The Pain Scale (41 page)

“Shoot him,” I said without being sure if I could even hear myself speaking.

My focus was returning, and I saw two figures silhouetted against the white curtains of the large front window.

They were both in fighter’s crouches, and it looked as though he was backed up into a corner.

Jen was standing in his way.

He closed in on her, but she stopped him with a kick to his knee.

He backed up and then feinted left, but Jen didn’t take the bait. He hooked with his right, but Jen blocked it and connected with a hard left jab and then a right open-handed strike to his neck. He stumbled back and got his bearings, then lunged hard at her.

She moved in toward him, twisted and bent at the waist, and threw him to the floor with a force that reverberated strongly enough for me to feel the vibrations through the hardwood slats all the way across the room.

She rotated upward, still grasping his wrist in both of her hands, then spun again, turning him facedown on the floor. She yanked and twisted his arm, and I heard a meaty snap.

I was expecting a scream. It didn’t come. I found my balance and wobbled to my feet.

By the time I made it across the room, she had stepped over him without ever releasing the wristlock and brought her foot down hard on his other hand, then cuffed him with his face in a puddle of his own blood.

We heard Phillips and the rest of the tactical team kicking in the front door.

“Jarman,” I said, looking down at him and recognizing his face from the iPhone image and our facial recognition match, battered and swollen as it was.

He spit some blood on the floor. A tooth went with it.

“Is that all you’ve got left?”

He rolled over looked up at me with anger in his eyes.

I fired the Taser into his face.

When he stopped convulsing, I squatted down and grabbed his web belt above the hips, pulled his pants down, and rolled him up onto his hip.

Half a dozen SWAT officers leaned in and looked at the tattoo on his ass.

“I’m not sure that’s proper procedure,” Phillips said.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t return his grin.

That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

—Samuel Beckett
, Waiting for Godot

W
HEN
J
ARMAN WOKE
up in the security ward of Long Beach Memorial, he had casts on both arms, one for his shattered left wrist, the other for his right elbow, which, when the EMTs had started working on him, had been bent at a ninety-degree angle in the wrong direction. One of his legs was elevated as well. Jen had done a job on one of his knees. His face was a swollen, discolored mass of bruises and inflammation. There were two bandages—one on his cheek and one on his forehead—where the Taser electrodes had hit him.

On a scale of one to ten, I thought.

And I wanted nothing more than to hurt him even more. He saw me smile, and although it was really impossible to tell with his face in the condition that it was in, I genuinely wanted to believe that he found it disturbing. I stared at him until he tried to talk.

His voice was slurred and muffled, but I think he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Really? You’re going to be stand-up after everything that happened? You know Kroll sold you out, right?” I watched his eye. Of course Kroll hadn’t sold him out. I wanted to shake something loose. Get him to give us something we could use to add credence to our best theory. Or even to help us come up with a new one.

He was buying it. I could see the seeds of doubt in his squint.

“That’s right. We’ve got you cold on Shevchuk and on Porter.” The coroner had been able to, finally, ID the SUV driver. “And on Anton Tropov, too. Kroll told the DA the whole story. You’re going down hard. Unless...”

The “unless” got his attention, but he tried not to let me see it. He hardened his expression as much as he could. Tried for a thousand-yard stare. I wondered if his one good eye meant he could only go five hundred.

I stopped talking again. Made him bring the conversation back to me.

“Unless what?” he mumbled.

“You know what. You want to talk to us?”

He turned his face an inch or two toward the window. It was the closest he could come to storming out of the room.

“Okay. I get it.
Semper Fidelis
, and all that.” I let that sit for a few seconds. “No, wait. That’s the marines, right? Does the air force have a thing like that? A motto?”

He made a vague grunt.

“Isn’t it
Aim High
or something like that? Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?”

He was still quiet.

“How about Pararescue? PJs, right? You’ve got to have something, right? Something for when you’re all drunk and trying to pick up chicks? To impress the wannabes?”

It looked like he was clenching his jaw.

“Nothing? It seems like you’d have something to say when the SEALs or Green Berets tell you that calling yourselves ‘PJs’ makes you sound like a bunch of pussies.”

He angled his face back to me, and I could see the rage in his uncovered eye.

“What, you’re not pussies?” I finished that sentence with a snicker. I could feel him wanting to talk, to fight. But he couldn’t. “You got your ass kicked by a girl you outweigh by seventy-five pounds. You really believe you’re not a pussy?”

I couldn’t have stopped pushing his buttons at that point even if I had wanted to.

“I saw your ass tattoo. Green footprints. I get it. I do. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you aren’t a pussy, after all.”

There was a question in his eye. He thought I was changing my tactic. But he still didn’t have anything to say.

“I think I get Porter. He was...uh...What was he again?” I made a show of flipping through my notebook. After half a dozen pages, I pretended like I couldn’t find what I was looking for and snapped it shut. “He was in some kind of logistics unit, right? What does that mean? He drove a forklift or something?”

He exhaled through his nose. Was that indignation?

“An asswipe like that has no business with that tattoo.”

He wanted to say something, but I could see him struggling to hold back.

“The dicktard didn’t even know enough,” I said, “not to put it on his fucking arm.”

He didn’t say anything, but his expression at least confirmed that theory. Porter was a poser wannabe, and it had gotten him killed.

“Is that why you did him like that? I know he blew the getaway, but that wasn’t all of it, was it? If he’d been a real PJ, you wouldn’t have dropped him like that, would you?”

I wasn’t sure, but under the bruises, his face seemed to grow redder. He wanted to tell me. He needed to. I could see it, and even more, I could feel it. I just didn’t know if I could push him hard enough.

“Did that make it easier? That he fucked up? I can see how you justified Tropov and Shevchuk. They were low-life shitbags. But no matter how incompetent Porter was, he was still on your team. That means something, doesn’t it?”

It did.

And we both knew it.

He’d found his resolve.

Or maybe he’d just remembered his counter-interrogation training.

That was it.

He wasn’t going to give us anything else we could use. All I could do at that point was rub salt in his wounds. So I did.

“
That others may live
,” I said.

He tried to lunge for me and let out a cry filled with anguish. He was only able to move a few inches, but that was enough that he almost fell out of bed. I caught him by the cast on his right arm, put my other hand on his shoulder, and shoved harder than I needed to in order to get him back into bed.

I knew it caused him great pain, but he didn’t make another sound.

In the next room, Jen, Marty, and the lieutenant had been watching the video feed of my interview with Jarman.

“That others may live?” Ruiz asked.

“Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to,” Marty said.

Ruiz looked puzzled.

“That’s the real USAF Pararescue motto,” Jen said.

“I wish I were in a better mood,” Ruiz said. “Maybe I could appreciate the irony.”

Jen and I were at our desks a few hours later working on reports.

She looked up from her MacBook and said, “Is this as far as we can take it?”

Neither one of us had given voice to the idea that Peter Jarman could be the last link in the chain and that we might not be able to make a connection to Kroll or Margaret Benton
or anyone else. Molly was the only one who was willing to talk, and she had suspicions, too, but nothing anywhere close to solid.

We were out of leads.

I couldn’t accept it, though.

“No,” I said, “it’s not.”

Her face held an enigmatic expression that I couldn’t quite read. I wanted to think that it was hopefulness, that she just needed me to give her a little pep talk to get her back in the game, but I wasn’t naive enough to convince myself of that. The reality was more likely that she had found some small bit of amusement in my total and complete inability to accept the truth.

T
HE PHONE CALL
took me by surprise. My BlackBerry only displayed a phone number with a Long Beach area code. No name. I fought my inclination to hit
D
ECLINE
and answered it.

“Beckett,” I said, trying to sound mildly annoyed, just in case I wanted to get off the line. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

“Hello, Danny Beckett.” The voice had a familiar Eastern European inflection. It took me a few seconds to place it, but I did.

I didn’t bother trying to hide my surprise. “What could you possibly want?”

“We should have a talk, you and I.”

“I’m listening.”

“Not on the phone. Not that kind of talk.”

I agreed to meet him that evening at the harbor. On Pier B Street, close to the edge of the inner harbor.

About a block away from where we’d found Anton’s body.

I ended the call.

And wondered how to handle it.

The night air was still and cold and heavy with the industrial smell of the harbor when I got out of my car across the street from Anton’s warehouse. It was only about a block away from
the meeting place. I looked around. No sign of him, but there were a thousand places he could be hiding. I wondered if he was watching me.