Levon Cade Omnibus

by Chuck Dixon

  Satisfied that the white guy couldn’t understand, the lean one asked in Arabic, “Is Ghadeer back from California?”

  “He said he was staying another day,” the beard said.

  “Does Danny know that?”

  “I don’t know. Should we tell him?”

  “And listen to his shit? Ghadeer is his cousin. That makes it his problem.”

  Just idle chatter. Levon listened, recalling names only. It sounded like Danny was the one in charge. He’d be the one they were going to now.

  The lean one said something to the woman and she turned right at the next corner, went straight a few blocks to cross a bright street lined with storefronts. A dry cleaner on a corner, a blue neon sign reading Rite-Wash. The streets behind were dark. The road they were on curved past dim streets of single homes through trees growing close by the road before opening up to flat expanses of snow covered fields. A high cyclone fence raced by them along the right. Levon could see pole lights illuminating long featureless buildings.

  The car turned into a driveway and up to a gate. The driver’s window rolled down half way. Icy air knifed in through the gap. The woman reached an arm through the open window to punch a series of numbers into a keypad on a metal stanchion. Levon noted the sequence. Six. Four. Four. Nine.

  She rolled the window back up. The double-wide gate swung slowly inward. The driveway inside the fence had not been recently plowed. The tires crunched over a few inches of snow, treads mashing down the hard frost crust. The headlights showed the hard outlines of ruts ahead of them. Several cars or trucks had entered or exited since the last snowfall.

  The car pulled past a row of steel cargo containers and stopped in a pool of light between two long steel structures lined with garage doors. The driver touched the tab of a remote clipped to the sun visor. A garage door crept open, a bar of yellow light growing beneath it. When it was fully open she pulled inside to park by a Mercedes sedan sitting in a puddle of fresh snow melt.

  The lean one said, “We’re here,” and motioned for Levon to exit.

  The driver remained behind the wheel while the men stepped out into the open warehouse area. There were rows of boxes shrink-wrapped atop pallets. Some were appliances like microwave ovens or computers. Others were cartons marked with unreadable lettering stamped on them and contents stickers. A forklift sat recharging, a long cable stretching back into the dark recesses of the building.

  The lean one and the beard guided him to the door of a low structure against the back wall. It was the size of a double-wide trailer. Light came through the windows from behind blinds. The lean one pulled a door open and motioned Levon inside.

  Rather than the office he expected, Levon was surprised to find the room looked more like a suite from a casino hotel. Or at least a cheaper version of one. Thick carpeting, plush furniture in crushed velvet, blood red and pumpkin orange. A long wall of mirrors tinted bronze. A basketball game played muted on a big screen television mounted on a wall paneled in faux cherry wood. A broad marble-topped coffee table held a sand-filled ashtray at the center. At one end was a tidy kitchenette with granite countertops and white cabinets. A second door led to what Levon presumed was a bathroom. The room smelled of cologne and stale tobacco smoke.

  A man sat with his back to them, puffing a cigar and speaking on a cell phone. Levon noted a neat row of six identical phones arrayed on the table top.

  “You sent me shit so I pay you shit,” the cigar smoker said in Arabic. “You bring me better then I pay you better. Or maybe I pay someone else. It is business. We can do business my way or not at all. Try to understand that.”

  The smoker ended the call by hurling the phone across the room.

  “Eli far ab t’zak!” he growled to himself before turning to greet his guests. A predator leer replaced his expression of contempt at the caller. The cigar wobbled in his clenched teeth.

  “Danny Safar. You’re looking for good eye-dee?” the smoker said, standing and offering his hand. He was a man in his fifties. Once fit and going to fat.

  “Matt Dresher.” Levon took the man’s hand. There was power there. Safar stood a head shorter than him but had broad shoulders and thick arms that stretched the fabric of his open twill shirt.

  Safar nodded, meeting Levon’s eyes. “Is that who you are or who you want to be?”

  “It’s who I am for now. You’re going to tell me who I’m going to be next, right?”

  Safar grunted at that, amused. He turned to Levon’s escorts and spoke in flat Arabic. “You were not followed?”

  “We came through Armourdale. Took our time. No one was behind us,” the lean one said.

  “He’s not wired?”

  The lean one bit his lip. The beard shrugged.

  “Jerry!” Safar called, eyes still hard on Levon’s escorts.

  He turned to the door at the far end of the room and called the name again, louder.

  Levon heard a toilet flush followed by water running. A young man emerged from the bathroom. Shaved head. A black running suit with yellow stripes on the legs and sleeves. His eyes were bloodshot and face flushed. The flesh around one of his eyes was yellowed and the lids were puffy. Jerry was recovering from either a recent fight or a recent beatdown.

  “Yes, uncle?” Jerry said.

  “The thing. Get the thing,” Safar said with impatience, returning to English. He waved open hands at Levon in a gesture like an amateur magician.

  “You need to learn how to work these things yourself.” Jerry rummaged in a cabinet to retrieve a voltage reader.

  “I have you for that,” Safar said and stood aside for Jerry to step up to Levon with the bright yellow wand.

  Levon removed his coat and raised his arms from his sides to stand with his feet shoulder-width apart. The young man moved the wand over his back, chest, belly and crotch. Levon lifted his untucked shirt to reveal the Sig Sauer snug in his waistband.

  “Did you even know he had that?” Safar said in Arabic, cutting his eyes toward the escorts. They shuffled and mumbled replies.

  “Is the gun a problem?” Levon said.

  “I only wanted to know it was there,” Safar said, shrugging.

  “Nothing. No batteries. No reading,” Jerry said, stepping back.

  “Now we do business,” Safar said.

  23

  Jerry couldn’t take his eyes off the diamonds.

  Uncle Danny left the Wasem brothers to channel surf his big screen. He ordered Jerry to make them coffee.

  Now his uncle sat with the white guy at the table in the kitchenette. The white guy had taken a paper envelope from his coat pocket and spilled the contents onto the table top in a tiny heap. A dozen cut diamonds glittered. The largest was the size of a pistachio nut.

  “What is this?” his uncle said, waving a hand over the glittering pile.

  “These aren’t traceable. Cash is. These are better than cash,” the white guy said.

  “I don’t know diamonds,” his uncle said and pursed his lips as he poked a finger into the pile, separating the gems.

  “Then take them to someone who does. I need to start the process here. You take the stones. Have them valued. If they aren’t worth what I’m asking for then I don’t get what I want.” The white guy sat back.

  Jerry placed two cups of strong black coffee in front of the men. His eyes took in the diamonds. They cast constellations of white reflections on the table top. They looked real enough to him.

  “You trust me with them?” his uncle said, hand hovering over the table, eyes on the white guy.

  “I want you to trust me. At least enough to get my papers started.”

  “Okay.” Uncle Danny picked each stone up to return it to the envelope.

  “So, we’re good?”

  “We’re good,” Danny said and snapped his fingers at his nephew. “Get a paper and pen.”

  Danny dictated a Haskell Avenue address and the white guy wrote it down in neat block letters.

  “Go to that add
ress in the morning. They’ll know you’re coming. Tell them what you need and we’ll see if these gems cover the cost.”

  “I think you’ll be pleased,” the white guy said.

  “Get him a phone,” Danny said.

  Jerry opened a drawer filled with a dozen identical cell phones. He chose one. After recording the number on his own phone he handed it to the white guy.

  “Jerry will stay in touch with you. Only Jerry. Only use the phone to answer calls from us. When our business is done you give us back the phone. Is this clear to you?”

  The white guy nodded and pocketed the phone. Danny returned to Arabic, calling to the Wasem brothers who were lounging in the fat chairs, critiquing the porno movie they’d settled on.

  “Take this asshole back. Watch his hotel to make sure he has no visitors.”

  “How long do we watch?” the beard said.

  “Until I call you. Then I have something else for you to do,” Uncle Danny said, brushing a hand toward them in a shooing gesture.

  Jerry watched the white guy who sat sipping coffee, his face betraying nothing.

  He set the cup down when the Wasems stood and called to him. He followed them from the warehouse.

  “You think he’s for real, uncle?” Jerry said, making to sit at the table until his uncle’s scowl made him stand again.

  “If the diamonds are real then he is real. What cop pays that way? They always offer shitty money. Drug money.”

  “What do you think they are worth?”

  “I know diamonds? I know shit about diamonds. I’ll take them to a Jew. He’ll tell me they’re worth half of what they are worth and offer me half of that for them. And if it’s enough for me I will be happy to be rid of them.”

  “I could make a better deal maybe,” Jerry offered. “A Lebanese I know owns a couple of jewelry stores.”

  “A Lebanese? Worse than a Jew. And how would I know you’d bring the money back?” His uncle rose, carrying the coffee into the entertainment area and sitting down.

  Jerry raised a hand to touch the fading bruise around his eye. It was still tender to the touch. A week ago it had been swollen shut. Jerry had skimmed a little off a pay run to buy some coke. The plan was to turn the coke into more cash and replace what he’d skimmed. Instead, he took the four ounces of powder on a long weekend in Vegas with his girlfriend. When Monday came the coke was gone, sucked up by some brand new friends they’d invited to a party in their room. Jerry came back with no coke and no money to replace what he’d “borrowed.”

  Uncle Danny was not understanding. Uncle Danny had no sympathy for youthful enthusiasm. Uncle Danny had spent his youthful enthusiasm in Saddam’s army fighting the Iranians.

  Jerry was given a thorough working over by the Wasem brothers. Not hard enough to put him in the hospital but hard enough to make him piss pink for a couple of weeks. One of the Wasems, Khalid, the fat one, delivered the fist to Jerry's eye. They had been under strict orders not to because Uncle Danny did not wish to hear about it from Jerry's mother who was Danny's little sister. So Jerry was staying close by his uncle until the bruising went away. That meant doing woman's chores like errands and making coffee.

  “Now, get this shit off my television,” Uncle Danny commanded and waggled a hand toward the enthusiastic women writhing naked on his big screen.

  Jerry plucked the remote from the sofa and switched the TV back to ESPN. He did every menial task for his uncle, even working the remote control easily within reach of his uncle’s hand.

  It won’t always be this way, he thought as he returned to the kitchenette to take the white guy’s cup to the sink.

  All I need is one break. Just watch for one break so I can make my own deal. Have my own crew. Stop being Uncle Danny’s bitch, he thought, rinsing the coffee cup and returning it to its hook like a good wife.

  Maybe this white guy was the break he was looking for. The man was on the run. Financing his getaway with stolen swag. He wouldn’t spend it all on a phony driver’s license and credit card. He’d have more somewhere.

  Jerry dried his hands on a paper towel before removing his cell from his pocket. He looked at Matt Dresher’s number on the screen.

  His eye didn’t hurt so much now.

  24

  The girl wasn’t on the train when it reached New Orleans.

  The train was delayed for four hours in Yazoo City when an attendant found her cabin empty an hour out of Memphis. Every car was searched and the girl was not found. The disappearance of a minor child traveling alone on one of their trains sent a shiver of terror up the corporate spine of Amtrak. Local and state police were called in both in Mississippi and Tennessee. The area around Memphis station was searched for evidence as was the station in Greenwood, the only stop before Yazoo. An Amber Alert was sent out over four states.

  The only agency not called in was the FBI who had agents waiting throughout the day at Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans to question Megan Elizabeth Bruckman when she detrained.

  State CID reviewed the video footage in Memphis based on account of an eyewitness who told them about a strange man she saw pestering the child just before the stop there. The highly stressed train attendant told them that a coach passenger had entered the sleeping cars to talk to the girl. This was corroborated by a waiter in the dining car who gave the same description of a tall man in his thirties. Dark hair. Glasses. Creepy. Both the attendant and waiter used that last word.

  The video footage from the platform clearly showed the man identified by the train crew detraining in Memphis. Shortly after, the Bruckman girl exited the train carrying a backpack. Two different angles showed the “creepy guy” watching the girl from concealment and following her into the station.

  The “creepy” passenger was quickly identified from the train’s manifest as Axel Louis Colfax.

  It was eight in the evening when a tactical team of combined Memphis PD and staties hammered down the front and rear doors of the Colfax home, startling his elderly parents. Axel was found playing Super Mario in a room the cops at first assumed belonged to much younger sibling until they learned that Axel was an only child. The suspect appeared to be either ill or high on some controlled substance. A further search of the home failed to uncover evidence of a missing child.

  The search did uncover a locked room in the basement. Their warrant gave them all latitude in their search and so the lock was snipped with bolt cutters and the room was entered by a half dozen cops calling Megan’s name. Instead of the allegedly abducted girl, either dead or alive, the cops found a treasure trove of child pornography lovingly boxed and filed by subject matter. A computer and CPU towers promised even more.

  It was swiftly determined that all of this was evidence relating to a suspected abduction. Axel Colfax was a registered sex offender and therefore, by his past actions, stripped of many of his constitutional rights. The presumption of innocence was strained to the point where they could haul him in. The boxes and hard drives were carted off along with Axel. Flashes fired from police cameras backed up the damning evidence caught by the body-cams each cop wore.

  Further viewing of video footage from Memphis Amtrak Station exonerated Colfax when it was clearly proven that he did not leave the station with the little girl.

  High definition footage taken from a camera set high on one of the station’s fluted columns plainly showed Colfax bracing the Bruckman girl only to see them both approached by an adult female of undetermined age. This female took Colfax to the floor with two lightning fast actions that made even the hardened state CID cops wince in empathy. The woman had moves. Colfax was left puking his guts out and searching for his testicles which were probably residing somewhere north of his navel after the ass-whupping received from the unidentified female. The female was then seen walking hand-in-hand from the station with the child identified as the Bruckman girl.

  The mystery was solved for the arresting officers as to why the suspect Colfax was seated holding a bag of crushed ice o
n his crotch. Colfax was cleared of abduction charges but held on the shitload of violations of his sex offender status represented by the vast library of kiddie rape photos, videos, and comic books found in his basement lair in boxes and on his hard drive.

  For all of this law enforcement action, the feds in New Orleans were not looped in. They were left to question the train staff already exhausted from the grilling they’d received in Yazoo.

  Team Megan, the section of the task force assigned with identifying, finding and questioning the minor person of interest, shifted focus to Memphis.

  Team Roeder, a combined unit of Bureau and Treasury tasked with finding the adult male fugitive, was left to spread out all over the lower Midwest chasing shadows.

  The following morning, the Feds, TSA and local cops staking out the departures in St. Louis waited two hours past the take-off of the nine-thirty to Phoenix. Matthew Dresher was a no-show.

  Everyone turned to Bill Marquez, acting lead in St. Louis. His prediction that the airport stakeout would result in a big zero came true. Beyond that he had no answers. Tex had an overnight jump on them. He could be anywhere in eight states—if he was still on the ground. Anywhere in the world if he managed to get airborne somehow.

  Gone into the ether with the key to a multi-billion dollar fortune.

  25

  "Do you know what this is?" Gunny asked, turning the flash drive in his fingers.

  “All Daddy told me was that you should hide it,” Merry said.

  They were snug in the cabin’s kitchen. It was dark outside, forest dark. A freezing rain pattered on the windows. The branches of the trees looked like they were encased in glass. Joyce made coffee for herself and Gunny. Hot chocolate for Merry along with a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies baked from a roll of dough Joyce kept in the chest freezer.

  “Levon didn’t tell you what’s on it?” Joyce asked. She plucked the drive from Gunny’s hand and detached the silver chain.