The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (10 page)

Archer had no interest in delaying the inevitable. He was eight feet from the nearest of the two. The punk nearest him was blindly reaching for his gun with his right hand. They weren’t wearing masks or dark glasses or anything. If there were cameras anywhere in the small store, their mugs would be on the evening news. The punk nearest Archer was wearing a trucker’s cap turned backward, a blue and red logo clearly legible from eight feet away. Archer noted the familiar logo and then his eyes tracked to the patch of pink flesh half an inch beneath the punk’s hairline. That was the target area.
 

Their strategy was predictable. The punk at the counter would get the Korean’s attention and distract him as punk #2 approached from the side to keep the old man from pulling a shotgun or pushing a hidden button beneath the countertop.
 

Archer watched punk #2 travel two more steps before emerging from the restroom door and leaning out close to the wall. He didn’t make a sound. The punk at the counter said something to the Korean as punk #2 dipped the hand under his shirt and came out with a revolver. Archer brought the mop handle up to his ear, holding it like a javelin, gripping it near one end so that the length of it protruded out toward the sales floor. Archer took one step forward and closed the gap to within five feet. Then snapped it forward without wasting a breath, making contact with the punk’s spine at the base of his skull. The punk folded to the floor like an empty suit.

The punk at the register noticed the movement, but a second too late to react efficiently. He reached for his gun but Archer had retracted the mop handle and immediately flung it like a spear at the punk’s head. It hit him in the shoulder. He spun on his heels, freaking out and panicking, dropping his gun and kicking it away as he scrambled to regroup.

“Get down,” Archer yelled at the Korean. Then he ducked below the end of the counter, squatting beside the punk in the trucker’s hat and took his gun. He leaned out and spotted the kid’s partner fumbling with his firearm. Archer leaned out, leveling his gun at the punk’s head. “Drop it,” he said.

The kid froze. He was all of eighteen.

“You don’t want what I’ve got,” Archer said. “Live to see another day, friend.”

He could see indecision racing in the punk’s eyes.

“Place it on the ground,” Archer said.

The punk hesitated a full beat, still estimating his odds, but made the wise choice. He slowly placed the gun on the floor.

“Lie on your face, amigo,” Archer said as he picked up the second firearm and placed both guns on the counter. “Make the call,” he said to the wide-eyed Korean.
 

The old guy in the thick glasses nodded enthusiastically.

Archer sat on the counter, munching on a Payday candy bar, waiting for the cops to arrive and ask questions, the two punks seated on the floor in front of him. The one was still dazed from the blow to the back of his head. His eyes were glassy and his head wobbled. Archer didn’t say a word. Within four minutes, three police cruisers pulled up outside, light bars flashing.
 

SIXTEEN

Tom Webb received a call from the lead detective on the Tatum Cloud case. His name was Jensen. The detective said a package had been delivered to his desk and it was something Webb might be interested in taking a look at.

Webb was standing at Jensen’s desk, staring at the parcel the detective had received that morning. Webb and Detective Jensen had a lengthy history that had been more antagonistic than not, so Webb was somewhat taken aback that the detective had been so forthcoming in inviting him over.

The parcel had the physical dimensions of a shoe box. It was wrapped in brown paper, sealed with packing tape. Jensen’s name and work address were written in clear, neat script in the center of the front side, with the name Tatum Cloud included at the top left corner as the name of the sender, but no return address. A blue felt tip marker had been used. The parcel remained unopened.

“You waited on my behalf?” Webb asked.

Jensen nodded. “It’s been X-rayed. There is nothing explosive inside. It looks like nothing but some folded clothing. It’s rather light. Not much weight to it at all.”

Webb studied the handwritten script. It had distinctive feminine characteristics, but not a molecule of his brain believed for a second that Tatum had addressed the box or dropped it in the mail. This was a crank. A false lead. A distraction. But that didn’t matter. It had to be taken seriously, if only for the few minutes it would take to peel open the paper and have a look inside at whatever the nut job had decided to send along via the USPS.

Jensen wore a suit with no tie. He had aged significantly in the past five years, in the time since his second wife’s death. At one time he had been a slightly funny guy, but the humor had drained from his eyes. He was as thin now as Webb had ever seen him. The flesh under his eyes was dark. His cheeks were hollow. The gray in his hair had flanked back from the temples and spread like a rash. He had suffered alongside his wife until the cancer won. He looked like he was still fighting the battle in his heart. His suit looked expensive but didn’t look good on him. Nothing would look good on him, Webb thought, until he shook the demons free and took his life back.

“Go ahead,” Webb said.

Jensen had taken a small pocketknife from his top desk drawer and set in on the blotter to the right side of the mysterious parcel. Now he flicked open the blade and turned one end of the parcel to face him. The wrapping job was as neat as a Christmas present. He sliced through the tape on one end, spun the parcel on the blotter, and cut the tape on the other end. There was another piece of tape along the bottom and the detective tilted the parcel up on its edge to make the final incision.
 

Webb watched without comment.

“Would you like the pleasure?” Jensen asked.

Webb shook his head no.
 

It was indeed a shoe box. New Balance was printed on the lid. Jensen lifted the box out of the paper and brushed the paper aside with one hand, then set the box down in the center of his desk. There was tape on both ends of the lid. He used the knife again—just a single quick flick to free each end. Then he removed the lid and both men looked inside.
 

There was a greeting card envelope neatly placed on a folded youth-size cotton hoodie. The detective passed the envelope to Webb and lifted out the hooded sweatshirt. Webb ran his index along the flap to break the seal as his eyes watched Jensen. The hoodie had
American Eagle
stitched on the front side. It was brand new with the tags still attached. Only the barcode had been removed.

Inside the envelope were four color photos of a teenage girl, each showing her from the neck down, dressed in bra and panties and lying on her back on a bed with pink sheets. There was no way to identify her. On her belly, written in the same blue ink as was used on the outside of the parcel, were the words
Tatum’s tummy.

Webb passed the photos to Jensen.

“What do you think?” Jensen asked.

“It’s not Tatum.”

“It’s somebody.”

“Some freak.”

“Welcome to Los Angeles,” Jensen quipped.
 

“I’ll take the pics over to have Jimmy Cloud verify, but it’s not her.”

“How do you know it’s not her?”

“They would show her face. They’d want to prove beyond doubt they have her,” Webb said.

“You think there’s more than one of them?”

“Without a doubt.”

* * *

Glen was still in bed when Archer knocked on the duplex door. The door opened and Glen stood there in the same clothes he’d worn the night before, but now they were very wrinkled and there was a stain low on the left side of his T-shirt. Archer did not want to know what the stain was from.

“Dude, I was asleep,” Glen said. His eyes were blood red and he was squinting against the midday light.

“I called your cell but got no answer,” Archer said. He was still trying to wrap his brain around what an attractive young woman like Cecile had been thinking planning to waste her life with this loser.

“I turn the ringer off while I sleep.”

Archer stepped past him into the house. “I need to have another look around,” he said. He didn’t wait for a response. He walked right in.

Glen stood at the door looking stupefied for a moment, then the slow-motion activity in his brain caught up. He shut the door and slouched toward the living room, moving like a zombie.
 

Archer didn’t wait for his host. He was already up the stairs. The room where Tatum had slept was to his right, so he followed the hallway to a bedroom on the left-hand side. He tipped his upper body through the open door. The room looked lived in. There was a big sleigh bed with bedding twisted up and slung aside. The bed looked comically oversized for the modest bedroom. There was barely space enough to squirm around on either side. A dresser stood at the foot of the bed, with a mirror bolted to the top and leaning forward ever so slightly. One of the lower dresser drawers was pulled out, as if forgotten. There were clothes scattered on the floor. T-shirts and jeans, underwear and cheap lingerie. A closet door was open, the folding door pushed open on its track. Lots of empty hangers, and a collection of shoes and flip-flops on the floor. Glen and Cecile’s love nest.

Archer stepped into the room. Glen stood in the doorway.

“Sorry about the mess,” Glen said.

“Did Cecile have many friends?”

Glen shrugged. “You know, just the normal amount, I guess.”

“Any of them into drugs? Not pot, the heavy shit? Heroin?” Archer asked.

Glen stared at him with empty eyes, dumb as a post. “Don’t think so, man.”

Archer believed him. His suspicion was Cecile had had a decent enough social circle. He suspected that Glen had been the one black spot in her life, one of her major flaws in judgment. But not the only one. Some other decision, some other imprudent relationship had placed her on a park bench with a syringe filled with heroin stuck in her left arm.
 

“Her friends come around much?” Archer asked.

“Sure,” Glen said.

“You know them well?”

Glen shrugged like he didn’t know how to answer, like he suspected a possible trap lingering ahead if he didn’t choose his words wisely or keep his mouth shut altogether.
 

“There’s no wrong answer,” Archer said. “I’d like to know how this happened to her, because I believe she was a good person.”

Glen nodded, his red eyes blinking away tears. “She was great. I really loved her.”

“Did you see her hanging around anyone lately you hadn’t seen before?”

“Not really. Not that I can remember.”

Archer kicked clothes aside, getting down on one knee to look under the bed. He hooked an arm onto the mattress for balance. The bedroom was trashed. It smelled of pot smoke, cigarettes, and dirty laundry. There was no excuse for an adult human being to live that way. Archer hadn’t left his bed unmade since his first day of boot camp in the Marines.
 

There was nothing under the bed but more clothes. Archer stood and walked to the closet, inspecting the overhead shelving. He pushed hangers around and kicked at a pair of shoes on the floor. Then he returned to the bed and lifted one side of the mattress off the box springs. That’s where he found the wad of cash. Archer hoisted the mattress up and braced it against his shoulder, then reached in with one hand and scooped out a sandwich baggie filled with money. He dropped the mattress and stepped around to the foot of the bed.

Glen was still standing in the doorway. His eyes widened at the sight of the cash.
 

Archer shook the baggie, displaying his discovery.

“Does this belong to you?” Archer asked.

Glen shook his head.

“Did you know it was there?”

“I’ve never seen it before,” Glen said. “How much is in there?”

Archer turned the baggie over in his hands. It was thick enough to grip like a baseball. He opened the runner to break the seal and dumped the wad of cash into one hand. The bills were held together by a pair of thick rubber bands. He touched the wad to his nose, gave a sniff. The outermost bill was a hundred-dollar note. He peeled back one corner and saw that the note beneath it was another hundred. So he thumbed to the middle of the dense wad of bills and found that they were all the same.
 

“There’s several thousand dollars here,” Archer said. “Perhaps your fiancé was saving for a raining day. Why would she have been hiding money under your mattress?”

Glen shrugged.

“Looks like she didn’t want you to know about it. Did she have a job? Did she work anywhere?”

“No,” Glen said.

“Where would she come by a few thousand bucks like this?”

“Don’t know,” Glen said. His eyes were still red and glassy. He looked half asleep and half stoned.

“Does it surprise you to see this?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Would she have stolen from you?” Archer said.

“No way, man. She wasn’t like that. She’d never take anything from me. I gave her anything she needed.”

“Did she ever sell dope on the side on her own that you might not know about?”

“No way,” Glen said again. “She didn’t sell at all. She wasn’t interested.”

Archer removed the rubber bands and fanned the cash out on top of the dresser. His eyes made a quick scan and he counted fifty-five hundred dollars. Cecile hadn’t wanted Glen to know about her little stash. No other logical reason to stow it under the mattress. But this hadn’t been collected over time. A wad of hundreds like that had come into her possessing in a single burst. The money had come from a single source as a single payment.

Could it be connected to her death and the heroine needle in her arm, Archer wondered?
 

“The police didn’t find her cell phone,” Archer said. “Have you seen it?”

“No, but I’ve looked around some. She always had it with her. She wouldn’t have left it here if she’d gone out somewhere. I’ve called it several times but it goes straight to voice mail.”