Just as Yolanda walked through the door into reception, there was a knock on his own door. Carver immediately hit the escape command and the three screens returned to data flowcharts for three different server towers. He hadn’t heard the mantrap buzzer out in the control room but he wasn’t sure. Perhaps he had been concentrating so hard on Geneva that he had missed it.
“Yes?”
The door opened. It was only Stone. Carver became annoyed that he had killed his screens and that he was going to miss out on following Geneva.
“What is it, Freddy?” he asked impatiently.
“I wanted to ask you about vacation time,” Stone said loudly.
He entered and closed the door. He moved to the chair on the other side of the worktable from Carver and sat down without permission.
“Actually, fuck vacation time,” he said. “That was for the benefit of the guys out there. I want to talk about iron maidens. Over the weekend I think I found our next girl.”
Freddy Stone was twenty years younger than Carver. Carver had first noticed him while lurking under a different identity in an iron maiden chat room. He tried to trail him but Stone was too good for that. He disappeared into the digital mist.
Undaunted and only more intrigued, Carver set up a catch site called www.motherinirons.com, and sure enough, Stone eventually came through. This time Carver made direct contact and the dance began. Shocked by his young age, Carver nevertheless recruited him, changed his looks and identity, and mentored him.
Carver had saved him, but after four years Stone was too close for comfort, and at times Carver could not stand him. Freddy assumed too much. Like just coming in and sitting down without permission.
“Really,” Carver said, a note of disbelief placed intentionally in the word.
“You promised I could pick the next one, remember?” Stone responded.
Carver had made the promise, but it had come in the fervor of the moment. As they were on the 10 Freeway leaving the beach in Santa Monica, the windows open and the sea air blowing in their faces. He was still riding the high and he foolishly told his young disciple that he could pick the next one.
Now he would have to change that. He wished he could just go back to watching Geneva, maybe catch her changing that tampon in the restroom, and leave this inconvenience for later.
“Don’t you ever get tired of that song?” Stone asked.
“What?”
Carver realized he had started to hum again while thinking about Geneva. Embarrassed, he tried to move on.
“Who did you find?” he asked.
Stone smiled broadly and shook his head like he could hardly believe his good luck.
“This girl who has her own porn site. I’ll send you the link so you can check her out, but you’re going to like her. I looked at her tax returns. Last year she cleared two hundred eighty K just from people signing up for twenty-five bucks a month to watch her fuck people.”
“Where’d you find her?”
“Dewey and Bach, accountants. She got audited by something called the California Tax Franchise Board and they handled it. All her four-one-one is right there. Everything we need to set up. Then I went and checked her out on her website. Mandy For Ya dot com. She’s a stone fox with long legs. Just our type.”
Carver could feel the slight trill of anticipation in his dark fiber. But he wasn’t going to make a mistake.
“Where exactly in California?” he asked.
“Manhattan Beach,” Stone said.
Carver wanted to reach across the glass tabletop and whack Stone on the side of the head with one of the plasma screens.
“Do you know where Manhattan Beach is?” he asked instead.
“Isn’t it down by Lo Jolla and San Diego? Down there?”
Carver shook his head.
“First of all, it’s La Jolla. And no, Manhattan Beach is not near it, anyway. It’s by L.A. and not too far from Santa Monica. So forget her. We’re not going back there for a good long time. You know the rules.”
“But, Dub, she’s perfect! Plus, I already pulled files on her. L.A.’s a big place. Nobody in Santa Monica is going to care about what happens in Manhattan Beach.”
Carver shook his head emphatically.
“You can put the files right back. We just burned L.A. for at least three years. I don’t care who you find or how safe you think it is. I am not deviating from the protocol. And another thing. My name is Wesley, not Wes, and certainly not Dub.”
Stone looked down at the glass tabletop and seemed crushed.
“Tell you what,” Carver said. “I’ll go to work on it and I’ll find us someone. You wait and see and you’ll be very happy. I guarantee it.”
“But it was going to be my turn.”
Now Stone was pouting.
“You had your turn and you blew it,” Carver said. “Now it goes to me. So why don’t you go back out there and get to work. You still owe me status reports on towers eighty through eighty-five. I want them by the end of the day.”
“Whatever.”
“Go. And cheer up, Freddy. We’ll be on the hunt again before the end of the week.”
Stone stood up and turned toward the door. Carver watched him go, wondering how long it would be before he had to get rid of him. Permanently. Working with a partner was always preferable. But eventually all partners got too close and assumed too much. They started calling you by a name no one has ever used. They started thinking it was an equal partnership with equal voting rights. That was unacceptable and dangerous. One person called the shots. Himself.
“Close the door, please,” Carver said.
Stone did as instructed. Carver went back to the cameras. He quickly pulled up the camera over the reception area and saw Yolanda sitting behind the counter. Geneva was gone. Jumping from camera to camera he started searching for her.
FOUR: The Big Three-oh
By the time Sonny Lester and I left the apartment where Wanda Sessums lived, the projects were alive and busy. School was out and the drug dealers and their customers were up. The parking lots, playgrounds and burned-out lawns between the apartment buildings were becoming crowded with children and adults. The drug business here was a drive-through operation with an elaborate setup involving lookouts and handlers of all ages who would direct buyers through the maze of streets in the projects to a buy location that was continuously changed throughout the day. The government planners who designed and built the place had no idea they were creating a perfect environment for the cancer that would in one way or another destroy most of its inhabitants.
I knew all of this because I had ridden with South Bureau narcotics teams on more than one occasion while writing my semiannual updates on the local drug war.
As we crossed a lawn and approached Lester’s company car we moved with a heads-down-minding-our-own-business purpose. We just wanted to get out of Dodge. It wasn’t until we were almost right to the car that I saw the young man leaning against the driver’s door. He was wearing untied work boots, blue jeans dropped halfway down his blue-patterned boxer shorts and a spotless white T-shirt that almost glowed in the afternoon sun. It was the uniform of the Crips set, which ruled the projects. They were known as the BH set, which alternately meant Bounty Hunters or Blood Hunters, depending on who was spraying the paint.