Silver Lining - A Carpelli Adventure: Sequel To The Bestselling Thriller Fatal Mistake

by Cliff Roberts

  I dragged Nolan out of the bedroom into the hallway which was tiled. I slipped a small throw rug I found in the bathroom, underneath him. I then dragged him to and then through the kitchen and out the backdoor over the slick tile flooring utilizing the throw rug. With the fiber side down on the tile it was slicker than ice with a thin coating of water over it. As I traveled, I tased him every couple of minutes. The last thing I wanted, was to get into a fight with this overgrown ape. I could tell I was in no condition to get into any type of a fight with the man due to the injury I had suffered. It was taking nearly everything I had just to move the man’s dead weight across a slick tile floor. Once I had gotten out side, it became a real challenge because the concrete walk way wasn’t anywhere near as slick as the tile floor was. It became extremely difficult as the rug seemed to glue itself to the concrete. It was all I could do to get a few feet down the concrete walk way and finally I just had to give up. I rolled Nolan on to the grass where it was somewhat easier to drag him along but it still more difficult than I could deal with.

  I’d gone only about twenty feet and was seriously considering altering the plan I’d made, when I spotted a life saver. There against the wall of the house, was a medium sized wheel barrel. It wasn’t perfect, a motorized wheel barrel would have been perfect, but I was grateful for any help I could get at this point. It took me several minutes to wrestle Nolan into the wheel barrel. Once he was in the barrel, I tased him for a good twenty seconds before gathering my strength and trudged slowly around to the house to the front parking area.

  This wheel barreling even proved to be far more difficult than I thought it would be. Nolan outweighed me by a good fifty pounds and gravity was making sure I felt every pound pulling at my recently healed wound in my side and back. The further I got from the house, harder it was to keep control of the wheel barrel. After traveling another hundred feet or so, I tried to set the wheel barrel down to give my back a rest. I set the wheel barrel down on its wheel and the two steel stanchions at the rear of the barrel. These were formed from the same metal tubes that formed the wheel axel housing and the handle bars for the wheel barrel.

  I had no sooner set the wheel barrel down, when I realized, the downward slope was far steeper than I thought to begin with. But by the time I reacted and grabbed for handle bars, the wheel barrel was gone. I began running after it but it was soon clear, I wasn’t going to catch it until it came to a stop of its own accord.

  The driveway unfortunately wasn’t exactly straight but it wasn’t exactly curvy either, until the last hundred feet. At about a hundred feet before the gate there was a dog leg to left for about fifty feet and then it curved sharply back to the right, dead ending at the gate. Lucky for me the wheel barrel didn’t make the dog leg left. It went straight into the woods at about twenty-five miles an hour.

  I heard the clanging of the wheel barrel as it hit several trees before the sounds of the crash, just stopped. I pulled my pen light out of my pocket and waded into the woods following the path craved out by the flying wheel barrel. As I picked my way through the underbrush, I found first one tennis shoe then another. Then came the barrel part of wheel barrel. The barrel is a metal pan about thirty-two inches by thirty-two inches, Michael Nolan was not there with the barrel he had been riding in and my own nervousness went off the chart.

  Nolan’s body, which was what I had expected to see very close to barrel, wasn’t there. So, I followed the slope down towards where I had left the SUV. With every yard I traversed, the stronger the fear factor became. I tested the taser, just a quick on and off and discovered the batteries were dead and for the first time in years, I was afraid for my life. From the condition of the underbrush though, a clear path of broken and bend weeds and small trees, I was hopeful Nolan had rolled down the hill and was in no condition to attack me.

  Sure enough, once I’d climbed down another twenty yards or so, the beam of my pen light caught the edge of his crumpled body piled up at the base of a fairly large tree. Stepping up next to him, I could hear him moaning.

  “Oops, my bad. I didn’t realize how much of a downhill slant the driveway had. I just set the wheel barrel down for brief moment and well…how was the trip? It looked all kinds of exciting from my vantage point. I find it incredible that you managed to avoid hitting a tree until you reached the bottom of the hill.” I crouched down next to him, looking for signs of real injury. He had a few facial cuts, along with several large tears on his shirt. There wasn’t any blood pools, no broken bones, nothing torn off, though it was clear from looking at him, he was going to be black and blue all over in the morning.

  Oops! My bad. He’d be dead by then, so I guess it didn’t matter what he looked like now, just as long as I had complete control over him. I tried to roll him over but he was reluctant to do so. He actually was clinging to the tree. In an effort to explain that he couldn’t remain clinging to the tree, I popped out my telescoping wand and whacked him soundly across his lower back.

  It worked as expected and he quickly let go. I dragged him the rest of the way down the hill. Angling towards my car that was only a short distance off to the right, thankfully. Nolan was clearly disoriented and struggling to shake off the last effects of the taser and his joy ride down the hill in the wheel barrel. When I reached the car, Nolan was starting to struggle against my efforts to drag him and I knew I was seconds away from having the table turned on me. So I did what I could do, the easiest and the fastest. I whacked him across the back of his head with my wand. He was out cold, but for how long, I had no idea.

  I tied his hands together at the wrist, first, then I tied his ankles together. As I loaded Nolan into the back of my SUV, I could see just how beat up he was. Damn that wheel barrel ride really tore him up. What I thought were small rips and tears in his clothing, actually were the telltale sign of how the small tree branches and brush twigs had literally sliced or gouged dozens of thin stripe type wounds on his face, arms and back. I had driven about two miles when Nolan began talking.

  “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am. You tried to beat the crap out of me a couple of months ago.”

  “A side from that, how did you know to focus on me and Diablo’s?

  “It wasn’t hard, Holston got the ball rolling when he hired me to check out what happened to Conners. I guess he couldn’t believe you’d kill Conners and needed it confirmed. I would have walked away at that point except you wouldn’t let it go.”

  “You don’t come into our club and disrespect us.” Nolan snarled as if that was the reason he acted as he did.

  “Why? You disrespected me the moment I walked in. What goes around, you create. Good will, bad will it’s all created by you.” I commented back hoping to baffle him with bullshit.

  “So now you figure you’ll kill me and the Diablo’s will leave you alone?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re a damn fool. The Diablo’s will never quit. You’ve spilled Diablo blood and now you have to pay.” Nolan was beginning to sound as if he just about back to normal. A flaming asshole right up to the very end.

  “Oh really. So who are they looking for?” I asked.

  “You.” Nolan shouted.

  “And who am I?” I asked again.

  Silence. Nolan didn’t have an answer for that one. Then finally he acted as though he’d found the keys to the kingdom. “We’d check the registration.”

  “Nope. Sorry.” I chuckled.

  “What? You barrowed the car? Don’t worry we’ll find out who owns it and they’ll tell us exactly who you are.” At least Nolan sounded confident.

  “That‘ll be hard to do, since they don’t exist. The car is registered under the name of Willard Nixon. Says he lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is eighty-seven years old.” I shared.

  “Then we’ll have your description run through the police data base and you’ll pop up there for sure.” Nolan didn’t sound quite as confident.

  “Yeah, everybody is in the pol
ice data base.” I agreed with him. “Except if they aren’t there.”

  “How could you not be there?” Nolan wanted to know.

  “Oh come on, now. It only takes a couple of grand to have your files erased from the system. As an attorney for the mob you’ll need know these things.” I purposely misstated things so I could remind him of his situation. “Oops! My bad, I keep forgetting you won’t be an attorney for the mob or anything else for that matter. You tried to kill me and warned you not to, but you wouldn’t take the hint.”

  “You killed more than dozen Diablo’s.” Nolan blurted out, I guess for shock value because it was a positive as I saw it.

  “Gee, I only killed a dozen. Damn, I am slipping.” I teased.

  “Why’d you hit the street dealer?” Nolan then asked out of the blue.

  “I needed to leave a message and I’ve found in the past the best way to get a message through to a bunch of drug dealers is to hit them were it will hurt most, in the wallet. There is nothing like seeing your cash disappearing to grab your attention and keeping it focused.

  “I have cash. A lot of cash. I can pay you off. I’ll stop bothering you. Just name your price.” Nolan had changed his tactics from being the tough guy to being just another rube begging for his life, now that the old steel plant and it’s huge blast furnace were insight as we exited the freeway.

  “You got it in cash on you?” I asked just toying with him.

  “I have some back at my house and more at the office,” Nolan shared.

  “Yeah, you see that will take too much time to go all the way back there and besides, you could just be lying in the hope of my being an idiot. I have lots of cash and can get more cash, from any one of your street dealers should I need more.”

  “I could make you a full partner. Do you know how much money a full partner makes?” Nolan asked, but I remained silent knowing he no longer had any of the power he thought he had. “A full partner makes from five hundred k to over two mil every quarter. That’s a minimum of two mil a year. I have friends and partners in very high places. You’ll be like a God compared to the average citizen here.” Nolan was clearly desperate now, so I decide to try and see what he knew about Doctor Anne’s disappearance.

  “There is something I might consider.”

  “What? Just ask. I can make it happen, if you can see your way clear to letting me live.” Nolan was groveling and it wasn’t pretty.

  “I want to know where Doctor Anne Harris is.” I stated and Nolan got silent. In fact, he was stone cold silent, until I pulled into the access road to the steel plant.

  “Okay, okay. Kelly and Washington killed her. They said she was trying to frame them for the false death certificates and that she was blaming them for the deaths of her husband and her son. Hell the woman ordered their deaths. The old man was running around on her and the son was druggie who probably wouldn’t have lived another three years at the rate he was going.”

  “Doctor Anne ordered the deaths of her husband and son?” I asked not believing a word he said.

  “Who do you think was running this operation?”

  “What operation?” I asked.

  “The drug dealers and the black market organs. She ran it all. She figured out the need for the organs and she figured out how to use the druggies to get them. She then used Kelly and Washington to be the street face of the operation. Kelly and Washington were already working for the mob as enforcers and part of their job with the police department was to arrest drug dealers. So it was a natural progression from arresting them to controlling them and getting a big cut of the profits. Then she came to us and explained how she could use the death certificates to control whether or not the DA would be asking for investigations into the deaths of our competitors as well as anyone that we could get paid for doing. She knew all about every little detail and pocketed forty percent of the profits because of it.”

  “That’s a lot of cash.” I stated still unsure as to whether I should believe him or not. I remembered what the Oracle had said about the spider and how she had caught lots of people in her web so far and if I weren’t careful, she’d get me as well. It was then I saw the two cars that Mrs. Carmel had sent for Nolan. The condition of my killing Michael Nolan, was to not kill him.

  It was obvious that I could have killed him and that he knew it, but Mrs. Carmel insisted on cleaning house herself. It was a respect thing and it was something she needed badly in order to be the boss of her late husband’s business.

  “What this?” Nolan asked as I pulled up to the two black Crown Vic’s.

  “Oh, I changed my mind. Thanks for your help with getting a clear understanding of how everything worked in conjunction with each other. And for clearing up the disappearance of Dr. Harris for me.” I responded as I watched Nolan’s face slowly change its expression from one of curiosity to one of extreme terror. As soon as he recognized then men getting out of the car, Nolan began screaming like a little girl.

  “No, don’t do this. You kill me! Do it now! Oh God, don’t give me to them. Don’t do it!” Nolan screamed as the men walked over to the car opened the rear hatch and dragged Nolan out. They then slammed the hatch and carried Nolan over to the trunk of one of the cars and tossed him. That was the last time anyone saw Michael Nolan.

  EPILOGUE

  Three days after I dropped off Michael Nolan with the men loyal to Mrs. Carmel, the papers finally carried a story about the missing Michael Nolan. The headline read, “Prominent local attorney, Michael Nolan, missing!” The story went on to explain about the mad car chase through downtown three nights ago and how the police were called to Mr. Nolan’s residence by his girlfriend, who had awoke around three a.m. Monday night to discover fourteen or fifteen men, all members of the Diablo Motorcycle club, sitting in the game room of her boyfriend’s mansion, playing cards. No one admitted to knowing anything about the missing Mr. Nolan and the police suspect foul play. Funny, I didn’t remember any car chase.

  In another related story, there were two deaths reported overnight on Wednesday, of county prisoners being housed out of county, as part of the overflow corrections program. This is a state program where Counties with too many prisoners, for the amount of space available to house them, send them to counties with too few prisoners for housing, at a predetermined price set by the state. Thus, avoiding the release of criminals due to overcrowding.

  The men who died were identified as former Knox County Sheriff’s Detectives Robert Kelly and Jerome Washington. The two men were being held in separate facilities in two different counties. Both were under indictment for drug trafficking, loan sharking, black market organ trafficking and the suspected murder of the missing Knox County Medical Examiner, Dr. Annie Harris. Both men are presumed to have been poisoned but the official ruling regarding the cause of death will not be available until after the autopsies are completed in about a month.

  With the deaths of the infamous Kelly and Washington, all of the trial appearances and testimony requirements were rendered unnecessary. Thus Betty’s life, as well as my own, returned to relative normal overnight. During our stay with the Oracle, we’d grown very close and we were considering finding a place, together. This would be a first for me. In the past I’d always looked at relationships as unnecessary complications. Now suddenly, it felt more like the right or natural state of being. When our friend, the Oracle, got wind of our departure, he was offended at first but then he offered to sell us a condo for a price we couldn’t refuse. Talk about moving up in the world.

  It turned out the first case I worked in Knoxville was a huge success with several silver linings. I had a new friend who could help me by providing the best inside information, I’ve ever heard of or seen ever. Plus, I had finally, maybe, found a way to relax and open up with a woman. That was a totally new thing for me. Plus, I had found a rather large stash of illegal cash and claimed it for myself, roughly doubling my retirement cash.

  These were all great little silver linings to the shi
t storm I had just been through. But the real silver lining was a repeat of the silver lining I had found after being busted and kicked off the police force, years ago.

  The silver lining is, I was now a known entity in my new hometown. I had street credits and I was poplar with all the wrong people for the right price. And as Michael Nolan, Detective Kelly and Detective Washington found out, you really don’t want to get to know me on a professional level.

  THE END

  OTHER BOOKS BY CLIFF ROBERTS

  Reprisal! The Eagle Rises

  Reprisal! The Gauntlet

  Reprisal! The Sorrow

  Fatal Mistake

  Apollo Road

  One by One

  The Motor Home

  The Fishing Trip

  The Ambush

  Gold for San Joaquin

  The Innocence and the Outlaw

  Shootout

  Pirate’s Plunder

  Connors Slate-Bounty Hunter

  What No Second Date?