by John Douglas
“Squirrel town? You get this snappy stuff from a comic book?”
In a John Wayne voice, Trevor said, “I been to squirrel town, mister, and believe me, it’s no place to be after dark.”
“Amen,” I said. I put my head down and prayed that things would stay as far away from squirrel town as possible. I looked up in time to see the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He was looking back at us as if we were brain damaged, and he was probably right.
“Remember,” Vince said, “you two are not even here. So I don’t want anything remotely cowboy out of either of you or I might as well apply for that night shift at the 7-Eleven right now. The director would have my ass in a sling if he knew I’d let you two do a ride-along.”
Trevor crossed his heart. I promised I’d behave.
The van stopped at the intersection of two country roads. All around were open fields, broken by small stands of hardwoods and rolls of cut hay. We got out and the heat wrapped us up. The gloom of the morning had lifted and been replaced by a yellow sun in a cloudless sky. I immediately began to sweat. Neither of us had changed clothes since we’d rolled out of bed at Trevor’s place fourteen hours before, but while Trevor looked as fresh and pressed as the cowboy hero’s hat at the end of the last reel, I looked like I’d slept in the barn with the hero’s horse. Even dressed in black, under an August sun, Trevor kept his cool.
Vince conferred with the local police manning the roadblocked intersection, then returned to us. “The house is over that small rise.” He shouldered a backpack and an M16. “Saddle up.”
I carried a pack with water, light rations, and extra radio batteries. Trevor carried extra radios, ammunition, and his black bag.
“What’s in there?” Vince asked him.
“My makeup.”
We humped up the hill and over the top, a walk of about half a mile. A stand of trees gave us shade and cover and a clear view of the house at the bottom of the valley, two hundred yards away. A local cop, dressed in black SWAT fatigues, lay on his stomach and peered at the house through binoculars.
“Anything?”
“Nothing yet. There’s somebody inside, but I can’t tell if it’s male or female or how many might be inside.”
The small vacation cottage had a long porch that shaded the front windows. In the driveway was a green minivan with Maryland tags.
“Have you been able to run the plates?” I asked.
“Yeah.” The cop, Officer Waters, didn’t take his eyes away from the binoculars. “Belongs to a Russell Frey from Takoma.”
“Have we tried to call Russell Frey in Takoma?”
Vince said, “His wife says he’s at a sales retreat in the mountains—you know, that fire-walking, team-building bullshit. We tried his cell phone number and he must have it turned off.”
Waters said, “Yesterday, the state police found a body in a Dumpster off 40 that matches the general description of Russell Frey. No positive ID yet, but he’s about the same age, weight, and height.”
Trevor pulled his black bag toward him, unzipped the top, pulled out a Colt Python and handed it to me. “If you’d prefer an automatic, I’ve got that in here, too.”
“No.” I swung out the cylinder, checked the rounds, and locked her back up. “This will be fine.”
The sun slowly sank toward the ridge behind the house.
“Be careful of your reflections,” Vince said. “He sees sunlight off a lens and we might as well walk up to the door and introduce ourselves.”
Each minute that passed made me more nauseated with dread. I needed to move, and the sooner the better. I watched Waters wipe his palms on his shirt and knew we were all feeling the same way.
The cop at the intersection came through the radio. “Special Agent Andrews? I’ve got a Joe Ripley here. He says he’s from Agent Burke’s office in Washington. Should I send him up?”
Vince looked at me. “What the hell’s Joe doing here?”
“Whatever it is, it’s not good.” Joe Ripley was a great guy, and a real warrior in the turf battles that erupt around Washington, but I could sooner see my mother storming this house with a gun in her hand.
Vince went back to the radio. “Roger that. Send him up.”
Trevor zipped open his bag, removed a small case, opened it, and started to put together a sniper rifle.
Vince gave him a look that would have shattered a lesser man. “Malone, what the fuck?”
“Joe’s here, it means we’re on our own.”
“Do not, and I repeat, do not shoot anyone with that thing unless I tell you to. You got that?”
“I got it.” The rifle together, Trevor put it to his shoulder and adjusted the scope, doping out distance and wind. “But it still doesn’t alter the fact that we’re on our own.”
Ten minutes later, Joe came huffing into the trees. “Goddamn,” he said. “I’ve got to get out more, do a push-up or something.”
“Joe,” I said, “Trevor here thinks you two are our only backup. Please tell him he’s wrong.”
Joe wouldn’t look at me. He stretched out onto his stomach and crawled up to the tree line. “That the place?”
“Jesus, Joe, you see any other place?”
Trevor muttered in blackface vaudeville, “Dis mus’ be de place, boss.”
Joe glared at him, eyes in a squint.
“Joe, we’re getting toward dark. Are we getting any help?” Vince asked.
Joe stared through the binoculars at the house. “No. We’re on our own.”
“Told ya,” Trevor said, eye still glued to the scope.
Vince blew out a long, patient breath.
I was not so patient. “Let me guess, Joe. The attorney general decided he needed the HRT someplace else, like his rec room, just in case some Eastern European busts in and blows up his fucking stamp collection.”
That drew Trevor’s attention away from the house. “Jake. Did you just use the F-word?”
I don’t use rough language, as a general rule, but as Mark Twain said, sometimes prayer helps and then there are times when a man’s only recourse is blue.
Joe said, “When Armstrong vetoed the HRT response, Neil wanted to come himself, and the director was ready to suit up, too, Jake, honest. But Armstrong called both of them up to Justice. So here I am.”
“Neil let you do this?” Vince asked.
Joe gave us a thin, wavering grin that made him look vaguely seasick. “He wasn’t in the office to stop me.” I could tell that the macho Joe who had strapped on the Kevlar in Washington felt a hell of a lot different up here on the hill, facing a man whose murder of one FBI clerk wouldn’t add a day to his sentence.
Waters said, “You want, I can have our team here in a couple hours.”
Vince thought it over, then said, “I don’t see how we have a choice, do you, Jake?”
I didn’t think I could stand the wait. But I knew Eric would be safer if the assault was done by people trained for this instead of two Broken Wings, one agent, a cop, and a clerk.
As it turned out, we didn’t have a choice.
Waters whispered, “Hold it.”
“What?” Everyone’s attention went back to the house.
“Someone’s coming out,” Waters said.
In my binoculars, I saw the man moving in the silence of distance. He took a small bag from the house to the van and then went back inside the house. He was in a hurry.
“Looks like he’s leaving,” Vince said.
“He’s running scared,” I said. “Look at his face.”
“You want to catch him at the crossroads?” Waters asked.
Vince said, “What do you think, Malone?”
Trevor didn’t hesitate. “We need to get him when he comes out. Don’t wait until he has Eric in the car.”
Vince looked at me. “And you, Jake?”
“Trevor, can you hit him from this distance?”
“You know I can.”
“Okay.”
“If you’re goin
g, go now,” Trevor said.
“Right,” Vince said. “Joe, you and Waters go left. Jake, you and I go right and come up on the far side of the van. Remember, we wait for him to come out and hope he doesn’t have Eric. If he does, you take him down before he gets to the van, right, Malone?”
“Right.”
“Everybody ready?”
We all nodded and on Vince’s word we were up and running in two enveloping arcs down the hill, moving as quickly as we could while staying low. My pounding heart was so loud I felt sure the killer could hear it inside the house.
The grass was nearly to our knees and our running released clouds of insects into the air. Gnats got into my eyes and mouth and I worried about being able to make an accurate shot with the Colt, but felt better knowing Trevor was behind the scope on the hill.
As we reached the house, Vince and I pressed against the side of the van. When the man came around to the driver’s side, we’d take him, hoping he’d be too surprised to clear a weapon. We knew that once he rounded the front of the van, Trevor wouldn’t have a shot. It would be on us.
The hinges shrieked and heavy steps hurried across the porch and down the three steps to the grass.
My body tensed, and my finger curled into the trigger guard of the revolver. Vince was crouched below me, his Sig in two hands, ready to take the man down. I heard the soles of the man’s shoes crunch gravel and stop. He slid the van’s side door open and dropped something heavy inside that made the van rock slightly on its springs. My stomach lurched. We waited. The man came around the front of the van. I could see his silhouette pass across the windshield and there he was, keys in one hand, his face open in shock as Vince sprang at him, the pistol pointing at his face.
“Get down! Get Down! Get down!” Vince hollered, and even I was shaken by the volume and force of his voice.
The man’s arms shot up toward the sky, and in one motion, Vince had his weapon holstered, the cuffs out, and he was spinning the man around and down to his knees. When the man was facedown on the gravel drive, Vince planted his knee against his neck and snapped the cuffs around his wrists.
Joe and Waters were just clearing the front door when I looked up. I ran for the porch, took the three steps in one stride, and burst into the living room just as Waters cuffed a woman who, like the man outside, was on her stomach. Unlike the man, the woman was crying.
Joe came out of the bedroom. “The house is clear.”
Waters helped the woman to her knees and I hollered at her, the big Colt Python’s muzzle aimed between her eyes, “Where’s Eric? Where’d he bury the boy?”
The woman stopped crying and her face fell open, her eyes wide, her mouth agape.
“Where’s the boy? Where did he bury the boy?”
“I don’t know.” She began to cry again.
I ran outside and jumped off the porch. Vince had the man on his feet, his hands cuffed.
I couldn’t see the man’s face. The air turned red and details lost all definition. I hollered at the man’s shape, “Where’s my boy?”
Vince’s hand was on my chest and his voice echoed in my head. “Jake, Jake, stop. It’s not the guy. It’s not our guy.”
“What?” My vision began to clear and I saw the man in front of me, trembling.
“Jake, this is Russell Frey. The woman is Bonnie Booth. Mr. Frey’s business associate.”
The man said, his voice a mere squeak, “What boy?”
33
“You should see a doctor,” Toni said.
“I am seeing a doctor.”
“You know what I mean,” she said as she slowly peeled away the bandage. The wound had opened and soaked through to my shirt, making a great picture for the nightly news. As I’d made my way through the reporters, I’d heard one ask, excited nearly to the point of incontinence, “Did you get it? Did you get the blood?”
Now, standing in front of the motel room mirror, Toni inspected the through-and-through Bower’d given me in the parking garage. “Doesn’t this hurt?” She gently probed the tender flesh with her fingertips.
“I’ll heal,” I said, smarting more from the humiliation of the balls-out assault on Russell Frey’s love nest than anything as trivial as a gunshot wound.
Toni poured hydrogen peroxide on the wound, fore and aft, and the sting chased away the drowsiness that dulled my thoughts and caused my mind to wander into dark dead ends of self-recrimination and dread. When I was a younger man, I’d marched for three days without so much as a nap. But now, sleep was claiming more of my time, as if life itself was preparing me for what Chandler called the Big Sleep, that final lie-down that comes too quickly to the young and too slowly to the old.
I wondered if Eric was sleeping, or if he was awake and terrified, calling for me, and counting on his famous father to ride in with the cavalry, a father who had wasted the day chasing a software salesman from between adulterous sheets.
Toni saw my face in the mirror and knew my thoughts, as she always knew them. “You’ll find him. I know you will.”
“I’m running out of time. And I’m running out of ideas.”
“Vince is a good agent. He’s out there right now, I bet, following new leads the Bureau’s turned up.”
“Vince is back in Washington, explaining to the director why he should keep his job.”
Toni took in a deep breath, gathering her strength so that she could hold us both up. Slowly, almost afraid to hear the answer, she asked, “So who’s taking the investigation?”
“Harry Gillette.”
It was my turn to read Toni’s thoughts as they passed over her face. They were the same as mine.
“I know. He’s not my first choice, either. Or my fifty-first. That’s why I need to get back out there. Harry will spend more time on the phone, covering his ass when he fails, than he will on the case.”
“You need some rest.” Toni taped fresh bandages over the puckered entry and the ragged exit wounds.
“A quick shower. The bad guys will smell me coming.”
“You don’t want to get this bandage wet.” Toni took a washcloth, soaked it in hot water, and lathered it up with soap.
Carefully, she began to wash my skin, first around the bandage, then around the sutures on my neck. She rinsed the washcloth, lathered up again, and began washing my arms and chest. The warmth of the water, and the closeness of this woman who had been my wife before murderers, rapists, and arsonists had crept into our bed, and her gentle ministrations, made me pull her closer. She kept her face turned away from me, and I could feel her hesitation and fear. When she did lift her face, it was to kiss me, her arms around my waist, her mouth open and forgiving.
I pulled her from the bathroom and we fell onto the bed. Like teenagers stealing a moment while the parents slept, we fumbled with the buttons and belts and snaps, trying not to wake Ali in the next room.
It is perhaps the least talked about kind of sex there is. Grief sex. In times of tragedy or loss we often lose ourselves, or find ourselves, in this most intimate of human connections. Perhaps it is the affirmation of life in death. Perhaps it is simply an escape from the pain and confusion. The naked truth is, funerals are almost as fertile a field for coupling as weddings.
So it was with Toni and me. We used our bodies to numb our minds, finding comfort in the ageless rhythm of flesh on flesh. We turned, through the alchemy of sex, our panic into passion. And when we returned to earth, we felt as if we should somehow feel ashamed, but we could not.
Toni, lying next to me, her body against mine, said, “Tell me it will be all right, Jake. I need to hear that.”
“It will be all right, Toni.” And I discovered that I needed to say it, as much as she needed to hear it.
The bedside phone rang and I fumbled to pick it up.
“Jake, this is Trevor. Dom is here and Jerry’s on his way.” Trevor hesitated, and in that pause, I knew that Trevor was a hell of a lot more sensitive to the truth of things than any of us had ever given him c
redit. “Uh, is it all right if we come up?”
I asked him for ten minutes and he said, “Take all the time you need, partner.”
Toni slid out of bed and was picking her clothes up from the floor.
“Toni?”
“You don’t have to say anything, Jake. I’m glad this happened. I am. But I’m not kidding myself. I’m not a schoolgirl.” She pulled on her shirt and buttoned it, crooked in her haste. “You need to get back to work.” She leaned over the bed, kissed me lightly on the cheek, and left by the adjoining door.
“Take all the time you need,” Trevor had said.
In this case, that would be centuries.
34
Although Russell Frey was the one caught with his tail flapping in the breeze, Vince, Joe, and Officer Waters got their butts kicked in public. Our old friend Spider Urich was back on his feet, head wrapped melodramatically in a bandage, doing a stand-up in front of the Frederick courthouse. He was understandably eager to take a few shots at me, but he saved his snidely best for Vince.
Urich, his voice carrying the weight of the crumbling republic, intoned, “Special Agent Andrews, with little more than a few years’ experience, took it upon himself to form a vigilante posse to smoke out a philandering software salesman from Takoma, Maryland. Is this what we pay our law enforcement officials, from the attorney general right on down to the cop on the beat, to do; to catch otherwise law-abiding software salesmen with their trousers down? I, for one, think not.”
Trevor aimed the motel remote at Urich’s nose and plinked him into a tiny, receding beam of light. “How does he do that?”
“Do what?”
“Raise that eyebrow up to his hairline?”
“The guy’s forehead muscles must be strong enough to lift a truck. It’s something I wouldn’t mind investigating,” Dom said, “during an autopsy.”
“I mean,” Trevor said, “he lifts that one eyebrow clean off his head. How does he do that? The man’s a cartoon.”
Dom tugged at the knee of his slacks, making sure the crease was sharp, and crossed his legs. His socks had little clocks on them. Calmly he said, “Did you know that Urich’s right testicle hangs lower than his left?”
