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“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.”
