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“Anything else?” I quickly asked Rain.
“I can’t consult formally any longer,” she said. “I’ll do what I can, but things are getting hot.”
“I appreciate all you’ve done,” I said.
“Me too,” George added. “Watch your back.”
“Will do.”
Rain hung up, and I realized we had not ended our conversation with our usual Ranger exchange, which disturbed me more than it should have. I turned off the phone and put it back in my pocket.
“Job offer?” George asked.
I waved it off. “Wilcox wants me out of town, but I’m not going.”
“What kind of job?” George pressed.
I looked George in the eyes. “I’m here and I’m staying here. You were right. O’Toole is running Bartlett. He briefed us yesterday that River Vista was off-limits since it now has its own security force. By which he means the Iron Wolves. Who ever heard of—” I paused as I saw the look on George’s face. “What?”
“O’Toole did that before,” George said.
“When?” I went over and put a pod in the Keurig.
“After Cleve moved the manufacturing part of his factory to Mexico,” George said, “he kept his transportation and distribution hub here. He was still employing some people, although most had been laid off. O’Toole told me the factory wasn’t to be touched.”
“Did you comply?” I asked. His cup was ready, and I handed it to him.
“Not at first,” George said. “But he made my life—and that of everyone on the force— hell. Cut our budget in half. I had to lay off a couple of good men.
“Do you know why he did that?”
“He was in some sort of business with the Iron Wolves.” George took a drink. “This is good.”
So much for loyalty to the field mocha. “Drugs?”
“No,” George said. “At least not directly as far as I could tell.” He put the cup down. “Listen, Vince. I’ll level with you. Which I should have done when you came here. But I thought all this was in the past, and it’s not something I’m proud of.”
I felt a chill hit me and an echo from my own past washed over me. I sat down on one of the counter stools.
“I could never prove any of this,” George began with, which didn’t help. “Plus, O’Toole and Senator Alex Wilcox, the present senator’s late husband, were exerting a lot on pressure on me to back off.”
It wasn’t like George to make excuses, but I realized he wasn’t. He was giving me the lay of the land. I thought of the lyrics from that Bob Dylan song:You gotta serve somebody.
We all like to think we’re independent, the heroic individual standing up against the evil in this world, but it wasn’t that cut and dried. I’d watched that play out in Afghanistan, and that, along with Rain’s wounding, had played a large role in my getting off active duty. I’d done things, under the yoke of following orders, that I didn’t agree with. Because I served someone.
“As best I can figure,” George said, “after Cleve moved the factory to Mexico, he was leveraged by a cartel down there. Workers walked off the job. Then the Wolves came to him since they had been working with the cartel since well before Cleve moved the factory. Hard to tell what came first.”
“What did they want?”
“I think Cleve Blue laundered money for the Wolves. They were bringing in lots of cash and it’s not like you can walk into a bank with that. I think they used Cleve to funnel it into his business and some of his other dealings. And he kept a cut. And the Mexican cartel got the workers back on the job.”
That explained Skye, Cleve’s youngest daughter, telling Thacker she’d seen the Wolves giving her dad briefcases of cash.
“Any proof?” I asked.
“No. I got my opportunity when Mickey Pitts beat the crap out of a truck driver. I hauled him in. The driver recanted, most likely because the Wolves threatened him or his family, but Mickey was carrying enough product on him when I cuffed him that he got convicted.”
“What about going to the staties?”
