The Pawnbroker (14 page)

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

“I've been made. He's entering the food court, heading northwest. Where are you?”

“Coming your way past the Victoria's Secret. I see you.”

There he was, about a hundred feet away, entering the food court from the west.

“He's by the Starbucks,” Charlie said, watching blue jacket maneuvering around a cluster of bistro tables.

The guy stopped, turned, and looked right at Gordon, who was only fifty feet away. “Fire!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, then sprinted toward the main entrance.

Everyone froze for a second. “False alarm!” Charlie shouted, racing to cut off the guy before he got outside. “April Fool,” Gordon added, then laughed at the top of his lungs.

“Assholes,” somebody else shouted, followed by a mixture of laughter and curses. It was November.

Mazda guy saw Charlie closing in from the right. He swerved, leaped the counter of a lost and found, bounced off a wall, then threw open an emergency fire exit fleeing outside as the alarm went off.

Charlie followed four seconds later, with Gordon at his heels. Charlie reached the wide sidewalk and stopped at the curb. Their guy was running into the parking lot toward a white Ford sedan full of people.

Gordon raced past him in pursuit.

“No!” Charlie yelled, seeing at least two pistols at the open car windows.

Gordon dove to the pavement and rolled, and Charlie chose the closest concrete planter to duck for cover. Bullets started flying, but they were high, fortunately, showering him with clipped debris from the potted plant.

Tires squealed, and he raised up to look, seeing only a mud-smeared plate on an otherwise spotless car. “Gordo!” he yelled.

“Yeah? I'm fine. Pissed, but fine.”

Charlie stood, watching as Gordon rose to his feet, dusting himself off.

“There they are!” a woman yelled from his right. Charlie turned and saw several shoppers and a mall security officer looking at him and Gordon.

Charlie held his hands up where they could be seen, then began to walk slowly toward the man in the gray uniform, who was armed with a Taser. “We didn't yell ‘fire.' We were helping the police run down a suspect.” It was a stretch, but not by much.

“Call APD Dispatch, and have them contact Detective DuPree,” Gordon added, following Charlie's lead.

“We just got shot at by someone in a car,” Charlie added. “Was anyone inside hit?” It was unlikely, but it shifted focus. He stopped twenty feet away, not wanting to alarm the guard any more than necessary. If the fifty-five-year-old couch potato saw their weapons, he might have a heart attack or, worse, Taser one of them.

*   *   *

“All this because someone was following you? Bullshit. This isn't Afghanistan, boys,” DuPree argued, standing next to his unmarked cruiser beside the crime-scene van.

“So why are we still taking fire?” Gordon shot back.

“From some guy in a Mazda wearing a Broncos cap?”

“Actually, it was his limo service that opened up on us. If you lift some prints and trace from the Mazda, you might get DNA and a hit. I'm betting this guy has been arrested.”

“If not already, then soon enough.” Gordon said.

“Enough, you two,” DuPree said, his voice reaching soprano—the pitch, not the TV mobster. “I've already forwarded your photo. We've got units looking for this white Ford, recovering slugs, and processing one Mazda, recently stolen, according to the woman owner. Either of you know about the flat tire on the Mazda?”

“I didn't see anything,” Charlie said.

“And you, smart-ass?” DuPree asked Gordon.

“You heard Charlie,” he deflected.

“Have you been able to get an address, phone number, social, or anything else on Ruth Adams?” Charlie asked the detective.

“No more since you last asked.”

“Nothing plus nothing is still nothing,” Gordon said.

DuPree shot him daggers. “If we don't have anything local, we're going to run the photo through some national databases that have image-recognition systems. We might get a hit.”

“What about Baza? Guns from his time at the shop are showing up in the hands of someone staking out his apartment,” Charlie prodded.

“Gun. And if you morons had your shit together, we might have some pawnshop records to track recent gun sales.”

“Baza was the one who screwed up the records, and now we're seeing why. We've heard, but can't prove, that he supplied guns to gangbangers,” Charlie added. “We also heard that Eddie Henderson was doing the selling for Baza through his gang contacts. Sergeant Medina informed you that Eddie was talking to the gang members in that van just before she came on the scene, didn't she?”

Gordon jumped in before DuPree could respond. “Yeah, and the guy from the Mazda and his well-armed pals all fit in with what's going on. Are they all from the same gang?”

This time Detective DuPree looked puzzled instead of angry. “I'm checking with the gang unit on all this, including any Eddie Henderson involvement. They haven't gotten back to me yet.”

“Well, the night is young. Keep in touch, Detective. Right now, we've got a wounded friend to check up on.”

*   *   *

“Gina is looking better, huh?” Gordon asked as they walked out the front entrance of Saint Mark's Hospital.

“Her face is a little thinner, but, yeah, her eyes were bright and her attitude is improving. If she can avoid an infection it won't be long before her voice comes back full strength.”

“I hate hospitals,” Gordon said, looking toward where his pickup was parked.

“Beats the cemetery.”

“Yeah. Hard to get a Navajo into one, huh?”

“If they're still alive.”

“There's a lot of evil in burial grounds, right?”

“According to the more traditional
Diné,
yeah. Actually, it's more dangerous around where they died, not where they're buried,” Charlie said.

“I remember. The evil in every man stays behind when they die,” Gordon said, pushing the key to open the pickup doors as they approached. “The
chindi
.”

“After spending three days with me hiding out in that basement with the bodies of the Taliban, how could you forget?”

“Nine men, all gone to meet Allah. Was it worse for you because we were the ones who killed them?” Gordon asked, climbing behind the wheel.

Charlie entered on the passenger side. “Not something I'd care to ask my
hataalii
. If he knew all the dead I'd been around, I'd need a seven-day Sing before he'd come near me.”

“Why don't you just get the ceremony already? I know you think about it—we all do, even those of us who don't go to church.”

“Maybe I'm beyond help,” Charlie said, opening the glove compartment and bringing out their handguns.

“Or just burned out. Still having nightmares?” Gordon said, taking his pistol and placing into the holster at his waist.

“Every once in a while. But they're so familiar, it's like TV reruns. I wish I could just switch dream channels.”

“Me too. All I dream about are women, pizza, fishing, women, chile burgers, football games on TV, and women.”

“We're going to have to trade dreams.”

“Can Navajos do that?”

“Don't really know. Must be a ruling on that somewhere. Lots of Navajo taboos, though.”

“Hope that doesn't include eating after hospital hours. I'm starved,” Gordon said.

“There are rules about food, but I've always ignored them. Sit down or takeout?”

“Let's switch to your rental car, so we'll blend in, then get a bucket of chicken at the colonel's. Then, maybe we can cruise that neighborhood where Jake says Ruth lived.”

Charlie nodded. “Okay. I think we can recognize the building from the partial in the photo. We'll circle the area for a half hour and if we don't get a probable, we'll call it a day.”

*   *   *

“That looks like the place, all right,” Gordon said as Charlie drove by the brown stucco apartment building a second time. It was nine at night but there was a streetlight at each corner of the block and a nearly full moon overhead. The main entrance to the building had overhead lighting beside a unit of mailboxes. They were the aluminum kind that residents opened with their own keys.

“I'll park along the street and we can walk past the mailboxes and check out the names. Maybe we'll get lucky,” Charlie said.

“Okay. You think the Denver fan or his buds will be cruising this neighborhood tonight, looking for us?”

“Well, I'm betting we weren't followed this time. Whoever has us on their radar might have our places staked out, or maybe Three Balls. We'll have to stay alert when we go home.”

Charlie parked the Ford sedan by the curb in the economically mixed neighborhood, which contained a few newer apartments along with inexpensive pueblo-style single homes probably built in the sixties and seventies. In Shiprock, back on the Rez, if you lived on a street like this you'd have it made. Here, there were even sidewalks on both sides of the street.

“How do you want to play this to get the least amount of attention?” Gordon asked, stepping out onto the sidewalk.

Charlie locked the car, then joined him by the curb. “Let's be two guys trying to remember Rosie and her roommate's address. You know, the ladies we met last night at the Appaloosa Bar. We're well behaved, not drunk, and just a little horny.”

“Typecasting, for sure. I'll be Brad, and you're George, or maybe Gilles.”

Charlie couldn't help but laugh. “We'll walk this side of the street, then cross at the end of the block. When we get to the apartments, we'll stop to read the mailbox names, and write them down, maybe.”

The porch lights of the houses they passed were mostly lit this time of the evening, but nobody was outside except some youngsters looking for lost keys with flashlights, based upon their overheard comments. The two boys didn't even look over when Charlie and Gordon walked past.

Four minutes later they approached the cone of light around the entrance to the apartment building. The mailbox unit was set off the sidewalk on the building lawn, so all they had to do was stop and read.

“Eight mailboxes,” Gordon said, bringing out his smart phone and pushing the record button. He read the printed names aloud, along with the apartment numbers, A-1 to A-4 on the ground level, and B-1 to B-4 on the second floor of the two-story building.

“Hmmm, no Ruth Adams,” Charlie confirmed. “But there's an R. Cumiford in B-2, and that name is darker than the others. The paper is also little whiter than the others, which are yellowed.”

“This label is for the newest tenant,” Gordon put his phone away, reached over, and slid the thin strip of paper out. He turned it over. On the yellowed backside was R. Adams.

“Okay,” Charlie whispered. “Put it back, carefully, then let's walk on.”

They were fifty feet from the mailboxes when Gordon spoke, softly. “You think Rose changed her last name, at least with the landlord, when she found out Baza was dead? That ink was fresh.”

“Or she moved out and somebody moved in with the same first initial. I'm not buying that,” Charlie said.

“So we may have a hit, but we'll need to get visual confirmation.”

“Yeah. There's not much more we can do tonight without attracting way too much attention. Let's go home and start fresh tomorrow morning.”

They crossed the street at midblock, then got into the car. There was no traffic, so Charlie pulled out and turned around in the street to drive out the same way they'd come in.

“Whoa, do you see what I see in the apartment's parking area?” Gordon said, pointing. “Underneath the carport in the back row.”

“A blue Lincoln Town Car. Suppose that's Ruth's ride now?”

“Looks new, at least the finish. Maybe Baza had it repainted, then kept it here. Part of his laying-low strategy?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Tomorrow we need to get a look at the place. I'd go back there now, but we don't want to scare her off—if that is her ride. Assuming she knows what happened to Baza, she's probably on edge. We need to catch up to her, not drive her into hiding.”

“I hear you. If she's already changed her name, the next step for her is to load up her kid and drive off into the desert.”

 

Chapter Eleven

Nancy walked into the pawnshop around 8:15 the next morning wearing jeans; a soft, sleeveless top; and a colorful long-sleeved shirt that she'd left unbuttoned.

Charlie looked up as she approached the counter. He was standing behind it, looking over yesterday's business transactions on the computer. “Good morning, Nancy, you look very … nonthreatening in your civilian clothes. Have you done any undercover work on the force?”

“Lucky me, I got to play hooker nearly every shift my first two years working for the city. So you think Ruth Adams still lives in that apartment?”

“Jake thinks it's the place. That, plus what we saw last night with the name change and that Lincoln Town Car. It's a fifteen-minute walk from there to here, and almost that close to the apartment complex where Baza lived. It makes sense.”

“Let's hope it's not just a coincidence. So far in this case we've got three dead men, an equal number of shooting incidents, Gina in the hospital, and several thousand dollars in cash that the lab techs turned up on a second search of Baza's apartment. But we still don't have a shooter for Baza, and we know neither of those guys in the van could have done it.”

“What's this about cash?”

“Thought I'd told you. It was, like, nine thousand dollars. Enough to buy plane tickets for three to almost anywhere, one-way.”

“My guess is that Baza had more than that stashed away.”