by Brad Smith
“You still got the cylinder?” Brownie asked.
“I’m looking at it right now,” Hoffman said. Yuri was watching and listening.
“Well, somebody’s on your trail, and they’re fucking serious.”
“Who?”
“The original owner. Or one of them.”
Hoffman considered this. “You at the marina?”
“Yeah.”
“On my way.”
He hung up the phone and turned to Yuri. “We’re going to have to postpone this. I got something to take care of.”
“Wait one dang minute here,” Yuri said. “You are suddenly going to vamoose? You show me this, and tell me story about pure cocaine from Colombia, and now you leave? Are you cock-teasing me, Mr. Hoffman?”
“No,” Hoffman said. “There’s not a problem.”
“But you get phone call just now and you are talking about cylinder,” Yuri said. “This I know because I am eavesdropping. And I hear you say who? And then you say you are on your way. How do I know you did not just receive other offer? Tell me how do I know this?”
“It’s nothing like that.” Hoffman closed the trunk lid. “Just somebody sticking their fucking nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
Yuri thought for a moment. “You know what, Mr. Hoffman? I did not go looking for you. You came looking for me. But now I think your business is my business. I think I will stick to you like glue. Until we see what we have here.” He paused, glancing at Soup. “I think we are a team, the three of us.”
Hoffman wasn’t happy with the new partnership, but the Russian made it clear that it wasn’t up for discussion.
“Ain’t it funny how things turn round, Hoffman,” Soup said. “Bottom rail on top now.”
* * *
Brownie’s right ear was still attached to his head, but that was the only positive he could take from the incident. He’d gone to emergency and had things stitched back together, after concocting a story about a mast from a catamaran falling on him. The doctor who had sewn him up, a young woman who had been summoned to the hospital from some social event, questioned the story but only briefly. It seemed as if she didn’t believe it for a minute, but also that she didn’t care. The fact that Brownie had a noseful of dried blood and was reeking of scotch and fear-induced sweat might have affected her bedside manner. She put in forty-odd stitches, taped some gauze over the wound, and returned to her party.
Brownie was back at work the next day, running the tackle shop and managing his pain with aspirin and vodka. Before opening the shop he’d spent a good half hour cleaning his own blood from the glass counter, the carpet, the concrete wall, and even the front of the safe. The woman’s fingerprints would be in evidence all around the shop, he knew, but he didn’t need them. He knew exactly who she was. If he wanted her arrested, all he had to do was call the police. But the police would want to know why the woman had attacked him. Brownie knew the answer to that too, but he didn’t feel like telling it to the local cops. So he called Dick Hoffman instead.
Hoffman showed up a little past noon, with a large grinning cowboy and a shifty-eyed skinny black kid who was either an addict or a refugee from some ghetto hell or both. Mudcat McClusky was sitting there when the trio arrived, finishing his lunch. He had a dab of mustard on his nose, the result of attempting to ingest in two gulps a foot-long hot dog from the carnival across the road. When Brownie saw Hoffman and his little crew walking across the parking lot, he told Mudcat to wipe off his nose and go check the cash box at the boat launch.
Mudcat met the three men as he was going out and they were coming in, and he slowed at the sight of them, glancing back toward Brownie before leaving; Mudcat was a nosy man and it was clear he wasn’t happy about being dismissed. When he had quizzed Brownie earlier about his ear, Brownie had snapped at him and advised him to leave it alone.
When Hoffman entered, he walked directly over to Brownie, standing behind the counter. The cowboy commanded the middle of the room while the junkie held back by the door. Hoffman indicated the bandaged ear.
“They did that?” Hoffman asked.
“Forty fucking stitches’ worth,” Brownie said.
“And it was Parson?”
Brownie didn’t reply for the moment. He looked at the cowboy, who was standing spread-legged, still smiling at God knows what. Maybe he was an imbecile. If he was, why was Hoffman traveling with a druggie and an idiot? Whatever his reasons, Brownie would have preferred he had left them both outside. He was embarrassed enough to tell Hoffman the story, let alone tell it in front of a couple of strangers.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t Parson. Somebody working for him, is my guess.”
“Well, who?” Hoffman asked.
Brownie had a vodka and orange juice tucked down below the register, out of sight of any customers, and he reached for it now and took a drink. “It was the girl,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Hoffman didn’t hear. “What?”
Brownie looked up, his lips tight. “It was the girl,” he said, a little louder this time.
“The girl?” Hoffman repeated. “What girl? Wait a minute—you mean the fucking girlfriend? From the boat that night?”
“Yeah.”
“How the fuck did that happen? She’s back running with Parson?”
Brownie thought for a moment he’d say she hadn’t been alone. But he knew he’d look even worse if the truth came out. And it would. “She got the jump on me,” he said. “I’m half in the bag, and she’s got … a fucking machete or something. I’m locking up and she jumped me from behind.”
“What did she want?”
Brownie took another drink. He’d gone through half a quart of Absolut and it wasn’t one o’clock yet. “Asking about the cylinder. I told you on the phone.”
“Asking what?”
“Who found it. Where. All that shit. What I want to know is—how the fuck does she even know about it? Why don’t I get a heads-up? Maybe I could have been ready for her. I never knew the fucking bitch was even out of jail. Is Parson behind this?” He stopped, staring defiantly at Hoffman. “Lot of questions here, Dick.”
Hoffman ignored them all. “Did she ask what happened to it?”
Brownie exhaled heavily. “What do you think?”
“What did you tell her?”
Brownie shook his head, disgusted at what he’d done, and pissed off that he was being forced to admit it.
“What did you tell her?” Hoffman asked again.
Brownie exploded. “What do you want me to say? That I spilled my guts? Well, I did. She was cutting my ear off! Did you somehow miss that part? She was cutting my fucking ear off!”
“What did you say?”
“I told her. All right? I told her you took the cylinder.”
“My name?”
Brownie had another drink, his nose in the plastic cup like he was inhaling the contents. He nodded his head.
“That’s nice, Brownie,” Hoffman said. “That’s real nice.”
The cowboy spoke for the first time. “I suggest you cut off his tongue too,” he said to Hoffman. “To prevent further indiscretions.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Brownie snapped.
“I am associate of Mr. Hoffman,” the cowboy said. He smiled. “In charge of tongue removals. If he so wishes.”
“Jesus Christ,” Brownie said. He turned on Hoffman and indicated the other two. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“What else did you tell her?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Listen, you better take care of me, Dick. Wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have the thing to begin with. I got an idea what it’s worth. You owe me.”
“You’re fucking right I owe you. What else did you tell her?”
“I don’t know,” Brownie said. He tried to remember. “I told her it turned up a couple of miles upriver. It was like she was trying to figure out if it was the real thing. She was asking about the guy who hoo
ked it.”
“Why him?”
“I don’t know. I got the impression she’d talked to him.”
“What’s his name anyway?”
“Virgil Cain.”
“And she’d been to see him?”
“Maybe. I got no idea,” Brownie said. He grew defiant. “I didn’t get a fucking chance to follow up because I had to go to the fucking hospital because some crazy cunt tried to cut my fucking ear off. Okay?”
The cowboy with the Russian accent got a kick out of Brownie’s tirade. He actually slapped his knee. Even Hoffman smiled.
“Glad you’re enjoying this,” Brownie said. “Next time I’ll call somebody else.”
“You’ll heal,” Hoffman said. “What we need to know is how she knows. And whether she’s working as a free agent or if Parson sent her.”
“How would Parson know about it?”
Hoffman hesitated for a long moment. “No idea. But if she’s working for him, then we know she’s not going to involve the police. Because we don’t want the police involved, Brownie. They don’t and I don’t and you don’t. You do understand that.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Brownie said.
“But if she’s on her own, I got no idea what she’s up to,” Hoffman said. “And we need to find out. So where does he live?”
“Where does who live?” Brownie asked.
“Virgil Cain.”
THIRTEEN
Dusty worked until three the next afternoon and then told the foreman she needed to leave early. She could tell that he was curious. She had taken yesterday off to go to Kimball’s Point and now she was asking for more time, even if it was only a couple of hours. She was still new on the job and taking time off, especially without giving good reason, was not a good idea. He told her to go ahead, but she could tell by his tone that he wouldn’t tolerate her making a habit of it.
She wasn’t all that thrilled about walking into the Arch Street station but there didn’t seem to be any other way. Besides, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been there before. In fact, she’d been there a number of times in her past, usually under arrest. She hadn’t been back since the night things turned to shit on the river, and she was hoping she wouldn’t run into any of the cops who had known her back then, or even earlier. Her Jefferson Park days. Cops come and go, but then seven years really wasn’t a long time.
She parked along the street and walked over to the station. On her past visits to the place, she had never entered by the front door before. Under arrest, she had always been driven into the rear parking lot and brought up into the station from below.
It was a different feeling, walking through the front door, and not just because she wasn’t wearing handcuffs. The place was a little cleaner out front, and the walls were covered with posters showing cops in various acts of serving the community—a smiling cop directing traffic at an intersection while a parade passed by, another helping a child on the playground, and a third tending to a wounded puppy. Apparently somebody on the force had a Norman Rockwell fixation, and that somebody had been put in charge of sprucing up the department’s image. She noticed that there were no posters of clean-cut cops kicking the shit out of crackheads down by the river, or of jolly patrolmen pocketing bribes from the bar owners selling to underage students. Maybe those posters were still being made.
A woman of about fifty, in uniform, was behind the front counter, talking to an older man, who was complaining about being ticketed for something or other. There was another cop, a man also in uniform, sitting at a row of desks just beyond the counter. Dusty didn’t recognize either of them.
After the woman finally convinced the man that he had to go to traffic court to vent about the horrific injustice inflicted upon him by some bylaw officer, Dusty approached her. She was taking a chance even being there but she needed to eliminate certain scenarios, and this was the first. Maybe she’d get lucky and it would be the last as well.
“Would Detective Hoffman be in?” she asked.
“I’d have to check,” the woman said. As she spoke she was writing something on a pad in front of her. Dusty wondered if she was making a note about the irate old man who’d just left, in the event he really lost it and ended up on a roof somewhere with a hunting rifle. All over a parking ticket. “What’s this about?” the woman asked when she finished.
Dusty shrugged. “Just need to talk to him.”
The woman nodded. “And just him?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold on then.” The woman picked up the phone and hit a number.
“Who’s she looking for?” the man at the desk behind her asked. “Dick Hoffman?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s gone.”
The woman put the phone down. “What do you mean—gone?”
“Took his pension. As of yesterday, I believe.”
The woman turned to Dusty. “There you go. You want to talk to somebody else?”
Dusty shook her head. “No.”
Walking back to her truck, she decided to take a stroll down to the farmers market, a few blocks away. She bought strawberries and tomatoes and fresh corn on the cob. It was the first corn of the season. Travis was going through an anti-vegetable stage and she would use the strawberries as a reward for his eating the corn. She would even stop for ice cream to go with the strawberries. She walked back to her truck but instead of starting it, she sat there and ate a few strawberries from the basket while she thought about what she knew, even though it wasn’t a hell of a lot at this point.
On one level, things made less sense than ever. It had bothered her that the guy who had shown up at the marina and taken the cylinder had not asked Virgil Cain for any identification, or even for his name. He had taken the boat and left. That didn’t sound like something a cop would do. Dusty had encountered her fair share of police and she knew that most of them would go to the other extreme, take down the names of everybody within five miles of the place, ask a bunch of stupid questions that had nothing to do with anything, and make note of the temperature and wind direction to boot. And all in that formal language they like to spout in front of a judge. Saying “persons of interest” instead of suspects, or “I attended to his residence” instead of just saying they went to somebody’s house. But that hadn’t been the case with the cylinder. This was strictly a hit-and-run. It was only natural for Cain to assume the guy wasn’t a real cop.
But Dusty knew two things now that she didn’t know before. One was that the man who seized the cylinder was a real cop, not a phony one. And two, it was now obvious why he’d acted the way he had at the marina. One day he seizes the cylinder and two days later he decides to retire. He had no intention of turning the dope over to the drug squad.
Or did he? What if the retirement story was bogus? If Dusty knew one thing about the police, it was that lying was their stock-in-trade. Maybe the two cops she’d encountered at the front desk were in on it. One playing ignorant and the other in the know.
One of two things could be true. The first was that Hoffman was dirty. He’d stumbled on a shitload of cocaine and decided to go free agent with it and sell it to the highest bidder. Which would explain his sudden retirement, and which meant that nobody would be trying to connect the drugs to Dusty. Whatever this cop Hoffman was going to do with the coke, he was doing it for his own benefit.
Which would mean that Dusty was out of the picture.
The second scenario wasn’t as rosy. Maybe the police were running a sting. Right now they had a hundred pounds of cocaine they couldn’t connect to anyone. They could dump it down the drain, but flushing it without busting anybody wasn’t going to give them any satisfaction. They knew damn well it was Parson who brought the shit up from down south. And they knew Dusty had been the legal owner of the boat that brought it. So what if this was all a scam? They’d invented the story about Hoffman retiring and sent him underground. An unhappy cop looking to make a deal.
Dusty wondered now if it was Hoffman who had contac
ted Parson in the first place. Parson hadn’t said it was a cop, but then that was Parson’s way. Tell half of what he knew, and make sure half of that was bullshit. But who else could it have been, if it wasn’t Hoffman? It sure as hell wasn’t Virgil Cain.
She needed to find out. She really wanted to learn that Hoffman was on the take, that he was the dirtiest of cops. Then she would be out of it. She could go back to work and hope she never heard from any of them again.
Parson’s business card was on the dash of the truck, where he’d tossed it that day at the construction site. She reached for it, taking note of the address, out on Van Wies Point Road. He’d moved since becoming a vintage car expert. She put the truck in gear and started across town.
The house was large and impressive and old, with leaded windows and a circular drive out front. A second driveway curled around the house, past an inground pool and down to a large brick garage that sat overlooking the river. The garage was of a more recent construction, and it had six doors across the front. It looked as if it could house a dozen vehicles.
There was a blond woman sunbathing topless on a lounge by the pool, with a cool drink by her elbow. She had pouty lips and large gold hoops in her earlobes. When Dusty drove past her in the old truck, she sat up and stared, removing her shades for a better look.
Two of the garage doors were open and a black Escalade and the red Camaro Parson had been driving at the site were parked out in front. There was a navy blue Mercedes convertible there too, new or close to it, with the top down. As Dusty pulled up, she could see Parson inside, carefully polishing the hood of a ’67 Corvette.
Dusty had picked up a takeout coffee on the drive across town. She got out, coffee in hand, and walked into the garage. Once inside, she sensed another presence and glanced to her left to see Cherry leaning against a workbench, drinking a Coors Light. Cherry, with his dyed hair, his gold chains, and his pumped-up physique. Drinking that horse piss because he was worried about his waistline. Dusty hadn’t seen Cherry since before she’d gone to prison. But his name had come up, and quite recently. She was surprised to see him there.
