October's Ghost (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

EVENTS

“There he is.”

Jorge leaned forward against the van’s dash, looking to the left past Tomás. The man was walking with the crowd in the pedestrian crossing, hands pushed deep in his pockets and his balding head moving from side to side. “Right on time.”

“He looks nervous,” Tomás commented.

“He has reason to,” Jorge said, sitting back.

Tomás scooted forward in the driver’s seat, his slight paunch pressed against the steering wheel, and removed the revolver from his back waistband. He kept it below the window line and slid it between his legs, the barrel pointed bravely backward. He would not do the same with the semiautomatic pistol under his coat. It was cocked and locked, ready to fire, with the safety on, but he trusted safeties as much as he did weathermen. The nice thing about revolvers was that they went off only when one wanted them to, without the risk of jamming, features that still made them popular with many nostalgic American policemen, and equally popular with men in his line of work.

“Going inside,” Jorge reported. He, too, was armed, carrying the identical mix of weaponry, though he left his concealed for the moment. There was no rush. The time would come soon enough.

*  *  *

“One for lunch?” the hostess inquired.

The man’s eyes searched the room.
¿Dónde está?
He wasn’t there.

“Sir?”

“Yes. No. I... I am meeting someone.”

The hostess smiled politely, her blue eyes twinkling benignly below the perky blond coiffure.
Fucking immigrants
. She had to work her
ass
off just to survive while attending UCLA, and these people came over the border and somehow ended up with all the money they needed. His accent wasn’t Mexican, though. Probably a fucking chiropractor or something trained in Guatemala. Her smile widened as she led him toward a table at the back corner of the restaurant.
If I have to work two jobs just to make it through pre-med, you can live with some kitchen noise.

“Will this be all right?”

“Yes,” the man answered. “Very fine.”

He watched the hostess walk away. She was young and might have received closer attention at another time, but his gaze soon shifted outside, through the window on his left. He felt somewhat more comfortable where he sat. The entire dining room was visible, as was the entrance.

“Water,
señor
?”

“
Si. Gracias.
” He looked up at the busboy and slipped him a dollar. It was truly the underlings who deserved the tips.

“
Gracias
,” the young Salvadoran said, his eyes beaming. “
Gracias!
”

The man lifted the glass to his lips but jumped at the sound of dishes falling behind. A splash of water leaped from the glass and spilled on his trousers, drenching the left side. He quickly grabbed the napkin from the table and set it on his lap.

But it wasn’t the clothing he was concerned with.

*  *  *

“Are you ready?” Jorge asked.

Tomás nodded, straightening himself as much as possible in the seat and tucking the revolver in the front of his waistband. He buttoned the coat next.

“Let’s go.”

*  *  *

He was killing himself. There was no doubt about it. Frankie watched him put the end of it in his mouth. It was only a matter of time.

“Mmmmm.” Art Jefferson bit into the bacon-chili cheese dog with a satisfaction he had avoided for almost six months.

Frankie Aguirre shook her head and sipped her flavored seltzer. “You gonna make me watch you do this? Huh? Is this so I can testify at the probate hearing? ‘Yes, Your Honor, I saw him do it.’ ”

Art heard his partner’s protest but continued anyway, chewing the first bite until swallowing was a necessity. “Ooooh. That is good!”

“Yeah, right.” Frankie drained the bottle and set it down on Pink’s streetfront counter, her fingers picking at her chips.

Special Agent Thom Danbrook nursed his root beer and took in the good-natured exchange as an eager observer. “Does he always eat this stuff?”

“Hey, twice a year,” Art said, explaining before his partner could do his culinary reputation harm. “That’s what I give myself. Kinda like a vacation from boring food.”

“From healthy food,” she corrected him.

He did plenty of that, Art could say, eating healthy and all. Lots of salads and fruits, chicken, pasta, veggies till his mouth tasted like broccoli all day. Bush had it right on
that
green hunk of nutrients, he believed. It had been just over a year since the heart attack, and he was doing fine. Even his cardiologist said an occasional divergence into cholesterol land was acceptable. The whole idea was moderation, something his partner exhibited little of in the area of overprotectiveness.

But that’s what partners were for, inasmuch as the Bureau had ‘partners’ (the correct term was ‘team’), and Special Agent Francine—‘Don’t call me that’—Aguirre was top-notch. She and Art had been paired since he left desk duty and returned to real work, as he called it. A true Bureau street agent, just the way he began his career in the days of old J. Edgar. It was also the way he wanted it to end. Three more years to a full thirty, and he was damned glad he’d gotten out of the bureaucracy end of things.
That
would have killed him. The heart attack had been a very clear warning that the stress of command and his screwed-up personal life was too much, and Art had heard it loud and clear.

“I could just shoot you, if you want,” Frankie offered.

Art brought his right elbow down against his side in a reflexive action, the hard grip of the Smith & Wesson right where it should be. “I’ll take the slow way out, if you don’t mind. Okay, pardner?”

“Art, trust me, you’ll never get used to ‘Mother’ here,” Danbrook informed him. He had been teamed with Aguirre for two of his first three years fresh out of the Academy before transferring to the San Francisco field office, giving her up to Art.

“I hear you,” Art said between chews. “So, you think old Barrish will go down this time?”

“That’s why I’m here.” Danbrook was back in his old Bureau stomping grounds in order to testify in the case of United States of America versus some white supremacist asshole. He hated to dignify the man by using his name; ‘the suspect’ would do just fine. “This place have any burgers?”

Art nearly choked on his dog at the remark that bordered on heresy. “At Pink’s? Didn’t Aguirre ever bring you here?” He got a smiling head shake in response. “Frankie!”

“I don’t believe in killing my own partners,” she answered, deadpan. “If they want to do it themselves, well...”

Danbrook laughed fully at that. Frankie was a wiseass if ever there was one, and the number-one wiseass to have on your side when the heat was on. He had learned well from her. “Is there someplace around here I can get something to eat that doesn’t have pig snouts as a main ingredient?”

This time Frankie was the one to laugh, while Art gave Thom a purely devilish look.

“Out the back, across the alley,” Frankie directed. “Clampett’s has what you want.”

“Thanks. Back in a minute.” Danbrook walked through Pink’s and out the back door.

Frankie saw another third of the artery torpedo disappear into Art’s mouth and a look of pure ecstasy come to his face. “Live it up, Arthur.”

“Sure will, Francine.”

*  *  *

He was a reporter, and that meant he had to do things like wear bad blazers, drive a never-new, American-made car of some sort, and, of course, buy lunch for people who had a story to tell. It was all part of the persona, and George Sullivan fit into it with no effort at all.

The three-year veteran of the
Los Angeles Times
turned his eight-year-old Chrysler left onto Melrose, sneaking a sip from the flask in his coat pocket, a necessity, he believed, to survive the streets of L.A. He was a transplant from New York, a former Gray Lady staffer who had gotten tired of the cold and the crowds and traded them for the smog and the crowds, and he still hadn’t figured just
who
had taught Californians to drive. Not that they were nuts, but they all drove like old women. They even used turn signals! Hell, he had learned to drive in the city—Manhattan—where you changed lanes if you wanted, and if someone was already there, they would hit the horn, or maybe scream something. It worked, and it was a lot more interesting.

This fine autumn day, when the parts per million of some airborne carcinogen or something equally as horrid had reached the magical level where the weathermen colored the Los Angeles basin orange on their air-quality maps, George was off to meet what was supposed to be a story: some Cuban exile who had a juicy bit of nostalgia to share, it had been alluded to by his boss when he assigned it to him a week earlier. At least Bill had checked the guy out and verified that he
might be
someone who knew something. But, then, who wasn’t someone? Everybody had something to tell. Or something to sell, he added cynically.

His own conversations with the guy, all over the phone, had been pretty uneventful, a bad signal for a reporter. News, generally, meant something of interest, and to this point there had been no indication of such. But today was supposed to be the day when the guy gave up his secret, the terrible secret he kept referring to in their conversations. The guy had actually been testing him, making sure that he wasn’t a cop or some foreign agent out to steal the wondrous knowledge he possessed. Give me a break, George thought. Just give me the straight poop, and I’ll decide if it’s earth-shattering.

There it was. Clampett’s. Another trendy L.A. eatery that had degenerated into something—surprise!—quite ordinary. They served
food
there, George thought, not fucking Picassos. Angelenos had a tendency to think themselves somewhat superior in just about anything they attempted, even the mundane. It was amusing, at least, and made for good stories every now and then.

That must be him, George thought, as he waited behind a row of cars to turn left into the alley alongside the restaurant. He could see him sitting in the corner, fiddling with something on the table, his features darkened by the tinting on the restaurant’s large front windows. The description the guy had given of himself was pretty good. Sixtyish, balding, a bit of a gut, though the guy hadn’t put it that way. Sullivan could see his bulk widen at the waist.

The light ahead was red, creating a backup of cars trying to turn left onto La Brea. Sullivan was stuck in it, not yet close enough to the alley to turn. He kept looking back and forth between the light and the man. Then their eyes met. Only about forty feet separated them. George smiled, but the man did not return it. He checked the light again. Green. Good, he thought, and looked back to the...
Who are those... Oh, shit!

*  *  *

“Yeah, can I get a burger, plain, to go?” Thom asked the hostess. She smiled almost seductively at the request He was a good-looking guy, attractive to women, something he had been told on numerous occasions, and almost monthly by his mother. Oh, well. At least she accepted it now.

“One burger plain to go.” The hostess walked back toward the kitchen, her day starting to brighten up.
Hey
. Who were those guys? They didn’t wait to be seat—

“Portero,” Jorge said in a normal voice, waiting for the man to react and turn. His hand unbuttoned his coat and reached behind his back. To his left Tomás was making much the same move.

Francisco Portero turned his head toward the voice, knowing as soon as the word was spoken that something was wrong. His eyes confirmed that fear a second later.

Both Jorge and Tomás pulled their revolvers at the same time and leveled them at their target from a distance of five feet. The caliber meant little at this range. Both men squeezed the triggers twice in even, steady pulls, Jorge using one and Tomás two hands. The four rounds impacted above Portero’s waist, half in his head. Tomás’s doing. He preferred the head shot.

The body, unlike the result of movie murders, fell easily against the chair back and slumped left, the head coming to rest with a thump against the glass.

The first shot surprised Thom more than alarmed him, and he looked up from the menu at Clampett’s front counter to see what was happening. That was when the warning was flashed from his visual sensors to the brain, starting a trained response that was automatic, developed from patterned repetition. His left hand slid his jacket back as he twisted slightly right, the Bureau semi-auto he had been issued a few years before coming out of its hip holster and to his front.

“Federal agent!” he yelled, both hands now on the Smith & Wesson, the right hand wrapped around and on top of the left, his gun hand. It was the grip ingrained in his mind from the endless hours of firearm instruction at Quantico, where he had been trained using the Bureau’s former standard-issue weapon (the Colt .357 revolver), and it was a mistake. A grave mistake.

Tomás began spinning when the first word of the shout from behind reached his ears. He also dropped low, bringing his gun around to find the...there! Jorge had also turned and was aiming at the same target.

Thom knew they were turning to fire, but there were people scrambling all over the place, running in front of him toward the door and toward a window someone had smashed out. He shifted his aim a little to the left, drawing a bead on the one who was closest to firing, and squeezed the trigger. The power of the 10mm kicked his hands back, causing a fiery pain on his right hand that had never happened before. But that was inconsequential. He was in a fight for his life, in a test of speed. His mind directed his finger to squeeze the trigger again....

But nothing happened. It was strange. He could
feel
his eyes widen at the surprise. He looked at his weapon, still held at eye level. The slide was forward, no obvious jam, but what was that on his thumb?
Blood?
What was—

The first shot entered Thom Danbrook’s torso just below the sternum and continued through his lean body, exiting out the back with a vital portion of his spine. The muscles below his chest immediately registered the cessation of controlling signals from the brain and began to relax. But before that effect could be manifested, seven more shots were fired, three of them connecting. One shattered his right elbow. A second hit low, doing massive damage to his left hip. The third was a gut shot that punctured intestines and fragmented into several pieces, peppering the liver four times.