‘BIG FUCKING DEAL!’ shouted Suarez. ‘I’ll put you in a cage full of perverts so fast you won’t know if you got your pay docked or your GODDAMNED TAIL!’
Jeff glanced at the whip but the man just watched him steadily through lazy green eyes. It gave Jeff a little twinge of irritation that this guy never spoke. What was this? Bad Cop, Possibly-Even-Worse Cop? Fuck ’em both.
‘I don’t give a shit.’ He waved a finger at the screen. ‘That there is consenting between two adults. Lyle says anything different and he’s a fucking lying little queer.’
‘What about Chuck Zhong? Is he a lying little queer too? Huh?’
‘I never touched him.’
‘That’s not what he says.’
‘Then, yeah, he’s a lying little queer too. You got evidence? You got another tape? Then go fuck yourself. Both of you.’
The slim man stood up slowly and Jeff turned his attention to him. ‘Okay, here we go,’ he drawled. ‘Loud cop, dumb cop. I get it.’
The thin man barely looked at him. Instead he took a pad of Post-its from his pocket and peeled one off. Jeff’s eyes found the camera in the corner of the room bare seconds before the man reached up and covered the lens.
Jeff swallowed hard, suddenly not so sure he’d played this quite right.
The man wandered over to him, seemingly without focus, then punched him so hard in the nose that he fell backwards off the metal chair with a loud bang.
Jeff Bukelo’s size had generally spared him the indignity of being punched in the nose. He couldn’t remember the last time it had happened and for that he was suddenly very grateful. It hurt like a motherfucker.
Before he could properly appreciate that, the thin man grabbed him by the sideburns and yanked his head round to watch the TV. Jeff yelped and, in passing, caught a disturbing look from Suarez, which made it plain that he wasn’t going to come to his aid. He wasn’t going to stop the assault; wasn’t going to play Good Cop.
‘You think your wife’d like to see that tape, Jeff? You think your kids would? Little Marlee and Jeff Junior? You think “consenting adults” is gonna cut it for them? Do you?’ The man shook Jeff by the chops, making him howl.
‘I’ll sue you, you sonofawhore! I’ll see you kicked off the fucking force for this!’
The slim man started laughing and Suarez joined in.
‘Oh, yeah?’ said the man gripping Jeff Bukelo’s face. ‘You got a tape?’
29
NICHOLAS NICHOLAS SHOWED Suarez and Tom to the engineering office where Annette Lim had been killed.
‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’ said Suarez, not shouting.
Nicholas shrugged. ‘I had a few days off. Better to work, I think.’ He frowned around the office from the doorway.
Tom spoke to Nicholas without looking at him: ‘What’s your middle name?’
‘Hudson.’
Tom ducked low under the police tape stretched across the doorway. ‘Ah, well, two out of three ain’t bad.’
Nicholas Nicholas smiled a little.
Suarez struggled to bend double under the tape but couldn’t make it. ‘Fuck.’
‘You want I should cut that for you, Detective?’
‘Nah. I looked round before they taped it off. Let the fucking limbo kid have his turn.’
As he had in a heat-hazed half-barn half a world away from Irving, Texas, Tom skirted his objective as if a direct approach might scare it off. He’d seen it the moment Nicholas opened the door – the pad of certificates lying on the desk – and his heart had knocked against his ribs like it wanted out.
‘Is this how you found it?’ he asked Nicholas Nicholas.
‘Pretty much. ’Cept for the body, y’know.’
Tom and Suarez nodded almost unconsciously in sympathy.
Finally Tom moved to the pad.
‘Those them?’ Suarez said and Tom grunted back in the affirmative.
He leaned close to the pad as if clues might be written on the forms. Each one had space for a serial number in the top right-hand corner. Each one would eventually be stamped with the number of an approved WAE part as it rolled out of Quality Control.
Or not.
Not if it was stolen first. Then it could be matched to anything. Any cheap, low-grade Tonka-toy part from anywhere in the world.
And here was the beautiful thing: the paperwork was all that made that piece-of-shit part worth top dollar. Once the parts were papered, airline companies trusted that they had been manufactured to the highest standard. So a fan disc manufactured for a hundred and fifty dollars in a Shanghai sweatshop or a Rio slum would fetch three and a half thousand from Boeing or Airbus, on what was supposed to be one of the most tightly controlled and safest markets on the planet.
The part would look the same. It would feel the same. An experienced engineer would receive it from a reputable source and check the paperwork. Then he would place the fake part into the bowels of a passenger-jet engine and put a flag on the computer that it should be inspected every thousand cycles, replaced after twenty thousand.
And it would fail at twelve.
