Witness Rejection

by David R Lewis

  A small man with rather close-set eyes and a pale complexion, the assistant manager looked a little harried. “That is an unusual request.”

  “My money,” Crockett said.

  “Well certainly, but, well, you see…”

  “The money is gonna stay right here in your bank. I just need it liquid for a while. And I need it now.”

  “Of course. May I ask why you’re making such a request?”

  “You can ask, but I won’t tell you. Here’s the deal. Do what I need in the next thirty minutes, and, before long, everything will return to the way it is now. Don’t do what I need, and I will put my money in another bank.”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “Let me try again,” Crockett said. “Give me the money now and you’ll get to keep it. Don’t give me the money now, and you won’t get to keep it. Make your choice. Quickly.”

  “I’ll, ah, see what I can, ah…I don’t know if we have that kind of cash available.”

  “Sure you do. You have other resources to draw from. Twenty-seven minutes and counting. Better hurry.”

  “Hey, Crockett.”

  He turned to see Satin standing behind him. Crockett extended an arm and she moved into him, leaning lightly against his left side. “What’s up?”

  Crockett turned back to the assistant manager. “This is Satin Kelly,” he said. “She needs to rent one of your large safety deposit boxes.”

  A little before noon, Crockett and Satin, who had arrived separately and about ten minutes apart, were sitting in Higgenbotham Realty, a little north of Gladstone, Missouri. Crockett lifted a bank bag onto Lyle’s desk.

  “There are one thousand one-hundred dollar bills in there,” Crockett said. “Wanna count it?”

  Lyle smiled. “Take yer word for it, boy. I assume, at this point, Miss Kelly here will present you with that money as full payment for your land?”

  “Yep. And you get to witness it.”

  “Okay. I got some stuff for you two to sign, and we’re done, all legal and binding.”

  The signatures were completed, the necessary fees paid, and the appropriate copies of papers were distributed. Crockett took a thousand dollars from the bag and handed it to Lyle.

  “What’s this for?” the old man asked.

  “Your commission for all your hard work, showing the place, advertising and stuff.”

  “Fine by me,” Lyle chuckled, and slipped the money into his inside jacket pocket.

  “Now all that’s left,” Crockett went on, taking another thousand dollars from the bag and stashing it in his pocket, “is for me to leave, and for you and Satin to hang around for a while, then go to the bank so she can stash this money with the rest of the cash, and enjoy a nice lunch courtesy of your newly received commission. That sound okay to both of you?”

  “What if Lyle and I decide to keep the hundred grand and take off to Mexico together?” Satin asked.

  Crockett grinned. “Whatever you guys think is best.”

  Lyle peered at Satin. “Purty cheerful for a homeless feller, ain’t he?” he said.

  A little after one, Crockett met Chief Smoot at Wagers Café. The big man eased into Crockett’s booth and grinned at him. “Got it done,” he said. “Some questions asked, no questions answered.”

  Crockett’s fish sandwich arrived. He waited until the waitress left with Smoot’s order for meatloaf before he continued the conversation.

  “I really appreciate it, Dale. You saved my bacon. That FBI weenie issued some very real threats. So now, I have no home for them to attach, no bank account for them to freeze, no public services for them to stop, nothing.”

  “What about credit cards?”

  “I have cash.”

  “What about your truck?”

  “Shit. I forgot about that. I suppose they could confiscate it.”

  “Not if you leave it squirreled away in my garage. I got an old Plymouth Neon you can use if you want. It’s beat to shit but it runs real good.”

  “For a few days until my other options open. Thanks.”

  “How ‘bout your motor home?”

  “I don’t own it. I’m really grateful for all you’ve done.”

  “No sweat. Slippin’ the FBI the old maroon harpoon is kinda fun.”

  Crockett slid a folded napkin on the table. “You might wanna put that in your pocket,” he said.

  Smoot eyeballed the napkin. “What is it?”

  “Thousand bucks. Money for my bills, rental of garage space, and the Neon.”

  “This here is way too much.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Crockett said.

  Smoot grinned. “No, it isn’t,” he said, and deposited the napkin in his pocket.

  Mid afternoon, Crockett parked the ratty Neon outside the motor home, went inside, greeted Dundee and Nudge, got some green tea from the fridge, flopped in his recliner, and clicked on the tube. No signal. Damn.

  He’d forgotten about the satellite service.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rag Mop

  “Guy’s name is Boster, right?” Cletus Marshal said.

  “Yeah,” Crockett said. “Charles.”

  It was a little after eight on Sunday morning. Crockett had called Clete on his satellite phone and told him of the recent events.

  “I’ll see what I can find out about him. Goody may still have a contact or two left from his days teachin’ out at Quantico. I’ll ask him, too.”

  “Fine. I really appreciate all the trouble you’re going to, Texican.”

  “Ain’t no trouble. Makes me feel useful. I’ll next day the commission and things to you in the mornin’, along with the address an’ directions an’ stuff for Joe Beckner. Sounds to me like you stuck a stick into a nest a yella jackets. Be careful you don’t git your ass stung.”

  “The Feebs’ll lay off me for a while now and see what I’ll do next. Boster is probably pretty pissed off that I beat him to the punch on freezing my assets.”

  “You sure he went after ya?”

  “My satellite dish reception is dead, and when I checked on my gas bill on line, it listed my account as unavailable.”

  “How ‘bout your cell phone?”

  “Still works fine.”

  Clete chuckled. “I bet it does. They’ll want you to use that as much as possible. Get to listen in. Hell, Crockett, they can probably LoJack you on that damn thing.”

  “Shit! I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s okay. I’ll send it on a little trip. With this satellite phone, I get better reception anyway.”

  “Yeah, and they most likely don’t even know you got that thing. It’s in one of Ivy’s company names.”

  Dundee began barking outside. Crockett looked out the window. Satin was getting out of her Jeep.

  “What do ya make a all this shit, Crockett? You got any idea what’s goin’ on?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Crockett said, opening the door and pointing Satin at the coffee pot. “This is gonna sound pretty hinky, even for one of our most respected law enforcement agencies.”

  “That’s okay, son. Ol’ J. Edgar liked runnin’ around in party dresses and makeup, ya know. Go ahead on.”

  Satin took her coffee, sat across from Crockett in the dinette, and smiled at him.

  “Here’s young Mary Lou Shaffer,” Crockett went on. “She works for a couple of years getting the goods on her abusive husband for the Feebs. Testifies against him in court. Divorces him while he’s in prison. Goes into the program. Gets a new identity. A new location. A new life. Hubby gets twenty-five without parole. Then, only about halfway into his mandatory sentence, she starts feeling like somebody is watching her. She calls me. Somebody really is watching her. I stash her with the world’s most wonderful woman, (Satin blew him a kiss) and this Boster character shows up, a loose cannon if there ever was one, and threatens my ass because he’s looking for Carson Bailey. I show him somewhat less than the awe and abject fear he believes he deserves, and he tries to take action on his threat
s. Meanwhile, you’ve dug around and found out the official Feebie line on Carson and her ex is that there is no info available on either of them. Sure there is. There’s a paper trail two yards wide and a half-mile long stuffed in somebody’s closet. My guess is that Phillip Metzger got tired of prison and made his own deal.”

  “Kinda what I was thinkin’,” Clete said.

  “I figure he told the Feebs that he could give them a lot more goodies on a lot more people than Carson had delivered on him, and would be glad to do it, if they’d do him a couple of favors. All he wanted was out of the graybar hotel and into the witness protection program. The FBI hears that and they got stars in their eyes and spit on their chin. All of a sudden, he’s much more important to the Bureau than Carson ever was. Man, they can get a jillion dollars worth of publicity outa something like that. Congress’ll cough up enough new funding the FBI can start their own space program, for chrissakes. This is the mother load. Just when they’re about to come all over themselves, Metzger says something like, ‘Oh! By the way. There’s something else I need. Just a little thing. Doesn’t amount to much. I’d like to know where my ex-wife is. Just want to drop by for old time’s sake and say hello.’ By the time he springs that on ‘em, they’re so close to orgasm, they’ll do anything to grab the brass ring. Including squeeze somebody in witness protection for info they have no legal right to.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Clete said. “So they send a couple a their extremely special agents out to check on her, she gets nervous, calls you, and you disappear the lady. They got a shitload ridin’ on this, they’re illegal as hell, an’ you got their only bargainin’ chip stashed away someplace. They know Metzger is gonna kill her if he finds her, but who gives a rodent’s rectum. Her life don’t mean shit compared to what they have to gain. And, they already got the deal set up with Metzger. Hell, he’s probably out of the joint and livin’ large someplace. They are committed to this, and he ain’t gonna say shit until they deliver the rest of the goods. There stands ol’ Crockett, a six-gun on each hip, done stashed the school marm away and is queerin’ the deal.”

  “It ain’t easy bein’ a hero,” Crockett said.

  “So now, I reckon somebody else’ll be by to see ya. Somebody or somebodies with crooked noses and clam sauce on their ties. Or maybe Desert Storm champeens who really love their work. Maybe a displaced Bosnian or two. Whoever it is, son, you can bet they’ll be purty serious fellers.”

  “And me just a one-legged old man.”

  “Cheer up, Pard,” Clete went on. “They won’t kill ya right off. They’ll wanna have a nice conversation first. Git ta know ya a little bit.”

  “I love making new friends.”

  “Uh-huh. You see any Injuns on the fuckin’ horizon, you call for the fuckin’ cavalry, goddammit. Me an’ Stitch’ll slap leather.”

  “I thought you were scared of horses, Texican.”

  “A figure a speech, goddammit. I ain’t scared a horses anyway. I just don’t like the sonsabitches, that’s all.”

  “Well,” Crockett said, “I have a beautiful woman sitting across the table from me who might do almost anything for some peach pancakes. I no longer have time to discuss matters with a horse-a-phobic. See ya.”

  He disconnected.

  “I didn’t think wives could testify against their husbands,” Satin said.

  “You’re watching too much TV,” Crockett said. “All kinds of holes in that statement. The law is not consistent on the matter from state to state. Mostly it’s that wives cannot be compelled to testify against their husbands. Kind of a moot point. I’ve never been able to compel a woman to do anything she didn’t want to do anyway.”

  Satin’s eyes got big and her voice dropped into a girlish whisper. “Not even with peach pancakes?” she asked, bumping knees with Crockett under the table.

  “Well…” Crockett said, fluffing his ponytail. “It’s amazing,” he went on, “how an attractive woman can be stimulated into a competitive mode over something she doesn’t even want anymore, simply by the presence of another attractive woman in her close immediacy.”

  Satin eyeballed him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Crockett said, lurching back from the brink, “that you get your pancakes with no strings attached.”

  “Make a few extra and stick ‘em in a plastic bag,” Satin said. “I’ll take ‘em back for Carson. I’m sure she’ll love ‘em, even if they’re a little stale. After all, leftovers are better than nothing.”

  Crockett didn’t say a thing. He didn’t have to. He could see it in Satin’s eyes.

  Satin left a little after ten, a half-dozen peach pancakes in hand. She was jealous. Jealous of a woman that Crockett had known only for a short time, with whom he had not been intimate, and about whom he had never expressed any interest while in Satin’s, or anyone else’s, company. Jesus. At least some sort of jealousy was inevitable, he supposed, cosmically determined by a female’s genetic makeup, tenaciously in place even before Johnson’s Lucy was committed to the fossil record in Ethiopia.

  Satin was a wonderful person. Crockett had enjoyed her company almost since the first moment he arrived in Hartrick. They were not intimately involved at the current time, and had not been for some months, but that didn’t seem to make any difference when the female factor came into play. Satin, of course, would never behave in an antagonistic manner toward Carson. That was not her style. She would save her tiny bouts with jealousy for his eyes alone. Crockett chuckled. The surest way for a man to get the attention of one woman was to appear to have the attention of another. Or maybe it was more than just appearances. Maybe he did have Carson’s attention. Who could know what information might have passed between the two women in casual conversation? Certainly not he.

  Damn shame, too.

  Crockett spent most of the day doing laundry and housecleaning. After the sun went down, he built a small fire in his iron and copper Costco fire pit, and spent some time in the screen room fighting humidity, watching the flames, and enjoying the cloistered darkness of the woods. His back and hip ached and the hot tub beckoned, but he was just too lazy to respond. Dundee lay beside his chair, occasionally pawing at his foot to remind him he hadn’t given her a pat for a while. Nudge casually prowled the perimeter watching the occasional bug blunder into the screen. Now and then something scuttled through the leaf litter. An owl hooted his query to the night, only to be answered by a distant rival, each claiming his territory or possibly advertising for feathered companionship. It took Crockett back to evenings on the lake with Zebulon and Mazy Watkins. It was late when he finally turned in, taking to bed with him a comfortable melancholy, a sweet sadness that brought him more pleasure than pain.

  He slept in the next morning, not arising until nearly nine, and grunted his way into the living room to a dancing Dundee. He let her outside to tend to business, filled her water bowl, and flopped on the couch, struggling with his back, waiting for the dog to scratch at the door demanding breakfast. After she was fed he treated himself to some cappuccino. As was usual, the sound of steaming milk brought Nudge sailing to the countertop, and Crockett spooned some of the froth onto a saucer so the cat would leave his wrists and forearms intact. Sighing, he settled into the dinette, lit a Sherman, and looked out the window. Significant cloud cover and a fair wind had the temperature down fifteen degrees from the day before. Crockett was contemplating life its ownself and the beginning of another day, when his satellite phone went off.

  “Hey, Crockett.”

  “Cletus. Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “The hard shit only takes a minute. The really hard shit takes a little longer. Gotcha a line on Charles Boster.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Uh-huh. Ol’ Charlie is FBI okay, but he ain’t with no particular section that’s identified in the Federal Bureau of Instigation’s official handbook.”

  “No?”

  “Not hardly. He’s whatcha might call a facil
itator. They send Boster, and folks like him, out when they need a little dirt done to somebody. Intimidation, threats, some dread, stuff like that. Not exactly a enforcer. More of a encourager, ya might say. Usually team him with some newbie that’s only got a couple a years in the organization. He does Boster’s grunt work, phone taps, surveillance, stake outs, boring stuff like that. Boster comes in an’ impresses upon the current victim the error of his ways an’ suggests changes, doncha see.”

  Crocket could hear Clete’s grin. “Why yes, Cletus, I do,” he said.

  “Thought ya might,” Clete went on. “Ol’ Charlie pretty much makes up his own rules. Operates from suggestions instead a orders. Most a the time, those Feebs like everthing carved in stone. Them boys can generate more paperwork than a public toilet in a diarrhea war. But with Boster, seems like they just scratch his instructions in the sand with a stick. Charlie takes it from there. Leaves the Feebies with what is known in some circles as plausible deniability.”

  “So you’d figure that he’s still on me, huh?”

  “Sure. He’ll probably send his newbie to do the slow work, but you can bet yer ass he ain’t too far off yer back trail.”

  “Maybe I need to Ghillie up and go for a sneak.”

  “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “Thanks, Clete. A lot.”

  “Yessir. You need anything, you holler.”

  Crockett finished his coffee, got up, lifted the seat on the dinette to expose the storage area underneath and began to rummage through what appeared to be a pile of rags.

  Crockett peered at himself in the mirror. The face paint had been a little dry, but a judicious introduction of a few drops of olive oil had restored its constitution, and his visage was now a collection of mottled diagonal stripes in three shades of green, punctuated by black. Over a lightweight coverall in dusky green he donned his Ghillie suit, another coverall in loose netting festooned with yards and yards of strips of material and jute in various shades of green and brown. It was the same suit given to him by Sir Thoroughgood Henley-Walls back when he and Clete had gone after the enclave of The White Lions. Over the Ghillie suit went his Ghillie cape. Leaving a trail of random threads and such, Crockett failed to locate Nudge, locked Dundee in the bus, slipped his 686 Smith & Wesson into a breast pocket, and schlepped off into the woods on a westerly course, parallel to, and about fifty yards north of, the road. Three steps into the trees, walking upright and making no attempt to conceal himself, he was nearly invisible.