Out of Time

by David Klass

  Earl passed him the paper from the Holiday Inn pad with his ten questions written out in small, neat handwriting. Tom asked the policemen, “Can I borrow a match?” One of them handed him a book of matches, and Tom lit the paper on fire and dropped it in an ashtray. While it burned, he looked over at Earl, and when the ten questions were reduced to cinders, Tom said to the surprised policemen, “So, to continue, we’re looking for one man, thirty to fifty years old, who would have been unshaven and looked exhausted. He’d driven through the night, so, careful as he is, he might have had trouble staying in his lane or missed a speed trap. That’s why you might have stopped him. He was driving a van with tinted windows and wearing a hat or cap tilted over his eyes. We think his Michigan, Wisconsin, or possibly Ohio license plate would have all numbers and no letters—”

  Earl exploded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  But the policemen were listening carefully, and Tom kept going: “He wouldn’t have wanted to stop and talk, but if he was pulled over for anything, he would have been polite and even conversational to a point, and he’d follow all commands perfectly. His goal would have been to get away with a warning and not have the policeman at the scene give him a ticket, run his plates, or generate any data from the stop.”

  After they left, Earl furiously demanded an explanation. “What the hell was that nonsense you were spouting? We have no idea about any of that. Green Man could be twenty or he could be eighty.”

  “Thirty to fifty is not just my guess; it’s part of the FBI’s profile,” Tom told him.

  “It’s just their guess,” Earl said. “We don’t know it, so we shouldn’t ask—”

  Tom cut him off. “It feels right to me. He doesn’t stay in hotels or even use public bathrooms, so there’s no mirror or hot water available, and even if there was, I don’t see why he’d take the trouble to shave. . . .”

  “All he needs to shave is his car mirror,” Earl pointed out. “Most men shave in the morning as part of their routine. I have for the last forty years or so.”

  “Yeah, but why would Green Man shave on a mission? He wants to alter his appearance and hide his face as much as possible. Why would he do anything to clean it up and make himself more recognizable? And why risk drawing blood or leaving any hair follicles or suds? No, he’d let his hair and beard grow out during his trip.”

  “And that’s why you think he’d wear a hat and drive a van with tinted windows?”

  “Green Man likes privacy. He’s especially careful about hiding his face.”

  “What’s that nonsense about the numbers on his license plate?”

  “Numbers are much harder for people to recall than letters, which people remember in patterns. If I was Green Man, I’d get a vanity plate with a random sequence of seven numbers and then doctor the first few numbers before setting out, just in case some hidden camera snapped a picture of my van. But that carries a risk—if any police along the way ran the plate, it wouldn’t come up, so he’d have to drive slowly and carefully and be ready just in case that ever happened.”

  “Be ready for what?”

  “For whatever he’d have to do to stop a cop from running his plate. Why are you laughing?”

  “Brennan was right.”

  “About what?”

  “He said you have a real good sense of smell but you don’t know it and maybe because of your father you hesitate to use it, so you have to be provoked into it. He told me to keep you on a really tight leash and stick to the facts till it pissed you off enough to blow a gasket, put your Green Man hat on, and take over.”

  “He really said that about me?”

  “Yeah, he gave me those ten questions and told me to keep repeating them till I drove you crazy. He has a very high opinion of your ability to be a pain in the ass,” Earl said, taking the window down five inches and lighting another cigarette. “Not to swell your ego, but we wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think you had a chance to crack this. Except he thinks you might be soft.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Compromised. A greenie.”

  Tom considered that. “He thinks I might be sympathetic to some of Green Man’s environmental motives?”

  “Are you?”

  “I admit I’m fond of the planet I live on,” Tom said. “Aren’t you?”

  Earl puffed white smoke out the window from both nostrils. “It’s done okay for itself for six billion years. I don’t know if we can kill it that easy.”

  “This from the man who smokes a pack a day and is destroying his own lungs?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How? You’re killing yourself. If we keep fucking with the earth, we’re all killing ourselves. You’re being a short-term idiot. We’re being suicidal fools long-term.”

  Earl looked over at Tom and said in a flat voice, “My wife of thirty-one years, Susie, died last Christmas in a very painful way, and that’s when I started smoking like this. I don’t really care fuck-all about living long without her.”

  Tom slowed for a sharp turn. “I’m sorry,” he said. “As long as you keep the window down, it’s none of my business.”

  “Nope, it’s not,” Earl said. “But you did good back there. You’re gonna be asking all the questions from now on. I’ll just ride shotgun and try to find us some good burger places along the way. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” Tom said, and hesitated. “But there is one thing I’d like you to teach me.”

  “What’s that?” Earl asked, a little surprised.

  “Could you teach me how to shoot?”

  “A gun?”

  “I have my father’s Colt with me.”

  SIXTEEN

  Gus juked right and then cut the ball back left, and the defender bit hard on the fake, lost his balance, and fell on his ass. Suddenly alone in midfield, Gus didn’t hesitate. He ran right up the gut of the opposing team till their sweeper had to step up and take him on. That left the center of their defense wide-open, and one of Gus’s wings cut swiftly in from the side of the penalty box. Gus led him with a well-measured pass that the winger smashed into the upper corner of the net for the winning goal.

  The parents’ section erupted, and Green Man was on his feet, punching the air and shouting, “WAY TO GO, GUS!”

  Sharon tried to pull him down. “Mitch. Chill.”

  “Did you see that move? He faked that kid out of his shorts. GREAT PASS!”

  “You don’t want to be one of those parents.”

  Gus had separated from the congratulatory scrum of teammates and was searching the stands for him. Green Man raised his right hand, and Gus spotted him and proudly raised his own palm, an imaginary father-son high-five across fifty yards of soccer field.

  After the game, Gus’s team headed off to celebrate at a local ice-cream and video arcade. Kim was sleeping over with her best friend.

  The big white colonial house was empty when Green Man and Sharon drove home. He had been waiting for a moment when they were totally alone. In the garage, he used a razor blade scraper to carefully remove a small, square decal from the black van’s rear bumper. He cleaned it with alcohol to remove any trace of the adhesive, and then scrubbed the entire bumper with a dry wash of river clay so the surface looked equally weathered. Sharon inspected it carefully and nodded her approval.

  They armed the security system, double-locked the second-floor door, and climbed to the third-floor library. They knew they were all alone. “So,” she said, “have you decided?”

  “I have,” he told her. “It’s the last one, so it’s got to be big and also deeply symbolic. There’s nothing bigger in America now than oil. Probably there never has been.” He led her over to a map of the United States that hung on a wall and pointed with a finger. “West Texas,” he said softly. “The Hanson Oil Field in the Permian Basin.”

  Sharon loo
ked at the map and then at him and nodded. “It’s the right choice,” she said. “They’re making obscene amounts of money, and they’re doing so much damage with their fracking and the chemicals they use and the methane leaks—and they don’t care at all. Do you know how you’re going to do it yet?”

  “I have some ideas,” he said. “It’s tricky because I can’t take the chance of lighting the oil tanks on fire. If they went up, I’d be doing exactly what I’m trying to prevent. And security’s real tight. They have money to spend on keeping people out, and they’re spending it. On the other hand, the field I’m looking at has a giant perimeter, and there’s a river that cuts through the heart of it. Security never pays enough attention to rivers. I think I can bring it off.”

  “I know you can,” Sharon told him. She added softly, “And after you’re done, it will be time for us to go.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “If we can wait that long.”

  She reached down for his hand, and they stood together, looking at the map and the big square stretching from near Lubbock, west into New Mexico, and all the way south to the Rio Grande, where the massive shale field held billions of gallons of oil and natural gas that some of the most brilliant engineers in the world had finally figured out how to unlock and blast free and suck out of the earth.

  “I know it’s been terribly difficult,” Sharon said softly. “But they don’t have anything solid on you.”

  “We can’t know that.”

  “If they did, they wouldn’t say they did. It’s just a bluff, just psychological warfare.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s effective,” he told her. “Sleeping is so hard now. I can feel them closing in. I worry about Gus and Kim all the time. And if anything happened to you, I wouldn’t want to keep living.”

  She kissed him gently on the cheek. “You wouldn’t be the man I love if you didn’t fear for us or feel guilt over the casualties.”

  He tightened his grip on her hand and led her two steps to the window, where they stood arm in arm, looking out over the treetops, which were soft in the afternoon light, and they were silent for several minutes. “Shar, maybe I should stop at six.”

  She looked up into his eyes. “You’re so close,” she whispered. “It was always seven, with the seventh being the biggest. You should see it through. Finish what you started. We’ll make it, and we’ll go.”

  “But if I slip up, even in some tiny way . . .”

  “You won’t,” she promised. “There’s no one else in the whole world strong enough and smart enough to do it. Hundreds of years from now people will recognize that you turned things when they absolutely needed to be turned and saved the world for generations to come. Someone had to do it, and you were the one. And I know as well as you do how mad that sounds, but we both also know it’s absolutely true.”

  “I believe it is true,” Green Man admitted in a low and solemn voice. “But maybe you and the kids should go to the summer house ahead of me.” That was how they always referred to it.

  “We always said we’d go together. The break works best and cleanest if we leave together—same hour, same minute, same second. That’s what you always said, and you made a break work once before.”

  “Sure, but it could also work if you went on ahead. I could make the strike in Texas and join you there. I’d worry less.”

  “We should stick to our original plan,” Sharon said firmly. “It’s worked so far, and it will take us the rest of the way, to a safe and beautiful place with no more worries. . . .”

  The security monitor beeped as a blue SUV pulled up to the gate. It was Coach Ross, bringing Gus home from the arcade. Green Man pushed the button to open the front gate and then turned to Sharon and nodded very slightly. “All right,” he said. “I’ll hit number seven in Texas and see this through just as we always planned. Now we’d better head downstairs. There’s a young man about to walk through the door who, I believe, may need medical attention because he has eaten at least three pounds of chocolate ice cream.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Aim at that dead tree,” Earl told him, “and don’t close one eye like they do in the stupid movies.”

  “It’s an ash.”

  “What?”

  “That dead tree is a green ash.”

  “Maybe it was a green ash. Now it’s just firewood. Feet apart the distance of your shoulders. Weight evenly balanced. That’s not bad at all. You’ve done this before?”

  “Long ago,” Tom admitted, feeling the grip of his father’s pistol and, very oddly, touching the best and worst of his father at once. He felt his father’s coolness and confidence, and also his cold-blooded ruthlessness and taste for violence. As his finger stroked the trigger, he remembered his father taking him to firing ranges when he was as young as seven. “Green ash are beautiful trees. They were all over Nebraska. But the emerald ash borer has got their number.”

  “The emerald ash borer can crawl up my ass,” Earl said, and flicked away a cigarette. “You really are a greenie. Fire when ready and expect the kick. Aim for that big branch about three feet up.”

  Tom adjusted his aim slightly. “You wouldn’t want an ash borer to do that, because the females lay eggs, and the larvae feed voraciously,” Tom told him, and fired. The big branch splintered, and the dead tree shook.

  “Well, looky here,” Earl said, impressed. “Warren would have liked that one.”

  It was the first time that Earl had mentioned Tom’s father’s first name out loud.

  “It wouldn’t have been good enough for him,” Tom said quietly.

  “The hell it wouldn’t. It was bang on target.”

  “He would have found something wrong with it or my stance or he would say that my hair is too long and I look like a girl.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that hair,” Earl said. “We’re getting looks from some of the police.”

  “Fuck you,” Tom said, and fired again, and the top half of the dead tree shuddered and then cracked and toppled over.

  “Hey, you killed the dead tree,” Earl said. “Is there anything else you want me to teach you about shooting, or can we go find the nearest barber?”

  They got back in the SUV and drove along the long, flat roadway. Endless fields of corn and sorghum stretched away on either side of them, and in the far distance the low mountains were molten bronze as the sun rose over them. A sign announced the town of Destry five miles ahead. “Talk about the middle of nowhere,” Earl said, and spat out the window.

  “It’s on our list,” Tom told him. “The Destry Police Department.”

  “What the hell is there to steal around here?” Earl asked. And then, carefully: “I’m guessing your dad taught you to shoot like that?”

  “Thanks for the refresher course.”

  “I’m not sure you needed it.”

  Seconds ticked by. Tom swerved to avoid some roadkill. “Did you know that my father saved Jim Brennan’s life?”

  “No, I never heard that.”

  “Many years ago. He shot a man who was going to kill Brennan.”

  Earl fished out a package of beef jerky and tore it open. “Your father had a way of being in the right place at the right time. You like the teriyaki?”

  “It’s too salty, but it’s good. Do you think my dad used this Colt I’m carrying around to shoot the guy?”

  “Probably,” Earl said. “We get fond of our guns, and we keep them. Here, don’t try to swallow this in one go or I’ll have to Heimlich you.”

  He handed Tom a piece of jerky, and Tom popped it into his mouth and chewed for several seconds and then said softly, “You don’t have to answer this.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  Earl gazed out over the small town that was swimming toward them across the fields. It was red rooftops and stunted trees and a wat
er tower with the name “Destry” in big letters. He nodded.

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Not good,” Earl said. “If it feels good, there’s something wrong with you. But you do what you need to do, and it sounds like your dad needed to do it.”

  “I’m not sure I could,” Tom told him.

  “When the moment comes, anyone can do it.”

  “I don’t think I’d think I have the right, if that makes any sense.”

  “Sometimes you think too much for your own good,” Earl told him, and then grinned and pointed. “Look, there’s a barber right across from the police station.”

  A half hour later, with a buzz cut so short that it looked like there was a black bowl inverted on his scalp, Tom faced the two members of the Destry Police Department. The chief was older than Earl and had stained teeth that he kept running his tongue over, as if to try to lick them clean. And there was a short female officer who went by Andrea and insisted on getting the men fresh coffee, which she proudly made from whole Starbucks beans. A sack of beans and the grinder were on a little table next to the coffee maker.

  The chief and Andrea listened politely and shook their heads in unison at Tom’s questions. “I’m really sorry we can’t help you guys, but I haven’t seen anybody like that in the last week. Andrea?”

  “Really wish I could help but nope,” she said. “Would you guys like one more cup of joe for the road?”

  “No, thanks,” Earl said, getting up, apparently eager to say goodbye to Destry. “We’ll be on our way.”

  Tom had noticed some platoon photos on a desk by a window. They looked like they could be from Iraq, but neither the chief nor Andrea seemed likely to have served recently. “Is there someone else on the force we should talk to?” he asked. “What about the guy who sits over by that window?”

  “Oh, that’s Dwight,” the chief said. “He hasn’t said anything about stopping a van.”

  “Dwight just started here a month ago, and he’s always out on the road,” Andrea added.