“What are you talking about?”
“How old are you?” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He dropped his PDA on the table and glowered at me.
“Easy, Lenny.” Special Agent Hitchcock placed a hand on his partner’s arm. “Oswald is obviously used to getting jokes about his name.”
“I don’t get it.” Lenny turned to his coworker. “What do you mean?”
Hitchcock looked like he was going to say something but shut his mouth instead.
“Guess they’re not teaching much history at Quantico these days.” I stirred my coffee. “Pretty cool how you came up with my name so fast. Does that thing have a camera in it?”
“The homeland security boys aren’t the only ones that get the cool toys.” Hitchcock waved his PDA at me, his voice displaying just the faintest trace of jealousy at the mention of the antiterrorist group. “Facial recognition software. Directly linked to a half dozen databases.”
“It’s good to see my tax money at work,” I said.
“Let’s talk about why you were visiting a known mobster.” Hitchcock took a sip of coffee. “That guy’s suspected of ordering the deaths of at least twenty people.”
“Victor’s in his seventies with one foot in the grave and the other standing in a puddle of grease at the front door to hell.” I took a drink. “What do you guys care?”
“Something’s up here in Dallas,” he said. “And we think Mr. Lemieux might know what.”
I didn’t reply. Tess asked the passing waitress for a bottle of mineral water. Mohawk laughed and told her she’d bring a pitcher of tap.
Hitchcock took a long drink and put his mug down. “You’re not a wise guy but you’re not a CPA either. You know something’s going on, too.”
I remembered the name of the Vietnamese hood from the restaurant the other day, the one who ran the Asian modeling studios on the west side of town and was sporting a fresh bruise on his cheek. “You know a guy named Tran Huang, runs Oriental girls out of some cribs over by Denton Drive?”
Hitchcock nodded. “He got whacked last night. Somebody put a twenty-two in his belly button.”
Tess gasped. I felt cold inside.
“Took him an hour and a half to bleed out, they figured.” Hitchcock spoke while tapping on his PDA device. “Says here you served in Kuwait.”
“Yeah.” I took a sip of coffee and tried to control my breathing.
“Remember that old Schwarzenegger movie, with the invisible monster from outer space?” The older agent sat back in his booth and placed his hands behind his head.
I nodded. “Predator, right?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” He leaned forward. “Remember how you couldn’t actually see the alien, but you could see the space where it was, the air kinda moved?”
I nodded again.
“It was invisible but you could sense its presence.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The same thing’s going on here.” Hitchcock lowered his voice, cupped his hands around the mug of coffee. “We can’t see anything, but we know it’s there.”
I thought about Jesus Rundell, debating whether to relay that information to the sandy-haired federal agent.
Hitchcock looked around the diner before continuing. “Every few years some of the higher-ups in organized crime get together. Like a summit meeting or something.”
“A retreat?” I said. “Goal setting for the coming year?”
“Right.” He leaned forward. “And this time around, they’re coming to Dallas.”
“Because this is neutral territory.”
“Bingo.” Hitchcock smiled.
“But this invisible player is a new wrinkle?” Tess asked.
“Yeah,” the FBI agent said. “And what if this new guy tries something way out there, like taking out everybody at the meet?”
“So much for neutrality,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Which means Dallas is a plum that gets picked. By somebody.”
The waitress came back with the coffeepot. We all declined refills and pitched some money on the table. I asked Hitchcock where the meeting was supposed to take place, and when.
“We don’t know. In the next two or three days. The get-together is usually at a strip club. Most of them are owned by some connected entity.”
I slid out of the booth and got up. Everybody else did, too. We left the café without talking. Lenny walked away and pulled out his handheld device. Probably downloading porn off the Internet. Tess went in the other direction, toward a convenience store next door.
I turned to Hitchcock. “Why did you tell us all that?”
“I recognized your name,” he said. “You’re the guy that busted Billy Barringer.”
I sighed. Sometimes it’s better to be associated with a presidential assassin. “You think his family could be involved?”
“Maybe. There’s a new generation coming online.” His expression was quizzical, bordering faintly on incredulous.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why are you staring at me?” I grabbed my fly, made sure it was zipped.
“That was pretty amazing what you did, turning him in like that.” He nodded slowly, almost reverently. “I mean, the guy had just saved your life.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A city bus drove by, diesel smoke streaming into the hot and muggy air along Harry Hines Boulevard.
“This is a shot in the dark,” I said.
“What?” Hitchcock arched one eyebrow.
“The twenty-two in the gut was a Billy Barringer trademark.”
“I know what you’re thinking.” The FBI agent shook his head. “Not a chance. Billy Barringer is dead.”
“You sure?”
“Without a doubt,” he said. “We even had them send the coroner’s file to Quantico to verify the ID process.”
“You do that often?”
“When it’s a world-class piece of slime like Billy Barringer, we do. The dental match was one hundred percent.”
“Then somebody is trying to make it seem like he’s still around.”
“Wise guys are not known for their originality.” He shrugged.
A private jet screamed overhead, headed for Love Field or maybe Addison Airport, farther north.
“You want to try a name on that fancy little doodad of yours?” I said.
“Go.” Hitchcock pulled out his handheld computer.
“Jesus Rundell.”
He tapped for a few moments, then looked up. “Guy’s an enforcer for a family in Houston, the Frantinis. Pretty clean as lowlifes go. About a thousand arrests but only two convictions, assault and man one. Did eighteen months in Florida twenty years ago.”
“He’s in town, making waves.”
Hitchcock shook his head. “He’s a nobody.”
“What if he wants to be a somebody?”
“Guy’s pushing fifty, too late to be a player. Besides, he’s got no family juice; the Frantinis were never exactly major players. And their kind is a dying breed in organized crime.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Italian Americans don’t count anymore. The new OC is Russian, Asian, Mexican, especially in this part of the world.” He punched some more buttons on the handheld computer, squinted at the screen. “Besides, the profile on this guy is all wrong. He doesn’t have the cojones to make a move to management.”
“You might still keep an eye out for him.”
“Profiles are usually right.” Hitchcock placed his PDA in the breast pocket of his suit coat.
“Like the D.C. sniper?” I walked away.
Tess was sitting on the curb in front of the 7-Eleven. She held her cell phone in both hands, seemingly oblivious to the homeless guy leaning against the corner of the building, jabbering to himself, and the crew of landscapers guzzling soft drinks and eating hotdogs by the front door.
I sat down beside her. Together we watched the two FBI men cross the street and dis
appear into the throngs of people in front of the hospital.
Tess said, “We’re not really closer to knowing what’s going on, are we?”
I shook my head.
“We need to go to East Texas.” She stood and faced me.
I nodded and pulled myself up off the curb.
“I thought I’d left all that behind,” she said.
“Me, too.” I didn’t understand what she meant but didn’t particularly feel like asking.
“Shit.” She headed toward the street and the parking lot where we’d left the car. I followed her, and in a few minutes we were in the Bentley, headed toward the center of town. I called Nolan, looking for my truck. No response.
I tried Delmar next, and this time he answered. He was in Olson’s room, at the hospital. My friend had suffered a concussion. They were evaluating a very small hematoma underneath the back right quadrant of his skull. Delmar said I could keep the Bentley, as far as he was concerned. And to quit coming around and getting Olson in trouble.
I hung up and headed to my house. Once there, I packed a couple of things in a duffel bag and arranged for my neighbor to look after the dog. We got back in the car.
Tess said, “I need some clothes, too.”
“The Galleria’s not too far away.” I headed toward Central Expressway, which would take us north to stores or south to our destination. The Galleria was an upscale, multilevel mall on LBJ Freeway. It had a lot of options, Gap, Nordstroms, Saks Fifth Avenue.
She pointed to the Target coming up on our left. “That will do.”
“The Galleria has a Victoria’s Secret.” I pulled into the lot and parked.
“I’ve decided not to wear underwear for a while.” She grinned and kissed me on the lips once before bounding out of the car.
I watched her saunter toward the entrance and wondered what it would have been like if we’d met under different circumstances, if I would still feel the same way about her. I smiled and wondered how I actually did feel about her. Before I could think much more about Tess McPherson, my cell phone rang.
“Hello.”
“I saw you called,” Nolan said.
The smile slid off my face. “Where’s my truck?”
“You slept with her, didn’t you?” My partner’s tone was accusatory even over the static-filled airwaves.
“What’s it to you?”
“I worry about the choices you make with women sometimes.”
The sheer number of possible responses to this statement overwhelmed me. I didn’t reply.
Nolan continued. “I’ve done a little research.”
“And that was okay with Larry?” I tried to sound as sarcastic as possible.
“He was a cop, too, Hank. He understands.”
“Whatever.”
The open line crackled and hissed for a few moments, neither of us making a sound.
Nolan said, “Lucas Linville is not an ordained minister. At least not a Baptist one.”
“How do you know?”
“Larry’s first cousin’s wife’s best friend is here. She works for the Southern Baptist Convention.”
“The guy’s lied all along, what’s one more mean?” I watched a Nissan Maxima pull into the space in front of me, its grille only a few inches from the front of the Bentley.
Sergeant Franklin Jessup and I looked up at each other at the same time. He was behind the wheel of the rice-burner, an attractive woman about his age next to him. She twisted the rearview mirror her way and began to apply lipstick.
“Hank?” Nolan said. “You still there?”
“Gotta go.” I ended the call.
Other than a twitch in one eye, Jessup’s face was totally blank. The woman put her lipstick away. She said something. He shook his head. She raised her eyebrows, spoke a few more words, and got out of the Maxima. Jessup never quit looking at me. I cut my eyes and saw that the woman was almost to the front door of the store.
Jessup and I got out of our respective automobiles at the same time. He stood by the driver’s door of his; I did the same. The parking lot was busy, Sunday-afternoon shoppers scurrying across the hot asphalt. I smelled popcorn from a machine by the front of the store. A low-riding Chevy with neon lights along the front fender drove by, a wall of Mexican rap pouring from its open windows.
When the noise subsided, Jessup pointed to the Bentley. “Fancy car.”
“Uhh . . . yeah.” The gears clicked in my head and I realized I was standing next to a $250,000 automobile.
“Going private must pay pretty well these days.” He patted the top of his Maxima. “Only twenty-seven more payments and this baby is all mine.”
“The car belongs to a friend.”
“Must be a good friend.”
“What do you want, Jessup?”
“Nothing. Just took my wife to church.” He pointed in the direction of where the woman riding with him had entered the store. “Didn’t think I was gonna get to. Work’s been pretty busy lately.”
“Oh?” I tried to keep my tone neutral.
“Buncha shit going on,” he said. “Something major went down behind a gun store on Ross Avenue.” He smiled. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Ask your buddy Rundell.”
Jessup snorted.
“Guy is a nutcase,” I said. “Needs his hard drive reformatted.”
The detective walked to the passenger side of the Bentley. He peered inside and whistled. “Nice interior. Got a navigation system and everything.” He looked in the backseat. “You got a bag in here. Not planning on leaving the county, are you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“We still like you for the dead guy in the boardinghouse.”
“Then why don’t you arrest me?”
“Because we both know you didn’t kill him.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Then what’s your point?”
“The stiff’s uncle is connected to a couple of city councilmen. The pressure is on to make an arrest.”
“Maybe you should do like O. J. and look for the real killers.”
Tess walked to the passenger side of the Bentley, a plastic shopping bag in one hand. She nodded at Jessup and then at me, a question in her eyes. Jessup moved away from the door and let her get in the car. I opened the driver’s side.
“Hey, Oswald,” Jessup said.
“Yeah?” I looked at him across the top of the car.
“Watch yourself, okay?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My mother lived with her third husband, a retired dentist named Buford, in a ranch-style house on the north side of White Rock Lake.
They had a good life together, I supposed. Buford smoked a meerschaum pipe while he built scale dioramas of famous World War II battles and bitched about the ethnicity of his neighbors. Mom drank a lot of pink Zinfandel, smoked those skinny cigarettes favored by topless dancers and senior-citizen bingo addicts, and thought about new ways that her children had disappointed her.
I figured I would be safe for a quick visit before leaving town. I wanted to ask her just one question. About the Barringers.
I turned onto her street. The houses were all the same: low-slung, one-story brick structures looking like two-level homes someone had squashed.
Mom’s house was the only one with a mimosa in the front yard. I parked the Bentley underneath the pink blossoms of the tree and got out. Tess did likewise. A minivan pulled into the driveway next door and what appeared to be three generations of a Korean family disgorged themselves.
We walked up the concrete sidewalk to the minuscule front porch favored by builders of that era. The grass was green like a golf course and smelled of pesticides, a remnant of Buford’s other hobby, carpet bombing all suburban flora and fauna with an array of chemicals.
I rang the bell. Through the frosted glass that served as the top half of the front door, I could see a female-shaped figure approach.
The door opened. My mother stood in the entry
way. She wore a loose-fitting flowered housedress and a ball cap with a couple hundred rhinestones glued to the surface. In one hand she held a clear plastic tumbler full of pink liquid with a cigarette between her index and middle fingers.
She smiled. “Hank.”
“Heya, Ma.”
She looked at Tess and frowned. “And who is this?”
I introduced the two women. Tess stuck out her hand.
My mother ignored her proffered shake and repeated Tess’s name, a look on her face that was meant to be a smile but the curled lip and arched eyebrow conveyed anything but pleasure.
After a few awkward moments, Tess lowered her hand.
“Can we come in for a minute?” I said.
Mom moved out of the way and motioned us into the interior of her home. The entryway was tiled but every other room was covered with a brown sculpted carpet. To the left was a living room about the size of a broom closet. The beige sofa was covered in a protective plastic cover. The carpet was freshly vacuumed, the tracks in the pile plainly visible.
“Let’s go to the den.” Mom walked to the back. Tess and I followed.
The family room dominated the house, a vaulted-ceiling chamber with about a thirty-foot leather sectional sofa facing a console TV. An episode of Bonanza was on at the moment, the sound muted. In one corner of the room, under a cloud of pipe smoke, sat a card table covered in pieces of colored plastic, papier-mâché landscape props, and tiny paint bottles.
Buford looked up from his work—an olive drab half-track troop carrier in one hand, a paintbrush in the other—and nodded a hello. Smoke billowed from the bowl of his pipe. He looked as if he were going to say something but then returned to his toils. Judging by the color scheme of the half-finished battle scene on the worktable, I guessed he was doing a series on Rommel’s North African campaign.
“You’ve got a nice home,” Tess said.
Mom ignored her and sat in a La-Z-Boy recliner. She stubbed out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “Your sister needs money again.” My younger sibling lived in a mobile home park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with husband number four.
I sat on the sofa and fell back into it, the springs long since worn out. Tess sat beside me. The divan enveloped her, too.
The Next Time You Die Page 14
