Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  That light in his eyes was a little scary, a little too much for me right now. He fixed me with that stare and wouldn't let me go.

  "Join my team, Dent. We can take the gloves off, the way you've always wanted to."

  "Maybe," I said. "But right now I'm in jail. If I get convicted of what they're saying I did, I'll be in prison. I'm not much help to you there."

  Bolle sat back, that smirk on his face again. "If Todd can get Gibson Marshall out, I'll get you out. You're going to be transferred into Federal custody. I can make that happen."

  "You know," I said. "All the people I've arrested get to have arraignments and lawyers and such. Seems like I've been here a while without any of that."

  Bolle waved that away. "I've got a lawyer for you if you need one. Your arraignment keeps getting pushed back. With luck, none of this is ever going to see a courtroom anyway."

  Interesting. He was waving away the justice system as easily as Todd and the Marshalls appeared to. I wondered if Marshall's trial for killing Heather Swanson would ever see a court room. Somehow she had gotten lost in the shuffle.

  Al and Bolle were packing their stuff, getting ready to go. Al looked troubled.

  "Someone will be here for you tonight," Bolle said. "Stay safe until then."

  I wanted to ask him questions, but the deputy was coming in and they were going out. I didn't want to discuss anything with the deputy present. I just stood there like a piece of meat while he cuffed me up. I wondered if he was taking me to my death, if I'd get shanked by a passing inmate on the way back to the cell, or if I'd suddenly get depressed and figure out a way to hang myself in the cell. It would all be unfortunate. The deputy might even lose his job, but that was nothing a little bit of the Marshall family fortune couldn't make all better.

  As we walked, me always three steps ahead of the Corrections officer and to his left, on the other side of the red line painted on the floor, I was far more alert than I had been. I saw the hallways of the jail anew, eying each potential opening and hiding place, where before I'd been in a dazed funk. If somebody had wanted to slip a knife in me then, they would have done it. Now, handcuffed or not, they'd get a fight.

  Soon we were back at the cell, and I actually breathed a sigh of relief when the door slammed shut and locked behind me. I still chose the floor over the stained mattress. I lay back down on the concrete, put my hands behind my head and focused on the ceiling.

  Guitars were the furthest thing from my mind now. Now it was all strategy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I trusted Al.

  I came to that conclusion after lying there, staring at the ceiling for maybe an hour, maybe a little longer. If someone had told me the week before that it would take me an hour to decide whether I trusted Al, I would have cheerfully broken their jaw.

  But now, all bets were off.

  Everything I thought I could count on was gone. I'd always known there were corrupt cops at my department, but I'd always figured it was small time, individual stuff. Maybe we had the occasional guy who would skim some cash from a drug dealer, maybe take a freebie here and there, but I’d never even suspected widespread corruption.

  I'd never done it myself. You find yourself taking a freebie, maybe a cup of coffee, then a whole meal and before you know it, you're in a back room somewhere being handed a greasy bag full of $20 bills.

  Now I questioned everybody. I questioned the whole damn department. A couple of times I started to add up the number of people that had to be complicit in setting me up, but my mind just skidded away from that.

  But I didn't question Al. I'd seen him make the right choices too many times.

  Besides, if Al wasn't being straight with me, I truly had no hope. There was nothing left that could save me.

  That left Bolle. He wasn't like any Fed I'd ever known, and the more I thought about him, the less I realized I knew about him. He didn't appear to be attached to the Portland FBI Field office. I was familiar with most of the Special Agents that worked there. He could have been part of some anti-corruption task force. That's the sort of thing the Feds probably wouldn't advertise.

  All I knew is that I was heading for the ground way too fast and I needed to find a way to pop my chute before I hit. I lay there, coming up with one plan, then discarding it as unworkable, only to work on another one for a while, only to run into yet another dead end.

  Even if I somehow "proved" my innocence, what was to stop the evidence from disappearing? Or more "evidence" from being generated that I was guilty? Before, I'd operated on the assumption that if I just got to the truth, everything would be ok. Now I wasn't sure the truth mattered.

  The cell door rattled open and the older guard stood there, still fat, and still looking mean as hell. We must have had a shift change while I was lying there.

  He chained me, and led me through the corridors, twisting and turning until I was thoroughly lost, although I had the impression we must be working our way towards the outside. He popped me down at a desk, put down the clear plastic baggie with my personal effects in it, minus my guns and knives of course.

  I looked up and got a surprise. I'd expected Al, or maybe Bolle, but instead it was Eddie, Bolle's driver. There were FBI credentials hanging around his neck, he was straining the seams of a suit, he even had the regulation Fed haircut, but he didn't look like a Fed, didn't walk like a Fed, didn't stand there waiting like a Fed. He looked like a thug in a suit. There was no way anybody was going to mistake him for a Fed.

  A guy with a handlebar mustache and Captain's bars on his collars was standing in the corner, his arms crossed over his chest and a sour expression on his face. As Eddie signed the paperwork, I kept expecting the Captain to see through this charade for what it was, to put a halt to things and send me back to my cell.

  But he didn't. I watched in disbelief as Eddie and the captain signed the paperwork. Eddie walked over to me, and without a word pulled me up out of the chair by my biceps, with about as much effort as I would expend opening a jar of peanut butter. Christ, he was huge. I didn't have a real appreciation for how big he was until he was standing right next to me. He was remarkably light on his feet for such a big guy.

  He pulled out a pair of cuffs and put them on me, almost laughably loose, then the deputy removed his own cuffs. Eddie steered me towards the door, pausing only to collect my bag of personal effects between a thumb and a forefinger.

  The corrections guys just stood there, stony-faced and silent, as we headed out to the sally port. From there Eddie deposited me in the backseat of an unmarked car. I got to ride on a real upholstered seat this time instead of hard plastic.

  I was silent until we pulled out of the garage and were out on the street, then I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Eddie heard me, looked back in the rearview mirror. "What's the matter?"

  "I didn't think we were going to make it out of there. No offense, but you aren't the world's most convincing FBI agent."

  "I don't have to be convincing, man. I had official paperwork."

  I guess he had a point there. A few blocks from the jail he pulled into the parking lot of a fried chicken joint and drove around to the back. He got out, came around and opened my door.

  "What, are we going in for a snack?"

  "Funny," Eddie said. "Look, you're the one in the back of the car in handcuffs, so no fat guy jokes, understand? Or you can just stay that way." He dangled a handcuff key from one finger.

  I nodded and turned in my seat so he could get to the cuffs. He unshackled me and dropped my plastic baggie of stuff in my lap.

  "There. I thought you might feel better with your belt and shoelaces back."

  It was a small kindness, but an important one. I did indeed feel better with my belt and shoelaces back. I sorted through the pocket clutter in the bag, putting everything back where it belonged. I missed my weapons.

  Eddie drove silently. I stared out the window and planned. We glided on to I-205 South, then at the interchange got
on the I-5 headed back North, but before we got to Portland he took one of the Tigard exits and we dropped off into the middle of bland suburbia on Highway 99. We passed fast food restaurants and strip malls before he took another turn onto Bull Mountain Road. We ran out of suburb fast and into farm country. Our tires crunched up a long gravel driveway and we stopped.

  The house probably hadn't been designed as a fortress, but it could pass for one. Low, squat and rambling, it had a slate roof and heavy stucco walls, not quite bulletproof, but close. It sat at the crest of the hill with no trees for a hundred yards around it. It was all open fields. They were fenced off, presumably for livestock, but they were all empty. The nearest house was almost a half a mile away. There was a big barn behind the house. One door was half open and I saw several cars and sport utility vehicles lined up inside.

  Eddie came and let me out. When he slammed the door behind me it seemed very loud. It was quiet out here. He motioned for me to follow, walked to the front door and punched in a code on the numeric keypad on the front door. I noticed a small video camera half hidden behind the light sconce next to the door. The door clicked and he pulled it opened. As we passed through, I noticed that the door seemed unusually thick.

  The inside was barely furnished. It was all functional, couches scattered haphazardly in the vast living room, a large-screen TV parked in one corner, but no decorations, no sense of any one person living here. I followed Eddie through a kitchen that could have served a medium-sized restaurant. He led me to another door with a keypad. He punched in another code, turning his body ever so slightly so I couldn't see, and it too clicked open revealing a set of stairs. The camera here was a little more obvious, mounted right on the ceiling with a big "x" of duct tape, the wire trailing down the wall.

  I followed him down towards the sounds of people talking. The basement had been finished as one big room running the length of the house, with only structural pillars breaking the line of sight. There were desks, computer displays, and workbenches scattered everywhere. Bolle sat in the center of the room at a long conference table strewn with papers. Al was over in a corner, standing with his arms folded next to a youngish-looking man that needed a haircut and a shave. They were both looking at a computer monitor that showed a map display of the Portland metro area. A blinking red dot was moving up I-5 towards North Portland. When Al saw me he reached up and flicked the screen off abruptly. He forced a smile and started walking towards me.

  I didn't smile back. Instead, I stood there taking in the room one slice at a time. It looked a combination office, conference room, high school science lab ,and storage room. An Asian woman sat on a chair in a portable office cubicle, staring at a computer screen. Two men were cleaning guns. As I watched they field stripped a pair of rifles with the ease born of long familiarity and started scrubbing. One, a Latino guy had long hair in a ponytail and some blurry tattoos on his forearm. The white guy sported a buzz cut and a lack of a neck.

  I looked back to Al as he walked up. His companion was so skinny I could count his ribs through his Foo Fighters T-shirt.

  The guy was young, couldn't even be thirty yet and had the pallor of somebody who spent too much time indoors.

  Al stuck out his hand. "It's good to see you, Dent."

  I didn't take the hand.

  "We need to talk. Alone," I said, staring at Al.

  Bolle stood from where he’d been looking at a flat screen display. "But I'd hoped to introduce you to the other members of the team," he said, walking over to us. He had his suit coat off and now I saw a long flat automatic pistol of a type I didn't recognize strapped to his hip in a fancy looking holster. It didn't look like Bureau issue.

  "We need to talk. Alone," I said again to Al.

  "Ok," Al said softly. He grabbed his suit coat, put it on so it covered his own gun, a plain old Smith and Wesson, and started up the stairs. I followed. Bolle also put on a coat and fell in behind me. I hadn't really wanted to talk with him, but I didn’t say anything.

  Al walked through the kitchen and out to the back porch. It was covered with dust and the pool was murky and green. Al folded his arms across his chest.

  "What can I do for you, Dent?"

  "Who are these people?"

  Bolle answered for him. "Members of my team."

  "Bullshit," I said, still staring at Al.

  "What do you mean?" Al said, still soft, but I could see the vein starting to throb on his temple. Al rarely got mad, but when he did you weren't likely to survive the explosion if you were standing too close.

  "Those people aren't Feds. The woman and the nerd in the T-shirt are civilians. They aren't in the game." I turned to Bolle for the first time.

  "Your 'driver' is a thug in a suit. He doesn't make a very convincing FBI agent, by the way. The two hard cases you've got down there are street muscle. If we strip them down, we're liable to find at least one 'born to lose' tattoo between the two of them."

  Bolle withdrew inside of himself. It was strange to watch. He became still. His facial expression became bland and fixed. His eyes unfocused and his body posture changed slightly. His weight settled lower, towards his hips. It was subtle. You wouldn't see it if you weren't attuned to things like that.

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I'd known one other guy who acted like that when he got pissed. His name had been Arthur Anthony Levy and he'd been a serial rapist I worked almost nine months to catch. I also suspected that Arthur had buried some bodies somewhere along the line, but I'd never been able to prove it. I'd worked on Arthur in the interrogation room for hours, playing cat and mouse with him as he indulged his ego. Finally, I'd suggested that the reason he raped women was because he didn't have the skills to pick them up in a bar, and Arthur had gone flat just like Bolle had just done. At the time I had wondered if this was the face Arthur's victims had seen.

  Bolle was quiet for a second. "You're absolutely right, Dent. They are criminals. Eddie has felony convictions in three states. Mickey should go to jail just for touching that AR15 he's cleaning. Felons can't have guns you know. And Fredrico is a convicted sex offender." His voice was slow and smooth and oily.

  That sank in for a minute. "Why?" was all I could think of to ask.

  "Because I have a soft spot for unfortunates, Dent. You see, the thing all three of those men have in common is that they all went to prison for things they didn't do. They were all framed at one time or another."

  I remembered where I had just come from, remembered being led through the halls of the Clackamas County jail in handcuffs, wondering if the guard had been paid off to let somebody stick a sharpened toothbrush smeared with human feces in between my ribs. I remembered all that and I shut my mouth. The ground was still coming, and I was starting to feel like I wasn't even wearing clothes, much less a parachute.

  "What, Dent?" Bolle asked. "No protestation that every con has a story about how he's been framed? No affirmation that our criminal justice system only punishes the guilty and protects the innocent? Where is your sense of outrage?"

  I kept my mouth shut for a minute, looking off in the distance. On a clear day, the view from here would be incredible. Even with the November sky, I could see halfway across the valley. Off in the distance, a heavy black cloud was drifting towards us, rain on the way.

  I looked at Bolle, hard. He didn't shrink away. I had to give him credit for that.

  "I can't figure you out," I said.

  "You're not supposed to. The only reason you're here is because Al says you're useful. That got you in the door. If you want to know more about me, I'm going to have to see you work. If you don't like it, Eddie can come get you and drive you back to your cell."

  I was tempted to tell him to whistle Eddie up and tell him to take me for a ride. Something stank about this. I had the feeling I was making a bargain when I didn't have a clue what my end was supposed to be.

  "Just go with it, Dent," Al said softly. I looked at him, seeing a balding guy with a little too much p
aunch, a guy who could easily be somebody's grandfather, but I was remembering the Al of years ago, the guy who had all but held my hand when I was a young detective, the guy who had taken a chance on making me a detective in the first place.

  "Ok," I said, feeling tremendous relief.

  I was doing what I'd always done, trusting in Al.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Everyone was sitting around the big table and pretending everything was fine when we went back downstairs. Bolle made introductions all around. Mickey and Frederico each shook my hand with a grunt, their faces flat, hard and expressionless.

  The kid in the Foo Fighters T-shirt was Henry. He was Bolle's computer expert and had a handshake like a limp fish. Eddie I already knew.

  The woman was May. Bolle said she was a psychologist. Her face was that perfect mask, polite but impenetrable. She sat down next to Eddie and put a hand on his arm with an easy familiarity.

  Bolle cleared his throat and everybody fell quiet. "For Dent's benefit, here's where we are. After his meeting with Todd, Marshall holed up in his studio and hasn't moved since. Dent impounded his van, but this morning a couple of employees of Cascade Aviation dropped a rental off, another full-size Ford Econoline, white."

  He took a sip of water before continuing. Everyone around the table was quiet.

  "The Cascade Aviation compound in Albany has tightened up security considerably since Gibson got arrested. Todd appears to have brought the boy in line. As soon as he got out of jail he went straight to the studio, none of his usual partying. He's even dumped his cell phone, unknown if he'll acquire a new one. He hasn't made any landline calls from the studio, nor has he accessed the internet, as far as we can tell."