The Gatekeeper, page 9
The guy spits up blood. “Don’t … Jesus … stop…”
“Where do I find these soldiers you hear tell of?”
“Don’t kn—”
Pop. More cartilage crackles. More blood arcs away from the guy’s nose.
“Don’t … know! Man! Don’t know!”
Dez believes him. He hits the guy one more time. Animated bluebirds circle. He releases the guy’s shirt and he falls back like a sack of laundry.
Dez rises. He checks the third man.
Out like a light.
Dez tsks. Oh well.
He didn’t find anyone at any of the three bars who was helpful.
That’s fine.
Come tomorrow, the blokes who’ll be helpful will come looking for Dez.
CHAPTER 23
Dez stops by a Burger King and gets a cup of ice for his knuckles. He parks the Cooper and calls Petra.
It’s half midnight and she answers on the first ring. “Where are you?”
“Looking at bars that cater to militia types. How’re you?”
Petra’s in her room, wearing a T-shirt and panties and reading glasses. She’d been sitting cross-legged in bed, laptop perched on her knees, communicating with Singapore. Her hair is back in a ponytail and it makes her look ten years younger. “I’m glad you’re doing this, Dez. Thank you. Did you find anything?”
He removes the lid and distends the cup so he can fit his curled fingers in. The ice will reduce any swelling. “Guys talking, is all. Word is out that someone attacked you, an’ that you did something to deserve it.”
“Did what?”
“Dunno. Still haven’t told me what’s wrong with Triton.”
“It’s…” She pauses. She studies the thick cube of a glass between her fingers. “I found some missing funds. Very, very carefully camouflaged in the company’s profit and loss statements. A little here, a little there. I’ve had a full forensic analysis done. I found money missing back as far as two-plus years ago.”
“How much?”
She sips her drink. “To date? One point three billion.”
Dez barks out a laugh. “You’re joking!” When she doesn’t answer, he sobers up. “You are joking. Aye? Nobody misplaces one an’ a third billion dollars. The Vatican couldn’t misplace one an’ a third billion dollars!”
“Triton does several billion dollars’ worth of deals across the globe every year. We are providing the funding for infrastructure projects like bridges and dams to third-world countries. We’re arming first-world countries. My father had an attack of angina in a restaurant a year ago and the NASDAQ lost seven points. Triton is just a company. But if we were a sovereign nation, we’d be among the top-ten largest economies on the planet. We can lose one point three billion. We have. I just don’t know how.”
“Who would know how to hide something like that?” Dez asks.
“Very few people. I could. My father could. Maybe two other executives, acting alone. Or a dozen other executives acting in tandem.”
“D’you have a board of directors?”
“Yes, but they’re toothless. My father and I own fifty-five percent of the stock.”
“Where’s all this money going, then?”
“The concept of misplaces eludes you.” She says it sharply, and quickly apologizes. “Sorry. I’m … scared, is all.”
“You were attacked.”
“I’m scared for Triton. I can handle myself.”
“I seem to remember you putting a gun to the back of me head, so, yeah, I second that motion.”
She smiles and swirls the liquor in her glass. “So what do you do now?”
“Keep watching. Keep asking questions. Find someone who knows someone, then find that someone, and find out what they know. It’s pretty simple really.”
“And people will just talk to you?”
Dez feels the swelling going down in his knuckles. “I’m likable.”
“Okay. Are you coming here tonight?”
“No. Got a bit more hunting to do.”
“Okay. Dez? Thank you. I mean it.”
“I know. Sleep tight.”
She hangs up, tosses the mobile to the foot of her bed. She thinks about it awhile, sips her drink.
Dez knows all this: about her being in bed, her wearing a baby blue T-shirt and blush pink panties, about the whiskey and the computer, because he’s watching her. On his tablet computer.
He’s sitting in Alonzo’s Cooper, a block from the Malibu house, watching the feed off the house security cameras. Dez took the time, since barhopping in Los Alamitos, to download Vincent Guerrero’s twelve-digit pass code to the house security system. Now he knows what his code nets him that Petra’s eight-digit code doesn’t net her.
Vincent Guerrero can spy on the inhabitants of the house. He can monitor all cell phone and computer activity. The Malibu Colony house may be the most gorgeous property Dez has ever been inside, but it’s also a gilded cage. And Petra has been under surveillance in her own home for who knows how long.
Dez leaves the melting ice in the Mini Cooper and sneaks out, walking the perimeter of the house. It takes him the better part of two hours to do so without being seen, since making the full circle means slipping onto neighbors’ property and walking the beach. But when he’s done, he’s spotted four outdoor cameras facing the house. He recognizes the make and model of the cameras; they’re brand-new, state-of-the-art.
He hikes back to the borrowed Cooper around three in the morning and returns to Los Alamitos.
He’s going to get some sleep, then hit the bars again.
Tried and true.
CHAPTER 24
Dez has a plan to hit the same three bars tonight in the same order he hit them last night.
Nothing happening at the first two.
The third bar is the one that wants to be a German thrash metal club. It’s decorated as if by someone who once saw an episode of a television show set on a studio lot decorated to resemble a German thrash metal club. In fact, the owner likely hasn’t taken the time to actually go to Germany and sit in an actual thrash metal club. Dez has. They look fuck-all like this sad lot.
This time, he spots several guys who could be active-duty military. They look fairly agitated.
Dez hears two longhaired guys talking about rugby at the bar. He joins the conversation, shows them a puckered scar on one arm he got from playing ruggers with some mates, and soon they’re besties. He’s not a loner with a foreign accent now. That’s who the soldier types are talking about, but because he’s in an animated conversation with two other blokes, their eyes pass right over him.
After a bit, he spots the reason the active-duty blokes looked agitated; they were meeting their marijuana dealer. Their agitation ain’t his agitation, so after that, Dez kites out.
Back at the lavender Mini Cooper with its rainbow flag decal—it goes without saying, he’s been parking the car several blocks from each tavern—he makes a phone call. Then he drives back to the first bar he’d been in the night before.
He gets to the Dukes of Hazzard bar and orders the same creamy German doppelbock as before. He lucks out and sits on the same stool. He ignores the same crappy music.
He gets spotted in under a minute.
Three soldier types sit at one table—opposite side as last night. They spot him but they play coy. One of them pulls out a phone and texts someone. Another stands and heads to the loo. After a sec, the other two rise, a little too casually, throw a twenty on the table and head out.
Dez follows.
The two guys head toward the gravel parking lot behind the bar, just like the lads from last night.
Once everyone’s nicely isolated from street traffic, the two boys stop walking and turn around, facing Dez.
One of them slips on brass knuckles.
Three more guys—white, late twenties to early thirties, short hair, well built—emerge from a Ford F-250 Super Duty. The guy who’d slipped into the men’s room emerges and stands guard at the edge of the bar to make sure no one comes near the parking lot. It’s six to one now.
One of them is at least six-three and rangy, moving with the easy grace of a fighter. The way the others move out of his line of sight, Dez guesses he’s the leader.
“You the fucking foreigner attacked some soldiers here last night?”
“Attacked? We was having a nice conversation. Chatty, that’s what I am.”
The leader says, “You were asking about that shit at the Hotel Tremaine on Monday. How come?”
“Naturally curious, is all.”
The leader has sandy red hair and ears that stick straight out from his skull. He’s got the muscles of a serious athlete—not like Dez’s fireplug build, but put together pretty well. “We heard some English dude was involved in that shit on Highway 1, Tuesday. That you?”
“The one where someone rammed the fuck out of an arsehole and drove him over the guard railing and into the Pacific?” Dez asks. He ponders a moment. “Yeah. Now’s you mention it. That was me.”
The leader draws a fixed-blade knife. A good one, well designed, toughened.
All six of the men wear blue jeans and good civilian boots. It’s tough to tell them apart. But one has a Hawaiian shirt. That’s distinction enough. Dez speaks louder: “Chemise Hawaïenne, s’il vous plait.”
The leader says, “The fuck are—”
And a fast-moving swarm of rock salt rips into the knee of the man in the Hawaiian shirt.
He screams and falls to the gravel. That seems to happen a lot back here, Dez thinks.
Ephrem Kebede emerges from the dark with a sawed-off shotgun in both hands. Two other lads, also Ethiopian immigrants, emerge from the other direction, also carrying shotguns.
The man on the ground keens in pain.
Dez takes three steps toward the leader. “Can I have that knife, kindly?”
Six-three, the man glares down at him. Dez smiles up at him, muscles loose, ready. The others are soldiers, and they’ve been trained to obey orders. Even facing shotguns, they’ll fight if their leader tells them to. So Dez opts to take out the leader.
“The knife, my son.”
The big man lunges at him, knife held professionally, blade toward the butt of his hand, quick slashing moves designed to draw first blood.
Dez grabs the wrist of the knife hand, digs his thick fingers into the man’s flesh, and drives his other, comically large fist into the man’s solar plexus.
The knife falls.
The guy’s bent over so Dez steps in and head-butts him, cracking open his nose.
He falls straight back on his ass.
Dez picks up the knife, walks to the F-250, jams the blade between the bed frame and the rear gate, and puts his weight into it laterally. The knife snaps in two, the blade staying where it is, the bolster, tang, and butt in Dez’s hand.
The other four men stand, dumbstruck.
Dez walks back and tosses the knife handle onto the ground between the leader’s akimbo legs.
“Chef,” Ephrem Kebede drawls, and gives his usual low and rumbling laugh. “C’est bon de te revoir.”
“Et toi, mon amie.”
He turns to the other white supremacist goons. “On home with yourselves, now. Scoot, the lot of ye.”
The Ethiopians take a few steps nearer. The man with rock salt buried in his thigh, knee, and calf lies in the fetal position, holding his leg, his denim oozing blood around his fingers.
The four men back away.
There’s a rumble, and a van inches out of the dark. One of Ephrem’s men opens the sliding side door.
Ephrem gestures toward the unconscious leader with the broken knife between his knees. Dez points to the crying man with rock salt in his leg. “Non, prends celui-là, s’il te plaît.”
The Ethiopians lift the keening guy up. He struggles a little. “Hey … wait … the fuck…” They toss him in the van. This has to be a racist’s worst nightmare: wounded, abandoned by your mates, tossed into a van by Black men speaking a foreign language.
Dez circles the vehicle, checks the driver.
A cherubic face, a massive grin, and twinkling eyes.
He turns to Ephrem, aghast. “Ye brought Nyala!”
He shrugs. “Take your daughter to work day. It’s an American thing.”
CHAPTER 25
It’s a complicated night. Dez and the Ethiopians—that’d be a killer name for a band, he thinks—need to get from Los Alamitos to Torrance, which normally would be a straight shot west on the 405, but Dez also wants to return Alonzo’s Mini Cooper, which he’s had for too long. And he wants to fill it up and wash it, because that’s the polite thing to do, and Ephrem Kebede’s guys know an all-night car wash, this being LA, so they get the Cooper back to Malibu Colony Beach around three in the morning. You don’t want to be a Black guy driving a nice car in that neighborhood at night, so Dez makes the trek with Ephrem and his daughter, Nyala, riding drag in the stolen F-250 Super Duty.
They left the owner of the F-250 lying spread-eagled in the gravel parking lot. Taking out their leader had been good craft, and it’d been a bit of fun, but Dez is under no illusions: He’s now a target.
Better him than Petra, he thinks.
On the way back to Torrance in the stolen pickup, Nyala sits in the middle and chatters away, telling Dez about her favorite bands and the latest role-playing video game and about running for treasurer in student government and about a paper she’s writing on the #MeToo movement. “What’s that?” Dez asks, although he knows perfect well, and she says that guys touch women in unwanted ways and that in the future they won’t be able to get away with it. Dez asks, “What d’you do when that happens to you?” and she says, tell ’em to stop, tell someone in authority, tell Dad, tell Mom, tell Uncle Dez.
“So you stand up for yourself?” And she looks at him like he’s dumb and shrugs and says, “’Course.”
Dez and Ephrem exchange nods over her head.
Nyala falls asleep leaning on her dad’s arm before Torrance, and they don’t get back to the Quonset hut garage until nearly dawn.
The soldier they grabbed is named Tom Polhaus and, according to the information in his wallet, he’s an E-5; petty officer second class, U.S. Navy. His left knee is an oozing mass of salt-rock-pitted meat, but the bone is fine and the deep muscles are fine, and he’ll walk again. He’ll limp, but you pays your dime, you takes your chances, as a Texan Dez knew used to say.
Dez is really not looking forward to questioning this guy. He’s a gatekeeper, not an interrogation expert. But fortunately, Ephrem Kebede’s wife, Beza, was an anesthesiologist in Cairo before immigrating to the States, and she gives Tom Polhaus a powerful painkiller that puts him instantly to sleep. She also treats his wound to avoid sepsis.
Everyone gets a couple hours’ kip. As the sun rises, Dez calls Raziah Swann, the vocalist and lead guitarist of the band he’d played with Monday night. She’s Black and Persian. Call her Iranian and she’ll rip you a new one. She’s lovely, a twenty-year-old, five-foot-tall bundle of TNT, and Dez is dead certain she’s going to be a superstar in the not-too-distant future. She flirts crazy with him. She often asks Dez to sit in on gigs, not because he’s the finest bass guitarist in town—he’s not—but because he never, ever responds to her flirting. She’s safe with him.
“Where are ye?” he asks.
“Vegas,” she says. “Why, are you lonely?”
“No, love, I’m in a bit of a thing. Some people might start looking for me. If they do, they might start at the Hotel Tremaine.”
“And…?”
“And if they’re looking for me, they might start with you an’ the band.”
Raziah’s laughter always reminds him of wind chimes. “What did you do this time? Wait wait wait. Rescued a maiden from a drunk in the parking lot? Stood down an abusive boyfriend? I know there’s a damsel in distress in there somewhere.”
Dez makes a note to never, ever tell Petra Alexandris that she’s been compared to a damsel in distress. “Me?” he bleats. “I lead a blameless life! You know that!”
She laughs. “Want do you need?”
“Keep an eye open. Stay out of LA for a couple weeks. Wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world.”
“I have a standing invite to play at a club in Portland. The owner of the joint wants to get in my pants.”
“An’ who doesn’t?”
“Just say the word…”
He laughs her off. As he always does. “I’ve T-shirts older’n you, love! The gig in Portland? Can it last a week or two?”
“So this is serious?”
“A bit.”
There’s a pause. “Oh, holy fuck, Desmond! The dead guys, the shooting at the hotel that night…?”
“It’s connected to that, yeah.”
“That was you? Are you in danger?”
“Don’t be daft, ye brat. I’m fine. But, you know. Better safe than. Yeah?”
Raziah makes a snap decision. “Portland, it is. You can’t beat the coffee or the cannabis.”
* * *
Around 8 a.m., they start in. Ephrem and Beza fry up a massive quraac, or breakfast, of quanta firfir, a spicy dried beef, plus a goulash of sardines and chopped tomatoes, with berbere. Plus shiro, ground and reconstituted pea powder served over injera, or Ethiopian bread. Ephrem’s men eat heartily, as does Dez, and Ephrem’s wife teases him about being skin and bones, which makes everyone laugh.
“This is insane,” Dez moans, gesturing toward the food. The word comes out infane because his mouth is full. “I’m about to cry.”
Beza laughs and piles more on his plate.
“What’d you give our Navy lad, Doc?”
“Sodium thiopental,” she says. “Eat up. More coffee?”
* * *
She had, indeed, given Petty Officer Polhaus sodium thiopental, and by the time Dez and Ephrem go to talk to the lad—lying handcuffed to Dez’s old bed behind the garage—the man’s positively effusive.
Dez hadn’t wanted to torture the man, so the truth serum is a best-case scenario.
