Chapter 9
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The voice on the phone was male. He spoke calmly with no accent Flint could place.
“This isn’t your fight. Let it go.”
Flint stood in the alley with a dead man at his feet and the disassembled shotgun device in his jacket pocket and his pistol at his side.
“Who are you?” Flint answered as he bent down to collect a DNA sample from the body. Later, he’d run it through the labs. Maybe get a hit. Maybe not.
“A friend.”
“Not even close.”
The man didn’t argue. “The woman isn’t worth what’s coming. Walk away. Tonight.”
The voice carried no threat. No emotion. It delivered instructions the way a dispatcher reads an address. Facts to be acted on, not discussed. He suspected the voice was altered with a tech device based on the slightly robotic feel that even the best AI still couldn’t eliminate.
Flint pulled the phone from his ear and looked at the screen.
The Lazy M Ranch landline. A number that hadn’t been connected to anything in years.
The phone had been disconnected before Bette died.
Whoever was on the other end had spoofed the caller ID deliberately, choosing a number that would mean something to Flint.
That meant they knew about the Lazy M. They knew about his connection to it.
They wanted him to understand they’d done their homework.
He put the phone back to his ear. “Say that again.”
The line was dead.
Flint checked the call log. Duration was nineteen seconds.
He looked down at the dead man in the alley. He used his phone to snap photos of the body. Gaspar could run him through facial recognition. Mid-thirties, stripped of identification, and a phone call telling him to back off.
Two messages delivered within the same hour. One in the alley. One on his phone.
Flint walked back through the gate and crossed the yard to the house. He locked the back door behind him and stood in the kitchen for a moment, thinking.
Then he called Scarlett.
She answered on the second ring. She’d been driving. He could hear road noise and the low hum of the SUV’s engine.
“You get there?” he asked.
“I’m here. Maddy’s fine. She had a nightmare.
Ruth was already with her when I walked in.
” Scarlett’s voice was clipped and tired.
The kind of tired that comes from running on adrenaline for too many hours.
“Ruth said Maddy woke up screaming about a man at the window. She checked. Nobody there. She got Maddy back to sleep twenty minutes before I arrived.”
“Ruth’s good,” Flint said.
“Ruth’s better than good. She’s the reason I can do what I do.” A pause. “What’s going on? You didn’t call to ask about Maddy.”
Flint told her. The guy in the alley. The shotgun shell device on the back gate. A machined pipe with a spring-loaded firing pin wired to the latch. Built in a shop, installed by someone who knew what they were doing. Designed to kill the first person who opened it.
Scarlett was quiet for a beat. “Twelve-gauge?”
“Twelve-gauge. At chest height. No spread at that range. It would have gone through the sternum and out the back,” Flint said. “Dude’s no longer a problem.”
“Charming.” Her voice was flat. “Another message.”
“There’s a third. I got a phone call thirty seconds after I dropped the guy. Male voice. No accent. Told me this isn’t my fight and to let it go.”
“The caller from the disconnected number?”
“Same display. The Lazy M landline. Spoofed. Nineteen seconds. He said the woman isn’t worth what’s coming.”
He heard Scarlett exhale. She was running through the same math he was. Someone knew about the Lazy M, the USB, that Flint was involved. He had enough operational reach to wire a device, send a killer, and spoof a dead phone number all in the same night.
“These aren’t the same people who tossed Patterson’s car,” she said. “The car job was sloppy. This is organized.”
“Agreed. The car was opportunity. The gate and the call were planned.”
Scarlett was quiet for a moment before she changed the subject. “The fort. I’ve been thinking about it since she called. And I think I was wrong.”
Her voice shifted. Not softer, exactly. More careful. As if she hadn’t considered the memory in a long time.
“There was an old stone pump house near the stock tank on the back side of the property. Behind the barn, past the equipment shed, out where Bette ran cattle when she still had cattle,” Scarlett said.
“Fieldstone walls about four feet high. Tin roof. Concrete floor with a drain. It hadn’t pumped water in years by the time I got to the Lazy M. ”
“And you called it a fort.”
“Nora and I called it a fort. We hauled blankets out there and pretended the stone walls were castle walls. We played there every day for a summer. Nobody else used it. Nobody else cared about it.”
Flint considered the implications. Scarlett didn’t offer childhood memories. She kept them locked away and rarely acknowledged they existed. The fact that she was sharing this one told him she’d already decided it was significant.
“If the caller knows about the pump house, she either is Nora or Nora told her what ten-year-old girls did on a ranch in West Texas twenty-five years ago,” Flint said.
“Nora was twelve. I was ten.” The correction was automatic. “And nobody knew about our games there except us. Not even Bette.”
“Then we should go out there to the fort to meet this woman.”
“Not tonight. We need some sleep. And you need to deal with what’s in your alley before a neighbor finds it.”
She was right on both counts.
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
“Flint. The device on your gate. If you’d opened it without looking, we wouldn’t be talking now.”
“I looked.”
“This time.”
She hung up.
Flint put the phone down and stood at the kitchen counter. The house was quiet. Patterson was gone. The whiskey glasses from earlier sat on the coffee table where he’d left them.
He picked up the landline and called a contact at the Houston Police Department. When the guy picked up, he said, “I’ve got a situation I need help with.”
“What kind of help?”
“There’s an unidentified deceased male in the alley behind my house,” Flint said, straight up. He described the location and the condition of the body. He didn’t mention the shotgun shell device or the spoofed phone call.
“And what is it you want me to do, exactly?”
“Get him out of here. Quietly. Preferably in the next twenty minutes before my neighbors start to notice.”
“You know what you’re asking me to do?” His contact balked. “The homicide squad won’t be happy. Neither will the medical examiner.”
“I’ll owe you one,” Flint replied. “I’m ninety percent sure this guy came here to kill me. It won’t help me or you or anybody else if we shine a spotlight on this before we know more.”
His contact waited. They’d known each other a long time and Flint had given him solid intel before. “Okay. I’ll send a couple of guys I can trust to pick him up. But you’ll tell me who he is first. The family deserves to be notified.”
“I’d tell you now if I knew,” Flint replied. “He’s got no ID and I don’t recognize him. My guess is he’s not even close to local. I’d be surprised if he even hails from this hemisphere.”
“Why?”
“It’s not likely that he’s from around here. And he doesn’t look like a Texan to me, is all I can say right now.” Flint paused. “Don’t worry so much. The feds aren’t likely to come at you. If they do, let me know, and I’ll deflect the heat.”
His contact paused much longer this time. “You think this was supposed to be a hit? On you? Or someone else you’ve got over there?”
“I don’t know. Which is why I want to keep it quiet. Give me some time. I promise you’ll be the first to know when I figure it out.”
“The last time I did something like this for you, it cost me a two-week suspension,” he replied.
“Yeah. Which you spent fishing in Cabo on my dime, as I recall,” Flint put the grin into his words. “I’ll meet your guys out in my alley. No lights and sirens. Get in, get out, hope nobody notices.”
The guy said, “Okay, but you owe me.”
“Money is no object. Start thinking about your price,” Flint deadpanned before he hung up.
He went back outside and waited by the gate. The dead man hadn’t been moved. The blood had congealed further, darkening to the color of old rust against the gravel.
Two plainclothesmen arrived in an unmarked SUV fifteen minutes later. They approached from the east end of the alley on foot. Flint met them at the body. He kept it simple.
They didn’t ask about devices on his gate or any other questions. They quickly zipped him into a body bag and loaded him into the back of their SUV and drove off.
The device components stayed in Flint’s jacket pocket. The machined pipe, the spring assembly, and the spent twelve-gauge shell.
He headed toward the garage to examine them.
The machining on the pipe was precise enough to narrow down the tools and possibly the shop. The shell was a standard buckshot load, available anywhere, but the way the device was constructed told him more than the components alone.
This one could have been made by anyone with appropriate military training using standard components from the local hardware store.
Inside the house, Flint washed his hands and poured the whiskey from earlier down the drain. He checked the time. A quarter past four in the morning. First light would come in about two hours.
He called Drake, who answered on the first ring. He didn’t sound like he’d been sleeping.
“You up?” Flint asked.
“I’m always up. What do you need?”
“I need a ride. Can you be ready to go at first light?”
“Where are we going?”
“West Texas. The Lazy M. Pick me up at six?”
Drake didn’t ask why. The details would come on the way.
“You got it,” Drake said.
Flint hung up and set the phone on the counter.
Whoever these people were, they wanted him to understand that they could reach him. They could reach his home. They could put a weapon on his gate and a killer in his alley and call him from a number that shouldn’t exist.
The caller had said this wasn’t his fight. Which only proved the man didn’t know Flint at all.
He turned off the kitchen light. He had two hours before Drake arrived. He’d use the time to pack, after he texted Scarlett to be ready.