by Deek Rhew
“See the customer, that’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
Silence greeted him from the other end of the line before Josha said, “You know that’s confidential. Even I don’t know who it is, the assignment came from up high. I think we’re done here. Have a nice vacation.”
“No.” Sam’s voice left no room for argument.
“Sam. You need to drop this.”
“This case has bothered me from day one.”
“Your place isn’t to think about the merits of an assignment. Your job is—”
For the first time ever, Sam cut his handler off, interrupting Josha mid-sentence. “Just shut up and listen to me.”
To his great relief, the other man did, though out of respect or out of shock Sam didn’t know.
“When I got the confirmation, Monica told me about her situation. I didn’t believe her at the time. I figured it was the usual ramblings from someone trying to get away with shit, but something about it rang true. So when I got home, I researched the case, and everything she told me checks out. Did you know she was a star witness in the trial of a drug lord? That without her testimony, the guy will walk.”
“No. But what has—”
Sam stood and started pacing around the room. “How is it that we have access to information no one else does, yet somehow it slipped past our radar that she was to stand as a witness? Also, you are aware that someone killed her before I had a chance and the FBI and the police ruled the explosion an accident. They said it was a gas leak.”
Josha fell silent again. “Why would the FBI be involved in a domestic house fire?”
“Because she was in Witness Protection. They were working with the U.S. Marshals to keep her safe. I think your ‘customer’ was the goddamned mob, Josha. That’s not who we’re supposed to be working with. ‘Enemies of the state’ are who we’re supposed to be finding, remember?”
“Sam, maybe you’re just misunderstanding the information.”
“Seriously? I’ve been working for you for almost a decade. How many times have I gotten it wrong?”
“Okay, point taken. But…”
Sam made a fist, clenching his fingers until the knuckles turned white. “There is no ‘but,’ Josha. We fucked up, and this innocent girl died because of it.”
“Shit. All right, let me look into it. For now, do what I told you to do: stop. Go on vacation. This isn’t your problem anymore. I’ll take care of it. Send me your research, and I’ll be in touch.” Josha disconnected the call.
Sam sent his handler everything then went to the fridge and got another beer. Popping the top, he leaned against the counter and stared off into nothingness as he tried to force his mind to think about something else. But the damning headline dogged him, and he couldn’t escape its accusatory condemnation. He swore under his breath as he sat back down at the desk and began to go through the information again.
34
Lisa had never been one to spare herself the electronic amenities and thus had no paper maps in her car, so Angel drove with gusto in what Monica hoped to be the right direction.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Monica asked her at one point.
Angel pointed out the front window. “That way.”
Monica shrugged. “Okay, good enough for me.”
By mid-afternoon, they needed to stop, fill the Audi, and get some coffee. They survived okay on the rations Monica had bought at the all-night truck stop on her pell-mell escape from Walberg, but nothing else replaced the caffeine-infused elixir. Angel guided the nondescript car into the parking lot of Nan’s Little Big Diner and Gas.
They got out, and Monica stopped just before she pushed through the glass door. “Hey, I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll get us a table.”
“Booth,” Monica said over her shoulder. When she slid in across from Angel a couple minutes later, she held Lisa’s laptop.
“Online dating?” Angel asked her.
“No, smarts. Google Maps. We need to figure out where we are.”
When the waitress stopped for their order, Angel asked her, “Where are we?”
If the middle-aged woman with the name badge Coral pinned to her ample bosom thought the question odd, she showed no sign of it as she smiled. “You’re about twenty miles east of Burlington.”
“Is that in Tennessee?”
“What? No.” Monica admonished. “You never did study in school did you? Tennessee and Arizona aren’t exactly neighbors.”
“Whatever. Some of us didn’t graduate top of our class and go to NYU.”
Monica stuck her tongue out at her.
“Is that where you’re headed, darlin’? Well you still gotta ways to go then. No, dear, you’re in Colorado. Where are you from?”
“Phoenix,” Monica answered.
“Well sugar, I think you’re going a bit out of your way. There’s a more direct route than coming through this neck of the woods. But generally speaking, you’re headed in the right direction. Let’s see.” She squinched up her pleasant face. She indicated to the highway through the big, tinted windows at the front of the restaurant. “This here is the Seventy. Take that to St. Louis.” She arched an eyebrow at Angel. “That’s in Missouri.”
Angel rolled her eyes.
“Then,” the waitress continued, “turn right on…on… Hmmm, the Fifty-five, I think. Then…well then you’d better stop and ask for directions. That’s about as far as my mental map goes.” She smiled. “So, what can I get you?”
They placed their order, and Monica started up the computer.
* * *
Sam lay on the couch. A brigade of empty beer bottles littered the floor and coffee table, and he considered adding another to their fallen ranks when his computer pinged. He had gone through Monica’s case for the thousandth time and lain down to rest his eyes. The machine sat across the room, and in spite of having just been thinking about getting up for something else to drink, he decided against trekking across the chasm between his comfortable couch and the desk. When his phone started buzzing from beside him on the floor, he groped for the little device, never taking his arm from across his eyes.
He used both the Mac and the Blackberry only for work, not that he had any semblance of a personal life—hence being at home while on vacation, drowning his sorrows in Budweiser. Finally, his hand happened upon the phone, and he lifted it, looking at the little screen. His heart stopped at the message. Someone had started up the laptop with his tracker app installed. He’d never bothered to turn off the alert.
He got up, stumbling over fallen glass soldiers, and made his way to the desk, sobering with each step.
* * *
“So, I think we are about here,” Monica said, looking at the screen. Angel’s attention seemed to have wandered, the history of the little diner in the place card on the table capturing her interest instead.
“Ang?”
“Hmmm?” she said.
“Got a minute?”
“Oh, ah sure.” She put down the small bit of trivia and came around the booth, sliding in. She bumped hips with her friend. “Oops.”
Monica tried to convey her disgust with a look.
Evidently oblivious, Angel stared at the little screen.
Monica turned back to the task at hand. “So, like I was saying, we are about here.” She pointed to the screen. “The waitress was right. If we continue down the Seventy, we could go to St. Louis, maybe check out the Gateway Arch, then on down here.” She started tracing another highway then stopped. “You know what the Gateway Arch is, right?”
“You keep this up, and I’ll turn you over to the mob myself.”
Monica grinned and turned back to the computer screen.
* * *
Sam double-clicked the flashing icon in the task bar. The tracker app contained four separate sections: Monitor, Root, Camera, and Control. He chose Monitor then clicked Locate. The machine thought for a min
ute, then a map of the United States appeared. A bubble indicator pointed to a spot in eastern Colorado.
Why would someone take Monica’s laptop to Colorado?
He minimized the window and clicked Camera. Within a minute, he connected to the laptop and an image materialized. Two women, cheek-to-cheek, peered back at him in rapt concentration.
Sam’s eyes widened with disbelief. Despite the poor picture quality, he recognized the face he remembered from Walberg. Marilyn Monroe mole, a smattering of freckles, dark hair with blonde roots. Monica. She had survived.
The other girl looked familiar as well. He pulled out his folder, rifled through the images and information it had taken him six months to gather, and found it: Angel Humbolt, childhood friend and apparent co-conspirator.
Sam clicked the plus next to the speaker icon, turning up the volume.
He caught Monica mid-sentence. “So, then we take the Forty into…”
“Here you go ladies,” someone interrupted. Both women looked up, and he watched Monica’s hand reach over and close the laptop, disconnecting the app.
“Shit!” Sam switched back to the maps screen, found their approximate location, and traced until he found highway forty. Following that, they could be headed to Nashville or on to North Carolina, or who knew where else?
Relief flooded him; Monica had somehow survived the explosion in Arizona. He didn’t know how, but he would figure it out. First, he needed to know where they were going.
* * *
Barry stared at the Connection Terminated message on the screen in front of him. After his meeting with Laven, Barry had re-enabled the app’s alert feature. While he worked through the legal issues, the alarm went off. He had stared at the image of the two women—one he knew and the other he did not—on his laptop. He caught their conversation mid-sentence and thought he’d been poised to hear where they intended to go when one of them closed the computer, severing the connection. He backed up the video feed, took a screen shot, pasted it into an email, typed up the information provided by the little program, and clicked send.
A minute later, his screen flashed the reply. “On it.”
He didn’t know who had been killed in Arizona—in the end, it didn’t really matter—but there would be no mistakes this time. He would not allow this loose end to destroy all he had risked his life to build.
35
Sam threw some clothes in a bag. He hadn’t even been home twenty-four hours yet. He opened a bottom drawer and pulled out a small wooden box. The familiar scent of gun oil took him back to his days in the military, when he’d spent hours cleaning and maintaining his weapons. Someone else had already tried to kill Monica. He wasn’t going in unprepared.
He pulled back the slide on the Sig Sauer P229, verified the chamber contained a round, and grabbed several extra magazines. He put the lot in a side pocket of his bag designed to holster the weapon.
This is totally unsanctioned; you don’t even know what you’re going to do, Chet piped up. You have no plan. Action without purpose is worse than no action at all, Rule eighty-eight, remember? You can’t do this on your own; you have to call the boss.
I don’t get it. First you tell me to not send the confirm to Josha, that I need to spend more time thinking for myself, and you berate me because I follow the Rules. Now you’re not only quoting them at me like they’re the gospel, but all you want me to do is follow the chain of command?
You can’t just go half-cocked on some wild mission. You’ve got nowhere to go, no idea where she’s at now, and you don’t even know who’s chasing her. You can’t go into this blind or everyone, maybe even you, will get killed. Not to be selfish or anything, but I have a vested interest in your well-being.
Without the support of The Agency, Sam would only have his skills and wits to rely on. Josha had told him to drop it, that the case had been closed. If he went against his boss’ order, he’d be in direct violation of agency protocol and could lose his job, or worse.
But his boss may have already known that Monica had been targeted by someone else. And if that were the case, why send a second party to do a job he’d already been hired to do? Did that mean that Josha, for once, didn’t have all the information? Maybe someone above him had leaked it?
It boiled down to either corruption in The Agency or Monica being such a big threat that they double-booked her and the other agent had simply gotten to her first. He’d been over her case a thousand times; no way had they sanctioned two agents. That meant someone had sold information. But to whom?
Then it hit him. Who had the reason above all else to see Monica dead? If she had told Sam the truth that night they’d slept together, then he knew exactly who had hired the hit.
What are you doing? Chet asked as Sam picked up his phone.
Thinking outside The Agency.
The call connected on the second ring. “Armon.” The deep rich baritone sounded more like an opera singer than a former-Marine-turned-NYPD-police-detective.
“Armon, it’s Bradford.”
“Sam, you old bastard. How you doin’?”
He smiled at the butterscotch smoothness of his old friend’s voice. “About the same. How are Jenny and the girls?”
“Man, I wish you was here, I’m seriously outnumbered and out-flanked. I got princesses and pink up to my ass bones.” The man’s smile resonated through his words.
“And you love every minute of it.”
“Just don’t tell Jenny. She feels bad so lets me get off to poker on Mondays and b-ball on Thursdays.”
“She already knows it, Armon.”
“Yeah, ’spose she does. So, what can I do for you?”
He sobered. “I need a favor.”
“Didn’t figure you called for any other reason.
“The Laven Michaels case, what do you know about it?”
“Not a lot other than what’s been on TV and word around the office. What do you need?”
“Everything.”
“Can you narrow it down a bit? This is one of the hottest cases in the city. My chief will give me the stink eye if he finds out I’m poking around in it. What’s the angle?”
Sam filled him on the specifics of what he needed then hung up and resumed packing.
A half hour later Sam’s phone rang. “Bradford.”
“Hey, cracker,” the rich baritone voice replied. “You don’t mess around, there are a lot of folks with their panties in a wad over this. I couldn’t get everything, but I did find something that will help you out a bit.”
Sam knew his old buddy would come through. “What have you got?”
“You said you’ve researched everything in the news, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve been pounding all the public channels.”
“Well, here’s something you don’t know. We’ve got a mole in the office of the man who handles all of Mr. Michaels’ legal matters, Barry Yamalki. Seems Mr. Yamalki went to see our Crossbars Hotel guest a few days ago. In addition to the regular lawyer mumbo-jumbo, he was told to handle the ‘loose end’ problem. I’m thinking that ‘loose end’ would be your girl. Following said meeting, Mr. Yamalki called a local bad boy by the name of Tyron Erebus. Check your inbox; I just sent you the guy’s dossier.”
Sam sat at his computer and opened the email. He double-clicked on the first attachment, an image file. A scarred face with a large, misshapen nose bent to the right stared back at him. The man might have been in his mid-thirties, but the scarring obscured his actual age. His eyes disturbed Sam. Their cold lifelessness resembled the deepest pits of a rock floating through the frozen blackness of space. Sam had seen eyes like those before in Afghanistan. They belonged to a man who had walked into a crowded shopping square and detonated a bomb strapped to his chest.
Sam clicked on the second file to find a chronology of terrible things the scarred man had done over the course of his life. At age five, he’d moved into a foster home after watching his parents d
ie in a drive-by shooting. A state-run facility took over his care at age seven when he killed his foster family’s poodle by jamming a corkscrew into its chest. When asked why he would do such a thing, he replied, “The dog wouldn’t shut up no matter how much I yelled at it. I figured I was going to show the mutt who’s boss.”
As Tyron made his way through school, he bounced from facility to facility, leaving a path of pain and misery behind him. He received his first conviction as an adult at age seventeen, when he repeatedly raped the mother of one of the families he lived with. The woman suffered the abuse for months before he hurt her to the point she ended up in the hospital.
He spent 18 months in the Pennsylvania State Penitentiary before a lawyer—as coincidences go, Barry Yamalki—got him out on a technicality. Tyron had been accused of aggregated assault no less than a dozen times, but in each instance, the accuser dropped the charges. He had been under suspicion of multiple homicides, but like his boss, Mr. Michaels, enough evidence never existed for a conviction.
“Cracker, this guy is ruthless. He doesn’t have official training other than what he’s learned on the streets, but anyone that’s tried to stop him has wound up in a hole in the ground. You take my meaning?”
“We’ve dealt with worse.”
“Yeah, I ’spose we have, but we did it as a team. I’m guessing, since you’re calling me instead of going through your czar or whoever you work for, this job is off the books.”
“Something like that. Can you also get me information on Mr. Michaels’ operation? Who he does business with, who he’s pissed off, his organizational structure, all of it.”
“Let’s take a step back here. This guy is one of the biggest kingpins in New York. You will not be able to negotiate with him, blackmail him, or probably even talk to him. There’s no way you’re even getting close to this guy.”
“I don’t need to.”
