The sign on the door read Sgt. Charles Marx, Major Crimes. I raised my fist to knock, then realized the guy at the desk wasn't just resting his eyes. He was totally out, slouched in his chair, his grubby Nikes up on his desk, baseball cap tipped down over his eyes, snoring softly. Looked like a class C wrestling coach after a losing season. Edging in quietly, I eased down into the chair facing his desk. When I glanced up, his eyes were locked on mine like lasers.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm Jax LaDart, Sergeant Marx. Your FNG."
He frowned at that, then nodded. "The fuckin' new guy?" he said, massaging his eyelids with his fingertips. "Ah, right. You're the homeboy the chief hired, straight out of the army. I was reading your record. It put me to sleep." He spun the Dell laptop on his desk to show me the screen. "According to the Military Police, you've closed a lot of felony cases overseas, but the details are mostly redacted, blacked out."
"The army'd classify 'Three Blind Mice' if they could. You don't remember me, do you? Jackson LaDart?"
He glanced up at me again, looking me over more carefully this time. Not a comfortable experience. I was in my usual leather jacket and jeans. Not dressed to impress.
"Nah, sorry, I got nothin'. Did I bust you for something?"
"No, but you could have. When I was fourteen, you had me for grand theft auto."
"No kidding?" he said, curious now. "What happened?"
"My cousin and I were working after hours at the Shell station by the freeway, tuning up an old junker Norton motorcycle. Managed to get it running, took it out for a test drive. We made it a few miles, then a tire blew and we cracked it up."
He nodded, didn't comment.
"I banged my face up pretty seriously," I said, jerking a thumb toward an old scar on my forehead. "I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, we had no phone. My cousin runs to the nearest house. Nobody's home, but a pickup in the yard had keys in it, so Jimmy piled me in, drove me into Samaritan Hospital, pedal to the metal. You spotted us on the road, chased us the last few miles with lights and sirens. But at the hospital, you took one look at my face, hustled me inside, and got me some help." I shook my head, remembering.
"Thing is, Jimmy and I were only fourteen, neither of us had a license yet and we'd wrecked a bike and stolen a truck. You could've come down hard on us, but you stood up for us instead. When the pickup's owner came stomping in, yelling he wanted our asses arrested, you took him outside, straightened him out."
"Curly Beauchamp," Charlie nodded slowly, "I remember now. He was half in the bag, all bent out of shape about you two borrowing his piece-of-shit ride. Needed an attitude adjustment, is all. No big thing."
"It was to us."
"I was new to the badge back then," he said with a shrug. "Young and dumb and full of myself. Threw my weight around a lot. Till I learned not to."
"How do you mean?"
"What's that rule about unintended consequences? Something about butterflies?"
"Butterfly Principle," I said. "A butterfly in China flaps its wings, and Hawaii gets a hurricane."
"Except butterflies don't know any better. Cops are supposed to be smarter, but sometimes we're not.
That's what the law's for. Draws hard, clear lines, the ones we don't cross."
"You crossed a line for me, back then. If you hadn't, maybe I'd be talking to you from a cage."
"And the world might be a better place."
We both smiled at that. He was probably right. But his grin morphed into a frown as he cocked his head, listening to the loud music wafting up from the street. Rock and roll at concert volume. "Sweet Home Alabama." Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Easing stiffly out of his chair, Charlie moved to the tall window behind his desk and cracked the blinds. I stood at his shoulder, looking down on Valhalla's Main Street, three stories below. Northern Michigan in mid-December. Snow and sleet mixed, stinging like BB pellets in the winter wind.
Down on the street, a funeral cortege was crawling past, a flatbed truck in the lead, carrying a small coffin, escorted by a long queue of pickups and motorcycles, revving their engines, adding to the din of Skynyrd blasting from the flatbed's sound system. Battle flags were flapping wildly in the wind, some trucks flying Old Glory, others flying red rebel flags, the Stars and Bars. The flatbed was flying both, full size banners at the head of the small casket.
"What's all that?" I asked.
"What we were talking about," Charlie said. "How bad things can wind up when you cross a line."
"In a funeral, you mean?"
He nodded without speaking, which was answer enough.
Eyeing the long cortege, I noticed an old man on the flatbed staring up at me. He was maybe sixty, salt-and-pepper beard, wrinkled black suit from Goodwill. I wondered if he was somebody I knew from back in the day. I tilted the blinds for a better look, but the truck was already passing out of our sight.
"Crossing a line can definitely go sideways," I conceded. "But sometimes bending a rule or two is the only way to get a bad guy into a cage. Or in the dirt."
"What was your date of separation, LaDart?"
"A few weeks ago."
"From where?"
"Afghanistan. Why?"
"You're back in the world now, troop, and here we call 'em cells, not cages. And dirt naps—"
"Strictly hyperbole, Sarge," I said. "Just kidding."
"Right," he said, eyeing me doubtfully. Because I wasn't kidding. And we both knew it. I'd come home from a war without rules, where I learned to live by my own. He let it pass.
"Chief Kaz tells me you grew up out in the county."
"I'm a woodsmoke kid," I nodded. "Raised in the deer woods."
"Still know your way around out there?"
"Some, sure, but nobody knows it all. There's eighty thousand acres of state land spread over the five counties, Sarge. Daniel Boone could get lost."
"Which is why our brother officers in the DEA have asked us for a guide. They got a call on their tip line about a motor home parked deep on state land. Their GPS coordinates put it somewhere inside this red circle, but they've got no idea how to get there."
He tapped a computer key, then swiveled his laptop to face me again.
I leaned in, scanning the screen. It took me a moment, but then I recognized a few landmarks. "Their circle's just beyond the north fork of the Black. It's swampy ground, but there's an old logging road just east of it. That road is the only way an RV could make it in. I can get them there."
"Won't be easy. The DEA Strike team will be mostly newbies, recruits fresh out of Quantico. We'll have our hands full with 'em."
"We? You're going?"
"Why wouldn't I?"
"The chief said you're short. Almost out the door."
"Eight days to my anniversary," he said with a broad grin. "Thirty and out. Thirty years from the day I signed on the Valhalla force as a rook."
"It'll be rough going out there, Charlie, and I owe you one. Why not relax, put your feet up for once. Let me handle it."
"You think I'm ready for a rocking chair, LaDart? You're the FNG here, not me."
"I didn't mean it that way."
"Then let's get something straight. A couple weeks back, I got called to the Samaritan Hospital emergency room. Three kids had been dumped off in their driveway, overdosed on meth. They were foaming at the mouth, like dogs! High school kids! So if the DEA thinks some lab rat's cooking crank on our turf, I'm all over it. If that's okay with you? FNG Sergeant LaDart?"
"Absolutely, boss." I raised my hands in mock surrender. "It's totally fine by me."
But it wasn't totally fine. The raid was the diametric freaking opposite of fine. Charlie and I met up with the DEA crew at first light at an abandoned motel parking lot just off the interstate. Charlie knew the Agent-in-Charge, Ken Tanaka, but the others were green kids, decked out in full battle rattle, body armor and helmets, M4 automatic weapons, night vision gear clipped to their helmets like snorkels. Looked like fucking starship troopers. They even brought a dope dog along, a black-faced Belgian Malinois bitch half again the size of a German shepherd. She looked more wolf than dog, but she definitely seemed to know her business, cool, calm, and collected. Which was a lot more than I could say for her crew. The young agents were practically jumping out of their skins with excitement, first raid, first action. I was getting a very bad feeling about this.
We divided up into two squads, then scrambled into a pair of camouflaged Humvees to head into the back country. As the guide, I was riding shotgun in the lead vehicle with the DEA boss, Agent Ken Tanaka at the wheel, a hard-eyed oil drum of a warrior, shaved skull, Fu Manchu. Ken would have looked at home on a steppe pony, riding to war beside Genghis Khan.
Only the Belgian dog was totally calm, alert and aware, but not a bit hinky. Like she'd done this a hundred times before. Which made me wonder about her.
There was no time to quiz her handler about her history, though. The logging road twisted through the hill country like a rattler with a broken back. We stayed with it until we were roughly a half mile from the DEA's red ring, then I called a halt to dismount. Our target should be straight ahead, at the end of the road, but we were in a cedar swamp now. If the meth cooks heard us coming and scattered into the woods, we'd be chasing them all damned day. We needed to locate the lab, encircle it, then tighten the noose.
Good luck with that.
Out of the vehicles, we formed a long firing line, stringing the young DEA agents out for seventy meters on both sides of the road, with Charlie and me holding down the center. It's a Tactics 101 maneuver, should have been easy, but the line has to stay absolutely straight to give everyone a clear field of fire.
No chance. A hundred meters along, we had to stop to realign, then twice more as we made our way through the snowy swamp. The young agents were unconsciously edging ahead, eager to put first eyes on the target. Unfortunately, they were also increasing their chances of getting their heads blown off by their own crew. There's no such thing as friendly fire.
After our second stop to realign, I was seriously wishing I could turn the lot of 'em into dogs. The Malinois maintained her position perfectly, always aligned with the center, her eyes front, sniffing the icy breeze—
"Contact!" one of the agents yelled. "Ten o'clock, straight ahead!"
He was right! A hundred meters down the road, a battered Coachman motorhome had been pulled off the road into the trees. It was well hidden, crudely camouflaged with rattle-can paint, then covered with brush.
Even at this distance, we could smell the rank bite of crystal meth on the wind. For the young agents, it was red meat thrown to a pack of wolves.