“What stopped you?”
“Mr. Moretti. Tom called him and he said to chill.”
“Where does the black tar come from?”
“Tom said the Sinaloa cartel.”
“Oh, bullshit. Washed-up Chicago gangster and some teenagers who can’t get dates running heroin for the Sinaloa cartel…”
“Real shit, dude! The demand is unbelievable. I’m making so fucking much money and that’s just me. All I have to do is make some deliveries every week. Why should the fucking spics make all the money? Mr. Moretti’s a legend and a real American.”
I could have told him that Italians had once been held in the contempt now shown Hispanic immigrants, but what was the point? I asked him what Moretti supplied to the cartel in return?
“Money, lots of money.” He puffed up his chest. “And guns. I’ve never seen so goddamned many guns.”
“Where does he get them?”
“They don’t tell me. Really, I swear to god.”
I pulled out the image of the hit woman and held it in front of his rapidly swelling face.
“Who is this?”
“Sabrina.”
He said it too easily to be dissembling. I wanted her last name.
“I think it’s Cobb. Talk about a skank.”
“What’s her connection to Moretti?”
He said he didn’t know.
“Then how do you know her?”
“I took a package to her, okay?”
“Heroin?”
“She’d a rather had that,” said this straight-A product of what passed for the well-funded suburban schools. “But it wasn’t.” He tried to smile but it hurt too much. “I checked it, ’cause my ass would have been on the line, you know? It was ten thousand dollars. Hundreds and twenties. I made her count it, too, so she couldn’t say I’d stolen anything.”
I reached into the back and pulled out my old metal clipboard, which I’d carried as a uniformed deputy and had to dig out again when Peralta put everybody on standby for uniform duty because of budget cuts. Pulling his driver’s license out of his wallet, I started writing up an incident report. It was mostly for show. The kid’s name was Jonathan Zachary Grady. I wrote down his name, date of birth, address. He kept sniffling and suppressing his bawling.
“You’re in a shitload of trouble, Jonathan.”
“They call me Zack.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Are you following me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The old man is under surveillance as of an hour ago. I’m going to temporarily let you go because you cooperated. Do you skateboard?”
“What?”
His head crashed into the unyielding sun-baked polymer surface once again, hard this time. Blood spattered like July Fourth fireworks. He screamed.
“Yes, yes, goddamn, yes, I skateboard. Please don’t hurt me!”
“Then it’s too bad you fell off your skateboard,” I said. “Don’t go back to the old man’s house. You’ll go to jail and you’ll be tried as an adult, then you’ll go to prison. I’ll make sure the prison gangs know you were a snitch, and by the time they finish passing your virgin asshole around…”
Out of his rapidly swollen face, he looked at me with growing terror.
“Don’t go back to Moretti’s house. Don’t contact him. All his phones are tapped. Don’t say anything to your buddies. We’re watching them, too. This is a big case for the feds and they don’t give a shit who your parents are.”
He tried to nod vigorously but it hurt too much. He kept saying “yes” until I told him to shut up.
I ordered him to lean forward and unlocked the handcuffs. They had left no cuts or bruises on his wrists. He put a wad of McDonald’s paper napkins I gave him up to his nose.
“Now get the fuck out and walk. And thank you for your cooperation.”
26
I used surface streets to return home. The stop-and-go gave me time to assess new information. Sal “the Bug” Moretti-Judson Lee-in Chandler, comfortably relocated thanks to our tax dollars, and now running new criminal enterprises. Selling black-tar heroin to affluent high-school kids. Somehow involved with the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, selling guns to the cartels. This was what had showed up on our doorstep, peddling himself as an attorney with a bogus story.
Why? What was his role in the beheading of Jax Delgado? The answer ate at my insides all along the length of Baseline Road, as I passed the cheap, fake Tuscan-Spanish architecture of apartments and subdivisions, profaning the land that once held the Japanese gardens whose images so enchanted Robin. He wanted to get close to Robin. Maybe he had wanted to see how effective our defenses were. Maybe…I didn’t know.
I had let this happen.
Beyond that, it was all little things. Holden wanted to kill us that night, but Moretti had held him back? Why? Had Tom Holden been the long-rifle shooter who had taken down La Fam as we watched stupefied? What was the Bug’s angle in that killing? I cursed so long, loud, and profanely that I fogged the inside of my sunglasses.
The drive gave me time to assess new information about me. The packets of wet wipes Lindsey kept in the glove box did an adequate job of cleaning the blood off the inside of the car and my hands. But I had seen my own capacity back there with Jonathan Zachary Grady, middle-class teen drug dealer. I had enjoyed it, this darkness that had been growing in me suddenly let out into the sunlight. I kept wiping my hands long after the little cloths were dry, kept wiping them until my skin was raw.
On Central, I turned north, crossed the canal, passed Sue’s Fashions, and took in the brown cloud hovering over the skyline. In the historic districts, everything was blooming and lovely. This was the garden city of my youth, the green oasis, what was left of it anyway. It was lost on me. I was almost home when the cell rang. It was Peralta. This time I picked up.
“How’s Casa Grande?”
“Why aren’t you answering your phone?”
“I’ve needed quiet time.”
“You’re a really crappy liar. I heard about the gunfire at your house. You need to get out of there. Come see me and gun-up.”
“No.”
The line was silent for several seconds. “Do you still have the wallet you took off the banger watching your house?”
I hesitated.
“Because he’s a DEA agent,” Peralta said.
It was eighty-five outside but I felt chill.
He continued, “Don’t start on me. I just found out myself. So don’t fuck this up. Bring me the wallet and the TEK-9.”
“I don’t have a…”
“Crappy liar, Mapstone. I need the gun back before Amy Preston sends me to Guantánamo or you murder somebody with it.”
“Fine. Fuck you. What was a DEA agent doing watching our house before I ever got in the middle of their investigation?”
He had already hung up. That answer, of course, was obvious: their man, Jax Delgado, had been killed and his head sent to the Spanish revival house on Cypress Street.
The next call came two hours later.
“Mapstone, it’s Demetrius. Thanks for your help back there. You have good moves. I hope you got the misguided lad home safely.”
“Where are you?”
“Sorry, my man, but I just crossed the state line. Ditch pig will be safely in jail in Bakersfield when you need him, and I’ll be thirty-thousand-dollars closer to paying my daughter’s tuition at UCLA.”
I just let the microwaves carry silence until he said my name again.
“Did you make him do the phone call?”
“He did it just the way you wanted. Sorry about the rest, but California called.”
I put up a fuss, made it a good one. But I was satisfied. Demetrius Smith had not let me down.
Now I sat in the living room and looked around the house. “Just get me to the night.” I said it over and over, as if it would stop the tachycardia that was overwhelming me. The only thing that helped for a few moments was to lie in bed, where the sheets still had Robin’s scent.