My PI training kicked into overdrive. Finally I had a vague idea why Danya might’ve wanted a maverick PI in her life.
What I didn’t have was a paying client.
Sonofabitch. I was working pro bono.
CHAPTER FIVE
OKAY, NOW IT was hell-for-leather scurry-around time. Ignacio was out there somewhere. I pocketed the motel receipt and the flash drive, returned Jo-X’s wallet to his pocket, looked around, didn’t see anything out of place except me. I couldn’t leave. I had to report this mess. Neighbors might’ve seen things going on over here and taken down my car license, and Vince had my picture, taken right after he got a shot of Jo-X, so leaving the scene of the crime, so to speak, wasn’t an option. Vince’s photographic journalism notwithstanding, God only knows how many fingerprints I’d left inside the house.
I took out my cell phone and hit 9-1—
Well, hell.
Time to slow down and think.
First thing the cops would do is put me facedown in the dirt and check me for weapons, which they would find if I didn’t do something about that. They would find the Caliente motel receipt, the flash drive, and the note demanding money, which made a little more sense now, but still wasn’t entirely clear. A million dollars for what, exactly? Body removal? Silence? But I wasn’t in the mood to give up any of those things—receipt, flash drive, note, gun—so it was time to scramble around for another few minutes and dig myself deeper into this mess.
I couldn’t put any of it in my car, parked a hundred feet up the street. They would probably dismantle the entire thing, take out all the bolts and screws, engine, transmission, spread the whole thing out in a forensic garage. Jo-X was hanging in the girls’ garage, not some homeless guy who’d had a little bad luck. Fair or not, that would make a difference. Mort Angel, gumshoe extraordinaire and media darling, was about to get another round of national exposure on prime-time news—talk about your sorry sonofabitchin’ moment.
I hoped Ma still had a sense of humor.
I looked around, tried to think how the police were going to go over the place—the house, the backyard, several yards on the other side of the fence. They would scour the place, look under rocks and boards, take the doghouse apart, strip-search the Mort.
Finally I put the gun, holster, motel receipt, rubber gloves, the thumb drive, Vinnie’s SD card, and the note in a big Ziploc bag I found in the kitchen. At the last minute, I remembered the matchbook I’d seen in the kitchen drawer—Pahranagai Inn—same place as the receipt in Jo-X’s wallet, what a coincidence, so I grabbed it then scooped up the other matchbooks—clues all—and added them to the Ziploc, stuffed it all up a drainpipe at the side of the house, wedged the wad in place with a couple of kitchen towels, shoved everything as high as I could up the pipe without touching the outside of the drainpipe or disturbing the dust outside it. Then I found a short stick and used it to run the wad another foot up the pipe—all of this being a class-A felony, by the way—dropped the stick in the dust and rolled it around with my shoe, carefully put it right back where I’d found it, and looked around.
I went through the house again. The shower was wet. I didn’t think I could dry it and I couldn’t wait for it to dry, so I was going to have to explain about the shower, which was going to put Shanna in the thick of this. Danya, too, because why was Mort Angel at this house in the first place? Nothing I could do about that, or wanted to. Jo-X’s location alone was going to drag those two neck-deep into this mess. Of course, it was their mess, not mine, or should’ve been—but here I was, up to my own neck. I had the feeling they’d left out a few things they might have explained in more detail, so my sympathy level was running a tad low.
Five more minutes of snooping around the house didn’t turn up anything useful. Ignacio’s camera had probably put a time stamp on the photo he’d taken of me, so my time was about up.
Last thing I did was put the knife—without my prints on it—back in a wooden knife block in the kitchen. Shanna had left it on the dresser in the bedroom, and I thought it would muddy the story unnecessarily if they wanted her or me to explain it. And I didn’t know if Jo-X had a stab wound or two in his back, which would have been trouble I didn’t need. But if he did, I was going to double the hourly rate I’d quoted to Danya.
Finally I punched in 911 on my cell phone and gave the public safety dispatcher the gist of the situation, including Jo-X’s name and a description of his condition to fire up the police, then I sat on the front porch steps to wait, watching the street, thinking how all this quiet was about to go straight to hell.
Which it did.
Sirens from two directions—stereo, God love ’em. Three cars. I was flat on my stomach and cuffed by the time the next two cop cars pulled up. I was sitting up on the porch with my back against the front wall of the house when my buddy, Russell Fairchild, arrived in an unmarked car, no siren, and pushed his way through the four cops who had me surrounded.
“You,” he said when he saw me.
“I,” I said. Our standard greeting under these circumstances, which was getting to be routine.
He was wild-eyed, eyes jittery, hands trembling. Not his usual unflappable self when I came across bodies or body parts of political figures or celebrities.
“You,
