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The anxiety in her voice was undeniable. “Just stop. Please. Before it’s too late.”
She hung up.
I sat on the beach the rest of the afternoon, staring at the waves, trying to comprehend her words. Before it’s too late. Why did Sava
I called Buzz. Dangling the promise of a gift certificate to Dave and Buster’s, I asked him to check the records for me on Miles Zambelli. Buzz said he’d get back to me.
I drove a circuitous route to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently, my gun tucked between my legs. Nobody followed me.
Larry’s hangar was empty. He’d gone for the night. There were two messages on my answering machine. The first was from Eugen Dragomir, my one and only prospective student pilot. His father was rushing him a check made out in my name for $5,000. Eugen would be by with the money as soon as it arrived. I allowed myself a smile. Another five grand on top of the twenty-five large from Carlisle. I vowed not to tell Kiddiot. Knowing him, he would definitely demand I buy him more cat toys.
The second message was from Lamont Royale. He said he needed to speak with me urgently. I called him at the number he left. It took him several rings to answer.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Let me get back to you.”
“I’ll be here.”
I sat down at my desk and reread the paid death notice Sava
He was born in Oakland in 1961. Bullshit. The Arlo Echevarria I knew was born in Guatemala and emigrated at age five, crossing the border at Calexico with his mother, both hidden behind the driver’s seat of a tractor-trailer truck hauling cantaloupes up from Zacatecas. They’d settled in San Diego and later Oceanside, where Echevarria’s mother found work cleaning the bachelor officers’ quarters at Camp Pendleton. The Marines made a lasting impression on Echevarria. He would enlist in the Corps on his seventeenth birthday.
He earned a business degree from San Francisco State. Like hell. The only college Echevarria ever graduated from was what we in Alpha jokingly referred to as the “University of Direct Action.” Like the rest of us, he’d earned a bachelor’s in close quarters battle and a PhD in “Look at Me so Much as Sideways and I Will Fucking Blow Your Shit Away.”
He’d built a successful international trading company. The trading company was little more than a mail drop in a three-story Art Deco office building on Geary Street with gilded styling and a terra cotta exterior, a half-mile west of downtown San Francisco. An outsourced answering service in New Delhi fielded incoming telephone traffic. The operators were instructed to say that Mr. Echevarria was “in a sales meeting” and to take a message whenever anyone called.
“He is survived by his loving and devoted wife and soul mate, Sava
I folded Echevarria’s death notice and returned it to the belly drawer of my desk. I thought about what Miles Zambelli had told me in the limo driving in from North Vegas, how Janice Echevarria, Arlo’s first wife, had abundant reasons for wanting him dead. The planet is thick with divorced people who secretly wish such ill on their former spouses. Very few, fortunately, ever attempt to carry out those fantasies.
My office phone rang. It was Lamont Royale, calling from a very loud casino. He said he had hoped to talk to me in confidence while I was still in Las Vegas, but that would’ve been impossible. Carlisle, he said, planted listening devices everywhere, including all of his automobiles.
“I have some… on… Mr. — ” Lamont said.
I could barely hear him above the din of carnival music and the metallic clink-clink-clink of slot machines paying out.
“Say again?”
He repeated himself, only louder and slower. “I have some information on Mr. Echevarria’s murder.”
Something thudded heavily just then against the concrete floor to my left, caromed off my trash can, and came to rest near my feet. I looked down: the object resembled the kind of cardboard roll toilet paper comes on, only metal and painted olive drab, with a big metal cap on each end. A stun grenade.
“Five-banger,” I thought to myself.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
A succession of deafening but otherwise harmless explosions meant to shock, not kill, rocked the hangar, as helmeted SWAT officers in green Nomex flight suits from the Rancho Bonita PD came swarming in with short-barrel shotguns and MP-9 submachine guns. They were yelling “On the ground!” and “Get on the ground!” and “Lemme see your hands!” and it looked like they couldn’t wait to put a bullet in somebody, anybody. I sat with my hands folded placidly on my desk so that somebody wouldn’t be me. Two seconds later, I was kissing the concrete, gun barrels jammed against my head, knees against my back, while my arms were yanked painfully behind me and my wrists handcuffed. I noticed there were many dust bu
The police yelled, “Clear!” and two SWAT officers hoisted me up off the floor by my armpits. A third frisked me, a big, jarheadlooking dude with freckles.
“I’d offer you coffee,” I said to the lawmen, “but, one, I don’t have any, and, two, you guys look like you’re already way over-caffeinated.”
It wasn’t hard to find the two-inch revolver stuck in my belt. Freckles handed the weapon to his sergeant, then finished patting me down.
“He’s clean,” Freckles said. The officers who’d hoisted me off the floor slammed me back down into my desk chair.
Czarnek and Windhauser strolled in as if on cue.
“Five-banger,” I said to the detectives. “A little overkill, don’t you think?”
Windhauser propped his ass on the corner of my desk, planted a cowboy-booted foot up on my chair, and squinted hard at me, arms folded, while Czarnek read me my Miranda rights from a little laminated card. I told them I understood my rights. I was happy to talk. The entertainment value alone would make the conversation more than worthwhile.
Windhauser smoothed the ends of his Wyatt Earp moustache with his thumb and index finger and said, “We know you killed him, Logan.”
“Killed who?”
“You know who.”
“You play games with us, Mr. Logan,” Czarnek said, working his Nicorette, “and I guarantee you, it’s go