To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  “I doubt it. And he’s more like a…a lobbyist or something.”

  I rubbed my nose. “Lobbyist for who?”

  “The cartel, dipshit.” Finney smiled at me and sipped more wine.

  “Which one?”

  “Juarez.” Mayfair and Finney said it at the same time.

  “So honest,” I said.

  “So forthright,” Slade said.

  “Look,” Mayfair turned to face me. “It’s no secret what side Decassin is on. You two know this shit. And, yeah, me and Finney are…” He paused.

  “We’re fucking,” she said and raised her pencil-thin eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” Mayfair continued, “and that’s all there is on our end. That’s it, okay?”

  “Who killed the Castaneda brothers?”

  “And who chopped off the one’s wang?” Slade said.

  “Gross.” Finney sighed. “I lost my appetite.”

  Mayfair shook his head. “Look, the man doesn’t let us in on his business. Like I said, I’m just a fucking errand boy.”

  “Me too,” Finney said. “Just different errands.”

  I picked up my old fashioned, glared through the muddy liquid, put it to my lips and drank it down to ice cubes and sweat. “When’s Turner coming back?”

  “He’s not,” Mayfair said.

  “Where’s Decassin?”

  Finney sighed again and said, “Probably fucking some whore at The Lady Shoppe.”

  “That dirty place off Rosecrans?” Slade sat up straighter.

  Finney gave us each a bored look. “Are you two really that surprised?”

  The waiter reappeared and said, “May I interest you in some appetizers?”

  Chapter 33

  As a cop—shit, former cop?—I’d seen my share of strip clubs. Been inside them. Fucked inside them. And I’d vomited inside them. Lots of people say they can’t understand the allure. To them, I say it’s the female body. Am I ashamed of that? I don’t know—I can tell you it’s a hell of a lot more civil than taking another person’s life. I figured God knew about strip clubs. He made them, didn’t He? The Lady Shoppe, though, was a bit different. Most cops knew or had a hunch that it was a way station for human smuggling. Not to mention porn and drugs and money laundering.

  A year or so previous, the narco division did a raid and arrested ten strippers for peddling coke. Made the papers and local news shows. Thing was, the narcs wanted to turn one of the girls, get her to fold on the man who ran the place, a scummy Texan named Skooch McKinney. But none of the girls snitched, and Skooch knew how to hire lawyers.

  Had the money for it, too.

  The Lady Shoppe kept doing business, and the narcs kept punching the clock.

  Slade parked the Ford on the street behind the building. There was a gray door behind us and a red one up ahead. I decided the red door was the emergency exit for customers, and the gray door led into the back offices and the girls’ dressing room, or undressing room.

  Slade flipped the ignition and poked a cheek with his tongue. “You know they’ll pat us down? No warrant, no entry. Skooch knows his rights—man’s civically fucking engaged.”

  “It’s always the scumbags,” I said.

  “You got to know how to get away with shit.”

  I nodded and watched my mirror. “We’re going in the back way, Slade.” I got out of the car and Slade followed. We crept along the building, close to the wall in hopes the security camera missed us, and stopped at the gray door.

  Behind me, Slade said, “Well?”

  I rapped on the door and made my voice a high-pitched warble. “I got locked out, baby! Let me in!” Nothing like a fat man talking like a parakeet. The door swung open and I caught a woman’s slender, pedicured hand. “Hold on, sister.”

  I pushed her into the hallway and Slade closed the door behind us.

  “What the fuck? Cops?” She tried to pull away—her brown hair swung across her almond-shaped eyes. “Let me go, asshole.”

  I gripped her wrist as tight as I could, knew my fingers would leave purple bruises. “First, I need you to tell me something.”

  “What?”

  Skinny moved ahead of us down the hallway, stood in the darkness with his hand on his gun.

  “Tell me if you’ve seen somebody.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of people.”

  “This guy looks like a Scarface wannabe, slick dresser and plastic surgery. He’s Latino, and a high society type. I bet he throws money around.”

  “You’re talking about Reg?”

  “Am I?”

  “The lobbyist, right?”

  Slade looked back at us and shrugged.

  I said, “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “He’s always here, in one of the private rooms.” She tried to yank away again.

  “How do we get there?”

  “End of this hall and take a right. All the doors on your left are private. They should be locked though—good luck getting in.” With her free hand, she adjusted her bra and pushed hair out of her eyes. “Don’t fuck him up too bad, okay? He bought my kids Christmas presents last year.”

  I let her go and me and Slade moved down the hallway. “Yeah, well, tell them Santa might not make it down this year.” The woman made an annoyed sound in her throat, opened a nearby door and went into a room. The door slammed. As me and Slade neared the hallway’s end, the strip club’s booming music echoed against the walls.

  Slade peeked around the corner and lifted a hand. He turned and said, “Looks like the office.”

  I looked too and saw a square of light coming from a half-closed door. Filing cabinets and the corner of what I thought was a large safe. I lifted my chin in the other direction and we moved toward the private rooms. I put my ear to the first door and didn’t hear anything. Behind the second, I heard the bored moan of a woman and the grunts of a man I knew right away to be overweight. Like me. I shook my head and we moved to the third door. Behind this one, I heard music—jazz. I turned to Slade and nodded. He moved in front of me and tried the door.

  It wasn’t locked.

  We pushed the door open slowly. Against the far wall, on a twin bed with a floral print bedspread, Regis Decassin had his shirt off and his head pointed at the ceiling. His eyes were closed and a topless blonde woman in a pink G-string was giving him a blow job. Regis’s torso was covered with prison and cartel tattoos: automatic weapons, Santa Muerte, Catholic crucifixes, and goateed faces of—I imagined—dead paisanos. He didn’t hear us. Me and Slade stood together watching the woman’s head move up and down. Decassin moaned once or twice and said, “That’s right.”

  I removed my gun and held it with both hands.

  Slade put both hands in his pockets and said, “Singing telegram for Regis Decassin here.”

  “The fuck!”

  “Oh, my god!” The girl twisted and fell back against the headboard.

  “Stay there,” I said.

  Regis sat up and crossed his legs. He covered himself with the floral-patterned sheet. “I thought I told you to talk to my lawyer, you fucking—”

  Slade sang in halfway decent soprano: “Your wife is fucking your bodyguard...”

  Decassin didn’t flinch. Instead, he sighed. “You think that’s breaking news to me?”

  I moved toward the bed. The girl was scared—she didn’t know a cop when she saw one. “Relax, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re murder police. You can blow whoever you want. We don’t give two shits. I’d advise you to ask for the money first.”

  She said, “I get half right away.”

  “Smart. Do me a favor. Get out of here.”

  She hopped off the bed and scooped up a pink sarong, draped it over her shoulders as she left the room. Slade moved after her and closed the door with a soft click.

  With the quickness of a cat, Decassin swung his legs over the bed, tumbled onto the floor and came up with a little silver pistol. He lifted the gun in a long
swinging arc and I squeezed my trigger twice. The rounds caught him in the lower left thigh and flesh tore like ground beef. He fell with a whomp sound.

  The silver pistol clattered and slid to a stop near Slade who removed his hands from his pockets and picked up the gun. He inspected it carefully and said, “A little showpiece.” I couldn’t hear him clearly because my ears were ringing from the shots, but I read his lips.

  I got a flashing vision of Santa Muerte in my head, the skeletal version I’d worshipped in the makeshift church. I swore I smelled candle wax and incense. But that was impossible. On the floor, Decassin whined. It sounded like it came through a steel pipe. The ring in my head died bit by bit, and I said, “I didn’t want to shoot you.”

  Slade moved in front of me and squatted to stare Decassin in the face. “Who killed your enforcers, the Castanedas?” Slade waited, but he got no response. He took the silver pistol and pressed it into Decassin’s mangled leg. Decassin screamed. Blood ran on the floor like sewage from an overflowing toilet. “You want to keep this up?” Slade pressed the pistol into the leg again and Decassin howled.

  He got out a few words: “It was my wife.”

  “Like we said, she’s out getting fucked by your bodyguard.”

  “No,” Decassin shivered and tried to scoot back against the wall. “She killed Enrico. Chato, too. Her and that fucking asshole, Mayfair. Last time I hire a veteran of a foreign fucking war.”

  I put my gun back in its holster and said, “Come again?”

  “Her and Mayfair. They killed the Castanedas.”

  Slade said, “What the fuck for?” Regis started to fall unconscious and Slade prodded him with the pistol. “Why, motherfucker?”

  Regis shivered. His eyes closed halfway and it was apparent the life was running out of him.

  “He’s done, Skinny.”

  Slade dug the pistol into Decassin’s thigh. “You the one who killed the Jacoby family? Was it you, motherfucker? You kill that little girl? Or did you have your goons do it?”

  Decassin didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.

  Slade stood and shook his head. He turned to face me.

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  A squeaky voice in the hallway. “Sarah? Skooch said you should be done by now. I need this room for another client. You two still in there?”

  Me and Slade looked at each other. He raised his eyebrows—the fuck are we going to do? I took another look at Decassin’s lifeless body and almost vomited. Well, shit. I moved toward the door and put my hand on the latch. As the woman knocked again, I swung the door inward and grabbed her wrist. She grunted as I yanked her inside and tossed her on the bed.

  Slade closed the door and locked it.

  “What the—oh, holy fuck.” She paled when she saw Decassin and the floor slick with blood.

  “Oh, my god. Please, please, please, leave me alone. I swear to god, I—”

  Slade lifted the badge on the chain around his neck. “We’re cops. Calm yourself.”

  “Cops did this?” Her hands went to her mouth, stifled a scream.

  “Of course not,” I said. “No cop would do this.” Given my professional circumstances, it wasn’t quite a lie. Or the truth. But you get away with whatever you can. Especially when it comes to murder. “We’re looking for the guy who did it—you see anybody running out of here?”

  “No, oh, god. Jesus. You two did this…” Again, she covered her mouth and her eyes filled with fear. She curled into the fetal position and began to cry.

  “Frank, leave her. Forget it. We have to go…” He went to the door, unlocked it. “Now, Frank.”

  “She can ID us, Slade.” I lifted the gun and instead of the girl I saw the bone-heavy face of Santa Muerte. I saw death and hatred. I saw Miranda’s face emerge out of that, like she was resurfacing from deep waters. “She can tell who we are, Slade. She can—”

  “Frank!” Slade’s hand gripped my arm.

  I lowered the gun and turned away from the girl. Like pulling my eyes from Miranda’s bruised and water-bloated body. Fuck. Slade tugged on me. We were in the hallway a moment later, Slade slinking along one wall. Me, huffing along the other. As we reached the corner, where another hallway lead to the back exit, the office door creaked open and poured yellow light.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Go,” Slade said and ran toward the door.

  I started after him and heard more shouting. A gunshot rang over my left ear and plunged into the wall above Slade’s left shoulder. We both crouched and sprinted faster.

  “Stop, you assholes!”

  Slade plunged through the door and into the dark evening.

  Another shot sounded, this one near my right ear, and slammed into the door jamb.

  When I made it outside, I realized I was holding my breath and opened my mouth. Damp air ran into my throat and lungs. Slade was already in the Ford. I collapsed into the passenger seat and the car’s engine strained as Slade pressed the throttle to the floor.

  In the rearview mirror I saw a pudgy white man in a black ten-gallon hat emerge from the strip club’s rear exit. He waved a pistol in the air and flipped us the bird.

  “Mission accomplished,” I said.

  Slade didn’t look at me. After we merged onto the freeway headed downtown, he found his words. “I sure hope I get assigned the Decassin murder. Otherwise, we’re fucked.”

  Chapter 34

  We stopped at a dive bar near the airport.

  We both ordered tequila on ice. I couldn’t hold my glass. My hands shook too much. The bartender left us alone. He understood the look on my face. A don’t fuck with me look. Not tonight, motherfucker.

  Slade kept fingering his badge, twirling it on the chain and letting the chain unspool.

  When the tequila started working its way into me, I spoke. “He had a weapon, lifted it and came at me with it. You know, if I was on duty…I swear to fuck that’s a legal shooting.”

  “Except we walked in on him getting a knob job.”

  “So the fuck what?”

  “We got two strippers with eyes on us…” Slade’s hand shook as he sipped. The ice in his glass chimed like dinner bells. “The Texan, too…”

  “Those strippers won’t say shit. The Texan neither. Man wouldn’t admit he twice missed a target as fat as me. A real Texan would be ashamed of himself.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  The paradox of a murder detective killing a murder suspect did not escape me. I squinted hard and drank faster. “Fuck Decassin. He might not have pulled the trigger on the Castanedas, but he was as dirty as it gets.”

  Slade said, “And those brothers, they probably killed more people than you and me have ever seen dead.”

  “It’s true.”

  “What bothers me is this Jacoby thing. I ain’t seen shit about it in the news. We give it to this fed—well, two of them—and it vanishes like a fucking white rabbit.”

  I nodded.

  Slade said, “That’s got to be tied to Applewhite. And the girl’s dad, what’s her name?”

  “Celeste Richards.”

  “Right, her lawyer daddy. You got two lawyers involved here, one of them running for county DA. And you got this whole stadium thing downtown. I mean, what the fuck?”

  “We’re as far from an answer as when we started.”

  “You remember…” Slade stopped and finished his tequila. The bartender poured us each a new one, moved back down the bar and leaned into a dough-faced woman’s ear. “You remember how before we caught the woman delivering the boots, you said it was Applewhite, people like him? They always did it. It always came back to them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we got Applewhite’s car—the Juarez decal on the back window—spotted at the second Castaneda killing. We got Finney Portray double-crossing her husband.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And we got the two feds not doing a f
ucking thing. Least of all not interviewing Decassin.”

  “It’s a bad look to interview the man running a PAC for the DA candidate.”

  “Maybe,” Slade said, “you’ve been right. And more right than even you know.”

  I shrugged. “I guess, in an indirect way, there’s some way of saying how—”

  “And Jackson suspends you,” Slade said nodding to himself. “Jackson fucking suspends you.”

  “He was mad about us interviewing Applewhite.”

  Slade laughed and drank, licked his bottom lip. “You were right about this, Frank.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. All this sounded like a hamster chasing his own tail.

  “It’s somebody with power, Frank. Above Applewhite. Fuck Applewhite. He’s in it, sure. But the feds letting a triple murder stay in the red? You remember what Chato said? When he came to ID his brother?”

  “He said a bunch of stuff.”

  “No, something about how only a white man runs things over here.”

  “Shit.” I sighed and rubbed my neck. “And Applewhite’s half-Mexican.”

  “You got it,” Slade said.

  We sat there for a few minutes without speaking. The bartender poured us another round. I drank and thought I might ask Slade to drop me off near the Santa Muerte shrine. Something inside pulled at me, kept yanking and yanking me back to the place. Like I wanted to fall at Santa Muerte’s feet again. Yet another fucking thing I didn’t understand. It lurked in my head, like a hunch on a case. One of those dumb luck things you think to try because…Well, why the fuck not? My hands had stopped shaking and I studied my fingers. Same fingers that held the gun and shot Regis Decassin to pieces.

  Slade’s voice sounded hollow. “If Applewhite’s half-Mexican, that means somebody else is part of this thing. It’s got to be somebody…”

  “Somebody bigger,” I said. “More important.”

  “More powerful.”

  “Twisted as fuck.”

  “To get the feds to shut up, to get Jackson on your ass, and to keep it all out of the papers…”

  I finished my tequila. “Like always, it’s some gangster in a suit. A tailored suit.”