Counterfeit Road

by Kirk Russell

  ‘Out toward Vacaville.’

  ‘We’ll need you to take us there.’

  ‘That, my man, depends on your offer.’

  Outside the glass Raveneau said, ‘He doesn’t think he’s going to be charged with murder.’

  ‘Where did you get paid?’

  ‘At the bar and in cash, and no I don’t have some account book I entered it in.’

  ‘Have you been through the photos on his cell phone?’

  ‘We’re going through everything. We’re in his house. We’re in his computer and everything in his life we can find. Eight agents are on this guy tonight.’

  One of the interrogators stood up. The other asked, ‘Were you paid at the bar at Pete’s Corner every time?’

  ‘Yeah, and I know it’s a stupid name, but Pete’s a good dude.’ Drury rubbed his right cheek. ‘Look, I’m trying to help here. Am I going to be set-up somewhere in like witness protection or something?’

  The interrogator who stood leaned on the table and stared him in the eye.

  ‘Our job in here is to get the information from you. If the information checks out things advance to the next step, but those decisions aren’t made by us. Right now, it’s not advancing the way we want. I’m not sure about this Helsing, if you know what I mean. The things you’re telling are a little hazy at key spots. You keep telling us the same story and it’s making me tired. It’s making me think we’re wasting our time.’

  Coe turned. ‘Guess they agree with you.’

  ‘You need to go in and sell him.’

  ‘I’ll be lying to him.’

  In the interview room Drury said, ‘I want my deal now.’

  ‘First we need something to make a deal over. We need to be able to find this Helsing without a first name.’ There you go, Raveneau thought, give it back to him. ‘Did Mr H ever say where he lives or where he’s from or what he does for a living?’

  ‘He said he was a broker.’

  ‘What kind of broker?’

  Drury shrugged.

  ‘Are you going to tell us a guy like you wouldn’t find out who he’s dealing with? You’re way too smart for that.’

  ‘It wasn’t any of my business. He was just saving money hiring me and I needed the cash. He paid up front.’

  ‘A few minutes ago he was paying you afterward at Pete’s Corner. So which is it?’

  ‘I’m not fucking giving you this and then getting screwed later. The Coe dude said we’d make a deal.’

  Raveneau nudged Coe. ‘Go tell him something to get him talking.’

  ‘What would you do with him, right now?’

  ‘Either sell him a car or threaten him. If you sell him a car you’ll have to lie to him, but it won’t hit him right away and you can take him on that drive early tomorrow before it all blows up. If you take that route you’re on his side, so knock down the interrogators, especially her. She’s most effective. She’s gotten under his skin. Let him name what he wants and agree with him that’s fair as long as he comes across with everything you need. Then leave like a car salesman goes back to the dealership manager, which in this case is Bureau headquarters.

  ‘Leave the room to go call Bureau headquarters. Guys like Drury are used to getting screwed by people like auto dealership managers. He expects to get screwed here, too. But he needs to get something in return. He needs a framework he can see his new life in. So it should be prison but not too much and a promise of special privileges while he’s there.’

  ‘I’m not doing that.’

  ‘OK, then threaten him. You guys operate outside the boundaries of law anyway. Everyone in the country knows it, so hit him hard. Tell him there’s a bunk waiting for him in Guantánamo.’

  In the interview room an interrogator, the woman asked him slowly, ‘Are you expecting everything that happened today to go away?’

  ‘Coe said he could make things happen.’ Drury looked from her to the glass. He spoke to the glass. ‘I know the Oakland cop got hurt and you’re not talking about him. What about him? Are you going to wait until you’re done milking me before you mention him?’

  Drury lifted his hands and pretended to make quotation marks in the air as he asked, ‘If that’s the plan, I should have just shot fucking Raveneau and myself. I’m not sitting in a prison the rest of my life. If you’re so worried and you want to know where I took this stuff, you better keep your word. I want to talk to someone who can make decisions. It’s not going to happen otherwise.’

  In the room the interrogator, the woman said, ‘It’s just us until you give us something. Then we’ll call Special Agent Coe. But no one offered you a deal. You were offered a trade and so far you’re not coming across.’

  ‘I’m not talking any more. I’m done.’

  ‘Then so are we.’

  They left and Drury sat there for forty-five minutes before Coe went in. Coe sat down across from him and said, ‘I’ve got some bad news. The police officer, the woman you took hostage, those aren’t your biggest problems any more. We’re close to charging you with aiding terrorists and we may up the charges from there. If we do that, you may never feel sunlight on your face again. You’ll never hold a woman again. I can promise you that. You’ll never drive again. You’ll never go anywhere ever. You won’t have a life. You’ll have a number and after awhile your name won’t really matter to anyone any more, not even you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The deliveries, the people you’re working with. You can’t believe the shit we’re prepared to charge you with.’

  Raveneau saw Drury’s face change.

  ‘You got him,’ Raveneau said, but there was no one to hear him.

  THIRTY

  The bar was empty, the lights dimmed for the night when Raveneau and Celeste sat down at a table. In the early evening the wind blew in hard gusts as a storm came in off the ocean. It was raining and outside the street was dark and wet and the sodium street lights threw orange light through sheets of rain on to the oiled wood of the restaurant floor. Raveneau hung his dripping coat on the back of a nearby chair. A bottle of a Rioja sat between them, along with salt cod crostini and a salad of farro, shrimp, and cucumber. She smiled at him and said, ‘This is something we can do now. Are you really OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine, and Drury is with the FBI.’

  ‘He killed an Oakland police officer. He could have killed you.’

  ‘Yeah, he could have.’

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  ‘Sure.’ Raveneau glanced at her. Of course he was scared. ‘I didn’t know what he was going to do, but I didn’t think he wanted to kill himself or me.’

  ‘But you seem so normal now.’

  ‘I’m really not.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  He didn’t answer that. He poured her wine. He poured himself more wine and lifted his glass, touched hers, took a sip, and then drank more. It was hard not to just talk with her, tell her about the bomb casings and all the rest.

  ‘We had the radio on as we were cleaning up here and they said he was held in connection with the murders at that cabinet shop. How did the FBI get involved?’

  ‘That’s about a delivery he was part of. He helped the wrong people and doesn’t know where it’s going to lead. He screwed up badly. He’s like a big truck, an eighteen wheeler that’s come over the crest of mountains, started down, and the brakes are fading. He thought he was smart and clever and had control of his life and now it’s so out of control he doesn’t even realize yet his next fifteen years are in prison, and that’s if he gives up what he knows.’

  ‘Which you can’t tell me about.’

  ‘That’s right, Celeste, I can’t tell you what I’d like to.’

  ‘Even though you might have gotten killed today.’

  Raveneau picked up one of the little pieces of toast with salt cod on it. He was surprised he had any appetite but he was hungry. He poured more wine and waited.

  ‘We were busy tonight,’ she said.
‘People are ordering the mixed drinks and that’s good. I can tell already we’re going to be a place where people come for drinks and crostini. Maybe a few salads will catch on like this one.’

  ‘It’ll catch.’

  He scooped some of the farro salad and saw she was staring at him.

  ‘You were a hostage at gunpoint and now you’re sitting here eating.’

  ‘I’m sitting with you.’ He took another bite and another swallow of wine and said, ‘We’re trying to get from Drury to people who hired him. We may have pushed him too hard.’

  ‘I wish you had called me before you went into that house. Did you think of calling me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  OK, so now they were to it. But even knowing it was coming he didn’t have an answer she was going to like.

  ‘There wasn’t much time and I needed to get in a frame of mind where I was focused on getting the hostage out and then myself. I think you might have worried and wanted to know why I was taking the risk.’

  ‘I already know why and calling me doesn’t mean you have to explain. It means you want to hear my voice before you take a risk like that. It means something could happen. It means what I don’t want to ever do again is hear on the radio you’re risking your life in a hostage negotiation and not talk to you. I’d rather you called me and said you’ve got to do it. Then I would know.’

  ‘Next time I’ll call you.’

  He tried to say that in a light way, but it fell flat.

  ‘You didn’t call me for hours after.’

  Raveneau nodded. He understood yet it was hard to believe they were having this conversation. Still, it continued a while longer. Then as she got up to get something he brought her chair around the table. He put it alongside his and they sat close to each other. He poured more wine and they watched the rain through the windows and let it be until his phone buzzed.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ Coe said. ‘We’re touring with Drury at dawn.’

  ‘You won’t get much time.’

  ‘I know, and I’ll call and let you know if we learn anything. What time do you fly tomorrow?’

  ‘Late morning and I’m back in a couple of days.’

  He hung up and felt the fatigue of all the spent adrenaline wash through him, but he didn’t want to leave yet. Being with Celeste was when he felt calmest and happiest. He put an arm around her shoulders and held her. For the first time since they started going out he knew he should be living with her. They locked up the bar and left and the rain pounded on the roof as they walked the boardwalk to the deck and inside his place. Late in the night he woke to Celeste shaking him awake. Her voice was soft.

  ‘Ben, Ben, you’re having a nightmare.’

  Part of it was still with him, but he said, ‘I was trying to find a phone to call you.’

  ‘You kept saying hurry. I think you said the word President. What were you dreaming about? You were trying to get somewhere. Where were you trying to get to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She lay back down then rested a cool hand on his forehead.

  ‘You’re very hot. You sounded very worried.’

  His heart was still pounding but he couldn’t remember the dream any more.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Two days later Raveneau stood along a guard rail on the Kohala Mountain Road on the Big Island and took in the coastline below and the warm sun and the wind with the smell of lava rock and ocean. Beyond the guard rail the grassy slope fell steeply to a highway. Dark lava outcrops dotted the slope as did stands of trees. He used binoculars working his way across the slope, holding the photo in his left hand.

  After scanning all of the ranches, and there weren’t many, he returned to one and then to a narrow dirt track rising from a stand of trees to a house. He could see the roof of the house but the roof was all that showed in the photo. In the photo with the handwritten note, ‘The house, Big Island,’ the photograph was taken from closer in. Someone had walked up the steep slope behind the house, he guessed. But still, it looked like the same roofline and the same metal roof.

  He lifted the binoculars from the house and studied the coastline, the long sweep south with its narrow white band of sand. He looked at the coastline in the photo again and now he was almost certain it was the right house. He lowered the binoculars. The blue corrugated metal roof of the house below had faded and rusted. He checked the photo again and though there was no one there to hear him, said, ‘That’s got to be it.’

  Raveneau had already checked for record of a mortgage or deed of trust. There was no record of a Jim Frank owning a house on the Big Island, but maybe Frank had rented or leased. He looked down at the highway and then called up the Big Island map on his phone again. He needed to get to the highway below to get to the house. After studying the map he walked back to the car and was getting ready to pull out when he saw he had missed a call from Coe. He called Coe before pulling away.

  ‘How did the drive go with Drury? I thought I’d have a message from you when I landed.’

  ‘It’s why I’m calling. Things strung out through the day, but he showed us a machine shop and a building where he delivered the unit of plywood and then picked it up a week later. The tenant moved out last week and we’re looking for him. Tools are gone but it looks like he had what he needed to make the bomb casings. We’ve got metal filings to compare so we’ll know more soon. We’ve got a description of two men and their vehicles. We’ll find them.’

  Coe made it sound as if they were following a trail, but to Raveneau it sounded as if they got there too late.

  ‘Any movement with Khan?’

  ‘No, it’s ghostly quiet in there. There’s a family of rats we see every night but that’s it. I’ve got one more thing for you. I heard back on the Hawaii photos and some confirming information on Jim Frank. He was Navy during the Vietnam War and flew off a carrier, but I don’t have the aircraft carrier name in front of me. I’ll call or text it to you later. He flew off a carrier and then from one of the forward bases. He had a reputation for taking chances. He got medaled but you probably already have all this.’

  He did. His file on Frank doubled every day in the last week, but it was like everything with this case, it still didn’t amount to anything.

  ‘What’s interesting and why I wanted to catch you this morning is that your expert was right. Two or three of those landscape photos were taken with a very high resolution camera. It either belonged to the US government or a movie maker, a film company. When are you coming back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, have a drink on me somewhere on the island later this afternoon. Thanks again for your help with Drury.’ He sounded cautiously upbeat, adding, ‘We’re farther along than we were a day ago.’

  Raveneau got back out of the car after hanging up with Coe. He double-checked the big rock across the highway below he was going to use as a landmark. He checked the house again. It sat on a notch cut into the long-falling slope. Someone must have driven a bulldozer up there and cut a flat pad to build the house on. He wouldn’t see much of the roof from the highway below. He would see the trees where the dirt track came up from and figured there were other ranch buildings down there also. He glanced at the coastline once more. None of the resorts in the distance to the south were in the photo.

  Now he drove north toward Hawi. When he got there he picked up a text from Celeste, ‘Remember the Kona.’ She wanted him to pick up samples of a Kona coffee she couldn’t find in the Bay Area. Raveneau didn’t know when he was going to do that or how before flying out tomorrow.

  He texted back after going into a little shop to get a coffee to-go. ‘Drinking Kona right now.’

  He left Hawi and the road was one lane in either direction and then widened to two. The morning was warming and he could feel the change as he followed an old pickup in the slow lane. He studied the long upslope on his left and as he spotted the landmark rock ahead he slowed even mo
re. Then he was past and knew he’d gone too far. After turning around he pulled over next to a local cop waiting for speeders. Raveneau showed his San Francisco homicide star and explained what he was looking for.

  ‘Look for aluminum gates,’ the officer said. ‘They open out. You have to close them for cattle and you need to go to the ranch house first. They don’t like people they don’t know on their property.’

  ‘I’ll introduce myself.’

  Five minutes later he found the gates.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The gates were double-latched, but not locked, the No Trespassing signs impossible to miss. The gates swung across a cattle grate and against a barbed wire fence. Raveneau drove through then closed them again. The road climbed very steeply and he went left at the first fork. It continued the same steep rise before leveling and starting north across the slope and then rising over a lip to an unexpected flat area with a big ranch house and barn set back among a stand of trees.

  The house was two-story, deep and long with a porch running down the front and a tall steep roof facing the ocean. A large screened lanai was on the far end and at the north end was the barn. Two vehicles, a yellow jeep open to the air and a brown late model Toyota pickup sat in front of the house. So somebody was home. He parked near the cars then went up the steps to the long porch and knocked on the front door.

  After a minute he tried again, and when no one answered walked down the porch to the lanai. Presumptuous maybe, but this was Hawaii, and the people did seem more laidback. He figured it was warm enough that someone might be inside the screened room. But he didn’t see anyone.

  He crossed to the barn. He opened a door and it was cool and dark inside. When he called hello no one answered and he returned to the house and slid one of his cards in between the front door and jamb. Then he figured he could justify driving the ranch roads looking for the owner so when he got back down to the last fork, instead of continuing down he turned on to a narrow broken asphalt road barely wider than his rental.