August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Sentimental value’s no value at all right now, Frank,” I said. “Anything else that puts us in the winner’s circle?”

  “Couple good jokes and movie-star looks?”

  Frank had called ahead and spoken to Colleen. She’d walked the perimeter of the house, taken some notes and made a hardware store list of supplies needed to beef up security. She’d also walked basement to attic, front door to back. Vivian had asked what she was doing. Colleen had told her the Farmers’ Almanac had predicted a Midwest winter full of heavy snows and subzero temperatures. She was simply putting things together to winterize the house.

  Colleen had also spun a story about her cousin Frankie, who’d just gotten out of the army and needed a place to stay for a while. Vivian was excited by the prospect of meeting another of Colleen’s family members. I asked Frank his first impressions of Colleen.

  “Oh, yeah, dude,” Frank said, “No doubt she can handle herself. Tough as hell. Smart, too. Plus she’s a country girl. Bein’ a son of Big Sky country I’m partial to country girls. My daddy used to say a country girl’s got about as much gold in their heart as they got dirt under their fingernails.”

  As I drove, I thought about Frank’s dad, and then about my dad—about the things our dads had taught us that turned us into military men. While my mother took pleasure in reading poetry to me when I was a child, my father would read me the battlefield psychology and philosophy of Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Carl von Clausewitz.

  “What possible reason could there be for a boy—a child!—to know about war?” my mother once said.

  “I’m not raisin’ a boy,” my father replied. “I’m raising a man. And maybe you ain’t noticed, baby, but this is a world of men chewin’ up boys for sport.”

  I thought now of Sun Tzu as I drove. Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.

  At Titan Securities Investments Group, I was greeted by the attractive black woman at the reception desk.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Snow.”

  “I need to see Kip Atchison,” I said. “Now.”

  The three well-dressed security guards who manned the lobby had, not unlike before, taken an acute interest in me. A young guy casually flanked me while the older athletically-built guy named Dax stood fifty feet behind me to the right. Two more guards—a massive black guy with no neck and a slab-of-gristle-beef white guy—stood resolutely by the elevators.

  The receptionist nervously searched my eyes for a moment, then quickly dialed four numbers and touched her ear.

  “Yes,” she said. “This is reception. I have Mr. Snow here. He wishes a few minutes with Mr. Atchison.” There was a long pause. A few nods. A couple of furtive glances at me. Then, “Yes, thank you. I’ll pass that on.”

  Of course, I knew what she was going to say but I waited around to hear it anyway: “I’m sorry, but Mr. Atchison is unavailable. If you’d like to make an appointment—”

  “You don’t mind if I just go up, do you?” I said, moving quickly from the reception desk toward the elevators.

  The brown-haired guard with wire rim glasses quickly made his way in front of me and blocked my path. “Mr. Snow,” he said. “ My name is Dax Randolph. I think we should—”

  “You think we should what, Dax?” I said. “Dance? Friend each other on Facebook? Share tapas?”

  “To begin with,” he said, with a forced smile and dead blue eyes, “I think we should calm down and—”

  Instead of listening to Dax’s advice, I juked right and moved left around him, continuing my hurried walk toward the elevators.

  The slab-of-beef white guard by the elevators took a step toward me.

  “I got him, sir,” the guard said, moving toward me. Before Dax could say anything, the guard took a swing at me. With overdeveloped muscles like his, speed and flexibility were severely compromised. Two jabs to his solar plexus, a right-cross to his jaw and a heel to the knee and he was down.

  I cut a look of combat readiness to the massive black guy.

  “Lousy pay, empty promises, now yo ass squarin’ off on me?” the big black security guard said. He held up the palms of his hands and shook his head. “Oh, hell no. Don’t need this shit. I’m out.” He yanked off his black clip-on tie, dropped it to the marble floor and walked past me out of the building.

  I felt Dax put a hand on my shoulder. I grabbed his hand, locked the thumb back and turned, bringing his arm up and behind his back. I brought my knee up into Dax’s kidney twice.

  The receptionist gasped and said, “Oh, God!”

  Dax wasn’t done. “This isn’t a smart thing to do, Mr. Snow,” he said as I pushed him away. He shook off whatever pain I might have caused and assumed a stance that was somewhere between well-trained karate and nasty Krav Maga.

  I deflected his first two quick punches with right and left forearms, absorbing the impact of his knee into the side of my right thigh. I countered with a heel to his left knee and a right hook to his jaw. Both attacks had impact, but not enough to put him down.

  “This is going to end badly for you, Mr. Snow,” Dax said, recovering quickly.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s give it a go.”

  The white security guard I’d laid out managed to get to his feet, but Dax held up a hand. “I got this.”

  I grinned. “Oh, you got this, huh?”

  All warfare is based on deception.

  Dax smiled at me. “Yessir. I do.”

  Bank customers who entered the lobby were hustled into a corner by two of the other security guards.

  “I would suggest you walk out of here under your own power, Mr. Snow,” Dax said, holding his stance, “or get carried out on a stretcher.”

  “I’d tell you to kiss my ass,” I said, “but I don’t want you getting that close to me.”

  “If necessary I will shoot you,” Dax said calmly as he circled to my right.

  “Not before I break the barrel of your gun off in your ass,” I said.

  Dax unleashed a flurry of kicks and punches. Some connected with my ribs and chest. I managed to deflect a few, but he was good. Better than I’d been in my prime marine days. And I’d been damned good.

  I managed to land a kick to his ribs that would have brought down an average man. Dax was no average man. He took the kick and countered with his own swing kick, which connected hard with my right shoulder and threw me against a marble wall. He didn’t waste time, moving in close and landing three high-speed punches to my stomach and one to my face, which he followed by an elbow to my right cheek. I went down on one knee. Dax dropped to a knee behind me, locked my neck in a chokehold and waited for my lights to go out.

  “Get the elevator,” Dax called out to the big white security guard.

  “Let him go.”

  Ray Danbury.

  Dax let me go. He stood, calmly adjusted his tie and smiled. I stayed on my knees for a few seconds, hoping not to pass out, throw up or both.

  August Snow: Tough Guy.

  “Officer,” Dax said, “this man—”

  “Quiet,” Danbury said. Standing to Danbury’s right was Leo Cowling, resplendent in a navy blue wool car coat and matching fedora. He was grinning ear to ear as he looked down at me. On Danbury’s left were two young uniformed cops. I recognized one: Aswan, the young Chaldean fresh out of the academy.

  “We’ll be filing a complaint,” Dax ventured.

  Danbury knelt down by me and whispered, “You okay?”

  “Lucky for him you got here when you did,” I said, catching my breath. The stars popping in front of my eyes dissipated. “I was wiping the floor with this jerk-off.”

  “Funny,” Danbury said. “Looked to me like he was using your face as a mop.”

  Cowling was smiling as Danbury helped me to my feet.

  Then Danbury handcuffed me, ha
nded me over to the two young patrolmen and quietly said to Aswan, “Take him to my car.”

  The patrolmen nodded and, hands firmly locked on my upper arms, led me outside to Danbury’s car. As they were marching me through the lobby, I called out in a voice loud enough for the bank’s patrons to hear, “Why won’t they give me my money? It’s my money! Twelve million! What have they done with my money? What are they doing with everybody’s money?”

  From behind me I heard Cowling shout, “Read him his rights and shut him the fuck up!”

  Outside, a small group of noonday onlookers gawked at the proceedings. A few—the ones who weren’t homeless—took video on their phones; maybe something other people could “Like” on Facebook, Snapchat or YouTube. I noticed a trash can and said to Patrolman Aswan, “You mind?”

  I leaned my head into the trash can and vomited.

  Vomiting in public is bad enough. Vomiting with your hands cuffed behind your back is enough to dislocate shoulders. Fortunately for me, I had strong shoulders.

  Once I’d completed my business, I stood upright. Aswan asked if I wanted a breath mint. He opened a tin and tossed two curiously strong mints into my mouth like a trainer tossing fresh herring into the mouth of a seal.

  “‘When you are the anvil, be patient—’” I said, chewing the mints.

  “‘—And when you are the hammer, strike hard,’” Aswan finished, then repeated the proverb in its original Arabic.

  I winked at him with my good eye, then got in Danbury’s car.

  Danbury didn’t say a word as Cowling drove us back to the 14th Precinct. Cowling kept looking back at me in the rearview mirror. If it were up to him, he would have driven me down to the river, given me a double tap to the back of the head, then gone to lunch at The Whitney.

  When we arrived at the 14th, Cowling pushed me toward a female officer and told her to throw me in lockup.

  I was in lockup for more than an hour. I figured Danbury needed to cool out before he saw my face again. In the meantime I made new friends.

  “Muhfuckin’ five-oh, man,” a black man wearing motorcycle club riding leathers grumbled. He had an Afro-mohawk and a variety of ear, nose and lip rings. “Niggah can’t catch a break in this goddamn town.”

  “I feel ya, bro,” I said. My right eye was puffing up and closing. My ribs ached and I hadn’t quite gotten my legs back.

  The large black biker furrowed his bushy eyebrows, glared at me with bloodshot eyes and said, “Wha’d the po-po jack yo ass fo?”

  I gave him a hard look and made sure he saw my swollen jaw and slowly closing right eye.

  “Killing a librarian,” I said. “With kindness.”

  Twenty-six

  “That’s why you called me down there?” Danbury shouted. “See some lame-ass mixed martial arts show?”

  “I thought you’d like it,” I said. I’d called Danbury just before I entered the TSIG building and invited him to witness a crime. “Especially the part where I got my ass kicked.”

  “That’s it. You just made it official,” Danbury said. “You and me? We’re done. I been tryin’ to keep you stowed away safe. Do what your daddy would’ve done. But that’s it. We’re fucking done.”

  Once again we were sitting in his office. Rather, I was sitting. Danbury paced around me like a lion sizing up the warm carcass of an antelope.

  I was still handcuffed.

  “This mean I won’t be getting the family Christmas card this year?”

  “Oh, you goddamn right you ain’t gettin’ no fuckin’ Christmas card!”

  The beehive of officers outside of Danbury’s office heard the boom and clash of his voice and all widened eyes were suddenly on Danbury. Cowling leaned against a desk, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest, smiling contently. This was what he’d been waiting for and now he had a front-row seat.

  Danbury walked briskly to the door of his office and shouted, “Don’t y’all niggahs got jobs to do that might—just fuckin’ might!—involve serving and protecting?”

  Then he slammed the door shut.

  For ten long, loud minutes Danbury excoriated me. If he’d had access to a blowtorch, I wouldn’t have had a face. He said the security guard was adamant about pressing trespassing and aggravated assault charges against me. And with that came another potentially embarrassing episode involving the department.

  “I’ve already had one call from the chief and another from the commissioner,” Danbury yelled. “The first call took my left cheek! The second call took my right cheek! You can see I ain’t got no ass left!”

  “I don’t know,” I said, leaning sideways in my chair for a better view. “Looks like there’s still quite a bit.”

  “You think this is a fucking joke?” Danbury pounded a fist on his desk. “Does it look like I’m goddamn laughing? You have any idea what I’ve done to keep your ass above ground while you out there dancin’ a minstrel show?”

  While Danbury eviscerated me, voices had been rising outside of his office, and now the door flew open. Cowling entered first. “I tried to stop her, boss.”

  Pushing past the much taller Cowling was FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” she said. She flipped out her badge and credentials.

  “I know who you are,” Danbury snapped.

  “Good,” O’Donnell said, the set of her mouth hard. “Seems we all know each other.”

  “Want me to toss the bitch?” Cowling said to Danbury.

  O’Donnell turned to Cowling, craning her neck to look at him. “That is an absolutely hideous tie. Who wears Jerry Garcia anymore?”

  I wanted to laugh but my cheek hurt like hell.

  Danbury gave Cowling a look and Cowling backed down.

  “My momma taught me to respect women,” Danbury growled. “But you barging in like this? Into my house? You ’bout to be the one exception to my momma’s rule and I don’t give a shit what your badge says.”

  “Wow,” O’Donnell said, channeling the calculating calm of Boudica the Celtic Warrior Queen. “I’d always heard about the hospitality of the Detroit Police Department, but …”

  “Hey, listen, O’Connell or O’Donnell or whatever-the-fuck-your-name-is,” Danbury said, “I don’t give a baboon’s swollen red ass if you’re FBI or not—”

  “You should.” O’Donnell took a seat next to me in front of Danbury’s desk. “You really should.”

  She unfolded two pieces of paper, one of which was a Chain of Custody Request signed by her director, and laid them neatly on Danbury’s desk. Danbury looked at the papers. Then he stared for a very long time at me.

  “You bullshittin’ me, right?” Danbury said at last.

  “I’d very much appreciate you taking the cuffs off this man,” O’Donnell said.

  “And I’d very much appreciate you kissin’ my black ass!” Danbury roared.

  After a tense few seconds, Danbury sighed heavily, reached into his pants pocket, extracted the key and tossed it to O’Donnell. O’Donnell unlocked the handcuffs and tossed them onto Danbury’s desk. I rubbed my wrists to get blood back to my hands.

  “We ain’t done,” Danbury said pointing a rigid forefinger at me. “You have seriously fucked up, August. We for damn sure ain’t done here.”

  As I walked out of Danbury’s office with O’Donnell as my escort, we passed Leo Cowling.

  “Soon,” Cowling said, pointing a forefinger at me and flexing his thumb as if to shoot me.

  “Wow,” I said in reply. “That really is a bad tie.”

  On the way downstairs, O’Donnell said, “Jesus, Snow. You’re playing your friends like suckers and your savior—which would be me—like a get-out-of-jail-free card. I give you a week tops before I’m fishing you out of the Detroit River piece by piece.”

  “In the meantime,” I said reaching into my pants pockets and extracting a wallet, “why don’t you run this.”

  O’Donnell took the wallet and looked at the driv
er’s license.

  “Who’s Dax Randolph?”

  “Randolph is the guy who wiped the floor with me at the bank.”

  “You picked his pocket?” O’Donnell said. “Jesus. You really are a piece of work.”

  I spent the next two hours in an FBI interview room with Special Agent O’Donnell.

  I told her about Dax the security guard. How he fought. She said the guards were mostly ex-military and contracted through a company called Black Tree, a private security contractor out of Oklahoma. Black Tree was deep in the pocket of the Department of Defense, with multimillion-dollar contracts for security work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Lately there had been some Capitol Hill concern about how extensive and secretive their financial and recruiting practices were: a Congressional investigation had uncovered information that two of their employees attached to the Army in Afghanistan were ex-Russian FSB looking to make big American contractor bucks. Neither had the proper US immigration and security clearance papers.

  “Black Tree ain’t what it used to be,” O’Donnell said. She eyed me with an air of curiosity and disgust. “That looks like it hurts.”

  “My eye?” I said.

  “Your everything,” she said, gesturing to my body, head to toe. “While Black Tree’s sinking in the shit, a few of their former employees—and I’d bet your Dax Randolph is one of them—moved on, looking for other means of gainful employment.”

  “Like banking,” I said.

  O’Donnell nodded. “Like banking. Be nice to know who their recruiter is. Think this Dax guy would give him up if we squeezed him?”

  “I think this Dax guy is one hard sonuvabitch,” I said, feeling my ribs throb. “Squeeze him and all you’re gonna get is tired.”

  O’Donnell picked up her phone, dialed three numbers and waited for a second or two before saying, “Yeah, Gene? Hey, listen. Can I get a couple cups of coffee in here and an ice pack? Yeah, an ice pack. Thanks.”

  O’Donnell tossed a bottle of Tylenol over the metal table. I caught it and choked down three.

  An anonymous-looking white guy in a nondescript navy-blue suit brought in two blue ceramic mugs of black coffee, several packets of sugar, powdered creamer and an ice pack. Quickly determining I was the one in need of the ice pack, Gene offered it to me and I took it. The blue coffee mugs were emblazoned with the FBI logo rendered in gold.