by Riley, A. M.
his muscles were frozen into an expressionless mask and only his eyes and lips
moved. “Adam, I'm so happy to see you still alive.”
Stan didn't like me any more than I did him. I have to say that anyone
who knew and liked Peter would probably not like me, but Stan was Peter's
partner and so had a vested interest in Peter's mental health and physical well-
being. So Stan really didn't like me.
I'd guess that, in some dark recess of Stan's mind, he knew of Peter's and
my more intimate relationship. And I'm fairly certain this was just another
distasteful facet to the whole “unhealthful association” issue. But Stan didn't
need to know that Peter and I were fucking to dislike me.
I wasn't the kind of cop that good cops liked.
We all sat at the dining table. Stan had brought the combined files
regarding my homicide and that of Sergio Armante, the DEA agent. The “book”
was already encyclopedic in its breadth. Peter brought coffee for Stan and a
beer for me.
I needed the beer. The blood I'd consumed in the garage had me as keen
as a tuned Kawasaki, buzzing and horny and focused. So tight my edges
showed.
Stan gave me a narrow-eyed, discerning look, and I knew what he was
thinking. I'd be thinking it too, if I were him. I surmised that telling him it was
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the blood that pumped me up, not drugs, was unwise, so I let him think his
thoughts. “Evidence released your personal effects,” he said. He tipped a heavy
manila folder and my wallet, keys, cell phone, watch, and shield spilled out.
“Thanks, man.” But before I could snatch up the shield, Stan's hand
landed on my wrist.
“I don't think so.”
I'd never shown a lot of respect for the job, so I was surprised by how
much I ached to pick up that shield. “Right,” I said, trying to sound smart-ass
and like I didn't care. “Don't want dead men busting bad guys.”
I laced the watch on carefully. It was about five years old and had a
message engraved on the back. From Peter. I wondered if good old Stan had
read the message.
“You've got some interesting numbers on your speed dial,” said Stan to
me. “I ran a trace on one and had an FBI agent up my ass ten minutes later.”
“There's a lot of cross-pollination these days,” I said calmly, wondering
who the fuck of my “associates” was also working for the FBI. And how much
they knew. “Which number was that?”
“Hmm, I don't recall,” said Stan.
“Four shots fired,” said Peter, neatly changing the subject. He spread out
the crime scene sketch. I saw, uncomfortably, the outline that was supposed to
be my body. “Two hit Armante. One was Stan's in Richie. We found a slug in
the door frame near us. All the slugs were from a .38.”
“Why do you think there was a second shooter?” I asked.
“Richie was carrying a Glock, not a .38.”
“You think it was the guy who punctured me in the throat?” I asked.
Stan shook his head. “We found a door at the back open; there could have
been even more than two.”
“You hear any bikes? Cars? Anyone in the area see any vehicles leaving
the scene?”
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83
“We canvassed the entire block. Hardly anybody's in that part of the
Marina late at night.”
At least, hardly anyone who had legal business there. I'd performed plenty
of “transactions” in those alleys.
“I didn't hear anything,” said Stan.
“So they escaped on foot,” I said.
“Hard to believe,” said Peter. “Stan called dispatch seconds later and it
couldn't have been five minutes before the entire area was enclosed in a
dragnet. The only way out would have been via water.”
“Harbor patrol reported nothing,” said Stan.
I thought of Betsy and Caballo running up that two-story wall. It was a
trick I meant to try soon. “Tell me about this 'sting,'” I said.
“My source in the DEA said Armante had a meet with a pilot that the
Mongols recruited to traffic,” said Stan. He gave Peter a meaningful look from
beneath those impressive eyebrows of his.
Fucking hell. So an ex-Marine pilot, who had kept up his license, and
who, by the way, had just spent two years infiltrating the infamous Mongols
Motorcycle Club, the biggest meth distribution operation in Southern
California, shows up at the meet with the undercover DEA agent. It's a sting
custom-made for yours truly. Except I didn't do it. For once, but no one is
going to believe me. Peter's got a look on his face like he's suffering some deep
internal pain. He must have thought I'd finally blown it. And then, capper, he
gets to watch me die.
“Helluva coincidence Bertoni's CI was killed with the same MO,” Stan
commented, his eyebrow raised and pointed straight at me. Homicide
detectives don't believe in coincidences.
“Obviously a hit,” I said. “Retaliation for the Mongol arrests last month.”
“How do Paolo Spence and Richie Ortiz fit into that theory?”
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Good question. “I don't know,” I admitted. “But Freeway was scared
shitless of somebody.”
Stan's gaze focused on me with the steady intensity of a gem cutter on a
raw diamond. “Really?”
I felt Peter shoot me a glance from beneath his lashes.
“We were both keeping a low profile,” I said. “He was too smart to do
anything to bring attention to himself.”
“And yet he wound up dead. Maybe you overestimated his intelligence.”
Stan slid out a file with Freeway's name on it. “We spoke to his mother and she
said—”
“You've questioned her? You should have called me first. ” I snatched the
file from Stan's fingers and saw that Freeway's mother had been called in to ID
his body. Damn.
“You hadn't yet told us your death was a ruse,” said Stan.
I could hear my own teeth grinding. “It wasn't a ruse.”
Stan ignored me, turning the pages of the interview report. “She said they
were about to move to a new home. Apparently your CI had recently come into
a lot of cash.”
Goddamn you, Freeway. You were never smart enough to play double
agent.
“We've heard more than our usual share of rumors, lately, about an LAPD
officer involved in the meth trade,” said Stan. “Add to that the fifty thousand
missing last month from the Vice evidence log…”
“That was some kind of clerical screw up,” I said immediately. “And LAPD
conspiracy theories are as regular as the swallows at Capistrano. A new batch
lands every spring.”
“You always have a clever answer, don't you, Bertoni?”
“There's a third party with an interest in both cases,” said Peter, hurriedly.
“Adam and his CI may have just been caught in the crossfire.”
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85
“What third party? And what's their interest?”
Peter tapped his fingers on the table. “Something was being trafficked
besides Armante's meth.”
He meant th
e blood, of course.
“How do you know that?” asked Stan.
“My CI was moving something when he was killed,” I told him.
“Really? Were you there?”
“Later,” I said quickly. “After he was killed.”
“I'd sent Adam to question a man who'd worked with Armante. He took my
Cadillac. Didn't the Boyle Heights men call it in?” Peter looked at Stan and
then away. I had to struggle not to gape at him. Had Peter just lied for me?
Stan's eyes narrowed a bit and he glanced from Peter to me and shifted
uncomfortably. He took a breath. Let it out, and obviously decided to set it
aside. Probably it was sidling up too close to the “relationship” issue that he
always sought to avoid. “What kind of drug?”
“We don't know. There's nothing on the street about it yet,” I said.
“So we have a new substance,” Peter said. “Who's usually in at the ground
floor of a new product?”
“The Mexican Mafia,” said Stan. “I'd bet on it.”
“Then you'd bet wrong,” I said. “Freeway would never trust those cholos.
Never. He'd only trust another Mongol. Or someone associated with the
Mongols.”
“Then I have to ask you yet again,” said Stan, like I was stupid, “what
about Paolo Spence? What about Richie? They were part of the ICE sweep last
year. No OMG connections.”
“Drugs connect them all,” I said. “They were part of the largest meth
distribution ring outside the OMG's. They're rivals for any new business. Drugs
are the connection. This stinks of some kind of territorial battle. The 'M' have
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been promising a war for a year. Now a new drug hits the streets and they are
determined to take out the rival OMG's from day one.”
Stan rubbed his lower lip with a callused thumb. “There are signs that
something was stolen from the building where we found your CI's body.”
“The drugs.”
“Maybe. The CS techs are busting a vein analyzing every square inch of
your friend's body. I've asked them to take a look at a workbench in the room
too.”
I thought of myself, backing up into that bench when I'd discovered the
blood and didn't look at Peter, who, rather pointedly, avoided looking at me as
well. I found myself holding my breath, waiting to see if he'd say anything.
“We could hypothesize all night. Adam's the one in the pit. He's the one
who can get us the answers we need,” he said. I could have kissed him.
“So if you could get the DEA to at least confirm our suspicions, Stan?”
Peter turned the page to the agent's bio. Starz, a.k.a Sergio Armante. Twice
decorated, father of three. Damn, I think, reading his bio over Peter's shoulder.
Why him and not me?
Peter sighed. “We've been following this trail of bodies for months, Adam.
La Eme has claimed a lot of cold-blooded murders. You heard about the boy
shot down on Commerce Street? We had a tip that the same man offed Paolo
Spence.”
“I knew Paolo,” I said. “He got out just before ICE busted Viktor.” Viktor
had been the leader of a huge meth distribution and weapons smuggling ring
part of the Mexican Mafia. His nickname was El Diablo. You guess why. “But I
thought the Mexican government got him in a sweep last month.”
“So did we. Then his body falls out of a car trunk in the impound lot in
San Diego. Dead of exsanguination via two puncture wounds in his neck. So,
we figure this guy is the one we want for the kid's death and maybe a couple
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87
others. We think we've got a line on the M's through him and then we got a tip
that he was holing up in that warehouse.”
“Who phoned in the tip?”
Neither of them answered me. I felt more than saw the quick exchange
between them.
“Our source is UA,” said Stan. “I…went by his place and it looks like he's
been gone for a few days.”
“Fifty bucks says he shows up exsanguinated with puncture wounds,” I
said. “What a clusterfuck this is. Why didn't you call in Vice before now?”
I saw a muscle clench in Peter's jaw.
“We still haven't called in Vice,” said Stan. “You aren't working this case.
You are a person of interest.”
“What?”
Peter stood up. “Another round?” he asked us both.
While Peter was in the kitchen, Stan gave me one of his fierce looks. “I
know you're in this up to your chin, Bertoni,” he said.
“You watch too many old movies, Stan,” I told him. Peter came back in the
room and plunked a bottle of Miller down in front of me and poured more coffee
into Stan's cup.
“Thanks for bringing the files,” said Peter.
“Sure. We had FBI come in an hour ago,” said Stan to Peter. “A couple
numbers on Leonard Chavez's phone are persons of interest to them too.”
“Freeway's phone?” Damn, I wish I'd lifted it before CSI had gotten there.
“What did you tell him?”
“As little as possible.”
Now, I should explain here that neither Stan nor Peter is being a bad cop
or a bad American. It's just the FBI can be kind of self-centered about things.
As in, they'd rather bust a terrorist than solve a homicide. Go figure. They're
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not big into sharing information with homicide detectives. And homicide
detectives aren't big into giving out hard-won info without getting something in
return.
I mulled over my decision for a minute, but in the end I knew I had to
hand over Caballo's cell phone.
Stan looked down at the thing like it might give him a disease. “What is
that?”
“Dude dropped it when I was questioning him about Freeway,” I said.
Stan's lip twisted. “Your prints are all over it, aren't they?”
“At the time, I really couldn't stop and put on gloves, man. I'll bet the
numbers are interesting.”
Stan drew a pair of gloves out of his pocket. Of course he carried them
everywhere with him. The man was a fucking Eagle Scout. He opened the
phone and pressed the contacts list. The only name there was “Ozone.”
Stan pressed the speed dial. The phone rang and on the fourth ring we
had a message from AT&T telling us that that cell phone customer was no
longer in service.
“I've never heard the name 'Ozone' before,” said Peter.
Stan had been a homicide detective since the silent film era. He fixed me
with a suspicious glare. “You knew an Ozone, didn't you, Adam?”
I answered Stan, because I'd never been able to lie to Peter with any
success. “Name is new to me too.”
Stan's expressionless gaze held mine. He pocketed the cell phone. “I'll
have the service give us a complete list of calls.”
Peter looked bored. “All prepaid toss aways, odds are.”
I picked up my beer bottle and poked at the edge of the label with my
thumbnail. “I'd like to talk to your DEA connection,” I said. “He and I can
cross-reference a little, maybe find parallels.”
“His identity is privileged,” said Stan.
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89
“Don't blame me if we're tripping over each other, then,” I said.
“You won't be tripping over anything but your own feet, Bertoni,” said
Stan. “Because you're not on this case. Not this one, or any other, for that
matter.” He turned to Peter. “I'll leave these copies of the files.” He rose and
lifted his suit jacket from the back of the chair where he'd hung it. “Do me a
favor and take his statement. I'll contact our gang task force in the morning,”
he said. “They'll want your report,” he told me. He went off to use the bathroom
before leaving.
I looked at Peter and when the bathroom door closed behind Stan I said,
“You know I can't go into the station in the morning.”
Peter frowned at his hands folded before him on the table. He had that
mulish set to his chin. “Now you want Stan to lie?”
“Christ, Peter…”
A big sigh. “I'll talk to him.
* * * * *
Peter walked Stan to the door and in the hallway I saw them stop and
have one of those “partner” moments. The intimacy of which put a twitch in my
eye.
Along with my other new attributes, I seemed to have bat's ears. I could
clearly hear their conversation. “How're you holding up anyway?” Stan asked
Peter.
“Can't take it in,” said Peter.
“You need to sleep. The staff psych man give you anything?”
“Yeah. I hate to take that stuff.”
“If you want to talk the chief into letting you back at your desk, you have
to get some rest, man. You look half-dead.”
“That's not from lack of sleep. I need to get this thing cleared up.”
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“Peter, do you even remember what you did? What you said? If they
hadn't shot you full of tranqs…”
Peter muttered something so low even I couldn't hear it, and they came
farther down the hallway, so I could see them in the doorway. Stan had his
hand on Peter's shoulder in a brotherly way. It made the blood pulse behind
my eyeballs.
From the hallway, Stan cast a black look in my direction. “You know, they
