Excerpt
Mississippi Blue 42
Chapter 1Rae Johnson said, “The one with his hands up, number four? He’s what’s called the quar-ter-back,” taking it slow as she explained the rules of American football to Madeline Mayo instead of mentioning her first week as a federal agent, her rookie case. “Hear him? He’s calling out the snap count. UCM just got a first down—”
“I know quarterbacks, but first downs?” Mad said, frown framed in a light blue window on the left side of Rae’s laptop screen. “How many points are those worth again?”
Rae rolled her eyes a couple inches to the right, studying the college football game she had going there, ignoring her own face displayed in a smaller window on the Skype app. The screen made Rae’s hair look redder than it really was. Almost orange, like it’d been back when she was a girl. No makeup. Not even any eyeliner. She hadn’t showered once over the last six days. Her armpits reeked, a funky, locker-room tang, but Rae wasn’t even in the game. She was trapped inside an unfurnished studio apartment with pizza boxes everywhere, bankers boxes and accordion files too.
“
Touchdowns get you six points,” Rae said. “Field goals three. Two-point conversions, two, obviously, and a PAT is just worth one.”
Mad said the letters “P-A-T?” like a question.
“It stands for point-after-touchdown. Sorry.”
“This is crazy. You know that, right?”
“What? No. This is football, and it’s—”
“—not the first time you’ve tried to explain it to me,” Mad said, a scrim of smoke drifting up from the bottom of her display. “
Me. Your best friend who also happens to make a living decoding complex computer systems.”
The former roommates were ten minutes into their Skype call and still not getting anywhere. Rae’d first tried to explain basic football rules to Mad sometime around the end of the FBI Academy’s eighth week, a hellacious five-day span chock-full of pass-or-fail firearm, academic, and athletic tests. There’d been a college game on that Friday, two mid-majors duking it out in Idaho, or maybe Iowa. Rae couldn’t remember. The teams didn’t matter. Neither did the score or the fact that Madeline Mayo was too high to get it.
The drug test the next morning was the only test Mad ever failed, but it was enough. She was back home in Missouri that same night. The infraction almost took Rae down as well. She’d pissed clean, of course. Too clean. “Diluted.” That’s the word they’d used. The instructors in charge of drug testing didn’t want to hear why some New Agent Trainee was overly hydrated; they wanted tickets to the Smithfield Commonwealth Clash, the Virginia versus Virginia Tech rivalry game, a donation that Chuck Johnson, Rae’s father and longtime college football coach, was able to make after placing a single call.
“Cut the crap and just tell me about your case.” Mad coughed as she snuck another off-camera hit. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
Mad’s hair was longer now than it had been at Quantico, or at least the top was. Somewhere between a Mohawk and a mullet. Rae grinned at the digital image of the cyberpunk hacker from just outside of Springfield, Missouri, thinking if Mad ever decided to write a memoir,
Between a Mohawk and a Mullet might work for the title.
“That’s classified information,” Rae said.
“Your partner, then. Is he hot?”
“Who said my partner’s a he?”
“I might not have made it through the Academy, but I learned enough at Quantico to know the Bureau’s not putting two women on the same investigation.” Mad ran her hands along the shaved sides of her head. “The only thing more patriarchal than football is the federal fucking government.”
It was getting late, almost ten. The purple and orange Trapper Keeper on Rae’s lap was closed, the Velcro strap fastened. She’d finally finished her homework. Otherwise, she would’ve never called Mad. She wouldn’t have been watching that football game either, the one that was taking place less than a mile away at Sutpen Stadium.
The University of Central Mississippi Chiefs—the 2012 defending national champions—were somehow losing to the Southern Miss Golden Eagles in what should’ve been a non-conference, cupcake game. Brett Favre, Southern Miss’s most notable alum, was propped up in the south end zone like a cutout cowboy silhouette. The announcers couldn’t get enough of the retired gunslinger. According to the duo of broadcast analysts, Favre—his presence in general—was the reason behind the Golden Eagles’ shocking success. Rae knew better. The Chiefs’ senior quarterback, Matt Talley, had committed more turnovers than completions. The coach’s daughter had never seen a sorrier performance from such a highly accomplished QB.
“Earth to Rae.” Mad flicked her joint at the screen. “I see those boxes behind you. You wanna tell me about all those classified files or your partner?”
Rae wanted to tell Madeline Mayo about the files. The six straight days she’d spent working through them, recording everything she’d found in her retro Trapper Keeper because Trapper Keepers couldn’t be hacked. Her first case was a lot like football; it was complicated. There were so many moving parts, so many different players. Rae decided to start at the beginning, right after she’d gotten off Delta Air Lines Flight DL674.
“My partner, he, uh . . .” Rae took a strand of hair out from behind her ear. “He thought I was a guy.”
“A dude? I was right! Wait,
you? I mean, I know you’ve got the whole sporty vibe going, but come on . . . You’re five, what, nine? Ten, probably, in heels? You’re a babe. A total knockout . . .”
Rae didn’t think of herself as a “babe” or a “total knockout.” Maybe once, back in her track star days. No, not even then. Not really. Rae only noticed her beauty from certain angles: her jawline in profile, her calves, and sometimes her thighs, flexed. Mostly, Rae tried not to look at herself at all. Instead, the rookie agent focused on her fitness. Just that morning, she’d completed a vigorous jump rope cycle and four sets of static lunges. Rae’d gotten her workouts off whiteboards in her father’s weight rooms. Glute-ham raises, side straddle hops, Romanian deadlifts, and fifty-yard prowler pushes when she wasn’t locked inside a six-hundred-square-foot apartment.
“It was my name,” Rae said.
“Rae?”
“He’d written it on the back of a Papa Johns flyer, an ad from the newspaper or something. Three black letters in all caps, except he got the last one wrong.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. R-A-Y,” Rae said. “You should’ve seen him, standing at the baggage claim wearing this baby-blue blazer over a Hawaiian shirt, gold-rimmed aviators pushed back in what was left of his hair. An old guy, late fifties, at least, with this thick Yankee accent, wadding the pizza coupons up as he said, ‘Ray?
Jesus. You, uh . . . You’re Ray Johnson?’”
“Did you tell him the story? Your full name and all that?”
Rae’s first name was Raider, and she did tell her new partner that. Even hinted at what her father did for a living—why he would’ve named his only child, his baby girl, “Raider”—by connecting it back to the case she was there to help close. All the guy did was ask about the spelling. “Why not R-A-I?” Lips moving as he sounded it out then shook his head and said, “Or what about your middle name?”
Rae’s middle name was Indigo, which had been her mother’s contribution, but Rae didn’t mention Lola Johnson. Didn’t even say much about the history of her first name either. How her daddy had coached all over the country but spent the late 1970s as a graduate assistant at a string of Division II colleges in California. The Oakland Raiders left such an impression on the young coach from Arkansas, Chuck knew exactly what he’d name his own little QB, or heck, maybe even a linebacker. What he never considered, though, was what he’d do if he had a baby girl.
Rae said, “We didn’t talk much,” being honest about the drive out from the Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, the Boeing 747s and the Airbus A320s framed in the rearview of her partner’s cherry-red Subaru Outback. The ride was like the rest of Rae’s rookie investigation had been up to that point, all twelve minutes of it.
Weird. Nothing at all like what she’d pictured in her mind.
A month ago, the FBI Director had been handing Quantico’s Leadership Award to Rae, top of her class again, but where had that gotten her? Stuck with a past-his-prime field agent investigating a possible NCAA fraud case in Compson, Mississippi. The White-Collar Crime division of the FBI wasn’t exactly the trajectory Rae had imagined for her career. A Joint Terrorism Task Force would’ve been more her speed. More contact. More action. A badass in a black jacket with jttf stamped across the back, chasing down leads, collecting counterintelligence, and nullifying national security threats. Then again, how many agents’ daddies were college football coaches? Rae knew why she was in Compson; she was there because of her father.
But what about her partner? Did he know her story? He could’ve. He
should’ve. There were no secrets in the FBI, at least not for rookies. When Rae finally asked him about the case—why were they looking into UCM, exactly?—he’d said, “We follow the money, kid, and the highest-paid state employee in Mississippi also happens to be the Chiefs’ head football coach.” He’d added that it was the same in almost every state, but UCM’s recent success had caught the Bureau’s attention. The Chiefs had gotten too good too fast. “Haven’t seen a turnaround like that since SMU won the big dance back in the eighties,” he’d said, “and
everybody knows what happened to the Mustangs after that.”
Rae knew about the Pony Express but kept quiet for the rest of the drive, watching as gas stations hawking tall boys and fried chicken blurred together through the passenger-side window. Toss in a couple firework stands, a string of tiny white churches with signs out front that read
Jesus Saves, or Rae’s personal favorite,
Mosquitos Know There’s Power in the Blood, and that was it. Mississippi in a nutshell.
“Anyway, all Frank said was—”
Mad jabbed a finger at her laptop screen. “
Frank?”
“Ranchino. Frank Ranchino. That’s the guy’s name. My partner. He’s old, getting close to mandatory retirement age.”
“He’s lazy? That’s what you’re saying?”
“He’s something. Listen to this. Frank pulls into the parking lot,” Rae said, reminding herself not to say too much, not even to Madeline Mayo, “and starts explaining how there aren’t any federal buildings within a two-hour drive in any direction. Tells me that’s why I’ll be working from my new apartment, but doesn’t get out of the car. Just says he left me a ‘housewarming’ gift.”
“Bottle of bourbon?” Mad said. “No, you drink vodka, right? But the guy, Frank, he didn’t know that. What was it?”
“This.” Rae held both arms up, the way a referee signals a touchdown. “All of this.”
“The files?”
“A whole year’s worth. That’s what Frank had been doing, collecting intel but going about his work ‘incognito.’ Said he didn’t want to tip our hand. He says stuff like that. ‘Tip our hand.’ Talks in poker lingo, and quotes movies a lot too, but I got it. He couldn’t subpoena anybody because he didn’t want them to know the feds were in town. That’s why he spent a year gathering up bank statements, emails, phone records. It’s all here.”
Rae watched Mad’s eyes, glassy but widening, as the rookie agent rotated the webcam, giving her friend a panoramic view of the mess Frank had left in her apartment.
“You spend twenty straight weeks going through hell at Quantico, you make it through all that,” Mad said, “just to graduate and be some greaseball agent’s secretary?”
“I’m sitting on a bankers box,” Rae said. “I used a stack of file folders for a pillow last night. But I did it. I went through everything.”
The laptop was turned so that Rae couldn’t see the screen. She could just hear Mad’s voice, saying, “Well, what did you find?
Wait . . . What were you even looking for?”
Rae was looking for evidence of fraud, any indication that the University of Central Mississippi, their football program in particular, was misusing federal funds. Namely, paying players more than their already allotted scholarships. Rae knew about such shenanigans, of course. She’d seen the documentaries, read the breaking news. Her dad had even told her a little bit about the dirty side of the sport, but Chuck Johnson was one of the good guys. Chuck played the game straight.
Work hard, never quit, and good things’ll happen. Rae’s father was a walking, talking, motivational jukebox, and that one line was his mantra. Rae’s too.
