Troubleshooter Read online

  Six apparent entrance shots to Deputy Frank Palton’s torso, two to the head. Skull fragments and soft tissue noted in the mesh and the back of the van.

  He flashed on his first day back on the job after Ginny’s death, Frankie doing his shtick with Jim, joking about the “Commie Sutra” book his wife had foisted on him. Tim remembered it vividly because it had been his first single moment of levity in three days, the earliest glimmer of a possibility that the world might still be inhabitable. When Tim had gone missing, Palton had been the one to find the blood at the pickup near the cult ranch. Tim pictured the annoyingly endearing batches of photos Frankie used to e-mail out every few months—updates on his daughters’ swim-club awards, theme birthday parties, Halloween costumes.

  Dray looked over, psychically attuned to Tim’s shifts in mood from ten years of marriage. She met his eyes, her face soft with empathy.

  “Two kids left behind,” Tim heard himself say, as if he and Dray weren’t aware of this already.

  “Not over there,” Dray said gently. “Talk about Frankie’s two kids with me over here on the couch. Not when you’re a deputy over files.” She watched him, the yellow light of a Claritin commercial shining through her translucent, ice green eyes. “Only let it be personal when you’re off duty. Otherwise just get it done. That’s how you’ll honor Frankie’s memory. And Hank Mancone’s. And Fernando Perez’s.”

  “Who?”

  “The illegal guy killed one car over in the blast. Which is my point. If that guy doesn’t matter, no one matters. Everyone counts. And everyone counts the same. Getting personal is like putting on blinders. It blocks you from weighing deaths equally, which blocks you from weighing clues equally.”

  “You’re implying I’ve been hotheaded in the past?”

  She laughed. “Never. I’m saying your friend just died. Take a timeout when you need it. Besides, haven’t you seen enough of Goat Purdue’s fetching smile for one day?”

  Tim looked down at the files and pictures spread across the table, let out a breath, and pulled back his shoulders, which he realized had been cramping his chest for the past hour. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to feed me.” A long pause as they studied each other across the room, both on the verge of a smile. “And yourself.” He got up and looked inside the refrigerator. Save jars of condiments, a browning apple, and the residual legs of a chocolate Santa Claus, it was empty. “I thought you were waiting to eat Santa until Christmas.”

  “That’s four days away.”

  “I’m gonna have to start hiding food around here.”

  “There are some sunflower seeds in the cupboard.”

  “I was hoping for something heartier.”

  “You,” Dray said, “are a Black Hole of Need.”

  He closed the refrigerator door.

  “And while you’re out,” Dray continued, “can you bring me Strawberry Crush? In the bottles? And Lunchables?”

  “Lunchables?”

  “Yeah. The turkey ones.”

  “Right.”

  He took his newly purchased used Explorer to Albertsons and shoved a cart up and down the aisles, checking his phone—still nothing—and stocking up on everything he could remember Dray eating in the past eight months. No small feat. When he came home, the living room was empty, but he could hear the television going in the bedroom. He peeled off the Lunchables lid, popped open a Crush, and arranged the meal on a silver tray they’d received as a wedding gift from someone they no longer recalled. Across the folded napkin, he laid a clipped grocery-store-diminished Siberian iris—Dray’s favorite flower, one of the few girlie indulgences she permitted herself.

  She was lying flat as a cadaver on the bed, her tummy sprouting between her boxers and her shoved-back academy T-shirt. Her head rolled to take him in, and then a spontaneous smile reshaped her face and he thought of the first time he saw her smile, in the parking lot at a fire-department fund-raiser. “Timothy Rackley.”

  He lowered the tray to the mattress and kissed her sweaty bangs. She regarded the food and—through a grin—issued her trademark grimace. “That looks disgusting. Turkey on crackers and strawberry soda? Whose idea was that anyways?”

  He handed her the iris, slid the tray onto his lap, and began his dinner.

  7

  The five men walked a slow turn around the broken figure on the chair. Duct tape bound the man to the chair arms from wrists to elbows; both his arms had left their sockets. His features were no longer discernible. He coughed out a mouthful of blood; it ran from his cheek to the thin carpet. His matted ponytail hung stiffly.

  The room, a garage conversion with milky plastic windows set high in the still-functional roll-up door, smelled of oil from the Harley and from the greasy tools occupying the brief run of kitchen counter. A vise protruded from a wobbly table littered with engine parts, spare wheels, and blackened wrenches. The cot against the far wall and a scattering of dirty plates and cups were the sole signs of habitation.

  Den halted, and the others stopped their pacing, waiting for his next move. They looked unnatural off their bikes, eroded into slouches acquired from too many hours leaning on handlebars.

  “Tell me,” Den said. “I know you planned it out by now.”

  The man was weeping quietly, a hiss that turned to a gurgle somewhere around the mouth. “I haven’t. I swear, ese.”

  Den looked at Kaner. “Put out the cigarette. Warm-up’s over.”

  Kaner ground the butt against his front tooth, popped it in his mouth, savored a few chews, and swallowed.

  “Still never met a nicotine junkie like you.” Goat tapped his glass eye with a long fingernail, a gross-out stunt that had developed into a nervous tic. “Chasing the cancer like a piece-a ass. What you gonna do when you catch it?”

  Kaner’s words came in a deep rasp: “Smoke through the hole in my throat.”

  He tugged off his shirt, revealing an enormous pectoral tattoo—a revolver aimed straight on, with six Sinner skulls staring out of the holes in the wheel. The dim light—morning’s first gray glow—turned his flesh pale and moldy. He found a fresh T-shirt in a cabinet and tossed it to Den. Den slid his bowie knife from his shoulder holster. Its genuine-ivory handle shimmered. On the butt, tiny inset rubies formed a flaming skull. He’d paid over a grand to a Kenyan poacher for the section of tusk, or so the story went. Den slit both sleeve cuffs and threw the shirt back to Kaner. The fabric still stretched at Kaner’s biceps when he pulled the shirt on.

  Tom-Tom laughed. He was bouncing in his boots, white hair flapping, fingers going at his sides as if he were hopped up on meth, though he required none. “Lookadit. His shirt. Doanfitchasogood.” His voice sounded funny, altered through an oft-broken nose.

  Kaner said, “Why should I stain mine?”

  The man in the chair emitted a faint cry.

  Goat laughed. “You sound like Chief. Next you’ll have your bitches polishing your boots.”

  Chief stared ahead, unamused and silent, his thin lines of beard fastidiously sculpted.

  As Kaner drifted behind the man, Den drew forward into a square of foggy light thrown through one of the tiny windows. The man tried to recoil in his chair, pulling his head back and to one side, muttering a prayer in Spanish.

  Den’s surprisingly handsome face tensed. “I won’t ask again.”

  “Por favor … por favor …”

  Den nodded at Kaner, who palmed the man’s skull, his other hand locking beneath his chin, and ripped him and the chair backward. Kaner dragged him, shrieking, toward the kitchen area.

  Den got there before they did and spun the arm of the vise. A metallic whir as the jaws spread. At the sound the man found a hidden reserve of strength, bucking against Kaner’s hold. Goat and Tom-Tom stepped in, and then Kaner gripped the man’s blood-slick ponytail, forcing his head back. The man grunted and strained forward against his hair, face reddening, veins standing up in his neck. At a snail’s pace, both hands tightening aroun
d the ponytail, Kaner fought the head between the open jaws. Den knocked the handle with the side of a hand, and the device clenched.

  A piercing scream that faded to whispered babbling.

  Chief watched impassively from across the garage, looking mildly bored. He had not moved.

  Den appraised the tools on the counter, picking up a pair of needlenose pliers. He looked down at the trapped head.

  The pliers rose into the man’s view. “I tell you. I tell you todo.”

  “I know.” Den bent sympathetically over the upturned face. “But I’m gonna work for a while first.”

  8

  The air-conditioned elevator filled with the Muzak stylings of “Arthur’s Theme.” Bear hummed along at the chorus, then rustled under Tim’s and Guerrera’s looks.

  “What? I was clearing my throat.”

  The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into a marble foyer that led to glass doors with deco etching. Bear, who’d made short and noisy work of an eye-opener Super Big Gulp on the way over, ducked into a bathroom.

  The foyer window looked down four stories onto South Rodeo Drive. Tim and Guerrera stood shoulder to shoulder and watched Jags and Hummers flash back the morning light.

  Guerrera brought his knuckle to his jawbone, a nervous tap. “Listen, I’m sorry I lost my cool at the clubhouse yesterday.”

  “You let Pete get to you a little, that’s all.”

  “Never seen you get rattled like that.”

  Tim laughed. “You don’t read the papers.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re level, even when you’re not.”

  “They say racist shit to get a rise out of you. Don’t give it to them. Detach.”

  Bear stepped out from the bathroom, readjusting the star on his belt, and by tacit understanding, Tim and Guerrera let the exchange end. The three headed to reception and flashed creds. After a fifteen-minute wait, during which they were forced to endure the receptionist’s too-loud phone recollections of a recent shopping expedition, they were escorted past a secretary and a dressed-for-success paralegal to the Inner Office.

  Dana Lake stood with her back to them, silhouetted against a sunbleached pane of glass. A cordless headset slightly crimped her hair. “If you won’t offer us anything better than that, I’ll wait until five minutes before trial to plead him out. I’ll make you spend six months building a case you won’t even try. Yeah? Then don’t waste our time with bullshit offers.”

  She pulled off the headset, shook out her hair, and pivoted to face them. “Don’t fuck with my client. You want to talk to him, you bring a warrant or you phone me.”

  “Uncle Pete and I reached our own arrangement,” Tim said.

  She tossed the headset onto her meticulously ordered desk. “Credentials.”

  They handed them to her, and she wrote down their names and badge numbers on a yellow legal pad. A framed lithograph of the Laughing Sinner logo commanded the wall behind her desk. “To DL—a friend to bikers, my kind of tough broad.” Danny the Wand’s flourish of a signature was Sharpied beneath the dedication.

  Dana stared at Tim’s creds for an extra beat. “I hope you don’t think you can get away with your celebrated stunts with my clients, Deputy Rackley. I’ll have your ass in a sling.”

  “Ms. Lake, my ass lives in a sling.”

  “So. You’ve sicced the heat on the entire Laughing Sinners organization. Incisive investigative strategy. Was the Marshals Service the brain trust behind color-coding Arab travelers after 9/11?”

  “You rep all the Sinners?”

  “I do.”

  “How’s that arranged?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m on retainer to the club.”

  Bear said, “Lucrative, I’d imagine.”

  Her gaze dropped to his feet. “I don’t buy my shoes at Payless.”

  “You know where that money comes from?”

  “And your paychecks come from an Enron-funded junta government that supports tyrannical monarchies and wages illegal war in violation of international law and against UN votes. Looks like you’ve got the moral upper hand on a sleazy gal like me. Let’s get to business. I bill six-fifty an hour. This diverting badinage with the constabulary has already cost me”—a glance to her Baume & Mercier—“a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  “I’m sure Uncle Pete’ll pick up the tab,” Bear said.

  “Good idea. I’ll inform Billing.”

  Tim produced the municipal permission allowing the Sinners to ride without helmets in that morning’s funeral procession. She lowered her head into a pair of frameless half-glasses and perused it. She finished, and her glasses took flight, landing softly on the legal pad on her desk. “What’s your angle?”

  “Goodness of my heart. I was told to smooth things over so our fine city’s middle-class churchgoers can sleep soundly in their beds.”

  She refolded the permission. “I’ll drag you through the press if we take you at your word and you use it to roust my clients.” She seemed to speak without breathing, a rapid-fire assault perfected by years of courtroom performance. “It’s preposterous that riding bareheaded even has to be granted as a favor. We’ve been petitioning against the helmet laws for years. So much for Patrick Henry—you won’t let people risk their own skulls.”

  Guerrera said, “Helmet laws save—”

  “Great. A bean counter. Accounting can’t justify everything. What you forget is, your numbers erode our freedoms. What’s the deaths-per-year cutoff to make something illegal these days? What’s next? Diet legislation to cut heart-disease stats? Burgers? French fries? Supersize it and ride the pine in county for the night. What do you say, boys?”

  “We refer to them as freedom fries now, ma’am.”

  Tim said, “If any of the nomads contact you, we want to know.”

  “Of course. Insert yourselves into every aspect of everything regardless of your understanding or the casualty rate.”

  “I’m not sure I’m catching your drift.”

  “Bikers are true patriots. As American as laissez-faire economics. They administer their own justice. Surely you can relate to that, miraculously reinstated Deputy Rackley.” She seemed disappointed by Tim’s nonreaction, not that it slowed her down. “During the grudge match between the Sinners and Cholos, neither club complained to the police or requested protection. You should have let them be.”

  “To kill each other?”

  “Beats killing federal officers and innocent bystanders. Which is what happened when you imposed your laws on them. Laws and bikers are like sodium and nitric acid. You’re the geniuses playing chemist.”

  “Someone drank the Kool-Aid,” Bear muttered.

  “You’re right. All three of you have stained chins. Aren’t you sick of being told what to do? The corporations pay the lobbyists, the laws get passed, and you enforce them. Tax laws. Drug laws. Patriot Act II, the Sequel. Your boss tells you to come sniff around here, and you prick up your little ears and obey.”

  “I hadn’t realized my ears were pricked,” Tim said.

  “And my ears just stick out that way naturally,” Bear added.

  “So by way of protest,” Guerrera chimed in, “you take the side of gang-rapists and cop killers.”

  “Don’t you read the papers, Deputy? This country is rotting from the top down. There are no sides anymore.”

  Tim said, “There are always sides.”

  “Not for me.”

  “I bet that makes it easier to sleep at night.”

  “Don’t play that card with me. I like my Jaguar. I like flying a chartered jet. I like billing six-fifty an hour. And I have no problems sleeping at night. You walk in here, your shoulders squared with all that unequivocal midwestern confidence that comes with thinking you’re moral—”

  “I grew up in Pasadena.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Not to me. I would have preferred the Midwest.” Tim nodded at Bear and Guerrera, and they headed out. He paused
at the door. “We’ll be seeing you soon.”

  Her cheeks were still flushed from her tirade. “How’s that?”

  “I’m planning to spend more quality time with your clients.”

  9

  Twenty motor units led the official funeral cortege, an ironic biker send-off, followed by fifty black-and-whites. Behind the caissons bearing the caskets and two riderless horses with reversed stirrups—a tradition holding on from Saxon days—came another police phalanx, trailed by a solemn convoy of unmarked cars. The procession slowed around Chinatown to accommodate a pipe-and-drum band. Local-affiliate TV crews formed up with crowds along the downtown streets, grabbing highlights for the six o’clock news. Evincing terrorist-age sensitivity, people waved flags, prayed silently, pressed their hands to their chests. Uniformed peace officers wore black ribbons across their badges. Grief was rampant but, no less, fear.

  As the draped caskets rolled past, spectators gave in to emotion. The martial choreography was, after all, largely for them—the citizens on hand and the multitudes tuned in from home. The void opened up by the slaying of an officer could be compensated for only by symbolism, an overwhelming show of force and tradition to reassure citizens that they weren’t under attack, that the bedrock wasn’t fractured, that the moorings still held.

  The procession filtered through surface streets and access roads, skirting the freeways with as much dignity as it could, to arrive at Forest Lawn.

  Uncle Pete straddled the yellow dotted line that ran past the clubhouse, his legs like pillars. The sun glinted off the exaggerated blade of Den’s bowie knife, lent to him with considerable pomp and circumstance for the occasion. Before him the bikers, in a half-mile formation, throttled and lurched on their marks like angry steeds. Sinners had descended from all the satellite chapters, their bottom rockers a sampling of West Coast and Southwest geography.