Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  There was a conscious snap somewhere in the letter, some flash of red that Brianna couldn’t recall ever feeling before. Now that she was done with Olympics, but not set on her next goal, her brain was seeking a purpose. Going pro was an option before her. Competing in 3-gun was interesting. Becoming a shooting instructor was another option. Hell, she could have retired; their mother and father had died just a couple years before Rio, leaving the kids a trust fund that would turn into a full inheritance at thirty. Brianna could have easily soldiered on through that just with her monthly allowance.

  But this? Seeing her sister’s face on the news less than a month after getting that letter? Knowing that somehow, she’d missed the biggest secret to hit her family ever, while she was off doing her thing, pursuing excellence and Olympic Gold?

  Her last family member dying, and after a revelation like that?

  Yes, she had snapped. Her new goal had been so quickly decided as to make any previous decisions look slower than cold oil drifting across the Gulf of Mexico.

  She’d avenge her sister by killing Ivan Warrington. And maybe, if she used her skills right, she might even get away with it.

  The TV was the only light on in the room, and Brianna stared at it blearily, thinking about how she’d gotten to this point. How had she missed Warrington at the ferry? It was a damned disgrace, Rio all over again, and coming back with a lot less than a silver. Sure, it was at a longer distance, but she was better now.

  This was losing big, failing to even medal, maybe worse. Today had only compounded it. Now they knew who she was, thanks to Sienna Nealon. Thanks to her own strange desire to open up after so long—so damned long—keeping it all to herself! Why couldn’t she have just run and kept her mouth shut?

  The news played the weather report. More heat, no cold, making tomorrow look like a light summer day, both in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Not that out of the ordinary for October here. Brianna watched without watching, took it in as her mind was on other things.

  Then the next story came up, and all the other stuff on her mind? Gone in an instant.

  “We’re here live in downtown New Orleans at the Hotel Fantaisie,” a reporter with olive skin and long dark hair was saying into a microphone. “I’m standing here with Governor Warrington in the aftermath of today’s assassination attempt. Governor, how are you feeling?”

  “I feel just fine, Jennifer,” Warrington said, his smug face taking up the whole frame. “And I want to reassure the fine people of Louisiana that no second-rate assassin is going to throw me off my game. We’ve got work to do ’round here, and I’m still at it. We’re not stopping for anything.”

  Brianna sat up in her chair. The backdrop was a hotel room, and she could see the city of New Orleans out the window. Behind it was the old, grey United States Customs House building. A few blocks past that, the waterfront was visible.

  Was he staying at the same hotel where she’d taken her shot at him only a few days before?

  Boy, wouldn’t that just be the most Warrington thing he could have done? It made sense, though—why not exploit the hotel’s desire to put themselves on the right side of the investigation by handing out some free rooms to him? It wasn’t exactly high tourist season, they could probably afford that minor sacrifice, especially since neither the Saints nor the LSU Tigers were playing in town this week.

  “What are your plans now?” the reporter asked.

  “We just keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Warrington said with that same damned smile. “We’ve got an exciting slate of legislation coming up before the election, lots of important bills moving through. We have an addendum to the education reform bill, which we’re going to try and expedite because it means more money to schools in underprivileged areas…”

  Brianna blinked. He was staying at the same damned hotel. The one she’d researched exhaustively before choosing it for taking her shot at him. She knew it inside and out, absent the security precautions they’d probably implemented now that he was in town…but she knew it, backward and forward.

  Looking out that window…he had to be on a floor in the middle teens. She snorted; ironic, that. Warrington liked the teens, didn’t he?

  But that meant…

  Brianna smiled in the dark. Without even realizing it, that arrogant son of a bitch had sealed his own fate. A plan was already forming in her mind, and all she had to do was move quickly. She stood, all trace of sleep already gone as she ran through the idea again, then once more, standing there in the dark, TV flickering before her.

  Yes, it would work. It’d require doing things differently than she’d originally wanted to, but that was just fine. She was exposed, they knew who she was, they’d be after her. There was no point in holding to the old plan, not anymore.

  The new plan…it’d see Ivan Warrington finally get his just desserts.

  Brianna smiled. She couldn’t wait to get started.

  And if she hurried, she could even make it back to New Orleans tonight.

  70.

  Sienna

  I woke in the early morning hours to a city that was sleeping. Riding the elevator to the lobby, I nodded as deferentially as I could to the LSP troopers surrounding the lobby. They kept a wary eye on me, and for good reason, as I exited the hotel onto Canal Street, utterly quiet at this time of morning. It was probably 4:30 or so, and I had a destination in mind.

  The massage parlor where I’d first gotten the runaround from Michelle wasn’t open, the metal shutter down like most of the other businesses on the street, save a few all-night establishments catering to the Bourbon Street party crowd. I could still hear a little noise coming from Bourbon, and behind me, Harrah’s was all lit up. I suspected the party was still ongoing inside, though I couldn’t hear anything as I headed toward Bourbon.

  The street of legend looked dark at this entry point, neon lighting it farther down. A twenty-four-hour Krystal glowed to my right, and an adult novelty item store waited to my left. Farther down, more bars still writhed, music drifting out.

  The smell of over-full trash cans hit me, and I stuck my sleeve up to my nose. I was in my standard FBI jacket, blouse, cotton pants. My primary gun was on my hip, backup on my ankle. It was just a little, single-stack Glock 43 9mm with seven shots, but I was packing I because I felt like walking into this particular encounter, I needed to be ready for anything.

  I walked a block down Bourbon Street before I hit a cross street, braving that garbage smell the entire time. I found myself wishing that I had used a laundry detergent with a stronger after-odor by the time I rounded the block, though, because that garbage stink on Bourbon was really potent.

  I found what I was looking for about halfway down the block. It was an alley that ran parallel to Bourbon, back toward Canal. I figured there was an alternate entry and exit for employees of the massage parlor and the other service businesses that lined that part of Canal to get to work in the mornings and leave in the evenings. In fact, remembering Michelle sending Liu Min out the door in front of me, I suspected she was doing it entirely for show. That seemed to be all she did—put on some sort of show for me.

  Well, I resolved as I walked to the back door of the massage parlor, the show was over. I was done playing games with her, and getting her half-ass help. It was time for Michelle to make a decision, to get off the damned fence one way or another.

  I reached the back door of the massage parlor and it was pretty obvious I’d found the correct one, even absent the labeling. The restaurant next door had a massive dumpster right outside theirs; the massage parlor had a smaller one, mostly filled with latex gloves and paper waste. A dozen smashed cigarette butts wafted their stale scent out of a plant pot turned into a jumbo ashtray, adding to the lingering stink of Bourbon Street that clung to me.

  The doorknob turned easily, opening into a small break room. There was only one person waiting there, thumbing through a Style magazine, her dark eyes looking down at the pages as she flipped them. “Don’t you need a war
rant to just walk in like that?” Michelle asked, apparently unsurprised that I was here at four in the morning.

  “Only if it’s locked,” I said. “Besides, do I look like I’m doing any searching or seizing?”

  “No, you look lost,” she said, looking up from the magazine and tossing it aside.

  “Same with you,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for yoga class right now?”

  “It’s not until six.” She smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  “Oh, I just stopped by to say ‘adios,’ but however you would say it in Chinese. I’ve been recalled to New York.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I heard about that scene you caused in the governor’s suite.” She shook her head. “Probably not how I would have recommended you handle the situation, but I can’t blame you for being upset.” Her eyes flashed, showing the most emotion I’d seen from her since we’d met, at least of the non-smug variety. “I know I was when I found out about Emily Glover. At least you kept your violence under control.”

  “How’d you find out about Emily? What he did to her?” I asked, my voice low and even. Just past the break room, I could see the door cracked open to the massage parlor. There was no one moving out there, which meant she was the only one in the place. Why would New Orleans’s Triad boss be sitting in a massage parlor at four a.m., alone?

  Her eyes flicked up to me. “You know the business I’m in. Who I am.”

  “Of course.”

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t. You know what they said, which is what they know, and what they know is my father’s business. I’ve only been in charge for a year. When I came up in my father’s ranks, I did not do so as his heir, because he wasn’t keen on handing over his empire to a girl. I worked my way up as a common—well, whatever you want to call it.” She waved a hand behind her toward the parlor. “I worked here, I worked in other places in his operation. One of them—” and here her eyes flashed again “—was what you could charitably call a flophouse; a hotel that had certain dealings catering to the basest instincts; where a woman could sell herself and then immediately turn over the money she’d made to feed habits she’d accumulated.”

  “Ew,” I said. “A drug house and brothel, all-in-one.”

  “Vertical integration.” Michelle nodded. “I shut it down when I took over. Got out of both of those lines of business.” She narrowed her eyes as she thought about it. “But I worked there for a while. Met the girls. Got to know them. Do you know how many weren’t addicts? None. Hookers who aren’t hooked on something? That may happen in the high-class escort ranks, but it doesn’t happen on the low end of the business. And that’s how I met Emily Glover.”

  I nodded. “She told you.”

  “I had to forge a good relationship with the girls working there,” she said, and now she was looking back down at the magazine cover, though I doubted she was really seeing it. She seemed very far away. “They don’t want to hand over all their money, see? Who would? And the manager’s job was to get as much of it as possible, if not all. The previous manager? A pig of a man. He took it by force, classic pimp who felt it was just owed.” She looked up at me. “I tried to earn it. To help them. I never took it. I traded for it, provided shelter for it, made sure they had food and—” She shuddered, looking away. “I hated myself every day for all of it, even being there. But Emily…” She shook her head even more violently. “She made me feel the worst I ever felt while I was there.”

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Michelle said. “I was just doing my thing; getting close to another girl. You could tell she hadn’t had anyone just listen to her, maybe ever. She was high, of course…and she just told me. Everything.” She looked up at me, and there was water in her eyes. “She was a really smart girl, too. A little younger than me, and bright—so bright. Could have been anything if she hadn’t started using. The way she told her story I felt like I was there in the car the first time it happened. Like it was happening to me. And given who she was, where she lived, it could have been me. It could have been anyone. That’s how brazen Warrington was.” Her hand was bound tightly into a fist on the table. “I don’t think he ever felt an ounce of fear or remorse for what he did to her.” Her eyes were glazed with tears in the dim break room light. “And she begged him not to.”

  “Why not just tell me?” I asked. “Why not just…straight up tell me what was going on with him?”

  She laughed lightly. “I don’t know you, Nealon. I know your rep—badass avenger, Slay Queen, whatever. But you, actual you?” She shook her head. “Not a clue. You come off this fugitive run into the Revelen war, and suddenly you’re more famous than ever. But you take all that goodwill and instead of going back to work for yourself, you join the FBI. Well, I know what the FBI is. They’re a known quantity, a thorn in my side, a pain in my ass. You think I’m going to just start confiding the darkest things I know to some FBI agent, then you really did fall off the turnip truck yesterday.”

  “Yes, I did, but I had boots when I fell off, which is more than I can say for after I met you.”

  She grinned. “That was fun.” The smile faded. “I pulled us out of the prostitution and drug businesses over the last couple years, but that doesn’t mean I’m legit. I still have my hands in some pies that the FBI would love to take away.” Now she turned stone-faced. “And I have dealings with Warrington, too, that make me—us—a ton of money. I’m not the only going concern in the Triads in New Orleans. Just the biggest.”

  “So you didn’t want to see him take a fall for something that could be traced back to you,” I said, nodding along. “Like corruption.”

  It was her turn to nod. “And he is corrupt. That school bill he’s so proud of? A lot of people are benefiting from that who aren’t underprivileged kids or teachers. By design. The fix was in. But you’d have a hell of a time proving it.”

  “I’ll have a hell of a time proving that he raped Emily Glover,” I said, leaning back against the wall. “Assuming the statute of limitations hasn’t run out, there’s not a single witness to it still alive other than Warrington.”

  “You know how this works, Nealon,” Michelle said. “Emily cannot be the only one he preyed on over the years.”

  “Yeah, but if Whit Falkner, local superstar reporter, couldn’t find any other victims, what makes you think Sienna Nealon, total stranger, is going to be able to waltz into town and drum some up?”

  “Look at other guys this happened with,” Michelle said, voice rising with hope. “Bill Cosby. Harvey Weinstein. They got away with it for years until one story broke—and then it was like the floodgates opened.”

  I shook my head. “Bill Cosby’s allegations were out there for decades. The press never covered them, but they were out there. You could find it all on a simple internet search years before the story broke. As for Harvey Weinstein, the press in New York and LA were bought and paid for by him.”

  She raised an eyebrow at that. “What do you mean?”

  “Reporters in the big markets—and some of the small ones—like to write books on the side,” I said. “Weinstein, through his movie company, allegedly kept buying up the rights to all the big reporters’ books. That left them invested in him, and he in them, giving them a financial reason to doubt that this guy, doing so much good for them, could possibly be doing bad to others.” I thought about Holloway pawing at me in the hotel room the other night, and repressed a shudder. “I don’t know. I don’t want to judge any of the victims in that situation for not saying anything, because I don’t know what pressure they were under. All I know is that the people who were supposed to hold up the magnifying glass to the corrupt—which would be the press—kept their damned mouths shut and let it go on without whispering so much as a peep.” I shook my head again. “Warrington is loved by the local press. I can tell after watching two or three fawning reports, seeing a couple pieces in the local paper. He can do no wrong in their eyes. Whit said almost the
same, that this scandal, if it came out, wouldn’t finish him.”

  Michelle stared at the wall behind me. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” I said, looking at the floor. “Whatever it is, I need to bring him down righteously, within the system.”

  “I thought you said you were getting sent back to New York?”

  “Well, that’s what they ordered me to do,” I said, and it was my turn to smile. “I’m not the greatest listener. And I’ve got a little time before I ‘accidentally’ miss my first flight. Got any suggestions on places to look? You know, for trouble?”

  “I wish I did,” Michelle said. “I was waiting here for you, you know?”

  “I kinda figured when I saw you were here alone, reading a magazine. I doubted the Triad Queen of New Orleans just hangs out here doing that when she could be anywhere in the city.”

  “It’s not very interesting, that’s true.” She lightly tapped the cover of the magazine. “If I knew a direction I could send you with some assurance you wouldn’t blow me up in the process…I would. Even the directions that would blow up parts of my business, I might be willing to make a sacrifice, if I had a clear path for you.” She shook her head. “But I don’t. Warrington’s corruption is arcane and well-managed. A good portion of it isn’t even illegal, as such.”

  “Is that the part where he deals with Mitchell Werner?” I asked.

  She gave a quick nod. “Werner and Warrington grew up together. I’d bet you anything that Warrington got his bestest buddy to claim Emily’s body, but I’d also bet there’s no record of a phone call where it happened. Warrington’s good at being dirty, and Werner’s the bagman, the one that gets the real dirt on his hands. He doesn’t just play that multi-company shell game so he can be an ‘independent’ attack dog for Warrington. He’s getting paid by people who are benefiting from Warrington’s tenure as governor, and he’s returning that money, cleanly, to Warrington via different channels like campaign contributions and a gubernatorial library fund. I suspect he’s even pre-funding a senatorial or presidential run for Warrington with his PAC activity and maybe even preparing an organization for Warrington to step into as CEO with a huge war chest to influence future party activity; turn him into a kingmaker even after he’s retired from politics, keep his influence going while bumping up his paychecks and wealth.”