Page 115 of The Right to Remain

Jack froze, but his mind was in overdrive. The connection between Serena and CJ had been surprising enough. The power dynamic in that relationship changed Jack’s thinking entirely.

Jack walked across the room to the intercom, asked the guard to open the door, and stepped out into the hall.

“I need to get a message to my client,” said Jack.

“Okay,” said the guard. “What’s the message?”

“Tell Elliott we’re going back before the judge on Monday morning. I’m taking one last shot to get him out of this place.”

Theo went back to Cy’s Club, worked behind the bar through happy hour, and got the musicians ready for their first set. At nine o’clock,he left his manager in charge, drove to the foreign trade zone near the port, and parked in the alley alongside his warehouse space. It was a scheduled meeting, and technically Theo had “agreed” to it, but the annoying voice of his new “business partner” still made his blood boil.

“Evening, cousin,” Baptiste said in his Haitian accent. He was standing outside the side-entrance door halfway down the alley. Another man was with him, but it wasn’t one of the Haitians from the last time. This guy was white, built like a weightlifter, and almost as tall as Theo.

“Who’s he?” asked Theo.

“Elton John,” the man said. “What the fuck’s it to you who I am?”

Theo noticed the footlocker at his feet but didn’t waste his breath asking what was in it.

“I see you fixed the lock, cousin,” said Baptiste. “You gonna let us in or make us break it open again?”

Theo unlocked the door with his key and let them inside. They walked through the office to the storage area. Elton John set his footlocker on the floor and opened it. Theo tried not to be obvious about it, but he saw something a little different from what he was expecting.

“Those are guns,” he said, putting his confusion to words.

“Don’t act so surprised,” said Baptiste.

Theo had been expecting only gunparts. Either Baptiste’s source at VanPoll Enterprises was rerouting confiscated weapons before they could be “destroyed” at the plant, or someone was reconstructing fully operational firearms from the salvaged gun parts.

“Go ahead, take a good look, cousin,” said Baptiste. “That’s the whole point of this meeting. We’re having a planning session at your warehouse, and you’ve seen with your own eyes what’s going to fill those empty barrels. There’s also a footlocker full of cash on its way to Cy’s Club. So don’t even think about trying to tell Customs and Border Protection you got forced into this. You’re in up to your eyeballs now.”

Elton John closed the lid on the footlocker.

Baptiste continued. “We’ve done the geometry. Each barrel can hold eight footlockers. You got till Monday morning to have the paperworkdone for the shipment of twenty barrels of ‘gin,’” he said with air quotes, “to the Dominican Republic.”

The DR made sense. It shared a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. It was easy enough to slip just about anything through Haiti’s eleven hundred miles of lightly patrolled coastline, and it was even easier to run guns through the side door.

“Did you hear me, cousin? I want that paperwork done by Monday morning.”

“Yeah,” he said through gritted teeth. “You’ll have it.”

Chapter 42

Jack was back in Judge Garrison’s courtroom on Monday morning. Elliott was beside him, shackled and wearing his inmate jumpsuit. The prosecutor’s scarf was a matching shade of “prison orange,” as if to send a message that jail was exactly where the defendant would remain. The hearing had been scheduled as an “emergency,” on Jack’s request, but the judge seemed skeptical from the outset.

“Mr. Swyteck, I fail to see how a renewed request for release on bail is an ‘emergency.’ Frankly, it strikes me as nothing more than a second bite at the apple.”

The prosecutor seemed tempted to add an “amen,” but it was Jack’s motion, and the defense spoke first.

“Judge, my client was assaulted in his jail cell for the second time since this court remanded him to pretrial detention. That’s the emergency.”

“Inability to get along with one’s cellmates is not grounds for pretrial release.”

“No, Your Honor, it’s not. But release on bail is appropriate even in a murder case where the discovery of new evidence brings the defendant’s guilt into serious question.”

“What’s your new evidence?”

Jack took a minute to bring the judge up to date on the latest developments, including the recovery of Helena’s handgun in the Pollards’ yard. Then he made his point.