Rigged

by Jon Grilz

  “Wouldn’t do much good, I suppose,” Charlie said, his response to Damon’s offer to take a swing at him. Sherry couldn’t believe Charlie didn’t take him up on it. She kind of hoped he would, just to show that asshole what it felt like.

  “You’d feel better,” Damon said. He smiled at Charlie, grandstanding like he always did.

  Meanwhile, Sherry didn’t know why the Wheelers hadn’t been a lesson learned. She didn’t want to see anyone else die. She kept whispering to Billy that they should leave, but he kept pushing her away, saying Luther had their junk and that they needed to stay.

  “Maybe I’d feel better,” Charlie said, “but, if we’re being honest, with me about to die anyway, I wouldn’t waste a good punch on you anyway. Personally, I’d rather bitch-slap you.”

  Damon bristled at the mention of the strike. Maybe it was the idea that Charlie had just called him a bitch, or maybe it was the idea of him getting hit like he’d hit so many women in the past. Still, after a moment, Damon flashed a little smile and lifted his chin just slightly, as if to give Charlie a target. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Go ahead and what?”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, you can give me one shot. Make it a good one.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope, call it a last request for Kay’s brother. I’ll let you die feeling like you put up a fight,” Damon said and held his arms out to the sides.

  Charlie poked the brim of the porkpie hat so it rose a little on his forehead. He looked like he didn’t believe Damon would actually let him slap him, but he shrugged. “Okay,” Charlie said. “Don’t flinch now.”

  Damon stood like a statue, his eyes looking off at nothing, as if he didn’t care; then again, it could have just as easily been because he didn’t want to flinch and look like a punk in front of his guys—not that getting bitch-slapped would look any better. Sherry could only imagine the things Damon would do after to save face.

  Charlie brought his hand back and paused. He looked around at the guys and their guns, as if he thought they might shoot him before he got his one last slap against the guy who’d killed his sister.

  That was a trip too. Sherry wasn’t sure she understood the whole story, something about Kay being the guy’s sister and him wanting drugs or something or a new hat or something.

  When it looked like everyone in the room was just as content to watch Charlie slap Damon, Charlie turned his shoulders in a weird way, as if almost turning his back to Damon.

  Sherry started to creep away, pretty sure that the slap would cause more than a few bullets to fly.

  The slap missed—sort of. Charlie swung his hand for the follow-through, but instead of slapping Damon, he slammed the bottom of his hand into Damon’s throat, like something in those phony old Chopsocky films Sherry’s dad used to watch. It sounded like something crunched on impact, but Charlie kept his momentum forward, moving around Damon.

  Damon just stood there, his eyes bulging like a pug’s, making a weird kind of gasping, moaning noise.

  Charlie peeked out from behind Damon’s wide shoulders to find that everyone had their guns drawn, though they were frozen in disbelief at the sight before him. “Okay, guys,” Charlie said. “Here’s the deal. I just crushed your bosses windpipe, and he’s gonna die pretty soon, probably. I understand if you want to kill me, but you need to know that he’s dead because he killed my sister, and that’s all. That’s the only reason I came here. I don’t give a good goddamn about your business or any of this drug shit.”

  Damon was still moaning, and it looked as if he’d begun to droop down in his stance.

  “Now, if you’re a better shot than I am, you can probably kill me pretty easily, or maybe you’ll just shoot through your former boss, but there are all kinds of things around here that go boom. Trust me. Explosives are sort of what I do.”

  Sherry looked around, as did everyone else. She hadn’t seen them before, but there were gas tanks and boxes of chemicals everywhere. What the hell are all those doing there? She moved toward the door, keeping both eyes fixed on what was going on. She could tell they were all thinking about it, and she just wanted to get out of the door before they killed Charlie and possibly themselves in the process.

  “Here’s the thing,” Charlie said. “I had to light a car on fire and try to find a train crossing MP3 on a flip-phone before you guys finally found me. In that time, I got bored and made a call to the police, so now they’re waiting for a follow-up call. My plan was to tell them to go somewhere else. Let me go, and I’ll send them on a wild goose chase. Otherwise, I’m guessing they will be here pretty quick.”

  “Bullshit,” Luther said. He was big and mean-looking like Damon, but at least twenty years old with a crew cut, and looked like an overweight drill sergeant. He had Sherry’s drugs, after all, and that was all she really wanted.

  “Doesn’t really matter if you believe me, but you might wanna think about how I got away from Rook and five other guys. I couldn’t have been alone.”

  It looked like Damon’s eyes were starting to roll in his head, like he was dying.

  Sherry reached for the doorknob without turning her back.

  “I have a couple friends who are more than willing to clean this house, but if you let me go, they won’t have any reason to.”

  The guns looked back and forth at each other as if they didn’t know what to do without Damon telling them.

  “Well, I don’t see any guns other than ours,” Luther said. “Can these supposed friends of yours kill us before we kill you?”

  “Honestly,” Charlie said, “I don’t know.”

  Luther cocked the hammer on his gun. “Well, I don’t think they can.”

  Charlie’s eye narrowed, and only his left eye was visible as he peeked out from around Damon’s lolling head. “That’s why you’re gonna die.”

  And the room exploded in fire and blood.

  Perez sat inside the open door of his car as the firefighters did their job. He’d been out to Damon’s farm more than a few times with warrants, but they’d never found anything. It only made sense that any dealings Damon had would be offsite. Perez had never been at the farm he was currently parked at, but it didn’t look like much. As the sun came up over the horizon, he watched the ground slowly light up the seemingly insignificant barn.

  Nikki walked up to him with a clipped gait. “Dogs are going crazy. There must be over 200 kilos in there, and there’s no telling how much went up in the fire.”

  “Got a body count?” Perez asked as he got up out of the car.

  “Could be as many as a dozen, but they’re only finding charcoal and body parts so far.”

  “Anyone identifiable yet?”

  Nikki shook her head. “Hard to tell. There are bullet casings everywhere. This deal went wrong in so many ways.”

  “Maybe,” Perez said. “How about money?”

  “We found some remains of hundreds, but they’re just kind of flying in the wind. The money coulda burned up.”

  Perez laughed. “Right. As if they’d carry millions of dollars around unbound. There were stacks of cash, and that means a lot more than a few bills floating around. I want that money found, and I want IDs on the bodies.”

  “You think Damon is in the pile?” Nikki asked.

  “I hope so,” Perez said. He walked up to the edge of the foundation and looked at it all. It really was a strange picture. A few firefighters had thrown up upon entering the scene, and Perez couldn’t blame them. From where he stood, he could see three arms and what looked like a leg.

  Nikki and Perez walked the area and gathered the occasional report from paramedics and firefighters who’d discovered more body parts. It looked as if a lot of the bodies had suffered gunshot wounds, and a couple, with tattoos on the backs of their neck indicating they were Wheelers, had caved-in skulls—another loss for which Perez felt no urge to mourn.

  Perez spent the entire day there as his officers and the firefighters catal
oged body parts and identified who they could from the police mug shot books. A few stacks of bills were found, but not more than $10,000, nowhere near the value of the recovered drugs.

  It was late afternoon when Nikki kicked through the debris and pulled up the one thing Perez hadn’t expected to see: a porkpie hat, the brim singed and the top burned out. She brought it over to Perez.

  “So much for Charlie?” Nikki asked.

  “Not until we ID the body,” Perez said, not willing to let it go.

  Nikki handed her partner a pack of matches. “This was under the hat.”

  Perez turned it over in his hand.

  “You know the place, Boss?”

  Perez was familiar with the rest stop diner near the Minnesota border, as he’d stopped there before when going to visit his wife. The booklet was empty except for one match on the far left side and “:30” written under the jacket.

  “Any idea what it means?” Nikki asked.

  “Probably from one of the corpses. Who knows?” Perez said and put the booklet into an evidence bag.

  Nikki leaned up to the car next to her partner. “So it’s over, huh, Boss?”

  Perez turned back to his car and climbed in. “It’s never really over, Nikki.”

  Chapter 27

  Two days later, at one thirty p.m., Sergeant Mark Perez walked into the Good Eats Diner near the Minnesota border and sat down at the counter. He was on his way to see his wife at the Mayo Clinic and stopped for something to eat.

  There was only one other person at the counter, a trucker-looking guy with a flannel shirt and a gray winter hat pulled back high on his forehead.

  Perez set a plastic bag with a ruined hat in it on the counter between himself and the man. “You look better in the porkpie,” Perez said.

  Charlie wiped his mouth and put the fork and knife back on the plate with what remained of his waffles. “I agree,” he said, “but it happens. I was wondering if you’d get the message.”

  “Actually, I was here yesterday and stayed overnight just in case that matchbook really was from you.”

  Charlie smiled. “I’m impressed. I figured it’d take you a day to find it, let alone to figure out it might be a message.”

  “How much of it was ever real?” Perez asked.

  Charlie sipped at his coffee cup and set it down gently. “My name is Charlie,” he said, “and Kaitlyn was my sister.”

  “So the tumor, the revenge plot—all that was fake?”

  Charlie looked down. “Didn’t you wonder why Nikki was able to pull my supposed file so easily?”

  Perez felt his face warm up, maybe even blush. “She’s got friends in the military.”

  Charlie smiled. “Uh-huh. Friends with a pretty high level of clearance—at least high enough to get the profile that got set up. The tumor was a little tasteless I thought, given your wife’s condition, but there was the chance that sympathy would play, maybe keep a bullet out of me or least cause a second thought before a trigger was pulled. People treat you different when they know you’re sick.”

  Perez sat in silence, doing what he could to backtrack, trying to figure out what was real and where it had all gone off the tracks. “Why, Charlie? Why go through all this? The CIA doesn’t have any reason or jurisdiction to be here for some meth bust.”

  Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Assuming that I am who you think I am, you know I couldn’t speak with any certainty.” Charlie paused. “You remember those commercials that came out right after 9/11? Those ones that said if people buy weed, they’re supporting the terrorists?”

  Perez nodded.

  “Well, let’s say there was a sect of al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab or some other group you’ve never heard of operating almost off the grid on plans for another attack on U.S. soil. Then let’s say, through intelligence gathering, you found financial threads to the group that wrapped all around the world, like the butterfly effect. Maybe they didn’t know they were a part of it, but they were. And let’s say as those threads are getting pulled at, you find there is a pretty successful drug operation being used as a money-laundering front by these bad men. Would you say that could be probable cause for OGA to get involved?”

  Perez just looked over at Charlie, who seemed to stare at nothing, looking like a cold, blank slate. He had trouble wrapping his mind around the CIA being in his town, but with the involvement of the Other Government Agency branch—agents dedicated to secret operations—Perez was just happy that it was all over.

  Charlie went on, “Then imagine that you’re looking into the players. You have guys who get close to the operation and send back intel, pictures, and everything, and in one of those pictures you see someone who looks familiar, only from so long ago that it’s like you’re trying to remember a dream. How messed up is that? A guy not remembering his sister on sight? Then the idea comes in to use that angle, to go and find the operation, to use the sister to get closer to the inner workings. You draw up a back-story and plant it shallow, in case anyone is even somewhat competent at digging, and then you go on your merry way. You run the operation like you know how to run operations, only you find out that the sister is dead.” Charlie paused.

  “Did you know Kay was involved? That it was her idea to come to North Dakota?” Perez asked.

  Charlie looked up at him, wondering how he knew.

  “The Baker. He talks even more than you.”

  Charlie looked back down and slowly spun his coffee cup on the counter. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know. The problem with intelligence is that it’s hard to know whose idea anything is, on either side.”

  “What about the other two spooks?” Perez asked. When a waitress walked over, he ordered a cup of coffee.

  “Good to have friends. It’s not the best idea to go into a new place as conservative about their firearms policies as North Dakota without someone keeping an eye on you. Personally, I thought the Town Car and sunglasses were a bit over the top, but they convinced me otherwise. Why does everyone think trained operatives would walk around like tourists? The average person spends so much time surrounded by fiction that they start to accept it as reality.”

  “So that was just more story? You left it to me and Nikki to infer that those guys were chasing you down, maybe so we’d leave you be and let the Agency police its own?”

  Charlie put his hand over his cup as the waitress filled Perez’s mug and asked if Charlie wanted more. “Sounds like a good idea in this hypothetical scenario. Should a guy find himself surrounded by guns, backup would be a good way to get out.”

  “It got sloppy though. That explosion at Dick and Clarence’s trailer, was that part of the plan? The M.E.’s report said Clarence was dead before the explosion. His chest was caved in.”

  Charlie sighed and looked down. His mouth was open, and his jaw moved, but no words came out at first. “You’ve seen what meth does, right, Sergeant? I have, thanks to research, but you’ve seen the mothers and fathers who ignore crying babies because they’re high or wanna get high, right? Three-year-olds in recovery programs?” Charlie balled up a fist, and Perez could hear restraint in his voice. “How can a man see that kind of thing, babies suffering, and still stay on point?”

  “I don’t know. You just have to,” Perez said.

  Charlie nodded. “Yeah, that’s what they said when they pulled me out of the Congo after sixteen men from a rebel patrol were found. They were on their way back from burning down a village full of women and children. Maybe the only reason the Agency didn’t burn me was because I left two who could talk and corroborate my story. Even that—”

  “You took a lot of risks,” Perez said. “There’s a lot of evidence left behind.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Charlie asked. “I’m guessing the forensics will be pretty inconclusive, assuming you guys have a lab. A lot of bodies, the guns that match the bullets, even the ones in some bodies about thirty miles out of town at a trucker graveyard. Plus explosions tend mess up body positioning. You’ll find a lot of
fingerprints, none of which are mine. In the end, all you have is a guy who came into town in a funny hat and IDed his dead sister.”

  “That’s still something,” Perez said.

  Charlie shrugged. “I knew this wasn’t a zero-residual presence op when I took it. I figure they’ll send me back to the sandbox anyway. Kay was my last tie to American soil, so who knows what’s next?”

  Perez looked away from Charlie and took a sip of the steaming-hot coffee. “We haven’t found Damon’s body yet.”

  Charlie didn’t move.

  “I take it we won’t, will we?”

  “The way I hear it, the size of the explosion is gonna make it hard to piece the body parts together. Then again, if there were a person with intimate knowledge of the trafficking and laundering, I’d guess he’d be a valuable source, even if, through a lapse in judgment, he had his vocal cords collapsed. The guy can still write, I suppose.” Charlie took out his wallet and put some cash on the counter.

  “There’s just one more thing I’m wondering about,” Perez asked. “The Baker seems as scared about going to prison as anyone I’ve ever met, so he’s been telling us a lot.”

  “Oh yeah?” Charlie said.

  “He said some huge deal was supposed to be going down the night of the explosion.”

  Charlie looked up at Perez, but he didn’t say anything.

  “The thing is, we found a whole lot of meth around, and the area was practically toxic for hours after the explosion—so bad that the firefighters first on the scene had to be treated for inhalation problems. There was all that product, which Damon would never keep around, but no money.”

  “Weird,” Charlie said.

  “Why would someone as cautious as Damon bring all that product in without any money changing hands?” Perez asked.

  Charlie adjusted his hat, pulling the brim of it a little further down his brow. He looked at his watch, then reached down at his side, where Perez couldn’t see because of the position of the stools. He slid a duffle bag over. “As long as we’re talking in hypotheticals, if a cop had a sick wife and was offered some found money—unmarked cash that really didn’t belong to anyone and would probably just wind up in some evidence locker for all time—would the cop take it? Especially if that money was enough to cover the cost of a surgery that might save her life.”