Cold Burn (8 page)

"Well, ya know, it's the salad bowl thing."

"Now you've lost me," I tell him.

"Oh, come on," he says, sounding exasperated. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed it, too."

I shrug to show I really don't know, so he elaborates.

"In the old days, anyone who came here would start by learning English and adapt to fit in. The English, the Irish, even the Germans and even the Poles—they all managed to adapt. It was the great melting-pot era. Nowadays, no one wants to integrate. The melting pot has been transformed in to a big salad bowl. They all wanna keep their cultural identity, so the Haitians go on babbling in Créole while the spics never bother to learn English."

I stare at him and wonder if he's that open on this subject in the station. I'm guessing he's not because it's definitely a diversified working place.

"Don't look at me like that," he says. "It's not like the motorcycle clubs are not selective about who they let in, and I won't ever blame you for being picky and sticking with your own kind."

"You're right," I tell him. "There's some people you clearly don't want to be associated with."

The look in his eyes tells me that the irony of my tone has not been lost on him. He's sharper than I thought.

Probably realizing that he shouldn't have been so forthright with me, he says good-bye and snaps, "Next time, you shouldn't park here. It's reserved for members of the police force. You lost that right when you dropped out of school."

His choice of words is interesting. I didn't drop out; I resigned, which is totally different, but I think he knows and was trying to be insulting.

A few minutes later, Everest comes out and says that Captain Williams will be expecting us at his house around eight. That gives me enough time to drive by the Friendly Persuasion Agency offices and see if Whiz has made any progress on his investigation about the contents of the disk.

And he has.

"I've drawn a chart for you." He slowly unfolds a few pages taped together like a paper maze or puzzle. "They're worse than a virus spreading throughout Florida. They start by finding a way to get a toe in an activity, and soon, they take over and have everyone marching to their tune."

He starts showing me how the Unrepentant Southern White Wizards have acquired a controlling or decisive interest in a large majority of the gun stores in the area and how they have now directed their interest in strip joints.

"That's the only activity for which the USWW Corp seems color-blind," he says.

"What do you mean?"

"All their other business are run by Caucasians and cater exclusively to them. The pussy trade, however, is more diversified. They're all over the map, and even if the management stays white, the talent is more diverse."

"Thank you, Whiz. You've done amazing work," I tell him. "Can I take the chart with me? I would like to show it to someone tonight."

"Sure, this is for you. I've got it all in my head," he says while meticulously refolding his paper creation. "Now that I've done that with the corporate structures, I'm looking at the people behind them. If you give me another week, I should be able to provide you with some interesting information. But I can tell you right now, some of those places are owned outright by a few politicians or high-ranking police officers."

"How is this possible?" I ask. "With all the dirt the politicians throw at each other during an election, I'm surprised their political opponents didn't out them about any sort of borderline activity."

"Someone tried with Ervaners," he reminds me. "He owns a few buildings in a shopping center. One of them was initially a bar and grill, then a bar, and then it became a strip joint. Don't you remember? When put on the spot, he explained that the way the twelve-year lease had been written, the tenant's lawyer was allowed to modify the activity carried out on the premises and that his hands were tied."

I nod and take the chart he hands to me.

"He's not getting re-elected," he says.

"Is that so?"

"Yeah," Whiz says with a malicious grin. "He got a taste of his own medicine. Do you remember how he used the municipal police to get his town sanitized after being elected?" He exaggerates his southern accent as he pronounces the word sanitized, and I nod to show that I understand what type of sanitation he's talking about.

"They used the most absurd reasons to stop and search selected targets and then hold them until immigration came to check their status. When they found illegal aliens, they took them away. As a consequence, anyone with a questionable status fled the town, and today, the ‘good people’ of his town are complaining about the increase in the cost of labor. Funny how people with no fear of being deported have the gall to require minimum wage."

The way Whiz presents the situation surprises me, making me smile. It shouldn't because politically, the only thing he believes in is karma.

I'm not so optimistic. I'm not certain that what goes around always comes around. I've seen too many people get away with murder.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It's five to eight when I park my bike in front of Lisa's house. Doing so is kind of weird because during the last year, I've made a habit of parking a block away when I come visit either my mother or Lisa. I look over at the other side of the lawn, to the identical construction in which my mother and Tony live. I can’t see if anyone’s home.

At Lisa’s house, which is now the captain’s home too, the garage door is open, and the space is empty, except for David's cross-country bike in the far corner. It looks all greased up and ready to go. I wonder if Lisa's been riding it again.

Everest's Harley is next to Captain Williams’s truck in the driveway. Both men are sitting on the porch swing, taking up the entire seat of what is supposed to be a three-seater. Williams drops his cigarette in his can of beer and crushes it as he gets up.

We shake hands and gauge each other for a few seconds. Our paths have crossed several times, but we've never officially met before.

"Nice to meet you," I say as I decide that I was right to trust Everest's gut feeling about the man. I like the firmness of his handshake and the way his gaze meets mine. It doesn’t waver, as if he has nothing to hide and no preconceived ideas about me.

"Same here," he says. "Let's get started while the girls are out."

"He sent them to the movies," Everest explains.

That’s good thinking; it would have been kind of weird otherwise.

As we enter, I notice a few changes in the familiar house. The captain has been taking really good care of the place. The decor hasn’t changed much, but there's been a fresh coat of paint and this lived-in look. Not looking like a perfect showroom or model house, as it did when Lisa’s mum was single, makes the place more pleasant.

Steven Williams brings a six-pack of beer and some tacos from the kitchen and gets straight to the point while we sit around the dining room table.

"Everest here says that you believe David's still alive. Can you tell me why?"

"I know for a fact it's not his body in the coffin you put in the ground last spring," I say, avoiding part of his question.

"But you don't want to tell us how?" The captain asks.

"Let's just say that David reached out to me."

"I thought you had a good explanation for the postcard," Everest says.

"I did until I realized that the card was printed in June of last year, weeks after he was supposedly dead."

"That boy is an idiot," Steven Williams snaps.

"So you knew?" Everest asks.

"Yeah, he and I work for Internal Affairs. We are part of a special unit investigating the infiltration of our rank by some Aryan group."

"You mean the Unrepentant Southern White Wizards?" I ask.

Steven Williams’s head snaps to look in my direction as he asks, "What do you know about them?"

I hesitate for a second before I decide to go all in and show him my entire hand. From the inside pocket of my jacket, I pull out the plastic bag with the broken disk as well as Whiz’s chart and start spreading it out on the table.

Ignoring the disk, Captain Williams takes his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studies the chart. With his fingers, he follows the arrows that lead from one corporation to another, showing how the network is interconnected.

"This is excellent work," he says. "Our guys have a few you didn't catch, but you have several that have escaped us so far."

Everest studies the chart silently then asks, "What got you started in that direction?"

"The information collected on this disk that I found in David's leather jacket," I say.

"Come again," Steven Williams says. "I checked the pockets of that jacket before Lisa took it with her to New York, and there was nothing in them."

"It was in the shoulder padding." I tell him about the Aryans trying to get David’s jacket from Lisa.

"Is that how she got hurt?" the captain asks. "She told her mother she got shot by a crazy guy during a Xander Wild concert."

"That was a separate incident."

"She sure has been riding a rough patch," Everest notices.

"Yeah, that's for sure," Williams says. "But then, so did her brother. He started working on one of the girls who was working in a strip joint operated by the Wizards. Jeanne-Michelle was a sweet girl from Haiti who started feeding us information after David told her what kind of people her bosses were. Even though he never came clean with it, I'm pretty sure she and David had a thing going. Can’t blame the kid. She was lovely and a drop-dead beauty." He shrugs and cracks open one of the cans before continuing with the story.

"A few days before David's official death, he left his favorite jacket to dry at Jeanne-Michelle's place after being caught under a torrential rain. When he came to retrieve it the next day, the place had been thoroughly tossed, mattress ripped apart and all, and the woman had vanished. Since everyone knew he had a sweet spot for that girl, he felt comfortable enough to ask the other strippers about her and found out that her locker had been emptied by the management the very day she had vanished. And they weren’t really looking for her.”

"So you guys figured out she had stolen something from them and either ran away or been killed before she had a chance to hand it over to David while, all along, David had the disk hidden in his jacket," I say.

"Right, but then the management started questioning all Jeanne-Michelle’s Johns, and somehow, David's cover got blown. That's when we knew we had to pull him out and, to avoid retaliation against his family, stage his death," Captain Williams says.

"Did you ever find out who blew his cover?" I ask.

"It has to be someone from our station," he says. "David joined us right out of the police academy, so he was not a familiar face to anyone but us."

"It could be the same person who had been feeding Lisa false information," Everest adds. He answers the question he must read in my raised eyebrows. "Last year, she asked me when we were going to clear the streets of the Iron Tornadoes. I figure someone must have told her that it was our MC her brother was investigating, right?"

"The only person Lisa's been friendly with at the station, as far as I know, is Mike," Williams volunteers. "He was the one on reception duty when she came to get her brother's stuff and then again when she dropped by afterwards."

"He fits the profile," I say.

"I'm not sure," Williams says. He furrows his brows and stares into the distance as if he’s flipping mental images of the guy. "I don't think I ever saw him befriend anyone in the station. He's polite and amicable but never volunteers any personal information. If I didn't have access to his personnel file, I wouldn't be able to tell you if he's single or where he lives. He did belong to some right-wing association when he was in high school, but it wasn't held against him when he filed. Boys will be boys. We all did stupid things when our hormones were overriding our brains."

His admission puzzles me since he seems like the type of guy who has always had everything under control. Maybe not. Could he have done some crazy shit in his days, too? I try to visualize him in a hippy commune, smoking grass or dropping acid, but my imagination's not powerful enough to conjure such images.

"Mike did suggest to a young recruit that there was a way to stop and search people without serious probable cause, because if you waited long enough, you could get them for jaywalking," Williams adds.

"But there's no jaywalking laws in Florida," Everest interjects.

"Almost none," I say. "The law does prohibit pedestrians from crossing between adjacent intersections where traffic control signals are in operation. So you see, if there are two traffic signals—which is the case when you're in Point Lookout or most other cities—you can actually stop someone for a traffic stop violation if they step out of line."

Captain Williams looks at me as if I’ve grown a second head. "That's precisely what Mike told the recruit."

"We were taught that at the police academy by one very conservative criminal law teacher who thought civil rights were nothing more than encumbrances thrown in our way by 'bleeding heart softies judges,' who, according to him, should have been sentenced to walk some wild beat for a week to live with their decisions."

Williams laughs. "I know precisely who you're talking about. He's lost his teaching position this year. He was doing too much damage."

"So where's David?" I ask.

"I don't know. This is information given on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know. But you should see him soon enough," Captain Williams says. "We're doing a three-state coordinated action on Monday morning under the supervision of the Feds." He pronounces supervision as if the word left a bad taste in his mouth. "After that, he should be free to come home."

"And you're gonna be in so much trouble, man. I really feel for you!"

Looking genuinely surprised, Captain Williams looks at me while a big grin spreads across Everest's face. Everest gets it. Captain Williams will have to tell his wife that he's slept by her side for almost a year without telling her that the son she was mourning wasn’t really dead.