RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King Read online

  “Motion!” one of the men hissed into the mouthpiece. “Doors are open and a plane, twin-engine … older model Cessna is turning RPMs. She’s rolling now, target is in the cockpit, pivoting toward the tarmac, gaining RPMs. The side of it’s coming up now. ‘Frank Ocean Edward King’ on an orange and white Cessna ... aircraft is turning into the runway ... starting her run, picking up speed aaaaaannnnnd ... she’s in the air.”

  The men in the seats removed their headphones and started flicking switches. One of them dialed a number on the cellular phone.

  “Joe’s,” a voice answered.

  “Tell her he’s on the way,” the man said.

  An hour later and thirty miles away, Drug Enforcement Agent Judy Wells walked through the revolving doors of the Capital City Hotel.

  She was a pretty woman, though visibly pale, clothing understated and hanging loosely on her body, blonde hair rolled back into a bun. A bellman held the door, brow glistening with sweat. She forced a smile and crossed the marble floors toward a patch of monogrammed carpet and a black lacquered plaque that read Senate Lounge. Her watch said it was 4:35 PM.

  Five carpeted steps descended to a dimly lit room where candles flickered over a cold stone hearth. There were dark oil paintings of Washington crossing the Delaware River, and winter at Valley Forge.

  Two middle-aged men sat at one end of the bar, eating almonds from a crystal bowl and drinking tapered beers. Their ties were askew and their jackets draped over their barstools. By their appearance they had been there for some time.

  Judy Wells slipped out of her own jacket exposing a gold sleeveless sweater and took the corner at the far end of the bar. A mirror at the back of the liquor bottles afforded views of the dining room and door behind. The bar was a favorite of Capital Hill workers, and in general a quiet place to meet during the day.

  “Cocktail?” the bartender rasped.

  He was an older man wearing a pressed white shirt and black bow tie. His fingernails were manicured and his hair dyed black and combed straight over his scalp. “Chardonnay,” she answered and nodded as he held up a bottle for inspection. She was still on duty, but that hardly seemed to matter right now.

  The bartender stepped away and the cellphone buzzed on her belt. She reached for it and silenced the ringer, noting the call was from Jack Halligan, her supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s field office in Washington DC. Jack knew she was meeting an informant and wouldn’t be answering the phone, but his call had been expected. He would want to know what happened at the pistol range in Quantico today.

  She replaced the phone, letting the call go to voice mail, and rested both hands on her knees.

  The men at the end of the bar were laughing and raising their glasses in a private toast. An employee in white shirt and black slacks made her way through the dining room, rearranging chairs and lighting wicks in crystal candles.

  Movement drew her eyes to the mirror behind the pyramid of brown and green bottles. A trio of women in business suits entered the room, crossed the carpeted dining room and took seats in an elevated section above a gleaming black piano.

  The bartender returned with a glass, set it before her and poured the wine, nodding curtly before returning to a cutting board at the end of the bar. She watched him spin a lime on its axis and begin deftly slicing it in wedges.

  With a trembling hand she raised her glass and took a sip.

  This afternoon the informant made a ten kilo pickup in Norfolk and delivered it to Leesburg where DEA surveillance teams videoed the drop. A few minutes from now she would meet the informant and then return Jack’s call to endure questions about the case. And then he would want to talk about Quantico and the state of her mental health.

  Everyone in the Washington Field Office knew that she had been hospitalized last winter and all had been sympathetic under the circumstances. Within a week of losing her baby to SIDS, her husband Tom moved out, announcing he was moving to Los Angeles. She had suffered an emotional breakdown and was diagnosed with acute stress disorder.

  Her return to work a month later was more than anyone expected. Her boss, not wanting to overtax her, allowed her to work on her partner’s caseload.

  Spring arrived and while she couldn’t say she was great, things appeared to be going smoothly.

  Then last Monday Jack had called her into his office and asked her if she was ready for a case. There was little else to say but yes. She had been riding on her partner’s coattails since last winter. Sooner or later Jack wouldn’t be able to protect her anymore.

  She was scared she wouldn’t be up to the rigors of a case, but appreciated the confidence Jack was demonstrating in her ability. So she said she was ready, and he dropped the bombshell that a high level informant in the Latora Crime family had agreed to work with the Agency. Judy was going to be brought in on one of the biggest cases in the city and she was at once both terrified and flattered. Maybe this was the beginning of her revival back to normal.

  Agents don’t talk about crime families like they used to. The mafia was all but obsolete by the end of the twentieth century, having lost the war of survival of the fittest. Now the players had college degrees, rode in whisper-jets, pecked on laptops and entertained rock stars in their mansions. They were younger and smarter, and pound for pound the greater threat.

  Jimmy Latora was one of those pioneers to break the mold. A political science major at Berkley in the 1970s, he had been offered a job in Belize with the Agency for International Development. He made friends quickly south of the border and it was said he bought his first kilo with a graduation gift from his uncle. In a year he had interest in a shipment of cocaine destined for Miami. In five years he had financed an entire shipment of his own. In ten he had a fleet, and all his confidants became millionaires; they were loyal to the end, forming an impenetrable barrier that had kept him out of jail for thirty years.

  But Jimmy Latora Senior died in 2010 and his son Jimmy ‘Junior’, known for his pomposity and arrogance, had managed to produce enmity in the ranks. By 2012 there was a deep organizational rift. One of the longtime lieutenants he had insulted was a man named Carlisle. Now Carlisle was going to give them Jimmy’s organization from the bottom up.

  Today was to mark the first video surveillance of a ten-kilo drop. A day Judy was actually looking forward to before an innocuous email arrived to inform her she was due at the Quantico pistol range for her annual service weapon qualification.

  It wasn’t that big a deal. She could be in and out of Quantico by noon. Agents were always complaining that the qualification was inconvenient, but you went and got it over with and it was never a big deal. Or at least it hadn’t been until this morning when she had a panic attack on the firing line.

  Afterward, she couldn’t describe it adequately. She had been standing behind the booths waiting for the order to move forward. A group of fifteen agents had just finished firing and the smell of gunpowder lay heavy over the room. She could still remember that smell and how it was making her queasy, and then as the Range Master ordered the class forward a feeling of dread began to envelop her. She stepped into the booth, put her hand on the grips and was wholly and utterly seized by fear. Gunfire erupted, paper targets began to rattle, a virtual hail of bullets sent downrange. She could only watch what was happening, heart pounding in her chest. She began to tremble as sweat flowed from every pore. Someone came up behind her and took her by the shoulders and pulled her gently out of the booth.

  They sat her on a bench and brought her water and a paper towel to dry her face. She began to breathe to gain composure, crafted what she hoped looked like a smile and excused herself for the ladies’ room. Minutes later she returned and mumbled something about the flu and then she logged out at the security desk and walked quickly to her car. The feeling of dread didn’t leave her entirely, not until she was past the gate and headed down Route 1.

  The agency had inflexible guidelines concerning weapons qualifications. First failures resulted in
rescheduling. Second failures resulted in a week of retraining. Third and final failures resulted in suspension pending psychiatric evaluation. If nothing ‘duty related’ could be found to account for an agent’s inability to qualify, a formal process of termination would commence.

  But no one was thinking about that now. No one suspected it was anything more than the flu. It was assumed she would return in a week and qualify in her second round and that would be the end of the story.

  But Jack Halligan knew better, or at least enough to be concerned.

  Judy looked at the Chardonnay and let her mind wander back to December, recalling how different things had been back then. She was living in the boutique district of Old Town Alexandria with her husband Tom and little Lynn, their new baby girl. They had titles to their cars and money in the bank. Christmas was just around the corner.

  Sure there were challenges balancing work and a six-month-old baby. Tom was spending a lot of time on the west coast, but he’d had a recent promotion and promotions came with increased responsibility. There was nothing unusual about his demeanor. Nothing to alert her that something was wrong.

  Then Lynn died. Just like that. One cold night she put her in her crib. The next morning she was cold and pale as if someone had stolen her breath in the night. Never could Judy have been less prepared for that day. Never could she have imagined such raw debilitating pain. And in the middle of all this Tom had gone missing. He didn’t call, he didn’t show; he was grief stricken, she had thought. He was handling Lynn’s death in his own way. But hours after the funeral it was clear there was another reason. He told her he was moving to LA and leaving that afternoon. His lawyer would contact her about details like the house. A truck would arrive the next day to collect his things.

  A few days later Judy’s best friend Carol came by and found her balled up on the living room floor. She hadn’t slept or eaten for days.

  The hospital admitted her for shock and observation. She was fed intravenously until nurses could compel her to eat. A week passed and she was released to a psychiatrist’s care and then began a regimen of anti-depressants and cognitive therapy. A month later she returned to work, numb, dazed and damned to despair.

  She knew she wasn’t alone. She knew she shared life’s tragedies with an incalculable percentage of the population. She knew that millions around the globe were less fortunate. Yet for each it must be as intensely unique and personal. For each it was like living in hell.

  She drank more of the wine and thought about her last few months on the job. To be honest she hadn’t been functioning at a very high level – not in the purest sense of the word. The more accurate term might have been ‘performing’. She had been going through the motions and people were enabling her to pretend. But then came the pistol range, which to a civilian must sound like a bad day at golf, but to law enforcement agencies around the world was an inviolable requirement of the career.

  Looking back, it all seemed so unfair: every hour of every day had been like swimming through mud, all of it so exhaustive and repetitive and mind-numbing.

  But you couldn’t fake your way through the pistol range. At the range you couldn’t avert your eyes or excuse yourself from the room. At the range the mind had to collaborate with the body. At the range there was need of all one’s senses.

  In the end it wouldn’t matter that she was being treated for depression or even the fact that she was taking prescribed medications. Prescriptions weren’t forbidden to law officers. The government had learned years ago that people in treatment were less liability than those who were not. This was and always would be about Judy’s inability to qualify with a weapon, which in the Drug Enforcement Agency was a deal breaker.

  She could feel heat rising from her shoulders and glanced anxiously at the mirror, taking another sip of the wine and trying to control her breathing. A tall man, well dressed in a beige linen jacket stepped into the reflection. He looked once around the room and walked to where she was seated. The gold sweater she was wearing was their prearranged cue.

  “Judy?” he asked tentatively.

  She nodded and he took the stool next to her. He offered his hand. “Carlisle,” he said with a light smile.

  Judy took his hand and watched as his eyes strayed to the men at the end of the bar.

  “They yours?” he asked, nodding toward them.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re different from what I imagined,” he said with a look of approval.

  She shrugged and looked down at her lap as the bartender appeared. Carlisle ordered an imported beer and Judy waited until he was gone.

  “Who was in the body shop?” she asked.

  “Man named Frank Filas.” He pushed a business card under the corner of her napkin. It read: ‘Filas Fine Restorations’, and had the likeness of a Porsche embossed above an address and telephone number.

  The beer came and the bartender poured. Judy slid the business card off the bar and tucked it into her purse. “The shop on Ocean Avenue. Have you been there before?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you’ve been living in Virginia for more than a month.”

  “Pickup locations change all the time. Little Jimmy likes to keep it random,” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm.

  “Anyone else?”

  “Two white guys in the back. I’ve never seen them before.”

  “Did they know you?”

  Carlisle shook his head. “Filas shut the door of the office and took the bag from a safe. It’s not the kind of office where the help hang out.”

  Judy looked in the mirror, scanning the room behind them. “Tell me about Leesburg,” she said. “Ever seen the pilot before?”

  “Never.” He raised the beer glass and took a drink. “Big mouth and too close to his business, if you know what I mean.”

  “He’s a user.”

  “His eyes itch and his nose runs. Told me he was flying to Ohio.” Carlisle inspected his fingernails. “The old man would have killed him for saying something like that. Sloppy business, running your mouth to total strangers.”

  Judy was silent a moment, turning the glass of wine in her hands.

  “Any idea where in Ohio?”

  “Suburbs of Cleveland. Jimmy Senior kept a mistress there. Bought her a string of Pizza franchises in the late eighties. She cleaned up his money and after a couple of years got into the powder.”

  “You know her name?”

  “Sandy Mercer. She would be in her fifties or sixties by now.”

  Judy reached in her purse for a pen and pad, scribbled the woman’s name and replaced it.

  “Little Jimmy. You don’t like him very much?”

  Carlisle tilted his head to the side and shrugged.

  “You know one day a Grand Jury will start handing out indictments. Little Jimmy’s going to wonder how you managed not to testify.”

  Carlisle scratched his thumbnail across the etching on his glass. “When the old man died Little Jimmy held a meeting. He said he wanted to make room for new blood. Then after twenty years of working for his father he took me out of Miami. Sent me to Norfolk and replaced me with some kid. Called that an enhanced security measure.” Carlisle’s words dripped with contempt. “Next thing I’m in a warehouse with a boat captain and fifty kilos when DEA Norfolk starts coming out of the woodwork. I hear later they got a tip out of Florida. Seems Jimmy’s new boy was going around South Beach like he was Scarface or something, talking about shipments of cocaine traveling out of Belize.”

  Carlisle looked up and down the bar, then back at Judy. “So they covered up the bust and I made a deal with the US Attorney in Richmond. As far as I’m concerned, Little Jimmy managed to bite himself on the ass.” Carlisle tapped the bar with his finger. “Either way, he won’t presume to come after me. He doesn’t have the clout.” He raised his beer and finished it. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small envelope and laid it on the bar in front of her. “I took a spoonful from
one of the bags.”

  Judy put the cocaine in her purse. “What’s next?”

  “Same run next week. I presume you’ll have people waiting in Ohio?”

  Judy didn’t respond.

  Carlisle stood and Judy followed. He pulled her jacket from the stool and helped her into it. He placed a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “You know you should get out in the sun a little more,” he said

  Then he walked away.

  Judy looked in the mirror.

  It took thirty minutes to turn the narcotics in at the DEA lab and another ten to get up the nerve to call her supervisor.

  She filled him in on the Carlisle debriefing and they talked about setting up DEA surveillance in Ohio. Then he came around to asking about the pistol range at Quantico.

  “What did you hear?” She tried to keep it light.

  “I hear everything,” Jack said. “Just wanted to know if you were okay. This really about the flu? Or something else?”

  “It’s probably the flu and maybe some stress like everyone else.”

  “Don’t bullshit me if you’re in over your head. If you feel overwhelmed by the Latora investigation, turn it over to your partner. Whatever you do, don’t let this crap interfere with your head. I’m not saying you’re not sick, but if it’s something more than the flu get it fixed. Don’t go back there and give them a reason to question your fitness for duty.”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him.

  “Well if you’re not by Friday morning, I suggest you call in sick. Take a sabbatical. Do what you must to get better.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “I’ll be fine by next week. And I appreciate the advice. I really do.”