BULLETS (23 page)

“Don’t you tell me how to do my job,” Ted said. “I’m getting things done, just like I’m supposed to do. He attacked me, you all saw it. You all saw it. We can’t have these types coming into our town. He came looking for trouble and that’s what he found. He assaulted me. Anyone here have any problem with that? Anybody?”

No one in the diner spoke another word. Slick listened as the deputies dragged him out of the diner and Ted followed. He stuck Slick’s phone in his pocket and the screen got very dark but the audio continued. He heard Ted wheeze as he eased his bulk into the squad car. The car doors slammed shut.

“Goddamn lippy nigger,” Ted said. “When he wakes up, you take care of him.”

“If he wakes up,” Brower said.

“He’ll wake up, niggers are hard-headed. That’s what my daddy always told me, he was an MP in the army, he said you couldn’t hurt niggers by hitting ’em in the head. You had to aim the baton for the shins.” Ted coughed.

Slick chuckled. This was really going to play well, once it got out. He got the impression that Ted was one of those bigots who got all sensitive and offended whenever someone accused them of racism. There wasn’t going to be any denying this shit.

“He’s gonna have a headache, that’s for damn sure,” Brower said.

“I hit the beaner a helluva a lot harder. I’ve been doing this long enough, I know exactly how hard to hit someone. That’s one done taco, done and done.”

And that flushing sound you hear,
Slick thought,
is the sound of Ted’s life going straight down into a prison toilet.
This was a one-way express ticket to jail for the good Sheriff Ted Rawlings, who just all but admitted that he killed Pedro on purpose and took this from manslaughter to murder two, at least. Go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Boom!

And they said nothing more. His phone was tossed into a desk drawer and the screen went black and stayed quiet for a long time.

Slick finally clicked it off and thought about what he’d watched. He still didn’t want this video getting out and going public if he could help it, but that might be too difficult. At the very least, they should protect his identity. He sent a copy of it to Melvin, along with an explanation of what was going on and his wishes to keep his identity in the video private, if possible. He knew Melvin would be doing somersaults of joy once he watched it anyway, as he was Pedro’s lawyer, too.

Slick sat and thought about things for a long time. Something bothered him but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He sat and mulled it for hours.

It was well after dark when Camilla came home, carrying takeout from his favorite restaurant. She set it on the counter and gave him a big kiss and a package.

“New shirt!” he said.

“Shirts, plural. I got you a couple, I hope you like pink.”

“I’ve got no problem with pink, pink and black are Elvis colors, after all. I’m a big Elvis man. How’d it go?”

“Ted Rawlings is through,” she announced. “He doesn’t know it yet, but he is.”

“So it went well?”

“Yes! Javier and I met with George and broke it down, and he’ll break the news to Ted first thing tomorrow morning. Ted’s an elected official, of course, but this is a federal case now, Javier’s got him in his sights and his goose is cooked. George knew it the minute he saw both videos. He went pale. It’s going to be difficult for him, since he’s friends with Ted. He’ll have to step aside and let a federal prosecutor handle it, starting tomorrow, but he requested that he be the one to break the news to Ted and ask for his badge. Javier and someone from the state AG’s office will also be there. That video from your phone is the nail in the coffin, especially what he said at the end about a done taco, oh my God. I had no idea it was that bad. Why didn’t you show me this right away?”

“Because it wouldn’t have really mattered until we cleared Pedro.”

“What he said about you would have mattered, it would have.”

“Not for most white people around here. Now it does, now he’s cooked.”

“More than cooked. Burned, more like. Ted is done.”

“Done and done.”

“You should have seen Javier, he was on fire. Oh, he’s going to play this up and make the most out of it. He’s never liked Ted and this will play well, a Latino federal officer involving himself in a civil suit concerning the unlawful death of an undocumented Mexican worker at the hands of bigoted law enforcement. This is his big ticket to Washington.”

“Yeah, it’s quite a story. What about you, do you get anything out of this?”

“I don’t want anything out of it.”

“Everybody wants something.”

“I already got what I wanted.” She smiled at him. “Don’t read into that more than necessary. What I meant was, I wanted Ted gone and now he’s gone.”

“Not yet, maybe by morning.”

“Oh, he’s gone. I know Javier. And George. By the way, George wants you in his office tomorrow, to give an official statement, on the record, about your digital recording, the arrest and everything. And Javier wants your phone number, he needs it.”

“Right. So he can have a government drone drop something on my head.”

“He’s not like that, really.”

“Not yet.”

Camilla pulled a bottle of wine out of a bag. “Okay, so what’s wrong?”

“We still don’t know who killed Roger Carlson or why.”

“George is going to re-open that case, he promised me. It’s still a county crime, so Javier can’t officially involve himself, but he said he’d keep tabs on it and George gave me his word that he’d see it through himself. Roger was a friend of his, too. And I had a message on my phone from Doris Carlson, she left town to stay with friends, but said that she has to come into town for business and could meet me for breakfast tomorrow morning at City Diner at eight. Do you want to come with me?”

“Yes. She left town?”

“On her message, she said she couldn’t spend another day in her house. I called her back, left her a message that I’d meet her there.”

“It doesn’t add up.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. Look, we got two things here that are connected, somehow…” Slick grabbed a fork and a spoon. He set them apart from each other on the counter. “Two things. One, the setting up of Pedro, and two, the murder of Roger Carlson. Related, but how? If you wanted to murder Roger Carlson, why use Pedro, someone who knew him?”

Camilla took down some plates and unwrapped the food. They both began to eat with an easy familiarity, as if they’d known each other for years rather than just days. Slick enjoyed it more than he’d enjoyed anything else in quite some time.

“Well, from an outside point of view, it looks like Roger was simply murdered by an undocumented Mexican. Hardly anyone knew Pedro, except Roger and his wife and Pedro’s priest. And his friend Sergio,” she said.

“He fit a profile. A loner and an illegal.”

“Yes. It looks good on the outside. They had a shovel with his fingerprints, no alibi, you have it all. If we hadn’t found the footage of Pedro at the park, nobody would believe that he DIDN’T murder Roger. Even Javier didn’t want to believe it, remember?”

“Maybe. Had I not sat next to him, maybe I wouldn’t have believed it, either.”

“Exactly. Citizens always want to believe the worst about others, especially brown people. It doesn’t matter how devout they are, how often they go to church or how much they love their mother. In a way, that makes it worse, because we’re sure that someone like that is going to snap and kill somebody. What was it you said?”

“No one is a saint. So if the goal is to murder Roger Carlson, Pedro seemed like a good bet from an outside point of view because he knew the man, didn’t have many friends and was usually home on a Friday night. And HAD he been home, it would have worked. Except…”

“Except that he wasn’t.”

“He wasn’t home and he wasn’t a virginal saint. I don’t think he WAS a perfect suspect, actually. I keep feeling like there was some other reason he was involved. But for the life of me, I can’t put my thumb on what it is or why.”

Slick sighed as he dug into tofu. “And besides, the goal wasn’t to kill Roger Carlson. Or to set up Pedro. There was some other goal that both of those events served. And that’s the other thing I can’t figure out. Why kill him, what purpose did that serve?”

“Someone wanted his farm. Oh, shit, I forgot to call Del and ask about that.”

“Why is that worth murder? There are a lot of lettuce farms after all, right? What’s one more? What’s the purpose behind it? Why murder a man over that?”

“Why does anyone murder anyone?” Camilla poured them both a glass of wine.

“In my experience, usually for two reasons.”

“And they are?”

“Love or money.”

“Just those two?”

“There are more, but those are the two big ones. Someone wants to buy Roger’s farm, he says no, so they have him murdered so they can buy it from his widow. But if she says no they still have to find a way to get rid of her, too, all for a lettuce farm that is worth, what? A million? Maybe two?”

“Less than that, I think. I’d be surprised if it was. But that’s still a lot of money.”

“If it was cash in a bag, it would be. But it’s not cash right now, it’s dry, arid land that you have to farm in order to get the money out of it. Land has value only if you put something into or on it. Manhattan is valuable only because of the buildings and the nearby transportation hubs. Without those, it’s an island like most other islands, if not worse … it’s Staten Island. Roger Carlson’s farm is a farm, it’s not a million dollars in cash. And even then, this wasn’t just a straight out murder, you had to set Pedro up, pay Sergio to steal Pedro’s shovel, have someone murder Sergio—”

“If he was murdered.”

“He was. It’s too complex for just a simple lettuce farm that the widow may still not want to sell even after all of that. I can’t get it straight in my head.”

Camilla took a sip of wine and smiled at him. “Maybe you need to think about something else for a while.”

He smiled back at her. “If you mean what I think you mean, and I’m pretty sure that you do because I’m fairly well trained in the art of observation, there’s not a lot of thought involved in that.”

She set her glass down. “We can finish the rest of dinner later.”

“We can?”

“Yes.” She took his hand and led him toward the bedroom. “We’ll eat later. And we’ll worry about Roger and Pedro’s girlfriend and everything else tomorrow. Because for the rest of the night, we’re going to celebrate as tomorrow is quite likely to be the worst day of Ted’s life.”

T
ed Rawlings pulled
his Cadillac into his garage, feeling pretty damn certain that so far this day had quite likely been one of the best days of his entire life. He’d spent the afternoon in a flurry of conference calls with his lawyer and a group of political advisors.

He and his lawyer had plotted and planned for this moment ever since he became sheriff and now what they worked for was about to come to fruition.

He already had a book deal in place, that’d been set up earlier in the year. He was going to be an author and, best of all, he didn’t even have to write the damn thing, they hired some kid to do the writing for him. Ted had talked to the kid for a week straight, got his words all recorded and the kid would put all the commas in place, make the grammar work and shit like that. Kid was supposed to deliver a rough draft in a few weeks for Ted to sign off on.

The book would cover his life and philosophy on American government and border security.
TAKING AMERICA BACK
was the working title. Ted chuckled as he slid his bulk out of the Cadillac.

But the book was small potatoes compared to what was to come. They were thinking governor, the current one was very vulnerable at the moment. They were convinced Ted could take the top seat in the state.

Four years as governor, they figured, buttressed with a couple more bestselling books and carefully selected media appearances, and then they would make the move for the big kahuna—the White House. Four years, maybe sooner if a natural disaster or terrorist strike pushed his presence in the public eye further along. All very doable.

He’d have to lose weight, he was told. A hefty governor is fine, but no one wants a fat president it was said. He’d have to lose at least a good forty or fifty pounds in order to look presidential. He could switch to salads, easy enough, if it meant he’d be the owner and operator of Air Force One. Shit, if he had to, he’d get his fucking stomach stapled.

The other vexing problem, Ted thought as he left his garage and walked through the connecting door into his house, was that if Ted were serious about the White House, he’d have to get married. That’s what his team had told him. He groaned just thinking about it.

Ted himself had nothing against married women, not at all. In fact, he was currently juggling sexual relationships with three married women. Married women were perfect for him, they were home during the day, didn’t demand too much face time, gave him the space he needed and they were tigers in the sack.

But Ted was no fan of marriage. He’d been married once, years ago, and it had been a miserable experience from day one. Plus, the fucking bitch took him to the cleaners when it was finally over, got half of everything he’d owned at that time. It was ridiculous. Ted had vowed never to put himself through that kind of torment ever again.

But his team had told him that the nation wasn’t really ready for a single man as president and he’d have to get his stability established.

Ted walked into his kitchen, still mulling that over as he removed his gun belt and dropped it on the kitchen counter. He opened his refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He didn’t really want to get married again, but his team underlined the importance of image when it came to the national stage. They explained that the best candidate for a wife was one who’d been born and raised in Arizona, divorced herself, so they could angle it as they’d simply been searching for each other for their entire lives, and she needed to have a couple of children of appropriate ages, too.

Ted had no intention of stopping his outside sexual activities, so the perfect candidate for wife for him had to be one with some empathy and compassion for the attention a powerful man gets. He would need to find a Jackie Kennedy, a woman who knew her place and would not make waves about what he did on his own time.