Shattered Trust

by Leslie Esdaile Banks

  He nodded, hating that she was right, and that peace had just been a fleeting, twenty-four-hour experience. “All right,” he said, giving into the inevitable. “Just make sure that Brother B drops us off to a cab, and is far enough away from the house when we enter that nobody can follow his station wagon back here.”

  George Townsend sat with his attorney at FBI headquarters in Philadelphia, quietly horrified as he slowly related his story. Sutherland had had his throat slashed in prison? Devereaux and his lovely wife had been murdered in a car bombing? Polanski had been shot in the head by an assailant that had entered his home? The executive director of Micholi, Polanski, and the foundation’s treasurer, Devereaux, gone, and now, he, the secretary and CFO was the only one left from the old guard?

  Hell no. He’d spill his guts, sing like a canary, give up whatever information he had for federal witness protection and having his name kept out of the press, so that he could quietly live abroad for a few years, returning once the storm had passed. Elizabeth Haines could take the helm of that sinking foundation. They could then hire whomever they wanted to fill the other two key vacancies—Devereaux’s and his. He had friends at the State Department.

  Rick stared at his boss in disbelief. “I’m laid off? Me? After all these years? Why, John?”

  “Knight-Ridder is consolidating. You know that. All the newspapers in Philly are going through a trim down, and all us old-timers are on the chopping block. They can get two fresh-out-of-college journalists to replace you as part-time freelancers, with no bennies. You and I cost too much. I can’t do anything about it. I’m sorry.” His boss looked away ashamed and raked his fingers through his profusion of white, scraggly hair. “This shit sucks.”

  Rick stood and folded up the lay-off notice into his pocket. Fuck that. He had a wife and kids in college to feed. It was time to negotiate and take any info he could find to the highest bidder. It was time to call in all markers and Laura for a favor.

  They exited the cab and looked at the small, clapboard house that sat within the crush of close-together homes in the center of Kingston proper. A missed-package sticker was on the door. FedEx had obviously come, and no one was home.

  James glanced at Laura, and as their eyes met, the silent message was clear. Let him go in first, packing heat. He calmly extracted the antiquated weapon that Brother B had given him and shoved it into his waistband, pulling his shirt over it to hide it from neighborly view. During the four-hour trek from the hills into town by way of narrow, slow-moving roads and then through thick urban traffic, they had their nerves on edge.

  “Maybe I should try to find a cybercafé somewhere first, or see if I can buy a temporary cell phone to dial into my voice mail remotely?” she offered, glancing up at the house, her nerves raw.

  “Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other,” he muttered, beginning to round the house to see if there were any signs of forced entry.

  “James, what if the door is rigged to blow?”

  He hesitated, watching the few lean stray dogs snuffle at curbside garbage. “And what if we miss the second delivery attempt, and all our shit gets shipped back to the States?”

  She sighed and nodded, but kept her eyes on the dogs in the street. His line of vision went to them as well.

  “There’s a food vendor not far down the block,” he said in a faraway tone, glancing down the street.

  “I can’t believe you’re hungry!”

  “I’m not,” he said calmly, motioning to the dogs with his chin. “But they are.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she followed him down the street and watched him buy a grilled pork sandwich, and then hit another corner grocery store for some duct tape. It was amazing, just watching him work, as he tore off bits of food to ball in his hand as he loosely wrapped the sandwich, taped it to the back doorknob, inserted the key to turn the lock and then took cover by the adjacent house, tossing a handful of food toward the hungry dogs that scoured the streets for a meal.

  Before long, several dogs had picked up the scent and snuffled their way toward the back door, snapping at each other through yelps and low whines, and then began to pull at the sandwich that had been affixed to the door. The dogs’ aggressive efforts rewarded not only the street scavengers that finally got the meat away from the knob, but also Laura and James, as the back door eerily creaked open without incident. No bomb. They were in.

  “Whoa ...” Laura breathed out, once the dogs had run down the street battling over a ragged pork sandwich. “Where’d you learn that MacGyver shit, James?”

  He didn’t answer her as he cased the house, smelling for a possibly broken gas line, and searching for a hidden intruder. “Don’t turn on the lights or open the front door,” he said carefully as he continued to scout the tiny, neat home for any evidence of tampering. “They wouldn’t expect us to come in through the back door. But I don’t know what else has been rigged.”

  She nodded and wrapped her arms around her waist. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait until four o’clock for FedEx to come. When they ring the bell, we go out the way we came in through the side alley, get the package, come back in, open it, get what we need, then we’re out.”

  She looked at her watch, her gaze taking in all facets of the home for any clue. They had an hour. This house, like Brother B’s, was neat, old-fashioned, with furniture too big and too formal for it, with all mantles laden with family photos, but not much more. Her line of vision briefly lingered on a yellowing photo in an oval, silver frame that contained her uncle, Lillian Braithwaite, and Brother B in a candid beach shot from years gone by. Both she and James simultaneously looked at the telephone, and she went to it first. James simply nodded.

  There were three messages on her cellular that she had to access remotely. The first was from Megan. The second was from Rick. The third one almost made her heart stand still.

  Megan’s message was very short and very concise: “My father says that it’s best that we end our association, and I agree. This last bit of information that my cousin sent you is our way of saying good-bye under good graces. Don’t try to return my call or his. Our cell-phone numbers will be disconnected after this and our phone records to you purged. Be well. Take care of yourselves and Donny.” The message ended without any signature or name, but she knew the frightened female voice well by now.

  Rick’s message was less cryptic and contained a level of urgency that gave her an idea. It simply said: “Laura, what the hell is going on? I just got fucking laid off from the paper! Where are you? Call me. I need a favor, some contacts to get me back in the game and positioned well. Don’t leave me hanging. I love you, and you’re still my favorite girl. Tell me you’ve got a marker you can call in and a story I can use to bargain my rusty ass back into a media job somewhere.”

  Yeah ... she might be able to accommodate Rick, after all.

  Then came the call she’d never thought she’d receive again in life, the one from Elizabeth Haines.

  “This is Liz. I know it’s been ages, but I don’t know what’s going on, Laura,” a nervous female voice said in a heated whisper. “Someone murdered Sutherland in jail. Polanski got shot in his own home.” There was a long, static-ridden pause. “James Devereaux and his wife were blown to bits in their family driveway. No one knows where George Townsend is ... and people want me to become the new executive director of Micholi. I’m afraid. I don’t want to be a part of this, and I want my son to be all right. Do you know what’s happening? Please call me on my new cellular, and here’s the number.” A quick number was rattled off, and then the voice mail electronic message came on to denote that Elizabeth’s urgent call was the last message in the queue.

  “Talk to me,” James said, his eyes holding a steady, intense beam of worry as he watched Laura’s expression.

  “Our friends are bailing,” she said, and then relayed the three messages word for word for him.

  “Lemme use the phone,” he said, taking the antiquate
d receiver from her. “I might have something on voice mail that could prove interesting.”

  Sure enough, he had one message—from Captain Bennett. It told him all that he needed to know. The shit was getting rugged, and George Townsend was in with the feds, cutting a deal. While that took some of the spotlight off them as key players, and could help them bargain with the authorities in the Caymans, it also meant another long trial was in the offing that would ultimately drag them back to Philadelphia as material witnesses.

  That was an unacceptable option, until they found out exactly who was after them, why they wouldn’t just crawl back into the hole they’d slithered out of, and how to diffuse the bounty that was on their heads.

  “What?” Laura said, her eyes glued to his as he slowly lowered the telephone.

  James quietly relayed Cap’s message as she remained mute and still, trying to formulate a plan in his head as he spoke.

  “I need to get my laptop up and working,” she said quickly, rummaging in the knapsack he’d brought along. “Once I see what Megan and Sean sent as a parting gift, from there I can feed enough of it to Rick to give him a media-in to bargain with—which will give our side of the story further credibility way before we try to negotiate with Cayman authorities.”

  “Yeah,” he said calmly. “Let me get a call off to Cap, tell him we need some courtesy cover through his boys on the fed team as an entrée to the squad down in Grand Cayman. I’d rather be treated like VIPs who are coming down there to help them solve a case as freelance PIs, rather than be met at the airport and taken into custody in cuffs.”

  “Make the call,” she said, nervous perspiration wetting her skin with sheen. She got out her laptop, waited until James had finished his call to Bennett, and then searched for a place to plug it in. “Shit!”

  “What’s wrong?” James folded his arms over his chest.

  She held up the old phone cord and sighed. “It’s not a plastic adapter. This is old, hardwired to a four-pronged wall jack!” She rubbed her palms down her face in total frustration. Being in a foreign country had its merits and distinct limitations. The dusty, thick air in the house was stifling. “I’ve gotta find a cybercafé. That’s all to it.”

  “Then we wait for FedEx,” he said, trying to remain calm.

  “Why don’t you do that thing on the front door with the dogs, so we can just open it and act normal when they get here?” she said, frustration making her tone brittle, and the request come out as a command.

  “After FedEx comes and goes. Whatduya think will happen if the door possibly blows before then?”

  He walked away from her in frustration, his nerves tight enough to pop.

  “OK. I’m sorry,” she said, stuffing her laptop back into the knapsack. “We’re both edgy. I just hate sitting here in the house, waiting.”

  The sound of the doorbell almost made her squeal; she was ready to jump out of her skin. They both dashed to the back door, but James held up his hand, shoving his gun into his pants waistband under his T-shirt again.

  “Let me slide out of the house, then go around the front, in case it isn’t FedEx. You peep through the shades on the side and give me the nod if you see a real FedEx truck. Cool? But stay away from the window.”

  She nodded and watched him exit the house through the back, holding her breath, and gave him the thumbs-up the moment she spotted the familiar, marked truck.

  He collected the package without fanfare, and rounded the house with a box. They tore into it like thieves, and quickly shoved the contents into his knapsack.

  “Now, we leave,” James said, a slight tinge of annoyance and triumph in his tone that irked her.

  “We still need to test the front door like we did that back door,” she said. “If Brother B comes back here for some reason, after we’re gone, I can’t have anything happen to—”

  “I know, I know,” James said, hurrying with her down the street back to the same food vendor. “You ask where you can hook up your laptop, but stay in the store. I’ll go do my thing, and will be back in a minute.”

  This time she listened, every muscle within her strained to the limit as the slow process of getting served took place. Nothing happened quickly in Jamaica. Everything was done at a leisurely, mind-wracking pace of no worries. Once James left the store, it was all she could do to keep up the pleasant, idle banter, and seem like a casual, American tourist on holiday while her heart slammed against her breastbone.

  The sudden sound of a blast made the few milling patrons, the clerk, and Laura shriek, drop everything, and tear out of the small, sparsely stocked store. Billowing black smoke could be seen where she stood, but there was no James in sight. Instant terror made her feet move toward the blaze. Tears filled her eyes—where was her husband?!

  Commotion ensued in the street. A jumble of patois-strained voices and shouts to call authorities rang out. Dead, mutilated dogs left in bloodied bits against the curb, parked cars, and in the street almost made her vomit at the sight. But no James.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered, swallowing hard, and running in the opposite direction from the horror to find a way to get to the house from a back street. She had to find James’s body before the house burned to the ground.

  A man stepped out of the alley, yanked her arm, and she screamed—but her voice was drowned out by the sound of the shrieking neighbors and sirens.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and pulled her nearly off her feet.

  It took a few seconds for her brain to sync up with her vision. It was James, their knapsack over his shoulder, and pulling her into an adjacent street with a steel-force grip. He jogged them through several alleys, ditching the gun in one trash can and the bullets deep in a Dumpster a block away, lest neighborhood children accidentally discover the weapon. She knew what he was doing as he stripped the weapon clean, wiped his prints off of it with his shirt, and kept moving, eyes roving. If he’d died in the blast, her soul would have died right along within him. But she didn’t have time to think about all of that as he pulled her out onto a main thoroughfare, then flagged down a cab before additional gridlock ensued.

  Shaking, she gave the cabbie the location of the cybercafé as though they’d been oblivious to the blast like the cabbie was. They went in the opposite direction of the mayhem, paid their fare, and jumped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Get on your laptop; I’ll call the house to get our family out of there. You send whatever to Cap and Rick, and we head to the airport in ten minutes.”

  “Oh ... baby ...” Rick whispered as he stared at his Blackberry. “This is a Pulitzer in the making.” He licked his lips quickly, closed his eyes, and forced himself to wait for the right moment, just like Laura had said. “You are still my favorite girl.”

  “Yeah, this is Joey,” Scapolini said, walking through his expansive Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home sipping a beer. He stopped in the middle of his kitchen and waited as a rush of information filled his ear.

  “But see, this is why friends should come to friends—and only friends, first,” he said as a smile tugged at his cheek. “We wasn’t even invited to the party. Is that how you treat friends, after all these years?”

  Again, more urgent words filled the receiver, and he opened the fridge, nonplussed, to hunt for some lunch meat.

  He stood, growing agitated. “Listen. I don’t fuck with the feds—creates tax problems. Especially when there’s no incentive.” He waited and listened, still not happy with what he was being told.

  “No. That wasn’t us. We’re not sloppy like that. See, you shoulda come to professionals. Friends who are professionals. Those guys are new to the game. Do shit half-cocked. Ain’t our style.”

  Joey slammed the refrigerator door. “Now you want us to clean up after them? Look, you guys have a lotta nerve—”

  The caller’s urgent pleas cut off his argument, and Joey leaned against the center butcher-block island in his white-on-white kitchen, listening to bullshit that was beginning to make the beer in h
is stomach curdle. Something wasn’t right.

  “This much I did hear,” Joey said, angling. “You know the network has ears. It didn’t involve us, but we heard that some Russian guy’s cousin bought it, and they took offense, on account of the fact that their client ordered the job on the jobber. Bad form, if I must say so myself—but you didn’t hear that from me... . I’m just saying, word travels, rumors get spread. Anyway, from my take, that’s when things got messy. Went ova the top. I’m glad I’m just in the casino business and building trades, ya know. But, a little waste management contract down in the Gulf might help me become more interested in your problems. Capice?”

  Joey smiled. The Main Line fat cats were so stupid, for all their political clout. Blessed Mary knew he was-n’t about to admit to any involvement over some freaking phone. Pin it all on the Russians. Bastards.

  “Laura Caldwell? What’s that broad got to do with it?” Joey waited, becoming suspicious. “I ain’t heard from that black chick in, what, more than a year ... if memory serves me. Mighta been longer than that. Only time I saw her was when she came to play some blackjack. Your point being?”

  Every instinct within him told him to play it cool. George Townsend never called him directly. OK, so they wanted to play games.

  “That cop, Carter?” Joey pushed away from the center island slowly. “I’m a law-abiding citizen, George. I try not to mix with cops, unless it’s a friendly game of cards down at my establishment. I don’t think I can help you on this one. Like I said, neither the cop or the broad have been whispered in my ear as a problem. But shame what happened to Devereaux and Polanski, though. Sutherland, too—a man should be able to serve his time and get back into society, once his bid is done. My condolences to all of Micholi Foundation, on that. Seriously. It’s a fucked-up sin that a man can’t even enjoy his own home. What’s the world coming to?”