Total Immunity (26 page)

Oscar nodded his head.

“Yeah, that sounds real nice, Jack. You know, you're starting to turn into a bitter and resentful kinda cop. Those are the kind that don't appreciate their blessings and end up eating their gun. I hope that don't happen to you, Jackie.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I got so much to be happy about.”

“You do. A great kid, a wonderful girlfriend.”

“I'll give you the kid,” Jack said. “I'm not so sure about Julie.”

“Cut it out, man. She's beautiful, and she loves you and Kevin.”

“I don't know,” Jack said. “It was great she came to the hospital, but she's very delicate, Osc. I'm not sure she can handle being a cop's wife.”

“Yeah, sure,” Oscar said. “Sylvia acts that way sometimes, too. But that's because I'm getting all wired up in a case. When I start bringing that kind of stuff home with me and get all jumpy, it changes how she feels. She starts to worry I'm going to go nuts or I don't love her anymore. So she starts to . . . you know, withdraw . . .”

Jack felt his skin crawl.

“Man, you're talking just like some fucking shrink. That's what it is, right? You go to the shrink, then you attend the freaking AA meetings, and you start talking like you're some Mexican textbook.”

“Fuck you,” Oscar said, without raising his voice at all. “Don't lay that shit on me. You don't take any fucking responsibility for shit, Jack. A woman has got to believe you want her. You got to take care of her. They say all this shit about being independent, but that's not how they are. They need to be spoiled a little. All of 'em.”

Jack started to snap back at Oscar for no reason at all. He knew his partner was right, that he hadn't taken care of Julie at all lately, that he hadn't really been there for Kevin, either. Charlie Breen was more of a dad to Kevin than he was. Just like Julie said.

But he couldn't stand hearing about it just now. He was wired, thinking about Lopez, feeling like a coiled rattler ready to strike.

He looked out at the desert, the parched landscape, and thought that once he was as tough as one of the cactuses, but not anymore. He was prickly, but somebody had chopped him off at the roots . . .

“There,” Oscar said, pointing down the road. “There's our boy.”

Jack shielded his eyes and looked a half block down the dirt road.

A shabby-looking, weather-beaten sign said: Borrego Springs Car Repair. Proprietor J. Lopez.

“Let's do it!” Jack felt an electric current cut through his arms and chest. Thoughts of Julie and Kevin and his home miseries faded away . . .

This is what he lived for, he thought. Moments like this, when you could take the assholes down. Something solid you could do like a man, losing yourself in pure action.

He checked his revolver under his jacket and took a deep breath as Oscar pulled into the dusty parking lot.

Jesse Lopez was working on a Lincoln Navigator SUV in his steaming tin-roof shed with a big window fan blowing on him. He was a sleek-looking man with jet black hair, somewhere in his early thirties. His shirt was open down to the third button, revealing a muscular chest. His arms were cut as well, suggesting to Jack that he'd spent a lot of time in the weight room in his four years in Chino State Prison.

He looked up from the engine and wiped his face with a greasy rag.

“Help you gentlemen?”

Jack flashed his badge.

“Jack Harper, FBI. This is my partner, Agent Oscar Hidalgo. We'd like to ask you a few questions.”

Lopez blinked wearily and picked up a bottle of water. He took a long sip, then nodded to them.

“So ask.”

“First of all, we want to know about a certain $50,000 check you received from a man named Andreen on April 27 of this year.”

“He gave me a check to customize his car.”

“Fifty grand for a customizing job?” Oscar said. “You put wings on it or what?”

“That's funny,” Lopez said. “But that's what it costs to do the kind of work he was looking for.”

“What kind is that?” Jack said, moving a step closer.

“Well, that isn't for me to say. See, he wanted the work done privately, which is one of the reasons he came to me.”

Jack stepped around the bumper of the car until he was six inches away from Lopez.

“Let me ask you a question, Jesse. You think we would come all the way out here to talk to you in this heat if we wanted to fuck around?”

Lopez glared at Jack directly in the eyes. He didn't look the least intimidated.

“I don't know why you came out here. But what I did for Mr. Andreen is
his
business, not yours. I don't gotta tell you jack-shit what kinda work I did.”

“Technically, no,” Jack said.

He grabbed Lopez by the throat and kicked him in the balls.

Lopez squawked and fell to his knees.

“You're gonna tell me,” Jack said. “You're gonna tell me all about the shootings of the two cops, or you're gonna end up in the fucking lethal-injection chamber.”

He squeezed the mechanic's Adam's apple until he fell over on his side, gasping and gagging.

Finally he looked up at Jack, his eyes bloodshot and watering.

“You're out of your mind.
What
cops?”

“The ones you got $50,000 to fucking kill,” Jack said. “Feds.

You're not walking away from this, Jesse. We already looked at your record. Two ten-year bits for armed robbery. Suspect in two gang slayings. Nobody is going to get you out of this one.”

Jesse Lopez pulled himself up and spat out blood on the floor.

“I didn't kill any cops. I did a job for Mr. Andreen's car. Or maybe his boss's car . . . I don't know the guy's name, but he sort of said it was for some other guy.”

Oscar came up to him and straightened out his spit-mottled shirt.

“What did you do for his car?” he asked.

“I made some secret compartments for it, that's all. He said he was in a dangerous business and he had to use the car to transport valuables. So I made two secret compartments in it. One on the undercarriage and one in the roof . . . It was a convertible and I made it in the back, next to the retractable roof motor. Small compartments. I don't know what he was transporting, but unless you knew, you would never find either of them.”

Jack grabbed Lopez's arm and twisted it behind his back.

“You fucking lying sack of shit! I know you took that money for killing two cops. I know it. We're going to take you to a place that makes fucking Guantánamo look like a picnic. Tell me now. The truth, shithead.”

Lopez screamed in pain and cried out:

“You're nuts! I didn't do a damned thing. I fixed his car, and I sold one to some buddy of his. That's all I did.”

“Who was he?” Jack said, pulling out his revolver. “Tell me now, Jesse, 'cause I'm losing it.”

“Wait . . . wait,” Lopez said. “I had an old Jaguar I picked up down here cheap. I sold it to him for a price . . . 'cause Andreen asked me to help him out. Guy's name was on the bill of sale. It was Wilson. Thomas Wilson.”

Jack let him fall to the floor in a heap.

“Tommy Wilson,” Oscar muttered.

Jack felt as if the blood was leaving his head.

“Let me see that bill of sale — now!”

Lopez staggered to his feet and walked over to a greasy-looking file cabinet in the corner. He opened it slowly and went to the back, looked under the Ws. A second later, Jack had the bill of sale in his hand, with Tommy Wilson's signature at the bottom.

“We shoulda seen it with Tommy,” Oscar said. “If Zac Blakely and Hughes were bought off , then it only makes sense they'd get to Tommy, too.”

“Yeah,” Jack said as they drove through fields of bright yellow flowers. “Of course. How could we not see that? He's got them all paid off . But if that's the case, why did he get arrested? That's the question we haven't asked yet.”

Oscar looked as though someone had hit him in the face.

“You mean he
wanted
to be arrested?”

“I don't know,” Jack said. “But think about it. Two of the guys who arrested him were guys on his own payroll. So why didn't they tip him off before we arrested him?”

“Jesus, Jack, we already talked about this. You had him on the diamond thing, and Blakely and Hughes couldn't tip him or they would give away their own crimes. They
had
to let him get caught. So now Wilson gets bought, and he gets Steinbach moved to the Homeland Security side of things . . . where he can help him out.”

“Okay,” Jack said, as they hit a massive three lanes of traffic near Long Beach. “Then riddle me this, Batman . . . if it goes like you said it does, then why are Blakely and Hughes killed?”

“Because,” Oscar said, “they didn't tip Karl off . He did it to send a message to all the other people he has on his payroll. ‘Cross me and you'll get this.'”

“That's where I don't get it,” Jack said. “It makes sense, yeah . . . but to do it in the open this way, to say you're going to kill federal agents and then do it, and think you can get away with it . . . that's the work of another guy. Karl is a blowhard sometimes, but he was always very careful in his dealings. That's why it took us so long to get undercover with him, right? He had us checked and rechecked. At any time in that process, Blakely or Hughes could have tipped him that we were agents.”

“But you're forgetting something, Jackie,” Oscar said. “Blakely and Hughes weren't in the mix with us until the end of the case, not at the start. They didn't know what our assignment was until later in the game, when we were only a month or so away from springing the trap. Then, if they'd tipped him, it would have been obvious.”

“No, Oscar. That's where you're wrong. Even that late, they could have let him know and blamed it on one of his guys.”

Oscar shook his head.

“Too risky,” he said. “They had to play it out.”

“And then a subtle, smart operator like Karl Steinbach deals with this whole thing by telling us he'll kill us and does it, and gets away with it? I don't buy it.”

Oscar looked out at the huge oil derricks which lined the 405 like rusted robots.

“There's only one thing wrong with your idea there, Jack.”

“What's that?”

“He
is
getting away with it. We got nothing on him at all. Every step we've taken has just led us to another dead end.”

“That's right,” Jack said. “And that's why this is all starting to feel as though it's been scripted. How could he have set all this up so fast? And one more thing, Osc . . . If he hates us all so bad, how come nobody has tried to kill me or you yet? I'm telling you, Steinbach is not the guy. Not the
top
guy. He's a player in all this, yeah, but there's somebody above him. Somebody who made him play this game.”

“I don't know, Jack. That's paranoid. Maybe you got too much snake venom roiling round inside you.”

Jack laughed as they turned onto the 10 Freeway and headed toward Westwood.

“Yeah, well, look at it, Oscar. Wilson is involved. He gets Stein- bach out of it, almost instantly. It feels like a setup. So what you and me are going to do now is put our own little tail on Tommy Wilson. And dig this, old pal: I think what you said about the case really being about whomever it is they're trying to get to in Witness Protection . . . that is starting to make more sense. That's what all this is leading to, somehow. I can feel it.”

“Yeah, I'm a genius for thinking that,” Oscar said. “But who
is
the muther?”

Jack shook his head.

“Remember the other night when you told me to think about all the old Witness Protection cases?”

“Yeah. You come up with one?”

“Sort of. But it makes no sense. Still, there's something strange there. Thing is, it was a case so long ago, I can't really remember all the details. Did you come up with anything?”

“Nada,”
Oscar said. “But tell me about your case.”

“That's the problem. It was one of my first cases, and I don't really know how it all came out. I gotta dig deeper. Probably nothing, anyway.”

“So can you remember what it was?”

“Not all of it. But there's something there — it's like a picture that hasn't quite been developed yet.”

“You think it's got something to do with this case?”

“Maybe . . . Fuck, I don't know. But if it does I'll let you know. Now let's go see
Mr.
Wilson.”

35

AFTER MAKING A COUPLE of quick calls, Jack and Oscar found out that Tommy Wilson was at his home, a condo in Playa Del Mar, just two blocks from the beach. A place where the rents and condo prices were pretty steep for a cop. They waited a half block down the street from the place, the salt ocean smell in the air, both of them more than a little worried.

“What do you think Tommy did with his new car?” Oscar said.

“He's got it stowed somewhere. Probably with another house and another life.”

“I never figured him for a sellout,” Oscar said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I remember when we met him. Young, gung ho. Wanted to save the world.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “I wonder how it happens.”

“How what happens?”

“How a guy like that goes from wanting to save the world to wanting to own it.”

Jack shook his head and looked through his binoculars again.

The door to Tommy's bungalow swung open and he came out, dressed to kill.

“Check out Mr.
GQ,
” Jack said. “Man, those aren't fed clothes.”

He handed the glasses to Oscar, who watched Tommy walk down to his Chevy Trailblazer.

“Maybe he's going to meet the man,” Oscar said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “But
which
fucking man?”