by Matthew Iden
“Good answer.” He nodded. Or the rocking of the chair made it seem like it. “I guess if you’re standing here, you must’ve put another dent in Toby’s head?”
I forced myself to relax. If Jay wanted to talk, maybe I could keep him going until Warren made it in. “He’ll live.”
“Good. Maybe you jarred something loose in that moron’s head.”
“You expecting me?”
“It was the next logical step. Either you or Warren.” Jay’s voice had changed. It had lost its twang, gained a measure of self-assurance.
“You know, someone told me the Browers couldn’t find their butt with both hands and a map,” I said. “Which means someone else is the brains behind the meth empire taking shape here in Cain’s Crossing. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
He grinned outright, showing crow’s-feet around the eyes. “That’s rich. No, I ain’t the boss.”
“You just run the errands, tote the bales? Check on the labs once in a while?”
“Yeah. And keep meth dealers from kicking in nosy ex-cops’ doors at the Mosby and filling the room full of buckshot.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What? You want credit for keeping the Browers on a leash?”
“Well, some fucking gratitude would be nice.”
“You don’t strike me as a softy, Jay. Why not score some points with the Browers?”
“I don’t think my betters would approve.”
“Are you kidding? Will would’ve given you a promotion.”
“No, you idiot.” He sighed dramatically. “Weren’t you some kind of hotshot detective up in DC?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Well, can’t you detect it? All the clues are there.”
I stared at him, lost.
He rolled his eyes. “Singer, not every backwater cop is crooked or has their head in a bucket. Didn’t you wonder why your buddy Bloch was being stonewalled by the Warrenton DEA? Didn’t any alarm bells go off when Palmer told you he had Cain’s Crossing under his wing? Asked you to leave things alone?”
My face flushed. I relaxed all the way and sat down with a thump on one of the boxes. I wouldn’t need to talk myself out of anything. Unless it was obstruction charges. “DEA? Or FBI?”
Jay pulled the shotgun away and laid it across his lap, looking like some kind of modern Pa Kettle. “DEA, son. Special Agent Jay Shero. Warrenton office, as you might imagine.”
“You’ve been all over this.”
He nodded. “Palmer saw something change in the way things were being done around here. Busting some hillbillies for growing weed, a couple chopped cars, that’s one thing. Epidemic levels of meth? Whole other prospect.”
I shifted my weight and the boxes moved underneath me. “The chief knew he was in over his head, so he called you for help.”
“Yep. Took a while to get anyone interested. Crank labs are in Iowa, Missouri, places like that. Not the Commonwealth of Virginia. Then a couple of cities started noticing a surge in tweakers with no good reason for it. Somebody remembered Palmer’s call and we came down to nose around.”
“So the chief gave you carte blanche to start an investigation. You took it from there, going undercover…”
“Hoping to find the brains behind the operation,” he said. “Because, I can tell you, it ain’t the Browers.”
At that second, we both jumped as the front door banged open at the front of the house. Jay shot to his feet, fast, bringing the shotgun to a ready position. I snatched mine from the floor and whispered to Jay, “If it’s Warren, he’s with me.”
“What the— Singer, Warren’s one of our suspects,” he hissed.
I shook my head. No time to explain. We could both hear cautious footsteps coming down the hall. Jay glanced at me nervously. I could understand why. If it was a Brower, Jay couldn’t very well call the name of a local police officer out loud. If it was Warren, he couldn’t poke his head out for fear Warren was in on it…or that Warren didn’t think Jay was armed and dangerous. I only saw one option.
Jay hissed for me to stop as I moved to the doorway. I slipped my head around the corner to take a peek. It was Warren, holding a bead with the AR-15 straight ahead as he shuffled down the hall.
“Warren,” I called. He jumped but kept from shooting me. “Keep cool. I got Jay-bone in here.”
“That’s a good fucking thing, bud,” he said, jogging down the hall, out of breath. “’Cause all three Browers are back and they saw me high-tail it in here.”
Jay appeared in the corridor behind me, shotgun held at the ready. Warren yelled something and I managed to knock the assault rifle up.
“Hold it! Hold it!” I yelled.
“You son of a bitch, I thought you said you had him in there,” Warren said, struggling with me to get the assault rifle free.
“Jay, goddamn it, tell Warren who you are,” I said.
Jay didn’t move the gun. “DEA, Warrenton office.”
Warren froze, mouth hanging open comically. “What?”
“He’s undercover,” I almost shouted, trying to get through to him. We didn’t need to shoot each other when the Browers might be seconds from opening the front door.
Warren dropped the barrel of his gun towards the floor. “Please tell me you’re shitting me.”
“Long story,” I said. “Jay’s DEA, been working with Palmer on the Browers. They cut you out of the loop, I’m guessing they didn’t trust a native. We’re on the same side.”
“Speak for yourself, Singer,” Jay said. “Warren, here, is still in the pool.”
“I can prove I ain’t in on it in about thirty seconds,” Warren said, “when Will and Tank and Buck come through that door and start shooting.”
“Jay, I trust him,” I said quickly. “He’s helped me out too much, too many things fit together, for him to be dirty. Same for you. Only you would know about my buddy Bloch and the call he put into Warrenton. Trust me on this.”
Jay’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two of us. Finally, he swore and lowered the shotgun, pointing to the kitchen. “Out the back. I’ll head to the front and see if I can’t stall ’em.”
As Warren and I retraced our steps, we heard the front door open again. There was a long pause, then the door slammed shut. Heavy steps stomped down the hall. “Toby?” Tank Brower’s deep voice called.
“Hey, Tank,” I heard Jay call as he walked to the front of the house, where the voices became muffled.
Warren and I snaked our way down the hall, through the dining room, and into the kitchen. Keeping to a bent crouch, we were headed for the back door when Buck’s head popped up like a jack-in-the-box on the other side of the half pane of glass. Without thinking, I jerked the shotgun up and pulled the trigger. Buck’s face disappeared along with the glass and half the door.
The boom rocked the house. I dropped the stealth act and sprang forward, kicking the shreds of the back door free from the hinges. What was left of Buck was a mess at the bottom of the back steps. Without thinking, I racked another round into the chamber and was turning to tell Warren to cover me when we heard a matching boom from the front of the house, followed by a quick pop-pop-pop.
Warren yelled, “Circle around, find Will,” and gave me a shove towards the open door before turning and running back to the front of the house. I scooted down the steps and circled Buck’s twisted body in time to see Will’s pickup roar around the corner of the house at top speed.
My perception slowed, stalled, and shrank to individual fractions of a second. I observed them almost impassively as they passed. I saw Will’s face. He had the twin to Toby’s AR-15 pointed out the window, balanced in the crook of his elbow. The dust from his tires kicked up in a plume behind him, obscuring the yard. There was an instant’s recognition as he saw me, then a sick pause before the industrial rattle of the ArmaLite being fired filled the air.
It took a century for me to bring the shotgun up, aim at the truck, and pull the trigger. Stipples appeared broads
ide in the truck’s driver-side door as it roared past. My body and mind processed the danger and the need automatically, shooting and pumping, shooting and pumping, until I realized I was out of rounds and the truck had slammed into the garden shed, knocking one wall down and getting beached on the brick foundation.
I dropped the shotgun and drew my SIG as I jogged to the truck. The side and back windows were shattered, as was the windshield. The door was mangled and through the hole where the window had been I could see Will, bloody, slumped over the wheel. I opened the door one-handed and Will dropped halfway out of the seat and onto the ground. I dragged him by the collar the rest of the way out and, with a supreme effort, got him thirty feet away.
He was breathing, though his face was pimply with shot and his shirt flecked with blood. I put my fingers on his neck where his pulse was weak but there, then did a quick frisk. A hunting knife. I ran back to the truck, picked up the AR-15 and was jogging for the back door, when Jay and Warren came out, wary and ready. They saw Will laid out in the grass and slowly straightened up.
I stopped. “You get both of them?”
Warren nodded. I ran a hand through my hair, shaking with adrenalin. My body was having a rough time dealing with the hours of waiting followed by the compressed and sudden violence. I took a deep breath, trying to get a grip. The day wasn’t anywhere near done. “What about Mary Beth?”
Warren shrugged, shook his head.
I looked at Jay. “Was she ever here?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t know where they took her, Singer. I’m sorry.”
I blew out a huge breath and sat down in the dust, beat.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Warren, Jay, and I stood close together, watching while the ambulance crew worked on Will and zipped up the other two brothers. Jay seemed to have warily and grudgingly accepted that Warren was clean. For his part, Warren seemed to be caught somewhere between amused and irked that he’d been a suspect. What they thought of me, however, remained to be seen.
“I know sorry’s not even going to cover it,” I said to Jay as the paramedics lifted Will’s stretcher and put it in the back of the ambulance. “But I’m sorry about the investigation.”
Jay shook his head, shrugged, and looked away. “Spilt milk.”
“Where did J.D. figure in all of this?”
Jay blew out a breath. “J.D. contacted our office when he got released. Offered to help. It was perfect timing. Palmer had asked us to intervene just a few months earlier and we were looking for a way to worm our way in. I was already making some progress, but Will’s been keeping me on the outside.”
“J.D. was a local boy, coming back after being in the big-time,” I said, putting it together. “It must’ve seemed too good to be true.”
Jay made a face. “It was. That’s why we staged that whole thing with the fight. Try to take the shine off him.”
“Little bit of theater,” Warren said, spitting to the side.
“Yep. And, let me tell you, J.D. Hope wasn’t a trained stunt man. I had to get stitched up for real afterwards. Probably helped, though. They took him in after that and liked to joke about their two in-home brawlers.”
“Why’d you keep Warren in the dark?”
Warren laughed. “You serious, Singer? The Brower and Warren family trees go back three hundred years. Hotshot, here, and the chief figured I had to be dirty.”
I looked at Jay, who spread his hands. “Dirty or not, why involve him? Palmer asked for need-to-know only, and I can tell you that cops who went to kindergarten with the subjects of a DEA crackdown don’t make the cut.”
I went quiet, thinking things through. “What kind of deal did you have with J.D.?”
“We helped him find a place, set him up there, gave him his informant stipend.”
“That’s not all, though, was it?”
It was Jay’s turn to be quiet.
“You knew about his ALS,” I said. Another statement, not a question.
Jay nodded. “We knew. We were able to set him up with an insurance plan for the treatment. Five hundred a month doesn’t exactly cover the bill.”
“The guy was sick as a dog,” I said. A surprising jolt of anger shot through me. I’d known what it was like to be dangerously ill. I didn’t like what it implied about the way he’d been used. “You were just going to ride him until he was dead?”
“His choice, Singer,” Jay said, his mouth a thin, flat line. “No, his demand. J.D. wanted to do one good thing and this was it. He told me his life was already over. He wanted to do something real, something right. And when he found this shit was going on in his own hometown, he wanted to pitch in and do something.”
I didn’t say anything.
“If it makes you feel any better, I tried to talk him out of it,” Jay said. “Told him to go to the hospital and take care of himself. Or hole up with his crazy mother. But he threatened to shoot the Browers on his own if we didn’t let him work as a C.I. on the case.”
“Was he getting anywhere, at least?”
Jay nodded. “Top-notch. He was ready to leapfrog me and get introduced to whoever is pulling the strings on this thing. Maybe they trusted a local boy more, maybe they just liked how he was working out. Either way, he was close to cracking the nut. Still would’ve meant a few weeks of work to get them on a tap and round up the evidence, but we were slapping high fives in the office when we heard J.D. was near a promotion.”
“And then he was killed?”
“And then he was killed,” Jay said.
“What’s your theory? Did they make him? Was it all a setup?”
“We don’t think so. I know Will wanted him to meet the boss, not just because it was time, but because they wanted J.D. to go back to DC and put together the buys that they couldn’t. I was around enough to know they were serious about that expansion. It wasn’t all a snow job to get him to relax just so they could pop him. Another month and they would’ve sent him to DC with a truck full of crank.”
“That’s a big investment,” I said. “Of money. Of trust.”
“Exactly. That’s why we don’t think the Browers or their boss took J.D. out.”
I was quiet again. “You know my next question, then.”
“If they didn’t kill him, then who did?”
“Right,” I said. “Well?”
Jay looked at me. “We have no idea.”
“The kingpin,” Warren said. “Find him, you find whoever offed good ol’ J.D.”
“And Mary Beth,” I said.
We turned as a cruiser came up the drive. No siren, reds-and-blues flashing. Palmer got out of the car and started walking towards us.
“This ought to be interesting,” Warren said. “Be a lot easier over a beer or two.”
Palmer marched up to our little triangle and put his hands on his hips, looking at us. “Anyone want to explain this royal clusterfuck to me?”
We took turns explaining what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, or at least as much as we knew. As we stood there, we were all reminded, uncomfortably, that Palmer hadn’t trusted Warren enough to bring him in on the investigation. And Palmer wasn’t anyone’s fool. He knew the only reason Warren probably set me on the Browers, precipitating the shootout, was because his detective didn’t trust him. But they were going to have to play make-up on their own time.
“Do we have any idea where Mary Beth is?” I asked. “Jay? We didn’t get a chance to talk about her.”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t in the house or I would’ve known. And none of the Browers mentioned her. Tank started to say something about being on the road last night when Will told him he was going to tear his head off if he didn’t shut up. That’s all I heard.”
“No other safe houses? Cabins? Back of a store or something?”
“If there are, they never told me,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “My job was to check the labs and watch the family house. That’s all they trusted me to do.”
/> I turned to Palmer. “No leads on the brains behind all of this? The one pulling the strings on the Browers?”
He looked at me. “That’s what the DEA investigation was supposed to do. We knew they were cooking meth a year ago. We didn’t need to shoot them, we needed the guy running the show. That’s for shit, now, thanks to you and Warren.”
He was probably right, but if we started pointing fingers, we’d be here all night. “What about Will?”
“He’s out and sedated. No help.”
I glanced at Jay and Warren again. “So, we’ve got nothing?”
They both studied their feet, saying nothing. Finally, Jay said, “We can search the house, see if we find something. I never had a chance to go through their personal stuff. Might get lucky.”
“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let’s take that place apart.”
“There’s no us, here, Singer,” Palmer said, staring at me. “You’ve done enough damage. I don’t want you going anywhere near that place. From now on, your involvement with this case is over.”
I gritted my teeth. “That woman could be out there, right now, looking for help.”
“And we’ll find her,” Palmer said, his face grim, emphasizing each word. “Without your assistance. If I see you near this place again or breaking into any more farmhouses or barns or homes trying to find her, I’ll have you arrested. You’re lucky you’re not in custody now.”
I glanced at the other two, but couldn’t expect to get any support there. Warren raised his eyebrows and Jay gave a small shrug. It didn’t make me happy, but it made sense. If Warren wanted to keep his job, he had to keep his mouth shut. And relations were probably strained enough between the local PD and the DEA, so Jay wasn’t going to come to my rescue. He might be okay with me personally, but I had single-handedly stomped all over a DEA investigation that had been going moderately well before I’d pulled into Cain’s Crossing.
“One last question,” I said. “Who killed J.D. Hope?”
“Mr. Singer, it’s time to leave,” Palmer said, pointing to the cruiser like I was a bad dog. “Warren, take our guest down to the station and get a statement, then drop him off at his hotel. Singer, stick around for a few days so we can find you. But go anywhere besides your hotel or Lulu’s and you’ll sit it out in a cell.”
