Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“I’m not you and I’m not Mom. I don’t give up. If he falls, I’ll catch him.”

“And who will catch you?”

“You,” she said with the wide-eyed smile that never failed to open my heart.

Dinner was at Fortune Wok, a Chinese restaurant in a strip center at 143rd and Metcalf in Overland Park. Five years earlier, the owners would have been serving wontons in the middle of a cow pasture. Now they were stoking the appetite of the latest wave of suburban migration for everything wok roasted.

There were too many cities on both sides of the state line for me to keep up. There were forty-plus burgs in five counties, each with a budget and a city council dedicated to high growth, low crime, and good times. Overland Park was one of the biggest, cramming farmland down its throat and regurgitating rooftops so fast that it wouldn’t be long until Denver was just down the street.

Lions Gate, the subdivision where Colby was house hunting, bordered the strip center. I was early, so I drove through its manicured streets, past the clubhouse and the villas on the golf course. I remembered a friend who decided to sell his house and downsize to a villa only to discover that a villa was half the house for twice the money. The houses in Lions Gate were bigger and more expensive than the villas, proving that size mattered but not as much as money. There were no Chevy Impalas in anybody’s driveway.

I circled back to the restaurant, parked, and stopped short of the entrance when I saw Colby sitting in a Lexus two cars down from mine. I tapped on the passenger-side window and let myself in. He was on his cell phone.

“It’s nothing, man. I just needed some air. Call you later,” he said to whomever he was talking to,?ipping the phone shut. “Don’t you knock?” he asked without looking at me.

“I tapped.”

“Next time, knock and wait. The people I talk to don’t want anyone listening. They play close attention to everything, including the background noise. They know I’m in my car, they hear the door open, and then they start asking a shitload of questions about who opened the door, who got in the car; who got out of the car, how come I let someone get in the car with me while I’m on the phone with them. Crazy shit like that.”

“You should get one of those Do Not Disturb signs the hotels use and hang it on your rearview mirror. Maybe get a bumper sticker that says ‘Undercover FBI Agent driving car he can’t afford.’ “

Colby looked at me and grinned, running his hand across his freshly shaved chin. He’d washed the red out of his eyes with sleep or Visine and was wearing crisp jeans and a black, short-sleeved polo. With his hair brushed back, he was indistinguishable from the thousands of other doctors, lawyers, and accountants who were living large.

“You remember that case we had last spring, the one where the stockbroker husband made a career move to peddling dope and the wife called us and turned him in after she caught him cheating on her?”

“Yeah. Thomas and Jill Rice. He went away and the wife got an emergency divorce.”

“And,” Colby said, laughing and shaking his head, “the wife called the office a few weeks ago and I took the call. Said how much she appreciated that we got rid of her husband for her. Then she says that she got his Lexus in the divorce settlement and did I know anyone at the Bureau who’d be interested in it, that it was her way of showing her gratitude. I told her I’d be interested but I couldn’t afford it. So she says, ‘you don’t know my price.’ “

“She make you a good deal?”

“A helluva deal. Says she doesn’t care about the money. She just wants her ex to know that she sold his car to an FBI agent for next to nothing.”

“Love is a beautiful thing.”

“It’s better looking than you think. I go over to her house to pick up the car and she says her ex was so pissed off that I was buying the car that she’s decided to do the same thing with her house, really make the poor bastard suffer. Says she’s leaving town and wants that to be her going-away present to him. So I figure, what the hell. Even with what’s she’s asking, it’ll stretch me, but I figure I can?ip it, sell it to someone else, and make a bundle. I just came from her house. It’s a done deal.”

“Sounds like you can’t lose.”

He brushed the soft leather seat with the palm of his hand. “Like you said. Love is a beautiful thing.” He studied me, losing the grin. “You doing okay, Jack?”

“Yeah. Swell. I’m going to see a doctor at KU Hospital. He’ll adjust my vertical and horizontal holds and I’ll be good as new. How’s it going with the Marcellus Pearson case?”

Colby shrugged, looked away. “The usual grind. Run the forensics, run the family, friends, and neighbors. Line up the known bad guys and listen to their bullshit alibis. Hope somebody snitches so we can all declare victory and go home.”

Colby had told me more than once that he thought Ben Yates was a tightass and that Troy was so straight you could stick him through a keyhole. Ammara would struggle with breaking the rules. Colby would look for the chance. I decided to push him, make him decide whether to talk to me about the case.

“Did we pick up Marcellus’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Get anything from her?”

“Just a lot of crying about her baby.”

“Who’s Troy looking at? Javy Ordonez? Bodie Grant? Is he still obsessing about a leak from our squad?”

Colby put his hands on the steering wheel, sliding them slowly around its circumference and looking at the instrument panel like it was the first time he’d seen it. His arms tensed, as if he’d rather be fighting the wheel around a hairpin curve than answer my questions. A horn blared behind us, making both of us jump. Colby glanced in his rearview mirror, a smile creasing his face. I turned around to see Wendy waving from her car. Colby waved back, opening his door. I reached for his arm. He pulled away.

“Look, Jack. I can’t talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Orders. Ben Yates put the lid on it. Troy has him shitting in his pants that there might be a leak, that someone at the Bureau might be involved.”

“I’m not exactly an outsider.”

“You are now. People think you cracked up. No one expects you to come back.”

“Do I look crazy to you?”

My words came out in a staccato rhythm, tripping over another round of tremors.

“Face it, Jack. You’re not right. Stay out of the case before you make things worse for everyone.”

I hadn’t told Wendy that I’d invited Kate to join us for dinner because I didn’t know how. Though Wendy accepted that our marriage was over, she was loyal to her mother and protective enough of me that she’d welcome a new person in my life with the same open arms she would extend to a carrier of the avian?u.

Joy had told Wendy that I was having an affair with Kate well before we separated. Wendy confronted me and I told her it wasn’t so, explaining that ours was strictly a professional relationship. Wendy pushed harder, educating me about emotional affairs that stopped short of sexual intimacy but were equally destructive of marriages.

I had more trouble denying that because I fit the profile, remembering again how I’d reacted to Kate when I first saw her in the courtroom and how the word intimate so accurately described the lunches, conversations, and thoughts we’d shared since then. I fell back on a strict interpretation of my marital vows, telling Wendy that whatever our marriage was, it was still a marriage. When Joy finally left me, I realized how weak my defense had been. Joy was the one who’d been honest and courageous enough to walk away.