Levon Cade Omnibus

by Chuck Dixon

  She withdrew her hand and crouched to watch the hound’s eyes, white all around with the pain.

  Uncle Fern replaced the phone receiver on the wall and took a seat in a kitchen chair.

  “Riverstone Vet has a van out on call up Bushmill Road. They’ll be here in an hour or more. All we can do now is keep Tex as calm as we can,” he said.

  “The more he moves around the deeper the quills work in,” Levon said to Merry. He went back to petting the hound in slow, even strokes.

  “Dumb son-bitch cornering a porcupine,” Fern said. His eyes were wet with tears.

  An hour and a half later a four-wheel drive truck pulled up on the gravel. Instead of a bed it had a covered back with hatches along each side. On the doors were the words Riverstone Veterinary above the silhouette of a prancing horse. Uncle Fern went out to greet the vet. Merry watched through the screen door as the vet rooted around in one of the hatches along the bed and came out with a metal toolbox. They walked together into the pool of light on the porch. Merry was surprised to see the vet was a woman. She was dressed in jeans and a work shirt, both stained with fresh blood. Her sandy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The lady vet looked tired, eyes red and no makeup. For all that she was pretty to Merry's eye. And despite the early hour and her weariness, the woman was smiling and talking easy to Uncle Fern.

  "So, here's my patient, huh?" the lady vet said as she set the toolbox on the kitchen table.

  Merry watched as the vet crouched on the linoleum by the hound’s face next to her father.

  “You did good keeping him still,” she said.

  Levon raised his head to respond.

  “Holy shit. Levon?” she said before he could speak.

  “Jessie,” Levon said.

  “I didn’t know you were back in Colby.”

  “Thought Dale might have told you.”

  “Haven’t talked to Dale in years.”

  Levon said nothing. He guided the flat of his hand down the dog’s hide in even strokes.

  “I’d better see to getting these barbs out of poor Tex,” Jessie said. She bent low over the whimpering dog’s head with a pair of snips in her hand.

  “Honey, you get on back to bed,” Levon said to Merry.

  Merry backed from the kitchen but did not return upstairs. She stood in the hallway, leaning against the wall to listen to the metallic snip as each barb was picked off. Tex let out a low mewling sound as each quill was drawn out. Jessie's voice cooed to him. "There, there, boy. There's a good boy."

  After a while Merry could hear the scrabble of claws on the tiles meaning Tex was back on his feet. She peeked around the corner into the kitchen. The hound galumphed over to her, tail wagging, sniffing and snorting.

  “I have some antibiotics in the truck just in case. Give Tex one in the morning and one in the evening for six days.” Jessie was at the sink washing her hands. She was speaking to Uncle Fern. “You may see some bleeding but that should stop in the next few hours.”

  Merry saw her father and he saw her.

  “Thought you were in bed,” he said.

  “I couldn’t sleep till I knew Tex was okay,” Merry said.

  “He’s just fine, sweetheart. They stung a bit coming out but not as much as they must have going in. He was scared is all,” Jessie said. She dried her hands on a dish towel and set it by the sink.

  “My name’s Merry,” Merry said.

  “Merry Cade?” Jessie said.

  “Yeah. This is my daddy.”

  “She’s just beautiful, Levon,” Jessie said. She turned back to Merry with a smile. “I’m Jessica Hamer. I was a friend of your daddy’s way back when we were both kids.”

  “Uh huh,” Merry said. “You’re a doctor now?”

  “Yep. A vet. Mostly large animals like horses and cattle. But I can treat dogs and cats if they need it. But no chickens. Have to draw the line somewhere.” She spoke the last with mock gravity then shared a beaming smile with Merry who giggled.

  “You have a lot of blood on you,” Merry said.

  “I was delivering a foal on a farm near here. A beautiful dappled mare. It was already nursing by the time I got the call from the service. You like horses?”

  Merry nodded with enthusiasm.

  “Of course you do. What little girl doesn’t? You have your daddy bring you by my place sometime soon. I have a pony that would love to have you ride her. If it’s okay with you, Levon?” She turned to where Levon stood mute.

  "We could. Sure," he said. "But let's not hold Jessie up anymore. I'm sure she'd like to get home."

  “Or stay for breakfast,” Uncle Fern said. He nodded toward the windows where sunlight was slanting in through the glass.

  Merry yipped. Levon gave Fern a withering glance.

  “I like the beard on you, Levon,” Jessie said. She was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

  “Been lazy since I got here, I guess,” he said. Levon’s hand went to his jaw to a two week’s growth.

  Over eggs, sausage, pancakes, ice cold milk and piping coffee, Merry peppered Jessie with questions while her father suffered in silence. Except for a grunt now and then to give credence to one of Jessie’s stories.

  Gunny Leffertz said:

  “A wolf always knows when other wolves are around.”

  10

  “Can I go horse riding at Jessie’s? Can we call her? Maybe go this week?” Merry said.

  “Sure, honey. Do you have the list Uncle Fern gave you?” Levon said.

  “In my head,” she said. Merry tapped a finger on her temple.

  “It’s your turn then,” he said. He nodded toward the donut counter where Fay herself waited with a fold of wax paper in hand. Merry skipped forward to lean on the counter glass, raised up on her tip-toes.

  “Um… two cream-filled… two raspberry…”

  Levon took a booth.

  The place smelled of coffee brewing, fry grease and yeast. It was a smell infused into every porous surface. It smelled the same when he used to come here before or after school. When he went to school. Fay's mother, also Fay, ran the place then. The older Fay passed a few years back, Fern told him. The younger Fay was a shadow of her mother. Old Fay was fat as a house. Used to sit on a high stool behind the counter and sling donuts made by her husband Clyde from before dawn to late afternoon. Always smiling. Always with a greeting for everyone and the patience of a saint with customers who picked out a selection of donuts like they were making a life-altering choice.

  Young Fay was thin as a marathon runner and moved like a cat to pluck donuts from the tray and place them in boxes. A brush of frizzy hair held in place by a clip bobbed atop her head. Her sneakered feet squeaked on the floorboards.

  Levon found a whole new generation in the little flyspeck town. The garage, the barber’s, the donut shop and general store were either run by new owners or the children of the old ones. Fewer people to remember Levon Cade. Still, he pulled his Kubota ball cap low atop his dark aviators.

  Only a few customers in the middle of the morning on a weekday. A couple of old guys telling war stories at the six-stool counter. Dressed in farm clothes though they probably hadn’t worked the ground in decades. Both nursing coffees. They joked with the girl behind the counter. Just playful stuff. They were both old enough to be her great grandfather. Her laughter was honest. The old guys were longtime regulars.

  Two booths away a kid sat scrolling on a laptop, hair worn long down to the collar of a Wrangler jacket with the sleeves cut away. This was the closest to Starbucks Colby had to offer.

  Out the window Levon could see the wide main street with mostly pickups pulled into the angled parking spaces on either side. Three guys were hanging around an SUV on the other side of the road, smoking and sucking down beers.

  They stood out. Their ride stood out. Two wore baggy jeans and outsized t-shirts. The third wore a western-style yoke shirt, skinny jeans and a straw cowboy hat. Levon didn’t know much about sneakers but theirs looked expensive. L
ight glinted off gold chains and bracelets. Nothing about them fit in Colby.

  It wasn’t that they were Latinos. The county had lots of migrants working in season on the commercial farms. The migrants dressed like farm workers, dressed like most everyone else in this part of the state. Not the guys hanging around the pimped out SUV. Everything about them said gang.

  The ride was a copper-colored H3. It gleamed liquid in the sun with fat tires and chrome wheels with spinners. Dual chrome exhaust. A Mexican flag decal filled the rear window. The three men were young. Their body language was relaxed. One of the men bent double to laugh at a remark from another. The white fabric of a t-shirt stretched to describe an automatic in the waistband of his jeans.

  “You wanted coffee, daddy?” Merry said from the counter.

  “Yes, honey. A large black.”

  She brought the box of donuts to the table. He gave her a ten. She returned with his coffee, a small milk and change. Merry slid into the booth across from her father.

  “You could have coffee at the house,” she said.

  “Not your uncle’s coffee.”

  “The lady gave me a baker’s dozen,” Merry said and unfolded a napkin to set a donut on it.

  “Because you were polite, honey.”

  Merry returned to the subject of horses. Levon gave her half his attention while he watched the three young men across the street. They separated after a bit. Two climbed into the Hummer. The cowboy continued on down the street to where a pickup was parked. A jacked-up Silverado with a crew cab, roof lights and chrome bull bar. Jet black with a poker hand painted on the doors. All aces of spades. An ATV with knobby tires was strapped down in the bed. Both vehicles reversed onto the road. The engine sound made the glass panes of the store windows hum. They turned on the street and took off for the county road.

  “So can we?” Merry was saying.

  “Can we what?” Levon said. He turned his eyes from the cloud of exhaust dissolving on the street.

  “Call Jessie.”

  “You call her and set up a day. Me or Uncle Fern can drive you over.”

  “I thought maybe you’d like to see her again. You and her being friends and all.”

  “Maybe a long time back,” Levon said. He sipped his coffee. It had cooled.

  “So what? You’re still friends. She still likes you, right? You still like her, right?” Merry said. Her lips were white with powdered sugar. She was studying his face.

  He cut his eyes back to the empty street.

  “Like I said. It was a long time back. I have no idea how Jessie feels about me now. We were kids then.”

  “Friends are friends forever.”

  “It’d be nice if it was like that.”

  “If you don’t want to take me over there…” she said. She stirred her milk with a straw.

  “Of course I want you to, honey. You call and get permission and I’ll take you over,” he said. He reached across the table to touch her hand.

  “Great,” Merry said. She looked up at him, beaming.

  11

  “Now that the Bureau is done tripping over their own dicks we can get to work on this guy Cray,” section chief Brett Sylvester said to the room at large.

  “Cade,” Nancy Valdez corrected.

  Nancy sat at the opposite end of the conference table along with three other agents. Two of them she already knew from the DC Treasury office. Chad Bengstrom, a forensic accountant and stone wonk who could make numbers tell a story.

  And Tony Marcoon, an old warhorse who'd transferred over from ATF after taking a bullet in the knee during a raid. He was a former Philadelphia homicide cop and in on this case since the Blanco family had been found murdered in Costa Rica.

  The third was a petite black girl in a severely cut business suit. She was on the young side and trying to project a no-bullshit, all-business attitude. This effect was undercut by large eyes and even larger horn-rimmed glasses that gave her a look of a cartoon mouse.

  Brett said, “I picked this team because you’re all soldiers. Your rep has been built on solid, dogged work done over long days and weeks. You do the thankless job of finding the evidence needed so the knuckleheads can go kick the doors down with their asses fully covered.”

  Someone cleared their throat.

  “No offense meant to the knuckleheads, Tony,” Brett said.

  “None taken, sir,” Tony Marcoon said. His voice sounded like shifting wet gravel.

  “Joining you, in the spirit of inter-departmental cooperation,” Brett began. There were dry chuckles. “Laura Strand is coming to this team from Internal Revenue. They have a stake in finding this guy, too. Agent Strand is on loan to us from the taxman. She worked on the team that brought down the Hester Foundation. She comes with her agency’s highest recommendation.”

  The three Treasury agents looked at the newcomer with fresh eyes.

  “The Hesters? One Gordian knot of fucked-up accounting. Props to you,” Chad said.

  “It was a lot of hours,” Laura Strand said. A flat response, eyes level on Chad until he turned away to pretend interest in the wood grain of the tabletop. There was a silence broken only by the air conditioner hum from the ceiling of the windowless room.

  Maybe she is tougher than she looks, Nancy thought.

  Brett took back command of the meeting.

  "You all have the background on this case. Run it the way you see fit, though I might suggest digging a little more into Cade's history. The book on this guy is suspiciously thin. I want weekly reports every Thursday by the end of the day. None of this sending in stuff late on Fridays bullshit." Brett's eyes cut to Chad who wore a ‘who me?' expression.

  “And we’ll meet back here in two weeks so you can lay out your progress. We’ll continue on this schedule until we’ve either nailed the bastard or the deputy director feels our assets would be better utilized elsewhere,” Brett said. He snapped his laptop shut and pushed away from the table.

  The quad would serve as the new team's HQ. It sat at the rear of the same floor as the conference room. Four desks in cubicles around a common table. There were still cartons stacked high. Equipment and paper files against the walls. Only two work stations were up and ready. Loops of cables snaked over the floor. Chad promised their network would be booted up and running by the end of the day.

  Their quad was separated from a maze of cubicles stretching across the vast floor by a wide carpeted corridor. The place had an open floor plan with hundreds of workers busy at their monitors. Still, there was a hushed tone to the place. The other agents and staff created a waxing and waning sound like distant surf.

  “I’ve been the longest on the forensic end of this so I’ll take lead,” Nancy said.

  She took a seat at the head of the table. Chad flipped open his laptop and was immediately tapping away. Nancy had worked with him before and knew he was taking in everything she said even if he appeared to be lost to cyberland. Tony sat regarding her with heavy eyelids. Laura Strand had a notepad open and pen poised to take notes.

  “We’ll attack this from several different angles,” Nancy said. “First up is to build a history on Levon Cade. Like Brett said, his file is thin. We need to know more about him. Something might tell us where he is now.”

  Chad tapped. Tony nodded. Laura Strand jotted.

  "We're going to keep up our sweep for any currency popping up connected to the Blanco stash. We've had a few hits but not enough to create a pattern."

  “The bills that have been reported point south,” Chad said.

  “We just got a call on a hundred note in Montreal. I need you to enter that in our system,” Nancy said.

  Chad blew air through his lips.

  “Next we’re going to do as deep a forensic analysis of the late Corey Blanco as we can. Really grind it out to create a full picture of his holdings. There might be something there we can use. An angle. A chink in the armor. That way we’ll have a full inventory of funds we can possibly seize. There’s a lot of stol
en loot to be found and a shitload of tax dollars to be recovered.”

  “How’s that help us find Cade?” Tony said.

  “It’s more to justify our continued existence,” Nancy said. “If we can establish a dollar amount on what Blanco was holding then we can make the deputy director understand why we need to keep digging.”

  “What’s to say this guy Cade can lead us to the Blanco stash?” Laura Strand said.

  “We know there’s a key, some form of a code or a device, that Blanco used as an index to his offshore accounts,” Nancy said. “Our working theory is Cade has the key.”

  “I understand the key exists,” Laura Strand said. “The home invasion crew broke into the Blanco home in Costa Rica but left millions in cash and valuables behind. They didn’t find what they were looking for because Corey Blanco died of a massive heart attack while they were torturing his family. The crew then broke into another Blanco home in Fiji, again leaving millions in swag behind.”

  “Then they show up in—” Laura Strand flipped pages in her notebook, “—Bellevue Lake, Maine. Another Blanco home. Another home invasion. They run into a handyman who kills the entire crew before vanishing with a few million in cash, his eleven-year-old daughter and, theoretically, this key to billions in stolen funds.”

  “That’s the reason why we’re here. And it’s more than theoretical,” Nancy said. “We have confirmation from Kiera Anne Blanco-Reeves, a Blanco ex-wife. She’s made a statement that Cade took more than cash from the house. She also has her own experience of her husband’s practices to back up the idea of a load of hidden assets.”

  “What about this crew?” Tony said. “Do we have more on them?”

  “There’s a fat file from the FBI on all of them. Mostly Belgian nationals. All professional career thieves. High-end scores only,” Nancy said.

  “They went global in their search for the Blanco stash. That takes start-up money. There’s no way they did it on their own dime. Someone financed them,” Tony said.