“He’s gonna kill somebody,” Morris said.
Lucas dumped the Porsche and jogged through the scene, past clusters of neighbors watching from the sidewalks. Morris was talking to a couple of other cops, and he waved Lucas toward the front door of the house, which stood open.
Lucas stepped up, looked inside, said, “Ah, man.” He stepped inside, moved carefully around the body, squatted to look at it: Rivera was facedown, his brown eyes still open, but flat and dead. A pistol sat a few inches from his right hand, the hammer back, the safety off.
Across the room, a Mexican guy slumped half-on, half-off the couch, looking dead. Lucas had read of shooting victims looking surprised, but he hadn’t seen that. They just looked dead. The Mexican’s T-shirt was stained with blood, a circle at the heart with seepage lines down the front.
“Looks like he kicked the door,” Morris said.
Lucas stood up, made a hand-dusting motion, glanced at the door handle, then looked back in the room. “Did you talk to Martinez?”
“For a minute, but she’s fucked up. We’re looking for a silver SUV of some kind. Don’t know what kind, don’t know the size, don’t know the plates.”
“Good luck with that,” Lucas said.
“Yeah.” Morris waved at the scene. “What do you think?”
“Looks like he kicked the door, landed on his feet, the guy on the couch pulled a gun and he shot him.” Lucas looked at the front drapes. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a little noise, a sound, coming up the steps. Another guy steps over to the window, to look, he’s got a gun in his hand….”
Morris nodded. “Rivera kicks the door, lands inside looking at the couch, the guy on the couch goes for his gun, Rivera shoots him, never sees it coming from the guy at the window. I’d buy that.”
“The question is,” Lucas said, “where are those fuckers now?”
“Not too far away. This only happened fifteen minutes ago.”
Lucas looked around the living room. “We need to find out who owns this place and grab him. If we get to him quick enough, he might not know what happened.”
Morris said, “We probably can’t screw the scene up too much-we know what happened. There could be something that would tell us everything we need.”
“So we’ll walk easy,” Lucas said.
The house seemed to be lightly lived-in-not much in the way of personal stuff, but on the kitchen counter they found a basket full of paid utility bills, which had been sent to a Ricardo Nunez, and in the bedroom, a box of business cards, half of them in English, half in Spanish. Under Nunez’s name was a business name, “International ReCap, Inc.” with a phone number, but no address.
Lucas called his researcher, Sandy, at home, told her he needed her to work despite the fact that she’d planned to go to a flea market that morning. He gave her the information he had about the house and said, “We need to know where International ReCap is, and what it does, and we need to get our hands on Nunez.”
“Sounds like some kind of finance company, International ReCapitalization, or something like that,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Quick as you can,” he said.
Lucas said to Morris, “Let’s go talk to Martinez.”
The neighboring house had a small covered porch, with two chairs behind a banister. Nobody home. Morris and Lucas took Martinez up onto the porch and sat her down, and Lucas leaned back against the banister: “You okay?”
“No, I’m not,” Martinez said, though she looked fairly composed, sitting with her hands in her lap. No tears.
“I was under the … impression … that you and David had a personal relationship,” Lucas said.
She nodded, and now Lucas saw the crystalline glimmer of a tear. “I hope this does not become official. He is married, he has four children.”
Morris, in the chair to her right, said quietly, “Do you remember anything else about the vehicle?”
She shook her head. “No. A silver truck. David knew something more about it, I think, he didn’t say anything to me. When he got out, he wasn’t sure it was right … so he peeked in the window. I was parked there”-she pointed down the street to the car-“and I heard the gunshots and I got out. I was going to call…” She pointed at Lucas.
“Okay,” Lucas said.
“I didn’t know what happened inside, but I thought David probably succeeded. He was a, mmm, not devil, that’s not right, I don’t know the English, a daring devil…”
“Daredevil,” Morris said.
“Yes. A daring devil. He has done this before. He is very proud of this, of taking down these Criminales. He calls it the American phrase,
“That’s when you called?”
“No, I heard shouting…. It didn’t sound like David. I don’t have a gun, I don’t shoot, but I started to walk that way, and then I started to run, and I went to the steps and I saw him lying there, his shoes, anyway, and I knew it was him, he wears those white stockings, and I went up the steps and then the men ran out the back door, I think, and I heard the truck start and I ran up the steps so they couldn’t see me, because I’m afraid they will … kill me … and David is there and I see he is dead and the car goes past the door, fast, and I run outside, I fell down.”
She turned her wrists toward them, showing them the bloody scrapes. “And I tried to call you, but I couldn’t push the button right….” She brought her purse with her, like women do, unconscious of it, but always with them, and she dug inside and produced a cell phone. “The fuckin’ telephone, this is a piece of shit, this telephone, this, this, Samsung shit…”
She stood suddenly and pitched the phone into the street, where it clattered across the blacktop, and she said to Lucas, “He is gone. I was waiting for this. I rehearsed this, sitting talking to the investigators, saying, ‘David is gone.’”
They worked through the details. Halfway through, she began to sob, and asked where they could find a bathroom. She didn’t want to go back in the death house, so they walked her down to a neighbor’s place, and asked, and the neighbor said she’d be welcome to use the bathroom.
She was in there for ten minutes, and Morris said, “Jesus, wonder what’s going on in there.”
“Crying out of sight,” Lucas said. “She’s got her pride.”
When she finally came back out, they went back to the porch and walked her through the details: how they’d found the shooters’ car, the meeting the night before. She said Rivera had gotten some information about the shooters’ car from his friends, but she didn’t know exactly what that information was.
“But he didn’t tell you?” Lucas asked.
“He might have told me, but I don’t remember. The name, I don’t remember-but he said it was a silver SUV, and it was. I don’t know cars. My job was to drive slowly up the streets, and his job was to look for the car.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” Lucas asked.
She shrugged. “He might have told
“I got a small feel for that,” said Morris.
“Yes, a Negro, yes, I suppose,” she said, unself-consciously. “So this is how he is treated, and he told me that when he learned about the truck, and then this morning, with the Zapp’s place … he thought they must be close, and that if we drove around…”
“You found them,” Lucas said.
“It took a long time,” she said. “Three hours.”
“Hell of a lot better than we did,” Morris said. “We hardly got started in three hours.”
