Twenty-Four

Fallon was very familiar with underground establishments. He’d learned a long time ago how to use cash and subtle questions in the right sorts of places to find what he was looking for without a lot of scrutiny or pushback. Even so, it was astounding to witness how many underground contacts and allies Boyle had amassed over the years.

Allies was perhaps too strong a word. None of the men setting up camp in the old depot were friends of Boyle.

First had been the prisoners. Boyle, it seemed, had spent his entire career catching powerful people in compromising positions, and was now owed more than a few favors. A judge was able to get the convicts released from the federal prison in Alabama, but all of those men had either been killed by the party of Lean Dogs chasing them, or tucked tail and fled once their buddies were killed. Boyle had fumed for about a hundred miles, and Fallon had figured that was that: they were on their own. His plan at that point had been to abandon the kid and flee the second Boyle gave him the chance.

Instead, Boyle had placed a dozen more phone calls, and that was when the thugs-for-hire had started coming out of the woodwork, lured by the promise of cash and indifferent to the threat their targets posed.

“Lean Dogs don’t fuckin’ scare me,” one of the men, a hulking bruiser named Lloyd, had said when he introduced himself in front of the depot.

Lloyd and his men, who’d arrived in three nineties-era F150s lifted up on fat mud tires and tricked out with spotlights, brush guards, winches, and aftermarket welded doors that looked armored, were unloading duffels and setting up tables, and chairs, and all manner of camp equipment on the moldy concrete floor of the abandoned metal warehouse where hunters had once brought their gator hauls for processing.

Remy was over in a corner – Fallon had gotten too nervous leaving him outside after the little shit almost got himself eaten, so he’d hauled him indoors to keep a closer watch on him – tampering with some bit of trash he’d found.

“Hey, Mulder,” someone called, and Fallon hated that he turned around.

The man who’d called him was wiry and rat-faced, with a scraggly mullet so stereotypical Fallon wondered if it was a wig. He laughed when Fallon turned, and gestured to the piece of equipment he stood beside: a massive hook on a length of wire attached to a rusted hydraulic lift, and a track in the ceiling that ran all the way out through a roll-top door to the fetid concrete pool out back. “What’s this used for?”

“We’re in a gator processing depot,” Fallon said. “What do you think it’s for?”

The rat-faced man put his hands up. “Hey, I’m just wondering. Does the hook start here, or out there?” He grinned, afterward, a shitty, shit-eating grin.

“Take your best guest,” Fallon said, and his phone rang.

For the seventh time in a row.

With a swallowed curse, he turned away from Rat Boy and checked the ID display. It was his wife, same as the first six times, and the sight of her name set his teeth on edge – further on edge. She’d been the type to call, and email, and pester, and generally want to talk to him every ten minutes in the first years of their marriage, but time, and kids, and his own disinterest had cooled that desperation. He’d called her a few days ago to tell her his assignment had been extended, and she’d said, “Be careful, love you!” This, though, this incessant calling, was out of character.

Maybe one of the kids was sick, or his dad back in the hospital. Something. In any event, he knew he couldn’t afford to let her jam up his phone for the next whoever knew how long.

“Marianne, now’s really not a good time,” he snapped when he answered.

Before he could say I’ll call you later, she let out a high, breathless sound of distress that set all of his hair on end. She knows . That was his first thought. His mind flashed not to his kids, or to her, injured, bandaged, deathly sick. She knows . That constant, back-of-the-consciousness terror that had plagued him for all of his adult life: that someone had learned his secret. That someone knew what he’d paid Miss Carla, and others like her, for.

“Joe, I’ve been calling and calling you!” she burst out, and he could tell that she was near tears; could envision her clutching at the diamond solitaire necklace he’d given her for their fifteenth anniversary, a bloodless, candlelit dinner affair after which he begged off of sex with a headache.

Usually, when she got like this – a more and more frequent occurrence, which was annoying, because he’d thought wives were supposed to care less as marriages aged – he put on a soothing voice and talked her down from her spiral with a familiar list of platitudes. But today, in light of his current circumstances, he snapped, “Yeah, stop doing that! I told you I’m on a case!”

“Stop yelling at me!” she yelled back. Then hiccupped and failed to suppress a sob.

“Jesus – fine, okay, yeah. I’m sorry,” he said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“If you hadn’t been yelling at me, I could have told you –”

“Marianne.” He didn’t think he sounded all that patient, what with his teeth gritted, but it was the best he could do.

She took a series of shuddering breaths during which he listened to men unload lots of clinking, metallic gear onto the tables behind him. One of them laughed, an ugly barking sound.

Finally – only a few seconds that felt like hours – Marianne collected herself and said, “This woman called me. An agent. She said some things…Joe, the things she was saying…” Her breaths verged toward hyperventilation. “Terrible things, about you, and that you’re being arrested, and I had to know…”

Whatever else she said after that was lost to the blood pressure whine that started up in his ears. He tried to think: agent. A female agent. But who? He couldn’t…he didn’t know…And maybe it was all a trap, yeah, that was it, it was all bullshit, someone–

His phone beeped to tell him he had an incoming call. When he pulled back to check the screen, he saw an unfamiliar number with a Quantico area code.

Face numb, heart beating so high and quick in his throat it threatened to choke him, he said, “Marianne, I’ll have to call you back,” and hung up on her to accept the other call while she was still midsentence.

He accepted the other call with a trepidatious, “Hello?”

“Agent Fallon?” an unfamiliar, professionally cool female voice asked.

He debated, briefly. He was up to his eyeballs in shit at this point, and if this woman was an agent, she could very well have his phone tracked, so what was the point in lying? “Yeah.”

“This is Special Agent Isabella Duet. I’m currently working the Grendel case in New Orleans.”

“Oh, fuck,” he blurted. Who could blame him? With the way things were going, he was either going to shit his pants or suffer a massive coronary any moment now.

“Look,” she said, tone shifting to a tired, down to earth register. “You could pretend you don’t know what this phone call is about, and I could ask you a bunch of leading questions like I was going to get a straight answer out of you, or we could be honest with one another.”

When he didn’t respond, because he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say, she continued, “I know two things. One: Boyle took Remy Lécuyer. Two: you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Shock stilled the racing of his pulse. “What?”

She sighed. “I’m speaking to you off the record here. This case is fucked. It won’t get solved, and I don’t care what Boyle does or doesn’t do. But that’s an innocent boy, and I want to find him. I think you want to get as far away from Boyle as possible. We could help each other out.”

Help each other out . That was how Boyle had phrased it two years ago when Fallon had been promoted to his second-in-command. Fallon could still smell the bourbon on the other man’s breath, and see the bright glimmer of fervor in his eyes on that evening in the bar. When Boyle had gripped his shoulder harder than necessary and steered him to a dim corner booth. We’re the same, you and me. We’ve got…wants and needs. Those wants and needs hadn’t been the same, obviously, but it had been so easy, then, to get roped into the idea of mutual protection; of FBI protection, thanks to a few high-placed individuals with wants and needs of their own.

But two years had made him warier, and smarter.

He sighed. “Do you really think I’m gonna fall for that?”

“Hey, Mulder,” one of the thugs shouted, and he held up a finger over his shoulder.

A quick glance proved that Remy was no longer playing with garbage, but instead sat with his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them in a pose that, despite conventional wisdom, looked neither frightened nor defensive. He was staring at Fallon, eyes huge and luminous brown in the dimness of the building, like some Amazonian creature watching him through the trees. Decidedly unsettling.

What’s he looking at?

And then Fallon knew, because a hand gripped his shoulder – Boyle! but, no – and spun him around. It was Lloyd, all up in his face, breath sour, piggy eyes narrowed. “Where the hell’s the money?”

Fallon dug an envelope out of his back pocket and handed it over; took three big steps back once Lloyd released his shoulder in order to take it. “That’s half,” he reminded, “like we talked about. You get the second half when the job’s done.”

Lloyd grunted in the affirmative and wandered back to his men, counting humidity-crumpled bills.

Fallon dragged a hand through his hair, took a shaky breath, and turned back around.

Remy was still staring at him, and Fallon had a sudden, intense, terrifying mental image of those same eyes on Remy’s father…and what the giant of a man would do to Fallon if he caught hold of him.

He’d forgotten about the phone still clamped to his ear until Duet said, “Do you really have anything to lose?”

He swallowed, throat dry. “No. I guess not.”