Dead Silence df-16

by Randy Wayne White

  I said, “A Bonesman leaving the country to become Muslim?” It made no sense, unless Norvin actually had worked for an intelligence agency. He wouldn’t have been the first to be consumed by his own cover story.

  Tomlinson said, “Some people attack their old lives to validate their new ones. Valid point, though. Skull and Bones is a one-way religion.”

  I placed the frame on the desk and began going through a stack of magazines as Tomlinson opened his hand, showing me the Indian figurine.

  “There’s not a strip mall in the country that isn’t built on Indian bones. Geronimo was a shaman. Marion, they stole his head. I know you don’t believe, but I’ve seen it work too many times. It’s a different kind of power.” He paused. “The Apache graveyard is in Oklahoma. Did you know that?”

  “No. Now that I do, I’ll try to forget it.” The man had littered my mind with so much oddball trivia that I was trying to do some housekeeping.

  “Geronimo lived in Florida, too. With a bunch of imprisoned Florida Indians before they were all shipped west. You told me Will Chaser was from a reservation in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Synergy, man, it’s becoming clear to me now…”

  I knew what Tomlinson was implying but didn’t want to hear his fairy-tale notions of spirituality and noble Indians. I was more interested in an article I had found. After years of court battles and injunctions, Skull and Bones had recently been forced to allow in female members.

  “This magazine’s only a few months old,” I interrupted. “Someone’s been here.” I handed him the magazine, then looked at another that was folded open.

  Tomlinson began to grin. “Women, the source of reason and light. Also, the ultimate ball-breaker cannibals. Skull and Bones has finally had its cherry busted. Older members, they’ve gotta be mad as hell. In a room full of Bonesmen, I bet Charles Manson would seem bedrock solid, the last nickel bargain in CEOs.”

  “Even for you, that’s absurd.” I was trying to concentrate. “Do you know if your brother ever visited Cuba?”

  He appeared surprised. “Not when I knew him.”

  “Your father?”

  “Same answer.”

  Tomlinson had been to Cuba at least twice. No need to ask.

  I continued going through magazines. Obsessive people dog-ear pages, use a highlighter, underline passages. Someone-maybe one of the Tomlinson men-circled things. He’d been keeping track of the females petitioning to get into Skull and Bones. He’d also been following the battle for Castro’s confiscated files. Key names had been circled.

  I said, “On the fraternity roster, did you notice some of the other names? A couple of members helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion. The country’s first attempt to take down Castro after he came to power. A generation older than your brother, but still…”

  “You’re looking for a connection. Cuba, a kidnapping, Bonesmen.”

  I said, “I don’t look, I collect-or try to. The Bay of Pigs was a disaster. Someone in a top spot tipped off the Soviets. No one’s ever figured out who.”

  “A traitor.”

  “Depends on which side you’re on.”

  “It’s what I’ve been thinking all along. Castro’s papers could expose the wizard behind the curtain. Like Judas-that’s what I was telling you on the plane. The Tenth Man… Tinman. Same thing.”

  I said, “Since 1959 there have been a lot of men behind a lot of curtains.”

  Judas, the tenth disciple. J -the tenth letter in the alphabet-Tomlinson loved all symmetrical intersectings that suggested the world was orderly, design-driven.

  I hadn’t told him that the real name of the covert operative, Tinman, had been confirmed. But which Tomlinson?

  “That song was in the dream- Tinman! The dream that pulled me back to the old homeplace. ‘But Oz never did nothing to the Tin Man/That he didn’t, didn’t already have – ’ ” An old habit, perhaps, he reached for the harmonica in his pocket.

  Before he got to it, I asked, “When you were in the Hamptons last week, who did you tell that you knew Senator Hayes-Sorrento? Or that I was meeting her for dinner last night?”

  “A couple of people, I guess.”

  “Barbara and I made our dinner date almost a month ago. Any late-night gabbing? Or text-messaging with your Long Island pals?”

  He said, “Hey!,” offended. On his computer, Tomlinson had pasted a cryptic note: “No Es or Cs while D amp; S”-No E-mails or Calls while Drunk and Stoned. It had saved him money and cut down on next-day apologies.

  I tossed the magazine into Tomlinson’s lap and watched his face change as he read.

  “Sonuvabitch. It’s them. Bonesmen are behind the kidnapping deal.”

  I said it again: “Fraternity boys don’t participate in murder just because of a secret handshake.”

  “Well… it means my brother’s involved, at the very least.”

  I said, “Is he?,” studying his reaction. I was thinking about the Cuban Program, scanning for a way to link it with an Ivy Leaguer from the Hamptons. If there was a connection, what completed the triangle?

  Tomlinson stood. “We’ve got to search this place. I mean, really search it.”

  I told him no, what we had to do was seal off the area as best we could until an FBI crime team arrived, plus the local cops and more search choppers.

  I added, “I want to go back to that horse farm. If the trainer wakes up, you’ll do the explaining.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? All day the cops were there.”

  “Because… Just because.”

  I didn’t have an answer, but it was true when I told him that the helicopters were equipped with heat-sensing radar. The corpse of a dead horse, still cooling, could mask the heat signature of a live human.

  I told him to find a phone or I’d get mine from the car.

  “Call in the cavalry,” the phrase I used, unaware of the irony until I referred to Will Chaser, adding, “Saving the Indian kid takes precedence.”

  I watched Tomlinson’s hand become a fist, squeezing the little bronze statue of Geronimo.

  “I’m taking this with us for luck.”

  I replied, “Good. Something to keep your hands busy,” which he chose to ignore.

  18

  A harmonica…?

  Someone’s playing a damn harmonica!

  Uh-huh. Like a cartoon. Some doofus swallows a harmonica and makes haww-heee… heee-haww notes as he walks.

  Will Chaser could picture it, although he couldn’t see.

  A man. No, two men, talking. Close.

  Nothing he could do but listen, until the sound of the harmonica was transformed in his head and began to resemble Cazzio’s wheezing scream.

  Harmonica. Sounded like a donkey bloated on helium, something he knew about because he’d joked around with some girls using a helium balloon a few years back at the fairgrounds in Oklahoma City. Native American Rodeo Championship. Senior Division, even though he was twelve at the time. The Yavapai Apache team had brought him in as a ringer. How could he lose riding Blue Jacket?

  “The kid wants to wager how much…?”

  Skins off the Rez loved gambling and vodka-vodka because bosses couldn’t smell it on the job. The more booze in their bellies, the stupider they got, which was fine because Will had cashed in. Made.. . six bills? About that.

  Shak-oh-pee!

  A word from the old language. Another thing about Skins when drunk. They’d throw together the few phrases they remembered, getting belligerent, as their eyes glazed, pretending to be real Indian warriors like in the movies that Old Man Guttersen watched. Just as fake, too.

  An excuse for acting like assholes, is what it was. Same as when they passed out, curling up in some alley-Will had seen it-then later, claimed they’d been on a Vision Quest. Visited by the Old Ones in their dreams.

  Vision Quests. Dreams. All bullshit.

  Haww-heee… heee-haww.

  The harmonica again. Or maybe he was dreaming no
w? A nightmare, all of it. Which meant he was imagining men’s voices, too.

  No. The voices weren’t real. More hallucinations. Same with the harmonica, although it wasn’t easy to be sure, not since he’d awakened after being injected with a dose of Ketamine, the same horse tranquilizer he’d used on Buffalo-head.

  The boy tried to relax. He summoned a pattern of thought that might be comforting. Into his brain floated the image of Old Man Guttersen.

  Will held tight to the image as he opened his eyes. He was testing his own sanity, wondering if a mental picture would remain as lucid with his eyes open as it was when his eyes were closed.

  It should have made no difference, considering what the Cubans had done to him now. One darkness was no blacker than the other.

  But it did make a difference.

  Will realized images in his brain were sharper with eyes closed, possibly because that’s what his brain was used to: dreams and certain daylight fantasies.

  So that’s what Will did now, closed his eyes, breathing softly through his nose, and returned to the image of Bull Guttersen, which was more tolerable than the image Will wanted to get rid of: the old Cuban, with his dead, clinical eyes, holding a revolver, then pulling the hammer back.

  Metal-eyes had blinked when his revolver jolted, the weapon making an unreal explosion as guns did in real life. But the hole the bullet had tunneled through Cazzio’s head was as real as anything Will had ever seen.

  Too real for Will to think about, so he levered his thoughts back to Minnesota, the way it was living there before he had boarded that damn plane and before the big nerd with glasses had ordered, “Get your ass back in the limo!,” or something similar, which had contributed as much as anything else to his shitty situation.

  Will took a deep breath through his nose, and let his mind settle, repeating Minnesota… Minnesota over and over in his brain, but then had to interrupt himself with an honest aside, thinking, Never thought I’d see the day I’d dream of going back to that ass-freezing land of too many lakes and not enough ranches.

  True enough. But right now, he would have traded the box the Cubans had stuck him in for the worst hellhole foster home in Minneapolis.

  “Specially constructed,” the scary American with the stringy hair had described the box.

  Not that Ruth Guttersen’s place was a crummy box or hellhole. It was neither. Mrs. Guttersen kept her two-story house, with its white siding, with its flowers and a flag out front, as tidy as a church. Which would have been tough for Will to have endured had the old man not kept things interesting.

  Bull had a knack for that, which he had proven on day one.

  The first time Will met Otto Guttersen, the old man was holding a Colt. 38 to his own head, only seconds from committing suicide-the suicide part, though, Bull hadn’t admitted to Will until later.

  Okay, so I lied. Russian roulette ain’t something I normally do when bored-not with more than one round in the chamber anyway.

  The gun, though, the man couldn’t deny. It was a knockoff Colt, with a plastic-ivory handle but loaded with real bullets.

  This was two years ago, Minneapolis. Because that first meeting had turned out okay-it had turned out good, in fact-the boy didn’t mind remembering it, so he let his brain follow the thread.

  Will had climbed through the kitchen widow because no one answered the door at his new foster home, then hurried downstairs carrying a garbage bag. He had enough experience with the Lutheran Foster Grandparents Program to know Minnesotans kept many of their valuables in the basement, which they called recreation rooms after fixing them up nice with carpet and neon beer signs, a pool table or foosball and sometimes a flat-screen TV.

  There sat the old man, a gun to his head, even though what Will would learn was his favorite radio program was on, Garage Logic. The fact it was a commercial break may have had something to do with the timing, but it didn’t explain why the old man was holding a gun to his head and crying. Eyes swollen red, cheeks wet.

  It was new to Will, the helpless, sad blubbering of a grown man. Stood there almost a minute before Guttersen noticed, then he watched the man slowly, slowly take the gun from his temple and point it at Will. Embarrassed, no doubt, but not too damn old to pull the trigger. No doubt about that, either, when Will saw a spark brighten the man’s eyes.

  “It’s good you brought that garbage bag. Less mess when I blow your head off.”

  Will had said, “You talking to me or your hostage?,” never so scared in his life but trying to keep it light, as if the situation wasn’t serious, while not sounding like a smart-ass.

  “I suppose you plan on robbing the place, then murdering the witnesses,” Guttersen had said, his tone mean-mad but also hopeful in a spooky way. Maybe planning something in his head, a way to kill two birds with one stone. Shoot the robber, then shoot the witness. A perfect crime.

  Will decided the smart thing to do was explain. “There’s a pawnshop, they pay thirty cents on the dollar for old coins and gold and souvenirs from the war.” Something about the old man indicated Lie to me or try bullshitting, bang! so Will added, “I saw the flag outside. Houses with flags, the people usually collect all three.”

  Click: The gun’s cylinder rotated as the hammer locked back. “Stealing from American patriots makes me less inclined to offer you a beer while we’re waiting for the ambulance.”

  Will didn’t respond, didn’t even put up his hands.

  “Are you deaf or just slow?”

  The man was motioning with the gun, so Will raised his hands, saying, “I’m scared shitless, what do you think?”

  “You can hear.”

  “Yeah! I can see, too.” Will nodded toward the sign over the bar: FREE BEER TOMORROW. “It’s no surprise that I’m gonna go thirsty.” He forced a smile.

  Guttersen didn’t soften. “A damn kid who’s got no respect for the American flag shouldn’t be robbing houses owned by patriots with guns who know their rights.” He studied him for a moment. “What are you, Puerto Rican? Mexican?”

  The old man was trying to fire up the situation. That’s what was happening. He had a plan and didn’t want to lose his momentum.

  “No need to call names,” Will said. “Why don’t you go back to doing what you were doing? I’ll promise to never steal from a house that flies the flag again. How’s that sound?”

  The old man was still looking at Will’s face, seeing the black eyes and the shoulder-length crow hair, trying to figure it out. “Maybe Mexican mixed with something else. Ethiopian is a possibility. They’ve ’bout taken over the Twin Cities. Could be your daddy raped one of our local Latin girls.”

  Will said, “Don’t say that,” and lowered his hands.

  “You got something against Ethiopians? Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  A burning sensation in his ears, Will could feel it blooming. “I ain’t no damn Ethiopian, mister. Knock it off.”

  “You break into my house to rob me and kill witnesses. Now you’re giving me orders?”

  “What right you got saying my dad’s Ethiopian? I’m a Native American, not some damn foreigner who wears robes and pisses in the park.”

  Guttersen liked that, although Will didn’t see it and only got madder when the old man replied, “Don’t blame me for sizing you as a welfare mutt. Hell, half the people claiming to be Indian in Minnesota, you couldn’t get a bullet through their heads with a. 357. It’s ’cause of the gambling money.”

  That did it. Will felt the craziness take control-an ammonia smell mixed with sulfur-and he started yelling, “I wouldn’t live in this shithole state if you gave me the keys! Wear robes just to get a welfare check? Humping Mary Tyler Moore’s statue just ’cause she’s white? My dad was pure-blooded Seminole from Oklahoma. And my ma was Apache!”

  Which was partly a lie. Will had only heard rumors about his father being Seminole. Before his mother had died, she’d told the boy that his daddy might have been a no-good, drunken drug addict, but on her side of the fa
mily things were different. Her father had run a successful airboat business in the Everglades. His grandfather had been famous-in that part of the world at least.

  The way his mother had talked, Will’s grandfather had been seven feet tall and so damn handsome every woman in the country, white, black or Seminole, was crazy about the man, his mother included.

  But screw it, Will wasn’t going to waste effort convincing some old racist Casper who was on the verge of suicide anyway.

  Walking toward the old man, slouched in his wheelchair, Will had yelled, “Pull the goddamn trigger or I’ll show you how it’s done!”

  Threatening to shoot the man. Just like that.

  Off to a bad start with Otto Guttersen, no question. But it had balanced out because interrupting Bull in the act of killing himself gave Will leverage. Stealing meant jail, but attempting suicide meant the loony farm.

  As to shooting a foster grandchild, Lutheran Social Services was strict. Mrs. Guttersen would have been banned from the program and forced to spend her days home alone, not volunteering.

  “She would’ve talked me to death, I shit thee not,” Guttersen had said later, thanking Will. “That’s a thousand times worse than a bullet.”

  The relationship between robber and witness had improved over the last eighteen months.

  Weird, how much I think about that old bastard. Same as when I was locked in the car trunk, taped tight and scared. Like he was there with me.

  To which Old Man Guttersen would have said, “You’re surprised? Any situation that requires a cool head, I’m your go-to guy.”

  Well… sometimes, maybe. Guttersen was right a lot of the time, but was also dead wrong upon occasion. What he’d said about stupid threats- Never make a threat that’ll get your ass kicked or prove you’re a pussy- wasn’t actually the first time he had given Will misinformation. More like the fiftieth or sixtieth.