by Trace Conger
“What in the hell am I supposed to do about it?” I said. “I don’t have much pull with the Cheerleading Mom’s Club.”
“Hey,” Albert’s voice floated out of the guest room. “You guys talking about cheerleaders?”
“No, Dad.” I yelled, and turned back to Brooke.
“Maybe you could talk to her husband, Michael,” said Brooke. “He’s some big shot at the savings and loan on Harrison Avenue. Candy never shuts up about him.”
“Savings and loan? I didn’t know those were still around. Why don’t people just use a bank?”
She shrugged.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything. This really isn’t my area of expertise.”
“You’ll figure something out,” she said, finally breaking a smile.
I took another sip of my coffee as Becca walked out of the guest room. She pulled her penguin suitcase, the one with the squeaker in the bill, behind her.
“I’m all packed up,” said Becca.
She wheeled to a stop next to me and I bent down to give her a squeeze.
“I hope you had a good time, sweetheart.”
“I did. I always do. And I can’t wait to come back next time.”
I gave her a wink and then opened the door.
Becca turned to the guest room. “Bye Grandpa,” she yelled.
“Bye kiddo!” Albert yelled back.
Brooke and I stared at each other the way we did every Sunday afternoon, unsure of the standard ex-spouse goodbye protocol. I grinned and wrapped my arms around her. Unlike Becca, with Brooke, I never knew how tight or how long to squeeze. She squeezed back, smiled, and walked out of my apartment with Becca wheeling her penguin suitcase behind her.
I closed the door and inhaled. Brooke’s perfume lingered in the living room.
A moment later, my father emerged from the guest room with a cordless drill in one hand and a yellow Stanley level in the other.
“Seriously,” he said. “Were you guys talking about cheerleaders?”
Three
THE MAN IN THE GREEN baseball cap sat in a silver Cadillac Escalade watching the entrance to the Shillito Lofts on West Seventh Street in downtown Cincinnati. He tapped his finger against the custom-modified Glock 17 nestled in a holster between the driver seat and the center console. The man watched as a tall redhead emerged from the apartment complex. She carried a yellow purse and held the hand of a young blonde girl who pulled a penguin-shaped suitcase across the sidewalk.
The man grabbed his cell phone from the dashboard and dialed. A moment later, a woman answered.
“How’d it go?” she said.
“Good, but there might be a small hitch. I need you to look through the Dark Brokerage’s database and see if there’s any information for someone with the last name N-O-L-A-N. There might be two listings. Brothers.”
“Who are they?”
“Not sure, but according to an email they sent to Bishop’s sidekick, they’re close to finding our man Finn. They might be full of shit, and they might not. Get me their identities and I’ll find out how close they really are.”
“Okay,” she said. “Be careful.”
“Always am.” The man clicked off the phone and tossed it back onto the dashboard. He watched as the thin redhead buckled the young girl into the back of a green Range Rover and then pulled onto West Seventh Street.
Four
I MET BROOKE MCBRIDE WHEN we were both freshman at Ohio University. She lived in the dorm room directly above me and frequently visited our floor. Brooke was dating some guy from her high school days, and I was too busy binge drinking and sleeping around to date one person exclusively, so we never progressed beyond the friend zone.
After our freshman year, we went our separate ways, and except for passing once or twice on the way to class, our paths rarely crossed.
That all changed in December of my senior year. It was a few weeks before Christmas, and I was spending the winter break on campus slinging coffee at The Percolator. A friend and I closed the coffee shop at 9:00 pm one Friday night and headed uptown to hit a few bars and make some poor decisions, our usual routine. I saw Brooke at the first bar we visited and we struck up a conversation. We reminisced about our freshman days in Tiffin Hall, a co-ed dorm. About the strange RA who always blasted Metallica, and the time a campus cop caught us drinking rum-and-cokes in the dorm hallway at 3:00 am.
The conversation turned to our majors and what we had planned after graduation. She’d arrived at college with dreams of being a doctor, but realized at some point her brain wasn’t cut out for it. Then she changed course and focused on hospital administration and then medical research. She knew she wasn’t going to change the world, but she thought she might be present when someone else did. I talked about my interest in criminology and sociology and everything that made the criminal mind tick.
We’d talked so long that I hadn’t noticed that the friend I’d arrived with had already left and that the bar staff was wiping down the tables and flipping the chairs. We slipped on our jackets and stepped out into the bitter Athens, Ohio night. I don’t think I actually invited her to my apartment, but I started walking that way, and she followed, huddled close for warmth.
It was somewhere during that walk home that something happened. Maybe it was the amber hue of the street lamps lighting our way, or maybe it was the flurries falling to the deserted cobblestone street, but sometime during that walk I realized that for the first time I thought I’d found someone I cared about more than myself. We went back to my apartment on Mill Street and spent the night together. She was a permanent fixture in my head and my bed until graduation five months later.
After graduation we moved to Cincinnati and got married. She nabbed a nursing position at a prestigious hospital. The medical research thing never panned out, but she took the nursing job as a temporary gig until she figured how to parlay her nursing degree into a career. I’d abandoned the idea of being a criminologist, because I didn’t want to go to grad school and end up stuck in an office, analyzing individuals who led more exciting lives than I did. While I was figuring out my own career, I answered an ad from a law firm looking for an investigator. Part of my college coursework had included spending time with police officers, studying criminals, and learning my way around police and legal databases. I thought I could take on investigative work while I figured out my next step. I hit it off with the partners at the law firm, and they liked me enough to cover the costs of my PI education and license certification.
A year after taking the gig, I was a full-fledged private investigator. Brooke wasn’t thrilled. She saw me doing something more lucrative, not to mention safer. She pressed me to leave the law firm and open my own private investigation agency. It sounded like a great idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I’d get caught up in the business side of things; hiring and firing, looking for new business, and the high cost of liability insurance. I realized that I’d be off the street—more of an administrator than an investigator. I forgot the idea as quickly as I could.
Our downhill slide started one afternoon when Brooke found the .45 in my messenger bag and nearly stroked out. I told her it was for protection, and that I’d probably never have to use it, but all she saw was her husband carrying a firearm and the potential risk it signaled.
I never knew if it was more about the perceived danger of the job, my inadequate career goals, or the lousy salary—it was probably an even split between the three—but we started to fight more often. What started as once a week ended up as a daily event.
Of course, the best thing about fighting was the make-up sex. That was the one part of our relationship that didn’t suffer, and I’m not sure which argument did it, but one of them produced Becca, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Brooke delivered our daughter at the same hospital where she worked.
For the next four years, we tried to keep things together, but it unraveled a little every day until there wasn’
t enough of a relationship to salvage. It was like being on a roller coaster and knowing there wasn’t anything you could do to get off. I knew we were doomed when our conversations began to focus on how great things used to be. We always looked back because neither of us could see anything ahead of us. Toward the end, we were just going through the motions, pretending we were a happy family.
Brooke was the hottest woman I’d ever been with, and she turned a lot of heads. I loved that when we were in college, but I loathed it when she went to work at the hospital. I knew she’d be walking the halls surrounded by guys in white coats who quadrupled my annual salary. And I knew every one of the med-heads on her floor were ready to pounce on her, give her a luxury car, a vacation home, and a reason to never work again. After being married for seven and a half years, I discovered I was right.
It was a Tuesday night when she came home from work and said she was leaving me. “Drifted apart” was the phrase she used, and she was spot-on as usual.
Two weeks later she took Becca and moved in with an anesthesiologist she met at work. He promised her all the things I couldn’t. His name was Dr. Daryl Jennings.
I preferred to call him Dr. Dickhead.
Five
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, THE CELL phone buzzed on the dashboard of the silver Escalade. The man in the green baseball cap clicked on the speaker without taking his eyes off the main entrance of the Shillito Lofts apartment complex.
“I’ve got the information you wanted for the Nolan brothers,” said the woman on the other end of the line.
The man grabbed a small notepad and clicked open a pen. “Go ahead.”
“It took some time to access what’s left of the Dark Brokerage’s servers.”
“Is the website still down?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And the Nolans?”
“You were right,” said the woman. “Two of them. James and Charlie. They’ve got two vehicles registered to separate addresses in Kentucky.” The man in the cap scribbled in the notepad. “The first is a Ford F-350 pickup. Color black. That’s registered to James Nolan. The second is a Yukon Denali registered to Charlie Nolan. Color red. I pulled their information from the licensing bureau. I’m emailing the addresses, license info, and license photos to your phone.”
“Thanks. I’ll pull it up.”
“Listen, these guys look like bad news,” said the woman. “They’ve got some colorful records and a few open warrants. I’m sending info on all of it. Be careful, they’re not lightweights.”
“They never are.”
THE MAN IN THE CAP eased back into his seat, sipped his gas-station coffee, and reviewed the Nolans’ information on his phone. He’d been parked at the Shillito Lofts complex for six hours before spotting the red Yukon Denali in his rearview mirror. It stood out among all the black and gray sedans and mid-sized SUVs he’d seen pass by.
The man in the cap grabbed his phone and clicked open Charlie Nolan’s DMV file. He glanced at the license photo, and a man with a wide face and shaggy blond hair stared back at him. Charlie’s license indicated he was six-two and two-hundred-and-thirty pounds.
He caught the Denali’s Kentucky plate as it slowed, rolled past the front of the apartment complex, and then turned right onto Race Street. The man in the cap slipped the Glock from its holster, quickly screwed on the suppressor, tucked it under his jacket, and watched his rearview mirror. A moment later the Denali appeared again. This time it turned into the apartment complex parking lot.
The man in the cap stuffed two rolled up industrial-sized garbage bags down the back of his pants, jumped from the vehicle, and walked toward the Denali, his right hand tucked inside his jacket. Before the driver had time to exit his vehicle, the man in the cap stepped to the Denali’s passenger door and knocked on the window.
“Do you know how to get to 71 from here?” he said, his voice low. He studied the driver’s confused look and waited for the blond man behind the wheel to roll down the passenger window.
The driver lowered the window. “What?” he said.
“I said do you know how to get to 71 from here?” The man in the cap glanced around the parking lot. “My cell died and I need to get back on the highway.”
The driver shook his head. “No, sorry buddy.”
His jaw hadn’t closed before the man in the cap pulled the Glock from inside his jacket and fired two quick rounds into the blond man’s head. The first shot ricocheted off the man’s cheek bone and struck the driver’s headrest. The second shot exploded through the back of Charlie Nolan’s skull painting the window with red and gray chunks. Bullet number two also cracked the driver’s-side window, but it didn’t shatter. The man in the cap raced around the car, opened the driver’s door, released the seatbelt, and kicked Nolan to the passenger side. He yanked the bags from his waistband, laid them out across the driver’s seat, climbed into the SUV, and closed the door.
He checked the ignition. No key. He ducked beneath the dashboard and scoured the vehicle’s floor. Finding the key, he pushed it into the ignition and turned the engine. As he lowered the cracked driver’s window, parts of Charlie Nolan’s brain dropped off and fell onto the edge of the driver’s seat.
The man in the cap pulled the Denali onto Race Street and then caught Fifth Street to I-71. As he drove down the highway, he glanced at the map on his cell phone, searching for a large parking lot. Six miles later he found one.
He pulled into the Rookwood Commons’ parking lot and took a spot at the rear of the lot away from the other vehicles.
The man leaned over toward the passenger side and searched Nolan’s jacket pockets for a cell phone but didn’t find it. He ducked his head under the dashboard again, but still nothing. Then he clicked open the glovebox. There it was. He turned on the phone and searched through the text message history until he found several messages from James Nolan. He turned to his own phone and punched in the addresses for James and Charlie Nolan that he found in their BMV files. The satellite view revealed that James lived on a cul-de-sac in a Florence, Kentucky neighborhood. Charlie lived in a rural part of Jonesville, Kentucky, 40 miles away from his brother. According to the satellite image, Charlie’s home was isolated and surrounded by trees on three sides.
The man in the cap placed his cell phone inside his jacket pocket and returned to the text message screen on Charlie’s phone. He pulled up the last text exchange with James Nolan. The last message appeared to be sent just after he arrived at the Shillito Lofts, probably moments before he took two to the head.
It read: “Just arrived. Will call after it’s done.”
“Okay” read the response.
The man in the cap typed on the screen.
“Done. Need help getting rid of the package. Meet me at my place in one hour.”
Seconds later James Nolan replied. “Will be there.”
The man in the cap wiped his prints from Charlie’s phone and tossed it onto the passenger floor mat. He typed Charlie’s address into his own phone’s GPS app, slammed the Denali into drive, and followed the monotone voice as it guided him through the twists and turns of Kentucky’s back roads to Charlie’s home at 4408 Gooseneck Road in Jonesville. As he drove through the sleepy town, he noted the sign for the bus station in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, six miles from his final destination.
THE MAN IN THE CAP arrived at the home on Gooseneck Road and parked the Denali in the dirt driveway. He turned to the passenger seat. The absence of a wedding ring on the dead man’s left hand indicated he likely lived alone, but the man stepped out of the SUV to confirm his suspicion. He quickly walked the perimeter of the home, noting the steep ravine beyond the back yard. He peered through the windows, but saw no one.
When a knock on the front door returned no answer, he walked back to the driveway, crouched down in front of the SUV, and waited, the Glock gripped tightly in his hand.
The black F-350 pickup truck arrived ten minutes later. The man listened as the truck’s door opened and closed and
the soft thud of boots approached.
The man pulled the green cap low over his face and rose to his feet in front of the Denali. “James Nolan?” he said mentally comparing the man in front of him to the photo in his DMV file.
James Nolan turned and ran back toward the pickup truck as the man in the cap raised his weapon and fired. The shot clipped James’ shoulder, but did little to slow him down. The second round pinged off the driver’s-side mirror.
In one fluid motion, James reached the rear of the pickup, grabbed a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun from the back, turned, and fired. The shot exploded through the rear of the Denali, shattering the rear window and forcing the man in the cap to take cover behind the front of the SUV.
“Where’s my brother?” shouted James, as he racked another shell into the shotgun’s chamber from behind the tailgate.
“He’s dead,” said the man in the cap. “Same as you’re gonna be.”
James stepped out to the side of the pickup truck and fired another blast, which blew the Denali’s passenger mirror off the side of the vehicle. “I can do this all day, you piece of shit.”
“Me too.”
“I’m gonna blow your dick off either way, but it’d be nice to know why you’re here,” said James.
“Finn Harding.”
“You competing for my contract?”
“Ain’t your contract, dipshit. It’s open to anyone who wants it.”
“Well, step on up, then.” James fired a third shot, which tore through the Denali and shattered the front windshield, sending shards of glass raining down onto the green baseball cap.
The man in the cap laid on his stomach, brushed the glass off, and watched from underneath the SUV as James retreated back behind the pickup and racked the shotgun again. The man in the cap aimed the Glock at James’ lower left shin and fired. The shot splintered James’ tibia, dropping him to the dirt ground behind the pickup.