Chapter Thirty Four
“Hey, Nina,” Sergeant Oliver James said. He was a tall, muscled man with the look of a running back, restless eyes that fixed you fiercely, then moved on, always scanning. He favored cheap off the rack suits from J.C. Penney’s or Sears, since it seemed he was always getting torn up, though Homicide detectives weren’t supposed to be wrestling with suspects, they were supposed to be investigators, and not get their hands dirty in the same way as the patrol dogs did. But hey, once a street po-lice, always a street po-lice, and he liked the personal touch.
He liked Nina, or Sergeant Capushek as everybody else called her, too, but he hadn’t been able to get her to give him the time of day. He’d even gone down to the range to hang out, since she spent a lot of her off-duty time drilling holes in targets and shooting for beers with the SWAT boys, and embarrassed himself by not being able to hit the target half the time. He preferred to put the fist and then the boot to his guys, all those years on patrol and he’d never fired a shot, though he’d waved his pistol around plenty. And despite the TV shows, homicide dicks didn’t get to pull their guns very often.
Unlike Nina Capushek, who’d killed an armed robber when she walked in on a robbery in progress not a month into her new job with Lake City, lit him up with six rapid shots from that Glock 21 she carried, all of them in a group small enough to be covered with one hand. When she was asked why she shot him so many times, she’d replied, “He didn’t fall down fast enough to suit me.”
What a woman.
There was a certain challenge that appealed to Oliver, or Olly as his friends called him, to get next to the woman everybody agreed was hot as hell (though that nose had to go…) but wouldn’t give anybody on the PD any play.
But some day…
“James,” Nina said. “You learn how to shoot yet?”
Olly looked off to one side, felt the flush climbing under his pale skin. “Maybe you’ll take me to the range some time and school me.”
“You’d take some schooling. Oozy talk to you about me?”
“He said you were working this guy Darko, the crispy critter we got mixed in with the rest of Sergey Komorov’s crew.”
“Yeah. What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About what the fuck happened here. Why these guys? Why here? Who hit them? Where are they? Is this a turf war? Drug related? What?”
“Don’t want much, do you, Sergeant Capushek?”
“Just enough so I can get on with my job.”
“Darko’s dead.”
“Loot wants me to look into some aspects of this.”
“You working with Homicide?”
“No, I’m not working with Homo-cide, I’m working by myself. So give, or do I have to find a patrolman or junior grade to fill me in? You still running things, or just going through the motions?”
“Jesus. Don’t you ever let up? Can’t we just have a conversation without you busting my balls?”
“We’re not having a fucking conversation. You’re telling me what I need to know to get my job done. So speak, then move along, huh?”
She punctuated that, surprisingly, with a big grin, lips thinning beneath the sprawl of her nose in a way that took Olly completely off guard. He laughed, cautiously.
“Yeah, right. I never know how to take you, Nina.”
“It ever comes to that, it’ll be me taking you, not the other way around, Olly. So give.”
He referred to his notebook for a long moment, let her hang.
“I think it’s guns,” he said. “Komorov is one of the big Lake City dealers, moves a lot of weapons. ATF has been looking at him for a long time, tried to run some undercovers in there, but that didn’t fly…he’s too cautious. We keep an eye on him but haven’t been able to tie anything to him. Russian with the usual clout and juice with the émigrés, involved in loan sharking, rumors of drugs and some white slavery with those nice eastern European girls.”
“Like that, do you?” Nina said. “I always found eastern European porn a bit raw for my tastes. The production standards aren’t up to snuff. If you like that sort of thing.”
His jaw dropped. “Jesus, Capushek!”
Nina laughed. “Just funning you, Olly. Give.”
He shook his head, looked around to see if anybody was listening in on their conversation. Two of the patrol dogs were grinning to themselves, heads carefully turned in the opposite direction.
“Yeah, right,” Olly said. “Okay. So this gun store that got shot up? Belongs to Deon Oosthuizen, South African with a green card. We got a watch on him from FBI and State Department. He’s Mr. Law Abiding Citizen, real devotee of the Second Amendment. Sells guns, always on the up and up, no trouble, pays his taxes and his parking tickets, travels a lot. A lot, which is why the Feds been keeping an eye on him. Some rumors, all unsubstantiated, just gossip from some CIs that he might be a player in the gun biz as well, hooked up with some white supremacist groups from up north, you know the types, cry at Hitler’s birthday anniversary, that type. Our CIs don’t like to talk to him.”
“Where’s he?”
“Hasn’t showed, no answer on his emergency contact number. The ATF form has a secondary form to his insurance agent, who’s been down here already, took some pictures, and asked me to fax the report to her.”
“Where’s he like to hang? Got a residential address?”
“POC address is his lawyer’s. Got a call into him, he says he’ll try to get ahold of him. One of my CIs says he likes to hang out in Moby Dick’s, which is not exactly a testament to his good sense, his associates, or his taste in drinking establishments.”
“I know Moby’s,” Nina said. “I like it down there.”
“You been there?”
“Yeah. I like the ambience.”
“You’re fucking nuts, Nina. I wouldn’t go in that place without somebody to back me up.”
“I don’t have any trouble in there. They got a good bouncer.”
Olly looked at her in surprise. “You know that guy?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“He’s like this guy, Mr. South Africa. Mr. Law Abiding, nothing on record, just again talk from the CIs that he’s some kind of military hard guy, laying low. Supposedly some kind of commando, though he never talks about it.”
“He don’t talk about it, how does your CI know?”
“Probably bullshit. Says some military guys came in there once, he was there, they sat around, talked some war story trash.”
“Huh,” Nina said. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I go down there. This Deon guy, what’s he look like?”
“Tall, 6 plus. Real skinny, around 165 or 170. Blonde hair parted on the left, longish, blue eyes. 43 years old.”
Nina stared into the distance, remembering.
“I might have seen him around,” she said. “So he ain’t showed up?”
“Unavailable, his attorney says. He says he’s trying to run him down.”
“Okay. That gives me a start. So why the OK Corral out here? What’s your theory?”
“Your Loot said that this guy Darko was in that other shooting in Viet Town, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And he ends up dead over here. So pretty obvious it’s more of the same -- look at what’s similar: you got Steep Ride, Mr. Gun-Nut and Captain Drive-By, gets into a major battle with the Hmong Ghost Riders and this guy from Komorov’s crew…and everybody gets laid to waste in a military style ambush that puts out more firepower than Black Hawk Down on our fair streets. So, what the fuck?”
Nina laughed. “Yeah. I see it.”
“Guns and money, money and guns. Lawyers, guns and money. Hey, you like that song? You like Warren Zevon?”
“I think he sings for fags, Olly. You like him?”
“Uh, no. Not really.”
“I bet you sing his songs in the shower don’t you, Olly? Bet you like that other song, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, don’t you, Olly?”
The truth was, Olly did like that song, though he’d never admit it now.
“How do you know his songs?” he said, in a weak attempt at defense.
“I’m not a fag, Olly. So I can listen to his music.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Uh, okay,” she said. “So, I got to go find this Deon guy, ask him some questions, nobody else out here? What was the shooting scene like? Where were they, the guys with all the heavy metal?”
Olly pointed. “That storefront there. Two machine guns, shooting 5.56. Couple hundred casings on the floor in there. Oh, and if there’s any question about it being pros -- no prints on any of the links or cases. And then over there in the parking lot, there were some casings, 7.62 from a heavy machine gun, links also, same for prints. Probably from a truck, but you know, you want to shoot somebody, shoot them in a parking lot, you can’t handle that scene, everything’s contaminated and everything blows in. So we don’t got much. No witnesses to speak of, this is a dead part of town, and when it kicked off everybody ducked for cover. Nothing for nothing.”
Nina looked at the angles of fire, how they intersected and overlapped on the burnt hulks of the vehicles. Pros for sure. Interlocking fields of fire, but not into each other. Somebody who knew how to do this and had done it before.
And somebody who knew Jimmy mixed up in all this.
Interesting.
***
Deon hung up his cell phone. “My lawyer. The cops want me to come down, make a statement.”
“You going?” Marcus said.
“Soon enough. Let them wait a bit.”
Joe flipped through a comic book. The Punisher. “This guy Innis gets the guns right, you ever notice that?”
Marcus laughed.
***
She was gone. She’d insisted on going alone, and for once, Jimmy didn’t argue with her. Let her do what she wanted, he respected that. Something watched over her, and it wasn’t just him.
Her absence filled the room with memories. Her tea cup, the bag neatly folded around a spoon set on the edge of a saucer beside a half-full cup. The carefully folded damp towels in the bathroom after her shower, a hint of lilac from the soap she brought with her. Her smell in the bedroom. The rumpled sheets.
He took his time in the shower, let the hot water run over him. Changed into clean jeans, a soft cotton oxford, rolled the sleeves up. Left his holster, tucked his Glock into his waistband beneath a light cotton pull over against the evening chill, checked his look in the mirror. Like a yuppie.
Young urban pistol packing independent entrepreneur.
Well, maybe not so young.
Everything else, though.
He jumped in his FJ Cruiser, drove slowly downtown, went through the drive through at Starbucks and got a large mocha. Pulled into the parking lot at Moby’s, in the employee slots at the very back of the lot, right next to the service door entrance. In the cool dark of the bar, Thieu and Morgan, her bar back, stacked cases of beer and refreshed the ice in the sink. There were several plastic trays full of fresh limes and oranges set beside a cutting board with a small black handled knife where Thieu had been cutting garnishes for the night.
“Hey, Thieu,” Jimmy said. “Morgan.”
“Hello, Jimmy,” Thieu said. “You early tonight.”
“I’m looking for Deon. He come in?”
“Not yet. You hungry?”
“Yeah. Starving.”
“You want noodle soup?”
“No. How about some egg rolls, not spring rolls, crushed rice and pork?”
“You want iced coffee?”
“No. I got this mocha already. Thanks, Thieu. How you doing, Morgan?”
Morgan was young, maybe 24, quiet and withdrawn, his head concealed beneath a baseball cap he wore 24/7, inside and out, a faded denim shirt and levis, with a Leatherman tool sheathed at his side, battered cowboy boots.
“Good, Jimmy.”
Jimmy studied the younger man with amusement. “You don’t say much, do you, Morgan?”
Morgan shrugged.
“I like that about you.”
Morgan shrugged again.
Jimmy took his coffee to a corner table, sat himself down with a good view of the empty room and the door, sipped his mocha. Took out his cell phone, scrolled through the numbers till he found Deon’s, hit the speed dial.
“Hey, oke,” Deon answered.
“How’d it go?”
“Down to a T, oke. Just like you said it would. Everybody’s down except for Mr. K’s better half, and a few of her domestics. We were thinking a service call out to the farm might be in order.”
Jimmy stared into the distance.
“That just might be in order,” he said. “Let me think about it.”