The Last Detective (22 page)

20
            

time missing: 49 hours, 28 minutes

P
ike was waiting for me at one of those flat anonymous office buildings that were clustered all through Downey and the City of Industry, just south of LAX; cheap buildings thrown up by aerospace companies during the defense boom in the sixties, surrounded then as now by parking lots jammed with midsized American cars driven to work by men wearing ill-fitting dark suits.

When I got out of my car, Pike studied me in that motionless way he has.

I said, “What?”

“They have a bathroom in here.”

He brought me into the lobby. I went into the men's room, turned on the hot water, and let it run until steam fogged the mirror. DeNice's blood was still speckled around my nails and in the creases of my skin. I washed my hands and arms with green soap, then put them under the running hot water. My hands turned bright red again, almost as red as the blood, but I kept them in the water trying to burn them clean. I washed them twice, then took off my shirt and washed my face and neck. I cupped my hands and drank, then looked at myself in the mirror but I was hidden by fog. I went back to the lobby.

We walked up three flights of stairs and into a waiting room that smelled like new carpet. Polished steel letters on the wall identified the company: THE RESNICK RESOURCE GROUP—
Problem Resolution and Consultation
.

Problem resolution.

A young woman smiled at us from a desk built into the wall.

“May I help you?”

She had an English accent.

Pike said, “Joe Pike for Mr. Resnick. This is Elvis Cole.”

“Ah, yes. We're expecting you.”

A young man in a three-piece suit came out of a door behind the receptionist and held it for us. He was carrying a black leather bag.

“Afternoon, gentlemen. You can come with me.”

Pike and I stepped past him into a hall. As soon as we were out of the waiting room, the young man opened the bag. He was fit, with the pleasant professional expression of a mid-level executive on the way up. He wore an Annapolis class ring on his right hand.

“I'm Dale Rudolph, Mr. Resnick's assistant. The weapons go in here and will be returned when you leave.”

I said, “I'm not armed.”

“That's fine.”

Pike put his .357, a .25, the sap, and a double-edge SOG knife into the bag. Rudolph's expression never changed, as if men de-arming themselves was an everyday occurrence. Welcome to life in the Other World.

“Is that everything?”

Pike said, “Yes.”

“All right. Stand erect and lift your arms. Both of you, please.”

Polite. They taught manners at Annapolis.

Rudolph passed a security wand over us, then put the wand into the bag.

“Okey-doke. We're good to go.”

Rudolph led us into a bright airy office that could have belonged to someone who sold life insurance except for the pictures that showed mobile rocket batteries, Soviet gunships, and armored vehicles. A man in his late fifties with crewcut gray hair and coarse skin came around his desk to introduce himself. He was probably a retired admiral or general with connections to the Pentagon; most of these guys were.

“John Resnick. That's all, Dale. Please wait outside.”

“Aye, sir.”

Resnick sat on the edge of his desk, but didn't offer us a seat.

“Which one's Pike?”

Pike said, “Me.”

Resnick looked at him.

“Our mutual friend speaks well of you. The only reason I agreed to see you is because he vouched for you.”

Pike nodded.

“He didn't mention anyone else.”

I wanted to identify myself as the sidekick, but sometimes I'm smart. I let Pike handle it.

Pike said, “If our mutual friend spoke well of me, then that should cover it. Either I'm good or I'm not.”

Resnick seemed to like that answer.

“Fair enough. Perhaps you'll have the chance to show me just how good, but we can discuss that another time.”

Resnick knew what we wanted and got to the point.

“I used to work with a PMC in London. We used Fallon once, but I would never use him again. If you're trying to hire him, I would recommend against it.”

I said, “We don't want to hire him, we want to find him. Fallon and at least one accomplice abducted my girlfriend's son.”

Resnick's left eye flickered with an unexpected tension. He studied me as if he were deciding whether or not I knew what I was saying, then he sat a bit taller.

“Mike Fallon is in Los Angeles?”

I told him again.

“Yes. He took my girlfriend's son.”

Resnick's left eye flickered harder and the tension spread through him. But then he shrugged.

“Fallon is a dangerous man. I can't believe that he's in Los Angeles or anyplace else in the country, but if he is and he did what you said, you should go to the police.”

“We've been with the police. The police are trying to find him, too.”

Pike said, “Without my resources. You know him. The thought is that you know how to reach him, or know someone who does.”

Resnick considered Pike, then slid off his desk and went to his seat. The sun was beginning to lower and bounced off the cars. Jets arced out of LAX heading west over the sea. Resnick watched them.

“That was years ago. Michael Fallon is under a war-crimes indictment for atrocities he committed in Sierra Leone. Last I heard, he was living in South America, Brazil, I think, or maybe Colombia. If I knew how to find him, I would have told the Justice Department. Jesus, I can't believe he had the balls to come back to the States.”

Resnick glanced at Pike again.

“If you find him, will you kill him?”

He asked it as simply as if he wanted to know whether or not Pike enjoyed football.

Pike didn't answer, so I answered for him.

“Yes. If that's your price for helping us, then yes.”

Pike touched my arm. He shook his head once, telling me to stop.

I said, “If you want him dead, he's dead. Not, then not. All I care about is the boy. I'll do anything to get the boy.”

Pike touched me again.

Resnick said, “I believe in rules, Mr. Cole. In a business like mine, rules are all we have to keep us from becoming animals.”

Resnick went back to the jets. He watched them wistfully, as if a jet could take him away from something that he could not escape.

“When I was in London, we hired Mike Fallon. We sent him to Sierra Leone. He was supposed to guard the diamond mines under a contract we had with the government, but he went over to the rebels. I still don't know why—the money, I guess. They did things you can't imagine. You would think I'm making it up.”

I told him what I saw in the van at the edge of the Los Angeles River. Resnick turned back from the jets as I described it. I guess it sounded familiar. He shook his head.

“A fucking animal. He can't work as a mercenary anymore, not with the indictments. No one will hire him. You think he kidnapped this child for ransom?”

“I think so, yes. The boy's father has money.”

“I don't know what to tell you. Like I said, the last I heard he was in Rio but I'm not even sure of that. There must be a lot of money at stake for him to come back.”

Pike said, “He has an accomplice. A large black man with sores or warts on his face.”

Resnick swiveled toward us and touched his own face.

“On his forehead and cheeks?”

“That's right.”

He leaned forward with his forearms on the desk. It was clear that he recognized the description.

“Those are tribal scars. One of the men Fallon used in Sierra was a Benté fighter named Mazi Ibo. He had scars like that.”

Resnick grew excited.

“Is a third man involved?”

“We don't know. It's possible.”

“All right, listen, now L.A. is starting to make sense. Ibo was tight with another merc named Eric Schilling. I guess it was a year ago, something like that, Schilling contacted us looking for security work. He's local, from here in L.A, so Ibo might have contacted him. We might have kept something.”

Resnick went to work on his computer, punching keys to bring up a database.

I said, “Was he involved in Sierra Leone?”

“Probably, but he wasn't listed in the indictments. That's why he can still work. He was one of Fallon's people. That's why it stood out when he contacted us. I won't hire any of Fallon's people even if they weren't involved. Yeah, here it is.”

Resnick copied an address from his computer, then handed it to me.

“He had a mail drop in San Gabriel under the name Gene Jeanie. They always use these fake names. I don't know if it's still good, but it's what I have.”

“Do you have a phone for him?”

“They never give a phone. It's like the mail drop and the fake names. It's a way to stay insulated.”

I glanced at the address, then passed it to Pike. I stood, but my legs felt wobbly. Resnick came around his desk.

He said, “We're talking about very dangerous people right now. Don't mistake these men for your basic shit-eating criminals. Fallon was as good as it gets, and he trained these people. No one is better at killing.”

Pike said, “Bears.”

Resnick and I both glanced at him, but Pike was staring at the address. Resnick gripped my hand and held it. He looked into my eyes as if he was searching for something.

“Do you believe in God, Mr. Cole?”

“When I'm scared.”

“I pray every night. I pray because I sent Mike Fallon to Sierra Leone, so I've always felt that part of his sin must be mine. I hope you find him. I hope the little boy is safe.”

I saw the desperate darkness in Resnick's face, and recognized it as my own. A moth probably saw the same thing when it looked into a flame. I should not have asked, but I could not help myself.

I said, “What happened over there? What did Fallon do?”

Resnick stared at me for the longest time, then confessed.

Sierra Leone
Africa
1995
The Rock Garden

A
hbeba Danku heard the gunfire that morning only moments before the screaming boy fled down the road from the mine to her village. Ahbeba was a pretty girl, twelve years old this past summer, with long feet and hands, and the graceful neck of a princess. Ahbeba's mother claimed that Ahbeba was, in fact, a royal princess of the Mende tribe, and prayed every night for a prince to take her eldest daughter as his bride. The family could claim as many as six goats for their dowry, her mother predicted, and would be so rich that they could escape the endless war that the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front waged against the government for control of the diamond mines.

Ahbeba thought her mother crazy from smoking too much of the
majijo
plant. It was far more likely that Ahbeba would marry one of the young South African mercenaries who protected the mine and village from the rebels. They were strong handsome boys with guns and cigarettes who grinned brazenly at the girls who, in turn, flirted with the young men shamelessly.

Ahbeba spent most days with her mother, sisters, and the other village women tending a rock-strewn subsistence farm near the Pampana River. The women cared for a small goat herd and grew sweet potatoes and a hard pea known as a
kaiya
while their men (including Ahbeba's father) mined the slopes of the gravel pit for diamonds. As diggers and washers, the men were paid eighty cents per day plus two bowls of rice flavored with pepper and mint and a small commission on any diamond they found. It was hard, dirty work, shoveling gravel out of the steep slopes by hand, then pumping it into small washing plants where it was sorted by size, sluiced for gold, and picked through for diamonds. The men worked in shorts or underwear for twelve hours a day with only the dust that caked their skin as protection from the sun and the South Africans to protect them from the rebels. Princes were in short supply. Even more rare than diamonds.

That morning, Ahbeba Danku had been left to grind
kaiya
into meal while her sisters tended the crops. Ahbeba didn't mind; working in the village gave her plenty of time to gossip with her best friend, Ramal Momoh (who was two years older and had breasts the size of water bladders), and flirt with the guards. Both girls were blue with pea meal as they snuck glances at the guard who stood at the edge of the village. The young South African, who was tall and slender and as pretty as a woman, winked at them and beckoned them to join him. Ahbeba and Ramal giggled. Each was daring the other to do it, saying you, no, you, when a string of faraway pops crackled down the hill.

Poppoppop . . . pop . . . pop . . . poppoppop.

The guard jerked toward the sound like a street puppet in the Freetown bazaar. Ramal jumped up so quickly that the grinding stone tipped over.

“They're shooting at the mine.”

Ahbeba had heard the guards shoot rats before, but it was nothing like this. Older women stepped from their huts and younger children paused in their play. The young South African called across the village to another guard, then unslung his rifle. His eyes were bright with fear.

Bursts of automatic-weapon fire layered over each other in a furious overlapping rage that ended as quickly as it began. Then the valley was silent.

“Why were the guards shooting? What is happening?”

“That wasn't the guards.
Listen!
Do you hear?”

A boy's scream reached the village, and then the thin figure of a child raced between the huts. Ahbeba recognized eight-year-old Julius Saibu Bio, who lived at the northern edge of their village.

“That's Julius!”

The boy pulled to a halt, sobbing, flapping his hands as if he was shaking off something hot.

“The rebels are killing the guards! They killed my father!”

The South African guard ran several steps toward Julius, then turned back toward the trees just as a white man with hair the color of flames stepped from the leaves and shot the South African twice in the face.