Iron Curtain

By Bowen Greenwood

"Drop the charges against Ram Castro, or we will keep killing."

The last honest judge in Hunter, Montana is gunned down in cold blood. The killer has journalists and cops next on his list. And the Hunter Post gets a manifesto in their email with that simple warning.

Crime reporter Sherman Iron has covered the Sureste drug cartel for years. He’s lost countless people he cared about to the heartless meth trade that’s turning his community into a war zone. Finally putting the cartel’s kingpin Castro in jail cost him almost everything.

He’s not going to let the man go without a fight.

The question isn’t whether more lives will be lost, it’s whether Iron or anyone he loves will survive. Everything he holds dear will be at risk. Every value in which he believes will be tested. In an apocalyptic showdown between a murderous drug dealer and a simple man trying to tell the truth, the streets of Hunter will run red with blood. Sherman Iron and Ram Castro collide in a final battle for the soul of the town, and the cost of survival may be higher than Iron can bear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowen Greenwood
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215113790

Bowen Greenwood

Bowen Greenwood is an Amazon charts bestselling author of thrillers and science fiction. His experience as a police beat reporter and as a court clerk inform his thrillers. His lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy led to the Exile War series.

Book preview

CHAPTER

ONE

Ever since Ram Castro came to town, judges in Hunter, Montana were an iffy thing. You never knew from whence they drew the bigger paycheck, the taxpayers or the drug cartel. I cut my teeth dealing with the bad kind: I found a dead judge in his pajamas next to a briefcase with a million in cash and got framed for his murder.

Judge Warwick was the opposite.

His monk’s fringe of hair and full beard presented a united front of steel gray. Flinty eyes spoke of the law, the law, naught but the law. In a different age, they might have called him a hanging judge, but Montana hadn’t had anyone sentenced to death in years.

I had a feeling he was going to break that record, so I asked him about it.

I told you, Mr. Iron, I can’t comment on what might happen at trial. The prosecution has filed a notice that they expect to seek the death penalty for Mr. Castro—which is a public document, and you can view it at the court clerk’s office—but he hasn’t even been tried yet, let alone sentenced, so what’s likely to come of it is beyond the scope of this interview.

Aggravated homicide. Kidnapping. Possession with intent to distribute—at least a hundred counts on that last one. If the charges against Ram Castro didn’t get him a date with a needle, nothing would.

Raul Warwick wore a charcoal gray business suit rather than the black robe he would have on when Montana’s trial of the century began. His shirt was a lighter shade of gray. His tie, black. This was not a man with the patience for pastels or bright colors.

How long do you think the trial might take?

There’s no way to tell, Mr. Iron. The accused will get a speedy trial.

I hoped it wasn’t all that speedy; it was going to pay my bills. The trial of notorious drug kingpin Ramsey Castro was the biggest news in Hunter, and news was my job.

I’m Sherman Iron. I cover cops and courts for the Hunter Post.

I had my phone out with the voice recorder app open, collecting the judge’s every word for later transcription by another app. Reflected in the screen I saw a light-haired slender man in a loose, unbuttoned shirt over a red T-shirt. The dual top layers were too hot for a Montana summer, but they had another purpose: concealing the pistol at my hip. The culture of violence Ram Castro had created here made covering the police beat a dangerous job indeed.

Returning to my question, the judge said, We haven’t even begun the process of jury selection, Mr. Iron. You know all this already. I told you when you asked for the interview, I will not answer any questions that might create a risk of a mistrial.

The same rectitude that made me believe he could be trusted to try Castro fairly stymied me now in an attempt to get a story out of him. The prosecuting attorney was next on my list to interview; I knew she’d be a lot more forthcoming with answers.

What did you do before you were elected as a Judge?

I knew the answer already, but getting it in his words was my job.

I worked in the Office of the Public Defender, first as a trial attorney, then as a bureau supervisor, then as Director.

Do you think your background defending criminals—including people in the drug trade—might bias you in favor of the defense?

I knew it wouldn’t, but a sizable portion of the readers didn’t share my confidence, and that made it an important part of the story. Or at least it would have, if the next second hadn’t changed the world.

The bullet entered the building from the south side, shattering a window in its path. Then it shattered a life.

Judge Warwick screamed in high-pitched agony, his stern, old testament image ruined in death. Both hands flew to his chest as if to hold in the blood, but there was far too much of it for that.

With impossibly bad timing, my cell phone buzzed. I ignored it, confronting a moment of indecision. Help the judge or catch the shooter? Warwick’s face frozen in a rictus of shock and pain helped me answer that. There was nothing I could do for him. Perhaps, though, I could catch the man who shot him. Mentally, I traced a line of sight through the broken window of the courthouse to the buildings across the street.

My phone didn’t stop buzzing, but I blocked it out of my mind—no small feat for a screen addict like me.

There! Was that a figure vaulting over the edge of the building across the way? There must be a fire escape …

The door of the courtroom burst open, and Hunter’s finest in their blue uniforms flooded through it like a dam bursting. Guns drawn, shouting Freeze! at the top of their lungs, about five of them raced in one after another, and every last one of them aimed his service weapon right at me.

Across the street! I shouted as I put my hands in the air. Fire escape! You can still get him.

The first call had gone to voicemail, but now my phone was buzzing again.

One of the cops turned around and sprinted back out, apparently to investigate my suggestion. The rest of them threw me very roughly over one of the counsel tables in the courtroom, holding my hands behind my back, causing my phone to clatter to the floor face-up. Even from my awkward position, I could still read the text message that swam up on the screen.

Iron, pick up! Get somewhere safe and bring the judge. We just got a threat to his life in our email!

It was from my editor, and it was a minute and an eternity too late.

It took the whole morning for the police to arrive at the obvious conclusion. The bullet that killed Judge Warwick had been fired from a high-powered rifle by someone located across the street. I could not have killed him. Hunter’s cops knew me, but they were thorough, so they ran all the traps before letting me go. They did let me send a couple quick texts to people who had to be panicking. Finally, on the way out the door, they gave me a warning that my concealed carry permit for the pistol didn’t cover bringing a gun into a courtroom.

The first firearm I’d ever bought for myself, a .357 magnum revolver, currently sat in the Hunter Police Department’s evidence locker, having been used—quite extensively—in the incident that had put Ram Castro in the county jail.

Ram Castro. Ram Castro. His real first name was Ramsey, but he had a tendency to kill people who used it to his face, so his preferred version was the name he was known by throughout the community of Hunter.

My town, at 100,000, was the second largest in Montana. Perched on the border between the great plains and the Rocky Mountains, it offered decent access to both the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park. It was also the largest community close to the intersection of Interstate 15, which came up from the Mexican border all the way to the Canadian one, and Montana Highway Two, which, called different things in different states, was the main thoroughfare between most large cities on the northern border. That location, so beneficial for Hunter’s growth, had, in recent years, become a curse.

It made us a perfect distribution hub for the Sureste drug cartel.

They had started with meth. These days, from precursor drugs manufactured in China and brought into the United States over the southern border, they sold fentanyl. That same Interstate that brought so much tourist traffic to my outdoor recreation community also brought poison. Sureste’s dark merchandise flowed up to Hunter to be moved out along the asphalt artery to Spokane, Bismarck, Minneapolis, and the rest of the northern great plains.

And the cartel’s man in Hunter was Ram Castro.

He was, on paper, a nightclub owner. 3A had been the hottest of hot spots for students at Montana Polytechnic to engage in the mating rituals for which college students were so famous. However, charging trust fund babies $400 for a bottle of Jack Daniels was really only a cover. Castro’s real business was taking a cut of every drug deal that happened between Washington state and Minnesota. He ran the dealers, he ran the pimps, he ran the muscle, and the profit from all of it had made him wealthy beyond imagination.

It had made him wealthy enough to corrupt my mentor at the Hunter Post, who let his meth addiction turn him into a tool for Castro’s bribery operations.

It had made him wealthy enough to bribe lawyers in the County Attorney’s office, whose spying had led to the death of my best friend’s mother.

The drug trade had made Ram Castro powerful enough to blackmail a county commissioner.

Finally seeing him arrested by the Hunter Police had nearly cost me my life. It had cost me my mobility. I still walked with a limp from Ram Castro shooting me in the foot—not a miss in the course of trying to kill me, but a deliberately non-lethal shot just for the entertainment of causing me injury and pain.

After that arrest, Ram Castro was finally about to be tried for such a wide variety of charges it was hard to list them all. Not by the judge we expected, though. His ties to one of the biggest drug cartels in Mexico, combined with his career of addiction, human trafficking, and terror, had apparently made him wealthy and powerful enough to hire an assassin even while locked in solitary confinement.

I had suspected something like this might happen. Castro had used violence, bribery, and hired muscle at every step of the long road that led to his trial; he wasn’t going to stop now. That’s why when the cops had impounded my revolver, I deepened my indentured servitude to the Visa corporation and bought another one. Different brand, longer barrel, capable of holding one more bullet in the wheel, but otherwise a lot like my old one.

That meant I wouldn’t have to learn anything new if I had to use it.

Back at the Hunter Post, my editor paced his messy office, finally stopping only when I came in and sat down uninvited. My knees blocked his path around his desk, so he had to go backwards to his chair.

Jim Tenner’s hair was blond these days, but that was mostly due to the summer sun. In cooler, darker weather, it would be a light brown. His narrow green eyes always made him look like he was suspicious of whoever he talked to, but it was misleading. Jim and I had built a good relationship since he took over the job of editor after Ram Castro had the last one killed.

He was one of those who had received an I’m OK text the HPD had let me send, but he still looked like he’d been afraid I was dead.

Iron! Thank God! I’ve been worried sick ever since we got that email!

Yeah, I’ve been wanting to know more about it ever since your message. What email, boss? Fill me in.

He passed over his phone, which he’d had in his hand as he’d been pacing. The screen had the message up and ready for me to read.

"We are the Sureste Cartel, and we do not leave our own behind. We are responsible for Judge Raul Warwick’s death today. Unless our demands are met, we will be responsible for more. Police. Lawyers. Judges. Reporters. We will kill, and kill, and kill until all charges against Ram Castro are dropped, and he is released from prison.

"You have no right to try any of us. We simply supply your people with entertainment they want. We are the innocent here. You are the guilty, and it will be our justice system, not yours, in which you will be tried, convicted, and sentenced if you continue to hold Ram Castro against his will.

"No one in Hunter is safe. No one is above our law. If you are involved in the unjust show trial against Mr. Castro, your life, and the lives of the people you love, are forfeit. What happens to you will be justice. You have been warned.

"Publish this manifesto in your newspaper tomorrow, or someone at the Hunter Post will be next."

CHAPTER

TWO

A chill lifted every hair on my arms as I read it, and I did a quick mental comparison of the time Tenner’s text message had come in on my phone, the time stamp on the email, and the official time of death.

I said, It looks like the killer probably had this message pre-prepared, hit send on it, and then pulled the trigger.

Tenner nodded. I thought the same thing once I realized my warning was too late.

What are we going to do?

"I don’t want to publish it, Iron. It’s like negotiating with terrorists. If we print it, it’s like rewarding them for murdering a judge. I mean, I’ll listen to you if you have