The Contractors Read online

  The balcony was a rectangle, about eight feet long by three feet deep. A waist-high metal railing ran along the edges. The view looked east over the emerald canopy that led to White Rock Lake.

  Piper followed me out.

  Someone banged on the door to the bedroom.

  “We have to go down,” she said.

  The balcony below us was identical to ours.

  “Yeah, that’s the only option.” I pulled the Glock from its holster, wedged it between my hip and the waistband of my jeans.

  “I’m terrified of heights,” she said.

  Muffled gunfire, most likely from the hallway. Not silenced. More of Sinclair’s guys or the real police? Either way, I hoped it slowed everybody down.

  I stuck the extra mags in my back pocket and connected the Sam Browne pistol belt with the regular one I’d pulled from my waist. Looped the double-length piece of leather through the bottom rung of the railing.

  “Lower yourself and I’ll catch you.” I stepped over the protective barrier. Tried not to think about the dizzying height and the accompanying shakes.

  Toes on the edge, I eased my torso down until I was on my haunches, one hand on the railing, the other in a death grip on the leather.

  I let go of the metal and pushed out with my feet. Swung away and then back toward the building. Let go. Landed in a heap on the balcony below.

  A few seconds later, one of Piper’s legs appeared.

  I wrapped an arm around her thigh. Grabbed her waistband with my free hand. Inched her body down until we were in an embrace. Then I pulled her in.

  “You okay?” I took several deep breaths, trying to lower my galloping heart rate.

  “Okay is relative, but I’m fine for the moment.”

  The apartment on the ninth floor was empty, unfinished as well. The sliding door was not locked. Piper and I rushed through the vacant rooms to the hall entrance. We stopped at the door.

  I grabbed the Glock from my waistband, placed an ear on the door, listened. Nothing.

  “Did you get everything?” I opened the door.

  Piper nodded, followed me out. We took the emergency stairs down, encountered no one. The garage was empty. We jogged to the exit and stopped.

  “Where’s the car?” Piper said.

  “Same place.”

  “Want to race?” She handed me a new cell phone.

  I drove without destination, crisscrossing the residential streets on the west side of White Rock Lake, like a patrol cop with nothing to patrol.

  Neither of us talked.

  Piper was in the passenger seat. Eva Ramirez sat in the back, hands cuffed in front now, hooked again to the D-ring. The duct tape was still across her mouth.

  I made a turn and headed east toward the lake.

  The closer we got to the shoreline, the nicer the houses. Bungalows became estates, glimpses of sweeping lawns not quite hidden by stone walls.

  A few minutes later, on a narrow tree-lined road, I stopped by a cemetery, the wrought-iron fence overgrown with oleanders and Boston ivy. I parked under a towering cedar tree so elderly it must have been planted during Prohibition.

  I opened the door and got out. Piper exited as well. The gate to the cemetery was open, and we walked through it.

  The place had been freshly mowed but not edged. Weeds grew around the bases of the tombstones. The graves were all old, at least for this part of Texas. The ones nearest indicated deaths from the 1920s.

  I sat on a marker for a veteran of the Confederate States of America and pulled out the cell phone I’d taken from Tommy, the guy who worked for Sinclair.

  “Where’d you get that?” Piper eased onto a tombstone next to mine.

  I told her. “The other DEA agents had to be Paynelowe contractors.”

  She nodded. “I recognized one from the warehouse yesterday.”

  “They must have tracked Sinclair’s people.” I held up Tommy’s phone. “Triangulated a cell or something.”

  After a long pause, he said, “This is some bad mojo we’re dealing with.”

  I scrolled through the numbers in Tommy’s cell. Most were local, but a couple were from the 202 area code, Washington, DC. I didn’t want to dwell on what that meant.

  The last incoming and outgoing calls were to a phone a few digits off of the one we had for Sinclair.

  I pressed the Send button.

  “Why did you do that?” Piper shook her head.

  I motioned for her to be quiet.

  A woman’s voice answered after one ring. “You take care of it?”

  I grunted but didn’t speak, evidently something Tommy would not have done. The call ended abruptly.

  “So much for that.” I shrugged.

  Piper handed me one of the backup phones. We programmed each other’s new numbers, busywork, each of us trying to come up with something that could get us out of the mess we found ourselves in.

  A few moments later, Tommy’s phone rang, a private number in the caller ID.

  Piper and I looked at each other. She nodded, pointed to the cell.

  I clicked the speaker button. “Yeah.”

  Silence. Heavy, labored breathing. Then, Sinclair’s voice: “Where’s Tommy?”

  “He can’t come to the phone right now,” I said. “In fact, he’s pretty much out of the game on a permanent basis.”

  Sinclair swore, his voice soft, full of genuine pain. He cleared his throat and said, “That boy was like a son to me.”

  “Paynelowe had a team at the Cheyenne,” I said. “That’s not on us.”

  Sinclair hesitated. Then he spoke again, voice gravelly: “You have her, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Give her up, Jon, and I’ll see that you walk away in one piece.”

  Piper snorted.

  “We’ll call it a favor for your daddy,” he said. “Bring her to the house on Tranquilla, then you can skiddaddle.”

  Piper spoke for the first time. “We’re supposed to trust you why?”

  “The bounty on her is fifty thousand,” he said. “I’ll double that. Right now, cash money.”

  I didn’t say anything. Piper patted her watch and nodded toward the Tahoe. Every second we were on a phone tied to Sinclair was another second advantage to Paynelowe and their cell trackers.

  “All right, you little turd.” Sinclair’s voice was angry now. “I’ll go a hundred grand each.”

  That was a large sum, even for a crooked ex-cop with delusions of grandeur. Two hundred grand was a whole lot of payoffs from small-time hoods like the Korean pimp. Sinclair was desperate, a condition to which up until now I thought him immune. Milo was right. Sinclair was the Shield, and he wasn’t afraid of going to prison. He’d been skimming from the cartels, his clients, the ones he supposedly shielded, and he was afraid of dying. Slowly and painfully.

  Sinclair spoke again, voice softer time. “This shit’s bigger than you think. Bigger than your little mind can imagine.”

  Piper was at the gate. She whistled, snapped her fingers. At this point, every second on the line was an exponential increase in our risk.

  Sinclair’s voice grew frantic. “This ain’t just about the damn cartel—”

  I dropped the phone next to the Confederate soldier’s grave and crushed it with my heel.

  At the Tahoe, I slid behind the wheel. Piper was already in the passenger seat.

  “You want to call Phil?” She held up a phone. “Or should I?”

  “We need to get away from here first.” I accelerate down the road.

  Eva thrashed in the back, growling beneath her gag.

  Piper leaned in the rear and tugged on an end of the duct tape. “If I take this off, will you quit bouncing around?”

  Eva nodded. Piper ripped the tape away.

  Eva took several deep breaths. Then she said, “What happened back at the apartment?”

  I drove, didn’t speak.

  “They were trying to kill you, weren’t they?” She paused. “B
ecause of me.”

  Piper buckled her belt. “How far should we go before we call Phil?”

  “A couple of miles at least.”

  I had been worried before. Now I was terrified. What if we couldn’t get in touch with our DEA supervisor, the one person we trusted? Phil DeGroot was as honest as a Mormon accountant on fresh-long-johns day, but what if Paynelowe had tapped into our phone conversation or even the one I’d just had with Sinclair?

  “We’re all marked with a bull’s-eye,” I said. “At least two sides want us dead, one of which has federal IDs.”

  “You’re starting to understand,” Eva said. “The DEA and the US Marshals have been compromised.”

  “Where are you supposed to testify?” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I can tell you.” Piper picked up the new cell, a smart phone. She punched a few buttons, waited, punched a few more.

  “In West Texas,” she said. “A place called Marfa.”

  I nodded.

  A town in the Big Bend region, a hundred miles on the backside of nowhere. But not that far from the battle zones of Juárez.

  Eva Ramirez swore.

  The lake appeared in front of us. Tiny whitecaps shimmered on its glassy surface. In the distance a pair of sailboats sliced through the gray waters.

  I turned south on Lawther, the street that ran along the west side of White Rock Lake. The temporary but false anonymity of the interstate was a few miles away.

  “Let me go now and you have a small chance of living,” Eva said. “Turn me in or take me to Marfa, and you will die.”

  “Witnesses should be seen and not heard.” I jammed on the gas, headed toward the interstate.

  - CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO -

  Sinclair refused to carry a cell phone or have an email account.

  But he did have a beeper, a holdover from his days as a Dallas police officer, back when the tiny black device had been the cat’s meow of gizmos.

  His beeper was one of the last available, registered under an alias, and the number only known by a handful of people. One of them was Imogene, the woman who manned the phones at Tranquilla, his de facto base of operations since that thing in South Dallas with the redneck gunrunners from Tyler.

  So when Imogene had beeped him with the emergency code, he’d called back immediately using the phone in the office of his current location. Imogene told him about Jon Cantrell’s call and the news coming in from his contacts at the Dallas police about the firefight at the Cheyenne Apartments. She also told him there had been a couple of calls from the East Coast, Hawkins in McNally’s office, who asked that Sinclair get in touch ASAP. Sinclair had ignored those and phoned Tommy’s cell instead. This had confirmed his fears: Tommy was dead, and Jon had the witness and wasn’t amenable to selling her.

  That left Myrna DeGroot as his fallback option.

  Sinclair flicked open a lockback knife and began to clean his fingernails.

  He was sprawled on a black leather sofa in a warehouse in East Dallas, not far from the house on Tranquilla. The warehouse was outfitted as a movie studio and used for porn shoots, a relatively new endeavor that Sinclair had invested in. The interior walls had been padded with sound-absorbing material. Large stage lights, now off, hung from the rafters. The only illumination came from a series of fluorescent fixtures mounted on the ceiling.

  A round waterbed sat a few feet in front of him, surrounded on three sides by free-standing mirrors that had been placed to simulate walls. The bed had two items on it at the moment: a zebra-skin comforter and a handcuffed Myrna DeGroot.

  “Tommy’s dead.” Sinclair shook his head. “They killed him.”

  “W-w-who?” Myrna DeGroot wiped away her tears. Her movements were awkward due to the handcuffs. “W-w-why are you doing this to me?”

  “That boy was like family. Hired the best lawyer in Dallas for his first indictment.”

  “Please let me go.” Myrna continued to cry. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “He was as stupid as a carton of hair.” Sinclair sighed. “But he was good people. And a hard worker.”

  The woman opened her mouth to speak but didn’t say anything.

  Sinclair slid off the couch and approached the bed. He grabbed her jaw and squeezed, forced her eyes to look into his.

  “You know who Jon Cantrell is?”

  The woman didn’t reply. Probably because he had her mouth in such a tight grip. She gurgled instead.

  “If Jon Cantrell would just play ball.” Sinclair squeezed harder. “You and me wouldn’t be stuck here in this damn porn studio.”

  Myrna DeGroot’s lips turned purple and then white.

  Sinclair let go.

  A few moments later her cell phone rang.

  “Bet that’s your husband.” Sinclair picked it up and smiled. “Showtime.”

  I drove. And drove. Ten minutes later, I parked the Tahoe and grabbed the phone that Piper had retrieved from the Cheyenne.

  We were on Grand Avenue, a couple of blocks from Interstate 30, parked in front of Our Ladies of Charity Thrift Store and a taco stand.

  “Phil DeGroot is our DEA contact.” I looked in the back. “I’m gonna get him to bring us in. We’ll be safe with Phil.”

  “Please, don’t call,” Eva said. “You’ve seen for yourself what happens when others know about me.”

  I hesitated.

  Piper snapped her fingers, pointed to the phone.

  Eva leaned forward. She propped her chin on the back of my seat, stared into my eyes in the rearview mirror. Her expression was sad and lonely and desperate all at the same time. She bit her lip, wrinkled a brow, and her look changed, vulnerable and alluring, a tad naughty, the lost girl who needed someone to take care of her.

  I dialed the number.

  He answered after a long time. “This is Phil DeGroot speaking.”

  “It’s Jon.”

  Nothing except the hiss of an open line. Eva lay her head on my shoulder for a moment, then sat back in the rear seat.

  “We’re in the deep end,” I said. “Sinking fast.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “We’ve got the witness.” I gave him a short version. “And things are a little, oh, let’s say sticky.”

  “This is an unsecured line.” Phil’s voice sounded hollow. “Can’t you ever follow the rules?”

  “Piper and I want to give her to you,” I said. “We trust you.”

  “Probably the safest thing,” he said. “Or you could deliver her to Marfa.”

  A muffled noise from the other end. Static on the line or something else?

  I said, “We don’t want to make the trip—”

  Phil interrupted. “You should turn her over to me. The prosecutor has arranged for a platoon of Marines to guard the courthouse, but getting there’s a big problem.”

  I didn’t speak. Phil sounded funny. Why didn’t he ask about Piper’s sudden return? Maybe that was just the stress of the last few days playing with my head. Or maybe not. For a moment, I debated telling him I also had the scanner, hidden at my father’s rented place, but decided not to.

  “Piper will be glad to hear that,” I said. “She’s been worried.”

  “You’ve done a good job, Jon. Your old man would be really proud of you.”

  His tone was patronizing, completely out of character. Also, in the years of working together, he’d never once referred to my father. Phil DeGroot was all business, no time for sentiment.

  “Yes.” I frowned. “Piper and my dad will be happy.”

  “Let’s get the witness squared away,” he said. “And we can all go out for dinner or something to celebrate.”

  Breath caught in my throat. The air-conditioning in the Tahoe felt extra cold all of a sudden. There was out of character, and then there was behavior from The Twilight Zone. Phil never wanted to meet outside of work. Never to socialize.

  Piper leaned forward, made eye contact. She arched a brow, asked if everything was all righ
t.

  “Sure, dinner, that’d be great,” I said. “Where should we bring the witness?”

  No response. Pings and whistles on the line.

  “Write this down.” Phil told me an address in East Dallas. “Let’s say in about forty-five minutes. How’s that?”

  I repeated the address, but the line had gone dead.

  “We need to roll.” I put the truck in gear. “Phil’s contaminated.”

  Sinclair wiped his face, enjoyed the slight lessening of the tension in his gut.

  Three quarters of an hour until he could rest easy and not worry about those greasy fuckers from south of the Rio Grande or the phone calls from Hawkins.

  In the warehouse in East Dallas, Phil DeGroot dropped his cell on the coffee table in front of the leather sofa. He then placed his hands in his lap, near the ornate belt buckle that contained a tiny derringer pistol.

  His wife, Myrna, sat on the waterbed. Her red hair hung tangled across her face.

  “See there, wasn’t that easy?” Sinclair said. “Now all we gotta do is wait.”

  Phil didn’t reply. He inched a finger toward the release button.

  “Hypothetically speaking,” Sinclair said. “What if Jon were to go to Marfa? What roads do you think he’d take?”

  Phil sighed elaborately. He rattled off random highway numbers and reached for the backup gun.

  - CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE -

  At a stoplight by Fair Park, I sent a text message to Milo Miller, asking him to run a couple of heavyweights to the address in East Dallas. Milo responded immediately. He had people only a few blocks away that he would send over ASAP. It was good to have someone like Milo Miller feel like he was in your debt. I should save more people’s lives.

  Sending some muscle Phil’s way was the least I could do. He was a dork, but a good guy. If he was under the gun, he deserved a chance to get free. Milo would take care of that, no questions asked.

  I cut down South Fitzhugh Avenue.

  The buildings were old and run down, a stark contrast to the shiny glass towers of downtown barely a mile behind us. Dingy little places housing R&B clubs and fried chicken takeout joints. Apartments that should have been condemned and houses that probably were.