Dust Up: A Thriller (7 page)

“Was this Royce the guy who handles security at the building on Thirtieth Street?”

“Might be. He seems to be everywhere all of the sudden.”

“Red-faced guy? No sense of humor?”

“Yeah, that’s him.” She almost smiled. “Anyway, after that we decided to go to the authorities, the feds. Like, whistle-blowers. We were terrified. I mean, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Maybe billions. But if it was true, thousands of people could get sick from eating the Soyagene soybeans—people could die.”

“What happened?”

“We were freaking out, wondering if Vinson and Bourden already knew about it. We were trying to decide who to go to—USDA, FDA, FTC—we couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t totally in bed with Energene already. Ron knew them all, because they all worked for Energene at one point or another. They were all good friends of Bradley Bourden.”

“What did you do then?”

“Ron was afraid for his professional life, you know. Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. But as he kept digging deeper at Energene, he became even more convinced there was a connection between the Soyagene hijacking and the illness at Saint Benezet. He got really scared. He didn’t want me helping him, he didn’t want me having anything to do with any of this. He said we were in danger.” She looked over at me, the fear and vulnerability in her eyes accentuated by a tiny flicker of hope. “Then he decided to come see you.”

We shared a sad, ironic smile, like,
look how that turned out.

“Why me?”

She shook her head, as if looking back maybe it hadn’t been the smartest idea. “Ron did some work with Energene’s insect genetics department. He’d been looking into Stoma’s Bee-Plus program when he read about what happened on Martha’s Vineyard. He said the official story was guaranteed bullshit, that he couldn’t be sure what really happened, but bottom line, you stopped some powerful people from doing some bad things.”

Then her eyes sharpened. “While he was digging, he learned some of what went down in Dunston, too. He said in both cases you took on guys like this, you got the feds involved, and you won. So maybe you had connections there that weren’t in Energene’s pocket. You were local, and he thought he could trust you, so…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess he didn’t know where else to go.”

“You said Ron decided to come to me because he learned something else that scared him. What was that?”

As she opened her mouth, the music out in the hallway turned off, accompanied by a loud cracking sound.

I held up my hand.

The place was suddenly silent, like all the other occupants were holding their breath and listening too.

“Is there a back way out?” I whispered.

Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. Then she pointed to a small sliding window set into the wall. I crossed the room and looked out. It was a ten-foot drop to the concrete alley below. Almost directly beneath us was a black Lincoln Navigator. When I put my face up against the window, I could see a heavyset white guy in a brown suit standing next to it.

I ducked back as he looked up. When I turned to look at Miriam, her face crumpled.

I put a finger to my lips, then held it up, telling her to wait for a moment. I crossed the room and stood next to the door, listening. A floorboard squeaked out in the hallway.

I turned and motioned her into the bathroom.

The guy out back didn’t look like a cop, but you couldn’t always tell. I left my gun in my holster. Then I quietly swung the security latch away from the door. With my back against the wall, I wrapped my left hand around the doorknob and cocked my right fist.

After a few seconds, I caught a strong whiff of cheap men’s cologne and felt the knob shifting in my hand. I ripped the door open and whipped my body around, putting everything I had behind my fist, and hoping to God there was some kind of bad guy out there.

18

I’ve never been a fan of the sucker punch. Kind of lacks class—not that I’m a specialist in that area. The sting of shame is lessened when the sucker you’re punching is holding a gun with a silencer—and even more when he’s doused with cheap cologne—but there’s still something douchey about punching a guy in the face before he has a chance to raise his eyebrows.

Fortunately for this guy, he was shorter than I am and crouching down. I had to adjust my trajectory in midswing, coming down on the side of his head. Fortunately for me, by the time my fist bounced off his temple and he crumpled to the floor, I had gotten over any moral ambivalence. I was hoping pretty hard he wasn’t law enforcement of any kind, but cops don’t use silencers—and they rarely douse themselves with Axe body spray—so even if he was one, it wasn’t my bad.

Axe-Man was down on his hands and knees, his hand still holding that gun. He was wearing a fancy suit—not necessarily a good one, just a flashy one—and a lot of product in his hair. He was young, which could have been why he went to the trouble of using a silencer and then broadcasted his presence with so much body spray. I stomped hard on his gun hand and slammed my knee into his face. He collapsed to the floor and let go of his gun. I kicked it down the hallway. He was out cold but breathing okay. I cuffed him and went back inside for Miriam. I’d read him his rights later.

She was hiding in the shower, trembling. She almost collapsed when she saw it was me, her eyes pinned to the gun now in my hand.

“It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Let’s go.”

I grabbed her by the elbow and guided her toward the door. She pulled back and said, “Can I get my stuff?”

I shook my head. “We’ll come back for it.”

She grabbed her handbag and her wig from off the chair.

Out in the hallway, she stared in horror at the guy on the floor, trying to get up onto his knees. I thought about grabbing the gun—you never knew when it would come in handy—but I’d sent it pretty far down the hallway, so instead I kicked him in the ribs, twice, then hustled Miriam toward the stairs while he groaned on the floor.

The kid at the front desk was gone. The sound system was shattered, with a bullet hole just to the left of the smartphone and shards of plastic littering the shelf.

Miriam’s arm trembled in my grasp as I led her toward the front door. I went out first, gun drawn, but there was no sign of anyone. By the time we were halfway down the path to the street, Miriam was pulling ahead of me, rushing to get to her car. As we reached the sidewalk, we both flinched at a strange popping, cracking noise. Next to us, a six-inch patch of the brown stucco wall exploded into a cloud of white dust.

I turned and saw the guy from the alley, leveling his pistol at us. He was the same age as the other one—young—but his style was more Old Spice than Axe. I brought up my gun, and as he ducked back behind the motel, I pushed Miriam forward. “Get in the car,” I said.

I kept my gun pointed toward at the alley. The streets were deserted, but it was a residential neighborhood. There was a school across the street. I didn’t know what I was going do if Old Spice started firing, but I didn’t want to get into a shootout.

I crouched behind the wall, keeping my gun raised, but he didn’t reappear.

I heard Miriam’s car snarling behind me, the engine revving.

There was no sign of either of the gunmen, but I could feel eyes on me. Glancing down, I saw the pit bull on the other side of the fence looking up at me, his head at a slight angle. He turned away from me at the sound of Miriam’s car speeding away.

We both watched as she disappeared down the block. The dog looked back at me for a moment. Then he left as well, trotting off and disappearing behind the house.

19

I kept my gun raised as I walked back toward the alley. As I’d expected, it was empty. Old Spice was gone, and so was his vehicle. I ran inside and back upstairs. My cuffs were lying empty and open on the ratty carpet. The room was empty, too. All that was left was the smell of cheap body spray.

I was worried about Miriam, hoping she’d gotten away, but there was nothing I could do about that. Part of me thought about just getting the hell out of there, but shots had been fired. At me. And even if none of the neighbors called it in, someone was going to find out. And then they were going to ask why I hadn’t called it in.

Besides, I needed a ride. I called it in. Then I called Danny.

The uniforms were there in five minutes—two cars, four officers.

Danny was there in six, pulling in right behind them. He shook his head as he got out of his car. “So which active narcotics case on our docket were you pursuing out here?” He couldn’t keep a straight face as he said it.

I flipped him off.

“Seriously. I’m confused,” he said. “Suarez tells me you said you were stepping off this case. ‘Carrick decided to act like a grown-up for once in his life.’”

He didn’t sound anything like Suarez. I told him so.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “I’ve been working on it.”

“Well, you’d better keep working.”

He looked indignant for a moment, then he gave his head a brisk shake. “Never mind that. I got the call from the task force. I’m out of town for rest of the week. Leaving tonight.”

Great.

He leaned closer. “We’re having work done on the house. The girls are staying with friends. We’d been planning on staying in a hotel, but now that it’s just her, she’d rather not. Nola offered Laura your guest room, but I know how you feel about houseguests. Say the word and I’ll quietly make other arrangements.”

Even better. “No,” I said with a big forced smile. “It will be great having her.” I owed Danny favors in the triple digits.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course.”

“Great. Oh, and Suarez wants to see you ASAP.”

It was a perfect day, I thought.

Then Mike Warren arrived.

*   *   *

“So tell me this shit again, Carrick,” Warren said for the fifth time, pretending to take notes. “You were just walking along, minding your own business eating a cupcake—”

“A cookie.”

“Whatever. And this lady drives up on you, all in disguise, and says, ‘Get in the car’?”

“Basically, yes.”

We were back in the motel room. Two uniforms were standing by the door, looking awkward but amused at the tension between Warren and me.

I was sitting on the chair, because I got there first. Warren was sitting on the bed, because I hadn’t warned him not to. I smiled.

“You think this shit is funny?” Warren scowled. “You had the prime suspect in a murder in custody and you let her escape.”

“She didn’t escape from me, dumbass. She escaped from the guys who were sent to kill her. Probably the same guys who actually killed her husband.”

“Oh, right, I forgot.” He hooked his thumb at the empty handcuffs lying on the floor in the hallway next to a folded cardboard evidence marker. “The invisible bad guys who disappeared when she escaped.”

“Yeah, that’s right, the guys who left the imaginary slugs in the wall outside and the sound system in the lobby. Maybe the kid at the desk got it on sale because it already had a bullet hole in it.”

He scribbled in his notebook like he’d thought of something important. Probably a doodle of him shooting me. “So she brought you here to tell you something, right? What did she tell you?”

And there it was. I had a decision to make. If I was walking away from the case, that meant I was hoping Warren would solve it. It meant giving him every bit of information I had. Including what Miriam had told me.

I stalled. “So these two guys come after her, and what, you still think she killed her husband in a domestic dispute?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I figure it’s probably the corporate spy angle Bourden was talking about. But who knows, maybe they were coming after you. Someone you locked up—although Lord knows there ain’t many of them, am I right? More likely just someone you pissed off.”

The uniforms laughed. I did, too. It was a good line, even if it was bullshit—plenty of flaws in my job performance, but none of them was about not locking up enough bad guys. I was too distracted to come back at him. I had to figure out what I was doing here.

If Ron’s murder was about something he’d discovered, then Miriam’s attempted murder was about the same thing. Probably by the same guys. I’d seen how far these companies could go to protect their interests, their secrets. This stuff was dangerous, and Mike Warren was careless, not just in a case-botching way but in a getting-people-killed way.

I didn’t know what to do with what Miriam Hartwell had told me, but I knew what
not
to do, and that was just put it out there without knowing what it meant. So if I was keeping it to myself, I had to figure out what was going on. I had to find Miriam again and find out what else she knew.

Warren was staring at me while I was thinking things through. “Then again, maybe it’s about you in a different way.” He shrugged again, looking at me sideways. “Like I said before, maybe you’re banging the Hartwell woman, her husband comes to confront you about it, maybe tell your girlfriend, and you shoot him. Now she freaks out, she’s going to testify against you, you kill her too.”

The two uniforms stopped smiling.

20

I laughed, but he’d made it sound plausible. “You think that’s how it went down?” I said. “He starts banging on my door while I’m in bed with my girlfriend, then what, maybe I climb out the window and run around the block so I can shoot him from the street, then somehow get back inside in time to close the door so I can open it in front of my girlfriend? I knew you were an idiot, but I didn’t know you had this creative side to you. You’re like one of these idiot savants. Do you do anything else? Play the piano or math tricks or anything?”

“Fuck you, Carrick. You know it makes more sense than any of the bullshit you’re talking about. You can joke all you want, but you’d better be giving me something else to go on, or you move up the suspect list to number one.”

He was right; I had to give him something. I turned to the uniforms. “Can you two give us a moment, here?”