Shakedown

Chapter Sixteen

My father was a salesman who preached that life was all about opening doors. The ones you could open yourself were the easiest, he said. All it took was guts. The hard ones were the ones someone else had to open for you because people won’t let you in if they don’t trust you. It didn’t matter what his product line was-plumbing supplies, corrugated boxes, or anything else he could buy right and sell smart-he always told me that he was selling the same thing. Trust.

That’s all I had to offer to Ammara Iverson. Troy Clark had told her not to trust me. That didn’t mean she didn’t, only that she was following orders by refusing to talk with me about the investigation. I had to give her a reason to disobey and open her door. I called her cell phone.

“Yes,” she said.

Her voice was quiet but hurried. I didn’t have to ask to know that I’d caught her at a bad time.

“It’s Jack. Call me on my cell when you can talk privately. It’s important.”

I had no place to go and nothing to do when I got there so I drove around, waiting for Ammara to call. I cruised south on Seventh Street, east on Central, winding my way across a bridge that took me back in to Kansas City, Missouri, past Kemper Arena, a modernistic white elephant relegated to tractor pulls after the Sprint Arena opened on the south edge of downtown.

I crept along Liberty Street, turning east on the Twelfth Street Bridge, which rose above old redbrick warehouses now converted to Halloween haunted houses whose faded logos advertising furniture and hardware were now obscured by three-story skulls with gaping, bloody mouths. Halloween was five weeks away, but it was never too early to be scared to death.

I continued across Twelfth Street, wandering south on Broadway into the Crossroads District where the warehouses had become art galleries and studios, lofts and restaurants that drew large crowds the first Friday of each month. Broadway carried me past Union Station and the Liberty Memorial, a towering obelisk remembering the victims and veterans of World War I, and south to the Country Club Plaza shopping district in midtown.

I left Brooks Brothers, Abercrombie amp; Fitch, and The Sharper Image in my rearview mirror, going farther south, where I passed the mansions on Ward Parkway. I turned west on Fifty-ninth Street, across State Line Road, and back into Kansas. More mansions?ashed by in an enclave called Mission Hills.

In the space of thirty minutes, I’d gone from ghetto to grandeur, without destination or purpose. I didn’t know what to do with myself and I began to shake, my hands locked on the steering wheel, my chin jackknifing against my chest. I pulled into a church parking lot, stopping the car while waiting for the spasms to ease. A sign announced that I’d crossed into Prairie Village, another of the ubiquitous suburbs that ran together like colors bleeding from cheap madras. My phone rang as I caught my breath.

“Jack, it’s Ammara. What’s so important?”

She was all business, careful and brisk. There would be no dance. I wouldn’t ask any questions, so she wouldn’t have to refuse to answer. I’d give without asking for anything in return, banking the information I gave her for a future payback.

“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.