The Wrong Side of a Gun Read online

  Virgil stared blearily around the empty lot. “Let me take a look,” he said and got out. “Yeah, she’s flat all right,” Quinn agreed a moment later.

  “I know she’s fucking flat. That’s what I just told you. You gonna help me out or what?”

  “Virgil Quinn,” Virgil said, holding out his hand. Stark stared at it for a moment then stuck out his own arm.

  “Willie Ray Stark.”

  Virgil shook Stark’s hand then paused to think. “Willie Ray Stark? Where have I heard that name? . . . Oh, I know. It’s on the warrant in my back pocket.”

  Stark’s brain seemed to choke on the word “warrant” and he stared stupidly at Quinn.

  “U.S. Marshal,” Virgil said, holding up his badge. “You know the drill. Put your hands on the car.” Stark took a step back. “Where are you gonna run to?” Virgil asked, waving his hand around the deserted lot. “Unless you’ve got a gun. If you’ve got a gun, show it to me.”

  Stark’s hand slowly edged toward his boot. In an instant Virgil’s Glock 22 was pointing at Stark’s chest.

  “See now, that changes everything. If you were unarmed then I’d have to chase you down and wrestle around with you ‘cause we’re not supposed to shoot unarmed men. But now,” Virgil pointed the Glock at Stark’s left thigh, “I can just shoot you in the leg and I won’t have to get my clothes dirty.”

  Stark’s eyes seemed locked on the muzzle of Virgil’s weapon.

  “So, what’s it going to be? Hands on the hood and a nice comfy ride back to my office or lots of blood and a trip in an ambulance? . . . If I hit the bone it may never heal up right. You don’t want to be limping around the joint in constant pain do you?” Stark gave his head an involuntary little shake. “Well, all right then. Come on, assume the position. I promise I won’t put the cuffs on too tight.”

  Willie Ray hesitated a second longer then leaned over the Lexus’ hood and spread his legs.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Virgil said a moment later as he led his handcuffed prisoner to the rear passenger-side door. “Watch your head.”

  Chapter Two

  LOS ANGELES, MAY, NINE AND ONE-HALF YEARS AGO

  It was a little after four a.m. by the time Quinn finished booking Willie Ray Stark into the massive Metropolitan Detention center on Alameda Street. The huge skyscraper towered over the 101 freeway like a brooding, stone temple of righteousness. Designed to hold a thousand broken men, it was always full.

  When Quinn finally walked into the pre-dawn gloom the internal battle between hunger and sleep had ended and hunger had won. He headed north on Alviso then left on Spring to a 24-hour café where all the waiters knew him and they brought him extra cream for his coffee without him having to ask. By the time Janet arrived at the office around eight-thirty he had almost finished the paperwork on Stark’s arrest.

  “Did you get any sleep?” she asked when she saw his puffy eyes and the coffee dregs in his cup.

  “I dozed off for about an hour between six and seven.” Virgil nodded an accusation at his coffee cup.

  “So, you got him then?”

  “I was staking out a bar he’s supposed to frequent and he walked right up to me.” Virgil held out his hands palms up. “A fugitive just about surrenders to you, you gotta take him in.”

  “Sure he did,” Janet said, her lips drawn into a tight line. “It happens all the time.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Not a fucking thing!”

  “Hey, I–”

  “Are you staying or are you going home?”

  “I may as well finish out the shift,” Virgil said, imagining the fight with Helen that was waiting for him at home, the continuation of her perpetual rant, “If you loved me and your daughter you’d quit your terrible job.”

  “I’ll finish up Stark’s paperwork,” Virgil volunteered.

  “Damn right you will. I’m getting a cup of coffee.”

  When she returned Virgil pointed at the first of the two folders he had placed on her desk. “Ralph Michael Berwin. He failed to appear on the second day of trial for securities fraud in New York City. He’s got a brother who works for a mortgage brokerage in Century City. Or, Lupo Jorge Villareal,” Quinn said, pointing at the second file. “Federal fugitive out of Arizona. Apparently he’s an expert at building drug tunnels. He’s supposed to be headed our way. Which one do you want to take?”

  “Really? A white-collar crook who’s probably hiding out in his brother’s pool house and a drug-cartel smuggler?” Virgil said nothing. “Stark was our case, Virgil, not your case. Our case. You froze me out.”

  “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Janet half shouted. On the far side of the office a couple of heads turned.

  “It means . . . .” Virgil began.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk to me in that tone like I’m your nine-year-old daughter.”

  “Nicole is ten,” Virgil said, then immediately regretted it.

  “Do-not-talk-to-me-as-if-I-am-a-child,” Janet hissed, pausing between each word.

  “Sorry. I was trying to say that an opportunity to grab this guy up presented itself and I either had to take it or spend the next two days organizing a fucking rodeo.”

  “You had to take it? We’re partners. We should have taken it.”

  Virgil frowned and leaned forward.

  “Look,” he said, almost whispering, “I had to break a few rules to make it work. There was no point in Edgar writing both of us up if things went bad.”

  “Bullshit. The truth is that you don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you with my life.”

  “If things had gone sideways you would have had to lie to the boss which means that if I had been there I’d have had to lie too. Just admit it. You don’t trust me to lie for you. . . . Don’t you know by now, Virgil, that I’d do anything for you?”

  Virgil stared at her for a moment then looked away. “I was just protecting you. Why should my nonsense get both of us fired?”

  “Because we’re partners, asshole!” Virgil raised his hand in a quieting motion as more heads turned their way. “We’re going after the cartel guy!” Janet told him and hid her face behind Villareal’s file.

  * * *

  It was still light when Virgil arrived home, the days lengthening as May wore down almost to the end. Helen’s car wasn’t in the driveway, but she liked to keep it in the garage, out of sight of the faceless predators she was convinced were stalking her and Nicole. All, she complained, because of him.

  Virgil had just reached the front steps when he noticed the morning newspaper lying on the grass a few feet from the camellias. He stared at it for a second then picked it up, still bound with a blue rubber band. Why hadn’t Helen . . . but then he remembered how much the stories of drive-by shootings and carjackings frightened her. If it had been up to her they would be living in some mythical small-town American dream where he would sell cupcakes or build birdhouses and the jails would always be empty because no one would ever do anything wrong.

  “Helen, it’s me,” Virgil called out as he came through the door, then turned to punch the code in to kill the squealing alarm. Silence filled the room. “Helen? Nicole? Daddy’s home.”

  The lights were off. The alarm had been set. The house felt empty. Virgil hurried over to the door to the garage. Helen’s Subaru wasn’t there. He released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

  Probably grocery shopping or picking up something for dinner, he thought, and looked at his watch. Traffic was still pretty heavy heading into the Valley. He checked the fridge. Not enough left-overs in there to feed the three of them.

  Yeah, that was probably it, Virgil told himself. She’s out picking up dinner and she got caught in traffic or there was a line at Rubio’s or whatever place sold the kind of food that Nicole was asking for tonight.

&nbs
p; Virgil peeled off his sweaty shirt, washed his face, pulled on a clean t-shirt, opened a bottle of beer and collapsed in his favorite chair. Slowly, the golden light seeping past the drapes turned pink then gray until, finally, it faded entirely away. Virgil lolled his head and sleep slowly enveloped him like warm, thick oil. Eventually, some shout or laugh or a thump in the street startled him and he awoke in darkness, disoriented and confused. A few streaks of light from the street lamp painted the far wall. Virgil peered groggily into the darkness. The faint glow from his watch said it was twenty to ten.

  “Helen? Nicole?”

  Virgil staggered to his feet and shuffled to the light switch by the front door. The garage was still empty. Virgil paced through the house, hurriedly checking each room. Thankfully, he was not greeted with any scenes of carnage or robbery. Where the hell were they?

  Virgil tried Helen’s cell but the call went directly to voice mail. Who were her friends? Karen something? Sheila something? She didn’t have a physical address book. Those had all disappeared with American-made TV sets and rotary-dial phones.

  Helen’s father was dead and she hadn’t spoken to her mother in three years, some fight about taking Nicole to church too little, or too much. She once had had a sister, Theresa, who had left her University of Bowie dorm room one night to meet some friends at a pizza joint and had never been seen again. Six years later the FBI caught Warren Lester Santangello and locked him up for eleven murders that they knew about and at least a dozen more they suspected but could not prove.

  Santangello had arrived in College Park two weeks before Theresa disappeared and left five days after. The Maryland State Police detective who was the primary on Theresa’s case believed that Santangello had raped and killed her and disposed of her body, but Santangello refused to cooperate as long as any of his appeals were still pending. He was murdered in prison eleven days before his final appeal was denied.

  Every time Virgil thought of his marriage to Helen, the image of a rock bouncing off the windshield of an eighteen-wheeler, suddenly starring the glass, popped into his head. The damage started out small, just a few faint lines, then it got bigger and bigger until you couldn’t see the glass for the cracks. For Helen, Virgil thought, Theresa’s murder had been that stone against the windshield of her life. At first he hadn’t paid much attention to it, then he kept telling himself that the cracks in Helen’s psyche would heal or at least stop growing. But they had only gotten worse.

  By ten-thirty Virgil was dialing the hospitals and his friends in the LAPD and the County Sheriff’s office, looking for reports of crashed cars and unidentified victims. Nothing. At eleven he dragged Helen’s mother in Baltimore, where it was two in the morning, out of bed. All he got for his trouble were angry denials and a slammed-down phone.

  Finally, around one a.m., exhausted and still fully dressed, he collapsed into his bed. That’s when he felt the crunch of paper beneath his neck. When he grabbed for the lamp it tumbled off the night table. He scrambled off the bed after it, managed to work the switch, then held it above the pillow like a sixty-watt lantern. A pale paper corner slightly whiter than the cream-colored sheets peaked out above the edge of the bed clothes.

  Virgil stared as if confronted by an alien contrivance. It was just a plain 5 X 7 envelope that might have contained a Hallmark wish for a happy anniversary or a quick recovery from a broken leg. Virgil ripped the flap open and extracted a single sheet of white paper folded into quarters. He sank down on the bed and hunched forward to read the page in the lamp’s feeble glow. It was printed, he assumed, on the computer in the spare room.

  Virgil,

  Again and again I’ve begged you not to put our lives in danger but you don’t care. You have refused for the last time. I must protect my child from the criminals and killers and drug dealers who will inevitably murder us to punish you.

  I want to live but I’m not doing this for myself. I am a mother and I must protect my child. I will do anything and everything necessary to protect Nicole.

  I gave you a choice – your so-called job or your family. You chose your job. So be it. Now I have to be the one to protect Nicole. I will do what is necessary to save her life, and my own.

  You win. You can have your job. Keep it, until those monsters come for you as they inevitably will. They will not get us. If you will not save your daughter’s life, I will, no matter what it takes. I will.

  Do not look for us. We are gone. Forever.

  – Helen

  His heart pounding, Virgil jammed the letter into his pocket and tore through the house, pulling out credit-card bills, phone bills and every scrap of personal information he could lay his hands on, then he raced back to his office.

  He started with a BOLO on Helen and her Subaru and followed that with a trace on her credit cards and cell phone. How far could she go? Do not look for us. We are gone. She was just a housewife and a part-time work-at-home bookkeeper. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal. He found people for a living. Except that her cell phone was not only turned off, the battery had been removed. How would she know to do that? he wondered. Television? Some book on disappearing she found on the Internet?

  The next morning, sweating and rumpled, Virgil confronted his boss as he came through the front door.

  “What’s happened?” Chief Deputy Marshal Perry Edgar asked when he saw the fear in Quinn’s puffy, bloodshot eyes.

  “My wife and daughter are missing,” Virgil told him in a broken voice that Edgar had never heard from Quinn before.

  “Missing? Are you saying they were kidnapped?”

  Virgil’s hand slid across his hip pocket. Helen’s letter crinkled beneath his fingertips.

  “I don’t know,” Virgil said after a long pause.

  “Were there any signs of a struggle? A break-in?”

  “No, nothing. The house was neat and the security alarm had been set. Everything was normal except that they were both gone.”

  “Are any clothes or suitcases missing?”

  “I – I didn’t check. After calling the hospitals and the police I came down here and started running Helen’s phone and credit cards. There’s been no activity.”

  “No activity?” Edgar asked, knowing that was a bad sign. Most experienced crooks were smart enough not to kidnap someone and then put themselves on a security camera by using their credit card. “Was there a note?”

  “No,” Virgil said instantly. The Service would help him find a possibly kidnapped family but not one that had just fled, at least not until the court had issued a parental interference warrant and maybe not even then unless there was evidence that Helen had taken Nicole across state lines. “We need to find my family, Perry. We need to move fast.”

  Had they been kidnapped or had Quinn’s famously unhappy and possibly unstable wife just run off? Edgar wondered. Not that it made any difference. Without proof one way or the other they had to err on the side of caution.

  “OK, we’ll treat this as a possible assault on the family of a sworn officer. You and Janet do what you have to do. I want a report in two hours.”

  “Thanks boss.”

  “No one messes with our families. Hang in there, Virgil. We’ll find them.”

  That crazy bitch! Virgil thought. This is what I do for a living. Five or six hours, tops, and I’ll find them. But he didn’t. Not that day, or the next, or the next.

  * * *

  “Mom, I want to call dad,” Nicole insisted.

  “We can’t, sweetheart.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the bad men can track your phone.”

  “It would just be for a second.”

  “Your father wants us to be safe and that means not using our phones.”

  “We could use one of those phones at the 7-11 or buy a new one.”

  “No, Nicole. I explained all this to you.”

  “I don’t understand why we can’t just stop someplace and call dad. It would be really fast.”

  “Nicole, your father i
s a policeman. I told you he’s working undercover. He’s after some very bad men, dangerous men. I showed you the stories on the Internet about the drug cartels. Those are the men he’s after and they kill whole families. If we call him they’ll find out that he’s a policeman and they’ll kill him. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “No,” Nicole sniffled.

  “Of course not. And if they find out he’s a policeman they’ll come after us. Your father doesn’t want anything bad to happen to us. That’s why we have to disappear, so that the drug people can never, ever, ever find us. If they ever found us they’d use us to get to your father and after they killed him then they’d kill us too. Now do you understand.”

  “I suppose,” Nicole said but clearly she didn’t.

  “Listen to me, sweetie. The most important thing in the world to your father is catching criminals and to do that he needs us to be safe, to be where no one can ever, ever find us. We have to do this not only to protect ourselves but to protect him too. You don’t want anything to happen to him, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t want him to worry about us, do you?”

  “No.”

  “All right, now do you understand why you can’t call your father?”

  “But for how long? I mean some day he’ll catch them or whatever. How long until we can see him again?”

  Helen Quinn tightened her grip on the wheel and stared into the darkness.

  “I don’t know, Nicole. Maybe a long time.”

  “A year?”

  “No, longer than that.”

  “Two years?”

  “It will be longer than that, honey. A long time.”

  “How long?” Nicole asked with a little whine in her voice.