When he left, Kinder looked back at me for a quick second and his eyes were telling me something that Bettie couldn’t see.
But Bettie had been blind for a long time. Sight wasn’t a total necessity for her vision any longer. There were other ways she could see, and when Kinder drove off Bettie very quietly asked, “What was that all about, Jack?”
Her inquiry was so loaded with suggestion that I couldn’t lie to her. “Something’s happening,” I told her.
“What?” she demanded.
“It’s a cop thing, doll.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re not a cop.”
“Are you?”
“I was.”
“... Can you tell me?”
“I can.”
“Will you?”
So you love the girl. She’s old enough to be a woman but she was born twenty years ago, even if she’s forty-something, so she’s a girl, who’s been through her own hell. She’s still in it, but beginning to see the light shining through the murk. You’ve kissed her and tasted her and you’re in total love with her and now she wants to be more a part of you than ever before.
I said, “I will.”
“Then tell me.”
“Something happened at Credentials where you worked. It was a computer business, so it had to do with the machinery you operated there. Computers, can you remember that? Ray Burnwald was your boss.”
“Poor Mr. Burnwald. You said he was... injured?”
“Yes. He’s recovering.”
“Mr. Burnwald was nice.”
“Do you remember your job there?”
For thirty seconds I got a blank stare, then she squinted her sightless eyes, seeing into a past a long time ago. She waited a little longer and said, “Fission.”
“What?”
“Fission,” she repeated. “Does that... mean anything to you, Jack?”
Silently, I mouthed a string of words that had nothing to do with my thoughts because things suddenly started to make a little bit of sense if you consider all the possible potential of that single word.
FISSION.
Nuclear devastation.
And only a retired cop and a blind beauty to stop it.
Chapter Six
Don’t mess with a bunch of pros.
They may have been low-paid cops, but they had been trained and were experienced and had gone through the muck and mire of the defects of society and been shot at and sometimes hit and sometimes killed and when they had something to contribute to the general welfare of the society they had protected for so long, you had damn well better listen to them.
Pudgy Gillespie, newly retired sergeant, who had gotten hit twice when he stopped a bank robbery, said, “Jack, I got hold of some information I think you’ve been looking for.”
“Oh?” I said to the voice on the phone.
“Bennie Orbach was released from prison four months ago,” Pudgy said. “He served out all those years for that attempted hijacking of that army truck that was transporting atomic materials to a new location. You remember that?”
That word atomic made my neck tingle.
I nodded, then said, “That truck was a dummy, wasn’t it? The real one got through.”
“The hell it was a dummy. That story came out only when it was found empty.”
“A cover-up,” I said.
“Like you can’t believe. All personnel connected to that affair were assigned to scattered outposts, kept from making contact until everything quieted down or they died, and until now certain Washington agencies have sat on this thing like it was Fort Knox’s gold hoard.”
I waited.
When he had his breath back, Pudgy added, “Benny Orbach went into deep cover as soon as he hit the street. He totally disappeared, never even attempting to contact his parole officer, but a couple of our hot shot trackers from downtown picked up a thread of information and followed it up.”
“They located Benny?”
“No, they found what was left of his body. Somebody had really worked him over and whatever he was holding out, he spilled. Nobody could have kept quiet with the kind of sticking he was given. It was almost like a living autopsy.”
“Damn,” I spit out.
“But they missed something,” Pudgy said. “They never found his personal stash.”
I squinted silently at that.
Pudgy told me, “You know how the cons hide their most necessary items, like narcotics?”
With the way prison shakedowns are held, I couldn’t imagine any way any con could hold out anything. After a few seconds I suggested, “You referring to rectal implants?”
“Exactly.”
“Hell, Pudgy, they would have found that before he was released. Their inspections are...”
“Come on, Jack. He was released. He used the implant after he got out. Whoever nailed him never even thought of that.”
“You don’t think he wouldn’t have talked, being carved up like that?”
Pudgy said solemnly, “One of our medics said pain and fear could have distorted his memory functions. In other words, he went out of his noodle.”
“Cut to the chase, Pudgy.”
“The condom up his ass had a note in it, only the thing leaked... but one word was still decipherable. It said Credentials.”
“Shit.”
“So to speak. Also a number, Jack: 4428.”
“How did you connect Credentials to me, Pudge?”
“I had lunch with Davy Ross the other day and he mentioned you, and Credentials came up. Almost like an afterthought with him.”
“But not with you,” I said.
“You know old cops, Jack. That’s why I’m passing it on. Maybe you can add it up.”
“Some things are standing tall enough to leave a shadow, pal.”
“Got you.”
When I hung up I stared at the phone. There was no way I could get any information from a government agency, even if I knew which one to tap. They ran their own railroad and didn’t share the engineer’s seat with anybody else; but something big had gone down and now it was coming back up again.
Benny Orbach had stolen a shipment of atomic material. It had been offloaded before the truck was found.
The load had to be put in a specially adapted vehicle.
It would have to be stored somewhere safe. No radiation emissions.
Who would be the ultimate purchaser?
Credentials was not a storage area... What was it used for?
What did 4428 mean?
There was an ambiguous side to the death of Benny Orbach — most likely any investigators would assume that the word “Credentials” in Benny’s implant would refer to identification in a drug deal.
But cops have their own sources of information too. Mine was a library where a cheery-voiced young lady was happy to research the affair of the hijacked Army vehicle that was transporting atomic material.
It only took her a minute on the computer to run it down and she told me the value of the shipment was over five hundred million dollars. Back then. What would it be worth now, in a world of terrorists backed by oil-rich sugar daddies?
The atomic material was never recovered and supposition was that the robbery never even happened.
Typical government subterfuge.
All this, now that my blind Bettie had dredged a deadly word from her fractured memory: fission.
Bettie was letting her dog lick her ice cream cone when I crossed over to her porch.
I said, “That healthy, doll?”
“He won’t get sick,” she laughed.
Down the street I heard the bells from the ice cream truck. “I thought you didn’t like those fresh kids.”
“This one was new,” she told me. “Tacos didn’t even growl at him. Can I get you anything?”
“I’m fine. I came over to ask you something.”
“Oh?”
“When you were at Credentials...”
“Jack, I can’t remember those things. Sometimes I get a fuzzy picture, but I can’t make out what it is.”
“Okay. Does the number forty-four-twenty-eight mean anything to you?”
Her facial expression was blank and she shook her head. “Should it?”
“I don’t know. There’s no prefix, so it isn’t a phone number.” Then I gave it further thought and asked, “A file number?”
No use. She stared at me and shook her head.
“Listen, I have to check something out. Something out of town.”
“Kind of used to having you around, Jack.”
“Stay that way.”
And I kissed her. And she kissed me.
I don’t know if it helped her remember anything, but parts of me beside my memory bank were getting stimulated, all right.
“Why don’t we leave Tacos down here with the ice cream,” she said, “and go upstairs and... jog my memory.”
“Listen, doll — you’ve only known me since—”
“Forever.”
She took my hand and the blind led the blinded up the stairs into the bedroom. A shorts and halter top fell to the floor and she crawled up on the bed and onto her back and opened her arms and herself to me.
Every peak and valley of her long-legged body was exactly as my dreams had replayed them over too many years. I started out gentle but she urged me on, demanded I let all of the pent-up passion out and into her....
Forever, she’d said.
I wasn’t sure that would be long enough.
That evening I drove to the airport and left for New York. It was a direct flight and I got in early enough to go to the hospital where Ray Burnwald was being treated, identified myself to the uniformed officer at the door and he told me Burnwald was able to speak, but not for long.
When I went in Ray heard the door snick shut and opened his eyes. There was apprehension there for a moment, then the man in the hospital bed recognized me.
“I was shot,” he whispered.
He looked pale and drawn but wasn’t hooked up to an IV or any other life support. He was on the mend, all right.
I nodded. “I know.”
“I didn’t see who did it,” he added. “I don’t know why they did it, either.”
“The files that were disturbed — was there anything missing?”
“They were over twenty years old, Captain Stang. We couldn’t tell.”
“What was the nature of the files?”
He shook his head, bewildered and frustrated. “Just messages to and from our clients.”
“Standard language?”
“Sometimes coded, but that was just how they handled their business affairs. We had no knowledge of what it meant.” He smiled gently and said, “We are really just a transmission service.”
“I see. Has anyone asked for copies of those files?”
“They were over twenty years old,” Burnwald repeated.
I asked him, “Could you possibly remember who owned those files, or who had access to them?”
“Bettie... Bettie was the only one who might know... but she’s dead.”
I let the comment hang, but Burnwald didn’t notice.
Then, suddenly, he raised his hand and said, “Wait.”
I let him take his time. He was reaching back twenty years for something that had just come to him. When he finally had it in perspective he told me, “The client paid in advance. He wanted service for twenty-five years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“That’s why it made an impression. That’s why I remembered....”
“He pay by check?”
Burnwald shook his head. “No. He gave me cash. I put it in a manila envelope and had Bettie deposit it right away. It was a very sizable amount.”
“And you gave him a receipt?”
“No. He didn’t want one. I tried to tell him it was a tax-deductible transaction, but he refused. I... didn’t try to push it any further. The customer is always right, you know.”
“Did Bettie see him?”
Burnwald thought a moment, then nodded. His eyes had the clarity of vivid memory. “Yes. I called her in to give her the money in the large envelope.” He bit on his lower lip and his eyes watered. “She was a nice girl. It was too bad... what happened to her.”
I had been there too long. He was getting tired and twice he winced in pain.
So we shook hands gently and I went on outside. Halfway down the corridor, a doctor was walking up, consulting a chart in his hands. I said to the uniformed officer at the door, “Nobody’s been here, okay?”
He got the drift right away and said, “Okay, Captain.”
It was nice to have a reputation. Being nicknamed the Shooter leaves a mark on everybody’s mind.
On the flight back I kept thinking about that one thing Burnwald had told me. He couldn’t remember the man, but paying in advance for twenty-five years worth of service was a damned unusual request. What was supposed to happen at that time? Who would get the information? And what was the information about?
There was another factor running right along with this one. A five hundred million dollar shipment of government-owned atomic material was missing.
And a blind girl whose memory was filling in a thousand-piece jigsaw one puzzle piece at a time could be the key to everything. They had tried to kill her once but the attempt had failed. It was twenty years later, but could she still be recognized? Would she still be slated for a kill?
So I said to myself, screw the details and start off with the kidnapping. Why was Bettie the target back then? Could Bettie possibly have recognized the man for somebody other than who he was pretending to be?
When we were together, she’d been an avid reader of newspapers, had two national news magazines delivered to her home and for mental excitement attended court cases of nefarious criminals. I went with her twice, but those things were pretty damn dull after getting your hands dirty in making an arrest on those slobs.
I was back to being the barroom psychiatrist again. You didn’t need a college degree for that. Experience would do nicely, with some cop smarts on the side.
When I got my car out of the parking area beside the airport I drove directly home. The lights in Bettie’s house were on, so I parked in my carport and walked up the stairs of her porch. I heard Tacos sound off with a happy yip and when Bettie opened the door she held her arms out and gave me a big squeeze.
And all those years of not having her were suddenly wiped away again. She was more charmingly beautiful than ever, still smelling of little-girl freshness and wasn’t at all surprised when I kissed her lightly.
But lightly wasn’t what she wanted. There was an excited quivering to her, almost a sparkle in her sightless eyes and she said, “I remembered you, Jack! It was like waking from sleep when you have a great dream, but can only recall it for a second.”
I waited a long moment and she continued, “It was from a long time ago! We were young!”
“I was never young, Bettie.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Would you want it to be?”
“Oh, yes,” she said very softly.
Tacos’ tail thumped the floor. If I had a tail, I would have thumped it too.
When all the exuberance had settled down, I sat next to her on the sofa and recounted my visit with her old boss. With the medical details out of the way, I eased into his telling me about the customer who bought twenty-five years of service in advance.
And that got a reaction. It had come from someplace way back in her mind and opened a mental door she thought had been shut forever. Her shoulders made a sudden twitch and her whole body tensed, then she said barely audibly, “He paid in cash.”
I waited without speaking.
“He... I had seen him before.” Her eyes were staring at the other side of the room. “He was... wrong.”
“How was he ‘wrong,’ Bettie?”
“He was bad.”
“You a
re sure of that?”
“They didn’t convict him.” She frowned, her forehead wrinkling.
I knew now what was going through her mind. She had seen the guy in one of those court cases she enjoyed attending. He had been up on charges and had not been convicted, but the D.A. had leveled some pretty heavy evidence on him, enough to put in her mind that he was “wrong.”
Trying to sift this event out without a photo ID of the guy would be nearly impossible. But at least it was a start.
I asked her, “Do you remember working at Credentials at all?”
Hesitatingly, she replied, “I think so.”
“What was it like?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Like a dream.”
Then I took a wild swing at a badly pitched ball and said softly, “Remember when you looked at that man’s files?”
Her answer was a strange, jerky nod. “There were odd symbols and numbers. Pages of them.” Then she turned and gave me one of those sightless stares and said, “Where is... Oak Ridge?”
I took a deep breath. Oak Ridge was the site of a nuclear development installation a long time ago. She didn’t notice my reaction and went on, “There was something else...”
“What?”
I saw that familiar blank expression again.
“I don’t know,” she said. That special moment had disappeared, but it had lasted longer than former episodes and if I played it right her memory might spark another bright moment.
Might. Maybe. Foggy words you couldn’t depend upon.
From out of nowhere, I said, “Where are those files now, Bettie?”
With a small smile and a solemn tone she said, “I took them.”
“Why?”
“That man was... bad.”
“Yes?” I encouraged her.
“I opened a sealed envelope. I saw the words.... ” And she paused, frowned deeply and said quietly, “ ‘Expected mass destruction potential,’ then a large number and.... ” She drifted off into total silence, looking straight across the room, seeing nothing at all. She turned back to me, her beautiful face taut with anxiety.
She said to me, “Jack... what happened to me just then?”
“You were returning to normal. You damn near made it.”
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