The Gauntlet June 29
Dunne stood in the alley behind the bar. He pictured Starrell facing down Lancette’s assailant. Inside he had been told that Lopez was in the basement with the plumber and would not see him.
He picked up a broken brick and threw it toward a window. The glass shattered. He waited a few seconds and hurled a stone through another closed window. The back door opened. A man wearing spandex shorts shouted at him.
“What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Please tell Mr. Lopez I’m waiting for him,” Dunne said.
Dunne found another rock and tossed it hard toward a basement window. It skipped against the ground and crashed into the glass.
“You’re fucking crazy,” the man shouted at him. “He’s gonna kill you.”
“Tell him I’m waiting.”
Thirty seconds later, Lopez burst through the back door.
Shit, he’s big, Dunne thought. Starrell hadn’t exaggerated.
Lopez took two strides toward Dunne before he saw the gun Dunne was holding. He came to a stop.
“You’re a dead man,” he said.
“Turn around,” Dunne said.
“Deader than dead,” Lopez said.
Lopez faced the brick wall. Dunne pushed Lopez against it. Dunne noticed several men standing by the back door.
“Stay back,” Dunne yelled at them.
They did not move. He lowered his voice so only Lopez could hear him.
“I imagine they have standing orders not to call the police unless you tell them to.”
“Something like that,” Lopez said.
He shoved the gun barrel into the back of Lopez’s neck.
“Tell them to go back inside,” Dunne said.
“Leave this fuck to me,” Lopez shouted at them. “But he pulls any shit, you call the cops and the whole wide world and tell them that Clarence Dunne, the asshole in charge when Hanover was wasted, went nuts behind a gay bar.”
The men went inside and closed the door.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Dunne said.
He backed away from Lopez and told him to turn around. Dunne kept the gun trained on him.
“To what do I owe this fucking pleasure?” Lopez asked.
“Just tell me where to find the man who used to work here, the one with the glass eye, the scar on the ear.”
“First the mystery girl and now you.”
“No bullshit,” Dunne said. “You told her you weren’t the owner when he worked here. That’s not what the liquor board says.”
“Very good, Dick Tracy. And if I don’t cooperate you’re going to blow me away? I don’t think so. That would make this a very bad month for you, seeing how about a dozen witnesses would send your black ass away.”
“You’re smart for a former government man,” Dunne said.
He lowered the gun. Lopez waited for Dunne to say more.
“It’s amazing what you can find out when you ask a few friends in the bureaucracy to check a name … . Born in Wilmington, Delaware. Marines. Then U.S. Army. Special Forces. Detailed to South Korea. Then the Philippines, counterinsurgency. Then to Afghanistan. A TDY for the Agency, I’m guessing. Trained the mujhadeen. Distinguished write-ups. But there was one problem. The Hekhtabar clan you were advising developed a creative method for financing its war against the Soviets. They learned that a supply line can work in both directions—in and out. And a DEA agent was paying attention. He tracked a supply from Mexico to Paris to Peshawar and to the Badakhshan hills controlled by Hekhtabar. He even turned a courier, who told him about an American—a very big American—who was helping out back home. The agent forwarded the case to Justice and waited. Nothing happened. Most DEA agents learn not to push inconvenient cases. But this guy was a real ballbuster. He kicked and screamed. He didn’t get his way, and it was suggested that his career might flourish elsewhere. He took the advice—but not before making sure there was a paper trail. It was classified, but at least it was there. And his last accomplishment: finding out the name of that American he never got to question—Ernest Ivan Lopez. I bet your Afghan friends got a kick out of the Ivan. But they probably didn’t know your real name anyway.”
Lopez’s jaw was clenched.
“I wasn’t involved in no heroin shipments,” he said.
“But you knew,” Dunne said. His tone was between that of a question and a statement.
“I wasn’t involved, I said. You go to the end of the earth and help some rag-heads who are up against the second biggest military power in God’s entire fucking universe. I was sent to help them kick Moscow butt, not to examine every package on every stinking mule train.”
“Fair enough. But don’t you think Mr. Hekhtabar might have thought your presence meant they had a degree of protection?”
“No one ever told them that. I sure as hell didn’t.”
“Not all societies are as plain-speaking as ours … . Anyway, Mr. Lopez, I didn’t drop by tonight to rehash old ground. I came to ask for your help.”
“You have a pretty damn funny way of asking for it. And if I don’t help, what are you going to do? Sic the DEA on me?”
“No. But what do you think might happen if that DEA report somehow ended up with a reporter and a story came out? Imagine it: local bar owner once advised CIA-backed drug traffickers. I suspect the District liquor board might be interested. And so would all those community activists who claim the CIA has been working with drug dealers and flooding inner-city neighborhoods with shit and pain. You can read this stuff all the time in the local black papers—which you may not get around to. You see, Mr. Lopez, these people are desperate to explain the devastation that’s struck their communities. You and I know they overstate the argument. But what would happen if they had a real-life symbol of their dark speculations? One living and working in their own neighborhood.”
Dunne did not actually possess a copy of the DEA report. A friend at DEA had read him portions over the phone. But judging from the look on Lopez’s face, he concluded the report was accurate. Paper wars—that’s what we fight in Washington, Dunne thought. Bloodless battles of leaks.
The tension in Lopez’s body lessened. He dropped his shoulders.
“Fucking extortionist,” he said. “I don’t deal with scum.”
“Not asking for a deal. Just asking for help.”
“I don’t help people who think they can blackmail me.”
His pride was talking now, Dunne thought. Not his head.
“I’ll say please, then,” Dunne said. “Please tell me where to find him. That’s all. Then he can tell me whatever he wants to. You know him? You worked together?”
“Semper fi, man.”
“You knew Raymond DeNoefri?”
“Yeah.”
“Heard what happened to him?”
“Yeah … . That fucking black kid who came in here—he’s part of this, too?”
“He was helping me. Raymond ever talk to your friend, the one with the glass eye?”
Lopez did not reply. Dunne asked again.
“They say Raymond pissed off the wrong people,” Lopez said. “Told them he didn’t want any partners. You don’t do that.”
“Maybe. Maybe it was something else. Was he a friend of yours?”
“Shit, man, you stand behind a bar in a straight joint and every god-damn sad-sack you pour a glass for thinks you’re his A-number-one best bud of all time. What do you think happens in a gay bar?”
“And I’m guessing that friend of yours might know something about Raymond, too?”
“You do a lot of guessing, man.”
“These days I have to. Have you asked him about Raymond? What does he think?”
Lopez tugged on his beard.
“I don’t speak for nobody but me.”
Acknowledgment, Dunne thought, that Lopez knew the man with the glass eye.
“So let me ask him myself,” Dunne said.
Lopez was silent.
“Raymond was ex-Marine, right? Hanover was a decorated vet. How about some semper fi for them?”
Lopez crossed his arms.
“Come on,” Dunne said. “Take me to see him. Kick my black ass, if you don’t like how it goes down. Unless you already know everything, you got to be curious, too.”
“I stopped being curious. It’s bad for business.”
“You know the girl that was killed with the reporter in the Mayflower? She worked for Raymond.”
Dunne paused to let Lopez absorb that fact.
“You see the picture here?” Dunne asked. “I know you do. The asshole who killed the President murdered a young woman who happened to work for your pal Raymond, who then was murdered in the comfort of his own home. And your friend with the glass eye, somehow he’s messed up in all this.”
Lopez kicked a tin can to the side of the alley.
“Please, Mr. Lopez. Semper fi for everyone.”
Dunne placed the gun back in its shoulder holster.
“Alright,” Lopez said.
He opened the back door and shouted that he would be gone for an hour or so. He then headed out of the alley; Dunne followed.
“Got a few apartments around the corner,” Lopez said. “Crash pads for customers. A place to go if they’re too drunk or they need privacy.”
“And he used to work for you?”
“Yeah, a few years back. Odds and ends. Working the door. Security. But it didn’t work out. He hates fags.”
“In the service together?”
“Fort Bragg and Korea …”
“And?”
“Afghanistan. He passed through … It’s a fucking cliché. But I owe him for some major shit.”
“And now.”
“Burn-out city. You’ll see. Can’t do much of anything. Got some pension or something. Been through some heavy stuff. I was just trying to watch his back.”
“And his name?”
Lopez ignored the question. The two walked up 5th Street and made a right on M Street.
“So why all the Marines and other military jocks at your place?” Dunne asked.
“Guys who started it were jarheads. Word got out: a safe place to go for fags in uniform when they were out of uniform. If you’re a new puppy at the Eighth Street barracks, you hear about the Gauntlet in the first week.”
“And he hates homosexuals, but you and he—”
“Hell, this is just a business opportunity for me. That’s all.”
They came to a small apartment building. Lopez took out his keys, but he saw that the lock was broken. With a push, the door opened.
“It’s not Georgetown,” Lopez said. “Proximity. Not style.”
The light in the front hallway was dim. The bulb shined through a discolored glass covering. The paint on the walls was peeling off in sheets. They took the stairs to the fourth floor. Lopez stopped before a door that had a three-foot-high paper cross taped to it.
“His idea,” Lopez said.
He knocked on the door. There was no answer. They could hear the sound of talking coming from within the apartment. He knocked again.
“It’s me,” Lopez said.
No one responded. Lopez unlocked the door and opened it slowly. He placed a hand on Dunne’s shoulder, indicating he wanted him to stay in the hallway. He then stepped into the apartment.
“So you’re saying that if we reinstituted school prayer, teenage pregnancy rates would drop—”
Sounds like a radio, Dunne thought.
A piece of the wooden doorjamb exploded; Dunne ducked.
“You little fuck!” he heard Lopez yell.
Dunne peered into the room. Lopez was striding toward a man sitting in an easy chair facing the door. Lopez raised his right arm and grabbed a pistol from the man in the chair. There was a silencer on the gun.
“You dumb bastard!” Lopez screamed at him. “You fucking dumb bastard!”
Dunne walked into the studio apartment. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes. The bed was unmade. Empty bottles were scattered. A loud-playing radio was on the floor next to the bed and tuned to a talk show. Lopez clicked it off.
Dunne took an inventory of the man in the chair. Pushing forty. Receding hair. Scar on the right ear. The left eye was the odd one. A pug nose. His mouth tilted to the left. Patchy stubble covered his face. Stocky. He wore military-style boots, jeans, and a black T-shirt with the name of what Dunne assumed was a heavy metal band.
“Man, what’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry, Big. Thought you were somebody else.” He spoke in a slow drawl.
“It’s fucking hard to mistake me for anyone else, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
The man’s arms hung limply over the sides. Boozed up, Dunne thought. Lopez sat on the bed. He signaled for Dunne to pull over a wooden chair.
“This man here wants to talk to you,” Lopez said. “He used to be at the White House. You don’t have to tell him anything you don’t want to. Okay?”
“Sure,” the man mumbled.
Dunne noticed that Lopez had not used the man’s name.
“My name is Clarence Dunne,” he said.
“I seen you on the television,” the man said.
“Could well be.”
“They said you fucked up or something.”
“Yeah.”
“I fucked up, too.”
“How’s that?” Dunne asked.
The man picked up a bottle of rum lying on the floor. He held the bottle in front of his face. There was a puddle at the bottom. He put the bottle to his lips and sucked out the contents.
“I was born,” he said.
“Did you know Raymond DeNoefri?” Dunne asked.
“I don’t want to talk about none of that.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“How you fucking sign up for duty, trust the fuckers, and then they fuck you up the ass. You know what I mean?”
“I think so. Which fuckers do you have in mind?”
“All of them.”
He looked at the floor, searching for a bottle that wasn’t empty.
“Let me,” Dunne said.
He spotted an unopened bottle of rum on the kitchen counter. Next to it was a plastic cup. Dunne rinsed out the cup in the yellow-stained sink. He opened the rum and poured out half a glass.
“Don’t you think he’s had enough?” Lopez asked.
Dunne had hoped that Lopez would protest.
“Fuck you, Big,” the man said.
“I want him to be comfortable,” Dunne said.
He gave the cup to the man.
“So tell me about the fuckers,” Dunne said. He took a pen and a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. The man didn’t pay attention to that.
“You know. You do your job. You do it straight-up. Then they say, hey boy, you’re a good old boy, we got something real damn special for you. Ain’t no one going to know about it. Can’t tell your folks. But if they knew they’d be real proud of their boy. Real fucking proud. Just like when you sacked the quarterback from Talladega and won the championship. You know?”
He gulped the rum.
“Or when they first saw you when you came home from Basic in your uniform. Like you were fucking superman. A god-damn Marine.”
He looked hard at Dunne and scratched the ear with the scar.
“Best friend in Basic was a colored boy, he was.”
“What was this special something they had for you?” Dunne asked.
“Ain’t even got a name. Like it don’t exist. If you work for something that don’t exist, what’s that mean? You don’t exist, right?”
“Right,” Dunne said.
“Fucking right. They brought us in, from all over. Destroyed all our records. Said, you boys don’t exist. But you do. Gave us special-ass training. Then said, you do the stuff no one else can do. You know, the stuff we can’t do ah-fish-al-lee. You know?”
“Yes, I do. When was this?”
“Back when I had two eyes … Told us to not use our real names anymore or say where we was from. Hell, we was no longer Americans. Turned me into a fucking Canadian … Shit, there’s no more beer. Maybe we all should go to Big’s place. It’s full of Marine-fags, you know?”
Dunne nodded and kept scribbling in the notebook.
“We weren’t fags. Man, we did the ugliest shit they had.”
“Where?”
“All over the fucking planet. We popped this guy in Hong Kong. He was selling high-tech shit to the Chinks. I don’t know what it was. In Germany, we torched this office and five-fingered a bunch of files. Most of it was in the Middle East, man. All those A-rabs, man. Took out some crazies. Then the shit went down. Where I bought all this. Became One-Eyed Jack, Jack.”
He finished the rum in the cup. Dunne poured more. Lopez was sitting quietly on the bed.
“Tell me about it,” Dunne said.
“Fucking Tangiers. The deal was, take out the boys running this one group. You know, the fucking Holy Warriors. But, you know, don’t be so clean about it. Make it look like a pissing match between the towel-heads. Right? So it’s fucking obvious, man: a car bomb. But it all got all fucked. The night before, they packed it in and moved. So our intel was no good. Then the damn thing went off before we even got it there. Don’t know fucking why. Wasn’t my thing. I didn’t do demo. But it did. Took out a whole damn block. Killed something like twenty-seven people. Bunch of those beggar-kids they got everywhere. Couple of Americans. Like what the fuck were they doing there? And we lost half of our fucking team. I was a trailer. Got caught in the blast. A fucking mess. Three of us left, including T. L.”
“T. L.?” Dunne asked.
“Team leader,” Lopez answered.
“He was a-o-fucking-kay. Mattie got his face beat up.”
“Mattie?”
The man went on: “Broke his nose and a cheekbone or something. Fucking changed his face. Me—mostly just the fucking eye, and screwed up my leg. Shattered some shit. T. L. dragged both of us out. I don’t remember that too good. Got us a doctor somewhere. Don’t remember all of that either. Then we had to get out of the fucking country. Left behind all this shit. Sat-phones. C-4. We fucking drove across it. Hell yes, I remember that. Every fucking bump. Thought I was going to die.”
“And they brought you back to the States?” Dunne asked.
“Not right then. First to Germany. Saw some doctors there. They gave me this eye. It ain’t glass, you know. Some high-tech plastic. Then back to the States. Put us up in different hotel rooms. Kept us apart. Lots of questions. Then they said, man, that’s it. See ya, don’t wanna be ya. A five-hundred-a-week pension. Straight into a bank account. Don’t even know from where. No taxes. And no medals. Can’t be no ah-fish-all record, they said. Jesus Christ, even when I asked for help they gave me the
middle of the doughnut, you know. Come around, hold my hand, take off. Then they said I had to stop calling the number we had. That’s all I had. No names, just one number. They disconnected the damn thing.”
“Who knew about your outfit?”
“No one. They said the President knows. They said the numero uno at the CIA knows, the one who’s dead now, but no one else there’s supposed to know. You ain’t really CIA they said. They wanted to make sure we know that. And they said some fools in Congress know. Guess that’s where they got the funny money.”
He knocked back the rum.
“And the other two?” Dunne asked.
“Went separate ways. Until … Well, I ain’t never seen one of them, T. L., and …”
He was drifting. He started looking at his hands. He turned sharply toward Lopez.
“You ain’t taking my gun,” he said.
“I’m not giving it to no drunk,” Lopez replied.
“Okay,” Dunne said, trying to gain control. “Okay. You never saw T. L. But the other one?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” the man said.
Dunne ignored his reply.
“You saw him again, right?” he said.
There was no response.
“Do you have a tattoo on your chest?”
Still, no response.
“An M with an arrow going through it?” Dunne asked.
The man’s eyes widened.
“Oh shit,” Lopez said softly.
“Where’d you get it?” Dunne asked.
“No need-to-know.”
“Can I see it?”
“Fuck you. You a fag?”
Lopez stood up.
“I’d like to see it, too,” he said.
“Told you that would happen if you stuck around those fags for so long,” the man said. He tried to laugh.
Lopez picked up the hunting knife that was on the night table next to the bed. He grabbed the man by the shirt and pulled on the collar.
“Fuck you, Big,” the man said. But he did not resist.
Lopez stabbed the knife into the edge of the shirt and sliced the material. He ripped the shirt apart. The tattoo was on the left side of his chest.
Exactly the same place, Dunne thought.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Cairo,” he said. “It’s not really an M, just looks like one. The guy told us it was an old symbol that protected warriors from getting shot.”
“You and …”Dunne said.
“You fucking know … . Me and … Mattie and …”
“The team?” Dunne asked.
“Yeah, the whole team,” the man muttered. “Except for the black one. Said something about not wanting to make his momma cry …”
The man coughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“And it was Mattie who shot President Hanover?” Dunne asked.
The man grabbed the bottle from Dunne and took a long gulp. He positioned the hanging pieces of the T-shirt over the tattoo. Dunne repeated the question.
“I didn’t know nothing about that,” the man said. “Not a god-damned thing. He didn’t tell me nothing. Just came to town. Found me’cause when I was all blasted up and they were trying to get me a doctor, I thought I wasn’t gonna make it, so I gave him my dad’s phone number. Wasn’t supposed to do that. Violation of the rules, you know. The fucking rules. But I wasn’t checking out like that without someone telling my dad what went down. I don’t care what they said. You got a right to know what happens to your son, right? So they split us up and all this time goes by—and a few weeks back, he calls my dad and gets my number up here. I got this room over in Arlington. Off Wilson. Too close to the damn highway. Thought I had me a job, too, with this company that goes overseas and tells American companies how to protect their dumb-fuck executives. But it didn’t come through. Man, I can’t tell them what I did for two years, you know.”
“Doesn’t make it easy,” Dunne said.
“Fucking-A.”
“So Mattie shows up …”
“Yeah. He comes to town. Calls me up. Asks to stay at my place. Sure, I say. What the fuck do I know? Tells me he was in Africa. Doing ops for this South African company. I’m thinking weapons shit. But he don’t say. He says he just got back. He ain’t acting alright. But he doesn’t say nothing about it. Not that he’s nuts. But I think he’s leaning too far into the well. Talking to himself. I see him do this twitchy thing. And it really pisses him off when it happens. Had a thick bushy beard. Guess he shaved it off right before he—”
He tapped the side of the chair with his right hand.
“Says his dad just died. And he goes on about how he hates all the fuckers that did this to us. And all the fuckers who did something to his dad. And, man, he sees the President on the television, and he starts cussing. Like he was the one that fucked us, man. But he don’t say nothing about doing anything about it. Swear to God, man.”
The man crossed his arms and held himself. He hunched forward. Dunne thought he was close to crying. He wondered if tears would come out of the socket containing the eye made of high-tech plastic.
“And then what?” he asked.
“He stayed at the place. Went out a few times. Said he had things to do.”
“And he asked for help?”
“I fucking told you,” he shouted. “I didn’t know anything about that.”
He swung his arms and knocked the bottle of rum. It flew off his lap and landed on the wood floor. The rum flowed into the floorboards.
“Shit,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“So what did he ask you to do?” Dunne asked.
“Said he needed a woman. Said he would pay. Not for him. But for some business associate.”
“You fixed him up with Raymond, who you knew from the bar?”
“But I didn’t know what it was all about. I fucking swear it.”
“And then?”
“Then he said he was going away for a few days. But no big deal. Like he was going to be back soon. Left some stuff. In my place. Then he … I bugged out of my place after that.”
He stared into space and rubbed one hand across the stubble on his face. Dunne wrote in the notebook.
“He was a fucking good man. He fucking was.”
“I’m sure he was,” Dunne said. “And his last name?”
“We weren’t supposed to tell each other that. Went by those names they gave us. Like me: Albert Peters. There’s a fucking name for you.”
“It wasn’t Max Bridge? Do you know why he would use that name?”
“No fucking clue—except that we used to sometimes call ourselves the fucking Maxes, like we’re going to take it to the max. It was a joke. That’s why we liked that tattoo. I mean, it looked like an M for Max.”
“Do you know where he was from?”
“A GOB like me.”
Dunne raised his eyebrows.
“Good ol’ boy. You know, another goober. From the South. Don’t know where. Used to talk about fishing and hunting with his dad. Told me he shot a copperhead when he was ten or something.”
“And how did he come to join your team?”
“I figured he’d been sent over from one of the services like I was. But one time—maybe when we were in Berlin—he said he went through Basic in the Marines but it didn’t work out. And never said nothing else about that.”
His eyes were beginning to droop. He was slurring words. What else to ask? Dunne wondered.
“Okay, who ran the team in Washington?”
“Who the fuck knows.”
“Well, you must have talked to someone, right?”
“Yeah. Had one fucking meeting. Told to report to this office in fucking Crystal City. Got there. A bunch of suits—all had soft hands, you can tell—and they ask me these questions. Then gave me money—cash—and told me to check into a hotel down the street and wait. Two days later, a suit came and took me to this house. The others were there. That’s how it began. Never saw one god-damn piece of paper.”
“And the men in the office, no names?”
He scowled at Dunne.
“Who the hell are you?” he said. “No fucking names at all. But, you know, I saw this fellow on the television the other day, looked like one of them.”
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know. He was going into Congress or the White House or something. To talk about all this you-know-what. I don’t know. Like he’s in charge. The sound was off.”
God-damn it, Dunne thought. Could it be?
“Shit, Big, I forgot to tell you, I think I fucked up the television. It don’t get nothing now.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Lopez said.
“And that fellow you saw?” Dunne said.
“Fuck, who knows? My memory’s shot. Can’t even remember all the pussy I got. Told Big that I left my best days and nights in Tangiers. All got blown right out of my head.”
Dunne slid his chair closer to the man.
“Did you kill Raymond?” he asked.
The man lunged and grabbed Dunne by the collar. Lopez jumped off the bed, and wrapped his hands around the man’s wrists.
“It’s okay, okay,” Dunne shouted at Lopez.
Lopez froze, his hands still holding the man.
“I didn’t fucking kill nobody,” the man said.
“Not Raymond? Not because he knew you knew this guy?”
“No-fucking-body,” he growled.
“Not the girl on the bicycle?”
“What are you fucking talking about?”
The man let go of Dunne’s collar. Lopez freed the man’s wrists and backed away.
“What about the woman who was looking for you?” Dunne asked. “The one you grabbed?”
“Didn’t want to be looked for. It’s pretty fucking obvious why.”
“And did you run her off the road?”
“Man, I didn’t want nobody looking for me. Don’t bug me on that. She’s okay, right? And it was Big who got me all worked up about that. He told me that if she kept coming around, I’d have to book.”
Lopez looked at Dunne and shrugged.
“And she ain’t the only one come looking,” the man said.
Dunne moved his chair back.
“What do you mean?”
“After I bivouacked here, I called my landlady, ol’ Nhu Nguyen. Madam Nhu. Vietnamese. Told her I’m not coming back. She said an old friend came’round to see me. Didn’t give a name. That was two days after, you know. I don’t need any more people looking for me. Don’t want any other people. Don’t want them. No, thank you.”
His breathing was becoming heavier. He’s zoning out, Dunne thought.
“What’s your name?” Dunne asked.
“Jimmy,” he said.
“Jimmy who?”
“Jimmy … Jimmy Shit-for-brains.”
He closed his eyes.
Dunne reached out to stir him.
“Let him be,” Lopez said.
“I think we should get him out of here,” Dunne said.
“No way,” Lopez said. “I’m not letting him go anywhere. I’ll keep watch over him.” He picked up the gun. “No one knows he’s here. Only you and me. Besides, your record isn’t too hot.”
“Thanks,” Dunne said.
Lopez pulled a sheet off the bed and draped it over Jimmy.
“He and I don’t put much trust in ah-fish-als,” Lopez said, mimicking Jimmy’s drawl. “I don’t think you’ll get him before the commission. Besides, I wouldn’t be too sure they’d want him there.”
“Then maybe we’ll get him a lawyer. He can do a video affadavit. We’ll keep him protected.”
“Or he can sell his story, right? Why give it away? This is a million dollars for him.”
And for you, too? Dunne thought.
“You knew of this special unit?” Dunne asked.
“Only from what he told me.”
“Ever see proof it existed?”
“Proof? Fuck it. Just look at him.”
“When was it operational?”
“Five years back or so.”
Shit, Dunne thought, when Mumfries ran the Senate intelligence committee.
“Okay, so let me bring a lawyer to see him. Get the story on tape. You
and he can decide what to do with it—as long as it gets out somehow. And you’ll stay with him here until the morning. Deal?”
Lopez picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Get me Sandy,” he said into the receiver.
Jimmy was slumped over in the chair, in a deep sleep, wheezing through his mouth.
“Sandy,” Lopez barked. “I’m not coming back tonight. Got some business. So you’re in fucking charge of the fairies—and the cash at the end of the night. Put it all in the safe. I’ll call in a few hours to check on everything. If any of the assholes from the precinct come by, tell them I’m fucking my brains out with a beauty queen and I’ll be there tomorrow. Got it? Good.”
He hung up and looked at Dunne.
“Deal.”
Dunne took the phone number for the apartment and left. Outside the building, three prostitutes passed him.
“Hey sugar,” one said to him. “Want a date?”
“You can pop the cherry tonight,” another said.
“No thanks,” Dunne replied.
In his car, he took out his cell phone and called the office of the Secretary of the Treasury. He then called another number.
“What’s up?” a voice said.
Dunne recognized the voice. “Don’t say anything. I’m coming by in an hour. I’ll meet you in the front.”