Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Working with Alpha had compelled me to be distrustful of my fellow man. It was liberating, watching him roll away on his skateboard, to realize that you don’t always have to question the motives and hidden agendas of everybody you meet. You can’t go around being suspicious of everybody you cross paths with, I told myself. Not everybody’s out to kill you.

* * *

Driving home that afternoon, somebody tried to kill me.

A car was following me. I first noticed it in my side-view mirror as I merged from the airport onto the southbound freeway, just past the Orchard Avenue exit. It was a white, two-door Honda Accord coupe, fifty meters in trail. No front license plate. Rear spoiler. Fat rims. Lowered suspension. Windshield tinted impenetrably black. A ride for dweebs convinced that tricking out a Japanese economy car will somehow improve their odds with the ladies.

I drifted casually into the fast lane. The Honda followed. I angled back into the center lane. The Honda did likewise, its driver careful to keep at least five car-lengths between us. My speedometer showed seventy. I bumped it up to seventy-five. The Honda driver pulled out into the fast lane and passed the cars separating us to settle in behind me once more, still keeping his distance. I knew I couldn’t outrun him, not in an aging Tacoma with nearly as many miles on it as the space shuttle. What I could do, though, was fall back on my training and evade him.

I mashed down on the accelerator. It was like stepping on a dead frog. The speedometer crept slowly past eighty, then eighty-five. The front end began to wobble like Ronnie Reagan’s head. The Honda driver knew he’d been made. He abandoned any pretense of a covert tail, floored it, and rapidly closed the gap between us.

The exit off the freeway at Valley View was a quarter-mile ahead. I waited until the Honda was about twenty feet behind me, then veered violently across traffic, cutting off a housewife in a silver minivan who made her displeasure known with an angry toot from her horn. Sorry, lady. I fishtailed onto the exit ramp, hoping my pursuer would overshoot the turnoff.

When I looked back, he was drafting my rear bumper.

We rocketed onto Valley View, the two of us, down a steep hill past San Roberto High School on the left and the Wisteria Shopping Center on the right. The light turned red just as I shot across the intersection at Hendricks Boulevard. The Honda never slowed down.

A quarter-mile straight ahead, Valley View came to a dead end. I could see it. So could the Honda driver behind his black tinted windows. I figured he was going to try to ram me and drive my truck into the wooden barrier at the end of the road. Why, I have no idea, but I wasn’t about to wait and let him prove my theory correct.

I slammed the gearshift into second and flicked my steering wheel to the right a little, increasing the load transfer to the outer tires, then yanked hard on the emergency brake and spun left. The tires smoked and screamed as I skidded 180 degrees, coming to an abrupt stop in the opposite direction – your standard bootlegger’s turn. Caught off-guard, the Honda driver overshot, skidded left and crashed broadside into the wooden barrier. He backed up, tires smoking, and reversed course to come at me again, but by then I’d already put 100 yards between us, turning down Zink Street and out of his sight line.

Zink gave way to a maze of residential streets with names like Cinderella Lane and Del Monaco Drive. There was a depressing sameness to all of the houses that no variance in landscaping or paint schemes could mute. I was glad I didn’t live there.

By the time I found my way back out onto Hendricks, the main drag, my pursuer was nowhere around. I was angry at myself for not having had the presence of mind to read the Honda’s rear license plate before bolting, but there was no use worrying about that now. I turned left onto Hendricks and drove back to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently.

Inside the hangar, I unlocked my desk, put the photo of Echevarria and me in the belly drawer and closed it. I opened the bottom drawer. Inside was a two-inch .357 Colt Python revolver. The little snub-nose had been my primary backup weapon during my time with Alpha. The only souvenir I kept from those days.

I was beginning to think it might come in handy.

SEVEN

Being the wondering type, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my pursuer in the Honda was associated with Arlo Echevarria’s murder. Echevarria and I had brought to justice any number of rabid animals who’d passed themselves off as human. Was there any truth to Savannah’s assertion that maybe an embittered relative of one of those animals had hunted Echevarria down and now, maybe, was tracking me? I needed to lie low for awhile, get out of Dodge, until I could sort things out. Unless you’re NORAD, it’s a lot trickier to track a single-engine airplane than an imported pickup truck. So I flew.

From above on a clear day, when the freeways are moving and the smog is on hiatus, the Los Angeles Basin can look like the most peaceful place on the planet. Stretching east from the Pacific, the aerial view is an amorphous pastiche of business districts, each with its own high-rise nucleus, and of verdant hills and blue reservoirs and tree-lined neighborhoods where aquamarine swimming pools dot every other backyard. Such are the delusions of tranquility derived from on-high. Only at ground level does hard reality emerge: that of an impersonal, often unforgiving megalopolis where people like Arlo Echevarria are butchered every day.

Half an hour after departing Rancho Bonita, I landed at Van Nuys, the busiest general aviation airport in the nation. I taxied to transient parking on the north side of the field, to a secluded spot as far away from the street as I could find, shut down the Duck’s engine, and called the number on the business card Savannah had given me. There was no answer. I told her answering machine that I was in town for a couple of days and needed a place to stay, somewhere quiet, where I could think things through without distraction. She called back less than a minute later.

“What happened? Did something happen? I know something happened.” She was breathless. I could practically hear her pulse pounding through the phone.

“Nothing happened, Savannah. I just decided to get away for a couple of days, that’s all.”

“Logan, I know you. You’ve never done a spontaneous thing in your life. You’re not the type to just ‘get away’ on the spur of the moment. It’s about Arlo, isn’t it?”

I told her about the Honda trying to run me off the road. Probably just some kid looking for a cheap thrill, I said. Nothing to be alarmed about.

“Like hell,” Savannah said.

Fifteen minutes later, she rolled up in a platinum-colored Jaguar convertible. She was wearing a broad-brimmed floppy hat made from burgundy felt, and oversized Gucci sunglasses.

“Who’re you supposed to be, Mata Hari?”

“Get in.”

I tossed my beat-up leather flight bag onto the backseat. Stuffed inside were aerial charts, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, two changes of clothes, and my revolver. I had barely lowered myself into her Jag when Savannah stomped on the gas, thundering out onto Hayvenhurst Avenue like Ricky Bobby at Talladega. We streaked through a red light and bombed a left on Sherman Way, making for the Santa Monica Freeway at thirty miles an hour over the posted limit.

“Slow down, Savannah.”

“You were the one who said somebody’s trying to kill you.”

“I said somebody tried to run me off the road. A simple case of road rage. Now, slow down.”

“Logan, do the math. Arlo’s dead. You could be next.”

I did the math. Based on Savannah’s nominal driving skills, I calculated my chances at that moment of being killed in a vehicular accident were substantially greater than any threat posed by assassins unknown. I reached down and slid the Jaguar’s gearshift into neutral. Disengaged from the automatic transmission, with Savannah’s foot still on the gas, the engine screamed – nearly as loudly as she did.

“What are you doing?”

“Either slow it down or I’m punching out, right here and now.”

I reached for the door handle.

“OK, OK.” She eased up on the accelerator. “There, you happy now?”

“Happy comes when your work and words benefit yourself and others.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask the Buddha. I’ll let you know when I figure it out myself.”

I slipped the gearshift back into drive. We merged onto the freeway heading south – straight into bumper-to-bumper congestion. A traffic jam in the City of Angels. What a surprise.

Savannah looked over at me expectantly. “You said you were going to talk to the police.”

“I did.”

“And you told them about Arlo? The truth?”

“I told them what I knew.”

“Which was what?”

I gazed out the window and said nothing.

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“Let it go, Savannah.”

She exhaled.

I asked where we were going.

“My place. Unless you have a problem with that.”

“Why? You mean because you used to live there with Echevarria?”

She pursed her lips. “I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable, that’s all.”

“I passed uncomfortable on my way to numb about six years ago.”

We drove in silence the rest of the way.

* * *

Savannah’s place was a two-story Tudor estate fronting a sweeping, tree-lined motor court hidden from the street behind tall hedges and an electronically controlled security gate of solid teakwood. The house was set on nearly an acre of rose gardens and rolling lawns a half-mile above Sunset Boulevard. Out back was a man-made waterfall that cascaded into a black-bottom swimming lagoon. I stooped to stir the water. It was warm as a baby’s bath.

“Daddy must’ve been in a generous mood,” I said.

Inside were antique English furnishings, hickory plank floors, cathedral ceilings, and a kitchen twice the size of my garage apartment. I tailed her upstairs and down a long hallway, to the guest suite. Handwoven tapestry panels of royal blue hung floor-to-ceiling from ten-foot-high walls. At one end of the room was a king-sized four-poster bed hewn from massive, ancient logs and covered by a purple velvet spread. The spread was embroidered with some sort of royal crest that matched the wall hangings and tasseled pillow shams piled against the headboard. At the other end of the room, beneath a pair of lace-covered windows that opened out onto the lagoon and surrounding gardens below, was an honest-to-goodness fainting couch. I couldn’t decide if I’d arrived on the set of Camelot or Gone with the Wind.

“This is where you sleep,” Savannah said.

“Where do you sleep?”

She looked at me with something approaching disgust.

“Those days are long gone, Logan.”

I tossed my flight bag onto King Arthur’s bed. “For your information, Savannah, I’m not interested in sleeping with you. You’re a grieving widow. I respect that, even if I didn’t respect the worthless piece of crap you’re grieving for. So you can just chill.”

She let go a small laugh like we both knew I couldn’t possibly be serious about not wanting to bed her. Then she realized that my disinterest seemed genuine. A glint of disappointment flickered in her eyes.

“My apologies if I presumed things incorrectly,” she said.

“I need to make a few calls.”

“I’ll fix us some dinner. I have some nice salmon I can grill. You do eat salmon, don’t you?”

“You’re telling me you don’t have a chef? Place like this always has a chef. Butler, too. And a masseuse – at least one on call. I mean, what’s the point of conspicuous wealth if you can’t enjoy a few slaves, right?”

Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “Forget the salmon. We’ll be having mac ’n’ cheese.” She turned on her heel and left.

I shut the door and called Mrs. Schmulowitz. Would she mind feeding Kiddiot while I was away?

“How long you gone for, Bubeleh?” “A few days at most.”

“What do I feed him?”

“On the shelf above my bed. There are some cans of cat food, all different flavors.”

“Which ones does he prefer?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mrs. Schmulowitz. He won’t eat any of them.”

“He won’t eat them but you keep feeding them to him? That’s the most meshuggeneh thing I ever heard, because, I mean, let’s face it, my God, he’s positively portly. He’s the William Shatner of cats– who, by the way, is a member of my tribe. He must be eating something, this cat of yours.”

“If I knew the answer to that, Mrs. Schmulowitz, I’d know the answer to life itself.”

“I’ll make him a nice brisket. Nobody turns their nose up at my brisket, not even persnickety cats.”

“You’re a saint, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Wrong religion, kiddo.” She hung up.

My next call was to an old friend I’ll refer to as “Buzz” who works counterterrorism at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The DIA is the American military’s very own in-house CIA. Most Americans have never heard of it. DIA employees would have it no other way. Headquartered at both the Pentagon and across the Potomac River in a sprawling, highly secure building that resembles a giant silver aircraft carrier, it is the DIA that gathers and analyzes classified information to produce the actionable intelligence that the military’s door-kickers rely on to bring terrorists to justice. Few DIA analysts look like what Hollywood would have you believe such spooks look like. They resemble librarians and community college professors, a decidedly academic bunch given to thick glasses and trousers that are too short, who toil at encrypted computers in secure, windowless offices, sipping coffee from mugs adorned with the Liberty Bell and patriotic idioms like, “These colors don’t run.” Buzz favored a mug that said “What SUV Would Jesus Drive?” On it was a drawing of the Messiah cruising the freeway in a Hummer, elbow crooked out the window like some long-haul trucker, holy hair billowing in the wind. When a particularly pious co-worker took exception to Buzz’s blasphemy, their mutual supervisor, an avid golfer, urged Buzz to find himself another, less sacrilegious vessel for his coffee. So Buzz did. His new mug said, “Golfers have tiny balls.”

“Allahu akbar,” Buzz grunted when I called. “How’s your scrotum?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s been awhile since I used it.”

“Join the club. When’re you coming back to the dark side? Our little G-WOT just isn’t the same without you.”

“I suspect the global war on terror is doing just fine without me,” I said. “Besides, you’re the one who’s indispensable.”

“And if you believe that, I got some swamp land I wanna sell you. Hell, I envy your shit, Logan. I’d pull the pin, too, if I could. Go sit on a beach somewhere, chugging Coronas and making fun of the touristas all day. But my kid’s got this crazy notion I’m supposed to pay his way through law school. So here I sit, saving the planet from tyranny, not to mention invasion from outer space. I haven’t had a fucking day off in six weeks.”

“Invasion from outer space?”

“Need-to-know basis. I’d tell you, but then, well, you know…”

“Oldest line in the book, Buzz.”

“Cut me some slack, Logan. I’m a burned-out, underpaid civil servant.”

We went way back, Buzz and I. One of the original go-to guys, he’d been there and done that a hundredfold by the time I clocked in at Alpha. Twice he’d been wounded on missions, the last time in Libya. Bleeding from just about everywhere from a rocket-propelled grenade that had exploded five feet away, Buzz ran down the terrorist who’d fired it at him and blew off the back of his head with a short-barreled, pistol-grip shotgun that Buzz called “The Bitch.” Only afterward did he realize that the terrorist was an eleven-year-old boy. Fragments from the RPG eventually claimed Buzz’s right eye, while recurrent nightmares of having killed a child robbed him of the desire to pull the trigger on anyone else ever again. He was assigned desk duty. By the time I arrived at Alpha, Buzz had built a network of personal contacts within the spook community so comprehensive, it had acquired its own acronym, BIA – the Buzz Intelligence Agency.

I asked him if he’d heard about what had happened to Echevarria, knowing that he undoubtedly possessed far more details than I did.

“I heard,” Buzz said, “poor bastard.”

“Anything you can enlighten me with?”

“Stand by one.”

I could hear him get up from his desk to go close his office door. Then he was back.

“He was doing contract work for folks across the river,” Buzz said. “Job apps, backgrounders, non-class shit is what I heard.”

“You think what happened to him was job-related?”

“That’s been knocked down. At least in this shop. I can’t speak for the shop he was freelancing for. They’ve still got an open file on him. I know that much. He and your old lady split. You heard that, right?”

“She told me. Actually, I’ve gotten sort of peripherally involved in the case, asking around, talking to a few people.”

“About what happened to Arlo, you mean?” “Roger that.”

“Jesus, Logan, the broad dumps you like a hot rock and now you’re holding her fuckin’ hand? Is that what happens? You move out there to the People’s Republic of California, next thing you know, you’re joining some masochist cult.”

“I needed the cash.”

“I guess you gotta do what you gotta do, eh?” Buzz said. “Look, I’m not saying what happened to Echevarria made my day, but I can’t say I wasn’t all that broke up when I heard about it, either. The guy was a dirtbag, going after that gal of yours. Last time I had anything halfway good to say about him, you and her were still together. I always thought that was a pretty shitty thing he did.”

I thanked Buzz for his loyalty and asked him to keep me posted on anything else he might pick up through the grapevine on Echevarria’s death. He assured me he’d call, but only if I agreed to buy him a six-pack the next time we crossed paths. I promised him a case.

That Echevarria was contracting for the CIA—“folks across the river,” as Buzz put it – wasn’t surprising. A lot of pensioners double dip as independent contractors after retiring from any number of federal intelligence organizations. What was surprising was that the CIA was actively investigating the murder. Typically, the agency let sleeping dogs lie. Probing the suspicious death of a covert operative can make it easier for foreign intelligence agents to confirm that the operative did, in fact, have ties to Langley. Other operators could be compromised as a result, along with the methods they used to carry out their clandestine missions. Whole spy networks have been unraveled virtually overnight in such fashion, their members rounded up and summarily shot.

Buzz had indicated that Echevarria was doing routine work for the CIA when he died, performing non-classified background checks on job applicants. Hardly cloak and dagger stuff. Why, then, would the agency continue probing his death when the LAPD’s investigation remained ongoing? There had to be something else to it.

I considered calling some of my other former colleagues from Alpha to see what they might know. But even if they knew anything, I knew they wouldn’t tell me. I’d jumped ship, left them in my wake. As far as they were all concerned, I was just another civilian puke.

* * *

“What’s the deal with place mats?”

“They keep food off the table. Plus, they look nice.”

“Why do they always have to match the napkins?”

“Because they just do,” Savannah said. “Now eat.”

She set a steaming plate of macaroni and cheese down on the plum-colored place mat in front of me, which matched the plumcolored linen napkin on my lap. Along with the mac ’n’ cheese came tomato wedges on the side, artfully arranged, topped with fresh-ground pepper.

I was sitting in a corner nook of Savannah’s kitchen. The table and benches were made of wormwood. There was a bay window. The view was of the black-bottom pool and the green Hollywood hills beyond.

“Nice crib.”

“Remember that little condo near Golden Gate Park, right after we got married? I always did like that place,” Savannah said.

I remembered. Best time of my life. “Macaroni needs salt,” I said.

She grabbed a salt mill from the cooktop and a plate for herself. On the table were two crystal wine stems and an uncorked bottle of eight-year-old Petite Sirah from some vineyard in the Napa Valley that I probably would’ve been impressed by had I known the first thing about vino. She took a seat and poured me a glass without asking.

“Forgot the salad.”

She slid out from the bench and crossed the twenty feet to the refrigerator, a massive, industrial-looking monster with stainless-steel doors that seemed out of place with the plank floors and antiquewhite cabinets. She got out a large blue ceramic bowl and brought it back to the table along with a set of silver tongs. The salad was spinach leaves topped with crescent moons of fresh avocado slices and finished with a raspberry vinaigrette. A salad for girls.

“Why would Arlo willingly move out of a palace like this?”

“Give me your plate.”

“The question still stands, Savannah. Why did he leave you?”

She paused, my plate in one hand, the salad tongs in the other. I waited.

“Arlo, he, um, he found out that I had…” She cleared her throat and avoided my eyes. “That I had slept with someone else.”

“You cheated on him?”

“It was a mistake.”

I felt a sudden surge of moral righteousness, even if I had no right to.

“Was he a flight attendant?”

“Go to hell, Logan.”

She dumped the tongs in the salad bowl and strode to the sink, her back turned to me, leaning on the polished granite countertop with both hands. Her shoulders shuddered almost imperceptibly. I could tell she was crying.

“Did you tell the police about this mistake of yours?”

“It had nothing to do with what happened to Arlo.”

“How do you know that?”

She turned back toward me, her cheeks wet with tears. “It was a stupid thing to do. It meant nothing, OK? – nothing.”

“Obviously, it meant something to Arlo.”

Savannah sighed and swiped at her eyes with both hands. “I suppose I deserved that,” she said.

She seemed almost eager to tell me about how the “mistake” happened, as if by describing the spontaneous nature of it, she could explain away the guilt she obviously still carried as a result of it. Her father, she said, had invited Arlo and her out for the weekend to Palm Springs where he was attending a meeting with some potential investors. She and Arlo had been arguing.

“What were you arguing about?”

“He wanted to stay home and watch a baseball game or something. I don’t really remember.”

“So you went to Palm Springs alone.”

Savannah shrugged. “There was this guy at dinner. I had a little too much to drink. We ended up in his room. I told him the next day never to call me and he never did. That was all it was. One night. End of story.”

“Who was the guy?”

“It doesn’t matter. Some guy, that’s all.”

“You had a fling. You ended it. Maybe the guy gets jealous. Decides he wants you all to himself. Next thing you know, Arlo’s in an urn on your mantle.”

“It wasn’t like that, Logan. It wasn’t anything other than what it was. Which was nothing.”

“Who was he, Savannah?”

“I told you! Some guy. It had nothing to do with what happened to Arlo.”

“Since when did you become a homicide detective?”

Savannah’s mouth parted as she looked at me, like she’d finally figured something out.

“You want to know who I slept with because deep down, it bothers you, knowing the train left the station and you weren’t the last stop. Admit it, Logan. You’re getting some sort of perverse pleasure out of this.”

Perverse pleasure? More like masochistic torture. I dabbed my mouth with my napkin that matched my place mat.

“Thanks for the chow,” I said. “I’m going for a swim.”