Wicked Break

Twenty-nine

“You believe him?” Carter asked, stretching out on one of the plastic resin chairs on my patio.

We had made our way back to Biddly’s after Wizard kicked us out. Moreno and Wesley were gone from their perch in front of the liquor store and, with Wizard’s warning fresh in our heads, we drove back to Mission Beach and settled under the hazy late-day sunshine.

I yanked the caps off two Red Trolley Ales and handed Carter one as I sat down in the chair next to him. “Yes and no.”

He put the bottle to his lips and waited for me to continue.

“I think he knew about the hit down here,” I said, squinting into the orange and yellow hues above the water. “Something like that, no way it happens without his okay. They had two cars with at least four guys. It was organized. That was crap about Moreno and his initiative.”

Carter nodded. “It’s a smart play on his part. He may have known who we were, but he doesn’t know if we’re tied to cops or feeding somebody info on him. He admitted nothing, basically.”

“I think he knew about Rachel, too,” I said, watching two bicyclists cruise by on the boardwalk, the bike tires sounding like zippers on the pavement. “He may not have known why, but I think he knew it happened.”

“Why did they go after her?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, frustrated that I hadn’t been able to come up with an answer for that. “Maybe they thought she told me something.”

“Nah, man, that doesn’t make sense. You’d just talked to her. How could they have put that together so quickly?”

He was right. I was starting to think that I had the reasoning backward. I’d been operating under the idea that Rachel had been shot because I’d talked to her. But it was beginning to look more like I’d been attacked at the SandDune because I’d witnessed her shooting by coincidence.

I drank from the beer and then set it on the table between us. “I don’t think he was lying about Moreno and Linc, though.”

“You mean that he didn’t know they had something going?”

“I think he knew something was happening. Would seem reasonable that he lets Moreno buy from whomever. But I don’t think he knew exactly who Moreno was dealing with. You see his reaction? It was the only time he stumbled. And he was pissed.”

He nodded. “Yeah, he didn’t seem too happy about having an association with the California coalition of white sheets. And if that’s what was going on-Moreno buying from Pluto-Matellion is not gonna like how that looks, even if Moreno didn’t know that Pluto was a hater. In which case, you may have just ended Deacon Moreno’s life.”

I nodded, not really feeling one way or another about that possibility. I found it hard to drum up sympathy for someone who had been an active participant in trying to end my life. If he wanted to work for Wizard Matellion, he would have to live with the consequences.

I remembered the scene outside the liquor store. “What was that shit with you and Wesley?”

A slow grin emerged on Carter’s lips as he pulled the bottle away from his mouth. “About a year ago, I was doing some recovery work for a guy in Tucson.”

“Recovery work?”

“Finding a guy who owed my guy some money,” he said, waving the bottle in the air. “You don’t wanna know. I go down to Ensenada to find this guy and the guy that hired me says another dude’s meeting me there, in case I need some help.” He smirked. “I was polite and didn’t tell him that wouldn’t be necessary.”

“Big of you.”

“Very. Guess who my help was.”

“Wesley?”

“Yep. Met him at the house where the dude was hiding.” He shrugged. “We exchange hellos and then we go into the house, grab the dude, and lucky us, we find a big-ass duffel bag of money, too.”

“Lucky.”

“So we do our thing with the guy and I grab the bag of cash to take back to my employer.” He shook his head, his eyes somewhere on the horizon. “Then old Wesley grabs it from me, says that my boss actually owes his boss and that’s why he took the job.”

“Wizard?” I asked.

“I guess,” Carter said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that makes sense now. So he wants the money, says he’s taking it with him.” His mouth slithered into a grin. “And I said no.”

Carter raised the bottle to his lips and drained it, then set the bottle down on the table.

“I drilled him in the ribs and put him on his ass and he dropped the bag,” he said, still smiling. “I know I broke a couple of them because I felt those fuckers crack. Then I bend over to pick up the bag and he catches me flush in the jaw with his foot.”

“Oops.”

He rubbed his jaw. “I had to get two teeth put back in. Anyway, we heard sirens, figured the federales were on their way, and got the hell out of there.” He paused. “And I, of course, left with the money.”

“Of course.”

“Hadn’t seen or heard from the guy until today.”

I shook my head. Carter lived in a comic-book world that the rest of us thought couldn’t possibly be real. He enjoyed proving otherwise.

“Great story, but none of it helps me,” I said.

“You asked, and I didn’t say it would.”

The more I worked over what we’d learned, the more I thought Moreno had made a simple mistake. He knew a guy who could supply him with guns. But he hadn’t checked him out. If he had known that Linc was tied to National Nation, he probably would’ve flat-out tried to kill him.

Carter sat up in the chair. “Dollar drafts down at the Pennant tonight. Wanna go over?”

“Dollar drafts?” I said, a tiny bell going off in my brain. “That would mean today’s Saturday.”

“Uh, yeah. All day, I think.”

The pounding in my head turned into an ugly jackhammer.

I stood up. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I watched the sun fight with the horizon, trying to squeeze out a few more minutes of daylight before it disappeared for another night. I stared at it for a moment, watching the water swallow the last few rays, silently pleading with the water to take me as well.

“Because,” I finally said, wishing hard that it were already Sunday, “I’m having dinner with Carolina Braddock.”