The steady, polite beep on the phone suddenly turned shrill and insistent: BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP! A red dot started flashing on the street map displayed on the screen. We were in some kind of warehouse district that looked like it hadn’t had much to warehouse for a while. The pale moonlight showed two- and three-story buildings, featureless rectangles looming over an asphalt moonscape.
“Okay, let me out here. I’ll take a look around.”
Thompson pulled over. As I climbed out, I thought of a question that I knew the answer to, but what the hell.
“You don’t by any chance have that Russian pistol of yours, do you?”
“Nope. Back at the hotel. Oughta get my butt kicked for that, too, I guess.”
“All right. Just cruise around with the doors locked and your lights off. I’ll call you as soon as I have anything.”
I found the Mercedes without any problem. It was around the next corner, up on the sidewalk, parked on a slant in an effort to hem a Harley in next to a corrugated steel wall. I stopped and pressed myself against the wall. Listened. Heard nothing special. Worked my way around the car and the cycle, then scooted back against the wall. I inched my way along feeling for a door and straining my ears to pick up a sound.
I had covered maybe forty feet in this way, and saw a huge black space coming up, presumably where the wall ended. That’s when I finally heard something: a punch and a grunt, then another punch and a panicky little yelp. It came from the black space, well above ground level. I must be coming up on a loading dock. I heard Chaladian’s voice then, calm and menacing.
“You are going to call Katrina and ask her to wait for you at the Rest Area off Exit 3. Tell her you will be there no later than two. You are all right, but you are exhausted and need her to drive you back to LA.”
Trowbridge’s answer sounded a lot like, “Fuck you.” Whatever it was, Chaladian didn’t like it. The punch-grunt sequence came again.
I had Thompson’s number punched in by the time I got my phone to my ear. I made my voice nice and loud.
“Okay, Hurricane, we got him. Send the cops right around the corner and halfway up the block, to the loading dock.”
That figured to get Chaladian’s attention, but I didn’t see any percentage in standing around waiting for him. I glimpsed him hustling to the edge of the dock as I sprinted past, running all the way to the far end. I half vaulted and half sprawled onto the dock. I rolled three turns along the surface. A shot split the darkness, followed by the fierce whine of lead ricocheting off concrete four inches from me. I prayed that it came from my own gun. For someone used to shooting semiautomatic pistols, shooting a double-action revolver can be a challenge. Unless you cock the hammer first yourself, the trigger pull cocks the hammer and then releases it—and that can throw your aim off if you’re not used to it.
I scrambled to my feet, pumped as I could be. This wasn’t Hollywood or an upscale hotel. This was a warehouse loading dock where people worked with their hands and their backs and made stuff happen. I finally felt at home. I did a shoulder roll as I ran along the back of the dock, looking for the control panel. It hurt like hell, but it made Chaladian’s second shot miss.
All at once, black on yellow on a three-foot square touch-pad in the dock’s back wall, I saw the magic words: LOAD LEVELER. I ran right past it, then ducked, turned around, and headed back for it. Chaladian had figured out that shooting with a double-action revolver at a moving target in the dark was a chancy proposition. He turned the Colt toward Trowbridge, crumpled into a gasping ball four feet from him.
“Stop, or I’ll kill him!”
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
The thing about loading docks is that trucks come in different heights. So they have load-levelers. I hit the top right button on the pad. Chaladian, at the front edge of the dock, suddenly found himself being lifted up and tilting toward the back of the dock. Taken by surprise, he threw both arms up in the air. The Colt in his right hand barked with shot number three. I made my charge, figuring I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting to him before he could recover his bearings and aim the gun properly.
I probably could have, but I didn’t have to. Trowbridge got him for me. Beaten to a pulp by a guy who knew how to make it hurt, Trow somewhere found the guts to spring to his feet and launch himself at Chaladian. He tackled the guy, falling heavily with him onto the dock.
I should have gone for Chaladian’s throat but out of instinct I went for the gun instead. Chaladian got his feet under Trowbridge and thrust him away with a double kick. I used my left hand to grab Chaladian’s right arm and start wrestling with him for the gun. He used his left hand to grab my testicles and squeeze with everything he had.
Bright light suddenly flooded the dock. Thompson had brought her truck around and was driving straight at us with her brights on. Raising his head and shoulders from the dock, Chaladian twisted his arm against my grip and squeezed off a shot. A supernova star spider-webbed across the windshield. Thompson’s reaction—“You sonofabitch!”—came after the shot, so at least she was still alive.
Thinking I had to be close to passing out from the excruciating pain between my legs, I remembered Trowbridge getting up to make his tackle. I lifted Chaladian’s right arm in the air and slammed it against the concrete. A high-pitched squeal escaped from him. Then I did it again. The Colt fell from his hand. I managed to push it six feet away. Gotcha now you bastard. I balled my left fist and raised it to smash his face. A Mexican-accented voice from the back of the dock stopped me.
“Enough!”
I rolled off of Chaladian as we all looked toward the darkness just beyond the arc of light created by the truck’s headlights. A guy in dark jeans and a wife beater stood there holding a major league automatic pistol that he wanted us to see. I could sense other people spilling tentatively out of the service door in the corner where he’d come onto the dock. Things suddenly seemed pretty simple. If drug runners were using the warehouse, we were all about to die. If something else was going on, I had just about one minute to figure out what it was. The guy in the wife beater took one step forward and squatted, resting the hand with the automatic on his right knee. He looked contemptuously at the Colt, then brought his gaze back to Chaladian.
“This is private property.”
“They attacked me,” Chaladian said. “You saw it.”
“I saw you shooting up the neighborhood with a piece-of-shit gun that no self-respecting man would use except to beat whores with. Gunfire attracts attention.”
“Ah.” Back came the patented Chaladian grin, as he decided to bet on drug dealing. “I apologize. An operational necessity. They had me outnumbered. You know Carlos Manueleza?”
The guy in wife beater bristled at that. I wasn’t sure the theory I’d come up with was right, but I decided to go with it—not that I had a hell of a lot of options. I turned a scornful expression toward Chaladian.
“Of course he doesn’t know Carlos Manueleza, you dumbass. Didn’t they teach you not to ask clumsy questions in baby-narc school? If this gentleman knew Carlos M, that would imply that he was involved in the illegal transport of narcotics, when he is obviously a lawabiding citizen.”
The guy in the wife beater kept a poker face, but I caught a couple of snickers from the invisible crowd in the rear. Time to double down.
“You insult him with fairy tales about ambushes when you couldn’t pull off a simple bust over a stinking little nineteen-month immigration law sentence.”
“This is bullshit!” Chaladian sputtered—all the more entertaining because his indignation was completely genuine. “Total bullshit! Me, a narc! What idiocy!”
“Right. You’re an international outlaw living by your wits—the only desperado in the world who uses a U.S. police standard issue Colt revolver—which even most American cops don’t use anymore.”
I paused for a breath. Then, just as Chaladian was about to speak, I started talking again.
“No, this gentleman doesn’t know Carlos M. But if he did know Carlos M., I’ll tell you something Carlos M. would have told him. He would have said, ‘As long as Anglos want heroin and cocaine and marijuana, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI and the entire Mexican Army cannot stop us. The harder and costlier they make it, the more our profits go up. But there is one thing that can stop us. And that is if we turn the people against us.’” I lowered my voice and made it edgier and angrier as I pointed toward the windshield. “‘Which will happen, my friend, if we do something incredibly STUPID, like helping American cops interfere with Project Oasis.’”
Chaladian sputtered some more, but I didn’t pay much attention. The guy in the wife beater got up, ambled over the edge of the dock, and peered at the windshield where the Project Oasis decal was still visible behind the spider-web cracks produced by Chaladian’s bullet. If the guy was a coyote, one of the vultures who sweat pesos out of Mexicans to bring them across the border, I had a chance. If he was a drug dealer I had maybe ten seconds to live.
Still in no hurry, with his automatic ready and a wary eye on Chaladian and me, the guy walked over to the Colt. Pulling a stiletto from a sheath in the middle of his left calf, he thrust the blade down the barrel and picked the gun up. He gave Chaladian a wide berth as he circled around toward me.
“NO!” Chaladian yelled. “This is lunacy! If I were a narc and you killed me, they would never stop looking for you! And you’d have to kill all three of the witnesses, because when they do get busted they’ll give you up in a second!”
I understood. I kind of felt sorry for Chaladian, so I thought I’d explain it to him.
“We can’t give him up if you’re killed with a gun that has our prints on it—and that he keeps.”
The guy reached me and held the Colt out to me, butt first. So much for my word of honor. I reached up to take it.
“BULLLLLSHIT!” Thompson yelled that as she pulled herself on to the dock. “I’m the one who’s gonna take that fucker out!”
For a critical second, just as my fingers brushed the Colt, Thompson’s antics distracted me. Chaladian came to his knees and started a feral leap in my direction. I felt my hand smacked aside and sensed the Colt being grabbed away. I braced myself for Chaladian’s bone-crunching assault.
The two shots seemed to come almost simultaneously. The second was beside the point, because the first splattered Chaladian’s brains over half the dock.
I looked over my right shoulder. Trowbridge stood there, holding the smoking Colt. He hadn’t missed. From a range of three feet, aiming isn’t a big problem.
The guy calmly held out the stiletto. Trowbridge slipped the Colt’s barrel back over it. The guy looked carefully at the cylinder, to be sure all six shots had been fired. Then he held the gun out to Thompson.
She understood. She gripped the handle, contributing her prints to it. She let go. The guy swung the gun to me. I did the same thing Thompson had. Then I pulled back a little knurled knob between the grip and the cylinder and swung the cylinder out. I caught the guy’s eyes.
“Souvenirs.”
He thought about it for a second and nodded. I pushed a rod in front of the cylinder. Six shell casings popped into my left palm. They would have only my prints. I let go of the gun. The guy pulled it away.
“Get rid of the body.”
We did. Pretty creepy stuff. The three of us hopped down from the dock, pulling Chaladian’s body along with us. We humped the thing down to the Harley. I climbed on, and they mounted Chaladian’s body behind me. Stuck the helmet on him just for luck. Thompson scrounged a couple of bungee cords from the pickup and lashed Chaladian’s torso to mine. She used a third to tie his ankles to the Harley frame so his feet wouldn’t slip off. With that taken care of, I sent them back to LA. I reminded Thompson to break the glass out of the windshield so that the bullet hole wouldn’t be staring in the face of any cop who happened to look.
Two-and-a-half hours later I dumped Chaladian’s remains in the Baja desert. A lot things could have gone wrong. Someone could have spotted me. If a cop had gotten within fifty feet, he would have known instantly, even in the dark, that I was riding with a dead body behind me. I could have run off the road or crashed into something in the desert out of sheer fatigue.
A lot of things could have gone wrong, but none of them did. After I dumped Chaladian’s body, I cruised into Tijuana on the Harley. No sweat at the border; my papers were in order. I parked the thing just before dawn across the street from a whorehouse six blocks from the bus station. The next bus for LA would leave at eight. Odds were the Harley would already be in a chop shop by then. Someone would find Chaladian’s body before too long. Maybe the report and the ID would reach Detective Kinjaro and he’d close the Wellstein case. Just as likely, some bored cop would check the paperwork over, grunt, and throw the report in a file with N-H-I scribbled on it: No Humans Involved.
Chapter Fifty-one
Rachel and I watched the first and, as it turned out, the last trial day of California v. Trowbridge live on TRU TV. Every once in awhile, the camera would show Thompson on the bench right behind the bar, supporting Trowbridge with a resolute, stand-by-your-man demeanor while Luci sat beside her.
The climax came with some poor clerk on the witness stand. Erin of Aaron & Erin stood at a podium, giving him a very hard time.
“And so we have twenty-six hours when the whereabouts of this sample is unaccounted for, is that correct?”
“Well, we know it was either in the evidence locker or the lab. We know it wasn’t just lying around somewhere.”
“Twenty-six hours when we don’t know the temperature at which it was being stored, right?”
“Well, a refrigerator is a refrigerator.”
“Twenty-six hours when we can’t be sure which people had access to it, right?”
“Look, it was the police evidence control people or the lab staff. It was one or the other. It wasn’t just Joe Blow. Someone made a mistake on one of the transfer logs. Got off one day on the date, because it was after midnight, maybe. That’s all it was.”
“Move to strike.”
“Granted.” The judge looked like he was mad enough to spit.
“What’s the judge so pissed off about?” I asked Rachel.
“He might have to kick the evidence. Which means the case is gone.”
Trowbridge’s next move caught everyone by surprise. He was already on his feet and talking when the camera found him.
“Your honor, I’d like to make a statement.”
“You don’t get to make statements. That’s why you have lawyers here.”
“I want to change my plea.”
“What?”
And we were off to the races. I’ll skip the legal palaver and cut to the chase. Aaron and Erin started whispering urgently to Trowbridge. Deliberately, I think, he answered them loudly enough to be picked up by the microphone.
“Look, skip it, okay? You’re fired.” He squared his shoulders and faced the judge. “Your honor, I can’t see letting this decent guy get beaten up because someone screwed up some red tape. I’m guilty. I was driving drunk that night. What I did was wrong. It was stupid. I put innocent people’s lives in danger. I could’ve killed someone that night, and I couldn’t live with myself if that had happened. I broke the law. So it’s on me. My bad. I’ll accept whatever sentence you think is appropriate.”
It wasn’t that simple, of course. In a movie it would have been, but in the real world the judge had to spend what seemed like an hour questioning Trowbridge and explaining this and that to him and asking him if he understood and mentioning “consequences” about forty-seven times and so forth and so on. End of the day, though, Trowbridge made it stick.
&n
bsp; “Acceptance of responsibility for an offense is a major factor in penal assessment,” the judge said when he got around to sentencing, “especially when it’s genuine rather than tactical. By standing up and owning what you did, well before you had to, you have saved yourself about four months in jail. I’m going to sentence you to one-hundred-twenty days in the county house of correction. With good behavior, you’ll be out for the World Series instead of the Super Bowl.”
“So,” Rachel said. “Cool move. This will make him a hero.”
“You’re right. The twenty-six A-List stars in Hollywood who didn’t drive drunk and endanger innocent people in the first place aren’t heroes, but he’s a hero”
“In a perfect world he wouldn’t be. But we don’t live in a perfect world.”
“No, I guess we don’t.”
Trowbridge started his sentence the day after Prescott Trail opened. Right on the verge of getting sprung on some slick lawyer’s technicality, he’d stood up like a man and taken responsibility for what he’d done. Prescott Trail topped the grosses for its opening weekend, and it stayed in the top five until Trowbridge waltzed triumphantly out of jail, in a new blaze of publicity that bought the movie a couple of extra weeks in that heady company.
I’d long since moved on to preventing losses in factories and shipyards and truck depots, but Proxy and Rachel independently updated me on the totals. Rachel seemed weirdly fascinated by it and ashamed of herself for the fascination. As if it were a guilty pleasure, like enjoying boy bands. I tried to shrug it off.
“Who would have thought that doing time could be a career move?”
“I think he was doing time long before he went to jail.” She looked like she was thinking about having a cigarette and decided not to. “He wasn’t trapped by money or job limitations or any of the stuff that traps ninety-nine percent of the people on Earth, but he was imprisoned by his own doubts and insecurities. If he hadn’t refused to give up Thompson when Chaladian beat him, he’d never have known he had guts. He might have lived his entire life without knowing that he was a real man.”
Jail Coach Page 23
