by Paul Coggins
“Sorry about what?” Cash said.
“Driving you away. We were one helluva trial team, until I started taking you for granted. Remember what I always said about our partnership?”
Cash smiled. “Yeah. The only thing that could stop us, was us. Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t drive me off. I lost my temper, said some things I didn’t mean, and had too much damn pride to ask for my job back.”
“Pride got the better of me too,” Goldy said. “I picked up the phone a hundred times to ask you to come back, but never managed to make the call.”
Cash blinked back tears. Good thing the conversation had played out over the phone. If he couldn’t wade through this call without waterworks, no way would he dam the flow of tears during the next one.
***
“I’ve been worried sick about you.” Eva had a voice for the phone. A perfect pitch that could soothe or sting on command. So far today, more sting than soothe.
“I took a quick trip,” Cash said, “and I’m about to take another.”
“Where are you going?”
“TBD.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Also TBD.”
A click on the line interrupted the call.
“Are we being bugged?” she said.
“Almost certainly.”
“We have to talk face-to-face.”
For a host of reasons, that was the last thing he wanted to do. “It’s not a good time for us to get together. Some very bad people are out for my blood. That’s why I’m entering the witness protection program.”
It proved surprisingly easy to lie to Eva. After all, it was for her own good.
“That’s insane.” The sting in her voice spiked.
“It’s my only shot at staying alive.”
“If you go in, I go with you.” It didn’t come off as a threat. More like a statement of the obvious. A law of nature.
“This is goodbye.” Cash choked up, the strain of holding back tears proving too great.
“We’re not doing this over the phone.” Her voice quivered.
“It’s too dangerous for us to meet,” he said. “This isn’t up for debate.”
Like hell it wasn’t. Eva turned everything into a negotiation.
“I know a safe place,” she said.
***
Though the courtroom lights were dim, Cash could make out Eva. She sat in the jury box in the chair reserved for the foreperson. Judging from the look on her face, Cash didn’t expect the verdict to cut in his favor.
The high ceiling room was empty, except for the two of them. Lining the walls were oil paintings of the succession of judges who had ruled over this courtroom.
The court painter had flattered the current occupant, Anna Tapia, by erasing a decade’s worth of worry lines and softening her angular features. She looked good, actually better than good. Not the first time Cash had fantasized that under different circumstances….
He instinctively sat at the defense table, the one farther from the jury box. “Persuading the judge to open her courtroom for us was no small feat. Do you have pictures of her with a dead chicken?”
“Those weren’t nearly as embarrassing as the one shot I had of her with you. Seriously, when I told her that Freddy the Forger’s case could be dropped from Monday’s docket, she would’ve offered her house to us. Amazing how accommodating a judge can be, when she gets back three weeks of her life.”
She walked to Cash. He stood. Had a clear escape path behind him, but his legs wouldn’t move.
She put her arms around him and held on tight. He couldn’t muster the strength to break her grip. Instead, he hugged back.
She buried her face in his chest. Her tears soaked through his shirt, burning his heart.
“You have to let me go.” His voice shook. It came off more like a plea than a command.
“I can’t.”
“Your mother needs you. The family needs you. Most of all, Goldy needs you.”
“And you don’t?”
He had no comeback for that. He finally broke her grip and held her at arm’s length. “The sooner I leave, the better the odds that both of us stay alive.”
“Will you ever come back?”
“I’ll be gone forever or until Los Lobos get wiped off the map, whichever happens first. Pray that another cartel comes along and clears out the competition.”
“And your clients,” she said, “how can you desert them?”
He had thought that through. “Bettina Biddle is the only loose end that’ll haunt me, but I’ve got a plan there. The key to helping her lies in the archives of the Powell law firm. To find that key, we need a mole inside the firm.”
“Don’t look at me,” Eva said. “They won’t take me back, not after we turned down the deal Stewart Powell offered.”
“We’d never accept a deal that required Bettina to drop the investigation into her husband’s death, so I’ve found another candidate to infiltrate the firm.”
“Who?”
“A player to be named later,” he said.
“You realize that you’ll probably end up in the frozen tundra or worse.”
“We’ll see.” He released her arms and walked away. At the door he turned back to her. “Leave the courthouse through the back door. I’ll walk out the front.”
“What are you going to do now?” she said.
“Remember what you used to tell me whenever we faced an impossible task?”
She nodded. “Never send a man to do a woman’s job.”
***
After a dozen aborted calls, Cash gave up on phoning Bettina. He rolled onto her block at 9:15 p.m. and parked across the street and two houses down from her place. Close enough to catch a glimpse if she popped outside. Far enough to keep her safe if he were followed.
At ten sharp the porch light came on, the door opened, and Nuisance bolted onto the yard. The chocolate lab had grown so large that Cash barely recognized him. The pup dashed to a flowerbed to do his business.
Bettina stepped onto the porch, barefoot and wrapped in a scarlet robe from her neck to her knees. It took all of Cash’s self-control not to call out to her and superhuman strength not to run to her.
Bettina clapped her hands and yelled, “Come on, Sport. Time to turn in for the night.”
Sport?
Cash could live with a name change for the pet. Just not sure he could live with one that sounded like something Stewart Powell had come up with.
Bettina followed the pup into the house. The porch went dark, and Cash saw her in a different light.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Six months later….
Cash listed starboard while shuffling into the Ritz lobby. He leaned heavily on a cane, a black staff capped with a silver-coated lion’s head for a grip.
He stuffed a twenty into the tip jar on the baby grand piano. The pianist obliged the request for an up-tempo version of “Send in the Clowns.”
Cash tapped out the beat with his cane, before moving slowly to a barstool. He stared into the full-length mirror behind the bar. An old man stared back, disapprovingly.
Cash blinked first.
The old man in the mirror had a new face, courtesy of the incredible Doctor Katz. The cosmetic surgeon had flipped the script by designing a flatter nose, a deeply-furrowed forehead, and sagging jowls. Padding here, cutting there. Adding twenty-five years on a good day. Thirty on a bad.
The transformation had started with a scalpel but hadn’t ended there. Contact lenses changed the eye color to a dusky brown, fitting for the autumn of a man’s life. Likewise, the complexion had darkened to a beige hue that hinted at hot climate ancestry. The salt-and-pepper hair featured more salt than pepper, and the right ear hosted a hearing aid.
Or what passed as a hearing aid.
Cash’s own mother wouldn’t recognize him. Then again, since she hadn’t seen him since he was eight, that wasn’t much of a test.
“Another scotch and soda?�
� the bearded bartender said.
Cash green lit round three of his go-to drink. The mixed drink reflected his mixed feelings about being here. The site of his highest highs and lowest low. His mood swung between hyper and haunted.
In a past life, the Ritz had been his happy hunting ground. The intersection of cheaters’ corner and lust lane. However, his arrest for jury tampering had gone down here, landing him behind bars for two years and without a law license for three. Had kind of put him off the place.
From his perch, Cash could take in the entire room, confident that he remained unseen. In a bar packed with the glam and glitterati, the only thing more invisible than a forty-year-old woman is a seventy-year-old man.
Cash reached for the drink but stopped short of the glass, mesmerized by the counterfeit liver spots on the back of his hand. They seemed to have multiplied overnight.
DEA agent Duane Leroy Lee appeared in the mirror and landed at a table, the first of the party to arrive. Like Cash, Leroy sported a new look. Clean-shaven and in a suit, he looked more like an arrester than an arrestee. For a change.
Eva placed second and joined Leroy at the table. From the barstool, Cash couldn’t make out what was being said, but clearly both were stumped as to why they had been summoned.
Next to claim a seat at the table was Detective Robert Gamez of the Dallas Police Department. Despite being in plain clothes, the ex-soldier with the Marine Corps crewcut and a baton up his ass couldn’t have looked more like a cop, even if he’d worn dress blues and pinned a badge to his forehead.
Tina Campos completed the quartet and step one of Cash’s game plan. Assemble the team for their assignments.
Tina placed a purse on the table. Cash fine-tuned the fake hearing aid. The bug in her purse allowed him to eavesdrop on the conversation at the table, while the mirror behind the bar offered him a panoramic view of the room.
Eva looked to each of her tablemates in turn. “Will someone explain why I’m here?”
“Same goes for me.” Detective Gamez sounded beat.
“I brought you here because we have something in common,” Tina said. “A desire to help someone we care about: Cash McCahill.”
Gamez snorted. “I met the guy only once. Twice, if you count the time he cross-examined me.”
Eva winced. “Let’s not.”
Cash recalled the cross of Gamez, then a rookie on the force and a virgin on the witness stand. It had been the biggest meltdown since Three Mile Island and a major reason a guilty-as-hell client walked from the courtroom.
“It’s time folks accepted the facts of life and death in cartel world.” Gamez’s tone turned harsh. “We’ll never find McCahill’s body. Los Lobos will make sure of that.”
“Not so fast,” Tina said. “Leroy, is there still a contract out on Cash?”
Leroy nodded. “My snitches swear it’s still open, and last month the jackpot jumped to five million U.S. dollars for proof of death.”
Cash choked on the figure. Five million bucks! He ordered another scotch and soda.
Leroy loosened his tie. “Who do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?”
After a waitress took their orders, Tina got back to business. “Why would Los Lobos keep open the contract, if Cash were already dead?”
“To throw everyone off their trail,” Gamez said.
Leroy shook his head. “That ain’t how cartels roll. When they take out someone, they generally want the world to know about it. Tends to keep the living in line.”
“If Cash has stayed alive,” Eva said, “it’s because he’s burrowed deep into a hole in the middle of nowhere. Long as he’s underground and safe, we shouldn’t try to find him. Odds are we’d lead the sicario straight to his door.”
“True,” Tina said, “unless someone were to remove Los Lobos as a threat.” She turned to Leroy. “I’ve read that the cartel wars are heating up south of the border.”
“North of the border too,” Leroy said. “The peace both governments brokered by siding with Los Lobos over La Tigra lasted all of six months. The new kids on the block call themselves Los Asesinos. Subtle fuckers. They make Los Lobos look like a kindergarten class.”
Cash was glad he’d ordered another drink.
“What if Los Asesinos were to do the world a favor by wiping out Los Lobos?” Tina said.
“The new apex predators wouldn’t give two shits about an old contract on our boy,” Leroy said, “and they sure as hell wouldn’t pay off on it.”
Cash drank to that.
The waitress returned to the table with four drinks. While Gamez had passed on booze, like a good Boy Scout, Leroy made up the slack with a whiskey and a beer chaser.
Gamez stood. “You three can war game this out all night, but I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
“Better than catching a serial killer?” Tina said.
Gamez froze for a beat before sitting. As the lead detective in the murders of six trans women, he was drawing heat from higher-ups and the LGBTQ community. The strain showed in his face, where premature lines bracketed his hangdog eyes.
“And me?” Eva said. “What am I doing here?”
Tina nudged her purse closer to the center of the table. “Have you talked to Bettina Biddle lately?” The conversation came in louder and clearer on Cash’s end.
Eva blushed. Odds were she owed Bettina a call.
“We talk from time to time,” Eva said, “mostly about Cash. She doesn’t believe he’s dead either.”
“Are you still looking for someone to infiltrate the Powell law firm?” Tina said.
Eva leaned forward and nodded.
Tina smiled. “Because I know the perfect girl for the job.”
***
LIFO. Last in, first out. Described Leroy’s office hours during the dregs of a career marked by more downs than ups. Standard nonoperating procedure for a beer-guzzling burnout.
FILO. First in, last out. Leroy’s schedule at the Ritz tonight. After the others left the hotel with their assignments from Tina, he relocated to the bar, two stools down from Cash.
Cash almost gagged on the agent’s buy-by-the-gallon aftershave. Leroy must’ve bathed in the swill. “Looks like your friends deserted you.”
The agent glanced at Cash. “They’re not my friends.” He ordered a Jim Beam Black.
“I would’ve guessed you were more of a beer drinker,” Cash said. “A Tecate guy.”
“Busted.” He changed his order to a Tecate. “Figured I had to up my game to mingle with the beautiful people.”
“I sensed that this wasn’t your usual watering hole, and that’s not a putdown. I’m a fish out of water here too.”
“So what else can you tell just by looking at me?” Leroy said.
Cash leaned back and took in the full measure of the man. “You a cop?”
Leroy did a double take. “What gave me away? Is it my trim but powerful physique?”
Cash laughed. “Yeah, that for sure. Plus your suit is too snug to hide the shoulder-holster.”
Leroy patted the bulge at his left ribs. “For an old-timer, you’ve got good eyes. Say, back in the day, were you a cop?”
“Guilty as charged,” Cash said. “Twenty plus keeping the peace in Buffalo.”
Leroy gave Cash another look, longer this time. “There’s something familiar about you.” He frowned. “Have we met before?”
“Not in this life.”
Tina doubled back to the bar and put her hand on Cash’s shoulder. “PawPaw, I told you to wait in the car.”
“This is your father?” Leroy said.
“Mi abuelo, but most of the time, he acts more like mi tontito.” She eased Cash from the barstool and held on until his balance steadied. “I hope he wasn’t bothering you.”
“Not at all,” Leroy said. “Sharp as the old fella is, we could probably use him in the agency.”
Tina laughed. “That’ll be the day.”
Cash shuffled from the bar, listing port. She
kicked his instep, a warning to shift the cane to the other hand.
“A mistake like that can get you killed,” she whispered.
On the way out, he tipped the pianist another twenty, made his parting request, and exited to “I Fought the Law.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the head of a long line of people to thank are my parents, from whom I inherited a precious gift: a love of reading and writing. I am blessed to have in my life a wife, Regina, and daughter, Jessica, both writers themselves, who are infinitely patient and supportive.
I am eternally grateful to super-agents Jan Miller, Austin Miller and Nena Oshman at Dupree Miller & Associates. Jan is more than an agent to my family and me. She is a longtime friend, a confidant, and most importantly, the godmother of our only child.
It also takes a village to produce a book, and I had a great team at Savio Republic and Post Hill Press, including the talented trio of Debra Englander, Heather King, and Anika Claire.
I have the good fortune of being a small cog in a group of talented writers who break bread on Wednesdays and critique each other’s works. The “Wednesday Night Writers’ Conspiracy” includes: Jan Blankenship, Victoria Calder, Will Clarke, Peggy Fleming, Harry Hunsicker, Brent Jones, Fanchon Knott, Brooke Malouf, Ellijzah Manuel, Clif Nixon, David Norman, Glenna Whitley and Max Wright.
Finally, my belated and wholly inadequate thanks to lawyer and friend, Jim Blume, and my Austin angel, Erin Brown, both of whom love mysteries as much as I do and who have read every word I have written. My trusty sidekick, Veronica Long, who is my Della Street, makes working at a law firm fun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Coggins is a nationally prominent criminal defense attorney, whose clients have included A-list entertainers, powerful politicians, Fortune 500 executives, professional athletes, nonprofit organizations, and government bodies. He is the former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas and is currently the immediate past president of the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys.
