He also taunted Saul mercilessly and came off as a cracker asshole sometimes. Nobody’s perfect.
“Marv was Monty’s partner back in the day, and the suicide didn’t look right. So Monty asked me to poke.” I rubbed the fork’s surface, wishing it was a knifehilt. But Carp was already jumpy. “I have to say, it’s looking less and less like suicide and more like someone’s hiding something.”
“Only a few million dollars and thirty dead people at last count.” Carp leaned back against creaking vinyl. “Kutchner was dirty, Kismet. As dirty as they come.”
Huh? I replayed the three sentences inside my head. Yes, Carper had just said what I thought he’d said. “But Monty—”
He dropped another bomb. “Montaigne’s under review. I don’t like it any more than you do. Do you think he’s involved?”
Monty? Hell, no. “Why would he ask me to take a look at it?” I picked up the fork, tapped it on the tabletop. “Would there be any reason for someone to try to kill me because I’m poking around in this?”
Theron shifted uneasily, staring off into the distance. He looked bored.
Carp shrugged. “Let me put it this way, I wish I was wearing some fucking Kevlar assplugs. This is big, Kiss.”
The waitress returned with a stack of pancakes and eggs for Carp, filled his coffee cup, and plunked down my orange juice. “Be a sec on the bacon,” she announced to the air over my head, before shuffling off.
Yeah, thanks. I got that. “Are you going to take it from the top, or are you going to be all cryptic? This isn’t the only iron I have in the fire.”
“Actually, I was going to ask you to help me.” He stared at his plate like it contained a pile of snot. I got the idea maybe Carp had lost his appetite. “Since you’re already involved, might as well.”
I so do not have time for this. But I heard the creak of a nylon rope rubbing against a ceiling beam, and saw a mask of bruising on a dead man’s terrified face. “What are we dealing with? Use small words, and speed it up.”
He stuck his fork into the pile of eggs, worked it back and forth. “You remember a barrio case, about three years ago? Two illegal immigrants found in a cheap-ass room, kidneys gone, blood on the walls?”
A quick fishing trip through Memory Lane produced zilch. “Nope. Unless something my-style hinky was involved, I don’t.”
“I remember,” Theron said quietly. “The Herald did a long series on organ thievery. An all-time high nationwide, they said. Whole underground economy.”
Cold fingers walked up my spine again. The last huge paranormal incident in the city had touched on black-market organ trade, but only briefly. By the time I’d unraveled it, everyone was already dead, the organs were sold—and I’d almost become a host for a Chaldean Elder God.
I still have nightmares from that. Just like the hundreds of other cases I have nightmares about. At least if I’m dreaming about it I know it’s over and done with. “Sullivan and the Badger were on that, weren’t they?”
“They got yanked. Sullivan thinks someone high-up is involved, since there were more deaths than could be accounted for even with whatever happened with those hooker murders you were chasing.” Carp had turned milk-pale. Those homicide sites had probably figured in a few of his nightmares too. “But still, they were pulled off it and the files were put in a deep freeze. We think whoever’s profiting mostly strips wetbacks of their kidneys, because they’re a transient population.”
I nodded. Illegal immigrants are victims in more ways than one. Coming to look for the American dream, they usually end up raped one way or another. If they’re lucky, they get more of a wage than they would back home while it happens.
If they’re unlucky, they become just another statistic. Or not even that.
I blew out a long frustrated breath. “Okay. So what does this have to do with—”
“I think there’s cops finding illegals for stripping, and cleaning up after it happens, a real body farm. It’s a safe bet the cash is laundered, but I don’t know how. I don’t think Marv Kutchner ate his Glock. He was in too deep and making too much money. That shitty little suburban house was small potatoes. He had plans to retire to a nice tropical paradise.”
“Who doesn’t?” I was only half sarcastic. And another question arrived, flirting at the corner of my consciousness. I never found out who they were selling the organs to. I assumed it was out of town, since I didn’t find anything here afterward and—
There I was, caught assuming. There was always a market for organs. I hadn’t thought the Sorrows would foul their own nest, but I’d been kept running around after other cases, chasing my tail. By the time I’d caught wind of their operation they were winding down. They could very well have been supplying brokers inside the city; the distribution network for organs was probably even better-funded than the one for drugs. Where there’s a will—and a profit—there’s always a way to get a product to someone who needs it.
If they can pay.
The waitress came and plunked down my bacon, or some charred sticks that resembled something that might have been bacon in the distant past. “Anything else?”
“No thanks,” Theron said promptly, and we waited until she disappeared into the smoke-filled bar.
I wondered if she smoked—I didn’t think she’d need to, breathing that fug all day. So this could have been going on for longer. Or it could be the tail-end of the Sorrows’ operation. Too many variables. “So if it wasn’t suicide, why did Kutchner die?”
“Jacinta Kutchner was an accountant. Her office was tossed as well as her bedroom. We think she had a set of cooked and uncooked books, either in the office or in the safe in her closet. Yesterday a blue bit it—”
“Officer Winchell,” I supplied helpfully. “Was he implicated too?”
A vintage Carper shrug, his shoulder holster peeping out. He didn’t look surprised at my supplying the name. “Only up to his eyeballs. Would it surprise you to know Winchell and Kutchner’s grieving widow were having an affair?”
Huh. That puts a new shine on things. I picked up a slice of charcoaled bacon. “You do such fine police work, Carp. What do you need me for?”
“The trail dead-ends with Marv’s retirement fund disappearing. All half-a-million of it. I think the widow was about to blow the whistle on the whole dirty deal, or she double-crossed someone and hid the money. Maybe she even loved her husband, I don’t know. But without her and without the books—and without Marv and Winchell—we have exactly what we started out with. Dead wetbacks and a whole lot of nothing.”
And here I was getting all bent out of shape over victims. The thought was too bitter to let out of my mouth. “That doesn’t tell me what you want.”
“I want to know how far up this goes.” He blinked at his food as if he couldn’t believe he’d ordered it, took a long draft of coffee. “I have to tell you, Kiss, I’m willing to break a few laws to do it. And you’re one of us, but you don’t have a lot of the same… limits… that I do.”
“Someone tried to kill me the other day.” Jesus. Was that only yesterday? “They didn’t use silver-coated ammo. Which leads me to believe someone knows Monty’s called me in and feels just a wee bit threatened.”
“You think?” Carp went pale. He was sweating. If it was concern for me it was awful cute. “Marv and Winchell weren’t the only ones to end up dead over this. Six months ago Pedro Ayala over in Vice stumbled across something, gave me a call, and turned up dead less than four hours later before I could meet him. It’s filed as a random gang-related shooting, since Ay did the gang beat. He was tight with a few of the old-school 51s, their territory’s a chunk in the barrio near the Plaza. He used to run with the oldsters before he turned all law-abiding. I can’t get any of them to talk to me about him.”
I vaguely remembered Ayala from rookie orientation—slim, dark, and intense. They blur together inside my head sometimes. All those cops, each and every one of them passing through my hands before they’re allowed out on th
e streets.
You’d think I’d feel better about that. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. They won’t talk to me or to Bernie—his partner—but it doesn’t seem possible that one of them pulled the trigger on him. He was out of la vida since he was sixteen, but he once or twice brought in some of the 51s as material witnesses during a turf war.”
I let out a low whistle. That was a not-inconsiderable achievement. “Did they walk afterward?”
“When the killing stopped. Ay was a good cop. He didn’t deserve lungs full of lead. The coroner said it probably took him ten minutes to suffocate on his own blood.”
I could relate. Jesus. I poked at the bacon some more, nibbled at a bit of it, set it down. “You want me to go into the barrio and poke around the 51s.”
Theron made another restless movement. But he held his peace, which was more than I would have expected.
Carp held my gaze, did not look away. “I’m asking for a hot chunk of lead if I go down there. Monty’s already called you in, Jill.”
He was serious. The trouble was, I was asking for more than one hot chunk of lead if I went into the barrio. The Weres run herd out there and keep everything under control. I know the streets and alleys—there’s not a slice of my city I don’t know by now—but going into the depths of Santa Luz’s other dark half isn’t something to be done lightly if your skin is my color.
I can’t spend more time on this. There’s scurf, goddammit. And the widow and Winchell weren’t victims in the usual sense.
But still. The rope made a small sound inside my head, a human being reduced to a clock pendulum, and I knew I couldn’t let this rest. Something else was bothering me about the whole goddamn deal, but damned if I could lay a finger on it.
I hate that feeling. It usually means something is about to take a big bite out of my ass in a very unpleasant way. “All right. Hand over the paper.”
His hand slid under the table and came up with a manila file, rubber-banded closed. It was dauntingly thick. “This is what I’ve got so far. A collection of fucking dead ends. If you can make something of it…”
“Dead ends don’t mean the same thing to me that they do to you.” I pushed the bacon across the table, took the file, and laid a ten down to cover a bit of breakfast. “Keep your head down, Carp. I would hate to lose you just when I’ve gotten you toilet trained.”
His reply was unrepeatable. I slid out of the booth, following Theron’s graceful motion. I tipped Carp a salute, he shot me the finger, and we parted, friends as usual.
As soon as we got up the stairs and stepped outside, the Were took in a deep breath, rolling it around his mouth like champagne. “No news,” he announced, needlessly. “Maybe that was the main nest, maybe we got them all.”
I’m not so sure. They were too old. “I’d feel better if we knew instead of guessing.” I slid my shades on; the sun was a hammerblow even this early in the morning. “And I’d feel a lot better if we could have ID’d some of the scurf as our missing people.” Good fucking luck doing that, scurf all look the same. “Or if I could have asked that skunk-haired ’breed some questions.”
“I’d feel a lot better if you hadn’t just volunteered to go down in the barrio.” He fixed me with a sidelong stare. “I suppose this is something else I’m not supposed to tell Saul about?”
“I never told you not to tell him anything.” I set off for my Impala, parked in a convenient alley some two blocks away. It was going to be another desert scorcher of a day. “I go where I have to, Theron.”
“This sounds like a human affair.” His tone was carefully neutral.
“So are scurf, if you look at it the right way.” Sarcasm dripped from each word. “Don’t ride me, Were. I know what I’m doing.”
“Easy, hunter. I’m just pointing it out.” He didn’t crowd me like Saul would have. He didn’t smell like Saul, not really. He was just similar enough, his bulk just familiar enough, to remind me of what I was missing.
“Thanks.” You don’t have to come along. But that would be a direct insult, since Theron had appointed himself my backup. It would imply I didn’t have any faith in his capacity to defend himself.
Weres are funny about things like that.
He apparently decided he’d pushed me far enough. “When are you going in?”
Well, if I wait for nightfall it will only get more dangerous. But sunlight’s best for hunting scurf. “If they find anything while doing sweeps you’ll know, right?”
“Of course.” He didn’t sound offended that I’d asked. “Do you think they’re connected?”
A hot breeze came off the river, ruffled my hair. Carp hadn’t said anything about me looking torn-up and exhausted. Dim light and some breakfast must have done me some good, though I’d never win any prizes in the looks department. “What?”
“The scurf, and this.”
Jesus in a sidecar, I hope not. “I don’t know. I’m not assuming they are. There’s no visible connection.” But he knew as well as I did that I wasn’t ruling it out, either.
He digested this. “Something’s off. They were too old, and too many of them.”
Just what I’d been thinking. “I know. But a hellbreed, busting in on a scurf nest…” There’s one small note off here, and it’s throwing the entire orchestra out of whack. “If this gets much deeper I’m going to have to do something drastic.”
“Huh.” He visibly restrained himself from making a smartass comment. “Like what?”
“Like something unsafe.”
“More unsafe than the barrio?”
Visiting Perry makes the barrio look like a cakewalk, Were. “Much, Theron. Now shut up, I need to think.”
“I’ll say you do.”
I let it go. A Were sometimes needs the last word. It makes them feel better.
14
Santa Luz’s barrio isn’t a shantytown, though it has a forest of shacks on the edge between “suburb” and “desert” where even the Weres go in pairs when they have to run through. There is the Plaza Centro, which used to be a railroad station but is now a mercado with a giant mezzanine, the center of the barrio’s seethe. There are bodegas on every corner, and Catholic or Pentecostal churches sprinkled throughout, sometimes even in abandoned storefronts.
The rest of the barrio is quiet, watchful streets. Violence occurs pretty rarely in most of its sprawl, but it’s always a breath away. The feeling is like a storm hanging overhead, ready to toss thunderbolts at the slightest provocation. A crackling edge of expectation blurs the air, and your entire skin turns into a sensitive canvas, ready to catch any breath, any faint tingle that might warn you a half-second before a bullet punches through your meat.
The 51s run in the south part of the barrio, in a wedge-shaped territory with its thin end pointing at the Plaza Centro and the wider, trailing hind end spreading almost halfway through the closest slice of shackville—what bigots in my fair city mostly call Cholo Central or, in slightly more politically correct terms, “that goddamn sinkhole.”
I surveyed the pockmarked sloping street. Ranchero music blared from the bodega on the corner, cholos lounged on every front porch. Two driveways down, a vintage orange Nova was up on blocks with someone’s head under the hood, two men in flannel shirts with only the top button buttoned offering advice while clutching cold bottles of Corona. Frijoles and sweat, beer and cumin, chili sauce and hot burning wax from novenas all mixed together, with the tang of poverty underneath—a bald edge of desperation, marijuana fumes, and old food.
Theron slammed his door. Down here he looked normal—the darker tone of his skin and the strangeness of his bone structure became mestizo instead of just-plain-brown-person. “You sure you want to do this?”
I shrugged. “I go where I have to. Why don’t you put that nose of yours to good use and find me a 51?”
“This whole street is theirs, hunter. But we’re going to see Ramon.”
“Head honcho?” I didn’t ask how he knew all this—he was a Were; th
is was his part of town. Most Weres in Santa Luz live either on the fringe of the barrio or in a narrow corridor between it and Mayfair Hill where the houses have been in the same families, packs, and prides for generations.
“Lieutenant. He’ll give you a safe-conduct if you act nice and polite. Let me do the talking.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I slid my shades on, silver chiming in my hair. The sensation of eyes on me was palpable, my hackles rising and the scar prickling with dense wet heat. Almost-living heat, like a flower opening under sunlight.
It’s not growing. Don’t even think about that.
Instead, I thought about the black-market trade in organs. I would have to meet up with Sullivan and the Badger if I had time, and if I could do it without endangering them. I thought about why a hellbreed would burst in on a scurf nest in the middle of a fight, and the thing that occurred to me was so plain and simple I stopped in my tracks for a good five seconds.
“Jill?” Theron looked over his shoulder. Morning sunlight touched off a furnace of highlights in his dark hair. “Everything copacetic?”
“Scurf don’t attack hellbreed. Their ichor doesn’t carry any hemoglobin or the right proteins for the viral agents.”
He didn’t think my revelation was worth the name. “No shit.”
I suddenly wished for Saul. He would have understood the way my thoughts were wending. “Which means someone might have laid the scurf like bait in a trap. A nightsider who’s not only able to handle them, but who knows I’d go after them with Weres.”
“Yeah?” Theron folded his arms. Time’s a-wasting, his body language said.
“So someone is probably profiting from the scurf. Nobody would want to kill me in the middle of a scurf hole just because I’m annoying. Someone is making some money, and there could be a connection to this other case. Profit’s a strong incentive. And what makes scurf so dangerous?”
“They’re contagious,” he said, flatly. But his head tilted a little, listening instead of dismissing.