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  “Don’t think he’s hit by it other than the evacuation. Which is just a precaution.”

  The man nodded.

  The van passenger said, “Don’t worry. Everything was by the book.”

  The driver frowned and looked down, only for a second.

  The man asked, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What? Tell me?”

  “It’s the donor.”

  “What about him?”

  The van passenger said, “It’s a woman.”

  “Okay. What about her?”

  “She was unconscious when they arrived with her.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “Yeah, drugged up.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Two people with her.”

  “What two people?”

  The driver shrugged.

  The van passenger said, “We checked them out. They’re legit.”

  “How?”

  “They had proof of relationship and consent.”

  “Proof of consent?”

  The driver said, “They had video of the donor. She consented to the procedure.”

  “So why was she drugged up?”

  “We have the video,” the van passenger said.

  “Let me see.”

  The van passenger took out his phone and went to his text messages. He pulled up a text from the phone number of one of the two people with the donor. He handed it over to the former SAS guy.

  He took the phone and pressed play, watched the video.

  It was a woman, young and pretty. She was on camera in a selfie video. She confessed to giving consent to go through with the procedure. That was the first part of the video. The second was what she planned to do with the money.

  “She appears to be stoned in this video. Is this how she was?”

  “No. I told you she was already unconscious.”

  “Who did you meet with?”

  The driver told the SAS guy who they ended up meeting with at the extraction site. He told the SAS guy about the verification of identities. He told the SAS guy about the relationship between the three of them. And he told him that they wired the money to them. All of it went off without a hitch.

  The SAS guy asked, “Did they call nine-one-one for her?”

  “We told them to wait ten minutes after we were all packed up and drove away.”

  The van passenger said, “As we always do.”

  The SAS guy nodded and asked, “Did they seem trustworthy?”

  The van passenger nodded, eagerly. But the driver said nothing.

  The SAS guy looked at him and waited.

  The van driver said, “They were sketchy, but I don’t foresee a problem. The girl gave consent. You saw it in the video. They definitely needed the money.”

  The SAS guy said, “They all need the money.”

  He turned away from the two men for a moment, walked over to the van. He rubbed his chin like he was thinking.

  Then he spoke again.

  “Okay. Take the merchandise inside. You know where to store it.”

  He was talking to the van passenger. That was clear.

  The SAS guy placed a hand on the van driver’s shoulder, holding him there like he was waiting for the passenger to get the merchandise and take it inside, which he was.

  The van passenger went to the side of the van and unlocked the door with a separate, extra key. Then he slid it open. He vanished inside the back for a moment until he came out with essentially a cooler. Only not a cooler for beer. This one was all metal and hard plastic. It smoked as it came out of a freezing cold temperature like it had been packed in dry ice.

  It was a medical cooler, marked BioWaste on the side in block, black letters.

  The top of the cooler had a combination lock embedded into it. Once it was closed, the combination was known only by a technician at the warehouse.

  The tech with the combination was nowhere in sight. He would arrive within an hour to open the cooler and inspect the incoming stock.

  The van passenger took the medical cooler and disappeared into the warehouse.

  The SAS guy turned back to the van driver and said, “We don’t take chances like this.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I thought under the circumstances; it was okay.”

  “It is. But this donor better keep her shit together. No blowback.”

  “I got it.”

  “I want you to monitor it.”

  “How?” The van driver paused a beat and then added, “Need me to drive back there?”

  “The contact in Rapid City.”

  The van driver nodded.

  The SAS guy asked, “You trust him?”

  “Yeah. He’s been reliable.”

  “Call him. Have him check in on this donor and her two friends. Make sure there’s no complications.”

  “Got it.”

  “Do it now.”

  The van driver hopped to it and pulled out his phone. He called the contact in Rapid City who had just finished breakfast in his own house. He had finished lacing up his shoes and was about to head out the front door when the phone rang.

  “Yo.”

  “It’s me.”

  “I know. What’s up? Problem with the van? You make it?”

  “We made it. No problem.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “We need something else from you.”

  “Okay.”

  “The donor may cause us problems.”

  “You need me to take care of him?”

  “It’s a woman. And no. Nothing that extreme. Not yet. We need you to check in on her and two others. Her associates. I’ll text you their names.”

  “What you want me to do? Call them?”

  “Don’t call them. I need you to drive out there. Go to the nearest hospital and check for her. She’ll be in recovery somewhere. She had major surgery last night.”

  The contact in Rapid City paused a beat and then asked, “Where was the surgery done?”

  “Deadwood.”

  “Twenty miles up the road. I’ll send one of my guys.”

  “No! You go!”

  “Okay. Okay. Fine. I’ll go check it out today.”

  “You go check it out now!”

  The contact stayed quiet. He didn’t like being talked to this way. He wasn’t used to it. Guys who talked to him that way didn’t normally get away with it. Normally, he ended up with their car.

  But he said nothing about it. The money was good, and he needed it. His main business of late was peddling opioids on the bored rural population around Rapid City. This time of year, coming up on the middle of winter, business was booming. People were bored. Their incomes faded away like the colors of leaves on the trees. He didn’t need the money from these guys, but the money was good, too good to pass up.

  So, he told them what they wanted to hear. He agreed to go check out the donor, personally, today.

  Five minutes later, he was off the phone and texting one of his guys who lived toward Deadwood to check it out for him.

  Chapter 14

  B Y TEN IN THE MORNING, Rower drove right past the turn for the Reznor sheriff’s station. She drove past it by a good hundred yards when she got turned around at a barely maintained train yard. It was more of a ghost train yard than a working one.

  She saw zero signs of life.

  The yard had a chain-link fence wrapped around it that had been standing since the early eighties. The fence had too many broken links to count. There were child-sized holes all over the place.

  Rower saw the rail. It came in from the west and went out to the east. The rail had been decommissioned long ago—no doubt about it. What remained were bent-up metal and missing rail blocks. Both directions, west, and east, were barricaded by large metal, angled constructs that looked like Czech hedgehogs, a device used by the Germans in WWII. They were antitank obstacles that were extremely heavy. The Germans dropped them into the sand at Normandy Beach by the thousands to stop
the Allied Forces from driving tanks up onto the beach.

  There were still trains in the yard, prehistoric ones.

  Some were rusted, and the rest were a different age of rusted as if they were the first trains to ever come off the factory floor, the great-great-grandfathers of the modern train.

  At first, she didn’t know why the trains and the yard were still there until she saw a small two-story building off to the side with a sign posted out front with kid-friendly blocks of letters on it with little cartoon trains. The place had been turned into a train museum for kids.

  She noticed a lot of the trains were covered in colorful graffiti, which was meant as a way of spicing up the colors for the children.

  Weird, she thought. But then she imagined a family clan living out here, maybe losing their business due to staggering economic changes. Maybe someone in the family was a train lover, and they somehow managed to buy up the trains and the yard and decided to turn it into this. It was kind of neat.

  Rower looked away from the trains and glanced down at her phone. Google Maps was giving her issues. It told her to continue straight for another ten miles, but she knew she was close.

  She backtracked, and within a minute, Maps recalibrated and told her where to turn. She arrived at the station just as Sheriff Shostrom was stepping outside for a smoke.

  She knew it was him because even though she had never been to Reznor before, had never heard of it; she had met with Shostrom before, naturally. She was the designated agent over the region that his county was in.

  Shostorm was a short man, about five-foot-six. Standing next to his two deputies, that she couldn’t identify, Shostrom looked even smaller.

  Rower parked in the only other parking spot left open and got out.

  “Henry, how are you?”

  Shostrom never got the chance to light the cigarette. He kept it in his hand with a metal Zippo. He stepped forward off the front step of the station and greeted her halfway.

  He nodded at her and offered a hand to shake, which she took.

  “Special Agent Alaska, good to see you again.”

  “Good to see you. You don’t need to call me special agent. Just Alaska is fine.”

  A small breach of protocol, she knew, but the rural cops appreciated it. It gave her the advantage of trust. That was a price she was willing to pay for the potential verbal reprimand that she might get if she ever got caught by her SAC.

  Trust among rural cops was very important. For Rower, two of the three gunfights she had ever been in were out in less populated areas. People who lived out here were more likely to carry a lot more firearms than people living in urban areas, in her region of the country at least. Not to say that suspects in Rapid City or Minneapolis didn’t carry guns and didn’t shoot at her. But people out here collected guns and they fired them a lot. Hard to fire a gun in a city without being noticed. Easy to fire guns out here. No one would even know in some areas.

  So, for Rower, trust with local cops was essential.

  “Alaska, these are my boys, Rousey and Roberts.”

  Rower shook their hands, didn’t bother to memorize their names because they wore nameplates. She could look when she needed to.

  Rower asked, “The guy inside?”

  “He is.”

  Shostrom lit his cigarette and puffed on it, blowing the smoke away from her.

  “He say anything?”

  “He says he’s not guilty.”

  “Who is he?”

  Shostrom reached into his pocket and handed her the passport.

  She flipped it open, noticed the numerous travel stamps, and read the name.

  “Widow?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  She closed the passport but didn’t return it. She kept it in her hand.

  “What’s his story?”

  Shostrom told her the whole story. Beginning to end. All of what Widow claimed happened last night, all of what they knew happened from the eyewitnesses and the security camera footage at Overly’s.

  She said, “Did you pull the gas station cameras? Check with the night clerk?”

  “I called the gas station. The night clerk claims he remembers him.”

  “He sure?”

  “He described him exactly.”

  “And?”

  “And they are sending the footage to back up the story.”

  “Was the woman with him?”

  “Not according to the clerk. And the clerk backed up his story about being ditched. No woman. No car. And Widow wandered off alone and down a dark road, just as he claims.”

  Rower nodded and turned and went back to the car. She opened the back door and took out a thin briefcase. She closed the car door. And walked back to them.

  “I’m gonna go see him.”

  “You don’t want to visit the victim first?” Rousey asked.

  She looked at him.

  “The victim awake yet?”

  Shostrom said, “Nope. Comatose.”

  “Then what’s she gonna tell me?”

  Shostrom smirked and took another drag off his cigarette. He was about to discard it when Rower put her hand up.

  “No. You stay out here. Finish your smoke. I wanna talk with him alone.”

  Roberts said, “I should go with you, ma’am.”

  “For what?”

  Roberts looked at Rousey, a quick side glance, then he looked at Shostrom, who puffed the cigarette and shrugged at him.

  “He’s dangerous.”

  “How do you know that?” Rower asked.

  “He tried to kill that girl.”

  “Innocent until proven guilty.”

  Roberts asked, “How do you know who’s dangerous then? If you go around seeing all suspects as innocent civilians?”

  “I said innocent until proven guilty. I see everyone as dangerous. At all times. No exceptions.”

  Roberts looked her up and down, not in a slow way, but not fast either. It was slow enough for her to take note of it.

  Rower was late thirties, divorced, no kids, and she liked to drink more than the Bureau’s recommended amount in a week. She only drank off duty, of course, which was most nights, these days.

  Rower didn’t drink wine or mixers like a rookie agent. She drank whiskey, neat—the same brand. The same year it was barreled if she could find it.

  Despite the drinking, Rower ate moderately healthy. She didn’t go to the gym, unless she was back in Minneapolis in her two-bedroom apartment, with one empty guest room and no pets. She did have five fake floor plants that she had named. She called them all Debbie, which was the name of a calf she had had growing up on a dairy farm.

  With no motivation to seek out new gyms every night that she spent on the job, on the road in motels, she did push-ups when she woke up, before coffee. She did the same number of push-ups before bed. Three days a week she did sit-ups in the morning and before bed. And four days a week she jumped rope.

  She carried a jump rope in her briefcase.

  Rower was proud of her fitness, but she hated guys on the job making comments or looking too long.

  Roberts had done this.

  She noticed, and she put him on notice with a look. He saw the look but didn’t register it. She knew he didn’t. Men who registered the cold look returned it with a shamed expression, knowing they had been busted.

  Roberts didn’t express this to her.

  But she said nothing to him about it because of trust.

  It may come down to a gunfight with her life on the line and Roberts might be the extra gun with the extra bullet to make the difference.

  Trust.

  Chapter 15

  R OWER WENT in alone to the Reznor sheriff’s station. The layout was easy enough—a simple bullpen that doubled as the entrance. There were three desks laid out, two back to back, and one facing the entrance like a reception area. There was a phone on every desk, but only two computers—one at reception and another on the farthest desk.

  Interes
ting, Rower thought. She had seen a lot of small sheriff stations. This one wasn’t that bad for the town it served.

  Around the corner, through a door entryway, she saw a hallway with three cell doors.

  She walked down and found the man called Jack Widow in the last one. He was standing a foot behind the bars, staring at her and waiting.

  She walked to the center of the hall and stayed standing a good ten feet back. And then she looked Widow up and down, not blatant and rude like Roberts had done to her, but more like sizing him up, like most good cops did.

  He recognized the movement.

  Then she did something he wasn’t expecting. She looked him in the eyes and walked right up to the bars.

  She said, “Mr. Widow?”

  Widow nodded. He noticed his passport in her hand.

  She reached into her inner jacket pocket, popping her jacket open. He saw her hip holster and the exposed part of a Glock 22. She pulled out a faded black leather billfold. She flipped it and showed him her FBI badge and ID.

  He looked at it.

  The ID was behind a milky, plastic cover. There were an FBI badge and an ID card. He read the Department of Justice, the big FBI letters, and saw her designation as a special agent, along with her Federal ID number and name.

  She spoke as he read the name.

  “My name is Alaska Rower. I’m an Investigator with the FBI.”

  Widow smiled and reached out his hand, offered it to her to shake.

  He said, “Jack Widow. No fancy title other than that.”

  She stopped, froze and stared at his hand.

  Trust, she thought. But not with an attempted murder suspect.

  She said, “I can’t shake your hand.”

  “I know. Just wanted to see if you would.”

  He pulled it back.

  She put the badge, ID, and wallet back into her jacket.

  “You understand why you’re in here?”

  “I do. But I shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. ‘Sides breaking down a door. I suppose.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the story?”

  “I already told Shostrom. I’m sure he told you.”

  “He did. But why don’t you tell me?”

  Widow repeated the story. The gas station, being abandoned, deciding to take the road less traveled, seeing the lights, finding the dog, the girl, and the rug. He told her about carrying her and finding his way to Overly’s biker bar.