Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  Ricci hadn’t been certain if she honestly believed that. He knew the power of female sexuality but also understood the power of men with money. And he always gave an edge to the men when they kept their clothes on and paid women not to for their pleasure.

  Once he had asked Devon exactly what she meant by control, and by a customer feeling nice, and she had remained quiet for a long while.

  “Do you really want to know?” she’d said at last.

  He’d told her he did.

  “I’ll come down as low as they want, for as long as they want,” she’d said, her hesitation suddenly gone. “But their hands stay off me.”

  Three rows from where Devon was deftly bending herself around a pole, Ricci took a deep breath and lowered his empty glass to the tabletop. He felt a kind of soft grayness settling over his thoughts and guessed he was a little drunk. Not too drunk to drive, but he could see how that might be a biased opinion. If he went for another refill, he might have to dispute it himself.

  He stood up and pushed in his chair. Devon was almost through with her set and he’d decided to leave before she got off stage. He didn’t want to know if she’d spotted him. He didn’t want to know if A.J. was in the house. He didn’t want to see her go one-on-one with any of the customers who’d watched her dance, or make her feel as if she shouldn’t because he was here. He wanted nothing except to leave.

  He turned and strode between the tables in the main room, and past the cashier’s counter, and then past the hulking bouncers in black pants and T-shirts at the door, giving them a nod as he walked outside.

  The night was cool and breezy with mist that carried the salt smell of the bay across the parking lot. Ricci stood on the neon-splashed sidewalk before the entrance and took it in for a moment. He felt steady enough on his feet and told himself he’d be okay behind the wheel.

  He stepped off the sidewalk into the parking lot and went around back toward his Jetta. The lot was illuminated by high overhead sodiums, but the club’s rear wall largely blocked his aisle from the glow of the lights. Though he had a decent recollection of where he’d left the car in the solid row of vehicles, he had to pause and search the darkness for a minute or two to locate it.

  Ricci finally saw it about a dozen cars up ahead and moved on.

  That was when he noticed a shadowy figure crossing the lot from its perimeter fence opposite the club. The man cut through several aisles of vehicles, momentarily slipped out of sight between two cars, and then emerged into Ricci’s aisle three or four yards in front of him. He wore a raincoat — a trench — belted at the waist and flowing well down below his knees.

  Ricci’s guard raised itself a notch. You were alone in a dark place and saw somebody appear out of nowhere, you would be a fool in general not to be alert. He had met some dangerous people in his time at UpLink. And before that, and after — if his life as it was proved to be after.

  And there was the coat. And the smooth, almost gliding way the man moved in it.

  Ricci couldn’t dismiss the association they brought to mind.

  He suddenly felt the absence of his weapon under his sport jacket. His suspension had not up until now cost him his carry permit, but the bouncers who wanded everybody who passed through the club’s door didn’t worry about permits, they worried about men with too much testosterone and alcohol in their bloodstreams acting like they were in some Dodge City saloon, and thinking they would get into it over the dance hall girls. Coming here tonight, he’d had to leave his apartment without his FiveSeven.

  Ricci walked a little further through the aisle, stopped. The man approached to within a couple of feet of him and did the same, hands in the pockets of his coat.

  They studied one another with quiet recognition in the darkness and fog.

  “Lathrop,” Ricci said.

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  Ricci stood there watching him. Lathrop’s hands being out of sight in his coat pockets made him more acutely conscious of his own lack of a weapon.

  “How’d you find me here?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” A shrug. “I’ve managed to find you in all kinds of places.”

  “Super,” Ricci said. “Now lose me.”

  Lathrop was quiet, seeming to notice where Ricci’s gaze had fallen, his lips parting in a kind of smile.

  “You think I came to take you out,” he said.

  Ricci shrugged.

  “I don’t know why you came,” he said. “Wouldn’t waste my time worrying about it.”

  Lathrop slowly slid his hands out of his pockets and let them drop to his sides.

  “This better?” he said.

  Ricci just looked at him and shrugged again.

  “Seems to me,” Lathrop said, “you could use a cup of strong coffee.”

  Ricci remained silent. The breeze had picked up strength and he could feel the drifting mist on his cheeks.

  “What the hell do you want?” he said after a while.

  “My car’s back near the fence.” Lathrop nodded slightly in that direction. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “No,” Ricci said, edging past Lathrop and up the aisle.

  “Ricci,” Lathrop said in a calm voice. “Not so fast.”

  He kept walking.

  “You owe me, remember?” Lathrop said from behind him. Again calmly, softly. “Big time.”

  Ricci took another couple of steps forward, slowed, and finally halted. He stood there for almost a full minute, his back to Lathrop in the deserted parking lot. Then he turned around to look at him.

  “Damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”

  Lathrop smiled his enigmatic smile.

  “I’ll buy the coffee,” he said, his long coat ruffling around him as he led the way off into the deeper shadows.

  FOUR

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 2006

  SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

  The waterfront at Alviso was not much more than a drainage slough for the Guadalupe River, but then the Guadalupe itself amounted to little more than a glorified creek as it snailed through downtown SanJo, and then out of the city to deposit its sewage overflow between Alviso’s dirt levees and reeded banks before wearily petering off into San Francisco Bay.

  From where Lathrop had parked at the end of Gold Street, Ricci could see nothing in the fog and distance besides some aircraft warning lights on the power transmission towers across the slough. Pale beacons under the best conditions, they gave the illusion of flickering on and off now as the high, slow mist dragging past them over the marshes began to gradually mix with light rain.

  Behind the wheel of his Dodge coupe, Lathrop reached into the 7-Eleven bag he’d stuffed into a molded plastic storage compartment on his right side, produced a Styrofoam coffee cup, and handed it across the seat to Ricci. Then he got out a second cup for himself, peeled open the sip hole on the plastic lid, and raised it to his lips.

  The two men sat quietly, as they had throughout the entire ride on the freeway to the extreme northern edge of San Jose, their silence uninterrupted even when Lathrop had pulled up to the gas station convenience store for their coffees.

  “So here we are,” Lathrop said. “Like a couple of old friends.”

  Ricci drank from his cup.

  “No,” he said.

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Here we are, anyway,” he said.

  They sat looking out across the ugly mud flats. Lathrop had driven from the club with his wipers set on intermittent, and now that they’d been turned off, the windshield was smeary with an accumulation of moisture.

  “Too bad about what happened to you,” Lathrop said. “Enforced leave… I might have figured.”

  Ricci’s remote stare didn’t move from the windshield. “How do you know they’re calling it that?” he said.

  Lathrop shrugged again.

  “They can call it anything they want, doesn’t matter,” he said. “Somebod
y phones the switchboard operator at UpLink to ask for you these past few weeks, she connects him or her to your voice mail. Somebody asks the operator why you aren’t returning messages, her answer’s that you’re on leave of absence. Somebody asks how long you’ll be gone, she just says indefinitely.”

  Ricci sat watching the inconstant tower lights through the haze. “Could be that’s my own choice,” he said.

  Lathrop shook his head.

  “There are newspaper stories about an incident at that chemical factory outside Manhattan, and UpLink security being involved, and how the Feds are crying foul because they didn’t get invited to the party,” he said. “Knowing you called the party, it’s easy to dope out the rest.”

  Ricci still hadn’t turned from the windshield.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  “I heard you the first time in that parking lot,” Lathrop said.

  “Then get to it,” Ricci said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “In a minute,” he said. “First we need to finish up with New York.”

  Ricci didn’t say anything.

  “I tipped you about the Dragonfly laser,” Lathrop said. “I know what was supposed to go down at the plant. There wouldn’t be an available grave plot in the city today if it was up to the people who want your head on a pole, and they’d have swallowed that a lot easier than you doing what you did. It’s all about control for them, and they hate losing their hold on it to a guy like you.”

  “Good that you’re so sure,” Ricci said.

  “Don’t let yourself believe anything else,” Lathrop said. “I’d love to hear them talk about it behind closed doors. Seriously, Ricci. I would love it.”

  They were both quiet for a while as the mist and drizzle began intensifying to a steadier rainfall against the windshield. Lathrop leaned back in his seat and drank some coffee.

  “Quick story about an acquaintance of mine,” he said. “Special agent, counter drugs, deep cover. Doesn’t matter which agency and I probably couldn’t remember it to tell you. But what I do remember is he wasn’t interested in the rule book. Didn’t follow the rule book. Too many other guys did and it got them killed or burned. Because the players on the other side were smarter and meaner and knew how to turn the rules against them.”

  He paused, sipped.

  Ricci kept staring out toward the glints of distant light on the electrical towers.

  “This guy any good?” he said.

  “From what I know he got the job done,” Lathrop said, and shrugged. “If he rubbed his bosses wrong, they left him alone. The main thing for them was he delivered for a long time. And that meant they could stay posed for the television cameras behind piles of seized dope and guns.” Lathrop fell silent a moment. “Doesn’t matter who the bosses are, it’s the same. They don’t have to get their hands dirty. They don’t deal with the snarling dogs. They never get bullet holes in their foreheads, or have their dead bodies dumped in weed fields with their privates stuffed down their throats. From where they sit in their pressed suits and white shirts, everything’s risk free, and that’s exactly how they want it to stay. Gives them a chance to act like winners every once in a while without ever taking the hurt when they lose.”

  “Tell me the rest about your friend.”

  “Acquaintance,” Lathrop said. “Like the two of us.”

  Ricci grunted but didn’t comment.

  “I hear a federal judge took exception to him giving a Big Willie drug dealer rough treatment, made some noise about looking into how he’d handled some other investigations,” Lathrop said. “His bosses started to worry about what might turn up, wanted the problem taken care of before stories started leaking to the press, and cut him loose. Erased his name from their employee records, wiped out every mention of him in their case files.”

  “Just like that?”

  Lathrop snapped his fingers.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Ricci grunted. “Where’d that leave him?” he said.

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Far as who or what?” he said. “He didn’t go away, he was going down. There were some things about his tactics that would have gotten the kind of publicity nobody up the line appreciates. Things he did that wouldn’t jibe with what your ordinary citizen hears is right and good at his Sunday morning church sermons.”

  “And how about after he went away?” Ricci said. “He keep on playing by his own rules?”

  Lathrop shook his head.

  “My guess is this guy would tell you that’d be too simple,” he said. “He would have stepped off the board. Made up his own game, shoved its rule book in his back pocket, and left everybody else guessing. Their guesses get too close to suit his interests, I could see how he’d change the game on them. Or maybe even play a bunch of different games on different boards. All at the same time just to keep things jumping.”

  Ricci looked around at Lathrop.

  “This one of them?” he said.

  Lathrop shrugged again and said nothing more for a long while.

  “Remember the night we first crossed paths?” he said finally. “The Quiros and Salazar clans mixing it up in Balboa Park. Enrique and Lucio getting popped. You after information I’d got on Enrique Quiros.”

  Ricci kept looking into his face. “You’re the person who brought me there,” he said. “Always figured it was the same thing for them, but that maybe they didn’t know it.”

  Again Lathrop’s veiled expression showed neither confirmation nor denial.

  “Lucio was an old school handler, used muscle and guts to keep his syndicate together,” he said. “When he died, it was over for them. But Enrique’s style was different. He had the personality of a pocket calculator, ran his business like any other corporation. His branch got clipped, the power just shifted over to another office. Juan Quiros, one of Enrique’s cousins, took charge, pretty much oversees operations from out in Modesto these days. Without Salazar’s competition, the Quiros bunch marked their territory all up and down the coast.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a girl, Marissa Vasquez,” Lathrop said. “She’s twenty years old, a college student. Sort of kid every father would want for a daughter. Her dad happens to be Esteban Vasquez, ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s Enrique and Lucio rolled into one… the badges would call him an up-and-comer and they’d be wrong. Been on the scene for years giving cash subs to pot growers across the Rio Grande, uses his construction companies in Frisco as laundering fronts for his return on investments. Until lately, Vasquez kept his trade away from his own neighborhood, but that’s changed, maybe because he saw some openings after Balboa Park. Ecstasy, meth, smack — Vasquez has couriers moving stuff right through Quiros turf.” Lathrop flicked his eyes up to Ricci’s. “Quiros had Marissa kidnapped to get him to back off.”

  Ricci held his gaze.

  “Haven’t heard anything about that, either,” he said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “You wouldn’t have,” he said. “Guys like Esteban try to avoid bringing their troubles to the cops.”

  “So he came to you,” Ricci said.

  “Right.”

  “And you came to me.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  Their eyes remained locked. Lathrop raised his coffee cup and drank from it very slowly.

  “Esteban Vasquez wants me to find his daughter,” he said. “I want your help.”

  Ricci sat there, his face very still.

  “I don’t do favors for drug dealers,” he said.

  “We’d be in it for ourselves,” Lathrop said. “Working freelance.”

  “Whatever word you use, my answer won’t change,” Ricci said. “It was my kid, I’d find a different place to run my business.”

  Lathrop shook his head. “You aren’t Vasquez. If he gives in to the competition, it’ll make him look weak. They’ll devour him wherever he tries to migrate.”

&n
bsp; “Then he’d get what he deserves.”

  “And how about the girl?” Lathrop said. “The way these flesh eaters work there’s no guarantee Vazquez gets her back alive no matter what he does.”

  Ricci was quiet a second.

  “Might be true,” he said. “Still doesn’t make it my problem.”

  Lathrop shifted around to look out the rain-streaked windshield, rested back in his seat.

  “You ever been to the Sierra Nevada? Out there in the canyons along the mountains between Fresno and Yosemite?”

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Marissa Vasquez was baited by a slick operator name of Manuel Aguilera,” Lathrop said. “Didn’t know he was connected. He romanced her and set her up to be taken and now she’s somewhere in all that nothing with about eight to ten cholos in guerrilla outfits imported from down around Ciudad Juárez.”

  A long silence spent itself between them. It was pouring outside now, raindrops dashing against the windows, beating erratically on the roof of the car.

  “How do you know?” Ricci said.

  “Where they brought her?”

  “Where they brought her, how they did it, everything.”

  Lathrop made a low sound in his throat.

  “Got it from another Quiros relative. I crashed his party down in Baja three, four nights ago,” he said. “He’s tight with Juan and Aguilera and hooked them up. Pretty much told me everything.”

  Ricci flashed a glance at him. “He give you any details about the abduction besides what you told me?”

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Some,” he said. And paused. “Won’t be doing any more talking, though.”

  Ricci watched the raindrops splash the windshield, slither down over it to further distort the red warning lights on the high towers across the slough. The coffee had succeeded in sharpening his thoughts, but while he was mostly sober now the feeling of inner grayness had persisted.

  “I could find Marissa Vasquez on my own,” Lathrop said. “But the banditos would be a problem at ten-to-one odds.”

  “Ten-to-two doesn’t sound much better,” Ricci said.