Sallow City

by Jim Heskett

  Micah went inside, locked the door, and slid onto the bed to consider his options. Logan’s mom Yvette hadn’t told him everything. That much was for sure. Harvey and his Crossroads casino gang had killed Logan, and the logical theory was that they’d done it to collect the bounty on Micah’s head. But the pieces didn’t all fit together. Micah didn’t know how much the bounty was, but it couldn’t be enough to inspire Crossroads to do all this work.

  Something else was happening here, but what?

  He couldn’t find a logical path to answer that question. And the longer he ran in that circle of thought, the more time he was wasting. Yvette had said Crossroads was abandoning the casino, but not why.

  Micah wondered if Rourke and his crew knew about that. If they did know, they’d probably try to raid the casino to rob it on its last night. To take advantage by shooting up the place while it was in a transition.

  And if they did that, they might spoil Micah’s chance of finally learning the truth.

  That couldn’t happen.

  He had to get into that casino before they did and confront Harvey. Put a gun to the Nazi bastard’s head and make him tell the truth. Get justice for this Logan kid.

  But why? Micah didn’t even know anymore.

  Selfless act.

  He now realized he’d given up on Yvette too quickly. She had secrets.

  He could barely keep his eyes open any longer, he was so tired. First thing, he knew, was that he would go back to the King house in the morning. Yvette hadn’t wanted to talk to him, but he could get answers some other way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Olivia and Jeremy crouched behind the dumpster, in the exact same spot the crew of three amateur casino robbers had sat, watching the back of the mall. Except now, Olivia was watching the three of them, positioned on either side of the back door. A little bit of research had revealed their names to be Rourke Patterson, Carter DeLeo, and Ethan Greenberg. Local amateur criminals with notions of taking their enterprise to the next level.

  Olivia had seen this scenario played out dozens of times. It never worked out for the small-time crooks. Instead of becoming big-time, they usually ended up dead.

  Rourke’s father had a gambling problem, which explained the choice for their current operation. Some kind of revenge/robbery, most likely.

  “I thought you might stop by my room last night,” Jeremy said. In the pre-dawn light, she could barely make out his features.

  “I was tired.”

  “It’s just… the way you were at dinner… playing with my knee under the table.”

  She yawned. It was too early to deal with this. “It feels good to flirt, Jeremy. Sometimes I want more. Sometimes I don’t.”

  “But do you see how I could construe that to be a mixed signal?”

  She kept thinking about seeing Micah outside his motel room, how he’d worn that look of disdain on his face. She didn’t know why, but his scowl unsettled her. “What do you want? You want to be my boyfriend? Is that it? Most guys would be perfectly fine with an occasional no-strings fling.”

  He crossed his arms. Now he was sulking. “Maybe I’m not most guys.”

  “Well, you know what? I’m married, so that’s all there is to it.”

  He scowled, which happened whenever Olivia brought up her husband. She didn’t like to do that, but Jeremy’s whiny desperation had left her no choice.

  “Can we please focus on our task at hand?” she said.

  “Fine. Think they’re hoping to snatch someone and get information?”

  “I think that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. They were making notes on the comings and goings of mall employees yesterday, and now they suspect someone’s about to walk out of that door.”

  “What could they hope to find out? How much money is inside or something like that?”

  Olivia tugged at her right eyebrow, twisting the edge of it between her thumb and forefinger. “No idea. These little robbers are quite a mystery.”

  “But you have some kind of plan to use them to our advantage.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Our main directive is still making sure Crossroads doesn’t get spooked before they abandon ship. Exposing them so we can apprehend the key figures.”

  Jeremy pivoted toward her. “Apprehending them? You never said anything about that before. We were only supposed to pull strings, keep activity restricted to the private sector so the feds wouldn’t have to show their faces. Not get directly involved.”

  “The parameters changed. I got word from the boss last night.”

  He sighed. “This is why I hate government contracts. Always changing their damn minds. So if we need to ensure this event happens, we’re going to have to eliminate these three.”

  “Maybe.”

  The back door opened and out stepped a man in a black suit, unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Longhaired Carter snatched the man’s arm to unbalance him, and big Jewish-looking Ethan smacked the man over the head with something cylindrical.

  The man tumbled to the ground, and the three casino robbers snatched him up, tossed him into the trunk of their car, and jumped in after him. Lightning-quick. After the car had disappeared around the corner and to the front of the mall, the back parking lot returned to its desolate silence.

  “What now?” Jeremy said.

  “Now we see what they’re going to do with him. Kill them if we have to after that, but first, we find out where they’re going.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Micah stood in front of Yvette King’s door as the sun rose above the trees to the east. Not quite the same spectacular purple and orange colors of a Colorado sunrise, but the sky did burn a nice shade of pink before slipping into a flat blue.

  In Micah’s dream last night, pieces of the plane had splintered away, but the frame of the airplane kept flying. As sections of the walls broke and sank to the ground, the seats and the passengers in them kept careening through the air, oblivious to the chaos around them. No screams of panic. Just a few hundred airplane seats, floating in space. Only Micah was aware of the danger they were all facing.

  And he knew also he was asleep, but that hadn’t stopped him from feeling his pulse race. Hadn’t stopped him from wanting to dream-puke.

  He couldn’t turn off his feelings.

  Olivia and her male companion had been gone when he’d left the motel that morning. Whatever they wanted, they hadn’t bothered him.

  Now, standing in front of Yvette’s door, the insanity of all Micah’s plans weighed on him. He didn’t have a good grasp on what he hoped to accomplish here, at her house this morning. He just knew he needed something from her. And wouldn’t leave until he got it.

  She opened the door before he had a chance to knock. Wearing a bathrobe, spatula in her hand. The sharp smell of bacon wafted from the kitchen.

  She shook her head as her little dog tried to jump on him. The dog made it as far as his knee, then retreated from the room when Micah shook his leg.

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

  Micah didn’t ask to be invited in. He stepped forward and Yvette didn’t stop him. He had no desire to hurt her or even threaten her, but in order for Micah to obtain the info he desired, he had to seem like someone who’d demand answers.

  Yvette shut the door behind him and clutched her spatula to her chest. “I don’t know what else I can tell you. I let go of Logan a long time ago.”

  Micah spun and put his hands on his hips. “You said the Crossroads gang was abandoning the casino. I need to know why.”

  She frowned. “What good will it do?”

  “Do you know what they did to him? What they did to your son? How they burned him, cut him, turned his body into discarded meat?”

  She put a hand to her mouth and stumbled back a step. “They did what?”

  Micah hadn’t thought it through. He assumed she’d already known this, maybe she’d been to see the body, but her reaction meant
she’d been oblivious. He wished he’d never said anything, but he couldn’t take it back.

  “Mutilated him. I’m sorry, Yvette.”

  “Oh, God. My baby.”

  The look of anguish on her face squeezed Micah. He had to push that aside. He hadn’t wanted to trouble this woman, but maybe she needed to know the truth. Maybe this is what it would take to get justice.

  “They weren’t supposed to do that,” she said. “He told me they would give him something to make him sleep. To make it painless.”

  “He probably didn’t know. Or maybe he knew, but didn’t want to trouble you.” Micah crossed the room to Yvette and placed his hands on her shoulders as she sobbed. “Yvette, please. Tell me what you know. Help me do something about these awful people who did this to your son.”

  She shrugged away from his hands and left the room, down a hallway. Micah followed as she shuffled along the carpet and into a side room. A young person’s bedroom, something clean and untouched. She lifted a framed picture from the top of a wardrobe. A preteen in a baseball uniform, bat slung over his shoulder. He did look a bit like a young Micah.

  “I’ve kept it the way it was when he lived here. He hasn’t been at home since he was fifteen or maybe sixteen. I gave up thinking he would move back in. With the drinking and the drugs… I never knew where he was, most of the time.”

  “Yvette. Why are they abandoning the casino?”

  She clutched the photo to her chest. “Logan owed money. Gambling, drugs, other things… I don’t even know. He had worked for the Crossroads people for a couple years, and tried to stop working for them, but he owed too much money. They were going to kill him and me anyway, but then the whole interstate thing happened, and they made him an offer. His life for my life. Make him look like you so they could draw them out.”

  Micah already knew, but he had to ask. “Draw who out?”

  “A drug cartel from down in Mexico. Named the Sina… Sinaliva, Rinalua, or something like that.”

  His old employers, the Sinaloa. He’d known the cartel had to be involved, but the connection didn’t make sense. Something was still missing. “The Crossroads people wanted to collect on a bounty from the cartel.”

  “No, it wasn’t ever about that. Nothing to do with collecting money. It was about I-35.”

  “What about I-35?”

  “The drug cartel, they own the highway from Mexico to Canada. To move their drugs, I suppose. The Crossroads gang wants to move in on that and control the route.”

  Realization tickled the back of Micah’s neck. “So collecting on this bounty on my head was a ruse the whole time. They want to make the cartel show themselves so Crossroads can start a war with them.”

  She nodded. “Logan told me the bounty was the only way to get their attention. Harvey and his people are going down to Mexico tomorrow to meet with them. That’s where it will happen.”

  Her face changed, a soft sort of pity pulling it down. “What did you do to these people that they put a price on your head?”

  Micah didn’t know how to answer. He had testified against them in court, sent most of them to prison. But he didn’t see how telling Yvette King that information would help her. She would only see a man who looked like her son, and that fact had indirectly been the cause of her son’s brutal murder.

  She ran her fingers over the photo frame. “I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  Micah’s time was running out. An impulse to leave now and rush to the casino burned at him. But why? Why should he involve himself in this war between a skinhead gang and a Mexican drug cartel?

  Before he could think of an answer to that question, the doorbell rang. From the other room, the dog chirped a single bark.

  Yvette gulped. “They’re here.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Crossroads. I sent you away yesterday because I knew they would come for me this morning. I wish you would have honored my request, but it’s too late now.”

  Doorbell rang again.

  “I thought you made a deal with them,” Micah said.

  “Logan made a deal with them, but he’s gone. They have no reason to stay away anymore.”

  “If you knew this, then why haven’t you left already? Why did you hang around where they knew how to find you?”

  She breathed in and out for a few seconds. “Where was I going to go? My son is dead, why does anything have to matter anymore?”

  He wanted to argue the point, but he couldn’t. Yvette had surrendered.

  “You shouldn’t have come back,” she said. “Now they’ll kill you too. I tried to help you, I really did. You should have stayed away.”

  The front door opened. Yvette dropped the photo frame.

  Micah drew his Glock and put a finger to his lips. Grasped Yvette by the hand and guided her out into the hallway, keeping her behind. Pistol out front.

  “Hello?” said a sneering voice. “Yvette, are you home?”

  She gasped, and Micah chambered a round into the pistol. Inched along the hallway toward the living room.

  “Yvette,” the voice said, “are you armed back there? You knew we would be here this morning. The fact that you’re still here practically gives us license to do this, you know. You pull a gun on me and I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”

  “He said I would be safe,” Yvette babbled. “He said you would leave me alone if he gave himself up to you.”

  The voice in the living room chuckled. “Come on, Yvette. You had your chance to get out of town. We would have followed you, probably, but you had your chance to make a run for it. This is cause and effect.”

  Micah paused just before the end of the hallway. He leaned as close as possible without exposing himself. Couldn’t see anything except the little dog running laps around the room.

  He gritted his teeth and jumped into the living room, pumping the trigger as he landed. He put one bullet in the man’s stomach, and another one blasted his shoulder.

  The home invader spun, wailing in pain. Micah squeezed off another shot, the screaming bullet puncturing the man’s left cheek.

  That one did it. He toppled into the television, knocking it over. He collapsed onto the floor, made one last attempt to grasp at the tv stand, then his arms fell to his side. He was silent.

  Yvette’s dog tore across the room, yipping.

  Micah turned to check on Yvette and found himself staring at a hand across her mouth. Attached to that hand was a man, and in his other hand, he was holding a knife next to Yvette’s throat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  They decided to interrogate the kidnapped gangster at Ethan’s place because his garage had overhead beams strong enough to support the guy’s weight. Carter lived in an apartment and Rourke’s sister was staying with him, so it wasn’t much of an argument. Ethan’s place was the way to go.

  Rourke parked in front of Ethan’s house and they popped the trunk to find the gangster wide awake. He shot a foot out and missed Carter’s face by a fraction of an inch. Rourke socked him in the jaw and Ethan dragged him out of the trunk. With the three of them working together, it was easy to get him into the garage.

  Carter threw a rope over the beam and Rourke tied the mobster’s arms together as Ethan held him still. Then, Carter anchored the rope to a workbench and the three of them raised the mobster so his feet could barely touch the ground.

  Rourke’s heart pounded in his chest. Murder and kidnapping in a single week. But this was a necessary thing. A good thing.

  Ethan kicked off the festivities by punching the mobster in the stomach a few times to soften him up. The mobster kicked and writhed, and he must have been a karate expert or something because his legs whipped out like knives. Rourke got behind him and tied his legs together, and after that, all he could do was wiggle like a worm on a hook.

  “You stupid little fucks,” the mobster said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you know how much shit is going to rain down on you for doing this?”

 
Ethan raised his hand to smack him again, but Rourke held his friend back. He waited until the restrained man had calmed down. Once they were all silent, Rourke faced off with him, noting the swastika tattoo on the mobster’s forearm. “Why the swastika? Why believe in something based on such hate and ignorance?”

  The mobster’s chest heaved a few times, then a grin spread across his face. “It’s not a belief, it’s the truth. Pure societies always function better. This mixed-race experiment the United States has been running for the last couple hundred years is a demonstrable failure.” He flicked his head toward Ethan. “Your Christ-killing friend here and his people have been run out of every country they’ve ever lived in since the beginning of time. Why do you think that is?”

  Ethan growled and cracked the mobster with a right hook so fierce that Rourke feared he might have broken the man’s jaw. He had to pull Ethan away because it wouldn’t do much good to kill their prisoner before he’d said anything useful.

  “Dude,” Carter said. “We don’t give a shit about your political leanings. We want info about the casino. How many guards, where is the money kept, is it in a safe, what’s the combination. How many of you will be there tomorrow night?”

  “Start talking,” Rourke said.

  They man spit blood onto the concrete floor of the garage. “Why would I do that?”

  Rourke took his hunting knife and flicked it across the mobster’s face, giving him a diagonal slash under his eye. “Because you can die here, right now, or you can tell us what we want to know.”

  The mobster laughed. “You dumb fucks. You’re too late. You walk in there tomorrow, it’ll all be over.”

  A cold chill hit Rourke’s spine. “What will be over?”

  “If you’d tried to rob us a week ago, you would’ve had almost no trouble. We were too busy planning our move against the Sinaloa.”

  Ethan slugged the mobster in the kidney. “The what? What the hell is a Sinaloa?”

  “The Mexican cartel, you dumbshit. We were going to shut down the casino and go south. But now that things have changed and they’re coming here today, none of that matters. They figured out what we were up to, so we had to change the plan. They thought they could catch us with our pants down, but they underestimated Crossroads. We’ll be ready and waiting to tear them to pieces.”