Lucky Town

by Peter Vonder Haar

  Without being too overt about it, I glanced at the goons, but neither of them acted like they’d heard me.

  “Too many people saw you come aboard.” He smiled, shark-like. “Why, I would have to sink the entire boat, ha ha!”

  “Good one,” I said. “Yakov Smirnoff better watch out.”

  He said, “Seriously, bringing the sort of merchandise your brother was investigating into the United States in this political climate is more trouble than it’s worth. The price has increased a hundredfold, the distances covered strain logistics, and local concerns have a much more robust infrastructure to deal with supply issues.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “You sound like a regular businessman. From what you just said, I’d never know you were talking about enslaving women and children.”

  He clucked his tongue. “You’re arguing semantics.”

  I said, “Nah, that’s always how y’all try to defend yourselves; by throwing out bullshit equivalency arguments about how banks ruin more lives than drugs, or the oil companies cause more lasting damage, but you kill people and force them into prostitution. Or worse. So spare me the evils of capitalism speech.”

  Steranko was silent and for a minute I was sure my earlier prediction of getting pitched overboard with a Colombian necktie were about to come true.

  “I’m not used to being spoken to like that,” he finally said.

  “I’m not used to mouthing off to … guys like you. Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  “One brother.”

  “Is he older or younger than you?”

  “Older,” he said.

  “Are the two of you close?”

  He smiled. “We haven’t spoken in fifteen years. I think. Perhaps, this is the reason I wanted to clear the air. You are obviously keenly interested in finding your Mike, which is why I wanted to bring you out here and tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree. As they say.”

  “It’s all very convenient,” I agreed. “The caller with the Russian accent, the car. Do you own any Ferraris?”

  He snorted. “Italian trash. I prefer British and German manufacturers. McLaren makes very good vehicles.”

  “I’m not much of a car guy,” I muttered.

  “I’ll say.” Steranko laughed. He turned to his bodyguards and said something in Russian that had them both laughing. Evidently the Corolla’s reputation preceded it.

  “My point is,” I said, “someone is obviously trying to point me at you, but I’m reasonably sure you’re not involved.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  I rose, finishing my scotch. “Just know that if I find out you actually are involved, you’re going to learn how it feels to get a McLaren parked on your chest.”

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  There were a couple reasons I believed Steranko.

  First, he didn’t have to meet with me. Hell, he didn’t even have to acknowledge me. You might think a guilty person would be only too eager to protest their innocence, except Steranko hadn’t protested so much as matter-of-factly explained why he wasn’t involved. True, his explanation was almost bone-chilling in its indifference, meaning there was just as good a chance he was a sociopath as he was innocent, but call it a gut feeling: I believed him.

  Second — and as I’d already pointed out — it was too much. “Boris,” the Testarossa, the would-be assassin with the Makarov … it made me wonder why Nevaeh gave me his name in the first place.

  Maybe another trip to Bottoms Up was in order. I could chat some more with my good buddy Nigel.

  The cruise lasted another hour after I left Steranko, and I did my best to remain invisible until we docked. My host had helpfully allowed me to wash up in a bathroom that was roughly the size of the first floor of my house, but my clothes were still rumpled and I doubt I smelled all that great.

  I went back to the bar to see if there was any Macallan left and was told by a very contrite bartender that I was cut off. Apparently there were reports that I’d been behaving aggressively. I laughed hysterically at that, which I’m sure only served as confirmation of same.

  I spent the rest of the cruise on the stern deck, close enough to the engine and the propeller-thing that the volume discouraged conversation seekers. We returned to the marina and I easily beat everyone else off the boat. Don’s Range Rover was still in the lot. Looking around at the sea of luxury vehicles, I was happy with my decision to borrow his car, as the Corolla likely would’ve been towed as an eyesore.

  It wasn’t especially warm, but I felt grimy from the sweat of my fight with Tiny and the sea air. I cranked the air-conditioning to max and steered the Range Rover onto Broadway, which ran for a few miles along the island then turned into the southern terminus of I-45.

  I needed to call Charlie, and probably Roy, and let them know I wasn’t sleeping with the fishes, or whatever the euphemism’s Russian equivalent was, but I was still mulling over the evening’s events.

  If Steranko wasn’t involved, and I was increasingly convinced he wasn’t, then I was back at square one. Mike was missing and whoever was responsible was sending me red herrings to try and implicate Steranko.

  But why? What benefit was there to putting me and Steranko together? If someone wanted to get rid of me, there were less complicated ways than engineering a meeting with a gangster and hoping I’d piss him off enough to kill me.

  Though I had to say, intentional or not, it had almost worked.

  Conversely, calling in a hit on Steranko should be less half-assed then sending an ex-cop to his boat. It’d be some kind of Splinter Cell level shit to infiltrate his boat, make my way past multiple bodyguards, kill the guy, and then escape undetected.

  Unless whoever was behind this wanted me dead. But that led me back to my first point. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t see the angle.

  Broadway became I-45 and before long I was on the causeway to the mainland. Traffic was light at this hour, though some people getting the jump on a three-day weekend were apparent on the other side.

  Steranko’s reference to “local interests” was aimed at the cartels, and he was right about the infrastructure. Houston was just one port of entry for anyone they wanted to traffic from Mexico or Central/South America. They could embark from dozens of spots on the Mexico coast or along the Rio Grande, arriving at dozens of others on American soil.

  And they would come by boat, train, truck, plane, SUV, or on foot. A steady stream of humanity doomed to monstrous cruelty just to fatten the pockets of cruel monsters.

  The Russian, on the other hand, would have markedly fewer options. Steranko would have to use large ships and planes, unless he tried to funnel them through Canada (the cartels wouldn’t let any Russian cargo disembark on their territory, after all). And recent crackdowns on immigration, both legal and otherwise, meant more palms to grease. The higher costs he’d referred to.

  If the safe house DHS raided wasn’t one of Steranko’s, then it stood to reason it belonged to the cartels. Ron said most of the women were Central American, and I made a note to ask him about the last time the task force had run across any Russian or Eastern European women. Maybe Steranko was telling the truth about being out of the business.

  I wasn’t taking anything for granted, and even if that revenue stream was done, Steranko was still rumored to be bringing in heroin, guns, and god knew what else. He was still a scumbag, in other words.

  I was missing something, I knew, but I was too tired from car crashes and boat brawls to figure it out right now.

  I called Charlie, but it went straight to voicemail. She’d be asleep, seeing as it was almost 2:00 a.m., but recent events made me worry nonetheless. I left a message telling her I was okay and not to wait up.

  My phone rang. It was Roy.

  “Hello?” I said, holding the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  "Cy?" His voice was tinny over my phone's crappy speaker, so I hit the "speaker" icon and Roy’s voice filled the car.

&nb
sp; “You sound like you’re at the bottom of a well.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Technical difficulties.”

  “How’d the meeting go?” he asked.

  I replied, “About as pleasant as could be expected.”

  “He didn’t throw you over the side, at least.”

  “No,” I agreed. “And he let me drink some of his twenty-five-year-old scotch.”

  Roy whistled in appreciation, except I hated whistling and he knew it. “So y’all are friends now, I take it?”

  “I’m not going to marry his daughter or anything, but at least he didn’t try to kill me.” Directly, I didn’t add.

  “He has a daughter?” Roy suddenly sounded interested.

  I wasn’t in the mood to deal with his libido. “Why are you calling me?”

  “Have you seen the news this evening?” he asked.

  I rubbed my temples with my non-steering hand. “Uh, no, Roy. Steranko’s boat only gets QVC and Telemundo.”

  Roy said, “I wanted to call you before you heard anything, but the story leaked tonight. They’ve officially linked Mike’s gun to the Ramirez killing.”

  I sat up straight, all fatigue leaving me. “What?”

  “Easy,” he began.

  “Shut up,” I said. “They have a ballistics match?”

  Roy said, “Yep, someone leaked the report from the DHS testing facility this evening. Two shots fired from a SIG P229 that matched the weapon taken from the scene. It’s registered as the service weapon for DHS Technical Enforcement Officer Mike Clarke.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. Could Mike really have killed a fellow agent in cold blood? It would explain why he ran; after all, if it was a clean shoot, the subsequent investigation would clear him.

  “No,” I said.

  “No what?”

  “This is bullshit, Roy. There’s no way Mike would shoot one of his guys, I don’t care what the report says.”

  “Cy.” Roy’s tone was maddeningly gentle. “When was the last time you talked to Mike?”

  “A few weeks ago, so what?”

  “And when was the last time you talked to him about anything of substance?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  Roy continued, “I know you two weren’t that close. Isn’t it possible there was something going on, something at work, that might have gone south?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Cy —”

  I cut him off. “No, Roy! I don’t care what they're saying, he’s my brother and he didn’t fucking do this!”

  “Our hands are tied, Cy. Mike is officially going to be charged with Hector Ramirez’s murder,” Roy said. “I just wanted to let you know before you saw it on the news. I owe you that much.”

  He hung up before I could tell him to get fucked.

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mom’s phone was ringing but she wasn’t answering.

  I thought about just driving straight on to The Woodlands, but I wanted to get out ahead of the news, if she hadn’t seen it yet. She usually went to bed by 10:00, so chances were pretty good she was unaware.

  My own phone rang. It was Charlie.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey.”

  “Why the hell are you up?” I asked.

  I heard Don. “She won’t take her painkillers.” He sounded annoyed.

  She said, “I slept when they brought me in. Don found Settlers of Catan in the pediatric lounge, so we’re playing that.”

  “She’s cheating, as usual,” he interjected.

  “He thinks I rigged the dice to get sevens, and won’t even let me explain how stupid that sounds,” her voice faded, and I realized she was directing her next remarks at Don. “If the dice are rigged, how come you’re not rolling sevens, too? They’re the same dice!”

  “You probably hacked them.”

  “Dice don’t have chips in them,” she scoffed. To me, “Sorry, what’s happening?”

  I was glad to hear she was in good spirits, even if I was about to dash them. “They’re charging Mike with Ramirez’s murder.”

  “Goddamn it!” she said. I could hear Don asking what was going on. “Hold on, Cy. I’m putting you on speaker. Go.”

  I told Charlie and Don what Roy relayed to me a few minutes prior. They were silent for a moment.

  “I’m not sure how to process this,” Charlie said.

  Don said, “What a crock of shit.”

  “I don’t disagree,” I said, “but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  Charlie asked, “Has anybody talked to Mom?”

  “I tried calling, but no answer. She’s probably asleep.”

  “I’ll try Kayla,” Don said. “I need to get some air anyway.” I heard him get up and, a second later, a door close.

  “He’s not taking this well,” I said.

  “Can you blame him?”

  “No,” I admitted. “And it feels like we’re banging our heads against a wall, especially after the Steranko meeting.”

  “How did that go?”

  I gave her a high-level version of my boat trip, right down to my near brawl with the Russian’s prodigious pair of bodyguards.

  “Nice.” She chuckled. “He probably could’ve goaded you into it if you hadn’t already tired yourself out on the first guy.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a fair fight,” I agreed, “but I bet I could’ve taken them.”

  “Two to one?” she asked, her incredulity apparent even over a 4G connection. “Boy, they would’ve beaten you like a drum. Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  I heard her rustling around. “Where’s my laptop?” It didn’t sound like she was asking anyone in particular.

  “Charlie?” I said. “Charlie, what’s going on?”

  “Where’s my goddamned laptop? Nurse? Nurse!”

  I was close to yelling now. “Charlie, pick up the phone!”

  “Cy? I’m sorry,” she said. She’d picked the phone up again. “I think I can crack Mike’s code.”

  “What? How?”

  She said, “I won’t know until I can find my laptop, but I think it’s a lot simpler than we initially thought.”

  “Didn’t we get your backpack out of the car?” I asked after a second.

  “I thought so, but everything was so hazy when we — wait a minute.” She dropped off again, which was starting to get annoying.

  There was another voice in the room now, a female one that I assumed was the nurse. Really, I’m not sexist.

  Charlie came back on. “Okay, that was the nurse.” Told you I wasn’t sexist. “She said the backpack was with my clothes and is going to get it for me.”

  I said, “Can you clue me in? What’s the code?”

  “I don’t know for sure.” She was lying, because her voice had the excited lilt to it that always appeared when she was about to solve a technical puzzle. “But visualizing you getting beaten up by two guys clicked for me.”

  “That’s not entirely reassuring —”

  She said, “No, listen! Two to one, beaten like a drum, beats, pulses … I think I know how Mike encrypted his message.”

  That didn’t make sense, to me anyway. “Charlie, I read those emails. Are you telling me you can read them now?”

  “Not until I decode it,” she said. “He ran it through an encryption cipher to garble it. I don’t know what the key is, but once I have a copy of the emails I can start running them through some basic sets and see if there are any patterns.”

  This was all Greek — or Ultra, or Enigma — to me, but if Charlie was confident, that would be a huge boost.

  “Now if I could just get my goddamned laptop,” she yelled. Evidently the nurse wasn’t moving quickly enough for Charlie’s purposes.

  Not that any of us ever did.

  I heard another voice, then Don came on the phone. “What the ever-loving hell is going on? Our sister looks like she’s about to pop a blood vessel.”

  “S
he thinks she’s figured out Mike’s code,” I told him.

  Momentary silence, then, “Sounds like we’d better find that goddamned laptop.”

  In the movies, when hackers are shown breaking into secure government systems, it’s to the accompaniment of techno/house or indie rock music while lines of code scroll across their face, cast by some mysterious projector bulb only found in movie laptops. In more extreme scenarios, it’s depicted as a battle against a formidable security apparatus poised to terminate the user’s connection or — more terrifyingly — trace back the interloper’s location, resulting in imminent arrival of squads of police in riot gear.

  The reality, as is often the case, is depressingly tedious.

  I was trying to doze in the hospital waiting room, because I knew Charlie would be incommunicado for a while, as she tends to get absorbed in even the most mundane technical tasks And trying to decrypt what might very well be her older brother’s last words was another matter entirely.

  Don’t be so pessimistic, I kept telling myself, but professional experience and life in general worked against that approach. Most people who went missing in similar circumstances didn’t turn up alive, and even if Mike wasn’t “most people,” he’d participated in a raid in which one of his fellow agents was dead and another was MIA.

  That reminded me: I needed to check on Garcia again.

  Things were moving too fast. It had been only three days since we learned of Mike’s disappearance. Time was a luxury we most assuredly did not have, and all I could do was sit on my thumbs and wait for Charlie to (hopefully) succeed. Mike’s emails were literally the only real leads we had.

  That wasn’t entirely true, I guess. Someone had seen fit to put me on Steranko’s scent, and my meeting with the Russian wasn’t sitting well with me for that reason. I resented being used, and I wasn’t getting back those hours wasted farting around on a boat.

  I’d ruled Steranko out, but could I be sure? What real proof did I have besides his word that he wasn’t involved? Forcing my mind to slow down, I tried to piece everything together.

  Nevaeh had given me the name, and Bottoms Up was already on my agenda for tomorrow. But Roy was the one who tipped me off to look her up in the first place. Was the detective trying to throw me off the scent? For what reason? We went a ways back, but I’d been off the force for a while, and rumors always followed him, like seagulls behind a shrimp boat.