August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Is this over?” I said. “Are we safe? My friends, are they safe?”

  “Safe?” the man said with his erudite continental accent. “I suppose so long as you use seatbelts, exercise and do not eat too much processed food or sugar.” Then he sighed heavily and said, “I do not mean to injure your pride, of course, but you realize very little of this had anything to do with you. You were, how shall I say, the wasp stinging the giant’s tender underbelly. But my contract was only for Mr. Deubel and Mr. Randolph.”

  “Dax? Why him?”

  “Let’s just say one should always be careful of the legends one chooses to believe.”

  And with that, the night swallowed the man whole. Another devil walking the earth.

  From the loading dock we heard someone say, “I ain’t feelin’ too good, man. Like I’ma throw up or something.”

  Skittles.

  I issued a sigh of relief. And not for the FBI deal I’d made.

  Dazed, weak from his wounds and caked head to toe in white concrete dust, he looked like a skeleton reveler at a Day of the Dead celebration.

  A choir of police sirens drew closer.

  I told Frank and Tomás to bug out. Frank asked if I wanted them to collect up Skittles and get him off-scene. Reluctantly, I said no. We shook hands and they left. Somewhere in the near distance, a car started, its sound system blasting Carlos Santana’s song “Soul Sacrifice.”

  A minute after they hit the road, a police chopper was hovering overhead, its blinding spotlight illuminating the carnage. And me.

  The Detroit Police and FBI showed up in force. Before their arrival I dropped to my knees, neatly arranged all of my weapons in a semi-circle in front of me and laced my fingers behind my head. Several uniformed and Detroit SWAT tactical teams cautiously made their way toward me, shouting, “Stay on the ground! Stay on the fucking ground!”

  I was tired and my ribs hurt. Old wounds were opening. New wounds were bleeding.

  I had no intention of moving.

  Thirty-seven

  “Wow,” O’Donnell said, surveying the carnage around me. I was still on my knees, fingers laced behind my head. “You sure know how to throw a party.”

  “Ain’t no party like a Dee-troit party.”

  The uniformed and SWAT Detroit cops surrounding me kept me squarely in their gun sites. O’Donnell had shown up with her own small contingency of agents.

  O’Donnell looked at the prone body of Brewster. “Kinda looks like the first part of our agreement is null and void.”

  “Yeah, but since your raid on the bank, the second part trumps the first.”

  Skittles, his arms draped around the shoulders of two FBI agents, was escorted to an awaiting ambulance. “The fuck’s going’ on, man?” he was saying. My stomach knotted and I suddenly felt an uncomfortable kinship with Judas Iscariot. I’d given up Skittles for FBI immunity and protection. The buffer I needed from the Detroit Police Department.

  O’Donnell was brought into an impromptu confab with three on-site DPD captains, several lieutenants and the commissioner. She was a good head shorter than the men, but it looked like she was holding her own.

  Several of the DPD captains angrily gestured toward me. Other gestures were reserved for Skittles, who was quickly secured in the ambulance and whisked away. O’Donnell calmly nodded in the face of the angry recriminations, accusations and threats. She extracted her phone from her coat pocket and held the phone to her ear. She said a few words, then handed the phone to the DPD commissioner. The commissioner took the phone, held up a hand in front of his staff. The captains and lieutenants instantly fell silent.

  Several minutes later I was being lifted to my feet by two FBI agents and escorted to one of the two remaining FBI Chevy Tahoes. Past the Detroit uniforms and SWAT teams. Past the captains, lieutenants and commissioner. Past the gathering of news trucks and reporters suddenly on the scene, jockeying for position and hysterically speculating on what latest war had been fought on this decimated Mexicantown territory.

  At the FBI Detroit regional office, I was frisked for the third time, treated for minor lacerations, given several ice packs and a couple of aspirin for my badly bruised but unbroken ribs. The bullet wound I’d received in Traverse City was cleaned and redressed. And I spent the next several hours in an interview room answering variations on the same questions from different agents, including a conferenced-in agent in Quantico.

  At 5:30 Tuesday morning, O’Donnell entered the room wearing a tactical black jumpsuit and a very imposing sidearm strapped to her left thigh. She had two big cups of Starbucks coffee, a box of Tim Horton donuts and a nondescript white box. She sat the box of donuts and one of the coffees in front of me.

  “Ever have the donuts at LaBelle’s Soul Hole?” I said, surveying the box of donuts. “Little place on Michigan Avenue near Rosa Parks Boulevard.”

  “LaBelle Mason-Dunwitty,” O’Donnell said, “Carries a Smith & Wesson 1911 and makes a helluva apple fritter. I’m not the tourista you may think I am, Snow.”

  I grabbed one of the buttermilk glazed donuts and took a hearty bite. It was good.

  Seemed all of my weapons and most of the weapons used by Brewster’s crew were accounted for. However, several of the weapons that had killed them were unaccounted for. Like Frank and Tomás’s weapons. And, of course, the gun used to kill Brewster. I casually speculated that perhaps divine intervention had provided me well-armed angels.

  “I’d love to meet these avenging angels,” O’Donnell said.

  “You know how angels are,” I said. “‘Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’”

  O’Donnell’s raid on Titan Securities Investments Group had been performed with swift tactical precision. Like the wrath of God, FBI agents stormed the building, gathering up computers, servers, paper files, office safes, lockboxes, safety deposit boxes, notepads, pens, paper and paperclips. Even the offices of LifeLight were turned over.

  O’Donnell filled me in on Atchison’s story, which made me nearly choke on a plain donut: The FBI and State Police, unable to serve a warrant to Kip Atchison at his Grosse Pointe Estates home, made the long journey north to his palatial Charlevoix summer home. Atchison was found wearing knee-high leather high-heel boots, expensive panties and bra and a long silk scarf. Dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation. An APB was out for a high-end male escort whose professional name was “Ima Bytchakokoff.”

  “You brought in Aaron Spiegelman?” I said after laughing for a minute straight. “How’s he doing?”

  O’Donnell shrugged. “’Bout as well as anybody who was in love for twenty-five years and just lost their partner. Funny thing, though. He asked me if you had any part in bringing Titan down.”

  “And you said?”

  “I told him you were integral to our investigation and left it at that. Then he sang like a castrato choirboy about everything that had been going on at the bank.”

  O’Donnell and the FBI’s legal eagles were getting serious carpal tunnel writing up the various and sundry charges against Titan’s board of directors. Of course, O’Donnell wasn’t quite sure what kind of charges to lay at Spiegelman’s feet save for operating with astounding naiveté and willfully blind arrogance. “And hell,” O’Donnell said, eyeing a Boston Cream from the box of donuts, “if I could put him away for that, I could certainly put you and most of congress away for life on the same charges.” She took a moment to enjoy a bite of her Boston Cream and a sip of coffee, then said, “Tell me about Rose Mayfield.”

  I did.

  When I finished, O’Donnell said, “You’re lucky three witnesses saw you by your car when the shot was fired.” O’Donnell walked to the single narrow window of the room and looked out at the increasing morning traffic on Michigan Avenue, ten stories below. “McKinney, a.k.a. Skittles, is on lock-down at Henry Ford Hospital. He knows you’re his Judas. But I think between the morphine drip and the deal we’re offering, he might be forgiving.”

  “Speaking of Judas,” I bega
n, “you ever find out anything about Dax Randolph?”

  “Just another mercenary looking for a big pay-out,” O’Donnell said unconvincingly.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s not what the Cleaner told me.”

  O’Donnell, gazing out at the traffic on Michigan Avenue, suddenly turned to face me. “You talked to the Cleaner?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said brightly. “We’re thick as murderous thieves. He said his contract wasn’t just for Brewster. It was for Dax Randolph, too. Which begs the question: Why would there be a high-end contract out on a glorified bank security guard?” O’Donnell folded her arms across her chest and stared at me dispassionately. “The last thing this Cleaner guy said to me was ‘one should always be careful of the legends one chooses to believe.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “See, that’s just it,” I said. “I had no idea. I thought maybe he was telling me Dax was some sort of legendary badass. But Dax knew things about me. Knew about a mission I had in Afghanistan. A mission maybe five people knew about.”

  “How’s any of this—”

  “Dax Randolph never existed,” I said. “He was a fiction. A ‘legend’. Somebody who wears and sheds a number of skins. Someone adept at infiltration. Dax Randolph was CIA. What better way to find out where terrorist money’s coming in from and going out to? Only problem—I mean if Mr. Gramatins, my ninth-grade civics teacher, was right—is the CIA isn’t sanctioned for domestic operations. That would be like a big, bad neighbor taking a steaming hot piss on your rosebush, right?”

  O’Donnell walked to the metal table, closed the lid on the box of donuts and started to walk out of the room, taking the remaining donuts with her.

  “You forgot something,” I said, pointing to the squat white box on the table.

  “It’s yours,” she said standing in the doorway.

  I opened the box.

  Two navy blue ceramic coffee mugs emblazoned with the FBI logo.

  She walked away, leaving the door to the interview room open.

  Thirty-eight

  “Turn the TV on, compadre!” Tomás said. “Channel eight!”

  Standing at a podium that threatened to completely hide her was FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell. Behind her, standing like an army of giants, were Detroit’s mayor, the Detroit police commissioner, several captains, the State Attorney General and people I didn’t know. Reporters and photographers were crowded in front of the podium. Cameras clicked furiously, handheld microphones and digital tape recorders competed for airspace.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” O’Donnell said. “Since this is an ongoing investigation, I will provide the press with only bullet points that will not impede our continuing inquiries.”

  In a matter-of-fact voice, O’Donnell informed the gaggle of reporters that Titan Securities Investments Group had been under investigation for fraud, racketeering, extortion, cybercrimes and a litany of other charges. This was a multistate FBI-organized crime investigation carried out with the complete cooperation and resources of state and local law enforcement.

  “Before I introduce FBI Regional Director Hammond Phillips, I’d like to personally thank Detroit’s mayor and the extraordinary dedication and cooperation of Detroit Police Commissioner Horace Renard and the brave men and women under his command. Also, a special thanks to a private citizen who, at great personal risk, helped us break this case—”

  “That’s you, mi amigo!” Tomás shouted in my ear. He began laughing loudly. “My man!”

  I was about to turn the TV off when the local news anchor threw the broadcast to the affiliate’s national news anchor. With overly serious John Williams-style music throbbing in the background, the national news anchor in the Armani suit introduced the evening’s top story: a high-level, closed door meeting which included the directors of the FBI and CIA in front of the Senate intelligence subcommittee.

  “Heated speculation has begun in the nation’s capitol today as to why directors of the FBI and CIA were seen quickly entering senate chambers. Members of the Senate intelligence subcommittee were also seen entering chambers on the heels of John Morgantraugh, Director of the FBI, and Ben Baker, Director of the CIA. Correspondent Nancy Elwitz has the story …”

  I had a feeling I knew what the meeting was about …

  … The big, bad neighbor taking a steaming hot piss on their neighbor’s rosebush.

  For two days I slept like the absolved dead on my sofa with occasional interruptions from Jimmy Radmon, Carlos Rodriguez, the Rodriguez kid, Carmela and Sylvia and my seventy-five-year-old real estate agent I’d called to inquire about purchasing two other houses on the street. After my recuperative sleep, I dressed in my black Calvin Klein suit, white shirt, black tie and black wool overcoat and left the house.

  I’d been standing over Ray Danbury’s grave for about five minutes when my peripheral vision caught him approaching, dressed in a dark plum-colored wool overcoat and matching wool fedora and walking with a cane. Soon I felt the cold business end of his gun press against my neck.

  “I could kill you right here and they’d pin a fucking medal on me.”

  Leo Cowling.

  After several long seconds he slowly lowered his gun and let it dangle at his side, then slipped it into his coat pocket.

  I began walking away from Danbury’s grave when I heard Cowling say, “I see you here again, maybe things go different.”

  “You won’t see me here again,” I said without turning to him. “I’m done with the dead.”

  Thirty-nine

  A week went by and nobody tried to kill me.

  The only real excitement came Wednesday when my electricity, gas, water and cable all went out at the same time. I would have written this off as just another day in Detroit until I got a call from my credit card company.

  “Sir,” the overly-serious East Indian man said, “My name is Chet. I see that your card has been used on several occasions by someone named August Octavio Snow. Do you know any such person and have you authorized purchases by this person?”

  “I’m August Octavio Snow.”

  “Did you, Mr. Snow, authorize August Octavio Snow to make a recent purchase of male penis enhancement products, a two-year subscription to Big Beaver magazine and a subscription to the Internet website www.wackyjizzjackers.com?”

  After forty frustrating minutes, I finally convinced the credit card guy that I was, in fact, August Octavio Snow and no, I had not authorized myself to buy any of the stuff he’d listed. He apologized for the call and said he would cancel the existing card and would send me a new one.

  A new card wouldn’t have made much of a difference: soon after the credit card guy hung up, a burner cell phone stowed away in a shoe box on the floor of my bedroom closet began ringing. The ringtone was “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays.

  “Don’t feel too good having yo mothafuckin’ life up-ended, do it, Snowman?”

  “I did what I had to do, Skittles,” I said. In the background I heard water splashing and women giggling. “Where are you?”

  “I could tell you, but then the FBI would have to kill you.” After a pause, he said, “You hurt me, Snowman. You really hurt me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey,” Skittles said, his voice softening. “Ain’t about a thang now. But let this shit be a warning to you, man. I ain’t to be fucked with.”

  “Hey, dude—get over here!” a voice in the background said. “Holy shit! Those tits are phenomenal!”

  I recognized the voice.

  “You know Danny Cicatello? FBI cybercrimes dude outta the D?” Skittles said brightly. “Yeah, he’s cool for an FBI handler. They got us shacked up at some Miami four-star for a couple days. He wouldn’t be cool if he knew I was spoofin’ a call to you right now, but—” Then Skittles’ voice went low and soft. “You plannin’ on makin’ some sweet love any time soon at your crib, Snowman?”

  “Uh—what the hell does that have to do—”

  “Just thought if yo
u was plannin’ on makin’ that funky beast with two sweaty backs, you might wanna pull them shades way down low, bro,” Skittles said. “Them new streetlamps in the ‘hood? Them LifeLight streetlamps? Some of ‘em tasked to an FBI pilot program called Operation: First Light. Even the manufacturer don’t know the fed-fuzz be retrofitting some of them streetlamps with state-of-the-art listening, video and blue-spoof surveillance.”

  “Why my neighborhood?” I said looking out at one of the LifeLight streetlamps.

  “Why not the ’hood, bro?” Skittles said. “Shits and giggles. See if all y’all be happy down on the plantation. But guess where most of them streetlamps be?” I said nothing. “Dearborn, baby. Home of the nation’s largest population of Middle-Eastern ex-pats.”

  In the background I heard Skittles’ handler admonish him to hurry up and look at a particular bikini-clad young woman.

  “Listen, you boys have fun on your little spring break,” I said. “In the meantime, its thirty-four degrees in Detroit, I got no heat, water or light. And I’m missing SportsCenter.”

  Skittles laughed then disconnected.

  Five minutes later I had heat, water and light.

  And SportsCenter.

  That Saturday I did the unthinkable: convinced that the number of people in Detroit who wanted me dead had gone down dramatically, I threw a party at my house. I was determined to do all the cooking, but Elena and Catalina Rodriguez from across the street inserted themselves into the process, which I was grateful for. With the warm and spicy aromas from the kitchen and the cacophony of talk and laughter between Tomás and Elena, Carlos and Catalina Rodriguez, Carmela and Sylvia, Jimmy Radmon, Frank and FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell (rather striking in civilian clothes), an immigration attorney and his wife, whom Elena had invited, and four other neighbors, I could feel the heart of the house—my parents’ house—once again beating strong.

  I had invited Vivian and Colleen. They were in town for a memorial service for Rose Mayfield. It was a painful. The loss of the last mother. Colleen said for as much as they wanted to attend my party, they were leaving from Metro Airport on a much needed vacation to Koh Lipe island in Thailand, where they’d honeymooned. I told her to bring me back a snow globe with a seashell in it.