by Joshua Guess
I coasted further out into the county, letting instinct direct me. “So why not just hand me over to him? Seems like the more efficient solution.”
“Seems like it, but isn’t,” Fahey said. “He really expects you to show up at noon and face him like a goddamn cowboy, and I think he’s willing to do that with just the guys he has now if necessary. If he got his hands on you tonight, the mood he’s in, there’s no doubt in my mind he’ll order his boys to start a shooting war with those fellas you talked into keeping an eye on them.”
Understanding dawned on me. “And you gave me that idea. You feel responsible.”
“No shit,” Fahey said. “If I’d have known before I said anything how fucking nuts the guy was, I’d have just handed you over. I didn’t know your safe houses were in residential neighborhoods.”
Technically they were on the outside of those neighborhoods to make getting onto a main road faster, but I didn’t correct him. In essence, Fahey was right. They were dangerously close to families sleeping in their beds, and bullets had no respect for borders.
“So the plan is to get me somewhere safe so I can make my date with Russey?”
“Pretty much,” Fahey said. “Honestly, I don’t care what you do once you get rid of that car. I just don’t want to see the west side turn into a fucking war zone tonight.”
I debated my next words, weighing them carefully before deciding whether to risk them. In the end it came down to the basic truth that I had nothing left to lose that decided it for me.
“Are you willing to give me some help actually dealing with Russey?”
Fahey paused as well. “Maybe. Not for free. Let me give you the address and you can try to convince me.”
“First of all, I can pay you,” I said. “And you’ll probably need it considering I’ve taken steps to put the boss out of business regardless of how this plays out…”
I outlined my ideas over the next fifteen minutes. As I drove wherever Fahey was sending me, I drew on every ounce of sincerity and cunning I possessed. Making it worth his while financially was only one aspect, if an important one. It took some work to convince him that I wouldn’t let anyone else he did business with know he helped me. Fahey was like criminal Switzerland around these parts.
“All right,” Fahey said. “There’s an old junker you can drive at the spot you’re going to. Keys are in the visor. Once you’re done there, call me back. In the meantime I’ll get to work on a few things.”
Getting there took a while. Not because the space, which was an isolated and technically condemned garage out in the county, was actually that far in distance. I had to drive carefully, avoiding main roads or anywhere else the police might be. I had no doubt I was the most wanted person within a hundred miles.
I drove up and opened the gate in the tall metal fence behind the garage, drove in, and shut it behind me. The space was mostly empty, aside from the old jalopy I would be leaving in. One of the services Fahey offered was a place to temporarily stash hot cars, though we’d never had a need to use it. I idly wondered whether he’d picked the property up during the financial crisis.
I rolled up my sleeves and hauled out a few tools, including a siphon and an empty gas can. I wanted the car to burn, but not in a way that would draw attention or get…explody.
God, I was so tired. It was the sort of exhaustion that clawed its way into your brain from the outside, raking through the gossamer connections making cool logic possible.
As I mechanically went through the motions of prepping the car for destruction, I realized I didn’t much care if Tom Russey walked through the door in the next five minutes.
It would have been just like the first time I met him. Me alone in a dark, dismal place. Him with his cadre of loyal operatives. Both of us looking for a missing piece of the puzzle.
I’d told him to meet me where we did the landscaping job. Those with darker senses of humor might think of it as an inside joke.
To me, it wasn’t in the same universe as funny.
26
Then
When I walked into my small apartment, I found a man sitting in the cubby pretending to be a living room. I could see a few more down the hall, standing in the kitchen. I stared hard at the guy lounging on the ratty love seat, saying nothing. In my experience these kinds of situations always ended in violence or a business deal, and I preferred not letting my mouth make the former happen unnecessarily.
“Hi,” the man said. “You’re a very interesting guy, Carter.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And you are?”
The big man’s mouth tugged up at the corner into a sly smile. “The man you just got done doing a job for, though if the broker did his correctly you have no reason to know it.”
“Ah, you’re Tom Russey,” I said. “Sure, I know who you are.”
His head rocked back slightly. “Seems that man and I are going to have a talk.”
“No, you aren’t,” I said simply. “First because he’s a friend, second because he didn’t tell me anything. I don’t take jobs this complex without doing some heavy research. It’s not his fault you’ve got a sloppy operation.”
“Sloppy?” Russey said in a dangerously soft voice. “Really, now? We’re good enough that bigger players have us work all over the country.”
I nodded. “That’s exactly your problem. You’ve put together your own crew for the first time over the last two years. Before that you were a fixer. You did just about every kind of job. Now you’ve got this team working with you, and you’ve developed a pattern. The kind cops will notice. Always the same number of men, identical tactics, it’s like a fingerprint.”
I could see the guys in the kitchen stiffen in my peripheral vision, but Russey only looked at me critically. “I’m listening. What else have you figured out?”
I sat my backpack down with a shrug and stripped off my jacket. “You’re hiring yourself out to smugglers as an all-in-one service for interstate transport, from stealing the trucks you’ll need to getting the product where it needs to go.”
Russey didn’t seem like a guy who rattled easily, and to his credit he didn’t rattle then. His mouth did drop open slightly, however. “You figured this out because of the job we hired you for?”
The job in question had been a unique one for me. It didn’t pay a ton, just two thousand dollars, but neither was it very dangerous. I had to get access to a local shipping company and over a period of several days log every truck they used for local deliveries. Once I had a comprehensive list, I had to ensure none of them had the correct plates. The original thought, I was sure, involved me switching the plates of all the trucks there like shuffling a deck of cards. Instead I spent a day swapping them with ones from another shipping company. After that—yeah, it was a stupidly complicated job, but the challenge motivated me—I had to gain access to schedule and route information.
But…
“No,” I said. “I figured it out before I spent the first minute actually doing the work. I looked into every truck theft I could find that ended with the vehicle trashed more than one state away, which seemed like something I’d want to do if I was using it as an untraceable mule for drugs or something. Once I saw a pattern, I used a few contacts to ferret out who might be behind it. That was harder. Apparently you’re a pretty scary dude.”
Russey laughed. “Well, shit, I sure as hell thought so. But you don’t seem impressed.”
“Oh, it took a lot of work to figure out who you were,” I said. “Don’t feel bad about that. I had to burn a bunch of small favors and one pretty big one with a guy known for disappearing entire gangs. Even then I only got the name of a disgruntled former associate of yours, but he was happy to tell me all about your transition from fixer to whatever it is you like to call yourself now.”
I half-shrugged. “But no, I’m not scared of you.”
Having dealt with a lot of people who relied on fear to get things done, it wouldn’t have shocked me to find Russey in that mol
d. My research had only gone so deep, and judging the content of a man’s character from cold facts alone was difficult and often lacked accuracy. Of all the things I could have expected, what he said next was last on the list.
“I understand that. People with nothing to live for don’t have much to be afraid of, do they?”
Without looking at it, he waved a hand toward the picture on the end table next to the love seat. “You lost them, what, three years ago? And the bastard who did it is still out there walking free.”
As suddenly and completely as a light going off, I ceased caring what this entire conversation was aimed at. “You’ll want to get out of my place now, Mr. Russey.”
Russey blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” I said, my voice utterly dead. “Leave. The second you used my wife and daughter as conversation or leverage or whatever, you lost any goodwill my curiosity gave you. Get the fuck out of my house before something bad happens to you and your men.”
The sound of weapons being drawn in the kitchen was soft but clear. Russey stared up at me, more baffled than worried. “You really mean it, don’t you? Even a harmless, offhand comment about them and you’d throw your life away.”
“I like my odds,” I said, and I did. The math wasn’t great for me, but there were several factors in my favor. The most important of them being the relentless, uncaring determination of a someone who doesn’t have plans for tomorrow. Any tomorrow.
“Jesus wept,” Russey said, shaking his head sadly. He looked toward the kitchen, where a bulky Hispanic man watched warily from the door. “Put those up and wait outside, guys. I need two minutes with Mister Ash.”
When we were alone, Russey glanced down and clasped his hands. “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. I wasn’t trying to insult their memory. I have a family of my own, and I can only imagine what losing even one of them would do to me.”
I nodded stiffly. “Fine. You gonna leave now?”
“Not just yet,” Russey said. “I actually came here to offer you a job. When I looked into you, though, I figured out why you stay around here. You’re watching Caldwell.”
“If there’s a point in there somewhere, you should probably get to it,” I said. Thinking about Jacob Caldwell did nothing to enhance my calm.
Russey sighed. “Before you decide to pull that knife on your belt and stab me, understand I’m not trying to use this as leverage, only incentive. Okay? What I’m about to say isn’t contingent on you working for me, just a way to sweeten the pot.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously.
Russey seemed encouraged by this. “You said it was hard to get anything on me, but son, it was damn near impossible to figure out you were the one ruining Caldwell’s life. I mean, that’s some masterful work.”
My hyper-aware state of mind, teetering on the edge of violence, was the only thing that kept my shock from showing. Since returning from his deployment, I had used every shred of information gleaned by my team of investigators to inflict as much damage on Caldwell as I could from a distance. He was too canny to leave the base at regular, predictable intervals, and too wary to be caught off guard. I couldn’t find the slippery bastard to put a knife in his guts personally, so I had to settle with the hundred small tortures I’d imagined in those early days.
“I mean, you did everything from fucking up his credit report to having his truck repossessed. You must have a computer expert with a sadistic streak working with you, unless your talents stretch that direction. Apparently two separate relationships ended abruptly, or so his therapist says. I still haven’t figured out how you got a freeze on his bank account, and I can’t actually prove you did any of it. That’s a big part of why I want you working for me.”
I snorted. “Didn’t hear the offer you were so delicate about in there anywhere. And I don’t know why any of that would impress you. The only other person who knows about all of it thinks they’re just a series of pranks.”
“Might look that way from the outside, I guess,” Russey conceded. “But shit, anyone with one roadblock after another in their life is going to start to lose it. The kinds of stresses Caldwell deals with in his job plus the death by a thousand cuts you’ve piled on him over the last six months? It has to be crushing him one day at a time.”
I smiled. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew there was nothing funny in it. “It’s all I can do.”
Russey smiled, too. “That’s where my offer comes in.”
Forty-eight hours after that first meeting, we stood in front of a door. The dynamic between us had changed in a fundamental way. Russey, taller and more broad in the shoulders, seemed an almost fatherly presence.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked me. “Because I have no problem doing this.”
I shook my head. “No. Three years of waiting is enough. I’m going in.”
“I figured. Just had to ask.” He opened the heavy steel door for me.
Inside the prefab metal building, chained by one leg to a steel rod in the floor, was a face I hadn’t seen in person in those three years. Caldwell looked up at me, and I nearly had to stifle a gasp. He looked older, certainly, though that wasn’t surprising on its own. The incredible strain of his job combined with the slow hell I’d been heaping on him were bound to have had an effect.
Age aside, he looked like absolute shit. Caldwell hadn’t shaved in at least a week. His eyes were bloodshot, hair far from regulation. He was drawn, clearly unhealthy. Yet when he looked up and saw me, he burst out in bitter laughter.
“I fucking knew it,” he said in a smooth, mellow voice at odds with his appearance. “I couldn’t say anything to anyone until I had proof. They already thought I was going crazy.” His voice trailed off to a mutter. “Probably right, though.”
Looking down at him after all this time, after the endless nights spent berating myself for not being able to reach him and imagining the words I would say if I did, I reached deep and found nothing to say.
“They’re going to notice I’m gone. I was supposed to be back on base half an hour after I was taken,” Caldwell said. “They’ll look at you. You know they will.” Again, that smooth tone. So unafraid. This was a man who had Seen Some Shit. As much as I hated him, intimidation wasn’t much of an option.
I sat on the floor with my legs crossed in front of me. “Well, you’re right and wrong there. My friend out there? He and his boys are the ones who took you. They made sure to do it in a window of time that could be verified. They watched you from a distance, saw you get gas, and snatched you up. During that time, I made sure I was somewhere public with a lot of witnesses. A bar I go to regularly, as a matter of fact. Plenty of people saw me there for five hours straight, too drunk to stand by the time you were grabbed.”
“You think that’ll help?” Caldwell asked. “They’re going to come looking for me. Probably are already.”
“I’m sure,” I agreed. “Hope they bring enough guys, though. You’re a long way from Maryland right now.”
I watched some of the hope die in his eyes, and it would be a lie to say I didn’t enjoy it a little.
“Is this the part where you tell me you didn’t mean it?” I asked. “That it was an accident? Or maybe you’ll start going on about how I’m not this kind of person and I won’t be able to live with myself. Because I have to tell you, you’re not even the first guy I’ve had tied up in front of me like this.”
Caldwell bared his teeth. “Not interested in your sex life.”
I laughed, a real, honest sound. “You got jokes. Shouldn’t surprise me, I guess. I’ve seen enough of your record to know you’re the real deal. You’ve lived through more close calls than I can count. It’s actually the one thing I respect about you.”
Caldwell looked up at me again, met my eyes. “I’m not fooling myself about what’s gonna happen here, and it probably means nothing to you, but that accident is my biggest regret. I hate myself for it. Only thing I could do afterward was throw myself into the work.�
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He said it simply and without guile. I believed him. A big part of why I believed him was Russey’s kind of terrifying ability to access the patient files of Caldwell’s military therapist.
“I know,” I said, just as honestly. “That’s the really fucked up thing. You didn’t do it out of malice. You made a mistake. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter how small the error was on your part. What matters is how big the consequences were. You got drunk and killed my family. You denied the world everything they were and everything they could have been. So yeah, while you were fucked up over it and had to deal with guilt, you still got to go on. Didn’t even lose your job. It pisses me off that you got to where you were on the strength of your decisions and character only to fail so badly. It doesn’t make sense to me that someone with your history would make that choice.”
Caldwell’s head drooped, shoulders slumped. “There’s no good answer. Nothing that will change anything.”
“I know that!” I shouted. “Don’t you think I’ve played over every fucking possibility in my head? Stress of the job, shitty personal life, none of it matters. The why doesn’t matter. Only what happened.”
I stood and stretched my back. “I can’t scare you any more than you already are. If you are. So I’m just going to put it out there, Jacob. You’re not leaving this room. I’m going to kill you. It’s not what my family would have wanted, but I can’t live this way any longer. Maybe the guilt will overwhelm me, I don’t know. But it’s the only thing even approaching closure I’m ever going to have.”
Jacob Caldwell was many things, but meek wasn’t one of them. I saw the gears in his head click over, the fight-or-flight center switching on. I could almost feel him assessing the situation and measuring the variables. It’s what I would have done in his place.
“Just know this,” I said. “I’m killing you because even though it’s not nearly enough, it makes the scales a little more balanced. I’m not expecting to enjoy the act. The part I want you to think about between now and then is that no one will ever know what happened to you. You’ll have vanished. Russey set up a few false trails to make it look like maybe you finally snapped and ran off, but in the end no one will ever have answers. Not your friends, not your superiors, not your family. You’ll just drift away like smoke.”
