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“What you northerners never appreciate... is that Texas is so big that you can live your life within its limits and never give a damn about what anyone in Boston or San Francisco thinks.” — James Michener, Texas
Dolph
Behind the wheel of his parked dove-gray Silverado, Dolph Ahlberg sipped from a paper cup of coffee and pulled a face. The java came from a chain with more locations than an outhouse had flies, and everybody except Dolph seemed to like the burned taste of their product. He bought the coffee in exchange for using the shop’s Wi-Fi and didn’t have the will to finish it or the wastefulness to throw it out. So he drank it like a kid taking medicine.
And sweated.
Not a breeze stirred, and the humidity approached the density of sea water. Muddy clouds covered the sky and held the heat like an electric blanket, and every breath felt like he was being waterboarded.
He answered his cell phone when it jangled a tune. “Yo?”
“Ahlberg, are you still in Houston?” Rita Goldman’s squawky Bronx voice violated his ear, and he held the phone farther away to minimize the damage. Who could live with a woman like this? Her voice alone would cause instant erectile deflation.
“Ahlberg, you hear me? You there?”
“Yep.”
“Listen.” She read off an address on Mosley Street and asked, “Do you know where that is? I looked it up, and it’s down by Hobby Airport. You know where Hobby is?”
“Yep.”
“Can you find the address?”
“Yep.”
“There’s a warehouse there, belongs to the same company owns Bartlett’s property?”
“I know.”
“We need to—Wait. You know? Whaddya mean you know?”
“I been sitting on it for the last hour.”
“You...”
“Y’all ain’t the only one can use the inter-webs. I did a property record search in the county records database, and I—”
“Well lookit Sherlock-fuckin-Holmes. So what’s there?”
Dolph’s lip twitched in a smile. “Warehouse.” He exaggerated his drawl on purpose, making it sound like warrr-house.
Muffled swearing followed as Goldman covered the mouthpiece. In a long-suffering tone, the FBI agent said, “Is that all? Are there, like—I don’t know, maybe clues and shit?”
“What we got is this.” Dolph shifted in his seat and killed the dregs of his awful coffee. He set the cup in the center console holder. He paused as a blue-and-orange Southwest Airlines jet screamed overhead. “Two lines of small buildings, perpendicklar to the street. Down the middle runs a mostly paved alley. I’m parked across the street, in front of a closed-up auto shop. The war’house buildin’s look like they got kicked out of Mogadishu for being too shitty for the construction codes. The Sugarland Enterprises unit—the one Bartlett owns, in other words—is mostly bluish, ugly, with a streak of snot gray on the front where the paint come off. All the other units got rusty padlocks on the roll-up doors, except for Bartlett’s, which has got this shiny new, high-grade steel lock with a protected shank.”
“Protected shank...” Goldman mused in a distracted way.
“Yep, the shank’s covered to keep people from cuttin’ her open with bolt cutters.”
“I know what ‘protected shank’ means,” she growled. “Can you see inside?”
“Nope. No windows.”
“We get a warrant?”
“Based on what?”
Goldman huffed in frustration. During the silence, Dolph pictured the woman’s teeth grinding protected-shank steel locks into metallic flakes.
A black Escalade with chrome spinners boomed from his right, bass thumping in his chest as it passed, rolling south on Mosley. Dolph retrieved a palm-sized pair of binoculars with a built-in camera from the seat beside him and made a note of the license plate.
In a subdued tone, Goldman asked, “Any word? About... you know?”
“Hun, we got nothing on Sam—” Dolph straightened and leaned forward. “Hold on.”
“What? What is it?”
A dark-green Jeep Cherokee slowed at the entrance to the row of warehouses and turned into the alley. It stopped at Bartlett’s unit, right side tight against the building, the rear bumper a few feet past the roll-up door. The taillights flickered, red-white-red, then died.
A slender man, maybe late-twenties, hopped from the driver’s seat and bounced around the tailgate, moving like a man in a hurry to be somewhere else. He marched to the warehouse door.
“Rita, darlin’,” Dolph drawled, “buy yourself a lottery ticket, because today’s your lucky day.”
“Wha—”
Dolph hung up and tucked the phone in his shirt pocket without looking, eyes focused through the dinky pair of binoculars.
The young man bent over to work the lock then tugged. Dolph heard his grunt from across the street. The door rattled up and tried to slide back. The guy shoved it higher and held it until it stayed up.
Dolph reckoned the Jeep’s driver to be about six feet tall. Caucasian, athletic but not a muscle head. Dark-brown hair, stiffened with gel and spiked up. He dressed like he was on the way home from a low-level office job: polo shirt and slacks with loafers.
Dolph framed the shot and clicked the camera’s shutter button once, twice, then a third time, getting three solid pictures of the guy’s face as he turned back to the Jeep. The driver popped the lift gate, revealing a full load of plain brown cardboard boxes. Dolph took pictures of those, including some action shots of the guy dragging the first box out and carrying it to the warehouse.
“Let’s go see what you’re haulin’, boy.” He fired up the Silverado and dropped it into gear. “If it’s your mama’s Tupperware, I’m gonna look mighty stupid.”
His heart jitterbugged the way it always did when the action got rolling. To Dolph, the moment he nailed some sack-of-shit felon’s scrawny balls to a fencepost gave him the same jolt as touching a hot-wire fence. Or like the buzz that zapped his heart when a three-pound lunker hit the crankbait and bent his rod double. His wife would never know it, but he liked that feeling better than Saturday-night sex.
He roared across Mosley without looking, trusting his peripheral vision and Jesus to keep him safe. The Chevy bounced on its springs cresting the road. Stooped under the Jeep’s lift gate, the driver froze solid, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, holding a second carton.
Dolph screeched to a stop, his off-hand mirror almost touching the Jeep’s left side, blocking the driver’s door from opening. The kid might run, but he wouldn’t be driving away.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Dolph ordered. His top speed was somewhere between an amble and a mosey, so it took Dolph a few seconds to climb out of the truck and round the back. By the time he made it, the Jeep’s driver had put the box back in the cargo compartment and moved to block him, palm out like a traffic cop.
“Who the fuck are you, and what are you doing here?” On closer inspection, the driver was definitely in his late-twenties, with delicate features and wire-framed glasses. Still a kid, in Dolph’s opinion, but not as young as he’d first assumed. The polo shirt he wore had a BATF crest over the left breast, which the wearer confirmed by saying, “I’m with the federal government.”
Dolph moved in close, causing the younger man to back up a step. He hooked his thumbs in his belt so the kid could get a look at the star he wore and the bone-handled .45 automatic on his hip. “The federal gubberment,” Dolph drawled. “Where’s my welfare money, then?”
“Huh? Hey!”
In the blink of eye, Dolph snagged the ID card hanging from the kid’s belt. It was on a retractable lanyard, which unreeled when Dolph brought it up close to his face. “Adams, Don. That your name, boy?”
“Yes, it is. Give me that back.”
Dolph let go, causing the badge to snap back into place. “Don Adams, huh? With the feds? You get a lot of shit about being Agent Eighty-Six?”
Adams’s brows knitted together. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Get Smart? TV show? Nothing? Generation thing, I imagine.” Dolph stepped around the confused-looking Adams and ambled to the open warehouse door. “ID says you’re a civilian employee of the Bee-Ay-Tee-and-Eff. What you do for my brethren law enforcement officers?”
“Look, you can’t be in here.” Adams scrambled to get between Dolph and the open door. He reached for the pull chain hanging beside the track and gave it a tug. The door didn’t budge. Adams looked around and found Dolph holding the door up with one beefy hand.
Stacks and stacks of cardboard boxes filled the interior of the metal building, which could hold a semitrailer’s worth of goods. A strong smell of fresh tobacco filled his nose. One of the boxes close to the entrance had the flaps laid back.
“What’s in here?” Dolph reached his free hand into the box, having to stretch a little to hold the door at the same time. Cellophane crinkled under his probing fingers, and he picked up one of the small packets.
“Hey, you can’t touch that!” Adams bounded forward to clamp Dolph’s forearm in a panicky grip, though the Ranger barely noticed the restraint. Like a dog leashed to the bumper of a pickup, Adams was coming along whether he wanted to or not.
“Marlboros?” Dolph examined the pack of cigarettes with a raised eyebrow. “There’s no tax stamp on here.”
“That’s evidence,” Adams told him. He had a blustery, obnoxious attitude that put Dolph’s teeth on edge. Two minutes, and he already wanted to slap the kid’s face.
“Evidence, huh?”
“Yeah, look here, Sheriff—”
“Ranger.”
“This is a federal evidence locker, and you have no right to interfere with it.” Adams fixed Dolph with a stern look. “You’ve probably already tainted chain of custody by touching that pack.”
“Where’s the evidence tag?”
“The what?”
“Evidence tag. You know, that thing what labels evidence and has a case number and all? What do you do for the ATF, anywho?”
“I, ah, computers.” Adams shook his head and blinked. “IT.”
“Why don’t that surprise me none?” Dolph tossed the pack of cigarettes back in the box where he’d found it. “All these boxes have cigarettes in them?”
“Yeah, I—look, you shouldn’t be here.” The BATF employee reached for the chain again and held it, as if expecting the Ranger to wander off. His bluster had blown away like so much smoke.
“You should clean off your glasses.” Dolph stood in the threshold, one hand propping open the roll-up door, as placid as a Longhorn steer chewing his cud. “They’re getting kind of fogged up. Humidity, I expect.”
“Listen, dude,” Adams whined, “you really don’t want the kind of heat my boss can bring, you know? He’s like... like a ton of badass. Why don’t you let me pack up here, and I won’t say anything.”
“Your boss happen to be a feller named John Bartlett?”
“I—no, ah, it’s somebody else.” The IT geek looked everywhere except at Dolph.
“I know some folks over at the ATF.” Dolph fished his phone out and made a production of scrolling through his contacts. “Why don’t I just give my old pals a call and see why they’re storing illegal cigarettes in a warehouse owned by Sugarland Enterprises?”
Adams folded faster than a lawn chair, sinking to the concrete floor and putting his head between his knees. Dolph wasn’t sure, but he thought the kid might be crying.
“Ah, shit” was all he said.
Dolph ambled over and sank to a knee beside the dejected Adams and patted him with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Donnie, my son, I expect you feel like you’re in a world of trouble right about now,” he said in his best Andy Griffith manner. “In fact, I bet you feel like you’re in a whole universe of trouble. From here to the Milky Way, nothing but trouble.”
The air in the alley moved in the tiniest of breezes. To Dolph, it felt more like standing in the open mouth of a giant while he exhaled hot, moist, smelly breath all over him. He wanted back in the air conditioning, but he had to exercise some patience with the computer guy.
“I won’t kid you, boy,” Dolph continued. “You’re in a leaky boat on an ocean of shit, and you’re sinkin’ fast. We suspect your boss may have killed a couple of law enforcement officers—friends of mine, in fact—which would make you an accomplice. You know what they do to cop killers in Texas, boy?”
Adams sniffed. He buried his face in the crook of his arm, glasses held to the side, dangling from an earpiece.
“The needle ain’t a pretty way to go, Don. I ain’t lyin’ about that.” Dolph let the IT geek stew in his own sweat and fear for a long count of sixty. “You know,” he said in a speculative way, “there might be something you can do, get yourself outta this here mess.”
Adams looked up. His eyes were only slightly redder than his flushed face. At that moment, he reminded Dolph of when he told his son, at twelve years old, his dog had been run over by a car.
“What?” Adams whimpered. “I’ll do anything. I can’t go to jail. I’ll die.”
Gotcha, you little shit. Hooked, reeled, and boated. Dolph smiled. “Why don’t you tell me about John Bartlett.”