Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  “So I understand. But tell me something; you are separated, why not divorced?”

  She shrugged and looked around at the pool and the house. “You know, I guess I haven’t found the time.”

  O’Malley nodded. “Still hoping?” he asked. She smiled back, but volunteered nothing, so he continued. “Anyway, I asked my staff to take a look at his Army records so that I could get a better handle on the man, you know.”

  “And you didn’t learn very much, did you?”

  “Frankly, I’ve never seen so much redacting and blank pages in my life. The last half of his career appears to be completely classified.”

  “Even to a big-shot US Attorney? I’ll bet that got you mad.”

  “Frankly, it did; but it also made me very curious. What can you tell me about him?”

  “You mean what did he do in the Army, in Iraq and Afghanistan?” she laughed.

  “Well, yes, that would certainly help, and anything else you know about what he did.”

  “Me? Not a damned thing. He never opened up to me or anyone else outside the service as far as I know. Maybe to my father, but he’s long gone now. So I suspect you know more about that part of his life than I do. To tell you the truth, though, I couldn’t care less, never did. That was his ‘guy’ thing, him and his pals, and I was permanently locked out. I could have the rest of him, but never that. When you tell that to a ‘tender’ young bride, especially one like me, it really hacks them off. So I said, ‘screw you!’ You have your little secrets, and I’ll have mine.”

  “Interesting… You know, there’s a wall of photos and plaques in his office…”

  “Awful, aren’t they? My father left all that crap. I tried to get a decorator…”

  “No, no not those. One shows your husband with his troops in Iraq. The other one is of him and what could only be a Delta force or CIA Special Ops team in Afghanistan.”

  “And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘When I met that guy in the office, he didn’t look like much, did he? Pretty ordinary, in fact.’ ”

  “West Point, Rangers, Delta Force? I’m surprised he was big enough to get in.”

  “He told me he ate a lot of bananas and stood up straight,” she laughed. “The other guys in that photo look like a bunch of low-lifes you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, while Bobby looks like the supply clerk who gave them a case of beer so he could get in their photo and get some free drinks at the VFW back home.”

  “Now that you mention it,” O’Malley smiled.

  She shook her head. “Well, that’s not the way they tell it.”

  “So, you met them?”

  “Most of his Special Ops guys were at our wedding. Vinnie, Ace, Chester, and Lonzo — those four I will never forget. They were his senior sergeants, and they have that magical bond he said only soldiers in a war can share. They remain intensely loyal to each other, and to him, even now. No matter what they were doing, they came to the wedding, at least the ones who weren’t dead or off on some other god-awful mission somewhere. Apparently, they all think they owe him big time, and they’ll tell you, they’d go to war with him all over again, any place, anytime.”

  “So, they talked to you about what they did, what he did?”

  “Oh, God no! All I got was a comment here and a look there, enough for them to let me know I should appreciate what I was getting. They all have nicknames, you know, for operational security. They call Bobby ‘the Ghost,’ or ‘Casper,’ because they said he could ‘disappear’ and you’d never even know he was there. And whether he had a gun, a knife, or only his bare hands, I got the idea that he’s the one you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley.”

  “Really… But with a distinguished career like that, why did he get out?”

  “I am vain enough to think it was for me, but I doubt it. We were the hottest thing on the planet for a year or two, but it was the Army itself and the war that finally drove him out. It never seemed to end, and he lost too many classmates and friends in something that meant less and less to him the longer it lasted. He often said that if the Pentagon refused to study history, at least they could read some Kipling.”

  “Kipling? You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. He’s a very interesting man, undoubtedly the most interesting man I’ve ever met. I think if they had left him out in the bush with his men chasing the bad guys, he’d still be there; but that wasn’t going to happen. The higher he got in rank and responsibility, the worse the bullshit became, until he couldn’t take it anymore. He was on the list for Lieutenant Colonel, which I’m told was pretty remarkable for his age, and on the fast track for stars. That was when he and I hooked up, and my father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse — me, the company, a fresh start, the whole enchilada.” She paused and looked across at O’Malley for a moment. “All right, Peter, your turn. What do you want from me?”

  “A glass of wine with a beautiful naked woman, what else could I possibly want?”

  “Almost naked, Peter. With me, there is a magical difference.”

  “What more could life possibly offer?”

  She smiled. “What more? I’ve been told that an evening around my pool under the stars with a fine bottle of wine can be most memorable,” she smiled coyly.

  “I’ll have to work on that,” O’Malley said as he leaned back, smiled, and straightened the crease in his slacks. “Unfortunately, the timing is very bad for me. You see, Bob holds the key to a very important prosecution I’m working on. He claims he saw a man strangling a woman to death on a roof…”

  “The airplane thing, when he was landing at O’Hare?’

  “Word travels fast. Yes, the woman was supposed to testify in front of my Grand Jury this week, but she’s disappeared and I fear the worst has happened.”

  “I thought Bobby went to the police and told them what he saw. What’s the problem?”

  “There’s no ‘problem,’ per se. However, I was hoping he would agree to be a tad more ‘creative’ regarding who and what he saw. Unfortunately, he wasn’t interested in stretching his memory quite that far.”

  Angie looked across and laughed at him. “You wanted him to lie, so you could nail some perp, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I would phrase it a bit more delicately than that,” he tried one of his most buttery smiles. “The man I am investigating is a sexual predator.”

  “How nice,” she grinned. “I didn’t realize sex was a federal crime now.”

  “Normally, it isn’t, but this man has a long track record of sexual harassment and rape involving his employees, and we believe a number of murders as well. My main interest is his involvement in a massive Medicaid and Medicare fraud scheme; so, this is hardly a matter of my trying to ‘nail’ an innocent man.”

  “Regardless, Bobby’s not wired that way, and he doesn’t like to be pushed.”

  “I understand that, but I need his help to pressure the individual involved, so I can elicit his testimony against the criminal network he is involved in. In the end, what your husband may or may not have seen on the roof won’t matter very much. He’s simply leverage. As I said, I hoped your husband would be a useful means to a very necessary end, and I came up here to see if you could give me any hints as to how I could get him to do that.”

  “If that’s why you came all the way up here, you wasted a lot of gas. He’s gonna do what he wants to do, and what he thinks is right. If you want to change his mind, you need to give him a good reason. So, good luck with that, Mr. O’Malley. Good luck with that.”

  The sun was beginning to set when Bob Burke drove into the CHC parking lot. From the number of empty parking spaces, most of their corporate staff had already left for the day. The medians were well landscaped, with equally spaced, round-topped pear trees that cast long shadows across the lot. He pulled into a dark space in one of them a few hundred feet from the building’s revolving front door and waited. He had a clear view into the brightly lit front lobby and some of the individual offices. At the back
of the lobby were second and third floor balconies and walkways, which connected the two wings. With the lobby’s two-story floor-to-ceiling glass front wall, it was like looking into a large-screen television set.

  As he watched, he saw a handful of casually dressed male and female staff members walk by carrying papers, interspersed with janitors pushing carts, carrying trash bags, and vacuuming. Other staff members headed for their cars, leaving a couple of bulky men inside in dark suits with two-way radios. Bob assumed they were private security guards. While everyone else appeared eager to be on their way home, the men in the dark suits looked anything but. They strolled around the floors slowly, without much of a purpose as they checked doors, hallways, and faces. Hired guns, he concluded. Most of the ones working security jobs like this were younger, usually ex-military, minimally trained, paid a nudge or two above minimum wage, and invariably dressed in gray slacks, white shirts, short hair, and blue blazers with some kind of crest or company logo on the breast pocket. However, these guys looked different. They appeared older, their clothes were a tad too gaudy and mismatched, and they neither moved nor walked as if they had much training at all, much less at the hands of their Uncle Sam.

  On the first floor in the center of it all sat the diminutive figure of Linda Sylvester, hunkered down behind the relative safety of her tall, semicircular marble reception desk. Relative safety? Not in that building, Bob Burke thought. From her movements, she looked to be putting her things away and straightening her desk, getting ready to leave for the day. From the look on her face and the way her eyes darted nervously around the lobby, she appeared as unhappy as the night before. Clearly, something was bothering her, and Bob had a good idea what that was. She pulled on her jacket, clutched her purse to her chest, walked quickly to the back of the lobby, and turned to the left. As she did, Bob saw the muscular figure of Tony Scalese appear on the second floor balcony above her. He motioned and called down to her. he could not hear what Scalese said, but her head suddenly jerked to the right as she looked up at him. He couldn’t hear what she said back to him either, but she didn’t stop. She kept walking away, clutching her purse even tighter as Scalese leaned over the balcony, pointed a finger at her and said something else. Whatever it was, this one didn’t go unanswered. She pointed a finger up at him, glared, and shouted back as she vanished down the side hallway and was gone.

  Bob’s present vantage point gave him a good view of the front lobby and door, but he knew the company “worker bees” would have been told to park in the rear, so he put the car in gear and circled the building to the left. Sure enough, by the time he turned the building’s corner he saw Linda Sylvester hurrying out the side door and across the parking lot. As she approached the driver side of an old, dark-blue Toyota and pulled out her keys, he pulled in next to her and rolled down his window. Her reaction was immediate. Her head whipped around and her hand came out of her purse holding a small can of pepper spray, which she pointed at him.

  “You keep away from me!” she shouted, terrified, as she extended her arm with the pepper spray toward his open car window.

  “Whoa!” he answered as he raised both hands. “All I want is to talk for a minute.”

  “They told me not to talk to you,” she said as she quickly looked around to see if anyone was watching. “They told all of us not to talk to anyone, and certainly not to you!”

  “Good for them, I only want to ask you a couple questions about the woman I saw on the roof last night,” he went on anyway. “Eleanor Purdue? Is that her name?”

  “Oh, is that all? You want me to talk about Eleanor. Are you crazy?”

  “No one’s watching us,” he tried to reassure her, concluding that if she hadn’t sprayed him by now, she probably wouldn’t, not as long as he stayed in his car and didn’t make any sudden moves toward her.

  “They’re always watching. They have cameras everywhere now. Everywhere!” she answered, desperate, almost on the verge of tears. “They’ve been watching me, bugging my phones, my house, probably my car for all I know, and they’ve probably been watching you too. They watch anyone who is a threat to them.”

  “Let them, I’m not afraid of them, and you shouldn’t be either. If you’ll help me, we can put an end to all of this.”

  “You really are crazy; don’t you realize who you’re dealing with? Well, I do, and I can’t afford any trouble, Mr.…”

  “Burke, Bob Burke, and I can protect you. We can go to the police, to the US Attorney.”

  “Don’t drag me into this. I have a daughter and… Oh, leave me alone!”

  “The woman in the white dress, Eleanor? She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she? She was a good friend, and now she’s missing.” She stared at him, wide-eyed, her lower lip quivering. Clearly, the girl was on the verge of a breakdown. “Linda,” he pressed. “I looked online, at the CHC website and I saw her picture. She is your head of accounting and finance. I don’t know if you know this yet, but she was supposed to testify to a Grand Jury next week. That’s why Greenway killed her.”

  “Nobody killed anyone.” She quickly shook her head. “You made all that up. Eleanor is traveling, that’s all. They told me she needed to meet with the auditors, and left early.”

  “Look at yourself,” Burke answered. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. She was up on the roof with Greenway as I said, and you know it.”

  “No, no, you’re wrong. That can’t be.”

  “No? Well, when she doesn’t show up this week or next, and they tell you she quit and moved, it will be too late. Come with me and we’ll both go to the police. I’ll take you.”

  “The police? Out here? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Not Bentley, real police, like that Chicago cop I was with, or the FBI.”

  “Dr. Greenway told me you’re making all that stuff up to ruin CHC. He told us his competitors are out to get him now, out to get all of us. And I’ve got a family, Mister Burke, I’ve got a daughter and I need this job.”

  Before she could say much more, a pair of Indian Hills patrol cars suddenly pulled up behind them, blocking him in. Burke quickly shoved one of his business card into her hand before either of the two policeman saw him, and whispered, “Call me, please!” For a moment, she stared down at the card lying in the palm of her hand as if it were a dead mouse, but she kept it; finally closing her fingers around it and shoving it in her pocket.

  Chief Bentley climbed out of his big cruiser and walked toward him, while the burly young town patrolman he recognized from the night before scrambled out of the other car. The nameplate on his shirt read “B. J. Leonard.” Bentley hitched up his heavy equipment belt over his gut and sauntered to the driver’s side door of Burke’s car, positioning himself between Burke and Linda Sylvester. Bobby Joe circled around to the passenger side and pointed a .38-caliber Colt revolver at him through the open window.

  “All right, son,” Bentley ordered. “Out of the car.”

  “And why would I want to do that? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “You want to, because I told you to; and that’s the only reason you need or I intend to give. Understood? There’s been a rash of office burglaries out here. It’s about dark, when they usually strike. Besides, I distinctly remember you bein’ told to stay away from here. That makes it ‘trespassin’,” he added with a thin smile as the palm of his right hand moved from his belt buckle to his pistol butt. “Now, get out of that car.”

  Bob looked up at him, but realized there was no reason to give the fat cop or his trigger-happy pit bull an excuse, so he did what he was told. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

  “Well, since you asked, I believe you are,” Bentley replied. “The last time you were here, it seems you didn’t listen too well; so this time it might take a bit longer.” Bentley turned him around and handcuffed him from behind, while Bobby Joe grinned at him and kept him covered with his long-barreled .38 Colt, holding it out in front of him in a classic two-handed shooting stance, knees
bent and ever-so-serious.

  Bob looked at him “Did your uncle give you a bullet for that thing, too?” he asked.

  “The Chief ain’t my uncle!” the young police officer glared at him.

  “Best not sass Bobby Joe,” Bentley warned Burke. “The boy just got back from Afghanistan, and he’s got a mean streak in him like an itch he can’t scratch.”

  “Afghanistan?” Bob repeated. “Well hot damn! What unit?”

  “Wasn’t you in the Air Force?” Bentley asked him. “At that Bag-ram place?”

  “Doing what? Baggage handler?” Burke cocked his head and asked.

  “No, I weren’t no damned baggage handler!” Bobby Joe finally spoke up. “I was an Air Force cop… and then I did some construction.”

  “Ah, ‘some construction?’ ” Burke nodded, appearing to think it over for a moment. “Let’s see, I’ll bet you were in Air Force Security and messed something up, probably a couple of times, at least. So Security kicked you out and they handed you a shovel. Yeah, that might leave a man with a ‘mean streak,’ but it was better than a court-martial, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s none of your goddamn business! What the hell do you know, anyway?” Bobby Joe stepped closer and poked Bob in the stomach with the Colt.

  “Be careful you don’t get on Bobby Joe’s bad side, now,” Bentley warned.

  “Oh, no, I sure wouldn’t want to do that,” Bob agreed. “But the next time he jabs me with that thing you better call for backup,” he said as he turned and got in the rear seat of the Chief’s car. That was when he saw Tony Scalese standing behind him, arms crossed over his chest, listening to the conversation and laughing.

  “Some people don’t listen, do they, Burke?” the big man said. “And it wasn’t as if you weren’t warned.”

  Bob smiled at Scalese. If his little trip tonight hadn’t taught him anything else, it confirmed that Scalese was indeed Mafia and Bentley was in bed with them, right up to his four-star collar tabs. As the police cruiser pulled away, he looked back at the building and saw Lawrence Greenway standing in the side doorway. His eyes were focused on him much as they had been up on the roof the day before — cold, cruel, and analytical, as if he were studying a bug under a microscope.