On Thin Ice Page 2

  Mick had been following the diatribe with a certain amount of cynical amusement, but that particular emotion disappeared quickly when he heard the phrase that triggered his own temper. “Fellow agent?” he snarled, pushing himself upright. “No pencil-pushing bureaucrat is my fellow ag . . .” He ground to a halt, forcing down the rest of the condemnation like a bitter tonic. It left an acrid taste that was hard to swallow, but he wasn’t entirely suicidal when it came to his career. A harangue against pencil-pushing suits to McMahon, who was the biggest pencil pusher of them all, probably wasn’t the wisest course of action he could take.

  Swallowing his pride with great difficulty, he mumbled, “My apologies.” God, that hurt. But he had no desire to end up humping a desk in Waaskooskie Peoria. He gave it a little more thought and then limped out a grudgingly tacked-on, “Sir.”

  “You called him a cocksucker, Vinicor!”

  “Yeah, well, sorry about that, too. But in my own defense, sir, he called me in asshole. Now you know as well as I do that assholes are anyone who’s not DEA, sir—and especially not a DEA street hump.” Vinicor grinned crookedly. “Let’s me out.”

  “Oh, what the hell,” McMahon suddenly capitulated. “He was only FBI anyhow.”

  Mick swallowed a laugh. His butt was saved only because he’d had the good fortune to threaten an FBI agent instead of one of the DEA’s own. You had to love it.

  The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a standing rivalry. A 1982 attorney general’s order directing a coordinated effort between the two agencies had set the tone when it required the DEA administrator to report to the AG through the director of the FBI.

  It was an order that had never once been followed and one the attorney general was wisely considering rescinding. He much preferred that both agency heads continued to report directly to him anyway, having learned the hard way that day-to-day informal coordination worked much more successfully than any attempts at a formal arrangement. Even then it required the deputy attorney general to oversee operational matters and resolve disputes between the two agencies.

  The supervisor had been shuffling through some papers on his desk. Finding what he wanted, he looked up at Mick. “So. You ready for a new assignment?”

  Mick hesitated. The truth was he knew he was in serious danger of burning out. Deep cover required an agent to sleep, breathe, and eat his role twenty-four hours a day, for however many days were necessary to see an assignment through to its completion. A field agent, or hump as they were known in the lexicon, was out there all on his own with no one to back him up, and armed, more often than not, with nothing more substantial than a bullshit story and his acting ability.

  That part Mick could live with. Hell, his own mother had once said he was such a good liar that he was bound to end up either a con artist or a politician . . . and of the two, she had added, she sort of hoped he’d opt for con artist. No, what really affected his general attitude these days was that even when he did make a righteous bust, it seemed the suits and the politicians were invariably standing in line just waiting for an opportunity to undo all his hard work. Mick’s belief in actually making any kind of difference in the war on drugs had been wearing increasingly thin.

  Then McMahon said persuasively, “This is undercover, Vinicor, not deep cover. Hell, it’d be like a day at the beach for you.” He tossed a file on the desk.

  Mick resisted the temptation to see what it contained for about forty-five seconds before he broke down and scooped it up. A loose snapshot slid from the folder and he plucked it off the desktop.

  “Ice skaters?” Mick looked incredulously from the picture to his supervisor. “You want me to bust a coupla kid ice skaters? ” Looking back down, he ran the side of his thumb over the woman in the picture. A definite looker—too bad she was only a baby.

  “They’re Miller and Morrison,” McMahon said, coming around the desk to stand next to Mick. He looked down at the snapshot. “Sasha Miller and Lon Morrison. And they ain’t kids no more; this was taken quite a while ago.”

  “So what’s the history?”

  “Several years back they were some big-deal, hotshot sensation on the amateur figure skating circuit. Won top prizes in about every competition goin’, I guess. Can’t remember the exact dates, but if you need ’em they’re in here.” He thumped his forefinger against the folder Mick still held.

  Mick tore his eyes away from the woman’s face in the photograph and looked up at McMahon. “What’s any of this got to do with me?”

  “Well, a funny thing began to happen around the ole ice rink, Mick. Everywhere Miller and Morrison competed, high-grade heroin began showin’ up on the streets. Scag so pure it had junkies dropping like flies.” McMahon rubbed his palm over his balding scalp and frowned. “We got Morrison in a sting, nailed him dead to rights for distributing. I’m pretty damn sure he was recruited by Quintero but we couldn’t get the kid to flip, not even when faced with murder two. Actually, because he didn’t show up in NADDIS—hell, didn’t have any priors at all—in the end he got off fairly lightly: seven-to-ten in minimum security. The girl was never implicated and went her merry way without him. She’s still skating. She won the silver at the Winter Olympics, then went professional. That shoulda been the end of the story.”

  “But?”

  “But there were kilos of heroin never accounted for, Vinicor, and now the shit’s turnin’ up again. Gotta be the same stuff—it’s knockin’ off junkies like ducks in a shooting gallery. We’ve had reports from San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Fresno. You name it; if it’s a city of any size in California, we’ve heard from them.”

  “So you want me to investigate Morrison.”

  “Nah, Morrison’s due to be sprung soon, but at the moment he’s still in lockup.” McMahon thumped his finger against the woman in the snapshot. “I want you to nail Miller.”

  Mick felt a tiny pulse of excitement but sternly suppressed it. “If she checked out clean the first time around,” he said, deliberately playing devil’s advocate, “what makes you think she’s got anything to do with it now?”

  McMahon passed him a full-page advertisement from Variety for an upcoming engagement for Follies on Ice. He pointed out Sasha Miller’s photograph. Leaning closer, Mick looked it over, studying it carefully. He read her name in bold print beneath the full-body shot and beneath that, in finer print, US champion and Olympic silver medalist.

  “Now look at the itinerary,” McMahon said.

  Mick flipped to the next page and scanned the contents. “San Diego, LA, Bakersfield, Fresno, San Jose, San Francisco,” he murmured. He looked up at his supervisor. “We’ve got a trail of dead junkies matching the dates the ice show appeared in these cities, I take it.”

  McMahon pointed a finger at him and cocked his thumb. He pulled the trigger. “Got it in one.”

  “How many kilos involved?” Mick inquired.

  For the first time McMahon looked uncomfortable. “Uh . . . seventeen.”

  “Oh for . . .” Mick tossed the folder aside in disgust, watching as the advertisement floated to the desk in its wake. “Call the local Narcs,” he advised flatly. The DEA dealt in cases where seizure of heroin and cocaine was counted in tonnage. It didn’t say much for the American way of life that they’d come such a long way since the seventy kilos seized in the French Connection just twenty years ago.

  McMahon shook his head. “Can’t do that. The show stays in one town maybe three-four days before it moves on to the next one. In the bigger cities like LA and Frisco it maybe stays a week. It’s due into Sacramento tomorrow and when it leaves there it crosses state line into Oregon.”

  “Let the FBI have them then.”

  McMahon just looked at him and Mick rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. The FBI always attempted to dismantle an entire drug trafficking organization in a single law enforcement operation. When they had identified principal members and gathered sufficient evidence to prosecute, they tried to arrest a
ll the leaders and key members at one time. One little independent skater wasn’t going to grab their attention, even if her product was killing off junkies faster than you could say habeas corpus. “Shit,” Mick muttered in disgust.

  McMahon was looking down at the picture of Sasha Miller on the desk. “Man, she had me fooled,” he admitted. “Pure as the driven snow, I woulda said.” He frowned and scratched at his scalp. “Well, no, that’s not exactly right. You should see this girl skate, Vinicor. Babe’s so hot I’m surprised the ice don’t melt—hell, I didn’t know they could get away with that kind of sexy stuff in a family ice show.”

  Shaking off the memory, he met his agent’s gaze. “But I tell ya honestly, when it came to the scam I coulda sworn she was bein’ straight about not knowing what her partner was up to. His arrest sure as hell seemed to knock her on her pretty little butt.” He swore softly and shook his head again. “Just goes to show ya, I guess. There’s no fool like an old fool.”

  “Well, don’t let it get you down,” Mick advised, for once feeling a trace of empathy for a suit. “We all get conned one time or another and a pretty little honey with big baby blues and a patter that makes her appear vulnerable is a better reason than most of the excuses I’ve heard for an agent being rooked.”

  He rubbed his thumb back and forth over Sasha Miller’s picture in the Variety advertisement on the desk, tracing the pretty curl of her lips with the edge of his nail. Then his eyes snapped up and met his supervisor’s dead-on. “I’ll promise you something, though,” he flatly vowed. “If this is the woman responsible for distributing the tainted scag up and down the West Coast, I’ll personally bring you her head. Hand delivered on a platter.”

  TWO

  Sasha opened her eyes to a hotel room that looked just like a hundred others she had awakened to in her lifetime, and for the briefest moment she couldn’t remember what city she was in. Um. Blinking sleepily, she rubbed long, narrow fingers over her mouth, trying to raise a little moisture to alleviate the cottony taste on her tongue. Sacramento, wasn’t it? Yes, sure, of course. Sacramento.

  She rolled out of bed, stretched luxuriously, and ambled on into the bathroom. When she emerged a few minutes later she felt much more alert. Climbing into a pair of tights and a leotard, she donned a threadbare pair of sweats and pulled a thick, hooded sweatshirt over her head. Once she had cautiously picked the snarls out of her thick and curly dark hair, she swept it to the top of her head with one fist and secured the high ponytail with a coated rubberband. Its weight caused it to tilt haphazardly to one side the minute she let go. Not particularly interested in making a fashion statement anyway, she ignored its lopsided disarray. Picking up her purse and skate bag, she let herself out of the hotel room.

  On the taxi ride to the arena, Sasha watched the scenery go by and mulled over the confusion of the past few days. Henry Chambers, their business manager, had abruptly left the Follies. Without any prior notice, which was not at all like him, he had simply departed. Rumor had it there was some family emergency, but his unexpected departure had left a great deal of confusion in its wake. The scramble for rooms yesterday had been a regular free-for-all without Henry there with his ubiquitous clipboard in hand, to direct their arrival at a new hotel in a new city with his customary soft-spoken and calming efficiency.

  Fortunately, the powers that be had already found a replacement; a new guy was due to take Henry’s place later this afternoon. The chances of him being half as nice as Henry, who was sort of unassuming and sweet, were pretty slim, but she’d be happy to settle for someone half as capable.

  And Henry, bless his heart, even in the midst of his own crisis had not forgotten about her. One of the last things he must have done before he’d departed was to arrange for someone to let her into the Sacramento rink where tonight’s performance would be held. He’d left her a note to inform her that from 9 A.M. on there would be guards on duty who would be expecting her.

  Henry understood the importance Sasha placed on being able to check out the ice in each new rink before she had to perform on it in front of thousands. And efficient as usual, he hadn’t let her down. There was a guard to meet her and let her in when she arrived at the Arco Arena at nine o’clock sharp. That left her two hours to practice before the caravan of five forty-five-foot-long semitrailers was due to arrive with sets and scenery and the stage crews who assembled them.

  It was cold and dark inside, and as she followed the guard down several corridors the hollow echo of their footsteps bounced back at them from the low-ceilinged concrete hallways. The moment they entered the arena proper, their voices took flight, resonating from the tiers of empty seats that rose up to the soaring ceiling.

  The guard’s escort ended just inside the arena’s entrance and within moments, amid the clank of switches being thrown, the lights overhead began to come on one grid at a time. Sasha slid out of her sweatpants, sat down in a rinkside seat, and opened her skate case, pulling out her skates.

  She toed off her street shoes and leaned over to don the skates. It was second nature to exert steady, equal pressure to the laces, and in moments she had them secured and was on her feet, delicately shaking the tension from first one leg, then the other. Stepping onto the ice, she reached down to remove the rubber guards that protected her blade’s sharp edges and placed them atop the balustrade separating the ice from the stands.

  She started skating slowly around the rink, warming up her leg muscles and developing a feel for the ice. Every rink had its own distinct flavor, the ice in each different from any other. As she neared the culmination of her warm-up exercises, Sasha gradually began to increase her speed.

  Skating to center ice, she stopped in a spray of ice chips and took her opening position. With phantom music playing in her head, she paced herself through her first number and when that went well, moved on to the next. For some reason the double axle was giving her fits today and finally, in frustration, she focused her concentration, pouring all of her energy into improving her execution of it.

  The axle is the only jump in which a skater takes off while going forward. Sasha bent her left knee, arms stretched backward. With a single movement she brought her arms forward and her right leg close to her body, thrusting herself into the air. She pulled her arms in tight and crossed her ankles for speed, turning two and a half revolutions. Kicking back with her right leg, she landed firmly, gliding in a small arc.

  Okay, good. She tried it again. It came off without a hitch. Feeling cocky, she decided to try a triple.

  And fell on her butt.

  Laughing, she picked herself up. What the hell, her act didn’t include the triple anyhow; she’d just wanted to see if she still had it. She tried again and it went off smoothly enough, although the landing could have stood a lot more polish.

  Sasha’s mind wandered as she continued to practice her routine. Professional skating didn’t call for the same degree of technical difficulty that the amateur circuit demanded when grading its performers, and if one didn’t constantly practice it was easy to lose proficiency. Sasha tried to stay on top of it, to keep her skills honed. At the same time, she didn’t deny it was a major relief to be skating solely for an audience these days—their appreciation tended to be uncritical.

  The amateur circuit in her experience had been far from flexible, but the Follies was a different story, and she loved it. Unlike some of the other big name ice shows, Follies encouraged their performers to develop new routines incorporating innovative ideas, a concept that she, as a skater whose individuality on the ice had often been more of a detriment in competitive skating than an asset, dearly appreciated. She’d lost a lot of points in her competition days for being different, but no longer was she at the mercy of some judge who, before her program had even begun, had a preconceived idea of what it should all be about. And that was wonderful.

  Skating had been her life for . . . God, forever, it seemed. It was what had enabled her to leave Kells Crossing.

  It was the
reason that her life there had been so difficult in the first place.

  She’d grown up on the wrong side of the river in a place where such things mattered. There was a strict social order in Kells Crossing that one was expected to adhere to religiously. You were either Town with a capital T or you were from the poorer west side. Skating and Sasha’s association with Ivan Petralahti had landed her somewhere betwixt and between.

  It was a less than enviable position to be in at the best of times and especially rough for a teenager. She and Lon Morrison, or so it had seemed at the time, were the only two people in all of Kells Crossing who had never quite known where they fit in. Neither fish nor fowl, nowhere had they appeared to entirely belong. Except on the ice.

  She met Lonnie when she was ten years old. They were both from the west side, children of millworkers, but their paths had never crossed.

  Which wasn’t that surprising. Lon was a year older than she and lived on State Street. She lived closer to the river on Fifth. They attended the same school but were in different classes. He was a boy, she was a girl; their interests up until the day they met were in different arenas. But then one Saturday afternoon Ivan Petralahti opened his ice rink to the millworkers’ children, and Sasha and Lonnie were exposed to a brand-new world.

  It changed their lives.

  The social structure in Kells Crossing was for the most part defined by its economics. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, mill owners, and the mills’ upper management lived in Town on the east side of the river and the wealthiest lived in the big houses that lined the Hill. The inhabitants of those huge, ornate houses were considered pretty big fish in the small pond that was Kells Crossing.

  But Ivan Petralahti was the closest thing it had to a celebrity.

  Ivan Boris Petralahti was an Eastern European who was well known and well respected in the world of international figure skating. Still a foreigner when all was said and done, of course—at least as viewed through the parochial eyes of Kells Crossing’s first families—that didn’t stop the social lions from inviting him to every social function the Hill had to offer. Inbred prejudice could be counted on to take a back seat to one-upmanship every time.