The Prophet (17 page)

He often considered the monetary value of the bond, but he’d rarely considered the power that came with the signature.
I’m yours to watch,
the offender was acknowledging.
I’m yours.

On Thursday morning, exactly one week after he’d set out to look for him originally, Adam returned to searching for Jerry Norris, his outstanding skip.

The first two times Jerry Norris had skipped, he’d crashed at his cousin’s house, a pattern he’d given up since, but Adam knew damn well that Rick Tieken, the cousin, would know where he could be found. He’d tried bribes with Tieken in the past and had some success. Family mattered to Tieken, sure, but not as much as cash. Priorities.

Tieken worked for an auto parts store and was behind the register when Adam walked in. He looked up when the bell over the door rang, recognized Adam, and smirked. Probably had been waiting on him for days.

“How’s it going, Teek?”

“Just fine, man, just fine. The Jeep letting you down again?”

“Serpentine belt,” Adam said. “Got a feeling it’s about done. Got a match for me?”

“I’m sure we do. What’s the year on that?”

“Oh-four.”

Tieken clicked away on the computer, wrote down a number, and vanished into the back. Came back with a belt in a plastic bag.

“This should do the trick, chief.”

“Great. You mind coming out to take a look with me?” Adam said, taking a pointed glance at the other employee in the store. “Want to be sure I’m not wasting dollars. A professional opinion might help.”

Tieken’s smirk widened. He knew the drill.

“You seen your cousin recently?” Adam said as they walked around the corner of the store to the Jeep. It was parked behind the store’s van, out of sight from the road.

“Hillary? Yeah, we played cards just the other night.”

“Funny. But you know I mean Jerry. Where is he?”

“Oh, Jerry?” Tieken ran a hand through his red hair, pursed his lips, mock-thoughtful. “Man, I thought that old boy was in jail. You mean he’s not?”

“He needs to be,” Adam said. He opened the driver’s door, then popped the hood. “And I’ve got ten grand invested in seeing him back there. Think you can help?”

“Ten grand? Boy, that’s a lot.”

“It is.” Adam lifted the hood, set the brace. “And the thing is, Teek? I need this one settled fast. Like,
today.
”

What he needed settled had nothing to do with Jerry Norris, but Jerry was an important means to the end, and Adam could not afford to waste time getting there. He took the bag from Tieken’s hands, tore open the plastic, and slipped out the belt. A long loop of very strong rubber, V-ribbed. He pulled on the ends, felt the satisfying tension.

“You want to entertain yourself with this bullshit, or do you want to make a little money?” he said. “Pick fast, Teek. It’s two hundred dollars you won’t have in about thirty seconds. So pick fast.”

“Two hundred? I thought he was worth ten grand to you. I mean, if you spent five to get him back, just breaking even, that would help, wouldn’t it?”

Adam dropped the serpentine belt over Rick Tieken’s head, jerked it backward, and twisted. Tieken’s grunt of surprise was the last sound he got out before his air was gone. He fumbled at the belt and Adam twisted it again, cinching it tighter, and then slammed him forward, pressed his face down against the engine block, which was not hot enough to sear, but still hot enough to be awfully uncomfortable. Adam leaned down and spoke with his mouth close to Tieken’s ear.

“I do not have time to waste on you. Just don’t have it.”

He hit him again, and Tieken tried to let out a sob but couldn’t get enough air, just strangled a little more. Adam stepped back and loosened the belt. Tieken fought to clear it from his neck, and Adam obliged, slipping it back over his head, then coiling the belt in his hand. When Tieken fell, gasping, into the parking lot, Adam whipped the belt back and lashed it off his ribs, watched him double over and drop onto his face in the gravel.

“Son of a bitch.” Tieken wheezed. “I’m calling the cops, you piece of—”

“Do that and I’ll come back here and when I leave again you’ll be toothless. Now tell me where to find your brain-dead cousin. I promise you, if you see me again, it will not go well.”

Tieken looked up at him, and Adam smiled and looped one end of the belt tight in his fist, let the rest dangle in front of the man’s eyes.

“You want to have me arrested, you better believe I’m going to earn it.”

Tieken gave him an address through shaking breaths.

“That better be accurate,” Adam said.

“It is.”

“I’ll go find out.” Adam dropped the belt onto his chest in a loose tangle. “I don’t think I need that. Restock it, would you?”

The address checked out. Jerry Norris was lounging in a trailer on the south side of Chambers, watching
SportsCenter
and throwing Doritos at a fat pug who sat on the couch with him. He looked out the window when Adam knocked on it, made eye contact, and then abandoned the couch and sprinted down the hallway. The dog moved on the Doritos immediately, was face-first into the bag in under three seconds. On another day, Adam might have laughed. There were skips you actually worried about, guys you wanted off the street and in jail, and then there were skips like Jerry. Eating Doritos with a pug at nine in the morning.

“Jerry?” he called. “We just looked at each other. It’s safe to say I spotted you in there. I can wait outside and call the police, or you can open the damned door.”

Silence. The pug had fallen off the couch with the chip bag on his head. Adam squeezed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

“Jerry. Come on.”

Now he heard the click of a door opening, and Jerry Norris came down the hall and back into the living room. He looked at Adam through the window, spread his hands, and gave an awkward smile.

“Instinct,” he said.

Adam nodded. Instinct.

“Let me in.”

Jerry unlocked the door and swung it open. Adam stepped inside, looked around the trailer, watching the pug push the chip bag out of the living room and into the kitchen, and said, “Whose place?”

“Girl’s name is Christine. Works on the turnpike. I met her at the tollbooth.”

Adam had to give Jerry a little credit here; picking someone up at a tollbooth was kind of impressive. He assumed it had been a light traffic day.

“She know you’re violating?”

Jerry shook his head.

“Good thing you’ve got going with her? Think you can stick it out if you’re not in jail?”

“Maybe.”

“Think you can stick it out if you
are
in jail?”

“Doubt it.”

“Well, then,” Adam said, “let’s talk.”

Jerry gave him a puzzled look. They had never discussed options before; Adam just cuffed him and hauled his ass in.

“You’ll do a minimum of ninety days if I bring you in,” Adam said. “Minimum. They might go for a year. No more Christine. Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it?”

Jerry waited, curious or confused or both.

“I will drive away and leave you here,” Adam said, “if you can do me a favor. I would like some drugs.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I am not.”

Jerry laughed. “Oh, man. You got to be kidding me. What do you need?”

“Something in the heroin, meth, or coke families would be terrific,” Adam said. “But if that’s hard for you to come up with, I’d settle for OxyContin, provided the quantity is substantial.”

The smile left Jerry’s face and his eyes narrowed. “Screw this, man. Entrapment, that’s what this bullshit is.”

“Only police can entrap you, Jerry. And I’m quite serious. I would like whatever you can give me. Right now. Or we go to jail. Right now.”

There was a long pause while Jerry studied his face and
SportsCenter
ran and the pug wrestled with the chip bag somewhere out of sight in the kitchen.

“I can give you some OxyContin.”

“I’d like more than a hundred.”

“What? Why?”

“Jerry—again, we could be on our way to jail now. I’m frustrated by the need to continue to reiterate that idea. What I am telling you is this: I will officially lose interest in your bond if you make sure you give me at least 101 pills. Understand?”

Jerry understood perfectly. That extra pill was the difference between illegal possession charges and trafficking charges. Between jail time and prison time.

“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not letting you trap me, man.”

“Trap you? Jerry, I’ve
got
you. What I’m offering is to release the trap. Your call.”

Jerry Norris sighed, looking unhappily at Adam, not liking the situation but not liking the certainty of several months in jail if he didn’t roll with it, and then he said, “Hang on,” and went down the hall and into a bedroom and closed the door. When he came back, he had four orange prescription bottles.

“One twenty,” he said. “There’s a lot of money there. Maybe we could talk about that?”

Adam almost laughed. The dumb son of a bitch had a pair of brass balls on him, you had to admit that.

“Jerry,” he said, “you probably have one hell of a battle of wits going with that dog who is currently stuck in the chip bag. I’m going to let you get back to it now.”

He pocketed the pill bottles, left the trailer, and drove to the hospital garage where Rodney Bova parked his truck every day.

The hospital parking garage was a risk-versus-reward scenario. On the one hand, it was a far more potent opportunity than Rodney Bova’s house; on the other hand, there would surely be security cameras in place. Adam addressed this problem as best he could by borrowing a jacket, hat, and set of car keys from Bova’s home. He was even more pleased to find that Bova had an extra security tag, complete with his photograph. It was outdated, but Adam doubted they’d changed the design much. He was a good deal taller than the man, but if he kept his head down and the cap pulled low and moved fast and with confidence, he’d make it hard on anyone studying the tapes, at least.

He left his own car nine blocks away, where no camera would track it, and then walked in, staring at his feet as he entered the hospital, careful not to lift his face to the cameras. Once inside, he found a restroom, where there would be no cameras, and waited for a full hour, giving those security videos a long lapse to deal with after his entrance. All of this would not fool a diligent detective, but it was unlikely that a police detective would buy the “someone planted this stuff” story enough from a guy with priors to pursue it to such lengths.

When he entered the parking garage through the attached walkway, he moved fast, and then he was in the poorly lit space and headed down to the second floor, where he’d seen Bova park the previous day. The F150 was right where it belonged. He used Bova’s spare set to unlock it, then reached out with a gloved hand, opened the door, and placed the bottles of OxyContin in the glove compartment, then removed a Colt .38 revolver from the jacket pocket. An acquisition from one of his previous skips—Adam had taken it after the guy threatened him but then backed down. The gun’s serial number was filed off, and it had probably floated through dozens of hands over the years. Today it was loaded, and wiped clean of prints. He added the weapon to the glove compartment, then locked the car again.

He was out of the garage in under two minutes, back at Bova’s house in ten, the jacket, hat, and car keys replaced exactly as they had been.

It was another two hours before Rodney Bova left for lunch. Adam, now parked with a clear view of the hospital, slipped in behind him, followed him to a Burger King, and called the police from a disposable cell phone—
burners,
his skips liked to call them, guys who didn’t want to have a number attached to their name—and gave the location and license number, then said that the driver seemed impaired and was armed.

“I honked, you know, because he was so erratic, and he held a gun up,” Adam said, speaking high and with a shop towel held between the phone and his mouth, enough distortion to get by. “Pointed that thing right at me, I thought he was going to shoot.”

They asked for his name, of course.

“Hell, no,” he said. “No way, no way. That guy just pointed a
gun
at me, do you understand? I’m not going to be part of this. I don’t want him coming to my house, threaten my wife, my kids, how do I know what he’ll do? You just pull him over and see if I’m lying. He’s going to leave the Burger King on Lincoln Avenue in about five seconds if you don’t hurry. The guy’s drunk or stoned and he’s waving a gun around. Do something about it.”

He hung up. A defense attorney would have a field day with this anonymous call, but Adam didn’t care what happened in court, he cared about providing probable cause for the vehicle search.

When the F150 pulled out of the Burger King, Adam passed it driving the opposite direction on Lincoln, then banged a left so he was running on a different street but parallel. It was maybe a mile before he saw police lights come on through the houses beside him.

He made another call then, this one from his own phone. Called the Chambers County Jail and asked for one of the booking
agents he knew best, a guy who regularly sent business to AA Bail Bonds in exchange for a small commission. There were only three bond agencies in the county, but Adam wasn’t about to take a risk on missing this one.

“I’m listening to scanner traffic right now,” he said. “You’re going to see a boy in there soon on possession charges, maybe weapons, too. Sounds lucrative. I need it. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“A grand in cash tonight if you can send him my way. I need this one. And if anybody else comes in today on high-dollar shit, consider the offer matched. When you recommend me, though, don’t use my name. Just say Double-A Bonds.”

“A
grand?
Shit, you got it, Austin.”

“Thanks,” Adam said, and then he hung up and drove to the office. Chelsea was behind the desk.

“Jerry Norris back in jail yet?”

“He is not,” Adam said. “But I’m done chasing for the day. We got any calls?”

She frowned. “None. Slow day.”