Ellipsis (28 page)

When I'd first run afoul of the Triad, this was where they'd taken me to persuade me to tell them the whereabouts of their nemesis, Charley Sleet. Since at the time I didn't know where Charley was—he'd just broken out of jail and was on the run from the entire police force—it had been easy to maintain my integrity. But they'd broken my finger anyway, just to make sure I knew they were tough. I'd known it already, but some people are given to histrionics.

The Triad hadn't found Charley, Charley had found the Triad. And executed two of its leaders, though not, apparently, the very top dog, since he'd had the luck or the foresight not to be present that evening. Then Charley had shot me trying to make me shoot him. As I cruised past the vacant lot where the tragic farce had gone down, I paid silent homage to my departed friend.

As I hoped, they were waiting when I got there. In fact, I was pretty sure they'd had a tail on me since I'd left my apartment, and I was also pretty sure they had a lookout ready to sound a warning if I'd brought along some form of cavalry to back me up or bail me out. I parked beneath a streetlight that was pathetically inadequate to the gloom of the night, then got out of the car and waited for them.

The wind banged metal against metal somewhere in the shipyard at my back. The smells that aggravated my nostrils were of seaweed and dead fish. The cop in mufti who got out of a plain brown Lumina and lumbered toward me like an upright walrus didn't improve the atmosphere.

“Tanner?”

“Present and accounted for.”

“You packing?”

“Of course.”

“Where?”

“Back of the belt.”

He frisked and disarmed me, then ejected the ammunition clip and put it and the pistol on top of the Buick. “Hardy wants to know why you're here.”

“Hardy will have to ask me himself.”

“It don't work that way, pal.”

“It does now.”

He shrugged. “You're the one wanted the meet,” he grumbled, and turned back toward his ride. I felt as if I were bargaining for a used car and being bluffed above my budget.

Two could play the game of chicken, of course, so I opened the door to the Buick and bid the doorman good-bye. “Wait,” the cop said as I was about to get back in the car. “I'll go see if he'll see you.”

I leaned against the fender and waited. The cop went down the road to a new blue Chrysler that was parked in the shadows of a hulking storage tank at the far end of the lot. A moment later he trudged back. “Vince'll meet.” He pointed. “At the car.”

I followed him back to the Chrysler. As we approached, a door opened and a man got out. He was large and muscular, filling his black turtleneck and canvas cargo pants with muscle and swagger. He wore a shoulder holster on his flank and a black SFPD baseball cap on his head. His eyes were lazy and lidded, but I doubted they missed much of interest. His mouth was toothy and genuinely amused, the way sharks sometimes look, as though he were in his element and I were an unwitting new snack.

Hardy put me in mind of someone, and suddenly I realized it was Charley. Except if what I'd heard about Vincent Hardy was true, he was the anti-Sleet, the antithesis of everything Charley believed, Darth Vader to Charley's Luke. It would be a pleasure to put him out of business. It might also be a bloody mess.

Hardy inspected me the way he would a new weapon. “You're Tanner.”

“Right.”

“Sleet's buddy.”

“Yep.”

“You think you got something I need.”

“Yep.”

He looked beyond me toward the hulk of the decrepit shipyard blotting out the sky at my back. “You didn't do anything stupid like bring backup, I hope.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Like you said. That would be stupid.”

He considered the quip, then nodded. “Okay, make it quick. What the fuck do you want?”

“A piece of your action.”

“What kind of piece?”

“Four thousand a month.”

“That's a big piece.”

“I've got a big prize.”

He crossed his arms in easy anticipation, as if I'd offered to tell him a lawyer joke. “What prize is that?”

I made him wait for it. Somewhere, a siren mocked our lawlessness. Behind Hardy's hat, a top-heavy freighter steamed out of the bay with the grace and displacement of a hippo. The smells of leaking fuels mixed with the odor of decomposing marine life to make a stench as potent as kraut. The wind still whistled; the fog was still tangible and cautionary; the only humans in sight probably wanted me dead. I didn't hear anything alien or alarming, but I didn't know what that meant.

“I've got a girlfriend,” I said when it was time to move things along.

“Great. So do I. Three of them, in fact.”

“Mine is an assistant DA.”

Hardy nodded with satisfaction, as though he'd beaten the information out of me. “So I hear.”

“Then maybe you also heard she's running the grand jury looking into your little boys' club.”

“I heard that, too. So what?”

“I can tell you what's going to happen in that grand jury before it happens.”

His shrug was massive and self-explanatory. “Why would I care?”

“Because they're after the circus that's called the Triad and you're the ringmaster.”

“Says who?”

“One of the witnesses before the grand jury.”

“What witness?”

“Wally Briscoe.”

His snort was brusque and autocratic. “Briscoe's not going to be a problem.”

“Not anymore,” I acknowledged. “But there are other witnesses where he came from. Do we have a deal or not?”

His sneer was damning and dismissive. “I still don't see what I get out of this.”

“You get to know the evidence the DA's got against you. You get to know what times you need an alibi for, what forensics you need to explain, and what witnesses you need to discredit. And you get all that before you get your subpoena.”

He started to walk away, then didn't. “Guaranteed?”

“Solid gold. But I need something in addition to the four thousand bucks.”

“What's that?”

“Protection.”

“From what?”

“From you.”

“What kind of protection are you talking about?”

“I need a statement that you gave the order for Briscoe to be killed.”

That his concurrence was immediate was the most frightening thing so far. “Okay. You got it.”

“And I need the names of the triggers.”

“Storrs and Prester.”

“And I need to know that you or your people set the bomb that blew up Chandelier Wells.”

“You got it,” he said with a grin, as though we'd just perfected a juggling routine.

“And I need all of it in writing.”

His smile turned sloppy and insecure. Without a word, he turned toward the Chrysler. “Kill him,” he said to someone inside.

As two guys got out of the Chrysler and poked their handguns at me, Vincent Hardy turned back to me and smiled. “You want to know your mistake, Mr. Private Cop?”

“I'm always up for self-improvement.”

“We
already
got a line to the grand jury.”

“Not Jill Coppelia,” I blurted, more as testimonial than question.

Hardy shook his head.

“Then who is it?” I asked.

But no one heard me.

Chapter 30

The first shot cut Hardy off in midword. The second was a head shot that took out one of the guys with a gun trained on my chest. The third wasn't fired with a pistol, it was a volley of words made indelible by someone holding a bullhorn. “Freeze! Police! Drop your weapons and hit the dirt. You know the position. Assume it!”

After that came the floodlights, accentuating every evil detail of the impound yard, animate and inanimate, alive and dead. I stayed as still as I could and kept my hands in the air, hoping they'd know me as a good guy.

They had come over water, not land as the Triad had expected, the way Wolfe had come against Montcalm at Quebec. Lucky for me, the element of surprise had produced the same result—the grungy citadel that was the staging ground for the Triad's reign of terror fell quickly and decisively, with little in the way of resistance. The genesis of the assault—that someone in the police department would actually try to shut him and his criminal enterprise down—seemed more shocking to Vincent Hardy than the ambush itself.

Hardy wasn't a fool. Once his adjutant had been taken out, he didn't move a muscle except his lips, which stretched in a sardonic smile as his hands moved away from his sides in the universal gesture of surrender. The smile suggested what I already knew to be true—that this wasn't the end of the game, this was only halftime.

“I covered my ass, you pimp,” Hardy hissed above the commotion that swirled around us. “I'll be back on the street before noon.”

“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “Or maybe you finally went too far. Maybe someone took the baton from Charley and decided it was time to purge the department of scum suckers like you.”

His teeth gleamed like fangs. “There's nobody in this outfit with that kind of guts now that Sleet's in the ground.”

I looked to my left, toward the platoon of cops who were rounding up a dozen or more of Hardy's henchmen. “I think the captain over there might disagree with you,” I said as I watched Mark Belcastro fit a pair of plastic cuffs around the wrists of one of the men from the Chrysler.

“Belcastro eats shit,” Hardy swore, then put his hands on top of his car and waited for someone to arrest him. If I believed the New Age mantra that all things happen for reasons, I'd believe that my finger had been broken in this very spot a year earlier to make this moment possible.

Impressed by their efficiency and élan, I watched Belcastro's troops round up the members of the Triad who were present for the festivities. The exercise culminated in the arrival of a paddy wagon to haul away the catch of the day. Such was the professionalism of the squad, none of the Triad put up an ounce of resistance, not even when Belcastro read them their rights.

Of the dozen men put in custody, none were Prester or Storrs. But if Belcastro had employed the eavesdropping equipment I'd suggested to Jill that he bring, Hardy's casual indictment of the two detectives would be admissible evidence and it would be only a matter of time before they were brought in. And if Jill was as good at her job as I thought she was, there would be so many cops rolling over on their confederates to cut themselves a deal, the Triad would be out of business before the end of the week.

I was halfway back to the Buick when Belcastro looked over at me from the paddy wagon and nodded, which I interpreted to mean he'd gotten what he needed to enable Jill to indict and convict. A moment later, as he was being herded toward a squad car and kept away from his mates, Vincent Hardy called out for the others to keep quiet till they talked with a lawyer, but his mandate seemed more plaintive than defiant. After that, one of the Triad men let out a loud curse as he was unceremoniously hustled into the paddy wagon by a cop who had taken the same oath to serve and protect the city as had his prisoner.

My gun was off the roof of the car and back in its holster when I felt a hand on my arm, then a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you for this,” Jill said softly. “It will save us a lot of time.”

I turned and gave her a hug. “And get you a lot of convictions.”

“I hope so. You're all right, aren't you?”

“I'm fine. Though for a minute I was worried you were going to be late to the dance.”

“Turned out the Coast Guard couldn't help. We had to use a fireboat.”

“Nice job of improvising, counselor.”

She grinned. “We got it all, too—video and audio both.”

“That's great.” I lowered my voice. “Did you hear the part about the mole in your unit?”

She nodded. “We think we know who it is. We had some suspicions ourselves, so we pretty much cut him out of the loop several weeks back.”

“Good.”

She couldn't suppress a wider smile. “God. I'm so wired I could fly. I'm starting to see why men like war so much.”

“Maybe Spielberg will make a movie of it.”

Something in my tone made her calm down. “I'm being silly, I know. If they'd started shooting, it would have been terrible. For one thing, you might be dead.”

“Or hiding under a Honda, at least.”

Her expression turned grave. “I hope this makes up for Wally Briscoe.”

“It will,” I lied. “In time.” After absorbing the moment for another minute, I added, “There's one other thing that might help.”

“What's that?”

“The FBI might have someone undercover inside the Triad.”

“Really? What makes you think so?”

“The speed with which an ex-agent decided the car bomb that hurt Chandelier Wells wasn't targeting his pal Filson.”

Jill's features furled prettily. “I don't know if that's a good development or not. The feebs foul things up as often as they help out.”

“Just wanted you to know the score.”

“Sure. Thanks.” Jill looked once again at the benighted surroundings, this time with a proprietary air of obvious satisfaction. “I guess it's under control.”

“Looks that way.”

“I'd better get some sleep before the arraignments.”

“Good idea.”

“Will you call me tomorrow? I should be back in the office by eleven.”

“Sure.”

“I really do appreciate this, Marsh. The city will be lots better off with these guys behind bars.”

“I know.”

“Well …”

“Well …”

Like ballplayers after a big win, we were reluctant to leave the field, so we didn't. “Belcastro will want a complete statement from you, probably,” Jill commented absently.