“All the time!” I railed at him. “Are you kidding?”
“Really? Man, I find money in the pockets of my winter coats every year, and it’s awesome, like a little surprise that never gets old, but it’s once a year.”
I shook my head at him.
“Just judge me later, all right? Order something from Grubhub while I call Detective Aguilar.”
Instead of doing that, I walked over to my laptop and stuck the flash drive in the USB port.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m going to make sure we have a copy of whatever’s on this drive. I don’t trust anybody, not where you’re concerned, so we’re going to make sure we have insurance.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s a video of somebody being killed or something?”
“Like a hit?”
“Like a murder.”
“And it was somehow caught on camera?”
“Have you ever even seen the internet, Cameron? Just…never mind. Oh my God, maybe it’s a snuff film.”
I scowled at him. “You do realize that snuff films are an urban legend.”
“Are they, though?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, but are they?”
“Yes,” I insisted. “And no matter how many times you say but are they? that isn’t going to change.”
“Are you positive?” He drawled out the words again.
“Yes,” I repeated. “And this is all I’m doing right now, so use my phone, order food, and then call the police, because I’m not moving.”
He groaned like I was ridiculous, but he took my phone I absently held out to him, not making eye contact, focused solely on opening the file saved on the drive.
It was a video, but nothing even remotely interesting. There was a group of men playing poker, the TV on in the background and a weatherman talking about how hot it was going to be the first weekend in October.
“This is it?” Jeremiah asked as he walked up behind me, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“Did you order food?” I asked, not having heard anything he was doing, completely absorbed with the lack of anything happening on the video.
“Yes, but it’s gonna be awhile, and I called Detective Aguilar.”
“Oh good, perfect,” I praised as he sat down beside me, close, elbow on the table.
We were both quiet for several minutes.
“Are you kidding? This is the smoking gun?”
“I guess.”
Watching other people gamble had never been something I enjoyed. My father and brother used to always stop flipping channels when they saw a professional poker tournament, and I never understood the appeal.
“All right. So, as far as I can tell, it’s nothing even remotely interesting.” I forwarded the video frame by frame, looking closely at all the men, watching them bet and raise, drink, smoke cigars, eat wings, and later drink snifters of what I guessed was cognac.
But no one shot anyone, no one gave someone a Colombian necktie, there was no coke passed around, and no one yelled or even accused anybody of cheating.
“This is extremely anticlimactic,” I told Jeremiah.
“Agreed.”
Thirty minutes later, changed into sweats and waiting for the food to arrive, I was working on some spreadsheets and Jeremiah was on his laptop working on a paper when there was a knock on the door. I checked the peephole, saw it was Detective Aguilar, and let him in.
“Tell me again what you found.” Detective Aguilar directed the order to Jeremiah as soon as the door closed behind him. “Because you weren’t making a lot of sense on the phone.”
“Cameron found a tile in my jacket.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“What?”
Turning, I waved the detective over to the laptop and started the video from the beginning. “I found a flash drive hidden inside a mahjong tile in Jeremiah’s jacket pocket. Shawn must’ve been wearing the jacket the night he went where he wasn’t supposed to be. Though I can’t imagine why he’d think to swipe what looked like a normal mahjong tile.”
“Fuck me.” Aguilar gasped and dropped down into the chair beside me.
“What’s the big deal about a poker game?” Jeremiah asked him.
“The big deal is that man right there,” Aguilar answered, pointing to the one I knew was going to enjoy his wings a few minutes later. “That is Cristobal Tremaine, who, according to the DEA, died last year, the victim of a car bomb.”
“Well, if you look at the TV, the weather’s on, so you can see the date and everything.”
“Which I’m guessing was Daniel Nieman’s intent when he shot this in the poker room at his house in Westlake.”
“There was a housefire in Westlake, wasn’t there? The one that killed an entire family?”
“Yeah, kid”—Aguilar glanced at Jeremiah—“that would be the one.”
I stopped the video, removed the drive and stuck it back in its cap, and then passed it to Aguilar. “You’ll release a statement to the media as soon as possible so Tremaine’s men don’t keep looking for the drive in the homes of anyone even remotely associated with Shawn Pelham, won’t you?”
“Don’t worry, this’ll be over by the time you wake up tomorrow morning.”