Welcome to book fifteen in the Operation Quickline series. Christmas may be Lisa Wycherly’s favorite time of the year, but then Sid’s shocking encounter with an old friend gets them embroiled in one messy case. With Lisa’s nephew spiraling out of control, it’s looking like a not-so-merry holiday. You can read the latest chapter here, and follow the whole series here.
Lisa’s Voice
That morning, at breakfast, we were interrupted by loud honking from the driveway. Sid looked worried for a second, then realized it was the Twelfth of December. Nick, Darby, and I hurried out to the front of the house, where Josh Sandoval stood outside his car. Sid followed us. As soon as the four of us were gathered outside, Josh sang Las Mañanitas loudly, and Nick, Darby, and I sort of joined in. Well, Nick and Darby did okay. My Spanish pretty much sucks.
The Twelfth is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and singing Las Mañanitas, even though it is generally a birthday song, is part of the festivities. I went over to Josh and gave him a big hug and kiss on the side of his head.
“Hey, sweetie, I’ll call your mom, but would you give her a heads up that there’s a family trip to Beverly Center happening today?” I grinned at him.
Josh’s eyes lit up. “Beverly Center? Hell, yeah.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “Hopefully, we’ll see you this afternoon.”
I was looking forward to seeing Lety and Reuben later that day. Lety is part of the poker group and a wonderful friend. Reuben and Sid have bonded as well. And Josh, Nick, and Darby are all best friends.
I called Lety a little bit later. She wanted to meet Mae, Mama, and me around two that afternoon. She would try to get her husband, Reuben, and Josh’s younger brothers to join us around four-thirty or five, especially since they’d have to leave at six-thirty to go to Lety’s mother’s house for the last night of the Novena to the Virgin and party. While Justin and Kyle hate shopping, they do like arcades and malls, and anything connected to Sid’s and my families.
So, I was in a nice, contented place when I got to the office, pulled open Quackenbush, and dove in. Until the phone rang again. It was Sid’s morning for the phone, so I ignored it until he cursed.
“What?” I asked, almost silently.
Sid waved me off for the moment.
“Uh-huh… That doesn’t make any sense… Alright. Thanks for letting us know… Don’t worry about that part. We’re on high alert here… Okay. Thanks. We’ll talk to you later.”
He hung up.
“What’s going on?” I asked even as the receiver hit the phone base.
“That was Angelique.” Sid took a deep breath. “Peter Venkt was found smothered in his bed at the hospital this morning.”
“What?” I almost leaped out of my desk chair. “Could it have been Louis?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him, but Ange doesn’t think so. Harlan Cobb was seen at the hospital around four-thirty that morning, although it doesn’t make sense that he’d have killed his partner.”
“Unless Venkt was trying to get out without sharing their loot.”
Sid shrugged. “That may be.”
I sat back as another thought hit me. “I know I didn’t kill him, but I feel as though I set Venkt up to be killed.”
“I’m not surprised.” Sid got up and came around to my desk, and pulled me into his arms. “You stopped him without killing him. That’s a lot, sweetheart, and we know plenty of people who would have killed him without blinking.”
“I know.” I swallowed as my eyes filled. “And there’s no way I could have foreseen someone smothering him in his hospital bed. Still, it just feels awful.”
“Of course it does. That’s because you are a good person and you care, and that’s one of many reasons why I love you so much.”
I pressed my lips together, then undid his belt buckle.
Sid squeezed me gently, then so softly, tenderly, pressed his lips to the old knife scar I had on my forehead, just below my hairline.
“I’ll shut the door,” he said. “Do you want a glass of water?”
I nodded, and he got it from the office bathroom.
Sid and I do come in for a fair amount of justified teasing because we really love having sex together, and we can be pretty uninhibited, let alone noisy. But there are times when our lovemaking is not about the joy, but about the violence we encounter. Making love is our antidote to that violence. As Dr. Heilland explained it some years before, making love, for us, is the most life-giving thing we do. So, loving each other physically helps counteract that horrible feeling when someone dies because of our actions.
Earlier that year, I had killed somebody. It was one of those situations where there was no time to aim, let alone think. Sid and I were up all that night, making love over and over again.
Fortunately, I wasn’t in quite that bad a shape that morning. After all, I hadn’t killed Venkt. As Sid had pointed out, I had actively avoided it. But it was bad enough and close enough to that last incident that my stomach was still roiling a little as we cleaned up. Sid offered to let me go with him to his appointment with Dr. Heilland.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ve got lunch and then shopping with Mama and Mae. That’s life-giving, too. See you at the Beverly Center food court at six-thirty?”
Sid thought. “I should be able to make it then. I’ll see if Stella and Sy want to come, too.”
“That sounds like fun.”
Sid headed off to the psychologist’s office, and I did some reading before I had to leave to meet Mae and Mama.
Mae noticed right away that I was off and asked about it as we perused the menus at the restaurant. It was one of those oak and brass places that featured overpriced drinks and the same dishes everyone else did.
“Uh, someone I know died,” I said. “No one close. It’s just sad, is all.”
“It’s always sad when someone dies during the holidays,” Mama said, then patted my hand. “I know you’re feeling bad, but maybe a little distraction will help. Do we want to have some of those baked potato skins as an appetizer?”
“Sounds terrific.” I put on a grin.
Mae’s eyes lingered on me for a second before she agreed.
It was a lovely afternoon and evening. Mama made a point of getting new Christmas pajamas for all the kids, since they’d all grown out of the ones Grandma Caulfield had gotten everyone the year before. Lety caught up with us at two, and by three, Nick, Darby, and Josh had joined us. Around five-thirty, Reuben and Josh’s brothers met us at the food court, and we began staking out a group of tables, just in time for Neil and the rest of his kids and Daddy to arrive. Sid had Sy and Stella with him when he showed at six-thirty. Lissy saw her uncle and ran to him.
“Unka Sid! Unka Sid!”
“Hey, Lissy.” Laughing, Sid scooped her into his arms and picked her up.
He gave my niece Janey a quick one-armed hug and kiss, bussed me, then stood chatting with Reuben as Lissy snuggled into him.
“Oh, my god!” screeched a female voice. “Is that you, Sid Hackbirn?”
Sid’s smile got rather tight as two women with highlighted and gelled hair, designer handbags, and faux jeweled belts holding in their full tops, came walking up.
“Hey, ladies.”
“It is you, Sid. Can you believe it, Sherry?”
Sherry’s chuckle was significantly deeper than her friend’s voice. “Look at you. With a baby, of all things.”
Lissy buried her face into Sid’s shoulder.
“She’s my niece,” Sid said.
The first woman looked over our group, not only missing me, but somehow not seeing Nick or Stella, either.
“Still,” the first woman said. “What did that woman do to you?”
“What woman?” Sid looked puzzled.
“That little ice cube you married.”
“Ice cube?” Neil sniggered, and Mae backhanded him.
“Or did we get lucky and that ended?”
Sid rolled his eyes. “It’s not going to end.” He looked over at me. “What she did to me was make me deliriously happy for the first time in my life.” He smiled at the ladies as if to suggest that they’d done anything but.
“Come on, Sherry.”
The two stalked off.
“Sorry about that,” Sid said, shifting Lissy.
“Apart from your former bad taste, I see nothing to be sorry for,” said Stella.
“It’s like you’ve always said, Sid, honey,” Mama said. “You gave up sleeping around because it wasn’t doing anything for you. And I can see why now.”
I was a little surprised by Mama. She usually pretended that Sid had been as pure as I was when I’d met him. But then I saw the thoughtful look on Darby’s face and suddenly got it.
Josh, however, was glaring at his mother.
“Do I have to go?” he asked.
“Reuben, we’ve got to leave,” Lety said. “Mamí will be mad if we’re late.”
“What about Josh?” Reuben asked. He’s as tall as his wife is short, as calm as she’s constantly in motion.
Lety turned to her son. “Your abuelita. She wants to see you.”
“But Tío Alfonso will be there.” Josh looked miserable.
Josh’s uncle was determined to make Josh a real man. Now, Josh could and usually did act straight, especially at the all-boys high school he went to. But it was tiring for him, and around his family, he sometimes relaxed, and Alfonso was horrified.
Reuben looked at Lety. “Let him off the hook this time. He and Alfonso can beat each other up on Christmas Day.”
“Alright.” Lety hugged her son. “Justin, Kyle, come on.”
The younger boys shuffled off.
Reuben and Lety are very supportive of Josh. So, it might seem odd that they’d sent their probably gay son to an all-boys high school. But Reuben says that Josh is going to have to learn how to function in that kind of world, anyway, and Josh wanted to go where Nick was going. What sold the school, though, was the spring before the boys graduated from middle school, Sid got both Josh and Darby enrolled at the martial arts dojo where we go to learn how to defend themselves. So, while all three of our boys do get some teasing, between Darby’s violin, Josh’s love of acting, and Nick being a dyed-in-the-wool nerd, they haven’t gotten beaten up because the first time a group tried, the attackers were soundly thrashed.
The evening was very relaxing and did a lot to help me get over my morning’s angst. Which was why we felt utterly blindsided when we got home to a ringing telephone, and it was Kathy.
She was in tears.
“It’s Jesse,” she told us over the speakerphone in the office. “He was coming home this afternoon from his grandma’s place and got pulled over on Wilshire. The cops found four ounces of cocaine in the trunk of his car.”
“Oh, my god,” I gasped.
“Has he been booked?” Sid asked.
“No. They’re holding him for questioning,” Kathy said. “At least, that’s what the lawyer I got says. Jesse won’t talk without the lawyer there, but the cops are saying that they have to wait for some FBI agents who want to talk to him.”
Even I cursed. “At least, they’re just holding him for questioning.”
“It’s L.A.P.D.” Kathy snarled.
She had a point. The thing is, if you’re White in this area, stuff does not happen to you. If you’re Black, it happens all the time. Worse yet, there were decent odds Jesse had already gotten knocked around.
“Better start hoping they keep holding him for questioning,” Sid said. “If they run fingerprints on him, his cover is blown as an operative. The cops generally keep that stuff quiet, but with the Feds we’re dealing with…”
Kathy cursed.
“I need to make a couple of phone calls,” Sid said. “Who’s the lawyer you got?”
Kathy told him, and Sid said there might be a better option, but that he’d see to it that whoever would work with the lawyer Kathy had.
“Kathy, do you want me or Sid to go over there?” I asked.
She sighed. “No. I’m not even at home. I’m at Estelle’s.” Estelle is Kathy’s sister.
“Do you want us to take Keshon?”
“Oh, God, have mercy, no. I need my baby.” Kathy’s voice trembled, and it was so very frightening.
“Look, we know the coke wasn’t Jesse’s,” I said. “We’ll try to figure out how it got into his car. Okay? It’s going to be fine.”
Kathy took a deep breath. “I know, Lisa. I’m just glad we got you guys.”
“Just be glad you guys are part of our operation,” Sid growled. “That will save his ass, if nothing else.”
We hung up after I reminded Kathy that I’d be praying for her and Jesse. Sid called Lillian and even called Dale O’Connor, which is saying a lot because Sid does not like Dale.
“Dale says it’s on ice.” Sid frowned as he hung up the phone.
“But why did they target Jesse?” I asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Sid’s mind was somewhere else. “I may not know why, but I’m willing to bet I know when.”
“What do you mean?”
Sid went to one of our file cabinets, unlocked it, and pulled out a file.
“This.” He tossed the file of photos onto my desk, then sorted through the pictures. “Here it is. I wasn’t sure what to make of it when I first saw it, but now I do.”
The photo was of Special Agent Bruce Whitemore standing next to Jesse’s car.
“I don’t know why he stashed the drugs in Jesse’s car,” Sid said. “But I’ll put up some serious money that he did for some reason.”
“Why not?” I asked. “He’d have to figure that Jesse would get pulled over at some point. But why attack Jesse? He and Kathy arrived with a freaking toddler in tow. Why would they think Jesse was up to something?”
Alas, we found out why the next day, but not before we found we had a similar problem.
The thing is, we have a great drug-sniffing dog. Not Bowser. Bowser isn’t good for much besides looking cute and helping you feel good because you’re petting his belly. Motley, on the other hand, had been trained to find cocaine by his previous owner. About a year and a half ago, Sid and I worked a case where several illegal substances turned up. Motley had gotten a workout but proved he had not lost his drug-sniffing skills one iota.
That Wednesday morning, as the four of us humans and two dogs left the house to go running, Motley whined and ran up to Darby’s car in the driveway. We called him off and did our run. But when we came back, Sid glanced at me and chivvied Nick and Darby into the house with Bowser on their heels. Motley ran up to Darby’s car, sniffed it, then whined and pawed at the back driver’s side door. I winced. I didn’t have any lockpicks on me.
I went inside, got Sid on the intercom, and asked him to get breakfast ready. The lockpicks I retrieved from the office. I was in and out of Darby’s car in an instant, with a small plastic bag of some white powder in my hand.
“What the…” Sid groaned when he saw it.
The boys had been sent safely (we hoped) off to school in their individual cars since Darby would be at Stella’s and Sy’s music school after school, and Nick would (again, hopefully) return to the house.
“They’re targeting us,” I said. “Which makes a little bit of sense. They knew that Louis was connecting with his old friends.”
“But how?” Sid looked at the plastic bag with horror.
“Honey, if I knew that, we’d have the case broken.”
“I know.” Sid groaned. “This is ridiculous. What can they think is to be gotten from chasing down Loser’s friends?”
“Apart from setting Louis up?” I did add a bit of emphasis to Louis’ name. Sid did not, alas, notice.
Sid shook his head. “Even odds Loser is setting those bastards up to serve his own purposes.”
“And, as you have pointed out to me more than once, does it make that much of a difference?”
The doorbell rang. I did not recognize the man on the doorstep that our video camera showed us, but Sid did. He was a tall man with full shoulders and an attitude.
Sid let him in and started the conversation in the hall, presumably with whatever codewords were appropriate.
“Well?” Sid asked as he led our visitor into the office.
“You’ve obviously guessed I’m not just a former Special Forces guy,” said the man. He had medium brown hair and was wearing an expensive suit. He reached out to shake Sid’s hand, and I saw a tattoo on the back of his wrist.
“And you’ve figured out I’m not just a freelance writer and veteran.” Sid smiled at him.
“But my name really is Zack Peters.” The man laughed. “Your crew member has been safely sprung from jail with no charges. There were threats of a suit for false arrest. Neither Cobb nor Whitemore came in to question him, so I’m guessing they hung him out to dry just for the fun of it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Those bastards do it all the time.” Peters rolled his eyes. “They see a Black guy someplace they don’t think he should be, they plant some drugs in his car, and just wait. He’s Black, he’ll get pulled over sooner or later, and usually searched, legally or not. If Cobb had been trying to bring your friend down for some reason, they’d have put an APB out on the car. The only reason L.A.P.D. knew to hold him for questioning was that Whitemore usually likes to know when one of his victims has been brought in.”
I groaned. “That is disgusting.”
Sadly, however, it was not that surprising. Sid and I live in Beverly Hills, and our stupid neighbors are so prone to calling the cops when Jesse and Kathy come to visit that Beverly Hills P.D. knows them and knows to leave them alone.
Sid looked Peters over. “And how do you know all this?”
“A mutual friend of ours.” Peters chuckled. “He and I have been trying to get these guys since Vietnam. We’ve had to tread pretty damn softly. Cobb’s connections are significant.”
“So, why now?” I asked. “You’ve had almost twenty years since the war ended.”
“Yeah. Twenty years for the resentment to build. Twenty years to piss off a lot of people.” Peters grinned. “Eventually, that sort of thing is going to come back and bite you in the ass.”
Sid shrugged. “We’ve been told that the people who have been protecting them are getting fed up.”
“And how.” Peters’ eyes swept over the office. “Besides, they’ve almost disrupted one of our operations. I don’t know why our mutual friend thinks you guys are so damned important, but he is not happy.”
“I’m told we get the job done,” I said.
“Yeah.” Peters’ grin seemed jovial, but something was just a hair off being sincere.
“Which mutual friend?” Sid’s smile was also jovial, but also a couple hairs off sincere, although I suspect I was about the only person who would have noticed.
“I believe you knew him as Colonel Landry.”
I couldn’t help wondering if Peters knew Landry’s real name, and if he did, why wasn’t he using it? Sid and I did know Landry’s real name, which was Congressman Dale O’Connor. There’s a reason why Sid has a serious grudge against him, and it’s not just because O’Connor is a full-of-himself, sexist asshole. O’Connor blackmailed Sid into intelligence work back when Sid was in boot camp. Then, when Sid was discharged from the Army, O’Connor sucked him right back into intelligence work, this time as part of Quickline. Both times, O’Connor used the alias Colonel Landry. Sid didn’t find out his real name until 1985, when we were working on another case that O’Connor was part of.
“I do know him,” Sid said.
Okay, both of us had our best poker faces on and were watching even the least tic in Peters’ face. That Sid had used the present tense did not get past Peters.
I smiled. “Look, if we’re all trying to achieve the same end, maybe we should share information.”
Sid looked at Peters. “What gets me is why these guys didn’t cut bait and run like hell weeks ago. They have to have known their protection was weakening.”
“That’s a good question.” Peters sighed. “There’s no question that Cobb has gotten cocky. Twenty-plus years of getting away with murder can do that to you. On the other hand, I think that’s why Cobb iced Venkt. He didn’t want to take a chance on Venkt talking.”
“Venkt wasn’t under arrest,” I said. “As I understand it, the police thought Cobb and Whitemore were legit and that the warehouse was part of regular FBI operations.”
Peters shrugged. “Maybe Venkt was waffling. Maybe Cobb doesn’t want to share. Does it really matter?”
“It might,” said Sid. “Especially if you want to pin Venkt’s murder on the right person.”
Peters’ eyes narrowed as he looked at Sid. “If you’re worried about your buddy Renfrew, I have no idea how he got involved in all this, but I have evidence that he was solidly alibied for Venkt. He’s one lucky SOB that way. Trust me, I was looking at him for that one.”
“That’s good to know,” said Sid. “So, how do we stay in touch with you? To share information and all that.”
“I’ll be around,” Peters said. “But there’s always our mutual friend.”
“Okay. Well, you know where to find us.” Sid smiled.
He escorted Peters out of the house. I looked at Sid as he came back into the office.
“Do you trust him?” I asked.
“About as far as I can throw him.”
I winced. “That’s probably pretty far.”
Sid looked at me, then laughed. “How about as far as I trust Loser.”
“In other words, not very far at all.”
“No.”
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.