“Yes, Chief?”
“Bowen,” Chief James Ragsdale said, as if he was speaking around the stub of one of his favorite cigars. “Director wants to see you at fifteen hundred hours. Anything I should know about?”
Bowen shot a wary glance at the wounded prisoner. “No,” he said. “I don’t think she would be aware of anything.”
“Good,” Ragsdale barked. “Do me a favor and put on a suit before you head over.”
August Bowen snugged a red-and-blue-striped power tie against the top button of a starched white shirt and popped his neck from side to side.
Sammy Willson sat at her desk, situated so it butted up to his, and stared at him with a little more than awe. “The director of the United States Marshals Service doesn’t just call in PODs to chat,” Willson said.
They’d dropped Donaldson off at the jail and returned so Bowen could get changed for his meeting.
A POD was a plain old deputy—no rank, just a simple silver star. And that was just where Deputy Bowen wanted to be. His mother, who ran the Republican Party in Flathead County, had asked him if he wanted the presidential appointment so he could carry a gold badge as the U.S. Marshal of Montana rather than be a lowly deputy. He’d told her thanks but no thanks, giving the age-old reply of deputy marshals, content with their lot in life—“a gold badge is given, a silver badge is earned.” So, he’d gone to Glynco for training, done his time in Billings, and had recently transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia five months before to get a feel for life in a bigger office — and to be near his doctor girlfriend.
Bowen looked at his watch and sat down.
“Whatever it is,” he said, picking up the drawing pad on his desk. “She doesn’t want to see me until three. I have a few minutes to clear my head.”
Bowen’s pencil whispered across the paper as he put the finishing touches on a sketch of a court clerk named Roslyn. After his last Reserve deployment as a Scout to Afghanistan, the Army shrink had told him to use his art when he was working things out in his head. An audience with the director was certainly something he needed to work out.
“Maybe she’s giving you a Director’s Award for something you did overseas,” Willson said. Out of her tactical gear it was easier to see that she was not only tall but extremely fit, with a quick smile and curvy build that made prisoners turn flirty when she moved them to court. At first blush bad guys on the street thought she might be a pushover. Half a second into any confrontation and she showed them the error of such thinking. There was a no-nonsense air that Bowen found… comfortable — like a favorite kid sister.
“Pleeeease.” Mitch Lucas scoffed from three desks over, tucked into the back corner of the squad room, farthest from the supervisory deputy’s office door. “They don’t give you a Director’s Award for being a hero in the military. That’s the Army’s job.”
Bowen smiled, half-entertained, half-disgusted. The little Chicken Hawk was a decent enough deputy. He worked his shift in court, hooked and hauled prisoners without too much whining, and did a fair job of finding fugitives with his computer. But Lucas let it be known at every turn that he felt sidelined by Bowen’s presence. Bowen got the good details. Bowen got the good warrants. Bowen got the girls.
Everyone else suffered for not being Bowen.
Lucas turned back to his computer. “What exactly were you decorated for anyway?”
“You know, Mitch,” Bowen groaned, tossing his pencil on the desk. He leaned back in his chair in an effort to pop his back. “Heroic shit.”
“Who you drawing now?” Lucas pecked away, apparently feeling it was his duty to harass the new guy. “Another court clerk with big ti—”
“Hey now!” Bowen cut him off, eyes still closed in midstretch. “You’re about to cross the line, Mitch.”
Sammy Willson backed away. She turned to Lucas, shaking her head in warning. Lucas sat still, thinking things over. Both deputies had seen what Bowen did to people on the street when they, as he put it, “crossed the line.” It wasn’t pretty.
“How about you go f—”
“That’d be crossing the same line,” Bowen said, cutting him off.
Lucas’s hands slipped away from the keyboard. “Who gets to decide where this line is that you’re always talking about?”
“I do,” Bowen said. “And I draw it close so I don’t have to reach very far to slap the shit out of a bully.” He stood to leave, shrugged on a dark gray suit jacket, and winked at Willson. “And when, not if, I do, I might get days off, but I doubt they’d fire me. Hell, maybe they’d give me the Director’s Award. Apparently, being a half bubble off from the war earns me a fair bit of leeway.”
Sammy Willson frowned. “You’re an idiot, Mitch.”
“He thinks he’s God’s gift to the Marshals Service,” Lucas said.
“My daddy had a dog like you when I was little.” Willson sighed. “He was a pretty good dog, too, chasing away panthers and keeping snakes out of the yard. Trouble was, he kept trying to bite everybody that came to visit.”
“What happened?” Lucas smirked, but still half interested.
“He bit the wrong guy one day and got himself shot.” She nodded at Bowen as he disappeared through the front door of the office. “I’m tellin’ you, Mitchell. That’s the wrong guy.”
CHAPTER 30
Bowen swiped his pass card and drove his black government-issue Dodge Charger into the underground parking lot beneath the Crystal City mall off Jeff Davis Highway. He was old enough to realize he was at the top end of his physical prime but still young enough to try to maximize it. He knew his way around the gym and had boxed during ROTC in college. He’d lost only one fight that mattered and still flushed with anger at the judges and himself when he thought about it for too long.
His girlfriend was a doctor at GW University Hospital, which for all practical purposes meant he lived alone. Though he loved to cook, there was rarely any reason to do much but eat canned soup while he stood at his sink. He kept his prematurely gray hair on the longish side so he could be reminded every morning when he trimmed his goatee that he was no longer in the Army.
Bowen parked the Charger in a vacant visitor space against the concrete wall and checked his tie in the rearview mirror before he went upstairs. Since coming aboard with the agency it had always bugged him that the FBI had the Hoover Building, the ATF had their bunker-like fortress near Gallaudet College. ICE, Interior, DEA, all had their own buildings worthy of Washington, D.C., architecture. But the United States Marshals Service, the nation’s oldest federal law enforcement agency, rented space in a mall.
Bowen took the elevator up to the shopping level, then hung a right in the underground to work his way through the afternoon crowds of government employees and military brass from the nearby Pentagon. The guard beside the nondescript glass doors across from Morton’s Steakhouse checked his Headquarters ID and let him by.
Bowen nodded to a group of black women from Human Resources on their way out for lunch. Being stationed in Virginia meant he’d come to headquarters a few times, so he knew people by face if not by name. They smiled back, chatting happily among themselves, apparently not recognizing him. He jumped in the elevator they’d come out of and pushed the button to the twelfth floor.
Miles Nelson, the Assistant Director for Investigative Operations, was waiting for him in the common area of the director’s suite. A South Carolina native, Nelson gave him an earnest handshake and welcome.