The Gentlemen's Hour

26

The three decapitated bodies lie in a drainage ditch.

Johnny Banzai shines a flashlight on them, fights off the urge to vomit, and slides down into the ditch. From the relative lack of blood he can tell that the men were killed somewhere else and dumped out here to be seen.

What happens to people who fuck with Don Cruz Iglesias.

Steve Harrington slaps the back of his hand to his forehead and says with a moan,

“¡Ohhh, mi cabeza!”

Funny guy, Harrington.

Johnny checks one of the dead men’s wrists for tattoos and finds just what he expected—a tattoo depicting a skull with wings coming out of each side. Los Ángeles Muertos, the Death Angels, are an old-line Barrio Logan street gang who’ve been revived by hooking up with the Ortega drug cartel across the border. The Criminal Intelligence guys had given Homicide a heads up that the Ortegas had taken a shot at Cruz Iglesias yesterday and missed.

The decapitations are his response, Johnny thinks.

“Any ID on the Juan Does?” Harrington asks.

“Death Angels.”

“Well, they sure are now.”

Johnny’s no particular lover of gangbangers, but at the same time he’s not happy that the cartels’ war for Baja has spilled over into San Diego and threatens to start a full-blown gang war like they haven’t seen since the nineties. The Ortegas recruited the Death Angels, Iglesias signed up Los Niños Locos, the Crazy Boys, and now it won’t be long before stupid kids and innocent bystanders start getting killed. So he’d just as soon the Mexican cartels kept their shit in Mexico.

The border, he thinks.

What border?

“I guess we’re going to have to start looking for the heads,” Harrington says.

Johnny says, “My guess is that they’re in dry ice and on their way to Luis Ortega in a UPS package.”

“What Brown can do for you.”

A gory, media-feeding triple is not what I need right now, Johnny thinks. Summer is the busy homicide season in San Diego. The heat shortens emotional fuses and then lights them. What would be arguments in the autumn become fights in the summer. What would have been simple assaults become murders. Johnny has a fatal stabbing over a disputed bottle of beer, a drive-by that happened after an argument at a taco stand, and a domestic killing that occurred in an apartment after the air-conditioning broke down.

Then there’s the Blasingame case headed for trial and Mary Lou all over his ass to make sure his “ducks are in a row.” Whose fucking ducks are ever in a row, anyway? Five eyewitnesses and little Corey clinging to his strong, silent type routine, Mary Lou should just relax. Then again, it’s not Mary Lou’s nature to relax.

I wouldn’t relax either, he admits, with Alan Burke on the other side.

He makes himself focus on the case at hand, even though he knows they’re never going to make an arrest on it. This was a professional hit, and the pros who did it are already down in Mexico, knocking back a few beers.

But we have to go through the motions, he thinks.

“Hey,” Harrington says, “what do you call three Mexican gangbangers with no heads?”

“What?” Johnny asks only because it’s required.

He already knows the tired punch line.

A good start.