Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

57

Behr’s knuckles gripped the steering wheel as if to tear it off the stalk as he drove out to Thorntown. He parked in front of Teague’s ranch style and watched it for half an hour. There were no signs of movement inside, no cars in the driveway. He played out versions of the conversation he was going to have with Teague and couldn’t picture them going any way other than the man laughing in his face or at least blanking him completely. The thought filled Behr with rage. Finally he couldn’t sit still any longer, got out of his car, and passed the garage. Though it was closed, Behr looked in through one of its small square windows and was disappointed to see it empty of vehicles.

He returned to his own car and sat there again, his fingers drumming on the wheel, and his insides tightening like a diver’s cylinder being filled with pressurized air. That’s when he saw Teague’s Traverse roll up and park in the driveway. Teague got out, dressed in suit pants, dress shirt, and sunglasses, and headed for his door carrying a paper bag and a newspaper.

Behr was out of his car and at the door before Teague was inside his house.

“Hey. Teague!” Behr called out.

“What do you want?” he said, turning and pushing in.

“You hiding from me?” Behr said. “That’s not gonna work.”

“Fuck off,” Teague said, dropping the bag and newspaper as he made to close the door in Behr’s face. But Behr stepped forward and blasted it with both hands like he was hitting a blocking dummy. The door flew open and Behr followed it, stepping inside.

“I want to know, Pat, and I’m not leaving until I do,” Behr said.

“Get out of here or you’re a dead man,” Teague answered.

“This is gonna happen,” Behr stated. Teague shook his head.

“Lose the Maui Jims,” Behr yelled, and slapped the sunglasses from Teague’s face. What flashed in Teague’s eyes was not fear, it was anger, and Behr knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

Teague threw a stiff-arm palm that caught Behr’s face, driving him back a few feet. He was softening a bit around the middle, but Teague was still a big, thick ex-Fed, and he came at Behr, snapping out a steel telescoping spring baton that he pulled from his pocket. Behr heard it and felt it whistle past his head as he leaped out of its path.

He squared with Teague, who feinted high, then changed levels and swung the weapon again, this time low at Behr’s thigh. Behr tried to check it as he would a leg kick, by raising his shin and turning it toward the blow, but took the shot across the outside of his kneecap. A white-hot bolt of pain lit through him, but he managed to deliver a looping overhand right that caught Teague high on the side of the head. Teague stumbled back, and Behr closed the distance, collared him behind the head in a sort of Muay Thai clinch and gained an over hook that took the baton out of play, before it eventually got knocked to the floor.

Tied up as they were, they did the dance, and Behr felt in Teague the balance of an ex-lineman. They staggered into a piece of furniture that was coat and hat rack and mirror. Baseball caps scattered and the glass cracked. A potted plant was knocked on its side and dirt spilled across the foyer floor. After a minute, Behr found he couldn’t take the man down, and neither could Teague him, so the dirty boxing commenced. Fists, elbows, and shoulders flew across the tight span between the men. At that range more landed than missed. It became a question of chins and will.

Behr heard Teague’s breathing begin to go ragged and labored. He knew the older man hadn’t put in the gym time and road-work he had, and he pressed the advantage, upping the speed and the output. Behr’s blows began landing more cleanly, thumping Teague’s head back. Teague threw a knee to the body, his desperation growing. But Behr leaned into it and stuffed it, and his abs held like a retaining wall, and then he felt Teague sag.

Wrapping an arm behind Teague’s neck, Behr doubled him over, landing a standing guillotine choke that he closed but didn’t finish. Instead, Behr dropped his weight over the man, cranking Teague’s neck, and dished out a set of three knees to the body, the last of which found the liver and deposited Teague on his broad ass.

He gasped and keeled for a moment before Behr grabbed him by his matted, curly hair and turned up his bile- and puke-streaked face.

“What did you know?”

“Nothing,” Teague began. Behr drew his fist back and blasted Teague in the ear, which burst red with blood.

“What did you know?”

“Nothing,” Teague said again, but when he saw Behr rear his fist back once more, quickly continued, “nothing clear. Nothing for sure.”

Teague sucked in a breath and went on. “Most of this shit’s way above my pay grade, man, but suffice it to say not everyone loves Bernie Cool.”

Behr drilled a punch into Teague’s mouth. “Start getting specific or I’m gonna start getting ugly.”

Teague gave a sickly smile. Blood ran over his teeth and he spit it on the floor. “What do you call this?”

“The warm-up lap,” Behr said, and kicked Teague in the floating rib with the point of his shoe. He put some leg into it, enough for a thirty-yard field goal. Teague groaned and doubled over into the dirt from the fallen plant. When he finally caught some air, he pushed himself up, leaning on one hand.

“Okay. Okay. Shit, your stand-up game is tight … SB-5373X.”

“SB, what’s that?”

“Senate bill. Proposing a tax break on the racinos.”

Behr had read about it when he was researching Indy Flats. It was the massive relief bill that would allow the Indiana racinos to survive and compete with those in Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois.

“What does it have to do with Kolodnik?” Behr asked. “He’s out of his piece of the casino interest, and that’s a state senate vote anyway,” he said.

“Everyone knows the senators out of Washington tell the state legislature which hand to wipe with,” Teague said, rubbing his side.

“Kolodnik wasn’t going to be senator until five minutes ago,” Behr said.

“Well, best as I can tell it’s a story of eighteen months. That’s when Kolodnik’s ex-partner-”

“Gantcher,” Behr said.

“Yeah, Gantcher. That’s when he broke ground on the hotel. Then the business went into the dumper. They’re losing six figures a day, man. It’s a bloodbath.”

“What’s it connect to?” Behr was writing now, his swollen knuckles clenched around his pen.

“About a year back Gantcher and some others in the state gambling business request a special assembly so they can propose SB-5373X.”

“I read about it. The legislature told them kiss off,” Behr said.

“That’s right. But with that kind of money on the line, they’re not just going to walk away. So about seven months ago Gantcher goes to Kolodnik, even though he’s out of it, to get him to use his juice to get a special assembly, you know, to safeguard the economic engine that is the racino business. Bernie Cool’s a stand-up guy, so he asks. But they reject the request.”

Teague pulled himself heavily into a more upright seated position. He wasn’t going anywhere, though. He was talking now.

“This worries Gantcher, big-time. Same with his competitors-the other racino and casino owners in the state-who are now quickly becoming his asshole buddies. They all get together and have a meeting with Kolodnik where they fucking tell him to go to the governor and demand an assembly. They figured he and the gov are so tight he can do it.”

“What happened?” Behr asked. He fought to keep writing and to resist the urge to just let the information wash over him.

“I don’t know. I suppose the meeting didn’t go well. Kolodnik didn’t go along. He’s not the kind of guy to be pushed, and I guess that’s when he decided he needed security.”

“This is what, six months ago, when he hired Caro?”

Teague nodded.

“How’d he decide on Caro?”

“How’d he decide?” Teague laughed. “He didn’t. It was decided for him. See, there was this thing I was working for Potempa on the quiet-”

“The daughter,” Behr said.

“Yeah, that fucking wild-child daughter of his-”

“I know about her. I’ve seen the video,” Behr said.

“Fuck me! You’ve seen the video? I never got that far on it. Man, I wouldn’t mind getting a look-”

“Shut up,” Behr said. “Where’d it lead?”

What couldn’t I get out of Potempa? Behr wondered.

“So he asked me to sort this thing for him, since we go back the furthest, and I’m on it, talking to this jackwad Barnes trying to work it out-”

“Lenny Barnes, daughter’s boyfriend,” Behr said.

“Yeah. He and the daughter want to leave town. They want to move to Hawaii or something and open a business. The guy’s looking for fifty grand from Potempa …”

An agonized look crossed Teague’s face, probably from a cracked rib. That pain comes on slow and builds.

“Look, I’ve known Karl Potempa a long fucking time. I can read when a man’s in the shit. And that’s where he was. He don’t have leaks-like gambling or liquor-but on this, I saw he was weak … he was wide-open. So I’m in there, working out leverage on how I’m going to squeeze Barnes, make him walk away or take him down on pandering-I’m just trying to keep the video squelched, you know, for Karl-”

“Yeah, yeah. Father to father,” Behr said.

“Right. And I get called to this apartment to meet, and Barnes has got this girl he runs there with him, and this douche bag of a john is there too, drooling all over her, with an idea on how we can all make a lot of money.”

“The john was Shugie Saunders,” Behr stated.

“Yeah. Damn, you’ve gotten a lot.” Teague’s hand found his bleeding ear, as if just discovering it wasn’t working right, but he went on. “And Saunders says he has a prominent client for us, a guy he advises that needs some special services, yada yada-”

“What the fuck is ‘yada yada’?” Behr said.

“Nothing. ‘Special services.’ That’s all he said then. We go out and have dinner and talk about the services and coverage we provide. He calls Potempa the next day and hires Caro. I’m an experienced E.P. guy, so it isn’t long before I catch a Kolodnik detail, and after the first one, they start requesting me.”

Behr took it in.

“Round this time people start talking about Kolodnik getting the Senate seat. Thinking was: business as usual, the casino owners grease through their tax measure, no problem. But now it looks like Bernie Cool’s ready to be the law-and-order senator. Instead of helping, he’s gonna stick it in their eye to make a point, so they needed to make sure he never got there.”

Behr understood what happened from there. Still, he wanted to hear it.

“Gantcher and the other casino owners paid you to kill Kolodnik,” Behr said.

“Not to kill him. They did pay me. Paid the note on this place clean,” Teague said, glancing around his house. “But they just asked for a tip on where he would be at a given time. There was going to be a team of shooters. Said it would come when I was on shift. I knew it would be bad press for the company, for me, but I figured Caro could survive it …”

“Why didn’t it go down that way?”

Teague straightened and gathered himself a bit.

“The thing was, after riding with Bernie Cool a few times, I just couldn’t … be there for it. You know what I mean? I just couldn’t. The man is a prince.”

Behr did know what he meant. In a charm derby Kolodnik had most everyone beat.

“So you started subbing me in,” Behr said, “and it was ‘fuck the new guy.’ ”

“Not exactly …”

“No?”

“The body man-me-was never supposed to be hit. It was supposed to be a clean deal, I swear to you on that-”

“Whatever it was, you didn’t want to be there that night.”

There was a period of silence. “No.”

“Who were the shooters?”

“No idea.”

“Who did the hiring?”

“Again, I don’t have a clue. Not a damn clue.”

Behr eyed Teague. “So you went ahead and served me up.”

“I hardly knew you. We weren’t in the Bureau together-”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know what else to do. Shit, looking back, of course it was a setup and the bodyguard was going down too. I just didn’t see it at the time. You did damn good though. Better than I would have. Behr, it wasn’t personal.”

“To me it was.”

Another period of silence elapsed, this one prolonged.

“That’s it, then? All you did was give the location.”

Teague shrugged pathetically.

“Are they going to try again?” Behr demanded.

“Kolodnik’s in D.C. Confirmation is any day. He’s made now. I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed.”

“And how much does Potempa know?”

“He doesn’t know shit about this, just that we had a fat new client and after my first time out with him, I was requested. Anything he thinks, it’s meaningless. The man’s a fucking puddle since watching that video.” As Behr had suspected, Potempa couldn’t stop himself from looking at the thing.

“Potempa’s just screwed up-he’s not dirty,” Teague said with a near laugh.

“Unlike you. You’re screwed up and dirty, aren’t you?” Behr said, extinguishing the humor.

Behr looked down at Teague, the man’s head sagging forward. He didn’t know if he’d gotten 10 percent of the details or 90, and had no idea how much of it was the truth. He also didn’t know what to do with him now. Taking him to the cops would stop his own investigation cold, and Teague would be out on bail in three hours. A trial would happen two years down the road, and everyone else responsible would be long gone. On the other hand, Behr couldn’t torture him. He couldn’t sit on him. He couldn’t kill him. He had no other way to shut him up besides the old-fashioned. Behr used his foot again, this time planting it in Teague’s chest, and knocking him onto his back. Then he put the edge of it across Teague’s throat, stepping down with some weight on the trachea.

“You’re not going to show up for work. For a while. And you’re not going to be reachable either,” Behr said, “except by me when I need bits and pieces filled in.”

Teague nodded, his eyes bugging from fear and the pressure and lack of air. Fragments of mirror glass ground into the floor and Teague’s shoulder with a grating sound.

“You’re not going to say anything about this to Potempa or anyone else at Caro.” Even as he spoke, Behr knew he was wasting his breath. Teague was going to tell whomever he was going to tell and do whatever he wanted to do. Teague’s gurgle had heightened to a high-pitched wheeze. Behr took his foot off Teague’s windpipe and walked out the door.