Cold Burn Page 6

  ***

  At five fifteen, Lisa's still not out. I lock the bike and enter the hotel lobby. Walking through the main bar, I see Lisa in a booth with two other girls. Each holds a handful of index cards, and they take turns reading from them, probably prepping for the test. I retreat to a spot by the entrance and settle on a tall chair next to the cute barmaid's working station.

  "Hello, Ice," she says, flashing me a pretty smile. "Long time, no see."

  I rack my brain, trying to figure out where I know her from. Since she called me Ice, it's gotta be MC related.

  "Good to see you, angel," I tell her while flipping through my virtual memory cards. I order a beer, and when she comes back with it, I still have no idea who she is.

  "You don't remember me, do you?" she says with a coquettish smile.

  I laugh and plead guilty. She tilts her head exaggeratedly and twirls in front of me. She's built like a goddess, and her uniform leaves little to the imagination. When I see it, I realize she's not doing this to show of her scrumptious ass. That's an added benefit. She's showing me the tattoo of a blue bird that would otherwise have remained hidden under her jet-black ponytail.

  "Birdy!" I say, giving the girl a new look over. She's one of Brains’s daughters, one from the first litter, as he would say.

  "You're looking good, baby." And I mean it. She's wearing way too much makeup for my taste, but otherwise, she looks good enough to eat.

  "You're not looking too bad yourself," she tells me.

  "Happy to know you're back in town. How long have you been working here?"

  "A couple of weeks. I arrived the day you and my dad left to go babysit a rock star," she tells me. "Landed this job on the first day, and it's really a cool place to work."

  A customer at the other end of the bar finishes nursing his drink and calls her over. She comes back to me with a flier for a special event organized at the hotel.

  "I know I'll see you at the Fourth of July barbecue at the clubhouse." She puts the flier down on the bar in front of me. "But before this, we're having a big event on June fifteenth to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the opening of this place. You should come."

  Without waiting for my answer, she strolls away from the bar and through the room, collecting orders. She stops at Lisa's table and takes the girls’ orders before returning to her station.

  "Virgin piña colada and diet sodas," she says, wrinkling her nose. "Those ladies are not getting drunk for a few weeks. They're a bunch of would-be lawyers preparing for the bar exam."

  "Yeah, I know," I tell her, grinning. "One of them is my girl."

  "Really?" she says. "I didn't know you had an old lady already."

  "Well, she's not really my old lady yet, but she will be."

  "Lucky girl." Birdy winks at me.

  I laugh and tell her, "I'm on her shit list right now, so she'll need a little convincing."

  "You could start by putting their drink on your tab," Birdy suggests.

  "Good thinking. A man should always have a wise woman like you as his strategy advisor," I tell her while she tallies up my bill. I put some cash on the bar and look at the flier.

  The picture looks familiar, but I don’t recognize it for a few seconds. It's the picture on David's postcard, and now I remember Cracker's observation about this tower being a sore thumb in the middle of Point Lookout. That was what had been bugging me all along. It was not a spring break picture; it was the huge party the hotel management threw for the opening on June fifteenth last year. That means the postcard was definitely printed after David's death. So, yeah, Everest got it right—David's not dead!

  I get up and rush out of the bar. Talking to Lisa can wait. I need to find Everest and figure out where David is hiding. God help me, I want to kill him for putting Lisa and me through this misery for a year.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I drive to the police station and park by my brother's bike, where I wait for him to come out. Ever since he’s been off the task force, he has regular hours. When he does come out at six, he's not really surprised to see me. Every so often, I drop by the station when I need some information I can't get without the help of the force.

  "What do you need?" he asks, dispensing with the civilities.

  "I need to know how much you trust your captain."

  Obviously hesitant about his answer, he leans against the fence and runs a hand in his short hair. "He had a bad rep when he arrived.”

  "Bad how?" Bad can mean several things. A corrupt cop is a bad cop, but so is a cop that rats to internal affairs or sleeps with his partner's wife.

  "I don't know," he explains. "No one would come out and say anything specific. No one's ever accused him of being on the take or alleged that he was a mole for IA. There was just this rumor that he was not to be trusted." Everest stares at the tip of his boots as if they hold the answers to the mysteries of the world. He closes his eyes and goes on. "At some point, I thought it was just some weird sort of superstition because he lost three partners on the job."

  "Wow, three partners!" That would make anyone think twice about going out on the street with him.

  "Yes, and all gunned down, too," Everest adds. "At one retirement party, I met an older cop who told me that on two out of the three instances, he was with his partner and was badly shot, as well. But somehow, he managed to survive both times."

  Since he still hasn’t answered my question, I ask, "What does your gut tell you?"

  "I think he's clean and working with Internal Affairs," Everest spits out. "I think your pal David was working with them, as well, and they faked his death because something went sour in their investigations."

  "I think you're right, and I'd like to have a sit-down with your captain outside of the station. You think you can arrange that?"

  "He's still in his office. I'll go back in and ask him."

  While I wait for Everest to return, I see Mike coming out of the station. I remember him from the police academy. He was friendly enough, but something about him was off. David thought I was paranoid.

  "Hey, Brian," he says, walking toward me and extending his hand. "Long time, no see."

  "How's life been treating you?" I ask.

  "Been doing good," he says. "I've got a desk job, and I'm loving it. Much safer than all the street action. Soon, we'll be just as bad as Miami."

  "What do you mean?" Miami seems like a pretty good place to live to me if you're into big city life.

  "Well, ya know, it's the salad bowl thing."

  "Now you've lost me," I tell him.

  "Oh, come on," he says, sounding exasperated. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed it, too."

  I shrug to show I really don't know, so he elaborates.

  "In the old days, anyone who came here would start by learning English and adapt to fit in. The English, the Irish, even the Germans and even the Poles—they all managed to adapt. It was the great melting-pot era. Nowadays, no one wants to integrate. The melting pot has been transformed in to a big salad bowl. They all wanna keep their cultural identity, so the Haitians go on babbling in Créole while the spics never bother to learn English."

  I stare at him and wonder if he's that open on this subject in the station. I'm guessing he's not because it's definitely a diversified working place.

  "Don't look at me like that," he says. "It's not like the motorcycle clubs are not selective about who they let in, and I won't ever blame you for being picky and sticking with your own kind."

  "You're right," I tell him. "There's some people you clearly don't want to be associated with."

  The look in his eyes tells me that the irony of my tone has not been lost on him. He's sharper than I thought.

  Probably realizing that he shouldn't have been so forthright with me, he says good-bye and snaps, "Next time, you shouldn't park here. It's reserved for members of the police force. You lost that right when you dropped out of school."

  His choice of words is interesting. I didn't drop out; I resigne
d, which is totally different, but I think he knows and was trying to be insulting.

  A few minutes later, Everest comes out and says that Captain Williams will be expecting us at his house around eight. That gives me enough time to drive by the Friendly Persuasion Agency offices and see if Whiz has made any progress on his investigation about the contents of the disk.

  And he has.

  "I've drawn a chart for you." He slowly unfolds a few pages taped together like a paper maze or puzzle. "They're worse than a virus spreading throughout Florida. They start by finding a way to get a toe in an activity, and soon, they take over and have everyone marching to their tune."

  He starts showing me how the Unrepentant Southern White Wizards have acquired a controlling or decisive interest in a large majority of the gun stores in the area and how they have now directed their interest in strip joints.

  "That's the only activity for which the USWW Corp seems color-blind," he says.

  "What do you mean?"

  "All their other business are run by Caucasians and cater exclusively to them. The pussy trade, however, is more diversified. They're all over the map, and even if the management stays white, the talent is more diverse."

  "Thank you, Whiz. You've done amazing work," I tell him. "Can I take the chart with me? I would like to show it to someone tonight."

  "Sure, this is for you. I've got it all in my head," he says while meticulously refolding his paper creation. "Now that I've done that with the corporate structures, I'm looking at the people behind them. If you give me another week, I should be able to provide you with some interesting information. But I can tell you right now, some of those places are owned outright by a few politicians or high-ranking police officers."

  "How is this possible?" I ask. "With all the dirt the politicians throw at each other during an election, I'm surprised their political opponents didn't out them about any sort of borderline activity."

  "Someone tried with Ervaners," he reminds me. "He owns a few buildings in a shopping center. One of them was initially a bar and grill, then a bar, and then it became a strip joint. Don't you remember? When put on the spot, he explained that the way the twelve-year lease had been written, the tenant's lawyer was allowed to modify the activity carried out on the premises and that his hands were tied."

  I nod and take the chart he hands to me.

  "He's not getting re-elected," he says.

  "Is that so?"

  "Yeah," Whiz says with a malicious grin. "He got a taste of his own medicine. Do you remember how he used the municipal police to get his town sanitized after being elected?" He exaggerates his southern accent as he pronounces the word sanitized, and I nod to show that I understand what type of sanitation he's talking about.

  "They used the most absurd reasons to stop and search selected targets and then hold them until immigration came to check their status. When they found illegal aliens, they took them away. As a consequence, anyone with a questionable status fled the town, and today, the ‘good people’ of his town are complaining about the increase in the cost of labor. Funny how people with no fear of being deported have the gall to require minimum wage."

  The way Whiz presents the situation surprises me, making me smile. It shouldn't because politically, the only thing he believes in is karma.

  I'm not so optimistic. I'm not certain that what goes around always comes around. I've seen too many people get away with murder.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It's five to eight when I park my bike in front of Lisa's house. Doing so is kind of weird because during the last year, I've made a habit of parking a block away when I come visit either my mother or Lisa. I look over at the other side of the lawn, to the identical construction in which my mother and Tony live. I can’t see if anyone’s home.

  At Lisa’s house, which is now the captain’s home too, the garage door is open, and the space is empty, except for David's cross-country bike in the far corner. It looks all greased up and ready to go. I wonder if Lisa's been riding it again.

  Everest's Harley is next to Captain Williams’s truck in the driveway. Both men are sitting on the porch swing, taking up the entire seat of what is supposed to be a three-seater. Williams drops his cigarette in his can of beer and crushes it as he gets up.

  We shake hands and gauge each other for a few seconds. Our paths have crossed several times, but we've never officially met before.

  "Nice to meet you," I say as I decide that I was right to trust Everest's gut feeling about the man. I like the firmness of his handshake and the way his gaze meets mine. It doesn’t waver, as if he has nothing to hide and no preconceived ideas about me.

  "Same here," he says. "Let's get started while the girls are out."

  "He sent them to the movies," Everest explains.

  That’s good thinking; it would have been kind of weird otherwise.

  As we enter, I notice a few changes in the familiar house. The captain has been taking really good care of the place. The decor hasn’t changed much, but there's been a fresh coat of paint and this lived-in look. Not looking like a perfect showroom or model house, as it did when Lisa’s mum was single, makes the place more pleasant.

  Steven Williams brings a six-pack of beer and some tacos from the kitchen and gets straight to the point while we sit around the dining room table.

  "Everest here says that you believe David's still alive. Can you tell me why?"

  "I know for a fact it's not his body in the coffin you put in the ground last spring," I say, avoiding part of his question.

  "But you don't want to tell us how?" The captain asks.

  "Let's just say that David reached out to me."

  "I thought you had a good explanation for the postcard," Everest says.

  "I did until I realized that the card was printed in June of last year, weeks after he was supposedly dead."

  "That boy is an idiot," Steven Williams snaps.

  "So you knew?" Everest asks.

  "Yeah, he and I work for Internal Affairs. We are part of a special unit investigating the infiltration of our rank by some Aryan group."

  "You mean the Unrepentant Southern White Wizards?" I ask.

  Steven Williams’s head snaps to look in my direction as he asks, "What do you know about them?"

  I hesitate for a second before I decide to go all in and show him my entire hand. From the inside pocket of my jacket, I pull out the plastic bag with the broken disk as well as Whiz’s chart and start spreading it out on the table.

  Ignoring the disk, Captain Williams takes his glasses out of his shirt pocket and studies the chart. With his fingers, he follows the arrows that lead from one corporation to another, showing how the network is interconnected.

  "This is excellent work," he says. "Our guys have a few you didn't catch, but you have several that have escaped us so far."

  Everest studies the chart silently then asks, "What got you started in that direction?"

  "The information collected on this disk that I found in David's leather jacket," I say.

  "Come again," Steven Williams says. "I checked the pockets of that jacket before Lisa took it with her to New York, and there was nothing in them."

  "It was in the shoulder padding." I tell him about the Aryans trying to get David’s jacket from Lisa.

  "Is that how she got hurt?" the captain asks. "She told her mother she got shot by a crazy guy during a Xander Wild concert."

  "That was a separate incident."

  "She sure has been riding a rough patch," Everest notices.

  "Yeah, that's for sure," Williams says. "But then, so did her brother. He started working on one of the girls who was working in a strip joint operated by the Wizards. Jeanne-Michelle was a sweet girl from Haiti who started feeding us information after David told her what kind of people her bosses were. Even though he never came clean with it, I'm pretty sure she and David had a thing going. Can’t blame the kid. She was lovely and a drop-dead beauty." He shrugs and cracks open one of the cans
before continuing with the story.

  "A few days before David's official death, he left his favorite jacket to dry at Jeanne-Michelle's place after being caught under a torrential rain. When he came to retrieve it the next day, the place had been thoroughly tossed, mattress ripped apart and all, and the woman had vanished. Since everyone knew he had a sweet spot for that girl, he felt comfortable enough to ask the other strippers about her and found out that her locker had been emptied by the management the very day she had vanished. And they weren’t really looking for her.”

  "So you guys figured out she had stolen something from them and either ran away or been killed before she had a chance to hand it over to David while, all along, David had the disk hidden in his jacket," I say.

  "Right, but then the management started questioning all Jeanne-Michelle’s Johns, and somehow, David's cover got blown. That's when we knew we had to pull him out and, to avoid retaliation against his family, stage his death," Captain Williams says.

  "Did you ever find out who blew his cover?" I ask.

  "It has to be someone from our station," he says. "David joined us right out of the police academy, so he was not a familiar face to anyone but us."

  "It could be the same person who had been feeding Lisa false information," Everest adds. He answers the question he must read in my raised eyebrows. "Last year, she asked me when we were going to clear the streets of the Iron Tornadoes. I figure someone must have told her that it was our MC her brother was investigating, right?"

  "The only person Lisa's been friendly with at the station, as far as I know, is Mike," Williams volunteers. "He was the one on reception duty when she came to get her brother's stuff and then again when she dropped by afterwards."

  "He fits the profile," I say.

  "I'm not sure," Williams says. He furrows his brows and stares into the distance as if he’s flipping mental images of the guy. "I don't think I ever saw him befriend anyone in the station. He's polite and amicable but never volunteers any personal information. If I didn't have access to his personnel file, I wouldn't be able to tell you if he's single or where he lives. He did belong to some right-wing association when he was in high school, but it wasn't held against him when he filed. Boys will be boys. We all did stupid things when our hormones were overriding our brains."