by Cat Connor
“Going somewhere?” he asked, as the scruffy individual tried to unlock the driver’s door.
“Home,” he replied, with downcast eyes.
“Where’s home?” Caine asked. He opened his jacket just enough to reveal his gun and badge.
“Natural Bridge,” the young man replied. He stared a hole into the ground.
Caine rolled his eyes at me. We both knew this kid was no killer. He didn’t have the confidence to lie nor was he brazen enough to face us.
“Come on over here and give me those car keys,” Caine said, and held his hand out. “What’s your name, son?”
“Jimmy,” he replied. “Jimmy Turner.” He handed Caine the keys and stood on the sidewalk with his arms hanging by his sides.
His hands were rough and unkempt. His clothes seemed several sizes too big and well-worn. The pattern on his flannel shirt had long since faded into a nondescript beige blur, and he had oil and grease marks on his torn and ragged-bottomed jeans.
“Well, Jimmy Turner. I think your mama is going to be disappointed in you.”
“I didn’t do nuthin.’” Jimmy’s voice cracked a little.
“Let’s start with driving a car that doesn’t belong to you, and move on from there, shall we?”
“I’m under arrest?”
I smiled at Caine and whispered in his ear, “Jimmy’s none too bright.”
“No, Jimmy, you are helping us with our enquiry,” Caine said. “How old are you, son?”
“I’m twenty,” he replied. He kicked at stones with shoes that had seen better days. For the first time, Jimmy raised his eyes. He drawled, partly under his breath, “I’m not your son.”
Caine’s mouth twitched. “Well, son, you and I are going to have a chat.”
I motioned to Caine to step back with me for a moment. “I’ll go have a coffee with Mac. The real killer may show.” I’d heard some very strange things over the earpiece and I knew Caine had, too.
“Yeah, do that. You think Mac’s okay?”
“He seems odd, and it’s not like him.” Odd? He was whistling ‘Three Blind Mice’ in between bouts of random noises. He’d moved on from odd and had begun to freak me out.
“Go find out. I’ll have a talk to this young man, and then get someone to remove and impound the car.”
I said goodbye to Jimmy. He seemed a little special. I drove back to the café and parked in the lot. There was something peculiar going on with Mac. He was sitting facing a computer and didn’t see me approach. His hands were tapping out a beat on the desk as he chuckled to himself.
I took my earpiece from my ear and turned it off then dropped it into my shirt pocket.
“Hey, Mac.”
He looked over at me and appeared to have difficulty focusing for a second or two. “Ellie!” He leapt to his feet and grabbed me in a bear hug and swung me around before putting me down.
“You okay?” I asked while I made sure I was on my feet.
“I’m great!” He sat back down and reached for the coffee in front of him. I intercepted the cup and moved it away. He slurred, “Hey. Get your own.”
“I will in a minute, have to call Caine.” I walked away a few feet and watched him as I held my phone ready to make a call. He was not behaving anywhere near normal. Mac lit a cigarette and sat staring at the burning embers. My phone rang. Caine, pre-empting my call.
“And?”
“He’s high. I don’t know how, but he is.”
“I’m sending two agents over to you. They have been in the café for a few hours now.”
“Thanks.”
“He okay?”
“Seems to be. He’s quite entertaining ... I’ll deal with this, you sort out Jimmy.”
I hung up and dropped the phone into my pocket.
Mac called out to me, “Ellie! Dance with me?”
I smiled indulgently at him. I had no doubt he could hear music, but it wasn’t playing in my head, and he hated to dance.
“Check it out, Ellie, this is way cool.” He held out the burning cigarette and touched the ember with a finger.
“Mac, stop it!” I snatched the smoke from his hand and looked at his finger. “You’ve burned yourself.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” he replied, inspecting his finger.
“It will later.”
Footsteps came up behind me. I glanced over my shoulder as two agents came into view. I turned to face them and smiled. “Lee?” It was at least four years since I’d seen Lee. He was bigger than I remembered, but hadn’t aged at all. There was still a familiar smidge of Rambo mixed with rock star in Lee.
“Hey, Ellie,” he replied.
“Will you get a glass of iced water, please?” I asked, and held up Mac’s finger for him to see.
“Be right back.”
Mac found Lee’s presence amusing. “Oh, cool, General Lee.”
I looked up at the second agent. It had been too long. He grinned at me then spoke to Mac, “I’m Sam, General Lee’s partner.”
Mac smiled vacantly.
I attracted Sam’s attention with a question, “Did you see who brought Mac his coffee?”
“A pretty, little dark-haired chick. I’m on it,” Sam said, then strode away in the direction of the kitchen, leaving me stunned. The older he got, the more he looked like Mr. T, minus the bling, of course. I shook The A-Team theme song from my head as I wondered if Sam was scared to fly in an airplane.
Lee came back with the water. I set it on the desk and plunged Mac’s finger into it. Mac leaned back in his chair, his head tilted up, smiling at whatever he could see on the ceiling.
“What’s up there?” I asked. I hoped to find a clue as to what was happening in his head.
“Rainbows and butterflies. See? The small rainbow is trying to be a big rainbow.” He pointed. We looked. After in-depth inspection of the ceiling all I saw were the old ceiling lights and the need for fresh paint.
Lee and I looked at each other. “He’s tripping,” Lee mumbled. “Look at him ... he’s relaxed, feeling no pain, hallucinating.”
Sam came back holding a young girl by the elbow. He was short of breath and flushed. I gave him an enquiring glance.
“She ran when I asked her about the coffee.” Sam pressed the girl into an empty seat and spun it to face us. “This is Julie. She has something to tell you, Conway.”
“Go ahead, Julie.” She looked all of eighteen and scared. I gave her my undivided attention, which wasn’t easy with Mac asking me to dance every two seconds. He didn’t just want to dance, he wanted to dance on a rainbow.
“He said it wouldn’t hurt him, it was a joke.” She paused and looked at Mac, then up at me. “I was supposed to give him his coffee at the end of my shift then go home, but they asked me to do extra hours to cover for someone.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t really care why you are still here. What was in the coffee?”
“It was a clear liquid.”
I was losing my cool with the half-wit. “What kind of liquid?” I snapped.
“I don’t know, it was in a little bottle.”
“Where’s the bottle now?”
The girl shrugged.
Mac sang again. This time it was ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’
“What did this man say to you, exactly?” I asked, and leaned toward the girl. I wanted to pull my gun, hold it to her stupid temple and squeeze the trigger. Why would anyone put something in someone’s drink? People are dumb.
“He told me to put the stuff in his coffee and then take it to him. He said it wouldn’t hurt him.”
“How much were you paid?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Sam’s large hands hauled her to her feet, then he searched her pockets. I noticed he’d already pulled on latex gloves. He found a twenty-dollar bill in her jeans’ pocket.
“This it?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her voice trembled. Tears built up in her eyes.
Sam dropped the note into a small baggie and sealed it, then shoved
her back down.
“When and where did this happen?”
“Out back, around lunch time. I was taking a break. He must’ve been over by the trees behind the building.”
“Describe him.”
Lee stood ready, pen poised over his notebook. Mac had quit singing and was talking to the rainbow people.
“Tall. As tall as him.” Julie pointed to Lee. “But not big like him, more medium-sized.”
“So you’re saying he’s around six feet four inches and medium built?” Lee clarified her answer.
She nodded and said, “He was white, thirty maybe, old.”
I guess to an eighteen-year-old, thirty does seem old. Some days thirty feels old.
Mac chuckled. “It’s General Lee.” Then managed to spill the water all over himself.
Sam swooped in, with surprising agility and a bunch of napkins and mopped it up.
Mac chuckled louder. “You’re Mr. T?”
Sam grinned. “I’m whoever you need me to be, you just be happy, yeah?”
Mac’s hand reached up and touched Sam’s bald head. “How do you get your head so smooth and shiny?”
Sam’s grin grew even wider, exposing his brilliant white teeth. “A bit of elbow grease goes a long way. You ask those rainbow people of yours.”
Oh man! My head was starting to pound. I needed coffee. I was in a café and I didn’t have a coffee! I listened to the girl and to Mac’s ramblings.
“He was nice looking, had blue eyes and very dark hair. He had on jeans and a mid-blue hooded sweater.”
Since when was ‘nice looking’ a description we could use?
A slow dawning occurred – decoy. The bastard had screwed us again. Two decoys for what? Jimmy wasn’t a killer. Why drug Mac?
The answer was obvious: to keep us busy and off balance.
Julie said one more thing and I heard it echo through my head. “Cornflakes.”
“What?” I asked. “What about cornflakes?”
“He told me the stuff in the coffee was like liquid cornflakes.”
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. “Ketamine,” I said and stared at the girl.”
Lee tapped my shoulder. “If he’s been given ketamine then by the look of him, he’s had just enough to put him into K-land. It should only last an hour or so.”
“K-land?”
“He’s tripping, With K you either go to K-land, which has been described as a magical wonderland ... or you do the K-hole thing, which is like a near-death experience, or so they say.” Lee kept his voice low and even. “The thing now is, let’s make sure he stays happy ... even tones, no raised voices. We don’t want him agitated, and we don’t want to turn this trip into a scary thing.”
“Okay. Will he remember this?”
“Maybe, some do, some don’t.”
Mac interrupted us, “Heeeeey, General Lee?”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t you be really, really old now?” Mac spun around in his chair with his head back watching the ceiling the whole time. “The rainbow people said you were really old.”
“Yep, I’m an old bastard, Mac,” Lee replied. “Mind if I sit with you a bit?”
“Nope.” He tipped his head further back and asked the Rainbow people if they minded; apparently they didn’t mind either. “See the little tiny rainbow person?” Mac pointed to the ceiling. “That’s a new one, you can tell ‘cos the colors aren’t as bright as the others.”
Lee perched on the desk and conversed with the rainbow people and Mac. For one surreal instance, the whole thing seemed very normal.
Sam hauled Julie to her feet a second time and said to me, “I’ll take this girly outside. We’ll get a full description of this man to Caine, and he’ll decide whether we press charges or not.”
I glared at him. “She will be charged. I’m thinking we start with reckless endangerment and move on up from there.”
Sam smiled, turning a little, so the girl couldn’t see his face. “Mac’s one of us, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Drugging a federal agent carries a high penalty. I wouldn’t want to be you, kid. Administering a Schedule-3 controlled substance to a fed ...” he said. He spun her to face him and shook his head from side to side. I could’ve sworn I heard him whisper “Pity the fool!”
The girl looked ill. “I’d better get her out before she pukes.”
“Okay. I’ll stay here with Mac.”
Lee moved to get a chair, which he pulled past Mac to sit on the window side of him. I sat on the other side. It was killing me knowing the bastard drugged Mac, but he was pretty damn amusing. I had a growing need for coffee. The low levels of caffeine in my system were threatening to tip my mood into a downward spiral.
“I’m going for coffee,” I told Lee and Mac. I stood up then stooped and kissed Mac’s forehead.
He smiled up at me. “You’re my girlfriend.”
I smiled back. “Yes, I am.”
I ordered us coffee and watched as it was made. Something forced its way into my consciousness causing me to tug my phone from my pocket and call Caine.
There were no niceties as I vocalized my thoughts. “Jimmy Turner ... decoy one. Mac being drugged ... decoy two. Why?”
“To throw us off balance,” he replied with customary calmness. “To pull manpower away from his target or prove how clever he is.”
“What the hell does he want?”
“We’re getting closer to finding that out. Every time he does something the odds of discovery go up. I’m almost done with Jimmy then I’ll meet with Sam and the girl.”
“We’re stuck here till Mac feels better.” I looked down at the counter. Our coffee was ready. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Leave his mic on, so I can monitor the situation.”
“Will do.”
I shoved the phone in my pocket and paid for the coffee. I picked up the tray and headed back to Lee and Mac.
I almost dropped the tray when I heard Mac say, “Just stop clicking the damn thing!” I heard his mother’s voice getting louder and angrier. Mac said, “Why is it so hard for you to follow simple instructions?”
I glared at Lee and snapped, “We were keeping him happy ... what’s with the phone?”
“It’s his mom,” he replied. “How bad can it be?”
Okay, it was unfair of me to be snappish with Lee. He didn’t know about Mac’s mother.
“Trust me, Lee!” I grimaced and turned my attention to Mac. “... is that your Mom?”
Mac didn’t attempt to shield the phone as he spoke to me, “She’s fuc’n nuts, Ellie. Silly bitch keeps clicking and clicking and screaming and clicking.”
Uh oh.
I smiled at Mac and slipped the phone from his hand into mine. “Mrs. Connelly, it’s Ellie.” I could hear her angry raspy breathing down the phone. “Mac’s not very well. I’ll get back to you soon and explain.”
She screamed at me, “He called me a bitch!”
“I’m sorry. I’ll explain later.” How the hell I would manage that I didn’t know. She would not let this one go in a hurry.
She yelled some more, “He can’t speak to me like that!”
“I have to go now.”
I hung up and once again blocked her number. This time I kept Mac’s phone in my pocket. He leaned back in the chair, making random comments to the rainbow people about how he was the HP help desk.
Lee looked over at me. “He seems calm enough.”
He wasn’t so much calm as mellow. Mac was in a happy place. “For now,” I replied. “Wait till this wears off and he finds out what he’s done.”
I sipped my coffee and smoked a cigarette, letting Mac have a drag every now and then. I didn’t want him to hold anything that could hurt him. Turning my chair so I could see Mac and into the café, my mind sifted through the most recent events.
My car. Oh, man, he got me out of my car. So much for swapping the Explorer, the clever little shit knows what I’m driving again
.
I looked at Lee. “Could either of you see my car before you came over to help me out?”
“Yeah, we both could. We saw you park and come in.” His congenial expression fell, “Shit!”
“Who else is in here?”
“No one, now. There were four of us. Caine called two to help him. Sam’s outside with the chick. I’m with you.” Lee’s brown eyes widened, “We’ve been played. We underestimated the motherfucker.”
“Well, fuck!”
So far, we’re not doing too well. The FBI foiled again by a lone nutter and his ability to distract.
Lee’s phone rang. I knew it was Caine.
“I’m on it, boss,” Lee said then hung up. He lifted his eyes to mine. “He wants you and Mac to stay in here. We’ve got four more agents arriving in less than ten minutes … when they arrive I’ll go out and check the car.”
I had trouble believing that all this was just so he could hide another body in a car in a public place. I don’t know why it was difficult for me to believe. Maybe I just didn’t want to.
My phone rang. I was very tired of hearing cell phones ring. Caine again. “I got a call back from Virginia Beach. Darius Senton left his home early yesterday morning. There have been no sightings since. No signs of struggle in his house. He lives alone. Neighbors reported seeing him leave in the company of another man. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at the time.”
“So is he the Unsub or is he dead?”
It would be too easy for him to be the Unsub.
“Good question, which hopefully we can answer soon.” Caine sounded tired. He even sounded annoyed.
“Anything else?”
“Just another complication. DEA are screaming at me. They’ve lost an agent. He disappeared thirty-six hours ago.”
Nope. I didn’t see how that was our problem. They should’ve been more careful. It’s not our fault if they were careless and misplaced someone.
“And?”
“You’re going to love this ... don’t yell at me!” He paused for breath, “They had an agent in Cobwebs. Ever seen the nickname 4urxtc?”
“Yes, a regular for maybe nine months or more.”
“Well, he’s missing. They’re hollering that we jeopardized an ongoing investigation into Carter’s activities within the chat room.”
“Like hell we did. They understand the man is dead, right? Rather makes the investigation into his activities difficult, doesn’t it? If they had info, they should’ve come forward. What happened to sharing pertinent information? I didn’t even know there was an agent in the room.”
