Body Broker

by Daniel M Ford

  “Are you trying to tap out? This ain’t a match, doc. This is me talking and you answering.”

  He made a kind of choking sound, and I suddenly realized I’d been leaning on him a little too hard. Sheepishly, I let him up, stepping back and away from him. He slumped to the ground, rotating his arm and massaging his shoulder. I stepped away and picked up the watch, letting it dangle from my hand.

  Suddenly, he shot up and dove across his desk. He opened a drawer, frantically ruffling through it.

  Thinking he was going for a weapon, I bolted around the other side of the desk, grabbed the back of his head, and bounced it sharply off the polished wood. There was a sharp crunch and he went limp, let out a sob, and brought his hands to his face. I opened the drawer and found a phone. I stuck it in a back pocket.

  “You really gonna call the cops, doctor? That was your big play? Christ. You come up with a gun, that I could respect. But you’re the drug dealer here. I’m just a righteous anti-drug crusader who got a little over-zealous. Who’re the cops going to side with?”

  He was still kneeling in front of his desk, holding his nose, crying around it. He didn’t answer. I felt, perhaps, a smidgen of empathy. Not sympathy.

  “Broken nose hurts like hell, every time. Or so they tell me…mine’s pristine. But I can probably set it back in for you.”

  He fell back on his ass and scrambled away from me on the thick green carpeting. “Keep your hands off me, animal. I sometimes give Naloxone to the kids, sure. And maybe other therapies they need but can’t get.”

  “Give? Because the kid I spoke to, they said they bought it.”

  He finally took his hands away from his face and looked up at me balefully. “I have to fund the purchase somehow. It’s certainly no more than the families can afford. Most of them don’t even miss it.”

  “I’m a little curious about how you make the drugs disappear, not gonna lie. But I’m here about one thing, and one thing only. Gabriel Kennelly. Ladders. Tell me what you know.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or the next thing I do is let the Cecil County Sheriff’s Department in on your little extracurricular chemistry club. And probably the state troopers, while I’m at it.”

  “You’ll do that anyway.”

  “I might!” I smiled at him. “But telling me about Ladders is the only thing that could save you, so, let’s have it.”

  He was no longer looking at me. His voice was quiet and resigned.

  “It is a rehabilitation center,” he said, very slowly and carefully. “I can get you an address.”

  “Good. Get it.”

  “It might take some time.”

  I dropped the watch to the ground theatrically, and lifted my boot over it. “Let’s hurry it up.”

  He finally pulled himself up. His nose was floating; every step brought pain to his face and his eyes watered. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “Do what?” I touched the heel of my boot to his watch, but I didn’t crush it.

  “Not the watch. This,” he said, lowering his hands and trying to fix me with his watering eyes. “You don’t want any part of it.”

  “I want one part. Gabriel Kennelly.”

  “It’ll cost more than you’re willing to pay.”

  “You’ve already got one broken bone today, Doc. Unless you’re keen to add to that number, get me the address.”

  “I’ll have to go into the house.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” I pulled his phone out, set it down. Looking at it now, I realized it almost certainly wasn’t his everyday phone. It was cheap blue plastic; it looked old and basic. Probably a burner. “Unlock the phone. Tell me the number you need to call. I’ll dial it, and I’ll hold the phone. You talk. I suspect for one second you’re selling me upriver, you’re trying to tell anyone anything, you’re gonna eat the goddamned phone. You got me?”

  “Not even a call. Just need to look it up. It’s only on there.”

  He tapped open the phone. I held it flat on the surface of his desk and watched him open an email app. It moved slowly. I could read what he tapped in, just a quick search for “Ladders” in his email. I saw several pop up, and he swiped at one before I could read them all.

  He looked up at me.

  He held out the phone and I saw an address taking up the screen. It was in the county, off a state route, but nowhere I recognized. I stared at him.

  “Write it down, asshole.”

  He snatched a fountain pen and a notepad in a thick leather portfolio from a table on the other side of the room, where there was a therapy couch and a chair, all in the same green leather as his office at Farrington.

  He scribbled it down. I took it, carefully stuck it inside the fold of my wallet. He snatched at the phone, but I smacked it out of his hand.

  “Paperclip,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I cracked my knuckles.

  He got me a paperclip and I popped open the little compartment of his phone with the SIM card and dumped it into my hand. That, I also carefully slipped into my wallet.

  “You can have that back when I find Gabriel. Understand something, Doc,” I said as I stood from where I’d been sitting on the corner of his desk. He scurried away from me. “If you’re any deeper in this thing…drugs, kids using, selling, putting them in rehab to bilk insurance money…best you just tell me now. If I have to find out, I’m gonna come back here, and I won’t be as agreeable and placid as I have been this morning.”

  “If I ever see you again, you’ll regret it,” he sneered.

  “Way I see it, Thalheim, you call the police, you have to explain everything I came to talk to you about. Even if they come grab me, I just tell them what I know. They start talking to kids at Farrington. Whatever story you give them blows up. I’ve got you by the balls. I’m not letting go that easy.”

  “I didn’t say anything about cops,” he said, and his voice had a new kind of confidence in it. I shrugged.

  “I’m not all that worried about the state licensing board, either.”

  I turned to go and then I had a stray thought. I walked back to him. He’d picked himself up and summoned his dignity, standing up straight and adjusting his shirt-cuffs, then bending to pick up the watch.

  I grabbed the hand with the watch and held it up. He jerked it away, pulling it protectively against his chest.

  “Where’s the other one?”

  “The other what?”

  “The watch you were wearing the other day.”

  “Why, do you want that one?”

  “I don’t want any watch. Just curious.” I took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to Brock, with a single word and a question mark: Retail?

  “It’s in the winder in my study,” he sneered. “I don’t expect you to know what that is.”

  “I can read the context clues,” I muttered, as I turned to leave. I looked back at him. “Remember, Dr. Thalheim. I’ve got you by the balls. It can’t feel great, but don’t do anything rash. If I don’t find Gabriel Kennelly, I’m coming back. And I’ll have the license plate number of that sexy little German number in the driveway ready to send to my friends at the sheriff’s.”

  “You’ll regret this,” he said from the door of his office.

  “Probably,” I said with vague wave as I went out into the driveway.

  I did snap a pic of that license plate on my way out. Then I got in my company car and set my GPS for the address he’d given me.

  On my way out of the development I heard the rumble of bikes again.

  Chapter 29

  I did set out for the coordinates I had, way up in the woods near the state line with Pennsylvania. But I had to pull over after a few minutes of driving.

  My hands had started shaking. I steadied them by placing them in my lap after putting the car in p
ark on the side of the road. I took a few deep breaths.

  “Just adrenaline,” I said aloud, to no one else. “Just all worked up for a fight and he wasn’t much of one.” My body was reminding me that what I’d said to the doctor about hurting people had been true. I thought about how easily I could’ve broken his arm. I could hear the snap of broken bone. I gave my head a shake.

  I felt a chill, and then suddenly sweaty. My stomach roiled. I was glad I hadn’t eaten anything.

  I turned on the car’s AC, said aloud, very carefully, “He sold drugs to kids who came to him for help.”

  That seemed to calm it, me, the body that I suddenly didn’t have much control of, down. I put the car back into gear and eased onto the road. It was a solid half hour from where I was now.

  I drove robotically, thinking only of finding the kid. The kid who might be a drug addict, or at least a user, whose friend was worried enough about him to start buying Naloxone off their school psychiatrist.

  “Which means she knew to do it, and other kids know it. If other kids know it, faculty know it. How does that kind of rot spread?”

  I put that out of my head, because Google Maps told me I was close. It was a residential area, but the kind where every house had an acre or so of land around it.

  I pulled up across from my destination. Tall privacy fence around the back. Heavy drapes in the windows. No lights on that I could see.

  “Well,” I said aloud. “It’s bright goddamn daylight on a Saturday, I have no backup, no weapon, and nobody knows where I am.”

  I decided to doublecheck the no weapon part. I killed the engine, took the keys, and opened the car’s lockbox under the passenger seat.

  No gun, thank Christ. No Taser. No spray.

  But there was a novelty paperweight of the kind sold in any number of shops along Route 40 between New Castle and Baltimore. Which is to say a heavy piece of metal with a handle and sturdy, even pointed, loops around the knuckles. I slid my fist into it.

  A little tight, but it would do. I felt better.

  With my hands in my pockets I walked straight up to the door of the building. No signage, but there was a small, cheap-looking camera pointed right at the front door. I couldn’t see any lights on it but I did keep my head down.

  “I gotta start wearing a cap,” I muttered.

  I tried the door and it slid open at the slightest push.

  Inside it was a goddamn ghost town.

  I felt anger well up in me, and I wanted to rush into the place and start tearing it apart. I stood in place and counted, slowly, to ten, with my eyes closed. Then I tried to do it in Latin. Then Greek. I didn’t get past four in either one.

  It was a pretty standard three-story home. I didn’t know what kind of style. The kind where you walked into the living room. There was a large TV against the wall to my left and a ring of chairs near it. Beyond that I could see the kitchen. A set of stairs rose up on the other side, and in the kitchen it looked like there was a basement door.

  First, I went and touched the back of my hand to each of the chairs in front of the TV. Two were warm. Then I went into the kitchen.

  Dishes were piled in the sink, cheap plastic stuff, with plastic silverware that looked like it was designed for children. All color-matched. I grabbed a towel from where it sat on the counter and immediately regretted it when I felt an accumulation of sticky grit on it. But I used it to open the fridge anyway.

  Lots of packaged and processed stuff, water bottles, individual juice boxes. Individually wrapped cheese slices, a huge stack of industrial lunchmeat.

  The fridge was dirty. I wouldn’t be surprised to find roaches in the folds of the part that sealed the door.

  I gave up on the kitchen and went upstairs. There were three bedrooms. One had a queen mattress and box spring on the floor, shoved in a corner, with sheets strewn all over it. The other two had single mattresses laying on the floor, with cheap blankets and cheap, uncovered pillows on them.

  Heavy metal bars had been mounted on the walls of that bedroom, on all sides. I went and tested them, pulling on them with my hand wrapped in the towel.

  If I laid down and braced my feet against the wall, I could yank them clear. I had no doubt. But if I was shackled to one? If I was an addict, or in a haze from being medicated?

  They were at just the right height to shackle an ankle or wrist and keep someone from slipping away in the night.

  A bathroom with a glass-walled shower. None of it had been washed and all of it reeked. I forged in anyway, wishing for a clean towel to cover my mouth with. The mat in front of the shower was still wet. Hair lined the sink and the drain in the shower.

  With the towel still wrapped around my hand, I pulled open the linen closet. Plain white shelves stacked with junk.

  Including an industrial quantity of Ioperamide, both Immodium and the generic variety. Box after box of it. Ladders had been providing “services” and “therapies” alright. The absolute bottom tier of both, but for top shelf prices. Gen had redacted most of what was on the claims statements she’d turned over, but the charges for Ladders had been long enough to put four or five digits before the decimal.

  I turned on my phone’s flashlight, and reminded myself, not for the last time, that I should bring my damn Maglite on investigations and not just door jobs. I squatted down — wincing as my ribs rebelled — and peered into the closet.

  There was a clear handprint in the back, where no boxes of anti-diarrhea medicine — or in this case, poor man’s Methadone — were stacked.

  A section of wall slid open. Inside it were two marble notebooks, the kind I remembered from middle school. Piles of receipts. And two plastic zipper bags full of much smaller bags, each containing white and beige pills. I popped open one of the notebooks. It was indecipherable, giant block-like letters that I couldn’t make any sense out of. Definitely not English. Perhaps a kind of code.

  I took all the paperwork, stuffed the receipts inside one of the notebooks. I left the drugs.

  “Should probably get out,” I muttered. But there was still a basement. And the cord from the camera mounted by the door ran down to it.

  Down in it I found a bare concrete floor, a circle of chairs, some IV racks with nothing on them. A chest freezer. I almost dreaded opening it, but it was full of labeled sample jars — though there was a numbering system I couldn’t read.

  The other side was full of cheap frozen food. Pizzas, hot pockets, chicken nuggets, and popsicles.

  There were two windows high up on the wall, facing the neglected lawn. Below them was a simple folding table with a power strip connected to an extension cord. Several component cords were scattered around, as if they’d been left behind when a computer had been quickly disconnected. I looked carefully over the table. There were silver candy bar wrappers and empty Utz bags scattered around the table and the folding chair that sat in front of it. But there was definitely an undisturbed rectangle in the middle where a computer had sat.

  “Took the computer, disconnected the security camera,” I said, glancing up the wall, where the cord of the cheap camera had been sloppily secured to the wall with painter’s tape. “But forgot to go upstairs and get the secret shit.”

  My hand curled into a fist inside the towel and I wanted to bring it down in the middle of the table. I was furious. Thalheim had played me — sent me here when he knew he could scatter them somehow. Which meant there was another location out there.

  But I was closer, and I had threads to pull.

  I texted the address to Bob, along with a quick message. “Oh no. Help. Please come to this address immediately. Signed, P. Rob Ablecawz.”

  Just because I was angry didn’t mean I couldn’t take the time to poke fun at Bob. I hustled out of the place, folding up the towel and sticking it in my back pocket — after wiping the doorknob with it — and sauntered casually back t
o my car.

  I felt my phone buzz. I ignored it and drove.

  Chapter 30

  I debated driving home to the marina and the Belle or heading back to Thalheim’s. There’s no way he’d have stayed put, so I thought I better be a little oblique about approaching him. Plus, my ribs were throbbing and I wanted at least some Advil. It was almost 11 a.m. Sun would be over the yardarm soon.

  I settled on home. My phone buzzed a couple more times as I drove, but I wasn’t going to flagrantly ignore the rules about handheld phone use and driving. Not when I’d just burgled a house-slash-shady rehab clinic and had a passenger seat full of evidence I’d stolen.

  I was not eager to test the limits of the Cecil County Sheriff’s patience with my particular brand of derring-do.

  The drive passed easily, mostly with me hoping to find a list of addresses or patients in the notebooks I’d taken. But they had proved a mystery when I glanced at them at stoplights, the letters in them looking more like they were etched with a pen held in the fist rather than written.

  “Might be time just to go to the cops,” I wondered aloud as I turned into the marina.

  I stuffed the notebooks into the glove box of the car, and headed for my dock.

  Then I stopped and turned back to the parking lot. There was a bike in it. A big, shiny, chrome-and-gray bike. American, long exhaust, loud. It seemed out of place.

  There’s certainly crossover between bike owners and boat owners. All the same, I didn’t often see folks come out to the marina on their bikes. People came to their boats with coolers, PFDs, sunscreen, picnic baskets, cases of beer, fishing tackle, camping gear, luggage, folding bicycles. Or they came towing their boats just to use the launch, if they weren’t renting a slip and didn’t feel like driving to a free launch.

  But you didn’t do either of those things on a motorcycle. Sure, it could’ve been a friend of a renter. Could’ve been a lot of things.

  But I’d noticed it, and I didn’t notice things for no reason, in general.