Smith's Monthly #15

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  There was a knock at the door. He kissed her on the shoulder and went back out into the living room area of the big suite and opened the door, making sure his towel wasn’t showing anything that shouldn’t be shown.

  Doc and Ben came in carrying trays of hot drinks and a couple of boxes of hot food and pastries. The wonderful smell of hot chocolate hit Lott instantly as Doc passed him.

  “Fleet says he’s ten minutes out,” Doc said. “So we’ll set this up here and when he gets here with the clothes we’ll all meet in here to figure out where we go next.”

  “Hot chocolate and a doughnut first,” Lott said.

  “Double that,” Julia said, coming out of the bathroom holding her towel up to make sure it stayed in place as well.

  Ben worked quickly to pour them both hot chocolates out of a large thermos while Doc poured a cup of coffee from another one and grabbed a breakfast pastry for Annie and headed next door.

  A moment later he was back pouring another hot chocolate and grabbing a doughnut for Agent Munn.

  Lott let the hot chocolate take the last of the chill from his back and stomach and then a bite of the cake doughnut made his stomach really happy.

  Julia smiled at Doc and Ben. “Thank you.”

  Then with her doughnut in one hand and her hot chocolate in the other, she headed back to the bathroom and closed the door to work on her hair some more.

  “Hope putting you both in here together was all right,” Doc said, smiling at Lott.

  “Just perfect,” Lott said.

  And it had been.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  May 16, 2015

  8:30 P.M.

  McCall, Idaho

  Julia could not believe how much better she felt after a shower, some hot chocolate, a doughnut, and fresh, warm clothes. She couldn’t remember being that cold in a very, very long time. There was a reason she liked Las Vegas so much. It was warm.

  She sat next to Lott on the couch in the large suite. Annie sat in a cloth overstuffed chair and Doc had pulled up a chair from the small table and sat beside her.

  Fleet sat at the small table near one wall, his laptop in front of him, his fingers seeming to not stop moving.

  Agent Munn and Ben sat facing Lott and Annie. All of them had hot drinks and Julia was working on her second doughnut. Doc had ordered in pizza and it would be here shortly.

  “So how come we’re not all panicked to catch Williams now?” Julia asked, looking around at the fairly relaxed group drinking hot beverages.

  “Because he’s going to believe we think him dead and is heading out of the area,” Agent Munn said.

  “And that’s the problem Williams has,” Doc said, smiling. “There are just very few ways out of this area.”

  “Only three,” Fleet said, “and two I am convinced he would never take.”

  “Three?” Julia said, surprised.

  “Besides flying,” Fleet said, not looking up from his keyboard, “which we have covered, yes only three. The major highway outside the hotel here is the only north-south road in the state. It’s only two lanes, so that is two of the three ways. And about twenty miles to the east of here there is another road that leaves the highway and goes back toward Boise and Oregon.”

  “He wouldn’t go that way,” Ben said, “and he wouldn’t go back toward Boise because too many people have the chance of recognizing him.”

  “So he’s headed north,” Julia said.

  “How long until he can actually get off that road in any real fashion?” Lott asked.

  “The road merges into the highway coming in from Missoula, Montana,” Ben said. “About three hours from here.”

  “If he left right after the explosion,” Fleet said, “He would be just over an hour along the road.”

  “He would know he was putting himself into that bottleneck,” Annie said.

  “He flat does not think we survived the explosion, or that he has anything to worry about,” Lott said. “He has steered us like cattle in chutes and believes there is no way we could ever be ahead of him.”

  “So before we talk about how we find him,” Agent Munn said, “I think Ben needs to leave us.”

  Ben nodded. “I completely understand, Agent Munn.”

  She nodded and stood and Ben stood while Julia and everyone watched. She knew this was the right thing, but from the looks on Lott’s and Fleet’s face, it hurt them.

  Agent Munn opened the door to the hallway where two of her agents stood. She indicated that Ben turn around. She was handed cuffs by one agent and she put Ben in cuffs, then nodded to the two men. “Watch him closely until this clears.”

  Both men nodded.

  Ben glanced back at the room. Julia could see the hurt in his eyes, but the strength as well. “I’m sorry for the part I played in this.”

  “All of us were duped up to this point,” Lott said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Fleet said, “and your family is in a safe place, so no worries there. This will be over soon.”

  Ben went out the door and let the two agents take him down the hallway.

  Agent Munn closed the door and came back and sat down. To break the silence she asked, “So how do we find Williams? That’s some stretch of road and even at this time of the evening there are going to be cars all along it.”

  “We got him,” Fleet said, looking up from his computer and smiling. “He’s just passing through the little town of Riggins driving a pretty standard dark blue Ford sedan. And unless he really wants to trap himself up in dead-end roads along the River of No Return, he’s continuing on the main highway.”

  “There is no real way off that road there,” Doc said, laughing. “River of No Return on one side, Hell’s Canyon on the other.”

  “How did you do that?” Lott asked Fleet a half second before Julia could. “How did you find him?”

  She was stunned that Fleet had been able to find Williams so easily, even with the limits on the road.

  “Once I turned my people on Williams’ finances to look for money he was funneling away from his businesses, the trails went cold quick. We could find nothing,” Fleet said, smiling. “Everything looked as if he was going to kill himself in that building.”

  “I’m not following you?” Julia said.

  “Williams had his fingers and ownership in hundreds and hundreds of companies all over the world,” Fleet said. “And many, many of the companies were almost impossible to track back to him. He had many good people working for him who knew how to cover ownership tracks through offshore accounts and such,”

  “But when you have a large web,” Lott said, sitting forward on the couch, “and suddenly there is a very black hole in the middle of the web, you know something is there, but not able to be seen.”

  “Exactly,” Fleet said. “And in many of his shell companies, money tended to vanish into official and then not-so-official offshore accounts and then vanish completely.”

  “I don’t want to know how you did any of this tracking,” Agent Munn said, shaking her head.

  “No worry,” Doc said. “None of us but Fleet and his people understand any of it anyway.

  Fleet laughed. “Not even so sure I do, to be honest. But we found a way to trace just one of those accounts and discovered another web, almost as large as the first web, with hundreds of companies, some standard, some shell, some holding companies, but with a different named spider at the core.”

  “And all working with no contact at all with the other web?” Julia asked.

  “Nothing but the money trails,” Fleet said. Then he hit a key on his computer and turned the laptop around.

  Meet Jefferson Last.”

  Lott was stunned. The image on the screen could be identified as Williams, maybe. The same eyes, the same basic smirk, but this man had silver hair combed back, and his cheekbones were higher and more pronounced and his nose was smaller.

  “Oh, my,” Julia said.

  “Williams after some surgery I’m sure,” Fleet said. “T
his picture was clearly Photoshopped. And there is no evidence anyone has ever seen Mr. Last. But one of his companies rented the car he is driving. And since it is a rental, there is a tracking signal on it. That’s how I know where he’s at exactly.”

  “So how are we going to get him?” Julia asked.

  Doc smiled at her. “I have just the plan.”

  “As long as it doesn’t include a cold dive into a freezing lake,” Julia said, “I’m in.”

  Annie and Agent Munn and Lott all completely agreed to that.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  May 16, 2015

  9 P.M.

  White Bird, Idaho

  Lott was stunned from the air that he could see the ruggedness of the wilderness they were flying over. The snow-topped peaks seemed to glisten in the moonlight and the dark shadows of the canyons looked like deep and very dangerous lakes.

  It had taken them all of fifteen minutes to get to the small McCall airport and be picked up by the chopper.

  In Doc’s helicopter, Lott and Julia and Annie sat in the center seats. Agent Munn, Fleet, and Doc sat in the seats behind them.

  The FBI chopper with men that Agent Munn trusted completely had left just ahead of them.

  Lott was surprised at how fast the trip went as they were dropped off in a field just up a narrow valley from a small town called White Bird. The FBI chopper was already there. It couldn’t be seen at all from any place along the highway.

  Lott could see that the highway passed about a hundred feet above the lower part of the tiny town at the bottom of the steep valley and then wound its way up the side of a very steep hill.

  FBI helicopters coming in from Spokane had already reached the top of the summit. They had borrowed the use of a large semi-truck and had it pulled off to one side waiting. When they got the signal, the truck would be positioned blocking the road as if it had an accident.

  Agents with rifles would be stationed in hiding above the area behind the truck. They planned on letting Williams just pull up behind the truck and stop. On one side it would be straight up, on the other side was a drop of over a thousand feet.

  The agents that had gotten there slightly ahead of them had set up three cars from local residents. One was a large Ford Bronco, another was a Chevy pickup with a load of hay in the back, and the third was an older style Jeep.

  Lott decided he was best suited to drive the Ford Bronco, since a bunch of years back he had had one. Julia got in the passenger side.

  Agent Munn and one other agent got in behind them.

  Doc got into the pickup with Annie and Fleet.

  Three other agents piled into the Jeep.

  “He’s coming by in about two minutes,” Fleet said into all their communication links.

  They pulled where he wouldn’t see them in a turn-out, but where they could get onto the road behind him. The Jeep with the agents stayed down hidden in the town and would come on last.

  Lott turned off the Bronco, shut down the lights and the four of them sat there silently for a minute until Fleet said, “Here he comes. Dark sedan.”

  Everyone in the Bronco ducked so the car looked empty. Then when Lott saw the sedan was past, he started up the Bronco and climbed up onto the highway. He slowly gained speed, letting the sedan get a ways out in front of him.

  There were no other cars on the road. Seemed that very few people drove this twisty north-south highway at night.

  Behind the Bronco, Lott could see the pickup come up onto the road and then a few moments later the Jeep.

  “Last car ahead of Williams has passed the truck,” Fleet reported. “Truck is getting into position.”

  “The driver going to be able to get out of there?” Julia asked.

  “An agent is driving,” Agent Munn said.

  “Truck is in place,” someone reported.

  Once again Lott could feel his stomach starting to clamp up from the excitement of all this. Williams had played them for a very long time and thought them too stupid to figure him out. He was going to be in for a very sudden surprise.

  The road, the higher they climbed, got slightly more frightening. Not like the gravel road they had first driven, but even though this road was paved and three lanes wide, two going up, one coming down, with guardrails, Lott felt more like he was piloting an airplane that was slowly climbing instead of driving. Nothing but space and stars and snow-capped peaks could be seen to their right.

  Ahead, Lott could see the blinking warning lights of the truck and Williams slowing down to stop near the truck.

  Lott slowed down behind him, finally coming to a stop near the bumper of the brown sedan. Lott put the Bronco in park and set the parking brake.

  Around the truck, a man who looked like he was the driver was inspecting something near the front of the cab. The truck looked like it had almost rammed into the hillside.

  The other two cars behind him pulled up and stopped, one in the center lane and back twenty paces, while the Bronco and Williams’ car were in the outside right lane near the guardrail.

  “Everyone in position?” Agent Munn asked.

  “Ready,” were the responses quick and short.

  “On my mark we move,” Agent Munn said.

  A two count, then she said, “Now!”

  Extremely bright lights from the hillside above and the top of the truck hit the sedan as Lott clicked on the bright lights on the Bronco and went out the driver’s door and to the ditch on the inside of the road, his gun drawn.

  He could see that Julia went out on the passenger side, holding her position, with her gun drawn, using the door as a shield. The agent behind her went out and took a position using the rail as a form of shield.

  The truck driver pulled a gun and ducked in behind one wheel of the big truck, aiming back on the sedan and Agent Mann followed Lott from the Bronco and to the ditch.

  Behind them the agents spread out while Fleet and Doc stayed crouched in their rig.

  “Williams,” a very loud speaker shouted, echoing over the valley. “Please open the door and keep your hands on the wheel.”

  Nothing.

  “Williams,” Agent Mott said, “you have no place to run this time.”

  Nothing.

  “I doubt he even has a gun in there,” Lott said.

  “Can’t take the chance,” Agent Munn said.

  “Let me try to egg him out,” Lott said. “But be ready for him to try to make a run for it.”

  “Go ahead,” Agent Munn said. “We either arrest him or kill him and I honestly don’t care which at this point.”

  After seeing the woman embalmed and floating in that car, and digging Trish’s body out of the lake, Lott didn’t much care either.

  “Hey, Williams,” Lott shouted to the car, standing up near the edge of the road and lowering his gun to his side. “Now who is boring? We’re getting tired out here.”

  Williams rolled down the window, his hands not visible, and looked across the road to Lott.

  Lott had been, for a moment, afraid it would be someone else in the car, but it was actually Williams.

  In the flesh.

  They had finally cornered the bastard.

  Lott didn’t let himself smile, kept his poker face on solid.

  “I’m surprised the four of you survived that blast,” Williams said. “Very impressive, Detective.”

  “We knew you weren’t in there,” Lott said. “And we knew you weren’t coming to the mortuary either. “We rescued that poor state cop’s family the moment he turned on the lights. What an amateur play. We expected more of you.”

  Williams said nothing, so Lott went on.

  “You thought you were playing us, but we played you the entire time,” Lott said, lying. “We were just waiting for you to make a boneheaded mistake like this one, show yourself, and make it easy for us to trap you or kill you. And what kind of stupid name is Jefferson Last, anyway?”

  Williams seemed to jerk at that.

  Lott smiled. The bluster
was completely gone from the man.

  “And it was very nice of you to lead us to your body dump,” Lott said. “And show us exactly who was working with you. They are singing like songbirds on a beautiful day, by the way. They don’t much like you.”

  Williams jerked at that as well.

  “You know,” Lott said, “if you hadn’t decided to move on and push all that money into Jefferson Last corporations, we never would have trapped you like this.”

  “Who says I am trapped, Detective?” Williams asked, turning to really stare at Lott.

  Lott suddenly knew what Williams had done. He had rigged the car to explode just in case. He liked that kind of dramatics it seemed. And Lott had a hunch Williams would take himself out this time.

  “I suppose you could take the easy way out, give up the fight, lose the game,” Lott said, “by letting us kill you, or you blowing yourself up with that rigged car.”

  Again Williams jerked.

  Bluff called. Lott had hit it right on the head again.

  “Not fun having someone ahead of you, is it?” Lott asked, laughing. “So how about you take the fight to the courts, see if you and your team of lawyers are smart enough to beat a few dumb cops and prosecuting attorneys.”

  Williams just sat there, saying nothing.

  “Don’t think you can beat us, do you?”

  Williams sat staring forward.

  “Then pull the trigger on that bomb,” Lott said, “if you think you can’t beat us yet again. This is getting boring.”

  Williams sat for a long moment and Lott just let him.

  Finally Williams lifted his hands slowly to the steering wheel. “Come and get me, Detective.”

  “You really do think I’m that stupid,” Lott said, laughing. “I’d suggest you blow yourself up right now, or just make a sudden move and let us all put a few hundred bullets into your pathetic body. Great target practice. You clearly keep underestimating us and that won’t get you a win in court.”

  “I’ll walk free,” Williams said. “You watch, Detective.”