How is that other cop? Cutter messaged Difiore. The one who got shot in the hospital.
Did you shoot him?
No!
Why do you care, then?
I was there to save Lasko!
How did you know it would go down?
I can’t tell you.
Why should I believe anything you say?
Because, he replied spiritedly, I seem to be the only one who’s doing something!
Why don’t you get back to doing something, in that case, she texted sarcastically, instead of wasting my time.
He had no reply to that and checked the green dots on his screen. Both Zohrab and Janikyan were still in their locations.
I can’t repeat yesterday’s move. They’ll be alert to it. Is there an Armenian Bros cache that I can strike and force him to talk to me?
He sucked his breath sharply when the call came. Number withheld. That could be Covarra or Janikyan.
‘That was some move yesterday,’ the Armenian Bros leader said coldly. ‘No one has ever touched me, other than my own men—’
‘I didn’t touch you,’ Cutter reminded him. ‘I hit you. I should have buried the claws of that hammer in you.’
‘There won’t be a next time for you. There will be for me, however. I’ll dangle you from a meat hook, upside-down, and rip your body—’
‘That’s what Covarra said he’d do to me, too. Do you two compare notes? He threatened a lot, and what happened? He lost a lot of his drugs and men. I’m still free, but he—’
‘This is not Iraq or Afghanistan or Cameroon,’ Janikyan swore. ‘This is my city. My people have eyes and ears everywhere. You can’t escape, you can’t hide—’
‘Did you kill my friends?’
‘I’ll watch you bleed—’
‘Did you shoot them? Did you rape them?’
‘You don’t know what you’ve got yourself mixed up in. You should have left the city after the funeral.’
‘You,’ Cutter fought to control his rage, ‘are a gangster. A small one. You are nothing but a sewer rat—’
‘Enjoy your freedom, Grogan. It won’t last. The next time we speak it will be—’
‘Did you kill them?’
‘You’ll have to meet me to know that,’ and with that the Armenian hung up.
Cutter brooded for a moment before jamming the phone in his pocket. The call had given him an idea. There’s someone who might know where the Bros operations are.
He had to gear up appropriately for that, however.
‘I need a van,’ he told Beth and Meghan when he got them on a call.
‘You can steal one. Why do you need us for that?’ the elder sister asked.
‘This one is different. It has to be a gas company van.’
‘You want to go as a gas technician?’ Meghan mocked him. ‘You’ve been reading too many pulp thrillers—’
‘It’s the third house on the left on Apple Street, in Mid-City,’ he interrupted, before she or Beth started ribbing him. ‘It’s used by Street Front as a store.’
‘You know this, how?’ Beth commanded. He could hear keys clicking in the background.
‘Not important.’
‘Got it,’ she said softly, almost to herself. He could picture her and Meg in their New York office, intense concentration on their faces as they brought up satellite images of the street.
‘SoCalGas is the energy supplier to that house,’ the older twin informed him. ‘You’ll need their van, or one that looks like theirs, their uniform …’ she trailed off.
‘We’ll need to log him in their system,’ Beth told her, both of them talking as if he didn’t exist.
‘Yeah, we can do that. We can hack into it—you can’t be alone. Their technicians rarely go out on their own.’
Who can I take with me? Cutter frowned as he thought hard and smiled to himself when it came to him.
‘You can get uniforms for me and another person? He’ll be about an inch shorter than me, about the same build.’
‘We can get you an Abrams tank.’
They probably mean it, too.
‘Give us three hours,’ Meghan told him. ‘We’ll text you where you can find the van, the uniforms, the equipment inside, everything you’ll need.’
‘How are you able to organize this stuff when you’re not in the city?’
‘You’ll never know that.’
‘Why are you folks helping me this much?’
‘We want you alive long enough for Difiore to slap cuffs on you.’
They chortled when he had no comeback to that and hung up.
‘No!’ Isaiah Limon shook his head firmly. ‘I have no idea who you are, what crazy stuff you’re up to. You got me to crash into a car on Sadler, I did that for you. I gave you my cab—’
‘And you got paid well for that.’ Cutter fanned himself with bills. ‘These bennys,’ he added, looking pointedly at the hundred-dollar notes in his hand, ‘are yours. You need to drive a van for me. That’s all.’
‘Nope. Nada. Read my lips. Where’s my car?’
‘I see you got a new one. Why do you need another?’
‘Go.’ The driver gesticulated angrily and took a breath when that got the attention of a few travelers at LAX-it. ‘I don’t want to see you anymore.’
‘My heart’s broken,’ Cutter told him solemnly. ‘I thought you and I had a thing going on.’
Limon looked at him as if he had lost his senses.
‘You’ve earned more money by helping me than by driving people around.’
‘I’m alive, I’m not arrested. That matters to me,’ the cab driver retorted.
‘You’ll be all of that, and richer, if you come with me.’
‘Come where?’
‘To Mid-City.’
‘And do what?’
‘Nothing,’ Cutter told him innocently. ‘You just need to sit in a van and look official.’
‘Official? Like what?’
‘Like a gas technician.’