the Pallbearers (2010) (32 page)

"What I don't get is why you went after Walt Dix," I continued, trying to get him talking. "What could be in that Huntington House embezzlement for you?"

Mesa said nothing.

"You couldn't possibly care about a crummy one point five million dollars. There had to be something else." His expression remained blank. Now he wasn't even looking at me. His gaze had shifted to the plate-glass window and the three men standing just outside the closed sliding-glass door. "You surfed with him, right? Long boards."

After I said that, he shifted his weight and seemed to tense. When he turned back to me, his expression had changed slightly. There was a new tightness at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. But still he said nothing.

"Those cigar-box boards are a bitch to stay up on," I said. "I know, 'cause I tried." I still had no idea where the hell this was leading, but I could tell it was upsetting him so I kept going. "Seal Beach. Six in the morning, right? Up by the Municipal Pier just before sunup, you and Walt kneeling in the sand with a buncha little kids. Walt timing the AWPs."

Mesa just stood there, but now his whole body was rigid. His dark face began to flush with blood. A vein started pulsing in the center of his forehead.

"You two musta been the only guys around who could stay up on a cigar box. Nose always pearling. Hard as shit to cut back on. I couldn't do it. Walt taught you, right? That was his thing, always helping the other guy."

Now Mesa's face twitched. "Shut the fuck up," he hissed angrily.

"So I'm right about that. He taught you to ride boards like he taught all of us. You met him before dawn at Ninth Street, tapping the source. So why steal from him? Why send O'Shea to kill him?"

"I didn't send Rick to kill him," Mesa said sharply. "It was a mistake."

"When you make a guy write a phony suicide note then blow his head off with a shotgun, it's hard to call it a mistake," I said.

His face was getting redder. His jaw clenched. He didn't say anything more for almost a full minute, and I just stood there and watched him smolder. When he did talk, he changed the subject.

"You don't have anything that can hurt me," he began. "Even if you have a federal warrant for Ricky, all I have to do is get him across the reservation border into Mexico and that ends it. A little cash in the right hands down there and your warrant or any extradition gets crushed. As long as O'Shea doesn't do anything stupid, it's finished. If he screws up, he'll disappear. Nobody will ever see him again. Simple."

"Nothing in life is that simple, Gene."

"O'Shea's the one who killed Walt. So how's that my fault? I wasn't even there. It's on him, not me."

"That's gonna depend on how Rick decides to tell it," I said. "And then you got this multiple-kidnapping charge. You're holding four people at gunpoint against our will. If we end up dead, it's murder. Who you gonna blame for that?"

"You got lost wandering around out here at night, ended up on the wrong side of the border, got shot by cartel drug smugglers. I know how to control Mexican jurisprudence. I've got connections down there. It's not even close to being a problem."

I didn't like the sound of that. There's a lot of police corruption in the border provinces of Mexico, and with the right connections, my guess was he might actually pull that off.

"You've got nothing, Scully. I'm wasting my time talking to you." He turned and walked to the door but stopped unexpectedly and turned back. He had something more he wanted to say but was struggling to get it out.

"You probably loved Walt," he began. His voice was thick with emotion. "You were too fucking gullible to see what a selfish, egocentric prick he really was."

"Selfish?"

"All that cheap Zen philosophy, talking over everyone's head. Trying to make it sound like he had some kind of cosmic answer. Like my life was some kinda journey instead of what it really was--a nightmare created by selfish, angry people who didn't give a shit what happened.

That worked great on most of you, but even back then I knew it
. W
as psychobabble. I was too smart for Walt's livpe. My mind refused to log bullshit. I was always looking for the real answers. I could see what was really going on. I was too smart for him. Too smart for everybody. That's why I made it from a dirt hut in the desert to the top of corporate America. Nobody understood what I was thinking. I thought Walt did in the beginning, but then I found out he was just another guy with a program, working the system." He stopped talking, but the vein had not stopped pulsing in his forehead.

If I wanted to survive, I needed to get a handle on this guy fast.

"Why were you so angry at Walt? A guv you just surfed with?" I asked.

And then, without warning, he told me.

"Walt caught me stealing once," he said. "After it happened, he took me out to dinner. I remember thinking, What is this? I steal a bunch of money from the home, lie catches me at it, then pays me back by buying me dinner in a big fancy restaurant.

"Asshole that Walt was, of course he had this bullshit Zen lesson for me. We're sitting there over inch-thick steaks, and he tells me that two wolves were fighting over my soul. I'm thinking, wolves? Gimme a fuckin' break. He says one wolf was evil and only wants to eat my heart, but the other was good and was fighting to protect my spirit. I remember getting more pissed by the minute. The guy was patronizing me. It wasn't about that. It was about need. It was about winning; getting the other guy before he could get you. So I finally asked him, Okay, if these wolves are fighting, which wolf will win? You know what he told me?"

"Yeah," I answered. "He said the wolf you feed will win." I remembered the story well. Walt had told it to me the second week I'd been there. The day he'd caught me stealing money from the office.

Mesa was silent for a minute, then he said, "Two months later Walt threw me out. Sent me back to child welfare. I was twelve."

"So you were at Huntington House just like the rest of us," I said.

It was the piece I'd been missing. All along, I'd thought Walt had befriended him as an adult. Now it turned out Eugene Mesa was just another orphan. It was the emotional connection that had caused all of this. Anger, love, and betrayal were driving him. Revenge, not money, was the motive for Pop's murder.

I must have looked shocked because Mesa laughed before saying, "I thought you already knew." "No."

"I was found in an alley in Long Beach by child services when I was nine years old. I lived at Huntington House for three and a half years."

"And that's why you framed him and tried to destroy his reputation? Because he threw you out for stealing?"

"He betrayed me," Mesa said, coldly. "Pop was a fool. After I made it, I called him, set up a meeting. He let me get close to him again all those years later. I formed Creative Solutions and bought Huntington House when he ran out of money in the mid-nineties. All the time I was helping him, he never realized all I ever wanted was to pay him back for what he'd done."

In that instant, I could see Eugene Mesa the way he was as a nine-year-old, full of hatred and fear. He had been exactly like me.

"I feel sorry for you, Gene," I said softly.

"Don't," he said. "As it turned out, I never needed anybody anyway." Then he opened the slider and left me.

Chapter
59

I watched Mesa talking to Rick O'Shea out on the deck, just outside the pool-house window. As soon as I was alone, I began trying to get the Swiss Army knife out of my right front pocket. I had my hands around to the side as far as they would go and thrust deep into my jeans. My fingertips could just barely touch the knife. I moved over to a barstool, and by rubbing on the edge of the seat, managed to shift the knife up half an inch inside my pocket. I hooked my little finger through the metal loop on the top of the handle and finally fished it out.

I
was holding it in both cuffed hands behind me as O'Shea came back inside the pool house. He was now dressed in his fight trunks and wearing a white silk robe that had RICOCHET embroidered on the back. He closed the door and walked directly over. As he crossed, I managed to open the small blade behind my back and turned it in my hand so I could start sawing on the plastic band tha
t b
ound my wrists, while trying to conceal my body motion as I worked.

"What makes you think you can prove
I
killed Walt?" he asked.

"We've got the motive, the accounting work papers Pop had, your bank transactions that match the exact amounts you embezzled. All the stuff you were trying to get from him when you accidentally beat him to death."

I was about halfway through the plastic cuffs when he suddenly stepped forward and hit me. The knife flew out of my hand and clattered on the floor behind me. I instantly tasted blood in my mouth. He hit me again, and I went down hard.

As soon as
I
hit the floor, the half-sawed plastic cuffs snapped and my hands came free.

I scrambled to my feet, with my fiberglass cast and one good fist in front of me, ready to defend myself for the third time. If I lost this round, it was going to cost me my life.

"This is gonna be fun," O'Shea said as he went into a fighting stance, "just like before, you got no chance, Scully."

I slammed the cast down hard on the bar top. It hurt like hell, but the scored end cracked and immediately exposed the little Bobcat .25 in its protective baggie. I transferred the gun into my good left hand, ripped the baggie off, flipped off the safety, and fired.

I pulled the shot slightly and the bullet hit him high in the right shoulder.

"Fuck," he said, looking down at the wound. Blood began spreading out, blossoming on the white silk robe around the bullet hole.

It looked like the .25 caliber slug had gone clean through without hitting a bone or doing any major damage.

Then O'Shea charged me, knocking the gun to the side as I fired a second shot, which missed him completely. In seconds he had me by the throat, and threw me to the floor.

It was the Torrance Airport all over again as he wrapped me up in some kind of bone-breaking, martial-arts hold. I managed to retain the Bobcat, got it up between us, and fired again. This one hit him in the groin and did a lot more damage. He screamed in pain, then let go of me as he grabbed his stomach with both hands.

"Hey, Scully. My turn."

It was Jack. He had rushed through the door at the sound of the first shot and was standing directly behind O'Shea with a pool cue he'd picked up off the center table. He swung from the heels and caught O'Shea behind the ear. Rick slumped on the floor, out cold.

I untangled myself and slowly stood. "We gotta tie him up. See if you can find something."

Jack picked up my Swiss Army knife and used it to cut down a drapery cord to bind O'Shea's hands, then handed it back to me.

"Somebody must ve heard those shots," I said. "We gotta get outta here. Call the hotel desk. Ask to be connected to Captain Thomas Ironwood at the tribal police. Tell him to get some people out here fast, and tell him the FBI should be arriving any minute. They need to be included. Then get that maintenance truck and park it by the back gate behind the pool."

"Whatta you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna find the others and meet you out back in five minutes."

I headed out of the pool house, clutching Alexa's tiny Beretta in my left hand.

Chapter
60

Once I was outside, I realized that, despite the gunfire, miraculously, nobody was running out onto the pool deck. I sprinted across the pavement into the main house and started looking for the most logical place where Calabro would take the others. I saw a door leading to the subbasement and bounded down the stairs.

I was running recklessly down a narrow basement hallway, throwing open doors, looking for Alexa and the others when
I
turned a corner and suddenly collided with Kimbo Sledge and Gary White. They were also decked out in silk fight robes, their MMA ring names stitched on the back.

I
raised the Bobcat and pointed it in their general direction. Its such a small weapon, it didn't seem to worry them at all, because they both simultaneously attacked me. I was trapped in close quarters and had just enough time to fire once. The .25 caught Gary
White in the forehead. "The Great" White was off the ride and dead before he hit the floor.

I didn't have time to shoot Kimbo Sledge, who was instantly on me. His silk robe said SLEDGEHAMMER, and he began to prove it. The man was pretty much finishing up the job O'Shea had started on me five days ago.

Suddenly a corridor door flew open and Sabas Vargas came charging out and hit the pile. He'd somehow gotten his hands untied. All three of us were rolling on the ground. Both Vargas and I were pummeling Sledge, who had curled up and become a very difficult target composed of nothing but elbows and forearms. We weren't doing any damage when Alexa came through the same door, also untied. She held a heavy metal floor lamp in both hands. Without hesitation, she swung the base at Kimbo's head. He went down and out.

"How'd you get loose?" I asked them as I picked myself up off the floor.