by Deek Rhew
The harsh land, scorched during the day, cooled as soon as the sun fell behind the mountains to the west. A refreshing breeze tousled her hair and tickled her neck as she inhaled its arid crispness.
Monica stretched her back and legs, marveling at how much better she felt freed from the shackles of the depressing little town. The oppressive hand of the FBI, however brief the hiatus, no longer encircled her throat, asphyxiating the life out of her.
She was free.
A thought struck her, and she turned to Angel. “Maybe we should just keep driving? Screw the FBI, screw the mob, screw everyone. We’ll just travel from place to place. There’s so much to see, and neither of us have any obligations. I’m dead and you…well you were already planning to give up the grocery job. Come on; it’ll be fun.”
Semi-serious, she longed to remain unconfined. She hadn’t fought so hard to survive her childhood only to become a pawn of the FBI and an enemy of the mob.
Angel cocked her head. “So we’ll just become professional nomads, the crappy little car our proverbial camel?”
“Something like that.”
“What about the dream of fighting for the rights of abused and neglected children?” Angel assumed her best Monica impression. “‘I’ve decided to be a lawyer, Angel. I want to represent those who have no voice.’”
“Guess they need to find someone who’s up to the task. The person who had that dream died in an explosion a couple of days ago.” Monica reflected for a moment, her gaze not focused on anything. When she came back, her eyes found Angel’s in the deepening twilight. “I can’t believe how badly I’ve messed up my life. Everyone tells me how smart I am, but I had to call you because I couldn’t figure out what to do on my own. I can’t even take care of myself. How am I supposed to help the kids of the world who need it? I’d probably make things worse.”
Angel came up and stood next to her on the edge of the bluff. She took Monica’s hand and said in a quiet voice, “Why don’t we just Thelma and Louise it then?”
“Huh?” Monica stared at her friend.
“You’re a complete and utter loser. A failure. A pimple on the donkey’s ass of society. What’s the point in going on?” Angel took a step closer to the ledge. “Right now. Couple of steps and we’re flying, at least for a few seconds, then it’s all over. No more Peter, Jon, Crew Cut, your mom, the mob, the dream, any of it. A quick, neat end and all your little problems are solved. Come on, let’s do it!” She pulled Monica’s hand. “Right here. Right now. I’m not screwing around. Ready? On the count of three. One…”
Monica gaped at her, looked over the edge of the cliff, and then back at Angel.
“Two…” Angel took a step back, tensing to run.
“Ang, I don’t know.”
“What?” Angel snapped, turning to her. “What don’t you know? It sounds like you’ve got it all worked out! It’s been kinda tough, so let’s just fold up and let those bastards win. Oh, poor me. I’ve been so abused. My dad died, and my mom’s a whore. Sure, I’ve had a friend that always, always has my back and a surrogate family. Sure I got straight A’s in high school, a full ride to NYU, and had plans to be a big shot lawyer.”
Angel threw her arms up in the air. “But shit got a little rough for a while ’cause I was helping take down some low-life scumbags. Life hasn’t been ideal lately, and there’s simply no way to get back to the dream. I can’t do that with another identity, which is what my friend is going to insist on when we get to the effing FBI headquarters. Oh, poor me.”
Angel turned back to the cliff and took another step back, tensing her body for the final leap. “Come on! You’re right. There’s no turning this boat around. Let’s do it! Let’s end this thing! Ready?”
Monica’s mouth still hung open. Her jaw bobbed up and down, but no words came out, making her feel like a guppy. As hard as she tried to stop them, the edges of her lips curled up, and she giggled. She tried to stop, but the giggles were relentless and attacked her. She laughed harder than she had in years as she mimicked her friend. “Right here. Right now. I’m not screwing around.”
“I’m not. Come on, let’s go.”
Angel’s serious demeanor only made Monica laugh harder. “Let’s Thelma and Louise it.” She fell on her butt in a cloud of dust, not caring about the dirt. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Angel’s face cracked, and a smile played across her lips. A groan turned to snickers, growing until the full belly roll took her. Their combined laughter echoed, amplified by the canyon walls until it sounded like an auditorium full of spectators at a Jack Benny premiere. They lay on the flat rock, the dust clinging to their sweat and tears.
As they regained control, Monica looked at her. “I love you, you know that.”
“Of course you do. I’m awesome.”
Monica started laughing again, and they lay on the ground holding hands as the sun finished its decent to the west, and darkness claimed the desert.
* * *
“I need to get my shit together. My life’s a disaster,” Angel told Monica as they drank warm beer and smoked. They lay on the hood of the car, their backs propped up on the windshield, the night’s unblemished sky a kaleidoscope of brilliant stars.
Monica regarded her friend. “I’ve been telling you that for years.” She took a pull from her bottle.
Angel raised her middle finger in response.
Monica smiled. “What I mean is, you’ve got so much potential. You just need a direction. What do you want to do?”
“That’s the problem, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been stuck in neutral forever.”
“You need to leave The Cove, at least for a while. Go see the world.”
Angel indicated towards the desert with a half-full Michelob.
“Yes, I suppose this is a start. But you’ve had your foot to the floor since we left Arizona. We haven’t exactly been sightseeing.”
“Well.” Angel traced the label on the beer bottle with her thumb. “I wouldn’t mind going to Nashville.”
“For real?”
“Why not?” Angel replied. “We have money, and no one’s going to mind if the dead girl calls in sick a couple of days.”
Monica shook her head. “I’m pretty sure that I’m fired. Getting the boss killed and all.”
“See? You’re free and I’ve got zero obligations because I don’t have a life. What’s to stop us?”
Monica regarded her friend, who continued to surprise her. Did anything hold them back? In the eyes of the law, she had stolen the money from the Bunder safe, but so what? Neither of them would fess up to taking it. “Yeah, okay, let’s do it.”
The women clicked bottles.
32
Chum in an ocean full of great whites stood a better chance of survival than Barry Yamalki. Laven Michaels, his single most important client, stared at him from across the marred wooden table. Laven’s unsavory mood radiated from him in waves of dark energy. The heat of it scorched Barry’s skin, and he often wondered how he didn’t come away from these meetings blistered and sunburned. He, the head of the team that did all of the mob boss’ legal work, couldn’t remember a time, not a single one, when the stocky man had been in a good mood.
Laven’s entire emotional repertoire seemed to consist only of various flavors of unpleasantness that ranged from displeasure to seething.
“We are working on getting your trial thrown out. I think the odds are well in our favor,” Barry informed his client. If the good news pleased the little man, Barry couldn’t see it. “If you’re unable to face your accuser, everything they have is circumstantial. If that happens, then I think we can get almost all of it dismissed, so we should have you out by the end of the week.”
The mob boss stared at him, dark eyes boring in as if he could read the lawyer’s thoughts.
Don’t ask. Don’t ask.
The mantra circled in Barry’s head like an out-of-tune carousel. He tried to give L
aven a reassuring smile. He knew how people viewed him―cadaverously gaunt, stooped-shouldered, six foot seven with huge, watery gray eyes that swam behind Coke-bottle glasses―but Barry had stood with complete confidence before juries, judges, congressmen, and, on a memorable occasion, the Vice President. In the professional arena, no one intimidated him. But no matter how much he steeled himself, he could never overcome the sensation of being a seal in open waters while this relentless hammerhead circled. With a word or nod, Barry could befall an “accident” or simply disappear if he displeased this man.
And Laven appeared displeased now. “So…” Laven leaned forward, his eyes startling in their blackness and intensity. “What aren’t you telling me? I don’t like being jerked around. It makes me unhappy.”
Barry’s skin prickled, and he had to focus on keeping the club sandwich he’d had for lunch from escaping. The meeting should have been routine, but Laven must have sensed something. Not deception, Barry never lied, but the withholding of information. Laven always seemed to know. He had the honed instincts of a predator—this innate yet sharpened ability that separated successful businessmen from those doing twenty to life.
Trepidation squeezed Barry’s heart as he hesitated.
Laven did not move other than to raise one trim eyebrow. His client would not ask again.
“The unfortunate accident in Arizona…”
“It was only unfortunate for the prosecution, it works in our favor. It ties up a loose end that should make your job child’s play. What about it?”
“The locator app that told us where the girl was, well… One of our techs was wrapping things up, and just before he closed it down, it pinged.”
If possible, the mob boss’ eyes grew darker. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of Barry’s neck. He charged an exorbitant fee for his services, but the world did not contain enough antacids to cure the ulcer his doctor warned him had begun to develop in his stomach.
“Are you under a lot of stress?” the man with the stethoscope had asked.
You have no idea, Barry had thought but did not say. Maybe the time had arrived to retire? Having money did no good if he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. Whether the end came via a heart attack or through a midnight trip in the trunk of a dark sedan seemed irrelevant.
“It’s possible,” the lawyer continued, “that she had checked her email on multiple computers and…”
“No,” Laven interrupted.
Barry stopped talking, mouth hanging open, the word frozen mid-syllable.
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“The IP address was traced back to a hotel in Arizona. The connection cut off before we had a chance to get any images from the camera though, so we don’t know who it was.”
“What about the MAC address?” The question referenced the media access control address, or MAC, a unique identifier for every computer accessing the Internet.
Barry fished through his briefcase and pulled out the report the tech had given him, comparing that with the previous logs of access. Shit. “It’s different. That was the first time the email had been accessed on that machine. But it doesn’t mean it’s her. She could have given the username and password to someone else, her friend for instance.”
“And you think maybe her friend drove from California to Arizona just to check her email?”
Barry didn’t have an answer to the question.
“What about her phone?”
“We found it broken on Highway Thirty, about ten miles outside of Walberg. Looks like someone threw it out the window. Again, that could be explained.”
Laven’s eyes flashed, and Barry knew the glowing, animal-like eyes had been the last thing many people saw before drawing their final breath. “No. The prosecution believes Monica is dead, and it’s up to you to make sure she stays that way. This will not interfere with my case. You will take care of the problem. This time, there will not be any slip-ups.”
“I understand.”
“I hope so. I’ve been more than patient with your incompetence. The risk you have put me in makes me uncomfortable. When I start feeling uncomfortable, I look for alternatives to my problems.”
Laven’s mood seemed to shift, and he smiled. The shark about to dine. The expression felt worse than the simmering anger. Much worse. Laven continued, “But I shouldn’t have to worry, that’s what I pay you barrels of money for. Your job is to take care of the details.” He paused then stood, fixing Barry with a gaze blacker and deeper than any abyss. “Take care of it, Barry.”
Laven walked to the back of the room and banged on the wall. When the door opened, the mob boss exited.
Just before it closed, a guard looked at the pale lawyer, and their eyes locked for a moment as total understanding passed between them. Even on the other side of the bars, the little man scared this enforcer of the law.
The door closed, leaving Barry alone with his indigestion.
Spending twenty minutes with someone who made the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse look like Captain Kangaroo took something from him—his essence or lifeblood or a piece of his soul. Barry didn’t know what, only that each time he met with this man, he left wasted―the depleted, empty sensation not dissimilar to having given too many pints of blood. Barry pulled out a small flask and drained the contents in three long, shaky gulps, wincing as the alcohol barbed through his degenerating digestive system. He took a deep breath and closed his briefcase.
He had some work to do, and very little of it had to do with the law.
33
Local Woman Killed In Gas Explosion. The headline of the news article Sam had printed from the Phoenix Sun screamed at him. Under the damning words, the paper included a picture of firefighters sorting through ash between burnt wall supports that stood like a blackened skeleton of some prehistoric dinosaur.
The article provided the scantest of details about the explosion itself. Using a hacker program provided by The Agency, Sam accessed the fire department’s computer system. The formal report and dispatch records held nothing of interest.
Another article, written a few hours after the one published by the Sun, gave a few more details, including the victim’s name: Susan Rosenberg, Walberg paralegal. None of this helped.
Next to him stood a stack of printouts on the New York City trial. The disintegrating case had made national news, and rumors circulated of it collapsing altogether since the prosecution had lost its star witness. For either dramatic or strategic reasons, they had waited until the last minute to put Monica on the stand. Unfortunately, they’d waited a little too long.
Sam accessed the city’s court system, which had everything. The defendant, Laven Seth Michaels, had been charged with, among other things, murder and drug trafficking. Circumstantial evidence abounded, but it had been the testimony and the recording of a conversation by Monica Sable that would have brought the various details together to create a prosecutor’s dream.
Brow furrowed, Sam continued researching. Based on all the corroborating information, Monica had spoken the truth. Witness Protection. Drug lords. Evil henchmen. The tale played out like a made-for-TV cop docudrama. He kept searching, trying to find something that countered what the mounting evidence told him. Sam dug, without a break, into the early afternoon. His training instructed him to exercise patience, one step at a time, and he would uncover the trail. This time, though, the path led him somewhere he had not expected.
He had printed information on the defendant, the structure of his organization, his family, everything. Even more interesting, Sam found Laven had a strong rival who had been thrilled when Laven had been put behind bars.
For years, the Michaels family, the largest player in New York, raked in massive profits. As with any successful business, competition popped up trying to get a slice of this money. But unlike other businesses, turf wars abounded, sometimes lasting for years, resulting in massiv
e civilian casualties—nothing more than collateral damage. Laven headed up the family on the east side while a man named Alphonso Delphini ran the family in the west. The two clashed somewhere in the middle. Turf changed hands—taken, taken back, and taken yet again in a perpetual cycle.
Delphini had been quoted as saying that his only wish is that justice be served. The Michaels family was “a menace and a threat to society.”
Sam took a long pull on the beer he’d been nursing and sat back staring at the article. Local Woman Killed…
Responsibility for her death weighed on him. Sure, Josha had given him the assignment, but he’d had his doubts and could have done this research after Monica told him about her secret life. He hadn’t, though; he’d just turned her over to his handler then put her in the crosshairs of his rifle, justifying his choices by labeling her a liar.
Told ya, Chief, Chet said from somewhere deep in his cerebellum.
Yes, I know.
She’s dead, and now you are going to have to live with that. The bad guys won; isn’t it your job to stop the bad guys?
Yes. But why? Why was I looking for her? Was I working for these bastards, or was it a coincidence?
Why don’t you find out?
Sam picked up his Blackberry and hesitated. The very act of calling Josha—way out of standard operating procedures and going against everything in his training both in the military and with The Agency—would be impossible to justify.
You’ve already gone beyond S.O.P. just by doing this research.
Yeah, point taken. Sam pressed the send button.
As usual, Josha picked up the call on the first ring. “How’s vacation?”
“Hi, Josha. So far I haven’t had much time to do anything.”
“What can I do for you?” Josha had always been reluctant to engage in any sort of small talk.
Sam took a breath, preparing to cross a line that could never be uncrossed. “So, the Monica Sable case…”
“Yep, all wrapped up. The customer is pleased. Nice work.”
