| |
Shorty was having a good time. He liked Angie. He thought she was good for Mac — he actually liked Mac better now that she was around. He and Mac would always be best friends, but he had to acknowledge the man was intense. And he had a way of dragging Shorty into the kind of problems Shorty didn’t want to be involved in.
Specifically, any problem that involved guns. You’d think that would go without saying, but around Mac, it didn’t. Even after he specifically did say no more guns, he’d gotten dragged into that battle at the Parker House. He shook his head. He almost lost Mac that day. He would have, if it wasn’t for this fun-loving chick with the fuchsia streak in her hair. When it came down to it, she’d picked up a gun and saved Mac’s life.
He would owe her forever for that.
Not that she seemed to realize he felt that way. She just accepted him as part of Mac’s life and included him in hers as well. Mac had better realize what he had here, or they would have words.
Even more, he would drag Mac home to his mother and let her have words with him. Even Mac listened to Shorty’s mother.
So he hadn’t had any problem sitting by the side of Mercer Avenue to see who was tailing Angie. That it was the FBI was a bit disturbing, however. And he was betting it was Mac’s fault. Somehow, someway, Mac was in deep shit again, and he had managed to suck Angie into it. Shorty assumed it would only be a matter of time before he, too, was knee deep in shit and carrying a gun again.
What part of ‘I only want to teach math and do some data mining to pay the bills’ did Mac not understand?
That wasn’t really fair, Shorty admitted to himself. Mac hadn’t done a damn thing to drag him into this problem. If anything, Shorty was worried he might have triggered the whole thing by snooping around online and on ancestry.com. He knew Mac was more bothered by his ignorance of his own heritage than he let on. Mac joked about it, but it bothered him. Shorty got that. It would bother him too.
He was blessed with two parents who really cared about him and his siblings — even during Shorty’s wild years. He tried to imagine not knowing who his parents were and couldn’t. And truthfully, Mac’s mother was worse than not knowing. Mac would have been better off if his mom had let Lindy raise him from birth. Much better off.
So an abusive mother and an absentee father? Mac had built himself out of nothing. He could be pretty scary at times, but Shorty only had to look at the students he taught to see how psychotic people could be when they didn’t have the home Shorty had been blessed with.
Although, Mac might also be psychotic. He snickered a bit. Mac had admitted once that he’d broken into his CO’s office to find out the results of a psych eval he’d been ordered to take. Findings of sociopathy? Inconclusive. Mac had felt vindicated by that, actually. Everyone else blinked at the idea of inconclusive as a positive — and that Mac had no compunctions about breaking into his CO’s office to find out, either.
Might be the definition of a sociopath, actually. Shorty snickered again.
So here he was at the Bohemian, Mac’s go-to bar, drinking beer with Angie and her former roommates. Not a bad reward for coming out and checking on Angie’s tail. His only problem for the evening was deciding who he liked better, Kristin or Carla.
He was in between girlfriends. He’d broken things off with Regina last fall when it looked like things at the Parker House were going to get really ugly. He didn’t need to drag her into it, and he’d realized he didn’t like her enough to pull her into the Parker house like others had their SOs. They had fun. The sex was good. But it wasn’t a relationship for the long haul — not the ‘for better or for worse’ kind. And going through something like last fall required more than a good-times relationship.
He hadn’t found anyone since then either. Something had changed, he admitted to himself privately. He wanted someone who would stand by him like Angie stood with Mac. And Mac stood with her, for that matter.
But there wasn’t anything wrong with some good times until he found someone either. And Kristin — or Carla — might be just what he needed.
So he had a second beer, and then he invited Kristin to dance. And when they came back, people were ordering burgers, so he did too. Somehow the table had grown — it usually did with Angie. She collected friends.
He was thinking about a third beer when Rand Nickerson walked in. He was probably close to 40, tall, with brown hair and eyes. He looked more like the mountain guide he was on weekends than the buttoned-down type Shorty associated with the FBI. Rand was wearing a gray wool shirt, and some kind of non-descript dark brown trousers. Northwest attire. But not necessarily FBI attire.
At least, he couldn’t picture Stan Warren wearing something like that. But then Warren was a D.C. bureaucratic FBI type who’d moved to Seattle less than a year ago.
Rand pulled out a chair next to Angie and sat down. “So what have you gotten yourself into, now?” he asked her. “Or rather, what has Mac gotten you into?”
Shorty laughed at that, since it was so close to what he’d been thinking. Angie rolled her eyes. She told Rand what happened, turning so that the rest of the table wasn’t invited to listen. And truly, as loud as the music was, and as noisy as this crowd got after their second drink, they probably weren’t. Shorty moved closer, however.
Rand pursed his lips and tapped his fingers on the table. “It wasn’t us,” he said finally. “I told Stan. He’s going to make some ‘inquiries.’” Rand made air quotes around that and rolled his eyes. “I asked the bureau chief. He was still swearing when I left for the day. Nothing that man hates more than when other agents head into his turf without giving him a heads up.”
Shorty frowned. “They drove?”
“Yeah,” Ran said, with a nod of approval in his direction. “Usually we get encroachment from D.C. right? Fly in, rent a car. But this car had government plates. They drove up.”
“Up,” Shorty repeated.
“Best guess, they’re up out of California,” Rand said. “Oregon office would tell us. They don’t bother with games like this. They’ve got enough on their plate in Portland to bother coming up here unannounced. They’d call and beg us to do whatever it was they needed. They’re stretched too thin.”
“California,” Shorty said with a sigh.
“Where’s Mac anyway?” Rand asked.
“California,” Shorty repeated. Now it was Rand’s turn to sigh.
“What’s he doing down there?” Rand asked.
Shorty looked at Angie. She looked troubled, then shrugged. “If he didn’t want me to share it, he shouldn’t have sent me up to Craig’s place, and pulled me into all of this,” she muttered. She told Rand what she knew — about the text from Mac’s cousin, and Mac had gone down to help. He’d called her just a little bit ago in response to her texts about this. Things had gone downhill fast. His sister-in-law had been kidnapped. Mac was protecting his nieces — second cousins really — at his uncle’s condo. And now he was sending his uncle Michael north with the girls to keep them safe.
Shorty hadn’t gotten that last update. He considered it.
“Toby Rollings is bad news,” he said abruptly. “Mac sees Toby as not much different than himself, just that Mac got a break and Toby didn’t.”
“Andy Malloy,” Rand said. He knew that part of the story from last fall. Angie’s hands clenched into fists at the mention of the name of the man she’d killed. Rand reached over and patted her hands gently. She smiled at him and released her fists.
Shorty nodded. “Andy Malloy,” Shorty agreed. “But truth is Toby isn’t Mac. Mac stands by his friends. He is capable of believing in justice. Really, he’s got a white-knight complex. Toby? Toby is all about Toby, and short-term gains. He always was. He never did anything for anyone but Toby.”
“Except he lied for Mac,” Angie objected.
Shorty shrugged. “Hardly the big gesture he made it out to be,” Shorty said. “He was going down for that car theft. It cost him nothing to deny Mac knew the car was stolen. Mac benefited, no lie. But Toby always made it seem like he took the fall for Mac. That’s not true. Toby took the fall for Toby; he just didn’t pull Mac down with him.”
And Toby had called in that chit over and over again. Shorty didn’t bring that up. Rand was an FBI agent after all, even if he didn’t look like one. Really, it wasn’t until Mac got on at the Examiner, that Mac had told Toby no more. Shorty had never asked exactly what those jobs entailed, but he could guess. And they weren’t jobs Rand needed to know about.
So it had been three years until this, and Mac went. This was different, Shorty conceded. This was about Toby’s wife and daughters.
“Mac says Toby might be trying to go clean,” Angie said. “Something about his oldest is 8 years old now and starting to ask what Daddy does for a living. And her respect matters to him. That possible?”
Shorty shrugged. “Anything is possible,” he said. “Sure. Even Toby probably wants to be a hero in his daughter’s eyes.”
“So Mac goes off to rescue the wife and daughters?” Rand asked. “He doesn’t call us for information first?”
“No,” Angie said. “It was made to seem urgent, and I guess it was. They kidnapped Keisha last night, after all. He missed being down there in time to prevent it by about 12 hours. Something’s bugging him, though. I can tell. Something big enough that he’s sending the girls to safety up here. But shouting over the phone in the Bohemian is hardly the way to drag it out of him.”
“No lie,” Rand said, looking around. A waitress placed his burger and fries in front of him. Rand thanked her with a smile, and the waitress actually got a bit flustered. Shorty watched that consideringly. Rand had a good deal of charm. Mac had better be looking after his own woman, and not Toby’s.
“So, tell me again? Why did you go to Craig Anderson’s empty shop?” Rand asked.
Angie told him what she knew: There had been a blotter item about a break-in at that address. Mac was going to go check it out, but then Toby sent the text. So she went — just to make sure the place was secure. “I didn’t see any sign of a break-in at all,” she said, because that bugged her. “But I went inside, mostly because I was curious what that apartment upstairs was like, to be honest.”
Rand grinned at that. “Reporters,” he teased. “You’re all alike, even you photog ones.”
“True,” Angie agreed. “It’s a nice one-bedroom apartment, FYI. But there was a sleeping bag on the floor of the bedroom. And I got out of there in a hurry. Someone is living there — at least sleeping there. I didn’t see anything in the kitchen. Didn’t go into the bathroom. But as I got into the car, I looked up, and someone was at the window, watching.”
Shorty hadn’t heard this part. He didn’t like the sound of that at all. A glance at Rand told him Rand was none too happy about it either.
“So I was spooked by that,” Angie continued. “And it made me jumpy. At first I thought I was just being paranoid about being followed. But I went through a drive-through, did the slow-driving bit, and finally went off at an exit and got right back on. And he was still there — like he didn’t even care that I knew he was following me.”
Rand grimaced at that. “Been a while since I tailed someone,” he said. “But yes, sometimes you want them to know you’re there — a panicked person often leads you to someplace interesting.”
“Well I led them to the Bohemian,” Angie said with a laugh. “Good luck making something out of that.”
“And then I show up,” Rand muttered as he considered that. He shook his head. “I didn’t see anyone outside. And most FBI agents would stick out like a sore thumb in here. Hell, even I do.”
Shorty grinned at that. “Not as bad as Stan Warren would.”
“No,” Rand agreed with a laugh. “But Stan still sticks out even at the office.”
Angie giggled. Stan Warren’s attempts to fit into the more casual Pacific Northwest environs was endlessly entertaining to all of them. Shorty thought even Stan was amused, if somewhat flummoxed, about how hard it was to transition from D.C. to Seattle.
“But let me see what I can find out about that blotter item,” Rand said as he got up from the table. “I’ll step outside to make this call. Not the right ambient noise, I’m afraid.”
Angie looked after him as he walked away and then turned to Shorty. “He’s taking this pretty seriously,” she said, and she sounded worried by that.
Shorty shrugged. “Reporters aren’t the only ones who have more curiosity than is good for them. Cops do too.”
She nodded. “Mac worries me more,” she said. “Shorty? Has Mac gone down to solve Toby’s problems before?”
Shorty wasn’t about to answer that. “That’s a question you should ask Mac, someday,” he said slowly. “And not over the phone now. Wait until he gets back. Or let it go? The Mac you know isn’t the Mac of five years ago. This is the Mac you want — don’t remind him of the man he was.”
Shit, he thought. That didn’t even make sense. But Angie nodded as if she understood what he was trying to say. He decided to call it good, and he asked Kristin if she wanted to dance before he put his foot farther into his mouth. Talking about Mac had so many landmines.
When Shorty came back to the table, Rand was there. “So?” he asked.
Rand shook his head. “Someone called in and said they’d seen someone hanging around the building. Didn’t leave a name. Cops did a drive-by, didn’t see anything unusual. Dispatch logged a number. I had them try it — no answer. Just dead air. A burner phone. And that is weird.”
“So were the FBI agents staking out the place? Tried to flush out whoever is there? And when that didn’t work, they decided to follow Angie because she was the first sign of life they’d seen?” Shorty asked.
“Maybe,” Rand said. “That makes as much sense as anything. Still leaves me wondering who was up there, though. Is Craig back?”
“Living pretty lean if he is,” Angie said.
Shorty looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Don’t you be thinking about going back up there,” he warned.
Angie looked guilty. “Well? Someone should, don’t you think?”
“Not you,” Rand said definitely. “I’ll run up there myself. I like Craig. You need to stay home and safe, Angie. You’ve got houseguests on the way, it sounds like. Let me handle this.”
Angie sighed. “Bunch of overprotective Neanderthals,” she muttered. “How did I end up friends with you all?” But she dug the key out of her purse and handed it to Rand.
Shorty laughed. “What did you expect Mac’s world to look like?” he teased.
And Angie laughed too. “Come on,” she said. “I want to dance.”
“You guys have fun,” Rand said, standing up. “I’m out of here. Place gives me PTSD flashbacks. Too many people, too much noise.”
Angie gave him a quick hug. “Thanks for coming to my rescue,” she said. “Let me know what you learn? Don’t go all protective, here, Rand. I want to know.”
He nodded. “I will,” he said.
Angie tugged Shorty toward the dance floor.
Shorty went home alone, however. He had fun. He liked Kristin and Carla, and he knew Angie was trying to matchmake there. But, he wasn’t in the mood. And didn’t that suck?
He parked in front of his Bellevue condo and went inside, flipping on the lights. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at it. Mac.
“Hey,” Shorty said. “What’s going on?”
Mac snorted. “I got shot at, then they came to Michael’s place looking for me. And Michael says the man had a Spanish accent. So my question of the evening is, exactly who is Toby’s supplier? Del Toro?”
“Shit,” Shorty said. He sat down at his computer and turned it on. “I’ll see if I can find any traces.”
“Fine,” Mac said. “What’s the deal with Angie being followed?”
Shorty told him the latest. “You should be here, not there,” he finished.
“I know,” Mac said — a surprise. “But I’m down here now. I’m sending Michael and the girls up to Angie, though. It worries me, Shorty. They had a key.”
Shorty thought about that. “Who has one?”
“Michael says Keisha does. Not Toby, I might point out. But since Belinda thinks the men tonight were the same men as the ones who kidnapped Keisha last night, I guess that makes sense.”
Belinda? Oh, right. Toby’s daughter. What was she now... 8 years old? Not the most reliable witness, Shorty thought. But Mac knew that as well as he did. Probably better. “So what are you thinking? Was this a ruse to get you down there?”
“I’ve been sitting here wondering that,” Mac said. “But I don’t see how that works. If the cartel wants me, they could come to Seattle after me as easily as here. And why would my father want to get me now?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Shorty said. This had been worrying at him all evening. “I wonder if I didn’t trigger some tripwire while looking in ancestry.com. I was going to go look at the site’s rules, actually. Are people are notified that someone looked at their profile?”
Mac was silent. “Possible,” he said at last. “But the timing doesn’t work — unless you’ve been exploring longer than I thought. Toby’s been gone since last Monday — over a week.”
Shorty thought about that. He’d sent in Mac’s swab a while back, but he hadn’t found his possible father until Friday. “No,” he said, relieved. “I didn’t find the possible link to your maybe-father until Friday.”
“No, I think something else may have triggered it,” Mac said. Shorty waited, but Mac didn’t explain. No, of course not. When he said something next, it was in a different direction. “My mother had to have known who my father was back then, right?”
Shorty grimaced. “Yes. Since she submitted your swab, she had to be looking.” He considered it. “No, I bet that’s not the order things happened in, actually. I bet she contacted the man she thought was your father, and he demanded that she submit a swab, so he could see if it was possible.”
“A form of a paternity test,” Mac said. “And once he knew, he blocked his profile. Probably if he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t have put himself in the database at all.”
“Probably,” Shorty agreed. “But this was the early days of ancestry.com and sites like that. People just thought it was cool and hadn’t figured out all the pitfalls. You’re not the first person to discover he’s got relatives he doesn’t want.”
Mac laughed. Shorty winced. There was no amusement in that sound. Mac was hurting. This was hitting at Mac’s biggest sore spot. And there was damned little Shorty could do for him.
“That’s one way to put it,” Mac agreed. “So, I’m guessing Mom was looking for money — child support. Money is Mom’s motivation for most things. So did he give her money? If so, where did it go? It sure as shit didn’t get spent on me. How long did she get it? How close of tabs did he keep on me? On her?”
“Good questions,” Shorty said. “Can you ask your mom?”
“No clue where she is,” Mac said. “Michael doesn’t know either. She was here a couple of years ago. She’s living in an RV, and she needed repairs — figured Michael would help her. And she was right, he did. So he got her license plate from the repair shop before all hell broke loose here. Can you track her?”
“Maybe,” Shorty said. “Give it to me and I’ll see.” He jotted down the number Mac gave him.
“So now what?” he asked Mac. There wasn’t an answer. “Mac?”
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he heard Mac say to someone.
“Mac?” Shorty said, alarmed. He couldn’t hear the other person. Just Mac. Then he heard the splintering of a chair. He knew that sound, all right. Mac was in a fight with someone. And if he didn’t have a gun, his weapon of choice was a chair leg. Shorty hit record on his phone.
Why didn’t Mac have a gun? He always had a gun!
Shorty listened, helpless to do anything else. Well, no he wasn’t. He logged into his computer, looked up dispatch for Vallejo, and sent them an email message: On the phone with a friend. Someone just broke into the apartment he’s staying at. Condo belongs to Michael Rollings, a professor at the community college. Don’t have the address.
Dispatch: Sending a car now.
Shorty: There may be children in the home. Shorty didn’t think there were actually. He thought Mac had already gotten them on the road. He hoped so, anyway. But the cops might respond quicker if they thought children were in danger.
Dispatch: Are you still on the phone?
Shorty: Yes. I can hear sounds of a fight. My friend, Mac Davis, is a former Marine. He’ll put up a good fight. But it sounds like there’s more than one person attacking him.
Shorty opened another email window, and sent an email to Rand, he copied Stan Warren, and just for good measure, Janet Andrews. He hesitated, but he didn’t add Angie’s name. He’d call her when he knew more and tell it to her over the phone, not by email.
It was Janet who got back to him first: Calling a reporter down there. Will let you know if I learn anything.
She must have said something to Stan, because he responded next: Making calls.
Shorty glanced at the clock on his computer. Not even 10 minutes had gone by. It was always that way. Fights happened faster than people realized.
“Dios,” he heard someone swear. “He had a phone line open.” And then the call dropped and Shorty was listening to nothing. He stopped recording. He would upload it to his computer and see what he could hear when he enhanced the sound.
Shorty carefully thought about the voice and how he would describe it. What had Mac said? Michael and Belinda had both described it as a Spanish accent, but Michael had said it was that of an educated man — whatever that meant. Shorty was a bit sour about how people described accented English. His parents had been looked down on for their accents — by people who could only speak one language, and quite frankly, most Americans spoke English poorly.
It reminded him of a joke he’d heard: What do you call someone who speaks three languages — trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.
That had struck him funny, and a deserved put-down, until he thought about it. His parents were American too — and his Mom was bilingual and his father was trilingual. Because if you reversed that joke? It said they weren’t really Americans, didn’t it?
Focus, he demanded. He looked at the find me app on his phone. Mac’s phone wasn’t moving. He frowned, not sure what that meant. He jotted down the address and sent it to the dispatcher with an explanation of how he got it, and an update that the phone call had ended. The dispatcher thanked him, said the officers were pulling into the condo parking area now.
While he waited, he uploaded the call file to his computer.
Then Shorty thought about Mac’s truck with his hidden cargo space, and grimaced. Something would have to be done about that.
He sent the dispatcher his phone number and asked that he be called directly.
When the call came in, it was on Mac’s phone. “Mac?” he said, snatching it up.
“This is Officer Gutierrez,” a stranger said. “Are you the one who reported the break in?”
“I am,” Shorty said. He gave the officer his name — his real name — and mentioned he was a math teacher in Bellevue, Washington. It never hurt to establish his bona fides as a law-abiding person before the cops found out who else Mac was related to.
Shorty ran down a brief background — Mac had been visiting his uncle, and there had been an earlier break-in. Concerned, Mac had suggested Michael Rollings take his granddaughters to visit their grandmother — Michael’s ex-wife who lived up here. Mac had called to give him that information.
“And then he said, ‘what the hell are you doing in here?’ And I heard a fight break out,” Shorty said. “Is he all right?”
“He’s not here,” the officer said. “No one is. But the place is pretty trashed. I’d say it was quite the fight.” He sounded admiring.
“Mac is a former Marine,” Shorty told him. “He’s a reporter now. Covers cops. But once he was recon.”
“He put up a good fight,” the officer said. “But they probably knocked him out then took him with them. Any ideas who?”
“No,” Shorty said. And that was true. “But his boss said a local reporter named Ryan Geller might know more. I emailed her after I emailed dispatch.”
“Good thinking about that, by the way,” the cop said. “Geller? I know him. I suppose he’ll be here shortly, then.”
“If he’s a good reporter, probably will be,” Shorty said with a contrived laugh. “And Janet Andrews’ word says he’s a good one.”
“By some definitions of good,” the cop agreed. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t see any blood. And I don’t see any bullet holes. They weren’t trying to kill him or he’d be here bleeding out.”
“He was shot at earlier today,” Shorty remembered. “He thought an AR-15. Downtown? He’d been having dinner with Geller.”
“We’ll open a case,” the officer promised. “Ideas about what to do about this place?”
“Lock the door?” Shorty said. “And when I hear from Michael Rollings, I’ll have him call you.”
“Good thing for him he wasn’t here,” the officer said. “I’m really glad there weren’t kids involved.”
“Mac’s got good instincts about dangerous situations,” Shorty said. “Afghanistan.”
“That would do it,” the officer agreed. Shorty didn’t say he thought those instincts had been honed years before that. Best the cops thought of Mac as a Marine turned cop reporter.
Which he was, Shorty thought. He wasn’t lying.
It just wasn’t everything he was.
Shorty closed his eyes for a moment, and then he called Angie.
Mac? Where are you?