Troubleshooter

Chapter 18

Bear plucked another heart off the skewer with his teeth. The charred smell of chicken over fire moistened the air. A bedsheet of a sign flapped by the entrance, featuring a minimalist chicken and the paintbrush-rendered name of the restaurant: Yakitoriya. Tim leaned back from the stick of chicken throats dividing his plate and gazed out at Sawtelle Boulevard, a strip of Japantown transplanted to the West Side.

Bear nudged Tim's untouched dish, concerned. "C'mon, now."

Tim tapped a smoked quail egg on the dab of four-alarm mustard coloring his plate and popped it in his mouth. Forced himself to chew, to swallow, to refuel. Dray had once eaten fifteen quail eggs in a sitting-Cool Hand Luke gone exotic. On his hurried final phone call with her, chicken neck had been her last request. It suited her better than the mythical staples-a T-bone, cigarette, apple pie.

Having endured the unendurable two years ago, he knew better than to indulge his grief. He knew he needed food to continue functioning, and he knew he didn't want to go home, so he'd let Bear drag him here, figuring he'd try to eat Dray's favorite meal for her rather than gag down hospital gruel.

He managed a few cubes of thigh meat and drank half his glass of water, doing his best to ignore the weight of the cell phone in his pocket. At any moment, the phone could ring. And she could be conscious again. Or not.

It chirped as if on cue, and Tim tensed. But when he fought it out of his pocket, the screen remained unlit. Then he noticed Bear snapping open his Nextel and felt foolish. Bear uh-huhed a few times at Freed in the command post and hung up.

Bear picked at a chicken throat, a tiny tube crisped like a french fry. "Back when I started, New York days, we worked the mobsters sometimes. They knew we were watching them, we knew they knew, but we managed. We made it work. We wouldn't bust a guy's balls until we had a case built. They never took a shot at one of us. Not once. We'd leave them alone on family outings. There was a kind of code." He used his skewer to impale one of his remaining quail eggs, the only time in Tim's memory he'd left food on his plate. "Mutts are getting too good at their jobs. No honor, no remorse, nothing. It's hard not to think things are getting worse. Bikers were losers, but they stood for something-or at least pretended to. The Angels stood for something. But the Sinners? I don't buy the gross-out biker veneer. It's costume design. Underneath it they're stone cold." He poked at the egg, again piercing its rubbery brown skin. "People don't stand for anything anymore."

The waiter asked in broken English if they wanted beer. They declined and sat quietly, flushed with the sting of mustard and the heat of the open grill.

Tim replayed his last conversation with Dray on the phone: The captain needs someone to pick up a few overtime parole hours… I'll take 'em if it'll be a late one for you.

It will, he'd replied, sealing her fate.

"If I hadn't slowed them down," Tim said quietly, not lifting his eyes from his plate, "Dray wouldn't have pulled them over. They would've been fifteen minutes farther up the road. Den would've had his helmet on."

"It's not your fault."

"I didn't say it was. I'm saying chance is fucked."

Bear's eyebrow rose at the anger in Tim's voice.

"It would be great if I felt guilty. But I don't. I'm pissed off at her. Everyone keeps telling me I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing. You don't take down five outlaw bikers on a deserted road without backup." His voice was wobbling, and Bear looked on, horrified and starting to mist up himself. "She fucked up."

"Maybe she thought-"

"There's no 'maybe,' Bear. You know it, and I know it. She should've gotten her ass back to the squad car. It was just Dray being stubborn. What'd she say? 'I'm not going without taking you in'? What kind of cowboy bullshit is that?" He took a moment to be unabashedly furious with Dray, a solo, pregnant deputy failing to retreat from a lethal biker gang. He swore quietly, used the napkin to dry his face.

"Okay," Bear conceded. "It looks like an error in judgment. A bad one. Maybe she was more emotional. She is pregnant."

You gonna cuff him upside the head, or should I?

Tim felt a faint grin tense his lips, catching him off guard.

Bear furrowed his forehead. "What?"

"Being pregnant wouldn't have affected her judgment. You know Dray."

"Which means she had a reason." Bear met Tim's eyes evenly. "Something we're missing."

"You're right," Tim finally said.

Bear rose and threw down a few bills. They exited through the split fabric of the sign amid a chorus of Japanese farewells. Tim found the CD in the glove box, twirled it between his thumbs. The shooting of his wife preserved on 700 megabytes.

Bear looked from the CD to Tim's thoughtful face. "You thinking of calling him?"

"Yep." Tim pulled out his phone, dialed a mobile number.

The familiar voice answered. Tim explained his predicament.

"Sure, I'll look at the footage, but that's it. I don't go operational. I know how things got last time you took something personal-people getting their heads blown apart and shit. So remember: I don't fight. I don't shoot."

"It's not like that," Tim said. "I'm doing this on Service time."

"So why are you calling me?"

"Because you're the best."

No argument there. A pause. "Meet you in two hours."

"Where?"

But Pete Krindon had already hung up.