Jake Caldwell Thrillers

by Weaver, James

  Murphy closed the gap between them. Though inches shorter and at least twenty years his elder, the man commanded a presence. “Yes, I believe you’re going to have to do that.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jake explained the series of events leading to the shootout in Connelly’s driveway. Special Agent Murphy didn’t seem to like any of it, but since Jake technically did nothing wrong, Murphy’s threat against him faded like a fog of breath on a mirror. They showed Murphy the pictures from Connelly’s wall. To the old man’s credit, he barely flinched.

  “Lord have mercy,” Murphy said. “We have an APB out on the car and are blasting his picture across the local networks. Let’s hope it flushes him and the kid out.”

  Jake chewed on his lower lip, agitation tingling in his hands, tired of hanging around with his thumb up his ass and wanting to do something, anything to nab Connelly. Murphy seemed content hashing the details in the driveway.

  “Anything to add, Caldwell?” Murphy asked, a tinge of irritation as Jake’s name rolled off his tongue.

  The fire fight flashed through Jake’s mind. He’d told Murphy what happened, and Foster’s account matched with perfection. Something tickled the back of his brain, but he couldn’t extract it. The shootout flashing in an enormous blur, pops of guns and flashes of barrels in the dark.

  “There was a second shooter in the car,” Jake blurted. “Passenger side. When I was pinned against the house, after I pulled Snell from the driveway, I saw muzzle flashes from the passenger side of the sedan.”

  Foster bobbed her head. “You know, now that you say it, I think you’re right. I had my sights on Connelly tucked in beside the car, but a round of shots pushed me back behind the house. I think those did come from the passenger side.”

  “I thought it might be Connelly inside the car, shooting out the passenger window, but if you’re saying he was outside the car, there had to be a second shooter.”

  “Great.” Murphy drew his lips tight. “There’s two of them out there. Connelly knew the cops would be looking for him. What the hell did he come back home for?”

  It was a good question. Why stay? Why risk a fire fight? Jake let the scene play out in his head. The four of them walking up the driveway. Snell in the lead with the notebook in hand. Foster and McKernan on her left with the photos, Jake on her right. The sedan pulling up, blinding them with the headlights. Shit. The answer had been right there in front of them. Snell’s blood, a trail leading back to where she lay. At the peak of the crimson trail, Snell’s abandoned gun, but the red notebook was missing.

  “The notebook. Connelly came back for the notebook,” Jake said. “He wanted it bad enough to gun down four of us to get it.”

  “How do you know?” Murphy asked.

  “Snell had it in her hand. He came home to get it and saw her with it. It was the reason for the break before the shooting began. He weighed his options and got ready for the shootout.”

  “It makes sense,” Foster said. “If he would’ve backed up and left, we couldn’t have known it was him, and even if we tried to stop him, we’re parked a hundred yards away, which would be a hell of a head start. Once Snell went down with the notebook, they laid out all that ammo to drive us back to let him get it.”

  “Does us no good now,” Murphy said. “It’s gone and we have no idea what was in it.”

  Jake considered informing him about the pics of the notebook he snapped on his phone but bit his tongue. He wasn’t telling this guy anything. “Are we done here? Foster and I need to run these photos and see if anyone pops up, and I want to get to the hospital and check on Snell.”

  Murphy stepped close again, invading Jake’s space. “This is now an official FBI investigation, Caldwell. You’re not doing a damn thing except going home and letting the experts handle it. If I find out you’ve come within a millimeter of this investigation, I’ll throw your ass in jail for obstruction. Am I clear?”

  “I kinda thought you’d appreciate all the help you could get at this point. You’ve got one agent dead and another on the way to the hospital.”

  “We don’t want your help, mister. Stay out of it. So, I’ll ask again. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal. Sir.” Jake took one last peek at Foster who seemed fixated on her shoes and headed to his truck. His first stop was the hospital to check on Snell, and then try to hook up again with Foster and figure out if they could obtain anything from the notebook pages on his phone. Screw “Special Agent in Charge” Murphy.

  “Jake,” Foster called out as his hand gripped the door handle. She trotted along the asphalt, backlit by flashing lights. “Where are you going?”

  “Hospital to check on Snell.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” Foster flashed the envelope. “We have to figure out who’s in these pictures.”

  “We? What about Murphy? You’re gonna get in trouble working with me.”

  Foster’s nostrils flared. “This piece of shit just blew away a friend of mine. Murphy is so meticulous that he’ll draw this out for weeks, scouring every detail to death, and we don’t have that kind of time. Besides, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. You can be discreet, can’t you?”

  Jake’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “McKernan was right. You are a bad girl.”

  “Fuckin’ A, I am,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  On the way to Shawnee Mission Medical Center, Jake woke Bear to give him an update.

  “Jesus God,” Bear breathed out. “She gonna be all right?”

  “I hope so. She lost a lot of blood, and with two shots and one exit wound, gotta be concerned about the other bullet. She’s a tough lady, though. I’ll let you know when I find something out.”

  “The good news is Connelly isn’t anywhere near Warsaw. The bad news is I still want to wring his neck like a chicken.”

  “You’ll want to chop his head off his shoulders when you see what we found in the basement.”

  “What was it?” Bear asked.

  “You have to see it in person. Let’s just say that Connelly is one twisted individual.”

  Jake turned right onto 75th Street, the five-story, emerald-windowed hospital lighting up the north side of the road. He followed the signs and wound his way toward the emergency entrance on the west side.

  “Maggie still pissed?” Jake asked.

  “Think she’s cooled off, but no telling what she’ll say when she finds out the bad guys shot Snell and bullets flew around your narrow ass.”

  Maggie’s tirade at the house wouldn’t leave his mind. She worried trouble kept finding him. She wanted some normalcy to life, and he couldn’t blame her a lick. Was it in his DNA to be normal? Given what they’d been through in the last eighteen months, the doubt spread like a cancer. Fear crept into his large frame as the prospect of losing Maggie and Halle loomed.

  “Don’t say anything to her,” Jake said. “I’ll call her after I find out if Snell’s going to pull through.”

  “Will do. Be careful.”

  “Thanks, partner. I’ll call you later.”

  Jake took a parking space in the back row. Foster found a space in the row near him, and the two walked in silence to the entrance. The waiting area held a dozen patients ranging from coughing and sneezing to a bloodied arm wrapped with a stained towel. Foster flashed her badge at the duty nurse who asked them to wait while she fetched a doctor.

  “I hate hospitals.” Foster settled in a chair in the corner of the room.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Haven’t been in one since my dad died. Heart attack mowing the lawn eight months ago.”

  “Sorry about that. You two close?”

  “Yeah. He was a cop and the reason I went into law enforcement. He tried to get me to do something else, but all I ever wanted was to wear a badge and a carry gun like him.”

  Jake patted her on the back. “He’d be very proud of you.”

  “After our Ares shootout, Snell told me about you
, you know? Your…umm…history.”

  “Did she now?”

  “Uh huh. But don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. Better hope Murphy doesn’t find out.”

  A gray speckle-haired doctor swept through a set of double swing doors and updated them. Snell was conscious but sedated for pain as they readied to take her back into surgery. The doc hesitated but granted them a minute with her. They followed him along a series of halls and through a set of doors protected by a keypad. The doc waved a card in front and escorted them to the second bay on the right. Snell lay under a stark white sheet, an oxygen tube set in her nose, eyes sleepy. Jake and Foster took positions on either side of the bed and held her hands.

  “How you doing, Snell?” Jake asked.

  “Hurts.” Snell’s eyes found Jake for a brief moment before disappearing in a line. Her voice cracked and strained as she spoke. “Get him?”

  “No, but we will. He has the red notebook, but we still have the pictures.”

  Snell winced, squeezing their hands as if she tried to crack a walnut. Jake imagined a wave of pain rolling through her gut, experiencing a cocktail of sorrow for her and fury at Connelly for putting her there. The doctor stepped close to the bed and announced they should get her into surgery.

  “The picture,” she croaked, eyes fluttering open. “I remember.”

  Foster edged closer as Snell’s eyelids drooped. “Victoria? Who? Who is it?”

  Snell’s tongue slipped out and wiped across her cracked upper lip. “He’s…dead, I think.”

  “Who?” Jake asked.

  “We need to get her back, right now,” the doctor said.

  “Damn it, Snell. Who is it?”

  Snell’s iris flashed, searching for Jake’s face. She located it and clutched his hand. “Blake. Jackson.”

  “Please step back,” the doctor said as a couple of nurses appeared. Jake and Foster released Snell’s grip, and the nurses rolled the gurney past several bays of patients before disappearing through doors on the far side of the room.

  “Blake Jackson?” Jake asked. “Ring a bell for you?”

  “It’s Jackson Blake.” Foster’s jaw clenched as she stared at the doors Snell disappeared through. “Yeah, the name rings a bell.”

  “Who is it?”

  “FBI Agent Jackson Blake. They flashed his name and face at a briefing six months ago after someone slit his throat in an alley behind a bar in Iowa. They never figured out who killed him, though the Iowa field office had their suspicions.”

  Foster walked back out toward the waiting room. As Jake followed, she pulled out the manila envelope with the pictures in it, thumbing through and handing one to Jake. The same picture of the guy Snell said she recognized.

  “What was he investigating?” Jake asked.

  “Something right up your alley, Caldwell. The Russian mob.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The longer they sucked in the antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital waiting room, the antsier Jake became. The urge to move rolled like waves through his legs. He’d get up, pace the perimeter of the room and plop back in the chair with an audible sigh. Foster spent the time on the phone shooting snapshots of the men from the envelope to her contacts within the Bureau. She was at least doing something.

  “How long did the doctor say it would be?” Jake asked when Foster hung up the phone.

  “Three to four hours.”

  “It’s been less than an hour and I’m losing my mind. You get anything from the people you’ve talked to?”

  She opened a granola bar from the vending machine, offering half to Jake. He declined with a wave of the hand. “Nothing yet. These guys are good, though. If there’s something in the system, they’ll get it.”

  “If they’re in the system. Let me have the pictures.”

  Foster cocked an eyebrow. “What for?”

  Jake held out his hand. “I’m not sitting here doing nothing for four hours. While your people work on them, let me see if I can get info from mine.”

  “Who? Keats?”

  “For starters. Keats has a lot of business history with the Russians, and I guarantee if he knows them, I can get better intel than what the government has.”

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Keats is a major night owl. Ninety percent chance he’s awake.”

  She smacked the envelope against her hand, biting her lower lip. “Murphy will have my ass if he knows I gave these to you. Maybe I should come with you.”

  “You think Keats will talk to me with an FBI agent attached to my hip? Hell, he might not talk to me at all. Trust me. I’ll be back before Snell gets out of surgery, assuming he doesn’t shoot me out of spite.”

  She pursed her lips, considering the options before handing him the envelope. “Bring those back. All of them. And get us something good.”

  Jake winked and returned to his truck. He turned his cell phone in his hand, debating if he should call first or just show up on Keats’s front door. Better to ask for forgiveness than beg for permission.

  * * *

  Jake hit downtown just past two-thirty. If Keats held to his old patterns, he was either at his office in the River Market warehouse or his house in Briarcliff. Jake hoped for the office, more familiar territory for one, and Keats hated visits to his house for another.

  He pulled off the highway and wound his way through River Market side streets before the warehouse loomed in the distance. The windows were dark, and the only sign of life was a homeless man pushing a shopping cart across the cracked asphalt. The warehouse would’ve been too easy.

  He spun around and hit Highway 169, heading north, watching the lights from a prop-driven commuter plane descend into the downtown airport as he rolled along the narrow two-lane road. Several miles later, a smattering of lights from houses on the hill dissolved the darkness, and a familiar pit balled in his stomach. He hated meeting with Keats, even when they were on the best of terms. The mob boss put him on edge, like a steel trap would spring and lodge its sharpened spikes in his throat. Keats was charming in his own rough way but unpredictable. Jake knew more than one person who’d disappeared from innocuous transgressions like showing up at his house uninvited at three in the morning.

  After winding through streets lined with houses costing more than Jake would make in a lifetime, he turned onto a concrete drive and drove fifty yards up to a menacing black wrought iron gate. A gorilla in a dark suit materialized from a squat wood guard house. Jake rolled down the window, greeted by the guard’s beady eyes. He was thick across the shoulders with close cut hair brushed forward. Jake didn’t recognize him.

  “Help you?” The man’s baritone voice cut through the night.

  “I need to talk to Jason Keats.”

  “In the middle of the night? He expecting you?”

  “No, but he’ll want to see me.”

  The man scowled. “Mr. Keats doesn’t take visitors at this hour, especially unannounced ones. He’s most likely in bed. Maybe you should call tomorrow and make an appointment.”

  “Jason’s an insomniac and if he’s asleep, I’ll make your next car payment. My guess is he’s lounging with a glass of Scotch worth more than you or I make in a month. Tell him Jake Caldwell is here.”

  The man drew his head back, eyebrows raised. “You’re Jake Caldwell?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’ve heard stories,” he said, his posture relaxing.

  “Don’t believe them. Bullshit tends to accumulate as time goes by.”

  He cocked his head. “I hope they’re not all bullshit because some of them are pretty good. I’ll make the call to the house.”

  The guard disappeared into the shack while Jake drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Would Keats let him in? The shootout in the stockyards over the bioweapon Ares cost Keats millions in lost opportunities, and he issued a veiled threat against Jake the last time they spoke. He shot a text to Foster and let her know where he was. If his body turned
up floating in the Missouri River with his limbs chopped off, he wanted someone to know where to start looking.

  The gate arced inward, and the guard materialized at Jake’s door. “You can go up. He’ll meet you at the front door.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said. “How did he sound?”

  “Unhappy.”

  “More than usual?”

  The guard slapped Jake’s door. “Yeah. Glad I’m not you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “What in God’s name do you want, Caldwell? It’s three in the morning.” A red, silk robe draped Keats’s barrel-chested frame as he blocked one side of the carved mahogany double doors to his palace. His usual slicked back iron hair was gel free and drooped, reducing his menacing presence a notch.

  “I need a little help.” A heavy ball churned in Jake’s stomach. “Can I come in?”

  Keats didn’t move an inch. “You know how much money you cost me with the Ares debacle? I’m trying to decide whether I should let you in or blow your head off.”

  Jake crossed his arms. “Well, if you blow my head off, it’s gonna make a hell of a mess on your sidewalk. The blood’ll seep into all those little cracks, and you’ll never get it out. I just need a few minutes, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Keats sucked his cheeks against his teeth, eyes burning a hole in Jake. The nostrils on his scarred nose flared out once, then twice before he stepped to the side. “Jesus, I don’t know why I like you so much.”

  Keats closed the door behind Jake and led a vaguely familiar path to the den, which reeked of the earthy tones of a freshly smoked cigar. Jake had toured the house once during a fundraising party a few years ago. Keats was a multi-millionaire from loan sharking, running drugs, booze, and the occasional gun shipment throughout the Midwest, but he did a lot of charitable work as well. In addition to his apparent soft spot for Jake, he also loved kids and gave with surprising generosity to dozens of agencies. He would be more than happy to chop off a guy’s fingers, one-at-a-time, and letting him bleed to death for screwing him over, while at the same time making sure the guy’s kid had a roof over his head and food in his belly.