T. Parker: Cold Pursuit

Stuff, thought McMichael. Parts. Units. Items. Merchandise. Product. "How did you get the people at Diaz Leather into the loop?"

"Money, Tom. How do you think?"

McMichael could feel his anger rising. "Did Bland kill Courtney Gonzalez?"

"I don't know for sure, but it makes sense. Victor- well, you know Victor. No telling what he'd say. He's just a boy."

"Then why didn't Bland kill him, too?"

"Beats me. Maybe he had a soft spot for Victor, like I did."

It made no sense to McMichael that Bland would silence Angel but not Victor, soft spot or not.

"But why did you keep taking Victor down to TJ with you?"

"At first it was to implicate him, keep Pete off our backs. After Pete got it, though, they wanted Victor close. No reason to leave him out, maybe making him mad, and him getting Charley Farrell or Patricia involved. They figured that as long as he was happy he wouldn't be telling any tales."

"Charley know?"

Thigpen shook his head. "Just us, and for a while, Pete."

"Patricia?"

"No."

"Garland?"

Thigpen shook his head again, this time with an air of annoyance. McMichael looked hard into Jimmy's eyes, saw no contrition at all.

"Jimmy, you picked on people so poor and desperate they'd sell parts of their bodies for three hundred bucks?"

"Three fifty. That's a lot of money in some places."

"You ever meet one of them?"

Thigpen looked puzzled. "No. Why?"

"How could you do that?"

"Nobody made them sell. It was their choice. I heard the facilities were real clean, it was easy."

"What facilities?"

"Mobile unit. Drove around village to village, like a bookmobile."

McMichael pictured it: some broken-down paramedic van limping down a dusty village road, leaving a wake of dazed and wounded villagers a few hundred dollars richer. The postop care was probably fantastic.

"I'd send you down for all of it, if it was up to me."

Thigpen looked surprised. "At least you get to hang Bland. Even though he's dead."

"I'd rather hang you."

Thigpen shrugged and looked away. "Yeah. I let a lot of people down."

"You got Rawlings killed."

"I just drove the damned truck, Mick."

"And Bland and the brothers and two San Ysidro cops. And Mitzi, with her insides torn apart, maybe paralyzed, maybe won't even make it."

"I do feel bad," he said sincerely.

"And you cut open all those people for parts. "

"They made money. And look at all the good people we saved. Kidneys, man- God gave us two so we could help each other out. It's not all bad, and I just drove. I wasn't out there with the damned scalpel."

McMichael pushed off the wall and backhanded Jimmy hard in the face. Jimmy looked back at him with wet eyes and a red cheek and McMichael hooked him in the side and put him down. Thigpen curled into a ball, gasping. Then he made a breathless shriek that didn't sound fully human.

"Kidney shot," said McMichael. "But don't worry, you've got two of them."

Charley Farrell called just before noon to say he had found no additional wine-colored SUV's sold or leased in the last year. "Sorry," he said.

"Thanks for trying."

"That was one heck of a shoot-out at the border, according to the news."

"It was grim."

"How many died?"

"Five."

"And that captain."

"Rawlings, yes."

A moment of respect.

"Well. Detective, I don't know if this helps, but Garland Hansen- that's Patricia's husband- he checked out an Expedition a few months back, drove it a while, then turned it back in, early January. It was Bordeaux red- Detroit's idea for a paint name. Those dealer demos don't show up on the lease or sale books. So, maybe talk to him."

"He turned it in when?"

"See here… January the fourth. Saturday."

"Why so soon?"

"He picked up a rock or something, shattered out the window. Said he didn't want the car back because the seats weren't comfortable and the mileage was lousy."

Or maybe she was sitting in a car, passenger side. The driver just reached out and bap, bap.

"Which window?"

"Right side, front."

Garland, thought McMichael- anxious husband of Patricia, soon to lose half of the community property in a divorce, and all of what might come to him and Patricia after Pete's death. Garland- unhappy in life, seeing his company failing and his wife packing her bags. Garland- alleged protector of Victor, but protecting him from what? A dangerous woman?

"Give me the VIN on that car, Charley. And the date Garland took it home."

He called Patricia next, under the pretense of clarifying some of the probate terms of her grandfather's will. He asked if she was going ahead with the divorce proceeding, which she was. In fact, she was moving some things out of her and Garland's house this morning, while her husband was up in San Francisco on business.

"Need a hand with the heavy stuff?" McMichael asked.

"I could use that," she said. She gave him the address, told him she'd be there in an hour, offered to buy lunch. "I'm really sorry to hear about your captain and all that bloody business at the border. And really thankful it wasn't you who caught a bullet, Tom."

McMichael told Hector he was going to help Patricia move some things, then signed out of the Homicide/Robbery/Special Investigations Unit. He walked past Captain Don Rawlings's closed door, which was completely covered in sheets of black construction paper. Rawlings's nameplate showed through a box cut from the paper. On the floor was a flower arrangement- orchids wrapped around a gnarled branch, black rocks in a black ceramic bowl, some tufts of greenery showing through the rocks.

Look what thirty-four years gets you, thought McMichael. He touched the paper with his palm.

The Hansen home was out on Point Loma, less than a mile from Pete's place but a few blocks up from the water. McMichael parked on a steep short street, pushed down hard on the parking brake. He walked toward the house smelling the cool Pacific just a few hundred yards away. The Hansen driveway was gated so he used the intercom. Patricia buzzed him in.

The house was set far back from the curb, beneath three towering pines. It was white plaster with a brown tile roof and Castilian wrought iron over the windows. McMichael felt a chill as he walked from the cool winter sunlight into the eternal shade of the trees. Patricia's red Mercedes with a small rental trailer attached was parked in front of the garage. The door knocker was an iron ring with a black cast hummingbird flying inside it but he couldn't tell if it was Anna's.

McMichael stood in the kitchen while Patricia placed wineglasses in a partitioned box. She wore old jeans, new athletic shoes and a Henley shirt with the sleeves pushed to her elbows. Hair up, the black zigzag bouncing off her forehead.

"Fifty bucks a pop for these," she said. "Have to take care of them. Gar, hell, he'll drink an Opus One from a coffee mug if it saves him half a step to the cupboard."

She glanced at the double sink, one side filled with dirty mugs and tumblers and flatware.

"I should quit ragging on him," she said. "This makes me sad, packing up. Nine years with that guy, and they weren't all bad."

"I did this, too," he said. "A top-fiver of rotten days."

She looked at him, nodded, went back to the wineglasses. This was exactly the kind of place that would have set them off twenty years ago, a place forbidden and irresistible. Her and her husband's bed, just a room away. McMichael's mind wandered pleasantly back to an evening on Pete's deck, then rushed forward to Rawlings on the ground at the border.

"There's boxes by the door you could load in," she said. "Books and papers."