NO CRIMINAL RECORD. NO SPEEDING TICKETS. NO PARKING TICKETS. NO CIVIL COMPLAINTS. NO RUN-INS WITH THE LAW THAT I CAN FIND IN MD/VA/DC.
Which made sense. Someone who worked for the Bureau of Prisons would understand all too well the dire consequences of running afoul of the law.
Storm finished off his outfit with a pair of black Doc Martens. It wasn’t fancy. But he looked—and, more importantly, felt—like himself again.
Except now he was curious. What was Mason Wood up to? Had he not, in fact, taken a bribe from the Shanghai Seven? Was he just doing what he thought was a solid for Bart Callan, who he knew somehow from their shared time in law enforcement? But what would make a man in Wood’s position want to do favors for felons?
Storm brought his mental picture of Wood back into his mind and studied the man for a moment or two. Was there anything about him Storm had missed?
Of course. The pants. They were too small. Wood had gained weight recently—stress eating?—and now his pants didn’t fit. But he hadn’t gone out and bought new suits that fit better, because he wasn’t swimming in cash. He was, in fact, in debt to MasterCard.
Storm had, by that point, wandered back to the Bureau of Prisons building, an impressive chunk of limestone designed to impress upon passersby that the federal government took the construction, administration, and maintenance of its detention facilities quite seriously. Storm looked up at the fifth-floor corner office of Mason Wood, as if he might see something that would solve this mystery.
“What are you up to, Mason Wood?” Storm muttered to himself.
Lost in this thought—and busily staring skyward—he nearly missed what was happening at street level: a man with a jowly face and white hair was walking out of the building’s main entrance. Wood was on the move. Storm quickly glanced at the time on his cell phone. 12:02. Lunchtime.
With Storm lagging fifteen or twenty yards back, Wood turned up 1st Street, then right on D Street, where he ducked into a parking garage. He was walking with purpose and without glancing back. There was no reason for him to think he had someone tailing him. Other than fellow professionals, most people Storm followed were delightfully oblivious this way.
That said, Wood’s destination gave Storm a problem. People typically only went to parking garages for one reason: to retrieve their cars. Mason Wood was about to have four wheels under him, which would make him difficult to tail on foot.
Storm kept a car stored near Dulles Airport. He just hadn’t anticipated needing it. He had taken a cab from the airport, because it was quicker than taking a detour by the garage.
He looked around, his head swiveling up and down the street until he found what he was looking for:
A rusting 1985 Ford Thunderbird, parked at a meter. Perfect.
Storm’s first car had been a well-used 1987 Thunderbird that he’d bought in high school for five hundred dollars and lovingly fixed up. It carried him all through college, and by the time he surrendered it to a junkyard a year or two into his working life, it was more duct tape and bailing wire than car.
He knew that make and model better than any car made before or since. There was one important difference between the ’87 model and the ’85. By ’87, the first onboard computers had started regulating many of the car’s functions, including ignition. In ’85, the Thunderbird still started in a way that would have been fundamentally familiar to Henry Ford himself.
Storm yanked the Thunderbird’s door handle, hoping anyone who drove a junker like that wouldn’t bother locking it.
The door held firm. A lesser man might have uttered an indelicate phrase or two. Storm just looked around at the rest of the street. To his mild dismay, there was no other vehicle that would do. It was the T-bird or nothing.
Then his eyes fell on the clothing store he had just patronized. Perfect. He ran in and grabbed the first hanger he saw, hollering a hasty, “Hi. Me again. I’ll be right back with this. Thanks!”
He rationalized the temporary theft by telling himself he had probably overpaid for the T-shirt.
The hanger’s hook was metal, but its body was plastic, and therefore a little chunkier than Storm might have preferred. But the rubber seal in such an old door had been loosened by time. Storm was able to work the hanger in until he found the latch he was looking for.
He pulled up and watched on the other side of the window as a slender metal knob, which had previously been flush against the top of the door, slid into its unlocked position. Then he yanked open the door. He was in.
With one quick jab, Storm bashed off the covering underneath the steering wheel and quickly found the two wires he was looking for. He ripped them out of their mooring, exposing their braided metal ends. The moment he touched them together, current surged through the solenoid, and soon Storm heard the delightful sound of a V-8 engine stuttering to life.
Back in this vehicle’s heyday, a professional car thief could break into and hot-wire a car in less than sixty seconds. It had taken Storm about a minute and a half. But that was good enough. He had gotten himself seated behind the wheel by the time Wood, driving a blue Acura, emerged from the parking ramp.
Wood took a hasty look at the lack of oncoming traffic and pointed himself west on D Street. Storm did the same and continued following as Wood descended into the 395 tunnel that ran under the Capitol Mall.
“Where are you going, Mason Wood?” Storm asked as the Thunderbird rattled along a dozen car lengths back. “Aren’t there enough lunch places in downtown DC for you? What are you hungry for?”
Wood eased into the left lanes, then followed signs for 295 south. He stayed on the freeway as it passed within sight of Nationals Park and neared the Washington Navy Yard. There had been massive redevelopment and a certain amount of gentrification in what had previously been a downtrodden part of the city. A number of upscale restaurants had sprung up. It made sense that a well-paid government worker might seek out one of them for a decent meal.
“What, you want Chinese fusion?” Storm asked. “Italian? Farm-to-table contemporary southern?”
But Wood didn’t exit the freeway. Instead, he crossed the river into Anacostia. The gentrification, quite clearly, had not. This part of Southeast DC was still desperately poor, a pocket of multigenerational poverty and stubbornly high crime less than four miles from the Capitol of the most powerful nation on Earth.
This, of all places, was where Wood chose to exit. He passed the Anacostia Metro Station near Suitland Parkway, then worked his way into the neighborhood. He was making a series of turns, and it was all Storm could do to keep up. He didn’t worry about Wood noticing he was being followed. That was another advantage to an ’85 Thunder-bird: perfect ghetto camouflage.
Storm was starting to wonder just how long a journey into the ’hood he was in for when the Acura’s signal indicated it was turning into a small driveway. Storm kept driving past a former single-family house that had been converted into a business.
The neon sign attached to the ancient siding had several of its letters missing. Had it been nighttime, Storm would have thought Wood was entering an “ASS AG” establishment.
But in daylight, Storm could make out the letters just fine: MASSAGE.
Storm had finally figured out what Wood was hungry for. And it wasn’t food.
* * *
Storm parked the Thunderbird just down the street and did some quick reckoning.
What was the right amount of time to wait to catch Wood in flagrante delicto? Five minutes felt like too few. He might not be flagrante yet. Fifteen felt like too long. The delicto might have already happened.
So Storm decided to wait ten minutes before making his move. In that time, he solved at least one of the mysteries of Mason Wood: the credit card debt. He had two cards—the two his wife knew about— fully paid off. It was the card his wife likely didn’t know about, the one he used to fund his happy endings, that carried the balance.
Did the amount of money he was able to squirrel away each month for
his escapades simply not equal his appetites? Did he have some plan in place to pay it off—some stock he could sell without his wife knowing it—that he simply hadn’t executed yet? Or was he slowly working himself toward a financial and matrimonial disaster, one rub-a-dub-dub at a time?
Whatever the case, Storm was betting Mrs. Wood, dignified school counselor, would be very interested to know how her hubby was spending his lunch break.
With that in mind, Storm pulled out his phone and began documenting his walk toward the building. He took a picture of the sidewalk, strewn with litter and glistening with glass pebbles. He perfectly framed the “ASS AG” sign. He only wished he could play with his phone’s f-stop so he could get the composition right. Automatic cameras were the worst.
He kept snapping as he barged through the door. The waiting room was aged and tacky, with plastic chairs and a decorating style some ill-informed soul had once called “oriental.” He was immediately greeted by a creased-faced woman of Southeast Asian origin. Vietnamese. Filipino. It was difficult to say.
“Hi!” she said, with a wide grin. “You need massage? We give nice massage to nice gentleman!”
Storm took her picture then kept walking, through a curtain into a dimly lit hallway lined with doors.
“Hello? You no go there! You no go!” the woman chirped after him, trying to grab his arm.
Storm shook his arm free and said in Mandarin, “I’m going. And you can’t stop me.”
He then repeated some approximation of that phrase in both Vietnamese and Malay. Not that he really spoke either of those languages as well as he spoke, say, Arabic or French. But he could fake it.
Finally, back to English, he said, “I’m going where I please. You can call the cops if you want. I’m sure they’d be happy to be invited in here for a tour. I’m sure your customers would like it even more.”
He opened the first door, finding only a small room with an empty massage table. The second door revealed a man with a towel draped over his butt, moaning as a woman young enough to be his granddaughter kneaded the muscles in his back.
It was the third door where Storm found what he was looking for— or, rather, what he immediately wished he could unsee.
The Bureau of Prisons associate director was lying faceup on a table wearing only his socks. An Asian woman with well-toned forearms was pouring her considerable efforts on one particular portion of his midsection. She was wearing a robe, which she had opened, exposing her bare breasts.
As the door swung fully open and Storm clicked away, her rhythmic stroking ceased. She looked at Storm with more curiosity than hostility.
It was Wood, with his oak tree rapidly turning into an acorn, who moaned, “Oh, God. Not again.”
Storm had switched to video for the ending—which most assuredly wasn’t happy—as the woman took her hand away from Wood’s now-shriveled manhood and closed her robe.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Storm said. He stowed his phone, then dug two twenties out of his wallet and handed them to her. “Your work is done for today. Here’s your tip. Thank you. You can close the door behind you.”
Wood had swung around into a sitting position and was leaning toward a towel, which was clumped on a nearby counter. In one quick move, Storm swatted it on the floor. Wood looked at it helplessly, his defeat now total.
“Look, do you people really need more dirt on me?” he said miserably. “You’ve already got the photos from last time. Was this really necessary?”
“What are you talking about?” Storm said.
“I’m talking . . . Wait, what are you talking about?” Wood asked.
“I’m talking about your wife and how much she’d like to see the photos I’ve just shot.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Wood said. “I thought we had already gone through this before.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“You work for Jedediah Jones, right?”
Storm said nothing. How could Wood possibly know that?
“You do. I can see it on your face,” Wood said. “So, yeah, this. The photos. The . . . blackmail, I guess you’d call it. Look, I have a weakness, okay? I thought we already established that. No one’s perfect. Do you guys really have to keep humiliating me like this? I’m just trying to blow off a little steam. This is all very aboveboard below-board entertainment. No one is being hurt here.”
“I’m not here to debate the morality of prostitution with you, Mr. Wood.”
“Ouch. Isn’t ‘prostitution’ a little bit of a strong word? Mimi is a sensual massage artist. She’s got a certificate and everything. She performs a valuable service for me.”
“With her breasts hanging out.”
“She works hard. It gets warm under that robe. That’s her choice.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Look, is there something else your boss needs me to do for him?” Wood asked. “Because, if not, I really do need to be getting back to work.”
“That depends. What did you do for him the first time?”
Wood had hopped down off the table, brushing close enough to Storm that he could smell the massage oil on the man’s wrinkled, flaccid skin. Naked looked good on some people. Not on Mason Wood.
“If you don’t know already, I’m certainly not telling you,” Wood said.
“Yes, you are,” Storm said, holding up the phone.
Wood looked at the phone and frowned as he pulled on his underwear. “This is ridiculous. The left hand doesn’t even know what the right hand is doing. You’re worse than the BoP. I thought you guys had your act together more than that.”
Storm watched as Wood yanked up his pants while shaking his head.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Wood said. “It was about three weeks ago? And now it’s all over the news? And the only reason it’s not getting me fired is because I claimed the signature was forged? Which it was, because I made that woman do it.”
“What woman? Clara Strike?”
“Is that her last name? Yeah. Clara. All I know is she’s so gorgeous, she probably could have charmed me into doing whatever she wanted even without the blackmail.”
Storm was ignoring the commentary. Clara Strike had been the woman who first recruited him into Jones’s employ, rescuing him from life as a ham-and-egg private investigator when she became aware he had abilities far beyond that low station. She had since become the love—and torment—of Derrick Storm’s life. Her brains, beauty, and dedication to Jedediah Jones’s sometimes twisted priorities made her one of his most formidable assets. It also made the prospect of a long-term relationship with her all but impossible.
And yet, when they were together . . .
Storm shook the thought from his head. He had to focus on what Wood had just confessed.
“Wait, the order for Bart Callan’s transfer. You signed it because Jedediah Jones blackmailed you?”
“Well, yeah,” Wood said. “You think that was my idea? You should see Callan’s psych evals. He’s got an IQ of one-forty-five and the worst case of narcissistic personality disorder I’ve ever seen. Plus, he’s trained in, like, ten different disciplines of martial arts. We had to put him in one of those supermax cells where the inmate is never touched by human hands, because he kept beating the crap out of the guards when he got pissed at them. That guy is a total piece of work. I can’t believe you guys helped him escape. He’s a—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Wood,” Storm said. “I have a phone call to make.”
* * *
Storm stumbled back out in the street, so momentarily stunned he just stood on the sidewalk, looking for all the world like a satisfied John who was just soaking in a bit of afternoon sunshine after some afternoon delight.
But on the inside, his mind was a jumble.
Jedediah Jones wanted Callan released—then, apparently, helped him escape.
But how could that be? Storm couldn’t imagine what possible value Callan would have to Jones. Callan had skills, yes, but Jones had access to a lot
of skilled operatives who weren’t convicted serial killers. It made no sense that Jones would free a psycho whose only real usefulness was to the Shanghai Seven, unless . . .
Unless Jones was in bed with the Shanghai Seven.
It was the only possible explanation. But it made no sense. Hadn’t Jones been the one who had not only ordered the raid on the Shanghai Seven but had asked that Storm come home with evidence Jones would use to get the criminal syndicate shut down?
Then again, the raid had clearly been compromised. Colonel Feng didn’t have an entire squadron at the ready by accident. Had Jones both arranged the operation and then conspired to scuttle it? That would be classic Jones.
But then what, in the bigger picture, was Jones looking to exploit from a relationship with the Shanghai Seven? What could seven corrupt Chinese businessmen do for him? Who was the cat? Who was the mouse? It was beyond Storm’s fathoming. The motivation for Jones’s actions often defied conventional explanation.
Storm took halting steps back toward his car. Generally speaking, white people only went to Anacostia for one reason. And, sure enough, as he approached the Thunderbird, a young black kid who looked like he should have been in school was crossing the street, making a straight line toward Storm. He wore a long white T-shirt covering a waistband that likely had a pistol tucked in it.
“Hey, mister, you looking for something?” he asked.
Ordinarily, Storm would have disarmed the kid, twisted his elbow within a quarter inch of dislocation, made him confess where his stash was hidden, flushed the drugs down the toilet, then marched the kid back to school with certain threats about what would happen to him if he didn’t stay and graduate.
It spoke to Storm’s state of agitated distraction that he just brushed the kid away with a “No. Sorry.”
Storm sat in the Thunderbird. He was dimly aware Wood had walked out of the massage parlor behind him, soon to be making the trip back to middle-class America in his Acura. Storm ignored him. Mason Wood was now a nonissue, a pathetic example of a man who was no longer a concern to anyone other than his unfortunate wife.
Before Storm fully knew what he planned on saying, he pulled out his phone and rang Clara Strike.