I’d sent Sneak into a gas station to get me an ice pack for my sore head, but she returned with a bag of popsicles that was difficult to mould around my brow, even more so when she extracted one and started sucking on it. I stood in the desert sun with condensation dripping down my face while she read text messages between Officer Lemon and a contact named only ‘D’, which we took to be our missing girl.
LEMON: R we really gonna do this?
D: We give it a try. Y not? Worst case scenario someone finds out and beats us to it.
LEMON: Worst case scenario I end up fired and u end up with ur ass in jail. I said it to u last nite and I’ll say it again now. I WILL turn on u if I have to.
‘What the hell are they talking about?’ I asked.
‘They’re going to commit some kind of crime, clearly.’ Sneak frowned at the phone, sucking her ice pop now and then, which was staining her lips green. ‘We just have to figure out what it is. Bank heist? Murder?’
‘Someone beats us to it,’ I repeated.
‘Here’s a thought,’ Sneak said. ‘Might be crazy. But maybe ten years ago I knew this guy who worked in a station in San Bernardino. A cop. Johnny Reselt. He figured out that every time there was an earthquake, the cameras in the evidence lock-up blinked out. Not for long, maybe twenty seconds. So he gets himself assigned down there. The only way you can get put in the evidence lock-up is by getting in trouble. Bringing the police force into ill repute, for example. So he paid me a grand to get caught with him doing coke in a public toilet. I got a drug charge and he got assigned to the evidence dungeon.’
‘Where is this story going?’ I asked, massaging my stiff neck.
‘Give me a minute. So Johnny’s working in the evidence room. He starts quietly looking around at what they got down there. He figures out that the most high-profile case on the shelves is this rape charge against a local celebrity chef. Pretty famous guy. Does some TV shows, lives in a big house in the mountains. Apparently the chef guy cornered a teenage apprentice and locked her in the freezer room, and wouldn’t let her out unless she gave him a blow job. So Johnny works in the evidence room, waiting patiently for an earthquake. Months go by, but then it comes. When the cameras blink out, he goes into the evidence box for the chef case, nabs the key piece of evidence against the chef and stuffs it in his backpack. It was a shirt, in case you’re wondering. The apprentice’s shirt. Had the chef’s jizz on it.’
‘How does all this relate to Dayly?’ I asked.
‘Johnny sold the evidence bag to the chef for, like, fifty grand.’ Sneak sucked the remnants of her popsicle from the wrapper. ‘Maybe there’s something similar going on here. Dayly and Officer Lemon are teaming up to rob the evidence room.’
‘And they’re worried someone in the station is going to beat them to it?’ I asked. ‘Before the case goes to trial? What are the chances of two crooked cops having the same crazy idea?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever this is, it has to have something to do with cops. Dayly’s not making friends with Crips on one hand and cops on the other.’
‘Or it might just have to do with Lemon himself. The fact that he’s a cop is a coincidence.’
‘I’m just spitballing here.’ Sneak hefted her handbag onto her lap and took a bump of cocaine.
‘Keep reading the messages,’ I said.
‘There’s not much else. Looks like Dayly and Lemon were meeting regularly.’ Sneak scrolled through the phone. ‘They meet . . . four times over the space of three weeks.’
‘How can you tell that?’
‘The messages just say stuff like I’m here and Three minutes. I’m out back. Caught in traffic.’
‘Okay.’
‘There’s a conversation two weeks ago that’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Let me read it to you.’
D: What do you think?
LEMON: He knows his shit.
D: But can we trust him?
LEMON: I’ve looked at jacket. He’s good for this sort of thing. If u want, I can try to get something on him but I don’t think we need to do that. If we piss him off he’s gone and so is whole deal.
‘I’ve looked at jacket?’ I said.
‘His jacket,’ Sneak said. ‘His rap sheet. Lemon has run a check on a guy, whoever it is they’re trying to decide if they can trust.’
The radio in the passenger-side footwell crackled to life. Sneak and I looked at each other as we listened through the open windows.
‘Dispatch, this is L81, can you start me the paperwork on a stolen phone? Some asshole nabbed my cell while I was attending to that 211, over.’
‘Oh, man, Marcus, are you serious? Over.’
‘Yeah. Right out of my cruiser. I’ve checked the surrounding CCTV but I was parked in a blind spot. Witnesses saw a fat blonde woman.’
‘Tough ride.’
‘You said it.’
‘Marcus, while I’ve got you, go show your face at the Mesa, would you? Ronnie’s over there trying to steal bottles from the dumpsters again. In progress.’
‘Be there in five. Over.’
I drove with Sneak to the Mesa Inn, a tiny dive bar nestled in a strip mall between an insurance salesman’s storefront and a pawn shop. The lettering on the front of the building looked reused from a cinema; green block letters on white racks. I parked a good distance from Lemon’s cruiser, knowing that he would recognise the Gangstermobile from the earlier crash if he spotted me in the street. We sat watching as he negotiated the release of a hessian sack full of beer bottles from a man standing in the street behind the bar. Lemon’s manner was gentle. His hands were out, open, appealing. I thought about his voice, warm and encouraging, as he guided my car back onto the road after issuing me a caution for reckless driving, with much professed reluctance. Sneak was leaning wide out her window, squinting in the sun.
‘We need binoculars,’ she said.
‘Police radio. Binoculars. Some GPS trackers. You could get yourself fully set up as a private investigator. Get a licence and start charging for this stuff.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Why not? You’re good at it.’
‘I’m never gonna leave the life,’ she confessed. ‘The street. I was made for it. For falling down over and over. That’s my destiny.’
‘What bullshit.’
Sneak laughed and looked at me.
‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You could change your destiny right now. Change it back to what it was originally, before the accident that wiped you out of the Olympics. You were on track for great things.’
‘So was Dayly.’ She shrugged. ‘And now look. Something’s turned her down the dark path. Maybe it’s genetic. A family curse. I knew a guy once who was cursed. Ex-girlfriend put it on him. He was killed by a pelican.’
‘We don’t know what’s happened to Dayly.’ I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sure, it doesn’t look good, but she might come out of this okay.’
‘They say all that stuff in rehab, you know,’ Sneak said. ‘“You can change your destiny right now”, that kind of thing. They’re all about their quotes. Affirmations. They’ve got them painted all over the walls in pretty colours. Sometimes they put them on bracelets and T-shirts, wear them around. Believe in yourself. Be grateful for every moment. Make a plan and stick to it. Trust the process. Problem is, they’re not from anybody, those quotes. They’re not tried and tested in real life.’
‘Have you got a quote you live by that’s tried and tested, then?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Mike Tyson,’ she said, watching Lemon return to his vehicle. ‘“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”’
I thought about that. About how many wonderful plans I’d had for Jamie and myself before a set of handcuffs snapped shut on my wrists for the first time. Until life itself punched me in the mouth. Sneak righted herself in her seat and flicked a hand in Lemon’s direction.
‘Let’s follow him for a while,’ she said.