the Pallbearers (2010) (20 page)

"Those look like the same bikes that were in Jacks video of E. C. Mesas garage," I said.

Alexa reached across me, opened the glove box, and pulled out a pair of Bushnell binoculars. She put them to her eyes and studied the Indians, then shook her head. "Too far away for me to read those bike plates."

I pointed to her little Beretta Bobcat still in the open glove box. "You should keep that .25 loaded," I said.

"I wanted a new purse gun, but I wish I hadn't bought it," she said as she put the binocs down. "No stopping power. Won't blow an asshole out of his socks."

I smiled. Most guys don t have wives who could get away with a statement like that.

We've had this punch-versus-penetration handgun argument before. Alexa favors big-bore Magnums and Super 9s that carry a wallop. When I was in patrol, I did too. Like everybody else, I packed Dirty Harry style. But now that I'm in homicide I go for lighter, easy
-
carry weapons.

As far as I'm concerned it's not the size of the gun but the quality of the shooter that counts. Goliath got dumped with a slingshot. You just have to know what you're doing.

I listened to the rap beat pounding out of the house, fouling the neighborhood. I wondered how long the residents on this street had been putting up with this. But it was going to take a real set of cojones to pound on the door and demand that these animals dial it down.

As we watched the house, we saw women and men dancing to the music through the living room window. My eyes shifted back to the Indian motorcycles. They're rare. You don't usually see so many gathered in one place.

Indians had big V-twin engines and looked a little like Harlevs, but with long, deep-skirted fenders and distinctive fender lights. One thing separating the vintage Indians from their Harley competitor back in the day was the fact that the throttle and shifter were on the opposite side from where they were located on a Harley.

The people who loved Indians were fanatical about them, and I guess that included some of these fighters and, for some reason, Eugene G. Mesa.

Alexa put the binoculars back up to her eyes, scanned the cars on the block, and started calling out plate numbers, which I wrote down. After about ten minutes, we had all of the tags from the vehicles parked near the old Victorian.

"I'm gonna go check those bikes."

"Be careful," she said as I got out of the BMW.

I made my way across the street, staying in the shadows. 'Then I crept up onto the grass and approached the six bikes, which were tucked off on the far side of the dead lawn.

Plates on a motorcycle are about the size of an index card, which is why Alexa couldn't read them with binoculars from where we were parked half a block away. As I wrote down the numbers, I was even more sure than before that these were the same bikes I'd seen on Jack's DVD.

I was just finishing with the plate numbers when I heard another motorcycle coming down the street. Before I could duck down, the headlight swept across me as it turned up the drive. I was caught in its beam.

The bike's engine shut off and the headlight went dark. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, and I used the moment to pull my Taurus .38 snub-nosed Hy-Lite from its ankle holster.

When I could see, I got a shock. Standing in front of me, next to his pavement-scarred Harley, was Jack Straw. He pulled two six-packs of beer out of his saddlebags, and said, "Don't shoot. Strange as it seems I'm still on your side."

Part of me wanted to tackle him, put him under arrest, and drag him out of there. But any commotion on the lawn and I'd have the head-butt team from inside to deal with.

"Jack, what the fuck are you doing?" I whispered.

"Get out of here, Scully. This is a whack move."

Then the screen door opened, and I ducked back as I heard footsteps coming across the front porch to the railing.

"Hey, Jack, get yer ass up here with that beer. Where you been? You left over half an hour ago." It was Rick O'Shea.

I slid further away from Jack, out of sight under the porch, pushing myself quietly into the bushes that surrounded the house.

"Whatta you doing down there?" O'Shea said to Jack from the porch just over my head.

"I thought I saw something by the bikes. A huge rat of some kind." Jack smiled at me huddled ass down in the bushes.

"How big?" Rick replied. "Maybe it was just a possum. We got a lot of those around here."

"This was no possum, dude. It was a big, slimy, ungrateful rat."

I flipped him off as he turned and bounded up onto the porch with the beer and entered the house.

When I got back to the car, Alexa was looking worried.

"That looked like Jack," she said, the binoculars still in her hand.

"It was Jack." My heart was pounding from an adrenaline rush.

"Why didn't you arrest him?"

"Why didn't you?"

Both of us tensed, watching the party house.

"If we aren't up to our asses in trouble in the next two seconds, then I guess Jack is on the level," I told Alexa.

When nothing happened, I added, "It appears that our runaway bank robber is over here infiltrating these pecker-heads on our behalf."

"How's he gonna infiltrate this bunch?" Alexa said.

"Look at him, honey. He's one of them. He's just the kind of asshole they'd throw their arms around."

Nobody came out to hassle us. The party raged on. About twenty minutes later, Jack came out to stand on the front porch. He seemed to be motioning to us. I grabbed the binoculars and focused in on him.

All he was doing was giving me the finger.

Chapter
35

The party broke up a little past 2:00 A
. M
. Men and women started coming off the front porch. I saw Rick O'Shea exit. He had a pretty dark-haired girl in a Hooters T-shirt clinging to his arm. They got into his Escalade, and he revved the engine like a teenager before slamming it into gear and squealing away from the curb.

The partygoers were streaming out of the house, heading to their vehicles. Motorcycles and old cars with dented fenders started firing up all over the street. Alexa and I ducked down as they roared past. I noticed they all turned east at the end of the block.

I pulled my head up and spotted the short, middle-aged man with the hair plugs who had been out by the pool in Jack's video leaving the house with Chris Calabro. E. C. Mesa.

He looked slightly ridiculous the way he was dressed. A clumpy
,
middle-aged guy with obvious hair implants wearing a too-tight biker jacket, torn jeans, and three-inch Cuban-heeled boots. He and Calabro got on the last two Indian motorcycles and racked the starters.

Jack exited the house a few feet behind them, mounted his Harley, and jumped down on his starter. The two Indians roared across the lawn and bounced over the curb, with Jack just a few yards behind.

I ducked down quickly, but Jack saw me. A big, slimy lugie gobbed onto our side window as he roared passed.

"Thanks, Jack." I turned to Alexa and said, "Let s go."

"Where?"

"Everybody turned east at the end of the block. I'm no mathematician, but that defies even my meager understanding of the law of probability. Gotta all be going to the same place. The party ain't over yet."

Alexa put the car in gear and swung a U-turn. When we got to Alameda Street, everyone was about three blocks ahead just making a left. I could see the taillight of Jack's trailing Harley as it made the turn.

We hurried to catch up. Either Alexa was closing the gap or Jack's Harley was slowing, because as we sped down Alameda and made the next left, I could see we were much closer. It was soon obvious that Jack was deliberately dropping back. I rolled down the window as we came alongside.

"Get out of here, Scully!" he shouted over the roar of his engine.

"You're under arrest!" I yelled back.

Jack shook his head in disgust, then powered ahead.

We followed the party as it turned onto Pacific Coast Highway, heading east, and crossed the Los Angeles River into the coastal town of Signal Hill.

We continued along the PCH into Long Beach and were soon in a run-down industrial section of town a few blocks from the San Gabriel River. Up ahead the motorcycles and cars were turning into the parking lot of a big, wooden, red barn-shaped building. As we neared, I could read the neon-lit sign on the roof:

HAYLOFT BAR & NIGHTCLUB

The parking lot was about half full of cars and a smattering of Harley choppers. The party crowd we'd been following all pulled in and began backing and filling in the gravel lot, sending up clouds of dust that reflected in everybody's headlights.

As we rolled past, I heard car doors slamming and saw the tough
-
looking men from Avalon Terrace, along with their dates, walking toward a barn-sized front door. Alexa and I came to a stop a block past the club.

As soon as she parked, Alexa leaned across me to rummage in the glove box, quickly pulling out the little palm-sized Beretta Bobcat. Then she grabbed a box of .25 caliber ammo from a hiding place I hadn't found under her seat and began thumbing cartridges into the clip.

"Don't go all Jane Wayne on me," I said, watching her load the gun, then slam the clip home.

"Hey, pilgrim, I know how you plan your work. I'm going in there with you."

"Let's just settle down for a minute and talk this over."

"You talk it over." She got out of the BMW and headed up the street toward the parking lot.

"Shit," I said, and scrambled out after her.

We knelt behind some bushes a hundred yards from the Hayloft. It was now two thirty in the morning, and according to California law, the nightclub should have already been closed.

Then, as we watched, the neon sign on the roof flickered off. We could still hear the distant sound of a crowd cheering loudly.

"What on earth are they doing in there?" Alexa said.

"Underground fight."

"I'm sorry?"

"I read up on this stuff on the Internet before you got home. The younger, upcoming MMA fighters start their careers in unsanctioned bare-knuckle events. They're known as underground fights and they take place in gyms or bars after hours. Lots of MMA fighters, including Rampage Jackson, the ex-champ, got their start like that."

"A bar fight?" She looked at me. "I gotta see this." She started to rise.

I grabbed her arm. "Get back here."

She shook me off, then pulled her shirt out, unbuttoned the bottom, hiked it up, and knotted it. Of course, she's already a ten, but in navel-baring mode, she was a twelve.

"Alexa, I forbid this."

"I'm your boss, dummkopf."

Man, do I love this hard-headed woman.

"Okay, okay. Then at least let's get a plan of action."

"I already got it. The putz with the hair plugs has gotta be E. C. Mesa. I'm gonna seduce that little gnome. Take his temperature."

"Okay, that's not bad. You target him and see what you can find out. I'll be close by." I pulled out my Taurus snubbie. Alexa frowned at the light, magnesium-framed .38.

"We're better off not pulling these two little pop guns. They could die laughing. Put it away. I know how to do this." As I reholstered, she stuck the Bobcat down into her boot, then pulled her pant leg over it.

"Ready?" she asked.

"If something happens to you, I will start a riot. So be careful."

"Shane, I ran the Patrol Division in Southwest for eighteen months. Thats the toughest division in the city. Stop mothering me"

Then she headed straight across the gravel lot toward the front door of the Hayloft.

Chapter
36

There was a bouncer on the door who looked bright enough for the job, but, as it turned out, not quite.

"I'm a Shooto fighter from NHB," I said, pointing to the butterfly bandage and the ugly cut on my forehead.

He nodded and let us inside without even asking for ID. Maybe it was because he couldn't take his eyes off my wife.

"Hi," he said, as she walked past.

"Not yet." Alexa smiled seductively.

Once we were inside it was pretty easy to mingle. The club was large, the theme corny. The Hayloft had a few old, worn saddles on poles sprinkled around as barstools, and there were bales of hay piled up for people to sit on.

There was a crowd of at least seventy-five people, most of them shouting encouragement at two bare-knuckle fighters who were goin
g a
t it inside an octagon cage that had been set up in the center of the room. It was so loud it was almost impossible to talk.

One of the fighters was a sumo-sized white guy--a big, sloppy, slow-moving, four-hundred pounder with ugly rolls of body fat and Teutonic folds of flesh on the back of his neck. He threw looping punches in slow motion that took forever to land. His opponent was only five foot nine or so and about half the weight. But he was quick.