Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  “Go on in,” the guard said, each word jumbled together, a complete lack of enunciation. “Take the far left stool. He’ll be out in a minute.”

  Carlos nodded, grabbed the door handle, and slid into the room. A negative energy seemed to hit him as he stepped inside, a combination of fear and nervousness, the smell of body odor and sweat in the air. Neither of the women glanced his way as he walked past, toning down his usual swaggering gait and averting his gaze from the two inmates sitting on the other side of the divider. He settled himself down onto a squat round stool with a cushioned top, his knees folded up toward his stomach, and waited.

  Two minutes after he took his seat, the door in the far back corner of the room opened and his cousin shuffled through. There were no cuffs or chains on his wrists or ankles, but his posture seemed to indicate he was used to wearing them; everything was bunched up tight, not moving more than a few inches.

  Carlos stood as his cousin made his way to the corner, extending a fist to the plastic and pressing his knuckles against it. A faint smile crossed his cousin’s face as he extended his own hand, reaching out slowly, as if he were afraid the imaginary cuffs would restrain him, and returned the gesture.

  Manuel Juarez was older than Carlos by three years in real-world terms, though he had always carried himself in a way that made him seem much older. His time inside had done nothing but exacerbate the chasm between them; his movements were slower, his mannerisms more reserved.

  As the two settled onto their respective stools and took up the phone receivers on the wall beside them, Carlos couldn’t help but feel he was staring at a man twenty years his senior. Lines now encased his cousin’s mouth and eyes. Gray hairs permeated his hair and goatee. A sense of weariness hung around him like a cloud.

  “Good to see you, Manny,” Carlos said, forcing a smile.

  “Yeah, you too,” Manny replied, nodding. He didn’t bother to return the smile, letting Carlos see the worry on his face. “You know you shouldn’t be here, Cuz. It isn’t safe.”

  “It isn’t safe anywhere right now,” Carlos said, the smile retreating from his features. He pressed the receiver as tightly as he could to his mouth and whispered, “They found Mateo.”

  Manny pulled the phone away from his face and dropped it on the counter in front of him. He looked away to the side and ran a hand across his forehead, his mouth turned down in a frown.

  After a long moment he picked the phone up and stared back at Carlos. “When?”

  “The package arrived two days ago. Doing the math, I’m guessing a week, week and a half.”

  “Shit,” Manny whispered, extending the word out several times its usual length. “Did he go up north, like he said he would?”

  Carlos glanced back over his shoulder. The two women on his side of the room were both engrossed in their conversations, each one staring straight ahead. The elderly woman seemed to have tears in her eyes while the younger one looked to be just seconds from exploding.

  Behind him was a sheet of one-way glass extended across most of the room, a cadre of guards on the other side watching his every move.

  “I don’t know,” Carlos said, shaking his head. “I assume so. It was what we’d always agreed.”

  Manny nodded, glancing up past Carlos toward the glass behind him. “Yeah.”

  Carlos rose an inch off the stool and adjusted himself, lowering back down on to it. He leaned his upper body in another few inches and said, “What do you want me to do?”

  A long moment of silence passed as Manny stared at the glass, shaking his head.

  “Cuz?” Carlos asked, his voice low, probing.

  Still, Manny stayed locked in his thoughts, no response.

  “Cuz!” Carlos spat in an urgent whisper, drawing a quick look from the elderly women to his right.

  The word seemed to snap Manny awake, causing him to blink several times, shifting his gaze back to Carlos. “Worst thing we ever did was enter that partnership.”

  “I know,” Carlos whispered, bobbing his head, “but we didn’t have a choice. You know that.”

  “Didn’t we?” Manny said, the right side of his face twisted up in disbelief. “What if we hadn’t? Everybody would be alive? I’d still be in here?”

  Carlos leaned back a moment and ran his free palm down the length of his thigh. More than once he had considered the same question, often coming to the same conclusion as Manny. He himself might also be in jail if they hadn’t gone through with it, but given the losses they’d taken in the time since, it might have been worth it.

  Still, he couldn’t express any of that. He couldn’t lay any extra grief onto his cousin, couldn’t make it worse than what it was clear he was already feeling.

  So instead, he ignored it.

  “What do you want me to do?” Carlos asked, pausing between every word, weighing each one carefully.

  “Have you talked to the feds?”

  “Last night,” Carlos said. “Told them what had happened and that I needed to see you, fast.”

  “What did they seem to think?”

  Carlos blew a quick breath out through his nose, loud enough for his cousin to hear and infer what he was trying to say. “Nothing. And I don’t mean nothing of substance, I mean nothing at all.”

  A scowl grew across Manny’s face as he shook his head. “Assholes.”

  Carlos nodded in agreement. “I got the impression they wanted to check out my story before they committed to doing anything.”

  “Yeah,” Manny said, sarcasm laced through his tone, “and in the meantime . . .”

  “My ass ends up dead,” Carlos said. “Yeah, I know.”

  Manny fixed a gaze on him and said, “Mateo would never give you up. You know that.”

  “I do, but it doesn’t matter now,” Carlos said. “The package was sent. There’s a trail out there. I can’t go back to Texas, and I already told Diaz that.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  Another head shake from Carlos. “Nothing.”

  Manny ran the back of his index finger under his nose, swiping at an itch, and sniffed deeply. “Give her a day or two. She’s just checking facts. Of everybody over there, the chica’s the only one with balls.”

  A smirk slid out of Carlos, rocking his body backward on inch. “Yeah, she’s all right. Takes this shit seriously, makes it fun to mess with her.”

  “Yeah,” Manny agreed, trying to force a bit of mirth onto his face. “What about the other? Any sign?”

  “Nothing yet,” Carlos said.

  Manny’s eyes narrowed as he again shifted his attention past Carlos, thinking. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he surfaces soon. He won’t stay away for long.”

  “Agreed,” Carlos said. “He’s in way too deep to let go now.”

  “Right,” Manny said, nodding. “And what about the other guy? The one Mateo went up to find?”

  Carlos twisted his head from side to side, his lips pursed. “Nothing out of him, either.”

  “You think they found him with Mateo?”

  “I don’t know,” Carlos admitted, having considered the same thing on the trip in the day before. It wouldn’t surprise him if it had happened; the entire thing had been nothing more than a sliver of hope Mateo had clung to long after he had any reason to.

  A long shot, at best.

  “Where do you think I should go?” Carlos asked, leaving those and many other thoughts unspoken. As much as he wanted to share them with his cousin, he just couldn’t bring himself to, not in this situation, not knowing where they were both headed off to soon.

  Manny sat silent for a long moment. He laid the phone down again and wrung his hands in front of him, visibly weighing the options while Carlos kept the phone pressed to his face and waited.

  Once his internal debate was finished he picked up the receiver and said, “Stay th
e course. See how fast they found Mateo on his own? At least this way you’ve got someone watching your back.”

  “No matter how incompetent,” Carlos muttered, rolling his eyes.

  “No matter how incompetent,” Manny agreed. “All right, Cuz, keep me posted.”

  “Will do,” Carlos said, sensing that the conversation was over. They both knew that every word was being listened to, neither one wanting to say anything beyond the bare necessities needed.

  He stood, extending his fist back to the plastic divide, returning the phone to its cradle on the wall. Across from him, Manny did the same, the cousins locking eyes for a moment, both of them solemn, and nodding.

  They walked toward their respective doors, neither one looking back. Carlos could see the elderly woman and her young counterpart both still locked in conversation in his periphery as he went. He didn’t once glance at them or at the mirrored glass on his opposite side.

  The tension of the room seemed to fade away as he crossed out into the hallway, the door swinging shut behind him. The sounds of the women’s voices, the feeling of desperation, the stench in the air, all drained away as he stood there, taking in what stood across from him.

  He’d expected to find the same guard as before, waiting with a hand on his hip, the buttons of his uniform screaming for mercy beneath his bulbous frame. Instead he got Special Agent Diaz, her arms crossed over her chest, frowning at him.

  Beside her stood a man Carlos hadn’t seen in five years. He was a little older, his hair shaggier, but he was unmistakable, standing there in a rumpled suit.

  Carlos’s jaw dropped a half inch as he looked at the man, realizing Mateo had been right.

  “Carlos Juarez,” Diaz said, interrupting his thought. “We need to talk.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hutch swirled the dregs of his latte in the bottom of a tall paper cup that had the gaudy mascot for a drive-up stand named Mountain Moose Coffee emblazoned on the side. After twelve hours in transit that had included two car rides and two flight connections, he’d choked down the coffee, though the only redeeming qualities he could find in it were the cheap cost and the bubbly twenty-something who served it to him.

  Dark circles bordered his eyes, the telltale end product of an extremely long day. One of the upsides to taking the position in D.C. was he no longer had to travel the globe at a moment’s notice. Even though he now rarely had to so much as leave the country, that didn’t make it any more enjoyable.

  Besides, he could be to almost any major European city on a direct flight faster than he could make his way to West Yellowstone, Montana.

  Less than a day before, he had been sitting in his living room with Hawk, swirling a perfectly aged Johnnie Walker Blue in a crystal tumbler. Now he was standing outside an interrogation room in West Yellowstone drinking a cup of Mountain Moose piss from biodegradable paper.

  Sometimes life was a bitch.

  Hutch waited in a small darkened room deep in the bowels of the Sheriff’s Department, staring through a window of one-way glass. On the other side was a room void of life, a single metal table with folding chairs on either side in the center of it. Two elongated fluorescent bulbs were stretched out parallel above it, casting a harsh glow over everything.

  The door on the right side was pushed open after a moment, its hinges whining in protest. A giant of a man walked through first, his hands cuffed in front of him, dark hair shrouding most of his head and face. Behind him was FBI Special Agent Andrew Cofey, his tie loosened at the neck, a file in his hand.

  Hutch tried swirling the coffee one more time before giving up on it and dropping it into the trash. As it landed in the can, the door beside it opened and Sheriff Latham stepped in, just missing the residual splash from the last bit of the latte.

  “You were right,” Hutch said, arching an eyebrow. “He is a big son of a bitch.”

  “Told you,” the sheriff replied, folding his arms across his chest and turning to stare through the glass. “Reminds me of that one old boy from the Superman movies.”

  Hutch let out a small smirk, taking in the man as he sat in his chair, staring right at the glass. His gaze was so intense Hutch couldn’t help but feel he was looking right at them, even though he knew the man could see nothing but his own reflection.

  “Non, I think they called him,” Hutch said, nodding. “The one that couldn’t talk.”

  “Yup,” Latham agreed. “This one here can talk, he just isn’t saying anything.”

  Hutch shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks, the sleeves of his sport coat bunching up by his wrist. It had been determined that Cofey would take a first run at the man, and if he got nowhere he would hand it over to Hutch to try.

  After that, if they couldn’t get anything to shake loose, they would have no choice but to cut him loose or charge him. If they charged him, he would be appointed a lawyer, and the odds of them getting anything of use went down tremendously.

  This was their shot.

  Inside the room, Cofey slid into his chair across from the prisoner, the back of his head facing the mirror. Despite Cofey appearing to be in his mid to late thirties, Hutch could already see a baseball-sized spot beginning to appear near the crown of his head, most of it covered by an elaborate swoop-and-swirl combing pattern. Once upon a time Hutch would have tried the same approach, but he had long since let such efforts fall by the wayside, accepting his age and his bachelor status with grace.

  Some day Cofey would get there too. It would just take a while longer yet.

  “All right,” Cofey said, spreading the contents of his file out in an orderly line in front of him, “I’m going to start at the beginning here, just to get everything down for the record. That okay by you?”

  The man across from him looked back as if he were bored and shrugged, offering no audible response.

  “Okay,” Cofey said, “could you please state your name for the record?”

  The captive pushed out a long breath to show his disdain for the entire affair before stating, “Pavel Haney. Mora, New Mexico.”

  “Mhmm,” Cofey said, jotting down a note. “And what do you do down there, Mr. Haney?”

  “I work for my family’s farming business,” Pavel replied. “We grow chilies, ship them all over the world.”

  Another notation from Cofey. “I see. So what brought you up to West Yellowstone now? During a time I’m guessing you should be harvesting your crop?”

  Pavel glanced up at the ceiling a moment, a move that Hutch noted could have meant he was frustrated, or trying to access the cover story he’d been trained to know.

  “My sister, Lita, came up here a week ago to find our friend Matthew. He works for us and said he needed to get away. She came to try and bring him home. When we lost touch with her, I was sent to make sure everything was OK.”

  “Matthew. Right,” Cofey said, finishing marking down the words and looking up at Pavel. “And did Matthew have a last name?”

  Confusion passed over Pavel’s face a moment as he gave a shake of his head. “I’ve never thought about that. We always just considered him family, but I don’t think he was actually a Haney.”

  Hutch couldn’t see Cofey’s face from where he stood, but he could tell by his body language that he was growing antsy in his seat.

  “Nice recovery,” Hutch said, shaking his head at the exchange of obviously phony information going on in front of them.

  “Complete bullshit is what it is,” Latham said, running a hand back over his head, frustration growing on his face.

  Hutch nodded in agreement and watched a moment longer before patting the sheriff on the arm. He said, “I’ve seen enough of this. I’m going in.”

  “Good luck,” Latham said to his back, as Hutch stepped out into the hallway and knocked on the solid wooden door leading into the interrogation room. He remained outside a long moment
before Cofey emerged, the exchange something they had discussed before the interview began.

  They would do the swap without ever being in the room together, trying to throw Pavel off, not letting him get his bearings before switching the direction of things.

  “Thanks for cutting me off early,” Cofey said. “Much longer and I was going to start getting really pissed in there.”

  “I could tell,” Hutch said, nodding. “Your shoulders were twitching like you wanted to fly across the table and club him to death with the butt of your gun.”

  “Damn,” Cofey said, retreating two steps and opening the door into the observation room, “I didn’t think I was being that obvious. Have to work on that.”

  He disappeared without another word. Hutch waited a few seconds to let him get situated before stepping inside.

  The room was much colder than the rest of the building, the solid concrete enclosure putting a chill in the air. The smell of citrus disinfectant tickled his nose as he walked in, his gaze aimed at Pavel, his hands still shoved down deep into his pockets.

  Across from him Pavel glanced up as he entered and looked back down at the table, his attention shifting up a moment later and remaining there. He tracked Hutch as he walked over and took a seat, shuffling the items strewn across the table back into the folder and dropping it to the floor beside him.

  “Good afternoon,” Hutch said, dropping his hands onto the table before him and lacing his fingers. “Tell me, red or green?”

  Pavel stared back at him a long moment, a blank expression on his face. The wheels in his mind seemed to be visibly turning as he sat in silence, trying to piece together what was being asked of him. “Red?”

  “Ah,” Hutch said, nodding. “Good answer. I’m a hot man myself. Something in the range of an NM 6-4? You?”