Chapter 16
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Houston
Flint set the Sikorsky down on the same pad it had lifted from that morning. He cut the engines and ran through the shutdown checklist. He secured the cabin while Scarlett dealt with Oakley.
He collected their go-bags and Oakley’s backpack and made his way to his SUV. The vehicle had been parked at the edge of the apron since Drake picked them up that morning.
Scarlett had put Oakley in the back seat. Oakley’s wrists were zip-tied. She’d been face down in the dirt out at the Lazy M. Now she was filthy. Her shirt was stiff with sweat, and her face and scalp were covered in dried mud, too.
Flint dropped the backpack and the go bags onto the floor in the cargo area. He took the passenger seat. Scarlett was already behind the wheel, which was just fine with him.
Scarlett pulled out into the access road. “Safe house first. We need to get cleaned up where we won’t be asked a lot of questions we don’t want to answer.”
“Works for me. I smell like an old goat, and you two are not much better,” he replied to lighten the mood.
They were covered in sweat and dust. Flint’s right sleeve was also stiff with the blood from Patterson’s arm wound.
In the back seat Oakley had not said a word since he’d lifted the helo off the ground at the Lazy M. Now, she watched the road through the window. Her filthy face gave away nothing.
Scarlett’s safe house was a modest single-story brick home on a quiet street west of the loop. She pulled into the attached garage and dropped the overhead door before anyone got out.
Flint had been here before. Inside were two bedrooms along a narrow hallway in the back. The front was an open floor plan with a sparsely furnished galley kitchen, a couch and a coffee table. Dishes and drinkware were paper or plastic.
She kept the place under a shell corporation and paid the utilities that way as well. The neighbors thought a divorced consultant with a heavy travel schedule lived there.
While Flint collected the go bags from the back, Scarlett walked Oakley into the kitchen through the garage and sat her in a wooden chair with her back to the wall. When Flint walked in, she was checking the zip tie already on the woman’s wrists.
Flint dropped Oakley’s backpack on the kitchen table, looked at Scarlett, and tipped his head toward the hallway.
“I’m going to shower and change,” he said on his way down the hallway. “Back in five minutes.”
He shut the bathroom door. The pipes thumped once and the shower started.
Given the bare-bones nature of the place, it had surprisingly good water pressure.
He stood under the beating spray for long enough to remove the grime and then shampooed his hair.
By the time he finished, he felt almost human again.
When he finished, he stuffed his dirty clothes into a trash bag. He’d drop them in a dumpster on the way out.
The smell of freshly brewed coffee led him back to the kitchen. He poured himself a cup and leaned against the countertop to drink it.
Scarlett sat in the chair across the cheap table from Oakley. She pulled the backpack toward her and unzipped the main compartment.
“Get your hands off my stuff.” Oakley straightened and flashed an angry scowl toward Scarlett.
Scarlett didn’t look up. She pulled out a crumpled gray T-shirt, a pair of jeans, socks rolled into a ball, a toothbrush in a plastic sleeve.
“You can’t do that,” Oakley said. “You don’t have a warrant. You don’t have probable cause. Whatever you find in there, you can’t use it.”
Scarlett kept unpacking. A pair of underwear. A cheap drugstore hairbrush. A travel-size deodorant.
“I’m serious,” Oakley’s voice climbed a notch. “That is an illegal search. Anything in that bag you can’t use against me. I know my rights.”
“I’m not a cop,” Scarlett said. “The Fourth Amendment applies to the government, not me. And this is my kitchen. If you’ve got a weapon or contraband in here, I’m taking it out. You wanna call your lawyer, you can do that when we get you to HPD.”
Scarlett unzipped a small interior pocket and pulled out a phone. A black plastic burner.
Then she found the cash in a brown envelope. She held it up.
“How much is there?” Flint asked.
“A few thousand, looks like.” Scarlett ran her hand around the inside of the bag, checked the seams, turned it inside out, and found nothing else. She returned the personal items to the backpack.
Flint pulled out the third chair and sat. He picked up the envelope and lifted the flap with one finger and looked inside.
He picked up the phone. He pressed the side button and the screen came on. The phone required no passcode. He opened the call log. Only one outgoing call in the log, placed late the night before, to Scarlett’s mobile.
He turned the phone so Scarlett could see the screen. Then he showed it to Oakley.
Oakley turned her face toward the window. The blinds were closed. There was nothing to see.
Flint set the phone down between them.
“And the cash,” he said.
Scarlett picked up the brown envelope and laid it open on the table. Hundreds, mostly. A few fifties. Held with a rubber band wrapped around the stack.
“Hey.” Oakley straightened against her ties. “That’s mine. You have no right to take it.”
“It looks like almost enough to pay for our trouble today. But not quite,” Scarlett said.
Oakley closed her mouth.
“I’m tired. Let’s get this done. I’m calling HPD.” Flint picked up his phone and hit the redial for the contact he’d called last night. As it had before, the line rolled to voicemail. “It’s Flint. Call me back at this number.”
He ended the call and set the phone face-down on the table next to the envelope.
Oakley stared at him. “Who was that?”
“He’ll call back in an hour. Maybe less. I’ll tell him the facts. He’ll send officers to take you into the station,” Flint said. “After that, Scarlett and I can head home. Like I said, it’s been a long day.”
“He was coming for me,” she said with more defiance than the facts supported.
“So you said. I didn’t see it that way. I’ll tell my friend what I saw. We’ll let him decide.”
Oakley’s gaze went back to the window. “I’d be dead now if I hadn’t shot him.”
“You can try to sell that to the detectives who will care. Probably in about an hour,” Flint said. “Which means whatever you wanted from Scarlett, you have less than one hour to persuade her to give it to you. Your call.”
She said nothing.
Scarlett got up, put a hand under Oakley’s arm and lifted to help her stand. She picked up the backpack and walked her down the hallway to the bathroom.
“There’s no exit back here. The only exit is through the kitchen. No window you can climb through, either.” Scarlett set the items on the counter inside the door. “This will be your last chance to shower alone for a very long time. I’d take advantage of it if I were you.”
She took out the folding knife from her belt, opened it, and cut the wrist tie. “Come back when you’re done.”
She locked the door from the outside and walked away. The shower started before she reached the kitchen.
Flint was at the table with the burner phone in his hand again. He turned it over and looked at the back. Scuffed plastic. No model number visible. She might have bought it anywhere. Gas stations and drug stores carried them.
“You think she’s Nora Weiss?” Flint asked Scarlett when she’d refilled her coffee cup and returned to the table.
“Nora died years ago. At twenty-three. Of a drug overdose,” Scarlett replied shaking her head. “I told you I confirmed it myself.”
“Given the explosion on that Gulfstream, there’s no way she could have survived it,” Flint replied. “Unless she wasn’t on the plane.”
“Which creates another whole set of issues,” Scarlett mused aloud. “But she sent a kid to my office on a bicycle with a USB and a Polaroid. She also set a meeting at a place no stranger could have known.”
“I’ll agree that seems odd for a cold-blooded killer.” Flint replied.
Scarlett poured herself another cup of coffee and returned to the table.
“HPD will send officers whenever you ask. There’s no real rush,” Scarlett said, working it through. “If we do that, she’ll be downtown by midnight, and we can go home. Nothing about this situation requires us to do more.”
“I’m guessing you have a caveat,” Flint said with a tired grin.
“We don’t know what she wanted from me when she sent that envelope,” Scarlett replied. “I worked on it for two days and I’m no closer to real answers. I’d like to know what’s going on here. Don’t you?”
Flint turned his coffee cup on the table, mulling. “There’s also the guy in my alley last night to consider. Along with the explosive on my back gate. Could be related to her. Or not. But the timing is too tight to dismiss the possibility as trivial.”
“You think all of this is connected to her?”
“Possibly. Along with the man with the flashbang in your garage and whatever he stole from your building. Once she’s downtown, it’ll be harder to find out.”
Scarlett nodded slowly. “So we agree we’ll hear her out before we decide.”
“Assuming she’ll tell us anything. She hasn’t said much so far,” Flint cautioned.
The shower stopped down the hall. The pipes ticked as they cooled. Neither of them moved for a moment. When she rattled the locked door handle, Scarlett went to unlock it and returned.
A few moments later, the bathroom door opened and Oakley came around the corner into the kitchen. She stopped at the table, freshly washed, wearing the clean but wrinkled T-shirt and jeans from her backpack.
Flint set his coffee cup down. “Are you ready for me to call HPD? It’s getting late.”
“Not yet. I want to talk about the man at the ranch first.”
Flint waited.
“They showed up out of the blue. No warning,” she murmured. “I thought they were coming to kill me.”
“So you’ve said. What you haven’t said is why.”
“Because it’s not the first time they’ve tried.
They’ve been after me for months. They got to my friend a few weeks ago.
You know her name. Theresa Moreno.” Her eyes were clear and her voice stronger now.
“That pilot was armed. He was walking across that yard toward the front of the house with his hand near enough to his weapon to grab it. I was upstairs in the house. I had a chance to shoot first. So I did.”
“You shot him twice. He wasn’t anywhere near you. And then you shot the second guy from the helicopter, too,” Flint replied.
“I’d have shot the second one again if she hadn’t stopped me.” She glared toward Scarlett.
“He was no threat to you. You shot him before he made it halfway toward the house.”
“I’ve been over it in my head a dozen times. There was nothing else I could have done.”
“What do you want us to do here?” Scarlett asked.
“I need cash. Enough that I can disappear.” She drew a breath. “I’ll do the rest myself.”
“You have money in that envelope.” Flint pointed his chin.
“Not enough. Not for what I need to do.”
Flint looked at her for a long moment. “And what do we tell the wounded man and the dead pilot’s family?”
Flint’s phone buzzed against the table. He turned it over. Drake. “What’s up?”
“We’re in Houston, and we’ve got a problem,” Drake said. “Patterson went to wash up in the men’s room and walked off toward the terminal. Now he’s gone. They let me check the CCTV. Looks like he got into a black sedan and drove off.”
“Why would he do that?”
“My guess is they pointed a gun at him. I can’t see it on the CCTV. But it’s the only thing that makes sense,” Drake replied.