Paid in Full

Declan St. Pierre scrolled the photos and the case attachments on his iPhone. They had just been emailed over to him. A normal-looking man. Large. Bearded. Wearing a ball cap, tattered T-shirt and worn blue jeans, with a black lab at his side. The man looked healthy enough.

It was hard to believe the photo was less than two years old and the man was dead. Cancer, apparently. It had come on fast and took him quick.

The message with it was brief. The usual insurance claim information notice of loss, and a few assorted attachments. Pruitt, the insurance agent and client hadn’t sent it to the carrier yet.

Life insurance. Cancer. Nothing suspicious on the face of it.

The message was from Josh Pruitt. A local insurance agent. Apparently this claim had raised some red flags. Linda, the widow was pressing him for payment, her bills were starting to pile up and she feared losing the house. Pruitt wanted a private preliminary review before he submitted it. Declan had done a few jobs for Pruitt before. They had been straightforward and Pruitt had paid his bills. Holding a claim back was an odd request, but Declan accepted it. He was looking into Ray.

Ray Dunmore, by all accounts, was a regular working stiff. White male, 56 years old, married, no children. A framer. He hunted during the season. The problem, it seemed, was that he walked into Pruitt’s office about two years ago and bought a life insurance policy worth a million dollars. The monthly premium on the policy was close to a car payment at that age, with no medical check up.

Pruitt’s concern was clear. Did Ray Dunmore know he had cancer when he bought the policy? Did he lie when he said he was healthy? When he paid a premium amount for a policy that didn’t require a medical evaluation? It seemed likely.

Declan set the phone down on his desk and pulled up the email on his laptop. He printed it off, added it to a file folder and set it on the desk. Then he typed a message back to Pruitt. He accepted the job. Regular fee. One week. He would have an answer.

Declan thought about this as he stared out his window to the street outside. Traffic crawled slowly past moving east and west on Camelback Road. It was July. So that meant the heat outside was north of 100 degrees. He could see the heat waves rising off of the asphalt.

A working man buys himself life insurance, pays a premium amount to avoid a medical check up, and drops dead less than two years later. This was going to be easy money. Easy money is great, he thought. Boring, but great. He had been a cop before this. That was exciting. Before that, a Marine. More exciting. He didn’t need the money really, but being in the thick of things had always been his deal. His parents didn’t understand it. Hell, he didn’t understand it.

He pulled up a Google map of Dunmore’s house, expanded it out to a ten-mile radius and started looking for medical offices and phone numbers. He would keep expanding the radius until he had a good idea where the man treated. He started dialing.

Four hours later Declan closed the laptop. He was tired. He was fifty. His back hurt from sitting in the damn chair all afternoon. He needed a better chair. He would try and remember to order one. Except it would probably come in a box and he would spend a day assembling it. Maybe he could run by a store and get one assembled. Where did one buy an office chair anyway? Costco probably had them, he would need to check.

Declan stood, took the file, and left the office. The July heat hit him in the parking lot. The first blast was always a shock, but overall he liked it hot. He was probably a lizard in a previous life. He climbed into the Ram truck and tossed the folder on the passenger seat. He took a swig from the water bottle in the console only to realize the water was about 140 degrees. He sat idling until the AC kicked in. Traffic on Camelback moved at a snail’s pace.

He had several hits from his phone canvass for medical records for treatments prior to the policy being purchased. He pulled the signed authorization from the folder while he sat in crawling traffic and wondered what he would find. A country song started to play on the radio and he started to tap the steering wheel in rhythm. He turned up the volume and forgot about the case for a while.

By the time he got back to his house in Paradise Valley, it was late. He was worn out. The evening was beautiful, just hovering under 100 degrees. He liked it.

He clicked the remote and the gate slid out of his way. He turned through the gate and drove under the old trees that were nicely lit from the base. The grounds were large and contained an assortment of trees and cactus. He’d had the original house torn down. The one in its place was steel, stone and glass. He parked the truck in the four car garage alongside the sports cars and the motorcycles. The lights came on as he went inside. Cool and quiet. He told Jarvis his AI assistant to play some smooth jazz. He knew it wasn’t very original stealing the agent name from Iron Man, but it sounded cool. He was immediately at peace. He had lived here for years. It was comfortable and all his. He would never leave. When he did, it would be in a body bag. He tossed the folder and the records on his desk and went to fix a cold drink. Iced tea.

He had found nothing indicating any knowledge of cancer up until a few months before Ray’s death. A dead end. In his experience something this clean was wrong.

Then an idea hit him. He pulled out his cell, typed out a quick message. Hit send and put the phone on the charger in his home study. He would leave it there on the cradle until morning. He used to keep it on his end table in his bedroom, but that led to endless mind numbing scrolling, so recently he had made the change.

The next morning Declan rose before 5 just like every other day. No alarm. He drank down a couple cups of black coffee, loaded some carbohydrates on board and drove down to the gym. 90 minutes later he was ready for the day. He showered, changed, prepared a quick lunch which he tossed into a thermal lunch bag and headed out the door.

When he arrived at the office, he opened the door, flipped on the lights, fired up the old AC and dropped into his crappy chair. He booted up the laptop and opened his Outlook. He had a message waiting from an old, reliable friend who worked for Homeland.

It was the border log that he requested the night before. Declan opened the border log. Ray’s truck had crossed the border into Mexico four times in the months leading up to the purchase of the policy. Not unusual in these parts, but worth a look. The crossing was at Lukeville, on the route through Ajo to Puerto Peñasco. The locals called it “Rocky Point.” March. May. July. The policy was signed in August.

He looked back over the file and its contents. The tax return from the packet. He worked on a framing crew. Took some side jobs. He made roughly forty-eight thousand on the W-2 the year the payments started. On that income, the premiums on this policy would have cut deep into rent and groceries.

Saturday morning Declan drove out to Ray’s house. He wanted to chat with a neighbor and take a look around. Quiet block. A woman watered her gravel with her garden hose. A yellow dog lay under her truck and didn’t move when Declan parked.

“Ray?” she said. “Ray hated the beach. Said sand got in everything. His wife wanted to go once and he took her to Flagstaff.”

“Why Mexico?”

“Fishing, he said. He never brought fish home from those trips. Not once. Linda used to joke about it. That was back when she knew how to joke.”

“He talk about being sick?”

“Not to me. He worked until he couldn’t. Then it went fast.”

Declan nodded, asked nothing else, and drove home. He spread the file on the kitchen table and looked at the dates again. March. May. July. August.

He packed a bag. Two shirts, jeans, underwear, a ball cap and the file folder. He was about to lock his pistol in the safe when he changed his mind. He shoved it into his appendix holster and headed out. Taking a weapon into Mexico was a real no-no. He was going to do it anyway.

The road south was long and empty. The air conditioning in his truck was turned on high, and SiriusXM even higher. Billboards for casinos and dentists dotted the desert every few miles. He topped his gas off at a truck stop outside Gila Bend. He considered Subway, but decided on waiting for some Mexican food. This time he left the radio off. He liked it quiet.

Somewhere past the truck stop, with the sky still red at the edges, he took notice of the beauty of the landscape and for a moment wondered how God had done it all. A strange thought since he wasn’t normally spiritual, despite the years of Catholic school that his parents subjected him to.

It was a hundred and twelve in Ajo. A man that resembled leather wearing a straw hat sold him Mexican car insurance at a roadside stop. Declan paid cash and got back on the road.

Near the water the air thickened and it smelled of, well, ocean. Tourists packed the area searching for cheap beer, shrimp and pharmaceuticals to take back across the border. Declan parked and started hitting the clinics one at a time on foot. He had a photo of Ray and a pocket full of cash. In his experience, the cash would get him some answers.

He finally arrived at a small pink cinder block building two streets back from the water about an hour later. The paint was peeling at the corners. The building had a green door. It had the kind of colors you only saw in the third world. He had heard it was all the lead paint that America couldn’t use anymore sold off on the cheap. He didn’t know if that was true, but it made a certain amount of sense. A fan moved hot air around the waiting room. It was small. Musty. And the clerk was bored.

He showed the clerk a hundred dollar bill and asked if he could speak to the doctor. She looked at the money, then at him, then went into the back without a word.

He introduced himself as Dr. Salcido. He was an old man with a white coat that had been washed thin. His desk was cleared of everything except a pen and a phone. Declan guessed he hadn’t made the leap to a computer filing system yet.

“Dunmore,” Declan said. “Raymond. I am looking for some treatment records.”

“I know who he is.”

Somewhat unprepared, Declan responded, “I work for his insurance agent.”

“Okay.”

“How much for his records?”

Declan dropped five hundred U.S. on the desk.

The doctor stood, walked to a cabinet, opened the second drawer down and pulled out a thin brown folder. He sat and slid it across the desk. Cash for records. Simple economics.

The file contained a scan from Hermosillo. Spanish on top. English summary underneath. Signature. Date. March. Five months before the application. Staging notes. A follow-up in May. Another in July when Ray had asked about timelines again.

Ray had known before he signed. Pruitt wanted that on paper and here it was.

“He sat where you are sitting,” Dr. Salcido said. “He asked me how long. When I told him, he said that was enough time.”

“Enough time for what?”

The doctor shrugged. “He didn’t say. I assume to get his affairs in order. That’s what they normally do.”

Declan stood and took the folder.

A blast of heat hit Declan as he exited the building. When he arrived back at his truck, he put the folder on the passenger seat and started the engine. He ran the air full. On the way out of the lot he ran the timeline again. March diagnosis, a couple of trips and an August insurance policy.

He had the case locked down. He needed lunch before heading back. He found a good-looking spot with a patio off the street and tried to find a place to park. He found a spot behind the building a block over. He left the truck facing the exit lane and walked the rest with the folder under his arm.

The front of the building had a window sticker for lunch specials. A handwritten sign on the glass said to use the side door. Declan tried the side door. Somehow he got the wrong side door.

The room didn’t lead to the restaurant. It had a bare concrete floor with a folding table under a bare bulb. Two men were counting cash. A duffel open between them. Cash stacked in bricks with rubber bands. There was a third man coming in from the alley with a second bag over his shoulder.

For half a second nobody moved.

The first man went for a gun on the table. Declan didn’t draw. He closed the distance. He hit the guy hard enough to push him backwards off his feet. He heard the gun skitter across the floor. The second swung a length of pipe. Declan took it across the ribs instead of the head, staggered, then stepped inside and put him down with an elbow to the jaw. He pulled his pistol, and the third man in the alley froze, then ran. The second bag hit the concrete and spilled some of its load in the dirt.

Shouting from the front of the building. A door slamming. Declan’s ribs burned. He stopped at the table with his hand on the open duffel. He had enough money of his own to leave it alone, but he wanted it. He grabbed the bag. The spilled money stayed where it lay and he went out the way he’d come. He ran back down the alley, and into the truck. Moving fast and pushing the pain away for now. He jammed the brown folder under his thigh and checked the mirrors to make sure he wasn’t being followed. His heart wasn’t racing as much as it probably should have been. This is why you always back into a parking spot, he thought. Instinct always mattered.

Two blocks north he forced himself to drive like he wasn’t in a hurry. He kept it just under the speed limit. A white van sat crooked at the corner where the alley met the street. A police car sat on the opposite side of the street. Nobody got out. They watched him pass but stayed parked. He watched them as they watched him pass, stared back at them, pretending curiosity. A guilty man would have looked away. Declan knew better than that. He kept driving. When he was past the tourist area, he pulled into a gas station long enough to shove the duffel under a moving blanket that he had left in the back seat to better cover it. He paid cash for a soda and an ice pack. Back in the truck, he pressed the ice pack to his ribs and headed for the border.

At the first turnout, he emptied the cash into his gym bag and tossed the empty duffel in case it contained a GPS. He made sure the cash was clean and hit the road back toward the border. He didn’t count it. He didn’t need to. It was a lot. He had lifted a bag of twenties like this once before. It would be close to 400-500 thousand dollars. At the checkpoint the line crawled. When he reached the front of the line, he noticed that the border agent had a USMC tattoo on his forearm. He saw the agent looking at the matching ink on Declan’s forearm. They exchanged a knowing nod. No questions.

“Have a good day, sir.”

The agent waved him through.

He was back on U.S. soil with a sigh of relief and a bag of cash still buried behind the seats. His ribs were starting to scream at him, but he allowed himself a slight grin.

He drove to his storage facility. The one he rented for the junk he couldn’t part with. He left the gym bag inside the storage container. He then drove home and slept four hours with the Glock back on the nightstand. He was glad it hadn’t been fired. He would hate to have to toss it in the canal. He woke to a throbbing pain and a purple bruise across his ribs. They didn’t feel broken and he was breathing fine.

The next morning, he woke up stiff. He brewed himself some coffee and drank it black in his office. Coffee. He photocopied Salcido’s pages to make an extra copy, put the copy in a blank envelope, which he kept on him. He drove to the storage locker and secured the original.

Thinking back about the previous day, he was still surprised how well he had reacted when the gun came out and the pipe appeared. Maybe the old guy still had what it took after all.

Declan had found what Pruitt wanted. He ought to have been writing the report, but he kept looking at the file. Pruitt had sent him a tax return and a signed medical authorization, yet there was nothing from the carrier saying it had issued the coverage. The number on the sticky note was Pruitt’s agency reference. Declan had accepted that at the start. Now he thought better of it and wanted to check on it. Something seemed off.

Declan flipped the application copy. Carrier name on the header. He knew that carrier. He’d worked an investigation for them about three years ago. A warehouse fire in Mesa. Same logo and letterhead.

He made a call from a burner phone he kept. He provided Ray’s full name and date of birth. Gave the policy number printed on the packet. He identified himself as an investigator hired privately by the agent and asked them to confirm the coverage.

The woman on the other end was polite for thirty seconds. Then she put him on hold. Then she came back with a supervisor who didn’t sound polite at all.

“We don’t have a Raymond Dunmore policy,” the supervisor said. “Nothing under that DOB. No file at all.”

“What about the policy number on the application?”

“It doesn’t match him. I can’t discuss another customer’s file. If that’s what the agent gave you, send us a copy. Who did you say you were with?”

Declan hung up before there were any more questions.

There was no policy.

Pruitt had taken eighteen months of premiums and never placed the coverage. Linda was asking for her money and he had run out of time. A report from an independent investigator showing Ray had concealed cancer would give him something to scare her off. He could tell her the carrier wouldn’t pay and hope she never went to the company herself.

Pruitt hadn’t needed Declan to make anything up. He must have figured Declan would find the cancer and stop there. Declan had nearly done exactly that. He’d gone to Mexico to check Ray’s honesty without asking much about the man who hired him. That bothered him too.

Phoenix heat pressed on the windows. Salcido’s pages still proved Ray had known. That didn’t matter anymore to Declan.

It was time to visit the widow. Declan drove to Linda’s house that afternoon.

There was a black lab on the porch that thumped its tail, which gave away that it wasn’t menacing. He immediately wanted to be Declan’s friend. Dogs always liked Declan and he liked dogs. He liked them more than he liked most people. A busted ice chest sat by the garage with a cracked hinge and a roll of duct tape on top of it. Ray had been going to fix it. Linda said that when she caught Declan looking at it.

She let him in. The kitchen smelled like coffee. The usual set that he had seen a million times. Cheap table and chairs, photos on the fridge. Ray and Linda with the lab mostly. It was obvious that she believed the insurance money was coming. She talked about it like it would help, but wouldn’t really. She spoke about how Pruitt had been kind on the phone after the funeral. She poured him coffee. He tried to drink it but couldn’t finish. His stomach was turning in knots. The lab came into the kitchen and surveyed the area.

“Ray worked doubles after we bought the policy,” she said. “Said the policy was the one thing he wouldn’t miss. We ate a lot of ramen.”

Declan listened. Without a real policy, she was looking at getting her premiums back, if that. Pruitt would lose his license and maybe do some time. Nothing that would help.

“Do you still have the payment records?” he asked. “Canceled checks. Receipts. Anything Ray kept when he paid Pruitt.”

She did. A plain envelope in a kitchen drawer, fat with stubs and images of checks written to Pruitt Insurance Agency. A couple of months paid in two pieces when the work was slow. Proof that the money left Ray’s account and went to Pruitt.

Declan photographed them with his phone camera and asked her to keep the originals. He didn’t tell her about the missing policy. He didn’t tell her much. He wasn’t sure what he could say to this woman, so he said he was still working the file. She nodded. The lab put its head on his knee and he scratched behind its ear until the dog sighed and settled. Then he stood to go.

He took the application and payment records to a detective at the AG’s office the next day. He laid it out for an investigator named Ruiz who took notes without interrupting. No policy on the books under Ray’s name. A policy number on Pruitt’s forms that the carrier said didn’t match Ray. Eighteen months of canceled checks to Pruitt’s agency. The carrier’s phone confirmation that it had no file for Ray. Ruiz asked whether Declan was alleging theft.

“I’m alleging enough for you to open a file,” Declan said. “The rest is your job.”

Ruiz gave him a business card with a file number and walked him to the door.

“This goes to the AG once I speak to the carrier,” Ruiz said.

“We will be questioning Pruitt shortly after.”

Declan dropped a short cover letter and copies of the same documents at the Arizona Department of Insurance the same afternoon. He kept an eye out for anything unusual for a few days. The bag of money nagging at him.

The next afternoon he noticed a white van parked across from his office. It looked like the one in Mexico, though he hadn’t gotten much of a look at that one either. By the time he went outside it was gone.

Pruitt knew on the third day. The first call came angry and short, Pruitt talking fast about loyalty and misunderstandings. Declan hung up.

On day five, they showed up at his house.

Declan had been expecting a problem. He was walking home from the store with a grocery bag in one hand. He had almost reached his gated driveway when a dark sedan cut in front of him. The passenger got out and came around the hood with a pistol already up, pointed at Declan’s chest.

“Pruitt wants the file back,” the man said. “And you quiet.” Pruitt, he thought… so not the cash.

Declan dropped the bag. His groceries spilled on the street. The barrel tracked him as he stepped sideways and in. They hit the fender together. The gun went off once into the asphalt. The muzzle flash lit up the night. Declan’s ears rang. He kept control of the weapon arm until the pistol came free and he controlled it. The driver scrambled out with something dark in his hand, saw that Declan had the pistol and ran. Declan pushed the pistol under the car, then pinned the first guy to the ground and waited.

Neighbors were already shouting. Someone had called it in before Declan got his breath back. He stayed on the guy’s back until the uniforms arrived, then pointed them to the pistol under the car. The patrolman cuffed the dirtbag and tossed him in a cruiser. One of them recognized Declan from his days on the job, so it went easier.

The detectives took his statement. It was dawn when it was all said and done. The CCTV footage of the confrontation from his security system made it pretty obvious what had happened. So that had helped. So did the spent casing on the concrete and the divot in the asphalt six feet from where Declan had been standing. The passenger had Pruitt’s number in a recent call log and a cash envelope in the glove box. Declan gave them Ruiz’s name. They photographed the bruise on his ribs from Mexico and the newer scrape on his forearm from the scuffle. He left the part about Mexico and the cash out of the story. It didn’t seem relevant.

When he finally got home, he slept like the dead.

News of the situation remained local: An insurance agent under review for possible fraud and a shooting under investigation, no charges against the private investigator. Declan worked a skip-trace for a different client to pass his time. The guy lived in Glendale and owed three landlords. Declan found him easy enough. They always went back to the old lady when in trouble.

On the second night after the excitement had ended, he visited the storage facility. He counted the cash under the fluorescent lights. Four hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. This time he took it with him when he left. He took Salcido’s original out of the lockbox too.

The next morning he put the original chart and the drugstore copy in the truck and drove to Linda’s with the gym bag.

She met him on the porch. The lab stood and sniffed the bag like it might be groceries. The ice chest still sat by the garage with the tape unrolled and unused.

“This is for you,” Declan said.

She stared at the old bag, then at him. She pulled the zipper back and looked inside.

“That’s not how insurance pays.”

“No.”

She looked like she was going to ask a follow-up question, so he shook his head. She stopped.

She didn’t say anything else. He didn’t offer details.

“I can’t take something I don’t understand,” she said.

Declan nodded.

“Leave it there a minute,” she said.

He left the bag on the porch and waited.

She stood with her arms folded for a long time. A car passed slowly on the street. The lab watched Declan. Linda wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then knelt and pulled the bag inside the house. The lab followed her.

Declan stayed on the porch until he heard the deadbolt. Then he walked back to the truck. He knew the cash wouldn’t make her safe by itself. It would feed her and keep a roof over her head. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was making things better or worse. He started the truck and sat in the quiet for a few minutes before he put it in gear.

He didn’t know if he had done this for her or for himself. The question would sit for a long time.

Ray had known he was dying. He’d worked doubles and paid eighteen months for something that didn’t exist. Linda could keep the good memories of a hard working husband that left her better off. Declan didn’t see what she gained by knowing about the Mexico visits. He was making that decision for her too.

Two miles away, at a gas station, he fed the Salcido original and the drugstore copy into a trash can next to the pumps. A trucker crushed a coffee cup on top of them.

The fraud packet was already with Ruiz and DOI. It didn’t include Salcido’s pages. They had the application and the payment records to investigate Pruitt.

Declan stood in the shade of the canopy.

He smiled. He hadn’t smiled in a long time.