Jake Caldwell Thrillers Read online

  * * *

  With time to burn before his appointment with the Hospice House manager, Jake used it to cruise to Langston’s dealership which sat on a busy corner a few miles from Hospice. Jake circled the block a few times, checking the place out, and finally parked up in front of the showroom. Polished Navigators with sparkling windshields guarded the front door.

  He got out and perused the lot, milling around trying to formulate a plan. A beanpole in a cheap suit spotted Jake and slinked over with a flash of teeth. His name tag read “Brad.”

  “Mornin’, sir. Anything you’re looking for in particular?”

  Yeah, your dickhead owner in a body bag. Can I get the bag in black or is that extra?

  “Just browsing,” Jake said, running his hand along the window of an overpriced sedan.

  “We have some great specials. Trying to clear out last year’s models.” Brad invaded Jake’s personal space and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “I can make you one hell of a deal.”

  “That a fact?”

  “As sure as I’m standin’ here. Our owner’s got to make room for a new shipment. Practically giving these things away.”

  The opening Jake needed. “Your owner?” Jake asked. “Shane Langston, right?”

  Brad nodded. “That’s him. Great guy. He’s willing to…”

  “He here today?”

  “Mr. Langston? Not at the moment, but he’s authorized me to make each of our customers…”

  “Any idea when he’s coming in?”

  Brad stopped his sales pitch and took a half step back, his eyes narrowing. “Do you know Mr. Langston, sir?”

  “Just met him a coupla times around town. Told me to stop in and look him up if I was interested in a car.”

  Brad managed to revive his salesman’s smile. He didn’t buy it. “Live around here, do you?”

  “Warsaw.”

  “And where’d you meet Mr. Langston?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, Brad.”

  “It’s my job, sir,” Brad said, the smile faltering. “You know, get to know my customers. Find out what they’re really after.” Jake wanted to punch him in the nose and knock the smile the rest of the way from his face. He hated salespeople.

  “Appreciate the attention, but I think I’m going to just browse around for a while. If I need anything, I’ll flag you down.”

  “Take your time…Mr.?”

  “Maxwell. James Maxwell.”

  Brad extended his hand and Jake took it, the grip weak and sweaty. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

  Jake wandered toward the south end of the lot. When he glanced over his shoulder, Brad regarded him for a moment before turning away. Jake walked the line of cars leading to the building and waved off a couple other salesmen before they got too close. When Brad trekked to the far corner of the lot to help an elderly couple, Jake made a beeline for the showroom and the offices behind it.

  Three new cars with jaw-dropping window stickers covered the showroom floor. Two employees sat at desks talking on the phone, oblivious to his entry. Across the polished tile, a service bay bustled with mechanics while bored customers watched The Price is Right from a muted television mounted in the corner. He turned left down a short hallway past the restrooms and around a corner to the office area. The first one had Brad’s name stuck to the door on an engraved metal plate. Jake resisted the urge to shove the clutter of paperwork covering the desk to the floor. He passed three empty cookie cutter offices to one in the back with Langston’s name plate: a closed door with no window. An alarmed emergency exit dead-ended the hall beyond Langston’s office.

  Jake checked around and tried the knob. Locked. This was a stupid idea. What would he do if Langston sat in the office with his feet up? Shoot him in the head in a crowded car dealership? He should leave the detective work to the cops and stick to being the muscle. But Keats’ clock ran and he had nothing else to go on. A quick glance at the lock revealed it was old and cheap. He could pick it in seconds and maybe find something useful inside.

  He double checked the coast was clear and took out his wallet. He thumbed past the credit cards, generally too rigid for this kind of deal. You could bend them to the point where they couldn’t be used or snap them in half. Instead, he selected a thick, laminated and expired gym membership card.

  Jake pushed in the door to get a look at the locking mechanism. No trim to get in his way, so he slid the card into the vertical crack between the door and the doorjamb. Once he felt the bolt, he bent the card the opposite way to force the bolt back into the door. After a few seconds of wiggling the card, the door popped open. He checked over his shoulder one last time and darted inside, shutting the door behind him.

  Light filtered in the office from partially opened blinds on the south wall. Jake turned the angle of the blinds down so nobody could see him from the lot. Get in and get out. He set the timer in his head for sixty seconds and began his search.

  He walked behind the large, tan veneer desk and opened desk drawers, finding nothing but invoices and bank envelopes addressed to the dealership. A batch at the back of the drawer, rubber-banded together, was addressed to Marion Holdings c/o Shane Langston. Forty-five seconds left. Nothing much on the desktop except a phone, a monitor with an empty docking station for a laptop, and a half-used, five-inch memo pad with Langston Motors printed on them.

  Jake moved to side-by-side file cabinets on the far wall, four feet high with three drawers each. The first set was locked. The ones closest to a window overlooking the lot opened. Nothing but office supplies and a few dust-covered trophies from a softball team Langston Motors sponsored. Twenty seconds left. What was he looking for? He scanned the room one last time, his gaze ending at the window where Brad approached with the elderly couple in tow. Jake pressed against the wall as Brad looked toward the window. Get the hell out of there.

  As he stepped toward the door, sunlight from the window filtered on the desk. From that angle, indentations showed up on the writing pad. He ripped off the top few pages and stuffed them in his jeans. Opening the door, he peeked down the empty hallway. He engaged the lock and quietly closed the door, hearing the bolt thunk.

  He inhaled and hurried to the bend in the hall—almost knocking over Brad.

  “Can I help you, Mr. Maxwell?” Brad asked, his smile gone. Brad may have just been a smarmy salesman, but he smelled something fishy. Had he seen Jake through the blinds?

  “Just looking for the bathroom,” Jake replied.

  “Back toward the front. You passed them on the way in.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, skirting around him. He popped in the bathroom and waited, washing his hands for effect. He counted to twenty and left the building. He started his truck and stared out the windshield, the air through the vents drying the sweat on his brow. If nothing else, he could stake out the dealership and wait for Langston to show. Then what? Could he kill him in cold blood? If it came down to Keats’ goons killing Jake or Jake taking out a scumbag drug dealer, he could probably do it. There had to be another way.

  He lifted the middle console and rooted around until he found a pencil. He took out the notepad pages from Langston’s office and lightly rubbed the graphite back and forth against the indentations. White letters appeared through the gray. 5145 Southbend Avenue. Pulling out his cell phone, he plugged the address into his navigation app. 3.2 miles away. The clock on the truck dash said he had another twenty minutes before his appointment at Hospice. As he drove through the lot, he glanced in the rearview mirror. Brad stood in the safety of the showroom; his cell phone pressed to his ear. Jake should’ve punched the guy.

  * * *

  5145 Southbend Avenue was a non-descript, rectangular, steel building, the kind you’d see farmers build to store their equipment. Forty feet high, and a hundred and fifty feet long, the corrugated steel building sat on the east end of town with a large bay door in the front and a man door at the corner. A dirty, white cinderblock
small engine repair shop sat idle to its left and a pasture with a handful of cows grazing by the fence on its right. Jake parked up in front of the steel building. A small plaque next to the door read “Global Distribution Center” above the address. No trucks, no cars. It felt empty.

  Jake drove along a narrow dirt road around the side of the building to a back lot adorned with a couple of forsaken cars abandoned in a tall collection of weeds. A door with a reinforced window stood below a single bulb in cobwebbed housing. He kept the truck running and walked to the back door. Locked. A look through the window revealed nothing but a small, cluttered maintenance shop and a darkened door leading to the rest of the building. He didn’t have time to mess around inside. He had to get to Hospice.

  * * *

  Jake sat in the manager’s office, who explained, in excruciating and unnecessary detail, the dying process and what his father could expect over the next several days or weeks. But Jake’s thoughts were about the Global Distribution Center building and its link to Langston. All Jake cared about was that Hospice had a room and he’d have enough money to cover it if Stony didn’t hold out too long. If he did hold on, Jake would be calling Keats for some additional work in the near future.

  Jake signed his name to a number of lines on the extensive paperwork below legalese clauses he didn’t bother to read. Sign here, initial there. Page after page. The woman said he could bring Stony in that afternoon as they had a vacancy.

  “We’ll take good care of him, Mr. Caldwell,” she continued. “Don’t you worry.”

  “I’m not worried.” Jake pushed up from the chair. The woman reached across the desk and extended a bony hand with impossibly long fingers. They wrapped around Jake’s hand and a shiver went up his spine; it was like shaking hands with Stony’s skeleton.

  He ventured to the hall. The exit to the left and a long hallway with a number of doors leading to the rooms on the right. A fat woman in a muumuu the size of a circus tent talked in hushed tones on a cell phone, a box of Kleenex in her free hand. A young couple scurried past, the woman crying into the shoulder of a suited yuppie. Jake started to follow them out, then remembered Bear’s advice to check out the nurses so he took several tentative steps along the hall.

  The first few doors were closed. In the next, a withered old man hooked to beeping and purring machines by tubes running from his arms focused on a soundless television playing from a wall mount on the opposite side of the room.

  A nurses’ station sat at the end of the hall. A nurse in light blue scrubs wrote on some charts with her back to him as he approached. She had long, wavy champagne hair and strong, sinewy arms protruding from a short-sleeved top. She shifted her weight from foot to foot as she wrote, and Jake couldn’t help but admire a very nice backside. She glanced over her shoulder as his boots clomped on the thin carpet. The corners of her mouth turned up to reveal a perfect row of gleaming, white teeth. Now he knew why Bear wanted him to check the nurses. He’d have to thank him later.

  She set the pen on the chart, turned, and stepped forward. The woman working at a computer stopped pecking and alternated her glance between her and Jake like they were two fighters squaring off.

  “Oh my God.” The blonde nurse clasped a hand to her sensuous lips. “Jake? Is that really you?”

  “Hi, Maggie,” he said, heart thundering at the mention of her name. She threw herself into his arms and held him in his second hug of the day. Jake had to admit he liked Maggie’s much more than Bear’s.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dexter may have been short on personality, but he made up for it in precision. Willie gazed around the living room and kitchen area at their setup. It was going to be a long cook, but in the end, they’d rake in enough cash for Willie to get away from the life. He and Dexter prepped until noon, then stepped out the front door to have a smoke in the clearing by the van.

  “You worked for Shane long?” Dexter asked.

  “Few years,” Willie said.

  “He speaks highly of you. Well, as highly as Shane speaks of anybody.”

  “That’s good to know.” Yeah, that was definitely good info to have.

  “He trusts you, but not your fat buddy.” Dexter took a last drag and crushed the butt on the heel of his boot as he exhaled, then put what was left in his shirt pocket.

  “Bub’s a necessary evil. Can do stuff to people I can’t do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like break their face,” Willie said. “We went to high school together. He dropped out to work for one of Shane’s dealers. I came on board after I dropped out the next year.”

  “How’d you get above him in the food chain?”

  “I have a brain. Bub ain’t the sharpest crayon in the box, but he’ll do what you tell him to do and that’s all I need.”

  They went back inside and worked in silence, moving chemicals here and there, adjusting valves and beakers. If only Willie paid better attention during his high school chemistry class, maybe he’d know how this exactly worked. He may be a redneck hillbilly, but he’d done some research on meth.

  Methamphetamine had been around for a long time. Speed, crystal, glass, crank, tweak, rock, tina, ice, shards. The main ingredient ephedrine or pseudoephedrine was found in many legal drugs like decongestants, Nyquil Nighttime Cold Medications, Sudafed and diet pills. The national crackdown on scoring ephedrine had led people like Willie to find some creative sources of the drug.

  The familiar tense knot formed in his belly. Guilt because of what they were making and who they’d be selling it to. Picturing his mother hunched over in the shack she called a house, smoking what he cooked from a dirty glass pipe made his skin crawl. But it wasn’t like he invented the shit. He forced his thoughts to turn to dollar signs.

  “You know they used meth during World War II?” Willie asked. “My great grandfather flew bombers over Germany and told me they used to call meth ‘Pilot’s Chocolate.’ You know, to help fight fatigue.” Dexter said nothing, just kept setting up tubes and beakers. Willie gave up trying to make conversation.

  Since they were in the Midwest around farming country, Dexter’s basic cook method used the readily available anhydrous ammonia. Mix it with the right quantities of pseudoephedrine, and sodium or lithium, and boom, you get meth. The hard part was getting enough pseudoephedrine, but this guy seemed to have ample supply. Willie didn’t ask where Shane scored it and Dexter didn’t offer.

  Willie never touched the product because it scared the shit out of him. His customers snorted or smoked it, flooding their pea brains with dopamine, wide eyed and tweaking for days at a time, continuing to chase the first high until they ran out of product, or crashed and burned. The tragic downside wasn’t worth feeling like Superman for a short time. He had dreams of breaking free from this life, maybe having a family with kids. Getting strung out on this poison wasn’t going to help make that dream a reality.

  “You ready?’ Dexter asked.

  Willie zipped up his protective yellow suit and stretched the straps of the full-face respirator wide, slipping it over his head. He drew in a deep breath, soaking in the musty air of the old house, and pulled the respirator over his face. Pressing his hands against the filters, he inhaled deeply, the rubber sucking against his face ensuring he had a good seal. Dexter waited, tapping his foot impatiently.

  “Let’s do it,” Willie said. Hopefully, for the last time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It took the thirty-minute drive from Sedalia to Warsaw for the smile to dissipate from Jake’s face. But not even the joy of seeing the only woman he ever loved again could stop the prospect of dealing with Stony and Keats’ looming deadline from pulling down the corners of his mouth. Stony was straight forward, but how to track down Langston? A trip to the car dealership, some worthless phone calls and a locked-up warehouse wasn’t going to get him very far.

  He might not survive the next forty-eight hours, but if he did last that long, supplies were needed. He took the exit ramp for Walmar
t, weaving through abandoned carts in the parking lot to an open space on west side. He walked toward the store, giving a wide berth to a sloppy woman with a booger-picking kid lazily clad in pajamas at two in the afternoon, and then helped an old woman finish loading her car, offering to take her cart back to the store. She looked like Hap Anderson’s mother. Hell, it could’ve been. He hadn’t seen either of them in sixteen years.

  Pushing the cart toward the Walmart entrance, a flash of denim caught his eye between two cars. A tall, heavy set man in overalls stood next to a rust bitten El Camino, Iron Maiden cranking from backseat speakers that probably cost more than the entire car. The fat man retrieved something from his pockets and palmed it to the driver. An obvious exchange of money for drugs. If Langston ran the drug trade in Warsaw, one of his dealers could lead Jake in the right direction. But which one was the dealer and which the customer?

  The choice was made for him when the El Camino’s glass packs rumbled and faded away. Jake parked the cart with a pile near the entrance, swinging the cart around so he could check out the fat man without being too obvious. He headed his way, so Jake went inside. No better place to track someone than inside a busy Walmart.

  An ancient greeter offered a pleasant hello. Jake nodded to him then approached the discount shelves near the entrance. He grabbed the closest item, an “As Seen on TV” miracle garden hose and pretended to read the back of the box. The fat man moved past in a wave of body odor. Jake waited a moment and followed. If he lost sight of the guy, all he would have to do was follow his nose.

  The fat man picked up some high calorie snacks and a case of cheap beer and made his way back to the front. Along the way, one of the boxes slipped off the pile toward the floor. With surprisingly fast reflexes, the fat man snagged it before the box hit the floor. Big and quick. Good to know. The lines at the registers were six deep so Jake headed to his truck.