‘It seems the thefts from the plant were to order, and had been ongoing for quite some time. Years.’
‘Theft of what?’ Tom butted in again impatiently.
Lumsden looked uncertain, as if he was suddenly worried the cards he held might not take the pot after all.
He cleared his throat tightly. ‘Paperwork.’
Suarez threw up his arms and almost laughed. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me! He wants a deal on a cold-blooded murder and all he’s got to offer in return is fucking paperwork?’ He drew breath to pour further scorn on the deal, then stopped abruptly and looked at Tom, whose eyes had suddenly become quite feral, like those of a wildcat that’s spotted its prey.
‘Paperwork,’ said Tom, softly.
*
While Suarez and Tom were following Lumsden’s three-year-old Mazda towards Dallas and Chuck Zhong, that same Chuck Zhong was being summoned from his cell.
‘Zhong. Visitor.’ The guard pronounced it ‘Zong’. Chuck was used to it. He got up with a sigh and went to meet his parents.
But it wasn’t his parents.
It was the man with the gun and the bad skin. He was sitting on the other side of the polycarbonate barrier on the nasty hard-backed chairs they provided – like visitors deserved punishing, too, by association.
Of course, he didn’t have a gun right now, but Chuck still stopped dead and stared when he saw him. The guard gave him a nudge between the shoulder-blades to get him going again.
Chuck felt goose-bumps flare on his chilled skin as he sat down. It took him a half a minute to get up the guts to look the man in the eyes and pick up the phone.
The man slowly picked up his phone but said nothing.
‘Hi,’ Chuck said stupidly, like they were buds.
The man’s eyes were dark and cold.
‘I wanted to show you an old friend,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ said Chuck, nervously – as if the guy needed his permission.
Without looking away from Chuck, the man reached into his pocket and brought out a photograph. He pressed it against the barrier with his big hand and Chuck cocked his head to look at it.
For a second he couldn’t quite make it out.
When he did, he felt his bladder convulse and struggled against the urge to piss himself again.
The photo was of Lyle – Lyle of the Suzuki 4 × 4; Lyle who had serviced Jeff Bukelo before him; Lyle who’d almost cried when he’d lost his job.
Not to mention his life.
Lyle was naked in the picture. Naked and bloody from the jagged barbed wire that dug into his flesh as it bound his wrists together, his arms to his torso, his knees and ankles to each other.
There was a bloody pulp where his penis had once been and Chuck felt a sick pull to explore with his eyes where it might be now …
‘He had a big mouth,’ said the man, and Chuck had the answer to any question he might have had.
And that’s why, by the time Tom Patrick, Charles Lumsden and Ronaldo Suarez reached the TDJC facility at Hutchins, Dallas, the deal was already dead.
28
JEFF BUKELO LOOKED at Ronaldo Suarez and felt superior. It wasn’t a rare feeling for him, but usually he felt superior because of the power he wielded, like a stick, over others: his mousy wife, his two cowed children, his security-booth colleagues. But Suarez made Jeff feel superior because he was much, much fatter than him.
Jeff was a good size himself, with a beer gut that spilled over his work pants, but he always told himself that his weight helped him to dominate others, which it pretty much did. But this cop was a fucking barrel of fat, and that made Jeff feel pretty damned good about his own relatively svelte figure.
Of course, he’d have felt even better about it if the cop hadn’t brought along a sidekick, who was as thin as a goddamned whip, but you couldn’t have everything in life – nice though that might have been.
Jeff appraised Suarez – and the other one whose name he’d already forgotten. His piggy little eyes shone with low cunning. He figured he was ahead of this particular game. He could smell desperation on the detective.
Suarez hit play on a bulky old police DVD and Jeff watched Lyle’s head bobbing in his lap.
‘Recognize THIS?’
Jeff saw the slim man blink defensively. Seemed Suarez’s interview technique was to batter a suspect into submission with sheer volume.
He shrugged. ‘Jealous?’
‘Yeah,’ the fat man said unexpectedly, ‘I wish my wife was that good.’
‘So? Divorce her.’
‘What say we ignore the sexual-assault charge and you tell us WHAT they were stealing and WHO FOR?’
Jeff jabbed a forefinger at the television. ‘I already got my pay docked for that!’
