Wrongful Death: A Novel

by Dugoni, Robert

  “Relax,” Jenkins said. “No way he can see us.”

  Cassidy flicked the butt at the dog, walked to the edge of the grass, which was covered by a thin layer of mist, and unzipped his fly. Steam rose where he urinated. Finished, he jumped up and down to zip his fly, pushed the bangs of hair from his face, and walked up the dilapidated trailer steps searching a key ring. He unlocked one lock, flipped through the ring for a key to a second lock, and repeated the process.

  “A lot of security for a trailer nobody would ever find. What’s the guy making, gold?” Sloane asked.

  “Not far from the truth,” Jenkins said. As Cassidy stepped inside the trailer Jenkins gathered their things. “Time to go pay him a visit.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Dog won’t bother us.”

  “What if she starts to bark?”

  “Dogs bark, David. No way to keep a dog from barking. We’ll use it to our advantage. Just remember what we discussed.”

  At the bottom of the hill they split up. Sloane reached a designated spot in the trees about fifty yards from the trailer and waited. The dog’s ears perked and she turned in his direction, sniffing the air. When the dog appeared to lose interest Sloane shuffled closer, slow and quiet. The tree line ended about twenty-five yards from the trailer. He squatted, checked his watch, waiting until the exact time he and Jenkins had agreed. Then he stood and stepped from the trees. The dog’s head snapped in his direction and she lunged against the rope barking and growling. Sloane swung his approach in a wider arc to avoid her.

  A curtain pulled back inside the mobile home. Cassidy pressed his face to the window. Then he disappeared. A second later the door to the trailer swung open and Cassidy stepped out onto the porch, the butt of a handgun protruding from the waist of his jeans.

  “Hey! This is private property. You’re trespassing!” He looked and sounded like a punk kid.

  Sloane put a hand to his ear as if he couldn’t hear over the dog’s barking and slowed his approach. He needed Cassidy to step away from the door and down the steps. “What’s that?”

  “I said, this is private property. You’re trespassing.”

  Sloane raised both hands. “Wow. I’m sorry about that. Someone told me there’s a lake around here. I was hoping to do some fishing. I must have taken a wrong turn.”

  “A big wrong turn. There’s no lake around here. So just turn around and go back the direction you came or I’ll unleash the dog.”

  “No reason to get hostile, friend.” Sloane took a couple more steps toward the trailer. The dog’s bark grew more forceful. “It was an honest mistake.”

  “I ain’t your friend, and I don’t believe in honest mistakes.” Cassidy stepped down off the porch and started toward Sloane. He pointed to the trees. “So just get the fuck out of here.” He paused, a thought apparently coming to him. “Where’s your fishing pole anyway?”

  Cassidy’s hand went for the butt of the gun, but before he reached it, Jenkins had come from around the backside of the trailer and swept the young man’s legs out from under him. Cassidy lay on his back, the shotgun leveled at his face.

  “Easy there, partner.”

  For a second it looked like the idiot might reach for his gun.

  “Don’t!” Jenkins warned. Cassidy froze like a bug on its back unable to right itself. “Don’t…do…anything…stupid. Put your hands on the back of your head and interlock your fingers.” Cassidy complied. “David, come around here.” Jenkins handed him the shotgun. “Put a bead on this shithead; if he so much as flinches, shoot him. You don’t even have to aim. It will cut him in half.”

  Sloane aimed the shotgun at the ground, not comfortable pointing it at Cassidy.

  “Who are you?” Cassidy’s bravado had been replaced with a staccato quiver.

  “We’re the guys holding the shotgun to your head. That’s all that matters at the moment. So shut up.” Jenkins pulled the gun from Cassidy’s pants, a nickel-and-dime nine millimeter. The damn thing felt like plastic. “Anybody ever tell you not to shove a gun down the front of your pants, son? Good way to blow your dick off. You hold it at your side or put it at the small of your back.” Jenkins threw the gun into the tall grass. “When you go looking for that, see if you can find a shoe while you’re at it.”

  Cassidy looked at Jenkins like he was crazy.

  Jenkins ran his hands over the rest of Cassidy’s body, finding a sheathed, serrated knife strapped to Cassidy’s leg just above his boot. “You have any more weapons on you, Butch?”

  Cassidy shook his head. Then his eyes widened. “How do you know my name?”

  “Your name isn’t Butch. It’s Michael. You a fan of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”

  “Never seen it.”

  “Figures. I know everything about you, Michael. You and me, we spent the day together with that other dirtbag, Kroeger.”

  Cassidy looked confused. “I don’t know you.”

  “I didn’t say you knew me. You got any more weapons inside the trailer?”

  “No.”

  “Liar. Let’s all go inside and look, shall we?”

  “Can I put my hands down?”

  “Yeah, but if you so much as fart I’ll come down on you like a hammer. You got it?” Jenkins took back the shotgun. “David, you go in first. Just be careful not to touch anything and don’t take any deep breaths.”

  The steps sagged under Sloane’s weight, rotted. He ducked inside the trailer. The smell nearly overwhelmed him, like a huge litter box for cats. His eyes watered and burned. He covered his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his shirt, fighting a gag reflex. After a moment the smell was less like cat urine and more like ammonia.

  The inside of the trailer looked a lot like the yard. Mason jars filled with a clear liquid atop an inch of white or red solid material were scattered about the room. The cabinet doors had been removed, revealing bottles of iodine, and sulfuric, muriatic, and hydrochloric acid. Other unlabeled bottles contained a reddish-purple powder with rubber tubing protruding from the top. Cans of camp fuel, paint thinner, acetone, lithium batteries, and propane tanks, some with blue nozzles, littered the bare plywood floor.

  Jenkins ducked inside behind Cassidy, his head inches from the ceiling. “Well, well, well. What have we here?” He walked down a narrow hall to what was presumably the bedroom before returning to where Sloane and Cassidy stood. “This is quite the operation you have going here, Mike. You’re a regular chemist. You ever see a crystal meth lab, David?”

  Sloane shook his head. “No, but this would be my vision of hell.”

  “Oh, no,” Jenkins replied, speaking as if Cassidy weren’t in the room. “Hell is for the people who become addicted to this stuff.” His voice hardened. “You a junkie, Michael, or are you the devil ruling over hell?”

  Cassidy tilted back his head and thrust out his narrow chin, making it even more prominent. With angular, thin features, an equally prominent Adam’s apple, and a nose that looked to have been broken and not set, he resembled a Midwest scarecrow. His eyes blinked rapidly—a tic. “I don’t have to say nothing. I know my rights. I want to talk to a lawyer.”

  “Well, you’re in luck there, Mike. David here is a lawyer.”

  Cassidy looked to Sloane. “You’re not a cop?”

  Sloane shook his head. “Lucky you.”

  Cassidy turned back to Jenkins. “Who are you?”

  “A guy who really hates drug dealers and dog abusers.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Believe it or not, we’re your guardian angels,” Jenkins said. “Surprise! We came to save your life. You can thank us later.”

  Cassidy’s brow furrowed. “Say what?”

  “We need some information,” Sloane interjected. “And we have some information to give in exchange.”

  “About what?” Cassidy bit the nail of his index finger.

  “James Ford.”

  The name seemed to momentarily catch Cassidy off guard, though not be
cause he didn’t recognize it. It likely didn’t fit with Cassidy’s current predicament. He pulled the finger out of his mouth. “Jimmy Ford? The dude in Iraq?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He’s got nothing to do with this.” Sloane gestured to the inside of the trailer. “I represent his family. They’re suing the government for the way he died. I’m trying to find out what happened that night. I need you to tell me about it.”

  Cassidy laughed. “You ain’t here to bust me?”

  “We’re still debating that,” Jenkins said.

  “Not if you cooperate and tell me what I need to know,” Sloane said.

  “About what?”

  “Get the wax out of your ears, Michael,” Jenkins said. “About what happened the night James Ford died.”

  Cassidy went back to nibbling on his nail. Sloane knew he was thinking like a drug dealer, wondering what the information could be worth even though he had no idea why Sloane needed it. “How much are you suing them for?”

  “Oh, Christ,” Jenkins said.

  “You looking to make a deal?” Sloane asked. “Okay, here’s a deal. You tell us what we want to know and we don’t call the police so you can spend the next twenty to thirty years in jail. And if that’s not enough to motivate you, then how about we keep you from getting killed?”

  Cassidy scoffed. “Right. Who would be trying to kill me?”

  “First things first,” Sloane said. “Tell me what happened over there.”

  Cassidy’s face momentarily hardened, but he knew he was screwed. He just didn’t like it. “Hell, I would have told you anyway. You could have just asked me.”

  Sloane doubted it. “Start at the beginning.”

  Cassidy leaned his back against the counter and gripped the edge. “It was fucked up from the start.”

  “What was?” Sloane asked, remembering Katherine Ferguson told him that her husband had said something similar. They never should have been there.

  “The night Jimmy got shot. The whole thing was fucked up.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.”

  “I’m going to need more specifics. What were you doing away from your FOB?”

  Cassidy looked like he was momentarily constipated. “They had us protecting a supply convoy. I hated that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the fucking Hajjis over there couldn’t wait to blow our asses up with a bomb shoved up a donkey’s ass, is why.” His voice escalated. “Or else they hid under tarps along the side of the road to shoot at us.”

  “You boys ever take some stuff off those supply trucks?” Sloane asked.

  Cassidy shrugged. “Sometimes. Hell, everyone did it—pack of smokes or an extra MRE. It wasn’t any big deal.”

  “Your witness statement says you got stuck in a sandstorm.”

  Cassidy nodded. “It’s like having a whole mountain of sand blasting at you. It comes out of nowhere like that. You can’t see shit.”

  “So Captain Kessler gave the order to stop.”

  “Nothing more you can do.”

  “And then what?” Sloane asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘Then what?’”

  “What did you do after the storm passed?”

  “Nearly got ourselves killed,” Cassidy said. “Drove into a fucking Hajji ambush.”

  “Tell me what you were doing in a town off the main highway, off your designated course?”

  Cassidy paused.

  “What were you doing, Butch?”

  “Give me a second,” he said.

  Sloane thought Cassidy’s reticence was because he didn’t want to incriminate himself. “Fine, we’ll let the police handle it.”

  “This shit isn’t exactly pleasant to remember, you know.” Cassidy’s eyes had watered. He turned his head, wiping away tears.

  SIERRA DE LA LAGUNA

  BAJA, MEXICO

  TINA WATCHED JAKE climb the granite boulders, stopping every few seconds to hitch up his shorts. The weight of the soaking-wet fabric had caused them to sag below his hips.

  She called up to him. “Not too high.”

  He waved down to her, smiling, and proceeded to step higher.

  She sat on a rock letting her legs dangle in the pool and eating fruit from the camp trees. Occasionally she dipped her bandana and squeezed water onto her neck and chest. The hike into the mountains had been harder and longer than she had anticipated, but that could also have been because she had not slept the night before and had eaten little. The stress made her legs leaden, and the lack of food made her weak. Though only in the mid-eighties, the temperature felt hotter to them hiking up the mountain trail, which, as the camp owner had said, was partly overgrown with scrub brush. The dry air had sapped the fluid from her body and she had made Jake stop frequently to drink from the canister provided by the owner.

  The topography at the lower elevations reminded her of areas around Phoenix, with red-tinted soil, cacti, palms, ironwood, and prickly shrubs. As they climbed higher, they encountered more oak trees and green vegetation, apparently watered by mountain streams. Tina had let Jake lead, giving him a wide berth as he hacked away with the machete, thinking it just about the coolest thing. Every so often she’d borrow the blade to mark the trees at the base with an X as Alex had instructed.

  After about an hour of hiking, they heard the trickle of the stream and descended into a shallow valley where they found the pool. Jake had undressed and jumped in before Tina had even found a place to sit and rest her feet. He came out screaming with exhilaration.

  “Okay, watch this one.” Jake’s voice echoed down to her as he stepped onto a flat rock that jutted out above the pristine blue pool. He inched forward until his toes curled over the edge.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Make sure you jump out.”

  He stood rigid, arms at his sides, chin thrust forward. Then he bent his knees, lifted his arms to a cross position, and jumped up and out like an Acapulco cliff diver. But rather than lean forward, entering the pool like a jackknife, Jake grabbed his knees, pulled them to his chest and shouted.

  “Cannonball!”

  Tina had little time to react. Jake’s bottom hit the surface with a thud and sent a pillar of water cascading over her, as if tossed from a bucket. She screamed.

  Jake breached the surface spitting water and laughing so hard he was choking.

  “Jake Andrew Carter! That’s it,” she shouted, standing. “You are going down.”

  “I dare you.” He treaded water in the center of the pool.

  She hesitated, reconsidering the water’s temperature. “You’ll have to get out sometime,” she said.

  “Chicken. Come on, I dare you.”

  “Who are you calling chicken?”

  “You. You’re a big chicken.” He started clucking. “You would have jumped in when you were young.”

  “That’s it. Calling me chicken is one thing. Calling me old…”

  She leapt from the rock. The cold shot needles across her skin and momentarily took her breath away. She breached the surface screaming and swam after him. Perhaps shocked that she had actually jumped in, Jake got a late retreat and was now struggling to reach the other side of the pool. Tina wasn’t about to let that happen. She hadn’t braved the cold for nothing. She grabbed him by the ankle and jerked him under the water. They surfaced laughing, wildly splashing one another.

  “Who’s chicken now?” she asked, clucking like a hen. “Huh? Who’s chicken now?”

  She continued to splash back until she realized Jake had stopped his return fire. He treaded water, looking up at the rock formation from which he had jumped.

  “Hello, Jake.”

  Tina turned, looking up, blinded by the bright sun, but seeing a shadow on the rock.

  “Mr. Williams,” Jake said, shading his eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MAPLE VALLEY, WASHINGTON

>   Michael Cassidy’s story was a classic double-edged sword. If it was to be believed, somebody was covering up what actually happened the night James Ford died. But if true, it also appeared to confirm that Ford had been acting incident to his service at the time he was shot, which left Sloane without a case.

  Sloane was right. He was missing something.

  “We can’t help you if you lie to us, Butch,” Sloane said.

  “I ain’t lying.”

  “Phillip Ferguson and Dwayne Thomas were both murdered.”

  The information seemed to catch Cassidy off guard. His eyes narrowed. “Now I know you’re bullshitting. I heard Fergie committed suicide.”

  “You knew him. You tell me, did he seem like the type to kill himself?” Sloane asked.

  “No, but I heard he was blind. I might kill myself too. You guys are making this shit up.”

  “Somebody put a bullet in the back of Dwayne Thomas’s head,” Sloane added. “That was definitely not a suicide.”

  Cassidy shrugged. “So? He probably deserved it. He was an asshole.” He went back to biting his nails.

  Jenkins said, “Sure, Mike. It could all be just one big coincidence.”

  “Except the Tacoma police don’t have any suspects,” Sloane said.

  “And if we’re right, it makes him the last of the three amigos,” Jenkins added. “But he thinks using P.O. boxes and not paying taxes is going to hide him forever.”

  Cassidy’s eyes shifted back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match.

  “We found him. If we can, they can,” Sloane said.

  “He’s definitely next on the hit parade,” Jenkins concluded.

  “What about Captain Kessler?” Cassidy blurted.

  “Kessler might be the guy trying to kill you,” Jenkins replied.

  “What?” Cassidy shook his head. “I know that’s bullshit. Why would Captain Kessler want to kill me?”

  “Because he doesn’t want what really happened that night to come out,” Sloane said.

  “I just told you what happened. There’s nothing to hide. Hell, we were god-damned heroes.”

  Sloane thought so too. “We don’t know why,” he said.