Cactus Garden

by Ward, Robert

  The room became quiet, and Jack heard Brandau blow out his breath in relief. Jack’s speech had been a good one, mature, confident.

  C.J. winked and kicked Jack’s shin.

  Brandau nodded his big head and wiped a smudge of Twinkie off his lip.

  “I say we go ahead and give them a good old-fashioned ass whipping.”

  Valle nodded. “Fucking right,” he said.

  “Okay. We’re going to do it,” Zampas said softly.

  Michaels said nothing but sat silently, with his head down.

  Jack smiled and nodded as the men adjourned. But as Michaels left the room, he looked at Jack with a strange expression on his face. Jack expected anger or jealousy, but Michaels looked as if he pitied him. Then he disappeared into the hall.

  C.J. joined Jack as they left the room.

  “What the fuck is with Ted Michaels?” Jack said. “It’s weird. Like he doesn’t want to make the bust.”

  “Tricky Ted,” Calvin said. “He’s always got his own little games. Important thing is you won the fight.”

  “I suppose,” Jack said. But he thought of Michaels’s expression as he left the room, and he felt a chill.

  “Hey, fuck Ted Michaels,” C.J. said. “Listen, man, why don’t you come over tonight. Have some barbecue. Lucille and Demetrius are out of town, and I hate eating alone.”

  “Like to, partner,” Jack said. “But I gotta wait by the phone. My man is supposed to call.”

  Calvin said nothing but nodded slowly. Jack suddenly realized that C.J. looked exhausted.

  “Hey, what’s going on with you, bro?” Jack said.

  “I told a little white lie,” C.J. said. “Lucille ain’t just out of town. She took Little D. and went back to Detroit. For good.”

  “Shit,” Jack said. “Man, I’m sorry. But she’ll come back.”

  C.J. looked at Jack with a certain disbelief, rolling his eyes.

  “You know, Jackie, sometimes I forget jest how young you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It ain’t your fault. You still at the age it’s easy to be romantic…. Ole C.J. and Lucille, together through thick and thin. Stuff like that.”

  “So?” Jack said. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

  “The operative word is ‘been,’ “ C.J. said, shaking his head. “As in ‘has been.’ “

  “Don’t run that stuff on me.”

  C.J. gripped Jack’s arm.

  “No offense, Jack, but you ain’t there yet. I’m talking about how a woman sees you when you’re young—you know, full of promise, hope … gonna kick butt, take names. Then one day they wake up and smell the barbecue. They see a house that’s falling down and a kid who can’t make it to school without getting hit-on by crack dealers, and now they say, ‘I backed the wrong horse, baby,’ and they want to get their-selves out of there, grab some life, man, before some gang banger shows up on the front porch with a MAC-10.”

  “Bullshit,” Jack said. “I know Lucille. She’s just emotional. She’ll wake up in Detroit and wonder where your scraggly ass is, and she’ll be begging you to send her a bus ticket.” C.J. shook his head wearily.

  “Wrong,” he said. “I’ll tell you how serious it is. You know what a screamer Lucille is, man? Well, she didn’t yell at me once this time. She just said she was taking D. for a little trip to her mother’s—so I wouldn’t have the chance to stop her—then she called me once she got there and told me real calmly that she was staying. Permanently. Said a lawyer would be getting in touch with me.”

  C.J.’s voice had sunk to a growl. For a second Jack thought that C.J. might burst into tears. The idea filled Jack with dread and an intense embarrassment. He found himself unable to speak.

  Finally, C.J. broke the awkward silence between them.

  “Look, man, it’s okay. I know you got to wait for Wingate to call you. That’s fine. I guess I just told you this as a way of apologizing for ragging your ass the past few weeks.”

  “Hey,” Jack said. “That’s nothing. Man, listen when I get back, we’ll take some time. Go fishing down in Baja. Make a long weekend of it.”

  “You got it, partner,” C.J. said.

  He managed a smile, and Jack put his arm around his partner’s broad shoulders and squeezed in an awkward half hug. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was all he could do for now.

  Chapter 13

  In the dark woody atmosphere of the Union Pacific Railroad Car restaurant, a slender black man of about thirty-five sat across the room from West Coast Agency Director George Zampas and his wife, Ronni. The black man was not a businessman stopping in for a drink before he went home, however. His business was to observe the Agency director and his wife, who sat drinking in a dark leather booth diagonally behind him. The black man watched them in the mirror on the opposite wall. When they left, he would follow Ronni Zampas. Meanwhile, he glanced at a copy of The Wall Street Journal and attempted to look interested in the stock quotations.

  On the other side of the room, Agency Director George Zampas downed his third Jack Daniel’s. Across the dark oak table from him, his wife of ten years, Ronni, shook her head. She was in a foul mood.

  “How many drinks is that, George?” she said.

  “Two,” Zampas lied. He’d had the first one at the bar before she came.

  “Right,” she said. “You’ve become such a liar, George. I know it works for you at the office, but why not tell me the truth once in a while?”

  The big Greek looked at her through a whiskey haze.

  “What makes you think I’m lying, Ronni?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “How long have we been married?” she said.

  “Twenty-four years,” Zampas said.

  She picked up her gin and tonic and sighed. “Let me ask you something, George. When did you stop loving me?”

  “Jesus, Ronni,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to be maudlin,” she said. “I just want to know. Was it last year? That’s what I thought for a while. I even thought I knew the exact date … December twenty third, when we had our big Christmas fight. For a long time I thought that was it … the George Zampas fuck-you cutoff date.”

  “Ronni, don’t do this.” It occurred to him that maybe she’d had a couple of her own drinks before she left the house. She waved to the young waiter, who came promptly. “Another gin … make it a double,” she said. “Ronni, I don’t think you want …”

  “You don’t know what I want,” she said, then looked at the waiter. “Bring it. Okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A couple of tears rolled down her face and Zampas felt his guts being pulled out.

  “So tell me, George,” she said. “Tell me the truth. You’re fucking Jane Hawkins, aren’t you?”

  “Jesus, Ronni, no,” he said. “Come on. I’m sorry if I’ve ignored you lately, but there’s a lot of pressure at work. Which doesn’t make it right. I know I’ve been distant.”

  “Distant?” She laughed bitterly. “How about on Mars? And if it’s so damned important, why can’t you tell me about it. You used to.”

  “I just can’t. It’s classified.”

  “I bet you tell her about it,” she said. “And I bet you tell her all about your cold-bitch wife who doesn’t understand you. Isn’t that how you guys always cast it … the dragon lady at home who spends all her time shopping and playing tennis. Or are you the more subtle type, George? Maybe you tell her that your wife is still a lovely person, it’s just that there’s no passion in the relationship anymore. Yes, now that I think about it, that would be more your style … the phony compassion number, while you stroke her nice, tight, twenty-five-year-old thighs.”

  His wife’s voice had risen now. Zampas looked around the restaurant and found that several people were staring at him. “Embarrassed, George?”

  “Yeah, I’m embarrassed,” he said. “Feel better?”

  “The thing is,” she said. “I still love you. Isn�
��t that the greatest joke of all? I should go out and get the heaviest-hitting attorney I can find, but I don’t want to, even now. I guess that makes me some kind of codependent enabler or whatever they call it nowadays.”

  “Ronni,” he said, “stop. Please.”

  “I guess this is the spot where I’m supposed to throw the drink in your face,” she said. Instead she pushed it toward his side of the table.

  “Have another one, George. Or better yet, you can save the drink for Jane. Though I imagine she doesn’t drink. None of the perfect young people do anymore. They don’t smoke; they don’t drink; they don’t eat red meat. What do you do after you’ve gone to the motel, George? Eat tofu together? Well, fuck her, and fuck you, love.”

  She got up and walked out. And as she did the black man, folded his Wall Street Journal under his arm, and walked out a few feet behind her.

  As Zampas watched his wife leave, a pain began throbbing in his forehead. He was losing it, he thought. It was as though someone had a spade and was shoving it into his guts. He shut his eyes and thought of a beach somewhere, maybe on Kauai—a sparking white beach that fronted a crystal blue lagoon.

  He sipped his drink and ached for it. The place no honest cop could ever afford.

  Chapter 14

  Jack rode shotgun alongside Wingate in his black Mercedes 350 SL. They drove down Victory Boulevard past abandoned factories and a couple of overweight hookers, then turned right and stopped at a guard shack. A huge black man in what looked like a black storm-trooper’s uniform stuck his large head in the car window.

  “How you doing, Mr. Wingate?”

  “Fine, Billy,” Wingate said. “You looking good, son. The boys arrive yet?”

  “Believe they are all inside, sir.”

  “Good deal,” Wingate said. He winked as if they were fishing buddies and drove on.

  “Boy oughta get himself some Sen-Sen, son, his breath smells like warmed-over shit,” he said.

  They drove through a narrow alley and came to what looked like an abandoned airplane hangar. Wingate parked with an adolescent squeal of brakes.

  Jack stepped down and looked at the five men coming from the hangar. He felt a chill run down his left arm. The first was Tommy “Chuey” Escondero, a Colombian hit man who was known for his psychotic temper and unlimited sadism. Jack remembered the case of a confidential informant named Paco Lewis, whose cover had been blown in Bogota three years ago. Word came down from a peasant who claimed to have been there that Chuey had tied Lewis to a tree and sawed through his limbs, as slowly as possible, all the while mimicking and mocking the snitch’s death screams. The case had been thrown out, though, because the witness had disappeared from protective custody three days before the trial.

  Behind Escondero was another figure Jack recognized from DEA files. This was Loco Larry Altierez, a short, thick man with a long forlorn mustache. Loco Larry was often partnered with Escondero and was an excellent man with a knife. His speciality was slitting throats.

  The other three men were strangers to Jack.

  “Well, boys,” Wingate said, “as I promised you, we got a new leader. No reflection on any of you … it’s just that this job is what we call stress-intensive, and the way I see it … we need new blood at the top to keep everybody piss-ready. Jack McKenna is an old friend of mine from back East, and I know what he can do with a gun … so I want you all to listen up when he talks. Course, I don’t expect any real problems with this little op, but then again, in the wonderful world of addictive chemicals, a boy never can tell. Especially where our old friend Pedro Salazar is concerned.”

  The men said nothing but looked at Jack, as if they were waiting for him to address the troops. Instead, Jack remained silent, putting the ball back in Wingate’s court.

  “Well, let me introduce you to the boys. This here is Cutty Marbella, Cutty is an expert with the AK-47 assault rifle … done some very nice work in the Mideast.”

  Marbella, a thin, gaunt-faced man, with a scar two inches long above his right eye, looked at Jack and nodded slightly. There was something utterly silent and still about him. He looked like a hunter, the kind of man who could sit motionless for three hours in a duck blind or on a road, waiting for birds or politicians to fall into his sights.

  “And this kind gentleman is Joe Cerrado, a man of many and varied talents.”

  Jack started to give Cerrado the same silent treatment, but the big man stepped forward. He had an agitated look on his thick brown face.

  “Buddy,” he said, in a deceptively soft voice, “we have no need for a new … leader.”

  “Jose, ole buddy,” Buddy said, “I explained this to you on the telephone just this morning, and I thought we had it all straightened away, pard. This ain’t in any way a reflection on you, it’s just that I …”

  “Excuse me, Buddy,” Cerrado said. “It is a matter of pride, my friend. I have done everything you asked….”

  “Except provide me with the safety that I require to live my life, pal,” Wingate said. “Remember when I asked you about going away to Tahoe for the weekend. You told me I didn’t need no backup. Well, it’s a damned good thing I happened to invite Jack along, or my ass would be bear shit on the trail right now.”

  “I’m not accepting demotion, Buddy,” Cerrado said. “Besides, I don’t think this gringo is man enough to take my job.”

  He reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a pearl-handled knife. With one click of the button, a six-inch gleaming blade appeared.

  “Cool it,” Buddy said.

  “Hey, man, watch that thing,” Jack said, backing away.

  Wingate looked shocked as Jack backpedaled.

  “You see what I mean, Buddy,” Cerrado said, moving toward Jack. “He’s a fucking maricón. Come here, amigo … I got something for you.”

  Jack backed up another step, then turned his back to Cerrado.

  “Look at him,” Cerrado said, in disbelief. “A woman. Next he will be begging.” Staring at Jack, Wingate’s eyes were wide open in disbelief. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  The other four men began to laugh nervously, and Escondero said, “You might want to cut him, heh, Joe?”

  “I’m coming for you now, chickie,” Cerrado said. He moved forward, faster.

  But Jack now turned, suddenly, and threw something toward Cerrado. It happened so quickly that it was impossible for anyone to make out what the object was.

  “Catch,” Jack said.

  Cerrado reflexively reached out for the object, and when it hit his hand, he let out a yell and dropped it on the ground. He looked down to see what had burned him. In an instant, it was obvious he’d been tricked. The object was only a steel cigarette lighter, the flame still glowing.

  Now the cowardly gringo would pay.

  But these were the last thoughts Cerrado had. In one swift motion, Jack moved forward and kneed him hard in the groin. Cerrado groaned and dropped the knife. He fell forward, holding his gut as Jack’s knee came up again, into his face, splitting his nose.

  Cerrado fell heavily on the ground, and Jack coolly reached down and picked up both his lighter and the knife. He flicked the button, retracting the knife, and then snapped his lighter shut.

  “Nice knife,” he said. “I’ll add it to my collection.” He looked at the others.

  “Take our friend here outside and dump him somewhere. Tell him if I see him again, I’m going to cut his heart out with his own knife and feed it to my dog. Comprende?”

  Escondero and Altierez nodded silently and moved forward.

  “Jesus, son,” Wingate said. “You are just chock-full of surprises. But now I’ll have to hire me another man.”

  “Not necessary,” Jack said. “We’ll be fine with the happy little band you got here. Now, why don’t we finish the introductions and get down to work. I hate wasting a fine morning dealing with assholes.”

  Jack smiled as he drove around a hairpin curve in the Hollywood Hills. Dona Rosa, Dona Pegita … from t
he street names you would think that you were living in some kind of Spanish fantasyland, but in reality many of the million-plus houses looked like real estate offices or overly elaborate Wendy’s.

  But just as he was expecting Buddy Wingate to live in some tacky Valley box, Jack took a last turn up Rosa Flora Road and faced a setting and home that was as stunning as anything he’d ever seen in Los Angeles. There in front of him was a golden hillside covered with cacti. Jack felt his nerves twitch. Though he had grown up in California, he had never gotten over the alien quality of the land itself. Los Angeles was not really meant for human beings, he thought, as he pulled into Buddy Wingate’s circular driveway. It was a goddamned desert, and if Mulholland hadn’t stolen the water from the Sacramento Valley, the place would still belong to the coyotes.

  “Hey, partner. Glad you could make it for dinner.”

  Jack looked up, startled. Buddy Wingate walked from the giant wooden Spanish door, replete with massive dead bolt. He walked by a water fountain, a sculpture of a young boy whose lower body was a blue dolphin. Buddy wore a blue track suit, and on his feet were a pair of new three-hundred-dollar track shoes.

  “Like my hill? But that’s only the overture. I got me the complete symphony down in back of the house. You an admirer of cactus?”

  “It does cast a spell,” Jack said.

  They walked through the big Spanish door, and Jack saw oversized Mexican couches, all leather and dark wood, and a leather-topped coffee table. But the pièce de résistance was a huge eucalyptus tree growing in the middle of the living room. It soared through the roof, which was clear glass and through which Jack could see the newly risen moon.

  “You like my friend there?” Wingate said, sniffing the air. “I call him Freddie. He keeps the air smelling California-sweet night and day.”

  “Remarkable,” Jack said.