Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Read online

  He stared at me. I tried to look as high and as unappealing as possible.

  “She’s cute,” he said.

  “She’s off the clock now, spook,” Jack sneered into his reflective Ray-Bans. “Maybe you can find another crack whore tonight, when Uncle Sam lets you off the leash.”

  His demeanor slipped, and he stepped aside. Jack led me out the automatic doors. We headed for the parking lot at a brisk clip.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” Jack said. “That’s some outfit.”

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

  “Oh, I’ve tried it.”

  “The world’s oldest profession?” I tried to picture Jack in hooker clothes.

  “Second oldest. Vice squad. I wore things that make your clothes look frumpy. So do blondes have more fun?”

  “Absolutely. I’m having loads.”

  As we wove our way through the cars, I tried to guess which was Jack’s. She certainly dressed well. No doubt her car would be equally impressive.

  Which is why I was surprised when we stopped next to a 1987 Chevy Nova.

  “Get in.”

  “Seriously? This is what you drive?”

  “Do you know how much this purse was? Or these shoes? I can’t afford a nice car.”

  I slid into the passenger seat, and it almost swallowed me, as if someone very heavy had been sitting there for a long time. I undid the cuffs, and traded them for my gym bag. Jack turned the ignition, and it started on the fourth try.

  “Your car sucks,” I said.

  “This car is a classic. It’s so popular it was even stolen a few months ago.” She pulled into traffic. “Unfortunately, they brought it back.”

  “Even thieves have standards.”

  “Do spies?”

  “Let’s say I’m glad I’m in disguise. I really wouldn’t want to be seen in this car.”

  We pulled into traffic with all the acceleration of an ox-drawn cart. “Hungry?” Jack asked.

  Actually, I was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. “Yeah.”

  “Can you secret agent types do hotdogs? Or does it have to be pâté de foie gras, beluga caviar, and Bollinger ’88?”

  “A hot dog would be great.”

  “I know a place nearby. My partner swears by it. It’s his day off, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s there right now.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m thinking two double dogs with the works, and we can split a fry.”

  “With tracing the clothes, Jack.”

  “We’ve got one of the best crime labs in the country, but the waiting time is unbearable, and we don’t want to draw any attention. I don’t want to be awakened in the middle of the night by men surrounding my house and trying to kill me.”

  “They probably wouldn’t kill you. They’d take you someplace where the Geneva Convention doesn’t exist, then take their time torturing you for information.”

  Which is what was no doubt being done to Fleming.

  “Luckily I have a friend, of sorts, who is almost as well equipped as the CPD.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Trust him? Yes. Like him? That’s another story.” Jack glanced at me, her eyes moving down my body. “But he’ll like you, for sure. Especially in that getup. His name is Harry. Harry McGlade.”

  Harry McGlade? Why did that name sound so familiar?

  Chandler

  “This line of work makes for strange bedfellows,” the Instructor said. “Just like you have to roll with the punches, you sometimes have to roll with the weirdos. Whether that roll is literal or figurative is up to you.”

  After a delicious hot dog and some French fries of dubious freshness, we drove to McGlade’s office. Apparently he was Jack’s old partner, now in the private sector. She parked in front of a fire hydrant, and when I’d extracted myself from her trench of a passenger seat, I fell into my regular habits and scanned the environment.

  Ritzy neighborhood, nice cars on the streets, sidewalks well kept and trees tended to. The storefronts were dominated by jewelers and art galleries, with a few clothing boutiques and non-chain cafés sprinkled in. I smelled dark roast, and heard pigeons warbling from a nearby park.

  “McGlade is a bit, um, abrasive,” Jack said. “If he says something rude, you have to promise not to kill him.”

  I smiled. Jack didn’t.

  “I’m serious. Promise me.”

  “I promise. I don’t kill people just because they’re rude.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s because you haven’t met Harry yet.”

  She pressed the buzzer on an inauspicious security door next to a brass placard that read MCGLADE INVESTIGATIONS.

  “Can I help you?” a female voice asked.

  “Buzz me in, Harry. It’s Jack.”

  “Jack who?”

  “Jack who is going to shoot the lock off your door, then kick your ass if you don’t open up.”

  “Do you have an appointment with Mr. McGlade?”

  “And stop that ridiculous falsetto. You don’t have a secretary.”

  “Well, maybe I got one,” a male voice answered. “And maybe she’s hot, and maybe we’re doing stuff to each other right now. Sexy stuff.”

  “I’m pulling out my gun,” Jack said. Then she did and waved it at the security camera above the door. “Who’s the skirt with you? She’s stacked like a plateful of pancakes.”

  “I’m aiming at your lock,” she said, and did.

  “You’re being quite aggressive, Jack. That’s hot.”

  Jack cocked her .38. He buzzed us in.

  McGlade’s office was on the second floor. His door had an actual stencil of a magnifying glass on it, with an oversized eye peering through. Jack entered without knocking. I followed.

  Harry McGlade was sitting behind an enormous desk. He was in his forties, out of shape, unshaven, and I realized where I’d heard his name before.

  “I know you,” I said. “You were in the Cook County Morgue the other day.”

  He put his feet up on his desk and crossed his legs. “Who? Me?”

  “You were wearing your old police uniform. You hit on me and my sister.”

  “That doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “I had longer hair. Brown. She was in a wheelchair.”

  His expression remained blank. “Not ringing any bells.”

  “You tried to blackmail us into going to see some sports game with you. You had box seats. Then you offered us two hundred bucks if we French kissed.”

  “Apparently you weren’t very memorable, but I’ll double that offer if you plant one on Jack right now. First you need to take your top off. And shake them like they’re on fire.”

  On reflex I dug my hand into my gym bag, seeking my Beretta. Jack grabbed my arm and said, “You promised.” Then she turned to McGlade. “I need your help.”

  “You can’t afford me.”

  “I’m not paying you. We’re going to trade favors, professional to professional.”

  McGlade nodded and winked. “I get it.” Then he reached for his fly.

  “You whip that out and I’ll shoot it off,” Jack said.

  “Easy there, Lorena Bobbit. Just going in for the scratch.”

  “Resist the impulse,” Jack ordered. “You help us, then I owe you one.”

  “So the next time I need help from the CPD,” Harry said, folding his arms, “I can call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No questions asked?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll come over and sex me up?”

  “Those rude come-ons, do they ever actually work?” I asked.

  “Not so far. But if the Wright Brothers ever gave up, think of the loss to humanity. I mean, where would we be without airline food?”

  Jack placed the paper bag on his desk. “We need to analyze these, see if we could find out where they came from.”

  “Hmm, real crime fighter stuff, huh? OK, let’s see.”
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  Jack dumped out the contents of the bag. A wallet, gun and holster, two shoes, a jacket, pants, a tie, underwear, sunglasses, socks, a belt.

  “Where’s the guy these belong to?” Harry asked. “Did you shrink him?”

  Jack sighed. “Yes, Harry. I shrunk him. You guessed it.”

  “You have a way of making guys shrink, Jack.” Harry opened his desk and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. He reached for the pants first.

  “Off the rack, not tailored. Label has been cut out. They aren’t high quality. Jacket is cheap, too. Nothing in any pockets. Looks like spookwear, right down to the sunglasses. This guy work for our government in some unofficial capacity? Or did you get this off some nerd at a sci-fi convention cosplaying Will Smith?”

  I shrugged. “If I had to guess, I’d say NIC.”

  Both Harry and Jack gave me blank stares.

  “The National Intelligence Committee. They don’t officially exist. They work for Homeland Security.”

  “Does this have something to do with London almost blowing up?”

  Maybe McGlade wasn’t as stupid as he let on.

  “The less you know, the better.”

  He nodded. “Good. Because I know very little.”

  “No shit,” Jack said.

  McGlade didn’t appear insulted. “Underwear are Hanes tighty-whities. Guy apparently didn’t do a very good job wiping himself. Want me to analyze the skid mark, try to figure out what he recently ate? My guess is something Mexican.”

  “We need to know where he’s from, Harry.”

  “Someplace they have Taco Bell, apparently. Let’s look at the wallet.”

  McGlade unfolded it. “Leather. Cheap. Got a Florida driver’s license that says, oh this is good, ‘John Smith.’ No doubt the address will be just as fake. And here’s something I don’t understand.” He held up the ID to the light. “Look at how shitty that ghost image of the portrait is. A blind bouncer high on pot could spot this as a fake. All that money we pay in taxes, and our government can’t get better fake IDs? Why should they even be fake? Shouldn’t they be able to get the real ones? Incredible.”

  He took some money out of the wallet, three twenty-dollar bills. “Hmm. This is good.”

  “Something there?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. Dinner and a movie for me later tonight.” He put the money in his pocket.

  “You aren’t helping much, McGlade.”

  “I’m just getting started. Let’s look at this belt.” He stretched it out over the table. “Finally, we have something good.”

  “We do?” I asked.

  “Yep. Ralph Lauren. Probably cost a few hundred bucks.”

  “Can it be traced?” Jack asked.

  “No. But it’s pretty nice. Too small for me, but I do good business on eBay.”

  He tucked the belt into his drawer. I was really starting to dislike this guy.

  “Shoes also have the labels removed, but the stitching above the sole is obvious. Doc Martens. Available everywhere. He put his nose next to one. “Hmm. Smell this.”

  He held it out. Jack and I each gave it a sniff.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Just stinky foot odor,” Jack said.

  I agreed.

  McGlade nodded. “That’s what I figured. I wasn’t going to smell it myself, because that’s gross. I’m surprised you guys did.”

  I was about to go back on my promise and reach for my gun when Harry said, “Hold up. Got something for real this time.” He took a black leather case out of his desk and removed a dental pick. “Jack, hand me a piece of paper from the printer there.”

  Jack complied, and McGlade used the pick to tease something out of the tread of the shoe. A small rock dropped onto the paper. It was opaque, with a faint purplish color.

  “We may have something here, ladies.” He checked the other shoe, and found two more of the stones. “I think this is a job for Mr. Mass Spec.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “A mass spectrometer,” Jack said. “It’s a machine that determines the chemical composition of things.”

  “Where are we going to get one of those?”

  “Got one,” Harry said. “It’s in the back room, next to my Richter scale.”

  Jack shrugged. “Harry’s rich.”

  “Come on,” he said, folding up the paper. “Let’s see where our boy has been.”

  I remained dubious. “So you’re going to go all CSI on those and find out it has some rare mineral only found in one part of the world?”

  “Yep. That’s the plan.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “If you want, we could take a picture of the shoes and spend a year showing it to every employee of every store in the whole world that sells Dr. Martens, and hope one of them remembers who bought this pair.”

  I didn’t have a response to that. I simply followed Jack and Harry to the back room, which was jam-packed with expensive-looking equipment stacked on tables and carts and bracketed to the walls.

  “Why do you even have a Richter scale in the Midwest?” I asked.

  “I like to hook it up to my bed. My best is a six point two.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Want to see if you and I can beat that?”

  “And you were really his partner?” I said to Jack.

  “I’m still in therapy. How long will this take, Harry?”

  “Long enough to peel off our skivvies and get familiar.”

  “In minutes, Harry.”

  “Just a few. The mass spec burns the sample at tens of thousands of degrees, then it identifies the ions using argon plasma, or something like that. Hell if I know how it works. The instruction booklet was four hundred pages long.”

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked.

  “Naw. Probably not. I hope not. Do either of you women ever plan on having babies?”

  “This thing can make you sterile?” I asked.

  “No. That was just a personal question. I was going to volunteer.”

  I almost laughed at that, but didn’t want to encourage him. Not that lack of reinforcement seemed to be slowing him down. Harry seemed to be happy enough just amusing Harry.

  “OK, stand back,” he said. “I’m about to do science.”

  He put the rocks in a tiny drawer in a beige machine that looked like an oversized copier, then pressed a few buttons.

  Nothing happened.

  “Hmm. How about that.” He pressed the buttons again, then scratched his chin. “Jack, can you grab that thick manual on the table there and find the number for customer service?”

  “Is it plugged in?” I asked.

  Harry checked under the table. “Jack, can you plug it in? Outlet is over there.”

  “Have you actually used this before?”

  I got another wink. “I know how to turn things on.”

  I really doubted that.

  Harry punched the buttons again, and a bright green light spilled out the center of the machine, bright enough to make me squint.

  “Oooooo,” Harry said. “Look at all that science.”

  He walked over to a computer, tapped on the keyboard, and a window on the monitor winked on, showing a porn video.

  “Old case,” he said, tapping more buttons. “I was researching this pervert with a big butt fetish.”

  “I bet you beat him mercilessly,” I said.

  “Did I ever. Poor little guy was sore for a week. OK, here we go.”

  The booty porn was replaced by a white graph with spikes all over it. Harry pressed a few more buttons, and some paper came out of his printer.

  “Aha,” he said, handing me the paper.

  I glanced at it, half expecting more porn. Instead I saw this:

  (Fe2+2Al)Al6Si6O18(BO3)3(OH)3(OH)

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Fuck if I know. Look at all those letters and numbers. Is that even English?”

  Jack put her hands on her hips, looking as annoyed as I felt. “Well, what are we supposed
to do with this, Harry?”

  “We ask Google.”

  Harry entered the formula into his browser. A moment later several Web pages appeared as results. He scrolled through them.

  “Looks like it’s something called tourmaline, commonly found in something called Baraboo quartzite.”

  Baraboo?

  Oh, no. If that meant what I thought it meant, we had found Fleming.

  And there was no possible way I’d be able to save her.

  Chandler

  “If the mission seems impossible,” the Instructor said, “then opt out. There’s no glory in marching to certain death. That’s not patriotism or bravery. That’s stupidity.”

  “You OK?” Jack asked. “You just lost all color.”

  Harry put his hand on my shoulder. “Can I get you something? A drink? Some sexy underwear?”

  “I think I know where this rock came from. The old Badger Ammo plant in Baraboo, Wisconsin. It closed down after the Vietnam War, but it’s still owned by the government. I’ve heard unconfirmed rumors that it was being used again, for something else.”

  “For what?” Jack asked.

  “A black site.”

  “You mean like Harlem?” Harry asked.

  “Don’t you watch the news, McGlade?” Jack asked. “A black site is a secret US prison. Prisoners get taken there without due process. Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The Salt Pit in Afghanistan. No trial. No lawyers. No Amnesty International or Red Cross.”

  “Just torture, death, and an unmarked grave,” I said, my stomach becoming tight.

  “There’s a black site in Wisconsin?” Jack asked.

  “Unconfirmed. But possible.”

  Harry frowned. “That’s…deplorable. My country can’t do that.”

  “This country does a lot of things it isn’t supposed to,” I said. I knew, because I was one of those things.

  “We can get the media involved,” Jack said. “Blow it wide open.”

  “Then they’ll take my sister somewhere else.”

  “Your sister?” Harry said. “That cute chick in the wheelchair? She’s at this black site?”

  I needed to think. Even with firepower and a trained team behind me, I wouldn’t be able to break into a secret prison.

  “How can we help?” Jack asked.