The Contractors Read online

  “Again with the leg.” Tanya hobbled toward the kitchen. “I need to wash my hands.”

  “Here’s your meds, Pop.” I put the glass of pills next to the water.

  “Who are you?” Frank squinted at me. He wore a dirty khaki uniform, a dented sheriff’s badge pinned to the breast pocket. The familiar clothing from long ago seemed to comfort him.

  “I’m Jon. Your son.”

  He had advanced dementia, a condition not unlike Alzheimer’s, and only a half pension, grudgingly offered, from Marlin County, the hardscrabble chunk of Texas just to the southeast of Dallas where he’d served as sheriff for twenty-eight years until the whole coke-in-the-trunk fiasco. He took a smorgasbord of meds, some for mental acuity, others for his prostate and blood pressure. All were expensive.

  “The hell you say.” He squinted at me. “If you’re Jon, then tell me where your mom is.”

  I shook my head, lips tight. The words wouldn’t come.

  “Jon’s mom said she was gonna fix me a steak tonight.” He banged his TV tray. “Where the hell is she?”

  My mother had died two years ago at a commune in Oregon. Tanya’s mother had been institutionalized after stabbing a manicurist in Wichita Falls.

  Frank, not an easy guy to live with, had a knack for picking women from the spicy side of the menu.

  “She’s not around right now.” I sat across from him in an easy chair. “You hungry?”

  “Ah, Jesus.” He lumbered to his feet. “I gotta get on patrol.”

  “Take your medicine first.” I opened the water, nudged the pills closer.

  “You on the job?” He pointed to the bulge on my hip where the pistol rested covered by my T-shirt. The portion of his mind that still thought like a law enforcement officer worked just fine.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “I’m on the job.”

  “My boy Jon used to be a cop.” He swallowed the meds. “Couldn’t keep his mouth shut with the feds way back when. He ended up screwed like a three-legged dog.”

  I leaned back, closed my eyes. Tired now, so very, very tired.

  “His mother was the problem.” He coughed. “She was a hippie. Damn flower child.”

  Silence for a while except for bickering voices on the television. I opened my eyes.

  “Where the hell is my steak?” Frank pounded the headrest of his chair. “I gotta get to work.”

  “Listen to me, Pop.” I picked up the remote, clicked the mute button. “You’re not sheriff anymore.”

  He stared at me, eyes welling with tears. “W-w-what did you say?”

  I bit my lip, tried to control the frustration. The Glock felt heavy on my waist. I wanted to shoot something—anything.

  “Hey, you’re Jon.” He wiped moisture from underneath one eye. “My son.”

  I nodded. Tried to smile.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “Tanya’s in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Why? Is it time for dinner?”

  My limbs grew heavy. My body ached, a dull throbbing in the middle of my chest.

  No place like home.

  - CHAPTER TWELVE -

  Sinclair blinked, suddenly awake, the phone on his bedside table ringing.

  The caller ID told him he’d be better off going back to sleep in the hopes that the whole missing witness issue was a dream. The number belonged to Hawkins, a piece of slime who worked with the other people who wanted the witness found, the ones Tommy didn’t know about. Hawkins’s employer was a very powerful man, a childhood friend of Sinclair’s, now a United States senator. Hawkins and his employer were just more incessant voices clamoring for Eva Ramirez to be found.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t like to talk to Hawkins under the best of circumstances.

  A knock on the bedroom door followed by the muffled voice of Tommy, the only other person on the premises.

  “Hey, boss.” The man rapped again. “You need to get out here.”

  Sinclair had spent the night in a vacant apartment he’d leased two years before, using the married name of one of his stepdaughters. The phone and the utilities were registered under an alias.

  The last few days he’d stayed in a different place each night. Motels, a friendly ex-wife’s house, apartments like this one. No particular reason, just a nervous twitch at the base of his spine that told him he should keep on the move.

  The clock radio on the bedside table read ten a.m. He’d fallen asleep at around four, after finally pushing all thoughts of Eva Ramirez, the missing witness, from his mind. He’d been over the plan a hundred times, tossing and turning. It would work. It had to work.

  He lumbered to his feet, reached for a robe. A deep cough rattled his chest, brought up the taste of last night’s cigars, sticky on the roof of his mouth. His esophagus burned, the acid reflux acting up again. From the nightstand, he picked up a nickel-plated revolver and dropped it in the pocket of his robe.

  The bedroom door opened before he could reach it, and Tommy’s hulking figure filled the entryway.

  He nodded toward the living room, whispered, “Somebody here to see you.”

  “Here?” Sinclair cinched his robe.

  Tommy nodded, face inscrutable except for a tiny glint of worry in his eyes.

  Not a good sign. Sinclair and his crew had the run of the city. Fear wasn’t part of their vocabulary. Neither was “unannounced visitor at a safe location.” The cartels didn’t have the resources in North Texas at the moment to find this place, and Hawkins’s people were not local. Besides, dropping in wasn’t their style.

  The apartment was a two-bedroom unit in a complex that was part of a much larger conglomeration of apartments, what locals called the Village.

  Twenty or more complexes, thousands of apartments, all clustered around the intersection of Lovers Lane and Greenville Avenue in Northeast Dallas. Lots of bars and nightclubs in the area. Lots of young, transient people as well. Plenty of turnover among the residents.

  Sinclair kept an apartment here for the anonymity, but also because he’d lived in a neighboring complex in the early 1980s, when he’d been a young cop. The older he got, the more he liked to remember back in the day, the women, the parties around the pool, the good times.

  This complex was one of the older ones, early seventies vintage. The rooms had shag carpet and ceilings that were stark white with a texture like painted popcorn. The furniture was minimal. A brown sectional couch and glass coffee table in the combo living/dining area. A coffeemaker and cups in the kitchen.

  A man in his thirties wearing a blue windbreaker stood in the living room. He was looking out of the sliding glass door that opened onto the second-floor balcony. The balcony overlooked the pool.

  The man’s name was Keith McCluskey, and he was the absolute last person in the solar system that Sinclair wanted to see at the moment.

  “How in the hell did you find this place?” Sinclair walked over and stood beside him.

  Both men stared out the window.

  “Nice view.” McCluskey nodded to the pool.

  A pair of blonds were lying on their stomachs by the blue water, stretched out on recliners. Both had elaborate tattoos, tramp stamps, just above their bikini bottoms.

  “They work at that new titty joint down the street,” Sinclair said. “You want me to introduce you?”

  McCluskey shook his head, rubbed his nose with the back of one hand.

  “What do you want?” Sinclair yawned. “I’m not exactly receiving visitors at the moment.”

  “You can’t hide from me,” McCluskey said. “Never forget that.”

  “Whatever.” Sinclair lumbered over to the couch and sat down.

  McCluskey turned away from the window. The badge clipped to his belt identified him as an officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He wasn’t an actual government employee, however. He worked for a private law enforcement contractor called Paynelowe Industries. That didn’t mean the badge wasn’t real, however.

  “Where’s the scan
ner?” McCluskey hitched his thumbs in his gun belt.

  Sinclair didn’t reply.

  “I know you have it because you’re a fucking thief.”

  “Most people say good morning.” Sinclair chuckled. “You start with the insults.”

  McCluskey rubbed his nose again.

  The lines in his face were deep, like they’d been etched in granite by a laser. Dark bags hung under his eyes. His skin was sallow, pupils dilated, whites shot through with red. A portion of one eyebrow was missing, the skin on his forehead blistered above the damaged brow.

  Tommy came into the living room. He nodded once. A call had been made.

  “Let’s talk about this item then.” McCluskey pulled an evidence bag from underneath his windbreaker. The clear plastic sack contained a handgun, the distinctive silhouette of a Glock semiautomatic. The black grips were deformed, like they had been melted a little.

  Sinclair didn’t like where this was headed. He didn’t say anything.

  “Standard DEA issue, forty caliber,” McCluskey said. “A guy who works for you sold it to a federal firearms dealer yesterday at a gun show in Fort Worth.”

  Sinclair pressed his lips together, resisted the urge to swear. That dumb son of a bitch. He’d told him to toss the gun, not try to peddle it. And certainly not to a dealer.

  “The serial number. We keep records, you know,” McCluskey said. “The last known location of this weapon was with the scanner.”

  Sinclair shrugged. “You’re looking a little ragged. No wonder, much as your little misadventure with the pipe torched you up. That had to have smarted.”

  McCluskey touched the spot on his head where his eyebrow was missing, seething.

  “You just left me there.” He sounded incredulous. “Passed out and smoking. And cleaned out my vehicle.”

  “At least someone thought to call the medics. Made it so you could live to spark it up another day.” Sinclair decided to change the subject. “I can get an eight-ball of primo coke here in a few minutes. Then maybe you’d like to meet one of those girls by the pool.”

  “I am not a drug addict.” McCluskey enunciated each syllable precisely. He sniffed, wiped his nose again.

  “Of course you’re not.” Sinclair smiled. “You just, uh, misplaced that scanner doohickey and a bunch of guns and now you’re blaming me.”

  Tommy chuckled. McCluskey didn’t reply. His breathing grew ragged, fingers clenched.

  Sinclair and the DEA agent were sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. Never friends. Now they were playing a dangerous game, and they both knew it.

  On the one hand, federal law enforcement officers, especially crooked ones employed by contractors, couldn’t just arrest retired police captains, no matter how checkered the captain’s career had been. Retired police brass, even corrupt ones, carried a certain weight in the community, demanded a certain respect.

  Added to this was the fact that Tommy, himself an ex-cop, had made a call to the northwest substation, and in a few minutes a half dozen active-duty Dallas police officers would be swarming the apartment. The Blue Tide backs their own; those were the rules.

  On the other hand, Keith McCluskey was a credentialed federal agent, able to wield the ungainly but terribly destructive power of Uncle Sam’s national law enforcement apparatus—the FBI, Homeland Security, IRS, and so on.

  Since both men were bent, they knew that to rely too heavily on their backup resources—the Dallas police for Sinclair; the feds for McCluskey—was to invite disaster, tantamount to suicide. Questions would be asked, official inquiries made. Drug tests administered. So, instead, they danced this particular dance.

  Sinclair could always reach out to the man who had called earlier—Hawkins, and by extension his boss, Senator McNally—and have McCluskey taken off the board that way. But that was the nuclear option, and he didn’t want to leave a radioactive hole where his business used to be.

  McCluskey tucked the damaged gun back under his windbreaker. Then he grabbed an intact Glock from his hip.

  Sinclair tensed. Tommy took a step forward and then stopped. Everybody was in uncharted waters now. The dance had changed.

  “I need the scanner,” McCluskey said. “My ass is on the line for that. Where is it?”

  “I ain’t got it.” Sinclair held up his hands. “Now be cool, and put your gun away.”

  The device he’d given to Jon Cantrell the night before. Glad he’d thought to get rid of the damn thing.

  “I’m gonna find it.” McCluskey rubbed his nose with his free hand. “Soon as somebody turns it on, it sends a signal. Don’t think you can get away with using it.”

  Sinclair kept his face blank. He should have figured that something like that was programmed to send a signal out. At least the device was out of his possession. He hoped Cantrell would take his advice and not turn it on.

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head. “Maybe you oughta switch to downers, mellow out a little.”

  A thin trickle of blood meandered out of one of McCluskey’s nostrils. The agent didn’t appear to notice. He gripped the gun tighter, breathing heavily. His index finger curled around the trigger, began to whiten.

  “Read my lips, cokehead.” Sinclair held his hands higher. “I. Ain’t. Got. It.”

  “You motherfuckasswipesunuvabitch.” McCluskey kicked the coffee table. The glass top shattered. Shards scattered around Sinclair’s bare feet.

  Sinclair inched away on the sofa. He’d been around addicts all his life, knew their mood swings, the dangers inherent in dealing with them.

  “Tell me where the scanner is.” McCluskey aimed the gun at Sinclair’s chest. “I need it.” He paused, his voice lower. “I need… her.”

  Tommy had eased his way along the wall when McCluskey kicked the table. Now he was out of sight of the DEA agent. He lunged, grabbed the gun wrist, twisted, wrenched the weapon from the agent’s grasp.

  McCluskey yelled, swore.

  Tommy shoved the DEA agent over the broken remains of the coffee table and onto the sofa.

  Sinclair had his revolver out. He launched himself atop McCluskey on the sofa and used his gun like a set of brass knuckles, rammed the stubby barrel into the man’s groin.

  McCluskey howled.

  “If you weren’t a fed,” Sinclair said, “I’d rip off your head and shit down your neck.”

  “Please.” The DEA agent was crying now. “T-t-tell me where the scanner is.”

  Sinclair hopped off the sofa, avoiding the broken glass.

  “They’re gonna hang me out to dry if I don’t find it.” McCluskey huddled in the fetal position, whimpering.

  “You’re having a sucky day, aren’t you?” Sinclair tightened his robe. “I’m gonna get you a couple of bumps on the house.”

  “Listen, okay. I’ll make you a deal.” McCluskey sat up, cradling his groin. “Keep the scanner. Just tell me where they’re gonna be with the witness.”

  Sinclair didn’t reply. The missing woman from San Antonio, Eva Ramirez, the one with the bounty on her head, the single person who could destroy all that he had created. Apparently, the rumors were true. She’d played every side of the fence, including Keith McCluskey’s. He wondered if the other stories were accurate as well.

  “What do you want with her?” he said. “You working with the US Marshals now, too?”

  “Please.” McCluskey held up a hand, begging. “I need to find her.”

  “How come?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” McCluskey wiped his eyes.

  A loud knock on the door. The police had arrived.

  “Try me.” Sinclair gestured to Tommy to keep the backup outside for a moment more.

  “The witness, I have to save her.” McCluskey took a ragged breath.

  An emotional and chemical turmoil churned deep inside the man, evident in his contorted face and hunched shoulders.

  “Save her?” Sinclair raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound like good business
to me. Sounds personal.”

  McCluskey didn’t reply.

  “Jesus H.” Sinclair shook his head. “Don’t tell me you’re in love with her.”

  - CHAPTER THIRTEEN -

  I watched my father weep, powerless to stop him.

  “You made Dad cry.” Tanya came back in the room, limping on two legs now, the missing right one miraculously regrown.

  I ignored her. The walls of the double-wide seemed to be getting closer, falling in on themselves.

  “I’m good police.” Frank trembled. “You can’t tell me different.”

  “And of course you had to remind him he’s not on the job anymore.” She shook her head. “Smooth.”

  Tanya, in addition to terminal bitchiness, agoraphobia, and that thing where you wash your hands all the time, suffered from a rare psychosexual condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, a disease that manifested itself in an overwhelming desire to amputate a perfectly healthy limb in order to feel normal.

  “It’s a miracle.” I raised my hands, laid the sarcasm on thick. “Your leg’s grown back.”

  Tanya pointed a perfectly healthy middle finger at my face.

  Like when a man desires to be a woman and wears female clothing, a BIID sufferer often binds up a limb and acts like an amputee for a period of time.

  “Christ, I am tired of this.” Tanya massaged her closed eyes with one hand. “You have any idea what it’s like living in this house?”

  “Here’s a thought.” I stood. “Why don’t you get over the crazies and find a job.”

  “Ooh, why didn’t I think of that?” She wobbled toward me, finger jabbing. “Then who’s gonna take care of him?”

  We were both silent while our father blubbered. I felt bad for giving her a hard time. She was ill, too, no money for good insurance or the right meds.

  Piper wandered into the living room. She sat on the sofa, Snapple in one hand, Pop-Tart in the other. “I just love these family gatherings.”

  “Get up,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

  “And you’re not family.” Tanya crossed her arms. “Quit acting like it.”

  Piper paused with the bottle a few inches from her mouth. The smile slid off her face, replaced by a blank expression. She had an emotional hide as thick as rhinoceros skin. Not much could penetrate, except the casual words of someone she considered a friend. Unfortunately, that was what she considered Tanya.