Badger Games

by Jon A. Jackson

  The affiliation of Helen, however, was another matter, Dinah felt. The group hadn’t had the opportunity to interview Helen, nor had there been an occasion to debate the issue with them, unlike the case with Jammie. As Dinah saw it, they had no adequate sanctions on Helen. What if, for instance, Helen had a falling out with Joe? Who knew what might result? Was she even stable?

  Jammie listened carefully, watching Dinah. “You hate her ass, don’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t hate her,” Dinah protested. “I hardly know her. I talked it over with the colonel, but I didn’t have a chance to discuss it with the others. The colonel is confident about her. He says she’s smart, she’s totally attached to Joe, she’s very level-headed, can be very useful to Joe and to us—”

  “But you don’t trust her,” Jammie said. “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t trust the bitch if she wore a lead chastity belt under a brick apron. Well, why’d the Old Man take her on? He got the hots? Is this another recruit for the harem?”

  No, that was impossible, Dinah said, brushing the thought away. But it was disturbing that the colonel had maneuvered around them this way. He had committed them to this woman before he’d discussed it with them. Apparently, he felt very strongly that they needed Helen’s assistance, that Joe would be able to control her, that there was no danger. It was quite unsettling. She went on to describe the Pollak incident and the Kosovo affair.

  Jammie was keenly interested. After Dinah had finished, Jammie went off to fetch them refills of their latte grandes while Dinah kept watch over their stuff. When Jammie returned she said, “Pollak doesn’t faze me too much. I worked with that bastard in Colombia. I’m surprised that he was a member. To tell you the truth, Dinah, the fact that you guys thought he was all right makes me a little nervous. Not to sound like a ho, but that dude was a bad john. This Kosovo thing, though, that’s another matter. This Franko deal sounds like found candy. So the guy drops out—so what? It was good while it lasted.”

  “The problem is Theo Ostropaki. Remember him? It seems the colonel might have approached him about the group.”

  Jammie said she vaguely recalled Ostropaki. She didn’t know him, hadn’t met him, but knew about him and had heard something about his success in the Balkans. She hadn’t heard anything about Ostropaki’s disappearance, except that he’d run afoul of some gang in Serbia.

  “Whew,” she said. “You’re right, this outfit is a little spooky. No wonder you’re upset. Who else has the colonel decided, on his own, to invite? Maybe we should start thinking about the colonel’s stability, about retiring him.”

  “Exactly,” Dinah said. “You know, at first we were all on the same page, but over time we kind of delegated de facto leadership to the colonel. He seemed better placed to coordinate things, he was older …”

  “I hear you,” Jammie said. “So, what are you thinking? Maybe getting the others together, without the colonel, and discussing it? I mean, it’s everybody’s ass. You know that. We got a right—and a responsibility—to get this straightened out.”

  Dinah didn’t think that would do. Eventually that might become necessary, she thought, but not yet. It was enough for now to take a closer look at the Joe and Helen situation, as well as the Franko business. There was yet another complication: the colonel anticipated other pursuers of Franko, in Butte. She told Jammie all she knew about Harry.

  She reiterated the colonel’s briefing and analysis. One point had struck her, she said: if Franko could attract the attentions of Harry, mightn’t others be interested, as well? The possibilities seemed to be: one or more of the agencies were growing suspicious and had initiated an investigation of the Kosovo connection; or the Ostropaki disappearance was connected to the Franko disappearance, and whoever had engineered the one could be pursuing the other—and it might not be Harry; and finally, there might be some wholly unrelated reason for unknown persons to pursue Franko. As far as the colonel had been able to discover, the Kosovo connection was a dead issue, a closed case. But now that they were in the game—had put Joe and Helen on the case—any other searcher for Franko had to be dealt with.

  The colonel had come up with one additional possibility: the international war crimes tribunal had stumbled on Bazok—Harry’s nom de guerre—who was an American citizen. They might have connected him with the disappearance of Franko—another American citizen. There were elements in the tribunal not particularly pro-American. They might have someone investigating Franko as a connection to Bazok, or at least for someone who could provide evidence against him if he resurfaced. Any involvement of Americans in the tribunal’s field of inquiry could be highly political.

  Jammie found that plausible, even probable. She also saw where this was leading. “You want me to go to Butte?” She thought for a moment, then said it could be done. She had just finished the report on her counterfeit case—“Honey, you wouldn’t believe it—they’re color-xeroxing money and passing it! Stupid, but they succeed enough to make a dent.” She could cut out some time to get to Butte, possibly by tomorrow.

  “And don’t worry, honey,” she told Dinah, “I’ll be checking out the frame on that Helen bitch.”

  Kibosh

  Joe was enumerating the tasks at hand. One, they had to find out where Boz had gone. Two, they had to remove his rental vehicle from the ditch and stash it somewhere. And three, they had to figure out some way to explain all this to Colonel Tucker without exposing Paulie. This also meant finding the stolen Dodge Ram and keeping that out of the cops’ purview. The gate would have to be fixed, of course, and they’d have to keep a standing guard, a watch.

  Some of these things could wait until tomorrow, had to wait, in fact. But others needed doing now, tonight. They were all tired, not to say exhausted, but they couldn’t rest. Well, Frank could rest. He had suffered the most. Boz had targeted him for abuse, perhaps as an object lesson for Helen and Paulie, to ensure their cooperation. Joe was surprised, in fact, that Boz hadn’t simply shot him out of hand, but perhaps he’d felt that he needed him to operate the security system, at least until Joe got back and was taken care of.

  The others wanted to discuss these matters, and Joe wasn’t opposed to that, in a way, but certain things needed to be done. Now. A watch, for instance. They were sitting in here in a lighted house in a vast, unlighted near wilderness, totally exposed to Boz if he was out there. And he was out there, somewhere. He might not be close, but who knew?

  “It’ll be more complicated if he gets picked up,” Joe pointed out. “He’s drunk, driving a stolen vehicle—or at least one that he can’t demonstrate ownership for. He’s shot. He’s also an accomplished liar—hell, he convinced Frank that he was just a lost partygoer, and he’d killed two of Frank’s dogs! He got Frank to help him get some booze, and even return here to ‘sleep it off.’ The guy’s a menace, but a survivor, and he has charm. I know,” he said, “he didn’t seem all that charming at the end, but that’s how he got us to that point.”

  What he didn’t voice, but knew he would have to discuss with Helen, was why he and she had to stick around. They could call in the colonel right now and presumably get some help, wrap up their involvement. But the fact was, Joe had fallen in love with the idea of hiding Paulie and establishing himself in this ideal mountain lair. Helen, he knew, wasn’t going to be too excited about all this, but he thought he could convince her if he had a chance.

  “I think we should call in the colonel now,” Helen said. So there went Joe’s chance.

  “Call the sheriff” was Paulie’s opinion.

  To Joe’s relief, Frank vetoed that idea. Frank was not feeling very chipper, but he didn’t relish the idea of the sheriff and, unquestionably, a posse of DEA agents being invited into his marijuana plantation.

  “The colonel can deal with that,” Helen said. “Hell, he’s DEA himself.”

  Joe winced. That wasn’t information he wanted to discuss with Frank and Paulie. Frank wasn’t privy to the notion that Joe and Helen were involved with a fe
deral authority. He looked shocked. He’d assumed that this whole thing with Boz had been strictly about Paulie. But now they had to take valuable time to bring him up to speed. In the meantime, as Joe pointed out, Boz was still out there.

  Maybe there was too much to do. Maybe Helen was right: the situation had escalated beyond their ability to deal with it. A crazed killer was on the loose out there—a menace to society. He had to be dealt with. Maybe … but no.

  “We can deal with this,” Joe said forcefully. He looked at them, gathered in the kitchen, at the scene of a near disaster. The butcher knife, for instance, still lay on the counter. There was blood on the floor. Joe could see that Paulie was with him, and Helen would go along. Frank? Frank didn’t want the cops in.

  “We’ve got to get that gate back in place,” Joe said. “Get the dogs out, to help patrol. Then we’ve got to figure out where Bazok went, where the truck is. Okay? Well, let’s get going. We can discuss some of these problems while we work.”

  Joe felt they had adequate arms, for now. He had five handguns, counting Boz’s Glock, for which he had 9mm ammo that would work. Frank had a .30-06 deer rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun, a Remington pump. Paulie had his .410 popgun. Later, if he had time, Joe could run down to his old place, where he had a veritable armory stashed, including AK-47s. For now he put Paulie up on the ridge to watch, with the dogs, while he and Frank tried to get the gate functioning. Helen could stay in the house and monitor the system, act as a command post. They could communicate using the cell phones.

  The gate was a mess, but with some hammers and crowbars they managed to get it remounted and working within an hour. Fortunately, the electronics had not been trashed.

  “Who comes up this road?” Joe asked Frank. Helen had made coffee and brought it down to them with some sandwiches. They sat in the truck and ate. “The mailman? UPS? FedEx?”

  “No, I get my mail in Forkee,” Frank said. “UPS and FedEx know to call me first. I run in to Butte to pick up. Nobody lives out here. Fishermen come in, but not this time of year. Maybe a hunter. The thing is, more people come around than you expect—just looking, bird-watching, or lost. We get kids who drive out here and park, to screw, or have a party.”

  “We better get Boz’s car out of that ditch then,” Joe said. “Someone will spot it and call the sheriff, for sure. I want to take a look at it, anyway.”

  It took the four of them the better part of an hour to drag the white Ford Taurus up out of the ditch, using a chain and the four-wheel-drive power of the Durango. When they got it up, finally, with Helen at the wheel of the Durango and the others pushing, it was a great disappointment to find that while it started all right, the right front wheel was badly damaged, the steering gear smashed. It couldn’t be driven. Frank figured out that with the aid of his tractor, which had a front loader for picking up hay bales or scooping up gravel and the like, he could hoist the front end of the car onto the back of his old pickup. They drove slowly back to the house and maneuvered the vehicle into Frank’s barn, out back.

  Joe could find nothing in the vehicle except for the paperwork in the glove compartment, which said it had been rented to one Harry Hart, of Atlanta, Georgia. Joe took that and stacked hay bales around the car to further hide its presence. Then he went into the house.

  Paulie and Frank had gone to bed. Joe was not sleepy. He was excited. Frank had described his security system in greater detail to Helen before retiring. She explained that Frank’s fence was electronically sensitive for all of its extensive perimeter. Already tonight Frank had shown her the electronic signature of a deer leaping the fence. They were fairly secure, for now. A careful and measured attempt to breach it could be accomplished, especially in some of the more distant reaches, where it was little more than a single wire strung over rocky outcroppings. And there were approaches from the backcountry, where no wire could be strung. But you would have to be more thorough and careful than Boz to find those places.

  “I don’t think there’s much to worry about tonight,” Joe said, “if the nut has found someplace to crash. Pardon the expression,” he said with a snort. “He’ll be wanting to sleep, that’s for sure. But we don’t know how badly wounded he was. If he’s not too bad off he’ll go back to his motel, or whatever, and rest. With any luck, the bastard will die in his sleep. That’ll be a problem if the truck is connected to him, and then to Frank. But we should be so lucky.”

  “If I knew where he was, I’d kill him myself,” Helen said. She was serious. Joe knew that she was capable of doing it. “Joe, why are we fooling around with this? Let’s call the colonel.”

  Joe explained why that wasn’t such a great idea. He filled her in on what Paulie had told him about Kosovo, about the cave. “I don’t know what the colonel really wants here,” he said, “but my gut tells me that Paulie won’t come out of it whole. I’m not just thinking about Paulie. The potential for us is great here, if we can only hold it together for a few days. I’m not ready to give up on it. But we’ve got to locate this bastard and get to the bottom of this.”

  They discussed it further, in more detail, but he could see that she was about out of it. He convinced her to go to bed. He would stand guard until daylight. He found a warm jacket and went out to patrol above the house, on the ridge.

  Well before daylight, Paulie came out, bringing coffee. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” he told Joe. “If it hadn’t been for you, we’d all be dead. I owe you an explanation.”

  Joe let him go at it. The whole story of Ostropaki and Boz came out. Paulie was glad to unburden himself, at last. In the end, he opined that Boz was driven by at least two factors: he thought Paulie might have more “goods”—he had demanded as much, in the time before Joe had gotten back from Basin. But there was something else. Paulie had figured out that Boz knew that Paulie could finger him for the cave massacre, to the war crimes tribunal. The people he worked with in Serbia had probably made it clear to Boz that he had to get rid of this witness. Paulie endangered them all.

  Joe wasn’t so happy to hear this angle. It meant, if he judged Paulie right, that Paulie would be going back, cooperating with the tribunal. That could have a big effect on Joe’s plans. The press would be interested in what Paulie had been doing in Butte, where he’d holed up, and so on. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what the colonel’s take on it would be. Maybe, he thought again, Helen was right: it was time to bail. But no … it was too soon for that. First things first. Find the man.

  Joe probed Paulie carefully. “I understand what you want to do,” he told him.

  “What I have to do,” Paulie corrected him. “I should have come forward before, but … I wasn’t ready. Now, I have to do it. For all of them, especially for Fedima.”

  “You don’t even know what happened to Fedima,” Joe pointed out. “When we get Boz we can find out that much. For all you know, she’s still alive somewhere. A guy like that, he could have sold her into slavery. This might be her one chance to be liberated, you don’t know. Once we learn that, we can figure out what to do next. You’ll go back, don’t worry. I’ll see to it. But we have to work out the best way to do it.”

  Joe was already thinking of a plan. Maybe Paulie’s Butte background could be kept quiet. He could be provided with another history, possibly. It wasn’t relevant to the tribunal. Only his activities in Kosovo meant something to them. The colonel could help there, and he’d be eager to do so, Joe felt. But first things first. He got Paulie’s agreement to keep this confidential, for now at least.

  This government work was dicey, Joe thought. But interesting.

  When dawn came, Joe and Paulie went in to find that Helen and Frank were up, looking rather awful but at least a little more rested. Joe got them fed. There was no television in the house, Joe learned, but there was a radio. He was eager to find out if the news had gotten on to Boz, for any reason. But there was nothing about him. The sensation of the day was a double murder in Butte, overnight. A man and his wife. The police were not rel
easing names, yet, “until they’d notified family.”

  Within a half hour there was a new crisis. An uncle of Frank’s called. Had he heard? Gary and Selma had been murdered by a burglar. The sheriff wanted to interview anyone from the family. Funeral arrangements were being made. Frank and Paulie would have to come in and be interviewed. The officer the uncle had talked to was Jacky LeBruyn. Frank remembered Jacky, didn’t he? Jacky wanted to talk to him. The uncle had told Jacky that he’d get hold of Frank—he knew Frank wouldn’t want a bunch of cops knocking on his door.

  “You’ve got to go in,” Joe told Frank when the uncle rang off. “You don’t want the cops out here. Paulie will go with you.” The question was, What would they say? It was immediately apparent to both men that their uncle and aunt could have been the source of Boz’s information about where to find “Franko.”

  Frank seemed dazed. “I don’t know, man,” he said, running his hands through his hair ceaselessly, tugging at his unruly beard. “What’m I gonna say? They’ll see my face. What’ll I tell them, man?”

  Helen started to go to him, to comfort him, but Joe shook his head to warn her off. Joe leaned against the counter and let the man ramble in near panic for a moment or two. Then he said, calmly, “Well, you’ll just have to belt up, Frank, and do what you think is right.”

  Frank stopped pacing and stared at Joe. So did the others. Joe hadn’t spoken unkindly, but with confidence.

  “But what is right?” Frank asked.

  “You’ll figure it out, Frank. You always do. I’m sorry about your aunt and your uncle, but for all you know this has nothing to do with Boz. If the cops thought it did, if they suspected anything, they’d have been out here by now, don’t you think? I imagine they’ve been looking for an excuse to visit you for some time, anyway.”