Chapter 50
CHAPTER 50
WHEN WE GOT back after lunch, Mack disappeared with Luke for the afternoon, partly to look at the sights of Richmond and partly, I suspected, to look at each other.
Blackwood offered flexible hours for senior employees. People could work whenever they wanted as long as they got the job done. For some projects, like the Syria incident, we stayed in the office twenty-four seven, but everyone needed downtime. If Mack wanted to take a few days off and her schedule allowed it, that was up to her.
I went back to the surveillance room and found Tia watching video feeds from a shopping centre beside Jorge, who appeared to be her new best friend.
“Oh no, lady. You need to put those back!”
“Shoplifter?” I raised an eyebrow at Jorge.
“No.” He rolled his eyes. “She just doesn’t think a woman with a butt that size should be wearing leggings.”
A couple of the other guys sniggered. Clearly Tia was their entertainment for the day. As she seemed to be enjoying herself, I left her to it, telling Jorge to call me if she got too annoying.
Nick rolled in just after lunch with bloodshot eyes and two days’ worth of stubble. Although judging by the looks he got from the ladies as he strolled through the office, that hadn’t diminished his sex appeal.
“How are you feeling?”
“Coffee.”
Sloane heard his answer as we walked past her desk. “On it,” she said, dashing off.
“You look terrible.”
“Thanks. Believe it or not, this is an improvement on earlier this morning.”
“Where were you?”
“In the boathouse. I don’t suppose you know how I got there?”
“Not a clue, but I suspect beer was involved. Why did you bother coming in?”
“I have a video conference at four. I’m hoping Mack can do some fancy computer magic to make me look more human.”
“Bad luck—Mack’s out for the day. You’ll have to try an hour of sleep instead.”
I steered Nick over to the black leather couch in the corner and shoved my jacket aside so he could lie down. With Tia occupied too, that left me the afternoon to get on with some work. I’d received a request from the DEA the day before. Well, more of a re-request. We’d actually had the job on the books for a while, but it blew hot and cold, and we’d never managed to make much headway with it. For almost two years now, bad batches of cocaine had been turning up in New York and the surrounding areas, including Richmond.
The dodgy coke was cut with levamisole, a veterinary dewormer that could be fatal to humans. It killed off the white blood cells that made up the immune system, meaning small things like a cut or mouth ulcer escalated into deadly infections. The end result wasn’t all that dissimilar to AIDS. And if the user didn’t die from that, there were the added side effects of seizures and damage to the heart muscle.
Nice.
The flow of the drugs into the area hadn’t been constant. Every couple of months, another batch turned up and more users died. Dan had interviewed a couple of them in the hospital a year or so back, an unpleasant task by all accounts, and one she’d told me about over a working lunch.
“They had these huge open sores covering their faces and bodies. One guy could have been an extra in a horror movie. And the dude in the morgue had pus leaking out all over the place.”
I hadn’t got past the appetiser.
The tipping point in the case had come a month back with the death of Steven A. Trent, a young, wealthy, and very stupid investment banker. In his case, the A stood for Addict, because according to his acquaintances, he couldn’t get through a party without snorting a few lines. Not only was he rich, his levamisole-induced death got extra coverage because he happened to be the son of a prominent New York senator.
The day after the funeral, Herman Trent had announced his mission to win the war on drugs.
I spent the afternoon reading through our files before my video conference with the DEA at five. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the notes, but I wanted to refresh my memory. Black had been one of the previous investigators, and his connections with that scene were better than mine, so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to add a lot to the party.
But I needed a project to get my teeth into, and as with everything in life, I’d give it a good go.
“So, do you have any new ideas?” I asked Damon Belcourt, my primary contact at the DEA.
He twiddled his pen around on his fingers, a nervous habit he’d had for as long as I’d known him.
“Nothing but whispers on the street, and most of those contradict each other. The lab’s done chemical analysis that shows all the bad coke’s come from the same source, but we’re no nearer to finding where that is than we were two years ago.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“What you usually do—rattle a few cages, shake a few trees. See what comes loose. You’re not bound by the rules of paperwork like we are, and we’re short of manpower. Everyone’s too busy taking out low-level street bums so we can make it look as if we’re fighting Herman’s crusade.”
I hated having to read through Black’s notes. His spidery scrawl, not the easiest to decipher but something I’d learned to read with ease over the years, would never straggle across the page again. But I trusted his instincts, so I needed to know what he’d written. He believed the coke was being cut with the levamisole before it got to the States, which was strange in itself because smugglers usually liked the drug as pure as possible when they shipped it. It took up less volume that way, making it easier to hide.
Why the smugglers wanted to cut the drugs at that stage was anyone’s guess. Black hypothesised that the smugglers had a misguided belief the levamisole would act as a fungicide and prevent the coke from going mouldy when it was shipped in damp conditions, and nobody had come up with a better theory.
I’d got through most of the files when Tia bounced into my office, beaming.
“I spotted a shoplifter. He took a bottle of vodka, and I saw him getting arrested and everything.”
“I’m proud of you. Are you done for the day?”
“I can hang around with the guys downstairs if you’ve still got stuff left to do.”
“No, we can go home.” She wouldn’t be in town for long, and I wanted to enjoy the time we had together. “You want to get pizza? Watch a movie?”
“Awesome!”
At least when we got back to Little Riverley, the house was back to its rightful state. Bradley would be keeping his car after all.
“You want to go back to the surveillance centre?” I asked Tia the next morning.
“Can I? The guys said they’d buy me a donut for every thief I spot.”
“Sure. You want to try and up their offer, though. I’d hold out for at least a Happy Meal.”
While Tia headed off to work, I took a trip to New York. I spent the day tracking down acquaintances, something easier said than done when I’d been out of the game for so many months. Some had moved on, others had changed occupation, more had simply disappeared. The highlight of my afternoon was winning two hundred dollars in an underground poker game. By early evening, I’d got no further with the drugs case, but I was sick of hanging out in dive bars, so I got one of Blackwood’s pilots to bring Tia into the city to catch a Broadway show.
After Phantom of the Opera , we went out for dinner.
“How was work?” I asked.
“I loved it! I caught two shoplifters today. One of them ran off and the security guard rugby tackled him. Can I come and work for you when I leave school?”
I choked on a prawn cracker. “I’m not sure Luke would be too happy about that. Besides, I thought you wanted to be an artist?”
She shrugged. “Art doesn’t pay. Everybody says so.”
“Some artists make money. Or what about something else creative?”
“I like textiles, but fashion design’s really hard to get into.”
“Get good exam grades, and you might be surprised. Somebody’s got to be the next Vivienne Westwood.”
“You think?”
I smiled at her. “I don’t think; I know. You need to follow your heart. If you do something you love for a living, it won’t seem like work.”
“Do you love what you do?”
“I’m compelled to keep doing it.”
“But you don’t love it?”
“Maybe once, but not anymore.” Not without Black beside me.
“Couldn’t you leave? Do something else?”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
The evening before Tia flew back to England, a group of us went out for dinner. Jed was still wearing his cast, which, strangely, seemed to behave like a magnet for women. At first, it was amusing, but by the time the eighth one came over to coo sympathy at him and leave her phone number, just in case he wanted any help, with anything , it wore a little thin. He waved me next to him, fastened his arm around my shoulders, and rolled his eyes dramatically.
“Save me!”
“They didn’t teach you how to deal with horny women in the Army Rangers?”
“Not officially. And not in a fancy restaurant.”
I was glad to see Tia among those laughing. She hadn’t been happy to see me with Jed at first, but she was coming around to the idea now she realised I’d still give her the same amount of attention as when I was with Luke. At least she hadn’t reverted to her brattish self when her brother and I split. It would have been all too easy for her to go back to her spoiled ways, but she’d turned a corner.
I lent her my big plane to fly back to London, which I think made her year. That wasn’t as wasteful as it sounded because a team from the London office needed it the following day to take some equipment to Japan. When I left Tia at the airport, she was taking photos of everything from the cockpit to the bathroom fittings. Her Facebook page wouldn’t know what hit it.
Tia’s departure left me free to start working nights, which meant I could catch up with the drug dealers working the evening shift. Nothing like a good fix at six.
I tapped into my network in Richmond, slowly clawing my way up the food chain. After three days, I came across a guy who interested me. A key player, perhaps? He masqueraded as a bar owner, but no way had he earned the Porsche he drove through an honest living. I put him under surveillance, and it turned out I was right. Couriers brought him shipments two or three times a week, and after a few dead-ends, we tracked a batch of levamisole-laced coke back to one of the man’s New York acquaintances. While the DEA followed up at that end, I went to have a little chat with our guy in town.
“All I want is a name,” I said.
A perfectly reasonable request, especially when one considered the knife in my hand.
The prisoner didn’t seem to think so. He spat at me, but the disgusting glob fell a foot short. I stepped forward and ran the edge of my boot down his shin. That earned me a whole array of curses.
“Would it help if I said please?”
“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you!”
Really? I jammed my fingers into the spot between his earlobe and his jaw, wincing as he yelled loudly enough to wake an Ambien addict. Good thing I’d turned the music up.
“I’d like to see you try. Last chance. A name.”
I pressed down on his carotid artery. He held on almost to the point of passing out, then whispered, “Louis Santos.”
“Thank you. And I meant what I said. Try and kill me. Just try.”
I carried on pressing until he lost consciousness, then I untied him. I no longer cared for my own life. I was on borrowed time, anyway.
Although in the great scheme of things, today had been a good day.
I should have known the peace wouldn’t last. Less than a week passed before my world turned dark again, in the control room at Blackwood this time.
The red blob of the tracking device on Louis Santos’s car moved slowly across the screen. I’d planted it last night while he ate dinner with his wife, an easy enough job since he’d left the Mercedes in a dark parking spot behind the restaurant. Green blobs followed him as Blackwood vehicles played a game of follow-my-leader. The map Nate had designed reminded me of Pacman , and I wanted the greens to gobble up the bad guy.
My red phone rang, flashing “Unknown caller” across the screen. Unusual, but it wasn’t unheard of for me to get a wrong number.
I didn’t take my eyes of the car-blobs as I picked it up. “Yeah?”
An electronically distorted voice came back at me, one I hadn’t heard in over six months.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Black. Or is it Ms. Black now?”
Mentally I was in a lot better shape than the last time this son of a biscuit called, so rather than acting dumb again, I hit a button to record the call and start a trace.
“What do you want?”
“Come now, is that any way to greet the man who holds the lives of your friends in his hands?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. How may I help you?”
“There’s no need for sarcasm. I heard you were back from your little sabbatical, so I thought I’d give you a friendly reminder to keep your nose out of my business.”
“Which I’ve been doing, you murdering freak.”
“Under different circumstances, I could enjoy you getting feisty.”
“And under different circumstances, I could enjoy peeling your skin off your body, piece by tiny piece, but circumstances are what they are, aren’t they?”
“I’m glad we’re seeing eye to eye on this.”
“We’ll never see eye to eye. Just keep out of my life, and I’ll keep out of yours.”
I hung up on him, exercising the only bit of control I had over the situation, then stared at the screen for a second before hurling the phone across the room like I was pitching in the World Series. It hit the wall with a crunch and dropped to the floor.
Silence spread as people turned to stare at me. I’d never lost my rag like that in front of anyone except Black before, so I suppose I deserved the shocked looks.
As time stood still, I felt something creeping through me, flooding my veins and seeping out of my pores. Rage. Pure, unmitigated fury. All the anger I’d been missing after Black’s death finally came.
How dare he?
Nate materialised beside me. “That was him, wasn’t it?” he murmured, too quietly for anyone else to hear. He didn’t have to elaborate on who “him” was.
“Yes. It was.”
“What’re you going to do?”
I looked at the faces around me. Nate. Nick, sitting at his desk, watching me closely. Dan, halfway across the room, carrying a cup of coffee. Behind her, Mack waited for instructions, mouse in hand.
Then I saw Black the last time he looked at me, his expression of confusion, soon to become death. I couldn’t face that again. I couldn’t watch the soul of another person I cared about leave this earth. I didn’t want their blood on my hands.
No more.
Decision made, I turned back to Nate.
“Nothing,” I replied through clenched teeth. “I’m going to do…nothing.”