Текст книги "Greed"
Автор книги: Dan O'Shea
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
CHAPTER 48
Hardin punched it, shooting up a block, turning in, winding through a neighborhood, creating some distance before the cops got to the scene. Wilson had gone quiet.
“That was a little cold,” he said. “The kid.”
A pause. “Yeah,” she said. Strange look on her face, lip quivering a bit.
He waited.
“I got called out on a domestic my third week on the force down in Wichita, some beat-to-shit rental house.” Wilson was talking, looking straight out the windshield, perfectly still, nothing moving but her mouth. “We get inside, in the kitchen, this guy’s got his wife in a half nelson, got a butcher’s knife to her neck. The kids are screaming, the wife’s eyes are rolling around, and the guy’s yelling about how nobody leaves him. My training officer stays in front of him, holding his attention, and I work around to the side. At one point the guy starts gesturing with the knife, waving it at my partner, trying to make some point, and my partner gives me this look telling me to take the shot. I mean, it’s like three feet – no way can I miss. And instead I start talking to the guy, trying to calm him down. I get him to drop the knife, to let the woman go, he lets us cuff him, and everybody tells me what hot fucking shit I am.
“So by the time the whole thing goes through the wash with the DA, the thing’s been pled down from attempted murder to some domestic violence deal. The guy does two-and-a-half years on a five-year jolt. Two-and-a-half years and two days later, I get 911’d back to the same address. The woman is duct-taped to a kitchen chair, both the kids lying on the floor with their throats cut all the way to the spine. The woman’s gutted like a fish.ME tells me he did the kids first, made her watch. The guy called it in himself. He’s sitting in the recliner in the living room when I get there, six empty Bud cans on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I told you nobody leaves me.’”
Wilson stared straight ahead, her face frozen. Hardin silent for a moment, looking for the right words.
“That’s on him,” Hardin said finally. “That’s not on you.”
She shook her head. “The first time? When I was a rookie? I knew. I looked into his eyes, and I knew. I knew, and I didn’t take the shot. I didn’t take the shot because I wanted to sleep nights. I guess I thought I could get through without ever having to kill anybody. I didn’t take the shot for me. So yeah, the woman and those two kids? They’re on me. They’re on me for not having the balls to step all the way up.”
They drove for a while. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardin could see her jaw clench and unclench, could see her lip quivering.
“All I know is this,” she said. “People get a choice to be on the right side or not. You come up on somebody who’s made the wrong choice, then you have to step up, every time. You step all the way up.”
She still had that look on her face, like she wasn’t done. Hardin didn’t know what to say.
“That black kid?” she said. “His mother should have told him not to play with guns. And whoever told him he could, they should have told him not to play with me.”
Her voice was thin and brittle, and he knew she was locking that kid away somewhere inside. She was tying another knot into a cord, a knot for the black kid on the same cord where she had tied a knot for the woman and her kids and for her brother. A cord she would whip herself with every time she failed to perfect an imperfectible world.
He thought of Africa, of the Legion, of maybe a dozen times they’d been called out for some piss-ant action because some thug somewhere had tweaked some tribal bullshit for his own venial ends. It usually ended with a mess of kids, most of them younger than the one Jeanette had shot today, stinking in the heat with their guts blown out, some of them blown out by Hardin. He’d always told himself that even a postcolonial anachronism like the Legion was on the side of the angels when it came to dealing with the Idi Amins of the world. Except it was never the Amins that ended up showing their guts to the sun.
He took her hand, and she squeezed it like she could force some kind of hope out of his pores.
And then it was over. She pulled her hand away, her face solid and unmoving now, like quick-drying cement. Her foot nudged the backpack on the floor of the passenger side. She picked it up, unzipped it.
“You want to know the bright side?” she said.
“Could use one,” answered Hardin.
She pulled the shrink-wrapped brick out of the backpack. “Now we’ve got the diamonds and at least a couple million worth of coke.”
CHAPTER 49
Gonna end up in Iowa, way the day’s going, thought Lynch. He was stuck in traffic on 88 coming up on the Route 59 exit, trying to get out to meet Perez and the Aurora PD at a scene out there.
The Downers Grove thing broke loose right after lunch. Jablonski had called Lynch and Bernstein out pretty much as soon as he got a look at it. Three Hispanics down. Based on the tattoos, looked like all three of them were mainline members of the Hernandez crew out of Juárez. And Jablonski knew the guy they found in the street – Julio Ruiz, trigger man, wheel man, guy that usually traveled with Hernandez himself. They also had a black kid who turned out to be a low-level member of one of the West Side gangs that the DEA was pretty sure was tied into the Hernandez network.
Thing was a cluster fuck. Two cartel gunmen and a civilian dead in a second-floor hallway, two outside on the street. The inside stiffs all looked like.22s. The outside guys were larger caliber – 9mms it looked like, at least until they heard different. Witness statements were all over the place as usual. Best they could piece together, the shooting was in the building first, then outside. Couple of people said it looked like a black SUV (got everything from a Navigator to an Escalade to a Suburban on the model) tried to run down a couple on the sidewalk. The man shot the driver. The black kid ran across the street, shooting at the couple, and the woman shot him. Ruiz was driving the SUV, and whoever shot him knew what he was doing, because Ruiz took three in the face and two in the chest, which ain’t bad through a windshield when you’ve got three or four tons of Detroit’s finest bearing down on you. Then, while the guy was dumping Ruiz out of the SUV, the woman walked over, capped the kid in the head. Then her and the man hopped in the SUV and took off. They found the SUV dumped about a mile north.
So a couple of interesting things. The shootings inside? It looked like Mr .22 was in play again, although this wasn’t his usual triple tap to the head. Stand up fight. The two guys were armed, both got shots off, and he took them both out.
But the real interesting thing was this. The guy who shot Ruiz? Based on descriptions, it sounded a lot like Hardin. And the women he was with? Well, the dead guys were right outside a condo with the door still open. Jeanette Wilson’s condo. And things were calming down just a touch by the time this woman strolled down the walk and parked one in the black kid’s braincase. Jablonski had shown Wilson’s picture around. Consensus was, the woman was Wilson.
That’s when Perez had called. They had another stiff, a black guy in the basement of a town house in the DuPage County part of the Aurora, just west of 59.Guy had a deal with one of those Merry Maids crews where they had the keys to get in if he wasn’t around. When they let themselves into his place, they found a bigger mess than they had contracted for. Looked like a .22 again. So Lynch left Bernstein to finish up in Downers Grove and headed west.
Aurora was a city of almost 200,000 straddling the Fox River about forty miles west of Chicago. Lynch didn’t work with suburban cops too much, but Aurora had its own gang problems, and most of their gangs were tied in to the Chicago gangs. So guys from Aurora would turn up dead in the city, guys from Chicago would turn up dead in Aurora, and guys like Lynch and Perez, they’d sort it out.
Every time Lynch had been out to Aurora before, though, it had been on the east side, usually right in by the river. This was some high-end subdivision just across 59 from Naperville. Goofy-looking McMansions were shoe-horned into tiny lots as he followed the winding street in past the White Eagle sign. He was beginning to think Perez was fucking with him until he saw the black and whites and the crime scene tape in front of an upscale townhouse. Behind the house, a couple of yuppies in ill-advised pants pretended to take practice swings, standing in the fairway while they watched the cops moving around the house. Somebody on the tee must have said something – one of the guys looked back flipped the bird, then topped his ball another thirty yards toward the green. Gapers’ block on the fairways.
Lynch parked, badged the uniform at the end of the drive. Guy told him Perez was in the basement.
Lynch could smell the blood before he got to the bottom of the stairs. When he got down, he saw Perez over near an L-shaped office setup. Lots of computer equipment, three different monitors, a rack of boxes and wires – routers and servers, Lynch figured. And a black guy in his boxers, his legs duct-taped to one of those fancy office chairs with that hi-tech mesh for a seat. Some duct tape also hung from the arm of the chair. The guy’s head was down on the desk – or most of his head. Looked like some of it was splattered on the monitor in front of him.
Perez saw Lynch, walked over.
Lynch nodded toward the body. “So what have you got here?”
“Stiff’s name is Robert E. Lee,” Perez said.
“Ironic,” said Lynch.
Perez shrugged. “My people are just Mexicans who got stuck on the wrong side of the Rio Grande when you guys stole Texas. I got no dog in that fight.”
“You said .22s?” Lynch asked
“Three to the back of the head,” said Perez.
“Awful lot of blood on the floor,” said Lynch.
“Pedicure,” said Pérez. “Your .22 buddy took off a couple of his toes with something before he plugged him.”
“Could see where that might be persuasive,” Lynch said “Any idea what he was after?”
“Last thing Lee printed out was this.” Perez handed Lynch a sheet. Jeanette Wilson’s name and address. Mr .22 had been a busy boy today.
Lynch nodded, looked up at Perez, who had a little grin on his face.
“What?” said Lynch.
“Jenks!” Perez called. A metrosexual-looking guy in civilian clothes walked over – flat-front pants, shirt in a you-can’t-buy-me-at-Penny’s shade of blue, some of those hipster, steel-framed glasses. “Show Lynch here what ol’ toeless had been up to.”
“Guy’s got a great set up,” said Jenks. He and Lynch were sitting at a wet bar across the basement from Lee’s office area, Jenks on a laptop at the end of a cable that ran over to the dead guy’s computer equipment. The crime scene techs were still busy with the body over there. “Highest speed wireless pipe I’ve ever seen. Would’ve been tough to crack it, except he had a pad in his desk with all his passwords in it. Stupid, but we all do it, right?”
“I just plug into my cable box,” said Lynch.
Jenks shrugged. “OK, so anyway, I start poking around, just looking at recent files, IP addresses, shit like that, and one of the things I get is this.” Jenks popped up a series of pictures of Hardin in Chicago: the traffic cam shot Lynch had seen on Columbus, Hardin in front of the Hyatt on Wacker, Hardin’s rental in the Grant Park Garage.
“Can you tell when he pulled those?” said Lynch.
“First one, the shot of the car? That was the morning after the Stein shooting.”
Couple days before we started looking for it, thought Lynch.
“You know how he got them?”
“Watch this,” said Jenks. He hammered at some keys. Kid had fast hands. A video feed popped open. Columbus Street – same angle as one of the Hardin shots they’d been using. It had to be the same camera, except on this screen the cars were moving, people were walking.
“Tell me that’s not live,” said Lynch.
“Oh,” said Jenks. “It’s live.”
CHAPTER 50
Husam al Din clicked off the television in his hotel room. The shootings in Downers Grove were quite the sensation on the local news stations, which identified the dead men as functionaries of the Hernandez drug cartel.
Strangely, neither Wilson nor Hardin were mentioned on any of the newscasts. The story was being pitched as some mysterious fall out among the Mexican cartels with considerable nervous handwringing about the violence that had been escalating in Mexico for the past several years spilling over onto America’s streets. Yet, surely by now the local police knew who Wilson was, knew where she lived, and knew that two cartel members had been killed immediately outside of her door. Surely witnesses had seen Wilson on the street, shooting a young man dead and leaving with Hardin. And surely they had also seen Hardin killing the driver of the large black vehicle. While neither those witnesses or, possibly, even the local authorities might know who Hardin is, they would have seen Wilson leaving with him.
Yet the news coverage included none of that. Which meant that the authorities were suppressing that information. Interesting.
Clearly, the DEA agent, Wilson, was allied with Hardin in some fashion. Al Din could think of no reason why. He had no immediate intelligence he could use to track either of them, but having two people to hunt instead of one doubled the odds of them being spotted. Al Din summarized the data he had on Wilson and e-mailed it to his Tokyo contact, along with her picture. He also instructed the man in Tokyo to research them both in order to uncover the nature of their relationship.
Meanwhile, al Din had another issue.
He had been close to Hardin twice. First, he had been interrupted by criminals working for the American mafia boss Corsco. Today, he had nearly been killed by criminals working for the Mexican drug lord Hernandez. Since both were also looking for Hardin, that made them his competitors.
While al Din had cut off one source of their intelligence, both organizations would be far more familiar with the area. Both would have many other sources of local information. Both had considerable manpower at their disposal.
From Lee, al Din knew that Hernandez wanted Hardin for vengeance. But he had no idea what Corsco’s interest was. It was always best to know one’s enemies. Corsco himself would be too difficult to approach, would have too much security. Al Din started Googling, looking for a weak link.
In many of the pictures attached to news stories about Corsco, he was accompanied by a short, overweight man identified as his attorney. The lawyer would be more approachable.
Al Din’s phone peeped. A daily alarm he had programmed in. He hit a number on his speed dial, waited for the tone that told him the call had connected, and then hung up. Then he started to research Gerry Ringwald.
CHAPTER 51
Hardin and Wilson had been driving the Honda north for better than six hours. Hardin figured a little space was what they needed right now. They’d also been listening to the radio. The Downers Grove shootout was getting some play, but their names were out of it so far, the whole thing going down as a drug turf battle.
It was almost 8pm and they were cruising a neighborhood in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Lots of bed and breakfasts up here. They figured, with the economy the way it was, nobody was going to get real picky about IDs with someone paying cash.
“That looks nice,” said Wilson, pointing at a big, dark green Victorian on the next corner.
“Always wanted to see Door County,” said Hardin.
“Secretary at work went her for her honeymoon, always going on about it,” Wilson said.
“Might be all the honeymoon we get.”
Wilson went quiet, Hardin catching a little swallow out of the corner of his eye.
“It is, isn’t it?” she said finally, sounding a little choked. “Our honeymoon?”
Hardin thought about it. No priest, no wedding, no I dos, but he couldn’t think of anything that could tie them closer than they already were.
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
He turned and smiled at her and she smiled back. First smile he’d seen from her that didn’t have a ghost behind it.
CHAPTER 52
“This Wilson throws a wrench in things,” said Hickman. “We don’t know what the deal with her and Hardin is yet, but Jablonski tells me she knew we were going to bag him.”
Bahram Lafitpour stirred his coffee. He, Hickman and Munroe were back at Lafitpour’s condo. They’d waited at Lafitpour’s office until 10pm, raid assets in place, just in case Hardin showed. He didn’t.
“So we have to assume that Hardin knows I betrayed him,” said Lafitpour.
Munroe nodded. “You worried he’s going to make a run at you?”
Lafitpour shook his head. “People have been making runs at me for thirty years. My security is excellent. Besides, Hardin isn’t an ideologue. He’s just trying to sell the diamonds. There is no margin in making a move on me. The question becomes whether we still have a play with him.”
“So we took a shot,” Munroe said. “He’s a big boy. He knows all about Plan Bs. And he still needs a buyer. Get word back to his contact that we’ll still play ball. Probably gonna cost us though.”
“We can’t make a deal with Hardin,” said Hickman. “We don’t just need the diamonds, we need him. We’ve promised his scalp to the Feds and the DEA, and I’ve already got the press rubbing the bottle on this. We don’t get a genie to pop out of it soon, they’re going to get pissed and start asking the wrong kind of questions.”
“Yeah,” said Munroe. “And with the Feds inside the tent, we started the clock on this thing. We got a couple of days at the outside.” Looking at Hickman now. “This Wilson, she was with Hardin?”
“Yeah,” Hickman said.
“And she was at your briefing?”
“Yeah,” Hickman said.
“So she knows about al Din,” said Munroe.
“Yeah.”
“What do we know about her?” asked Lafitpour.
“Jablonski’s pulling apart her file. Should have word soon.”
Silence around the table for a moment, tension tightening.
“So,” said Lafitpour, “we need still need Hardin and the diamonds.”
“Don’t need him alive,” said Munroe.
Hickman and Lafitpour looked at him. Munroe wasn’t worried about Lafitpour, but this thing was getting sloppy and taking too long. Dead or alive, he needed it done, and dead was always faster and usually easier. Quiet around the table for a minute, Munroe watching Hickman’s face. They weren’t just talking about a little legal three-card Monte anymore, playing fast and loose with the facts to frame some bad guys. Now, killing people was on the table.
Finally, Hickman shrugged. “OK. But we still need to throw the Feds a bone. If they don’t get to make a bust on Hardin, they’re going to want something else.”
Munroe nodded, keeping his eyes on Hickman. It looked like he had the stomach for the job. “Let’s find Hardin and Wilson, make it sloppy, make it look like Hernandez. Give my guys five minutes with the crime scene and we can hang it on him solid. We let the Feds make the bust on Hernandez. Bigger name anyway. Everybody wins.”
“OK,” Hickman said again.
“That’s Plan B then. Bahram, get back to this Fouche, tell him we’re ready to go. Plan C is this – keep the money together and ready to move. Turns out we have to make a deal with Hardin, then we do.”
“Plan C?” Hickman asked. “How many plans are we going to need?”
“Someday when I know you better, ask me about Plan Q,” Munroe said.
Lafitpour chuckled like he was reliving a happy memory. “That poor bastard.”
Munroe had one more asset to line up. He called the phone he’d left with Tony Corsco.
“Jesus,” Corsco answered. “You know what time it is?”
“Time for you to answer the phone,” said Munroe. “You got anything on Hardin yet?”
“We’re working on it. I get anything, you’ll now first thing.”
“Let me update your orders a little. Intel’s still fine. I hear what you hear as soon as you hear it. But if Hardin happens to end up dead, let’s just say that’s fine, too.”
“You putting a contract on him?” Corsco asked.
“Contract is when somebody pays you,” Munroe said. “I’m just saying intel’s fine, but if that intel happens to be where to find his body, so much the better.”
