The Contractors Read online

  I massaged my bruised stomach, swallowed a wave of nausea.

  “How’d you know about that location?” Phil sliced a tomato.

  “A confidential informant.”

  Rich Dude in his fancy house in Highland Park. Sinclair had told us about a low-level cartel soldier who we’d started following. The soldier had approached Rich Dude about leasing space. We immediately started investigating Rich Dude and used what we learned to lean on him for information about the soldier and his plans for the lease space.

  Phil munched another few bites, then pushed his plate away.

  “Speaking of Houston. Got an email a day or so ago. One of their scanners has gone missing. Assigned to the company working the South Texas region.”

  I shrugged, tried to look innocent.

  “An outfit you might have heard of,” he said. “Paynelowe.”

  “How’d they get a scanner to lose?” I tried not to think about that name. “Field agents aren’t scheduled to get those for another eighteen months.”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged. “That was the original plan. Had to go through the spook brigade at Langley first.”

  Neither of us spoke for a few moments.

  “Seems Paynelowe’s doing overlay work in the Dallas region.” Phil drained his coffee cup. “Thought you should be aware of that.”

  Real DEA agents operated under a regional system designed to keep things organized and sane. Private law enforcement contractors, with their bottom line mentality, had recently lobbied for and won the right to operate more independently. The result, more often than not, was utter confusion on the street.

  “Paynelowe.” I shook my head. “That explains a lot.”

  Phil DeGroot clearly had brushed up on my little, all-but-forgotten slice of history with the company, the incident where I bashed in the teeth of a Paynelowe contractor, an FBI agent named Hollis. He also knew of Paynelowe’s reputation, as did most law enforcement officers and private contractors. Paynelowe was aggressive to the point of unlawful. Their agents were violent when they didn’t need to be, imperious, disrespectful of actual government employees.

  I tried Piper’s cell again. Nothing.

  “The scanner program may not happen as planned.” He stuck a toothpick between his front teeth. “The privacy beatniks are all up in arms, some malarkey about civil rights.”

  “Imagine that.” I tried not to sound too sarcastic.

  An unmarked Chevy Impala pulled in next to my Tahoe, where the charred scanner sat on the floorboards. Two beefy men in their forties got out. The suits they wore looked like they’d come from the wardrobe department on Hee Haw. Homicide investigators.

  “Dallas PD wants to talk about those stiffs at the warehouse.” Phil watched them walk toward the entrance. “You know these guys, Jon?”

  I shook my head. They’d know about me, that’s for sure. Mutilate an FBI agent and word gets around.

  “Piper’s fingerprints were all over the gun.” Phil shook his head. “And how many times have I told her not to load up with hollow points?”

  He’d obviously saved the most unpleasant topic for last.

  “There was an entry team, DEA, like I told you already,” I said. “One of them shot the two suspects with Piper’s gun. They were both wearing gloves.”

  “I believe you.” He sighed. “Those Paynelowe guys, they play rough. It’s gonna be their word against yours.” A long pause. “And with your record, well, you know.”

  I had not told him about the strange woman in the disheveled clothes. Part of me didn’t believe she’d really been there. Part of me hoped all of this was a dream. Then I remembered the look in Keith McCluskey’s eyes.

  “There was another person at the scene.” I lowered my voice. “Somebody who saw what happened.”

  Phil didn’t say anything.

  “Does the name Eva Ramirez mean anything to you?”

  Phil pursed his lips, sucked in a mouthful of air, surprised. The two cops entered the restaurant.

  “She disappeared a few days ago,” he said. “Set to testify in the Morales trial, the deal in West Texas.”

  My turn to express surprise. The Morales trial was potentially the biggest strike against Latin American organized crime in a generation. Morales was the number two guy in a major cartel. The thinking was that if he got close enough to going to prison, he might make a deal and turn over the number one guy.

  “She’s dead by now,” Phil said. “That’s what everybody’s saying.”

  “We saw her, Piper and me, in the warehouse.” I explained briefly. “More importantly, she saw us. Saw who really shot those two guys.”

  The homicide cops in bad suits stopped at the counter and ordered coffee.

  “Me and Myrna have Bible study tonight.” He stood. “I’ve got a ton of paperwork still.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You’re leaving me to deal with these guys alone?”

  “I like you, Jon, always have.” Phil put his hands on the table, leaned close. “But you make poor choices, get yourself into things that are bad news for everybody.”

  He shook his head and walked out.

  - CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE -

  My interview with the two Dallas homicide detectives went about as well as expected.

  From the booth in the Popeyes, I tried to explain how two dead guys ended up in the abandoned bar, both killed with my partner’s gun. I did not mention the witness, Eva Ramirez. Something told me that now might not be a good time to bring her up. Visions of Sinclair, the crooked ex-cop with the long reach, listening to every word of my supposed confidential interview, danced in my head. Where did he fit in with all of this?

  They were homicide investigators so they didn’t believe me, as was their way. And since Piper was MIA, they informed me I would be the one indicted once all the paperwork and tests were completed. Oh, happy day.

  Fortunately, both of the deceased had extensive criminal histories as well as ties to organized crime, while I possessed a federal law enforcement badge. Unfortunately, the detectives kept wanting to know why my DEA supervisor hadn’t stuck around for the initial interview.

  I told them again about Keith McCluskey and the other team of agents who seemed to have vanished into the ether. They didn’t write anything down this time, just stared at me. We scheduled a follow-up meeting for the next day, ten in the morning, Dallas police headquarters. A suggestion was made that I bring an attorney and a DEA supervisor.

  I scribbled down the details about our next confab on a paper napkin, nodded politely to both men, and left. Outside, I crumpled the napkin into a ball and tossed it on the floor of the Tahoe as I got in the driver’s seat. Rule one, Jailhouse School of Law: Never voluntarily enter the police station if you are even remotely suspected of a crime.

  I started the engine, took a deep breath, and tried to contain the rising panic. The scanner was sitting on the floorboard in the shoe box where I’d left it.

  My federal ID would stall them only so long. Dead bodies meant coroner’s reports, referrals to the grand jury. A slow-moving but unstoppable wave of official entanglements was headed my way. Fortunately, the home address on my driver’s license and in my personnel file was a condo in Fort Worth, not the borrowed apartment. Tracking me down wouldn’t be easy. Piper’s records were similar.

  I exited the restaurant parking lot. Piper and I had a backup plan, a rendezvous point if things went bad. This certainly qualified. I tried her number again, nothing.

  The shotgun houses of West Dallas zoomed by. I pulled onto the freeway, headed back to town. The glass and chrome skyline glistened in the afternoon sun.

  The interior of the Tahoe smelled like a house fire, either the residual smoke still in my head from the bar or the charred scanner. Before going to the rendezvous point, I needed to get rid of the thing. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t turned it on. If Sinclair hadn’t given it to me.

  I turned south on Interstate 35, drove past downtown, and rea
lized I wouldn’t have found the drugs or the witness without Sinclair either.

  The trailer and plot of land where my half sister and father lived was a rental owned by Tanya’s ex-sister-in-law, an active-duty noncommissioned officer serving in West Germany.

  Tanya and my dad get all their mail at a PO box in Seagoville, a town on the southern border of the county known primarily for being home to a medium-security federal penitentiary. Since it was on the county line, most of the state databases were split, adding an extra layer of difficulty in case anybody wanted to track them down. In other words, the property was virtually untraceable to them and by extension to me.

  I turned onto the driveway and stopped. The trailer was barely visible in the distance. Tanya’s truck was gone.

  Off to the right, a few feet in front of the Tahoe, a narrow path led through the brush.

  I left the motor running, got out, and jogged down the trail, the shoe box with the scanner tucked under my arm.

  Bamboo intermixed with squat cedar bushes on either side of the trail. At the end of the path sat a storage shed. It was wood-sided, about six feet square, a tin roof.

  I opened the door. The interior was full of rusted lawn equipment and smelled of motor oil and insecticide. The floor was rotting plywood.

  I found a sheet of plastic, wrapped the shoe box, and then pulled up a corner of the flooring. There was a hollow space, a depression in the dirt that just fit the shoe box. I stuck the package there, replaced the floor, and pushed a broken roto-tiller over the spot.

  Sweat dripped from my face, not just from the heat. I left, mopping my forehead with one hand.

  A dog barked in the distance, and a single-engine plane flew overhead not too far away.

  I wanted to go see my father. But I didn’t.

  - CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO -

  Nearly ten years ago—maybe a year after the unfortunate incident at the Pussycat Lounge where I encountered Hollis, the FBI contractor—I found myself adrift, both emotionally and professionally, making a subsistence living from the occasional private investigator job.

  The pictures on the key-shaped thumb drive had been destroyed, but the debacle at the Pussycat Lounge had ended the only way it could: badly for everybody but the Senator, who was reelected by a landslide.

  His son cleaned up for a short period but eventually crashed his Porsche into a house in South Dallas on the way back from a crack dealer. Both car and house were destroyed, and two of the three children asleep in the front bedroom were severely injured. The son served a total of seven hours in jail for his crime. A few months after that, he overdosed and died in a motel room in Galveston.

  For assaulting the FBI agent, I was fired but not prosecuted. The media had uncovered Hollis’s record during his US Army deployment in Afghanistan, a document that used terms like “excessive civilian casualties” and “unfit for duty” in abundance. A court case would bring all that to light, so the powers that be decided to cut their losses and be satisfied with merely terminating my partner and me. Costco, deep on the wrong side of fifty, took it relatively well even though he was still a couple of years short of his full pension.

  The mother of the child with the burned legs never made it to rehab. The EMTs from the ambulance I’d called were finally allowed into the storeroom, and she went to the hospital with her infant. She dried out and detoxed, and her son recovered, though his legs were severely scarred.

  Upon her release, she moved in with her mother. She tried to stay clean, but a few months later she’d downed two bottles of Yellow Tail Chardonnay and a hydrocodone and went for a drive with her son in the back of her Hyundai.

  When she woke six hours later, she was in the driveway of her mom’s house, the keys in one hand, a third empty bottle in the other.

  She had no recollection of the day’s events. A giant, gaping black hole of unaccounted time. The car was in the same condition as when she left with only an additional twelve miles on the odometer.

  Everything was the same, as it should be.

  Except her son wasn’t in the rear in his car seat.

  For years afterward, I would try to understand the emotions that went through her mind at that moment. The horror, the sense of doom.

  The child was never seen or heard from again. No corpse turned up. The Amber Alert failed to yield a single lead. Neither did the private detectives that were hired. No ransom note was ever delivered. Nothing. It was as if that baby had never existed. I spent a lot of time and energy tracking down leads but to no avail.

  A few months after the child disappeared, I was in a bar near downtown when Costco Barnett, my old partner, came in.

  He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and conservative blue tie. He’d lost about forty pounds, and his whiskey tan had faded.

  “You’re a hard man to find.” He ordered a Diet Coke.

  “Costco?” I tilted my head, stared at the new image. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Not many people call me that anymore.” He held out an FBI badge. “I’m a federal agent now.”

  “You? A Fed?”

  “Yep. Well, a government contractor,” he said. “Ever see those guys in Iraq that look like they ought to be at the country club in their khaki pants and button downs, carrying machine guns?”

  “The private military contractors?” I said. “The mercenaries?”

  “Please.” He held an index finger to his lips. “We don’t use the m word.”

  “But you’re a federal agent?” I couldn’t quite get my head around what he was saying.

  “I’m both. It’s the coming thing.” He nodded. “I actually work for a firm called Blue Dagger Industries.”

  “Blue what?” I ordered another beer.

  “Look, dipwad.” He pointed a finger at me. “I’m trying to offer you a job. We need warm bodies with law enforcement experience.”

  “Even with my record?”

  We’d both been terminated but, because I had assaulted Hollis, the black marks in my file far outweighed his.

  He nodded. “You can’t be on salary like me, but you can still make good money.”

  I didn’t say anything. I thought about my life at the moment. Costco nodded, seemed to read my thoughts.

  “Blue Dagger would pay you the daily rate,” he said. “Plus a 401(k) account and a commission.”

  “A commission?”

  “We need DEA agents. Whatever the street value is of any contraband you seize, we pay you a percentage.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head.

  “I’d be a federal agent?” I said. “But work for a private company?”

  Costco nodded. “Blue Dagger wants you on the team.”

  I pondered that for a moment. Then, I said, “Why me?”

  “Your record.” He stared at the pool, chewed on his lip. “It’s a good match with the narcs.”

  I didn’t press him. Did he mean my record as a cop, or my record that got me fired as a cop?

  “I don’t actually do fieldwork,” he said. “I’m a recruiter. My commission comes when I sign up guys like you.”

  Neither of us spoke for a few moments. The implication floated in the smoky air of the bar. Costco was there because I owed him.

  “When do I start?” I said.

  “Yesterday woulda been good.” He straightened his tie. “Get cleaned up and I’ll introduce you to your supervisor, Phil DeGroot.”

  - CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE -

  Ernesto Fuentes-Manzanares reviewed the notes from his business trip to the East Coast and his meeting with Senator Stephen McNally. He was sitting in a window seat in first class, a United flight from Dulles to San Diego.

  Banco Manzanares Internationale, Ernesto’s family business, had entered into an arrangement with a Mexico-based organization with financial concerns in the United States—mainly bridge loans and various cash flow services—and Ernesto had been tasked with due diligence, inspecting facilities and inventor
y.

  His personal guard, a former Mossad agent, occupied the aisle seat, still wearing the same gray suit.

  Ernesto carried the envelope Senator McNally had given him in the breast pocket of his velvet blazer. He wore the jacket for the entire flight. The black looked spectacular with the purple of his shirt, so he saw no need to remove it.

  When they landed at San Diego International Airport, two freshly washed Suburbans met them at the curb outside the terminal. Both vehicles were armored. The drivers worked for the security division of the La Jolla office of Banco Manzanares.

  The first SUV had California plates. Ernesto handed the driver the envelope that Senator McNally had given to him, and the vehicle sped away.

  The second Suburban had Mexican plates, and Ernesto and his personal guard slid into the rear seat. A security agent, armed like the driver, rode in the front passenger side.

  Before shutting the door, Ernesto took a deep breath of the sea air, marveling at the beauty and balmy temperature of Southern California after the heat and humidity of Washington.

  After stopping for Starbucks, they headed south, a straight shot down I-5 to San Ysidro where the interstate breached the Mexican border at the world’s busiest land crossing.

  A little after lunch, the crossing point wasn’t very crowded, only a ten-minute wait in the eight lanes of traffic headed toward Baja California.

  They entered Mexico, waved through by a tired-looking border guard, and soon they were on the crowded main thoroughfare heading south, the Paseo de Los Heroes. Except for the billboards for the men’s clubs, this part of Mexico looked remarkably like what they had just passed in San Diego, strip malls and office buildings, chain outlets and fast-food restaurants.

  Twenty minutes later, the cartel spotters picked them up, just past the Ensenada-Tijuana Highway. Two young men in a late-model Camaro stuck on their tail like a husk on a tamale.

  The guard in the front seat looked in the back at Ernesto and his personal security man, the Israeli.

  Ernesto finished his coffee and said in Spanish, “Who are they?”