The Ragged End of Nowhere

by Roy Chaney

  Hagen lay on his side on the cold linoleum floor, his legs pulled up. The pain shooting through his back made his head swim. He tried not to move. Even breathing was difficult. He took slow shallow breaths and waited. After a few minutes he was able to move, climb to his feet.

  The holding cell was not much larger than a good-sized closet. The walls were white. The white door was made of metal. There was a small observation window in the door. Stark white light shone down on him through a sheet of opaque plastic in the ceiling.

  A wooden bench rested against the wall.

  Hagen sat down on the bench.

  The holding cell. The heavy silence within it. The pain shooting through his body as he sat there—

  It all seemed quite familiar.

  11.

  COLD DARKNESS. Cold fog. A cold and deserted forest road ten kilometers outside of Morlaix . . .

  Hagen lay flat in the wet grass along the edge of the road, his body pulled in close to the right side of the car, his pistol in his hand. He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t hear anything except the occasional ticking of the warm car in the cold night air and Vogel moaning in pain as he lay on the ground behind the car.

  The shooter was a professional. Must’ve been using a rifle fitted with a nightscope. And there had been no gunshot that Hagen had noticed. Which meant he was using a silencer. The rifle had to be a high-powered one—a sniper rifle—if he expected to shoot with any degree of accuracy through a silencer.

  And because visibility was reduced by the fog he had to be close by.

  Very close.

  But where?

  The shooter had been waiting for them. The shooter knew where Hagen and Vogel had gone, knew which road they’d be taking on their way back to Morlaix. As the Mercedes traveled down the narrow lane in the fog the shooter had taken out the front left tire. Then he shot Vogel as Vogel stepped around to open the trunk. The third shot hit the rear window.

  The shooter was somewhere behind them—for the moment.

  A very precarious moment.

  Slowly Hagen crawled past the rear tire, pushing himself along a few inches at a time. He heard Vogel’s pain-racked breathing. He heard his own pulse, pounding in his ears. He had to get to Vogel. He had to pull Vogel out of the line of fire.

  “Bodo . . .”

  Vogel’s voice was weak. Vogel tried to say something else but his voice was choked off by a liquid sound somewhere deep in his throat.

  Hagen crept forward. When he reached the back of the car he paused, listening. Another liquid cough from Vogel. No other sounds out there. Hagen moved forward the last few inches, his head low, his chest flat on the ground.

  In the red glow of the taillights Hagen could see that Vogel hadn’t moved. He still lay prostrate behind the car, the lower half of his body lying in the grass along the edge of the country road, the upper half of his body on the concrete surface of the road itself. His hand was tucked under him, holding his chest. His head was turned to one side.

  There was a sharp popping sound. Somewhere down the road. The rear taillight of the Mercedes shattered above Hagen’s head. Plastic flying in every direction, a dull metallic sound as the bullet tore into the back of the car. Hagen dropped his head, scrambled back around to the side of the car.

  Then another sound.

  Footsteps on concrete. Somewhere down the road behind the car. Very soft and faint. But not far off. Soft-soled shoes running on the road . . .

  No time to think. He had to move. Now. He picked himself up and ran in a crouch toward the trees along the road. Only fifteen feet away but it seemed like miles. Hagen’s left foot came into contact with a rock or an exposed tree root and he stumbled forward, somehow kept his balance. Then another sharp popping sound from behind him on the road and suddenly Hagen was falling through the air.

  He landed facedown in the grass at the edge of the tree line. He tried to pick himself up and move that last few feet into the protective cover of the tall trees but his right arm didn’t do what he wanted it to and he fell forward again. His right arm was numb, all the way up to his shoulder. He’d been hit. It was a dull realization, seemed to be of little consequence. He had to get into the trees. That was the only important thing. Gripping the pistol in his left hand he raised himself on his bent left arm, placed his weight on it. On one elbow and his knees he pushed himself the last yard into the trees, then struggled to his feet and stumbled forward. He felt suddenly dizzy. His legs didn’t want to hold him up. He ran forward, hunched over. Ran deeper into the trees, until he encountered a tree trunk in his path. He fell against it, then turned himself around so that he faced the direction from which he thought he’d come. His back against the tree trunk for support, his heels dug into the ground to keep him upright. He felt a great warmth down his right side. His own blood against his skin. The air was cold and there wasn’t enough of it—he was gulping air as fast as he could.

  Ahead of him, through the trees, he could see a dim light. The headlights of the Mercedes. He raised the pistol and pointed it in the direction of the light. The shooter would be coming from that direction. If Hagen was lucky he might see the shooter’s silhouette as he moved into the trees with the light behind him. Hagen waited. He knew the pistol was shaking in his left hand but he couldn’t do anything about it. One shot, he told himself. One shot was all he needed. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he noticed that the trees around him all stood in neat rows, like pieces on a chessboard. He smelled the sweet scent of the pine trees and the heavier scent of freshly turned earth.

  The light. He kept his eyes on the light. But then the light went out. The shooter had reached the car and switched off the headlights. Hagen stared into the darkness where the light had been. Without being aware of it he’d slid down the tree trunk. He found himself sitting on the ground at the base of the tree, his legs out before him, the pistol pointed uselessly out into the darkness.

  “Bodo . . .”

  It was Vogel. He was screaming Hagen’s name. Then a gunshot echoed through the trees. Not a silenced rifle shot but the report of a pistol, clear and loud and rolling through the tree branches above him. Hagen knew what it meant instantly. Vogel was dead. The shooter had reached the car and delivered a coup de grâce with a handgun and now Vogel lay dead on the concrete surface of the road with Hagen’s name dying out in his throat.

  Now the shooter would come after Hagen, and Hagen wouldn’t be able to even save himself. Hagen would die here too. It all seemed so logical.

  Hagen waited.

  Another light appeared. Through the trees, off to the left. The light moved. Hagen’s dizziness had increased. His eyes swum in his head as he watched this new light. It was the shooter. The shooter was the light and the light was the shooter. The light would come toward him and wash over him and then he’d be dead too in a sudden rush of hot bright light. Hagen wasn’t even sure if he still held the pistol in his hand anymore. But what did it matter? There was no way to shoot the light.

  But this new light had a sound too. A loud groaning sound. Growing louder. Then a high screech as the light slowed down and stopped moving. From somewhere deep in the blackness that Hagen was falling into a thought rose to the surface. Hagen caught it and clung to it. A vehicle. The light was a vehicle. Coming along the road. Coming upon the dark Mercedes and Vogel’s body behind it. Stopping. Hagen heard the rattle of a diesel engine idling. With the last of his strength he raised the pistol in the air and fired. Then again and again. In his mind he saw the bullets rising up into the sky, exploding in great bursts of red fluorescence like distress flares from a ship far out to sea.

  Then he saw nothing else.

  Nothing until—a room. A white room. White sheets. Heavy white bandages up his arm and around his chest. A nurse in a crisp white uniform with a small gold watch dangling from a gold chain attached to her breast pocket. She stood over Hagen, her hand on his wrist. Then she called to someone who sat in the corner of the white room. The figure stood up. A d
octor? No. A man in a blue uniform. A policeman.

  A gendarme . . .

  Later when the drugs wore off and his head cleared they took him to another room in the hospital. A much smaller room, painted a clean sterile white like the first room but with no bed, no nurse, no doctor. The door was shut but Hagen knew there was a gendarme on the other side of it, standing guard. They’d placed him in a wheelchair and left him in here. Waiting. He knew what for. Vogel was dead and a gendarme captain was on his way to the hospital to question Hagen about the events out on the road between Morlaix and Trégastel. The gendarme captain would know nothing about William Severance and the shredded Stasi records and the puzzlers in Berlin. He would know nothing of a former Stasi agent named Heinrich Kress or two other agents known only as Totenkopf and Hohle. He would know nothing of Ingeborge Stromm. He would know nothing of the cooperation of the French DST with the BND and Severance’s CIA team in Berlin. And Hagen couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t tell him a thing.

  Hagen sat there in the wheelchair, waiting for the white door to open and the questions to begin . . .

  “Hello, Bodo.”

  “Hello, McGrath.”

  McGrath stood in the doorway of the holding cell, grim-faced and tired. Rolled up in his hand was a typed report of four or five pages.

  McGrath removed the handcuffs from Hagen’s wrists, then led Hagen down the hallway and into the same room that Coyne and Mansfield had questioned him in earlier. Hagen sat down at the table. The parallel shadows running across the table from the half-closed venetian blinds were longer and darker now.

  McGrath closed the door slowly, dropped the report onto the table and sat down across from Hagen. Hagen saw his own name at the top of the first page of the report, followed by Coyne’s and Mansfield’s names. The report was a typed copy of the notes that Mansfield had taken earlier.

  “Jack Gubbs is dead,” McGrath said.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  McGrath rubbed his eyes with his long thin fingers. His narrow face was a mass of dry wrinkles, a contour map of a hard life, right there for everyone to see. “Maybe you didn’t, Bodo. But if you did, I’m going to find out. It’ll be better all around if you tell me yourself. You make me work for it, things might not be so easy for you.”

  “That’s what your friends said too.”

  “Mansfield and Coyne?”

  “The ones you sent to put the screws to me.”

  “I asked them to pick you up and have a talk with you. I would’ve done it myself but I’ve been over at Gubbs’s place with the forensic people and the coroner. A gunshot to the head is a messy business.”

  “Is that how he died?”

  “That’s how he died.”

  “What makes you think I had anything to do with it?”

  “You talked to him day before yesterday. You seemed to think he knew something about what happened to Ronnie. It occurs to me that you might’ve arrived at the conclusion that Gubbs killed Ronnie himself. And that would be one good reason for you to kill Gubbs.”

  “Who told you I spoke to Gubbs?”

  “Gubbs told me.”

  “I didn’t realize he was a friend of yours.”

  “He wasn’t. Not a bit. Jack Gubbs had a lot of bad habits. He wasn’t much into clean living and going to church. But he knew a lot of people and he traveled in interesting circles and over the years I helped him out when he needed it and when I could, and in his gratitude he helped me out. Jack Gubbs was an informant, Bodo. I’ve had him on a leash for years. He worked for me, I guess you could say. Now he’s dead. That bothers me somehow. I want to know who and I want to know why.”

  Hagen understood the words coming out of McGrath’s mouth but he had a hard time believing what they signified. Jack Gubbs—a police informant? Hagen cleared his throat. “If Gubbs was an informant, why didn’t you know that Ronnie stayed at his apartment last week?”

  “I knew. Gubbs told me.”

  “It’s not in the file I read.”

  “There’s probably quite a few things that I know that aren’t in those files. I keep that kind of information under my hat. Too many people read those files and too many people talk. Even inside the department. An informant’s no good when everyone knows he’s an informant. An informant’s no good when he’s dead either.”

  “Like Ronnie and Jimmy Ray? Is that something that didn’t make it into a file? The Jimmy Ray murder was your case, McGrath. Some people have the idea that you think Ronnie was involved.”

  A patient smile appeared on McGrath’s face. “Some people being who?”

  “Marty Ray, for one.”

  “I wouldn’t believe everything Marty Ray told me.”

  “What part should I believe?”

  McGrath looked away, laughed quietly to himself, as though he’d just realized that he was the butt of a mildly amusing joke. “You do get around, don’t you, Bodo.” McGrath reached into his shirt pocket, removed a pack of cigarettes, slid one out and lit it. He looked around for an ashtray, didn’t see one. He got up and walked over to the trash can by the door, pulled an empty soda can out and brought it over to the table, flicked cigarette ash into the can. “I didn’t tell Marty Ray anything about Ronnie. Not five years ago and not since. When Jimmy Ray was killed I asked Marty questions about Ronnie, but I asked him questions about a lot of people. That’s my job, Bodo—I’m a cop. You remember what that is, right? If Marty Ray thinks your brother was involved in Jimmy Ray getting whacked, he didn’t get it from me. But I’ll tell you one thing. When I heard that Ronnie was back in town I dug out those old files and went over them again. Ronnie and I were going to have a talk.”

  “So you do think he was involved.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I wanted to have a talk. I never got the chance to ask him the questions I wanted to ask him five years ago. Ronnie left town right after Jimmy Ray was killed. He joined the Legion. Next thing I knew, he was on the other side of the world. Good place to be when things get sticky at home.”

  Ronnie wasn’t involved in Jimmy Ray’s murder but McGrath wanted to talk to him about it all the same? What was McGrath holding back? What was it that McGrath didn’t want to tell him?

  Hagen said, “Did you talk to Ronnie last week?”

  “Didn’t get the chance. Hell, I didn’t even know he was back in town until the day before he was murdered, when Gubbs told me. Gubbs told me something else that was interesting—he told me that Ronnie had been to see Harry Needles and he also told me that Ronnie was looking for a fence. Now what do you suppose Ronnie wanted to sell to a fence? Any ideas, Bodo? I told Gubbs to find out what he could about whatever nasty little pie Ronnie had his fingers in. I wanted to know if Harry was involved too. Didn’t work out, I’m sorry to say.”

  Harry Needles? A couple of hours ago Hagen had come to believe that Harry Needles might be involved in this. Now McGrath was suggesting the same thing. “How does Harry work into this?”

  McGrath asked Hagen how much he knew about the events surrounding the murder of Jimmy Ray five years ago. Hagen told McGrath what he’d heard—Jimmy Ray was murdered at his home and a couple hundred thousand dollars that he’d kept in a safe was stolen. And the money was skim money, if Hagen knew the Ray brothers as well as he thought he did.

  McGrath nodded. “That’s most of it. I’ll tell you the rest. Don’t want you running around with only half the story. One of the people who knew about the money Jimmy Ray had in the house the night he was killed was Harry Needles. Back then, Jimmy and Marty were backing Harry in that strip club he runs, and Harry Needles was there in Jimmy Ray’s office when Jimmy and Marty Ray and the rest of them were cooking the books and counting up the leftover cash. Some of that money came from Harry’s strip joint, I’m sure. Then Jimmy Ray takes the lion’s share of the skim money and goes home and puts it in his safe and he gets himself killed and the money takes a hike. That’s no coincidence—whoev
er killed Jimmy knew the money was there or knew someone who knew. So I talked to Marty Ray. I talked to an accountant who was there that night and a couple of Marty Ray’s boys who were there too. And I talked to Harry Needles. I didn’t get far with any of them. But I always wondered about Harry. Nothing solid—just a feeling that he might know more than he’d told me.

  “A few weeks later Ronnie leaves town and disappears. It looks—well, let’s just say that it looks interesting. Ronnie worked for the Ray brothers then too. He wasn’t around the night they were divvying up money in the office, but he worked there. He might’ve heard something. And you know and I know that Harry Needles and Ronnie were pals. So Ronnie disappearing like that, it made me wonder. Then he comes home and, first thing, he gets himself killed. That makes me wonder too. Who in Las Vegas wants to keep him quiet? You see what I’m getting at?”

  “My brother wasn’t a murderer.”

  McGrath shrugged. “Given the right circumstances anyone can commit a murder. Even you, Bodo.”

  “I didn’t kill Gubbs.”

  “I truly hope not.” McGrath took one last drag, then dropped the butt of his cigarette into the soda can. Hagen heard the sizzle as the hot ash landed in the liquid at the bottom of the can. “I know what kind of work you do overseas. Your old man told me after you left town. He was proud of you. Maybe you believe that and maybe you don’t, but he was. But don’t get the idea that what you do for the government over there gives you any kind of special protection here in Las Vegas. In this town you’re just another citizen. You don’t have anybody’s permission to start poking your nose where it doesn’t belong. If I find out that you are, I will surely cut that nose off. Do we understand each other?”