by Robert Ward
He opened it and was pleased by the cone of yellow light, which came out and made a pleasant pattern on his dingy office.
Inside the fridge were bottles of beer and another ice-cold Ab- solut. Only this one was lime flavored.
He leaned down, felt a crick in his back, and then pulled out the bottle and a box of La Roca chocolates. His doctor, hip Lon Huizenga of Beverly Hills, had told him to chill out on candy and booze, but he found it difficult to heed his doctor’s warnings. It was the class of people who drove him to excessive eating, he told himself as he hobbled back to his desk. So many losers, so many hustlers and creeps. It was killing him inside. And the women he knew . . . skanks, all of them skanks. Jesus Christ, the only real pleasure a guy got living in fucking L.A. was from food.
He ripped off the top of the vodka and took a hit. Cold and limey. Now that was good. After he knocked back a few and ate a few chocolates, he figured he’d get the car and head out Sunset to grab a little Thai.
In the basement of Nicki Sadler’s building, Harper and Hidalgo sat in the janitor’s closet equipped with headphones and digital recorder. Oscar had deep bags under his eyes; he had not slept for more than two hours a night for the last three days.
“Nicki’s a warm and lovable guy, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “A real sweetie. Hey, man, you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Oscar said. “Okay, I walked into a wall today, but outside of that, I’m terrific.”
“Glad to hear it, ’cause I’m not hanging out with no Mexican slackers.”
Oscar laughed and shook his head.
“’Tween you and Nicki Sadler, I’m just surrounded by compassion and kindness.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “That makes you a lucky man.”
Through his headphone, Jack heard Sadler dialing again.
“Here we go again.”
After two rings, a woman picked up and said hello.
“Miss Heyward, I have those photos you contracted for.”
On the other end was Doris Heyward, a worn-out-looking blonde. She was wearing a midriff -revealing shirt, but her midriff had quit standing up about four years ago. Now it sagged over her hip-hugging pants. As she talked, she looked into a cracked mirror in her trashy bedroom and plucked her eyebrows.
“Save me another heartbreak, Nicki. Tell me about what you got.”
On Sadler’s end of the phone there was a dismissive sigh.
“Hey, Miss Heyward . . .”
“Call me Doris, sweetie.”
“All right, then, Doris, listen up. I’m not some phone-sex worker, okay? I don’t wish to regale you with the gory details.”
“Gee!” Doris Heyward said as she plucked out a vagrant brow hair and dropped it on her fake Indian rug. “I never realized how delicate you were, Nicki.”
Jack and Oscar exchanged a smile.
“Like a flower, Miss Heyward. If I have to do verbal, it’ll be a hundred bucks more.”
“You fucking vampire!” Doris Heyward said. “Go.”
“Okay, Miss Heyward,” Sadler said. “You asked for it. Let’s see here. The first shot we have here is a very candid picture of your husband and the woman in question. She’s kneeling down in front of him and taking his engorged member into her open mouth and . . .”
“That’s enough. The son of a bitch!”
Now Nicki Sadler was starting to get into his verbal shtick.
“You’re still paying the hundred, Doris, so you might as well hear the second picture. In a way, it’s much more charming than the first. In this one, the woman in question is leaning over a desk and your husband Brett is giving it to her up her asshole, which is causing a look of extreme pain-slash-happiness to be elicited from her very reddened face.”
“Fuck you!” Doris Heyward said. “You send me the pictures and forget the hundred. You already got your fun out of this, you sadistic bastard.”
She slammed the phone down and Nicki Sadler cackled like a madman.
In the basement Jack and Oscar did as well.
“That’s the thing I love about this job,” Jack said. “We get to see the crème de la crème of society every single fucking day.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Like my madre used to say, ‘The world is a beautiful place if we could just eliminate all the humans.’”
Jack fell asleep on the moldy old couch, bedbugs chewing on his arm. Oscar manned the phones, but from eight to ten there was not one call. He curled up in a battered armchair and read The Charm of Quarks: Mysteries of Particle Physics. At eleven there was another call, in which a voice said, “The bitch said she was gonna deliver, and since she din’t, she’s gonna be delivered to the fucking morgue.” The caller hung up immediately after delivering this happy bit of information, but his caller ID was blocked. A few minutes later, there was a call to Nicki in which a woman said she was “gonna shoot her sister in both her heads.” Sadler laughed out loud at that one. Oscar looked over at Jack, who snored mightily from the couch.
Oscar waded through the book, only on the edge of understanding it, but liking it, anyway. There was something clean and refreshing about science . . . just reading about string theory and the way the universe was put together made him feel better about everyday life. And the fact that men could understand it . . . well, some men, that was amazing. Maybe when he retired from the force, he would go back to school and get a master’s in physics. Then again, maybe he’d go down to Baja and disappear like his favorite author, B. Traven.
Finally, at 12:10 A.M., Sadler made a call, which caught Oscar’s full attention. The voice was male, muffled.
“Hello.”
“What a great pleasure it is to talk to you,” Sadler said.
“Fuck off !”
“My, you’ve become crude,” Sadler said.
“It’s late. What the hell do you want?”
Sadler laughed and began his spiel:
“What do I want? I want Osama bin Ladin’s head on a pike in front of the Pantages. I want happiness and eternal youth in a bottle. And I’d like Angelina Jolie to dump Brad Pitt for me. But I’d settle for a one-time payment of $300,000.”
In the basement, Oscar kicked Jack’s foot and in a second Harper was wide awake and had on his headphones.
There was a long silence before the muffled voice spoke again. This time he was furious.
“You want to keep on living? You kinda left that out.”
But Sadler didn’t seem shaken by the threat.
“Very much so,” he said. “But given my classy tastes, I want to live well. I’m sure you, of all people, understand.”
There was another brief pause. Then the muffled voice said, “And if I refuse to make this payment?”
Sadler gave a nasty little laugh.
“You won’t. May I remind you I got you all the information, and I know what you’ve done with it. That makes me an accomplice, which means you didn’t give me the correct job description when you employed me. By paying me, you’re only acknowledging the true value of my work.”
Jack looked at Oscar and shook his head. This is what they’d been waiting for. It had to be.
“You’re a clever boy, Nicki,” the other man said. “Meet me tomorrow at Musso’s. Four o’ clock. At the bar. I want all the information, including any copies you made. Oh, and if you ever try this kind of play again, you won’t be able to talk so slick anymore, ’cause I’m gonna cut out your tongue.”
Sadler didn’t miss a beat.
“I knew you’d be reasonable,” he laughed. Then he hung up.
Jack looked at Oscar and smiled.
“That was fucking Steinbach. I’m pretty sure.”
Oscar shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Came from a cell phone, but not his. And that voice. It sounded sort of like Forrester to me.”
“Whoever it is, we’re gonna find out tomorrow,” Jack said. “Maybe we can wrap this thing up. Meanwhile, you hear from Marshall today?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah, he called me today. Looks like Forrester has a little bank account in the Cayman Islands. But, of course, it’s untouchable.”
“Not if it turns out to be the result of a criminal activity.”
“Very hard to prove that, Jack.”
“Just the same, I’d like to find out how much dough he has in there, and the dates the deposits were made.”
“I already got Marshall working on that.”
“Good man!”
“Man, that’s it for me tonight, bro. I’m wasted. Heading home.”
“You go ahead,” Jack said. “I’m so wired, I need a drink.”
“See you tomorrow, bro,” Oscar said.
He shambled out . . . Jack watched him go and felt a surge of camaraderie for his partner. Having never said a word about it, he knew that Oscar would lay down his life for him, and Jack would do the same.
It was an amazing bond, one neither of them ever had to mention. And yet it was more real than any other bond in his life, with the exception of his son.
The way things were right now, Jack realized that Oscar was the only sure thing he had in his life.
21
FROM THE MIRACLE MILE stakeout Jack drove his Mustang down Fairfax, hit the 10, and, speeding all the way, made it to Charlie’s bar by 1:30 and was surprised to find it still packed.
He gave his car to Sergio, the valet, and went inside. Charlie was standing right by the door, pouring salt into his hand. Two good-looking women in their thirties, wearing hip-huggers and skimpy tank tops, looked on as Charlie made the salt disappear, then reappear.
The girls laughed and hugged Charlie, who turned and smiled at Jack.
“Hey, Jackie,” he said. “Just in time. I get you something?”
“How about a Harp?” Jack said.
Charlie nodded and waved to the bartender. The two girls smiled at Jack and then turned to talk to two surfer guys. Jack envied them their youthful freedom.
Charlie got the mug of beer and handed it to Jack.
“Here you go, Jackie,” he said. “Man, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about Zac and Ron. It just doesn’t seem possible. I keep expecting them to walk through the door.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, not wanting to talk about it. “Hell of a thing.”
Charlie nodded, then drank his ginger ale.
“Hey, we got our first big game tomorrow night with the Palisades Angels,” he said.
Jack sighed.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m going to be working tomorrow night.”
“Maybe Julie can bring him.”
Jack quickly looked down at the floor. Charlie, who never missed a thing, put a friendly hand on Jack’s shoulder.
“What’s going on, Jack?”
“Julie and me . . . we’re taking a break from each other.”
“Oh, man, what happened?”
“It’s a long, sad story, Charlie, and to tell you the truth, I’m too wasted to tell it right now.”
“That’s tough,” Charlie said. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here for you.”
“Sure,” Jack said.
Charlie managed a smile.
“Look, we gotta get Kevin up there,” Charlie said. “He’s turning into my best hitter. We need him out there. Tell you what: I’ll pick him up and take care of him until you get back. I can let Bobby, the night manager, run the place for a few hours.”
“That’s great,” Jack said, taking a swig of his Harp.
“Sure,” Charlie said. “Anything to accommodate my slugger.”
Jack smiled and slapped five with Charlie. This was a good thing . . . his son living a normal life. Baseball, surfing, school . . . like any other kid. Maybe he’d come around . . . maybe they’d seen the last of the teenage rebellions. If so, the bump on the head was a good thing.
Jack took another swig and set the mug down half filled. Time was he would have knocked back two or three, but he suddenly felt tired; it was all he could do to stand up. Charlie smiled and talked to two customers who were leaving, and Jack chatted briefly with a trooper he knew from a murder case in Solvang. He was about to call it a night when he saw him. The same scarred and bearded man he’d seen at the Little League field. This time there was no doubt. The guy was over in the corner, looking directly at him. Jack watched as the man picked up a shot glass, knocked back what looked like whiskey, and then walked toward him. Jack felt for his shoulder holster and steadied himself. But there was no need. The scarred man walked right by him, out the front door.
Jack ran his hand through his hair. Maybe he was just jumpy after what had happened to Zac and Ron. Maybe the guy wasn’t looking at him at all. But why was he both here and at the ballpark?
Jack thought about asking Charlie, but he bagged the idea because he already knew what Charlie was going to say: “Hey, the guy likes baseball and hanging out at the beach, like a million other guys. He looks scary because of the scar, but you can’t hold that against him.”
Yeah, Charlie would think Jack was losing it, and maybe he was right. Seeing ghosts, hearing voices. Now his head felt like hell, and he decided that he’d had enough. Time to pack it in and go home.
Jack walked by the little cluster of smokers who huddled together like lepers outside the bar. He took the keys from Sergio and walked toward his car. It was going to be good to get home now . . . fall asleep for six hours, then deal with Sadler, maybe nail Steinbach for good.
He was about five feet away from his car when it happened.
A car with its headlights turned off roared toward him. Jack was unable to move. He saw the car bearing down on him, and then — as quickly as it happened — it was over. Someone had tackled him from the side, and both of them were rolling over the hood of his car to safety.
Jack’s head smashed into his fender, and he fell headfirst into the hard gravel of the parking lot.
He saw little blue lights, and then the world went black.
Three minutes later, he came to and saw Charlie looking down at him with concern.
“Jackie, you okay?”
Jack tried to push himself off the ground, but he was groggy and there was a searing pain in his forehead.
“I’m fine, except I’m gonna look like a unicorn tomorrow morning.” Jack gently touched the bump in the middle of his head. “Thanks, Charlie. Where’d he come from?”
“I don’t know. I was just saying good night to two other people and I saw you. You were walking toward your car, and then he just came from back there . . . He musta been out of it. Man, I just went into linebacker mode.”
“Thank Christ you did, or I’d be with Zac and Ronnie.”
Sergio came running back from the curb.
“Mr. Jack, are you all right?”
“Yeah, Serg. You see which way he went?”
“Yessir, he turned left, headed south.”
“You know the car?”
“Yessir. It was a silver Porsche.”
“Either of you know who it was?”
Sergio nodded.
“Yessir, I saw him pretty good, Mr. Jack. He real ugly with scar on his face, like this.”
He drew an imaginary scar down his right cheek.
Jack looked at Charlie and shook his head.
“That’s the same guy who was at the ballpark, Charlie. We gotta find somebody around here who knows him.”
“Sure thing, Jack. You really think it was from that guy you busted?”
“Yeah,” Jack said, “I do.”
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed for LAPD dispatch. Within thirty seconds, he had three cars headed for the 405, looking for a silver Porsche and a man with a long scar across his right cheek.
Only minutes later, Jack came out of Charlie’s parking lot and headed south. Once he got down to Main Street in Santa Monica, there were any number of turnoffs the guy could have taken. Jack roared down the freeway, then made a systematic search of the side streets running into the city. But there was no sign of the
silver Porsche. After an hour, he gave up. After all, the scarred man could already have parked his car in any of the countless garages around the area. Or maybe they’d find the car abandoned while the driver was already home, snug in bed.
Jack turned up Pico and headed east. He had just gone by McCabe’s Guitar Store, where he’d bought Kevin his Strat, when his cell phone beeped.
He assumed it was one of the other agents who were helping in the search, but when he looked at the display, he was surprised to see Michelle Wu’s number.
“Hey, Jackie . . . You still up? What are you doing, you bad boy?”
“Nothing, baby. Just defending the public from late-night predators and other scum.”
Michelle laughed and Jack immediately felt aroused.
“You going to owe me some serious fun,” she said. “Dinner, drinks, and maybe a night in a first-class hotel.”
“Nothing I’d like more, babe,” Jack said. “But it all depends on the quality of the information.”
“You think I give you anything but the best, Jackie?”
“I don’t doubt you one bit, baby,” Jack said. “You are the info queen. Now what you got?”
“Well,” she said. “I was thinking and thinking about that friend of yours, Zac Blakely. Like where I heard his name before. And then I was at the Valentine Room the other night, you know the place over on Ventura Boulevard, and it comes to me.”
Now Jack was fully awake.
“What came to you, Michelle?”
“Where I heard the name. Your man Zac Blakely . . . I had heard his name before. He wasn’t just an agent, baby. He had another side. The man was a serious player.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying that he and his partner, Hughes, they had a thing going with Timmy Andreen. They was doing deals with him, baby.”
“Bullshit!” Jack said. “Who told you this shit?”
“Nobody had to tell me, Jackie. I play around with those boys sometimes. They let me sing at their club. You should come hear me, Jackie. Anyway, I met this guy there . . . said his name was Jay Richards. After you left the other night, I looked up Blakely’s obit in the Times. The picture there? That’s the same guy I met.”
“You sure, baby?” Jack felt something in his chest sag.