“Are they all being checked out before we go in?” I asked Jo.
“I don’t know,” Jo said. She picked up the handset. “Do you have visual on the signal? It should be within one hundred feet of us.”
“Looking,” Susan replied. “It could be any of the cars, or even a building. As soon as HRT checks out the nearby warehouse on that list Jarek gave us, we can start sending plainclothes in with a handheld, and see what vehicle it is.”
“What if he already dumped the tracker?” I asked Jo.
“I’m worried about that too,” Jo said.
There was nothing to do but wait.
“Ok, so I’m your friend, and feelings get mixed up. You aren’t in love, nor do you want a relationship with me. Right?” I asked her.
“Dammit Jarek,” she said, exasperated. “No, no I don’t. You’re my boss, and what we did was a mistake. I wish you would just drop it.”
“Ok. I’m sorry you regret it. I won’t bring it up any more,” I said, feeling hurt but not knowing how to communicate that.
“I’m sorry, I’m just all… I shouldn’t have yelled. Sex is more complicated emotionally for women than it is for men. I know you don’t express yourself the same way other people do, but it messes with my head, you know? When we were all in your apartment and you were getting in the shower, I just went with it. I know you can’t do a relationship, it’s just that you’re so brutally honest with me that I feel like we’re already a team. I don’t want a relationship with you because I’m not going to fuck this up for either of us. We’re a good team. And, for the record, I said mistake, not regret.”
I nodded, completely understanding. “Thank you.”
“Look, it’s moving!” Johanna said.
“All units hold,” a voice said over the tactical net.
“Where is it?” I asked her, straining to make out the map in the front seat.
“It’s coming right this way. Good thing these windows are tinted,” Jo said.
“That’s not good. There’s two blacked-out SUVs parked, one behind the other. Do you see the car?”
As Jo talked, I saw an old homeless man walking down the street. He was pulling pop bottles out of the trash cans that were set apart every twenty feet. Part of the city’s effort to help clean everything up. Down here in Detroit, pop bottles got you ten cents. A good-sized bag could hold a few dollars’ worth. It was a worthy goal to shoot for. In a small amount of time, they could get enough for a meal or a bottle of whatever’s cheap.
I looked at the map on the tablet, squinting again.
“Jo, let me see that,” I asked her, reaching.
She handed me the tablet. I had a four-foot window of margin, and I could see the flashing red dot getting closer. It was coming down the right side of the road. I looked up again and saw the bum, bending over to check another can. Now that he was closer, I could make out a suit jacket underneath one arm.
“Johanna! He’s got the coat. Martin’s dumped the tracker!”
“Susan, stand by,” Jo said, opening her door, almost stepping into oncoming traffic.
She swore and looked in her mirror before going out. Her fast pace and the loud clicking of her shoes on the sidewalk had the homeless man looking up in surprise as she advanced on him. I knew she didn’t mean to frighten the old man, but his grizzled dark features seemed to pale under the advance of Jo’s determined gait.
I rolled down my window so I could listen, but doubted I’d be able to hear much with the passing traffic and the jets taking off and landing at Metro Airport. She talked with him a moment, then stepped back and held her hands up. I saw her smile, which was a feat—she didn’t smile much. They talked some more. She pointed to the SUV, and I gave a little wave. They both wandered over.
“Who is that?” Susan’s voice came over the radio.
I reached up front and grabbed the handset, noting I’d need hand sanitizer from the looks of the grimy used unit.
“The bum has the coat. Jo’s talking to him,” I said and put it down as they both approached the window.
“This is Mr. Phelps,” Jo said, motioning to the man.
The smell was staggering. He was an elderly man from what I could tell, his white whiskers a sharp contrast to his dark skin. He smelled like he’d been digging through garbage all day, and he probably had. He had a Kroger sack full of cans and bottles.
“Mr. Phelps said that he picked up the coat up the road. He’s willing to show us where for twenty dollars,” Jo said, using all of her restraint not to throttle the man.
“Fine.” I pulled money out of my pocket and held it with the tips of my fingers.
He snatched it and immediately tucked it into his layers of clothing.
“Thanks man. Now if you’ll just scoot over,” he said, starting for the door handle.
“Jo, he rides with Pete,” I said.
Jo gave yet another rare smile and took Mr. Phelps by the arm. She led him up the road to where Pete opened the SUV’s door to talk to her. Their conversation was brief, and Pete leaned into the SUV several times, probably to talk to Susan. Jo opened the back door to the Suburban and then walked back to where I was waiting. She got in our SUV once traffic had cleared enough. Jo fired up the engine to make sure the car stayed warm while we waited.
“We going to follow them?” I asked her.
“No. She wants us to wait here. I guess that red brick building over there is the warehouse. She wants us to watch that, and she told me to tell you that you owe her one for taking Mr. Phelps for a ride.”
“Hand sanitizer?” I asked her.
“Yeah, he needed it bad. I don’t think he’s washed between garbage cans.”
“Can you give me the hand sanitizer?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, right,” she said, handing it to me in the back seat.
The smell of the alcohol-based gel filled the Suburban. When I was done, I rolled up the windows.
“The radio is filthy; you should use some as well,” I told her, passing it back up.
“You know, if you weren’t so OCD about your hands—”
My phone rang—the one that only a few people have the number for. A quick check on the caller ID confirmed it was Skye.
“Hello?” I asked her.
“Are you alone?” she asked me.
“Jo’s with me. Susan and Pete are in a different car,” I told her.
“Oh, it’s ok then.”
“Hold on, Skye, I’m putting you on speaker so Jo can hear you.”
“Ok, I umm… I don’t know what to do with this information, but I figure if I tell you, you can figure it out,” Skye said, her voice nervous.
Jo turned around so she could see me and the phone, contorting her body in a distracting way.
“So you had me follow the money. I just finished that about twenty minutes ago and—”
“Why didn’t you call immediately?” I demanded, knowing I sounded short.
“Because, the money came from Mayor Thomas Taylor’s personal account,” Skye said, the bomb hitting and blowing my mind.
“You’re kidding me,” Jo said.
“No, and the reason I didn’t call at first is because something didn’t seem right. I’ve been monitoring call logs with everyone involved in the case… sorry Jarek, I don’t know if I was supposed to or...”
“No, no, that’s fine. Go on,” I told her.
“Anyways, when I saw it was the Mayor’s account, I went back and checked his records as well. His house phone called a warehouse near your GPS coordinates about forty-five minutes ago, and the address matches the one on your list.”
“Oh shit,” Johanna said. I nodded in agreement.
“They know we’re here,” I told Jo.
“The bum was a distraction so it’d split the team up?”
“I think so. Anything else, Skye?” I asked her.
“No. I’m going to focus on the video second, and use the FBI’s backdoor to get into their facial recognition software.”
“Good, run every face you can. Compare it to the Mayor’s household, work, office—everything,” I said, my mind starting to go into overload. “Also, I need to figure out more about Martin Fuller and his connection to Mayor Thomas. I need every associate of his run down, and dossiers on everyone. There’s a piece to the puzzle we’re missing, and I wish I had a terminal closer…” I hit the back of the seat in frustration.
I’d never wanted to become a field agent, never once. But I’d done it on this job, and several before. Always with Jo, and only because they fit my skillset perfectly, even though I was uncomfortable.
“On it,” Skye said and broke the connection.
“Do we wait for HRT?” Jo asked me, looking at the warehouse.
“I don’t know,” I said, my mind ready to explode.
Were the police in on this? The Mayor for sure, but who could we trust? The timing of the phone call to the warehouse coincided with the call Jo had made to the Mayor, giving him updates. None of it was critical information, but Jo had been telling him that we were hopeful to get his daughter back to him today. Unless somebody had his phone tapped besides the FBI and us, how did they get a call out while the FBI was monitoring it?
There were too many dangling pieces of information that made little to no sense. I could feel myself getting overwhelmed, and I put my head down on the seat in case I zoned out as I thought it through. I knew that a phone call from the Mayor’s office went to the warehouse. Who made it? The Mayor himself had to have been the one who passed the information along, unless it was an FBI agent who had allowed the information to be passed on without alerting the rest of the police and agency. Who to trust?
Susan. I trusted Susan. Jo, of course. And Skye, too. Did I trust Pete? That one I was still chewing on. He’d really been nice and helpful, for once, when it came towards the end here, but was that in an attempt to distract me? No, I wouldn’t trust Pete for now, and I wouldn’t trust Landon until I knew for sure whether the FBI was eyeballs-deep in this.
“I don’t think we can afford to wait on HRT. Someone else, including the Mayor or one of his associates, is in on this somehow,” I told her quietly.
“Ok, I’m going to check it out. If there are any problems, lock the doors and I’ll be coming back within the hour.”
“I’m coming with you,” I told her quietly.
“Dammit, Jarek, no.”
“You need somebody to watch your back. The cops always have partners,” I pointed out to her.
“You’re not a cop. You can’t even shoot a gun.”
I nodded but got out, following her as she went to the back of the SUV. I had made sure Jo had a concealed carry permit, and had continued my father’s FFL class firearms permits so our agents could be as well-armed as police officers. This wasn’t the time for a submachine gun, although I did have several locked in the compartment where the spare tire used to be. All of our vehicles were modified with a safe such as that.
It would take cutting torches and several hours of frustrated cussing for somebody to break into one of them, and the locks were exceptional. It took two different keys to open them. Jo had one, and I had the other.
“I can’t let you get hurt, you’ll only slow me down,” Jo told me, her voice sounding strange.
I pondered that as she pulled out a slender Beretta 9mm, a gun she was very familiar with. She tucked it into a holster that clipped to the small of her back. With her business suit and coat, there was nothing to notice.
“I’m going, Jo,” I told her.
I didn’t want her getting hurt either. Without her, I might as well sell the agency. Sure, I could still do the cyber side of things, which was lucrative, but I didn’t have the people skills needed to deal with the day-to-day stuff. The new therapist was really working wonders. If we wrapped this up today, I planned on making it to my appointment at six o’clock.
Jo looked me up and down and then at the armament. She reached behind her back, and instead of handing me a gun, she handed me the collapsible baton she kept strapped to her back. I flicked my wrist in the same motion I’d seen her do when she took out the three guys who were beating on me. It extended to its full length with a swift sshhhk sound.
It was much lighter than I expected, and I found the release and collapsed it. It was made by Smith and Wesson I noted, and I tucked it into my back pocket and fixed my coat over it. The handle bumped into the back of my belt, but unless I was running, it wouldn’t be noticeable and it wasn’t uncomfortable.
“You listen to me. Out here, I’m the boss, ok? And you’re going to explain to me at some point why we can’t even call Susan and Pete.”
“There’s a leak,” I told her simply, and she nodded and motioned for me to follow her.
We crossed the street without getting run down, but there were several drivers upset at us for crossing, and we got a couple of horns blasting. It wasn’t anything unusual, so I didn’t worry about it too much. I looked up and caught sight of the warehouse. It was an old brick building, half a block north of us. Some of the top windows had been busted out by rocks, but the downstairs had all of its windows intact, the ones that weren’t boarded up, that is.
“Some kind of fancy place, isn’t it?” Jo asked.
“I don’t see that,” I told her. “It looks like it’s abandoned to me.”
“Jarek…”
There didn’t seem to be any covert way to get to the side of the building, and a man and a woman in a business suit sneaking around would be conspicuous in this neighborhood, so we cheated. We cut through the back of a church parking lot after walking past the red-brick building, and came in behind the property to an old truck turnaround lot.
The asphalt was cracked and the pot holes were big enough to swallow a small car. The loose gravel crunched under our feet as we walked towards the tall grass in the un-mowed section behind the building. There were three overhead doors and two smaller office doors. The one door was so pitted with rust and streaked with corrosion, I felt like I needed a tetanus shot even coming near it. The other door was brand new. The other thing that stood out between the new entry door and the two overhead doors to the right was a new electrical meter. In a neighborhood like this, copper was stripped and stolen as soon as it went in. That showed me that even though there were no cars in the parking lot, somebody was here somewhere. I was pondering all of that when my phone rang. I silenced the ringer and saw it was Susan.
“Damn,” I said, before answering it.
“Hello?” I said quietly.
“Hey, the guy showed us the warehouse he found the coat at. We’re going to move up the road to the second location,” Susan told me, her voice so loud I was afraid the people inside the warehouse could hear it.
I cupped my hand over the speaker so the wind wouldn’t crackle and give me too much feedback on her end. “Ok, I’ll see you guys soon,” I said and closed it up.
“Well?” Jo asked.
“They found the coat and the next warehouse up the road,” I told her.
“You think it’s a diversion?”
My answer was cut off as the overhead door to the left rolled up. Jo and I flattened ourselves against the side of the building. She inched sideways towards the door when we both heard a motor fire up.
“Shit, he’s moving!” she said loudly as the sound of screeching tires preceded a black Durango flying out of the overhead door as it lifted enough for the low-slung car to escape.
“It’s Fuller!” Joanna confirmed as she pulled the Beretta out of the holster at the small of her back.
She fired three rounds, and one of them hit the rear tire of the Durango as it rounded the back of the building on the driveway that led to the street. We both ran as we heard the car horns go off and the sickening crunches of multiple crashes.
“If she’s hurt…” I panted.
“Sorry, reflex,” Jo said.
“Not you,” I told her, trying to focus on my breathing.
I was hoping
she wasn’t hurt. I saw a second head in the passenger seat, one whose profile and long hair matched Caroline Taylor’s. If she was alive at this point, the kidnapper was still keeping her for a bargaining chip or a get-out-of-jail free card. My cell phone rang again, but I ignored it as Johanna and I put on a burst of speed in time to see Caroline Taylor being pulled out of the passenger seat by Martin Fuller, his gun already out in his hand.
I pulled Johanna sharply, almost making us fall as two sharp reports hit the side of the building we’d been running next to. Jo tackled me to the ground as one shot exploded right where my head would have been.
“She’s not hurt,” Jo said before looking up and then pulling me to my feet roughly.
“Hurry. They’re out of traffic and heading towards the people mover!” I yelled, my breath almost back.
Maybe the elliptical workouts were worthwhile after all. The difference was, I felt stronger than ever, my breathing came much easier and, as we ran through the now-stalled traffic, I felt faster. I knew it was the effects of adrenaline, but it was a high I’d never had before. This was almost as pleasurable as the act that shall not be named.
We were gaining ground despite dodging between people and pedestrians walking. I almost got tripped up by a woman who’d stopped her forward momentum to look at Fuller and Miss Taylor in their wild escape, and nearly toppled her over.
“Jarek, go,” Johanna encouraged.
I ran harder and had just rounded a corner when a gunshot hit the brick wall of an apartment building, the sharp chips cutting into the right side of my head near my swollen eye.
“Shit,” I screamed, falling and rolling, my momentum carrying me across the alleyway and into the side of a dumpster.
Jo flopped down beside me and pulled my hand away. My hand was a red smear, and I could feel her pulling at something.
“Your eye is fine. It’s your head. It’s going to bleed, but it isn’t going to do anything permanent. You ready?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Jo looked around the edge of the dumpster, then motioned for me to get up.
“I think they went this way,” she told me.
The scariest statement that somebody chasing somebody could say: I think.
Kidnapped: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 1) Page 11
