The Last Witness boh-11 Page 7

  “No shit?” Matt said, pushing his chair back to stand. “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m sure, damn it,” Chad said, working to keep his voice low. “Why are you even suggesting otherwise? What’s gotten into you?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you got conned into some shady deal.”

  Chad tossed his fork and knife onto his plate and crossed his arms.

  “You’re not going to let that thing with Skipper go, are you?”

  Matt shrugged. “‘That thing’? I’ve told you that I don’t begin to blame you at all for his death-the dipshit was going to get himself killed one way or another all on his own. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but it’s one thing that he ruined his life-and it’s something entirely worse that he almost got Becca killed. As I’ve said, my point is that you didn’t walk away from Skipper when you could have.”

  Matt and Chad had grown up with J. Warren “Skipper” Olde, whose history of booze and drug abuse had begun when they all attended Episcopal Academy prep school. His father made a fortune building McMansion subdivisions across the country. While the twenty-seven-year-old Skipper had a few legitimate-if questionably successful-real estate projects in development in Philadelphia, it turned out that he supplemented his cash flow by being actively involved in the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine.

  Skipper, on September ninth, had been in a seedy motel room at the Philly Inn, one of the properties owned by the company that Chad Nesbitt had invested in. It was on Frankford Avenue, which had come to be known as the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. They had planned, when the timing-and tax break-was right, to demolish and replace the two-story motel with upscale condominiums. At about two o’clock that September morning, with Becca Benjamin, Skipper’s twenty-five-year-old girlfriend, waiting right outside the room in her Mercedes SUV, the meth lab in the room exploded.

  The motel became consumed by the chemical-fueled inferno. Two illegal aliens who had been cooking the methamphetamine were killed. Skipper was critically burned. Becca suffered burns and a severe head injury.

  Ambulances rushed Skipper and Becca to the advanced Burn Center at Temple University Hospital. There, Matt met the head of the burn unit, Amanda Law, MD, FACS, FCCM.

  The bodily injuries had been bad enough. But the next day one Jesus Jimenez, sent to permanently settle an ongoing disagreement over drug money, snuck into the Intensive Care Unit and pumped thirteen rounds of 9mm into Skipper.

  Amanda had confided to Matt that it was her brutally cold professional assessment that Jimenez had done Skipper a favor. There was no question that if he was not going to die from his burns, he would’ve suffered a long and painful recovery from them and never been the same again.

  Meantime, Becca, recovering from her injuries, battled with Survivor Guilt, and Amanda had arranged for her to be treated by Dr. Amelia Payne, who had been her suitemate at the University of Pennsylvania. The surname was no coincidence-Amy was Matt’s sister, and had long held the same opinion as Amanda vis-a-vis the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line hanging up his gun belt.

  Chad looked out the dining room windows at the Atlantic, then turned back to Matt and said, “I thought I was doing the right thing investing in Skipper’s project. And when it all blew up, so to speak, especially after learning about the damn meth, I admitted I’d made a mistake-a huge mistake, okay? — one that I’ve been lucky has not caused any fallout with Nesfoods. As you just said, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’” He paused, then added, “So, that said, I am not making any damn mistake with Antonov and whatever he and his South Beach Cuban are up to.”

  Matt met Chad’s eyes for a long moment, nodded, then exhaled audibly.

  “Okay. Sorry,” Matt said, not sounding completely apologetic. “It’s just that something about that SoBe Cuban rubbed the cop in me really wrong. It triggered my Don’t Believe Anyone mode. That, and I’m suddenly ten kinds of really pissed off. I brought Amanda down here to have a pleasant time away from Philly-and we’re not here forty-eight hours and the shit has followed us. Now she’s upset. .”

  Chad nodded. “I understand, man. No apology.”

  “Thanks,” Matt said, and looked over his shoulder. “If Amanda returns, tell her I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To hit the head. Mother nature calls.”

  And to make a call so maybe we can get this shit behind us and get back to having a good time.

  Right. Dream on, Matty.

  Unless we find out that Maggie has suddenly popped up safe somewhere, her missing is going to keep weighing on Amanda. .

  Matt crossed the dining room and entered the gentlemen’s facility that was between the dining room and the bar. When he exited, he turned in the direction of the bar. He expected to see the men with the young women as he entered, was surprised they weren’t there, then went through the bar and outside. He followed the path lined with flickering tiki torches down toward the immaculately groomed beach, pulling out his cell phone as he went.

  When he looked at the screen, he saw that Mickey O’Hara had texted three times and, in the last hour, called twice and left voice-mail messages.

  What the hell is up with him?

  Well, first things first. .

  He speed-dialed Jason Washington.

  “Good evening, Matthew,” Jason answered on the first ring.

  “Sorry to have taken so long. It’s been a very interesting day since you called.”

  “What do you have for me?”

  “I’ll tell you about the other later. To answer your question about Maggie McCain, Amanda said she has not spoken with her in about a week. She doesn’t recall exactly which day. But it’s been since Maggie came back from a trip to the Caribbean.”

  “We’re aware of the trip. Did she say if she understood it to be business or pleasure?”

  “We”? Matt thought. That certainly sounds official.

  “‘Vacation’ was the word she used. Amanda has spent the last half hour trying to call and text her, since learning about her house catching fire-”

  “How did she hear that?” Washington interrupted.

  “Not from me, obviously,” Matt said. “Chad Nesbitt told us just now at dinner. Said it started as a home invasion. Any truth to that?”

  “Your friend whose family owns Nesfoods?” Jason asked, but it was more of a statement and effectively evaded Matt’s question.

  “Yeah. He’s down here on business. Actually, it seems like half of Philly is down here.”

  “Did he say how he knew? Did he have any other information about her?”

  “No, not really anything else. Only that his wife had driven past and seen the damage and crime-scene tape-and said that she hadn’t known Maggie was back from her trip.”

  There was a moment’s silence before Washington said, “Okay, got it. Thank you.”

  “What the hell is going on, Jason?”

  “Let me know if Amanda hears from her. I will get back to you, Matthew,” he said, dodging the question as he broke the connection.

  Matt stared at the glowing screen.

  If she hears from her?

  Then if someone did die in Maggie’s house, it wasn’t her.

  She’s simply missing.

  He shook his head, then speed-dialed Mickey O’Hara.

  III

  [ONE]

  Hacienda Gentlemen’s Club

  Northwest Highway near Lemmon Avenue, Dallas

  Sunday, November 16, 7:45 P.M. Texas Standard Time

  The two-year-old dark gray Chevrolet Tahoe, coated in road grime and with mud caked to its wheels and fenders, sat in the parking lot of Juanita’s Tex-Mex Cantina. The lot was adjacent to the Hacienda strip club, the building of which in a former life had served as a Sears amp; Roebuck home appliance store. The restaurant, despite its garish colors and Spanish-language signage, still somewhat resembled the Burger King that it originally had been.

  The Tahoe
wasn’t the only vehicle in the parking lots lining Northwest Highway that looked as if it could have just driven in from the sticks. There were plenty of dirty cars and trucks, some of them farm and ranch pickups, but most advertising some type of service-plumbers, electricians, welders.

  Odds were heavy, however, that the Tahoe was without question the only one with red-and-blue emergency lights behind the grille, a fully automatic Heckler amp; Koch UMP.45 ACP submachine gun in a concealed lockbox in back, and, in a rack mounted in the headliner, a Remington 870 Tactical twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Sergeant James O. Byrth, of the Texas Rangers, sat behind the wheel, his right elbow on the armrest as he held a cell phone to his ear. In his left hand, at the knuckles, he repeatedly tumbled a small white pinto bean from pinkie finger to thumb, then back again.

  Byrth was thirty-one years old, six feet tall, a lithely muscled 170 pounds. His thick dark hair was neat and short. He had on gray slacks-the cuffs breaking over a pair of highly polished black ostrich-skin Western boots-a white cotton dress shirt with a striped necktie, and a navy blue blazer, single-breasted with gold buttons. Pinned just above the shirt pocket was his sterling silver badge, a five-point star within a circle engraved with DEPT. OF PUBLIC SAFETY-TEXAS RANGERS-SERGEANT. A white Stetson rested brim-up on the passenger seat.

  As he listened, Byrth’s dark, intelligent eyes stared out the wiper-smeared windshield, intently watching the traffic at the Hacienda’s front door. The facade of the strip club had been painted a bright canary yellow and had posters of half-naked girls in suggestive poses stapled to it. Above the black door, which was swung completely open, a red neon sign flashed ENTRADA. A bouncer, a swarthy rough-looking Hispanic, sat on a backless stool in front of the door, his arms crossed as he eyed the cars circling the parking lot and the approaching customers.

  “Hold one, Glenn,” Byrth said into his phone as he heard the growing whine of twin turbofan jet engines. “Here comes another damn plane.”

  He looked across the street to where an elevated line of airport runway approach lights blinked into the distance. A moment later a Boeing 737-the medium-range passenger jet’s bright orange belly illuminated by its landing floodlights-flashed overhead with a deafening roar. He watched it descend over the runway lights, then land at Love Field, Dallas’s municipal airport.

  After a moment, Byrth said, “Okay, Glenn, give it to me again. What’s the kill count up to?”

  Texas Rangers Sergeant Jim Byrth had spent most of the day with Hunt County Sheriff Glenn Pabody, after Pabody had put in the call around seven o’clock that morning. Since the founding of the legendary Rangers in 1823-making them the United States’ oldest state law enforcement organization-the relentless lawmen had earned a reputation for taking on extraordinary cases that others didn’t have either the resources or the authority, or often both, to handle. Such was its importance that Section 411.024 of the Texas Government Code stated: “The Texas Rangers may not be abolished.”

  “I ain’t sure what exactly this is, Jim,” Pabody had reported. “But it ain’t just another Hunt County meth lab. It’s a helluva lot worse. Definitely some kind of organized crime. Maybe cartel? You need to see it to believe it.”

  Byrth had headed toward Lake Tawakoni, an hour’s drive east of Dallas. As he drove along Interstate Highway 30, the city gave way to suburbs, then that turned to large spreads of horse and cattle ranches, some of which were dotted with towering rigs drilling for natural gas in the vast shale. Exiting the freeway, he picked up two-lane farm-to-market roads, following them through country that became increasingly rugged and heavily wooded.

  Near the lake, finding the entrance to the property had not proven a problem. It was just past a wide spot in the road-the tidy little town of Quinlan, population a thousand or two-and had a Hunt County Sheriff’s Office patrol car parked on the shoulder of the road. The white Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, even with its emergency lights dark, stood out in the middle of nowhere.

  A uniformed deputy sheriff, who looked to be maybe thirty and apparently hadn’t missed a meal in all those years, stood in the middle of the dirt road, his thumbs dug into the black leather Sam Browne gear belt just below his well-rounded gut.

  Byrth hit his wig-wags and the enormous deputy, now recognizing the Tahoe as an unmarked vehicle, stepped aside.

  “It’s a ways back, sir,” the deputy sheriff said with a pronounced drawl, after Byrth introduced himself. “But you sure as hell can’t miss it. And it is hell-I ain’t seen nothing like it. Ever.”

  Limbs from bushes and trees scratched and thumped at the Tahoe’s sides as Byrth navigated the narrow dirt road. It was muddy and deeply rutted, and he was convinced the SUV might at any moment slide into one of the oak trees that edged the road.

  He then passed open fields with barbed-wire fences. And, after a good ten minutes of bouncing down the road from rut to rut, the Tahoe bottoming out twice, the narrow road turned sharply.

  Around the bend there was an iron pole, rusty and bent, pushed to the roadside. It had a sign wired to it, a wooden board crudely hand-painted PRIVATE! DONT ENTER!

  He rolled past and saw that the road now widened, opening up onto a sleepy ramshackle property that looked to have been hacked out of the wild by hand.

  The first thing he saw, also standing out in the middle of nowhere, was a white Ford F-150 four-door pickup truck with the same HUNT COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE markings as the Crown Vic. It was parked beside a beat-up Chevy Malibu and an old moss-covered fifth-wheel camper. The boxy aluminum-sided trailer, its four tires long ago gone flat, leaned sharply. To the right of it, ringed with barbed wire, was a small corral, at the back of which he could make out a two-stall stable that had been patched together with mismatched boarding.

  Jim Byrth rolled to a stop beside the pickup and got out. He saw Sheriff Pabody, in his tan uniform, stepping out from behind the trailer.

  Pushing sixty, Pabody was tall and fairly fit, with weathered skin and a bushy head of white hair. He had his right hand on the grip of an almost new matte black.30 caliber Springfield Armory M1 carbine. It hung by a black nylon sling from his right shoulder, next to the older Springfield Armory tactical 1911-A1.45 ACP holstered on his hip. His left hand held a folded red bandanna over his nose and mouth.

  As the two men approached each other, Byrth called out, “Glenn, I thought I told you that cutting out those greasy fried mountain oysters would stop that foul gassy problem of yours.”

  Pabody grinned as he stuffed the bandanna in his back hip pocket. He let the carbine dangle, and held out his hand.

  “Sure good to see you, Jim,” he said sincerely, meeting his eyes. He then nodded in the direction of the corral and added, “It’s pretty damn nasty back there.”

  Byrth knew that Pabody, once an Army reserve major, had seen his share of gruesome scenes as a Green Beret fighting the Taliban. He recognized that for the understatement that it was, and nodded.

  “So, what the hell do we have here? You said a game warden found it?”

  Texas game wardens, like the state troopers under the Department of Public Safety, were peace officers with the power to enforce laws statewide, on and off the pavement.

  Pabody nodded. “Luckily not just any game warden. I thought you knew Gerry Bailey.”

  Byrth shook his head. “Should I?”

  “There’s good guys in the business”-he pronounced it bidness-“and there’s really good guys.”

  “Don’t tell me. Another of you Green Beanies?”

  Pabody nodded. “Fifth Special Forces Group. Led assault sniper teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. Put in his twenty years, then figured he was pushing the odds of meeting his maker after four long tours in the Sandbox. Good ol’ country boy. Nothing makes him happier than hunting and fishing-and, okay, to hear him tell it, that and fucking.”

  Byrth grunted and grinned.

  “And now Bailey gets paid to be around it,” Pabody went on. “The hunting and fishing, that is.” H
e paused in thought, then went on, “I meant that crack about fucking as a joke, but maybe that, too. Man, this was the last thing that he-hell, any of us-expected to find out here.”

  He sighed audibly, then went on: “Anyway, Bailey was making a routine patrol early this morning looking for poachers. He was on his all-terrain vehicle when he crested a hill not far from the lake and came across the guy. This Mexican was big and beefy, maybe thirty. He was dressed all in black and carrying a nice Mossberg pump, a twelve-gauge. He took off running. When Bailey ordered him to stop, then pursued him, the guy stopped and took two shots at him.”

  “Hit him?”

  Pabody nodded. “Got grazed by some pellets. Birdshot. Nothing bad. I made him go to the ER-he was able to drive himself.” He paused, shook his head, then added, “But wouldn’t that be a bitch? Do four years dodging raghead bullets and IEDs only to get blown away by an illegal Mezkin damn near in your own backyard?”

  “Yeah, a real ironic bitch. Did Bailey bag him?”

  Pabody nodded again. “So the guy takes off into the bush. Bailey gets off his fancy four-wheeler, grabs his Car14, and takes off after him. Bailey gains ground on him, shouts for him to stop. Fucking idiot then tries to take another shot-and it’s game over. Bailey says it wasn’t intentional-blames not hitting center mass on his heavy breathing, but that’s bullshit because he’s such a good shot he could drive nails at a hundred yards with a.22, and he had the selector on single, not full auto-he puts a round right above the bad guy’s right eye. Top of his head explodes like a ripe cantaloupe.”

  “Nice shot. You said he was an illegal. Any ID, background?”

  “Not a damn thing on him-just my gut feeling that he’s illegal. We’re running down property records to find who owns this place. Anyway. . when Bailey comes up on the guy, he gets a whiff that’s overwhelming. Since it’s not Bailey’s first rodeo around a mess of gray matter, and he knows that that’s not what he’s smelling, he can’t figure it out. So he recons the area-and bingo.” He nodded toward the corral. “Hell, come here. I’ll show you.”