The Contractors Read online

  He ran his fingers over a blister pack of pills like the bumps of medication were Braille.

  Opitrene, the next generation narcotic pain medication, manufactured by McCormack Pharmaceuticals. They were called opie-dopies on the street, about eight bucks a pill depending on the market.

  “You know what this is?” McCluskey held up another item, a slim piece of plastic a little smaller than a credit card.

  I knew but didn’t say. An RFID tag, the device that had triggered the scanner. There was probably one embedded in the cardboard of every carton in the back of the trailer.

  “How did you know about this shipment?” He held up the sheet of pills.

  I gave him my best thousand-yard stare, a blank expression on my face.

  “A couple of freelance contractors,” he said. “And you clowns found the big enchilada.”

  I didn’t respond.

  It was too soon for the local office to have responded to our call regarding the shipment.

  “You don’t look familiar,” I said. “You a contractor as well?”

  The firm I freelanced for had the contract to provide supplemental DEA agents for the Dallas Division. I knew most of the other employees as well as the real DEA agents operating out of the local office.

  These guys were part of neither group.

  Therefore, they were either real DEA agents from a different field office, highly unlikely, or employees of another, competing law enforcement contracting firm.

  A guy in a dark windbreaker approached McCluskey and handed him a file. McCluskey flipped it open and scanned the documents inside.

  “You shot two unarmed suspects with hollow points.” He read for a few moments and then looked up. “The serial number on the gun with the hollow points goes to your partner.”

  “I want to talk to my supervisor.” I shrugged. “And a lawyer.”

  “Apparently, this is the same partner who is now aiding and abetting a wanted felon.” He shut the file. “How long have you been in contact with Eva Ramirez?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the trailer with the drugs,” he said. “Now’s not the time to play stupid.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “There’s a lot of cash for whoever brings her in.” He stepped closer. “Did you think you were gonna screw me out of that? Screw me out of her?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  McCluskey punched me in the stomach, the same spot as where the muzzle of the submachine gun had hit.

  I fell to my knees, tried to detect some oxygen in the general vicinity of my lungs. Any little bit would do. Stars dotted my vision.

  “The scanner.” McCluskey knelt beside me. “We picked up two transmissions.”

  The antenna sign on the screen, they’d triangulated the signal. The amount of resources needed to do that staggered me. Fortunately, I’d turned off the device and left it in the Tahoe hidden down the block, which obviously they hadn’t found yet. Sinclair had been right to warn me not to activate the device.

  “You appear to have two things in your possession that are very important to me.”

  I retched, then vomited on the dirty asphalt.

  “A classified piece of electronics that is the property of the US government.” He rubbed his nose, sniffed. “And a woman named Eva Ramirez, a known associate of several high-ranking cartel members.”

  “How much coke does it take to get you going in the morning?” I clutched my stomach. “A narc with a drug problem, that is such a cliché.”

  “You are going to tell me where the scanner is as well as the location of Eva Ramirez.” He grabbed a handful of my hair and forced my head up so we were staring at each other.

  “If you don’t,” he said, “then I am going to use a blowtorch on your toes and work my way up.”

  His matter-of-fact tone was betrayed by the twitch of his feverish eyes. A dot of blood appeared at the base of one nostril.

  “Paranoid delusions.” I coughed. “Another sign of drug addiction.”

  “Then you’re going to become acquainted with a new Homeland Security program, a little thing we call detain-at-will.” He wiped his nose, voice angry now. “Imagine spending the next ten years in Guantanamo Bay.”

  Before I could come up with a smart-ass reply, his radio squawked, a high-low tone, and an agent approached, whispered in his ear. McCluskey jumped up, looked around.

  Sirens in the distance. The other personnel scurried toward their Tahoes. One guy ripped down the crime scene tape. Nobody paid any attention to me.

  I struggled to my feet.

  McCluskey didn’t try to stop me. He pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt and moved a few feet away, speaking into the mouthpiece.

  The two agents in the entry team, Windbreaker One and Two, hopped in the closest Tahoe.

  In the distance, on the main street, a police car appeared.

  McCluskey got in another Tahoe, and all of them sped off in the opposite direction.

  I was alone. I grabbed my badge and gun and ran into the bar.

  The two dead guys were still there. The room smelled like a copper outhouse—spilled blood, released sphincters—mixed with the acrid tang of the smoke grenade.

  I headed to the warehouse, stomach aching not just from the two blows.

  Except for dust and rat crap, it was empty.

  The trailer was gone.

  Five million dollars’ worth of opie-dopies disappeared.

  I tried to control the mounting panic. After a few moments, I went back outside.

  More Dallas police cars than I could count. Three or four white Tahoes. The agent who was our liaison with the regional office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a man named Phil DeGroot, stood by the front door.

  “What the heck’s going on here, Jon?” He looked at me. “We’ve got reports of shots fired. Explosions, too.”

  Several uniformed police officers entered the bar.

  “Piper called in the shipment.” He looked up as a Dallas PD helicopter flew over.

  A spasm of pain rippled through my abdomen. I clutched my stomach, staggered.

  “Well, where is it?” DeGroot caught me so I wouldn’t fall.

  One of the cops came out. “We’ve got a crime scene. Two stiffs inside.”

  “The opie-dopies, what happened to them?” DeGroot said. “And where’s Piper?”

  I shook my head, felt cold even though the day was brutally hot and getting hotter.

  “I have no idea.”

  - CHAPTER NINETEEN -

  The Pussycat Lounge was gone, closed not long after the Night of a Thousand Lap Dances, almost ten years ago. The building had been split into two storefronts, a dialysis center and a payday loan outlet/pawnshop.

  Whenever I drove by, I always wondered if you could sell an item in one side to pay for something else in the other.

  Over the years, I pieced together the story about the strung-out stripper and the baby with the burned legs.

  The guy in the dark suit, Hollis, was a real FBI officer about like I was real employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He worked for the domestic division of a company called Paynelowe Industries, a large multinational military contractor based in Alexandria, Virginia. Paynelowe’s main source of revenue was supplying armed security consultants for corporate VIPs working in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stateside branch, where Hollis worked, had a contract at the time to staff supplemental positions in the southwest region of the FBI, a tiny tributary in the massive river that was the War on Terror.

  The strung-out woman in the storeroom, an alcoholic, drug-addicted stripper, was the mother of the child. The babydaddy—himself a hard-core chemical abuser—was the son of wealth and privilege, the eldest child of a rich man turned US senator.

  The key was not really a key, but a thumb drive shaped liked one, the contents of which were the product of one of the stripper’s few lucid, self-preserving moments.

  The drive contained
photos: the babydaddy and the stripper doing the nasty in all sorts of positions and locales, under the influence of various types of substances.

  As you can imagine, the Senator—a family values and law-and-order type—was none too pleased about the whole situation. So he called the attorney general and, well, one thing led to another.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t know any of this when Hollis, a rent-a-badge FBI agent, stepped into the storeroom of the Pussycat Lounge.

  All I knew was that I was a Dallas cop who had stumbled upon a child with severely burned legs. The injured child was going to the hospital or I was going to hurt somebody. Badly.

  “So which one of you mutts has got the pictures?” Hollis looked at me and Costco. “This key thing?”

  I decided to ask the obvious question first. “Why is the FBI involved?”

  “The whore’s mother.” Hollis pointed to the stripper whimpering in the corner. “She’s married to an Iranian dude that runs a used car lot in Grand Prairie.”

  I turned down the volume on my walkie-talkie. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Iran is a state sponsor of terrorists, dipwad.” Hollis rolled his eyes. “That makes this a national security issue.”

  I didn’t reply. The anger welled inside me, a bubble deep down that threatened to burst.

  “We don’t know anything about a key or any photos,” Costco said. “Do we, Jon?”

  I shook my head.

  Captain Sinclair, possessing the survival instincts of a cockroach, had left the room a few minutes before and not returned. I later found out the owner of the strip club had him on payroll, just as Chung Hee, the owner of the Korean whorehouse, one day would. Unfortunately for the strip club owner, though, there wasn’t much Sinclair could do for him with the FBI involved.

  “Why don’t we take the kid to the hospital and call CPS?” Costco pointed to the infant. “Then you can talk to the stripper about your key or whatever.”

  “That might have been possible before your partner used the radio and got this little mess logged into the system,” Hollis said. “Now we’re operating under different rules.”

  The child woke up. He mewed like a sick kitten, the sound soft but devastating at the same time. The start of the pain.

  “We’re leaving now.” I put my hand on the pistol resting in my Sam Browne belt. “And we’re taking the kid.”

  “I have four agents on the other side of that door.” Hollis held up a walkie-talkie. “I don’t give them the okay, they’re gonna shoot whoever walks out of this room, Dallas Police uniform or not.”

  A trickle of sweat meandered down Costco’s cheek. I squeezed the butt of my gun.

  The child began to cry, a mournful wail. The dope the mother had given him was wearing off.

  “There’s a bureau medical team on their way,” Hollis said. “Maybe a half hour out.”

  “There’s a hospital ten minutes away,” I said.

  “You’re new at this, aren’t you?” He shook his head.

  A dull roar filled my skull. Adrenaline and rage coursed through my system.

  “We’re cool then,” Costco said. “So long as the kid’s taken care of.” He tugged my arm. “C’mon, Jon. We need to get out of here.”

  “Not so fast.” Hollis held up his hand. “The key. Where is it?”

  “We don’t have it,” I said. “Told you already.”

  A keening sound from the child, a screech that started at the base of my spine and rose upward.

  “My baby.” The mother stood, a hand against her bloody nose. “He needs help.”

  Hollis shoved her back. “Nobody gets anything until I get the pictures.”

  “P-p-please let me help my baby.” She was crying. Blood and mucus mixed with the tears and ran down her face. “I’ll give you the photos, just let me help him.”

  Hollis held out his hand.

  “I hid them.” She pointed to the child in the carrier. “There.”

  Costco swore and shook his head. I tried to control the tunnel vision affecting my sight, the cone of anger it projected.

  The woman pulled the crying infant gently from the car seat and set him down on one of the tables. She undid the diaper, releasing a sharp ammonia smell, reached under his buttocks.

  The child cried harder.

  “Criminy, where’d you hide that thing?” Hollis slid on a pair of latex gloves. “You are one sick-ass bitch.”

  She held up a thumb drive shaped like a key with the logo of a well-known local Realtor on one side, a high-tech gimme advertisement for the wired age.

  “You’ll get me into rehab?” The woman handed him the thumb drive.

  “Sure.” Hollis took the device, dropped it into a plastic evidence bag. “Whatever you say.”

  “And my baby?” She licked her lips. “A doctor’s coming for him, right?”

  “You got it.” Hollis held the walkie-talkie to his ear, his smile as cold as January.

  “Then you’ll put him into a good foster home? Like we talked about?”

  Hollis nodded. There was no trip to rehab in the works. People like Hollis didn’t honor deals with marginal members of society like the woman standing in front of us.

  The child’s cries turned into screams.

  “Darn it,” said Hollis. “Looks like the medical team’s been delayed.” He glanced at me and Costco. “You two should get out of here. I’ll let them know outside.”

  “What about the baby?” Costco said.

  Hollis shrugged. Not his problem anymore. He’d try, but not very hard.

  “Let us take him to the hospital,” I said.

  “Nope.” Hollis shook his head. “This little cluster-fuck has turned into a Homeland Security op now. The kid stays with me.”

  Calm swept over me at that moment. I pulled out my Dallas Police Department radio and spoke the words that no FBI agent or national security threat could erase.

  “Shots fired. Officer down.” I rattled off the address for the Pussycat Lounge. “All available units please respond.”

  “What the hell?” Hollis’s face turned pale. “Are you nuts?”

  I dropped the radio and pulled the baton from my belt.

  The first blow knocked out the teeth on the right side of his mouth, the heavy wood connecting with a meaty crunch.

  Then I hit him again. And again.

  After that, things got a little hazy.

  And that’s how I came to be no longer employed by the Dallas Police Department.

  - CHAPTER TWENTY -

  I slumped against a hard plastic booth in the Popeyes Fried Chicken on Singleton Boulevard, not far from the warehouse where the shipment had disappeared and a pair of hoods had been killed with Piper’s gun. That had been two hours ago.

  Piper had disappeared into the white fog and general chaos caused by the grenade, along with the strange woman in the disheveled clothes. I’d thrown up twice more from the smoke and the blow to the gut.

  Popeyes was empty of customers except for myself and Phil DeGroot, our DEA supervisor, who was talking to a girl with purple hair behind the cash register.

  “What I’m hearing you say is that you don’t have a latte machine.” Phil stroked his chin.

  The girl shook her head, eyes rolling just a tad.

  Phil DeGroot was a career bureaucrat. He wore knit ties that weren’t long enough, short-sleeved, plaid dress shirts. No-iron Dockers. A Minnesota transplant who liked to go on budget cruises with his wife, Myrna.

  “So a cappuccino is out of the question?” Phil chewed his lip, frowned.

  “We got, like, decaf.” The girl shrugged. “You can put extra sugar in it.”

  “Tell me about your menu,” he said. “Do you have anything that’s grilled?”

  “Aw, c’mon, Phil. This’s a fried chicken joint in West Dallas,” I said. “The only thing that’s grilled here is the cook’s front teeth.”

  “Hey, that’s funny.” The girl laughed. “You want some decaf, too?�
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  I shook my head.

  “Something to eat?” Phil looked at me. “You want lunch? My treat.”

  My stomach was in knots, mostly fear now. Two dead bodies, the missing shipment. I waved him off.

  “I’ll take a salad and a coffee.” Phil paid the girl and then sat down across from me, a steaming cardboard cup in his hand. After a few sips, he looked up, spoke in a quiet voice. “We’ve got us a little problem here, don’t we?”

  “The shipment was in the warehouse,” I said. “Piper and I both saw it.”

  “I believe you.” Phil dumped a packet of Sweet’N Low in his cup. “Only it’s gone now. And so are those other agents you were talking about.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “You tried Piper again?”

  I nodded. Seven times now, each call going straight to voice mail.

  “Technically speaking, you owe the Drug Enforcement Administration thirteen hundred cartons of Opitrene.” He paused for another taste of coffee. “On account of you called it in.”

  I rubbed my eyes.

  “Relax. You’re an independent contractor, so it’s not like Uncle Sam can garnish your wages.”

  The girl behind the register called out a number, and Phil slid from the booth and got his salad. When he sat back down, he said, “Of course, you won’t be getting paid, either.”

  “We’ve got nearly two months into this one.” I leaned forward. “You should at least cut loose with some expense money.”

  “Haven’t you read your new contract?” He skewered a tuft of lettuce with a plastic fork. “You opted for lump-sum, performance payments. No expenses, no benefits.”

  “The other team took the stuff,” I said. “The agent in charge was named Keith McCluskey.”

  “Yeah, we’ve looked into that.” Phil nodded. “He’s not a DEA employee either. I’m guessing he’s a contractor out of Houston.”

  “I didn’t know Houston contractors had rights in the Dallas region,” I said.

  “What would I know?” Phil took a bite, chewed thoroughly, swallowed. “I’m just a career DEA agent with twenty-six years’ experience.”