The Contractors Read online

  “You people?” I frowned, my patience wafer-thin. “Did you just say you didn’t want to do business with us?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “One call.” I pulled out my cell phone, dropped it on the counter. “And all the banks are gonna foreclose on everything. The buildings. The cars.” A pause. “Even the house.”

  Rich Dude clutched his stomach, face grayer than before.

  “That’s your deal structure,” I said. “Or you can give me the address.”

  We’d been over this before. Rich Dude was going down financially. Not a question of if, but when. I’d found him by accident a few weeks ago and offered the deal. In exchange for some information, one of the banks could be stopped for a few months, buying him a little time to polish the silverware on the Titanic. The other part of the deal, the one I’d just mentioned for the first time, was that I could also make all the banks go postal on his loans at any given moment.

  A few hundred dollars to my name and I had that kind of power, courtesy of the powers that be at my employer, Blue Dagger Industries. Scary, isn’t it?

  Before I could say anything else, a woman in a Nike running suit came into the room. She was in her early forties, tanned and fit, a diamond ring as big as a garlic clove on one hand.

  Rich Dude’s wife.

  “Oh.” She wrinkled her nose. “You two are here.”

  Rich Dude had told her we were building contractors, working on their lake house renovations.

  A quiet noise rumbled from Piper, part growl, part hiss.

  “We’ll be gone in a few minutes.” I smiled.

  The wife paid us about as much attention as she would the gardener’s assistant. She handed her husband a gold credit card.

  “This doesn’t work for some reason. Take care of it before lunch, okay.”

  Rich Dude nodded, a blank look on his face. She left by the back door.

  I slid the pad and pen across the counter.

  “I’ll call you when I know the time.” He scribbled something and pushed it back.

  “What do you mean, the time?” I took the pad and stuck it in my pocket. “How about what day?”

  “Oh, they took possession early. A couple of days ago,” he said. “They’re moving stuff today.”

  “Shit.” Piper headed toward the door.

  “We’ll show ourselves out.” I stood, in a hurry now.

  “What’s the problem?” Rich Dude said. “Why you guys rushing out of here?”

  I paused, looked around the expensive house.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  - CHAPTER FIFTEEN -

  I already had the address, a warehouse in West Dallas. I’d just been waiting for the day.

  Now I had it.

  The building was one of twenty or so industrial properties that Rich Dude owned, scattered across Dallas County, most on secluded streets according to the maps we’d already consulted.

  “Today is too soon.” Piper slammed the passenger door. “What should we do?”

  “Get there.” I threw the truck into gear. “Fast.”

  We’d been counting on at least twenty-four hours advance warning in order to set up a stakeout with other freelance Blue Dagger employees.

  “What about backup?” She grabbed two dark-blue windbreakers from the rear seat. Shrugged one on and pulled her holstered Glock from the console. She gave the other coat to me.

  “There’s no time for backup.” I sped away from the house. “No sense splitting our commission either.”

  We were DEA subcontractors, and our employer paid us on a performance basis, in this instance five percent of the estimated street value. Because this was our operation, an entrepreneurial venture, we’d been planning to pay the backup people an hourly fee, not a share of the profit.

  The shipment that was headed to Rich Dude’s warehouse was reported to have a street value in the five-million-dollar range, meaning that if all went well, Piper and I were going to split a quarter million dollars later tonight, minus some incidental expenses. A nice chunk of change considering the dry spell of late. More than enough to pay for my father’s biopsy and for Piper to sponsor an entire banana republic’s worth of parentless children.

  “Call Milo then.” She shifted nervously in her seat. “We can’t go in cold.”

  Milo Miller was an old acquaintance, an impresario of vice and most things illegal as well as a collector of lowlife gossip, a TMZ for the criminal set, the Perez Hilton of hoods.

  He was also batshit crazy. Nevertheless, she had a point. If that was a hot area, lowlife-wise, then he would know.

  I dialed his cell.

  He answered after the first ring. “How’s my future wife?”

  “She’s fine.” I glanced at Piper. Milo Miller had a crush on her that bordered on pathological.

  “Did he call me his future wife again?” Piper raised her voice, leaned toward the phone. “I am not gonna marry you.”

  “She says hi.” I waved at her to be quiet.

  “What the hell do you want?” Milo said. “I’m a little busy.”

  In the background a scream and then music, the volume increasing. KC and the Sunshine Band. “That’s the Way I Like It.”

  I told him the address of the warehouse as I entered it into the dash-mounted GPS. “You got the four-one-one on that part of the world?”

  Milo ignored my question. “When are you gonna come work for me?”

  “You’re a crook. I’m not. It would never work out.”

  “That part of town is off the reservation,” he said. “You should be careful. As in stay away.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded. “Any spec—”

  He hung up.

  “What did he say?” Piper asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?” She slid the holster into place on her hip. “Why do I ever believe you?”

  I turned off of Mockingbird Lane and onto the Dallas Toll Road, a six-lane thoroughfare that ran through the middle of town.

  The highway, an old railroad right-of-way, was narrow, just enough room for the lanes of traffic, a barely there shoulder, and a concrete barrier median about a foot wide. The surface ran below the level of much of the city like a canyon filled with roaring autos instead of water.

  I headed south, thirty miles over the limit, flitting in and out of traffic, a darting fish among a river of slower moving steel.

  Piper grabbed a duffel from the backseat. The bag clanked, our extra hardware. Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine guns, .40 caliber, noise-suppressed. The Ferrari of firearms.

  “I’ve never taken down a shipment this big.” She placed an MP5 in her lap.

  Her weapon had a tiny sticker on the forearm, a pink peace symbol about the size of a quarter.

  I took the Stemmons Freeway and skirted the west side of downtown, past the Old Red Courthouse and the School Book Depository.

  “Me neither.” I exited at Commerce Street. “You didn’t load up with hollow points, did you?”

  There weren’t many rules for private contractors. Follow all applicable laws, due process, blah-blah. And only use full metal jacket ammo, no expanding bullets.

  “Well, duh, I’m using hollow points,” she said. “I hit something, I want it to stay down.”

  The city center lay behind us. Ahead was the county lockup and the Trinity River.

  We drove past the jail, crossed the river on the Commerce Street viaduct, and entered West Dallas, a part of town the guidebooks rarely mentioned.

  Housing projects and dollar stores, bingo parlors and trailer parks. The grim slice of Dallas where Bonnie and Clyde had gotten their start, born into poverty and destined for early, violent deaths. By the look of things a century later, not much had changed.

  On the corner a group of young men in low-riding jeans milled around in front of a burglar-barred convenience store. A couple of guys were passing a bottle in a plastic sack back and forth.


  Three blocks later we idled past a vacant cinder block building that looked like it had last been used as a juke joint. The parking lot was asphalt disintegrating into gravel and dirt. On one wall, faded, barely legible lettering read TOMMY’S BLUES CLUB.

  “That’s the address?” Piper said.

  “Yeah.” I made the block. “This is it.”

  The place screamed drug house. Plywood where the windows should have been. Motion detector lights next to small wireless cameras. An elderly Pontiac with new tires and tinted windows, parked at an angle to the front door.

  “Where’s the warehouse?” She craned her head. “This dump looks like the old bar one of my foster uncles used to take me to.”

  “There.” I pointed to a large metal building that was connected to the rear of the tavern.

  The structure was hard to see, bordered by a chain-link fence that was turning into a shrub line from the overgrown hackberry trees and cedars. On the other side of the street were wood-framed houses. Tiny shotgun shacks built in the fifties and not cared for much since.

  I kept driving, going through the cross street.

  In the next block, I U-turned and headed back the way we came, stopping about two hundred feet from the intersection.

  The rear of the warehouse was visible, a large double door that was closed.

  Piper said, “They could have an army in there.”

  “Or not.” I backed into the gravel drive of a house with a for-sale sign in the yard. “If the shipment hasn’t come in yet.”

  A row of unkempt trees grew alongside the driveway. The foliage hid the Tahoe from the building, the entrance still visible through their branches.

  “Can I tell you something?” She stroked the machine gun like it was a cat.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m gonna quit after this.” She took a deep breath, voice quivering. “Use the cash to find my birth parents.”

  I nodded but didn’t speak.

  The topic of her real mother and father came up often, especially of late as our relationship became strained, a worn spot in her mind she continued to revisit.

  “Then I’m going to visit all those kids I’ve been sponsoring.”

  “You’ll rack up a lot of airline miles that way.” I paused. “Getting out of this line of work, that’s not a bad play, though.”

  An awkward silence.

  I cleared my throat. “Maybe, we could, um, visit them together.”

  “I bet my mom was a ballerina.” She spoke hurriedly. “I’ve got the legs for that, you know.”

  I nodded in agreement but didn’t say anything. My heart was beating faster than normal, not just from the impending takedown of a shipment of drugs. I had just told Piper—in a roundabout fashion—that I would go away with her. That was pretty close to commitment in my world.

  “Or maybe she was a writer, like a poet or something.” Piper stared out the window. “I like words and stuff.”

  Every week it was something different, her parents in various improbable roles: mother a schoolteacher or Peace Corps volunteer, father an actor or some other dashing but ultimately tragic vocation.

  “If she was a ballerina, then my dad might have been a dance critic,” she said. “They had this passionate but brief affair.”

  “My mother was a hippie and a junkie,” I said. “She had her bad qualities, too.”

  “My mother would have probably tried to help your mother.” Piper nodded. “Because that’s the way she was in those days.”

  I didn’t reply. These moments were bittersweet. Relationships that might have been, sadness that filled the void instead.

  We were silent for a few moments. No movement on the street or at the warehouse.

  “One of us needs to do a little recon,” she said. “There’s probably a window somewhere.”

  “Rock-paper-scissors?” I balled a fist into my other palm.

  “I’m thinking you should go,” she said. “On account of it’s hot out and I don’t want to.”

  “Let’s try that thing Sinclair gave us.” I pulled the box from the rear seat and opened it.

  The battered instrument looked like one I’d heard about but never seen before. The latest trick in Big Brother’s magic show, a device that kept tabs on radio frequency identification cards, the souped-up descendant of the bar code.

  A handheld, broad-spectrum RFID scanner, a radar detector for stuff that wasn’t moving.

  Though the technology was nothing new, ever cheaper components meant that RFID tags, both passive and active, were now in more things than not, and the efficiency and range of the scanners had gotten better as well.

  “You think it works?” Piper said.

  “Let’s find out.” I pressed what looked like an On switch.

  Sinclair, a technophobe of the first order, had warned me not to activate the device. But what did he know? He could barely figure out a microwave oven.

  The screen crackled to life, missing a few pixels. A message from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned that the device was the property of the US government and any unauthorized use or possession would result in imprisonment. No mention of fines.

  “So far so good.” I pointed the muzzle at a parked car. Pulled the trigger.

  The warning on the screen dissolved into a series of squiggly lines, indicating the device was searching. After a few moments a new message appeared. “No Data.”

  I aimed at a house across the street and pressed the trigger.

  More squiggly lines. Then a different screen, two blinking dots next to a code of some sort. Both were hyperlink blue like on a webpage.

  “Bingo.” I examined the top of the machine and figured out the keypad. Scrolled over to the first item and pressed enter.

  The screen dissolved into an antenna sign, indicating information was being transmitted. Then a series of numbers appeared followed by the notation, “Unknown Item—tag assigned to retail outlet—Barnes & Noble.”

  “Well I’ll be a monkey’s bunghole.” I hit the next hyperlink.

  A few seconds later, the screen read the same thing, ending with: “retail outlet—Best Buy.”

  Piper whistled. “That is so fricking cool.”

  The information meant that the house across the street contained RFID tags for at least two items, one that had been purchased at Best Buy, one at Barnes and Noble.

  “My turn, my turn.” Piper grabbed for the scanner. “I want to play with it.”

  “Let’s see what’s going on here first.” I pushed her away and pointed to the next block.

  What looked like a UPS van stopped across the street from the warehouse, and two hard-looking men got out, obviously not employees of the United Parcel Service unless the company had started hiring at the local probation office.

  “Scan the truck,” Piper said.

  I did. Got nothing.

  “Should be a bunch of tags in a UPS van.” She frowned.

  The two men, both armed, judging by the bulges on their hips, walked across the street to the warehouse. They knocked on the door, which opened a crack and admitted them.

  “They’re waiting on the shipment,” Piper said.

  “Maybe.” I aimed the scanner at the warehouse. “Unless it’s already here.”

  The device took a long time. The squiggly lines seemed to go on forever. When it stopped, the screen filled with links, too many to count, each with the same code. At the bottom a tiny note read, “Scroll down for more items.”

  Piper exhaled loudly.

  I hit one of the links.

  The transmit icon followed by the note, “Unknown Item—tag assigned to manufacturer—McCormack Pharmaceutical.”

  “Winner-winner, chicken dinner.” I dropped the scanner on the floor. The shipment was on the premises.

  With the advent of medical marijuana dispensaries and the relaxing of drug laws around the country, the cartels had begun to diversify into legal narcotics, hijacking shipments at various places al
ong the route from factory to pharmacy.

  Unfortunately for the hijackers, legitimately manufactured products were much easier to track than bales of plant material grown on the sly. Legitimate products left a trail. There were shipping manifests and inventory records to contend with, tax records and video surveillance at the production plant.

  And electronic tags.

  “Holy crap.” Piper shifted in her seat. “This is it.”

  The two men came out. One pushed a dolly stacked with cardboard boxes. The other held a cut-off shotgun pressed against his leg. He scanned the street and then appeared to relax.

  “They’re moving the product.” I put on my windbreaker.

  “Remember,” Piper said. “Any problems? The answer is rounds on target.”

  I nodded but not in agreement, just to shut her up. Her mantra: rounds on target. The modern equivalent of “Shoot first; ask questions later.”

  “Let’s do it.” Piper grabbed a canvas bag from the floorboard, jumped out.

  I got out too. Slung the MP5 strap on a shoulder, snatched the grip with one hand, finger outside the trigger guard. I used the trees and houses as cover until the intersection. Then I headed straight to the warehouse at a gallop.

  Piper ran across the street at an angle, flanking the two men, using a pair of abandoned cars as cover. As she went she pulled a Taser from the bag.

  The guard wasn’t expecting trouble. He didn’t realize what was happening until we were about thirty feet away.

  He yelled, brought the shotgun up.

  Piper was off to his side. She fired the Taser and two barbed hooks connected to the unit’s battery embedded themselves in his abdomen.

  “DON’T MOVE!” I brought the submachine gun to my shoulder. “POLICE.”

  The guy behind the dolly looked at his friend jerking around on the ground. He stepped back, hands up.

  “Drug Enforcement Administration.” I held up a badge.

  - CHAPTER SIXTEEN -

  Easy operation so far, thanks to the slightly burned scanner.

  I cuffed the man who’d been moving the boxes and wondered for a half second where Sinclair had gotten the device. There was no telling. He usually kept a lot of pitchforks simmering in the brimstone.