Flat Spin (31 page)

I gave him Czarnek’s number and signed off.

My fellow Kmart shoppers with whom I’d been waiting in the check-out line avoided eye contact with me. Even though I’d lowered my voice, they had all apparently overheard my conversation with Ostrow. And not only that. I could feel a breeze on the small of my back—my shirt had hiked up, probably when I’d stooped to load Savannah’s trunk in the parking lot. The butt of my revolver was protruding from my waistband for all to see. I casually pulled down my shirt.

A biker chick in line directly behind me—waiting to buy a cartload of coloring books, bath towels, and a new George Foreman grill—glanced anxiously at the uniformed rent-a-cop standing guard near the entrance. The guard was scraping his fingernails with a penknife. He looked old enough to be Mrs. Schmulowitz’s father.

“I’m auditioning for a part on
CSI Miami
,” I explained. “I play a retired government hit man. Could be my big break.”

You could tell by their lack of response and the way they avoided my eyes that they feared me. Some men like that feeling, the power of it. I never have. Even when I was with Alpha, when survival depended on exercising such power, I did so only because I had to, not because I wanted to. There’s a difference.

I made some lame excuse about forgetting to buy floss and retreated from the check-out line, ditched the toothbrush, and walked past the security guard, out of the store. He never looked up from his fingernails.

“S
omebody burned down your
apartment
? Logan, my God.”

Savannah bit her lip. She said she hoped the fire had nothing to do with her having dragged me into the investigation of Echevarria’s murder, but that she feared there was a correlation.

I was too busy devouring my Kmart pizza over her kitchen sink to offer details about the fire that I’m sure she wanted to hear. Nor did I much feel like cluing her in about how my pilot’s license had been lifted by the feds. So I just ate.

“You’re being uncouth,” Savannah said.

“
Au contraire
. I’m being green. No washing of extraneous dishes. No wasting of water. Friend of the planet.”

“That’s right. You’re Buddhist now. I forgot.” She picked a mushroom off my pizza without asking my permission and ate it.

“Help yourself,” I said with some sarcasm.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

She grabbed up a slice and ate over the sink with me. I wasn’t going to make an issue of it. She was, after all, letting me stay at her house until I could find more permanent digs. I had accepted reluctantly. It was either that or Mrs. Schmulowitz’s itchy sofa.

“I got a call today from your father’s attorney,” I said. “I didn’t call him back. You wouldn’t happen to know what’s up with that, would you?”

“My father and I aren’t speaking at the moment,” Savannah said. “He’s mad at me. He’s convinced he made a major mistake, asking you to go to the police about Arlo.”

“He wouldn’t have asked me if you hadn’t asked first.”

Savannah was looking at me and I was looking at her, and what was not said between us in that moment could’ve filled an entire shelf of self-help books about longing and coping with loss and how to get laid. That was my take on it, anyway. Who knows what she was really thinking?

“I’m going to bed,” Savannah said, wiping her mouth with a paper towel. “You can turn off the lights when you’re done down here.”

There was a small rip in the left seat of her Levi’s through which I observed flawless skin. No panties. I tried not to stare.

“You got an extra toothbrush I can borrow?”

“Hallway closet. Bottom drawer.”

“Thanks.”

A week earlier, I’d been a humble flight instructor, content, for the most part, to put the past behind me and almost pay my bills. Now here I was, at my ex-wife’s mercy, bunking in her guest room and having to ask her for a goddamn toothbrush because mine had burned up along with virtually everything else I owned. I swore that come morning, I would leave and never look back. Screw her. Screw Echevarria. Screw it all. Maybe I’d fly up to British Columbia, slap a couple of pontoons on the
Duck
, and make a good living shuttling salmon fishermen in and out of the bush. Or make my way down to the Caribbean and run air charters in and out of Barbados. Bikinis and margaritas. A pilot could get used to that. Yeah, come morning, I told myself, I’d be gone like a hawk on the wing. Then I remembered: I was officially grounded.

Some days you’re the kitten, some days you’re the lawnmower.

I turned off the kitchen lights and ate what was left of my pizza in the dark.

N
INETEEN

T
he sun was not quite up and neither was I when Czarnek called me the next morning to let me know that Detective Ostrow from Rancho Bonita PD had called, told him that my apartment had been bombed, and wanted to compare notes. Like Ostrow, Czarnek could barely contain his glee. Most of the killings he investigated, he said, were pathetically ordinary. Gang-related drive-bys, jealous control freaks strangling their girlfriends, scorned wives stabbing their cheating husbands with kitchen knives or running them over with the family wagon. Same old, same old. But this, he said, this was something gloriously different. Echevarria’s murder was rapidly turning into the makings of a by-God international conspiracy.

“It’s like eating cheeseburgers every day for lunch,” he said. “Then one day, presto, it’s
empanadas
with fresh
pico de gallo
.”

Food analogies aside, Czarnek said he couldn’t divulge what progress he’d made in the case since we’d spoken last, given the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation, then proceeded to do just that. He was too pumped not to.

According to Czarnek, the late Gennady Bondarenko had been moonlighting as a consultant—a fixer, essentially—for an LA-based consortium of Russian expatriates eager to stake oil leases in Kazakhstan. The consortium would’ve found itself in direct competition with Gil Carlisle and Pavel Tarasov for the very same leases. The LAPD was working the theory that Bondarenko’s consortium, aware that Echevarria was snooping around in Kazakhstan on behalf of Carlisle, had him killed to deter Carlisle’s and Tarasov’s business interests there. Bondarenko, in turn, had been murdered to derail the consortium’s ambitions. A homicidal tit-for-tat.

The particularly brutal manner of Bondarenko’s death, Czarnek said, suggested the handiwork of any number of Russian freelancers now living in Southern California. Many were trained killers who boasted of current or former ties to the Kremlin. Czarnek, his partner and a handful of Russian-speaking LAPD detectives who’d been brought in on the case as part of a task force had identified more than twenty viable culprits in Bondarenko’s murder, though none specifically in Echevarria’s.

“The same .40-caliber pistol was used in both homicides,” Czarnek said. “All we have to do is find the weapon and it’s two for the price of one.”

“Here’s a crazy thought: what if Carlisle hired Micah Echevarria to kill Bondarenko? After all, the kid blew away his own father. How hard could it be to shoot a total stranger in the head, saw off his hands and set him on fire?”

Czarnek knew I was yanking his chain.

“We’re not barking up that tree right at present,” he said.

“So, you’re saying the kid’s not a suspect?”

“Sometimes, when you try something on it fits, sometimes it doesn’t,” Czarnek said.

“I’ll let him know he’s out of the running for Miss Congeniality. What about Miles Zambelli?”

“Who?”

“Miles Zambelli. Carlisle’s personal assistant.”

“The assistant. Yeah, we took a look at him, too. We got multiple wits that put him at some conference in London the night Echevarria got hit. Guy’s got a solid alibi and no rap sheet. Not so much as a parking ticket.”

The same, Czarnek said, was true of Janet Echevarria’s second husband, Henry Ramos. Why Ramos had paid Bondarenko a visit shortly before his death remained unknown. Detectives were planning to question him upon his return from the business trip to Kazakhstan.

I told Czarnek what Micah Echevarria had said about his father planning to attend the funeral of a friend in Arizona, and how I believed that friend to be former Alpha member Robbie Emerson whose wife was convinced that he hadn’t killed himself, despite a gun and note having been recovered at the scene.

“If I had a dime for every sobbing widow convinced her husband didn’t shoot himself and got whacked,” Czarnek said, “I’d be living the good life up in Tahoe. I’m sure the local cops checked it out.”

“You don’t mind me double-checking? The guy served in my old unit.”

“You wanna waste your time? Have at it. My dance card’s full up right now.”

“I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

“Do that. Just do me a favor, Logan, OK?”

“Anything for you, Detective.”

“Try to stay out of trouble? Please? My day’s already exhausting enough as it is.”

He said he’d let me know if anything broke in the case. I said I’d try not to hold my breath given the glacial pace at which he and the LAPD seemed to undertake murder investigations.

“You’re a barrel of laughs, Logan. By the way, there’s a rumor going around you won’t be flying the friendly skies for awhile.”

“You heard about that one, huh?”

“Violating the Vice President’s airspace and freaking out his security detail? Everybody’s heard about that one. It’s all over the news. Good thing I didn’t vote for the guy. I might be pissed at you, too. Nothing personal, Logan, but you do tend to piss off your fair share of people. I mean, when that detective from Rancho Bonita called me and asked who I thought might’ve bombed your apartment, I didn’t even know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning. My deprived childhood. Being raised by wolves in the forest. Being voted, ‘Most Likely to Have Zero Friends on Facebook When Facebook Is Invented Someday.’ A tragic tale, Detective, the story of my life. It makes
Phantom of the Opera
look like
Beach Blanket Bingo
. Who among us, under such circumstances, would not piss off their fair share of people?”

“You’re fucking nuts,” Czarnek said.

“When you’ve got it,” I said, “flaunt it.”

T
here was a telephone listing without an address for an “R. and E. Emerson” in Glendale, Arizona. I called. The woman who answered started to say hello but fumbled the phone, which clattered to the floor with a jarring clang. She picked it up and tried again.

“ ’Lo?”

“Emma Emerson?”

“Who’s this?” Her words were slurred, like someone who’d been abruptly awakened from sleep after getting hammered the night before. It wasn’t yet seven in the morning Arizona time.

I apologized for waking her up. I told her I’d served with her husband, and that I’d only recently heard about his death. I was calling, I said, to express my condolences.

“ ’Scuse me one second,” she said. More clanging and clattering as she dropped the phone again. Her footsteps grew distant. I could hear coughing, a deep, tubercular hack. Then a labored groan. Then a toilet flushing. A few seconds later, she was back.

“Phone’s not cordless,” she said. “That way, they can’t listen in.”

“Who’s
they
, Mrs. Emerson?”

“I can’t talk about it over the phone.”

“But you just said they can’t listen in.”

“I know what I said!” She popped open a can of something and took a long gulp. “My Robbie was with Alpha. Were you with Alpha?”

I balked. Any decent operator knows what to do when people start sniffing around for confirmation of his work on the dark side. He lies. He falls back on plausible, well-rehearsed cover stories—the ordinary desk job, the unremarkable home life. He bobs and weaves, redirecting the conversation:
Alpha? Never heard of it. Man, that was some kind of gully washer we had last night, wasn’t it? This pasta salad is delicious. What did you put in it? You look great. Have you lost weight?
But how do you obfuscate when the person asking the questions was clearly privy, by whatever degree, to the same shadow world in which you once operated? The answer is, you don’t.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I was with Alpha.”