Impact tom keeler book 3, p.14
Impact (Tom Keeler Book 3), page 14
The man was grunting and breathing heavy. It was an intimate situation, but I was comfortable with that. I relaxed into it. The guy wasn’t going to be able to get me off. I took him piece by piece, relaxed and confident. I looked into his face, engaged his eyes. He didn’t hold contact. There was a bad bruise on his left temple. The mark of Linda Cartwright’s hammer was perfectly formed and plain to see.
Every time he struggled I was able to increase my traction on his body until he was nullified. He knew it; I saw the look in his eyes: bugged out and fearful, desperate in the knowledge that his life was over, yet not capable of giving it up. My face mashed into his armpit and I got a chunk of flesh into my mouth and bit down hard through his shirt. The guy flinched involuntarily. I shifted position and got a knee on his chest, triumphant. The arm that had been across his neck came back and I smashed a fist into his face, striking him between the nose and the upper lip. That was enough to wrench the big pistol out of his hand.
The guy leapt up. Blood flowed freely from where his lip had been split on the sharp edge of a broken tooth. He was holding his hand up to his face, a reflexive action. I saw the Glock on the ground behind him.
I stood up, stepped back, and covered him with the weapon.
I said, “My friend who hit you with the hammer. You know who I’m talking about. Where is she?”
He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. It made me think about those Homeland Security agents. Dead now, but definitely interested in some kind of Homeland Security–related issue. I hadn’t yet understood why they were involved in all of this. Unless maybe it had to do with some kind of transnational criminal activities. This guy looked like he might be familiar with parts of our two-thousand-mile-long border with Mexico.
I spoke slowly this time. “Easy choices. Either you tell me where you took my friend, or you don’t.”
A look of pure hatred came over the man’s face. The hammer mark had turned red on his flushed face. He screwed his mouth into an ugly twist and tried to spit at me. That was his answer.
I shot him in the chest. Except I didn’t. The firing pin clicked uselessly onto the chambered round, which I immediately assumed was either an ammunition issue or a bad primer strike caused by bad maintenance. I pressed forward while ejecting the round and caught a fast flash of the guy’s terrified face. He might have gone for the Glock, but that wouldn’t have worked. I would have been all over him, with or without a firearm.
By the time I had cleared the gun, and verified that there was no more ammunition in the Desert Eagle, the man was gone through the corn, running for his life. Some kind of a survivor for the time being.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I walked back to J&S Services through the high corn.
The crops didn’t look ready for harvest. Tall and healthy, but not yet something you’d want to put on the grill. On the plus side I came out of the field with a different kind of bounty. Cold and angular weapons made from polymer and steel, with modern ballistic projectiles tucked into magazines and chambers, plus the antique pistol.
The Desert Eagle was impressive, which was the attribute its makers had been aiming to convey. The gun weighed around four pounds with an empty magazine. Impressive, but currently as useless as the antique. The Glock 17 was in 9mm parabellum. Seventeen round magazine capacity plus one in the chamber. Practical. Neither of the two men had thought to lock the van.
I opened the driver’s side door and vaulted into the seat. Five thousand dollars in hundreds made for a fat wad bunched up in my pocket. I eased it out and laid the cash on the passenger seat. The photograph of William F. Cartwright came with it. I separated the card from the photograph, put the card on the cash and returned Cartwright’s photo to my pocket.
The other pocket was stuffed with my wallet and the house keys that I had taken from the upstairs cabinet. I pulled it all out of my pocket and dumped the load onto the passenger seat, right next to the wad of cash.
The cab featured a clean dashboard with a pine tree–shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. I detected nothing else of note in the cab except the chemical stink of the air freshener. I leaned over and popped open the glove compartment. One burner phone sat there looking at me in silver-colored plastic.
I pulled it out and sat back.
In between the driver and passenger seats was another compartment. I lifted the cover and slid it open. The cavity contained a sunglasses case and a wallet. I flipped open the wallet to find the sullen face of the dead guy who had knocked on Cartwright’s door. He peered warily from the top left photo box of an Ohio driver’s license made out to Alfredo Celio Remírez. Besides the license, the wallet contained a thin stack of cash.
I thumbed Collins’s number into the keypad, watching as the digits appeared on the little screen. She answered with a voice like a finely tuned woodwind instrument.
“This is Tela Collins.”
“It’s Keeler.”
“Oh. One moment.” She didn’t speak for a couple of seconds, but I heard things moving. A door closed and clothing rustled before her voice came back online. “I had to close the door. Too much noise from the office outside.”
“You get home all right?”
“Sure. Took a cab to get my car. I’m at work now.”
“How is it?”
“I’m distracted today.”
“Unfinished business.”
“To put it mildly, yes. You know how it is when stuff gets left undone, like the opposite of a satisfying conclusion.”
“I’m tied up at the moment.”
“Don’t play with me, Keeler.” Collins’s voice was somewhere between humor and tension. “You want to know what I’m wearing?”
I said nothing.
Her voice was silk. “I want to put a picture into your head, keep you focused.
“Okay.”
“First, keep in mind that I’ve got a private office. There’s a door and it’s got a lock. And that for work I usually try to dress up.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means I’m wearing a business suit, Keeler. Black and formfitting with a sleeveless blouse in white with ruffles. The blouse has pearl buttons, real ones that work both ways, one way to attach, and the other to remove. The blazer’s on the other side of the room and my shoes are kicked off on the floor.”
I could picture that. I said, “Stockings?”
“Black stockings. I’ve got my legs up on the desk, leaned back in the office chair. If anyone came in the door now I’d be in a compromised position. You got that image, Keeler?”
“It’s vivid in my mind.”
“So what do you want me to do now?”
I let that question percolate for a while, drifting in my mind and hers and in between.
Eventually I said, “I want you to meet me at a school and help me figure something out.”
“Right now?”
“In about a half hour. Doesn’t sound like you’re having a very productive day anyway.”
She said, “So I might as well just get out of here. Is this related to my wearing a short skirt or to the violent events of last night?”
“Both.”
“I see. I can’t promise to be well-behaved.”
“There has been a new development in the situation.”
She let some time pass before speaking. “The situation from last night.”
“Correct.”
“Okay.”
I said, “Your aunt’s neighbor Linda Cartwright seems to have been taken, with signs of a struggle.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t go far last night. Cartwright let me sleep on her sofa. I woke up to her being gone instead of her making coffee.”
“That sounds bad.”
“School’s called Booker T. Washington. I’ll be in a vehicle across the street in about twenty minutes.”
“Can you be any more specific?”
“About what?”
“The vehicle.”
The silver van was facing the wrong direction. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw nothing but a panel wall behind me. I checked the passenger’s side mirror. I could see the line of used cars on the other side of the lot, but not in a very detailed way.
I said, “Not at the moment, but you’ll find me.”
“Booker T. Washington. See you there.”
Collins clicked off the line. I looked up at the rearview mirror again. No rear view, only a blank steel wall separating the cabin from the back. Which made me think about the back of the van, and what I might find in there. I leaned to the driver’s side mirror and looked at myself. Face flecked with the dead guy’s blood and a couple of ancillary wounds from the recent struggles.
I came around to the back of the van. J&S Services was in operation. The garage doors were open, and a car was up on the lift. I couldn’t see the guy whose nose I’d broken, but he was probably in there somewhere, no doubt hard at work.
I pulled the latch on the rear door and partially opened the left side. I saw a wire basket just inside containing a pair of work boots, a flashlight, and a thick roll of duct tape. I peeked in farther. No bodies lying in a pool of blood or wrapped in a plastic tarp. I pulled the two doors wide. There was a rolled-up carpet next to two shovels and a pickaxe. I saw a spool of rope and a black backpack shoved to the rear panel wall. Hanging from hooks on the right side was a weed whacker. Closer to the opening were two red plastic jerry cans.
I vaulted into the van and pulled the doors closed a notch for privacy. The carpet was cheap acrylic with a chunky modern design featuring red, black, and white squares. I rolled it open the width of the van. There were no blood stains. I shifted the carpet and unrolled more. Same thing, nothing obvious, which didn’t mean there hadn’t ever been a body rolled inside, just not a badly bleeding one.
I crab walked to the backpack.
The pack was filled with wood. Specifically, given the color and texture of the wood, I was looking at a bag of broken antique furniture. Given the size of the backpack it would have been either a very small piece of furniture, or a select portion of something.
I thought for a half second and decided there wasn’t enough information to draw conclusions. I turned the backpack upside down and emptied out the contents. I crawled back out into the fresh air with the backpack in my hand and closed the van door.
The stuff situation had gone beyond the pocket stage. The backpack was going to be helpful.
Back in the cab, I placed the Glock in the backpack’s main compartment. There was a zip pocket in the front. I dropped the phone and the keys into that as well as my wallet and the photograph of William F. Cartwright. The antique gun and the Desert Eagle got wiped and went under the driver’s seat.
I had immediate plans for the cash. I shoved the wad into my pocket and closed the van.
There was post-lunch activity around the auto-services bay. A couple of guys moved in and around the raised chassis of a two-door hatchback. The front office door swung open and an older guy egressed. He was absorbed in his phone and didn’t notice my coming. The guy laboriously climbed into a civilian vehicle parked out front.
As I peered through the glass front door, I saw a man at the office desk that had previously been vacant. The tough guy I’d taken out had said the place was owned by Ricardo. I figured that was Ricardo, right there, recovering from lunch.
I had a couple of questions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I closed in on the glass front door and started to get a better look at Ricardo.
He was in his late thirties and was not noticing my approach. The owner remained captivated by whatever it was he had in front of him. As I approached, the object of his attention came into view. He was using a letter opener to slice through the top of an envelope. Ricardo’s nose was prominent and wide, maybe the defining feature of his face. He put the opener down and lifted an orange can from the desk. He tilted it up to drink.
That’s when he saw me coming.
I was one step away from the door and momentarily refocused on my own reflection. Which was a little surprising in the full light of day, my face was still covered in blood from the back spatter in the cornfield. I’d forgotten about that. I decided to ignore myself and came through the glass door. Ricardo’s eyes widened and he spilled foaming orange soda over his shirt.
I said, “Ricardo.”
He nodded, distracted by me, and trying to deal with the spilled soda at the same time. I took two strides to the desk, leaned over, and smashed my blood-encrusted fist into Ricardo’s face. I got him flush in the nose with a slightly downward angle. His head rocked back on a thick neck. Blood joined the orange soda and dripped all over his shirt and chin.
Time was an issue. I’d told Collins twenty minutes, and I like to be punctual. I needed Ricardo’s full attention.
The radio played loudly from the garage to cover the click and whine of a pneumatic air ratchet. Ricardo was trying to get himself together. He was taking too long. I saw the letter opener lying on the desk.
I pinned Ricardo’s right hand to the desk, then fetched the letter opener and placed the point in his palm. He struggled weakly for a moment but gave up fast. I got my face a foot away from his and looked into his eyes. “Ricardo.”
The guy was all over the place, defocused, disoriented, the whole nine yards. Not exactly condition black, but close to it. He was in some kind of a gray area. Ricardo’s eyes finally found mine and settled there, like a shipwreck survivor spotting land.
“Yes.”
“You like this hand. You are right-handed. You need this hand.”
He looked down at the letter opener. The sharp point was presently making an indentation in the center of his palm. “Yes.”
“Good.” I applied pressure and allowed a single drop of blood to pool in the callused palm. He struggled to remain calm, snuffling air through crushed nose cartilage. I said, “I have a date to get to, so this needs to be quick, Ricardo.” His eyes rolled up at me. “I am interested in the house keys that you give out to people sent by The Bob. Do you understand?”
Ricardo nodded, mute.
I waited. Nothing emerged from Ricardo’s mouth. I pushed the letter opener in. More blood came from the pierced skin. He got the message. “I understand.”
Ricardo’s eyes came off me and went on a little trip around the room. First they aimed at the ceiling corner, then traveled in the direction of the automobile key cabinet on the wall. I followed the direction that his eyes had initially travelled, to the ceiling corner. I hadn’t seen it before, but now I did, a little indentation in the wall for the minuscule eye of a camera.
Too late to care about that.
He said, “The house keys. They keep them upstairs. I’m not allowed to go there.”
I said, “The Bob records you, in your own place.”
He nodded, ashamed.
“What is that, a person who people call The Bob, or some kind of garage band with a dumb name?”
Ricardo licked his lips and bared his teeth in a pained grimace. I don’t get concerned with pain; it’s not on my list of things to think too much about. Ricardo didn’t feel the same way. His eyes rolled up and he glanced at me. “You’re coming on a little strong.”
“I’ve got a date to get to. I like her.”
He shook his head, like he didn’t believe it. “The Bob’s got me under his thumb. Yes, it’s a person. I think. I’ve never met The Bob. I don’t think he’s a musician, at least I have no reason to think that. Most people like music.”
“If you don’t meet The Bob in person, who do you meet?”
“Various people who I’d prefer not to meet.”
“Who brings the keys for the cabinet upstairs.”
Ricardo’s eyes widened noticeably. “You went upstairs? They aren’t going to like that. You better think about leaving town.”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m not allowed to go up there. Sometimes they leave keys on the desk and I have to give them out. Like, to contractors. I don’t know anything else. I get here in the morning and either there are keys on the desk, or there aren’t.”
I nodded. “What kind of contractors, Ricardo?”
He licked the blood from his lip. “Cleaners, plumbers, electricians, decorators. People who work on buildings. Sometimes it’s people who do air conditioners. I only see the trucks when they come for the keys.”
“To put it clearly, Ricardo, your shop is being used as a cut out for distributing keys to properties that The Bob acquires through his loan sharking business. I assume that’s how he came to have you under his control.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“They record sound or just the video on that camera up there?”
“I think just the images. They have cameras all over town. The operation is huge.”
“You still owe them?”
He nodded. “Biggest mistake of my life. Look at this shit.” He indicated himself, me, the entire situation. “I’ll never get out from under it. They keep raising the vig and there’s just no way. Once they get their hands on to you they keep squeezing, man.”
“What does The Bob do with the residential properties?”
He hung his head and let it droop. “I don’t know. You think I’m in a position to go digging into The Bob’s business? I’m too busy trying to stay alive.”
“You’re not looking very good, Ricardo. Your quality of life seems unacceptably diminished. Didn’t anyone tell you that offense is the best defense?”
“What do you mean?” Fat tears rolled down Ricardo’s face.
I almost felt sorry for him. I released the pressure from the letter opener. “What’s your plan, Ricardo?”
“What do you mean, plan?”
“I’m just wondering why you don’t terminate The Bob. That could help advance your cause, fix your quality of life issues.” He looked at me, uncomprehending. He didn’t know how to think outside the box he was in, which was why he was in that position in the first place. “Where does someone go to get close to The Bob?”
