Assume Nothing (6 page)

‘Tell me you’ve got something for me this time,’ Hart said.

They were up in his office on the eighth floor of City Hall East, surrounded by photos of Hart crossing various finish lines in near-death triumph, and he was bouncing the tip of a pen on his desk with an impatience no meeting only thirty seconds old should have warranted.

Reddick said, ‘He’s a bowler.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You know. A ball with holes in it. Ten pins at the end of a long stretch of hardwood. Bowling. He likes to bowl.’

Hart tapped the pen two, three more times, then stopped. Catching on. ‘With his right arm?’

‘With his right arm.’

‘And you have video?’

‘I have video.’

Hart nodded and grinned. It was the grin of a shark with capped teeth and a bad need for braces. ‘I knew it. I knew this one was bullshit.’

Hart thought every excessive force case brought against the LAPD was bullshit, especially when the charges were coming from somebody of color, but Reddick didn’t bother to point this out. Hart thought he was doing the Lord’s work, and anyone who questioned his impartiality was just a bleeding heart looking for employment elsewhere.

‘How soon can I see it? The video?’

‘I’ll work on it over the weekend and have something for you by Monday,’ Reddick said. In truth, he could have come to today’s meeting with a copy of the video in hand, but he liked making Hart wait. It was one of the few ways he had of punishing the asshole for replacing the man who had originally hired Reddick five years ago. Compared to Hart, whom Reddick had been enduring now for a little less than a year, Ed Flores had been a goddamn candidate for sainthood.

‘OK. Stay on him in the meantime,’ Hart said. ‘Until I see that video, I want as much physical evidence of his bogus incapacity as we can gather.’

He stood up and opened his office door. He’d heard all he needed to hear and lacked the common courtesy to offer a simple goodbye.

Reddick smiled, choosing amusement over some other emotion that might have moved him to change the position of Hart’s nose on his face, and walked out.

‘Finola, what are you doing?’ Finola Winn asked herself out loud. She’d been doing a lot of that lately, holding conversations with herself like a crazy homeless person, and it worried her a little. She let the wrong person hear her do it, a Northeast watch commander or news reporter, say, and the brass would have her on administrative leave before she even knew what hit her.

But there was no one around to hear her today. She was alone, wasting her lunch hour wandering the cement bed of the Los Angeles River, working a John Doe case that in all probability wasn’t even a homicide. Her partner, Norm Lerner, had refused to join her in this exercise, choosing instead to do what sane people did between the hours of twelve and one p.m. and eat. Norm thought Finola was nuts, doing legwork on a case they’d only caught the day before, and one he was sure was going to turn out to be some bizarre form of LA suicide rather than murder, at that, and Finola couldn’t really argue with him. This
was
nuts, which was why she was behaving like a lunatic off her meds and talking to herself now.

Something about the body they’d found in a storm drain down here yesterday wouldn’t leave her be. A fully clothed white man spread out on his back in a pool of black water, ripe as a rotten cantaloupe and crawling with maggots after what the coroner’s tech guessed had been maybe three-to-five days of curing. The clothes had been nice: high-end slacks and a silk sport shirt, the shoes soft leather loafers that had Norman drooling. A TAG Heuer watch was on the dead man’s left wrist and a gold ring was on each of his middle fingers. He carried no wallet, no ID, no cash.

It was way too soon to rule out homicide, but nothing at the scene had suggested it. The body bore no obvious wounds and neither blood nor a weapon – nor shell casings, for that matter – had been found anywhere around it. It looked as if the guy had just wandered into the mouth of the storm drain and collapsed in a heap. The idea seemed far-fetched, but Finola knew she had seen much crazier things happen, more times than she cared to admit.

Still, the incongruity bugged her. The deceased and the river just didn’t jibe. Whoever he was, he wasn’t the kind of person one regularly saw down here – vagrants and gangbangers, indigent poor folks scavenging for recyclables. This guy had money, and probably, somewhere, a home. Why come down here to die?

The barrel-chested black woman with the LAPD detective’s badge clipped to her belt, neatly corn-rowed head shining in the sun, scanned the river’s cluttered floor for answers. Not knowing what she was looking for, or why she was bothering to look for it.

‘What are you doing, Finola?’ she asked herself again.

No sooner had their waitress set their coffee cups down than Dana said, ‘I’m going to see a lawyer next week, Joe.’

‘Yeah? What about?’

‘Don’t. Please don’t. This is hard enough for me as it is.’

He thought about saying something smart, despite her warning, but it had taken him all week to get her to agree to this lunch meeting and he was afraid she’d storm out before he’d even had a chance to speak.

‘You don’t want to do that, Dana,’ he said, and the words came out sounding just as pathetic as he felt.

‘No. I don’t. But I don’t know what else to do.’

‘You could give me another shot. That’s something you could do.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried. It’s just too hard.’

‘And being alone would be easier? Raising my son on your own, without his father?’

‘His father’s a crazy man. A hot-tempered headcase who’s going to get him seriously hurt someday – or worse – if I don’t do something to stop him.’

She was losing her own temper, the way she always did when Reddick refused to admit he was demented. He thought he saw the guy in the booth behind her turn his head, her sudden anger drawing his attention, but Reddick wasn’t sure. The coffee shop was just too damn crowded to suit him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dana said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Yeah, you did. But you’ve got it all backwards. I’m the reason Jake
hasn’t
been seriously hurt yet. And as long as I’m around, he never will be.’

‘You can’t say that. Nobody can. That’s your problem, Joe. You’re trying to guarantee something you can’t possibly control.’ She waited for two women headed for the cash register to pass their booth, then went on, making a concerted effort to be kind. ‘People get hurt. Bad things happen to them. It’s life, and you can’t make Jake and me exceptions to it, no matter how hard you try. It just isn’t possible.’

‘That’s what you say. I say, it’s better to attempt the impossible than do nothing. Life’s a rigged game, Dana. The man who doesn’t try to improve the odds for himself and everyone he cares about gets fucked.
That’s
your “guarantee.”’

The man sitting behind Dana visibly flinched, and now Reddick was sure he was listening in. Reddick was going to give the asshole ninety seconds to mind his own business before getting up to suggest he have his lunch somewhere else.

‘Look,’ Dana said. ‘I didn’t come here to argue with you. I just wanted you to know what I plan to do. I’m going to file, Joe.’

‘No.’

‘Separation is just delaying the inevitable. You won’t change and Jake and I can’t be around you the way you are. Let’s try to end this thing amicably, for Jake’s sake, while we still can, before it turns into something completely ugly.’

‘No. I’m not walking away and neither are you,’ Reddick said. ‘OK, so I come off the rails every now and then, maybe even more than I should. But it’s only because I love you, and I don’t want to see anything happen to you. I’ve got that right, Dana. To protect what’s mine. I’ve earned that right as much as anyone in this world, and you know it.’

‘Joe . . .’

‘You want to tell me you’re calling it quits because you don’t love me, that’s a different conversation. But that’s not what I hear you saying because it isn’t true. Is it?’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘You’re lying.’

Dana pushed herself out of the booth, attempting to flee, knowing she was only proving him right. Reddick jumped up to catch her by the left wrist and turned her back around to face him.

‘Wait! Don’t go.’

‘I have to get back to work. And we’ve said all there is to say. It’s over, Joe. Whether we love you or not, Jake and I don’t want to be your excuse for waging war against the world anymore.’

She pried his hand off her wrist to free herself and walked out. Reddick let her go. The coffee shop was dead silent, every eye in the place aimed in his direction, but he barely noticed.

He sat back down in the booth and drank his coffee.

Clarke had been following Reddick around for hours – ever since early this morning when he’d driven out to the Echo Park address Reddick had given Andy Baumhower at the scene of their accident and this guy fitting Reddick’s description had come out – and now he was faced with a dilemma. Stick with Reddick, or follow this big, nice looking brunette he’d just tried to have lunch with at the Eat Well coffee shop on Sunset? Clarke thought Reddick ‘tried’ to have lunch with her because it looked like lunch hadn’t worked out, the lady storming out of the joint in a huff before anything more than coffee could be served.

From his parked car across the street, Clarke watched the brunette scurry down the block as Reddick, clearly visible behind the coffee shop’s big picture windows, just sat there sipping his joe, looking like he’d just lost the family dog to cancer. Or, Clarke thought, having an epiphany, like his old lady had just told him they were through. He’d noticed the wedding band on Reddick’s left hand when he’d had the binoculars on him earlier, so unless she was some kind of piece he had on the side, it stood to reason the brunette was Reddick’s wife.

His decision suddenly made, Clarke started up his BMW and watched as the lady got into a blue, late model Ford parked a block down the street. He eased away from the curb, did a U-turn well out of Reddick’s sight, and started east down Sunset after the Ford, keeping his distance, in no great hurry.

If Clarke was right about the woman he was tailing, Reddick was a family man, maybe even one with kids, and that could only make him that much easier to deal with. A man with a wife and kids had no choice but to listen when you spoke to him; he had more than himself to think about when making critical decisions. A man without, on the other hand, could blow you off if he felt like being a hero because he had nothing to lose but his own life. Your leverage against him was severely limited.

Driving on in the air-conditioned car, keeping the blue Ford in plain sight, Clarke reached into the bag of chocolate chip cookies on the passenger seat beside him, next to the nine-inch assault knife and fresh roll of duct tape, and hoped Joe Reddick knew how to lay down when somebody gave him the order.

EIGHT

B
ecause of the strange holes he liked to put in people with assorted sharp instruments, both his friends and enemies in the Mexican drug trade had come to call Ruben Lizama ‘La Aguja,’ or ‘The Needle.’ Pencils, steak knives, screwdrivers, garden shears – it seemed nothing with a hard edge or point was too esoteric to be used by
La Aguja
to either torture a man, stop his heart from beating, or both.

It was no doubt this proclivity of Ruben’s that was foremost in the minds of the five men he had come to see today in the city of Tampico, at the southern-most tip of his home state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. The five men were arranged in a neat row, face down on the dusty floor of the machine shop in which they worked, as Ruben and the three family soldiers he’d brought with him loomed over them, automatic weapons at the ready. The men knew why Ruben had come – all had spoken to the Federal Police about a murder they had witnessed one of the Lizama soldiers commit, and one of them had actually said something other than ‘
Yo no vi nada
’ – and so they also knew they were all dead. What they didn’t know was what kind of death Ruben had in mind for them, and it was this mystery above all else that had two of the five pissing into the floor through their overalls.

Ruben let them squirm for a long time; he was in no particular hurry. They had the machine shop all to themselves. Upon his arrival, he had ordered it to be evacuated of all but the five men on the floor, and without anyone issuing a single word of argument, the building had emptied out like a burning movie theater. Now it was almost deathly silent, with only the sound of a few running machines providing background for the prayers some of those on the floor were uttering.

Finally, Ruben pointed to one of the five, a short, older man with jet-black hair and skin nearly as dark, and said, in Spanish, ‘Him.’

The soldier closest to Ruben reached down with his free hand to lift the little man off the floor. The other offered no resistance; instead, he came to his feet and stood with his back straight, head up, making no attempt to avert his eyes from Ruben’s. He was afraid, but not a coward, and he understood that anything he said or did now to try to save himself would only serve to disgrace his family name. Ruben saw all this and grinned, satisfied he had chosen the right man.

He glanced over at the three Lizama soldiers, almost offhandedly, and nodded his head.

Instantly, the shop roared with gunfire, blinding sparks and muzzle flashes lighting up the walls. The four men prone on the floor died in a hail of bullets, a barrage that only seemed to stop when their assassins had grown weary of the exercise.

With great interest, Ruben watched the little man standing before him and saw him flinch once, then close his eyes up tight. That was all. When the shooting stopped, he opened his eyes again without being asked and waited, trembling but silent, as unwilling to dishonor himself by pleading for his life as ever.

‘
¿Cómo te llamas?
’ Ruben asked.