Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  Casey you and Dent are in danger. Take precautions. Bolle sends.

  There was a phone number after that.

  “Huh,” I said. “I wonder if it’s for real.”

  I remembered something from earlier.

  “I got a text message right as I walked in the door back there,” I said, pulling the phone pouch out of my shoulder bag. “I wonder if it was from him. Can we check without giving ourselves away?”

  Wordlessly, Casey held out a hand. When it came to technology, I had learned to defer to her.

  “There are two phones in here,” she said. “Yours is the Samsung. What’s the other one?”

  “I pulled it off one of the guys who ambushed me.”

  She grunted, her attention focused on manipulating the phone inside the bag. After a minute she handed it to me.

  There was a message on the screen.

  Dent you and Casey are in danger. Take precautions. Bolle Sends.

  The same phone number was attached.

  Interesting. After the events of last year, Bolle and his crew from the Justice Department had all but disappeared. They had blown town, leaving me and Casey behind like discarded cigarette butts. We’d tried to make contact discreetly a couple of times with no results.

  Casey had used her skills to look into Bolle. The man was an enigma. He’d been in Army intelligence for a few years after 9/11, then he’d joined the FBI. She could find evidence of him being assigned to the New York field office for a couple of years, and then it was like he had disappeared until he showed up in our lives last year.

  “So what exactly happened back there?” Casey asked.

  I took a deep breath and recounted the ambush. Then, I went ahead and told them both about my visit to Lubbock. In many ways, it had been a stupid thing to do, but I was trusting Casey and Robert with my life. I needed to be honest with them.

  “Huh,” Robert said. “The guys that tried to smoke you at the house don’t sound like what we’ve been expecting.”

  He was right. Cascade Aviation employed mostly former military special operators, with a smattering of spooks from the CIA. They had started out just doing logistics and transport, but had evolved into a full-fledged private military company. They had plenty of job openings for former Army Special Forces, Navy SEALS, and Air Force combat controllers and the like.

  Even though I hadn’t had time to fully examine them, it was clear to me that the men back at the house didn’t fit that description. They looked like common criminals. Tattoos weren’t uncommon in special operations, but Nazi stuff was still forbidden. The second guy I shot had been toting a big magnum revolver, something I wouldn’t expect from a special operations guy.

  They just hadn’t looked the part. Even out of uniform, you could pick a special forces guy out from across the room.

  More importantly, they hadn’t acted the part. If I’d walked into a room full of trained operators, I’d be dead right now, or at least handcuffed, hooded and drugged as I took my last ride to a quiet spot in the national forest. My survival back in that house had been a close thing. I remembered the feeling of a bullet whizzing past my cheek and shuddered.

  “When we stop, I can crack the phone you took,” Casey said.

  “That would be good,” I said. Maybe that would give us a lead.

  We rode in silence for a while. We were gaining elevation as we headed up and over Mount Hood. Soon it grew cool enough that Robert turned the heater on, and I sat there, lulled by the heat and the drone of the tires on pavement. I was tired. I’d woken up at dawn for my run, had trained hard and then capped my evening off with a gunfight. Robert turned on his satellite radio and started listening to a talk show related to farming. Most of it was incomprehensible to me, except the part where it was getting tougher to make a living running a farm.

  I woke up when the tires of the truck went from pavement to gravel. The first bare hint of pink was showing in the eastern sky as we drove under a sign that said “Williams Ranch.” Where the west side of the cascade mountains was wet and lush and reminded me of something out of one of those Hobbit movies, the east side was dry and open. It looked like you could expect to see John Wayne or Clint Eastwood ride up on a horse at any minute.

  I didn’t know much about ranching, but I’d read enough Max Brand and Louis L’Amour novels as a kid to know it was impolite to ask a man how many acres he owned, so I looked it up on the Internet. The Williams family had started out with a 160-acre homestead in the late 1800’s. As their neighbors had either gone broke or just gave up, the family had expanded their holdings to over 300 acres. Dale Williams, the current family patriarch was keeping everyone’s head above water courtesy of the market for grass-fed, organic beef.

  We drove for several minutes down a long dusty gravel road. Cows stared at us mutely as we rolled past in the half-light.

  The main ranch house was dark, except for a light in the living room. Robert stopped the truck and we all stepped out. I was grateful for the chance to stand, and shook all the kinks out of my back and legs. A man in a long coat came around the corner of the house, with a rifle in his hands, very carefully not pointed at us. It was Mandy’s father.

  “Good to see you, Dent,” he said as he shook my hand.

  “I appreciate you taking us in.”

  He nodded and shook Casey’s hand. She’d been out here a couple of times with me. Given that he was an old school eastern Oregon cattle rancher, I thought he’d done an admirable job of warming up to Casey with her blue-dyed androgynous haircut and penchant for black leather jackets and a nose ring. I think Dale Williams recognized serious people when he saw them, and that trumped appearances.

  It was cold out here, and I was grateful to step inside the warm house. It smelled of brewing coffee and baking bread. As we stood in the foyer, Mandy appeared from around the corner, wiping her hands on a towel.

  She stood there for a second, with that vacant, flat expression that I’d had to get used to. I could tell that she knew she should recognize Casey and me, but couldn’t. This happened more often than not when I came, and I could tell it frustrated her.

  “Hey Mandy, good to see you,” I said softly.

  She gave a little start and smiled. “Dent!”

  Then she gave me a hug. It seemed like once I spoke to her, she recognized me. In the last few months, I’d had plenty of time to read about traumatic brain injuries. While the areas of the brain weren’t as neatly divided up into particular functions as some people would have you believe, damage to some areas affected some functions more than others. In Mandy’s case, there seemed to be a disconnect between her visual processing and her memory. Her auditory processing seemed less affected.

  She pulled back and I looked at her. Her front teeth implants looked good, they were hardly noticeable. When she’d been attacked last year, they’d both been broken in half. Between me, her dad, and her brothers, we’d managed to send her to one of the best dental surgeons in the Northwest, making up the difference between what workman’s comp would pay, and the surgeon’s astronomical fees. Her face still looked a little lopsided, thanks to a crushed cheekbone. It was probably always going to be that way. I’d flown with her to Los Angles, to consult with two of the country’s best plastic surgeons, and they’d concluded that it would take a quarter of a million dollars to make it a little bit better, and the surgery would be horribly invasive, with months of recovery.

  “We’re getting ready for breakfast,” she said.

  “That sounds good.”

  She gave me a smile, and I watched as she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “She still has good days and bad days,” her father said. “But lately the good have been outnumbering the bad.”

  That was probably the best we could hope for. Mandy seemed to have resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t going back to work as a police officer. In her more lucid moments following the attack, all she had talked about was how she was going to get better and go back to w
ork. Perversely, as her cognitive abilities improved, she seemed better able to understand how impaired she was. Back in April, she’d almost burned the house down with a kitchen fire. After that, I hadn’t heard her mention going back to work.

  People started filtering in for breakfast. Days started early here on the ranch, and it was their custom to gather for breakfast to hash out a plan for the day’s work. Mandy’s two youngest brothers were still in high school and lived here in the main house. They were on summer break and would be working on the ranch from sunrise to sunset. Robert lived with his wife and two kids in another house here on the ranch. Daniel, freshly back from a tour in Iraq, lived in a line shack farther up on the ranch. The quiet of the open plains and the fourteen-hour days of back-breaking labor were exactly what he needed after a year in the Land Of Bad Things, something his father, who had done some tours in Vietnam, understood all too well.

  You didn’t leave a Williams family breakfast hungry. I consumed embarrassing quantities of coffee, bacon, eggs, and biscuits in silence, content to listen to the conversation around me. It was interesting to watch a functional family at work. My own family meals had been full of tense silence with the occasional outburst of screaming. In some ways, I felt uncomfortable, like an interloper that shouldn’t be there, but I also found sitting at the table, surrounded by Dale, his kids, Robert’s wife Anna, and their two toddlers comforting in a way that felt both foreign and comforting at the same time.

  I was savoring a last cup of coffee, and contemplating another biscuit when Dale cocked his head towards the door and said, “Dent, you want to join me for a smoke?”

  I didn’t smoke, but I was interested in whatever Dale had to say. The sun was up over the ridge, and it was already noticeably warmer outside. Dale shook a Marlboro out of a pack and lit it with a Zippo lighter with the Marine Corps globe and anchor engraved on the side.

  “Sounds like things have kicked off,” he said as he breathed out a cloud of smoke.

  I nodded.

  “Feels good to finally get some licks in, doesn’t it?”

  I almost laughed. One of the things I liked about Dale Williams was that I could admit that finally getting into a gunfight after waiting for six months was a form of relief, and he wouldn’t think I was crazy.

  “I’m looking forward to bringing this to an end, one way or another.”

  Dale took another drag on his cigarette. “I want in this time.”

  I stared off towards the corral. The horses were milling around, knowing their day was about to start.

  “You sure about that?” I asked. I thought about the peace I’d felt sitting around the breakfast table. “You’ve got a fine family here, Dale. You’ve got a lot to lose. Besides, you’ve already helped me out a bunch.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette, then laughed. “I’ve fed you a few times and gave you a rental car. It was hell explaining the bloodstains on the upholstery, I admit, but I’ve got some more direct action in mind.”

  Dale snubbed out his smoke, threw it in the coffee can by the porch rail. “I’m down to three of those things a day, and I only smoke ‘em halfway down. Seems like I ought to be able to quit.”

  He turned to face me.

  “What you’re forgetting, Dent, is that my daughter got her head caved in by these assholes. I don’t really need a by your leave to go after them. I’m politely expressing a desire to work with you, but what I’m really saying is that I’m determined to put some blood on the walls, whether you agree with it or not.”

  My mouth dropped, and I realized I was being an asshole. Dale’s family was his own lookout, and I needed to stay in my lane. Behind me, the screen door creaked open and Casey stepped out onto the porch.

  Dale gave a little blink when he saw her.

  “My apologies, Casey. I should have invited you out here for this little palaver as well.”

  She gave him a little half smile.

  “Thanks.”

  She’d accepted, with wry amusement, the fact that most of the Williams men didn’t know what to make of her. Beneath the sardonic hipster exterior, Casey was pretty down to earth.

  “Dent and I were just discussing how it’s a kind of a relief to finally have the conflict out in the open again,” Dale said.

  She nodded. “I prefer a straight up fight to all this sneaking around.”

  That sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Casey was found of movie quotes.

  Dale gestured at me. “Dent and I were just trying to figure out how we might best work together.”

  Casey looked back and forth at the two of us.

  “I think we need to reach out to Bolle. I don’t entirely trust him, but he wants what we want. If we can take out Todd, Marshall, and Cascade Aviation we can walk away from this mess and get on with our lives.”

  I opened my mouth to talk, then realized that a noise had been building in the background. It was the beat of helicopter blades. I saw a black dot moving towards us, a couple of hundred feet above the Williams’ ranch road. It quickly resolved into a helicopter, an MD-500. It was a small, little bulbous helo that could turn on a dime and land in a spot barely bigger than a parking spot. I was intimately familiar with the military version, the MH-6, from my time in the Army.

  It slowed to a hover about a hundred yards from the front porch of the house, scattering cows in all directions. Robert stepped out with a pair of rifles. Wordlessly, he handed one to his dad.

  The helicopter settled onto the grass. The pitch of the engine changed as the pilot throttled down to idle and one of the doors popped open. I recognized the man that stepped out immediately.

  “Don’t shoot him,” I said.

  “Friend of yours?” Dale asked.

  “Yeah. Also, he’s a big, mean son of a bitch. You’d need a bigger rifle than that.”

  I stepped off the porch and started walking towards the helicopter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Big Eddie was from the Pacific Islands. Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, someplace like that. He’d been pretty vague and I never pressed him. I was a big guy. Next to Eddie, I felt small.

  He ducked under the helicopter rotor arc and strode toward me. He wore aviator sunglasses, khaki pants, and an untucked shirt that no doubt was hiding a gun. He looked perfectly comfortable out here on the high prairie, picking his way around cow pies in the morning desert sun.

  My relationship with Eddie was complicated. He’d proved himself a good man to have around in a tight spot. He’d stood by me during a particularly hairy gunfight that ended in a transport plane exploding in a giant fireball, but he worked for Bolle.

  Most importantly, last year I’d shot a man down in cold blood. My only defense to a jury would be “he deserved it.” Some of them probably would agree, but they’d have no choice but to send me to prison anyway. Eddie knew where the body was buried, or in this case, which stretch of the river it was lying in.

  Once he got close enough that I could hear over the sound of the helicopter, he yelled, “Morning, Dent! You’re a hard guy to find.”

  Despite my other misgivings, I shook his hand.

  “I’m kind of curious how you found us.”

  His grin got bigger. “I can’t reveal my sources and methods, my friend. Introduce me to your hosts?”

  We walked towards the house. The rifles had been put away, probably just inside the door, and Casey, Dale, and Robert stood there watching.

  “Want to fill me in?” Eddie asked.

  “I might ask the same of you,” I said. “Let’s wait until we get up on the porch so we don’t have to tell it twice.”

  He nodded and we walked the rest of the way up.

  Casey surprised me by running up to Eddie and giving him a big hug. She was closed off and reserved, except when she wasn’t. I introduced Eddie to Dale and Robert.

  “You know anything about four skinheads having a bad night last night?” Eddie asked me.

  “I heard it was some kind of firearms accident.
Unsafe gun handling,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s out of sight, man. Four on one?”

  “I got lucky. They’ve got Gina though. I don’t think she was with them by her own choice.”

  His grin faded. “I know and I think you’re right. We’ve got a bigger problem though. Alex is on her way here from Hawaii. She’ll land in a couple of hours. I’ve got people headed to the airport. If we leave right now in the bird, we’ll get there in time. I’m worried Todd will make a play for her too.”

  I looked at Casey. She looked tired, just like I probably did.

  “I’m in,” she said. “I need to grab my bag.” She headed inside.

  “Me too,” I said. I looked at Eddie. “I’ll be right back.”

  He nodded, and just like I’d hoped, Eddie stayed outside, and Dale followed me in. I collected my shoulder bag from where it had been sitting next to my chair and turned to him.

  “Look, you’re right. You want in on this? You’re in. But let me run out front. I’ll keep you posted. You and your boys can be our little secret. I trust Bolle, but only to a point.”

  He gave a slow nod. “That works. You stay in touch. You need some overhead cover, give a holler. Portland ain’t that far away. We’ll use that commo plan we cooked up?”

  I nodded and shook his hand. Mandy walked in from the kitchen and gave me a hug.

  “I wish I could come,” she said.

  “I wish you could do.”

  She turned quickly away. I guess she walked off so I wouldn’t see the tear in her eye, but I did anyway. I walked out of the house and Casey and I trotted to the helicopter. Ducking under spinning helicopter blades always made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and the top of my head tingle. No matter how low I got, I was afraid the damn thing was going to take my head off. It was horrendously loud.

  Eddie opened the back door, and Casey scrambled in. As she did, I noticed something interesting. There was a pair of brackets welded to the bottom of the fuselage. The work looked fresh. The welds and brackets were still bare metal. Back in the bad old days, the Army used helicopters almost identical to this one to insert special operations troops into various hot spots, urban areas in particular. In a matter of minutes, a metal mesh bench could be mounted on the brackets for three operators to ride on each side of the helicopter. The little helicopter could squeeze into tight spots at high speed and troops could jump off the benches and be on their objective in a matter of seconds.