What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “What did he sound like?”

  Felix screwed up his face as if he’d bitten into a rancid piece of meat. “It was an odd voice, like in the movies, like when they use a distortion machine.”

  “Did he say anything else, this man?”

  Felix slid a piece of paper across the black granite countertop. “He gave me this number and then he hung up.”

  Slava.

  I thanked Felix and then went straight up to my room. I wasn’t sure who to call or what to do first, because as much as I wanted to save Slava’s life, as much as I owed it to him, I had now incurred another debt, a bigger debt, so said the renewed screaming in my ears. Besides, I knew if I called the number Slava had left for me, he wouldn’t pick up and it would be impossible for me to leave a voice mail. He would call me again when he was sure he was safe and beyond detection.

  I wondered why he just hadn’t run. He had no more connection to the USA than he had to East Timor, for chrissakes. He was an adaptable bastard, with a survival instinct like none I’d ever seen. I don’t know. Maybe he figured that with the oligarch’s money, running was a waste of time and that if he was going to make a stand, it might as well be here. Whatever his reasoning, I hoped he lived long enough to explain it to me. Lagunov was right, I couldn’t very well keep Maggie protected round the clock, but I could afford another few days without seriously depleting my savings. So for now, I decided my new debt came first.

  I called Bill and asked him to invite Micah Spears over to his apartment. I was prepared to be insistent about it. There was no need. Bill was perceptive. I’m not sure how he knew, whether it was the tone of my voice, the cadence, or the phrasing. What mattered was that he understood. I suppose good priests, like good cops, have to be able to sense trouble coming around blind corners. And before leaving the church, Bill had been a good priest. I didn’t know another man who could have sustained people the way he had in spite of having lost his own faith for forty-plus years.

  Spears was already there, sharing a glass of wine with Bill. They weren’t exactly all smiles and good cheer, nor were they at each other’s throats. It must be tough for priests, doctors, and lawyers to keep in confidence some of what they know. Hardest for priests, I thought. Sin and forgiveness was their business, but they were humans, too. At least some of them were. The ones who preyed on children belonged in a zoo. Not on display, but as meals for the big cats and hyenas. And when all was said and done, I’m not sure I would cry if Micah Spears, Rondo Salazar, and the men who killed Lara wound up in the lion enclosure with a brief head start. My bloodlust was tempered by Lagunov’s words about what Slava had done in Russia. Many people would want to add him to the lions’ diet. A few would happily add me.

  The minute Spears and Bill saw my expression, they knew something was up with me but were unsure what. I didn’t leave them guessing for very long.

  “Been to Cambodia lately, Mr. Spears, or whatever the fuck your real name is?”

  Bill looked sick, but Spears reacted exactly as I knew he would. He smiled at me, what passed for a smile, anyway. Then he turned to Bill.

  “You were right about him, Bill. He is good at this.” He turned back to me. “I’ve guarded that secret for quite a long time with very few cracks in the walls, and in less than two weeks you found out the whole story, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Care to tell me how?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Now he was laughing. I thought he and Lagunov would have been a fine pair. Maybe not. Possibly because Lagunov had saved my life, I thought better of him than Spears. I couldn’t picture Lagunov doing to women and children what Spears had done and I was again thankful not to have seen photographs of the Cambodian village.

  He stopped laughing. “But somehow I don’t think you called me here just to tell me what a horrible monster I am. You’ve made progress about Linh Trang.”

  I ignored him. “You’re very wealthy, aren’t you?”

  “I am wealthier than most, but I don’t have really big money. What has that to do—”

  “Three things,” I said, “and then we’ll discuss your granddaughter.”

  He was all business now. “They are?”

  “A woman was murdered helping me find out about Linh Trang. You’ll hear about it on the news and read about her in the papers tomorrow. She was a single mother with an autistic daughter. I want you to take complete financial responsibility for the daughter for the rest of her life.”

  “If what you say is true, and—”

  “You didn’t hear me too well, I guess. This isn’t a negotiation. The answers I need are yes, yes, and yes or I walk away and I make public the fact that a prominent Long Island businessman drowned babies, hung old people from trees like Christmas ornaments, and raped and butchered women. And I have the file to back it up,” I lied.

  Spears actually looked shaken by that.

  “Yes, I’ll take financial responsibility for the girl.”

  “Swear to it in front of Bill.”

  “I swear it, Bill, as I have never lied to you about what I did or what I was. What else?”

  “I’m having someone kept under twenty-four-hour protection and the bill could run as high as twenty grand. Will you cover it?”

  “Yes. Done.” He snapped his fingers at me. “Move on.”

  “Tell Bill the real reason you were interested in me finding out why Linh Trang was killed. You lie and I’m walking out the door.”

  Spears hesitated, finally opening his mouth to answer after collecting himself. But it was Bill who spoke.

  “Gus, for fuck’s sake, don’t be daft. Arnold over here—Yes, that’s his name. Arnold Mason. Not the name you would figure for a monster, is it?—was in fear that after all these years his bill was coming due. The way poor Linh Trang was killed, mirroring so closely the way he and his squad mates had killed those women in the village, shook him to his core. There’s no surprise in that for me, but if you think for one moment that this man didn’t love his granddaughter and that his only reason he was curious as to motive was a selfish one, you are wrong.”

  “We can have that debate some other time,” I said.

  “It’s a fair debate who knows more of monsters, cops or priests, but this one I’m well acquainted with. Indeed, we’ll talk of this at a later date.”

  “So,” Spears said.

  “I’m not there yet, but I’m close.”

  “What is that supposed to mean. Is this all going to be about oaths and riddles?”

  “Linh Trang and Lara, the woman I was telling you about before, were killed because they found out something about the things going on at Gyron Machinery. That’s right, Spears, the place where you got her the job.”

  Whatever perverse pleasure I might’ve taken in the irony of it was extremely short-lived because for the first time since I’d met him, maybe for the first time in his whole miserable fucking life, Micah Spears looked broken. The frosty exterior cracked into a million pieces, a billion, not all with sharp edges. I gave him a moment to make some sense of it before I said any more. And that moment helped me recover from the pang of shame I felt. It was a comfort to see that part of who I once was still remained.

  “Whatever the reason Linh Trang and Lara were killed is in that building, and I think I know where.”

  That seemed to get his attention and his icy demeanor returned, this time, though, with eyes on fire. Humpty Dumpty back together again, but red in tooth and claw. I read that phrase once—red in tooth and claw—in a poem in high school, I think. It never made sense to me before.

  He said, “What are we going to do about it?”

  “We?”

  “That’s right. We.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m probably not going to be able to get in there alone.”

  “I’m coming.”

 
I thought about arguing with him, but I didn’t see that I had many options. Slava, my first choice, was unavailable. Smudge was great in a fix, but not this kind of fix. Bill . . . I couldn’t do that to him again. He had already had to bloody his hands on my account. The guys who worked the club with me were either still on the job or recently retired. And while they might’ve been willing to stretch the law a little, they wouldn’t be willing to go as far I would be. And they would be right, because at the moment, I was prepared to go pretty fucking far. I had put Lara in danger, as Spears had put Linh Trang in danger. Neither one of us meant to, but what did that matter now?

  “Okay. You wanna come, you’re in. You’re probably gonna have to get your hands dirty and you might not come out the other end of it.”

  “Do you really think that bothers me?”

  I didn’t answer directly. “I’m not sure how we’re gonna do this yet, but we’ll have to move fast. Once the Gyron people see the cops are sniffing around, they’ll stop doing whatever it is that got Linh Trang and Lara killed. At least for a little while. From what I know of how they operate, Saturday is our best bet. The factory floor is pretty much shut down, but they have a few guys in to crate orders and prep shipments.”

  “Shipments of what, I wonder?” Bill said.

  “Exactly, Bill. Exactly.”

  Spears’s jaw clenched. I looked him in the eye.

  “Do you have a gun or a rifle?”

  Before I could finish the question, he peeled back his tweed jacket and showed me a Smith & Wesson 9 mm clipped to his belt. “I have a carry permit and I have some more questionable weapons at my disposal.”

  I nodded.

  “When I come up with a plan, I’ll call you. Whatever we do, it’ll be tomorrow.”

  There wasn’t anything left to say. I could see worry in Bill’s eyes, but he kept his concerns to himself. Bill wasn’t a gassy sort. He never spoke just to hear the sound of his own voice. And in this case he knew there would be nothing to stop what others had already set in motion. The issue for me now was coming up with a plan that wouldn’t get us killed or arrested.

  59

  (FRIDAY NIGHT)

  I was about to head downstairs for my usual Friday shift working the door at the Full Flaps when my room phone rang, its red light flickering, its ring an annoying electronic chitter. Since getting back from Bill’s apartment, I’d accomplished exactly zero—sitting up in bed, mindlessly, blindly, flipping from channel to channel. No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a plan for Spears and me that made a lick of sense or wouldn’t get us both shot or arrested. I liked to think I was a pretty smart person, fairly well read, too, for a cop, but sometimes that stuff didn’t count for shit. And my twenty years on the job wasn’t helping me much, either. Being around mutts and skells doesn’t transform you into a criminal mastermind. Osmosis doesn’t work that way. Besides, the thieves, arsonists, and killers I’d been around were the ones who got caught.

  I’m not sure what it was, the chirping, the flickering light, or knowing that it was probably Slava on the line that flipped the switch. Whatever it was, it kicked me in the ass and sparked an idea of how it might be possible for Spears or me to get a peek at what was inside the Box at Gyron Machinery without signing our own death certificates. And in that same moment, I realized there might also be a way to get Slava out of his mess alive. Odds were against it. A lot of stuff had to go just right for it to work, but any chance at all was more than he had now.

  If I didn’t need Spears alive to take care of Lara’s daughter, I wouldn’t have spent a second worrying about keeping him safe. Spears, unlike Slava, seemed incapable of real guilt. Slava needed to live in order to suffer. He explained to me that his shame was something he needed to live with as long as he could breathe. Death, he once confided in me before I knew the details of his old life, would be too easy and would only add to the insult of what was in his past. I knew Slava to be capable of aching regret, shame, guilt. Did Micah Spears regret his part in his granddaughter’s murder? Yeah, he did. I saw that for myself, but I think that was about the extent of his humanity. Did I think he spent more than fifteen seconds over the last forty years regretting what he and his friends had done in Cambodia? Probably not. The only thing he’d spent the last forty-plus years worrying about was the blowback, waiting for what he’d done to catch up to him. Hoping like mad it never would.

  It was an odd equation to ponder. I don’t think that’s the kind of balance the universe seeks. And even if it did or even if there was a God, would the brutal murder of an innocent young woman somehow pay down the debt on the slaughter of an entire village? How could it? The dead in that village were gone, incapable of asking for restitution, incapable of receiving it, incapable of anything. And would the tortured dead take a second’s pleasure in more innocent brutality? Those were the kinds of equations for God’s defenders, philosophers, and physicists to ponder. I left all questions of balance behind once I picked up the phone.

  “Gus Murphy,” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to sound happy.

  “Is Slava, Gus.”

  “I hoped it was you.”

  “You are calling Slava, yes?”

  “Is it a secure line to talk on?” I whispered, as if whispering mattered.

  “Is safe.”

  I explained to him about Maggie, about the twenty-four-hour protection she was under and why. I explained to him about how Lagunov had saved my life by killing the Asesinos. I waited to tell him my idea about Gyron because I wanted to give him a moment to take in what I had just told him. I also knew his first instinct once he did absorb it would be to sacrifice himself in order to protect Maggie. The thought of any innocent blood being spilled on his behalf was worse than the shame and guilt he was already dealing with.

  “Slava is stopping this, Gus. I am giving myself to Lagunov and this is all being over with,” he said, as I suspected he would. “I cannot having your beautiful Maggie hurt for my sins and stupidness.”

  “I have an idea, Slava. It’s not much of one, but if it works, I think you have a chance and we will all come out of it okay.”

  From his end, there was silence. Then finally, “What are you having in mind?” he asked, some hesitation in his voice.

  I was glad he asked. He was a man who would see the holes in my plan. He listened very patiently. When I was done, there was more silence.

  “Much can be going wrong with this. Is very risky for you, Gus, and for this other man. For Slava, not so much.”

  “In the end, Slava, if it works and we get that far, the risk will all be yours. Your life will be in my hands.”

  “You should be forgetting this other man, let Slava go in with you. My life is worth very little and I have no worries of dying.”

  “No,” I said, “it won’t work if you expose yourself like that. This only works if you hang back. You can’t be out front with me.”

  “This other man, you are trusting him?”

  “In this? Yes.”

  “He is not hesitating to use weapons?”

  “He has killed.”

  “Is not what I am asking.”

  “He won’t hesitate,” I said, though I had no way of knowing.

  Spears or Mason or whoever he was under his skin might have happily killed dozens of people, but that was a long time ago. I didn’t think he had necessarily changed. People don’t change unless they want to or unless events change them. I had all the proof of that I needed. But Spears was an older man now, and old men, even old monsters, might hesitate. They have more to protect. I’d find out soon enough.

  “Why not go to police?”

  “I already have, Slava, but I have no real proof of anything. They have to work their cases the way they work them. You know that. And once the police start sniffing around—”

  “The Gyron people will be disappearing
all evidence,” he said, finishing my thought.

  “Are we set?”

  “I am not liking this, Gus. What if you are wrong? You could be going to prison.”

  “I’m not wrong. Are we set?” I repeated.

  “Tomorrow, Slava will be there as you are saying.”

  There was little joy in his voice about the prospect of getting out from under the hangman’s rope. Neither of us had any illusions about our odds for success. He realized that part of his chance of escaping a death sentence depended on me putting my neck in the noose. I realized it, too. That’s why my next call would be to Maggie. I wanted to tell her that the end to the worries about her safety was at hand. I wanted to hear about how the first day of rehearsals had gone. But mostly, I wanted to hear her voice and thank her for loving me. Before I called, I gathered myself. It wasn’t going to be easy to not give myself away.

  60

  (SATURDAY AFTERNOON)

  The monster and I sat in his black Mercedes SL550 convertible, the roof down in spite of the late-afternoon chill. Having the roof down allowed us to stand on the seats and use binoculars to keep tabs on the comings and goings at Gyron. We were in the parking lot of a “To Let” factory building across the way and slightly down the road from Gyron, a convenient row of overgrown hedges affording us some cover. And we needed as much cover as we could get. Although we were at an oblique angle and the street separating us from the Gyron building was a wide one, Saturday in this industrial park was almost free of activity. A few FedEx trucks had passed by, an eighteen-wheeler or two, and a useless security cruiser had made a few cursory laps.

  In opposition to the rest of the park, there had been a flurry of activity across the way. We’d been there for two hours, and in that time the loading dock’s bay doors had rolled up seven times. The strange thing was that the vehicles backing in and out of the bays weren’t what I would’ve expected. Not a single semi or box truck had backed in. The largest vehicle had been a brown step van that kind of looked like a UPS truck but wasn’t. The other six times the bay doors had gone up, they’d been raised for smaller vans and even a few cars. I’d taken down all their tag numbers. Five of seven were out-of-state plates. The corrugated steel doors rolled down each time a vehicle backed into the dock, so we couldn’t get peek at what was going on or what was being loaded.