by Robert Greer
“By who?” asked Flora Jean, eyebrows arching.
Carmen reached across the table and slipped the newspaper clipping out of Flora Jean’s hand. “By him,” she said, thumping Margolin’s name with her index finger several times before looking at Flora Jean pleadingly. “Can you help?”
“Ain’t up to me, sugar.” Flora Jean looked over at CJ.
After a lengthy silence, punctuated by Carmen’s penetrating gaze, CJ nodded and said, “Yes,” uncertain why he’d done so, especially in light of his earlier promise to Mavis. “What’s your father’s name?”
“Langston. Langston Blue.” Carmen realized only after she’d said it that for the first time ever, she’d said the name proudly.
Chapter 4
Langston Blue hadn’t pushed his gear-grinding, rusted-out ’62 Ford pickup past 40 in years. Now he was cruising along at more than 60, and he felt an overwhelming sense of trepidation as he knifed his way west along the narrow switchbacks that followed Willow Buck Creek, the rising sun at his back. The asphalt pavement, damp with dew, had recently been replaced for the first time in fifteen years. The unaccustomed smoothness was unnerving and unfamiliar.
No one had gotten around to painting a center line down the road, so the strip of highway seemed to be all his as he breezed past the gnarled, road-hugging trunks of eighty-year-old creek-bottom oaks. After three and a half decades he was leaving West Virginia, racing along the same route he’d taken when he came home from Vietnam, following the outline of a creek that had choked to death on coal dust bleeding from a strip-mining slag heap twenty miles upstream.
Prior to joining the army he’d spent his early teenaged years bouncing around the West Virginia hills with his life stuck on idle, trying to figure out how to become a man, and for most of his childhood he had been what people around his hometown of Bluefield liked to refer to as “slow.” But during high school he’d become a basketball star, and in the wake of his athletic success his marginal slowness had been conveniently ignored by family, neighbors, and friends. He and Rufus Hawkes, the only other black student at the then recently integrated Bluefield High, had taken their team all the way to the state basketball championship during their senior year, turning themselves into West Virginia playground legends. They had both signed letters of intent to go to Penn State, fully expecting that one day they’d make it to the pros, where they would spend their lives raining down jump shots and living like kings. But the summer after graduation, Rufus had been killed—gunned down in a bar in the middle of the day by a thick-necked lumberjack during an argument that had started over Rufus dating a white girl from nearby Bexley, Ohio.
That killing had done something to Langston, more or less slipping him into neutral out of drive. While lots of people around Bluefield claimed that the murder had only eliminated the nigger whose job had been to feed Langston the ball, Langston knew better. His mother hustled him off to college on a train in September, but when he came home for Christmas he didn’t go back. Two months into the new year he joined the army. Six months later he was trudging through the jungles of Vietnam.
The army transformed him from a sometimes slow-to-get-it athletic wonder into a precision killing machine, and while many of his fellow soldiers were potheads, lost souls, street hustlers, and horse-stall-mucking country loads, the worst possible candidates for members of a team, Blue’s tenacity and need to fit in made him the perfect foot soldier. Early into his second tour he’d become a sergeant and sharpshooter who’d earned himself a spot on an elite eight-man assault team charged with carrying out clandestine missions behind enemy lines—no-accountability missions that included the green light to kill at will.
Langston Blue’s palms were sweating as he nosed his pickup out of a final series of switchbacks and into a ten-mile straightaway that led to Route 119. Nursing the truck past 70 and into the shade of a half-mile-long stretch of cottonwoods, he thought about what he was leaving behind: thirty-four years of playing a role, close to four decades of self-imposed exile in an isolated back hollow lost to the world. During all those years his only trips outside his ten-acre retreat had been his monthly treks to Princeton, the nearest town, for groceries, snippets of news, and auto and building supplies, along with the occasional clandestine trek across the border into Ohio to satisfy his manly needs. Only during the past decade had he made an annual trip to Maryland to pick up twenty thousand dollars in crisp twenty-dollar bills. Before then, the money he’d been guaranteed when he had agreed to go underground had been delivered to him. During it all he had stayed busy, first building his cabin and clearing the acreage, then reading books, painting watercolors, fishing, hunting, and exploring the thousands of acres of surrounding woods. He had played the good soldier and now, in the blink of an eye, just like when his friend Rufus Hawkes had died in that bar, everything had changed.
His cabin was gone along with his cherished paintings, his books, his guns, his gear, and his twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year safety net—all replaced by someone who wanted him dead and a mysterious letter from a woman named Carmen Nguyen, who claimed to be his daughter. He nudged the accelerator and patted the letter in his shirt pocket as he slipped out of the shade of the overhanging cottonwoods and tried to think things through.
It made sense that the woman claiming to be his daughter would use his wife’s maiden name, Nguyen. Who’d want to be saddled with the name of a man who’d been a deserter? Whoever she was, she understood the need to be detached from the past, and that meant she had to be smart. Blue suddenly smiled at the thought of having a daughter, a piece of his beloved Mimm.
He’d mapped out the trip across country, diagramming it in his head like a winning jump shot or an assault on a Vietcong stronghold. He’d take the West Virginia turnpike north to Charleston. From there, just to be on the safe side, he’d take a series of back roads to I-70. Then, traveling only at night, he’d take a shot at making it halfway across the country to Denver to find Carmen without getting killed.
A suitcase he’d bought for a dollar at a flea market the day after his cabin had burned sat on the floor, wedged against the transmission hump. A 24-by-12-inch metal strongbox filled with all that remained precious in his life—Mimm’s wedding veil, her diary, and her wedding ring—rested on top of the suitcase. Their letters to one another, photographs of the good times they’d had even in the midst of war, his two Bronze Stars, and an official-looking government document with an army seal and a barely legible signature were also locked safely inside the box that he had stashed for years in the soft dirt below a tree a few yards from his cabin. The fact that his precious mementos had survived the fire had been the omen he’d needed to move ahead, a powerful signal along with the letter from his daughter that it was time to come up for air.
The truck’s out-of-alignment front end began shaking as he banked into a series of curves, and his thoughts turned from Carmen and Mimm to Cortez. If worse came to worst, he’d handle Cortez. He had done it before, and he knew he could do it again. It wasn’t Cortez he was worried about anyway. When you came right down to it, Cortez was probably still the same irrational, miscalculating, loud-mouthed, pot-smoking Jersey City Puerto Rican he’d always been. The man he had to worry about was their captain and kill-squad leader, Peter Margolin, a much darker, softer-spoken, thoughtful, and more treacherous man. Blue would be thinking about that incisive man of privilege all the way to Denver.
Eyeing a buckshot-riddled road sign that read 119 East, Blue eased off the accelerator and rubbed his eyes in a final attempt to clear his thoughts. As he nosed his truck onto the much wider state highway, the engine sputtered. He tapped the accelerator to a chorus of engine backfires, then floored it. As if responding to some preprogrammed order, the engine slipped into a smooth rumble. Within moments the truck disappeared into the West Virginia hills.
Peter Margolin looked up from his iced coffee, gritted his teeth, and eyed three briefcase-toting, downtown-Denver, 16th Street pedestrian mall white-collar types q
ueued up heel to toe, champing at the bit to order their late-morning Starbucks caffeine fix.
“What the hell do you mean the SOB’s still alive?” Margolin said to the man across the table from him.
Lincoln Cortez raised an index finger to his lips. “Lower your voice, Captain. This joint ain’t soundproof.”
“I thought I told you to solve the problem. And can that Captain shit. We’re not on patrol, and this isn’t the Mekong Delta.”
Cortez nodded and smiled, flashing a set of perfectly aligned white teeth that seemed just a bit too large for his thin-lipped mouth and protrusive lower jaw. Aware that Margolin preferred that everyone, including his closest associates, call him Congressman, Cortez reveled in bringing his former commanding officer down a notch, all the way to just plain captain.
“Sure thing.” Cortez eyed a nearby bleached-blond teenybopper who was wearing a pair of faded cutoffs that outlined her bulging cheeks. “Bet she ain’t wearing undies.” Letting out a lecherous sigh, he gave Margolin a wink. Margolin glanced in the girl’s direction with an uninterested grunt.
“Don’t be so dismissive, Captain. It’s me, Lincoln C. Remember? I used to bring you fresh Vietnamese catches like that two, three times a week.”
Margolin shot Cortez a death-trap stare that said, Shut the fuck up, Sergeant, or else. When he was certain the silent order had been understood, he smiled. “Now, what about Blue?”
Cortez shrugged and glared down into his coffee as if he expected the steaming brew to provide him with the answer. “He just up and vanished.”
“Into the West Virginia mist? Just like a ghost? Bullshit! I’ve got a derringer aimed at your dick, Sergeant. You can do better than that.” His tone was edgy and rising.
Cortez looked around the room, his eyes bloodshot from a two-day, 1,450-mile drive across country. Cupping his crotch and lowering his voice to a near whisper, he said, “I torched that rathole of his and ran a half-dozen perimeter sweeps right afterward. Even spent two hours the next day digging through the ashes. Nothing.”
“And you’re sure Blue was inside the cabin when you torched it?” Margolin looked unconvinced, recalling how adept Cortez had been with a flame thrower thirty-four years earlier. And how effortlessly Cortez used to pick off the Vietcong, and even innocent villagers when he felt like it, as they fled from their burning huts.
“Pretty sure,” Cortez said hesitantly, eyes glued to the tabletop.
“Then why didn’t you wait for Blue to run for cover and pop him then?”
When Cortez didn’t answer, Margolin leaned across the table until he was eye to eye with his former sergeant. Swinging one foot forward, he kicked Cortez in his grenade-mangled, surgically repaired right leg. The painful toothpick, three inches shorter than his left, had forced Cortez to use a cane for more than thirty years. When Cortez let out a yelp, the teenybopper in the cutoffs looked their way. Margolin flashed her a stern look that said, Don’t interfere, and she turned away.
“I think the son of a bitch mighta made me,” Cortez said, massaging his leg.
Margolin’s nose remained just inches from Cortez’s. “Why’s that?”
Cortez looked up and swallowed hard before returning his gaze to the tabletop, aware that Margolin probably had the connections to shoot off his testicles and get away with it. “During one of my perimeter sweeps the next day, about thirty yards downhill from the cabin, I found a couple of footprints and a partial handprint right next to an imprint of the tip of my cane.”
Margolin shook his head and sat back in his chair. “Then he wasn’t in the cabin when you torched it.”
“I’m not sure.”
Margolin’s face turned pensive. Turning away from Cortez, he gazed out at the mass of workaday people moving up and down the 16th Street pedestrian mall. “See those people out there, scurrying to their cubicles?”
“Yeah.” Cortez twisted in his seat and moved his bad leg out of kicking range.
“I need them, every one of them, and so do you.”
There was no response as Cortez looked puzzled. Smiling at the other man’s befuddlement, Margolin continued, “They’re the people who’ll punch the ballots and pull the levers that’ll send me to the Senate. And, my good First Sergeant, they’re the people who’ll keep you breathing. I’d dust your crippled ass right now if it weren’t for them.”
Aware that Margolin meant every word, Cortez took a deep breath. “I’ll get him next time.”
“No need. I’ll handle it myself.”
Margolin took a sip of coffee and continued watching the pedestrian flow outside, leering as the long-legged teenybopper’s buttocks jiggled toward the exit. He shook his head knowingly as the look on Cortez’s face quickly changed to fear. “You’re a real Einstein, Lincoln. A real magna brain of a spic. I’m busy building a seventy-five-million-dollar high-rise, talking with heads of state, breezing into a U.S. Senate seat, and you’re worried about me pulling the trigger on an over-the-hill, slow-thinking hermit of a nigger.”
“Just recalling how intuitive Blue used to be.”
Margolin broke into a Cheshire cat grin and slipped the derringer he’d been holding on Cortez’s jewels into his pocket. “I don’t think he’s like that anymore. After nearly thirty-five years of living like a back-hollow coon, my guess is he’s more like a stroked-out pussycat.” Margolin broke into a snicker that quickly rose to a booming laugh.
Chapter 5
There was no need to rush things, Celeste Deepstream told herself as she slowly strolled down a musty back aisle of Peterson’s Guns and Pawn, a seedy East Denver, Colfax Avenue gun enthusiast’s mecca, under the watchful gaze of an aging rodeo cowboy of a clerk, a man who, she’d been told by a prison snitch, would ignore the law and outfit her with anything she needed for a hundred bucks and a piece of ass. She had gained forty pounds during the last year of her five-year prison stay, transforming her trim, athletic frame into a sagging mass of loose muscle and increasing flab. Her once flawless skin, formerly the essence of Colorado ski-slope tan, was now mottled and lifeless, a tepid, washed-out, paper-sack shade of brown.
Eyeing bank after bank of floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with every imaginable accessory for a firearm, she was at peace for the first time in years, knowing she had the rest of her life to kill CJ Floyd.
Gazing along a neatly aligned row of Ithaca double-barreled over-and-unders, she thought about the world-class swimming champion she’d once been and how, seven years earlier, Floyd had destroyed her life. She had been a newly selected Rhodes Scholar poised to study anthropology at the University of London when a collision between her drug-addicted brother, Bobby, and CJ Floyd had derailed her plans. Because of Floyd, her dreams had been swamped. Because of Floyd, Bobby was dead.
She and Bobby had been more than brother and sister; they were fraternal twins born six minutes apart on the kitchen table in a crumbling two-room Acoma Indian reservation adobe. All her life Celeste had been stronger, smarter, and wiser than Bobby, miles ahead of her brother in all the things that mattered as if the couplet of DNA she had sprung from had harbored all of life’s richest components, while Bobby’s had been stripped to the bone. Until the day he died, Bobby’s one claim to fame was that he was the oldest.
She had turned down the Rhodes Scholarship to spend time detoxifying Bobby, who had been strung out on Ritalin, Percocet, alcohol, and model-airplane glue. In time Bobby won his war with drugs, but her painstaking sisterly intervention transformed her into Bobby’s permanent crutch, and the bond between them, no less tenacious, degenerated into an unhealthy codependent union fueled by Bobby’s instability and her own deep sense of guilt.
And then came Floyd, an unrelenting bounty-hunting bear of a black man hired to track down her now dried-out, bond-skipping brother, who had been a small-time fence. Floyd had tracked Bobby across two states before hog-tying him in chains, dumping him in the back of a pickup, and hauling him from Santa Fe to Denver to face charges of transporting stolen weapon
s and illegal fireworks across state lines.
While awaiting trial, Bobby had tried to kill himself in the Denver county jail. Guilt-ridden and enraged, she had unmercifully beaten the skinflint bail bondsman who had originally hired Floyd to track down Bobby, blaming him for her brother’s plight. When the man died from injuries sustained during that beating, Celeste received a plea-bargained manslaughter conviction that earned her a twelve-year prison sentence. She never again saw Bobby alive.
With five years of model-prisoner check marks next to her name, chits that included saving a prison guard’s life, teaching college-credit courses to inmates, and founding a Native American prisoners’ prerelease job opportunity program, she masterminded an early release, dumping buckets of remorse around the room at two critical parole hearings and playing the role of a long-suffering sister forced all her life to shoulder responsibility for her bad-seed twin. She was paroled after serving just under half of her original sentence.
“Help you there, ma’am?” called out the pudgy, gruff-voiced clerk, sporting a silver-dollar-sized turquoise bolo and a broken-brimmed cowboy hat. The man had been watching her intently since she’d first walked into the store.
“Sure can. Need ammo for my thirty-ought.”
The man flashed a half smile, showing several badly stained teeth. “Any particular brand?”
“I’m partial to Remington.” Celeste flashed a brief come-hither smile.
“Good as any. Got ’em up front.”
“And a scope,” Celeste added, her tone suddenly expectant.
“They’re three aisles over.” The man eyed Celeste from head to toe, thinking that if she were thirty pounds lighter, she’d be a real knockout. “Got a brand in mind for the scope?”
