The Contractors Page 8

  “Don’t take it out on her,” I said to Tanya. “She’s just trying to make a joke.”

  “We don’t need jokes around here.” Tanya curled a lip. “We need money.”

  Piper put the drink and snack down. “I’ll be out in the car.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You stay.”

  She shifted in her seat but remained on the sofa. She crossed her arms and stared at the floor.

  Nobody spoke. Tanya glared at me. I glared back.

  After a minute or so Dad cinched his belt tighter. “I’m gonna go on patrol.”

  “That’s probably not a good idea.” I grasped his arm, tried to steer him down to his recliner. “Let’s do some paperwork inside.” I looked around for a magazine or something he could putter with.

  “The hell you say.” He wrenched free and clomped out of the living room.

  “Aren’t you going to do anything?” I looked at my sister.

  She shrugged. “He wanders around the yard for a while. No harm done.”

  I listened as the screen door screeched open and then whammed shut. “But—”

  “But what?” Tanya interrupted. “So he acts like a cop for a while. You want to screw up what little pleasure he has? It’s not like he’s in bad physical shape.”

  Age had clearly taken its toll, but Frank Cantrell was still a formidable individual. Six-three, a stout two hundred plus, and a thick head of gray hair. He looked like the Marlboro Man in a dirty sheriff’s uniform.

  I slumped my shoulders, shook my head.

  “You haven’t even asked about him,” Tanya said. “Your own dad.”

  “I meant to…” I stopped talking. Nothing about to come out of my mouth would make anything better.

  “His mind’s dying a little more every day. And I don’t have money to pay the electric bill.” Tanya shook her head. “That’s how he’s doing.”

  “Here’s all the cash I’ve got.” I handed her the rest of my take from Sinclair.

  Nobody spoke. I stared at the wall of the rented trailer that had the plaques and awards from our father’s years in law enforcement.

  “There’s something you should know.” Tanya spoke softly.

  I turned, looked at her.

  “Dad needs this test. The county clinic told me there were some abnormalities in his blood work.”

  “Abnormalities?” I said. “What does that mean? What kind of test?”

  “Do I look like a doctor?” Tanya said. “Some cancer thing, that kind of test. A biopsy.”

  “When? What…” I struggled to stay calm. “When did you find out? And when were you gonna tell me?”

  “Last week.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I tried to call you a couple of times.”

  The messages I had not returned. Because I’d been busy. And because talking to Tanya was like getting the big neck-suck from an emotional vampire with dull teeth.

  “Let’s take him to the doctor now.” I pointed to the door.

  “It’s an overnight stay at the hospital,” she said. “Costs six grand on top of what Medicare’s gonna pay.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You can have my cut from last night,” Piper said. “If that helps.”

  No one spoke. Piper was all about family, even when it wasn’t hers. I hoped Tanya felt guilty. Then I felt guilty for thinking that. I rubbed my temples, tried to clear my thoughts.

  “Thanks, Piper.” I looked at my partner. “But we’re still short thousands.”

  Tanya limped across the room and turned off the television.

  “I close this next deal, we’ll have the cash,” I said to her. “Things are gonna be easier for everybody.”

  Tanya nodded, a glum look on her face.

  Anger and a deep sense of helplessness lashed across my mind. My palms grew sweaty and then cold.

  I took several deep breaths, calmed down a little, and shuffled across the room to a picture of Frank Cantrell and Chuck Norris on the set of Walker, Texas Ranger. Dad and Chuck were sitting on the hood of a Mercedes Dad had been driving at the time. He’d worked security consulting jobs on the side to supplement the county salary.

  The photos clustered on the other side of the room were of the family ranch, long since gone to the bill collectors.

  Tanya rubbed her right knee, grimaced. She glanced at Piper. “Sorry about earlier.”

  Piper nodded, face impassive, the emotional armor back in place.

  I wiped dust from a photo of me in a Little League uniform and hoped the Katrina debit cards still worked.

  From outside came the sound of glass-pack mufflers, a throaty rumble.

  “That’s my boyfriend,” Tanya said. “You remember the guy I’ve been going out with?”

  “The deputy constable?” I arched an eyebrow. “Did he ever get the gastric bypass?”

  Her boyfriend was morbidly obese, a silent indictment of the minimum employment standards used by certain law enforcement agencies.

  The engine noise stopped. A car door slammed. Heavy footsteps on the wooden porch. A knock on the screen door. Tanya sighed and sat down.

  “Aren’t you gonna get let him in?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes, I like to see how long he’ll stand there.”

  Another knock rattled the screen. I shrugged too and moved to the next photo. Frank Cantrell with Willie Nelson in the mid seventies. Willie was in handcuffs.

  About a minute later, Tanya’s boyfriend waddled into the room. He said hello and blinked a lot.

  I felt the anger rise in my throat again, a bitter, foul taste like warm soapy water.

  Rage just for its own sake, no purpose, no reason.

  Tanya kissed her boyfriend and told me goodbye. Piper and I left. Outside, I opened the driver’s door of the Tahoe and hesitated. Piper was already in the passenger side, thumbing her phone, engine running.

  The double-wide trailer where my sister and father lived was behind me. The stand of bamboo on the other side of the gravel driveway rustled. I mopped sweat off my face and waited.

  A few moments later my father pushed through the cane pole and stepped into the sunlight. His steel-gray eyes were alert now, unlike before.

  I shut the door and walked over.

  “Hello, Jonathan.” He smiled. “When did you get here?”

  “I, um, we’re just leaving.” I held out my hand.

  He shook it but didn’t speak.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “Me? Ah, I’m fine.” He sighed. “Worried about your sister though. I really put her through the wringer.”

  “It’s okay.” I touched his arm.

  “I could still work, you know.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m a damn good lawman.”

  I nodded.

  “My mind.” He stared at the trailer. “It’s not that bad most of the time.”

  “Why don’t you go inside,” I said. “It’s hot out.”

  “One thing you need to understand.” He pointed a finger at my chest. “A man has to provide for his family.”

  I nodded.

  “Hard living with the badge sometimes.” He tapped the tarnished shield on his chest. “You know what I mean?”

  “I gave Tanya some cash.” I wiped my eyes. “Got some more money coming in later this week.”

  A pair of gulls flew above us, trilling, headed toward the river.

  “How’s Kmart doing?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Your partner.”

  “Costco.” I nodded. “He retired last I heard. Moved down to the coast. Padre Island somewhere.”

  “But you were here with him the other day.”

  I shook my head but didn’t speak. The last time my dad had seen Costco was about three or four years ago.

  He grasped my arm. Pulled me close. I hugged him.

  We broke apart, and he looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face.

  “What was your name again? You ever met Jonathan, my boy?”

&
nbsp; I was twelve when I saw my father shoot Bobby Tremont, an alcoholic misogynist who’d been in and out of the local jail a dozen times.

  Bobby was a real piece of work—a mean version of Otis, the Mayberry drunk on The Andy Griffith Show, crossed with the guy who made Ned Beatty squeal like a pig in Deliverance.

  For most of his forty-some years in Marlin County, Bobby had been a minor nuisance, relatively speaking, the guy who picked fights on Friday at the honky-tonk on the edge of town and then spent Saturday sitting on a burlap sack of corn in front of the feed store, chewing tobacco and whistling at girls as they walked by.

  Every so often the county tried to take his kids away, mostly when the bruises were too prominent to ignore. His wife never pressed charges, even when her arm was broken that one time. She just smiled and told everybody she fell down a lot.

  Every place has a person like that. A bad man, but one who skates far enough under the porous radar of the legal system that he avoids the consequences for his actions.

  That was before Bobby Tremont discovered cocaine.

  In the mid-1980s the drug swept the nation, even backwater towns in the shadow of big cities like Dallas.

  One Sunday in January, a raw, blustery day, my father and I were sitting in the café on the square, eating a late breakfast. My mom wasn’t around much at that point, something about finding herself at a New Age retreat near Austin, so I was living with Dad, Tanya, and Tanya’s mother. Dad had a ranch at the time, a sprawling place with lots of cattle, the best that money could buy. Times were good at the Cantrell household.

  The smell of cigarettes, coffee, and fresh-cooked bacon hung in the air of the café. People were eating and laughing, the conversations centered around the sermon they’d just heard, the Cowboys’ chances in the playoffs, and cattle prices. Everything was normal. Until Bobby drove up in his rusted pickup and parked in front of the restaurant.

  The atmosphere in the room changed when he slammed the door of his truck. The clink of silverware slowed. The voices stilled. Everyone glanced at my father.

  The mayor, two tables over, pushed back his chair and walked to our booth, keeping his eyes on the outside. He stood next to my father and said two words: “He’s here.”

  Frank Cantrell, my dad, wore his usual work clothes—a starched khaki uniform shirt, creased Wranglers, and Justin Roper boots. On his hip rested a Ruger double-action revolver chambered in .357 Magnum.

  He looked up at the mayor and nodded once. Then he continued to eat.

  The mayor stared outside for a few moments and returned to his seat.

  The room remained silent.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” I pushed away my plate of eggs.

  “Selfishness.” He took a sip of coffee. “That’s what.”

  “Huh?”

  “Some people are so ate up with selfishness, they end up killing themselves, one day at a time.”

  Bobby stood in front of the window of the café, peering in. Breath fogged the glass. His skin was pale, eyes aglow with a fire that I’d never seen before, like a house full of angry people burning in on itself.

  “A terrible thing when that happens.” Dad stuck a pick between his two front teeth.

  “Why’s Bobby staring in here?” I pointed to the front. “He looks crazy.”

  “I suspect the selfishness has gotten so twisted up inside of him, that he’s ready for it to be over.”

  “What does that mean?” I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “His wife.” Dad sighed. “We found her down by the river last night. Shot in the head with a forty-five.”

  Bobby shouted something, voice muffled by the glass.

  “He’s most likely got his granddaddy’s army gun under his coat.” Dad stood. “The forty-five Colt the old man brought back from the war.”

  “You’re not going out there, are you?” I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice.

  In my mind, I knew that’s what lawmen did. They went to the dark places and stopped people like Bobby Tremont. In my heart, I didn’t want my dad to get hurt.

  “You’re a smart boy, Jonathan.” He tugged at his gun belt. “And law enforcement’s an honorable profession. But when you grow up, do something else. Days like this, it ain’t no good way to make a living.”

  The mayor’s wife, a heavyset matronly woman, waddled over. She squeezed in next to me and said, “I’ll sit here with you while your daddy goes outside.”

  “Much obliged.” Frank Cantrell put on his Stetson and ran two fingers over his bristly mustache. He moved toward the door and stopped.

  The room was as quiet as a church basement.

  He stepped back to the booth and patted me on the arm.

  “See you in a few minutes, Jonathan.” He smiled and walked out to face Bobby Tremont.

  When it was over, and Bobby lay dead on the concrete outside the café, I knew there was nothing else in my life I wanted to do as much as be a lawman like my father.

  - CHAPTER FOURTEEN -

  I drove away from the trailer, a lump of emotion welling in my throat. Piper sat quietly next to me.

  The dusty road that was my father’s life was getting more and more rocky the closer it came to its final destination. Hard traveling on that road. Tough on everybody.

  After a few minutes, Piper entered the address of our confidential informant’s place into the GPS even though we’d been there several times.

  Our other job—the one we did when we weren’t rescuing teenage hookers for bent ex-cops like Sinclair—was working for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  We were DEA agents, our windbreakers in the rear seat marked as such in bright yellow on the back.

  We had the power to arrest people. Or, if they resisted, use deadly force to subdue them. We were fully credentialed federal law enforcement officers, just like J. Edgar Hoover or the Secret Service guys who guard the president, except for one tiny difference.

  Our paychecks came from a private company, not the US Treasury, a firm called Blue Dagger Industries.

  We’re the new breed of law enforcement, the leaner, more efficient kind, what’s known in the trade as outsourced service providers, private contractors who work as public servants.

  Maybe you’ve heard about our international colleagues, the PMCs, short for private military contractors, companies like Blackwater, hired as corporate soldiers for the latest Middle Eastern conflict. We’re just like them, only without the scandals. Mostly.

  Neither of us spoke as we drove.

  At ten thirty, I parked the Tahoe in front of a Mediterranean-style home in the tiny town of Highland Park, a well-to-do residential enclave located in the center of Dallas. The house belonged to our confidential informant, the guy we called Rich Dude.

  According to lore, the people who designed Highland Park had been hired because of their earlier success with a similar hamlet on the West Coast, another town-within-a-town called Beverly Hills. Except for the climate and the movie stars, the two places bore a striking resemblance. Expensive homes. Manicured yards. Lots of fashionably dressed white people.

  In Rich Dude’s driveway: a four-door Maserati, a Mercedes, and a Suburban, the latter plastered with stickers for various athletic teams at the local high school. All three were leased, the payments current on only one.

  Piper rang the bell, and a Hispanic woman in a maid’s outfit let us in without speaking. She pointed to the back.

  Rich Dude was on the phone, standing by the sink in a cavernous area built from stainless steel and marble that looked sort of like a kitchen. He was wearing a peach polo shirt and a complicated gold watch, looking like he’d been born in the Nineteenth Hole Men’s Lounge of some hoity-toity country club.

  We sat on bar stools at the island that served as a dividing point between the food area and the family room, itself another huge open section dominated by a sixty-inch flat-screen TV mounted over a fireplace.

  “You want some coffee?” Piper reached for a Krups in the
middle of the island.

  I nodded and she poured us each a cup.

  Rich Dude hung up, shook his head.

  “Happy Monday.” I raised my cup to our host and took a sip. It tasted like charred ass.

  “They’re gonna foreclose.” He rubbed his eyes. “The shopping center in McKinney.”

  “That’s what happens when you don’t pay the bank,” Piper said.

  Rich Dude was a real estate developer, a man who lived and died by leverage, the amount borrowed versus the value of the asset. To say Rich Dude was overleveraged was like saying Donald Trump had bad hair.

  “It’s the damn appraiser’s fault.” He banged the countertop. “We only needed a hooch more equity on that last project. Just five hundred K.”

  “And that would have helped on all those other buildings?” I tried to sound sympathetic to the idea of a “hooch” being only a half million dollars.

  “You don’t understand.” Rich Dude was in his late forties but looked twenty years older. His face was gray, the lines around his eyes deeper than they should have been.

  “True dat.” I pulled out a pen and pad. “Let’s get to the business at hand, though. What’s the address?”

  “You sure this can’t be traced back to me?”

  “You got a choice?” Piper drummed her fingers on the counter.

  “Why’d you bring her?” Rich Dude said. “She gives my wife the creeps.”

  Piper shrugged. She was wearing a nose ring today and a yellow smiley face T-shirt. The smiley face had a bullet hole between the eyes, blood tickling down either side of the mouth.

  “Make with the info.” I tapped the pen against the pad. “We don’t have all day.”

  “I want to make sure I understand the structure of our deal.” He crossed his arms.

  “Look, turdball.” Piper rose from her seat. “I got your structure right here—”

  “Piper.” I touched her arm. “Let me handle this.”

  “It’s not like I want to do business with you people,” Rich Dude said.