Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

I looked at her, my anger had turned cold. She was pathetic.

  “That’s not up to me,” I said. “But honestly, I hope we figure out a way to put you in prison for a long time.”

  With that, I turned, walked out and gently shut the door behind me. From the other side came a wail like a wounded animal.

  I stood in the hall, breathing long and slow. The next door down the hall opened and Alex stepped out. She was deathly pale.

  “She spied on him. Set him up,” she said.

  I put my hand on the doorknob to the room Gina was in.

  “You can’t kill her,” I said.

  Alex’s eyes were big and round. Her fists were clenched.

  “I want to, so bad.”

  “I know, but you can’t.”

  Her nostrils flared, and for a second I thought she might try to push past me. Thanks to her months in Japan, she probably knew some ways to break Gina’s neck.

  “I think they were aiming for me,” I said.

  Alex nodded. “I wondered.”

  Bolle stepped out then. Looked at each of us.

  “I’m going to transfer her to another facility,” he said, deadpan.

  “That might be best,” Alex said. “I don’t think I can provide her with any more medical care. There’s a conflict of interest when you want to kill your patient.”

  With that, she turned and walked down the hall.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bolle called a meeting and we all gathered in the command center. At first, I didn’t think Alex was going to come, but she finally showed. She took the last available seat, across the table from me. Her mouth was set in a hard line, but she seemed calmer, more focused. I think she’d just walked through the same process I had: starting out wanting to kill Gina, then realizing that the real offenders were Marshall and Todd.

  Dalton was there, nursing an oversized mug of coffee. Also around the table were Eddie, Casey, Henry, Drogan, Byrd, Struecker, and Jack. The gang was all here.

  Bolle cleared his throat.

  “We attracted some attention yesterday. That’s not a criticism of those of you that rescued Mrs. Pace, just a statement of fact. We can’t throw flashbangs and fly helicopters around without people noticing.”

  I saw Alex wince at “Mrs. Pace.” Maybe I could ask Bolle not to call Gina that anymore.

  “We did well to get our hostage out of there when we did. We weren’t so lucky with the surviving suspect. In order to make peace with the locals, we housed him in the Clark County Jail.”

  Bolle’s little facility was totally off the radar. If we started housing prisoners here, we probably could be fairly accused of running a “black site,” an off the books detainee camp. What we were doing with Gina was pretty sketchy, but at least we could argue she was a witness that needed protection.

  Bolle hit his remote, and Pimple Face from yesterday stared back at us from one of the flat screens mounted on the wall. It was a booking photo, taken yesterday.

  “His name is Alvin Tolly. Juvenile record. Mostly minor stuff like dealing weed and vandalism. He recently became a probationary member of the West County Hammerheads, a white supremest group.”

  I’d heard of the Hammerheads before. They were a bunch of vicious losers. They were mostly a problem in the counties to the west and east of Portland, but we’d had the occasional run-in with them when I worked for the city.

  Bolle hit the remote again. Now we were looking at an old booking photo of Tattoo Guy. He looked a little younger and skinnier than when I’d last seen him, but I’d recognize him anywhere.

  “This man is Clarence Coban, but as an adult, he changed his name to Thor Wulfguard. He was, until yesterday, a fully patched member of the West County Hammerheads.”

  Eddie gave me a wink and a thumbs up. I felt like I shouldn’t take pride in killing somebody, but truth be told, I felt like the world would spin a little more freely on its axis. If the West County Hammerheads let Clarence, or Thor, or whatever the hell his name was, wear their patch on his jacket, it meant he’d done some bad things. The usual price of admission was something like beating a person of color until they were either dead or had some broken bones or raping a woman or something similarly heinous.

  “The local police did let me spend some quality time with young Mr. Tolly. After some initial resistance, he became enthusiastic about talking to me.”

  Bolle clicked his remote again. A video of Tolly started playing. He had on a prison orange jumpsuit and had a slack-jawed expression on his face.

  “So it was all Thor’s idea?” Bolle’s voice said from the speakers.

  “It totally was, man. I had to go along with it or Thor was going to kill me. I was looking for a chance to escape. I was going to run away and call the cops when those guys charged in and shot Thor. I thought we were being bombed man, it was crazy.”

  “So I’m sure Thor didn’t think of this by himself,” Bolle said. “Who put him up to it?”

  “It was all Curtis, man. Him and that big bald dude.”

  “Tell me about the bald man.”

  “He’s big, like really big. He’s old too, but still fit. He’s scary. Even scarier than Curtis.”

  “When did the bald guy show up?”

  “A couple months ago, far as I know. I used to be Curtis’s driver. I kept his ride clean, fetched him shit, picked up his women, stuff like that. I would take Curtis somewhere and he’d meet with this dude, but they’d always leave me in the car while they talked.”

  “Where did they meet?”

  “Restaurants mostly. But one time I drove Curtis out to that big nature park in Portland. He met the dude out there and they just walked around for a couple of hours while I sat in the car. It was like they were on a nature hike or something. Weird.”

  “Powell Butte?” Bolle asked. “Is that the place you’re talking about?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Powell Butte. Look, can I get a sandwich or something? And when can I get out of here?”

  The video cut off.

  “Needless to say, Alvin isn’t getting out of there any time soon. I did get him a sandwich though.”

  Bolle clicked again. Now we were looking at an aerial photo of a big green space.

  “For those of you who didn’t recognize the significance of that, Powell Butte reservoir is where the majority of the drinking water for the city of Portland is stored. The city built a giant underground water storage facility there a few years ago, to replace the open reservoirs that were over a hundred years old.”

  Bolle let that sink in for a second.

  Dalton leaned back in his chair.

  “Yeah, on the surface, that sounds troubling,” he said. “But that’s a hard target. You can’t poison that much water without attracting attention. Even with something really lethal, we’d be talking tractor-trailer loads of contaminants.”

  Bolle shook his head. “But what if you just want a display? What if your goal isn’t to kill people necessarily, but just scare people?”

  The room was silent for a minute while everybody chewed on that.

  “The drinking water for a million people passes through this system. All it will take is a hint that something is wrong with it and it will cause a mass panic that will cost millions of dollars. Marshall has been screaming for years that we aren’t doing enough to protect ourselves against terrorists, that our borders are too weak. A terrorist attack in Portland would play right to his strategy.”

  Casey spoke up. “But why these white power assholes? Isn’t Marshall’s whole shtick about how vulnerable we are to foreigners?”

  Bolle shrugged. “I think he would prefer to use somebody from overseas. In fact, we strongly suspect that’s what he was doing last fall. We think those men on the plane were destined to be used as patsies for some kind of attack. But time is running short. His election is coming up. I think what we’re seeing is their plan B.”

  That made sense, in a warped way. I’d long ago given up being shocked at the things other
people would do to advance their own agenda. I’d met sociopaths who lived in boxes down by the railroad tracks, but the ones that really scared me were the ones that lived in mansions.

  “Who is Curtis?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Bolle said and clicked again. Another mug shot appeared on the screen. This one was of an older man. He was still a skinhead though. You could tell not only by the shaved head but by the tattoos. He didn’t have any on his face, but the Nazi eagle on his chest came up all the way to his neck. I recognized him. He’d been at the house when the skinheads had tried to kill me. He was the older guy who had pulled up in the black Suburban and shot at me with the rifle.

  “He was out the house,” I said. “Where they tried to hit me.”

  Bolle nodded.

  “I’m not surprised. His name is Ragnar Curtis. He’s another name changer. He was originally named Marion Curtis, but changed it after his first stint in prison.”

  “Can’t say I blame him there,” Eddie said.

  “Hey, John Wayne’s real name was Marion,” Dalton said.

  Bolle looked annoyed at the interruption. “Curtis has worked his way up to leadership of the West County Hammerheads by virtue of brutality and animal cunning. The locals have gotten close to getting him on methamphetamine distribution charges on a couple of occasions, but they’ve never managed to get a good case on him.”

  The cops in Washington County had their hands full. In addition to the usual criminal street gangs, they had white supremacist gangs, some Asian organized crime, and a growing influx of Eastern European gangsters to boot. It was like playing whack a mole over there. While they were busy taking down one group, another one would metastasize.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Marshall and Todd have a tremendous number of resources. They’ve got former Special Forces guys, SEALs, people like that on their side. If he had sent four of those guys to kill me in that house, I’d be in a bag right now. Why is he screwing around with these peckerwoods?”

  Bolle sat down. “Getting into Marshall’s organization is like peeling an onion. On the outside, you’ve got a legitimate government contractor. Maybe legitimate isn’t the right word for a company that rips off the taxpayers to that degree, but the men who are involved think they are carrying out a worthy mission, just like when they were on active duty, only making more money.”

  I saw Dalton nodding his head. It made sense to me too.

  “The next layer is the drug smuggling and human trafficking. We suspect quite a bit of heroin made it into the country via Cascade Aviation planes. Most of those former military men didn’t know about that, but enough of them did to make it happen. Those men made hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Dalton was nodding his head at that too. Interesting. Not for the first time, I wondered what his story was.

  “We think fewer than half a dozen people at Cascade Aviation and Transnational Solutions knew about the human trafficking. Even men that could countenance heroin being brought to American shores would put a bullet in Todd’s head if they found out he was shipping American women overseas.”

  Dalton nodded at that too.

  “How many of those former military men are going to support a terrorist attack on American soil? Even one that is only designed to make a statement?”

  At one point in my life, I would have thought that number would be zero, but Todd himself was proof that wasn’t true.

  “So Todd and Marshall need cannon fodder,” Bolle said. “They’ve found that in the Hammerheads. They may honestly have some sympathies towards their beliefs too.”

  Bolle stood. “Today, I want us to take a two-pronged approach. Dent, Dalton, Eddie, and I are going to pay a visit to Powell Butte Reservoir. Everyone else is going to work on finding Ragnar Curtis. We’re going to run a combination of physical and electronic surveillance until we find him.”

  He looked at his watch. “We leave for the reservoir in an hour.”

  Everybody stood up and Alex headed for the coffee pot, which seemed like a good idea to me. I walked over to her. I wanted to ask her how she was but didn’t want to do it in front of everyone. She reached over, gave my hand a quick squeeze and gave me a half-smile. I guess in the back of my mind, I’d been worried she’d blame me for her dad getting killed by a bullet meant for me.

  “Guess while you’re out investigating, I’ll be standing by here in case somebody gets shot,” she said. “Try not to drum up any work for me, ok?”

  Bolle stepped forward. “Actually, I was hoping you could help us out with some other things. We’re short of people, and I was hoping to work you into the watch officer rotation.”

  Alex seemed grateful for something to do. As Bolle and Henry led her off to show her how all the radios and other equipment worked, she gave me a little wave. Before I left the room, I made sure Casey was the one sitting by the cell phone ministering equipment. She gave me a little wave of her own.

  I fueled up on coffee and headed back to our little trailer for a few minutes. I dug a burner phone out of my satchel and checked a Facebook group for buying and selling guitars in the Portland Metro area. There was an ad for a 1978 Shell Pink Fender Stratocaster, modified with Dimarzio pickups and a Floyd Rose tremolo.

  I dialed the number in the ad. Dale Williams answered.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s me,” I said. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Low and slow.”

  That was our all clear code. Anything else and we’d know the other man was in duress.

  “I think we underestimated the amount of attention that ad would generate,” Dale said. “I’ve gotten twelve phone calls since I posted it. I don’t even know what a Floyd Rose tremolo is.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I would have guessed the color would turn people off.”

  I briefed him about what was going on.

  “I wondered if that was you I saw on the news. I’m just sitting here in my hotel, avoiding the mini-bar, and watching too much cable TV. Portland really isn’t my kind of town. My boys are chomping at the bit to come out here and join in the fun, but so far they’re listening to their old man and running the ranch. I’ll check out this Powell Butte place. I’m in the mood for a little nature hike.”

  “Sounds good, Dale. I’ll keep you posted. You keep that guitar case handy.”

  “Will do, son. If I have to open it, I’ll sure as hell be playing somebody the blues.”

  I shut the phone. The conversation had been short, and since Casey was running the monitoring equipment, there wouldn’t be any record of the call in Bolle’s records.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Bolle, exactly. It was that I trusted Dale Williams more.

  Dale was my ace in the hole. If this thing went totally to shit, having a cranky old man on my side who could put .308 caliber holes in someone’s head from half a mile away seemed like a good idea.

  Part of me wanted to protect Dale. He had much more to lose than me.

  I wondered if, by the time this was over, he would wind up protecting me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dalton and I drove in one car. Bolle and Eddie went in another. Bolle apparently had another meeting later, and he wanted me and Dalton to be ready to roll in case something happened. We were driving around in a black BMW with a trunk full of guns. It was nice to work for an employer that understood the importance of quality vehicles that didn’t look like cop cars.

  It had been a long time since I’d been to Powell Butte park. I’d worked a case where a homeless man had been beaten nearly to death on one of the trails and never found a reason to go back. On the rare days that I did something to relax, I usually left Portland. I knew bad things happened everywhere, but when I visited other cities, I didn’t know exactly what those bad things were.

  There were a few more roads through the park than I remembered. They were all blocked off by two simple posts with a padlocked chain strung across them. It wasn’t exactly high security. The new parking lot
and bathrooms were nice though. The parking lot was empty except for us.

  I got out and stretched. Two vehicles were approaching. First was a pickup truck with a police-style light bar with “Water Bureau Security” stickers on the hood and sides. Then came a compact car I recognized because it had been parked in front of Lubbock’s house.

  Eddie and Bolle walked over to join us.

  “Looks like we’re about to meet my old boss,” I said.

  “This should be interesting,” Bolle said.

  The uniformed security guy got out first. He was a burly dude in his 50’s. At a few paces, you could confuse him for a cop. The uniform was a gray shirt over black pants, instead of the blue over blue the Portland cops wore, but he was wearing a badge and a duty belt. When you looked close though, you could see there was no gun hanging from the belt, and the badge said “security” instead of police. It looked like to me he had all the right stuff on to make somebody want to shoot at him, but nothing to shoot back with.

  He looked at each of us, probably trying to figure out which one of us was in charge. Bolle stepped forward and stuck out his hand.

  “Special Agent Sebastian Bolle.”

  “Zach Wilson.” He shook hands all around. The guy looked like a professional. His uniform was pressed and neat, boots were polished and his gear looked squared away.

  Bolle actually treated the security guard with some respect, I’ll give him that. Bolle not only came from the FBI, but he came from a rich east coast family to boot, but he greeted the security guy like a colleague and not an inferior. Bolle’s stock rose a little with me because of that. I’d been raised around blue-collar, working people who were doing whatever they needed to do to put food on the table.

  I couldn’t say the same for Lubbock. He walked up and didn’t even acknowledge his own guy with so much as a nod.

  “Special Agent Bolle,” Lubbock said, extending a hand.

  “Lovely to finally meet you, Lieutenant Lubbock,” Bolle said with a shark’s grin.

  Lubbock wasn’t technically a Lieutenant anymore. He’d taken early retirement from the police bureau, and the new gig at the Water Bureau was a civilian position.