The Shop

by J. Carson Black

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chasing after him like that, once he’d had enough. One thing I’ve learned, chasing never makes it better. It only makes a man so desperate he’ll chew his foot off to get away.”

  “She loved him.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  Riley came out of the bathroom. “The police have everything?”

  “Yup,” Mrs. Frawley said. “Impounded his car, too. That’s what happens when you take a woman hostage and get yourself shot up in a cheap motel.”

  Back in the car, Riley slumped against the wheel. “Oh, God. I am so screwed.”

  She looked shaken. Scared. Nothing like the Riley Zoe knew. It scared her. Zoe wanted to say something comforting, but the words stuck in her throat.

  Riley started to cry.

  Then Zoe had an idea. “Maybe Aunt Jolie can help us.”

  “Aunt Jolie? You mean the cop?”

  “She’s a detective. Jolie’s a good friend of Mom’s. Maybe she could find out who has the phone and see if she can get it back.”

  Riley wiped her nose and looked over at Zoe. “You think she could do that?”

  “I bet she could pull some strings.” Although suddenly, she wasn’t so sure.

  “Call her,” Riley said.

  18

  Jim Akers wasn’t the family man Jolie assumed him to be.

  Nobody at the Gardenia PD was surprised that Maddy Akers had killed her husband.

  “Did you ever know him to threaten anybody?” Jolie asked Acting Chief McClelland.

  McClelland sighed. “I saw him threaten a confidential informant once, back when he was a deputy. Going on fifteen years ago. Said if the guy didn’t stop torquing him around, he’d kill him.”

  “Kill him?”

  “A lot of people say that. Like, if you do that again, I’m gonna kill you. Hell, I’ve said it. But he meant it.”

  He was clearly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Couple of weeks later, the CI went missing. Found him in a canal not far from here. His head bashed in.”

  “You think it was Chief Akers?”

  “Well, that’s open to conjecture. But I do think Jim was capable.”

  “Would he ever threaten his wife?”

  “Now, that I don’t know. He never talked about her. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Jim acted like he wasn’t married. Once in a while he’d bring her to a cookout. I’m sure she talked to the ladies, but I don’t recall ever having a conversation with her. Whether that was her fault or his, I don’t know. But it kind of felt like he was hiding her.”

  Jolie had bought it—Akers as the quintessential small-town police chief.

  Maybe Maddy, manipulative as she was, really believed her husband planned to kill her.

  Jolie went looking for Davy Crockett. She had a number of questions about the motel standoff, and she could trust Davy to be straight with her. They’d worked together many times over the past few years on cases that required interagency cooperation.

  And Zoe’s call earlier today was on her mind—Davy was the only guy at the Gardenia PD who might help her.

  Davy Crockett was a giant black man with a bullet-shaped head he shaved every morning. In deference to the name his parents gave him, Davy had a moth-eaten coonskin cap tacked up on the wall above his desk. Davy was the PD’s only detective, what was known as a “generalist.” He worked homicide, but he also worked auto theft, smash-and-grabs, and domestics. Davy had been a good friend of Dan’s when they were both deputies with the sheriff’s office. They grew up together, kind of (Davy lived in the black neighborhood in Port St. Joe), and played on the same football team in high school.

  When they were through with official business, Jolie said, “Would it be out of line if I asked to see an evidence list?”

  “For who?”

  “Luke Perdue. I’m looking for his phone.”

  “You want to tell me why?”

  Davy had three daughters. She thought he’d sympathize. “There’s a teenage girl who’s worried about some photos of her on his phone. Sexting.”

  “That ain’t good. Tell you what, I’ll go check the list. As I recall, that whole thing went down a week after Memorial Day?”

  “June eighth.”

  “Don’t seem like it was that long ago. Time sure flies in this business. If and when they release the phone, I’ll let you know. Who they releasing it to?”

  “Next of kin would be his sister, Amy Perdue.”

  Davy shook his head. “Kids. It sure was a lot tamer when I was growing up.”

  “You ever take naked pictures of your girlfriend?” Jolie asked.

  “Sure. And hid ’em away in a drawer. But these days…” He tapped the folder he’d been carrying against his leg. “Doesn’t she know she’s gonna end up on the Internet?”

  Davy came back to the break room ten minutes later with a printout of the evidence list for Luke Perdue. “Talk about a wild-goose chase,” he said.

  Jolie took the pages from him. There were a number of pieces of evidence the police had confiscated from Luke Perdue’s apartment. “No cell.”

  “Nope. Thought that was kind of strange myself.”

  “It wasn’t on him when he was killed?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Well, I know he had one. The girlfriend was very clear about that. Do you know who went to his place that day?”

  “Crowley and LeFave. Just before noon on the day.”

  Jolie checked her watch. She wanted to call Judge Sharpe and see about the search warrants. She worried Maddy would have already destroyed whatever evidence remained. As Davy walked her out, she asked the same question she’d asked Acting Chief McClelland. “Do you think Chief Akers would threaten his wife? Threaten to kill her?”

  Davy said, “He was into control, I know for a fact. Secretive, too. He didn’t share what he was thinking with anybody else. The truth is, I have no idea what he would do and what he wouldn’t do.”

  “Most people, you have a general idea,” Jolie said.

  He nodded. “Not the chief, though. He kept himself to himself.” He added, “He had one hell of a temper. It was like a nasty storm brewing—everyone could feel it coming, and nobody would know what would touch it off.”

  19

  ASPEN, COLORADO

  This RadioShack was like RadioShacks anywhere, Landry thought. The interior was one long oval connected to a smaller oval, like a child’s drawing of a cat. Fluorescent lights in boxes were set into the ceiling, the lighting harsh and muted at the same time. Sparse shelves. A quiet atmosphere. Only two men in the store, a clerk and a customer discussing iPod models.

  The RadioShack was the same, but the shops around it were upscale. The scenery was spectacular.

  Landry bought two wireless lapel microphones, $49.95 each. Inside each box was a single-channel mic, built-in compander noise reduction, with a two-hundred-foot operational range. Each box contained a lapel microphone transmitter, a receiver, and a 9-volt AC adapter. He bought four sets of AA batteries for the transmitters (two extra) just to make sure. The microphones were cheap, but that didn’t matter. For certain occasions, you could get just as good stuff at RadioShack as you could going high-end. In the military they even had an acronym for it: COTS—commercial off-the-shelf. And Landry liked a bargain.

  Stepping outside into the diamond-hard sunshine, holding the RadioShack bag with the boxed microphones inside, Landry looked in the shop window next door. He gathered the store sold clothing for the new generation, casual stuff you could wear to class or on a skateboard. Navy hoodies were displayed in the window, a photo above showing an unshaven twenty-something rappelling down from a helicopter. The clothing line was called “SEALS.”

  “If you only knew,” he said to the display. The kid in the ad would likely want no part of SEALs training he’d endured at the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado.

  That evolution of BUD/S training was to keep him from drowning b
y making it a working proposition. He, along with the other trainees, was thrown into the water bound hand and foot. Hands behind the back. Normally, he was pretty tough. He liked to train—no, make that, he loved to train—and he was strong. Stronger than the guys who quit. Stronger than the guys who stayed. He was bigger than most, but he was able to keep up with the little guys, the compact guys who excelled in SEALs training. He was near the cutoff at the top of the age range, but he was as good any of them and smarter than most. Invincible. But when he plunged into the nine-foot-deep pool, something inside him broke loose. It was mortifying, this rebellion at the idea of drowning, apparently hardwired into him. There was yelling, there was berating, there was the water closing over his head as he sank. There were other bodies in the water, wires of refracted light cutting their bodies into pieces.

  Commotion at three o’clock. Guy flipping out. Had to be taken out of the pool. Thrashing like a fish on a hook. Landry felt like flipping out too, felt like he really was drowning, even though he wasn’t. Straining to breathe. Chest burning. The first time his feet touched bottom he had forced himself to stay under, using what little breath he had, holding it for the required minute before shooting up to the surface like a cannon. He was expected to bob on the surface for five minutes. Any way he could, but ideally, he should conserve energy. There was some fuck with a watch. Yelling at him. That fuck was his BUD/S indoc instructor, a real hard-ass named Keogh, a man he admired. No, make that a man he worshipped. But right now he was just the fuck who was stretching the time out, way past five minutes. Fifteen minutes, maybe. How could he get away with that? It was blatantly unfair, but that was something Landry’d learned first thing: the SEALs were not about fairness. They were about unfairness. He could feel himself slipping under the water. Blow it out. Grab a breath. Chin up. His body bucked, got torqued around. He looked like a prisoner and he felt like a prisoner. At this moment, he was less than a human being.

  He was less than nothing and more than everything, because if he made it through, he truly would be invincible.

  This was how you were forged.

  This was what made you a warrior.

  His swim buddy was having trouble. He couldn’t let that happen. His bond with his swim buddy was greater than his bond with his wife. They did everything together. They never left each other’s side. They even went to the head together. He managed to get closer, managed to throw him some confidence. At least he thought that’s what happened, because they both made it. Float, bob, swim, forward and back flips. Other stuff. Interminable.

  They called it drown-proofing. It was the worst thing he had to do, the one thing where he thought he would break, where he thought he would give up the dream and admit defeat.

  But he didn’t break that day. He didn’t quit like some of the others.

  He didn’t have quit in him.

  Landry stared at the mountain above town, thinking about last night.

  Mars cooperated as much as he could, but he didn’t really know anything. He said his father kept him on a tight budget. He needed money, and when some guy approached him at J-Bar with a proposition, he was happy to oblige. What it came down to was babysitting some guy and making sure he left the party at the house on Castle Creek Road by a certain time. Mars said he tried everything, even enticing Nick Holloway with a ride in his Lamborghini. As time grew short, he got Nick to walk down the hill toward the street to get some air, and “just sort of pushed him over the edge” into the garage, which was cut into the hill below the house. But Mars had no real information on the guy who hired him—it was a cash transaction.

  Mars died hard, from a combination of opiates and Valium. His choice. But he had a seizure. His feet drummed on the polished pine floor of his Starwood condo.

  It looked like an accidental drug overdose, which was what it should look like, but the whole thing bothered Landry. It was not his style to let someone suffer.

  If Mars had not glanced out the window and seen Landry without his ski mask, Landry would have let him live. But once that happened, Mars was doomed.

  And now Landry was no closer to finding out who ordered Brienne Cross’s death, or the deaths of the others.

  He worked for a shadow company that worked for a shadow government, and up until now he thought he was on the right side.

  Now he knew better.

  He walked. It was a nice day. Clear. Lots of people on the street; he was just one of them. Thinking about how he got here.

  He’d started out pure. Like white socks, straight from the department store. You wore them once and they got a little worn. The threads stretched, almost imperceptibly. There was the slightest discolor. Enough so that you cared about them a little less. They were no longer white and new, fresh off the cardboard. They’d been in your shoe. By the end of the week, after a washing, they weren’t new in any way. Then you got careless. One day you wore them to mow the lawn. You got grass seeds in there and sweat from your feet, and they started to yellow. Before you knew it, they were just old socks.

  He was a warrior. He’d stood up for his country. He did good and bad things, but they were all for his country. And when he felt he couldn’t go on—when he realized that he was pushing his luck and five tours were enough—he returned stateside and became an instructor at BUD/S. They say a racehorse has only so many times he can run down the track. That was the way Landry felt when he returned from active duty. He’d run his requisite number of times, and after that, he was through. But then he wanted to go back, he was restless, and he had a way to make a lot of money. Warfare and money together: the best of both worlds. That was when he took the sock out of the cardboard. Eight months working for Kellogg, Root & Brown. Making money hand over fist. Feeling the resentment of the soldiers. Their eyes on him: You sold out.

  That’s how he came to kill a bunch of kids in Aspen, Colorado.

  He arrived at his destination and waited. It didn’t seem like a long time.

  He saw Nick Holloway leave his condo and drive away. He watched the car get smaller as it proceeded down the street. He watched until it turned the corner and was lost from view.

  He bugged the condo. In and out in five minutes.

  20

  Long ago in a galaxy far away, Jolie was a sharpshooter. She’d earned three sharpshooting medals, attaining the designation “Expert.” Her instructor had a saying. Miss one day of practice, you know it. Miss two days of practice, your instructor knows it. Miss three days of practice, everyone knows it. Running wasn’t the same as shooting, but Jolie felt rusty when she started out on the street outside her house. It was still dark. Misty halos wrapped the streetlamps. Dew glittered on the grass. She smelled bacon and eggs coming from the bungalow on the corner of Conch and Highway 98. Crossed the deserted two-lane highway and took the easement through to the beach. Once on the sand, she picked up the pace. The regular sand, not the hard-packed. The scene before her grooved into her memory. The beach, the slow-heaving blackness beyond, the constantly rearranging fringe of surf in between. The rumble and sigh. Her calves felt like heavy bags of sand, hard to move. Being rusty bothered her, but only a little. The job got in the way, and since the job was her life, that was okay.

  She got into a rhythm. Not the one she was accustomed to. Harder won, as if the sand she ran on sapped the blood straight out of her legs. She thought about going over to the hard-packed sand. On her left, buttoned up, were Cockatoo’s Fine Seafood and Beach Ware Gifts. The Quik Mart across the highway. She came to the place where she had to jump a rivulet of brackish water. Shoes hitting the sand, one-two, one-two, one-two. New construction. Space. More new construction. The little park. Her mind going back to Amy, asking for a safe house. Amy was going to run. She might have taken off already. Jolie ran past more new construction, just a frame and poured foundation. Amy’s boyfriend, Niraj Bandhu, had been released from the hospital. Maybe Amy was there, or maybe she’d packed up the rest of the U-Haul and taken off. Jamaican Pete’s ahead, kayaks stacked on
their sides. A surge of water crawled up the sand in a long curve. Jolie ran around it. The other night, she’d observed the way men reacted to Amy—like they wanted to eat her up. They’d acted guilty and embarrassed about their behavior, reminding her of her dad’s old dog when he peed on the carpet. Guilt didn’t stop the dog, and it didn’t stop them. The dog couldn’t help his incontinence. The men were helpless, too, in their way. All of them, Skeet included. The deputies who were there that night—smitten.

  Jolie couldn’t see it, herself. Amy Perdue was no bigger than a flea. She had freckles and weak eyes. Her eyes were pale green and dull as grapes—nothing to them. Limp red hair parted in the middle. No boobs whatsoever. But she had something. It came off her person, silent as a dog whistle. Pheromones?

  Amy’s talk of “something bigger.” Her belief that someone had hired a lawyer just to get her back out on the street. Maybe Amy was paranoid, but it was clear she was in some kind of trouble. Jolie didn’t know what it was, but she knew Amy was in way over her head. It didn’t take much of a leap to think it might involve her brother Luke and the standoff at the Starliner Motel. That was the biggest thing to happen around here in a long time.

  Jolie turned around and ran back, reviewing the events at the Starliner Motel. Luke taking the woman hostage, Chief Akers trying to talk him out, the FBI sharpshooter’s bad shot.

  Did Amy really think the FBI shot Luke on purpose? But Amy wouldn’t be in a position to know about that. No one would. It wasn’t like she could phone the FBI and ask. Try talking to the FBI! Impossible.

  Amy might be prone to conspiracy theories. Her brother was killed, the FBI shot him, she didn’t want to blame her brother, so she conjured up a scenario wherein the FBI shot Luke to…what? That’s where it all broke down.

  Over the little rivulet. Past the Quick Mart, the incandescent light white against the indigo sky. And Riley—Riley had Jolie on her speed dial, constantly calling and texting about her boyfriend’s missing phone. Strange, Gardenia PD having no record of a phone. But Davy’d told her that the FBI was involved, which made sense. They had the snipers. So maybe the FBI had the phone. Probably the FBI. She jogged across Highway 98. Slowed to a walk on Conch. Home. The cat in the window, his cries silenced by the glass. Leaning with her hands on her knees, Jolie’s breath came in sharp gasps.