WICKS DROVE THE big Dodge. I stared out the windshield. Just after nine at night, and I should have been home with Olivia. Not being there to see that she was all right, to talk to her about Derek, hollowed out my gut and left me empty. To counter the feeling, to shove it aside, all I needed to do was think about the tape recording of Borkow talking to someone on the street, arranging to put Olivia in danger for the sole purpose of drawing me out of the courtroom. I wanted to tear Borkow apart, make him wish he’d never heard the name Johnson. And I would. He didn’t have long to wait before I came up on him, took him by the neck, and squeezed.
He had to be the first priority now.
I rolled down the window to let in the warm summer evening. I couldn’t shake the cloying scent that had hung heavy inside the Grand Orchid. Too many perfumed candles and incenses had ended their lives in that place. They lit them in an attempt to mask the lack of hope and despair and hide the odor of the sexually deviant. The sickening sweet odor clung in an invisible sheen, thick as a gel, to the walls and floors and curtains. Now it permeated my clothes and skin. It’d linger there for a day or two as nothing more than an ugly afterthought.
As soon as the glass door came down and I stepped inside, I knew we’d find the place empty. Anyone who could plan such an audacious jail escape was not going to be found that easily. We were going to have to dig him out of his hidey-hole, and it would take a lot more than shoe leather to do it. It’d take a similar cunning, a criminal wit.
At the same time, something niggled at the back of my brain. That feeling only came around when I’d missed something, usually something big. I played back everything we’d done since we left the courthouse, all the houses we’d hit, all the people we shook down, but nothing bubbled up. The Grand Orchid, for some reason, bothered me. Maybe it was the odor. Or maybe it was the many individual rooms with the beds and rumpled towels strewn about, the hidden cameras that captured the multitude of sex acts to be sold on an even broader market. Or the idea of all the women that were needed to run an operation that size. The terrible waste of life. And for what?
No, it was something else. I’d missed something important.
“What are you thinking, big man?”
I didn’t answer, just watched the houses zip past in a blur of speed. Everything was bathed in orangish-yellow sodium vapor streetlights that fought back the encroaching darkness, the place where evil lurked. Locked gates and wrought iron on windows and doors buttoned the houses up tight. Some of the yards had oscillating sprinklers working hard to keep the dry summer heat from killing the rest of their lawns, the only evidence of life inside waiting out the dawn.
“Bruno, my friend, you’re too wrapped up right now. You got the scent of revenge in your nose and you can’t smell anything else. You’re running too hot. Back it down a couple of notches and refocus. Think about how we’re going to find this little puke. You’ve got to be able to visualize it.”
He knew me like a brother and could read me like a spouse. I missed working with him.
He put his hand on my shoulder and shoved. “Hey, anybody in there? Talk to me, my fine Negro friend. Fire up that brilliant man-hunting brain of yours and let’s put this guy on a slab.”
“Why don’t we pick this up in the morning, all right? Just take me home. We’ll get him tomorrow after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
“Hey, come on now, it’s too early to call it a day. You got any ideas at all? ’Cause I’m drawing a big zero here and the clock’s tickin’. I have to report to the deputy chief in less than an hour and I better have something for him or he’s gonna hand me my ass in a hat.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a few ideas, but I need to get home tonight. I need to talk to Olivia. It’s important.”
“Didn’t you call your dad to look after her pending the outcome of this operation?”
“Don’t try and come between me and my daughter, Robby. You’ll lose.” I never called him by his first name. He didn’t like it. He even preferred “Asshole” over his first name.
We drove for a couple of minutes more. His jaw muscles worked as he suppressed his anger. “Okay, I’ll take you home. Just tell me what you got in mind. I’ll work on it through the night, and if we don’t get him by morning, I’ll pick you up bright and early.”
He was playing me. He knew I wanted to be in on the take-down—that I had to be in on the takedown. He was trying to push my buttons, and it was working. I needed to push back.
I looked over at him. “Alienating other members of this department isn’t going to help find this guy. You were never like that when we used to run together.”
He looked at the road, looked at me, then back at the road. “What the hell are you talking about now?”
“We need to work with, and get along with, the other members of this department.”
“Agreed, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We should’ve waited for SWAT to clear that building. That’s what they were there for.”
“You goin’ soft on me, big man, is that it? Were you afraid to go in there after a weasely piece of shit like Borkow? He’s a skinny little pencil-neck, know-nothin’ white boy. How tough can he be?”
“You know better than that. Going in before SWAT made them look like a bunch of idiots. You couldn’t leave it at that; you had to go and flip off the team lead.”
“What? Oh, no, no. You got that all wrong. It’s not what you think. I know the guy. I flipped him off because he wasn’t supposed to be going in on that raid in the first place. And he knew it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lieutenants are supposed to stay at the Incident Command Center and direct the op. When the captain’s not around, that cowboy takes the lead. His boys love him for it. That was Lau. He and I went through sergeant’s school together. He’s a real comer and he’s going to be the sheriff one day, you wait and see if he’s not. You’d be smart to hook your wagon to that rising star.”
“Lieutenant Lau?” I asked, my voice more a croak.
Nicky Rivers’ husband.
The Nicky Rivers who I had a thing for. The Nicky Rivers who I’d already kissed too many times and twice more passionately than the others.
When the SWAT team had passed by, I hadn’t seen his face well enough to identify him. He’d had his goggles on and his balaclava covering his head under a Kevlar helmet. I didn’t know how Wicks could identify him well enough to flip him the bird. Maybe it was Lau’s voice when he called us assholes, uttered with complete contempt as he went by on our way out of the Grand Orchid.
“You okay, partner?” Wicks asked. “You look like you just ate a bad taco or something.”
“Yeah, you’re right, my stomach’s a little sour.”
“I’ll drop you off and pick you up in the morning. We’ll get an early start, say oh-dark-thirty. Now tell me what you got.”
“What?” My mind had shifted from Olivia to Nicky and then to Lieutenant Lau. I had inadvertently got myself into a real mess. But it wasn’t too late to extricate myself, and, hopefully, without anyone finding out. If the department at large somehow got wind of my indiscretion, it would compound the problem tenfold.
“Come on, gimme your best ideas about how to take down this puke.”
“Alright. Listen, I … ah. You remember that place over in Torrance, right on the border of Hawthorne? The one we hit when we were looking for T-Dog—you know—Roy McKinney?”
“No, I don’t. But keep talking.”
“A massage parlor that belongs to Borkow over off Hawthorne Boulevard, where McKinney used to go to get a rub-and-tug. You remember, the Willow Tree.”
“Okay, we hit that one already today. Zero. Zip. And?”
“Back then there was a woman working there. I remembered her when we were in there today looking for Borkow.”
“Buddy boy, all they got working in massage parlors are women. You’re gonna have to gimme a little more.”
“You going to smart off or do you want to hear this?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“When we were looking for T-Dog, we talked to everyone in the place. We pulled them all aside and talked to them individually.”
“Okay, I remember that. And?”
His eyes diffused as his mind worked on another problem, probably trying to remember the event I described.
“This one girl wore a real nice pair of pumps.”
Wicks snapped his fingers. “That’s right, now I know the T-Dog you’re talking about. He was an Avalon Gangster Crip, who’d gunned his two nephews over a half pound of coke. We got him on 133rd east of Wilmington. You took down that door hard. Old T-Dog was sleepin’ on the couch, and he jumped straight up into the air like a cat with a firecracker up its ass.” Wicks laughed. “I remember how big his eyes got, huge. He was so scared he crapped himself.”
“That’s him.”
“He’s doin’ time now and he’s never gonna get out. How’s he gonna help find Borkow if he’s in the joint?”
“No, you missed what I’m saying here. The girl, she was wearing a pair of shoes worth two or three grand.”
Wicks looked over at me and smiled. “I gotcha. You’re saying girls in massage parlors don’t wear shoes like that. So she has to be one of Borkow’s Ho Chi mamas.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah.” Wicks shook his head. “But if she is one of his special girls, and she does happen to know where Borkow is laying his head, he has to trust her a lot. She isn’t going to just flip and talk to us. We’re gonna need a twist on her.”
“Or?”
“Or what?”
“We can get a wiretap on her place and—”
He snapped his fingers again. “And tickle the wire.”
I nodded and smiled.
“That’s brilliant. It’s going to be a lot of bullshit paperwork, but that’s truly a brilliant idea. Especially since we got nothing else. What’s the name of this broad?”
“Her name’s not an easy one to forget. It’s Lizzette.”