by Jason Trevor
“Here’s a five. Keep the difference. Either cream or powder is fine. Whatever’s in arm’s reach,”
“I’ll take day-old cream over non-dairy powdered chemicals any day. It’s a good thing we haven’t poured out the leftovers yet. Give me a second,” Royce strolled past his wife toward a cooler against the back wall.
Joe took the opportunity to look around at his real motive for stopping in; to case the place. If they were willing to accept cash before opening, the till probably had money in it overnight for them to make bank runs in the morning, and there was no sign of a safe to lock it up after closing. The customer area and the prep space behind the counter and glass cooler consumed the entire shop. There was no back room. Peering around the crown of the one-room shop, he spotted the most important reason he was there: several Arecont cameras, but no motion detectors. There was also no alarm control panel or siren on any of the walls. They relied on the cameras heavily, and Joe’s experienced eye spotted several very expensive ones, along with a sleek new NUUO recorder on the counter in the corner. A body could probably count the fleas on a dog’s back from across the street with these cameras. One pointed at the cash register and counter. One pointed across the food prep areas. One covered the customer seating area, and the last one pointed across the room at the front door, with a full view of the street outside.
◆◆◆
After stopping into Randall’s office briefly to chew him out in person, Joe headed back to his house in the suburbs. He needed rest, now that he had plans for the night that required him to be fully on his game.
After parking his Escalade in the dog-run between his house and garage, Joe trudged through the side door clutching his briefcase and the stainless-steel coffee cup, down the hall to deposit the briefcase in his office, and into the living room where he straightened the picture and continued into the kitchen. He emptied his dishwasher in silence, dropped in the coffee mug and a few dishes from the sink, and headed toward the bedroom. This time he stopped and stared longingly at the photo for a few seconds before straightening it, then thought better of sleeping and doubled back to the kitchen again. His body needed more fuel than just coffee.
Joe stared blankly at his cast-iron skillet on the stove as he watched some eggs cook, thinking about Foster and what Elaine was going through. What about those poor kids? They were two beautiful children, exactly the ones Joe would want if he still had kids. The whole thing made him sick to his stomach. He could barely choke the eggs down as he sat in the dining room, unsure of why the formal room and dining set was somehow necessary today in lieu of eating in the kitchen breakfast nook like he usually did. From his chair at the head of the table, he could see straight through the kitchen to the living room and he stared at the small photo some more.
He slammed the dishes into the dishwasher out of disgust and stomped to his bedroom, stopping on the way to straighten the perfectly hung picture once again.
◆◆◆
After returning from an early and fast lunch, Sergeant Sims stood a few feet inside of the yellow tape, hands on hips, with his small spiral notebook pinched between two knuckles, and surveyed the scene. Several media outlets had set up camp along the curb just outside of the police line beyond a few parked cruisers, filing their reports electronically over their towering antennae, having finished shooting their ratings-grabber footage of the bloodstained pavement, the yellow tape flapping in the wind, and him interviewing people who lived in the nearby buildings.
There was a retro-looking ice cream shop across the street from him. It looked like a drugstore from the fifties where young lovers would have gone to share a malted, and probably had been exactly that in decades of the past. A gaggle of people was gathered inside the shop and outside of the front door. A box truck with a reefer above the cab was parked just around the corner, which Cody surmised was unable to get closer to the door due to the crime scene tape. There was a man in blue bib overalls and a yellow flannel shirt rushing back and forth with a dolly, unloading produce, dairy crates, and boxes of dry goods. Another man walked hurriedly alongside, carrying whatever crates and boxes that he could.
“So Mr. Danton wanted ice cream, huh?” He hurried across the street and pushed his way through the crowd to the counter of the shop. “Who’s the boss around here?” he produced his credentials as he shouted over the din to a woman who was cramming pecks of fruit and bottles of cream into an upright cooler.
“My husband, Royce. He’s coming through the door behind you right now. There, the guy with the apron,”
The man was brawny and athletic but slowed by middle-age spread. Clad in tan canvas work pants and a chef’s jacket under an off-white apron, Royce looked harried. Sergeant Sims waved the badge at him.
“Cody Sims, HPD homicide. Do you have a minute?”
“Not really. We were supposed to open three hours ago, but my food truck couldn’t get here because of the traffic from the crime scene out there, so now we’re trying to receive our morning delivery and serve customers with a very limited menu, just in time for the lunch rush!”
“I’d love to take a look at your footage,” Cody pointed at one of the cameras, “and maybe talk to you about one of your early customers,” He might be able to finger an actual suspect after all, instead of just a gang of tight lips. That’s when it dawned on Royce what the detective needed.
“I’m happy to help. Just not now. This is going to be a tough day. Can I call you after we close? We’ll get together and you can take all the time you need with me and my recorder. Just leave a business card. That recorder keeps footage for months. Anything it caught last night will still be there this evening. Coffee is always on the house for cops. It’s the best in town. Have my wife make you a cup and I’ll call you later,” He said each sentence breathlessly as he stacked crates and boxes from the dolly behind the glass deli cooler to be counted.
“Well, I’d prefer-” he was cut off by the ring of his cell phone. “Yeah, Sims,” he snapped annoyedly as he answered it. “No kidding? They found it?” he cracked a smile because now he had yet another lead on this case. “Well, God bless LoJack! Have a half-dozen uniforms meet me along with SWAT in the parking lot of the restaurant supply place on 20th ASAP. We’ll stage from there. Does LT know? Then tell him! He may want to actually leave his office for a bust like this. Yeah, I know auto theft will want to be there. Give their detective my name and tell him we’re only waiting on him for as long as it takes to get the warrant. I’ll call Judge Lemond on the way. Thanks for letting me know so quickly,” He stuffed the phone into his inside coat pocket and retrieved his tiny memo book from same, scribbling an address into it quickly. “It looks like someone bought you some time. I’ll pass on the coffee for now, but you be sure to call me when you close up,” he pushed his way back through the crowd and out the door, off to raid a chop shop and hopefully find Foster’s truck, or what was left of it.
Chapter 3
“How did they find us, Jefe?” Oscar was confused. There was no way someone knew they were stripping cars in that building. It even still had the sign on it from a paper importer who had been there before.
“Because you didn’t kill the LoJack on one of the cars, dumbshit. Did you grind all the VIN’s?”
“Si! I’m sure of it!”
“You’d better have, man. I can try to tell them we didn’t know that one LoJacked car was stolen, but if they run any VIN numbers, we’re dead. I’ll talk, you don’t. When they come through la puerta, the only thing de tu boca is ‘abogado’, and that’s it. Nothing else. Nala! I’m gonna kill tu hermana for making me give you a job,” he was shouting down to Oscar as he climbed up a steel rack with a dirty composition book folded in half and stuffed into his back pocket. Oscar stared nervously through a tiny clean triangle at the corner of a very dirty old window. When he got to the top, Jefe gingerly walked around piles of power steering pumps, brake boosters, and A/C compressors to the end of the rack, pulled out the comp book, flattened it, the
n stretched for a huge, ancient, hanging heater that had not run for decades, shoving the book though the grill into the air inlet. Then he scrambled back down the rack and over to Oscar to look out the window at the massing swarm of policía gathering outside, including a big SWAT van, a CSU van, and a few TV trucks in the far back. The small door next to the roll-tops suddenly thundered.
“Houston Police, we have a warrant to search the property. Open up!” shouted a disembodied voice. “You have until I stop talking, then we breach your door!” just then Jefe threw the door open wide.
“No need to break anything man! We’re here!” He was met by two men in tactical gear on each side of a menacing-looking hand-held battering ram. On one side of them was a uniformed policía and on the other was a man in a cheap suit. Both had guns drawn and at the ready, as did a grupo of policía gathered behind them. Policemen swarmed in through the door and the man in the suit jumped straight into Oscar’s face, pushing a folded paper into his chest with a gloved hand.
“I’m detective Cody Sims. This is a bench warrant to search this property for any type of contraband, stolen property, or evidence pertaining to open investigations. Is there anyone else in the building?”
Oscar had a wild-eyed and terrified look. “Abogado! Abogado! Talk to Jefe!” he pointed.
Jefe rolled his eyes as Detective Sims turned to him. “Hey man, we’re a legi-”
“IS THERE ANYONE ELSE ON THE PROPERTY? Yes or no?” Detective Sims interrupted.
“No, man! It’s just us two!”
“It better be,” Just then a man in tactical gear approached the detective.
“The building’s been cleared, detective. These are the only two subjects on site. The place is yours to toss,”
“We’re an auto recycler, man. This is a legitimate business!”
“Then you don’t have anything to worry about. What’s your real name, Jefe?”
“Gabriel Espinoza, man,”
“Got ID? My name is Detective Sims and not ‘Man’ but ‘Sir’ works fine if you prefer,”
Jefe produced a resident alien card as Cody turned to Oscar. “ID”
“Abogado! Talk to Jefe!” he was beginning to shake.
“You make a fine gofer. Why do you want a lawyer so badly? I thought you were honest businessmen,”
“Abogado!” stammered Oscar again.
“Dale tu pasaporte, idiota,” Jefe said in an irritated voice. “Él sabe que quieres un abogado. Just drop it and shut up!”
Oscar produced a passport. Cody handed the documents to a uniform to take down the information.
“You’ve got a real winner on the payroll here, Jefe. So, you got every one of these cars and all of those parts legally, right?”
“Yes sir!”
“Got paperwork on them?”
“It’s all in the computer,” Jefe thought quickly. “But it was stolen,”
“Did you report it?”
“Just happened last night, man – uh, sir!” he had a shameless grin.
“You should check out your help better. There’s no sign of a break-in on that door, so it must have been someone who had access. Unless you’re lying to me, of course. You’re not lying to me, are you?”
“No!”
“We’re working on a homicide, and lying to me would make you an accessory. You don’t want to be an accessory to murder, do you?”
“No man, we say verdad!” squeaked Oscar as soon as he heard the word murder.
“Oh, so you do know how to say more than just ‘lawyer’? That’s awesome. I’d like to spend a little while chatting down at 1200 Travis. It was sure nice of you to both clear your schedules this afternoon for me. I look forward to your cooperation,” He waved to another uniform. “Put them both in cars and take them to 1200. I’ll be there after we find the victim’s truck,”
“Got it!” shouted a LoJack contractor from near one of the roll-top doors. “This should be the truck,” There was nothing left but a chassis, engine, driveline, wheels, and tires. “The LoJack is on top of the transmission cross member right here next to the motor mount for the trans. They couldn’t see it to kill it like they do the others because it was hidden by the transmission. A few more hours and it would have been gone,”
“Great. We’ve got them on the stolen truck. Maybe one of these other scraps in here will have a VIN and we’ll have them on more than one. This one is all I care about. Work with auto theft on the rest when he gets here. He can have them when I’m through with them. I’ve got bigger fish to fry. I bet I can make that gofer sing,”
◆◆◆
Joe lurched out of his bed and took a blind swing at someone shouting in Slovakian who wasn’t there.
“What the hell?” he was confused at first. “Aw, jeez.” He shook the clouds out of his head and mashed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Then he grabbed the watch that he never wore from his nightstand and angled it toward the dim light filtering through his bedroom curtains. 1:42 AM. This was a good time. He quickly threw on some ripped up old black jeans, a faded black tee shirt, and some dark-colored tennis shoes, along with his glasses. Deliberately leaving his wallet on the nightstand, he grabbed the keys to his old Ram out of the top dresser drawer, swung by the kitchen for a pair of vinyl gloves from the box he kept around for cutting jalapenos and other peppers, and hurried out to the driveway.
He hadn’t started the truck in a few weeks, but the battery should have been okay. A quick stomp of the clutch and turn of the key assured him as much. The straight pipes he’d added some years ago weren’t exactly discrete, but the truck would draw far less attention than an Escalade or a Charger. Joe idled out of his driveway and to the end of his block, then pointed himself toward Midtown once again.
◆◆◆
Royce was having a very bad morning for the second day in a row. First, those rodents from across the freeway had shot some poor guy to death in the street in front of his shop, then they broke into his shop only the next night. That took some nerve.
“Hello? Anyone here?” Sergeant Sims pulled the door open and stepped over a large brick, surrounded by broken glass, that lay on the floor just inside the newly ventilated door.
“Wow, that was fast,” said Royce as he sifted through a stack of credit card receipts that had been in the cash drawer under the till. “We only just called a minute ago,” Then he looked up and saw that it was Sergeant Sims again. “Aw, crap! I’m sorry, Detective! It was such a rough day yesterday that I completely forgot to call you once we closed up. Wait. The card you left me said homicide on it. Why are you here for a break-in?”
“I’m not. I’m here for some footage. When were you burglarized?”
“I came in this morning and found the place like this. They took the TV off the wall, pried open the register and got $800, and took my muzak machine,”
Cody’s eyes narrowed. This didn’t seem like a coincidence. “Did they take the camera recorder?”
Royce’s head swiveled toward the corner and he spotted the bundle of cables laying haphazard where the recorder had been. “Shit. I didn’t even notice that was gone too. Dammit!”
“Huh,” Cody didn’t like the looks of this. “Did you have a backup?”
“I’m sorry Detective, no. The recorder had two hard drives in case one died, but I thought that was all the backup I would need. I guess whoever ripped us off was smart enough not to be recorded. That was a $1600 recorder!”
“Not to a pawn shop. They won’t know what it is or give hardly anything for it, if anything at all. Have the robbery detective call me when he shows. I don’t believe in coincidences. There are softer targets around here that don’t have state of the art camera systems. Do you still have my number?”
“Dang! It was in the cash drawer, and they took the whole till. Can I have another card?”
“No problem,” He handed a new one over to Royce. “One more thing. Did a guy named...” He pulled out his notebook and flipped to the first page “Joe. Di
d a guy named Joe stop in here yesterday morning?”
“We do a lot of business and yesterday was crazy because of the late truck,”
“He would have been very early. Maybe right when you opened,”
“Come to think of it, a guy did wander in before we opened. He just wanted a cup of coffee, but I didn’t get his name,”
“Skinny, shaved head, glasses, lots of starch in his clothes?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy! Hey, you don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you? He was only here for a minute, and he sure didn’t look like a burglar,”
“I don’t know. He’s just a person of interest. You call me if he stops in again,”
“You bet. I’m sure he came in after gawking at the crime scene or something, right?”
“Or something. Maybe,”
“How did you know he was here?”
“He told me,”
Chapter 4
Joe shoved the NUUO recorder in between two other pieces of equipment on a shelf in his office where it was inconspicuous. Then he added a few twenties and fivers to the wad of cash from the till and crammed it all into an envelope, addressing it to St. Jude’s with no return address. He would be sure to drop that into a mailbox across town later that day. He then retrieved a big black garbage bag from his garage and crammed the cash till, muzak machine, and other loot from his pickup into it. This bag couldn’t make its way to the dumpster behind Kroger’s fast enough. Into the back of the Escalade, it went. The 60” Vizio was already smashed on the shoulder of Highway 290 halfway between Houston and Cypress.
Joe rushed into the house, fixed a cup of coffee, threw on another pair of starched jeans and a dress shirt with suspenders, a leather sport coat, and some Bates wing tips. Grabbing his coffee and briefcase, he straightened the picture on his way to the side door before jumping in his Escalade and heading for a business meeting in the Energy Corridor that had been scheduled weeks before, with a quick stop at Kroger on the way.
