The Fallen
- Автор: Паркер Т. Джефферсон
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-06-056238-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Fallen». Краткое содержание книги:
“I can’t just let her go, Vince.”
“No. But for now you have to. Go home. Do your job. She talks to her mother and me, kind of. I’ll keep you in the loop. Things change, Robbie, and then they change again. You know what I’m saying.”
That sounded both ominous and hopeful. I held my hands up to the glowing heating element and rubbed them.
“I love her,” I said.
“You’re lucky.”
It was an odd statement but I knew he was right.
“Most people, they just drift apart, vanish on each other,” said Vince. His words were soft and heartfelt and I wondered about him and Dawn. After all, Vince was sitting alone in a cold garage rather than in a warm house with his wife.
“This is fuckin’ fucked,” I muttered. I rarely swear and have no skill at it.
Vince laughed. “That’s one way to put it. I’m sorry, Robbie. I don’t know what I can do.”
I sat for a while and looked at the stars. I could see the lights of the city a few miles north.
“How come you’re sitting in the garage, Vince?”
“I miss the outdoors.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too. I grew up in Buffalo, you know? Sometimes I miss the woods and the stars and the cold.”
“Well, you’ve got two out of three tonight.”
He looked at me but said nothing.
“See you and thanks, Vince,” I said.
“It’s almost one o’clock. I made up the spare just in case.”
“Love to Dawn.”
“She wanted me to apologize for her not waiting up. Actually, she didn’t think you’d race over here but I knew you would.”
Vince gave me a big, strong Italian-style hug, which I appreciated.
“How’s the head?” he asked. Vince is the one person who has never shown me any great sympathy for what happened at the Las Palmas. He seems to believe that it was a fairly common event in my line of work, the kind of thing that most cops have to endure sooner or later. I like that attitude, because it takes attention away from me.
“Hard as ever.”
“You’re a good man, Robbie.”
“Who’s the PI?” I asked.
“Get in your car and drive carefully,” said Vince. “I’ll call you when I’ve got something you need to know.”
“I don’t want to just drift apart, Vince. I don’t want her to vanish on me.”
“I don’t either.”
“You know, we have it pretty good. I can’t understand what she wants. I was thinking, though, maybe I can do something that will make her want to come back.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants, Robbie. She’s young. She’ll figure it out.”
I looked up once more at the glittering stars.
“The Mobil down at the corner’s got the best prices,” Vince said. “But stay away from the slots.”
I was back home in bed around sunrise. I slept for two hours, showered, shaved, and went to work.
17
Chupa Junior — the Squeaky Clean Madam’s bouncer with his own moral code — had been arrested at three that morning on suspicion of driving under the influence. While I’d been zooming through Barstow, Chupa Junior was blowing a .24 blood-alcohol count, over double his legal limit.
Patrol Officer Ron Mincher had left a message for me that Chupa had been busted, and thought I might want to see him. I was thankful for Mincher’s tip but not surprised by it. He was a young man who’d gotten himself into some understandable trouble and now he was trying to get himself back out of it.
Chupa Junior glowered at me as I walked toward his cell. A normal man would have been in the drunk tank but Peter Avalos was six-four, three hundred, and not normal. I’d learned from his jacket that he’d been questioned and released in two murders before I came to Homicide. They thought he was good for them but couldn’t get anyone to talk. They did, once, and she was found in Glorietta Bay one morning just like McKenzie had said, strangled and three ribs broken. Chupa had done his prison time for carjacking, armed robbery, and multiple assaults. Like a lot of creeps, Chupa had no problem selling out other creeps. He’d turned a few dollars informing for us, even slipped out of yet another assault rap when he snitched out a La Eme — Mexican mafia — boss, which could have gotten him killed and still might.
He was as big as Vic Malic, just shaped differently. Malic is a wrestler, all shoulder and back. Chupa was big in the legs and middle. His small, shaved head crawled with tattoos, and his black eyes stared at me with open violence. He was slumped on the metal bed and looked half drunk. I was happy to have the bars between us. Two hours of sleep leaves the dreams still trying to get in and out of you. I felt wobbly.
“I’m Detective Brownlaw, Homicide,” I said.
“Then get me out of here, big man.”
“Jordan told me to say hello. She says you’re a good guy, have your own sense of right and wrong, do some bouncing for her at the club.”
“She’s the one.”
“Guess you drank a little too much last night. Wish I could have, but I was driving down from Las Vegas.”
He looked at me as if he was sizing me up for a knife.
“I like the rooms at the Venetian and the rubdowns at Bally’s,” he said. “They use old fight men, really got the hands.”
“My brother is a dealer at Excalibur,” I said.
Chupa thought about this, as I knew he would. I wanted to give him something personal to keep him off balance and talking. Not that I would ever tell him anything truthful, because I could see that Chupa was already looking for a way to use this new information. One thing about genuine bad guys is, they never overlook an opportunity, and to them everything is an opportunity.
“What’s his name?”
“Bill Brownlaw.”
“Make good money?”
“It’s all tips, but he does okay. The good-looking women do better.”
“You and him got a little system going at the tables?” asked Chupa.
“I’d never mess with him or a casino.”
He looked at me like he didn’t believe me.
“Funny time of night for you to be driving in from Vegas,” he said.
“You make better time.”
“So what are you doing here, man?”
“Asking you about Garrett Asplundh.”
A spark of pleasure twinkled in his black eyes. “The cop in the car with the brains all over?”
“He wasn’t a cop. He was Ethics Authority.”
“He used to be a cop. He popped me back in ’98 for an assault I didn’t do. Want to know how to tell I didn’t do it?”
“Because the guy lived.”
“Fuckin’ right.”
“You got dynamite in both hands, from what I hear.”
He stood up and lumbered over. He moved like an elephant, with a tonnage that was slow but not unwieldy. His ears were stacked curves, like hourglasses, lobes big and round, with black hair growing from the canals.
“Why am I talking to you, man?”
“The Ethics guy. I want to know what he was up to with Squeaky Clean.”
He clamped two big hands to the bars. The tats on his forearms were a black jailhouse jumble of Celtic letters, chupacabras, and demons that wrapped around to his underarms. One of the demons jammed his claw up a woman’s dress as he drank the blood gushing from her severed neck. Chupa Junior burped beer at me.
“Why would I tell you?”
“I’m rich,” I said. “I’m influential.”
Chupa smiled. Small teeth, pale gums.
“I saw them together at the Indigo. That’s Jordan’s place.”
“When?”
“Six months ago. I was working the door. Tried to pat him for guns on his way in and I thought he was going to tear my head off. Try to anyway. Could have gotten messy. Jordan pushed him past me, told me he was VIP. I said, ‘Yeah, very important pig.’ He gave me the mad dog, the look, you know, so I owed him.”