1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

  Johnny Two Leaf, Righteous Kingpin of Marquette. The Ace of the Game.

  “Bloody Johnny,” he said, and hefted the shotgun into both hands, holding it across his chest. “Bloke what's got the coppers on the run and the birds callin’ his name proper-like.”

  FIFTEEN

  They’d been cutting through downtown, heading for the Detroit office of the FBI, when Darren yelped for Issabella to stop the car and pull over. Flustered and suddenly apprehensive, she wheeled to the curb, checking all her mirrors for some sign of what had Darren animatedly fumbling to get his door open before they were completely stopped.

  “What—" she started, but he was out, his tall frame slipping up and away like he was propelled on wheels.

  He came to a lurching stop on the sidewalk a few yards away, and Issabella watched him for a minute. Then she buried her face in her hands and struggled not to swear into the interior of her car.

  Darren came back. When he was seated again, he had four wax paper-wrapped hot dogs in a bag and two Styrofoam cups of pop resting on the dashboard.

  “Seriously?” she said. “A hot dog cart? I almost had a heart attack.”

  “Wait until you try these,” he said with a grin, and held two of the wax paper cylinders up for her. “They are worth the risk of cardiac arrest, I promise.”

  He took a big bite of his hot dog and chewed happily. Issabella unwrapped one and stared at it skeptically. She took a bite. Darren, his mouth still full, nodded knowingly at her and said “Mm-hmm”. Issabella swallowed and dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

  “Alright,” she said. “It’s a very good hot dog. Not ‘panic your driver into a near-accident’ good. But good.”

  “I had an ulterior motive,” Darren said. He sipped his pop.

  “Share.”

  “We’re not really going to go to the FBI.”

  “Hmm. That’s odd. I thought for sure that was what we were really going to do.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “I think I thought that because it’s what we agreed to do.”

  She took another bite, chewed it, and sipped her pop. Darren wadded up the wrapper from his first hot dog and started opening the second one.

  “Well,” he said. “I think we have to answer some questions first. By ‘we’, I mean ‘you’. I’ve already answered them.”

  “Okay.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “That’s vague.”

  “I mean, what is our aim here? If we go see this FBI guy and tell him what you’ve figured out…“

  “That Vernon was the transportation guy for the Evil Police drug ring,” she finished, and favored him with a self-satisfied grin. “That he was using his crematorium business as a cover and was probably having the drugs sewn up in the bodies of the John Does and indigents he was getting through his contracts with the county. You mean that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then he’d drive his crematorium truck up to Marquette and the drugs would get distributed up there. And he’d burn the bodies in the ovens there. And that’s why the gas bills up there are sky high and down here not so much.“

  “Izzy, I already said ‘congratulations’, you know.”

  “And nobody would pull him over on his way up there,” she continued, still beaming with smugness. “He’s got a truck full of corpses and it’s all marked up with biohazard stickers or whatever. And even if he did get pulled over, what cop is going to go searching through a bunch of dead bodies? It was actually a really good system, when you think about it.”

  Darren finished his hot dog. He sipped his pop and stared out the windshield.

  “Say it, Darren.”

  “I already did.”

  “Not ‘congratulations’.”

  “Then I don’t know what you mean.”

  They sipped their pops noisily and the afternoon traffic burped past them.

  “Say it.”

  He sighed in exasperation.

  “Fine,” he said. “You win. You won the game.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “I’ll be alright,” he said. “So, now that we have that out of the way, answer my question.”

  “I forgot it.”

  “What’s our goal here? What’s the outcome you want? The money side of things is gone. There’s no legal work to be done. What’s the deal?”

  Issabella thought about it for a minute. She kept seeing Eugene Pullins’ face, the sad little man recounting how he had tried to shepherd his little brother away from trouble. She thought about the breathless, gossipy way her mother had talked on the phone about the cop-killing black man. She thought about the newspaper headlines.

  “They slandered our client and killed him,” she said finally. “They killed a defenseless man in a hospital bed. And we were the ones who were supposed to be protecting him.”

  Darren chewed the ice from his cup and nodded his head.

  “I think we’re of like minds, Izzy.”

  “This is the weirdest legal case I’ll ever be on, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “So, you have a plan.”

  “I do, in fact.”

  “Do I need to pack an overnight bag?”

  Darren laughed and kissed her again.

  “See?” he said. “Like minds.”

  *

  Agent Schultz stared down the slope of wind-whipped garbage at the black, cracking corpse of Noel Hammond below. Smoke rose out of his remains and swirled around the basin in the center of the county landfill. Schultz thought he looked like some failed super-hero-- rocketed to Earth, his trajectory carrying him askew of Kansas and a kindly adoptive family, instead delivering him here, his impact blasting a crater among the heaps and crests of refuse.

  Detroit Superman, dead on arrival.

  The crime scene techs in the basin milled on unsteady feet among the shifting garbage. As Schultz watched from the lip of the basin, a tech crouched over Noel’s corpse and gingerly removed the dead cop’s badge. The thick copper pin on the back of the badge had been stabbed through Noel’s sternum.

  “We need to go arrest Al Phelps, pronto.”

  Schultz glanced at the agent beside him. Matthews. A young guy, new to the job and new to Detroit.

  “You think so?” he said.

  “You’re kidding, right? If Smokey down there really is who that badge says he is, who else do you think would have done it? You served Al his papers and spooked his ass. This is Al cleaning up loose ends.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s not to know?”

  Schultz stared back down into the pit of trash. The little copper badge went into a baggie. Techs took photos.

  “It’s like a staged performance,” Schultz said finally. “Or a framed piece of art. Our killer sets Hammond in the dead-center of a valley of garbage, stabs him dead-center with his badge so identification is immediate. And burns him. Doesn’t bury him or hide him. Burns him to death in the wide open so he gets found right away. Why the hell would Allen Phelps do any of that?”

  Matthews gave him a flat look.

  “So you’d stand here and ask that,” he said. “So it looks like some crazy psycho did it. So he doesn’t get hit with being a cop-killer on top of all the other shit you’re trying to put on him.”

  Schultz didn’t answer. The techs had walked a gurney down to the bottom of the basin of trash. One of them was unrolling a body bag. Schultz thought about Phelps, out there in the world and desperate to cut off any source of evidence. He thought about his afternoon lunch with the lawyer, Issabella Bright.

  “You can hold this down?” he said.

  “You have something more important than this?”

  Schultz remembered how Issabella had been so engaged with their conversation. He’d wound her up on purpose, filled her head with facts from his case and sent her out to poke around the hornet’s nest.

  “Yeah,” he said, stalking off toward his car. “I do.”


  *

  All of the panic and pressure of the last day was gone, evaporated, leaving Allen Phelps in a clear-headed state of detached purpose. The department’s gossip-channels were bleating and braying the news that Noel’s corpse had been found in a garbage dump. Three different people had called to fill Al in on the news, none of them aware of his situation with the feds.

  His first act had been to race out and do a foot patrol around the Fort Shelby Tower. No cops. No reporters. Just a quiet late-morning stream of pedestrians. Which meant that Noel had never gotten the job done. The lawyers were alive. He walked and watched and thought, eventually coming to a stop over the two broken pieces of Noel’s cell phone laying at the curb.

  ‘Malcolm Mohommad.’

  Al pushed the disquieting thought out of his head and drove out of Detroit. The stash—the pooled millions in cash that he and Noel and Lee had amassed since beginning their enterprise –was buried on state land inside a closet safe, two counties north.

  When he hit the Jeffries Freeway, aiming himself north, Al pushed the button that sent his window humming down. Wind and traffic sounds climbed inside the car with him. He pulled his wallet out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open on his lap. Once he had taken all the cash out, he threw the wallet out the window. His cell phone followed.

  Allen Phelps was calm because he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had no more lies or deceptions to manage, no more roles to play. The man hurtling north was the same man who had stalked the deserts and mountains of foreign lands, a man who lived on mission clocks and a simple, reductive certainty that objectives were all that defined him.

  He had three. First, he would collect the money-stash. Then he would continue north to Marquette and collect the unsold pounds of heroin from Vernon’s crematorium there. All of the northern product was getting delivered to Canadian contacts Darnell had supplied. If he could deliver whatever was still left to those contacts, he could add those riches to the money-stash. After that, it was all flight and evasion until he could get to a jurisdiction that wouldn’t extradite. But that was far down the road, he knew. The cash and heroin were simple, easily attained goals. After that, he would have plenty of room to breathe in the wild expanses of the Upper Peninsula. He could plan his route to safety then.

  Allen Phelps stared fixedly into the future as the road disappeared under his wheels.

  *

  Malcolm was not overly mindful to disguise the fact that he was following Allen Phelps as the Lieutenant drove deeper into the rural stretches of Michigan. He always kept at least one vehicle between his and the TAC lieutenant’s, but did nothing beyond that.

  He understood predators as well as he understood prey. A rabbit knew in the deepest part of itself exactly what it meant when a winged shadow appeared and danced over the grass ahead of it.

  But Allen Phelps was no rabbit. As far as he was concerned, all of the sky was his and his alone. Malcolm weaved through the afternoon traffic, his window down, and listened to the snapping rush of wind sing him dark promises.

  SIXTEEN

  An hour south of the Mackinac Bridge, Darren pointed out the signs advertising a scenic lookout. Issabella pulled the Buick into a tree-shrouded parking lot and the two of them walked up a winding set of wooden steps that disappeared into the woods. The steps terminated into a large deck set upon a high bluff.

  “Wow,” she said when they both came to a stop at the railing.

  It seemed that all of Michigan was laid out in front of them, an expanse of endless oak, elm and evergreen, rolling away, vibrant and timeless beneath a slate-gray sky.

  Darren stretched and scratched absently at the stubble on his cheek.

  “Whole different world isn’t it?” he said.

  “I always forget that,” she said. “There’s Detroit and then there’s everywhere else.”

  Other drivers had taken the same opportunity to stretch. A family of four loitered on the other end of the big deck. A younger couple stood close to one another and spoke in intimate whispers. Issabella smiled and bumped her hip against Darren’s thigh.

  “Hmm?”

  “James Klodd,” she said.

  Darren’s expression didn’t change, but she could feel a line of tension run the length of him. He kept his eyes in the horizon.

  “It’s okay,” she said, suddenly sorry she had broached the subject. He had an open wound, and she had just poked at it. She felt stupid, like she’d ruined a nice moment. But then Darren started talking.

  “The cops got an anonymous tip,” he said. “The caller said he thought he’d seen a girl who looked like Shoshanna Green peering through one of the bedroom windows in Jamey Klodd’s house. The cops were at the end of their rope. They had nothing else. So they got a judge to sign a bad warrant.”

  Issabella nodded, said “Anonymous phone call doesn’t make probable cause.”

  “That’s what my motion said,” Darren sighed.

  “Not just your motion. It’s what all our courts say, too.”

  “I wrote the motion. Just me.”

  She wrapped her arm in his and leaned her head against his shoulder. They were quiet for a long time.

  “After the motion succeeded, I was the toast of the town,” he said. “Dinners with other highflyers, offers from big firms. So I’m in my office and my head’s full of all the future possibilities. The phone rings and the read-out says it’s Jamey Klodd. When I pick up the phone and answer, there’s just silence.”

  “Weird.”

  “I say his name a couple times, but there’s nothing. I’m about to hang up and call him back, like maybe the connection is just screwed up. But then I understood. He was letting me know what I’d done. He was sitting there on the other end of the line, letting the silence tell me that he’d kidnapped that little girl. He made that anonymous tip. He made it because he’s clever. He knew the cops were running themselves ragged, and gambled that they’d take the bait. Once they did, all he needed was a lawyer to get the illegal search thrown out of court. And with it, all the evidence they’d found in his house.”

  “What evidence?”

  “A crayon drawing pinned to his fridge. It was hanging there in the middle of the door all by itself. It was a kid’s drawing of a house and a yard and a sun overhead. And it was almost identical to the one hanging on the fridge in the Greens’ home. No prints or DNA. But a swirly, orange sun and crooked blue grass and a house with red shutters, just like in the one Shoshanna had drawn for her mother a week before she disappeared.”

  “Not exactly a magic bullet,” she said.

  “It was a damn billboard,” he whispered. “He was advertising he was the one.”

  Issabella shook her head, “That’s insane. Why take that risk? He couldn’t be sure that a motion would succeed."

  “He’s a malignant narcissist,” Darren said. “He needed the world to know it was him. He needed to show the cops and the court and me that he’d tricked everyone and gotten away with it. A week after that phone call, his house in Ann Arbor burned to the ground and Jamey Klodd vanished. A month after that, the first envelope showed up in my mail. Always mailed from a different state. No prints or DNA or notes. Just my home address and a little girl’s tooth.”

  The sun touched the horizon, throwing long shadows. The family of four had wandered back down the winding steps.

  Darren took in a slow, deep breath. He looked exhausted.

  “Judge Hodgens was the judge assigned to that case,” he said. “She threw out the warrant. When she found out about the green envelopes, she took it as hard as I did. Maybe harder. We both…I don’t know. Bonded, I guess. She’s a strong person. She got back on her feet, eventually. She soldiered on. I…didn’t.”

  Issabella watched him fall silent, and thought about her conversation with Judge Hodgens.

  “She’s trying to help you, isn’t she? To get you on your feet again.”

  Darren nodded.

  “Yeah. It was her idea that I should ease back
into cases when I felt ready. I promised her I wouldn’t take anything above a ninety day misdemeanor without a co-counsel. I was a real wreck, Izzy. I agreed and just stayed in my booth. Eventually Eugene Pullins called. You know the rest.”

  “You’ll have to forgive yourself,” she said.

  Darren managed a faint smile, but he didn’t say anything.

  “And maybe stop running your law business out of a bar.”

  Darren chuckled.

  “And not hold it against me for prying.”

  Darren kissed her forehead and turned away from the panorama.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go find Johnny Two Leaf and clear our client’s name.”

  *

  They stopped a few miles north of the bridge at a roadside motel. The rooms were a row of little individual cedar-shingle bungalows, quaint and inviting among the evening shadows. Darren walked over to the office and paid for a night while Issabella stretched and looked across the two-lane highway at the black expanse of Lake Michigan.

  Darren unlocked the bungalow door and they both paused in the entranceway, peering in at the room and its lone bed. They looked at each other and were silent. Finally, Darren put voice to what they were both thinking.

  “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to assume how you feel.”

  “That’s such a right thing to say.”

  “It has the benefit of being true. We haven’t really talked about…”

  “So tell me,” she said, and set her overnight bag on the floor.

  “Tell you what?”

  “I’m not in high school,” she said, and favored him with a gentle smile. She put her hand on his arm. “But you’re right, I’d like to maybe hear you tell me how you feel.”

  Darren nodded and was quiet for a second. Then he looked at her, took a long breath in through his nose and seemed to steady himself.

  “I’m crazy about you,” he said. “Right away, I was. In the hospital, I mean. I’m crazy about you and I don’t want to do anything to scare you off. I don’t want to screw up working with you or being able to be your friend.”