Broken

by Don Winslow

  “These are copies.”

  “Thank you.” He goes to leave again.

  “Mr. Daniels . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “If you do find him,” Samantha asks. “Will you tell him . . . that I’m not angry with him?”

  It’s funny, Boone thinks as the maid shows him out. Terry Maddux can do the most outrageous shit, and the worry always is that you don’t want him to think you’re mad at him.

  Like somehow you need him to forgive you.

  At the door he says to the maid, “I’m Boone. What’s your name?”

  “Flor.”

  “Did you know Terry?”

  She nods.

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s a bum,” she says.

  But he’s a bum with money now, Duke thinks as he hangs up from Boone and the photos of the stolen jewelry come across his screen.

  Terry Maddux has a little cash (who knows what “a little cash” means to a woman like Samantha?), and some valuable merchandise he’ll try to lay off somewhere. The proceeds could be enough to buy him a ticket far away from here, maybe to another country.

  As a precaution Duke already had people at the bus depot, the train station and both terminals of San Diego airport. They’re good people, and if Terry shows up at any of those places, they’ll nab him.

  Duke comes out of his office and hands the photos to Adriana.

  In her fifties, she’s been his right-hand woman for twenty years. He couldn’t have run the business without her. Black hair, thin, dressed like she makes more money than she does, she manages the office with style, humor and no nonsense.

  “Circulate these to the usual people,” Duke says.

  He doesn’t need to be any more specific. She’ll forward the photos to every jewelry store and dealer and every pawnshop in greater San Diego. That way they’re forewarned that if anyone shows up looking to sell, the merchandise is hot. And he knows she’ll red-tag it, send it out with a request that if a seller does show up, they notify the Kasmajian office immediately.

  Most will honor the request. It’s good business, and a lot of people owe the Duke a lot of favors.

  Adriana looks a little teary this afternoon.

  Duke knows why.

  This place has been not only her living but her life.

  He also knows that if she fell apart, she went into the ladies’ room to do it and looked put-together when she came out.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ad,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Who has the helm tonight?” Duke asks.

  “Valeria.”

  “If anything comes through on this, I want her to call me,” Duke says. “I’ll be at Carey’s.”

  “It’s Thursday, where else would you be?” Adriana says. Every Thursday for the past umpteen years has been poker night at Dr. Carey’s house. Jumpers have jumped and been found, marriages have come and gone, the game goes on.

  Adriana has called it “The Odd Trio”—Duke, Neal Carey and Lou Lubesnick. A bail bondsman, an English professor and a cop who play poker, go to baseball games and have endless philosophical debates about meaningless subjects.

  For instance, the ethics of refills in fast-food restaurants.

  “It says free refills,” Lou said, in one of their endless discussions.

  “That doesn’t mean forever,” Neal answered.

  “There’s no time limit on it.”

  “Maybe not legally,” Neal said, “but ethically.”

  Duke challenged him on this, because Carey has an annoying habit of claiming the moral high ground. “Okay, what is the ethical span of time in which it’s acceptable to refill?”

  Neal considered this for a moment and handed down a ruling. “Once you leave the premises, you yield refill rights for that session.”

  “So say I forgot something in my car,” Lou said, “and I go back out and get it. When I come back in, I can’t refill?”

  “That’s different,” Neal said, “because it constitutes the same visit.”

  “But I left the premises.”

  “Temporarily.”

  “But that’s always the case,” Lou said, “if I go back.”

  “Yes, but not a week later,” Neal said. “That constitutes a separate visit.”

  “So it’s a temporal issue,” Duke said, to keep it going.

  “Exactly,” Neal said.

  Lou was undeterred. Not that he would ever actually go back and refill his drink after a week, but he was stubborn about the principle of the thing. “Nowhere on the cup does it state a time limit.”

  “So it’s forever?” Duke asked.

  “For the life of the cup,” Lou said. “I purchased the cup.”

  “But does that constitute rights in perpetuity to the liquid that goes into the cup?” Neal asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “But they don’t count by the liquid,” Duke said, “they count by the cup.”

  “But they’re still out the liquid,” Neal said.

  “As they would be if I sat there all day drinking,” Lou said. “Would that be more ethical, if I sat there all day refilling my drink and taking up space? When you think of it that way, I’m doing them a favor.”

  The debate has gone on for months. As has the discussion regarding ketchups, mustards and napkins that the kid at the counter puts on the tray. To wit, if there are ketchups, mustards and napkins that you don’t use, is it acceptable to take them home?

  “I paid for them,” Lou said.

  Neal is an ethical stickler. “You paid for sufficient ketchup and mustard to season your burger and enough napkin to wipe your mouth.”

  “But if they give you extra, they intend for you to have them,” Lou said. “Besides, I don’t think the Health Department lets them use packages once they’ve gone out to the customer.”

  “So you’re performing a public service,” Duke said.

  “Someone has to,” said Lou.

  Now Duke pulls in to the Careys’ driveway. Their house is a bungalow on El Paseo Grande they bought twenty years before real-estate prices went insane. Lubesnick’s old Honda Civic is already there.

  Duke’s efforts to get Lou to get a new—that is, decent—car have met with abject failure.

  “You’re a lieutenant in the SDPD,” he told Lou. “You can afford a new car.”

  “Affordability is irrelevant,” Lou said. “I can afford a jeweled tiara, too. Does that mean I should buy one?”

  “He wasn’t speaking to affordability,” Neal said. “He was speaking to a necessity that you can afford to meet.”

  “Define ‘necessity,’” Lou said. “My car gets me from Point A to Point B. This is what I need in a car.”

  “But it looks like shit,” Duke said.

  “Which is as irrelevant, if not more so, as affordability,” Lou said.

  “Not necessarily,” Neal said. “If, in your role as a police lieutenant, the appearance of your vehicle causes you to lose prestige, it becomes a liability that you can’t afford.”

  “Or,” Lou says, “it becomes sort of a trademark. A charming symbol of my refusal to conform to a societal demand for prestige items. Like Duke’s Cadillac.”

  “I drive a Cadillac because I’m big.”

  “You drive a Cadillac,” Neal said, “because you’re nostalgic, because you think it brings you back to an era that you consider preferable to the current one.”

  “I do consider an older era preferable to the current one,” Duke said.

  As would any sensate being who ever heard Hank Mobley play “No Room for Squares.”

  “I think it’s more a matter of image,” Lou said. “Chronic criminals see the Duke rolling around free in a big old Cadillac, they believe he can free them, too.”

  “I can,” Duke said.

  “My point,” said Lou.

  Who had successfully evaded another effort to pressure him into buying a new car.

  Karen answe
rs the door.

  Amazingly attractive at sixty-eight—tall, leggy—she has long white hair tucked under an eye shade. “Good evening, sucker, come on in.”

  Both Neal Carey and Lou Lubesnick are terrible poker players, perhaps because they’re more focused on the Talmudic debates than on their cards.

  Not so Karen.

  She’s a cutthroat, steely-eyed, brutally efficient card player who couldn’t care less about ethics and just wants to win, and the end of the evening usually sees her with a stack of chips in front of her. Sometimes Duke has to remind himself that Neal’s wife is from Nevada, although not from Vegas, but from some little town way up north in ranch country.

  “The other loser’s already here,” Karen says.

  “Lou or your husband?” Duke asks.

  “Either,” she says, ushering him in. “Both.”

  The kitchen smells great. Karen’s famous “Dreaded Bean Dip” bubbles in a slow cooker, a stack of quesadillas sits on a platter, and her even more famous “Even More Dreaded Chili” simmers in a pot.

  The first time Duke had Karen’s Even More Dreaded Chili—a recipe she got, improbably, from a Chinese restaurant in Austin, Nevada—she’d warned him about its heat. He’d scoffed and put a big spoonful into his mouth. Then his eyes watered, his cheeks flushed, and he felt as if his actual hair were on fire.

  Duke lifts the lid and waves a waft into his nose.

  Something’s different.

  “I made it with turkey,” Karen says.

  “Why?” Duke asks, distraught.

  “Because I don’t want you falling face-first on our dining-room table,” she says.

  “My heart’s fine.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Karen Carey is one of the best people Duke knows. And one of the kindest. When Marie was first diagnosed, it was Karen who brought casseroles to the house, Karen who drove her to chemo when Duke couldn’t, Karen who held her head while she vomited.

  When Marie passed, it was Karen, Neal, Lou and Angie who got Duke through the grief, had him over to their houses, came by and drank wine on his deck to shorten those endless nights. It was after Marie passed that Thursday-night poker started and the season tickets to the Padres got purchased, despite Neal’s being a lifelong and ardent Yankees fan.

  That’s been—is it possible?—five years ago now.

  He couldn’t have gotten through even a year of that—especially that awful first year—without these people.

  They’re precious to him.

  So is this house. He’s spent so many hours here, first at couples’ dinners when Marie was still with them and before Lou and Angie got divorced, later at Thursday poker, or just those nights when he’d come over to sit and watch TV or listen to music as Neal feigned an interest in West Coast jazz.

  It’s an academic’s house—every bit of wall space is taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, most of them holding Neal’s books of English literature—“Brit lit,” as he calls it—some containing Karen’s collection of children’s books—she’d been an elementary-school teacher—and a small shelf of books that Neal has written.

  Highly academic books with titles like Tobias Smollett and the Origin of the Modern Literary Hero, Samuel Johnson and the Beginning of “Literature,” Amazing Grace: The Poetry of Slavery—books that Duke has stubbornly pretended to have read and Lou has as stubbornly pretended not to have.

  Neal is apparently a big deal in his field.

  Duke goes into the dining room, where Neal and Lou are standing by the table, which has a green felt cloth thrown over it.

  The cards and chips are already out.

  “What are you drinking?” Neal asks.

  “Grapefruit juice with a sprig of kale,” Duke says.

  Neal pours him a scotch and clinks his glass with his beer bottle.

  Neal Carey, at sixty-five, has hair that is equally gray and brown, un-stylishly long down to his collar as befits the raffish street-guy persona that he cultivates to offset the egghead stereotype. But the street thing isn’t an affectation—Neal doesn’t say much about his early days, but over the years Duke has gleaned that he grew up rough on New York’s Upper West Side when it was rough, that he never knew his father, and that his mother was a heroin addict who sold herself to pay for her habit.

  Students who first take Neal’s class are surprised by the New York accent, the black leather jacket, the use of “freakin’” as a descriptor (“You never heard of Smollett, but he’s freakin’ important, and here’s why”)—a word he never uses outside the lecture hall. The accent likewise disappears, or at least fades.

  “Your students have to be able to imitate you,” he explained to Duke.

  Lou Lubesnick has a similar philosophy—in addition to the beater car, he sports a black goatee that matches his full, slicked-back black hair, this in the famously buttoned-down, straitlaced, white-bread SDPD, where even the Mexican and black cops listen to country music. In a department full of Republicans who think that Democrats are basically Communists, Lubesnick is a dues-paying member of the ACLU.

  Duke knows that neither of his friends could get away with their iconoclastic behavior if they weren’t so goddamn good at what they do. Lou’s Robbery Unit has a clearance rate that’s among the top in the country, and UCSD is afraid of losing Neal to Columbia, just a short subway ride from Yankee Stadium.

  They go into the kitchen and “dish up,” in Karen’s rustic phrase, then go back into the dining room to eat and play cards.

  Duke is surprised that the turkey chili isn’t as awful as he’d feared.

  Ms. Carey plays five-card draw or seven-card stud and doesn’t go in for fancy-ass shit with wild cards and kickers and any of that nonsense, so she doesn’t hide her disdain when it’s Lou’s turn and he announces, “Nine-card draw, best five cards, deuces wild, red queen can be an ace, last card in the hole.”

  “Which hole would that be, Lou?” Karen asks. “Your vagina?”

  She kicks their asses.

  Even more so than she normally does, and about ten hands in she says, “You’re playing even worse than usual, Duke. I expect it from these two, but you generally put up a fight.”

  “I might be distracted.”

  Neal asks, “By . . . ?”

  “A big-ticket jumper,” Duke says.

  “Does he have a name?” Lou asks.

  “Terry Maddux.”

  Lou sets his cards down. “You should have known better.”

  Duke nods. “It was against my better judgment.”

  Karen asks Lou, “Do you know him?”

  “The whole department knows Terry,” Lou says. “We arrest him on a semi-regular basis. Why softy here wrote him is a mystery to me.”

  “You hit the nail on the head,” Duke says. “I guess I’m going soft.”

  “How much are you on the hook for?” Neal asks.

  “Three hundred. Thousand.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I put Daniels on it,” Duke says. “We’ll find him.”

  He reaches into his shirt pocket and jams his cigar into his mouth.

  Boone spends the night cruising the PCH.

  Because runners are funny. Either they bolt far away or they burrow in, and when they go to ground, it’s almost always close to home, in places they know.

  Terry is a surfer.

  He knows the PCH.

  And now that he has some money, he could be at one of the hundreds of motels that dot a tourist town like San Diego. He could be downtown, in the Gaslamp, or he could be up in the northern burbs, but Boone doubts it.

  Terry will stay close to the ocean.

  Surfers get nervous when they can’t smell the sea.

  So Boone drives the van up and down the PCH, because it’s possible that Terry would wait until the sun sets and then poke his head out looking for something to eat. He’d go to one of the dozens of taco stands or fast-food joints.

  Terry Maddux has two conflicting needs.

&
nbsp; As a runner he needs a place to hide.

  As an addict he needs to score.

  The way users hook up with dealers has changed. It used to be there were certain blocks, or parts of parks and even beaches, where sellers would hang out and wait for buyers. So back in the day, Boone would cruise those locales to find his target, but those drug markets don’t exist anymore. With the advent of cell phones and social media, addicts phone or text their dealers and arrange to meet someplace indoors, out of sight.

  So Boone has had to take a different angle.

  He went to High Tide. The charter member of the Pacific Beach Dawn Patrol grew up as a Samoan gangbanger in Oceanside. Now literally a saint, albeit of the Latter-day variety, Tide still has his gang connections, so Boone has asked him to contact them and put out the word that if Terry shows up looking to score, they had better drop a dime if they ever want Duke to bail them out again.

  While Boone waits on that, or for Terry to go to a jewelry store or pawnshop, he cruises the coast to see if Terry sticks his head up somewhere.

  Dave the Love God rides with him.

  If they do find Terry, it’s going to be a two-man job taking him in. Plus, they have a lot of people to interview, and at least half of them are going to be women, and women like Dave, perhaps because they sense that he returns the feeling.

  “I don’t like this,” Dave says.

  “I don’t either,” Boone says. “But Terry has crossed the line. And Duke has put a lot of food on our plates.”

  They start down in Ocean Beach—just “OB” to locals—and work their way north, stopping at motels and fast-food joints. They take turns, one waiting in the car while the other goes and shows Terry’s photo and asks the clerks and servers if they’ve seen him.

  No one in OB has seen Terry, or if they have, they’re not saying.

  Ditto in Mission Beach.

  They get up to their home turf in Pacific Beach (PB) and finally get lucky at a little motel just off Mission Boulevard.

  Boone goes in and talks to the desk clerk, a middle-aged Indian woman who also happens to be the owner. He shows her the picture and asks, “Have you seen this man?”

  “Are you the police?”

  “No ma’am, but I’m sort of deputized.”

  “We respect our guests’ privacy,” she says.

  “So he was a guest here?”