Troubleshooter Read online

  Strauss said, “There’s no case to taint. The case has already been made. These are wanted, convicted felons, lawfully tried and sentenced. I—and the public—don’t give a shit if you bring ’em in in cuffs or feetfirst. I just want them off the street.”

  It took a moment for Tim’s brain to catch up to the words. “So what are we arguing about?”

  “You’re the only one arguing here.” Strauss angled his head toward the door. “Like I said, you’re our Troubleshooter. Go shoot some trouble.”

  18

  Bear plucked another heart off the skewer with his teeth. The charred smell of chicken over fire moistened the air. A bedsheet of a sign flapped by the entrance, featuring a minimalist chicken and the paintbrush-rendered name of the restaurant: Yakitoriya. Tim leaned back from the stick of chicken throats dividing his plate and gazed out at Sawtelle Boulevard, a strip of Japantown transplanted to the West Side.

  Bear nudged Tim’s untouched dish, concerned. “C’mon, now.” Tim tapped a smoked quail egg on the dab of four-alarm mustard coloring his plate and popped it in his mouth. Forced himself to chew, to swallow, to refuel. Dray had once eaten fifteen quail eggs in a sitting—Cool Hand Luke gone exotic. On his hurried final phone call with her, chicken neck had been her last request. It suited her better than the mythical staples—a T-bone, cigarette, apple pie.

  Having endured the unendurable two years ago, he knew better than to indulge his grief. He knew he needed food to continue functioning, and he knew he didn’t want to go home, so he’d let Bear drag him here, figuring he’d try to eat Dray’s favorite meal for her rather than gag down hospital gruel.

  He managed a few cubes of thigh meat and drank half his glass of water, doing his best to ignore the weight of the cell phone in his pocket. At any moment, the phone could ring. And she could be conscious again. Or not.

  It chirped as if on cue, and Tim tensed. But when he fought it out of his pocket, the screen remained unlit. Then he noticed Bear snapping open his Nextel and felt foolish. Bear uh-huhed a few times at Freed in the command post and hung up.

  Bear picked at a chicken throat, a tiny tube crisped like a french fry. “Back when I started, New York days, we worked the mobsters sometimes. They knew we were watching them, we knew they knew, but we managed. We made it work. We wouldn’t bust a guy’s balls until we had a case built. They never took a shot at one of us. Not once. We’d leave them alone on family outings. There was a kind of code.” He used his skewer to impale one of his remaining quail eggs, the only time in Tim’s memory he’d left food on his plate. “Mutts are getting too good at their jobs. No honor, no remorse, nothing. It’s hard not to think things are getting worse. Bikers were losers, but they stood for something—or at least pretended to. The Angels stood for something. But the Sinners? I don’t buy the gross-out biker veneer. It’s costume design. Underneath it they’re stone cold.” He poked at the egg, again piercing its rubbery brown skin. “People don’t stand for anything anymore.”

  The waiter asked in broken English if they wanted beer. They declined and sat quietly, flushed with the sting of mustard and the heat of the open grill.

  Tim replayed his last conversation with Dray on the phone: The captain needs someone to pick up a few overtime parole hours…. I’ll take ’em if it’ll be a late one for you.

  It will, he’d replied, sealing her fate.

  “If I hadn’t slowed them down,” Tim said quietly, not lifting his eyes from his plate, “Dray wouldn’t have pulled them over. They would’ve been fifteen minutes farther up the road. Den would’ve had his helmet on.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I didn’t say it was. I’m saying chance is fucked.”

  Bear’s eyebrow rose at the anger in Tim’s voice.

  “It would be great if I felt guilty. But I don’t. I’m pissed off at her. Everyone keeps telling me I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing. You don’t take down five outlaw bikers on a deserted road without backup.” His voice was wobbling, and Bear looked on, horrified and starting to mist up himself. “She fucked up.”

  “Maybe she thought—”

  “There’s no ‘maybe,’ Bear. You know it, and I know it. She should’ve gotten her ass back to the squad car. It was just Dray being stubborn. What’d she say? ‘I’m not going without taking you in’? What kind of cowboy bullshit is that?” He took a moment to be unabashedly furious with Dray, a solo, pregnant deputy failing to retreat from a lethal biker gang. He swore quietly, used the napkin to dry his face.

  “Okay,” Bear conceded. “It looks like an error in judgment. A bad one. Maybe she was more emotional. She is pregnant.”

  You gonna cuff him upside the head, or should I?

  Tim felt a faint grin tense his lips, catching him off guard.

  Bear furrowed his forehead. “What?”

  “Being pregnant wouldn’t have affected her judgment. You know Dray.”

  “Which means she had a reason.” Bear met Tim’s eyes evenly. “Something we’re missing.”

  “You’re right,” Tim finally said.

  Bear rose and threw down a few bills. They exited through the split fabric of the sign amid a chorus of Japanese farewells. Tim found the CD in the glove box, twirled it between his thumbs. The shooting of his wife preserved on 700 megabytes.

  Bear looked from the CD to Tim’s thoughtful face. “You thinking of calling him?”

  “Yep.” Tim pulled out his phone, dialed a mobile number.

  The familiar voice answered. Tim explained his predicament.

  “Sure, I’ll look at the footage, but that’s it. I don’t go operational. I know how things got last time you took something personal—people getting their heads blown apart and shit. So remember: I don’t fight. I don’t shoot.”

  “It’s not like that,” Tim said. “I’m doing this on Service time.”

  “So why are you calling me?”

  “Because you’re the best.”

  No argument there. A pause. “Meet you in two hours.”

  “Where?”

  But Pete Krindon had already hung up.

  19

  Mac sat nervously in a vinyl-upholstered chair by the door, his tousled hair and two-day stubble roughing out his appealing features. He stood at Tim and Bear’s approach, hefting his gear-heavy belt and throwing a sigh that smelled of Clorets. As Dray’s partner he was sometimes territorial; that he nursed a long-standing and hopeless crush on her didn’t help ease tensions between him and Tim. Tim took a moment to smooth down his annoyance at the sight of this man sitting sentry outside his wife’s room.

  “Any change?” Tim asked.

  Mac shook his head. “Nurse is with her now. But they’re only letting in family.”

  Tim pushed on the doorknob. When Mac went to follow, Bear laid a thick hand on his shoulder.

  “Can’t I come in with you, Rack?”

  “I’d rather be alone with her.”

  “Look, can I just—?”

  “Not right now.”

  Sleeplessness and grief had left Mac looking loose and a touch unpredictable. He appeared to be working up a retort, but Tim slid past him into the room.

  A nurse leaned over Dray, her arms moving industriously. Thumb on one lid, then the other, click-click of a pen flashlight. Over her shoulder: “Hello, Mr. Rackley.”

  Tim sank into the bedside chair. “Hi. Have we met?”

  She turned, showing off her name tag, her jet-black hair twirled around a pen. “The night Andrea came in. We spoke a few times.”

  Beige liquid coursed up a clear plastic tube through Dray’s nose and into her body. Her finger swelled into a pulse-oximeter. The cardiac monitor blipped deadeningly.

  The nurse made a fist out of Dray’s pliant hand and slid two fingers in. “Now, squeeze my fingers, Andrea. Go on and squeeze.”

  “She’s Dray,” Tim said, “unless you’re mad at her.”

  The nurse smiled and tried again, using her nickname. She looked u
p and gave Tim a little head shake before jotting on a clipboard. When she finished, she used a moistened washcloth to wipe an iodine stain from Dray’s forehead.

  He worked up the courage to ask the question. “How’s it look?”

  “The doctor will be in to talk to you in a second.”

  Tim’s vision went a little glassy. “I see.” As the nurse walked past, he took her arm gently. “Thank you. For cleaning her face.”

  The doctor entered a moment later and greeted Tim warmly.

  “No surgery,” Tim said.

  “That’s the good news. The pellet is wedged against her rib cage at the back of the chest in the serratus anterior. It’s not bothering anyone back there, so we’re gonna leave it in her.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The longer she stays unconscious …”

  “Yeah?”

  “The odds diminish.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of her coming back. Or coming back easily. But it’s not even been twenty-four hours. It’s early yet.”

  “The baby?”

  “By all indications the baby’s healthy. Of course, this is a fragile situation. Do you know the sex?”

  Tim shook his head.

  “Do you want to?”

  “No. We wanted to wait.”

  “Okay.” The doctor paused at the door. “I’m sorry for what I said when you came in. When I talked about myself. I made some assumptions, and, frankly, my timing sucked. Husbands losing wives is a tough one for me. I’m sorry I didn’t use better judgment.”

  “Believe me, I’ve used worse.” Tim offered his hand, and the doctor took it. “I’m glad she’s in your hands.”

  “I’ll take care of her.”

  “Please.”

  The door clicked, leaving him with the headache beep of the monitor and the white noise of unseen moving parts. Dray’s hair remained dark at the tips from dried sweat. Tim rested a hand on the mound of her stomach. His thoughts took him to the waiting crib in their nursery, and he remembered his first three weeks home with Ginny when C-section complications had left Dray hospital-bound. He tried to envision those three weeks of solo parenting stretched into eighteen years, and then he pictured not even having that option.

  The thrill of their honeymoon, a four-day weekend in Yosemite he’d squeezed between deployments, had been heightened by his impending departure. The orange glow of moonlight filtered through tent nylon. Dray’s form emerging from the flannel sheath of a sleeping bag. The muscles in her tapered back, arranged like river stones beneath her smooth skin. Her face smudged up against her shoulder so her cheek grew chins. A fall of lank hair split over her left eye. Tim tended hot—the exertion had overheated him—and he was sitting Indian style at her side, fingertip-tracing the dip between her shoulder blades.

  Her voice was muffled by her shoulder. “How ’bout if I lost a leg?”

  “No.”

  “Both arms?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hysterical blindness?”

  “We’d get through it together.”

  “Chronic halitosis?”

  “We’d figure something out. Buy stock in Listerine.”

  “Hmm.” Her eyes were closed; she moved toward his touch like a contented cat. “Would you divorce me if I started collecting Hummels?”

  “No.”

  “God, you really took those vows literally. Just so you know”—with exaggerated exertion she shoved herself up so she could look at him— “one false move, I’m outta here, pal. I’m talking allergies, facial tics, whistling while you pee, disfiguring scars, referring to yourself as ‘this guy,’ bringing home sport-themed couch pillows—”

  “I’ll watch my step.”

  She hugged him at the waist and curled into him, suddenly serious, inundated with feeling. She spoke to his ribs in a hot whisper. “I want you to always be happy. If anything ever happens to me, you can marry someone else.”

  She was twenty-two and new to emotion. He was twenty-five, convinced of his greater maturity, and invincible.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he’d said.

  Now her milky arm protruded from the papery gown, exposed to the armpit. He lifted her hand. It came limply, as if detached. He ran his thumb across her short-cut fingernails, then over the recent wrinkles that pond-rippled from her middle knuckles. He pressed his face to the skin at her inner wrist—the smell of her, disguised by hospital soap and sweat. He slid his finger into her fist to feel the soft press of her skin all around him. “Squeeze, Dray. Go on, squeeze.”

  He waited for the faintest pulse. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, choked on a breath.

  What are you doing here?

  “Visiting you.”

  Leave the hound-dog-at-the-grave routine to Mac. He’s got nothing better to do.

  “I wanted to see you.”

  Great. Wring your hands. Rend your hair. Fall asleep on the visitor chair, too—that one always looks good on TV movies. This isn’t me. Come on. You spent thirteen years enlisted, eleven with Spec Ops. You know better than to sentimentalize this.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She laughs, crow’s-feet bunching around her impossible green eyes. Get out there and bag some crooks.

  20

  Ambulances lined the unlit berths like worn-out predators. Tim and Bear walked through the dark underground bay, heading up the slope to the open air. A GMC Safari van waited in the turnaround circle up top, bubble lettering announcing drain-clear plumbing. Tim rested the heel of his hand on the butt of his hip-holstered gun. As they passed, the door slid open. Tim halted but didn’t draw—too much like a bad South American kidnapping to occasion hard-edged concern.

  Pete Krindon’s voice issued from the dark interior. “Get in.” Tim and Bear stepped up into the van. Rim seating, carpeted walls, embedded surveillance screens, wires protruding from the torn-apart dash. Pete veered around the block, easing behind a Dumpster in a supermarket parking lot. He cut the engine and pivoted, his thin arm fish-white against the navy vinyl of the headrest. “Turn off your cell phones. You don’t have BlackBerries, do you? Good. Those wireless PDAs might as well be billboards advertising your location. I told you before, Rack, the Mark of the Beast’ll be a bar code worn on the palm.”

  Krindon, a technical-security and surveillance specialist, could remote-monitor a man’s every movement, or reconstruct a woman’s life from the cards she kept in her wallet. Though he was too paranoid or too informed to work for the government, he sometimes contracted in, delivering sensitive intel while maintaining a freelancer’s distance. Tim and Bear used him on occasion to acquire information that warrants couldn’t flush out.

  Bear nodded at the gaping hole in the dash. “You tore out your OnStar.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the information embedded in those fuckers. If people knew the half of it.” A world-weary head shake. “They’re remote-operated—Big Brother can send a signal that turns off your engine. I tracked a mule from Matamoros once, remote-locked him into his Buick by satellite. Federales came, he was at the windows like a lizard in a jar, fifty bricks of coke locked in there with him.” Krindon chuckled sadistically, scratching his vivid red hair as he scrambled into the backseat.

  Tim withdrew the CD from his jacket pocket, and Krindon slid it into a unit beneath the passenger seat. Dray’s approach played on a mounted screen. Krindon watched it through once, his face remaining impassive. He offered Tim no condolences, instead tugging on a catch that released a folding instrument panel from the wall. He stopped the recording when Dray’s head jerked to the right to track the phantom bike’s approach, and he set to work on the digital enhancer. After comparing each pixel to those surrounding it, the artificial-intelligence program either sharpened or flattened it, bringing the freeze-frame into greater resolution—it was like watching a cheap repro of a Monet transform into a photograph.

  Something seemed to catch Krindon’s eye, and then he zeroed in on G
oat’s rearview, angled to the side to deflect the squad car’s spotlight glare. He advanced frame by frame until he picked up a darting movement—black on black, like a bat against the night sky. He captured the reflected blob, then enlarged the image and fussed with the contrast, bringing a partial silhouette into view. The mystery biker. An immense man astride a motorcycle. Kaner.

  “What’s that?” Bear squinting, leaning forward.

  “Don’t touch the screen.” Krindon zoomed in farther, and then the screen rippled downward to pick up a protrusion from Kaner’s boot. Krindon worked on it awhile, the screen rendering the image in waves of clarity.

  “It’s a shoe,” Bear said.

  “He’s double-packing,” Tim said. “Someone’s on the bike behind him. We just can’t see him because Kaner’s so wide.”

  “Her.” Krindon focused in on a fan of wrinkles at Kaner’s side. Four fingers with cherry-painted nails, clutching Kaner’s shirt.

  Tim and Bear waited patiently, letting Krindon fuss over the segment, but the phantom bike never reappeared in the other bikes’ mirrors, nor did the female passenger. Krindon sat back, frustrated, letting the footage roll in real time. Though Tim had seen it now many times, he couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen.

  Dray’s profile, frontlit by the spotlight. “Okay. Stay still. Relax.” The striker’s snarl: “Get the fuck outta here.” The refrigerator truck blasting past, on its way to another stop, another city, Andrea Rackley little more than a passing speck. Just another deputy harassing a few bikers. Nothing to turn a trucker’s head.

  Krindon slowly drew himself up until he sat erect, locked in the grip of an idea. Bear started to ask something, but Tim stayed him with a gesture. Krindon reversed the footage. The blood sucked back up into Dray’s side. She drew herself together, bounced off the ground onto her feet, holstered her weapon and reverse-waddled a few steps. The truck flew by, also in reverse, winking back the spotlight. Krindon froze the bleached-out screen. He fiddled with knobs, darkening the truck’s aluminum paneling. A reflected tableau resolved, like ghost characters emerging from a Polaroid fog. Kaner on his bike, a teenage girl clinging to his back.