Shakedown

Chapter Fifty-seven

I sat in Kate’s car on the northbound side of Fifth Street and started the engine. The night had turned cool, the drop in temperature coating the windows with a layer of dew. Tanja was standing inside the bar, peering out over the neon sign promising free beer tomorrow and waiting for me to drive away.

I pulled away from the curb, wondering whether Colby Hudson was standing in the shadows behind her, watching me over her shoulder. Petar and Maja Andrija’s house was a few blocks to the north, dark and silent as the rest of Strawberry Hill as I glided past. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I saw a burst of light suddenly?are from their open front door, the porch light blinking on and framing Colby as he?ew down the stairs and bolted into the protective darkness surrounding the house next door.

He’d been at Tanja’s parents’ house, not at the bar. She could have called him by now but, if she had, she would have told him to sit tight until she was certain I was gone. His departure looked more like a jailbreak than a careful getaway. Either he wasn’t supposed to be there or he wasn’t supposed to have left.

I stayed off the brakes, not wanting him to think that I’d seen him, knowing that he wouldn’t recognize Kate’s car and that he’d wait until I was out of sight before he started moving. Advantage mine.

I crested the hill at the intersection of Fifth and Ann in front of St. Ann’s Church, which sat on the southwest corner of the intersection, the church and the street named after the same saint. A playground stretched from the east side of the church to the curb. This was where Marty Grisnik and Tanja had gone to school, Marty probably stealing a kiss, getting whacked on the back of his head by a nun for his trouble.

I turned left onto Ann, then right into an alley, where I parked the car. I popped open the dome light and unscrewed the bulb, not wanting to give the edge back to Colby when I got out of the car.

He could have gone in any direction. I was counting on him choosing the only one that gave me a chance. I found a doorway recessed a couple of feet into the damp, limestone wall of the church facing the playground. Standing in the doorway was like nesting in a cave. It was so dark that Colby could have spit on my shoe and not known it. I held my gun at my side, and waited, steady as the rock that surrounded me.

My eyes adjusted to the dark, the shapes of the playground equipment coming into focus. Thinking of the playground as a clock, I was at twelve o’clock, Fifth Street was at six, a swing set in the center. Ann Street was at three o’clock and the jungle gym was at nine. The playground covered half a block and was surrounded by a chain-link fence meant to keep kids and balls in, not meant to keep rogue FBI agents out. If Colby were headed this way, he’d stay close to the church and away from any passing headlights.

Sound travels farther late at night, undiluted by kids playing ball or cars grinding their gears. The jingle jangle sound that chain-link fence makes when someone climbs over it would have been lost in the mix of daytime background noise. In the still of the night, it sounded like an out-of-tune wind chime.

Colby slipped by my doorway, his head down, less than two feet from where I stood. I waited until he’d gone ten feet past me and then stepped onto the playground, my gun aimed at him, calling his name.

He stopped, his back to me. He was wearing jeans and a light jacket. He raised his head, his right shoulder turning in as he reached in to his jacket. I knew he preferred a shoulder harness to a holster stuck in his pants or clipped to his belt.

“You won’t need that,” I told him.

“Why, Jack? Because you’re unarmed or because you’re not going to shoot me?”

“Because I won’t shoot you if I can help it but I will shoot you if I have to. You pull your gun and there’s a lot better chance that will happen. Turn around real slow, keep your hands where I can see them, and talk to me.”

He turned around and said, “You don’t have to do this.”

“Then I apologize in advance. Unzip your jacket, use two fingers to lift your gun out, and put it on the ground. Use three fingers and I’ll shoot one of them off. Then kick it over to me.”

“Listen, Jack.”

“Don’t say a word until I tell you. Just get rid of your gun.”

Colby did as he was told and I kicked his gun toward the jungle gym, steel skidding hard on the asphalt. I pointed my gun at him.

“You can lay down on your stomach, I can cuff you, and search you for your backup gun, or you can save me the trouble and put it on the ground along with any other toys you’re carrying.”

“Give me a break, Jack. You don’t even have your fucking badge. I’ll keep my hands where you can see them, but that’s all. You don’t like it, you can shoot me, or you can come over here and search me.”

I had made a stupid bluff, the kind that always made the other guy bold when he called it and I had to fold. Backing down wasn’t an option. That would turn our power struggle on its head.

“Don’t push me, Colby. Be a good boy and lay down.”

“No,” he said, taking a step toward me.

“Don’t make me shoot you.”

“You won’t. In the first place, I’m unarmed and I haven’t threatened or attacked you. In the second place, you haven’t told me that I’m under arrest. In the third place, if you shoot me you won’t get what you really want.”

He was right on all counts. My right hand began to quiver. I squeezed the butt of my gun to steady myself but it didn’t help. My belly broke out in minitremors. I could feel them but I hoped Colby couldn’t see them.

“Where’s Wendy?”

“She’s not at the Andrijas’ house.”

“That’s what you were doing there? Looking for her? Then where is she?”

“That’s not the way this is going to work. You put your gun down and kick it over to me. Then we’ll talk.”

“She loves you. Now you’re using her as a bargaining chip?”

“You’re the one pointing a gun at me. Doesn’t leave me a lot of choice.”

I reached in my pocket with my left hand, removed my cell phone, and?ipped it open. “I make one call, we’ll have company. Or you can tell me where I can find Wendy and walk away.”

“Go ahead. Make the call. That will be worse than shooting me. Troy and the rest of the gang will show up. I won’t talk until I get a lawyer and the lawyer won’t let me say a word. Besides, they’ve got nothing to charge me with. By the time I walk out the door, it won’t matter where Wendy is. It will be too late.”

My heart slammed into my throat. “She’s alive?”

“Last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“Her place. We were having dinner. I left. When I came back, she was gone.”

“How can you do this to her?”

Colby ran his hands through his scraggly hair, his eyes hard but not hard enough to hide a pained wince, too?eeting to be fake. Kate had been a better teacher than she gave me credit for. I was seeing things I would have missed.

“I’m not the one doing it.”

His question matched his involuntary confession. He was worried about Wendy, too.

“Then let me help you get her back.”

“It’s not that simple,” he said, looking away.

And then I understood. “So you’re willing to sacrifice her to save your own ass. Just like you did Thomas Rice.”

Colby took a deep breath as if he was about to launch a denial and then dropped his hands in surrender. “Rice was different.”

“Different because you weren’t sleeping with him?”

“Different because you think you know what you’re talking about but you don’t. Wendy’s a big girl. She made her choices, just like me.”

He was baiting me, implicating Wendy as an accomplice, something I wouldn’t buy. “When you didn’t show for your polygraph, Troy sent a couple of agents to your house. They found enough drugs and cash to put you away for a long time. If anything happens to Wendy, that won’t matter because I’ll kill you before you serve a day.”

“The way my luck is running, you’ll have to get in line.”

“Jill Rice denies calling our office looking for someone to buy her car. She says her ex had it all set up before he went to prison. That it was all part of a deal to set him up for when he got out.”

“I guess that’s a better story than the one I told.”

“You have a good story for the money and dope that was found in your house?”

“Yeah, and this one is irresistible. I’m not that stupid. I know how the game is played. I was set up.”

“Why?”

“To discredit me if I came in and told what I know.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I needed an exit strategy. The drug business is like every other business, Jack. Everyone always wants a bigger slice of the pie. I took mine and used it to buy the house and car. People I do business with didn’t like it.”

“Who are they?”

“Sorry, Jack. I’m not making that deal with you or anyone else anytime soon.”

“There’s a big difference between the drug business and every other business,” I told him. “You steal from GM, they send you to jail. You steal from drug dealers, they kill you.”

“Except I’ve got an insurance policy. Anything happens to me, they go down. Long as they don’t find it, I’ve got leverage. They must have snatched Wendy, figuring she gives them leverage against me.”

“Except you’re willing to let her die!”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s an ugly world, Jack. You arrest me, they’ll think I gave them up and they’ll kill Wendy. You kill me and they’ll kill her because they won’t need her and can’t risk letting her go. Now put your gun down.”

Colby took two more steps toward me. I raised my gun at his chest, but my arm began to wobble and then I began to shake. My eyes clamped shut as the fog wrapped around my brain. I twisted and folded in half at the same instant, slammed with contractions that took my breath away. I tried to straighten, but the contractions pulled me to my knees and held me there like chains.

I felt Colby next to me, felt him take the gun from my hand. I opened my eyes. He was standing over me.

I forced my words into a choppy stutter. “What happened to you?”

“I looked around and decided I didn’t want to be you. I wanted a life I couldn’t afford at my pay grade. I had the girl, the house, and the car. Then you fucked it up. Anything happens to Wendy, it will be on your head.”

The contractions eased. My breath was ragged. The shakes were hitting me on and off as if a child was playing with a switch.

“How did I fuck it up?”

“By doing your job.”

“What about your girlfriend, Tanja? You running out on her, too?”

He laughed. “That’s your problem, Jack. You only see what you want to see.”

“My daughter is the only one I want to see. What’s happened to her?”

His mouth turned up in a cruel grin.

“Maybe she didn’t want to be like you, either.”

Another wave of contractions rocked me, arching my back and neck. Colby shoved me on to my side. I watched with clenched teeth as he scooped up his gun and threw mine against the fence. He looked at me, shook his head, turned, and ran away, his silhouette suddenly familiar. I’d seen it once before when he ran away from Marcellus Pearson’s house. The fog came again and I closed my eyes, shaking while his footsteps faded in the darkness.