Gregg Hurwitz - Troubleshooter

"This a pay phone?" Tim asked.

"Yeah?"

"Where?"

"I dunno." Confused pause. "Valencia."

"Look around. You see a sign?"

"Tipper's Liquors."

"Thanks."

As the deputies set about scrutinizing the records, they discovered that though plenty of the calls went into the mother chapter and Sinner-owned businesses, many were to pay phones. The pay-phone calls were most commonly made precisely at the hour or half hour, consistent with prearrangement. It was not uncommon for those numbers to repeat throughout, probably corresponding to pay phones convenient to Sinner haunts, operations, or safe houses. Dana had logged a lot of hours talking to Sinners who didn't want their locations known.

Nomads.

It took the entire Escape Team and half of the Probation/Parole Team nearly three hours to attach an address to each phone number and to cross-reference the locations on the maps bearing the data from Uncle Pete's sat-nav box. A profusion of purple dots now spread across the master street map, laid on a spaghetti bed of red-pen routes. They wound up with just over a hundred strong leads. Prioritizing the locations proved less time-consuming. Guerrera ranked them in rough order based on his feel for biker routes and habits, and the hottest overlaps-places where the black dots of Uncle Pete's destinations appeared to be within blocks of a Dana Lake-called pay phone. Tim put in a quick call to Malane, who promised three two-man teams for the first shift.

When he hung up, all the deputies were looking at him. "Okay, everyone takes eight leads. Me, Bear, and Guerrera'll take sixteen since we're a three-man team."

Jim cleared his throat uncomfortably, met Tim's eyes, then looked away. Light duty had been killing him; he seemed eager to hit the streets. The abrasions on his face from the shattered windshield glass had mostly healed, leaving slivers of scabs. His right ear had recovered nominal hearing.

"Gimme a sec, guys." Tim beckoned Guerrera out into the hall.

"What's up, socio?"

"You and Jim can give us another team. We need the numbers."

Guerrera's lower jaw slid out level with his top. A few days' worth of stubble darkened his face.

"You have a problem with that?"

"I'd rather stay with you and Bear."

"Why?"

"I don't need to baby-sit Jim."

"Maybe you do. Maybe not. But I need you to."

"Okay." Guerrera's eyes stayed on the floor tile. "Okay."

"You gonna be cool?"

"I'm gonna be cool."

"Unless you have to be not cool."

"Thass ride." The accent amped up with his defensiveness.

Tim headed back in and said to Jim, "We need you in the field, too."

Jim's face shifted. He nodded at Tim, took a deep breath, and rose. A few of the guys tugged on Kevlar vests beneath their shirts. The others rustled, checking their clips, their boot laces, the batteries in their flashlights.

Tim pulled Guerrera aside again. "We have to split our top sixteen. Me and Bear should take one through eight. I'm thinking the locations closest to the Sinner clubhouse." He indicated the scattering of numbers corresponding to pay phones on the outskirts of Fillmore and Simi. "That leaves you and Jim with the grouping around Kaner's safe house."

"How come Guerrera gets nine through sixteen?" Thomas asked sharply from across the room.

"Because Guerrera's been running the case with us from the gates," Tim said.

Guerrera touched Tim's elbow. "Listen, Rack, if you want the highest-odds locations, you should take the ones near Kaner's safe house. Den would want to hole up near another nomad."

"More than he'd want proximity to the mother chapter?"

"That's right."

Tim studied Guerrera closely, for the first time unable to read his dark eyes. "You're the expert."

The other deputies paired off and took their leads, and then everyone was silent for a moment beneath the quiet rasp of the heater.

Tannino, who'd appeared sometime in the past hour to lean cross-armed against the doorframe and watch with a sort of paternal pride, said, "You know who you're dealing with here. Watch your partner's back and use your judgment. I don't want to preside over another funeral."

The clock showed 9:14, but it might as well have been midnight for the silence in the rest of the building. No footsteps overhead, no doors shutting down the hall, no lit windows across the way.

"All right, guys," Tim said. "Let's fetch."

His mouth tight and his eyes on the carpet, Tannino kept his post in the doorway as they brushed past in groups of two.

Tim was one leg into the Explorer when Guerrera called his name. He paused, Bear grumbling impatiently from the passenger seat as Guerrera jogged across the underground parking lot.

The sheet containing the leads fluttered at Guerrera's side. Sweat from his hand had bled a half-moon into it. "Rack. I lied."

"About what?"

"The higher-probability locations. You were right. Nearer the mother chapter. Not Kaner's place." He offered the paper, looking uncomfortable under Tim's gaze. "Hey, they're just leads. Who knows. Maybe Thomas and Freed make the collar. Maybe none of us do. I just want to keep my backyard clean."

After a pause Tim swapped Guerrera's sheet for the one in his back pocket. "Why the change of heart?"

"I figure maybe Jim isn't the best guy to go through that door right now."

Tim arched an eyebrow. "Just Jim?"

A half grin. "Don't push your luck, white boy."

Tim and Bear checked three bars, a strip club, and a pay phone outside a motorcycle-parts store. Boston and Precious rode along, tongues lolling; after his schedule over the past week, Bear insisted on playing guilty weekend dad. Out in the field, he and Tim fell back into the interrogation rhythm they'd perfected over the past years. They spoke to a bald bartender wearing a dog collar, a woman walking her calico on a leash, two gas-station convenience-store clerks, and an exotic dancer who insisted on replacing her nipple tassels-to Bear's evident discomfort-while describing her on-the-side clientele. The only hit they got in the first four hours came from a homeless woman living behind an adult bookstore, whose eyes lit up at Den Laurey's photo; she ID'd him as the guy from Gladiator.

The blue panels of the sixth pay phone gleamed in the glare of Tim's headlights. Scarred by restroom wit and cigarette burns, the unit was bolted into a sawdusty wall off the front porch of a freestanding country bar. Despite saloon doors and Loretta Lynn's jukebox lament about pappy a-hoein' corn, the bar suffered from a confused identity. A punk sporting an algae-green Mohawk tossed darts with a lip-pierced person of ambiguous gender, while four unaffiliated bikers nursed drafts at the bar. ESPN recapped Pittsburgh's trouncing in the Continental Tire Bowl, as if anyone cared. A girls' night out had somehow wound up in a corner booth, grating laughter radiating from a trio whose feathered hair seemed more vintage than retro. Wine coolers and buffalo wings dotted their table, and the saccharine scent of drugstore perfume was evident from the doorway. Only the bartender, an old guy wearing a Stetson Cattleman and a belt buckle the size of a Christmas platter, looked at home in the decor. Then again, they were north of the fish hatchery, out where the Fillmore citrus groves faded into God knows what, so a watering hole earned its nickname here. They'd passed a gas station a quarter mile back, but before that it had been a long run of dusty road, with scattered lights twinkling out from the dark hillsides like Ewok eyes.

One of the corner-booth gals offered Bear a giggly wave as he and Tim headed for the bar. Loretta gave way to "London Calling"-three guesses who'd dropped that quarter-and a kid in grease-stained Dickies shuffled out of the men's room, trailing the smell of weed and a streamer of toilet paper. The bartender worked his way down to them, polishing nothing much off the bar with a rag that looked as if it had stuffed a hole in a flue for about a decade.