Outlaws

by Tim Green

  "I'm serious about the general," Striker said from out of nowhere, and she knew he was. "You have to understand that a man like the general will come back to bite you."

  Jenny thought about this for a moment and wondered if it would bother Striker to kill her.

  "What was the general saying to you about your last friend?" she asked.

  "I killed him, for the same reason I have to kill the general," Striker said with the casual manner of a Federal Express man talking about the packages he delivered. "It would be foolish to go through all this only to leave a trail for people to follow. They would find us, and we would be killed or jailed. That's not acceptable."

  'You said 'us,'" Jenny pointed out.

  'Yes, 1 did, didn't I?" he said with a pleasant smile. But this was a discussion he wanted to have at a later time. That was a hook he was saving.

  "Would| you please reach into the back and take... There's a manila envelope in the side pocket of my bag," Striker said, motioning behind him and changing the subject completely.

  Jenny did as she was told. The envelope was made of a heavy-grade paper, and it was fat with something. She held it out to him.

  "Open it," he said, "it's yours."

  Jenny straightened the tabs that held the envelope shut and reached in to find five thick packets of hundred dollar bills.

  "Its your cut for this part of the operation," Striker said. "It's a hundred thousand dollars. You'll get more as you do more. It's simple market economics: the higher the risk, the greater the profit. We're partners."

  This was a perfect example of what Jenny had just been thinking about. Just when the conversation took a turn toward their future, Striker muddied the waters. But a hundred thousand dollars in cash was one hell of a way to do it. The inky feel and smell of the freshly printed bills was intoxicating. Jenny liked the idea of money that was hers, money that no one could take from her or make her feel she hadn't earned. Cody never talked like that to her, but she knew he thought it. She knew he resented the way she spent their money. She knew he felt like he earned it and she did nothing but spend it. Now she was earning it.

  "Don't spend it all in one place," Striker said. "I mean, you can go shopping for some clothes or something like that, but don't go out and buy a new car or anything enormous. This is the kind of money you can only spend a little at a time. You don't want to draw attention to yourself. Just put it somewhere safe where no one will find it."

  "Jenny," he said, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips in a reassuring way, "I'm going to teach you how to survive. I will never hurt you."

  Jenny tucked the envelope under her knees and rested her head against the leather seat. Striker opened the sunroof and all the windows. He punched up music from the Cars, and the heavy beat pounded through the hair-whipping breeze. Outside, the flat Texas landscape raced by in a hundred-mile-an-hour blur. Jenny smiled. She didn't know exactly what was going to happen, but that was okay. She knew the whole thing was just like a movie.

  Cody watched in a daze as the first team defense jogged out onto the field. They broke the huddle and Derell Biggs took his position in the middle of the field, exactly where he was supposed to be. Cody cursed under his breath. The guy wasn't stupid, either. He hated to wish someone else ill, but he couldn't help it. He wanted to be on this team. He wasn't ready to end it now. He wasn't ready financially or emotionally. He knew he could still play in this league.

  The offense lined up, and Cody watched in silence as the defense adjusted to an unbalanced, three-receiver formation. Biggs rolled over the top of the heavy-receiver side, exactly where he was supposed to be again. The quarterback called out the cadence, then dropped back to pass. The receivers streaked down the field and then split apart like Blue Angel stunt planes, each going in his own direction. Biggs locked on to the deepest man and opened up his stride into a lull sprint. The quarterback lofted a long ball out in front of Biggs and the receiver he was covering. The two strained forward, one to catch the ball, the other to ensure that no one caught it. It was only practice, but in the NFL, players know that careers can be made or lost on any given day in any given practice.

  Biggs suddenly crumpled into a heap and tumbled along in the grass until his inertia was spent. The younger player clutched at the back of his leg, and Cody knew in an instant that Biggs had blown out his hamstring. Cody tried not 1.0 get too excited, but it was hard. A hamstring could be four weeks, or it could Ire eight. It could be twelve, or it could even end a career. They were tricky things that sometimes never healed correctly or at all. It was like super gluing something back together,- you always know the crack is there, and sooner or later it's going to break in the same place again. The trainers ran out onto the field with the urgency of a 911 call. When a high-paid free agent went down, even the trainers knew they better get there fast. If a rookie free agent were to drop, or a minimum-salary veteran, they would probably take their time.

  Cody looked nervously from Dryer, the head coach, to a second-year kid named Jon Wesley. Wesley was Cody's backup last season. He was a young free safety out of Baylor. The kid had some ability. He liked to hit, and his speed wasn't half bad. The problem with Wesley was that he tended to screw things up. About one out of every five plays, Wesley would do the wrong thing. On the defensive line, a screwup meant the other team got a five-yard run instead of a two-yard mn. In the secondary, a screwup usually gave the other team a touchdown. There was a big difference. Cody knew that there was great significance in whomever they called out to replace the downed Biggs. If they called Wesley, it would mean they felt the kid could be ready to fill in this season behind Biggs. If they didn't feel confident that they could put the kid out there in a game under fire, they would opt for Cody. Even though they feared he would be physically limited because of his knee, they could count on him to be in the right place at the right time. With Biggs's bad hamstring, even though most people wouldn't even realize it, it was a critical decision for the team.

  "Cody!" the coach yelled suddenly. 'Take it."

  Cody didn't waste a second,- he didn't want anyone to change their mind. All he knew was that he was home again. He could barely contain his enthusiasm. When the huddle broke and he was walking toward his position, he fantasized to himself that the whole thing had merely been a ploy to help rejuvenate him, like when you bought a young puppy to pep up the old dog. That was wishful thinking. The fact was that he had been marked as expendable. He was going to be replaced. But now, if Biggs's injury was worth anything at all, the last laugh would be his. That was football, it was a tough way to make a living.

  Adam Garbosky sat in his comer office overlooking the wooded hills surrounding Langley. Garbosky was a short man with a nasty streak, the perfect governmental bureaucrat. He had waited for years and given everything he had to give to be sitting in just such an office in the headquarters of the CIA. It was his lifelong dream, and now he had it. He had his own directorate. The second youngest deputy director the agency had ever known. The first was a computer genius named Stuart Lisson. But Lisson was involved in the technological side of things. Garbosky operated people. He was the spy master.

  Part of being the master, though, was cleaning the cluttered house left behind by his predecessors. He didn't need the scum and the riffraff that had accumulated in the agency since the early sixties. He envisioned an exclusive club, not unlike the Ivy League fraternities from his college days at Yale. Garbosky envisioned an agency of gentlemen, people who were not only competent, but who had integrity. It would be his legacy to the CIA. If the current president could hold on for a second term, his sweeping changes in one of the biggest black eyes of the American government could earn him a chance to become director of the entire agency. Anything was possible with work. Garbosky believed that. Luck was a ridiculous notion. He knew for a fact that he had worked very hard and that he deserved every good thing he had. There were no coincidences in his life.

  He looked at his gold Rolex and buzzed his secretary
.

  "Send Teitelbaum in," he said.

  Bruce Teitelbaum was one of the most seasoned veterans that the agency had. Teitelbaum was in his early fifties. He had salt-and-pepper hair that was cut close. He wore the typical gray two-piece suit. Garbosky knew Teitelbaum wasn't happy with his present assignment, but that didn't matter. In fact it was a testament to the man's professionalism. He was covering the man people called Striker like white on rice.

  Teitelbaum walked in and sat down without bothering to shake hands. Garbosky didn't mind. In fact, if Teitelbaum had made some perfunctory gesture, Garbosky would have been disappointed.

  "So," Garbosky began, "how is my friend Bill Moss, aka Striker?"

  Teitelbaum gave him the disgusted look of a man who was being forced to waste his time.

  "I've got four good men on him," Teitelbaum said. "They lost him once, but it was for less than twenty-four hours, so we know he didn't leave the country, unless you count driving across the border to buy some hash in Mexico, but you know what I mean.

  "Anyway, it seems to have been nothing more than a slight error by my men. Since you've made it hard for him to do deals, he's not traveling. He has a predictable pattern. He goes to work every day from nine to five. On weekends, he exercises and does other recreational sports around the immediate area. That includes his favorite pastime, which of course is sport fucking. In fact the only thing worthy of mention in his otherwise very routine life is that he's poking the wife of one of the Outlaws players, Jenny Grey. Her husband is Cody Grey, a defensive back for the team. She shows up every so often and cleans his pipes. She's very attractive by the way. Is that what you were looking for?"

  Teitelbaum stopped here. Garbosky turned red. He didn't know whether to be angry or embarrassed. He didn't know if Teitelbaum was blatantly referring to his own wife's affair with Striker or just making some innocuous locker- room joke. Teitelbaum's face was no help, it was emotionless. Garbosky said nothing.

  "I've had my best man look into his books," Teitelbaum continued with a sigh. "There's nothing there. Striker has been living on an income of about three hundred thousand dollars a year, but he hasn't hidden that fact, either. Dick Simmons approved every cent of it, and I can't say as 1 really blame him. Striker has made millions for the agency over the past seven years, highly unusual as you know. Most front corporations lose money in at least their first few years, and most stay that way forever."

  "Bruce, the man is an arms dealer," Garbosky reminded him. "He has all our contacts, internationally and within the Pentagon. It's really no secret #06 why he's been successful."

  "I'm not saying there is. I'm just saying that he has been successful, and that he apparently hasn't dipped into the till. I'll be honest with you, I don't like having to use four good men full-time to keep tabs on him and another to analyze all his phone calls. It's getting expensive."

  "You said, 'apparently,'" Garbosky said, ignoring what Teitelbaum said. "That suggests that there could be some improprieties?"

  "Sir," Teitelbaum said, "with all due respect, this is a huge fishing expedition, isn't it?"

  Garbosky put his hands flat down on the surface of his desk and leaned forward.

  "Yes, Bruce. It is a fishing expedition. But Striker is a bad man. He's bad, and when you're bad, you always make a mistake somewhere. It's always been that way. We're fishing, yes, but in a pond that has been stocked for years, and no one else has ever bothered to throw in their line."

  Teitelbaum nodded with resignation, then said, "Well, I'll keep those men on it. If anything unusual happens, you'll be the first to know."

  Jeff Board battled his way through five screens of Mercs before getting squashed by an armored tank that disgorged enemy soldiers at an overwhelming rate. He took a big slurp of Diet Coke from the dripping thirty-two-ounce cup he'd balanced on top of the video machine and began to dig for another quarter. He found one but noticed his watch. It was just past two-thirty in the afternoon. He should be getting back to the office. The thought made him purse his lips and frown.

  "Shit," he mumbled to himself.

  He was tired of doing what he was doing. He'd been at his list of athletes for months. The trouble was that almost every one of them relied completely on some accountant or tax lawyer to do their returns. The damn things were spotless. After the initial fervor for targeting sports stars. Board was beginning to lose interest. Like most things Board started in life, the idea was a hell of a lot more exciting than the actual work. He'd sent out his notices and talked tough to a few accountants, but the bottom line was that his job entailed thousands of thankless hours poring over documents, trying to find errors in the math. So far, the only errors he'd found were his own.

  By the time he got back to his desk it was just after three. He looked at the pile of papers cluttering the surface in front of him and let out a heavy sigh. He picked up the Cody Grey file and sat back in his chair to go through it for a second time. He hated Cody Grey. Grey was everything he reviled in athletes. He was vicious on and off the field, and he was continuously using his celebrity status to get out of the jams his hotheaded temper got him into. His self-satisfied mug was always on the local television doing commercials for everything from pizza joints to car dealerships.

  Board had even seen Grey and his wife in person from time to time, strutting around Sixth Street like they owned the place. Grey was a drunk, he knew that. Every time he'd seen the player, he was staggering around, rudely bumping into people and eyeing the world with a suspicious scowl. If Board could put just one professional athlete in his place, Grey would be his first choice. If he could only get something on a guy like Cody Grey, he could make a name for himself within the office, even around town. He liked '. He idea of taking out the man whom so many people around town feared and revered. Board knew that no one was very tough when the IRS came knocking at the door.

  "Hey, Jeff."

  It was Loreen, the office director's assistant. Board instinctively ran his fingers through the stringy locks of hair that hung limply to his collar from the back of his head. There wasn't much up front to run through.

  "Boss wants to see you in her office."

  Board felt all thirty-two ounces of his soft drink start to chum in his stomach. Someone must have ratted on his long lunch.

  "Coming," he said, shuffling the papers in the Grey file as though he'd been doing some hard-core analysis.

  Board followed Loreen through the maze of cubicles to the director's office. He hitched his pants and tucked in his shirt as he went. There was a mustard stain on the front of his shirt, and he almost went back for his jacket but decided against it. Despite his concern for the summons, he took advantage of his position to enjoy the nice view of Loreen's ass. She was a little old, but Board would jump on her if he had the chance. He thought the possibility wasn't out of the realm of reason. He thought he was a pretty good-looking guy

  "Okay, Loreen, thanks," he said, veering off into Patti's office.

  Loreen didn't give him a second look.

  "Jeff," Patti said without looking up from her desk, "sit down."

  Board licked his lips and sat. His boss's office reeked from cigarette smoke. His mouth was dry, and there seemed to be no way to clear the smell of old Marlboro Lights that was filling his nasal cavity. He rubbed his nose a bit, cleared his throat with a rasp, and fidgeted nervously with his tie, waiting for the onslaught. Patti finally looked up and took off her glasses.

  "Got anything for me, Jeff?" she said as she took a long drag off her cigarette.

  "Not yet," he said with great discomfort. "These guys are pretty slick, but I'm hammering away."

  Patti blew out more of the foul air and gave him a false smile. She tossed a folded newspaper at him.

  "Did you see this?"

  "What is it?" Board felt somewhat relieved. If lunch was the issue, it would have been broached by now.

  "It's the Wall Strut Journal," Patti said with another puff. "Look at the article about Darry
l Strawberry. Read it."

  Board read. As he did, his mouth slowly opened until he was forced to suck some drool from the comer of his mouth to keep it from spilling onto the page.

  "Wow," he said. "We could look into this."

  Patti looked at him and wondered how it was that with dead-weight like Board she got the kind of results she did out of her office.

  "I don't think looking into it is the right term, Jeff," she said, losing patience. "I think you better start digging and digging hard. You begged for this assignment, but you haven't come up with anything so far, and it's been three months. I'm not happy. This is the kind of thing you need to be on top of. You should be the one showing me this article, not the other way around."

  "Well, I--I probably would have gotten to it," he said.

  "Yeah, well, it's last week's paper," Patti said flatly. "Anyway, do you want me to get someone to give you some help with this? I don't want it blown. When the public sees us putting the squeeze on a high-profile athlete, it's good for business. They know that no one is above the law. They know we're doing our job."

  "I was just thinking that, Patti," Board said enthusiastically. "I was just thinking about how these guys think they're above everyone else. You're absolutely right."

  Patti twisted her mouth in doubt. She crushed out her cigarette in the mound of gray ash that filled her ashtray.

  "I've heard you say that before," she said sarcastically. "Get me something on this. If a guy like Strawberry was getting hundreds of thousands from card companies, and no one was reporting it on either side, you can bet there are plenty of five- or ten-thousand-dollar gigs out there that went unreported, too."

  "I'm on top of it," Board said confidently, as though the whole thing had been his idea.

  He returned to his desk with a new purpose. He picked up the Cody Grey file and started to work. He'd start with the bank accounts. He'd get those records and really go at it. He'd find something. He had a feeling about this. It was fate.