me. I said, “Maybe Morton Lang didn’t steal your cocaine. Maybe somebody else did.”
“No.”
“Maybe Nanuk here took it.”
“No.”
“Look, if Mort had taken the dope and now I had it, wouldn’t I be trying to sell it back to you?”
Duran touched a button on my shirt with the point of the sword. He pressed. The button split. “Return my property. Perhaps then you’ll find the woman and the boy.”
The ranch hands began to chatter. When I looked, the bull had lifted his snout and begun to trot around the pen. The hands scurried to open a gate on the far side, but Duran snapped an order and they stopped. The bull made a coughing sound and lowered his head. There was drool streaming out of his mouth. The steer, eyes wide and rolling, edged away.
Duran said, “He smells the female.”
The bull charged the steer. When they hit, it sounded like a mortar round, whump. The bull caught him in the gut by the hindquarters, then lifted and twisted, ripping forward into the ribs. You could hear them pop like green wood. The steer brayed and went down. The bull stayed with him, lowering the thick neck and hooking his horns two lefts and a right like a boxer throwing combinations, once almost lifting the steer off the ground. Then Duran nodded and the hands threw open the far gate, shouting and waving their hats. The bull backed away from the steer. His horns glistened red. He pawed the ground then ran through the gate. The steer flopped around for a while, then managed to gain its feet. When it did, most of its intestine fell out onto the ground. It wobbled and staggered but stayed up. Some friend.
Duran looked at me, then vaulted the fence. I was dismissed. The Eskimo led me back to the limo and opened the door. A full-service thug. Kato was still behind the wheel. The Eskimo said, “He’ll take you where you tell him.”
“What if I tell him the police?”
“He’ll take you there.”
“That easy.”
The Eskimo shrugged. “Play it the way you want. Mr. Duran was lunching at the Marina today. He can prove that. If you consider what has happened and what could, he won’t have to. You will do as he tells you.”
“I don’t have the dope.”
He looked at me.
I said, “The woman and the boy, they’d better be all right.”
Something like a grin touched the Eskimo’s lips. He said, “Nanuk,” then turned and walked back toward the corrals.
I got into the car. The last thing I saw was Domingo Garcia Duran approach the steer and drive the sword to its hilt down through the steer’s shoulders at the base of its neck. The steer dropped, the ranch hands cheered, and I shut the door.
19
When I got back to my building I went to the deli to pick up the corned beef sandwich. They’d saved it and weren’t happy about it. I wasn’t so happy about it myself. I snapped at the blonde behind the register to prove I was still tough, then brought the sandwich and three bottles of Heineken up to my office. I was so tough I forgot I didn’t have an opener and had to ride all the way back down to the deli to buy one of theirs. Buck sixty-five for a piece of tin.
I let myself into the office and locked the outer door. There were two messages on my machine: the first from an auto parts store letting me know that the genuine 1966 Chevrolet Corvette shifter skirt I’d ordered four months ago was finally in, the second from Lou Poitras, returning my call. I reset the machine, opened the balcony doors for air, sat down behind the desk, opened the first Heineken, and drank most of it.
The smart move would be to call the cops. That’s what I’d advised Ellen Lang. More often than not, the cops crack the case, the cops get their man, the kidnapped come back alive when the cops are involved. The Feds will supply you with statistics that bear this out. Lots of neat black lettering on clean white sheets that don’t have much at all to do with some dead-eyed psychopathic sonofabitch saying that if the police come in a little kid and a woman get dead. Well, no, Your Honor, he didn’t actually say it, but he strongly hinted that that would be the case…
I finished the rest of the Heineken, dropped the bottle into the trash, opened another, and unwrapped the sandwich. It was cold and the bread was stale. My back hurt where the Eskimo had hit me and my hand hurt from hitting Kimberly Marsh’s boyfriend and the thick-necked Mexican. I ate some of the sandwich and drank more of the beer and thought about all this.
I couldn’t see Morton Lang ripping two keys of cocaine off Domingo Garcia Duran. Trying to set up a deal and blowing it, that’s one thing. But to shove two plastic packs of dope in your jockeys right in the man’s house and walk out, unh-unh. That took cojones. There was Garrett Rice, but he didn’t strike me as being particularly well- endowed either. Maybe someone else. Anyone else. The Eskimo, the guys in the Nova, Manolo, the fat guy at the ranch. Maybe the rich Italian Kimberly Marsh had mentioned. I drank more beer and ate more sandwich. What did I know? Maybe Mort had swiped it and Ellen knew about it and that’s why she hadn’t wanted the cops involved. Maybe she’d known all along and right now the dope was buried in a coffee can under the swing set in her back yard. I killed the second Heiny and opened the last one.
No chance. Maybe Mort had ripped off the dope but there was no way Ellen had known about it. Mort, I hadn’t met, hadn’t touched, hadn’t sat with. Ellen, we’d breathed the same air. If Mort had ripped off the Crown jewels of London, Ellen hadn’t known it. She’d been enduring, going through the necessary chore of shopping for groceries to feed her kids, probably wondering why life had turned so unfair since leaving Kansas when a man or men approached to show her just how unfair life could get. They would take her somewhere and ask her about the dope and maybe hurt her. And she would cry and maybe be angry but mostly be scared. After a while, when the fear wasn’t so new and her head began to work, she’d think of me. Mr. White Knight. Dragons slain. Maidens rescued. She’d say, “Mr. Cole has it,” because that would take the heat off her and maybe bring me into it and I could help. Maybe.
I finished the sandwich and the third Heineken and put the wax paper in the waste basket and the empty bottle beside the other two. Okay, Ellen, I’m your guy. Shield shined and charger shod. I got up and fished around in the little cooler by the file cabinet and found a Miller High Life. The Champagne of Bottled Beers. Domingo Garcia Duran has a couple of thugs deliver me and lays it out like he’s talking to a dog who can’t repeat it or report it or use the information in any way. Not that I had anything to repeat or report. I could tie Mort to Duran’s little party through Kimberly Marsh and Garrett Rice, but Duran had admitted that much and would probably be willing to admit it again. He hadn’t admitted offing Mort or holding Ellen and the boy. All I had for evidence was a phone call from Mort to Kimberly where Mort said he was in trouble with someone named Dom. Big deal. Still, I could run to the cops and let them worry about digging up the evidence. Maybe Duran didn’t care. Maybe he was so connected he could take the heat and shut off or divert an investigation. Maybe if he couldn’t, his friend Rudy Gambino could. Rudy Gambino. Christ. I had seen Rudy Gambino once in Houston before I became an op. He was being led through the lobby of the Whitworth Hotel, surrounded by a swarm of attorneys and state marshals, on his way to face charges of statutory rape, rape, mayhem, assault, and sodomy against a twelve-year-old girl. Quite a guy, that Rudy. The charges were later dropped.
I finished the Miller and put it with the other empties. Saturday during a Dodgers game the pile would look respectable. Midweek during a case made me look like a drunkard. I dialed Lou Poitras. “You ever hear of a guy, Domingo Garcia Duran?”
“Runs a bodywork shop on Alvarado.”
“Different Duran. This guy used to fight bulls. Now he’s rich, has investments, friends, like that.”
“This got anything to do with Lang?”
I ignored him. “This guy, he’s seen around with Rudy Gambino and those guys. Think you could ask around, see what kind of weight he could handle?”
“You mean like, can he get a ticket fixed? Like that?”
