Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) (15 page)

So, I fetched the thickest set of rubber gloves I could find, scooped everything into a plastic baggie, triple sealed it and dumped it back in the packaging it'd come in before sealing it inside a shoebox that I taped shut. Then, I brushed my teeth twice before I called Tindall and told him about the tongue. It took more effort than it should have to talk without throwing up again. When I finished, he promised to send someone out to get it and asked me if I wanted to file any kind of complaint. “Someone delivered a severed tongue to my house while my son was home alone. What do you think?”

“Well,” said Tindall. “We can check it for prints and such but I think the message is pretty clear. Judah, I warned you about this. The only thing I can offer you at this point it to put a uniform on your door, though we really don't have the staff to spare.”

“I don't want a damn bodyguard,” I screamed into my cell. “I want help cuffing this guy. My son was home, Tindall. They were within feet of him. They had to be to drop that off on my front porch.” I was beyond irate, shaking and in a cold, raging sweat. Rational me knew there wasn't anything Tindall could do to make me feel any better. Whoever I'd pissed off knew where I lived.

“What kind of tongue are we talking about? Human? Bovine? Swine?”

I thought I was going to be sick as I glanced over at the package one more time. On closer examination, it should have been clear to me that it didn’t come from the home office. They wouldn’t have taken the time to write on the outside of the package. They’d gotten my name right, though my address was all wrong. I didn’t live on Fae Boulevard. Then it hit me. I’d been on that street earlier in the day. Holy Hell, what if Donald Summers…

“Tindall. You have an officer in route here yet?”

“Quincy's on his way. Why?”

“Send someone to check on the Summers house.” There was a scratching sound as he put his hand over the receiver and relayed the order to someone else. While that was happening, the screen door opened and Hunter came through, sulking, with Sal's hand on his shoulder. Sal stepped in, glanced around and then hurried Hunter into the back part of the house, for which I was thankful. “I got two guys headed that way. Judah, were you careful? Did anyone see you talking to people?”

“I don't know,” I said running my fingers through my hair. “I wasn't paying attention. God, I should have known. I should have known.”

“Calm down, Judah. We don't know that anything's wrong other than what's happened at your place. Just relax. Quincy will be there in fifteen. You going to be okay until then?”

I looked up just as Sal ducked back into the kitchen from the direction of Hunter's room and stood, his form taking up most of the doorway. I didn't envy anyone who tried to pick a fight with him. Sal was built like a tank. By his posture, he was already on high alert.

“I'll be fine. Tell Quincy to come in quiet. No need to stir up the whole neighborhood. That will just make my job harder.”

“Will do.” Tindall hung up without saying anything else.

“What happened?” Sal asked.

I didn't answer him. I was too busy staring at the duct taped shoe box full of tongue sitting on my counter. I'd been threatened before. Death threats kind of come with the job. It was something I could shrug off. What bothered me was that someone had come to my house and hand delivered
that
to my door when I wasn't even here to protect my son. And that wasn't the worst of it. If I was right, then across town Donald Summers was...

The room spun. I felt like I might throw up again, which was the last thing I wanted to do in front of Sal. I turned and felt my way down the hallway and into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. At first, all I was going to do was splash some water on my face but I couldn't get that sight out of my head. He'd been here, touched my things, my house. I suddenly felt dirty and leaned into the shower, turning the faucet on, letting the cold water wash over me, clothes and all.

It took a while but I eventually got my head back. The cold water helped. So did brushing my teeth again and cleaning off my face with a rag. My shirt was wet so I took it off and searched through one of the shirts hanging on the towel rack in there for one that would be comfortable enough to wear and threw it on. When I wandered back out to the main part of the house, Sal was standing at the door, arguing with Quincy. “No, you can't.”

“It's police business, bow bender. Step aside. Don't make me get out the silver.”

“It's all right,” I told Sal. He would have heard me coming up the hall, though he didn't turn to acknowledge me. “I called him.” Sal stepped aside.

Quincy swaggered in, adjusting the collar of his shirt. “Tindall didn't tell me you had company.” He took a few steps forward before his eyes fell on my box. “That the tongue?”

“Hear anything about the Summers yet?”

Quincy refused to meet my eyes. That's when I knew. I swallowed the tightening lump in my throat. “Was it just Donald?”

“Might take a while before we know for sure. There was a lot of pieces, according to dispatch,” said Quincy, staring at his shoes.

My heart ached. I felt my chin start to shake and my hands sweat. I pushed the thought and feelings of self-pity
and guilt away. They wouldn't help me now. I had to look at this through the eyes of a BSI agent, through my training. Forget that I was a mother, that they had threatened me and my son, too. Forget that, if I hadn't knocked on Donald's door this afternoon, he would be watching TV with his wife. He would be alive. This was my fault. My fault.

I grabbed the box and held it out to Quincy. “Take it.”

He took it and didn't say anything about the way my hands were shaking. “You sure you don't want someone to watch your back, Black? You're awfully far out, near the edge of the reservation. Wouldn't be a quick drive if dispatch called it in.”

“I'll be in the company of a pack of werewolves tonight,” I said numbly. “If I'm not safe there, none of your officers will do me any good.”

Quincy nodded and lifted the box. “Everything in here? Packaging and everything, huh?” I took a deep breath and nodded. “I'll ship it to the lab after my report and keep you updated.”

“Just take it.” I raised my eyes from the floor between us to look at him. I hadn't meant to look down. I just didn't want him to see how angry I was. If he saw, he might want to bring me in before I killed someone. The truth was, though, that I wasn't angry at anyone but myself. People had died because of my carelessness, innocent people. I wasn't going to let it happen again. “And you and Tindall go over that scene with a fine toothed comb. Even if you don't think it's important, I want to hear about it, you hear me? No more games. Now, get out of my house.”

“You, uh, want to come out to the scene? Maybe you'll do a better job yourself, eh?”

Sal put a hand on Quincy's shoulder. “You heard the lady. She told you to beat it.”

“All right, all right. You don't have to tell me twice. Just trying to cooperate with the feds.” Quincy grumbled all the way to the door.

I bolted it behind him and leaned my forehead against it. Sal had probably learned enough between Hunter and me and the smells in the kitchen to guess what had happened. I could feel his sympathetic eyes crawling on me and wished he'd just go away. If I didn't need so badly to get help for my son, if I wasn't sure Tindall would come check up on me if I stayed put for the night, I wouldn't have gone out. But I'd given my word. That sort of thing is important and I was going to stick to it.

“You want to sit?” Sal asked.

“Will it make us late?”

“Nope.”

I nodded and pushed away from the door. Eventually, I found my way to the sofa in the living room and just sat there with my gun on the coffee table, resting on a pile of video game cheat codes. Sal went into my kitchen and I heard him moving things around in the fridge. I didn't care what he was doing. Donald and his wife were dead, his wife, who I hadn't even met. She'd paid the price for his cooperation. Dammit. That was my fault, too.

I looked up and saw Sal offering me a coffee cup. I seized it and sipped from it over-zealously only to find he hadn't filled it with coffee. He'd dug out my bottle of scotch and insulted it with a pair of ice cubes. Didn't matter to me. It was wet and comforting so down the hatch it went. Sal studied me closely in silence after taking a seat in the old rocking chair off to the side of the sofa. He was going to say it wasn't my fault, probably. The bad guys did it. While that was all true and good, it wasn't going to make one lick of difference to me who was at fault. The blame I could deal with. I'd shrug it on like a weighted vest every day until I tracked the bastard responsible down and hung him out to dry by the dark and curlies. Donald and Teagan Summers would never have that chance. They hadn't even gotten their closure before they died.

“You know,” Sal started, rocking back on the heels of his boots. “When I was on my first tour, I got assigned to this unit with another Indian guy. Of course, he was Indian in the other
other
sense of the word, meaning his parents were actually from India. I never learned to pronounce his name. None of us could. We just called him Taj. We picked on him a lot because he was small but Taj was the best shot in the whole unit, present company excluded. I was technically a non-combatant, as a medic. Anyway, about two months into the tour, we were on a convoy, moving some classified something or other from one base to another. We were way out in the desert. In Iraq, all the deserts look the same. Sand everywhere. If you got lost out there, you could go thirty, forty miles in any direction before you found a camel, let alone a city. We were pretty damn far in. And Taj, he was short. I mean short, like almost didn't make it to basic ‘cause he was so short.” He laughed to himself. “Where was I?”

“Convoy in the desert.”

“Right. Anyway, the roads aren't so good out there. We got lost as shit and had to keep calling to get our coordinates straight because Charlie's scramblers turned our GPS into a fancy coaster. Whenever we did that, we had to stop and wait for a while. Taj wandered off to take a piss once while we stopped and didn't come back so I went to see what was keeping him. I found him standing on the top of a big cliff, looking down into a pool of the bluest water I'd ever seen. I asked him what he was doing out there. You know what he said?” I shook my head. “In his very best Tanto English, Taj said, 'Small man take-um big piss.' I laughed so hard I swear to God I don't know how we didn’t get ourselves shot to bits.”

I chuckled a little at his story, despite myself. I thought he'd told me the story to make me feel better. After all, he was laughing too. But his face and voice darkened and he went on.

“The next day, on our way back to the assigned position, Taj got in the front transport while I got in the one behind him and
stayed in the rear. We hit an IED. Blew Taj one way and me the other. I remember having to crawl through part of him to get to the rest. Poor Taj, though, didn't even know. He just kept complaining his legs were cold. I gave him something for the pain and tried to put back together what I could but it was no good. There was no fixing Taj. Eventually, when the shock started to wear off, even Taj knew that. He also knew it was going to be a good, long while before he went and he didn't want to go slow and in pain.”

Sal paused for a minute to scratch his chin and stare at the floor. “A lot of people tell stories about the men they kill, the first ones, how they stay with you forever. Taj was mine.”

I held my watered down cup of scotch to Sal who took it, swallowed some and handed it back. “I don't know if anyone ever got the towel head bastard that shot Taj. War doesn't deal death equally. It isn't fair. Make no mistake this is a war. This asshole, whoever he is, has declared war on us and our families and he isn't going to stop until we make him.”

I shook my head. “How do I make something like this right?”

“You don't. You make it stop and you do it by whatever means necessary. Whatever this is isn't going to stop with just the Summers. They're going to come for you if you keep this up. I just wanted to say that no one's going to think less of you if you walk away now. We all understand. Hell, we have to live here. You don't.”

I stared down into the last little bit of my drink. “What did you say to Hunter? He looked pretty down.”

“I told him not to leave you alone when you're worried sick about him already. He thinks you just got some bad meat. No one's going to tell him different if you don't.”

“You were hanging around all day?”

“Yup,” said Sal. “Been working on my deck.”

“See anyone come or go?”

“Whoever delivered that box, Judah, must have come while I was in the can or taking a water break. I didn't see anyone.”

I don't know why but that was oddly comforting. If he hadn't seen them, Hunter probably hadn't either. It meant that whoever had dropped the box off didn't hang around long enough to be noticed. I downed the rest of the drink and then placed the cup on the coffee table, drawing the back of my sleeve across my mouth. “Well, Tonto. We might as well hit the road. Don't want to keep Chanter waiting. That is, if you still don't mind us tagging along?”

Sal crossed his arms dramatically. “Hmm. Kimosabe take-um papoose to iron horse. Tanto call Big Chief. Tell-um we be late. Then, we stop and get-um tobacco. Gift for angry Big Chief.”

It was uncanny how well Sal could pull off Tonto. I couldn't help but laugh. While none of that brought the Summers back, it kept me from sinking into a spiraling fit of self-loathing and guilt. It gave me perspective. “Thanks,” I said, standing. “I mean it.”

“Don't thank me,” Sal said pulling out his cell. “Get the bastard.”

Chanter did not live on the reservation but on a large plot of desert just outside of it. He was close enough as the crow flies that, on a clear day in a fast walk, we could have walked there inside an hour. Being that it was technically outside of the approved grounds, however, meant that we had to pass through a checkpoint to get there.