by Andrew Gross
“Never sure.” Hauck sighed with a smile. He stood up and tossed a few bills on the counter to cover both drinks. “Just steady…You make sure you put those funds to good use.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Upstairs, Hauck unbuttoned his shirt, sat on the couch in the large room, and turned on the flat-screen TV. He flicked to ESPN. There was a college basketball game on, and Hauck went over to the minibar and took out one last bourbon and some water and sat down to watch the game.
His blood coursed.
His mind drifted to Karen, to the gulf that lay between them now. He needed to put that all behind him. Whatever was happening was happening. He flashed to Josie again, pausing over the glimpse of her breasts underneath her halter and the thought that something between them might have been fun. Your call… Maybe she was still at the bar. Maybe he should go back down there. He brought his feet up on the table and rested his head on his knees.
There was a knock at the door. Housekeeping, maybe, to turn down the bed. Hauck got up and cracked it open. “Yeah?”
It was Josie.
Staring up at him, with a steady, not-at-all innocent look that communicated something she knew they both felt, which needed no words. She pushed the bangs on her face out of her eyes.
“I was just making sure there was nothing you might have forgotten down there.”
“Like what?”
Josie shrugged. “Like second thoughts, maybe.”
He looked in her smoky eyes. “Are you really just working here while you’re going to school?”
She stared back at him. “Are you really up here just looking into false shuffles?”
Hauck didn’t reply, just felt this undeniable urge rise up in him and the hair on his arms rise as she brushed by him into the room.
“This is bad, you know,” Hauck said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just bad.”
“You know what they say about ‘bad,’ don’t you…” She came up to him, so close they were almost touching, and curled a smile. “Only matters in wine and cheese.”
Hauck looked at her, drew in the scent he found so intoxicating at the bar. He felt her arm go around his waist, the loose, breasts that she had been so willing to let him see pressed electrically against his bare chest. Everything he told to be quiet in himself sprang alive.
Josie’s other hand draped across his cheek; she looked up at him and he kissed her. Her lips parted and her tongue gradually overcame the hesitancy of his indecision; his blood rose like a wave, surging against the feeling that he was doing something wrong to the person he loved…
Until he found his own hand sliding down the smooth curve of her back, inside the waist of her jeans. His breathing picking up and his foot shifting and the door to Room 3209 of the Pequot Woods Resort and Casino clicking shut.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Hauck opened his eyes the next morning. The light canted inside the shades, the slowly dawning sensation of what had taken place last night coming back to him like sun through a lifting fog.
Shit.
The clock read seven eighteen. He stirred. The covers were strewn haphazardly across the bed. Oh, God, Ty, nice job.
He shot up. Josie was gone. Her clothes picked off the floor where they had been scattered in the haste that had overtaken them last night. It had been delicious. He let himself fall back against the pillow, drift back to thoughts of the dreamy night they had shared. Once he had let her in there was no turning back. He had taken her right up against the wall, against the African animal print that was shifted sideways now. Once from behind at the sink in the fancy bathroom. Then they went at it on the bed until they both fell asleep. Hauck placed his hands behind his head.
Maybe not the single most professional thing he had ever done on an investigation.
But, jeez, they were both adults. Well, at least one of them was.
And it was fun…He felt his cheeks stretch into a sheepish grin. Karen had pushed herself out of his life. He waited for the admonishment.
None came.
He got out of bed, shaved, and showered. He took his bag downstairs by ten of eight. Even fighting the slow jam of traffic that was bound to be going south on I-95, he ought to be at his desk by nine.
What then…? The decisions he had to make came back to him. Where do you take this, Ty…?
In the lobby, Hauck called for his car and stopped at the front desk to check out. An attractive Asian desk clerk named Randi waved him forward. Hauck put a credit card onto the counter. “Checking out of 3209.”
The desk clerk typed his room into the computer. She looked up and smiled. “Mr. Hauck, I see your room’s been comped by the resort. You’re all set.”
“Thanks, but I’d like to pay,” Hauck said. No way he was going to let the investigation be compromised or be indebted in any way to Raines. “It’s okay, please…Just run me a bill.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Hauck,” the desk clerk said. “It’s all been zeroed out.”
“Randi…” Hauck leaned close and said nicely, “You do whatever you have to do, put it all on a minibar tab if you like, but I need to pay for my room. How much is the standard weekday price?”
The desk clerk grew a little flustered. “I’d have to look that up…” She punched it into her computer. “Two hundred and eighty-nine dollars, but—”
“Ring it up,” Hauck said, pushing forward his card. “Charge me for whatever you like. Book it for tonight. It’s inside the cancellation penalty window, isn’t it?”
“Yes…”
“So that’s fine.”
Confused, Randi printed off a bill, which Hauck signed, and he thanked her for understanding. He folded the receipt into his pocket and was about to head out to his car when she called him back.
“I almost forgot, this was left here for you, Mr. Hauck.”
She produced a large manila envelope, taped shut, his name on it, and handed it across the counter.
Hauck tucked it under his arm. “Thanks.”
He walked away, wondering if this was some kind of good-bye from Josie. He put down his bag and slit the envelope open.
The blood left his face.
He was staring at a series of black-and-white photos. Photos of himself. Last night.
With Josie.
In his hotel room. In the throes of what they were doing. At the wall. On the bed. Josie over him.
A stomach-turning nausea rolled over in his gut.
There was a note clipped to one of the photos. Handwritten. On the hotel’s stationery. As he read it, Hauck’s fists tightened. Raines’s contemptuous grin flashed through his mind.
“Fortunately, as the saying goes—what happens at the Pequot Woods stays at the Pequot Woods, Lieutenant…”
Hauck crumpled the note in his fist. His temperature escalated through the roof. He felt the veins in his neck bulge with anger.
He ran back to Randi. “Where is Mr. Raines’s office?” he asked.
She was with a customer. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Where’s Raines’s office?” He knew his voice rang out too loudly, but he was barely able to control his rage.
“Up the stairs.” Randi pointed. “Second floor. Security. All the way down the hall.”
Hauck nodded, then bounded up the wide, red-carpeted stairway, leaving his bag sitting at the desk. His blood coursed with the torrent of just how stupid he’d been.
How could he have taken his eye off the ball so completely? Allowed himself to be played like some stupid rookie in heat? He flashed to Josie. The bit about what she was studying in school. A ripple of shame shot through him. She’d done her job well. He’d damn well let her. He should have seen it coming.
It had all been set up by Raines from the start.
On the second floor Hauck ran down the hall, passing the Flight Room, where he had met Raines yesterday afternoon. He didn’t know how badly he had been compromised. Or whether Fi
tzpatrick would still support him. He was already on the fence.
But mostly, he wondered what it was these people had to hide to make them pressure him so strongly to back off the case.
At the end of the hall, Hauck came across a double door marked SECURITY. He pulled it open, and a secretary looked up at him from behind a desk. Hauck looked around the rooms for an office with Raines’s name on it.
“Can I help you?” the secretary asked.
“Where’s Raines?”
The middle-aged woman did a double take.
“Where’s Joe Raines?” Hauck said again. He didn’t identify himself. He could barely control himself. He didn’t know what he would even do. Arrest him. That would blow everything. Slug him. Hauck’s pulse was racing so out of control, he knew she must be thinking he was crazy.
“Sir, Mr. Raines isn’t here at the moment…,” she said, probably pressing a button for assistance underneath her desk.
Hauck dropped his badge in front of her.
“He won’t be in today,” the secretary said, surprised. “He’s out of the office for the day. I don’t know if there’s anyone else who can help you, but—”
“You give him this,” Hauck said. His eyes were fiery with rage. He took a pen from the top of her desk and scratched out a few words on the back of Raines’s crumpled note.
“You make sure he gets this—today!”
The secretary looked at the card, startled, and nodded. “I will.”
“Today.”
Hauck left the suite and stood, decompressing, in the second-floor hallway. It was probably better Raines wasn’t there. He knew he had behaved stupidly. But more than that, he knew he was opening up a current that could no longer be controlled.
You keep digging, Raines had said to him, you have no idea the forces that are at work here…
Someone had ordered those deaths. Someone clearly wanted him off the case. Hauck went back down the stairs. His blood calmed.
You wanted to know what kind of man I am…he had written on Raines’s note.
I’m the kind who risks it all.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
By ten, Hauck made it back to the station. He went straight upstairs and knocked on the door of the chief’s office. “Must be important, huh, Ty? You got that look in your eye…”
“Yeah, Vern, it is.”
The chief waved him in with his mug of coffee; Hauck pulled up a seat across from him. “So what happened up there?” He laughed. “You get lucky or something, Ty?”
“You could say.”
Hauck told him about Raines and the video he had shown Hauck of David Sanger at the table. The conspiracy Raines had mapped out about the prosecutor and his inside friend. And what might have befallen them.
“You’re suggesting Vega and this DR-17 were merely acting out a hit for the Pequot Woods?” Fitzpatrick looked up at him and asked.
“I’m suggesting Sanger and Kramer may not have been as innocent as they appeared. Raines tossed out the possibility that people up there might’ve been handling things in their own way.”
“A gambling scam? This ‘false shuffle’? An up-and-coming federal prosecutor? With everything going for him?”
Hauck shrugged. “I know what you’re saying, but there’s the bank account he kept secret from his wife. Several of the deposits seemed to match up. Everyone’s got their vices, Vern. I saw the guy walk away with a sizable pile of chips.”
“Which proves he had a gambling bug, that’s all. This Raines, he implied this was how the resort took care of it? How they ‘balanced their books’?”
“He threw it out. Among many possibilities…”
“But I can see you’re not exactly giddy about his explanation.”
Hauck shrugged. “I’d like to shoot a fucking missile through it, if it’s okay with you.”
Fitzpatrick shifted back in thought. He tapped his fingers against his lips. “You’re not taking on a bunch of Wall Street people here, Ty. You have any idea what type of interests you’re stepping into?”
“Funny, Raines asked the same thing to me.”
“Well, that’s because you don’t. You don’t even have a goddamn clue. And I’m not even talking the general scum who are usually a part of this kind of business operation.” Vern looked at him. “Those casinos up there are the principal reason we have a balanced budget in this state. That new thruway they’re widening, between here and Fairfield? You think it’s the declining real estate tax pool that’s ponying up the funding for that? Or the new sports arena they’re building up near Hartford? Trying to attract an NBA team? Half the goddamn high schools in this state—all those science labs and fancy new gyms and scoreboards…Who do you think’s paying for all that, Ty? Or how we can support one hundred and twenty officers on our own force? Just what is it you think those billions in gambling revenue actually buy?”
“Three people are dead, Vern. Some piece of shit who empties his gun at a state trooper has his case mysteriously dropped. Makes you think they might be covering something up.”
Fitzpatrick directed a stern look into Hauck’s eyes. “You think there was pressure from Hartford when this drive-by initially took place, you don’t even know the meaning of ‘pressure’ if we start looking into the Pequot Woods. Besides the obvious question of jurisdiction. Every politician in the state has their hands out to them.”
Hauck stared in the chief’s steady blue eyes, which, for the first time since Hauck had known him, looked haggard, even a bit afraid. Vern was going on seventy. He’d had the job as chief in Greenwich for almost twenty years, well past what anyone expected. Eighty percent of their job here was waving traffic down Greenwich Avenue, smoothing out spats at the high school or a fender bender between BMWs and Mercedes. Complaints between neighbors who could buy and sell them in a single trade.
“You asking me to back off, Vern?”
“I’m asking you to know what the hell you’re doing, Ty!” Fitzpatrick pushed back in his chair, ran a hand through his wavy white hair. “Listen, son, what do I have—maybe two years left on my term? Then what? You’d be the logical choice to take over. You’ve got the experience. Everybody’s behind you. You can build a good life here.”
Hauck knew that was always the plan.
“But you step into this, Ty, you step into things you’re better off just letting go. There’s no telling where it takes you or who you may piss off. Ninety percent of what I do”—the chief winked with a modest grin—“is just not pissing the right people off.”
“Too late for that,” Hauck said with a halting smile of his own.
He opened the manila envelope he’d been keeping on his lap and laid out the series of photos of him and Josie.
Fitzpatrick groaned. The color in his cheeks waned. “Looks like you did get a little lucky up there…”
“I wanted you to see these, Vern. I should’ve known better. I just got careless.”
Fitz put them back down on the desk. “So I would know the kind of headlines we’re about to receive?”
Hauck winced. That had already crossed his mind. LOCAL COP INTERROGATING WITNESS ON CASINO LINK TO SHOOTINGS.
“To know what kind of people we’re dealing with, Vern.”
“I damn well already know what kind of people we’re dealing with, Ty.”
“This was all just a threat, Vern. To get me to back off. They’d never dare use it. The whole thing would explode right back in their faces.”
Fitzpatrick stood up. He came over to the edge of his desk and sat, leaning over Hauck. He looked at the photos one more time and began to rip them into tiny pieces. Then he tossed the piles into his trash. “You’re a smart man, Ty—generally…It’s just that sometimes you can be a bit naïve. Good people generally are. Seems to me you’re still carrying a small reminder of what kind of people we’re dealing with in your own right leg.”
“Yeah.” Hauck nodded. “I am.”
“These types are far worse, Ty.”
Hauck’s eyes glanced to the torn-up photos in the can. “You want me to back off, Vern, I will. You want me to step aside on the case, I’ll do that too.”
“I’m not telling you to stop!” Fitzpatrick looked back at him, gritting his teeth. “I just want to make sure you know what the hell you’re dragging us into here. I’m telling you to be careful, son.” He placed his hand on Hauck’s shoulder. “If they already killed a federal attorney, that badge won’t protect you much. I’m telling you to watch your ass, Ty.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Hauck sat outside the gray shingled house on Pine Ridge Road. He ran through what he would try to say. What he was about to unleash.
Basically, destroying a good man’s reputation. His family’s memory of him. With only the most circumstantial and trumped-up evidence to back it up. If he decided to take this forward.
And over what?
Over a crime that hadn’t been proven and could easily be swept away.
Maybe Fitz was right. Opening all this up would only unleash a torrent of misery and pressure. And what was he prepared to do? Indict Raines on a heresay comment? Subpoena the tapes? They’d be destroyed or misplaced before they ever saw the light of day. Pry open the questionable dealings of the largest tax generator in the state?
One day he could take over Fitz’s job. He could build something here.
Be careful what you get yourself involved in, Ty…
Hauck stepped out of the car. Flurries had begun to fall. He rang the chime on the red front door.
“Haley, watch Ethan for me!”
The door opened. Wendy Sanger was dressed in a blue velour set, her short blond hair clipped up in back. “I saw you waiting out there,” she said. “In a way, I was hoping you’d drive away.”
“You said you wanted to know.”
“What are you going to tell me, Lieutenant? That my husband was involved in something bad? That he wasn’t the nice, perfect person I knew? That all these noble things—”
