Lee Child - MatchUp

“This ain’t the time for talking.” The old guy wasn’t open to suggestions, and he couldn’t blame him. None of this looked good for anybody. “Slow as molasses, I want you to lace your fingers on top of your head.”

He did what the cop told him to do. “Please listen to me, sir.” He talked to the chief because Paulson was leaning his shoulder against the wall like he was about to pass out. “You need to find a blue Ford pickup—”

“I cain’t throw a rock without hittin’ a blue pickup truck. Shit, my son drives a blue pickup.” The chief was already reaching into the open trunk. Then he removed and held up a brick of cocaine. “You wanna tell me about this?”

His bowels turned liquid.

“Hoo-ee.”

The chief had dollar signs in his eyes. Thanks to new federal laws, arresting agencies were allowed to keep proceeds from drug seizures. “You gotta ’bout ten grand worth of guns, a stack of cash, a hundred grand worth of coke.”

“He killed Nora,” Paulson said.

A small town like this, the young cop probably had gone to high school with the victim. He was crying for real now. His gun had stopped shaking. But his finger stayed on the trigger.

“You murdered her in cold blood.”

“Steady now.” The chief peeled his eyes away from the booty in the trunk. His smile said he fully understood the situation, or at least what he thought was the situation. “That why you shot her, boy? Come down here to peddle some guns and blow, but she got greedy?”

“Down?”

Jeffrey glanced at the car.

He’d seen it at the time but hadn’t registered the fact until now.

Ohio license plates, front and back.

The cop dropped the brick of cocaine back in the trunk, then walked to the side of the car and opened the door and glove box. A stack of cash held with a rubber band fell out. The cop eyeballed the cash but didn’t say a word this time.

“I can explain,” Jeffrey said, the same three words he had heard from every criminal he’d ever arrested. “Please let me explain.”

“Shut up until I ask you a question.”

The chief bent down to search the car. His old knees popped, and he groaned as he pulled jeans from the floorboard of the backseat. He tossed them onto the ground, then a newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer .

The chief looked at Jeffrey. “Cleveland, huh?”

All he could do was shake his head as the chief reached back into the car. The older guy groaned again as he bent his knees deeper to yank something out from underneath the seat. The cop grinned when he showed his prize.

A greasy brown paper bag.

The logo on front read “Duke’s Grill.”

The chief squinted at the receipt stapled to the bag. “Says here that six days ago, you were in East Cleveland on Eddy Road at 3:42 in the p.m.” He nodded at Paulson. “Stretch, put the cuffs on this scumbag.”

Like most cops, Jeffrey had a terror of being handcuffed. He worked to keep the quiver out of his voice. “That’s not necessary. I’ll cooperate fully.”

“Shut up, you Yankee fucker.”

Paulson walked toward Jeffrey, struggling to unsnap the handcuffs from his utility belt, but the belt kept shifting. The buckle was pulled to the last hole, but it was still loose because his hips were basically like a woman’s.

“Gimme your hand.”

Jeffrey didn’t move.

Paulson wrenched Jeffrey’s left hand off his head and twisted it around. Technically, the officer should’ve grabbed the right hand, and he should’ve cuffed it first, but teaching time was over. They were really going to push this? Arrest him for being some coke-dealing killer from fucking Cleveland?

Cleveland?

Motherfucker.

“Hang on, there was a black guy in the—”

“This ain’t Ohio, buddy.”

The chief nodded for Paulson to ratchet down the cuffs tight to the wrists.

“You can’t just grab your nuts and blame the black guy.”

CLEVELAND, OHIO

9:27 A.M.

THE DEA ARRIVED WITH PLANE tickets to Georgia on the first day Joe Pritchard had with his new partner, a kid named Lincoln Perry.

You were supposed to get to know your partners by working with them, but Joe had actually been watching Perry for a week, and not feeling optimistic about the pairing. Every night, Perry went drinking alone at a bar on Clark Avenue called the Hideaway. He was drinking alone because two weeks earlier he’d busted his childhood buddy, a guy named Ed Gradduk, on cocaine-dealing charges on the very streets where the two had grown up more like brothers than friends. To say that Perry was now persona non grata in his old neighborhood was an understatement. Given the chance to choose badge or buddy, he hadn’t hesitated.

Thus the promotion.

Joe had heard the story and was impressed by it, but as he sat running surveillance on his own partner-to-be, watching Perry sip beer and stare into the middle distance as if unaware of the building rage his presence was creating in the bar, he was worried. Coming back down there, insisting on sitting down in the lion’s den, was baiting trouble, and for what?

So on Friday morning he had a plan for the day, and the plan was his “no cowboys” lecture. Then the DEA showed up and told him he was packing Perry along to Georgia, cowboy or not, to try to find Antonio Childers.

Antonio Childers was a viral plague of Cleveland’s crime scene, an east-side banger who’d spread his empire wide, pushing across town. He sold everything he could, from stolen cars to physical enforcement, but lately he’d made his name on Colombian cocaine. He was a suspect in more than a dozen murders in the past two years alone.

He’d also been missing for nearly a month.

For a week, maybe ten days, investigators had entertained the hopeful notion that he was dead and his body would turn up in the trunk of a car on Eddy Road, or maybe wash up in the Flats of the Cuyahoga River, or the Lake Erie breakwater. Joe hadn’t shared that enthusiasm. None of his informants gave the slightest indication that there had been a power shift, or a power vacuum. The system purred on, and Antonio Childers remained at the wheel.

From where, though?

They’d heard a lot of rumors. Georgia wasn’t in the mix. But here were two DEA agents with plane tickets. One of them was a stocky white guy with a crew cut who chewed Nicorette for the entire briefing, popping in fresh pieces but never removing the old ones, so that by the end of things he was working on a damn golf ball in the corner of his jaw. He didn’t say much, but he nodded a lot and occasionally made a finger-gun pointing gesture when he agreed with something. The other was a tall woman named Luisa who had packed the brains while her partner packed his gum.

“The coke Antonio is moving has come through Atlanta for about nine months,” she explained. She held a folder in her hands but kept it closed. “He’s one of four, maybe five players working off the same supply. But they always transported it to him. When that stopped, he decided to head south himself.”

“Why’d it stop?”

“We think they got a little uneasy about surveillance.”

“That would be DEA surveillance?”

She nodded.

Joe thought this made sense. Antonio was not the type of guy who’d give up on a good thing when he found it. He’d be more inclined to go down and sort it out. If you stayed untouchable in your own neighborhood long enough, you could begin to think the same rules would apply elsewhere.

“You’ve known this for a while,” Lincoln Perry said.

They nodded.

“You also know we’ve been looking for him for a while. Yet you didn’t think it was worth sharing?”

“Let her finish,” Joe said, but he didn’t disagree with the kid. Still, feds were feds. He’d spent too many hours in too many meetings like this to want to debate what they should have shared and when.