by Tim Green
With an armful of papers, files, and the computer, she flung open the back door and dashed to her car. No keys.
She set her work down and sprinted back inside. Someone pounded on the other side of the door, rattling the hardware. Her purse hung over the back of her chair. She snatched it and took off, fumbling for the keys as she ran.
She found them, dropped them, and heard a shout from in front of the clinic. She groped for the keys, scratching her knuckles on the broken pavement.
"Ms. Jordan!" Agent Lewis said, rounding the building.
Casey glanced up. Her fingers found the key. She stuck it into the lock and turned.
"Ms. Jordan, stop," Lewis said, starting to jog.
Casey grabbed the papers and the computer. Lewis closed the distance to twenty feet and lengthened his stride.
"Stop right there!"
She tossed everything across to the passenger seat, then jumped in and slammed the door. Lewis grabbed the door handle. She smacked down the lock and started the car.
Lewis pounded on the glass and Casey jammed the car in reverse, nearly running him under her front wheel.
Lewis had his gun out.
She threw it into drive.
He pounded the glass with the butt of the gun and she knew it would shatter. She closed her eyes and stomped on the gas. Lewis swung the gun in a wide arc, hit the roof with a bang that made her think gunshot, then cartwheeled over, losing his grip and spilling to the ground as she fishtailed out of the lot, burning her wheels on the street until they got their grip and she shot through the intersection like a bullet.
CHAPTER 43
JOSe HAD AN AUNT IN WEST DALLAS, ONE OF THOSE TYPES WHO refuse to leave the home she raised her own kids in, even if the kids, like the area, had gone bad. She went to Mass every day and she kept her small place clean. As a cop, Jose had pushed the drugs and the gangs up around the corner and off her street, and stowed a Smith & Wesson snub-noseed.38, the same as his own, in the nightstand next to her bed. When he showed up with Amelia, his aunt didn't ask a thing, just took her in with a smile.
Jose stopped by early Monday morning before heading to Wilmer. He ate a plate of eggs and peppers while the two women sipped strong coffee, and he went over Amelia's story again so everything Nelly had overheard would be fresh in his mind. He knew he'd be lucky to get a chance with Mandy Chase, and that if he did, he wouldn't get a second one.
With a full stomach and plenty of ideas, he drove down to Wilmer in the rental sedan they'd picked up in Laredo. He knew Gage would recognize his truck and he didn't trust his luck with the chief a second time. It wasn't yet seven-thirty and Jose figured a woman like Mandy Chase wasn't likely to get up-let alone out-much before ten. He pulled the car off the road a good two hundred yards from the entrance to Lucky Star and dumped two sugars and four half-and-halfs into his coffee. He hadn't finished stirring his drink before the white Range Rover that he knew belonged to the wife came bursting out of gates in a cloud of dust and hit the road with a slight swerve before racing off toward town.
Jose capped his coffee and set off after her, keeping enough distance to avoid suspicion. He followed her onto Route 45, north toward Dallas. When she got off at a South Side exit, Jose squinted and looked around, unable to make sense of a rich senator's wife traveling to the wrong side of town. The white SUV was easy to follow, even from a distance. When it turned into the back lot of a run-down building with boarded-up windows, Jose could only think of another rich wife he'd been hired to follow the previous year. She'd come to this part of town to buy her meth.
He watched from across the street as Mandy Chase got out of the Range Rover wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair bound up in a purple scarf, and wearing a pair of large dark sunglasses. She glanced around, then walked hurriedly past a handful of battered cars parked in the lot and slipped into the back door of the three-story brick building.
Jose studied the area, waiting and watching for some time. When he got out of the car, he felt for the gun under his arm and then the one tucked into the waist of his pants before crossing the street. Clouds hid the sun, but the day was already warm and dank with humidity. Cars whooshed past on the nearby highway and the smell of spent fuel choked the air. In the gutters and scattered across the busted pavement of the lot lay flattened cans, broken glass, used condoms, and the wrappers of a hundred different forms of junk food. Jose circled the building and watched from the corner as a thin stream of ratty-looking people, mostly men, entered the front of the brick building through a battered wooden door.
Next to the building, a decrepit brick church stood in near-ruin, its faded walls tainted by vandals and graffiti. Jose returned to the back of the building and listened at the door Mandy Chase had gone into. The random clank of metal mixed into the occasional bark of orders between people confused him. The door opened easily and the heavy smell of cooking greeted him: frying potatoes, crackling grease, fake eggs, and white toast singed brown and black.
Jose stood at the back of a large kitchen, where several people worked over industrial-size pots with two-foot utensils. Mandy Chase was nowhere in sight. An older black man with tight white curls of hair and plastic-rimmed glasses looked up from his work, wiping the sweat from his face on the white sleeve of his uniform before asking Jose if he could help him.
"Looking for Mandy Chase," Jose said uncertainly.
The man flashed a yellow-toothed smile and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened.
"Miss Mandy?" the cook said, grinning even harder. "She'll be out there."
Jose followed the direction of the man's bony finger, through a set of swinging double doors and into a large hall, thick with the din of nearly a hundred homeless and mentally ill people sitting on benches along three long rows of tables. At the front of the hall, Mandy Chase stood alongside several older black women ladling out food to the line of tattered people. Armed with a giant spoon, she offered up a smile as well as a couple of words to go with her scoops of rubbery yellow eggs whipped to life from a powder.
Jose walked in back of the other helpers until he came to Mandy. Up close, he could see the dark roots of her blonde hair and the mottled skin on her long neck from too much sun. Still, she was strikingly beautiful and as out of place as a daisy blooming from broken asphalt.
"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.
"Oh," she said, glancing at him with a scoop of eggs balanced on her spoon, "good. Can you get more trays from the kitchen?"
"Sure," Jose said.
To the man who'd directed him in the first place, he said, "Mandy sent me for more trays."
"Helping out? Good," the old man said, pointing to a station beside a stainless-steel sink where a younger man worked over a mountain of dishes with a steamy spray nozzle. "Right over there, and you might as well take them plates, too. They're hungry today. Weather coming and I think they sense it."
Jose placed two stacks of mismatched plates, warm and wet from the water, onto a stack of damp gray trays and carried them out to the service line. He set them down alongside the bins of bent and tarnished silverware and returned to Mandy's side.
"Set," he said. "Anything else?"
"Mr. Jenkins," she said, raising her voice so the toothless man in front of her could hear, "it's good to see you. How's your cat?"
"Linda?" the old man asked, opening his coat to reveal a pouch slung across his naked chest, where an emaciated tabby cat stared out with bulging yellow eyes.
"There she is," Mandy said, scooping out another clump of eggs for the cat. "Get her fed, Mr. Jenkins. She's too thin."
Mr. Jenkins worked his gums and gave Mandy a nod before closing his coat and passing on.
Mandy glanced up at Jose and said, "You're new."
"I'm not really a volunteer," Jose said. "But it's nice to see you helping people."
Mandy's face clouded over. She stopped spooning and studied his face.
"Jose O'Brien," he said, extending a hand. "I used to be with
Dallas PD."
"He sent you?" she said, her face crimping with disgust, her big brown eyes wincing.
"Who would 'he' be?" Jose asked.
Mandy turned sharply away, set her jaw, and continued with her work.
"Leave me alone, Mr. O'Brien," she said, bitter.
"Your husband?" Jose asked. "I'm not with him. Not even close. He having you followed after your little thing with Elijandro?"
She ignored him, her shoulders drew back, and the cords in her neck showed. Jose waited for her to turn back, but she didn't.
"I thought," Jose said, "when I saw you here, doing this, no cameras, no reporters, just a bunch of broken-down homeless people, that maybe you're not the rich-bitch wife of a megalomaniac senator."
After a pause, through clenched teeth she said, "That's exactly what I am, so leave me the hell alone."
"I'm not with your husband," he said.
"Everyone is with my husband," she said, scooping out eggs. "Go to hell."
"You knew Elijandro had a wife," Jose said. "I'm helping her. Elijandro had a little girl, too. They've got nothing. Now, some lawyer might have told you that what your husband said about Ellie can't come out in court, but that won't hold up. We know about Nelly hearing the two of you fight."
Mandy looked at him sharply.
"Even without Nelly," Jose said quietly, "I've got a witness who knows Nelly was there and what she heard and I'm told that's just as good. So we're gonna subpoena you, and even the senator can't make that go away."
"What about Nelly?" she asked.
Jose shook his head and said, "She's gone, like you probably know. Look, I didn't think it was going to go like this, then I see you dishing out eggs here and I think maybe you give a shit about someone other than yourself. I've seen wives dipping in with the help before and they're usually not working the soup line in their off-hours."
"Dipping in?" Mandy said, shaking her head. "You're pathetic. If you're not with my husband, you should be. Send him your resume, Mr. O'Brien."
"Your husband is not a good man," Jose said.
Mandy turned and looked him in the eye, her own glass-blue irises burning with hatred as she said, "You have no idea."
"Tell me," Jose said. "Help me. Help Elijandro's little girl."
"I tell you, it'll be the end of my problems, that's for sure," she said.
"How so?"
She looked deep into his eyes and said, "'Cause I'll be dead."
CHAPTER 44
CASEY RACED TO THE COURTHOUSE. SHE PARKED ON THE DECK in back, riffled through her files to find the request for a letter of administration and the complaint, and hurried into the surrogate court clerk's offices. She had to make a couple of calls and use some favors to get the judge out of a conference to sign the letter of administration, but after half an hour she had it and went straight to the county court clerk. After a short wait in line she handed over the complaint along with the letter of administration, cut a check, and got back an index number. Cases were typically assigned the same day, so she left her cell phone number and asked to be called the moment a judge was assigned. With the papers filed, there was now nothing Chase could do to stop her.
That done, she returned to the car and dialed Sharon 's cell phone to find out how the scene with the EPA agents had ended.
"Jesus, you should have seen that guy's face," Sharon said. "I thought his head was going to explode. He said you almost ran him over. His pants were torn, knee bleeding all over. I can't believe you."
"They asked me to leave," Casey said. "I left. They can't arrest you for that."
"A couple city cops showed up," Sharon said. "They listened for a while and headed for the doughnut shop around the corner."
"I got the papers filed, anyway."
"What do we do now?" Sharon asked.
"Call the others. Tell them to think of it like a mini vacation. Let me sort this out," Casey said, "see how our senator enjoys the media crawling up his ass."
CHAPTER 45
JOSe DIDN'T ANSWER HIS PHONE, BUT THAT WAS NOTHING NEW. She left him a message about the EPA, then called Tim Smith, an environmental attorney from Baker Botts, one of the three big firms in Dallas.
"You better make plans to relocate your office," Smith said, "at least for the near future."
"It's bullshit," Casey said.
"Even if it's totally unfounded," Smith said, "and from what you tell me, it's not."
"A little oil in the pipes?" Casey said.
"Probably got a plume," Smith said. "Most old stations have them. Gas leaking from the tanks for fifty years. Let me guess, some magnanimous developer donated the property."
"So?"
"I saw one of these out by Tech," Smith said. "Rich alumni owns a piece of land, gives it to the school, takes a huge tax write-off, and surprise, the school goes to put up a building and finds out the site has PCBs off the charts. The alum says he didn't know. He doesn't own it anymore, and the school has to clean it up. EPA? They don't care. You own it, you clean it. Doesn't matter some farmer dumped oil down a dry well sixty years ago, you fix it. That's the game."
"I'm a nonprofit," she said.
"You could go belly-up," he said. "State comes in, cleans it, and auctions the land. Change the name of your charity and you can buy it back cheap. About a five-year process, though. My wife's a Realtor with some nice downtown office space if you want her number."
Casey's head spun.
"They said something about me sending people to work, some Resource Recovery Act. I've heard of it, but what is it?"
"Hardball," Smith said. "Trying to scare you."
"How so?"
"It's a crime to knowingly expose employees to toxic substances," Smith said.
"Is there anything to it?"
"Very tough for them," he said. "It's just a position. Sixty, seventy percent of the time you can plea down."
"Plea down?"
"It's rare you get jail time with petroleum products," he said. "It's not like it's arsenic."
"Jail?" she asked. "Not really, right?"
"Highly unlikely," he said.
"But possible?" she asked. "You're kidding."
"I wish you hadn't pulled that stunt with running away."
"I wasn't under arrest."
"You made them look bad, grabbing your stuff and slipping out the back like that," he said. "These federal agents get touchy."
"They're with the EPA," she said.
"That's what they get touchy about. They carry guns, too, you know. Pension after twenty years. All that."
"Just do your best," Casey said, "and let me know."
"No worries. I'll handle it."
Casey hung up and headed for her Realtor's office to find a place where she and her team could work.
CHAPTER 46
YOU'RE AFRAID OF HIM?" JOSe ASKED.
Mandy pressed her lips together and let the spoon clatter into the bottom of the empty egg pan. She turned toward the kitchen and Jose followed.
Mandy laid the pan into the sink, untied her apron, and hung it on a nail.
"I'm all finished, Frank," she said to the wrinkled cook. "I'll see you next week."
From the front pocket of her jeans she removed a folded check that she stuffed into the pocket of Frank's apron.
The old man smiled at her, touched his cap, and said, "You're awful good to these folks, Miss Mandy."
"I'm happy to help, Frank," she said, and turned away.
With her hand on the back door, Mandy turned to Jose and said, "I'll talk to you, but not here. You go out the front. I've seen them out here before, watching. Is there a place we can meet that has two entrances?"
"There's a place up on Lamar near Grand," Jose said. "Pilar's Kitchen. I'll go in through the kitchen and meet you at a back table."
Mandy started to open the door. Jose grabbed her arm and said, "This isn't some little trick, right?"
"If I wanted you gone," she said, yanking her arm free, "all I'd have to do
is say abracadabra. I have some things to pick up, but I'll meet you there in half an hour."
Jose watched her go, then turned and melted in with the steady flow of sated homeless out the front door. After a careful look around, he circled the block for his car. He took a couple of side streets, signaling one way, turning another, and checking his rearview mirror. By the time he reached Pilar's he was convinced that no one had followed him.
He took a deep breath and tried to make it past the overflowing garbage cans in the alley, nearly denying himself a mouthful of the ripe stink. The back screen door opened with a screech and several of the help glanced up from their handiwork of pans and dishes, but none spoke. The cook, dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and a paper hat, removed his cigarette, but only gave Jose a nod before turning back to his pan. Pilar nearly knocked Jose down as she banged her big hips through the double doors with a tray overloaded with more dirty dishes bleeding egg yolk and dripping with refried beans.
Pilar's scowl turned into a grin when she realized it was Jose who'd bumped her. When he told her to keep her eyes open for a blonde coming in through the front and asked Pilar to send her into the back room, the big cook waggled her eyebrows.
"Just business, Pilar," he said, pecking her cheek and slipping past. "Let me know if any gringos come in the front, too."
"Gringos like you?" she asked, catching the door with her foot.
"They'll be lighter-skinned than me," he said.
Jose sat at a corner table. Pilar reappeared in a colorful flow of silk that only heightened her immense bulk, slapped a cup of coffee on the table in front of Jose, and disappeared into the front room of the restaurant.
It wasn't more than ten minutes before Pilar returned in a flourish of silk, waving Mandy to the seat opposite him and plunking down another mug of coffee. As the big cook sashayed away, Mandy leaned around the corner to follow Pilar with her eyes.