Rose City Kill Zone

by DL Barbur

  Winter had been pretending like I wasn’t in the room, so I was surprised when he turned to me and extended a hand.

  “Good to see you, Dent. I wonder if I could buy you a cup of coffee when you’re done with Bloem.”

  I would have been less surprised if he’d just punched me in the face.

  “Uh, sure, Dan,” I said, giving Bolle a sidelong glance.

  “See you then.” Winter stepped aside and gave the uniform at the door a nod. We walked into Bloem’s room and shut the door behind us.

  Bloem was a fitness junky, one of those greyhound lean guys that ran marathons and triathlons for fun. Now he looked pale and puffy. Where his right arm ended in a stump, it was wrapped up in bandages. His left arm was bandaged too. He’d been holding the gun out in front of him with both hands when I shot him, and some pellets had passed through his right arm, into his left. They’d plugged the IV lines into his legs because of this.

  Bloem blinked at us, his face slack and emotionless. Casey had managed to access his electronic medical records, which showed he was stoned out of his gourd on pain medication. That made what we were about to do both trickier and easier.

  “Miller,” he said, and a trickle of drool ran out of his mouth.

  I wasn’t sure if he said it because he remembered me shooting him, or just because he recognized me.

  “Mr. Bloem, I’m Special Agent Bolle. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Bloem looked from me to Bolle, then cleared his throat.

  “I’m not saying anything without a lawyer,” he said, loud and clear. Apparently, our arrival had spurred him to be a little more lucid.

  Bolle sighed and looked at Alex. She took a case out of her shoulder bag, and withdrew a syringe. I noticed her hands were shaking a little when she plugged it into the port in Bloem’s IV line. She depressed the plunger.

  “What’s that?” Bloem asked.

  “Something to help you be less of an asshole,” Bloem said with a shark’s grin.

  I couldn’t pronounce the name of the drug Alex was giving Bloem. It was supposed to make him talk. It was also safe to give him despite all the pain meds he was on. Probably.

  Alex’s hand were still shaking a little as she re-capped the needle, something medical people were never supposed to do. Normally it would have gone in the sharps container mounted on the wall, but we couldn’t leave evidence behind. She managed to get it re-capped without stabbing herself in the hand and put the needle away.

  Bolle put a digital recorder on the tray beside the bed. He identified himself and stated the date and time.

  “Mr. Bloem, I’d like to start by asking you why you participated in the attack on Detective Mandy Williams from the Portland Police Bureau.”

  At first, he said nothing, just sat there swallowing multiple times like he had too much spit in his mouth. Then he smirked.

  “Bitch had it coming,” he said. “She should have been back in the kitchen where she belonged.”

  The Bureau had some work to do when it came to its psych evals in its hiring process.

  “What exactly were you supposed to do that day?’

  Bloem stared up at the corner of the room like there was something up there that captured his attention. Alex was staring intently at his vital signs on the monitors.

  “Just what I did,” Bloem finally said. “I was supposed to keep a lookout while Todd did his thing. I was supposed to arrest Miller when he came along.”

  I felt my fingers flex as I remembered that day. I’d actually gone to Mandy’s door and turned away, unaware that she lay on the other side with her skull fractured and her brain swelling.

  “So Rickson Todd is the person who directed you to do this?”

  “Yeah. Todd. Him.”

  “Why? What did he give you?”

  Bloem’s eyelids fluttered and for a second I thought he was going to nod off.

  “Some money. I wanted a job with him. I was sick of all the touchy-feely, politically correct bullshit at the Bureau. I wanted to kick some ass and take some names.”

  Before joining the Bureau, Bloem had a lackluster career as a Petroleum Supply Specialist in the Army and had spent a tour in Iraq sitting inside the wire at a Forward Operating Base, although word among his shift partners was he’d tell bullshit stories that made it sound like he’d been GI Joe over there. We’d recruited him during a hiring frenzy six or seven years ago. He wasn’t terribly well liked by his peers or his supervisors. He had a reputation for being arrogant way out of proportion to his skill level. He used force more often than the average officer, but nobody could ever say he’d done anything particularly wrong.

  I’d worked with guys like him before. I could walk into a disturbance with a bunch of drunk guys being belligerent and usually talk people into handcuffs without having to get rough with them. First, I never talked down to people, and treated them with as much respect as they would let me. Second, I had a pretty good grasp of my abilities and limitations, so guys realized I wasn’t afraid of them, I was just coming up with a plan to fuck them up if they got rowdy.

  Guys like Bloem always let it be known in subtle ways that they looked down on people on the street, usually in a way that was hard to articulate. Then when a drunk got pissed at that and took a swing, they’d overreact because they weren’t confident in their abilities. I hated working with guys like him.

  “So Todd offered you a job with Cascade Aviation?”

  Bloem didn’t look good. He’d gotten even paler and his speech was slurred.

  “Yeah. I would have been making twice what I was making at this shitty job.”

  That was a pipe dream. Cascade Aviation had only employed veterans of elite military units. Bloem’s service certainly didn’t qualify. Todd had a real talent for stringing people along by telling them what they wanted to hear.

  “When?” Bolle asked.

  Bloem mumbled something I couldn’t quite understand. Alex made a hurry up motion with her hand and pulled a second syringe from her bag.

  “Who else did you meet from Cascade Aviation?” Bolle asked.

  Bloem shook his head and mumbled.

  Alex injected the second syringe into the IV line. Supposedly this would reverse the first drug we’d given him. Now her hands were steady.

  “What was that? I didn’t hear.” Bolle leaned closer.

  “No… Nobody, just Todd,” Bloem mumbled. His head dipped forward. On the monitor I saw his respiration rate dropping.

  “I need to reverse him,” Alex said and stood with a Narcan nasal spray in her hand.

  Bolle shut off the digital recorder. We’d discussed this possibility earlier. The drug Alex had given Bloem to make him talk wasn’t interacting well with the opiates he’d been given for pain. The second injection would counteract the first over the course of a few minutes. But during that time there was a danger Bloem would stop breathing, so now Alex was going to give him Narcan, which would almost instantly reverse the effects of the opiate painkillers in his system.

  She squirted the Narcan in his nose and Bloem’s eyes went wide.

  His eyes went unfocused and he gave a low moan. I saw his respiration rate, heart rate, and oxygen saturation shoot up on the monitors.

  “Looks like the party is over,” I said.

  The downside to giving Bloem the Narcan was that now all those nerve endings in his amputated arm were wide awake and screaming. Bolle and Alex preceded me out of the room. I gave one last look around the room and saw the plastic cap to the Narcan inhaler on the floor. I quickly pocketed it on my way out. Supposedly none of the drugs Alex had given Bloem were detectable, even if somebody thought to look for them. There was no sense giving ourselves away by leaving a piece of physical evidence behind.

  Behind us, Bloem gave a louder moan and the nurse at the nurse’s station turned around and looked over his shoulder.

  “We’re done with him,” Bolle said. “But it seems like he’s in quite a bit of pain.”

&n
bsp; The nurse closed out the report he was writing and got up to check on Bloem. I guess I should have felt some sympathy for the injured man, but I couldn’t muster any.

  Winter was looking expectantly at me. I turned to Bolle.

  “Can I meet you guys at the car in say, twenty minutes?”

  He nodded.

  I followed Winter through the bowels of the hospital. He looked like he knew where he was going so I followed, hoping this wasn’t some clever way of luring me into an ambush.

  “You look well Dan,” I said. “I would have thought you would be retired by now.”

  I didn’t mean it as a dig. I was genuinely curious. When I’d still been at the Bureau, Winter had been coasting his way towards retirement and doing as little work as possible. He’d also been carrying a pretty fair sized spare tire that seemed to have been greatly reduced.

  “I started working out again,” he said.

  My fears of an ambush were alleviated when we came around a corner and arrived at a coffee stand. He even paid for me.

  We walked over to an out of the way corner.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Did Rickson Todd really beat up Mandy Williams and set you up for it with Bloem’s help?”

  He watched me intently, waiting for an answer.

  “Yep,” I said, and took a drink of coffee.

  Some of the tension left his body, and I could tell he believed me. It was a big change from a few months ago when he’d sat across an interrogation room from me and accused me of trying to kill Mandy.

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said softly.

  “Hell, I was there,” I said. “And I hardly believe it myself.”

  “Lubbock? He was in on it?”

  “Yep.”

  Winter took a sip of his coffee.

  “Something changed in him six months or so before it all happened. I thought he was just having an affair. But it was Todd wasn’t it?”

  “Yep.” I didn’t see any particular reason to keep all this secret. I was curious why Winter had called me down here.

  “I could have retired a month ago,” Winter said. “But I fought to get assigned to Internal Affairs instead.”

  “Why?” During my time as a cop, I would have rather slammed my balls in a car door than work IA. Everybody hated you then.

  “When they first accused you of hurting Mandy, I believed them,” he said. “Then it all began to unravel, and the truth was nowhere to be found. I was determined to get to the bottom of it, and I was told to shut my hole, mind my own business and collect my pension.”

  He started walking then, I think as much to burn off nervous energy as anything else. I walked beside him.

  “At first I was determined to do exactly that. But I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I didn’t want to go out like that. I haven’t been a very good cop since the shooting, Dent.”

  Five or six years ago, Winter had shot a man in a parking lot. He’d pointed a gun at Winter. Winter shot him down, simple as that.

  Only it wasn’t that simple. The guy had been a vet, struggling with an addiction to pain pills due to an injury from service, and the pistol had been a air gun, and an unloaded one at that. There had never been a chance that Winter would be disciplined or fired. It was one of those things that happened sometimes, but Winter had been dragged through the mud in the media. The Bureau hadn’t exactly abandoned him, but it hadn’t exactly supported him either. The Bureau only protected itself. It was after that people started counting Winter among the ranks of the “Retired On Active Duty.”

  I didn’t really know what to say to that. The default response among cops about anything emotionally uncomfortable was not to talk about it. Part of me was still shocked Winter was willing to talk to me about this at all.

  “So I got a job at IA,” he said. “And I’m starting to think like a cop again, instead of like a retiree.”

  “How’s that working out for you?” It came out sounding snarkier than I meant for it to, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Everyone closed ranks,” Winter said. “Nobody gave a shit about you or Mandy. Every time I tried to gain some traction into investigating Bloem, I was stonewalled.”

  I’d busted my ass for the Bureau for most of my adult life, which apparently counted for nothing. I would have been hurt, but I’d had months to get used to the idea. Right now I was trying to decide if Winter was brave or stupid for doing what he was doing.

  “So what do you want from me?” I asked.

  It took him a little while to answer. He looked out the window stirring the cream in his coffee cup. What was unspoken between us was the last time I’d seen him was the day I’d turned in my badge after being accused of trying to kill my partner.

  “I’ll take anything you’ve got, Dent. I don’t know if other people in the Bureau knew exactly what Bloem was doing, but I think people had to know he was up to something. They need to pay.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. I could talk for hours about Bloem’s connection to Todd, and the whole mess with Cascade Aviation. All of it would be news to Winter. But it didn’t sound like Winter had anything for me. He’d never been one of the Bureau’s stars. His career had been marked by a willingness to show up on time, keep his mouth shut, and do what he was told. He had been useful to people like Steve Lubbock, my old boss, but he’d never been a skilled investigator or tactician.

  The fewer people who knew the details of our investigation the better. I had everything to lose, but nothing to gain by talking to Winter.

  I think deep down, he knew it. Asking me for help was an act of desperation.

  I took a deep breath and reached in my pocket. I had two sets of business cards. They were both pretty spiffy and said “US Department of Justice Special Investigator Dent Miller.” I’d never expected those words to be strung together. The difference between the two sets was one had my personal cell phone number, and the other had the duty phone in our command center. I gave him the duty phone.

  “I can’t give you the family jewels without talking to my boss,” I said. “He’s keeping his cards pretty close to the vest. But you can reach me at this number.”

  He took the card, not meeting my eyes. He fished in a pocket and pulled out one of his own. I took it and we shook hands awkwardly.

  “Thanks for talking with me Dent,” he said, still not meeting my eyes. He knew I was blowing him off. Investigators shared information under the table all the time. I didn’t have to share everything with him, but I wasn’t even offering so much as a scrap.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Dan.”

  I turned on my heel and left, chucking my half full cup of coffee in a trash can as I went.

  The night before at Kelly Point Park, I’d told myself I didn’t have any regrets. Now I was even more sure. Dan could work out all he wanted and convince himself that he was somehow going to redeem himself by exposing the rottenness in the Bureau, but it was too little too late. He didn’t have the knowledge, the resources, or the time to make anything happen. They’d force him out soon and he’d find himself retired, sitting home alone at night with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded gun in a desk drawer.

  I wasn’t sure how my life was going to end, but I had a pretty good idea about Dan’s.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Alex.

  U Ok?

  I figured I was.

  Chapter 6

  “I still think this is a bad idea,” Alex said.

  She’d been quiet since the events at the hospital, with the exception of a vociferous argument in the car on the way back about my meeting with Mack. She didn’t think I should go. I was determined to do it. There didn’t seem to be any common ground.

  “It just seems weird to me that they figured out we were housed out of Wapato, and now they want to get you alone.”

  I opened my mouth, almost said something snarky and stupid, and for once in my life, bit my tongue before it came out.

  I took a deep breath. Th
is relationship stuff was hard, and I was beginning to realize I wasn’t very good at it.

  We were sitting in the back of the surveillance van. Henry was in the driver’s seat, while Alex, Casey and I sat in the back. Casey was holding a cell phone in her hand, looking from Alex to me with an expression on her face that said she’d rather be anywhere than between the two of us at the moment.

  “I understand that you don’t agree, Alex,” I said. We’d rehashed the argument three or four times now, and I didn’t feel like either of us had anything new to say. “But I feel like I need to do this. The meeting is supposed to start in a few minutes, and I can’t keep doing this. I just need your support. I need to know if I get in a jam, you’ll back me up.”

  She was sitting there in the jump seat sweating in a bulky set of hard body armor under a windbreaker. The a/c couldn’t compete with all the heat generated by the electronic gear. Her carbine was slung around her neck and a medical backpack was between her feet. She had her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, and she looked tired and out of sorts.

  She also looked heartbreakingly beautiful to me at that moment, more than she ever had before. I just wanted to hold her and get the hell out of here.

  But first, work.

  “Back me up, ok?” I asked softly.

  She nodded and seemed to relax a little.

  Casey glanced at both of us. Then held out the phone.

  “Even if you power it down, the microphone will still be hot and broadcasting. If battery is pulled out there’s an internal backup that will keep it working for about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, but I wouldn’t count on it for longer than that.”

  I took it from her and tucked it in the front pocket of my shirt. Unlike everyone else, I wasn’t wearing armor, just an untucked button-down shirt with a square hem, perfect for hiding my 10mm that rode in a Milt Sparks Versamax holster on my right hip. I also had my little revolver in my right front pocket, and a couple of knives, my usual outfit for when I was walking around not expecting trouble.