Five minutes later we’re in the car backing down the driveway. The house is locked and the alarm is set. I punch the button and the garage door starts to slide down.
“I packed a box of extra ammo if we need it,” I tell him.
“Coulda saved the weight. We blow through more than half a clip, we’ll know we’re in real trouble,” he says. “Where are you supposed to meet her?”
“L.A. A hotel out near the airport. Joselyn’s flying in tomorrow afternoon.”
“Joselyn, is it?” Herman looks over at me and smiles. “I assume she has other business out here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You must have made an impression,” he says.
“Business,” I tell him. “She has information I want. I have information she wants. Nothing more.”
“You don’t have to convince me.” Herman is still smiling. “I met the lady, remember? You had me lock her out of my office. Nice looking as I recall.”
I ignore him.
“I hope this meeting isn’t too close to the airport.” He fills the void as I shift into drive and head down the street.
“What’s wrong with the airport?”
“We’ll have to shed the firearms the minute we get near a plane. And while I’m not personally too fussy, the permits to carry are only good in California.”
“So that means we use the car as long as we can,” I say.
“That’s good, ’cause any big hops, and we’re gonna be traveling naked,” he says.
Liquida smiled to himself as he watched the car cruise by the house, the lawyer at the wheel. He was standing in the empty living room looking through the blinds with binoculars in his hand. It was the same house, the one that was for sale when he’d scoped out the two girls a few days earlier.
He was flattered by all of the sleight of hand, the trouble Madriani and his friends had gone to. He wondered if the guys from the van actually cleaned any of the carpets.
They could have saved themselves the trouble. Liquida knew they were on the move the minute he got out of bed that morning and checked his computer. The only reason he came by today was because he was curious.
Did they really think he had nothing better to do than sit there and watch them twenty-four/seven? Liquida was a busy man. There was always somebody new to be killed. He had to work for a living, unlike some people who could stay home and hide in their houses.
Killing the blonde had put a bolt of lightning up their collective asses. They’d turned the lawyer’s house into a bunker. And now they were all packing guns. This was like trying to run with a load of lead in their pockets. They couldn’t fly, not commercial, not with all the metal. The guns would tend to keep them grounded and offered little protection as far as Liquida was concerned. He liked to work in close with something sharp.
Liquida knew something was up the minute the other lawyer’s car moved in the middle of the night-3:42 in the morning to be precise. It went from the parking lot behind the lawyer’s apartment to a location in downtown San Diego.
This was strange because for two days running, the car’s owner had been shacked up in Madriani’s house, barricaded with the rest of them.
Since Madriani and the investigator were in the car that just went by, Liquida figured that the girl and the other partner must have been in the van. He knew the house was empty. He’d watched Madriani going to all of the windows, locking everything up. It didn’t take a law degree to figure out where the van was headed. Liquida could take care of business, watching his computer, until the other lawyer’s car, the one in San Diego, started to move again. There was nowhere they could hide that he couldn’t find them. If they crawled under a rock, Liquida and his stiletto would be there waiting for them.
TWENTY-FOUR
The phone rang in his study and Bart Snyder picked it up. “Hello.”
“Mr. Snyder?”
“Speaking.”
“Volney Dimmick here. Got your message. Sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner. I’ve been meaning to dictate a report and get it off to you, but I’ve been so damn busy…”
“Don’t worry about the report. Tell me what you found out.” Snyder was no rube. The fact that Joe Wallace, the young FBI agent, had refused to share information wasn’t going to slow him down.
Dimmick was a private investigator in a Washington, D.C., agency known as the Brownstone Group. Brownstone had a reputation for cherry-picking many of their employees from key government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department. They were well connected. Besides investigations they did consulting and had a number of high-profile clients, including some major corporations. Snyder knew that if you couldn’t get information one way, you could always get it another.
“We’re still working on it but we have some information,” said Dimmick. “First off, the police are now operating on the theory of foul play, that your son’s death was not an accidental overdose.”
“I knew it,” said Snyder. “What did they find?”
“This is confidential,” said Dimmick.
“I understand.”
“If word leaks, the police will know where it came from and it’s going to be very difficult to get further details.”
“Yeah, I know. What did they find out?”
“The point of injection was on the back of the hand,” said Dimmick, “which is very unusual, especially for somebody who is inexperienced in shooting up. The veins can be harder to find. So you have to ask yourself why he would pick that location instead of the inside of the forearm.”
“That’s it?” said Snyder.
“No,” said Dimmick. “It was the fact that the injection was in the back of the left hand that caught their attention.”
“Jimmie was left-handed,” said Snyder.
“Correct,” said Dimmick. “He’d need his left hand to operate the syringe. If he was going to shoot up, he’d do it in the back of the right hand.”
“That’s why the police asked me whether Jimmie was right-or left-handed,” said Snyder.
“Evidently. And there’s more. Forensics found loose hair and fibers on the body. The fibers didn’t match anything your son was wearing that day, and the way they laid on the surface of his clothing indicated that they were transferred after he was on the bed. Long and short of it is somebody else was in the room when your son died, and no doubt was handling the syringe.”
“Good work,” said Snyder. “Did you get any information on the Mexican?”
“Nothing solid. No mug shots, no rap sheet, but according to our sources at DEA, drug enforcement, he does exist. Up until about a year ago he was one of the Tijuana cartels’ major badass soldiers. Word is he would kill anybody for a fee and was highly efficient at what he did. Of course, if he was involved in your son’s murder, he stepped in it.”
“How could he know Jimmie was left-handed?” said Snyder.
“Good point.”
“You said up until a year ago he worked for the cartel. Who’s he working for now?”
“According to the information he’s always been freelance, but the cartel was his principal client. According to DEA he’s branched out. He was involved last year, you probably read about it, in that attack outside the North Island Naval Air Station near San Diego.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Snyder.
“What is it?”
“Never mind.” Suddenly the pieces started to snap together, the Internet research he’d done on Madriani. His
