It was already dark and the streetlights made me squint, my vision like a screech in my head, materializing in the actual sound of sirens whining in the distance. Gunshots in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Time to go. I lurched as quickly as I could to my convertible, threw the hard drives in the backseat, wiped some of the blood out of my eyes, and started driving.
27
Iset the hard drives down and banged on the door—my shoulder banged back.
“Hang on!” Rider called out. I leaned on the jamb; my arm was half-wrenched out of its socket. Rider was taking his sweet time getting downstairs. I saw a fleck of red and stepped back. I was leaking, leaving paint splatters on his porch. Cadmium red, maybe, or alizarin crimson.
The door finally opened and Rider’s eyes nearly popped right through his wire-rimmed glasses. “Holy shit! Itchy, what happened to you?”
He took me in and put me in the shower. I made it a cold one, and then spent some time in the mirror investigating the damage. My face was a mess. My nose was visibly broken, leaning to one side, and my lip was swollen to twice its normal size and still oozing thick, dark blood. I had a goose egg on my head, giving me an elephant man profile. I looked like hell, but I was still alive.
I met Sobczyk in the kitchen and he handed me a sandwich. “So it is the CIA.”
“Apparently. They kicked the SFPD off the case, and I doubt anyone’s looking for my Guatemalan. And he’s looking for me.”
“Everyone always thinks I’m paranoid.” Sobczyk blinked hard, twice. “Did you find the girl?”
“No.”
“You think she’s dead already?”
“Can’t say.”
“It would be pretty lame if she died after trying to save you.”
“Yeah, Sobczyk.” He couldn’t have put it better. “It would be pretty lame.” I took a bite out of the sandwich, wincing with my swollen lip. “More dead.”
“What?”
My mouth was full. “I mean if she got more dead. She’s already officially dead. She got accidentally put on the Death Master File.”
Sobczyk blinked again. I didn’t think it was possible for him to look more serious than usual, but he did. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I forgot.”
“That’s on purpose,” he said. “No accident.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Too many coincidences tend to equal a conspiracy,” he said. “Someone put her on that list.”
I kept chewing.
Sobczyk shook his head. “If you want to find her, it’s got to be an ex-boyfriend,” he said, wiping down the counter. “I mean, if she’s alive.”
“Is that what all the good conspiracy books say?”
“No, man, that’s just always the way it is on TV. The convict always ends up at his ex-girlfriend’s place.”
“That’s TV.”
“Ostensibly, TV is based on reality. That many cop shows wouldn’t be in agreement for nothing.”
“You have a point, I guess. But I checked the ex-boyfriend. Nothing. Let’s see what Rider’s got.”
Rider had the hard drives from the deer blind propped up on a stack of magazines and was working two keyboards and two monitors—one for each drive. “In terms of surveillance, you don’t have that much here,” he said. “They were purging files on a regular basis, looks like every day.”
“You mean erasing the footage?” I asked.
“If they were recording you twenty-four seven and keeping it all,” Sobcyck said, “you’d have a lot more of these drives.”
“Yeah,” Rider agreed. “Right here. Yup. Dumped. Daily. But we do have the last . . . let’s see . . . eighteen hours, since the last dump. Which means we have this.” He brought up the clip he had just watched of Sharkskin and Al in my living room.
“Don’t,” I said. “I’ve seen it already.”
Rider took it down. “I’m just telling you, you’ve got proof. You got the guy, you got a fucking murder on tape. And he confesses to another—your girlfriend?”
“Susan Dalton. What about the e-mails?”
“Man,” Rider said, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his T-shirt, “it would take some time to go through all of this. Most of them are in Spanish, and I’m sure most of them are just inter-office whatever, if you know what I mean. I looked at some of the notes from your pal McCaffrey, and if the rest is anything like that, it’s mostly crap. Scheduling, paychecks, errands—I mean, if you didn’t know better, he could be the manager of a Pizza Hut. Same day-to-day bullshit.”
“Nothing explicit? Nothing about either of the Daltons?”
“Itchy,” Rider said, “I’ve only been alone with these for half an hour.”
“Sorry, I know. You’re the best. Both of you guys.”
“What next? What can we do?”
“Can you copy all of that?”
“I’ve got a spare drive,” Sobczyk said. “How much data is it?”
“Not that much, really,” Rider answered, kicking one of the drives. “This one is mostly porn.”
“All right. Make a copy of everything pertinent, and bury it. Keep it someplace safe. Then take the originals to the cops.”
“I thought you said the cops wouldn’t help,” Rider said.
“Go to the Northern Police Station, on Fillmore and Golden Gate, and ask for Inspector Berrera. He’s kind of an asshole, but I think he actually gives a shit. Him or his partner, Willits. You tell them you have a video of a guy getting shot at Itchy Crane’s house, and they’ll listen. Tell them what I told you—that there’s a guy running around town killing people, that he’s probably an operative or somehow sanctioned by the CIA. Get them to take it to the FBI.”
“Berrera and Willits?”
“Yeah. And give them my apologies. Sobczyk, can I borrow some clothes?”
“Sure.”
“Rider, can I borrow your car for a few days?” He made a face. “Look, give me your car, and I promise that when all this blows over, I’ll let you borrow mine.”
“Seriously? Dude, you’re gonna let me drive Delores?”
“I can’t be seen in that thing. After I got my face rearranged, I left it in long-term parking at SFO and took a cab here. I’ll let you pick it up when this is over.”
“Oh, man—let me get my keys.”
It was high time I checked in with McCaffrey.
28
Rider had an old Honda Civic. Nothing fancy, not too beat up, backseat full of fast-food detritus, and excellent gas mileage considering what I was used to. I drove as if possessed and made LA in record time. McCaffrey’s office building was on 4th, near the 3rd Street Promenade. It was still the middle of the night, so I found a parking garage, moved into the passenger seat, and passed out.
I woke up midmorning, the sunlight heating Rider’s Honda to oven-level temperatures. Every part of my body felt like it had been run over. I fell out of the car and tried to stretch, cracking my back audibly. I pissed in the lot, leaning on the hood heavily. It was now or never. I loaded up my little Derringer and walked over to McCaffrey’s office. The lobby was a typical high-ceilinged, polished-interior nightmare, and the bored security guard gave me a startled look when he saw my busted-up face. I grinned, shrugged, and he didn’t bother me. I checked the list on the wall for McCaffrey’s agency: sixth floor.
The elevator was mirrored and I looked away. The office itself was white and minimalist. McCaffrey’s secretary sat at an alabaster island in the middle of a waiting room with chairs that seemed straight out of Star Trek. She looked as bored, as blond, and as tragically washed out as she had sounded on the phone.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see McCaffrey. He’s expecting me.”
“Your name?”
“Conrad Johanssen. But don’t tell him who it is. He thinks I’m dead.”
She gave me a blank stare, blinked, and picked up the phone.
“Mr. McCaffrey, I have a Mr. Johanssen here. He says that
you think he’s dead . . . ?”
She pointed at the hallway behind her. “Thanks,” I said, and headed back, worrying the gun in my jacket pocket. The door to McCaffrey’s office was open, and he got out of his chair as I entered.
“Itchy,” he said, smiling, “I thought that had to be you.” He hadn’t changed. His paunch was still prominent, his thinning hair still bleached blond, his ugly face still beaming with rancor. He still favored overpriced suits, but wore only a T-shirt underneath, a look that should have died in Miami in the eighties. He crossed the floor with a hand extended. “Damn, you look like hell.”
I kicked the door closed behind me, stepped to him, took his hand with both of mine, pumped it once, smiling, and on the upswing stepped around him and caught him in an arm lock, pulling and twisting his arm away from his body in a direction it was not designed to go. He grunted.
“Don’t scream, McCaffrey.” I fished the gun out, kept him bent in front of me, put the gun to his temple. “Not a fucking sound.”
“Uh. You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
“S-sit down. Talk this over.”
“Who’s setting me up?”
“Wait—wait—”
I pulled his arm a little harder. He flinched. “Who’s setting me up, McCaffrey? Why did you want me to find Ashley?”
“Stop it, please.”
“Answer me.”
“Itchy, come on . . .”
I leaned in so close he could feel my breath. “Who. Is. Ashley.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“Bullshit.”
“She’s my stepdaughter.”
I yanked his arm and he squealed. I wasn’t buying that either.
“She’s my ex-stepdaughter. Fuck, I’m like her uncle.”
That got me. I let go but kept the gun on him. “Sit down. In front of the desk.” He did. I sat on his desk across from him. “You smoke in here?”
He was rubbing his shoulder. “I quit.”
“How LA of you.” I took out a cigarette and lit it. “Speak.”
“Why do they call you Itchy anyway?”
“What?”
“Why do they call you Itchy?” McCaffrey seemed suddenly calm, almost sincere. “If you’re going to kill me, I want to know.”
“I got that at the Chronicle. I was such a drunk that by midday I’d be twitching and scratching myself.” I shrugged. “Don’t be so convinced I’m going to kill you. I might just shoot you in the kneecaps. Tell me about Ashley.”
He let out a long, depleted sigh. “I was married to her mom before she died. Look, that kid never had anyone. Dad died young, mom was a bum—hot, a stripper, and I think she hooked too. When I met her she was trying to clean up, working at Disneyland, if you can imagine that. Living in Anaheim and working at Disneyland. It’s like . . .” He trailed off.
“White trash in a rich suburb.”
“Exactly. I was married to her less than two years. Ash and I got along. She was obsessed with the private dick business, wanted to learn everything. It was fun having her around. Cute kid, y’know? Maybe thirteen, smart as hell. I used to let her take pictures of people trying to defraud insurance companies. Y’know, guy with a back injury, you catch him loading cinder blocks. She was great at watching people. Decent photographer too—always had a good eye. Me and her mom split up, the mom latched onto some other poor schmuck and they moved to San Francisco. I didn’t hear from Ash after that.”
“Until she disappeared?”
He reslicked his thinning hair back with the flat of his hand and wiped a bit of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “You’re not going to like this.”
“I haven’t liked any of it.”
He rubbed his wrist and looked me in the eye for the first time. “A couple years ago, the mother of one of Ash’s old middle-school friends in Anaheim comes knocking on my door. Rich bitch, totally Orange County. Her daughter was killed up in San Francisco. The cops closed the case, would I look into it? Something about a nude beach.” He read the cloud passing over my face. “Do you remember her name, Itchy?”
“The girl’s name was Patty. Her boyfriend was . . .” I couldn’t bring it up.
“Patty’s name was in all the papers, but no one remembers the name of the boyfriend who died on that nude beach. You know why? It was a pretty white girl from Orange County dating a black guy from Oakland. And they weren’t lost, they were wasted. There was nothing wrong with your directions, Itchy—they were both drunk and stoned out of their gourds. Patty’s mom kept that out of the press. She wanted someone to punish, and the boyfriend was already dead. His parents live in the Acorn projects—West Oakland—there was nothing to gain by going after them. So I went digging and found you. Hired you to help me on some—I don’t remember.”
“A gravesite search in Colma. Your irony was intact.”
“Got me a closer look at you.”
“You threw me under the bus.”
“I gave Patty’s mom a scapegoat. This job isn’t about learning the truth, Crane, it’s giving people what they pay for.”
“You killed my career. Why shouldn’t I kill you right now?”
“Please. The Internet had your number. Besides, you’re not a killer, Crane, and you’re not an information broker. You’re an information junkie. You want the story.”
“Who the fuck are you working for, McCaffrey? And don’t tell me Ashley’s dead friend’s mom.”
He looked almost stung. “I never wanted to get into this. Business was slow. I was tired of staring though binoculars at some fat-ass fucking his mistress. I was approached by . . . an organization.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t know what else to call it. They do consignment work for the CIA.”
“What kind of work?”
“They kill people, Itchy, all right? They kill people. They do what the CIA isn’t technically supposed to do anymore. They kill bad people. Or that’s how it was pitched to me. They needed boots on the ground—reconnaissance, surveillance, information management. I find out things they need to know, I manage a small group of guys who keep track of potential targets. Someone else does the dirty work.”
“And you set up a patsy to take the fall for the hits.”
“Yes.” He looked at the carpet. “I guess you know just about everything.”
“Not quite. How did Ashley get into this?”
“When I went up to San Fran to investigate the nude beach, I tracked her down, found out her mom had been dead for a few years—”
“How did she die?”
“Lung cancer. No foul play, just bad luck, and a two-pack-a-day habit for decades. Ash had been living on her own since she was fifteen. Squatter communities, artist communes, co-ops. Real counterculture shit, man. She lived at the old Dolores Street Baptist Church—the one that burned down. Camped in Golden Gate Park. It’s a tough town to be homeless in, but the kid still finished high school. When I found her she was answering phones at Macy’s, just turned eighteen, ready to start her life. And then she found out she was dead.”
“The Death Master File.”
“Fucking ‘keystroke error.’” He winced. “She was just eighteen, it was terrible. She hadn’t had a fixed address in years, she didn’t have any ID, she could barely prove she was alive—she couldn’t build anything. She needed help.” That stung look again. “I got her an apartment, kept an eye on her. Gave her a job.”
“In your criminal organization.”
He flinched, blood pressure spiking. “It was just a part-time job to help support her painting.” He ran a hand across his hair again and took a deep breath. “Nothing dangerous, no big deal—little fill-in jobs. One of the jobs was you. Watching you, logging your movements . . . the tedious grunt work of a routine surveillance case. That’s all it looked like, that’s all she knew. She liked it, and she was good at it. Then she started to have some kind of a thing for you.”
I let that go. “She worked at the house in Sa
n Mateo?”
“When we set up shop there. Look, it’s not like we’ve been watching you twenty-four seven for two years. We’d set up an observation post, and when the job was done we’d take it down.”
“And Ashley watched me get framed for three murders.”
He threw his hands up. “There was you. There was Ash. And everything just kind of clicked. We were looking for a new subject, and the Bay Area was a leading contingency. No one would miss you, no one would cry for you. And after the nude beach, maybe people would think you had it coming. Besides,” he raised his shoulders and let them down again, “you fit the profile.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re white, you’re of a certain age, you have no family. You have your own business and you work alone. You have few friends, fewer girlfriends. You own guns, you’re a good shot. You have a history of depression and alcohol addiction.”
“And I have motive to kill people I’ve never met?”
“With your prints on the murder weapon and no alibi, no prosecutor would worry too much about motive. They’d make a case for you as a lone gunman, a misfit, a serial killer. If it came to that.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s coverage, Itchy. There was never any plan to turn you in to the cops unless there was a hitch. If we smelled heat, we’d put them on you. A fall guy, for emergency use only. It wouldn’t even matter if the charges didn’t stick—by the time anyone figured anything out, we’d be long gone.”
“And that’s worth the expense of keeping tabs on me.”
“It’s not as expensive as you’d think. Besides, if you learn one thing as a subcontractor for the government, it’s to keep your expenses high. As soon as you save them a little money they slash your budget.” He pulled at his T-shirt collar. He sounded calm, but he was sweating. “Look, I don’t have anything against you, personally. In a perfect world all the jobs would’ve finished clean and you’d never have known anything about this.”
“I don’t find that reassuring. Since when does the CIA kill people in the United States? What happened to foreign dictators?”
The Painted Gun Page 15