Читать книгу Malicious - Jacob Stone - Страница 18

Chapter 11

Charlie Bogle dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the table. Sitting across from him in the dimly lit and mostly empty Koreatown restaurant was Lionel Simmons, who had been one of Bogle’s confidential informants when Bogle was on the force. Simmons, who had been rail thin the last time Bogle had seen him three years earlier, looked like he had lost even more weight, and from the nervous way he grabbed the fifty dollars from the table, had to still be smoking meth.

“If you were a car thief, and you were going to steal a 2004 Chevy Tahoe with a GPS recovery system installed, how’d you make the car disappear?”

Even though Simmons looked like he was trying hard to maintain a badass, empty stare, he broke out grinning from the question, revealing brownish, ruined teeth. Bogle knew that his former CI had at times worked as a car thief.

“What type of system?” Simmons asked.

Bogle told him.

A waitress came over to take their lunch order. Bogle ordered the bibimbap with chicken and Simmons told her he was just going to have tea. During the seven minutes they’d been there, Simmons had drunk three cups of the stuff, each loaded with three sugar packets. The waitress picked up the pile of torn empty packets that Simmons had left on the table before walking off. Once she was out of earshot, Simmons asked how long it took to report the Tahoe missing.

“Around twelve hours.”

Simmons made several twitchy movements as he adjusted the way he was sitting and crossed his legs.

“Twelve hours?” Simmons made a noise somewhere between a whistle and an exhalation to express his incredulity. “That gives someone who knows what they’re doing all the time they need to rip apart that Tahoe’s dashboard and find the device, then smash it to pieces. Or drop it into a garbage disposal. Or hell, you have that much time, you can drive that Tahoe deep into Mexico. Ain’t no tracking done there. How long ago did it disappear?”

“Four months.”

“You got an exact date? Color and VIN?”

Bogle checked through his notepad, ripped out a blank sheet, and copied the information for Simmons.

“Two bills I’ll ask around at chop shops I’m friendly with, and see if they helped make this car disappear.”

Bogle gave Simmons a hard look and tried to decide if he would only be throwing two hundred dollars away since there was no telling if Simmons would actually do anything for that money. Karl Crawford’s Tahoe could’ve ended up in a chop shop in Los Angeles, but it could’ve also ended up in a chop shop somewhere else. Other things also could’ve been done with it once the GPS recovery device was removed, including shipping it out of the country. Bogle wouldn’t put it past Simmons to be playing him for a quick two hundred dollars, but he made up his mind and took a hundred out of his wallet and held it within reach. When Simmons reached for it, Bogle was faster as he pulled it back.

“I’m going to want names of who you talk to at these shops. Dates also. Lionel, I’ll be checking up on you, and if you deliver you get the other hundred. If you don’t put in the effort, we’ll have words later. We understand each other, right?”

Bogle moved the bill closer so that his former CI could take it out of his grasp.

“We understand each other,” Simmons agreed. “But that don’t mean the Tahoe ended up at any chop shop. As I said, it could be in Mexico, or even all the way down to Chile by now. She-it, these signals ain’t that strong. No more than eight miles. You find a remote enough spot, you park the car and cover it with a tarp, and police ain’t going to find it. But I’ll earn this bill, and the other, even if I turn up nothin’.” He sat back, and tried to act nonchalant as he asked, “Why’s this one Tahoe so important?”

“The guy who was driving it disappeared the same day.”

“This guy’s who you’re really trying to find?”

“That’s right.”

“A bad dude?”

“Not that I can tell.”

Simmons considered that. “I’ll see what I can dig up,” he promised.