The Third Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery

by Hendricks, Gay

  “Break a few rules? Is that your definition of what he’s up to?”

  She sank into her pillow. Her eyelids were at half-mast, and I knew my time was almost up.

  “Don’t you worry about me and Mr. Morales. They got crooks in the White House that eat guys like Chaco for breakfast.” She lifted a forefinger, pointing vaguely. “That’s where I’m going, Ten,” she intoned, like a stoned seer of the future. “Sacramento first, then D.C. You’re looking at the second governor of California who will make it to the White House. Morales is nothing. Just another blow job, so I can live long enough do the real work God’s got planned for me.”

  I heard a brisk knock. Dr. Gomez stepped inside. “Almost time,” he said to Bets. She barely nodded. He caught my eye and beckoned toward the door.

  “You’re wanted,” he said. His mouth twitched strangely.

  I stepped out the door and into the point-blank range of a pair of guns at the end of a pair of extended arms. One pistol, the Heckler, belonged to the security guard; the other, an older but equally deadly Beretta 92, to Mark Goodhue.

  Gomez withdrew, closing the door softly behind me.

  A cop can always tell whether a person aiming a gun is an amateur or a professional. The “tell” is the steadiness of the shooter’s hand. The security guard’s grip was stable as a rock, and the quiet gleam in his gaze informed me he had experience pulling the trigger and it was an experience he’d enjoyed.

  In contrast, Goodhue’s two-plus pounds of pistol fluttered and waved like a flag in a fickle wind.

  Police Academy training teaches a variety of complex physical maneuvers that should work when faced with a close-range, armed perp. Should is one thing. Reality is another. I’d learned the hard way that the wisest way to disarm a dangerous shooter was with my mouth. In this situation, though, I was hampered by the fact that the expert shot and I were fluent in different languages. Where was Carlos when I needed him?

  The language barrier was the least of my worries. Goodhue concerned me more. He’d probably never pointed anything heavier than a Montblanc pen before now. Berettas aren’t light, and some 92s don’t have manual safeties.

  The gun waggled in the general direction of my head.

  Criminals aren’t used to the truth. It confuses them. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Goodhue,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Could you point your Beretta somewhere else, before you shoot me in the face?”

  Goodhue had an MBA and a designer suit, but he was still a criminal. He blinked, as if suddenly realizing how much his gun hand was wobbling.

  He said something in Spanish to the guard, who stepped back two feet and raised his second hand to steady his first. The new angle gave him a better direct shot. Goodhue lowered his own arm with a visible sigh of relief. He reached a hand to massage his shoulder muscle before replacing gun-wielding with a more familiar weapon of choice: honcho arrogance.

  “Representative McMurtry and I are deeply disappointed that you are meddling in our affairs again,” he sniffed. “Against explicit orders.”

  I wasn’t all that happy at the moment, either. The only thing that gave me cheer was that nobody had frisked me. I could feel the comforting touch of my pal and partner, the Wilson Supergrade, tucked alongside my rib cage.

  “Who told?” I said.

  He jerked his head toward the guard. “He called me in town. Said there was some Chinese-looking guy here. I knew right away.”

  He turned to the guard and fired off another sentence in Spanish. I may not speak the language, but I know bloodlust when I see it. The guard practically licked his lips, as his hand tightened on his weapon. So Goodhue was giving him my killing orders.

  For the third time this week, I was in the company of a stone-cold shooter, with a target on my chest. The guard jerked his chin toward the door. I stayed put.

  Goodhue said to me, “Don’t worry. He’s just taking you to the helicopter.”

  Right.

  Goodhue turned, as if to walk away.

  “Mr. Goodhue?”

  He stopped. Faced me, his eyebrows raised.

  “Why? Why Chaco Morales?”

  If he talked, I knew I really was dead. But at least I’d die knowing a little more about the nature of greed. Goodhue’s look danced between smugness and pity. “You haven’t been around politics much, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You ought to hang around Washington for a while. Or even Sacramento. You deal with those guys for a few years, and you’re grateful to do business with a guy like Chaco. At least he doesn’t waste your time pretending he’s not a crook.”

  “That’s your justification?”

  “You can’t possibly be that naive, Detective Norbu. Hell, no. My justification is the same as everyone else’s. I want to be rich, and I want to be powerful. I was just an entrepreneurial peon with an MBA, trying to get a small medical supplies business off the ground, when I stumbled onto Chuy Dos’s cleaning-service model. We met, and we hit it off. The more he told me, the more I liked what I was hearing. He and his partner were sitting on a gold mine with this concierge cleaning–slash–drug delivery scheme they’d hatched, and I told them so. They had a database of a couple thousand wealthy people around L.A. who didn’t mind bending the law to get their special treats. It was a niche opportunity of a lifetime. I pitched the idea of using the same model to locate and satisfy transplant candidates. Put together a business plan, combined forces, formed a new company under their umbrella one, and voilà, here we are. We’ve got over four hundred people on the waiting list. Once we’re up and running, we’re talking half a billion a year. Net.”

  Just saying the numbers made him shine with glee.

  “And the organ suppliers?”

  “That’s Chuy’s end of the business. I don’t ask. But gangbangers are vermin, Tenzing. You show me someone who says otherwise, and I’ll show you a liar. Mr. Morales is a generous man. The family of every dead banger gets five thousand in cash. It’s a triple win.”

  “How does Bets feel about that?”

  “Bets doesn’t know the details. She doesn’t want to. She’s got long-term political plans, and so does our PAC, New Americans for Freedom. With a rising star as our political mouthpiece, one who literally owes her life to us, we can keep all our business models nice and lucrative. I’m sorry, did I say triple? I should have said, home run!”

  “All very impressive,” I said.

  You’re a stain on this little patch of the universe. I’d like to …

  Settle down, I thought. You need this stain to keep talking.

  “So, what about the other thing, the heat under the building? What’s that about?”

  He frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “What are you guys storing down there?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  This, I wasn’t expecting. Now what? I decided to rattle his cage. “The foundation showed up hot on a satellite heat scan. A drone confirmed it.”

  Goodhue reddened. “What are you … ?” His voice climbed the scale. “What satellite? What drone?”

  I held up my hands, but kept pushing. “Sorry, I assumed you knew. Homeland Security picked up unusual heat readings somewhere around here.”

  “Homeland Security? Jesus Christ!” Goodhue swayed from foot to foot, his right fist clenching and unclenching.

  The guard chose this moment to pull out a cigarette and light it, one-handed, while still keeping his pistol trained on my heart.

  Goodhue snapped at him. “You can’t smoke in here! It’s a goddamn hospital!” Apparently the tension was getting to him. Good.

  The guard removed the cigarette from his mouth. He didn’t put it out, though.

  “You want to see heat?” he said. “I show you.” So his English was serviceable.

  I was vibrating with eagerness to get something into motion. In addition to the tension of being held at gunpoint, my muscles were shi
vering with the chill. The temperature had lowered to the point of human refrigeration.

  The guard led us back through the building, opened the front door, and waved me out with the gun barrel. Emerging into the dry Baja heat was like diving into a pizza oven. The shock of scalding air caused me to exhale forcefully. Behind me, Goodhue yelped.

  The guard waved his cigarette around. “Heat,” he said, and laughed harshly.

  Everybody’s a comedian, as Bill loves to say.

  But we were finally outside, and I sensed a small shift in my survival odds.

  “Sorry, but I’m melting here. I gotta unzip this,” I told Goodhue. I calmly unzipped my coveralls.

  The guard lifted the cigarette to his lips for a long-awaited drag.

  Now!

  I dropped and rolled, hitting the ground sideways and coming up on my knees with my Wilson in my right hand. The split-second the guard’s brain took to abandon the pleasures of addiction for his duties as a killer was all I needed. I dodged left. He fired and missed. I got my own shot off as I crashed into Goodhue with my left shoulder, taking us both down. My ears were screaming from the shots, but I didn’t hear any human screams added to the mix.

  I pressed my Wilson hard in Goodhue’s heaving chest, pinning him with my knees as my other hand pocketed his Beretta, after making sure the safety was, indeed, engaged. I checked on the guard. He was on his back, head turned toward me, eyes wide with surprise and leaking life. I’d hit him lower than I’d intended, square in the navel. He was illustrating what they say about gut shots: You’re already dead, but your head don’t know it.

  I waited for the nausea, the self-disgust to kick in. Nothing.

  I felt … nothing.

  I watched with as much reverence as I could muster, given my numb state, and the fact that I was pressing a steel barrel into another man’s chest. The light slowly left the guard’s eyes. Om mani padme hum. I said the words, but I didn’t feel them, either.

  I swung back to Goodhue, who appeared appropriately shaken. His expensive suit was blooming stains of sweat, and his skin had taken on a greenish tint.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “What? What?” He pulled his eyes away from the corpse and focused on me. Fury flared across his face, and his lips drew back as he swiped his slick brow with the back of a fist. Then he remembered I was the one with the gun. He visibly retracted his fangs, like a viper. I’d never seen a person so angry and yet so contained—an explosive combination.

  “We need to check the foundation,” I said.

  “I’m not doing a goddamn thing until you get that gun off me.”

  I considered his words. Rage or not, I wasn’t too worried about Goodhue jumping me. I’d put my Police Academy moves up against any he might have learned in an MBA program.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t a complete idiot. I compromised by lowering my .38, while grabbing his right wrist and yanking his arm high, behind his back. I made him bend down with me, as I disarmed the dead guard, sliding his pistol in my empty holster. I took his cuffs, keys, and cell phone as well. I was loaded down with all the extra artillery, but I wasn’t going to complain.

  I herded Goodhue toward the perimeter of the building.

  “You sure you want to do it this way?” he muttered. “I could put a lot of money in your pocket. Just give me a number.”

  “The magic number is zero,” I said.

  We moved slowly around the perimeter in a counterclockwise direction. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. Every time I saw a crack or an imperfection, I made Goodhue kneel next to me to inspect, but the walls and foundation, while blemished, were solid.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I had service again.

  But when I pulled it out, I was holding the guard’s clunky flip phone in my hand.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” I ordered Goodhue. He nodded.

  I fished my phone out as well and brought up Gus’s number. I called, using the guard’s working phone. Answer. Please answer.

  “Agent Gustafson. Who is this?”

  “Gus,” I said. “It’s me, Tenzing.”

  A pause. Then, “What the fuck, Ten?”

  I’d met official Gus and tipsy Gus. This was my first encounter with angry Gus.

  “Sorry I couldn’t call earlier, my …”

  “Shut the hell up and start talking!” she yelled, illogically, to my mind.

  “Is there a problem?” I kept my tone neutral, my eye on Goodhue.

  Her voice rose. Soon Mark would be able to hear every word.

  “Problem? I specifically told you not to go back there! I’m starting to think you’re as full of crap as everybody else! Or maybe you’re in on this whole thing!”

  I said, “No. You’ve got it all wrong.”

  And then my phone went dead. Or maybe she hung up on me. Either way, the connection was lost.

  We continued around the back and up the other side. Except for a single safety door—an obvious emergency exit from the building—nothing, nothing, a whole lot of nothing.

  We arrived once again at the still body of the guard, his own patch of universe now darkened by a spreading stain of blood. I was running out of time.

  Where was the underground entrance? The method of ingress?

  I mentally riffled through last night’s conversation with Gus and remembered her final piece of intelligence, the second anomaly: a reinforced foundation measuring slightly bigger than its building, a cut that extended a dozen meters beyond its cover.

  I squinted at the sky to get my directional bearings. The angled sun, a god of hellfire, now hurled its hot rays at a slant. Mid-afternoon—Bets was halfway through her procedure. I hoped Kestrel’s pill-fueled hands were holding steady.

  I dragged Goodhue over to the west wall of the building, calculating. A dozen or so meters, that translated to about 16 yards.

  “I’m dizzy,” Goodhue whined. “I think I have heat stroke.”

  I ignored him. Using a grid formation, as if looking for a missing body in brush, I paced back and forth along the area perpendicular to the wall, scuffing at the loose topsoil, keeping Goodhue as close to me as my own hot breath.

  Midway through my search, I found it—a flatter feel to the earth, something man-made camouflaged beneath the topsoil. Crude, but effective. Unless you were right on top of it and looking for it, you wouldn’t know the change in terrain was there. I scraped away at the sandy soil, panting in the sweltering heat.

  “Dig, you bastard,” I snarled at Goodhue.

  He applied his manicured hands to the task.

  We slowly uncovered a wide plank, slightly recessed within a concrete frame. A triangle of small holes had been drilled into one corner of the thick wood.

  “Any ideas?” I said.

  “They look like finger-holds,” Goodhue answered, grudgingly. “You know, like with bowling balls.” He illustrated. So the man wasn’t completely useless after all.

  I met Goodhue’s eyes.

  “Okay. I’m going to lift this, and you’re going to help me. Otherwise, and this is a promise, I’ll cuff you to a cactus and leave you out here to roast. Understand?”

  He nodded.

  I squatted, fitting two fingers and a thumb into the holes.

  “Brace me,” I said.

  He did. The wood didn’t budge.

  “Again.”

  I inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled again, taking the scorched desert air deep into my lungs. I filled every cell and sinew of my body with intention. I pressed against Goodhue, while pulling upward with all my arm strength.

  Move.

  The cover yielded. Sweat poured down my face. I shifted the raised plank sideways and slipped one hand under it, then both. If Goodhue had been thinking, this would have been a good time to run. But his thrill of the hunt must have kicked in. My muscles were screaming as I lifted and shifted, lifted and shifted, enough to finally expose a set of steep concrete steps leading downward, straight into the shadowed bowels o
f Mother Earth.

  I let the wooden covering drop to one side and fell against Goodhue. We stared at the opening, catching our breath.

  “Now what?” Goodhue said.

  “Now, I go look.” I grabbed his arm. “We go look, I mean.”

  He shook his head.

  “Not me,” he said.

  “Yes, you. You think I’m leaving you out here alone?”

  He started to shake. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do that.” He was panting like a thirsty dog, and his eyes darted from side to side. He clutched at his throat.

  “Claustrophobia,” he gasped.

  Great. Now what? It didn’t seem like the right time or place for implementing exposure therapy. I looked around. My eyes lit on the EMS chopper, waiting patiently nearby on its helipad.

  Five minutes later, Goodhue was cuffed and strapped tight to the helicopter gurney, Sam and the Heckler keeping watch, and I was feeling my way down, down, down into my first deeply buried facility.

  This was like my recurring lucid dream about the tower, only in reverse. I descended a good dozen steps until I reached a concrete floor. The air was as dark and stale as you’d expect in a desert bunker, although at least 20 degrees cooler than the outside. That put the temperature in the 80s.

  I couldn’t see much, even after my eyes adjusted. My only flashlight was my iPhone app, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. I held the small square of light high and slowly turned, playing it over the hollow, cement-walled space. The room was maybe 1,200 square feet total. Big, for a tomb. I stepped to my right first.

  Metal shelves again, a wall of them, holding thousands of handhelds, antennas, radios, repeaters, batteries, radio bases, and heavy flip phones like the one in my pocket—enough to connect a small city. I had found Chaco’s personal Radio Shack: telecommunications central.

  I moved to the next wall of shelving. Ah. The armaments department: AK-47s; belt-rounds of ammo; rifles, handguns, and more rounds of ammo; Barrett 99 Bolt Actions; Cugir semiautomatics; Romarm WASR-10s; Glocks, Berettas, and a dozen more submachine guns; night-vision goggles; heavy body armor—bulletproof vests and protective helmets. Even a row of fragmentation hand grenades, the size and shape of small melons but devastatingly deadly. This portion of the underground storehouse was a veritable Superstore of supplies for an army of survivalists. I wondered how much of this stash traced back to the Fast and Furious debacle.