Fangs Out

by David Freed

  “I owe more than twenty large on that plane, Vinnie. I’ve got two notes against it. I settle with you for $20,000, I’m done flying. That means no more annual premium checks from me to you. This is the first claim I’ve ever filed. Ever. You’re telling me that doesn’t count for something?”

  Vinnie heaved a Godfather-size sigh and said he would see what he could do, like he was doing me a huge favor.

  After I got dressed, I settled back on the bed and tried to relax. I thought about checking in with Detective Rosario to find out whether Bunny the Human Doberman had been picked up by the authorities in Arizona, but I figured Rosario would’ve called if she had any news. I yawned, suddenly realizing that I was tired, and closed my eyes to catch a short nap. When I awoke, four hours had come and gone. The guesthouse was dark. I walked outside.

  Ryder was in the pool, floating on an air mattress, wearing a Little Mermaid bikini. Crissy was reclined on a padded chaise lounge in a white, one-piece tank suit, sipping what looked like a Bloody Mary, and perusing a copy of Millionaire magazine. Hub still wasn’t home, she said. He and Castle had gone to cocktails and dinner after golf. “Boys’ night out,” Crissy said with an irritated smirk.

  “I’m a girl,” Ryder said.

  “Yes, you are, Ryder,” Crissy said. “And you know what? You’re lucky, because you’ll be a woman someday, but men will always be boys. Silly little boys who have no idea what they’re doing half the time. Isn’t that right, Cordell?”

  There was an edge to her words, a definite bitterness, as if in the interim between her having made a pass at me and my having rejecting it, she’d concluded I was a ball-less jerk.

  “That’s right, Ryder,” I said. “All men are boys. And the trick for us boys is to always remember to think with our big heads, not our little ones.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means Mr. Logan thinks he’s being funny, but he’s not.”

  I gazed up at the night sky and tried to change the subject.

  “See the Big Dipper up there, Ryder?”

  Ryder floated on her back with her twig-like arms outstretched and said nothing, rotating her wrists and making circular splashing movements as if her hands were pectoral fins.

  “Well, anyway, if you follow those two stars,” I said, pointing, “they’ll take you straight to Polaris, the North Star. That way, you’ll always know which direction to go.”

  “Ryder has eye problems,” Crissy said curtly. “Congenital stationary night blindness. She was born with it. Everything looks blurry to her in low light.”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it. Must be a rare condition.”

  “Only one out of every two hundred thousand people gets it.”

  Many of life’s greatest gifts can only be enjoyed in the dark. The aurora borealis. The lights of Paris. The saliva-inducing way roasted pig looks in the glow of Hawaiian tiki torches. I felt sorry for Hub Walker’s granddaughter, all she would miss in her life.

  “One more reason Ryder’s so special,” I said.

  Ryder said nothing.

  My stomach was making noises. I checked my watch: half-past suppertime. Crissy seemed in no mood to offer me dinner, and even I am not so presumptuous as to go foraging through other people’s refrigerators without an invitation. I told her I was heading out to grab some chow, and would be back afterward. Hopefully Hub would be home by then.

  She sullenly sipped her drink, read her magazine, and said nothing.

  THE VILLAGE of La Jolla at night is no cheap eats central. Unless your hankering is for coq au vin or wild mushroom raviolis in port wine sauce with a sautéed side of pomposity, you’re pretty much out of luck.

  Where’s a taco shack when you need it?

  El Indio still had to be open at that hour. It was fifteen minutes away, but definitely worth the drive. I wheeled the Escalade south onto Coast Boulevard and accelerated to something under Mach.

  Bent as I was on my craving for something refried and wrapped in a tortilla, I didn’t notice the headlights at first, creeping up on my tail. I switched lanes. The lights did, too, so close behind me that they disappeared from view altogether, leaving only an ominous, dark presence in my wake. The Escalade’s illuminated speedometer registered close to fifty in what I assumed was a thirty mile-an-hour zone. The guy behind me had to be Johnny Law. My second traffic stop in three days. Damn.

  A real Buddhist is supposed to be kind and considerate, even to traffic cops. I decided I’d save him the trouble of firing up his lights and siren; I pulled over without being prompted. He followed, aiming a high-intensity beam at my side-view mirror, blinding me to his approach, just as his fellow officer had done two nights earlier when Savannah and I were still on speaking terms. I turned on my dome light and put my hands on the top of the steering wheel to assure him that I posed no threat to him. But in heeding the Buddha and the Golden Rule, I forgot Rule Number One of the Official Special Operators Handbook, highlighted in boldface and printed all in caps on page one: NEVER LET YOUR GUARD DOWN OR YOU’LL HAVE ONLY YOURSELF TO BLAME WHEN THEY FIND YOUR SORRY ASS IN A DITCH.

  The passenger door was flung open and into the Escalade climbed Bunny the Human Doberman with his .50-caliber Desert Eagle, the muzzle of which he jammed in my right ear.

  “Drive,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

  “You mind if we stop at El Indio? I’m seriously jonesing for a burrito.”

  The blinding, high-intensity beam reflected in my side-view mirror had come from an LED flashlight like the kind police officers carry. Only in this case, the flashlight belonged to Daniel ‘Li’l Sinister’ Zuniga, Bunny’s cousin, who came hustling up to the driver’s side of the Escalade with the flashlight in his left hand and a Mac-10 submachine pistol in his right, which he proceeded to level at my head.

  “You got him?” Li’l Sinister said, panting, sweat pouring off his pudgy face.

  “Get back in your car!” Bunny yelled at his cousin.

  I watched out of the corner of my eye in the side mirror as Li’l Sinister hustled back to his ride.

  “I’m not gonna tell you again,” Bunny said, pressing the barrel of his gun into me even harder. “Drive.”

  Twelve

  “Turn left here,” Bunny said.

  I turned left.

  “Make a right at the next corner.”

  I made a right, kicking myself at having left my revolver back in Rancho Bonita.

  “Turn left at the stop sign.”

  We were meandering through the hills of residential La Jolla with Bunny’s pistol aimed at my head. He glanced back every few seconds to make sure the only vehicle following us was the one driven by his cousin, Li’l Sinister. I thought about making a move, but I was worried Enterprise might charge extra if I returned the rented Escalade bloodstained. Any heroics would have to wait.

  “You obviously have no idea the kind of gas mileage these things get,” I said, “because if you did, we wouldn’t be driving around in circles, expanding our carbon footprint. We’d be driving directly to wherever it is we’re going and protecting the earth’s delicate environment.”

  “I don’t give two shits about the environment.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Go left here.”

  La Jolla Scenic Drive South became Soledad Park Road. To the south, the skyline of downtown San Diego shimmered like a jewel in the night. We drove uphill, past a sign that said “Mt. Soledad Memorial Park” and into a cul-de-sac at the center of which stood a concrete Latin cross nearly forty feet tall, flanked by two small parking lots north and south. A red Honda Civic was parked in the southern lot, its windows fogged. Probably a high school kid and his date, enjoying more than the view.

  “Over there,” Bunny said, directing me to the unoccupied lot on the park’s north side.

  I maneuvered the Escalade as ordered into a parking space and switched off the ignition. Li’l Sinister pulled up on my left, driving a primer gray Chevy Caprice w
ith low-profile tires and shiny, gangsta-style rims.

  “Caught you on the news,” Bunny said contemptuously. “You must be a pretty shitty pilot, you know that?”

  “We all have our bad days.”

  “You’re gonna fly us to Mexico.”

  The depth of his illogic was hard to comprehend. “I suck as a pilot and you want me to fly you to Mexico? That’s like saying, ‘I’m planning to go on a cruise. I wonder if the captain of the Titanic is still available?’ ”

  “Like you said, asshole, we all got our bad days.”

  “Why not just drive to Mexico, Bunny? It’s thirty miles away.”

  “Why? Because every cop from T.J. to El Paso is looking for me. Because they got surveillance cameras at the border. You don’t think I don’t know how the game’s played?”

  I was about to explain how the use of double negatives is never a good thing grammatically, but then Li’l Sinister jumped in behind me, breathing hard. “We’re cool,” he said, slamming the door. “Ain’t nobody on us.”

  Bunny was giving me his best crazy, mad dog-killer look. “First thing in the morning, you’re driving us to the airport. You’re gonna rent a plane, and you’re gonna fly us to Mexico. You say no, I put a bullet in you right where you sit. I’m a wanted man. I don’t give a damn at this point.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t enjoy some real Mexican food, but I have a better idea: why not give up? It won’t matter where I fly you, Bunny. They’d find you. I mean, let’s be honest, you guys aren’t exactly Butch and Sundance.”

  Li’l Sinister jabbed the barrel of his Mac-10 into the back of my neck. “I say we cap his sorry ass right now, dawg.”

  Bunny ran his left hand across his mouth, still pointing his pistol at me. “I didn’t kill that bitch,” he said.

  “Then why run?”

  “Jesus, are you that stupid? I’m half-black, half-Mexican. The Navy boots my ass out on some bullshit assault beef, this Bollinger chick mumbles my name before she checks out, and you want to know why I’m running?”

  “How is it you know she said your name?”

  “None of your business, puta, that’s how,” Li’l Sinister said, jabbing me again with his gun barrel.

  His act was getting old real fast.

  “Ain’t none of my DNA in her goddamn apartment, I guarantee you that,” Bunny said.

  “And you know this how?”

  “ ’Cuz I was never in there, that’s how.”

  Bunny’s version of the story was that a distraught Janet Bollinger had called his boss, defense attorney Charles Dowd, a few days after Dorian Munz was executed to say she couldn’t take it anymore. Whatever “it” was, Bollinger wouldn’t say over the phone, only that she needed to get something off her chest concerning the testimony she’d given in Munz’s trial, something that had been weighing on her for a long time. Dowd then instructed Bunny to go interview the woman.

  “And she just happened to live in the same building as Li’l Lunatic, here?”

  “That ain’t my name, dawg,” Li’l Sinister said from the backseat.

  “Shut up, Daniel,” Bunny barked.

  Li’l Sinister flapped his lips in protest like a kid who’d just been admonished for chewing gum in class.

  “I didn’t know she lived in the same building as him, OK, ’til I went down there to talk to her, like Mr. Dowd told me to,” Bunny said.

  “So you go down there to just talk. Small world. Then what?”

  “I knock on the door. No answer, so I go ’round back. Take me a look-see in the window. She’s laying there, blood all over the place. My cousin, he’s up on the second floor, in his apartment. So I go up there. Tells me he didn’t see squat. He’s on probation—agg assault.”

  “They knocked it down to a misdemeanor.”

  “Shut your mouth up, Daniel! I ain’t gonna tell you again!”

  Li’l Sinister exhaled and crossed his arms.

  Bunny went on. “I’m thinking the cops, they ain’t gonna buy me saying I had nothin’ to do with it. They gonna put two and two together, come up with five thousand—”

  “Like they always do,” Li’l Sinister chimed in.

  “Like they always do,” Bunny said, “and one-eighty-seven both our asses. So we split, ditch my ride and jump in his. Trying to buy ourselves time, come up with a game plan.”

  “And that plan is, what, ‘Let’s kidnap a pilot and make him fly us out of the country?’ That’s not a plan, Bunny. That’s a ticket to life without the possibility of parole.”

  “You gonna fly us down there, yes or no?”

  “No.”

  His nostrils flared. “Yes or no, asshole?”

  “No. Final answer.”

  “That,” he said, pressing the barrel of his pistol to my forehead, “is the wrong fucking answer. Nobody grabs my balls and gets away with it.”

  “If I could make a suggestion before you decide to do anything felony stupid?” I gazed deliberately over his shoulder and nodded. “You might want to discuss things first with those nice police officers over there.”

  He whipped his head around reflexively in the direction of my sightline, as I knew Li’l Sinister would do behind me. I bent Bunny’s gun hand back at an angle it was never designed for, snapped his wrist with my right hand and smashed him in the face with his own pistol. I pivoted in the same motion, reaching between the front seats while driving the clawed fingers of my left hand into Li’l Sinister’s throat with just enough force to make him wish he was dead. The kid got off a short burst from his submachine pistol that went high and wide through the roof of the Escalade before his lights went out.

  Bunny was out cold, leaned against the passenger door, blood trickling from the bridge of his nose.

  “My bad. There were no cops. Must’ve been wishful thinking on my part.”

  Tires screeched. I glanced over as the red Civic parked in the south lot raced away, date night ruined.

  Sorry, kids.

  I scooped up Bunny’s pistol and his cousin’s Mac-10, and counted five bullet holes stitched in the Escalade’s roof. I had no clue how I was going to explain them to Enterprise. Then I called Detective Rosario.

  LI’L SINISTER hunkered silently in the backseat of a San Diego Police Department black and white. I stood with Rosario and Lawless watching paramedics load Bunny the Human Doberman into an ambulance. He was screaming how it’s against the rules of human decency to handcuff a man with a fractured wrist and broken nose.

  “Stop whining like a little girl,” Rosario said to him, “and be a man.”

  “Eat me, bitch!”

  Rosario shrugged him off. “I’m a cop,” she said to me, smiling. “You get used to it.”

  Lawless was convinced that with the arrests of Bunny and Li’l Sinister, the investigation of Janet Bollinger’s homicide was all but complete. There was little left to do, he said, beyond tying up a few loose threads before presenting the case, heavy with circumstantial evidence, to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “What was their motive?”

  Rosario and Lawless both looked at me.

  “What reason would these two clowns have had to kill Janet Bollinger?”

  “You’re a pilot, Logan, and obviously not a very good one, considering you nearly got us killed,” Lawless said. “How about leaving professional law enforcement work to the professionals?”

  “Janet Bollinger’s purse was missing from her apartment, along with a few other valuables,” Rosario said. “I’m sure we’ll find things when we execute search warrants.”

  “Bunny said he had nothing to do with it.”

  “Wow,” Lawless smirked. “An innocent suspect. That’s gotta be a first.”

  I told the detectives what Bunny told me, how Janet Bollinger had telephoned attorney Dowd to say she had to get something off her chest about her testimony during the Munz trial, and how Dowd had dispatched Bunny to go meet with her.

 
Lawless checked his watch like I was keeping him from more important duties. “What’s your point, Mr. Logan?”

  “My point is that maybe you should go talk to Dowd, the attorney.”

  “Maybe we just will.”

  He walked back to his unmarked cruiser while a tow truck pulled into the parking lot and backed up to Li’l Sinister’s Chevy. The truck driver hopped out in grimy coveralls and began hooking up the car.

  “How’s your plane?” Rosario said.

  I pantomimed crocodile tears. She smiled sympathetically.

  “You know, one thing I’m wondering,” Rosario said, “is how these two jokers were able to track you down.”

  “Bunny knew I was doing some work for Hub Walker. He digs up Walker’s address, establishes eyes-on, then waits until he thinks he has an advantage before engaging the target. I made it too easy for him, spaced out on my counter-surveillance measures.”

  “How do you know counter-surveillance measures?”

  “I watch too much TV.”

  Her sideways look said she didn’t know whether to believe me or not.

  “Well, anyway,” Rosario said, “I’m just glad you got ’em. Makes my job easier. Flying out to Arizona would’ve been a giant time suck.”

  “One’s allotted life span is not disallowed the time one spends in the sky.”

  “Heavy. You just make that up?”

  “Me? Nah, I read it in a men’s room at the San Francisco airport.”

  Rosario smiled and stroked the side of her neck. “You married, Logan?”

  “Was.”

  “Me, too. Twice.” There was a pause, then she said, “Been forever since I got laid.”

  Two offers to get busy with two different women in the same night. The last time that happened to me was . . . well, I couldn’t remember the last time. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbor fleeting fantasies of spending the evening with a woman stripped naked down to her badge and shoulder holster. But I had a lot on my mind. Too much, in fact. I shoved my hands in my back pockets and watched as a twin-engine King Air flew by, pretending that Rosario’s invitation, like the airplane, had gone right over my head.