Then Marcellus come along, him and his girlfriend, Jalise, and their little boy, moving in right behind him, the three of them making it so Latrell couldn’t stop thinking about Johnny McDonald and his mother and him when he was the same age as the boy, until he had a hard time telling the dead from the living. The whole neighborhood knew Marcellus was dealing dope but nobody did nothing about it. The more Latrell couldn’t put them out of his mind, the closer he got to making things right. The Winston brothers waling on that girl in his backyard was it. He couldn’t take any more.
Growing up, he was a small, soft boy, easy prey for bullies, gangs, and any kid looking for someone to pick on who wouldn’t fight back. The cave, a remnant of a mining operation, had saved him. He’d stumbled onto the entrance one day after work while walking in the woods not far from the rail yard. It was nothing more than a seam in a rock wall till he pulled down some bigger rocks, learning how to put them back so no one who didn’t know about it could tell it was anything.
After that, Latrell spent his spare time exploring the inside with a ?ashlight, storing batteries and candles on a rock shelf, comfortable in the shadows. Most of the cave was underwater, his hideaway confined to a series of chambers ending on a rocky beach. He never did know how far the water went or how deep it was, only that it was so black there was no bottom and no end.
Johnny McDonald had had a pair of .45 caliber Marine pistols and some night-vision goggles he stole off a guy at a gun show, that and the cash under the mattress Latrell’s inheritance. When he was old enough, Latrell went to a range and learned how to shoot the .45s. Then he’d practice in the cave wearing the night-vision goggles, dry firing ‘cause he was afraid of ricochets, ready in case he had to make things right again one day, same as he had with Johnny and his mother.
A few years ago, some kids out canoeing had found their way into the cave from a small lake and gotten lost, making a big deal about spending the night in the cave like they was gonna die. He read about it in the paper, the article calling the cave the Argentine Mine and saying it covered thirty-four acres underground. The county promised to seal it up before anyone else got lost and they did just that except they never did find Latrell’s way in.
He spent several nights in the cave imagining how, late at night, he would walk through the front door of Marcellus’s house and kill everyone inside. He could do it. Soft, shy, quiet Latrell, stronger than any of them, could kill them all. He’d practiced and practiced. It wouldn’t be hard. It would be a good thing. He replayed the scene over and over in his mind, opening his eyes to find that nothing had changed until simply imagining wasn’t enough.
On the day he first decided to do it, he changed his mind when he saw the camera installed on the utility pole down the street from Marcellus’s house. He had seen men climb those poles before at the rail yard. He knew the kind of tools they carried, the kind of work they did, and how they did it. The man on the pole never touched his tools, the tool belt slapping against his right thigh like it didn’t belong. The man was some kind of cop, maybe even FBI, he decided, not caring so long as they got rid of Marcellus. So he waited.
Latrell thought it was all going to be over a week later when the police raided Marcellus’s house, until he realized that no one had been arrested. He didn’t understand—first the camera, then the raid, then nothing. Still, he had waited two more weeks until last night, listening and watching Ron-dell and DeMarcus mess with that girl who could have been his momma.
The FBI had failed him. The police had failed him. What was he supposed to do? They left him no choice. If he didn’t make it right, he’d keep seeing his mother in every woman’s face. He’d have no peace. His eyes adjusted to the sun and he headed for home where he’d wait for dark, when it would finally be time.
Latrell drove past Marcellus’s house. Oleta Phillips, her fat brother Rodney, and some more of her people were out in front, Oleta looking half dead, Rodney grinning. He’d heard that Oleta’s boy got hisself shot on a corner belong to Marcellus. She must’ve come to collect.
Oleta reminded Latrell of his momma more than Jalise did; Oleta was so thin that the light passed right through her. His momma had lived on dope her whole miserable life, paying for it with her legs spread, coming on to him right after he killed Johnny, saying he had to take care of her now that Johnny was dead. He told her no, shoving her away. She came back at him, throwing her arms around him, rubbing against him, begging.
He snapped her neck like it was nothing. She was already dead to him. He just made it real. Latrell dug Johnny’s hole in the basement ?oor a little deeper and laid her on top of him, the washer and dryer covering the grave.
He slowed down, looking at Oleta again. He was right. She did have his momma’s face.
It started to rain late in the day, the storm growing into a steady pounding after midnight. A good sign, Latrell thought. It would be like taking a walk in the cave.
He’d been in Marcellus’s house once or twice years ago. It had a shotgun layout: front door, front room, kitchen, and out the back; two bedrooms and a bath were down the hall on the second ?oor, stairs to the left as you come into the house.
Latrell had watched the lights turn on and off for weeks, figuring out which bedroom Marcellus used and where the Winston brothers ?opped. He’d seen people coming and going enough to know that Marcellus did his business in the front room. That’s where he’d find Marcellus and the Winston brothers if he was lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d find them anyway.
Afterward, he knew the police would question him just as they would everyone else in the neighborhood. He would answer their questions. Be polite, smile as he lied to them. He could do that, he knew, better than anyone.
Rummaging through his dark house, Latrell found a pair of galoshes, pulling them over his shoes, not wanting to leave muddy footprints on Marcellus’s ?oor the cops could trace back to him. He’d thought of everything. He stuck the gun in the waistband of his pants, slipped on the goggles, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and stepped outside into the storm.
Chapter Three
I was alone in my office, lights off, door closed, cradling a cold cup of coffee. It was past midnight, everyone else long gone except for the new security guard who knocked at my door on the half hour, last time reminding me not to take any files from the building without signing them out.
“I’ve been an FBI agent almost as long as you’ve been alive,” I told him.
“I know that, Agent Davis. Regulations say I’m supposed to make sure, that’s all,” he said. “Get that light for you?”
I shook my head. “Call me Jack.”
“Yes sir, Agent Davis.”
A storm blew outside, the rain hitting the window without making a sound against the insulated glass. I leaned back in my chair outside the reach of the pale-blue glow from my computer monitor. I kept to the dark so I couldn’t see myself shake.
The tremors started in my belly, galloped up my neck, and spilled into my arms and head like they were excavating fault lines. I didn’t shake all the time. Tonight, it had been every ten or fifteen minutes, usually only for a few seconds, except for one stretch that lasted two minutes by my watch.
It had started two months ago, right after my future former wife Joy moved out. It was a few twitches at first, not enough to send me to a doctor, slowly getting worse, taking off in the last week. I could go for hours without so much as a hiccup. Other times, like now, I kept the door closed. I’d gotten a few looks, but no questions, from the agents on my squad. That’s the way it had to be until I shut Marcellus Pearson down, which I would do when our surveillance warrant expired in four days. I could wait that long to find out what was happening to me.
I was watching the feed from the surveillance camera I’d installed two and a half weeks earlier in the front room of Marcellus’s house. The camera was in the ceiling fan, giving me a 360-degree view, and with a microphone that could capture a fart.
Marcellus’s crack operation was good enough to make him Entrepreneur of the Year, except he didn’t have anything to show for it besides the usual pimped-out ride, tattoos, and bling. He could have lost his money in the stock market, given it to charity, or funded retirement plans for his enforcers, the Winston brothers. Or, he could be fronting for someone.
I ran the Violent Crime squad in the FBI’s Kansas City regional office and there was no criminal enterprise more violent than drugs. Marcellus had been operating in Kansas City, Kansas, for a long time. No one bothered him. People who did woke up dead. I intended to bother his ass right out of business before I shook myself into an early retirement. We had already mounted a camera on a utility pole down the street, but we needed eyes inside the crack house.
A month ago, I asked Marty Grisnik, head of Robbery and Homicide for the Kansas City, Kansas, police department, for his help serving a fugitive warrant. I’d met him a year ago at one of the interagency events put on to foster cooperation between federal and local law enforcement. We hadn’t worked a case together, but we drank enough that night to make up for it, and had traded a couple of favors since then. I gave him Marcellus’s address, not telling him that the warrant was phony and that I was going to use it so I could get inside the house and install a surveillance camera.
“FBI has its own fugitive warrants team, Jack. Why do you want my help?”
Grisnik had a linebacker’s build and looked uncomfortable in a suit, like he’d rather be on the field roaming for someone to hit. Near my age, he worked harder than I did to keep a muscled edge. We were in his cramped office on the fifth ?oor of the police department headquarters on Seventh Street, Grisnik rocking back in his swivel chair. I stood, keeping a tight grip on the arched back of a chair in case I started to shake.
“The guy we’re after, Darrell Johnson, is hooked up with one of our undercover people. If we don’t get him, we don’t want him tipped off that the FBI is chasing him. Works better if he thinks it’s you guys.”
“But you want to go through the door, not us?”
I took a breath, glancing over his shoulder at the view to the east out his window. The Intercity Viaduct stretched over an area called the West Bottoms for its close proximity to the Missouri River. The Viaduct and the West Bottoms connected the two Kansas Cities, the highway a concrete artery, the Bottoms muscle and ligaments made of old warehouses, new businesses, and reborn bars. From Grisnik’s window I could also see a thin slice of the Missouri coming down from the north, then bending east on its way to St. Louis. The FBI building stood on a bluff on the southwest edge of downtown Kansas City, Missouri, part of a string of office towers running north to the river.
“That’s right. I need your people for backup. And I’d like to borrow one of your uniforms.”
Grisnik pecked away at his computer, sending an e-mail, double-checking my warrant to make certain he got the address right. He smiled, waiting for a response, his silence code for telling me I was full of shit and he was about to prove it.
“The Bureau appreciates your cooperation. If we get him, you get the credit. If we don’t, nobody will know or care.”
I didn’t tell Grisnik about the surveillance camera because I suspected that Marcellus had some KCK cops in his pocket. That would go a long way in explaining how he had stayed in business for so long. If I were right, Marcellus would get word of our raid and clean house so that we wouldn’t have any reason to arrest him. That was fine with me. All I wanted was to get him out of the house long enough to install the camera. I wasn’t ready to lock him up.
Grisnik’s computer binged, signaling that he’d received a reply to his e-mail. I couldn’t see his monitor to read it, though that wasn’t necessary.
“This would play a little better if you worked homeland security into it somewhere along the way,” Grisnik said.
“Do I need to?”
“Wouldn’t smell any sweeter if you did. This address belongs to Marcellus Pearson. Says here Marcellus is a suspected drug dealer. Bet you didn’t know that. And no one named Darrell Johnson shows up on the list of his known associates. You want me to run a quick check on your fugitive?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“We got our own fugitive squad and we got our own drug squad. You ought to be talking to them, not me. Since you aren’t, makes me think you’ve got a reason I’m not going to like.”
“I do.”
“This isn’t my idea of cooperation, Jack. You coming to me for help and not telling me what I need to know, especially if it involves this department.”
“Operational constraints. It’s better for everyone.”
“Better for you, maybe,” Grisnik said. “Puts my ass in a sling if this blows up.”
“It won’t blow up.”
“You can’t keep something like this a secret.”
“I don’t intend for it to be a secret.”
Grisnik nodded, his eyes softening as he understood what I needed. He held the warrant to the halogen lamp on his desk as if he was checking a fifty-dollar bill to see if it was counterfeit. He slid it back toward me with a reluctant grunt.
“You’ll need a name tag for your uniform. You want one that says Jack Davis or you want me to pick on somebody else?”
“Any name will do as long as it isn’t mine.”
Chapter Four
In my world, only liars, drunks, and the guilty shake uncontrollably. If Ben Yates, the Special Agent in charge of the Kansas City office, caught me doing “Shake it up, baby,” I’d be on the shelf before I got to “Twist and Shout.” So I worked late and kept my door closed.
I’d been an agent since I gave the army the tour of duty I’d promised in return for my college education. I’d worked in FBI offices all over the country, picked Kansas City for my last stop since it was where Joy and I wanted to live when the Bureau retired me in five years when I turned fifty-five.