by Zack Klika
Sometimes you need a win, Lee thought.
He took a deep breath and hopped out of his car. A flickering light from above made him pause when he saw his reflection in the other car’s back window. His skin looked jet-black. His face gaunt. His eyes bloodshot. Florescent light was never kind to anyone. He slid into the back seat of the Crown Vic.
“You’re late,” said a haggard Detective Edwin Johnson. He was in his early forties and lounging in the driver’s seat. His loose gray suit a reminder of the man he used to be.
“I got stuck at Buck’s,” said Lee. “It’d look funny if I didn’t smoke with them.”
Detective Johnson glanced to the rearview mirror. “Don’t get too smart on me now.”
“He’s right, Johnson,” said Detective Dettra Conn. She sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat. Her toned six-foot frame was evident through her dark jeans and snug sweatshirt. For twenty-nine, she was in excellent shape. The Army was to thank for that.
Lee grinned towards Conn. “Buck invited me to the speedway tomorrow night.”
Nothing.
“I think he’s gonna have some fights there after the race,” Lee continued.
“You’ll be there then,” said Johnson.
Lee shifted uncomfortably in the seat. “You told me I only had to find out the where and when.”
“You got busted with three ounces of weed. You’re off the hook when I let you off the hook.”
“That’s fucked up,” Lee said. “You can’t keep using me like this.”
Before Johnson could reply, Conn turned to face Lee. “We’ll make sure you’re safe.”
He locked eyes with her. An uncomfortable silence filled the car.
“Text me when the fights start,” Johnson snapped.
“All right,” Lee said.
He went to leave but paused, his clammy hand clenched around the door handle. It was a tough choice, deciding whether or not he should tell them about what he had heard at Buck’s. He decided against it. It would only complicate his life further. And possibly get him killed.
Chapter 2
Sergeant Emily Riley crossed one camouflaged leg over the other while she waited on the ice-cold chair at the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital, which sat in the middle of Fort Campbell. It had been forty-five minutes since she arrived. Forty-four minutes since the goose bumps began. Her Army-issued uniform covered everything besides her hands and head. Somehow the nurses walking by in short-sleeved scrubs looked warmer.
Fluorescent lights flooded the tile floor and showed her reflection in the massive windows that lined the corridor. Her light skin tone complemented her brown eyes and brown hair. She looked carefree, confident, Caucasian. Most people thought she was white, not Hispanic. Her father would always tell her, “You spend thirty years painting gringos’ houses and you’d be just as dark.” Riley didn’t want to take up the family business, though. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to serve her country.
She looked left, then right, and, satisfied that the coast was clear, pulled out a pill bottle from her pocket, twisted the top off, and threw a few of the white oval pills back. There was no self-pity in what she had come to know as her dependence on Vicodin. She liked taking the pills, and the pills seemed to like her taking them. Life slid by like she was on a magic carpet ride when the pills kicked in. When they wore off? She could barely remember how that felt.
After graduating high school in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she achieved her dream and secured an Army MOS, military occupational specialty, most soldiers didn’t know even existed: 25V, combat documentation specialist. She told people she was a journalist for purpose of ease.
She joined the Army to see the world. Pure and simple. After a grueling nine weeks of basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, during July and August, and after almost thirty weeks at her training duty station in Fort Meade, Maryland, she ended up being stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, thirty minutes away from her hometown. Not ideal. As much as she loved her family, she was ready to have some space from them. The universe could be cruel.
Now, four years into her contract, a change of scenery was in sight if she wanted it. She still had four months left to decide if she wanted to reenlist. If she did, she would certainly get a different duty station, but it would have to be written into her contract. She was not going to take any chances this time.
Getting out of the Army had its appeal as well. But the possibilities of what to do if she did leave were overwhelming. Where would she go? College? What would she study? Was she good enough to jump into a media job right out of the military?
Her thoughts drifted back to the dead soldier who had brought her to the hospital. Riley worked for the Fort Campbell Daily, but she had to read about the murder on the website of the Clarksville Times, the city’s local paper. A soldier named Jennifer Carlson had been found murdered on a bridge by some local high schoolers the night before. The article mentioned that her clothes were bloodied from head to toe and her face looked beaten and swollen. No picture of Jennifer, though. And no detectives named. Riley tried calling the Clarksville Police Department multiple times to find out who the responding detective was at the crime scene, but all they would tell her was that the case had been handed off to Fort Campbell’s Criminal Investigation Division, CID. They wouldn’t even tell her the name of the CID agent who took over the case.
It should have been mine, she thought when she saw the article online.
For the most part Riley’s assignments never meant anything to her. Change of command ceremonies, radio-repair training exercises, live-fire exercises. The only time she had felt like she was getting anything out of her military career was when she had covered soldiers’ day-to-day grind while deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Word of something like murder traveled pretty fast across a military base. Gossip and worry about the looming threat of deployment were the main ways soldiers kept busy. Chow hall banter usually consisted of uneducated guesses about who the next president would be and whether or not he would put a stop to future deployments. Being stationed at one of the largest bases also meant you were one of the most frequently deployed. Riley knew that firsthand.
But no one was talking about Jennifer. No press release from the base commander. No point of contact to call with any information about the murder. Nothing. Details were being kept tight on Jennifer’s murder. Riley wanted to know why. There was still a chance to make the story hers if she could get some new details.
Special Agent Jake Sanchez emerged from the medical examiner’s office with a grave expression. That bad? She stood up, knowing it was him from the description the duty sergeant at the CID headquarters on base had given her: Short. Stocky. Thick mustache. The duty sergeant was her chink in the fence. No one had told him to keep his mouth shut about the case.
Even though most of the special agents at the CID were in the military, they didn’t have to wear uniforms, instead opting for more traditional detective attire. Sanchez wore an off-the-rack dark gray suit with a white shirt and cream-colored tie. His hair was black and cut short on the sides and top. It framed his box-shaped face well. Riley noticed that he had impeccable posture.
“Special Agent Sanchez,” she said as he walked towards her. “I’m Sergeant Riley with the Fort Campbell Daily. I have a few questions for you.”
“Make it quick,” he said and continued down the hall.
She caught him looking up with a hint of annoyance. At five feet, ten inches tall, she probably had a few inches on him. A noticeable difference when they were side by side.
“Do you have anyone in custody for the Jennifer Carlson murder?” she asked.
The question did not seem to faze Sanchez.
“No.”
So it’s a murder.
“Any idea what happened?”
“No,” he said again, like a parrot that only knew that one word. But this time something was different.
That’s a lie. Riley could always tel
l when someone was lying. Always. She could never pinpoint what it was that gave a lie away. But her internal lie detector had pinged just then.
“Could you give me a bit more than ‘no’ please?” she asked.
“You’ll find out when everyone else does.”
He went for the stairwell, but Riley blocked his path. Perspiration formed under her arms. Doing her job was one thing. Disrespecting someone who outranked her could result in disciplinary action.
“And when do you think that will be?” she asked.
Sanchez let the question hang in the air for a moment.
“Who are you with again?” Agent Sanchez asked her.
“The Fort Campbell Daily,” she said.
He nodded and walked past her, heading down the stairs.
“You didn’t answer the question,” she shouted into the stairwell, her voice echoing down the eight flights of stairs.
“Have a great day, Sergeant Riley.”
And he was gone. Her watch started beeping. She glanced down and flinched when she saw the time. The flinching was a souvenir from the deployments. Sometimes her right ear rang too.
“Shit.”
A passing nurse shot her a dirty look.
*
The main gate that led into Fort Campbell was a madhouse. Even when soldiers were deployed. There were nine different entrances and exits around the base, but for some reason most people only used the main one. Six lanes of heavy traffic led to six different covered checkpoints, replete with soldiers holding M4 assault rifles. All of them pissed off at being stuck on ID duty.
A plaque above the checkpoint read: “Welcome to Fort Campbell, KY, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Home of the Screaming Eagles.”
It was a mouthful. Anyone who served there knew the words well. Different insignias surrounded the plaque. The most noticeable was an eagle’s head with its mouth open in a scream, set against a rectangular black canvas. Another was a medical corps badge that showcased a flagpole with angel wings at the top and two snakes wrapping their way to the top of it, set against a circular blue canvas. The last was of two rifles crossed at the muzzles with a lightning bolt running down the center. The canvas for that one was orange. Only the people in that infantry unit knew what the hell it meant.
Above it all, an American flag whipped in the wind.
Past the gates were fields of green that housed close to five hundred buildings, half of which were mobile-home-styled tan offices on cinder blocks placed in grid formations of nine to twelve per military unit. Everything dress right dress. Uniform in appearance.
In the distance, the sun sat atop a dense forest that extended into the clear blue horizon. “The back forty” was somewhere back there. Close to thirty thousand acres of woods and fields used for training exercises and target practice. There was a Burger King in the middle of the base, always too busy to be of any use to anyone with some form of schedule to keep.
A change of command ceremony was taking place directly in front of one of the tan office buildings in the middle of the base. Someone had thought it would be a good idea to hold the ceremony at the end of work when the traffic was just as bad as the morning rush hour. Soldiers stood on the lawn behind their new captain as she received command of her unit.
By the time Riley stopped running, she was drenched in sweat. Her trip to the hospital had been an off-the-books endeavor. The ceremony was her military-issued assignment. But no one really noticed if she was there or not, and she really only needed one photo of the new captain for the newspaper. She crouched low and hurried to the front of the formation, snapping off a few pictures. In five minutes she had taken a couple hundred photos. After the formation was dismissed she checked the LCD screen and, satisfied at least one of the images would be acceptable, headed back to her car.
If her work assignments had to suffer while she investigated the death of a female soldier, then so be it.
Riley set her camera gear in the trunk, then slammed a bottle of water. Ice-cold air blasted against her throat when she started up her Volvo S60. While cooling off, she took in her surroundings. It was hard to believe Fort Campbell had been her home for the past four years. Nothing but tan offices everywhere she looked. Tan—she hated the color. “Tan”—she hated the word. She wondered what a duty station in Germany or Italy would look like. Probably tan, she thought with a grin.
A buzzing on her thigh shook her from her thoughts. A text message from her boss read, “Get back to the office. ASAP.” He would only be rushing her if he had something good. And that meant he had probably acquired new details about Jennifer Carlson. One step closer to her big story.
Chapter 3
Conn felt pretty good about herself as Johnson drove down the dim stretch of road that led back to the police station. Their visit with Lee had proven fruitful. It felt like she was doing some good for a change. Handing out speeding tickets had been a waste of her investigative talents. Up until Lee, Conn and Johnson only had one other informant willing—forced, really—to give them information on Buck’s illegal fights: Neil Rounds, a scared young man who fell into the wrong group along the way.
Conn and Johnson came into contact with Lee the exact same way they happened upon Neil: a routine traffic stop. Neil was pulled over for doing five miles over the speed limit. While the cop walked up to Neil’s car, he saw something fly out of the passenger’s side window. That was enough to warrant a search.
The item that Neil had thrown out of the window was a brand-new Glock 19, black, with a standard fifteen-round clip. The officer also found three pounds of marijuana in the trunk of the vehicle. Back at the station, the officer was preparing paperwork to book Neil, but Conn and Johnson got to him before he could be entered into the system. Three pounds was quite a bit of dope. And people like Neil were always full of surprises.
Conn had only been a detective for a few months, so she watched while Johnson questioned Neil. Johnson was thirty seconds in when the kid broke down and spilled his guts.
Neil said he was Buck Miller’s dealer and then told them about the weapons operation that Buck ran during his underground fights. He couldn’t tell them any specifics about the weapons, just that he was definitely selling weapons, by the truckload. He also told them about Buck’s right-hand man, Danny Smith. And he agreed to help incriminate them as long as Johnson would guarantee his safety. Johnson did. Conn thought it would be an open-and-shut case. After sneaking Neil out of the police station that night, they never heard from him again. Conn and Johnson assumed the worst and got their captain, Sara Landel, involved. But all Neil had left them was a pistol with a filed-down serial number. Captain Landel didn’t think much of it.
“I want to bring Buck and Danny in,” Johnson had said. Conn learned early on that he always went straight for the interrogation room.
“You think this guy Buck is just going to admit that the Glock is his?” Landel said with a voice that barely traveled past her lips. She was short with an athletic build. Her dirty-blonde hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Hard to read.
“No, but—” Johnson was saying before Landel waved a hand.
“What do you think, Detective Conn? Will bringing him in do any good?” Landel asked.
Conn glanced at Johnson and saw he was clenching his jaw so hard that she thought it might shatter. She had only been his partner for a short time. Bad business to go against him this early on.
What the hell, Conn thought.
“Probably not,” Conn said. She saw Johnson’s knuckles turning white. “Running surveillance on him would be more beneficial. If there are weapons and fights involved, then there are probably drugs involved too. I looked into Buck’s records and something like a weapons racket doesn’t seem like the next step in his criminal career, but it’s possible.”
Landel agreed and approved a surveillance detail, but for no longer than three months. Conn knew she and Johnson needed another dealer, someone Buck didn’t know. Their last mistake was bringing in so
meone too close to Buck. Of course Buck knew Neil had been arrested. Of course he knew the kind of man Neil was. Weak. Loose-lipped. In retrospect, the mistake seemed obvious.
I won’t make the same mistake again, Conn had told herself more than a few times.
Lee was pulled over for making a rolling stop at a four-way intersection in downtown Clarksville. The officer probably wouldn’t have searched him if he weren’t black, but he was, so he did. He had a few ounces of weed in the glove box of his Honda. After Neil, Johnson had put it out to all the officers at the station that he wanted to know about anyone who was busted with more than a few grams. The arresting officer brought Lee straight to him.
Johnson ended up being a good fit for Conn, even if his temper did flare up from time to time. He was forward-thinking when it came to equality in the workplace. And he valued her input. So when Lee showed up, Johnson had her take a crack at him.
“Would you like this to go away?” Conn asked Lee.
“Yeah,” Lee said.
“Do you have any issues with being an informant?”
“You mean snitching?” asked Lee.
Conn nodded.
“No issues here,” Lee said.
Conn was a bit thrown by his willingness to cooperate. And by how attracted she was to him. Johnson didn’t think Lee needed to know about the arms dealing, so they didn’t tell him. Johnson made him think the illegal fights were the main target of their investigation. Lee’s biggest issue with helping them spy on Buck was that he didn’t have an in to Buck’s group.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” was all Johnson said to him.
That was the thing about telling someone their fate was in their hands. They will always figure out a way to save themselves. And Johnson was right. Lee had put out some feelers letting friends know he was trying to unload a pound of the best kush this side of Afghanistan. A few hours later, Danny contacted him. It was only a coincidence that the two of them had gone to high school together. That built immediate rapport.
