Free The Watchman by Robert Crais Page A

entry in the NCIC report Pike had given him was dated six years ago, and ended with the notice that Meesh had fled the country and was currently believed to be living in Bogotá, Colombia. Absent for six years, Meesh was old news.
    Reading the NCIC brief was like reading the
TV Guide
version of a twenty-year criminal career. An expanded version including photographs, fingerprints, and even DNA could be had by special request, but the shorthand version told the tale with a chronological list of crimes, convictions, incarcerations, descriptions, associates, and warrants.
    Meesh was a peach. He had been indicted on two counts of first-degree murder, seven counts of conspiracy to commit murder, and sixteen counts of racketeering, all in Colorado. Meesh, who oversaw several hijacking crews, had murdered a truck driver and his wife in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Meesh believed the driver had double-crossed him by laying off a load of flat-screen TVs to a rival hijacking crew. Attempting to recover the flat-screens, Meesh poured hot cooking grease on the driver’s wife. Not just once, but repeatedly during a twenty-four-hour torture session. Then he went to work on the driver. Witnesses to the event claimed Meesh wanted the other crews in the area to understand he owned the roads.
    Cole reread that part, then studied the hawk. Hawks probably didn’t pour boiling grease on other hawks. Cole considered his cat. It was staring down through the slats into the canyon. He wondered if the cat and the hawk were searching for the same thing.
    “Hey, buddy.”
    The cat came over and head-bumped his hand. Petting the cat made it easier to forget about things like deep-fried flesh.
    Cole returned to the file. Nothing explained how a homegrown criminal from Denver had become a financial player for a group of South American drug lords, but Cole didn’t care. He wanted to find Meesh, and Meesh wasn’t in South America. He was in L.A.
    All criminal histories listed people with whom the subject was known to associate, including friends, family members, and gang affiliates. Cole had hoped to find a known associate in Los Angeles, but the names, like Meesh’s arrests, were all based in Denver. It was possible one of Meesh’s friends had moved to L.A. during the intervening six years, but Cole wouldn’t know until he checked. The odds were slim, but now he set about listing the names from Colorado. Later, he would see if any of those people had connections in Los Angeles, and work backward to find Meesh.
    Cole was making the list when a flick of grey dropped from the sky. Cole glanced up, smiling. He wanted to see what the hawk had caught, but that’s when his doorbell rang. His first thought was that Alex Meesh had come to burn him with bacon grease, but Cole was given to wild imaginings. He limped to the front door with his pistol and peered through the peephole.
    Two men stared back at him, their faces distorted by the fish-eye lens. They didn’t look like bacon-grease killers. The man in front had a golfer’s tan and short brown hair. He was wearing a brown sport coat that looked out of place in the L.A. summer, especially at seven A. M. The man behind him was taller and black, wearing a blue seersucker coat and sunglasses.
    Cole parked the gun in his waistband behind his back, pulled his T-shirt over it, then opened the door.
    The man in front said, “Elvis Cole?”
    “He moved to Austria. Can I take a message?”
    The man in front held up a black leather badge case showing a federal ID.
    “Special Agent Donald Pitman. Department of Justice. We’d like a few words.”
    They didn’t wait for Cole to invite them in.
     
     
     

10
     
     
    OUTSIDE the walls of the Echo Park house, the neighborhood woke with the slowly rising sun. Finches and sparrows chirped. Sprinklers at the house next door came on, ran for twenty minutes, then automatically stopped. Cars started, then backed out of drives or pulled away from the curb. The brittle