Dying for the Highlife (26 page)

Escobar clicked the safety off and leveled the machine gun at Cody. His black eyes were empty, his face expressionless—until he heard the very real sound of a motor revving and rocks spitting from under tires.

• • •

When I came power sliding around the final corner to the small valley where Sanzini told me Cody was being held, the first thing I saw was a dusty gray Chevy Blazer parked next to a small, decrepit structure. To my left I caught a brief glimpse of Cody sitting, his body still as a statue, his great bearded mug staring at me. A man stood near him, a short-barreled machine pistol in his hands. A second later, a burst of automatic fire spider-webbed my windshield. I ducked low, straining to see out of a small section of undamaged glass, and pushed the pedal to the floorboards, accelerating toward the shooting figure. Bullets whirled overhead, ripping holes in the seats and punching through the roof. Glass rained down, and I heard the distinct sound of steam hissing as a series of slugs pounded into my radiator. Then the clatter of the weapon stopped, and the man froze for an instant before he dropped it and ran for the Blazer. But he wasn’t quick enough. I turned and hit him at almost forty miles an hour. His body folded under my bumper, and I felt the bump as my rear tire ran him over.

I scrambled out of the truck and aimed my pistol at the shack. A faint female voice yelled for help from behind the walls. I ran toward the Blazer, and saw a disheveled gangbanger wearing a red bandana stagger from around the building, pointing an automatic. He held the gun sideways, palm down, arm extended. It may have been a trendy gangster style, and I’m sure he thought it looked cool, but it is not an effective way to aim in a combat situation. His shot went wide, and I slid to a knee and returned fire, hitting him in the chest. There is no mistaking the outcome when a man is shot in the torso from twenty feet with a hollow-point .40-cal round. The man fell forward, a fist-sized hole in his back. He shuddered briefly and died.

Sanzini said there were three, and I assumed the third man was in the shack with the girl. He would either come out on his own or come out holding her hostage. Regardless, Cody was in an extremely vulnerable position. Keeping my eyes on the shack, I ran back to my truck for a knife, then reached behind the driver’s seat and took my back-up piece from its hiding place. It was a Glock 9mm, a weapon I considered inferior to the Beretta, but no less deadly. Sanzini was crouched as low as he could get in the passenger’s seat.

“You hit?” I asked.

“No,” he rasped.

“Stay down.”

I sprinted the twenty yards to where Cody was tied.

“Having fun yet?” I said, cutting the ropes around his wrists.

“Give me that piece. There’s one still in there with a rifle.” Cody pushed himself to his feet, his eyebrows creased low over his eyes, blood caked and scaled on his face.

“You go left,” he said, running behind my bullet-riddled truck, the Glock trained at the shack. I took position behind the rear of the Blazer. We were no sooner in place when the door opened and a Hispanic man in his forties stepped out holding a large hunting rifle, probably a 30-06, to the head of a naked blond woman. Even though she had been roughed up some, the natural beauty of her face was striking. So was her curvaceous, tanned body, which could have only belonged to a stripper. I wondered if he had raped her yet.

“Drop the gun, gringo,” he said. I didn’t think he could see Cody crouched behind my truck from his angle.

“Okay, don’t hurt her,” I said, dangling my gun from the trigger guard. He lowered the rifle and pointed it at me, and that was all the room Cody needed. The girl jumped as a blast split the air, and the Latino’s head exploded, his hair, teeth, brains, and gore painting the wood slats behind him. His body collapsed in a blood-soaked mess.

“Oh, my fucking god!” the woman screamed, and puked on his corpse.

I walked to my truck and found a blanket. Cody was inspecting the Glock as if amazed. “Nice shooting,” I said. He nodded as I brought the lady the blanket and draped it over her bare shoulders. She stood shivering for a moment, until she remembered her clothes were still in the shack.

While she dressed, Cody picked up a half-full bottle of Herradura someone had left on the porch. We walked away from the carnage and sat on my tailgate and took a few pulls. The sun was going down, and a single dark rain cloud stood against the clear sky. Columns of light spilled from the cloud, striping the barren hills in sunlight and shadow.

“He’s still alive,” Cody said, pointing to the body of the man I’d run over.

His legs were twisted at wrong angles, and he had lost an eye. I could see the tread marks where my tire had crushed his ribs. Blood gurgled from his mouth with each wheezing breath, and his remaining eye twitched madly, as if it was still trying to understand what happened to him.

“Should I offer him a shot?” Cody said, gesturing with the bottle.

I knelt down to the man. “Where’s Jimmy Homestead?”

His eye stopped twitching, and he turned his head to look at me. His lips started moving, blood flowing down his chin.

“Chinga tu madre,”
he whispered, then he gasped and died.

“Nice last words,” I said. I pulled my cell phone and started dialing just as we heard the first whine of the sirens. I put the phone away and took the Glock from Cody and secured it and the Berretta in the lock box behind my cab. Then the girl came out of the shack, her hair tangled, her face dark with bruises. She teetered across the dirt in form-fitting jeans and high heels and managed a small smile before she sat between us on the tailgate. I offered her a hit off the bottle, and we sat there waiting for the cops to arrive.

I
t would be inadequate to describe what happened next as simply chaotic; a more apt description would be to say it was like a rowdy acid trip. A pair of military-grade SWAT vehicles rumbled around the corner and bore down on us, followed by four Reno PD squad cars. A dozen fully outfitted SWAT commandos spilled out, and in seconds we were staring down a phalanx of AR-15 assault rifles. The uniformed cops dispersed and scrambled about, and in the confusion, they actually tried to interrogate one of the dead men. Jimmy Homestead jumped out of a squad car, only to be wrestled to the ground and cuffed. Amid the yelling, a coyote trotted by a little ways out, and one of the Reno cops drew his service revolver and took a pot shot. The SWAT team freaked and one heaved a stun grenade at the perplexed patrolman.

Cody lit a smoke and handed me his pack. We sat on the tailgate until eventually the cops were satisfied the crime scene was secured. The SWAT teams left, leaving the local police to conduct interviews, gather evidence, and otherwise sort things out. I gave my keys to Gordon DeHart, a cop I knew from a run-in I had with the Carson City police last winter.

“Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction, Lieutenant?” I said.

The portly, balding officer freed Sanzini from my truck and shook his head. “Reno, even if you’re innocent of any wrongdoing, which I doubt, do you have any idea how much paper work this is going to take? You’re on my shit list, buddy.”

“Another member of your fan club, I see,” Cody said.

They separated the four of us to take our statements. Within a few minutes, Sanzini was again cuffed and escorted to the rear seat of a squad car. Two young patrolmen fawned over the blonde, whom I overheard crediting Cody and me for saving her from being sexually assaulted.

“You might as well start at the beginning,” DeHart said. “But do me a favor and try to make it quick.”

I looked at my watch. “Yeah, I know, it’s damn near happy hour.”

“Get on with it, Reno.”

I took a deep breath. “Jimmy Homestead’s stepmother hired my partner and me to find Jimmy after he won the California lottery a few months back. We found him, but she stiffed us on our fee. So Cody went to talk to Jimmy to see if he’d be willing to pay us in return for our disclosure of what we knew about his stepmom.”

“Which was?”

“Not much, really. Anyway, Cody borrowed my truck to drive to where he thought Jimmy was staying. When he didn’t answer his cell, I took a cab out there. Here’s the address.” I pulled the folded sheet of paper from my pocket.

“And?”

“Sanzini was the only one at the house. He tried to take me down, but I subdued him, and then he admitted his associates kidnapped Homestead, the babe, and Cody. He also said one of the Mexicans shot and killed a man earlier at the house.”

“Another dead body? This just keeps getting better.”

“Yeah, no shit. So I convinced Sanzini to tell me where the Mexicans were, and when I came here, one of them opened up on me with a machine pistol.” I pointed to my truck. “You think insurance will cover that?”

“I doubt it,” DeHart said.

“That’s okay, I think I have a skateboard somewhere. Anyway, I ran over the dude, and another one shot at me with a pistol, and I returned fire, hitting him in the chest.”

“What about the third guy? Looks like his head was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He came out of the shack holding a rifle on the woman, who was naked, obviously not by choice.”

“And?”

“Cody shot him.”

“With what, a bazooka?”

“No, a Glock nine shooting hollow points.”

DeHart sighed. “What do you like on your pizza?”

“I’m kind of in the mood for pepperoni. Why?”

“You and me, and the rest of this merry band,” he said, waving his hand at the police and civilians alike, “we’re all going back to the station, and maybe if I get lucky I’ll get to go home tonight.”

“What about me?”

“You’ll get a nice cot, until I talk to the DA in the morning.”

“I guess stopping at a bar on the way to the station is out of the question?”

DeHart didn’t answer, but his expression said he wished he could.

• • •

The interview room at the Reno precinct station was drab and poorly heated. I sat at a metal table, facing DeHart and a younger black officer who was clearly playing the role of the bad cop.

“So let me get this straight,” the black cop said, leaning over the table, supporting his weight on his hands. “You walk into a home, uninvited, looking for your buddy.”

“That’s right.”

“Then you claim to be attacked by a man who you choke unconscious, chain to a D-ring in your truck, and torture with a stun gun until he tells you what happened to your partner.”

“Yeah. I was in a hurry, and the stun baton usually brings pretty quick results.”

“Wow. You sound like quite the expert. So, first we got trespassing, and now let’s add assault, battery, and kidnapping to the list. And we haven’t even got to the best part yet.”

“You mean the gorgeous nude woman and the bottle of tequila, right?”

“Reno,” DeHart said from where he was sitting in the corner. He shook his head, and looked down in an effort to hide his expression.

“I’m glad you think this is so funny,” the black cop said to me. “Actually, I was referring to the two men you killed.”

“They were both shooting at me. I killed them in self-defense. So what’s the point here?”

“The point is, instead of calling the police, you took it upon yourself. And now three people are dead.”

“I got there just in time to save the life of my best friend, and also to prevent the rape and probable murder of an innocent woman. There was no time to wait for the police.”

“All right,” DeHart said, rising from his chair. “Let’s go back to how these people are connected. Tell me again what Sanzini said to you.”

“He said the three Mexicans were gangbangers who wanted to rip off Jimmy Homestead.”

“And the connection between Sanzini and the Mexicans?”

“All Sanzini said was Homestead had heisted some coke from him, and when Sanzini heard he’d won the Lotto, he tried to find him to get payback. When he had trouble finding him, Sanzini called the Mexicans for help.”

Both cops were silent. We’d been in the room for over an hour, and I’d repeated the same answers to their questions more times than I could count.

“Owens, is the pizza here yet?” DeHart said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go out and check, would you? I’m starving, and I’m sure Mr. Reno is too.”

The man blew his breath through his teeth and stomped out the door.

“They took your friend Gibbons to the hospital,” DeHart said.

“They did? How is he?”

“He had two huge knots on the back of his head and complained of a headache. Probably has a concussion.”

“Shit.”

“They’ll most likely keep him overnight for observation. He’s down the street at Reno General.”

“You still planning on keeping me here tonight?”

“No,” DeHart sighed. “But don’t make me regret it. You know the routine—don’t leave town, and make yourself available if I call.”

“No problemo.”

“One more question, Reno. Jimmy Homestead claims he knows you. Said you went to the same high school.”

“That’s true.”

“So what’s the connection?”

“Connection? I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over fifteen years. Other than his stepmother hiring me to find him, there is no connection.”

“I don’t like coincidences.”

“Well, if it’s really bugging you, I suggest you contact Sheila Majorie.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

“If you do, tell her she owes me about thirteen grand. And if my insurance doesn’t cover the damage to my truck, I’ll send her the repair bill for that too.”

I
walked out to the small lobby of the precinct, eating a slice of pizza and wondering how I’d get home. Sitting on a bench against the wall, her hands in her lap, was the blond woman. Her makeup was tear-streaked, and when she looked up, her expression made me think of someone lost at sea.

“Hi,” she said weakly.

“Hello. It’s cold out. You don’t have a coat?”

“No.”

I looked out the plate-glass windows into the black night. “Where you headed?”

“My car’s parked at Jimmy Homestead’s house. But my keys are in my purse, and my purse is locked in the car.”

“The cops didn’t offer you a ride?”