Flat Spin

by David Freed

  I asked her if he’d ever talked about Arlo Echevarria.

  “All the time. Robbie loved Arlo. The only one who ever stood up for him.”

  “Then you heard what happened to Echevarria.”

  Emma looked over at me. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Echevarria was killed. About a month and a half ago. Shot to death.”

  “Jesus.” She gulped down half her beer. “Robbie called Arlo to tell him some Russians were out to get him. He called to warn Arlo.”

  “When was this?”

  “The night before they found him out in the desert. Don’t you see? They murdered Arlo to cover their tracks, just like they did my Robbie, just like they’re gonna do you. They know you know.”

  “Know what, Emma?”

  She didn’t answer, scanning the skies and checking her mirrors. We were doing ninety in the slow lane, passing cars on the right.

  “You said ‘some Russians.’”

  “Fuck the Russians! They’re in on it, too! They all are! You know who it was!” She reached behind her, steering with her right hand, trying to wrestle the Winchester out of the gun rack and nearly sideswiping a big rig hauling a load of sheetrock. “Take the rifle. Take it!”

  I grabbed the Winchester out of the rack before she shot herself with it. Or me. She was straining forward in her seat, peering intently upward, through the windshield.

  “There!” she said, pointing, “Right there! You see it? There it is!”

  I followed her sight line to a Bell Ranger cruising at our eleven o’clock position, about 1,500 feet AGL, paralleling the freeway. “Channel 11 Action News” was emblazoned on the side of the helicopter’s fuselage.

  “You mean the news chopper?”

  “News chopper. Yeah, right.”

  She veered violently off the freeway, ignoring the red light at the bottom of the off-ramp, and fishtailing onto Union Hills Drive, racing eastward. I could see the TV helicopter through the truck’s rear window. It continued to parallel the freeway, flying on a perpendicular course, away from us.

  “Lost him.” She lit another cigarette with trembling hands. “God, that was close.”

  I soon realized that the news helicopter wasn’t the only thing Emma Emerson had lost.

  She lived in a two-bedroom mobile home across the street from the clubhouse in a treeless, sun-blanched trailer park on Scottsdale’s north side. Three deadbolt locks secured the corrugated aluminum front door. Robbie Emerson’s widow quietly put her ear to the door and listened with the pistol in her right hand, hammer back. Satisfied we weren’t walking into an ambush, she undid the deadbolts. I followed her inside.

  Dozens of banker boxes filled with papers were heaped haphazardly atop each other almost to the ceiling, creating wobbly cardboard walls through which narrow passageways had been constructed like some sort of indoor corn maze. Newspapers and magazines and clothes and cartons of ammunition were piled on the furniture. There was nowhere to sit. The trailer reeked of tobacco and garlic.

  “In here,” Emma said, sidestepping between walls of boxes and into the trailer’s cramped galley kitchen. She put the pistol on top of the refrigerator, snatched a half-gallon bottle of off-brand bourbon from a cupboard next to the stove and poured herself a glass. The kitchen table, barely big enough for two people, was crammed with boxes, files, and an old CRT-type computer monitor.

  “You need to see this,” she said, sitting down at the table and typing.

  I stood over her shoulder and watched. Black and white video appeared on the computer screen: a broad V-formation of lights in the night sky. I remembered seeing the same footage on the news years earlier. The Air Force said the lights were nothing more than flares dropped by military aircraft on a training exercise outside Phoenix, but hundreds of eyewitnesses insisted otherwise. What they saw that night, they said, was an enormous UFO.

  Emma lit a fresh Camel. “That’s the alien mother spaceship,” she said, gesturing with her chin to the computer screen. “Where everybody took all those pictures of it was right near where those utility workers found Robbie. Same location. That’s why Robbie was killed. That’s why Arlo was killed. To keep them quiet because they knew all about the arrangement.”

  “What arrangement would that be, Emma?”

  “The reverse engineering stuff they’re doing at Area 51! I thought you said you were with Alpha. Jesus.”

  Her late husband’s top-secret security clearance, she said, had afforded him detailed knowledge of hush-hush research programs that allowed scientists working for the Defense Department to parlay technology gifted by ETs into the development of technological advances ranging from Stealth bombers to longer-lasting light bulbs.

  “Robbie knew things he wasn’t supposed to know, so they made it look like he killed himself,” Emma said. “They’re gonna kill you and everybody else who was ever with Alpha, just like they did him and Arlo Echevarria because they know you all know the truth.”

  “You’re saying the aliens killed your husband?”

  “Christ, do I have to spell it out for you? Not the aliens. They’re too smart for that. They make these big defense contractors hire professional killers, Russians, because they don’t want the public to know they’re all in cahoots.” She gulped some bourbon. “The CEOs of these companies, they’re making trillions of dollars, cashing in on all the tech transfer! The police won’t do nothing because they’re afraid they’ll get killed, too, just like my Robbie. So nobody says a word.”

  “Did Robbie tell you all this?”

  “He didn’t want to put me at risk. Far as he was concerned, the less I knew, the safer I’d be. But I figured it all out, believe me, the whole story. Mailed Arlo a book that lays it all out, the whole coverup, to protect him, because I knew how much Robbie respected him. But Arlo must not have read it, cuz if he’d of had any sense at all, he would’ve run for the hills before they got him.”

  I asked her about the suicide note her husband had allegedly left behind.

  “That wasn’t him that wrote it. The grays forged his handwriting to make it look like he’d killed himself.” She removed a sheet of paper from a file. “The police would only give me a copy. Said the original was evidence.”

  She handed me the copy of her husband’s suicide note. In steady block print it said, “I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

  “Robbie would’ve never shot himself, not in a million years,” Emma said. “Our daughter’s having a baby. She’s due any day. Robbie was gonna be a grandpa. You should’ve seen him. He was so excited. Them aliens, the grays, they was the ones who made him do it. The police can deny it all they want, but I got the proof.”

  She handed me an envelope from the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division. Inside was Robbie Emerson’s driver’s license.

  “This came in the mail the week after he died,” she said.

  The photo on Emerson’s license made him look older than his fifty-seven years. He had thinning hair and a straggly beard flecked with gray and stared listlessly into the camera, like some shellshocked veteran resigned to his fate. He looked to me like a man who could’ve easily put a pistol to his skull and squeezed one off.

  “Look at the date on the license,” Emma said. “He goes and renews his license two days before his birthday, then, five days later, you’re telling me he drives into the desert and shoots himself? Who in their right mind renews their driver’s license, then five days later does that?”

  She showed me a prescription bottle with Emerson’s name on it—Prozac, the same anti-depressant Savannah dropped like candy toward the end of our marriage. Savannah always said she needed happy pills because her career wasn’t going well, but I always wondered if it was because of me.

  “Look at the date on the bottle,” Emma said. “He refills the prescription and three days later, he kills himself? Gimme a break. It makes no sense. None of it.”

  “I’m sorry, Emma.”

  She stared at the photo on his driver’s license
for a long time, caressing it with her thumb. Then she got up from the table and hurried unsteadily into the bathroom, slamming a hollow core door behind her that did little to mask the sounds of her retching into the toilet.

  I leafed through one of the file jackets piled on the table. The folder was crammed with newspaper clippings detailing alien abductions. Other similar file jackets held clippings about cattle mutilations, crop circles, and, inexplicably, singer Wayne Newton. There were files for insurance claim forms, warranties and receipts, and annual tax returns. There was also a file thick with copies of cashier’s checks made out to Emma Emerson, each in the $1,000–$5,000 range and dating as far back as 2003—the same year Robbie Emerson joined Alpha. All of the checks had been issued by Massio Trust, Ltd.—the same Massio Trust whose banking clients included members of the Russian mafia and the father of Eugen Dragomir, my one and only student pilot.

  It’s a small world, I thought, but not that small.

  Emma emerged from the bathroom wiping her mouth with a washcloth. She looked wan.

  “Who was Robbie working for when he died, Emma?”

  “Home Depot. Part-time. Why do you wanna know that?”

  I held up one of the cashier’s checks. She tried to snatch it away.

  “You got no right looking in my personal files! Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “He parlayed his security clearance into a little income on the side, selling innocent tips here and there to certain interested foreign parties. What kinds of weapons we used. Basic tactics. He figured, ‘Where’s the harm in it? It’s information they probably know already.’ Only he couldn’t deposit dirty money under his real name, so he had the checks made out to you. That way, if anybody ever asked him during a polygraph, ‘Have you ever accepted illicit funds from any foreign parties?’ he could say no and the needles wouldn’t budge.”

  “My Robbie served his country. He was a hero. He would never do something like that. Ever.” Her carotids were pounding like jackhammers.

  “You’re lying, Emma. I can see it in your neck.”

  She covered her throat with her hand to cloak her throbbing arteries. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “All I want is the truth, Emma. Same as you.”

  She winced almost imperceptibly and licked her lips. The truth, Emma conceded, was that she didn’t know where all the money came from. Her husband never said. Checks would arrive every month or so—a thousand bucks here, two thousand there—and she would dutifully deposit them. She had her suspicions that perhaps he was involved in some peripheral way with the alien technology transfer cover-up, she said, but she was never certain.

  “He came home very upset the day before he died. I asked him if something had happened at work. He said he’d got in an argument with somebody, but he wouldn’t tell me who, or what it was about.”

  “You mentioned Russians.”

  Emma sat back down at the table and stared mournfully at her hands.

  “Is that who came to see Robbie that day, Emma? A Russian?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Robbie called Echevarria, to warn him about ‘some Russians.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I was cooking bacon. The TV was on. Robbie was on the phone.”

  “Did you tell the police this?”

  “They said he was already depressed, taking pills, whatever. Robbie was never like that, arguing with people. He was never the same after they made him retire—all that crap about him being in that bar with that European woman and supposedly telling her things—but I know he didn’t kill himself. And not you or anybody else on this earth can ever tell me otherwise.”

  She sat down once more at the table and keened mournfully.

  You seem to have this effect on a lot of women, Logan, I thought to myself.

  I rested my hand on her shoulder. “For the sake of the entire human race,” I said, trying to make her feel better, “I only hope the grays were not involved.”

  Emma looked up at me appreciatively, her eyes glistening.

  “I’m not off my rocker.”

  “No one said you were, Emma.”

  After Robbie Emerson’s widow dropped me back at Savannah’s car, I drove to the Home Depot where he’d worked. The manager looked like Babe Ruth in an orange apron. He was at the service desk, on the phone, trying to placate an irate woman who’d accidentally dropped a ninety-pound bag of dry cement mix on her foot and was now threatening to sue. I waited until he hung up.

  “Hell hath no fury,” the manager said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

  I told him my name, said I was looking into Emerson’s death, and asked whether it might be possible to see store surveillance tape taken the day before Emerson died.

  “You guys already went through all the tape. I thought you said there was nothing there.”

  “I’m not a detective. I just play one on TV.”

  The manager looked at me funny. “Come again?”

  “Mr. Emerson and I served together in the same unit. I’m just trying to find out what happened to him.”

  “Look,” the manager said, “I’m ex-infantry myself. Desert Storm. But unless you’ve got a court order, or you’re the police, I can’t help you. Corporate policy. I’m sorry.”

  “Desert Storm? I was over myself.”

  “Is that right? Who were you with?”

  “Air Force. I flew A-10s.”

  “Hog driver, huh?”

  “Shake and bake, baby.”

  “You guys saved our bacon more than once, that’s for sure.”

  “Good times,” I said.

  The manager looked away wistfully as the trace of some distant memory crossed his face. He was quiet for a long moment. “You know,” he said finally, “I never really got a chance to thank you guys properly.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s Ted, by the way.”

  The surveillance tape, shot by a video camera hanging from the corrugated aluminum ceiling, was grainy and without audio. Still, Robbie Emerson’s likeness was unmistakable. No wonder he went by “Herman Munster” during field operations. Anybody that grodylooking, you can spot with a satellite. He was wearing his Home Depot apron, arguing animatedly in the plumbing department with a lanky customer who stood with his back to the camera. The customer wore jeans, a plain green T-shirt, a black or possibly blue baseball cap, and sunglasses. He carried in his right hand a red plastic case about two-and-a-half feet long. The word, “Milwaukee,” was printed on the side of the case.

  “Looks like a Sawzall,” I said.

  “Fifteen amp Super Sawzall,” Ted said. “One of our better sellers. You can cut through a two-by-six like butter with one of those bad boys.”

  “Or cut off somebody’s hands.”

  “You are one strange dude,” the manager said.

  “It’s been said of me before.”

  Inside the Home Depot’s darkened security office, the store’s security director¸ a squat, bespectacled retired postal inspector named Skaggs, reclined in a well-worn swivel chair while monitoring a wall of eleven camera monitors, each of which shifted its view automatically every ten seconds, covering every aisle as well as the store’s parking lot and loading docks.

  The heated discussion between Emerson and the faceless customer played out silently on a twelfth monitor. Ten seconds of video on a repetitive loop. I moved in closer for a better look.

  “Play it again.”

  Skaggs replayed the clip. And again. The man carrying the Sawzall case never showed his face to the camera.

  “Nobody heard what they were arguing about?” I asked.

  “None of our associates,” Ted said. “We talked to everybody who was on-shift at the time.”

  “What about any customers?”

  “Nobody heard anything so far as we were able to determine,” Skaggs said.

  “What about when the guy goes to pay for the saw?” I said. “Yo
u must’ve gotten a better shot of his face then.”

  Skaggs spooled up another video clip. “The camera covering those registers, unfortunately, was down that afternoon for maintenance. This was as good a picture as we could get.”

  The second clip, also shot from on high, captured the man with the Sawzall swiping a credit card at a self-service check-out stand, but the on-screen resolution was no better than the first clip. With his baseball cap pulled low and wraparound sunglasses, the man’s face was impossible to make out.

  “He paid with plastic,” I said. “You can ID him that way.”

  Ted looked chagrined. “Yeah, well, unfortunately, we had a problem with that, too. American Express reported the card stolen out of California about an hour after we processed the transaction.”

  Scottsdale police, he said, had reviewed the videotape and concluded that the faceless crook who bought the Sawzall probably had little, if anything, to do with Emerson’s decision to kill himself the following day.

  “That guy might’ve set Robbie off for whatever reason,” Ted said, “but Robbie was always wound up pretty tight anyway, always about two seconds from going off on somebody for something. I mean, if anybody was unhappy with his life and was gonna, you know, do himself in, it was him. The cops said that’s what all the evidence pointed to and that’s good enough for me. I don’t want to sound cruel or anything but, really, the only reason I hired him was because he’d been a grunt, like me. I probably was gonna have to let him go anyway given his attitude.”

  “Mighty considerate, him saving you the trouble.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. Robbie Emerson was far from perfect. He made his share of mistakes. But the man did earn a Silver Star defending his country. He deserved better than a six-word goodbye note and a bullet in his brain.”

  I stalked out of the security office, which was in the back of the store, and through the paint department, making for the main entrance. Ted hustled to catch up.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”