Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

you to be. I know you don’t have the balls to do it yourself, but you could get your boy Schnitzel to do it.”

“Schimmel.”

“Shitzle, Shamwow. Makes no difference to me what his name is. I mean the weird bag of bones. Have him go break a bottle over some JPD cop’s skull. That takes at least one badge out of the equation, and he can do the Hernandez brothers when they toss his ass in Lemon Creek.”

“He’s connected with Valkyrie,” Dollarhyde said.

“Always with the why-nots,” Grimsson said. “So what if he’s connected with Valkyrie? Half the people in jail have probably dug ditches or broken rock for me at one point or another in their miserable lives. I want you to make this happen.”

“Yes, sir,” Dollarhyde said. He sounded unconvinced, but Grimsson didn’t doubt he would do as he was told.

“Now,” Grimsson said. “That other thing…”

Ephraim Dollarhyde ended the call and pitched the cell onto the blotter at the center of his desk. If it had been possible, he would have shot Grimsson through the phone lines. The arrogant fool thought he was oh-so-much smarter than everyone around him. Normally, that’s what Dollarhyde wanted him to think. The inertia of such monumental hubris made him easier to steer in the right direction. Dollarhyde had been the brains behind every important decision since he’d come aboard. Oh, Grimsson believed he was running things, but the idiot was too caught up in his whiskey-addled bravado. Kill him. Dump that. My grandfather would have cut your head off with an axe. In truth, Grimsson’s forefathers were cod fishermen for as far back as Dollarhyde could see. Still a rough lot, to be sure, but not the horn-helmeted, axe-wielding Vikings of legend Harold Grimsson liked to trot out there with every threat he made. And he made a lot.

Dollarhyde was the man behind the power. The chamberlain to the shogun. The special adviser with the king’s ear. But all too often kings and shoguns started to believe their own bullshit and forgot who propped them up. They began to think they were invincible, above the laws of probability and physics. Bulletproof.

Dollarhyde’s phone pinged, showing he’d missed a call. It was from Senator Fawsey. The brainless idiot had left a voice mail. An actual voice mail… Dollarhyde buried his face in both hands. These people were so incredibly exhausting. It wasn’t as if voice mails could be discovered by the FBI or anything… Groaning, Dollarhyde listened to the message.

As stupid as it was to leave the information, it was promising to hear.

According to the lawyer who’d bailed him out, Levi Fawsey had taken off at a dead run as soon as he hit the JPD parking lot. Childers and two other trusted men had rushed in to scour the area, checking the boy’s apartment and all his old haunts. He’d gone to ground. Disappeared. Senator Fawsey’s message said he had a couple of leads where his son might be staying. Thankfully, he didn’t leave the locations on the voice mail. He’d call when he knew more.

Dollarhyde deleted the voice mail, opening the app that was supposed to overwrite everything on his phone seven times. NSA-level protection, the app claimed. In reality, Dollarhyde knew the voice mail was still out there, on Fawsey’s phone, or just floating around in the phone company cloud, waiting for the FBI to grab and use it to bury everyone.

Done is done, he said to himself, and punched in the number for Dallas Childers.

The former Marine answered on the first ring.

“Yeah.”

“It’s me,” Dollarhyde said. “How’s Schimmel?”

“I just hung up from him.”

“So he’s alive…?”

“For now,” Childers gave a soft chuckle. “He’s hurting, though. You’re not going to like what he told me. Apparently, he was downtown and some cop took out after him. He said he had no choice but to run. It’s all over the news.”

Childers filled him in about the kid in the water.

Smart, Dollarhyde thought. Smarter than he gave Schimmel credit for.

“Did he say why he was downtown? Why the cops were after him?”

“Nope,” Childers said. “We’re supposed to meet in half an hour. You still think he might be the rat? That could be why he was running. If some deal went south or something.”

“Not likely,” Dollarhyde said. “Find out what you can when you meet.”

“You want him alive after the meeting?”

Dollarhyde thought about that. “Grimsson has a job for him, so, yes, keep him alive.”

“Unless he’s the rat.”

“Yeah,” Dollarhyde said, knowing there wasn’t much of a chance of that. “Unless he’s the rat.”

Chapter 36

Changing into dry clothes after being soaked to the skin for two hours was nearly as good as a nap. Though, Cutter had to admit, the cold water had drained him. A nap would have been welcome, if he’d had the time.

Bobby Tarrant arrived as Cutter stepped off the elevator into the lobby. Everyone, including the Forest Service LEO, stepped into the parking lot and crowded around Maycomb’s iPhone.

The YouTube video her friend at the radio station had found turned out to be a campaign commercial, produced during Fawsey’s first run for a seat on the state senate a decade before. His car dealerships had already made him wealthy, a man separate from the masses. It helped to be an everyman in Alaska politics – someone whom the people identified with, someone they could trust. It was hard to trust someone with money.

Cutter had spent a good portion of his career helping State Diplomatic Security with dignitary protection, dropping him into the grease of politics and politicians. Standing by the wall, radio pigtail trailing from his ear, pistol hidden under the tail of his jacket, while they talked their schemes and dreams and situational ethics right in front of him, as if he were nothing more than a potted fern. Sure, there were a handful of rich and honest people in politics. But then, in Cutter’s experience, there were only a handful of rich and honest people period.

Fawsey was a millionaire, not