CHAPTER SIX

 

 

When he found out Nathan Auerbach drove a sleek, late-model Aston Martin, Micah decided for sure that he didn’t like Daisy’s boyfriend. Maybe it was because Micah still drove the same battered Honda Accord he’d crashed into a ditch a little more than a year ago. Or maybe it was representative of something bigger about Nathan’s character. His need to flaunt.

“Yeah, I know,” Micah said to Boba Fett, whose head was sitting in the cup holder in the car. “I’m playing amateur psychologist a little too much lately. But you know what, Boba? A year of sobriety, maybe I’m entitled to think I know a little more about the human condition than I used to.”

Boba Fett said nothing.

Micah had that shiny Aston Martin in his sights as he drove along I-270, headed east. There wasn’t much out this way past Denver besides the airport and a few warehouses. Since Nathan worked in logistics consulting for different companies, maybe he was visiting one of those company’s satellite locations. That would make sense since it wasn’t yet lunch on a weekday. Micah hadn’t found much clarification about the day to day responsibilities of a Logistics Manager Consultant.

When Nathan turned onto Peña Boulevard, Micah disregarded the warehouse theory. Denver International Airport had to be Nathan’s destination. Or something near it. Micah kept his distance because closer to the airport, the traffic would thin to a trickle. Nathan could maneuver his Aston Martin between any straggling cars with laser efficiency. Micah had to work hard to keep up, but not look like he was keeping up.

Best to stay unnoticed. If this guy liked to spend his free time counting possibly illicit cash with possibly corrupt cops, who knew how paranoid he was.

Or dangerous.

Or, maybe not dangerous at all. Maybe just a rich boy with flashy cars and houses and a girlfriend who jumped to conclusions. This whole thing could be in Daisy’s imagination. That’s what Micah was here to find out.

Nathan exited off Peña at 75th, about a mile before the airport. This was rental car and private hangar territory, and as Micah suspected, Nathan slowed and turned into a lot with a small airfield and a collection of hangars. Those enormous metal buildings with no decorations.

Micah continued along 75th, keeping Nathan in his rearview to see which hangar he’d stopped at. Micah pulled a u-turn at the next opportunity, as two other cars came to a stop next to Nathan’s in the parking lot. A BMW and a sporty thing that might have been a Lamborghini. Micah wasn’t a car expert.

Whatever kind of car it was, this collection would have been any rich guy’s wet automotive dream. Micah didn’t understand the need to drive something so expensive. As long as his car worked, that was good enough for him.

As Micah neared the hangar, he piloted into the gas station across the street and idled at a pump. Reclined his seat to get a decent view without exposing himself as a gawker.

Nathan stepped out of his car and his brother Alec emerged from the BMW. They looked exactly alike, right down to the haircut. Micah wouldn’t be able to tell them apart in a lineup, that was for sure. Then, he remembered Daisy had said that Alec had brown eyes, not blue like Nathan.

Some other man stepped out from the Lamborghini. The new man looked like an Eastern European gangster. Slim, tall, tweaker-short hair, big aviator sunglasses. Something familiar about him gave Micah that same sense of unease as when he couldn’t remember where he’d seen Daisy before. Not likely that this guy lived in Micah’s building too, but Micah knew his face.

All three of them sported razor-sharp suits. Micah raised his phone and snapped a few pics of the three of them. He was too far away to get clear face shots, but he might spot something useful in these photos, anyway.

The three men stood in front of their cars, legs spread wide and hands clasped in front of their waists. Eyes forward, not speaking. They were waiting for someone.

A few seconds later, another car entered the lot. Not a luxury sports car, rather a big truck, with oversized tires and an extended cab. Micah didn’t know the model.

The truck parked opposite the three luxury cars, and a nondescript man wearing normal-looking clothes got out. He faced off against Nathan and the other two. For a few moments, none of them spoke or made any movement to meet in the middle. A standoff. A tumbleweed might as well have crossed the pavement between them.

Daisy had suggested that her boyfriend Nathan wasn’t into the drug business, but everything about this interaction screamed drug dealers. The fancy cars. The tailored suits. Nathan’s multiple residences. Corrupt cops. It had to be drugs, didn’t it?

The three fancy guys on one side and the regular guy on the other side talked for a couple minutes, but Micah had no idea what about. He couldn’t read lips and he had no spy equipment to pick up their voices.

But after another minute, he didn’t need sound to understand what was going on.

The nondescript guy approached the other three, his hands out. He was pleading. Nathan backhanded him across the face, then Alec grasped the guy by the arms and spun him. Now restrained, the European gangster loosed a barrage of punches into the guy’s midsection. He made little attempt to slip free or fight back.

This lasted for fifteen or twenty seconds. Nathan took his turn, cracking the man across the jaw a few times, until Micah could see the spatter of blood from here.

Eventually, it stopped, and they dragged the poor guy off toward the hangar. Blood dripping from his mouth fell in red dots, like breadcrumbs leading back to his truck.

Micah’s voyeur episode came to a screeching halt when a car horn honked. He glanced around to find that all the available gas pumps were now taken. The horn honked again, and Micah checked his rearview to find some guy giving him the finger. Get some gas or get out of my way, asshole.

Micah lifted a hand to acknowledge the guy, then started his car.

 

***

 

Micah parked behind the gas station and crossed the road on foot, aiming toward the hangar. Pulled his Denver Nuggets baseball cap low as he entered the same parking lot as the hangar. The building was an enormous barn-like structure with corrugated metal outside. One garage-type door for the plane entrance, which was currently closed. A couple of human-sized doors were at ground level.

A small plane roared and sped toward the ground, engines sputtering as it leveled off and descended. It matched the angle of the runway between the rows of hangars. Touched the ground once, twice, then skittered a little as it slowed near the end of the runway. Micah watched it come to a stop. Heat rose from the runway in waves of curved air.

Micah kept to the edge of the parking lot, walking as if he were trying to pass the hangar without directly crossing its path. Actually, he wanted to come close enough to see what kind of outdoor surveillance the building had. He would assume that Nathan, Alec, and the European gangster were busy pummeling that guy from the truck, but couldn’t say there weren’t others inside the hangar, watching security cameras.

There could be any number of things inside that building worth protecting. But Micah wouldn’t learn what until he could get access.

Out of his peripheral, Micah did see a couple of cameras over the main hangar door. But, nothing pointed at the side doors, which gave him a ray of hope he could break in if given the chance. Maybe not today, but at some point. He had to see what was inside that hangar.

Once he had escaped the reach of the front cameras, he veered inward on a path that would take him to the back corner of the building. If the hangar had dumpsters out back, he could learn a lot from that. He might expect to find drug packaging materials like discarded stretch wrap rolls and vacuum-sealed containers sterilized with bleach. Parts of broken or old scales. Possibly, odor control items like petroleum jelly and motor oil. Items that would seem innocuous in the trash, but a trained eye would know their purpose.

These were some of the tricks Micah had learned back in his cartel days. How to package and sell drugs and get away with it. Not exactly resumé-building skills, but the knowledge did come in handy from time to time. Luis Velasquez’s Sinaloa cartel had taught Michael McBriar many lessons, most of which, Micah wished he could now forget.

He met the corner of the building, still confident he’d been clear of the cameras. But when he turned the corner, it didn’t matter what the cameras had seen.

He came face to face with the European gangster, leaning against the back of the building, smoking a clove cigarette. His hands were bloodied.

“What the hell?” the guy said. Definitely European, but Micah couldn’t place the accent. He’d always been terrible at European geography. That feeling of familiarity intensified, but Micah still couldn’t match a name to that face.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Templeton,” Micah said. “Roland Templeton. I think I might have the wrong hangar. I’m supposed to meet a buddy of mine by the dumpsters.”

“We do not have dumpsters.”

Micah’s eyes flitted to the man’s bloodied hands, and the European noticed this. He dropped his cigarette and gritted his teeth, telegraphing a punch.

His left arm reared back, and Micah was already leaning to his right to dodge the blow. As the man’s fist sailed past his face and he felt the whiff of air, he had a momentary pang of realization that he missed being in the boxing gym. Missed a lot of things he used to do, back when he was someone else.

No time to think about that now.

Micah jabbed the man in the gut, which made him lean forward, exposing his chin. Micah swept his other fist straight up, catching the guy underneath his jawbone. Micah made sure he extended the knuckle of his middle finger to give his punch the extra sting.

Even though the punch knocked the man’s head back, he was only out of sorts for a split second. He lurched forward and stepped on Micah’s foot, driving his heel down into Micah’s toe.

Micah had been expecting a punch, and this move caught him completely off guard. With his foot pinned, he couldn’t pull out of range of the guy’s fists. The European took advantage and popped Micah cleanly on the cheek. Micah’s teeth involuntarily gritted. He might have chomped his own tongue off if he hadn’t anticipated the punch a split second before it had landed.

That would give him a black eye, no doubt about it.

Micah jabbed his thumbs into the guy’s armpits to push him back and create a little space, but the European was sturdy. He barely moved an inch. Micah slid a step to the right and tried to drive his heel at the guy’s knee, but his opponent swept his leg back and out of the way.

Now off balance, Micah couldn’t steady himself when the guy pushed him, which sent Micah crumpling to the ground. A jolt of unease panicked Micah. This European was more skilled, more vicious, more agile. Micah thought himself clever in a fight, but this guy had him outmatched at every level.

The European was on him in a flash. He lunged forward and Micah barely had time to roll out of the way before the European landed on the ground. Micah threw his elbow at the man’s exposed back, driving it with all his force.

Time to play dirty.

This blow knocked the air out of the European, and before he could recover, Micah flung his other hand, palm open, at the back of the man’s head. Slapped him hard enough to drive his face into the ground. That wet smack of flesh on concrete almost made him gag, but Micah couldn’t waste the precious second of distraction.

He readied his hand to smack the guy again, but the back door started to open. He panicked. It could be Nathan, or Alec, or both of them. Maybe with guns.

He scrambled to his feet as the European was busy spitting blood on the concrete. Took one last peek, but still couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.

Micah dashed back around the corner as the door opened all the way. Didn’t bother to check who had actually appeared through that open door.

He had to pray they hadn’t seen his face. If he’d used up his anonymity, that would make everything much harder.

As he ran, he didn’t bother to look back. But he was sprinting so wildly that his cap came flying off his head.

He’d have to abandon it, at first thinking it wasn’t a big deal. If they were behind him and he turned, he’d be spotted. Not worth it.

But, as he neared the edge of the parking lot and met the street, he remembered who these guys supposedly had as friends. Cops. They had access to DNA testing. All it would take would be one swab of sweat off the inner brim of that hat, and they could find out the name Micah Reed.

Going back for the hat was not an option.

Micah sprinted across the street, barely managing not be flattened by an oncoming truck. As he met the other side, he dared a glance back, and he saw Nathan or Alec Auerbach stopping to pick up his baseball cap, halfway across the parking lot.

Shit.

Micah kept on running until he’d rounded the gas station, car keys in hand. Panting, dizzy, wanting only to reach the car as quickly as possible.

Maybe they wouldn’t bother to test the hat for DNA.

Or maybe they would.

How long would it take to get those results back? Weeks? Days? Whatever it was, Micah was now on the clock.