by Joe Ide
Chapter Three
Fangs
Jimenez’s father was a gardener, and on Saturdays he took his son along to rake leaves and pile cut branches in the truck. The boy learned to love the abundant jacarandas, Western oaks, and box maple trees in the rich neighborhoods, and wondered why they didn’t grow that way in the barrio. Laguna Hills was lush with trees, flowers, and wide green lawns. The houses were big and there were almost no pedestrians around, the residents content to lie out by the pool or play a set with their attorney.
Jimenez pulled into Walczak’s driveway, his matte-gray Jeep Rubicon bumping over the cobblestones. The hell is that about? he thought. Did Walczak want to hear his horse clip-clopping when he came home from a fox hunt? The house was a massive brick thing. Jimenez had read about it in a magazine. He wondered what it was like living in a custom-made 12,000-square-foot building with nine bedrooms and a bathroom for every ass cheek in the neighborhood.
Walczak’s flunky and bodyguard Craig Richter let him in. He wasn’t the usual no-neck weight lifter or chiseled Secret Service type. Richter was an ex–homicide detective from the Newton Street Division in South Central LA, the gangbangers’ Promised Land. He hadn’t changed since the last time Jimenez had seen him. Burly, fifties, wide and bowlegged like a bulldog, dark bags under his eyes. He wore a cheap gray suit, a red tie that hung like a flap of cardboard, and security guard shoes. He was still a slob too. Unshaven, one shirttail out of his pants, stains on his tie, and for that cosmopolitan look, he’d added a porkpie hat like Gene Hackman in The French Connection. It made him look stupid.
“You’re making good money, Richter,” Jimenez said. “Why don’t you buy some new clothes?”
“What are you talkin’ about? These are new.”
They’d met once before at a memorial service for a veteran officer who was killed in Afghanistan. Richter drove Walczak’s family to the church in the Bentley. Walczak’s perfect wife, Patty, elegant and vivacious, and their perfect son, Noah, twelve years old, good-looking, polite, and as shiny as the chrome on the Bentley. Together, they looked like the photo that comes with a picture frame.
Jimenez and Richter had a smoke together on the church steps while the minister droned on and on. Richter didn’t seem too bright for an ex-cop, his conversation limited to the Dodgers and where you could get good carnitas.
Walczak’s foyer was as big as Jimenez’s apartment. The main hallway could have doubled as a driving range. The place was furnished like one of those English TV shows about lords and manors and butlers and footmen. There were crystal chandeliers, parquet floors; the furniture heavy, dark and European. Oil paintings in gilded frames hung on the walls. Boring landscapes. Crashing seascapes. Dead pheasants slung on a wooden table. If there’d been chamber music Jimenez wouldn’t have been surprised.
Richter led Jimenez to Walczak’s study. The man himself was sitting behind his ridiculously huge desk. Get somebody to stand on the other end and you could play Ping-Pong, assuming you could thread the ball between the gold-plated pen holder, a fifty-caliber machine gun shell, a Sharper Image gizmo that levitated a globe, a laptop in a case that could withstand an IED, a teakwood humidor that once belonged to the King of Siam or the Duke of Earl, and lots of photographs. Birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, grandparents; corny, sentimental crap you wouldn’t associate with a shit like Walczak.
Walczak was already annoyed. “Glad you could make it, Jimenez.”
“I’m glad too,” he said. Hawkins and Owens were lounging in leather club chairs and drinking Walczak’s Scotch. They looked weird holding fancy crystal tumblers, like aborigines with power drills. Hawkins grinned and they bumped fists.
“What’s up, Hawk?” Jimenez said.
“Ain’t nothin’ to it,” Hawkins replied. Owens huffed contemptuously.
“Hey, baby,” Jimenez said. “Long time no see. Shouldn’t you be milking something?”
“Shouldn’t you be picking lettuce?”
“This is a time-sensitive matter,” Walczak said. “Do you mind if we get started?”
“I don’t get a drink like everybody else?” Jimenez said.
Walczak sighed and drummed his fingers on the desk. He was trim and fit, like he could run on a treadmill for weeks at a time. He had blond hair, Aryan blue eyes, and an All-American face, his smile as broad as a car salesman’s, his teeth too white to be human. More like an appliance or snow. He had on his casual Friday look. Khaki chinos, a white Egyptian cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a fat gold Rolex, and for that touch of hipness, six-hundred-and-eighty-nine-dollar Kanye West sneakers in fire-hydrant yellow. If he was handling your portfolio you’d give him the passcode to your brokerage accounts and not worry about a thing.
Jimenez got his drink from the bar and Walczak rose from the Ping-Pong table. He used a remote, and a photo of a woman appeared on a large wall monitor. “Remember her?”
“Oh shit,” Jimenez said.
“I hope you’re gonna tell us her plane crashed in the Amazon,” Hawkins said.
“Afraid not,” Walczak said grimly. “She’s turned up.”
“It’s been, what, nine, ten years?” Owens said. “Why’s she poppin’ up now?”
“She’s blackmailing us.” It went quiet except for Owens swirling the ice cubes around in her glass. “Sarah sent me these,” Walczak said. “They came in an email. Untraceable, even by my guys.” A slide show began. They were pictures from Abu Ghraib. They were taken clandestinely, the cameraman shooting through half-open doors and dirty windows, over partitions and around corners. They were shocking. Richter choked on his drink.
It was the four veterans torturing detainees, but there was more. Hawkins smirking as he came out of a cell zipping up his pants, a naked woman curled up in a corner, Owens threatening her with a baton. Walczak, sitting imperiously in a chair, grinning at a woman removing her burka and weeping with humiliation. The next slide made Jimenez want to blend in with the carpet. He was on top of a woman, bare-ass naked, her beseeching hand flailing in the air. Owens was there, hands cupped around her mouth, braying as if to egg him on. Walczak thrusting against a woman pinned to a wall. The group in a cell, plastic cups in their hands, leering and laughing at a naked woman. She was hysterical, pleading, her hands clenched together as if in prayer. Jimenez, sitting on a cot, Owens giving him a blow job.
“That’ll be enough of that,” Owens said. The slide show stopped. The silence that followed was like an unexpected ceasefire, everyone bewildered, not believing what they’d seen, not believing what they’d done.
Richter was so appalled he was laughing. “Holy shit, I thought I was bad. Jesus, you guys went nuts! Talk about a depraved bunch of assholes! Didn’t you have any conscience at all?”
Everyone looked at him like he’d kicked a puppy to death.
“Shut up, you idiot!” Walczak barked. “You don’t know anything about it, so until I ask for your opinion, shut your big stupid mouth.” Humiliated, Richter leaned back in his chair, drew in his cheeks, and looked away.
“Are these the ones you told us about?” Jimenez said. “The ones that Chuck took?”
“Yeah,” Walczak said. “I don’t know how he did it without us seeing him.”
“Because he was a sneaky little goddamn rat,” Owens said, pouring herself another drink. “Always hangin’ around with that damn camera. He was worse than Graner.”
“Sarah wants a million dollars or she’ll go public with the pictures,” Walczak said.
“She should have asked for more,” Hawkins said. “You got that in your penny jar, don’t you?”
Walczak ignored him and went on. “I told her I was going to split the bill with you guys and getting it together would take awhile. She gave me until Friday.” He shook his head. “Stupid. It just gives us more time to come up with something.”
“And it gives her time to come up with something too,” Richter said.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
�
��Wait a minute,” Hawkins said. “Split the bill? That’s bullshit, Walczak, you got us into this.”
“Oh really? And how did I do that?”
“You were our superior, remember? You gave the orders.”
“Did I order you to rape those women?” Walczak retorted. Hawkins’s nostrils flared. He set his drink down hard and got out of his chair.
“Whoa, ease up, Hawk,” Jimenez said. He stood in front of him with his palms out. “Walczak’s gonna pay the bill because a million is nothing to him and he knows the rest of us are living paycheck to paycheck. Ain’t that right, Walczak?”
Walczak heaved an exasperated sigh. “Yes, that’s right. Back to business, please?”
Walczak’s company had access to every law enforcement database in existence. He’d already run Sarah’s name through ATF, DEA, FinCEN, IRS, INTERPOL, NCIC, Nlets, US Customs. Not a single hit. Sarah had successfully flown under the radar for a decade, not an easy thing to do.
“We have a lead,” Walczak said. “Her daughter.” He put another photo on the monitor. “Her name is Grace. Twenty-five years old, single, calls herself an artist. She lives in a shitty part of Long Beach.”
“We paying her a visit?” Jimenez said.
“Yes, we are.”
This was fucked up, Jimenez thought. Maybe Sarah was staying with her daughter, maybe not. Either way, they’d have to kidnap one or both of them and if they held out, Walczak would torture the shit out of them and kill them when he was done. Walczak was a de facto leader on the tier and like a deep-sea submersible, he explored your murky depths and discovered shit you never knew was there. Mainly, that you were capable. Capable of evil. And nobody who wasn’t actually there understood what it was like to be in a world where evil was expected, where evil was the norm. Shit you never imagined you would do, shit you’d stop somebody from doing if you were anyplace else, was suddenly your fucking job. It was like you gave up the power to decide things for yourself. You were working for the devil and you did what you were told.
They had their own little cabal; Walczak, Jimenez, Hawkins, and Owens. They called themselves the Four Horsemen. If Abu Ghraib wasn’t the apocalypse, nothing was. Walczak was different from the other CIA guys. He got right in there and tortured prisoners personally, which was weird if you didn’t have to. He was also a clean freak, showering four or five times a day and paying somebody to do his laundry. He only went to the bathroom if he was alone and washed his hands like an eye surgeon. If he was anywhere but in his office he wore latex gloves.
With the detainees, he always went that extra mile. If they’d beaten a guy senseless and he was lying on the floor, Walczak would kick him. If a detainee had a broken leg, he’d step on it. Walczak organized contests for the dog handlers. If you were the first one to make a prisoner piss on himself, you got a bottle of booze. He ordered a detainee to be crucified. Hung him by his arms with a hood over his head. The guy died and they buried him just outside the prison walls. Why not? Who was going to dig up some asshole in a killing field?
Walczak was delighted when the detainee’s family was being held too. He’d bring in the guy’s wife, tell him all the different ways you were going to defile her if he didn’t start talking. Then he’d grab her tits or rip off her burka. It worked better than sic’ing Slayer on him. There wasn’t a lot in the news about rape but there should have been. The whole cell block was rape central. Men, women, boys, girls. Didn’t matter.
Walczak’s specialty was waterboarding. He’d get excited about it like he was getting the prisoner ready for a space launch. The plank had to be tilted down fifteen degrees for maximum effect, a number Jimenez suspected Walczak made up. The prisoner was strapped down completely, ankles to shoulders, even his head. Walczak didn’t like wigglers. The towel had to be drawn taut over the prisoner’s face so as not to impede the water flow, and Walczak’s preference was to use a hose. A stream of water made the sense of drowning continuous. If no hose was available, Walczak used ten-gallon gasoline drums. None of it was necessary. A bucket and fifteen or twenty seconds and the guy would be choking and gagging and freaking out. A trained marine couldn’t hack it for more than thirty. But Walczak let it go on. And on. And on. Until the guy was actually drowning and everybody in the room was alarmed.
By that time, the detainee would be screaming at the interpreter, giving up information about everything and anything, relevant or not. This way, Walczak claimed, he’d get answers to questions he hadn’t asked, which made no sense at all. Anybody in that situation would make shit up just to get you to stop and the vast majority of the detainees didn’t know jack in the first place. Since then, Walczak had founded his own security company, WSSI, with contracts all over the world. He was richer than his hero, Donald Trump. And what was Jimenez’s reward for defending his country? A shit apartment and a job working as a dispatcher at a cab company. The payments on the Rubicon took half his income but it was the only thing in his life that made him happy.
Walczak put a diagram of Grace’s building on the monitor. A dump called the Edgemont. “Here’s the layout,” he said. He started pointing at things and rambling on about the operation’s objectives and entry points and static posts like he knew what he was talking about. At Abu Ghraib, he was a desk jockey when he wasn’t torturing the detainees. Walczak went on about the “mission” and the “targets” and it reminded Jimenez of rounding up Iraqi cabdrivers, rug salesmen, janitors, store clerks, camel drivers, and any other random asshole who happened to be at home minding his own business. Jimenez glanced at Richter. He was half asleep, fiddling with the end of his tie, probably thinking about his next plate of rice and beans. Jimenez wondered why Walczak kept him around.
“Is everybody clear?” Walczak said.
“You’re coming with us,” Hawkins said, belligerent. “You’re in the front lines with the rest of us, you hear me?”
“I never thought otherwise,” Walczak said, not fooling anybody.
“Could we stop jawing and get on with this?” Owens said. “I didn’t bring a piece, by the way.”
“Don’t worry,” Richter said. “Walczak can get you a nuke if that’s what you want.”
They were sitting at Grace’s workbench, looking at her laptop. Isaiah brought up a pay site that searched personal records.
“I can’t afford this,” she said.
“Part of the service.”
“No, it’s not. I’m taking advantage.”
“If you were I’d tell you.”
“I’ll pay you back,” she said, like Isaiah wouldn’t believe her.
“You’ve already paid me.”
“No, I haven’t,” she said, adamant.
“Don’t you think your art is worth $129.95?”
Sarah’s school, financial, property, and educational records turned up nothing relevant. “I think this is a waste of time,” Grace said. “All of this happened in the past. What good does it do us now? I’m gonna make coffee.”
“Could I have water, please?” Isaiah said. She got up and went to the kitchen while he brought up Sarah’s criminal record. She had an unpaid traffic ticket in Reno, Nevada. And then there was this:
MONAROVA, SARAH JANE. HEIGHT: 5′3″ WEIGHT: 110lb EYES: GREEN. HAIR: BLONDE. WANTED FOR: MURDER. WARRANT NUMBER: F7900076 USE CAUTION: MAY BE ARMED AND DANGEROUS. IF ARRESTED, CONTACT DETECTIVE SWINSON AT (661-459-0404) HOMICIDE DIVISION BAKERSFIELD POLICE DEPARTMENT, CALIFORNIA.
A murder warrant had been issued for Sarah’s arrest, dated the day after she fled Bakersfield and left her daughter behind. This was what Grace was hiding and why she didn’t want him delving into her past. He wanted to tell her it was okay, that he’d help her no matter what her mother had done. Should he confront her? No. She might be humiliated and back out of the investigation altogether.
Grace put water in the kettle. “Anything else?”
“No, nothing,” he said. He closed the site and was glad she hadn’t made note of the password. “I’ve got to go,” h
e said.
“Already? We were just getting started.”
“I have to feed Ruffin, take him for a walk.”
She fumed. “Now? We haven’t done anything yet.” Isaiah was annoyed. First she pays him with a painting, then she makes it hard for him, and now she’s complaining because he has to go?
“What do you want me to do?” he said, a little more harshly than he intended. “Let him go hungry and crap in the house?”
She took a deep breath as if she needed a moment to find her patience. “When can we pick this up again?”
“In the morning. I’ll call you.”
They exchanged numbers and he left. He came out of the building and stretched. A long time to be sitting on a stool. He saw a matte-gray Jeep parked across the street. The driver was a Latino. He had short hair, his Hawaiian shirt stretched tight over an imposing shoulder, a tatted-up forearm resting on the windowsill. He had the intense stillness of a cop just before a drug raid. He glanced at Isaiah and turned to talk to a passenger. He was wearing an earbud with a coiling wire that went down under his collar. A Secret Service–style radio. Not a cop then. They used car radios or handhelds. FBI? DEA? But the car wasn’t right. A new forty-thousand-dollar Jeep with BBS rims. It wasn’t a fleet car. This was the Latino man’s personal ride. So these people were probably private security, but what were they doing here? Why were they sitting out in the open? A staging area? Maybe. Isaiah relied on his internal sonar to alert him to possible trouble. He heard a faint ping.
