Rose City Kill Zone

by D L Barbur

  “Ok,” I said. “I’m headed out. You guys sit tight.”

  We were on Foster Road, in far southeast Portland. I’d been to Charlie Mikes a couple of times when I first moved to Portland, but it had been easily fifteen years since my last visit. When most people thought of Portland, they thought of vegans and hipsters. But there was also a thriving population of military vets who settled down here to live out their post-service lives.

  Vets who’d spent their time chipping paint in the Navy or driving a truck in the Army could be found down at the local VFW or AMVETS watering hole, drinking cheap beer and lying about their service. Charlie Mikes had a more selective clientele. You couldn’t find it written down anywhere, but it was open only to folks who had served in one of the Special Warfare components, Rangers, Army Special Forces, Navy SEALS, Air Force PJs, folks like that. Former CIA spooks were tolerated, although they could expect some ribbing.

  Occasionally, wayward Portland hipsters would find their way in the door, and hilarity would ensue. When I’d first discharged from the service and was studying at Portland State, I’d hung out here, but gradually as I de-institutionalized myself from my time in the Army, the appeal wore off.

  The vehicles in the parking lot were pretty evenly divided between jacked up trucks, sports cars, and Harley-Davidsons. When I walked in, Johnny Cash was playing on the jukebox. Some guys were playing pool, some were playing darts, and most were sitting around tables talking low. The walls were covered with unit patches and memorabilia. I saw a couple of Iraqi flags, military helmets, a small collection of brassieres dangling from a ceiling fan, and an RPG-7 rocket launcher mounted over the bar. If it was a replica, it was extremely realistic. If it was real, it was a pretty lengthy prison sentence for somebody.

  Eyes turned to look at me, but nobody stood up and headed my, way. The bartender was a guy in his sixties without an ounce of body fat on him and faded tattoos on his forearms. He was polishing the already spotless bar when I walked up.

  “Getcha?” he asked.

  The selection of beers was abysmal.

  “Bud Light,” I said. If I was going to drink shitty beer, I might as well skip the calories.

  He put the beer on the bar. I put down a five spot and the challenge coin. He took the money and pushed the coin back towards me.

  “In the back,” he said. “The door that’s past the shitter.”

  I picked up my beer and headed towards the back, conscious of eyes following me. Some things hadn’t changed. One of the restrooms was labeled “men’s restroom.” The other was labeled “the other men’s restroom.” Charlie Mikes wasn’t a place you brought a date. There were other bars for that.

  Once again I was reminded of some of the reasons I left the Army. There were guys who managed to have a relatively normal life, with a wife and kids, despite the stress of frequent deployments and the risk of getting killed at work. But I’d known plenty of guys like the ones here at Charlie Mikes, dudes in their forties and even fifties that still led an almost adolescent life, with a string of broken marriages and estranged children churning in their wake.

  The door past the restroom had gold letters that said “employees only.” Below that was neatly stenciled “If you don’t work here, stay the fuck out,” but I figured I had dispensation.

  On the other side of the door was a small office with barely enough room for a desk, a busted pinball machine, and three men.

  Two of them I recognized. First was the young guy from the night before, the one who had dropped off the package.

  The second was Mack. I hadn’t seen him since the mid-nineties, when I’d mustered out, but he didn’t look that different. He was tall, powerfully built, with a shaved head. The biggest change was the salt and pepper goatee that hadn’t been allowed in the Army.

  “Miller,” he said, and stuck a hand out.

  We shook briefly. The third guy was so bland as to be instantly forgettable. He was medium height, medium build, brown hair, wearing khakis and a polo shirt. He was looking at an electronic tablet.

  “I need your phone,” he said, without even looking up.

  “John here is formerly from the Army of Northern Virginia,” Mack said. “He handles all my electronic security needs.”

  Army of Northern Virginia was slang for the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity. Most people have heard of Delta Force and the Navy SEALS. Few of them have heard of the ISA. They were the Joint Special Operations intelligence collections arm.

  I handed John my phone. When he saw it was turned off, he popped the back cover off, removed the battery and looked at his tablet again. He gave me a smirk, then pulled a zippered pouch out of his pocket. He put all the parts to my phone inside, then looked at his screen again.

  “You’re clear,” he said. He put the pouch on the desk and walked out of the room.

  I recognized the pouch because I owned one just like it. It was designed to block cell phone signals. Apparently, nobody cared that I was carrying a gun, but they didn’t want me recording the conversation. Hopefully, the rest of my crew wouldn’t freak out when they realized I was off the air.

  Mack gestured to the younger guy, who followed John out of the room. He sat down and motioned to a chair.

  “You’ve upset some apple carts here lately, Dent,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said. I wasn’t going to make this easy for him. I’d never liked Mack very much. The Ranger Regiment hadn’t been full of warm, fuzzy people, but even there, there was a coldness to Mack that made him stick out. People wound up in the service for many different reasons. Some needed a way out of whatever shit hole town they grew up in. Some were motivated by patriotism. Some wanted an adventure. Usually, it was a mix of all three.

  With Mack, I’d always gotten the feeling that he would have been just as happy being a Mafia enforcer, or a member of a third world death squad. He got off on feeling powerful, and he was always working an angle.

  He waited a few beats, seeing if I would say more. His expression didn’t change, but he stiffened a little. Irritated maybe to realize I wasn’t the Private First Class he’d browbeat all those years ago.

  “Up until about six months ago,” he said. “I was making pretty good money working for Cascade Aviation.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Were you in the department that kidnapped women and shipped them overseas, or the department that planned terror attacks on US soil?”

  That pissed him off. His forearms flexed like he was going to come over the table at me. I wondered which one of us would wind up dying, but after a second or two, he reined it in.

  “That was all Todd and that shitbird Marshall’s son. I just had a sweet gig flying around on Cascade planes to various sunny spots and making sure nobody blew us up while we were on the tarmac.”

  I watched his face closely as he talked. He was lying, but I wasn’t sure about what. I wondered if Mack had envisioned me as the young grunt he’d known, and subconsciously failed to take into account the intervening years I’d spent as a homicide detective.

  “What do you want, an apology?”

  I was intentionally provoking him, not showing him the deference he was used to receiving from guys like John, and whoever the young kid was. Bloem hadn’t given us anything, but maybe Mack would be my conduit to the inner workings of Cascade.

  “I want to help you,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m done with Cascade. I almost got caught up in their bullshit and wound up having to talk to some Feds. I can write my ticket with any private military company I want.”

  “How are you going to help me?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Mack’s biggest objection was that Cascade’s actions had brought heat down on him. I also wondered which “Feds” had talked to him. It wasn’t anyone in our group.

  “There’s an inner circle at Cascade,” Mack said. “The old man, Marshall is at the center of it. Todd was next in line, but word is you put him in the ground a little while back.”

  The word
was right. Todd had been a former Delta guy and Marshall’s right-hand man. He’d come close to killing me in the Max train tunnel in Portland, but instead, I’d stabbed the shit out of him, then shot him in the head for good measure. I’d killed more people than I cared to admit. I actually slept better at night knowing Todd was no longer moving air.

  “Go on,” I said. I wasn’t about to confirm out loud whether I’d punched Todd’s ticket or not.

  “It’s a tight crew,” Mack said. “They keep their cards pretty close to their vests, but a few days ago one of them reached out to me. He wants out. He’s willing to talk in exchange for protection. He wanted my help getting ex-filled out of the country, but this whole thing is just too hot for me.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Doesn’t work that way, Miller. I’m not even sure who it is. It was an anonymous contact. They provided just enough insider knowledge to establish their bona fides. When I said I couldn’t help, they specifically asked that I get them in touch with you.”

  “Interesting,” I said. I tried to maintain a neutral expression, but in my head, my wheels were turning. I forced myself to be cautious. This sounded too good to be true.

  “I’m going to reach in the desk and pull out a cell phone,” Mack said. “It was couriered to me with instructions to give it to you.”

  Apparently, he was taking me seriously enough not to reach for something without giving me a heads up. That was progress.

  I nodded and he pulled a phone out of the drawer. He slid it across the desk towards me but I didn’t take it. Instead, I just stared at him.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “What more do you want?”

  “You’ve been wrapped up with an organization that sold American women into slavery and tried to machine-gun kids at the Portland zoo. You’re giving me a cell phone and walking away? You think you’re done? Don’t you want to hurt these fuckers?”

  He gave me a twisted little smirk.

  “You always were a boy scout Miller. I did my twenty getting paid next to nothing for eating shit food and sleeping in the dirt in one shit hole country after another. The only person I’m looking out for now is me.”

  Mack was a lost cause. I wasn’t going to change his mind tonight, but now that we knew he was a potential source, we could always grab him later. A few days out at Wapato being pumped full of a drug cocktail might change his tune.

  I picked up the cell phone. It didn’t look remarkable in any way, just a run of the mill Samsung. It was deactivated. I didn’t turn it on. Analyzing this thing was a job for Casey and Henry. Instead, I picked up the pouch and took my own phone out. I reassembled it and put the new phone inside.

  I pushed my chair back and turned to leave. Mack looked like he was chewing on something that tasted bad, but didn’t say anything as I left. The younger guy was standing outside the door when I walked out. I gave him a cold stare, and he gave it right back. I walked across the floor of Charlie Mikes to the tune of that Charlie Daniels song about the devil going down to Georgia as a bunch of eyes followed me.

  It smelled like exhaust fumes and ripe garbage as I walked out the door but I was still glad to step out of Charlie Mikes. My phone started buzzing as soon as it powered up.

  “Yeah,” I said, talking as I walked across the parking lot.

  “You good?” Casey asked.

  “Easy and breezy,” I said. That was our code word that I wasn’t under duress. If I’d said “good to go” my crew was supposed to go tactical and rescue me, Justice Department be damned.

  “I’m headed to the corner,” I said. “Can you get a handle on all the phones in there? We may need to see my contact again.”

  That was as far as I was willing to go on the phone, supposedly secure line or not. There would be dozens of phones inside Charlie Mikes, but maybe one of them would lead us to Mack and his buddies. Since he had John working for him, maybe not, but it was worth a try.

  “Ok,” she said. “We’re headed your way. Things are complicated right now, but I’ll do what I can.”

  Complicated. Interesting.

  I stopped at the corner and a few seconds later the van pulled up with the door sliding open. I’m not sure it even came to a complete stop as I hopped in. Casey was tapping away on two keyboards at once. I shut the door and crammed myself into a seat.

  “There was another team surveilling the place,” Casey said. “We made them as you went in. Two cars on opposite corners. A man in one, a woman in another.”

  She was twiddling the joysticks that controlled the video cameras hidden in the equipment rack on top of the van.

  “We’re about to pass her now,” she said.

  On the screen, I saw a sedan sitting at the curb. She was sitting in the passenger seat, an old surveillance trick. Somebody sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car for no reason was suspicious. Somebody sitting in the passenger seat was obviously waiting for the driver to come back.

  We passed too quick for us to get a look at her, but Casey had been recording as we rolled past. She played it back, found a frame that showed the woman’s face, and zoomed in.

  “She looked away from the camera as we rolled past,” Casey said.

  I got the impression of a younger woman, probably in her thirties, with auburn hair. I couldn’t tell much else.

  “I don’t think it’s enough for a facial recognition match,” Casey said

  “I’d know her again if I saw her,” I said.

  “There’s a bunch of phones in there,” Casey said. “I’m grabbing all the numbers and we’ll sort it all out later. I may need more info to figure out which one belongs to your buddy.”

  Casey excelled at following trails of digital breadcrumbs. We could easily comb through Mack’s credit card records, or airline flight databases, to see where he’d been in the last couple of months. She would then see which of the phones in Charlie Mikes had been in those places at the same time. All that assumed that Mack wasn’t just using a phone account in his real name. People could be surprisingly dumb that way.

  When I’d been a cop, I’d had a passing familiarity with digital surveillance. Since I’d joined Bolle’s crew, it was like I was living in a different world. When all this was over, I was going to go live in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and pay for everything with cash, and maybe wear a hat made of tinfoil all day.

  In my head, I was already writing a material witness warrant for Mack. I knew I could get Burke to sign off on it pretty easily. Mack’s mistake was thinking I couldn’t touch him if he just acted as a middleman.

  Maybe we’d put that cell meant for Bloem to good use after all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “All I’m saying is that Bolle is going to have a fit if he finds out you put a hundred-year-old Mauser pistol on your government credit card,” Dalton said.

  Even though Wapato was huge, it still felt like we were living in close quarters because we only occupied a small corner of the facility. Due to the reinforced walls, the WiFi signals sucked, so I was sharing space with Dalton and Casey in the operations center, deep diving through Mack’s credit card records and drinking coffee. By all rights, I should have been asleep next to Alex, but I knew all I would do was lie next to her and stare at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Casey said. “Never mind.”

  One of the side effects of our communal living relationship was I was getting to know everyone’s quirks. Big Eddie was a gourmet level cook. Dalton was a voracious reader of anything he could get his hands on. Henry had an annoying propensity to listen to mid-eighties hair metal at a really ridiculous volume.

  When Casey got bored, she got into gadgets. Lately, she’d been fascinated by German firearms, and had put her government purchase card to work. She could justify the multiple Heckler and Koch pistols, rifles, and submachine guns, but Dalton had a point. The Broomhandle Mauser was probably pushing it.

  “I
still think we need a foosball table though,” she said.

  “Hmmm… Do we have a morale budget?” Dalton started clicking through folders on our shared hard drive.

  I was debating whether I should move to a quieter spot with crappier WiFi when the phone rang.

  “For you, Dent.” Casey handed me the receiver.

  It was Dan Winter.

  “Dent, about three hours ago you entered an arrest warrant for a guy named Thomas Macklin, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering if Dan was actually going to come through for me after all.

  “He’s dead. He and two other guys were found in a room in the Portland Hilton.”

  “Dammit,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Supposedly an overdose.”

  “All three of them?”

  “Yup. Heroin.”

  That sounded like bullshit to me. Mack was many things, but a junkie wasn’t one of them.

  “Who caught it?”

  “Tanner Reese. You know him.”

  Reese had been the newest detective in Major Crimes when I’d worked there. I didn’t know him well, but he’d always struck me as arrogant, and I didn’t think that was just because I was a bitter old fart.

  “Have they moved the bodies yet?”

  “Not yet. The Medical Examiner should be here within the hour.”

  “Can you stall them until I get there?”

  “I can try.”

  “Thanks, Dan.”

  I wasn’t sure what Winter could do for me. IA wouldn’t have any business interfering in a homicide investigation. I needed Bolle to get Burke out of bed so she could start making noise with the locals.

  “Wake everybody up,” I said to Casey. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Bolle, Alex, and I rode in one car, while Henry, Casey, and Eddie took the van. Bolle spent most of the ride on the phone with either Burke or various lieutenants, captains and assistant chiefs at the Portland Police Bureau. When he hung up from the last call I thought for a second he was going to hurl the phone out his window, but apparently, he thought better of it because he tucked it away in a pocket.