Hot Wire (5 page)

"OK." My voice broke a little. Just enough.

"Now get out of here – and let me know where you're staying."

"I'm sorry, Deke," I said. "I was just trying to make our quota."

"I know." He softened a touch. "Shit happens. That's all."

He had bought my pitiful act. Maybe. I stood up and was getting ready to leave when someone pounded on the door. Three hard bangs made me jump. Deacon glanced at Heberto and they didn't look too thrilled.

"Stay put for a while," Deacon told me. "Everything's business as usual, understand? Never been better. And don't say a goddamn thing about the Lexus. Every time there's a problem, he tries to Jew us on his cut."

"Emma should leave," Heberto said.

"Let her stay for a couple minutes. The bastard's got the hots for her, so maybe she'll distract him from ripping us off a little. Besides, if he heard about it already, maybe he'll let something slip when he sees her hanging around. We got to feel this bastard out."

Heberto shrugged, then sat down again, clasping his hands on his stomach and staring at me with a little smile. Deacon nodded and I opened the door.

Surprise, surprise – in walked Detective Matt Jacobo, Emeryville P.D. Auto Theft Detail.

Mr. Washed-up Bag Man.

"Hiya, baby." Jacobo squeezed my shoulder, winked, then waddled into the office on a breeze of cheap cologne. He was plainclothes tonight: gray slacks, white shirt and tie, wingtips, tan trench coat. A regular fashion rack.

"Well, well," Deacon said. "Look what the cat drug in. Have a seat. We're just wrappin' this up."

"You got me covered?"

"Yeah, yeah. Take a load off."

Jacobo sat down on the couch and settled back, clasping his hands on his gut and propping his feet on the desk. He was the ugliest goon I'd ever seen: fifty, sixty, squat and flabby, kind of pitted and lipless with turtle eyes and a sloppy comb-over. He looked like a strip-show barker, but he was a cop – a nervous cop with one hand stuck in Deacon's pocket.

"You got a lot of stock outside, Deke." Jacobo unclasped his hands and rubbed his nose. "Some squad gets a bug up its ass and I have to go through the motions, it jacks up the price, you know? Can't be helped. The motions are getting kind of tricky these days."

Heberto gave him a deadpan.

"Don't worry about it," Deacon said. "They're fresh and we'll be clear in a couple hours. We're moving everything down to the warehouse tonight."

"I got to worry about it, Deke." Jacobo glanced at Heberto. "It's tougher with your new partnership – a lot more ground to cover. More hands, more divisions. Two jurisdictions. You got Narcotics in Emeryville and Oakland, not to mention the auto-theft details, and that's just state and local. Forget Customs and the DEA." He cleared his throat. "I hear the feds got a new task force sniffing around the Port. They're checking all the manifests, or so they say. It would take an army, but who the fuck knows? It's Homeland Security. Full Spectrum Dominance. Orange alerts, yellow alerts. They're all worked up about terrorism and you're shipping through a major port, so that kind of puts you on their radar."

"Full Spectrum what?" Deacon looked puzzled.

"They are lying about Iran," Heberto said. "Just as they lied about 9/11 and Iraq and Serbia and Vietnam and death squads in El Salvador. Weapons of mass destruction. Bullshit. All you have to do is listen to their voices to know they are lying cocksuckers."

"What are you?" Deacon asked. "Some kind of Berkeley faggot?" He blew smoke at the ceiling. "I say waste the ragheads so they can't pull that crap again – just bomb the whole place and grab the oil. What the hell."

Heberto smiled at him.

"I'm not arguin', Herb." Jacobo looked pained. "Maybe it's bullshit and maybe it's not, but that's kind of beside the point right now. Maybe the feds are just trying to scare everybody so they can take over. The point is they're all over the Port and we're kind of exposed to random acts of Fate, if you know what I mean."

"Just cover your end," Deacon said. "We'll worry about Port security."

"Yeah, well, you don't act too worried to me."

"Listen." Deacon puffed his cigar. "You know damn well they can't check all that cargo. They're doin' good to check five percent of the containers that go in and out of there, so all this talk about extra security is just a lot of crap for the dumb-ass voters. We got all the stamps. As far as they know, we're a legitimate operation."

Heberto lit another cigarette.

"We are not renegotiating your fee," he told Jacobo. "We ship in two weeks and the costs are well established."

"That's not what I'm talking about."

Deacon propped his elbows on the desk, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked like he had a migraine. When he opened his eyes again, he saw me and waved at the door.

"I've got to go," I said. I could take a hint. It didn't sound like Jacobo had heard anything about Arn or the Lexus, and Deacon didn't want me to witness the payoff. That was fine with me. I didn't want to witness anything anymore.

"You leaving already?" The scumbag was disappointed. "I'll be done in a second. Maybe we can catch a drink or something. It's on me tonight."

"Sorry, Mr. Jacobo. Maybe later, OK?"

"You're a hard case, Emma." He snickered. "A real hard case."

#

Thank God.

I was relieved to get out of there, but relief was just the flip side of fear. I felt spaced and wired and my imagination was starting to run amok. Closing the office door, I walked down the hall into the convenience store, checking the overhead mirror to see if anybody was hanging around in the aisles. The station was quiet – a dead zone on the night shift. Janice sat behind the counter, chin propped on her hand, leafing through a National Enquirer. She didn't look up when I walked by. Didn't see me at all.

The ice machine rattled. A phone rang in back and I wondered who was calling that time of night. Maybe Heberto had talked Deacon into getting rid of me. Maybe they were making arrangements to compact the Lexus and dump my twitching corpse. I ran all these grisly movies: gang bangs and knives, arteries spurting across the floor in the warehouse,
locos
bagging my head and hands, wrapping my torso in a plastic sheet. I made the front door, but I didn't want to go outside. Too dark. Too quiet. Leaves scattered through a circle of streetlight on the corner and a trash bag rolled by the pumps in the empty lot. I checked the shadows by the propane tanks in case somebody was hiding in the alley.

I was gripped. Losing it big time. I had to get my keys from Vincent and figure out what to do, and I needed a drink or something. A Valium. A lobotomy. Nobody had decided jack, I told myself. Nobody knew anything yet and nothing was going to happen for days, maybe weeks – if anything was going to happen at all. Like Deacon had said, this could all be a lot of nothing. Except it wasn't. One way or another, I couldn't do anything but wait.

A pickup clattered by on Hollis, dragging its muffler along the blacktop in a shower of sparks. I waited until the street was empty, then walked over to the Hot Box, checking my back, scanning the alleys and sidewalks. I kept expecting to see Baldy turn a corner in the Lexus or a couple of Oakland cops pull up and nail me with their spotlight. I could hear a voice – Deacon's voice – and I didn't like what he was saying:

"I know, Herb, I know. You're right. I like her, but why take a chance? Get Castel to dump her in the Bay – Arn, too, when he gets out on bail – and I'll figure out what to do with the Lexus. I don't think she suspects anything. We played it real good."

Lovely.

They say everybody has millions of these tiny bugs that look like hairy monsters with tusks and horns and dozens of eyes crawling all over their skin.

I could feel them.

The Hot Box was dead. A longhair in a stained T-shirt banged on the pinball machine by the door and a couple janitors were shooting pool at the table in back. The longhair checked me out when I walked in, but he was just a neighborhood druggie; I'd seen him around before. The janitors looked like janitors in grubby overalls. One of them leaned back to chalk his cue and I could feel his eyes trailing me across the room, or maybe it was just my imagination. When I glanced in his direction, he had turned back to the game, just another fat old man.

Everything looked normal. Too normal. Vincent, the owner, stood behind the bar, polishing glasses and talking to a drunk hunched over a draw and a bowl of pretzels. I recognized the drunk. He was this sleaze-bag reporter named Brown who chased dirt for a Berkeley scandal rag when he wasn't busy drinking himself to death. A TV flashed scenes of chaos over their heads: Muslims waving rifles, a truck exploding in a market. The grill was shut down and pans clattered in the kitchen.

Then I saw her.

Steffy was sitting at a table back in the shadows, staring at her bottle like a zombie. "Great," I muttered. Just what I needed. I'd forgotten about the message Vincent had left with Deacon earlier that night or I would've avoided the place like the clap. My bimbo cousin was hanging around because she needed money or a place to crash – it was always the same old story – but I needed time to figure out where I was going to stay, what I was going to do myself. I had to pick up my keys. I couldn't leave just yet. She didn't see me come in, so I sat down at the bar and Vincent came over, walking kind of slow with his arthritis.

"Well, well," he said. "Little Miss Strange."

"Hi, Vincent." I propped my elbows on the bar, took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. I was getting this gnarly headache. "I guess I know why you called."

"Sorry to bug you at work," he said. "I figured you'd want to come by."

"Yeah, well, she could've picked a better night."

"She ain't your look-out, you know."

Vincent was a nice old guy – bald, skinny as a stick – and he wore these bifocals that made him look like a mad scientist. A friend of my father's before my parents croaked, he helped me out when he could, loaned me money, introduced me to Deacon when I got out of Juvie three years ago. Vincent used to be a long-haul trucker, but he got into a jam over light loads and ended up doing nine months for trafficking and some other crap. I missed him bad while he was gone. They wouldn't let me visit. When he got out, he spent a year mixing drinks at some dive in West Oakland before he bought the Hot Box with his cut from a warehouse robbery. He did OK with the place, more or less. The joint cleared forty or fifty grand during a good year, more than enough to keep him in Marlboros and Johnny Walker. Deacon helped him out now and then. Vincent told me they were buddies from the old days before the city got overrun by faggots and dirty hippies.

"You cut it pretty close," he said, nodding at Steffy. "She's been hanging around all night, caging drinks and getting more squirrelly by the minute. Coked up or something. Nothing different there, except she got kicked out again by her latest manager or whatever the hell he is and I got to close in thirty minutes." He glanced at the clock. "Don't want to toss her out this time of night. Something might eat her."

"Wonderful." Backfire on the street made me flinch. I sat up, put my glasses on, then slouched over again, checking the door, running a hand through my hair. "Can I get a beer?"

He shook his head, watching me fidget.

"Not out here you can't. Goddamn Liquor Control."

"Oh, yeah." I wasn't tracking too hot. "You got any coffee left?"

"That's just what you need," he said. "Everything OK? You look like you swallowed a bug."

"I'm OK," I said. "Tired."

"Where's Arn?"

I hesitated. "He called in sick tonight."

"Sick? What's the matter?"

"Cold or something." I watched Steffy nursing her bottle in the corner and wished I could push a button that would make her disappear. She looked stoned and depressed; maybe she was feeling sorry for all the poor little butterflies trapped inside her head. "Thanks for calling, Vincent. I guess I'll deal with it somehow."

"Anybody else, I'd of dumped her junky butt in the trash." He glanced over at Brown sitting at the other end of the bar, then leaned closer and lowered his voice. "You interested in a piece? I got a couple Glocks from that dealer thing in Richmond. The one last month."

"I heard about that."

"No, you didn't."

"I don't know, Vincent." I couldn't concentrate. "Let me think about it."

"Well, don't gnaw on it forever." He nodded in Brown's direction, then started to polish the counter with a rag. "Looks like somebody wants to show you some dirty pictures."

"What?"

"Don't get your shorts in a wad." He gave me a wink. "Brownie's workin' a big story."

Brown staggered over and sat down on the stool next to me, propping his elbows on the bar and dragging a hand through his tangled hair. A tall, skinny geek with wire-rim glasses and bloodshot eyes, he was wearing a baggy trench coat with scuff marks and stains on the sleeves. I'd seen him around before and he always reminded me of a college professor who'd just spent the last week curled up in a dumpster. He was a fleabag reporter, broke all the time, a bottom-feeder sniffing at keyholes with a fifth of vodka in his pocket. Vincent had met him a couple years ago, but I never got the details. The old man said he was harmless, but Brown hung out with bail bondsmen, seedy cops and courthouse reporters, so I always kept my distance.