Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel)

by D. A. Keeley

  Hewitt drank coffee, swallowed without grimacing—a feat that, to Peyton, indicated the guy either lacked taste buds or could chew nails, because few things in this world were as bad as stationhouse coffee. A silver oak leaf was pinned to his lapel, designating him PAIC, but it was Hewitt’s NAVY SEAL mug that spoke to who he was: desk always immaculate; in his early forties, he was trim and fit. Desk job or not, the guy was still capable of running down even the quickest border jumper.

  And right now his scowl told her he was ready for a fight.

  “Care to explain what the hell happened tonight?”

  “I found a baby.”

  “Peyton, don’t push my buttons.”

  “That’s what happened, Mike.”

  Hewitt leaned back in his swivel chair.

  “Your old boss told me you are driven. I know it can be tough being in the ten percent, but don’t get a chip on your shoulder.”

  “You think I have a chip on my shoulder because I’m a female agent?”

  Hewitt didn’t speak.

  “I call it determination,” she said.

  “Fine. You insisted Kenny Radke’s tip was legit. So, against what the guy’s rap sheet told me and what my gut said, I let you chase it down. I should’ve insisted you hand it over to Maine DEA and let them look like fools. Now we have a meeting with DHHS and the state police. At best, this was Attempted Homicide and state police take it over. At worst, you stumbled onto something larger, and this is going to be a shit storm.”

  There was no sound from the bullpen. She knew the desk jockeys were all ears. She stood and closed the door.

  “I grew up here, went to school with Radke. I know his tendencies, and I know for sure that if it can be smoked and is within a fifty-mile radius, he knows about it. I still think something’s going on down there.”

  He pointed to her chair, and she sat down again.

  “Look, Peyton, in El Paso you could be a one-person team every shift because something happens just about every shift. The northern border is different. Teamwork is more prevalent here. Sometimes you work for weeks with nothing to show for it. I’d like to see this station make a big bust, too. But not by gambling on the likes of Kenny Radke.”

  “I understand the differences, and I’m a team player.”

  “You sure about that? When I interviewed you for this position, you told me you wanted to move back to Garrett for your son. I understood that to mean you knew what you were giving up. If you need the adrenaline rush, this might not work out.”

  She thought about Tommy, who’d be waking soon. In the four months since returning to Garrett, Peyton had yet to find a suitable house to purchase. So she and Tommy were staying with her mother, Lois, who conveniently provided childcare. Convenient or not, staying with her mother was getting old. Even more frustrating than life in her mother’s guestroom, Peyton wanted to be the one to make Tommy breakfast. But it wasn’t to be. Not this morning. She hated it when her roles—as single parent and agent—conflicted.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “I got a bad tip. That’s all this is, Mike. Don’t read anything more into it.”

  But she knew he was right on at least one thing: she had rolled the dice on Kenny Radke, and he’d burned her, a rookie mistake.

  Informants in this town of 1,100 were about as easy to come by as a heat rash in January. And who should she find creeping down a dirt road near the border in a rusted Aerostar van the previous week? Kenny Radke, with a dime bag in his glove compartment. No way she’d confess to using the dime bag as leverage with Radke.

  She wasn’t an adrenaline junkie. Radke had just burned her. And she’d discuss that with him very shortly.

  She leaned back in her seat and exhaled. “DEA says BC Bud is being grown in Youngsville, New Brunswick. Entering here, going to Boston and New York.”

  “Straight down I-95?”

  She shrugged. “Possibly. Know how many logging trucks and potato trucks go down I-95 each day? I was thinking maybe Radke told someone, and they changed plans.”

  “And left a baby instead? On the coldest night of the fall? Someone must have left her to freeze.”

  “I don’t think so. If they wanted her to freeze, why leave her where someone would see her? Why not just throw her in the river or leave her behind a tree?”

  “Jesus, that’s bleak.”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore.” Her eyes left Hewitt’s. Through the window, the sun was rising over the Crystal View River. The dark water looked cold. “In El Paso one time I saw a mother let her baby drown so she could make it across the Rio Grande. I think someone wanted me to find this little girl.”

  “You, in particular?”

  “I was there. I walked the perimeter once, never saw the baby. Someone sure timed it perfectly.”

  “So whoever left her was watching you, which explains how you didn’t see the drop. Did you use motion sensors?”

  She shifted in her chair. He wouldn’t like the answer. “I had night-vision goggles, and I was sign-cutting on foot.” Her ability to sign-cut—reading the landscape, instinctively noting what should and should not be there, spotting tracks and aging them—had been a big reason for her BORSTAR accolade.

  “We have those detectors for a reason, Peyton. They cost a damned fortune. Anything on the wire to help us ID the baby? Missing persons reports? Anything?”

  “Not yet. I talked to the state police and DHHS. It happened so close to the border that, if it’s okay with you, we’re going to be in on it, too.”

  “Which explains why they’re both calling me.”

  “Something is going on near the river,” she said. “That’s our border. We need to know what.”

  When she left Hewitt’s office and crossed the bullpen, Scott Smith looked up from typing. “Anything I can do for the baby?”

  “You busting my chops again, Scott?”

  “No. I’m dead serious. And I’m sorry about the ‘orphanage’ comment earlier. I was trying to be funny.”

  She stopped walking. “Apology accepted. I probably overreacted.”

  “My brother, in Caribou, had twin girls last year,” he said. “They have a bassinet and clothes for a little girl.”

  Like her, Smith was divorced. He’d been there only six months. Another newcomer trying to make a friend?

  “Thanks, Scott. Maybe we could take up a collection for her. Wherever she ends up, she’ll need those things.”

  “Get a name yet?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  “DHHS custody.”

  “Get me an address and I’ll tell my sister-in-law where to bring the stuff.”

  There was a puddle of mud forming a three-foot arc around his chair.

  “You leave any dirt and snow in the woods?” she said, smiling.

  “I was in the Alagash. Ever been there?”

  “I used to fish the Alagash as a little girl with my father,” she said. “Actually, he’d fish. I’d sit in the canoe.”

  “Not an easy place to get from point A to point B.”

  The Alagash Wilderness Waterway was a ninety-two-mile network of rivers, lakes, ponds, and streams that cut through Maine’s commercial forests. The water was ice-cold and fast-moving, and canoes and kayaks were the only water vehicles permitted. The danger was great to inexperienced paddlers. The dirt roads through the forests were dominated by eighteen-wheel logging vehicles that had (or took) the right-of-way at all times, which meant sportsmen weren’t safe on the water—or the roads.

  “Like the Goddamn Wild West,” Smith continued. “You get me an address for the little girl, and I’ll drop off the clothes.”

  “Will do.”

  “And tell Tommy I saw him score on my nephew the other day.”

  “You were at the soccer game?”

  “Yeah. Your son’s another Pelé.”

  She smiled at him. “That’s nice to hear. Thank you.”

  “It’s the truth.
I played a little semi-pro. I know skill when I see it.”

  “Thanks again,” she said, and headed toward the door. But she paused before she left to glance back at Smith.

  He was typing, refocused on his work.

  THREE

  PEYTON DASHED HOME, MET Lois and Tommy at the bus stop, kissed her mother on the cheek as a thank-you, and then drove Tommy to school, soaking up the fifteen minutes she could spend with him following her midnight shift.

  Shortly after 10 a.m. that Monday, Peyton was in a booth at Gary’s Diner. She was off duty, but sleep could wait.

  The smells of the place always brought back childhood memories: her seated at the counter beside her late father, sipping hot chocolate, eating ployes drenched in syrup. Ployes—a thin pancake-like food made of several kinds of wheat and topped with local items like maple syrup—were to Aroostook County what grits were to the South.

  She sipped black coffee and worked on a crossword puzzle in the Bangor Daily, having enjoyed solving them since elementary school. She’d always taken failure hard. Even more than she liked solving a puzzle, it was her hatred of leaving a space incomplete that motivated her. The frustration of missing the drop the previous night was similar: someone had out-smarted her.

  The bell chimed and the front door opened. The morning break crowd from the Garrett Public Works Department entered.

  She gave him time to sit and order. That would make it hard for him to run.

  After filling in 2 down and 8 across, she stood, set her pen down on her newspaper to indicate she’d return, and crossed the room.

  “Sleep in that shirt?” She was standing behind him. “Looks like the thing hasn’t been washed in a month.”

  Kenny Radke looked like hell. When she’d seen him here previously, he’d been clean-shaven, always in a Dickies work shirt, Garrett Public Works stitched into the breast pocket, matching pants, and smelling of inexpensive cologne. Now his unshaven face held a bluish tint and his shoulder-length hair hung in greasy clumps.

  Playing to a man beside him with a shaved head, he said, “Bet you’d love to know what I sleep in.”

  “That a feeble attempt to flirt, or are you trying to be obnoxious? I’m in no mood for jokes today because I didn’t get much sleep last night, Kenny. Want to know why?”

  “Bet I can guess what you were doing all night.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that. Instead, I’m going to remind you of Francis Cyr. Remember him?”

  The incident had taken place during their junior year, close to twenty years earlier.

  “That stupid look on your face tells me you haven’t forgotten it.”

  “You broke his nose. Some karate move.”

  “I was a brown belt then. I’m a black belt now. He laughed at my family. Dad had lost the farm, had to take a job at the town dump. Francis Cyr called him a ‘dump picker.’ I don’t like being made fun of, Kenny.”

  “Relax. I was just kidding.”

  “Come with me. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  “Can’t. Break ends soon.”

  “You can buy me a coffee, eh,” the guy next to Radke said in a French accent. About Radke’s age, he had ARMY tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, CHRIST on the knuckles of his left. He looked vaguely familiar. “Eh, Peyton, you don’t remember me? Christ, that hurts.”

  “Tyler Timms?”

  “The one and only.”

  “You look different.”

  She remembered Timms. A burnout in high school, he’d joined the Army a week after graduation. She hadn’t run into him since returning to Garrett.

  Behind them, the bell jingled. Morris and Margaret Picard entered. Mo Picard, her former US history teacher, spotted them, made a just-a-second gesture to his wife, and walked over. Judging from his attire, he was still teaching.

  “Peyton Cote, I read an article about you in the paper. ‘Star Agent Returns.’ ”

  She grinned. “That wasn’t the headline, Mr. Picard.”

  “But that was the gist.” He smiled, and she gave him a hug, eyes returning to Radke.

  Mo Picard had to be nearly sixty, but his brown hair curled at the nape, forming a single boyish flip near his collar. Small and lean, he could pass for forty, and he knew everyone in Garrett, Maine.

  “How’s your mom, Peyton? It was terrible when your father passed, very tough on her. They’d been through a lot together. I know having both you and your sister out of state was rough.”

  Was that a criticism? Elise had been in a different city each of the past three years. Now her husband was four for four, working for Picard in the high school history department. Peyton had been in Texas but made it back to see her father in the hospital before he died. The farm and farmhouse had been lost long before then. Maybe that helped the bankers to sleep at night; maybe it didn’t. She hoped not, hoped they realized that when you take a man’s way of life, the clock starts ticking.

  “I’m about to beg Peyton, here,” Timms said, “to go out with me before Kenny can ask her.”

  Chuckles all around.

  “Be careful, Tyler,” Picard said, still smiling, but his voice dropped an octave. “She’ll discover your true colors.”

  Peyton smiled. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Timms looked at Picard for an awkward moment, then both men smiled.

  “Well,” Picard said, “with the economy struggling and jobs downstate paying more than anything up here, it’s good to see some young people staying and others even returning to Garrett.”

  “Why do you guys stay?” Peyton asked.

  “I like helping people,” Radke said.

  “At the public works department?”

  Radke turned his attention to the floor.

  Picard coughed once, a loud, deep smoker’s rumble.

  “You okay?” she asked. “Want some water?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m here because I got shot in Iraq,” Timms said. “Been home about a year. Wore St. Christopher around my neck every day over there, and I still got shot, eh. Lost thirty pounds.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said.

  “Besides, my church is here. Be hard for a”—he looked at Picard and flashed a smile—“good French Catholic boy to leave his church, eh?”

  Tattoos lining Timms’s arms reminded Peyton of the Skinheads she’d seen in Texas. She noticed something else: his eyes offered a calmness she’d seen in agents who’d served and fought—the look of one who’d seen combat.

  “Welcome home,” she said.

  “You too,” Timms said. “I’ve got to get back to the garage.” He turned and left.

  She looked at Radke. “Kenny, come with me for a minute.”

  “Good to see you again, Peyton. Give your mom my best.” Picard went to the booth, where his wife waited.

  “Coffee for both of us,” Peyton said. “My bill.”

  The waitress, Donna Dionne, shook her head. “He hasn’t changed a bit since high school, has he, Peyton? He’s still mooching.”

  “Hey, I always pay for my coffee.”

  “Oh,” Donna said, “look, Peyton, Kenny’s getting indignant.”

  “You can’t treat me like that.”

  “No? You going to go somewhere else? There a Starbucks around here I don’t know about, Kenny? Why don’t you tell Peyton how much you tipped me yesterday?”

  Radke was silent.

  “You work nights fixing my damned car, Kenny. You know how much it’s costing me to get it fixed.”

  “I don’t need to work nights anymore.”

  She went on as if he’d not spoken: “And you stiffed me? Lucky I serve you at all.” Donna poured Kenny’s coffee sloppily, shoved the cup toward him, some slopping over the edge, hitting his hand.

  “Ah, you burned me.”

  She politely freshened Peyton’s coffee and moved off.

  “Can’t treat me like that,” Kenny said again, staring at the tabletop. “I don’t even need to
work nights anymore,” he said quietly.

  “Guess I’m not the only one having problems with your tips,” Peyton said.

  “What?”

  “Your information was for shit, Kenny. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked over his shoulder. “I didn’t give you no tip.”

  “Of course. You and I are just old friends having coffee, Kenny. No one can hear us. Did you purposely give me bad information?”

  “I didn’t give you no information.”

  “Where’d you get your tip?”

  Radke tried to sip his coffee but spilled some, burning his hand again. “Son of a bitch.”

  She took a napkin from the metal dispenser, handed it to him.

  As he patted his thumb, a wry smile creased his lips—he’d thought of something clever.

  She waited.

  “You threatened me.”

  “Don’t even try it, Kenny.”

  “I’m serious. I made that tip up to save my ass because”—he nodded, buying into his own story—“because you threatened me.”

  “Okay. Fine.” She added sugar to her coffee and stirred for a long time. Radke fidgeted, not liking the silence. “That’s how you want to play it?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you lied to me, Kenny—and you just said you did—Obstruction of Justice is a pretty big offense.” She sipped some coffee, shrugged. “Especially for a parolee.”

  Radke looked down. “Shit.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you’ve stepped in here. Now, where’d you get your information?”

  Still staring down, he whispered, “Poker game.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No, really.”

  The bell on the door rang continuously as the break crowd departed.

  Radke glanced around the now-sparse diner. “We were playing Texas hold ’em at Mann’s Garage. I lost my shirt—I can never keep a straight face, you know? And you kind of have to in that game.”

  She sipped her coffee, giving him room to ramble.

  “I was out of the hand, and this new guy, wearing a fancy suit, was there. He’d brought a case of beer and had offered me one earlier, so I figured he wouldn’t mind if I had another. I went out to the kitchen to get one, and he was on his cell phone talking about the delivery.”