by Chris Holm
“Any reason these Savage Prophets would have a beef with the LA family?”
“None that I could find—and anyway, Franklin is the only one they’re looking to whack. They’re one of the few black gangs in the area not affiliated with the Crips. Could be the Prophets get their product from the LA family, which would make this a supply chain issue.”
“How old is he?”
Lester sighed. “Listen, Mikey, I know you, and I know what you’re thinking here. But Franklin isn’t some scared kid who fell in with a bad crowd—he’s a fucking drug dealer.”
“How old, Les?”
Les hesitated. “He’s sixteen.”
Sixteen. Jesus. “There a time line on the hit?”
“Nothing solid. Be a few days, at least.”
Hendricks finished his beer. Nodded as if something had been decided. “Get me on a flight to Long Beach. I want to give this kid a look.”
“You sure you don’t wanna sit this one out, Mikey? You’ve been running yourself ragged lately, and you haven’t even been home yet since your last job.”
“I’m fine, Les,” Hendricks replied. “Book the flight.”
“Say for a second that I’m wrong about this Franklin, and he really is a decent guy—there’s no way he’d be able to pay your fee. Only way he’d have the money’s if he’s crooked. You’ve said yourself you’ll never kill for free.”
“True. But I can warn him to get clear, at least.”
“And if I’m right? If this kid is just another piece of shit drug dealer?”
“If you’re right, I let him die.”
Lester studied his friend a moment, the lines in Hendricks’s face deepened by the angle of the light.
He’s looking old, Lester thought. Tired.
Not for the first time, Lester wondered just how long Hendricks could keep this up—and what kind of toll this job was taking on him. Gone was the scrubbed idealist he’d met those many years ago when their unit was first assembled. Then again, apart from him and Hendricks, gone was the whole damn unit. Maybe becoming something cold and hard was the only way to make it through.
Lester’d tried another route. Tried to put the past behind him. After his injury, Lester was of no further use to the military—his very existence a reminder to the current administration of the sins of the past. His discharge had been listed as general, as he knew it would be; regardless of how valiantly their unit served, their actions were covert and could never be acknowledged, so an honorable discharge was never in the cards. Still, after all he gave—and all he lost—it stung. And when his parents died just six months after he returned Stateside, burned alive in his childhood home when his mother fell asleep with a cigarette between her lips, he just gave up. He used his parents’ life insurance and his meager disability benefits to buy this bar—an utter shithole at the time—and spent the next year or so behind it, the place closed more often than not as he tried his damnedest to crawl into a bottle and die. He’d lost everything—his friends, his family, his hope, his sense of purpose.
Then one day, Michael walked through that door—back from the dead—and everything changed. Michael gave him hope. Gave him purpose. Gave him some small measure of absolution, as though he’d been sent by God himself to let Lester know the guilt he’d been carrying around for getting his unit killed was too much for any one man to bear. Michael represented both an easing of his burden and someone to help him shoulder the remaining load.
The money didn’t hurt, either. Anyone who says it can’t buy happiness should do without it for a while. The money he and Michael brought in turned the bar around—turned it into the kind of homey neighborhood place one goes to live a little, instead of just die slowly. And, more important, it got Lester out of the storeroom and into a proper apartment. He’d bought the bar before the market crashed, and by the time Mike found him, he’d been so far underwater he couldn’t afford a place to live, so he’d been sleeping on a cot in back. Now the bar was beautiful and so was his apartment, with its stunning view of Portland spreading out below him to the west and nothing but the icy blue Atlantic to the east.
Lester didn’t think of what they were doing as killing. The way he saw it, the balance sheet was murder-neutral either way. Either some poor schlub was getting whacked, or a hardened killer was. Hell, you take out a hardened killer, you’re probably saving lives.
He knew for damned sure they were saving him— nothing stronger than club soda’d passed Lester’s lips since the day they started on this little crusade.
Michael, though, was another story. For all his bluster, the work ate at him. You could see it in his face. In the slope of his shoulders as he slumped in his chair. Lester may have the luxury of not thinking what they did was killing, but Michael knew better. Michael was out in the field, the muck, the blood—and out there, the truth was harder to avoid.
If it weren’t for Evie, Lester wondered if Michael would have lasted this long. Evie’d been everything to him. Walking away from her—regardless of his reasons or his resolve—had devastated him. But he’d never stopped—he couldn’t stop—taking care of her. It was one more reason Michael needed Lester’s skills. Maybe the only reason that mattered.
Even after Michael’s supposed death, Evie’s parents never forgave her for leaving with him. She—now a nurse practitioner who split her time between three free clinics in her area—was too proud to ask them for help paying back her student loans, her looming mortgage. Michael, with Lester’s help, ensured she’d never have to.
She didn’t realize who the money came from. Had no idea it was blood money. As far as she knew, the deposits were part of a structured settlement—the result of a bogus class-action lawsuit Lester conjured from thin air, supposedly brought forth by loved ones of war dead who fell victim to faulty body armor. And thanks to Lester’s computer chops, that’s all anyone who thought to look would ever see.
Lester didn’t know if those payments helped Michael sleep at night, but he was pretty sure they kept him rising every morning. Even after all these years—after Evie fell in love with someone else, after she married—he couldn’t help but try to take care of her.
Couldn’t help but try to make things right, one murder at a time.
10
The afternoon sun streamed through the windows of the dead man’s flat—no, apartment, Engelmann reminded himself for perhaps the thousandth time, though the Americanism struck him as inaccurate and artless. Cruz’s apartment stood apart from nothing, being one of thirty units in the building—a squat, stuccoed box three stories high, from which jutted perfunctory balconies just large enough to place a hibachi and a single chair, and AC units laboring to make tolerable the city’s heat.
Cruz’s AC unit sat idle, and the windows were all closed. The apartment was oven-hot and stuffy, the air laden with sex and cheap, masculine cologne. As soon as he walked in, Engelmann’s face and neck broke into a sweat, and his hands grew sodden and clumsy inside their black nitrile gloves. Had it been this hot in the hallway, Engelmann likely would’ve taken twice as long to pick Cruz’s many locks. As one might expect, Cruz was a cautious man. Though in this case, Engelmann suspected the locks weren’t to protect against retaliation for his crimes but to bar entry to his wife.
This apartment was not the home they shared. And though the bedding was mussed and stained—the night-stand topped with oils, candles, and all manner of phallic appliances—Cruz’s wife had never seen the inside of its bedroom. Perhaps she suspected the existence of her husband’s little love nest, situated just blocks away from their tidy Little Havana bungalow, or perhaps not. Engelmann suspected it was the former—in part because one’s wife, he’d discovered in the course of many an interrogation, often knows a good deal more than she lets on, and in part because he’d seen her expression as she stood watching from the lawn as the Feds picked apart her home, one grandchild propped on each wide, matronly hip, another clinging to her legs. Though her neighbors gathered and watched, too, and w
ith them the news crews, and though her youngest granddaughter buried her face in the woman’s ample bosom and cried, Cruz’s wife’s face showed neither shame nor distress.
Instead, her face showed rage.
At first, he’d assumed it was directed toward the agents ransacking her home. Toward the pretty agent in charge of the scene and her swaggering partner—the same agents he’d observed just yesterday investigating the scene of Cruz’s murder. But to them she was cordial, polite—even offering them something to eat while they waited for their crew to finish, as if she craved their approval.
As Engelmann watched, one of many in the crowd, he realized it was not their intrusion that vexed her. It was the fact that her husband had brought this intrusion upon her. She spit whenever the agents mentioned him by name; she shook her head in disgust when pressed for details about his work. As if she’d had no idea until his death what he’d done for a living. As if she had no idea what kind of man her husband really was.
Engelmann had seen this a hundred times in his profession. She was content to look the other way when her husband’s work bought them a tidy, sunny-yellow Craftsman home, the nicest on the block—tapered stone pillars propping up the clay shingled roof over the covered porch, a well-manicured lawn in front and back for kids to play on‚ fenced in as if to say to passersby “MINE”—but when it came time for her to face the fact that the fruits of his labor were plucked from a forbidden tree, mock horror was her response.
It made her a hypocrite, Engelmann thought—a liar to herself and to the world. Looking around Cruz’s spartan apartment, Engelmann knew the teak glider on the porch of his widow’s bungalow was not a purchase he would have made on his own, nor was the elaborate landscaping or the darling patio set he’d glimpsed around back.
No, those were his widow’s doing. And it seemed to Engelmann if she were so content to spend Cruz’s money, perhaps she shouldn’t hold his way of making it in such disdain.
No wonder the man had taken a lover. And no wonder he’d taken such pains to keep his wife out of this place. Having seen her reaction to having her husband’s earnings outed as blood money, Engelmann could only imagine how livid she’d become if she were confronted with the evidence that she was not the only one on whom he lavished it.
After a brief circuit to take in the gestalt of the apartment, Engelmann searched the dwelling slowly, methodically, without fear of discovery. The Federals knew nothing of this place. It was not leased under Cruz’s name, nor under any of his known aliases. In fact, the apartment wasn’t leased at all. The rental company’s paperwork listed it as vacant, though in ten years it had never once been shown, let alone rented.
The rental company was owned by the Cuban Mafia. The late Mr. Cruz’s employer.
All it took for Engelmann to find it was one call to his Council contact. The address was texted to his burner phone in minutes.
Engelmann started in the kitchen. Small and galley style, it stretched along one side of the empty living room. A stack of take-out menus sat on the countertop. The phone jack on the wall was bare and unused. He opened each drawer in turn: empty. Then he removed the drawer boxes from their frames and searched each for false bottoms, or envelopes taped to their undersides. Still nothing. He searched the cupboards. All but one were bare. The cupboard nearest the three-quarter refrigerator contained two juice glasses, a corkscrew, and a box of plastic eating utensils. He dumped the utensils onto the yellowed linoleum floor and let the box fall after them once he saw that there was nothing left inside.
The oven was empty and appeared unused. In the refrigerator he found a half-empty six-pack of Cerveza Cristal and nothing else. In the garbage, a few rancid food wrappers and two empty wine bottles. He emptied the trash can’s contents onto the floor, but there was nothing hidden underneath them—nor between the bag and bin.
There was no furniture in the living room. No art. The beige carpet was stained, the window bare of curtains. Beside the window was a sliding-glass door over which hung a set of cheap vertical blinds, louvered open to let in the light. Engelmann grasped the chain that operated them and slid them back and forth. They moved easily on their track. He ran a hand along the top of the track, but felt nothing. And when he poked his head outside, he found the balcony bare.
What he was looking for, he didn’t know. Some clue as to how Cruz operated. Some indication as to how his quarry knew Cruz’s plans. He didn’t know if he would find it here, or even if such evidence existed. But given the attention to detail with which the woman agent conducted the search on Cruz’s family home, and the deflated air about her when, after hours of searching, she gave the order to pack up, he was certain there was no such evidence to be found there.
The apartment’s bathroom was a collection of dingy off-whites. The cheap faux-marble vanity. The putty-colored toilet—the seat up, the bowl streaked with rust. The yellowed fiberglass tub, blushed with mold at the corners and black from mildew at the edges of the fixtures. The popcorn ceiling was mottled black as well. The whole room smelled of damp.
He checked the vanity. The toilet tank. The hollow inside of the towel rod. Nothing. The fan rattled when he toggled the switch on and off, so he plucked a screwdriver from his pocket tool kit and removed the vented faceplate. Nothing but grimy fan blades.
Engelmann entered the bedroom. One could hardly call it that, for there was no door separating it from the living space—just the suggestion of a doorway as the room narrowed slightly before widening once more. There was nothing in the room but a nightstand, a combination light fixture/ceiling fan, and a mattress resting on a metal frame, draped loosely with unmade sheets of charcoal gray. There weren’t even any pillows.
Naturally, he checked the nightstand first. There was no lamp atop it. There was, however, a bottle each of strawberry-and chocolate-scented body oils, an amber prescription bottle half full of Viagra, a hot pink vibrator, and dildos in a variety of shapes and sizes—none of which were likely found in nature. Some were so oddly shaped, Engelmann wondered at their method of use. Then he found the Polaroids in the drawer and wondered no longer.
It seemed when Engelmann assumed Cruz’d taken a lover, he’d underestimated Cruz’s appetites. There must have been three dozen photos in the drawer, and at least three times that many partners. Each picture contained no fewer than two people, not counting the person behind the camera—who, by dint of his omission from the collection, must have been Cruz himself—and no two pictures contained the same combination of lovers. They ranged in age from maybe fifteen to twenty-five, and they ranged in gender from male to female to any combination thereof. Most were Hispanic, but many were black, with the occasional Asian thrown into the mix as well. None were white. Cruz apparently drew the line somewhere in his predilections.
Engelmann pored over these images of tangled limbs, toys, and genitalia for quite a while, but it stirred nothing in him. He was simply looking to see if they held some clue that could prove of use to him, but if they did, their secrets were as remote to him as the pleasures of the flesh they depicted. Only killing provided him the satisfaction these hollow images promised.
When he finished with the photos, he tossed them to the floor and returned his attention to the nightstand drawer. There was nothing in it but the old, bulky Polaroid that snapped those pictures, open and empty of film, and a tacky hardback crime novel, which he cast aside after shaking to see if anything fell out. Then he inspected the drawer box as he had the ones in the kitchen, but to no avail.
Engelmann stripped the mattress of its sheets, which were stained, soft from countless bodies, and smelled of sweat. The mattress appeared intact—no openings or hand-stitched seams to suggest Cruz’d hidden anything inside—but Engelmann sliced it open and searched it regardless. Soon the room was littered with springs and batting as well as tawdry photos, but Engelmann was no closer to the clue that he was looking for.
He disassembled the metal bed frame, but that was empty, too. Nothing was taped to th
e upper surface of the ceiling fan blades, nor stashed inside the glass dome that encased the bulbs. All Engelmann found in the heating vents were mouse droppings, and moving the appliances yielded nothing but dust bunnies and dead roaches.
Engelmann stood shaking with frustration in the center of Cruz’s ruined apartment. Filthy and sweat-soaked, he retreated to the refrigerator, yanking open the door, grabbing one of Cruz’s beers, and cracking it open. Then he lowered himself stiffly onto the linoleum, letting the chill air from the open refrigerator pour over him as he drank.
His gaze wandered the apartment, dispassionately taking in his handiwork. He found no joy in the mess he’d made—only disappointment. He’d been so certain there
was something here to find. And yet.
And yet.
As his eyes lit upon the hardback novel lying spine-up and open on the floor, he felt a rush of discovery, of revelation. The cover, he realized, was in English, though his dossier indicated Cruz held the English language in disdain and would not permit it to be spoken in his home. Perhaps the lack of white lovers indicated he preferred other tongues in his love nest as well. And anyway, the lack of furnishings made it quite clear Cruz didn’t spend much time here that wasn’t spent in bed.
So why the book?
Engelmann hoisted himself up off the floor and bounded over, his beer and exhaustion both forgotten. He picked up the novel, turned it over in his hand.
It was Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
He thumbed through it and found that, here and there, letters were underlined, seemingly at random.
Engelmann smiled and fetched his burner phone from his pocket, fingers clumsy in his sweaty gloves.
That was fine. The Council was on speed dial.
The phone rang once. “Yeah?” his contact answered. Not angry, simply succinct.
