Simon Rising

by Brian D Howard

  Had a renovation project started and been abandoned? Some urban renewal project? If so, someone had given up on it. He moved a little closer to the construction to look for a place to set up a temporary little home in. More like an animal den than a home, but still better than a rooftop.

  He skipped past one with a “Danger - Condemned” sign, figuring a building given up on halfway through and presumably deemed unsafe to continue building was not a good place to take shelter.

  Another one seemed to house about a dozen people already. He moved on, reasoning they might be less than welcoming to a stranger. No, he wanted somewhere unoccupied. He moved on.

  He spent the day wandering and trying to plan but coming up short. A few times throughout the day he stopped and rested. Fatigue flooded through him sporadically, random like thunderclaps during a storm. Sometimes the waves of exhaustion made him dizzy. He stopped and rested over and over.

  The wandering helped him get his bearings and the lay of the surrounding city. One candy bar did not do enough to raise his flagging spirits.

  Along the way he found an even seedier partof the city. An ugly woman standing outside a dangerous looking bar, with scraggly hair falling out over her ears and sporting a meager collection of brown teeth called out to him as he approached.

  “You lonely, handsome? You wanna buy me a drank?” She lifted a dirty and torn skirt to show off—if that could possibly be the term—knobby knees and part of a thigh striped with horizontal scars. Her vision couldn’t be good if she thought he was handsome—or she had lower standards than he did. He walked past without saying anything, moving aside to put more space between them. Nothing about her had been attractive. What was he attracted to? Legs? Butts? Tits?

  Not long after that, in an area with more car traffic, he encountered a dirty, older black man in a haphazard collection of filthy, mismatched clothes which could have come from a grunge band’s garbage. The man was missing fingers on both hands clutching a cardboard sign proclaiming in smudged letters,

  homeles

  enything helps

  God bless

  He propelled himself a little faster past the man, not sure why. He had no money to help the man. The homeless man probably had more money than he did. Still, he felt guilty for walking past, for avoiding eye contact. He probably did not look too different from the man, aside from having all his fingers. Did other people see him that way? Would people avert their eyes like that? The ugly hooker hadn’t, but that only meant so much.

  He wondered how much money people gave the man throughout each day. He rejected it as an idea. Even if it might work, it was not something he could afford to try. He was unwilling to risk someone noticing or recognizing him. He had been on the news, however many weeks ago it had been. No, anything which caused exposure might lead to the police or FBI converging on him.

  He looked for places to stay, especially as a light rain started, trying to figure out where he should go. At one point he saw someone fling a bag of garbage into a mini dumpster behind a diner in a strip mall. It gave him the idea that perhaps the alley would be vacant for a while, so he took the opportunity to change himself. He added the wrapped bundle to the dumpster then slunked away, anxious someone might have seen him and would challenge him about what he had been doing. He longed for a shower.

  Eventually he found a building he concluded was a drug den based on the movements. People came and left furtively, looking around anxiously in ways all too familiar to him. People went inside and mostly did not mingle with each other. There were small interactions as people entered, but then they sat or reclined and tended to not move much for quite some time.

  He knew he would not be welcome without cash, so it was not a place to seek shelter or refuge. There were far too many people inside for robbing it to be an option although he might find quite a bit of money inside.

  He had been observing from across the street for perhaps an hour, unsure what he was going to do, when the idea came to him. There would be a lot of money inside. The money had to go somewhere. Somewhere along the line a supplier, or suppliers, would come with more drugs and would leave with some of the collected cash. He would just need to figure out who those people were. They would be a small group or a lone individual he could ambush in any number of unexpected ways. At last he had something resembling an option. Robbing drug dealers was not much of a plan, probably not a career, but it was something. “The journey of a thousand miles,” he groaned.

  CHAPTER 16 – RAUL JUAREZ

  A buzz and clang and the door to the Bay City Jail’s cafeteria opened. Moore and Thorne followed a black-uniformed guard through. The guard clanged the door closed.

  The cafeteria was an odd mix of light and airy—with large skylights letting in the Saturday afternoon sun—and gloomy—with every surface painted some shade of flat gray. Only one inmate sat in the cafeteria, at one of the seats which happened to fall under a wide shaft of sunlight emphasizing the orange stripes on his jumpsuit - the only color in the room.

  Two other guards flanked a door in the far wall. Beyond the door some five thousand men and women waited. Some served out sentences for lesser offenses, some awaited trial, some were housed here until they were transferred somewhere more permanent. She had heard men in Thorne’s precinct call it the Halfway House of the Damned.

  It was a medium security facility, an ugly, squat building six floors tall looking more like a medieval fortification than anything else with its narrow windows and gray stone walls and block shape. The warden, a grumpy fat man named Anderson, had met them at the gate and guided them in. Thorne and Anderson knew each other, and as they had talked Anderson’s disposition had lightened. Slightly. If she worked here would she smile?

  Their guard waited at the door and Thorne followed Moore to the square table with its built-in gray stools. She set her folder down on the dull metal tabletop, letting it thunk more heavily than necessary. First impressions.

  Raul Juarez sat hunched with his hands in his lap under the table. Beady eyes peered from under uneven eyebrows. Rachel kept her posture straight and tall. Authoritative. Thorne set his hands apart from each other on the table. His fingers splayed out wide. She wondered if he was doing it deliberately to make his hands apepar larger. He could be an imposing figure in an interrogation if he was the one leading. She had learned early on to lead their joint interrogations.

  “Hello, Raul.”

  “Remember us?” Thorne’s voice lowered, a shade huskier than normal.

  “I remember the chica,” Juarez nodded towards her while addressing Thorne. You look kinda familiar, puerco.”

  Puerco. Older slang she hadn't heard much in a while. Recent immigrant, Mexico City, probably.

  “Agent Moore,” Thorne corrected, pointing. “Officer Thorne,” hooking a thumb at himself.

  “Raul, we want to talk to you about Steven Ambrose.” She tapped the folder with a fingernail.

  “What about him? I heard you lost him.” Raul leaned forward, his gut pressing against the table, setting his hands on top of the table in a closer-together impression of Thorne’s. The cuffs around his wrists clanged on the metal.

  “Don’t worry, we’re gonna find him.” Thorne’s hands closed partway, unmasked tension building towards fists. There was something personal going on here. He hadn’t said a word on the way here. He should have. Maybe just some stupid macho crap, knowing Thorne.

  “I understand your sentence was being reduced pending your testifying at his trial. If he stays on the loose you can’t exactly do that, can you?” She had a delicate line to walk, but she had cards she could play when the time was right.

  “Hey, it’s not my fault you lost him.”

  “Don’t...push it,” Thorne grated.

  “I want to understand Ambrose a little better.” She pulled the top loose sheet from the folder and slapped the picture of a skorpion machine pistol on the table. “Unless you’d rather talk about why you shot him.” Beady eyes shot to the pic
ture, widening in recognition, then bolted up to her gaze.

  “Nobody said I shot him. There was a lot of shooting going on, anybody coulda.”

  “It was 7.65mm rounds that we pulled out of him. This gun here was the only one present that fired those. Your prints were the only ones on it.” Play out the line, let him take it.

  “Circumstantial.” The chain between his wrists rattled as he rubbed at his nose with a knuckle.

  “Not really, asshole.” Thorne leaned forward, looming. No, not something personal. She had seen that lean before. He liked the ‘bad cop’ role.

  “Oh, I think it would stand up in court just fine, Raul,” she added.

  “No body, no crime.” Juarez straightened upright, hands at the edge of the table. Tension showed in his shoulders, narrower into his body than before.

  “We can still talk about attempted murder, if that’s what you really want to talk about.” She opened the file and set the picture on top of several other sheets. “Or you could tell us about Ambrose.” And the hook....

  His eyes scanned back and forth between the picture of the gun and a form filled out with handwriting sloppy on purpose. Upside-down he wouldn’t be able to read it, but it would look official and important.

  “What uh...,” Juarez stared at the folder, scooting back on the stool. His eyes crept back up. “What do you wanna know?”

  She flipped a page in the folder, pretending to study it. “Ambrose did all the planning, right?”

  “Duh.” He shrugged. “Said that plenty times before. Your undercover...puerco can tell you that.”

  “But you, you spent a lot more time working with Ambrose. How much in advance did he tell you the plans?”

  “Most of the time...,” beady eyes looked up and left, “most of the time a few hours before. The first time in the truck on the way there.”

  “And he’d show you blueprints and sketches and explain the plan?”

  “Yeah, tha’s right.” He rubbed at wrists, moving the cuffs to different spots. Bruises on his wrist were fading to yellow. Bruises running in a line parallel to the cuffs. The kind of that come from being cuffed aggressively.

  “Did he ever get feedback from any of you and change any plans?”

  Juarez scoffed. “Nah. He was a prick about that. Always right. The puto had an answer for fucking everything.”

  “You saying he was gay, or you just didn’t like him?” Thorne pushed, leaning forward with his left shoulder closer. As if keeping his right back for a hard punch.

  “Maybe both.” Juarez rubbed his nose again. It was a matter-of-fact statement, not a judgment or homophobic reaction.

  She thumbed through some pages to buy herself time to plan out where to take the questioning. “Did you ever get the feeling that maybe he didn’t make the plans, that he was just relaying them?”

  Juarez dropped his head, cocking left as if listening. “Never thought about it,” he said after the thoughtful pause.

  “How was he with details?”

  “Details? He was fucking anal.”

  “How?” Thorne’s voice raised a little, intrigued.

  “He checked everything at least twice. Made us all repeat back to him what we were s’posed to do. He’d badger us about making sure everyone knew where everyone was s’posed to be. Like a teacher asking the class questions.”

  “Was he ever late for anything?”

  “Nah. No, he was always the first one wherever we were meeting.”

  “How would you describe his personality?”

  “Personality?”

  “What’s he like?” Thorne prodded, crossing his arms.

  “I dunno. Smart. Arrogant. None of us really liked him much. But he knows his shit, you know? I can respect that. And he understood respect, but you had to earn it first.”

  They continued through a list of other questions. Most confirmed things she had heard before. Attention to detail. Good speaker, good listener. Paused before saying things, chosing words. Always seemed to have a backup plan, and his plans were well thought out from every angle. All of it meshed with her original profile and seemed to confirm the original conclusion he had been the one planning everything. But it did not seem to describe the man who stole clothes from apartments and set off an alarm at a warehouse store.

  One of the guards started shifting, looking antsy. It was time to wrap this up. One more card to play. She flipped the folder closed, leaned forward, tried to drill into his eyes with her own.

  “So, level with me, Raul. It looks like all the shots you fired were at around chest height. But Ambrose you hit head and neck. Why is that?”

  “I...,” his eyes darted around, jaw and cheeks slackened. “I’m not saying another word without a lawyer.”

  “I see. Thank you, Raul.” One facial expression had told her more than all the words he had used combined.

  “A...agent. Puerco.” Juarez practically spit the last word at Thorne.

  Thorne scowled as he stood.

  Doors buzzed as they headed out, retrieving their guns and badges on their way. They dashed through the rain to the car. Where some might hold papers over their head to stay dry, Rachel tucked the folder under her arm to keep it dry.

  Thorne started the car but left it in park. Wipers swatted at the rain. “I see?”

  “Why do you think he lawyered up like that so suddenly,” she prompted him.

  “Probably because he knew there was nothing he could say he could use in his favor. No way he could benefit.”

  “I think it was more than that. His whole face when he paused. He was scared. I think he was put up to it. By someone he’s afraid of.”

  Thorne scoffed. “Barton.”

  “That was my thought, too.”

  “Which means Ambrose knows something Barton doesn’t want let out.” He was following her reasoning.

  “Exactly.” She looked at the window, back at the jailhouse. “I’m thinking Raul was a contingency plan. Something along the lines of, ‘if anything goes bad make sure Ambrose can’t tell the cops anything.’”

  “So does that tell us anything we can use? We can’t exactly have a mob boss dragged in for questioning.”

  “I think it means that Barton either has him or is gunning for him. Either way, we need to have him watched more closely.”

  Thorne made the calls while he drove back to the precinct.

  CHAPTER 17 – WHAT FRIENDS DO

  Andrew Barton drove his S-class Mercedes slow through the construction site’s gravel entrance. Wipers squeaked, swinging faster than the light rain required. He wound among the complex of half-built structures.

  No workers welded or lugged materials. No trucks made deliveries here today. Cranes napped unattended. Permit problems halted the project in southern Harborview. Low traffic around it, and its layout, created an ideal, secluded place to meet.

  He could not always meet with connections and contacts and resources at his condo, where he preferred to conduct most of his business. He had access to an office, but he seldom used it. It certainly would not help him today.

  How many times had he met someone under a bridge? At a park or cemetery? Or even at a place like this? Often he had been the junior one at such a meeting, where he was given instructions or a job to do. Of course, was...seventeen years ago? Now, he handed out the jobs and the instructions. The things he had dreamt of back then he now held in his strong hands. He liked being one of the most powerful men in the city.

  The burgundy Chevrolet was already there. Barton pulled up next to it. He unlocked the passenger door and cracked the window just enough. He beckoned for the driver to join him.

  Detective Rico Martín hustled from car to car. He removed his narrow fedora as he entered. Respect. Martín was a man who understood respect and manners. Barton could have liked him if he weren't a cop.

  “So, Detective, how does the manhunt go?”

  “He’s robbed some apartments, and a warehouse store. Still all pretty close to the hosp
ital.”

  “All in Bridgeview?”

  “Yeah.” Martín rubbed the brim of the hat with his thumb.

  “Something bothering you, my friend?” He put a hint of added emphasis on the last word. Martín had gotten himself in trouble, and Barton helped him out. The cop voiced concerns about owing favors to a mob boss. ‘We’re just friends, helping each other out, as friends do,’ Barton suggested at the time.

  “Lieutenant Thorne and the FBI chick went to talk to Raul Juarez at BCJ a couple hours ago.”

  “Are you worried that he might say something implicating me? Your concern pleases me, but is not warranted. I can take care of myself.”

  “F-friends help each other out, right?”

  “The bigger question is what did he tell them, and what conclusions might they draw. Let me know how the morning briefing goes tomorrow.” His first concern remained getting to Steven before the police did. That was too big a loose end to leave out in the open. Juarez himself was an easier issue to resolve.

  “Vice is going after some of your Boost dens, too. I don’t know which ones.”

  “Ah, that’s good to know. Thank you.”

  “Um, I need a favor, Mr. Barton.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “My guy in Vice needs something else he can go after. I...I kinda owe him, and he’s calling on that.”

  Barton looked out through the windshield and swooshing wipers. Martín had proven himself a worthwhile asset. Feeding him something he could use was a reasonable investment. He had a woman in Vice in his pocket, but she hadn’t told him about any Boost busts. She warranted looking into. Just in case.

  “Ah, I know. Tell your man in Vice that in informant tipped yyou off to a brothel in Bridgeview, near the art district. Supposedly, it’s involved in human trafficking. That will give them something that’ll make them look good, and should earn you some good graces.”