Dead Lawyers Don't Lie: A Gripping Thriller (Jake Wolfe Book 1)

by Mark Nolan

“Yes, somebody set me up to be the fall guy. Now my goal is to find the man who is impersonating me and beat him to a pulp. That’s about it… so how’s your day going?”

  “You have no idea,” Knight said. “The perpetrator left a body in a media van, and the Secret Service shot a few dozen holes in him. Everybody is so jumpy they’ll shoot anyone who even looks like you. If you have a twin brother, tell him to stay home and hide under the bed.”

  “Luckily I don’t have a twin, and since I am uniquely handsome, everyone else is safe too. The shooter actually called me to gloat about his crime. Can you have your people access the call records of my regular phone and trace the number? I want to find this guy. It’s personal.”

  “No Jake, you listen to me, what you have to do is come into FBI headquarters. Turn yourself in to one of our agents so we can keep you safe in protective custody while we figure this thing out.”

  “Everyone is giving me that same advice, and I wish I could follow it but I don’t feel like disappearing into the witness protection program.”

  “You’ll only be going to our FBI building here in town. And you don’t have any choice. I’m not asking you, I’m ordering you to stop running and to let an FBI agent bring you in.”

  “Sorry but I can’t let this guy get away with shooting Katherine Anderson. How is she doing now and how is the baby?”

  “The latest I heard was that she and her baby are both alive and expected to survive. That’s all I know.”

  “No change for the worse then. That’s good.”

  Knight heard Jake breathe a sigh of relief over the phone. He also heard the sincerity in Jake’s voice.

  “I want you to survive too Jake. Several agents are converging on your position and they’re going to bring you in safely and keep you alive.”

  “Okay G-Man you win,” Jake said. “Tell your people that I’m thinking of giving myself up into their custody.”

  Jake ended the call, and he visualized SUVs full of agents finding his phone on the airport shuttle. He realized that pretty soon they would also be chasing the phone he’d just now used to talk to Knight. Information lag time was his friend. He took the battery out of the disposable phone so they could no longer get a fix on it.

  Jake had not lied to a federal agent. That would have been a crime. He’d said he was thinking of giving himself up. He did momentarily think about it, but he decided against it. Jake felt that the FBI was an amazing and impressive organization. He had great respect for them and he tried to help whenever he could, but he had no desire to be taken in for questioning. Federal laws were so incredibly broad that you could be sent to prison simply for talking, for saying a few words. Next year the Feds would probably start arresting anyone who passed gas.

  Agent Knight spoke to Jake but got no reply. The phone call had ended. Knight called back, but there was no answer. He hoped Jake would turn himself in. The man had been framed and nearly murdered so far today, and if he was found by a rookie police officer he might end up being shot by mistake. If Knight took Jake into custody he could make sure his friend got a fair hearing. Jake was already being smeared in the news media. His life could unravel fast, and he might never recover. Right now his best hope was to trust Knight and be under his protection.

  Knight looked at a framed quote he kept on his desk to remind him to use his FBI power wisely. The quote was by an FBI Agent named Gary Aldrich, who had worked at the White House. Knight read these words every day:

  The mere existence of an FBI investigation can lead to an individual’s personal, professional and financial destruction. An actual indictment is like dropping a house on someone. FBI agents, at least senior ones, are well aware of this, and they use their power wisely. We have seen how businesses can go under, banks fail, marriages dissolve, prosecutors become famous and defense attorneys become wealthy as a result of a single visit from an FBI agent.

  Katherine Anderson rested in her hospital bed with her eyes half closed. She’d asked to be released so she could go home, but had been told there were a few more tests to be done. Various doctors and nurses and Secret Service agents came into her room and went out again. Her husband Daniel sat next to her and held her hand while he talked quietly on his phone.

  Down the hallway, Doctor Rachel Brook was in her office studying Katherine’s chart. Her prognosis was that the mother and baby both appeared to be uninjured by the paintball, thank goodness. Dr. Brook’s concern was the lump she’d seen on the ultrasound, in one of Katherine’s breasts. She stared closely at the image. The sight of it gave her a knot in her stomach.

  The ultrasound could easily be wrong, but in the image, it looked as if Katherine might have a mass in her left breast. It could be a harmless lump related to pregnancy, or it could be a tumor… breast cancer.

  Many women who were surprised with a prenatal diagnosis of cancer were then faced with frightening decisions about their own health and their baby’s health. It was doubly challenging to save both lives. Sometimes the mother opted to have her breasts removed with a double mastectomy.

  Dr. Brook knew that Katherine had tried for years to get pregnant, and this baby was greatly wanted and hoped for and loved. She felt a weight on her heart. Katherine was a close personal friend of hers and now she only held back her tears by using every ounce of her professional training. She reminded herself that they couldn’t be sure of any diagnosis based on this hurried exam. They would need to do a biopsy test. That would cause a great amount of fear and stress for Katherine, but it was unavoidable.

  Dr. Brook called in a nurse, ordered a biopsy and said that she would handle it personally. The nurse gave Brook a puzzled and worried look, but after she had locked eyes with her fierce boss for a long moment, she nodded and said nothing as she rushed off to do her job. Dr. Brook then sat alone in her office with her elbows on her desk, and her face cradled in her hands. The tears she had fought back were now stinging her eyes, and she could no longer stop them.

  After a minute, there was a knock at the door, and she wiped her eyes with a tissue and composed her face into the professional mask she wore each day at work. “Come in.”

  A nurse opened the door and said, “Dr. Brook, please come quickly, there’s something wrong with Katherine Anderson.”

  Chapter 76

  At the SFPD Homicide Detail squad room, Kirby looked up from his computer screen and said, “We got the numbers of the prepaid phones. Wolfe was just now using one and talking to… wait… the FBI?”

  Denton was beginning to worry about how Wolfe kept calling the FBI, but she pretended to be glad to hear that. “Good work. He must be talking to the feds because he’s scared of me and wants to turn himself in. Where is he right now?”

  “He’s near Fisherman’s Wharf. That makes sense because his phone went on the shuttle near there. The Wharf was his last known location. We have two cops searching the area.”

  Denton had assumed that Wolfe boarded the shuttle, hid the phone, and then got off at one of the next stops. “Send two more cops, double up on the search. Do we have any CCTV cameras at the Wharf? Can we see if there’s a man with a dog? Hopefully Wolfe is still taking his stupid pet along for the ride.”

  “Some of the tourist shops have security cameras in their windows, we can start calling them.”

  At the Wharf, a blind man wearing dark sunglasses was walking along the sidewalk with a golden-haired guide dog by his side. The dog was wearing an official service dog vest.

  Jake was pretending to be blind, but his eyes were seeing everything from behind the dark sunglasses. All he needed was a white cane to complete his disguise. He felt guilty impersonating a blind man, and he thought that he’d have to make a donation to a charity and atone for his bad behavior. Cody, however, was a certified service dog and the vest he was wearing was the real thing.

  The tourists were out in large numbers today at the Wharf and Jake looked in wonder at the crowd of shoppers and followers of fads. Many people had their minds programmed wit
h whatever the talking heads told them to think. They went along with the herd, trained by school and television to be obedient and do what they were told. “Good boy Bobby, you colored inside the lines. Now buy this crap.” Jake knew that the longer he worked in the news media, the more he lost faith in humanity. As he walked down the crowded street he was surrounded by people, yet he still felt alone.

  He stopped and bought a souvenir. It was an inexpensive flag attached to a white wooden dowel. The kind you put in your flowerbed. He asked the seller what the flag said. The woman told him it said “Mom’s Garden.” Jake walked a block away and removed the flag and set it on a park bench. He then used the five-foot long white dowel as a makeshift cane, tapping it in front of him as he walked along with Cody.

  He noticed a lot of sudden activity in the tourist shops along the street. People came out of doorways and looked around, talking on phones and adjusting storefront CCTV cameras. The citizen snoops were eager and willing to hunt down a fellow citizen and a neighbor, as long as someone in authority told them they had to do it because he was one of “the bad people.”

  Time was running out, Jake had to go into hiding. Too many law enforcement organizations on his trail. There was only one other organization he knew of that could possibly help him now. He was going to have to call in a powerful favor, but he couldn’t use his current phone to do it. Agent Knight must be really fast at tracing calls, or else the cops had discovered the numbers of his prepaid phones. Either way, it was time to dump the phone he’d just used.

  Jake was walking past a trash can, but then he noticed the line of people waiting to get onto the Ferry boat that goes to Alcatraz Island for a tour of the old abandoned prison. A smile crossed his face as he thought of the previous phone he’d sent on a journey to the airport. He put the battery back into the burner phone and set the volume on mute. He then passed close by the line of tourists, gently bumped into a man who was wearing a camera bag on his belt, and dropped his pre-paid phone into the man’s bag. Jake apologized for bumping into the man, and when the tourist turned and saw the dark glasses and white cane and guide dog, he said, “That’s alright, no problem.”

  Jake and Cody walked away, and Jake said, “That trick might not work twice, but it’s worth a try huh Cody?”

  Cody barked once and panted Ha-Ha-Ha.

  Jake went down a side street away from the Wharf and the crowds and activity. He’d been walking in this direction because there was a quiet little bar here that he knew of and it actually still had an old-fashioned pay phone in the back near the restrooms. When Jake went inside, the bartender said, “Hey you can’t bring a dog in here.”

  Jake turned in the general direction of the voice but looked off to one side as if he couldn’t see the man. “I’m sorry but he’s my seeing-eye dog. I have a permit to take him anywhere. It’s the law, my friend. If you don’t comply with the law, your bar will be shut down, and you’ll be unemployed. We’ll be gone in just a minute after I make a phone call.”

  “Why is that dog giving me a strange look?”

  “Maybe he thinks you look strange. He’s trained to bite your nuts off if you seem like a threat.”

  “Go on and use the phone but make it quick.”

  “Thanks, I’ll put in a good word with my dog about your nuts.”

  Jake walked away, tapping his cane. When he got to the pay phone, he was glad to find that it was still in working order. The very few pay phones that were left these days were often vandalized and broken. One day soon they would become as extinct as the dinosaurs. The only reason this phone was still here was that it helped mitigate the legal liability of the bar owner. This way the owner could say he’d provided a phone for patrons to call a taxi if they were too drunk to drive. It was not his fault if they got in a wreck.

  Jake placed a call to the Italian restaurant where he’d worked years ago when he was in high school. A woman answered the call, and Jake said, “I have a case of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo to deliver to Anselmo Amborgetti, but I’m having car trouble, and I need someone to pick me up. Please tell big Mo I’ll be in debt to him, and it is a matter of honor.”

  There was a long pause and then the woman said, “Un momento per favore,” one moment, please.

  Jake thought about how similar the Italian language was to the Spanish language in many ways.

  An older man came on the line, his voice raspy from grappa and cigars. “Who is this?”

  “Hey big Mo, it’s me, Jake the knife,” Jake said, using his old nickname from his restaurant days.

  When Jake was a restaurant cook, he’d once gotten into a heated argument with a waiter, and he’d thrown a kitchen knife in anger and stuck it into a wall. Hence, the nickname that would forever be his on the Italian side of his family tree.

  There was a pause as Anselmo recognized Jake’s voice and then he said, “Where are you, little buddy?”

  Big Mo was so big he called everybody “little.”

  “I’m in a bar near Fisherman’s Wharf,” Jake said, and he gave Mo the name and address of the bar.

  “I know that place. I’ve got a man and a car close by there right now. He’ll pick you up out back in the alley in a few minutes. How is your mother, we all love her and miss her here.”

  “Mom is doing great, she misses all of you too. Tell your driver I’ve got a dog with me.”

  “That’s good you got a dog. I’ll call my guy right now.”

  “Thanks, Big Mo. You are a man of honor.”

  “And you are family to us here. You can always call, day or night, and we will stand by you. Capisci?”

  “Capisco.”

  Jake hung up the pay phone with a sigh of relief. He felt grateful for the loyalty of his Italian friend and the entire Amborgetti family. He was not closely related to Anselmo, but they shared a distant cousin or two. And Jake’s mother Rosabella had worked at the restaurant for many years. Eventually she’d changed their lasagna to her own grandmother’s handwritten recipe that had been brought across the ocean from Italy.

  The members of the Amborgetti family were some of the most trusted people Jake had ever known. Just don’t ever get the famiglia angry at you by breaking their trust. Then they could be the most fearsome people, and they had long memories. They never forgot a friend or an enemy… never. If someone double-crossed them, the next thing you heard was that his dead body had floated up to the piers with a canary stuffed in his mouth.

  Jake walked out the back door with Cody, and they hid out of sight in the doorway alcove. Soon a black limousine drove up the alley from Jake’s right and stopped next to him. The driver’s window went down. An amused but dangerous looking Italian man gave the two of them an appraising look and then nodded his head. The locks on the passenger doors popped open, and Jake and Cody got into the backseat of the vehicle.

  Chapter 77

  Sergeant Kirby studied the police computer screen on his desk and said, “The prepaid phone Wolfe recently used is now heading out onto the water in the Bay.”

  “He’s trying to escape on a boat, just like I thought he would,” Denton said. “Get me the SFPD Marine Police, hurry.”

  “You’re patched into Patrol Boat Marine One, on line three.”

  Denton put the desk phone on speaker. “This is Sergeant Denton in Homicide. We’re tracking a phone used by the fugitive Jake Wolfe. It is currently moving out onto the water.”

  A deep, gravelly voice said, “This is Captain Leeds, we’re receiving your data on our computer. It appears that the device is moving in the direction of Alcatraz.”

  “Maybe he thinks he can hide out on the island. Pursue and intercept. Be advised that the fugitive is considered armed and dangerous. He also has a military dog with him that is trained to kill and is suffering from PTSD. Do not hesitate to fire at will on either the man or the dog. Both of them are a serious threat to public safety.”

  “Affirmative Sergeant, we are engaging in pursuit now.”

  The police boat’s co
mputer-controlled diesel engines roared, and its siren wailed as it charged across the water of the San Francisco Bay. Leeds stood tall in the bridge, looking ahead through binoculars. Marine One was the SFPD’s largest boat, a police version of a 47-foot US Coast Guard motorized boat, known as a USCG MLB.

  Another SFPD patrol boat, a smaller and faster M2-37 twin-engine aluminum Moose Boat, raced ahead to pass the target vessel and cut it off from the other direction.

  As Marine One got closer to the location of the phone signal, Captain Leeds made positive ID of the vessel up ahead and reported it on the radio.

  “Sergeant Denton, the phone we are tracking appears to be riding on the Alcatraz Ferry that takes tourists to visit the island.”

  Denton cursed. “Understood, Leeds. FYI the last time we closed in on the suspect’s phone on public transportation it turned out that he’d sent it for a ride on an airport shuttle while he went in another direction.”

  Leeds and his police shipmates heard that on the speaker, and they all started laughing. Leeds took his thumb off of the transmit button on his radio to prevent Denton from hearing them. He laughed along with his crew for a moment, then held his hand up for silence and pressed the button and said, “Roger that Denton. We’ll assume the suspect is on board, but if all we find is his phone we won’t be surprised.”

  The ferry was getting closer to Alcatraz island but the M2-37 Moose Boat was moving much faster. The power boat’s turbo engines churned the water as it overtook the ferry and pulled in front of it. The lights and siren came on, and a voice boomed from the loudspeakers. “This is the San Francisco Police. Turn off your engines and stop your vessel. Everyone onboard put your hands on top of your heads and do not move. Prepare to be boarded.” A uniformed officer stood on the deck of the police boat, holding a high powered rifle so the passengers and crew on the ferry boat could see him.

  Marine One came up behind the ferry boat and Captain Leeds studied the ferry with his binoculars. When the ferry powered down its engines, the Marine One police boat pulled up alongside it. Leeds hailed the ferry boat captain on the ship to ship radio. “San Francisco police patrol boat Marine One hailing The Hornblower.”