Kill Signal, page 17
part #1 of Marko Bell Series
“For my sake? Or for ours?”
“Both,” she said, as the girls, who had been seemingly engrossed in their own conversation, went quiet and glanced at them.
After lunch, Shake drove them back to Bel Air. He hugged and kissed the girls. He and Abby looked at each other for a solid ten seconds and for the first time in a long time he felt that a lot of ugly and difficult things that had occurred between them could go away, someday.
He held her hand for a few seconds, then he watched her walk to the front door. She turned and waved goodbye.
Shake called the number on the card Sgt. Beverly Jackson had given him. She answered on the first ring.
“Oh, Inspector Wingfield. I’ve got an address for you. Wayne Bordelay lives in Santa Monica.”
He parked downhill, a block and a half from the stucco Mediterranean. It had vaulted windows and Bougainvilleas tumbling down the brick front steps, Spanish style. The house was easily worth a million dollars. Shake knew no cop could afford a place like that.
In the next instant he realized he lived in a million-dollar house and felt a little wave of nausea sweep through him. It was true that no cop could afford a house like that, unless corners were cut.
Shake felt the battle rage inside him again, defiance and abject shame staging an unholy racket somewhere just under his solar plexus.
He turned the radio on and grabbed a granola bar from the paper bag on the passenger seat of the Saturn, which he had rented that afternoon at LAX. He had purchased a Dodgers cap at a gas station. As a lifelong Giants fan, it felt blasphemous to wear the blue. But better to fit in.
He pulled it down over his forehead and slouched down in his seat. Settling in.
He enjoyed stakeouts, perversely. Most cops couldn’t stand them and started to go crazy after three or four hours. Shake liked the simplicity of it. So much of the job was impossible to get a handle on, so fraught with moral dilemmas and complications. Stakeouts boiled things down to their essence: Sit there. Watch that. As long as it takes.
He preferred working them alone, munching snacks and listening to the radio and thinking without the distraction of a jabbering partner. He began to recall all the partners he had had, listing them in his mind the way that, as a child, he used to try to list all the starting lineups of the Giants from 1958 on. Which he did, after he listed all his partners.
He was into the 1976 season – Von Joshua in centerfield, Kenny Reitz at third base – when he saw the garage door open and a silver Jaguar back out onto the street.
Through binoculars he saw Wayne Bordelay in the driver’s seat, wearing a black leather jacket. He looked thin and feral. The car headed Shake’s way.
He laid down on the front seat and waited for it to pass. Then he counted to ten and got out, keeping his head down and walking briskly but unhurriedly toward the Mediterranean.
Nobody was on the street or on their balconies and none of the garage doors were open. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Shake adopted a different walk for the occasion, mindful of his bigness, his darkness. He leeched his stride of any attitude, just in case some old biddy peeked through the curtain and took cues from his body language.
Look at that nice man, he wanted the old biddy to think. Must be a real-estate agent.
When Shake made it to the bougainvilleas, he turned left and walked in between the houses, following a long, low redwood fence. At the end of it he ducked under wooden stairs heading up to the second floor.
He looked around to get a read on privacy: The neighboring houses extended further into their backyards than Bordelay’s did. That meant he’d be invisible from their back windows. The house whose yard abutted Bordelay’s from the back was completely hidden by a stand of oak and eucalyptus trees.
Shake was concealed. Safe.
He edged toward a back door and looked through the pane of glass. There was a darkened room that looked like a laundry room. Beyond that door there was a large French door that probably led to a sun room or den. He decided to stay where he was and work on the laundry room door.
He didn’t know if Bordelay had an alarm system. He was betting he didn’t. If Shake had been in San Francisco, he wouldn’t be worrying about a silent alarm that brought cops to the house. He knew all the district captains and most of the patrol cops and knew they wouldn’t ask too many questions.
But in L.A. he was on foreign turf. He thought of Beverly Jackson, how long it took to thaw her just enough to run a routine DMV check. He had no friends here, no safety net. But he’d have to take a chance.
He picked the lock and turned the doorknob. He listened for the sound of an alarm or the beep of an unauthorized entry. He looked around for a security keypad. Nothing.
He was in.
The laundry room contained the water heater and a washer and dryer. Shake walked through it, into a huge kitchen with granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances. There was an island in the middle of the kitchen that was the size of a dining room table for eight.
He moved into the living room.
Bordelay’s tastes were good – soft leather sofas, some original modern art hanging on the wall, an expensive plasma television that was as thin as the art.
He saw a curving staircase with an oak balustrade and took it upstairs.
At the end of a long hallway he saw a half-open door and peeked into it, seeing an oval glass desk with a sleek computer monitor on it. Behind it, in front of a window that looked out over the backyard, was a cluttered wooden hutch on which rested stacks of paper and manila files.
Shake moved to the computer and saw an open web page on the screen: a travel site listing high-end hotels in Jamaica. Then he clicked the back button on the computer to see what other pages Bordelay had been looking at. The travel sites gave way to a Rolls Royce page, then Maserati, then Ferrari. He went further back and saw a page for an online female escort service. High-class hookers, a $1,000 an hour minimum. More pages: An online order form for a kitchen appliance company in which Bordelay had purchased a $12,000 sub-zero refrigerator and a $9,000 range hood. Another travel site, this one for a four-day hunting trip on a private Texas ranch.
A travel page with requests for fares to San Francisco. The departure date entered into the blank fields was two days ago and the return date was this morning.
Shake looked at his watch, giving himself another five minutes.
He moved to the closets. He saw a piece of carry-on luggage with tickets still affixed to the handles: LAX-SFO.
Shake noted that Bordelay’s itinerary coincided not only with the attempt on his and Karen’s life, but with the five murders and Marko’s disappearance.
Shake moved to the clutter behind the desk. He combed through every file, every piece of paper. He found a stack of stubs from what looked like money orders. They were made out to Bordelay but with no indication of the source of the funds.
Each check was for $10,000 and came every two weeks. Like clockwork.
Shake carefully moved some paper aside and saw four addresses:
417 Pacific.
1210 Ellis.
942 Valencia.
707 Green Street.
Shake recognized them as the addresses of Maurice Weathersby, Walter Roark, Marko Bell and Rafe Strauss.
That was when Shake heard the garage door open.
Lying in bed the night before, Shake had convinced himself that he was going to Los Angeles to find evidence. He had found it.
Now, as he heard the garage door settle and quiet again descend on the house, he knew that he had been lying to himself.
Making Bordelay a suspect in the murders would give him nothing to lose. It meant Bordelay would talk about La Traviata. He’d reveal who was involved. Who had taken money. He’d take everybody down with him.
Boogeyman Bordelay. The keeper of the secrets.
Take away his fortune, watch the Boogeyman sing.
Shake walked downstairs and sat down on the living room couch in the dark. He began to thread the silencer attachment onto the barrel of his gun.
He never could have predicted what Bordelay and Phong would do, and that the money would come soaked in blood.
He couldn’t do anything about that now.
But maybe killing the boogeyman would allow Shake to forget it, once and for all. Let him move on with his life, with some shred of dignity left.
Lord, he whispered. Please forgive me.
Chapter 27
Wayne Bordelay pulled the car into the garage and cut the engine. He walked into the dark living room and sensed a disturbance in it. Years of police work taught him to absorb the atmosphere through his pores, to search for something beyond sight, sound or smell.
He sensed it now.
He felt someone there, with him, in the dark. Before he could reach for the light he knew which strand of his past was revisiting him.
“Hello, Wayne,” the voice said. “You’re back soon.”
Shake Wingfield. Wayne nearly smiled. The familiarity of the voice, the answer to the question of the intruder’s identity, seemed funny to him suddenly. It reminded him of childhood, when strange sounds in the night provided a fertile ground for grotesque fantasies.
Shake’s voice was the banal explanation, a tree branch brushing against a gutter.
Images floated, excavated from years before: A furtive Shake, sitting in a coffee shop on Market Street. An envelope, handed from Wayne to Shake. Shake’s green eyes, scanning the room. Not so superior anymore, Wayne thought then, getting an illicit thrill from the equalizing force of greed. Shake had grabbed the envelope quickly, as if afraid other customers could see through the envelope at the outline of the money.
Shake was sitting comfortably in Wayne’s living room, one arm thrown over the back of the sofa. Wayne felt a growing unease, triggered by Shake’s air. The son of a bitch had a sense of entitlement, sitting there in his living room like he owned it.
“What the fuck do you want?” That gun in Shake’s lap was worrying Wayne.
“That the way you talked to Tommy Phong? How about Weathersby and Strauss? Or Walter?”
“I don’t remember you complaining about Tommy Phong when you were getting your cut.”
Shake jerked his gun angrily toward Wayne. “Shut your fucking mouth, Wayne. Don’t try to drag me into it. The Phong thing was bullshit. I had no part of your game on La Traviata.”
Wayne was surprised to hear a note of hysteria creep into Shake’s voice. A primitive part of Wayne’s brain understood it immediately as guilt.
Shake was falling to pieces.
Wayne was always surprised when people displayed emotions like that: guilt, sorrow, sympathy. Over the years he had occasionally contemplated how much more difficult those feelings must make the act of living for some people, and he was glad he was never inclined in that direction.
Shake would be the emotional one in this confrontation, Wayne noted with satisfaction.
But he had that gun.
“You kept it going, Wingfield. You could have made things real hard on me. But you kept your mouth shut. I appreciated that. It gave me and Tommy the freedom we needed.”
Shake rose from the seat and walked closer to Wayne. The sudden movement seemed to change the air in the room, disrupting the balance that had settled when Wayne clicked on the lights.
Now Wayne was recalculating angles, imagining a point in the middle of the room and Shake moving into it.
Once he did, Wayne would lunge at him, knock the gun from his hand.
But Shake had the cop’s sense, too. He edged close to that point at which the odds would even out enough for Wayne to make a play, but he stayed back. Keeping the odds firmly in his favor.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” Shake said. “All those people. I never signed on for that.”
“Sure you did. You didn’t have a problem taking the money. Once you’re in, you don’t get to pick and choose how dirty it gets. Everybody knew that, including Cuddy.”
“I saw the check stubs upstairs. Who’s paying you?”
Shake had inched closer to him. Almost within reach. And the gun casually held in his right hand as he looked at Wayne plaintively. Shake was hungry to know. It was making him sloppy.
Wayne shrugged. “I don’t know. But I expect the checks to get bigger, now that your partner got her teeth into the case. My little phone call to her worked wonders. All I had to do was suggest she should look into Fielding murders as a way to get back at that reporter who’s been making her life miserable. It’s amazing how predictable people can be when they’re trying save their skin, even if it creates chaos. And more chaos does wonders for the generosity of my benefactors. They’ll pay anything just to make it all go away. To make Karen Yancey go away. To make you go away. It’s been fun stringing you both along, but it’s time to end it now.”
Wayne saw the confusion and anger in Shake’s eyes. He could almost read his mind: But I have the gun. He was getting out of control, Wayne could see it. Shake was a proud man but he had a rage inside him. He’d been humiliated, left by his wife, made to feel small and guilty. He wanted answers that would somehow assuage his shame and guilt.
Shake had the gun, but Wayne would control him, just like he’d done in his military work.
“Who are they?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Wayne said casually. I’m in control.
“How do they communicate with you?”
“They don’t. They communicate with Frank. He communicates with me. They blackmailed him a long time ago. Somebody big. That’s all I know. And that’s all you’re ever going to know.”
Wayne saw Shake take another shuffling half-step forward.
“I get all of it,” Shake said. “Solorzano had to go because he heard Flanagan talking to Tommy Phong about La Traviata. Maurice and Rafe had to go because Roland told them about it. But what started it all? What happened at La Traviata?”
“Marko’s wife made it easy,” Wayne said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Every goddamn night. About a quarter to nine. Stay until eleven. Marko would pick her up. Clockwork.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shake moved closer, waving the gun carelessly. Wayne squinted through the corner of his eye. Another step was all he needed.
“Talk about consistent, huh? I told Tommy, go in there at 9:15, when it’s most crowded. Show them who’s boss. All it took was a couple of weeks of planting the idea in Tommy’s head. That people thought he was weak. Scared.” Bordelay laughed. “Dumb gook. He was like a fucking child. He actually reminded me of you, Shake.”
Shake stepped forward, raising his gun at Wayne’s head and releasing the safety. “Talk, Bordelay. What are you saying? Why Bell’s wife? What is Flanagan covering up?”
Wayne swung his arm violently, catching the barrel of the gun with his knuckles and sending it flying backward and clattering on the hardwood floor behind Shake. Wayne hurled his body forward and drove into Shake, his jaw hitting the bigger man’s shoulder and sending searing pain through him. They smashed through a glass coffee table, the air going out of Shake in a loud sigh as he hit. Wayne saw a spurt of blood fly through the air. He started to get up, shoving his hands down hard on Shake’s face, his eyes locked on the gun just a few feet beyond them. He set his feet for a dive that would take him there and felt an explosion of bright lights at the point of his chin. He felt bones splinter and his face went numb.
Shake felt glass shards digging into his side, the points digging deeper as Wayne clambered up above him. His face was smashed down on the hardwood, Wayne’s arms pressing down as he gained leverage.
The gun. Just a few feet away. Wayne almost there.
Shake clenched his fist and struck upward with all the force he could muster. He connected solidly with something hard and heard cracks. Wayne screamed in pain and fell back on top of him, driving the glass deeper into Shake’s sides, a harder pain now as it sliced deep through muscle and tendon. Wayne screamed again, an animal sound borne of fury, and began to rise. He lifted his arms together over his head in a sledgehammer motion and paused at the apex, looking down at Shake, aiming his fists into his face. Shake was pinned under him, unable to reach the gun.
His mind flashed ahead several seconds: Wayne slamming his fists down onto his face with terrific force, giving him time to get free and scramble for the gun. Then it would be finished. Beverly Jackson would tell her story and the blanks would fill in neatly. Even a disgraced ex-cop was allowed to defend himself against a renegade former colleague invading his home and intent on settling some personal score. Wayne would finesse that part of it later.
Shake reached down and gripped a long hard sliver of glass, feeling the smooth edges cut into his hands. Skin opened and sent blood oozing. He pulled outward. He swept his arm up, catching Wayne’s throat and feeling thick resistance that gave way as the glass sliced through skin and muscle.
Shake looked up and saw a flood of dark red liquid come pouring out of Wayne’s throat. Wayne stopped and looked at Shake quizzically. His hand went to his throat but the blood was gushing out, and he locked eyes with Shake.
Shake thought he saw the beginnings of a smile die in the cloud that was forming in Wayne’s eyes as the thick red liquid poured out of him.
Shake held his breath to keep from drowning in the sea of blood.
Chapter 28
He opened his eyes slowly.
He was laying on a bed in a dark room. His body ached.
He moved his right arm to his side and felt bandages wound tightly around him.
Over the course of several minutes he took inventory. His toes and fingers seemed to work. He was able to turn his head slightly. He could shift his body, with great effort. He could feel his legs.
He was woozy.
“Shake? Can you hear me, Shake?”
A woman’s face was in front of him, close to his.
Karen.
“Are you all right, Shake?”
“Both,” she said, as the girls, who had been seemingly engrossed in their own conversation, went quiet and glanced at them.
After lunch, Shake drove them back to Bel Air. He hugged and kissed the girls. He and Abby looked at each other for a solid ten seconds and for the first time in a long time he felt that a lot of ugly and difficult things that had occurred between them could go away, someday.
He held her hand for a few seconds, then he watched her walk to the front door. She turned and waved goodbye.
Shake called the number on the card Sgt. Beverly Jackson had given him. She answered on the first ring.
“Oh, Inspector Wingfield. I’ve got an address for you. Wayne Bordelay lives in Santa Monica.”
He parked downhill, a block and a half from the stucco Mediterranean. It had vaulted windows and Bougainvilleas tumbling down the brick front steps, Spanish style. The house was easily worth a million dollars. Shake knew no cop could afford a place like that.
In the next instant he realized he lived in a million-dollar house and felt a little wave of nausea sweep through him. It was true that no cop could afford a house like that, unless corners were cut.
Shake felt the battle rage inside him again, defiance and abject shame staging an unholy racket somewhere just under his solar plexus.
He turned the radio on and grabbed a granola bar from the paper bag on the passenger seat of the Saturn, which he had rented that afternoon at LAX. He had purchased a Dodgers cap at a gas station. As a lifelong Giants fan, it felt blasphemous to wear the blue. But better to fit in.
He pulled it down over his forehead and slouched down in his seat. Settling in.
He enjoyed stakeouts, perversely. Most cops couldn’t stand them and started to go crazy after three or four hours. Shake liked the simplicity of it. So much of the job was impossible to get a handle on, so fraught with moral dilemmas and complications. Stakeouts boiled things down to their essence: Sit there. Watch that. As long as it takes.
He preferred working them alone, munching snacks and listening to the radio and thinking without the distraction of a jabbering partner. He began to recall all the partners he had had, listing them in his mind the way that, as a child, he used to try to list all the starting lineups of the Giants from 1958 on. Which he did, after he listed all his partners.
He was into the 1976 season – Von Joshua in centerfield, Kenny Reitz at third base – when he saw the garage door open and a silver Jaguar back out onto the street.
Through binoculars he saw Wayne Bordelay in the driver’s seat, wearing a black leather jacket. He looked thin and feral. The car headed Shake’s way.
He laid down on the front seat and waited for it to pass. Then he counted to ten and got out, keeping his head down and walking briskly but unhurriedly toward the Mediterranean.
Nobody was on the street or on their balconies and none of the garage doors were open. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Shake adopted a different walk for the occasion, mindful of his bigness, his darkness. He leeched his stride of any attitude, just in case some old biddy peeked through the curtain and took cues from his body language.
Look at that nice man, he wanted the old biddy to think. Must be a real-estate agent.
When Shake made it to the bougainvilleas, he turned left and walked in between the houses, following a long, low redwood fence. At the end of it he ducked under wooden stairs heading up to the second floor.
He looked around to get a read on privacy: The neighboring houses extended further into their backyards than Bordelay’s did. That meant he’d be invisible from their back windows. The house whose yard abutted Bordelay’s from the back was completely hidden by a stand of oak and eucalyptus trees.
Shake was concealed. Safe.
He edged toward a back door and looked through the pane of glass. There was a darkened room that looked like a laundry room. Beyond that door there was a large French door that probably led to a sun room or den. He decided to stay where he was and work on the laundry room door.
He didn’t know if Bordelay had an alarm system. He was betting he didn’t. If Shake had been in San Francisco, he wouldn’t be worrying about a silent alarm that brought cops to the house. He knew all the district captains and most of the patrol cops and knew they wouldn’t ask too many questions.
But in L.A. he was on foreign turf. He thought of Beverly Jackson, how long it took to thaw her just enough to run a routine DMV check. He had no friends here, no safety net. But he’d have to take a chance.
He picked the lock and turned the doorknob. He listened for the sound of an alarm or the beep of an unauthorized entry. He looked around for a security keypad. Nothing.
He was in.
The laundry room contained the water heater and a washer and dryer. Shake walked through it, into a huge kitchen with granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances. There was an island in the middle of the kitchen that was the size of a dining room table for eight.
He moved into the living room.
Bordelay’s tastes were good – soft leather sofas, some original modern art hanging on the wall, an expensive plasma television that was as thin as the art.
He saw a curving staircase with an oak balustrade and took it upstairs.
At the end of a long hallway he saw a half-open door and peeked into it, seeing an oval glass desk with a sleek computer monitor on it. Behind it, in front of a window that looked out over the backyard, was a cluttered wooden hutch on which rested stacks of paper and manila files.
Shake moved to the computer and saw an open web page on the screen: a travel site listing high-end hotels in Jamaica. Then he clicked the back button on the computer to see what other pages Bordelay had been looking at. The travel sites gave way to a Rolls Royce page, then Maserati, then Ferrari. He went further back and saw a page for an online female escort service. High-class hookers, a $1,000 an hour minimum. More pages: An online order form for a kitchen appliance company in which Bordelay had purchased a $12,000 sub-zero refrigerator and a $9,000 range hood. Another travel site, this one for a four-day hunting trip on a private Texas ranch.
A travel page with requests for fares to San Francisco. The departure date entered into the blank fields was two days ago and the return date was this morning.
Shake looked at his watch, giving himself another five minutes.
He moved to the closets. He saw a piece of carry-on luggage with tickets still affixed to the handles: LAX-SFO.
Shake noted that Bordelay’s itinerary coincided not only with the attempt on his and Karen’s life, but with the five murders and Marko’s disappearance.
Shake moved to the clutter behind the desk. He combed through every file, every piece of paper. He found a stack of stubs from what looked like money orders. They were made out to Bordelay but with no indication of the source of the funds.
Each check was for $10,000 and came every two weeks. Like clockwork.
Shake carefully moved some paper aside and saw four addresses:
417 Pacific.
1210 Ellis.
942 Valencia.
707 Green Street.
Shake recognized them as the addresses of Maurice Weathersby, Walter Roark, Marko Bell and Rafe Strauss.
That was when Shake heard the garage door open.
Lying in bed the night before, Shake had convinced himself that he was going to Los Angeles to find evidence. He had found it.
Now, as he heard the garage door settle and quiet again descend on the house, he knew that he had been lying to himself.
Making Bordelay a suspect in the murders would give him nothing to lose. It meant Bordelay would talk about La Traviata. He’d reveal who was involved. Who had taken money. He’d take everybody down with him.
Boogeyman Bordelay. The keeper of the secrets.
Take away his fortune, watch the Boogeyman sing.
Shake walked downstairs and sat down on the living room couch in the dark. He began to thread the silencer attachment onto the barrel of his gun.
He never could have predicted what Bordelay and Phong would do, and that the money would come soaked in blood.
He couldn’t do anything about that now.
But maybe killing the boogeyman would allow Shake to forget it, once and for all. Let him move on with his life, with some shred of dignity left.
Lord, he whispered. Please forgive me.
Chapter 27
Wayne Bordelay pulled the car into the garage and cut the engine. He walked into the dark living room and sensed a disturbance in it. Years of police work taught him to absorb the atmosphere through his pores, to search for something beyond sight, sound or smell.
He sensed it now.
He felt someone there, with him, in the dark. Before he could reach for the light he knew which strand of his past was revisiting him.
“Hello, Wayne,” the voice said. “You’re back soon.”
Shake Wingfield. Wayne nearly smiled. The familiarity of the voice, the answer to the question of the intruder’s identity, seemed funny to him suddenly. It reminded him of childhood, when strange sounds in the night provided a fertile ground for grotesque fantasies.
Shake’s voice was the banal explanation, a tree branch brushing against a gutter.
Images floated, excavated from years before: A furtive Shake, sitting in a coffee shop on Market Street. An envelope, handed from Wayne to Shake. Shake’s green eyes, scanning the room. Not so superior anymore, Wayne thought then, getting an illicit thrill from the equalizing force of greed. Shake had grabbed the envelope quickly, as if afraid other customers could see through the envelope at the outline of the money.
Shake was sitting comfortably in Wayne’s living room, one arm thrown over the back of the sofa. Wayne felt a growing unease, triggered by Shake’s air. The son of a bitch had a sense of entitlement, sitting there in his living room like he owned it.
“What the fuck do you want?” That gun in Shake’s lap was worrying Wayne.
“That the way you talked to Tommy Phong? How about Weathersby and Strauss? Or Walter?”
“I don’t remember you complaining about Tommy Phong when you were getting your cut.”
Shake jerked his gun angrily toward Wayne. “Shut your fucking mouth, Wayne. Don’t try to drag me into it. The Phong thing was bullshit. I had no part of your game on La Traviata.”
Wayne was surprised to hear a note of hysteria creep into Shake’s voice. A primitive part of Wayne’s brain understood it immediately as guilt.
Shake was falling to pieces.
Wayne was always surprised when people displayed emotions like that: guilt, sorrow, sympathy. Over the years he had occasionally contemplated how much more difficult those feelings must make the act of living for some people, and he was glad he was never inclined in that direction.
Shake would be the emotional one in this confrontation, Wayne noted with satisfaction.
But he had that gun.
“You kept it going, Wingfield. You could have made things real hard on me. But you kept your mouth shut. I appreciated that. It gave me and Tommy the freedom we needed.”
Shake rose from the seat and walked closer to Wayne. The sudden movement seemed to change the air in the room, disrupting the balance that had settled when Wayne clicked on the lights.
Now Wayne was recalculating angles, imagining a point in the middle of the room and Shake moving into it.
Once he did, Wayne would lunge at him, knock the gun from his hand.
But Shake had the cop’s sense, too. He edged close to that point at which the odds would even out enough for Wayne to make a play, but he stayed back. Keeping the odds firmly in his favor.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” Shake said. “All those people. I never signed on for that.”
“Sure you did. You didn’t have a problem taking the money. Once you’re in, you don’t get to pick and choose how dirty it gets. Everybody knew that, including Cuddy.”
“I saw the check stubs upstairs. Who’s paying you?”
Shake had inched closer to him. Almost within reach. And the gun casually held in his right hand as he looked at Wayne plaintively. Shake was hungry to know. It was making him sloppy.
Wayne shrugged. “I don’t know. But I expect the checks to get bigger, now that your partner got her teeth into the case. My little phone call to her worked wonders. All I had to do was suggest she should look into Fielding murders as a way to get back at that reporter who’s been making her life miserable. It’s amazing how predictable people can be when they’re trying save their skin, even if it creates chaos. And more chaos does wonders for the generosity of my benefactors. They’ll pay anything just to make it all go away. To make Karen Yancey go away. To make you go away. It’s been fun stringing you both along, but it’s time to end it now.”
Wayne saw the confusion and anger in Shake’s eyes. He could almost read his mind: But I have the gun. He was getting out of control, Wayne could see it. Shake was a proud man but he had a rage inside him. He’d been humiliated, left by his wife, made to feel small and guilty. He wanted answers that would somehow assuage his shame and guilt.
Shake had the gun, but Wayne would control him, just like he’d done in his military work.
“Who are they?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Wayne said casually. I’m in control.
“How do they communicate with you?”
“They don’t. They communicate with Frank. He communicates with me. They blackmailed him a long time ago. Somebody big. That’s all I know. And that’s all you’re ever going to know.”
Wayne saw Shake take another shuffling half-step forward.
“I get all of it,” Shake said. “Solorzano had to go because he heard Flanagan talking to Tommy Phong about La Traviata. Maurice and Rafe had to go because Roland told them about it. But what started it all? What happened at La Traviata?”
“Marko’s wife made it easy,” Wayne said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Every goddamn night. About a quarter to nine. Stay until eleven. Marko would pick her up. Clockwork.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shake moved closer, waving the gun carelessly. Wayne squinted through the corner of his eye. Another step was all he needed.
“Talk about consistent, huh? I told Tommy, go in there at 9:15, when it’s most crowded. Show them who’s boss. All it took was a couple of weeks of planting the idea in Tommy’s head. That people thought he was weak. Scared.” Bordelay laughed. “Dumb gook. He was like a fucking child. He actually reminded me of you, Shake.”
Shake stepped forward, raising his gun at Wayne’s head and releasing the safety. “Talk, Bordelay. What are you saying? Why Bell’s wife? What is Flanagan covering up?”
Wayne swung his arm violently, catching the barrel of the gun with his knuckles and sending it flying backward and clattering on the hardwood floor behind Shake. Wayne hurled his body forward and drove into Shake, his jaw hitting the bigger man’s shoulder and sending searing pain through him. They smashed through a glass coffee table, the air going out of Shake in a loud sigh as he hit. Wayne saw a spurt of blood fly through the air. He started to get up, shoving his hands down hard on Shake’s face, his eyes locked on the gun just a few feet beyond them. He set his feet for a dive that would take him there and felt an explosion of bright lights at the point of his chin. He felt bones splinter and his face went numb.
Shake felt glass shards digging into his side, the points digging deeper as Wayne clambered up above him. His face was smashed down on the hardwood, Wayne’s arms pressing down as he gained leverage.
The gun. Just a few feet away. Wayne almost there.
Shake clenched his fist and struck upward with all the force he could muster. He connected solidly with something hard and heard cracks. Wayne screamed in pain and fell back on top of him, driving the glass deeper into Shake’s sides, a harder pain now as it sliced deep through muscle and tendon. Wayne screamed again, an animal sound borne of fury, and began to rise. He lifted his arms together over his head in a sledgehammer motion and paused at the apex, looking down at Shake, aiming his fists into his face. Shake was pinned under him, unable to reach the gun.
His mind flashed ahead several seconds: Wayne slamming his fists down onto his face with terrific force, giving him time to get free and scramble for the gun. Then it would be finished. Beverly Jackson would tell her story and the blanks would fill in neatly. Even a disgraced ex-cop was allowed to defend himself against a renegade former colleague invading his home and intent on settling some personal score. Wayne would finesse that part of it later.
Shake reached down and gripped a long hard sliver of glass, feeling the smooth edges cut into his hands. Skin opened and sent blood oozing. He pulled outward. He swept his arm up, catching Wayne’s throat and feeling thick resistance that gave way as the glass sliced through skin and muscle.
Shake looked up and saw a flood of dark red liquid come pouring out of Wayne’s throat. Wayne stopped and looked at Shake quizzically. His hand went to his throat but the blood was gushing out, and he locked eyes with Shake.
Shake thought he saw the beginnings of a smile die in the cloud that was forming in Wayne’s eyes as the thick red liquid poured out of him.
Shake held his breath to keep from drowning in the sea of blood.
Chapter 28
He opened his eyes slowly.
He was laying on a bed in a dark room. His body ached.
He moved his right arm to his side and felt bandages wound tightly around him.
Over the course of several minutes he took inventory. His toes and fingers seemed to work. He was able to turn his head slightly. He could shift his body, with great effort. He could feel his legs.
He was woozy.
“Shake? Can you hear me, Shake?”
A woman’s face was in front of him, close to his.
Karen.
“Are you all right, Shake?”
