A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?” he said.

  “You can check if you want.”

  He thought about it. Maybe it had already occurred to him that if OPR, the Bureau’s version of Internal Affairs, were on to him, they would have busted him the moment he tried to leave the field office with confidential files.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “And I’ll trust you, too.” The little receiver in my pocket hadn’t emitted the buzz alerting me to any cellular or two-way signals within a dozen feet. Panni wasn’t wired.

  “I don’t know why we couldn’t go through our mutual friend,” he said, sitting next to me on the bench.

  “Because our friend isn’t always available,” I said, “and if I need information quickly in the future, it’s better that you and I know each other.” I patted Panni on the back.

  “I can’t do this a lot,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant logistically or emotionally.

  “Let’s just take care of today.”

  “So how do we . . .”

  “You leave what you brought on the bench. Then you go to your car and find yourself a party.”

  He frowned. “What about the rest?”

  “It’s already in your pocket, Mark.”

  He pressed his elbow against his North Face ski jacket and was rewarded with the crackle of paper from the folded envelope I’d placed there. His eyes widened.

  “Happy New Year,” I said.

  Panni fumbled in his jeans pocket and set a black thumb drive on the bench. He managed to take long strides on his way back out of the garden, despite being clenched enough to hold a broomstick lodged where I couldn’t see it.

  I scratched Stanley’s flank as I reached into his harness again for an adapter cable. I plugged the thumb drive into my phone and began to read the files Panni had brought.

  The first document was Bilal Nath’s travel visa to the United States, including an image of his passport. He was a citizen of Pakistan, with a listed residence in London. He’d entered the country on a flight from Heathrow to Miami in mid-November. The next two pages of search results confirmed Bilal had no arrest record in the United States and a check with Interpol had drawn a similar blank.

  But the next file was a surprise. A State of Florida marriage license. Bilal Nath and Aura Kincaid had been married in Miami only a week after Bilal had arrived in America. The gangster and his girl were newlyweds.

  Aura’s record wasn’t quite as clean as her husband’s. Arrests for identity theft in her home state of Washington, and again in Florida, which also included a count of wire fraud. Cybercrimes. Unsurprising, given that code she’d created to strip-mine my phone for all its data. She hadn’t been indicted on the first rap and had gotten off with probation for the second.

  The sentencing statement noted that the judge had been lenient given Ms. Kincaid’s ongoing health concerns. It didn’t elaborate on what those problems had been, but if they’d been serious enough to make a Dade County judge pause, I guessed Aura had been afflicted with more than a hangnail.

  She’d been married once before Bilal, too, I noticed. To a Timothy Gorlick, while she was still living in Washington. Their divorce had been finalized right before her move to Miami.

  That was the sum total of information on my new and unwanted acquaintance. I had gleaned a few biographical facts, but nothing that might give me any leverage to shake Bilal loose. Stanley caught my angry curse and raised his head.

  Bilal had hired Dr. Claybeck through Ondine Long. It was a sure bet Ondine was also the person who had first dropped my name to Bilal, although I had no idea why. Nothing good, that was equally certain. Whatever motive that witch might have had for mentioning me, my best interest wouldn’t be a factor.

  I closed the files on Bilal to open the second folder. The information Panni had been able to find on Fergus Burke.

  Gut Burke’s federal rap sheet was the largest file. It had been linked to records in various counties and states. I didn’t know if that efficiency was Panni’s good work or courtesy of Homeland Security tying information across sources.

  Fergus William Burke, aka Big Gus, aka Gut Burke, aka George Bergin. White male, six-foot-one, 260 pounds. Born New York City, died twelve years ago in Longview, Washington, only days shy of age sixty.

  So he was dead. If Gut Burke had been my paternal grandfather, he was just another relation lost to time, never to be known.

  But that was making the very big assumption that Burke had any connection to me at all. I scrolled ahead, looking for his family and known associates.

  There. Three relatives. Wife Iva Burke, divorced with no year listed. Daughter Kathleen, deceased. She had her own criminal sheet as a separate file on Panni’s drive. Katie Burke had been arrested in Berkeley twice for possession of heroin and died of an overdose at age twenty.

  And son Sean. Sean Burke.

  Hollis’s memory had been spot-on. My mother, Moira, had known him.

  The news was big enough that I let the file labeled sean_william_burke _09790467a sit unopened and full of its own portent, while I read more about his father, Gus.

  Gut Burke had racked up enough arrests to force me to scroll down twice to see the whole list. He’d been in handcuffs before he’d had his first zit. Assault, burglary, armed robbery, possession with intent, suspicion of extortion, suspicion of kidnapping, suspicion of murder more than once. Leaving aside a host of short jail terms, two of those arrests had earned Burke prison time. Four years in Sing Sing for manslaughter, six in San Quentin for selling cocaine. East Coast, West Coast.

  Mug shots of Burke at various ages showed a man who was almost fully grown and next door to good-looking at sixteen, with a strong nose and chin and dark wavy hair, who had slid downhill fast. Like a time-lapse of Dorian Gray’s portrait. It wasn’t just the weight gain that ballooned his already thick neck. The skin on his cheeks blossomed into rosacea and his countenance became darker in a different way.

  Burke looked exactly like what he was: a thug, a crook, a killer.

  The attached Bureau dossier gave me some color commentary to back up all the stats. Gut Burke had been an enforcer for the Westies, the Irish-American mob in Hell’s Kitchen, who started as competitors of the Italians and ended as little more than attack dogs working for the Gambino family. Seeing the writing on the wall, Burke had pulled up stakes and fled to California in the early 1980s. The Feds had tried to make him turn state’s evidence when they nabbed him for trafficking drugs, but Gut hadn’t taken the deal.

  Burke had moved again, to Washington State, just after his parole from SQ ended. The dossier showed registered addresses in Olympia, Longview, Tacoma. Never anywhere longer than five or six years. And no arrests after his relocation to the Northwest. Had he suddenly quit? Or changed his methods?

  Which renewed my curiosity about what business Burke might have had with Dono thirty years ago. Despite a few similar notes in the melody of their criminal records, the two men didn’t have much in common. Burke was a few years older than my grandfather had been, and from NYC, while Dono had come to the States through Boston. Dono was a thief, with no interest in dealing narcotics and especially not in murder for hire, which looked to be Gut Burke’s specialties. And Dono had assiduously avoided working with gangs. If crime could have hermits, that would have been my grandfather.

  My fingers hesitated over Sean’s file. The more I learned about the Burkes, even reading between the emotionless lines of the official record, the less I liked.

  My grandfather had raised me to be just like him. A thief. Dono Shaw wasn’t without his own scruples, and he’d loved me. I’d bought into the idea—the delusion—that he and I were justified in what we did. That I was a good person despite my crimes.

  I’d grown out of that way of thinking.

  Gut Burke couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be considered good, not ever. Was his son the same?

  I opened his file.

  Sean Burke’s dr
iver’s license and two passport copies were on the first pages. He was forty-seven. He traveled internationally with enough frequency that he’d filled the first of the passports within a few years. Trips to Canada and Russia, mostly, and a handful of former Eastern Bloc nations as well.

  I studied Burke’s face. The photos were straight-on and impassive, as with most DMV and passport pictures. It was a squarer face than his father’s but with the same strong features and the same pugnacious set to the jaw.

  He didn’t look a ton like me, except for the shape of his skull and perhaps the ears. Dark hair and eyes, sure, but not so dark as the Shaw bloodline with their black hair, and eyes close enough to that shade that a drunk girl in a bar near Fort Benning had once poked me in the chest and proclaimed them obsidian. I’d known my whole life that my looks resembled Dono’s. Everyone who’d seen us together had remarked on it.

  Burke and I were similarly sized, though. Over six feet, and big in the shoulders and chest from what I could gauge from his headshots and his license. That hadn’t been the case for Dono. My grandfather had been even taller, but rangy. More a wiry strength than the muscle mass that came naturally to me. I noted Sean had kept his weight down as he’d aged. No one was likely to call him Gut after his dad.

  He was also married. To Natalia Burke née Morozova, no children. Real estate records showed they owned a house right here in Seattle, a two-bedroom suburban in Bitter Lake bought ten years ago for four hundred and ten thousand and probably worth twice that now, thanks to Seattle’s insane real estate boom.

  Married, and settled. That surprised me, and the fact that I was surprised made me wonder whether I was trying too hard to fit Sean Burke into a preconceived notion. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Maybe Sean had escaped the pull of his father’s gravity, as I’d more or less escaped Dono’s.

  I continued to page through his records and stopped abruptly, thinking at first that the copies of Burke’s U.S. travel documents had been duplicated.

  But no. I was looking at a copy of a second passport for Burke. With the red-and-gold cover of the Russian Federation.

  That must have taken some doing, even with a Russian wife. Did Burke somehow arrange for dual citizenship? Was that even recognized by both countries? It hadn’t seemed to set off any red flags during travel. He’d logged at least two trips to Asia per year, with entry points at Pushkin International in Moscow and also to Kiev in the Ukraine. Family visits? Or working?

  Sean held a Washington State business license under the name SWB Consultants. I clicked away from the file to make a fast search. If the business was still operating, it was unusual. I couldn’t find any online presence for SWB or Sean Burke. No social media, no company website, not even a Yelp review.

  He did have a criminal record. A single arrest by the SPD, for suspicion of assault when he was barely eighteen. I checked the date against Gut Burke’s file. Sure enough, father and son had been busted together. Neither man had been indicted.

  The last part of his rap sheet was especially curious, an appended section of only two sentences. Sean Burke had been questioned by the ATF two years ago. Any inquiries were directed to the federal agency’s Seattle field office. No further details on the investigation were provided. I suspected that the official record had been classified, which would make sense if the case was still considered open.

  Burke might be a suspect. Or a witness, or even just a technical expert the Feds had consulted for information. No way of knowing. But those two lines had become a cloud obscuring any clear picture of Sean Burke.

  The final three pages were almost identical, each one a federal firearm transaction form. Burke had purchased two SIG Sauer M17 pistols, and one bolt-action SSG 3000 rifle by the same maker, all within the past four years. I knew the M17, had even tried it out on the range in the Army when the model was in contention to replace our standard issue Beretta. SIG Sauer had eventually won that bid. The M17 was rolling out by the tens of thousands to Army and Air Force personnel.

  Burke wasn’t a veteran. Why pay top retail to own pistols that would become as common as weeds within a couple of years?

  The SIG rifle struck me as even stranger. A sniper rifle used by law enforcement, and an odd choice for the casual gun enthusiast.

  I recalled something else about the rifle. Something that turned the nagging tap at my mind to frantic scratching. The SSG 3000 had a rare feature, a barrel that could be replaced in just a few minutes. Useful, if you wanted to try out different calibers.

  Or maybe swap out the rifle’s original barrel to muddy the results of a ballistics test.

  I could think of at least one private sector occupation that would find that feature useful. A job that might reward tactical proficiency with a model of handgun you could acquire with comparative ease almost anywhere in the world.

  Combine those facts with frequent travel. A vague registered business. And a family history shadowy enough to make mine look like a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers.

  A shooter. Not a grunt like Gut Burke, weighted down with a rap sheet that would attract attention in any town he settled in. But a professional killer, careful and prepared.

  Had Sean Burke gone straight? Or, like Dono after his young wild years, had he refined his approach over time to become much better at the work he’d done all his life?

  Hell. I was probably building an elaborate house of cards. Maybe Sean Burke had buddies in the Army whom he liked to go shooting with, or he had found some price break on weapons from his favorite manufacturer.

  And he lived in Seattle. My possible next of kin, my father, might have been living less than ten miles away from me all these years.

  Ten miles, a drive of no more than twenty minutes. I could be at Sean Burke’s house just that fast.

  I unplugged the drive and filled Stanley’s harness with the various pieces of electronics once more. The bully stick long since devoured, he hopped up, keen to be on the move.

  So was I, I realized. I had enough raw energy suddenly firing my blood to sprint like a wolf chasing prey.

  I just wasn’t sure which direction I should go.

  Eleven

  Cyndra was the first to hear Bilal’s phone ringing. I got up from the little circular table Addy used for sit-down meals, which had become more frequent occurrences now that Cyn lived with her, and retrieved the phone from my jacket pocket.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This is Shaw?” Bilal’s gunman, Saleem, I guessed, based on the accent.

  “You give these phones out to a lot of people?”

  He paused, maybe uncertain whether he was being mocked. “We are at Eastlake and Roanoke. Come here.”

  “Later. I’m busy.”

  Another delay as the line went completely quiet. Maybe Saleem covered the phone with his hand while he conferred with Bilal or Bilal’s new wife, Aura.

  “We can come and find you,” Saleem said finally, “at the Proctor house.”

  My jaw tightened. I had to give them intimidation points for efficiency. Bilal could track the phone’s location, and he’d already matched it to Addy’s home. Sure as shit I didn’t want these assholes anywhere near Roy Street.

  “Half an hour,” I said, and hung up. I could be terse, too.

  “Who was that?” Addy said from over her sliver of mince pie. Addy liked food, would try a bit of everything, but she claimed she’d reached the age where she couldn’t eat as heartily as she once enjoyed.

  “Someone I have to see.” I returned to the table and tucked in to the last of the roast. “Start the movie without me. I’ll come back to catch the end if I can.”

  “But it’s Mad Max,” Cyndra said. “And Furiosa.”

  “I’ve seen it before. We all have.”

  “Too much for me,” said Addy. “So much violence.” Her tone implying something other than the film.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, answering her question. “Save me some dessert. Cherry, not that wei
rd spiced stuff you call pie.”

  Addy didn’t rise to the joke, lame as it was. Cyn didn’t look entertained, either.

  “You’re still off school.” I nodded to Cyndra’s gear bag lying in the corner of the living room. “How about you and me go to the gym in the morning? Like Wren said?”

  “Okay,” she answered, only half looking up from her plate.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Neither of them said anything to that. I swallowed the final bite and took my dishes to the kitchen before leaving. Setting a fine example.

  I knew the intersection of Eastlake and Roanoke. About a block away was a good Italian restaurant called Pomodoro that stayed open until midnight. I’d taken Luce Boylan there once. And another woman much more recently, on a date that had ended in a one-night stand. The meal was worth seconds, the sex not so much. We’d both agreed to feast elsewhere.

  As I drew near, Bilal’s phone rang again. Probably tracking my progress. My electronic leash had a fucking choke collar on it.

  “I see you in your car.” Saleem again. “Leave it and come down to the corner.” I spotted him in his leather coat on the stone steps leading to the tennis courts at Rogers Playground. I’d played some baseball on the diamond there as a kid. Never enough time on any league team for me to become much of a batter; life with Dono had interfered with the schedule demands of organized sports. But I could run fast enough and throw hard enough to get by at center field, the same position my idol, Ken Griffey Jr., played. The notion of beaning Saleem with a fastball gave me an ounce of pleasure.

  I left the Barracuda two blocks from the park and walked down. Saleem stayed on the steps, maybe to keep us eye to eye. His jacket was open, and his right hand hovered near the buckle of his braided belt.

  “Nervous?” I said.

  Saleem’s only reaction was in his eyes, which blazed. His chiseled face might have approached handsome if it ever relaxed. But there was an intensity, maybe lifelong, that had drawn the fine ligaments under his skin taut, like the rage within was consuming him.