“Amigo my ass!”
“Okay, but I still need information.”
“I thought you had snitches for that. Or did we kill them all?” Three front teeth were missing from the man’s wide grin.
“Now listen good,” said Bob. “I don’t have a lot of time, so here is my offer, probably the best one you’ll get in the course of your probably short life.”
“I ain’t saying a word to you, fucking asshole cop!”
“Oh but you will. Because I’m offering you the perfect incentive, which is a fancy word for carrot.Comprende?”
The man’s eyes flashed.
“I’m not threatening you with prison, I’m not threatening to beat you, I’m not threatening you with what will happen to your kid brother who’s doing time in MCF.”
“I don’t have no kid brother, you prick!”
“All I’m doing is offering you this.”
Bob tossed a bundle of something with an elastic band around it onto the dashboard. The man in the passenger seat stared at the long-dead general and president whose portrait adorned the fifty-dollar bill.
“There’s two thousand dollars there,” said Bob. “Go ahead and count it.”
The man looked at him with a well-ain’t-you-a-funny-guy look on his face, his jaws working furiously.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot, you’re in handcuffs,” said Bob.
The man worked his jaw a little more and then spat. A yellowish globule that coated the general’s serious face.
“If that’s a rejection then I’m going to ask you to think again,” said Bob. “You make three dollars an hour for getting shot at by gangs, robbed by customers, arrested by guys like me, and now I’m offering you this for what they’re gonna guess I got from you anyway. Because in five minutes’ time I’m going to drive you back there and drop you off without a mark on you, and I’ll be calling out a cheery ‘thank you’ as I drive away. I leave it up to you to work out what your buddies will think I’ve gotten out of you. And what the consequences will be.”
The man looked at Bob. He blinked as his brain tried to process what this asshole cop had just said to him. Bob waited.
“What d’you wanna know?” the man grunted.
“Tell me about Tomás Gomez.”
“Who?”
Bob sighed. “I didn’t exactly pick you because you’re the best-looking or the smartest, I picked you because you’re obviously the oldest. And maybe from south of the border. So dig around, go back a few years in your mind and recall Tomás Gomez. It’s not like you’re snitching on one of your own.”
“What would you know about that?”
“Gomez isn’t X-11 anymore. He bailed out, right?”
“There’s lots of people bail out, that don’t mean we snitch on them.”
“That brings us back to the two thousand, amigo.”
The man looked at the money on the dashboard. Bob waited. Let the gravitational pull of logic do its work. Finally the man gave a heavy sigh. “He came over from south of the border some years back. Called himself Lobo.”
“Wolf?”
“As in lone wolf. Kept to himself, a real loner. But he might just as well have called himself Loco. He didn’t say much, butrumor has it he’d worked for one of the cartels down there, killed a lot of people, the police put a price on his head. Gang boss didn’t believe none of it, I mean, Lobo was just a kid, so he gave him an Uzi and told him to go shoot some of the competition. Lobo went straight to a Black Wolves party, shot the whole thing up.”
“Hang on. You meantheLobo?”
“Well, I dunno, I only know one Lobo.”
