Hard Town

Book 2: Kurt Argento

by Adam Plantinga

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

When a plea for help sends retired Detroit cop Kurt Argento to the small desert town of Fenton, Arizona things immediately don’t appear to be as they seem, and he finds himself unraveling secrets that want to stay hidden and questioning his own moral compass.

After having survived a deadly prison break, ex-Detroit cop Kurt Argento is ready for some quiet. Still working through his grief over the passing of his wife, Argento finds himself house-sitting for a friend with his loyal companion, Hudson, a Chow Chow-Shepard mix. It's a simple life, picking up odd jobs here and there, but it's one that Argento is content to live.

Then Kristin Reed shows up with her young son, Ethan, and begs Argento to help find her missing husband... and Argento tells her he'd just be in the way. He's no investigator, not anymore. He's a handyman who fixes fences. But he's not one to ignore his gut feeling when something is wrong. After an attempt to talk with Kristin more in the next town over, just to find her and her son missing as well, Argento starts to notice that Fenton, Arizona is more than meets the eye.

First there's the large, overly equipped public safety team complete with specialized tactics and sophisticated weaponry. Then there's the unusual financial boosting of failing small businesses by the U.S. government. And finally, there's one man with no name who seems to have control over this town in an unprecedented way.

Argento finds himself unraveling not just the truth behind the disappearance of a family, but a conspiracy that's taken a whole town to cover up. But Fenton, Arizona is going to push him further than he’s ever had to go. And along the way, he may just lose a part of himself as well. Because justice isn't as black and white as Argento would like to believe.

Release date: April 8, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Braylo, Arizona. Present Day.

There was one real sit-down café in Braylo, a place called Powell’s, and Kurt Argento was there about every morning. There were two reasons for this. The first was the steak and eggs special for $6.99, a reasonable price. The second was the fresh pastries, especially the apple fritters. They usually came out after nine o’clock. The first two batches of dough were used for the glazed and chocolate donuts. Customers had to wait for the third batch before they made the fritters because, as the baker explained to him, the dough in the first two batches was too thin for the fritters. That was okay with Argento. He had time to wait.

He’d gone home to Detroit to some fanfare after the bad business at Whitehall Correctional Institute in Missouri where the prison’s security system had broken down and some people had died because of it. He’d helped get some folks out of Whitehall, including the governor of Missouri’s daughter, a touring student named Julie Wakefield. He’d turned down multiple news outlets who’d wanted to interview him about what happened in the prison. Picked up some work as a handyman. Attended church at Trinity Lutheran, where he’d reconnected with his pastor and spent his off-hours fishing and hunting. When a retired Detroit SWAT buddy named Trapsi invited him to visit in Braylo, Arizona, he’d agreed. When Trapsi got called to active military service for a six-month deployment and asked Argento to housesit, he’d agreed again.

He’d been in Braylo for a month. He had no short-term plans other than picking up some side jobs while he waited for his friend’s return. He’d put Trapsi’s home number on the corkboard at the town’s main grocery store and had gotten a gig dismantling a dilapidated tool shed and building a new one out of pine. It had been an easy job. Take the roof off the shed first, remove the trim, and knock the walls down with a sledge. Then a run to the lumberyard to drop off the old wood and pick up the new. He was glad the homeowner hadn’t stuck around to watch him work. Argento didn’t always care for talking. Most of the folks in town were friendly but not overly chatty. He had even gotten to know a few of their names when he’d been on walks with his chow-shepherd, Hudson. He didn’t initiate many conversations, but he’d say just enough to be polite.

The bell on the front door to Powell’s chimed. Argento looked up from his seat in the back out of habit. Twenty-one years as a Detroit street cop had taught him to pay attention to everyone entering the space he occupied. Argento had no firearm at the moment because he hadn’t gotten around to filling out the paperwork for a concealed carry permit, although it would be a light lift for a retired cop in Arizona. But if someone came in shooting, the heavy wood table he sat at would serve as a ballistic shield. The steak knife he was using to cut his breakfast would function as an adequate missile weapon at close range—Argento figured he could throw it with enough velocity to penetrate his target up to the hilt. The chances that someone might come in this particular diner at this particular time to do him or the other customers harm were low. But they weren’t zero.

However, the woman who’d entered did not rate particularly high on his threat meter, in part because she was carrying a toddler in her right arm. She was about forty, was plainly dressed and looked fatigued. She had a diaper bag over her shoulder and a cast on her left arm. She glanced around the restaurant, and her eyes settled on Argento for a moment. Then she sat down two tables away from him, and the waitress brought her a menu and high chair.

The toddler was a boy, probably one or two years old. Argento didn’t have children, so the age was a rough guess. The kid was facing away from Argento in the high chair but he twisted his small torso and craned his neck to peer back at him. Then he waved. Socially speaking, it was probably par for the course to wave back. But Argento kept eating his steak. The waitress would know to bring the apple fritter when he was done. They had an understanding. Dessert for breakfast was highly underrated.

The woman ordered. The boy squirmed in his chair. He was wearing a Denver Broncos T-shirt that had food stains near the neck. He kept looking back at Argento. Maybe he found something interesting about him. Or maybe the kid would have been just as content staring at a traffic cone.

Now the woman was looking at Argento as well. He was used to that given the ugly circular scars on both sides of his face, which he’d picked up at Whitehall when a crazed Armenian inmate had shoved a ballpoint pen through his cheeks. History written into flesh. When people saw them, he could see the question in their eyes. Surgery? Injury? Defect? The scars told people to keep away. Argento was fine with that message. Even before his face was marred, a fellow cop had once told him he looked like a bouncer at a post-apocalyptic bar. But she was looking longer than most. He sensed that she was going to come over and ask if she could sit.

Then she did just that. Her voice was quiet. Tired.

Argento gave it a second’s assessment before he said, “Suit yourself.” Maybe she was looking for a laborer to replace a rotting deck or rewire a kitchen.

The woman moved her child’s high chair over to Argento’s table. Then she sat herself. The kid hiccupped, looking pleased with himself. Argento kept eating. If the woman had a point, she’d get to it.

She brushed her longish hair behind her ears with her good arm and locked eyes with him. She hadn’t asked him about a job yet, which made Argento think she was after something else. Money, maybe, or a ride. Argento wasn’t in the habit of giving out either. He held her gaze. Despite her obvious weariness, she had an unlined, kind face. But there was the arm cast. Plus, her clothes looked wrinkled. As if she had been wearing them a few days. Argento instinctively checked her right arm for track marks and saw none. When she set her water glass down, he cast a glance at her fingertips. No scorch marks from a drug pipe. No sniffles, no red-rimmed eyes. She didn’t smell. If she was a user, she hid it well.

The child hiccupped again and grinned.

“My name is Kristin Reed,” the woman said. “This is my son, Ethan. We need your help.”

Argento cut off a square of scrambled egg and ate it.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Fenton, Arizona?”

Argento shook his head.

“It’s a town about forty miles west of here.”

“What about it?”

“My husband went missing in Fenton. His name is Warren Reed. I believe something happened to him there.” There was no emotion in Kristin’s voice. Flat and measured. She had said this before. She handed Argento a homemade missing person flyer with a picture of Warren, his date of birth, description, and contact info for Kristin if found. Argento glanced at it. Warren was smiling in the picture. He was a man of about thirty-five with a shock of thick dark hair and the beginnings of a beard. He wore thick, old-fashioned glasses, and resembled a church elder.

Argento looked at Kristin’s shoes. The footwear often gave it away. But hers were in decent shape. Not the torn, stained shoes of an addict. He cut off another square of egg. He had maybe two more forkfuls left and one more wedge of steak followed by the fritter. Then breakfast would be over and he could look forward to breakfast the next day. He’d dropped weight since coming to the desert, from daily workouts and long walks with Hudson, and he now tipped the scale at an even two hundred. He needed Powell’s breakfast calories to keep his strength up.

“What makes you think something happened to your husband?”

“He went to Fenton for the weekend. Didn’t say why. Then he sent me a text that something strange was going on there and he’d tell me about it later. After that, he stopped communicating. And he wouldn’t do that. Not to me. Or his son.” Kristin put her palm lightly on top of Ethan’s head. “Warren is a smart, stable man. We’ve been married fifteen years. There’s no way.”

“Sounds like something the Fenton cops should hear about.”

“I tried. I said he was missing. Maybe dead. They took a report. But after that, they ignored me. They could be in on it for all I know.”

“Big jump from missing to dead.”

“No other reason for him not to call me. Something happened. I know it.”

Argento flagged the waitress down and ordered a cup of coffee to go.

“He didn’t run out on us. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

Ethan said something that sounded like “Wa-wa.” Kristin reached into the diaper bag and took out a child’s plastic cup and gave it to him. Ethan gulped from it greedily.

Argento wasn’t a cop anymore and he was no kind of private investigator. People disappeared all the time, for reasons that made sense and reasons that didn’t. They nearly always turned back up. But the woman in front of him was road-weary with a bad arm and had a child with her, which made telling her to buzz off bad form. Plus his late wife, Emily, wouldn’t have liked it, and whenever possible, Argento tried not to do things that Emily would disapprove of. Civilized, Argento thought. I’m getting civilized.

“So is this what you do? You go from town to town looking for someone to help you find your lost husband?”

“I have to. Otherwise I’m just giving up.”

“There are some folks out there who say they’ll help and then do the opposite.”

“A week ago, there was a man in Phoenix,” Kristin said, her level voice now taking on a huskier quality. “His name was Wayne Ellerbee. Cowboy-type. He worked for a private investigator. Showed me his business card. He said he’d find Warren. When he came to my hotel, he was drunk and I knew what he wanted. He put his hands on me and when I pushed him, he broke my arm. I stabbed him with a fork to get away.”

Argento wondered if any of that was true. Was she trying to win him over with a sad story? A you have to help me or I’ll be forced to go to more men who will assault me approach? His time as a cop had made him pick apart every tale he was told.

“How do you know I’m any different than the cowboy?”

“I know who you are. You were a police officer. You protected the governor’s daughter at that prison in Missouri. It was on the news. People in town said you came to this diner. And now I’ve found you.”

The rumor mill of a small town. Argento had been in Braylo long enough for someone to recognize him from his picture in the media and told someone and that someone told someone else and now here they were. Argento set down his utensils. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere productive. But Argento would give her this much—in addition to his threat meter, he had a crazy meter and she wasn’t setting that off either. She was weary, but entirely coherent.

The breakfast crowd had faded and the diner had the after-the-crowd, settled calm where you could hear voices in the kitchen, the clink of silverware, the whir of the overhead fans. Kristin watched him closely.

“Will you help us?”

Us, Argento thought. Not just her. Ethan too. She was banking that he would be less inclined to turn away both a mother and a child in need. But no matter how civilized Argento might become, there was still a problem with appealing to his emotional side.

He didn’t much have one.

“You don’t need me. You needed Richard Boone about forty years ago.”

“Who’s that?”

“He was on a TV show.”

The waitress returned with Kristin’s breakfast and Argento’s to-go cup of coffee and apple fritter. Argento took them and stood. Kristin put one hand on his forearm. Argento looked down at her hand and she removed it. But she held his gaze.

“I can tell what kind of man you are. You’ll do this for me. You’ll find out what happened to my husband.”

Argento thought that was a lot to figure over one breakfast but he didn’t say as much. “Follow up with the local cops.” He paid his bill, and left a twenty on Kristin’s table to cover her tab.

“You’ll help me,” Kristin said. Her voice had gone up an octave. Her arms were folded across her chest, her face set in stubborn repose. Next to her, Ethan sipped from his water cup.

“I’d just be in the way.”

Kristin closed her eyes. Something that might have been a shudder went through her. She put her hand on top of Ethan’s head again. Argento guessed she hadn’t slept in a while. “I expected more from you.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so Argento left the diner. He cast one more look at Kristin and Ethan before walking away. Kristin was watching him intently, like if she tried hard enough, she could look straight through him.

The man with the silver hair did a vigorous forty minutes in the endless pool adjacent to his office. He toweled off and changed into khakis and a plain white-collared shirt, which he wore untucked. It was the same thing he put on nearly every day, for he found fashion asinine. When he entered his workspace, he went right to his chair. It was plush, ergonomically sound, and utterly noiseless. He could roll along the office floor from one corner to the next without a whisper.

There were three keyboards in all at his workstation, each linked to a towering monitor. The middle one approached the size of a drive-in movie screen. He could have consolidated the keyboards into one system, but he liked sliding his chair between consoles. He liked the subtly different sounds his fingers made on each keyboard, the split attention required, the kinetic energy of it all. Like conducting an orchestra.

The man with the silver hair had more money than he could ever spend, but he’d never felt the need to surround himself with the trappings of the well-off. That was why he was content in this windowless gray room with nothing on the walls—no art, no photographs, no frills. A complete lack of distractions. There was only the work.

The current job was at long last a challenge for him in a life where challenges had been difficult to come by. He did not hail from an intellectual bloodline. His parents were both well-meaning dullards, but they recognized that even from an early age he was special. The man with the silver hair was three when he showed his mother how to program the VCR. He’d expressed an interest in both the hard and soft sciences—curious after a unit on electricity, he’d given an elementary school classmate a handful of button-style lithium batteries which he’d quietly encouraged him to swallow. When the boy had died in agony of internal burns from the battery’s caustic chemicals, it had confirmed his hypothesis.

By age twelve, he’d audited graduate-level logic courses. Achieved perfect scores on the GMAT and MCAT. His parents wouldn’t allow him to go to college early because they were concerned about his social development, so he had to wait until after high school to enroll in MIT on a full scholarship. But he dropped out midway through his first year, stone-bored and disgusted with the self-satisfaction of professors who thought they knew more than he did. He drifted for a spell afterward, but everything he did felt like slumming—like the ten million he’d amassed by his nineteenth birthday through astute stock picks or the blueprints for a revolutionary automobile fuel cell that he designed but then discarded after a bout of ambivalence.

He wasn’t just a genius. He could grasp nuances, unpack complexities, and see patterns invisible to others, but despite the ability to understand absolutely everything, he found himself interested in absolutely nothing. By age twenty-two, his hair had prematurely grayed, and he felt imprisoned in a life he could not help but feel was already squandered. He had no job because nothing could hold his attention. He had only his own roving mind, waiting for a true test.

Then the government came calling. A pair of recruiters, who told the man with the silver hair they’d been following his exploits since he was a child when the local paper had run a story about his self-taught ability to speak fluent Mandarin. They’d spoken of a small, specialized unit within their agency that the man with the silver hair would be perfect for. They had made an attractive offer and the man with the silver hair had accepted. It wasn’t the generous starting salary by any means—he had more than enough money through his investments. It was the nature of the work. The respect he’d been shown by the recruiters. The control he’d be given.

Over the years, the job had been everything they had promised. And his current assignment had given him a degree of power and autonomy second to none.

The man with the silver hair watched his monitors, fed by a combination of satellites and webcams. His drone footage allowed him to look out over the flat expanse of desert that surrounded Fenton: red dirt, crimson rock, a great swath of nothingness, the only movement coming from the wind or an occasional gecko. He let the images flow over him, using them to activate his subsurface thinking as preparation for an undertaking that would require every unit of his mental horsepower.

When it was time, the man with the silver hair stood and walked down the hallway to his lab, which held his current assignment.

Once it was complete, he would make God Himself feel like an imposter.

Argento took a Marlboro Red from a hard pack on the dresser and lit it indoors so he wouldn’t have to contend with the desert wind. He’d started smoking again about a year ago during the prison riot at Whitehall. He figured his lungs were clean enough now that he had a decade or two of grace before they blackened. He headed toward the front porch. Hudson was resting in front of the door, so Argento had to step over him, but Hudson didn’t mind this because he knew Argento didn’t mind. Hudson was guarding the gates. The dog knew Argento had already been hurt, with the passing of his wife, Emily, on the job, at Whitehall. He didn’t want him to be hurt anymore.

Argento settled in a wide-backed chair. He had no work lined up until the weekend. Business had been slow. A lot of people in Braylo did their own home improvements. Argento was fine with not having anything pressing. It was the kind of schedule he preferred. He’d shop for groceries later. Trapsi hadn’t left much food in the house before he left. That didn’t surprise Argento. When they’d worked together on SWAT, he’d rarely seen Trapsi eat. Guy lived on Mountain Dew and Copenhagen.

The day’s swelter lingered in the late-afternoon air, blunted by the breeze. Hudson shook himself, padded over from the doorway, and curled up on the porch next to him. The house was a two-bedroom southwest adobe. It was small and Argento used about a third of it. The backyard was ringed with paloverde trees, and the land was flat for a good stretch in every direction before it bled into mountains. Argento appreciated that. He liked to be able to see people coming.

He was living a life now where he did what he wanted when he wanted. He could get used to that. But it wasn’t complete. Emily had been an intervention. She’d come into his life just before being a cop completely defined him. Now he had to navigate the puzzle of how to be without her. Some days he was functional. On others, his grief felt like an undertow that hid in the waves and then pulled him out into the deep.

He pictured her sitting on the front porch of their house in Detroit. Hair tumbling past her shoulders. Her ready laugh. He could remember exactly what her voice sounded like. That was important. If he forgot her voice, it would be like losing her again. He scratched Hudson behind the ears and put his head against his dog’s, feeling his warmth.

Argento went back inside for a beer and when he returned to the porch, Hudson’s head shot up. He sensed something nearby to track. A lizard or rabbit. There were plenty of critters around to occupy him. Argento hadn’t spent much time in the desert, but he was already impressed by the number of things that could hurt or kill you. Heat, rattlers, spiny plants, probably the ghost of Geronimo. He eased back in the chair. He’d been hurt in Whitehall and still saw the place in a recurring nightmare where he would try to get people out but his arms wouldn’t work and then would disappear from his body. But he’d had a year to mend, physically and mentally. While his body still ached at times, the pulsating pain in his leg and spine had subsided, aided in part by morning physical therapy exercises he did on the floor while Hudson got down next to him like he was prepping for his own stretches. His damaged knee had cut into his foot speed some, but Argento didn’t see that as much of a disadvantage; his day-to-day activities didn’t involve a lot of retreating.

He saw the car coming from a half mile away. A green sedan trailing a thin plume of dust. As it grew near, Argento could see two occupants. An adult female driver and a child in a car seat in back. The car, a Toyota Corolla streaked with dust, jostled along the last stretch of road and pulled up in front of the house. Kristin Reed got out and stood by the driver’s-side door, her casted left hand raised to block the sun. She was wearing the same clothing as the day before. Hudson’s head rose and he watched Kristin and the car with middling interest. Then he scratched his face with his hind leg and settled back down on the porch. He didn’t bark. He was keyed in to Argento’s wavelength, and if Kurt wasn’t concerned at the presence of these strangers, neither was he.

“Small town,” Kristin said. “Delivery guy at the market told me where you lived.”

Argento remained seated and finished his cigarette, letting the smoke roll around in his mouth before he exhaled. The presence of the woman was an irritant, albeit a minor one, but it was to a certain extent canceled out by her tenacity. Argento admired that in people. But that didn’t change anything. She was going to leave disappointed. She might as well get used to it. Argento had often found the world to be a disappointing place.

“Thank you for breakfast,” Kristin said.

“I’ll save us both some time,” Argento replied. “I’m sorry your husband is missing. I wish he wasn’t. But I’m not any kind of investigator. Not anymore. I repair fences. I break up concrete.”

“Meet me in Fenton tonight. I want to show you something.”

Argento shook his head. “You got problems with the Fenton police, talk to the law here in Braylo. I’ve heard they’re halfway decent. They’ll listen to you.”

Kristin continued as if Argento hadn’t said anything at all. “My husband and I were separated. I didn’t tell you that before but I should have. He didn’t talk to me much the last year but we were trying to make it work again. I don’t know why he went to Fenton. But the text he sent that said something strange happened to him there… He and I have had our troubles, but he would never leave Ethan. And he doesn’t have any enemies. Warren gets along with everyone. He’s nice to a fault.”

Inside the car, Ethan squirmed in his car seat. His mouth was open and his head tilted slightly upward, as if he was singing to himself.

“Good-looking dog,” Kristin said. “Chow?”

“Half. Other half shepherd.”

“What’s his name?”

“Hudson.”

“Like the explorer?”

“Like the marine in Aliens.”

She nodded. Kept her gaze fixed on him. Argento held it. When he looked at most people, he often saw weakness. But not in Kristin Reed. He saw resolve.

“May I use your restroom for a minute?”

Argento wasn’t a big fan of strangers entering the space where he lived, but he wasn’t going to say no to a mother with a child. “First door on the right.”

Kristin unbuckled Ethan from his car seat and walked him over. Then she handed him to Argento and went inside.

One of Argento’s old SWAT partners had a houseful of kids whom Argento used to play with and toss in the air. But he hadn’t had much contact with children since. Argento looked at Ethan. Ethan looked at Argento. To his credit, the kid didn’t cry; there was nothing about Argento that was remotely paternal. Close-cropped hair setting off an unforgiving face, his perpetual stubble, the scars. He wasn’t the kind of man a stranger would willingly pass a child to. Unless she was trying to build more sympathy for her cause.

Argento held Ethan like a football the way he’d seen other parents do. Ethan gurgled. He seemed content with this position. Then the child reached out across Argento’s thick forearm, grabbed his right pinky finger, and held on to it. When Kristin emerged from the bathroom, she took Ethan from Argento and walked back to her car.

“I’ll be at the Baldwin Hotel at eight,” she said. “They allow dogs. Before he went missing, my husband told me he was staying there. Room eleven.” She turned away from Argento and opened her car door with her good arm.

“I’m not going to be there, Kristin.”

“You remembered my name.” Then she shut the door. From the back seat, Ethan waved. Maybe at him. Maybe at a nearby cactus.

He felt it then. Just a twinge of something approaching regret. He tried to ignore it. Feelings like that had never done him much good. He still didn’t quite know what to make of Kristin Reed and her story. But he’d made a decision when he was standing in front of the Pacific Ocean not long after he’d escaped Whitehall. Maybe even a pledge. Though he was no longer a cop, he’d still try to fix things for some people when he could.

After the car had disappeared from sight, Argento went back inside. He read for a time, a novel set during WWII called City of Thieves that Julie Wakefield, the governor’s daughter, had recommended. The two of them had kept up since . . .