by Jeff Shelby
“Stay here,” I said, getting out of the Jeep. “I’m going to go up to the house.”
“Wait-he had a bag with him,” she said.
Wellton told me the apartment had been cleared out. “Guns?”
“I couldn’t tell. But why else would he have been back at his apartment?”
I nodded and closed the door.
Walking up the sidewalk, I came to the front edge of the house and moved carefully along the porch. I stepped onto it gingerly, hoping to avoid creaks and rattles. Nothing emanated from the wood, so I continued up, moved next to the screen door, and listened.
Quiet.
I grabbed my gun from my waistband, held it at my side, and knocked on the door.
Nothing.
I tried the screen, but it was locked. Moving down off the porch, I retraced my footsteps to the fence and looked over it. An empty backyard.
I put my gun back in my waistband and hoisted myself over the fence. I fell to the ground and rolled close to the house and pulled my gun out again, creeping low next to the home until I came to the edge, and peered around the corner.
A small patio. An old hibachi barbecue sat on the ground. No tables or chairs.
I moved near the sliding glass door on the back wall of the house. Taking a deep breath, I crouched down, raised my gun, and pivoted so I was looking straight in through the door.
No Linc.
I rose up slowly and tried the slider. It started to move, but then caught. An old lock making it a little loosey-goosey.
I was starting to doubt Dana. Maybe she’d smoked a little too much pot the night before.
I rattled the door some more, seeing if I could shake it loose.
A figure darted out from the hallway on the other side of the door and sprinted for the front of the house.
I spun and ran back the way I’d come, throwing myself over the fence. I came around the corner of the house to see a young man sprinting parallel to the property in the opposite direction, glancing back at me.
Which explained why he never saw Dana step out from the side of the house and clothesline him with a straight right arm.
The guy fell to the ground in a heap.
Dana looked down at him, then at me. “This is Linc.”
Thirty-seven
Dana had stunned him and he was a little woozy, so I picked him up off the ground.
“I got bored waiting in the car,” she said.
I was annoyed that she had ignored my directions, but it wasn’t the time to argue. “We’ll discuss it later.”
I set Linc on the couch. I sat down in a ripped leather chair across from him and Dana stood next to me.
Linc looked a lot like the photo Peter had given me and, in person, a lot like his older brother-same dark hair and intense eyes-just a little rougher around the edges. Dirty jeans and a black T-shirt hung listlessly on his body.
His eyes cleared and he looked like he had shaken off the blow.
I was so angry with this kid I didn’t know where to start.
I glanced at Dana. “You heard him in his apartment this morning?”
She nodded, staring at him. “The walls are thin. The noise woke me up.”
“I dropped something,” Linc said.
I turned to him. “You can feel free to shut the fuck up until I tell you to talk.”
He didn’t flinch, just returned my stare as his mouth closed into a tight line.
“Who the hell are you?” Linc asked, moving to the edge of the couch.
My right fist clenched and if I’d been closer, I would’ve punched him.
“I’m the guy that was hired to find your sorry ass,” I said. “Both your aunt and your brother asked me to figure out where the hell you’ve been because for some unbelievable reason, they seemed to give a rat’s ass about you. And if you speak again before I ask you a question, I’m going to choke the shit out of you.”
“He’s an investigator,” Dana said.
Linc finally wavered and he slid back into the sofa.
I took a deep breath, summoned up a little composure, and looked at him again. “Let’s start with Rachel. What do you know about her?”
He looked at me for a moment, maybe wondering if I was setting him up to say something so I could jump down his throat again.
He chewed on his lip for a moment. “I know she was shot.”
“Any idea who did it?”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
I felt my blood pressure spike. Wouldn’t look good to murder the kid I was hired to find. I tried a different approach to see if I could get a straight answer.
“What do you know about your brother?” I asked.
His expression soured and it was clear he was in the dark. “Peter? What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
His features drooped and the sour expression morphed into confusion, the first sign that the tough facade had a real weakness. “What are you talking about?”
Part of me felt bad for dropping the news on him. But the other half of me recognized that he was indirectly responsible for Peter’s death.
“He hired me to find you,” I said. “He was found in a canyon the next day.” I paused. “Killed by a couple of other guys looking for you.”
He looked away from me, his eyes focused on the floor. His shoulders bunched, the weight of what I’d said taking him out of our conversation for a moment.
Then he lifted his head up.
“You and I need to talk,” he said, then nodded at Dana. “Without her.”
“Oh, fuck you, Linc,” Dana said, irritated.
He didn’t look at her, just at me.
There was something in his eyes that I hadn’t expected to see. It was the same desperation I had seen in Peter’s face the day he hired me to find Linc.
“Dana, please. Go wait outside,” I said.
“Fuck you, too,” she said. “I helped you find him.”
“Dana, this isn’t the time. You’ve been a huge help, but right now I need you to give us a few minutes, alright?”
She gave an exasperated sigh and threw up her hands like a great stage actress. “Fine. You don’t need me? Then I’m outta here. I’ll go someplace I’m wanted. You two dickheads have a great time.” She spun on her heel and walked out the front door, slamming it behind her.
I looked at Linc, at this kid who I’d been pursuing for what felt like too long, and thought about how ugly the situation had become. I thought about pulling out my gun and putting a bullet in his chest.
But that wouldn’t have given me the answers I wanted.
“Talk,” I said.
Thirty-eight
“My brother’s really dead?” Linc asked.
“Yeah. You want the details?”
He thought about that for a moment, indecision lingering in his eyes before he finally nodded.
I told him about Peter hiring me, then finding the skinheads at his house, and how they’d killed him. I left out the specifics of what they did to me.
Linc leaned back in the sofa, his face heavy with something between sadness and anger. “It all blew up on me. And now I’m totally screwed.”
I had a million questions I wanted to ask Linc. But his body language indicated that he seemed on the verge of unloading his story-where he’d been, what he’d been doing-and I didn’t want to get in the way. Sometimes, the best way to get answers is to shut up and listen.
“Maybe that’s what I deserve.” He shifted his eyes toward me. “You know about our parents?”
“I know they’re dead.”
“My mom died of cancer.” He looked out the window. “It sucked.”
“I’m sure.”
He studied the window for a moment. “I need help. I don’t know how to get out of this on my own.”
I wasn’t willing to commit to anything yet. “Then you better keep talking.”
He drummed his fingers on his thigh, his anxiety trying to work itself out. The ange
r was now removed from his expression, replaced entirely with a look of desolation and dejection.
“My dad died in a fight,” he said with a twisted smile. “He was a skinhead. But he hated that term. He liked Aryan Warrior or Caucasian Centrist.” He shook his head. “So fucking stupid.”
“You don’t believe in that stuff?”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve heard, right? That I followed in his footsteps?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to be really fucked up to believe in that shit,” he said. “I’m not.”
I resisted the urge to point out that non-fucked-up college students didn’t usually sell guns.
“Then why did your aunt tell me you were involved?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “I wanted to know my dad. After my mom died…I needed to know him. It was the only way I could figure out how to get close to him.” He paused. “I thought if I understood it better, I could find a way to pull him out of it.” He paused again. “Peter wanted no part of him. He had just written our dad off, but I couldn’t do it. I thought maybe he could still end up being a regular dad. Or at the very least, a dad who was pretty much normal.”
Peter had told me about the rift between him and his brother. Peter had probably taken Linc’s ideas as lunacy and Linc had obviously taken Peter’s resistance as cowardice. Both of them had been half right and all wrong.
“You can’t fake it,” Linc continued. “To really be accepted, I had to act the part. To everyone, even my family.” His eyes shifted away from me again. “And I thought it was the only way for me to really understand what he thought was so great about hating people.”
He rubbed his hands together like he was cold.
“But it was…awful,” he said. “And I didn’t understand why my dad believed in it.” He leaned forward. “And it just hurt that my dad was such a piece of crap.” He looked up, embarrassment and sorrow shaping his face. “Because he really was. Peter was right all along.”
I thought about my own parents. I knew next to nothing about my own father, something I had learned to conveniently compartmentalize out of my life. I wasn’t close to my mother and I still didn’t understand why she couldn’t pull herself out from the boozy haze that had become her life.
He was telling me a story I knew pretty well.
“I was trying to figure out how to leave National Nation when my dad was stabbed outside a bar,” he said, his voice cracking. “A couple of black guys gave him what he deserved.” He paused and cleared his throat, tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. “Only he was my dad, you know? He was an asshole, but he was still my dad.”
I stayed quiet, giving him time to compose himself.
He wiped the tears away. “And then I just got pissed at the world. Peter for not trying to help, my friends for not really understanding. My dad got me involved in some hateful shit, but I didn’t tell anyone because I was sick of everyone telling me what an asshole he was. I learned that the hard way. I didn’t need to be reminded.”
He sat up a little straighter. “My dad used my place to stash and sell guns.”
“Why your place?”
“He lived out in Bonita and he was worried that his neighbors would get suspicious if they saw too many people coming and going,” he answered. “Anyway, after he died, I wanted to get rid of the guns. All these gang-looking guys were hanging around my apartment. It didn’t take much to figure out who they were. I knew Lonnie from the group and he told me what to charge and to give the money to him after they were sold. It wasn’t hard to hook up and before long I was dealing with them. What the fuck else was I going to do with a dresser full of guns?”
I thought of a lot of things but said nothing.
“I figured I’d just get rid of them and be done with it,” he said. “But Moreno and those guys bought a lot. When I turned the money over to Lonnie the first time I sold, he freaked because it was so much. So instead of only selling what I had, Lonnie kept giving me more. I didn’t know how to say no. That guy scared the shit out of me.”
I knew the feeling.
Linc shuffled his feet on the floor and the soles squeaked on the wood.
“Then I got sort of comfortable with it,” he said, shaking his head. “I was friendly with the gang guys. Lonnie acted like I was his best friend. It was easy. Easier than telling the truth, anyway.”
Linc had jumped into something that had overwhelmed him. He’d forced himself into believing that going along was better than getting out. It may have been easier, but it wasn’t better.
“But then it changed,” Linc said, his eyes moving away from me. “It all completely changed and I had to get out of it.”
“What happened?”
He sat still, his eyes focused on the window. “I knew it was wrong, you know? I really did. I knew I was being a coward, and for a while I thought I could live with that. But then…I realized I couldn’t.”
“How were you planning on getting out of this, Linc?” I asked.
“I was just gonna go down to Mexico or to Arizona and lay low for a while,” he said. “I figured I’d sort it out when I got out of San Diego.”
“So what changed?” I repeated. “It just hit you that it was wrong?”
His gaze on the window was so intent I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.
“Linc?” I said.
“She changed it,” he finally answered, his voice catching.
On my initial visit to his apartment, the girls had explained Rachel’s relationship with Linc. He wrote her papers and she slept with him in return. Maybe it had turned into more than that for Linc.
“How did Rachel change things?” I asked.
He moved his eyes back to me, confusion on his face. “Rachel?”
“You said, ‘She changed it.’ How did Rachel change things?”
He shook his head. “Rachel didn’t change anything.”
Now I was the confused one. “Then who are we talking about?”
Linc Pluto turned back to the window and the tears reappeared in his eyes. “Malia. Malia changed everything.”
Thirty-nine
Malia’s name exploded inside of my head.
“Malia Moreno?” I asked, making sure I’d heard him correctly.
“Deacon Moreno’s sister,” Linc said. “Yeah.”
I couldn’t come up with another name that would’ve surprised me more.
“How did you know her?” I asked, trying to gather my thoughts.
“I went to make a drop to Deacon at their house a couple of months ago,” he said. “She answered the door, Deacon wasn’t there, and we started talking. She was going to State, too. It just sort of fell into place.”
A gigantic knot formed in my stomach. I’d already dropped the news about his brother on him. Now I was going to have to do the same about Malia.
“You were dating her?” I said.
His eyes iced over. “We weren’t just dating. I was in love with her.”
The way he said it made me feel dumb for suggesting any less. “Did Deacon know?”
“We thought we were being careful.” His eyes softened as he chewed on his lip for a moment. “But then Malia was pretty sure Deacon had heard her talking on the phone with me. He started asking who her new boyfriend was. She didn’t tell him, but I immediately started getting calls from Deacon and Wesley that didn’t feel right. They wanted to meet me at different places than normal. I got freaked and that’s when I went into hiding.” He rubbed his chin. “And then when Rachel was shot, I knew he knew. It was a message to me.”
“Have you been here the whole time?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. A guy I know, he’s doing a semester abroad. But he kept the lease on the house because he didn’t want to lose it. I knew it was empty and I didn’t figure anyone else knew about it.”
“You said Rachel getting shot was a message to you. How do you know that?”
He sighed and sa
nk back into the couch. “Dana told you about me and Rachel?”
“Yeah.”
“It was before I met Malia. I swear to God.”
“Okay.”
“When I started selling the guns, Deacon and his guys didn’t know me. So I had to act friendly with them. Hang out, talk shit, and all that, so that they’d trust me.” He shook his head. “Rachel walked out of her apartment one day when we were hanging out in the parking lot and they all went crazy, talking about how hot she was and everything.”
It was starting to come together.
“And you told them about having sex with her?” I said.
“It validated me with them,” he said, his voice straining. “It was dumb and stupid, but it worked.” He paused and I thought he was going to cry again. “And even after Rachel and I were done, I kept telling them that we weren’t.”
“So Deacon didn’t like the idea of you and Malia being together and he may have thought you were cheating on her?”
He blinked rapidly, tears clouding his eyes, and he nodded.
It seemed like every time Linc had tried to do something right, he’d made things worse.
He used the heels of his hands to dry his eyes and said, “I was there that day you came to her house.”
“What?”
“I was the one behind the door,” he explained. “She told you she was studying with a friend. It was me.”
My gut had tried to tell me that day something wasn’t totally right. His explanation confirmed it.
He started to say something, but it caught in his throat. He swallowed hard, tried to compose himself. “And I was there yesterday, too.”
Linc was full of surprises.
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair, remembering the scene. “You were?”
“They made Malia call me and tell me where to meet them.” He swallowed hard. “I’d been out there a couple of times before when I was with my dad.”
“You were the other shooter,” I said.
He nodded, his eyes oozing pain.
“Why did they take Malia?” I asked.
“They knew she and I were together.” He hesitated for a moment. “Lonnie saw us together a couple of weeks ago. We were having lunch at the pier in Imperial Beach. We were walking back to the car and I saw him with Mo at the other end of the lot. I tried to duck out of sight and thought maybe I had, because they didn’t follow us out of the lot.” He shook his head. “But I knew it. I felt him looking at me.”
