The waitress came back and refilled their coffee, and Bear ordered another side of bacon.
“Thought your cholesterol was high,” Jake said, his thick eyebrows raised.
“Shut up. You sound like my wife. She won’t let me eat real bacon anymore. Just fake shit that tastes like fuckin’ cardboard. She called every restaurant in Benton County and threatened to have them shut down if they served me bacon. It just ain’t right.”
“I won’t tell, but I’m not giving you mouth to mouth if you keel over from a heart attack.”
“I took a bullet for you, dickhead,” Bear said. “The least you can do is give me some lovin’ in my final hour.”
Jake finished his last bite and shoved the plate to the middle of the table, picking up the notebook again. “So maybe this Snell knows what Ares is. Can you call her?”
“Hell, no. She hates my guts.”
“What’d you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Bear said. “Her stick-up-her-ass Washington attitude and my charming mid-western personality didn’t mesh very well. We admired our respective skills from as much distance as possible.”
The waitress returned with a dish of four greasy slices of bacon along with the check. Bear ate the first one, jaws working slow, eyes rolling back. “Jesus, that’s good.”
“You look like you just had an orgasm.”
“I’m pretty sure this is better.”
“Will Snell talk to me?” Jake asked.
Bear pulled out his phone. “Maybe. You’ll have better luck than I will.” He scrolled through some contacts and wrote a number on a napkin. “That’s the local Fed office. She might still be there. We didn’t exactly keep in touch.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to visit Logan. I’ll check around with some of my folks around here and see if anyone knows what or who this Ares is. Might be a guy with a stupid name. Might be some new task force.”
Bear finished the bacon and snagged the check. Jake knew better than to try to argue with him about paying for his share. They agreed to touch base in the afternoon. Bear got into his truck, and Jake turned toward home.
“Jake?” Bear leaned out the open window of his Tahoe. “Something you should probably know. Snell had a hard-on for someone while we were on this task force.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jason Keats,” he said. “Might be far enough back she doesn’t know about your involvement with Keats, but if she’s been keeping tabs on him…”
“She’ll already know me.”
“And probably will hate you more than she hates me. If that’s even possible.”
Bear winked, started the Tahoe and headed north toward Truman Medical Center. On the way to his apartment, Jake dialed the phone number from the napkin. Whoever answered the phone said Snell would be in the office around ten. Still a couple hours away.
Jake entered his complex through the back door. Back at the window in his apartment, the two bruisers still occupied the sedan down the street. The driver with the mashed nose smoked. The bald guy was awake and irritated, his head stuck out the open window. Jake wondered how large a brick Keats would shit when he found out Jake was going to meet the FBI agent who wanted to put his ass in prison. It would be worth the price of admission to see it.
Chapter Eight
Since he had an hour to kill before Snell arrived at her office, Jake swung by Truman Medical Center. He stopped by the gift shop and searched for something to take to Logan’s room. Going up empty handed, even to a grown man, seemed rude. Jake always kidded Logan that he ate like an ape, so he settled upon a six-inch gorilla that must have been stuffed with gold based on the price. At the information desk, a man old enough to have fought alongside Custer directed him to a room on the fourth floor where he found Bear by Logan’s bed. Bear glanced up but couldn’t speak, his nostrils flaring. Logan was bandaged and asleep, an IV stuck in a bruised hand, monitors beeping. He looked like he’d been in a ten-car pileup and thrown through the windshield.
A few seconds later, the young Indian doctor shuffled in, studying a chart in his dark hands. He did a double take when he saw Jake.
“You’re back,” he said.
“As are you,” Jake replied.
“That would imply that I left.” The doctor yawned. “I was going to call you but we had a trio of gunshot victims show up last night. I was a little distracted.”
“How’s Logan?” Bear asked. The doc’s eyes narrowed at the new visitor and glanced to Jake.
“This is our other brother.”
“Right,” the doc said, eyebrows furrowed. “I can see the family resemblance. I’m afraid your…brother has not regained consciousness, which has us a little concerned.”
“How concerned?”
The doctor drew his lips together and tilted his dark head to the side, considering the question. “On a scale of one to ten, about a six. He took a pretty bad beating, and I’m concerned with brain swelling. He’s responsive to stimuli, but his breathing is irregular which is why we put in the breathing tube.”
Bear gripped the steel rails on the bed like he was trying to crush them. “What’s the prognosis?”
The doctor shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. We’ll do a CT scan this afternoon and continue to monitor him. Until then, we can only wait.”
A plump nurse with flowery scrubs and fire engine-red hair waddled in and collected the doctor, and the duo disappeared.
Bear set his jaw; teeth gritted. “Motherfuckers.”
“He’ll make it.”
Bear exhaled and released the bed rails. “Thought you were going to see Snell.”
“She gets in at ten. I wanted to visit Logan before I went.”
Bear regarded the stuffed gorilla in Jake’s hand.
“What the hell is that for?”
“I don’t know. Felt like I should get something for him to look at if he wakes up.”
“When he wakes up,” Bear corrected. Jake took Logan’s right hand in his own. Bear did the same with his left. They stood in a connected silence watching their friend. Whoever did this would look worse than Logan if Jake and Bear found them—if they ever made it to the hospital.
* * *
The Kansas City office of the FBI lay a couple miles from Truman Medical Center at the intersection of Highways I-35 and 670. It was an unimpressive, rectangular, two-floor expanse the color of dead grass. Jake waited in the parking lot for Snell’s ten o’clock arrival, sipping gas-station coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He resisted the urge to buy a Frappuccino in honor of Logan. He couldn’t afford it.
Just before ten, a red Fusion crept into the lot and parked two spaces from Jake. A pair of long legs in a tight blue skirt swung out of the car, and a hard, angular face followed. The woman was five foot six and slender with dirty-blonde hair brushing the shoulders of her power suit. High cheek bones and light eyes marred by dark shadows. She matched Bear’s description to the letter. When she reached her trunk, Jake climbed out of his truck. A face-to-face discussion would go better than a random phone call.
“Agent Snell?” Jake called from the front of his truck, trying to avoid freaking her out. The stiffness of her face and limbs as she moved said she was wired tight. At the mention of her name, Snell turned and discarded the box she held back to her trunk. Her right hand drifted behind her.
“Can I help you?” One eyebrow raised in a questioning slant.
“I’m a friend of Jack Logan. He suggested I talk to you.”
“Did he now? And who are you?”
“A friend of his.”
“You said that already. You got a name?”
Her hand continued to inch closer toward the gun under her jacket. He held up his hands and gave her his best disarming smile. “I just want to ask you a few questions on a case. You don’t have to shoot me.”
Her hand reached its destination and held steady. “I might if you don’t tell me who you are and what you want.”
“My name is Jake Caldwell and I work with Jack Logan.”
She stilled, the gears in her head turning. “So you’re a private investigator?”
“Kind of.”
Deep lines appeared in her forehead. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m in training. Learning the ropes from Logan.”
She studied him for a moment. “Tell me something about Logan most people wouldn’t know.” A test. Was Jake a friend of Logan’s or not?
Jake tilted his head back and forth, trying to come up with something he’d know and she might recognize. “He has a bad tendency of mixing Johnny Walker with cheap beer.”
“What kind of beer?”
“Pabst Blue Ribbon. He also wears too much cologne to try and cover up the smell the next day.”
She allowed herself a slight uptick of one corner of her thin, glossed lips. “Paco Rabanne. Keeps it in the console of his truck next to the Advil.”
She stepped toward Jake but kept a respectable distance. “What can I do for you, Mr. Caldwell?”
“Someone beat the shit out of Logan last night and put him in the hospital. I’m hoping you can help me figure out who it is.”
Her office was on the second floor. A simple desk with a couple cushioned chairs sitting in front, and two, beige, metal file cabinets along the far wall near a window overlooking the parking lot. A bookshelf covered with plaques on stands, pictures of her with an older man with her bone structure, her somber graduation photo from the academy, and three ring binders with laser-printed labels stuck on the side. The paper on the desk stacked even inside an inbox lined up with the edges of the desk. Meticulous and precise. The remaining occupants on the desk were a PC monitor and a mouse pad with a blonde girl, maybe six years old, printed on it.
“Nice office,” Jake said. She motioned for him to sit and placed the box she carried on the floor by her desk. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”
“Fifteen years. Right out of college.”
“All in KC?”
“Two in a podunk town in an Idaho field office, seven in Washington and the last six here.” She sat impossibly straight in her chair, like she was on a job interview. This woman was wound tighter than a drum.
“Married?”
“Used to be.”
Jake nodded toward the mouse pad. “Daughter?”
“You writing my biography?” She covered the picture with her hand as if protecting it.
“Just making small talk.”
“I have a busy day ahead, Mr. Caldwell,” she said, jiggling her mouse and reading her monitor. Jake scanned the bookcase photos again. No men or women who appeared to be a significant other, and no ring on her finger. Married to the job. “I have a meeting with my boss in seven minutes I have to get ready for. You can have two of them.”
“Fair enough. Logan directed me to a stash he had under his desk. A notebook in there had your name listed on a piece of paper along with the name Parley. It mean anything to you?”
“I worked with Logan and another cop named James Parley on a task force a few years back. That’s the only Parley I can think of.”
“Know where this Parley is now?” Jake couldn’t wait for her answer and wasn’t disappointed when it came.
Her face puckered like she’d smelled old Chinese food. “Last I heard he was the County Sheriff in some piss-ant area of the Ozarks.”
Jake sucked in his cheeks to keep from laughing. “Doesn’t sound like you like him much.”
“It sounds right, then. He was a smart cop. We simply didn’t see eye to eye on a few things.”
“Things?” Jake asked.
“You know, probable cause, innocent until proven guilty, not beating people to get information. The little things.”
“You’re an idealist.”
She rested her elbows on the desk, green eyes hardening. “I operate within the bounds of the law. Parley liked to push those boundaries.”
“But you saw eye to eye with Logan?”
“Jack was good, but he suffered from an excess of personality. He didn’t know when to put on the brakes. Rubbed some people the wrong way.”
“Which people?” Jake asked.
She clicked her manicured nails on her desktop. “The ones who pull the strings.”
“What was the task force investigating?”
“Why don’t you ask Logan?”
“Because he’s unconscious,” Jake said.
“He never mentioned the task force?”
“He doesn’t like to talk much about his days on the police force.”
She shifted in her chair and ran a hand through her hair before checking her watch. “I don’t blame him. You have sixty more seconds, Mr. Caldwell. And since he’d probably tell you if asked, we were digging into local drug and gun activity. But I think you know that already.”
The hairs on Jake’s neck bristled. “How would I know?”
Her eyes narrowed, her features sharp. “Call it a hunch.”
“How about the name Alexander Voleski? Heard of him?”
“He works for Jason Keats. Low-level thug in the organization. Why?”
The news pressed Jake in the chair. Voleski worked for Keats. Jake didn’t know him anymore than he knew the two thugs following him. The crystal ball was still foggy, but clearer now than ten seconds ago.
“Logan and I were trying to find him.”
“Why?”
“Somebody hired us to do it. Logan didn’t tell me who or why, and I didn’t ask.”
“What a dutiful soldier you are,” Snell said, her clipped words dripping with smugness. “Logan didn’t tell you Voleski worked for Keats?”
“Maybe he didn’t know.”
“He knew. Voleski was on our task force watch list. We had some low-level dirt on him, but nothing we could make stick.”
“Did Parley know?”
Snell pressed her lips together, considering the question. “Maybe, maybe not. Bear worked the drug angle. Voleski was the gun runner, and Logan and I were on the guns. There was some overlap, but it’s possible Voleski’s name didn’t cross into Bear’s realm.”
“Know where Voleski is now?”
“You trying to make me do your job for you?”
“Just grasping at straws, honey,” Jake said.
Her limbs tensed, and fire ignited in her eyes. “Don’t call me honey. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“My apologies,” Jake said, flashing empty palms, surrendering. “One last question. Does the name Ares mean anything to you?”
She scratched her button nose and looked up for a microsecond, but he knew the question hit home. “Never heard of it.”
It was a lie. He’d love to play poker with her. Success in poker could come from seeing micro-expressions people made—players called them tells. When some people lied, a rush of adrenaline to the capillaries caused the nose to itch. Liars also tended to look up, and to the right or left when trying to provide detailed information. Snell gave him two tells she was lying. If he’d blinked, he’d have missed them. But he didn’t blink.
“Your two minutes are up, Mr. Caldwell.” She stood and clipped to the door. “Let me show you out.”
Bear was right, she was icy. Still, there was something underlying her cold demeanor. She was afraid of something. The way she covered her daughter’s picture. The way she shut down the meeting at the mention of Ares. There was something there. He led the way out her office. A minute later, he stopped outside the front door. Snell paused with her hand on the door, already turning to go back in.
“Something else?” she asked, eyebrows raised, head tilted forward with impatience. Icy.
“Will you call me if you think of anything that could help?” He handed her a card with just his name and cell phone number on it. Of course, it would probably take her a nanosecond to find it on the computer. “Please? Don’t make me beg.”
She revealed a row of perfect, white tee
th. She looked good when she smiled, even if it didn’t reach her eyes. “Well, since you said the magic word. I’ll think about it.”
She disappeared into the building. As he ventured to the parking lot, the two gorillas in the sedan were parked in the far corner. Once inside his truck, he dialed up Bear. Bear said he was in the middle of something, but they agreed to meet at noon on Southwest Boulevard to compare notes. Jake drove out of the lot and trekked toward downtown. The dark sedan followed. As he turned the corner and drove along the access road running parallel to the federal building, he glanced over. Special Agent Snell watched him from her window.
Chapter Nine
Tanner Stanton trudged the thick carpeted hallway at Blue Heron, the Board Room looming ahead. As head of security, he liked the cushy job at the manufacturing company. It beat the hell out of his ex-Army Ranger days, getting shot at on a regular basis in shitholes like Beirut, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The three things he didn’t like were wearing a suit, the fact his number two man was dead, and he now had to meet with the man waiting for him in the Board Room.
As he entered, a polished man in an impeccable, two-thousand-dollar midnight suit with a blood-red tie was parked at the head of the oblong table. Two tough guys in cheaper, but equally menacing black suits stood at the back wall with thick hands folded in front of them, tracking Stanton as he shuffled in and shut the door behind him.
“Your boy is dead,” the polished man said, cleaning his nails with a pocketknife.
Stanton raised his hands palm up and shrugged. “An unfortunate incident.”
“And Voleski’s still hanging in the wind. An unfortunate incident as well?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”
The man burned a hole in Stanton’s forehead with his stare before standing and brushing the creases from his suit with intense, brisk strokes. Holding a palm out for the tough guys to remain where they were, he crossed the room and pressed into Stanton’s personal space. Stanton’s fists clenched. He didn’t like to be crowded.
“You don’t seem to understand the stakes here, Stanton.”
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