No way out jd-2

by Joel Goldman

  “I’m Quinn,” the second man said.

  “You’re Jeremiah Quinn, the negotiator?” Nardellli asked, raised eyebrows saying she didn’t think so.

  “Don’t act so disappointed. Henry Kissinger was busy,” Quinn said. “Who started this party?”

  “The guy down the hall with a shiv up against a hostage’s neck.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “A get-out-jail-free card.”

  Quinn shrugged. “Why should he be any different than all the others? Let’s see what we got.”

  The sniper took up position, sighting Jimmy just as he released Kate’s hair, dropping his arms to his side. She did a slow pivot, facing him, wrapping her fingers around his wrist, easing the shiv out of his hand, talking. Jimmy answered, and both of them nodded. Kate walked away, leaving him alone in the center of the hall.

  Nardelli and the sniper rushed past Kate. Nardelli shouted at Jimmy to get down on the floor, and the sniper grabbed him before he could comply, shoving him onto the tile, jamming his knee into Jimmy’s back as Nardelli cuffed him.

  I ran to Kate, embracing her, both of us trembling. Pulling away, I tilted her chin to one side, pressing my sleeve against a crimson tear along her pale neck. A paramedic materialized, replacing my sleeve with a pressure dressing and cupping Kate’s elbow, telling her to step outside.

  “I’m okay,” she insisted.

  “Let’s make sure,” the paramedic told her.

  “You better take this,” she said, handing me the shiv.

  It was six inches of hard plastic, tapered at one end to a sharp point. Nardelli and the superintendent studied it with me.

  “It’s the handle for a toilet bowl brush,” the superintendent said. “I recognize the color and shape.”

  I gave the shiv to Nardelli and went outside, finding Kate sitting on a gurney in an ambulance, the paramedic cleansing her wound and covering it with a small bandage while she talked with Quinn.

  “Damn fine piece of work,” he told her. “Except for the part where you asked to have the guy’s shackles taken off. That’s classic too-stupid-to-live rookie bullshit. Don’t trust anybody, especially someone who’s got more to lose than you do. Makes me want to puke every time I see crap like that on TV.”

  “Sorry you made the trip for nothing,” Kate said.

  “You kidding? Nobody died. That’s a good day. You ever want to do this again the right way, call me,” he said, handing her a business card.

  He patted her on the cheek and climbed out of the ambulance, nodding at me as I took his place alongside Kate. The superintendent and Nardelli joined us, standing outside the ambulance.

  “Is that guy a cop?” I asked Nardelli.

  “No. He’s freelance.”

  “A freelance hostage negotiator? How does that happen?”

  “Budget cuts,” she said. “We had two negotiators. One retired, the other had a nervous breakdown, and now there’s a hiring freeze.”

  “Are you telling me there are enough hostage situations in Kansas City that a guy can make a living as a negotiator?”

  “That’s not all Quinn does, and he doesn’t just do it around here.”

  “What else is there?”

  “He calls himself a conflict specialist. You got a problem with somebody and you aren’t too particular how it gets handled, you call a number, leave a message, and hope he shows up.”

  “Hard times makes for hard choices,” I said. “Kate, you feel like talking about what happened?”

  A rose blush crept into her cheeks. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I completely misread Jimmy. I didn’t see this coming.”

  To their credit, the superintendent didn’t say I told you so, and Nardelli didn’t crack wise about the vagaries of micro facial expressions.

  “How did he fool you?”

  “He didn’t fool me. I fooled me. He knew what I wanted, and he gave it to me: a smile, a friendly, open face. There was no hint of aggression or violence until the instant before he hit the guard. By then, it was too late.”

  “He knew we were coming, so he must have planned it,” Nardelli said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He couldn’t have known you would ask to have his restraints taken off. I’d say it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. He saw an opportunity and took it.”

  “That’s how a lot of escape attempts happen,” the superintendent said.

  “Except I don’t think he was trying to escape,” Kate said. “He knew he had no real chance of getting away. I think he just wanted out of the Farm.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “It’s what he told me, in so many words, anyway. Once we were out in the hall and you gave us some space, I asked him why he was doing this, and he said, ‘Why do you think?’ I said it was pretty obvious that he wanted to break out of jail, and he said, ‘Yeah, right, like how far am I going to get armed with a toilet bowl brush.’”

  “Are you saying he beat up a guard and took you hostage and risked getting shot just so he could get a transfer?” Nardelli asked.

  “Yes. When the SWAT team came through the door, his body went limp like he’d put down a heavy weight, and then he let me go.”

  “But you stayed to talk to him. What was that about?” I asked.

  “I was waiting to tell him what Adam had said about seeing him take the kids from Peggy’s house until I could watch his reaction. That’s when I told him.”

  “Did he deny Adam’s story?”

  “No. It was weird. He smiled, almost like he was glad.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just one thing. He said, ‘Please find my kids.’ He’s not acting like a man who killed his kids.”

  “He’s playing you,” Lucy said. “Just like he did with the restraints. Why would he ask you to find Evan and Cara when we know he took them? He knows where there are, and he knows what happened to them.”

  “And, first chance he got, he beat up an officer and stuck you with a shiv,” Nardelli said.

  “But he gave up,” Kate said.

  “When he was about to get shot,” Lucy said. “Give me a break.”

  The superintendent’s cell phone rang. She held her hand up, asking us to wait, listening and thanking the caller.

  “I had my assistant check the records on visitors and new admissions. It will take longer to get you the names of his visitors, but I can tell you that we’ve had seventeen since Jimmy got here, ten women and seven men, all but one of them regulars, repeat offenders who show up here three or four times a year.”

  “Who’s the new kid on the block?” I asked.

  “A kid named Ricky Suarez. He came in yesterday, ten days for drunk and disorderly, his first time on the Farm.”

  Chapter Fifty-two

  “You think there’s a connection between Jimmy Martin and Ricky Suarez?” Nardelli asked.

  “If Kate is right, somebody spooked him,” I said.

  “How does a blue-collar construction worker like Jimmy get involved with a probable gangbanger?” Kate asked.

  “It’s not so much the gangbanger as it is the gang,” I said.

  Nardelli explained. “There are two Hispanic gangs in town. The Cholos work the southwest side of town along Southwest Boulevard, and Nuestra Familia operates in Northeast.”

  “Which is where Jimmy lives,” I said. “Cesar Mendez runs Nuestra. Suarez probably belongs to him.”

  “Most likely scenario,” Nardelli said, “Jimmy bought drugs from Mendez and stiffed him. Mendez finds out that Jimmy is at the Farm and sends Ricky to deliver a message, maybe even kill him.”

  “A message, maybe, but kill him, I doubt it. This isn’t the state penitentiary where a guy can walk into the shower and come out on a slab and no one knows anything about it. And, with all the open spaces, Ricky couldn’t touch him without half a dozen correction officers coming down on him.”

  “So Mendez sacrifices Ricky. He’s got a dozen more just like him,” Nardel
li said.

  “The price is too high on a hit like that. Mendez can’t take the chance that Ricky would make a deal and trade his life for Mendez’s life.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s ask Ricky,” I said.

  I stepped down from the ambulance, my knees giving out as my feet hit the ground. I descended slowly, like I was melting, eyes clenched and my head floating in brain fog until my knees and hands touched the ground. My body was playing out the fundamental law of physics that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I’d pushed far enough and hard enough that it pushed back, calling an all stop.

  “Or not,” Lucy said.

  They talked about me as if I weren’t there, Nardelli asking questions, Lucy and Kate explaining, Nardelli saying “Hell of a thing” and “He’s no use to anybody like this,” Kate volunteering to take me home, and Lucy saying she didn’t think so. There was nothing I could do, no point in trying to get up until the moment passed, no reason for Lucy and Kate to help me until I could stand on my own.

  “Okay,” I said when I could open my eyes and my head began to clear.

  Lucy hooked her arm under mine, and I made it to my feet. “Welcome back.”

  “Good to be back. Let’s go see Suarez,” I said, the words fighting to get out of my mouth, one syllable crashing into the next.

  “That train has left the station, and Nardelli and the superintendent are the only ones on it,” Lucy said. “I’m taking you home.”

  My legs were still equal parts jelly and jam, and the rest of me was doing a slow-motion version of twist and shout. The only thing missing was a robotic voice assuring me that resistance was futile.

  Joy met us at the front door, Lucy handing me off with a sad smile like I was a favorite uncle who’d had too much to drink at the family reunion. Roxy and Ruby swarmed around me, jumping and scratching my legs, indifferent to my condition as if to say Don’t make your problems our problems. I couldn’t and wouldn’t, sliding to the floor and gathering them in my lap.

  “Thanks for leaving me a message,” Joy said, when the dogs lost interest, having smelled my breath, nipped at my nose, and allowed me to scratch their bellies.

  She sat on the floor across from me, her head tilted to one side, her sweater hanging off her shoulders, billowing. Though she ate with gusto, she had struggled to put enough weight back on, and no matter what size she wore, it always looked too big.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday. I knew you would be worried, and I should have called.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “And I’m sorry about Kate. I don’t know what to tell you. She just showed up.”

  She let out a long sigh. “You never knew my mother. She died of breast cancer when I was a teenager. I remember sitting around the dinner table with her and my father and my brothers. Once she knew she was terminal, she talked about what would happen to my father after she was gone. She knew he’d be no good by himself, that he wouldn’t be able to take it being alone. She’d look at him across the table, pointing at him with her fork, and tell him it was fine with her if he could find someone who would take him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He’d laugh and say thanks a lot, but since he’d fooled her into marrying him there wasn’t much chance he’d get that lucky again.”

  “Your father was a wise man.”

  “Yes, and my mother had more wisdom. She was right about him. And I’m right about you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re like my father. You’re no good alone. So it’s okay with me. Whether it’s Kate or someone else.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just hugged her until I felt her tears on my neck. She pulled away, wiping her nose.

  “So, tell me what’s happening on your cases.”

  She was letting me know that she wasn’t hiding or walking away, that our home was my refuge and she was, in the truest sense of that tired cliche, there for me, making me feel at once grateful and shabby.

  “I solved one case today, but it wasn’t one I was working on.”

  She boosted me off the floor, spotting me as we climbed the stairs. I told her about my day, leaving nothing out while we undressed, showered, and fell into bed.

  “The boy from the gang who was at the Farm,” she said, “you think he works for this Cesar Mendez?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  “And you think Mendez is also looking for Brett Staley?”

  “You’re two for two.”

  “And you said that Jimmy Martin and Nick Staley are friends and that you think Brett Staley helped Frank Crenshaw buy the gun he used to kill his wife.”

  I rolled over on my side, propped on my elbow. “Don’t stop now. You’re on a roll.”

  She gave me a smile, the first real one I’d seen in days, and stroked my face with her palm. “Then they’re all connected, Frank Crenshaw, the Staleys, Jimmy Martin, and Mendez. The question is how? Figure that out, and you’ll be home in time for dinner tomorrow night.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and turned off the light. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, my eyes adjusting to the dark, the final spasms of the long day bouncing me from the inside out, my brain clear enough to know that her last question was the right question, but too muddled to hazard an answer. I reached for her hand, squeezing it beneath the covers.

  “How was your day?”

  “Go to sleep. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “I don’t deserve you.”

  “You never did, but that’s okay. Even a blind squirrel gets lucky and finds an acorn now and then.”

  “A blind squirrel? Really?”

  “I read it somewhere. No shut up and go to sleep.”

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Braylon Jennings was sitting in my kitchen when I wandered in the next morning, drinking my coffee, reading my newspaper. Joy was eying him with crossed arms, the dogs flanking her, tails down, casting their votes with soft growls. I was wearing the T-shirt and boxer shorts I’d slept in, scratching my crotch, tasting my morning breath.

  “You look like hell,” Jennings said.

  If he’d been a dog, he’d have peed on the floor, staking his claim to my territory, and if I’d been a dog, I’d have bit him in the ass.

  “Get out.”

  He folded the newspaper, sipped his coffee, and leaned back in his chair. “Your ex-wife invited me in. She’s got better manners than you do.”

  “He said it couldn’t wait, Jack. I’m sorry.”

  I picked up Jennings’s coffee cup, poured it out in the sink, and pointed to the front of the house. “Get out. You want to talk to me, make an appointment.”

  “You got a short memory, Jack. Must be all that shaking. Tell you what, I’ll wait in my car while you get dressed.”

  I followed him to the door. He glanced at his watch. “Hurry it up,” he said. “I’ve got a full day.”

  There were two ways I could deal with Jennings: wait for him to tell me how high to jump, or push back, figuring he needed me enough to take a certain amount of flack until he got what he wanted. If I made it too easy for him, he’d use me till he used me up, and if I busted his chops too hard, he’d make good on his promise to throw Roni Chase back in the soup. It was that prospect that made me shave, dress, strap my gun on my hip, and sneak out the back door, climb over our fence, cut through our neighbor’s backyard, and get on a bus at Sixty-third and Brookside, Joy’s question from the night before rattling around in my head.

  Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley were first cousins. Jimmy Martin and Nick grew up together and were army buddies. Frank was in the scrap business, Nick sold bread and milk, and Jimmy worked construction. Their relationships were typical, friends and family, lifetimes spent in the daily struggle, grateful for the good times and sorry for the bad times, wondering whether they’d be missed or remembered when it was all over. Brett Staley tied his father and cousin to Cesar
Mendez, but that left Jimmy Martin as the odd man out, his connection to Mendez the missing piece of the puzzle.

  I would make good on my side of the deal with Jennings and give him what I had about the stolen guns, which was more guesswork than fact, but I wasn’t going to do that until I was satisfied that Roni was in the clear. If Frank Crenshaw, the Staleys, and Jimmy Martin were into something with Cesar Mendez, the blowback could easily drown her.

  She kept the books for Crenshaw and Nick Staley, and she dated Brett. Those connections would deafen the feds to her denials that she had no idea what they were doing. And she was already working without a net, offering no explanation for how her gun had been used to kill Crenshaw and refusing to talk to me. The only way I could protect her from Jennings and whatever else was happening was to figure out where she fit in.

  I got off the bus on Broadway at Thirty-eighth, taking the stairs two at a time to Simon’s office. I hadn’t spoken to him since Lucy gave him the files on the Martin and Montgomery cases. I needed to work the puzzle with him. I breezed through the door, stopping short when I saw Jennings sitting in my chair, Lucy and Simon standing behind Simon’s desk, glaring, Kate along another wall, taking X-rays of Jennings.

  He pointed his finger at me. “You got more balls than sense. I give you that. And don’t tell me to get out. I let you get away with that crap in front of your ex-wife, but I’m not taking any more shit off of you unless you want Roni Chase auditioning for penitentiary girlfriend of the week.”

  “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “You didn’t come out the front door, so I figured you went out the back. I knew you weren’t going to walk all day, which meant you’d take the bus, just like you did going downtown yesterday. I turned the corner onto Brookside when you were paying your fare. When I saw which bus you were on, I guessed you were coming here, and if you weren’t, I knew these good people would know how to reach you and that they would understand the importance of cooperating with federal law enforcement.”