wondered why he’d never thought to buy in Malibu.

  Get out of the car, he thought. Crush this guy’s kneecap, whisper the model’s name and get the hell back to Culver City.

  Then his cell phone trilled.

  Instinctively, he let his eyes swivel to the screen. Not that he was going to answer. He’d waited too long to deliver the gift basket. Nobody but nobody could get him to pick up a call. But there it was. Conrad Ellis. That ten-digit number that had become so familiar in the past forty-eight hours. Plus it was the Conrad Ellis witching hour. The beginning of that very time of day Conrad would force his will on whomever he could convince to pick up the telephone. And that was most people.

  “Conrad,” said Garvin into his phone, clipped and hoping a blistering moment of genius would materialize in the form of words to convince Pepper Ellis’ pop that it’d be worth waiting for Garvin to call him back.

  “Granada Hills,” said Conrad. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Listen, Connie—”

  “You do or you don’t know Granada Hills?”

  “I know where it is,” conceded Garvin, any moment of genius passing him by. “It’s in the North Valley. Why?”

  “Because that’s where the pool man lives.”

  “What pool man?” asked Garvin, certain the old man was two drinks past his limit. He tried to listen for the telltale sound of ice tinkling inside a scotch tumbler.

  “That witness who knows the man that killed my Pepper.”

  Garvin recalled the sound bite. Somewhere within the swamp of information choking the last half of the daily news cycle he might have heard a thing or two about a man who had identified the murderer-cum-suicide-bomber.

  “What about him, sir?” asked Garvin.

  “I want to talk to him,” said Conrad.

  “Of course.” Garvin agreed, but was still confused.

  “Tonight.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Have you ever known me to bullshit?”

  “If he’s a witness, I’m sure the authorities have him on lockdown.”

  “They do,” said Garvin. “Watching it right now on TV. He’s inside his house under police protection.”

  “Okay. Just like I said.”

  “Like I said, Garvin,” said Conrad. “I want to talk to him. Not tomorrow. Not after he’s got himself a lawyer and is booked on every TV show from here to bumfuck.”

  “Conrad—”

  “I’m gonna pay him to tell me what he knows. And you’re gonna make that deal tonight.”

  “But you said the authorities—”

  “I have someone inside the government. She’s my next call. I’m going to have her foam the runway.”

  “So you want me to drive up to Granada Hills and offer this pool man money?”

  “Fifty grand—cash—if he gets in your car and you drive him to my house.”

  “Wow,” Garvin heard himself saying aloud.

  “I know it’s a lot,” said Conrad. “But it’s worth it to me to hear what he knows. In person. Before the rest of the world gets it for free.”

  Garvin’s eyes squeezed shut. It wasn’t his job to question the motives or judgment of his clients. His chore was always the same. Make the client’s wish—no matter how difficult or misguided—come true.

  He checked the digital clock on his dashboard. 12:05 A.M. Garvin flicked one last glance at the stalker’s window. The light hadn’t yet been extinguished. He put the odds at better than two to one that the stalker would be asleep within ninety minutes. Garvin quickly calculated he’d have no more than five hours to return and deliver his gift basket.

  “Yes, sir,” Garvin heard himself saying. “I’m already on my way.”

  His headlights scraped the hillside topography of Malibu scrub brush and eucalyptus trees as he U-turned the Land Cruiser and pointed it back toward Pacific Coast Highway. He figured his drive to Granada Hills would last roughly forty minutes. Plenty of cushion. And time enough to roust Dave Wireman out of whatever drunken hole he’d crawled into.

  * * * *

  It was about the time Mark Stubbitz was wondering where he’d last set down his skinny can of sugar-free Red Bull that he’d gotten pulled into a run-through of all the gathered video from the crime scene. A collection of portable computers and laptops had been assembled on a folding buffet table just twenty paces from the southern entrance to the Long Beach Arena’s floor. Chairs were pulled up and portions of all the camera feeds were re-reviewed by Stubbitz and the four other assigned DHS investigators. In total, there were forty-three different recordings. From low quality retail store security footage to a high-resolution weather video recorded by an ocean-aimed camera perched high above the Bank of America building.

  Of particular interest was an unidentified white male who drove a silver Lexus. On seventeen of the camera feeds, the unknown subject could be viewed crossing the park and climbing onto the nautical sculpture centerpiece. Once set, the unsub produced what appeared to be a video camera and aimed it directly at the intersection where, moments later, the black Peterbilt refrigerator truck disintegrated in the massive explosi
on. Six feeds showed six different angles of the unsub tumbling from his perch. He was then seen retrieving his camera. More cameras captured the unsub as he limped hurriedly back to his Lexus and rushed from the crime scene.

  “Can we get a tag on the vehicle?” asked Stubbitz.

  “Uploaded everything to Quantico,” said the tech. “They’re working on it right now.”

  “And the guy he rode in with?” asked Stubbitz, referring to the black man who, moments before the detonation could be seen exiting the Lexus, patronizing a nearby Panda Express, only to be flattened by the hurtling debris.

  “Sorting through the DBs,” answered an unshaven investigator. “Not the only dead black guy recovered.”

  “Need IDs,” demanded Stubbitz. “Bet a sushi dinner the guy with the camera’s got a stake in this.”

  “What if I don’t like sushi?” asked the lone female on the team. Blonde, short, and broad in her gray on gray pants suit.

  “I’ll buy you Happy Meals for a month,” said Stubbitz. “But I need names, people. Names. Names. Names.”

  * * * *

  Big Dave Wireman thought he was going to have a heart attack. In the hours after the Long Beach bombing, he’d done everything but pop Xanax to try to calm his pulse rate.

  He’d first noted the compound racing of his own heart while speeding back toward the San Fernando Valley. Ever since he’d picked himself up off the park grass, found the video camera and hustled back to his car, Dave had been trying to replay the episode in his mind. He’d left Terrell in the Lexus and climbed atop the sculpture, zooming the camera until the black Peterbilt rig filled the video frame. Then BOOM! It all felt so surreal to Dave that somewhere near Inglewood he’d briefly pulled off the freeway to check the replay on his camera. That’s when he noticed that his body was shaking. Not from nerves but from the excess pounding coming from his chest cavity.

  The video playback confirmed it hadn’t been a bad dream. He’d witnessed the event. One second the Peterbilt was in his camera sights. The next it had vanished into dust, with the little Sony Handycam dutifully remaining in record mode until Dave had exited the freeway to check the camera.