Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  “And she was gone? Just that fast?” Hutch asked.

  “Like I said, pure dumb luck. There was a hell of a storm settling over the lake as we hiked in. She had no choice but to get her ass out of there or she was going to be stuck for who knows how long. She waited a minute to make sure I was gone, emptied her clip into the water, then took off.”

  Hutch nodded, his gaze never moving. In front of us, a sedan rolled by and a young couple walked past, a bulldog on a leash between them, but none of them looked our way.

  “Took me two days to ride the storm out,” I said. “First night I damn near died of exposure. I built that fire as big as I could get it, put on every piece of clothing the guy had brought with him, even took his bloodstained coat off and used it.

  “By the time the storm passed and I was able to hike out, my chest and shoulder were sore as shit from the shot, but everything was in decent working order. On the way out, I found her body. Looked like the elements had gotten to her first, the scavengers not far behind.”

  Hutch sat a moment in silence, his eyes squinted up a bit in concentration, the way they always had when we worked together. I knew he would remain in that position as long as it took, working out the events in his mind, piecing things together.

  “Anything else?”

  I took a deep breath, drawing the air in through my mouth and slowly exhaling through my nose. I ran my palms down the front of my thighs, knowing before I even said the words how crazy they were going to sound.

  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.

  “The man we were looking for was Mateo Perez.”

  For the first time Hutch took his attention away from the street, snapping his gaze over at me. “Bullshit.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” I said.

  I bent down at the waist and lifted the lid on the cooler, sliding it across the wooden planks of the porch so it was just a few inches from his foot. Hutch leaned over and glanced down into it, raising his gaze back to me just as fast.

  Inside the cooler were two hands, one stained dark brown with broken nails beginning to yellow, the other pale white, no more than a few days removed from a manicure.

  “You could have just brought their fingers, you know,” Hutch said, his expression dour.

  “I wasn’t taking any chances,” I replied. “Besides, it’s not like they need them anymore.”

  Hutch nodded once, then reached out and lowered the cooler lid shut. “Come on in. I’ll order some food and we’ll get to work.”

  Chapter Nine

  The smell of grilled chicken and onions hung throughout the room, its source two oversized sandwiches Hutch had ordered in from somewhere named Benicio’s. The name on the box and the heavy-handed application of tomato sauce said the place fancied itself an Italian restaurant, though it tasted more along the lines of cardboard to me.

  Still, it was free food. And it wasn’t like I’d come across the country for dinner.

  I left the last quarter of my sandwich in its box and folded it shut, tossing the scraps into the plastic bag they’d come in. I leaned back in the oversized leather sofa I was sitting on and draped an arm across the back of it, crossing my right leg up onto my opposite thigh.

  Throughout dinner, conversation had been light, which was to say nonexistent. Hutch had ordered the food and jumped in the shower, leaving me to my own devices for over twenty minutes. I had no illusions that he was actually cleaning himself that entire time, but I refrained from speculating as to what he might have been up to.

  If he had a real problem with me being there, he wouldn’t have let me in. As much as I needed his help at the moment, I would have let it go at that.

  Now that we were here, though, it was time to get down to it.

  “Why do I get the impression you’re not surprised to see me?” I asked, fixing my gaze on him. He had switched into a pair of track pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, his hair a puff of fuzz atop his head.

  Hutch shrugged and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to show up here every day for five years now.”

  While that was probably a true statement, I didn’t think it was the entire story. “No, I mean now. Tonight.”

  A pair of hound-dog eyes fixed on me for a long moment before Hutch lowered his head, nodding in concession. “I’ve kept a marker out for your name ever since you left. When it came over the wire in connection with two dead bodies in Yellowstone, I paid attention.”

  The news set me back a half inch, though I did my best to hide it. If Hutch had kept tabs on me all this time, there was no telling who else had as well.

  “But not enough to get involved?”

  “There was no reason to. The reports didn’t list either of the victims, said you were alive and well. I sniffed around a little bit, but all accounts seemed to indicate it was a simple case of Yellowstone claiming two more.”

  I shoved out a sniff, not at his handling of the situation, but at the media’s portrayal of it. “I saw most of Mateo’s occipital lobe exit his skull. Trust me, that had nothing to do with Yellowstone.”

  Hutch nodded in silence, taking a swig of ginger ale from the glass beside him.

  Shifting my focus away from him, I did a quick sweep of the room we were sitting in. He had referred to it as the den when suggesting we take our dinner there, though to my eyes it looked more like a cross between a mobile headquarters and a recruiting brochure.

  DEA plaques and insignia littered an oversized desk and a pair of matching cherry bookcases. Antique pistols lined multiple shelves, all polished to a gleam, displayed in ornate boxes. Enough electronic equipment covered the desk and two matching side tables to operate Skynet for the foreseeable future, most of it appearing to be brand-new designs since my departure just a few years before.

  My career with the DEA had started at the age of twenty-five. I’d earned a joint bachelor’s and master’s degree from George Washington in criminology and finished a three-year hitch in the Navy with my sights set on law school when the big boys came calling.

  They knew exactly what they were doing. They took a young guy like me, full of piss and vinegar, ready to get out into the world and mix it up, and they promised me exactly that. Told me of all the exotic places I’d be working, the international drug rings I would bring down.

  I signed on the dotted line after barely reading the papers they put in front of me.

  To be fair, they had been mostly right. I did travel the world and I did assist with the apprehension of some major players in the drug trade, but it took a hell of a lot of work. A lot of sleepless nights. A lot of images that were going to be seared onto my brain forever, images that no human being should ever have to carry around with them.

  And a loss bigger than anything I ever could have imagined.

  “It looks like you’ve done quite well for yourself here,” I said, giving an exaggerated once-over of the room. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” he said, dipping his head in awkward acceptance of the praise.

  “I never had you pegged as a bureaucrat,” I said, “but it seems to suit you well.”

  The left side of his mouth twitched upward, sensing the bit of bait I’d laid at his feet. “I’m not, and we both know it. After you left, it was only a few months before Diggs and Martin both bounced, too. Pally still does a little freelance work for me, but without the rest of the team, he really wasn’t into it anymore, either.”

  I nodded once, thinking back to the three other men that had joined Hutch and I to form the most feared Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team the DEA had ever seen.

  “You still keep tabs on them, too?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “It is.”

  At some point I would have loved to have gotten the full rundown on how everybody was d
oing, make sure they were safe, but that time was definitely not now.

  I leaned forward and rubbed my palms together, casting a glance around the room. “So what’s this new Candyland of yours capable of?”

  “Not a damn thing with that little present you brought me,” Hutch said, nodding toward the kitchen, where the single-sized cooler I’d brought rested. “But any kind of electronic wizardry we could do at the office, we can do from right here.”

  He spun the chair he was sitting in around and rolled himself over to his desk, shaking a mouse to wake the computer. On cue three different screens sprang to life, the background for each of them emblazoned with the DEA logo.

  “Subtle,” I muttered, shaking my head at the government’s insistence on putting its stamp anywhere it could find enough space to do so. I stood and walked up behind him, extracting a folded piece of paper from my jeans and dropping it down on the keyboard in front of him.

  “What have you got?” Hutch said, unfolding the sheet and spreading it out flat.

  On the top half of the sheet was a photocopy of a New Mexico driver’s license made out to a Lita Haney. Her address was listed as 405 Kovanny Road in a town called Mora. She was listed as five-ten, 128 pounds, and her picture showed two full rows of even white teeth.

  “Damn,” Hutch said. “She’s cute.”

  “She was,” I conceded, “in a hostile sort of way.”

  The bottom half of the sheet was a copy of her credit card, a MasterCard made out to the same name, set to expire the summer after next.

  “You realize these are probably fake, right?” Hutch said, sliding a pair of thick-framed glasses onto the bridge of his nose and bringing up a program from a list of icons on the far left screen. At the click of the cursor, it sprang open, and the entire center screen filled with a sheet customized to have data fed into it.

  “I would bet every dollar I have on it, but we have to start somewhere,” I said.

  Hutch grunted in agreement as his head shifted up and down between the printout and the screen. His thick fingers pounded on the keyboard as he input the data, the sound carrying through the quiet house. When he was done he set the program to searching; an oversized hourglass appeared on the screen, letting us know that things could take a while.

  Leaving it to run, Hutch brought up a second program and slid the window over to the far right. Except for the formation of the boxes and some of the text being a little different, the screen looked exactly the same as the first one. In the same painstaking manner Hutch inserted the credit card information and set the program to digging. A fan inside the computer whirred to life as the search commenced.

  “Okay,” Hutch said, pushing the paper away from him and reclining in his chair. “Now that the red herrings are out of the way, what else have you got?”

  While the tone of the question sounded a bit harsh, it wasn’t wrong. Everything I’d just fed him could have been done through an unsecured Yahoo! e-mail. Obviously the hands wouldn’t have traveled so well, but I had a couple of other ideas that might take a bit more finesse.

  “Fake credit card or not,” I said, “the money did hit my account. Any way you can trace it back and find an origin?”

  Hutch’s eyebrows raised a fraction on his forehead, either from being intrigued at the idea or surprised that I’d thought to bring it up. Either way, he said nothing for a long moment, chewing on the idea.

  “Me personally? No. You know how I am with electronics.”

  “You seemed pretty savvy just now,” I said, nodding toward the screens.

  “Pure plug and play,” Hutch said, twisting his head to the side. “I can get Pally on the phone, though. That sort of thing would be no problem for him.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding at the idea of employing the technical genius who had more than once saved our asses. “And while you’re on the phone with him, have him dig around and see if he can figure out where Mateo’s car ended up. Odds are it was a rental, but if not, maybe we can get lucky on a VIN number.”

  Hutch stared off into space a long moment, nodding his head. His eyes glazed over as he sat deep in thought before shaking himself awake. Without a word, he reached for the phone sitting on the desk beside him and pressed the third speed dial.

  “Hey, Mike, need a favor . . .”

  Chapter Ten

  A disgusted look crossed Carlos Juarez’s face as he held the remote control a few inches above the arm of his recliner, stabbing it forward at the television. With each movement he pressed the small rubber buttons harder, making the controls disappear down inside the plastic case housing it.

  Once he’d jammed the channel change and the volume both up and down, he got disgusted and flung the entire thing across the living room. It exploded against the opposite wall, the outer shell giving way and allowing a myriad of metal components to skitter across the floor.

  “To hell with it,” he said, pressing his backside deeper into the chair and sitting up a little straighter. “I like the Food Network anyway!”

  Carlos folded his arms across his chest and stared intently at the television, watching a young woman he’d never heard of before raving about the benefits of using canned goods, his anger simmering just beneath the surface. His breathing gradually became louder, and his brow was furrowed so low his eyes were nothing more than slits.

  “You know the least you guys could have done was get me a remote that works!” he bellowed toward the ceiling. From where he sat he couldn’t see the microphones embedded into the fixtures, but he knew without a doubt that they were there, that someone was listening.

  They always were.

  Carlos stared in hatred toward the ceiling a long moment, waiting for any form of a response before smashing down the leg rest on the chair. He leaned forward and smacked his palms against the padded rests on either side, pausing a moment before doing it again.

  “Why did I ever agree to do this? I should just go back. They can’t make me stay here,” he muttered, shaking his head in disgust.

  Halfway through his tirade, a sharp knock on the door sounded out. Three hard bangs in a row, equally spaced, before dying away.

  Carlos remained in his chair a long moment, his head twisted to stare at the door behind him, his mouth still hanging open from his outburst. Slowly the corners of it twisted up into a wide grin, revealing both rows of teeth and a tongue wagging back and forth in his mouth.

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” he said, still aiming his voice toward the heavens. “A man needs a remote that works, you bring him a remote that works!”

  Carlos stood and glanced down at his attire, taking in the gray boxer shorts and white ribbed tank top he was wearing, both standing in stark contrast to his caramel colored skin.

  “Aw, hell with it,” he said, sauntering toward the door and snapping it open without checking the peephole to see who was behind it.

  “It is about damn time,” he said, the grin fading as he saw what stood before him.

  It was definitely not somebody bringing him a new remote.

  A young Asian man in a brown UPS uniform was rooted in place three feet back from the door, a look mixed of apprehension and surprise on his face. His eyes grew wide as he stared up at Carlos, glancing down at the package in his hands and back up again.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the young man said, swallowing heavily, a lump traveling the length of his neck as he tried to get it down. “Are you Chris Jansen?”

  Confusion clouded Carlos’s eyes for a moment, his mind taking a moment to place the name. Just as fast it clicked into place, his head nodding before he even realized it.

  “Um, yeah,” he said, taking a step forward. “That’s me. What’s up?”

  “Package for you,” the young man said, extending a small electronic processor out in front of him, a stylus on a plastic leash hanging down the side of it. “Please s
ign on the line there, sir.”

  Carlos snatched the stylus from midair and used it to draw an indiscernible scribble, everything past the first letter C a tangled mess. The delivery man accepted it without so much as a glance, retracting the processor with one hand and extending the package out with the other. “Have a good day, sir.”

  Using both hands, Carlos accepted the package, noting how light it was immediately. He watched the young man spin on the ball of his foot and disappear down the front walk, not until he was almost gone managing, “Uh, yeah, you too.”

  The front door slammed against its frame as Carlos swung it shut and slid the deadbolt into place. He balanced the package across his outstretched hands as he turned and made his way back to the living room, the cooking show on the television now a distant memory.

  Only a handful of people knew where he was, a hand missing a few fingers at that. Most anybody that had something for him would just call and tell him, or at the very least alert him to keep an eye out. Of those, the number of those who would use the name Chris Jansen was even smaller.

  Whatever was in the box, the odds were it wasn’t good.

  Depositing it on the floor in front of the recliner, Carlos crossed over to the window and peered out. From where he stood he could see nothing but his fenced-in backyard, the grass cut the day before, the bushes trimmed down neat. He went to the front window and did the same thing, seeing a matching pair of maple trees in the yard, a mass of fallen leaves at their base.

  Running the front of his hands over his tank top, Carlos stepped back to the recliner and settled down into it. He slid his index finger along the lip of package, freeing the flap from its adhesive, and pulled back the top, peering down at what lay inside.

  A single piece of paper.

  On it, written in block letters with a black magic marker, were the words, THEY FOUND ME.

  Carlos felt his mouth go dry as he turned his face up toward the ceiling and said, “Get me Diaz. Now.”