Troubleshooter Read online

  Lash took a long time thinking about that one, pinching the mouths of his hand wounds and watching the blood flow. “Hell,” he said at last, “not like it’s a big secret. Even the Cholos know about her. It’s just a name.”

  “That’s right,” Bear said. “Just a name. Like, say, Benjie Franklin.”

  “Terry Goodwin.” Lash’s eyes darted around the room. “There. I said it.” He scratched a scab at the base of his biceps, drawing a red smear. “Now, where’s that hundo?”

  25

  By 3:00 P.M. Tim’s lower back ached every time he shifted, but he didn’t complain, since Bear and Guerrera had been sitting the stakeout all the way through. At least Tim had been able to sneak away to drop fresh flowers off in Dray’s room—irises to greet her awakening if he couldn’t—and then spend the morning at the command post. Even so, he’d memorized every detail of the exterior of Terry Goodwin’s house, a ranch style on a corner lot in Valencia.

  Tannino had expedited their middle-of-the-night warrant request, personally waking up a federal judge. Tim, Bear, and Guerrera had stalked the property cautiously the night before, not wanting to blow the lead if Chief wasn’t present. Tim had beheld Terry’s sleeping form— solo in the California king—through the bottom seam of the bedroom blinds, a pair of night-vision goggles helping him fill in the picture.

  The RV trailer they’d hooked from the Asset Seizure warehouse at least permitted them better viewing comfort. Sunflower seeds overflowed two cups in the front holders. Tim leaned over, finger in one ear so he could hear Freed giving him a cell-phone breakdown on chop and spray shops that had closed in the past few years around the Glendale Harley store. He and Thomas hadn’t stumbled across any paperwork with a “Danny,” “Daniel,” or “Dan” on it.

  Guerrera was lying on the shag carpet in the back, staring up at the ceiling. “She still at the kitchen table?”

  From his post at the tinted window, Bear said, “Yup.”

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “Reading the paper.”

  “Which section?”

  “Front page.”

  Ten minutes later. “And now?”

  “Sports.”

  “Finally. Who won the Citrus Bowl?”

  Bear readjusted his binoculars. “Dunno … she’s flipping back and forth…. Mia Hamm pulled a hamstring.…Turning the page … Miami.”

  “Yes.” Guerrera pumped his fist.

  Tim finished with Freed and snapped the phone shut. The RV’s smell—salsa and stale cigarettes—and his exhaustion, now verging on sleep deprivation, added to the burden of his frustration. “This is stupid.”

  “I said last night I didn’t want to sit the house.” Bear, hater of stakeouts, failed to keep the resentment from his voice. “We don’t have time to wait and see if Chief’s gonna swing by to play a little grab-ass.”

  “I agree,” Guerrera weighed in. “Not the best use of our time, here, socio.”

  “So what is? This is our strongest lead.”

  “If Lash’s information is good,” Bear said.

  “He’s a junkie. He needs money, and he knows if he does us right, we’ll be back with more. Beats ping-ponging around barbed wire for a few bucks.”

  Guerrera said, “It’ll catch up with him. You don’t tell tales out of school about the Sinners. He’ll be killed. Sooner or later.”

  They sat in silence, the only sound the autozoom on Bear’s binocs. Though he hadn’t remarked on it, Tim had taken a shine to Lash, and he’d gleaned that Bear and Guerrera had, too.

  Finally Bear said, “Let’s hope later.”

  “Why don’t we knock-and-notice her, search the house?” Guerrera said.

  “Because if nothing turns up, then we lose the angle,” Tim said.

  “You think she has Chief’s number to alert him?”

  “If she does, I’m not betting our one solid lead on the notion that she’s dumb enough to write it down.” Tim took the binoculars from Bear and trained them on Terry, who’d moved on to Entertainment. A healed knife scar glittered on her right cheek, maybe a parting gift from her three-day stint with the Cholos. “That phone number’s in her skull. It’s just a matter of getting it out.”

  “How?” Bear asked.

  But Tim was already dialing Pete Krindon.

  Krindon unloaded his bag of gear and glanced around the tight camper interior. “Nice digs. I particularly like the neon sign on top flashing ‘Stakeout.’ ”

  “You take care of the junction box?” Tim asked.

  “Yes. But we’re gonna need backup. If this chick is as street-savvy as you say, she’ll use a cell phone.” Krindon withdrew a parabola mike from his bag, the receiver surrounded with a cone collar. He slid open the window, hiding the mike behind a rust-orange curtain, then tossed a cell phone to Guerrera. “Lay on the Mexican accent something fierce.”

  “I’m Cuban.”

  “I don’t think,” Krindon said, “our girl will discern the difference.”

  As Guerrera dialed, Tim kept the binoculars trained on Terry’s kitchen window. She rose, picked up the phone. Guerrera hissed, “We got your hombre, puta. We gon’ kill heem.” He hung up.

  Terry slowly replaced the phone’s receiver. She stared at it, as if expecting it to ring again. She was surprisingly calm, a weathered deed. Tim had been betting on her to maintain her composure, to think matters through. She sat down at the kitchen table, set her elbows in the puddle of newspaper. She thought long and hard. Krindon’s mike picked up some of her whispering with remarkable clarity. “… a scam. Just a fucking crank call.” Her agitation grew. She paced a few times, her bare feet squeaking on the cheap linoleum. With his own spouse comatose on a hospital bed, Tim couldn’t help but feel a jolt of empathy.

  Terry picked up the phone, then hung it up abruptly as if it had shocked her.

  “Go on,” Krindon purred. “Go on.”

  She disappeared down the hall, popping back into view in her bedroom window. She pulled a cell phone from the pocket of her jacket, which was slung over the doorknob. Three beeps as she started to punch in the number, and then she hung up. She sat on the bed, phone in her lap, whispering a mantra. “God, let him be okay. Let him be okay.”

  She dialed. Krindon made a fist at his side.

  Terry let out a deep exhale. “You all right? … No, course I’m not on a landline. … Weird call. From a Cholo, sounded like. … Okay, baby. Me, too.”

  Terry clicked a button and flopped back on the bed, relieved.

  Krindon pulled back from the window and replayed the eleven tones he’d captured as she’d dialed. He matched them slowly on his Nextel until he’d duplicated the tuneless melody. He jotted down the number, handed it to Tim, and vanished out the RV’s narrow door.

  26

  They materialized from behind parked cars and the narrow alleys between broken-down houses, crouching in makeshift formation, MP5s pointing up like the tips of a wrought-iron fence. Indistinct forms in one-piece olive drab flight suits. U.S. MARSHAL patches on the left arms, subdued gray U.S. flags on the rights. Black Hi-Tecs with quiet neoprene soles. Marshals’ stars machine-embroidered over their hearts like targets. Wearing a thigh holster at crotch level, each deputy sported a .40 Glock.

  Except one.

  Tim thumbed free the cylinder on his .357, gave it a spin to watch the six brass dots whirl. With a jerk of his wrist, he snapped the wheel into place, then reholstered the revolver, letting it sling off his thigh. Chief’s safe house was barely visible down the street, a block of darker shadow against the moonless sky. Husks of leaves littered the gutter and car windshields, glowing green, then red in the flashing Christmas lights.

  Guerrera arrived at the staging point last, pulling into the curb between a battered VW van and a dilapidated hearse that provided further ambience. He emerged in a low crouch, document flapping, Judge Andrews’s signature a fountain-pen smudge at the bottom of the page.

  “Ready to light up this pendejo?” Guerrera
whispered.

  Miller folded the warrant into a cargo pocket and nodded at the abandoned hearse. “His ride’s waiting.”

  Guerrera squatted and got a jingle. He emptied a few coins from his pocket onto the asphalt, then removed his watch and set it on the tire of the hearse beside him—no on-the-hour beep or night-glow dials across the dark threshold. The deputies extinguished the volume on their Motorola portables and pulled into a tight-stack formation, drifting silently across asphalt.

  Miller halted, the explosive-detection canine and the column behind him freezing on the sidewalk. The house had been split into a duplex, both sides staking claims on the address Pacific Bell had relinquished.

  They studied the matching doors, the dark, still windows.

  “ ‘ ’Twas the night before Christmas …’ ” Jim intoned quietly.

  A whispered conference. Tim drifted closer to the house. An Indian bike leaned against the side wall of the left duplex unit, unchained but secure behind a locked gate. Tim gestured Guerrera over for confirmation, and Guerrera nodded excitedly and whispered, “The kick starter’s been cut in half and raised an inch or two. Only a little guy would need the extra leverage for leaning into the ignition.”

  They approached the row of tacked-up deputies, who’d pulled back to the neighboring house. “Left duplex,” Tim said.

  They hugged the wall to the front step, Maybeck pressing the top of his beloved battering ram up against his cheek. Miller directed Chomper to sniff along the door, and Chomper hesitated but didn’t sit—no booby trap.

  Tim lined up in the number one, Bear behind him toting his cut-down twelve-gauge Remington. Jim started his nearly inaudible pre-entry hum. For good luck or as a private show of respect, Jim tapped the black band at his biceps—Frankie Palton remembered. It struck Tim that the loss of his partner, only three days old, was still fresh to Jim. To Tim it felt distant, dulled by the fresher horror of seeing his wife shot off her feet time and time again. Even now as he muscled toward her maybe killers, her body wavered, indifferent to his desires or hers, making up its own damn mind.

  The men lowered their night-vision goggles into place, Maybeck drew back the battering ram, and Tim rode its momentum into an unfurnished living room.

  Before the hazy green world pulled into focus, a blaze of fire erupted from the couch, throwing Tim’s view into violent brightness. Four slugs pinged the wall at his head, and one hit the stock of his MP5, shattering it and spinning him in a half turn. He slammed against the wall and struck carpet, flinging the NVGs off his head. Bear and Guerrera dove for cover as the others stacked at the door, the lead deputies trying to push back against the inward rush so as not to be driven into the line of fire. The familiar gunfire cadence continued, the song of the converted AR-15.

  Though Tim’s vision was still bleached out, the gun-muzzle starbursts from the couch gave him target acquisition. He slid the .357 from his thigh holster and fired sideways over his head. A cry of pain, masculine but surprisingly high-pitched. The automatic weapon clattered to the floor.

  Tim’s eyesight had recovered enough for him to make out a diminutive form scrambling across the room. Tim rose and charged after him, the other deputies just beginning to recover at the door. Chief ran in a furious limp and dove through the pass-through window into the kitchen. As Tim came around the jamb, a skillet took flight at his head. He ducked, and the aluminum dinged drywall, expelling a cloud of scrambled eggs. He dove and caught a leg, but Chief kicked free and bolted down the hall, Tim seconds after him as he slammed through a doorway. In a mad dash for his bed, Chief threw a rolling chair behind him; Tim got a foot on the bucket and leapt. He crashed down on top of Chief, pinning him to the mattress, his pistol to the back of his ear. Chief’s hand froze half withdrawn from his nightstand drawer, gripping a Colt .45.

  Tim’s adrenaline had ignited an explosive fury. He heard the low, rageful growl of his own voice as if it were separate from him. “You choose.”

  Chief’s defiant eyes strained to take in Tim. His biceps tensed, and then his gun hand whipped from the drawer, finger dug through the blank eye of the trigger guard.

  Tim squeezed.

  Breathing hard, he remained for a moment with his knee dug between the slack shoulder blades, listening to the moist descent of brain matter on the opposing wall. Then he drew himself up, checked the closet, and shouted “Clear!” down the hall. Spread on top of the nightstand were diagrams of explosives. He gathered them up, doing his best to make out the cramped scrawl in the dimness as he headed back toward the front of the unit. Pipe bombs. Scored tubes to create more shrapnel. He flipped to another diagram, squinted at the dark sketch.

  BBs. Gunpowder filler. A filament wire.

  The lines took shape as a light-socket bomb. He glanced up as Maybeck reached for the switch.

  “Wait, don’t—”

  The floor jumped with the boom. The screech of rent metal. The whine of ricochets. When he heard only the tinny white noise of eardrum aftermath, Tim glanced up from the carpet. The five deputies in the entry stirred, finding their feet, dusting themselves off, picking shrapnel from their tactical vests. Maybeck’s nylon raid jacket was sliced neatly down the front. With trembling fingers, Maybeck plucked a twisted metal shard from the Kevlar covering his stomach. His fingers went to the gash, came away bloodless. His sigh of relief was shaky, verging on tearful. He helped Bear up, and they all limped outside, patting themselves down for leaks and gashes.

  Miller held a black Mag-Lite knuckles up, surveying the interior. He chewed his lip, his jaw tight, facing off with the darkness. Tim noted a tremor in the sun-beaten skin at the corner of his eye. His own nerves had not yet calmed. Malane showed up and poked around, nodding to himself as if dispensing approval.

  Watching the FBI agent explore the front shrubs, Bear spoke in his version of a whisper. “ ‘Liaison’ my ass. He’s working a cross-agenda.”

  “Agreed,” Tim said. “So let’s figure out what it is.”

  Malane observed the empty American Spirit pack impaled on his pen.

  “I feel more like he’s playing spy guy. Lining up the case for his funny-handshake brethren to take over. Slowing us down where he needs to.”

  “Good luck there.”

  They broke apart from their mini huddle as backup arrived. It took the LAPD Bomb Squad nearly an hour to clear the building. As outlets and sockets were ruled safe, lights clicked on, illuminating the duplex a section at a time. The bomb technicians used their own dogs; Chomper watched alertly from the sidelines, licking his chops and whimpering wistfully. They found trip wires in closet thresholds and a scattering of shotgun-shell-loaded mousetraps in drawers.

  Bear discovered a file cabinet hidden behind hanging clothes in the bedroom closet and went to work on the lock. The see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil stickers—one monkey on each drawer—seemed not only a fine specimen of dry Sinner humor but an indication that the cabinet held confidential material.

  Criminalists from LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division showed up to give the Sheriff’s CSI guys, who’d already started processing the body, jurisdictional grief. Marshal Tannino was en route; Tim figured he’d let him untangle egos.

  He took a moment before reapproaching the body. If a kill was within ROEs or Service regs, if it adhered to the laws of fair play imperfectly defined in his own heart, he could sleep soundly at night. He’d killed often with the Army Rangers, though he’d never taken to it the way some of his platoonmates had. He’d inured himself to the guilt and horror over time, but he still felt enough to register his impassivity as a loss.

  Staring at Chief’s body now, he felt renewed rage about his wife’s unresolved fate. The emotion unnerved him.

  If you feel that much, you shouldn’t be killing people.

  “Not now, Dray.”

  Thomas glanced over. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  You feel good about wasting that guy?

  No. Yes.
<
br />   Can’t tell us much now, can he?

  I guess not. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  Right. You had to put the gun to his head. You couldn’t have shot him in his gun hand. You don’t exactly have shitty aim, Troubleshooter.

  The guy looked on while Den shot you off your feet. You left a boot behind on the asphalt.

  Nice try, but you know damn well what I’d want. Leads. Answers. Not just bodies.

  Tim stared at the spray across the pillow, the wall.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying over Chief’s demise. I’m just saying, if you kill ’em, you can’t much use ’em.

  Bear stopped fussing with the lock and walked over, his brow furrowed with concern. “What are you doing?”

  “Just talking to myself.”

  “Don’t make it a habit. The church elders will gossip.” He shot Tim a warning stare and withdrew to the file-cabinet lock. Bear was terrible with a pick set, but he wouldn’t admit it. Tim had once waited a half hour for him to fumble his way into a school locker.

  Snapping on latex gloves, Tim regarded the corpse with greater detachment. First step: confirm ID. No wallet in the back pocket made sense, given Chief’s hours in the saddle. Tim tilted the already stiffening body and tugged a wallet from the front pocket, freeing a few coins and sundry bits of pocket trash. Looking at the license photo—the proud, meticulous lines of facial hair etching the beard; the erect, compensatory posture—Tim couldn’t help but think of Terry Goodwin, Wünderdeed. Her relieved collapse back onto her bedspread after she heard Chief’s voice on the phone. The memory, in combination with the ripe odor, made him faintly nauseous.

  Nestled in the sheets beside two pennies and a generic book of matches was a torn paper crumpled around a wad of gum. Fuzzy with pocket lint, it yielded grudgingly when he unwrapped it. A ripped receipt, Flying J Travel Plaza, Nov 8. A partial credit-card number terminated at the tear: 4891 02—. With a purchase date and location, they’d have no problem retrieving the full data.