by Jon L. Breen
“I didn’t mean to kill him. I only wanted to wound him before he shot me.”
“It was this business with the horses?”
He nodded. “Scooter wanted me to steal them and run them across the border. When I refused, he said I’d double-crossed him.”
Ben realized Pancho was still holding the derringer on him. “Put away that gun,” he said. “I’m not going to turn you in.”
“Thank you,” Elana said. He could see she was relieved.
“Where will you go, now that you no longer exist?”
Pancho Quizas smiled, revealing his gold tooth one more time. “A new identity is easy to find in Mexico.”
Ben turned to ride off. “Remember to sew up the bullet hole in your balloon before you fly again.”
Some time later he heard there were still songs and legends about the San Agustin miracle, but he never told anyone the true story.
Loren D. Estleman
“Evil Grows”
Loren D. Estleman, a master of many styles, has written dead-on-target Sherlock Holmes pastiches, award-winning Westerns, and the Chandleresque novels about Detroit private eye Amos Walker. The story that follows is a gritty piece of fiction noir as told by a man in a bar.
No, I’m not prejudiced. Well, not any more than the majority of the population. I’m an organic creature, subject to conditioning and environment, and as such I’m entitled to my own personal set of preconceptions. No, I’m not disappointed; relieved is the word. If you’d shown up with cauliflower ears or swastikas tattooed on your biceps, the interview would have been over right then. So let’s sit down and jabber. What do you drink? Excuse me? Jack and Coke? Don’t get defensive, you’re young, you’ll grow out of it. You grew out of your formula. Miss, my friend will have a Jack and Coke, and you can pour me another Chivas over rocks and don’t let it sit too long on the bar this time. Scotch-flavored Kool-Aid is not my drink.
What’s that? No, I’m not afraid she’ll spit in my glass. She’s got miles on her, no wedding ring, she needs this job. People will put up with what they have to, up to a point. Which is the point where my job begins. Or began. See, I’m not sure I’m still employed. It isn’t like I go to the office every day and can see if my name’s still on the door. I’m talking too much; that’s my third Scotch the barmaid’s spitting in. You don’t mind that I’m a motor-mouth? I forgot, you’re one of the new breed. You want to know why. I’m down with that. Thank you, miss. Just keep the tab going.
Let’s see. You ever watch the news, read a paper? Don’t bother, the question’s out of date. You can’t avoid the news. The wise man on the mountain in Tibet picks up Dan Rather in his fillings. But that’s network; it’s the local reports I’m talking about, the police beat. I know what you’re thinking. Crime’s the last thing I should be interested in when I get home. Truth is, I can’t relate to wars in eastern Europe, not since I got too old for the draft, but give me a carjacking two streets over from where I live and you can’t pry me away from the screen. Past forty you get selective about what you take in. I’m not just talking about your stomach.
Anyway, have you ever noticed, once or twice a month there’s a story about some schnook getting busted trying to hire a hit man? Some woman meets a guy in a bar and offers him like a thousand bucks to knock off her husband or boyfriend or her husband’s girlfriend or the mother of the girl who’s beating out her daughter for captain of the cheerleading squad? Okay, it’s not always a woman, but let’s face it, they’re still the designated child-bearers, it’s unnatural for them to take a life. So they engage a surrogate. The reason they get caught is the surrogate turns out to be an undercover cop. I mean, it happens so often you wonder if there aren’t more cops out there posing as hit men than there are hit men. Which may be true, I don’t know. Assassins don’t answer the census.
That’s how it seems, and the department’s just as happy to let people think that. Actually there’s very little happenstance involved. The woman’s so pissed she tells her plans to everyone she knows and a few she doesn’t, gets a couple of margaritas in her and tells the bartender. Working up her courage, see, or maybe just talking about it makes her feel better, as if she went ahead and did it. So in a week or so twenty people are in on the secret. Odds are pretty good one of them’s a cop. I don’t know a bookie who’d bet against at least one of them telling a cop. So the next Saturday night she’s sitting in a booth getting blasted and a character in a Harley jacket with Pennzoil in his hair slides in, buys her a zombie and a beer for himself, and says I understand you’re looking for someone to take care of a little problem. Hey, nothing’s subtle in a bar. People want their mechanics to be German and their decorators gay, and when they decide to have someone iced they aren’t going to hire someone who looks like Hugh Grant.
You’ll be happy to hear, if you’re concerned about where civilization is headed, that many of these women, once they realize what’s going on, are horrified. Or better yet, they laugh in the guy’s face. These are the ones that are just acting out. The only blood they intend to draw will be in a courtroom, if it ever gets that far; a lot of couples who considered murder go on to celebrate their golden anniversaries. A good cop, or I should say a good person who is a cop, will draw away when he realizes it’s a dry hole. It’s entrapment if he pushes it, and anyway what’s the point of removing someone from society who was never a threat to begin with? It just takes time away from investigations that might do some good. Plus he knows the next woman whose table he invites himself to will probably take him up on it.
Hell yes, he’s wearing a wire, and I’m here to tell you Sir Laurence Olivier’s got nothing on an undercover stiff who manages to appear natural knowing he can’t squirm around or even lift his glass at the wrong time because the rustle of his clothing might drown out the one response he needs to make his case. I was kidding about the Harley jacket; leather creaks like a bitch, on tape it sounds like a stand of giant sequoias making love, and you don’t want to hear about corduroy or too much starch in a cotton shirt. Even when you wear what’s right and take care, you need to find a way to ask the same question two or three times and get the same answer, just for insurance. Try and pull that off without tipping your mitt. I mean, everyone’s seen NYPD Blue. So you begin to see, as often as these arrests make the news, the opportunity comes up oftener yet. You can blame Hollywood if you like, or maybe violent video games. I’m old enough to remember when it was comic books. My old man had a minister when he was ten who preached that Satan spoke through Gangbusters on the radio. My opinion? We’ve been fucking killers since the grave.
Lest you think I draw my munificent paycheck hanging around gin mills hitting on Lizzie Borden, I should tell you life undercover most of the time is about as exciting as watching your car rust. When the lieutenant told me to meet this Rockover woman I’d been six weeks raking leaves in the front yard of a druglord in Roseville, posing as a gardener. I never saw the man; he’s in his bedroom the whole time, flushing out his kidneys and playing euchre. He’s got maybe a year to live, so assuming I do gather enough for an indictment, he’ll be in hell trumping Tupac’s hand by the time they seat the jury. I don’t complain when I’m pulled off. Friend, I’d work Stationary Traffic if it meant getting out of those goddamn overalls.
The briefing’s a no-brainer. This Nola Rockover has had it with her boss. He’s a lawyer and a sexual harasser besides, it’s a wonder the Democrats haven’t tapped him for the nomination. It’s her word against his, and he’s a partner in the firm, so you know who’s going to come out on the short end if she reports him. Her career’s involved. Admit it, you’d take a crack at him yourself. That’s how you know it’s worth investigating. The odd thing, one of the odd things about getting a conviction is the motive has to make sense. Some part of you has to agree with the defendant in order to hang him. It’s a funny system.
Getting ready for a sting you’ve got to fight being your own worst enemy. You can’t ham it up. I’ve seen cops punk
their hair and pierce their noses—Christ, their tongues and belly buttons too—and get themselves tossed by a nervous bouncer before they even make contact, which is okay because nine times out of ten the suspect will take one look at them and run for the exit. I know what I said about bars and subtlety, but they’re no place for a cartoon either. So what I do is I leave my hair shaggy from the gardening job, pile on a little too much mousse, go without shaving one day, put on clean chinos and combat boots and a Dead T-shirt—a little humor there, it puts people at ease—and mostly for my own benefit I clip a teeny gold ring onto my left earlobe. You have to look close to see it doesn’t go all the way through. I’ve spent every day since the academy trying to keep holes out of me and I’m not about to give up for one case. Now I look like an almost-over-the-hill Deadhead who likes to hip it up on weekends, a turtleneck and sportcoat on Casual Friday is as daring as he gets during the week. Point is not so much to look like a hit man as to not look like someone who isn’t. Approachability’s important.
The tech guy shaves a little path from my belt to my solar plexus, tapes the mike and wire flat, the transmitter to my back just above the butt-crack. The T’s loose and made of soft cotton, washed plenty of times. Only competition I have to worry about is the bar noise. Fortunately, the Rockover woman’s Saturday night hangout is a family-type place, you know, where a kid can drink a Coke and munch chips from a little bag while his parents visit with friends over highballs. Loud drunks are rare, there’s a juke but no band. The finger’s a co-worker in the legal firm. I meet him at the bar, he points her out, I thank him and tell him to blow. First I have to reassure him I’m not going to throw her on the floor and kneel on her back and cuff her like on Cops; he’s more worried she’ll get herself in too deep than about what she might do to the boss. I go along with this bullshit and he leaves. Chances are he’s got his eye on her job, but he hasn’t got the spine not to feel guilty about it.
The place is crowded and getting noisy, the customers are starting to unwind. I order a Scotch and soda, heavy on the fizz, wait for a stool, and watch her for a while in the mirror. She’s sitting facing another woman near the shuffleboard table, smoking a cigarette as long as a Bic pen and nursing a clear drink in a tall glass, vodka and tonic probably. I’m hoping I’ll catch her alone sometime during the evening, maybe when the friend goes to the can, which means I don’t count on getting any evidence on tape until I convince her to ditch the friend. So I wait and watch.
Which in this case is not unpleasant. Nola Rockover’s a fox. Not, I hasten to add, one of those assembly-line beauties on the order of Heather Locklear or some other blond flavor of the month, but the dark, smoldering kind you hardly ever see except in black-and-white movies and old TV shows. She’s a brunette, slender—not thin, I’ve had it with these anorexic bonepiles that make you want to abduct them and tie them down and force-feed them mashed potatoes until they at least cast a decent shadow—I’m talking lithe and sinuous, like a dancer, with big dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. You’re too young to remember Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show. I know you’ve seen her on Nick at Nite, but your generation’s got some fixation on color, so I’m betting you’re thinking about that thing she did in the seventies. You had to have seen her in capri pants and a pullover to understand what I’m getting at. If you were a man or a boy, you fell in lust with that innocent female panther, and she was all yours. I mean, you knew she was beautiful, but you thought you were the only one in the world who knew it. Well, that was Nola Rockover.
She was sitting there in this dark sleeveless top and some kind of skirt, no cleavage or jewelry except for a thin gold necklace that called your attention to the long smooth line of throat, and she had a way of holding her chin high, almost aloof but not quite, more like she hadn’t forgotten what her mother had told her about the importance of good posture. She’s not talking, except maybe to respond to something the other woman is saying, encourage her to go on, except I’m thinking she’s not really that interested, just being polite. In any case it’s her friend who’s flapping her chin and waving her hands around like she’s swatting hornets. Probably describing her love life.
Yes, miss, another Chivas, and how’s yours? Sure? Now you’re making me look like a lush.
Nola’s friend? Okay, so I’m a chauvinist pig. Maybe she’s talking abut the Red Wings. She’s got on this ugly business suit with a floppy bow tie, like she hasn’t been to see a movie since Working Girl. Jogs, drinks bottled water by the gallon and two percent milk, got enough calcium in her you could snap her like a stick. Takes the Cosmo quiz on the G spot. One of those goddamn silly women you see walking in sheer hose and scruffy tennis shoes, poster child for penis envy. I’m giving you a better picture of her than Nola, and I never saw her again or learned her name. I’m thinking Nola tolerates her company to avoid drinking alone in public. Maybe she already suspects she’s said too much in that condition. You can see I’m kindly disposed to her before I even make contact. There’s no rule saying you can’t like ’em and cuff ’em. I get Christmas cards, sincere ones from killers and pushers I sent to Jackson. Meanwhile I don’t know a lawyer I’d go out for lunch with, and we’re supposed to be on the same side.
I watch twenty minutes, my drink’s all melted ice, and I’m starting to think this other woman’s got a bladder the size of Toledo when she gets up and goes to wee-wee. I give it a minute so as not to look like a shark swimming in, then I wander on over. Nola’s getting out another cigarette and I’m wishing, not for the first time, I didn’t give up the weed, or I could offer to light her up from the Zippo I no longer carried. Sure, it’s corny, but it works. That’s how some things stay around long enough to get corny. So I do the next best thing and say, “I hear the surgeon general frowns on those.”
She looks up slowly like she knows I’ve been standing there the whole time, and you’ll like what she says. “I don’t follow generals’ orders any more. I got my discharge.” And she smiles, this cool impersonal number, that in a book would be a page of dialogue about what a load of crap the mating ritual is, and why can’t we be more like cats and get right down to the scratching and yowling. Either that or she’s saying go fuck yourself. I’m not sure because I’m too busy noticing what nice teeth she has—not perfect, one incisor’s slightly crooked, but she keeps them white, which is not easy when you smoke, and it’s good to know there’s someone with the self-confidence to refuse to send some orthodontist’s kid to Harvard just to look like a model in a toothpaste ad. Her eyes don’t smile, though. Even if I didn’t know her recent history I’d guess this was someone for whom life had not come with greased wheels.
I’m scraping my skull for what to say next when she throws me a life preserver. “You like the Dead?”
Copy that. Not, “You’re a Deadhead?” Which is a term they know in Bowling Green by now, it’s hip no more, but most people are afraid not to use it for fear of appearing unhip. The way she doesn’t say it, though, tells me she’s so hip she doesn’t even bother to think about it. I admit that’s a lot to get out of four words, but that was Nola, a living tip-of-the-iceberg. Thanks, honey; I like my Scotch good and orange.
I lost the thread. Oh, right, the Dead. I take a chance. Remember everything hangs on how I broach the subject, and the conventional wisdom is never, ever jump the gun. If opening it up standing in front of her table with her friend about to come back any second is not jumping it, I don’t know what is. I say: “I like the dead.”
That was it. Lowercase, no cap. Which you may argue makes no difference when you’re talking, but if you do, good day to you, because you’re not the person for what I have in mind. No comment? There’s hope for you. Then you’ll appreciate her reaction. Her face went blank. No expression, it might have been enameled metal with the eyes painted on. She’d heard that lowercase d, knew what it meant, and quick as a switch she shut down the system. She wasn’t giving me anything. Wherever this went, it was up to me to take it there.
; “I know about your problem,” I said. “I can help.”
She didn’t say, “What problem?” That would have disappointed me. Her eyes flick past my shoulder, and I know without looking her friend’s coming. “Have you a card?”
This time I smile. “You mean like ‘Have gun, will travel’?”
She doesn’t smile back. “I’m known here. I’ll be at the Hangar in an hour.” And then she turns her head and I’m not there.
I confer with the boys in the van, who take off their earphones long enough to agree the Hangar is Smilin’ Jack’s Hangar, a roadhouse up in Oakland that’s been around since before that comic strip folded, a trendy spot once that now survives as a place where the laws of marriage don’t apply, which is enough to pay the bills even after it gets around that it’s not Stoli in the Stoli bottles but cheap Smirnoff’s and that a ten-dollar bill traded for a three-fifty drink will come back as a five-spot more often than not. Every community needs a place to mess around.
So forty minutes later, wearing fresh batteries, I’m groping through the whiskey-sodden dark of a building that was once an actual hangar for a rich flying enthusiast under the New Deal, my feet not touching the floor because the bass is so deep from the juke, looking for a booth that is not currently being used for foreplay. When I find one and order my watered-down Scotch, I’m hoping Nola’s part bat, because the teeny electric lamp on the table is no beacon.
No need to worry. At the end of ten minutes, right on time, I hear heels clicking and then she rustles into the facing seat. She’s freshened her makeup, and with that long dark hair in an underflip and the light coming up from below leaving all the shadows where they belong, she looks like someone I wish I had a wife to cheat on with. I notice her scent: Some kind of moon-flowering blossom, dusky. Don’t look for it, it wouldn’t smell the same on anyone else.
