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“The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number seventy-nine.” — Douglas Adams
Captain Marshall
Janelle, Captain Marshall’s admin, bustled into his office a moment after he hung up from giving Sarah Jo Cable the news about her son. Janelle laid a note on Marshall’s desk. “That sounded like fun.”
“Like havin’ a pineapple jammed up my—sorry, Janelle. What’d you bring me?” Marshall grumped.
A stout black woman, Janelle kept more secrets than the KGB and ruled Marshall’s headquarters with a kind of tough love somewhere between Aunt Bea and Chuck Norris. She could slap a man upside the head one minute then offer him hot chocolate with marshmallows the next, and he would be grateful for both.
“Mm-hm, I bet.” She pointed to the note. “That there’s the number of that lawyer you wanted. The one from California.”
“And the girl’s parents?”
“Right there, on the same paper.”
“Oh. All right.” Marshall put on his reading glasses and took a closer look. “Good.”
Janelle stayed in front of his desk, her expression serious.
The captain looked over the top of his glasses. “Anything else?”
“Don’t you worry none about our boy Sammie. He’s gonna be okay.”
Marshall sighed and tapped out the last Marlboro in his pack. “I know he’s double-tough, Janelle, but a plane crash... That’s a helluva equalizer.”
Janelle nodded, a firm jerk of her chin that brooked no doubt. “He’ll be all right—you mark my words.” She swished away, having given her pronouncement. Strangely, her conviction made Marshall feel better.
He pecked out the first number on the piece of paper she’d given him, dialed it wrong, and had to do it again. Fortunately for his temper and his blood pressure, he only cussed out one flunky before getting the person he wanted.
“Angela Romano. How can I help you?”
“Ms. Romano, Captain Marshall of the Texas Rangers. I understand you represented Ms. Jade Stone after her arrest there in Cally-forna.”
“Yes,” the attorney said, drawing it out. Her tone sounded guarded. “That’s true.”
“Ma’am, I need to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Assuming it doesn’t violate privilege, I’ll be happy to answer them.”
“Something you may not be aware of, Ms. Romano, but the plane carrying your client and her escort went down in New Mexico.”
“What?”
Marshall gave her the details about the crash and the current status of the search, which was only just getting underway.
“That’s horrible,” Romano said.
“Well... it ain’t good.” Marshall lit the cigarette he’d been toying with and took a drag. “Thing is, reason we’re involved in the first place, your client made some noise about police corruption, which ain’t no shock. Half the crooks in prison say the same thing. ’Cept this one, her daddy’s got some pull, and he made some calls, and here we are.”
Marshall paused for another drag and let Romano fill the silence. “That’s true, Captain. Ms. Stone believes she’s the target of a police conspiracy.”
“Care to expand on that answer?”
When Romano spoke again, it was obvious she’d chosen her words with care. “My client and a Dallas Police detective, Thomas Grace, were seeing each other socially, as you probably know. Ms. Stone began to suspect Mr. Grace of engaging in a criminal enterprise—”
“What kind of criminal enterprise?”
“She did not say.” Romano cleared her throat and continued, “She did mention she believed this conspiracy involved federal law enforcement, in particular Mr. Grace’s half-brother, John Reed Bartlett of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Bureau.”
“The ATF?” Marshall sat back in his chair and stared at the acoustic tile overhead. “No shit?”
“No shit, Captain. Please understand that some of what I’ve just told you, I learned in a privileged conversation. I believe in this case, the safety of my client outweighs the need to protect that conversation.”
“And I appreciate that. I have two men missing, and if there’s anything to this conspiracy thing... well, it makes that plane crash look mighty suspicious. She have any evidence of this criminal enterprise?”
“Not that she related to me,” Romano said.
“Name any names?”
“None more than I’ve already given you.”
“What about her folks?”
“What about them?”
“You think she told them anything more?”
“You’d have to ask them, Captain. I truly don’t know.”
Marshall thanked the attorney and hung up. “Janelle!” When his admin poked her head in the door, Marshall said, “Look up all the public stuff you can find on John Reed Bartlett of BATF. Then get me the phone number of the Wicked Witch of the FBI.”
“Who?”
“That woman who helped Sam that time.” Marshall stubbed out his Marlboro and rolled his hand to get his memory flowing. “Goldstein, Goldfarb, something like that.”
“Rita Goldman?”
“Yeah, her.”
“Uh-huh. You know she’s in New York City, right?”
“Last I heard, they had workin’ phones there.”
When Janelle disappeared, Marshall picked up the handset again and dialed the second number on the slip of paper. Time to see what the parents of Ms. Jade Stone have to say about their little girl’s story. Crooked ATF agents and Dallas cops. Neither one would surprise him, since he’d arrested more than a fair share of LEOs in his time, but a conspiracy seemed far-fetched. But impossible?
Not a damn bit.
The phone rang on the other end, and he yelled out to Janelle through the open door, “And get Dolph in here pronto!”
~~~
Sam
NO BEAR APPEARED, WHICH I found oddly disappointing. Stone may have been yanking my chain about it, but more likely, the critter heard all our human commotion and wandered off to do bear business elsewhere.
Both narrow and shallow, the stream ran fast and hard, as if shot from a fire hose. Had I wanted, I could’ve jumped across it or waded it without much effort. Slick muck and wet rocks bordered the rushing creek.
The fog muted sounds and held the temperature somewhere in the low sixties. Not cold enough to give me shivers but too cold to run around in wet clothes, so I was very careful where I put my feet. The water chilled my hand when I dipped the empty plastic bottles in to fill them.
Marlon had passed out again by the time I got back. He tossed and moaned in shivery, agitated bursts, and sweat soaked the collar of his uniform blouse.
Stone had cut the other sleeve from the ATF guy’s jersey and fashioned it into strips. She was busy wrapping them around Marlon’s upper arm when I loomed over her.
“His ankle’s in a bad way.” Her anxious look left me feeling even more helpless than before. “I can’t imagine the pain he’s in.”
“He’s a tough son of a bitch—that’s for sure.”
I poured the water into the miniature camp pan—it could be disassembled into a cook set, complete with knife, fork, plate, and skillet—and set it directly on the coals. My stomach rumbled when I shook the freeze-dried meal to settle the contents. Never before had reconstituted chicken casserole sounded so good. I checked the ingredients: chicken, mushroom, pimentos, nonfat dry milk, celery, corn oil... hydrolyzed corn gluten... autolyzed yeast extract... Yum.
While I waited for the water to boil, I scouted around the campsite for some saplings. I had half a mind to rig a stretcher out of the sleeping bag and a couple of long poles and carry Marlon out of here between us. I found one likely candidate and commenced to whittling at its base with Bragg’s Swiss Army knife. Stone found me, and I explained my plan.
“Could work,” she said, glancing at Marlon. “It’ll hurt like hell.”
“It’ll hurt like hell, him just laying still.”
“True.”
“Like you said, he’s in a bad way. If we don’t get him off this mountain soon, he’ll likely die.” Fresh pine sap made my hand sticky where I chipped away at the sapling’s trunk. “Our other choice would be to send you for help. I leave you here, the bad guys could get both of you.”
“You trust me enough for that?”
I took my time answering, pushing and pulling the tree to work the notch I’d cut into a splintery mess. “Trust is a big word. Let’s say I believe you have some bad folks after your ass. Bad enough they can take down a plane. Bad enough they have—had—a crooked ATF agent on their payroll.”
The mist had lightened while I worked, and I could see almost all the way to the stream. Behind us, the rock cliff rose above the trees, big sandstone blocks stacked together. I shoved the sapling with my boot and pushed it over with a crackle of springy wood.
Stone watched me with her hands in the back pockets of her stained blue jeans. She wore Bragg’s dark-blue jersey with cut-off sleeves over the bulky Kevlar vest, her hair needed a currycomb more than a brush, and streaks of blood and dirt served as makeup. If you threw mud on the Venus de Milo, would it be it any less beautiful?
“Are you okay?” Stone’s eyebrows pulled together in a frown.
“Huh? Me?” I went back to playing Paul Bunyan, digging at the tough little strands of pine with my knife. “Yeah, sure. Ah, anyway, trust. Why don’t you tell me why these guys are after your ass? Out to kill you, that is.”
Stone found a chunk of flat rock, and I tried not to watch her rear end as she brushed off the leaves and twigs before sitting down. I failed.
She crossed her arms over her knees and rested her chin on them. “Are you sure you want to hear this? You sounded pretty adamant in the car that I was full of shit.”
“Circumstances have changed,” I told her.
A wry smile. “That, they have.”
I cut my sapling loose at the base and commenced stripping and whittling the branches off. “And Jade Stone. Tell me about that. Your parents have a sense of humor?”
“Hah! You’d think, wouldn’t you? I have an older sister named Ruby, a brother, Diamond, and a little sister, Gem.”
“Gem Stone. Seriously?”
“Daddy liked his rocks. What can I say?”
“All right, Jade Stone, how’d you get to be number one on the hit parade?”
She scratched her nose and stared at the ground in front of her. “Tommy Grace and I started dating last fall. He’d made detective in the summer, and I’d been hired at Cleburn & Harris not long after. Tommy and his brother, Reeder Bartlett, wanted some business filings done, and the law firm assigned me. That’s how we met.”
Warmth crept into the day as the sun rose higher in the sky, and the mist had lifted to a layer of low clouds obscuring the surrounding peaks. I fought a pesky limb that didn’t want to give up its attachment, and sweat burned my eyes from the effort. “Wasn’t it... what? A violation of ethics, or some such, to date a client?”
She had a self-deprecating way of smiling, crimping her lips down at the corners. “It was definitely tiptoeing along the line. But Tommy could be sweet and charming and funny, and he had all these great cop stories...” She shrugged. “I didn’t date much in college—too busy, I guess. I suppose you could say I was naïve, and I missed seeing Tommy for what he was.”
“Crooked, you mean?”
“Like a pretzel.” She sniffed and wiped her nose on the jersey’s hem, clearing her throat. “I figured out later, the business filings I was handling? Tommy and his brother were setting up shell corporations to hide their illegal income. The corporations invested in money-laundering fronts like bars and dry cleaners. Car washes. All places you can hide funds. And man, they were raking it in too.”
I finished stripping my pole and set about trimming it to a ten-foot length. More sap gummed my hands. Around me, the forest sounds blended into peaceful background music. In other circumstances, there was nowhere else I would rather be than in a secluded forest with a pretty girl. Right then, all I wanted was to get Marlon and Jade off that mountain without any of us dying along the way.
“How much?” I asked.
“Almost a hundred grand a month. When I asked Tommy about it, he said Reeder had family money from his father. Tommy and Reeder share a mother but have different fathers. Tommy was the youngest.”
“So what happened?”
“Hm?”
“How did Tommy wind up dead and you on the run?”
“Well, I was naïve but not stupid, so—”
A heavy beat of rotors echoed along the valley, direction and distance impossible to determine. Stone and I froze, ears cocked. The thumpa-thumpa-thumpa grew closer, and I scanned the low clouds.
“Is it them?” Stone’s eyes were wide, and she hunched forward on the perch.
“I don’t know.” I located the direction, somewhere higher and to my right. “But it sounds like they’re right where the plane went down. Wait here with Marlon while I go take a look.”