Her eyes immediately latched onto the butchered biker, and she stopped in her tracks and just froze, dropping her bag, her hands rushing up to cup her face.
“Wook!” she screamed, tears bursting across her face. “Wook, oh Jesus, no, Wookie baby, no no no . . .”
She wobbled and looked like her legs were about to give out from under her. I rushed across the room to help her, with Villaverde close behind.
“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be here, please,” I said as I reached her, placing myself between her and the biker’s body. “Please,” I repeated, putting my hands on her shoulders.
“I don’t . . . ,” she muttered, the words trailing off as tears streamed down her face now. Then her voice came back, full of rage. “What happened? What did they do to him?”
I pulled her in and held her for a moment, trying to calm her and give her a chance to catch her breath. “Let’s go over there,” I said, guiding her into the meeting room while making sure I stayed between her and the dead body. “Come on.”
I couldn’t avoid passing close to two of the other dead bikers and did my best to shield her eyes from them, but she still caught sight of them and flinched with each new shock.
I pulled up a chair for her, facing away from the main room. “Please, sit down, ma’am.”
I asked her if I could get her some water—I don’t know why we always do this, as if water has some magical curative power that lets people just brush away the most traumatic events. In her daze, she nodded a yes. Villaverde went out to get some from the bar.
I had to tread softly, but I also needed to get anything useful from her, fast. I felt the clock was ticking on Scrape, and we were playing catch-up. She said her name was Karen, she was Wook’ s wife—Wook being Eli Walker, she informed us, the club’s president. One of the prospects had called her as soon as the grisly discovery had been made, and she’d immediately rushed over.
I tried to answer her questions as gracefully as possible, within the limitations of what I could actually tell her, but very quickly, I had to steer her away to what we really needed to know.
“We need to find Scrape,” I told her.
She looked at me in total confusion, like I was suddenly discussing the weather.
“Why?”
“He’s still out there,” I replied. “He’s wounded, and I think the guys who did this might be after him. We need to find him first or he might end up dead, too.”
She looked at me, jittery and nervous, then asked, “Wounded?”
“He’s been shot.” I let it sink in, then pressed on. “Do you know how to contact him? Do you have the number of his cell?”
Her eyes darted away and she blinked a few times, finding it harder now to keep eye contact with me.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “This isn’t about you. This is about keeping Scrape alive. I just need to know how to reach him.”
She hesitated again, then shook her head. “I don’t have his number. But if he was out doing something for the club,” she added with a look that made her subtext about it being something illegal clear, “he wouldn’t be carrying his cell anyway. He’d have a fresh prepaid for the job.”
I turned to Villaverde. “You find a phone on Walker?”
“No.”
I frowned, feeling time slipping away from us, like a sea that was receding before a tsunami. “What about a safe house, somewhere Scrape might go to wait for help. A doctor the club works with, someone’s house maybe? A girlfriend?”
She was still visibly nervous and kept shaking her head like she didn’t know anything.
“Please, Karen,” I insisted, gently. “We need to find him.”
“We’ve got a friendly doc at St. Jude’s who doesn’t ask too many questions, but Scrape wouldn’t go there, not if he has a bullet in him.”
“Where then? Think, Karen.”
She looked at me and her eyes narrowed with concentration, like the answer I was looking for required a physical effort.
Then she said, “The grotto.”
26
“I’ve got him. Suspect in custody, I repeat, suspect in custody.”
Todd Fugate, deputy sheriff with the San Marcos Sheriff’s Station and part of its Gangs and Narcotics squad, felt good radioing in the news. The call had come in from the San Diego office and was a high-priority request from the FBI—not exactly a daily event at the station. Fugate was just pulling out of the Grand Plaza Mall when the call had come in, and he’d jumped on it. The target’s location, a downtrodden warehouse complex tucked in off La Mirada, aka the grotto, was less than five miles down the parkway. Knowing he’d be first on the scene, he hit the gas and rushed over.
Once he got there, he didn’t even wait for backup to show up. The alert had said the suspect had been shot in the shoulder and was probably traveling alone. It didn’t specify that he was armed. Fugate didn’t need more than that, and, as it turned out, he’d been proven right. The suspect was unarmed and weak and looked like he was about to faint. He gave himself up with zero fuss. Hell, by the looks of it, he was probably relieved that his ordeal was over. Fugate would drive him to the hospital himself—faster than waiting for an ambulance to come all the way out there—and the sonofabitch would soon find himself sitting in a cushy hospital bed with flirty nurses fussing all over his bad-boy ass, which had to be way better than bleeding out in some dingy warehouse all on his own.
Fugate felt good as he herded the suspect into the backseat of his Crown Vic. He didn’t bother to handcuff him to the steel loop on the floor of the backseats. The man was pretty out of it already. Yes, the deputy sheriff was pleased with himself. The San Diego County Sheriff ’s Office had been, as per the slogan on his black-and-white’s fender, “keeping the peace since 1850,” and right now, on this fine summer’s evening, Todd Fugate felt proud to be making a solid contribution to that noble tradition.
He was dead less than a minute later.
He was pulling away from the warehouse when a big SUV appeared at the gate and suddenly, unexpectedly, charged at him. Fugate spun the wheel to avoid the collision, but the SUV’s front bumper clipped his tail and spun him around like a toy and sent him careening sideways before diving nose-first into a ditch by the warehouse’s gates. The deputy looked out through shaken eyes to see the SUV do a quick U-turn before storming back and pulling up so it was blocking his way. Before its wheels had even stopped turning, its doors were flung open and two men were climbing out.
Fugate threw the car into reverse and hit the gas pedal, but the tires just shrieked and spun aimlessly as the jammed car rumbled in its spot and refused to budge. He gave up and drew his weapon, but he was too late—the men had already sprinted over and had beaten him to it. The first slug hurt like hell as it punched into his lungs, but the pain lasted only a second. The second bullet took care of that as it went through his brain and turned his lights off.
He wasn’t alive to see them drag his charge out of the car and shove the wounded man into the back of their SUV, nor to see them drive off unchallenged.
Which was just as well.
27
We were back at square one.
Soulpatch—sorry, Scrape or Torres or Dickhead or however you want to refer to him—was gone. Flamehead—or, more accurately, Billy “Booster” Noyes, as it turns out—was in ICU at Scripps Mercy with a big tube down his throat. The rest of the bike brothers were in permanently suspended animation on aluminum trays down at the morgue.