by Mark Wheaton
ALSO BY MARK WHEATON
Luis Chavez Mysteries
Fields of Wrath
City of Strangers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Mark Wheaton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477819449
ISBN-10: 1477819444
Cover design by Damonza
To Hershy
CONTENTS
PART I
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
PART II
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
PART III
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART I
I
Had it already been a year?
Mrs. Contreras looked out her front window, careful not to trouble the blinds. The man in black was there, just on the other side of her gate, as if deciding whether to enter. He never did and she imagined he never would.
She’d first seen him on that night—that horrible night—fourteen years ago. It had been unseasonably hot all that week. The window unit in her bedroom barely worked, so she’d taken to sleeping in the living room under the ceiling fan. That was when it had happened, right out in front of her home.
The house at 6780 Diaz Boulevard was nothing special, built in the late fifties after the original, almost entirely Latino citizenry of Chavez Ravine had been relocated with false promises by the City of Los Angeles to make way for Dodger Stadium. To Mrs. Contreras, now pushing eighty, this wasn’t ancient history. Whenever she saw young Latino men in their Dodger gear or heard sports broadcasters refer to the stadium as “Chavez Ravine,” she wondered if they didn’t know what had happened there.
Or maybe they knew full well and didn’t care. It was the twenty-first century.
Why you got to live in the past, abuela?
Maybe that was why she’d come to sympathize with the man in black. He couldn’t escape the past either.
She would never be able to accurately remember how many shots there had been. One day she’d remember seven, another eight, another four, another nine. She imagined that she’d been awoken by the first, but what if it had been the second or third?
Whatever the case, she’d thrown herself off the sofa and onto the floor. Only one bullet struck her house, entering the front window and embedding itself in the ceiling. As plaster drifted down into her hair, she’d realized that if her instinct had been to stand rather than fall, the bullet might’ve ended up in her head.
The shots ended and she waited for more. More never came. She waited for screams, for footsteps, for anything but heard only silence. After a few minutes distant sirens drew close, and she crawled to the window. There was a car parked in front of her house with two men slumped in the front seat. One was rotating his head, as if unable to control his neck. The other looked dead.
Then she saw the one on the sidewalk. He was a teenager but well dressed. She would later remember thinking he looked as if he’d returned from church. This turned out to be the case.
When the police arrived, they knocked on her door immediately, having seen the bullet hole. Once they’d confirmed she was uninjured, a barrage of questions ensued. For the next several hours she told everyone the same thing.
“No vi nada.”
I saw nothing.
A crowd gathered soon thereafter, the usual gawkers and rubberneckers. But Mrs. Contreras wasn’t interested. She wanted to close her front door, put something between herself and the pinches estúpidos gangbangers destroying her life, her street, her feelings of security, and now the life of some innocent teenager caught in a cross fire.
She’d seen the two men pulled from the car, clocked their tattoos, saw the weapons removed from their pockets and drugs taken from within the vehicle. The teenager had only a small catechism in his hand. His body remained on the sidewalk for some time before a hearse finally made its way up the street to claim it.
That was when she was introduced to the man in black.
“¡Ya valió madre!” a teenager clad in a white sleeveless shirt screamed at her from across the street. “You know you saw something! Bet all you do all day is sit at that window sticking your nose in your neighbor’s business. So who pulled that trigger? What’d you see, puta?”
He was beaten and bruised, as if he’d been in a fight. His eyes were filled with tears, and two of his friends held him back from the police line. Otherwise, she knew he would have been over her fence in a flash, his hands at her neck as he asked the same questions. She’d never seen anyone filled with such fury.
He’d left when the hearse left but came back the next day and the day after that. He’d come back for several weeks thereafter. At first, she’d thought he was affiliated with the gang members who had been shot. She soon learned, however, that the teenager caught in the cross fire was his older brother. The dead boy’s name was Nicolas Chavez. His brother was Luis.
She didn’t see him for a while after that, but on the one-year anniversary he was back, this time wearing clothes similar to that of his brother. His hair was cut short and he didn’t look like a criminal anymore. He came back for the next three years but then vanished. Until last year.
When he showed up one year earlier, he wore the vestments of a priest. Mrs. Contreras almost went outside to greet him but decided against it. Tonight she considered it again. His face was filled with such sorrow. As he gazed down at the spot where his brother had left this world, he looked lost. At one point he knelt in prayer, and Mrs. Contreras looked away, feeling as though she was invading his privacy.
She went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea but ended up saying her own prayer for the fallen young man and his troubled younger brother. She asked the Lord to grant her visitor the peace he sought and to bless all those who still felt the loss of the dead teenager.
When she came back to the window a few minutes later, the man in black, Luis Chavez, was gone.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Story was running late. His girlfriend had selected a restaurant conveniently located five minutes from the courthouse, but somehow, being Michael, he’d turned that into twenty even with downtown practically empty on a Saturday night.
Thank God for valet parking.
“I’ll keep it close for you, boss,” said the valet outside the skyrise as he handed Michael his ticket.
“Thanks,” Michael said, hurrying to the door of the building but seeing no restaurant in sight. “Where am I—?”
“Take the first elevator all the way to the top,” the valet said, indicating the building’s well-lit but otherwise nondescript lobby. “You’ll get off and there’ll be a second elevator bank, but the girl’ll need
the password.”
Lord.
“Which is?” Michael asked, hoping he didn’t sound annoyed.
“Um . . . pescador.”
“Thanks.”
He hurried inside, mashed on the elevator button, and waited for an interminable amount of time for the car. When the brass deco-style doors slid open to reveal a rickety freight elevator prettied up with sheets of velvet attached to the walls, he sighed. This was exactly the kind of place Naomi went for and why he found himself yet again somewhere in his city he’d never have thought to go on his own.
Love’ll do that, he thought.
Naomi Okpewho had started out as a temp sent up to help with the Marshak case when it was blowing up almost a year ago now. She’d worked out so well that she’d stayed on as his assistant through the Jiankang Pharmaceuticals case, during which the probe into the murder of a priest had led to the exposure of a triad-backed unlicensed drug manufacturing ring. The case had become global news. It took Michael and, well, his silent partner Father Luis Chavez to finally put a stop to it.
But things had settled down after that. The frenzied media had found another tragedy to feast on and the spotlight on Michael had gone dark. Michael and Naomi had been dating for three months now, even before his divorce from Helen was finalized. Their age difference—Naomi was a full ten years younger—hadn’t been the stumbling block Michael had assumed it would be. A native of Abuja, Nigeria, Naomi hadn’t dated much as an undergrad at Stanford or during her time studying law at Pepperdine. Though drop-dead gorgeous, with a beautiful smile and long braids that descended all the way to the small of her back, she had an intense focus and energy that most boys—always “boys,” not “men” in her retelling—found off-putting.
They all wanted tall, blue-eyed blonds with honey-colored tans, she’d say, describing Michael’s soon-to-be-ex-wife to a T. Future power wives. Or, well, first wives.
He was thankful for the callow nature of these boys for overlooking someone so wonderful as Naomi. Sure, she was a brilliant lawyer and a deep thinker, but she was also adventurous and fun. She’d authored Michael’s move to Silver Lake—an area of the city he’d never considered before—emphasizing her hatred of suburbia (“White people in Priuses as far as the eye can see,” she’d say caustically, a Prius driver herself). He’d taken the plunge and purchased a four-bedroom place on Ivanhoe two blocks from the Silver Lake Reservoir, where they’d often walk on weekends to discuss cases.
On top of that, his kids had been quick to love the carefree Naomi. When they visited, she always had some new adventure in store for them.
Though they hadn’t officially-officially moved in together to the point they would need to alert human resources, she stayed over more nights and weekends than not. While his house wasn’t the sprawling estate Helen’s father had bought for his daughter and son-in-law in Bel Air, Michael and Naomi had made it a home. They cooked together in the kitchen, ate on their deck looking out over the tops of palm trees and the roofs of similarly ramshackle Silver Lake bungalows, and were friendly with their neighbors. But unlike those other couples, who might unwind in front of the television, they were more likely to be up reading in bed, surrounded by half-filled file boxes, legal pads, and laptops until they collapsed from exhaustion well past midnight.
Thinking about the life they’d cobbled together so quickly made Michael feel satisfied—perhaps for the first time. He was determined to enjoy it. He hoped it wouldn’t be another late night for Naomi. It was Friday and they both could use a break. When dinner was over, all he wanted was for her to follow him home, off-load all her weekend work to the living room, then fall into bed and call it a night. They had no weekend plans—no charity functions, no parties, no dinners with friends—giving them two whole days to get work done.
The universe wouldn’t blink out if they managed to get a full six hours of sleep for a change, would it?
When the elevator doors opened, Michael found himself in front of a young woman in sailor shorts and a vest that revealed sleeves of vibrantly colored tattoos. She was perched on a stool in front of a second elevator bank. She didn’t so much as look at him.
“Hi, my party is already up there . . .” he began.
Still nothing. He sighed and leaned past her, touching the elevator’s call button. The button lit up when he pressed it, only to dim when he removed his finger. He glanced down the hall to look for stairs but saw none.
Then he saw the large koi fish tattooed on her thigh.
“Sorry. Pescador,” he said.
“Welcome,” the woman said, the word animating her like a clay golem. She waved a key card in front of a nearby reader and the elevator opened right up.
“Thanks,” Michael said.
Three more stories up and Michael stepped out into a fairly large restaurant perched on the side of the building. While there were a few tables inside, most were out on a deck that overlooked the city. A short flight of stairs led to a smaller rooftop bar above, the partial ceiling revealing a DJ up there as well. But Michael was escorted to a small corner table with no view whatsoever, where Naomi pored over an open file folder by candlelight. He knew there was no spot he’d rather be.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, kissing her cheek before he sat.
“I’d be alarmed if you weren’t,” she admitted. “How was the call with the US attorney? Can they help any more with the Chinese?”
“Not really, though I can’t tell if it’s because they don’t want to or because they can’t,” Michael replied. “It’s a customs case with immigration issues, so they keep looking for ways to make the whole thing federal with national security overtones to freeze me out. How’s Sittenfeld?”
Naomi darkened. “Getting worse. This guy must know where some serious bodies are buried, given all the political weight being thrown around.”
Michael saw Charles Sittenfeld as a typical entitled scumbag out of Beverly Hills. A banking executive, he’d become very wealthy over the past few years, less due to his own skills and more because of family connections, shrewd investment advice from some of his politically connected friends, and dumb luck due to the rising LA housing market. He’d taken this as proof that he’d been anointed by the universe in some way and responded by creating a constellation of mistresses, whom he’d put up in apartments selected for their geographical proximity to his office, gym, golf course, and elderly parents’ Palisades estate. When he concluded his wife of twenty-five years had become a needless drain on his expenses, rather than go through a potentially costly divorce, he decided she needed to go.
Instead of doing the deed himself, however, he listened to his own most oft-repeated business maxim and sought out the right man for the job. Through a lawyer friend, he contacted a hired killer and negotiated a $100,000 fee. The lawyer friend, whom Michael strongly suspected was having an affair with Sittenfeld’s wife, had put Sittenfeld in touch not with a hired killer but an LAPD reservist, who happened to look like the Mongols biker gang member he claimed to be. Everything was recorded, the paper trail was so clearly laid out a child could trace the steps taken, and the eyewitnesses were unimpeachable.
But somehow cases that looked like slam dunks from the outside always seemed to spell trouble for the LA district attorney’s office.
“Part of why I wanted to talk to you about it outside the office is that I may have inadvertently found something that could lead to additional charges beyond the scope of this investigation during discovery,” Naomi admitted. “Problem is the warrant—”
Michael interrupted, raising a hand. “Should I hear this? If this is you admitting to exceeding the bounds of a warrant, we may need to tread lightly.”
“That’s a good question,” Naomi said. “I’m genuinely unsure. I thought about contacting my old constitutional law prof at Pepperdine about it. Even thought about hitting someone up anonymously at Michigan State Law or Texas.”
“Do you have the warrant here?” Michael asked.
; Naomi passed it over. Michael read it. It was a fairly standard property search warrant that included Sittenfeld’s hard drives, online storage, and e-mail accounts. There were limitations, however, restricting it to only matters relating to the hired killer case.
“This is pretty explicit,” Michael said. “You’re saying there’s evidence of another crime?”
Naomi hedged. “It’s on the threshold.”
“Capital crime? Federal crime?” Michael asked.
“It depends on how far down it goes. The indications—”
“I don’t want to hear about indications,” Michael said. “I’ll need hard evidence in what you’ve already gotten access to.”
“Can I plead the ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire’ defense?” Naomi asked.
Michael scoffed, then shook his head. “We couldn’t prosecute, and it might even pollute a future investigation. It’s fruit from a poisoned tree. Can’t go there.”
“What about an expanded warrant? One with fewer restrictions?”
“Any judge worth his salt would see that coming from a mile away,” Michael said. “And he’s all lawyered up now. It’s asking for trouble.”
Naomi frowned and took a sip from her cocktail. She turned her eyes back to Michael. In them he could read how troubling whatever she’d found had been. It wasn’t good. He didn’t think she’d do anything rash, but then again she was young.
“How about if I talk to Deb about it?” Michael asked. “Obliquely of course, but enough to see if she knows a judge who owes us a favor. If you believe there’s something there that outstrips the original warrant, of course we can’t let it slide.”
Naomi’s smile returned. The restaurant was so dark Michael hadn’t been able to read the cocktail menu without the help of the table’s candle, but her smile made it seem like high noon at midsummer.
“Thanks, Michael,” she said.
They put the work talk aside and ordered dinner. At one point Michael had put his hand on the table and Naomi had put her hand on his. He hadn’t moved it since. He resisted an urge to rise from his chair, cup her face in his hands, and kiss her right there in the restaurant. Then he did it anyway. Her smile got even broader. When dinner was over, they wandered upstairs to see the view. The cool of the evening and a misty breeze kept most patrons downstairs. They ordered drinks from the bar and listened to the DJ. Michael slipped his arm around Naomi’s waist and they kissed, not caring who saw them.
