NAACP @NAACP • 15m
FACT: Nearly all targets posted to @Bounty4Justice in the US are NOT people of color, yet the overwhelming majority of prison inmates ARE.
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# 36.01
A short walk from the North Tower prison sat the Frank Crowley Courts Building, which shared the other half of the convicts’ mall but featured a far more civilized lobby of marble, glass, polished wood, and leather furnishings. There was even a gourmet café, where Michaels waited patiently, sipping green tea, noshing on a ham and Brie panini, and catching up on email, while Simmons went off to handle business with the judge.
Twenty minutes later, Simmons came striding into the café, swinging her big disco purse, grinning ear to ear, and holding an official-looking envelope in her left hand. “Got it.”
“Impressive,” Michaels said.
“Ahh.” She pooh-poohed the flattery with a wave of her brightly painted fingernails and slipped the warrant into her purse. “We were roomies at Dartmouth. Between you and me, that girl was anything but honorable,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Come on now. Let’s get moving. Time’s a-wastin’.”
# 36.02
The delivery address Manny had submitted to Bounty4Justice turned out to be on the outskirts of Dallas proper, upriver from the prison, where the slow-moving Trinity curved west and paralleled a commercial zone accessed by Irving Boulevard.
Simmons handled the driving, flipping up the toggles for the siren and light bars on her Taurus fleet vehicle and shooting off like a rocket.
Michaels sat in the passenger seat holding Manny’s jam-packed key ring, which they’d checked out from the inmate property department. She was staring at the clear plastic fob that contained a picture of Manny’s deceased son—a good-looking boy with a big, innocent smile. It made the father’s loss all the more tangible and tragic.
“You married, Rosemary?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Dog?”
“None of the above. Not even a goldfish.”
Simmons pressed a button to make the sirens wail at full blast, weaved into the oncoming lane, and blasted through a red light. “Get out of town,” she said. “A nice young lady like you? So pretty and so well put together?” She gave the agent from Long Island a sideways glance. “You gay?”
Michaels smiled. “No, Angie. Just biding my time. How about you? What’s your story?”
“What’s to tell, sugar? Thrice divorced. Those daughters I mentioned earlier? Well, they’re identical twins who share not only the same drop-dead gorgeous looks but the same bad attitude. Both just graduated from A&M right in time to move back home with Momma. There’s an ungrateful Yorkie named Pebbles who shits on my pillow if I don’t show her enough love. An upside-down mortgage and a downright laughable balance in my bank account…” She sighed. “Still searching for the right man. Gotten a bit harder nowadays. You know, the over-fifty scene isn’t pretty, let me tell you.” She flashed a big smile that, for a smoker, was remarkably white. “So I guess I’m biding my time, just like you.”
Simmons slowed to hang a left off Irving Boulevard, killed the lights and the noise, and rolled up to a rectangular building of once-white cinder blocks topped by gray corrugated-steel roofing.
Michaels eyed the signboard out front, which listed a truck-repair shop, a moving company, and a seafood distributor. The fourth slot on the signboard was blank and corresponded to Manny’s rental unit at the far right end of the building; it featured two roll-down garage doors and a windowless people door marked only with a stencil-painted 4.
Simmons overshot her destination, then waited for a U.S. Postal Service delivery truck to turn out of the lot before she backed up and parked in front of Manny’s unit. “And here we are,” she said.
They got out of the car. At the door, Simmons went through Tejada’s key ring, searching for the right matches for the dead bolt and the knob lock.
Michaels looked over at a mechanic in oil-stained coveralls who’d come out from the garage next door. She waved. That brought three more mechanics out from the truck-repair shop. “FBI, fellas,” she called out. She tapped the shield clipped to her belt. “It’s all good.”
They scurried back into the garage.
On the fourth try, Simmons found her perfect match, at least in the context of dead-bolt locks. She turned the tumblers, pushed the door inward, and a heap of mail that had built up behind the door spilled across the floor. “Just what exactly am I looking for? Is it a check or a money order or something?”
“Not sure,” Michaels said. “We think it could even be bearer bonds.”
“Ooh. Very exotic. Exciting, isn’t it?”
“Mmm.”
Simmons went inside, circled behind the pile of envelopes, magazines, and junk mail. She crouched and spread out a Sports Illustrated and the latest issue of Time on the grimy floor tiles, saying, “Heck, I picked a bad day to wear white.”
Michaels remained outside, looking over toward the repair shop, sensing a weird vibe. A fat-faced bald guy wearing glasses leaned out from the door frame, looked in her direction, then quickly retreated. Why were these guys so spooked? At the end of the street, she saw the mailman hop into his truck and execute a U-turn. “Keep looking through that stuff,” she told Simmons. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
As the panel truck rumbled along, heading back toward Irving Boulevard, Michaels stepped out into the road and held up her credentials. The driver eased the truck to a stop and plucked out his earbuds, looking starstruck. She walked up to the driver’s side, which had no door, and tapped her shield. “FBI.”
“Uh, did I do something wrong?” He smoothed out his sweaty comb-over. “It’s not a one-way or—”
“Just have a question for you.”
“I’m on a tight schedule, ma’am, and my manager’s a total hard-ass.”
Damn, she thought. I’m officially a ma’am. “You make any deliveries to this place in the past couple days?” She thumbed over her shoulder at Manny’s garage.
“Nothing yesterday or the day before. But I just tried to deliver a package there a few minutes ago. No one answered.”
Michaels’s heart raced. “Let’s see it.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“Some fat dude over there signed for it,” the deliveryman said, pointing to the truck-repair shop. “He told me he’d give it to the guy when he got back. Nothing unusual about that.”
“What was it?”
“Didn’t seem like anything important. Just a big box of books, or something.”
# 36.03
Michaels hauled ass back to Simmons. “Angie, I’ve got a situation out here, and I need you to go around the back of the building, right now, and if anyone leaves via the back door of that garage next door, you grab him.”
“Got it, sugar,” Simmons said, springing up and pulling out her Glock with the ease of a gunslinger.
Michaels hightailed it next door. Entering the repair shop, she scanned the four service bays. One had an ambulance up on a hydraulic lift with all its wheels off, another cradled a florist’s delivery truck, the third had a moving van parked over a pit for a fluid change, and the fourth was empty. Not a mechanic in sight. No fat dude, either.
She moved quickly to the shop’s rear and through an open doorway that led down a short corridor, presumably to the restroom and the office. The hall doglegged left, and she stopped dead in her tracks. The four missing mechanics stood blocking the way—two in front, shoulder to shoulder; two in back, shoulder to shoulder—obviously running defense.
“Where is he?” she said.
“Who?” the biggest guy said.
His embroidered name patch read “Stu.” And he was built like a brick shithouse. “The fat guy.”
“What fat guy?”
“I’m a federal agent, pal. I suggest you not mess
around.”
“I didn’t see no fat guy. Caesar, you see a fat guy?”
Caesar, the short one next to him, had the face of someone who’d lived life at full throttle. He shook his ruddy, oblong head. “I don’t judge people by their eating habits.”
“I was told that the fat guy took possession of stolen property for which I have a search warrant. If that package is tampered with, you’ll all be facing felony charges.”
They didn’t budge. Michaels began calculating her next move, which basically entailed a few more veiled threats about obstruction of justice, blah, blah, blah…No time for that. She took out her Glock. “Let’s go, Stu. You, too, Caesar. And bring your buddies with you.” She waved the mechanics forward with the gun. “Looks to me like you’ve all got plenty of unfinished work out there. Let’s not disappoint the customers.”
Stu did the math for three seconds, then shrugged. “Fine by me, pretty lady.”
A wiseass, no doubt. But at least he didn’t call her “ma’am.” She herded them back out to the garage, warned them to stay put, then darted toward the office in the rear, where she met a second security door, this one with a wire-mesh window. Its knob didn’t budge. “Shit.”
Through the security glass, she could see shelving along the office’s outer wall, packed tight with binders and manuals. Set in the middle of the room was a metal desk buried beneath stacks of greasy invoices. Sitting on top of the mess was a newly opened box with its snipped plastic straps left dangling and its lid tossed aside. Old paperback books that had apparently filled it had been pulled out and tossed haphazardly onto the grimy linoleum floor.
Then she caught a flash of daylight and a split-second glimpse of the fat guy’s ample hindquarters exiting the solid metal door leading into the rear alley. But he reappeared almost instantly, backing up slowly, shoulders hunched over around something heavy he was carrying. Simmons pulled the alley door closed behind herself and circled around him with her gun trained on his man boobs. She commanded him to sit in the desk chair. Flashing Michaels a smile, she came over to the door and unlocked it.
“I feel like I’m doing all the work here, sugar,” she teased, holding the door open. “You know, whenever you’re ready to help…”
“Thanks, Angie. Great job.”
“Big Boy here almost made me break a heel,” Simmons said. “Lucky for him that didn’t happen, or I’d have shot him for damn sure.”
The thief’s name patch read “Paul.” Paul looked to be a prime candidate for a heart attack, so Michaels wasn’t itching to get him too wound up. He was sweaty and red-faced, and red-handed. He clutched what he’d pulled from the box—packages resembling two reams of copy paper. But the wrapper on each bundle was deep gray, almost metallic-looking—a protective shield of some kind. The wrapper on the top ream had been torn and peeled back. And it certainly didn’t contain copy paper. Michaels was staring at neat, banded stacks of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
# 37.01
@ Boston, Massachusetts
12:52:08 EDT
Kevin Chesney sat on a bench at the Charles River Reservation, in an ideal spot just along the waterfront, close to the steps for the pedestrian footbridge that spanned Storrow Drive to access the dorms across the way at Boston University. It was a cold day, which did a nice job of culling the foot traffic along the jogging trail. Only the diehards would brave the chill to go out for a run along the riverfront pathways. And plenty of them were lovely young BU ladies who were doing everything possible to combat the freshman fifteen. This was an exciting time for a young university student: the big city, the campus life, the first shot at truly cutting free and spreading one’s wings. It was that euphoria that blinded them to danger, made them let down their guard. And there were so, so many of them.
Easy pickings.
He had a backpack and a thermos of hot chocolate spiked with mint schnapps, and he was bundled up and wore a knit cap pulled down over his ears. To a passerby, he looked like just some college kid in a town teeming with college kids. But he’d never stepped foot in a university classroom. Hell, he’d barely managed to get a GED, which made it even more ironic that he was leafing through the pages of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. Partly for cover, partly because if he got bored, he could actually read one of Fred’s snippets of philosophical thought—what were referred to as “aphorisms”—and think it over to pass the time.
Man, it was fucking cold. He flipped open the thermos’s sip spout and warmed his gullet with some spiked HC.
He looked left down the path and saw nothing coming his way. To the right, a couple of super-fit dudes were running toward him, huffing and puffing, each wearing spandex and ear warmers. Probably gay together, or both infected by the highly contagious metrosexual virus. Seemed most guys were either one or the other these days. He buried his head in the book until the two posers passed by, and the random quote Nietzsche threw back at him said, “Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.”
True that, Fred, he thought. He pondered the line for a few seconds as he swigged some more HC. Less than a minute later, he spotted a lone runner coming his way. More spandex, but this time, the curves were 100 percent feminine. He’d need a closer look to make sure she truly passed muster, though.
She stopped running, put her hands on her hips, and did the old cooldown walk, puffing clouds into the frigid air. He discreetly watched her, sized her up. As the gap closed between them, he could see that she was the real deal. Young, slim, petite. No glaring facial irregularities, as best as he could tell. She was veering onto the path leading toward the pedestrian bridge. Perfect.
She stopped to stretch a few yards away, at an unoccupied bench.
He felt the excitement building inside him, the dark urges surfacing, demanding gratification. Sliding his hand into his pocket, he made sure the syringe of highly concentrated flunitrazepam was positioned properly so he could get to it quickly when the time was right. He wiggled his right foot and felt the knife sheath rub against his ankle. He ran his hand over the bulge of the GoPro camera in the backpack’s side pocket. All systems go.
Just as he stowed the thermos and book in his backpack, his smartphone chimed loudly with the air-horn ringtone assigned to his best bud, T-Man. Talk about shit timing. But he’d thought he’d muted it already, so maybe T-Man was doing him a solid. He tapped his phone’s display to send the call to voicemail, then muted it. Lucky for him, the runner was wearing earbuds, so she paid him no mind. Man, did she have some legs on her. Couldn’t really tell what was going on beneath her baggy sweatshirt, but he was sure looking forward to finding out.
Then his phone started blowing up with text messages from T-Man.
What the fuck?
He looked at the screen:
U sick fuck!
What the fuck were u thinking!
U r SOOOO FUCKED!
At first he thought T-Man was screwing with him, like he always did. But the messages kept coming:
Better look at your FB page, asshole. WTF is wrong with u!
This ball-busting session was going a bit over the line. Nonetheless, Kevin tapped the phone’s Facebook icon to see what the hell had gotten T-Man’s panties all up in a bunch. That’s when he saw that his own profile looked a whole lot different than it should. His photo was the same—a shirtless pic from his trip to Cancún last year when he had a killer tan that made him look friggin’ ripped. His profile name, however, had been changed to “Kevin Chesney, THE SORORITY STALKER.”
Now his heart was out of the gate and running.
Frantic, he looked under the “About” tab at the particulars of his profile, where it now plainly listed his work and home addresses for everyone to see and his professional skills had been changed from “heating and air-conditioning technician” to �
��SERIAL RAPIST.” The pics of his favorite bars and clubs listed under the “Places” tab had been replaced by the most recent locations where he’d raped college girls. Then there was the “Photos” section, which had been transformed into a sadomasochistic collage of images taken straight from his private collection of photographs hidden under password protection on his home computer—his personal archive of conquest, the pics he’d taken of each of his victims as he’d raped them, but with their faces pixelated to blurs. He scrolled through them, page after page, dread pouring through him.
“Oh, my God,” he said, feeling like he was going to start hyperventilating.
He tried to log in to his account to wipe the postings. His password didn’t work.
“Fuck.”
He tried it again, but Facebook was telling him that his password was invalid. Then he got locked out of his account altogether.
“FUUUUCK!”
Tightness gripped his chest as the horrifying reality struck him. Someone had hacked into his account. The truth was out.
T-Man hit him with another text:
Now ur on the news! Cops r tracking ur phone. Good luck ASSHOLE! When you get to prison, don’t waste ur 1 call on me.
Kevin slung his backpack over his shoulder and sprang to his feet, trying to keep his mind on track, trying to think of where to go and what to do. Though he was no longer watching the female runner, she had taken a sudden interest in him. She came running toward him again, this time with a gun in her hand.
“Stop right there, Kevin!” she yelled, leveling the weapon at his chest. “Boston PD!”
No fucking way was he going to prison. He’d heard stories about how rapists were treated there. He dropped the backpack and broke into a sprint, heading for the bridge.
That’s when the two Sallies he’d seen running past him earlier came out of nowhere and tackled him to the ground.
Bounty Page 18