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“The Farm?” Perez asked, arching an eyebrow.

“CIA training camp.”

“Go on.”

“Anyway, the guy’s an ace behind the wheel and, uh…Mr. Wizard with explosives—”

“Explosives?” Perez said, feeling the heartburn coming back.

“Maybe you were right about that meth lab explosion. Anyway, he’s also a hand-to-hand savant, fluent in Arabic, there’s only one bad mark on his profile.”

“What? Mr. Perfect has a blemish?”

“Yes, an almost pathological need to tell the truth.”

“You’re kidding me. A spy who doesn’t lie?” Perez asked and immediately balked at the unintentional rhyme.

“So it would seem. Guy graduates and immediately gets his assignments, all in the collective assholes of the world.”

Perez finally abandoned his chew toy in the garbage. “Sucks being a rookie,” he said.

“You don’t get it. The kind of concern they had for him, they shouldn’t have even let him in the Agency, but then they turned him into cannon fodder. He’s thrown into no-win situations, white man in a black hole, no chance of light escaping—except he has, over and over again. Guy never got a scratch, never got picked up by locals, never blew a cover, and developed more assets than anyone: all women. It seems like they loved the truth over the standard company lies. Bars, churches, even on the street, he could find them and run an asset better than anyone.”

Perez groaned and rubbed his aching knees as he stood off of the table. “I guess honesty really is the best policy, huh?”

“Maybe so, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good in keeping him from getting discharged.”

“The brain tumor? He was telling the truth about that?”

Nikki nodded. “Three months ago, doctors discovered a walnut-sized tumor on his brain. They said he could undergo surgery to remove it. It’d give him a one-in-eight chance of living, or else he could buy the farm outright.”

Perez looked around. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone your age say that.”

“What, buy the farm?”

“Yeah. How old are you anyway?”

“Bite me,
Boss
. Anyway, this Charlie said he didn’t want the surgery and took off, but it seems the Agency isn’t all that pleased that he doesn’t want to go gentle into that good night.”

Perez scoffed and rubbed the back of his neck. “We’re stuck inside our own little spy thriller, aren’t we? We’ve got some spook with a tumor out there blowing shit up and going vigilante for God knows what reason, more spooks after him because the fucking government can’t keep their loose ends tied up, and we’ve got nothin’—no motive and no witnesses to ID him. What the fuck are we supposed to do?”

Hamill shrugged. “I dunno. Stay out of his way?”

“Seriously?” Perez asked.

“Sort of. Listen, a few years back, I was talking to some friends of mine from when my dad was stationed in Los Angeles. We were just exchanging stories, and one of them mentioned something about these Rangers who went out on a patrol. It wasn’t anything strange, per se, but there were a couple of CIA ops with them, down there to work reconnaissance training. Supposedly, they always kept to themselves and kind of just trudged along, like it was a punishment or something. One day, the recon patrol came back in to make their report. The commander asked how many supply trucks their surveillance revealed, and they said they saw two.” Hamill paused for a moment, and a strange look came over her face.

Perez couldn’t tell if she was just concerned or entertained by her own story. “Go on.”

“Well, the commanding officer started to chew them out, because there were really three trucks. The Rangers didn’t even bat an eye and just said, ‘No, sir. There
were
three trucks,’ and motioned over at the two spooks, who finally looked as if they’d had a good day. Those guys didn’t have any weapons or explosives with them, but they got bored and blew up a fucking truck just for the hell of it.”

“Is there a point to this story, Sergeant?” Perez asked, hoping his voice conveyed a kind of confident dismissiveness.

“Yeah. I’m saying that if a guy who’s been trained to be a ghost and blow shit up aims to go after guys with an explosive enterprise, maybe we need to stay out of the blast radius.”

Perez felt almost inclined to do just that, but it was a cold chill from a delayed reaction that got the wheels turning. “Is Charlie Kelly is real name?”

“It doesn’t say, but he has a laundry list of aliases.”

“Did you say he had a sister?”

Nikki flipped back through the file folder. “Yeah. Says here her name is Kaitlyn.”

Perez snatched the file folder from her hand and scanned through the pages to Charlie’s list of aliases. His eyes stopped and he pointed at an entry halfway down the page: Charles Robert Burke.

Charlie Burke…Kaitlyn Burke… Kay Burke.

In that instant, they both realized the dead girl was his sister. This guy, Charlie whatever-he-wanted-to-be-called, instantly turned into a nightmare. He wasn’t merely someone with an explosive grudge against the local meth dealers. Rather, he was a trained killer with a vendetta against the guys he blamed for his sister’s death. Perez thought long and hard about the idea of just staying out of the crossfire, as far away as possible, but dutiful and curious as he was, he couldn’t turn his back on it. “Do we have any info on Charlie’s whereabouts?”

Hamill’s eyes floated around a bit before she answered. “He was supposedly staying at the Motor Lodge, but I already put a call in to the manager, and no one fitting Charlie’s description has been seen around there.”

Perez looked over at his partner and wondered how it was that she knew where Charlie was supposed to be staying. For a second, he considered asking, but then he decided it really wouldn’t make any difference. “Call it in, Nikki. I want an all-points out on this Charlie Kelly. Bring him…now.”

Chapter 15

Rook lay naked on the top of his Egyptian cotton sheets and watched the girl leave. He had one hand behind his head, but the other hand gently drummed on the tight skin that stretched across his stomach like a snare drum. A quick roll was always good to relax him, but it didn’t do anything for inspiration. Damon had gotten more and more wild the closer it came to the time of the deal, and the wilder he got, the more he relied on Rook to watch his back. While it was always important to prove one’s worth in the drug trade, it also put a lot of undue pressure on him for a chump’s share of the deal.

It was always so quiet at night. Sometimes the rednecks whooped and hollered outside, shooting guns off after getting loaded on beer and Wild Turkey, but that was usually reserved for warmer weather. The Fourth of July was just an excuse for hicks to blow shit up. Rook stood up and walked over to the window. He looked out to the barn and saw that lights were still on, so he assumed Damon was probably still up, making some speech and scaring the street dealers. If Rook was lucky, Damon would leave it at that; on the other hand, if he was unlucky, Damon would start hitting lines of blow and blasting death metal that would shatter any hope Rook might have for some peace.

There was no other way to look at it than a betrayal. Rook was a lot of bad things, but he was loyal. Damon had been a good thing for him in a very, very bad time. The old crew Rook had run with was in lockdown less than six months after he left. Damon had his eye on the prize, though, and he wasn’t looking for quick money. There had been a lot of reasons for the two to hook up three years prior, but the reasons for them to continue to work together seemed to be dwindling day by day. To make matters worse, Damon had forgotten how much Rook had done for him and his operation.

Rook walked down the hall to the bathroom, not bothering to put on any clothes. No one would be in the house, as they were all out in the barn, and even if anyone did spot him, they’d sure as hell know better than to say one foul word about the emperor’s new clothes. Sometimes he hoped one of them would wander in by mistake, just so he could take the time to teach them a lesson.

Rook stood in front of the toilet and pissed as he looked out another window that opened up to a whole lot of nothing. It annoyed Rook. North Dakota was simple, good for business, and low on police presence, but it was even sparser when it came to nightlife. There was absolutely no action or excitement. Rook had lowered himself to torturing skimming dealers just for some kind of thrill, some kind of jolt to let him know he was still alive. He could have gotten his kicks on the dance floor in a club, but since there were no clubs he could visit, all he could do was act like a savage, like some kind of animal. The nothingness had turned him into just that.

On the way back to his room, he wondered if he was walking differently, if he was actually prowling. It wasn’t like any of these guys around would notice a difference, they’d probably seen more panthers than black men. Maybe he had become one in the same, some big killer jungle cat.
 

Lying back down on the cool sheets, Rook thought about the deal. He thought about all the ways it could go wrong, about how many guys would be there and what window of opportunity there would be. From what he’d managed to glean from Damon, there would be three guys from the buyers there, and he knew they’d probably be packing more than a little hardware, just in case. Damon had more guns and guys, but most of his troops were complete knuckleheads, no match for trained shooters.

Rook thought about if he could actually get away with any of it, but that was the central irony. With Rook working on the deal, nothing would go wrong. It would all go like clockwork. No one and nothing short of an act of God would get in the way of that fifteen-million-dollar deal.

As Rook closed his eyes to sleep, the faint, distant sound of a death metal guitar rift started, a grinding lullaby that brought him no more comfort than the dull North Dakota silence or the howls of the drunken rednecks.

Chapter 16

Sergeant Mark Perez woke to the sound of clinking glass. He sat upright in bed and listened for the sound again, as he wasn’t sure if it was just something from a dream or if he’d actually heard it. The light from the moon filtered in through the mini-blinds of their bedroom as he sat there in silence, slowly convincing himself that he’d only heard it in his dream. 

When he heard it again, dispelling that theory, Perez took his sidearm and the magazine from his nightstand and quietly loaded his gun. He took care to pull back the slide and chamber a round before he eased out of bed, gun in his old-school cup-and-saucer grip as he crept down the hall in his boxer shorts and t-shirt. Perez heard the clinking again and froze when he realized it was coming from the kitchen. He turned the corner of the hallway and looked down the length of his rambler-style house, but he couldn’t see anyone. He moved inch by inch, staying close to the wall, avoiding the familiar spots in the floor that creaked and groaned. Perez eased along, keeping his gun raised, with the safety off. He finally arrived at the kitchen doorway, where he held his breath and counted to three before he jerked to the side and cleared the doorway. There at the table, glass in hand by the moonlight, sat Charlie Kelly.

Perez stared at Charlie down the length of his gun, and Charlie just stared right back, without even flinching at the sight of the gun pointed at his head. “What are you doing in my house?” Perez asked.

Charlie tapped the bottle of Jameson with his glass. “I had to go to a cop’s house just to find a decent bottle of whiskey around here. All those liquor stores, and nothing but gut-rot.”

“I’m not going to ask you again,” Perez said.

“I just wanna talk,” Charlie said.

“Unless you wanna talk about your travel plans for leaving Bluff Falls, we don’t have anything to discuss. And I have enough suspicion to run you in on a double-homicide.”

“That’s not very hospitable for a small town cop. Why don’t you sit down and have a drink with me?” Charlie said. He reached out to grab the bottle and poured a shot in a second glass. “I don’t think you have quite as much to go on as you think you do, and it would be a whole lot less painful if you just sat down and had a drink with me.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” Charlie asked, almost laughing.

“Don’t test me. I put an all-points out on you.”

“I know,” Charlie said as he reached his other hand forward and stood two bullets upright on the table.

“What are those?” Perez asked.

“Well, this one,” Charlie said, pointing to the bullet on the right, “is the bullet that should be in the barrel of your gun right now. And this one,” he said, pointing to the bullet on the left, “is the bullet that should be first in line in your clip.”

“Oh really?” Perez asked doubtfully. “So what’s in there now?”

“Two empty casings, bullets with no powder and their primers discharged—a shell of their former selves, really, if you’ll pardon my pun.”

Perez went blank for a moment, not sure what to make of what he’d just heard. The man had broken into his house, disarmed him, and drank his whiskey without him even knowing he was there.

“A gun safe would be a lot better storage location than a nightstand. It was easy for me to find your gun, Detective, and I appreciate that,” Charlie said as he sipped the pilfered booze out of the borrowed shot glass.

“Why leave any bullets in my gun at all?” It was all Perez could think to ask.

“I’m guessing you have a backup piece, or at least another clip somewhere. I couldn’t risk you actually pointing a loaded weapon at me, as I’m in no mood to be shot in the head. And I couldn’t just put those two bullets in it. For all I know, you know your gun intimately, and you might be aware of the weight of an almost empty clip. People look to see that there are bullets, not to see if primers have been discharged. No, I needed you to put that clip in, thinking everything was all well and good.”

It was one of the strangest explanations Perez had ever heard, and he scrunched up his face in confusion as Charlie went on.

“I figure if I just put one dummy in, you might pull the trigger on me and have time to eject it and pull again, but I doubt many people in the world could do that twice before I’d close the distance on them.”