by Marc Rainer
“Hey, dude, toss me another beer while you’re up,” Joey shouted over the noise of the game.
Jimmy headed toward the fridge, but a knock on the front door made him redirect his steps. As he opened the door, he recognized the face and stepped back instantly, almost bowing as he invited the visitor in.
“Joe!” Jimmy shouted, turning toward his brother and the television. “Turn that off! We have company!”
He turned back toward the man in the doorway, only to find a silencer inches from his face. The gun spit twice, and Jimmy fell to the floor. It spit again, and two more bullets flew across the small room into the brain of Joey Gonzalez.
Gladstone, Missouri
Anthony Minelli glared at the two men who sat quietly in his living room. They were waiting deferentially for him to speak. Minelli was short—about five-seven—and weighed about twice the number of pounds recommended by his doctor to maintain optimum health for his height. His shape had earned him the nickname “Fat Tony,” both among his soldiers in the Kansas City Mafia and among the law enforcement professionals who monitored his activities. His black eyes peered from narrow slits in a face scarred by a bad complexion in his youth, and his thin lips sneered when he finally spoke.
“I don’t recall giving anybody permission to hit John Porcello,” Minelli growled, “and I sure as shit don’t recall giving anybody permission to shoot my damned sister!” He thought for a moment about his last phrase, then quickly crossed himself, adding, “God rest her soul.”
“You got me, boss. I got nuthin’,” Paul Beretta said, his palms pointing toward the ceiling.
“Dom?” Minelli asked, looking toward the other man.
“Same here, Don.” Dominic Silvestri shook his head. He used the formal term for the head of the Kansas City Mafia only when a sign of utmost respect was appropriate, and this was one of those times. The don had lost his little sister.
Silvestri shook his head. “Nobody ever even asked me about such a thing before it happened, and I ain’t heard a chirp about who might’ve done it since it happened. I heard that Big John did good at the tables just before it went down. It was probably some black hood rats who just wanted to rob him or something, don’t ya think?”
“I want to know who did it,” Minelli fumed, “and I want ’em dead. No, I want ’em brought to me and I’ll make ’em dead. A good, long, slow dead. Understand?”
“Got it.” Beretta was nodding. “Our guy, our town, our problem, our solution.”
“Exactly!” Minelli agreed. “Just like that. I like the way you said that.”
Big Dom Silvestri nodded along with his don and the other underboss, concealing his contempt for Beretta. As far as Dom Silvestri was concerned, Paulie had always been just a glib suck-up: all tough talk and no action.
“Somethin’ else,” Minelli added. “Patsy Battaglia called me. Somebody whacked both her kids the same night that Margie and John got hit. You know—she married that spic asshole Bobby somethin’ or other—”
“Gonzalez,” Dominic Silvestri filled in the blank, beating Beretta to the punch. “They went to our church before they split up.”
“Yeah. Gonzalez.” Minelli threw his hands up. “Patsy couldn’t find one of her own kind to marry, so she hooks up with a Gonzalez. Go figure.” He shook his head. “I got people dyin’ all over the place all of a sudden. Anyway, both her boys that she had with that Gonzalez took two to the head in their apartment. She’s all broken up about it, of course, and called to see if I could help her with some payback on that mess.”
“We’ll keep our ears open on that, too,” Silvestri said.
“Yeah. Good. Do that.” Minelli walked around the living room, clinching his fists. “Just call me first, if you find out anything. I got no clue what that’s about. But, the thing with Margie and John—whoever did that—bring that rat bastard to me, and make sure he’s still breathing.” He dismissed his lieutenants, waving them toward the front door. “Excuse me. I gotta couple of funerals to plan.”
Kansas City, Missouri
Cameron Turner had saved Trask’s bacon once when they were both circuit prosecutors working in the Air Force JAG Corps. At the time, Cam was the chief in the Fifth Circuit, covering California, Alaska, Hawaii, and a couple of other western states. Trask had been the Chief Circuit Trial Counsel—the official title for the head prosecutor—in the Air Force’s Second Circuit, covering general courts-martial in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and Panama. They had been summoned to a conference in Washington, and a bird colonel named Arthur Andrews, suspicious of the Second Circuit’s first-place rankings in both conviction rates and sentences, had told the conference that such statistics could only be achieved by unethical practices.
Trask stood up, demanding that the colonel offer some proof or withdraw the accusations. Colonel Andrews tried goading him with some further unjustified claims, and Trask had almost decided to let the chips fall where they may when he felt the hand of Lt. Col. Turner tugging on the edges of his uniform.
“It’s not worth, it, Jeff. He’s an ass. He’s not worth it, hero,” Cam had whispered. Trask maintained a piercing stare long enough for the colonel to break his gaze before they both took their seats as the other officers in the room held their collective breath. Many congratulated him after the fact, but Trask counted only one among them who had actually stood with him, and he had always remembered Cam Turner as the officer who probably prevented the court-martial that would have been titled, United States v. Trask.
Cam’s car was waiting for him outside the lobby doors of his hotel near the Kansas City airport. Turner was retired from the Air Force and was working as an Assistant United States Attorney on the Missouri side of Kansas City.
“How ya been, hero?” Turner asked as Trask climbed into the passenger seat.
“Not too bad, Cam. You?”
“Been better, been worse. We have a little time before your appointment with the new boss, so I thought we’d take the scenic route into town and show you your new home.”
“I haven’t had the interview yet, Cam.”
“Oh, you’re hired. Don’t doubt that.” Turner laughed. “Between the attorney general and then me vouching for you, you’re in like Flint.”
“That would be the second James Coburn spy flick, after Our Man Flint,” Trask observed.
“Who played his boss?”
Cam and Trask had taken many a round together in some bar trivia contests. This was a challenge to mentally get back into the game. Trask paused for just a second before answering.
“Lee J. Cobb.”
“Damn. Same old Jeff. Never forgets a thing.”
Trask smiled. “Unless it’s something that might actually matter. Tell me about my possible new boss.”
“Sure,” Turner said. “But first, how’d you like our little airport?”
“I like the three little terminals,” Trask said. “Three circles, airlines separated, security lines broken into thirds, seems pretty efficient. It should make it easy to get in and out.”
“It does,” Turner agreed, “and it’s also easy for DEA to follow drug couriers who’ve just flown in from Baltimore. Your Jamaican led ’em to a stash house just off the Paseo yesterday—”
“The what?” Trask asked reflexively.
“Oh, sorry. The Paseo is one of the old historic streets running north-south in KC. Used to be quite the neighborhood. Now it’s in quite the hood, and one of the major arteries for our high-crime district. The DEA guys knew the house. Your instincts were good, as usual. They walked up on your guy on the sidewalk, he got all flustered, consented to a search of his suitcase, and two kilos of coke will not be getting cooked into crack today. Nice work. Anyway, some genius planners are trying to talk the city into ‘modernizing’ the airport. I’m sure their new single terminal will be a cluster-hump that rivals that abortion in Denver in terms of efficiency.”
“That’s a shame. You were going to
tell me about the new boss.”
“You’re a man on a mission. Okay. The Honorable John Phillip Barrett—we call him ‘J.P.’—was one of us until his confirmation a couple of months back. He was a regular line AUSA, trying cases. He’s not just a political appointee unbaptized in the ways of federal criminal litigation.”
“That has to be a plus,” Trask observed.
“Yep,” Turner said. “It sure saves time not having to explain the elements of every statute to him when we’re trying to get an indictment approved. You’ll like the guy, and he’ll like you.”
“I have been known to rub some people the wrong way, as you’ll recall,” Trask reminded him, thinking of his least favorite colonel.
“Just those of lesser merit.” Turner dismissed the memory of the conference with a wave of his hand. “King Arthur was a bird colonel, but the bird in his case was a turkey instead of an eagle. You and I were holdovers from the prior regime, and the boss who hired us was light-years better than his replacement. Colonel Numb-nuts was just pissed that you and your trial results were better than any that he had ever been able to deliver. If I’d had your numbers, I’d have been on his shit list, too. I’m just glad you didn’t swing at him.”
“I owe you for that.”
“Nah,” Cam said, waving the idea away like a fly. “I just reminded you to think before you took the otherwise very appropriate step of decking that stupid SOB, at which point I would have had to sign some sort of false report to back you up.”
Trask broke up laughing. “You probably would have, too.”
“Damn straight, hero.”
“Where the hell are you taking me?” Trask asked. They seemed to be miles from any structure other than the occasional farm house.
“They built a smart airport,” Turner explained, “but they put it in lower Iowa. This is the northwest side of our beltway. We’ll hit I-70 in a few miles, and I’ll take you by the sports complex. I want you to see the city.”
Trask nodded. The woods and farms gradually gave way to suburbia, and Turner turned the car westward toward Kansas City.
“We’re in Independence, now,” Cam explained. “Our largest eastern suburb, the jumping-off spot for the Santa Fe Trail, home of Harry Truman, and past capital of the bathtub meth lab movement. We used to call it ‘methdependence.’”
“All the labs dried up?” Trask asked.
“They’ve been replaced by Mexican smugglers. Why risk blowing yourself up or burning the house down when you can get the junk cheaper and safer from Carlos down the street?”
“Got it.” Trask saw what appeared to be the back of a huge scoreboard, topped by a crown, on the southern side of the interstate. “Stadiums on the left ahead?”
“Yep. Kaufman Stadium—‘the K’—where the Royals play, then Arrowhead, home of the Chiefs, all surrounded by one big collection of parking lots.”
“Access looks good for traffic.”
“It is. Lots of folks wanted to put the baseball park downtown instead of remodeling this one. I like ’em where they are ’cause they’re closer to my house. You ought to pick up some season tickets. There’s not a twenty-year waiting list like there is for the Redskins in Washington.”
Trask laughed again. “Where do you live?”
“Lee’s Summit. As if we had any mountains in Missouri. It’s the southeastern suburb for KC. About 100,000 people, huge areas of undeveloped land with room to grow. Plenty of convenient restaurants and shopping. You’ll like it there. Plus, it’s halfway to Whiteman if you’re still pulling blue-suit reserve tours.”
“I am.”
Trask had put the Kansas City office on his list for that reason. Whiteman Air Force Base, home of the B2 bomber fleet, was about an hour east of the city.
“You make O-5 yet?” Turner asked.
“Yeah. Pinned on the silver oak leaves last month.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Trask. I’ll be damned. I never thought I’d see that.”
“Neither did I. They made me do it.”
It was Turner’s turn to laugh. “They just want to keep you around as long as possible.”
“It might help if I live to see the retirement pay.”
“It sure won’t hurt. I like getting two paychecks.” Turner steered the car onto an exit, then turned left. “That’s the courthouse ahead. We’re on the fifth floor. They didn’t plan that initially. The United States Attorney’s Office wasn’t included as an original tenant in the planning, but then the GSA informed the judges that they’d built more house than they could afford, and we were graciously invited to room here because of our rent money.”
Trask nodded. “That’s a good thing. We had to hike a bit from our office to the courthouse in D.C.”
“We had the same arrangement here for a while,” Turner said. “We used to have to walk about six blocks to the old courthouse from our office space. The new arrangement saves time and makes us all fatter. I like to take the stairs when I can to keep the weight off.”
Cam parked the car in a lot across the street and led the way up the steps. Trask read the building’s dedication plate as he passed it. The Charles Evans Whittaker Courthouse. Completed in 1998. He stopped and went back down some of the front steps, looking up at the façade.
“Designed and built before 9-11,” Turner said. “You’ll notice that the building is a cylinder open to the front, an ideal ground zero for a bomb. After the terrorists hit New York, the GSA had to add all the concrete barriers out front. We call those vertical slabs on the roof ‘Stonehenge West.’ They do a great job of collecting sheets of ice in the winter. Then the thaws hit, and the ice chunks fall onto the glass ceiling overlooking the lobby and break the panes. Those cost six-hundred bucks apiece to replace. The open front also serves as a wind tunnel and accelerator. It’ll blow you down these stairs in the winter, and the wind smashes pigeons against the windows. They fall and rot on those same glass panes. If the maintenance guys don’t get ’em off quick enough—”
“Another six-hundred bucks?” Trask asked.
“Yep. Plus labor. Your government at work.”
They took the elevator to the fifth floor. A receptionist behind some bullet-proof glass waved them through the inner doors at the far side of the lobby. Trask found himself before another set of doors, marked with a hall plaque identifying the office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. Turner held the door for him. Once inside, he introduced Trask to the executive secretary.
“I’ll leave you here for a bit. Got some work to do,” Cam said. “After you’re done with the boss, we’ll grab some lunch.”
Trask nodded and started to take a seat in the waiting room, but a door opened, and John Phillip Barrett offered his hand. Barrett was an inch taller than Trask, and about five years younger. He had an athletic build, dark hair, and even darker eyes.
“Jeff? Welcome. Call me J.P. I’ve heard a lot about you. Come on in.”
Trask followed Barrett into the office and sat in a leather chair facing his desk.
“Let’s make the first part of this as fast and easy as possible,” Barrett said. “Why are you coming to Kansas City, and what do you want to do here?”
Trask smiled. He liked what he saw in Barrett. Direct and no-nonsense. Trask told himself that he could like working for this guy.
“If I’m hired to work in your office, I’m coming to Kansas City. I don’t know that much about the town yet—other than it is not Washington, D.C., which I regard as a tremendous plus. So, I’m escaping the swamp more than making this a destination. If I’m hired and we like the town, I imagine we’ll be here for a long time. What do I want to do in this office? That’s easy. I want to follow the evidence to wherever and whomever it leads, then do the right thing. If that means a prosecution, we go to the mat with it. If it means we find no crime, we say so. I view being a prosecutor as having the truth as my client. In D.C., too many people seemed to have other ideas about the job.”
B
arrett smiled back at him. “Then you’re hired. I have stellar recommendations from both the attorney general and your old boss in the D.C. United States Attorney’s Office, plus I have a lot of Air Force history on you from Cam Turner. Welcome to the Western District of Missouri. When can you start?”
“Is two weeks soon enough? We’ve got a buyer lined up on the house in Maryland, but I need to find a place here.” Trask paused. “If you don’t mind me asking, what will I be doing here? Do you have a particular unit in mind for me? Drugs? White collar work?”
“You’ll be the new SLC, my senior litigation counsel. Same job you had in Washington. I don’t think you’ll object to keeping the higher salary since you’ll have a new mortgage to pay.”
Trask was a little surprised by Barrett’s answer.
“Thanks very much,” Trask said slowly, “but won’t that generate some resentment from the folks who are already here? I don’t mind starting on the ground floor if—”
“I’m sure there will be some jealousy and resentment, but frankly—if I can play Gable for a moment—I don’t give a damn,” Barrett said. He got up and walked over to a large window before turning back toward Trask. “Speaking of actors, did you ever see the Gregory Peck movie, Twelve O’Clock High?”
“Sure,” Trask answered. He’d seen the flick more than once. “He played a one-star who took over a troubled bomb wing in World War II. They were getting shot up when he got there, and he turned them around before getting fired himself.”
“Right. I actually had a management course instructor base an entire lecture on that flick. Four quadrants of management style. The first, heavy emphasis on mission, almost no sympathy for people—’”
“Like when Peck’s character first arrived on station,” Trask offered.
“Exactly.” Barrett said. “Rotating clockwise, the second quadrant was about 60-40 mission over people; the third quadrant was 40-60 with the people getting more attention as they themselves paid more attention to the mission; and the fourth quadrant was 20-80, with the people getting way too much attention—”
