Cool in Tucson (29 page)

“Now’s as good a time as any, and it’s not gonna take long.  This guy let most of his gigabytes go to waste.  Here, take my chair, I’ll sit by you and tell you what to poke.”  She sat in his warm chair as Eisenstaat guided her quickly through the contents of a nearly empty machine.  The e-mail program held ten messages in the inbox, nothing in the sent file, nothing in the trash.

           “Just these ten?  And they’re all clusters of letters and numbers,” Sarah said.

            “Some kind of code,” Eisenstaat said.  “Customer number first and then an order.  And he must have blown off every message as soon as he’d read it.  These are all from the last two days.”

Sarah said, “Any idea how much he was moving?”

“Well…a guess.  No way to know if these two days were average, but…” he guided her to an account in a Quicken program.  “This looks like his re-orders for the last couple of weeks.”

“Have you figured out the symbols?”

“I’m guessing CO is cocaine, and HE is probably black tar heroin, they tell me that’s the joyride of choice this year.  Jimmy thinks, based on his customer list, he wasn’t peddling much hemp.  I’m not really schooled in this crap, though, Sarah, you should get some help from our guys at the undisclosed location.”  Detectives at 270 South Stone had adopted the Vice-President’s supposed hideout after 9/11 as an ironic address for their own narcotics squad. 

“I will.  But let’s try some ballpark figures, for now.”

“Well, say this biggest amount is coke…” He did some math.  “Somewhere between three and five thou, his cost, every week.”  He looked up over his glasses.  “Double on the street, right?”

“Oh, triple,” Sarah said.  “Or more.  Delaney’s rule of thumb is, ‘Just crossing Tucson, the wholesale price doubles.  And then retail, it’ll double or triple again.’ 

“What’s that thing Johnny Carson used to say?”  Eisenstaat pushed his glasses up on his long nose.  “ ‘Sure beats selling shoes at Thom McAnn, doesn’t it?’ ” He made a derisive noise.  “Kind of hard to match it in the police department, too.  Not that I’d ever say a discouraging word.”

“Keep thinking how lousy his long-term benefits were,” Sarah said, scrolling.   “What else is in here, Harry?”

“Games.  Solitaire, chess, bridge.  A couple of crosswords.”

“Personal correspondence?” 

“None.”

“I swear, Ace Perkins had less fun pushing drugs than I have hooking.”

“What?”  Eisenstaat peered through his bifocals. 

“She just makes rugs, don’t let her start,” Ibarra said, walking by. 

“Let’s look at his favorite sites,” Sarah said.  She tapped.  No list came down.  “
Nada
.  This man has more in paper records than he has in his computer.” 

Eisenstaat chuckled.    “A horse-and-buggy drug dealer, don’t you just love it?”

Sarah pushed her chair back impatiently.  “I feel like we’re stuck in the mud here—I’m going to go order print and DNA testing on the Excursion.”

And while she was at it she could nose around a little about Janine’s car.  It was officially none of her business, of course, somebody in auto theft would have that folder.  But as long as she was over on that side of the building, there was no harm in schmoozing with a receptionist named Lois, who told her a crime scene specialist was working on the Dodge, “as we speak.” 

“Terrific.  Who’s on today?”  

“Gloria Jackson.  And she told me a few minutes ago not to expect her back for a while, she’s finding plenty of latents.”

“Well, fine.  Who’s got the theft?”

“Nobody yet.  All the detectives have so many cases already—but this one has a priority rating, they’ll get to it pretty soon.”

“Uh-huh.”  Car theft was like sunburn in Tucson, an affliction so common people hardly bothered to complain about it. 
If I’d reported Denny as a kidnapping the FBI would be all over this car. But then so would the media. 
    

“Of course if some prints match up with other cases,” Lois said, “whoever’s working those will grab it.”

“Sure.  Now, how about these work orders on the Excursion?  How much of a delay am I facing there?”

“Oh, we might have somebody to put on it by afternoon.”

Back on her floor, Jimmy Ibarra followed her into her workstation and stood by her desk looking incandescent, saying, “I offered my man at Verizon a great big kiss but for some reason he wants it from you.”

“What’s he got?”

“Wednesday night, at twelve minutes after nine, Ace Perkins’s phone received a call from this number,” he showed her the slip of paper, “
and somebody answered it
.”  He gave her one of his hot-salsa super-smiles.  “Couldn’t have been much of a conversation, three seconds.  But still.”

“But still is right.  Oh, this is very nice, Jimmy, somebody’s carrying that phone around and you know what?  It just might have a GPS on it and—and—”

“And we could do some electronic stalking, how cool is that?”  Ibarra said.  He did a little dance before he added, uncertainly, “Tell me again, how do we do that?” 

“Well, you know what, I think this is why God created support staffs.  I’m going to call my favorite geek.” 

She got Tracy Scott on the phone and explained their request while Ibarra jittered happily beside her.  Listening to Tracy’s reply, she said, on a descending scale of happiness, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” and hung up scowling.

“What, what?”

She put her fingertips on her forehead and closed her eyes while she recited the difficulties.  “Our telephone system is Verizon which doesn’t support that service.  But Nextel does but he doesn’t think our software interfaces with theirs.  But he’s also heard we can rent the equipment from the feds when we need to but he thinks it’s too expensive for anything but high-profile cases, so he’s going to ask around and get back to me blah blah blah.  Why are all the phones ringing?” 

“Probably if you answered it—” Ibarra sprinted for his.

She picked up hers and Delaney said, “Sarah, we just got a new case and it sounds like a messy one.  Is everybody out there on the floor?”

“Uh…” She stood up and looked over her divider walls.  “…yes.”

“Good.  Tell me, are you making any progress on the Perkins case?”

“Yeah, we’ve got several good things going.”

“Well, what I was thinking, I think I can manage this one I just got with five guys, if—would you be able to keep going by yourself?” 

“Oh, sure.”

“Okay, I’m going to try it that way.  If I get there and decide I need you, I’ll call you from there. Switch me over to Ibarra now, okay?” 

For ten minutes, there was a great clatter of phones, desk drawers, briefcases and Glocks all around her.  When they were all out the door, Sarah sat down in the echoing silence, telling herself not to start imagining that Delaney was starting to isolate her from the rest of the section.  He got a new case, he needed everybody but decided to make do with one less so the primary on yesterday’s case could keep some momentum going.

To quell her screaming paranoia, she started a list.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After breakfast Tilly drove to Ohio Street and parked across from the Rodriguez house, two doors east where he could see most of the west end of the block.  He had been in this neighborhood a half-dozen times in the last three days, looking for Hector, so he had it pretty well memorized. 

It was crowded but not complicated, old adobe single-story houses with open patios and junk-filled yards.  The occupants lived precarious lives, paycheck to paycheck when they had jobs, scratching and grabbing when they didn’t.  People here weren’t looking for any trouble they didn’t already have. 

By now, Tilly figured, he could not be the only one checking on Hector’s house.  So before he went after Hector’s mama and sisters he needed to sit quiet a minute and see if anybody was hanging out on the block today that didn’t belong.     

While he watched he thought about Rudy, who was beginning to worry him. 
He’s had it too good for too long
, he decided,
he can’t stand the thought of losing anything now
.  This was the same Rudy Ortiz who had once stuffed money into the mouths of two bloody heads and shipped them to Mexico.  Now because one of his dealers had been capped he was breaking beer glasses in public and accusing his hired hands of conspiring against him?  Pitiful. 

Tilly had watched Rudy Ortiz trying to keep up as the drug culture became increasingly corporate, suits coming up from Mexico to talk about “building a customer base” on the Junior High playgrounds.  He had been afraid Rudy was passing some kind of a tipping point the day he began trying to say “potential new revenue stream.” 

Man with money and power starts losing his confidence like that, trying to impress the sexy new girlfriend and the hip haircuts from Cancún, the next place he’s going to be is up to his eyeballs in shit.  And anybody standing too close is going right down into the slime with him.  

The neighborhood looked quiet enough, the usual dogs barking, a boy riding his rusty bike toward Middle School.  Just beyond the Rodriguez house, a car with bald tires and one door that didn’t match backed out of the driveway where it was parked, and drove east.  As soon as it was out of the way Tilly saw the car turning the corner out of Fifteenth, a new Impala carrying two men with short haircuts, neat shirts and ties and impassive faces.  They drove slowly toward the Rodriguez house and stopped at the curb in front of the next house to the west. 

Just then the door opened and Carmencita appeared on the step with her two daughters.  Tilly watched while she tied up their hair with rubber bands strung with bright beads, straightened their clothing with a couple of little jerks, checked their bookbags and handed each of them a coin.  The men in the maroon Impala were watching her too.

Tilly had quit paying attention in school a couple of years before he dropped out in sixth grade; both the little girls he was watching now could undoubtedly read better than he could.  Life had been his teacher and even at that he had been a slow learner.  But over the years he had developed good instincts on a narrow range of subjects.  He usually knew who was high and on what.  He was good at spotting a weapon, could smell when a fight was likely to start, and knew all the ways to win if you had to get into it.

He was muscle.  He made his living in whatever illicit activity was happening nearby when he needed money.  He kept a small bag packed at all times, and had more than once left even that behind.  One of the first things he did after his arrival in any city was find all the ways out of it. 

He knew when, as now, he was looking at cops.  These two had the tightly wound but confident look he associated with Feds.  DEA, he was guessing—that would figure.  And what Tilly knew best of all was his bottom line: he had been in prison twice, and he was never going back.

So as Hector’s sisters walked away waving good-bye and the two self-possessed men got out of the Impala and introduced themselves politely to Carmencita Rodriguez,   Tilly made up his mind. 
Fuck it.  Time to go.

 
He drove quietly to Fifteenth Street, watching his rearview mirror to see if the cops made a note of his license plate number.  They never even glanced his way.  He thought he probably had time to pick up his grab-and-go bag, but as he turned into the street below his apartment building he saw a couple of cars he wasn’t sure about and decided, once again,
Fuck it
.  He drove quietly away from his few possessions and was rolling northwest on I-10, passing the cement plant in Marana, by the time Hector’s sisters had begun to recite the pledge of allegiance at Apollo Middle School
.