Lucky Town

by Peter Vonder Haar

  I had no idea how long I’d slept, but when the deputy returned to the room, the sun was well past midday. I’d like to say my nap was refreshing, but I only felt slightly less like hammered shit. My abdominal muscles ached and my right shoulder made a disconcerting grinding sound whenever I tried to rotate it. I decided to stop rotating it.

  “Your concealed carry permit checks out,” he said, sliding the paper across the table.

  I retrieved it and stuck it back in my wallet. “Took you that long, huh?”

  He left the room without replying and I belatedly realized baiting a cop after being involved in a fatal shooting was in the top tier of dumb things I’d done today. He also hadn’t told me whether or not I could leave.

  As I debated walking out, the door opened again. It was Emma.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey yourself.” Smooth. “Are they letting us go?”

  “I talked to the commander on scene and he says eyewitnesses and everything else bears out that you and Don acted in self-defense,” she replied. “I think they know something hinky’s going on, but they aren’t planning on formally charging you with anything.”

  I said, “Finally, some good news. How are you holding up?”

  She ran a hand through her dark hair and I felt my breath catch in my throat. Goddamn it.

  “Pretty tired,” she said. “You sure know how to show a lady a good time.”

  “We should get a meal first next time. Firefights go much better on a full stomach.”

  My lame attempt at asking her out hung between us for a moment, then she said, “Also, I wanted to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “For not believing you.” She sat down. “I don’t know why I thought you were making it all up. You never were much for paranoia.”

  I smiled. “I have many negative personality traits, but that’s never been one of them.”

  She said, “What are you going to do now?”

  “Oh, I have a few ideas,” I said.

  “Cy …”

  I waved her off. “Don’t worry. I shouldn’t require your services anymore, counselor.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said, leaning forward. “These people are trying to kill you, Charlie, and now Don, too. Where does it stop?”

  “It doesn’t. Don’t you get it?” I leaned forward as well, and our faces were mere inches apart, it was exhilarating. “I have to make it stop, otherwise they’re just going to keep coming.” I sat back. “Thank you, sincerely, for your help. But I can’t ask you to do any more.”

  “So that’s it.” A statement, not a question.

  I sighed. “I’m not going to lie, it’s been great seeing you again. But believe it or not, things might get worse before they get better. I don’t know if I could live with myself if something happened to you.”

  She smiled. “That might be the nicest thing you ever said to me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I complimented your butt once or twice.”

  Laughter at that, which hopefully meant she’d accepted my dismissal. I wasn’t lying, exactly; I did care for her still, more than I’d realized until this very night, and knowledge aforethought of what I was planning might jeopardize her career.

  Emma stood up, and I did the same. We walked around the table and hugged awkwardly. She smelled faintly of the lavender shampoo she’d always used. She definitely got the short end of this embrace, as I was pretty sure I reeked of gunpowder and stale sweat.

  I held the embrace as long as I dared, then eventually withdrew.

  “Take care of yourself, Cy,” she said.

  “You too, Em.”

  She turned and left the room before I could do something stupid like ask her to take me back, which I might have done anyway if Don hadn’t walked in at that moment.

  “Hey,” he said. Popular greeting.

  “Are we sprung?” I said.

  He nodded. “Looks that way. The sheriff’s department is talking with HPD to see if there’s anything they need to hold us for, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s a clean shoot.”

  “Nothing from DHS?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Don said. “Somehow I doubt they want any more publicity on this.”

  “I’m counting on that.”

  “Huh?”

  I ignored him. “Is Charlie still up?”

  He said, “Still up and still pissed off.”

  I chuckled. “She’s just mad she didn’t get to shoot anybody.”

  “That’s exactly it. Why are you in such a good mood?”

  “Because I think I’ve come up with a way to go after these bastards,” I said, “but we’re going to need Charlie’s help.”

  He said, “She’ll be so grateful to finally be useful.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way when we talk to her.”

  We walked out of the conference room. I stretched and tried to get my bearings. It was a new day, but there was still lots to do and not a lot of time to do it. Mike was still out there — alive — and we’d wasted enough time.

  “Did Emma come and see you?” Don asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  He favored me with a shitty smile he knew would get a rise out of me. “No reason. It was nice to see her again.”

  I grunted, not willing to give him an iota of satisfaction.

  “Why did the two of you break up again?

  “She didn’t like my family.”

  “That's funny," Don replied. "As I recall, you're the only of us she didn't like."

  Chapter THIRTY-SIX

  “Y’all had a busy night. Assholes.”

  Charlie was up and much more well-rested than I was. She was leveraging that for maximum annoyance.

  “Please,” I said, “in your condition you would’ve shot yourself in the foot.”

  She laughed. “On the best day of your life, you couldn’t outshoot me.” She nodded to Don. “Him, maybe.”

  “Damn right,” Don said.

  I said, “Anyway, nobody’s filing charges.” I had a thought. “Has anybody talked to Mom?”

  Don said, “They kept our names out of the news reports, and I already talked to Kayla and she’s making sure everybody watches Netflix.”

  “Good deal,” I said.

  “Jim called, though.”

  Charlie said, “What did he want?”

  “To make sure we were all okay,” Don said. “Somehow he’d already heard about the shooting. And your arrest,” he said to me.

  “Curious,” I said sarcastically. Jim instantly knowing about something taking place 3,000 miles away was actually the least curious thing that had happened in the last 24 hours.

  “Don said you had a plan,” Charlie said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s not really a plan,” I said. “More like switching from passive to active mode. I want to take the fight to these ass-clowns instead of waiting around for them to try and kill us again.”

  Charlie said, “That sounds fine, but we aren’t even a hundred percent sure who’s behind this.”

  “You ruled the Russian guy out?” Don asked.

  “The only thing linking him is the Ferrari that ran us off the road,” I said. “He said he doesn’t have any, which is easy to check. You know what else is easy to check? DHS seizure manifests.”

  “I’m going to need my regular setup if we’re breaking into those servers,” Charlie said. “Are we free to go?”

  Don nodded. “With the usual ‘don’t leave town’ condition attached, of course.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s beat it before the hospital decides to sue us for damages.”

  I didn’t feel particularly safe returning to our attempted murder house, but if our enemies didn’t mind coming at us on a freeway or a hospital, anything short of Branch Davidian compound levels of protection wouldn’t make a difference.

  And it hadn’t really turned out all that well for the Davidians, anyway.

  Don dropped us off and left to check on Mom.
I wouldn’t have minded having his skillset at the house, but it made more sense for him to keep an eye on her.

  Charlie went to her lair, more slowly than usual, and I hoped she wasn’t going to end up with a permanent limp. She emerged about a half hour later with her first batch of results.

  “Steranko isn’t listed as the legal owner of any Ferraris,” she said. “That doesn’t really mean anything, so I checked manifests for shipments received by his holding companies and nothing on those either, not even for sale to other entities.”

  I said, “Anything on the DHS side?”

  Charlie shook her head. “Their publicly available list of seizures didn’t turn up anything, so I’ve got a script running to crack their internal server. Shouldn’t be too long now.”

  I appreciated the casual way she referred to procedures it would take hours to walk me through using small words.

  “Feeling okay?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “A little stiff. My neck still hurts. Maybe if we ever find out who wrecked my car, I can sue him for whiplash.”

  “If he skates on the attempted murder charge, you mean?”

  “Civil versus criminal cases,” Charlie said. “I gotta get paid, yo.”

  “Did you ever look at the rest of those reports you downloaded from Hammond’s secure drive?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Shit! I was going to do that after we got back from Mom’s, and of course we never made it.”

  She went back to her room and returned with a laptop. She had five or six and I was never sure which one was for what purpose. It wasn’t her personal one, which I only knew because this one wasn’t covered in 80s punk rock stickers.

  After typing for a few seconds, she scrolled through several screens before slowing and finally stopping to read something in its entirety.

  “Well, this is interesting.”

  “What?” I said.

  Charlie said, “There’s a report here from Ramirez, dated two weeks before his death.”

  “No shit? Wait, was that on the original list of reports?”

  “No,” she said, “and it’s not in Hammond’s sent files, meaning he received it but never passed it to his superiors.”

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  She gave a low whistle. “Ramirez talks about irregularities in the numbers of individuals intercepted in their trafficking searches.”

  I looked over her shoulder (it couldn’t be helped). “What kind of irregularities?”

  “There’s quite a list,” Charlie said. “Leads not followed up, failure to notify relevant local agencies, but he mostly talks about failure to report. Ramirez says he’s concerned the numbers going out are — and this is a direct quote — ‘underrepresented by the hundreds.’”

  I sat back. “DHS is taking women being brought in by human traffickers into custody and not reporting them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Ramirez noticed, then reported it to his boss, who did nothing.”

  She nodded. “Looks that way.”

  I said, “Do you think Mike knew?”

  She hit a button and her screen’s magnification increased. “See for yourself.”

  I looked at the report. Sure enough, there at the bottom, under Ramirez’s signature, it read “Cosigned, Technical Officer Mike Clarke.”

  “In other words,” I said, “Mike signed a report detailing — if we’re being charitable — DHS incompetence, and shortly thereafter he murdered the guy who filed the report and went AWOL.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure Hammond sat on this?” I asked. “Do we have examples of other reports that he passed up the chain?”

  She said, “He has a whole directory in his work drive of reports he sent along to his boss, a Director Morris. Morris reports directly to the Area Port Director, who oversees all Houston and Galveston entry points for Customs.”

  I’d already known Dave Hammond had lied to me about some things, but now it looked like he was covering up even more. A lot more.

  “Do you think you can access the manifests now?” I asked.

  She said, “Let me check,” and returned to her room. A minute later, she emerged with yet another laptop. “Here we go.”

  After a moment, “Jesus.”

  “Now what?”

  She said, “Hammond or whoever has been sitting on an unbelievable number of seizures. I’d say they’re maybe reporting half of what they’re taking.”

  I said, “Any cars?”

  “Cars, cash, drugs — you name it,” Charlie said.

  “You know what I’m looking for,” I said.

  She said, “Give me a sec.” She searched for a moment, “Looks like DHS seized three Ferraris in the last year. One was a red Testarossa.”

  Son of a bitch. “The last year? How long has this been going on?”

  “There’s no way to tell,” she said. “It looks like they use some sort of auto-archiving program that clears files out after a set period. Looks like eighteen months, but they probably have a separate repository for e-discovery if there’s litigation pending.”

  I said, “Can you download these manifests? Without them finding out, I mean?”

  “Not a problem,” she said. “I’m mirroring the contents to my own secure server.”

  I said, “Good deal. Get screenshots too, and anything else you think would help from a forensics standpoint. We’ll need the evidence when we go after these assholes.”

  “Already on it,” Charlie said, then she looked at me. “Cy, the value of these unreported seizures is more than the GDP of most countries. Are we sure Hammond is the only one involved?”

  “No way to know,” I said. “But first things first: we know Ramirez’s report was suppressed. Let’s dig a little more into Mr. Hammond’s business and see if there’s something we can use for leverage.”

  “And if there isn’t?”

  I said, “I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

  Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

  “You want the good news or the bad news?” Charlie said.

  “I always want the bad news,” I said.

  It was late afternoon, and our efforts at digging up dirt on Dave Hammond had borne little fruit. Everything Charlie had unearthed from behind DHS firewalls was indeed damning, but the guy’s public profile was squeaky clean.

  She said, “Ramirez’s report is the only one I can find evidence of Hammond suppressing. It looks like he manually deletes everything he receives after a certain period.”

  “Like that auto-archiving thing you were talking about?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I bet he just has a reminder set to go clean out his inbox. We’re lucky we found this one.”

  I cursed under my breath. It wasn’t enough. There was no direct link from the suppressed contraband seizures to Hammond, and without evidence, I had no leverage to use to find Mike.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “I backed up all the DHS material,” she said.

  “That’s great,” I replied. “Maybe we can print it all out and threaten to bury Hammond alive in it if he doesn’t tell us where Mike is.”

  “You didn’t find anything online?” she asked.

  “I found plenty,” I said. “He coaches Little League, he’s a member of the local Jaycees, and he’s on the board of the Fraternal Order of Police. He may or may not be running the biggest black market on the Gulf Coast out of a Ship Channel office, but publicly he’s a pillar of the community.”

  “I guess blackmail is out,” Charlie said.

  “It was always a long shot,” I admitted. “By itself, the report might be enough to go to the authorities with, but if we try moving forward with it, it’s just going to get bogged down in internal investigations.”

  “Meanwhile, they can keep taking shots at us.”

  I nodded. “Yup. And since we’ll have officially shown our hand, they won’t hold back. Forget a lone driver on I-45 or a handful of dipsh
its with M-16s, they’ll send a strike team to take us out, then plant drugs or kiddie porn in the house.”

  Charlie said, “Kind of makes you wonder why they haven’t already.”

  “Like I said, they don’t know what we know,” I said. “Right now, I’m just a guy poking around to find his brother. They tried to scare us off and probably think they’ve succeeded.”

  “That’s why you told Roy you were backing off.”

  I said, “Yeah. I don’t know who he’s in contact with, but if he is compromised, he’ll report that we’re standing down. That should buy us time.”

  “Time for what?” she asked.

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “For leaning on Hammond, or so I’d hoped. Now …” I spread my hands.

  “There must be another way,” Charlie said, “something we haven’t found yet. I can keep digging …”

  “Oh, there’s another way,” I said, “but I’m really not looking forward to it.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  I told her. She was, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Charlie said.

  “That’s entirely possible,” I agreed.

  She was pacing in front of me now, always a good indicator of when she was pissed off. “How is this supposed to work again?”

  I said, “I thought I was pretty clear.”

  “Yeah, I guess I just thought you were pulling my leg,” she said. “You’re going to break into Hammond’s house to find proof of his heinous crimes.”

  “With your help, but yeah.”

  She said, “You’re that ready to lose our investigator license?”

  “I’m that ready to find Mike,” I said. “Hammond would have to be an idiot to keep any evidence on DHS computers, and you’ve confirmed there isn’t any.”

  “That I can find,” Charlie pointed out.

  I said, “Well, not to blow smoke up your ass, but if you can’t find it, it ain’t there.”

  She chewed on that for a second. “Proceed.”

  “And I’m willing to bet he’s not stupid enough to keep anything incriminating on site, like in an office safe,” I continued. “That only leaves one place.”

  “Technically, it could be any number of places,” she said. “He may have a storage container or a boat or a fucking treehouse for all you know.”