The Eye of the Tigress

by Paul Coggins

  Cash could’ve countered with two hundred, and they would’ve jumped at it. Instead, he let out a low whistle.

  Amber looked flustered. “But because we like you and for one time only, we’ll make it an even thousand.”

  Rookie mistake to bid against herself. Amber wasn’t cut out for the profession. Not the one she was flirting with anyway. Nor the one Cash had mastered.

  He considered which version of the “scared straight” speech had the best shot at success. Not a good shot. Just the best one.

  He cleared his throat. “Free advice from someone who also bills by the hour. When you price your product, factor in two intangibles. First, the rapid depreciation of diminishing assets, the chief one being your youth. Second, the hidden costs of occupational hazards, like hospital bills, bail bonds, and legal fees.”

  He handed each a business card. “You girls are very attractive, but I don’t hire pros. However, they often hire me. Don’t take this personally or as a rejection. This time it really is me and not you.”

  End of the lecture. “Keep my card handy. You’re going to need it.”

  And sooner than you think.

  As if on cue, FBI Agent Maggie Burns showed up. She stopped short of the bar. Best case for Cash, she held back while her eyes adjusted to the subdued lighting. Worst case, she was having second thoughts about meeting him for a drink.

  Whatever her bullshit reason for running late, it hadn’t been to change into something sexier. She wore the same Bureau-sanctioned, boner-killer outfit she’d had on at the women’s prison earlier today. She couldn’t have stuck out more in the pickup zone if FED were written on her forehead.

  She steamed to the bar and performed her trademark magic trick. The one where she flicked open the lapel of her blazer, wide enough to flash the badge. The shiny, gold one that made denizens of the dark disappear.

  Sure enough, the counterfeit coeds fled like roaches from the light. Joining a stampede of more seasoned pros, who knew a narc when they saw one. Maggie’s arrival shot to hell the male-to-female ratio at the bar.

  She mounted the stool next to Cash’s—the one vacated by Amber—and draped her arm across his shoulders. “I can’t leave a walking hard-on like you alone for five minutes.” Her tone, only half-playful.

  “Oh, those two? They were selling Girl Scout cookies.”

  “And lord knows you do have a sweet tooth.”

  “What took you so long to get here?” He was more irritated than curious. “We were on the same flight from Lubbock.”

  “Yeah, but you were in first class,” Maggie said.

  “And deplaning from coach took an hour?”

  “No, but swinging by my apartment complex to swap cars did.”

  He swiveled to face her. “Let me get this straight. The Westin is midway between the airport and your apartment, but instead of driving straight here from DFW, you went all the way home to trade cars, before backtracking to the Galleria.”

  “Of course I did.” Not a hint of defensiveness in her voice. “The rules on government-issued vehicles are—”

  He cut her off. “Spare me the lecture on G-cars. I was a fed once.” The wise course would’ve been to drop the subject, but he couldn’t resist busting her bureaucratic balls. “So, you’re telling me that….” He shook his head in disbelief and started over. “Let’s say you work late into the night and need to pick up dinner. There’s a Chinese restaurant on your way home. But instead of stopping at the restaurant, you’ll drive all the way home, swap cars, go to the restaurant, and then return home.”

  She nodded.

  “You’re the only tool in the Bureau who would do that.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t take career advice from someone who surrendered his badge to avoid being fired.”

  Ouch. At least she had the decency not to bring up his status as a felon, another ground for blowing off his counsel.

  “Badge of honor to bail from that office.” He caught himself talking too loud and lowered his voice. “Means I was doing my job.”

  Again, it would’ve been better to move on, but he couldn’t. “The U.S. Attorney and I butted heads. Moore wanted to deep-six a righteous public corruption investigation. I didn’t. End of the investigation, along with my career in public service.”

  “You could’ve handled it more diplomatically,” she said.

  “Like how?”

  “For starters, by not calling the U.S. Attorney a ‘cocksucking chickenshit’ in front of a roomful of agents and prosecutors. Did I get the quote right?”

  Cash smiled. “Close enough.” Past time to leave ancient history behind. “How did your meeting with Mariposa go?”

  Her eyes clouded. “Like you’d expect. With Rhoden blocking us all the way, it went nowhere fast.”

  “She won’t make it to trial, will she?”

  “I don’t see how,” the agent said. “She can buy a little time by hiding out in isolation, but sooner or later, the cartel will get to her.”

  Maggie ordered a Diet 7UP. A good soldier following another silly rule by the folks who put the Bureau in bureaucracy. No consumption of alcohol while armed. The bulge in her blazer showed she was strapped.

  She slid her hand atop his. “You have to convince her to trust us.”

  He signaled for a third mai tai. “That’s a bridge too far. Best you can hope for is to persuade her that she has a longer life expectancy under your wing than outside it.”

  “Then sell her on that,” she said.

  “Tough sale, given the Bureau’s lousy record of keeping snitches alive.” He slipped his hand from under hers and reached for his wallet. “I’ll settle up here and get us a room, where you can spend the next couple of hours convincing me to convince her.”

  “That’s not in the cards tonight.” She gave him a brush-off kiss on the cheek. “On my way here, Eva texted me. Said you were dodging her calls and told me to send you straight to the office. If I cross her, my life expectancy will be shorter than Mariposa’s. Yours will be too.”

  “That bruja doesn’t run my life,” Cash said.

  “Guess again.”

  Cash knew when to fold a losing hand. Five minutes later, he hit eighty on the tollway, headed downtown to the office. A call came over the car phone, interrupting “Jungleland” during The Big Man’s sax solo.

  A capital offense.

  The caller’s number was blocked. A fed thing. Had to be Maggie, already regretting her decision to part for the night.

  He took the call, his heart outracing the Carrera. “About time you came to your senses.”

  Static and labored breathing on the line.

  “Maggie, is that you?”

  More heavy breathing before the call died, and the Boss came back on with a lament for the wounded and the dead. The song triggered a fear that had followed Cash since childhood. A premonition that he would wind up wounded but not dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cash smelled an ambush. That and a half-century of cigar smoke.

  A permanent haze filtered the framed newspaper clips and courtroom sketches on the walls of Gary “Goldy” Goldberg’s office. The room had the musty odor of a third-rate museum, the oldest relic being the dinosaur behind the desk: Goldberg.

  Since last year’s stroke, Goldy seemed like a shadow of his old self. More faltering. Less firebrand. The head had always been too large for the body, but lately the imbalance had grown more pronounced. Made Cash wonder how he stayed upright.

  Cash looked from Goldy to Eva before pointing to the stranger in the room. “Who’s he?”

  “Meet our client,” Goldberg said.

  “Like hell he is.”

  The stranger stood and offered a French-manicured hand to Cash. “Chris Campos, and we have met before.” The throaty voice straddled the sexes.

  Cash took the hand and made the connection. Familiar facial features left him 90 percent certain of the identity. Green-gray eyes cinched it.

  “What happened to Cr
istina Campos a.k.a. ‘Tina’?” Cash said.

  “Mister Goldberg told me to shove her back into the closet,” Campos said, “until the trial’s over.”

  Cash kept his temper in check and his voice steady. “Eva, please take Tina…uh…Chris to the conference room and wait for me there. Mister Goldberg and I need to confer.”

  After Eva and the client left, Cash unloaded on the old man. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Our client needs to man up before we introduce him to a jury of religious nuts, rednecks, and retirees.” Goldberg met and raised Cash’s decibel level. Though his body was withering, his voice remained as strong as ever.

  “Our client? Try my client.”

  Eva returned and closed the door behind her, ignoring Cash’s order to babysit Campos in the conference room. Not that her first insubordination of the day took him by surprise.

  She wore a pantsuit with a floral blouse that hung loosely, hiding her gym-hardened body. Experience had taught Cash that the petite frame packed a wallop. The yellow daffodils populating the top brought out a mocha complexion that matched the shade of Cash’s coffee. Her dark, frizzy hair corkscrewed wildly. She was going through a boho phase.

  “Keep your voices down,” she whispered. “It is so not the time to air this shit. We can’t have the client witnessing his dream team at each other’s throats, not on the eve of trial. He’s already freaking out.”

  The bruja had a point. Cash turned toward her. “Tell this old fool not to make any more dumbass decisions, without running them by me first.”

  She snapped at Cash. “He was here for the client, while you were off chasing tail.”

  Dammit. Just like her to follow up one solid point with another.

  Goldberg spoke to Eva. “Tell the whippersnapper that this old war horse has forgotten more about winning trials than he ever knew.”

  Eva rolled her eyes. “I’ve died and gone back to grade school.”

  Cash cut out the middle-woman and faced his mentor. “In all the years I’ve worked for you, I did manage to pick up one or two valuable lessons. You always said that when a storm is brewing, never try to fly around it. Instead, sail straight into its teeth.”

  “Eva, you’ve got twelve hours to turn Chris back into Tina,” Cash said. “Doll her up. Make her as drop-dead gorgeous as she was on the night of her arrest.” He handed her the firm platinum AmEx card. “Make her look young.”

  “She is young,” Eva said.

  “Make her look younger.”

  She pocketed the card. “Sounds like a job for the incredible Doctor Katz.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Cash said.

  Goldberg pushed a typed document across the desk. “But we’ve drafted a dynamite motion in limine, barring the prosecutors from referring to Campos as a crossdresser, tranny, fairy, shemale, ladyboy, femboy, sissy, whatever.”

  Cash tore up the motion. “Let’s protect our client from sticks and stones and not worry over whether words will hurt him…uh…her.”

  ***

  The brush with Tina Campos brought back a ghost from Cash’s past. Martin Biddle had been a crossdresser like Tina, but at the same time, not like Tina at all.

  For six months, Biddle and Cash had shared a cell at FCI Seagoville. A cell hadn’t been all they’d shared. Both had taken the fall for the real guilty parties.

  Both had survived in prison by submitting to the third cellmate, Marcus Allen DuPree—a.k.a. “Big Black.” Cash served as his personal jailhouse lawyer. Martin Biddle, as his prison punk.

  One big difference between the two. Cash had made it out alive. Biddle hadn’t, despite Cash’s frequent assurance to him that “I’ve never lost a client, and I’m not about to start with you.”

  Time after time, he had talked Biddle off the ledge. Cash had been his cellmate and his counselor. Until the end came, and Cash had been twenty miles from Seagoville. Still Biddle’s counselor. No longer his cellmate.

  On the way to Southlake, he called Bettina Biddle from the car, giving the new widow a chance to veto his visit or prepare for his arrival. The “For Sale” sign on the front lawn touted a “reduced price” for the Spanish-style house. His first notice of the offer to sell.

  Bettina greeted him at the door, looking tired but happy to see him. Her dark hair and dark eyes contrasted nicely with the pale, flawless skin. Always petite, she seemed to have shrunk since his last visit.

  She wore black workout clothes. The Equinox Club logo probably doubled the price of the gear.

  She invited him in and settled onto the living room couch, tucking her bare feet under her thighs, lotus-style. He took the chair farthest from the couch. He trusted the widow to exercise control. Himself, not so much.

  The house was suspiciously quiet. “The little angels must be asleep,” he said.

  “One little angel down. A little devil, still stirring.”

  “Which is which?”

  She smiled. “Depends on the day, the hour, and the minute.”

  “I see you’ve put the house on the market.” He worried about upending the girls so soon after they’d lost a father.

  She looked past him. “With Marty gone, we don’t need this much house.”

  He didn’t call her on the bullshit reason. “Is everything okay?”

  She was slow to respond. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You need to work on that line,” he said, “if you want me to buy it.”

  “I hired you for one task, to look into my husband’s death, to prove he didn’t commit suicide.” She took several deep breaths before going on. “I can’t afford to ask you to do more.”

  “Such as?”

  “The prosecutors have a forfeiture order against Marty for two million dollars. I don’t have that kind of money lying around, so the house has to go. Though mortgaged to the hilt, it’s still the biggest asset left to liquidate. Won’t pay off the debt, but it’s a start.”

  Cash sensed that she had more to unload. “What else is keeping you awake at night?”

  “The insurance company won’t pay a penny on Marty’s death.”

  “Because of the suicide ruling?”

  She nodded.

  “If you’re not using me to battle the Justice Department and the insurance company, tell me you’ve hired a junkyard dog to go up against the bastards.”

  She kept nodding.

  He committed the litigator’s cardinal sin of asking one question too many. “Who’s your lawyer on those two fronts?”

  “Tony Dial. Do you know him?”

  The air rushed from his lungs. “Yeah, we call him T.N.T. Short for ‘Terrible Negotiator Tony.’ I wouldn’t hire that hack to handle a traffic ticket.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Tina Campos is a tranny and a hooker.” So began Cash’s opening statement to the jury, starting with a slur that made his client squirm. “Pardon me. I meant to say she’s transgender and a sex worker. I’m trying to be more politically correct these days.”

  Cash let the lie sink in before resuming, “As Shakespeare succinctly put it, ‘A rose by any other name.’ Transgender, tranny, crossdresser, sissy, t-gurl, femboi, ladyboy. Tina has suffered the sting of all those words and worse. Your job as jurors is to get past the labels. We won’t ask you to understand her lifestyle, much less accept it. Just put your prejudices on hold for the limited duration of this trial.”

  The jurors’ expressions ran the gamut from disgust to distrust. Seven women, five men. Six white, four brown, two black. No LGBTQ. At least none who copped to it. Not the best panel he’d ever drawn, but far from the worst.

  The same went for Judge Anna Tapia. Neither the best nor the worst draw for Cash and his client. Sure, she favored the feds, but what judge didn’t? At least she knew the strike zone and called balls and strikes more fairly than most.

  Cash walked behind the defendant and placed a hand on her shoulder. Eva had worked her magic, giving Tina a head-to-toe makeover and turning her into a knockout.
She would turn heads not only in a dark bar but also under the harsh lights of a courtroom.

  “My client is not charged with being transgender, which is not a crime at all. She’s not even charged with prostitution, which is a state offense and not one for you to consider. Instead, she’s accused of assaulting a federal officer, who was acting in the line of duty.”

  Cash moved toward the jury box, standing as close to the twelve as the judge would allow. “An honest, hard-working agent will take that seat.” He pointed to the empty witness stand. “And he will swear under oath that my client, Tina Campos, struck him with her handbag. Not once, not twice, but three times.”

  Cash paused for effect. “And here’s the surprise twist in the trial. We’re going to agree with the agent one hundred percent. What he will say happened did in fact happen.”

  The jurors did a collective double take. One or two gasped, but not loud enough to drown out the groans from the defense table.

  ***

  At the midafternoon break, Cash sat alone in the hallway on a wooden bench. The trial had moved faster than expected. The government had wrapped up the direct examination of ICE Agent Sam Dobbs. After the break Cash would take him on cross.

  During two decades in the trenches, Cash had crossed scores of agents. Good ones. Bad eggs. The vast bulk, mediocre and muddling toward retirement. He’d encountered truthful witnesses, lying sacks of shit, and every shade in between.

  Generally, the shorter the cross of an agent, the better. Score a few quick points and get the fed off the stand before the defense lawyer tripped a land mine.

  The trial had boiled down to a half-hour or so of cross-examination, followed by whatever time it took to convince Tina not to testify. With forty-five minutes of closing arguments for each side, the case could go to the jury by late afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest. This would prove as close as Cash had ever come to a so-called stipulated trial—one where both sides agreed on the facts.

  Skyler Patterson blew past Cash in the hallway. Without a word. Not even slowing for a drive-by insult. So not like her.

  Even at the speed of flight, she seemed grounded. A workhorse with a low center of gravity, thin through the torso, thick from the waist down. A single, self-contained woman who flew under the radar and the gaydar. Equally immune to the charms of Cash and Eva, she kept her head in the weeds, not the clouds.