The Buck Stops Here

by Mindy Starns Clark

  The building was dark inside, but enough slats were missing from the walls that I could see to move around. Trying not to think about rats and snakes and spiders, I situated myself where I could peek through some holes in the front, my view of the highway clear. Sure enough, soon the blue sedan came barreling up the roadway, and then it slowed as it neared the field.

  I almost smiled, trying to picture the confusion of the man inside. After all, what did it mean when a tracking device showed that the car had flown up into the sky?

  The sedan passed the field twice. On the third try, it drove slowly along and then pulled over to the side of the road.

  From where I looked, I could see that my car had left tire tracks in the grass, leading around to the back of the barn. I watched as the guy got out of the sedan and then made his way via a more circuitous route. Trying to conceal himself along the tree line, he ran around the far side of the barn. As he got closer, he darted almost directly toward my car.

  I had left the keys in the ignition, and the alert was dinging loudly, over and over, drawing him near. Holding my breath, I watched through the missing slats as he walked to my car and carefully peeked inside.

  In that instant, his back to me, I stepped from the barn. Holding one hand at each end of the bat, I whipped it over his head and then jerked him backward against me, the wood pressed tightly against his neck. Afraid he might have a gun, I didn’t stop there. I twisted to one side, lurching so that we fell to the ground, my knee against the small of his back.

  “Freeze!” I said, catching my breath.

  He didn’t move, his hands splayed out beside him, though he was gasping for air.

  “I’ll let you breathe,” I said, “if you don’t move.”

  I let go of one side of the bat, and he started choking and coughing as I reached down and frisked him. From what I could tell, he wasn’t armed.

  “All right,” I said, sitting up, my knee still against his back, the baseball bat clutched firmly in both hands, ready to swing. “Who are you and why are you following me?”

  “You could’ve killed me,” he gasped, reaching for his throat.

  “I still could,” I said. “Now who are you and why are you following me?”

  He didn’t reply, and so I stood, swinging back with the bat as if I were going to bash him in the head. He didn’t know that I wouldn’t do it, that it was all a bluff. In terror, he rolled over and held up both hands to protect himself, screaming.

  “Ten seconds!” I warned.

  “Okay, okay!” he said, holding out both hands. Finally, I relaxed my posture enough to let him speak.

  “Yeah, I was following you,” he said, breathing heavily. “Don’t hurt me, okay? I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  “Who are you working for?” I demanded, knowing for certain now that he wasn’t FBI. He had been too sloppy for that.

  “A guy,” he said. “He paid me to follow you.”

  “What guy?” I demanded. “Who?”

  “I don’t have a name. He just hired me to tail you. He gave me a receiver for a tracking device.”

  “When did he hire you?”

  “Monday night. He said I could have the job if I could start right away.”

  “How did he find you?”

  “In the Richmond phone book. I’m a private investigator. I have a big ad.”

  “A big ad?”

  “Yeah,” he said, reaching up to smooth out his hair. “‘If you think he’s cheatin’, our price can’t be beaten.’”

  “What?”

  “That’s my slogan. I do a lot of divorce cases. Though this is the first one where I got to use a tracking device.”

  I put down the bat. This was just too confusing to maintain my threatening stance.

  “Look, I’m a PI too,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

  He sat up, brushing the dust from his clothes.

  “Fine,” he said, trying to gain his composure. “Okay. Some guy called my after-hours phone number late Monday night and said he had a tracking device with a ten-mile range that he needed me to use to follow somebody. Apparently someone else was lined up to do this job out of D.C., but you took off sooner than anyone expected. So this guy paid me to pick up your trail in Melville, follow your car, and report back to him. That’s all.”

  “Did you see this man in person?”

  “Yeah, I drove down and met him in Melville. He gave me a cash deposit and taught me how to use the monitor. You were staying at a motel. I’ve been following you since then.”

  I tried to process all that he was telling me. Obviously, my quick departure from Washington, D.C., had taken someone by surprise. They had tailed me as far as Melville and then improvised on the road, hiring this dolt to continue to tail me on their behalf.

  “Can you give me a physical description of the man who hired you?” I asked, reaching out to help him to his feet.

  “Sure,” he said, taking my hand. “Tall. Dark hair. Good-looking.”

  “Age?”

  “Early thirties, about the same as you. I thought he was your husband.”

  “My husband?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I took it,” he said. “He told me to follow you and to watch out for you. He seemed concerned that you might be in some kind of danger. I wasn’t supposed to make myself known unless you needed help out of a tight spot.”

  And there we had it. It sounded to me that this man had been hired by Tom. I pulled a photo of the two of us from my wallet and showed it to him. He took one look and nodded.

  “Yep, that’s him.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Are you by any chance licensed to investigate in any of the states I have led you through?”

  He looked down at the ground sheepishly.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Then let’s do each other a favor,” I told him. “You go on back home to Richmond, and I won’t report what you’ve done to the authorities.”

  Twenty-One

  Moving fast, I was able to reach the Brown Door by 4:20, just ten minutes before the prison guard was supposed to meet the woman and give her the $20 payoff for having an argument in the common room. The Brown Door was a ramshackle-looking bar and restaurant about a mile out of Americus. There was a hardware store directly across the street, so I parked there and hunched down low in my seat, fixing my rearview mirror so that I could see behind me. Luckily for me, neither he nor she seemed to have shown up yet.

  As I waited, I thought about Tom, picturing the scenario of the tracking device from his point of view. In my mind I replayed our entire encounter at the J.O.S.H.U.A. Foundation the other evening, and then I gasped as I realized when he had put the device on my car: Tom’s lawyer, Kimball, must have done it when Tom took my elbow and led me over to the payment booth to pay for my parking. I closed my eyes and tried to picture Kimball’s actions as Tom and I were walking back toward the car. He had been behind it, and then he moved away once we drew near. Now I understood why.

  Tom probably had some fancy, expensive PI lined up to follow the tracking device from my home the next day. But then I surprised them all by leaving town immediately! I guess he’d had no choice but to follow me himself, and when I finally stopped for the night, he scrambled for a replacement. It was just his bad luck that the local Richmond PI he had pulled into service wasn’t all that good.

  Now that I knew everything, I felt I ought to call and fuss at Tom, giving him a piece of my mind. But I didn’t, because while I should have found his actions invasive and infuriating, in a way, I found them kind of endearing. Despite everything, he wanted to keep track of me. To protect me. He was worried about me.

  Soon, a battered brown truck pulled into the parking lot and a man got out, and I put all thoughts of Tom aside for the time being. I thought I recognized the man as the guard, though out of his uniform and in jeans and a T-shirt, it was a little hard to tell. He was slightly paunchy, and his lined face seemed fami
liar as he sat on his back bumper and lit up a cigarette.

  After a few minutes, another car pulled into the parking lot, a low-riding Mustang with the woman I had talked to earlier seated on the passenger’s side. The man walked to that car and leaned over the passenger’s window. I watched as the guard pulled something out of his pocket and handed it in through the window, and then he stood up straight and rapped his hand on the hood of the car. From there, the Mustang sped off and the man walked on into the restaurant. The payoff was complete.

  I wasn’t sure how to proceed. A part of me wanted to go inside and confront him. Still, something about that didn’t seem wise or safe. I decided instead to take a closer look at his truck.

  Fortunately, the restaurant didn’t have any windows along this side of the building, so as long as the man stayed in there, I would be okay. I parked right next to the truck and tried the door handle, but it was locked. Putting my hands on each side of my face, I peeked inside, hoping to see something that might have the man’s address on it. The interior of the car was a mess, but mostly with fast-food containers and old newspapers. I didn’t see anything with an address. I did notice, however, that the window behind the cab of the truck was open.

  My heart pounding, I turned and looked in every direction to make sure there wasn’t anyone watching me. Then I kicked off my shoes, hoisted myself into the truck bed, squeezed my upper body through the back window, and unlocked the passenger-side door. Climbing out of the cab, I opened the door and then opened the glove compartment and quickly rifled through the papers inside. Sure enough, I found a proof of insurance card with a name and address on it: Les Watts, 179 Weyford Lane, Americus, Georgia. I memorized the address before putting everything back the way I had found it. I locked the door, grabbed my shoes, and got out of there.

  My heart was still racing five minutes later as I stood in line at a convenience store to buy a bottle of hand sanitizer and a pair of rubber gloves. What I had done, breaking into that man’s car and digging in his glove compartment, was illegal. Now I was about to find his house and take it one step further. The fact that this was wrong, wrong, wrong didn’t really matter at the moment. I felt emboldened by anger, justified by all of the roadblocks that had thus far been put in my way in the course of this investigation—not to mention the fact that my adrenaline was still in high gear from my encounter by the barn.

  I entered the guy’s address in my GPS and then drove back past the Brown Door on my way to his house. His truck was still there in the parking lot, though now there were about ten more cars and trucks parked around it. Hopefully, this was his after-work hangout, and he would be staying for a good while.

  His ranch-style house was on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood of modest homes. The only people around were at the end of the block, a family barbecuing in their backyard. Otherwise, things seemed deserted for a Friday afternoon. My mind racing, I tried to think of some way that I could get into his house without attracting attention. I finally decided to park a few blocks over and then make like a neighborhood jogger. At least that way if someone saw me, they wouldn’t be able to call in my license plate or identify my vehicle.

  I pulled shorts and a short-sleeved shirt from my gym bag and changed in a smelly gas station restroom. Then I parked my car in a parking lot nearby, shoved the gloves in my pocket, and took off running.

  When I reached Weyford Lane, I slowed a bit and tried to look nonchalant as I jogged down the street. I reached number 179 and then veered off naturally, as if I might be cutting through his backyard to get to the street behind his. I jogged up the driveway and into the carport, quite relieved to see once I got there that the place was completely private, hidden from the houses surrounding it by all manner of overgrown bushes and trees. The only line of sight was from the house directly across the street, but with no cars in the driveway and no lights on, it appeared to be empty.

  Heart pounding, I knocked on the side door, just to make sure no one was home here. When I got no answer, I pulled on the rubber gloves and tried the doorknob, and then I went around back and pushed on each of the windows. The place was locked up tight. I peeked inside where I could, but I couldn’t see anything other than the vague outline of furniture. I was just trying to decide whether or not I should dare check the front door and front windows when I heard his car in the driveway.

  Quickly, I ducked down and ran toward the far side of the house, hoping he would have no reason to come around that way. I pulled off the gloves and shoved them into my pocket, pressing myself flat against the side of the building, grateful beyond belief that I had been unsuccessful in my attempts to get inside!

  I listened for the house door to open and close before I chanced running away, but instead, after a moment, I heard the sound of the truck pulling back out of the driveway. I dared to peek around front, and I was surprised and relieved to see that it wasn’t the brown pickup after all—it was a Federal Express truck.

  Catching my breath, I waited until the vehicle drove away and then decided that was just too close of a call; I needed to get out of there. The chances of finding some kind of relevant evidence inside the house were not great enough to risk this crazy scheme of breaking and entering.

  I doubled back behind the house, hoping to go out the way I had come in, along the driveway. In the carport, I saw the FedEx envelope propped against the door, resting on a black rubber mat I hadn’t noticed before. I hesitated, wondering if there might be a key hidden under the mat. I decided to peek, knowing it would be smarter just to leave, but I was unable to stop myself. After all, was it still breaking and entering if the guy was dumb enough to leave a key out where I could find it?

  I peeled back the mat and found nothing but dirt. It was just as well, I told myself as I laid the mat back down. I shouldn’t be doing this anyway.

  It was then, however, that the return address on the FedEx envelope caught my eye, and I gasped. I didn’t recognize the name or the street, but the city it had come from was New Orleans, Louisiana.

  My heart in my throat, I impulsively grabbed the envelope. I don’t know what possessed me, but I folded it in half and shoved it up under my shirt, holding it in place with my left arm. Then I took off running. As my steps pounded on the pavement, one thought raced through my head: Callie, you just committed a federal offense!

  Once I was safely back in the car, I simply started driving. I must have driven ten miles before I finally had the nerve to pull over and take a look at the envelope again. Ironically, the empty parking lot where I chose to make my stop was beside a church. I ignored the big, illuminated cross on the sign and guiltily proceeded with what I was doing.

  The sun was setting, but there was still enough daylight to see without turning on an interior light. For a long while, I just sat there holding the envelope, knowing it might not be too late to turn back. I could drive to the man’s house and simply toss this thing toward the door and no one would ever know I had run away with it. But the address on the front kept screaming at me. New Orleans. New Orleans. This had to have something to do with Sparks.

  I looked off in the distance, trying to think back to my first semester of criminal law. From what I could recall, though stealing the U.S. mail was a federal offense, taking a package that had been delivered by a privately owned company was more along the lines of simple theft. If so, then my going into a carport and taking a FedEx envelope had been about on par with going into a carport and stealing a rake or a bicycle. Though it was still theft, I thought I could live with that a little more easily.

  Teeth gritted, I opened it as carefully as I could and looked inside. There was no note or anything, just a wad of paper towels. I pulled out the wad and unwrapped it to reveal…a small yellow asthma inhaler.

  An asthma inhaler?

  I turned the thing around in my hands, trying to see if it was real. It certainly looked real, and I almost gave it a squirt just to check. Something stopped me, however, and with a start I realized that this
was the exact same brand of inhaler that Sparks used. What did this mean?

  I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling that this was bad, very bad. I could only come up with two possible explanations: Sparks was a drug addict who snuck his fixes into prison via a “doctored” asthma inhaler, or Sparks was about to become a victim of something much more sinister. Either way I was making a bit of a leap here, but I had a feeling that whatever was inside this inhaler was not what it was supposed to be.

  Twenty-Two

  Using the secure phone Tom had given me, I dialed the number of Paul Tyson, a young man I hired from time to time whenever I needed help of a particular nature. Officially, Paul was a “computer research consultant”; unofficially, he was a hacker, and he had ways of digging up information I could never seem to get anywhere else. I kept him on a retainer, and he simply charged me by the hour for any work that he did. Paul lived in Seattle, so I knew the timing of my call was good, that he would probably be sitting at his computer, available to answer some questions for me as usual.

  Sure enough, he picked up the phone on the first ring. I identified myself and said I was calling from a scrambled cell phone.

  “Oh, goody,” he replied. “That must mean this is a big one. What’s up?”

  “A couple of things,” I said, wrapping the inhaler in the paper towels and sticking it back in the envelope. “I have a substance I need analyzed, and I’m wondering if by any chance you know anyone who could do it.”

  He chuckled.

  “Now why would you be asking me that particular question, Callie? You’re the PI. Don’t you have resources like that?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but this one’s different. I need—”

  “Let me guess,” he interrupted. “You need someone who’s maybe not quite as legit as usual. Am I correct?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What is it, illegal drugs?”

  “I’m not sure. But I probably shouldn’t have it in my possession, and I definitely don’t want any findings reported.”