by Dave Stanton
It was a Friday night, and Harrah’s was packed with gamblers. They crowded three deep around the card tables and jostled for seats like a swarm of cars searching for spots in a full parking lot. The slot machine aisles were also crammed, the ceaseless electronic cadences like a manic chatter. Grier was wearing street clothes, and we stood at the security booth until a middle-aged woman with curly brown hair finished a phone call. She hung up and looked down at us from her tall perch.
“We have an appointment with Joan Wallace,” I said.
“And you are?”
“Marcus Grier, sheriff,” Grier said. “Tell her I’m here.”
She gave a little raise of an eyebrow and picked up the phone. Then she said, “Chris Davies will come get you.”
Within a minute, a slim, athletic-looking man with a suntan and lank blond hair came down a set of stairs. I’d met him on a previous case, and he’d been cooperative and helpful, unlike a couple of his surly counterparts.
“Dan Reno, right?” he said.
I nodded. “Chris, this is Sheriff Grier, South Lake PD.”
“Hi, Sheriff. Follow me, gentlemen.”
We went to the upstairs room where Harrah’s managed its surveillance operations. Above a corner desk, a double row of screens was set in the wall. Along another wall, a long counter had been installed with computer monitors and chairs every few feet. Two of the chairs were occupied by men studying screens.
“I had our tech burn CDs from the reservation desk camera and the camera in the elevator lobby. I covered from noon to five P.M. You can set up over here.” He pointed to two empty chairs. “Dan, do you remember how the program works?”
“Could use a refresher,” I said.
“Sure. Hit F4 to pause, F5 to rewind, F6 to fast forward, and F9 to enlarge. Very simple. Call my mobile number if you need anything. I’ll be on the floor.”
Grier and I sat, and we each inserted a CD into our terminals. I had the reservation desk. After watching a few transactions, I realized I was at a big disadvantage. The problem was, I no longer considered it likely the room guest was an innocent businessman. If my hunch was right, Shanice Tucker’s john was a policeman. But I only knew a few of the local plainclothesmen or patrolmen well enough to recognize them. The majority would be anonymous faces to me.
I reset the disc to the beginning, but this time, when a new person approached the reservation clerk, I leaned over and said, “Hey, Marcus. Recognize this dude?” Grier would then pause his disc and scoot his chair over and peer into my screen. In this manner we worked for a solid hour and a half until Grier said, “I’m done. I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning,” I said.
“No, I’m taking the CDs with me. I’ll finish up at the station.”
“You want me to come by in the morning and help you?”
He reached over and ejected my disk and slid it into his shirt pocket. “What for? You probably wouldn’t know the suspect even if you saw him.”
I stuck my thumbs in my belt loops. “Are you gonna get anyone to help you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He started toward the exit. “Are you coming, or are you going to hang out here all night?”
The other two employees, who had largely ignored us, were now shooting glances our way. I didn’t say anything and followed Grier downstairs and through the casino. When we got to the parking lot, the night had cooled, and the air had a bite to it. Grier walked to his car like a man determined to put the day behind him. But I stopped him before he could unlock his door.
“Listen, I busted my ass on this case,” I said.
He unlocked the door and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. “What’s your point, Dan?”
“I think whoever was banging Shanice Tucker is your prime suspect. Those discs are the key to the case, the answer to who is crooked in your department.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “You ought to get some sleep. You look like death warmed over.”
“Don’t let me down, Sheriff,” I said, but he was already closing his door, and then he backed up and pulled away, his tires rolling over a shoulder and flattening the grass alongside the pavement.
• • •
When I got home, I made a stiff drink and finished it in two swallows. Then I went to my desk and ran a people search on Nate Forrest, a name that meant nothing to me and almost certainly was not the real name of the person who reserved the room at Harrah’s. After looking at over thirty hits, none of whom lived in California or Nevada, I tried a different tact. I typed the name into Google and found a biography on a Confederate war hero named Nathan Bedford Forrest.
He was a slave trader, a riverboat gambler, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and a lieutenant general in the Civil War. He was accused of war crimes for the slaughter of black union soldiers and praised for his fierce energy and brute courage. An uneducated man, he killed at an early age and earned a fortune as a planter and real estate investor before the war. No less than thirty-two historical markers bear his name in his home state of Tennessee, including a bust at the Tennessee state capitol building. An army base is named after him, as are two high schools.
He seemed an interesting character, a symbol of Southern culture: tough, unrelenting, a self-made man of wealth and power. Apparently his history as a Klan wizard and slave trader made little difference to the people who revered and memorialized him. What kind of person would identify with this type of man? Someone from the deep south or, more specifically, from Tennessee. Someone who had no problem with discrimination against blacks. And maybe someone who, despite his prejudices, had a particular lust for black women.
Or someone could have selected the name for no reason other than it sounded ordinary and would not be recognized or remembered by most people in this part of the country.
I sipped at the watery dregs of my cocktail. The Tennessee angle bore further scrutiny. In the morning, I’d call Marcus Grier and ask if anyone employed by South Lake Tahoe PD had any background in Tennessee.
• • •
I’d been asleep for about an hour when my cell phone rang. It was midnight.
“Hello?” I croaked.
“Sorry to wake you,” Cody said.” But there’s been a development.”
Candi murmured something, and I got out of bed and walked out to the hallway.
“What?”
“I didn’t find much else useful on Shanice’s phone. So I drove over to her apartment. I’ve been parked down the street for the last few hours. Guess who just showed up?”
“Landers?”
“Good guess, but no. It’s our boy, Duante. Has a suitcase with him. Looks like he’s spending the night.”
I walked out to the family room and sat on the arm of the couch. “What do you want to do?” I asked.
“I want to be here at eight tomorrow morning and see what Duante does with his day. Can you make it?”
“I guess I better set my alarm.”
“Get some sleep. Tomorrow could be interesting.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said.
11
It was sprinkling when I left my house at four thirty the next morning. The odd summer shower had dampened the roads just enough to bring translucent streaks of oil to the surface. A thin white cloud cover cast an eerie illumination over the mountains. I drove in silence over Echo Pass, my tires squeaking on the slippery asphalt. There was no radio reception, and the metronome of my wiper blades had an almost hypnotic effect.
The dawn began to break as I descended out of the foothills above Sacramento. When the first burst of sunlight flared on the horizon north of the city, the clouds turned silver and blood red and began to break up like a sheet of glass shattering in slow motion. By the time I reached the flatlands, a rainbow arced over the valley, and mist rose from the pavement. In the distance, the sun’s reflection off the gold towers of the Sacramento Bridge was so bright I had to shade my eyes.
I
was right on time when I exited the freeway in San Jose and turned down the street where Shanice Tucker lived. It was a Saturday, and there was no commuter traffic; I had made the drive in three and a half hours. I spotted Cody’s maroon Toyota a half block from Shanice’s apartment.
“Good morning,” Cody said when I opened his passenger door. “All quiet so far.”
I tossed my bag into his backseat. “You sure Duante’s still there?”
“No. But I stayed here until two A.M., and he didn’t leave. And Shanice’s car is still in the parking lot. I got you a coffee.”
I leaned my head back and shut my eyes.
“Here’s an article you should read,” he said, handing me a section of the San Jose Mercury. “The one about US aid to Egypt.”
I yawned and blew the steam from the cup of gas station coffee I took from Cody’s console. “Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s interesting.”
I closed my eyes again and tried to sip from the cup, but the contents were scalding hot. I set the cup down, crossed my arms, and let my chin fall on my chest.
“All right, because it will provide great clarity and illumination to our international affairs and the intractable problems we face,” Cody said.
“Intractable, huh?”
“Yeah. It means fucked up beyond repair.”
“I know what it means,” I said. “I read the dictionary.”
“You’re no doubt a great scholar.” He reached over and the tapped the newspaper. “Read it.”
The article was written by a Washington Post columnist. It described how, despite our huge federal deficit, the US secretary of state had just gifted $250 million to Egypt. The newly elected president of Egypt gladly accepted the funds, which would help stave off the looming collapse of the Egyptian economy. The new president had been elected during the series of Mideast revolutions known as the Arab Spring. The people of Egypt had overthrown the prior authoritarian regime and elected into office a Muslin Brotherhood leader who was lobbying for the release of terrorists convicted of killing Americans. The president also urged his countrymen to teach their children and grandchildren that Jews were “the descendants of apes and pigs” and thus forever should be hated and, if at all possible, exterminated.
The rationale for our financial aid was misguided and murky, claimed the writer. He posed the question: why would we spend our taxpayers’ money to support regimes that endorse terrorism and cannot even offer us oil in exchange?
I handed the paper back to Cody. “Intractable seems to sum it up,” I said.
“Our politicians are funding the same pukes they claim to be protecting us from. They need to pull their heads out of their asses.”
“If they did, they wouldn’t be politicians.”
“Buckle up,” Cody said. My eyes snapped to the windshield. Shanice Tucker’s Ford Taurus had just turned out of the alley aside the apartment building. I caught a brief glimpse the car’s sole occupant. A tall black man.
“Duante?” Cody asked.
“Looks like him.”
“Let’s go see if we can contribute to the greater good, eh, Dirt?”
“I always say, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“Hey, a line of your own. Not bad.”
The Taurus drove out toward the freeway. We followed south on 101 to the Guadalupe Parkway off-ramp. The driver drove the speed limit and took the Saint James exit. There was little traffic downtown, and to keep a safe distance, we had to drive slowly. But after the first turn, it was clear where the driver was headed.
“The Skyscape,” Cody said.
“The CIA man told me unit 1602 was empty, cleaned out.”
We pulled over at the corner adjacent to the ascending black windows of the Skyscape. The Taurus continued forward, past the main entrance, and turned the corner, out of our view. We followed but did not turn down the street where the Ford had gone. Instead, we passed through the intersection, and when I looked I saw the Taurus had pulled over and parked behind an older-model BMW, opposite the Skyscape.
Cody hung a U-turn, and we crept up to the corner. I grabbed my bag, got out of the car, and walked to where a hedge of shrubs lined the perimeter of the building on the same side of the street the two cars were parked. I shimmied under the hedge at the corner, lay in the dirt, and peered down the street through a small telescope.
Duante Tucker stood talking to two men sitting in the BMW. Tucker wore shiny blue sweat pants with red strips down the side and a white V-neck T-shirt. His cheeks were unshaven and looked hollow, and his eyes roved up and down the avenue. He stepped back from the BMW, and the driver stuck his head out the window and craned his neck, looking upward. Then he nodded, and Tucker walked back to the Taurus and got inside.
The BMW’s driver continued looking up at the Skyscape. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and the scraggly beard covering his face was uneven and reminded me of the coat of a mangy dog. The hair on his head was equally ratty and looked matted, as if he had been wearing a close-fitting hat.
I looked up in time to see a car pass through the intersection down the block. It was a black Ford, a Crown Vic, a car that for years had been the most popular choice of government agencies.
I looked back at the BMW. The driver was still staring out the window, his neck twisted diagonally. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he was likely the man Cody had photographed at the Arabic restaurant in Fremont.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The dirt where I lay was moist, and I could feel the damp cold through my clothes. An insect landed on my knuckle, and I shook it free. Then, within that instant of distraction, the ground shook with a concussive force, and my ears felt the atmospheric pressure change as a massive explosion erupted from above. For a second I froze in shock, then I looked up to see a ball of fire balloon from the sixteenth floor of the Skyscape.
I scrambled to my feet. Burning glass and metal rained down, and the concrete balcony of unit 1602 dangled by a few strands of rebar. Dense gray smoke poured from a gaping hole in the structure, and flames curled outward and lapped at exposed iron girders. The balcony swayed for a moment before breaking loose and plummeting downward. It crashed into the sidewalk with a thunderous boom.
The man in the BMW hadn’t moved. He continued staring upward. The Taurus also hadn’t moved, and when I brought the telescope to my eye, I saw Duante Tucker furiously jabbing at his cell phone.
I heard the screech of Cody’s tires as he pulled to the curb near me. “Let’s go!” he shouted. He held his .357 revolver in his right hand. I jumped into the passenger seat, he dumped the clutch, and we burned rubber around the corner. Cody’s souped-up Camry fishtailed, and as we straightened, the Taurus launched forward, steering around the BMW. We roared in pursuit, and when we passed by the BMW, the man was still staring upward, as if he was in a trance, or perhaps waiting for a secondary event.
When we reached the end of the block, Tucker took the corner without braking, and the Taurus went wide into oncoming traffic. A pickup truck jumped the curb to avoid a head-on and smashed into a fire hydrant. A jet of water blasted skyward, and I saw the black Crown Vic come from the opposite direction and turn away from us. Its tires squealing, it raced toward where the BMW was parked.
Cody handled the corner in a neat four-wheel drift, and we rapidly gained on the Taurus. We were nearly on its bumper when Tucker veered again into the opposing lanes and used every bit of the roadway to manage a seventy-MPH left-hand turn. Cody downshifted, and we narrowly avoided a minivan pulling from the curb.
“He’s going to fucking kill someone,” Cody said. He mashed his foot to the floor, and we roared down San Fernando Boulevard. Tucker blew through a red light, and we had to slam the brakes to avoid T-boning a box truck. Cody skidded sideways and corrected and the Taurus had gained on us and was probably going close to a hundred MPH. We passed under Guadalupe Parkway and away from the downtown grid. We were in an industrial part of town that wa
s largely deserted on a Saturday morning. The Taurus roared through another stoplight, and then Tucker hit the brakes and tried to turn left onto a side street, but his tries locked, and the car spun in a 360. He regained control and turned right down a street lined with warehouses and cabinet and flooring shops.
Cody had to slow to avoid a collision at the stoplight. Then he worked the gearbox, his left foot jabbing the clutch in a flurry of motion. The ugly Toyota that he called the hellfire hooptie flew ahead, hitting 120, then we slowed faster than I thought possible, and Cody skidded around a corner, all four tires squealing loudly. I saw the Taurus ahead just before it turned left behind a weathered building with stained stucco and blacked-out windows.
I could hear sirens in the background, but they were distant and probably all heading toward the Skyscape. We came around the corner, and the Taurus was accelerating down a long straightaway. Up ahead the road ended in a T, where a long, windowless, single-story structure ran along the street.
Cody’s foot never left the floor, and we were gaining on the Taurus.
“He’ll never make it,” I said as we neared the end of the street. A second later the Taurus’s brake lights flashed, and Tucker tried to make a right turn. The tires howled in protest and the car slid sideways, leaving black stripes of rubber on the road. I could see Tucker hunched over and fighting the wheel. But the steering was not responding, and the Taurus slammed hard against the curb and jolted into the air. It landed on the sidewalk, the tires smoking, both left side rims folded under the chassis.
As we came up from behind, Tucker jumped from the car and began sprinting down the street. Cody hit the gas, but before we could cut him off, Tucker bolted through a doorway into the building on our left.
I grabbed my bag from the backseat and found my backup piece, the Hi-Point 380 subcompact.
“I’ll come around the block,” Cody said.
I got out of the Toyota and ran to the door. Inside, the room was cool and cavernous. It was a granite slab warehouse. Row after row of eight-foot-tall slabs stored on steel frames stretched across a floor nearly the size of a football field. To the left was a counter where a woman drank coffee and studied a mobile device. She didn’t look up at me.