Dying Embers (37 page)

He said, “Fuc—”

I put the tape back in place.

“You know, Luis,” I told him, “I'm willing to bet there's a box of tissues in this desk.” I found them in the top right-hand drawer, pulled out a wad, and wiped his tape and chin. Folding once, I held the wad over his nose. “C'mon, honk. No reason to be embarrassed, I raised three kids.”

He blew. I wiped and dropped the wad in the wastebasket. I studied his forehead, whistled, and shook my head, “That's gonna leave a mark.”

Ken shifted through the cases of computers, making a short stack on the floor.

“I have a couple of questions,” I said. “I wasn't going to do this. I planned to take you to the hospital and show you a little girl. Her house blew up and killed her mother. She's horribly burned and struggling for every breath. But that would be cruel and unusual. And maybe you want to help me anyway.

“You and your friend met with Hank Dunphy behind a fast food restaurant on Division Avenue. You took a bag full of money from Dunphy. Except I don't think you liked the man you drove there in the green Taurus.”

Ken sat on the pile of boxes he'd made and folded his hands in his lap. Luis's eyes darted, refusing to look at me, his face astonished under the gray strip that covered his mouth.

I leaned my backside on the desk, put my finger in Luis's face, and
pushed my face into his space. “I don't think you like him because he talked to you just like this.”

Luis locked hot and angry eyes with mine.

“You didn't like it then and you don't like it now. That man you don't like blew up a house with a woman and a little girl in it. I want you to tell me where to find him. I know you know. I know you've been providing vehicles, little odd jobs, and probably meals and housing. He pays good but he doesn't respect you. You put up with that because the money is good. But what you don't know is that he is a mercenary—a terrorist—and when he is done with you, he will kill you. He left one of his associates to rot in a stone quarry—a guy who'd been loyal but became a liability when he got hurt. When this man you don't like is done here, you will be a liability.”

I watched Luis close his eyes.

I said, “Nod your head if you want to talk to me.”

Luis nodded. I pulled the tape loose.

Luis leaned toward me. He said, “Live fast, Anglo, life is short.”

I put the tape back on and patted it. “Right. Well, that would have been too easy. Let's see what's in the bag.”

Holding the bag open in both hands, I rolled my eyes up to Luis without raising my head. His eyes went wide. I said, “Humm? This?” I reached in the bag. Sweat ran down Luis's forehead and over the red goose egg above his eyes. “No, not this, not yet.”

I set the bag in my lap. “You know, I had planned to play ‘the hammer of truth game' with you. You know, fix your hand to the top of the desk and ask you a bunch of questions I already know the answer to. When you lie I hammer your hand. When I get to the question I don't know the answer, you flinch if you're going to lie and I just keep pounding away until I get a straight answer—except you got a hard head and I bought a cheap hammer, so we got to improvise.”

I opened the bag and looked in. “Oh, yes—indeed,” I said and seized an object in the bag. Luis bolted to his feet. I planted a foot in the middle of his chest and shoved him back in the chair. “Think of this as a trip to the dentist,” I said.

I took the bumper sticker out of the bag and displayed it in both hands. “See, Detroit Red Wings. I know that's familiar.”

I watched his eye dart around the room.

Luis said, “Ahh humm a hum-hum.”

“Oh, I know, you're thinking, ‘What can that lunatic do with a bumper
sticker?'” I studied it and then showed it to him edge on. “Very sharp if you move it fast. Don't you just hate paper cuts?” I showed him the backing. “Or maybe you peel off the backing and use it to pull out hairs. How do women do that? Wax, I mean.” I hunched my shoulders and shook my head. “Gives me the shivers.”

“Humph-hoo,” said Luis.

“You know,” said Ken, “I don't think his mind's getting right.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think he'd rather be with his friends.”

I took the hat out of the bag, peeled the backing off the bumper sticker, and applied it to the hat. “What do you think, Luis?” I put the hat on my head. “In the dark tunnel where I was told to deliver the money—where your associates are waiting to cave in my skull—think this will work?”

Luis's eyes took on a cold stare. I took the shirt out of the bag, rolled it up like I was dressing an infant, and looked at Luis through the head hole.

“Haa-haa-humph, hum.”

“Don't worry. I bought an extra-extra large.” I pulled it over his head and down his torso. I put the hat on his head. “What do you think, Ken?”

“Looks just like you.”

Luis's eyes went wide, and his cheeks belled out from the scream held back by the gray strip across his mouth. He convulsed against his bindings, his feet running against the tape that held them together.

“I don't want to hear it, Luis,” I said. “You could have helped. Now we're down to, ‘What comes around goes around.' Ken, if you will do the honors, please.”

Luis did not cooperate and earned a short straight right to the side of the head from Ken. “Don't make me hit you again,” Ken told him. “I'm starting to like it.”

I eased the edge of the curtain aside. Lights in the back room had been turned on. The bartender sorted empty longnecks into cardboard cases she'd spread out on the floor. She left and returned twice. I could hear Ken groaning. The lights went out and we eased down the stairwell and out the back door.

I guess people who own Jag rag-tops don't travel with much luggage. I had to put the top up before we could close the trunk lid over Luis. In any case he didn't make the task an easy one and needed a couple of body blows before we could fold him into an amenable shape.

We pulled out. Luis banged around in the boot. “Noisy bastard,” I said.

“I think they're supposed to be dead when you put them in the trunk.”

“I bow to your experience.”

“How the hell should I know?” said Ken. “There ain't no trunk on a Harley.”

We'd turned north onto Division when the red and blue rollers came on behind us. I looked in the mirror. Matty.

“Oh, shit!” said Ken. He shot a hand into his pocket and threw the bundle of fifties in my lap. “Tell them that's yours.”

“Nothing to worry about,” I said.

“Good, you can pay me tomorrow.”

“If you insist,” I said.

“Tell ‘em I'm a hitchhiker,” said Ken. “If they let me slide, I can get your bail posted.”

I turned into the parking lot of a dry cleaning shop and stepped out of the car. Matty shut off the rollers and met me at the rear bumper. The Suburban pulled in behind her and killed its headlights.

“Art, you put a man in the trunk of your car.”

“Two-seater, Matty.” I shrugged and tried for the sound of confused innocence. “The package shelf is upholstered like a seat, but—”

“Open the trunk, Art.”

I fumbled the key out of my pocket. My nameless best friend—the one newly flown in from Washington—stepped up between us.

“Luis Montalvo?” he said making the question sound like a statement. He unfolded a pair of glasses and hung them on his face.

“Luis,” I said. “Street name Poco Loco, but that's all I have.”

“He ready to talk?” my nameless friend asked.

“Ready as he is going to get,” I said.

Matty looked from me to the man from Washington and back. I opened the trunk. The light came on. Luis lunged and struggled to yell against the tape. His eyes, beseeching, darted from my nameless friend to Matty. When no one moved to help him he lay very still and closed his eyes.

“This is it, Luis,” I said. “Your shot. Don't blow it. Your blond-haired pal and his friends. Where are they holed up?” I pulled the tape loose.

He told.

• • •

“Sometimes all you can do is pray,” is a cliché that has never provided me with much comfort. I much prefer my grandmother's oft-proffered, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“No one leaves or makes a phone call,” said my nameless Washington benefactor—by way of inviting me and Ken to accompany the surveillance team. His third man being my witness to the Anne Frampton murder, I held little faith in his administrations, given the “extreme prejudice” with which Fidel/Andy and Jacob Anderson/Andy had come to justice.

“Tahiti Tanning,” Luis had been in a hurry to tell them, before being sent to share separate cells with Hank Dunphy in the fifth floor at the federal building. “In the upstairs apartment—four or five guys.”

As the night progressed Luis and good ole Hank set about informing on one another. By morning Luis proved to be the rat with the longest whiskers and won the “material witness” cheese-eating contest. State and federal charges against Hank Dunphy took days to compile, but among them was conspiracy to murder for hire. The bag of cash he'd given Luis was to purchase a “suicide” for Scott Lambert.

Ken slept loudly on the floor of the surveillance van, taking up most of the spare “foot space” and using his rolled-up suit jacket as a pillow. The van, a five-ton cargo box, had been done up as a telephone truck complete with boom and cherry picker. Inside, three technicians worked video, sound, and infrared consoles behind walls covered with black foam sound-absorbing insulation. Matty and I shared the precious little floor space not taken up by my itinerant hitchhiker's slumber.

At ten o'clock infrared cameras revealed three heat signatures—people—moving about the apartment above the tanning parlor, which had not a single customer despite tax returns that claimed monthly gross sales of ten to twelve thousand dollars.

Around eleven the clerk—a teenager with school books—turned out the lights and locked the door. Two additional people had arrived at the apartment by a quarter after one. By three-thirty the warrants, police, and fire department were in place. Forty minutes passed with no movement from the “heat signatures” inside, and an FBI SWAT team took the doors down.

On the back stairs one of the heat signatures presented itself as a hundred-and-twenty-pound mastiff with a spiked collar and a case of the ass. The boys in black counseled it with an MP5. The remaining
occupants, roused by the gun fire, proved to be better armed than dressed and died in their undershorts.

An M-60, two forty-millimeter grenade launchers, a half-dozen LAWS rockets, and nine pounds of plastic explosive were recovered. All in all, a fine night's work, particularly if the third man—deliveryman/Andy—had been among the suspects dealt with. He was not, and upon that revelation one more cliché reared its ugly head: “The shit hit the fan.”

“W
HAT IS IT WITH YOU PEOPLE
and all this dog shooting? Jesus Christ!” I said, as I stepped down from the surveillance van into the cool morning dampness. My nameless friend loomed over Matty, talking, moving his hands around the big picture and using the leg of his glasses to make the fine points.

“Ruby Ridge—you shot the kid's dog. Waco, same horseshit. What did you think would happen? Come to my house. Shoot my dog. You'll think Sherman's march to the sea was a tea dance.”

“Excuse me?” he said—no arch in the eyebrows, no raise in the voice—his face the placid plowed field of Godhood and focused solely on me.

I took the moment to unwrap a cigar, clamp it between my bicuspids, and light it up. When his attention was spent and eyes swung back to Matty I said, “You just walked on your own banana, and it's your fault.”

He snapped his eyes back to me and said, “Fault's hardly the point.”

“Fault will be important when you park your ass at your desk to write your report,” I told him. “Somehow I don't see you wrapping it up with, ‘Thanks to my trigger happy cowboys—”'

“That's about enough—”

“The third man would be enough,” I said. “And you don't have him. And you don't have anyone to ask where he's at.”

Matty closed her eyes and gave one negative wag of her head. My anonymous friend folded his glasses and swept them into his coat pocket.

He said, “I bow to your superior technique.”

Matty's chin hit her chest.

“Pepper gas would have taken out the dog. The yip might have woken them up but it wouldn't have sent them grappling for their firearms.”

“We don't train that way,” he said.

“And that vindicates you in what way?”

“The agent could have been shot while he was spraying the dog.”

“Gas works on people,” I said.

“Gas is a tactic we frequently employ.”

“When you want to set the place on fire.”

“That's never the intent,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't find that answer credible.”

“Thank you for your comment and criticism, Mr. Hardin,” he said—more like a growl—his lips revealing a lot of teeth. He turned. Walking away, he offered, “Should you have something constructive to add, I'm sure Agent Svensen would be pleased to discuss it with you.”

“Okay, Matty,” I said, “you want to make it a hat trick?”

My friend stopped. Without turning around he said, “You know where he is?”

I looked at my watch—a quarter after five. “Just now, I haven't the foggiest notion.” I took a drag on my cigar but it had gone out for want of attention. Turning, I leaned close to the side of the surveillance van to block the wind and lit my smoke. My nameless best friend turned about, his face a wry smile. I turned and exhaled a stream of smoke containing the words, “I know where he'll be at about ten o'clock this morning.”