The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “Oh, my God!” I shouted, “Neneng!”

  Denny stopped me. “You mean the woman—”

  “Yes!”

  “She’s OK, we found her outside. She’s on the way to the hospital now.”

  “Minus her nose!”

  “What?” said George.

  Denny said, “She said, ‘Doctor make new.’ She’s a tough little lady. What’s her name again?”

  “Neneng.”

  “We also collected the guy in the priest outfit—Culpepper. It was you who zip-tied him down there, right?”

  I admitted it.

  “What?” repeated George.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Denny said, “We’d have been in here sooner except for Ms. Neneng, she kept pointing towards the basement, so we thought the surveillance guys were wrong when they told us the first shot came from up here.”

  “With Culpepper’s and Neneng’s statements,” I suggested hopefully, “you’ve got Vargas on kidnapping and maybe even attempted murder.”

  “That’s right,” Denny said.

  George added, “And you’ll want to check the Port for a couple of bodies in a barrel.”

  Denny asked the LAPD officers to go ahead and take Vargas and Wichita to booking. You never saw such a pair of stupefied faces in your life.

  The Korean-descent officer named Ang stood back from me and said in amazement, “You’re a dead ringer for Annette, I can hardly believe you’re not her.”

  Still, I couldn’t smile. I was well aware that I’d been impersonating a police officer, on purpose this time, which is a crime by definition. True, I was doing it to try to nail a bad guy, but they had me dead to rights.

  Then Detective Herrera, the guy who’d questioned me as the ER doctor sewed up my arm, sauntered in, and the circle, for me, was complete.

  “Just like you to show up,” Denny told him, “well after the last ricochet.”

  Herrera said nothing, he just looked me up and down as if trying to decide whether to be angry or turned on.

  Denny told George, “I’ve been working on bringing down Dale Vargas since Tucson.”

  “You’re FBI, then?” asked George.

  “That’s right. Special Agent Milton Fairbarn.” We all shook hands, and he smiled a good guy’s smile, wide and relaxed, so different from the calculating smiles he’d given at my dinner table, and from the scowls he’d thrown around the mission. “I had no idea what you guys were doing.”

  He told us he’d infiltrated the Whale’s organization by getting hired as one of the few civilian guards at the ABC Mission. Eventually, he met Vargas and became a vice president.

  I interjected, “It was Wichita and that Jerrol Bays guy, wasn’t it, who beat up Kip Cubitt, then came back shooting?”

  “That’s right, they were a little team. When Jerrol bought it after murdering Annette, I stepped into his place as Wichita’s sidekick.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

  That got him a lot of face time with Vargas, plus he was able to limit some of the damage Wichita was bent on doing. “Not all,” and that gave him pause, “but some.”

  He’d checked George and me out, and started watching us. “We realized you guys were after the Whale too—and we knew you were a PI and you”—he pointed at me—“were not a drug addict!—and I was about to call you off when we thought we might as well see how you were going to do it.”

  I took that at face value, but George said, “Bullshit, Agent Fairbarn, you wouldn’t have left us alone out of pure curiosity. You were coming up too empty for too long.”

  “Don’t push it, Rowe.” Then he laughed, sweeping his dreadlocks out of his face. “I must admit, I’m impressed. You got him before we did, you surely did.”

  I realized I wasn’t going to get counter-busted. This time. Agent Fairbarn told us they certainly could have gotten Vargas and all the vice presidents on possession and assorted assault charges long ago, but they wanted Vargas for murder—or at the very least, conspiracy—and it looked good now. Other agents were, this night, rounding up the rest of the vice presidents.

  “I have to ask,” I said, “how you knew I wasn’t a real drug addict?”

  Denny said, “The needle tracks on your feet were wrong for heroin.”

  “They were?”

  “Yeah, they were consistent for intravenous cocaine, but not heroin, so I knew something was wrong. With coke, you get the tiny red dots inside pale skin, but with heroin the marks are usually darker—browner, you know—and wider, like a piece of brown worm along your vein. You must have looked at the wrong picture on the Internet. I realized you were faking it, and that made me even more curious about you two. I’d already begun to date Gina, thinking she was the one mainly looking into things—having seen you two nosing around the mission that day—but then I realized it was you, and you really confirmed it that night with the needle tracks.”

  “So my pregnant-addict disguise didn’t fool you.”

  “Oh, it did, at first, you were very good. It was only your muscle tone that tipped me off, your body wasn’t slack enough when I held your leg. Then I looked closer at your tracks. Really, you’re an excellent actress, do you know that?”

  George offered Denny the Siegfried. “Want to shoot a real corpse with it and pin it on Vargas?”

  Another laugh. “A bit of an end run, perhaps!” He shook himself—“Uffuh!” He had to come down from his adrenaline high too. “Nah, we’ll just dredge up however many poor bastards are underwater at the Port. And we’ll do some bargaining. That ought to be enough to put him away for a long time.”

  At Fairbarn’s prompting, George explained how he’d placed one live round in the chamber of the Siegfried, then filled the magazine with blanks. “I had to have a hole in the rat or a hole in the floor to make him think the gun was live, so when I shot Mrs. Keever he really bought it.”

  “Were you guys going to let him go once you’d scared the shit out of him?”

  “Oh, no; I was going to call the LAPD with the information and hope this citizen’s arrest would hold up. Rita here was going to just disappear, so we wouldn’t have the cop-impersonating problem, and those two ladies would go away as well. It’d be just me and the Whale, his word against mine. I didn’t know how much, if any, information he’d spew, but I knew he’d be one scared little boy. I’m glad we got him to mention the Port.”

  “Which,” said the agent, “I bet’s going to hold up.” He told us he’d been en route to Ventura with Gina when he’d gotten a text message from surveillance that something was up at the ABC, so he’d turned back, stuck close in to L.A., keeping the protesting Gina with him. Upon receiving a second message fifteen minutes ago, he’d ditched her at a bar downtown and raced here to join the SWAT guys who’d been called in. “I’ll make it up to her,” he promised brightly.

  “That’ll take some doing,” I muttered.

  Chapter 34 – Rowe Unleashed

  George Rowe walked into the Los Angeles night exhausted but happy. The breeze felt good on his face and dried the sweat under his arms as he and Sylvan walked to Sylvan’s ’80s-vintage Buick Riviera out front, talking. Sylvan was carrying Norway 433 in the crook of one arm and getting his keys out.

  The lights of Los Angeles pushed back the black night sky. Sirius had not yet risen in the southeast. The heat wave was broken, and the star would continue to edge lower in the sky, and the ghosts of the ancient Romans were no doubt happier.

  Rowe and Sylvan picked their way through the zombie-army flow of street people, some in wheelchairs, some pushing shopping carts crammed with plastic bags of God knew what—all of them feeling unsettled by the recent police activity at the ABC Mission.

  Rita had accepted a ride from Agent Fairbarn to rendezvous with Gina and get home. Before going, she had kissed Rowe on the cheek, and that had added to his happiness. Simply the touch of her lips on his cheek.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she had warned.

&n
bsp; “Never!”

  She gave him one of her looks.

  Now, as Sylvan was about to unlock his car, he stepped back to let a man aimlessly piloting his power wheelchair go by. A black dog sat alertly in his lap, and as they cruised abreast, Rowe got a nervous feeling about the dog, but it was too late.

  With an eager snarl, the dog sprang, startling Sylvan. It chomped Norway 433 right out of his grasp.

  “Hey!” Sylvan shouted.

  The rat was too heavy for the dog to really run with; it simply gave it a hard shake and dropped it on the pavement, then stood over it, ready to kill it again if it moved.

  Rowe grabbed the dog by the collar and Sylvan picked up his rat.

  The wheelchair guy said, “Oops!”

  Rowe held the dog back.

  “Hey, leave my dog alone! Give him to me!” The skinny guy and the dog both smelled pretty pungent.

  “Fuck you,” muttered Sylvan, squatting.

  In the distance, they suddenly heard the feral pack set up a baying. Rowe judged they were roaming the brush directly behind the mission.

  Sylvan held the limp body of Norway 433 in his large hand. “I spent a lot of time training this one,” he remarked sadly.

  The baying increased. Rowe pictured a scruffy jackrabbit leading them flat-out.

  “Your rat dodged a bullet tonight,” Rowe said, “only to have this damn dog—”

  He stopped.

  The dog’s collar, he realized, felt substantial in his hand. It felt like good leather. Very dirty, but good. There was no tag dangling from it, only a ring from which a tag might have been torn, or pried.

  He inspected the medium-sized black dog. It was a male.

  “Give me back my dog!” demanded the wheelchair guy, his eyes glassy, his meager body slack in the chair. “Here, Whizzer!”

  The dog ignored him. Rowe said, “Sylvan, this dog looks like a beagle, but it can’t be, can it? Because it’s black.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Sylvan said, finishing his sigh of grief over Norway 433, which he laid for the moment on the roof of his Buick, “every stray dog turns black sooner or later.” He cut an angry look at the dog. “It is a beagle. Why?”

  “I want to take it inside to wash its head and see his markings. See, I’m looking for a lost beagle for a client, and—I have a feeling.”

  “Here.” Sylvan took a wet wipe from his belt pouch. “Let’s see.” Rowe passed him the collar to hold while he scrubbed its forehead. Under the streetlight, beagle markings began to show. The dog flinched and sneezed, but Rowe carefully wiped off the grime to reveal a distinct tan-inside-white blaze, resembling a Doric column.

  “Ernest,” he said.

  The dog wagged its tail.

  “Goddamn.”

  One of Ernest’s ears had been torn, and there were a few notches in the other. He’d definitely lost weight.

  “Gimme back my dog!” demanded the wheelchair guy fearfully. “He’s a service animal.”

  Rowe told the man in the chair, “This dog is a runaway. The owner wants him back.”

  “No, he isn’t!”

  As the feral pack ran in the brush behind the mission, ever closer, Rowe could distinguish individual dog voices, all sharing the joy of late-night aggression.

  “He’s my service animal,” insisted wheelchair dude.

  Rowe placed Ernest in the man’s lap to calm him. The dog’s tattered ears pricked toward the sound of the pack.

  “Well,” said Rowe patiently, squatting instinctively so that his head was lower than the man’s, “the owner is a nice guy, and he has a right to get his pet back.”

  “Whizzer will be well taken care of,” Sylvan put in.

  “Yes,” Rowe agreed, “he’ll get a bath, get cleaned up. Good food to eat.”

  Wheelchair dude, crestfallen, said, “Back to captivity, eh?”

  Rowe said, “Well, yes. But you know, there’s a reward.”

  “How much?” asked the man with sudden alacrity.

  “A thousand dollars.”

  With street instantaneousness, wheelchair dude held out his hand.

  “Well, I don’t have that much on me at the moment,” said Rowe. “Give me the dog, and I’ll bring the money to you as soon as I can.”

  “When?” said the man.

  Sylvan watched all this.

  “Well—tomorrow,” said Rowe. “Or Monday, at the latest, when the banks open.”

  “No way, man, no way.”

  Sylvan said, “Tomorrow for this man might as well be next year. What’s your name, buddy?”

  “Benny.”

  Rowe said, “Benny, I could—”

  Benny broke in, “I give you guys this dog, there’s no way you’re gonna come back here and give me a thousand bucks.”

  “Yes, I will,” said Rowe.

  Quietly, Sylvan asked Rowe, “How much money do you have on you?”

  “About a hundred, I guess.”

  Benny shouted, “I’ll sell him to you for a hundred!”

  Rowe fished out his wallet and counted out all his currency, $112, and handed it to Benny.

  The man folded the money into a wad and shoved it inside his filthy shirt.

  The dog looked at Rowe curiously.

  Rowe reached for his collar, but Benny pushed the dog’s rump and yelled, “Go free!”

  Ernest plunged to the ground and bolted for his feral brethren. “Goddamn!” exclaimed Rowe. Them again. The pack.

  Benny looked after the dog with a crazy grin. “I’d just as soon he keeps his freedom, like me.”

  Rowe had never before wanted to punch a handicapped person.

  “Goddamn it!”

  Benny activated his chair and rolled away into the shadows. Rowe turned to Sylvan. “I’ve got to catch that dog!”

  “Shit, bro, that pack is vicious!”

  “You think they’ll kill him?”

  “Hell no, he’s a hound! They’ll kill us!”

  Already running, Rowe tossed over his shoulder, “They’re not so tough! I’ll split a hundred grand with you if you help me get him!”

  “What!” Sylvan grabbed a noosed catch pole out of his trunk and sprinted after Rowe.

  Chapter 35 – Hair of the Dog

  Gina and I sat up late into the night, talking as fast as our mouths could move, talking about everything—talking and laughing and crying with relief. We consumed a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk as an hors d’oeuvre, before starting on the gin and Wheat Thins. Gina had begun a martini thing after she and Daniel and I watched All About Eve on cable one night.

  I sipped about half of my martini, and Gina got up to make more. “It’s so good you have this jar of olives,” she commented. “And toothpicks. You’re so organized. If this were my house I’d have had both things but we’d never be able to find them. I think you should let me wear your aqua Noni Xon dress with the belt to the endowment ceremony tomorrow.” She looked at her watch. “Today, I mean.”

  “I’m wearing that dress.” A fantastic raw silk number I’d gotten for thirty-eight dollars at Madwoman.

  “Oh.”

  “I like gin,” I said, inhaling the juniper.

  “It’s part aromatherapy.” Gina poured the gin over the crackling ice without measuring.

  “It’s very generous of you to have bought Tanqueray, you know, top shelf.”

  “I used your credit card.”

  “God damn it.”

  We laughed like maniacs and drank more gin.

  When the door buzzed well after 3 a.m. and I saw George standing there, I almost fainted. Standing, actually, is an overstatement; he was bracing himself against the doorjamb as if his legs were about to buckle.

  There was a smear of blood under his nose, and his hand left a blood print on the doorjamb. His plaid shirt was torn, hanging from one shoulder, caveman-style, and he’d—thank God—lost his wig. A bruise was coming up in the exact center of his forehead, and I saw his pale knees, abraded red, beneath the torn cloth of his pant
s. Deep welts striped his arms like barber poles.

  The first thing he said in answer to my speechless stare was, “I’m fine. I figured you two would still be up. Sirius is rising.”

  That’s when I noticed the dog, a weary-looking thing with the head of a beagle and the body of some kind of black hound, tethered to George’s hand by a length of clothesline. It panted and looked up at me with pleading eyes.

  “Who is it?” said Gina, drying her hands in the kitchen. She got a load of George and said, “Gosh, you look like you tried to get away from a Russian hooker without paying.”

  He was too tired to crack back, but he was smiling, and I knew he’d won more than one important battle tonight.

  “Could you keep this fellow until the kennels open, like maybe ten o’clock? I’ll come back for him.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Let him in. Them in,” said Gina.

  Once inside, he asked for water for the dog, then drank two glasses himself. He waved off my warm washcloth and box of gauze. He took me to the patio and pointed to a star just peeking above the treetops of West Hollywood. “That’s the Dog Star,” he said. “Soon it’ll go below the horizon and we won’t see it again until next year.”

  “Dogs come and go,” observed Gina, wise with gin.

  I looked at the star, barely breaking through the night glow of L.A. The mysterious fragrance of night-blooming jasmine wafted along from somewhere.

  We went to the living room where, holding the unbelievably smelly, suddenly restless dog by the collar, George sat on the floor and told us about his client and the missing beagle, and an action-movie chase, tonight.

  “It’s a beagle? The whole dog is a beagle?” Gina was dumbstruck.

  George’s eyes glazed over as he described dashing after the feral pack through the thorny scrub behind the mission, across the freight yards of Vernon, down the ravine to the Los Angeles River and up again, over bottle-strewn streets, between buildings where ziggurats of discarded box springs had grown. Sylvan had helped him, and between the two of them, they’d managed to head off the pack, cut Ernest from it, and bring him in alive.