by Jon Mills
Tyson moved in quick to gather the winnings and they slipped away before Pope could change his mind. In the cab on the way back, Tyson threw some of the money in the air and watched it settle like snowflakes.
“Holy shit. Did you see the look on Pope’s face? I haven’t seen him that pissed in a long while. We just made a cool three grand tonight,” he said, gathering up the money and thumbing off Jack’s share. “How about we party?”
Jack shook his head. “I’m kind of tired.”
Tyson’s smile faded. “Right. Yeah, gotta get that sleep in.” He patted Jack on the shoulder. “I guess now that I’m gonna be managing your career, I should probably think about what you’ll eat and…”
“Tyson. Settle down.”
His youthfulness was getting the better of him.
He recalled those days. The late nights. The hard partying. The women, and the need to make his mark on the world. He’d made it but it wasn’t something he was proud about. Jack looked out the window, squinting into the darkness of the forest. His mind was far from fighting, the money or any threat Pope could be. His thoughts were with Dana. With the image of the man watching her in the video. Where was she? Was she safe? Was she alive? He got this sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. A sense that he wasn’t doing enough to find her, and yet he was doing everything he could under the circumstances.
When they returned home that evening, Shanice was waiting in the kitchen.
Since getting out of the cab Tyson hadn’t stopped talking about how they were going to take this to the top, and then maybe once Jack had more clout and earned the respect of Pope he wouldn’t need his permission to fight. Tyson would create his own event. It was all dreams but who was he to piss on them?
Tyson chuckled as he shouldered his way into a dark kitchen. He flipped the switch and was still talking when Jack saw his mother sitting in a chair at the table.
“But when we get to Albuquerque, that’s where the real money is. And—”
He turned and the smile vanished from Tyson’s face.
One glance at both of them and Shanice jabbed her gnarled finger at Tyson. “I’ll speak with you in the morning.” Tyson was about to reply but he knew better. Instead, he gave a nod, said goodnight to Jack and wandered upstairs. Once his door shut, Shanice stared at Jack’s cut lip.
“I prayed today and the Lord gave me the answer,” she said getting up and walking over to him and shoving the wad of money he’d given her earlier that morning into his chest. Jack clasped it. “I want you gone by the morning.”
She didn’t wait for an explanation and Jack never tried to give one. He knew she was only looking out for her own.
Chapter 15
Zach’s source came through but the Telluride business owners didn’t. Kelly was tapping away at her keyboard that morning writing up a rough draft on what they’d uncovered so far when Zach returned with two cups of coffee.
He’d knocked several times breaking her train of thought. “Open up, Kelly.”
“All right. All right.”
A few more kicks from him and she pulled the door open.
Zach handed her a coffee as he charged in and proceeded to roll straight into what his source had dug up. “So I was right. Jack Winchester was somehow caught up with the San Francisco mob. While there isn’t a lot of information on what his ties were, it was pretty serious. What they had on him was enough that they could have sent him down for a long time. But it never happened. Call it luck. Fate. Whatever. Get this. He was used as a bagman for the cops because that psycho had specifically requested him. While my source can’t say for sure whether he was the mystery guy, they know for sure that he was given immunity and sent on his way without even a slap on the wrist. How about that?” he said, squatting down and leering at her computer. Before she could respond he continued jabbering away. His brow furrowed. “I don’t get it. Armstrong, you’re not mentioning his name in the article?”
“Well we don’t have enough proof.”
“Of course we do. We know he was there at the time. We know he carried the bag. Who else could it be? He’s also linked to Dana Grant.” He took a large bite of a muffin and brushed crumbs off his lap onto her computer. She rolled her eyes and went over and shut the top.
“Do you mind?”
“Very much so,” he said with a smile.
Kelly walked back to her desk and took a seat. She peeled away the outer wrapper on her muffin and took a bite. After wiping her lips she continued, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Without a photo we don’t have anything. It’s all speculation. We need something more. Something concrete.”
Zach nodded. “Well what did the store owners say?”
“Not much.” She took a gulp of coffee. “It wasn’t because they didn’t have footage or they weren’t willing to help. Neither was it the fact that I told them that I was a reporter from the Chronicle and had worked with Dana. It seemed they were protective of their privacy, more specifically Jack’s.”
“But she’s missing?”
“Didn’t seem to matter.”
He snorted. “Well that’s what happens when you do work in this town for free. I still can’t get my head around that. Though it does make you wonder. Here’s a guy with ties to the mob, he’s handling a shitload of cash and it mysteriously disappears. He shows up here, purchases a large property and does work for people pro bono. Do the math.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, that might hold weight if he’d purchased the home after returning from the city. I did some research into when the house sold and spoke to the realtor, of course under the guise that I was interested in buying a property like that. Anyway, she was more than willing to tell me when Jack purchased it, and how much he paid, what she didn’t or wouldn’t disclose was whether he paid in cash or not. He bought it before his trip to San Francisco.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, it raises a few questions. What is this guy’s background? What is his tie to Dana? When did he meet her? What does he do for a living? We need to know these things, Zach, before we release an article on the guy.”
Zach laughed. “Make it up. We’re the media. We twist things all the time. Who cares?”
“I care. This is a man’s life.”
“Yeah, and we’ll make him famous.”
She leaned back in her seat. “What if he doesn’t want to be famous?”
“Second rule of being a good reporter — don’t grow a conscience, that is a fast track to failure. Armstrong, this is about landing the big story, a hefty bonus and a possible promotion. Not to mention we might actually save the paper.”
She rolled her eyes. “I want to know the truth.”
“There is no truth, Armstrong. There is what happened, what didn’t and what we write in-between.”
She took another sip. “Maybe that works for you but this will be the first time my name is on this and—”
“Ah…” he cut her off.
“What?” she asked.
“Well… I was going to tell you. I just forgot to get around to it. Don’t take offense but Johnson wants my name on it.”
His words hung out there, echoing in her brain.
“What?”
“Readers are more familiar with my work for the paper. They know what to expect. We’d be taking a risk having an unknown put it out there. It all comes down to trust, you see.”
Kelly closed her eyes and shook her head. She understood that veteran journalists often gained a following, but this was meant to be her break. Of course she wasn’t writing the story alone but…
“But hey, I’m sure I can convince Johnson to mention your name in the investigative aspect, you know, a credit at the end. It’s not much but—”
“Bullshit. You are trying to steal this out from underneath me just like you were trying to backtrack when I walked in on you pitching my idea to him.”
Zach chuckled. “Armstrong, you are paranoid.”
“And you’re an asshole. If you think for one minute…”
/> “I’m not trying to steal your thunder. Ease up. It’s called seniority.”
“Oh so now you’re changing the story.”
He blew out his cheeks. “Listen, unless you can sweet talk that officer down at the station into handing over a shot from their surveillance footage, I’m thinking we should either wait on the computer company to see if they can get anything off that notebook I found or look into where Winchester was when this fire happened.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t here, right? So where was he? If he spoke with the station, they would have questioned him about his whereabouts, no doubt they would have wanted to follow up with anyone he was in contact with to firm up his alibi. All we need is that contact and maybe then we’ll have the answers to those questions of yours. And who knows, maybe even a mug shot.”
She shook her head. “If we can’t get anyone in this town to speak to us, do you honestly think we’d have luck anywhere else?”
“Fourth rule of being a reporter. We make our luck.”
“Yeah? And you know what the fifth rule is…?”
Before he could reply she said, “You’re full of shit. I’m off to speak with the officer.”
“Ah, don’t worry about her. My ma gets salty over the craziest shit. I’ll talk to her this evening,” Tyson said as they made their way towards Cosmo’s after finishing breakfast at a different café far from the Plaza. “After this I have to run another errand. It shouldn’t take too long and then we can follow up with whatever Cosmo found.”
“Tyson, what are you delivering?”
“Huh?” He took a hard pull on his cigarette.
“Well you run a lot of errands that could probably be handled in the mail.”
“They could but Mr. Pope created this job for me.”
“Well what’s in them?”
He shrugged looking in store windows as they strode along the sidewalk.
“I don’t look.”
“And you’ve been doing these errands for how long?”
“Just over a year.”
“And you haven’t looked once?”
“They’re sealed. And what’s it to me? As long as I get paid.”
“Where do you take them?”
“To an advertising business on the far side of town.”
“To the same guy?”
He nodded.
“You know it could be illegal.”
He laughed. “Jack. Everything I have my hand in besides cleaning homes is illegal. These fights are too. I figure its payment for advertising services.”
“You ever bring anything back?”
“Occasionally.”
Jack was all too familiar with illegal operations in cities. Gafino had lived under the nose of the law. They monitored him closely as they did many of the other crime families in town. Jeremiah Pope was no exception. There might have been dirty cops in the city, but that didn’t mean they all were. It wasn’t a matter of if Pope would be caught, only when, and when he did go down, it was possible that Tyson would too.
“Look, Jack, Pope might be a dick but he runs things in this city. He’s helped me out. If it weren’t for him there would have been nights we didn’t have food on the table. You understand?”
“Completely.”
He thought back to when Gafino took him in. His home life was shit. There were days he didn’t eat a proper meal, and nights he would have found himself wandering the city if it wasn’t for Roy Gafino, or Eddie Carmine. They opened their doors, gave him a place to rest his head, and gave him a sense of belonging and even a job. Long before he collected on debts, Jack ran errands in the city. There were only a few products that were transported on foot and those were drugs. It was too dangerous to transport them by vehicle. Sure, some of it would get through but if stopped it could mean thousands of dollars lost. Give it to an errand boy and he could dart down alleys, climb across rooftops and disappear into the subways.
“Well let’s see what Cosmo has for us.”
Tyson bounded up the steps taking two at a time. Jack followed after. When he reached the top he rapped his hand on the door. “Hey Cosmo.” As soon as his knuckles hit the door it opened, the hinges groaned. “Cosmo?”
When there was no response Jack reached for his piece and yanked Tyson back.
He used the tip of his boot to ease the door wide before stepping inside.
The place was a wreck. Furniture overturned, the computer smashed on the ground, blood covering the walls, and a large bowl-shaped impression in the drywall as if someone’s head had been rammed into it. Cautiously Jack stepped over a slew of computer cables and made his way inside. With a wave of the hand he told Tyson to wait as he pressed into the dark room. The drapes were still pulled closed. Glass crunched beneath his boot. Jack surveyed the room and noticed the light bulb was smashed. He worked his way into the one room that wasn’t immediately visible from the front door.
Thick blood was smeared on the door as he kicked it open.
Lying face down on the mattress was Cosmo with multiple kitchen knives jammed into his back. The bed was soaked in blood and his room was in complete disarray. The closet had been opened, and clothes tossed all over the ground. Drawers had been yanked out. Latches to boxes broken up. There was no message on the wall. Nothing left behind by the killer. Anyone could have been responsible.
Jack’s mind shifted to the computer, to the work Cosmo had promised to do.
“Is he in there?” Tyson asked.
He threw up a hand. He didn’t want the kid seeing that. He’d seen it enough. It didn’t affect him but he recalled what it was like to see a brutal killing. It stuck with him all the years even as others became nothing more than a faded memory.
Jack didn’t touch anything. He didn’t want his prints to be found.
He hurried over to the computer and used his foot to turn it over. The other side was open and by the looks of it the hard drive was gone. Both servers were also gone. He sifted through the mess on the ground but there were no notebooks.
“You know of anyone that might have wanted him dead?”
“He… uh… I…” Tyson stumbled over his words, shock setting in.
“Tyson.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean he did work for people in the city but he’d never run into any trouble. He was careful not to take on jobs that could put him in the crosshair.”
They continued looking through his apartment hoping to find something, anything that might… and that’s when he spotted it. His heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t seen it when he’d gone into the apartment as the door was pushed back but now with the door closed, he noticed it dangling from the door handle.
A necklace.
A necklace that belonged to Dana.
Jack snatched it up and looked at it closely.
Their initials were inscribed into the gold. A flash of memory. Her smile. Her kiss. Thank you, Jack. A Christmas present he’d given her back when he was living in Maine.
As he tried to make sense of what it was doing in Cosmo’s apartment, the wailing of sirens interrupted his thoughts.
“Jack,” Tyson yelled as he stood beside the window. Jack dashed over and looked out to see two black-and-white cop cruisers swerve into the lot below the apartment. In that moment his stomach sank. Someone had set them up. He grabbed Tyson’s arm and pushed him towards the back of the apartment and told him to get out of the rear window while he barricaded the front door.
Chapter 16
Minutes. Seconds even. Jack knew the clock was against them as he shoved a sofa across the hardwood floor to the back of the apartment’s front door. He then flipped over the computer desk, piling it on top just as he heard the clatter of boots striking steel steps on the way up to the door. Whoever had done this had set them up. They had to have been watching them. On one hand he needed to escape, on the other he didn’t want cops pursuing Tyson. Cops banged on the door.
“Santa Fe Police Department, open up.”
/>
Jack continued to stack as many heavy items as he could find on the couch before retreating into the bedroom. He heard the sound of them smashing against the door trying to break in. Without looking at Cosmo’s body again, Jack bounded across the room to where the drapes were blowing in the window. As fast as lightning he climbed out onto a fire escape and scaled up to the roof.
“Hey, stop!”
Jack knew from experience not to look back. Generally cops wouldn’t shoot if they didn’t think you’d heard them or weren’t considered a threat. At the top of the fire escape he clambered onto the roof. By now he could hear even more sirens blaring. Within minutes the streets would be crawling with cops, and cruisers would be blocking off every means of escape. On the roof he was pleased to see Tyson was nowhere to be found. The last thing he needed was being held responsible for him or having to stare Shanice in the eyes if he was caught.
His boots pounded the roof like pistons as he dashed around metal ventilation and under telephone lines. The apartment block was right beside a bed and breakfast. Small alleys, gaps that varied in width, some that were impossible to cross, divided most of the buildings in the area. Not slowing for even a second Jack sprinted and launched across the divide between one building and the next, landing hard and rolling. Back up he pressed on even at the faint sound of another command to stop.
Adrenaline pumped through his system keeping him moving even as he took the next leap only to realize the gap was too wide. Jack slammed into the wall, bounced back and dropped. His arm caught on cabling slung between the buildings. It snapped and he plummeted three stories only to find himself tangled up in more cabling. Had it not caught and held him, there was no doubt in his mind it would have been game over. Still he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Pain shot through his body, and fear crept over him at the realization that the cops weren’t far behind. Only twenty feet above the ground he shimmed across the cabling and dropped down onto another fire escape. There he lifted a window into an apartment and dove inside. His shoulder crashed into a table causing the whole thing to collapse.
