Bad Guys, Page 3

  The kitchen emptied out. Paul left for high school, Sarah went up to our room to finish getting ready for work. Angie, who didn’t have a class until midmorning, was in her room, probably fuming about what it was like to live with Third World parents who only had one car.

  Sarah and I got into the car. I rode shotgun. We worked out a quick plan, that I’d drive the car home later in the day so that Angie, who was going to return home by way of public transit after her midday class, would have a car for going back to school in the evening. Every day, it was like planning the raid on Entebbe.

  As was usually the case when Sarah was behind the wheel, we were attracting the finger from a cross section of motorists as she moved from lane to lane, tailgated, failed to signal. Sarah was what you might call an aggressive driver. The people in the other cars might be more likely to call her a maniac.

  “They call it rush hour for a reason,” Sarah said, shaking her head as she got past those slowpokes and got some more in her sights. “How’d it go last night?”

  I told her.

  Her jaw dropped and she looked over at me. “This other detective, he’s dead? These guys, the ones you and this Lawrence Jones character were waiting for, they killed him?”

  “It may just have been because he was short. They might not have seen him when they were backing up.”

  “Fuck. Did you call the desk?”

  The city desk. “Yes,” I said. “They said they’d call Cheese Dick and send a photog.” Dick Colby, The Metropolitan’s police reporter, who smelled like old havarti. The paper’s editors might trust me to write a profile of Lawrence Jones, but a breaking news story, you couldn’t leave that to some writer from the features team. The desk would want the story covered by someone who could turn it in in under a week.

  “So this thing, it really will turn into a decent feature,” Sarah said. The editor in her had taken over. Sooner or later, it might occur to her that if these guys could kill one detective, they could just as easily kill another, particularly one I was hanging out with.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “What if they’d shown up at the store you guys were staking out?”

  “I’m sure we’d have been fine,” I said. “Lawrence seems to know what he’s doing.”

  “So they killed this Miles Diamond,” Sarah said. “Did they also rob the store?”

  “Pretty much cleaned it out of Hugo Boss and Versace and—”

  “It’s a ch sound. It doesn’t rhyme with ‘face.’ ”

  “Okay, so I’m not familiar. It’s not the Gap.”

  Sarah, in the middle of cutting off a Mustang, said, “Yeah, well, you haven’t even seen the inside of a Gap in years. You could use some sprucing up, some new clothes.”

  “I sure won’t be buying them at Brentwood’s. It’s very expensive Italian suits, designer stuff, silk ties, you get the picture.”

  “You’re right. That doesn’t sound like your kind of place.”

  “It’s Lawrence’s, though. Nice dresser. Why do gay guys always dress better?”

  Sarah scowled. “You might be surprised to learn that there are heterosexual men who know how to look good in clothes. Does he never go by Larry?”

  “No. It’s Lawrence Jones, Private Eye.” I used my TV announcer voice.

  “So, you got enough to write this piece? You’ve got color, there was the incident last night.”

  “You promised me a week. I’m going back out with him tonight, this’ll be night three.”

  Now Sarah looked apprehensive. “You’ve probably got enough already.”

  “Look, don’t worry, I’m perfectly safe.”

  At which point Sarah swerved from the middle to the inside lane to avoid a green Cutlass. “Jesus,” she said. “Was he going slow or what?”

  Now Sarah was taking the off-ramp that would lead us down to the Metropolitan building. The ramp was designed as a single lane, but Sarah was trying to squeeze along the inside, so close to a Mazda that if she put her window down she could hand the guy a coffee. I kept jamming my right foot into the floorboards, figuring if I shoved hard enough I could stop the car. There were a lot of things that made me feel anxious.

  I said, “Do we have any jazz CDs?”

  “I hate jazz,” Sarah said. There wasn’t a CD player in the Toyota; it was too old to have come equipped with one. But at home, she often slipped a disc into the stereo. Rock, lots of seventies stuff, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Why you asking about jazz?”

  “No reason.”

  This was a new wrinkle to our relationship, this business of having Sarah as my boss. Well, one of my bosses. At a newspaper, you had so many, it was hard to keep track. This was my first experience working for the same person with whom I slept. I had been back working at a newspaper for almost a year now, after spending a few years writing commercially unsuccessful science fiction novels. Okay, the first one did reasonably well, which had given me the confidence to quit a salaried job and write fiction full-time. But as most people who write fiction understand, unless they happen to be Tom Clancy, or a former president penning his memoirs, you can’t support a family and pay a mortgage without a regular job. And I was back at one.

  The Metropolitan offered me a feature-writing position. Given my experience, coupled with the fact I’d written four novels, the editors in charge seemed to feel I had graduated beyond the level of general assignment. To my surprise, and Sarah’s, they put me among the stable of city feature writers who reported to her. Although she wouldn’t admit this to me, I’d heard through the newsroom grapevine that she’d fired off a memo to the managing editor, Bertrand Magnuson, expressing some concern, something along the lines of “I can’t get him to do anything I say at home, so what makes you think I can do it here?”

  The problem was, the newsroom has a long history of people who sleep together—spouses, and non-spouses, and a few spouses with non-spouses—being thrown into the mix together, and Sarah’s superior probably wrote her back with a note consisting of three letters—“DWI”—which in the Metropolitan newsroom meant “deal with it.”

  Moving on, I said, “You know about this Trevor Wylie kid?”

  Sarah thought a moment. “The one calling Angie? Not much. He the one had a face like a pizza?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t know anything.”

  “I just don’t like the sounds of this guy.”

  “Has he done anything?”

  “He’s calling Angie all the time, shows up where she is, like maybe he’s following her.”

  “You mean, like when you were interested in me?”

  “I just don’t like him. You should talk to Angie, find out more about this guy, tell her to be careful.”

  “You talk to her.”

  “I think she’s still mad at me, over the Pool Boy incident.”

  “Yeah, well, who can blame her. I can’t believe Harley didn’t give you a prescription. You ask me, you need to be on something.”

  4

  The phone rang as I sat down at my desk. “Zack Walker,” I said.

  “Lawrence here. You get any sleep?”

  “Not much. You?”

  “No. I ended up going back to the scene, talking to Trimble a bit more, trying for more information, but there wasn’t much to get.”

  “What’s the deal with you two? I didn’t sense a whole lot of mutual admiration there.”

  “We used to be partners. When I was still on the force.”

  “Partners? You were partners?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe sometime I’ll tell you all about it. We still on for tonight?”

  “Of course. I was afraid, after what happened to Miles, maybe you wouldn’t let me tag along.”

  “No, it’s okay. Meet me at ten, doughnut shop around the corner from Brentwood’s. Still too much traffic that time of night for anyone to try anything. Anything happens, it’ll be later.”

  “You think they’ll come out, the night after they hit a stor
e and ended up killing a guy?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “I hate to ask, but you go anywhere near Crandall on your way?” If he wasn’t able to pick me up at home, I’d have to grab a cab, what with Angie needing the car.

  Lawrence said nothing for a moment. He was probably consulting one of several mental maps he kept upstairs. “Yeah, sure, why?”

  “No car tonight. But if it’s out of your way, I can get a cab, bill the paper—”

  “No, no, that’s fine. Give me your address.” I did. “See you round nine forty-five.”

  We were parked in the same place we’d been the night before, on Garvin, half a block down from Brentwood’s.

  Although we’d not had to meet at the doughnut shop, Lawrence and I still pulled in there. He still had the old Buick, what Lawrence called his “business” car, at least the one he used when the business involved surveillance. When he wanted to make a better impression, he drove a Beemer or Jaguar or some other type of high-end yuppiemobile that he kept back at his apartment.

  “Don’t get coffee,” Lawrence warned me. “You’ll be having to take a leak every twenty minutes.”

  I ignored him and got an extra-large, triple cream with two low-cal sweetener packets, and half a dozen doughnuts.

  “That makes sense,” Lawrence said. “Why don’t you get one more sweetener, and then you can get two more doughnuts.”

  But later, sitting in the car, he said, “You got a double chocolate in there?”

  “Aren’t you the one who mocked me for buying these?”

  “You got one or not?”

  I fished around, found a chocolate doughnut with chocolate icing slathered on top, and handed it to him with a napkin. Then I reached down for my coffee, tucked down in the cup holder, and had a sip. “Ohhh, my thanks to whoever invented coffee,” I said. “This is the only thing that will get me through this.”

  “Yeah, well, when your bladder’s ready to burst, don’t think that you’re using my emergency kit,” Lawrence said, nodding his head in the direction of the backseat, where he kept a plastic juice bottle with a screw top.

  The juice container was, as Lawrence had explained to me on our first night out, a key part of his surveillance kit. When you’re on a stakeout, and expecting your subject to be on the move at any moment, and you’ve got to take a leak, you can’t strike off searching for the nearest men’s room or slip into the nearest alley.

  Lawrence fiddled with the radio, located a jazz station, someone playing piano. “That’s Erroll Garner. This is from Concert by the Sea.” He kept the volume down, but loud enough that he could tap his finger on the steering wheel.

  I thanked him for picking me up at home. “We’re having a bit of car trouble.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind?”

  “We need another one.” I filled him in on the daily negotiations to try to get everyone where they had to be, and Sarah’s concerns about spending the money for a second vehicle.

  “Interesting that this problem of yours should crop up now,” Lawrence said. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Usual.”

  “There’s a government auction tomorrow, out Oakwood way. Where they sell off cars and other merchandise seized from drug dealers and other lowlifes, unclaimed stolen property—people already got their insurance payment, they don’t come looking for what they lost.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “I got my Jaguar at one of those for a song. You could probably pick up something reasonable, not much money. I know the people there, there’s a guy, Eddie Mayhew, knows what cars look good and what cars don’t. I was talking to him the other day, he said they’re selling off a bunch of merchandise that used to belong to Lenny Indigo.”

  “I know that name.”

  “He just got fifteen to twenty. Joint operation, local cops working with the feds, got him on trafficking, racketeering, half a dozen other things. They seized a few million in cocaine and took his cars and other toys at the same time. Indigo had his finger into everything in this town from drugs to table dancers and prostitution to robbery. Thing is, his organization is still around, some bozo’s trying to keep it together while he’s inside, but Indigo’s still trying to run the thing from the inside. Anyway, if you’re looking for a car with an interesting history, I know where you could get one.”

  I shrugged. “Sounds worth going. Even to get a feature out of it. But I don’t think I’m in the market to buy anything. Sarah was pretty adamant this morning. It’s just not in the budget.”

  “Let’s just go, then. I’ve been, even when I wasn’t looking for a car, bought one, sold it a week later for five thou more. It’s just after lunch. I’ll pick you up.”

  We sat for a few minutes quietly, watching cars go past Brentwood’s in both directions. The store window lights had been dimmed by half, casting soft shadows on half a dozen headless mannequins decked out in expensive menswear. “That where you get your stuff?” I asked. Lawrence was dressed in a pair of black slacks, a dark silk shirt, and a black sports jacket that I guessed cost more than everything I had in my closet at home.

  “Sometimes. Brentwood promised me a new suit if I find out who’s been hitting his store, but now, after last night, I don’t know. It’s hard to feel we’ve been doing our job very well.”

  “You got anyone else helping you, now that Miles is . . .” I hesitated, “gone?”

  “No. Thing is, they’re not going to be hitting Maxwell’s now. Next most likely target is here.”

  “Why aren’t the cops out here, too? After what happened last night?”

  “They promised to take a run by, step up patrols. Speak of the devil.” A city police car approached, slowed as it went past Brentwood’s, then kept going. “But they haven’t got enough people to stake out every place that might get hit. So that’s why you and I are sitting here.”

  Moments after the police car had disappeared, a red, lowered Honda Accord coupe with a set of flashy after-market wheels slowed as it drove by the store. The windows were tinted, making it impossible to make out who or how many were inside. “Anything?” I said.

  Lawrence looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. Maybe. But we’re really looking for a truck or SUV. Maybe this guy’s a lookout, cases the place, then calls his buds. Can’t even see with the dark windows.” The Accord moved on. “Looked like just one guy, but I couldn’t be sure. It’s easy enough to remember, with the chrome rims, so if we see it again, might be worth checking out.” He had a notepad on his lap and scribbled something down.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The Honda’s license plate,” he said. The guy was quick. I hadn’t even thought to look at the plate.

  That reminded me to dig out my own reporter’s notepad, make a few notes. I scribbled “red Honda” and “waiting” and “doughnuts.”

  “So, you were a cop,” I said.

  Lawrence nodded. “Went on my own about three years ago, still have plenty of friends on the force. They send work my way, help me out when I need a license plate ID, that kind of thing, which I’ll be asking them for in the morning.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  Lawrence kept looking out through the windshield, chewing on a bit of double chocolate, never taking his eyes off the scene in front of Brentwood’s. “Oh, I don’t know. Differences of opinion, I guess.” He paused. “Hello.”

  A big black SUV rolled past us. The windows were even darker than those on the Honda, and looked as black as the doors and fenders.

  “That’s one of those whaddya-call-thems,” I said.

  “An Annihilator,” Lawrence said. “They used them in the army, then regular folk wanted to get them. So they gussied them up with power steering, CD players, air bags, and now soccer moms can drop their kids off in something that could be used to launch surface-to-air missiles. Fucking ridiculous.”

  The Annihilator slowed as it passed on the opposite side of the street, in front of Brentwood’s. Lawrence’s entire body s
eemed to tense. He turned off Erroll and wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel. I felt a tingle work its way through me, like I’d put a toe into ice water.

  The towering sport utility vehicle inched ahead a bit more, then the brake lights went off, and the Annihilator continued up the street.

  “Interesting,” said Lawrence.

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t come back tonight,” I said.

  “I might have made a mistake. It was bound to happen eventually.”

  Suddenly I thought of the license plate. “Did you get the plate number?” I asked.

  “It had one of those opaque covers over it,” Lawrence said. “Couldn’t make it out. Maybe, if it comes around again.”

  I had a sip of my coffee, made a couple more notes. “Red Honda,” Lawrence said. “Coming this way. Can’t see the wheels, not sure whether it’s the same one. Come here.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Just come here,” he said, pulling me toward him and slipping his arms around me in an embrace. His cheek was pressed up against mine, his lips just to the side of my own. He felt warm, and there was a scent of aftershave. Hesitantly at first, I raised my right arm and slipped it around his shoulder.

  As the Honda drove by, Lawrence casually moved his head around to give it a better look. Even with Lawrence’s head pressed up against mine, I could see that this car had simple hubcaps.

  “Not our car,” Lawrence said, freeing me from his embrace and leaning back up against his window. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get fresh. I was afraid, had it been the same car, he was going to make us. Two guys sitting in a car at night, that’s a surveillance. Two guys going at it, well, that’s something else. And congratulations on not freaking out.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “You’re not my type anyway.”

  I gave that a moment. “What do you mean, I’m not your type?”

  Lawrence glanced over. “I’m just saying, if you were gay, you wouldn’t be the kind of guy I’d go for.”