Bad Night Is Falling (32 page)

Twin rachets of gunfire filled the air and Monk saw the Trooper skid and circle on the 11th Avenue side of the lot. The utility vehicle righted itself and Monk, already unlatching the driver's door, grabbed Andrade's arm and the two went out through the opening.

“Don't move,” he ordered, pushing the alcoholic accountant down against the side of the car. The Ford was at an angle to Continental's front door, the Trooper coming in straight like a swordfish on attack.

“Chief!” Elrod yelled, tossing him the automatic Remington shotgun he'd used to blast at the vehicle. Monk caught the weapon as the big man was spinning away, diving back into the shop. Monk got it up and over the lip of the trunk as incoming rounds tattooed the rear of the car.

There was a torso leaning out the passenger side of the Isuzu, its semiauto whatever prattling away. Pieces of sizzling metal torn from the trunk ripped skin away from Monk's face as he crouched as low as possible to get his shot. He clacked off three rounds, the rubber-cushioned stock recoiling with unfamiliarity into the nexus of his shoulder and chest.

The third rapidly dispersed load did something to distort that leaning torso behind a crimson haze. The Trooper veered abruptly to its right, rocketing out onto Vernon. The driver took it screaming east.

“Aren't you going to chase them?” Andrade asked, wide-eyed.

Monk laughed nervously at the image of tearing up city and private property. The resulting suits would have his grandchildren in debt. His heart was beating so fast he was afraid he was having a stroke. He sagged against the car, his knees watery.

Elrod reappeared, brandishing the .357 Magnum Monk kept in his file room. “Sweet baby Jesus rocking his cradle,” he exclaimed.

Monk put a shaking hand up to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “You ain't never lied.”

“I hope you trigger-happy niggaz realize this kind of shit tends to decrease my walk-in trade.” Curtis Armstrong's tinny voice seared from his large, round head. He was carrying the dusty little Beretta he kept taped to the bottom of his drawer under his office desk. He pointed at the ground. “Hey, Wild Bill, I think you got yourself another buffalo.”

On the ground near Armstrong was, after some discussion among the four, what they determined to be segments of an ear and skin. A dull white chunk shone from among the blood and bits, and Monk was sure it was a bit of bone. A peerless gold hoop was attached to the lobe.

By the time the cops arrived from Southwest Division, Monk was arguing with Armstrong and Elrod that determining the DNA of the ear would be of no value to him. Andrade sat at his counter spot, kneading his hands in a pensive mood.

“About time,” the accountant complained as the officers swarmed about like ants over a honey-covered hill.

Several hours later, Monk was released on OR. That it was an obvious self-defense situation seemed only to aggravate the D.A.'s office. They were grumbling that they might seek to tack on an endangerment charge to the manslaughter one, but it all seemed so anticlimactic. Monk was tired and scared of being too close to jumping in the big box. More importantly, he was worried these jokers would settle for killing Jill or his mother just to be evil. Just to get him to stop.

There had to be an end to it.

After being released, Elrod picked Monk up in the '68 Barracuda he was restoring. The manager drove Monk back to the donut shop at his request. “Jill called for you,” he said.

“You didn't tell her, did you?”

Elrod stole a glance at the passing blurs and lights in the night traffic. “Naw, man, I did like you said. Said you was out on a clue an' all. But ain't she gonna notice you ain't pilotin' your wheels?”

Monk didn't have an answer and he wasn't too interested in coming up with one. His mind was on the task before him. Back at the donut shop, Monk got the reverse directory CD going and found an address to go along with the phone number from where Mrs. Limón had called this afternoon.

He was also trying to determine if it was just an unusual coincidence that the bad boys came a-blazing so conveniently after his conversation with her. But, he allowed, his usual subfrequency of paranoia was notched higher than usual given the personalities involved in this matter. And given their involvement, he was compelled to tell Jill what had gone down. If they should come at her …

“No, what I want is you to get the high sheriff on the phone and have some deputies over there.”

“Only if you come home first, Ivan.”

“Jill, I—”

“My ass. I'm coming to get you then.”

There goes the momentum. She brought takeout from the Peruvian Thai restaurant on Hyperion and a bottle of J & B, “for calming purposes,” she said. At their joint insistence, Elrod stayed to eat with them. Sitting in one of the booths, Monk tried out several scenarios on Elrod and Kodama while they enjoyed their food. A steady wind beat at the panes.

A teetotaler, Elrod excused himself when the drinks were poured in paper cups. “You be careful going home.” Monk pressed the Magnum into his baseball glove of a hand.

“Always.” He kissed Kodama on the cheek and the couple watched him as he drove off.

Afterward, she dialed a number and talked for several minutes then hung up. “Deputies deployed, sarge.”

Monk was looking at the bottom of his cup. “I know this isn't how it should be, Jill.”

“Nobody knows how anything should be, Ivan. L.A.'s ready to rock twenty-four seven and you can't stand still 'less we get swallowed up.”

“You been listening too much to them homies you got rolling through your court.”

“Shut up.”

Kodama dropped him off at a rental agency near the airport, the only such places open this time of the night. The air was dense with moisture.

“You sure you don't want that efficient little Ultrastar?” Monk was on his haunches, talking to Kodama on her side of the Saab. He didn't like making a point of it, but it was gnawing at him that the Trooper was out there.

“You gonna have everybody you know run around strapped?”

His brows bunched. “Seems to be getting that way. Plenty of judges pack, Jill.”

She touched his face. “If we start on this, then I'm afraid we'll get into what you do, and why you do it.”

“Maybe I need to be doing someming else.” He surprised himself with his words.

Kodama leaned up and nuzzled his cheek and bit his neck. “Don't kid yourself. Wake me when you get home.”

Monk took the compact silver-blue Suburu east on the 105 to 110 north through the downtown exchange. Making the loop past the Convention Center, he noticed a large sign stretched taut along its side announcing a coming conference and trade show of new technologies. Seeing the announcement, a rueful look altered the bottom half of Monk's face.

His knowledge of computers began and ended with whatever his nephew Coleman deigned to inform him about. Learning arcane codes to troubleshoot his hard drive when the screen invariably flashed
FILE ERROR,
as it often did, or knowing the difference between RAM and gigabytes stretched his learning curve.

In one form or another—working for Dexter, being a bounty hunter, getting burned out before thirty and going off to the merchants, returning and working for Dexter, then as a PI on his own—he'd been running after people and problems for damn near fifteen years. What in hell else was he going to do? Sit in his chair getting a fat ass while he did personal research on the Net? Even car mechanics now demanded a more than serviceable knowledge of electronics, and of the apparatuses for analysis, what with igniters, chip-metered fuel injectors, and whatnot.

Donut magnate did have its possibilities. People always needed, er, wanted, donuts, even in body-conscious Southern California. 'Course he'd have to diversify and start including a fat-free line. Yeah, he concluded, taking the 5 south coming out of the exchanges, he could get started on that right away. Introduce some low-cal cinnamon rolls and devil's food cake. Even use soybean flour. Get some leggy former Raiderettes to pose with a trayful for publicity shots. Maybe open an outlet with the name Krishna Donut or something equally spiritual.

“Shit.”

He got off on Indiana Street then went north to Whittier, then east again, winding past the huge Calvary Cemetery until he got to Ferris in East Los Angeles. He missed the street at first and got as far as Atlantic before realizing he'd gone too far. Doubling back, Monk crept along the street trying to discern the address that went along with the phone number Mrs. Limón had called from. It was dark, and not every house number was painted on the curb.

Eventually he had to park and walk, straining to read house numbers until he got to the right one. The clapboard was set back from the street, partially obscured by an untrimmed lemon tree and an overgrown row of Birds of Paradise. What was left of the lawn had given way to dirt, and a Radio Flyer wagon sat on its side in the yard. A nearby streetlight provided weak illumination. He was sorry he hadn't brought a flashlight.

From not too far away, Monk could hear the sounds of chickens. He took a look around and found a coop on the side of the house. It reminded him of Maladrone's estate, but he shook the idea loose. He knocked.

“What is it?” a male voice demanded with the wariness born of city living.

He told him who he was, and that he'd like to speak to Rosanna or Karla Cruzado.

No light came on and Monk worried that everybody had fled out the back. Presently, the door opened on a Chicano about Monk's height, but several years younger. He was wearing a white T-shirt and grey Wrangler jeans. His hair was starting to thin, and it made his angular face seem as if it were carved from one solid piece of walnut. Three children, two girls and one boy, in pajamas sat transfixed, watching TV.

“She doesn't want to be bothered, eh?”

“She wants an end to this, doesn't she?” He didn't know which of the women he meant, but this was not the time to get into minutiae.

“She wants you to go,” he said with finality. Turning his head he said, “You three get to bed.”

“Aw, man,” the boy complained.

“Now,” he repeated. “You got school tomorrow. Brush those teeth.”

The three managed to make getting off the couch seem as arduous a task as slugging through sargasso.

“I'll only bother her this once,” Monk pledged. “I want to do something about finding the ones who killed her family.”

The boy and girls had come over to eye the stranger. The girls clung close to the man, the boy smiled tentatively at Monk.

“What's your name?” Monk asked the boy.

“Tomás, go,” the man ordered.

The three went away and the man set baleful eyes on the private detective. “You ain't working for nobody these days, homes.”

“That don't mean I don't know anything,” he said casually, folding his hands before him.

“Hmm,” the man murmured, pushing the door in, but not quite closed.

With nothing else to do, and no leads left, Monk waited. The chickens clucked and the air smelled pleasant from the aroma of the lemons. The warm evening triggered a physical memory in Monk of a stopover he'd once made in Salvador, a town in the state of Bahia, in Brazil, when he was a merchant seaman. The port was awash with the savory odors of plantains and empanadas cooking in
dengee
, palm oil. These smells blended with the Portuguese-Spanish-French polyglot cadence of the marketplace, where slaves used to be sold. The bazaar sprawled out from the docks like tendrils from a beached kraken.

The door opened again, and a Latina stood there in a loose shirt and tight jeans.

“Karla Cruzado?” Monk guessed. From his talk with Cady, he knew she was the one who spoke English.

“Why do you want to keep bothering us?”

“Can I come in?”

Reluctantly, she allowed him inside. She stood with arms crossed. The man stood beside a woman Monk took to be Rosanna Cruzado in the dining room area.

“My name's Ruzón, from my husband,” she corrected him.

Monk assumed the man who answered the door wasn't the husband, not proprietary enough. And asking the whereabouts of the mister wouldn't have been prudent at this juncture, as ex-president Bush was wont to say. “Who killed your mother, your brother, and your niece, Mrs. Ruzón? Do you believe it was Scalp Hunters?” It came out so soft, he wasn't sure she heard him.

She put a hand to her mouth, the enormity of his questions overwhelming her. He felt like he'd socked her in the gut as she sat heavily on the couch. She must have had to keep going after the incident, it would have been the only way she could deal with such a horror. She no doubt kept busy helping her sister-in-law and surviving nieces get settled into their new life. By allowing herself to be consumed with trying to rebuild a semblance of life, she probably hoped that she could stop herself from becoming bogged in the quicksand of loss and self-doubt.

“Who killed your brother?” he repeated.

“Understand,” she started slowly, “I can't prove this, and I won't say this in any court. Here or in Mexico.”

He didn't think it was going to be any other way, that would make it too much like right. “So be it.”

“In Villanueva, a city in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental, Efraín ran for the city council. For as long as we could remember, our family had been pree supporters. You know about the Partidad Revolutionario Institutionale,
¿qué no?
” she asked with an ironic tone in her voice.

“A little,” Monk admitted. “Some of the PRI's hold has started to slip after all these years. The third party, the PRD, their candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.” Monk stumbled through his pronounciation. “Is that how you say his name?”

“Close enough,” she said.

Monk went on, “So Cardenas, a leftist, won over the PRI's boy for the mayor's seat in Mexico City, which is a big thing considering its size and influence. And what with all the Zapatistas stuff, and the Salinas brothers implicated in the assassination of that opposition presidential candidate awhile back—”