A Devil's Bargain

by Jonathan Watkins

  He saw a jumble of questions appear in their eyes, but neither of them spoke them aloud, so Luther continued on.

  “One of our client’s employees took Joe. From what I know, he pressed Joe for answers. Joe being Joe, all he gave up were crude sexual invitations.”

  “That sounds like Joe,” Dick said under his breath.

  “When the client’s man couldn’t get any information quickly, the client reached out to the Fletcher Group. We’ve performed sensitive work for him in the past. I agreed to take the matter over. That’s why we’re here. Our job is to meet the client’s man on their property in Bloomfield Hills. We’ll take custody of Joe under the auspice that we will continue to interrogate him to discern his identity and discover why he was poking into our client’s sensitive business. We will also take possession of a hard drive. That is the full and total extent of what we will do. We’ll get Joe back home and that will be the end of any involvement the two of you will have in the matter. Understood?”

  Dick scrunched up his face to indicate he still had questions, but it was Carmen who spoke first.

  “We’re deceiving the client into thinking we don’t know who Joe is or what he was doing.”

  “Correct. Our client is powerful.”

  “All our clients are powerful,” Dick said.

  “Not like this one. We can’t afford for him to think we’ve betrayed him. If he knew Joe was one of ours and that Joe was poking into an exceptionally delicate private affair...well, the word calamitous springs to mind. Once we extract Joe and take possession of the incriminating evidence on the hard drive, a verisimilitudinous lie will be presented to the client in which what seemed like a threat to his concerns was, upon investigation, no more than a Chimera.”

  Dick pursed his lips and cocked his head to one side in blatant consternation.

  “Hell, I’ll give you props for getting that out without spraining your tongue,” he said.

  “A believable cover story,” Luther explained. “A lie that has the ring of truth. We’ll feed the client a story that explains away the problem and puts him fully at ease.”

  “And we’re certain Joe hasn’t compromised us?” Carmen pressed.

  “I spoke on the phone with the man who is holding him. He sounds agreeable.”

  “Maybe he’s just being verse-ah-multitude-ous,” Dick drawled and for the first time since Luther had met the rigid woman, Carmen Ras cracked a grin.

  “That’s why I employ the two of you, isn’t it?”

  “What about Gil?” Dick said. “Where’s he fit into this shit show?”

  Luther almost said, Gil’s dead. He almost told them Gil was a corpse in a Detroit morgue and that this fact was undoubtedly due in some way to his heedless and vexing younger brother. It would have been gratifying to hear himself say the words, to release that particular pressure valve and share his burgeoning sense of doom with the two people in front of him.

  He refrained.

  They were subordinates and whatever the real truth of how Gil Sharps had come to die behind the bar Darren frequented turned out to be, neither Dick nor Carmen needed to know it. At least, not yet.

  “Gil isn’t the issue,” he snapped and waved his hand in the air to dismiss the idea. “Forget Gil. I’ve explained to you what needs doing. Grab the medical bag and whatever else we need and let’s move.”

  Luther turned and opened the driver’s door to the SUV. The keys were resting on the seat and he reached for them, but not before Dick shot an arm in and snatched them away. Luther spun around and Dick was pointing a finger at him.

  “Nope,” Dick said. “See, that’s what me and Carmen were saying. This is fieldwork. You want to only tell us the bare minimum? Okay. That ain’t how I’d do it, but you’re the boss, so that’s your call. But tactics is our call. Carmen has the most training with being behind the wheel in stressful situations. So she drives.”

  Dick tossed the keys to Carmen and she caught them without looking away from Luther.

  “When we are outside the vehicle,” she said, “Dick will stay ahead of you and to your left. I will stay behind and to your right. We will accompany you at all times, sir, until we are back in the vehicle. Those are the rules.”

  “There is exactly one person in this organization who makes rules, Ms. Ras,” Luther snapped, and immediately wished he could swallow the words back down his throat. He sounded peevish and defensive.

  “Your safety is our only concern, sir.”

  Luther stepped to the rear driver’s side door of the SUV and opened it. He forced himself to nod in acquiescence and he said, “Alright. What else? Are there any other decrees you two formulated that you might want to pass down from on high?”

  Carmen climbed up into the driver’s seat and Dick hefted the duffel bag full of medical supplies off the hangar floor. He grinned at Luther and said, “Oh, there’s plenty more where that came from, boss. But we can cover that on the drive.”

  * * *

  “You’re not going to bring it up?”

  Darren had been sitting in silence on the other side of Judge Hodgens’s antique mahogany desk, scanning the plaques, certificates, and awards that decorated the walls and shelves of her chambers. Nothing had changed since the last time he’d been summoned to appear before her.

  “Bring what up?” he said.

  “I expected to see you three days ago.”

  “Oh. That. I thought you might have meant the fact that I have a case in front of you and it’s a bit improper to be having this powwow. But, no, I wasn’t going to bring up either issue.”

  Her patient, neutral expression did not change, but Darren suspected he’d annoyed her. Chelsea Hodgens wasn’t fond of sarcasm. She was a middle-aged woman with dark brown hair, an olive complexion, and a disposition that could shift from earthy warmth to abysmal chill without any steps in between.

  “Your name isn’t listed on the appearance notice,” she said. “As of right now, only Issabella is on the case. So there’s nothing untoward about you being here so long as we avoid that topic.”

  Darren shrugged and said, “I’m fine with it, either way. Untoward is a good color on me.”

  “You look utterly disheveled.”

  “It’s been a strange couple days,” he admitted. “Still, Theresa’s got it a damn sight worse, so I can’t complain. Hey, how did you wind up getting assigned the case in district court anyway?”

  “We can’t discuss that, Darren. I didn’t call you up here to get myself censured for discussing a pending case without both sides present.”

  “Loud and clear. Have you got anything to drink?”

  He watched her eyes widen in surprise and wished he hadn’t said it.

  “It’s hardly two in the afternoon.”

  “Forget it. I’m just worn down. Forget I asked.”

  He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. It wasn’t just the exhaustion of sleeplessness or the turbulent anxieties of Theresa’s plight and Gil Sharps’s murder. He was stooped and suddenly bone-weary because he knew why he was here and dreaded the ritual she was going to force him to perform before allowing him to leave her chambers.

  “Darren, are you alright?”

  He sat up straight and threw his arms out in the air, agitated, as he said, “What are we doing, Chelsea? Why are we still putting on this show for each other? I wrote a motion to quash a search warrant. You granted the motion. James Klodd walked. There. I acknowledge the facts. What more should I do? Five years in. What do I do now that I haven’t done each year before?”

  Chelsea Hodgens weathered the outburst without outward emotion. When he fell silent again, she crossed her arms across her chest and stared at him like he was a puzzle she could turn over in her hands, scrutinize, and hopefully find something akin to a solution
.

  “There’s nothing new to see here,” he sighed. “You can stop looking.”

  “Do you still see her?” she asked quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Shoshanna Green. Do you still see her?”

  Darren let out a dry chuckle and knew the dance had begun; that same formal back-and-forth they’d done so many times before, where the Judge who’d freed a child killer attempted to counsel and console the lawyer who’d prompted her to do it. In the past, Darren had been all too willing to cooperate. Her concern for him—her constant and explicit yearning to see him set free of his guilt—had been welcome. Their shared remorse was unique and it had formed a bond between them that had not existed before James Klodd walked out of her court a free man.

  “Sometimes,” Darren answered eventually, his exasperation softening as he thought back over all the times Judge Hodgens had stepped in and done her best to salvage him from his own recklessness. She was a boon, he knew. She deserved a few minutes of honesty from him, at the least.

  “The last time was a week ago. I was driving out to Dearborn to see a client. I passed a little city park and she was there, just in the corner of my eye. You know? Just a flash of color. But I knew it was her. I knew it as sure as I’ve ever known anything, Chelsea.”

  She nodded, brushed an errant strand of brown hair out of her eyes, and said, “But it wasn’t.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t her. I hit the brakes and came to a screaming stop right there in the middle of the street. Got out of the car and ran over to the park without even thinking about it. And it wasn’t her. It was a little girl in a green shirt. Just not the right little girl.”

  “Shoshanna wasn’t wearing a green shirt when Klodd abducted her, Darren.”

  “I know. She was wearing a pink top and jean shorts. But when I see her she’s wearing green. I guess because of her last name. A subconscious association, I suppose.” Darren shook his head ruefully and said, “How about you? Does Her Honor ever suffer from Sudden Shoshanna Sighting Syndrome?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Not as often as before.”

  Darren yawned into his fist.

  “You’ve been running yourself ragged,” she said. “More ragged than usual. This business with your brother...”

  “You know about that?”

  “Judges talk, Darren. I ran into Judge Holder at a sentencing-reform seminar. She said she was a hair away from holding you in contempt after you exploded over her dismissal of a wrongful death claim against your brother. I always poke my nose in when I hear your name, so she told me you’ve been filing every legal attack you could muster with every agency there is. What’s the story there? I didn’t even know you had a brother.”

  Darren was silent. He didn’t know what to say. As worried and caring as her expression was right then, Darren knew she could not help him.

  “You don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “I’m always willing to listen, Darren. I hope you know that.”

  “I do. But it’s over.”

  “The trouble with your brother?”

  “Yes,” he answered, because it was the least complicated lie—the easiest way to move off the topic without inventing things that weren’t true. It wasn’t over. Gil Sharps. James Klodd. Whatever was inside that suitcase. None of it was over and the sooner he earned Chelsea’s dismissal, the sooner he could get back to it all.

  “It was your job to write that motion,” she said. “If you hadn’t attacked the search warrant on Klodd’s house you would have been betraying your own client.”

  Darren scowled and shot back, “Five years isn’t enough time for me to swallow that, Chelsea. I wrote it. You upheld it. He walked. And we’re stuck with the consequences, you and me. Five years or five hundred, it doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand that yet? We’re never going to be free of it, either of us.”

  Judge Hodgens looked down at her hands in her lap, her worry for him seeming to turn inward as her voice dropped to a solemn hush.

  “Maybe that’s so,” she agreed. “Maybe that’s so.”

  * * *

  Easily winning the trivia game seemed to lift Reggie’s spirits. To Krane’s genuine surprise, the skinny heir of the Chalmers clan helped clean up his dinner mess without any prompting.

  When the game was tucked away again on a shelf in the library and the dishes were loaded into the washer, Reggie put his hands on his narrow hips and said, “We can do other things. Let’s do other things, John.”

  Krane wiped the counter with a dishrag and hoped his afternoon of indulging Reggie hadn’t made the man-child think they were friends now.

  “Like what?”

  “More games. I like games.”

  “No time,” he answered. “We have to get you locked away for when those men come.”

  “After that, then. When they leave we can do things, John.”

  Krane said they would, just to say it, and Reggie was agreeable the whole way down the stairs to the fetid length of hallway outside his suite of rooms.

  “If you let me on the computer I can show you some cool things,” Reggie promised, and Krane didn’t ask what things Reggie might think of as cool, because he was certain the answer would unsettle him. Reggie’s interests outside of trivia seemed to consist only of thoroughly disturbing pornography, shooting assault weapons at a tennis court wall, and eating tremendous amounts of anything that was set in front of him.

  Carnality, violence, and consumption were a triumvirate for him, one bleeding into the other. He was all appetite. Even his seemingly vast internal storehouse of trivia seemed like the result of indiscriminately taking facts in, possessing them. Reggie could recite some old English poem like a computer spitting out data, but Krane suspected that if he ever asked him to explain why the poem was considered worth remembering, the man-child wouldn’t even understand the question.

  “We can do fun things,” Reggie insisted.

  “Maybe,” Krane said. “We’ll see once the men are gone.”

  “Great. See you soon, John,” Reggie declared with an enthusiastic cheer Krane had never seen him display, before slipping through the steel door of his private suite of rooms and disappearing. The stench intensified, rolling out in that brief moment when the door was open.

  Krane held his breath and punched in the nine-digit code that triggered the building’s lockdown protocol. He heard the steel bolt slide into place inside the door to Reggie’s rooms and, satisfied, jogged up the stairs to the first floor before letting his breath out again.

  He made his way up to the security closet and sat down in front of the monitor. For a while, he passed the time toggling from one camera feed to the next. The entire grounds, inside and out, were covered. With one exception. There was no feed to Reggie’s suite of rooms. He was a prisoner, to be sure. But he was a prisoner who was afforded a great deal of privacy.

  Nothing moved out on the grounds. Reggie was safely locked away. The man who had started all of this nonsense was secure inside the old cottage. Krane looked at his watch. Not long now. They would be here soon. He would have to tap in the code to unlock the main gate when they arrived.

  Krane kept toggling through the camera feeds. He felt uneasy. He knew why.

  “We’re all on the same team,” he said aloud. That’s what the caller had stressed. They were just doing business.

  Then why bring it up? Why even mention it?

  Krane got on his feet and was heading for the stairs without having formed the conscious decision to do so. When he was back on the ground floor, he didn’t stop until he was in front of the gun safe in his bedroom.

  “Fuck it,” he told himself. “Trust your gut.”

  It was a sentiment he’d drilled into his men, back when he’d st
ill had men to call his.

  Trust your gut. Trust your training. If something feels wrong, it probably is wrong. The kid you see on the street selling bootleg DVDs today might be the kid who sets the IED that blows your brothers to pieces tomorrow. Trust your gut. Take nothing at face value in the sandbox, gentlemen. Enemies will make every effort to look like friends until they decide the time is right to strike.

  He’d made the speech dozens of times. Never, in all of the chaotic ugliness of the desert, had that advice been proven wrong. Even when his command had been stripped from him and he’d been shipped home to confront the disgrace of court martial, not even his most vociferous condemners had suggested that Krane had been anything but an exemplary leader of men.

  Mostly, the narrative from the other side was that he had snapped. John Krane was an effective and cunning soldier who had come undone under the pressure of occupying a hostile population bent on thwarting his missions. He’d shot three Iraqi men and a boy in the backs of their heads and dumped their corpses in a rural ditch. Murderer? Certainly. An ineffective leader? Not according the testimonials from his men.

  Krane nodded to himself and made the decision to trust his gut. Visitors would be arriving soon. They would wear friendly faces. But he could not know what intention dwelled behind their smiles. Maybe it was just business. Maybe it wasn’t. He needed to be prepared.

  Krane opened the gun safe and selected a weapon.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sparks leapt in all directions as soon as Issabella touched the saw blade to the suitcase and she smiled, her nine-dollar safety goggles affixed firmly in place.

  When the saw began to jounce and kick against the suitcase, she gripped it tighter and adjusted the angle of the blade. Sparks flew with greater ferocity. Bits of steel followed, showering down to the floor.

  A minute of that, and her arms began to tire from the struggle to keep the reciprocating saw from jerking and thrashing away. She released its trigger, pulled it away from the suitcase, and squinted through her fogging goggles at her handiwork.