Parley stepped back. “We’re familiar with the place. Tell us the tale starting with how you helped Shane out of the JCCC.”
Caldwell chimed in, “And make it the quick version. We don’t have all night.”
Shifflett’s eyes darted between the two. “I don’t like this. Maybe I do need to wait for the lawyer.”
The vein in Parley’s temple pulsated like a big, blue bass drum. “Jesus Christ. That’s it.” He lunged for Shifflett.
Chapter Forty-Five
Jake wondered if Shifflett would be able to tell them anything they didn’t already know to help track Shane down. They felt reasonably sure Shane holed up at The Asylum, but the periodic surveillance on the place hadn’t yielded any results, a brazen walk-through by the cops proved worthless, and they couldn’t send someone in undercover to scope the place out. The Blood Devils would break whoever it was into a million pieces before they ordered a drink at the bar.
Shifflett stalled, and Jake contemplated a different approach when Bear lunged. Jake wrestled Bear toward the door and out the interrogation room. Sheriff Taylor guarded the door.
Jake peered into Bear’s eyes of fury. “Easy there, big guy.”
Bear sucked in a lungful of air through his flared nostrils and patted Jake on the shoulder. “Something about the guy, man. Sorry. He ain’t gonna give us shit. He’s going to keep stringing us along until the lawyer gets here and then the talking comes to a grinding halt.”
“Let me take a shot.”
Bear drew back. “What the hell have we been doing together for the last hour?”
“Let me go in alone. No cops, no cameras. Just me and him.”
Taylor spoke from the door. “You think he’ll talk to you?”
“He wants to say something, but my guess is he’s covering for someone and is trying to figure out a way to help us so he can save his own ass, but without burning the person he’s covering for. Trust me, I’ve been in his position, and I think I can talk to him.”
Taylor considered the request and shrugged. “Go for it. I’ll turn off the camera.”
A deep frown sprung on Jake’s brow. “He’ll think it’s a trick. I would anyway. I need somewhere where there’s zero chance he’ll worry about getting recorded. Got an empty cell?”
Taylor nodded. “It’s a Friday, but it’s early. I think we can scare one up. Go get him.”
* * *
Shifflett’s eyes flew wide when Jake jerked him from the chair and dragged him out of the room. Shifflett babbled, but Jake cut him off. “Keep your trap shut until we get where we’re going.”
“Wh…where are we going?”
“Someplace we can talk without so many eyes. Trust me.”
Shifflett relaxed a bit and let Jake lead the way, following Taylor down a long, beige hallway. They passed through a keycard door at the end of the hall monitored by a Hispanic cop manning a computer desk. Inside, a bank of empty tiny cells lined another concrete hallway, separated by cinderblock walls. Jake ushered Shifflett into a cell and waited until Sheriff Taylor left, closing the door behind him.
Shifflett swung his eyes around the cell, taking in the bunk anchored to the wall inches from a stainless-steel toilet and sink. “Thought we were going somewhere to talk.”
Jake motioned for him to sit on the cot, leaning back against the wall by the sink. “We are. I wanted you to spend a little time in what could be waiting for you at the end of this journey.”
Shifflett’s knuckles blanched on his clenched hands. “I know damn well what the inside of a jail cell looks like.”
“From the outside perspective, sure. But I want you to think long and hard about being in a cell like this, day after day after day. Year after year after year. Unless you help us, you could very well die in a place like this. If you don’t get your throat slit in the shower or in the yard.”
Shifflett smacked back against the wall. “You don’t think I know that?”
“I know you do, and I think I know why you won’t talk. It’s why you and I are here. No cops, no cameras, no people. Just you and me.”
“You going to beat me with a bag of doorknobs until I talk?”
“Nope. I don’t need to. You know, I used to work for a bad guy. The kind of guy who made people disappear for crossing him. A life and death situation came up where I had the choice to keep this guy safe by staying quiet and letting someone die or figuring out a way to tell the cops enough info to save someone without implicating my boss. I went with the latter.”
“What’s your point?”
Jake took a step across the cell and lowered himself to the cot. “My point is you have a choice, Clayton. I have a feeling you want to talk to save your ass, but you’re afraid of the implications if you do. Am I right?”
Shifflett focused on the opposite wall, eyes growing moist. Half a minute crept past before he spoke. “I don’t know how this happened. I remember veering off the right path clear as day. It was supposed to be a one-time kind of deal, but the first step turned into two, then three. Pretty soon, the right path is so far away I don’t even know what direction it’s in anymore.”
“It’s not too late.”
A tear dropped from the man’s rheumy eyes. “Yeah, it is. I’m screwed. You know it and I know it. I wanted to get out, you know?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Someone wouldn’t let me. Him and the prospect of lot of money. One more score. That’s all and I would be a ghost.”
“You’re protecting someone higher up in the food chain?”
Shifflett wiped his eyes with his fingers. “Yes.”
“You going to tell me so we can do something?”
“No. I can’t.”
Jake clenched his fists. Damn it. He thought he had him for a second. “Then help yourself. Give me something to catch Langston. If you won’t burn the guy pulling your puppet strings, help me get the maniac out there. It’ll grease the skids with the prosecutor, Clayton.”
Shifflett stepped to the sink. He ran cold water over his face and turned to Jake. “There’s a shipment of guns, drugs, and girls coming up through Oklahoma.”
“You’re last big score?”
Shifflett dipped his head. “The last one. I can get you the truck. Garvan sent one of the Blood Devils to drive it from Oklahoma to The Asylum to split up the assets.”
Jake shoved his hands in his pockets to prevent himself from smacking Shifflett upside the head for calling the terrified women on the truck assets. “Which Blood Devil?”
“I don’t know any of them. Well, other than the ones who came through the JCCC.”
Jake chewed on his upper lip for a beat. “Will Langston be there? At The Asylum?”
“Supposed to be. There’s your golden ticket. You get the truck and Langston.”
Once Shifflett gave him the specifics where the truck would be, Jake patted him on the shoulder. “You’re doing the right thing.” Jake called for the guard and as he waited, a thought popped into his head. “Is this one of Heartstone’s trucks bringing the guns and girls?”
“And drugs.”
“Heartstone is owned by Enyart Property Management. You know anything?”
Shifflett’s jaw trembled and the color of his face drew three shades to the white. “I have nothing else to say.”
Jake turned. “That’s who you’re protecting, isn’t it? Enyart. What do they have to do with you?”
Shifflett groaned and went back to the cot. “Everybody reports to somebody, Caldwell. You figure out the rest.”
Jake held his hand up to the approaching guard who stopped in the hallway, the gears in his head spinning so fast he wouldn’t be surprised if smoke poured from his ears. “Who runs Enyart?”
“Haven’t you heard a goddamn thing I said? I can’t give him up or I’m a dead man.”
Jake wanted the name. It represented the last missing piece of the puzzle. “You’ve already implicated Shane Langston in this whole deal. What’s one more name? W
ho runs Enyart?”
Shifflett buried his face in his hands. “Oh, man. I’m so fucked.”
That wasn’t a refusal. The name perched right on the guy’s lips, and Jake hovered over Shifflett like a vulture. “Is Langston in control of Enyart Properties? Tell me.”
“In a way.”
Jake dropped to a squat. “What do you mean?”
“Langston has dirt on the owner. I don’t know what it is. All I know is Langston calls the shots, and he gets a cut of everything we did.”
“You help him escape?”
Shifflett ground his hands together. “I didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Who’s the guy in charge of Enyart? Who is in bed with you and Langston?”
Shifflett scrutinized Jake’s eyes, looking for some measure of trust. “You’ll protect me? You won’t say you got it from me?”
The bad guys would figure out who gave them up pretty damn fast, so Jake’s promises wouldn’t amount to shit. “If we take them down, it won’t matter who said what. Give me the name.”
Shifflett blew out a heavy and sad breath. “Dick Blackwell. The guy running against your friend Parley.”
Chapter Forty-Six
It took Bear ten minutes to get over the shock of Dick Blackwell being in bed with Shifflett and Langston and another five minutes of red-faced rage to the point Jake worried Bear would have an aneurism.
Bear’s jaw muscles pulsated as he ground his teeth to powder. “I can’t wait to nail the sanctimonious, lying cheesedick to the wall.”
“Take a breath. You’re gonna stroke out.”
“This is going to be fun.”
Jake jabbed a finger at his friend. “Langston first, Blackwell second.”
“You’re such a buzzkill. Let me have my moment.”
“Moment’s over. What do you want to do about Shifflett?”
Bear rolled his neck, vertebrae crunching. “We’ve gotten everything we’re going to get out of him for now. If his information pans out about the truck in Oklahoma, I’ll put in a tiny word of good faith with the prosecutor so we don’t break our promise, but the guy isn’t ever going to breathe free air again, and I have absolutely zero problems with that. You?”
“Not even a little one. Screw the fat prick. But, we gotta get the truck, especially if there’s women on board. If Shifflett is telling the truth, this is going to end up at The Asylum. The truck and any documentation from it could go a long way in getting a search warrant for the bar.”
Bear’s eyebrows rose. “Search warrant? Check you out. A few months ago, you would’ve said let’s go in there with guns a blazin’.”
Jake thought of Maggie and Halle and the life he tried to create, as free from danger and violence as possible. The Blood Devils hunkered in that red-painted hell hole of a bar would be tough to flush out. He’d hate to be gunned down in a fire fight with everything he now stood to lose. “The warrant isn’t going to stop the inevitable bloodshed but would legitimize the effort and anything we seize there, and maybe get us some more firepower. You and I aren’t going to be able to storm it alone. We have enough to get one?”
“Yeah, with the background documentation we’ve gathered on PMA and its ownership of The Asylum, along with whatever we find in the truck and Shifflett’s cooperation will get us there. If we knew a hundred percent that Langston was in The Asylum, we could just go get him and not worry about the damn warrant. Wish we had something concrete to tie Blackwell to Enyart Property. All we have on him now is what Shifflett says.”
Jake headed toward the door. “Let’s get back to Warsaw, and I’ll call Cat on the way. You have any contacts in Oklahoma who could nab whatever Blood Devil shows to pick up the truck?”
Bear followed Jake toward the Sheriff’s office. “It’s in Oklahoma County. I’ll make a call to Branson. Maybe Chuck knows some folks.”
“Have we actually reached a point where the great Bear Parley doesn’t have any contacts?”
“Oh, I’ve got contacts there. But it’d be better if Chuck makes the call. I had a bad run in with the local police there a few years ago.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jake stopped. “Now I have to know. What’d you do?”
“What makes you think it was my fault?”
“Because I know you. Was it?”
Bear cleared his throat. “Yeah. I was being an asshole.”
* * *
They burned up the phone lines along with the asphalt highway and made it back to Warsaw in less than an hour and a half. Once they hit the town limits, Bear headed toward the station house, putting in yet another pinch of tobacco between his bottom lip and gum.
Jake, waiting for a return call from Cat about Enyart, clucked his tongue. “You know that shit is going to give you mouth cancer, don’t you?”
“I could get killed in a shootout tonight at The Asylum. Mouth cancer is the least of my worries.”
They turned on Main Street and rolled up the hill through the barren, late night streets of downtown Warsaw. “You’d look pretty stupid trying to arrest the bad guys with your entire bottom lip rotted off. I’m just sayin’.”
“Jesus, you’re worse than my wife.”
Cat called as they walked through the front entrance of the station and headed toward Bear’s office. “I can’t find anything more on Enyart other than it’s owned by some outfit called Marion Holdings, but that’s as high up as the chain goes, and I don’t have time to dig any more on it. Got another client who’s going to fire me if I don’t get his stuff done, and they pay a hell of a lot more than you guys do.”
“Thanks, Cat. You’ve done some good work on this.”
“While your high praise means so much to me, is it gonna put some green in my wallet?”
“Probably.”
Cat grunted. “Goddamn it, Caldwell. You promised if I—”
“I know what I promised, and you’ll get something. Go eat some Cheetos.”
He silenced the phone without waiting for a comeback. The name Marion Holdings rolled across his brain as they hunkered in Bear’s office, Bear on the phone with Katrina getting the scoop on the truck.
Bear hung up. “They busted the driver taking possession of the Heartstone truck in Oklahoma City. Some Blood Devil named Marlo Michels. They nabbed him before he could sound off any alarms to his brethren back here.”
“What was in the truck?”
Bear’s lip twitched, his eyes growing cloudy. “Girls. A lot of them. Katrina says thirty alive.”
“Alive?”
“One died in transit.”
Jake groaned. “Jesus.”
“Katrina said she was maybe eighteen. Not sure where’s she’s from but she looks Hispanic.”
“Anything else?”
Bear rubbed his thumb against fingertips in the universal money sign. “Crates of guns and enough heroin to stock Hollywood’s after-parties for a year. Street value in the millions. This is a huge bust.”
“Is the driver talking?”
“Radio silence. But, Fancy at Xtreme is cooperating. He was a reluctant co-conspirator. Blood Devils threatened to kill his entire family if he didn’t comply. They were supposed to pick up some Russian AK-47s at his place and head to The Asylum. Given the fact the Blood Devils sent one of their own to get the truck pretty much seals the deal on the search warrant.”
“Now, if we could just tie this to Langston.” Saying the man’s name out loud pulled the Marion Holdings reference into focus. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?”
Jake plopped into the chair in front of Bear’s desk. “Cat called and said Marion Holdings owned Enyart but couldn’t get any more info.”
Bear stroked his beard. “Marion? Why does that sound familiar?”
“I thought the same thing, but I remember it now. When I tracked down Langston when I first came back to town, I found documentation in his car dealership addressed to Marion Holdings. S
hane’s company.”
“That’s right. Shane owns all this shit, including Xtreme, The Asylum and Heartstone. I know the government shut down the car dealership, but they must’ve missed the rest of his network.”
“Don’t forget Kappelmann Laundry hauling his illegal goods into the prisons. There’s our missing last piece.”
Bear’s eyes lit up. “Nice work, Caldwell.”
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Wait a second. I thought the government seized Langston’s assets. How’d they miss the holding company?”
“Beats the hell outta me. Maybe we ought to—”
Klages popped through the door, her angular jaw set. “Some fisherman in Forthview found a body floating in the lake. Someone did a shitty job of weighting it down.”
“We have any idea who it is?”
“Bennett Skaggs. I’m heading over there now.”
Jake’s eyes shot to Bear. “That’s right by The Asylum.”
Bear chewed on his upper lip for a beat. “Head over there, Klages, but keep it quiet. Shane’s cleaning up, which means he’s around and possibly holed up at The Asylum. We don’t want to spook him with a fucking parade of lights and sirens. Once we get the warrant, we gotta figure out a way to get in there.”
Jake slid to the edge of his chair. “I have an idea.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jake’s head buzzed as everything began coming together, thanks to a flurry of phone calls between Bear, Katrina’s group in Branson, and Judge Arthur who was approving the search warrant for The Asylum.
Fancy at Xtreme verified he hired Delbert as a favor for the local probation officer, and Delbert identified the back shed where they stored the go-karts as the perfect stash for weapons coming in from the West and South. When Fancy stumbled upon the crates, Delbert held a knife to his throat and threatened to slice his wife and grandkids into bite-sized pieces if he said a word.
Bear scanned a notepad. “As innocent as he claimed to be, he let it slip that cash payments were made to help buy his silence. Old Fancy is going to have some explaining to do to the Taney County Sheriff Department, FBI, and IRS.”
Jake Caldwell Thrillers Page 99