Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3)

by Bertrand, J. Mark

  And they think I did it. I wish I’d had the forethought and the nerve.

  I let out my breath. Whoever took that Hummer—a car thief seizing his chance?—is now tops in my book. By now I would probably be dead if not for his intervention. A freak occurrence, the kind of pure chance Carter Robb would attribute to providence.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  All I have to do is stay hidden. Even better, now that they’re on foot, maybe I should risk making a phone call. If the bright screen doesn’t attract their attention, or if I can shield the light from view, we’re in the heart of the city, meaning patrol units could swarm this place in a matter of minutes. That’s what I’ve got to do. Otherwise, I run the risk of letting Ford slip through my fingers. I don’t have a choice.

  I grip the phone in my left hand, my finger hovering over the sleep button. When I press it, the screen will flash to life. If I keep it close to my chest, screened by the trunk of the tree, then it should be invisible. I can only afford to speak in whispers, they’re so close.

  “Hey,” a voice calls, not Ford’s. “He left his keys behind.”

  A man slides behind the wheel of my car. He turns the key. The engine fires up, touching off the headlights. I flatten myself against the ground, eyes tightly shut, expecting the gunfire any second. I grit my teeth as if the bullets are already ripping through me.

  Nothing. I glance up, but the lights dazzle my eyes. The motor revs and the wheel spins in a long, whirring circuit, kicking up earth. The revving dies down.

  “The wheels are stuck. Give me a hand.”

  I can’t let them take the car. The file on Ford is in my briefcase. All my notes. The rifle in the trunk. There’s no way. I tap the sleep button on the top of my phone, bringing the screen to life. Now that I’m bathed in the headlights, what’s the risk? Emergency dispatch is on my speed dial. I punch the number.

  Then I cancel the call. This is exactly the kind of situation I can’t afford to be in. Exactly the kind of explaining I don’t want to do. Not to Wanda, not to Internal Affairs. But if I don’t call, I’m letting Ford walk away. The odds of finding him again are almost nil.

  Am I making a mistake? Probably so.

  I set the phone between two roots, facing toward me, ready to press redial as a last resort. As long as they don’t detect me, though, I’m not going to call for help. If I lose the car and everything in it, I’ll make up an excuse.

  “The front left is blown,” one of them announces. “Pop the trunk and see if there’s a spare. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  “Look.”

  The Hummer has reappeared on the embankment, coming from the opposite direction as it disappeared. I feel goose bumps rise on my forearm.

  “Leave that and come on!”

  Without another word, they head toward the newly arrived vehicle. It’s not the same one, I realize. They have a backup driver. One of them must have called for help during the whispered huddle.

  I keep my position until they’re all in the Hummer. The doors slam shut and they turn around on the embankment, heading off in the direction of Kirby, the way we came. Part of me wants to go after them. Ford is getting away.

  I wait a few seconds, conflicted about my lack of action.

  Cars pass back and forth on the parkway. Cicadas chirp in the distance. My breathing returns to normal. It’s done. The decision is made. It’s like they were never here, except that my car is trashed and stuck in the soft dirt. Unsteadily, bracing my hand against the tree trunk, I get up on my feet. I slip my gun away. I limp toward the car. The pain in my leg is back with a vengeance, hard to ignore.

  On inspection, they’ve at least done me one favor by rolling the car out of the ruts the front tires had embedded themselves in. The left front tire looks shredded. Even the rim is chewed up. I pull out the jack and the spare, retrieving my flashlight to make the work a little easier. The physical task calms me down. As I tighten the lugs, I begin to wonder who those guys were and why they were trying to kill me. Before now, the question hadn’t occurred to me.

  The Hummer must have picked up my trail at Downing Street. That much seems certain. How would they know to find me there? Tom Englewood told me where to meet him. It follows that he made this arrangement. At the last minute, revealing his connection to Reg Keller, he must have figured he was telling a dead man.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  Once the tire is changed, I back the car around carefully, not wanting to get stuck again. I edge my way up the embankment, then accelerate onto the road. At the first break in the median, I swing around to head east, picking up speed as I pass the site of my near-death experience. The engine whines.

  The apartment tower looms on my right again. In the next parking lot I see a black Hummer sitting with its lights switched off.

  Against my better judgment I hit the brake and pull in. I roll up behind the Hummer with my high beams on. With my gun drawn I get out to investigate. Before I can advance more than a few steps, the driver’s door pops open. Two empty hands poke into the light.

  “I’m not armed,” a familiar voice calls. “I’m coming out now.”

  He slides his feet down onto the blacktop, lifting his hands high. My muzzle is trained on the center of his chest, but he comes toward me, smiling.

  “That was a pretty close call,” he says. “I wasn’t sure what to do exactly. Four to one isn’t great odds, not in the real world, and I didn’t know if you were in any condition to help after they ran you off the road.”

  “Stop right there.”

  He stops. He raises his hands a little higher, showing off.

  “Are you gonna shoot me, March, or say thank you? ’Cause I’m pretty sure I just saved your life back there.”

  I lower my gun, then put it away. He extends his hand for me to shake.

  “Thank you, Jeff,” I say. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think you’d better start explaining.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I don’t know where I expected Jeff to take me.

  Not here.

  Not to a run-down auto repair lot wrapped in eight-foot hurricane fence and topped with concertina wire, where a line of rusted beaters sit rotting in the heat, and hand-painted signage on the side of the garage is sun-faded and semiliterate.

  This is his birthright, he says, the sum total of his inheritance.

  “And don’t get your hopes up, seeing it’s a car repair joint. It hasn’t been open for years.” The damage to my car will have to be fixed elsewhere.

  He gets out to unlock the chain threaded through the gate, reattaching the padlocks once I’ve driven onto the lot. I swing the car into a space near the garage entrance, but that’s not what Jeff has in mind. He directs me around back, where a channel of gravel runs between the back of the building and another row of dismembered Detroit muscle cars. When I switch off the engine, we’re sitting in darkness.

  “I don’t want to be visible from the road,” he says. “Come on.”

  The back entry has three dead bolts, shiny in the light of Jeff’s key ring LED. Newly installed, from the look of them. Judging from the outside, I wouldn’t have thought there was much in here to secure.

  He tells me to wait just over the threshold while he flicks on shop lights strung throughout the garage. The windows all seem to be blacked out for privacy. Inside, a small corner of the space has been reclaimed from the chaos of scattered tools and abandoned auto parts, all of it covered in a film of old grease, to make room for an Army surplus cot, some folding tables—one for dining, the other for cooking—and a desktop computer rigged to surveillance cameras with a view of the property outside.

  “You don’t live here,” I say.

  “If you can call it living.”

  There’s a restroom door with an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign still affixed to it, a sink, a washing machine, and some drying lines hung with Jeff’s clothes. There’s even an ironing board and iron set up on the edge of a gaping hole in the concrete fl
oor where a lift must once have been installed. The iron gets to me for some reason and I feel pity for the young man who’s just saved my life. Despite an oscillating fan at the foot of the cot, the whole garage is infernally hot.

  “It’s my base of operations,” he says, sounding a little embarrassed.

  “Makes sense.”

  It doesn’t, but I feel bad for having shamed him with my initial reaction. On the table, there’s an interesting mix of books and magazines. Back issues of Skeptic and Combat Handguns mixed together. A fat, dog-eared paperback whose title declares You Are Being Lied To.

  “I know it looks strange, but everything I need is here. And compared to where I was—over there—this is luxurious, believe me. To you, this looks like roughing it. But you’ve never lived off the grid. Which is fine. It makes you easy to find.” He drags over an incongruous-looking wooden dining room chair for me to sit in. “Me, I can’t afford to be easy to find. Not anymore.”

  I ease myself down, making sure the chair can take my weight. Absentmindedly I take up another of his books and flip through its pages. The Foxhole Atheist, it’s called, the content divided into daily readings like one of Charlotte’s devotional books.

  “And why is that?” I ask.

  “Well,” he says, “I used to have something for you, something I was supposed to give you . . .”

  I put the book down. “To give me?”

  “But I don’t have it anymore because they found where I lived and they took it. If I still had it, this would have been a whole lot easier.”

  “What was it?”

  He draws a rectangle in the air with his fingertip. “An envelope. I can’t tell you what was in there, but it was thick. I never looked because he told me not to. My job was just to hand it over in the event that anything happened.”

  “Did something happen?”

  His eyes widen. “Of course. And I should have given that envelope to you right then and there. But under the circumstances, I didn’t know what to do. It was you people who killed him. I wasn’t sure who could be trusted. That’s why I waited, and as it turned out, I waited too long.”

  “You’re talking about Andrew Nesbitt?” I ask.

  He nods. “Mr. Nesbitt. He said you’d know what to do with the contents of the envelope. He said you were one of the good guys. I should have just done what he told me, but—”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I worked for him.”

  “So all those nights at the shooting range . . . ?”

  “Partly I was trying to get a read on you. Partly I was looking for an opening. It’s not like I could’ve just walked up and told you any of this. You would’ve thought I was crazy. Without that envelope I figured I had to bide my time.”

  “Until tonight.”

  He smiles. “I had an idea something like this would happen.”

  ———

  The only thing he’d tell me back in the parking lot was this: the men in the Hummer weren’t out to kill me. They would if they had to, but the mission was more likely a snatch. If all had gone according to plan, I’d have been run off the road, pulled from the wreckage, and whisked away to an undisclosed location. The Hummers, stolen earlier in the day for one use, would be recovered far away, their interiors scrubbed clean. And as for me, once they’d found out everything I knew, then a decision would be made as to my final disposition. Based on the fact that I’d snuffed one of their number, chances are my body would never have been found. These guys think nothing of killing cops, he tells me, something I know already firsthand. They think nothing of killing anyone.

  “But who are they?”

  “I wish I could tell you.”

  “You didn’t recognize any of them?”

  “I didn’t get real close.”

  I hand him the photo I’ve been carrying of Brandon Ford, the one I took from the box in the garage. “Do you recognize him? What about the other two?”

  He shakes his head and starts to hand it back. Then he pauses.

  “I do know her.”

  Hilda.

  “She worked for Mr. Nesbitt, same as me. When I was hired, he sent me to her. She snapped my picture and asked me all kinds of questions, and a couple of days later I went back and there was a driver’s license, a passport, the whole nine yards.”

  “A new identity?”

  “Like the witness protection program. That’s what she does. Mr. Nesbitt said there was nobody better in the business. But I couldn’t even tell you her name. He believed in doling out information on a need-to-know basis. He believed in cell structures. If one goes down, the fact that its members only know their own role means the others can continue to function.”

  “Her name is Hilda,” I say. He seems impressed. “Do you know how to get back in touch with her?”

  He shakes his head. “When I got back, I was looking for more private security work, something that would let me take advantage of my skills. Mr. Nesbitt hired me as a bodyguard. I figured I’d be going everywhere with him, like a personal protection detail. I was cool with that. I’d done that kind of thing before. But instead, he kept me around as more of an errand boy. He wanted someone he could trust to make pickups and deliveries, to carry messages, things like that. I would’ve given notice—that’s not what I’d signed up for—but the truth is, he was this larger-than-life character and sticking with him seemed like my best shot for going places. Plus there was something exciting about all the precautions, the fake IDs.

  “I never got the impression from him that his life was in danger. But one day he sits me down in his command center, which is just this room in his house that’s got all these TV monitors and computers with news from all over, and he gives me an envelope I’m only supposed to deliver in the event of his death. He gives me a file, too, that’s got all your information in it. That I still have.”

  He reaches under the cot for a metal ammo box repurposed for storage. There’s only one thing inside, a thin file folder. I have one just like it in my briefcase. When I open it, a photo slips out onto the floor. My own face stares up at me. In every other respect, from the trim size to the thickness of the glossy paper, the picture is identical to the image of Ford in the file Bea Kuykendahl gave me. The pages inside could have been printed at the same time, from the same computer system. The type matches, the margins, everything. As if, somewhere back in time, the file on me and the file on my supposed John Doe resided side by side in someone’s cabinet, just waiting to be put into action.

  “You recognize your file?” he asks, surprised.

  I flip through the pages. There’s a detailed resumé, tracking my progress in life all the way back to high school, the Army, and my misguided years as an undergraduate in the University of Houston history department. My rookie class when I joined HPD, and every assignment since then. My marriage is here, the birth of my daughter, the car crash with Charlotte behind the wheel, the burial.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. “I shouldn’t have shown you that.”

  “It’s fine.” I close the file. “I have one just like this on a guy named Brandon Ford. Have you heard of him? According to the National Criminal Information Center, his body was found in a park not far from where we had our little adventure tonight. Just the body, not the head. And the hands had been skinned. Does any of that ring a bell?”

  There’s a funny kind of smile on his face, like he thinks I’m putting him on. “Is this a case you’re assigned to?”

  “It was. The only thing is, Brandon Ford was there. I recognized his voice.”

  Now Jeff looks really confused. “So you knew him?”

  “He was one of the guys who held me at gunpoint. He’s in the picture I showed you a second ago. His accomplice murdered my partner, and I killed him. This is news to you? That’s the reason I’ve been on leave, the reason I was talking to Tom Englewood tonight.”

  “Him I know. Or know of.”

  I’m surprised he hasn’t heard about Lorenz’s death o
r the murder investigation that lit the fuse. Need to know. Maybe Jeff only has a small piece of the puzzle. Maybe he knows less than I do about what’s really going on.

  “Tell me about Englewood, then. Those were his men, I assume?”

  “Mr. Nesbitt met with him once, and I escorted him. I don’t know what they talked about, but afterward Mr. Nesbitt said to watch out for him, that he was a mercenary and men like him were the problem.”

  “The problem with what?”

  He shrugs. “He didn’t elaborate. I think the two of them were in competition. When Mr. Nesbitt retired from the CIA, he started his own company. Englewood’s consortium wanted to shut him down, discredit him.”

  “So you believed him when he said he worked for the CIA.”

  “You know he did.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Oh,” he says, confused again. “Only, the way he talked about you when he gave me the envelope, I was pretty sure you knew each other. He actually said that, I think. That he knew you from the old days and you were one of the good guys.”

  “He said he knew me? Maybe from around town?” I wrack my brain, but I can’t think of any professional encounters we might have had. Until now, though I’ve heard rumors about goings-on in the intelligence community, I don’t recall ever running across these people in person. At the time of Nesbitt’s shooting, when the conspiracy theories started to get some coverage, the idea that Houston was home to a club of ex-spooks seemed as quaint as it did unlikely. “I think he must have been mistaken.”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff says. “He was a pretty sharp guy. Maybe you’re the one who’s mistaken. If he didn’t know, I doubt he would have told me you could be trusted.”