the Viking Funeral (2001) (39 page)

"He'd been undercover for two months.... I don't know how you guys supervise UCs, Bill, but over in my 'strange' shop, we set up phone drops, get interim reports. So unless you're running this place like a Carnival Cruise, you got his re-back file. We need those reports. We need to know everything Sergeant Lane found out, 'cause this thing is coming unglued. Most of that unit is already dead, and the ones who ain't are running for the airport. Like I said, we don't have a lotta time."

Bill Messenger pushed his titanium rims higher up on his nose. He went to his desk, opened a bottom drawer, then took out a metal lockbox. He opened it, pulled out a file, and threw it on the desk between them.

"You keep the ops reports in your desk drawer?" Tony said, smiling.

"For obvious reasons, I was supervising the Viking mop-up myself," Messenger said in a hard, clipped voice. "What do you need to know?"

"We're trying to get a line on an Argentine national named Jose Mondragon," Tony said. "We need to know where he lives when he's in L
. A
. We think one of our Viking cops is about to kill him. We need Jose alive, to make a money-laundering case we're settin' up."

"I can already tell you his L
. A
. residence's not in there. He stayed in hotels," Messenger said, motioning toward the manila folder. "But help yourself."

Shane picked up the file, opened it, and found the section on Jose Mondragon. "House in Palm Springs," he read. "We already know about that."

"No kidding," Messenger complained. "You hit that place harder than a Mexican pinata. That was the one good contact point we had."

"Maybe if we'd known you guys were in on our case, we coulda worked something else out," Tony fired back.

Shane scanned Tremaine's report quickly: "Jose is married to a diplomat's daughter. Didn't know that. Lives half the year in Argentina." He looked up. "Anything in here about an Argentine colonel named Raphael Aziz?" Shane asked.

Messenger shook his head sharply, so Shane kept scanning Tremaine's UC report. "Polo... Says here Jose's a member of the L
. A
. Polo Club. Plays polo at Will Rogers Park in Santa Monica." Shane looked up at Messenger.

"We checked that out. Jose stopped playing there two years ago, then shipped his polo pony back to Argentina. It's a dead end."

Shane kept reading. "His license plate number for his Jag is in here. Did you run it?"

"Yep," Messenger said stiffly. "Car is registered to one of Blackstone's companies in Switzerland, no local address."

"Dead end," Alexa said.

The sheriff nodded.

"Known associates, Lisa St. Marie," Shane read.

"She'd be a good place to start," Messenger said quickly. "Go find her. Jose Mondragon used her as a sexual spy, so if you roll her, she probably has some good stuff on him."

"Lisa ain't gonna be much help," Tony said.

"Why not?"

"She just ain't."

"I thought we were cooperating," Messenger snapped.

"She was tortured and shot five times in her condo a few hours ago. She's at the morgue."

The diminutive sheriff didn't react.

Shane kept reading: "He once kept a single
-
engine plane at the Santa Monica Airport, but sold it two years ago." Shane looked up. "If he played polo in Santa Monica and flew his plane out there, I wonder if he had a house out there, too."

"Don't know. Sounds like a good place to start." Messenger glanced at his watch, anxious to be rid of them. "Why don't you check it out?"

Shane closed the file and looked up at th
e s
heriff. "Can we get a copy of this?" he asked. "I'd like to look it over more carefully."

"If my man is dead, then you can have it. But you'll have to take a poly first. I want to know you're telling the truth about all this."

"Good going, Bill. Good cooperation," Filosiani snapped.

"Tony, Tony, Tony," Messenger sighed. "You never cooperated with anybody. Not once in your whole career. I can't take any more bad press on this Viking thing. This all started here at the Sheriff's Department, so if you kick it up again, I'm gonna have to suffer through a bunch of newspaper and TV recaps. We looked like a buncha Klansmen when the Los Angeles Times broke that piece three years ago. I'm finally getting past it. If it's spread to your department, I'm sorry, but my responsibility is to see it's not back here. That's what Sergeant Lane was trying to determine."

"I'll take the polygraph," Shane said suddenly.

"All you gotta do is convince my poly operator that Sergeant Lane is really dead. If that's the case, then I can't protect him anymore, and you can have his files."

Shane took the polygraph and passed.

Half an hour later they left the sheriff's office with a copy of the classified folder.

When they reached the parking lot, they looked up and saw Bill Messenger staring down at them from his office window on the fourth floor of the big, boxy Sheriffs Building.

He looked even tinier standing behind the huge expanse of glass.

"First time I actually liked that prick
"
Tony said as they got into the Crown Vic and pulled away.

Chapter
49.

THEY READ THE file in Chief Filosiani's sparsely furnished office. There was nothing in the Sheriffs Department folder that gave them any clue to Jose Mondragon's whereabouts. After going over it several times, they began to lose hope.

Shane used the phone in the chief's office to call Chooch at Filosiani's house.

"Thank God, you're safe, man," his son said, relief in his voice.

"Get your stuff ready; Alexa and I will be over to get you in an hour."

They checked the Santa Monica Polo Club and talked to the club manager, who confirmed that Jose Mondragon had not been a member for years. The club had no address on file for him, or anybody else for that matter; they didn't even have a membership list because all you needed to play was a horse an
d e
nough friends to make up a team. The team captains rounded up their players and scheduled the matches. The manager did remember Jo se's horse, though, because he said it was a world-class polo pony, a coal-black Arabian named Sir Anthony of Aquitaine. He confirmed what Bill Messenger had told them. The horse had been shipped to Argentina two years ago.

The polo club was a dead end.

So was the airport where Jose had kept the plane. The Cessna he flew didn't even belong to him. It was leased from an FBO and, true to Jose's practice, the Blackstone Corporation was the only name on the lease. Nobody at the airfield even remembered him.

"I'm out of ideas," Shane said as he limped out of the chiefs office with Tony and Alexa. They walked across the seafoam-green carpet, past the blond-wood paneling, and finally got into the large elevator. "Jody's so far ahead of us that if he knows where Jose is, he's already working on him like he did on Lisa," Shane continued. "Jose will be dead. Jody will have the money and be gone."

"But nobody knows where Jose is," Alexa countered. "Maybe Jody can't find him, either."

"Maybe," Shane said, but he didn't have much hope.

They climbed back into the chief's Crown Vic, Tony behind the wheel, Alexa in the front, Shane in the back. His leg was now throbbing horribly, but he clenched his jaw and tried to ignore the pain.

Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of a very modest two-story Tudor with a small lawn and, judging from the depth of the lot, almost no backyard.

Chooch was waiting out front with his overnight bag at his feet. If the chief looked like a butcher, then Mary Filosiani was equally well cast as the butcher's wife. A pleasant, dark
-
haired woman in a print dress, she was standing beside Chooch. She kissed him good-bye, and Chooch walked up to the car.

Shane got out and gave his son a hug. "Boy, am I glad to see you," he said in Chooch's ear.

Chooch just hung on, his arms unabashedly around Shane. When he finally pulled back, he had tears in his eyes. "Man, I was so worried about you," Chooch said, looking at the damage to Shane's face.

"How was quarterback camp?"

"Get the fuck outta here," Chooch smiled. "I was only up there for ten hours before you got your big dumb ass kidnapped. So I came right back."

"Oh, yeah," Shane grinned. "I forgot. And watch your mouth."

The chief let them borrow the Crown Vic to drive back to Venice. "I been thinkin' I'd trade it in for a fresher model anyway," he smiled. "It's one thing tryin' to set a good example for the troops; it's another to ride around in a garbage can with wheels."

Shane threw Chooch's luggage into the back and got behind the wheel.

They were silent for most of the drive back to Venice. Several times Shane looked over and saw Chooch or Alexa smiling at him.

"What?" he said, and suddenly they all started laughing.

They pulled into the garage at the canal house and parked next to Shane's dusty Acura, then walked into the small kitchen, where Shane opened the freezer and pulled out a package of four frozen New York steaks. He set them on the counter to defrost.

"Let's get the barbecue going, Bud," he said to Chooch, who grinned and pulled a bag of charcoal briquettes from the cupboard. The boy took it outside and filled the orange Weber barbecue that was sitting on a small patch of poured concrete in the backyard.

It was just about dusk. Shane put his arm around Alexa as they looked out the sliding glass door at his son, starting the fire in the backyard. It was wonderful to be home, but bubbling under that relief was a strange, unsettled feeling.

"I know what you're thinking," Alexa said softly.

"Now you and Jody both can do it, huh? Walk right inside my head, without knocking."

"You feel like it's not over, but it is. Sometimes things just don't wrap up perfectly."

"Yeah, I know..
. I
t's just..."

"We're alive and we're together, babe,"

she said. "You and me and Chooch. What more can we ask for?
"

"You're right, as usual.
"
He snapped his fingers. "Just a minute. I forgot something.
"
He turned and limped down the hall into the bedroom, where he opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out the engagement ring in Murray Steinberg's slightly crushed black
-
leather box.

Shane walked back outside, where he found Alexa and Chooch poking at the briquettes with long-handled tongs, spreading them out.

Shane turned and faced Alexa, took her hand, then slipped the two-carat engagement ring onto her finger. "There,
"
he said, "now it's official.
"

"It
'
s about time, is what it is,
"
Chooch said, smiling. "But aren't you supposed to ask her first?"

"She said yes two days ago," Shane told him, taking her in his arms as Chooch smiled his approval.

As the setting sun lit the edges of the rippling canal, Shane cooked the steaks, Alexa made a salad, and Chooch set the table.

They sat in the backyard and ate quietly, counting their blessings, grinning like children.

Later that night, Shane and Alexa made love in his bed while Chooch watched TV in the living room.

Shane felt as if he had completed an impossible journey. He had been looking for something that didn't exist, but in its place he had found something even more valuable.

If only he hadn't lost Jody. If only Jody hadn't confessed that he'd never cared..
. T
hat he hadn't loved Shane the way Shane had once loved him. That realization caused a sadness that he suspected was produced by betrayal as much as by loss. It touched on old issues of abandonment that he had lugged around his entire life. Shane's parents had dumped him at a hospital's back door like human trash. He had been infant number 732. City Services finally named him Shane. He had picked the name Scully, after his favorite baseball announcer, Vince Scully. But that first betrayal by his parents had caused an ache inside of him that had never left.

Why did my mother leave me like that? Didn't she care?

He had asked himself these same two questions over and over again, day after day, year after year, until they had almost lost their meaning.

The Deans had filled in some of the emptiness, until Jody had snatched it away again, coming back into his life two weeks ago.

Alexa had fallen asleep beside him, but he lay awake, thinking and listening to the TV in the other room.

He fell asleep some time during Leno.

Jody had his back to a field where beautiful horses ran, galloping around the edges of the wooden perimeter fence. The horses came to an abrupt halt each time they reached the rail, sticking their magnificent heads over, snorting angry air from flared nostrils, looking across the fence line at the distant city, before turning and galloping back across the field to the other side. But Jody didn't turn to watch them. His eyes were only on Shane.