“Thanks.”
Barton nodded and Martín pushed the hat back onto his head. Barton watched the Chevrolet drive away.
Losing the brothel would annoy Müller without doing any real harm. Slavery and human trafficking were despicable and was an irritant between them from the start. It would serve Müller right to have it taken from him and dismantled. Besides, Barton wanted the art district for himself. Bruising Müller’s credibility in that part of town played into those interests.
Other matters first. He pulled out his phone and pulled up one of his lieutenants, who answered on the second ring.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Paul, get in touch with someone inside BCJ. There’s a Raul Juarez in there. I want him dead before tomorrow morning’s roll call.”
“Not a problem, boss.”
“Thank you, Paul.”
He put the car in gear. He was getting hungry, and wondered what Sandy would be making for dinner. Maybe they should go out for a movie afterwards.
CHAPTER 18 – THE PAWN SHOP
Carl strode into a pawn shop like so many others in Bay City. A grate of black, iron bars barricaded the windows and doors, spaced enough to see displays inside but too small to crawl through. An old neon sign above the door tried to proclaim “PAWN SHOP,” but the N flickered and the S didn't light at all. In this neighborhood, one heavily tagged by Black Street Hoodlums, most customers were probably lured in by the “We Buy Gold/Jewelry/Guns for Ca$h.” He would never buy a gun anyone brought here to sell.
A string of bells jangled against the door as it opened and closed. He shook off the rain, tapering away at least, and glanced down both walls of the narrow strip mall shop before turning to the wall of guitars opposite the thick Latino manning the register with hopeful eyes. That hopefulness was unlikely to still be there when Carl left.
“Lookin’ fer a g’tar?”
He took his time, scoping out the different shapes and colors and flame patterns and death skulls. What he knew about guitars came down to not wanting to spend $600 and up on one.
“I don’t think I can afford any of these. D’you ever get any cheaper ones? You know, for somebody just starting?”
“Sometimes. Yeah.”
Stacey dated a guitar player before him. She mentioned more than once his long fingers were perfect for it, which made them good for other things, too. Supposedly his tongue was pretty agile, too. Fidelity, however, was one thing the kid lacked. Carl was there when she caught him backstage, hip deep in a roadie’s mouth.
That was the last time she ever saw the prick, and she never showed any real interest in running into him again. The last time Carl saw him was about two weeks later and ended with a shovel three hours outside city limits. Carl suggested to her it would be better if she never saw him again anyway, which was entirely true.
A stack of large speakers rested near a section of stereo components. “Are those as loud as they look?” He turned to hear the answer, but more to spot the one camera he could find.
“Depends on what you hook ‘em up to, amigo.”
Bicycles hung from hooks on the back wall on either side of a solid black door to the back of the shop. He moved towards them but turned to survey the other long wall behind a long counter topped with a low glass display case of watches and jewelry and cell phones and some big Bowie knives. Knives like those always made him feel a little sad.
Other people's stories of their first kill with a knife usually involving something little. Swiss Army knives, shorter switchblades, box cutters. The big, wood-handled Bowie might as well have been a machete in his high school hands. There were two gangs in his Bronx high school.
“Come on, little Carlie, cut the freak. Or we cut your little girlfriend.” Anita wasn't his girlfriend. He wasn't dating as a high school sophomore. But he did like her, and she seemed to tolerate him enough to sometimes sit at the same table as him. It was nice not always eating alone. The freak in question was a junior, a scrawny, curly-haired redhead science geek. Two of them held the kid up off the floor.
Young Carl hadn’t known how to use a knife. He held it like Norman Bates in Psycho. Anita screamed when one of the punks pressed his switchblade underneath long-procrastinating buds of breasts. That scream haunted him for months. He plunged the huge knife into the geek’s neck. Blood spurted out, covering his hand and a thug’s face and hair.
“AH! Asshole!” the thug yelled. The geek fell, his eyes wide with terror and pain and a scream too gurgled to get out.
“No, it’s good man. He did it. He’s cool. Let’s go.”
He couldn’t have said how long he stood staring at the bloody knife, just that Anita was gone once he had the sense to glance around to find himself alone with the body behind the school bleachers. He ran and threw the knife in a nearby creek. Anita died two days later in a crosswalk, hit by a car running a red light on her way to school Monday morning.
Carl looked up from the knives under glass.
“I don’t know. So far I’m not seeing anything I need.” He took his time walking to the door. “Shit, where’s my wallet,” he said as he shrugged the little pack off his shoulders. It hit the industrial carpet tiles with a weighty thunk and a jangle only Carl was close enough to hear. He grabbed the end of a length of chain in the pack and lifted the pack itself with the two smallest fingers on his right hand. Ortiz, behind the counter, paid little attention and made no effort to push for a sale. No, interest on loans was where he made his money, not on sales. Well, not on legal sales, anyway. The illegal pharmacy behind the black door was a different matter.
The Black Street Hoodlums ran these blocks, and Ortiz paid them protection money and cut them deals on pharmaceuticals which “fell off of a truck.” But the Chainz were moving in. When he left, nobody would suspect anything other than their involvement.
His left hand turned the latch to lock the door. His thin gloves were close to flesh toned, subtle, but enough to make sure no fingerprints got left behind.
“Hey, you can’t do that, amigo.” The man made his first mistake, hesitating. Carl turned.
“I’m not your friend, amigo.” He strode forward, long strides to close the short distance to Ortiz.
Ortiz registered the coldness in Carl’s eyes, and fear blanketed his face as his fumbling hands reached under the counter. Carl’s two fingers released and the pack dropped to the floor, not so weighty this time.
He swung, and the chain lashed out overhead, just missing the ceiling and coming down hard on the hand holding a stubby .38 revolver. Glass shattered as the force of the chain drove the hand and gun through the glass. He picked the gun out of the debris while Ortiz backed into the display case behind him, clutching his hand and cursing. Carl pocketed the gun.
“No, Ortiz, it’s not this crap I’m interested in.”
“What do you want?” Ortiz seemed to think this was the robbery it was supposed to look like. Carl scoffed.
“I’m looking for someone with a recent head injury and paralysis. He’ll at the very least need anti-seizure shit. I know all the underground medicines and medical supplies around here go through you. This guy needs medical care, and he’s not getting it legally. That means it’s probably someone you’re connected to.”
“What? Anti-seizure?”
Carl smashed another case, scooped up a handful of watches. “Cut the shit.”
Of course the man wouldn’t want to snitch on his customers. That would hardly be good for business. Carl wasn't looking forward to the coming conversation. How many people in this city had been tortured or killed at Kurt Müller’s orders? How many wives raped? How many children beaten to make a father talk? How many sons and daughters killed as punishment for crossing the German? Not Carl’s. No matter what it took, not his.
First came smashing inventory, pocketing some to look more like a robbery.
“I ain’t had none of those customers for a while,” Ortiz insisted. “Nobody all week. And before that mostly just painkil
lers, some antibiotics, some antivirals. Not seizure drugs. I don’t even got any.” Carl would find out later if that part was true.
He dragged Ortiz out from behind the counter. So many things the man could have grabbed for a weapon but didn't. Carl respected that on one hand, but was disappointed for him with the other. The guy was hardly trying. Maybe that was smart, actually.
More insisting. Pleading.
“Yes, I do have to do this,” Carl insisted. “I need to know for sure.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“Yeah, maybe you are. We’re gonna make sure, ‘cause I have to know.”
The man would eventually be completely honest. It wasn’t like the movies, where a hero could tough it out. No, it had nothing to do with strength, or courage, or determination. It all came down to one incontrovertible fact: in the end, everyone talked. Everyone.
Once Carl was satisfied Ortiz was telling the truth, that he hadn't supplied anyone at all with the drugs Steven would need, he finished beating the store clerk to death with the chain. Some hits came from different angles and different sides. Cops would figure he was beaten to death by a gang. It sure looked that way.
He looked again at the guitars. With the price tags no longer relevant, perhaps there was one he wanted. No, those were for people with normal lives. Not for people like him.
Little contractor booties from a backpack pocket went over his shoes. He stepped carefully to avoid the blood on the floor. Much of it landed elsewhere. He found the DVR for the security camera. Then he decided it was a decoy—its cables ran off in the wrong directions. He found the real one and took that, ripping enough length of cable out so there would be no obvious sign there had ever been one.
The booties came off back at the pack. He put the chain back in his bag and shouldered it. He left the door unlocked behind him and walked away like any other shopper. Across the street a fat old woman swiped her credit card at a meter and hustled through the tail end of rain into the resale “boutique” across the street, paying no attention to the man casually window shopping with his small backpack over one shoulder.
“You’re here somewhere, Ambrose. And you’re mine.”
CHAPTER 19 – FIREFIGHT
Rachel leaned on the railing and sipped her coffee, looking down at “the pit,” the main floor of the precinct. The rows of desks where detectives worked their cases. The desk sergeant “welcoming” the “guests” being dragged or escorted down the center aisle of desks. The line of chairs near the sergeant’s desk where people sat waiting to hear their name called.
Not many waited there now. Saturday afternoons weren't the busiest times. Things would pick up tonight, as they had last night. To Rachel it was an odd and sometimes entertaining mix of order and chaos. She liked this precinct hall better than several she'd worked with. For the weeks she'd spent here that was a good thing.
The precinct was, and was not, more influenced by the “good ol’ boy” mentality than the Bureau. Sure, in both cases the upper ranks had a higher share of institutional privilege. For the lower ranks, held more by younger men and women, the Bureau felt more professional to her. The FBI office was more white than the police precincts, but here she'd seen less racism among the officers. They worked together and cooperated, one “brotherhood.” Yet the effects of testosterone showed more here than in the culture of suits and ties the FBI cultivated.
A square of four officers, two in motorcycle gear, came in bracing a struggling African woman. The two behind pointed tasers.
“Boost,” Thorne muttered with a scoff. “God I hate that stuff.” He took a place next to her at the railing, carrying his own coffee.
The woman broke free from one of her captors’ grip. She immediately began kicking the officer still holding her. Both tasers fired. It still took three of them to wrestle her to the ground. Handheld stun guns came out and zapped her until she stopped struggling.
“Yeah. I hate that,” he reiterated.
Officers dragged the dazed woman away. She looked tiny surrounded by the four of them.
“It’s shit like that that makes me glad I’m not on a beat anymore.”
“I think I understand that.” Things below settled down into the normal murmuring and shuffling of feet and papers.
Thorne heaved an enormous sigh and gulped a large swig of coffee. He leaned against the railing with both elbows, mimicking her posture. She straightened. Her coffee was getting cold. It had been a long day. She was ready to go home, to take her shoes off. She would heat up a frozen dinner and pour a larger than normal glass of wine. Maybe a nice merlot tonight.
“I think down there is still my favorite part of this place, though,” Thorne mused. “Some days I think my years down there were kinda like my golden years, you know? I’d work a shift and go home. Yeah, some days’d run late, but every day I’d feel like I did something that made the streets a little safer, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, it’s kinda like that at the Bureau, too. There’s this optimism we all start with. Then the job starts to take its toll. Maybe we all get a little jaded, a little worn out.”
“Yeah.” Thorne rubbed his left fingers together, as if noticing the spot where a ring once sat. “We get promoted and we get cases like Ambrose and now the job’s seven days a week.”
This was a different conversation from those she’d had with Thorne before. He was opening up more. Bonding over a case, tired at the end of the day, both of those seemed like reasons he might show more of his feelings, at least without other “guys” he needed to protect his ego around. Sometimes she brought out that side of people. She held back, letting him share as he chose.
A lone officer led a prostitute in. Someone waiting on a chair whistled, drawing frowns and scowls.
“The guys down there, they go home and maybe they’ve got girlfriends. Or boyfriends for the women—or girlfriends for some of them too, I s’pose. The single ones go out for drinks with their buddies, catch a game. But they’ve pretty much all got someone. They put in their time, eyeing promotions. Then they learn that whole, ‘lonely at the top’ thing. I remember thinking that was probably bullshit. Nope, it isn’t.”
Someone sitting next to a detective’s desk ran out of patience. “I want my phone call, asshole!” The detective took the phone off his desk, started to extend it towards the man, but dropped it in his desk drawer instead.
“I tell you, Rach, first Saturday after we catch this asshole I’m sleeping in.” His shoulders slipped back as he sank forward a little, more weight on his elbows against the worn brass railing. He was either running out of things to share or starting to shut down. Maybe she could keep him going a little longer.
“I hear that,” she offered. “I almost got a cat once. But I’m so rarely home these days. When we catch him...? I’m thinking vacation. Somewhere the other end of an airplane. With a beach.”
“And younger guys that work out a lot?”
She chuckled, more okay with that idea than she felt comfortable showing him. “I could...cope with that, I suppose.”
A pair of officers, one limping, dragged a big, burly bald man between them. The man wasn't resisting, but wasn't walking. Drunk or high, probably. Weightlifter-bulky arms stuck out of a dark vest. They paused at a detective’s desk. She couldn't read what kind of conversation they were having. The man regained his footing.
He looked pretty battered, but if he was as tough as his size implied it might have taken a bit to subdue him. He swayed on unsteady feet. Huh. He wasn’t cuffed. The beating must have happened before the officers arrived. That also suggested he was a victim, not the aggressor. Curious.
The man’s bald head snapped up like a switch had been thrown. In about a second the bruise faded away like color draining from someone’s face after horrific news. Her jaw slackened. Anger and rage stormed across his face, and he shook off the two officers like an adult shaking off the grip of small children. He roared, an enraged bear looming over the officers who had
fallen on their asses.
Officers and detectives reacted like ripples spreading in a pond. Chairs squeaked as they slid back on the old wood floor. Rising to feet, drawing batons and tasers. Warnings to hold still.
The man slammed his fists together, an exaggerated single clap with clenched fists, and flame engulfed both fists. Fire spewed from his hands, flamethrowers sweeping the room on both sides. Chairs fell over as men and women, uniformed and not, ducked for cover behind sturdy, old wooden desks.
She and Thorne drew as one synchronized motion and both yelled, “On the floor!” Their mugs shattered on the hard tile floor.
A bolt of fire launched up at them, slamming into the railing and washing over them. A whoosh of overpressure ahead of it slammed them back against the wall behind them. Her head smacked hard and things went dim and blurry.
She had fallen to sitting. Thorne was standing back up already. She followed suit up to one knee, keeping lower to be a smaller target.
A uniformed officer took a shot, which pushed the man’s shoulder back as if punched. But that was all the effect it seemed to have. Fire hurled at the officer, hitting center-mass in the chest. Flame burst and, almost before the officer’s startled scream, her flame retardant uniform became a bonfire consuming her.
Other officers and detectives waited for clear shots, but Rachel and Thorne, from their raised vantage points, had them and took them. Thorne hit the man in the chest; her shot grazed his other shoulder. The man spun and ran for the door, hosing fire from both hands.
She raced down the stairs ahead of Thorne, huffing and slower behind her, and they followed policemen out the door.
Four cars burned in the streets. Officers in uniforms and bulletproof vests, and detectives in suits, advanced with drawn weapons but no clear target. Traffic already stopped. Steam billowed from under the hood of a car which hadn't stopped as quickly as the pickup truck ahead of it. Horns blared. But the big bald man in his dark vest was gone.
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