Castle Danger--The Mental States
Page 22
Human intel. Still better than Google when you needed to convince two old-school cops.
It also didn’t take them long to figure out who I was, even though I wasn’t saying anything beyond the occasional “please” and “thanks”. One of the troopers snapped a pic of my face with his phone, sent it up to HQ, and even though I must’ve looked pretty far along the “Faces of Meth” spectrum after what I’d been through, I was still recognizable enough for someone to nail my ID.
I wondered if Marquette would still claim me, or if it was finally time to throw me to the wolves.
As for my own choice in the matter, at what point could I be sure I had irrefutable info? The rich and the powerful, as I’d seen over and over again these past few months, could make bodies disappear, could change the narrative to fit their fantasies in spite of evidence, could rid themselves of the ‘little people’, the folk for the grunt work, as soon as they became a problem — i.e. as soon as they thought or spoke their own opinions.
I was fucked.
I relented and decided to speak to them after all. In other words, I asked if someone could give me a change of clothes — men’s prison issue was fine with me — and would they kindly let me sit tight until I could think up the next move?
Too bad the next move found me first.
Cop knocked on the door. “Your lawyer’s here.”
Which got my attention, since I didn’t really have a lawyer. Was it a public defender? Or had Marquette sent someone from the campaign?
Worse.
Much worse.
The door opened and in walked two men in suits. One I remembered all too well, the other I guessed was just there to keep me from doing anything stupid.
“Raske?”
Daniel Raske, looking much stronger and erudite than last time I’d seen him — in Hef-style pajamas and flanked by two transwomen, giving me a performance that made even me, long-time aficionado of rather unorthodox pornography, look in another direction. Now that we both understood each other a little better, the look on his face was sneering, superior. The suit, my god, was worth thousands. It looked like the most comfortable thing I’d ever seen anyone wear, ever. In bed or out. And I could’ve sworn he was wearing a little make-up, too.
“Manny, they been treating you well?” Before I could answer, he turned to the cop at the door. “I need some privacy.”
“We turned off the camera.”
“Not good enough. I need a place where there are never any cameras.”
Which was how we ended up in the ladies room.
Wow, twice in one day for me, and yet I still hadn’t been able to clean myself up.
His ‘paralegal’ — nifty double-meaning there — stood by the locked door, pretending to be a Secret Service agent. Hands clasped. Sunglasses. But if the pretense helped him feel better about himself, fuck it, who was I to judge? Besides, it seemed perfectly harmless. He certainly wouldn’t be armed, not in a cop shop. I knew his only real jobs were to keep me from killing Raske, and to keep me from getting away. And I wasn’t going to try my luck with any hand to hand combat. As I’d proven all too frequently, I was no Jean-Claude Van Damme.
“So …” With a sigh, he leaned against one of the two sinks. “I don’t care who hired you. You’re fired. Game over.”
Raske looked over at his muscle and they exchanged eye-rolls. “I’m going to pay your bail, and we’re going to leave here within the next hour, I’d say. The good news is that your time in the Fancy Room is over. The bad news is that you are a huge problem that we need to take care of in a better way than Andrew dealt with Hans.”
“Hannah.”
He backhanded me. I wasn’t ready for it. It hurt just as much as you’d think, but I couldn’t tell him that, so I played it off.
Laughed even. Laughed right through the toothache. And then, God knows why, I decided I needed to taunt the man.
“You’re so bad at this, Danny boy. Jesus, this is some kind of TV movie-of-the-week spiel, telling me all I need to know before you drag me off to kill me. I mean, all I’ve got to do is start screaming like a madwoman as soon as we head back out into the bullpen. There is no chance I’m letting you take me anywhere. ANY. WHERE.”
The sneer was back, as Raske stepped closer. His voice was as quiet as my regret, regret that I’d ever got in this sorry mess.
“You forget that this is a TV movie of the week. All politics are these days. And I’m not so stupid that I didn’t send a few guys out to your dad’s farm before coming here. And a few more to your mom’s condo. And one really nasty friend of mine to babysit your sister. You remember Jelly, don’t you? She certainly remembers you. And if you don’t do what I want you to do, my boy Brandon over there,” head nod to the Secret Agent Actor, “will send one text to all three parties. Believe me, we know how to make the scene look however we want. Carbon monoxide ought to do. Farm accident, that’s another. For your mom, well, we can’t make them all look like accidents. No, she’s due a good old home invasion, rape, and stabbing death.”
He stepped back to let it sink in.
Did it ever.
I made a run for one of the stalls. Sure, it had all sunk in, but I wasted no time getting it back out.
Perhaps it was too late to put on a tough front after that display, but when I was done — flushed and wiped my mouth and everything — I walked out of the stall, gave Brandon a badass stare, and conjured my best Dylan impersonation: “I don’t believe you.”
Brandon shrugged, bored, while he thumbed a couple buttons and showed me the screen. Three texts, three different callers, each having sent one picture of my family members, unaware they were being photographed, but still uncomfortably close.
I reached for the phone, but Brandon pulled it away.
Raske had sneaked up on me, standing behind me, to my left, whispering, “It’s no joke. It’s no TV. This is just how it is. And for you, it’s over.”
Back into the bullpen. A cop brought over some jail threads, which looked nice and warm, relatively, but Raske made it clear I would be leaving as soon as he posted bail for me.
Which is when I told the nice officer, “I don’t want to go with him.”
Well, that got the cop’s attention. “Excuse me?”
“This isn’t my lawyer. He’s threatening my family. He wants to take me someplace and kill me.”
The trooper widened his eyes, looked back and forth between Raske and me. Raske, obviously furious but unable to show it, shook his head. “He’s had a crazy day.”
“Thanks to you.” I nodded at Brandon. “His phone’s got some texts, pics of my family to scare me.”
The trooper turned to Brandon. “Is this true?”
Of course he’s not going to say it’s true! But I held my tongue. C’mon, think, man.
Already thumbing them into delete world, I supposed. He held the phone out to the cop. “That’s crazy, you can take a look.”
Raske reached for Brandon’s arm. “Now, now, with a warrant, maybe. That phone is my firm’s property.”
I lifted my eyes to the trooper. Held his gaze. “I’m telling you I’m willing to stay in jail rather than go with these guys. It’s a stupid charge, and you know it’ll get tossed come morning, but I’d still rather face a night in the cells than go with them. I’m afraid for my life, and my family’s lives. And since you already know who I am, you should know what sort of shit I’ve just been through.”
He nodded. “I know you got kicked off the force.”
“And ended up working for the next governor. Why do you think that is? My knowledge of certain high profile cases is worth a lot of money to people with power in this state. Or why do you think this gentleman here is so eager to get his hands on me?”
The trooper had smart eyes, I could tell. A dumb mouth, but smart eyes.
Without taking his eyes from the three of us, he shouted, “Hey, Maureen?”
A trooper in another cubicle stood, lifted her head. “Yeah?”
Raske’s cheeks were red and spotty. “Look, I can’t sit here all day. If he doesn’t want me, fine, he doesn’t want me. It’s his loss. You can tell he’s not right in the head.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’m not going to be condescended to! I came here with the intention of doing him a favor!”
The trooper laid one of his thick hands on Raske’s shoulder. Raske pulled it away. Didn’t matter. “Mr. Raske, sir, I don’t know if he’s right in the head or not, but what I do know is that it looks like he’s been used as someone’s punching bag. My youngest sister is gay and occasionally mistaken for a boy, very much to her detriment. So you’ll excuse me if I proceed with caution concerning his claims.”
“Are you … are you … how dare you accuse me of homophobia! I’m one of the biggest allies they’ve got in this backwater state! I will not stand for this.”
He signaled to Brandon for the phone. “Dial the district attorney, please.”
Before he could take the ringing smartphone from his paralegal, the trooper plucked it from Brandon’s fingers, turned it off, and shouted, “Maureen, I need some help here, if you don’t mind.”
Raske stared me down, the sneer gone, while I tried to look everywhere except his face.
Couldn’t help a sly grin creeping on my face, though, when I told him, “You forgot one thing.”
A huff. “What’s that?”
“Blackmail victims on TV are stupid. They never call anyone’s bluffs. You were lying about your leverage with my folks, or you’d be calling your heavies off, now that the cops are checking my claim. You dickhead.”
Maureen appeared, a pair of cuffs in one hand, and long, brightly designed fingernails on the other as she waved us towards two different interview rooms. Majestic shiny hair recently salon-styled.
“If you gentlemen would be so kind?”
Five minutes later, I was in a room by myself again, dressed in slightly warmer jail clothes, drinking hot coffee, very sweet and barely creamed. And I was crying. Tears of joy, perhaps, because I had finally fired my first real shot in the long-awaited endgame. No idea what was going to happen next, though Raske was sure to snake his way out, but for now, for one brief moment of respite from my increasingly hostile world, this cinderblock cell felt like the safest space I’d found in a long, long time. And just like that, I was asleep.
5
The first task for Joel and Thorn: track Tennyson. He was all over the place, notorious for it, and neither of them knew he’d recently been on the North Shore padlocking me into a rape RV.
Their only advantage: Tennyson was also notorious for his constant urge to stay connected.
Thorn didn’t mind using his compromised phone to call Tennyson, because knowing was half the battle. As long as the campaign didn’t know about his second, untraceable phone, he had no problem letting them believe that they had the upper hand.
“Compromises,” he told Joel as they drove. “You can float above the shit if you understand that you’re still going to get dirty. It’s those people who refuse to get touched by it at all that end up drowning in it.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“No. Of course not. No one is, except the guys at the top. But the only way for any good ones to stay afloat is to talk like them, smell like them, and think like them.”
Joel gave him the side-eye. “Hard for me to think of you as one of the good guys.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, you almost killed my former partner with a high-powered rifle. Don’t admire your wings in the mirror just yet.”
Joel huffed. They were in Thorn’s incognito car — a Pontiac G8 he’d bought right before the whole company shut down — which made them as good as invisible to their masters.
Thorn dialed Tennyson. Of course, sometimes that meant going through a message service, a voicemail greeting, some toady answering for him … And sometimes, the man himself just answered like it was no big thing.
This time, it was the answering service.
“It’s Thorn, and I’ve got the big fish. Tell him I said that, please. It’s urgent.”
He hung up.
Joel kept quiet as long as he could, maybe ten, fifteen seconds.
Then, “Who’s the ‘big fish’?”
“I knew it. I was waiting for it. Who do you think? And it’s not officially the ‘big fish’. You’re actually the Whale.”
“So Manny is what?”
“The Minnow.”
“This whole thing just keeps getting weirder.”
When Thorn’s phone rang again, he answered it with a clipped:
“Thorn.”
Joel could hear Tennyson’s voice clear as day.
And it was testy: “What is it?”
“I’ve got the Marine in my sights. What do you want me to do?”
“Can you bring him in before he fucks up anything else?”
“Sure. Do you want me to do it the easy way or the hard way?”
“What the fuck do you think? Easy! Easy!”
“Hey, hey, calm down! The fuck have I done?”
“Just get him here.”
“Where is ‘here’? Where are you?”
“Right, right, mm …” Long pause. “How long can you keep him on the hook?”
“An hour, but not much more. He’s stupid, but his Marine instincts aren’t.”
“Fine. Okay. We can meet at the back of the fake HQ.”
Joel remembered. That was the one in Minneapolis — cleaner, more accessible to the public — while the ‘real’ HQ was where the dirty tricks were done in secret, no press allowed. Funny that, since it used to be a newspaper’s offices …
Thorn cut through his tangential reminiscence.
“And if something goes wrong?”
“Shit, then abort the whole thing.”
“Right.”
Click.
Thorn looked at the silent phone in his hand. Then turned it off.
Joel cleared his throat. “Why …?”
“We won’t find out on the phone what we need to know from the man.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
Joel shook his head. “I heard that, but we’re not going to do it his way, are we? I say we stake out the fake HQ, wait an hour, call him and tell him plans have changed. I got away. You need to meet him somewhere else quickly.”
Thorn nodded. “Like I said. Good instincts.”
“At least you got the ‘Marine’ part right this time.”
A parking garage with a view of the alley between the fake Minneapolis HQ and the building next door, which housed one of those banks only rich people used, a bland hipster café, and a pop-up donut shop that must’ve been bleeding a fortune in rent. Thorn and Joel scanned the area from a corner of the building, wind sending chills through their leather jackets. Made a nice change from blizzards, but neither of them was getting too excited yet. Spring took way too long to come of age in Minnesota. Bit like my sexual identity, though it felt like half a lifetime had gone by since that was even worth mentioning in this ever more complicated case. Just telling you about it now makes me think I should probably retire at the end of it, but we’re not quite there yet. For now, my only remaining allies were busy risking their lives to, well, serve justice? Avenge Hannah? Save the State from a prospective fascist governor? Right now, the answer was more likely to be: save themselves. If they didn’t want to end up in a Fancy Room of their own, attack was their best defense. Their only defense.
As Joel expected, there was no sign of Tennyson. Just a cluster of sedans with dark-tinted windows, lining the street with their engines running, all in position about forty minutes before Joel and Thorn were due. The only good news, then, was that along the way, before the two had gotten anywhere near the parking garage, Thorn had switche
d off his phone, taken the back off, and removed the sim card. As far as the campaign was concerned, he was a ghost, and eager to take advantage of the fact.
“Tennyson’s not going to show.”
Joel shook his head. “Probably just wanted you to deliver me, take me some place nice, quiet, and six feet deep.”
“I just don’t get it. I don’t get why Andrew Marquette, a guy I’ve known forever, would even get involved in all this, let alone be the ringleader. His parents weren’t like that.”
Joel kept his own counsel on that case. The Marquettes were one fucked up family. “Mm hm.”
“His brother … I mean sister. Shit. I knew him as Hans, and he was fine. A rich prick, but still a good guy for a rich prick.”
“I think Andrew is a man used to getting his way. Sure, murder is a big step, but once he did it to get his way, he was fucked, because it couldn’t have been as easy as it seemed. It never is. And now he’s got to kill other people to cover up the first killing. There’s a good chance he’s improvising this as much as we are.”
“I can’t believe it. I just can’t.”
Thorn stared at the alley. No movement.
“Joel, I’m sorry if I treated you like shit.”
“You did, but no worries. I almost killed your partner. We’re even.”
“Well, I haven’t tried to kill Manny.”
“I did what I had to do. You guys should’ve handled that better.”
Thorn turned to Joel. “They didn’t give us a chance.”
“I mean, you shouldn’t have been in that cabin.”
“No, Manny shouldn’t have been in that cabin.”
Silence. Neither of them could be bothered rehashing their resentments anymore.
In a wordless truce, they both turned to watch the cars, the exhaust clouds they emitted, translucent in the crisp air, the reflections of the buildings distorted in the tinted glass. Joel wondered if the guys inside those limousines had actually spotted them and already sneaked a team into the garage, stealthily waiting for the right moment. He looked around, trying to make it look like he wasn’t. No one there.