Jake Caldwell Thrillers

by Weaver, James

  “Sure.” Stone turned his attention back to the pictures.

  Jake motioned for Foster to follow him and headed back through the crowd and out the front door. He traveled the sidewalk out of earshot of the dozen people waiting in the sunshine for a table.

  “You sure you trust this guy?” Jake asked.

  “Yeah, I do. Why?”

  “Keats said Sokolov was looking to gather IT resources. Trajor and MedFire are both technology companies. Either Stone didn’t put two and two together, or he added them up already and just isn’t telling us. Just watch your ass. Though I have a sneaking suspicion Stone will be taking care of that department.”

  “Smartass. What are you going to do?”

  Maggie and Halle sprung to mind. He wanted to see them, and he couldn’t do much else here until Stone and Foster checked in. “I’m going to head back to Warsaw. It’s less than two hours, and I can be back here pretty quick if you need me. Promise you’ll call me if you figure anything out?”

  “Promise. I’ll check on Snell, too.”

  “Thanks, Foster. Be careful.”

  “Always.” She turned and headed back to First Watch.

  Billowy clouds rolled in from the south. Information from Keats and Stone swirled in his brain as he determined what he should do. One idea came to mind, but he had to make a pitstop at his apartment before heading back to Warsaw.

  Fifteen minutes later, he sat at his flea market dining room table that tilted to the left. He restacked the three bar-room coasters under one of the legs to balance it and booted his laptop. While the computer whirred to life, he sent the pictures of the people from Connelly’s stash and the pages from the red journal to his Gmail account. He then emailed the info to Cat with the promise of payment if the hacker found anything good. Ten minutes later, as his truck rolled down the highway, he hoped the powers that be didn’t cut him out-of-the-loop. Christopher was still out there somewhere, and somebody still had to pay for what they did to Angela and Rollie. He wasn’t letting that shit go.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Though frustrated with the lack of a revelation from their meeting with Sam Stone and being pushed out of the investigation, Jake couldn’t help but grin as he headed home to Warsaw. He’d spent little time with Maggie during the last several weeks, and the guilt over his lack of involvement in the wedding planning mounted. To her credit, she said nothing.

  He wanted to be honest with her and tell her what happened with Snell and Connelly but worried each straw of danger he added to the pile would gather until the bridge of their relationship crumbled under the weight. He’d made promises to stay away from the risky stuff, but in the last twenty-four hours three people were shot to death, a boy kidnapped, a complex network of spies and weapons began to reveal itself, and Jake’s fingers touched all of it. It was a miracle Maggie hadn’t kicked his ass to the curb.

  He rolled up Highway 7, bypassing the turn off into downtown Warsaw, the limestone bluffs on either side of the road blurring past. Ten minutes and a slow-moving city boy towing an oversized boat later, he turned onto Poor Boy Road.

  Maggie peered out the kitchen window as Jake’s truck crunched up the driveway, a smile so wide the corners of her mouth threatened to touch her ears. She burst through the front door and threw herself into Jake’s arms, squeezing him hard enough to help him understand the meaning of John Cougar’s song “Hurts So Good.”

  “Wow,” Jake said. “What did I do to deserve that kind of welcome?”

  “Absolutely nothing.” She planted a firm kiss on his lips.

  Jake picked her up around the waist and buried his face in her neck as he made his way to the front door. He set her down when Halle entered the room and wrapped her strong arms around his waist.

  “Any word on Christopher?” Halle asked.

  “Nothing, unfortunately.”

  “You staying around for a while, Dad? I have to go to Jennifer’s to work on our biology project.”

  “I’m not sure, but if I have to bail, I’ll be sure to swing by her house.”

  Halle kissed him on the cheek, snagged her mother’s car keys, and disappeared out the front door.

  Maggie said, “We didn’t expect you to be back this soon.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  There it was. How much should he tell her? If he told her the whole truth, she might freak out. If he left out any information and she found out he lied, she would kill him. “Any coffee going?”

  “Fresh pot in the kitchen.”

  “Let’s get some in my system and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Maggie poured two steaming mugs and pushed one to Jake. “What’s going on?”

  Jake took a sip from the mug, stomach churning from the tale he feared he would have to tell. “How much do you want to know?”

  “All of it.”

  He blew out a breath. “You might not like it.”

  “All of it,” she repeated, enunciating each word.

  Sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table, it took twenty minutes for Jake to spell out the details of finding Connelly’s stash, the shootout in the driveway, and the meetings with Keats, the Feds, and Stone. Maggie took it in without a word, limiting her movements to drinks from her now empty coffee mug and fidgeting during his recap of the shootout at Connelly’s. But, despite her calm, Jake dreaded the storm clouds rolling in her eyes.

  “Snell going to make it?” she asked.

  “As far as we know. I’m waiting to hear back from Foster, but the signs look good.”

  “And what are you going to do now?” Her words were precise, the cadence slow. A telltale sign the storm clouds readied to dump their payload on his head.

  “Foster and Stone are trying to track the guys in the pictures. My contact is doing the same. We’ll see if our stories match up. I also want to check in with Bear and Klages and see if they’ve figured out anything.”

  Maggie said nothing else, instead casting a glare at her mug. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the ceramic cup, the antithesis of the axiom emblazoned on the side—“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” Then again, Jake supposed none of this could be considered small stuff.

  “What are you thinking?” Jake asked, afraid of the possible answer.

  “I don’t know, Jake. On one hand, I have this anger at the danger you keep putting yourself in. You keep saying things are going to calm down, but there’s your history with Shane Langston, Ares, and now a bunch of Russian spies. We’re trying to plan the rest of our lives together, but I keep wondering if you’re even going to be around.”

  Jake wrapped his hands around hers. “Mags, I’m not going anywhere.”

  She shoved his hands away, tears brimming. “Are you bullet proof? Are Halle and I bullet proof? I may have put on a great front, but I want you to know I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it while you were off shooting the bad guys.”

  Jake waited for words he didn’t want to hear. She loved him but couldn’t take it anymore. He should pack his stuff and get out of their lives before he got them killed. He thought of the laughs shared in this house, the love of his life and their daughter, one in each arm. He waited for her to say what would be a death sentence to his heart. Instead, she surprised him.

  “On the other hand,” she said, blinking away the tears, “I know you’d give your life for me and for Halle. You’d throw yourself on a grenade if it meant saving this little boy you just met a couple of days ago. I know I love you with every fiber of my being, and a life without that love is unthinkable. You have this undeniable need to do what’s right, and the fact you have that need, despite the shit you’ve been through in your life, is unbelievably admirable…and attractive.”

  The rays of the morning sun crept through the kitchen window, winding their way across the table, playing off her hair and accentuating the light in her eyes, the light he lived to see.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say,” she co
ntinued, “is I know this is who you are. You couldn’t take a job sitting behind a desk or schlepping away in the lumber yard. There’s no edge to that and you crave that edge.”

  “I’d do it for you,” Jake said. “You and Halle.”

  Now she reached across the table for him, her long fingers disappearing into his closed hands. “I know you would, but it would kill you and I won’t make you. I can’t say I won’t lose my mind about the danger on occasion, but I hope those times will be few and far between. I want you to know I’ll love you and I’ll be here for you no matter what.”

  “You’d still marry me?”

  She offered a flash of her pearly whites. “In a heartbeat.”

  Jake leaned forward and their lips met in the middle of the table, soft and electric. A touch that always loosened a shiver along his spine. Their lips parted, but their foreheads touched, and Jake snaked a hand to her neck, holding her there.

  “God, I love you,” Jake whispered.

  “I love you, too, babe.” Maggie pulled back and wiped a tear from her eye. “Now, one last thing. Go get this son of a bitch and find Christopher.”

  Chapter Forty

  Jake found Bear and Klages at the police station in Bear’s office. Bear’s massive boots hogged the corner of his desktop, and his hands locked behind his head. Klages crossed her short legs in a chair on the opposite side, thumbing through a file.

  “Those guys are getting to be a pain in my ass,” Bear said to Klages as Jake walked through the door.

  “What guys?”

  “Biker gang. Call themselves the Blood Devils. There’s at least thirty members as far as we know.”

  “Rings a faint bell. Where are they from?” Jake asked.

  “Right here in Benton County,” Klages replied. “Started off with a handful of backward ass hicks running moonshine ten years ago, but they’ve grown in numbers and balls. They’ve dealt meth and heroin in small quantities for years, but with Shane Langston out of the way, they’ve stepped up their game and filled the void.”

  “What’d they do now?”

  “Beat the shit out of some schmuck from Springfield last night.” Bear dropped his boots to the floor. “The dumbass made the colossal mistake of dropping into The Asylum for a cold one.”

  “The Asylum?” Jake asked. “I wouldn’t go in that hole without an Uzi in each hand.”

  “Yeah, well this asshole did and is now laid up at Golden Valley in Clinton, looking like he took a headfirst dive off a cliff. Now I have to send a handful of deputies to the backwoods to poke around. Klages drew the short straw.”

  “Lucky me,” she said.

  “Take Kuhlmann, Smajda, and Howard with you,” Bear said. “See if you can talk to Garvan Gallagher. He’s the head of the group of snakes but has been known to show a sliver of reason on occasion. Tell him I gotta have a warm body to answer for this one, or I’m going to take steps neither one of us want me to take.”

  Klages rose to her feet like a convict readying to walk the death-row mile to the electric chair. “Any words of advice before I jump into this shit show?”

  Jake shrugged. “Be careful out there.”

  “Yeah. It’s been nice knowing you.”

  She slunk from the office, and Jake took her place in the chair. “You find out anything interesting while I was gone?”

  Bear shook his head. “No. Nothing from the crime scene or the woods. We canvassed Poor Boy Road, but nobody saw anything out of the ordinary. How’d you make out in KC?”

  Jake related the events of the last twelve hours, culminating with his kitchen table talk with Maggie. He tried showing Bear the pics of the guys from Connelly’s basement, but Bear squinted at the phone.

  “How in the fuck am I supposed to see that? My eyesight is going to hell.”

  “Get some old lady reader glasses.”

  Bear scowled. “Ain’t ready for those yet. Send them to my email and I’ll print ’em out. What about the torture pics you mentioned?”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to see them.” Jake sent the surveillance pics and the pics of Connelly’s red notebook. Bear’s computer dinged and a minute later, his printer in the corner kicked out hard copies.

  “So,” Bear said, “other than the fact you have the greatest woman to walk the face of the earth, my wife excluded, we’ve got jack shit.”

  “We have some shit. Stone and Foster are running down the guys in the pictures, and I emailed Cat the pictures and the names and companies in the red book.” Jake circled the names from the notebook on the printout.

  “Trajor and MedFire?”

  “Yeah, I’m hoping Cat can hack into their databases and check out the names from the book. I know Trajor’s a telecom company, and I’ve heard of MedFire, but don’t know what they do.”

  “Hell,” Bear said, “MedFire’s a giant in the medical field. They hook up networks at hospitals to allow them to talk to each other. Supposed to be a great place to work, though a bit of a meat grinder. I met some security guy at MedFire at some cyber-bullshit conference last year. I saved him from taking a transvestite hooker back to his hotel room, so he owes me.”

  “You are such a giver.”

  “I know. And completely unappreciated. Let me find his number.” Bear rifled through his desk drawer for a minute before pulling out a business card. “Here it is. David Sauerbront.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Bear sniffed. “He’s the kind of pretentious prick who eats his French fries with a fork.”

  “What kind of prick uses the word pretentious?”

  “Fuck you, Caldwell.”

  “Think he’ll talk to you?”

  Bear dialed the number. “Let’s find out. His level of tolerability improved a great deal after a half-dozen drinks, and we had a pretty good time. Let’s hope he remembers it. David? James Parley from Warsaw. How the hell are you, man?”

  Bear paused while listening to Sauerbront. Jake used the break to type a message to Cat, asking for an update.

  “Yeah, sounds awesome,” Bear continued. “Listen, David, I’m working a case and someone from MedFire popped up on our radar. I hoped you could help me out.” Bear listened and paced the room before his eyes rolled into his skull. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that would take a lot of time I don’t have right now. Remember I saved your delicate ass from getting pounded by a dude in a dress. The least you could do is find a name in your system for me.”

  “Tell him S. Mack,” Jake whispered.

  “Yeah, I didn’t hear it from you. The last name is Mack, first initial S. I don’t have a first name.” Bear waited before covering the receiver with his hand. “There’s three of them.”

  Bear grabbed a pen and scribbled on a notepad. Jake walked around the desk and peered over Bear’s shoulder. Samuel Mack, fifty-five-year-old data analyst who worked in London. Sandra Mack, twenty years old, who was an admin in Sydney, and Sean Mack, a thirty-year-old technician from Kansas City.

  Jake tapped on Sean Mack’s name and Bear nodded. “What else can you tell me about Sean Mack? Any of his contact info?” Bear jotted an address and phone number on the pad and listened while drawing dark circles around the number. “No shit? Interesting. Thanks, David. I’ll call you when I’m in the city.”

  Bear hung up and leaned back in the chair, his bushy eyebrows cocked.

  “What’s interesting?” Jake asked.

  “Sean Mack hasn’t shown for work for the last two days, and nobody knows where he is.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  “A no show for two days?” Jake asked. “Your guy say why?”

  “Nope. His boss told him Mack termed and gave the order to shut off his access to their buildings and computer systems.”

  “He doesn’t show to work for two days and they lock him out? That’s weird.”

  “Said it’s their protocol.”

  Jake counted off names on his raised fingers. “Spy Handler Marta Niroff, FBI Agent investigating the Russian mob and Jackson
Blake, for sure dead. Arms dealer Andre Fisher missing and MedFire schmuck Sean Mack most likely dead. What do they have in common?”

  Bear cracked his giant knuckles. “You don’t know Mack’s dead. He could be off in the Bahamas humping his girlfriend.”

  “He feels dead.”

  “Oh, you’re some kind of psychic now?”

  Jake flashed his longest finger to his best friend. “You know what I mean. This journal in Connelly’s basement is a goddamn dead pool list.”

  “It’s either a list of the already dead or a twisted to-do list. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for”—Bear grabbed the printout—“J. Hart of the Trajor Corporation.”

  “You know anyone at Trajor?”

  “I found the MedFire guy. You expect me to do all the work?”

  Jake scraped his fingers across the five o’clock shadow along his jawline. He didn’t know anyone at Trajor. “Find their general campus number.”

  Bear found and dialed it on his desk phone, hitting the speaker button and turning it in Jake’s direction. “You’re talking to the Trajor folks.”

  The phone rang through the speaker. “You do it,” Jake said. “You’re the freaking cop.”

  “I’m liable to chew their ass about my cell service.”

  A female semi-robotic voice answered, prompting Jake to wade through a myriad of automated menus. Trajor missed out on a huge opportunity. He might’ve bought a new phone if he could’ve escaped the auto-menu hell and talked to a live human being. He settled for the dial-by-name feature. Jake tapped the phone keys corresponding to Hart’s name and listened.

  “For Jamica Hart, press one,” the woman’s voice said. “For Jerome Hart, press two, or to speak to a receptionist, press zero.”

  “Is Jerome spelled with a J or a G?” Bear asked.

  “I think it goes both ways.”

  “Kinda like you. Just hit two.”

  “And say what?” Jake asked.

  Bear reached forward and hit two on the keypad. “I don’t know, make something up.”