“Oh, no,” Maggie said, raising her hand to her mouth.
“Yeah. She’s about six years old, dirty face in hand-me-down clothes that didn’t match. Like her dad rolled her in a pile of clothes that Goodwill rejected and accepted what came out. But, underneath that dirt, I saw her innocence, her beauty. She’s pleading at me to stop hitting her daddy with these big, brown, tear-filled puppy dog eyes. I just stopped, fist raised, blood dripping from my knuckles and it came to me that I wasn’t hitting a slab of meat like I was Rocky. I was hitting a real person, a father. He may have been a scumbag, but a sinking feeling of despair grabbed hold and jerked me out of this robotic state I put myself in. I saw then that I was no different from my father and if I didn’t stop, I’d permanently turn to stone.”
Jake swallowed, looking sideways at Maggie who sat in silence, absorbing the story.
“What did you do then?” she asked after a moment.
“I flushed the heroin down the toilet and took the bottle of Jack. Left him there bleeding on the floor. Paid the five hundred he owed my boss out of my own pocket and began to think about how to get myself out from the rock I’d crawled under. I’ve been paying people’s debts out of my own stash to keep from beating them, which I can’t keep up forever. But I can’t stop because I still hear the bone of that finger cracking. I can still see that little girl when I close my eyes at night. They’re the ghosts of reality that haunt me, but I think they’re still there to remind me I gotta get out of that kinda life.”
The burnt-orange sun rested just above the horizon, blasting a golden hue over the valley. The temperature dropped as the westerly breeze picked up, slapping the chill against their faces. Jake took off his jacket and draped it over Maggie’s hunched shoulders.
“Do you think people can change?” he asked, wincing as he waited for her response, afraid of what it might be.
She regarded him, her eyes searching his face. “Yes. Yes, I do. I think you already started down that path. You just need the inspiration to keep going.”
He breathed out. The worry about her running off when he told her the truth carried off in the Ozark evening breeze.
“I was worried you’d go busting down the hill away from me.”
“I can’t say it’s not a little scary, but I’m not running away,” she said, an uptick flashing at the corner of her mouth.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’ve been here mostly. A couple months after you left, I needed a change of scenery and went to live with my grandparents up north. Then, Dad died in a car wreck a couple of years later. Mom used the insurance money to send me to school in Columbia and get my nursing degree. She got sick after I graduated, and I came home to be with her.”
“Is that how you got hooked up with Hospice?”
She swallowed the last drops of her beer and set the empty can on the ground. Jake remembered her mom well—tiny in frame, fiery in spirit. Maggie was their only child, her pride and joy.
“She fought like hell, Jake,” Maggie said. “It was six months from diagnosis until I buried her. The Hospice staff was so great I couldn’t see myself working anywhere but there.”
“So, now you’re by your lonesome in the house on the hill?”
“Not exactly.” Her hair danced across her face from the wind and she hooked the locks over her ear to hold it back.
“Married?” he probed.
She glanced up beneath long eyelashes. “No, just me and my baby girl.”
Jake drew back. What the…? Baby girl? He closed his dangling jaw before any leaves or bugs flew in.
“You have a baby?” he choked out. Maggie registered the shock on his face and laughed.
“Well, she’s not exactly a baby anymore. Teenager. She’s growing up so fast I can hardly keep track.”
“What happened to the father?”
She eyed the darkening ground. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t tell him.
“He’s gone,” she said. “Didn’t quite work out.”
“Sorry,” he said, still stunned that Maggie was a mother.
“Yeah, me too.” She stood. “But speaking of which, I’d better get home. She’s probably wondering where I am. And I still have to make some food for one of my patient’s family.”
“I thought volunteers did that,” Jake said.
“I’m a volunteer.”
“I thought you worked there.”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Not all the time.”
She climbed to her feet. Jake pushed his large frame off the ground and faced her.
“I’d love to meet your girl sometime,” he said.
“We’ll do that. You going back to Hospice tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’m going to check in with Bear and Janey, but I’ll be there in the morning sometime.”
“I don’t suppose I could hitch a ride with you,” she said, bumping him playfully with her shoulder. “I kind of abandoned my car so I could spend some time learning what my ex-boyfriend has been doing all these years.”
“No problem.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “He didn’t scare you off?”
She rose to the tips of her toes and leaned in, kissing Jake on the cheek. It was soft and delicate, a whisper that sent shivers along his spine.
“Not yet, anyway,” she said, handing him his jacket. She walked the backside of the hill toward her house and disappeared into the darkened trees. A myriad of stars popped one by one in the sky as the darkness took control of the daylight, leaving Jake to wonder why the hell he ever left her in the first place.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The pole lights of Main Street flickered to life, but all was already quiet. They pretty much rolled up the Warsaw sidewalks after five o’clock. Bear sat with his back to his desk, eyeing the oak tree in the middle of the Benton County Courthouse square, recalling the time he and Jake climbed to its highest heights with their pockets full of acorns and spent hours throwing them at passersby. Every once and awhile, some unfortunate soul would settle against the base of the tree, and they’d keep score on direct hits to the head. Bear usually won and held it over Jake; he rarely beat him in anything.
The pleasant image faded, and the stark reality of the present trumped the simpler times of the past. The shithead Howie Skaggs had been in the interrogation room with his lawyer for the better part of two hours and Bear teetered on the edge of tossing the lawyer out and violating Howie’s civil rights. He’d never actually do something like that to jeopardize his case, but he hated sitting around with his thumb up his ass. Howie had stood on the edge of the waterfall, about to jump off and give them Shane Langston on a silver platter when the lawyer showed up.
A knock sounded on the door behind him. Deputy Daniels leaned against the frame with a cup of coffee.
“He still in there with the lawyer?” Bear asked.
“Yeah. You seen the guy before?” Daniels crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite the desk. Bear spun around.
“No, but Langston has more than a few bloodsuckers at his beck and call. Damn it…we almost had him. Another sixty seconds and he would’ve spilled his guts.”
“We ain’t getting nothing out of him now,” Daniels said.
Bear reached out and held up the bag of red rocks. “I’m not so sure. I’ve seen this variety before. There’s a cook who works out of Kansas City who makes this red stuff. Saw some files on it when I was on the task force. Thought he was in prison somewhere. I do have another question, though.”
“What’s that?”
“How in the hell did the lawyer get here that fast? This is Warsaw, not New York City with a lawyer on every street corner. Somebody’s giving ole Shane a heads up.”
“Maybe somebody saw us driving him in and unloading him,” Daniels said.
“Can’t be that,” Bear said. “The bloodsucker had to drive in from somewhere unless he just happened to be fishing out on Truman Lake. No, he was already on his way before we even pulled into t
own. I think it’s a hell of a lot more likely we got someone in our house batting on both sides.” But who could it be? There might be a couple guys who’d look the other way, but teaming up with Langston? “Book him for possession of the gun and meth,” Bear continued. “Stick him in a cell and wait for me. I gotta go meet an old buddy.”
“You want me to give Howie some company? Big Dick Sanders is about to start humping the bars of his cell.”
“Nah,” Bear said. “Let’s leave Howie alone with his thoughts. I haven’t given up on rolling him yet. My ability to prevent the penetration of his delicate posterior by a dick the size of a tree trunk might be the trump card I need to get his trap flappin’. You hear about the bust in Sedalia?”
Daniels shook his head.
“Cops got an anonymous tip about a drug stash in a warehouse. Rolled up and found six kilos of coke in a floor drain.”
“Six keys? Who owned the warehouse?”
“Beats the shit outta me.” Bear shrugged. “I’ve never heard of the place. Global something or other.”
“Somebody’s gonna be pissed.”
“Somebody’s always pissed about something, Sad Dog. It’s one of life’s few certainties.”
Daniels left and Bear locked the Devil Ice in his desk drawer. He stepped into the cool night and headed out to meet Jake on Poor Boy Road.
* * *
Despite the cool autumn breeze, Willie had to wipe the sweat from his brow with the tail of his shirt as he, Bub and Bennett finished loading half the Devil Ice into Dexter’s van and half into Willie’s truck, their path lit by the gas generator lights Dexter brought with him. With each trip into the house, Willie noticed Bub eyeballing the closed door to Halle’s room. He could hear the thoughts rolling through his enforcer’s head and considered the size of the problem he had on his hands. His cell vibrated in his pocket. Willie checked the number and winced. He walked back inside the house, away from his crew and answered it.
“I hear we have problems,” Shane said.
“Depends on what you mean by a problem.”
“I mean a local teenage girl who saw you and my product with her own little eyes. I call that a problem.”
“I got it under control.”
“How do you figure?”
“She looked through a grimy window. I doubt she saw anything.”
“I’m not taking a chance. Off-load the stuff to your storage area and bring the girl to me. I’ll be at the blue house.”
Damn. Other than an order to put a bullet in Halle’s head and dump the body, delivering her to Shane was the last thing Willie wanted to hear. In either case, nobody would ever hear from her again. The blue house hid deep in the Ozark countryside, one of three houses Shane maintained in the area that only a handful of people knew about. How the hell could he get her out of this?
“Second problem,” Shane said. “Where’s your boy Howie?”
“He never showed back tonight and won’t answer his phone. He was hungover as hell after last night, so I sent him back to his trailer to catch a few z’s before we broke this place down.”
“You call him from this phone?” Shane asked, a razor edge to his tone.
“No, the other burner phone,” Willie said. “What’s going on?”
“Howie isn’t answering the phone because he got pinched by Bear this afternoon. He’s currently sitting in the Benton County jail.”
Willie’s gut cramped. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit is exactly what you should be thinking,” Shane said. “He and your douche bag bodyguard beat the bejesus out of some guy last night and Bear hauled him in for it. In the process, they found an unlicensed piece and a bag of my product you guys have been cooking.”
Willie’s insides melted to jelly and he crashed at the tiny kitchen table, head resting in shaky hands. This was a disaster.
“I’m pissed, Willie,” Shane continued, the tension in his voice drawn as tight as a trip wire. “Thought you had better control of your crew than this.”
“Howie won’t say nothin’,” Willie said, but without much conviction.
“You got a hell of a lot more confidence in the little prick than I do. Let’s talk more when you bring the girl. And bring that tub of shit Bub with you when you come. We gotta tie up some loose ends. Be at the house in an hour.”
The phone silenced, and Willie held it with trembling hands. He glanced at the closed door holding Halle, mind racing at what could potentially happen when he got her to the blue house. What could happen to her? What could happen to all of them? Shane didn’t like loose ends and right now they were as loose as a cheap hooker on a Friday night. Bub lumbered along the hall toward him.
“Hey, we’re done loading and I wiped the place down,” Bub said, sweat rolling off his fat jowls. “You look like all the blood ran out of your body. Everything okay?”
“No,” Willie said. “I’ll explain on the way. We gotta meet Shane after we dump the stuff at the barn. Loose ends.”
Bub’s eyes crunched with concern. “Shane don’t like loose ends.”
“Exactly. That’s why things aren’t okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You’re going to end up in jail, man.” Bear cracked open his third beer. “Jail or dead. People who work for Keats don’t tend to have long life spans.”
They leaned back in matching stamped steel chairs on the deck of Stony’s place, the cracked wood frame table in between them. The crickets and bullfrogs around the pond sang a symphony, far more enjoyable and relaxing in comparison to Jake’s normal balcony experience in Kansas City of car horns and police sirens. Jake had spent the last thirty minutes sharing the past sixteen years of his life, except for the mission Keats sent him on. Bear could probably tell him everything he needed to know about Shane Langston, but Jake couldn’t figure out how to delicately launch into his orders to track down and kill the guy.
“Off the record,” Bear asked. “You ever have to whack anyone?”
“This isn’t the 1930s, man. Nobody calls it whacking.”
“Have you?”
“No,” Jake said. “When it came to getting deadly, Keats never sent me on those jobs. Guess he saw that line in me he knew I wouldn’t cross. Besides, he had gorillas who liked doing that kind of shit. I’ve got my anger issues under control.”
“What do you do with it? The anger.”
Jake shrugged. “Push it down. Compact it into a little ball that I shove into a corner.”
“What if the ball gets out?”
“I won’t let it. Not after last time.”
“What happened last time?”
Jake hesitated telling the story to a member of law enforcement. Then again, it was Bear. “Found a guy I was sent to collect on in Oklahoma. Found him in the parking lot raping a woman in the back of his van. I started swinging and it came to me how much he looked like Stony. Once I started pounding and kicking, I didn’t stop until the woman pushed me back. Last I heard he spent the remainder of his days drinking his meals through a straw from his wheelchair. Not saying the guy didn’t deserve it, but the fact I lost control like that scared the living shit out of me.”
“What would you do if Keats asked you to kill someone?”
“I don’t know. Guess it would depend on the reason. Would have to be something better than the guy owed Keats money. That’s for damn sure.”
“Even then,” Bear said. “Even for something the guy deserved to die for like that asshole in Oklahoma. Could you stand over a cowering man and pull the trigger?”
Jake took a long drink and drained the can, crushing the aluminum and tossing it on the table.
“Exactly,” Bear continued. “He may not have asked you yet, but it’s coming one of these days, man. And once you cross that line, there ain’t no going back. That will haunt you for the rest of your life, but it won’t matter because Keats will own your ass.”
Jake popped the top on his second can. “It doesn’t matter because I’m g
etting out. But this isn’t working an assembly line in a factory. I can’t just toss my tools on the floor and say, ‘Fuck this job’ and head out the door. A person doesn’t up and quit on Keats. You have to exit gracefully.”
“And carefully,” Bear added.
“Very carefully. You have much experience with him?”
“Just some files when I was on the meth task force,” Bear said. “Keats dabbled in meth and other drugs, but the old standard of booze, cigarettes and loan sharking are more his MO. Lots of bodies dotted-lined to him, but no direct proof of anything. Seems like one of the old school types like you saw in The Godfather. There’s some rumors of gun running and extortion here or there, but nothing sticks to him. I ain’t got proof of it, but pretty sure he got a buddy of mine tossed off the KC police force on some trumped-up charges he planted.”
“He’s got that kind of pull with the cops?”
“Got that kind of pull with a lot of people. That’s why you gotta be careful. I’ll be pissed off if I read some news article about your dumb ass getting dragged from the bottom of the Missouri River.”
“Whatever it takes, I’m out.”
“Doing what?”
“Who knows,” Jake said. “Maybe I’ll move back here and come to work for you.”
“You don’t want this shit.” Bear took another deep slug off his beer and belched loudly. “There’s some really good people down here, smart people, wealthy people, people who want to relax, maybe fish a little and enjoy the fruits of their hard-earned labor as they fade away into the sunset. Unfortunately, there’s also a bunch of shitheads who live for nothing but getting drunk or high. Think they’re already so screwed in life that it has nothing to offer. Why not do it stoned? I tell you, drugs are going to be the death of me and I’ve never touched ’em. Got one in custody at the jailhouse with some red rock that’s completely new to this area.”
“Who is it?”
“One of the Skaggs boys. He’s a lackey for the local supplier. Some low rent lawyer showed up out of thin air and cut me off. Even when you get them, you never really get them, know what I mean?”
Jake Caldwell Thrillers Page 13