Drawing Dead (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 3)

by Patrick Logan

  If Chase was right, not only should they close down the arena, but perhaps the entire Las Vegas strip as well.

  Chapter 58

  “That man, the one that just entered, why didn’t you search him?” Chase accused, pointing a finger at the security guard who stood with his hands jammed into the pockets of his k-way coat.

  The man looked like a deer in the headlights, his large eyes charcoal briquettes embedded in unleavened dough.

  “That guy? He was here yesterday. Brought in oil for the fryers.”

  Yesterday? Shit…

  “Why didn’t you search him?”

  The man’s eyes flicked to the person to his right, and then the police officer to his left. And Chase immediately knew why: Mike Hartman had slipped him some cash that he wouldn’t be searched.

  “God damn it,” Chase muttered.

  Yesterday… he was here yesterday, planning this. Last night’s attack on the poker game was just a last-minute fuck you to the players.

  “Forget it,” she snapped. “The oil… where did he go with the oil?”

  “I dunno, I didn’t follow him or nothin’. Lady, I didn’t know nothin’ about this. He had ID and everything. Said he was just a cook, working the fryers upstairs.”

  Chase bit her lip in frustration.

  “Where did he go?” she yelled. “Where the fuck do the cooks go?”

  “I dunno—”

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  “Yesterday, I let him and his truck into the garage.”

  Truck? He had an entire truck?

  Chase’s heart was racing now. Even though the majority of the procession had scattered, there were likely already people inside… hundreds of them.

  “Where’s the garage?” Chase demanded. “Is it on this side?”

  The security guard shook his head.

  “No, it’s all the way on the other side of the area. But the best way to get there by foot is to go through here and then take the stairs on the left.”

  The man hadn’t even finished his sentence before Chase was off again, passing through the metal detector that chimed like the Hell’s Bells as she ran by.

  The inside of the mobile arena was more packed than she had expected. It appeared as if a good portion of the procession had already made it inside.

  As soon as she stepped into the stadium, Chase realized that she’d been wrong: there weren’t hundreds of fans inside, but thousands of them. They were everywhere, milling about, drinking beer, scarfing hot dogs and shoveling palmfuls of popcorn into their mouths.

  They were oblivious to the danger that they were in.

  With renewed vigor, Chase twisted her way between the fans and made her way toward the stairwell tucked behind a concession stand. She was hopeful that Sgt. Theodore was on his way, that he was taking so long because he was busy enacting some sort of evacuation plan, but deep down, Chase doubted it. The asshole was probably staring in a mirror somewhere, repeating “Lieutenant Theodore” over and over again.

  Shaking her head in frustration, Chase slammed her hands against the door, which was marked with EMERGENCY ONLY.

  Well, she thought, if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.

  A small bell chimed from somewhere above her head, an annoying pinging sound that Chase supposed constituted an alarm. Normally, she wouldn’t have wanted the attention called to her, but in this situation, Chase wished the alarm was ten times as loud — an air raid siren, perhaps. Anything to get the place to clear out.

  Chase took the stairs two at a time, heading past the first door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, before arriving at a second with GARAGE across the top.

  When she spotted the key card scanner next to the door handle, her heart sunk. Chase hadn’t thought to ask the security guard for access to the lower levels — she’d been so eager to hurry after the man who she thought was Mike Hartman, that it hadn’t occurred to her. And now it looked like she was going to have to go back up and waste more time that she didn’t have.

  But as Chase neared the door, she realized that someone had propped it open by jamming a wedge of wood in the top. She silently slipped through, making sure to replace the piece of wood in case she had to make a quick exit.

  It was a garage all right, she didn’t need to see the concrete pillars or the markings on the ground to know that much.

  The acrid smell of oil and gasoline caused her nose to scrunch.

  To her right, Chase noted several large vans, one of which was covered in a Golden Knights wrap. To her left was a catering van and several wheelchair accessible vehicles.

  Chase moved quietly now, knowing that stealth was an important factor in whether or not she made it out of the garage alive. She didn’t have to work too hard, however, given the crowd sounds from above. Withdrawing her pistol, she sidled up next to the Las Vegas Golden Knights team bus and moved along its length.

  When Chase got to the end, she poked her head out, then retracted it immediately. She repeated this several times, then stitched together the individual visuals to form a cohesive image.

  Near the center of the garage, not parked in a spot but wedged between two huge concrete pillars, was a truck that looked as if it had come straight from a construction site. It was a faded red, with patches of rust filling nearly every seam. A dark blue tarp had been laid over the truck bed, but it was clear by the way it bulged that it wasn’t empty.

  Caterer my ass.

  Chase stepped out into the open, then crept slowly around the rear of the truck, scanning the interior as she went. With a deep breath, she swung around the other side, and that’s when she saw him.

  He was on one knee, his back to her, but Chase knew that it was the same man that she’d seen outside in the bulky Knights jersey. His hands were out of sight, but the way his shoulders moved, it was clear that he was fidgeting with something.

  With another deep breath, Chase raised her gun.

  “Mike Hartman? I need you to stop what you’re doing and put your hands in the air.”

  Chapter 59

  The man in the Golden Knights jersey slowly rose to his feet, but he only lifted his right hand in the air. And even then, the angle of the arm was wrong, and it took Chase a few moments to realize that this was the shoulder that had been shot. She thought the material on that side of the jersey was darker too, as if soaked with blood.

  “Both hands,” Chase shouted. “Put both hands in the air, right now!”

  “I don’t think you want me to do that,” the man replied calmly.

  As he spoke, he slowly started to turn and Chase made sure to level her pistol at center mass. She also prepared herself to dive behind the Golden Knights team bus should he be aiming a weapon at her.

  The first thing Chase noticed was that it was indeed Mike Hartman, the second was that he was grinning. She even saw the cheap Timex watch on his left wrist, as if she needed further corroboration.

  “I said, put—”

  Chase’s eyes fell on his left hand and she gasped.

  Mike was clutching something that looked like a thick pen in his hand, one that had wires extending from the base that extended beneath the hem of his jersey.

  No, Chase most definitely didn’t want him to raise his hand above his head and let go of the Dead Man Switch. If he did, whatever explosives Mike had beneath that jersey would turn them both into Ragu.

  “Neat, isn’t it?” Mike said, turning the switch in his hand. “Got the materials from work, but the plans? Downloaded them. You’d be surprised what you can find online… well, maybe not. You look young enough to know how to use the internet, maybe even computers. Not like your Luddite of a boss, Sgt. Theodore. Couldn’t even track down a goddamn complaint.”

  Chase squinted as she took this in.

  “He’s not my boss. But you’re right; he’s an asshole.”

  Mike took a step forward, and Chase extended the gun.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Wait… you were there! You were at the poke
r game. How the—how…” he chuckled and shook his head. “Who knew cops could play poker?”

  “I’m not a cop. I’m FBI,” Chase said, stalling. She needed Sgt. Theodore or Stitts to arrive soon and help her either talk this guy down or figure out a way to disarm him.

  She was leaning toward the latter.

  “Cop, FBI, what does it matter? You’re all useless. Twenty-seven years my dad worked for the casino, and when he died because of the smoke and the stress, you know what he got? Nothing. Not a red cent.”

  “The rich get richer,” Chase said absently.

  The comment took Mike by surprise and he fell silent. Chase used the confusion to her advantage and with her free hand lifted the corner of the tarp on the back of the truck.

  In the truck bed were several large barrels marked in large letters with ‘RDX’ and EXPLOSIVE.

  “Just something to celebrate the very first playoff game,” Mike said, regaining his composure. “Help the Knights come out with a bang. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. How is it possible that I could come down here with just a shitty fake ID claiming to be a caterer and park a truck loaded with over a hundred pounds of RDX? How’s that possible? Well, I’ll tell you how that’s possible, lady.”

  “Chase.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name’s not lady — it’s Chase.”

  The man observed her curiously for a moment before continuing.

  “Okay, Chase, sure; you want to know how I did it?”

  Come on, Stitts, where are you?

  “I know how you did it. In fact, I know how you did everything. I know that you faked your own death with a corpse and a tattoo, I know that you put up false windows after you escaped the room to confuse us, I also know that your buddy Peter came back to put the real ones up the next day. I know that you set off those bombs just to draw attention away from yourself and the real plan. So… how’d you get in here? I bet you just greased a few palms,” Chase shrugged. “That’s all it takes.”

  Mike Hartman blinked several times, his face going slack for a moment before the grin reappeared.

  “Not bad, not bad. Not a revelation, mind you; that’s just how things work. If you have money, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want. You can screw over an old, retiring man who spent the better portion of his life working for you, and not give him a goddamn cent in severance. Even the insurance company managed to weasel out of their contract. Why? Because he had weed in his system? It was secondhand from one of the private games that he was dealing at to make some extra cash. Even the police — the ones who are supposed to protect us, normal, regular citizens — don’t give a shit. Probably got a handout from the casino and insurance company not to look for the complaint that my father filed.”

  Chase was content to just let Mike talk, but when his face started to turn red, she decided that it would be in both of their best interests to defuse the situation.

  “Paradise is lost, isn’t that right, Mike?”

  For the third time since entering the garage, he was taken aback.

  “How do you—”

  “But let me ask you something,” Chase interrupted. “Who’s the good guy here? You? Me? You’ve got the cash now and you can do whatever you want. You can just get the hell out of here and drive to anywhere in the country. Start over. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to kill all these innocent people.”

  The man balked.

  “Innocent? Innocent… really? Nobody here is innocent. These people… they’re all contributing to the rich getting richer. They couldn’t even give my father a couple hundred bucks to help my mother with the cost of the funeral, but they can buy a hockey team for half a billion dollars? Every single person in this arena, every person who supports this team, lines their pockets.”

  Chase found her own frustration mounting.

  “So, what? You get to be a martyr? You think that anything you do here is going to matter? You blow up this fucking place, kill all these people, and you know what they’ll do? They’ll rebuild. They’ll make it bigger, they’ll make it more expensive, and they’ll blame it all on you, Mike. How do you think that will make your mother feel?”

  “My mother? My mother? You leave her out of this.”

  “Leave her out of it? You really think that’s going to happen? The media will be all over her, hounding her, asking about you, whether you were spanked or had your pecker touched as a child.”

  Mike sneered.

  “I gave her enough money to get out of here.”

  “What? The half a mill? That’ll be gone in six months, a year, tops. Trust me, I’ve seen it before. Then she’ll be back here, in the very place that you condemned, asking the very people you scorned for a handout. Trust me, Mike.”

  The man’s expression softened, and Chase thought that she was getting somewhere. But then he broke into a grin, and her hopes were dashed.

  “Trust you? Trust you? I can’t trust you. I can’t trust anyone. How does the old saying go? The only things that are certain in life are death and taxes. But these large companies, they don’t even pay taxes, do they? Hiding money in offshore accounts, getting breaks so long as they fund certain election campaigns.” Mike held out the dead man trigger. “But I’m guessing that for all their power, wealth, and influence, they can’t get out of death. What do you think?”

  Movement behind Mike suddenly caught Chase’s eye.

  Finally, Stitts! It’s about fucking time!

  Chapter 60

  But it wasn’t Stitts; the figure was shorter and slightly stooped. Her initial instinct was that it was Peter Doherty or Tony Ballucci coming to lend Mike a hand.

  Except this was Mike’s calling, not theirs; they’d only been in it for the money.

  “I think you’re off your fucking rocker, that’s what I think. You think suicide will change anything? You think that it ever changes anything?”

  Mike’s face contorted then, twisting into a mix of emotions that ranged from anger to frustration and ultimately, to sadness. But then that stupid grin returned.

  “Oh, you’re good,” he said with a hint of joviality. “In fact, I’d say that you sound like someone who has considered the act yourself, isn’t that right?”

  It was Chase’s turn to protest.

  “I wouldn’t—”

  As if they were in a high school classroom and you needed the talking stick to speak, Mike held the dead man trigger out to her.

  “No, nothing as dramatic as this. But maybe… maybe you thought about taking a couple extra sleeping pills one night, or just letting the wheel go when you’re on an empty road. Oh, you’ve contemplated doing something like this — I can see it in your eyes. You stand there all high and mighty with your gun and your badge… you think you’ve never hurt people?”

  Chase took a deep, shuddering breath as her mind turned to the fateful day when Georgina had been taken from her.

  “Oh, I’ve hurt people,” Chase said softly. And it was the truth; she’d hurt Georgina, she’d hurt Brad and Felix, and she’d hurt Jeremy Stitts. She’d hurt a lot of people during her thirty-five years, and would undoubtedly hurt more before her time was up. But she wasn’t perfect, and never claimed to be. Words that Dr. Matteo used during one of their first encounters suddenly occurred to her.

  Live in the moment, Chase. We can’t go back and change what we did in the past, and we can’t with any degree of certainty predict what will happen in the future. All we can do is control our actions right here, right now, in this moment.

  “But there’s a difference between you and me,” she continued.

  Mike raised an eyebrow.

  “And what’s that?”

  The crowd above suddenly worked itself into a frenzy, and Chase could hear them chanting, Go Knights Go! It was so loud that Mike Hartman’s eyes drifted upward.

  “I didn’t go through with it,” Chase muttered.

  And that’s when the shadowy figure chose to strike.

&n
bsp; He leaped onto Mike Hartman’s back, wrapping his arms around the man’s chest.

  “Grab his hand!” Chase shouted. “Don’t let him let go of the trigger!”

  She sprinted towards the duo as she yelled, tucking the gun in the holster at the same time.

  Mike bucked and spun around, but he was unable to dislodge the man on his back. Chase shouted again for him to grab Mike’s left hand, but she was just wasting words; he had already wrapped his hand overtop of Mike’s, making it impossible for him to pull his thumb away from the dead man trigger.