by Ward, Robert
Jack stepped down to the last floor, opened the door to the lobby. There, directly across the room, was the nurse he’d spoken to and a doctor.
Jack saw them looking around and waited tensely. If they came over, if they grabbed him, he wouldn’t have enough strength to stop them from taking him back, shooting him up again.
He waited, saw them go outside, look around, then come back in, shake their heads, and go toward the elevators. Now was his chance.
He pushed open the door and walked through the lobby, past anxious patients waiting their rides home, past a uniformed security guard who seemed to do a double take as he walked by, and past a small barrel cactus sitting at the door. He looked down at it, thought of the cactus garden in Mexico, and shuddered with revulsion, then pushed himself through the revolving doors and headed outside to the muggy heat of El Paso.
Chapter 26
Jack caught the Delta Airlines midnight flight to LAX. He slept fitfully until fifteen minutes before landing, then quickly drank three cups of coffee, which wired his swollen eyes open. He walked like a zombie through the ugly expanse of the terminal, staggered out into the soft moonlight of Los Angeles, and grabbed a cab to his office. On the way in, he stared at the oil wells on La Cienega, and that barren, strange landscape reminded him of the hellhole in Juarez.
The cab dropped him off at Hill Street. As the Russian driver pulled away, Jack stood shakily on the pavement, staring up at the blank windows of DEA headquarters, as a bank of huge clouds passed theatrically by overhead.
It was a beautiful night, and the silence of downtown Los Angeles was a blessing. He sucked in his breath, cleared his mind. There was something he hadn’t seen, something crucial that Michaels knew. He hadn’t listened to Michaels, because he didn’t want to lose his advantage.
It occurred to him now that he had been terminally stupid with the girl and too smart by half with Michaels. Instead of assuming that Michaels was trying to screw him, maybe he should have made some excuse to Wingate why he couldn’t meet with him in the morning and checked out what Michaels had told him.
But that wasn’t his way. He had gone to Mexico with them, partially because he was afraid that if he didn’t go when they asked, he would draw suspicion to himself. That was a good motive, surely.
But he had also gone, he knew, because he loved the action. He wanted to go where the risk was, get to that spot inside himself where the adrenaline was flowing, where things were cooking. He believed that he could control events best, will them to be what he wanted, when he was in the “zone,” that place where he was no longer acting but had become one with the role. Once he was truly there, he radiated a kind of confidence and charisma that criminals, hustlers, and all the bad-acting players in town couldn’t resist.
He laughed a little at this.
It was true, he thought. When he was at his best, everything seemed to flow from him. He knew what people were going to say, what they were going to do, before they did.
But Wingate and Morales had turned it around on him. They had used all his cockiness, all his charm, against him. They’d played him, used him, then thrown him away like garbage—but not before letting him know how fucking lame he’d been. That was the part that hurt most of all … worse than even the broken ribs, his battered face.
As he let himself into the DEA offices and walked to the elevators, the enormity of their deception hit him full force.
Every single time he had said something hip or clever, or done something designed to win them over, they had known he was acting and used his act against him.
From day one.
Jack walked across the fourth floor and sagged against Michaels’s doorway.
Yet something had gotten him out of that hellhole in Juarez, something inside himself. He knew that too. And what it was, he thought now, was the thing he had always resisted in himself.
That was his softness, his kindness, the thing his father had told him he had to burn out of his soul if he wanted to be a good cop.
Because it was the real person inside him who really did care about Charlotte Rae, who really did want to help her. It was that essential decency that she had responded to; that and only that had gotten him out.
She had saved him, he knew now, because she saw through him, beyond all his games, to a place he barely knew existed within himself and had never trusted. She had seen and touched his heart.
And now she had disappeared, might be injured somewhere or not even alive. And there was even a possibility worse than death. Wingate’s men might have grabbed her. Jack shuddered to think what Buddy and Morales might do to her for helping Jack escape.
The thought that she might still be alive, that she was at this very moment being tortured preyed on his mind like an electric needle.
It made it all the more urgent that he figure out what was going on.
Jack stood in front of Michaels’s door. It opened via a set of numbers and letters, which you had to punch in on a small computer screen by the doorknob. Each man’s was supposed to be a secret, but Jack had long ago found out what Michaels’s code was. One drunken night he and C.J. had gotten into the mainframe of the DEA’s computer and gotten access to Michaels’s code. They had fantasized about using it to find out what skeletons Michaels had in his closet, just in case he tried to set either of them up.
Up until now they had never done it.
He hit the number-letter code and watched the small grid light up, and then heard the click on Michaels’s door. Quickly, he let himself inside.
Jack booted up Michaels’s computer. The Halloween orange print came on in the dark, a series of random numbers, letters. He felt the tension leaking out of his system.
“Come on,” he said. “Tell me something….”
Then the words came on the screen:
Files Erased 11-9. Files in Custody. Impound.
That was what he had feared. When a man died, someone, usually the agent’s secretary, wiped his computer clean and took all his floppy discs to Custody.
The problem was there were two places where files were kept—one in the basement of the building, the other in a warehouse on Temple Street. He had an idea and hit the computer again, asking which place he should check. But answer came up UNKNOWN.
He was screwed. He didn’t have the access to Custody, and James Bond couldn’t break into the basement or the warehouse without setting off alarms all the way to Pasadena.
He would have to get hold of Diane, Michaels’s secretary, and ask her where the files were stored. Then he would have to call Security, but that was risky, because Security would have to contact Zampas or Brandau to get him clearance. Once either of them got into the act, he would never get the clearance. After all, everyone was already pissed at him for disobeying orders and flying to Mexico. Now if he came back with some wild hunch that one of the assistant directors of the DEA was dirty, they might have him locked up in the paranoid wing at Cedars.
Still, he would have to risk it. Diane must know where they were. Maybe he’d get lucky and find she hadn’t stored them yet.
Jack looked at Diane’s neatly organized desk just outside of Michaels’s office. There was her Rolodex. He walked over, sat in her swivel chair, and turned on the desk lamp. A cone of light shone down on the address file, and he found her last name, Gibson—12855 Moorpark, Studio City—and the number, neatly printed out in block letters with Magic Marker. Her own little address and number in her own little Rolodex. Thank God for anal retentives.
He dialed the number, drumming his fingers on the desk. Christ, she had a musical message on her machine, a snatch of a Barry Manilow tune, “Copacabana,” a song that always sent shivers of creepiness up Jack’s spine. After the first two insipid bars, Diane’s pert, eager voice chippered its way onto the line.
“Hiii, this is Diane.”
For a second Jack was certain he was talking to an answering machine.
“Diane, this is Jack Walker. Great song on the machine.”
“It’s a theme thing, Jack. Pat and I are having a seventies party at our house this weekend. We’re going to watch Saturday Night Fever and dance to ‘Stayin’ Alive!’ But what am I talking about. Here you are in a hospital in, where is it … Texas, and I’m rattling on.”
“Texas is history, Diane,” Jack said. “I’m in Los Angeles, and I have to see Ted’s files. It’s extremely urgent.”
“Gee, his files. I don’t know, Jack. I’m supposed to take them to Custody.”
“Supposed to? You mean you haven’t yet?”
“Well, no … I was going to Friday, but we were trying to get ready for the party, and, well, the leisure suits we ordered came with narrow lapels, can you believe that? And the platform heels weren’t right either, so I ended up having to go over to the costume store and personally supervise the whole …”
“Listen, Diane, I’d love to reminisce about Barry White with you, but this is urgent. Where are the files?”
“Right where they always were,” she said, a little sheepishly. “In his computer.”
“I get it,” Jack said. “Under a code. What is it?”
“Jack, honey, I am not sure I have the authorization to …”
“Give it to me, Diane, and go disco out to Donna Summer.”
“All right. I suppose I can trust you. You know, Ted did.”
“Right,” Jack said. “The code.”
“The code is ‘Feelings.’ “
“ ‘Feelings’?”
“Well, Ted was dead, rest his soul, and it’s my favorite song. I mean it was only temporary. God, don’t tell anybody, will you? They’ll think I’m unprofessional.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “Your secret’s safe with me. Thanks.”
Jack hung up and limped back into Michaels’s office. He punched up the computer, typed in the code and instantly the files came up.
He looked through the whole list in shocked disbelief—not one mention of Wingate, Morales, Mexico, Colombia. He thought about the informal name he’d given the operation, CACTUS, punched in the letters—nothing.
He then tried ZAPATA, remembering Michaels’s strange raving the night before he had gone to Mexico. But that came up empty as well.
For an hour Jack went painstakingly through other cases, thinking that Michaels might have entered his case with some adjoining one. But there was nothing there either.
Jack slammed his hand against the computer, cursed silently.
Then it occurred to him. If Michaels had been bought by the Colombians, he couldn’t afford to mention the case in his office computer, because there was too much incriminating evidence.
If he had had information, it would be somewhere else.
In his computer at home in Encino? Not likely. Whoever killed him would probably rob his home computer as well.
Jack sat back in Michaels’s chair, stretched his right leg, and felt the pain coil up his spine. His temples and shoulder burned.
Where would it be?
Then he remembered. Michaels’s hideaway at Big Bear. What was the address? China Island, Boulder Bay at Big Bear…. Yes, if the information existed at all, that would be the place.
He got up and switched off the computer.
Standing there in the darkness, a new question haunted him.
Who knew what Michaels knew?… Who could? And then it came to him. The answer was suddenly and stunningly clear: only someone else in the Agency. Jesus, it was possible that Michaels wasn’t the mole at all. One of the others was. Either Brandau, Valle, or, God help them, Zampas himself.
Something was going to happen, something bad. And if he couldn’t come up with the answers now, he wasn’t going to be able to stop it.
Jack turned, took a deep breath, and went to his own office. He punched in the code, heard the door click open. He went inside, turned on the desk lamp, and walked to the mahogany cabinet that sat in the corner. He turned the combination lock to the cabinet, heard the cylinders click, and opened it.
Inside the cabinet was backup pistol, a .38 police revolver sitting in a shoulder holster. He took out the gun, thought of the day his father had given it to him, when he was twenty-one years old. He’d used it only twice before at the firing range. It was a good gun, and now it felt right in his hand.
He put the gun and holster on, tightening the buckles so it fit snugly on his shoulder. Then he grabbed his leather jacket from the hanger on the back of his office door and put it on. He felt the pain in his right arm again, and sagged momentarily by his desk. God, he wanted to sleep. But there was no time. He shut the cabinet, switched off the light, turned, and walked as quickly as he could for the door.
Chapter 27
Jack called a cab from the DEA office, and miraculously the driver showed up within fifteen minutes. Now they headed out on the empty Hollywood Freeway. In the early morning darkness the freeway had a ghostly look, as though someone had dropped a clean bomb on Los Angeles, leaving the strange signs that hovered over the road and vaporizing all the people.
Jack took a deep breath and told himself to keep his mind on the task at hand. Having gone through hell, it was too easy to fall into a kind of psychic creep show. What he had to do was go back to the Chateau, grab a sandwich, ammo, and his car, then head out to Big Bear. The drive took about three hours, so he could be there by five in the morning. That was if he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel and end up careening off one of the twisting mountain roads. Maybe he’d have to make one more stop too, at Dupar’s coffee shop, where he could buy a thermos full.
The driver, a silent Iranian, pulled up and pointed to the meter. Thirteen dollars and fifty-eight cents. Jack handed him a twenty and gave him a three-dollar tip. He thought it might make the guy cheer up a little, but he only grunted and turned away. Jack got out and felt a morning chill in the air. Then, as the cab driver pulled away, Jack headed up the steps to the Chateau des Roses.
Jack got off the ancient slow-motion elevator and walked toward his apartment. As he did, he heard the sound of footsteps moving inside.
He reached into his holster, pulled out the pistol. Then, slowly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. As quietly as possible, he turned the lock, kicked the door open, and entered the room, his gun in the two-handed shooter’s position.
“Whoever’s in there ought to come out now,” he said. “ ‘Cause I’m not in the mood for receiving visitors.”
He waited, there was nothing.
“I said, come out, asshole.”
“Oooh, you sound so tough,” a voice said. “But I’m still not convinced. Hey, I got an idea though. Why don’t you and I fly down to Mexico for a romantic weekend.”
Jack’s hands dropped to his side. He shut the door behind him.
“Mexico? Nah, I’ll pass,” he said, smiling.
Charlotte Rae sat on the old maroon couch, which was Jack’s only decent piece of furniture. Her right arm was in a sling, and her right cheek was bruised, but other than that, she looked remarkably well.
“How the hell did you get here?”
“Well, it wasn’t easy, I can tell you that. But I remembered you told me this address once a million years ago, and I thought, hey, he’s got to show up here sooner or later. I’d get up and kiss you, but then I might bust all my stitches and bleed to death.”
“But I thought you …”
“Come on,” she said. “You think I’m going to let a little bullet wound and truck crash kill me. Remember, I’ve survived a lot worse than that. I was almost married to Buddy Wingate.”
Jack walked over, sat on the couch next to her, and put his arm around her shoulders.
“Goddamn, I’m so glad to see you.”
Being careful not to press her back or arm, Jack gently squeezed her and kissed her on the lips.
“Jack,” she said. “That was the nicest kiss you ever gave me.”
“Think so?”
“Yeah, ‘cause it was the first one that came a hundred per cent
from you.”
He smiled and mussed her hair. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“The Jamaican, Toots Riley. Oh, mon, he so happy to see Jackie’s sister come to stay with him. He worries about you, mon, and he wants you to know that when the emperor comes, he is gonna put in a special word for you, even if you are a white devil.”
Jack shook his head and felt his heart fill with happiness.
“You’re alive,” he said. “Goddamn. I love your ass. And you’re alive.”
He kissed her again, and a tear came down her face.
“I love you too, you maniac,” she said, touching his cheek tenderly. “And I thought you were finished. I came to right after the truck crashed. Well, the crash was probably what woke me. You were out cold, there was a fire somewhere. I pulled you out and ran to get help. I guess I was bleeding and delirious. I found a Mexican family, two teenage brothers, they came and got you. They took you to the hospital. And they wanted to take me there too, but I wouldn’t let them. See, Jack, I’m not all that interested in doing jail time. This is something illegal immigrants understand very well. Jesus, those beautiful people. They took me to their own doctor in Juarez. I was scared to death he’d be some butcher, but he was okay. He took out the bullet, stitched me up, and let me lay around a little, until my girlfriend came for me.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“Delores Delgado. She was a dancer at Finochio’s, one of the few that got what she hoped for out of the life. She married a rich rancher named Clyde Randall and has three kids and a private jet. She owed me from the old days. I called her and she came through. A day later I was in their ranch outside Dallas, staring at a place that looked like the Ponderosa. I kept expecting Hoss Cartwright to show up.”
Jack laughed and stroked her hair.
“So why are you here? You could have left the country.” She turned to him and smiled.
“I bet even a dummy like you can figure out that one out.”
Jack felt a red flush come over his face.
