by Chuck Dixon
Axel’s hand encircled her arm. He looked down at her, his lips wet. He was taller than she remembered, rangy with sloped shoulders.
“You need a ride home, huh?” he said.
She drew away but his hold tightened until it hurt her arm. He stepped in closer.
“Just tell me where you live and I’ll take you there. I know every street in Memphis,” he said and turned to yank her along with him. He was pulling her along, tucked close to his side. Her sneakers squeaked on the tiles as she dragged her feet. He jerked her upright hard enough to make her gasp. She fell into step with him.
Her father told her never to go anywhere with strangers. He told her that Gunny taught him that no matter how bad things get, wherever strangers wanted to take you they’ll only get worse.
Merry shut her eyes and drew in her breath. She clamped her jaws tight and drew up her shoulders. The loudest, shrillest scream she could imagine was welling up from her belly.
The vise on her arm was released with a suddenness that made her stumble. She opened her eyes to see Joyce taking her hand, gently.
“Sorry, Merry. Ran into traffic,” Joyce said, smiling. “My truck’s out this way.”
They moved toward the doors and the sunshine outside. Merry glanced back. Axel was down on his knees holding his stomach. His face was white as a fish belly. His glasses lay in a puddle of puke spreading over the marble floor.
“What did you do to him?” Merry asked with more curiosity than compassion.
“I was a Marine, too, Merry. A woman in a man’s world. I picked up a trick or two.”
“Can you teach me how to do that?”
“You really want to learn?” Joyce said.
Merry nodded with enthusiasm.
“Well then, you and me are going to get along just fine.” Joyce put her arm around the little girl and hurried them both to the parking lot.
20
Mansoor noticed the minute the big guy walked into Kay-Cee Auto Parts. Canvas winter coat. Work boots. The guy was walking the aisles idly. Most customers came right to the back counter because most people didn’t know what the fuck they’re looking for. Mansoor was helping a customer with air filters for a Toyota. Maria, his sister, was finishing up a tire order.
The big guy spent time looking through a display of fan belts, his back to the counter. The customer buying tires made up his mind and Maria took his credit card. Mansoor found the air filter for a '08 Corolla in stock and let Maria ring that up too. Then he sent her to the McDonald's for coffee.
Once the store was empty but for himself and big guy Mansoor asked, “Can I do something for you?”
“I’m looking to sell a truck. ’14 Tahoe. It’s loaded,” the big guy said when he reached the counter.
“This look like a dealership to you? Try Craig’s List.”
“I don’t have any papers on it. I was looking for a quick sale. I’m new in Kansas City.” The big guy stood, hands on the counter, eyes unblinking.
“I don’t know anyone looking to buy a Tahoe.”
“I’m talking a good price. Fast cash.”
Mansoor studied the guy. Mostly his hands. Rough hands that had seen work. The skin on his face had seen a lot of sun at one point. And there was a set to the eyes, something hard.
“You’re not a cop, ’cause this would be entrapment,” Mansoor said, tapping the counter with his fingers.
“You know anyone looking for a deal?”
Mansoor reached over to a wire steel rack that rested on the counter. He plucked a business card from one of the pockets and slid it over the counter.
“Ask for Khaled. And don’t take his first offer.”
“Who do I say sent me?”
“Nobody sent you. Just go,” Mansoor said and watched until the big guy was out the door and off the front lot in a salt-streaked Tahoe.
The satellite phone trilled on the seat beside him.
Levon picked it up as he drove down St. John Avenue in the North Indian Mound neighborhood of Kansas City. It was trying to snow. The wipers smeared fallen flakes across the windscreen.
“That you, honey?” he said.
“It’s me, Daddy.” Merry’s voice on the other end. “Joyce and I are driving back to Gunny’s cabin.”
“Did you like your train ride?”
“It was okay.” Her voice was subdued. She was still raw over the sudden separation.
“You’ll have fun. You talk all the time about visiting Gunny and Joyce.”
“I know. I thought it would be both of us.”
“It’s only for a little while, honey.”
“Then where will we go?”
"I've been thinking about that. There are a few possibilities I'm working on."
“Okay.” An empty response.
“No more cheap hotels and take-out. I promise.”
“Okay.” Even more vacant this time.
“Tell Joyce to call me when she isn’t driving.”
“Okay. Bye, Daddy.”
He dropped the phone to the seat beside him and looked for All-Town Towing and Haul.
“I’ll give you three grand cash,” Khaled Maloof said, stepping away from the Tahoe parked on a lot behind his garage. The building was a block structure with a steel roof overhang. Flatbed haulers and tow trucks came and went. A long row of rental vans lined the fence at the back of the property.
“How about in trade?” Levon said.
Khaled squinted at him. “Trade? Trade what? A lifetime of tows?”
“I need papers. Good ones.”
“Let’s go for a ride,” Khaled said. “Wait here.”
He went into the office and returned with keys for one of the rental vans. He motioned Levon to get in the passenger side of an Econoline.
When they were well away from the garage, Khaled asked, "The papers. How good?" He was piloting the van along quiet streets lined with single homes, the lawns blanketed in white from the recent snowfall. The sidewalks were shoveled and salted.
“Top quality. A set for me and a set for a female minor. Passport for me. Driver’s license. Utility bills. Social security numbers. Good ones. Solid ones.”
“What you’re asking for, that Tahoe won’t even cover ten points. You know that?”
“Consider it a deposit to get the process started. Make introductions. Can you help me?”
“I know people who can.”
“Then the Tahoe is your finder’s fee.”
“I’ll see what I can do. How can I reach you?”
“I’m at the Holiday Inn on Prairie Crossing. Know it?”
“Near Schlitterbahn? What name?”
“Matthew Dresher. You can drop me there. The Tahoe’s yours.”
Khaled hooked a right at the next light to take them to the highway west to the Parallel Parkway. The six-lane gleamed under a fresh sheen of salt melt. Trucks hissed by them off the access ramp as they sped up to slide into the flow.
“How’d you find me? Or did you pull into the first Muslim-owned place you came to, figuring we’re all bent?”
“I went to a Chaldean first.”
Khaled laughed.
He snorted. “Who was it? Hanna over at the Goodyear? Or that shit Mansoor? Whoever it was didn’t trust you enough to send you to another Assyrian.”
“I promised I wouldn’t say.”
Khaled laughed harder.
“It was Mansoor then. Hanna would want me to know it was him fucking me. Don’t worry. Doesn’t matter. It’s all good. So you know Chaldeans from Muslims. You didn’t learn that on TV.”
Levon said nothing.
“You know something. You were somewhere to learn what you know. I won’t ask. You only want to do business. I only want to do business. The guys I’ll send to you, they are all business.”
“That’s all I’m looking for,” Levon said.
Khaled drove onto the Holiday Inn lot and stopped under the awning before the entrance.
“Matthew Dresher, right? You want t
o leave a number?” Khaled said as Levon stepped out of the van.
“They can ask for me at the desk. I’ll come down,” Levon said. He walked for the entrance, the doors sliding open to admit him.
Khaled pulled back onto the parkway. He thumbed his cell phone. It rang three times before a sleepy voice answered.
“Jerry? I’m looking for your useless uncle,” he said in Arabic.
21
“The guy has craft. He’s a player. He has to be in the system somewhere,” Bill Marquez said.
“You were told to take lead in St. Louis.” The tobacco-ravaged voice of Wysocki of DHS growled in his ear. The man was annoyed.
“But we dropped a thread here in Carbondale,” Bill insisted. He was in the closet-cramped Amtrak security office on the second floor of the Carbondale station building. The single security officer had given up the office when Bill showed his FBI ID.
“Tell me.”
“He picked this town because it has an Amtrak station. I went over surveillance video at the station from last night. I found him buying a round trip ticket to San Antonio, Texas. I have a crystal clear shot of him at the sales counter.”
Bill was looking at the footage on a monitor before him. He could see Roeder, Tex, Bruckman, whoever, standing at the ticket counter handing over his ID and cash. The camera set to one side of the booth caught him in painful detail. A second monitor showed the platform from a high angle, the subject standing with a little girl until a train rolled into the station. The subject spoke to a train attendant before the girl boarded. Tex stood watching the train depart before walking from the platform and back into the station.
“One we didn’t catch on Perseus?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. He has a beard in this footage. And he’s wearing Band-Aids on his ear lobes. He disguised the line of his jaw and the shape of his ears. He did that to fool the facial recognition filters. He didn’t want us to find him buying those tickets.”
“He’s on a train then?”
“No, that’s just it,” Bill said. “He bought the tickets in cash using a new ID. Oscar Bruckman. I’ll send you a scan of that. But the tickets are in the name Megan Elizabeth Bruckman. The girl he’s traveling with.”
“They’ve split up. We can find the little girl but it’s him we want,” Wysocki said.
“Or it’s a feint. Something to throw us off.”
“How so?”
“We picked him up on video in St. Louis. Clear as day. He goes to a place where he knows practically his every move will be covered in high-def. He makes sure we see him. He pays in cash using a bullshit photo ID that he knows will raise red flags. And the Band-Aids are gone. And he’s shaved. He wants us to know he’s in St. Louis, think he’s in St. Louis.”
“Why would he want us to think that?” Wysocki was hooked now, the edge in his voice gone.
“So that we spend a day looking for him in St. Louis. And we waste manpower staking out the airport tomorrow waiting for him to take that flight. He doesn’t plan on showing up.”
"Then where is he? If you're right, he most likely got back on the road. To where?"
“I don’t know that yet,” Bill said. “But we know that girl is on that train. And we know he’s doing his damnedest to lead us away from her.”
“I have the scan and the video you sent. Easy enough to find out where that train is,” Wysocki said. Bill could hear tapping keys in the background and rising voices. The shit had been stirred.
“Where do you want me, sir?”
“Hang tight where you are, Marquez. I’ll have someone get back to you. Five minutes. Good work on this.”
The line went dead.
Bill had the front seat of the bureau car reclined and the heater turned up to the max. He was catching a few minutes of relative peace in the station’s parking lot when his cell buzzed. It was Wysocki.
"I still want you in St. Louis to take lead. There's someone on the way to you to take over there on follow-up. Something in St. Louis should give us an idea of what direction this guy took."
“And the girl?”
“The train’s next stop is New Orleans. I have agents there waiting for it. We’ll take her into custody and see who she is and what she can tell us.”
“Is anyone looking for cars stolen here in Carbondale? What did he use to get to St. Louis?”
"Ahead of you on that. We have a '13 Chrysler reported stolen from near you that turned up illegally parked at the St. Louis airport. It's in impound with a hands-off order on it. A team's en route to sweep it."
“That means he has another ride by now,” Bill said, knuckling his eyes. He spared a look in the mirror above the dash. His eyes looked like he’d dashed Tabasco in them.
Wysocki said, “We seized the cash he used to buy the plane tickets to Phoenix. The Fed has the scans as of an hour ago. ATF has someone on the scene. What about the cash he used to buy the train tickets?”
“I told the Amtrak office here to hold their deposit until tomorrow. They weren’t happy about it. Can anyone go through the bills here?”
“Treasury’s sending someone from St. Louis. You’ll probably pass them on your way there. How are you holding up?”
“A little ragged, sir. I’ve been on the move since this thing broke.”
“You’ll have time to rack out in the back seat. The agents I’m sending will do the driving.”
Two hours of sleep cramped in a moving car. Like a vacation in Maui, Bill thought.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Make it ‘Darren.’ You’re on the team now,” Wysocki said and broke the connection.
Bill tossed his phone onto the seat by him and dropped his head back on the rest. Their subject was in the wind, adios, but leaving a trail of crumbs for them to find. It was obvious he was leading them away from the girl. They’d have her soon enough. What would she know about where Tex was heading? The guy already showed that he could appear and disappear at will. Breaking off from the little girl, someone he obviously cared about, might mean he was making a last goodbye, a run for the border and oblivion.
And who the hell was this guy? Most crooks were stupid. Even the smart ones got dumber when they tried to run. And the longer they were on the run the dumber, more careless they got. Not Tex. This guy stayed cool, deliberate. He was relying on skills that were trained into him. He was hardwired for escape and evasion and now he had freed himself of all encumbrances for a final vanishing act.
In addition to knowing how to run and hide, the guy was a stone killer as well. All on his own he took down a crew whose history read like a horror movie. He skated across a dozen states with a minor child in tow. If the cash he was spending wasn’t so red-hot the feds would still be up in Maine scratching their asses.
But how is a guy like that not in the system? Prints, nada. Picture, nada. He wasn’t a foreign national. Only a born American who understood the nuances could game his way this far.
So who was Tex?
A rap on the window by his head brought him bolt upright. Somewhere in his thoughts he’d fallen hard asleep. A face in the window smiled an apology. The face was ruddy with the cold. A man in a black raincoat with a second, slighter man standing beside another bureau car pulled up alongside.
“You Marquez?” the ruddy face man said.
Bill stepped from the car. “Bill Marquez.”
“I’m Tom Doolin. This is Tom Salucci. We’re your ride to St. Lou.”
“Tom and Tom.” Bill smiled weakly. The cold air was like a slap to exposed skin on his face and hands.
“Maybe last names would be better,” Doolin said, face creased with an open smile.
“What about this car?” Bill said as he hauled his bag from the back seat.
“Somebody’s coming to get it. Leave the keys under the floor mat.” Doolin took the bag and handed it off to Salucci who popped the trunk and placed it inside.
“Back seat’s all yours,” Doolin said with a grin and held the door
for him.
Bill stretched out as best he could, knees bent against the front passenger seat. He felt the car sway under him as it backed from the parking space. They hit the road, tires swishing. He vowed only to close his eyes for a minute. But soon the hiss of the wiper blades turned to the whisper of surf over white sand and he was lying in the sun on a beach atop a blanket of crisp hundred dollar bills.
22
He met the pair in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. They stood waiting for him by a gurgling fountain, eyes on the bank of elevators. They wore black leather car coats. Olive complexions. One was thickly bearded with a gut hanging over his belt; the other was lean with a bristling mustache. They wore permanent scowls, eyes hard.
"I'm Dresher," Levon said by way of identification rather than an introduction.
“We have a car out front,” the lean one said. No discernible accent other than flat Midwest.
He followed them out to a Mercury where a driver waited with the engine running. Levon got into the back seat with lean one. The beard took the passenger seat. A woman in a headscarf was driving. She glanced back at him in the rearview before pulling from the curb. Black eyes studied him with a cold light.
“We drive around a while,” the lean one said and settled back in his seat.
Levon said nothing. They’d make sure they weren’t tailed. And taking a switchback route to their destination would have the added benefit of disorienting him. He watched out his window at the moon moving behind powerlines and over rooftops.
They entered a warren of streets lined with the dark faces of rowhomes set back from tiny front yards lumpy with snow. They turned left then right then left again, never following a street for more than a few blocks. The woman drove without direction from the men in the car. They’d either discussed the route beforehand or left it to the driver.
The man by Levon said something to the passenger in the front seat. They spoke in low tones accented with grunts. Mesopotamian Arabic. They were Iraqi. The lean one glanced at Levon to see if he was listening. Levon sat watching the moon.