City of the Sun (12 page)

It was like a nightmare come true. Even worse than he had imagined. Tad had almost crapped himself when the huge guy started questioning him. Who the hell was he, and how did he
know
? He seemed coplike but didn’t say he was a cop. What other explanation was there? Tad was fucked, that was the one thing he knew for sure. He was screwed blue. The way he saw it there were only two things he could do: Nothing — just squeeze his eyes shut, pretend it never happened, finish his shift, and hope he never saw the huge guy again. Or call Mr. Riggi. It was horrible, but somehow he knew it wasn’t all going to go away and that he had to call. There was no sense in waiting, he figured, he might as well rip the Band-Aid off in one shot.

“Yeah.” Riggi’s voice came through the line, cold and irritated.

“It’s Tad Ford.”

“Tad,” Riggi answered, “I know you’re not calling me for your job back or for any kind of favor. Not after you rat-fucked me by walking out.”

Tad closed his eyes against the diamond-hard words, the hate, coming through the phone. He pictured him there, in some big modern house — he didn’t actually know where Mr. Riggi lived, he had never been invited over — in a silk robe, his bald head gleaming, the sound of ice cubes banging around in a glass of thousand-year-old scotch. He probably had a couple of hot Asian chicks waiting to satisfy his every desire, and now stupid Tad Ford was calling to screw up his night.

“Well, what is it?”

“Mr. Riggi, someone came to see me. He beat me. Fucked up my leg—”

“What’s it got to do with me?” Tad could feel Riggi gripping his telephone tightly.

“Maybe nothing, but … He was asking about a bike—”

“A goddamned—”

“I know I shouldn’t have, but I sold a few, you know, from the pickups a while back.” Tad heard a few short breaths of fury, then a quiet voice.

“Where are you calling me from?”

“From work, on a throwaway—”

“Thank god.” There was a rush of breath. “This conversation is over. Get out of there. Don’t say another word to anyone. You got me, you stupid fuck? I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll meet and sort this out.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. R., but I swear I didn’t say your name. …” Tad could’ve gone on, but he would’ve been talking to dead air.

Behr slipped out of the club when he saw Ford hang up the phone, figuring his time there was about up. He cast a backward glance on his way out and saw Ford leaning over the rail into the DJ booth. Behr sat in his car, watching the door, wondering if somebody would be showing up for an emergency powwow with Ford, but instead, within three minutes, it was Ford who hurried out. Behr watched him squeeze into an old but well-kept 300 ZX and pull out. He jotted down the plate number and took up a loose and easy tail. He followed him twelve minutes northeast, to a part of town that was choked with low-slung apartment buildings that had units you could pay by the month. The buildings had already started to fall apart and look old by the time the initial construction was finished, and they weren’t ever going to look any better before their date with a wrecking ball. Behr nosed toward the curb a half-block back and watched Ford ramble to the lobby door, casting a desperate look behind him. Behr gave it two minutes, saw a light go on in a street-side second-floor window covered by a thin, ratty curtain, then went and checked the mailboxes in the building’s foyer. Ford lived in 2-H, and that jibed with the light that had just gone on. Behr walked back to his car, relieved himself on the curb next to it, then climbed in to wait and see who showed for a visit.

THE GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING QUIET
gnawed at Rooster like a flesh-eating disease. The waiting thing had worn thin on him. He’d had the “just be patient” conversation with Riggi several times over the past four or five months.

This just isn’t the kind of thing that’s steady, me boy. And in this line you just can’t force it when it’s not there.

I know, I know.

I’ve got to find you a new anchor man, and he’s got to be the right guy.

I know, I know.

Let it come to you. That’s what I’ve learned you’ve got to do.

I know, I know.

If you need something, that’s never an issue. As much cash as you need to get you through, just ask your captain.

I know, I know.

But “be patient” wasn’t Rooster’s stock-in-trade. Over the past two weeks he’d started to look on his apartment as a cage. It was a bachelor style on a street busy with big trucks and whores on the way out to the fairgrounds. He had a double bed, a television and a boom box on a baker’s rack, and a chin-up bar in the doorway to the bathroom. It was supposed to be temporary before Riggi put him in the next house with whoever would be his new partner. But the weeks had gone on and he was climbing the walls. He’d been talking aloud to himself for the past few days.

On the other hand the idle time had yielded something positive for him: size. Twenty-five pounds of solid brick-shit muscle. Time in the gym, supplements that provided hundreds of grams of whey-protein isolates, creatine, ATP, and a cycle on anabolics, had made him different than he had ever been before. Despite his five-foot-six stature, he now had the musculature of a slugging American League first baseman. He could push more weight, for more reps, and recover faster than ever before. He incorporated a system called plyometrics into his routine after reading about it in a weight-lifting magazine. Down at the gym he’d stack aerobic steps into a tower that reached his chest and leap up onto it from a stationary position. He’d do it until his legs shook and his lungs were set to explode, then he’d drop and bang out push-ups until his arms seized up on him. After the workouts he’d peel off his sweat-soaked shirt and pace past the mirrors on the way to his locker, taking in his ballooning pecs and the ropy veins cording down his neck. His jaw bulged from having been clenched in effort for the past two hours, and he’d snarl at any fags in the locker room that looked at him too long.

One downside of the program: He had so much damn energy, near aggression, that he was practically bugging.
Have faith, baby
, he told himself,
a change is gonna come
.

Then the phone rang like sweet relief.

“Hello?”

“Oscar.”

“What’s up, boss?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” Rooster said, meaning it, because
anything
would get him out of his apartment.

“Tad.”

“You want me to do that?” Rooster was not hesitant, only surprised. Tad, the pussy, had quit, because he didn’t have a taste for the work anymore and because he was so whipped sick in love with his dancer whore. Not to mention the crank. He’d screwed up the operation and had now made him and Riggi vulnerable.

There was a quiet static on the line and no reply to his question.

“You know where he lives these days?”

“Yeah,” Rooster said, picturing the cheap-ass apartment building just beyond Broad Ripple. Unlike his own dump, which at least didn’t pretend to be anything else, Tad’s place was supposed to be for the upwardly mobile professional type.

“Only some fucked-up yuppies would live in a place like this,” he’d told Tad on the grand tour. Weak-sister Tad had looked like he was ready to cry at that one.

“What’s your time frame?” Rooster asked.

“Yesterday,” Riggi answered. “Yesterday would’ve been ideal, in fact.
Before
some guy’d come around asking him questions.” Riggi’s words brought a cold stab of fear racing through Rooster’s chest that was quickly chased by a hot bolt of anger. Oh, he’d take good motherfucking care of Tad.

“What kind of questions? What kind of guy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. We’ll talk later, in person … if you can do this.”

“Do this, man?” Rooster said, a luxurious feeling of loose power rolling down through his limbs like syrup. “It’s
already
done.”

Rooster was half embarrassed at the glow he knew was on his cheeks at Riggi’s asking him to do this important thing. It thrilled him deeply, that he couldn’t deny. It was a thing you couldn’t ask just anybody to do, nor could just anybody do it. All the same, thrill or no thrill, it surely needed to be done because the idea of going back to jail for a long stretch was unacceptable. Rooster didn’t mind his little apartment all of a sudden, compared with the alternative. He climbed up into a small crawl space at the top of his closet. The apartment wasn’t so much a cage now as it was a secret headquarters, a base of operations. As bad as the waiting had become, things could be a hell of a lot worse. But he wasn’t about to let that happen. Rooster found the hidden plastic box by feel and brought it down. Inside the box, wrapped in an old rag-wool sock, was a stainless Taurus .38. He filled it with soft points, set himself up with two speed loaders, did seventy push-ups, fifty squats, took a piss, and looked at himself in the mirror for a long, centering moment. Then he put on a windbreaker that wasn’t heavy enough for the weather but had good pockets, shut the lights, and stepped out.

Tad pressed a bag of frozen Tater Tots to his throbbing shin and tried to control his breathing. He meant to let it out in a calming, hissing growl the way he’d learned in the lone Pilates class he’d taken three months back. He’d gone to the studio after hearing it was where Michelle trained. She wasn’t there that day, and by the end of his session Tad was wringing wet with sweat and felt clumsy and stupid. The breath came out a warbling whine. He was scared. He looked around his place and considered running. He had seven hundred in the bank, but he could only pull three hundred from the ATM at one time. The dipshit Indian branch manager had convinced him on this limit when he opened the account.

“This way, if you lose the card, someone can only take three hundred before the card is canceled,” he’d said, the push-start, cow-loving bastard. Tad was sorry he even had the bank account and didn’t have the cash on hand. He’d needed to open it, though, when he went on the payroll at the Lady. He had a check coming to him in two days, five hundred fifty after withholding. The timing was a bitch. He’d be able to make it a lot farther and for longer if he had that money. He got up and paced the room in a limping gait, wishing he hadn’t finished the last of his stash when he smoked up before work. He grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey from the kitchen cabinet and took a pull that made him shiver. He limped over and sat down on the couch and looked at the phone, thinking of calling Michelle. Things had been going well with her, small steps, a little conversation here, a look there, and he hated to rush it, but maybe he should call her and ask her to go with him. He felt in his pocket for the hand-carved and-painted wooden key chain from Ciudad del Sol, La Frontera. He’d given her a matching one. She didn’t know it, but he felt the closeness in their both having the same one. He picked up the phone and dialed her. Rudy from the club, in a rare moment of generosity, had slid her home number Tad’s way several weeks back.

Tad tried to control his breathing again. Failed. He wondered what he would say should Michelle answer. “
Hey, ‘Chelle, it’s Tad. … I know we’ve only been friends around work, but you wanna road trip with me
?” It sounded fucking lame even to him. After four rings, her machine picked up. Her voice, low and sexy, asking for a message while Ryan Adams played in the background. Tad was almost relieved that she didn’t answer. He hung up and cradled the Wild Turkey and wondered what to do next.

Sitting surveillance was a mental exercise in calm focus and patience, and knocking a guy around was no way to set up for it. Behr sat still behind the wheel staring up at the lit window that was Ford’s apartment, coming down from the electric high the bracing had put him on. It was impossible, he had found, for him to experience physical violence without the adrenaline jag by-product he called the “come-down.” To combat it he reached across the front seat and took a Red Bull from the little Igloo that was always stocked with them. It was warm and syrupy, but he downed it and set his mind to the task: watching.

Behr switched on the police scanner he kept in his car. It brought back the old days as it fought off boredom. He looked up at the window while he listened to calls.

No matter how much
, Behr talked to himself, which was another thing he did to focus himself and pass the time on stakeout,
you never get used to it
. It was the same with death, he thought, but didn’t say it aloud. No matter how much exposure to it, for however long, he never became immune to the hollowness in the pit of his stomach brought on by a dead body. He thought back to his first week on the force, when he was just a kid. He worked Meridian Park then, a nice, quiet section that wasn’t known for its action. But he’d encountered two dead bodies within that first week on the job. On his second night there was a motorcycle versus an eighteen-wheeler motor-vehicle casualty. Behr and his training officer, Gene Sasso, a portly vet nearing his pension, were first on the scene. The biker was dead when they got there. His head and legs were twisted at impossible angles, and he was barefoot, his boots blown off and strewn around the blacktop. The truck driver sat on the side of the road, his head in his hands, sobbing.

“Check him for ID,” Sasso commanded.

Behr swallowed and reached into the rider’s back pocket. He had the momentary sensation that the biker would animate and grab his hand to stop the invasion. But the biker was through moving. The man was dead weight that barely rippled when Behr pulled the wallet free.
Meat
was the word that crossed his young mind. As well as the disquieting sensation that everyone, even he, was headed for that state eventually.

On his fifth day, a call came in from a distraught woman. Her boyfriend had been unreachable for three days. Behr and Sasso were sent to force entry into his third-floor apartment and found the guy, a twenty-six-year-old white male, draped over the arm of his couch. He had overdosed, a strange occurrence in a nice neighborhood where hard drugs weren’t supposed to be. Young Officer Behr learned that day that all the fluids drain out of the body in death, creating a vile pooling. The body was rigor mortised in its awkward position, and they couldn’t figure out how he would be carried down the narrow staircase.