Stateline (32 page)

“You find that farfetched? You were there when he abducted us.”

“I was there when he arrested you. If Conrad Pace wanted you out of the picture, you’d be sitting in a cell right now, not walking the streets.”

“Detective, I’m going to tell you something for your own personal protection. I’m not sure if you’re on the take or not, but even if you’re not, I don’t sense you’re going to play any role in taking down the bad guys, other than maybe filing some paperwork. So this is just information hopefully you can use to keep yourself out of trouble. Okay?”

“Continue, please. I can’t wait to hear this.”

“Conrad Pace is taking money from Tuma to allow him to deal drugs out of Placerville. Two deputies, Perdie and Fingsten, are relatives of Pace, and they’re part of the deal. So is your partner, Raneswich. Pace has a vested interest in protecting Tuma, and that includes Julo Nafui. Hopefully you can draw your own conclusions.”

“My, my, don’t we have an active imagination,” he chortled.

“Maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, huh?”

“Listen to me,” a different voice said.

I felt a sudden violation at having an unexpected party on the line. My throat tightened, and I could feel the heat rise in my face.

“Who is this?”

“Shut up and listen to me. You come into my town and trample all over my turf, preventing this police department from conducting a proper investigation, and then you start spraying around these ludicrous accusations–”

“How’s it going, Raneswich?”

“I should have thrown you in jail last week. Obstruction of justice, breaking and entering, drunk in public, murder—you’re a prosecutor’s dream. I want you out of town. And not just South Lake Tahoe—that means Reno, Truckee, the whole damn region.”

“You’re pissing in the wind,” I said. “Why don’t you go back to drinking from the toilet, or whatever it is you spend your working hours doing?”

I heard Raneswich suck in his breath through his teeth.

“I like your attitude. On second thought, hang around a while. It will make for a real nice day when I lock you up. I know some inmates down at Folsom who would love to meet you.”

“Give it up, Raneswich. I know you’re sucking off Conrad Pace and Salvador Tuma for chump change. You think they’ll give a shit when you’re indicted along with them?”

“I find it incredible a person like you is on the streets in this city. But that’ll be a temporary situation,” he said, and the line went dead.

“Don’t you hate it when they get in the last word?” Cody said, as I set my phone down.

“The Tahoe PD has no interest in Nafui,” I said.

He raised his beer mug to me. “At least you don’t have to compete with them for the bounty.” He had a point, but at that moment the money was the last thing on my mind. The exchange with Raneswich had confirmed that the morally insane were running the show, and both the criminals and the dirty cops would stop at nothing to preserve their cozy little arrangement. I was both angry and disheartened, and felt a strong urge to just leave the cesspool to those who inhabited it.

“You know why we’re still here?” Cody said, his eyes boring into mine. “Packing this new iron, wearing these vests, hanging around town? You know why? It’s because those guys caught us with our dicks out and our pants around our ankles, and it was
easy.
We barely put up a fight, and they took us out to that river and had a good laugh while we nearly drown and froze to death. They treated us like a couple of amateurs.”

Cody took a long hit off his beer. “And neither of us wants to leave until that score is settled. We’re gonna find those assholes, or, if they find us first, we’ll be ready. Then we’ll settle the fucking score.”

I looked at Cody. Even though his words sounded like boozy, macho, bar-rail boasting, I couldn’t argue his conclusion. But my reasoning was a little different. Yes, the criminals and corrupt cops had to be put out of commission. They all needed to go down, because any one of them might gladly kill us, given the opportunity. And that included the whole band: Nafui, Pace, Louis Perdie, and the dipshit cop Fingsten. And Raneswich, and maybe Iverson too, if he got in the way.

When I went out to the back patio to have a smoke, the skies had turned dark. Gray and white clouds were moving slowly over the lake with the wind, from the west. It looked like another goddamned storm.

While we waited for Edward, I took a seat at a cocktail table in the back of the place and called the number for the
Sacramento Bee.
I spent an hour on the phone with a journalist, giving him a detailed account of what had happened during the last three days. I gave him names, dates, everything I could think of. He said there had been vague rumors of corruption in Silverado County for months, but no one ever got a handle on it. “This is big,” he said.

“How’d it go?” Cody asked when I came back to the bar.

“I think I just poured a shitload of grief into Conrad Pace’s life. We’ll see how he and his buddies deal with that.”

We had dinner and watched TV, drinking slow beers, staying away from the hard stuff. By the time Edward showed up, I had switched to coffee.

“You look comfortable,” I said. Edward was wearing jeans, boots, and a t-shirt. It was the first time I’d seen him wear anything but his business clothes. “Are those the bank records?”

“Yes.” He handed me the thick folder. “Give me a margarita on the rocks with a shot of Herradura on the side,” Edward told the bartender. Cody raised his eyes and nodded in approval.

The copies of Sylvester Bascom’s canceled checks from the last six months covered thirty pages. I flipped through the sheets, looking for large amounts, scanning the payees for Osterlund or Tuma. Out of the dozens of checks, accounting for over $40,000 of expenditures, not one looked like it may have been used to buy or otherwise finance drugs.

“Well, Edward,” I said finally. “You ready to head out to the cathouse?”

“Sure, just for the experience—I mean, just to see what’s going on.”

“Hey, whatever you do is your own business,” I said.

“Yeah, monkey business,” Cody said, his bulletproof vest tight and bulky across his torso.

We piled into Edward’s Crown Victoria and eased our way through the traffic lights on 50, rolling slowly past the casinos, heading out of town. A blanket of whiteness covered the dirt and grit of the city, and snowflakes drifted lazily from the heavy sky. It seemed unusually quiet for Stateline, as if the town was muted by the weight of the snow.

Once the road turned east the forest thinned out, and was gradually replaced by the lonely landscape of the desert. We climbed over Spooner Summit, the Ford’s big motor pulling us up the grade. The pass was nearly deserted.

“Edward, I called Iverson and told him it’s Julo Nafui he’s looking for,” I said.

“What is it with Raneswich and Iverson?” Edward glanced at me as he drove. “Are you sure they’re in league with these bad cops? Or maybe they’re just really incompetent? It doesn’t seem like they ever made much progress on the murder.”

“That was by design,” I said.

“What do you think, Cody?” Edward said. Cody was sitting in the back, leaning against the door with his legs stretched out across the seat.

“They’re getting paid off. But their free ride is coming to an end.”

As we came off the mountain and glided onto the desert floor outside of Carson City, a jackrabbit darted in front of the car so quickly that Edward didn’t have time to react. We ran straight over it.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed.

“Lookit that,” Cody said, his head turned to the back window. “Lucky bunny made it. Probably just singed his ears on the oil pan.”

I wondered if it was an omen.

• • •

The Tumbleweeds Ranch was doing what I assumed was brisk business for a Monday night. We sat at the bar, watching the action. The girls rotated steadily in and out of the parlor, and every few minutes new ones appeared. Edward’s head turned like it was on a swivel. He kept tapping his fingers on the bar, and finally I said to him, “Hey, man, why don’t you pick one you like?”

“Huh? No, no, that’s not why I’m here, you know that. I’m just looking.”

“If you say so.”

“Maybe you should just buy a souvenir cap,” Cody said, pointing at the caps, shirts, and assorted promotional items behind the bar.

“Well,” Edward said a minute later, “if I was to partake, who do you think I should pick?”

“What, I’m the expert?” I said.

“Hey, go tear off a piece if you want. They won’t bite,” Cody said.

Edward tried to smile his way through it, but his face was turning red.

“You’re man enough, ain’t you?” Cody said.

“Take it easy, Cody,” I said.

Eventually a bleached blonde with cantaloupe-sized breasts sat next to Edward, and after a while she led him down a hallway.

While he was gone, I spotted the Asian prostitute who had told me where to find Samantha Nunez. I doubted she would recognize me, but she caught me looking at her and sauntered over.

“My favorite position’s doggie style,” she said, flashing her million-dollar smile.

“Woof, woof,” Cody said between sips off his beer.

“Hey, you. I remember you.” She slapped me lightly on the arm with the backs of her fingers. “Did you ever find Samantha?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Yeah, she didn’t stay in Vegas for long. You didn’t get to tell her about her sick family member, huh?”

“Never had the chance.”

“You still looking for her?”

“Why?”

“She called me the other day, said she can’t reach her boyfriend. Is he the one who’s sick?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Unfortunately he didn’t make it.”

“He died?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, my god, Samantha doesn’t know.” She put her finger on her chin and looked down and then looked back at me. “What did he die of?”

I thought of Michael Dean Stiles, lying with his legs in the Truckee River, his beard glistening with vomit, his face bloodless, his last breath leaving his body. What did he die of? Greed probably, and certainly foolishness. A career criminal, a drug dealer and a killer, dying like a fool on a winter night in a cold desert canyon. I had a bizarre notion that if I went back there, I would find his clothed skeleton, grinning at me as if he’d had the last laugh.

“Tell Samantha to leave me a message at this number if she wants to know.” I scribbled my office number on a cocktail napkin, then excused myself and went to the head. When I returned she was gone, but Edward was back at the bar with an ear-to-ear grin.

“You didn’t fall in love, did you?” I asked.

“Other way around,” he said, laughing, punching me on the shoulder.

“Way to go, Casanova.” Cody reached out and mussed Edward’s hair.

I bought the boys a round, and we toasted the good times, fun and laughter that could be had for the price of a few drinks, and free love, or at least love that didn’t cost any more than money.

• • •

We left around midnight. The gravel crunched under our boots as we walked to Edward’s Ford. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and in that dark instant my mind flickered with a vision of my father’s death. Then a man holding a shotgun burst from behind the truck parked next to us. When I recognized the identity of the man, the synapses in my brain exploded with alarm. It was Julo Nafui.

He pounced like a cat, his shotgun aimed at Cody. He wasn’t more than two feet away when he pulled the trigger. I could see the mucus in the corners of his eyes when the gun went off, the blast erupting into the still night like an angry curse. Cody had been standing next to me, and the next instant he was gone, his body flying back over the hood of Edward’s Ford as if he’d been hit by a bus.

I jumped forward and grabbed the hot barrel of the shotgun with my left hand. Nafui yanked it back, but I stepped up and got my right hand around his wrist. He jerked the barrel upward, trying to wrench it from my grip. I ran at him, pushing, locking my forearm around the stock as he kicked out at my shins. He started whipping his powerful arms back and forth in a frenzy, trying to break my grip and throw me off. I held on with everything I had, squeezing desperately with my frostbitten hands.

Then from out of nowhere Edward leapt on to Nafui’s back, growling and snapping like a rabid dog. We whirled around the parking lot, gravel spitting beneath our feet. Edward wrapped his hands over Nafui’s face, and gouged at Nafui’s eyes as if trying to reach the brain. Nafui wrenched his head to the side, and I pushed forward, slamming him into the cab of a yellow pickup truck. The stock of the gun shattered the side window, and Edward’s head cracked hard against the window frame. I lashed out at Nafui’s face with my right hand, catching an eye, and pushed with my thumb as hard as I could. Nafui roared in pain and dropped the shotgun so he could swat my hand off his face, then the heels of his hands hit my shoulders, and I stumbled back. The shotgun had dropped to the ground next to the truck, and Edward lay collapsed on top of it.

For a split second Nafui and I faced each other, gasping for air, our chests heaving. We were no more than five feet apart. I went for the Beretta, but he pulled his backup piece a fraction faster. I felt the twenty-five-caliber round splat against my vest, and I returned fire as I was falling back. At that range there was no need to aim. The hollow-point bullet tore through his chest like an auger bit from hell and sent a bloody fountain out his back, streaking the door of the yellow pickup. Amazingly Nafui remained standing, his lips curled in a sneer, staring at me with eyes that had turned blood red. He raised his pistol again, and my finger tightened on the Beretta’s trigger.

A thunderous shot exploded behind me. I felt a hiss of air, then the right half of Nafui’s face vanished into a red mist, slivers of bone and brains spraying into the air like a sudden geyser. His legs kicked out and he fell on his back, the pulp of his head slapping the gravel with a liquid crunch.

Cody walked past me, his .44 Magnum smoking in his hand. His face was white as bleached stone in the moonlight, his eyes coal black. We stared down at the gore of Julo Nafui in silence. Cody’s new green parka had a jagged hole in the center, and his body armor was scored and blackened.