Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  “Not our justice, maybe.”

  He inhaled, blew smoke. “There isn’t any other kind.”

  I heard a steady whop-whop high above us. I glanced up to see the police bird approaching.

  “I’m asking,” Nik said.

  “Damn it.”

  His face was made of stone. “Please.”

  A shadow moved in the trees near Rhodes’s camp. At first I thought it was Len Bandoni. Or maybe Calamity Jane going after Rhodes’s discarded food. But then I caught a flash of fair skin and the gleam of blond hair matted with blood.

  Elise.

  When you acknowledge the dead, you call them to you. I hadn’t yet figured out how to send them away. Most of us get over it, the Marine had told me.

  I kept reminding myself of that.

  “Ah, shit.” I pushed my face into Nik’s. Clyde gave a low growl, but this time I didn’t call him off. “You have no idea what this is costing me.”

  “I think I do.”

  “No. You don’t. You have no fucking idea because you never want to hear about it. I will do this because I love you, Nik. But you have used up every single karma point you had with me. You understand?”

  “I’ll never ask you for anything else,” Nik said.

  Heat rose in my face. “Damn straight, Nikolas George Lasko. You will never ask again.”

  He blinked. “I got it, Sydney Rose.”

  I turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears burning my eyes. Something had broken between us that I wasn’t sure we could fix. The worst kind of Weight.

  I picked up Clyde’s empty water dish, locked up the Ford, and shouldered my bag.

  The chopper came straight down, dropping a path through the snow, throwing a dim gray shadow over us and the truck.

  Down by the river, Elise moved from tree to tree, drawn steadily toward her lover’s lingering aura. She looked toward me, blue eyes meeting mine beneath a veil of blood, and I turned my back on her and Nik and the whole damn world. I fisted my hands in Clyde’s leash.

  The chopper landed.

  CHAPTER 5

  In modern warfare, people disappear. Not because they run off, or go native, or get taken prisoner. I don’t even mean that they’re gone because they’re dead. I mean they vanish. One second they’re right there, standing next to you, as bright and alive as they will always remain in the eyes of their parents, wives, children. Maybe they’re talking about how the Broncos just put some whup-ass on the Raiders or how they’re going to start a computer repair business when they get home or maybe just about how sweet that first post-dawn cigarette tastes and would you like one, too?

  And then they take a few steps and the bomb goes off, and when the pink mist is done soaking into the dust, all you’re left with is a single boot and the guy’s hand. Or maybe just his rucksack spewing his med pack and his lucky rabbit’s foot and his last clean pair of underwear across the field.

  And there you stand, scared all to shit and grieving like you’ve never grieved.

  But fuck if you aren’t happy, too. Because part of you is like, sweet Jesus, that could have been me.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  Cohen waited, arms folded and jaw tight, while I ducked against the downdraft and hoisted Clyde into the helicopter before Nik and I scrambled aboard, dropping into the forward-facing seats across from the detective.

  Cohen shook our hands briefly in turn then closed the chopper door.

  He donned headphones and gestured for Nik and me to do the same so that we could talk over the sound of the rotors.

  “Be just a minute,” he said. “Checking our clearance with Denver Approach.”

  “That train’s chewing up iron,” Nik said.

  “Won’t be long.”

  Cohen dropped back into his seat and busied himself writing notes in his large spiral book. Up front, the pilots shared a laugh on their private channel. The smell of hydraulic fluid rose from the floorboards, and the chill air held the stink of jet fuel. In an instant, my skin grew hot, my pulse jumped, and sweat beaded at my temples as memories from Iraq burst like mortar fire across my brain.

  The Sir. The bomb. Gurneys full of the dead.

  I pressed my hands to my face. PTSD. The gift that keeps on giving. I’d been furious with Nik because of Elise’s ghost. But it looked like the helicopter ride was going to be a bonus.

  Clyde pushed up against me. He’d been trained for helicopters, but he didn’t look happy, either. He laid back his ears and furrowed his face.

  “Easy, boy,” I said.

  I held out some kibble from the bag in my pocket and stroked his head, leaning over to whisper into his ear.

  “We’re still good.”

  He ignored the kibble and watched my face. Dogs sniff out fear and anxiety the way a street thief finds a mark—quickly and without effort. I had to convince myself we were okay before I could convince Clyde.

  Still holding out the treat, I relaxed my shoulders and drew in deep, regular breaths the way the VA counselor had taught me. I looked into Clyde’s anxious eyes and envisioned sitting with him in a mountain glen somewhere far away, the two of us basking in the sunlight, watching clouds drift overhead.

  We are here, we are here, we are here. Nothing can harm us.

  After a minute or two of silent interrogation, Clyde’s ears came forward and his brow smoothed out. He took the kibble from my hand then settled himself on the floor near my feet.

  I scrubbed behind his ears. “Good boy.”

  One small victory.

  I straightened and looked over at Cohen. “Detective?”

  He kept jotting notes. “Yeah, Parnell?”

  “We were just doing our job. Down at the camp.”

  Cohen lifted his head; his eyes met mine like a fist to the face. “That how it seemed to you? Because it seems to me that was my scene. My case, my scene.”

  Nik broke in. “We couldn’t be sure we had anything,” he said calmly. “Time was wasting. I made the call.”

  “My sympathy for your loss, Lasko. But it was a bad call.”

  “Could be we pushed the line a little. But if we’d waited for you to drag your ass down there, we wouldn’t be after Rhodes now.”

  Cohen ignored the jibe. “You think how it will look if this goes to trial? You think about what the judge is going to say, you digging around the camp of the man who—”

  “Look,” Nik said, “we weren’t trying to piss on your hydrant. But we’ve got to catch the guy before we can try him. We were there. You weren’t.”

  Cohen’s face went harder. “Why bring a perp in if you can’t keep him?”

  “You sound like a DA.”

  “And you’re what, the Lone Ranger? Or did I just miss the memo? When did you become a murder cop?”

  “Around the time you decided to sit on your ass while a killer got away.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  Nik looked at me. Cohen kept his eyes on Nik.

  I glared at both of them. “Can we quit with the territory crap and focus on Tucker Rhodes?”

  “Right,” Nik said softly.

  “Right,” said Cohen. Still pissed.

  The pilot’s voice came over the line. “We’re cleared to go.”

  The sound of the rotors deepened as they bit the air. Clyde gave a soft whine, and I pulled him close. Together we stared out the window as the chopper got light on her skids then lifted into the snow-dappled air.

  Denver dropped beneath us. Distance swallowed first Cohen’s partner in his dark overcoat and then the bright gleam of Elise’s hair. The tents and tarps of the hobo camp disappeared behind the cottonwoods as we swung north.

  For the next few minutes we flew in and out of pockets of a halfhearted storm; blue-gray sky whipped by, mottled with pale sunlight. The pilots chatted privately. In his corner, Nik sat like a man braced against a hard wind. Across from me, Cohen kept writing in his notebook.

  “Detective?”

  He didn’t look up. �
�What?”

  Ground glass in his voice.

  “You invited us along. How can we help?”

  He tapped a finger on the metal spiral then put aside his anger like a man shrugging off a heavy coat. “Tell me about the train.”

  “Engine 158346. It’s a mixed string of a hundred and thirty-eight cars. That translates into a lot of length.”

  “How much length?”

  “Almost a mile and a half.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “There a way to narrow that down?”

  “Our witness at the camp said he caught out somewhere on the back half of the train. Chances are good he’s in a rear DPU—”

  “Which is?”

  “Distributed power unit. Otherwise known as the rear locomotive. Hobos like it because it’s warm and it has a bathroom. This train has two rear units.”

  “Okay. We’ll put men in place along the tracks so they’re close to those units when we stop the train. Where else could he be?”

  “Can I borrow your notebook and pen?”

  When he passed them over, I flipped to a blank page. Then I called up the train consist—the string of cars—from my 3:00 a.m. memory when I’d checked into work from the computer at home. My laptop was still in the shop. A replacement hadn’t materialized.

  I started sketching.

  “Mostly we’ve got empty coal hoppers,” I said. “They’re too deep to climb out of, and the bottoms are angled into a chute. Hobos don’t ride them because they’re death traps. We won’t find Rhodes there.”

  “What else?”

  I kept scribbling as I ran down my mental list. “Sixteen or seventeen closed hoppers strung together two-thirds of the way down the train. Rhodes could be riding a hopper platform or tucked into the cubby. If that’s where he is, it will be easy for him to make a fast getaway when the train stops. You’ll have to get men on those quickly.”

  “And hoppers are what exactly?”

  The edge in his voice made me lift my head. Cohen’s face held a hungry, open-ended curiosity. A need to know everything I knew, and yesterday was too late. I’d seen the look on Doug Ayers’s face a thousand times. Usually when he met with someone involved in whatever covert ops he was working.

  The resemblance between the men was so startling that for a second I couldn’t breathe.

  Tell me everything, Dougie would say to his source.

  The memory shot through me with the kick of a sniper’s bullet. Dougie, sitting at a metal folding table in a grove of gum arabic trees, his long legs stretched in front of him, his left hand waving away the droning flies as he chatted with an old tribesman while Clyde and I kept watch twenty yards away. Dust rose languidly into the air and hung there, white as talcum in the desert light. Dougie’s face carried its habitual expression of curiosity and impatience as he twirled the old lion’s head ring he wore on braided leather around his neck.

  “Tell me everything,” he said in Arabic.

  “Na’am,” said his source, the Iraqi elder, and poured more tea.

  Dougie lifted his cup, saluted the old man.

  “Salâmati!”

  The old man raised his own cup. “Salâmati!”

  Ten days later, Dougie’s broken body lay on my table in Mortuary Affairs, his eyes and face powdered with that same fine, white dust. The day after that, someone left the old man’s head outside our gates.

  Tell me everything, Dougie, I’d whispered to his body. I need to know.

  “Sydney Rose?” Nik’s voice came from the far end of a long tunnel. “You okay?”

  I shook myself, my hand going to Dougie’s ring where it now hung around my neck. Through my coat, I touched the heavy gold. “I’m fine.”

  Nik eyeballed me.

  I flushed. “I am, Nik. I’m fine.”

  His eyes narrowed at the lie, but he nodded and went back to his window.

  “Hoppers and cubbies.” Cohen’s expression had softened. “You know that I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Right. Sorry. A hopper is a car used for carrying bulk items like corn or wheat—products that have to be protected from the weather. The front and rear walls angle in from the top to the bottom, leaving room at each end of the car for a metal platform that sits directly over the wheels. Like this.” I drew a quick sketch. “One platform is taken up with the brake system. But the other platform is open. Perfect for hobos.”

  “And the cubby?”

  “It’s a hole cut into the end-wall of the car, here”—I pointed—“above the platform. Not roomy, but a great place to hide.”

  “Okay. I got the hoppers. Go on.”

  “A few flatcars. No worries there—they’re filled with loads that make riding them too risky. But we’ve got twenty-three gondolas spread out along the train.” I made another sketch. “A gondola is essentially a roofless boxcar sliced in half horizontally so it’s only about six feet higher than the wheels. On our train, thirteen of the gondolas are empty, which means he could easily be inside. The only way for us to know is to climb up inside each car and take a look.”

  “What about a flyover? Could we see him that way?”

  “Depends. If he’s in one of the gondolas, sure. But if he’s on a platform or in a cubby, he’ll be impossible to see from the air. And we run the risk of alerting him if we do a flyover in a police chopper.”

  Cohen nodded. “Sounds like the work will have to be done from the ground.”

  “How many men do you have?”

  “Larimer County is putting their SWAT team in with twenty-one men plus a commander. We’ve got ten deputies, the sheriff, and two K9 teams. State’s giving us another twenty-five men. So sixty plus us.” Cohen rubbed his eyes as if only now realizing how tired he was. “You got suggestions on how we should use everybody once the train stops? Your witness placed him near the rear of the train?”

  “Right.”

  “Your witness is a drug addict, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Rhodes has enough experience catching out to know that the back half of a train makes for a better ride. I’d recommend focusing your manpower on the cluster of closed hoppers and empty gondolas in the last third of the train.”

  I showed him the consist I’d sketched. “Here,” I pointed. “And here. Plus the rear DPUs. If you stop so that the forward third of the train is across the bridge north of the fertilizer plant, you’ll be able to place men on the roof of the building to look into the open hoppers and the gondolas and to watch for him if he makes a run for it. Put some men on perimeter near the front of the train and at the bridge. Just in case. And tell the guys on perimeter that if Rhodes gets wind of what we’re doing, he might jump as soon as the train slows.”

  “We need to tell the sheriff exactly where he should place his men along the track.”

  “Mark off the track in hundred-yard segments. So you’ll have men in these places.” I drew tiny markers on the paper.

  While Cohen passed the distance indicators onto the sheriff’s dispatcher, I asked the copilot to patch me in with the Fort Worth operations center so I could talk to Engine 158346. The engineer was Dan Albers, a brute of a man with the temper of a cornered badger. When on duty, he kept a Bowie knife strapped to his calf and a sawed-off shotgun next to his chair. He once single-handedly took down a trio of purported members of an FTRA gang who tried to hop his train. The Freight Train Riders of America are violent thugs with a take-no-prisoners mentality. Albers coldcocked two of them before they knew he was there, and he had the third cowering in a boxcar at gunpoint by the time police arrived.

  Something to be said for taking care of your own problems. But with his temper, Albers wasn’t who I would have chosen to be driving this particular train.

  “Bastard’s on my train,” he said when dispatch put me through.

  “Albers, don’t get in the middle of this,” I warned him. “Stay in the cab.”

  “Bastard’s got no business being there.”

  “Albers.”

>   “Shit, Parnell.”

  I waited.

  “Long as he don’t cross me,” he said finally.

  “Keep the air up on the brakes,” I said. “We want him to think you’ve just stopped for something on the track.”

  “I got it. Don’t get yourself hurt, okay?”

  “Thanks.” I hung up.

  Cohen glanced at his watch. He looked gray with exhaustion.

  “Long day?” I asked.

  “Not long enough to fix anything.”

  I said nothing. I was unfairly angry at him for making me think of Dougie. Plus, I had no patience for complaints of exhaustion or lack of time. I’d set my standard by the Sir, who was years older than Cohen. The Sir would take seventy-two-hour shifts dodging IEDs and terrorists, spend the next forty-eight up to his elbows in gore, and top it off with back-to-back meetings with grieving Iraqi families. After all that, he would muster up a smile for his crew and a murmured “We’re still good.”

  “Parnell?”

  “What?”

  Something must have showed in my face because a gleam of amusement shone through Cohen’s exhaustion.

  “You think I’m a pussy.”

  “What do you care what I think?”

  “What if I do?”

  That stopped me. I noticed again the sharpness of his winter eyes, the rime-edge of intelligence gleaming there. And something else in his gaze, something as far from the ice as night from day. Something I might have labeled compassion if I’d been in a more generous mood.

  I frowned. “To be honest, Detective, I don’t have any opinions about you. Good or bad.”

  Cohen leaned back. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

  “Sorry. I’m more honest than I should be.”

  He winced.

  “That came out wrong,” I said. “I—”

  “No. It’s okay. I probably deserved it.” He laughed. “I’m out of practice, but you’re pretty good at the shutdown.”

  “A gift from the Corps.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said, but it wasn’t unkind. He scrubbed his face with both hands and shook off his fatigue. “Railroad property. I assume you want to be part of the takedown. You and the sheriff can duke it out as to who makes the arrest.”