Wolf's Revenge

by Lachlan Smith

  She sighed. “There were always guys coming and going. I mean, not always, but when they were here, I’d know it. Not that I was listening for it, I just couldn’t help hearing….”

  “What sort of guys?”

  She looked down. “I couldn’t generalize.”

  “How about the ones who lived in the house next door?”

  Silence. I waited. Lighting another cigarette, she blew out a puff of smoke, then said simply, “I just told you, there were always men.”

  “Did you tell the police about them?” I asked Sullivan.

  “No. I kept waiting for them to ask me about those guys, but they never did.”

  “You weren’t going to talk about them unless the police brought up their names?”

  “Because as far as I know, they didn’t have anything to do with her death.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that,” I said. “I’m just asking a few basic questions.”

  “Well, I’m trying to answer them. I had to go on living here. And in a murder investigation, bringing up names is the same as making accusations.”

  “They were over here, though? With Leann?”

  “I wasn’t keeping tabs. I didn’t ever talk to her about those men. But, yeah, they were over here from time to time. One night, I was bringing the trash out to the Dumpster and one of them literally ran me over coming out of her apartment late. He kept right on going without a word.”

  “That wasn’t the night she was killed, was it?”

  “Of course not,” Sullivan said. “I wouldn’t have kept anything like that from the police.”

  When I showed her Sims’s photo on my phone, she was unhelpful. “I don’t remember if it was him or the other one I ran into coming out of Leann’s place that time. Seems to me maybe they both visited up there at different times.”

  “What about the daughter?” I asked. “Did either of those men seem to be interested in her?”

  “No,” she said. “If that was the situation, I’d have known. And I’d have reported it,” she added, her voice rising in anticipation of my next question about whether she would have told the police if she suspected the men of sexual interest in the daughter.

  This denial, like the others, made me wonder if she was conscious, even now, of having deliberately covered her mouth, closed her eyes, and stopped her ears to threat and danger.

  I attempted to ask a few more questions, but her willingness to answer them had come to a sudden end.

  “I’m not going to get dragged into anything, am I?” she wanted to know as I was heading out the door. “The next time someone knocks, it’s not going to be one of them?”

  I told her that one of her former neighbors was dead. Giving her my card, I instructed her to call me immediately if she ever saw the one in the photo.

  As I walked down the steps, my eyes inevitably went to the onetime dwelling of Edwards and Sims. The porch was still deserted. However, on the hood of my car, a man with a handlebar mustache and tattoos sat smoking a cigarette. Seeing me, he mashed it out slowly on the paint job and slid down.

  I walked toward him, my heart jackhammering. As I walked past the house, the door opened. My knees turned to jelly as I recognized Sims. I was trying to imagine how to retreat when the first guy came closer and sucker-punched me.

  The world went end over end, like a child’s ball weighted on one side. Someone held me under the arms, and I was conscious of my heels dragging. I actually didn’t even realize I’d been punched until the horizon righted and I found myself lying on the floor of what turned out to be a van.

  I retched, then heard the door close. Someone was crouching over me. “Get up,” Sims said as the metal floor rumbled beneath me, the engine coming to life.

  When I couldn’t, he kicked me in the ribs. I sat up quickly and leaned my forehead against my knees, the world spinning as the van pulled away from the curb.

  “You hit him too hard,” Sims said to the man in the driver’s seat. There were only two seats, both up front.

  “He’s breathing, ain’t he?” was the response.

  I raised my head, my ears still ringing, then groaned, closed my eyes, and let my face fall forward against my knees. “I thought we had an understanding,” Sims said to me gently. “I thought you got the message last time we talked.”

  I had nothing to say. This was the man who’d killed my father and his wife.

  “You know where we’re going?” Sims asked.

  Again I didn’t respond.

  “Could be we’re going to Berkeley,” Sims continued, light-hearted. “Going to see your brother and his family. Let him know this arrangement of ours doesn’t seem to be working out.”

  Fear went through me. “It’s not an arrangement of ‘ours.’ Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “You work for Wilder, don’t you?”

  When I found my voice, it came an octave too low. “The impression I got when Bo called me after the killings is that he thinks the person who killed my father and Dot might be making a play against him.”

  Sims laughed. “And if so, what business would that be of yours?”

  “You made it my business when you murdered my father and Dot.”

  “My condolences. Really. But that wasn’t a job of mine. You might want to check with Bo. It’s possible he’s not being exactly honest with you. He tends to tell people what they want to hear.”

  My blood pounded in my eardrums. I looked up at Sims. I wanted to kill him and wouldn’t have hesitated to do so if I’d had a gun.

  I gathered my self-control, telling myself I wasn’t dead yet, so there could yet be a way out of the situation. Sims was prison-hard, the source of his power obvious in the promise of violence his body held. My power, if any, was less clear.

  The van was on the freeway now, cruising just below the speed limit. I was having a hard time not talking. “If Bo finds out you killed my father and Dot, he’s coming after you. Same goes for if you harm me and my family. You’d be signing your death warrant.”

  “Listen to me. Bo knows I didn’t kill your pops. Your whole goddamn family has a gratitude problem, as far as I can tell.” He snorted. “That’s one area Bo and I see eye to eye on.”

  “You must be talking about Russell Bell.” My head ached and I licked my lips. “You know, there’s a database where you can research address histories. Put your name in there and that house comes up.”

  Sims pretended curiosity. “Now what would you be putting in my name for?”

  “I don’t like surprises,” I said. “If I can trace the connection between you and Edwards that easily, you bet the police can, too.”

  We were nearly through Oakland now, maybe ten minutes from my brother’s place.

  Sims didn’t reply.

  My anger made me reckless, I knew. “It did strike me as a coincidence. What I couldn’t figure out is why you used a girl to pull the trigger. Then the answer came to me. I figure you just don’t have the balls to shoot someone who’s conscious.”

  This drew another snort. “You mean, like now? One problem is I’d mess up my van.”

  My breath caught in my throat. It was impossible to guess his intentions.

  Then he surprised me. “Another is that that little girl’d be left without a lawyer.”

  All the humor was gone from his eyes, and I saw that we’d now reached a point in the conversation that, for him, was deadly serious. He wanted me on this case, for reasons I didn’t understand. And something in his eyes told me it wasn’t just to cover his tracks.

  “The public defender might be able to represent her more effectively than I can,” I told him. “In a case like this, a straight-up acquittal is out of the question. To negotiate a favorable plea deal, she’s got to be willing to trade information—”

  Before I’d finished talking he’d grabbed me by the throat, thrown me to the rumbling floor of the van, and shoved his gun between my teeth. I struggled to breathe beneath the suffocating, menacing
weight of him. The metallic taste of gun oil spread through my mouth. There was also another taste, the sulfurous tang of burned gunpowder. The weapon had recently been fired, part of my brain realized.

  His words came out in an enraged whisper. “No lawyer I respect goes into a case talking about a plea deal. I don’t want to hear about deals. What I want is to hear how you’re going to convince a jury to walk her.”

  I made a sideways movement of my head, as if to shake it, trying to indicate the impossibility of the task he’d set for me. With a gun in my mouth, oral communication was out of the question.

  “You’re going to try that case, you hear me?” he said. “And the jury’s going to come back with a verdict. Now tell me what they’re going to say. You have one chance, and if you give the wrong answer, I swear I’ll blow off your fucking head, and to hell with the floor of my van!”

  He waited an instant, eyes locked with mine as if to show me how serious he was. Then he took the gun away, just long enough for me to mouth the words, every nerve in my body now focused on complying with his instructions. “‘Not guilty,’” I said, my voice barely a croak.

  He shoved me from him, and I hit my head on the side of the van, then sat up, gasping. With trembling fingers, I tested the tooth he’d jammed the gun barrel against. It was tender and seemed to wiggle in its socket.

  “Obviously, you know more about this case than I do,” I managed to get out.

  “That sounds right to me.” Now he chuckled. “Don’t you worry about the jury. Leave them to me.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Meaning, you disagree with your brother’s tried-and-true methods? You’ve got to reach the jury, is what he always used to say. Least that’s what I’ve heard. With the means at your disposal. If persuasion doesn’t work … then, well, there are always other methods, more direct ones.”

  “My brother never tampered with a jury in his life. He didn’t need to.”

  “Believe whatever you want. It’s possible none of the rumors about him were true, but, as far as I can see, he never did a damned thing to discourage them.”

  I’d heard all the rumors and wasn’t interested in debating them. Above all, not here, not now, and not with him. Then, before he could stick the gun in my face again, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. Just three words: “The Plum Tree.”

  The van suddenly decelerated, exiting off the freeway. Finally, Sims spoke. “Last I heard, they were looking for a couple of black guys for that job.”

  “Yeah, I heard that, too.” I shut my eyes. I was in too much pain and shock; he had the upper hand.

  “Pull over here.”

  We were on University Avenue, maybe a mile from Teddy’s place. “I’m not playing games,” Sims now told me. “This isn’t a puzzle for you to figure out. You’ve got one job, and one job only: Make sure she turns down every offer the DA makes, then get the case to the jury and spend a week trying it. I’ll do the rest.”

  He reached back and tugged on the handle of the rear door, throwing it open.

  “Now get the fuck out.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I walked half a block in a daze, turning every few steps to make sure the van really was gone, that they weren’t following me. Then, gripped by a terrible panic, I took out my phone and called my brother. I reached him as he was just leaving to walk Carly to her preschool, she and Tam evidently having returned home. As Teddy listened, I hurriedly described the van and told him to get everyone inside and lock the doors.

  “What happened? Should we call the police?” I could feel his mounting anxiety. And his sense of being trapped in the nightmare that had come to define too much of his life. But the trouble was, I had no answers for him. Not to mention, I was on the verge of collapse.

  “Just stay home,” I told him. “Wait for me.” I stood doubled over on the sidewalk, chest heaving, head pounding, the taste of gun oil in my mouth.

  After a moment I straightened, took out my wallet, and extracted what Sims would have found if he’d bothered to search me: the card Agent Braxton had given my brother, who’d passed it on to me.

  I keyed the numbers without giving myself time to stop and consider what I hoped to achieve. All I knew was that after this morning, a turning point had been reached.

  “Braxton here.”

  I hesitated. “This is Leo Maxwell.”

  “Okay.” There was the shortest of pauses, as if he’d expected my call and was prepared. “Do exactly as I tell you. Get a secure line—a throwaway phone—and call me back on the number I’m about to give you. Ready?”

  I took the number down. There was a convenience store on the corner of the next block. I ducked in, bought a phone, ripped the packaging off, and, after waiting for the device to activate, used it to call Braxton as I stepped outside.

  The instructions he’d given me were designed to bring us to a place of secure privacy. This proved to be a dark-windowed SUV, into which I stepped when it slowed down to let me in.

  “I was surprised to hear from you,” Braxton told me. “I’d been expecting your brother.”

  “The government’s dealings with my family will have to go through me,” I said. “That’s the first ground rule.”

  “That’s fine for now,” he said. “But if you’re going to make conditions, you might want to remember I’m here at your request.”

  “And before that, you approached my brother,” I reminded him.

  “So what is it you’d like to talk about?” Braxton asked. He glanced at me as he drove. “You get hit by a truck or something?”

  My head was still painfully tender. I’d tried to get some ice at the convenience store but its machine had been broken. “I’d have preferred a truck,” I said. “But never mind that. For starters, you told Teddy our father’s death was the worst day of your professional life. Clearly, an opening for a recruitment pitch. I’m here to listen.”

  “Listen to what?” Braxton said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. It’s true enough I approached your brother, but that wasn’t a professional visit. My motive was personal, because I wanted to express my condolences. Your father was a man I’d come to admire.”

  I shook my head, unwilling to accept such obvious bullshit.

  He went on. “I can repeat to you what I said to Teddy, but I get the sense that my sympathies would be lost on you. After all, he’s the one who visited your father in prison all those years. My sense is that you didn’t want anything to do with Lawrence until he was getting out of prison and you could no longer avoid him.”

  His take stung deeply, as it was no doubt intended to do. The source of Braxton’s information about my relationship with my father could only have been Lawrence himself. Now, here was his indictment falling on me from beyond the grave.

  “People change,” I said. I didn’t intend just to roll over when it came to his assessment of my failings as a son. “But our family relationships are none of your business. I didn’t risk my life to meet with you just to discuss what a great guy my dad was.”

  “I’m not sure what else we have to talk about.”

  “How about whether my dad was working for the government? And, if so, whether being an informant got him killed. And if that’s what happened, what does the FBI intend to do about it?”

  Braxton turned his face for a glimpse of the view as we rounded a switchback near the top of Grizzly Peak. Then, without glancing at me, he said, “Why should I trust you? We know you’re in Wilder’s camp now, representing his foot soldiers. I don’t mind telling you that if and when we fold up his operation, your name will be on the indictment.”

  Now he did look over at me, his eyes as cold and pitiless as Jack Sims’s gaze had seemed a few hours before.

  “Is Teddy’s name going to be in that indictment, too? You told him to contact you if he needed help getting out of the situation he was in. You also said you’d do everything you could to see that he didn’t end up like my father.”

 
“As I said, that was personal, not professional.” He paused. “I know you don’t want to believe this, but your father was my good friend. On a personal level, I owed him. And his greatest concern before he died was for Teddy and his family. He figured you could take care of yourself.”

  “Look, I’m not here for myself,” I informed him. “It’s Teddy and his family that are the problem. And my father didn’t die, as you so euphemistically put it—he was brutally murdered. I should know. I was the one who found them.”

  “I’m aware of that.” His tone was patently insincere, even mocking.

  “Think what you like. My guess is you feel a responsibility toward Teddy because my father did. And rightly so, because he was responsible for tangling us up with Wilder. My beef is that, to me, it looks as though Lawrence was killed because he was working for you.”

  Braxton shook his head. “The difficulty I’m having with this conversation is this. What’s to convince me you aren’t here acting for Wilder, looking to confirm what he suspects about your father but doesn’t know for sure? If I were him, and suspected your father’d been passing information to the feds, I’d want to try to learn what exactly he’s told us, so I could understand how bad the damage is. I might even send you to try to get that information. If Wilder was threatening your family, wouldn’t you do whatever he asked, no matter how you felt about the murder of your father and his wife?”

  “You’re wrong. He wouldn’t trust me to make contact with the FBI and not betray him in the process,” I said. “The simple truth is, if Wilder finds out I’m talking to you, I’m dead. That is, assuming he’s still the one calling the shots.”

  His answer was curt. “Who else would be in charge if he isn’t?”

  “The man who killed my father, of course. I assume you already know his name.”

  “Let’s quit playing games. You tell me who you think pulled the trigger and I’ll tell you if you’re wrong.”

  “Fine. Jack Sims.” I told Braxton in general terms about Sims’s threat to our family and my father’s promise to deal with him, followed shortly by his own death. He listened to me, saying nothing.