Chapter 5 So Many Inconvenient Things
So Many Inconvenient Things
brADY’S BODY felt like it uncoiled in the drive from the small police station outside Barstow to Victoriana, the place that wasn’t really there.
Of course as a deputy in the desert, he mostly was a patrol officer—albeit one with a vast and empty beat—and Brady knew there was more to the little town than met the eye.
Any traveler from Las Vegas to San Diego or LA knew Victoriana only as a convenient place to stop for gas or a sandwich in the middle of a four- or five-hour journey and the last best hope for a place to get your car repaired in either direction before civilization.
Both these things were true, but as was often the case with the desert, a little distance, a slight dip in the road, the long shadows of the day, were all it took to conceal a small, shy colony much like any other wildlife complex, but this one consisting of a couple of schools, some neighborhoods, some apartment complexes, and a small hospital.
Still the garage and the gas station seemed like the lonely outposts, deceptive markers to a larger world.
As he pulled up to the hardpan parking lot where he’d dropped off the Subaru that morning, he noted that some of the cars that had been there in the morning were no longer there, replaced by others that would need servicing tomorrow.
And the Subaru had been… messed with. Doors had been yanked on, and the hood had been hammered flat, the better to protect the engine from the elements.
They weren’t wasting any time, he realized, before they took him up on his gift.
He wondered what they would do with it.
But that wasn’t why he was there. He parked his unit and got out, taking a moment to look to the west, where the last of the sun was showing brilliant orange to intense pink to heart-stopping purple.
He breathed in deep, and since traffic was thin on a weekday, he could smell sage and sand beyond the car smells, and he’d always found those scents uniquely clean when it wasn’t hot enough to scorch the lungs.
For a moment, stresses of the day—and Walmart had been one big ugly paperwork clusterfuck—faded like the day into the night.
With a sigh he turned and headed for the business end of the garage, and found his target outside, leaning against the west wall, staring at the sunset as well.
“Oh!” Brady squawked before he could remember dignity. “I thought I was alone.”
“Only me and the coyotes out here,” said the mysterious Eric, who could hurl olive cans with enough velocity to shatter a behemoth’s nose.
“You, sir,” Brady said, feeling disgruntled, “are a lot more dangerous than a coyote.”
Eric chuckled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Coyotes have teeth,” he said mildly. “All I had was a couple of olive cans.”
Brady raked him with his gaze as he leaned there, and saw something… off. “Turn around like a runway model,” he ordered.
His new acquaintance’s eyebrows rose, and he took a few steps out from the wall and raised his hands from his sides, palms out, like somebody accustomed to being frisked for weapons.
Brady didn’t need to frisk him—he could see the concealed Beretta at the small of his back from where he stood.
“See,” he said, “I knew it. Oh, put your hands down and face me. I’m not going to arrest you. I assume you’ve got paperwork for a concealed weapon?”
“Of course,” Eric said, his voice smooth—too damned smooth—and suddenly accentless when Brady could have sworn the man had a touch of the East Coast in him that morning.
Brady would have put down money that any concealed carry permits were forged, or his name and ID were forged, or something was off about his paperwork, and he had about five minutes to decide if any of that posed a threat to any of the people in the desert.
Eric had turned around and was leaning back against the garage wall again, but his pose was… deceptively casual this time.
He was as relaxed as a coiled rattler.
“If you had that gun, why didn’t you fucking pull it?” Brady asked, hoping to startle him into striking.
But apparently this customer was cooler than most snakes.
“That’s how innocent bystanders—and helpful law enforcement—get shot,” he said simply. “No. The last thing that situation needed was another damned gun.”
Brady grunted and eyed him again. “I agree with you,” he said, surprised. “I mean, what you did was smart and brave—but it’s not what most men would have done. Where’d you train?”
“High school baseball,” Eric replied with a shrug. “What did you put in your police paperwork?”
“A helpful Samaritan with one hell of an arm,” Brady said—which was pretty much an exact quote.
“Your superior bought that?” The man—and he was handsome, with a face that had probably been piquant and sweet as a teenager but was simply standard, decent-looking white male now—cocked his head in question.
“My superior has other things to deal with,” Brady said grimly and shook his head.
“Like what?” Eric asked. “No, seriously, what? That poor man in the store was shot—he could have been killed if Bruce had gone for a head shot. That could have been a bloodbath—you could have been shot if I’d drawn a weapon. Didn’t your sheriff raise a single suspicion?”
Brady studied him, thinking that for a moment, those arctic blue eyes had heated up a little—on Brady’s behalf, no less. And because he seemed to give a rat’s ass, Brady found that he was honest.
“My sheriff has… well, I don’t know if you heard this or not, but there was something of a clusterfuck about a week ago.
One of our officers died in a fiery car crash, which you knew, but the phone found next to him implicated him in some pretty nasty stuff, along with his brother, who was one of those tent-revival preachers. ”
“What kind of stuff?” Eric asked, and Brady’s stomach churned.
“There were pictures. The brother with a bunch of minors, and not in a good way. And when somebody….” He swallowed. “Me, when I checked the place out, I found the guy dead at his desk in a puddle of blood, with his pants around his ankles, his thing out, and pictures on his computer.”
“Dear God.”
It wasn’t Brady’s imagination. His eyes were wide open and his horror was real.
“Yeah, the guy was a real fuckin’ piece of work, and his death was nasty and not his idea. So we’ve got the choice—break up the child porn ring on his laptop or chase down his killer, who, you know, sort of did us a favor. Guess which side won?”
“I know which side I would choose,” Eric said. “I don’t know which side you or your captain would.”
“Well I’d choose the child porn ring. Lots of dark-web stuff, but a lot of it we could track.
The murder has about a million suspects, but nobody saw anything.
There wasn’t even anything on all the tapes they had.
Some guy with a red baseball hat and long blond hair, and that was about it.
So I’d go after the stuff that keeps hurting kids, or, you know, the murder, but nope. That’s not what we’re going after.”
“What are we going after?” Eric asked, legitimately interested.
And Brady shook his head. “I don’t know.
I don’t. He keeps saying we’ll get detectives from an LA precinct, because we’re a tiny little patrol office out here, but we haven’t.
I called the FBI in, day one, and have suggested he give them the phone to study, but he told me if I so much as thought about calling the Feebs again, I’d get fired.
I mean… a double murder, one of the victims a dirty cop, and a porn ring—and all sorts of potentially important people on this guy’s phone list. And I’m starting to wonder, you know?
Is my sheriff on the phone list? Is the county DA?
Are there members of the chamber of commerce in any of the towns there?
Who is putting on pressure for us to do jack shit while this trail goes colder?
So when I bring in a case, with a guy already confessing to shooting his wife’s friend in the middle of Walmart, I’m greeted as a conquering hero, because this other shit, it’s just rotting on the vine. ”
Brady heard his voice cracking and tried to rein his frustration in.
He didn’t know this man—all he knew was that with a couple of great pitches, Eric, who had yet to give him a last name, had made his day a little easier and was now simply listening to him, and his unsettling eyes no longer felt like ice chips on his skin.
“You’re a good man.” There was more surprise than comfort in Eric’s voice.
“Is that bad?” It didn’t sound like comfort or a compliment.
“Inconvenient,” the other man said cryptically, eyes narrowed. He let out a sigh, and something about the sound of it reminded Brady of when he smoked in college. That ritual of breathing, in and out, had soothed the nerves, and he cocked his head at his companion.
“Marlboro or Lucky Strikes?” he asked, and was surprised by the man’s quick, startled grin.
“Lucky Strikes,” he said. “Miss it?”
Brady shook his head. “Yoga breaths do the trick for me. You?”
“No. It taught me how to hold my hands still, but it cut down on my wind.” His mouth twisted at one corner. “It did make me look rather deadly as a disaffected youth, though.”
Giving in to the sunset at his back—and the quiet pleasure of his companion—Brady laughed a little and moved to lean against the building next to Eric.
He smelled pleasantly of expensive cologne—just a spot—and motor oil.
“Did you help Ace and Sonny today?” he asked, which went against logic, because this man had manicured cuticles and not a spot of dirt on him.
“Worked the cashier stand,” Eric replied. “Ernie, their young helper, had a….” He frowned and blinked rapidly. “Needed some air,” he supplied and then looked annoyed with himself, as though he’d committed an incredibly stupid mistake.
“That place must be broiling,” Brady said.