Free The Fitzgerald Ruse by Mark de Castrique

we’d been hit. But if I’d had a choice between him being with me then or being with me tonight, the present beat the past.
    I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Cal, you were here when it counted.”
    He nodded, took a deep swallow of scotch, and leaned back. “And I told you to watch your back.”
    “That you did.” I shifted in my chair and winced. My back hurt like hell.
    “You sure you don’t want me to take you to the ER?”
    “I’m fine. I’m more interested in how you wound up in my parking lot at ten-thirty.”
    Calvin rose, as if what he had to say couldn’t be expressed unless he was in motion. He stood a good six inches taller than me, nearly six-four, and though we were both in our early thirties and had enlisted in the U.S. Army out of high school, Calvin came late to the Criminal Investigation Detachment. He’d transferred about a year ago from prison administration duties, even though it extended his Iraqi tour. He’d told me he’d been fortunate not to be tied to any of the abuse scandals, but the taint of those gross injustices was spreading from the guilty to the innocent. Calvin saw no future down that military career path. I’d found him to be a good soldier, if not a little cocky. But he’d always deferred to my judgment, and jokingly accepted his subordinate role. In short, I liked the guy.
    “The Ali Baba case,” he said. “I called you because I picked up a tail here in the states.”
    “You’re on leave?”
    “Such as it is. Six weeks. I’m a rotation statistic so the Pentagon can claim they’re not keeping personnel in Iraq too long. Of course, I’ll head right back.”
    “Who’s following you?”
    He stopped pacing and grabbed the back of his chair. “Who do you think, Chief? If the swill’s got the connections to smuggle booty out of Iraq, they can certainly find me in Paterson, New Jersey.”
    “That’s where you were?”
    Calvin started pacing again. “At my grandmother’s. I noticed this guy parked down the block. Even though I’ve been out of the hood for years, some things never change. You sense when someone’s not where he’s supposed to be.”
    “You confront him?”
    Calvin looked at me like I’d grown an extra ear. “And do what? Let him know I made him so he could shoot me down in the street? Man, I was packed and out the back door so fast I’d covered twenty yards between saying good and bye to Granny.”
    “Is that when you called me?”
    “No. This was last Saturday. Monday my grandmother phoned nearly in hysterics.”
    “Yesterday?”
    “I guess it was. Seems longer. Granny found her cat on the stoop, dead with a noose around its neck. She read me the note: ‘Tell your big buck and Blackman to return what’s ours or they’re next.’ I told Granny to catch the next bus to Philly where she can stay with her sister and not to leave till I said so.”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    Calvin whipped the hard-backed chair around and straddled it. “They think we plundered their cache. The one you were headed for when you were ambushed.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because three days later when my runs had stopped and I could walk without shitting myself, we went after it. Charlie and Ed were dead, and you’d been flown stateside, so I led some MPs to the site hoping to catch the bastards. That storage shed behind the contractor’s motor pool was empty.”
    We’d tagged some ex-Blackwater men as possible actors in the Ali Baba operation and traced them to a construction company who’d hired them for private security. A tip had told us about the storage shed.
    “What about the suspects?”
    “Gone. Disappeared like a desert mirage. But one local laborer said he saw them the night after you were attacked. Screaming, cussing, guns drawn. He hid because he didn’t know what they were going to do.”
    “How many?”
    “He said three. We’d pegged two, Lucas and Hernandez, but it stands to reason there would be a third, either