Sand Dollars (13 page)

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Authors: Charles Knief

BOOK: Sand Dollars
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It was dark by the time we arrived. Blue, red, and amber emergency beacons blinked on and off, a festival of light. News vans and official vehicles blocked the street in front of Claire's estate. The blue-white glare of camera crews illuminated the house from the sidewalk.
A female police officer guarded the driveway, standing in the rain under a bright yellow slicker, trying to keep dry, reminding me of the Mexican troops at the border. The cop raised her hand to stop our car and went to the driver's side.
Esparza rolled down the window and flashed his badge. She waved us through. Rain was still falling and her long fingernails shone like rubies reflected in the car lights.
Inside the gate, another officer directed us to the rear of the house. Lights burned in every room, as if Claire were hosting a vast party. We ran through the rain to the kitchen entrance. Esparza showed his badge at the door and we were admitted.
The kitchen was crowded but I could see Ed Thomas towering above everyone else in the room. Claire sat at the oak table, Juanita next to her, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. Farrell sat in the corner, conferring with two detectives. Claire saw me enter and tried to smile. It was that same brave smile I'd seen before, ragged, but still there.
My heartbeat began to slow for the first time since we'd crossed the border.
A big Latino policeman stood over Juanita, speaking in low tones. When I came closer, I recognized the Spanish. He had looked up when we entered and acknowledged Ambrosio with a sharp nod. Ambrosio went by me and patted him on the back.
“Ambrosio,” said the big cop. “Heard you were in Mexico.”
“Just got back, amigo. What you got?”
“Two punks broke in. Broad daylight, right across the street from Her Honor's house. Both had SMG's.”
“That right? Submachine guns?”
“Mac-11's. Forty-fives. Like in the movies. Shot the shit out of the place.”
“Hey over there!” An authoritative voice from the corner boomed over the buzz of conversation in the room. The voice belonged to a tall man with a glare to match. He was one of the two cops interviewing Farrell. “You got anything to say, take it outside. Otherwise, keep doing what you're supposed to be doing. If you're not supposed to be here, get out.”
“See you around, Ambrosio,” the detective said, then turned back to Juanita.
Ambrosio looked at me and grinned sheepishly and shuffled out of the kitchen. I followed him.
The living room had its own crowd, most of them gathered near the French door to the backyard. Chunks of plaster and dusty lath littered the hardwood floors near the entry corridor. A staggered line of bullet holes stitched across one wall, continuing to the ceiling.
A corpse lay on its back, surrounded by blood and broken glass, one leg stretched out straight, the other bent at the knee. A shaven, stubbled head faced the room. Both eyes were closed, the mouth slack.
Just outside the open door another body lay crumpled on the tiles. Blood pooled under it; some of it had collected in the grout lines and run down the slope to the edge of the steps, where the rain thinned it to a pale pink.
Both bodies looked impossibly young.
I bent forward and took a close look. Each chest had three entry wounds centered, holes so close together I could have covered them with the palm of my hand.
Two ugly black submachine guns lay on a table, MAC-11's, a powerful, reliable weapon good for close work, if you knew that it tended to pull up and to the left and you practiced with
it. With a thirty-round magazine in .45 ACP, a MAC-11 could lay down some impressive firepower. I looked again at the line of bullet holes on the opposite wall. It climbed to the left from its point of origin. There was only one short line on the wall.
“What do you think?” Ambrosio said.
“This was some serious shooting,” I said. “Whoever put these guys down didn't miss.”
He nodded. “This ain't stunt work.”
Esparza and Manny joined us.
“Captain decided we didn't need to be here after all. He thought Caine here might know something, but I told him he was with us, down in Mexico. We've got to go,” said Esparza, shaking my hand. He looked at the two boys on the floor. “I'm glad it wasn't worse.”
“It's better than I feared.”
“Yeah. Sometimes it is,” he said. “When you go back to Mexico, let me know first. I'll try to keep an eye on you, if I can.”
“Thanks. Good luck.”
“You, too, Caine. You're the one who needs it.” He handed me the plastic bag with the T-shirt I'd purchased in Calafia. “You left this in the car.”
“Thanks.”
They left me standing there, holding the bag. I stared at the corpse. It looked familiar. All dead bodies do. I'd seen more than my share in my time. More than I cared to see. There is a kinship in what Will Durant called The Great Certainty.
“How was Mexico?”
Ed Thomas stood behind me. “It was quiet,” I said. “This your work?”
Thomas shook his head. “Farrell. He was in the kitchen drinking cocoa with the housekeeper when he heard glass breaking. He unholstered his revolver and came into the living room and found these two just inside the door here. He gave them the standard warning, told them to put down their weapons. You know the drill. Fools. All they saw was a little
old man with a big old gun. Then they made a fatal mistake. They pointed their guns at him. One opened up. Hat returned fire.” Thomas shook his head sadly. “They brought it on themselves. It was a righteous shooting, no matter how it looks. Nobody is going to argue he used excessive force.”
“Why would that be an issue?” I asked.
“These were kids. Look at them.” I did, getting close to the bodies again. “How old would you say they were?” Thomas asked.
“Eighteen or nineteen,” I said, after I examined their faces. They were both thin, and they both had some facial growth, but it was sparse. Both were Hispanic males, so alike they could have been brothers, and probably were.
“Try fifteen or sixteen. They're babies. Farrell can't believe he shot two kids.”
“He upset about that?”
“He isn't happy about it, but they caused their own deaths. If he didn't kill them, they would have killed him. He just can't believe they were armed with that kind of firepower. These are gangsters. They may never have had much of a chance to be anything else, but that doesn't matter now.” Thomas looked at me. “They came to kill everyone in the house. These boys were hired guns.”
“We better get Claire and Juanita out of here.”
Thomas nodded. “That's just what I was thinking. We'll take them to a hotel tonight, somewhere bright and safe. Then we can figure out where they'll be anonymous and secure.”
“You have anyplace in mind?”
“I know some safe houses, but it would be better if they're out of the city.”
I knew where I'd put them, after I closed the deal. “I've got an idea,” I said, and told him about
Olympia
.
Thomas smiled. “I like that,” he said. Then he frowned. “You've got another problem.”
“Claire?”
“Related. She insisted on calling that lawyer. He's on his way over here. Wants to fire you. Insists he can do a better job. Got me on the line and ragged me about ensuring Mrs.
Peters's safety. Wanted a complete account of what happened, and where you were when it all went down, and how much money was I costing, blah, blah, blah. I took about two minutes of his shit before I told him to go fuck himself.”
“So he's coming over?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Is Claire free to go?”
“The detectives are done with her. They're still questioning Juanita.”
“Can you get her for me?”
Thomas smiled again. “You want to get her out of here before that lawyer comes over. You don't want him influencing her. You devious bastard.”
“Just cowardly.”
“I'll get the lady. Take her to a hotel, anyplace, just so she's gone by the time shit-for-brains shows up. I'll bring Juanita once everything is settled here.”
“What about the house?”
“Farrell will stay,” said Thomas. “He likes the place. He told me to tell you he's sorry he messed it up.”
“I won't take her back to the hotel at the marina. Stevenson will probably figure I'd go there. Where do you suggest?”
“Someplace quiet, where there's a lot of other hotels.” He thought a minute. “Mission Valley. Hotel Circle. There's a Marriott. It's quiet. Check in under my name.” He handed me his American Express card. “I'll add it to your bill.”
Before I answered the knock on the hotel-room door this time, I looked through the viewing port. Ed Thomas's face peered back at me, so I opened the door.
“Everything okay?” Thomas resembled a cat with canary feathers clinging to its mouth.
“Come in, Ed,” I answered. “Hello, Juanita.”
The housekeeper nodded, but kept her head down. Her eyes were red from crying. She clutched a handkerchief and a fabric bag in her hands and shuffled in behind the private detective.
“Claire's next door,” I said. “She's upset, but she's all right. She didn't like being forced out of her home.”
Thomas looked around the room and the interconnecting doors. Mine stood open against the wall. “Nice suite. Top floor,” he said. “That's the last time I lend you my credit card.”
“Took the back six rooms on this floor, closest to the stairwell. They had some vacancies, so it worked out.” I handed him the keys. “Take your pick. The two across the hall and the one the other side of Claire's are vacant. Put Juanita in one. That makes two empty. It should cause confusion if anyone finds out where we are.”
“You do know security.”
“That's my business, Ed. It's what I do.”
“You still let me do things my way.”
I shrugged.
“By the way,” Ed said, “we're fired. Stevenson showed up before the cops were through with Juanita. He told me that you, me, all of us, we're fired. Gave me a letter.”
I stuck out my hand.
“Lost it.”
“You wouldn't go home, anyway,” I said.
“Would you?”
“Not now.”
“I don't know what you did in Mexico, Caine, but something is shaking.”
“Somebody got stupid. Cops get anything we need to know about?”
“The dead guys weren't local. They rushed their prints through the system and came up with zilch. Theory among the muck-a-mucks is that they were brought in from Mexico just for this job.”
“Hired assassins.”
“Didn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out, but it's nice to be validated.”
“Why don't you let Juanita get settled, then we'll talk.”
“If you don't mind, I'm turning in, too. Been a busy day, and I missed my hot milk.”
“Farrell okay?”
“He's fine. He went home, but he'll come back tomorrow, when everyone is gone. Chances are nothing's going to happen tonight and he told me he's pretty tired.”
“Thank him for me. He did a good job.”
Thomas frowned. “He killed two people.”
“And did a damn good job doing it. Better them than him, Juanita, and Claire. Good night, Ed. I'll see you in the morning. Good night, Juanita.”
“Good night, Meester Caine.” She stared at the floor when she replied, her voice subdued.
I watched while Ed opened her door across the corridor and went in to check for boogeymen. When he came out and handed her the key, she accepted it with a placidity I found disturbing. I'd thought Juanita was the strong one, the survivor. I saw her as the cheerful trooper, the defender at the gate. I'd taken her cheerfulness and her courage for granted, thinking they would always be there for her.
Evidently the evening's events had been far too similar to
others in her life. When death hits too close to home, and there's no chance to jump back into one's defense mechanisms, then dealing with it is the only thing one can do.
In the end, we all have to deal with it, one way or the other.
I waited until I heard the locks set in place before closing my door.
I lay on the bed and turned on the television. CNN reported that a mysterious band of commandos had attacked something, somewhere in the Mediterranean, putting a terrorist out of business, a terrorist who had blown up a United States military installation. They had come in the night from the sea in small boats, hitting their target so quickly the local authorities could not react fast enough. By the time the police arrived, the commandos were long gone and the terrorist, whom the reporter always identified as “the suspected terrorist,” had been turned into hamburger. No one else had been injured.
The reporter, a jowly British gentleman who looked as if he hadn't had a bowel movement in decades, sniffed that the commandos' suspected country of origin was the United States. The tone of his voice held a whiff of condemnation as if it were okay for people with a grudge and an ax to grind to maim and murder innocent civilians, but reprisal was just not fair; not a viewpoint I could share.
The story depressed me further. I wondered if Max had been involved.
In my years in uniform I'd hunted terrorists with Max, but those were the days of the cold war, and there were other considerations that kept us from acting. Terrorism had been largely supported by the Soviet Union, one of the major powers Washington didn't want to upset. We saw the Soviet army up close, every time we crossed the Iron Curtain. The old Soviet Union was nothing more than an overgrown Third World country with nuclear weapons. It may have had millions of men in uniform, but as a military force it was a joke, effective only against unarmed civilians and ragtag bands of revolutionaries.
Washington didn't see it that way, of course. My team found Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, whom the news media had dubbed Carlos the Jackal, twice, once in the Middle East, once in Eastern Europe. He was the pudgy little Marxist, a son of a Venezuelan dentist, who gave Western Europe and the Middle East a run for its money back in the seventies. He'd hit and run—run back to behind the Iron Curtain—killing a policeman or two here, an innocent in a stroller there, an OPEC minister over there. The newspeople saw something magical in Sanchez. They canonized him, created the myth of the European gunslinger.
We could have knocked him off either time, could have reached right out and taken him as easily as we snapped his photograph. We wanted to. Dearly. But Washington, fearing something that wasn't fearsome, would not give us the green light. We had to be content to watch him strut like a peacock, convinced of his invulnerability and his place in history, just another dumb son of a bitch who thought it creative tossing hand grenades into crowded shopping malls.
It wasn't until after the fall of the Berlin Wall that Sanchez was arrested and jailed.
Max had been with me both times. He'd weathered the changes while I got out after Granada, having lost more friends to politics and stupidity than I could stomach. I wondered if he was content with the way things had turned out.
The connecting door opened and I shut off the television. Claire came in and sat on the side of the bed. She wore the Calafia T-shirt I'd bought her. Her legs were bare underneath.
“Are we safe?”
“As long as no one knows where we are.”
“I'm not used to violence. I've never experienced anything like this. People invading my home. It's unthinkable.”
“It's not real. It's the kind of thing you see on television. And then it comes into your living room.”
“I don't watch those kinds of shows. Never did. I don't go to those kinds of movies, either. I'd always believed that if you bring violence into your life, it will follow.”
“And now you're not so sure.”
She placed her fingers on her temples. “I don't know what to think. I can't sleep. I'm getting a headache. I get migraines and I feel one coming on.”
“You get pinched nerves in your back?”
She nodded.
“Frozen shoulder?”
“How did you know?”
“Lie down on the bed.”
Claire looked at me, her expression unreadable.
“It's not like that,” I said.
“Lomi Lomi
is Hawaiian massage. There's a woman in Kauai who taught me. It won't hurt and it might help.”
“You're a full-service detective.”
“Just doing my best.”
I got off the bed. Claire retained that same enigmatic expression. Then she nodded and slowly pulled the T-shirt over her head, lay down on the bed, and rolled onto her stomach. She had worn nothing under the T-shirt. She neither flaunted her body nor tried to hide it.
My mouth went dry.
I went into the bathroom and took a small bottle of oil from my kit. Claire lay on the bed, her eyes closed, a neutral expression on her face. The skin of her back was smooth and tan, the muscles bunched and hard. I rubbed the oil lightly onto her skin and on my forearms.
“That smells good,” she said.
“Kukui oil. From a tree that grows in Hawaii. It's essential to
Lomi Lomi,
if you want to do it right.” Starting at the small of her back, my fingers searched her muscles, looking for telltale knobs of cramped muscle tissue.
“Ouch.”
“Patience. You've got quite a crop of knots here.”
“I get those. Always have.”
“When you are tense.”
“Yes.”
“That may be what causes your migraines. The muscles knot up, then get worse and pull on the connective tissue. I'm going to loosen them. When we're done, you'll find those
muscles attach to your skull behind your ears. That's where your migraines start. We'll take those knots and push them out through your neck.”
“Ohhh.”
“That hurt?”
“Noooo. That feels so good.”
“These aren't so bad. We can get to most of these.” My fingers searched the muscles in her back, probing the ridges and the valleys. When they discovered a knot, they pushed and kneaded and manipulated the knots and the muscles, dissolving the large ones and moving the small ones from the back up toward the neck.
Claire smiled, her eyes closed, her face visible in profile. Her body was compact and powerful, her golden skin flawless. I closed my eyes, letting my fingers explore and heal, allowing them sole access. I told myself I was here only to heal. My fingers listened to the rhythm of her body, followed wherever the pain could be stopped. I put those other thoughts away for another time.
“Umm.” I opened my eyes. Claire's face held a beatific expression.
“Umm is better than ouch,” I said.
“Umm,” she repeated.
I worked on her for over an hour, pushing one knot after another up through her shoulder blades. Finally, I pushed out the knots from her shoulders and neck. When I rolled my forearms up and down her back, the muscles were soft and supple.
“Where have you been all my life?” she asked lazily. “My headache is gone. I feel wonderful.”
“Kauai has some of the best body workers and teachers in the world.”
“They must be, if they taught you.”
“Can you sleep?”
“I think so,” she said. “Oh. What are you doing?”
“Your feet. It'll relax you. Make you sleep.” I poured more oil on the soles of her feet and massaged them until she
snored softly. Her face was peaceful, as if she hadn't a care in the world.
I covered her and turned out the light. Then I took my shaving kit and my briefcase and went into the other room to sleep.

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