by Michael Crow
Nobody—not our IA, certainly not the DEA—wants truth here: that agent Francesca Russo was mad, bad, and as bent as they come. That she was well on her wicked way to creating and ruling a crystal meth empire. At least ten executions behind her, probably more on the agenda, since major drug trafficking isn’t a forgiving sort of trade.
The DEA, for all I know, may’ve already had some suspicions about her when she was killed. But they’re revealing nothing. They never will. Fed Rule Number One: do not permit anything—anything—to tarnish your agency’s image, no matter how massive the lies that must be told, how broad the deceit that must be sustained. So the DEA very publically lets it be known that Francesca was a stand-up, dedicated drug agent who died tragically in the line of duty.
The local cop who was there and survived? No hard proof he’s dirty, but fuck him anyway.
So it’s been one grilling after another, getting tighter and meaner with each interrogation. Must be pure sadistic pleasure for the IA dick, because I admit from the first moment that, yes, I did take some crystal meth from the BCPD evidence locker without authorization and plant it in Russo’s Corvette. Seems clear enough to me, though, that I had excellent reasons to bend the rules a little. There was some urgency involved. The IA dick doesn’t quite see that. His conception of rules is that they’re brittle as glass, no pliability at all. He buys the DEA hint of impure motive because it suits his ends.
I’m confined to desk duty until the inquisitors hand down a verdict, which is why I’m sitting around wasting IB’s time instead of out chasing drug dealers. Not cool. Not cool at all, the way this Russo matter worked out.
Like so many other things in my very uneven life. “Might as well have ‘Born to Lose’ tattooed on my forehead, right, IB?” I say.
“Somebody already did that in invisible ink or something before your mother took you home from the hospital. You got a very special talent for attracting troubles. Troubles love you, man. Any bored trubs just hanging out with nothing to do, they say, ‘Hey, there’s always Luther. Let’s go see him. Luther digs us.’ “
“Probably genetic,” I say.
“I don’t care what it is, long as it’s not contagious. I wake up with a pain in my gut every morning already, just from knowing I’m going to be spending most of my working hours next to you. It’s high-risk even being in your general vicinity, mostly.”
“Worst case, you’ll never be in my vicinity again once IA’s done with me.”
“Aw, man, don’t go there.” IB suddenly looks forlorn, regretful.
“I mean I’ll probably be back in uniform, instead of undercover with you,” I say, for his sake. Knowing I’ll do the job chop myself before I’ll accept that. “Down in the cage on graveyard shift, booking recovered stolen property. High-end mountain bikes, DVD players, super laptops, all that good loot.”
“Yeah, it’d have to be that,” he says, brightening back up. “They definitely ain’t going to let you anywhere near evidence. Especially seized-drug-type evidence.”
Just then Dugal’s office door opens, the IA dick and his two senior acolytes exit. So stiff with rectitude their knees don’t bend when they walk. All three wear identical dark gray suits and white button-down shirts (the acolytes do risk differently striped ties, though), and their usual ecclesiastical faces. But the IA head doesn’t look as righteously satisfied as I imagined he might. I’m expecting at least a sneer of muted jubilation from him. He doesn’t even glance my way.
I don’t want to read too much into impressions like that, though.
“Feels like lunchtime, IB,” I say. “I’m booking.”
“Right, man. Best to leave a decent interval for Dugal’s blood pressure to drop forty or fifty points, so his brain’s not swelling so much against his skull. Vanish for a while.”
The sun’s blazing, it’s humid as the Panamanian jungle where I trained back in my army special-ops days, but the sprinklers are whirling on the County Courthouse’s green manicured lawns, creating split-second rainbows, once each revolution. My shirt’s sticking to my skin by the time I make the hundred meters or so over to Flannery’s, a pub I favor because almost no other cops ever go there. The blast of super-cooled air that hits me as I walk inside tightens the muscles in the back of my neck. A headache’s likely to follow, but I figure that’s a reasonable price of admission. I take a seat at the end of the bar, well away from anyone else.
“Hey, Luther, what’s going down?” Frank the bartender says when he wanders over.
“Steak sandwich, bloody. If that retarded quadriplegic you got in the kitchen can manage it. And two Cokes. Cans, not from the taps. If you can manage that.”
“Hoo-ah,” Frank says softly, holding my eyes a little longer than usual. Former Marine lifer, like my father. He’s never said how or why he came here. Probably just wise enough to know anything’s better than joining the creaky legion of Corps retirees bunched on the drinking side of cheap bars in cheap towns around Camp Lejeune, boring themselves and each other with bitter bullshit about how exciting life used to be, before that thirty-year clock stopped. “HOO-ah.”
“One of those days, Frank. Sorry.”
“Sorry-ass excuse. So instead of letting that steak even touch the grill, how about I have the quad give it to you raw?”
“I’m good with that.”
“He’ll be pleased. Hates that grill, since he has to flip everything with his teeth.” Frank goes off laughing. He reaches into a cooler, slides two cans of chilled Coke down the bar. Little bit after that, he puts a thick white plate before me. The steak’s perfect, charred outside and nicely red and juicy in. “Chow down, hog,” he says.
I do. For two or three savory bites. But then I can’t help it, I start thinking options, outcomes. No matter how I try to twist and turn and rearrange them, they still form up as poor to truly shitty. My lunch starts heading in that direction, too. It was a certifiably insane move, trying to burn Russo the way I did. I knew it, did it anyway, so what’s that make me? Now I’m facing double trouble. No matter what the IA rules, I know I’m going to be on the DEA’s radar for the rest of my life. No way to get under it, no way to slip off their screen. Goddamn Francesca. I never wanted her in my life, never wanted her working my case, and I absolutely never wanted her dead. Just wanted her gone. Away from me. Someplace far away.
But not the place she wound up.
I’d had enough of putting people there, well before she came along.
It seems like I spent most of my adult life doing it, first as a special-ops soldier and then as a narc. No regrets and no guilt. At least none my conscious mind will admit to, since most of the fucks deserved it and I was only doing my job. I’d got trained for it and I’d got paid for it. A profession, and me an enthusiastic practitioner. But sooner or later—unless you’re a homicidal psycho, a personal possibility that haunts me worse than Russo or anyone ever will—you hit the wall. You do not want to do that kind of work anymore. You begin to feel you cannot.
You tell yourself to get out, get into something fresh, clean. Wipe the past.
Easy to say. Much harder to do. All sorts of complications, some real-world, some purely mental. Memory’s a major player. Memory has its ways of evading all orders. Soon I’m spiraling deep into dark regions I’d really rather not revisit. Soon I’m so far away on that joyless tour I’m oblivious to my surroundings. For God knows how long I’m not even aware someone’s slipped onto the stool right next to mine. Some instinct finally clicks, much later than it should have. Bad lapse. A quick peripheral check then: just another suit on that stool. Okay, I decide. Ignorable. Flannery’s is always full of suits—lawyers and civil servants from the courthouse. They never bother anyone, they’re too concentrated on selling whatever they’ve got to whoever they’re lunching with.
So I fall right back in. My spiral tightens. I’m no longer eating that sandwich, just staring at it. But seeing something else entirely. Scenes appear, play out, others start. With no regard for the r
eal chronology in which I lived them.
Then the suit speaks.
“Word is you may have some time on your hands. We have an opening that should match your skill set. Discuss?”
A flat, perfectly anonymous voice. The forgettable voice of a man with a forgettable face, the kind who moves through the world leaving little or no impression on anyone. But I snap to full alert, tensed about as tight as I get.
Anonymous. Forgettable. Yeah. Except I’d heard those exact words, in that exact voice, seven or eight years ago. I was underemployed at the time, restless, edgy, unhappy. He seemed to know that when he approached me. Just like he seems to know something now even I’m not sure of yet.
I had discussed, then. Not very much, either. Just enough. I had accepted the offer: independent contractor for a heavy outfit with major international interests.
And then I’d done a year in the worst place on earth.
three
FLICK FROM THREE-ROUND BURST TO FULL AUTO. GO louder.
“Suspended. Six months.” Captain Dugal’s tapping his pen faster and faster against a white legal pad. No beat at all, just tap, tap, tap. It’s his version of a facial tic. He won’t meet my eyes, though we’re face-to-face across his conference-room table. “Without”—taptaptaptaptap—“without pay.”
I don’t say a thing. I focus on the second hand sweeping around my wristwatch, around and around. Dugal’s pen is denting paper faster after one minute thirty. After three, he can’t stand it anymore. He looks up from the perfectly blank page, glances at me.
“It was the absolute best I could get for you, Luther. IA pushed very, very hard for dismissal. Morgan even mentioned criminal charges.”
Morgan’s the IA head. Total failure as a street detective, one of the poorest felony-conviction records ever. I know because I had a savvy friend hack into his file on the BCPD computer net. Five years ago, when he hit fifty, the chief nudged him onto the sidelines, promoting him to captain in charge of Internal Affairs.
I look steadily at Dugal. Now he looks back.
“I went to the mat for you, Luther. Even though this act of yours put me in a very tenuous place. It cast a shadow on my leadership of Narcotics and Vice, threatened to discredit my command and control of those units. You understand this?”
No reply from me.
“I’ll assume your silence means yes,” Dugal says, leaning slightly forward. “Just so you know, I took the risk of going upstairs on this. To the top. To the chief.”
I nod. He’s expecting gratitude. He isn’t getting it. The pen starts again. Taptaptaptaptap.
“Are you thinking of appealing this, Ewing?” he asks sharply, temper rising now. “We all know the union will back an appeal. They don’t care about waving our dirty laundry around in public. Are you going to make that happen, Ewing?”
“What for?” I say. “I could use a nice long break. And it’d only cause you trouble with the chief.”
Dugal drops his pen. Surprise, and an odd mix of great relief and extreme discomfort flicker across his face. He wouldn’t give a good goddamn what he did or who he screwed if he were ever in my position, so long as he managed to save his own ass. But he’s self-aware enough to know it. So it’s hard for him to deal with people who don’t share that trait, or the obsessive ambition he’s had on open display ever since I first met him.
“Goddammit, Luther! None of this had to happen,” he says. “Why in the world didn’t you come to me with your suspicions about that DEA agent?”
He knows exactly why: he wouldn’t have believed a word, or lifted a finger if he had. And he’s ranting because some small part of him he usually suppresses is feeling shame. I let him rant, let my mind drift back an hour or so, to the lunch I never finshed. As soon as the suit, name of Mister Westley, said, “Discuss?” I took a ten from my wallet, placed it on the bar, and walked away without looking at him. Nothing to look at, really. “The Man Who Isn’t There.” That’s what we used to call Westley, those of us who discussed and accepted.
We were wrong. He’s always there. He must have the instincts of a vulture. He circles, circles, circles. Always looking, always cautious, wary. Then suddenly he’s on the ground beside you, and if you’re not careful, he’ll eat you for lunch.
It’s a talent, a natural gift, I suppose. Or the Company wouldn’t still have him out there after all these years. He must meet or exceed whatever quota he’s given for recruiting contractors: wet-work specialists, covert-action types mainly. People who never have any true contract. If they get killed, get blown, fall into unfriendly hands, the CIA never heard of them. No connection, no relation. And no interest at all in their fates.
They did take care of me after I got shot in Sarajevo, but only because it was less risky to get me out than to leave me where my identity and employer might come to light. So what could Westley want with me now? It’d been years since I did a job for him, and working the suburban narc beat hadn’t exactly kept me in special-ops shape. My mind is weighing every possibility it can come up with when Dugal breaks the process.
“What in the hell is the matter with you, Ewing!” he snaps. “Has anything I’ve said registered with you? You are an outstanding detective who has just been suspended without pay for a serious breach of department rules, and you are simply sitting there like a lobotomized moron. Can you explain this? Am I losing it, or have you lost it, Ewing?”
“Ah, I’m just tired and dazed,” I say. “This whole ordeal has been draining, sir.”
Dugal unwraps a little. “Yes, yes it has. Not only for you, to some degree, at least. But going forward, let’s keep in mind that it could have been worse, much worse. You’ll report back in six months—same rank, same duties. All clear?”
“Clear.”
Dugal rises, reaches across the table to shake my hand. “Go on home now, Luther. Come in tomorrow, clear out your effects, turn in your badge. I will personally hold on to that, and I look forward to personally handing it back when you return. Good luck.”
I take a deep breath of chill, machine-generated air that’s been cycling through the plane since we left San Francisco. Not bad recall for a guy as disassociated as Annie’s labeled me, I reckon. I down the dregs of my Red Rock, put the bottle on the table. I know if I slip off to sleep now, the delicate Japanese girl who appears and disappears like a fairy will tidy up without disturbing me, though the scent she leaves in her wake may enter my dreams. An hour or two or three ago we touched down in Anchorage, topped up the fuel tanks. Odd. Commercials mostly make nonstop runs from San Francisco to Seoul. Kim must be a nervous flyer, some kink about his air yacht running out of gas over the vast, cold North Pacific.
Kim stayed in his private quarters during the stop. Sonny insisted I go with him to the tacky old passenger terminal, have a look and a laugh at the enormous Kodiak bear that lives there in a glass case. It was a laugh; judging by the mangy fur and the clownish posture, whoever did this monster was having a really bad taxidermy day. It was a laugh, too, when Sonny revealed his secret vice, cleaning out the place’s entire stock of Snickers bars.
“You never saw that, Mistah Prentice, okay?” Sonny said as we headed back across the tarmac to the plane, bulging shopping bag in each hand and grinning big. Koreans have two smiles, one genuine and one that’s a sign of deepest embarrassment. This Buddha was definitely wearing the second.
The 747’s cabin lights are as low as they go. I look out the nearest oval window. The moon’s off to the southeast, brilliant though it’s only a sickle. We’re cutting an arc over the globe from Alaska toward the big, bustling Korean port city of Busan. I’m on an arc with an end point unknown. Because I discussed.
Westley’s timing was perfect. He just waited.
Waited past the little going-away party my friend Annie—Detective Lieutenant Annie Mason, head of the Sex Crimes Unit—throws at her house down on Federal Hill in the city. It starts cheerful enough, under the circumstances, rapidly turns loud and boisterous as beer and
whiskey consumption increases exponentially, like an old-fashioned Irish wake. It’s a good crew, every one of them too cool to even allude to the fact that my suspension’s a rank deal, or rant about IA being some kind of asshole conservancy set up and financed by misguided do-gooders totally deluded into believing assholes may be an endangered species.
I can’t get drunk—more than one beer or one glass of wine on top of my medication, my brain turns into a kind of toxic and potentially lethal tapioca. But I can flow along with those who do, even when Radik, head of Homicide, falls into some slobbery gratitude about a little help I gave him on some killings related to the Russo case, then staggers into incredibly fluent (for a man who can no longer focus his eyes) descriptions of outstanding crime scenes. He even gets through the classic urban-legend one: teen-aged crackhead puts her two-month-old son into the microwave and nukes the kid because he won’t stop crying. Nobody’s too upset when Radik falls asleep on a sofa.
I get the married men like Ice Box, who’s got a terrific wife and adorable twin girls at home, in a state of wistful envy, and the young single guys drooling when I describe how I’ll be spending the next six months, though Annie and the other women don’t display the same appreciation for most of the details. I say I’m going to do something I haven’t done since I was a kid just about to ship out with my Special Forces team: take a long road trip. Leave town in my Audi TT, drive all the way down through Mexico to Merida, then still farther south along the Yucatán coast to Belize, stopping at every likely-looking beach, bay, and laguna, snorkling and working on my tan. And in the nights—ah, you can’t believe how hot the pretty little señoritas are down there. If you’re over thirty and haven’t kept yourself aerobically fit as a twenty-one-year-old, you’ll be dead of cardiac arrest before morning, they’re that wild. I oblige demands to elaborate, and pretty soon I’m half-believing my own bullshit.
Only two people see right through the act, sense the dread of empty time that’s hollowing me out already. One’s Dog, a rock-hard, super-chilled black city narc. Who took a bullet in the face when we were working on the takedown of a smack gang that left him in a wheelchair for a year, and still on crutches now. As the party’s ebbing, I sit on the arm of the chair where he’s been parked for most of it. I want to tell him how I’m really feeling. But the man already knows.