Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  “Let’s take him to Sirocco,” Megan says hopefully. “See if she’ll nurse.” We walk in procession toward the barn — McCord leading his horse, Sara and the herky-jerky foal, Megan and I — passing the white cat, the ducks, and the wire cage, now empty.

  Someone has stolen all the rabbits.

  “We’re having a party,” Megan tells McCord. “A midsummer festival. Please come. I’d like to buy you a drink for taking care of Geronimo.” “Not necessary but much appreciated. Especially if this lovely young lady’s gonna be there.” He is talking about Sara.

  Sirocco is standing placidly in the pasture when Megan leads the foal inside. She unsnaps the lead rope and withdraws, latching the gate. They approach and sniff each other. Sirocco dodges away. The baby chases her, and she wheels in the dust. He follows, absolutely desperate, but she won’t let him near, making little nips and kicks. Abruptly, when she’s ready, she just stops, and after a moment, he finds the teats.

  Megan, leaning on the fence, quietly thumbs the tears from her eyes.

  The gun that killed Sergeant Mackee is a single-shot bolt-action sniper rifle about fifty inches long, weighing between fourteen and eighteen pounds. Not the kind of thing you can hide in a sugar bowl.

  Every day, with quiet urgency, I search another part of the house. Every night, lying in bed, I perform a mental inventory of the rooms, noting anything missing or out of place. I visualize the porch. Grasses have grown tall around the rusted sink. Thick stands of lavender and wild daisies remain unbroken around the crawl space underneath the steps, and the basement windows show an untouched glaze of dust, meaning nobody’s been creeping around down there, hiding weapons. The narrow windows at ground level look in on Dick Stone’s workshop, which is always locked, and I have never rubbed the dirt away to spy inside. Stone is likely checking his own inventory every day.

  The front hall is a staging area of floating possessions — jackets, umbrellas, junk mail, Slammer’s skateboard — but there is also a closet jammed with vacuum cleaner parts, tennis rackets, rain gear, and brooms, at the back of which is a latched door. Hurried inspection with a flashlight reveals the door and latch have been thickly painted over. Probably leads to a crawl space beneath the stairs.

  The kitchen, to the left of the entryway, is a public space that would be hard to use for hiding contraband. The living room is a challenge. There are so many collections of tiny things, it is a perplexing game of Memory to place every piece of Depression glassware and each china cat. I have moved them just to see if Megan will move them back. She does.

  In the living room, the TV is always playing, even in the daytime semi-darkness. At night, we assemble on the caved-in couch grooved with body imprints, like any other cobbled-together American family, placing our heels on the coffee table precisely in the spaces between the old wine bottles and bowls of dried-up guacamole, watching cop shows or a movie from Dick Stone’s collection of tapes. He has become obsessed with Apocalypse Now.

  Also, he has begun to get in shape.

  Stone is jogging ten miles in the mornings, a major change, which gets my attention. Offenders have rituals. They will alter their looks, get high, call Mom, or rob a store before they’re ready to go out and execute a major crime.

  Like the Big One.

  Along with a dedicated running schedule, he has been screening this movie regularly — once or twice a week — all of us saying the dialogue out loud like a gospel choir. Stone is as fussy about his tapes as Megan is about the candy dishes — he always keeps Apocalypse Now on the fourth bookshelf, at eye level, between The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.

  One day, I noticed his favorite cassette was missing. It stayed missing for seventy-two hours; then it was back in the same place. Had he lent it? Is he playing with my head?

  The sewing room is a drafty screened-in porch with tilting bamboo shades and bolts of discount cloth infested with earwigs. I call it the “Room of Unfinished Dreams.” An old Singer sewing machine is the island in the storm, black lace panties caught in its teeth, as Sara comes in here to sew her samples of lingerie — original designs that she claims she’ll sell one day to big department stores. There’s a dressing table with a big round mirror, drawers stuffed with Megan’s bags of yarn. The white cat likes the rattan love seat in the morning sun.

  Lying in bed at night, I float inside my head like a dreamer to the upper limits of the sewing room, recollecting that the dropped ceiling tile showed no signs of removal (for illicit storage in the space above); then my inner eye travels up the stairs, past the German wall clock, to Stone and Megan’s bedroom, and the mondo mess of pills and herbal remedies in the master bath — including the heavy-duty antipsychotics Mellaril and Haldol, and benzodiazepines for anxiety, Ativan and Librium. It would be excellent to trace the doctor who wrote the prescriptions, but they are all generic, from Mexico. Megan, who did a stint as an aide in a psychiatric facility, has apparently been playing amateur shrink with Dick Stone’s brain.

  Every day, I inspect Slammer’s room, the outbuildings, and of course the attic, and in every night’s review so far, this aging Victorian dame of a farmhouse has convinced me that she has herself in order — nothing wanton, nothing to hide.

  The only place I have yet to search is Dick Stone’s locked workshop.

  I was in there only once, on the pretext of going down to the basement to get laundry detergent.

  Megan had been working on her quilt. A Christian station played on the radio. Megan likes that because it reminds her of her childhood. She was the eldest of five, growing up in an austere minister’s home in snowy northern Michigan. All the other siblings took up charitable work. One of her sisters was killed on a mission to Africa, but Megan doesn’t say how.

  The large frame that holds the quilt barely leaves enough space for a couple of hanging bicycles and metal shelves with household supplies — canned food and bleach. In an L-shaped room beyond, they have installed an industrial stove for the seasonal chore of making hazelnut brittle.

  It was damp in the basement and Megan was wearing a plum red shawl over an Indian blouse with fringes at the hem, a peaceful look on her face as she sewed patches on the quilt. I noticed a glass and half-empty bottle of wine on the floor. The door to Stone’s shop was open, yellow light spilling out. It was almost romantic to imagine them on winter nights, pursuing their rustic hobbies side by side.

  I filled the canister from a bin of laundry detergent, then wandered over to the woodworking shop, where Stone was applying lacquer to a cross section of tree trunk perched on a pair of sawhorses.

  “What are you making?”

  “A table.”

  “What kind of wood is that?”

  “Douglas fir.”

  “It looks like marble.”

  Quickly, I advanced through the doorway, sucking in the details like an alien invader: Table saw. Drill press. High window at ground level. Built-in cabinets, home-improvement clutter.

  “Thirty coats of varnish. That’s how I get it to look like marble.” Jars, tiny drawers of screws and nails; pliers, drills, drill bits, chisels. A pair of steel storage cabinets with a padlock.

  “The grain is beautiful. How do you know where to cut it?” “You have to read the wood.” He dragged a blackened fingertip across the polished slab. “See that darkness? That’s when the tree began to die.” I saw a black cloud, like a squirt of ink, spreading V-like through the amber rings of growth.

  “That’s death. You’re looking at it,” Dick Stone said.

  He keeps the guns in the locked cabinets.

  At that moment, in the workshop fragrant with cedar dust and hard work, he could almost pass for exactly what he seemed: a hazelnut farmer with eager, skilled hands, awed by the inevitability of nature.

  But then I saw the videocassette of Apocalypse Now on the workbench. I was certain I had just seen it, moments before, upstairs.

  “You must really like that video to have two copies.”

  Dick Stone said bri
efly, “It’s the greatest movie ever made.”

  I cannot get into the workshop again until one rare morning when they’ve all gone into town and Dick Stone has left for a run. I wait fifteen minutes after he’s gone, and then hustle down the basement steps, clutching the set of lock picks delivered earlier by an FBI agent posing as a U.S. postal worker. In undercover school at Quantico, we ran time tests for defeating dead bolts; Stone’s workout has handed me at least an hour.

  It takes only five minutes to blow Operation Wildcat sky-high.

  Twenty-three

  Inserting a tension wrench into the keyhole of the cylinder and then alternating several picks, I finally find the one with the right angle to lift each pin. The plug rotates and the lock opens.

  The door to Dick Stone’s woodshop swings wide. I hesitate, as if someone is waiting in ambush. Sterling McCord, maybe. He has a way of appearing when you least expect him. But there is nothing. Dead air. I pull out a penlight and aim it at the floor.

  As the light passes the legs of the sawhorse that holds the fir table, a wastebasket flips, and brown mice scatter. The scent of orange peel rises from the garbage. I right the wastebasket. My heart is racing and I have to pee. The smell of resin and lacquer in the enclosed space is dizzying.

  I seriously hope there are no more mice.

  The cone of light walks up the tall steel cabinet and stops at the padlock that secures the handles. This one is a common tumbler lock, using wafers instead of pins, and can be picked the same way. I’m getting good at this. The tumbler clicks and the hasp slides open.

  Alone at the bottom of the quiet house, I insert the penlight between my teeth and open the cabinet doors, anxious to reveal Stone’s secret arsenal — expecting to find the sniper rifle, automatic weapons, Tovex explosives.

  Instead, I am looking at a four-split television monitor.

  In each corner of the screen is a different view of the empty house: living room, kitchen, sewing room, stairs.

  It is an arsenal all right: a sophisticated wireless surveillance system, including a high-sensitivity receiver, whip antenna, and down converter.

  Before I can begin to think of a way to cover up this horrendous breach of Stone’s security system, I notice the cassette of Apocalypse Now is resting on the upper shelf of the cabinet. I know he loves the movie, but why hide it in here?

  The moment I pick it up, the quadrants on the TV monitor flip to four different views — driveway, bathroom, attic, inside the cabinet—and there is Special Agent Ana Grey, staring into the camera like a bonehead tourist. As I move the cassette, my image on the split screen moves accordingly.

  Stone has hidden a tiny camera in the spine of Apocalypse Now. He kept the camera aimed from the shelf in the living room, but he must have switched it for the real videotape when I noticed there were two. He has the whole place under constant surveillance. I can see from the monitor there is even a covert camera inside the German wall clock, keeping watch on who’s going up the stairs. And who’s been searching the house.

  The apocalypse is looking at me now, through the pinhole of a live camera, less than an eighth of an inch in diameter.

  My nose, on the screen, is as big as the snout of a moose.

  That night at 1:00 a.m., a flashlight shines in my face.

  “Get up,” says Stone.

  I am already up, speed-dialing a thousand explanations. I have avoided him all day.

  “You broke into my shop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I swing out of bed, but he pushes me down, his hand squarely on my chest.

  “You broke into my workroom and my personal cabinets.” “Why would I do that? It’s the dumbest thing in the world.” “It’s all on tape, Darcy.”

  I say nothing.

  Neither affirm nor deny.

  “Yeah.” He nods, reading my face. “That’s right. You’re toast.” I notice Sara is not in her bed. He has me alone. He has set the stage for — what?

  “All right!” I shout, and surprise him by lunging for the wall switch, defiantly flicking on the light, making him squint.

  “I did break into your shop, and I’ll tell you why I—” “Is that so?”

  He sits beside me and the mattress sinks. Again, that scent of male, and the threat of two hundred pounds of leaned-out muscle and bone. He’s wearing a loose rayon shirt and jeans, long, hairy toes blackened with sawdust gripping the shower thongs that pass for slippers. He must have just come from the basement, checking his daily surveillance tapes.

  “Everything around this place is a huge big secret,” I rant on. “I’ve been here weeks, and you still don’t trust me? Now I find out you’re spying on us? Your own people, who live in your house?” “It’s for everyone’s protection.”

  “What if those tapes wind up on the Internet? Or maybe this whole operation is some kind of a setup.” “Setup for what?”

  “Maybe you’re working for the cops.”

  “Why would I?”

  “To destroy the movement from the inside. They pull that shit, you know.” Dick Stone rubs his forehead, shiny from the warmth of the night.

  “No need to freak, little sister. I came up here just to say ‘Right on.’” What is that in his amber eyes — besides middle-aged fatigue, glazed by the lateness of the hour? Something I haven’t seen before: Amusement?

  He lays a heavy arm across my shoulders.

  “Darcy, I would have done the same damn thing. Looked through Daddy’s drawers when the folks weren’t home. You know, I did that once when I was a kid, and guess what I found? In my father’s nightstand? A heap of condoms and a huge fucking kitchen knife he kept right by the bed. That was a shocker.” “Which? The condoms or the knife?”

  “The knife, man. What was he thinking?” Stone shakes his head.

  “Protecting the family, just like you.”

  “We lived in suburban Connecticut.”

  “Gotta watch out for those serial stockbrokers.” Dick Stone snorts with laughter. “You’re not far wrong. He was a competitive old bastard.” “You’re not mad about the cabinets? I see a lock, I can’t help thinking there must be something righteous inside, worth protecting.” He nods. “I dig it. You’ve got skills, girl.”

  “Used to be a pretty good thief. Got busted for stealing data, served my time, but a regular padlock — that’s just too tempting.” Dick Stone’s face is now so close, I can see the tiny bristles on his cheeks.

  “One question. Where did you hide the tools? You can’t just pick a lock.” “Have you been going through my stuff?”

  “Regularly.”

  “That’s why I kept moving them.”

  I reach under the bed, pull out a small bundle that was duct-taped to the frame, and toss it over.

  This open display stops him. Could anyone actually be so guileless?

  I’ve pasted on a casual smile but I think I’ve stopped breathing. For several long seconds I watch Dick Stone waver, like a high school coach who discovers his best starting pitcher smoking weed in the locker.

  Screw it. He likes the kid.

  “Darcy,” he says slowly, “you’re okay. You’re the same as me. All you want is to have some fun. You like to start little fires, don’t you?” I rest for a moment in enormous relief. He hasn’t made a move on me, hasn’t doubted my story. And there is truth in what he says — sitting butt-to-butt on the edge of the bed, seemingly at ease in the heart of the night like father and daughter, or supervisor and agent, we recognize something inside the other that is the same.

  A paradox is unfolding. The longer I stay under, the larger Dick Stone becomes. Rather than working his way into ordinariness through everyday contact, he grows more vivid, and my own sense of self-cohesion fades. The boundaries between Darcy and Ana seem inconsequential, not worth defending, as we are swept toward the Big One by some inner momentum of Stone’s that the meticulous procedures of the Bureau are powerless to stop. Donnato’s voice on the Oreo phone and my former life
in Los Angeles dwindle and disappear like radio signals moving out of range.

  The first time I drove through the Marine base at Quantico as a new agent, there was that orgasmic surge of ecstasy: This is what I’ve always wanted! Now, out of this cozy intimacy with Stone, the same words echo, but with a newly ominous tone: This is what I wanted, going undercover, isn’t it? To forget the past and my mistakes and the larger-than-life figures who dominated, even as the realization creeps at the edge of my mind that I have replaced one despot with another.

  There is no retribution here. Dick Stone believes what he has said — that he and I are somehow the same — and now that he is done saying it, he simply gets up and leaves.

  And the Darcy part of me experiences a rush of feeling for the old bandit that Ana, still the FBI agent, could never admit: Affection.

  Twenty-four

  The panic in Donnato’s voice brings Ana Grey back instantly.

  “You breached Stone’s security system?”

  “I was looking for the sniper rifle.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He laughed.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “He likes me, or he’s nuts.”

  “Or he’s made you and is playing for time.”

  My stomach flips. “I have no way of knowing, do I?”

  Neither of us speaks. I am up in the hazelnut trees again, fussing with the traps for moths, and not liking the symbolism one bit.

  “This is not a disaster,” Donnato muses, as if to assure himself. “We can piggyback on his wireless signal. Hear everything going on inside the house.”

  “If he made me, he wouldn’t let you do that,” I remind him.

  “Tell me this — where does he go every morning?”

  “He started running and lost fourteen pounds. I told you, it’s a new ritual. I think he’s preparing for the Big One.”