Critical Mass (36 page)

I wandered up Milwaukee Avenue toward the Subaru, so involved in my tortuous thinking that I almost got hit crossing the three-way intersection at North Avenue. That would be a gallows-humor ending—surviving a shoot-out in a drug den only to die under a semi.

Davilats’s being on the take explained the two sets of people paying attention to me. Homeland Security was watching for action on the King Derrick auction of nuclear secrets, but Davilats wanted any valuables I’d found at the meth house. Davilats knew I’d found the desk drawer, because he’d heard about it during the Palfry football game.
Homeland Security had read my e-mail to Cheviot Labs, saying I’d found the drawer with papers stuck to it, but they didn’t know about the theft. That was why they hadn’t believed me.

So far so good, or so bad. Davilats had been in the Lincoln Navigator that Judy Binder tore off in. He or his accomplice had shot Ricky and Bowser.

I paused in front of a sushi restaurant. Judy gave Freddie Walker the Navigator in exchange for a little oxy, but Freddie did drugs, not cars. License plates, though. There’d been a stack of plates next to the drug cabinet. I wondered if Ferret Downey or his evidence techs had thought those worth bagging and tagging.

A woman with a stroller, talking animatedly into a headset, ran into me from behind. “You don’t own this sidewalk,” she snapped when I turned around, rubbing my leg.

“And a good day to you, too, ma’am. Be careful in the intersections: you wouldn’t want your phone hurt in a crash.”

I jogged up the street, her angry insults following me. At Wabansia, I collected Martin’s car for the slow slog to Freddie’s place, wondering for the ten thousandth time why they call it “rush hour” when you can’t move faster than a crawl.

Freddie didn’t live in a part of town where cleanup happened in a hurry. Tape still covered the surveillance camera, the car battery I’d stood on was still by the door, which still had police seals on it. Shaq and Ladonna were camped out on a curb up the street.

When they saw me ringing the doorbell, and then once again setting to work with my picklocks, they slowly moved my way. I could hear Ladonna’s labored breathing as I got the complicated dead bolt to click back.

“Freddie made bail,” Shaq volunteered.

I paused with the door partly open. “He home now?”

“Don’t think so. Think he’s at his place up by Lake Geneva. Got himself a big house there, boat, everything.”

Freddie Walker, floating on a tide of coke, nursing his wounds in Wisconsin. “How about the guy Bullet, who hit his head on the stairs?” I asked.

“He still in intensive care,” Ladonna said. “Freddie, he ain’t paying a nickel, and Bullet’s ma, she so far gone, she don’t even understand he’s hurt bad, so it’s up to the county.”

“Makes me proud to be a taxpayer,” I said.

“Police know you’re breaking those seals?” Shaq said.

“Do the police care if I’m breaking these seals?” I said. “Freddie has something that I want, unless the police took it.”

“Ladonna and me, we can keep watch, if you like,” Shaq suggested casually.

I thanked him gravely and held the door for them, but didn’t wait for their slow progress up the stairs. I stopped on the second floor to look at the two apartments there. These seemed to make up Freddie’s home, when he wasn’t living it up in Wisconsin. His outsized bed, with a ceiling mirror, was covered in animal skins, in imitation of Wilt Chamberlain, and the rest of the rooms were furnished in equally expensive if unappetizing taste: glossy varnished liquor cabinet, baby blue piano, giant stereo speakers. A kitchen with Viking appliances that didn’t seem ever to have been used. The refrigerator was full of Charles Krug champagne. Two hundred dollars a bottle and Freddie had a couple of cases stashed in here.

By the time I’d finished my tour, Ladonna and Shaq had huffed their way to the third-floor landing. The police had sealed the drug shop, but I opened that without compunction, too. I couldn’t believe Ferret Downey or his team would ever revisit this site.

When the door was open, Ladonna and Shaq made a beeline for the drug cabinet. The police had taken away the contents, but the two hunted diligently and found enough loose pills on the shelves to keep them happy for a few days. I was even happier: Lieutenant Downey had left the license plates behind.

“That what you wanted?” Shaq said, astonished: he’d obviously thought he’d have to fight me for any loose drugs.

“Yep. You any idea what chop shop Freddie uses?”

Shaq and Ladonna exchanged glances, shook their heads, keeping a nervous eye on me. They were as frightened of car thieves as they were of Freddie, and they lived in this neighborhood. I didn’t.

It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t going after car parts, I only wanted to know who owned the Lincoln Navigator Judy had fled in. With any luck, the license plates would lead me there. I went back down the stairs, but Shaq and Ladonna stayed behind, digging through Freddie’s desk drawers, looking for cash or powder or anything else they had the strength to carry.

I didn’t head straight home, but drove to the Naked Eye, a store that specializes in equipment for the fearful. Surveillance is not fun, especially not for the solo op, so I don’t often do it. I have a few pieces of basic equipment, night-vision glasses and so on, but I wanted something that would tell me if there were any tracking devices on my car. If the Mustang was clean, then I’d know I was overreacting to the threat of being followed. I also picked up four burn phones, each with two hundred minutes, just in case.

What I needed wasn’t cheap, but, as the Naked Eye’s slogan proclaimed, “Peace of Mind Is Worth the Price.” I paid cash, which meant that I also had to stop at a bank to get more money.

I put the Subaru into a covered garage on Broadway, about half a mile from my apartment, where I tested the sweeper on it. Martin’s car seemed clean.

My Mustang was a different story. After I lugged all my equipment down to where I’d left my car, I found one bug inside the trunk, a second under the exhaust manifold.

I studied them thoughtfully. They were tiny, only about an inch square, but they were attached by powerful magnets, very difficult to pry loose. They didn’t have any manufacturing or patent information
on them, so whoever used them was working hard to stay anonymous. And whoever used them had access to top-shelf electronics.

That could mean my pals in Homeland Security, but I wondered as well about Metargon, “where the future lies behind.” Metargon could and likely did make this kind of tracking gadget. Cordell Breen had a tight connection to the FBI, that was clear from how easily he got an agent to question the staff at Alison’s computer lab in Mexico City. If Homeland Security had seen Alison arrive at my place last night, Cordell could have persuaded them to bug my car so he could keep track of his daughter.

I put the bugs back where I’d found them and drove home. I used the sweeper on my place, on Jake’s and on Mr. Contreras’s. There weren’t any devices in our rooms that I could detect, but phone lines are tapped remotely these days, and there wasn’t any way I could tell if there were outside ears trained on the building. Life as a paranoid person is not fun.

Despite realizing that I genuinely was under surveillance, I fired up my laptop and went into a database that gets me DMV records. Besides being hideously expensive, it is illegal, so if Homeland Security wanted to rat me out to the state’s attorney, I was in trouble. I was betting on their incurable penchant for secrecy to protect me.

Of the seven license plates I’d taken from Freddie’s, two had belonged to Lincoln Navigators. One was a two-year-old model reported stolen nine months ago. The second belonged to Phoebus Fleet, a leasing company whose headquarters were in Dallas.

It was long after the end of business hours, but a leasing company must have round-the-clock staff to respond to customer emergencies. I spent half an hour in fruitless conversation with a representative who could neither confirm nor deny that one of their vehicles had been stolen and who certainly was not going to give me the name of the lessee. Neither would her supervisor, nor the supervisor’s manager. Unless I had a subpoena, the information was totally confidential.

I hung up in a snarly mood. Why couldn’t the Nav have belonged to Sheriff Kossel, or someone else in Palfry?

I took a bottle of Torgiano out to my back porch to call Jake. He was rehearsing the double-bass solo in Rautavaara’s
Angel of Dusk
for a performance with the San Francisco Symphony. He stopped work to talk to me, but when he said he had to get back to the rehearsal, I asked him to leave his phone on. Hearing him play was all I needed from him right now. He attached his phone to his bowing arm and I sat watching the clouds gather in the eastern sky, listening to the music.

Even after he hung up, the calm of the night and of his music remained. I sat on the porch, drinking a second glass of wine with a plate of cheese and salad, thinking of nothing in particular. I didn’t hear my front doorbell ring. The first I knew I had company was Mr. Contreras, slowly climbing the back stairs.

33

LAP OF ELECTRONICS

S
ORRY, DOLL,
but he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Mr. Contreras was holding the top railing, puffing for air, after his climb.

Peppy and Mitch, who’d run up ahead of him, were now standing on the top step, facing down. They were growling softly, that deep-throated sound that says a dog is serious. In the dim light from the alley streetlamp, I could just make out a tall, wide shape below them.

“Who is ‘he’?” I put my wineglass under my chair, out of reach in case things became physical. The Smith & Wesson was in my tuck holster but I wasn’t going to draw it on a crowded porch.

“You Ms. Warshawski?” the shape called.

“Yes.” I leaned forward in my chair, thigh muscles tensed so I could leap or duck in an instant. “And you are?”

“My name’s Durdon; I’m Mr. Breen’s driver. He wants to see you.”

“I thought he was married,” I said. “Anyway, I’m in a committed relationship.” The language of Facebook sounds stupid when you say it out loud.

“Huh?” Durdon took another step up and Mitch gave a warning bark. “Can you hold your dogs? It’s hard to talk with them sitting there.”

“You came around without an invitation,” Mr. Contreras said. “The dogs live here and you don’t, so say what you want to say from where you’re standing.”

I love Mr. Contreras. I went over to the dogs and put hands around both their collars.

“Tell Mr. Breen I’m very flattered, but I’m not interested.”

“What do you mean, you’re not interested?”

“It’s the age-old story, Mr. Durdon. Person X wants to see Person Y, but Y doesn’t reciprocate. X persists; Y gets an Order of Protection. Good night.”

Durdon stuck a hand in his pocket. I let go of Peppy to reach for my gun, but it turned out just to be his cell phone. He hit a speed dial number and communed with someone. After a moment, he held the phone out to me; I stretched a hand over the dogs for it.

“Ms. Warshawski?” The familiar warm baritone came on the line. “This is Cordell Breen. I’ve asked Durdon to drive you up to my home tonight. We need to talk.”

“Mr. Breen, I pay rent on an office so I can have my evenings at home the same way you do. I went out of my way to visit you at Metargon last week. It’s your turn to show some flexibility.”

“I’m going to use the same argument I did last week. Your place isn’t secure and mine is. I don’t want Homeland Security or my corporate rivals to listen in on me. Alison told me the hoops you jumped her through last night to get some privacy. I’m not going to a dead woman’s basement to talk. You can bring your neighbor; Durdon tells me he’s involved in your business.”

I gave in, only because I wanted to see the Lake Forest home anyway. I handed the phone back to Durdon.

“Want to come with me?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “See how the billionaires live?”

He was delighted and bustled back down the stairs to put the dogs inside his place. I told Durdon we’d meet him out front. I took my mother’s wineglass inside and ran water over my face, hoping it would jolt my brain awake: a long day and two glasses of wine are not the best
preparation for a high-wire conversation. I changed Boom-Boom’s jersey for a red knit top, but kept on my worn jeans.

Durdon had arrived in a Maybach sedan. I’d never actually seen one, just heard about them in the way one hears about unicorns. They’re made by Mercedes for people who think a Mercedes is a down-market car. It’s only the pit dog in me that made me wish I’d kept on Boom-Boom’s sweaty jersey.

Durdon was a good driver, the car was well sprung and upholstered. I dozed against the leather headrest, mumbling assent to Mr. Contreras’s running commentary: he’d had a phone call from my cousin Petra. He moved from Petra’s Peace Corps saga to the annoying nature of people like Cordell Breen, who expects people like us to drop everything at his whim.

“You need a union, doll: the bosses never pushed us around when I was a machinist, because they knew there’d be heck to pay with the union if they carried on the way this Breen fella does.”

“Yep,” I agreed. “The detectives union, I like it. We need a strike fund. Any of your horses win today?”

Mr. Contreras sniffed. He bets at an offtrack place over on Belmont, but no matter how carefully he studies the form, he rarely brings home more than twenty dollars on his winning days—which are not as numerous as his losing ones.

We rolled off the Edens Expressway and turned up Green Bay Road. After about ten miles, Durdon swung the Maybach onto a side road. There were no streetlights, but in the headlights I saw we were on the edge of one of the steep ravines that lace this part of the lakefront. The road dead-ended at a set of gates, but Durdon barely slowed—Metargon’s electronics included some type of transmitter for the car that opened the gates while we were still fifteen yards from them.

We cruised up a long drive lined with faux gas lamps. The drive ended at a white-painted brick house. It was three stories high with
double wings extending toward the lake. When Durdon stopped next to a porticoed entrance and opened my door, I could hear the lake breaking beyond us in the dark.