Lizardskin (49 page)

“At Offshore Films. Why?”

“Get your ass down to 220 Ditman. Rufus Calder’ll meet you.”

“Okay, I’m going. What’s the rush?”

“Rufus heard from his surveillance guys. There’s a truck at bay nine right now. Looks like they’re cleaning the place out. And guess who’s doing it?”

“Danny Burt.”

“Yeah, Beau. Go down there, nail his fat ass to the wall.”

Beth looked up from the computer paper when she heard someone tapping on the glass window of the Communications room. Valerie Fromberg was rapping it with her knuckles. When she got Beth’s attention, she pointed to her headset several times.

Beth picked up the desk phone and punched the
COMMO
key.

“Yes?”

“It’s some guy named Tarr, a reporter. He’s asking for Moses, and I can’t raise him on the radio.”

“Moses is out at Joe Bell’s. Nobody’s answering the phone out there, and Moses went to see if he’s on another bender and not hearing his phone.”

“Didn’t he take a squad car?”

“No, they’re all on the road.”

“Can you talk to this guy? He’s pretty excited.”

“Okay. Have you got your tape on? Moses’ll want to hear this.”

“Yeah, I’ll switch him.”

The line clicked and beeped. “Hello?”

“Hello. Where’s Harper?”

“Is this Mr. Tarr?”

“Yeah. Who’re you?”

“I’m Beth Gollanz. Moses had to step out of the station for a bit. Can I help you?”

“Are you a cop?”

“No, I’m a civilian employee. But I’m helping Moses with a case. Maybe you can tell me, I can get the information to him.”

“Where’s Lieutenant Meagher?”

“Out of town.”

“Where’s McAllister?”

“He’s not available right now. As I said, maybe I can—”

“For chrissake, lady, is
anybody
there with some brass on his shirt? Any management around at all?”

“They’re all on the road, sir. I’d be glad to help—”

“Lady, you’re not helping
me
. I’m helping
you
! And before I go down this road any further, I wanna talk to some brass and get some promises!”

“What kind of promises, sir?”

“Look, I’m doing McAllister a favor, okay? And suddenly I’m up to my ass in alligators. I wanna know why I’m looking at what I’m looking at, and I wanna know if I’m gonna get sued, and most of all, I wanna know, if I help you, I get the story
exclusively
! Just only me, right? Nobody else!”

“Sir, I can’t make you that kind of promise. I’m only—”

“You find McAllister or Meagher. Tell ’em to call Sig Tarr at home in an hour. That’s where I’m going. Tell ’em what I said and what I want. You have a nice day, honey!”

The line clicked off.

Valerie Fromberg came on the line. “What the hell was
that
all about?”

Goddamn that Moses. Where was he?

“Valerie, do you have the lieutenant’s cellular number there?”

“Yes. I already tried it. He’s on his way back from South Dakota, and he’s not in a service zone. He’s supposed to call in anytime, though.”

“You have Beau’s number?”

“He’s not in the state, Beth.”

“He has call-following. I put them all on call-following. Give me his number. And try Joe Bell’s line again!”

“Okay. Here’s Beau’s number.”

Beth wrote it down on one of the computer sheets.

Call me, Moses! Call in, you sneaky bastard!

The front swept down over southeastern Montana like a dam breaking in the sky. A thunderclap shattered the heavy air, and the sky fell on the hills and the grasses and the towns. On the interstate, the visibility dropped down to a few feet in ten seconds. The sky glowed green and purple, shot through with brilliant flashes of sheet lightning. Billboards bent in the rushing wind. A wall of brown dust a thousand feet high rolled on toward Hardin and Pompeys Pillar. The clouds came down from the sky and roared through the streets of Billings.

Maureen and Bobby Lee and Dell Greer ran for the back door, the first of the hard rain peppering their legs and rattling the fiberglass roof of the poolhouse. They could hear a hammering sound on the glass, and the front door was slamming and banging in the wind. Maureen raced from window to window, slamming them down against the rising storm. A thunderclap boomed above them, shaking the house.

Then another, and another.

Greer hustled through the house to the front door, tugged the screen door closed, struggling against the wind. He looked out at the street, where his cruiser was rocking in the wind. It was locked, and the windows were up. A green egg-shaped Sable was parked across the street. A red dog was sitting behind the wheel, staring up at the door.

Now
that’s
what you call—what’s the word?

Sur … something. When something is too weird for words.

Bobby Lee stood in the middle of the living room, shaking, her face white. Greer slammed the door. He knelt down and hugged her.

She looked past him, at something else.

“Who’s
he
?” she said, raising her hand.

Greer, still on his knees, turning, reaching for his nine-mill, cursing at his stupidity, saw the windows fill with white light and felt the thunder slamming against his chest, still turning, saw the screen door open and nothing in the door but rain and white light, and the street beyond it. And then, turning still, searching, his nine-mill now out, he saw the pale green rug rise up and strike his cheek, and he realized he was lying on his face. He tried to get up, but his hands would not work. He felt cold. He saw his nine-mill in his right hand, huge and black. The red plastic inlay on the foresight seemed to glow. The gold class ring on his third finger was very intricately carved, and he wondered why he had never noticed how fine a piece of work it was. It was very very fine.

Like bad bars, whores, and overdue bills, Los Angeles looked worse in the daylight. Beau would have sailed right by Marengo if he hadn’t seen that big billboard with the
BERMUDA
 … 
YOU DESERVE IT
ad sticking into the yellow sky above the crowded freeway lanes. The Marengo exit came up fast on his right, and he peeled out of the traffic and soared around the off-ramp, pushing the Town Car so hard, the tires shrieked and his cellular phone slammed into the passenger door and his papers flew all over the footwell. He hit the horn to move a Jeep stuffed with Chicano women out of his way, got a bouquet of middle fingers for his trouble, and accelerated up Ditman toward 220. He couldn’t see any squad cars or flashing red lights. His respect for Rufus Calder went up a couple of notches.

The drug dealing was still going on, although it had kind of a Wednesday afternoon laziness to it—a few old cars, and a mixed crowd of women and kids and wolfish teens ambling up and down the street in front of the Iranian grocery store and the crumbling apartments. In the gritty yellow light of the Los Angeles sunshine, all the buildings looked ancient, their outlines softened, as if they were ruins of an earlier, and not particularly better, civilization. He slowed the white car as he neared 220, looking for an obvious cop car.

He found it, a dark green Ford LTD with two men inside, parked in the same alley where he had positioned himself last
night. He rolled up alongside it, so that the two drivers’ windows were side by side. The black man at the wheel rolled down his window, waited for Beau’s to come down, and flashed him a huge brilliant grin.

“Now, you gotta be McAllister.”

“You’re Rufus Calder, then. Pleased to meet you.” He extended his hand, and Calder shook it twice, hard, through the windows.

Calder was in his late forties, a thin angular man with eyes slanted slightly upward, surrounded by humor lines. An ugly pink scar twisted his right eyebrow into a jagged Z, dropping the lid slightly. He wore a pale beige suit in some light fabric, over a crisp white shirt and a yellow tie.

His partner was a young kid, brown-haired and brown-eyed, with a stylish blunt haircut and round-rimmed dark brown glasses. He was wearing an olive-green silk sports coat and dark brown baggy trousers. His shirt was collarless, in a burnt orange, and it looked like silk. Calder watched Beau as Beau checked out his partner.

“Sergeant, this is Detective Freg. Ain’t he pretty? Luis, I want you to meet Staff Sergeant Beauregard McAllister, of the Montana Highway Patrol.”

Freg nodded at him, without smiling.

“Your name is Luis Freg?”

The man smiled a little. “Yes. You know me?”

“I know
the
Luis Freg. The matador, got a
cornada
in his chest in Madrid, back in the thirties. You even look like him.”

Freg loosened up to let some teeth show. They were very white against his tan. “I am named for him, but we are not related. How do you know of him?”

“I’m a Hemingway fan, and Hemingway wrote about him. I even went to see a fight, but that was in Mexico.”

“They fight differently down there,” Freg said, now smiling brilliantly.

Calder grinned at Beau, sharing Beau’s reaction to Luis Freg, amused by it.

“Okay, McAllister, here’s the thing. You see the yard there?”

Beau twisted in his seat. The truckyard at 220 Ditman was about half filled with vehicles of various sizes, parked here and there around the fenced-in lot. Drivers were sitting on their hoods or lounging around the dock while about twenty men and women scuttled around, dragging flats on power carts or running forklift trucks in and out of the loading doors.

At bay nine, a huge stainless-steel and maroon Freightliner with an unmarked stainless-steel trailer was parked right up against the bay doors. A gray tarpaulin was spread across the opening, effectively hiding the activity inside the door.

Beau shook his head. “How come it’s so busy? It was empty last night.”

“Yeah. Apparently the owner, Merced Industries, declared bankruptcy yesterday, and all the companies are trying to get their shit outta the building before the bailiffs lock it up. So this is gonna make things tricky.”

“Yeah, I don’t see any squad cars.”

“We don’t bring prowl cars down here unless we do it in fives. This area, in the summer like this, it’ll blow up in a minute. We keep a low profile around here—hey, which reminds me, you gotta look at this. You’ll like this, Sergeant.”

He handed Beau a photograph. Black and white, taken with a telephoto lens at night, it showed Beau in his tan suit, standing at the gate of the warehouse, reaching up to press the entry button. Beau smiled and handed it back to Calder.

“I figured you’d have somebody around. Who was it? Vice?”

“No, Strike Force. They were zooming a possible AR and saw you cruising around. Took this for fun. I just wanted to show you we ain’t asleep down here in Lotusland.… So the thing is, we got Jimmy Drinaw outta here at the end of his shift this morning. Man, he was pissed at
you
, McAllister. Anyway, he’s bagged, and we got him on the Ithaca. He took that with him when he left the Oxnard force, so we can hang him up for stolen police property. You want us to?”

“No, I just wanted him out of the way. If we make a case, we’ll need him for chain of evidence.”

“So what now?”

“How much did Meagher tell you?”

“Not a lot. He says you maybe got a drug thing here, but not to bring the narcs into it. He wants me to keep it under my vest for a while, see what it comes up as.”

“Can you do that?”

Calder reached into his suit pocket and flipped out a leather case. He showed Beau the badge, a bright gold badge and the engraved letters
LIEUTENANT
.

“I can do pretty much what I want, McAllister. I’m Two I C of the intelligence division. We own the town.”

“Okay. First off, I don’t think it’s drugs, I think it’s something else. But what I need is probable cause to pop a guy, says his name is Hank Starbuck—”

“That’d be the Danny Burt guy?”

“Yeah, and when I pop him, it’s gotta be solid enough to enter bay nine, do a kick-in, maybe search and seizure. It’s gotta stand up in Montana as well as L.A. County.”

“What do you think is in there, McAllister?”

Beau wiped his face and took a long breath. “Man, I wish I knew. Tell you one thing, Lieutenant. It’s gonna be nasty.”

Calder’s face stiffened a little. “Burt have a record?”

“Nothing connected to smuggling or drugs. Misdemeanors and minor assault charges. And we don’t have anything on him for a warrant. Legally, we don’t have shit on Danny.”

“Okay, that’s no good. We asked Jimmy about guns, he said he didn’t see any, so we can’t go with weapons dangerous.”

“You run the Freightliner?”

“We did. It’s registered in Visalia. Merced Industries owns it, leases it to Kellerman Cold Haulers.”

“Merced owns the warehouse, doesn’t it?”

“So far. Like I said, they went bankrupt yesterday.”

“Convenient.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, if they filed bankruptcy, what’s the position on them taking stuff outta that warehouse?”

Calder considered it. “Well, it happens all the time. Usually, the bailiffs get there, the place is a burned-out shell anyway. So they don’t rush to lock up the assets. But technically—maybe we could use it.”

“You think? Pop Kellerman Cold Haulers for violating the trustee rules? All I need is the excuse to walk across the street there, knock on the door.”

“Well, if the Freightliner is owned by Merced, and Merced filed yesterday, and Kellerman Cold Haulers is using the truck—Luis, what’s the law here about the Freightliner?”

Freg tapped his long-fingered hand on the dashboard.

“Luis is a lawyer, McAllister. Got a degree and the whole thing.”

“Congratulations, Luis.”

Freg nodded gravely. “Okay. I think, if Kellerman Cold Haulers has legally
leased
that Freightliner, and they’re all paid up to date, then they have a legal right to run it, and in a sense, Merced is in a debtor relationship to Kellerman. I don’t think you can pop the truck.
But
—”

Calder smiled at Beau.

“
But
, if Kellerman Cold Haulers is running the truck illegally—you know, in violation of any state law—then the lease is null and void because of the insurance violation.”