Total Immunity

by Robert Ward

  There was Karl Steinbach behind the wheel, his body mashed by an air bag. His left arm flopped out of the window.

  Jack started to pull Steinbach out of the wreck, but suddenly the smuggler’s eyes opened and he looked at Jack with a terrifying clarity.

  He tried to speak, but a gob of blood shot from his mouth, like a melting red ball.

  “Jackie, help.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, trying to pry open the smashed door. “I gotcha.”

  But Steinbach shook his head slowly.

  “Dead, Jack. All crushed inside.”

  Jack tried to open the door. But somehow Karl gathered his strength and put a finger on Jack’s lips.

  “Help,” he said again. “Need you to . . .”

  His words were interrupted by a terrible hacking cough, and more blood poured from his mouth.

  “C’mon Karl. We can still get you help.”

  “No, no, you don’t unnerstan’. You think . . . but . . . sons . . . and your kid . . .”

  He looked as though he wanted to say more but his words were again cut short by a terrible, rasping cough, and then a seizing up of his body, as though it was trying to expel something inside it, but the very act itself would be his last.

  He looked at Jack, tears rolling down his face, made a terrible sound from somewhere deep in his chest, and died.

  Jack looked at him, at the imploring look in his eyes. Was he trying to tell Jack something? Or was he just in shock, senseless?

  Now he would never know.

  Jack turned and hurried away.

  When he’d made it to the end of the parking lot, Wilson’s car exploded, blasting Karl Steinbach and a thousand hamburger patties throughout the purple sky, all the way across Burbank Boulevard.

  PART III

  TOTAL IMMUNITY

  36

  JACK AND OSCAR sat in the warmth of Charlie Breen’s Deck- house as the rain came down and the ocean waves crashed on the beach.

  Oscar held up his glass of Cuervo Gold.

  “Well, personally, though maybe we haven’t solved the case yet, here’s to the passing of Karl Steinbach, supreme creep and all-around bad guy.”

  Behind the bar, Charlie Breen lifted his usual celebratory glass of Newcastle.

  “Yeah, fuck that creep . . . Steinbach . . . Here’s to the good guys!”

  He clinked glasses with Oscar and both of them waited for Jack to join them. But Jack was slow in picking up his own glass of Sierra Nevada.

  “Maybe we ought to wait a bit to toast this one,” he said.

  Oscar gave him a skeptical look and put his arm around Jack’s shoulders.

  “I still don’t know why Steinbach wanted to get arrested. And when he was dying, he said something about his kids. It was like he was trying to tell me something. And Kevin. He mentioned my son.”

  Oscar shook his head in disbelief.

  “We’ll check on his kids. But maybe he just wanted to say good-bye to them. I mean, even Karl was human enough for that.”

  “I guess,” Jack said.

  “He was desperate,” Oscar said. “He was dying and he knew it. Didn’t he say, ‘I’m all broken up inside’?”

  Jack sighed and opened his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Yeah, but he mentioned Kevin, too. I don’t know . . .”

  Behind the bar, Charlie took a swig of his Newcastle. And shook his head.

  “Well, it’s none of my business, but I tend to believe Oscar here. Look, the guy is dying. In shock. Probably has no idea what he’s saying. And as far as Kevin goes, what the fuck can they do to him?”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “He just wanted to fuck with you one last time. And what better way than to bring up your son? ‘My reach extends beyond the grave!’”

  Jack laughed at Oscar’s Bela Lugosi impersonation.

  “All right. You’re both probably right. Still . . . There are a lot of unanswered questions.”

  He thought to himself once again of smiling, blond-haired Billy Chase. The case from so long ago . . . but still didn’t see how it could add up.

  And there was still Agent William Forrester.

  Though he still wasn’t sure why.

  “Okay,” Oscar said. “I can see you’re not convinced, so I’m going to give you the Oscar Hidalgo bread-and-butter fucking psychological test, used by all police headshrinkers in the known world.”

  Jack looked at Charlie and smiled.

  “Okay, do it.”

  Oscar looked at him hard, his hazel eyes not wavering.

  “What I am going to ask you is serious, okay? So I really want you to search your memory, and no fucking around.”

  “Yes, doctor,” Jack said.

  “Okay,” Oscar said. “Is there anything — anything at all in your past, either professionally or personally — that could come back to haunt you?”

  “Whoaaa!” Jack said. “You got all night?”

  “No, I am serious as a heart attack,” Oscar said. “Think it through.”

  “Personally, there’s a lot of shit, of course,” Jack said. “Stuff with my ex. Stuff going on right now with Julie. Maybe I didn’t treat either of them right. Maybe I was too involved with my work. Maybe I am, as certain women have insisted I am, a selfish male chauvinist pig.”

  “Okay,” Oscar said. “Knowing that, is there anything in any of that . . . that could have somehow crossed over to your professional life. Stuff that somehow Steinbach knew so that he and anyone he works with or for could use against you?”

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, Jackie. Think about it. We’ve been talking about something coming to get you, your son. So I figure it’s gotta be something coming from your past, right? So whatever it is, somebody must carry a big fucking grudge. So think . . . Is there something that you did to somebody, wittingly or unwittingly, that is so heavy that they’ve set up this whole fucking thing? I mean all of it. Steinbach getting arrested, giving you the evil eye, and setting up the chick . . . what’s her name, Maria?”

  “Alison Baines?”

  “Yeah, Alison Baines. And enlisting Tommy Wilson: the whole enchilada. In other words, somebody who is very fucking clever and hates your ass. Somebody who would like to bring you down. Plus, seriously fuck with your mind while they do it.”

  “Jesus!” Charlie said. “You’re talking about some kind of Svengali.”

  “Maybe I am. Come on, Jack. If it ain’t Karl Steinbach, then there’s gotta be someone who has it in for you. Somebody who is smart, has the juice to collect people like this, and get them to do this whole freaking operation.”

  Jack looked at Oscar and nodded his head as he smiled.

  “I can think of only one guy who has the brains, the juice, the opportunity,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Forrester,” Jack said. “William Forrester. Who knows we are on to him, also knows that we’re investigating him, and who hates my ass. Who would like me to fuck up professionally, and who would stop at nothing to bring me down, including making me worry about my son instead of doing my job. But does that really explain why Steinbach would say what he said about my son just before he died?”

  “It could,” Oscar said. “Maybe he was saying that Forrester was going to get your kid. Maybe he was saying that he was going to get his kids, too.”

  “Yeah, but why would Forrester want to hurt Kev?” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “But outside of him, I don’t know. There was this one case . . . a long time ago . . .”

  “Really?” Oscar said.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t add up. Not really. Still, if someone knew about it . . . I don’t know. You think it’s Forrester who is behind all this?”

  “Why not? He was in the bank deal with Blakely and Hughes. He got cut out of the money, and now he thinks you and I have the dough.”

  “And somebody we put into Witness Protection?”

  “I don�
�t understand that part of it yet,” Oscar said.

  “Me either. We need to find that guy. I still think it’ll all clear up once we do.”

  “Hey,” Charlie Breen said. “Can we drink our goddamned booze now? The stuff is turning into turpentine.”

  Jack and Oscar laughed, lifted their glasses, and drank. Jack felt little satisfaction in it.

  37

  AS THE THREE GOOD friends inside Charlie Breen’s Deckhouse clicked glasses and toasted the future capture of Supervising Agent William Forrester, Forrester himself sat outside in his 1992 Porsche Carrera. In his hand was his new Nikon camera, which he trained at the Deckhouse door.

  He had been clicking away for the past two hours, pictures of Jack and Oscar heading into Charlie Breen’s Deckhouse. And he would get more photos as they left the place. Maybe they’d even come out together. Maybe Charlie would do his man-hug thing with them all, which would be exactly what he needed to build his case.

  Of course, what would be even better would be recordings, wiretaps of their conversation. The thought of that made him smile. No doubt the three of them were figuring out some way to bring him down, make him take the fall for the missing money in the First City Bank robbery. Oh, yeah, he could almost hear smug Harper’s voice, probably going on about what a phony and what a jerk Supervising Agent William “Showbiz” Forrester was. How Forrester was the perfect person to take the fall, since everybody hated his ass anyway.

  Well, maybe it was true. Maybe he wasn’t Mr. Popularity in the Bureau, because maybe some of the other agents were freaking jealous of his connections, how he had been able to turn his FBI gig into serious-money consulting-producer gigs with Spielberg on his new cop/alien movie The Green Home . . . Yeah, they were all jealous of him, and why? Because they had this ancient FBI mentality . . . the Bureau against the world . . . yeah, we few, we incorruptible few, versus the sordid, compromised, and downright filthy outer world . . . an idea started back when Miss Blue Panties J. Edgar Hoover was in command. Well, Hoover had a reason to be paranoid, the dick-sucking, ass-eating, pillow- biting, ball-gown–wearing fag!

  But this was a new era. Hoover was long gone, and now the whole world (outside of the monks at the Bureau) was in the multitasking, schmooze-or-lose-universe! The idea that a man was guilty of a crime just because he had more ambition than another guy was sooooo over. The idea of being good at Just One Thing was so ’50s, so G-man, so black-and-white Anthony Mann movie world, when the rest of the world was running on computers and BlackBerrys.

  The thing now was to be good — no, great — at a lot of things. A man could be an agent, which was still way cool, but he could also translate that position into a new top position as a consultant to only the biggest director in the world, and this same agent could expand that position ever outward, commanding more and more respect, garnering more and more power. Agent, consultant, yes, beautiful, and then who knew, like other great cop entrepreneurs before him, maybe series creator (he already had the title: The Hard Guys!, which would be the continuing adventures of two FBI agents who were not only hard-asses against scum like the Neanderthal Muslims, but also guys who got it up with Hollywood-royalty actresses as well. Thus the subconscious hard guy hard-on reference, which would get every red-blooded kid up and ready to fight (but mainly to watch every week) and fuck like the loyal and obedient Americans they were. Yessir, there was no reason he couldn’t be a producer, none at all, but to get there you had to have contacts, and to have contacts you had to pay for lunch occasionally, and when you were taking Steve Spielberg or Bill Friedkin or David Milch (though he always paid) out there to lunchville, you had to have money. Yess! That was like soooo right. And if you were going to play the rich-and-cool producer guy, you had to have a decent car. Just imagine showing up to lunch with Steve S., and he’s driving his freaking Lexus or supercool Jag and you’re driving a Honda Accord! No, sorry, nada, won’t work, don’t play, homie!

  No, you had to have your own bread, baby.

  You had to show up in a car, not a piece of fucking tin.

  You also had to show up in a suit — not some FBI Shop at Syms, a freaking knockoff — but a real suit, custom made, from Savile Row, buddyroo.

  You had to spend the cash and get the real stitching. The button holes had to look right, or they would spot you as a Pretend Player and you were through.

  Thus, you needed a cash outlay to move forward, to reach your own human potential, and so, well, maybe you had to break a few eggs to make an omelet, after all.

  So he had taken the money and he had used it to finance his own little Liberation movement (as so many of the jerk-off movements the Left had out there in Sunni Land were called) . . .

  Yep, the Liberation of William Lindsay Forrester, and now the thing was he had to protect himself from scum like Jack Harper and his Tex-Mex partner, the burrito-eating slob, Oscar Hidalgo.

  Jesus, it wasn’t even fair that he had to protect himself against such scuzzballs. In the old days, the Bureau wouldn’t even have let in a Mexican bean-eating greaseball like Oscar.

  But that was how things had fallen apart.

  Nowadays, anyone could get in.

  Nowadays, if you could speak the language of the freaking Iraqis or knew two facts about Islam, you were in, you were golden.

  The good old boys, the guys who went back, the real American guys, were being pushed out by freaking greaseballs from the Mideast!

  Which was another reason he had to play hardball with Jack and Oscar, the evil bastards.

  And which was why he was watching them night and day now.

  And coming up with a plan.

  A plan that would get him free of their corrupt influence and let him move on up in the Bureau hierarchy and then . . . zap, right beyond it to showbiz riches.

  TV and movie Producerhood, major bucks, lunch every day at The Grill, and endless A-list actress pussy . . .

  But first things first.

  There were things to do, and let us not get the left foot tangled up with the right, lest we fall and break our face!

  Soon his enemies would be out of the way. ’Bye, ’bye, ’bye . . . And he would be soaring above the other fucking agents and

  their minuscule problems, high above them, and he’d come down, so soft and perfect a landing, right in Beverly Fucking Hills!

  38

  PAUL WAGNER HAD FOUND the perfect retirement job, head of Security at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. He loved working with the curator of the gardens and the other retired people who became tour guides and docents at the museum. As far as the work itself went . . . well, there wasn’t that much. Occasionally a drunken teenager or two would get stoned and try to climb over the electric fence, but the small shock in the wire usually sent them scurrying back to their cars.

  Really, there was little to worry about, and he’d found that after thirty years of working in the FBI it was a great thing to commune with nature every day, walk through the fantastic moonscape of the famous desert garden, appreciating the amazing variety of cacti planted there, some as long as eighty-five years ago.

  His favorite was the golden barrel cactus, the yellow-spined, spring-flowering cactus, which was thorny, and yet stunningly beautiful. It was, Wagner thought, a survivor, just like himself.

  And he’d had a lot to survive over the years.

  More than he could remember. After all, he was in his late sixties now, and he’d been shot, stabbed, his car blown up twice (he somehow survived without a scratch both times), and he’d received a mail bomb when he worked in Tucson. That one had almost gotten him. It had blown off three of the fingers on his right hand.

  But somehow God had been with him . . . and he’d survived it all.

  Survived and prospered and was still married to the same good woman, Ruth Ann, whom he’d been with for thirty-one years.

  They had two kids and three grandkids, and Wagner knew he was lucky.

  He had a good job, and that meant he didn’t have time to
think a whole lot. Think about how most of his life was over, and also how maybe he hadn’t always done the right thing. Not that he hadn’t tried to. But sometimes you wanted a guy so bad, maybe you pushed the envelope a little too much.

  Or maybe you did something even worse than that.

  Maybe you’d done something, taken a calculated chance to get a guy — a real bad guy — but maybe there were things you couldn’t foresee, things that, hell, nobody could foresee. They couldn’t blame you for that, could they?

  At least that’s what you thought when you did whatever it was that you did, that you were doing something that was just a little outside policy but sometimes, if you were going to be a really great agent, you had to go that way.

  And you thought that people would get it, and maybe, maybe, they would have, too, if certain things — things you couldn’t know, couldn’t foresee — that no one but God in Heaven (if there even was one, and after this particular case Wagner didn’t really see how there could be anymore) could possibly know.

  And how could they hold that against you?

  • • •

  Paul Wagner walked by some of the agave cacti and the terrestrial bromeliads, and looked at their amazing grotesque shapes and thought that maybe that was how his conscience looked.

  Twisted and spiky and defensive, just waiting for an attack from the outer world.

  But maybe it wasn’t the outer world that was going to get him.

  Maybe it was going to happen from inside.

  Maybe on a certain month and on a certain day of that certain month, every freakin’ year, memories would start to seep under the walls he’d built in his head.

  (Though sometimes, truth be told, he had to add a little fortification to the wall, in the form of a few shots of Maker’s Mark, and sometimes maybe more than a few.)