“Too much fucking is a First World problem if I’ve ever heard one.” He took a bite of eggs and washed it down with some orange juice before wiping his lips with a napkin and leaning back in the chair. “Don’t you want kids?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I don’t want anythin’ I can’t leave in a day.”
Dave nodded, like he knew what he was talking about. “That’s one way to live life I guess. How about you, Officer Boyd? You got any kids.”
“No.”
“Same reason as Ty?”
“No, I want kids. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”
He chuckled. “Let me tell you something, son. There is no right person. You want kids you just have them with whoever’s around. You never know where you’ll be a few years down the line anyway.” He took another sip of orange juice and looked to Ty. “What’s this I hear about a contract?”
“Nothin’.”
“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“It’s nothing, Dave. When I look worried you can be worried. Do I look worried to you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read you. To me you always just look like one of those guys in the movies who’s jumping off a cliff on horse to get away from the sheriff or something.”
“I’m not worried. When I’m worried, I’ll tell you.” Ty shifted in his seat. “So what the hell happened in the Jennings case?”
He smiled. “Life happened. I will say this about the segment of the population we deal with: they are unpredictable.”
“I heard he scared himself into a hung jury.”
“I don’t know if scared is the right word.” He turned to me. “This case we’re talking about, it’s a guy Ty busted about fourteen months ago. He’s a children’s party clown. He was also selling coke and pot at the parties to the adults and any of the kids’ older siblings that had any money. So we start jury selection three days ago and I think it’s going to be a slam dunk case. I mean we got witnesses, we got a CI who was wearing a wire and got Jennings to sell to him, and we got a confession.
“So I show up to court on the first day and look over and Jennings is in a full clown costume. I’m talking three-foot shoes, seltzer bottle in his pocket, horn for a nose, the whole bit. So I think we got this guy. We get through voir dire, pick our jury, and I think we’re good to go. So we’re an hour into our trial and I see one of the jurors just staring at Jennings, I mean really grilling into him. He never looks at me, never looks at the defense attorney, even when he was crying over Jennings in his closing. He’s just looking at Jennings the entire time.
“Well, jury goes out for deliberation yesterday morning and last night at ten, I get a call to head back to court. I go in and they read the verdict: unable to reach a decision. A hung jury. Afterward, I interview the jurors to see what happened. Turns out our man that was staring at him was molested by a clown when he was a kid. Wouldn’t even look at the evidence. Kept telling everyone that the clown would come after them if they convicted.”
Ty and the man to Dave’s right were laughing. I grinned though I didn’t find it very funny. When they were through, Dave took a deep breath and stared out the window.
“You keep me up to date on any news,” Dave said.
“I will,” Ty said as he stood. He started walking out and I followed him. I turned to tell Dave it was nice to meet him but he was already speaking to the other man.
We got outside and back into my Jeep. I pulled away into the road and said, “What was in the bag?”
“What do you think it was?”
I didn’t say anything and just kept driving. We turned at an intersection and I asked where he wanted to go. He checked his watch. “Back to the farm.”
“What’s he need it for?” I said. “I mean, why are you doing it?”
“Everythin’ costs money, Baby Boy. Even prosecutions.”
I shook my head. “I wish I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the way it is. He gets some cheddar and my cases get top billing for prosecution. Get more convictions under my belt, more overtime and more promotions. Everybody’s happy.”
“Everybody except the dudes in the trailer.”
“They get to sell their shit and keep a huge cut of the profits and we look the other way. Like I said, everybody’s happy.”
We got to the farm and went inside. We headed straight to the SIS man cave and I saw that the door to the poker room was locked. I sat on the couch and turned on the television as Ty went to his locker and took off his vest and firearm.
I began flipping through the channels, noticing that they had cable. I stopped on a rerun of Who’s the Boss? and zoned out for about five minutes before he sat down next to me.
“We’re doin’ somethin’ you haven’t done before tomorrow. Dig through your hamper and wear somethin’ nasty. T-shirt and jeans, maybe sneakers. Nothin’ else.”
The door to the poker room opened and Dax walked out in a tank-top and shorts. “What you guys still doing here?”
“Heading home,” Ty said. “You get what I needed?”
“Yup. On your desk.”
Ty looked to me. “What are you doin’ tonight?”
“No plans.”
“Come out with me. I wanna take you somewhere.”
“You know, Ty, I’m pretty beat.”
“Bullshit. You’re comin’ out with me,” he said, tapping my shoulder and standing up.
I followed him out and we walked to a Jeep Wrangler parked near the front.
“This is yours?” I said.
“Great minds,” he said. “Hop in.”
We drove down the strip and then went to a bar near Tropicana. It was small and dark and I guessed that it could fit thirty people at most. Several people huddled around the bar in the center of the large space and they shouted to Ty as we sat down. He ordered two beers, and the bartender, an Italian or Greek guy, with slicked-back, greasy hair, brought them over.
“How you been?” Ty said.
“Good, man. Who’s the green?”
“This is Tommy. He’s with me.”
The bartender looked me over and turned back to Ty. “You been good, Ty?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Heard you ran into some trouble with the Zetas.”
“Nothin’ I can’t handle.”
“That ain’t what I heard, man.”
“Yeah? And who’d you hear that from?”
“Just the talk on the street.”
Ty glared at him and the man instinctively pulled back and folded his arms.
“You tell the street to keep its fuckin’ mouth shut.”
The bartender nodded and walked away. I noticed for the first time that everyone else in the bar had been watching this exchange and they now went back to whatever it was they had been doing.
“What’s going on with the Zetas?” I asked.
“Nothin’. Just a little hiccup. Happens every day. You’re not drinkin’ your beer.”
I took a sip. “Why’d you choose me for this?”
“What’d ya mean?”
“There’re better candidates. I know at least half a dozen cops that would’ve fit better into this than me.”
“I see things in people, Baby Boy. Or at least I think I do. You got fire in you.” He took a chug of beer and half of it was gone. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”
“A cop still?”
“I think so. My granddad was a cop. Beat cop. He worked twenty-five years on the same stretch of sidewalk in Chicago. He loved what he did. He knew every person on his route, every house, every person’s schedule. When there was someone in the neighborhood that shouldn’t be there he knew there was going to be trouble and he was on it.”
“The Golden Years. Can’t be like that anymore. Beat cop would get bullied or bribed by the local gangs. Or they’d just start offing cops and eventually no one would wan
t it. Something’s changed in us. Not people, we’ve always been evil fucks, but Americans. Something’s different. We’ve lost somethin’ in the last fifty years that we weren’t meant to lose.” He finished his beer and motioned for another to the bartender. “But what the hell do I know? And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“I don’t know. Five years? Maybe a detective. Vice, something like that.”
“Vice? You one of those perverts that wants to get blowjobs all day for cuttin’ hookers loose? Vice guys all head down that route. You can’t help it. You become what you see every day.”
“What about you?” I said. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“Retired.”
“That quick? What’re you, about forty?”
“Forty-three. And it’s time to retire. I’ve put in nineteen years to the force. Nineteen hard years. I been shot twice, stabbed, jumped, hit by a car, forced to snort coke and meth, had my head busted open with a pipe…I’ve had enough.”
“Nineteen years, you can get your pension next year. Get some cush job as a rent-a-cop at Wal-Mart or someplace.”
“Nah, if I’m gonna retire, I’m gonna do it right. A beach somewhere. Virgin Islands maybe. Mexico, who knows? Just margaritas and senoritas from then on.”
Two women walked in and Ty smiled to them as they took a booth. He ordered four Heinekens and walked over to the booth and said, “Room for two more?”
Ty was good looking but there was something else to him that made those women say yes. He carried himself in a way that said he could kick someone’s ass by looking at them. He had a protruding scar coming up from his chest to the tip of his collar bone and broad, thick shoulders. I followed him over and sat down.
The two women were relatively attractive and Ty began ordering shots of tequila. By shot number five, I wasn’t paying attention to what the women were saying anymore. Something about being airline stewardesses. By shot ten I was making out with the blond one sitting next to me and letting her play with my firearm under the table.
“Gimme that,” Ty said, taking the gun away from her and tucking it away in his belt. He seemed calm and collected, like he was watching three drunken idiots and found it amusing.
“Let’s get outta here,” Ty said. The women agreed and we left.
“You okay to drive?” I said, pulling him back from the women.
“Fine.”
We got outside and began to drive. I had noticed when we pulled out of the bar that a car had sped up to catch us. It was large, an SUV, and black. It was too dark to see anything until we passed a street light and I looked in the rearview; it was a black Chevy Tahoe.
“Ty,” I said, “I think that car’s following us.”
“The Tahoe?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“One of you ladies have a husband we don’t know about?”
The girls laughed but I had seen something on Ty’s face; it was worry. It flashed for only a moment and was gone.
“Hold on.”
Ty sped up and then slammed on the brakes. The Tahoe had to do the same. He turned into the other lane and across two more lanes full of traffic until he flipped a U-turn and was going in the opposite direction. The Tahoe tried to do keep up but there was too much traffic behind us and we lost them.
I looked to Ty. He glanced at me and then back to the road without a word.
CHAPTER 12
Pain was what woke me up. It radiated from my head, down my neck, into my shoulders and back, and down my legs. I opened my eyes slowly and it felt like I was pulling sandpaper across my eyeballs. The first thing I saw was a blurry image of an empty tequila bottle on a nightstand next to me.
I twisted, slowly, onto my back and stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t at my house. I didn’t remember whose house I was at, though I had a fragment of memory that we had gone to some woman’s house and then to Ty’s. I closed my eyes again and started drifting off to sleep when I heard a door open somewhere in the house. There were footsteps and then a fridge opened and closed. The footsteps resumed and got closer to me.
The door to the bedroom opened and Ty walked in. He was wearing running clothes and had an iPod hooked to his arm.
“Rise and shine, princess. He opened the shutters and sunlight flooded in and hit my retinas like a blast. They slammed shut and I turned away.
“Where are we?”
“My house,” he said. “How you feelin’?”
I sat up, groggy, feeling like vomit was just on the edge of my throat, ready to burst out of my mouth. I burped and the taste of tequila came up.
“That good, huh?” he said. “Well, you almost got laid. That’s gotta make it worth it.”
“Almost?”
“You passed out before her clothes were even off.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “How are you not feeling like this? You drank as much as I did.”
“Nope. Bartender and I have an agreement. In situations like that, he gives everyone else tequila and my shot glass is beer with the foam taken off. In total I probably only had a beer and a half. Gets the girls nice and loose, though.” He opened the door to an adjacent bathroom. “I’ll be out in ten and then we’re hittin’ the road.”
“Where we goin’?”
“Got an assignment for you.”
“I need to go home and change. I got dried puke on my shirt.”
“No, you’re good. You reek like booze and puke. If you smelled like ass and weed too, you’d be perfect for what we need. But don’t worry about it, you’ll do just fine.”
I lay back down as he took a shower and came out. He woke me and dragged me into his kitchen and poured coffee down my throat.
As we were sitting at the table, I looked around his place. It was decorated tastefully. African masks and Asian paintings hung on the walls; oriental rugs covered the hardwood floors. I looked out through the glass doors of the balcony and realized we were at least ten floors up.
“Like the view?” he said.
I nodded, taking a sip of coffee.
“You know how to get a view like this, Baby Boy? You gotta use your brains. Most cops get out there and they either run off their hearts or their dicks but few run off their brains. Brains will get you through the day, and every night you go to sleep you’ll be richer than you were when you woke up. You do that twenty years, you’ll be a wealthy man. You have enough coffee?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
He picked me up by my arm and we started heading for the door. I pulled away from his grip, since I was feeling better now. He didn’t stop or look over, just keep heading for the door. We took the elevators down and my stomach felt like it was in my throat.
Outside was a sea of heat and it made me feel nauseated. I stopped by his bushes and dry-heaved a couple of times.
We got into his Jeep, thankfully, since I knew I wasn’t capable of driving, and pulled out into a residential area. For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I was going to put on a CD just to break the silence but when I reached for them Ty said, “We’re here.”
We were near Del Pico Drive. A lot of people called it Little Tijuana and it was known as a place where illegals could live in relative peace from the police. Some children played outside, and on the corner, a group of bangers eyeballed us. I felt bad for the families that had to struggle to leave Mexico and then ended up in a place like this which wasn’t much better.
“That house right there,” Ty said, looking to a little shack with a driveway. “You’re going in there.”
“For what?”
“There’s a dude named Roberto. They call him the Candyman but you’re not goin’ to call him that. Ask for him at the door and get him to sell you some meth. Tell me how many people are in the house and bring the meth back to me. Easy. Now get to it.”
I looked from him to the house. “There’s gotta be—”
“Doesn’t matter that you’re not Mexican,” he said, reading my th
oughts. “They sell to everyone and Roberto speaks English. You’ll do fine. Gimme your badge and gun too.”
“Why?”
“They’re going to search you for a wire.”
I hesitated and then handed them over before I opened the door. I took my time walking across the street over to the house. I glanced over to the men on the corner who were up on their feet now. They looked like a pack of jackals ready to defend their territory.
I went up the steps to the porch and knocked. I took a deep breath and tried to look dejected. I hadn’t worked narcotics but I had interacted with a lot of meth-heads on the beat. I knew my clothes weren’t too important; doctors and politicians were addicts just like prostitutes and homeless people.
The door opened and a short Mexican was standing behind the screen. I could see the bulge of a gun in the front of his pants.
“I need some glass,” I said. “They told me I could get some here.”
“Who told you that, motherfucker?”
“Eduardo.”
He paused; I could tell I’d hit on a name that meant something to him.
“How do you know Eduardo?”
“He dated my sister way back in the day. Now you gonna sell or I gotta go somewhere else? I didn’t come to get to know you.”
He didn’t move for a long time and then nodded. “Aight. Come in.”
I went inside. The house was dark and furniture was pushed up against all the doors and windows. The front door had a shotgun leaned up against the wall next to it. A man was sitting on the couch but I didn’t see anybody else.
The two men spoke in Spanish; something about who I was. The man on the couch looked up at me, staring. He had two teardrops tattooed just under his eyes.
“You know Eduardo?” he said. “How the fuck do you know Eduardo?”
“My sister dated him.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
The man that had answered the door said, “Yo, chill, esay. I’m a just sell him his shit and he can bounce.”
“You stupid, esay. This ain’t no fuckin’ tweeker. This dude a cop.”
The other man looked at me. “You a pig, motherfucker?”
My heart began pounding so loud I was scared I would pass out. The one on the couch had one of his hands underneath a cushion. “I ain’t no pig. You know what, never mind. I’m goin’ up to Twenty-Eighth Street and getting a score. Fuck y’all.”
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