Jack Davis Mystery - 01 - Shakedown (12 page)

“Marcellus Pearson gave Oleta Phillips three thousand dollars as funeral benefits after her son, Tony, was killed. She’s probably on the surveillance videotape. Find out if she’s ever been arrested. Check her fingerprints against any prints on the cash I found in Marcellus’s backyard.”

“Why?”

“Because Oleta has disappeared. If that’s her money, she may have seen the killer. If she did, she’s either hiding or dead. You need to find out which it is.”

“How do you know she’s disappeared?”

“Her brother told me.”

“Jack, what are you doing talking to her brother? Don’t tell me you’re working this case on your own! Ben Yates will have your head and Troy will give it to him.”

“Relax. I don’t have anything else to do. I was bored so I took a drive. I ran into Marty Grisnik.”

“He’s the KCK detective.”

“Right.”

“I remember seeing him the other night at the scene. He was not having a good time.”

“He doesn’t like being cut out.”

“I don’t blame him, but I’m not the one with the scissors. What’s the story with Oleta and her brother?”

“The brother’s name is Rodney Jensen. Oleta lives with him. He called in a missing-person report after she didn’t come home for the second night in a row.”

“Grisnik runs Robbery and Homicide. What’s he doing making a house call on a missing-person report?”

“He thinks Oleta’s disappearance is related to the murder of her son, Tony, the kid who got shot on the corner last week. I just happened to drive by Rodney’s house while he and Grisnik were out on the sidewalk. Grisnik saw me and ?agged me down. He wanted to know what was going on with our investigation. I told him I was out of it. He introduced me to Rodney and Rodney told me about his sister. So I’m telling you.”

“Why aren’t you telling Troy?”

“Because Troy might get the wrong impression and think I was freelancing. If he did, I’d probably never get back to work and I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything else that Grisnik might share with me the next time we run into each other. I was hoping that you’d follow up on the lead and leave me out of it.”

Ammara waited before responding, doing her own calculus. I knew the numbers she was crunching, trying to decide if an FBI agent who might be unstable, who was on medical leave for an unexplained disorder that made him shake like a ride at Six Flags and who had been booted out of the inner circle, qualified as a confidential source whose information she could rely on and whose identity she could protect. Plus, she had to factor in Marty Grisnik.

“What’s Grisnik’s stake in this?” she asked.

“Two things, I said. He wants anything that will help him with the shooting of Tony Phillips and the disappearance of Oleta Phillips. And he wants to know if we’ve got proof that any of his people were taking money from Marcellus.”

“He and Troy, they both got the same bug up their ass. I don’t like thinking that someone on our squad is bent. It changes the way I see all of us. Sometimes I don’t even trust myself.”

“We don’t get to choose what happens,” I told her. “Only what we do about it. Maybe Grisnik could get a look at the surveillance videotapes. I doubt that any cops would have shown up in uniform, but he might recognize someone who shouldn’t have been there.”

“I don’t know if Troy would go for that.”

“It’s going to take a long time to ID everyone on those tapes. Tell him that Grisnik can help. Just don’t tell Troy it was my idea.”

“Makes sense. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks.”

“And Jack,” she said. “You get anything else, let me know. I’ll keep it between the two of us.”

***

With nothing else to do until I met Wendy and Colby for dinner, I went to the Bullet Hole, a private shooting range located in a low-slung building that is bigger than it looks from the street. The owners spent their money to make certain it was safe, not gorgeous. The walls and ?oor are the same off-white, the showcases are all nicked wood and scratched glass filled with polished handguns. Wall-to-wall gun racks brim with ri?es and shotguns. The staff is devoted to the members, their guns, and the Second Amendment.

My personal weapon is a Glock 23 .40 caliber semiautomatic. It’s as close to perfectly balanced as any gun I’ve carried, fits neatly on my hip, and feels like part of me when I hold it in my hand. It’s slightly smaller than the original model, so some people call it the mini-Glock, but there’s nothing mini about it. I use it because it has the knockdown power that can make the difference in a life-or-death situation.

I’ve pulled my gun many times, fired it enough to know how I and it perform under real conditions, and hit enough people to know that I’d rather not. Real conditions had changed for me. I had to find out whether I could shoot and shake at the same time.

I bought a box of PowRball bullets. Each round has an expanding jacketed bullet with a polymer ball in the bullet cavity. The soft-point cap promotes controlled expansion of the bullet, resulting in a classic mushroom shape that dumps all the available energy into the target. I knew all that because I’d read it on their website and I’d seen what happens when one of their bullets hits a ?esh-and-blood target instead of one made of paper.

The range is half a ?ight down from the main ?oor and consists of a series of shooting stations separated by partitions. I set my gun and ammo on the ledge in front of my shooting station. I was the only one on the range, which suited me just fine. If I was going to fall apart again, I didn’t want another audience.

Guns are unforgiving weapons. They carry out the errors committed by the person firing them without apology or regret. They will jam or misfire if you don’t treat them with the care and respect they require. Their accuracy depends on a number of factors—range, wind, and angle to name a few. The steadiness of the shooter, more than any other factor, determines whether he hits his target. A firm grip and a controlled trigger pull are essential.

I went through my routine, making certain the gun was unloaded, checking the sight, loading the magazine, planting my feet, squaring my body, and gripping the gun with both hands. I measured my breaths, staying calm and focused. Still and steady, I fired, emptying the thirteen-shot magazine. I reloaded it and repeated the process a second time, then a third, locking my concentration on the gun, the trigger, and the target.

The pistol jumped slightly in my hand as I fired each round, the very manageable recoil another user-friendly feature of the Glock. After each round, I came back to my starting position and fired again. The blue smoke and smell of cordite were as reassuring as the bunched holes ripped in the center of the silhouetted target.

I started shaking when I tried to reload the magazine a fourth time. I clasped a bullet between my thumb and forefinger, repeatedly smacking it against the magazine like I was tapping out incomprehensible Morse code. The round slipped from my hand, landing on the rubber mat at my feet, followed by three more rounds before I laid the gun on the ledge next to a ballpoint pen someone had left there.

I picked up the pen, pulled the cap off, and tried to replace it, unable to make that happen, either. The harder I tried, the worse I shook, the tremors rebounding into my midsection until the muscles in my abdomen contracted like a snapped slingshot, yanking my head to my knees and leaving me grunting and gasping.

I raised my head. There were no witnesses except for the target hanging from a wire thirty feet away. I scooped the bullets off the ?oor and left.

Back in my car, I felt the butt of the gun cut into my waist, the barrel pressing hard against my hip. A gun was just one of the things I put on each day. All of a sudden, it didn’t fit. It was like a pebble rolling around inside my shoe. I couldn’t imagine not carrying it. The only thing worse was what might happen if I had to use it. There were too many things that could go wrong, none of which the gun would forgive.

There was no doubt that Wendy was her mother’s daughter. They shared the same silky, honey-colored hair, strong chin, intoxicating green eyes, and full-face smile.

A psychologist at the drug treatment facility said that Wendy felt guilty for having stayed after school the day Kevin was taken, believing she could have saved him had she been there. The shrink said that she compounded her guilt by blaming herself for the disintegration of our marriage, punishing herself further by making choices she knew would turn out poorly. It was the only explanation that could make us feel worse and it did.

Through it all, she still loved us. That counted for a lot, even when she accused me of not doing enough to help her mother, even after we tried counseling, rehab, and AA. Some things, I once told her, can’t be fixed, and her mother had decided that she was one of them. “Not good enough,” Wendy had said. “You love her, you fix her, like you fixed me.” I did but I couldn’t, telling Wendy she fixed herself. Then I didn’t love Joy anymore and I stopped trying. Two more things I regretted but couldn’t change.

Wendy met Colby Hudson last December at a holiday party for agents, staff, and their families, telling me later that she thought he was cute and edgy.

“Don’t date an agent,” I told her. “Especially that one.”

“Why not and why not him?”

“Because you might fall in love with him, decide to get married, and end up spending the rest of your life unpacking your suitcase and hoping he comes home vertical and sober. That’s a tough way to live, especially for someone with your history. A lot of agents and their spouses can’t hack it. But Colby is the kind of guy who ups the ante. If he’s edgy, it’s because he lives on the edge. You don’t want to be holding on when he falls off, and I’ve seen enough guys like him to know that sooner or later that’s where he’s headed.”

“I’m not you and I’m not Mom. I don’t give up. If he falls, I’ll catch him.”

“And who will catch you?”

“You,” she said with the wide-eyed smile that never failed to open my heart.

***

Dinner was at Fortune Wok, a Chinese restaurant in a strip center at 143rd and Metcalf in Overland Park. Five years earlier, the owners would have been serving wontons in the middle of a cow pasture. Now they were stoking the appetite of the latest wave of suburban migration for everything wok roasted.

There were too many cities on both sides of the state line for me to keep up. There were forty-plus burgs in five counties, each with a budget and a city council dedicated to high growth, low crime, and good times. Overland Park was one of the biggest, cramming farmland down its throat and regurgitating rooftops so fast that it wouldn’t be long until Denver was just down the street.

Lions Gate, the subdivision where Colby was house hunting, bordered the strip center. I was early, so I drove through its manicured streets, past the clubhouse and the villas on the golf course. I remembered a friend who decided to sell his house and downsize to a villa only to discover that a villa was half the house for twice the money. The houses in Lions Gate were bigger and more expensive than the villas, proving that size mattered but not as much as money. There were no Chevy Impalas in anybody’s driveway.

I circled back to the restaurant, parked, and stopped short of the entrance when I saw Colby sitting in a Lexus two cars down from mine. I tapped on the passenger-side window and let myself in. He was on his cell phone.

“It’s nothing, man. I just needed some air. Call you later,” he said to whomever he was talking to, ?ipping the phone shut. “Don’t you knock?” he asked without looking at me.

“I tapped.”

“Next time, knock and wait. The people I talk to don’t want anyone listening. They play close attention to everything, including the background noise. They know I’m in my car, they hear the door open, and then they start asking a shitload of questions about who opened the door, who got in the car; who got out of the car, how come I let someone get in the car with me while I’m on the phone with them. Crazy shit like that.”

“You should get one of those Do Not Disturb signs the hotels use and hang it on your rearview mirror. Maybe get a bumper sticker that says ‘Undercover FBI Agent driving car he can’t afford.’ “

Colby looked at me and grinned, running his hand across his freshly shaved chin. He’d washed the red out of his eyes with sleep or Visine and was wearing crisp jeans and a black, short-sleeved polo. With his hair brushed back, he was indistinguishable from the thousands of other doctors, lawyers, and accountants who were living large.

“You remember that case we had last spring, the one where the stockbroker husband made a career move to peddling dope and the wife called us and turned him in after she caught him cheating on her?”

“Yeah. Thomas and Jill Rice. He went away and the wife got an emergency divorce.”

“And,” Colby said, laughing and shaking his head, “the wife called the office a few weeks ago and I took the call. Said how much she appreciated that we got rid of her husband for her. Then she says that she got his Lexus in the divorce settlement and did I know anyone at the Bureau who’d be interested in it, that it was her way of showing her gratitude. I told her I’d be interested but I couldn’t afford it. So she says, ‘you don’t know my price.’ “

“She make you a good deal?”

“A helluva deal. Says she doesn’t care about the money. She just wants her ex to know that she sold his car to an FBI agent for next to nothing.”

“Love is a beautiful thing.”

“It’s better looking than you think. I go over to her house to pick up the car and she says her ex was so pissed off that I was buying the car that she’s decided to do the same thing with her house, really make the poor bastard suffer. Says she’s leaving town and wants that to be her going-away present to him. So I figure, what the hell. Even with what’s she’s asking, it’ll stretch me, but I figure I can ?ip it, sell it to someone else, and make a bundle. I just came from her house. It’s a done deal.”