The depth of his illogic was hard to comprehend. “I suck as a pilot and you want me to fly you to Mexico? That’s like saying, ‘I’m planning to go on a cruise. I wonder if the captain of the Titanic is still available?’ ”
“Like you said, asshole, we all got our bad days.”
“Why not just drive to Mexico, Bunny? It’s thirty miles away.”
“Why? Because every cop from T.J. to El Paso is looking for me. Because they got surveillance cameras at the border. You don’t think I don’t know how the game’s played?”
I was about to explain how the use of double negatives is never a good thing grammatically, but then Li’l Sinister jumped in behind me, breathing hard. “We’re cool,” he said, slamming the door. “Ain’t nobody on us.”
Bunny was giving me his best crazy, mad dog-killer look. “First thing in the morning, you’re driving us to the airport. You’re gonna rent a plane, and you’re gonna fly us to Mexico. You say no, I put a bullet in you right where you sit. I’m a wanted man. I don’t give a damn at this point.”
“Not that I wouldn’t enjoy some real Mexican food, but I have a better idea: why not give up? It won’t matter where I fly you, Bunny. They’d find you. I mean, let’s be honest, you guys aren’t exactly Butch and Sundance.”
Li’l Sinister jabbed the barrel of his Mac-10 into the back of my neck. “I say we cap his sorry ass right now, dawg.”
Bunny ran his left hand across his mouth, still pointing his pistol at me. “I didn’t kill that bitch,” he said.
“Then why run?”
“Jesus, are you that stupid? I’m half-black, half-Mexican. The Navy boots my ass out on some bullshit assault beef, this Bollinger chick mumbles my name before she checks out, and you want to know why I’m running?”
“How is it you know she said your name?”
“None of your business, puta, that’s how,” Li’l Sinister said, jabbing me again with his gun barrel.
His act was getting old real fast.
“Ain’t none of my DNA in her goddamn apartment, I guarantee you that,” Bunny said.
“And you know this how?”
“ ’Cuz I was never in there, that’s how.”
Bunny’s version of the story was that a distraught Janet Bollinger had called his boss, defense attorney Charles Dowd, a few days after Dorian Munz was executed to say she couldn’t take it anymore. Whatever “it” was, Bollinger wouldn’t say over the phone, only that she needed to get something off her chest concerning the testimony she’d given in Munz’s trial, something that had been weighing on her for a long time. Dowd then instructed Bunny to go interview the woman.
“And she just happened to live in the same building as Li’l Lunatic, here?”
“That ain’t my name, dawg,” Li’l Sinister said from the backseat.
“Shut up, Daniel,” Bunny barked.
Li’l Sinister flapped his lips in protest like a kid who’d just been admonished for chewing gum in class.
“I didn’t know she lived in the same building as him, OK, ’til I went down there to talk to her, like Mr. Dowd told me to,” Bunny said.
“So you go down there to just talk. Small world. Then what?”
“I knock on the door. No answer, so I go ’round back. Take me a look-see in the window. She’s laying there, blood all over the place. My cousin, he’s up on the second floor, in his apartment. So I go up there. Tells me he didn’t see squat. He’s on probation — agg assault.”
“They knocked it down to a misdemeanor.”
“Shut your mouth up, Daniel! I ain’t gonna tell you again!”
Li’l Sinister exhaled and crossed his arms.
Bunny went on. “I’m thinking the cops, they ain’t gonna buy me saying I had nothin’ to do with it. They gonna put two and two together, come up with five thousand—”
“Like they always do,” Li’l Sinister chimed in.
“Like they always do,” Bunny said, “and one-eighty-seven both our asses. So we split, ditch my ride and jump in his. Trying to buy ourselves time, come up with a game plan.”
“And that plan is, what, ‘Let’s kidnap a pilot and make him fly us out of the country?’ That’s not a plan, Bunny. That’s a ticket to life without the possibility of parole.”
“You gonna fly us down there, yes or no?”
“No.”
His nostrils flared. “Yes or no, asshole?”
“No. Final answer.”
“That,” he said, pressing the barrel of his pistol to my forehead, “is the wrong fucking answer. Nobody grabs my balls and gets away with it.”
“If I could make a suggestion before you decide to do anything felony stupid?” I gazed deliberately over his shoulder and nodded. “You might want to discuss things first with those nice police officers over there.”
He whipped his head around reflexively in the direction of my sightline, as I knew Li’l Sinister would do behind me. I bent Bunny’s gun hand back at an angle it was never designed for, snapped his wrist with my right hand and smashed him in the face with his own pistol. I pivoted in the same motion, reaching between the front seats while driving the clawed fingers of my left hand into Li’l Sinister’s throat with just enough force to make him wish he was dead. The kid got off a short burst from his submachine pistol that went high and wide through the roof of the Escalade before his lights went out.
Bunny was out cold, leaned against the passenger door, blood trickling from the bridge of his nose.
“My bad. There were no cops. Must’ve been wishful thinking on my part.”
Tires screeched. I glanced over as the red Civic parked in the south lot raced away, date night ruined.
Sorry, kids.
I scooped up Bunny’s pistol and his cousin’s Mac-10, and counted five bullet holes stitched in the Escalade’s roof. I had no clue how I was going to explain them to Enterprise. Then I called Detective Rosario.
Li’l Sinister hunkered silently in the backseat of a San Diego Police Department black and white. I stood with Rosario and Lawless watching paramedics load Bunny the Human Doberman into an ambulance. He was screaming how it’s against the rules of human decency to handcuff a man with a fractured wrist and broken nose.
“Stop whining like a little girl,” Rosario said to him, “and be a man.”
“Eat me, bitch!”
Rosario shrugged him off. “I’m a cop,” she said to me, smiling. “You get used to it.”
Lawless was convinced that with the arrests of Bunny and Li’l Sinister, the investigation of Janet Bollinger’s homicide was all but complete. There was little left to do, he said, beyond tying up a few loose threads before presenting the case, heavy with circumstantial evidence, to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.
I wasn’t so sure.
“What was their motive?”
Rosario and Lawless both looked at me.
“What reason would these two clowns have had to kill Janet Bollinger?”
“You’re a pilot, Logan, and obviously not a very good one, considering you nearly got us killed,” Lawless said. “How about leaving professional law enforcement work to the professionals?”
“Janet Bollinger’s purse was missing from her apartment, along with a few other valuables,” Rosario said. “I’m sure we’ll find things when we execute search warrants.”
“Bunny said he had nothing to do with it.”
“Wow,” Lawless smirked. “An innocent suspect. That’s gotta be a first.”
I told the detectives what Bunny told me, how Janet Bollinger had telephoned attorney Dowd to say she had to get something off her chest about her testimony during the Munz trial, and how Dowd had dispatched Bunny to go meet with her.