Rose City Kill Zone

by DL Barbur

  So after we got cleaned up, checked ourselves for any wounds we’d missed, and surrendered our weapons into evidence, we spent the next few hours being grilled by the US Attorney for the State of Oregon, Ana Burke. She’d insisted on being kept up to date on our investigation and now that we’d made such a spectacle of ourselves, she was doing the post-shooting interviews herself.

  She was pissed, and I didn’t blame her. When I’d worked for the Portland Police Bureau, you had the right to cool your jets for twenty-four hours before you had to give a statement about a shooting. I had no idea if I was entitled to that at this job since I’d never even seen so much as a written policy or procedure manual. I decided not to push it with Burke, so I played ball.

  She grilled me for over an hour, and I answered honestly, for the most part. I left out the parts about the illegal cell phone hacking. I was pretty sure she already knew about that, but we weren’t going to make it part of the official record. I gave honest answers about when I’d fired, and why. She was particularly thorough about having me describe why I’d shot Bloem.

  Finally, we wrapped it up. We both stood and walked out in the hallway.

  “Ok,” she said. “Now let’s go off the record.”

  As far as I knew, there were no recording devices in the hallway. I just stood there and looked at her for a second. I didn’t know much about Burke, other than she was in her early fifties, maybe ten years older than me, and had been a well regarded Multnomah County Prosecutor before landing her job with the Feds. I had no idea whether I could trust her or not, or how far she was willing to bend the rules.

  “This was a colossal fuck up,” Burke said.

  I nodded. I couldn’t argue with that, but I wasn’t about to agree out loud.

  “Bolle is in danger of being shut down. He’s got enemies you don’t even know about. One more fuckup like this and unemployment will be the least of your worries. There are people that want to find a way to put you all in prison.”

  The truth was, there were plenty of people who would love to see us in the ground.

  “We’ll be careful,” I said.

  She stepped closer.

  “Any news on Marshall?”

  Bolle had been a stepping stone, a way to get to our ultimate quarry: Henderson Marshall. He was the millionaire owner of an aviation company that specialized in moving stuff around the world for the US intelligence community. Along the way his company had been involved in human trafficking, smuggling young homeless women from the United States to different parts of the world. One faction of his company had aided and abetted the two terrorist attacks we’d stopped.

  We still weren’t sure what he knew. He’d gone into hiding, releasing the occasional video statement to the world. The guy was either off his rocker or a genius. I wasn’t sure which. His videos had made him a celebrity among the conspiracy-minded, anti-government groups that flourished on the internet.

  I shook my head. “Nothing new.”

  She stepped closer yet, close enough that I could smell perfume, which was surprisingly flowery.

  “He needs to go down. But he needs to be alive. You have a bad habit of putting people on a slab. I’m not sorry to see them go, but I want Henderson Marshall sitting in a room, with some bright lights aimed at him, telling me everything he knows. I won’t make any new friends going after him and his cronies, but he’s worth a little career suicide.”

  “Ok,” I said. “I want him too.”

  She slid a Post-it note into my hand.

  “It’s a secure line. Use it if you need it.”

  She turned and walked away, leaving me standing there.

  I fingered the note on my way down in the elevator. In any normal command structure, any communication I would have with the US attorney would go through Bolle. Jumping my chain of command would be unthinkable.

  But this really wasn’t a normal command structure.

  The surveillance van was the only vehicle we’d been driving that day that hadn’t been shot to pieces. I found it idling in the basement garage of the Federal Courthouse, sitting in a puddle of water dripping from the air conditioner. Even down here, it was hot and stuffy.

  Henry was behind the wheel. He looked half asleep, but as I walked up the side door slid open. The van was big, but with the racks of electronic gear, it was still cramped inside. Casey was sitting in a swivel chair, wearing a headset and looking at three different computer monitors at once. Eddie was crammed into a fold-down seat between two equipment racks, looking morose. I took a seat across from him and slid the door shut. Henry dropped the van into drive, and we pulled out of the cave-like garage into the blistering sunlight.

  “Bolle is at police headquarters, trying to smooth things over with the locals,” Casey said. “Jack is going to drive him back to base later. Alex is finishing up at the hospital. Grogan is settled in and doing ok, all things considered.”

  Jack was our pilot. Our unit had its own helicopter, but it had been grounded today due to some overdue maintenance. I’d asked myself more than once if having an air unit available would have helped with today’s debacle, and still hadn’t arrived at an answer.

  Casey punched a combination into a little safe bolted to the floor of the van, reached in and handed me a bag containing a Glock, spare magazine, a holster, and a magazine carrier. I grunted my thanks and strapped it all on, glad to be armed again.

  I settled back into the uncomfortable chair and listened to the hum of the tires on asphalt. It bothered me how normal I felt. I’d been in gunfights before. I’d killed men before. But always before, I’d been wired and anxious afterward. Now I was just hungry and wanted a nap. It seemed like getting in a raging gunfight shouldn’t be just another day at the office.

  Our little task force had blown its cover last month when we’d foiled a terrorist attack at the Portland Zoo. It hadn’t taken any geniuses to figure out the little black helicopter that was seen at the Troutdale Airport, was the same one seen hovering over the Portland Zoo with a sniper strapped to the side. We had a cozy little set up in an abandoned factory out by the airport, and had scrambled to find a replacement site that was both discreet and secure.

  In the end, we wound up in jail.

  In 2003, Multnomah County Oregon had spent millions to construct a brand new, state of the art, jail. They then promptly refused to provide any funds to operate it, and it sat empty, never housing an inmate for a decade and a half. It had been the focal point of numerous political debate, and no small amount of derision. Rumor had it the county was getting close to a deal to sell it, but for now it still sat empty.

  It was perfect for us. It sat on a dead end street in an industrial area and was surrounded by a fence topped by razor wire. It had excellent communications facilities, a surveillance system, a medical facility, and a full commercial kitchen. There was also room to set up a portable shelter under which we could hide our helicopter. We’d thrown some cots and mattresses in some of the empty offices and called it home.

  It suited our needs for another reason: it was a bona fide correctional facility. We’d played fast and loose with some laws regarding the housing of prisoners at our old site. We could have been fairly accused of running an off the books, black site prison. Not so in this place. We’d had a cell all picked out for Bloem and a plan on how we could keep him under guard in strict accordance with all the relevant laws.

  Instead, he was sitting in a hospital room, doped up on painkillers, with a gunshot wound to the chest and a traumatically amputated arm.

  Things had not gone according to plan.

  The front gate rattled open, courtesy of Dalton, who was well into a twelve-hour shift as our dispatcher. We were chronically short-handed, and losing two people wasn’t going to make that better.

  We parked by the sally port where inmates would have been unloaded and buzzed our way in with key cards. Since it had never been used to house inmates, Wapato didn’t have the usual jail aroma that consisted of a mix of unwash
ed ass, body odor, disinfectant, bad food, desperation, and despair. Instead, it just smelled stale and empty. I didn’t like living here and took every chance I could to get out on the street. The place was giant, empty and echoing. It gave me the creeps.

  Henry and Casey disappeared into their lair, a room they’d crammed full of computers and other gear. Eddie walked off by himself without a word. I was worried about him, but now wasn’t the time to deal with that. With Bolle gone, one of us had to try to get a handle on our situation, and as usual, that fell to me.

  I followed the smell of coffee to our command center. Originally this room had been the central control facility for the jail. From here we could lock and unlock almost all of the doors and monitor close to a hundred cameras. With the addition of some radios, it was the perfect place to direct our efforts.

  Dalton was on the phone when I walked in. He pointed to a corner where the heavenly smell of black coffee was coming from and I filled a mug. Dalton and Henry were both coffee snobs, each hell-bent on besting each other to make the finest brew. I was happy to be caught in the middle.

  Dalton hung up the phone and rolled over to me, clutching his own mug. He’d been in a wheelchair since a bullet shattered his femur a few weeks back. Most people would be lying in bed gobbling pain pills, but Dalton put himself to work, pulling long shifts in the command center. He had a complicated metal brace around his leg, and always seemed to have an unhealthy pallor, but he was invaluable to us right now. I admired the former Delta Force operators fortitude, but wondered what it said about us that we depended on a guy recovering from a major injury to keep our operation running.

  He held out his mug and I filled it. The brew was excellent, bitter and complex. It tasted the way coffee smelled, maybe even a little better.

  “Jack should be pulling in with Bolle and Alex soon,” he said. “That was an absolute shitstorm today. How did it happen?”

  I walked him through it, step by step. When I got to the part where Bolle had tried to initiate the traffic stop by ramming Maddox’s car, Dalton shook his head in disgust.

  “That’s some crazy Hollywood bullshit right there. What was he thinking?”

  I took a drink and let the coffee just sit in my mouth for a minute. It was that good. Lately, I’d been thinking about just going somewhere so I could sit, sip coffee and read a book for a couple of days. If I had a normal life, I’d just take some sort of vacation, but these days I didn’t get to do things like that.

  “I think it’s desperation,” I said. “We haven’t had a lead on Marshall in weeks. I don’t know how that asshole managed to disappear with a business jet, but he did. We’ve hit every office, business location and home that Marshall owned and we’ve come up with nothing. I think Bolle is getting desperate. This little flying circus of his can’t last forever. It’s only a matter of time before somebody shuts him down so he needs to get some results.”

  Dalton fidgeted in his wheelchair. I noticed his eyes were a little glassy. I knew he was living with a ton of pain, only taking a half, or even a quarter of one of his painkillers when he just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “We can’t keep making this up as we go along,” he said. “There won’t be any of us left after a while. I want Marshall as much as anybody, but I’m beginning to wonder if sticking with Bolle is the way to make it happen.”

  The one thing every member of Bolle’s task force had in common was we’d all been wronged by Marshall and his cronies at some point. Bolle had his Army career destroyed. I’d nearly been thrown in prison, framed for a crime because I’d uncovered Cascade Aviation’s human smuggling scheme. Alex’s father had been killed by a bullet meant for me. Casey had been kidnapped and nearly killed, just because she’d helped me in my investigation.

  Eddie and Henry were a little less forthcoming with their histories, but they were clear that it was personal for them as well. Dalton’s army career had also been cut short by a run in with Marshall, but he’d never shared the details, and I hadn’t pressed.

  When Dalton talked about quitting Bolle’s task force, he wasn’t making plans so he could go sit on the beach and enjoy an idle retirement. We’d dropped plenty of bodies in the last few weeks, but Bolle was committed to the idea of putting Marshall in prison, and holding all his cronies accountable in court. He wanted to blow the lid off the corruption and expose it. What was unspoken between Dalton and me was that if we quit Bolle’s team, we’d be diving even deeper into the shadows. We’d keep going until Marshall was dead, or we were. This was a battle you couldn’t walk away from. Until Marshall was dead, or in prison, we’d all have to keep looking over our shoulders.

  I wondered if it would end, even then.

  Over Dalton’s shoulder, on one of the surveillance monitors, I saw a car pull up to the gate.

  “Looks like they are here,” I said and jerked my chin towards the monitor.

  Dalton buzzed them in, and that was the end of this conversation, for now. On the camera, I saw one of our black Suburbans pull up to the sally port. Alex got out and stretched, and I felt a physical sense of relief. My life was only further complicated by getting into gunfights with my girlfriend, and even though intellectually I knew she was ok, I hadn’t seen her since I’d left her tending to a dying man while huddled behind a shot up car. By the time I’d returned from capturing Bloem, she’d been gone, tending to Grogan in the back of the ambulance.

  A minute or so later, Bolle walked into the command center. On the video monitor I saw Alex walking down a hallway towards the office we’d turned into a bedroom, no doubt looking for me.

  Bolle looked like he’d aged a decade since I’d last seen him. His suit was torn and dirty, and there were scratches all over his face. He was a big dude, taller than me, but cadaverously lean with an old-fashioned buzz cut. Usually, he looked like he could have played an FBI agent in a movie filmed in the 1950s. Right now he looked like a sack full of whipped dogshit, to borrow a phrase from one of my old drill instructors.

  He looked at us with a hundred yard stare.

  “They almost shut us down. I got them to agree to a compromise. From now on, the Justice Department wants us only to do investigative work. They’re flying in a tactical element from the HRT to handle any apprehensions.”

  HRT stood for Hostage Rescue Team, the FBI’s elite tactical element. Their bread and butter mission was hostage rescue, but they performed all sorts of tactical operations. If we’d had an HRT element with us this morning, Bloem and Maddox would have been face-down in the street wearing handcuffs before they knew what was going on. Even if it had devolved into a shootout, chances were we wouldn’t have had over a hundred bullets flying around a residential neighborhood and a dead agent.

  “Good,” I said. It was out of my mouth before I even realized I was going to say it. Normally, I didn’t talk much, and when I did I tried to think about what I said beforehand. But sometimes, my mouth got the better of me.

  “Good?” Bolle said. He looked like he’d been slapped. “How can you call this good? I don’t trust anybody with this investigation, not even anybody at the Bureau. The whole reason we’ve been able to come this far is because everyone on this team has some personal reason for being here. Their loyalty is unquestioned.”

  “If we keep going at this rate, there won’t be any of us left,” I said. The little voice in the back of my head said I should keep quiet, maybe have this conversation in a better moment, and in a different way. As usual, I disregarded it and steamrolled ahead.

  “We’ve already got two dead,” I said. “Streucker last month at the water reservoir, and now Byrd today. Grogan is out. Dalton can’t walk. We can’t keep taking losses like this. This isn’t a tactical team. Today my cover was a pair of computer nerds. They’ve come a long way but they should have never been in that situation.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off.

  “The biggest problem today is this: you fucked up. You should have never initiated
that stop by ramming Maddox’s car. That was a crazy ass move and it all went to shit. We’ve been playing cowboy for too long and our luck caught up with us.”

  All the color drained from his face and for a second I thought he was going to hit me. I braced myself for a knockdown drag out brawl. In the back of my mind, I wondered if he’d had a chance to replace the pistol that had been shot out of his hand this morning.

  He stood there with his teeth and fists clenched, staring at me. Then all the tension seemed to drain out of him. He pivoted and walked out the door without a word.

  I looked for my coffee cup and realized I’d set it down on the table next to me, as I unconsciously prepared myself for a fight. I picked it up and took a drink.

  “I probably could have handled that better,” I said after I swallowed.

  Dalton shrugged. “Truths need to be told, man. I agreed with everything you had to say.”

  He rolled back over to the desk by all our radios and other communication gear.

  “Hey,” I said. “You want me to take over?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. You go see that doc of yours. I’ll get Jack to spell me. He’s been out playing with the helicopter all day.”

  At first, Dalton had seemed to not approve of my relationship with Alex. After seeing us work together, and seeing that it didn’t impair our effectiveness, he seemed more ok with it. I thanked him for the coffee and left the command center, turning my conversation with Bolle over in my mind. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d told my boss exactly what I thought. It often didn’t turn out well.

  Fortunately, we didn’t have to live in cells. I would have drawn the line at that. Wapato had a huge wing devoted to administrative staff, and we’d set up our sleeping quarters in the warren of offices. Alex and I technically occupied two rooms right next to each other, out of some effort to keep up appearances, but we spent most of our time in her room. It actually had a window that overlooked the razor wire perimeter and Bybee lake beyond.

  She’d changed into shorts and a t-shirt and was sitting at a desk with a field stripped pistol in front of her when I walked in.