Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover (29 page)

And brought both legs up, curled and
kicked
. As hard as I could, every bit of strength and anger channeled into one strike.

I caught him square, at hip level. The combination of his momentum and my assist kept him in the air, flying right over me. Out of control.

Right into the inferno.

T
he Clabbton VFW wasn’t much—one story, wood—and could have done with new paint years ago. But the gravel lot was filled, and more vehicles were parked down the road on both sides. Two guys in black suits pointed newcomers where to leave their cars, helped older folks through the door, murmured directions and condolences.

The morning sun was sharp and clear. Birds twittered in the trees behind the hall. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust when I stepped inside.

Closed caskets, of course, on a dais up front. Two, end to end so people could pay their respects in order. Some black bunting on one table with flowers. A slatted metal hatch had been rolled up over the pass-through counter to the hall’s kitchen, and two women were serving coffee. Some trays of cookies and brownies, the plastic wrap just coming off. Nothing store-bought here.

There must have been a hundred people inside and with those numbers, even quiet and respectful chatting raised a din. But that was okay.

No one likes a silent wake. It really is for the living, not the dead.

Dave found me in the crush, coffee cup in one hand. People gave us room—or maybe it was just me. Him they knew and liked. I was a stranger, and maybe they could sense I’d brought this death into their community.

“Good turnout,” I said, working on a plate-sized sugar cookie. “They had a lot of friends.”

“Brendt grew up here, and Elsie one county over. Not everyone moves away.”

“You doing okay?”

“Sure.” But he didn’t smile.

We hadn’t talked much in the two days since ruining Markson’s jamboree. Chief Gator had taken one look at the scene in Brendt’s house and dismissed the suicide scenario, but he didn’t get any further before federal agents airlifted in and claimed jurisdiction. Which was reasonable enough, given the numerous SEC violations, environmental and commercial lawbreaking on a wide scale and apparent involvement of Russian criminal elements.

Remarkably, Wilbur Markson was staying afloat—a victim, like everyone else. The Russians were either dead or had disappeared, conveniently, on nonstop flights back to the motherland.

“The CEO who started all this, Brinker, he’s not even in jail,” Dave said. “He’s been getting pizza deliveries out at his mansion.”

“How do you know that?”

“Heard it down at Sully’s.” He shrugged. “It was him and the Russkies all along.”

“He was just an opportunist.” When Clayco’s board let Brinker know his division might be on the block, he must have gotten worried—and rightly so because even a blind-and-deaf auditor couldn’t miss the games they were playing. “I think every single person at Clay Micro was stealing from the company, and only the fact that they were making so much profit let them get away with it.”

“So why’d the Russians still want to buy in, if it was that raggedy?”

“My guess? Someone like Brinker they could understand. Just another amoral
biznesman
on the make. It was probably oligarch money at the top, looking for investments in America—lots of natural gas in Russia, not to mention other resource extraction, so it makes sense they were starting with a business they knew. And because you apparently can’t make an honest dollar in Russia nowadays, the mafiya were in, which meant they had their crew of enforcers handy to smooth the deals.”

“Well, they’re out of it now.”

And indeed, Dagger Light’s acquisition of Clay Micro had been stopped dead. Rockwire, Dagger Light’s part owner, was “under investigation.” Markson had already started to extricate himself and his money, claiming no knowledge of what such small and obscure holdings in his vast empire might have been up to. Throwing the Russians under the bus, of course, but that was okay. They’d find other opportunities later, other chances for synergistic cooperation.

People Dave knew came over, shook hands, said what you say in circumstances like these. They generally had an eye for me, too, but I didn’t offer much, kept quiet and let Dave send them on.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked me, in between.

“I don’t know.”

I really didn’t. Zeke was on the mend, back in New York, but I was responsible for getting him so badly hurt in the first place. Brendt and Elsie were dead. I didn’t feel bad about the Russians, but only psychopaths can kill so many people and not be affected.

Well, soldiers, maybe, but that’s a different story and even there the PTSD numbers are stunning.

Considering how murderous mankind has been through history, you’d think we might have gotten better at dealing with the consequences.

“I might take a sabbatical,” I said. “Visit some friends in quiet, sunny parts of the world. Sit on the beach.”

Dave grinned, a flash of his old self. “Friends like, I dunno . . . Harmony?”

“Harmony.” I smiled back, but it faded quickly. “She left.”

“Really? Man, I thought you two were, shit, like totally
made
for each other.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

At least we’d kept her out of the clutches of the law. Dave and I didn’t lie or make stuff up during the many interviews we’d had with law enforcement, but I know I committed numerous sins of omission. They had Harmony’s name, and some useless eyewitness descriptions, and that wouldn’t get them anywhere. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be found.

“That’s too bad.” Dave shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah.” I finished the cookie. “Or maybe yes. I don’t know.”

Later I found the bank officer, Vanderalt, standing to one side. He was almost as busy as Dave, a steady flow of people offering greetings, nods, brief conversations. Like I said, a pillar of the community, beloved by all.

“Silas.” He shook my hand. “An eventful visit you’ve had.”

“I’m sorry it happened.” I nodded toward the caskets. “Too many bad actors in the world.”

“So not meth gangs after all.”

I squinted for a moment, then remembered Dave’s speculation about the destroyed garage. “The Russian gangsters. Yes, they cut quite a path of destruction.”

“I’m glad no one got hurt, that time.”

“No one got shot. Dave lost his business.”

“Didn’t he tell you?” Vanderalt looked surprised.

“What?”

“The mineral rights. Turns out he might be sitting on a nice clean patch of Marcellus shale.”

“Natural gas.” I nodded slowly. “No way.”

“I was trying to think of anything he might get out of the land, and I called some of the other landholders nearby. Scouts have been around, offering contracts. It’s not lottery money by any means, but it could pay off the mortgage and maybe turn into some cash flow, over time.”

“Didn’t he
know
that?”

“I gather they’d been trying to talk to him, and he just kept sending them away.”

Figures. I looked at Dave across the room. Two women were speaking to him, close in, and I saw that amazing grin appear for a moment. “That’s too ironic for words.”

“Isn’t it though?” Vanderalt was probably one of the few people in Clabbton to appreciate that sort of thing.

“But fracking—” I thought of the drilling site I’d seen, the swath of destruction, the hammering so loud it made your eyeballs hurt. “Is he going to take it?”

“Ah.” Vanderalt paused. “That’s the question. With Dave, you never know.”

The wake thinned out after an hour or two, people drifting away. Dave and I left, stepping back into the sunshine outside, past the funeral home guy still murmuring his words of comfort. We stood by the Charger, which Dave had finally waxed to a brilliant, blinding sheen.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” he said while we waited for the parking lot to empty further.

“Yeah.”

“Back to Vegas?”

“No, I told you—” But I saw him grinning. “No, not Vegas.”

“Maybe I’ll come see you, up there in the city.”

“Do that.”

“Well, I . . .” He hesitated. “You know. Hope you stay in touch, that’s all.”

“How could I not?” I turned my face to the sun, feeling its warmth. “We’re brothers.”

T
he cornfields stretched as far as we could see in front of us.

Which was far, because the land was flat as a pool table, and this early in the season the corn was no more than shoots poking from the dark harrowed rows.

“How do you even know it’s corn?”

“Because we’re in Ohio. What else do they grow here?”

“Soybeans. Beets.” Harmony shook her head. “Rye. Lots of cash crops.”

Yes. Harmony. I hadn’t explained everything to Dave.

She and I had one last piece of business to see through.

“What do you think?”

I looked at the distant house, by itself on the plain, surrounded by a white painted fence. In addition to the usual outbuildings—two barns, a roof with some trucks underneath, hayricks, utility sheds—there was a big, old-fashioned satellite dish and several antennas, one at least thirty feet high. A single road led up to the estate. We’d watched for several hours, and a steady flow of vehicles had gone in and out: FedEx, town cars, a limousine and even a police cruiser, though he only drove through, waved to someone on the porch and reversed out.

“I think Camp David would be easier.”

“He always says how he lives in the same house he grew up in.”

“So maybe his parents were paranoid, right-wing millionaires.”

“Right-wing?”

“Look at the bumper of the SUV by the house.” She handed me the binoculars. “That’s a Ron Paul sticker.”

I couldn’t get a clear focus. We were a half mile away, at a picnic table by the side of the road. You don’t usually see rest areas on two-lane county backroads, but we weren’t the first ones to stop here. A trash barrel was full of Styrofoam takeout containers and soda cans, and the rutted spring mud was completely torn up by tire tracks.

“Ron Paul’s a libertarian.”

“That’s not right-wing?”

“They’re prepared to argue the point.” I handed back the binoculars. “Very well prepared.”

An RV pulled in, trundling off the road and sighing to a halt. After a few moments the side door opened and a woman in jeans stepped out, followed by a white-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt. Husband-and-wife retirees, surely.

Harmony had already disappeared her binocs.

“Afternoon,” the man said, nodding to us. “This here’s the spot, ain’t it?”

“It’s not bad, I guess.” I made room at the picnic table. “We just stopped to eat our lunch.”

“You know whose house that is over there?” He pointed. “Wilbur Markson.”

“Oh?”

“A billionaire, and he lives like plain folks.”

“How about that.”

“Uh-huh. Smartest investor ever. Smarter than those idiots in Washington, for sure.”

His wife put two bottles of energy water on the table and sat down. “We stop here every time we pass through,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

She looked over at us as her husband joined her at the table. “On vacation?”

“A working vacation, I suppose.” I noticed some road dust in the distance. “You know how it goes, always a few loose ends.”

“You said it.”

We sat for another minute. The tourists murmured to themselves as they ate chips. The dust drew closer, then resolved into several vehicles, pacing each other at high speed toward Markson’s compound.

“Look there.” The husband stopped eating.

“What’s going on?”

It wasn’t police or emergency—no lights, no official markings. One truck with equipment on its roof, a van, and several smaller, anonymous cars.

The first vehicle made it through the gate and most of the way up the drive, but guards appeared and waved the others to a halt at the entrance. Even from the distance it looked like shouting and arguments.

“They’re armed.” Harmony had the binoculars out again, ignoring the tourists.

“What?”

“The guards. But they haven’t drawn weapons.”

And why would they? The arrivals were all news reporters.

Which we knew because twenty-seven minutes earlier Clara had posted her first story about Markson’s desperate and colossal fraud.

Once she’d started digging, evidence piled up fast—so fast you had to wonder why the regulators hadn’t opened enforcement hearings long ago. That would happen soon enough now, though, no matter who’d been taking payoffs.

Markson had indeed lost his golden touch. Probably the worldwide economic collapse hit him just like everyone else, but he tried to make it back before anyone noticed—he was Wilbur Markson, by God, and he had that three-decade record to uphold. Hubris? Panic? The first soft tendrils of senility?

It didn’t matter. He needed money, he needed results and he needed them fast. He’d been doing business in Eastern Europe for a long time—some buyout equity, some utility privatization, some straight stock investment—and it was easy to start dealmaking further and further into the gray zones.

Clay Micro turned out to be the loose thread that unraveled the whole mess. Once it snagged, his new Russian partners reverted to old ways of solving problems, and then it was only a matter of time. Markson could neither suppress the collapse nor continue funding his losses.

And now, finally, the entire world was getting the story.

The RV driver was on his phone.

“No, we’re right here, seeing it for real . . . outside his farm, you bet. In Ohio. Can you believe it? There’s a downright
mob
in front now!” He listened. “No, that’s impossible. Russians, you say? What are you watching, Fox News? No, I don’t . . . never . . . he was ordering people
killed
?”

The man turned to his wife. “They’re saying he’s worse than Goldman Sachs!”

Harmony handed me the binoculars. The driver was right, the reporters
were
a mob, gesturing and yelling at the guards. They’d closed the gate and started to spread out along the fence, positioning themselves to prevent the more enterprising journalists from trying to climb over.

A flash of sunlight reflected off a window on the second floor, across the empty fields. Perhaps Wilbur Markson was up there this very moment, in his home office. A few minutes ago he could have been setting up another megadeal, earning another billion dollars, toying with the fate of millions as he talked on speakerphone to plutocrats all over the world.

Not now.

My own phone buzzed once, and I saw a new text.

SWTR.A -115.83 (-12.4%) haha awesome

“What?” said Harmony.

“Johnny’s making good on his short.” We stepped away from the tourists, who were still staring at Markson’s estate and talking in low voices to each other.

“How much did he commit?”

“No idea. But I think the year’s bonus season might just be looking up.”

“I love seeing the free market at work.”

Before we got in the car, I glanced back once more. The TV truck had extended its aerial antenna. More cars were arriving—the police, finally, and a pair of shiny black SUVs. Damage control. The fight had only begun, and Markson had billions of dollars to defend himself with. He might never go to jail, but his reputation was burned to ash.

The Buddha had just retired in disgrace.

I closed the door and started the car. Harmony smiled, resting one hand on my shoulder. We drove out of the turnout, bouncing over ruts, and turned east.

It was time to go home.