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‘Relax, big brother. I know what I’m doing. I always do.’ He grinned, then walked out before either Jorge or Rene could stop him.
    During the long elevator ride down to the hotel lobby, alone in the car throughout, Ruben thought about the news he had just received, and what, if anything, he should do about it. His father would be furious to learn he had entrusted $250,000 of the cartel’s money to four baby-faced Americanos , it was true, but nothing of consequence would come of El Principito’s anger as long as Ben Clarke delivered on his promises. That was the key. Clean money was clean money, no matter where it came from, and if Clarke and his three partners could launder the quarter million as promised, when promised, Jorge Senior and his two overly ambitious sons, Juan and Roberto, would have little to complain about.
    The Class Act boys were due to produce the money in exactly eleven days. Ruben had planned to fly into Los Angeles a day or two early just for the occasion, but now he had a better idea. He would fly in a full week early instead. Relax and enjoy himself over the weekend, then say hello to Clarke and the others first thing Monday morning. Long before they were expecting to see him.
    Just to make sure they weren’t planning to make him look stupid in front of his family.

FIVE
    O rvis Andrews was looking for a big payday. The biggest of his life, in fact. The figure his lawyers were throwing around was eleven million, but many observers believed he could get more than that, if he and his legal team played their cards right. Two of the LAPD’s finest had beaten Andrews senseless nine months earlier out in Woodland Hills, trying to take him in on a spousal abuse charge without having to kill him first, and the black man was now suing the department and the city which funded it for all his injuries were worth.
    And what injuries he had. A broken pelvic bone, one shattered kneecap, a broken left eye-socket, and three broken teeth, two upper, one lower. Witnesses said when the cops brought him into County/USC Hospital prior to booking, he looked like somebody the tanks had run over in Tiananmen Square.
    On the surface, it appeared to be the Rodney King fiasco all over again, except that this time, no one had been around with a handy camcorder or cell phone to record Andrews’s beating for posterity, leaving certain aspects of it open to debate. Like how it happened and why, for instance. Not surprisingly, Andrews’s story was that the cops had seen a brother who needed some knots on his head and immediately proceeded to administer them, whether such action was called for or not. The cops, meanwhile, were crying self-defense, claiming the six-foot-six-inch, 230-pound Andrews had resisted arrest with a vengeance, fueled by rage and controlled substances of unknown origin. The truth was probably somewhere in-between, but since eyewitnesses to the incident were scarce, and what there were had only conflicting opinions about what, exactly, they had seen that night, it seemed the court was going to have to decide for itself what precipitated Orvis Andrews’s beating, and what, if anything, he was entitled to in the way of compensation.
    Fortunately for Andrews, this decision would be made based entirely on the merits of the evidence at hand, rather than the sympathies of the court. For if ever a plaintiff appeared undeserving of the court’s sympathy – or anyone else’s sympathy, for that matter – Orvis Andrews did. Because Andrews was not a particularly nice man. He was a career criminal with a bad temper whose eclectic rap sheet was exactly six pages long, and counting. Which, while it didn’t grant the LAPD license to beat him within an inch of his life for sport, did help to explain why the officers involved might have thought it necessary to treat him differently than their average, law-abiding citizen.
    With Andrews’s case scheduled to go to trial in less than three weeks, Reddick’s