Rose City Kill Zone

by DL Barbur

  She rose and gave me a hug. We just held on to each other for a while. Usually my head was very busy. I was constantly thinking about what we were going to do next, thinking about the investigation from different angles, trying to find something we had missed that would lead us to Marshall. But I’d gotten into the habit of making myself think of nothing but her when I held her. It was a welcome break from our day to day existence. I just stood there, enjoying the feel of her pressed against me and the smell of her hair.

  Finally, she drew back and sat back down.

  “I want to put this back together,” she said. “They took my other one as evidence.”

  “You did good today.” Again I blurted something out without really thinking about it. But it was true. I’d seen men who had trained to be soldiers for years freak out and lose their cool when they were on the receiving end of automatic weapon fire, but Alex had kept her act together and functioned effectively.

  She didn’t answer me for a moment, instead she focused on putting the pistol back together. I sat down on the bed and the weight of the day settled on me. I felt too tired to even move. It was that way pretty often for me anymore. I stayed in constant motion and wasn’t aware of how exhausted I was until I stopped. Then it was hard to get moving again.

  “Byrd died anyway,” she said.

  “Not your fault.”

  Alex finished snapping the pistol together, loaded it and slid it into a holster. Then she pushed me gently on the chest until I fell backward onto the bed and snuggled against me.

  “I know it’s not my fault, but it was still hard not to save somebody I knew. In the car coming back, I was thinking about how much of my life has been about death. Maybe when all this is over, I’ll go do another residency and get a job delivering babies.”

  We’d been having “when all this is over” conversations lately. We both approached the subject tentatively like we were stepping into a mine field. Alex and I had both dated people before, of course. But for me, this felt different. Before I’d been happy to spend time with somebody and just see what happened. But this felt different. I felt like we were either going to go down in flames or spend the rest of our lives together. I got the feeling she felt the same way.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “You deliver babies. I’ll open a guitar store.”

  “Mmmm…”

  I loved Alex. There was no doubt about that. But sometimes trying to see our future was like a long dark tunnel. Our life right now wasn’t normal. I wondered what it would be like to try to settle into some kind of domestic bliss with her when we weren’t in constant danger of being shot. That was a new idea to me. Before, I’d been happy that my life had revolved around work.

  There was something else though. I couldn’t quite articulate it, but there was this feeling that Alex was holding back, that there was a core inside of her that she kept locked up and didn’t show to anyone else. I couldn’t even put into words what I wished she did differently, but it bugged me sometimes and I kept thinking about it the way a dog worries at a bone.

  “What happened with Bolle?” she asked.

  I told her about the Justice Department order that we were to hand over all arrests to a tactical element. I also told her about my little confrontation with Bolle.

  “I think maybe we should cross international diplomacy off your list of future careers,” she said. “God this is such a screwed up situation. Sometimes I wonder if we should just get in a car and drive away.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  We snuggled there for a while, not talking, and I realized she was falling asleep. Her breathing slowed down, her legs twitched a couple of times, and I felt her sort of melt into me. She started to snore lightly, courtesy of a broken nose from Judo practice in her teens. I found it kind of endearing.

  Sleep wouldn’t come for me. For one thing, I still had a gun and a bunch of other equipment strapped to my belt. But I was also in that state of wired exhaustion that I knew wouldn’t go away unless I did something different to change the channel.

  I hated to move away from Alex, but I slowly extricated myself without waking her. I kissed her on the forehead and put a light blanket on her before turning off the light.

  My hand brushed my guitar case. Inside was my old Fender Stratocaster, the only guitar of my former collection that had survived when Marshall’s people blew up my house. I’d thought about playing for a little while to take my mind off things, but I needed exercise. I grabbed a gym bag and left the room as quietly as I could.

  I changed in a bathroom into my running gear. Even when jogging I kept a pistol on me, in a little chest pack called a Kit Bag made by a company called Hill People Gear.

  Jack cocked an eyebrow at me when I told him I was going for a run, but he buzzed me out the gate and promised to keep an eye out for me upon my return.

  I needed the exercise, but there was something else I had been meaning to do for a while, and now was the time to do it.

  Chapter 4

  As I ran, I found myself getting angry. Alex and I should have been thinking about a real future together, maybe thinking about getting married and buying a house. I’d known Alex for almost twenty years. She was the daughter of my former boss at the Police Bureau. It wasn’t quite true to say I’d carried a torch for her for that long. There was a ten-year difference in our ages, and when she’d been a teenager, that would have been weird. But for easily the last ten years, I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t been in the back of my mind.

  Instead, her dad had been shot down right in front of us, and we were dodging bullets.

  I pounded my way down the sidewalk, and a thought that I’d been dwelling on a bunch lately came to mind. I was on the downhill side of my forties, but Alex was not quite thirty-five. If we got our act together soon, we could have a kid, maybe even two. I’d found myself searching the internet for risk factors for women who had babies in their mid-thirties. I hadn’t seen that coming.

  Marshall had done plenty of things to fuck up my life, but the thing I hated him for the most was complicating my chances with Alex.

  The sun had just set, but it was still hot. The heat radiating up at me from the pavement felt like I was running on a griddle. It was mostly warehouses and storage facilities up here. Occasionally a big truck would rumble by, but for the most part, it was quiet at this time of day.

  I crossed Marine Drive and found myself running toward where all this had started: Kelly Point Park. Only the city of Portland would put a park out here in the middle of a light industrial area. It was a hundred acres of forested land where the Willamette and Columbia rivers converged, right next to a giant parking lot where ships full of import cars were unloaded.

  Last year I’d found a dead teenage girl here. I thought I was investigating another in a long string of tragedies that punctuated my career as a homicide detective, but Heather Swanson’s death had been the first link in a chain that had led me to this moment. She’d been picked up by Henderson Marshall’s son, Gibson. She thought she was going to do a porn shoot in exchange for a little cash. Gibson’s plan was to ship her out of the country on one of his dad’s planes and sell her to the highest bidder.

  Before it was all over, I was fired from the police bureau and nearly sent to prison. Casey had narrowly escaped being shipped out of the country herself, and my former partner Mandy had been hit in the head so hard she’d never be the same again.

  I jogged up to the empty parking lot and stopped. From here you could see the spot where Heather’s body had been. I remembered how light she had been as we carried her up to the Medical Examiner’s van.

  Gibson Marshall was dead. I’d shot him in a highway rest stop that smelled of urine and stale cigarettes. If anybody ever asked, I’d say he tried to attack me with the metal baton he’d been carrying, but the truth was he’d been smarting off to me, taunting me, and I’d shot him in the face.

  Ever since, I’d been trying to make myself feel bad about it, with no luck. />
  Still, I wondered sometimes if my life could be different. If someone else had been on duty the night we found Heather, I wondered if the whole thing would have been swept under the rug. Heather’s death would have gone down as another unsolved homicide of an unfortunate runaway teen. Maybe one of my comrades on the detective squad would have suddenly come into some money.

  They’d known better than to try that shit with me. They immediately tried to ruin me instead.

  I’d lost everything. My job. My pension. My house. My guitars. I’d been dating a woman named Audrey at the time. I couldn’t honestly say we would have lasted, but I couldn’t say we wouldn’t either. When I wound up arrested, framed for beating up my partner, she’d packed her shit and gone home to New Mexico and I hadn’t seen her since.

  I stood there in the gathering dark, feeling sweat running down my back. The birds in the trees slowly fell silent as the sun set and soon all I could hear was the hiss of traffic out on Marine Drive and the thrum of an engine as a tugboat pushed barges full of Eastern Oregon wheat down the Columbia River.

  When I was sixteen, I’d been big for my age, and the kids at my high school in the hills of East Tennessee knew better than to fuck with me. One day I’d seen a handful guys from the football team picking on a little kid, a little freshman that probably wasn’t even five feet tall, and I went ballistic. By the time it was over I was sitting in the back of the Sheriff’s car, and some of them were on the way to the hospital.

  I made quite a few enemies that day, but it was worth it. There was something about protecting someone else that made the world make sense to me.

  I felt the same way about Marshall and his crew. I didn’t have any regrets. If I’d looked the other way it would eat at me until I died.

  It didn’t keep me from being angry though.

  I looked at the patch of ground that had once held Heather Swanson’s body and resolved that one way or another, I was going to get Marshall. I would find out the truth.

  But after that, I would walk away. I wanted that quiet life with Alex. Maybe she really could deliver babies while I sold guitars.

  Stranger things had happened.

  I turned and started running back towards Wapato, letting all the stress I carried in my body burn itself out and fuel my muscles. I’d been working out like crazy lately, using the exercise to beat stress. I’d been a little rough around the edges there for a while. In the last few weeks, I’d been in half a dozen gunfights, killed more men than I cared to count and had damn near died more than once.

  Alex and I had a long conversation about my “exaggerated startle response” after I’d pointed a gun at Eddie when I was half awake. I suppose I could have been diagnosed with something, but right now I was content to work out like a madman, stuff my emotions in a box, and deal with all that shit later.

  It was full dark now. I managed to cross Marine Drive without getting run over by any of the traffic, then started pounding my way down the sidewalk towards Wapato. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw a pickup truck pass me, then slow. It was a beater Toyota, and in the rear window, right behind the driver, I saw a sticker of a Combat Infantry Badge, an Army award given to infantrymen that saw combat. There was a bumper sticker with the word “Ranger” in a scroll, the symbol of the 75th Ranger Regiment, my old Army outfit.

  The driver pulled over to my side of the street and stopped. I came to a stop as alarm bells started going off in my head. I was standing on a sidewalk with an eight-foot chain link fence to my left, and an empty street to my right. I had no cover and no ideas other than to rip my little backup gun out of my kit bag and get ready to take somebody out with me.

  I watched the reverse lights flash as the driver shifted into park, then he surprised me by turning on his interior lights and holding up both hands so I could see them. He then looked over his shoulder and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  He was a young guy, probably not quite thirty, and had a high and tight haircut that screamed “military” to me. If this was a hit, it was a singularly unusual way to do it. If this guy was here to kill me, he could have just blasted me with a shotgun as he drove by. I looked over my shoulder. There was nobody else on the street.

  I pulled a little flashlight out of the kit bag.

  “Step on out,” I said.

  He pushed the door all the way open, then got out, leading with his empty hands. He was a tall rangy kid, and wore a tucked in t-shirt, jeans and a pair of cowboy boots. I lit him up with the flashlight.

  “Are you Dent Miller?” he asked. He squinted and raised his hand to shield his eyes. The little light was insanely bright. All he would be able to see was a bright glow coming from my direction.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m supposed to give you a package. You reckon I could reach in and pull it out of the truck without collecting a bullet?” He had a touch of a Southern drawl.

  “Do it,” I said.

  He pulled out a padded mailer envelope and held it up. My name was written on the outside in big letters in black marker.

  “Open it,” I said.

  He sighed. “It ain’t a bomb or nothing.”

  “Open it.”

  “Mind if I use my little pocket knife?”

  “Go for it,” I said, adding it’s your funeral in my head.

  His idea of a “little” pocket knife was a folder with what looked like about a six-inch blade. He cut the envelope open and returned the knife to his pocket.

  “Dump it out,” I said.

  He looked a little irritated but did as I said. A folded piece of paper fluttered out, as well as something small and metal that hit the ground with a ting.

  “Drop the envelope and get out of here,” I asked.

  I was tempted to try to hang on to the guy and get him to tell me who sent him, but I had a feeling that might not go well.

  “Have a good ‘un,” he said without a trace of sarcasm and hopped back in the truck. I kept the gun in my hand as he pulled a u-turn and headed off.

  I shined my light on the stuff he’d dropped. Next to the folded up piece of paper was a coin. It bore the Ranger scroll and around the border were the words “The Battle of the Black Sea, Mogadishu Somalia.”

  I picked it up and flipped it over. The back side read “Task Force Ranger October 3-6,1993.”

  What I was holding was called a challenge coin. Guys in the military carried them, to signify the unit they belonged to or an operation they’d been a part of. Another guy with the same coin could challenge you to produce yours and if you didn’t have it, beer was on you. This particular one commemorated the infamous Ranger raid in Mogadishu Somalia that left eighteen US soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead. The fight had happened in and around the Bakara Market, which we’d dubbed the Black Sea because its twisting warrens of alleyways seemed to just swallow people up.

  The coin was scratched and the edges were rounded from being carried in a pocket.

  I used to own a coin just like this one until my house was blown up. Presumably, it had melted into an indistinguishable lump of metal along with most of my belongings and had been carted off to the landfill.

  I stuck the coin in my kit bag and picked up the letter.

  Miller. We have matters of mutual interest. Tomorrow. 2000. Charlie Mikes. Mack.

  Mack. Shit. Sergeant Macklin had been my platoon sergeant during those fateful days in Mogadishu. What the hell was he doing mixed up in all this?

  I gathered everything up and stuffed it in the kit bag.

  I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but one thing was clear: our cover was blown. Apparently somebody knew we were at Wapato.

  Chapter 5

  The Portland Police Bureau considered me persona non grata before I blew an arm off one of their police officers, so I was surprised when Bolle told me I was going to the hospital to interrogate Bloem. The Bureau was alternating between being livid that we’d moved to arrest him without telling them, and wanting to put as much distance
between themselves and Bloem as possible. Apparently the fact that I was the one that had pulled the trigger was lost in the background noise of all the screaming.

  Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital held many memories for me. I’d been a patient there once, almost ten years ago, after nearly being beaten to death by a suspect. Last winter I’d actually killed a man in the stairwell because he’d been trying to kill Mandy, my former partner. OHSU was also where Dalton, Eddie, and most of the other shooting victims from the attack at the zoo had been taken. Maybe I should see about getting my own parking place.

  I kept stealing glances at Alex as we rode the elevator up with Bolle, wishing in some ways she wasn’t here. She was about to do something that flew in the face of medical ethics, and I was surprised she had agreed to it. She didn’t look at me, just stood there staring at the reflective surface of the elevator with her face set in a hard thin line.

  OHSU had a little corner of one floor with a couple of rooms set aside for special patients. This was where patients that were famous, infamous, or just downright notorious were housed. After a brief stint in the ICU, that’s where Bloem was being treated.

  There was a uniformed Portland police officer standing outside his room, which I’d expected. What I hadn’t expected was the older guy in a suit standing there. It took me a second to recognize him since he’d lost at least twenty pounds since I last saw him. It was Sergeant Dan Winter, former lackey of my old boss, Steve Lubbock, the guy who had helped frame me last year.

  He stepped forward, extended a hand to Bolle.

  “Special Agent Bolle, I’m Dan Winter with PPB Internal Affairs. I’ve been instructed to make Bloem available to you for questioning. I’ll be here in the nurse’s area if you need anything.

  Bolle returned the handshake and did his best to be gracious and play along with the fiction that the Portland Police Bureau could allow us to do anything. Burke had threatened to pull out all the stops and invoke some of the more draconian sections of the Patriot Act if the Bureau hadn’t played ball.