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“Fine. Fuck you. What was a DEA agent doing watching our house before I ever got in the middle of their investigation?”
He had already hung up. That answer, of course, was obvious: their man, Jax Delgado, had been killed and his head sent to the Spanish revival house on Cypress Street.
The next cal
l came two hours later.
“Mapstone, it’s Demetrius. Thanks for your help back there. You have good moves. I hope you got the misguided lad home safely.”
“Where are you?”
“Sorry, my man, but I just crossed the state line. Ditch pig will be safely in jail in Bakersfield when you need him, and I’ll be thirty-thousand-dollars closer to paying my daughter’s tuition at UCLA.”
I just let the microwaves carry silence until he said my name again.
“Did you make him do the phone call?”
“He did it just the way you wanted. Sorry about the rest, but California called.”
I put up a fuss, made it a good one. But I was satisfied. Demetrius Smith had not let me down.
Now I sat in the living room and looked around the house. “Just get me to the night.” I said it over and over, as if it would stop the tachycardia that was overwhelming me. The only thing that helped for a few moments was to lie in bed, where the sheets still had Robin’s scent.
***
The address the high-school kid gave me went to an old, single-story row of apartments on 15th Avenue north of Missouri. This part of the city had developed slowly, the cursed subdivisions creeping in on the acreages and farms. Some properties still had horse privileges in the zoning code. But I was not going to horse country. The apartment was in the middle, behind a fading white door that had no peephole in it. There was no back exit and the lights were on. It was full dark.
I walked through the smell of citrus blossoms that only fed my blood lust and gave the hollow-sounding door three knocks.
“Who is it?” A female voice.
“FedEx.”
The door cracked and I pushed through, raising the barrel of the Python to her face.
“Oh, shit!”
She turned to run and I grabbed her by her hair, smashed her into the wall, and dragged her inside, kicking the door shut behind me.
“Who else is in the apartment?”
“Nobody”
I told her we’d double check. With her hair pulled painfully and the big Colt against her back, I made her do a walk-through, to the bedroom, the bathroom, the closet. Then I pushed her back into the living room and threw her to the floor.
It was the same woman: thin, pallid face, long dark hair, wearing dark shorts and a teal top. In the light, she looked about five feet tall. She stared up at me with terror. In the light, her face was prematurely crisscrossed with lines and her skin carried the unhealthy pallor of an addict. I sat in a chair and kept the gun on her.
“Why?”
“Oh, mister, please, I’m begging…”
“I’m going to ask again.” My voice was quiet, unfamiliar. “Why?”
“He said he’d pay me, okay? My old man’s in jail and I was trying to get him out.”
“How did you find him?”
“He found me, I swear to god.”
