by DL Barbur
Robert turned an even deeper crimson. I suspected that with his good looks, he was likely to have helped save a horse a time or two himself.
“So we will separate our target from his buddies,” Casey said. “And then lead him back to the motel in town, where we’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Our target was Willard Stuckey, thirty-five-year-old ranch hand, high school drop out and twice sentenced for petty theft. He had an outstanding warrant for non-payment of child support from the state of Idaho. We had exactly zero jurisdiction over that, but Willard didn’t need to know that.
“Won’t this guy be a little suspicious when you pick him out of the crowd for your attentions?” Alex asked. “He’s no prize.”
Judging from his picture, Willard may have been gifted in some way, but good looks wasn’t it. He was a homely, paunchy guy with somewhat vacant-looking eyes.
“I suspect there won’t be enough blood flow to his brain to allow for too much analysis of the situation,” Dale said from over in his corner. He seemed somewhat amused by the whole thing.
“But I can’t just walk in there and… seduce him,” Alex said.
Alex was tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, and in some ways extremely shy. When it came to her work she could be outgoing and confident, but she’d more than once described her dating life as a disaster. She intimidated many men, and it seemed like sometimes she had no idea how attractive she was. It was hard to say which of us was the most introverted, but it was probably a safe bet that after all this was over we would be spending lots of quiet evenings at home.
“Not your job,” Casey said. “I’ll hook old Willard. I just need you to be my wingman. Or wingwoman. Or wing… person. Or whatever. I’m not walking in there alone like chum in a swimming pool full of sharks.”
Alex still looked doubtful.
“Look,” Casey said. “I’ll be the fun, risk-taking sister, and you can be the older, sensible one who comes along to keep an eye on me.”
Alex blew a strand of hair out of her eye.
“Ok. I can do that.”
“Let’s remember that this is plan B,” I said. “If we can get this guy alone and stop him on the road, that’s our first choice.”
Dale shook his head. “If I know ranch hands, they are all gonna pile in one truck to go spend their payday. Less money spent on gas that way. You’ll have to cut this feller out of the herd just like Casey said.”
I suspected he was right, but I still didn’t like this plan very much.
Dale stood up and stretched. I heard a couple of joints pop and he grimaced.
“I propose a little alteration to the plan,” Dale said. “Robert and I can travel to whatever bar the ranch hands, Casey and Alex wind up in. We can slip in all unobtrusive like and keep an eye on things without attracting attention.”
I instantly felt better. Casey and Alex were capable, but Dale and Robert’s ability to perform acts of mayhem was an order of magnitude higher.
I realized everybody was looking at me as if I had the final say in how this little charade was supposed to happen.
“Ok,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Two hours later, I was fidgeting in one of the motel rooms back in Lehigh Valley, listening to Alex’s body microphone in my earpiece. She was wearing the wire, and two guns. One for her and one for Casey. Casey had weighed the odds of wearing a wire and a gun and judged the chances of discovery were too great. She’d settled for the tracking app on her cell phone, and a microphone installed in the car we were using.
Via our video link, we’d watched a bunch of Webb’s ranch hands head into town. Just as Dale had predicted, they’d all piled into one crew cab pickup. They’d wasted no time heading into Lehigh Valley and pulling into the parking lot of The Oasis, the local watering hole, meat market, and fight club.
Rudder had loaned us a little hatchback he used to get groceries in town. Casey and Alex drove over to The Oasis in their cowgirl getups so Casey could peel Stuckey away from his buddies. The plan was under no circumstances was she to get in any other vehicle with Stuckey. If he insisted she was supposed to abort, and if Stuckey wouldn’t take no for an answer, Daniel, Dale’s other son would be sitting out in the parking lot in case Stuckey wanted to be a kinesthetic learner.
The music in my earpiece was modern, slickly produced faux country music that I hated. I could hear a general mishmash of voices, only rarely could I make out what exactly was being said. Alex’s voice was loud when she talked, and picked up the resonance in her chest, but she was being pretty quiet.
I hated this. I’d never worked narcotics, so I’d rarely had a reason to back up an officer who was going in undercover, but our vice and dope guys did it all the time, and every one of them said it was harder to be on the back up team than it was to be the officer that was going in disguised. Things could go to shit in a matter of seconds, and no matter how fast you tried to respond, your officer could be dead before you got there.
It was even worse when it was your girlfriend.
Bolle, Eddie and I sat in the dark motel room listening. I recognized Casey’s voice, but couldn’t hear what she was saying.
“Nice to meet you, Stuckey,” Alex said. That was for our benefit. They’d made contact.
I sat there and listened to Alex give monosyllabic answers to a drunk guy who mumbled when he talked and tried not to squeeze the arm of the couch so hard it would break. I could hear Casey laughing and chatting in the background. Before our lives all went to shit, she’d studied method acting and joined an improv group to help her deal with her own social awkwardness, and it had paid off in spades.
After what seemed like forever, but was only twenty minutes, Alex said, “I’m going to head off to the ladies.”
Casey had given her the sign that she was going to try to reel Stuckey in and get him to leave with her. Casey was supposed to take her opportunity when her sourpuss older sister got up to go to the bathroom.
“Casey is headed to the door with Stuckey,” Dale said. I wondered how he was managing to murmur into his microphone without attracting attention, but I figured Dale knew what he was doing.
“They’re coming out the door,” Daniel said. I relaxed a little. It sounded like the plan was working. So far Casey had been under our observation the whole time. The biggest risk was that we would lose sight of her.
“What the fuck?” Alex said over the radio. Her voice sort of echoed, and there was less background noise.
There was a thump and a crash. I thought I heard a woman’s voice say “bitch.” I was out of my seat and halfway to the front door when Alex’s voice came over the radio.
“Dale. I need you in the women’s restroom.” She sounded calm, but she was breathing a little hard.
“Wait,” Bolle said. “Don’t blow it.”
I walked back to the couch and sat down. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
“Casey is getting in the car with the target,” Daniel said. “Do you all need me inside the bar?”
“Nope,” Dale said. His voice had the same echo now. “We’re good. Pull around the back. We’ll be going out the service entrance with Alex and the other woman.”
Other woman? What the hell was going on? I reached up to key my microphone when Casey’s voice cut into my earpiece.
“Move your hand, baby. We’ll be at my motel room soon enough,” she said. She was in the car with Stuckey now and had activated the microphone. I heard the little subcompacts engine whine as she worked through the gears.
Even though I was desperate to know what was going on I kept quiet. We had way too much going for it all to be on one radio net, but it was too late to change it now. Both the microphone in the car, and Alex’s bodymic were constantly transmitting. It was like trying to listen to two radio stations at once.
I heard a muffled woman’s voice, then Alex said: “Shut up or I’ll shoot you in the back of the head.” After that, her microphone abruptly cut off.
>
Bolle, Eddie and I all exchanged glances and raised eyebrows.
“Dent, we’re a few minutes behind Casey,” Dale said. “I need you to unlock the front door to the other motel room, the adjacent one and meet us there.”
I had a million questions, but I did as he asked. I walked through the doors to the adjoining room and propped open the front door. I saw the battered little subcompact pulling into the lot. The passenger looked like he was practically sitting in Casey’s lap.
I hurried back into the other room. We had the lights off except for the one in the bathroom. Eddie and I took up positions on either side of the door. I heard the car doors slam outside, then Casey stepped through the door. As we’d arranged, she immediately sprinted to the back of the room.
“What are you doing?” Stuckey asked as he stepped through the door. Eddie and I each grabbed an arm and pushed him face down into the bed. Bolle shoved a set of credentials in his face.
“We’re Federal Agents Willard,” Bolle said. “Do you want to cooperate, or should my colleagues break some of your bones first?”
“I ain’t done nothing,” Stuckey said. His voice was kind of muffled from his face being shoved in the comforter.
Bolle gave him a shark’s grin.
“On the contrary, my friend. There is a warrant for your arrest. Unpaid child support I believe?”
He leaned over and whispered theatrically into Stuckey’s ear.
“But it isn’t what you’ve done that’s important. It’s what you are going to do for us that matters.”
“Ok. Let me up. I’ll do whatever you want.”
We lifted him up and frogmarched him over to a chair. Bolle sat down on the bed facing him and picked a tablet up off the desk.
“Now Willard, I’m going to show you some pictures and I want you to tell me if you’ve seen this man at the ranch.”
“Pulling into the motel,” Dale’s voice said in my ear.
I walked into the next room. Dale came in first, followed by Alex who had another woman in a hammerlock. She was almost a foot shorter than Alex, and I wasn’t sure her feet were touching the ground all the time. She had long dark hair that hung in her face. She was wearing western jeans, a halter top and cowboy boots.”
“Who’s that?” I said.
The woman twisted to get free and Alex swept her feet and face-planted her onto the floor. She landed with a thud and gave a moan as Alex came down and shoved her knee between the woman’s shoulder blades.
“Don’t recognize her?” Alex asked. She looked agnrier than I’d ever seen her before. She reached down, grabbed a handful of hair and yanked. For one queasy second, I thought she’d scalped the woman, then realized it was a wig. Underneath was a tight braid of red hair and a face I recognized.
“Diana,” I said.
“I ran into her in the ladies’ room,” Alex said.
Diana had a fat lip with some dried blood in the corner of her mouth, and as I looked at her, a big red mark started to swell on her forehead from being slammed on the floor.
“Well, this is interesting,” I said. I glanced at the connecting door. I could hear Bolle’s voice from the next room, but couldn’t tell what he was saying.
Daniel and Robert walked in. Robert was holding a little clutch purse in his hands.
“Show them what was in the purse, Robert?”
Gingerly, Robert pulled a small handgun, of a type I didn’t recognize.
“She pulled that on me in the bathroom when I recognized her. She almost shot me with it before I dumped her. Give it to me.”
She held out her hand and Robert put the gun in it. She shoved the barrel under Diana’s jaw.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“Calm down. You need to talk to my boss. Again.”
“How about if I just pull the trigger?”
“Don’t do that!” Diana said.
“Whoa,” Dale and I both said at the same time. We each reached for Alex, then pulled back. Her finger was on the trigger. She jerked the muzzle aside, then pulled the trigger. Instead of the loud bang I expected, there was a soft pfft barely louder than a cough, and a dart stuck in the carpet next to Diana’s face.
Alex put the gun back under Diana’s jaw.
“I want to know what it is. Either you can tell me, or I pull the trigger and we find out the hard way.”
“It’s a paralytic,” Diana said. “Some kind of synthetic drug. It isn’t lethal, but if you pull the trigger with it pressed against my skin you could tear the artery in my neck.”
“Huh,” I said, feeling like events were moving faster than I could keep up.
“Maybe we could let her up,” Dale said. “I think the five of us could keep her from escaping.”
I didn’t know if Dale was motivated from some innate chivalry, or if he didn’t want to be a witness to Alex committing murder on a helpless prisoner, but fortunately, she listened to him. She handed me the pistol and picked Diana up, then deposited her on the bed.
“There’s a safety catch on the right side of the grip, but to make it safe you have to unscrew the CO2 cartridge,” Diana said.
I nodded and rendered the little gun safe. I plucked the dart out of the carpet and put them both in the bathroom, well out of range of a desperate grab by Diana.
When I stepped back out, I rocked back on my heels. Alex had her hand down the front of Diana’s shirt. All three of the Williams men’s eyes were sort of bugging out of their heads. Before I could say anything, Alex pulled her hand out with a ripping sound. Diana gave a yelp and Alex held up a microphone with tape wrapped around it.
“Well, apparently someone has been listening,” she said. She looked at Daniel “You should have searched her better.”
He blushed.
“Ok,” I said. “Everybody just sit tight for a second.”
I walked over to the adjoining room and stepped in the next door. Stuckey and Bolle were in deep conversation, their knees almost touching, while Eddie and Casey looked on.
“Mr. Stuckey is cooperating fully,” Bolle said and raised his eyebrows. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know he wanted me to get the hell out of the room and make sure nothing happened to screw up the deal.
“What’s going on over there?” Stuckey asked.
“Uhhh… Somebody else isn’t being smart and cooperating,” I said.
Bolle rolled his eyes and I walked back next door again. Casey followed me and picked up the dart pistol from the bathroom counter.
“Huh,” she said. “This looks like a cut down Teledart 206. Cool. You can put a rhino to sleep with one of these.”
Every head in the room swiveled in her direction.
“How do you know stuff like that?” Robert asked.
“I watch lots of Animal Planet,” she said with a shrug.
I turned back to Diana.
“So are you the one that shot me with a dart last night, or was it Hubbard, your boss?”
I was watching her face closely, and the little jolt of eyes widening made me pretty sure that question came as a surprise to her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“She’s lying,” Alex said. “Fuck her. Where’s the pistol that has the suppressor on it?”
“It’s out in the truck,” Dale said. “We need to get her in the shower though, so we can wash all that DNA evidence down the drain instead of getting it all over the bed and carpet and such.”
I was pretty sure Dale was acting. I wasn’t so sure about Alex. She’d always had a bit of temper. Once, she’d even slugged her step-mother in the face, but I’d never seen her like this. I was not entirely convinced that she wouldn’t put a round in Diana’s head in that particular moment. The stress had been building in all of us. I’d made a few bad decisions myself a few weeks back, so I could empathize, but I couldn’t let her just shoot Diana in the head. She’d regret it. Maybe.
“Sounds like you need to do some more convincing,” I said
to Diana.
“I don’t know anything about Miller being shot with a dart,” she said. “The pistols are Agency issue. There are dozens of them in the field. You people know about the money on the plane.”
She looked around the room. Nobody nodded or said anything, but nobody denied it either.
“There’s a bunch of moving parts to this. There are more players on the chess board than any of us know about I think. I don’t know who tried to dart you, but it wasn’t me.”
I was inclined to believe her. Essentially Alex and the Williams crew had just kidnapped her, and now she was in a hotel room with no backup and at least one person that seemed cheerfully willing to put a bullet in her head. I’d seen big, trained men break in less stressful circumstances than this, but she was remarkably calm. The tells were there though if you knew what to look for. She was digging both hands into the comforter of the bed she was sitting on, probably to keep them from shaking. She couldn’t keep her left leg from quivering though.
As I watched, she reached up, wiped blood from the corner of her mouth, and smeared it on the comforter. Apparently, Dale’s comment about DNA had got some gears turning in her head. She wanted to leave some evidence of her presence behind in the room.
It was the act of someone who was afraid she was about to die. I realized I needed to defuse the situation before her fight or flight response kicked in full force and she did something stupid.
“Look,” I said. “Nobody is going to shoot you in the head tonight. We’re not going to kill you. You have to understand how this looks though. Alex found you in the same bar where we were operating, and you’ve got a dart gun on you. What were you doing there?”
“Same thing as you. Trying to catch a cowboy.”
She looked at Alex. “You weren’t very convincing by the way. You looked like a mortified nun dressed up in cowgirl clothes.”
“I guess pretending to be a slut comes a little more naturally to some than others,” Alex said through clenched teeth. Casey cocked her head at that.
I stepped between them and held up both hands.
“Ok. It sounds like we were all after the same thing,” I said.
“Car just pulled into the lot,” Daniel said from over by the window, where he’d been standing and keeping an eye out. At least one of us hadn’t been hijacked by the situation.
