Joel Goldman - Shakedown

“Different because you weren’t sleeping with him?”

“Different because you think you know what you’re talking about but you don’t. Wendy’s a big girl. She made her choices, just like me.”

He was baiting me, implicating Wendy as an accomplice, something I wouldn’t buy. “When you didn’t show for your polygraph, Troy sent a couple of agents to your house. They found enough drugs and cash to put you away for a long time. If anything happens to Wendy, that won’t matter because I’ll kill you before you serve a day.”

“The way my luck is running, you’ll have to get in line.”

“Jill Rice denies calling our office looking for someone to buy her car. She says her ex had it all set up before he went to prison. That it was all part of a deal to set him up for when he got out.”

“I guess that’s a better story than the one I told.”

“You have a good story for the money and dope that was found in your house?”

“Yeah, and this one is irresistible. I’m not that stupid. I know how the game is played. I was set up.”

“Why?”

“To discredit me if I came in and told what I know.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I needed an exit strategy. The drug business is like every other business, Jack. Everyone always wants a bigger slice of the pie. I took mine and used it to buy the house and car. People I do business with didn’t like it.”

“Who are they?”

“Sorry, Jack. I’m not making that deal with you or anyone else anytime soon.”

“There’s a big difference between the drug business and every other business,” I told him. “You steal from GM, they send you to jail. You steal from drug dealers, they kill you.”

“Except I’ve got an insurance policy. Anything happens to me, they go down. Long as they don’t find it, I’ve got leverage. They must have snatched Wendy, figuring she gives them leverage against me.”

“Except you’re willing to let her die!”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s an ugly world, Jack. You arrest me, they’ll think I gave them up and they’ll kill Wendy. You kill me and they’ll kill her because they won’t need her and can’t risk letting her go. Now put your gun down.”

Colby took two more steps toward me. I raised my gun at his chest, but my arm began to wobble and then I began to shake. My eyes clamped shut as the fog wrapped around my brain. I twisted and folded in half at the same instant, slammed with contractions that took my breath away. I tried to straighten, but the contractions pulled me to my knees and held me there like chains.

I felt Colby next to me, felt him take the gun from my hand. I opened my eyes. He was standing over me.

I forced my words into a choppy stutter. “What happened to you?”

“I looked around and decided I didn’t want to be you. I wanted a life I couldn’t afford at my pay grade. I had the girl, the house, and the car. Then you fucked it up. Anything happens to Wendy, it will be on your head.”

The contractions eased. My breath was ragged. The shakes were hitting me on and off as if a child was playing with a switch.

“How did I fuck it up?”

“By doing your job.”

“What about your girlfriend, Tanja? You running out on her, too?”

He laughed. “That’s your problem, Jack. You only see what you want to see.”

“My daughter is the only one I want to see. What’s happened to her?”

His mouth turned up in a cruel grin.

“Maybe she didn’t want to be like you, either.”

Another wave of contractions rocked me, arching my back and neck. Colby shoved me on to my side. I watched with clenched teeth as he scooped up his gun and threw mine against the fence. He looked at me, shook his head, turned, and ran away, his silhouette suddenly familiar. I’d seen it once before when he ran away from Marcellus Pearson’s house. The fog came again and I closed my eyes, shaking while his footsteps faded in the darkness.

Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. My midnight trip to Strawberry Hill would have made the Mad Hatter proud, though I had learned enough to get me back on my feet.

Wendy was alive. I didn’t know where she was or how I would find her, but she was alive. Colby had implied that she was as guilty as he was. I wouldn’t believe that unless Wendy told me. Even if it was true, it changed nothing.

I focused on what I knew. Colby said that I had screwed up his plans by doing my job. My last job had been shutting down Marcellus Pearson. That threatened Colby because Marcellus would have given him up to make a deal with the U.S. Attorney.

That explained what Colby was doing near Marcellus’s house the night of the murders. He’d come there to kill Marcellus, only Latrell had beaten him to it, just as Marty Grisnik had surmised. Colby must have waited around long enough to be certain that the job was finished, letting Latrell kill Oleta Phillips.

With Marcellus out of the way, he knew we’d go after Javy Ordonez next. Colby couldn’t let that happen because Javy would also give him up in a heartbeat, so Javy had to die, too. Colby followed Latrell, found the murder weapon, and used it to kill Javy.

Colby must have blessed his luck when he found the photograph of Latrell and his mother. He left the murder weapon beneath a Dumpster where it was likely to be found and planted the photograph of Latrell, nailing him for the murders he was guilty of while framing him for one he didn’t commit.

His relationship with Tanja Andrija raised more questions. She had kept her cool until I asked her if there was another way out of the bar besides the front door. I had assumed from her?ash of panic that Colby was hiding in the back but, once again, I was wrong, which meant that she was hiding something else in the back of the bar.

In any other case, I would have immediately called Troy Clark and Marty Grisnik, and told them to blanket the area with cops, FBI agents, dogs, and helicopters until we captured Colby Hudson. We’d pick up Tanja, her brother Nick, and her parents, letting Tanja get a look at her parents being interrogated in their pajamas. One of them would turn on the other because that’s what crooks, even family, always do.

I would disregard Colby’s warning about Wendy, taking my chances that we could find her. But this wasn’t any case, it was my daughter’s case, and I refused to take the chance that Colby was bluffing or wrong about what would happen to her if he were arrested. I didn’t care if he and Tanja got away clean, both of them living to be a hundred and twenty.

Now I knew which road I was taking and that I was taking it alone. It was the road that started at Pete’s Place, though I didn’t know where it would end.

I left the car parked in the alley and walked down Sixth Street, keeping to the shadows, until it?attened out. A thrift shop and a tire store backed up to the bar and restaurant. Neither the owners nor the city had invested in lighting, leaving their corner of the world dark and deserted.

Both buildings were one story. A forklift was parked on the side of the tire store, the forks raised to within a few feet of the roof. I climbed onto the top of the cab, high-stepped onto the forks and pulled myself onto the?at-pitched roof. The exterior walls rose two feet above the roof. I crouched against the far wall, looking over the edge at the back door to the bar.

The area behind the thrift store, tire store, bar, and restaurant was paved with access to both Fifth and Sixth Streets. A sedan was parked behind the bar next to an air-conditioning tower that was running full out, the rushing air and whirling fan obliterating any other sounds. The back door to the bar had warped, leaving cracks of light along the frame.