Troubleshooter Read online

“We’ve got a credit-card number,” Tim called out. “And I assume this isn’t the one Teflon Pete uses to buy clubhouse groceries.” Freed was waiting with a plastic Baggie. Tim dropped the gum-laden receipt inside and said, “Get on the horn to Visa and figure out how to get those statements. And if it’s linked to a bank account, I want ATM hits, too.”

  The smell was starting to get to him, so he stepped outside. Tungsten-halogen lights glowed over the roof; Tim could hear the field reporters starting their on-site pickups. He walked around to the side to get a peek at the news vans crowding the curb.

  Guerrera crouched beside the motorcycle at the gate. He’d removed the seat and set it on the concrete at his feet. Dressed in bathrobes and sweats, neighbors milled around on the other side of the street. Tim waved at an elderly woman staring out from her porch, and she retreated inside as if caught doing something wrong.

  Collapsing his telescoping mirror against his thigh, Guerrera rose. “Coño.” He gestured at a toggle switch on the handlebar. “That’s the kill switch.”

  “For what?”

  “For the pin-trigger mechanism laid in the frame tubing just below the seat. Someone tries to steal the bike, he gets a shotgun spray right up the culo. Penetrates the gut—not an easy way to go.” Guerrera reached in gingerly with his pocketknife and withdrew a twelve-gauge shotgun shell from the center post. “A trip wire runs to the rear wheel. I saw a cruder version once in Miami. The discharge’ll tear the spine right out of a person.” He shook his head, admiring the engineering.

  “Tom-Tom’s work?”

  “Likely. Which means it’s probably standard feature on all nomad bikes. You don’t watch your ass when we seize property, it’ll get ripped right off you.”

  Bear shouted from inside, and they headed in. A few file-cabinet drawers stood triumphantly open. Shirts pulled up over their noses, hands turned magician-white in latex gloves, Thomas and Freed flipped through files, laying out documents on the carpet.

  “Check this.” Bear used a pinkie to open the bottom drawer. A bunched mass of cracked leather, the cholos top rocker partially visible. Bear poked at the jacket with the end of a pen, bringing a fold-hidden patch into view. CHOOCH MILLAN.

  “Okay,” Tim said. “But we don’t need evidence. We’re not making a case. We need current red flags.”

  Thomas pointed at the diagrams and schemas spread on the floor. “We’ve got operation plans for the transport-van break and the Palmdale massacre.”

  “Any future plans?”

  “Not so far.”

  “So what else is in there?”

  “These two drawers are filled with intel on the Cholos,” Freed said.

  Thomas broke in. “More than you’d ever want to know about a bunch of dead guys.”

  “Hangouts, relatives’ addresses, ex-wives. There’s a list in there must have every woman El Viejo’s put his dick in since the Wall fell.”

  Bear dropped a binder into Tim’s hands. “This makes for the best reading.”

  Inside, Tim found mini dossiers on cops, prosecutors, and rival bikers. An eight-by-ten of Raymond Smiles was crossed out in red—Richie Rich’s diploma. An attached report identified Smiles as a top federal enemy of the club, detailing his field experience, which ranged from antinarcotics to counterterrorism. When Tim flipped the page, he found his own face staring back at him—a shot of him lying on his stomach taking pictures at Nigger Steve’s funeral. Once the chill subsided, he realized that part of him was flattered he’d made the hit list. A thought caught him off guard: What if he got taken out and Dray awakened alone? Or worse—if she didn’t and they were gone. No Rackley left. It would be as if their family, for ten years the self-important center of their own production, had never existed. Or yet another disturbing variation: Their child could be orphaned before birth, excised from an insentient body to be greeted by two pensions, a garage sale, and Bear.

  Their jobs gave them a courtside view of the void, a comforting illusion of separateness and control, but never before had the costs been so evident. After Ginny’s death Tim had rejected the law and his badge, weary from the essential uselessness of it in the face of universal mechanics. He’d wanted back in the Service so desperately, and now he was in, but with his wife shot and a crosshairs on his own head. The dullness Jim had carried behind the eyes the past few days suddenly clarified; Tim felt the sentiment it bespoke resonate in his bones, a low-register chuckle not unlike Uncle Pete’s.

  What were his options? Get a job selling mattresses? Urge Dray to take up quilting? The notion of retreating under fire would be as unappealing to her as it was to him.

  At Bear’s urging, Tim continued through the binder. The last section contained images of dead Cholos—crime-scene shots, news photos, and, most disturbing, moment-after Polaroids.

  The deputies perused the files, their discouragement growing as little useful information was revealed. If nothing else, Tim had to admire Chief’s spy skills; the intel he’d managed to acquire on the Cholos was staggering in its scope and specificity. The Sinners were wise to keep Chief—and the files—segregated from the rest of the club.

  Lash had told them as much—The intel officer runs separate from the pack, never goes to the clubhouse. Keeps his own safe house, even.

  Guerrera muttered, “This shit might be useful if we were going after the Cholos.”

  Tim’s hands stopped their movement. His head snapped up. “Exactly.” He shoved the binder at Bear and began digging through the hanging files in the two drawers dedicated to Cholo intel.

  “Rack?” Bear said. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re in the wrong house.” Tim sensed the others reacting with puzzlement, but he continued blazing through the file tabs, racking his brain to match the names to those on the list of the dead from the Palmdale massacre. El Viejo. Dead. Frito Terrazas. Dead. Gonzo Ernez. Dead.

  A name finally distinguished itself from the others; Tim didn’t recognize it from the coroner’s roll. He yanked the file free and flipped it open. Meat Marquez. Identifiers, bike information, and an address were typed neatly beneath a surveillance photo. Bear, Guerrera, Thomas, and Freed crowded around, realization dawning.

  Tim nodded at Chief’s stiff corpse on the bed. “We got the wrong intel officer.”

  “Huh?” Bear said with mild irritation. “Which intel officer do we want?”

  “Not the Sinners’.” Tim grabbed the page from the file, thumb creasing the Lancaster address. Guerrera and Bear barely kept pace down the hall.

  They passed Tannino in the entry. Without a word he took Tim’s .357 into evidence, handed him a fresh one, and continued back toward the body.

  27

  Needle-nose pliers protruded from the hole that had been Meat Marquez’s nose. His head was wedged in the jaws of a vise, distorted by the pull of his body weight. Tim, Bear, and Guerrera stood in a loose triangle around the body, motionless on their feet as if the slightest movement might wake Marquez up. Bear’s great, broad shoulders sagged, worn down by disappointment. Tim glanced at the sheet from Chief’s file on Meat, the typed address matching the brass numbers hammered beneath the light outside, then crumpled it up and shoved it into his pocket.

  Meat had been the last nomad of his kind—the hearts of the other three, Den and Kaner had left on the Cholo clubhouse doorstep, the bit of improvisational surgery that had won them matching convictions. After the past three days, Tim understood the strategic implications of the first rule of biker gang warfare—kill the nomads.

  The deputies’ preliminary walk through the garage conversion had turned up nothing in the way of files.

  The complaint of the A/C explained the merciful chill in the air; the nomads had likely maxed the unit while they tossed the place so they wouldn’t be assailed with the stench as Meat started living up to his name. A flipped cot soaked up engine grease. Tufts of mattress stuffing floated in oil puddles. Plate shards littered the kitchen. Smashed floorboards stuck up like stubborn weeds. A por
celain Virgin Mary lay shattered at the base of a shelf.

  “At least we know how they intercepted the Cholos’ funeral route,” Bear finally said.

  Guerrera broke their unspoken vow of stillness, toeing the remnants of the tchotchke Holy Mother. Tim figured Guerrera was being sentimental until he called them over and pointed at the interior of the statue base. A clear key outline showed against the sticky dust that had accrued inside.

  The tip of a footprint—boot edge rendered in oil—pointed toward the bathroom. Guerrera picked up its next appearance after a six-foot interval, the long stride indicating Kaner.

  Tim and Guerrera stood shoulder to shoulder in the tiny white square of the bathroom, Bear crowding them from behind. In the main room, the air conditioner groaned like a tired engine on a steep hill.

  Guerrera ran a hand over the tiles that sheathed the lower half of the walls like wainscoting. An offset edge. He tugged gently, and the tiles swung as one piece, exposing a file cabinet set back in the space between wall studs. Tim felt a long-overdue flush of excitement.

  The top drawer slid too easily under the tug of Guerrera’s finger. The hanging file folders remained, each tab listing an individual Sinner, but the contents had been pulled. The next two drawers revealed the same. After killing Marquez, the nomads had wisely purged all the intel on their club. Tim stared at the empty Den Laurey file and cursed sharply. They withdrew to wait for CSI. Doubleheader Friday for the crime lab.

  Standing over the rigor mortised body, Bear grimaced. “Whatever groundwork they’re laying, it’s thorough as hell.”

  “But for what?” Guerrera’s rhetorical hung in the refrigerator-cool air.

  Flashing blue lights cast a glare through the garage-door windows, mapping waves across the ceiling. A few more vehicles pulled up outside.

  The A/C emitted a creaking groan. Tim walked over and examined the main vent. The rush of air felt uneven. He placed his hand in front of it. Cold air was seeping from the edges, but the center gave off nothing. He pried the panel free and removed the dusty filter. A folder slipped out from behind, slapping the floor. Tim snatched it up.

  An assassination dossier, containing surveillance photos of Goat. Astride his Harley. Weaving through traffic. A familiar, horrifying close-up of the marred flesh of his face. Emerging from a commercial building into an alley. The location of the last shot was nondescript— no address, no telling marks on the wall. But captured in the background was a sliver of the world’s most recognizable image—the golden arches. One enormous yellow leg had been captured, and a segment of pantile roof. A Dumpster blocked part of the alley, its faded stencil showing a floral emblem.

  Tim slid the photo back into the file and rolled up the garage door, revealing four black-and-whites and a CSI van cramming the brief driveway. A few more units turned onto the street, lights flashing soundlessly, a KCOM news van drifting ominously behind. Having been assailed by reporters outside Chief’s duplex, Tim quickened his step.

  The three deputies threaded through the growing mass of cops, climbed into Guerrera’s G-ride, and disappeared into the night.

  28

  Tim lowered the photograph, but the scene remained, a midnight rendering of the identical angle. Same thin run of alley, same doorway, same yellow half arch, now filtered through Bear’s bug-splattered windshield. Despite the ubiquity of McDonald’s, the combination of identifiers—oversize freestanding arches, pantile roof, Renegade Rose’s Rent-a-Dumpster—had enabled them to cross-reference surrounding areas and narrow the field fast. The doorway belonged to a seemingly disused warehouse in Simi.

  “We’re just looking around, right?” Guerrera asked as they climbed out.

  Bear pulled his shotgun from the trunk. “Sure.”

  Tim emptied the new .357, checked the trigger tension again, then refed the six rounds. Guerrera nodded once, mouth pursed, and followed them silently toward the building. Securing the door, a shiny new padlock didn’t match the rust of the hasp. Guerrera squatted and retrieved the severed pin of an older lock from a cluster of leaves.

  Tim gestured, and they eased around the back of the warehouse. No cars or motorcycles in the parking lot or alongside the building. The sole window looked in on an office and beyond, the expanse of the warehouse proper. Parked inside the office was a Harley. Tim clicked on his Mag-Lite and drew the beam across the room. A russet pool glittered on the desktop. Smudges down the side. A wide stroke along the carpet, the signature of a dragged body.

  Bear’s exhale breezed over Tim’s shoulder. “I’d say there’s our probable cause.”

  Tim leaned on the window, which had been paint-welded to the sill. It gave with a creak. As Tim pried it open, Bear called for backup, requesting an ambulance and advising a stealth approach in case the suspects were still inside when the units rolled up. Guerrera took rear cover, his eyes darting nervously around the empty parking lot and neighboring buildings as Tim climbed over the sill.

  Once he was in, Bear followed suit, then Guerrera. The air was dank, sweetened with the faint smell of mold. Tim tapped his knuckles to the Harley’s craggy engine—faintly warm. He recognized the panhead engine and the checkerboard skull pattern on the stretched tank from the surveillance shots of Goat they’d found at Meat Marquez’s.

  Weapons drawn, they followed the blood trail. Tim led the way, his wrists crossed to keep the barrel of his .357 nearly parallel with the beam of the flashlight.

  Outside the office an embalming table gleamed, a stainless-steel anomaly among the industrial equipment. Tim paused beside it, Bear and Guerrera halting behind him. What looked like oil rippled in the table’s gutters. Tim didn’t require a closer look to know, but Guerrera’s flashlight beam proved the liquid crimson. A puddle on the far side, then a wider path snaked back into the warehouse interior.

  He heard Guerrera take a gulp of a breath, his own stomach knotting with the certainty of more ugliness ahead. Few noncombat experiences were more hideous than the slow-motion unfolding of a crime scene.

  They wound through heaps of dilapidated machinery. A faint glow up ahead. A rumble from the interior announced footsteps. The sound of cheery whistling.

  They eased around a partition. In the sole stroke of light cutting through the warehouse gloom, Goat tugged a woman’s partially disemboweled body. He shuffled backward, hands gaffed into the front of her so they disappeared in the folds of her armpits. Her head lolled, hidden beneath a mask of tangled hair.

  A desktop lamp, set on the concrete floor, provided meager illumination and funhouse effects. It threw Goat’s pitted face into fierce relief and stretched his shadow up the wall, bending it across the ceiling. Between blinks the etched skull stared out from his glass eye.

  Tim gestured for Bear and Guerrera to spread out along the perimeter of the darkness, then stepped into view, light falling across him like a sheet. “Hands up! Hands up!”

  Goat jumped a bit at the intruding voice. He released the woman, smiling almost sheepishly, and raised his arms. The body didn’t flop back to the concrete; her shoulders and upper back remained banana-curved, rigor mortis defying the laws of physics and propriety.

  Both hands steadying the .357, Tim walked forward. A rectangular flap had been laid open in the woman’s gut. A loop of intestine waggled from the gap, hanging like an ankh between her legs. Her face remained invisible behind a scraggly wall of orange-tinted brown hair. A few feet beyond them, a floor hatch angled back on its hinges, revealing a black square of crawl space.

  Tim stopped a couple of yards from Goat, sights aligned on his upper sternum. The smell of the corpse reached him—a battlefield stench, the odor of Ginny on the coroner’s table—and he looked up into Goat’s marred face, feeling the cool air tingle across the band of sweat dampening the back of his neck. He thought of Dray drifting a few feet above the shoulder of the highway, hair on end from the impact.

  The crisp report of a gunshot jarred him back into the present.

  For an instant Tim thoug
ht he himself had fired, but then Guerrera’s boots pounded behind him, Tim hit the ground, and Goat flashed into the darkness. Tim twisted to look over a shoulder, picked up Guerrera at the edge of the shadows, gun now pointed down, standing over a sprawled form. Bear charged past Tim after Goat, and Tim leaped up and followed him into a maze of modular partitions.

  The whine of a bullet past Tim’s cheek broadcast that Goat had located a gun. Tim and Bear split the aisle, backs to the partitions, stalking forward. A gooseneck in the path dumped them in the corner of the warehouse. The muzzle flashes of Goat’s gun—pistol, semiauto, poking blindly around the corner—revealed a backdrop of concrete wall.

  The slide of Goat’s gun locked to the rear. The gun disappeared, and Tim heard the click of the mag dropping. He crossed the open space, shoulder-slapping the far partition, now within feet of Goat’s position. Bear held down the wall just before the turn. Tim heard Goat’s mag click into place.

  He snapped his fingers at Bear, holding up his hand. Bear tossed his Remington across the four-foot span, the walnut forearm slapping Tim’s raised palm. Goat’s pistol poked back around the corner as Tim raised the shotgun and fired at the wall a yard away. The double-aught buck tore at the concrete, ricocheting around the corner.

  As the thirty-five pounds of recoil shuddered Tim’s torso, he registered Goat’s scream. Bear rolled around the turn first, disappearing into the haze of concrete powder. Goat groped at his head, shrieking. He’d taken most of the pellets in the face. His glass eye was missing, lost somewhere in the darkness; fluid streamed from the socket and from his good eye. Bear kicked the gun from its loose dangle in Goat’s hand and put him down on his chest. A knee in the back, a quick frisk—Bear was unparalleled at escort control—then the flex-cuffs cinched tight. Bear tried to hoist Goat to his feet, but Goat kicked and thrashed violently. Bear deep-grabbed the hair at the base of Goat’s skull and pulled back and down hard, forcing his chin up. He kept the leverage firm and steady, forcing Goat to ride his chin up to his feet. As Bear steered him back toward the light, Goat babbled and sputtered, streams of blood matting his face. He was a fearsome sight.