Explosive Eighteen

SIX

I LEFT THE FIRE SCENE, drove down Hamilton, and spotted the tail when I turned onto Broad. Black Lincoln two cars back. Most likely they were with me when I left my apartment, and I hadn’t been paying attention. The FBI had offices in a building in the center of the city. There was underground parking, but I chose not to use it. Even when security cameras were in play, I felt vulnerable in a parking garage. I found on-street parking half a block away, locked up, and walked to the FBI building. I waved at the Lincoln as it rolled past, but no one waved back or beeped the horn. Guess Lancer and Slasher were busy thinking up a new cover, since FBI was obviously out.

Berger’s office was on the sixth floor. He had a small cubby with a desk and two chairs. I imagined Gooley had an identical cubby somewhere in the vast room filled with cubbies.

“Did you bring the photo?” Berger asked.

I sat in one of his chairs. “I don’t have the photo.”

Berger blew out a sigh. “Did you ever have the photo?”

“Yes. I discovered it when I got home. I had no idea how it got into my bag or what it was. There wasn’t any writing on it. No name or address. I assumed I’d grabbed it by mistake when I bought magazines for the flight. So I threw it away.”

“Any chance of retrieving it?”

“No, I tried. The garbage had already been picked up.”

“Was it a man or a woman?” Berger asked.

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head. “To my knowledge, only one person knew the identity of the person in the photo, and that person is dead.”

“Would that dead person happen to be Richard Crick, the doctor who got stuffed into the trash can at LAX?”

“Bingo.”

“It was a photo of a guy standing on a street corner,” I told Berger. “Casual. Not posed. Completely unexceptional. No piercings or tattoos. Just a nice-looking guy. Somewhere around forty. Short brown hair. Fair-skinned. He was wearing a dark suit.”

“Did you recognize the street corner?”

“No. It could have been anywhere. It looked like an office building in the background. No vegetation, so I don’t know if it was Hawaii, Oregon, or New York.”

“Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?”

“Hard to say. Maybe. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the photo.”

“I’d like to set you up with an artist,” Berger said. “At this point, anything is better than nothing.”

“Do I want to know why this photo is so important?”

“No. I don’t even know. And I don’t want to know. Something to do with national security.”

“I’m being harassed by two men posing as FBI. Morelli ran them through the system, and they’re not with the Bureau.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“It’s possible you’ll also have some foreign nationals sniffing around,” Berger said.

“Great. What am I supposed to do with these people?”

“Don’t let them get too close. I imagine some of them are nasty buggers.”

“Shouldn’t you be protecting me?”

“Protection got cut from the budget. Come back tomorrow, same time. I’ll have a forensic artist here. We’ll see if you can give us anything useful.”

I left the building and found Ranger lounging against my parked car, arms crossed over his chest, his expression unreadable, his posture relaxed. My messenger bag hung from his shoulder. He had a Band-Aid covering the stitches under his eye. The Band-Aid was a couple shades lighter than his skin. Ranger’s heritage was Cuban and his look was Latino. He was multilingual, ambidextrous, and street-smart. He was formerly Special Forces. He was my age. He was more big jungle cat than golden retriever.

“You’re driving without a license and probably no money or credit cards,” Ranger said.

“It seemed like the lesser of two evils.”

There was the hint of a twitch at the corner of his mouth, as if he might be thinking about smiling. “Are you saying I’m evil?”

Ranger was playing with me. Hard to tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“I’m saying I don’t know where I’m going with you,” I told him.

“Would you like me to make some suggestions?”

“No! You made enough suggestions in Hawaii.”

“You made some of your own,” he said. His gaze dropped to my hand. “You’re still wearing my mark on your ring finger. Not as legal as a wedding band, but it would qualify you for a good time.”

“That ring mark got you seven stitches and a broken bone in your hand.”

“At least Morelli fights clean.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Babe, you stun-gunned me on the back of my neck.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy with the two of you rolling around on the ground, whaling away at each other.”

Actually, I had stunned both of them, cuffed them while they were immobilized, and drove them to the emergency room. Then I changed out my plane ticket for an earlier flight, called Lula, and took off before they were finished getting stitched and patched. Not only did I want to put distance between us, but I thought it smart to leave the island before getting charged with illegal use of an illegal stun gun. Sometimes there’s a fine line between a cowardly act and a brilliant decision, and my brilliant decision had been to get out of Honolulu and leave the stun gun behind.

Ranger transferred the messenger bag from his shoulder to mine, pulled me into him, and kissed me like he meant it. “Let me know if the guys following you in the Lincoln get too bothersome,” he said, opening the door to my car.

No point asking how Ranger knew about the Lincoln. Ranger pretty much knows everything.

I slid behind the wheel of the RAV, cranked it over, and drove to the coffee shop. Lula and Connie were in the table area by the front window. Connie was working on her laptop, and Lula was drinking coffee, paging through a magazine.

“Is this the new office?” I asked Connie.

“Until I come up with something better. DeAngelo says the building will be done in three weeks. Hard to believe.”

“Did he say that before or after he firebombed the bus?” I asked her.

“After. I just spoke to him.”

Lula picked her head up. “You think DeAngelo did the bus?”

“It’s a theory,” I said.

I got a Frappuccino and a big cookie, and suggested to Lula that we head over to the junkyard to check out the rumor about Joyce.

“Hard to believe Joyce is dead,” Lula said. “She’s too mean to die. It’d be like killing the Devil. You see what I’m saying? I bet it’s damn hard to kill the Devil.”

We piled into the Firebird, and Lula cut through town and motored up Stark Street, past the mom-and-pop chop shops, groceries, bars, and pawnshops. The groceries and pawnshops gave way to crack houses, third-world sanitation, and hollow-eyed stoop sitters. The crack houses gave way to the burned-out, rat-riddled slums of no-man’s-land, where only the crazies and the most desperate existed. And the junkyard rose fortress-like and defiant, a mountain of heavy metal and fiberglass discard, beyond no-man’s-land.

Lula parked in the junkyard lot and tried to gauge her distance from the big electromagnet that swung the cars into the compactor.

“They better not get the wrong idea about my Firebird,” she said.

“You’re good,” I told her. “You’re in the visitor parking area.”

“Yeah, but if these people were smart, they wouldn’t be working in a junkyard at the end of the world.”

No argument there. It wasn’t so much the junkyard as it was the proximity to Hell. Connie’s cousin Manny Rosolli owned the junkyard. I knew him in a remote sort of way, and he seemed like a nice man. And since 80 percent of Connie’s family was mob, this gave Manny a certain amount of security in spite of the precarious location.

I found the trailer that served as an office and asked for Andy, the son of Grandma’s friend Mrs. Kulicki. I was told he was stacking cars, and I was directed to the part of the lot where cars were stored when they came out of the compactor. Fortunately, the compactor wasn’t currently in use, so I was spared the sound of cars getting crushed to death.

It was easy to find Andy since he was the only one there. Plus, he was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with his name embroidered in black. He was a gangly tattooed guy with multiple piercings. I was guessing nineteen or twenty years old.

“You got a ankle bracelet on, too?” Lula asked him.

“This isn’t prison clothes,” Andy said. “It’s so the crusher guy can see me, so I don’t get a car dropped on me.”

“I’m looking for Joyce Barnhardt,” I told him.

“You might have a hard time finding her,” he said. “She could have got compacted. I was cleaning up, and I found her driver’s license on the ground, along with a smashed lady’s high heel shoe and a lipstick. You’d be surprised what gets shook loose after the crusher. There’s all kinds of stuff falling out of these cars when they get picked up and stacked.”

“Where’s the car now?”

“Dunno. No way to tell which car it came from.”

“Did you tell the police?” I asked him.

“Nope. I told the office. But they said when it comes to suspecting bodies in the crusher, we have a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

“What happened to the license and the shoe?”

“Threw them away. The license was all torn and bent, and the shoe was a mess and it smelled real bad. Anyway, the office said no one ever comes to claim stuff that’s been shook from the crusher.”

“Probably, the junkyard’s doing big disposal business since they put the surveillance cameras up at the landfill,” Lula said. “I bet you could bring a cadaver dog here, and he wouldn’t know where to go first.”