Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  There was also a gyroscopically stabilized infrared camera mounted on the front of the right skid. Interesting. The little bird was painted a nondescript white and gray, but there was more to it than met the eye.

  The back of the helicopter was cramped and spartan. I slid in next to Casey. Between the two of us and the gun cases, there wasn’t much extra room. The pilot, a guy with a goatee and close-cropped salt and pepper hair, cocked his thumb at a pair of headsets hanging on brackets. Casey and I each put one on as Eddie climbed into the front seat.

  The sound-dampening headphones killed the skull-busting roar of the engine and blades, but my ears were still ringing. Eddie put on his own headset.

  “This is Jack. He used to fly these things in the Army. We’re about an hour and a half from Portland. We should set down and meet Bolle just in time to meet Alex at the airport.”

  Casey and I gave him a thumbs up, and then we were off. The helicopter gave a lurch and the ground fell away like we had been catapulted upwards. I could see the instrument panel over Jack’s shoulder. We leveled off at a thousand feet above ground level and he pointed the nose down and gathered speed. We headed north. I figured Jack was planning on following US 26 over the mountains, then dropping down into Portland.

  It had been years since I’d flown in a helicopter. It brought back not very pleasant memories of cruising over Mogadishu, Somalia, inhaling dust and the stink of cooking fires and burning tires while waiting for somebody to fling a rocket-propelled grenade at me. I had a million questions for Eddie but didn’t want to try to communicate over the scratchy headsets. Plus he would probably give me an inscrutable smile and tell me to wait until we could talk to Bolle.

  I looked over at Casey. She was staring out the window, but her eyelids were drooping. I was bone tired myself. As a young Ranger, I’d spent weeks at a time living on a couple of hours of sleep a night, but I’d been in my twenties then.

  I leaned my head back and fell into a restless, troubled sleep. I dreamed about death. I couldn’t tell you how many dead people I’d seen in my life. During the seventeen-hour gun battle in Mogadishu, there had been bodies in the street two and three deep, courtesy of the gun runs from helicopters just like this one. My time as a police patrol officer and detective had been punctuated by dead people. I’d literally hurdled dead bodies responding to a shooting rampage at a shopping mall. I’d found dead bodies dumped in parks, stuffed in car trunks, and laying in the middle of the street. Sometimes when I slept, they played through my head like a slide show.

  From that, I went to a replay of the shootout back in Portland. Only this time, the men trying to kill me didn’t fall. I lined up my pistol sights, squeezed the trigger perfectly, and they just laughed at me.

  I jerked awake, surprised to see that we were near the Columbia River. I guessed I’d been out for maybe an hour or so. I didn’t feel particularly rested. My eyes burned like they were full of sand. I needed to shower and brush my teeth. Casey was leaning against me, with her head resting on my shoulder. She was drooling on my shirt.

  From the view out the front windows of the helicopter, I could tell we were approaching Troutdale Airport. We were just east of Portland. We were headed for a helicopter landing pad with two black SUVs parked nearby. Jack set us down, light as a feather. It was hard to tell the exact moment when the skids touched the earth. There was only a gradual feeling of settling as the chopper’s weight transferred to the skids. He had the touch.

  I shook Casey awake and we both doffed our headsets. I climbed out, and again the roar of the helo assaulted my ears.

  Bolle got out of one of the Suburbans. He was tall, taller than me, but cadaverously lean. He wore an old-fashioned buzz cut, like somebody from the fifties, and a charcoal suit that probably cost more than some of the cars I’d owned.

  “I’m glad the two of you are here,” he yelled over the sound of the helicopter’s engine. “Let’s get inside and we can talk on the way to the airport.”

  We both nodded and got in the back of the Suburban. The door was unusually heavy, and the glass was thick and tinted green. The Suburban was armored. The heavy doors thunked shut, and it suddenly became much quieter. Bolle sat in the front passenger seat. The driver was a guy in his early thirties wearing a rugby shirt and jeans. The hipster beard and hairstyle fit in here in Portland, but in the rearview mirror, I could see that he had an older man’s eyes.

  Bolle turned in his seat to talk to us.

  “This is Dalton. It’s ok to speak in front of him,” Bolle said.

  Dalton gave us a nod and dropped the Suburban into gear.

  “We’ll make it to the airport in time to meet Dr. Pace,” Bolle said.

  I blinked. I wasn’t used to thinking of Alex as “Dr. Pace.” She was an MD, had worked as a pathologist for Multnomah county before getting wrapped up in last year’s madness.

  “I know you have many questions,” Bolle continued. “I wish I had more answers. I want to start off by showing you this.”

  He handed me a tablet. A video was paused on the screen, showing an empty lectern with a microphone.

  “This was filmed three nights ago at a fundraising event for the Oregon Faith and Justice Alliance.”

  I’d heard of the Oregon Faith and Justice Alliance. They were an activist group that seemed stuck on one message: the country was going to hell in a hand basket, and only white heterosexual men could save it. I wasn’t the most liberal of people, but these guys struck me as a bunch of assholes. They spent quite a bit of time protesting one thing or another in downtown Portland, and seemed to be surprisingly well funded when it came time to suing the police after we broke up some of their demonstrations.

  I pressed play on the screen. A man in a suit walked up. I recognized him immediately: Henderson Marshall, owner of Cascade Aviation, father of the late Gibson Marshall. Decades ago, Marshall had served a brief stint in the Army, then his history became murky. After a decade or so of working overseas for various government contractors, he somehow came up with the cash to start Cascade Aviation, which was widely known to be a CIA front company. They provided discrete transport to all sorts of garden spots like Afghanistan and Iraq. It was Marshall’s son, Gibson, who had been kidnapping young women in the United States and selling them overseas, with the help of Cascade Aviation employees. It was hard for me to believe Marshall had been ignorant of their little scheme.

  “Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and the crowd hushed. Marshall had a hell of a speaking voice, I had to give him that. He had that distinguished guy in his 60’s thing going for him. Dressed in a tailored suit, lean and fit, he exuded authority and experience.

  “I come to you tonight to ask for your help. All of my life I’ve dedicated myself to the service of this great country. I’ve sweated and sacrificed for decades, only to watch the principles upon which this country was founded slowly fade away. We’ve traded law and order, and rewarding old-fashioned hard work for political correctness and special interest politics. My family blazed a trail to settle in Oregon generations ago, and now we find ourselves surrounded by people who mock those pioneer values.”

  He paused for a second, his eyes darting around. A smattering of applause started in the room, then quickly it grew to a crescendo. Marshall needed to work on his act. His body language told me the applause had been planned. The crowd had probably been seeded with a couple people to get it started.

  It died out pretty quick and he continued. “Even though I’m at an age where I should be sitting by the fire, enjoying a good Louis L’Amour book and a good whiskey, I feel a responsibility to continue serving this country. I come before you today to announce my candidacy for the United States Senate.”

  Again, a pause and the room erupted into applause. It sounded more natural this time.

  “I will affiliate myself with no party, and I will take money from no one. I care enough about this that I’m going to pay for it out of my own pocket. That means I can say the things th
at need to be said, without worrying about making big donors happy. The first thing I have to say will make some people angry, but I’m going to say it anyway.”

  He stopped and looked around the room again. This time it was quiet. The guy did know how to work a crowd.

  “Over the last few generations, we’ve allowed our country to become corrupted by degenerate influences. This nation was founded by white, Christian people. It was based on white, Christian values. It is time for us to struggle for the very soul of our democracy. We need to fight! And I aim to lead that fight!”

  The applause sounded very real this time. It overwhelmed the microphone with white noise. Then the video ended.

  “Wow,” Casey said. “What an asshole.”

  I handed the tablet back to Bolle.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Bolle cocked an eyebrow at me. “You’re a loose end, Dent. You, Casey, Alex. Me. We’re all loose ends that could derail Marshall’s political ambitions. That’s why there were four men in that house waiting to kill you the other night.”

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  Bolle shrugged. “Crazier than being framed for trying to kill your partner?”

  My mouth clicked shut.

  Beside me, Casey muttered something about “taking our first steps into a larger world.”

  “Why is he doing this?” I asked. “What’s his angle?”

  “Hubris,” Bolle said. “Simple ego. A desire for the world to be exactly as he wills it. If you’re interested, I have a fifty-page psych profile you can read, but I think it’s pretty simple.”

  “What are you doing about this?” Casey asked.

  Bolle didn’t hesitate. “I’m going to make sure he doesn’t get elected the US Senate.”

  My first impulse at hearing that was to agree. It was still murky whether Marshall knew about the human trafficking ring, or if it had been a scheme cooked up by his employees. Even if he’d been innocent of that, he was the kind of person who I intuitively didn’t trust: rich, powerful and involved in some shadowy government contracts overseas.

  But the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable Bolle’s declaration made me. Cops were supposed to be impartial, to not try to influence the political landscape. During my time in the Army, I’d visited countries in both Africa and Central America where the cops were loyal to one political faction or another, not the law. I hadn’t liked what I’d seen.

  “What do you have on him?” I asked.

  Bolle turned and fixed me with that gaze that made me wonder if he really could read my mind.

  “I could indict every single executive in his company right now, except him. Rickson Todd, his operations manager? I’ve got a trail of illicit money leading from Dubai to Todd’s offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I’ve got similar evidence on his head of logistics, his chief pilot, and his foreign military sales director. But Marshall himself? I’ve got suspicions and guilt by association. Not enough to indict him. Yet.”

  “Yet?” I asked.

  “It’s there, Dent. I refuse to believe this man is an innocent dupe. He’s directly involved in the day to day operations of that company. Do you really think he didn’t know his employees were trafficking American women to other countries? Or that they were smuggling foreign nationals with terrorist ties into the country?”

  Last fall, we’d disrupted Rickson Todd’s human trafficking ring, terminally. In the process of rescuing a shipment of young women going out of the country, we’d discovered Todd’s people bringing a group of men into the country. They’d perished when the transport plane went up in a giant fireball, and a very convenient narrative had been created that blamed them for a terrorist attack on Cascade Aviation.

  “Who were those guys anyway?” I asked, remembering a group of faces lit by muzzle flashes and the flames from the burning aircraft.

  “They were all young men captured in either Iraq or Afghanistan by US forces. They were all suspected of being low-level foot soldiers.”

  “Where were they taking them? Some kind of secret prison?” That didn’t make sense. The US had been warehousing prisoners overseas for over a decade, but they’d worked very hard to avoid bringing them to US soil.

  “I suspect they were here to commit a terrorist attack,” Bolle said.

  I blinked at that. I’d pondered why those guys had been on that plane for months, but that hadn’t ever occurred to me.

  “What? But Cascade Aviation was flying them into the country.”

  Bolle gave me the kind of grin you gave little kids who were missing the point.

  “Yes. And if your agenda is making people afraid, so you can make them feel safe, terrorist attacks are pretty useful.”

  I chewed on that for a minute. Like most Americans, these days I got my news from the Internet. I’d learned long ago to ignore the “comments” section because it was usually full of the kind of conspiracy theory bullshit Bolle was spilling.

  Out the windshield, I could see that we were approaching the terminal at Portland International Airport. Bolle’s phone buzzed. He listened for a few seconds then nodded.

  “Ok. We’re right outside,” he said.

  He put the phone away and turned to me.

  “Alex’s plane has landed. I’ve got a man inside the airport already, but we’ve arranged for some delays with de-planing until we can all get inside.”

  We pulled up to the curb. I pulled my revolver out of my pocket and dropped it in my bag. I slung the bag over my shoulder, then opened the door and got out. I was turning around to tell Casey we’d be back soon when I saw her getting out behind me.

  I opened my mouth to ask her to stay behind, but she cocked her head and gave me a look.

  I shut my mouth. Now wasn’t the time to argue, plus, Casey had as much right to be here as anybody. She was the one that had almost gone for a long swim in the Pacific Ocean, after being thrown out of a plane.

  My desire for her to stay was partially driven by a desire to protect her, but also an uneasiness with her abilities. Casey was a tough, resourceful, smart person who excelled at her job, but she’d also never been in a gunfight. She was carrying a handgun. Driven by her fascination with all things mechanical and complicated, she was toting a Heckler and Koch P7 pistol. It was finely made but would have been one of my last choices due to its complicated nature.

  In the last six months, Casey had burned thousands of rounds of ammunition through her growing collection of eclectic firearms. She had acquired skills but wasn’t tested. I tended to group people into two categories: people I would trust around me in a gunfight and people I wouldn’t. It didn’t have anything to do with whether I liked them or not. There were people I liked that I wouldn’t want around me when the bullets flew, and people I didn’t like I’d trust to cover my back.

  This was why I always had trouble working in teams. I really did prefer to be alone.

  Eddie, Casey, and I followed Bolle into the terminal. Traffic in the airport was light. I started scanning the crowd, looking for threats. I didn’t care if I stuck out while I did it. Todd’s people were likely to have photographs of all of us.

  I stood right outside the area where incoming passengers exited the secure area. As usual, the TSA agents were making sure nobody brought in too much hair gel or a knitting needle and were oblivious to the four armed people standing right outside the barriers. At least the TSA folks here in Portland tended to be nice and polite.

  There was a guy across the concourse who caught my interest. White, 30’s, and athletic looking with a baggy shirt and jeans. He was watching the exit for arriving passengers, but he was also watching us. I caught him giving me the odd extra glance out of the corner of my eye.

  I looked sidelong at Bolle and he gave me a little head shake. Not one of his men then.

  There was a burble of voices, then people started coming out of the gate. Most of them were older folks, coming back from a vacation in the islanda. There were a smattering
of Hawaiian natives, and folks who were probably flying on business.

  Then there was Alex. I could see her in the middle of the crowd. She was tall, nearly six feet, and for some reason, there was a little bubble of space around her in the crush of people. She was wearing a t-shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. There was a backpack slung over one of her shoulders. Her face looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her, and her hair was shorter, barely below her shoulders.

  She recognized me from a dozen feet away. She looked surprised to see me. I walked towards her smiling and spreading my arms.

  “Dent?”

  I grabbed her in a hug, hoping she wouldn’t knee me in the balls. We’d parted on somewhat ambiguous terms.

  I whispered in her ear. “There are people here that might try to either snatch you or kill you. Will you please just come with me?”

  She stiffened. Then hugged me back.

  “OK.”

  “I’m going to hand you a bag. There’s a five-shot .38 in the outside pocket.”

  “OK,” she said again. I let go, stepped back, and handed her the bag.

  She gave a smile to Eddie and Casey, and a nod to Bolle, then we were headed for the door. Alex put her hand in the bag, no doubt around the grip of the .38. Even though I was trying to scan the crowd, I couldn’t help but glance at her. She was different somehow. There was something about how she carried herself, head upright, with her weight on the balls of her feet.

  Across the concourse, polo shirt boy wasn’t even trying to be discreet. He was staring at us and talking into a cell phone.

  “It might be best if we made arrangements for somebody to come for your luggage later,” I said.