Free Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker Page A

more. Nothing about my mother, Will's lover, his anxious mood. Maybe I was trying to salvage some scrap of his privacy. Maybe I was trying to honor our pact of doing night business together, even though Will had flagrantly left me out of the darkest night business of his life.
    By the time he finished asking me questions, I felt like I'd told my story to every person in Orange County law enforcement.
    "Alex Blazak?" said Sammy Nguyen with an innocent look. "Why would I know Alex Blazak?" "You're both in the gun business."
    "I'm out of that now. But my business was legitimate. He'd sell machine guns to little kids if he could make money. He's got a sword that Hitler gave to Goering, first belonged to Napoleon, worth about a million three."
    "How well do you know him?"
    He eyed me, slipping on his glasses. "Joe, what are you doing here?’’ You're off work for a while. Bereavement, deputy-involved shooting, that."
    "Tell me about Alex."
    "Nice hat, Joe. Hides part of your face."
    "Come on, Sammy. Help out."
    It was early afternoon and Mod J was going through its daily drowsy time. About an hour after lunch the inmates run out of venom and energy, and they'll shut up for a while, take naps, maybe read. By three o'clock they'll be stirring again.
    Sammy was lying on his cot, staring up at his picture of Bernadette.
    "They call him Crazy Alex because he's crazy. Crazy people annoy me, Joe. Bad for business."
    "If you wanted to find him, where would you look?"
    He looked over at me, as if the idea interested him.
    "I saw the news last night. His sister gets kidnapped, and you can’t find him?”
    "Correct."
    "Then maybe he kidnapped her."
    Some of the inmates put things together quickly. Takes one to know one.
    "I doubt it. He skipped on a deal." I thought I could draw him out talk of his competition.
    "Who's the buyer?"
    "None of your business."
    "Probably some rich man who lives by the beach. Wants pink nunchuks to tickle his boyfriend. That's the kind of business Crazy Alex does best.”
    "It was small-caliber handguns, brand-new, numbers etched off."
    Sammy considered this. Maybe he was in on something like it himself. Maybe he'd like to get in on this one.
    "How can I find him, Sammy?"
    "You ask me for information about a former business associate and I still don't have a rat trap."
    "Try this."
    I pulled a rat trap out of my coat pocket and held it out to Sammy through the bars. It was the kind that uses an adhesive to trap the animal, which then dies because it can't move. I got it from the supply desk, one of just a handful we've managed to keep on hand. He hopped off the cot and came over.
    "This isn't the kind I need. I need the old-fashioned kind that breaks their necks."
    "You didn't specify. These are the only kind allowed in a cell."
    He cast his dark eyes on me. Measuring. Figuring.
    "I talked to some people, you know, on the phone, but I couldn't find out anything about that girl. You probably got what you needed from that press conference yesterday."
    "I need to find her."
    "I can't do that, from in here."
    "I just wasted a good rat trap."
    "I don't do things like that, Joe. When I say I'm going to produce, I produce. You know, within my capabilities. The girl got kidnapped, the FBI can't find her, and I'm supposed to? No. Not from in here. Now, her brother, maybe. Maybe I can do that. I know people who know Alex."
    "I'd appreciate your help."
    Sammy sat down with the trap, looked at me with pronounced sympathy.
    "It's bad when a father dies. Mine was murdered in San Jose when I was eleven—did you know that?"
    "Yes."
    "They shot him while he locked up his nightclub."
    "Robbery."
    "They took the night's cash off him—eight hundred dollars, forty-eight cents. The forty-eight cents made me angry."
    I'd read his sheet, and the report by a county psychologist, who included Sammy's account of his father's death.
    Sammy's version of what happened after the murder interested me. I learned some of it by sneaking into