“So what should I do?”
I finished the last of my beer. Warm and flat. I considered ordering two more but I didn’t. I figured we were near the end. I figured I didn’t need any more of an investment.
“Maybe you should go to L.A.,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“So you should let me hold the stuff for you. Then you genuinely won’t know where it is. You’re going to need that edge.”
“I’d be nuts. Why should I trust you?”
“You shouldn’t. You don’t have to.”
“You could disappear with my two million.”
“I could, but I won’t. Because if I did, you’d call Octavian and tell him that a face just came back to you. You’d describe me, and then your problem would become my problem. And if Octavian is as bad as you say, that’s a problem I don’t want.”
“You better believe it.”
“I do believe it.”
“Where would I find you afterward?”
“Right here,” I said. “You know I use this place. You’ve seen me in here before.”
“Method acting,” he said.
“You can’t betray what you don’t know,” I said.
He went quiet for a long time. I sat still and thought about putting one million dollars in cash and ten keys of uncut cocaine in the trunk of my car.
“Okay,” he said.
“There would be a fee,” I said, to be plausible.
“How much?” he asked.
“Fifty grand,” I said.
He smiled.
“Okay,” he said again.
“Like a penny under the sofa cushion,” I said.
“You got that right.”
“We’re all winners.”
The bar door opened and a guy walked in on a blast of warm air. Hispanic, small and wide, big hands, an ugly scar high on his cheek.
“You know him?” my new best friend asked.
“Never saw him before,” I said.
The new guy walked to the bar and sat on a stool.
“We should do this thing right now,” my new best friend said.
Sometimes, things just fall in your lap.
“Where’s the stuff?” I asked.
“In an old trailer in the woods,” he said.
“Is it big?” I asked. “I’m new to this.”
“Ten kilos is twenty-two pounds,” the guy said. “About the same for the money. Two duffles, is all.”
“So let’s go,” I said.
I drove him in my car west and then south, and he directed me down a fire road and onto a dirt track that led to a clearing. I guessed once it had been neat, but now it was overgrown with all kinds of stuff and it stank of animal piss and the trailer had degenerated from a viable vacation home to a rotted hulk. It was all covered with mold and mildew and the windows were dark with organic scum. He wrestled with the door and went inside. I opened the trunk lid and waited. He came back out with a duffle in each hand. Carried them over to me.
“Which is which?” I asked.
He squatted down and unzipped them. One had bricks of used money, the other had bricks of dense white powder packed hard and smooth under clear plastic wrap.
“Okay,” I said.
He stood up again and heaved the bags into the trunk, and I stepped to the side and shot him twice in the head. Birds rose up from everywhere and cawed and cackled and settled back into the branches. I put the gun back in my pocket and took out my cell phone. Dialed a number.
“Yes?” the Martinez brothers asked together. They always used the speakerphone. They were too afraid of each other’s betrayal to allow private calls.
“This is Octavian,” I said. “I’m through here. I got the money back and I took care of the guy.”
“Already?”
“I got lucky,” I said. “It fell in my lap.”
“What about the ten keys?”
“In the wind,” I said. “Long gone.”
Public Transportation
He said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.
“So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.
He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.
“From the top,” I said.
He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.
I said, “There were details that you withheld.”
He asked, “How do you know?”
“You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”
He nodded.
I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”
“A hundred and eight.”
“All phony?”
“Of course.”
“What information did you withhold?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not? You not sure you got the right guy?”
He didn’t answer.
“Keep going,” I said.
So he did. The scene was clearly fresh. The parents had gotten back maybe moments after the perpetrator had exited. Police response had been fast. The blood on the hallway carpet was still liquid. Dark red, not black, against the kid’s pale skin. The kid’s pale skin was a problem from the start. They all knew it. They were in a position to act fast and heavy, so they were going to, and they knew it would be claimed later that the speed was all about the kid being white, not black or brown. It wasn’t. It was a question of luck and timing. They got a fresh scene, and they got a couple of breaks. I nodded, like I accepted his view. Which I did. I was a journalist, and I liked mischief as much as the next guy, but sometimes things were straightforward.
“Go on,” I said.
There were photographs of the kid all over the house. She was an only child. She was luminous and beautiful. She was stupefying, the way fourteen-year-old white Arizona girls often are.
“Go on,” I said.
The first break had been the weather. There had been torrential rain two days previously, and then the heat had come back with a vengeance. The rain had skimmed the street with sand and mud and the heat had baked it to a film of dust, and the dust showed no tire tracks other than those from the parents’ vehicle and the cop cars and the ambulance. Therefore the perpetrator had arrived on foot. And left on foot. There were clear marks in the dust. Sneakers, maybe size ten, fairly generic soles. The prints were photographed and e-mailed and everyone was confident that in the fullness of time some database somewhere would match a brand and a style. But what was more important was that they had a suspect recently departed from a live scene on foot, in a landscape where no one walked. So APBs and be-on-the-lookouts were broadcast for a two-mile radius. It was midnight and more than a hundred degrees and pedestrians were going to be rare. It was simply too hot for walking. Certainly too hot for running. Any kind of sustained physical activity would be close to a suicide attempt. Greater Phoenix was that kind of place, especially in the summer.
Ten minutes passed and no fugitives were found.
Then they got their second break. The parents were reasonably lucid. In between all the bawling and screaming they noticed their daughter’s cell phone was missing. It had been her pride and joy. An iPhone, with an AT&T contract that gave her unlimited minutes, which she exploited to the max. Back then iPhones were new and cool. The cops figured the perp had stolen it. They figured the kind of guy who had no car in Arizona would have been entranced by a small shiny object like an iPhone. Or else if he was some kind of big-time deviant, maybe he collected souvenirs. Maybe the cache of photographs of the kid’s friends was exciting. Or the text messages stored in the memory.