Tied Up in Knots Read online

  “Because you’re white,” he said pointedly and then grunted.

  “What?”

  “You said African-American before,” he replied.

  “Yeah? And?”

  “It’s very proper, very PC, very careful of you to say.”

  “What do you mean careful?”

  “It’s just, that’s how I can tell whose report I’m reading—yours or Doyle’s—when I see them even without looking at your names.”

  “You lost me.”

  He chuckled. “He’ll put race down as black or white or Hispanic, you’re all fancy and you say African-American, Mexican-American, Italian-American… it’s fuckin’ exhausting.”

  “It’s correct.”

  “It’s careful, and I get why you do it, but Doyle’s in the military so it’s different for him. The rank is important but not much else.”

  I thought about that. “I just never want to be disrespectful to anyone. I think because I don’t know what I am exactly, I’m always careful with what other people are.”

  “Which makes sense,” he agreed. “But you can say black and I promise you no one’s going to lose their mind.”

  “So endeth the lesson?” I teased.

  “Yeah.”

  I groaned. “I wish whatever the fuck this is could end too.”

  He snickered. “At least The Befuddled Owl is out.”

  “You didn’t want to go either?”

  His scowl made me smile in spite of everything else. “Nobody wanted to go, especially not Ryan.”

  I looked around, taking in the deadlocked scene. “Man, I had other plans for tonight, I swear to God.”

  “Well, just don’t reach for anything like your phone, all right? I don’t wanna get shot because they’re aiming for you.”

  “No, come on, it’s gone on too long already. They’re just posturing now. They’re committed to this, and now they can’t back down until someone with power shows up.”

  “I hate to be the one to break it to you, Jones, but lots of people have been killed who were much less threatening than the six of us are at the moment.”

  I knew that too. I watched the news just like everybody else.

  “And I don’t mean just here, but all over.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And now, these cops, they could be scared too, right?”

  “True.”

  “For all they know we’re mob enforcers packing Micro-Uzis.”

  “In the giant red Hummer you guys all came in and this piece of shit Olds we’re driving?”

  “It’s the suits and trench coats,” I teased.

  He scoffed. “How does Ian’s uniform fit in?”

  “Oh God,” I groaned. “I don’t think anyone noticed his beret.”

  “I’m going with no.”

  “If he takes off his coat—Christ.”

  “Yeah. That’d be brilliant on the front pages of the Sun-Times and the Trib tomorrow.”

  “It’d be on the home page of MSN and Yahoo and all those too.”

  “Make sure he keeps his coat on,” Becker instructed. “Neither one of us, CPD, or our office needs any of that.”

  “They started it,” I flared.

  “They did,” he agreed. “But sometimes you gotta rise above.”

  “Kage is gonna have an aneurysm,” Ching commented from his side of the car, letting his head roll forward and back and side to side.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “This displaces tension,” he explained. “And I need to pee.”

  “You should have gone at the restaurant,” Becker told him. “What do I always say?”

  He grunted.

  “Why aren’t you pissed?” I asked Becker, because I would have been livid.

  “Are you kidding? This has been happening my whole life, man. I’ve been pulled over a hundred times more than you have, just because of the color of my skin.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are, buddy, and I appreciate that, and I will say now that the badge normally makes this shit stop before it escalates, but that guy right there, holding the gun on us, he just wanted me out of the car. He didn’t want to let me get my ID out of my coat or the car’s registration out of the glove box. This could have been over before it started, but now he’s done, and he doesn’t even know it yet simply because he saw a black man and nothing else.”

  “So you are mad.”

  “Yeah. This is me mad.”

  I snorted and he smiled back, and then we all heard the command from above from one of the helicopters. “Show us ID.”

  All of us together, carefully, slowly, pulled out our badges. I had no doubt that the stars were very visible, as evidenced by the collective groan from the law enforcement clustered around us.

  “Motherfucker,” the cop holding the gun on Becker and me swore under his breath before he holstered his weapon.

  Oh yeah, he was so done.

  WE WERE all sitting in a conference room in the main police headquarters at Thirty-Fifth and Michigan, looking out our window and across the hall into another room, where our boss was sitting with the interim superintendent of police, Matthew Kenton; Alderman Robert Dias from one of the south-side wards; Chicago police chief of support services, Edward Strohm; and too many others I didn’t know.

  All these people coming in on a Sunday confirmed how serious a mess this was.

  One of the mayor’s aides showed up an hour later—and I only knew because she popped her head in on us first to make sure we were all okay, did a double-take as she saw Ian’s uniform—and then went into the other room with everyone else.

  “You see?” Ryan said into the silence. “This is why we don’t want any new guys.”

  I turned to look at him, as did Becker and Ching.

  “What?” Ian asked irritably.

  “We’re bonding here, right? How’re new guys ever gonna be able to top this?”

  “Oh dear God,” Dorsey groaned. “I really don’t think this is anything but a clusterfuck of biblical proportions.”

  “And you guys are gonna be in trouble,” Becker made known.

  “Not us,” Ching clarified, “only you guys.”

  Ian grunted.

  “We didn’t draw our weapons,” Dorsey reminded them. “We didn’t escalate anything.”

  And he was right… kind of.

  An argument could be made—and was by the police—that the four of us could have walked away, or even better, remained inside our vehicle for the duration of the stop. For our part, with the track record of the Chicago PD, it was reasonable to assume that we were in fear for Deputy US Marshal Christopher Becker’s life, as well as that of his partner, Wesley Ching.

  Clusterfuck was going to be an understatement, I was guessing.

  While I was there, since Kage was a multitasker, he got the cops’ Internal Affairs Department guy in to talk to me about the incident with Cochran with the marshals’ service’s Office of Professional Responsibility liaison, Shepard McAllister. He was a nice enough guy, but as far as I could tell, his mouth was broken, as he was incapable of smiling. Ever. There was a lot of squinting, so much legalese, and too many interruptions to count. The IAD guy—Trey Covington—got really annoyed, but McAllister kept banging away at the same stuff over and over.

  “So Norris Cochran accused Chief Deputy US Marshal Sam Kage of lying to him,” McAllister clarified for like the seventh time.

  “Yessir,” I answered.

  And McAllister shot the IAD guy a look that clearly said Are you getting the seriousness of this? Covington’s groan said he wasn’t missing a thing.

  “Are there records that support the chief deputy’s claim?” Covington asked.

  I was going to answer in the affirmative, but McAllister raised his hand to shut me up. “We are not here to debate the issue of whether or not the firearm does in fact exist, or whether or not it was ever in the custody of the marshals’ service.” He had a ferocious clipping tone that made every word seem
like it was bitten off. It was really annoying, and if I were Covington, I’d want to pop him. “What we are here to determine is whether your detective attacked my marshal without provocation, and the glaringly obvious answer is an emphatic yes.”

  “I don’t think we can conclude that at all.”

  “Oh, I think we can,” McAllister snarled, levying his self-righteous tone at Covington. “I’ve already talked to the waitress and the manager on duty at the diner where the incident took place, and I have the sworn statements of two of Marshal Jones’s colleagues.”

  “Well, I’m sure I’ll have a signed affidavit from Norris Cochran’s partner, who will claim that the incident did not occur how the marshal remembers it at all.”

  “That’s fine. If you take away all the conflicting testimony, then we’re left with what the waitress saw and what the manager saw, and those eyewitness accounts will corroborate what my marshal has gone on the record as stating.”

  We were all quiet.

  “What is it that your office is looking for here?”

  “Are you admitting fault?”

  “I’m asking a question.”

  “For starters the detective will be suspended for no less than a month without pay and—”

  “Not without pay,” I interrupted, and both men turned to me. “He has kids.”

  “And how in the world would you know that?” McAllister asked.

  “He’s my old partner from when I was on the force.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” Covington almost crowed. “I imagine that old partners have a lot of reasons to beat the hell out of each other.”

  McAllister scoffed. “It doesn’t matter. Again I have testimony, as well as tonight’s incident, that shows a pattern of animosity from your department toward our office. I will have this conversation in the forum of your choosing, but know that all of them will be public.”

  “Your stance is that tonight’s incident has to do with some sort of animosity between the marshals’ office and Chicago PD?”

  “Are you saying it’s not?”

  There was no right answer. Whatever Covington said, he was fucked.

  McAllister waited, looking bored.

  “You mentioning public anything sounds like a threat.”

  “No, but again, it’s obvious that your officers are in the habit of physically attacking marshals, as evidenced by yesterday’s confrontation and tonight’s show of force. These facts can’t possibly be in dispute.”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Covington insisted. “You can’t in any way paint the entire department with the same brush.”

  “Oh no? Because I think the climate we find ourselves in presently lends itself to one of absolute mistrust of your department. I’ll bet you if you took a poll of a thousand random Chicagoans, that across the board, they would rather be taken into custody by a federal marshal than a Chicago policeman.”

  “I think that’s shortsighted of you and a rash statement to make.”

  “Perhaps. Shall we test it?”

  Silence for the second time.

  “I’ll talk to Cochran’s captain,” Covington finally muttered.

  McAllister’s smirk was douchey, but it took a big man not to gloat, and I didn’t think he had it in him to not lord it over Covington. Once we were in the hall, while holding his phone, he told me he was already sending Kage an e-mail for them to talk. It made sense that McAllister was chomping at the bit to report his probable success. Everybody wanted to be on the Chief Deputy US Marshal’s good list. McAllister was no exception.

  Back in the room, Ian asked how it went, and so I told him in the same detail I told McAllister, exactly what crap Cochran had pulled on me. Ian came to the same conclusion I had when I was done.

  “So Cochran thinks this gun is in our evidence locker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was just in there earlier,” Ching told me. “I transferred the last of the guns out for processing. They’re all on their way to Quantico.”

  “No, I know there was nothing in there,” I said, fidgeting in my chair, tired of sitting, tired of the same topic, and mostly just wanting to leave. “This is Kage we’re talking about. If there’s a more by-the-book guy, I’ve yet to meet him.”

  “Oh thank God, here we go,” Ian murmured, sitting up in his chair as we all saw our boss point at all the people in the room—except the alderman, who got a handshake—before hurling open the door.

  In real life, Sam Kage was not eight feet tall. I knew that. Logically I knew. It just felt like it whenever he came into a room. I knew men who were bigger: Becker, for instance, and Kowalski, but Kage was scarier. Not because of the hard, heavy muscle he carried on his frame, but because he was a protector. He truly cared about what was his, and that included all of us. We were his men, and because of that, if you questioned us, you were questioning him.

  You really didn’t want to do that.

  From the expressions of dread on the faces of the people still in the other room—except the alderman’s, who appeared a bit smug at the moment—the others looked wholly traumatized. It made sense. Kage intimidated everyone, and I saw the collective breath the people in the room took when he left. Not only was he scary, but he had the power to back it up. When Kage reached out to his boss and he in turn reached out to his, there would be a whole new storm of shit falling on the Chicago PD.

  Before he could open the door to the room where we were waiting, we all got to our feet. He moved immediately to Becker and offered him his hand.

  Becker took it fast, looking almost shell-shocked as he stared at our boss.

  “I’m so sorry about all this and very relieved that you weren’t physically harmed.”

  Because Kage knew Becker’d been hurt in other ways, he added the physical part. People said a lot of things about Sam Kage, and people speculated about the kind of man he really was. But I knew. He was a good man.

  “Thank you, sir,” Becker replied, releasing a deep breath.

  “I’m insisting on a formal public apology,” Kage told him. “You can be there to make a statement yourself or not. That’s up to you. I myself hate public anything, but I never assume anyone else’s preferences.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You, of course, can sue the department as well, and based on the apology, I’m sure there would be compensation involved.”

  He shook his head. “No, sir.”

  Kage patted his shoulder before turning to Ching and offering him his hand, making sure he, too, was all right before rounding on the rest of us. “What the hell was wrong with taking out your badges before you walked up on the car? Why would that have been hard?”

  The yelling surprised me.

  “Were you intentionally trying to make the officers on-site look worse than they already did?”

  He was waiting between questions, but I had the feeling that answering would be bad, from the way his gaze was boring into each of us, one at a time. The undercurrent of murder was there in his face. He was furious and, even worse, disappointed.

  “We’re all in this together, gentlemen. Us, CPD, the FBI, CIA, Homeland, State, all of us.”

  I noticed he didn’t say DEA, and I made the mistake of smiling.

  “Jones?” he said, his gaze zeroing in on me. “Something you’d like to add?”

  I cleared my throat. “No, sir, except to say I didn’t think of pulling my badge before we walked up on them.”

  The whole room around me groaned.

  “But that’s protocol, isn’t it?”

  Was it?

  Ian swore, Dorsey rolled his eyes, Ryan shook his head, Ching looked disgusted, and Becker nodded, silently saying that yes, dumbass, that was protocol.

  Kage’s grunt was not a good one, full of judgment and recrimination.

  Ian tried to defend me. “It was the heat of the moment, sir.”

  “I see,” Kage said darkly, his tone menacing. “Well, because you didn’t think of it and none of you
followed protocol, but because what you did was actually in support of members of your team, I’m going to educate you instead of suspending you.”

  Oh God. My eyes might have fluttered as I imagined the horror.

  He’d once sent me to Asset Forfeiture, where they managed and sold assets that were seized and forfeited by criminals, the proceeds doled out to victims and innocent people caught in the crossfire. Funds were also used for community programs and different initiatives that… God… I couldn’t remember. I knew they did good work. Compensating people hurt by crime was a noble pursuit, but the day-to-day accounting of it was a snorefest. They were, in fact, heroes, but they didn’t look cool doing it. I was vain enough to know that following Ian through the door, being the one on the ground, was something I got off on. I was as susceptible to praise as the next guy. So spreadsheets and endless reporting were not things I had the heart for. I was only there a week, but it had felt like a year. It was a huge responsibility. Huge. The marshal service managed assets in the billions, and I never, ever wanted to know anything about that. I was happy being in the field. I would die sitting behind a desk doing what others enjoyed because it wasn’t me. Sam Kage knew it, and just the idea that he’d send me back was terrifying. I prayed he wasn’t that mad.

  Please God, don’t let him be that pissed off.

  “So you two,” he said, pointing at Dorsey and Ryan, “will enjoy being on WITSEC intake this week, and you two,” he continued—Ian and I were up—“will enjoy flying to Las Vegas to bring back a witness who is not presently in custody, but that the office there has under surveillance. Maybe then you’ll all remember to pull your badges.”

  “Paperwork,” Dorsey whined.

  “Witness transfer,” Ian groused.

  There was nothing on Kage’s face at all to indicate even a sliver of caring.

  “You should get going, gentlemen,” Kage told Ian and me. “That plane leaves at seven a.m. from O’Hare, I believe, and Monday morning traffic in Chicago means you better be there a helluva lot earlier than that.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “And before you go, you need to settle that business with Cabot and Drake. I want to know their status before the plane takes off in the morning since you won’t be here.”