Shred of Evidence

Emilio Baca was six months out of prison in Huntsville on an aggravated robbery rap. He had been the driver for a moderately successful two-man team of armed robbers knocking off liquor stores and other targets of opportunity. He was what they called a horse holder in the Old West.

Going back to prison wasn’t on his Top 10 List of things to do. He wanted Brady Investigations to help keep him out.

“I don’ never want to go back to prison, Señor Brady,” he said.

Baca was a small, skinny man, dressed inexpensively, but neatly. He had a little tuft of hair growing under his lower lip and there was a single tear tattooed at the corner of his left eye.

He looked apprehensive. A lot of people get that look the first time they meet me. I stand six feet, four inches tall and weigh 280 pounds. In addition, twenty years in the Navy, mostly as a SEAL, and another eight-year stretch in the Border Patrol have given me a certain innate aggressiveness that’s hard to turn off.

I put on my most neutral face and tried to relax my body language. Not an easy task because I was due in court to testify in an insurance fraud case in just over an hour.

“I served my time, Señor Brady, didn’t rat on my homies, and got out on probation early for good behavior. I got a good job as a mechanic in a dealership. They even got an insurance plan that covers me and my wife.

“I didn’t rat ’em out, and now they want me to drive for them again.” Baca shook his head. “That prison is a terrible place. I can’t go back there. All I want is to be left alone. But they won’t.”

“What do you want me to do, Mr. Baca?”

“I want you to talk to them. Get them to leave me alone. I can pay. Not a lot all at once, but I’ll pay you some every week for as long as it takes.”

I could hear the tatters of his pride fluttering in his voice. The Huntsville screws hadn’t taken it all away from him. “Have you asked them to stop bothering you?”

”em>Si, every time. But they won’t stop. Now they say they’ll make trouble for me if I don’t do it. I could be violated just for talking to them.”

“Tell your parole officer about them. That’s the best you can do.” I felt for the little guy, but I was due in court soon.

Baca shook his head. “I didn’t rat them out when I was arrested or in court or anytime. I won’t do it now. I need help, Señor Brady. People have told me you are a good man. A man who can do these things. Ayúdame, por favór.

“Here,” he said pulling a white envelope out of his back pocket. “I have written down their names, what they look like and where you can find them.” He laid the envelope on my desk.

Well, shit. I glanced at my watch. I’d have to leave in the next five minutes if I was going to make it to court on time. I stood. Baca levered himself out of the chair probably thinking he was out of luck. I should have turned him down right then, but that would take more time than just putting him off.

“I’ll think about it, Mr. Baca,” I said, handing him one of my cards. “But I have to get to court right now. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll talk more.” Sweeping the envelope into a desk drawer, I could see hope rise in his eyes just a little. I should have felt ashamed of myself, at least a little, but I was in too big a hurry.

I headed to the door without waiting for Baca. As I passed Kathleen’s desk she said, “Wait, Jack. You need to sign these reports.”

I waved my hand. “No time. Judge Ramos is not known for his patience. Forge my signature. I can’t tell the difference, so no one else should be able to.”

* * *

The next day I had forgotten all about Emilio Baca until Johnny Soto turned up on my doorstep.

Kathleen showed him into my office. Johnny was the police lieutenant in charge of the Crimes Against Persons division. He had short black hair with just a few white strands, a bushy Zapata moustache, and dressed in the latest J.C. Penney fashion, rumpled like he slept in his clothes.

Kathleen, on the other hand, was dressed like a banker/model in a gray, pin-stripe suit, the skirt ending a couple of inches above her very attractive knees. Her dark hair was pulled back into a bun accentuating the lines and angles of her face. She towered above Soto, her low-heeled shoes propping her up to almost six-one.

Johnny and I had known each other since my time in the Border Patrol when he was a rookie just out of the academy. We’d been friends a long time.

He and Kathleen settled in the client chairs. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” I asked, smiling.

Johnny reached up and stroked his moustache. “You know a man named Emilio Baca?”

I kept the smile on my face while going quiet and watchful inside. Johnny was my friend, but he was also a cop, a functionary in the official machine. Why was he asking about Baca?

“I’ve met him,” I said.

When I didn’t say anything more, Johnny rolled his eyes and sighed. “We found one of your cards in his pocket. Did he come to see you?”

I nodded. “Yes. Why are you asking? Why are you finding things in his pockets?”

“Baca was mugged last night. Hurt pretty badly. The doctors think he’ll pull through, but it’s a pretty close thing. Why was he here, Jack?”

After a moment of surprise, I could feel the rage start to build in the pit of my stomach. All the little guy wanted was to be left alone.

I didn’t let anything show on my face. I had a lot of practice at that. Kathleen, too, had put on her cop face, the one she had picked up as a member of the Navy’s police force. It didn’t show any more than mine. She was waiting for my lead.

I shrugged. “I was in a hurry to get to court. Didn’t have enough time to spend with him then. I told him to call me today.”

Johnny looked straight at me. “So, you don’t know why Baca came to see you?”

I looked straight back at Johnny. “Nope.”

It got quiet enough in the office to hear the hiss of the air through the air conditioning vents. Johnny heaved a big sigh and got up. Kathleen and I rose with him.

Johnny glanced up at me. He didn’t look happy. “I don’t think you’re being straight with me, pardner,” he said. “I just hope it doesn’t come back to bite you on the ass.” Then he turned and trudged out the door.

Kathleen followed him. She made sure he left and came back into my office, closing the door behind her. “And why didn’t you tell him?”

“He couldn’t have done anything,” I said. “We don’t even know it was Baca’s old homies. ”

“Don’t bullshit me, Boss. You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you?”

Kathleen flounced into her seat, crossed her arms and glared at me. “Fucking SEALs,” she said. “You know, when I was stationed at Coronado, you guys were my biggest pain in the ass. Crazy, arrogant bastards thought you could get away with anything.”

I smiled a little. “If you’ll remember, we did get away with anything.”

“You see,” she said, pointing her finger at me, “there you go again. You’re not a SEAL anymore, Jack. You can’t just go around ignoring the law.” She still had the cop attitude.

I wasn’t a SEAL any more. I was older, slower, and not as strong as I used to be. Well, a little bit anyway. But I was still better than 99.9% of the street skels out there.

She was right about the law, too. I had a business, a license. I got caught thumping these guys, I could lose it all. Maybe do some jail time. Not only that, it could hurt Kathleen’s chances of getting a license as well.

I tried to stay on the right side of the law these days. Like Kathleen said, I wasn’t a SEAL anymore. I didn’t have the immunity I had then.

But one thing I always had was the deep-seated conviction that some people just deserve to die. While I was a SEAL, I was judge, jury and executioner. I couldn’t have done what I did for twenty years without that conviction.

Some people call me a barbarian, a throw-back, but that’s OK. I am.

“Baca’s not going to tell the cops anything,” I said. “You heard him. If I do nothing, the next time they’ll either kill him or force him into driving again, which will get him killed or sent back to prison. Like it or not, I’m the best chance he’s got for a normal life.”

“God help him,” said Kathleen. “When are you going to do this thing? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Tonight I’m doing that insurance fraud surveillance for Consolidated. If you need me to bail you out, you’ve got my cell phone number.”

* * *

I got to The Oso Negro Cantina on Zaragosa Road just outside the eastern city limits about 2130. It occupied a low adobe building that hadn’t seen a coat of whitewash since the Nixon Administration. Large patches of the stucco covering had flaked off. The only sign was a large once-black bear painted above the entrance.

Dusty gravel covered the parking lot that contained an even mixture of Harleys, pristine low-riders, and beat-up pickups. You could get anything here from a new stereo to a drug habit to a sexually transmitted disease if you were polite and stuck to your own business. If you weren’t polite, you could get dead.

I drove around the outside of the building. There were three ways in: the main entrance on the South, a door near the back on the East side that probably led to the office, and more centrally located on the back of the building, a third, flanked by two small windows for the restrooms. Opposite that door about twenty feet away sat a large trash dumpster.

I continued around the building in a loop and parked my dusty, five-year old Explorer next to the dumpster, facing out.

I walked around the building, went through the front door and stood there a moment letting my eyes adjust and scanning the inside, confirming the locations of the exits. The office door was to my right. The hallway to the restrooms and probably a storage room lay directly ahead of me screened by a stub wall about six feet high and eight feet long left over from a more genteel time.

The bar ran the length of the left-hand wall. A jukebox sat in a small gap near the entrance playing a corrida about narco traficantes, drug runners. They were the heroes of the song.

Booths lined the right-hand wall. Two pool tables squatted in the center of the room, the brightest spot in the bar. Scattered tables and chairs filled the rest of the floor space.

Fifteen people took up about two-thirds of the chairs in the bar. Five were women, girlfriends, hookers or both.

I sported the uniform of the day: cowboy boots, jeans, a white t-shirt tucked in, and a short-sleeve plaid shirt worn unbuttoned and tail out. I accessorized with a black Budweiser cap to cover my gray crew-cut, an ASP collapsible baton tucked into my waistband under my left arm, and a Taurus Model 617, .357 Magnum revolver that had a 7-round cylinder sitting in a Milt Sparks holster behind my right hip.

After quickly checking me out, everybody went back to their own business. I fit in.

Gordo Vasquez slumped at the near end of the bar with five empty Coors bottles in front of him. He was watching a soundless Sábado Gigante on the television above the liquor bottles. The scar Baca had described in his notes ran down his left cheek standing out in relief in the reflected light from the TV. His name fit him. He didn’t appear to be very tall, but he looked like he weighed as much as I do.

I could feel the tightness grow in my stomach and chest. I needed the rage, but couldn’t give it its head. Not yet.

I drifted down to the other end of the bar, near the restrooms, and ordered a Dos Equis. I slumped over to minimize my height and scanned the rest of the bar in the mirror. It looked like Flaco Caraveo hadn’t yet graced us with his presence.

The bartender put my beer in front of me and palmed my money. This wasn’t the kind of place you ran a tab. I took a drink and settled in to wait for the right opportunity.

It didn’t take long. Gordo got up and headed for the restrooms with a slow, splayfooted gait. I sat still, the bill of my cap shading my eyes, watching his progress in the mirror. I had been keeping one eye on the restrooms and knew Gordo wouldn’t have any company in there.

I gave him thirty seconds, smeared my prints on the beer bottle, and followed still slumped, head down.

Gordo had just finished at the urinal. While he shook and zipped I dropped a rubber wedge to the floor and shoved it into the gap under the door with my foot. No one else could come in and interrupt without ripping the door off its hinges.

Gordo turned toward me from the urinal, and I used a spear-hand blow to his larynx. Not enough to kill him. Only hard enough to make it difficult to breathe. It wouldn’t be a good idea to let him scream.

His eyes got as big as dinner plates and his mouth opened into a surprised “O”. As his hands went to his neck, I grabbed the ASP, extended it to full length, and used it to break both his wrists. I used my good tennis forehand to snap the baton into the side of his jaw. There was the snap and pop of breaking bones and torn ligaments accompanied by the spray of blood and rattle of flying teeth against the sink and mirror.

Gordo slumped to his knees unconscious against the sink, his feet splayed out not quite flat on the floor. I jumped up and landed with both feet on each of his ankles. More snapping and popping. It would be a long time before Gordo walked without sticks, if ever. He grunted, twitched and fell to the floor on his side.

I put the ASP away and arranged him so the blood would run out of his mouth onto the floor instead of back into his lungs, drowning him. He sounded like a ruptured steam piston. That would improve as the spasming in his throat eased.

Less than a minute, start to finish. I was breathing hard, the adrenalin rushing through my muscles. I retrieved the rubber wedge then used a paper towel to open the door.

The first thing I saw was the end of a pistol barrel in front of a guy my height and about a hundred pounds lighter. Flaco Caraveo had put in an appearance after all. He must have come in as I was following Gordo to the men’s room.

His eyes flicked to Gordo’s still form on the floor behind me, then back to me. His face didn’t change. He used a small motion with the pistol to indicate that I was supposed to go out the back door, which he had already propped open with a rock. The man planned ahead.

The problem with plans is that they almost never go right. Most people think of a firearm as some kind of magic wand. Wave it at someone and they automatically do what you want. I’ve never believed that.

Already high on adrenaline I leaned left, grabbed the slide of the pistol with my right hand and pulled down while delivering an open-hand blow to the underside of his arm with my left hand.

The pistol was mine now. I head-butted him in the nose and shoved him outside through the open door. I followed him out and kicked away the rock, letting the door close behind me.

I didn’t let him get set. I closed on him and delivered a sidekick to his left knee. His knee coming apart made more noise than the high, keening sound coming from Flaco’s throat.

That’s the thing about pain: the more intense it is the less noise you make because the nervous system short-circuits. Only when the first shock starts to ebb can you get enough air in your lungs to start screaming. I didn’t give Flaco enough time for that.

I backhanded the muzzle of his pistol, which was protruding from the bottom of my fist, into his right cheekbone and felt it turn to mush. He went down, unconscious. Thirty seconds later he had two broken arms and his hands were structureless bags of flesh.

I dropped the magazine out of Flaco’s pistol and kicked it into the darkness. I jacked the cartridge out of the chamber, wiped my fingerprints off with the tail of my shirt, and dropped the pistol into the dirt next to his inert body.

The whole thing, both guys, had taken less than three minutes and attracted no attention. I climbed into my Explorer and drove away.

* * *

I got up at five the next morning looking like hell. In spite of a 30-minute hot shower I was as sore as if it were the end of Hell Week. Getting too old for this shit. I hadn’t slept well. Must have been the adrenaline reaction. I didn’t feel any better than I looked.

The doorbell rang at seven o’clock on the nose. The coffee maker had just quit burbling. Johnny stood on my doorstep along with one of his detectives, Sergeant Louis de Palma. De Palma was a little guy, blond, mid-thirties with a slight build. Combine Little Man Syndrome with cop and you came up with an attitude that made me want to chew nails. De Palma and I didn’t get along.

“Johnny,” I said. “You’re up awfully early. What’s up?”

“I need you to come down to headquarters with us, Jack.”

“Why?”

De Palma was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. “You finally screwed up, Brady. We’re gonna put you away for a long time.”

“Shut up, de Palma,” said Johnny. “Just get your shoes on Jack, and let’s go.”

This had to be related to last night. Did I screw up? Did somebody recognize me? What did Johnny have? The note Baca had written had been shredded into confetti yesterday afternoon. The bag had been emptied into the office dumpster last night which would have been emptied into the trash truck early this morning.

I sat down in the living room and pulled on my boots. “Am I under arrest?”

“Do you wanna be?” said de Palma. “I’d be real happy to put the cuffs on you.”

Johnny looked at him. “Shut up, de Palma.” Turning back to me Johnny said, “Not yet. I just want to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

“About last night, asshole,” said de Palma.

I ignored him. “What about last night, Johnny?”

“Let’s just save it for headquarters,” said Johnny.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m going to call Kathleen and tell her why I’m not in the office.”

I headed for the phone in the kitchen. De Palma started to follow me, but Johnny held him back. Kathleen didn’t pick up her cell phone, so I left a message saying where I was going and the reason for it. I also told her to have Jimmy Sanchez on alert in case I wanted a lawyer.

The ride down to headquarters in the back seat of Johnny’s car was quiet. I don’t know what Johnny and de Palma were thinking, but I was going over every minute of my little expedition last night. I re-examined every face in the bar, looking for someone who might have recognized me. I was pretty sure neither Flaco nor Gordo had gotten a good enough look to identify me. I’d just have to handle the questions as they came up.

When we got to the Police Headquarters Building, they took me to an interview room. Johnny sat down across the table from me. De Palma leaned up against the door trying to look tough.

“OK,” I said. “We’re downtown. You want to tell me why?”

“I thought you might be interested to hear that Emilio Baca is out of danger,” said Johnny.

“That’s nice to know. You brought me all the way down here to tell me that?”

“Where were you between 9 and midnight last night?” said de Palma.

I looked him right in the eye. “Working,” I said.

“Working, my ass,” said de Palma. “Unless you call aggravated assault working.”

“Johnny, what the hell’s he babbling about?”

“Last night about that time,” said Johnny, “two low-lifes named Jorge “Flaco” Caraveo and Manuel “Gordo” Vasquez got the crap beat out of them at the Oso Negro. You ever heard of those two?”

“Nope.”

“It seems they were once known associates of Mr. Baca. Before he went to prison. They’re going to be in the hospital a very long time. They’re lucky they weren’t killed.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You say you were working last night. What were you working on?” said Johnny.

“None of your business,” I said.

“The hell it’s not,” said de Palma coming over from the door and leaning on the table. “This has your mark all over it. We know you were out there. We’ve got you for this. We’re gonna take your license and throw your ass in jail.”

I stood up and put my nose so close to de Palma’s that I could feel the heat off his face. He was short enough that this position was going to kill my back. “Bullshit! You don’t have anything except a hard-on for me.” I stared him in the eye until his gaze broke.

I sat back down and ignored de Palma. I spoke to Johnny. “You got me down here because of this pencil-neck?”

There was a knock on the door. Johnny motioned de Palma to open it. A Uniform stuck his head in and said, “Lieutenant? There’s a woman out here says she’s got some information for you.”

Johnny sighed. “Send her in.”

Kathleen walked in carrying a manila folder and looking like she’d just stepped out of the pages of Vogue.

“Kathleen,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She gave me a look. “Getting your stubborn ass out of a crack. You wouldn’t tell them would you. Goddamn hard-headed son of a bitch.”

She turned on Johnny. “And you. You should have known bringing him down here would get his back up. If you wanted to know about last night, you should have just come to the office and asked.”

“Don’t tell him anything, Kathleen. He has no probable cause.” I didn’t know what she had in mind, but I needed to keep her out of this.

“Will you shut up? Just because you like to aggravate the cops doesn’t mean I have to go along. Jack was with me last night.”

Johnny looked at her with raised eyebrows.

“We were doing surveillance on a suspected personal-injury insurance fraud up in Canutillo. We were there from 7:30 to 11:45 when the subject went to bed. Would you like to see the signed surveillance log and the photos?” She tossed the manila folder she was carrying onto the table.

I don’t know who was more surprised, Johnny or I. He shook his head and looked at me like he knew she was lying but couldn’t prove it.

He pushed the folder over to me without opening it. “Get the hell out of my sight, Brady.”

“But, Lieutenant,” said de Palma.

“Shut up, de Palma.”

I picked up the folder and followed Kathleen out to her Taurus.

“Your truck still at home?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

The ride back out to my house wasn’t any chattier than the ride in. I didn’t care about Caraveo and Vasquez. They got what was coming to them.

I did feel bad about Kathleen. She didn’t think what I did was right, and yet she lied for me. That cost her something. I just had to hope that I could make it up to her somehow.