by Glenn Meade
“Tell me this ain’t going to get all sexual. A dark, remote country lane, a helpless victim . . .”
“No chance.”
“Lucky I’m wearing my best underwear. So me thinking that maybe you were into me was pretty much delusional?”
“I’m going to search you.”
“Are you for real? Search me for what, exactly?”
Courtney waved the Sig in Tanner’s face.
“All I can say is, you’d better have a darn good reason for this, honey. CID agent or not, you’re looking at some serious court time for threatening a federal agent with a deadly weapon.”
“Turn. Do it.”
Tanner unbuckled his belt, opened the button and zipper. His trousers fell. He wore black-and-white-striped boxers.
“Cute.”
“Thanks.”
“Turn.”
He turned and spread his hands out on the car’s hood. Courtney moved up to him cautiously, her hands going into his pocket, taking out his wallet and his cell phone and patting him down. When she got to his ankles, she said, “No backup?”
“Hard to reach an ankle holster when you’re carrying extra pounds. A man’s liable to keel over and shoot himself.”
“Stay where you are. Hands on the hood. Makes it easier for me to watch you.”
“You’re sure you’re not just checking out my rear?”
“Pretty sure.”
“So when do I get an explanation?”
Courtney flicked on her flashlight, put the bottom end in her mouth to grip it, and opened Tanner’s wallet. She rifled through the contents, then tossed the wallet onto the ground.
Next, she looked at the cell phone, pressing a key, the screen lighting up. “No password?”
“Too fiddly.”
“That’s not clever, Tanner.”
“What the heck are you on about?”
Courtney scrolled down through the cell. After a few seconds, she seemed to find something and looked up, the Sig still pointed at Tanner.
She smiled. “And I thought you said you came prepared. I can see all your calls and texts here. Anyone could scroll through your phone.”
“Nobody does. I even sleep with the darn thing. There’s nothing important there. Are we done yet?”
Courtney scrolled though Tanner’s phone, her lips tightening.
She looked at the screen, then scrolled backward and forward.
“You called the same number eight times in the last seven hours. It called you twice.”
“So? I took a few calls.”
“It ain’t your office number, and it ain’t your buddy Agent Breedon. I know both those numbers. Want to tell me who it is you’ve been calling?”
“What’s up your nose, Courtney?”
“You told Dexter your home was burned down soon after you were working the Jack Hayes case the first time around. But that isn’t so. You were looking for help from Dexter, for sympathy. Wanting to get to the fifty-yard line before everyone else.”
“You reckon?”
“Dexter thought so, even if he felt sorry for you. But why you wanted the inside track I wasn’t sure. All I’ve got is my gut. And then I had Agent Stone probe around your background.”
“That’s the problem these days, so easy to do. You part your hair on the wrong side, and it’s on social media.”
“I didn’t need social media, Tanner. And the parting in question didn’t have to do with your hair but with your wife. Stone and I have a few fed connections we spoke to off the record. The whole wife dying thing was bull. Not so much bull as a time shift. Your wife died four years ago, and yeah, it was in a fire at your home, but there was no talk of any criminal aspect to it, unless you include the fact that the police questioned you on and off for three months, until they backed off for lack of evidence. All of which set the hairs on my neck on end.”
Tanner said nothing, just raised his eyes, his lips turned down in a dismal expression.
“But then, I’m betting a guy like you would know how to take care of something like a troublesome wife. Not that I’m suggesting anything, Tanner, merely making a professional observation. Folks like us in the business, we know things, have the inside track. Either way, you lied. And if you lied to Dexter, you probably lied to me in some way. Liars can’t stop lying.”
Tanner almost smiled. “You finished with the insight and observations rant?”
“For now.”
“You’re a clever lady, ain’t you? I’ve learned something. It hammers home an old truism.”
“Yeah?”
“Never underestimate a woman. They’re detectives by nature. Can I add never trust a little guy like Dexter with wiry hair who looks like a woman?”
“You want Jack, that much I’m certain of, but if it’s for the right reasons, I don’t know. That’s just my gut talking, because something sure smells. You going to tell me the truth?”
Tanner was silent.
Courtney held up the phone. “What if I called this number now?”
“Wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?”
“Because your cell won’t work.”
Courtney hit the call button on the last number and held the phone to her ear. Dead. She called 911. Her hands were shaking, and the phone was still silent. Tanner just stood there looking at her, his own hands on the hood.
“You hear anything?”
“No.”
“Told you.”
They both heard the sound of a car. It came closer, and then they saw the headlights.
Courtney licked her lips, a strange kind of fear growing inside her. She kept her Sig trained on Tanner. “What’s going down here, Tanner?”
Tanner said nothing.
“Tell me, Tanner.”
“I’d be careful with that gun if I were you. There’s someone wants to talk to you, put a proposition to you. If I were you, and I wanted to walk away from this alive, I’d listen.”
And the sound of the car drew closer.
99
* * *
A gleaming black Mercedes GL appeared from around the bend in the track, bumping over the ruts.
It drove closer until it stopped in the twilight. Two men got out of the front, both armed with MP5 machine pistols. A man stepped out of the rear, wearing a dark Nike jacket and jeans, his black shoes polished like glassy porcelain.
Courtney recognized Chad Benton at once.
He touched his forehead in a mock salute. “Courtney.”
“Stop right there. You going to tell me what’s going on, or do I have to shoot someone first?”
Chad shook his head. “Wouldn’t get you far. A Sig against two MP5s. It’s no competition.”
“I’d take one of you with me first. Maybe even two. One of them could be you.”
A brief smile raked his face. “The thing is, there’s no need for violence. It’s highly overrated as a means of persuasion. That’s what I always tell my customers. You don’t go in with a sledgehammer or guns blazing. Know what you go in with first?”
“Tell me, Chad.”
“A checkbook. Money always speaks louder and faster than lead.”
“I’m listening.”
“Take Tanner here, for example. Every man has his price. Not so much his price as his sense of what’s rational. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Simple as that.”
Courtney looked across. “What’s your price for looking the other way, Tanner?”
He winked. “It’s a lot higher than a government pension, I can tell you that for nothing.”
Courtney moved nervously on the balls of her feet, keeping her eyes on the two armed men and her gun pointed at Chad. “So where does this go next? You think you’ve figured out my price?”
“You like the good t
hings in life, Courtney. We can come to some arrangement. It’s retirement time soon. You can make sure it’s comfortable. A beach somewhere. A boat, maybe. No shortage of cash.”
“What are we talking here? Millions?”
Chad gave a tight smile. “You bet. Many millions. We can get to the exact figure in a minute. But I think I know you, Courtney. You’re a practical woman. You’re the kind of woman I can do business with.”
Courtney nervously licked her lips. “You just may be right.”
“I know I am.”
“And in return?”
“Any dots you connected regarding me in all of this, you unconnect. Anything I ask you to ignore, you do so. I’m doing this because we’ve been friends a long time, Courtney. And because killing you, or anybody else, wouldn’t exactly look good. It never does. It always comes back to haunt you.”
“You mean like those two women at Serenity Ridge?”
Chad’s mouth twisted. “That was truly unfortunate.”
“No, it was murder.”
“Not me. And I hate mistakes like that.”
“Tarik?”
“Yeah. His people got trigger-happy.” Chad sighed. “Look, all I want is for you to listen to what I have to say. Can you do that?”
“Maybe. But I’ve got one condition.”
“Name it.”
“You tell me the truth. And I mean the truth. Tell me everything. Lay it out, no lies, no cover-ups. Then I’ll know if I can trust you enough for us to come to some kind of deal.”
He thought about it a second, nodded, and indicated a tree stump. “Mind if I sit?”
Courtney shook her head, keeping her Sig pointed.
Chad pinched his trousers and sat. He raised his right hand and said to the men behind him, “No need to point at anyone.”
The men lowered their weapons. Courtney kept hers on point.
Chad looked at the ground a moment, deep in thought, took a long sigh, and looked up. “Here’s how it is. The real deal, the full story. That day near Babylon, Tarik took off with the money. All twenty-five million.”
“Let me guess. It was all a setup right from the start?”
Chad shook his head from side to side. “Well, not so much a setup as an understanding.”
“Meaning?”
“If it failed, there was nothing, no deal. If it worked, there was twenty-five million in a truck, the masks, and a whole bunch of artifacts. I didn’t need the money, but I liked the idea of those artifacts.”
“Don’t tell me. Your old man had a collection.”
Chad smiled. “One of the best.”
“And you’ve added to it?”
Chad shrugged. “Be impossible to prove. Artifacts can be stored in a bank vault halfway around the globe. Lots of ways to keep them hidden.”
“So Tarik got the money and the masks, and you got the artifacts.”
“That’s about it.”
“What about the others? Jack. Kath’s dad. They got their cut?”
“Yeah. They got their cut. Kept it offshore. Safer that way, not in their accounts, no way to trace it. Doled out when they wanted it. Of course, it called for a lot of trust, but we trusted each other.” Chad smiled. “At least, the colonel, Jack, and I did. None of us trusted Tarik.”
“Who was in on it?”
Chad nodded. “Me, Tarik, the colonel. We all hatched the plan. Frank wasn’t a happy man about the medal thing, being snubbed, and still took a little convincing until he went with it.”
“And Jack?”
“He went along with it, reluctantly, I always thought. When his mind started to go from PTSD, he became a weak link. For a time, I actually thought he was going to be OK, but . . .”
Chad tilted his head to one side and shrugged his shoulders. “But I always trusted him. Trusted him enough to have him fly to the Caymans and bring me back cash when I needed it and one of the masks that Tarik had stashed there. Jack always did those secret runs for me. Except this time, something went wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I called Jack when he got back to New Orleans from the Caymans. We had an argument, a dumb argument, and he told me he was sick of playing gofer. That he was bailing out. Didn’t want to do it anymore. I figured his mind was going, getting worse. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just the stress of doing something illegal. But that’s when I just knew I couldn’t trust him anymore. That he was a liability.”
“The plane crash was your doing?”
“Can I plead the Fifth on that?”
“Why?”
“Not saying I didn’t think about it, but really, the plane crash was an accident.”
“The heck it was.”
“Believe what you want to. But I’d never crash a plane with Jack’s kids on board. You think I’m some kind of monster?”
“I don’t now. But part of me isn’t convinced that you’re not lying, Chad.”
“You’ll believe what you want no matter what I say. But it’s time to make up your mind, Courtney. Are you with me, like sensible Mr. Tanner here? Are you going to win the jackpot, or are you against me?”
Chad stood.
Courtney kept her Sig pointed at him. “Where are you going?”
“To the farm. Jack’s there. And Kath and Sean. The colonel. Even Tarik.”
“Tarik?”
“You heard me. We’re headed to a reunion.”
“What about Amy?”
“I don’t know about her.”
“What’s your plan?”
“We need to talk this all out. A reunion. See if there’s a way we can find common ground. Besides, we know each other. We’re friends, or we used to be. No one needs to get hurt. We’ve all got a vested interest. But everyone’s got to be up front, and everyone’s got to be honest about what they want. Can you do that?”
Courtney said nothing.
Chad said, “As a sign of my honorable intent, why don’t you hold on to that gun of yours, honey?”
“Don’t ‘honey’ me.” Courtney looked doubtful. “Honorable intent? I sure wish I knew you had that in you, Chad.”
“I do.” Chad stood, offered his hand, “Well, have we got a deal?”
Courtney ignored his hand.
Chad’s head tilted to one side again, in query. “Is that a yes or a no?”
“I’ve got one more condition.”
100
* * *
I heard the footsteps on the patio grow louder.
The room was silent, Tarik waiting patiently, alert to the sounds outside, the front door left open a crack. Nobody moved. Jack, Kevin, and I were anxious. My father seemed in another world, dazed, his jaw slack. As if he’d just gone a battering ten rounds with a heavyweight and was facing another ten. I couldn’t tell if he was deep in thought or spaced out.
He looked toward the door—we all did—as the footsteps halted outside.
Tarik stared at us each in turn, Jack and Kevin in particular, then my father and me. “I want you to listen to what has to be said. It’s important. No trouble, no violence. Is everyone clear? This can be settled peacefully, unless you want Kyle hurt?”
He let his threat hang in the air. Nobody spoke.
The door swung in on its hinges. Two armed men entered, their MP5 machine pistols at the ready. They scanned the room and took up positions on either side of the door. I recognized one of them, a big guy with blond hair, from Chad’s bodyguard detail.
Chad came in after them. He appeared tense, dressed casually in a dark Nike jacket and jeans. I felt a pain in my heart, sharp as a stiletto.
“Hello, Kath.”
He must have seen the trauma on my face as he gave me a silent nod. I stared disbelievingly at him, and then my heart raced even faster when I saw Courtney enter the room behind him.
I didn’t understand what was going on. Courtney clutched her Sig in one hand, the other bracing it for support, and she covered the room as if she was ready to shoot someone. She looked on edge.
Her eyes darted around every now and then, watching Jack and Kevin, my father, and Chad’s men, before they settled on me.
I didn’t get it, didn’t get any of this.
Whose side was she on?
Chad said, “Tell her.”
Courtney licked dry lips. “We need to talk some things out, Kath. Chad wants you to hear a proposition. I think you all need to listen.”
I didn’t like the sound of this at all.
Courtney swallowed. “I’m just trying to be realistic here, Kath. There’s some stuff we all need to tease out. Real important stuff.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Courtney seemed lost for words and glanced at Chad.
I met her eyes. “Whose side are you on, Courtney?”
She bit her lip, as if unsure. “Can we have some privacy, Chad?”
Chad gave a jerk of his head to his men. “Step outside, and stay by the door. I’ll call if I need you.”
The men slipped out onto the patio, leaving the door open. I could see them take up positions, one watching through the window, the other through the open door, ready to move back inside at a second’s notice.
I turned to Courtney. “I’m waiting for an answer. Whose side are you on?”
“Kath, look, I don’t know how to put this . . .”
Chad seemed to have the answer for her. “Courtney believes we all have a vested interest in being sensible. That all of us can walk away from this with our pockets full and our lives intact. She thinks it wise that you listen carefully to what Tarik and I have to say. That any bloodshed or recrimination serves no purpose. Isn’t that right?”
Courtney gave a tiny nod. “You need to listen to what needs to be said, Kath.”
Courtney was on Chad’s side. That much was obvious.
But why?
I stared him down, feeling it all fall into place. “Walk away with our pockets full. Is that what this is really about, Chad? Money, artifacts. You were part of it, too. A big part or a small part? Which is it, Chad? How deep did your lies go?”