Frag Box (12 page)
A Deal With the Devil
My house has a storm entry, with about four feet between the inner and outer doors. I peeked through the edge of the leaded glass in the inner door and saw that my intruder was a familiar figure. I flattened myself against the adjacent wall and let her finish picking the inner lock. As she was opening the door, I threw a phone book down the hallway, and when she leaned forward to see what the noise was, I hooked my left arm around her neck, pulled her the rest of the way into the room, and pressed the Beretta against the base of her skull. She tried to put an elbow into my chest, but she had a poor angle, and it was easy to deflect. She also tried to stomp on my instep, but her aim was bad and all she managed to do was flatten my big toe a bit. She had a lean and athletic body, but she had definitely been neglecting her martial arts training.
“Good evening, Agent Krause. I’ll take your sidearm now, please.”
“You’ll take your hands off me, is what you’ll do. I have a no-knock warrant.”
“I don’t care if you have the goddamn Magna Carta. I’ll take your weapon. Now. Spare us both the embarrassment of me pulling it out of some kind of holster between your thighs.”
“You’re putting yourself in a lot of trouble here, Mr. Jackson. For assaulting an agent, you can get thrown in a hole so deep and black, the best lawyer on earth will never find you.”
“Is that what you told Charlie you were going to do to him? Is he dead because he believed you and let down his guard?”
“You don’t really think that, do you? That’s insane.”
“So are black holes where lawyers can’t find you. For all I know, so’s the whole damn Department of Homeland Conspiracy. Now give up the piece.” I pressed the barrel of the Beretta harder into her neck.
“All right,” she said. “Just stay calm, okay? I’m going to move really slowly.”
She started to reach down toward the hem of her skirt with her right hand, and I told her to stop and switch to her left. She did. And slowly, as she had promised, she produced some kind of very narrow, compact semi-automatic. Not standard Secret Service issue, I thought.
“Put it in my left hand,” I said.
“Take your left hand off my neck.”
“Actually, that’s my forearm on your neck. But give me the gun, and we’ll be all done with that, too.”
She put the weapon in my hand, barrel first, and I told her to turn it around the right way. When she did, I held it out in front of us, reached down with my little finger, and tripped the lug to drop the magazine out. If she was impressed with that fantastically dexterous maneuver, she withheld her applause.
“Do you have a round in the chamber?”
“The place I carry that thing? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No. Disagreeable, but definitely not crazy.” But I flipped the safety off and pulled the trigger, all the same, pointing the gun at the floor. It really was empty. Then I let her step away from me and gestured to the living room and its big, overstuffed couch. When she sat down on it, I gave her back her gun.
“I’m going to show you the warrant now, okay?” She made a move toward her handbag, but I grabbed it away from her.
“No. Not okay.”
“You need to see what you’re violating, here.”
“No, I don’t. You need to see that I don’t give a damn. If I shoot you, I’m not violating anything, I’m defending my home. Any jury in the nation would say so. But if I decide you can be trusted, then maybe you don’t need the warrant anyway.”
“Oh, really? That’s not how you were talking last time we met.”
“I’ve been thinking since then that I might be open to some trading.”
“We don’t trade. We insist, and we get.”
“We? I don’t see your partner, Agent.”
“He’s probably inside the back door by now, about to come in here and blow you away.” But she wasn’t looking toward the back of the house. Instead, her eyes were turned down and to her right.
“No, he isn’t. And from the look on your face, I don’t believe he’s coming, either.”
There was also the small matter of the silent alarm. If her partner really were at the back door, I would be seeing two flashing red lights on the hallway phone, instead of just one. But I saw no reason to tell her that.
“Do you seriously think I would come here without my partner?”
And suddenly I saw it. And it was hilarious.
“You dumped him, didn’t you?” I said. “I could see back in my office that you don’t like the little twerp. But you don’t trust him either, do you? That’s why you came here alone. You probably didn’t even tell him what you were up to.”
“Goddamned arrogant little prick.” She folded her arms tightly and found something to study in the pattern of my carpet.
“Him, or me?”
“I mean, stupidity is one thing, but aggressive, gleeful, pompous stupidity is inexcusable.”
I guessed she meant him. I was starting to like this conversation a lot.
“Does he hit on you, too?”
She unfolded her arms and slapped the couch on either side.
“God! What is it with you guys? I mean, is that a given? No, he doesn’t hit on me. That has too much finesse for him. He tried to rape me, is what he did.”
“Oh, shit.” Suddenly it had stopped being funny. “I’m sorry for you.”
“You think
you’re
sorry? Talk to him. I gave him a case of smashed balls that left him walking funny for a month. But that was just a gesture. I’m going to ruin that asshole’s career, and I don’t mean sometime in the distant future. I really am an agent, you know. I can—”
“Relax, Agent. I respect your professionalism, even if your partner doesn’t. And you might still make a success of tonight. First, though, I want to know why you’re interested in Charlie Victor.” And just to show her how trustworthy I was, I put the .380 in my back pocket.
“You talked about a trade. What do I get?”
“If your story makes sense to me, maybe you get Charlie’s box.”
“The one you said you didn’t have?”
“That’s not what I said. But in any case, how bad do you want it? Would it really hurt all that much to simply tell me what you’re up to?”
“Why is it any of your business?”
“Jesus, you just don’t give an inch, do you? He was my friend, okay? I want to find out why he was killed. And right now, you and your partner are the best suspects I’ve got.”
She sucked in her lower lip and scowled at the ceiling for a moment. “All right,” she said, finally. “I’ll tell you what I can. We have reason to believe your pet homeless person was going to hire an assassin to kill the President.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“That would be an understatement.”
“Wouldn’t that take an awful lot of money?”
“Not necessarily. There are plenty of people out there who will try it just for the thrill or the fame. And some will take any fee at all, just to show that they are professionals.”
“Which they are not, in that case.”
“Maybe not, but they’re still potential killers. A lot of agents have died for assuming that nut cases can’t also be deadly.”
“You said you had reason to believe Charlie was lining up a hit man. What reason?”
“That’s classified.”
“Screw classified. I thought we were talking about a trade here.”
“Somebody sent the President a threatening letter.”
“Charlie?”
“No, somebody else. Somebody said they were fed up with the President’s treatment of poor people, so they had decided to contribute to the frag pot that some homeless guy was keeping on him. The letter didn’t give his name.”
“Did the letter call it that? A frag pot?”
“Actually, it called it a frag
box
, as I recall. That’s a new term, I believe.”
“And the postmark led you here?”
“And the postmark led us here. And we talked to poor people and social workers and jailers and priests. And we talked to a lot of homeless people.”
“And you killed a dog or two.”
“We don’t do that sort of thing, Mr. Jackson.”
“Be cruel to animals?”
“Be cruel to anybody, out in plain sight.”
“So who did?”
“That, I am not free to tell you.”
“But you know, don’t you?”
“I’m not free to tell you that, either.”
“Thank you. What about the black Hummer, the one that’s been following me?”
“Now you’re being paranoid. We had a walking tail on you for a while. But a Hummer? Get real. Who would use a stupid, obvious vehicle like that for surveillance work?”
“That’s the question, all right. Who would?”
“Not us, I can assure you. That’s all you get. Now it’s your turn.”
“Okay, I buy at least some of it. Tell you what: I’ll give you Charlie’s box if you let me finish looking at the contents first.”
“I want to be there when you do.”
“Sure, why not?” I stood up and gestured to her to do the same.
“So where is it?”
“On the table in the next room.”
“You son of a bitch!”
“That has been observed, yes. I have some single malt Scotch on the table, as well as the box, by the way. Can I offer you a drink?”
“You must realize I’m on duty.”
“Of course you are. Yes or no?”
“Why not?”
What a remarkable evening this was turning out to be. I gestured Krause toward the dining room, and I went back to the kitchen to get another glass. But first, I went back to the hallway and picked up the phone.
“Still with me Anne?”
“Yes.”
“Could you hear all that?”
“I might have missed a word or two while I was getting my tape recorder, but mostly, yes. I love it. I don’t know how much of it I can publish, but I love it.”
“You probably won’t be able to hear us when we move to the dining room. I’ll hang up now and call you again when I get done with my disgruntled agent.”
“I’ll be here.”
Back in the dining room, I gave Agent Krause a cut glass tumbler.
“Ice?”
“Never.”
“A woman after my own heart.”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“Do you have a first name other than Agent?”
“No.”
Right. Agent Agent, then. She had let down her hair enough to tell me that she hated her partner, but if I thought that meant we were going to be friends, I could just forget it. In fact, it probably guaranteed that we wouldn’t be.
I settled into reading the last of Charlie’s ledger and finishing my notes. Sometimes she looked over my shoulder, but mostly she wandered around the room, looking at my things and putting a serious dent in the Scotch supply. At a glass case on top of my buffet, she paused overly long.
“Do you play, Mr. Jackson?”
“You’re looking at the violin? No. The only thing I play is a pool cue. The violin is a gift from an old friend, a sort of memento.”
“Really? I would have thought you would be musical.”
“Why would you think that?” I didn’t look up from the pile of papers.
“Well, music is mathematical, they say.”
“They do say that, yes. What’s your point?”
“Didn’t your name used to be Numbers Jackson?”
I was glad my back was to her, because that was a real kick in the guts, and there’s no way my face wouldn’t have told her so.
“I can’t imagine where you would have heard that,” I said. And that was absolutely the truth. Numbers Jackson was actually the nickname of my Uncle Fred, not me. But that was still way too close to home. And how the hell had she found it?
“You know, this box really doesn’t tell us anything about who the hired assassin was going to be,” she said.
“If anybody,” I said.
“Oh, there was somebody, all right. Or there will be. And I am going to find him. But of course, your friend Victor can no longer help me, so I need somebody else.”
“Well, we all have needs.” I started dumping all of Charlie’s junk back into the box.
“Yes we do. And you and I are going to help each other with them. Because, you see,
somebody
is going to go down here.”
“I assume you mean for the murder of Charlie Victor.”
“No, Mr. Jackson, I mean for the conspiracy to assassinate a president, the case that I am going to get a commendation for solving. A commendation and a new partner. Do we understand each other quite well now?”
So there it was. Find the hit man or invent one, because Agent Agent said so. And Agent Agent also knew a name from my blighted past in Detroit and maybe a lot more. Worst of all, I had foolishly hung up the phone, so I had neither a witness nor a recording of the extortion. So as much as it galled me, I would have to play by her rules. I gave her a silent nod, just in case she had some kind of recording device of her own. Then I put Charlie’s box in her hand.
“Don’t forget to pick up the magazine for your gun on your way out,” I said.
“Thanks for the drink.” She smirked and left.
There was a time when her threats would have seemed laughable. Not so long ago, either, but another era. Now we have the insultingly titled Patriot Act, and anybody who has read even a snippet of it and not been scared witless wasn’t reading very carefully. As a bondsman, I knew all too well that it’s an extremely fine line that decides which side of the law you are on. And if you have no rights, that’s very, very bad, because all too often, the law is enforced by the Agent Agents of the world. And besides not getting their facts right, they have no more professional integrity than a pack of hungry wolves. I had thought she was annoying. Now I knew she was downright scary.
I stood at the front door and watched her drive away in a featureless government sedan, then reset the door alarm and called Anne Packard back and gave her a short version of the encounter.
“Did you get enough notes from the ledger for me to do a write-up, I hope?”
“I tried, anyway. I also got an address that my lady spook might not have noticed.”
“Oh?”
“The box itself had what I thought at first was an importer’s stamp on it. But when I looked closer, I saw that it was really drawn onto the box by hand, with a felt-tip pen or some such.”
“Why is that important?”
“The address was in Mountain Iron.”
“As in Mountain Iron, Minnesota?”
“The very one.”