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  I turned to the room. “Besides the hardware? Lots of caffeine. No long-term living. No plates, cups, food. I guess that’s where Burger King came in. No personal effects.”

  “It’s a bolt-hole,” he said. “Or a staging area.”

  “It ain’t a love nest,” I said. “Unless Danny was seeing a gun nut with no sense of romance and a thing for carryout.”

  “Is that it? Besides the filing cabinet?”

  “The furniture’s a little strange.”

  Bloch glanced in the corner. “A couch and a chair? What about them?”

  “We’re talking about one guy who used the place a couple hours a week, if that. Maybe crashes on the cot or grabs a cup of coffee in between meets or busts. So, why the couch and a chair? One chair would do it.”

  “Sleep. No, he’s got the cot for that,” Bloch said, chewing his lip. “He meet people here?”

  I nodded. “Often enough that they needed a place to sit.”

  “Four?”

  “Maybe, but probably not. Three people don’t like to sit on a couch together, like ducks in a row. Especially guys. Most would sit one at each end of the couch, another in the chair.”

  “Three guys, meeting here, often enough that they needed a place to sit and talk,” Bloch said, then glanced at the kitchen. “How much caffeine?”

  “Enough to keep your squad awake for a week.”

  “And enough potential firepower to start a small war.”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Danny, what the hell were you doing?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Two days after trying to cash in some favors built over a thirty-year career in law enforcement I was starting to wonder just what kind of legacy I’d left behind. No one had phoned, dropped by, or sent a telegram acknowledging that I’d asked for some help. I would’ve felt better even if someone had called to say “no.” And, while I’d gone into the process with patience, there was a lunatic out there somewhere who had a clock ticking inside his head and when the alarm went off another cop would die. The files didn’t indicate a chronological pattern to the killings, but that only meant that the next one could happen anytime.

  On the other hand, the kitchen was now painted a nice, soothing shade of sage green, or at least as close as I could find to the color of the walls at Restaurant Nora. I figured I could do worse than styling my kitchen after a place that had served me my best meal of the year. If I was lucky, some of it might rub off on me next time I made something on the stove. It couldn’t hurt. My cooking couldn’t get much worse.

  I was looking at the cabinets, wondering what Amanda thought I would need to do next, when my phone rang. I scrambled around for it in my pocket.

  “Marty Singer?” A male voice I didn’t recognize, high and with a slight accent I couldn’t place. The syllables came rapid-fire, with the ends clipped off.

  “Speaking.”

  “Chuck Rhee, Arlington PD. My boss said you wanted to talk to me.”

  I straightened up. “Yeah, I did. Thanks for getting in touch. Uh, who’s your boss?”

  Rhee laughed. “John Creusfeld, head of Gangs. You don’t know who you’re calling, huh?”

  “Let’s just say I made a ton of calls the last few days. It’s easier to ask you than go through the list. Creusfeld tell you what this is about?”

  “Something about Brady Torres and maybe a tie-in with a case in DC.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’m trying to connect the dots on something and Torres’s name came up. It might be nothing or it might help out with both cases.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “What Torres was working on. Gangs he was looking into, dealers or junkies who might’ve wanted him gone. Especially any work that took him back and forth into DC. The victim I’m looking at was knocked off in the District and had, ah, ties to law enforcement.”

  “He a snitch?”

  “Undercover,” I said.

  “Oh, man.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can you meet?”

  Honking covered up whatever he was going to say. He must’ve been driving and talking. He tried again. “I can meet, I said. What time?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Give me half an hour. I can meet you anywhere in Arlington.”

  More honks. Rhee swore at someone or something. “Tell you what, I have to make some rounds out in Culmore and Lincolnia, check out my homies. You want to do a ride-along and we can talk? Kill two birds with one stone?”

  “Sure,” I said, getting a strange tingly feeling. It had been a year since I’d been in a cruiser. At least in an official capacity. Rhee asked me where I lived and told me he’d pick me up in an hour.

  I changed clothes, nervous as a prom date. I didn’t want to look like I was out to play cop, trying to get back in the game. I thought about what I should wear, how I should act. What about my gun? I had a license to carry and I knew I’d feel naked without it. On the other hand, there was no reason to believe I’d need it with an Arlington cop in the driver’s seat.

  In the end, I brought the gun, a case of caution overtaking sense. I couldn’t imagine a situation where, if I had to use it, I wouldn’t do so responsibly and as a last resort. On the other hand, I could visualize plenty of situations where I didn’t have my gun and wished I did. I had to put on a windbreaker to cover it, which was a shame, since it was another gorgeous day and I was about to sweat my ass off.

  Flipping through Torres’s file again helped kill the time until Rhee pulled up in a silver Integra with custom stripes and a two-foot-high spoiler in the back. I walked out and slipped into the passenger’s side. Rhee was a dark, thin Asian dude wearing a white wife-beater, baggy jeans, and black work boots. He had spiky black hair, silver wrap-around shades, and a star-shaped scar on one cheek. Around his neck was a gold chain with a cross. On his left thumb was a fat silver ring. He had wide shoulders and, judging by the muscle fibers working under his skin like piano strings, maybe one percent body fat.

  He stuck a hand out. “Chuck Rhee.”

  I shook. “Marty Singer.”

  He glanced at my clothes with a smile. “If you’re trying to look like a cop, it’s working.”

  “I was trying hard to not look like a cop,” I said, sour.

  He laughed and checked the mirror, then pulled away from the curb at about a hundred miles an hour. The Integra was a stick shift and he clutched and changed gears smoothly, like he was playing an instrument. “Some guys are just cops to the bone, I guess. No big deal. It’s not like these hombres don’t know what I do for a living. They’ll just think you’re my lieutenant or something.”

  “Who are you talking to today?”

  “Las Chacas,” he said. “Little shit Salvadoran gang in Lincolnia. If you can call it a gang. About eight girls and a handful of dudes. They hang out in malls, begging and stealing whatever they can snatch. End of the day, they pool it and rent a room at some fleabag motel. They drink cheap beer and smoke weed and fuck and trash the room until they get kicked out. Then they go to the next mall and start over.”

  “They sound like a waste of space,” I said.

  “They are,” he said.

  “What’s your interest in them, then?”

  “Grassroots,” he said as he turned onto Wilson Boulevard. We got stopped every block or two by the traffic lights that seemed to have sprouted up all over Arlington. “These small fry want nothing more in life than to climb their way up the ladder, be a real gang member, man, not just some dropout in a Mickey Mouse club. So they kiss ass whenever the genuine article comes around.”

  “Why do they bother? The real gangbangers, I mean.”

  Rhee answered while he watched a girl—dressed incongruously in a knee-length skirt, silk blouse, and flip-flops—walk up Wilson Avenue. Walk was one way to describe it. The skirt was so tight that she had to take steps that seemed half the length of her normal stride. Rhee grinned, loving every mincing step. �
��Eh, they gotta recruit, too. They take like one out of ten of the little fish. And the ones they don’t take…well, who wouldn’t mind having a bunch of groupies tripping over you, giving you pot and booze and pussy without you asking? Even if they are, for the most part, completely worthless.”

  “So you build up relationships with the little gangs,” I said.

  “And cash in once in a while on the big ones,” he said. “None of these kids have what it takes to make it into the real gangs, but they don’t know that. They give it the old college try anyway, try to impress the hardcore homies. Go stab somebody or torch an apartment building or be a drug mule to San Antonio. When that happens, shit can go wrong. Then they freak and come running to us.”

  “And you flip them.”

  “Sometimes. Not always. The smart ones realize there’s no going back if they talk to us. They clam up after we save their asses. Then we have to let them go. Lost opportunity. But even those usually give us something we can use. Where we picked them up, what were they doing when we did, that kind of thing. They know they’ll get the yellow light when they go back to their homies, but that’s the price you pay for talking to the cops.”

  “Yellow light?”

  He glanced over at me. “Medium level punishment. Gang makes a big circle. You get in the middle, then they beat the shit out of you for a ten-count. Well, not every time. Sometimes, if they’re feeling generous, they just stab you once and then drive you to a hospital. Kick you to the curb outside the ER and take off.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Was Torres doing this grassroots stuff when he got killed?”

  Rhee shrugged. Traffic broke for a two-block stretch and he shifted to fourth. “Kind of. Brady was impatient, always wanted to go to the top and make the big bust, haul in the head of the gang. He didn’t want to do the legwork to get there. He could get under your skin. But he was a smooth talker, man. Six months on the street and he was chatting up hardcore homies like they were related. Milk-white kid with red hair, shit.”

  “Did he get too close? Somebody get nervous and take him out?”

  He made a face. “I don’t see it. The big gangs have to be plenty pissed to take out a cop. They’ll do it, if they have to. But they have to get the nod from a bunch of honchos way up the food chain. Do it without approval and you’re fucked, end up in a garbage can in little pieces.”

  “That’s the, ah, red light?”

  “Beyond red light, man,” he said. “Red light means they just kill you. This is red light plus.”

  “They do it because of the heat?”

  “Yeah, but not just the way you mean. You kill a cop, everything stops everywhere,” Rhee said. “No drugs, no parties, no money changing hands. Three, four months, everyone in the gang has to lay low. And these boys don’t exactly keep a savings account, right? Even a couple weeks out of action hurts. If you’re talking months, then these guys are stone-cold broke. With every cop on the squad breathing down their neck.”

  “So Torres wasn’t bothering them enough to bring that on?”

  Rhee shook his head. “Not unless he was hiding it real good. Gang unit is tight. We all know pretty much what everyone’s doing. No one else is looking out for us, so we have to.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I don’t know. It’s better than it was. I’ve been with Gangs for eight years and it ain’t the best thing for your self-esteem, man, I can tell you that. First, everyone thinks the unit is a cutout, brought in by the mayor or the chief to headline a press conference.” His voice dropped an octave. “City Official Declares War On Gangs With Elite New Unit and that kind of shit. So, the rest of the force thinks we’re a bunch of props. Or, no, wait, we must’ve got kicked out of our old units because we’re fuckups and trouble-makers, right? And if that isn’t it and we actually do our job, well, it must be because we’re all on the take.”

  “Because you’re consorting with the enemy,” I said.

  “Every day, man. And you don’t do it in a uniform or a shirt and tie, you know what I mean? You want to tell a bunch of school kids to just say no, wear a badge and a hat. You want to know who’s driving up 95 with six hundred pounds of dope in the back of a U-Haul, then you gotta play the part.”

  “Isn’t Creusfeld on the warpath? I hadn’t read or heard a thing about Torres’s killing until a few days ago,” I said. “I mean, if no one is looking out for you…”

  “Then we look out for ourselves,” Rhee said. “Sure. Three Musketeers and all that shit. But you heard what I said, right? Half the department’s looking for an excuse to close the doors on us. If we go bananas and start putting people in the ground, Gangs is over.”

  “So?”

  “So we wait. And when we know for sure who put our boy Brady down,” Rhee said, turning to me and smiling, all teeth, “then life gets hard for that individual. Very hard.”

  We were both quiet for a few minutes.

  “What’s the theory on Torres, then?” I asked. “If he wasn’t bothering anyone enough to get knocked off and he was in tight with the right people, where’s that leave you?”

  Rhee was quiet, then shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We arrived at the stretch of suburban consumer hell known as Seven Corners. Every road in Northern Virginia seemed to come together at this one spot with all the charm of a train wreck. Parking lots and strip malls and traffic lights radiated in every direction. The road was twelve lanes wide in some places, if you counted both directions and all the turning lanes. At ten o’clock in the morning, we were one of hundreds of cars choking the road.

  Rhee took a left off of Wilson Boulevard and we headed down Route 50 at a stop-and-go pace for a mile before turning into the parking lot of an older, beaten-down-looking strip mall. A beauty parlor and a mattress store held down the middle of the row, flanked by a “party warehouse” on one side and a 7-Eleven on the other. The party store was dark and the posters in the windows were yellowed. It was pretty down-in-the-mouth for a place purporting to sell fun. How many foil hats and noise makers do you have to sell to make a living, anyway? The mattress place and the beauty parlor were almost as dead as the party store The only life was a group of kids hanging out in front of the 7-Eleven.

  Rhee pulled into a free space in front of the mattress store, put the car in park, then turned to me. “Okay, two of the girls over there are in Las Chacas, but I don’t see Rico, the leader. He’s probably still working off a hangover in a Motel 8, but if these cuties talk to me, it’ll save some time. Hang tight.”

  He got out of the car and sauntered over to the little group. There were four kids altogether, all of them girls. They wore nearly identical combinations of skin-tight jeans and pull-over tops. Two sat on the curb, one checked out something through the window of the store, and the last leaned against one of the pillars holding the veranda roof up. The first two noticed Rhee as he got close, but there was none of the scrambling around or straightening up that I was used to seeing when cops made contact with gangs. Or kids, for that matter. They seemed relaxed, chatty even. The girl who’d been looking in the window turned around and walked over to join them, popping gum.

  Rhee’s body language was confident, cool. He slouched, his hands in back pockets, while he talked. He must’ve led with a joke, because the girls all started to laugh. He made some kind of gesture to go with the joke and the girls all laughed again. He talked some more, then listened, asked a question and got some nods, then fingers pointing out towards Seven Corners. Another question, then shy nods. He turned towards me and made a “hold on” kind of motion, then went inside the store. The girls looked over at the car with idle curiosity, then went back to staring at nothing.

  Five minutes later, Rhee came out with a plastic bag ready to burst, which he handed to one of the girls. He waved and said something, but they’d already torn into the bag, spilling sodas and chips onto the ground.

  Rhee got into the car. “Okay, las chicas didn’t know fo
r sure, but they think Rico actually is at a Motel 8, the one off Columbia Pike. So, that’s where we’re heading.”

  “What was the joke?”

  “Huh? Oh, you know, the usual. Talking smack about how bad their guys are in bed. They love it. I was lucky it was all the girls, though. If there’s even one macho asshole there, they don’t say a word. You never deal with the ladies if there’s a dude around. And you can’t joke with most of the homies. They think they’re in a war or something. Gotta stay strong. Can’t laugh at a joke or you look weak.”

  “And the little bag of goodies?”

  Rhee waved dismissively. “Thirty bucks. Junk food. Keeps them happy, saves them three or four hours of panhandling at the malls. These kids are so poor, most of them don’t eat but once a day anyway. And they’ll remember me for it. Next time I come around, they’ll give me Rico’s shoe size if I ask. As long as I don’t tell him where I got it.”

  “Don’t a bunch of Latinas think it’s weird to trade jokes with a Vietnamese cop who’s trying to pump them for intel about their jefe?”

  He grinned. “We’re all outsiders, man. As long as I don’t look like a gringo or flash a badge, I’m in tight.”

  We joined the line of traffic heading down to Columbia Pike, passing the area known as Culmore. This was ground zero of the Salvadoran population in Virginia and pretty much the whole DC area. Business signs were in Spanish first with English, if it was listed at all, below.

  “We didn’t see any of this coming,” I said, looking out at the run-down neighborhood. “We all thought the black gangs had dibs on the worst of the drugs and the violence.”

  “The pulse of history, man,” Rhee said. “Someone else gets on top, once in a while. You know how it started? Why the Salvadoran gangs are so prevalent?”

  I shrugged. “A little bit. You probably know it forwards and backwards.”

  “Want to learn?”

  “We got time. Lay it on me.”