by Mel Odom
Tarlton had gotten a hit on the gun’s serial number almost immediately. He’d turned to his computer and worked from a short list of known gun dealers in the area. Keeping track of weapons was a problem in smaller towns, he’d pointed out, because people had a tendency to swap them out, sell them, and borrow them for years.
Gerald Otis had once owned the pistol Bobby Lee Gant had used yesterday on Shel. Tarlton had been forced to take it from the man during an altercation at the junkyard. A group of young drivers barely old enough to drive had been liberating parts to build a race car. Upon discovering them one night, Gerald had held them at gunpoint till Tarlton arrived. No other police officer would do.
During the heated moments that had transpired, Tarlton had taken the gun from Gerald. He’d later returned it, along with a polite explanation of why he’d taken it.
In the meantime, though, Tarlton had logged the weapon into his own private records system. He’d been doing that with the merchandise of every pawn shop and private dealer that he could. The list was nowhere near complete.
Tarlton walked to the front door and knocked loudly. Then he stood there and waited.
A frazzled woman in her fifties answered the knock. She peered at them owlishly from the other side of the screen door. Her hair was so white it shone like pale fire.
“Afternoon, Chief Tarlton,” the woman said in a cigarette-roughened voice.
“Afternoon, Maisie. I came out here to see Gerald. It’s official business.”
“Who’s your company?”
“Investigators from the Marine base at Camp Lejeune.”
“Military men?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now you know Gerald don’t like nothing to do with the government.”
“I know. But they need his help.”
Maisie frowned at that, as if trying to figure out why Tarlton would sell her such a big bill of goods.
Will waited patiently even though time was getting away from him.
“All right, you can go on back.” Maisie slipped the lock open on the door and pulled it wide.
“Thank you, Maisie.” Tarlton carried the shotgun across his chest with both hands as he entered.
Inside, the house smelled like motor oil and rust. An engine occupied a table in the center of the living room. A block-and-tackle assembly had been mounted on the roof.
The television in one corner of the room broadcasted a soap opera.
“Gerald’s out back in the garage with Woody and Taylor,” Maisie said. “You can see yourself out.”
Tarlton tipped his hat and went through the room to the door that let out to the back.
As he looked around the smoke-stained room, Will remembered other people like these who’d been frozen in time and pretty much forgotten about.
“You just mind them guard pigs while you’re out there,” Maisie said. “Gerald’s not feeding ’em like he should. They might get a little out of hand.”
“Thank you,” Tarlton said as he stepped out the rear door and onto shaky wooden steps.
Will and Remy followed.
>> 1514 Hours
Outside the house, the ground was barren in all directions. The earth was stained black where automotive oil and all kinds of other fluids had been dumped for years.
The salvage yard was primarily filled with automobiles. But there were also boats, motorcycles, and farm equipment. Two 1950s airplanes interested Will immediately.
Snuffling from under the house startled Will. He turned just as three lean shapes burst into view. The hogs stood almost up to Will’s hips. Yellow tusks curled up from their lower jaws. They were an indiscriminate brown color, covered by sparse curling hair. Rings festooned the wiggling pink noses.
One of the hogs tried to put its snout against Tarlton’s pocket. The police chief popped the animal in the nose with the butt of the shotgun.
Surprised and hurt, the hog let out a bleat of pain and ran away. The other two hogs backed off and snorted and grunted indignantly. Their ears flattened against their low-browed skulls.
“Chief Tarlton,” a deep voice called. “That you?”
Looking forward, Will spotted a tall, rawboned man in an olive uniform shirt and blue uniform pants standing next to a ramshackle building. He was bald on top, but the hair around his head trailed down to his shoulders. He looked like he was in his forties.
“Gerald,” Tarlton called back. “Need a few words with you if I can.”
“Sure. Come on ahead.”
>> 1517 Hours
Gerald Otis stood at least six feet seven and was built broad enough that he made Shel look small. But his weight was from overeating and had gone to fat. He smelled like oil, gasoline, and bacon grease.
The shed was a study of contrasts. Barely standing, it housed a pristine 1969 Pontiac GTO that had been lovingly restored and seemed incongruous to its surroundings. The bright red paint seemed to glow with an inner fire.
“Man,” Remy said as he examined the car, “that is some sweet ride.”
“It is.” Gerald Otis smiled broadly. “I’ve been taking my time putting it together.” He shifted his attention to Tarlton. “What brings you out this way, Chief?”
“I’d like you to talk to someone if you would,” Tarlton said. “This is Commander Will Coburn of the NCIS.”
Otis’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Don’t know what that is.”
“I’m a military cop,” Will said. “I specialize in Navy and Marine crimes.”
“I never been in no service. Don’t see how I could help you.”
“The chief tells me you sometimes deal in guns,” Will said.
Gerald hesitated. He ran a big hand across the back of his neck. A guilty flush flamed his face. “I ain’t supposed to do that, I know. Chief Tarlton done explained that to me.”
“I’m not here to give you any trouble over that,” Will explained. “I just need to know if you can identify a gun for me.”
Gerald’s face cleared as worry lifted from him. “Sure.”
Will took a picture of the pistol Bobby Lee had used from his shirt pocket and showed it to the big man. “Have you seen this gun before?”
“Sure. I sold it.”
“If someone asked you to identify it, how would you do that?”
“Serial number. Each one of ’em’s different.”
“Did you write down the serial number of this pistol?”
“Nope.” Gerald frowned again. “That’s one of the problems I got into with the chief. I didn’t write enough stuff down.”
Will looked at Tarlton. The police chief had a twinkle of merriment in his eyes.
“Ask him to identify the pistol for you,” Tarlton suggested.
Will did.
And Gerald rattled off a string of numbers and letters.
“That’s the serial number,” Gerald said when he’d finished.
From the picture, Will couldn’t tell. He took out his iPAQ and brought up his notes on the pistol. Then he asked the man to recite the numbers back again. The numbers and letters matched perfectly.
“Gerald has a gift for numbers,” Tarlton explained. “Once he sees them, they’re his. Always.”
Will was quietly amazed.
“The few times the DA has had to put him on the stage to hammer someone else for trying to sell Gerald something, he’s run numbers forward, backward, and sideways,” Tarlton said. “You could come back a year from now, and he’d still know the serial number without ever seeing it in the meantime.”
Will knew Tarlton was letting him know that acquiring unimpeachable testimony was entirely possible. He concentrated on smoothing out the testimony he’d need.
“Did you sell this pistol to Bobby Lee Gant?” Will asked.
“No. I sold it to another biker. That big guy that always hangs around with Victor Gant. Victor is Bobby Lee’s father.”
“You sold the pistol to that man?”
“Yeah. Fat Mike. That’s what he goes by.”
“If I needed you to testify to that in court, would you be able to do it?”
Gerald looked troubled. “Would it be like the other times the chief has had me do it?”
Will looked to Tarlton for guidance.
Tarlton nodded.
“Yes,” Will replied.
“Then I can do it.”
21
>> The Bloody Skull
>> Charlotte, North Carolina
>> 2156 Hours
The bar was more a clubhouse for the Purple Royals than a business enterprise. The bikers came there when they were in town, and they circled the wagons there when they were under attack from the outside world.
Victor Gant sat in the back office and gazed at the security monitors mounted on the wall in front of him. Although no sheet of paper showed it, he owned the bar. The business and the employees were wholly subsidized by the Purple Royals.
The people he’d hired to run the place didn’t exactly have it made. But they could at least live well enough. All they had to do was be available for the nights the gang was in town.
And the gang was definitely in town. Word had gotten out—over the phone, by word of mouth, and through the TV—that Victor’s son was dead, shot by a federal agent. Now the place was packed.
Heavy metal crashed through the surround sound system. The dancers worked the crowd, more enthusiastic than they’d been in months because the money was flowing like water. Victor thought the bikers were acting like children; certainly they were creating a mess in the bar.
He tried not to let the men’s pursuit of a good time bother him. But it did. He couldn’t isolate himself that well. He felt Bobby Lee’s absence in a way he never would have thought possible before.
He reached for the longneck bottle on the desk and took a sip. The beer was warm and flat. He didn’t know how long it had been sitting there. Too long.
His eyes roved the security monitors, searching for anything to distract him. Some of the women were attractive, not the used-up specimens the bar usually held. A lot of those women were on their last legs, coked up and decaying from the inside.
Today, not even the new ones held his attention.
You’re bordering on dinky-dao, brother, he told himself. Totally whack. You need to pull yourself together.
But it was hard. He kept seeing Bobby Lee in his mind. The young man had been all the immediate family Victor knew he was ever going to have. And that family had been wiped out in a heartbeat.
Reluctantly Victor dropped his feet off the scarred wooden desk and threw the flat beer into the nearly filled trash can. The glass bottle shattered and tinkled down among the others.
His leathers creaked as he walked out of the room and onto the main floor. Bikers stepped aside in front of him like the Red Sea parting for Moses.
He paused at the bar and called Creeper’s name. Creeper wasn’t the man’s real name, of course, but so many people knew him by Creeper that likely only the law enforcement agencies would know what his given name was now.
Creeper was young and hard. He hadn’t pulled Nam with Victor and Fat Mike and the others, but he’d made his bones in the first Gulf War. The vets got together and argued over who’d had the worst war, those who’d slogged through the jungles or those who’d slogged the desert.
They even each had their own conspiracy theories. The Nam vets pointed to Agent Orange as being responsible for so many cancer-related deaths. The first Gulf War vets had the mysterious “malaise” that had descended on them and might have been part of a biological weapon Saddam Hussein had been bankrolling.
Creeper turned and looked at Victor.
“Hey, boss man,” Creeper said. “What’ll you have?”
“Beer.”
“Coming up.” Creeper squatted and reached into the cooler beneath the counter. He brought up a fresh longneck, peeled the lid with the church key, and slid the bottle down to Victor’s waiting hand.
Victor took a long draw. “You seen Fat Mike?”
“Not yet.”
“Soon as he gets here, send him in to me.”
Creeper shot him a thumbs-up.
Victor made his way back to the office, a pit of roiling rage in his chest. He sat at the desk once more and used the remote control to flick through the television stations.
The need to do something vibrated through him. His hand actually shook as he brought the longneck to his lips. That hadn’t happened even when they were back in the bush taking heavy fire.
News footage of the standoff at the tattoo parlor started to roll on-screen. Victor muted the anchor’s commentary and just stayed with the images.
There behind the glass, he saw Bobby Lee standing with his hostage. He knew how scared his son had been. He looked so young; this was the first time he’d gotten into a situation that was so far over his head.
In another minute, Bobby Lee would be dead—again.
Victor sipped his beer, but he couldn’t turn away from the impending violence.
His cell phone rang.
Victor thought about not answering the call. But he was looking for a distraction of any kind.
He flipped the phone open and said, “Yeah?”
>> 2203 Hours
“Ah, my friend, it is good to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear yours.” But you’re a little late calling in condolences. Victor drank some more beer. Tran was his partner in the heroin business. No one knew that. They’d been very careful to set the business up that way. Rather, Tran had been careful to set things up like that.
They’d met in Vietnam. Tran had been a Kit Carson scout, one of the regulars who’d defected from the North Vietnamese army to lead recon missions for the American troops.
That had been back when both sides had figured the Americans were going to win the war.
A Kit Carson’s life expectancy hadn’t been high. If he was caught by his old army buddies, they tortured him as long as they could before they killed him. And his new army buddies weren’t the most trusting. A number of Kit Carsons had gone down under “friendly” fire that was anything but. The Department of Defense had a name for such things too. Misadventure sounded equally innocuous.
Tran, though, had seemed to flourish as a traitor to his people. When the tide of the war had changed, Tran had changed with it by going back to the NVA and claiming to have been a prisoner.
However, the friendship he’d had with Victor Gant had included a lucrative black market trade that involved drugs and women. During the thirty-plus years between, they’d found a way to do business. The latest thing with the heroin was by far the most lucrative.
“I just found out the bad news and wanted to call and see how you were doing,” Tran said.
“I’m fine.”
“You sound a little rocky.”
“I said I’m fine. Drop it.”
Tran didn’t acknowledge that one way or the other.
Victor sipped beer. Both of them were careful not to mention the other’s name.
Tran was based in Vietnam, where he oversaw the poppy growing and the production of raw opium. Back when he’d first gotten everything together, he had contacted Victor and explained how he’d gone into the drug business in a big way. It had taken them almost two years to work out the ocean transport through a shipper based in Singapore.
“I was told there’d been a problem,” Tran said.
Victor knew the man meant he’d heard about the arrest. “It’s taken care of. I negotiated my way out of it.”
“How?”
Victor grinned a little. After all these years, Tran didn’t completely trust him when the pressure started to mount. But that was okay. He didn’t completely trust Tran either.
But it made Victor wonder who among his group was selling him out to Tran.
“I’m going to give them something,” Victor said, answering Tran’s question. “Our southern competition.”
“Do you think that’s wise?”
&nb
sp; “Are you questioning my decision?”
Tran didn’t respond right away. “What happened?”
“A business negotiation with one of their men went south. His people were taking more of an interest than I thought, and they chose to make everything personal.”
“Couldn’t you have negated that?”
“The guy I had to deal with wasn’t local. He was based in Virginia. The domestic arm.” Meaning the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, and not the CIA at Langley, Virginia.
“I’m sure you did what was best.”
“I did. In fact, I streamlined the pitch I was giving the associate of the Virginia team.”
“And they went for it?”
“I didn’t give them a choice.”
“I see.”
Victor drained the beer bottle and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. It shattered with a brittle pop.
“I didn’t have a choice, either,” Victor went on, his voice tightening till it was edged steel. “The business I’m taking care of at this end isn’t easy. Sometimes deals have to be cut to preserve what we’ve got going on.”
“I realize that. But you have them off of you?”
“Till next time. Unfortunately the reality is that this business of ours is established. People are going to talk. Customers as well as rivals. When that happens, we’ll have to stand prepared to take care of it.”
“What about this man? The one who cost you so much?”
“I’m going to cost him.”
Tran was silent for a moment. “I could take care of him for you.”
Victor took a moment to think about that. The offer came with subtext, but he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. For Tran to offer to reach across the Pacific Ocean to whack the Marine meant that he’d come into more muscle than he’d had before.
The offer also served to put Victor on notice that he wasn’t as insulated as he had been.