Learning to Stand (40 page)

“
Joseph and I will come and
get you.”

“
Oh God, Joseph. Yes. And
Alex?”

“
Yes, Charlene?”

“
Is Nancy with Joseph? She
was my best-friend when the boys worked together and... I could
really use a friend.”

“
She’ll be there. Would you
like me to call your children?”

“
I will,” Charlene
said.

She was silent so long that Alex thought
she’d hung up.

“
Charlene?”

Alex heard the sound of Charlene crying.

“
I’m okay, Alex. Just
overwhelmed at the idea of going home. I kept our house. I guess
you know that. Would you mind...?”

“
I’m on it,” Alex said.
“Have a safe trip. We’ll see you very soon.”

“
Bless you,
Alex.”

Alex looked at the cell phone when Charlene
hung up.

“
What was that?” Trece poked
his head in the door. He and White Boy were guarding her
door.

“
Charlene O’Brien. Is Nancy
here?”

“
Joseph’s Nancy? Yeah, she
arrived last night with the kids. You didn’t see her?”

“
I went straight to bed.”
Alex began picking up her belongings. “I need to speak with
Joseph.”

“
He’s waiting for you to
finish up. He and Troy need to talk to you about the Fey bank
account. Do you want me to send them in?”

“
Great,” Alex
said.

Trece moved to close the door.

“
Hey Trece? Why does Cee Cee
Joiner have so many kids?”

“
I don’t know. White Boy
says it’s about money.” Trece turned to talk to White Boy. “You
wanna tell her your theory.”

“
Um...” White Boy blushed.
“Um...”

“
Chris, why does Cee Cee
Joiner have so many kids?”

“
Well, Alex, the only thing
Joiner cares about is money, really. We’ve never been able to
figure out how he gets his money. So I figure he gets money for
having kids. You know like the opposite of regular people. Regular
people, like us, have kids and go broke. Joiner has kids to get
rich.”

“
It’s not like he likes
kids,” Trece said. “We’ve guarded him… three…”

“
Five.”

“
Five times on family
vacation. He treated his women like garbage. Most of the time, he’d
be out catting around while the women are taking care of the kids.
I’ve never seen him speak to any of his kids.”

“
Me neither. He looks at
them like they are… what’s the word you use?”

“
Fungus,” Trece
said.

“
Yeah, like mushrooms,”
White Boy said.

“
Who would pay
him?”

White Boy and Trece both shrugged their
shoulders.

“
Ok, thanks,” Alex said.
“Joseph and Troy?”

“
I’ll get them,” White Boy
said.

“
Thanks,” Alex said. “Trece?
Charlene is coming home. She needs us to open her home for her. Do
you...?”

“
I think your contractor,
Jacob Marlowe, has some people who will help. We’ve shared a couple
laughs with his guys. I bet they know people who clean and
stuff.”

“
Thanks, but...”

“
I’m not leaving you alone,”
Trece said. “Never again. I’ve cleaned plenty of floors. If I have
to do it myself, I will.”

Alex smiled. Her eye’s held her friend’s
eyes for a moment. Their history – the good and bad – flowed back
and forth between their eyes. Sniffing at forming tears, she
nodded.

“
Troy and Joseph are here,”
Trece said. “I’ll send White Boy to talk to your
contractor.”

Alex moved her laptop and maps to make space
at the small table for Troy and Joseph. She stood when they
entered, but the weight of their dour, withdrawn faces caused her
sit back down.

“
Give it to me straight,”
Alex said.

“
Well Alex, it’s really more
complicated than...” Troy started.

“
Straight.”

“
The Boy Scout was
laundering money through the Fey Special Forces Team
account.”

F

CHAPTER THIRTY-three

“
Do we know how much?” Alex
asked.

“
Millions,” Troy said.
“Nothing stayed in the account very long. He took a percentage off
the top, and then moved the money on.”

“
To where?” Alex
asked.

Troy’s face went completely blank.

“
Not a chance.” Alex shook
her head at Troy. She’d taught him the
go-blank-when-you-don’t-want-to-answer trick in Special Forces
training.

“
Joseph?”

“
It will only upset you,”
Joseph said.

“
Joiner,” Alex said. “The
Boy Scout worked for Joiner. Right?”

Troy’s head moved in a slight nod.

“
Joiner paid the Weasel from
the same accounts Robert Powell moved money into,” Joseph said. “We
have a straight link – Robert Powell, the Weasel, and
Joiner.”

“
Follow the money,” Alex
said. “But we still don’t know why.”

Alex jumped from her seat to pace along the
edge of the room. Troy and Joseph watched her walk back and
forth.

“
What’s in the storage
vault?” Alex asked. “We cleared out everything except the three
lower storage areas. Those were yours and Charlie’s
areas.”

“
If they were my areas,
Alex, then they would have been the Boy Scout’s area.”

“
We never took him to the
vault. I didn’t like him, never trusted him. He never went there,”
Alex said. “I’d be surprised if, even now, he had any idea where it
was located. Plus...”

“
Plus?” Troy
asked.

“
Max bought the building,”
Alex said. “Or our little real estate empire bought it. Max
received his dual citizenship – French and US – a couple months
ago. He was able to purchase the building which includes all of the
storage areas below. Access to the tunnels has been closed off.
We’re researching the ownership of the other storage areas. For
now, no one gets in or out of them.”

“
There are other questions,
Alex,” Troy said. “Why would Cee Cee Joiner need to launder money?
How did Joiner get an inside connection into the Fey Special Forces
Team?”

“
Why did someone kill his
children?” Alex flushed with rage. “My entire life has been tainted
with the stench of Cee Cee fucking Joiner.”

She threw her pencil against the wall.

“
Let’s slow it down,” Joseph
said. “I understand how you feel, Alex. I’m angry too. But
anger…”

“
Won’t get us anywhere,”
Alex and Joseph said one of Charlie’s favorite sayings
together.

“
Yes,” Joseph smiled. “Troy
brought some white paper.”

Troy stood to tape a roll of white butcher
paper to one wall of the room.

“
Ok, Alex, you talk, and
Troy will write,” Joseph said. “We think we’ve found a pattern.
Let’s see what it builds. Start at the beginning.”

“
Of what?”

“
Of knowing Cee Cee Joiner,”
Joseph said.

“
You have to start. You took
the call.”

“
All right,” Joseph said.
“Almost eight years ago, the President called me to ask if we might
retrieve his best-friend and financial supporter. The President
said his friend had ‘run a foul’ with some ‘natives’ in Brazil. He
was very solicitous. Said he knew our record. We’d worked together
for...”

“
Four years? Is that
right?”

“
Almost five,” Joseph said.
“We’d never received a direct request from the White House. It was
a new president, so...”

“
I was talking about this
with the police detective. We were in...”

“
South America,” Joseph
said. “We retrieved three alive, two dead engineers. Fuck, did they
work for Pecos Oil?”

“
I don’t know,” Alex said.
“I wondered the same thing when I was talking to the police
detective. Troy can you...?”

“
Got it,” Troy said. “I have
a list here of things to check.”

“
Perfect,” Alex
said.

“
Do you remember why they
were held?” Joseph asked.

“
It was such a long time
ago...” Alex said. “Files?”

“
Everything was wiped,”
Joseph said.

“
Don’t you have the record
of your small journals, Alex? The ones you found in the vault last
fall? We had those Marines transcribe and translate them last
winter.”

“
I have the transcripts on
my laptop,” Alex said. “I’ll look through them while you guys
talk.”

“
I got the call while we
were stuck in the jungle. I say stuck because we didn’t have
transport, but we were camping out.” Joseph smiled at the memory.
“Dwight was learning to hunt with a bow. He’d bring back the
wildest stuff and we’d cook it up. It was fun.”

“
The Jakker wasn’t flying
you?” Troy asked.

“
He was,” Joseph said. “He
started flying us a couple years before this. He was... Alex? Where
was Zack?”

“
Let’s see eight years ago?
I bet Tina was having Brittanie. He was with her when she had all
of them.”

“
He was there at the
beginning. He’d better be there at the end,” Troy
laughed.

“
Well...” Alex raised an
eyebrow and shrugged.

“
They aren’t his kids?” Troy
asked.

“
We don’t know that,” Joseph
said. “Zack says they are his kids. It’s just that he was either
flying Dragonladies or with us the year she was pregnant with
Samuel.”

“
And the ‘miracle baby’
Brittanie. They got divorced right after Samuel,” Alex said. “He
tried for custody but the court wouldn’t do it. He’ll probably try
again when he settles in Denver.”

“
Back to Joiner,” Joseph
said. “I know he’s a reptile but...”

“
Found it! “ Alex looked up
form her laptop screen. “Oh sorry, Joseph, did I cut you
off?”

“
Go ahead.”

“
The engineers were picked
up while they were investigating some oil find. They weren’t held
very long... I have both three and six months down. Maybe different
people. When I contacted the captors, they wanted us to take them.
We didn’t negotiate at all. They were happy to have us come and get
them.”

“
That’s right. There was
torrential rain that fall. Massive flooding.”

“
I remember this now,” Alex
said. “The weirdest thing was that they were picked up because of
some title issue. The engineers thought they had clear title to a
piece of property but so did this tribe.”

“
Both sides were sure they
were right,” Joseph said. “Remember, we checked it out and found
that both had clear title to the land. The tribe had lived on the
land for centuries so had tribal rights to the land. The oil
company had purchased land that should not have been
sold.”

“
Was the oil company Pecos
Oil?” Troy asked.

“
The journal doesn’t say and
I’m not sure I ever knew. I’ll have to ask the police detective.”
Alex clicked ahead in her journal transcripts. Peering at the
computer, she said, “Huh.”

“
Huh?” Troy
asked.

“
I never put it together,
but we’d just saved those guys when the president called. We left
to try to get Joiner. They weren’t that far away from each other in
jungle distance.”

“
Jungle
distance?”

“
Distance measured by tribe
or region instead of miles,” Joseph said.

“
Same tribe?” Troy
asked.

“
Sort of,” Joseph
said.

“
Related by marriage,” Alex
said. “Wow, I feel really dumb. I never...”

“
We ran so fast and hard,
Alex. There’s no way we had time to sit back and look at
anything.”

“
But I wonder Joseph,” Alex
said. “When they took the big team journals after killing everyone,
I thought they wanted to learn something about us. What if they
took them so we don’t find out something about them?”

“
You mean like Joiner’s
behind all of this?” Joseph asked.

“
This can’t be just Joiner,”
Troy said. “There’s no way one man, even a wealthy man, had access
to insert the Boy Scout onto a Special Forces team. No
way.”

Alex felt like her head was going to rip in
two. Her hands instinctively grabbed at her forehead.

“
Alex? Are you all
right?”

“
I get these headaches some
times. Let’s finish up and I’ll lie down for a while.”

“
Why was Joiner held?” Troy
asked.

“
I don’t think we ever knew
why he was held,” Alex said. “Executive privilege or some shit. We
only knew he pissed off this group.”

“
He was held in the Amazonas
Basin,” Joseph said.

“
Very close to where Bobby
Lopez said those kids were killed.”

“
But that was eight years
ago!” Troy said. “Bobby found the shale mess last
year...”