Fangs Out (37 page)

Airplanes rarely crash because of pilot error. They crash because of
multiple
pilot errors, small mistakes that become larger ones, until the only option left is to bend over and kiss your keester goodbye. The same can be said of monogamy. Drop your guard, surrender yourself to an extracurricular distraction, and before you know it, you’re grocery shopping for one and trolling the listings on Match.com. It was a mistake to say yes to Alicia Rosario’s invitation to dessert in the same way I knew it was wrong to have asked her out to dinner, but I did it anyway. Blame it on her sundress. I was dying to find out where she stashed her off-duty weapon.

S
HE LIT
candles. We sat with our shoes off, on a buff-colored chenille sofa, in the living room of Rosario’s tastefully contemporary Pacific Beach townhouse, pounding down Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra while watching
Miami Vice
on a sixty-inch big screen. Armani-clad detectives Tubbs and Crockett were busting their humps trying to stop villainous arms dealer Bruce Willis (when Willis still had hair) from selling a shipment of stolen Stinger missiles.

The episode brought back fond memories of the time I flew into Zagreb with three other Alpha operators posing as Canadian arms dealers to meet with a former Croatian cabinet official who was offering to the highest bidder a batch of U.S.-made, Rockeye cluster bombs. The money exchange was to take place in the luxury suite of an über-stylish hotel built some eighty years earlier as a refuge for passengers from the Orient Express. Our orders were to take the Croat into custody and spirit him out of the country for criminal prosecution, but he had other plans. When he pulled a pistol and broke for the elevators, another go-to guy I’ll call “Barnes” snapped his neck like a chicken. We chucked the guy’s body out a sixth-floor window, left a conveniently pre-typed suicide note on his nightstand, and jetted home business class.

Good times.

I was thinking how fulfilling it felt, my mind drifting, when I realized that Bruce Willis was dead,
Miami Vice
was over, and Rosario was stroking my right thigh.

“Welcome back.” Her dark eyes gleamed. “Have a nice trip?”

She was exotic-looking and alluring, and I’d be lying if I said my neuronal impulses weren’t sparking with the kind of thinking that got Bill Clinton in big trouble.

“I’ve never been with a cop before,” I said.

“Then that’ll make two firsts tonight.”

She clicked off the TV, set my half-eaten bowl of ice cream on the coffee table, and softly pressed her lips to mine.

Time and reason quickly blurred in a frenzy of hungry mouths, groping hands, and clothing that seemed to shed itself. There was nothing romantic about it. It was foreplay in the same way Olympic wrestling is romantic. The stall warning horn inside my head was blaring and I didn’t care. My big head was on autopilot. And then, just like that, I came to my senses. Maybe it was the firmness of her touch, so different from Savannah’s, or the way Rosario’s skin felt under my own fingers—some nonverbal, subconscious
something.
All I knew was that I suddenly felt as if I had no business being there, on that couch, with Detective Alicia Rosario.

“I can’t, Alicia. I’m sorry.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

I stood, hiking my jeans back up, and re-buckled my belt.

She sat back, naked from the waist up, and stroked the back of her neck. Her breasts glistened in the candlelight. They belonged in an art gallery. I stooped onto one knee and tied my shoes.

“Was it something I said, or did?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just dealing with some personal issues right now.”

She clutched a tasseled throw pillow to her chest.

“You mean
ex
issues.”

I didn’t respond.

Rosario sighed. “Story of my life,” she said.

“Let’s talk tomorrow, OK?”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

I knew it wasn’t fine. I stood, pulled on my shirt, and leaned down to kiss her good night. She raised her chin and offered me her cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears.

“Thanks for dessert.”

“Thanks for dinner.”

The street was quiet, the chill night air a tonic. I sat in my luxury SUV outside Rosario’s place for a long time with the windows down and thought about how far I’d come from nights in my not-so-distant past when I would’ve made any accommodation, told any lie, to maneuver someone like her between the sheets. Chalk it up to maturity? Declining testosterone? Who knows? It dawned on me as I drove away that I never did determine where she stashed her off-duty weapon. I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud of myself or disappointed.

It was too late to call Savannah and too early to turn in the Escalade. I’d do both come morning.

Mission Boulevard was dotted with budget motels, the kind with towels you can see through and walls so thin you can listen to the porn flicks the guests next door are renting. Tired as I was, I would’ve settled for a room in any one of them, but every vacancy sign was preceded by an illuminated neon “No.” I pulled into a sparsely occupied parking lot a block from the beach off of Reed Avenue, behind a sign that said, “The Beach Cottages, Day Week Month.” There was another, smaller sign below it that said, “Tenants Only. No Overnight Parking. Violators Will Be Towed.” I rolled up the windows, leaned my seat all the way back, and dozed off.

I
WAS
dreaming about machine guns when I was awakened by a loud banging sound. The sun was up. A pudgy San Diego police officer was looking down at me, rapping on the glass with his baton. I raised my seat back and rolled down the window.

“Top of the morning, Constable.”

He was Latino, young, squared away. “Did you not see that sign?”

“What sign would that be?”

“The one that says no overnight parking,” he said, pointing.

“I did.”

“And you parked here anyway?”

“It was late. There was no room at the inn. I just needed somewhere to catch a couple hours of rack time. I’m out of here right now, if that works for you.”

I’m pretty sure it had been awhile since he’d had to roust any scofflaws camped out in $70,000 SUVs.

“Just don’t let me catch you overnight here again.”

“Roger that.”

I watched him walk back to his patrol car.

It was 6:20
A
.
M
. My phone rang. The man on the other end spoke with an impenetrable Indian accent. He said his name was “Khan,” then repeated it when I said, “Who?”

“Jahangir Khan. Your student.”

Not merely my student. My
only
student.

“Jahangir. Of course. How could I forget? What’s shaking, buddy?”

He apologized for calling so early, but said he was anxious to know when I would be returning to Rancho Bonita so he could resume his flight training.

“As you are no doubt remembering, Mr. Cordell, I am keenly interested in obtaining my official pilot’s license certificate because you see, sir, it is of the utmost interest to me that I—”

“—I get it, Jahangir,” I said, cutting him off before he got really cranked up. “I’ll be back this week. I’ll call you. We’ll get it going, OK?”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Cordell, thank you. You are a most kind and generous man—and, might I say, a fine pilot. If I could one day be only half as skilled as you are, sir, I will regard myself as a lucky man. You know, in the city where I am from, very few people will ever know the joy of flight, being in the air, above the teeming masses, and I—”

It was
way
too early in the morning to be that enthusiastic about anything, including flying.

“You’re breaking up, Jahangir,” I said, running the phone up and down my beard. “I’ll call as soon as I get back. You take care now, buddy. Talk soon. Peace out.”

I rubbed my eyes, yawned and stretched. Almost immediately, my phone rang again.

“I didn’t have much to do last night after you left,” Alicia Rosario said, “so I started reading up on your friend, Hub Walker.” Her tone was all business, tinged with the bitterness of a good woman scorned. “He carried a German Luger pistol in Vietnam.”

“His father fought in World War I. He inherited the pistol from him.”

“The Luger’s not exactly standard U.S. military issue.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Walker, by chance, hasn’t shown you the pistol, has he?”

“What reason would he have had to do that?”

I waited for Rosario to respond. She sneezed.

“
Gesundheit
.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Must’ve caught a bug from somebody last night.”

I let the slap pass. “Why the interest in Walker’s Luger?”

“One of our forensics people recovered a spent 9-millimeter round last night from the Sheen homicide scene,” Rosario said. “I just got a call from the lab. They think they matched the make and model of the weapon.”

“Was it a Luger?”

“How’d you guess?”

Twenty-five

N
o county sheriff with career ambitions would ever rush right out and throw handcuffs on a Medal of Honor recipient suspected of homicide without careful tactical planning, especially in a military town like San Diego. You don’t simply cordon off the neighborhood, break out the bullhorn, and demand that the suspect surrender or else. You set about your work quietly and unobtrusively, hoping not to alert the breathless bobbleheads over at
Action News,
because if things go sour, you’ll never be elected sheriff again. Or anything else.

Detective Rosario’s plan, which her chain of command apparently had approved, was that I go in first. She was certain that Hub Walker trusted me by virtue of having saved his granddaughter from drowning, and by my having guided him to a safe landing on that fogged-in approach to the Rancho Bonita airport, when his airplane was running low on fuel. I could talk some sense into him, Rosario reasoned, and persuade him to surrender peaceably. He would have fifteen minutes to ponder his options before the SWAT team took over and took him by force. First, though, I’d have to sign a waiver absolving San Diego County of any liability in the event rounds start flying and I caught one or more of them.

Arresting a legitimate war hero for murder, discreetly or otherwise, had national news story written all over it. As soon as the story leaked, the military bashers would use it to perpetuate the myth that every veteran who sees combat comes home messed up in the head. Some do, but certainly not all. How much of Walker’s alleged bloodlust, if any, was influenced by his exploits in Vietnam forty years earlier was unknown. I’d once idolized the man. Now, I didn’t know what to think of him. The knot in my stomach was the size of a grenade.

“You
do
have health insurance, correct?” Rosario asked me as I waited in the backseat of her unmarked unit, two sun-splashed blocks up the street from Hub Walker’s house.

“I’m covered by the VA.”

“Good luck with that,” Rosario’s partner, Lawless, said derisively from the front passenger seat. He yawned, heavy-lidded, like he’d been up all night.

I asked if his wife had given birth yet.

“None of your business, Logan.”

“And on that cheery note . . .”

I opened the door and stepped out.

“Just be careful,” Rosario said like she meant it.

“Always.”

Two black Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows hunkered on the opposite side of the street, facing in the direction of Hub and Crissy’s house—the SWAT team ready to roll in should my efforts to diffuse the situation prove unsuccessful.

Just don’t leave me hanging, boys.