Flat Spin

“The kid was in Oakland the night of the murder,” I said.

“So he says,” Czarnek said.

The waitress brought our meals. Czarnek insisted it was the best chicken piccata he’d ever eaten. My eggplant tasted like something Jeffrey Dahmer might’ve kept in a Tupperware bowl in his freezer.

SIXTEEN

Anya Bondarenko took the news of her husband’s death stoically, like a spouse who understood intuitively that the man she’d married years before was not destined to share with her the journey into old age. “At least,” she said, pouring herself more vodka, “he was not found fucking other woman.”

Czarnek asked if she or her late husband knew or had ever heard of Pavel Tarasov. The name rang no bell, she said, nor did Arlo Echevarria, or Gil Carlisle.

“What about Harry Ramos?” I said.

“Who?”

“Harry Ramos.”

“Harry Ramos… Harry Ramos.” Ge

She crossed from behind her late husband’s desk to the office safe from which she extracted a file folder with what looked to be various business-related correspondence. She licked her thumb and carefully perused each document before finding the one she was looking for, then handed it to me without comment.

It was a month-old letter thanking Ge

Anya Bondarenko took another drag from her cigarette. “This Harry Ramos, he comes to see Ge

I asked her who her husband went to see that night. She shrugged.

“Ge

The Hollywood Freeway was anything but free. Czarnek tuned his car radio to a news station with traffic reports every ten minutes. The radio let us know all about road conditions in south Orange County and east to the Inland Empire, but not word one on why the 101 was a parking lot. Gridlock in central Los Angeles at any given hour of the day apparently had stopped being news long ago.

“Might as well be in goddamn prison,” the detective said, chewing the hell out of his gum, fingers strumming the top of his steering wheel impatiently.

Fed up, he switched on the car’s flashing police lights and spun the wheel hard, wedging his unmarked Crown Vic between the stationary traffic to our left and the barrier wall to our right, its segmented concrete dividers streaked with scrape marks left by other, lesser drivers who’d tried the same maneuver and failed. We drove the shoulder that way for nearly a mile, exited onto Beverly Boulevard, and took surface streets into the hills, up to Sava

Czarnek dropped me off outside the gate. He said he and his partner would be taking a hard look at Harry Ramos, Zambelli and Tarasov as suspects in the homicides of Echevarria and Bondarenko.

“I still don’t see it,” Czarnek said as I got out of the car.

“See what?”

“All that spook shit you told my partner and me about when we were up having lunch in Rancho Bonita. Government agent. Taking out high-value targets. Doing the Lord’s work. I mean, I’m looking at you and there’s a disco

“James Bond wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.”

Czarnek smiled. “Behave yourself, Logan.”

“Fair skies, Detective.”

He drove on. I pressed the intercom button on the speaker box beside the gate.

“Yes?” The voice sounded young and Latina.

“Cordell Logan to see Ms. Echevarria.”

The gate buzzed and swung open. I walked up the drive. There was a metallic silver S-Class Mercedes parked in front of the house. The woman whose voice I heard on the box was waiting for me on the front steps. She said her name was Alameda Guzman, Sava

“Mrs. Echevarria has told me much about you,” she said.

“All lies.”

“She’s with a patient right now. Would you like to come in and wait?”

“A patient. Right.”

“Actually, we were just finishing up,” Sava

You would’ve never guessed from her ebullient mood that her life at that moment was anything but perfect. With her was a baggy-eyed, olive-ski

“Cordell Logan,” Sava

Katz’s grip wasn’t a handshake; it was a Herculean test of wills. His eyes held steady on mine as he tried to crush my fingers.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Logan.” The accent was South African.

“Mr. Katz,” I said, squeezing harder.

He gritted his teeth, smiling through the pain, and finally let go, hoping Sava

“Da

“That or a nagging ex-wife,” I said.

Sava

I asked how they met.

“We were at the Beverly Center,” Da

“He not only covered the repairs to my car,” Sava

“Seven actually,” he said, correcting her.

“Seven? Wow. How do you stand that kind of excitement?”

Katz didn’t appreciate my humor. “And what is it that you do, Mr. Logan?”

“Me? As little as possible.”

He smiled thinly, turned to Sava

“Anytime. Call me.”

He nodded curtly to me, eased himself into his Mercedes and drove away. Alameda went back inside. Sava

“Why do you have to be such an overbearing dick all the time?”

“How long have you known this guy?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks. So what?”

“He just happens to run into your car and leaves you a note? You don’t know what his story is, Sava

Buddhists don’t believe they’re punished for their anger. They believe they’re punished by their anger. At that moment, I was being punished by both. I unloaded on my former wife like a drill instructor addicted to Red Bulls. Wasn’t she the one who said she was getting strange phone calls and afraid someone was shadowing her? Wasn’t she the one who said she feared for her safety and mine?