Troubleshooter (12 page)

Her tone was authoritative; probably Tim alone could tell it lacked her usual confidence. "Okay. Stay still. Relax." It seemed she was speaking as much to herself as to the Sinners.

Tim made a noise of frustration, rubbed his mouth, let his fist fall to the table. He silently urged her to turn tail, to seek cover in the car as he had. The guy with the armband shouted at her, "Get the fuck outta here!"

"I'm not going without--" Her words were drowned out by a refrigerator truck barreling obliviously by in the near lane, its aluminum side catching the spotlight and bleaching out the footage. She was facing away, making lipreading impossible.

She tightened her grip on the Beretta, steeling herself. Den's right foot dropped, bracing for the recoil. His face remained a tan smudge in his mirror, etched with the nearly invisible crosshairs.

A drawn-out moment as Dray made her decision. She studied the phantom biker, her cap casting her eyes in shadow. Her jaw firmed. Her mouth tensed.

She moved forward toward the unseen bike, her second step bringing her into Den's range. A flame leapt from his left grip. Dray was already airborne by the time the boom hit the camera mike. She left her hat and one boot behind. Her hair fanned up and out as if on an underwater descent. Her foot was bent at the ankle as if broken, but floating two feet off the ground.

A drift.

And then she struck asphalt. Her pants were stained at the crotch; her bladder had released on impact.

The others' eyes made Tim suddenly aware that he was cringing back in his chair, turned almost sideways, one arm raised off the table. He fought his shoulders square, forced his posture straight.

Den blew a kiss at the camera. The Sinners laughed and fired up their engines. Den jerked his head at Dray's body, then called something to the phantom biker, his words lost in the engines' roars. They motored off, debris from their wheels showering her body. Engine noise seemed to indicate that the unseen bike circled around the back of the car and took the dark left lane of the highway, still clear of the camera's field.

A sudden quiet, broken only by the static-filled inquiries of the watch commander. A trickle of blood from Dray's ribs formed a pool that grew to a certain width and stopped.

Someone coughed uncomfortably. Jim rose and left the semidark room. After a pause, Haines and Maybeck followed. Tim sat and watched his wife's sprawled form for the entire eight minutes until the paramedics arrived.

Finally he said, "I want a name for the prick with the eye patch."

Bear's voice cracked, and he cleared his throat and tried again. "Okay."

The paramedics carried Dray offscreen. Tim's throat thickened.

What's this give you, Timothy? Come on, moping's not gonna get you to me.

Tim pressed his fingertips to the beads of sweat that had sprung up at his hairline.

It's a case like any other, or nothing gets done. Where do you start?

Tim's voice was dry, brittle. "What do we got on the anonymous tip?"

"A male voice, muffled," Bear said. "The call went in to a private line at the sheriff's station. No recording, no tracing."

Suspect, to say the least.

"Babe's an accomplice now," Tim said. "Put a local unit on the apartment. Shake up the roommate."

"We're running low on manpower," Bear said.

"Use the guy who sat on the Cholo clubhouse. I'm sure he's free now."

Freed gave a double take when Tim's meaning dawned.

Bear said, "Why would the mystery biker give a shit to avoid the camera? They're all known-and-wanteds. Den vamped for us, for Christ's sake."

Guerrera: "It's gotta be Kaner, no?"

"Maybe the mystery biker's not a fugitive," Thomas said. "Maybe that's why he's ducking his airtime."

"As far as we know, the striker's not a fugitive, but you didn't see him going back to pry the footage out of the trunk lockbox," Bear said.

"Whatever the reason," Tim said, "the other guy doesn't want to be seen."

Watch it again.

Tim took a deep breath and held it before exhaling. "Play it over."

Zimmer took it from the top, Tim doing his best to detach, to observe. The spotlight bleached out Den's face. The glossy flames licking the front fork were pristine, scratchless. Freshly painted? Tim's eye caught on the distinctive design. "We get anything back on Danny the Wand?"

Freed shook his head. "I'll stay on it."

"That's his work on that bike. Might be recent. Have ESU blow it up and check if there's any dirt or roadwear on the paint. Burn me a copy while you're at it. The whole thing."

Bikes resolving from the night. Dray's initial crouch, so much like a scared dog's. The truck's racket swallowing her words. Pellets dimpling her nylon jacket. Her weightless drift across the tarmac. Gravel spray. Growing pool.

Tim's stomach roiled. "Back," he said. "Again."

The truck passed again with the stubborn inevitability of a recurring dream. Den's leg tensed beneath his black jeans. Flame leapt from his fist. In slow motion Dray's brief flight looked almost peaceful.

"Hang on." Tim stood, moving closer to the image. "Back it up. Slow forward. There. Again. Give me a little more volume."

Zimmer moved the recording backward and forward. Tim stood mere feet from Den's mouth, reading its shapes as Den called out to the phantom biker over Dray's body. A few of his consonants were barely audible over the revving engines. Tim watched the segment over and over until he stiffened. He took a step away and eased himself into his chair.

"What'd he say?" Freed finally asked.

"'We should practice on this heifer.'"

Dray lay on the road, one arm flung up over her head. The perfect stillness was disrupted only by the wind riffling her hair and the thin, dark stream of blood making its way languidly from her exposed side to the highway.

Guerrera ducked his head, and when he looked up at Tim, his eyes were shiny. "The way I see it, those boys just made the worst enemy they'd ever want to make."

"If Tannino lets you stay on," Thomas said directly to Tim.

"They'll let him stay on," Guerrera said angrily. "They have to."

Thomas's mustache bristled with the hidden movement of his lips. "Okay, kid."

Line four rang through, and Bear answered it, grunted, and put the receiver to his shoulder. He bobbed his head, resigned; he'd been expecting the call as much as Tim had. "The old man wants to see you."

Chapter
17

Tim shoved through into Tannino's office, face red from the crisp walk across the quad. "Don't pull me off this case. I can nail these motherfuckers."

Tannino, angled with half an ass on the edge of his desk like an insurance salesman, kept his hands laced across his knee. "Rackley, please come in and say hello to the mayor." He lifted his dense eyebrows and tilted his head to Tim's right.

Tim turned, face still flushed, to take in the mayor. "Sir."

Strauss's eyes smoldered through the puffy skin surrounding them. Tim guessed that his own exhaustion looked as obvious. "I'm very sorry about your wife," Strauss said.

"Dray's a fine woman. Strong as hell." Tannino bobbed his head, emphatically agreeing with himself. He almost continued but stopped short of making foolish assurances.

"Listen," Tim said, "I know what you're both thinking."

Strauss's eyebrows rose, almost imperceptibly. "Maybe so, but I prefer to speak for myself just the same." He exhaled mightily through his nose, his flushed jowls tugging low at his jawline. "A city has certain barometers of fear. A good mayor keeps an eye on them to stay attuned to his constituents. In the two days since the media started screaming 'gang war,' firearm sales are up thirty percent. Guard-dog companies have run out of canines. Locksmiths are booked days out. Den Laurey and Lance Kaner are racking up more sightings than Elvis. We're fielding nearly two hundred tips an hour on the hotline--everything from looted TVs to girls snatched off street corners. Make no mistake, I'm aware that the Sinners represent a clear and present danger in their own right, but this has plugged in to something primitive in the people of this city. It's Jaws at Amity." He popped out his bottom lip with his tongue as if checking for stray bits of tobacco. "Our job is to assuage the fears of our citizens and extinguish this threat. As you well know, that takes a lot of feet on the streets. The Service's resources, the sheriff's department resources, LAPD's resources--they're all overextended."

"That's exactly what I'm trying to say. I'm a resource here." Tim's tone was driving, adamant. "We'll lose time getting someone else up to speed to take over. Don't reward their shooting Dray by burning those man-hours."

"As far as I'm concerned," Strauss said, and Tim's spirits sank at the finality of his tone, "if we drop a deputy from duty when a family member gets attacked, it'd be like advertising how to disrupt an investigation. We don't want to dangle that carrot in front of crooks and terrorists."

"Den and Kaner killed two of our boys," Tannino said. "This man-hunt is personal already. It doesn't matter who takes it."

Strauss said, "There's no case to taint. The case has already been made. These are wanted, convicted felons, lawfully tried and sentenced. I--and the public--don't give a shit if you bring 'em in in cuffs or feet-first. I just want them off the street."

It took a moment for Tim's brain to catch up to the words. "So what are we arguing about?"

"You're the only one arguing here." Strauss angled his head toward the door. "Like I said, you're our Troubleshooter. Go shoot some trouble."

Chapter
18

Bear plucked another heart off the skewer with his teeth. The charred smell of chicken over fire moistened the air. A bedsheet of a sign flapped by the entrance, featuring a minimalist chicken and the paintbrush-rendered name of the restaurant: Yakitoriya. Tim leaned back from the stick of chicken throats dividing his plate and gazed out at Sawtelle Boulevard, a strip of Japantown transplanted to the West Side.

Bear nudged Tim's untouched dish, concerned. "C'mon, now."

Tim tapped a smoked quail egg on the dab of four-alarm mustard coloring his plate and popped it in his mouth. Forced himself to chew, to swallow, to refuel. Dray had once eaten fifteen quail eggs in a sitting--Cool Hand Luke gone exotic. On his hurried final phone call with her, chicken neck had been her last request. It suited her better than the mythical staples--a T-bone, cigarette, apple pie.

Having endured the unendurable two years ago, he knew better than to indulge his grief. He knew he needed food to continue functioning, and he knew he didn't want to go home, so he'd let Bear drag him here, figuring he'd try to eat Dray's favorite meal for her rather than gag down hospital gruel.

He managed a few cubes of thigh meat and drank half his glass of water, doing his best to ignore the weight of the cell phone in his pocket. At any moment, the phone could ring. And she could be conscious again. Or not.

It chirped as if on cue, and Tim tensed. But when he fought it out of his pocket, the screen remained unlit. Then he noticed Bear snapping open his Nextel and felt foolish. Bear uh-huhed a few times at Freed in the command post and hung up.

Bear picked at a chicken throat, a tiny tube crisped like a french fry. "Back when I started, New York days, we worked the mobsters sometimes. They knew we were watching them, we knew they knew, but we managed. We made it work. We wouldn't bust a guy's balls until we had a case built. They never took a shot at one of us. Not once. We'd leave them alone on family outings. There was a kind of code." He used his skewer to impale one of his remaining quail eggs, the only time in Tim's memory he'd left food on his plate. "Mutts are getting too good at their jobs. No honor, no remorse, nothing. It's hard not to think things are getting worse. Bikers were losers, but they stood for something--or at least pretended to. The Angels stood for something. But the Sinners? I don't buy the gross-out biker veneer. It's costume design. Underneath it they're stone cold." He poked at the egg, again piercing its rubbery brown skin. "People don't stand for anything anymore."

The waiter asked in broken English if they wanted beer. They declined and sat quietly, flushed with the sting of mustard and the heat of the open grill.

Tim replayed his last conversation with Dray on the phone: The captain needs someone to pick up a few overtime parole hours.... I'll take 'em if it'll be a late one for you.

It will, he'd replied, sealing her fate.

"If I hadn't slowed them down," Tim said quietly, not lifting his eyes from his plate, "Dray wouldn't have pulled them over. They would've been fifteen minutes farther up the road. Den would've had his helmet on."

"It's not your fault."

"I didn't say it was. I'm saying chance is fucked."

Bear's eyebrow rose at the anger in Tim's voice.

"It would be great if I felt guilty. But I don't. I'm pissed off at her. Everyone keeps telling me I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing. You don't take down five outlaw bikers on a deserted road without backup." His voice was wobbling, and Bear looked on, horrified and starting to mist up himself. "She fucked up."