Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  She walked around the wreckage of the machine, turned over something with her foot. Crane smelled chemical reagents from smashed plastic bottles.

  “All gone,” she said. “All that work. We’ll have to start from scratch. I’ll have to get an inventory to Josh.”

  “About that,” said Crane. “I talked to Josh last night. He wanted to extract you and your team.”

  She turned to face him. “We’re not going anywhere!”

  “I talked him out of that. But I advised him not to restart your project yet.”

  She reacted with rising anger, but then it seemed to simply pop like a balloon and she shook her head. The energy simply wasn’t there.

  “Of course you did,” she said with resignation. “I forgot, in the heat of it all. I thought you were on my side for a minute.”

  “I am on your side,” said Crane. “But look around. Whoever has it in for your project isn’t kidding. And we still don’t know who they are, or why.”

  “The dead cop…”

  “They had no reason to come after you. I doubt they even knew about this place. They were working for someone else, someone who gains something by shutting you down. Right now, they’ve got what they wanted. You and your people are safe. But if you start trucking in loads of new gear and looking like a working project, they’ll send those men back again. Or worse.”

  He could see her thinking it through, realizing he was right.

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. And then Josh will be here with his checkbook in hand. But right now we’re going to go through the motions, and then you’re going to play dead.”

  “All right,” she said. “You win.”

  He smiled at her. “Well, don’t be too morose. I need you angry for a few more hours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to call the police.”

  “The police?”

  “That’s what you’d do if it really happened the way we want them to think it happened. Nobody was here when this happened. You came in this morning, found the place shot up. Nobody was hurt. And you’re not scared. You’re angry. You want the cops to catch whoever did it.”

  “They’re not going to—”

  “No, but you don’t know that. This wasn’t a police operation. Just a handful of dirty cops. They already covered up their dead man. The story is he got shot making a traffic stop. The safest thing we can do is hold up our end of that.”

  She was quiet for a long moment, working out the implications. “Why wasn’t anybody here when it happened?” she asked at last.

  “You went to the mainland to get some face time with your donors. Got to keep them happy so the money keeps flowing. That’s part of your job, and the trip checks out. Without you, nobody else had much to do, so they took a couple days off.”

  She let out a breath. “Okay, I can do that.”

  They drove back out to the main road and stopped at a convenience store with a payphone outside. Crane walked her through the call and asked a few different questions he thought the responding officer might ask. Once or twice he advised her to change an answer slightly.

  “Okay, you’re ready,” he said eventually. “Can you handle this? I can’t be here when they show up.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said, some of her old confidence starting to return.

  “Good. Call me later and tell me everything.”

  “Okay. Wait… how are you going to get back?”

  Crane smiled. “I spotted a roadside grill shack a couple miles up the road. I’m going to hike up there, have myself a beer and some pinchos, make some new friends. Sooner or later I’ll find someone going my way.”

  “Seriously?”

  He grinned as reassuringly as he could. “I’ll be fine. So will you. Call me later.”

  Then he turned and strolled away up the road as Melissa picked up the phone and pushed a quarter into the slot.

  ###

  By late afternoon, Crane was in a camera store in San Juan’s Hato Rey neighborhood, putting Josh’s credit card through its paces once again.

  “The Canon 70D body,” he said to the very attentive clerk, who had laid out a selection of cameras and lenses on the counter. Crane considered them, pointed to a long black metal model. “The 200-millimeter f 2.8 telephoto and the AstroScope low light module.”

  “That’s a big lens. With the AstroScope, the camera will be very unwieldy,” the clerk said, stating the obvious. “You will want a tripod for stability, I think?”

  “No, I’ll make do,” said Crane. “And give me two 8-gig SD cards, 10X speed.”

  “Very good, sir. And perhaps one of the 50 millimeters?” said the clerk hopefully. “For daylight shooting at closer range? And if you can get closer to your subject, you will find it much easier to use with the AstroScope.”

  Crane nodded at one. “The f 1.4, obviously.”

  “Of course, sir,” said the clerk, sounding exactly like a sommelier approving of Crane’s choice of wine.

  Crane’s phone rang. He checked the screen and recognized Melissa’s number. He handed the credit card to the clerk. “If you’ll ring those up, I’ll be right with you.”

  Crane walked to the far end of the display case and answered.

  “Is everything okay? How did it go?”

  “I’m home,” she said. “I did it. It was… easy, actually.”

  “What happened?”

  “I waited almost an hour outside that stupid store for somebody to show up.”

  “Uniformed officer?”

  “Yes. He followed me back to the lab, and I showed him around. I took a good half hour going through everything that was destroyed, and that wasn’t much fun, by the way.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Very little. He just took everything down. He didn’t question anything. Then he filled out a police report and left me his card. He took my number and said a detective would follow up. That was it. He left, and I came home.”

  “You’re at the guest house? Stay there. A courier’s going to bring you a new phone. From now on, if you need me, call me on that phone. Don’t use it for anything else.”

  She made a confused sound that shifted into concern. “Wait, are you saying they’re going to tap my phone?”

  “It’s not impossible,” said Crane, “but it would take some time to set up. More likely they’ll pull your call records. They’ll be looking for me, and you’re the only lead they’ve got.”

  “But if they do that, they’ll see this call, won’t they?” Crane could hear the rising alarm in her voice.

  “It won’t tell them much. I’ll be switching phones too. I’ll text you the number. After this, you won’t see much of me for a while. That’s to protect you.”

  The clerk returned with Crane’s credit card and a large shopping bag.

  “I need to go,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’re safe.”

  “Okay,” she said doubtfully.

  Crane disconnected. He put his phone into airplane mode before putting it away. He collected his bag and his card from the beaming clerk. “If you need anything else while you’re in Puerto Rico, sir, we are here to help.”

  “Thank you,” said Crane. “There is something, actually. Can you tell me where I can get a phone around here?”

  Chapter 15

  Hector Acosta’s funeral was held at midday, at a cemetery in his hometown of Campanilla, several miles west of San Juan. John Crane made sure to arrive early. He found a position among old, moldering family crypts, far enough from the gravesite to go unnoticed but within range of his telephoto lens. He made sure he could cover the approach road that looped lazily around the grounds. Then he waited.

  Eventually a hearse appeared, a line of cars creeping along behind it. The procession moved slowly among the headstones and pulled in to park in neat order along the edge of the road. Mourners made their way in twos and threes to the gravesite. Many were police officers in dress uniform. There was a grieving wid
ow in black and a priest with his cassock rippling in the warm breeze. Crane noted faces, who spoke to whom. The ritual seemed almost mechanical viewed from the outside.

  More cars drifted in after the main procession. Crane spotted an officer in dress uniform getting out of the passenger side of a silver Mustang with his arm in a sling. He snapped a photo as the man walked around the car and joined the woman who had driven. They walked together to the grave. The man with the broken arm spoke briefly to the widow and then joined another group of officers in dress uniform off to one side. There were five of them in a small cluster beneath an oak.

  Crane watched how they interacted with each other and with the other mourners. That was them, he decided. There were five of them, which was right, and the broken arm was strongly suggestive, but it was more than that. As he watched them, he sensed there was something invisible that fenced them off from the others, especially the police. It was as if there was some subconscious agreement that those five were different. Their presence at the funeral was accepted, but they were somehow not of the same kind.

  As the priest began to speak, Crane realized there were fewer people than he expected. For a police officer killed in the line of duty, it would be reasonable to see a flood of officers there to support the force even if they didn’t know the dead man at all. There might even be a politician with his entourage and some reporters. A respectable group had turned out to see Acosta off, but nothing on that scale. Perhaps it was because of the remote location. Or perhaps Acosta hadn’t been very popular with his fellow officers. Maybe they sensed an air of deception about him, found something dubious about the official manner of his death, and their protective instincts were keeping them at a safe distance.

  Crane swept the rest of the mourners with his camera. The family sat in a row of folding chairs beside the grave, all dressed in black. The priest stood beside the flower-laden casket. He was too far away for Crane to make out his words. His voice was a stale, emotionless drone.

  That was death. Prettied up and dusted off from the death Crane was used to, of course. There was no violence here, no screaming, no blood. It was all very orderly, but it was still death. There was the widow, surrounded by relatives trying in vain to comfort her. There were the dead man’s children, now without a father. Acosta had brought it on himself, but Crane was the instrument.

  Crane had never actually seen this part of it before. He’d killed to survive, and he’d done it without remorse. But then he’d moved on, eyes fixed on the mission. He was always long gone by now, when other people had to come along behind him, clean up the mess, and live with the consequences that Crane never saw. Well, this was what they looked like.

  After the service was finished, the mourners drifted away a few at a time. There was a line waiting to pay respects to the family. Crane watched his little group of rogue cops move through it. The tall, slender one with the close-cropped dark hair was clearly the leader. The others all looked to him as they talked, and he was the first of the group in the line. Crane zoomed in and snapped more pictures.

  Eventually they had all embraced the widow and shaken the hand of the son, who was perhaps twelve years old, trying to act like the man in charge now. They moved off and walked back toward their cars in a tight group. Crane snapped the cars as they got into them, made sure he could identify make and model and plate number.

  One by one they pulled out and drove slowly out of the cemetery. Someone led the family back to a black town car behind the hearse. It was over. Workmen collected the chairs and rolled up the artificial turf that covered the bare earth at the edge of the grave.

  Crane sat back and waited, his back against the rough, lichen-coated cement of a crypt. The mid-afternoon sun bore down on him, and the humidity made him sweat. Occasional drops of perspiration ran tingling down the back of his neck, feeling strangely like some instinct warning him of danger..

  When the grave was filled and the workmen had left, the cemetery was still once more. Crane walked to Acosta’s grave and looked down at the headstone with the name and the dates that contained his life. “Beloved Husband and Father.”

  Crane knew he would eventually have to kill again if he maintained the course he was on. He might well have to kill one or more of those men he’d come here to see. He needed to remember this, the cost of his choices for people who had nothing to do with him. Before he killed another enemy, he needed to be certain that was the only way to avoid something even worse. Because when he did kill someone, it would be like this again.

  But of course, it always had been.

  ###

  Crane spent the rest of the day at the beach, watching the surf roll in and couples walking hand in hand along the waterline. The funeral had put him in a dark mood, and he needed to get out of it. He considered calling Melissa on his burner phone, asking her to meet him here. They could sit on the sand together, stroll along the water themselves. Then they could go for drinks and pionono from a food stall up the beach, and what might come after. But after what she’d seen him do, Crane sensed a wall had crashed down, cutting off whatever attraction might have been there.

  So he waited alone. Eventually the sun began to set and the wind shifted. Clouds rolled in from the west, stained deep red by the sun. Crane got up and drove back to San Juan.

  A large package was waiting for him when he arrived back at the Vanderbilt.

  Crane signed the slip, and a porter rolled out a rather large box on a luggage cart. He took it up to Crane’s room and placed it on the foot of the bed.

  “Care package from home,” Crane said as he tipped the porter and showed him out.

  Then he locked the door and sliced through the packing tape with his pocket knife. Inside the box was a black suitcase covered in rip-stop fabric. Crane slid the zippers open and flipped up the lid. Then he let out a low whistle of appreciation. Josh’s source had come through.

  The suitcase was packed with tools and electronics. Crane organized the contents into piles by function. There were GPS tracers, radios and concealable microphones, and fisheye cameras with built-in burst transmitters. That all went into one pile.

  The next pile was smaller but made up for it by being not just suspicious but flat out illegal. At least Crane assumed Puerto Rico had the usual laws against possession of burglary tools. There were lock picks, plus a snap gun for quickly opening tumbler locks. There was a small, specialized computer with firmware for decrypting signals and a software-defined radio for sending its own signals back out. It would let Crane infiltrate and decipher a home or business alarm system and take control of it from a block away.

  Then there were a few other special-purpose items that went by themselves. A pair of compact night vision goggles. A silencer for the Glock he’d taken from Acosta’s body. A pair of USB flash drives with a note from Josh promising that they would load a back door into any computer they connected to and start sending data back to Josh’s servers. The prize was a mil-spec ruggedized tablet with a battlefield intelligence system. Crane had included that on his shopping list to see how far Josh was willing and able to go. He hadn’t expected him to actually come up with one. Josh’s resources continued to impress. He supposed that was what it meant to be richer than several countries.

  He reminded himself that he was no longer official. If he was found with these things, it wouldn’t all go away with a couple phone calls behind the scenes. For the whole suitcase, Crane guessed he was looking at about twenty to twenty-five years in prison. But that couldn’t be helped. He’d just have to avoid getting caught.

  He loaded everything back into the suitcase, put some clothes on top, and put it away in the closet. Then he fired up his laptop and went through the pictures he’d taken at the funeral. He studied the faces until he knew he would recognize any of the men on the street, in or out of uniform. He memorized their cars: the plate numbers, the identifying scrape on the front fender of a Dodge Charger, the third-party light kit on the grille of the leader’s F-150. />
  He was considering a drink at the hotel bar when his burner phone rang. It was Melissa.

  “Is everything okay?” he said when he picked up.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They want me to come to the police station tomorrow morning. A detective wants to talk to me about my case.”

  “That’s routine,” he said, trying to sound reassuring. It very likely was routine, but he’d told her to call him if she had any contact with the police at all. “He’ll want details from you that the responding officer didn’t ask for.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You go in and answer his questions. Just like you told the first cop. The story’s simple. There’s not a lot you can tell him. He’ll have you go through it again, but he won’t get much.”

  “If I get arrested, so help me,” she said, adding a laugh that sounded more forced than she probably intended.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Call me afterward and let me know how it went.”

  “All right. I’m just nervous. All right, yeah. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

  They hung up, and Crane had a scotch from the minibar and went out on the balcony. He watched the moonlit white caps rolling up the beach in the dark for a while. Then he went to bed early. Tomorrow was going to be a long day. Crane lay in the dark for a moment, listening to the sound of the waves dimly creeping through the glass balcony doors, and thinking for the last time of the man he’d killed. Then he put those thoughts away and was fast asleep within minutes.

  Chapter 16

  Melissa found a parking space down the street and walked toward the police headquarters building off the Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She took a couple deep breaths and looked up at the building. It was a tall, squarish tower of white cement studded with high, narrow windows that made it look like a fortress.