The Bag Lady, the Boat Bum and the West Side King

by Sam Lee Jackson

  I sat the satchel on her desk. She didn’t look at it.

  “You know,” she said. “Before I met you I don’t think, at the most, I had broken two laws in my life. And speeding was one of them.”

  “Was murder the other,” I said. I pulled a chair and sat.

  “No,” she said. “But, since I met you, I think about it a lot.”

  Now she looked at the satchel. She pulled it to her and snapped it open. She peered inside. She sat back and glanced at the detective across the room. He was absorbed in world events. She looked at me.

  “I need to record these serial numbers,” I said. “I’m going to get this money in Kaplan’s hands then you and Mendoza can put him in the slammer.”

  Boyce looked at me a long time. I recognized this look. She wasn’t looking at me, she was thinking. The detective across the room stood and tossed his paper aside. He slung his jacket across his shoulder and started by us.

  “Hey Boyce,” he said. “Be sure to turn off the lights. I don’t want Mendoza on my ass.”

  Boyce gave him a thumbs up.

  She said to me, “We have an oversized copier downstairs. We can lay these out and scan them. We’ll have a record.” She was thinking again. She took a memory stick from her desk drawer and slid it into her pocket.

  “I think I have a way to get this in his hands,” I said. “When Kaplan has it, I’ll let you know.”

  She stood. She took the satchel. “It’s downstairs. We’ll take the stairs.” She started across the room. I followed.

  The stairwell stank of old, used up, human despair. It made you realize how old the building was. Boyce went down the stairs rapidly. With my foot, I wasn’t as agile, so I ended up a few steps behind when she finally came to the landing she wanted. She pushed through the door. I caught it before it slammed me in the face. We went down a long hallway. We made several turns before she came to double doors. She went through, snapping on the lights. The room was filled with filing cabinets. At one end was a cage that filled that end of the large room. The cage had to be part of their evidence storage. There was a chest high window in the mesh where goods could be dispersed or received.

  Against one wall was a wide, oversized copier. Next to it, a utility table. The kind you can fold the legs up inside the underneath. The kind of table every church in the world has stored in their basement.

  Boyce lay the satchel on the table and unloaded the packages of one hundred-dollar bills. She carefully unwrapped a bundle, lifted the copier lid, and began laying them, face down, on the glass of the copier. She fiddled with the controls. I could see on the LED screen, it was set to scan. She took the memory stick from her pocket and slid it into a USB port on the side of the copier. She hit the start button and after some clicking and whirring, the copier scanned the first batch of bills.

  “Blackhawk says those things are obsolete,” I said.

  “What? The copier?”

  “Those little memory stick thingies.”

  “Everything in this building is obsolete,” she said. “Okay, your job is to bundle up the bills after they are scanned. I’ll lay out a new batch.” I started gathering up the bills while she unwrapped another one. It took over an hour, but eventually all the bills were back in the satchel.

  Boyce was studying her fingers. “I have to wash my hands,” she said. “God knows what was on those bills.”

  “Mostly cocaine,” I said.

  She looked at me. “When Kaplan has the cash, you’ll call me.”

  “That’s what I said,” I said.

  She turned and flipped the lights out. We left. I waited until I reached the boat before I washed my hands. Actually, I washed my whole body.

  48

  It was 3:30 in the morning. The streets were dead. Blackhawk jimmied the back door to the SanDunes, and we went in. We were both dressed in black, with black watch caps and rubber soled shoes. We each carried a backpack. We also each had a holstered Glock 17, 9mm strapped to our thigh. I had brought the guns from the storage unit I kept under a false name. The storage unit was packed with stuff. Stuff that had been important in my past life.

  The back room was cluttered with bar junk. Old bar stools, old beer signs, boxes of glassware and cleaning supplies. It smelled dusty and musty. I knew there had to be rats here. To my knowledge, it had never been cleaned. I also knew the room was windowless, so I snapped on the pencil light I had carried in my pocket. Out of habit I had taped the lens with black electrical tape, leaving the tiniest of openings. The light was just a thin strand, but it illuminated everything we needed to see. We silently opened the inner door on the other side of the room. We stepped out into the hallway that ran from the bar to Paz’s office. Paz’s office door was on our left. Of course, it was locked.

  Blackhawk knelt down in front of the lock, his zippered case of strange tools open in front of him. I held the light.

  “Don’t leave any marks,” I said.

  He stopped what he was doing and turned to look up at me. He held my eyes for a long second. I shrugged. He shook his head in disgust and bent back to the task. He had it open in under thirty seconds.

  Paz was a bad guy. If he felt inclined, he would cut your feet off and feed them to the carp in the Encanto Park Lagoon. He had been the top bad guy for a long time. It caused a certain arrogance. He just couldn’t believe someone would mess with him, so he didn’t take great pains to hide stuff. Someone a little less confident would have sensors and sirens and infrared do dahs all over the place. Not Paz.

  His safe was built into the wall behind his desk. He must not have watched any old movies. He didn’t even have a hinged painting in front to hide it. It was just there for all to see.

  I stood to one side and held the light on the dial. Blackhawk pulled a stethoscope from his backpack. Yeah, I know, this sounds old movie corny, but it works.

  “How many?” I asked.

  He held up three fingers. He believed there were three tumblers, the wheels inside that spin to the proper number to release the lock. Most cheap locks have three number combinations. He took out a small notebook and a pencil. He wrote a number on it. He hooked on the stethoscope and with one slender hand held the sensor next to the dial, and with the other, slowly turned the dial, listening intensely.

  There is a small rod, sometimes called a fence, resting gently atop the wheels. It is attached to a lever mechanism that keeps the safe locked. As long as the fence is in place the safe remains locked. Each wheel has a notch, or a gate, at one point along its circumference. The trick is to rotate each wheel to get all three notches at the top, so the fence falls into the notches. Like a log falling into a trough. Then the handle on the door will move and the door will unlock.

  As Blackhawk gently rotated the dial, he was listening for a click. The click was when the gate bangs into the lever, the stationary part attached to the fence. Bangs may be a little strong, but there would be a click. He would note the number on the dial, then go the other way. Sometimes it was several tries. Sometimes it was the adjacent number, so it wasn’t an automatic. But, Blackhawk was the best I’d ever seen.

  He meticulously moved the dial back and forth until he was satisfied. He had several numbers noted on his pad. He marked through all but three and handed the note pad to me. I handed him the flashlight, spun the dial several times clockwise, then to the first number, back past the first number to the second number, then back clockwise to the third. I pulled the lever and the door swung open.

  This was the critical part. If the safe was empty, my plan was screwed.

  It was full of cash. Of course it was. Paz dealt in cash. There was no way he wouldn’t have at least a hundred G’s on hand. We were incredibly lucky. Paz’s cash was wrapped in the standard bank strips, very similar to the cash in my backpack, so we didn’t have to do a lot of shuffling. I pulled Paz’s cash out and laid it on his desk. Blackhawk counted it. One hundred ten thousand and fifty dollars. Fifty dollars? What the hell? Was that going to be a tip fo
r someone? Blackhawk spread our cash out. The bundles of Paz’s that had been in front, the most visible in the safe, I placed on top of my cash. Now, again, there would be one hundred ten thousand and fifty bucks in the safe. Fifty thousand in hundreds with serial numbers on Boyce’s memory stick. I placed the front layer of Paz’s cash, backed by our cash in the safe. Blackhawk stuffed the fifty thousand of Paz’s cash into the backpack.

  Blackhawk closed the safe and spun the dial several times. He then moved the dial back to the very first number he had written down. It was the number the dial had been resting on at the beginning. He never missed the smallest detail.

  He handed me the flashlight. I moved the beam around the room, looking for anything that we had moved out of place. We were good. We went back out into the hallway, into the storage room, and out the back.

  Boyce was sitting beside the dumpsters, waiting for us. She was a dark lump, illuminated by the one back light that hadn’t failed yet. I could see she wore a full, ratty looking, bag lady dress that was long enough to cover her knees to her feet. She had a really nasty looking sweater she had found somewhere and she had a black stocking cap on. She sat against the wall, with her elbows on her knees, smoking a cigarette.

  The cigarette glowed as she took a drag. “You boys find what we need?” she said. She stood up and stumbled, catching her heel on the hem of the dress.

  “Careful, now,” Blackhawk said.

  She flicked the cigarette out into the parking lot. It caused a shower of embers.

  “Why don’t you just send up a flare,” I said.

  She had lifted the hem of the dress and was looking at it. “I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress this long,” she said. She looked at me, ignoring my comment. “Did you get it done?”

  “Yeah, we got it done.”

  “So now what.”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said with that exasperated feeling I usually get with Boyce.

  “Hey, guess what,” she said brightly, turning to Blackhawk.

  “What,” he said. He had a lot more patience. But then, he had been with Elena a long time. That was a PhD in patience.

  “The other day I got bored, so I decided to follow Peggy for a couple of days. Want to know what I found?”

  “For Christ sakes, Boyce,” I said. “Can’t you just tell us what you have to tell us?”

  Blackhawk was smiling, “What?” he said.

  “Peggy has a lover. Can you believe it? Who’d a thought it.”

  Even I was surprised by this. “Peggy?” I said.

  “Wanna know who it is?” She looked like the cat that ate the canary.

  “I can hardly wait,” I said.

  “I followed him to a bar down on Seventh, called Rosie’s.”

  Blackhawk started laughing.

  “What’s so funny,” I said.

  “Rosie’s is a gay bar,” Blackhawk said, still laughing.

  “Peggy’s gay,” I was incredulous.

  “Guess who he met there,” Boyce said, smiling.

  “For God’s sakes, Boyce,” I said.

  “I’m not joking,” Boyce said. “I couldn’t believe it. I sat there for two and a half hours until they came back out. I watched them kiss in the parking lot.”

  “So, who was it? Some downtown boy toy hooker?”

  “It was Pony Boy.”

  Yikes.

  49

  Little Joe crooked his finger at me, and I followed him into Paz’s office. Wally Chen, Peggy and Vanilla were already there. Paz was behind the desk. I moved to an empty spot on the wall and leaned against it. The wall safe was staring at me like I was an old friend. I winked at it. Sitting on the floor next to it was a piece of carry-on luggage. The kind with the wheels and retractable handle.

  “We’ve got our people in place. They get a thousand pills apiece,” Paz said without preliminaries. “They sell them for thirty bucks. Every other day we collect the money and count the pills they have left.” I did the math in my head. He had at least twenty dealers. That’s thirty thousand a pop, if they sell out. That’s $600,000 every two days.

  “What if they sell them for more than that?” Vanilla asked.

  Paz shrugged. “Hell, I don’t care, they can keep the extra. We collect $30 bucks a pill. It’ll make the math easier. They make back ten percent. We pay them on the spot.” He looked hard at us. “It’s your job to keep them honest.”

  I didn’t smile.

  “Anyone shorting us gets a broken finger. If it happens twice, we take care of them.”

  “Do we have the stuff?” Peggy asked.

  Paz shook his head. “Stein says they will have it at the Scottsdale clinic. Little Joe, you and Wally pick it up this afternoon. Twenty thousand pills. Stein says it’s a starter package, to see how we do.”

  “His name’s Kaplan,” I said.

  Paz looked at me. It wasn’t a friendly look. The rest looked at me too.

  “How do you know that?” Paz said.

  “It’s not rocket science, Boss. Once I knew the name of the clinics, which wasn’t hard to find out, I got on the internet and found the mother company, Cyntose. I searched their HR files, and I found him. Had a nice picture. He’s the Comptroller. The guy that was with him is Walter Tillburg. He’s a security specialist working for Cyntose.”

  Paz leaned back in his chair, studying me. Wally Chen was drilling me with his impenetrable dark eyes. Little Joe was looking at me, a small frown on his face.

  “You run very close to being too cute,” Paz said.

  I shrugged, “Look at it from my point of view. If I’m caught with a few thousand hillbilly heroin pills, and a bunch of hundred-dollar bills in my car, I’m looking at twenty years. I don’t take that kind of risk unless I’m sure I’m good.”

  “Hillbilly heroin?” Wally Chen said. Paz was thinking.

  Finally, he said, “So, you go with Little Joe and Wally.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  Paz leaned forward and put his hands, palms down, on his desk. “Oh, please enlighten us.”

  “When Kaplan came here, he shook us down. He didn’t want to be recorded.”

  “So?”

  “If we go to pick up the stuff, do you think a clinic like Cyntose might have surveillance cameras everywhere.”

  “He’s right, boss,” Little Joe said.

  “So, they have the goods on us, but they are free and clear. We’re a bunch of assholes stealing the stuff from their warehouse. Kaplan has the video that means we get twenty years hard time. At least for whoever picks the stuff up. If the cops turn one of us, then you join us at Florence. Kaplan holds all the cards.”

  Paz was nodding.

  “I’d never do that, boss,” Little Joe said.

  “The hell you wouldn’t,” Paz said, without looking at him. “Trade twenty years to be State’s evidence. Hell yes, you would. Anyone would.”

  He looked at me, “Okay, smart guy. How do we do it?”

  “He needs you. You are the only game in town. Pike can’t do it alone, but you can. What we need is détente. We need leverage on Kaplan, like he has on us.”

  “What the hell is détente,” Peggy said.

  “Equal threat,” Wally Chen said.

  “Mexican stand-off,” Little Joe said.

  I nodded. “He has something on us. We have something on him. Nobody gets hinky without putting himself in jail.”

  “So how do we do that?”

  “You tell Kaplan he has to meet us, himself, at the loading dock. Or wherever we’re supposed to pick the stuff up. He has to hand it to us personally. We record it. Wally can record it on his phone. Now we can feel safe.”

  “Why me?” Wally Chen said.

  “Because everyone knows you chinks are electronic whiz’s,” Peggy smiled.

  Even Paz smiled. Wally Chen didn’t.

  “What makes you think he’ll go for it?” Paz said.

  “Because you will insist. You tell him you won’t pl
ay without insurance. It’s called poker. He can’t win the pot unless he puts money in the middle, and you have the only poker game in town.”

  Paz thought about it. Finally, he said, “Give me the room.”

  We all went back out into the bar to wait. Frank set up beers for us. A few minutes later Paz came out.

  He looked at me, “It really pissed Kaplan off,” he said.

  “But, he will do it,” I said.

  He smiled, “You’re a smart little shit. Yeah, he’ll do it. You, Little Joe, Wally and me at two o’clock.”

  “You’re going, Boss?” Little Joe said.

  “Yeah, I’m going. The prick acts like he thinks he’s in charge. He needs to know he ain’t.”

  So, at one thirty, we drove out of the SanDunes parking lot. Little Joe drove, I sat in the passenger seat with Wally Chen in back with Paz. Paz had placed the small, rolling carry-on in the trunk. The distribution clinic was called Adobe Mountain Pain Clinic. It was in a high rent retail center east of the 101 Loop and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard in Scottsdale. We pulled into the complex parking lot at two.

  “Go to the back, where they take the shipments,” Paz said.

  “You think he’ll show?” Little Joe said.

  “He better. If he doesn’t, we just fucked a sweet opportunity,” Paz said sourly.

  Little Joe wheeled the car through the shoppers and around the parked cars to the end of the complex. It was a long complex, with all the retail spaces connected so that the back was one long, connected wall broken up only by rolling metal doors and loading docks.

  As we drove around to the back Little Joe looked at me, a question on his face.

  “It was the fourth one,” I said. He nodded. He maneuvered the big car around some semis and pulled in next to the fourth loading dock. There was a small plaque reading Adobe Mountain Pain Clinic attached to the wall next to the rolling metal door.

  “Got your camera?” Paz said to Wally Chen.