Impact tom keeler book 3, p.15
Impact (Tom Keeler Book 3), page 15
A grim smile played upon his lips. “You think this is joke, like you could do better. Nobody finds The Bob. He sends someone to collect; that’s it. New kid every other time. I guess it’s a job for the new guys. The Bob’s intelligent. Always has a bunch of people between himself and the action, at least as far as I’ve seen.”
“Bullshit. You’ve had the thoughts. You’ve gone through the possibilities. You’ve wondered how you could take that prick out. Early in the game, before you got your tenth beating by The Bob’s people. Then you gave it up. But back then you lay awake scheming.”
I could see his eyes clouding over, getting the thousand-yard stare. It confirmed what I’d had as a hunch. People aren’t all that different from each other. Nobody’s that special. Everyone dreams of being a hard ass.
I said, “Where would you go, Ricardo, to have the best chance of getting close to The Bob?”
Ricardo used his free hand to wipe the blood from his upper lip. His face was grim with the memory of failure. “I’ve thought about it, sure. First, I don’t know if he’s from Promise. This isn’t a city; it’s a town. I’ve heard of people owing The Bob in other towns across the state, but not in the big city.”
“He operates in the less-populated areas.”
Ricardo nodded. “Exactly. Which means he would be based in the city.”
“Indianapolis.”
“Right.”
“That’s all you have, Ricardo?”
He shrugged. “You’d be looking for a place with a lot of camera feeds. The Bob likes cameras.”
“That all you’ve got?”
“Yeah, that’s all I’ve got. I’m not Sun Tzu or something.”
Understatement of the month. I released the man and stood back from the desk. “I need a sink. Where do you clean up around here?”
He pointed me to the bathroom.
I splashed water on my face and scrubbed hard with the orange hand cleaner to remove the majority of the dead guy’s dried blood. When I came back, Ricardo was using a tissue to clean out the blood from his nostrils.
He looked up at me. “You really needed to break my nose?”
“It was a decision taken at a certain time with the minimal information I possessed. Can you sell me a car within the next three minutes?”
His shoulders slumped. Ricardo delicately pulled the bloody tissue from his nose. “As long as you have identification.”
“What do you have that’s good?” I saw trepidation on his face. I said, “I’m going to pay you.”
“The Crown Vic. If you’re taking on The Bob you’ll need a decent engine. That thing’s souped up with a cold-air intake.”
I peeled a thousand dollars in hundreds from the wad, laid them on his desk.
Ricardo looked at the pile for a couple of seconds, like he was considering something. I briefly entertained the idea that he might refuse payment. After all, if I succeeded in taking out the loan shark, Ricardo would get his life back. In any case, he used his wounded right hand to drag the cash toward the edge of the desk and slide it into an open drawer.
Three minutes later I drove away with the title to a brand-new used car in the name of Alfredo Celio Remírez. I bumped off the lot and hit the road back to town. Back to Tela Collins, back to Linda Cartwright and Donna Williams’s problems.
Indiana rolled by on both sides, green and pretty flat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Booker T. Washington High School was at the crest of a little green hill rolling up from the road. It looked like what it was, a high school. Worse still, it made me remember my own high school. The memories were unclear, like it had all been a dream. I’d gone to a bunch of different schools, one for each place we’d moved when my mother finished one job and got another. She worked in the energy industry, helping her clients guess at what they’d find deep in the ground. She dragged us from one pile of rocks to the next, which meant a new school every year or so.
The bigger schools had featured a hallway with sports trophies in a glass case. No matter what school it was, they’d called that hallway jock hall. And the same bullies always hung out near the trophy case, picking on kids as they tried to get through.
I’d learned a lot in jock hall, about cowardice and weakness, but most of all about fighting. The military taught me skills and technique, but for better or worse, the first lessons had been learned in jock hall. Lesson number one: get the first shot in, because it’s going to be the last. Which brought up the satisfying memory of my fist connecting with a big blond kid’s face and the blond kid’s sudden look of shock and fear.
The passenger door opened and Collins was there. The backpack was taking up space. I tossed it into the back. She folded herself into the passenger seat, one leg at a time. She closed the door and looked at me. I looked back at her and felt my brain melt. Business attire with the full monty: stockings, heels, skirt, blouse, and blazer. All put together so you’d never know it had ever been apart.
She raised her eyebrows and glanced around the car. “New wheels, Keeler.”
I said, “How do you rate it?”
She ran a hand over the dashboard. “Better than a Kia.”
I said, “Crown Victoria.”
“Yessir, old police interceptor.” Collins slapped the dashboard. “2012 Crown Vic. You’ve bought into the end of an era.”
I said nothing.
She said, “So what’s the deal?”
The deal was that she looked damned good in a business suit. I snapped my gaze away from that and indicated the school. “I want to get in there and find a student file. It’s got an address on it.”
Collins smoothed and straightened her skirt. “Whose address?”
“Donna Williams, the woman who took the shot at your aunt’s neighbor Linda Cartwright, then blew her own face out.”
“Why is her information at the school?”
“Because Williams has a daughter who attends. Cartwright works as a substitute teacher. She used her contacts to get the file.”
“That was a smart place to look.”
I nodded. “Cartwright’s a competent woman if she’s still alive. She had a printout of the school file, but it’s not at her house. I think whoever snatched her took that printout as well.”
She nodded to herself. “So what you’re wondering is how we go in there and get what we need without them getting suspicious.”
I liked the way the pronouns had become collective. I said, “That’s exactly what I’m wondering.”
Collins sank into the seat. “Let’s watch for a while, see who comes and goes, see what they do, what they look like, how they interact.” She glanced at me. “We need to get a good overall idea of how people are behaving, then we can draw conclusions and make a plan.”
We sat in the car looking at the school for ten minutes. Collins didn’t break eye contact with the building. People came and people went. Students, staff, and a couple of other individuals who I pegged as outside contractors or maintenance.
Eventually I asked, “You’ve seen the landscape, you’re an expert. What’s the verdict?”
She turned and let the green eyes rip into me. “So, I’m wondering what happens when the fire alarm gets pulled. They must have some kind of a protocol, like a fixed way of responding.”
I snapped my fingers. “Safety mentality.”
I removed the backpack from the rear seat and walked around the car to the back. I popped the trunk and set the bag down. The wad of cash was uncomfortable in my pants pocket, so I slid it into the front compartment of the backpack, where it joined the burner phone and the clutch of house keys. This time, I locked the car.
We walked into the school like we had business. It took us a minute to identify the layout. The school administration offices were past jock hall. The admin section was open plan with wide windows looking in from the hallway. The principal’s office was behind the admin desks. Two women and a man were hunched over in office chairs, looking at standard flat screen computer monitors. The man was eating a banana.
Collins pointed to the bathrooms down a short corridor off the main hallway. There were two doors side by side, one for the boys, one for the girls. Straight ahead was a handicapped toilet with the wheelchair sign. On the wall, just in from the water fountain was a red fire alarm pull station. There was a glass bar in front of the trigger, a simple but effective means of deterring false alarms. You didn’t pull that thing unless you were ready to break something.
I pulled the switch. The glass fell with a tinkle. The alarm went off immediately, a piercing wail. Collins slipped into the boy’s bathroom and I followed. The smell of paper towels hit me like a wall of nostalgia. She opened the door to a toilet stall and motioned me in. Collins sat on the toilet seat and I stood against the partition wall. We waited and listened.
There was the alarm, raising a ruckus, and the reverberated sound of feet pounding polished floors and people talking loudly. Commands were shouted by teachers and staff. There were softer sounds of students not caring one way or another but shuffling into assigned corridors and exit routes.
The positive was that classes were being disrupted. Positive for the students, a pain in the ass for the teachers. I thought of the administrators we had seen. I figured they’d be right up out of their chairs for the fresh air. No problem getting them to take a break.
Collins said, “How long do you think?”
“Five minutes total, two remaining.”
She stood up and leaned herself against my chest, hands spread out on either side, cheek touching just below the hollow of my neck. Her touch was like some kind of star dust. I put my hands at her waist, slid one around to the small of her back where it curved in. It felt good there, like a natural place to be. She smelled like lemon-scented soap mixed with some kind of vanilla body lotion. After what seemed like a long time, but was still way too short, she spoke. I could feel her mouth moving through my shirt. “Are you counting?”
“One minute and a half left.”
“Okay.”
The door to the bathroom banged open. An adult male voice called out. “Anyone in here?”
We didn’t answer, we didn’t move. She clutched me tighter. The door banged shut.
She said, “You think that’s the principal?”
“Or the janitor.”
Above the toilet was a small window in textured glass. I disengaged and stepped up on the seat cover. The window opened a crack, allowing me a slim view of the front lawn. Students and staff were milling around. I figured they were following the safety protocol, waiting the prescribed amount of time while the dedicated fire marshal assessed the situation. Maybe that was the guy who had come into the bathroom to check everyone was out. I calculated that we’d have something like five to ten minutes to do a little research in the school administration office.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The hallway was empty. All the hubbub came from out front, for now. The administrators had picked up and left. I canvassed the computer screens. Two out of three had been switched off, the banana eating guy’s screen was active, white and bright, filled with windows and data. I clicked the keyboard to make sure it didn’t time out. Collins took a seat at the desk.
I said, “Five minutes and we’re out.”
“Yes, boss.”
Collins dealt with the computer; I took a tour of the principal’s office. One side was lined with filing cabinets. I pulled on a drawer but it was locked. I returned to the admin room. Another wall of filing cabinets, also locked.
Collins was focused on the screen in front of her, monitoring my movements at the same time. “I bet the administrators have the cabinet keys attached to their key rings, which are probably in their pockets.”
That made a lot of sense. They would be using those cabinets all the time. The way to keep the documents confidential was to keep the cabinets locked. The daily work of an administrator would involve quite a lot of key use.
Collins was clicking the mouse, hunched over and leaning forward in concentration. “Hmmm, but they might have the documents copied digitally as well.”
I methodically flipped through the stacks of paper on the administrator’s desks. Nothing related to student records. I walked into the principal’s office and looked through his correspondence. I found nothing more interesting than the documents piled up on the other desks. I came back out and hovered over Collins.
Four minutes and twenty seconds later we weren’t any closer. No Donna Williams, no sign of student records. A lot of administration, like budgets and grade curves and exam board notes. A whole bunch of abstract regulations without the concrete data we required. Collins looked tense. “Maybe it’s something they get to through a web browser, Keeler. If that’s the case, I won’t be able to guess the login or the URL.”
Voices came into the admin room from the hallway, bouncing around off the glossy floors and walls. I couldn’t understand what was being said. The voices receded when the people speaking turned onto another wing of the building.
Collins said, “You think they can identify which alarm went off?”
“Focus on what you’re doing. The alarm triggers a centralized computer, which sends the signal to the fire department. They’ll know which one was triggered.”
We were running out of time.
I moved back to the principal’s office and took a chance. I used a paper clip to pop the lock on his desk drawer. Inside were trays for office hardware, like more paper clips, a stapler with extra staples, and refill cartridges for a fancy pen. Right next to that was a set of two keys on a flimsy ring, backups.
I moved to the filing cabinets right in front of me and tried one of the keys. The first attempt worked. The second key was different. That would be for out front. I pulled off the second key and came through to the open space. I whistled at Collins and tossed her the key.
She caught it left-handed and looked at me.
I said, “Filing cabinets. You’re in here, I’m in the principal’s office.”
The two voices from before were coming back: two colleagues chatting about lunch, going through the fire drill procedure, unworried. Collins got busy with the filing cabinet in the admin office. I went back to the principal’s office. Twenty seconds later, I found a whole bunch of historical school records but nothing that told me about the present. Collins’s voice called quietly through the door. She was calm now, good under pressure. “Come in here.”
I came out to the admin office. Collins was closing the section that she’d been looking into. “This is the A to G section.” She pointed to the far right. “That’s going to be where we want to look.”
Three cabinets, twenty six letters in the alphabet. Which didn’t divide easily into three. I stepped aside and Collins put the key into the cabinet on the right and pulled it open. I watched over her shoulder. There were fifteen folders for W, and two were Williams. She pulled both out. The first was a sixteen year old boy named Sasha. The second folder was the one. I saw a photograph of a blond girl and the name Emma Williams. Collins flipped the pages and caught the mother’s details, Donna Williams. She flashed a look at me.
I laid the pages on the desk, Collins snapped photos with her phone. Six pages and six photos later she checked the pictures for camera blur. “All good.”
I put the folders back in the cabinet and pushed the sliding door in. The latch clicked. The principal’s desk drawer was open. I walked back and dropped the keys in. I didn’t bother trying to lock the drawer. The paper clip went into a garbage can.
Coming back into the admin area, I had a thought. “Collins, did you see an attendance register?”
Collins was wiping down the keyboard and mouse with an antibacterial wipe from a desk dispenser. She stopped moving and looked at me. “You want to know if the girl’s in school.” I said nothing. She said, “I didn’t see one. Do we have time to keep looking?”
I shook my head. “Negative.”
We walked out of the administrator’s office. When we were halfway down the hallway, Collins spoke quietly. “We can call the school and I’ll pretend to be Donna Williams looking for her daughter. If Emma’s not here they’ll know.”
“Good idea.”
We found an exit through the gym and out the back. Behind the school was a baseball diamond. We sat on the bleachers for a minute. The back of the building was all red brick wall. A half-dozen kids were lounging around smoking and posturing.
The air was heavy with humidity. A complete change from the morning.
The sky had been blue and clear when we came in. Now it was covered in swollen clouds, threatening to rain. Collins had her phone in hand, looking at the pictures we’d taken. She read out loud. “Emma Harper Williams, fifteen years of age. Mother is one Donna K. Williams.”
Collins looked up at me. I saw the emotion expressed by her eyes, concern, compassion. Something like that.
She said, “What do you think’s going on, Keeler?”
I told her about the loan shark they called The Bob and the keys that I had found in the upstairs area of J&S Services. I said, “I don’t know what the exact story is, but these people are in trouble.”
“The Bob. You think that’s a single person or some kind of an organization?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’m figuring it’s a single person with an organization.”
“Right.” She was staring into space. She turned to me with a face all screwed into a single good question. “Why do you think those Homeland Security agents were involved with this?”
“You mean, if it’s a loan sharking issue.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“I don’t know. I’m wondering the same thing.”
