Angel Dance (Danny Logan Mystery #1) (18 page)

“
Pendejos!
” he screamed, not at us, but at the two men we’d dispatched. “One skinny gringo and his
puta
, and you
chingóns
go down in seconds? I never been so embarrassed in my whole life!
Mueven sus culos al coche!
”

The two men staggered to their feet and started to shuffle off to a car parked in the street. Salazar watched them pass. At the sound of the gunshot, several people had dropped to the ground or ducked behind cars. Most were peering out now, trying to see what was going on. A nearby patrol officer must have also heard the gunshot because a siren suddenly started blaring a few blocks away.

Salazar stared at us for another moment, then he smiled. “Amigos,” he said. “Well done. Now I know more about how to approach you.” He paused, then added, “And you should rest assured, our business is not done. We’ll meet again.” He started to turn to leave.

I tend to get pissed when people threaten me, so I started to step toward him. Toni grabbed my arm and held me back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she whispered, still breathing hard. “It’s over. We’re okay here.”

She was right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax as Salazar and his men loaded up and sped off to the west on Green Lake Drive.

I took another deep breath and saw stars all over again. “Fuck me, my head hurts.”

“Yeah, you should see yourself,” she said. “You’re covered in blood. I thought you were dead.”

“I heard you scream.”

“I screamed when I saw you get hit. I couldn’t help it. Then that fat bastard grabbed me from behind and tried to choke me.”

At that moment, Nick appeared at the top of the stairs. “You guys alright?” he shouted.

“Yeah,” Toni said.

Nick looked at me with horror. “Did he shoot you? I already called 911.”

“No,” I said. “They hit me with a two-by-four. They were hiding behind this wall when we stepped off the stairs. He fired into the air so they could get away.”

“Holy shit!” he said.

~~~~

Two minutes later, a police cruiser pulled into the lot. Toni was on the phone with Dwayne explaining what had happened. Nick brought me a couple of towels for my head. Three more police cruisers and a paramedic unit were on the scene within fifteen minutes. There were several witnesses who told the same story—a couple coming down the stairs got jumped by two Mexican gangster–looking guys. When the attacked couple turned the tables and kicked the gangsters’ asses, a third gangster stepped in and fired a shot in the air. Words were exchanged, but the Mexicans drove away in a silver Mercedes.

Satisfied that neither Toni nor I had been the ones to fire the shot, even though we were both armed, the cops left us to the paramedics. They cleaned my scalp wound and told me to go to the emergency room. Toni drove.

Before we left, I called Nick over.

“Thanks for calling the cops, Nick,” I said. “Might have made a difference. When Salazar heard the siren, he decided to leave. Now that those guys are gone, they’re probably off licking their wounds somewhere. Perfect time for you to take Kara and get her away from here before Salazar regroups. No doubt, he’ll be back.”

~~~~

“Jesus, Danny,” Toni said as we entered my apartment after spending two hours at the emergency room. “I saw all that blood, and I was scared to death. I thought they might have taken your head off.”

I smiled. “Well, I appreciate your concern. Scalp wounds bleed a lot. No big deal.” I hadn’t even needed stitches—the doctor just X-rayed my arm, taped my head, and sent me on my way.

“I know, but still,” she said.

“Anyway, speaking of taking people’s heads off, you were a fucking tiger. I thought you were going to behead that guy with that back kick of yours.”

She smiled. “Connected pretty solid, didn’t it?”

“Sure did.”

“I was pissed,” she said.

“I saw it in your face,” I said, smiling. “No fear, just anger.”

“I thought they hurt you. I wanted to finish my guy in case I had to go after yours. I didn’t see you take your guy out. Even with you being all bloody like that, you still got him. Looks like the Krav Maga stuff really works.”

“Worked out nice, didn’t it?” I said. I smiled at her. Nice to have someone like that who cared.

She looked in my eyes, then nodded. “It did,” she said.

Chapter 10

AT THE END
of the summer of 2000 after graduating from high school, I joined the U.S. Army. My personal game plan was four years for my country as an infantry grunt, and then four more years for myself as a special agent in the Army Criminal Investigation Division learning a trade other than infantry. My idea was that in the second four years, I’d be able to prepare myself for a career in civilian law enforcement.

It played out pretty much as I planned, although two separate tours of combat duty with the 101st Airborne Division in the Middle East were not something I’d originally expected. I served with the Second Battalion Raider Rakkasans in the Shah-i-Kot Mountains of Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom and later with the Third Battalion Iron Rakkasans in Iraq during the first months of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We were one of the first units into Iraq when the “Shock and Awe” bombing ceased. Through a combination of excellent U.S. Army training and preparation mixed in with a little blind-assed luck, I survived my two tours, although I was wounded twice in Iraq—first by an insurgent with an AK-47, and then two months later by that piece of shrapnel from a grenade. The shrapnel wound was actually the more dangerous of the two, though neither kept me out of action more than ten days. I was lucky. Hooah.

I had mixed feelings about leaving the infantry. My friends were in the infantry, and I was good at what I did. We looked down our noses at the pogues in the rear. The occasional adrenaline rush was huge. But even though I picked up sixty college credits through a correspondence college, the downtime was a drag. Also, getting wounded twice in two months may have been some sort of cosmic warning sign. “D-Lo! D-Lo! Get the hell out before your number’s up!” Anyway, I had a plan, and I was determined to stick with it. When our unit left Iraq and shipped back to Fort Campbell in January 2004, I took advantage of my original deal with the army and switched military occupations to Criminal Investigations Division—CID. With CID, I learned the business of law enforcement as it applied to felons within the U.S. Army. I was trained in legal procedures, criminal investigation procedures, arrests, warrants—the whole spectrum of law enforcement. In four years assigned to the Sixth MP Group (CID) stationed in Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, I ran across the same sorts of crimes that a civilian detective in a large metropolitan city typically encounters: murder, rape, robbery, burglary—we even had a few gang members stationed at Fort Lewis that we eventually busted for weapons charges.

Of all these, as is the case with most law enforcement personnel, I learned to reserve a special hatred for the bastards who killed, hurt, or otherwise abused women and children. For some reason known only to God, there are some guys who completely lack any semblance of a moral compass. They have no conscience, probably not even a soul. They don’t consider the people they hurt to be people. To them, their weaker victims are not somebody’s wife or mother or daughter or sister. These guys have a short circuit in those pea brains of theirs that enables them to believe their victims are their own personal play toys to be used as they want, and then thrown away when they’re done. Move on. No remorse. No second thoughts. They would think no more about hurting or even killing someone than most people would think about swatting a mosquito. It just didn’t register for them.

As far as I’m concerned, the depths of hell can’t possibly be hot enough for these bastards. I hate them. And now, one of them was after someone I cared about. It’s fair to say that he had my full attention.

~~~~

We don’t take regular days off when we’re in the middle of a case. Weekday, weekend, holiday—all the same, makes no difference. The next day was a Saturday. We met as usual at 9:00 a.m.

Dwayne and Gus, being civil servants, do take days off. Still, I invited them to dial in on a conference call and join our meeting, and they agreed.

“Dwayne, are you there?” I talked to the speakerphone in the center of our conference room table.

“Here,” he called back.

“Gus?”

“Yo!”

“Good. Thanks for calling in, guys. I’m here with Toni and three other gentlemen who work with the firm here and whom I don’t believe you’ve met yet. Kenny Hale is here—he’s our technology expert.”

“Good morning,” Kenny called out.

“Joaquin Kiahtel is here. He’s our security expert.”

“Gentlemen,” Doc said.

“And Richard Taylor is here. Richard is our consultant emeritus.”

“Hey, Richard,” Dwayne called out. “Good to talk to you again. It’s been a long time.”

“Good morning, Dwayne,” Richard replied. “At my age, any morning you wake up above ground is a good one. It’s good to still be around and involved.”

“I hear you,” Dwayne said, laughing.

I started the meeting. “We’ve made steady progress over the past five days.” I spent twenty minutes reviewing the events of the past week, including our trip to Ramon’s Cantina, discovering Kara’s identity, right up through our fight with Eddie Salazar’s troops yesterday afternoon, and my subsequent trip to the hospital.

“Holy shit,” Gus said. “You guys lead an interesting life for civilians.”

“I’m not certain interesting is the word I’d use,” I said. “After all, I did get hit in the head with a two-by-four.”

Dwayne laughed. “Sounds interesting as all hell to me. Looks like Eddie Stiletto is acting true to form. And he’s out in the open now. He’s on the hunt, and now it’s Gina that he’s after—maybe Kara Giordano, too. He doesn’t seem to care whom he runs over or whom he hurts. Gina must have done something pretty nasty to piss him off, don’t you think?”

“Sure sounds like it. Sounds like she’s playing teasey windup on purpose with a homicidal maniac,” Gus said. “Do you think she knew what she was doing? And who she was doing it with?”

“Yes, and yes,” Toni said.

I looked at Toni. “What are you saying?” I asked.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t know Gina, never met her. I don’t want to speak ill of her, and I’m not trying to lay down an indictment against her now. But everything I’ve ever heard about her in the past week paints a picture of someone who is definitely the smartest one in the room. Without fail, everyone we’ve talked to says she’s always in control. She’s always got a plan. She’s always a few steps ahead of everyone else. Why would this suddenly change now? Why would she start screwing up now?”

She paused for a second to reload, then she continued. “I can’t think of a single reason why she’d purposely cozy up to a maniac like Eddie Salazar, but if past form is any indication, I’d put good hard money on the notion that she did it on purpose, and she knew exactly what she was doing when she did it. The part about it that pisses me off is that whatever game she’s playing, she’s got a whole bunch of other people dragged into it now. And some of these people are starting to get hurt.” Toni was angry. “I still haven’t seen anything that doesn’t support this theory.”

It was silent for a few seconds as everyone considered this. She almost sounded like a prosecutor. Somehow I felt like I needed to try and calm Toni down, and at the same time, defend Gina. “What you’re saying is possible,” I said, “but it could also be that she didn’t know who she was dealing with, or, like you say, she did know but she miscalculated and pushed him too far.”

“Well, if that happened, it sounds to me like it would be the first time in her entire life that she’s made a mistake in just about anything she’s ever done,” Toni said sharply, looking straight at me.
Oops.
I wasn’t able to outmaneuver Toni when she was on a roll, like now.

“You’ll look pretty silly saying that if it turns out she’s dead,” I said.

She stared at me for a second, then said, “If she’s dead, I’ll kiss your—”

Richard interrupted the action. “Folks, what’s our timeline here?”

Toni continued to glare at me for another moment before looking away.

Kenny answered. “Kara Giordano said the last time she talked to Gina was last Thursday afternoon. The last time we know of anyone seeing Gina is Robbie Fiore seeing her leave Pacific Wine and Spirits at six thirty the same evening. Then, Kara gets jumped by Eddie Salazar at eight thirty the same night. Next day, Gina’s disappeared. And we don’t have any idea, except for Ms. Blair’s theory, which for the moment is impossible to either prove or disprove.”

“One thing we do know, though,” Richard said. “Eddie Salazar is out there and, for whatever reason, he’s behaving poorly. And he’s dangerous.”

“Well said,” Dwayne said. “We may as well focus on that for now. How do we find him?”

“No record of him with Department of Licensing,” Kenny said. “No driver’s license, no vehicle registrations, no titles.”

“According to Kara, Gina said that Eddie lives in Kent across from a cemetery,” I said.

“Can’t be too many cemeteries in Kent,” Gus said. “You guys going to check them out? It’s a little south of our jurisdiction down there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We haven’t mapped it out yet, but I was going to ask Kenny and Doc to do that so Toni and I could scout out the areas.”

“If we get lucky and you find him, we’ll have to coordinate with Tacoma PD,” Dwayne said.

“I think I’ll run Eddie Salazar’s name past the gang guys here and in Tacoma,” Gus said. “Maybe they’re working something on Eddie Salazar.”

“Speaking of names,” I said, “Kara said that Eddie told her to call Ramon’s Cantina and leave a message for . . .” I tried to remember the name.

“Armando Martinez,” Toni filled in, reengaged.

“Right,” I said. “Armando Martinez.”

“We’ll run that name, too, and let you know what we find,” Gus said.

Dwayne said, “Danny, good thing you told the Giordanos to bolt. I’m not certain that we could adequately protect them considering the resources we have to work with. Better to be hard to find for a while. Are they going to call and let you know how to reach them?”