Tracers

by J. J. Howard

  “Come on!” Jax yelled.

  “We gotta move, man,” Tate added.

  Dylan raised his gun, aimed it at the big guy.

  The kid spoke slowly, deliberately. “You’re not gonna pull that trigger.”

  “GET ON THE GODDAMN FLOOR!” Dylan was screaming at the top of his lungs now.

  Cam wasn’t close enough to hear the kid’s response, but he smiled as he said it, and from Dylan’s face Cam knew it had been filthy.

  Dylan turned to face Cam, his desperation plain. Something in his expression reminded Cam of Nikki, and suddenly everything snapped back to normal speed.

  He caught Tate’s eye and motioned for him to toss him his piece. Tate understood, and complied. Cam stepped forward and surprised the big guy by cracking him on the head with the butt of Tate’s gun. The element of surprise had worked; the kid crumpled.

  The others looked shocked. Cam crossed the lobby toward the wall of glass teller windows. The windows were all sealed shut; it was clear the bank had closed for business a long time ago. Dylan and Tate followed Cam, while Jax kept his gun trained on the guys they’d dropped.

  The door was locked, and the only way to open it was a keypad. Miller hadn’t said anything about a keypad.

  They all looked over at Skinny Jeans, but he looked more panicked than anyone. Any trace of a smile was now gone.

  “What’s the combination?” Cam demanded.

  Dylan stalked over and soon had Skinny in a choke hold—this time for real. He echoed Cam’s demand.

  “I don’t have it,” Skinny coughed.

  Cam kicked at the door, more out of frustration than out of any real hope of opening it. “Screw this,” he said, stepping back and looking for another way in. He was sure there had to be one.

  Finally, he spotted it. “I can get in,” he told Tate, pulling off his mask.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I can’t see anything with this mask on.”

  Cam took a few steps back to give himself leverage, then vaulted up onto the long counter that ran along the bank of teller windows. He jumped again, pushing off the counter as hard as he could, propelling himself up through the flimsy ceiling tiles and coming down on the other side of the wall. Now he was past the locked door that led from the lobby to the secure part of the bank. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the wide metal door of the vault hanging open.

  But . . . it was immediately clear that the stacks of cash Miller had promised were nowhere to be found. The inside of the vault was a mess, and Cam made it worse, ripping drawers out of the wall, opening every bag and safe-deposit box. He stalked back out of the vault, scanning the hallways and offices. The whole place was empty except for a few pieces of broken furniture. “There’s nothing!” he yelled. “It’s empty.”

  He heard commotion above his head; a few seconds later, Dylan crashed down beside him. “Three more guys just pulled up in an SUV,” he said, his voice breathless.

  Before Cam could respond, Jax and Tate fell through the ceiling. Cam spared a glance up and saw that, between the four of them, they’d managed to completely trash the ceiling tiles.

  “That was a nice trick,” Jax told him, trying to smile. They all seemed to be looking to Cam for guidance. Heart pounding, evil fish swimming up a storm in his stomach, Cam looked up and spotted their salvation: an access ladder in the corner leading up into some kind of storage area.

  “Come on,” he told them.

  They scrambled up the metal ladder and into a crawl space, but by that point the chase was on. The BTK bangers who had rolled up were hard on their heels. No wonder, Cam thought—the bangers didn’t have to jump up through the ceiling; they could just use the access code.

  Cam heard shots below. He led the way through the crawl space, and the others followed. He hadn’t planned to take over—hadn’t expected them to actually listen to him. But taking charge made him feel slightly less panicked. At least he was doing something, instead of just letting everything fall apart around him. They crawled as far as they could go, then hurled back down, into a maze of cubicles littered with broken office furniture. Shots kept ringing out, and footsteps pounded behind them.

  The four of them kept running as the heist continued to slide sideways, out from under their feet. They clambered out a side window and up onto the roof, one after the other, then jumped the gap that separated the bank from the neighboring building. The next roof was an obstacle course, littered with piles of lumber and construction debris—luckily, that made the roof feel almost like the cargo ship, like home.

  Except: when they were training on the cargo ship, no one was chasing them, spraying bullets with their semiautomatic weapons.

  They jumped one more gap, and went sprinting across the next roof. Cam’s lungs were burning, but he didn’t dare stop. The gunfire didn’t stop for more than a few seconds at a time. Dylan moved to the front of the group as they crossed the roof and was the first to jump down, spreading his hands out, a nice clean slide down to the street. Cam followed Dylan’s lead. It was almost too far to jump, but they didn’t have time to be choosy about their escape route.

  Just before he jumped, Cam glanced over his shoulder. Jax was right behind him.

  Cam’s body hit the pavement, hard. He rolled to soften the impact as much as he could, and to clear the way for Jax. Cam blinked and looked up, waiting for Jax to make the leap from the rooftop.

  In the next second, their luck ran out. A spray of gunfire rang out and Jax tumbled over the edge of the building. He wasn’t jumping. He was falling.

  He was hit.

  The moment Jax slammed into the ground, Cam knew he was dead.

  Cam froze for a crucial five seconds. He couldn’t look away from Jax’s blue eyes—an expression of shock and horror fixed on his face, permanently.

  Those five seconds stretched into an eternity as Cam remembered Jax’s laugh, his soft spot for rescue dogs, the dreams that had brought him to New York.

  The dreams that could never come true.

  The police car careened around the corner on two wheels and skidded to a stop at the end of the alley. A female cop was already barking at Cam to get on the ground, and Cam wasn’t in the mood to argue.

  He felt the hot asphalt against his face and closed his eyes, feeling the pinch as the cuffs locked around his hands. There was no point in struggling now. The only thought that gave him comfort was the fact that Nikki hadn’t come with them.

  Cam struggled to his feet and let the officer lead him to the car without protest.

  He understood that it was all over for him.

  FIFTEEN

  THEY LEFT HIM in the interrogation room for what was probably only ten or fifteen minutes but felt like hours. His mind kept going back to when he was a kid. How he and his friend Dave Sellers, who lived in the building down the block, had always played cops and robbers.

  The weird thing was, Cam always wanted to play the cop. Always.

  Usually, Dave was fine with it. He was a good head taller than Cam, but probably weighed about the same. He was painfully skinny, like he was growing too fast to keep enough meat on his bones. Cam was more compact, and strong from the martial arts classes his mom struggled to afford.

  Dave seemed to like playing the bad guy, pretending to swagger, coming up with a new catchphrase every week, some kind of quip to toss off whenever Cam caught up to him and pinned him to the ground. Cam enjoyed snapping the plastic handcuffs shut, but his favorite part by far had been leading Dave back to the “station house”—really it was the garage Dave’s dad rented in the basement of their building. Mr. Sellers had a long, metal shop table in one corner of the garage, and for the game they’d move it away from the wall. Cam would push Dave into the chair, and he’d perch on the little stool, glaring at him from across the table. Then the questioning would begin.

&n
bsp; “Where were you on the evening of September seventh?” He’d ask Dave about his whereabouts, his alibis, his criminal affiliations. All the shows Cam’s mom loved were cop shows, and Cam had picked up a lot of the lingo. Dave would pretend to squirm sometimes; other times he’d offer up Anthony Moretz from his building to save his own skin.

  To become the cop, Cam would always put on a jacket that used to belong to his father—an old, black fake-leather jacket that seemed like something a gritty New York detective would wear. Beneath the jacket, hanging around his neck, Cam wore his shiny toy police badge. His mom had given it to him for Christmas one year. It was his prized possession, once. Cam had loved to feel like one of the good guys.

  As he sat alone, waiting for the Newark police to come in and question him in this real-life interrogation room, Cam briefly wondered what had happened to the old badge. Like so much else in his life, it had gotten lost. But he was also pondering a more important question: When had his life gone so wrong? Was it when his mother got sick? Or further back? Maybe the first time he got in a fight at school?

  He couldn’t figure out which mistake had been the start of it all.

  The longer the cops kept him waiting, the more he was tortured by his memories. He thought about when his father left home for the last time. He’d been ten years old.

  They hadn’t known it would be their last night together. There had been other nights when Cam had known something was wrong—when he’d understood from his mother’s crying, from his dad’s nervous energy that his father was off to some kind of big “job” in the morning. After one such job, he disappeared for almost a year. At first his mom had visited him, somewhere upstate, every week. But then she’d had to get a second job waitressing on the weekends, and she’d stopped going to visit.

  Cam experienced the high price of his dad’s lifestyle up close, in the tired lines around his mother’s eyes, in the sound of her crying after she thought he’d gone to sleep.

  And now, here he was, in the exact same boat.

  He sat at a metal table, his hands cuffed in front of him. Someone had once put a coat of green paint over the table’s black metal, but the paint was chipping all to hell. On TV, the interrogation rooms always seemed cleaner. Reality was so much crappier.

  After an eternity of waiting, a tired and almost-bored-looking police detective finally sat down across from him.

  “So my partner tells me you’re not feeling chatty,” the detective said, breaking into Cam’s reverie. “How about this: What about your dead buddy? Does he have a name?” He didn’t sound terribly invested in finding out Jax’s name. In fact, it sounded like the guy was reading from a script. “Might be nice to let his family know where to pick up his remains,” he added, stifling a yawn.

  “He doesn’t have a family.” Cam forced the words out. His throat closed. He hadn’t cried since he was a little kid, except for the night his mother died. But, at that moment, he felt like crying.

  The detective didn’t look remotely surprised at his words. Cam guessed that lots of people who ended up like Jax were on their own.

  Cam felt a stab somewhere near his heart when he remembered Jax’s goofy smile, and his dream of having a wife and a bunch of little red-haired Jaxes. They had toasted to that dream just a few days ago. He was a good guy, Jax. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.

  Cam frowned. The thing was, if you’d asked Jax, he probably would have said he already had a family—in the form of Miller and the others. Miller, who had failed all of them . . . but no one more than Jax.

  The plan had started unraveling the moment they walked in the door. There was no question in Cam’s mind that the BTK had known they were coming. They’d let Skinny Jeans inside, but the bangers hadn’t seemed shocked that he was playing both sides. Cam’s mind kept returning to that paused game of Halo—the bangers’ lack of surprise. He tried to feel angry, but instead he felt mostly numb. Across from him, the cop was still talking. He forced himself to listen.

  “What the hell did you do to get half the BTK chasing you down Clinton Avenue?”

  Cam shook his head. “Look. If you had something real to charge me with, you wouldn’t be asking.” He’d managed to learn a few things, watching all those cop shows with his mom. Toward the end, it had been one of the only things he could do for her. At first, he’d sit beside her on the couch. Later, when she couldn’t make it out of bed, he moved the TV into her room. He’d sit with her on the bed and they would try to solve the case along with the detectives. He couldn’t remember a time they ever rooted for the bad guys.

  She’d never made him feel like he was a bad kid either. Even after he’d been to juvie, his mom never gave up hope that he’d get his life together.

  The detective looked mildly surprised at Cam’s tone, but someone knocked on the door before he could respond. He heaved himself out of his chair and went out to the hallway. Cam could hear the sounds of talking, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  A few seconds later, the detective walked back in. “Feds want to talk to you.” He gave Cam a smile that seemed to clearly say: Now you’re somebody else’s problem.

  The bored detective turned to leave the room again. “Good luck, kid.” He sighed. He didn’t say the “you’re gonna need it” part, but it was implied.

  As the detective left, a federal agent came in to take his place.

  Cam stared at the floor. “I already told those guys, I’m not saying anything without a lawyer.”

  As the fed walked around to the other side of the table, Cam looked up at his face for the first time.

  And the earth shifted on its axis. Cam felt a physical shock, like one of Hu’s blows to the stomach.

  “MILLER?”

  Cam started to stand, but Miller was already getting in his face, shushing him, talking fast.

  “James Hatcher,” he said urgently. “DEA.” Miller—or whoever the hell he was—was unlocking Cam’s cuffs.

  “What the . . . ? How . . . ?” Cam sputtered. He was sure his mouth was gaping open like one of those fancy fish they sold in Chinatown. “What the hell is going on?” he spat out, standing.

  Miller fixed him with one of those looks of his, punctuating it by placing a hand on the gun he wore on his hip. “Breathe, Cam. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Where are Dylan and Tate?”

  “Driving home in the van. Should be hitting the tunnel any minute now.”

  Cam let out a ragged breath. “Do they know?”

  “They all know, Cam.”

  The knowledge hit him like another punch to the gut. Without conscious thought, he fell back into the chair. He was still reeling. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of his body.

  He looked around the small interrogation room. “Aren’t there mics and cameras in here?” he asked.

  Miller grinned. “Not when I don’t want there to be. Not when I need to talk to a confidential informant.”

  Cam put his head in his hands. His brain hurt from the thousand conflicting thoughts that were swirling around all at once. He realized Miller was still talking at him, his words spilling out quickly: “How do you think I run this circus? Miller’s the man on the ground . . . shipping and receiving, HR, transpo. Hatcher’s upstairs: due diligence, new business, client relations. Neither one gets much sleep, but they work well together.”

  Cam stared at him. “This whole time, I’ve been working for a dirty fed.”

  “Or a clean criminal. Depends where your loyalties lie.”

  “And what about Jax?” Cam asked. “Where do your loyalties lie, Agent Hatcher?”

  Miller paused. For a moment, it seemed like his armor was about to crack. “Look, I got bad intel on this one. And Jax is gone. I feel horrible. But that’s the past. All we have is the present. And in the present, this department thinks you’re one of my CIs. Which means you get t
o walk out of here—with me, under my custody, free and clear.”

  Cam sat up fast and backed away from him, knocking over the chair. “So they can find my body in a Dumpster tomorrow morning? No thank you.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you. I need you, Cam.”

  Cam stood as far away from Miller as he could get. But he didn’t say anything, just waited to hear why Miller needed him.

  “The cops are rousting the whole gang. Someone’s going to have to talk themselves out of trouble, and that will lead back to me. It’s time to cash out.”

  “Is this your ‘one last score’ speech? Save it.” Cam had seen this scenario play out in enough shows and movies to know: never a good idea.

  “It’s an exit plan. It goes down tomorrow. But I can’t do it without you.”

  “I need ten grand. Today. Right now. Then we’ll talk.”

  Miller shook his head. “Not going to happen.”

  “Then I’m not helping you. All right? I’m out.”

  Cam received another one of Miller’s icy stares. “Thing is, Cam, it’s not just about you anymore. You’re part of a family now, remember? You have to think about the welfare of others.”

  Moving very slowly and deliberately, Miller placed something on the table between them.

  The toy GTO.

  Cam swallowed past the sudden, terrible lump in his throat.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. Miller was just like Jerry, after all. He’d use any scrap of feeling or humanity in a person, twist it to his own advantage. And that’s why those guys always won. Because in the end they didn’t give a damn about anybody—they were only about saving their own skin. Oh, and getting paid.

  Cam tried to speak, but it wasn’t easy. “Where is she?” he managed to ask.

  Miller cocked his head to the side, like he was still trying to figure Cam out—even though he’d clearly already managed that feat. “I don’t want Nikki mixed up in this anymore. You and I are going to finish it.”