Dust Up: A Thriller

by Jon McGoran

  I turned and saw the guy from the alley, leveling his pistol at us. He was the same age as the other one—young—but his style was more Old Spice than Axe. I brought up my gun, and as he ducked back behind the motel, I pushed Miriam forward. “Get in the car,” I said.

  I kept my gun pointed toward at the alley. The streets were deserted, but it was a residential neighborhood. There was a school across the street. I didn’t know what I was going do if Old Spice started firing, but I didn’t want to get into a shootout.

  I crouched behind the wall, keeping my gun raised, but he didn’t reappear.

  I heard Miriam’s car snarling behind me, the engine revving.

  There was no sign of either of the gunmen, but I could feel eyes on me. Glancing down, I saw the pit bull on the other side of the fence looking up at me, his head at a slight angle. He turned away from me at the sound of Miriam’s car speeding away.

  We both watched as she disappeared down the block. The dog looked back at me for a moment. Then he left as well, trotting off and disappearing behind the house.

  19

  I kept my gun raised as I walked back toward the alley. As I’d expected, it was empty. Old Spice was gone, and so was his vehicle. I ran inside and back upstairs. My cuffs were lying empty and open on the ratty carpet. The room was empty, too. All that was left was the smell of cheap body spray.

  I was worried about Miriam, hoping she’d gotten away, but there was nothing I could do about that. Part of me thought about just getting the hell out of there, but shots had been fired. At me. And even if none of the neighbors called it in, someone was going to find out. And then they were going to ask why I hadn’t called it in.

  Besides, I needed a ride. I called it in. Then I called Danny.

  The uniforms were there in five minutes—two cars, four officers.

  Danny was there in six, pulling in right behind them. He shook his head as he got out of his car. “So which active narcotics case on our docket were you pursuing out here?” He couldn’t keep a straight face as he said it.

  I flipped him off.

  “Seriously. I’m confused,” he said. “Suarez tells me you said you were stepping off this case. ‘Carrick decided to act like a grown-up for once in his life.’”

  He didn’t sound anything like Suarez. I told him so.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I’ve been working on it.”

  “Well, you’d better keep working.”

  He looked indignant for a moment, then he gave his head a brisk shake. “Never mind that. I got the call from the task force. I’m out of town for rest of the week. Leaving tonight.”

  Great.

  He leaned closer. “We’re having work done on the house. The girls are staying with friends. We’d been planning on staying in a hotel, but now that it’s just her, she’d rather not. Nola offered Laura your guest room, but I know how you feel about houseguests. Say the word and I’ll quietly make other arrangements.”

  Even better. “No,” I said with a big forced smile. “It will be great having her.” I owed Danny favors in the triple digits.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great. Oh, and Suarez wants to see you ASAP.”

  It was a perfect day, I thought.

  Then Mike Warren arrived.

  * * *

  “So tell me this shit again, Carrick,” Warren said for the fifth time, pretending to take notes. “You were just walking along, minding your own business eating a cupcake—”

  “A cookie.”

  “Whatever. And this lady drives up on you, all in disguise, and says, ‘Get in the car’?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  We were back in the motel room. Two uniforms were standing by the door, looking awkward but amused at the tension between Warren and me.

  I was sitting on the chair, because I got there first. Warren was sitting on the bed, because I hadn’t warned him not to. I smiled.

  “You think this shit is funny?” Warren scowled. “You had the prime suspect in a murder in custody and you let her escape.”

  “She didn’t escape from me, dumbass. She escaped from the guys who were sent to kill her. Probably the same guys who actually killed her husband.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot.” He hooked his thumb at the empty handcuffs lying on the floor in the hallway next to a folded cardboard evidence marker. “The invisible bad guys who disappeared when she escaped.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, the guys who left the imaginary slugs in the wall outside and the sound system in the lobby. Maybe the kid at the desk got it on sale because it already had a bullet hole in it.”

  He scribbled in his notebook like he’d thought of something important. Probably a doodle of him shooting me. “So she brought you here to tell you something, right? What did she tell you?”

  And there it was. I had a decision to make. If I was walking away from the case, that meant I was hoping Warren would solve it. It meant giving him every bit of information I had. Including what Miriam had told me.

  I stalled. “So these two guys come after her, and what, you still think she killed her husband in a domestic dispute?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I figure it’s probably the corporate spy angle Bourden was talking about. But who knows, maybe they were coming after you. Someone you locked up—although Lord knows there ain’t many of them, am I right? More likely just someone you pissed off.”

  The uniforms laughed. I did, too. It was a good line, even if it was bullshit—plenty of flaws in my job performance, but none of them was about not locking up enough bad guys. I was too distracted to come back at him. I had to figure out what I was doing here.

  If Ron’s murder was about something he’d discovered, then Miriam’s attempted murder was about the same thing. Probably by the same guys. I’d seen how far these companies could go to protect their interests, their secrets. This stuff was dangerous, and Mike Warren was careless, not just in a case-botching way but in a getting-people-killed way.

  I didn’t know what to do with what Miriam Hartwell had told me, but I knew what not to do, and that was just put it out there without knowing what it meant. So if I was keeping it to myself, I had to figure out what was going on. I had to find Miriam again and find out what else she knew.

  Warren was staring at me while I was thinking things through. “Then again, maybe it’s about you in a different way.” He shrugged again, looking at me sideways. “Like I said before, maybe you’re banging the Hartwell woman, her husband comes to confront you about it, maybe tell your girlfriend, and you shoot him. Now she freaks out, she’s going to testify against you, you kill her too.”

  The two uniforms stopped smiling.

  20

  I laughed, but he’d made it sound plausible. “You think that’s how it went down?” I said. “He starts banging on my door while I’m in bed with my girlfriend, then what, maybe I climb out the window and run around the block so I can shoot him from the street, then somehow get back inside in time to close the door so I can open it in front of my girlfriend? I knew you were an idiot, but I didn’t know you had this creative side to you. You’re like one of these idiot savants. Do you do anything else? Play the piano or math tricks or anything?”

  “Fuck you, Carrick. You know it makes more sense than any of the bullshit you’re talking about. You can joke all you want, but you’d better be giving me something else to go on, or you move up the suspect list to number one.”

  He was right; I had to give him something. I turned to the uniforms. “Can you two give us a moment, here?”

  One of them moved his hand to his gun, and they both looked to Warren. That alone was scary. Then Warren nodded and waved them out into the hallway.

  I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “She said they were whistle-blowers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said she and Ron had discovered some kind of criminal activity, high up at Energene. They were going to blow the
whistle.”

  “What kind of criminal acts?”

  I sat back. “She didn’t say.”

  He smirked. “She didn’t say, huh?”

  “The gunmen showed up before she could tell me.”

  “So why’d they come to you?”

  I thought about it a second. “She said they were scared out of their minds and didn’t think they could trust the usual channels. They knew I had some history with this stuff, hoped they could trust me.”

  He laughed. “They must’ve been out of their minds, all right. Sounds like bullshit, you know that, right?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “She tell you anything else?”

  I’d given him enough to look at Bourden and Energene. I didn’t want to get him any closer until I had a better idea of what was going on.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  * * *

  On my way back to the Roundhouse, I called Nola at work.

  “Busy?”

  “A little.” I could hear people talking in the background. “What’s up?”

  “Just had a visit from Miriam Hartwell.”

  “What?! Hold on.” The background noise fell away as she moved somewhere quieter. “Are you serious? Did she confess?”

  I laughed wearily. “Not exactly.”

  I told her the highlights of what Miriam had told me, about Ron’s suspicions that people were getting sick from Energene’s soy.

  “So she thinks someone from Energene shot Ron?”

  “That’s what she thinks. Have you ever heard of anything like that? People having allergic reactions to genetically modified stuff like that?”

  “Sure. That was one of the big early concerns about GMOs. Some people worry that if you’re allergic to spinach, you could unknowingly eat broccoli spliced with spinach genes and have a reaction. Some people even think there’s a link between genetically engineered foods and increases in food allergies overall.”

  “Really?”

  “One of the first GMO crops, StarLink corn, was only approved for animal consumption because there were concerns it might be allergenic. When it got accidently mixed into the human food supply, some people did have reactions. There were huge recalls and lawsuits, and eventually, they pulled it all from the market. It’s controversial, though. I don’t know if any of it has ever been proven, but there’s definitely science to suggest it’s possible.”

  “Huh.” Ron’s theory was at least plausible.

  “Okay, I have to get back to work. So did they charge her? Does she have a lawyer?”

  I laughed.

  “What?”

  “No, they didn’t.” I didn’t want to tell her about the shooting. “She took off again.”

  21

  Lieutenant Suarez looked up when I walked into his office, but he didn’t say anything, instead just motioning for me to sit in one of the two chairs facing his desk. He was staring at his computer screen and tapping at the keyboard, but I got the distinct impression that he was doing it randomly. He left me sitting there squirming for two minutes.

  His phone buzzed, and he picked it up. “Yes?… All right, send them up.” He let out a sigh as he put the phone down, waiting a few more moments before looking at me.

  “Carrick,” he said, as if my name was rich with many meanings, and none of them were good. “Warren got me up to speed. So this is you walking away from it?”

  “I did walk away from it. I was literally walking away from it when it drove up next to me and asked me to get in the car. What was I going to do, say no?”

  “Well, this might be news to you, but as a police officer, when you see a wanted felon, you should arrest that felon.”

  “I would have,” I said, not sure how boldly I was lying. “But I wanted to hear what she had to say first. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to be ambushed by gunmen. And neither was she.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing. You’re ambushed by gunmen as you say, and you don’t return fire? I’m not saying that’s a bad move, but very un-Carrick-like.”

  “We were across the street from a school, and I didn’t want to risk endangering the students.”

  He nodded, hearing me but not accepting it. “Well, you wanted to be involved in the case, you’re involved in the case.”

  He looked over my shoulder and said, “Gentlemen, come on in.”

  I turned around to see Tom Royce, Bourden’s security chief. Next to him was another man whose thin, angular face looked vaguely familiar.

  “I believe you know Tom Royce, from Energene,” Suarez said without looking at anybody. “This is his assistant, Morris Divock.”

  Royce gave me a withering stare that said he didn’t like this any more than I did. “The good people at Energene have suspicions that Ron and Miriam Hartwell may have been engaged in corporate espionage. They and their friends at the Justice Department have asked for our help determining if that’s the case and, if possible, recovering anything that was stolen. As they are cooperating with our investigation, we have been asked to cooperate with theirs.”

  I gave a polite nod.

  Then Suarez said, “That cooperation will take the form of you, Detective Carrick.”

  My head whipped around.

  Suarez was smiling at me. It wasn’t a nice smile. “We’re fortunate that we have someone so familiar with the case and yet completely nonessential to it. For the next couple of days, I want you to share with these gentlemen all aspects of our official investigation. You can start by taking them back to the Liberty Motel and walking them through what happened.”

  “Lieutenant—”

  He cut me off, cocking an eye at me. “They don’t know the city well, so you’ll be their official guide. And since I know you haven’t had a chance to write up reports on your conversations with Ron Hartwell’s mom, his brother, and his building super, you will accompany Mr. Royce and Mr. Divock on follow-up interviews. And then you can write all of it up for the case file. Is that understood?”

  “But—”

  He held up a hand. “I know how badly you want to help this investigation, Detective Carrick, so I know you will appreciate how important it is that those officially tasked with solving the case can concentrate on the job at hand.”

  22

  I felt better about not telling Warren everything Miriam had said about Energene now that we were sharing everything with Royce and Divock. I wondered how much they knew about what was going on in Haiti. Or about who had killed Ron Hartwell.

  “Suarez said you guys weren’t from around here,” I said from the backseat in a fake cheerful tone. I don’t like being in a car that I’m not driving. And I really don’t like sitting in the backseat, especially not behind Royce’s bright red ears and neck. It helped that every time I asked a question, he got redder. “Where are you from?”

  Neither of them moved, but I got the feeling a look had been exchanged.

  Royce let out a sigh. “Chicago.”

  “How long have you been in Philly?”

  “Couple weeks.”

  “They move you around a lot?”

  “As much as they need to.”

  “Must be nice. Traveling around the world all the time.”

  Divock looked at me in the rearview. Royce didn’t respond at all, except for a deepening redness in his neck and ears.

  “So what do you think Ron Hartwell might have stolen?” I asked.

  Divock kept his eyes on the road. Royce turned to look at me, then turned back without a word.

  I shrugged. “Be easier to help you if I know what you think he took.”

  “It’s a shame you weren’t helping us earlier. It would have been a lot easier if you’d arrested Miriam Hartwell when you had the chance.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “We don’t know what he took. Information.” He turned in his seat to look at me again. “Did she say anything to you about it? Did she tell you anything at all?”

  “No.” I looked back at him blankly. �
��She said she didn’t kill her husband and she didn’t know who did. Or why. Before I could press her on it, the gunmen showed up.”

  His eyes lingered on me, his sneer letting me know he didn’t like me, didn’t believe me.

  “What kind of stuff was Hartwell working on, anyway?” I asked.

  “It’s secret.”

  “Oh, you can tell me. I’m a cop.”

  “It’s technical,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Miriam said he was working on some new genetically modified soybean.” Seemed pretty straightforward to me.

  Royce didn’t say anything.

  “She said they were in Haiti a few weeks back. You guys ever been there?”

  “Once or twice,” Royce said without turning around.

  “Really? What was going on there?”

  He turned his head just enough to see me, but he didn’t answer. I understood, too—I was starting to get on my own nerves. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  23

  The dog was back at the fence in the lot next to the Liberty Motel. He didn’t look at me as we got out of the car, and at first, I took it personally. Then I realized he was probably put off by the assholes I was with. I wanted to explain to him that I had no choice, but he turned and walked away again.

  The kid from the front desk was sitting on the front steps, a set of earbuds connecting him to the smartphone that had so narrowly escaped being shot. He plucked one of the buds as we walked up.

  “You the police?” he asked as we walked up.

  “I am,” I said. “These two are just … participating in the investigation.”

  He nodded. “They said I had to wait until you guys were done before I could take down the tape and reopen the motel.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gerald Toyner.”

  I inclined my head toward the door behind him. “Anybody still in there?”