“I’m gonna kill you,” Dawson spat, breath ragged as he staggered like a prize fighter in the last round of an epic battle. Jake had to give the guy credit. Most people wouldn’t still be standing after the roundhouse he delivered. Dawson thrust the knife forward, and Jake jumped out of range. It took two more stabs before Dawson overcommitted. Jake clamped on the wrist holding the knife, yanked the arm forward and cracked his elbow in Dawson’s face. The knife fell to the ground, and Dawson’s pungent frame followed.
Jake dropped to his knees and straddled Dawson’s stomach. He grabbed the knife and held the blade against Dawson’s throat, a thin trickle of blood emerging. Dawson’s face wavered, and Jake’s father’s replaced it, the shit-eating grin and all. One more ounce of pressure and the slightest draw of the blade, and Evelyn and the boy’s problems would be solved.
“No! Don’t…please!” Evelyn screamed from across the yard, one thin, bruised arm outstretched and the other wrapped around the boy who watched Jake with wide, auburn eyes.
“Hey, man,” Dawson blubbered, “take it easy. Don’t do nothin’ stupid. No harm done here.”
Jake drew his face inches from Dawson’s, the liquor and the body odor blending together in a heinous cologne. “No harm done? Seriously? Let me tell you something, Harold. There’s plenty of harm being done here. A few years back, I was your boy over there. My mother was your wife, and if some stranger happened upon one of my father’s drunken beating sessions, I would have paid money to watch the stranger slit my old man’s throat.”
“Please…man,” Dawson whined. “Please don’t kill me…I’ll…”
Jake applied more pressure to the knife to silence him. “No, you shut up and listen. You jumped bail, and I’m going to bring you in. I don’t know how much time you’ll do if any, but I’m going to keep an eye on you, and tabs on your wife and boy. If I see one more bruise or even catch a whiff of you laying a hand on either of them, I’ll come back here and gut you like a fucking deer. You understand me, Harold? Blink twice if you do.”
Harold’s lids open and closed twice, his breath coming in hitches. Jake released the pressure of the knife. The wife and son were a couple of wide-eyed statues. Jesus, did he make it worse for them? What would happen when Jake left?
Jake flipped Dawson over and ground his face in the dirt as he plucked the handcuffs from his belt. He made sure the metal bit deep into Dawson’s wrist. “You lay here and bleed for a minute while I go talk to them. Don’t even think about getting up.”
Jake reared back and flung the knife as far as he could into the field adjacent to the old barn. He wiped the dirt from his hands as he approached the gawking mother and son.
“You okay?” he asked Evelyn.
“I think so. Who’re you?” she asked.
“Just a guy picking up your husband for jumping bail. How about you, little man? What’s your name?”
The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve, leaving a red trail on the fabric. “Timothy. My friends call me Timmy.”
Before Jake could ask him anything, Evelyn spoke. “Harold don’t mean to be like this. It’s only when he’s drinking.”
“And how often is that?”
She raised her bony shoulders. “Every once in a while.”
“Evelyn, it’s ten o’clock in the morning, and he’s hitting the bottle already, assuming he even bothered to stop from the night before. I grew up like this, and I’m telling you it’s a dead-end track. I’ll drive you right now to anywhere you want to go because this train won’t stop. Men like Harold don’t ever stop.”
“It’s my fault.” She glowered past Jake to the bloodied heap of a husband on the ground. “I woke him up too early.”
“Jesus,” Jake said. “Your fault for waking him up? Listen to yourself. There’s places you can go, shelters that can help you and Timmy. Now would be the perfect time to make a change.”
“This is my home. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Jake sighed. Her heels were dug in, and she wasn’t going to budge. He pulled his business card out and handed it to her. “You change your mind; you give me a call. I’ll come get you myself. You can’t want to live like this.”
She offered Jake the same steely glare she gave her husband. “You don’t know nothin’ about me, mister. Come on, Timmy.”
She tugged Timmy toward the house. The boy offered one last heartbreaking glance to Jake before the two disappeared inside. Jake clipped to Dawson and yanked him to his feet, his drunken gaze locked on Jake’s boots.
“Two things, Harold.” Jake smacked the man under his chin. “I was serious about keeping tabs on you. If you get out and touch them again, I’ll be back. You get me?”
Dawson glared, but ticked his head forward. “What’s the other thing?”
“Get in the truck and keep your mouth shut.”
Dawson nodded and Jake helped him into the back of his truck. He spun the truck around the gravel lot and took off toward the road. At the end of the driveway, he craned over his shoulder for one last peek at the house. Timmy watched him from one of the windows and offered a solitary wave with a bloodied hand before he disappeared. Jake headed back toward Kansas City with the image burned in his brain.
Chapter Seven
By the time he hit the outskirts of Kansas City, Jake’s blood pressure dropped to something resembling normal, though the odor wafting from Harold wasn’t helping things. He tried to shake the similarities between himself and Timmy but couldn’t do it. The kid’s bloodied waving hand would haunt him for a while.
When Jake was a kid, his father would get hammered on any day of the week ending in “day” and take out his frustrations on the closest warm body. He’d end up apologizing and swear he wouldn’t do it again, but whiskey proved a most effective promise breaker. There was zero doubt in Jake’s mind the Devil cut Dawson from the same cloth.
“I shouldn’t’ve gone back home,” Dawson mumbled from the back. “Shoulda just kept goin’ up to Canada.”
“You would’ve gotten caught eventually.”
“You got Dexter, huh?”
“Last night.”
“His old lady called me crying. That’s why I went back. Couldn’t just leave Evelyn and Timmy. I was gonna take ’em with me.”
“You’re a real family guy, Harold.”
Dawson was quiet for a beat. “Any chance we could work out some sort of deal?”
Jake turned off Highway 71 into downtown, the police station blocks away. “Doubt it. What do you have in mind? Dexter already offered me an AK-47 and his sister.”
“His sister? That bitch is crazier than a shithouse rat. Ain’t enough rubbers in the world to stop the diseases festerin’ in that nasty crotch. Naw, this would be more like useful information.”
“About what?”
“Them deaths at the hospital.”
Jake stopped breathing for a moment. He’d assumed Dexter was spewing shit just to get out of the jam he was in. Dawson might be on a similar track, but the fact both guys from the same crew offered the same information piqued his interest.
“What information do you have?”
Harold sucked in air through his teeth. “All you gotta do is pull over and let me out and I’ll tell you.”
Jake pulled in front of the Kansas City Police Station, shut off the truck, and turned in his seat. “Not how I work, Harold. You tell me and I’ll make an informed decision.”
“Not how I work, either. Me and Dexter overheard some shit. Shit I reckon we weren’t supposed to hear. You let me go, I tell you. You don’t, I don’t say a word. We got a deal?”
Jake climbed out, walked to Harold’s side and yanked the man out of the cab. “Guess you’re not saying shit, at least to me. I’m just a bounty hunter today. I don’t have a deal to make. Let’s go.”
Thirty minutes later, Jake drove away from the police station with Harold and Dexter’s offers on his mind. He had no intention of taking up either man on their bribe, but something tickled his brai
n that maybe this was more than just the typical jail-snitch bullshit. At least something someone should investigate. He dialed the number of FBI Agent Victoria Snell and left a message on her voicemail with the little he knew about their claims.
Agent Snell served on a drug and arms task force years ago with Bear and Logan. A few months earlier, she teamed with Jake and Bear to find her kidnapped daughter and stop the sale of a bioweapon called Ares to a bunch of terrorists. She and Jake remained in periodic contact, but she got along with Bear as well as a Baptist minister would tolerate a Satan worshiper. Jake knew she’d run with the information or get it in the hands of the right people.
Before packing to see his bride-to-be and his daughter, he stopped by the office to make sure there wasn’t anything pending on Logan’s plate before he left town. Logan’s downtown Kansas City office occupied a portion of the second floor of a three-story red brick building adjacent to a dumpy laundromat and a sandwich shop serving gut melting atrocities; both businesses had to be on the verge of bankruptcy from a lack of clientele. The wooden stairs groaned under his bulk as he took them two at a time before opening a door with Jack Logan – Private Investigator stenciled in black on the opaque window insert.
“Well, hello handsome.” Logan’s fiftyish, part-time secretary, Victoria Donelli, lounged behind a desk, filing absurd nails that would make Wolverine jealous. She flipped her long, violent-red hair and gave Jake a flirtatious pout of the lips. “Having a good morning?”
“Not really.” Jake plodded across the room and plopped into the worn brown leather of a chair.
“Bet I could make it better.”
“Now what would your loving husband Charlie have to say?”
“Charlie barely recognizes I have a pulse anymore.”
Jake gave her a wink. Victoria was a flirt, but she was hopelessly in love with her husband of thirty years. “His loss.”
A crimson blush crawled up her squatty neck. “You must want something, Jake Caldwell.”
“You hear from Logan? He make it to the airport on time?”
“No idea. Jack ordered me not to call him unless the office burned to the ground, and then only if the insurance adjuster suggested arson and wouldn’t pay for damages.”
“I was heading back to Warsaw unless something pressing came in this morning.”
Victoria held up a finger, and then clawed through a pile of paperwork. She found a purple Post-It note and handed it to Jake. “Woman called an hour ago asking for you.”
She’d scrawled a phone number and name on the note. Angela. No last name. “What did she want?”
Victoria’s plump shoulders rose and fell. “Beats me. Asked for you. Said it was important.”
“She give a last name?”
“No. But she sounded high strung.”
Jake flicked the note and headed to Logan’s office. “Guess I’ll call her.”
He dropped into the chair behind the desk, Logan’s ass imprinted in the cushion like memory foam. He picked up the phone and dialed.
A woman with a high-pitched voice answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Angela? This is Jake Caldwell. You left a message for me. Is there something I can help you with?”
In the background on her end, a dog barked in tune with cartoon theme music. Maybe Tom and Jerry. “I…uhhh…wanted your help with something.” Her delivery wavered, voice oozing tension and fear.
Jake’s brow lowered. “What kind of something?”
Her voice trembled, like she was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know where else to go. Would you be able to meet me to discuss this in person? I don’t want to do it on the phone.”
“Sure, why don’t you come by the office and—”
“No. No. How about Crown Center in thirty minutes? There’s a toy store across from the Crayola Café on the second level. I’ll meet you there. I have shoulder-length brown hair, and I’ll be wearing a sky-blue leather jacket.”
“Can you spell your last name for me, Angela?” Jake tapped a pen on a notepad.
An uncomfortable silence followed. “I didn’t give you my last name.”
“No, you didn’t, but would you?”
“I don’t think I want to yet, if that’s okay.”
Kind of odd, but Jake let it pass. “That’s fine. See you in a bit.”
Jake hung up, intrigued by her mystery name and the meeting place. Crown Center was a shopping and restaurant complex near the Hallmark Cards headquarters. He’d been through the toy store before—narrow aisles, horrible sight lines from outside the store, which might be the point. She didn’t want to be seen but knew the place was busy enough for her to draw attention if trouble arose. Only one way to find out what the woman wanted, and that wasn’t going to happen with his ass stuck in a chair. His trip to Warsaw would have to wait.
Chapter Eight
Angela Connelly backed out of her driveway a little before noon and headed north. Sokolov followed at a distance, his back aching from his all-night campout in the car outside her house. When he’d arrived, a solitary light burned in an upstairs window. He’d opened and shut the car door more than once, tempted to storm the house and kill whoever was there, but the voice of his training officer in Moscow whispered from a memory. “Only fools rush into the unknown. The wise man waits”.
The big unknown was exactly how the Connelly woman was connected to the Wolf. Sokolov’s contact proved vague at best, saying that she’d lead Sokolov to the Wolf. As much as he wanted revenge, Sokolov was not keen on going up against the Wolf in a one-on-one fight. The man’s fighting skills were well known. Legends blossomed in the academy barracks of his prowess in hand-to-hand combat including rumors of his participation in underground cage fighting beneath the Moscow streets.
Connelly turned onto Shawnee Mission Parkway and followed the traffic flow toward the Plaza. She drove a couple of miles per hour below the posted speed limit, which made it a bit more difficult to follow her without being spotted. At one point, he’d been forced beside her at a stoplight and risked a glance in her direction. She was pretty, but anxious, biting her lip as she tapped the steering wheel.
The Wolf. Sokolov himself was no slouch in the ring and had the scars to prove it. Though he’d earned top marks from his trainers, he found he cared little for the taste of his own blood. He preferred a gun and when he couldn’t have a gun, a knife like the serrated blade shoved in his boot. Which would he use on the Wolf if given the chance? Though he wanted nothing more than to see the man dead, he wanted it to be a slow death. A painful death.
The Connelly woman turned north on Main Street and ten minutes later pulled into the parking garage at Crown Center, just south of downtown. He knew the place and didn’t want to be trapped in the parking garage with its narrow aisles and limited exits, but he also couldn’t risk losing her.
She parked on the second level, and Sokolov managed to find a space several slots further down. Craning over his shoulder, he watched her extract a child from the car, a boy of perhaps six or seven years with brown hair who exuded timidity in the way he clung to his mother. She took the boy by the hand and hoofed it toward the shops. Sokolov followed.
Chapter Nine
Jake crawled through the narrow parking ramps of the Crown Center garage, wincing at the prospect of scraping paint from the front bumper of his truck against the narrow, scarred concrete walls while on the prowl for an empty parking space, all of which were half the size they should be. Whoever designed this garage must’ve driven something undersized, like a Mini Cooper, and needed to be kicked squarely in the balls. Finding a space on the third level, he squeezed the truck between a chipped support post and a tiny Miata with doors lower than the side rails on his truck. At least door dings wouldn’t be a concern.
At noon on a weekday, the shopping center bustled. Three stacked floors of retail with a food court at the bottom offered a variety of choices, ranging from pizza to barbecue. Sunlight belted through the three-story glass
front as he peered over the railing to the floors below. Employees of the nearby Hallmark Cards headquarters and one of the prodigious tobacco law firms crowded the bottom level alongside swarming shoppers with paper bags bearing the Crown Center logo. Jake rode the escalator from the third floor to the second, waiting at the bottom for a grade school fieldtrip mob to pass, holding hands like the paper cut outs his little sister Janey used to make.
He strolled to the meeting place, “Toy Time” blaring in neon green atop the entrance. Across the carpeted aisle, shrieks of children erupted from the Crayola Café restaurant as a frazzled mother scrambled to control her brood. She could have been the body double of the mom from the old bath salts commercials—"Calgon, take me away”.
Jake was never forced to deal with any little ones of his own. Breaking legs and snapping bones for the mob served an effective poison for any long-term romantic relationship. Halle just turned seventeen, but Jake had known her for barely a year. He waded through the new territory of being a father like a blind man and the spirited Halle gave him more than enough to work with.
He dove into the toy store, exploring the crammed aisles for a woman in a sky-blue leather jacket with brown hair. He parked at the back of the store, eyes sweeping across passersby through the storefront window and a curved mirror mounted at the opposite corner to deter would-be shoplifters. As he twisted a jumbo Rubik’s Cube with a masochistic sixteen squares per side, he spotted her through the window. Petite, maybe five foot three with thin but well-shaped legs clad tight in designer jeans. Chestnut hair draped both shoulders of the leather jacket. At her side, a tiny brown head of a young boy bobbed along at her waist level, small hand wrapped by his mother’s.
Jake Caldwell Thrillers Page 55