Now You See It

by Cáit Donnelly

  Brady opened the bottom drawer of his desk and dug under the carefully random layers of detritus until his hand found the slick surface of a cell phone. He took a deep breath and swallowed before pulling it out. He’d sworn to himself he’d never touch it again. Never. Not even under torture.

  He’d made it nearly ten months.

  When he left the Drugs and Weapons Task Force last year, after four years of hunting the scum of the earth across four continents, he was finished there. Burned out, exhausted. Soul-sore.

  Law enforcement had seemed like a good choice when he bottomed out of SEALs. A way to put his training and special skills to work for something positive. Something good.

  The transition had been brutal. Not physically. After SEALs, the physical training for almost any other organization was bound to be a dawdle. But he’d missed the sense of brotherhood he’d shared with his Team. Even if he had killed so many of them.

  Task Force units worked closely together, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe that was his fault—after the clusterfuck in Afghanistan that got half his men killed, and all the rest wounded, he just couldn’t give as much of himself as he used to. He’d always felt, too, as if most of his Task Force unit had problems like his, some past betrayal or disaster that kept a kind of barrier in place against total trust.

  And then, there was the slime factor.

  As mindlessly vicious as religious fanatics could be, at least most of them were acting from some sort of principles, however bent and twisted they might seem to his Western mind.

  The people the Task Force hunted didn’t deserve to be called human beings. And each time he had to think like them, even if it was to try and anticipate their next move, intercept their next shipment, head off their next massacre, the experience had left a sick feeling he couldn’t shake, a layer of corrosion on his spirit like tarnish on silver. He’d had to leave, before the pits grew into big, ugly, irreparable holes.

  He plugged in the odd-shaped connector and speed-dialed a number. With any luck it had been changed and the Universe would take care of the whole conundrum for him. If he couldn’t reach them—

  The unique sound pattern of Task Force encryption made his stomach twist. If he’d had any choice, he wouldn’t be—

  A voice answered with a series of numbers.

  “Zipline,” Brady responded.

  “Wait one.” Twenty seconds of static. “Confirm?”

  “It’s too bad zippers are being replaced by Velcro.” If he ever found out who had thought up such an inane code, he was going to strangle them. Slowly. In stages.

  “Oh seven-sixteen,” the voice said, just before the line went dead.

  Fucking spooks, he thought. Why not just say “afternoon matinee at the palm Cinema,” or whatever? And how dumb was it to give him a code name so close to his old SEAL handle? Fucking stupid spooks. Of course, they’d probably never heard the actual story of the tablecloth, his recalcitrant zipper and the admiral’s wife.

  He disconnected the phone and had barely set it back into the drawer and begun to pull papers over it when his other cell vibrated. The caller ID was unfamiliar, but it was supposed to be.

  He pushed the green button. “Yeah.”

  “Yo, Zips!”

  “Caz?” Holy shit!

  “Dude! Long time, and all that. I’m just in town. Wanna show me around?”

  “A round or a square?” Brady responded, giving the countersign.

  Caz laughed. “Same old Zip-Man. So—drinks?”

  “Sure. Where are you?”

  There was a pause, as if Caz was looking around. “Pine and First.”

  “Pike Place Market? Perfect. See you there in—give me twenty or so minutes.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Me, either,” Brady said, his voice dark. He meant it more than he’d ever thought he could.

  Brady approached the bus stop at Second and Stewart from slightly uphill. The voice on the phone had sounded like Caz, had given all the right responses. Still—

  And there he was, sitting inside the glass bus shelter, reading a bus schedule as if it were the latest Clive Cussler. Brady broke into a grin—which still didn’t prevent him from scoping out the area every few seconds.

  “Yo!” Caz said, getting up. He’d clearly been doing some scoping of his own.

  Casimir Kovashvili wasn’t enormously tall. He only had an inch or so on Brady. But his chest was a solid wall of muscle, and his thick arms ended in large hands that were surprisingly agile when working a K-Bar or a sniper rifle. Last time Brady saw him, Caz had been sporting a fierce, swirling black moustache like some bandit chieftain from the Georgian Caucasus. Which, of course, is what he probably would have been if his grandparents hadn’t fled to the States from one of Uncle Joe Stalin’s innumerable purges.

  Caz had cleaned up pretty well. His wild black hair worked well in the new metro brush cut. There was no disguising the rake-hell gleam in his black eyes, but all-in-all, in a “Save the Whales” T-shirt and Gortex jacket, he could easily pass unnoticed in downtown Seattle.

  “You ready?” Brady asked. The bear hugs and shouts could wait until they were out of public sight.

  “Yeah,” Caz said as casually as if they’d been apart a few minutes, instead of nearly five years.

  “Damn, McGrath, you’re looking good. Civilian life must agree with you.”

  “It has its moments,” Brady said as he unlocked the car doors. “Wait’ll you see my new digs.”

  “Last I heard,” Brady said as he twisted the top off a dewy bottle of ale and handed it to Caz, “you were at Quantico.” Training snipers and SWAT specialists.

  “Yeah. Ninja lessons.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got bored. Got married.”

  “Whoa! No shit?”

  Something in Caz’s face cut off Brady’s next caustic remark.

  “Didn’t take.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Yeah.” Caz took a half-bottle swig of Moosehead. “Besides,” he continued, “I don’t really fit back East.” He flexed his shoulders uneasily. “Too rigid.”

  Brady diplomatically concentrated on his beer. Time to change the subject. “I need a meet,” he said after a couple of sips in silence.

  “What’s up?”

  Brady laid it out for him.

  “Whoa,” Caz said, setting his bottle down with a thunk.

  “I need to know what the Task Force has going, and what they’ve dug up on Ned Carrow. I can’t reach Tran.”

  “He’s out of position for the time being.”

  “Can you set it up?”

  “Fuckin-A. You coming back in? It’d be great to work together again.”

  Brady shook his head. “I don’t think I can, dude. Not anymore. Or maybe not yet—I’m not sure about anything much but right now.”

  “Hunh. You still got the oh-my-Gods, eh?” Caz asked.

  “Ever bother you?”

  “Not so much. Once in a while. The more I see these dirtbags, the less I stress over putting them out of the world’s misery.” He turned his bottle, making damp rings on the table. Brady looked at his watch. “I gotta go see a guy and then go pick up Gemma at the hospital.”

  “Can’t wait to meet her, bro.”

  “Wipe that grin off, Master Chief. If you still had your moustache, you’d be twirling the ends of it right about now, and I’d have to hurt you.”

  Brady followed Caz out of t
he building. He’d forgotten how good it felt to laugh with a friend who really knew him.

  * * *

  “Hey, Abernathy! You’ve got a call from Seattle P.D.”

  There were none of the hoots and catcalls he would have expected just a few years back. The two departments worked together more smoothly these days—as smoothly as two neighboring law enforcement organizations could expect. And a good thing, too, Abernathy thought, in a fucked-up mess of a case like this one. Two bodies, three break-ins, two arsons, three jurisdictions and a partridge in a pear tree...

  He picked up his extension. “Pierce County Sheriff, Detective Abernathy.”

  “Dee-tective Abernathy,” came a snide voice.

  Abernathy grinned. “Yo. What’s up, Theo?”

  “Your head better be. Everybody’s favorite goatfuck just got weirder. Are you ready for this?”

  * * *

  “Let me be sure I’m getting this,” Olsen said to his partner. “Somebody broke into the brother’s office. Shot his paralegal. Shot him. She’s dead, he’s critical. Set fire to the place—so, that’s in pattern.”

  “Except he came ready to kill, this time.”

  “Yeah. Teach me to take a day off.” Olsen took a slurp of coffee, grimaced and set the mug back onto his desk. “Then building security gets a call from a woman reporting a fire in Cavanagh’s office, and that Cavanagh’s hurt.”

  “Yep.”

  “She immediately calls 911 with the same information. Sounds freaked out, doesn’t leave a name. Fire, SPD, EMTs, rent-a-cops all spend the next couple of hours trying not to get in each other’s way. How did she know—right?”

  “Right. Call came from the International District. Burn phone, but they traced the towers. No way she could have gotten from place to place within those times. Either she knew what was going to happen, or the doer called her.” Abernathy pressed his hand against his diaphragm, fighting a belch. “I don’t see it.”

  “You’re just a sucker for big green eyes,” Olsen grumbled as he pulled a folder from a stack of paperwork. “Well, we were heading that way anyway to interview the peeper. What’s his name?”

  “Falco.”

  “What else have we got?”

  “Well, didn’t Wheeler say he was at home when Ms. Cavanagh called him about her husband?”

  “Yeah. Wait a minute.” Olsen dug for his notebook.

  “When are you going to go digital?” Abernathy said, looking sideways at the small, spiral-bound notepad Olsen always carried.

  “When they make one that I can do this,” Olsen answered, as he flipped it open and thumbed through the pages. “Yeah. Monday night.”

  “I got an email from Lyons just now with the details. They interviewed this guy Falco on a separate case, who says Wheeler knew before that, when he was still at the office. And I quote, Falco: ‘Mr. Wheeler said Mrs. Carrow had just called and Mr. Carrow had been killed.’ The kid had no reason to lie.”

  “Okay, but why would Wheeler lie about something so unimportant?”

  “Because people lie. Stupid, though. If we call him on it, he’ll just look all vanilla and say, ‘Oh, that’s right. I forgot.’ As if he could have forgotten when he got that kind of news. We can never prove it, one way or the other—and it doesn’t really matter. It’s off, but it’s not even a thread. Carrow had already been dead for two days.”

  “What else have we got?”

  “Nada.”

  “So we should probably talk to the partner again while we’re down there.”

  “Up,” Abernathy said. “It’s up to Seattle. Seattle is north of here, and north is up. Bunch of yokels—man, I knew this was gonna be a day and a half. What?”

  Olsen had gone rigid in his seat. “You’re not gonna believe this.” He sailed a folder onto the table. It was generic government green, but the edges were wrapped in red-striped tape, and it was marked “Restricted, Eyes Only.”

  Abernathy opened it and began to read. “McGrath? You kidding?”

  Olsen was already flipping back in his notes. “Nope.

  “Braden John McGrath. Well, well.” Abernathy handed the file back with a triumphant little smile. “Told you so.”

  Olsen read briefly from the first page, glanced back at the cover. “What the fuck?” He sighed. “Saddle up. I’ll get our travel authorized.”

  * * *

  Brady stood in the Tiger Stance, halfway across Doug Wheeler’s oppressively modern office, looking deceptively relaxed but actually balanced and ready.

  “I would say thanks for coming, McGrath, but I don’t like you that much,” Doug said. He was sitting behind a large pedestal desk that looked like solid granite, carved and shaped to be at once sleek and imposing. At his back was a wall of glass with a spectacular view of the waterfront and Puget Sound. Early sunlight glowed off the white of a ferry on its way to Bainbridge Island.

  Brady didn’t bother answering. Wheeler’s peremptory summons had left him little choice.

  Doug rose from his chair, but kept the desk between them. “I want to talk to you about Gemma.”

  Brady waited.

  “I know why you’ve attached yourself to her.” Doug paused, as if waiting for Brady to respond. Then he went on. “With Ned dead, she’s a very wealthy woman. Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “You said you have critical information.”

  “I have. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial sum of money to stay away from her. Permanently. Very—” he said and paused, lifting a check off the black desktop with a melodramatic flourish “—substantial, indeed.” When Brady didn’t move closer, he placed the check on the edge of his desk, facing outward.

  Brady didn’t even look down at it. “No deal.”

  “Did you even look at the amount?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m not interested.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Brady took a clearing breath. It would have been so sweet to simply rip this asshole’s head off. He settled for a hard stare, but blinked in surprise. Doug’s eyes looked unfocused. Maybe the guy was just tired, but if he hadn’t known better, he’d think Wheeler was stoned.

  Doug’s smile grew nasty. “Then maybe you’ll respond to another kind of self-interest. I know all about you, McGrath. I know who you are, what you’ve done. I know you got half your Team killed in Afghanistan. You went rogue, did a little drug smuggling, and when they caught you and kicked you out of the Navy, you got in a little deeper. I do know about you. Surprised?”

  Stunned, more like, Brady thought, and hoped it didn’t show. Where was Doug getting his information? Brady had been sure none of that would ever surface.

  “You even killed a couple of people who got in your way.” Doug narrowed his eyes. “I want you to leave Gemma alone. Does she know what a piece of filth you are? Somehow, I doubt it. But she will, unless you agree right here, right now, to stay away from her. And I’ll bet the police would love to hear about your exploits.”

  “You done?” Brady could feel the hot rage behind his eyes. It had to be coming off him in waves, but Doug didn’t seem to notice.

  “You’re the one who’s finished, McGrath. I’m making a campaign announcement this afternoon at three p.m. You have until it’s over.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  * * *

  The hospital elevator opened to disgorge Mary Kate and Brady, talking to each other at a hundred miles an hour.

 
Gemma smiled. At least something seemed back to normal. Mary Kate saw her and smiled back. It was tense, but genuine, and Gemma felt her eyes fill as she stood to hug her sister-in-law.

  Mary Kate spoke first. “I know you both said not to come, but I had to. I can’t be that far away when he’s hurt.”

  Gemma hugged her again. “They’re taking blood and things right now,” she said, “but it should only be a few minutes. Do you want me to stay with Timmy?”

  “I left him with Mom and Dad.”

  “That was probably a good idea. Mike’s vital signs are improving. He woke up for a few minutes this morning, but he won’t relax and let himself heal, so they keep drugging him back to sleep now they know for sure his concussion was just a little bump. He’s going to be all right, M-K.”

  “Gemma, the cops are right behind us,” Brady said.

  “Okay. M-K, I’d better introduce you to the officer and the nursing staff so they don’t waste any time getting you in to see him when they’re done.”

  The very large, very black uniformed officer who’d been sitting stolidly in a chair by the door to Mike’s room suddenly came alert and spoke into the radio patch on his shoulder. “Sir,” he called to Brady, rising from his chair.

  “I’m outta here,” Brady said, giving Gemma a quick kiss. “Call me.”

  She turned to Mary Kate for a second, and when she turned back, he was gone.

  “Are you okay, Gemma?” Mary Kate asked.

  “Yeah. I am now.” She saw the three detectives emerge from the elevator. “I can handle this. You stay with Mike.”

  * * *

  “How did it go?” Brady asked when Gemma finally got back to the apartment. He handed her a mug of tea and a bowl of pistachios.

  “Okay. They had questions I didn’t know how to answer.”

  “Like, ‘How did you know your brother’s office was on fire?’”

  “Yeah. Like that. I told them it was a family thing, and we’d been doing it since we were kids when one or the other of us was in a bad spot. I don’t know if they believed me, but I can’t help that. How do you explain what you do?”