Edge of the Heat 5 (11 page)

“A hit man?” he choked out. “What makes you say that?”

Chester leaned forward farther. “Because man, get a clue. He’s carrying, for one. He’s got this fancy gadget he always checks, for two. And he’s covered in prison tattoos, for three. And let’s not even ignore the fact that he broke into her apartment to do a hit. And when he couldn’t find her, he marked the place up. With blood. Who does that?” Chester sat back, satisfied he had proved his point.

Jerry didn’t want to engage in this discussion. He felt like if he did, the safe, normal world he lived in would evaporate, fall over like stage dressing, and he’d never get it back. But he also felt like if he didn’t, he’d be damning himself to his own personal hell a second time. And that was unthinkable. So he leaned forward, mimicking Chester’s body language and whispered voice.

“Wouldn’t a hit man lay low, wait for the victim to show up, and
not
destroy her apartment?”

“Yeah, unless he knew he lost her. Then he’s gotta let her know he knows and hope she makes the next move.”

“Lost her?”

“She sniffed him out. Knew he was coming. Took off.”

Jerry thought about this. It didn’t make sense to him. “But why keep coming back here if he knows he lost her?”

Chester dropped his voice farther. Jerry strained to make out his words. “Cuz he’s got nowhere else to go, man. He’s waiting for her to slip up. To come get her stuff. To send for her stuff. For someone to lead him to her.” Chester stopped for a moment, appraising Jerry openly. “Someone like you, man.”

“Like me? I don’t know where she is!”

Chester nodded knowingly. “You don’t think you do, anyway.”

Jerry’s head swam. This guy was a genuine loony tunes on a stick. Suddenly all Jerry wanted was to be out of here, away from this apartment, away from the floor-to-ceiling
collections
, but most of all, away from this crazy conspiracy-theorist. But he needed a little more information first.
Besides, Chester’s got it backwards. This guy’s going to lead me to Sara, not the other way around.

“You said the guy was carrying. Do you mean a gun?”

“I don’t mean his library card!” Chester laughed silently, and slapped his knee. Jerry looked on in amazement.

“How do you know he had a gun?”

“Saw it, didn’t I? Under his shirt, right here.” Chester put a hand under his left arm. “I got a nose for weapons. Just like I know you ain’t carrying nothin right now.” Chester smiled a small, somehow malevolent smile that made Jerry feel like an idiot for coming into this apartment. But what could he do? He needed the information. He would just have to stay alert.

“What did you mean by a gadget?” Jerry asked.

“He got a little metal gizmo, no bigger’n a pack of smokes, and he pulls it out of his pocket and looks at it all the time. It’s covered with buttons and lights and it has a little screen on it, like a cell phone screen, but tiny.”

Jerry nodded like he knew what the hell Chester was talking about. “Can you tell me where and when you saw him?”

“Sure, I saw him yesterday about 3 o’clock, right in the hallway. He was just walking by like he lived here. And I saw him yesterday after the sun went down in the parking lot, just passing through again. And I saw him the day before, going into the super’s office.”

Jerry’s heart gave a little tripping leap forward. “What would he be doing in the super’s office?”

Chester laughed again. Jerry felt a white-hot bolt of hate jolt through him at the sound of that laugh. “Ain’t it obvious? He’s trying to rent an apartment here. What better way to spy on the building than to live here?”

Jerry knew there was more he should ask, but he couldn’t stand to be in this dull, cramped apartment for one more second. He stood and moved to the door, his hand on the knob. “Thanks, I really appreciate you answering my questions.”

Chester jerked to his feet, knocking his chair over. His eyes darted around the kitchen wildly. Jerry didn’t wait to see what the problem was. He opened the door, leapt over the threshold, pulled it shut behind him, and ran for the closest stairwell.

“S
it down over there,” Sara ordered, pointing.

Obediently, Manny sat down on the bed and stared at the floor. Sara pulled the drapes completely shut, flipped on the lights, then checked the room to be sure it was completely empty.

“Empty your pockets,” Sara told Manny.

Manny patted himself down from shoulders to waist and smiled horribly at Sara. He leaned forward and put his hand out as if he were going to try to pull her to him. Instead, he fell off the bed, his head making a sickly thunk sound on the thin carpet.

Sara waited to see what he would do.

When he didn’t move at all, she told him, “Get up, get back on the bed.”

A stream of unintelligible sounds came from underneath Manny. She couldn’t tell what he was saying and she didn’t particularly care.

“Get up, now!” She leaned down and grabbed a handful of his hair, pulling him upwards. Unless he was a closet scopolamine junkie, there was no way he could fight her, but she was alert for it anyway. It never hurt to be more careful than necessary.

He pushed up off the floor and made his way back to the edge of the bed. She let go of his hair and told him again to empty his pockets.

“Pockess, sprockess, wockets,” he said. He shuffled forward a little and stood, sticking both hands in the pockets of his jeans. They came back out full. He dumped it all out in front of Sara and stood there. Sara pulled a pair of gloves out of her pocket and put them on. Then she started going through his pile.

His money clip, a butterfly knife, a closed locket with no chain. Sara put these aside, moving the knife itself onto the floor beside her. She restrained the urge to look inside the locket to see if there was a picture in there. It never did any good to see a guy like this as a human being with emotions and a life outside of the evil things he did.

A metal tin with ibuprofen stamped across the top of it. She opened it. 4 white pills and 2 yellow pills. She held it up in front of Manny’s face. “What’s this?”

“Codone. Roofos.” He mumbled, swaying on his feet.

“Sit down on the floor,” she ordered. He sat/fell and stared a the drapes.

Codone? Roofos?
She grimaced. Probably Oxycodone and roofies. The Oxycodone could be useful here, but the roofies made her sick to her stomach. She hated to think of what he’d done with pills like those. She bet some of his
girls
were talked into being prostitutes with roofers, that quintessential date rape drug. And once they’d done it a few times, many of them felt too damaged to quit.

She put aside the pills and kept picking over Manny’s belongings.  His cell phone. Under that, a tiny baggie of brown powder.
Jackpot!
She held it up. “What’s this?”

He looked and licked his lips. “Smack. It’s mine.”

Sara opened the baggie and smelled it, then wet her finger and tasted a tiny amount. It was Heroin alright. Perfect. And it was more than enough for what she had in mind, no matter how much it was cut. She placed it by itself on the bedspread.

Two quarters and some pennies. A piece of paper with some names and numbers on it. A rumpled paper that looked to be torn out of a book. A pair of knuckle dusters with wicked looking points. That was it. She read the names and numbers on the paper but didn’t recognize any, then smoothed open the other paper. It appeared to be a page from a book called
Woman as Queen
. She read a paragraph.

Sara shook her head as if to clear it. Was this a joke? Some sort of a crazy laugh for Manny and his pimp buddies? She crumpled the paper and threw it with the rest of his stuff.

She looked at Manny. He was staring off into the corner of the room, a little piece of drool dangling from the corner of his mouth. She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “How do you take this?” She held up the little baggie of heroin.

He looked at it, and his mouth dropped open as if he’d never seen it before in his life. He reached for it in slow motion, more drool falling out of his mouth. She pulled it back. “How do you take the heroin? Injection?” She mimed pushing a needle into the big vein at her elbow. She doubted that was how he took it though. There weren’t any needles or tourniquets in his pockets. Unless he kept them in his car. But his arms didn’t have any marks or scars on them either. He could be shooting up on his legs, where it wasn’t so obvious, but she doubted it. She would bet money he was a snorting man.

He watched her mime injection and his mouth broke into a smile. If Sara didn’t think he was a disgusting worm who had lost all potential to be a useful member of society years ago, she could have thought that smile handsome.

He mimed rolling something with his fingers, then held his imaginary straw to his nose and sniffed hard. That made him laugh stupidly.

Bingo
, Sara thought.
Time to take your last hit Manny
. She considered asking him where he was going to get an 11 year old girl from, but decided to pass. Scopolamine made people completely unreliable. What he said might be a total story, and she didn’t have time to chase stories. Besides, she couldn’t save everyone. If she were going to clean up Las Vegas of all its pimps and sex trafficking, there really was no reason for her to ever have left Mexico, to ever have abandoned the agency, now was there?

She peeled a dollar bill out of his money clip and rolled it up, then grabbed a credit card too. “Stand up,” she told him. He stood. “Put this back in your pocket.” She handed him the items, one thing at a time. She debated on giving him the knife and then decided against it. She’d push it into his back pocket when he was dead. Her mother had taught her to never count on anyone to be completely helpless, no matter how much they seem to be. She hadn’t frisked him, so he could have other weapons on him, but she could see clearly there weren’t any on his torso. If he had something it was an ankle holster. And she could have a knife in his ear long before he could actually get to it.

“Sit at the table.” She motioned to the small writing desk.

Sara handed him the baggy and the rolled up bill and credit card. “Time to get high, Manny. Deal yourself 4 lines.”

Manny bent to work, slobber spilling onto the desk blotter. He shakily poured out almost all of the heroin and began to push it around with the credit card. When he had 4 lines he snorted one of them easily, then put the bill down and tried to relax into the hit in what was probably his normal fashion. Except his face looked sick, not relaxed.

She pushed his arm. “Another,” she growled at him.

Manny reached out for another and bent his head to the table, but he didn’t take it. Sara bent into his ear. “Suck that shit up your nose,
now
.”

Manny snorted. The powder disappeared. He coughed and sputtered, moving in slow motion. His fingers dropped the fake straw on the blotter and pushed it off onto the floor.

“One more, you can do it.” She whispered, picking up the straw and trying a sweet approach this time. He could and he did. Sara smiled. That had to be enough to kill him. That was a
lot
of heroin.

His eyes drooped. His head nodded. It started to fall and she let it. It hit the blotter hard and she heard his nose crunch. He didn’t make a sound. She could barely see the end of the 4th line under his forehead.

Sara sat down on the chair in the far corner and waited. She would wait until his breathing and heart had stopped for at least 10 minutes. And then she would leave. She knew that the cops wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about what had happened to a small-time pimp in a hotel room. It would be written off as an accidental overdose, and good riddance to bad rubbish, even with scopolamine in his system. The U.S. wasn’t like Columbia. People here didn’t use scopolamine to commit crimes. And some people did like to get high on it. It might raise an eyebrow or two since it was rare, but it wouldn’t warrant any extra investigation, she was sure of it.

As she watched his back, she ticked off all the things she planned to do today. This whole situation with Jessica and Manny had put her behind. She’d be even farther behind once she finished getting Jessica and Zoey somewhere where they could have a real life. That little baby deserved to at least have a
chance
. Every baby deserved a chance.

And the Brook Barnes identity? Was it ruined already? She didn’t think so, but it didn’t hurt to be extra careful. Her mother had taught her that too. Maybe she should wrap things up here in Vegas and head somewhere else. Be someone else. New York, maybe. She could really get lost on the East Coast.

Sara got up and checked Manny’s pulse in his neck. Slow. Almost gone. Good. She sat down again and waited for it to be over.

W
hen Jerry hit the stairwell, he chanced a glance behind him. Chester’s door was still closed and the hallway was clear. He slowed to a walk and examined his options. Wait for the guy to show up, of course. But he wanted his gun. He glanced at his watch. Still early. He would drive home and get it, then come back and wait for the man with the prison tattoos who looked like a cop.

Jerry got to his car, scooped up his phone, and climbed in. He started the car and backed out, checking his alerts before he pulled out of the parking lot. Two more calls from Craig and a call from Emma.
Damn, something big must be going on
.

He hit the button to dial Craig’s number and headed for the freeway entrance. Craig’s phone clicked like he was on the other line and his voice mail answered. “Hey man, it’s Jerry. Call me back.”

He hit the end button and tried Emma’s number. His phone beeped, telling him a call was waiting. It was a cab company. He hung up the call to Emma before it ever even rang and answered. The Sunset Cab company hadn’t picked up a woman on Eller’s Hill on Sunday night. Jerry thanked them and hung up, thinking. That left just one cab company. Bayside Taxis. And they had called him this morning. He would call them back and then be able to cross
call all cab companies
off his list.