Chapter Six #2
“With a pry bar and tarps?”
“It’s a cleanout business.”
“That what you call it?”
His smile came back, thinner now. “You should’ve handed her over and collected your money. Frank said you’d do the practical thing.”
Jade’s voice went soft beside me. “He hates that word now.”
I kept my attention on Ike.
Ike’s gaze flicked from me to Jade and back again. The pry bar lowered an inch, then rose. His jaw worked while he looked past us at the half-open unit and the narrow lane his truck had blocked.
“What was the plan?” I asked.
Ike’s jaw shifted.
“What did Frank tell you would happen after I brought Crystal here?”
Crystal stepped out of the unit doorway, one hand around the notebook, her face pale but lifted. “Say it.”
Jade turned slightly. “Crystal.”
“No.” Crystal stared at Ike. “I want to hear him say what they were going to do.”
Ike stared at her like he couldn’t make the second blonde woman make sense.
Then he laughed once. “You were supposed to panic. That was the story. Bounty hunter corners you at the unit. You shoot him because you can’t go back. Then you can’t live with what you did.”
Jade went utterly still.
My blood turned cold and clean.
Ike lifted the pry bar a little higher. “Frank said he’d have the rest handled. The gun, the note, the call, whatever made it read right. I was supposed to make sure the records disappeared and the scene looked ugly enough nobody dug too hard.”
Crystal’s hand flew to her mouth.
Jade moved first.
She kicked the bottom of the unit door.
The roll-up dropped halfway with a metallic scream between Ike and Crystal. It didn’t shut or trap Crystal inside, but it made Ike flinch and swing his focus toward the sound.
I crossed the distance before he recovered.
Ike lifted the pry bar.
I caught his wrist with both hands and drove him backward into the side of his truck. The impact shook the ladder rack. The pry bar scraped down the door with a long metal shriek. Ike grunted and slammed his shoulder into mine, heavy and dirty, trying to turn enough to bring his knee up.
He knew how to fight like a man who’d carried appliances down stairs and thrown drunk tenants out of rental houses.
That didn’t make him fast enough.
Jade came in from the side with the tire iron and struck the pry bar near Ike’s hand, not his body. The clang cracked through the lane. Ike’s fingers opened. The pry bar hit the gravel.
“Don’t,” she snapped when he reached for it.
He swung at her with his free hand.
I shoved him harder into the truck and hooked my leg behind his knee. He went off-balance, cursing, boots grinding in gravel. His elbow caught my ribs. Pain flashed hot under my arm. I took it, twisted his wrist behind his back, and drove him chest-first against the truck door.
Jade kicked the pry bar under my pickup.
“Crystal,” Jade called. “Box. Now.”
Crystal ducked under the half-lowered unit door, clutching the notebook and flash drive bag against her chest. She grabbed the banker box with the yellow tabs and dragged it behind the concrete divider at the unit corner.
Ike bucked under my hold. “You stupid son of a bitch. You think Frank won’t bury you too?”
“He can try.”
I pulled the cuffs from under my jacket.
Jade saw the metal and stepped closer with the tire iron held low, eyes on Ike’s free hand.
“You always bring those to a cleanout?” she asked.
“Only when the trash talks back.”
That almost cost me a breath.
I got one cuff around Ike’s wrist, hauled his arm tighter, and locked the other cuff through the ladder rack support. It wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t hold him forever, but it held him long enough for me to strip the phone out of his pocket and kick the pry bar farther away.
Ike spat into the gravel. “You don’t have authority to do this.”
“I have authority to stop you from killing people in front of me.”
Jade came to my side, breathing hard, braid half-loose and eyes bright with fury. “You okay?”
“Ribs,” I said. “Not broken.”
“Your optimism is medically unsupported.”
“I’m fine.”
“You can be fine after someone with a badge looks at you.”
“I don’t have a badge.”
“Not you, Tolliver.”
I took out my phone.
Annette’s name sat near the top of my recent calls, but this went past North Fork first. I called emergency services.
“I need deputies at the storage facility outside Whispering Pines,” I said.
“Back row, third lane, unit B-19. One restrained suspect, Ike Pendleton. He came armed with a pry bar and admitted a plan to stage Crystal Kemp’s death.
No shots fired. Three civilians alive, one suspect restrained to a work truck, and physical records on scene. ”
“Does the suspect still have access to the weapon?” the dispatcher asked.
“No,” I said. “Pry bar is out of reach. We’ll stay visible when deputies come through the gate.”
Then I called Annette.
She answered on the first ring. “Tell me you’re not calling from a ditch.”
“I’m not calling from a ditch.”
“I hate that I’m relieved by that sentence. Where are you?”
“At the storage facility outside Whispering Pines. The material frame-up is verified. Evidence is secured. Crystal Kemp isn’t a clean pickup.”
Silence hit her end.
Then Annette said, “Dex.”
“I’m walking away from the bounty.”
She didn’t answer right away.
Behind me, Crystal sat on the concrete curb near the unit with the banker box between her feet, one hand pressed over the key beneath her sweater, the other wrapped around the flash drive bag. Jade stood between Crystal and Ike, tire iron in hand, daring the whole world to comment.
Annette’s voice softened by half an inch. “Are you hurt?”
“Bruised. Nothing serious.”
“Kemp?”
“Shaken. Alive. With records.”
“And your identification issue?”
My attention went to Jade.
She met it, face dirty, hair coming out of the braid, jaw tight with the effort of not shaking.
“My identification issue is why we’re all still breathing,” I said.
Annette took that in with the kind of silence that meant paperwork would bleed later.
“All right,” she said. “You get her attorney those records. You cooperate with responding law enforcement. You don’t freelance yourself into a cell because you decided to be romantic at a crime scene.”
Jade’s eyebrows lifted.
I turned away from her because my face had apparently decided this was a fine time to betray me.
“This isn’t romance,” I said.
Jade snorted behind me.
Annette sighed. “Men are exhausting. Call me when someone official has your statement.”
“I’ll call.”
“And Dex?”
“What?”
“You did the right thing. I’m going to be furious about it after coffee.”
The line went dead.
I lowered the phone.
Ike had gone quiet against the truck, too quiet for a man who’d arrived believing Frank Dugan had built him an exit.
I crouched near him, out of range of his boots. “You want to start helping yourself before the deputies get here?”
His face twisted. “Frank said he’d keep my name off the worst of it.”
“Frank sent you to do the worst of it.”
“He said the records wouldn’t matter if Crystal was dead.”
Crystal flinched.
Jade’s hand tightened around the tire iron.
I kept my voice level because Jade was already holding enough fury for both of us. “Frank’s going to say this was all you.”
Ike stared at me.
His eyes shifted toward the gate, then the banker box at Crystal’s feet, then the phone in my hand.
Ike swallowed. “He told me when you’d been sent, where the girl worked, where she lived, and what places she might run. He said if you followed the records, I followed you.”
“Keep talking,” I said.
Ike turned toward the approaching flash of red-blue light beyond the gate.
His face drained.
“Then you better make sure they’re recording,” he said.
BY THE TIME THE SUN cleared the ridge, Ike Pendleton was in custody, Frank Dugan was being picked up, and Crystal’s attorney had the flash drive in her hand.
It wasn’t a courtroom, and it wasn’t a clean ending yet, but the records were in hands Frank didn’t control.
Crystal sat on a bench outside her apartment in Whispering Pines with a blanket around her shoulders and Jade’s hand locked in hers.
A deputy had walked the apartment with Crystal’s attorney and cleared the place before letting her back inside.
The broken desk drawer was still broken.
The closet still had clothes dragged out from the search that had sent Crystal running. None of that looked safe yet.
Now deputies and an attorney knew where to look.
Records sat in more than one hand, and Ike Pendleton’s statement was already moving through channels Frank couldn’t close by making one scared bookkeeper disappear.
Crystal lifted her face to me from the bench. “What happens to the bond?”
“Your attorney is already handling it.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
Jade’s attention came to me.
I leaned against the porch post and kept my hands loose. My ribs hurt when I breathed too deep. My knuckles were scraped. My shirt had dust and a smear of Ike’s truck on the shoulder.
I’d been worse after cleaner jobs.
“This recovery is done,” I said. “I’m not taking you in.”
Crystal blinked fast.
Jade didn’t move at all.
“You can just do that?” Crystal asked.
“I can refuse the pickup. North Fork can be angry. The bond issue still has to be handled legally, but your attorney has enough now to make that happen the right way.”
Crystal pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth.
Jade watched me with something raw enough that I had to turn away first.
A battered sedan pulled in behind my truck. Crystal’s attorney stepped out with a phone still pressed to one ear and a file folder tucked under her arm. She nodded toward Crystal, then me.
“Go,” Crystal said to Jade.
Jade’s head snapped toward her. “No.”
“Yes.” Crystal squeezed her hand. “I’m not alone. I’m not hiding. I have an attorney, two deputies, and a woman on the phone who sounds like she eats men like Frank for breakfast.”
“She does sound promising,” I said.
Jade ignored me. “Crystal.”