Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  1

  The center lane of the Long Island Expressway was a solid line of steel all the way to the horizon. One large truck after another, all rolling along at ten miles over the speed limit. The right lane was reserved for the undocumented immigrants driving landscapers’ rigs, the not-quite-legally blind, and senior tax dodgers in cars the size of small yachts with Florida tags. The far left lane held everyone else. From the guys who just wanted to get where they were going to the truly insane, who drove as though possessed of a death wish. I didn’t count the HOV lane, where minivans maintained a steady sixty, while SUVs and the Hampton Jitney did eighty. My shoulders were aching from the strain of keeping every other car on the road at something more than arm’s length, and my knuckles were so white they would have glowed in the dark. I have always had a special hatred for the Long Island Expressway.

  I was there on a long shot. My job was not—usually—a taxing one. After serving two years of a five-year sentence in federal prison for an accounting mistake that I had let snowball—if they don’t get you for the crime, they’ll get you for the cover-up—my job prospects back on Wall Street were limited. Most of my old acquaintances wouldn’t take my call. But over the next year and a half, I had carved out a niche as a freelance fraud investigator and done quite well. One thing had led to another, and now I worked directly for the CEO of a midsized investment bank, conducting the kind of investigations that the legal and compliance departments found inconvenient. Virgil Becker ran the firm his father had almost destroyed. I had been instrumental in salvaging some of the pieces, and thereafter I collected a ridiculously large annual paycheck for performing what was, in effect, a part-time job. Occasionally, someone or other would object to having their felonious secrets unearthed and I had found myself fighting for my life, or mourning the loss of another. But more often, the greatest danger I faced was the threat of backache and eyestrain from staring at a computer screen for hours on end. Sometimes I just needed to get out of the office and do a bit of field investigating. Which was how I found myself stuck in the center lane on the L.I.E.

  Every week, I ran a random search through all of the firm’s trades, looking for any pattern that looked unusual. There were always dozens. That’s the nature of the business. Then I had to sift through all the anomalies to see if there were any that warranted further investigation. There were surprisingly few. That’s also the nature of the business. Most Wall Street crime stays hidden simply because of the massive volume of legitimate trades that happen every day. The program that I had devised wasn’t any better than the ones the SEC used—and they had a lot more manpower—but if I waited for them to discover the malefaction, I wasn’t doing my job.

  The week before, I had come across one of those pesky patterns. One of the firm’s brokers had, some months earlier, executed a flurry of trades in penny stocks. Penny stocks are, as one might imagine, stocks that sell for less than a dollar. They are rarely worth even the pennies paid, but every once in a while a stock might pay off with a miraculous new product or discovery. However, it wasn’t the kind of business that the firm encouraged—there were too many opportunities for fraud. The dollar amounts were small enough that my program had ignored them until, on a whim, I widened the parameters. The penny stock trades all jumped to the head of the list. There was no obvious evidence of misdealing, but on a slow week I had the time to dig a little deeper. When I continued researching the stocks—all blue-collar types of businesses like plumbers, electricians, and cesspool companies that depended heavily on the use of trucks—I found that twelve of the twelve companies had long-term leases on the same property out on Long Island. That was the kind of coincidence that could go from agita to heart attack. When I looked it up on Google Earth, I saw an immense structure surrounded by a grassy field a few hundred acres in size. It was either a sod farm or pastureland, isolated in the middle of the wilderness of Pine Barrens. It was odd enough to get me out of the office for a closer look.

  I began my drop down to the exit ramp a mile in advance of the exit and still almost missed it, thanks to a woman wearing those oversized sunglasses that fit over regular glasses. She sped up when I tried to merge in front of her and slowed down when I dropped back. The trucker behind me finally hit his horn in frustration, which scared the woman into hitting her brakes, and I scooted through. Less than a quarter mile after the exit ramp, I was driving through a landscape of scrub oak and dwarf pine. The edges of the asphalt roadway had crumbled away on both sides so that if another car had come from the other direction, one of us would have had to veer off onto the salt-and-pepper sandy verge.

  The break in the wilderness was abrupt. One moment I was surrounded on both sides by an eight- or ten-foot-tall wall of evergreen and gray-brown scrub oak, the next I was passing fence posts as tall as the stunted trees enclosing a grassland resembling a western prairie. I slowed down to examine the territory.

  The fence around the property was a grid of thick strands forming four-inch squares supported by tall, thick posts six or eight feet apart. It looked like it would keep out a tank. It also looked solid enough to support half a dozen big men if they wanted to climb over. I thought that it must be for containment rather than security. This idea was bolstered when I saw the inner fence, a single bare wire about four and a half feet off the ground that ran through insulated fixtures on bare wooden posts. An electric fence. It looked harmless from the seat of the rental car, but the wire was heavy enough to carry quite a charge.

  Across the field loomed the building I had seen on Google. It was as tall as an airplane hangar, twice as wide, and it had to be the length of two football fields. There were no windows or doors on the side facing me. It was just a long expanse of weathered gray.

  I drove along a little farther until I could see the corner of the property and the convergent road, then I pulled off to the side and stopped the car. The sudden silence was disorienting. There was no breath of wind, no birds calling or insects buzzing, no hum of distant traffic or rush of airplanes overhead. I wanted to turn on the radio, to hear some sign that civilization still went on just over the horizon. The sudden ping of the engine as it cooled almost made me jump.

  I left the car unlocked and walked along the fence, careful to avoid the bright green poison ivy and the low thistle bushes that shared the roadside with the sparse grass and occasional fern. It was hot.

  Around the corner, I came upon the gate—or gates, for there were two, an inner and an outer, forming an enclosed lock the length and double the width of a long semi cab and trailer. The gates were each double-door affairs with electronic locks, counterweighted pulleys, and rolls of razor wire. A sign on each gate announced in both English and Spanish that trespassing was forbidden and that it was too dangerous to even think about coming in. I decided that the restrictions did not pertain to someone who had driven most of the length of the Long Island Expressway to get there, but I wasn’t going to attempt entry through those fortifications anyway. There were no signs on the fence, only on the gates, therefore the prohibition ended where the fence began.

  I walked back fifty yards or so and began to climb. The metal wires did not sag or buckle. They were made to support weight. Even so, I was sweating by the time I reached the top and swung a leg over. The change in perspective gave me a different view of the field below, and an idea began to form in my mind. I looked for more evidence and found it almost immediately. The remains of multiple fences crisscrossed the gently rolling property. Now almost all rotted away, they had once broken the huge pasture into smaller parcels. Sections where horses could be raised—stallions and mares kept separate until such time that the breeder wanted them together. Enclosures where colts could learn to run with their dams. All this had once been a horse farm. Or ranch. The precise nomenclature escaped me. I was born and raised in Queens.

  However, among the now defunct agricultural industries that had once dominated half or more of Long Island was the business of ra
ising horses. American quarter horses. Used for everything from dressage to rodeo. I knew this because of a brief fascination with a girl in middle school who had a less brief, and much more intense, fascination with horses. She and her mother would drive out east every weekend, where they rode hired horses while wearing little leather helmets, black blazers, tall boots, and funny pants. My fascination with her arose because she was almost as good in math as I was, which gave me the impression, ultimately very wrong, that we might have something to talk about. I listened to her rattle on about horses and she listened to me obsess about differential equations. The relationship did not flourish as I had hoped.

  There were no longer any horses gamboling about, but the long building now made sense to me. One end of the barn—and I now felt comfortable calling it that—would have held stalls for the horses, as well as storage for feed and equipment. The wider end with the curved roof would have been the indoor riding arena where rider and horse could train together to do the maneuvers required for dressage, or jumping, or even barrel racing or calf herding.

  What interest Keegan Cesspool Services—Roto-Rooter’s number-one competition on the East End—and the other companies would have in an old horse farm, however, was still a mystery.

  I climbed down the inside of the fence. No alarms went off. No armed guards arrived to escort me off the property. No thrashing helicopters hovered overhead. Therefore, I wasn’t really trespassing.

  The grass under the electric wire was about two feet high. I ran my hand through the top leaves to see if there was any leakage from the fence. I had seen the third rail on the subway arc at times when a train passed by. There was that same electric-train smell of ozone in the air. I didn’t want to duck under the wire only to find that there was enough current leaking that I became a quick-fried grounding post. But despite the smell, there was no sharp sting when I touched the grass. I went all the way down to hands and knees to crawl under.

  I was about three hundred yards from the barn, most of it through long grass. I was a city boy. Long grass meant man-eating lions, like in that Val Kilmer–Michael Douglas movie, or poisonous snakes, despite the fact that I knew on a purely intellectual basis that there were neither on Long Island. But there were probably ticks, and I could contract Lyme disease or spotted fever, whatever that was. Or at the very least, I might get a spider bite. I cut over toward the packed-earth drive, where the grass was beaten down to a sparse Mohawk fringe. The road led from the gate directly to the barn.

  Beyond the barn was a grove of three ancient catalpa trees, each one six or eight feet around. Lazing beneath them in the shade were what I took to be cows—large dark brown lumps. They were far away, resting, and, even to a New Yorker wearing a custom-made suit and Allen Edmonds wingtips, a relatively minor threat. I resolved not to step in any cow pies.

  The remaining posts from the old fencing, lined up like pensioned sentinels along the side of the dirt road, were all slightly askew, as though the earth had reshaped itself in undulating waves, or, more likely, something heavy had pushed against them repeatedly. The significance of that escaped me until it was almost too late.

  Once on the driveway, I could see the barn much more clearly and from end on. The wall facing me had a single enormous sliding door with the same kind of electronic lock and pulley contraption as the main gate. If that was not enough security, someone had wrapped a thick padlocked chain through the pulley system. If I’d had a hacksaw, I could have gotten through it in not much more than a day or two.

  I didn’t need a hacksaw. In the middle of the huge door was a smaller door. An Alice in Wonderland–sized door with no lock and nothing but a simple lever-handle doorknob. It was too easy. I opened the door and heard the shrill screech of rusty hinges. I paused, waiting to see if I had somehow raised an alarm. Nothing. I walked in and stepped into darkness.

  The fact that there were no alarms or hi-tech locks should have been a warning. The owners of the property were either painfully ignorant of modern security techniques or they were arrogantly confident beyond all reason. Or, they knew something that I did not.

  I began to explore the dark space. Almost buried under the overwhelming assault from fumes of diesel and other petroleum distillates, there was the faint scent of horse. Certainly not a recent smell, but impossible to ignore. I felt my way to the nearest wall and searched for a light switch. Instead I found a big metal switch box with a long handle on one side. I gripped it and pulled down. There was a loud thunk that sounded more like an axe hitting a stump than anything electric, but it worked. Overhead, banks of fluorescent lights began to buzz and flicker the length of the building, revealing a single open space—the stalls and tack rooms had been gutted and removed—that was now filled with trucks and heavy equipment of every description. Panel trucks, flatbeds, dump trucks, refrigerator trucks, monstrous semis and tow trucks that dwarfed them, septic trucks, a long line of oil delivery trucks, even a half-dozen beverage distributor trucks. The heavy equipment was all earth-moving machinery of one kind or another. There must have been tens of millions of dollars’ worth of vehicles there, most in pristine condition.

  I walked the length of one row to the far end of the barn where the arena had been. The overhead lights there were dark. The space seemed to hold vague geometric forms and dark amorphous blobs. I searched the wall until I came to another switch box. I pulled the handle. This time, the lights suspended from the high ceiling were all powerful floods. The floor of the arena lit up like an operating room.

  It was an operating room. For trucks. Three trucks in the center of the floor were in various stages of being dismantled—or reconstructed—their engines wrapped in thick chains and suspended with block and tackle from steel girders. Parts, some cleaned and labeled, others bathing in tubs of cleaning solvent, were organized neatly around the edges of the space. Along the far wall was a packaging area and loading dock. It was all a factory. But they didn’t make things there, they took them apart and sold the pieces. The trucks came in at one end, and if they weren’t held for use by D&Y Hauling, McFee Plumbing, L.I. Ice, or one of the other companies on the list, all of whom depended on trucks of various kinds to make their businesses work, they were taken to the far end where they were reduced to their most salable parts, which were then boxed and shipped and sent out through the single small door at the far end. It was possibly—probably—the world’s biggest truck chop shop.

  I took out my phone and started snapping pictures.

  There were too many vehicles to record each one; I would have been there all afternoon. Instead I took samplings and a few long shots for both scale and sheer numbers. Every few minutes I stopped taking photos and emailed them to myself. The moment I realized what this very private piece of property was being used for, I felt an urgency to be on my way back home. The collection of evidence was a necessity, but I did not want ever to have to come back. I had enough to bring to Virgil; he could pass the matter on to the compliance department. My part was done.

  I had just turned off the floodlights, casting that end of the barn back into a murky darkness, when I realized what was missing. Guard dogs. I had never seen an auto junkyard without a huge bloodthirsty mastiff or pit bull, or even a short-haired shepherd. By some luck I had arrived on a day when no one was there working, stripping parts or packing them up. But surely they must have had some kind of security. The fencing might have kept out army tanks, but it hadn’t stopped me. The urgency to be on my way increased by a factor of ten.

  The thunk of the lights going off sounded much louder than turning them on. I made my way to the small door and pushed it open. The hinges sounded their shrill protest again. The sudden changes from light to dark and back again left me blinded as I stepped through the doorway. I was in a hurry, but I stopped and took a second for my eyes to adjust.

  The realization that I was not alone came in strobe-light flashes. The first was a sound—a cough. Not exactly a coug
h, but definitely an exhale. A human could have made the sound, but probably didn’t. There was also a smell that hit me just a moment before my eyes focused. It was a wild smell, like what you might get if you crossed a cow with a bear.

  My eyes cleared. I was facing a herd of bison. American buffalo. Four very big fellows with horns were standing in a semicircle not twenty feet away. They were blocking my access to the road. My line of retreat. One of them made the coughing sound again. It could have been an expression of anger, or merely impatience. He stamped a hoof on the ground. Anger, I decided. In a group, more to the right and slightly farther away, were eight female bison. Though they were smaller and the horns they wore just a tad less lethal looking, the real clue to their gender was that six of them were swollen and gravid, while the other two hung back, protecting two spindly-legged calves, who watched me with both fascination and fear out of slightly protuberant eyes.

  I tried to convince myself that I was in no danger. I was no threat, therefore they had no reason to treat me as anything other than an oddity. An amusement. I would have to pass between two of the bulls to make my escape, but if I showed no hostility they would let me go unmolested. I took a step forward.

  The cough this time was considerably louder and its intent and meaning quite clear. I froze. The doorway was just a few steps behind me, but I had read somewhere—probably in Outside magazine while waiting at the dentist’s office—that bison were among the fastest land creatures, able to run for some distance at forty miles an hour or more. And, they could reach full speed instantly. I turned and ran. I must have hit full speed instantly, too. I was through the door and back inside in a flash, the door hinges screaming.

  I let my breath come back slowly. I had been holding it from the moment I saw the bison. My hands were clammy and I smelled like fear. I peered out the door. There had been no movement. The little herd was still there. I watched them for a few minutes and realized that I could easily see them but they could not see me, and so I relaxed. But if I let the door make the slightest sound, they became immediately alert and the bulls took turns coughing in my direction. We were at a standoff. I was stuck until they lost interest—and I would still have the problem of opening the door without making a sound to tip them off—or someone showed up to assist me. Or arrest me. Or worse.