Pain Management Page 27

  Clipper stood up so suddenly we almost bumped. His voice was low and hard, urgent. “Look, I don’t need lectures on ethics from mercenaries. One, it’s all about the greater good. And, two, she can’t stay like she is. I don’t know what’s wrong. Not exactly, anyway. But she can’t keep this up. I was going to call her friend Jenn myself, if Rose didn’t decide to come in on her own. And since you seem to have passed muster with her . . .”

  “I get it.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you want it, now you know what you have to do.”

  The rich lady’s penthouse looked like it had all been redecorated since the last time we’d been there. Probably one of her hobbies. I walked over to the huge aquarium. About half the fish were missing now. And the little sharks looked bigger.

  “Nice joint you’re running here,” I said.

  “That’s the way of the world,” she shot back, sounding annoyed. “In microcosm. Don’t you agree?”

  “Sure. People with money put things in cages. Then they watch them eat each other up.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You’re one of the good people.”

  “B.B.!” Ann hissed at me.

  “Hey, fuck the two of you,” I said. “You know why I’m doing this, okay? You want a good attitude thrown in, you’re out of luck.”

  The rich woman stood up. Walked over close to me. “I like you,” she said, huskily. “What do you think about that?”

  “What I think is that I don’t like you.”

  “Because of an . . . aquarium?”

  “That’s right.”

  She turned and walked away. “You picked yourself a real beauty,” she said to Ann.

  “Were you deliberately trying to get her to drop out?” she asked in the elevator on our way down.

  “She’d never drop out,” I told her. “It’s like her . . . thing, right?”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “And you’re purity personified. You and Clipper and everyone helping you. Me, I’m just a hijacker who’s getting hijacked himself.”

  “Everyone’s got a handle, B.B. I told you where mine was. Why are you so angry I found yours?”

  “I have a lot of data for you,” Gem said that night. “But it’s raw. And it could take you a lot of time to sort it. Can you narrow down the criteria for me, just a little bit?”

  “Sure.”

  “Burke, what is wrong? You sound so . . . angry.”

  “Not at you.”

  “At who, then?”

  “At me, little girl. Wesley warned me. A long time ago.”

  “What did he—?”

  “He told me,” I said, cutting her off, “that anyone who knows how I am about . . . some things, it’s like a bull’s-eye painted on my back.”

  “You mean . . . children?”

  “It’s not about kids. I don’t even like kids. It’s those fucking freaks who feed on them. . . .”

  “Burke, stop!”

  “What?”

  “When you start to talk like that, it frightens me.”

  “Why? I haven’t even raised my voice. I’m in control.”

  “It is so cold in here now,” Gem said, shuddering. “And you, you are . . . not in control. Not at all.”

  “You sure you can do it?” I asked SueEllen. “You’re the key. He doesn’t come along, we can’t—”

  “Honey, we got a lot of information. Everything you said you wanted. But there’s no way we’re going to know in front if that man likes women. Don’t believe everything you see in beer commercials.”

  “Fair enough. Besides that, can you—?”

  “Oh, spit it out, mister. I can do anything for those damn drugs. And I will, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “We have about a six-hour window. Maybe a little more, depending on what time we get on the road. But once it’s docked, the whole thing has to be empty and gone, fast.”

  “That’s covered,” Clipper said, emotionless. It was the first time I’d ever seen him without Big A.

  “And you’re sure about the information?” I asked Ann, for maybe the third time. “If any little piece of it’s off, so is the deal.”

  “Yes,” she said, patiently, “I’m sure. It’s not as if they ever take precautions with this stuff. It might as well be a load of TV sets, the way they set up security.”

  “I’ll handle my end,” the old man said.

  “Pop, you know all you’re supposed to do is—”

  “Create a little diversion for the County Mounties. Don’t worry about me, gal. It’s going to be fun.”

  Ann shook her head sorrowfully. “If anything happens to you . . .”

  “I asked Sherry,” the old man said.

  “That is what you want me for now? To be your alibi?” Gem said, sneering the last word. “That is not how you treated me before. . . .”

  “This is different.”

  “So you say, master. I hear and obey.”

  “Gem, you don’t want to do it, just—”

  “Just . . . what? Get out of your life completely?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “You are not saying anything, Burke. And you have not for a long time.”

  “When this is over . . .”

  “Ah.”

  I took a deep breath. Let it out shallow and slow. “Are you going to do it?”

  “You are a fool,” she said.

  Hong watched me approach his table like I was a bad biopsy result. “What are you looking for this time?” he asked, when I sat down.

  “I’m not sure I get your meaning.”

  “You’re not sure you like my meaning. Your little ‘trades’ seem to have a way of causing more problems than they solve.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. For example, Kruger’s stock has gone way up in the past couple of weeks. Any idea why that would be?”

  “Not me.”

  “Right. Not you. Only there was this gutter-punk who’d been shaking down hookers. And now he’s out of business.”

  “What’s bad about that?”

  “By itself, nothing. In fact, we didn’t really put the whole thing together until we showed him some pictures.”

  My face didn’t reveal anything—I was confident of that. But if Hong had my sheet, I was . . .

  “Not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Not a mug shot. A morgue shot.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “Oh, I know you’re not. If there’s anything I’m sure of in this whole mess, it’s that you’re not with me.”

  “And I was supposed to be?”

  “Let’s stop playing, okay? The punk—you know, the one with the missing fingertips—he wasn’t saying a word. But when we showed him a picture of his boss on a slab, he went into a panic. Can’t stop him from talking now. He’ll cop to anything we want, if we promise him PC on the Inside and the Program when he makes the gate.”

  “What’s he got to trade?”

  “A lot of crap about his big ‘operation’ he was fronting. Not much use to us, seeing as how the fucking ‘kingpin’ is dead. So the only thing he can give us is whoever did the job on him.”

  “You mean, like an assault?”

  “An assault-with-intent, pal. Pounding on him is one thing. But mutilation, that’s what we call an ‘enhancer’ in these parts. Whoever goes down for it is looking at a long bit. And if that person had priors . . . well, you know the deal in Oregon, don’t you? He might never see the street again.”

  “So you know it was a man?”

  “Ah, you’re a piece of work, Hazard . . . or whatever your name is. Yeah, it was a man. And, no, we don’t have a description we could do anything with. Except . . .”

  I raised my eyebrows, like I was getting bored with his pregnant pauses and wanted him to get on with it.

  “Like I said, this is one scared boy. We put a bunch of guys in a lineup, whisper ‘Number Three’ in his ear, guess which one he�
��d pick out?”

  “Sounds like a defense attorney’s dream,” I said, still bored.

  “It does,” he conceded. “But that doesn’t change the truth.”

  “Tell it to O.J.”

  “You ask me about Kruger. A favor gets done for Kruger. So I figure Kruger must have done a favor for you.”

  “Kruger didn’t do a goddamned thing for me,” I said. “And you can take that one to the polygraph.”

  “Maybe. But now you come here on another visit. What do you want this time? And who’s going to get themselves dead?”

  “More hookers are,” I said, taking everything out of my voice but the truth I needed him to hear. “It’s not one man. Like I told you before, remember? It’s a team.”

  “Two men? You’re trying to tell me that the little degenerate with the missing—”

  “No. A man and a woman. You’ve run every sex offender who’s been released in the past, what, five years?”

  He nodded, listening now.

  “What you want to look for is a man who’s been either married or living with a woman for some time. Either he’s using her to pull hookers, like she wants to bring the girl home for a three-way, or she’s right there in the car with him. Something like that Bernardo case.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned it before. In Canada, right?”

  “Right. The freak made torture videos of some of the girls they captured. When he got popped, the search didn’t turn them up. He told his lawyer where they were. The lawyer kept quiet, so his girlfriend got to cop to light time in exchange for her testimony against him. If the cops had found those tapes first, she’d have been buried as deep as he is.”

  “That might be the scenario, but it doesn’t narrow things down much.”

  “I’m sure it’s a man-woman team. Not two men, like the Hillside Stranglings, where those two dirtbags played cop to get girls in their car. It wouldn’t work up here.”

  “I’ll buy that. What makes you think it wasn’t that guy from Spokane? Robert Lee Yates. He just copped to a whole ton of hooker killings.”

  “Any of the missing ones on the list?”

  “Two.”

  “Sure! So why would he leave out the others? He made his deal; all the details, plus he showed the cops where a couple of the bodies were buried. Took a life sentence in exchange. What would he have to gain by not mentioning some of them? Freak like that, the more kills he can claim, the more letters he’s going to get in prison. Better chance some asshole will set up a Web site for him, too.”

  “Okay. But even if you’re right, we’ve got no starting place to look.”

  “You might. You already have the lists of men who were released. Go back and check, see which of them ended up marrying a woman who met them through some kind of prison correspondence, or even a prison visiting program.”

  “That happens a lot.”

  “Sure. And most of it’s straight-up legit. People get together for all kinds of reasons, and some of them are righteous. But what you’re looking for is any of those women you can’t find now.”

  “I’m not sure I . . .”

  “The women, they were the citizens, right? Not the outlaws. So why would they go missing?”

  “You think . . . ?”

  “That the guy you’re looking for, he cut her off from her family and friends. That nobody knows where she is. That she’s some kind of ‘slave’ to him by now . . . or she loves the killing, too. And that her family . . . her friends . . . her old job . . . somebody would be worried enough about her to have said something. Maybe even gone to the cops, but—”

  “If she was an adult, it wouldn’t be a missing-person case.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s a real long shot.”

  “It is.”

  “But . . . okay, worth playing. Thanks.”

  I got up to go.

  “Wait. What did you come to see me about?”

  “What I just told you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Sit down a minute,” Hong said. He lit a cigarette, pushed his gunmetal case over to me.

  We smoked in silence for a minute.

  “You know what ‘Angkat’ means in Cambodian?” he finally asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do. And I know you think you’re packing the glass slipper, too.”

  When I got up to leave then, he didn’t say a word.

  On my way back, I found the blues program on KINK-FM. Otis Rush was the featured artist. “You Know My Love.” I wondered if anybody did.

  Gem and I watched a bull-chested raven float down onto the flat top of a mailbox, then calmly drop whatever he’d been carrying in his beak to his personal chopping block and go to work. When he was finished, he left the table. In a few minutes, another raven took his place, with his own score. Word gets around.

  “We went for a long drive down the coast,” Gem said. “We packed a picnic dinner, because we wanted to sit on the seawall at midnight where we first met. To celebrate our anniversary. We were in that car,” she said, nodding toward the Corvette. “I remember setting the trip odometer, because Gordo was curious as to what kind of mileage the car gets, now that he’s worked on the engine. We got back to the loft around four in the morning. We made love. Twice. Then I took a bath while you watched TV. I will have the shows taped for you to watch when . . . later. You took a shower while I made us an early breakfast. You had a three-egg omelet, with mushrooms, onions, and roast pork. I had waffles, with ice cream. All the ingredients for these are in the loft. I will prepare the dishes. I will eat some of the food, and make sure the rest is disposed of. If you are there when the police come, then you never left. If you are not, you went out just before they arrived. I do not know where you were going, or when you will be back.”

  The ocean was an angry slate. The winds were cross-gusting. I watched a hovering gull briefly resist, flapping its wings hard for stability before straightening them out and just going with it, riding the vector.

  “Perfect,” I said, trying for the same path I’d just witnessed.

  “Oh no; it’s not,” she said sadly. “It is not perfect at all.”

  Gem dropped me off about a mile from the truck stop. I made my way through an open field, carrying my gear. Found my lurking place, and hunkered down to do what I do best.

  It was almost eleven before the semi rolled in. Couldn’t miss it; big silver rig with the drug company’s logo covering the length of the trailer.

  I watched the driver get out and head for the truck stop. He’d left his engine running—they pretty much all do if they aren’t going to sleep, and the word was that all his route permitted at this stage was a meal break.

  Between SueEllen inside the diner and Ann slutted up somewhere in the shadows, we had him bracketed—provided he hadn’t already made a CB appointment with one of the lot lizards. I saw a couple of them strolling halfheartedly, so I figured most of the business was prearranged over the air. The rich lady’s info had been perfect, but it didn’t drop all the way down to the identity of the individual driver, much less his sex habits.

  One time I never want a smoke is when I’m waiting. Too many men are doing time for that. Too many dead, too. I let part of my mind go to a safe place, opened my sensors to full alert. Another mistake amateurs make is to assume watchers don’t get watched.

  Every time the door swung open from the inside, I was on it. No need for night glasses. They kept the parking lot dark, but the diner was bathed in floodlights, making it look like an oasis in a desert of darkness. I guess that was the idea.

  When I saw SueEllen come out, long red hair swinging, her left hand on the right arm of a big guy in a blue windbreaker and matching cap, I knew it was a go—I just didn’t know exactly what the mark had gone for.

  “My husband will whip my ass big-time, he ever finds out where I was tonight,” SueEllen said, giggling, as they passedby where I’d moved to . . . a pool of shadow between a pair of parke
d trucks. She made the prospect sound like fun.

  “How’s he gonna find out?” the guy with her asked. “You said he works nights.”

  “Well, my girlfriend—remember, the one I told you came with me?—she’s got a mouth on her.”

  “But she’s doing the same thing you are, right?”

  “Sure, baby. That’s right. But she’s kind of . . . well, she’s not exactly skinny, if you get my drift. So maybe she won’t get as lucky as I did. Just remember, this has got to be quick, okay? Next time you’re back this way, you let me know in advance, and I’ll . . .”

  “You never gave me your number.”

  “Oh, I will, honey. But there’s something else I want to give you first. . . .”

  “My rig’s right over there. You sure you don’t want to get a room? They have some nice—”

  “No way, baby! Every time I see one of those huge trucks thunder by, I wonder what it would be like to do it right inside the cab. You said there was a . . . sleeper thing?”

  “Sure,” he said, proudly. “Wait’ll you see how it’s all fixed up.”

  I stepped out of the shadows, the dark stocking mask pulled down, the watch cap concealing my hair. And the sawed-off shotgun riveting his eyes.

  “Put your hands up,” I said. “Very quiet. If there’s even a little noise from you, there’s going to be a big fucking noise from this, understand?”

  SueEllen and the driver raised their hands.

  “You!” I said to SueEllen. “Drop your purse.”

  She did it.

  “Kick it over to me. Careful,” I hissed.

  She did that, too.

  “Now turn around,” I said. “Just the bitch,” I told the driver, when he started to do the same thing.

  “Lady,” I said. “Pull your pants down.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Now!” I soft-barked at her. “I’m not fucking around.”

  The sound of her zipper was clear in the darkness. The truck driver could barely keep himself from turning his head.

  “All your pants, lady. Down to your ankles.”

  “You sick motherfucker . . .” SueEllen muttered, even as she was doing what she was told.

  “Good. Now take off those boots. And the pants. Quick!”

  She did it, making below-audible sounds.

  “Travis, you there?” I called softly.