Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  I also left with the address of Cheryl’s ex-boyfriend and confidant, Robert Little. He lived on Rosemont Garden, a block down from the Rosemont Baptist Church. Van had written the street address on my hand when I said I needed to write it down to remember it.

  I decided to drive out, hoping Little would be home. I was wondering about my client—Miranda had not expressed any animosity toward Cory Edgers, which, under the circumstances, seemed a little off. She’d described Cheryl as bookish and introverted, something of a loner—the exact opposite of what Van and Ray told me.

  So who was lying? On the surface, Miranda, as the sister, was likely to know Cheryl better. But Cheryl and Miranda were stepsisters, thrust upon each other in disharmony. And Cheryl did have a battered basketball under her bed, giving credence to Van and Ray’s version. It would be interesting to see what the ex-boyfriend had to say.

  Robert Little lived in a smallish, snug little house that was made of Whitestone, from Kentucky quarries. A tiny yard was enclosed by a white picket fence that stood no more than two feet tall. There were no cars in the narrow driveway. I parked in the street, opened and closed the short wood gate, and rang the bell. My only answer was the staccato bark of a smallish dog, and the scrabble of doggie toenails on the door.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Los Angeles branch of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is on South Figueroa, and as usual, Wilson McCoy had to park in the underground garage. The morning sunshine was neon yellow, and as oppressive as the lighting in a pool hall. There was no humidity to speak of, unless you count ocean breezes, which couldn’t be felt on South Figueroa anyway.

  Wilson was early; most business in L.A. did not start until after ten. He had a nine A.M. appointment with Vaughn Chesterfield, the assistant to the Special Agent in Charge.

  For an ATF agent, Wilson was amazingly laid back. But then, Wilson was that rare creature, the California native; third generation at that. His parents had long since abandoned Los Angeles for San Francisco, where his mother made huge sums of money as a broker. His father taught spatial geographical analysis at Berkeley, and his grandmother lived in the valley. His grandfather had passed on several years ago and resided in an urn at the Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills location, no more than ten yards from Lucille Ball’s burial slot. Wilson had no doubt his grandfather was happy there—he was always crazy about Lucille Ball.

  The California blond jock aura dropped away from Wilson when he walked. His limp was impressive. It had been years since the Waco holocaust put him in the hospital and rehab for over seven months; years since his leg lost nerve, bone, flexibility, and strength. He knew one of the four ATF agents who was killed while trying to serve a warrant on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and has no regrets about being involved. That he considers himself one of the lucky ones is what he tells people when they bring it up. He doesn’t feel lucky, but hell, it sounds good, and keeps people off his back.

  Wilson passed through the glass doors into the high rise office building, took an elevator, and headed left for the ATF offices. He passed his ID card in front of the mechanical censor outside the door, glanced up at the cameras trained on the hallway and smiled. The receptionist buzzed him in and gave him a laconic wave. Like many L.A. residents, she didn’t really spark until noon.

  It was an effort, but Wilson managed to smile rather than grimace when he said hello. Today was a bad day for pain, a repercussion from yesterday’s excursion wandering the hills between Valencia and Lake Elizabeth, thirty-five miles northeast of the city, but still in Los Angeles County. He’d walked for miles uphill, at dusk, in order to confirm a cache of ten MAK-90 firearms buried under an old galvanized water trough. As hoped, the trough was right where it was supposed to be—rusting away on a small horse ranch that had been abandoned so long the stalls were marked by nothing more than a collapsed tin roof, the house reduced to cinder block foundation.

  Wilson’s informant had been on the mark. A minimum of digging uncovered the cache—stolen in the broad daylight heist of a UPS delivery truck parked on Ventura Boulevard. The guns were now waiting for the sales transaction to a dealer in Gardenside who would then turn them over to Colombian guerrillas.

  Informant Code Number 379S—a hooker who made extra cash as a straw purchaser of Lorcin and Bryco handguns—had been in way over her head. Wilson had caught her with the goods, as she was en route to make a delivery to one of the ubiquitous hives of office suites in Brentwood. Her mistake was giving her real address to the gun dealers when she made her buys. In Wilson’s line of work, stupidity kept everyone in business.

  Wilson had the paperwork to document the woman’s purchase of seventeen handguns in the last thirteen months, one of which had already been used in a homicide in South Central, time to crime less than a year. The serial number had been sanded off, but the lab was able to raise it again with acid etching, and that was the beginning of the trail Wilson had been following. He could nail Code 379S on §922(a)(6) for willfulness to deliver a firearm to a person where possession would violate state law or ordinance (five years); §922(d) for disposing of a firearm to a prohibited person (ten years); and §922(a)(1)(A) for engaging in the business of dealing in firearms without a license (five years). Ninety percent of the cases Wilson put together were prosecuted. There was no parole for a federal crime.

  The informant had two kids, both under six. Wilson had pushed the paperwork through in record time, gotten department approval to use her as an authorized informant rather than to prosecute, and personally moved her into public housing forty miles from where she’d been living. Forty miles was a universe away from her usual contacts and haunts. She was in Riverside now.

  She had baked him cupcakes the day after the move. Wilson thanked her kindly, then ate all of them on the way home, a violation of rules that were explicit about what kind of personal give-and-take was allowed between an agent and an informant (none). But he sure as hell wasn’t going to say no to her cupcakes.

  He would have liked to round up some clothes and nursery books for Code 379S’s kids, but that wasn’t allowed either—too easy to slide into a personal rather than professional relationship. But there was no reason he couldn’t leave a box of things on her doorstep, anonymously, at Christmas—providing she hadn’t returned to the old neighborhood, and the old habits. People often did.

  It had been full dark by the time Wilson made it back to his car. The quiet of a desert mountain after nightfall was eerie to a man who grew up rollerblading at Venice Beach. He hadn’t had to use the flashlight—once he got his bearings he had no trouble finding his way.

  The ATF agency begins the process of weeding-out candidates with a written test; one of the major features of that test is spatial analysis. Wilson’s advantage came from the four years he’d spent attending college and delivering pizza. By the end of his sophomore year, Wilson could stand outside a six-story building and determine where an individual apartment was located, hit the right stairwell on the first try and go unerringly to the front door. His university years hadn’t been a waste after all, no matter what his mother said. When anyone asked Wilson how to get hired on in federal law enforcement, he always recommended a minimum of three months delivering pizza.

  Wilson threaded his way through clusters of cubicles until he found his own tiny kingdom. The light on his phone flickered—five messages. He settled himself into his chair in such a way as to take the weight off the bad leg and ease it into the most comfortable position. He watched the orange light at the base of his phone flick on and off.

  He was worried about tonight’s stakeout. Wondering how he was going to hold up. He’d been pretty much off active field work since he’d come back from Waco, and was grateful no one had taken him off the case. Yet. They hadn’t been expecting the paper trail to lead to stakeouts, field work, and Colombian guerrillas.

  Assistant Special Agent Vaughn Chesterfield was standing outside his office door, looking like he’d been waiting awhile. Wilson wasn’t rattled. He
knew he was on time. Vaughn was just up to his games because Vaughn didn’t like him. As Wilson heard it, secondhand of course, Vaughn thought Wilson was some kind of beach boy, a California dude, and was of the opinion that Wilson was unfit for the job. Wilson did not think it helped that his mother had named him after her favorite singer in the Beach Boys. He wondered if she had any idea how much trouble this name had caused him. Knowing his mother, she would have done it anyway.

  Wilson made the effort to get along with Chesterfield, careful not to say “totally” or “like” or “dude” in front of the assistant S.A., careful to wear very good shoes. His efforts made no impression, but Vaughn was from Connecticut and rumor was he would not be in L.A. much longer. ATF moves people around.

  Vaughn motioned Wilson into a chair facing the desk. Wilson, invariably fair, would be the first to point out that Vaughn was smart and savvy, and the thing he admired most about the man was his refusal to give Wilson special treatment for being wounded in the Waco mess. Wilson thought that showed integrity.

  Chesterfield was immaculate in a white shirt and charcoal slacks, and an oddly patterned tie. Wilson would bet money that Vaughn had not bought the tie in California. He wondered how far a man would have to go to find a tie that ugly. Well, Hollywood.

  Vaughn sat straight in his chair, as behooves a man from Connecticut. He tapped a finger on the desk. “I’m pulling you off tonight’s stakeout.”

  Wilson gritted his teeth. He had spent a long time laying the groundwork for what had become a net for a major player. Now they were pulling him off?

  “I’ve put a lot of hours in this, Vaughn.”

  “Remember Alex Rugger out in Nashville?”

  Wilson blinked. “What?”

  Vaughn’s face deepened into a webwork of stress wrinkles. “Alex Rugger. From Nashville.”

  Wilson wondered what Alex Rugger had to do with anything. Was there some kind of Tennessee connection he didn’t know about?

  Last night, out in the hills behind Valencia, he had stopped to rest his leg, taking a moment, out in the desert and mountains, just to be still, just to think. There had been a three-quarter moon, and lights from the city created a belt of illumination that had an effect even out there. Wilson heard a coyote, close enough that he’d looked over his shoulder. This far out in the San Fernando Valley, the sky was an open book, with the stars as distinct as streetlights.

  It had been like that in Texas, his first night there, before the FBI guys strung the lights, blasted the music, and drove everyone out of their mind. Waco. He didn’t remember much about the last night, when the fires were burning. He was dead to the world when they cleared the compound of bodies, undergoing his first surgery, then intensive care, then another surgery, the next to the last. The final surgery, what the surgeon humorously called “tweaking,” was yet another two weeks after that.

  The recovery time shocked him. He thought for a while there was something else wrong with him, something no one was telling him. He thought that until a veteran agent from Tennessee, Alex Rugger, flew in from Nashville for the sole purpose of sitting by Wilson’s hospital bed for a chat. Rugger had appeared in the doorway of Wilson’s hospital room, cheerful and curious. Wilson had been edgy and in pain. He had noticed the man favored his right leg when he walked into the room. Wilson thought that if he could just walk and be up on his feet again, he could put up with a limp.

  Rugger said Don’t get up, ha, rolled a well-padded recliner in from the hallway, and pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of a brown paper bag. He settled in, leaving his right leg unflexed. They drank from Dixie cups—the blue-and-white paper ones used in Sunday school classes to serve juice at snack time. Rugger—a thin man in his early fifties, vibrant blue eyes and a face just now showing wrinkles—moved the leg again, crossing it over the good one, and finally seemed comfortable. He had an easy presence, and you knew without being told the details that he liked his job, his family, his whole damn life.

  Rugger stayed at Wilson’s bedside the whole afternoon telling stories, as if he’d been hired to provide the entertainment. Wilson told Rugger he could have a second career in stand-up. Rugger said only if Jack Daniel’s was his official assistant.

  Some of the stories weren’t so funny, talk of the trade in that shorthand experienced agents develop. Clearly Rugger had done his time in the dark places, but it hadn’t marked him, not that Wilson could tell, and seeing this reassured him.

  Halfway into the bottle Wilson was as free of pain as he had been since he’d been wounded. He floated in a drug and alcohol induced haze and Rugger just kept filling up the little cups. Wilson had been puzzled for a while, then realized that there had not been a single interruption since Rugger had appeared in the doorway. Not a nurse, not a CNA, no techs, no tests, no blood work, no meds—just Rugger and that bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Wilson had been feeling friendship and gratitude toward the man, and now he was enveloped in awed respect. Orchestrating an interval of peace and rest in the midst of hospital chaos, bringing in contraband and serving it in little cups without a backward look—Rugger’s presence was deceptively low-key. He was clearly a powerful man.

  About the time these thoughts permeated Wilson’s weary and buzzed brain, Rugger had leaned back in the chair and mentioned that he’d been hit by the same kind of bullet in his right thigh a decade ago, that it had taken him over a year to get back on his feet, and that he’d recovered pretty well but it was three years before he was really back to normal. He opened his wallet to show Wilson pictures of his kids, his dog, his brilliant university professor wife, a woman he clearly adored. He had a wealth of stories about his wife’s absentmindedness, her skewed way of looking at the world, her left-wing politics that clashed with his conservative standpoint. Rugger then began listing one hundred and one reasons not to own a sheepdog—none of them convincing when matched with the man’s obvious affection for the beast. Wilson knew the Agency had flown Rugger to Texas in order to give him peer support, and the amazing thing was that it had worked.

  “Agent Wilson?” Vaughn was leaning across the desk, staring at him.

  Wilson rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Sure, I remember him. He came to see me when I was in the hospital out in Texas. We compared scars.”

  “He liked you okay.”

  “I liked him.”

  Vaughn radiated annoyance. It did not matter to him who Wilson liked. “What I mean is, you made a good impression on him. He’s the assistant S.A. out there in Nashville. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Right.” He hadn’t.

  “He wants to use you.”

  “In Tennessee?”

  “You got something against Tennessee?”

  Wilson knew as little about Tennessee as anyone else in southern California, but he was pretty sure he would have a lot against it once he got out there. Clearly, he was being transferred. His first thought was of Sel. He didn’t think she’d really grasped the concept that a federal job in law enforcement equals relocation. Wilson had only lately been working up the courage to ask her to move in. It might be a better idea to marry her. Although marriage was an option Wilson had given very little thought to, this was Sel, and he might like to marry her either way.

  “Agent McCoy, are you with me here?”

  Wilson shrugged. “I don’t know that much about the South. Just that it’s the Bible Belt—guns and Moses. I take it I’m being transferred?”

  Vaughn shook his head. “Temporary assignment.”

  Gun shows and flea markets, Wilson thought, immediately followed by Why me?

  “It’s not gun shows and flea markets, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Vaughn leaned back in his chair. “Son, I guess you know I’ve had my doubts about you. You don’t act like the kind of agent I’m used to, but I’ve developed a lot of confidence in you.”

  This was news to Wilson. He was pretty sure it was news to Vaughn, too, but Chesterfield was a company man and if the job required a temporary respect for Wi
lson McCoy, he’d have it.

  “I think you handled that Waco business pretty well—”

  Wilson looked away. “Handled well” and “Waco” were two phrases he’d never thought to hear in the same sentence.

  “You’ve been slogging along in the trenches, doing a lot of sideline work since you got hurt out there, and I haven’t heard word one of complaint.”

  Wilson looked the man in the eye. They both knew that Chesterfield had been giving him low-end assignments, and that the only reason Wilson did anything halfway interesting was because he drummed up the business on his own. But then, that was how ATF operated anyway. No initiative, no career.

  “I think Alex has a point. A guy like you, kind of different from the average federal bear, can have an advantage in certain situations. And we’ve got a situation.”

  A situation. Two magic words. Wilson was newly alert to Vaughn’s tone of voice and he felt a tiny jab of excitement at the base of his spine. Hallelujah mama, let’s hope this is good. As soon as Vaughn started talking, Wilson realized how good.

  “You ever hear any whispers about a guy called Rodeo?”

  Wilson maintained a blank look, something he was good at. Yes, he had heard, just a hint, but he had no intention of admitting what he’d heard or from whom. In the aftermath of the Waco disaster and the finger-pointing, there was a brother-and sisterhood between the ATF agents who’d been there, the bond impenetrable, unspoken, permanent. And strictly out of any official influence. They watched each other’s backs from every direction, including the “friendlies.”

  “No? I thought maybe you had. We’re fairly certain we’ve got an assassin at work. As a matter of fact, at this point we’re sure.”

  “An assassin? Who are his targets, sir?”

  “His targets are agents—ATF and FBI.”

  “FBI?”

  “Yeah, FBI. And the targets all have one thing in common.”

  “Waco?” Wilson had heard the rumors, dropped in his lap as a faint but possible warning, but had put it down to paranoia. Two agents murdered in the last eight years—bad, but not a trend. Unless you added dead agents from the FBI. That might be a trend.