The Contractors Read online

  Dallas was brilliant gray, dull yellow, and darkly brittle, all at the same time. Fissured through with shiny glass and chrome plating.

  At night, the city glowed from the neon-covered bars and the artfully designed lights on the skyscrapers. In the day, she burned with a relentless heat from the near-tropical sun and the troubled energy of her inhabitants, the latter scorching those who got too close to the dark places, the secluded sections of town that made the city tick.

  I liked to think of myself as her jeweler, tasked with rooting out the imperfections, correcting the flaws. In rare moments, I recognized the problems inherent in this outlook: in order to do a proper job, shouldn’t I also clean the debris from my own psyche, polish the jagged edges of the empty spot at the core of my being? This, I was unable or unwilling to do. Sometimes, usually in periods of extreme stress, I wondered why.

  Piper and I helped Lisa into the backseat of the Tahoe that we’d left parked on a side street off of Harry Hines Boulevard, the main drag in Korea Town.

  The neighborhood was just inside the inner loop formed by LBJ Freeway, an edgy mix of blue-collar bars and Asian discount stores, places that sold off-brand perfume, leather goods, and cell-phone accessories. In any given block, you could find a meth dealer, a craps game, or a fake Louis Vuitton purse. Or a hooker.

  I drove to an all-night Hispanic grocery about a half mile south, across the street from a biker bar where my mom used to score weed back in the day.

  On the side of the building by the Dumpsters, I chased off a couple of winos and dug some change from my jeans.

  Pay phones were fewer and fewer in the cellular era, but if you dealt with Sinclair, you had to know their remaining locations. I dialed a series of digits from memory, hoping I got it right. Another by-product of the times: who remembers numbers anymore?

  A police car passed us, headed north. Rainwater feathered off the back tires.

  After three rings, a woman answered. She told me an address and then hung up.

  I got back in the Tahoe. The address was on the far east side of town near White Rock Lake, a quiet residential lane called Tranquilla Drive. No traffic this time of night, so we made good time, Piper dozing in the passenger seat.

  After about fifteen minutes, Lisa stirred, sat up.

  Piper woke at the sound and turned around. “You okay?”

  “Where are we?” The girl rubbed her face.

  “You’re going home,” I said.

  No response. In the rearview mirror, I could see her eyes get big. And scared.

  “You feeling all right?” Piper said.

  “Who are you guys?”

  “We were hired to get you out of that place,” I said.

  “My mom. Is she okay?”

  I shrugged, exited the freeway at Garland Road.

  “We don’t know anything about that.” Piper glanced at me, an eyebrow raised.

  “She’s got the lymphoma pretty bad.” Lisa stared out the window. After a few miles, she said, “I don’t want to go home. My stepdad’s such a jerk.”

  “Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Piper said. “We promise.”

  I started to say something but didn’t.

  My partner was writing checks we couldn’t cover. Our assignment was to get the girl out of the whorehouse, period.

  “I was on the street at about your age,” Piper said. “You thought it was gonna be better than what you left at home, didn’t you?”

  The girl made a sound like a sob but not quite.

  “Hard to say what’s worse.” Piper sighed. “The frying pan or the son of a bitch who’s stoking the fire.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “The street and places like that, uh, modeling studio.” Piper looked in the rear. “That’s no kind of life. You understand what I’m saying?”

  The girl didn’t reply. Piper smiled, reached over the seat and patted her knee. Then she turned back around.

  A few minutes later, I said, “You know a guy named Sinclair?”

  In the rearview mirror, the girl wiped her eyes and nodded.

  “He hired us,” Piper said.

  “He’s my mama’s cousin.” Lisa stared out the window as the night drifted by. “Takes care of us sometimes when the money gets tight.”

  I stopped at a light.

  “Are you gonna tell Mama about where you found me?” Lisa said.

  Piper shook her head. “That’s nobody’s business but yours.”

  But we will tell Sinclair about your stepdad, I thought. No sense putting you back in the same situation that caused the problem in the first place.

  “Don’t even know how I ended up at that place.” Lisa bit her lip. Her voice choked with emotion. “I just—I don’t know.”

  The light changed to green, and I pulled away as the girl began to cry again.

  - CHAPTER SIX -

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at the address.

  The street felt almost rural, no curbs or sidewalks but lots of trees towering over low-slung, ranch-style homes on half-acre lots. The cars in the driveways, sometimes a better demographic indicator than the homes themselves, were solidly middle class. Chevys and Hondas, Camrys and minivans.

  No lights on except at our destination.

  I parked in the driveway behind a Mercedes and two late-model Cadillacs, the only luxury vehicles on the block. Across the street sat a pair of Dallas police cars, empty and dark.

  We helped Lisa out and walked her up the sidewalk to the unlocked front door. Inside, a tiny entryway was between a dining room to the right and a small living area to the left. Both rooms were empty, outfitted in the finest furnishings that Sears had to offer circa 1975. The house felt like no one lived there but was occupied nonetheless.

  From the rear of the home, down a darkened hallway, came the sound of laughter and men talking amid the soft clink of poker chips. A faint odor of cigar smoke hung in the air.

  I glanced around, waited, and a few moments later a figure appeared from the shadows of the hall.

  One of Sinclair’s senior flunkies, a slab of gristle named Tommy, part of a motley assortment of lowlifes and ex-police officers usually a couple of hearings away from indictment.

  Tommy stunk of cop, the bad kind. He was in his early thirties, about six-five, and carried himself with the air of one who likes to slap around crack whores for fun. He wore Oakley sunglasses even inside, and sported a quarter-inch buzz haircut at odds with his bushy Fu Manchu mustache.

  I nodded hello but didn’t speak.

  He ignored me and Piper and stared at our passenger.

  “You must be Lisa,” he said. “They were worried about you.”

  Lisa took a half a step behind Piper but didn’t say anything.

  “Where’s Sinclair?” I said.

  “He’ll be along. What’s your rush?” He sauntered into the dining area and tapped on the door leading to the kitchen. His biceps and shoulders were ropy with muscles, straining the thin material of his Dallas Mavericks T-shirt.

  A haggard-looking woman in her forties stepped into the room, clutching a cell phone. She wore blue polyester pants and a platinum-colored wig, her face pale and unhealthy-looking.

  Lisa and the woman let out simultaneous cries of joy and ran to each other’s arms. After a few moments, they disappeared through the dining room into the kitchen, arm in arm, mother and daughter reunited.

  Tommy nodded and smiled. He ran a hand over his Fu Manchu mustache and dabbed the corner of his mouth with his tongue.

  Piper stood next to me, hands loose by her side but slightly raised, her guard not down even a little. Tommy had that effect on people.

  “You’re the find-it man.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Good at it, from what I see.”

  I shrugged. “It helps when you know the address where to look.”

  “What about you?” He leered at Piper. “You good at anything special?”

  Before she could answer, our employer for the evening emerged from the rear of the
house.

  Sinclair was in his early sixties with thick mutton chops and a Johnny Cash pompadour dyed the color of original sin, an inky black. A mustache of the same hue but as thin as a piece of string grew just above his upper lip.

  “Hear you gave ole Chung Hee a nice little tune-up.” He held out an envelope. “I oughta deduct some for his dental work.”

  The accent was Texas trailer park, as thick as a slab of smoked brisket.

  He wore an XXXL beige guayabera shirt that was stretched tight across his girth, shiny gray gabardine trousers, and lizard skin boots with pointy toes.

  “The first time you’ve ever paid full retail.” I grabbed the package, tossed it to Piper. “And now you want to renegotiate the fee.”

  Sinclair was a notorious tightwad. The amount he’d offered seemed high. We should have expected this.

  “Never mind.” He crossed his arms over his gut. “Money ain’t no object when it comes to family.”

  Tommy licked his mustache and stared at Piper.

  “It’s all there.” She handed me the envelope.

  I sat down at the table, put the packet of cash in front of me.

  “You expecting dinner?” Sinclair said.

  “Up yours, fat man.” Piper moved to a corner of the room, a good vantage point to keep an eye on both entrances and Tommy.

  “The mouth on this one.” Sinclair sat across from me, shook his head.

  Tommy stood motionless with his back to the wall, eyes half closed like he was dozing.

  “About tonight,” I said. “You didn’t tell us everything.”

  “Like what?” Sinclair pulled a thin cigar with a plastic tip from his pocket and stuck it between his lips.

  “Like you’re the bagman for that part of town,” Piper said.

  “I got a lot of business interests that don’t concern you.” He lit the cigar with a battered Zippo. “Puts food on the table.”

  “You could have gotten her yourself,” I said.

  “Chung Hee knows my guys.” Sinclair leaned back in his chair. “What are you complaining for? You got paid.”

  I paused for a moment, trying for a little dramatic effect, and then stuck the money in my pocket. “Don’t jack us over the details like that again.”

  Sinclair could best be described as a snake, except that was unfair to the reptiles of this world. He needed a mild rebuke every now and again in order to keep his fangs in check.

  “Or what?” Sinclair chuckled. “You’ll quit bugging me for piecemeal jobs?”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither Piper nor I wanted to do assignments for Sinclair, lying with dogs and fleas and all that. But you have to eat and pay the bills.

  “Speaking of jobs,” he said, “you remember that warehouse I told you about?”

  Sinclair liked to pass on information from time to time in regard to our regular gig. His endgame was always unclear and something I never wanted to know too much about. But the intel he produced was always first-rate.

  I nodded.

  “Word on the street is it’s gonna be up and running pretty soon.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “We’ve got that covered.”

  The warehouse, a way station for contraband, was in our sights already. It was something Sinclair and I both wanted taken out, though for different reasons I suspected. Piper and I were just waiting for confirmation on when it would be operational.

  “You sure?” Sinclair said.

  “Positive.”

  People loved to talk, especially when the right leverage was applied. The warehouse was as much of a lock as anything could ever be in our world.

  Sinclair smiled for the first time that night.

  Footsteps from the hallway.

  We all looked up as two uniformed Dallas police officers stopped in the doorway between the foyer and the dining room. Sinclair stood and greeted them. They looked familiar, but both made a point of not noticing me.

  Sinclair pulled another envelope from underneath his shirt and gave it to the older of the two cops. “A little something for the coffee pot back at the station house.”

  “Thanks, Captain.” The officer touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger.

  After the two policemen had left, Piper said, “You still on the job?”

  “Not no more. But once blue, always blue.” He stuck the cigar back in his mouth and looked at me. “How’s your daddy doing, Jon?”

  Nobody spoke for a few moments, an awkward silence.

  “Damn shame how that all played out.” Sinclair shifted the smoke from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Give him my best. He was a good sheriff, a lawman’s lawman.”

  I nodded, not speaking.

  Damn shame was one way to put it.

  Sheriffs were elected in Texas, and ten years ago a half kilo of cocaine turned up in the trunk of my old man’s squad car a month before the election, an obvious plant.

  His long and venerated career in law enforcement kept him from prison, but his days in law enforcement were over, a fact he accepted with his usual stoicism. Underneath his weathered features, the pain was evident to those who knew him, the damaged reputation, the loss of the only occupation he’d ever held, the only thing that mattered. He’d known all along that the job generated enemies, political opponents and others with a vested interest in seeing certain laws enforced in a certain way. He just never imagined they would go that far.

  “Let’s get.” Piper grabbed my arm, propelled me toward the door.

  “Wait.” Sinclair came up behind us, carrying a shoe box. He handed it to me. Tommy had moved into the hallway as well, watching us depart.

  I opened the container and saw a gray plastic device that looked like a radar gun, a pistol grip attached to a tube about the size of a potato chip canister.

  The muzzle end had a dish antenna about three inches in diameter. The body had a keypad on top with an LCD screen on the rear, canted at an angle for comfortable reading. Scorch marks ran along one side of the tube. The box smelled like a house fire, acrid and toxic.

  “One of my boys found this,” he said. “Along with some other stuff.”

  “What is it?” Piper said.

  “Beats me.” He shook his head. “But I don’t want nothing electronic like that.”

  Sinclair didn’t own a cell phone or a computer. Didn’t email. He used pay phones, safe houses, and cutout men to conduct his business, relying on blood kin as intermediaries more often than not.

  “Why’re you giving it to me?” I said.

  “I thought maybe you could sell it.” He shrugged. “I’ll take a cut of course.”

  Piper and I weren’t fences. We did have certain connections to the federal law enforcement community, direct lines to people who might pay a reward to get something like this—whatever it was—off the street.

  “Whatever you do with it,” he said, “I wouldn’t go turning it on.”

  “It’s a cold day on the Redneck Riviera when I give you a cut of anything.” I tucked the box under my arm.

  Sinclair shrugged. “Can’t blame a body for trying.”

  “You know why the girl ran away?” I nodded toward the kitchen where Lisa had gone with her mother.

  Sinclair didn’t answer.

  “The stepdad. Not a good situation.”

  “Never liked that son of a bitch.” Sinclair shook his head. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

  I opened the door. Piper followed me out. Back in the Tahoe, I started the engine and stared at the dim lights of Sinclair’s poker house. The rain started again, a hard drizzle, tiny pellets tapping on the hood of the SUV.

  “We gonna sit here all night?” Piper said.

  I blinked, erased from my imagination what I had hoped to see, a fourteen-year-old girl with a freshly washed face peering outside.

  Instead, Tommy and his bushy Fu Manchu mustache appeared. He stared into the rainy night for a few moments before he shut the curtains. The light went out in the kitchen
, and the rain fell harder.

  I put the transmission in gear and drove away.

  - CHAPTER SEVEN -

  Sinclair locked the dead bolt on the front door after the last player left.

  The rain had slackened, now just a humid mist that blanketed the city. The darkness promised a hot day when the sun rose, the moisture baking from the damp ground, a dirty, smog-filled steam bath. The month of August made Dallas her bitch, and everybody suffered.

  Nobody was left in the house on Tranquilla Drive but a handful of his guards straightening things up and his number two man, Tommy, ridiculous looking in that stupid mustache he insisted on wearing.

  Lisa and her mother had been driven home by a uniformed officer, one who owed his continued employment with the Dallas police to the long reach of retired Captain Sinclair. The officer had been given instructions—if Lisa’s stepdad was there, feel free to use the billy club.

  Sinclair scooped up a stray beer bottle from the floor, tossed it in the garbage.

  The city was a gambler’s town, built upon the fruits of oil and real estate, two legal, socially sanctioned forms of wagering. Dallas possessed the soul of a showgirl leering over a roulette wheel, waiting to see what turn lady luck would bring.

  On any given night there were hundreds of poker tables operating somewhere in the city. Dollar-ante, bring-your-own-malt-liquor games in South Dallas. Soul-patch-wearing hipsters in Uptown, drinking Belgian ale as they sweated the river card on a twenty-buck pot.

  The unoccupied but tidy brick home on Tranquilla Drive housed one of about a dozen games Sinclair ran on a weekly basis. Not his most profitable, not his least. The Tranquilla tables were his lowest profile, thus where he spent a lot of time.

  He lumbered into the counting room, a bedroom off the kitchen with blackout drapes on the windows and a set of monitors on one wall that showed the surrounding yard and street.

  Tommy followed him and stood against the wall, his usual position for the night’s count.

  A table and a single chair sat in the middle of the room. The furniture had no drawers, no places to hide anything. In the middle of the table sat a pile of rumpled currency, the house cut for the evening. Sinclair locked the door. He sat down and began to sort the money, entering coded notations on a yellow pad.