Monty was out of his office. I left a message on his voicemail and dialed Carp’s cell, popping the last bit of buttered toast in my mouth as I dropped down to sit on my bed, taking a deep inhale of the mixed smell of hunter, leather, and Were that reminded me again of Saul. My hair dripped. I’d taken a few minutes to reattach all the loose charms, braiding some in with red thread, tying others close to the scalp, and shaking my head to hear the reassuring jingle.
It rang twice. “Carper,” he snarled, the sound of open car windows roaring behind him.
“It’s Jill. You bellowed?”
A full five seconds of silence, and the wind-noise cut down. He must have rolled up his window. “I need to see you. Somewhere private.”
Well, miracles never cease. “I’m a married woman, Carp. What’s up?”
“No shit, Kismet. It’s serious, and I need to see you. Now.” Did he actually sound nervous? It wasn’t like him at all.
I juggled everything in my head, sighed. “Is it a case?”
“It’s the Kutchner case.”
My heart gave a bounce, my innards quivered, and I let out a short sound that might have been a curse if I hadn’t swallowed the last half of it with my mostly chewed toast. Now this is really too much, Carp. Goddammit. “Where?”
“You know Picaro’s, on Fourth?”
It was downtown, a little hole-in-the-wall bar. I was going to have to wear my replacement trenchcoat. “I can be there in half an hour. Care to drop me a clue?”
“Not without seeing you. Try to be inconspicuous.”
I’m a hunter, Carp. I could be standing right next to you and you wouldn’t know, if I wanted it that way. “I’m bringing a friend.”
“Come alone.”
You know, I would if people weren’t trying cut me in half with machine-gun fire or sic scurf on me. A shiver of reaction cooled along my skin, the scar a hard quiescent knot. “Can’t. Don’t worry, it’s one of my people.”
“Fine.” Bad-tempered as usual, he hung up, but not before I heard the click of a lighter and a sharp inhale.
I hope he’s not driving, smoking, and juggling a cell phone. I laid the phone back in its charger. “What the hell is going on?”
The empty air of my bedroom gave no answers. I heard Theron humming as he did dishes, rattling and clinking and sounding so much like Saul tears rose in my throat again.
Jesus. How was it possible to miss someone this much?
I touched the soiled leather of the cuff. He’d left me three, each custom-made with snapping buckles, fitting close to the wrist. This was the last one. I wondered if he’d thought he was going to be home sooner.
Two Weres were dead. Someone had tried to kill me, or kill them. A whole mess of old, contagious scurf—and a hellbreed. Which was like seeing a snake in a beehive—something you don’t expect at all.
What did it mean?
I don’t know. But I’m damn well going to find out.
To get into Picaro’s, you have to go down two flights of stairs from a plain door on the blank side of a skyscraper set in a hill. The main part of the bar doubles as a restaurant, a dim little hole with frayed carpet, sticky-tabled red vinyl booths, and stained-glass lamps hanging everywhere.
Picaro’s main claim to fame is their two-dollar drink specials, and large cheap breakfasts you can nurse a hangover on. Of course, they’re nothing compared to a Were’s cooking, but you take what you can get.
I was actually even contemplating a second breakfast as I slid into the booth opposite Carper, my replacement trench creaking as it folded. There were deep shadows under the deet’s blue eyes, and he’d taken off his tweed jacket. An actual tweed jacket, for Christ’s sake. He looked like an English professor in mufti, except for the shoulder holster and the flat oily stare of a cop who’s seen too much. He was also scruffy, sandy stubble standing out on his chin and the flat planes of his cheeks. Carp’s face is built like a skewed skyscraper, all angles that should work together but don’t. He’s handsome in the untraditional way of a character actor.
Theron dropped into the booth right next to me, and Carp opened his big mouth.
“Jesus. Are you dating another one of those fur rugs?”
I know you like ruffling Saul’s fur, but this is different. I winced, and opened my mouth to reply. The Were beat me to it.
Theron gave him a wide, toothy, sunny smile. “Maybe she just likes a little more than skinboys can give, Officer.”
For Christ’s sake. Save me from males and their pissing contests. “It’s Detective, Theron. And you’re looking at my temporary backup, Carp. Which means he’s deputized, and technically fellow law enforcement. So quit yanking his chain and tell me what’s on your tiny little mind. Sunlight’s wasting.” And I have other business to handle. Like finding out who’s trying to kill me, and why. If I knew one, I’d know the other.
Carp cupped his coffee in both palms, studying Theron. His gaze flicked to me, and he let out a loose, gusty sigh. The waitress came back, stepping into our armed truce with a bored “whaddalya have?”
I asked for orange juice and two orders of bacon, extra-crispy. Theron politely declined.
The place was deserted except for the bar, where a blue haze of cigarette smoke whirled slowly. A few anonymous male shapes sat in the cloudbank, and the waitress became a ghost among them as she headed for the kitchen. I touched the fork laid at my place—cheap metal, poorly stamped. “So why don’t you want anyone seeing you with me? Afraid people might start to talk?” I meant it as light banter, but Carp’s face immediately set itself hard like he’d sucked on a lemon.
He reached under the table. Theron stiffened, an infinitely small movement, and I wanted to roll my eyes. Carp’s hand came up holding nothing but his badge, which he flipped open and set on the table between us.
“I’m Internal Affairs.” He said it baldly, like it was a bad taste in his mouth. Maybe it was. “I had a hell of a time getting away this morning, but I had to talk to you. What were you doing at the Kutchner widow’s place, Jill?”
I studied him for a few moments. Internal Affairs? No wonder you’re paranoid. Still, Carp was a good cop with a finely-tuned sense of the weird; he knew when to call me in and get out of my way.
He also taunted Saul mercilessly and came off as a cracker asshole sometimes. Nobody’s perfect.
“Marv was Monty’s partner back in the day, and the suicide didn’t look right. So Monty asked me to poke.” I rubbed the fork’s surface, wishing it was a knifehilt. But Carp was already jumpy. “I have to say, it’s looking less and less like suicide and more like someone’s hiding something.”
“Only a few million dollars and thirty dead people at last count.” Carp leaned back against creaking vinyl. “Kutchner was dirty, Kismet. As dirty as they come.”
Huh? I replayed the three sentences inside my head. Yes, Carper had just said what I thought he’d said. “But Monty—”
He dropped another bomb. “Montaigne’s under review. I don’t like it any more than you do. Do you think he’s involved?”
Monty? Hell, no. “Why would he ask me to take a look at it?” I picked up the fork, tapped it on the tabletop. “Would there be any reason for someone to try to kill me because I’m poking around in this?”
Theron shifted uneasily, staring off into the distance. He looked bored.
Carp shrugged. “Let me put it this way, I wish I was wearing some fucking Kevlar assplugs. This is big, Kiss.”
The waitress returned with a stack of pancakes and eggs for Carp, filled his coffee cup, and plunked down my orange juice. “Be a sec on the bacon,” she announced to the air over my head, before shuffling off.
Yeah, thanks. I got that. “Are you going to take it from the top, or are you going to be all cryptic? This isn’t the only iron I have in the fire.”
“Actually, I was going to ask you to help me.” He stared at his plate like it contained a pile of snot. I got the idea maybe Carp had lost his appetite. “Since you’re already involved, might as well.”
I so do not have time for this. But I heard the creak of a nylon rope rubbing against a ceiling beam, and saw a mask of bruising on a dead man’s terrified face. “What are we dealing with? Use small words, and speed it up.”
He stuck his fork into the pile of eggs, worked it back and forth. “You remember a barrio case, about three years ago? Two illegal immigrants found in a cheap-ass room, kidneys gone, blood on the walls?”
A quick fishing trip through Memory Lane produced zilch. “Nope. Unless something my-style hinky was involved, I don’t.”
“I remember,” Theron said quietly. “The Herald did a long series on organ thievery. An all-time high nationwide, they said. Whole underground economy.”
Cold fingers walked up my spine again. The last huge paranormal incident in the city had touched on black-market organ trade, but only briefly. By the time I’d unraveled it, everyone was already dead, the organs were sold—and I’d almost become a host for a Chaldean Elder God.
I still have nightmares from that. Just like the hundreds of other cases I have nightmares about. At least if I’m dreaming about it I know it’s over and done with. “Sullivan and the Badger were on that, weren’t they?”
“They got yanked. Sullivan thinks someone high-up is involved, since there were more deaths than could be accounted for even with whatever happened with those hooker murders you were chasing.” Carp had turned milk-pale. Those homicide sites had probably figured in a few of his nightmares too. “But still, they were pulled off it and the files were put in a deep freeze. We think whoever’s profiting mostly strips wetbacks of their kidneys, because they’re a transient population.”
I nodded. Illegal immigrants are victims in more ways than one. Coming to look for the American dream, they usually end up raped one way or another. If they’re lucky, they get more of a wage than they would back home while it happens.
If they’re unlucky, they become just another statistic. Or not even that.
I blew out a long frustrated breath. “Okay. So what does this have to do with—”
“I think there’s cops finding illegals for stripping, and cleaning up after it happens, a real body farm. It’s a safe bet the cash is laundered, but I don’t know how. I don’t think Marv Kutchner ate his Glock. He was in too deep and making too much money. That shitty little suburban house was small potatoes. He had plans to retire to a nice tropical paradise.”
“Who doesn’t?” I was only half sarcastic. And another question arrived, flirting at the corner of my consciousness. I never found out who they were selling the organs to. I assumed it was out of town, since I didn’t find anything here afterward and—
There I was, caught assuming. There was always a market for organs. I hadn’t thought the Sorrows would foul their own nest, but I’d been kept running around after other cases, chasing my tail. By the time I’d caught wind of their operation they were winding down. They could very well have been supplying brokers inside the city; the distribution network for organs was probably even better-funded than the one for drugs. Where there’s a will—and a profit—there’s always a way to get a product to someone who needs it.
If they can pay.
The waitress came and plunked down my bacon, or some charred sticks that resembled something that might have been bacon in the distant past. “Anything else?”
“No thanks,” Theron said promptly, and we waited until she disappeared into the smoke-filled bar.
I wondered if she smoked—I didn’t think she’d need to, breathing that fug all day. So this could have been going on for longer. Or it could be the tail-end of the Sorrows’ operation. Too many variables. “So if it wasn’t suicide, why did Kutchner die?”
“Jacinta Kutchner was an accountant. Her office was tossed as well as her bedroom. We think she had a set of cooked and uncooked books, either in the office or in the safe in her closet. Yesterday a blue bit it—”
“Officer Winchell,” I supplied helpfully. “Was he implicated too?”
A vintage Carper shrug, his shoulder holster peeping out. He didn’t look surprised at my supplying the name. “Only up to his eyeballs. Would it surprise you to know Winchell and Kutchner’s grieving widow were having an affair?”
Huh. That puts a new shine on things. I picked up a slice of charcoaled bacon. “You do such fine police work, Carp. What do you need me for?”
“The trail dead-ends with Marv’s retirement fund disappearing. All half-a-million of it. I think the widow was about to blow the whistle on the whole dirty deal, or she double-crossed someone and hid the money. Maybe she even loved her husband, I don’t know. But without her and without the books—and without Marv and Winchell—we have exactly what we started out with. Dead wetbacks and a whole lot of nothing.”
And here I was getting all bent out of shape over victims. The thought was too bitter to let out of my mouth. “That doesn’t tell me what you want.”
“I want to know how far up this goes.” He blinked at his food as if he couldn’t believe he’d ordered it, took a long draft of coffee. “I have to tell you, Kiss, I’m willing to break a few laws to do it. And you’re one of us, but you don’t have a lot of the same… limits… that I do.”
“Someone tried to kill me the other day.” Jesus. Was that only yesterday? “They didn’t use silver-coated ammo. Which leads me to believe someone knows Monty’s called me in and feels just a wee bit threatened.”
“You think?” Carp went pale. He was sweating. If it was concern for me it was awful cute. “Marv and Winchell weren’t the only ones to end up dead over this. Six months ago Pedro Ayala over in Vice stumbled across something, gave me a call, and turned up dead less than four hours later before I could meet him. It’s filed as a random gang-related shooting, since Ay did the gang beat. He was tight with a few of the old-school 51s, their territory’s a chunk in the barrio near the Plaza. He used to run with the oldsters before he turned all law-abiding. I can’t get any of them to talk to me about him.”
I vaguely remembered Ayala from rookie orientation—slim, dark, and intense. They blur together inside my head sometimes. All those cops, each and every one of them passing through my hands before they’re allowed out on the streets.
You’d think I’d feel better about that. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. They won’t talk to me or to Bernie—his partner—but it doesn’t seem possible that one of them pulled the trigger on him. He was out of la vida since he was sixteen, but he once or twice brought in some of the 51s as material witnesses during a turf war.”
I let out a low whistle. That was a not-inconsiderable achievement. “Did they walk afterward?”
“When the killing stopped. Ay was a good cop. He didn’t deserve lungs full of lead. The coroner said it probably took him ten minutes to suffocate on his own blood.”
I could relate. Jesus. I poked at the bacon some more, nibbled at a bit of it, set it down. “You want me to go into the barrio and poke around the 51s.”
Theron made another restless movement. But he held his peace, which was more than I would have expected.
Carp held my gaze, did not look away. “I’m asking for a hot chunk of lead if I go down there. Monty’s already called you in, Jill.”
He was serious. The trouble was, I was asking for more than one hot chunk of lead if I went into the barrio. The Weres run herd out there and keep everything under control. I know the streets and alleys—there’s not a slice of my city I don’t know by now—but going into the depths of Santa Luz’s other dark half isn’t something to be done lightly if your skin is my color.
I can’t spend more time on this. There’s scurf, goddammit. And the widow and Winchell weren’t victims in the usual sense.
But still. The rope made a small sound inside my head, a human being reduced to a clock pendulum, and I knew I couldn’t let this rest. Something else was bothering me about the whole goddamn deal, but damned if I could lay a finger on it.
I hate that feeling. It usually means something is about to take a big bite out of my ass in a very unpleasant way. “All right. Hand over the paper.”
His hand slid under the table and came up with a manila file, rubber-banded closed. It was dauntingly thick. “This is what I’ve got so far. A collection of fucking dead ends. If you can make something of it…”
“Dead ends don’t mean the same thing to me that they do to you.” I pushed the bacon across the table, took the file, and laid a ten down to cover a bit of breakfast. “Keep your head down, Carp. I would hate to lose you just when I’ve gotten you toilet trained.”
His reply was unrepeatable. I slid out of the booth, following Theron’s graceful motion. I tipped Carp a salute, he shot me the finger, and we parted, friends as usual.
As soon as we got up the stairs and stepped outside, the Were took in a deep breath, rolling it around his mouth like champagne. “No news,” he announced, needlessly. “Maybe that was the main nest, maybe we got them all.”
I’m not so sure. They were too old. “I’d feel better if we knew instead of guessing.” I slid my shades on; the sun was a hammerblow even this early in the morning. “And I’d feel a lot better if we could have ID’d some of the scurf as our missing people.” Good fucking luck doing that, scurf all look the same. “Or if I could have asked that skunk-haired ’breed some questions.”
“I’d feel a lot better if you hadn’t just volunteered to go down in the barrio.” He fixed me with a sidelong stare. “I suppose this is something else I’m not supposed to tell Saul about?”
“I never told you not to tell him anything.” I set off for my Impala, parked in a convenient alley some two blocks away. It was going to be another desert scorcher of a day. “I go where I have to, Theron.”
“This sounds like a human affair.” His tone was carefully neutral.
“So are scurf, if you look at it the right way.” Sarcasm dripped from each word. “Don’t ride me, Were. I know what I’m doing.”
“Easy, hunter. I’m just pointing it out.” He didn’t crowd me like Saul would have. He didn’t smell like Saul, not really. He was just similar enough, his bulk just familiar enough, to remind me of what I was missing.
“Thanks.” You don’t have to come along. But that would be a direct insult, since Theron had appointed himself my backup. It would imply I didn’t have any faith in his capacity to defend himself.
Weres are funny about things like that.
He apparently decided he’d pushed me far enough. “When are you going in?”
Well, if I wait for nightfall it will only get more dangerous. But sunlight’s best for hunting scurf. “If they find anything while doing sweeps you’ll know, right?”
“Of course.” He didn’t sound offended that I’d asked. “Do you think they’re connected?”
A hot breeze came off the river, ruffled my hair. Carp hadn’t said anything about me looking torn-up and exhausted. Dim light and some breakfast must have done me some good, though I’d never win any prizes in the looks department. “What?”
“The scurf, and this.”
Jesus in a sidecar, I hope not. “I don’t know. I’m not assuming they are. There’s no visible connection.” But he knew as well as I did that I wasn’t ruling it out, either.
He digested this. “Something’s off. They were too old, and too many of them.”
Just what I’d been thinking. “I know. But a hellbreed, busting in on a scurf nest…” There’s one small note off here, and it’s throwing the entire orchestra out of whack. “If this gets much deeper I’m going to have to do something drastic.”
“Huh.” He visibly restrained himself from making a smartass comment. “Like what?”
“Like something unsafe.”
“More unsafe than the barrio?”
Visiting Perry makes the barrio look like a cakewalk, Were. “Much, Theron. Now shut up, I need to think.”
“I’ll say you do.”
I let it go. A Were sometimes needs the last word. It makes them feel better.