by Tripp Ellis
JD fed Punisher another treat and petted his head and scratched his chin. From then on, the two were best friends, and Punisher followed us around as we scoped out the building.
I hoped like hell Zeke didn't screw us and had actually disabled the camera feeds.
32
We climbed up to the loading dock and found a transom window that was slightly ajar. It squealed as we pulled it open and crawled inside the warehouse. Dust and rust got all over my suit. That was the least of my concerns at the moment.
Inside, there were rows and rows of boxes. I used the light on my phone to illuminate the way as we crept through the dark space.
JD pulled a tactical knife from his pocket and unfolded the black, anodized blade. He cut through the seal on the top of one of the boxes. He lifted the cardboard flap. Inside, amidst the packing material, were several handcrafted statues that looked like they were imported from Latin America.
JD and I exchanged a curious glance.
I grabbed a statue and examined it, looking at the bottom, shaking it for any signs of material inside. There was nothing unusual about it. I placed it back in the box and we continued down the row.
We snaked through the warehouse and found the black duffel bags we had seen the goons unload earlier. JD unzipped one. Inside there were stacks of cash.
Vasily ran several cash businesses, but this was an odd place to store cash to say the least. There was no doubt it was money from drug proceeds. The real trick would be proving that. We were in the building illegally, and anything we found would be inadmissible.
There was a lot of money in these bags. More than enough to take care of my financial woes. It wasn't like Vasily could report drug money stolen. I can't say the thought didn't cross my mind in a hypothetical kind of way. But using stolen drug money to buy Diver Down wasn't something I was willing to do.
The gate to the parking lot rattled, and the mechanical device squealed as it slid the fence open. Tires rolled against asphalt.
Jack's eyes widened, and my heart leapt into my throat.
He zipped up the bag, and we scurried back down the row of boxes. I snatched one of the small statues from the box we had opened earlier. We held up at the end of the row, crouching behind a stack of boxes.
A few moments later we heard voices and footsteps.
Ivan and Gregor entered the warehouse.
Punisher trotted in beside them and made a beeline for us. His paws clacked against the concrete as he trotted down the aisle. He rounded the corner and looked straight into Jack's face with an expectant gaze.
"Go!" Jack whispered.
Punisher just stared at him curiously, hoping for another treat.
"Go!" Jack hissed again.
"Punisher!" Ivan shouted down the aisle.
Punisher looked back to the thug, then back to JD.
"What is it boy?" the goon asked, unable to see us.
Punisher continued to gaze at JD, then took off down the aisle toward Ivan a moment later.
We both breathed a sigh of relief as we hid behind the stacked boxes, out of sight. My palm gripped my pistol, ready to draw it from the holster at any moment.
Ivan's footsteps thumped as he strolled down the aisle, heading toward us.
This was no good.
33
"Hey, can you give me a hand with this," Gregor shouted.
Ivan's footsteps stopped just before he reached the end of the aisle. He hovered there for a moment, just a step away, listening.
JD and I didn't move. We didn't blink. We didn't breathe. My heart thumped in my chest, vibrating my shirt. My pulse pounded in my ears. It was so loud in my head that I swore it could be heard echoing throughout the warehouse.
Ivan turned back to Gregor, spun around, and shuffled down the aisle to rejoin his partner.
I looked at JD and exhaled a relieved breath.
Ivan and Gregor each grabbed an end of a large box and lifted it from atop a stack, then moved it aside and set it on the concrete with a groan. They took the cash out of the duffel bags and loaded them into the box below the one they had moved. Once the task was complete, they put the big heavy box back on top of it. They took the duffel bags and left the warehouse.
Ivan called for Punisher.
The dog followed them as they pushed through the exit. Keys jingled as Ivan locked the door behind them.
JD and I breathed another sigh of relief. We listened to them climb into the vehicle. Car doors slammed. The engine turned over, and the car was put into gear. The chain-link gate rattled as it opened, and the vehicle rolled away.
We made our way to the transom window. I took the small statue with me. We traversed the sill to the loading dock, and Punisher raced around to greet us. Jack petted him and gave him another treat which he crunched into bits.
We jumped down from the loading dock and hustled across the lot to the slice in the chain-link fence.
Jack pushed it open while I slipped through, then I held it for him as he followed. We closed it, making sure Punisher didn't get out. Jack pulled a few zip-ties from his pocket and tied them around the links to reconnect the fence. He'd thought of everything. It would keep it together, and might keep Punisher from escaping. It might take the goons longer to notice the fence had been cut.
Jack said goodbye to Punisher, and we scurried away in the moonlight.
We slipped into the alleyway where we had left Zeke and climbed into his car.
"We're even now, right?" Zeke asked.
Jack nodded from the back seat. His eyes gazed into the rearview mirror, connecting with Zeke's.
"And you guys are gonna to talk to the DA?"
"You have my word," JD said.
"You find anything useful?" Zeke asked.
I showed him the statue.
"That's ugly. You broke in just for that?"
"Sometimes they mix cocaine in with the clay. It makes it easier to traffic," I said. "I'll take it by the lab for analysis."
Zeke started the car, and we drove down the block to the rehearsal studio. JD's eyes widened with dismay. "Son-of-a-bitch!"
Etched into the lizard-green paint was a colorful statement. You suck!
JD fumed as he climbed out of Zeke's car. The veins in his neck bulged, and his face flushed. He shouted and cursed as he stomped around in circles.
The metal-heads that were always near the entrance to the rehearsal hall were still there, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.
Jack marched toward them.
I told Zeke we'd catch up with him later, then hopped out of the passenger seat and followed Jack toward the metal-heads.
"Hey, did you see somebody key my Porsche?"
"No," a metal-head shrugged. "Sweet car, though!"
"You guys are always out here, you tell me you didn't see anything?" Jack growled.
The metal-heads looked at us with narrow eyes. "Dude, I'm so blazed. I didn't notice a thing. Sorry."
They all had blank expressions.
JD grumbled to himself as we marched back across the parking lot to the vandalize exotic.
Jack slid behind the wheel, and I climbed into the passenger seat.
"I got a pretty good idea of who did this," he said. "And when I catch that son-of-a-bitch…"
"In the scheme of things, it's just a little paint."
He looked at me, about to flip his lid. His face looked the color of a boiled crawfish. "Just a little paint? The minute you have to respray, the value goes down. There's nothing like factory paint!"
"Maybe they can just buff it out?"
"Those grooves are as deep as the Grand Canyon. There ain't no buffing that shit out."
Jack cranked up the engine, and we headed back to the station. He was still grumbling as we stepped into the lobby. JD filled out a report about the vandalism and went back and forth with Sergeant Calumet, who didn't really seem to care one way or the other.
I found Denise at her desk. "Working late?"
"Yeah, I'm on
a 12-hour shift. I'm thinking of switching to 10 hours and doing four days on, three days off."
"What can you tell me about the airline Nick works for?"
Her face twisted with skepticism. "Why are you, all of a sudden, interested in Nick?"
"You're not going to like this," I said.
She groaned.
I told her about his connection to Vasily.
"So, he was talking to the guy in the club!? That doesn't mean anything. I think I know Nick pretty well now, and he wouldn't get involved in anything illegal."
"Vasily Kozlov is a major narcotics trafficker. He is more than likely responsible for the deaths of Chelsea Jones, Brynn Douglas, and countless others. So, either your boyfriend," I said in air quotes, "is a really bad judge of character, or he's doing business with Vasily Kozlov."
Denise scowled at me. "He works for Coconut Charters. He flies executives to the Bahamas, to the Virgin Islands, and sometimes to Latin America. That's it. It's all above-board."
"I don't want you hanging around him anymore. I don't think it's safe."
Her face twisted. "Who are you? My dad? You don't get to tell me who I see and who I don't see!"
"I'm saying you need to be careful until we know exactly what's going on."
"You're just looking for an excuse to derail my relationship. I like Nick. He's a good guy. He's very safe."
I rolled my eyes.
Denise seethed.
I finally relented. "You're a big girl. You can take care of yourself. Just use your best judgment and keep this between us."
"You can't come in here and drop a bombshell like this on me and say I can't discuss it with him?"
"By all means, go ahead, tip him off that we're snooping around."
She frowned at me and clenched her jaw. "So, you want me to spy on him?"
"I'm not saying that."
"Grr. You make me so mad."
I raised my hands innocently. "I'm just looking out for you, that's all."
"I don't need you to look out for me. I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself."
"Okay," I said, dropping the subject.
I didn't expect that conversation to go well, but I think it was a little worse than I anticipated.
I took the statue to the lab and asked them to analyze it for illicit substances.
JD dropped me off at Diver Down, then continued home. I stopped into the bar for a minute and took a seat at the counter. It wasn't long till closing, and Teagan had already announced last call.
She wiped the bar with a rag and made her way around to me. She looked at me with a quizzical gaze. "You look a little bummed. What's up?"
"Nothing," I said, still sulking from my interaction with Denise. "Long, complicated night."
"Aw," she said with a sympathetic frown. "Did something happen to JD's car tonight?"
"Why do you ask?" I said, curiously.
She shrugged. "I don't know. I just got a strange vibe earlier."
34
"What do you think happened to JD's car?" I asked, trying to see if there was really something to her psychic claims.
Teagan thought about it for a moment. "It didn't get keyed, did it?"
I lifted my brow, and my eyes widened. "Yeah."
"See, I'm telling you!" she said. "It's weird, I know. For some reason it just popped into my head earlier, then I thought, hmm, it got keyed."
"Are you sure you didn't see the damage when he dropped me off?" I asked, skeptical.
"I swear."
"I thought you needed to have physical contact with an object for this to work?"
"JD gave me a ride to pick up my car from the repair shop."
"You could have called me," I said, suddenly jealous.
Teagan smiled. "That's so sweet. I didn't want to bother you. Plus, JD's car is nice. I wanted a ride." Then her face crinkled with guilt. "It's not that I don't want a ride on your motorcycle. You can give me a ride anytime."
I chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind."
There was a flirty tone in her voice.
I had to admit, she was damn good-looking. But I didn't want to go there with an employee. I mean, I wanted to go there, but I thought better of it.
I didn't know how to explain her uncanny ability. I chalked it up to a lucky guess.
We said good night, and I strolled down the dock to the Vivere. I took Buddy out for a walk before crawling into bed.
Daniels called the next morning. I grabbed the phone from the nightstand and swiped the screen.
"Get down here. Xavier King, or whatever the hell is name is, decided he wants to make a deal."
"Lucas Tyler?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of deal?" I asked.
"He wants to talk to you."
"I'm on my way."
I called JD and told him to meet me at the station.
"Took the car into the bodyshop."
"Take a cab."
He grumbled for a moment. "I'm so mad about that!"
"You've got insurance, don't you?"
"Hell yes," JD said. "But those bastard's always try to stiff you." He bitched for another minute, then said, "I'll see you shortly."
After I showered, dressed, and stuffed a blueberry muffin in my mouth, I grabbed my helmet and gloves and sprinted down the dock to my bike. I cranked up the Yamazuki X6 sport-bike and cruised down to the station.
Daniels had Xavier/Lucas waiting in an interrogation room. The inmate had been brought over from the detention center. He looked thin and disheveled. 23 hours a day in solitary confinement wasn't sitting well with him. The inmates were typically given an hour of rec time in a private cage where they could get a little bit of sunshine, but not much.
"Start talking," I said, sitting across the table from him.
JD hadn't arrived yet.
"I can't stay in that place. I'm about to lose my fucking mind," Lucas said. His crazed eyes stared into me.
"Should have thought about that beforehand."
"I can give you what you want. But you have to do two things for me. No jail time, and you put me in the witness protection program. I don't want these people coming after me."
"Tell me what you've got, and I'll see what I can do."
"That's part of the problem. I don't have it."
"Have what?"
"Brynn wasn't stupid. I mean, yeah, in retrospect, what we were doing was a little insane. It was easy money."
"It doesn't seem so easy now, does it?"
Lucas frowned at me. "Brynn wanted a fallback plan in case things went south. A get out of jail free card. She recorded many of her interactions with Vasily Kozlov. Phone calls. Meetings when she was showing properties. She told me it's enough to implicate him directly. She figured if she got caught, she'd use the audio recordings to cut a deal."
"Where are the audio recordings now?"
Lucas shrugged. "That's what you've got to figure out."
I scowled at him. "You're not giving me much to work with here."
"Did you search her apartment?"
"Somebody did," I said. "When she was killed, the place had been ransacked."
"That's what they were looking for."
"How would they know she made the recordings?"
Lucas thought about it for a moment. "Maybe Vasily threatened her, and she threatened back. They killed her for it."
His theory was plausible.
"Did she ever tell you where she kept these recordings?"
"They were on her phone, and she said she backed them up to the cloud."
"Her phone's gone, and all her computers as well."
"Sync her information from the cloud with a new device. If it was backed up, it will restore the contents of her phone. You'll have everything you need."
"Do you have her cloud password and username?" I asked.
"No. But you've got a bunch of techies that work for the Sheriff's Department, don't you? I'm sure they can figure that shit out."
I stared at
him for a long moment. "Okay. If this leads anywhere, I'll talk to the DA and see what he's willing to do."
Lucas lifted his brow, incensed. "That's it?"
"That's it. Until I have concrete evidence, this is all just speculation."
"You can't make me go back to that cell. It's inhumane."
I shrugged, lacking any degree of sympathy. I knocked on the door, and the guard buzzed me through.
JD had just arrived and met me in the hallway. "What did I miss?"
35
Daniels got a judge to sign off on a warrant to access the cloud backup of Brynn's phone. We sent a request to Pear Computers, the manufacturer of the phone and manager of the cloud storage. The company's guidelines stated there was typically a 10-day processing time. The company did provide an avenue for emergency situations, but, according to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the manufacturer was permitted, but not required to, voluntarily disclose information if it believes, in good faith, that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.
I read over the company's legal policy, and my eyes glazed. They had a team of experienced corporate lawyers that were more than ready to fight most requests. The manufacturer didn't want to be seen as a data collection source for federal, or local, governments.
Of course, JD suggested we contact Zeke. JD called the hacker, and with a little persuasion—and several hundred dollars—he agreed to lend his expertise.
"Do you have the subject's email address?" Zeke asked, his voice crackling over the speakerphone.
"I've got her business card, it's listed there," I said.
"If that's her Cloud ID, we can initiate a password reset. But that could prove difficult if she had two-factor authentication activated."
"What's two-factor authentication?" JD asked.
"If you sign in from a new device, you'll get a text with a verification code. Since you guys don't have her phone, you'd be shit out of luck. But I doubt her business email is her user ID on the cloud. That would probably be a personal email. At least, that's what most people use."
"Let me make a few phone calls, and I'll get back with you," I said.
