Rising Spirit

by Wayne Stinnett

  I could hear salsa music in the background and the sounds of people talking and laughing. DJ had been one of a group of new operators I’d met aboard Armstrong’s big research vessel when I’d first signed on. He’d later helped me and John Wilson take down a murderous cult in the BVI. I remembered he was a former Army spec-ops guy, who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan. I also remembered that not hampering him during his training with Armstrong.

  “I was wondering if I could ask your advice,” DJ said.

  “My advice? Are you drunk?”

  “Pretty much,” he replied, unashamed. “Do you remember Jerry Snyder? He and his wife were with us on Norman.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “John was trying to recruit him.”

  “Well,” DJ said, drawing the word out slightly. “I’ve been partnered with him for an op.”

  “He seemed capable,” I commented, wondering where this was going.

  “He is. That’s not the problem.”

  “So, there is a problem?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but he’s kind of a stick in the mud when it comes to rules and shit.”

  “And you like working alone,” I said, starting to understand.

  “Not so much that,” DJ said. “We’re just polar opposites, man. I’m more of a door-kicker. Ask a question and if the answer isn’t forthcoming, break a finger.”

  “I see,” I said, grinning.

  The man was a lot like myself in my younger days. Hell, even more so after I left the Corps. I’ve bent and broken my share of rules.

  “He’s stifling, Jesse. Everything’s gotta be straight from the book. Ever met anyone like that?”

  A younger Deuce Livingston immediately flashed into my mind. When we’d first met, Deuce, as well as the two SEALs with him, Tony Jacobs and Art Newman, were the consummate professionals, everything according to the prescribed rules of engagement.

  “Yeah, I have, DJ. You just described my partner Deuce.”

  “The big SEAL guy that was with you on Ambrosia?”

  “One and the same,” I replied.

  “How did you guys make it work?”

  “It takes time,” I replied. “Just like a relationship with a woman. You have to give and take, accept and demand, until both people become more like the one in the middle.”

  “You sound like that old blind guy on Kung Fu.”

  I laughed at the comparison. “How long have you guys been working together?”

  “Just one op, but where we’re headed next, I don’t see any way around busting some heads.”

  “Then bust them,” I said. “You’ll know when negotiations have ended before he does. Sometimes, that knowledge will be only seconds ahead of incoming fire. Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”

  “I’ve gone that route once already.”

  “He’s a smart guy,” I said. “He’ll pick up on things; sometimes it’ll be after you, and hopefully before the shit storm starts. Give it time, brother.”

  “Thanks, Jesse,” DJ said. “I just don’t want to see the guy get hurt, if there’s something I could have done to prevent it.”

  “Keep in mind,” I said, “it’s a two-way street. There may come a time when you think the only way forward is to bust someone’s head, but Jerry knows a way around. You’ll both make mistakes. Talk out the situations afterward and learn from them.”

  “Thanks, again,” he said and ended the call.

  I put the Armstrong phone back in my pack, removed my personal satellite phone, and went out to the small patio to call Deuce on the video link.

  “Get to Virginia without any problems?” he asked, when his face appeared on the screen. I could tell that he was aboard his boat and out on the water.

  “Yeah, and I already identified three of the players and the killer.”

  Deuce’s face leaned in closer to his phone. “What?”

  “The triggerman is a guy named Stuart Lane. His name was one of the three Chyrel gave me.”

  “How do you know that so fast?”

  “Dumb luck,” I replied. “The three addresses were clustered together and as I did a preliminary drive-by this evening, a pickup came out of one of the driveways, so I followed it. It came from the property Chyrel identified as belonging to the assistant prosecutor, Aiden Pritchard. He met with two of his neighbors. One was Luke Wright, another one Chyrel identified. The third man is Jeb something, not one of the three addresses.”

  “Better lucky than good,” Deuce said.

  I grinned. Pap used to say that a lot. Said he got it from a baseball player named Lefty Gomez who had played ball when Pap was a kid.

  “Who’s watching Eve’s house now?”

  “Tony is there until midnight.”

  I looked at my watch, surprised at how much time had passed. “It’s nearly that now. Pritchard told the other two to tell Lane to pack, he was leaving for Florida in the morning.”

  “Andrew will take over at midnight and be there until noon,” Deuce said. “I’ll have Paul back him up first thing in the morning, and Tom can back up Tony in the evening, so two will be there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  It made me feel better knowing that the guys were already on the alert. They’d be able to keep an eye on Eve’s house without them even knowing. Tony Jacobs had served under Deuce when he’d commanded a SEAL team. Paul Bender used to be on the presidential detail of the Secret Service, and Andrew Bourke was a burly former Maritime Enforcement specialist with the Coast Guard. The last man, Tom Broderick, was once my commanding officer in the Corps. He’d been injured in Afghanistan and lost his hearing. His ability to read lips made him a valuable asset in a lot of circumstances—stakeouts being one. All were very capable, highly intelligent, and some of my closest friends.

  “What are you going to do now?” Deuce asked.

  “They’re up to something up here,” I replied. “And it doesn’t sound like anything legal. The three men met way up on a mountain road, then hiked to a campsite. I overheard Pritchard tell the others that he didn’t want Environmental Quality agents snooping around.”

  “Any idea what it might be?”

  “I overheard that Lane was delivering a hundred gallons of something at a good price. In this area, that probably means only one thing.”

  “Illegal liquor.”

  “You got it,” I said. “I got a room for the night and tomorrow I’ll see if I can single one of those guys out.”

  “How do you plan to do that?” Deuce asked.

  “No idea,” I replied. “Hoping for more luck.”

  “You’re due.”

  “Let’s hope it holds out,” I said. “You sailing alone?”

  “Sailing now, yeah,” Deuce replied. “The wind died to nothing right after I left the Anchor. Been motoring most of the day. It finally picked up about an hour ago, so I killed the diesel. I’m about five miles from the marina. Be there in less than an hour.”

  “Julie’ll be worried.”

  “Just got off the phone with her before you called,” he said with a chuckle.

  “I just got off the phone with DJ Martin. Remember him?”

  Deuce’s laughter became a bit heartier. “You don’t say. Is he having a problem with his new partner?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Jerry Snyder called me a couple of hours ago. Said he needed some advice on how to handle a loose cannon, and since you and I are partners, he figured I could give him some tips.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “DJ was asking how I dealt with such a stick in the mud.”

  Deuce’s face turned serious. “Think they’ll make it?”

  I half grinned in response to his earnestness. Deuce hadn’t changed a whole lot, but he was a bit more liberal with force today than he used to be. I knew that my associ
ation with him has made me a better man.

  “I’m counting on it,” I said. “These are the guys who will take the place of the dinosaurs.”

  “You’re the dinosaur,” he said. “I’m still a young man.”

  “You shoulda brought Trey,” I said grinning back at my friend. “He’s a better navigator.”

  He laughed and we ended the call. It was a long running joke between us, that went back to before we even met. Deuce had been an officer and I was an enlisted man. It was often said around Marine squad bays that the most dangerous thing on the battlefield was an officer with a map and compass. It was all in jest, though. Deuce was one of the best tacticians I’d ever known, even better than his dad, whom I’d served with decades ago.

  I knew Deuce would take care of things there and would have Chyrel working on the four men, digging up anything and everything she could that I might use or exploit. Which basically meant everything there was to know about them. Things that their own mothers wouldn’t know. Things that were illegal for her to know and pass on to me. But we’d all decided a long time ago to play by the bad guys’ rules—none.

  Chyrel didn’t look for evidence to use in court, and a lot of what she did was illegal. But only if she got caught. And she never got caught. She’d once hacked into the CIA’s main computer, which she said was easy. It was getting out and closing all the firewalls that was hard. I had no idea what she’d meant, but it was the CIA’s computer. That alone meant something.

  If Stuart Lane showed his face anywhere near Eve’s house, the guys would quietly pick him up.

  There was something stinking in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was bigger than cows crapping in the water. I could feel it.

  Taking my laptop from its case, I powered it on and stripped down to my skivvies while I waited for it to boot up. Then I spent the next thirty minutes learning what I could on my own about the men I’d seen up on the side of the mountain.

  Stuart Lane had a Facebook page and was friends with both Aiden Pritchard and a guy named Luke Wright, who looked just like the guy at the campsite. Looking through all three of their friends lists, I didn’t find anyone named Jeb. And here I thought I was the only one who didn’t use “the Facebook” as Rusty called it.

  “What’s Jeb short for?” I mumbled to myself.

  Jebediah, maybe. I didn’t see that name either.

  I dug into each man’s profile, reading their recent posts and going through their profiles, page by page. Both Luke and Stuart were farmers, judging by the pictures they posted. Luke liked trout fishing and they were both hunters, too. That presented problems, but nothing I was overly concerned about. They were both divorced—no big surprise there—and that would make things easier if I met up with one of them. No innocent bystanders.

  This was way beyond any sort of environmental problem. Since hearing Jeb utter the statement about shooting Sandy’s lover, my mind shifted to tactical mode. A man had been murdered and the apparent leader of this bunch of wack jobs was a well-placed attorney who had just ordered another hit. On my ex-wife. I saved Pritchard’s Facebook page for last.

  He was married and had two kids. He hadn’t entered very much on his personal Facebook page, or he had privacy settings that prevented me from seeing it, but he also had a separate professional page, which was apparently public. His boss had just been reelected for another term, which I guessed meant that Pritchard would still have a job. At least for the foreseeable future. He hadn’t posted anything new on his public page since the election three weeks earlier. Before that, he was touting his boss’s successes almost every day. In the Corps, we called that brown-nosing, a deeper form of kissing ass.

  A ping alerted me to an incoming email. It was from Chyrel. She said she had Lane’s preliminary workup complete. I opened the attached file; it was pretty lengthy for a rush job. She’d probably already started with the three landowners upon identifying where Sandy’s email had come from. The file contained all the basics, stuff that was readily available to the public, if you knew where to look. I decided to set up the little coffee maker and get a shower before delving into Stuart Lane’s background.

  Ten minutes later, I returned to the computer and carried it to the bed, along with a steaming cup of java in a paper cup. I stretched out, placed the computer on a pillow I’d propped on my legs, and then took a sip of the coffee.

  When I opened Stuart Lane’s file, I found a picture at the top with a physical description. He was a big man—six feet tall and 245 pounds. His head and face were shaven and his eyes were sullen, set deep in his skull, which made it look as if he had dark circles around them. Beneath his heavy, pronounced brow, his nose seemed a little crooked. A cruel-looking mouth with thin lips completed the picture.

  In his younger days, Stuart Lane had had a few encounters with local law enforcement. He was forty-nine now and had remained fairly clean for the last few years. Before that, he’d had countless traffic citations, two charges of trespass involving domestic violence, two charges of vandalism occurring at about the same times as the domestic violence charges, and five for drug possession, going back to his seventeenth year. All but one of the possession charges had been dropped. He had done three months in the county lockup for simple possession, pleaded down from a felony charge of possession of ten pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute. He’d also been charged with several counts of disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, and assault and battery. He’d been a person of interest in the disappearance of a nineteen-year-old girl five years ago. All those charges were dropped as well.

  Pritchard had been his lawyer, prior to moving over to the prosecutor’s office. I knew Chyrel would find all the ways these men were connected. It was just a matter of time.

  Lane owned the property he lived on, free and clear. He’d inherited it from his parents, who were both deceased. Property records went back more than two hundred years, with the land remaining in the same family name since 1810.

  If Lane’s tax statements were to be believed, he lived just below the poverty line, showing a loss for three of the last five years.

  The man had to have a side gig; something that paid cash and was probably illegal. The “hundred gallons at a good price” that Jeb had mentioned was obviously moonshine and that was where Lane made his undeclared money. Even at just ten dollars a gallon for rotgut, that was a grand in income that I’m sure he didn’t report on his taxes. With little or no overhead, a thousand a week could go a long way. If all four men were involved, it could be pretty lucrative.

  I pulled up Google Maps and found that Lynchburg was seventy-five miles away. That got me thinking as I finished my coffee. A 150-mile round trip in the mountains was a long way. Only two reasons came to mind for going that far to make a grand—one being that he was cautious and didn’t want to sell moonshine locally. Lane’s criminal record showed that he hadn’t been a careful man.

  What had changed four years ago to make him toe the line? Maybe that was when Pritchard became involved in the operation, keeping him in check. His uncle Jeb couldn’t do it. He’d said so himself: “Nobody tells Stuart what to do.”

  But Pritchard was a different kind of animal. I could see it in his eyes and the way the two older men kowtowed to him. He was dangerous in a different way than Stuart Lane.

  Another reason for delivering to Lynchburg, one that fit in with all I’d learned so far, would be that if they had a large distribution system, Lynchburg was just one place they delivered. If Stuart had just been making his routine weekly run, Pritchard wouldn’t have needed to know where he was going. A moonshine pipeline, as opposed to local selling, probably meant more production than a hundred gallons a week. My guess would be that they made a similar run several times a week, maybe daily. Both Jeb’s and Luke’s trucks were worn out, but not old.

  High demand usually meant a good product. Ten bucks a quart was still cheap whiskey, but if it
was half good, it could easily bring that, and if they were producing a hundred gallons just two or three times a week, there could be $10,000 a week changing hands. Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey could run up to thirty dollars at a liquor store for less than a quart.

  Maybe that was why Pritchard didn’t want DEQ stumbling around on his property. He had the means to build a high-tech distillery. Who would suspect an assistant prosecutor? If his property was large, he could hide a state-of-the-art still in a barn or something. One large enough to produce a higher quantity of top-shelf corn whiskey—with a good distribution system to several locations—might be a $50,000 a week operation. Even to an assistant prosecutor, that was big money.

  I went back to Lane’s file. He’d served in the Army for two-and-a-half years. That sent up a red flag. Normal enlistments were six years, usually four years active duty and two years in ready reserve.

  His MOS—his job in the Army—had been Information Technology Specialist, but he’d been charged with theft of government property—several computers—and sentenced to three months at hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and given a general discharge.

  I closed the computer and placed it on the nightstand. Setting my alarm for 0600, I decided to get some rest. I wanted to get close to one of these guys, but not Pritchard. The others would have guns, and I’d rather go up against an armed man than an unarmed lawyer. For now.

  When my phone vibrated its alarm, I rose and turned it off. After setting up the coffeemaker, I dressed and repacked my stuff. I wouldn’t be returning to this room. I tried to make it a habit to stay in different places whenever I was away from home. Ten minutes later, I shrugged into my jacket and was out the door, coffee in hand.

  I remembered not having passed anything that looked like a restaurant after I’d turned off the bypass the night before. The motel I stayed at was at the east end of the loop, so I drove back around to the north side of town and, instead of turning north on US-250, turned south toward downtown.

  I found a small diner on the edge of town, just a couple of miles from the loop road. Though it was early, there were already a number of vehicles in the parking lot. Most of them looked like farm trucks. I backed my rental into a corner spot, aimed straight toward the exit, and got out.