After a moment, Bozo nodded. I, too, lowered my weapon, but kept it close. I halted with Ponytail about ten yards from the hostages and their captor. They looked anxious, but not overly so, considering the artillery involved.
“Where are you taking these people?”
“We stop in this place. A larger vehicle come to pick them up. Here soon.”
Was he telling the truth, or employing the timeworn “backup’s on its way” tactic?
I addressed my next question to the group of silent men.
“I’m not here to hurt you. Do any of you speak English?”
An elderly man, thin to the point of emaciation, raised his hand like a schoolchild.
“I’m taking these two men into custody.” At this, Ponytail let out a sharp comment, probably a Bosnian curse, which I ignored. “Tell everyone you’re safe now. Help is coming.” My plan was to call 911, plus the local cops, and wait for more good guys to arrive.
But apparently, I had it backwards.
The elderly man spat a rapid stream of invective at me. At his words, the other men’s voices merged into a swelling growl of complaint. A couple of them took a few steps forward, their expressions threatening.
“Go away,” the old man said. “Leave us alone.”
“Uh.”
He motioned to the vans and their two captors.
“This job our only hope.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We pay good money. Our families, they sell everything to send us here. Do not send back to Kosovo. We die there.”
“Shut up,” Ponytail snarled. I nudged him with the rifle butt, and he went quiet.
The old man’s laugh was bitter. “You cannot frighten us, even with death. We have nothing—we count for nothing. We are dirt.” Despair coated his every word, and centuries of poverty, of bitterness, informed his grim features.
“Maybe we die,” he said, “but here, at least, first we can work.”
“Where are they taking you?”
He drew himself up. “We work in restaurant. Pay good money.”
I looked at Ponytail. He shrugged. Not his business.
“What kind of restaurants? Where?”
“All over,” the old man said.
A thousand questions hammered at my brain, but the biggest one was whether or not to take the action that would insert them into an impersonal system, conspicuous for its cruel disregard of individual circumstances. These were not child victims, but grown men who had paid dearly to come. Once I brought in the cops, Immigration would be close on their heels. The do-gooder in me pulled hard in that direction. But was that really a choice for good? Maybe the compassionate act was to leave these men alone. Maybe I needed to respect their wishes, however misguided.
We are dirt.
I didn’t know what to do.
An engine rumbled behind me. A large yellow school bus lumbered along the gravel road, the most innocuous backup imaginable, but backup, nonetheless.
What was I doing here, beyond trying to be a hero to a group of grown men with no interest in being saved? But leaving felt just as wrong.
I was about to do something very ill advised, and not for the first time.
I motioned the old man close. Still keeping the rifle trained on Ponytail with my left hand, I used my right to reach into my jeans, praying I still had a few spares. Yes. I shook the old man’s hand, transferring the business card from my palm to his.
“I can help. Call if you change your mind,” I said.
I aimed my next words at Ponytail’s partner, Bozo. “I’m leaving now. Don’t do anything stupid.”
I herded Ponytail into the driver’s side of his van and jumped into the passenger seat.
“Back to my car. Quick!”
He slammed the van into gear and made a slithering U-turn, then gunned us toward the trees. We flew past the school bus, and I glimpsed a handful of startled faces peering out the side windows. We reached the trees in minutes.
“Stop,” I said.
I shoved the barrel of the Heckler under his nose. “Tell your boss he only gets one free pass. And this was it.”
I climbed out. He wrenched the van around and sped away. I kept the Heckler steady and trained until long after he was out of range.
CHAPTER 23
Dawn had come and gone as I entered Los Angeles via Hollywood, on the 101 South. I decided not to exit at Topanga, but continue toward downtown. I pressed voice control on my cell and heard the double tone that signified my phone was poised to act: “Call Mike K., mobile.” “Calling Mike K.,” a mechanical female voice replied. I mentally crossed my fingers. Mike, a cyber-jockey and amateur techno DJ, lived a night-shift life, and 7 A.M. was right around bedtime.
“Yo.”
“Oh, good. You’re still awake.”
“Barely.”
“I need to see you. I have a few questions. Mind if I pay you a visit?”
“Long as you’re not driving from Bosnia.”
That reminded me. Things had gotten so crazy over the final 24 hours over there, I’d never found the right moment to tell Bill about the Stasic connection. I calculated the time, adding nine hours. Four P.M., worth a shot.
“Call Bill Bohannon, mobile.”
Bill sounded harried.
“Hey, Ten. You home?”
“Yes.”
“Heard from Martha?”
“Not yet. Bill, I forgot to tell you something. Something strange I found out from Mila. You remember that address you had me follow up on in Van Nuys? Agvan Supply? It turns out the owner may be one of Mila’s half-brothers. Bill, I need to know how you got that address.”
Silence.
“Bill?”
“The fever’s broken, Ten.”
“Sorry?”
“The fever’s broken. Listen. Hear that?” He must have held up his phone. I heard ambient noise, the low hum of people talking, a female voice making some kind of announcement over a loudspeaker. “That’s the sound of my flight about to board. The sound of my sanity returning. It’s over. I’m heading home. Well, technically I’m headed home via Zurich via Belgrade, God help me, on some Serbian flying tank.”
“Bill …”
“They want me out of their lives, Ten.” Another announcement. “Okay, gotta go … I’ll see you on the other side. Don’t tell Martha, I want to surprise her. I just pray she’ll unlock the front door.”
Well, okay. I tested this new knowledge. One less thing to worry about. Which begged the question—why was I worrying about any of this anymore?
Because it wasn’t over for me.
Mike’s building was a modernistic stack of granite and glass, as elegant as it was practical. Mike called it a meta-living space. Before I punched in his code and pulled underground to park in a visiting guest slot, I had one more call to make. I leafed back through my notebook, praying I’d tucked it in here somewhere, and found the information on a rain-wrinkled business card.
After a few false tries, I managed to maneuver through the overseas codes.
“Da!”
“Petar? It’s Ten.”
“Who?”
“Monkevic.”
“Monkevic! You find me job in movies already?”
“Sorry, I’m not that connected. But I’m hoping you are … Listen, back when you were a cop, did you spend any time at the Sarajevo Centar station? The one next to St. Joseph’s church?”
“Of course. I work there for years.”
I double-checked the name of the detective who had worked with Bill when Sasha went missing in my notes. “Did you happen to know a policeman called Tomic? Josip Tomic?”
“Yes. Many times. Josip is good man.”
I felt a stab of hope. I explained what I needed. “The information may be in a file, or on a computer, under the name of Sasha Radovic, or maybe Milo or Jovan Stasic. Or even Agvan Supply. I don’t know. What I do know is, that file may hold the key to this operation, and where they’re keeping their
victims over here.”
“I will look,” Petar said. “Not many policija safe to ask, but Tomic is good man.”
I took the parking lot elevator to Mike’s penthouse loft. Inside was as practical yet hip as out, with a gourmet marble cooking island and a gleaming bamboo floor. A picture window of glass offered a panoramic view of downtown, dominated by the glowing, platinum-winged structure known as the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both Mike and his girlfriend, Tricia, were in plaid boxer shorts, Tricia’s topped by a skinny tank top, and Mike’s by a black T-shirt with a yellow peace sign silk-screened across the front. I tried not to react to Mike’s pasty, stork-like legs.
The loft smelled faintly of marijuana, and was a futuristic mix of modern art, postmodern furniture, and post-postmodern computer and music equipment. Tricia gave me a vague smile, and wandered about for a minute or two before climbing into their platform bed in the corner and falling asleep.
“Glad you made it back in one piece, boss,” Mike said. “I hear Bosnia’s gnarly, man.”
“Actually, it’s beautiful,” I said.
“Whatever. I’m glad you’re here. I dug up some shit on your mango smugglers. Let’s do some show-and-tell.”
For the next hour, Mike rattled off information while pulling up various sites on his various computer screens, and I tried to keep up, using my notebook and pen.
“So yeah, after I eliminated Silk Road as Agvan’s marketplace, I drilled down a little deeper.”
“Silk Road?”
“The drug marketplace I told you about.”
“Right. With the pirate.”
“A-plus for remembering that. Anyway, Agvan uses another one. Also underground, also untraceable. This one came on the scene pretty recently. Name’s an acronym: N-D-R-S-N-T.”
He showed me on the computer, and I wrote the letters down. NDRSNT.
“What’s it stand for?”
“No idea. But it’s got a mishmash of users and suppliers, as far as I can tell. So-called foodie sites like Agvan, fantasy gaming sites. A few I didn’t want to touch, going by the pictures. But also, a few NGOs, you know, nonprofits. Schools for Tunisian children. Libraries for Tibetan refugees. Like that.”
“Weird.”
“Indeed. Even weirder is the fact that they all seem to be shifting from bitcoins to a different cyber currency.”
“There are more than one?”
“Sure. Litecoin. Peercoin. All it takes is code, and people willing to give the currency value. These’re called DNA-coins.”
“As in human DNA?”
“You tell me. Anyway, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.” He shut down his computers. “So. What did you want to ask me?”
What had I wanted to ask Mike? I was so overwhelmed with his presentation I had to think a minute. “Oh. Right. Can you check up on a Serbian industrialist, Jovan Stasic, for me? See what he might have been up to in the 1960s?”
“Jovan Stasic. You got it. Once I’ve caught a few z’s with my lady. Nighty-night, boss.”
I was home by noon, my head a whirl of cyber-thoughts, but I still made sure to disarm and lock up the artillery, legally licensed and not. I fell asleep instantly, and woke up three hours later with a pair of green eyes staring at me fixedly. Tank had situated himself on the pillow next to my head, purring. He licked his cat lips, as if he’d just finished a snack.
“I don’t want to know,” I said.
Tank arched his back into a perfect, upside-down U and hopped off the bed.
My sleep cycles were all messed up. Without moving, I tested my own body with a head-to-toe stretch. I was the opposite of limber. Every nook and cranny was stiff and sore from too many hours buckled into an airplane seat. My wild dawn escapade came back to me in a rush. I must have left my good sense, along with my flexibility, somewhere over the Atlantic.
“I got lucky, Tank. Got away with something, for sure.”
As if the very thought caused the universe to reprimand me, my doorbell buzzed—an insistent, irritating sound.
“Crap.” When the front doorbell rings, it’s never anyone I want to see—people I know well come in through the kitchen.
A second series of short buzzes, followed by brisk knocking. Someone was losing patience.
“All right!” I pulled on sweats, crossed the living room, and pressed my eye to the one-way DoorScope I’d installed last year, replacing a far more complex and paranoid security system.
Two officers. Not LAPD. Not L.A. Sheriff’s Department. I ran to the kitchen and checked their patrol car. Ventura County.
Moorpark is in Ventura County.
Double-crap.
I inhaled and exhaled twice. Made my mouth smile. Opened the door. “Come in.”
The older officer—black, midforties, and whip-thin—pointed to his younger, beefier partner with a buzz cut and the ruddy complexion and eyebrows of a redhead. “Deputy Johnson. I’m Deputy Sergeant Thomas Gaines.”
“Tenzing Norbu,” I said. “To what do I owe the honor?”
Johnson frowned. “’Scuse me?”
“He means why are we here,” Gaines translated.
“Oh,” Johnson said. My prejudices kicked in: clearly Deputy Johnson had a long and secure future with the Ventura Police Department.
“Coffee?”
Both men brightened.
I made a big pot of Sumatra, extra strong. Tank wandered in to check his food bowl. Empty. He gave me a long soulful look, stuck his tail in the air, and stalked out again.
I set down three steaming mugs, and pulled up a stool. The officers had already claimed the two chairs.
I decided not to talk. Some information arrived faster in a vacuum.
Gaines looked around.
“Nice place.”
“Thanks.”
“Been here long?”
“About seven years.”
I sipped and waited.
Gaines broke first. He pulled out a plastic evidence bag holding a small white card. “You want to explain what your business card was doing in the pocket of a homicide victim in Moorpark?”
Everything went very still, the way I imagine it feels right before a nuclear bomb detonates.
I swallowed. “Who was the victim?”
Johnson bristled. “We’re asking the question—”
“Who was the victim?”
Gaines again. “Don’t know his name yet. Old. Maybe early seventies.”
I set my mug down carefully. “When?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Johnson growled.
“Johnson,” Gaines warned. He checked his notes. “Mr. Norbu, where were you between the hours of eight and ten this morning?”
They must have killed the old man just a few hours after I’d left.
My fault. All my fault.
“Mr. Norbu?”
“I was with friends, at a loft in downtown Los Angeles. From six o’clock on. They’ll verify.”
I pulled Gaines’s notebook over and jotted down Mike’s number and address. He relaxed visibly.
“You’re the guy that was on television last year. That private detective.”
“Yes.”
“Bet you see a lot of good shit. You know, husbands fucking their secretaries.” This, from Johnson, naturally.
I was gripping my mug so hard my knuckles were white. I relaxed my fingers, one by one. “I do missing persons, mostly.”
“But you used to be LAPD, right?” Gaines said.
“Right.”
“Ever work any Mexican cartel cases?”
I held onto my poker face, but barely. Where was Gaines going with this? My connection to Mexican drug lord Chaco Morales and my part in his untimely death were supposed to be completely off the public’s radar. Had somebody talked?
I played dumb. “Not really. Why?”
“Because this homicide? We think Sinaloa may be involved.”
Now I was completely lost.
“Why?”
Gaines ticked off the reasons. “Exe
cution-style slug to the back of the head. Body found facedown in a field. Simi Valley’s right next door? Crawling with runners connected to Sinaloa. And the bullet came from an assault weapon, ten grand if it cost a penny. Who else uses an HK416 to pop a guy?”
“Excuse me,” I said. I walked into my bedroom and unlocked my gun safe. Walked back out to the kitchen.
“You mean like this one?” I laid the Heckler on the kitchen table.
“Holy fuck,” Gaines said. “You got some serious explaining to do.”
I gave them an edited version of the truth, the “looking for Sasha” version. I mentioned the vans and the school bus. I even gave them a vague description of the warehouse near Van Nuys Airport, but that was all they’d get for now. Gaines seemed smart enough, but I didn’t want Johnson anywhere near Agvan Supply. Not yet. Not when I was getting close to some answers. If Zarko Stasic took off, I would never find him again.
Or learn if he had the two little boys who led Sasha to Los Angeles and instigated everything else.
I wrapped up. “So once I’d disarmed the first driver, the one who threatened me with this Heckler, I determined my missing person wasn’t on either van.”
“And then you just let these guys go?” Gaines frowned. “Didn’t cross your mind to call the authorities?”
“Of course it crossed my mind. But the old man begged me not to. And nobody was paying me to do anything but find a kid. I made a judgment call.”
Nobody said a word. The result of that call spoke for itself.
Remorse choked my solar plexus. Even the partial truth was hard to swallow.
“Anyway. I’m pretty sure this isn’t Sinaloa. More likely traffickers from Serbia or Croatia.” I pushed the rifle toward Gaines. “Take it. Maybe it will help with your investigation. And call if you need anything else.”
They both stood.
“Don’t leave town,” Gaines said.
Johnson had to add his own two bits. “Yeah. Got that, asshole?”
Gaines gave Johnson a look that would stop a charging elephant in its tracks. I didn’t envy the man. Partner like that, you had to work twice as hard.
As soon as they were gone, I got straight to work.
Correction: as soon as they were gone and I’d fed my cat, I got straight to work.
The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) Page 20
