The man said, “Why’d you do that?” With no accent.
“You speak English, too,” yelled Sutter.
“Yeah. I was born in Kendall.”
Sutter kneed him again.
After taking a few minutes to gather his breath and call into the command post that he was fine and had one in custody, Sutter yanked the man to his feet and shoved him though the swinging door. The place had emptied out, with only one teenage worker still there.
“Where’s the manager?”
“Tracey? She left.”
“When will she be back?”
“Won’t. That was the third time she was threatened here. She quit. Said she wouldn’t ever come back.”
“Shit,” mumbled Sutter. Now he’d have to track her down later for a statement. He looked at his prisoner. “You happy now? The girl quit, I’m pissed and we gotta walk back to the processing scene.”
The prisoner asked, “Why we gotta walk?” as they left the Church’s Fried Chicken.
“We need the gray package you had when you ran.”
“What gray package?”
“The one that if we don’t find I’m gonna shoot you for trying to escape. That one.”
The man didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, the package I threw in the bushes over off Sixth.”
Bill Tasker always used the commute time from Miami to his old house in West Palm Beach to hash out problems while he listened to sports talk shows on AM 560. At first, using the shorter ride from the West Palm Beach office, it was the whole shooting incident and the cloud from that. Then it was Donna throwing him out of the house. After that it was the impending divorce. More recently it was his troubles with the FBI. Now he tried to look at his Daniel Wells problem from the outside. Although he had wanted to find evidence at the Wells house to build his case, his first concern was simply locating the man. The problem was that he had no idea where the man was staying. He obviously wasn’t at the house, and it didn’t look like he was coming back. Tasker remembered him saying something about relatives in Tennessee. For all Tasker knew, he could still be in Naranja. If Wells was in Florida, Tasker had the resources to track him. Outside the state, it got trickier. Who could he call for help? The FBI was his obvious choice, but they weren’t too friendly lately. Jimmy Lail showed it in his attitude. What about the counterterrorism guy, Sal Bolini? He’d call him on Monday.
Tasker’s other worry, more of a vague anxiety, was: Had Wells known about the search warrant ahead of time? Or was he just lucky? Was he part of some terrorist group? What drove him? These questions haunted him almost every hour of the day.
Tasker pulled into the driveway of his old house. The two-door garage was closed and Donna’s tan Nissan van sat on the spot closest to the house. Tasker’s stomach completed a three-sixty as he hopped out of his Jeep and headed for the front door.
She had the door open before he could ring the bell. “Thank you so much, Billy,” she said, giving him a quick hug. “The girls are over at Morgan’s. As soon as they see your Jeep, they’ll race back.”
He just nodded, noticing how she looked like a Dolphins cheerleader in the light sundress, her blond hair in a ponytail.
“Nicky is picking me up in about ten minutes.” She looked at him and froze. “You’re all right with this, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Would it make a difference?”
“It would as far as who baby-sat for me.”
In his head, he said, Bitch! Out loud, he said, “No, it’s fine.”
“You’re the best,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed him as he got comfortable on the couch.
He watched her scoot around and finish little chores for a few minutes until the doorbell chimed. He stood and opened it to see a short guy, about thirty-five with perfectly arranged, short-cropped brown hair, wearing shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt.
The man said, “Hey, Bill, remember me?” He stuck out his hand, “Nicky Goldman.”
“Yeah, Nick, I remember you.” He let him in the house. The guy had the class not to kiss Donna in front of Tasker. To his credit, he went to her and asked what he could do to help. They seemed to have a pretty good connection, moving around the house like coworkers as they loaded the suitcases in his Expedition.
Tasker had almost made it-until Donna took a few extra minutes in the bathroom, which left him alone with her new boyfriend. They avoided eye contact and made small talk for a few minutes, until Goldman said, “That was a pretty wild case you got involved in with the bank.”
“You mean the one I was accused of robbing?”
“Yeah, I saw the news reports and Donna has filled in the blanks. Who was your attorney?”
“I retained Clayton Troub, but never needed him. The situation cleared itself up.”
“So I heard. Pretty incredible, huh? I never heard of a frame-up in real life before, only in the movies.” Nicky smiled like they were talking about a football game.
Tasker nodded, thinking, What does this guy want me to say?
“I have to deal with the cops piling on the charges all the time. I know how you must have felt.”
“What?” Tasker stood, hoping he hadn’t heard this moron correctly.
Goldman stood, too. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Bullshit. This had nothing to do with legal charges. I was intentionally set up by an FBI agent. I guarantee none of the lowlifes you represent were ever set up like this. And cops don’t pile on charges unless the criminal committed multiple crimes.”
Nicky Goldman held up his hands in surrender and started to back away.
“You fucking grave-robbing attorneys complain when your clients are charged, hoping for some sympathy. Let me tell you something, Counselor, you don’t help the downtrodden, you hurt them. Every day. By helping those predators get back into those neighborhoods.” Tasker started to go into his remedy for attorneys when Donna emerged from the rear bedroom.
“You boys getting along okay?”
Tasker cleared his throat and Nicky turned his flushed face. Both mumbled, “Yes.”
She kissed Tasker on the cheek, again saying, “We have to move on. At some point we have to meet each other’s new friends.”
Then Tasker realized that his ex-wife’s change in attitude in the last month may have been prompted by something other than fear of commitment. Maybe she was just afraid to recommit to him. He froze, wanting to apologize to the still-silent lawyer. He didn’t need this now.
After Derrick Sutter’s little adventure, he realized just how much he missed working on the bigger cases with FDLE, and missed his partner, Bill Tasker. They had fun together, and even though Tasker wasn’t the most cheerful guy, considering what had happened to him the past few years he seemed to maintain pretty well.
The Vice unit was finishing the sweep. They hardly made anything of Sutter’s efforts to run down the dope dealer earlier. Pretty common stuff for these tough veteran cops.
Sutter had placed the guy he had chased in line with all the other suspects, sitting on a curb, waiting to be processed. He had given the gray plastic package he’d recovered to the sergeant, who had opened it to find a load of cash.
Sutter liked helping out, even though he was still assigned to robbery. This gave him a chance to roam Liberty City and help clear out some of the dickheads that made it hard for the ordinary residents of the area to live and raise families. It also felt good to run after someone once in a while. At least the brothers here didn’t throw little sticks of dynamite at him or cook up all kinds of nasty explosives in their bathtubs. He decided that he preferred to have chicken thrown at him anytime.
Now, as his shift started to wind down, he was filling out an arrest form on one of the dozens of prisoners. With the other cops in a straight line, sitting at long, portable tables with folding chairs, it looked like a recruiting drive, with people filling out employment applications.