I STARED IN the mirror at Leroy Gadd and him at me. His lips moved. His words like water cut around me, as if I were a big rock in a small stream. He repeated something. “Long haul or short haul? Hey, you okay, buddy? Ah, ah, Karl?”
“Huh? What? Oh, I, ah, haul produce up from Calexico, mostly lettuce and melons. Seasonal kinda stuff. I half-starve in the winter.”
“You deadhead back down there?”
“Huh? Ah, yeah, not much call for produce trailers goin’ back.”
I didn’t know what to do, how to react.
The redheaded bartender worked a white towel on the bar sopping up the spilt draft beer, smiling at me. Gadd said to her, “Go ahead and get my man here another and put it on my tab.” He put his hand on my back.
I flinched. “No!”
Gadd startled at the abrupt objection to his kind offer. So did the bartender. The others down the way stopped drinking and looked. I couldn’t accept a beer from a cold stone killer, a man who killed two kids and their mother, snuffed out their lives in the most brutal way, with a gun to the back of their heads while they waited in agony, each in their turn waiting for it to happen.
Four years of looking for him and here he sat right beside me. That same man who’d murdered now engaged in enticing more children to rob banks. My right hand shook as I fought the overwhelming desire to pull my gun and pistol-whip him across the head. Knock him to the floor and put the boot to him again and again and again, do it in the most wicked and violent way imaginable.
This wasn’t me. I’d never fostered such thoughts before—going outside the law.
But I had.
A few years ago, on a hot summer night in the ghetto, I’d tracked a hit-and-run driver who’d run a small girl down in the crosswalk, killing her instantly. That night the law protected the offender as he stood in a safe zone on the other side of his threshold, the entry to his house. I couldn’t arrest him while he stood inside. So, in a fit of rage, I reached in through his screen door and yanked him out onto public ground. Robby Wicks had pulled me off the man, or no doubt, I would’ve kicked him to death.
“Hey, pal,” Gadd said, “you feeling okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost or maybe an ex-wife.” He laughed and looked to the redheaded bartender to join him in his joke. She didn’t. Instead, she shot him a fake smile.
“No, it’s cool,” I said. “I think I just ate a bad taco or something.”
“I know how that is, believe me.” He smirked, taking the interpretation of my comment down into the gutter, to the vulgar and the profane.
He spun further on his barstool to face me. He offered his hand to shake, his smile large and genuine, his eyes bright with a phony offer of friendship. “Jonathon Crum—spelled C-R-U-M, not the kind that you get when you eat a dry cookie.” He spoke his lie about his name with the confidence of a true grifter. I couldn’t take his hand. I couldn’t touch him, not without pulling back and smashing his face to pulp with my fist.
But I had to, the job called for it. I gritted my teeth and took his hand. Oddly, it didn’t feel like crocodile skin or slimy like a wet snake, something you’d expect from a character of his ilk. He squeezed with a strength that reminded me that I needed to pay more attention or fall prey as an unsuspecting victim lulled into a false sense of security.
At the same time, my mind spun a thousand miles an hour. Could I arrest him for the murder of that family four years back? I was a witness and could place him at the murder scene. Well, not exactly at the scene, but in the alley to the rear.
Of course, that wasn’t enough. Not yet. The DA would never take a case to trial with one statement and no corroboration.
But at least now I had a name I could take to Compton PD, and they could compare his fingerprints to those at the scene. They could insert his name into their equation, look for a motive, look for opportunity. If they got lucky, they could make Leroy Gadd for those murders and put him away forever. They’d just need a little more time to do it.
Or maybe Gadd had been smart enough to cover his tracks, and even with this new information, this revelation, Compton PD might not be able to put the triple homicide on him.
Would this information affect our operation? No, not if Compton was serious about the murders. They’d quietly go to work on it and not tip their hand until ready. All agencies became deadly serious when it came to murder, and this one was a triple. And if nothing else, clearing three murders with one suspect really softened up the stats. They’d be highly motivated. The smart play for them would be to let our violent crime team continue to follow him until they got the warrant for his arrest, maybe a few days, a week at the most. That was—if the evidence was even there for them to find?
What if Compton tipped their hand and Gadd tumbled to the play? He’d go underground to wait it out. Or he’d flee the country, and there’d be nothing we could do about it but watch as he boarded a plane or drove across the border into Mexico.
The redheaded bartender set another beer down in front of me, just as evil in its purest form slithered into my brain whispering with a superheated breath describing a morally corrupt option: I could tell no one. I could keep this new information to myself and when the time came, which it inevitably would—an opportunity would present itself. If we did our job following around a notorious bank robber, he would eventually take up a gun and then a shoot-don’t-shoot scenario would occur. If I didn’t hesitate, didn’t offer him the opportunity to drop his gun and just—
No. No. That would be wrong on so many levels. Dad had taught me better. To do it that way would make me no better than the morally bankrupt criminal who now sat next to me.
The beer roiled in my stomach and threatened to come up. No. No. I’d sworn an oath to uphold the law. I couldn’t do that, not in cold blood. The opportunity would have to come naturally, a gun in his hand with a warning to drop it—making it my life or his.
He’d lose.