Heat Storm (Castle)

by Richard Castle

  EIGHT

  STORM

  If you steal someone’s car, you return it with a full tank of gas. That’s just common courtesy.

  Derrick Storm would have also run the ’85 Thunderbird through a car wash, just as an extra little thank-you, had he not been afraid there’d be nothing left of the vehicle by the time it came out on the other side.

  The metered spot from which Storm had taken the T-bird was now occupied. But there was another spot available on D Street, two down from the original. So Storm parallel parked it, wondering what the owner would think about its magical teleportation and the sudden ability of the gas tank to fill itself.

  Storm’s last act was to tuck two twenties under the sun visor, deeming that an acceptable price for a short-term rental.

  He then hailed a cab and asked it to take him to his private garage near Dulles, where he would have gone in the first place had he realized his stay in the DC area was going to be extended.

  But, yes, Storm now realized he might be there for more than just a quick blackmail errand. Jedediah Jones was steeping himself in treachery, as usual, and until Storm could figure out why—why free Bart Callan? why do favors for the Shanghai Seven?—he wouldn’t be able to rest.

  He had an idea of a safe house where he could find sanctuary for the evening, where there was a man who might at least be able to help him brainstorm some ideas.

  However, first things first: wheels that weren’t stolen.

  A man of Derrick Storm’s wealth and connections could surely have afforded and procured any vehicle he chose. But none of the normal choices for a man in his profession felt quite right to him. A Lamborghini was too clichéd—and, plus, they were a pain to repair. A Maserati was too effete. An Aston Martin was too James Bond.

  No, there was only one make of car that felt right to Storm, and that was a Ford. As far as he was concerned, there was no finer automaker in the world.

  Commonplace? Certainly.

  Boring? Only to some.

  Unsexy? Don’t you dare think it.

  Storm just never felt better than when he was in a Detroit-made (or, okay, Kentucky, Alabama, or wherever it was Ford was assembling cars these days) product. It seemed only right for an American operative to have a great American car propelling him forward.

  He owned a small fleet of Fords, strategically stashed in the cities he was most likely to frequent. In Washington, his choice was a Ford Taurus. It was the SHO model, which meant it was the best Ford’s engineers—who were the best engineers in the world—could come up with, including a 365-horsepower twin-turbo engine that could shame anything Mercedes put on the road in the same class, a finely tuned suspension that Lexus would be proud to call its own, and a handling that compared favorably to any BMW you’d care to pick.

  But the Taurus took all that automotive excellence and wrapped it in the ordinary everyday package that was a midsize family sedan. It was, much like Storm himself, a car that hid its full capacity.

  By the time he felt the thrill of its engine vibrating in his heart, it was getting to be afternoon rush hour, a phrase that was something of a misnomer in the nation’s capital—it was really like rush four hours. Storm experienced the schadenfreude that was traveling east on the Dulles Toll Road at ten to fifteen miles above the speed limit while the entire population of Virginia’s Loudoun County sat inhaling its own exhaust fumes on the westbound side.

  His destination was a place where he often went to find solace from life’s thorniest problems. For some people that might have been a place of worship, a high-end day spa, or a trail high in the mountains.

  For Storm, it was a dowdy split-level ranch tucked in an unremarkable subdivision in suburban northern Virginia. Decades ago, every other house on the block had been more or less just like it, with only small allowances for individual variation. Since that time, the entire area seemed to have been swallowed by the suburban propensity for bigger, better, and more. What had slowly been regurgitated back out, one addition and one teardown at a time, would have been unrecognizable to the neighborhood’s original settlers.

  Only this one split-level remained in its original unaltered state. Storm pulled up the driveway until his progress was blocked about halfway by a thick block of a man whose hair was completely white— except for his eyebrows, which had somehow stayed black. His face was full of character, some would even say wisdom, but his age-defying chin had not gone watery and run down his neck, like some men his age. It was a chin that was strong as ever.

  The man didn’t own anything mechanical that was less than twenty-five years old. Even his car—a tank of a 1986 Buick—was older than a lot of the hipsters who were now starting to discover the neighborhood (but only ironically, of course).

  Arrayed in front of the man were the pieces of a machine that was even older. It may have once been a lawn mower. It was currently looking improbable it would ever become one again.

  “Don’t give me that look,” the man said as Storm approached. “If I had gone to the parts store they would have tried to sell me on a whole new spark plug.”

  “Yes. Heaven forbid if you had wasted an entire two dollars and forty-nine cents on that ridiculous suggestion.”

  “Well, come on,” the man protested. “Anyone could see the contacts just needed to be cleaned a little.”

  “And then, for the sins of the spark plug, you decided to punish the rest of the lawn mower?”

  “No. The carburetor was looking gummy. You don’t want to store it for the winter dirty. It just gets that much harder to clean it come spring. And then I had noticed the throttle was getting sticky. And I’ve been wanting to sharpen the blade for a while now. Just a little routine maintenance. What do you want me to do, go to the goddamn Lame Depot and buy one of those crappy Yamaguchis, or whatever the hell they’re called? They’re nothing but plastic and tinfoil. I’d just have to buy a new one in five years. But a Craftsman like this? Now, this is solid. This is worth taking care of. How many times I gotta tell you, if you get a good machine and you take good care of it—”

  “It’ll last forever,” Storm finished.

  “Damn right it will,” the man growled, wiping his brow on a grease rag.

  “Hi, Dad,” Derrick Storm said. “I’m glad to see nothing has changed around here.”

  “Hi, Son,” Carl Storm replied. “I’m glad to see you’re not wearing one of those two-thousand-dollar suits of yours.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because it means you can give your greasy old man a hug. C’mere, ya big lug.”

  The men embraced. Derrick, at six foot two, used to be two inches taller than his father. Now it was more like four. No one escapes gravity forever.

  “Now, I realize that the moment I kick it, you’re going to send this beautiful machine to the landfill,” Carl said. “And then someone is going to buy this place, knock it down, and build some palace where they get a lawn service to take care of the three square feet of grass that’s left. But, for now, why don’t you help me put this thing back together so I can get the damn lawn mowed?”

  * * *

  Three hours later, after they had reassembled the Craftsman and then mowed, trimmed, and blown the grass clippings off the driveway and sidewalk, the Storm boys were sitting out back.

  Carl’s deck chairs were from the 1980s, making them new by his standards. They were made of forged aluminum spanned by a series of plastic strips, the kind that left their dented impressions on your hamstrings and backside after you sat in them for more than thirteen seconds.

  Had the men been inside, it would have been Carl sitting on a Barcalounger and Derrick on a paisley sofa, also items that easily predated the first Bush presidency. And a blond woman with feathered hair would have been looking down on both of them from her picture on the mantel.

  That so little ever changed about the house was, in a strange way, that blond woman’s fault. Derrick’s mother had died in a car accident when he was five, leaving both he
r boys alone and bereft. Derrick slowly got over it—sort of. Carl never even made it to sort of.

  “She was a heck of a woman,” was the most Carl usually ever said about his wife before he had to excuse himself from whatever company he was in.

  The loss had brought Carl and Derrick together like nothing else could. A boy who grows up without a mother will become unusually close to his father—just like a boy without a dad will become steadfast in his love for his mother. It doesn’t matter if that woman is a steady homemaker, an eccentric actress, or some combination of the two. He’ll love her with ferocity.

  The same was true with Derrick and Carl Storm. And one of the things that bonded them was a kind of unspoken covenant that they would keep things in the house just as she had left them. Because if Mom made it that way, who were they to change it? The Storm residence had become a kind of living time capsule as a result.

  Carl’s fidelity to The Way Things Were went even beyond home decoration. Most men who became widowers at such a young age would have eventually started dating again and probably remarried. He was not only ruggedly handsome in his own right, he was also devoted, dependable, loyal, and gainfully employed—all the things women lust after once they reach the age when they finally realize Prince Charming is really just a guy who remembers to buy tampons at the grocery store.

  Yet, for all his desirability as a mate, Carl never seemed to look at other women, much less date them. He said it wasn’t out of some strange sense of allegiance to a ghost who could not love him back in the corporeal sense. He swore it was just because his dead wife had spoiled him for all other women.

  Derrick had asked him about it—just once—when he was seventeen, when sex was pretty much all he thought about and when that surge of teenage hormones had filled him with a keen appreciation for how much a heterosexual man (of any age) would yearn for certain comforts only a woman could provide. Derrick had fumbled his way through the wording of a question that had come out something like: Jeez, Dad, don’t you miss, you know, getting to, uh, have someone to, you know, sorta be with?

  “You mean, do I wish I could get a little ink for my quill now and then?” Carl had asked with a laugh.

  Then he dismissed his son with one sentence: “Once a man has been with a woman like your mother, it makes his standards a bit too high to go hopping in the sack with just anyone. Someday you’ll understand.”

  And Derrick did, eventually coming to see that sex was meant to be more than just an aerobic activity between consenting adults. Still, he wasn’t sure how much he bought his father’s “just waiting for the right woman” line. It probably would have been more convincing if Carl ever took off his wedding ring.

  The hand with the ring was now wrapped around a Pabst Blue Ribbon, Carl’s beer of choice. Ordinarily, Derrick would rather have drunk the old motor oil they had drained out of the lawn mower. Except even he had to admit that under these circumstances—a good sweat on the brow, the stink of grass and gasoline on his hands, the sun starting to get low in the sky after a few hours of manual labor—a PBR hit the spot.

  “So what’s going on?” Carl asked. “There aren’t airplanes dropping out of the sky, terrorists on the doorstep of the White House, or a biological threat that’s about to wipe out half the East Coast. At least not that I know of. Don’t tell me you’re just popping in on your old man for a visit?”

  “Not quite, Dad.”

  “Thank God. Because that would have been pretty damn boring.”

  Carl Storm was retired from the FBI. He still missed the action.

  Derrick grinned. “Okay, so when you were at the Bureau, did you ever hear of a consortium of Chinese businessmen referred to as the Shanghai Seven?”

  “Oh, sure. They were to the nineties what Cosa Nostra was to the fifties. They had their greasy fingers in all sorts of things. Anywhere you found a large Chinese population—New York, LA, wherever—you found offshoots of the Shanghai Seven. They had protection rackets, gambling operations, exotic animal smuggling, you name it. Chances were if you found a Chinese restaurant that couldn’t be bothered to do a brisk takeout business, it was really a front for the Shanghai Seven. A lot of what was sloppily referred to by the locals as ‘the Chinese mob’ was actually Shanghai Seven. We could just never seem to get any traction against them to get their slippery asses in court.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Carl said, taking a pull of his beer. “Part of it was they were good. And by good, I mean bad. They were willing to do whatever it took to keep their asses out of court. Witnesses changed their stories or disappeared. Coconspirators were either bribed or pressured into staying quiet. They ran a tight ship. I forget what the Chinese word for ‘omertà’ is, but the Shanghai Seven had it down pat.

  “The other part of it was just that we were, for lack of a better word, a little lazy. You had to dig pretty hard to find the connection between the punks on the streets and the bastards behind it all. It’s like those dandelions you were taking down with the Weedwacker just now. If you take the top off you can go to the special agent in charge, smile, and say, ‘See? All cleaned up.’ And from the curb, which is about as close as the SAC is going to get, it looks pretty good. But if you really want to get rid of them, you have to dig all the way down to the root. And the root can go pretty damn deep. In this case, when the root is all the way down in China, I think the Bureau kind of took the attitude that it was just unreachable.”

  “So they kept lopping the stem off the dandelion,” Derrick began.

  “And a new stem would grow back somewhere else,” Carl finished.

  “Still, I would have thought the Bureau would have eventually gotten tired of playing Whac-a-Mole. I mean, we do have an extradition treaty with China. Between that and RICO statutes, you could have gotten it done, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Carl said. “But I think around the time we were really going to get serious about things, our government gave them a golden opportunity to go legit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There was a big trade deal that opened up a lot of their markets to our stuff and vice versa. Suddenly, the Shanghai Seven could make money legally, so they left the illegal stuff behind.”

  “When was this? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it.”

  “Most Americans haven’t. It was the late nineties. It was one of those deals that sort of slid under most folks’ radar at the time, but it turned out to be a huge game changer in US-China relations. You want to know why we now have a three-hundred-sixty-whatever-billion-dollar trade deficit with China? That deal was a big part of it.”

  Derrick was curious enough that he slid out his phone and fired up a powerful leading technology, a proprietary investigative algorithm that he had learned was one of his best assets when he was under pressure to learn world secrets. It was called Google.

  “Huh, I’ll be damned,” he said.

  There on his screen was a long-forgotten press release about the United States agreeing to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in exchange for China lowering tariffs and opening its market to US goods. It was dated November 15, 1999.

  Derrick could feel his brain crackle. November 1999. Just like the taped recording of Cynthia Heat and Nicole Bernardin. Did one have anything to do with the other?

  “So try out a hypothetical with me,” Derrick said. “Say you’re the Shanghai Seven. This trade bill has just been passed, and you’re seeing dollar signs, because McDonald’s is about to move into half the neighborhoods in China—and someone is going to have to build all those McDonald’s. And on the other side of the globe, you know there are a bunch of American corporations who are eying the world’s largest labor force, knowing it’ll be willing to work for cheap. And if you’re the Shanghai Seven, you’re figuring you can get a piece of that, too.”

  “Right, exactly. It would have been a time of boundless possibility.”

  “Except, of course, you’ve got t
his little problem—and this brings me to the case I’m working on now,” Derrick said. “Because you’ve been into all this dirty stuff that might make the American corporations take their business elsewhere. Like, for example, you have this counterfeiting operation, and suddenly there’s this American intelligence agent who’s onto it and is now trying to gather more evidence. And the agent may have tripped across some funny money that has one of the Shanghai Seven’s fingerprints on it.”

  Carl Storm chortled.

  “What’s so funny?” Derrick asked.

  “I can already tell you, that American intelligence agent is in a world of trouble. The Shanghai Seven went into a mode for a while right when it was shifting operations where it had a bunch of loose ends to tie up. That agent would have been one of those loose ends. The Shanghai Seven would have done whatever it could to put that guy in the ground.”

  “That gal, actually.”

  Carl cocked one of his dark eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Really. And somehow she survived. She faked her own death and has been in hiding for seventeen years.”

  “She sounds like a heck of a woman,” Carl said, draining what was left of his PBR.

  Derrick studied his father for a moment. It wasn’t often Derrick heard the old man compliment a woman who wasn’t his late wife—with the same phrase, no less. But Derrick decided not to make an issue of it.

  “Okay, so then here’s another question,” Derrick said. “I was just in Shanghai last week. I blew up a counterfeiting operation that was allegedly connected to the Shanghai Seven. What would make them want to go back into that kind of business?”

  “Didn’t the Chinese stock market drop something like half its value not long ago? If I know the Shanghai Seven, they were probably up to their necks in it, and leveraged to the hilt on top of it. Now that they’ve lost their shirts, they’re falling back on old bad habits. Counterfeiting is an art as much as anything. Once you have people skilled in it, it’s probably hard to resist using their talents when you suddenly find yourself short on dough.”