Upper Hand (Cedar Tree Book 5) (38 page)

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F
ucker’s got a nerve, walking in here. Fucking Damien Gomez. If not for Beth’s restraining hand, and the fact that Tammy’s parents are at the table, I’d have been up and hauling his ass outside. Noticing his scan around the diner settle on our booth, I know we’re in for some unpleasantness. The moment he reaches our table, he lifts his hands in defense.

“I’ve got news. Gus is on his way over since he apparently has some news too. Told me to meet him here, but I had no idea you were, too.”

“We were just having lunch,” Beth offers, seeing as I’m unable to answer, too busy grinding my teeth. “Don’t think you’ve met Tammy’s parents, the Miltons, yet? Des, Janet, this here is Special Agent Gomez.” Beth’s introductions done, she leans back and slightly sideways, boxing me in my seat. I know what she’s doing and let her know by flipping my hand over under hers, so I can lace our fingers.

“Nice to meet you and rather perfect timing, I was going to look you up after. Saves me a trip,” Gomez tells them, pulling up a chair from the table behind us and setting it on the far side of Max, who quietly stares at him, the cold fry in his hand forgotten. The bastard barely acknowledges the little guy. More reason not to like him.

“Ah, here is Gus now.” His eyes are on the door where Gus, Joe, and Neil are entering, walking straight over to our table.

“We’re gonna need a bigger table,” Neil decrees and takes off to find Arlene. More introductions and a bit of shuffling later, we are seated at the big corner table, with plenty of room for all, including Max’s highchair. Janet has taken the seat next to him and seems to be keeping him occupied, while Arlene takes orders from the latecomers.

“Who wants to go first,” Gus asks and that puts an end to my patience.

“Does it matter? Just spill.”

Beth’s eyes turn on me and she mouths, ‘
easy
’ as Gus gives Damien the go ahead.

“I assume everyone here is up to date so far?” He looks directly at Des, who nods curtly. He hasn’t really said a whole lot, just watched the collection of big burly guys enter and move around like they own the place. He’ll find out what a tight knit group we are.

“Alright then. I got a call yesterday afternoon from Gus, telling me you had concerns about your daughter.” This he addresses to Tammy’s parents. “I questioned Dylan, who is fine by the way,” he directs at Beth, before turning back to the table. “He only knew her email address at her part time job, and she hadn’t been there since taking off. I think we may have all, at some point, tried that route. He did tell me that she liked spending time on the computer in chat rooms, supposedly with old college friends who’d moved away. I got in touch with Neil, since he’d be on it faster than one of our own IT guys. He apparently had already been digging up what he could from their desktop computer. With the information he found, we know she was planning to meet up with someone in Flagstaff. Here’s the tricky part,” he turns back to Des and Janet before continuing, “she made these plans months ago.”

That’s a bit of a shocker. We’d all been under the assumption she left as a result of the fight she had with Dylan, but this would imply her disappearance was preplanned. A total shock to her parents, who both turn pale at the news.

“She had an account with Ashley Madison,” Damien continues and I hear Beth gasp. We all know what that means, its membership just recently hacked and publicly listed. “She hooked up with a married real estate agent in Flagstaff and has been engaged in an online affair with him since. They planned to end up together, after dissolving their respective marriages.”

“Where is she?” Des barks, his face set to thunder, his wife hanging onto his arm, obviously distraught.

“We have his name and a number and called last night, but his wife answered. She told us he’d been gone for over a month. Needless to say she wasn’t very happy with our call, but was able to provide us with a number and his new address.”

“I need the address,” Des pipes up again.

“Mr. Milton—all due respect, but your daughter is an adult, I hardly think—” Gus joins in but Des cuts him off.

“You had a girl out there mucking up her life, would you sit back?” He blasts Gus, who takes it with a shrug.

“I imagine not. Regardless, let agent Gomez finish his part, I’ll tell you our news and then you decide. Yeah?”

He doesn’t draw a response, but the demonstrative folding of the arms and sitting back against his seat is enough of an answer. Des will sit back. For now.

“Right, so rather than calling, I called our field office in Flagstaff this morning and had them pay a visit. They found Tammy at the address, her new boyfriend apparently at his office, and took the opportunity to ask her some questions. The main question being how money ended up inside her son’s mattress. She claims she had no clue. At first. Until her brother called her at work, the last day she was there.”

I fucking knew it. The little prick had something to do with it. I keep my tongue, letting Damien continue.

“Claims Brian knew there was heat coming down on Dylan and called to suggest she take off. Then he took her by surprise when he asked her to remove money he had hidden inside her son’s mattress before she left. She says she told him she didn’t want to get involved with his shady dealings and hung up. That’s all she claims to know.”

“She left her son sleeping on that mattress? You’re telling me, she walked out of that house, knowing that?” This from Janet, who I’d seen sitting up straighter and straighter as Gomez was talking.

“Settle down, Janet.” Her husband tries to pull her back, but she slaps at his hand.

“Settle down? Are you crazy? That’s our grandson she walked out on. Our precious baby, she may well have put in danger, knowing what she knew when she walked away. There’s no settling down from that, Des. There just isn’t.” With that she slips out of her seat and runs into the washrooms. Immediately, Beth nudges me so she can get out. Now Max starts crying, because both his ‘Gammys’ have left him at a table with mostly angry looking men, so I pick him from his seat and try to soothe him.

“Looks good on you, old man,” Neil says with a smirk on his face.

“Watch it, smartass,” I fire back, to Max’s great hilarity, because with big crocodile tears still wetting his cheeks, he pats his little hands on my face.

“Smaddass!”

“You teaching my little man swear words already, Clint? Come here little man, Auntie Arlene will take you to clean your ears out.” With Max plucked from my arms and settled on her hip, Arlene disappears into the kitchen.

“You guys all related or something?” Des asks, looking at me, but Joe answers.

“We’re better than related. We’re close friends. Not gonna find family as tight as those you pick yourself, Mr. Milton.”

With a ‘
hmpf,’
Des sits back down, eyeing each of us in turn.

“To finish up, we’ve asked your daughter if she’d like to come back to meet up with us, but she declined. We have nothing on her that could force her hand. I can’t tell you her address because of confidentiality, but what I can do is call her later, and let you talk to her.”

Gomez surprises me. For a goal-obsessed, take-no-prisoners fed, he actually shows some compassion. He keeps his eyes patiently on Tammy’s father, allowing him to work it out.

“That would probably please my wife,” he finally says, disappointment evident on his face.

“Right, then as soon as we’re done here, we’ll do that in the privacy of my truck.”

“I can wait for the ladies to get back,” Gus says, “but given the results of this morning’s talk with Tammy, what I have to add isn’t much, since Brian was less than forthcoming and swore by high and low that he knew nothing of the money. This new information is reason to sit down with him again, but perhaps this time in the presence of Special Agent Gomez?” He looks pointedly at Damien who nods once. “Right, I’ll let you set that up with Joe then, Damien. I’m sorry, I know he’s your son, Milton, but I have little patience for the likes of him on a good day. Now that I know he’s played us, I’m better off not questioning him. Joe is the better choice.”

By the time Beth leads a red-eyed Janet back to the table, the boys are digging in to their lunches delivered by Seb, saying he couldn’t drag Arlene away from her office, where she was getting her ‘baby-fix’ from Max. Damien leads Des and Janet outside, and I watch them go with a heavy heart. She’s a sweetheart and he’s an ass, but neither deserves this kind of disappointment and pain at the hands of their children. Makes me kind of glad I went straight to grandparenthood, the place where you can give the kid back to its parents when they get to be too much.
And
do it guilt-free.

“You okay?” I ask Beth, who’s been rather quiet and withdrawn, which is not really like her. She looks at me with a sad little smile.

“I will be,” she assures me, not quite convincing enough. “I feel for them.” I follow her eyes out the window, where the large FBI truck is parked and Des and Janet are climbing in the front seat with Damien.

“She’s nice, but too soft. He’s an ass and too hard. They seem to work together, but they didn’t have a lot of luck with their children,” I offer.

“You can say that again,” Beth agrees, before turning to me. “I’m surprised at you.”

“Yeah? How come?”

“Thought for sure I’d have to bail you out of jail this time for assault on an officer of the law, but you were in total control, even when I left your side.”

I shrug, still looking at the truck. “He stays a bastard and will never darken our door, if I can help it, but he was being careful with Tammy’s parents. Figure there’s some sense of compassion in that large frame somewhere. Just enough for me not to beat him over the head with the highchair.”

She chuckles at that, “Max was in that highchair most of the time.”

“Semantics,” I tell her, pulling her into me as I see Damien leave the truck and stand beside the door, obviously giving the Miltons some privacy. “Besides, Max loves to do stuff with me, I figure he’d have helped.”

Beth bursts out laughing and lays her head on my shoulder, just as I watch Des wrap his arms around Janet, who’s clearly upset. Guess that didn’t go too well. I turn to my Bean and kiss her on the top of her head, enjoying the sound of her laugh.

Blessed
.

I didn’t have to turn around to know that when the door to the diner opened a little later, it would be just Damien coming in.

“They gone?” Gus asks when he reaches the table.

“Yeah. Was not a good scene. They went back to the motel to pack their gear. Plan on heading back to Durango. Said they’d be in touch with you at some point,” he says to Beth, who simply nods. “Fucked up situation.” That earns agreement from everyone. Damien raps his knuckles on the table but has his eyes on Joe. “Right then, I’m off to see a man about a mattress. You coming?”

“I’m ready,” Joe says, bending over when he slides behind Beth’s chair and kissing her cheek. “Almost over, Bethie.” He smiles at her before following Damien out the door.

“Finally,” Arlene pipes up from behind me. “See Max? Grumpy grandpa and Federal Bureau of Idiots man are gone, isn’t that great?”

She swings Max from her hip back in the highchair, where he bangs on the tray in front of him.

“Idjit?”

Everyone bursts out laughing and Arlene backs away from the table, her eyes big, her hands up, shrugging her shoulders and mouthing, ‘Oops’ before she turns around and practically runs into the sanctuary of the kitchen.

A
lmost over, my ass.

I’ve thought about those words Joe gave me almost two weeks ago at the diner.

He did come by the day after, to let us know that Brian finally caved. It’d been Dylan’s money, given to Brian to pay down Dylan’s debt with Sam. Except Brian, who’d been acting as go-between, decided to keep it. Figured he could get away with it, never considering that Sam would believe Dylan over him. When Dylan was approached by Sam, who demanded money, he clued in that Brian must’ve kept it. Joe said they suspect that’s the ‘meeting’ the feds apparently caught after which they approached Dylan. With Dylan trying to get hold of him over the missing money, and Sam questioning his loyalty, he left town. No way he’d be able to get in the house and retrieve the stacks he had hidden in Max’s mattress as a big ‘fuck you’ to Dylan. Less funny when he couldn’t get his hands on it. That’s when he tried to get his sister to retrieve it for him, telling her about the trouble Dylan was in. She wanted nothing to do with it or him. He was surprised to find both her and Dylan gone when he got back in town a week later. And shocked to find the house empty and up for rent. Apparently he remembered Tammy once mention Dylan came from Cedar Tree, which is how he ended up at Clint’s house eventually. 

That makes me think of lunch with the Miltons. Probably the weirdest lunch I ever had. I can’t even imagine what it was like for them and cringe when I think what it will do to them, when they find out the complete extent of their son’s role in this.

Janet’s called me once last week, and I purposely didn’t ask how the talk with Tammy went. It was obvious from what went down outside the diner, but she did volunteer some information.

“She’s my daughter, but I’ll be damned if I know who she is. She had no answers when I asked her how she could turn her back on her son, and it was obvious she had no real interest in having contact with us. Hard as it is, Des has convinced me we’ve gotta let it go. Both her and Brian. We really thought we did alright by them, never saw this coming, especially from her. I just hope when Dylan comes home, he’ll not hold our children’s behavior against us, but I can’t blame him if he does.”

“I don’t think he will.”

“We’ll see. In any event, Des has decided to take me on another trip. A cruise to Alaska over Christmas. He says it’ll keep my mind off the empty house we’d otherwise face. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. Just know I’ll miss Max. I put a package in the mail for him, it should arrive in time for Christmas. Hope that’s okay?”

She sounded so sad, it brought tears to my eyes and I didn’t hesitate. “Of course. And Janet? You are always welcome here, in my house. No matter what Dylan decides for himself, if he wants you in his life or not, I’ll make sure Max always will be.”