Falling Down (12 page)

Gates stayed long enough to bring his head close to mine.

“You look really pissed off,” he said.

“I am.”

“So, working with TPD isn't going to happen?”

“That's not why I'm pissed off, Bob.” He waited. “Private thing.”

“Maybe you'll charge your pissiness tomorrow,” he said.

 

After half an hour of being bustled around by the Magellan's crowd, and after a wonderful steak, I started to get really chilly. The aircon was on frigid, all the men with shirts and suit jackets and warm inside their clothing cocoons, but I'd only worn a short-sleeve cotton blouse, open in front.

Goosebumps on both my arms, I frowned at whatever guy was hitting on me right then and walked to the exit and outside into the hot June weather. Fifteen percent humidity is great for coping with ninety-five-degree heat, but not when the aircon is set to polar and you're wearing shorts, or short sleeves or a tank top.

Two men bumping each other with knuckled fists, laughing and oblivious to me, tried to come inside Magellan's front door just when I was leaving. And they weren't there for the first drink of the day, nor did they have breath mints, just boozy odors, we were jockeying for position at the door, each of them taking one of my arms,
Hey, don't leave, baby, we just got here, give us a shot
. I pushed violently between them, an elbow in each guy's gut, I had to resist kneeing one of them in the balls. Just outside the door at last, the hot monsoon humidity enveloping me with a wonderfully warm hug.

I drove around with the windows down and the moon-roof open. Somehow I found myself back at the park, but a chain hung across both entrances. I parked across the street, turned off my engine to watch three gardeners inside the park struggling with an uprooted thirty-year-old mesquite.

During high winds, and frequently during a monsoon, in seconds a tree can be uprooted. It shudders in the wind, but the roots are shallow, and somewhere around forty miles an hour, winds rip the root-ball out of the ground and the weight of the tree pulls it over, toppling to the ground. Sometimes, although not common, the tree can be saved if gardeners work quickly. Usually, the tree lays there until it rots, or somebody chain-saws it to
pieces. I used to save stumps, gnarly ones I'd find while out driving, and I'd wrestle together some people who could load the stump into my pickup and then position it somewhere on my property.

One time, I remember this so clearly, a huge blue Palo Verde lay across a hedge of Arizona bird-of-paradise flowers. I sat on the trunk of the Palo Verde, the bark still smooth and rippling with imperfections of a few decades of growth. Nobody else around, so I leaned over to lie, sideways, on the trunk, which, being nearly a foot wide, meant I couldn't lie on my back, but lying on the side was perfect. I put my ear against the tree, looked around to make sure nobody watched me, lay on my chest, and wrapped both arms around the tree.

I heard a woman sob and I sat up quickly.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” the woman said. Tears runneling down both cheeks. “I really, really didn't want to disturb you. That tree, I know that tree so well, my grandfather planted it when I was about eight or nine years old. When we owned the house, back there, it was the only house around at that time. So when I saw you hugging the tree, I had such memories of how we all watched over that tree. I didn't even know it was down. I hardly ever come by here, I live a mile away and I walk every day but usually along another road.”

“It's a beautiful tree,” I said. “Maybe we can find a gardener or landscaper who's got the equipment to plant it solid.”

“Maybe,” she said. Took out a cell phone, started to punch in a number. She wiped her tears and gave me a laugh. “I've just got to say, I've been an environmental protection person for years, but, true story, while I'm used to being called a tree hugger, I've never seen anybody hug a tree like you just did.”

 

My cell rang. “You've got to see this,” Alex said.

“See what?”

“I can't describe…we've never, none of us, we've never seen anything like this before.”

“Is it a name? Somebody we know, is it their name?”

“No.”

“Someone from the park?”

“From the park, yes. But nobody you know.”

“You're talking in codes, Alex.”

“Yah. Um, first thing we did, we found who'd used the computer. To look at the online casino. I called, what's his name, Charvoz. Told him the name of the person. He said he'd contact you later. But Laura, you've got to see this now.”

“Right now I'm not in the mood to see anything.”

“You sound really worked up.”

“Whatever.”

“Laura.” Insistent now. “Laura. You've
really
got to see this.”

“Okay. I'm closer to home than the office. Bring it to my house.”

“No,” she said. “Come here.”

“What's so important?”

“Laura,” Alex said. “I don't know what's going on here. I don't really know why I'm looking at this, this…Laura, is this something personal? This online casino website? Or are we being hired by somebody?”

“Does it matter?”

“I want to put these people down,” Alex said. “I want us totally involved in this, I want us to drop just about everything else we've got and work this case.”

“We don't need any more clients,” I said.

“I don't care if there are clients or not. I'll work this by myself, if you don't want anything to do with it. This really
really
can't be ignored.”

“Alex,” I said. “I'm not sure who's more worked up tonight.”

“Oh, I'm angry,” Alex said. “At first it just freaked me out, but now I'm so angry I won't work on anything else.”

“Okay. Who's there with you?”

“Kelle's still here, but I've sent everybody else away for the night. You've got to see this in the office, Laura.”

“Why?”

“Because you don't want it in your home.”

W
hat wouldn't I want to see in my own home?

What would be so…terrible? Disgusting? Horrible? What would make me walk immediately away from it? And I immediately thought of Nathan, walking away from me. Was
I
disgusting, was I somebody to be shunned, erased from his life?

I clamped down hard on that thought.

 

What wouldn't I want to see in my own home?

Something on the Internet, that was clear. In ten years, I think I've seen everything possible. Websites displayed anything imaginable:

Pornography is boring. I've sifted through hundreds of spam emails and websites, I've seen the most grotesque sexual positioning of naked genitals. Pornography is a huge business, generating thirteen billion dollars every year.

 

War is for television news programs and documentaries on the History Channel. War itself is senseless violence,
but violence is all over television and movies. Despite years of rumors about snuff films, filming an actual death no longer seemed
outré,
the Vietnam War changed all that, and cameras in the two Iraq wars perfected battlefield violence.

 

Gambling. Had to be something involved with gambling. Alex had cracked beyond the entry requirements of the online casino. People gambled for

The gambling game of choice was whatever suited the gambler.

Online gambling exploded into popularity around the turn of the century, fueled by the increasing number of casinos on Indian lands, state lotteries, and televised poker sessions. Gamblers always wager on the endless number of sports which demanded that somebody win, somebody lose.

You can bet online, but this is passive gambling. You make a bet before the action, you collect or pay out when the game is over.

Gamblers want hands-on action.

Dealing the cards, flinging the dice, staking chips on red or black or number twenty-seven.

For most people, the boringly repetitive routine of activating a slot machine.

Few slots even have a handle these days. You don't pull down the handle, you punch a button. Slots duplicate all kinds of TV game shows. America's top-rated TV game show is no longer for couch potatoes. You could play
Wheel of Fortune
and be your own Pat Sa
jac, Vanna White, or better yet, be a contestant.

Online casinos have mixed reputations. Some guarantee financial security with recognizable protection programs. Other casinos are like most websites. Here today, gone next month. Reputable and disreputable online casinos are indistinguishable to whatever flies are drawn to the site.

Now there are so many websites that casinos offer bonus chips when you make your initial cash deposit. Up to one hundred dollars if you predeposit a thousand dollars from your credit card or bank statement. Deposit more, get two or three hundred in bonus chips. Not to worry, an online casino isn't basically different in most ways than going to Vegas. They have the odds, they have the edge, and eventually, they'll get your money.

But once again, what had Alex found on an online gambling website that I wouldn't want to see in my own home?

 

I exited from I-10 Southbound at Congress and turned east, toward our office on the third floor of a 1930s renovated brick and adobe building.

What don't I want to see? Or turn that question on its ear. What wouldn't I want my daughter to see? Spider had seen everything. Like me, she'd been a runaway, a thief, and had served jail time. My granddaughter was too young to really see anything.

 

Cruising past the downtown park, I almost rammed the Chevy Suburban in front of me at the stoplight. In the park, three women had a man pinned to the ground, kicking and punching him. One of the women picked up a shopping cart and smashed it against the man's knees. The sudden violence caught me by surprise, cars behind me honking and screeching around me when the light turned green.

Violence.

Think video games, okay, sure. All manner of slaughter and destruction. Wreck cars, become a gangbanger, sell drugs, and most of all, the first person-shooter games like Doom, but now involving sophisticated graphic animation of warfare. Save Private Ryan yourself, storm ashore at Normandy.

But the thrill is the destruction, the ultimate rush when you've reached the highest game level by efficiently avoiding your own death by killing everything that's moved. How would you gamble, if you were actually driving the game?

No. That wasn't gambling.

Violence.

I parked in our office underground garage. When I park down there at night, after business hours, I always think of Robert Redford meeting Deep Throat underground in
All the President's Men.
Deep Throat, well, Hal Holbrook, half hidden behind a concrete pillar, clouds of smoke curling around his half-hidden face, and the end of one scene where a car's tires squeal somewhere inside the garage and Redford looks away and looks back to find himself all alone, the scene ending outside the garage as he's running away from…running from what?

Violence.

What kind of online casino would let you gamble on violence?

Boxing? Wrestling? Iron-man-to-the-death contests, animated?

 

What if…and then it came to me, what Alex discovered.

It had to be violence.

 

Real violence now appeared on the Internet in an unpredictable way. A year after declaring victory in the war against Iraq, armed revolutionaries and terrorists still
blew themselves and other people apart. Worse, kidnapped innocents were made to appear on grainy home videos, pleading for their lives as they knelt before heavily armed and hooded terrorists.

Most of the world never saw the beheadings. Editors and publishers have moral and ethical standards, any sight too gruesome never makes it through the publication gateways. But the graphic pictures exist on the Internet.

Knives drawn, the terrorists forced Daniel Pearl to repeat, “My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish,” and then he was decapitated. Many of the executions captured on video were reproduced on inexpensive CDs, including the final beheadings, and sold by the thousands on the Arab street.

This gruesome entertainment, and it does entertain those with violent political beliefs, probably started with the Chechens and Iraqi terrorist groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad. Zarqawi realized the awesome power of images, probably influenced greatly by the Abu Ghraib photographs of U.S. jailers humiliating Muslim prisoners. Zarqawi and others quickly and correctly estimated the power of the image, so the most logical step has a terrorist becoming a video director, despite the amateurish posing of the terrified victim on the ground in front of five hooded and armed men, one of whom reads out the death sentence.

American film ratings dilute this violence with an R-rating:

Violence. The videotaped executions weren't so much political statements as recruiting videos for more terrorists. Whatever Alex had found, it had to be something violent on which people would gamble.

Nobody gambles on war. There are too many sure profits to be made on war.

I swung my legs and bag out of the car, headed for the elevator, looking around me and moving faster. Thinking of Margaret Hassan, one of the last people to be kidnapped before the U.S. forces moved to destroy terrorists in Falluja. Hassan's body was found in the rubble, a bullet in her mutilated body. Hassan, long married to an Iraqi, her videotaped face still in my head, pleading for her life.

A warning to anybody who'd think of cooperating with the devil. I've seen enough evil, but I've never seen an execution video all the way to the end. Now I had a desperate feeling of reaching my limits, of going over the edge, across the border from which…

Stop these thoughts,
I told myself.
Don't get ahead of yourself.

And yet I still wasn't prepared. One thing I've always known about myself: When I'm not prepared, no matter what the issue, I'm not yet ready to face it.

 

Two phone calls.

 

“Alex,” I said. “Give me about half an hour.”

“No problem. We'll be working this all night.”

“Just half an hour. I need to talk to somebody first. But…this website. Just don't tell me it's a snuff film.”

“No,” Alex said finally. “At least, people aren't being slaughtered.”

“Animals?”

“Cockfights,” she said. “Not live. Animated. But Kelle believes the animations originated with live birds, live fights. It's just…gruesome.”

“I'll be there soon, maybe as long as an hour.”

 

“Christopher,” I said. “You awake?”

“Nope,” Kyle said. “Just watching the
Seinfeld
rerun about shrinkage.”

“Meet me for coffee? Right now?”

“Where?” No hesitation at all.

“There's a Starbucks on Grant. A block east of Swan.”

“Be there in fifteen.”