by James Phelan
“Missing?”
“No one goes missing around here. You’re either alive, or dead.”
Walker weighed that up. Dead? Another name added to the list? If so, where’d they get him—out here, or while he was still deployed overseas? The Navy had him listed as discharged, straight after the operation to kill bin Laden in Abbottabad . . .
“He’s alive, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. The headlights of the pick-up bathed the way ahead with the dull yellow light on his side, a brighter shade on hers.
“You’re sure?” Walker said.
Squeaker nodded.
“But you’ve not had word from him,” Walker said. “Nothing.”
“That’s right,” she said, following the highway, the tired old engine topping out around fifty-five. “But he’s alive. He has to be. He’s got family. He’s protecting them, you see?”
“He’s in hiding?” Walker said, tapping his side window at the tall spruce and hickory pine trees. “Out here, somewhere?”
“Nah,” she said, slowing and making a turn to the left, the mismatched tires doing better on the gravel road than on the highway blacktop. She pointed ahead. “Out there. Way out there.”
19
Squeaker’s cabin was a double-width trailer, placed on cinderblocks in the 1980s and never moved. Paint seemed to hold the walls together, while grass in the roof joints tried to break it apart. The lot was a clearing in the forest, and a dozen similar trailers were ringed around about half an acre of gravel. The hum of a generator came from a tin shack at the top of the slope, and the smell of diesel exhaust hung in the air.
Inside the trailer was a world of whimsy. Fairy lights were the only lighting, hundreds of tiny bulbs plugged into linked power-board sockets, each light wrapped in orange or pink or yellow plastic stars from some long-ago Christmas decoration. The result was a cozy space. Two worn armchairs. A small television on a timber crate. A couple of side tables stacked with messes of newspapers. Worn carpet underfoot, the same color as the worn pick-up truck outside. Walker left his boots on the mat inside the door, as Squeaker had done. It was warm, care of a small cast-iron stove that had been jimmied into place against a wall and flued out the ceiling. She went to it and used an oven mitt to open the steel handle, then took a split log from a steel bucket and placed it on the coals.
“You’re not worried about me?” Walker said, waiting by the open door. “Being a stranger and all, in your home?”
Squeaker looked at him like she’d never considered the notion of a stranger in her home being dangerous, and the ramifications of what might go wrong for her in such an eventuality. Walker saw something in her then that he’d not noticed before. She was scared. Deep down. Behind her eyes. They betrayed her. She was maybe twenty years old, living a hard-scrabble life, eking out an existence somehow, far from any government handouts. A survivor.
“You want nothing with me, mister,” she said, her eyes leaving his and going to the fire, which she poked and settled before adding a second piece of wood. “And I can handle myself, besides. Close the door.”
“I believe it.” Walker closed the door behind him, the flimsy aluminum siding rattling shut.
“So you should.”
“Who’s out here?” Walker asked, motioning out the window to the glowing lights in the other trailers in the clearing.
“People. Real Americans. If you’d call us that.”
“If I’d call you that?”
“Where you from?”
“Texas, as a kid. Then Philly, as a teen.”
“Right. So what’d you think of us?”
“Nothing. Never thought about you.”
She was silent.
“Look,” Walker said. “Your cousin isn’t here. But what did you mean before—that he’s way out here, in the forest or mountains?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Yep. Probably. The probability being that he is out there, further, somewhere, in the forest and mountains. Coffee?”
“Sure.”
Squeaker put the kettle on a small gas-bottle stove. The ceiling above it was discolored, but the rest of the trailer was neat, clean, but for the newspapers and a makeshift bookshelf made up of side-stacked cardboard boxes. She kept her front door locked too, he noticed. Only a dozen or so others around here in the clearing and she couldn’t trust them?
“One of my neighbors,” she said, watching him.
“Sorry?”
“The lock, on my door,” she said, nodding toward the place he had just looked. “It’s new. Two years, since not long after I moved in here. One of my neighbors used to come in while I was away. Go through my underwear.”
“Charming.”
“Right? Anyway, each to their own. I think he still comes in here. Somehow.”
“You know who it is?”
“Maybe. Yeah. I do.”
Walker sat on a hard chair at a small table, facing the flimsy door. He watched her put ground coffee into a French press.
“I like good coffee,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“I have a job, at a motel, couple towns west.”
“Okay.”
“They serve this stuff. I got hooked. And using this press is cheaper than getting filter papers.”
“Fair enough.”
“Are you really in the Air Force?”
“Was. Once upon a time.”
She looked at him. “Did you know my cousin?”
“No.”
“You said you did.”
“I said that to idiots.”
“They’re not idiots,” she said, taking a couple of small tubs of long-life milk from a cupboard above the sink, the type they stocked in motels. “They’re hard.”
“Hard in the head maybe,” Walker said. “Live hard lives, I don’t doubt.”
“They’re rich,” she said, putting mugs and milk and motel packets of sugar on the table. “So, they can’t be that hard in the head.”
“How’d they get that way?”
Squeaker was silent. The aluminum kettle started to whistle, so she turned off the gas and poured the water over the coffee grinds. The smell filled the room. She took the pot and sat opposite Walker.
“What danger is my cousin in?”
“That’s a tough one.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. Well, what do you know about Osama bin Laden?”
“Our president?”
“No.”
“I’m joking. Just testing to see your reaction.”
“I really don’t think that all people in the Ozarks are backward hicks.”
“Okay.” She pressed the coffee down and poured it. “Okay. So, he was the bad guy, the terrorist, the former CIA employee, killed by SEALs like my cousin in some Pakistani town a few years too late.” Walker looked at her, the surprise clearly evident on his face because she said, “I went to school. And I read newspapers I bring home from work. So, what about him?”
“Well, let me tell you that bin Laden wasn’t killed by SEALs like your cousin.” Walker picked up his coffee mug, held it between his hands. “Your cousin was there, in the house in that Pakistani town, on that mission. He was one of the Team Six guys who did the job.”
It was Squeaker’s turn to be surprised. Confusion, for a second, then a beaming smile for her heroic cousin.
She said, “Seriously?”
Walker nodded.
“He’s a hero—and he never said nothing about it!”
“Those guys tend to be quiet,” Walker said.
“Why?” she asked, then followed up with her own animated answer: “Because it’s all secret stuff.”
“Partly that’s the reason,” Walker said. “But ultimately it’s about the missions. They fail more often than not. If you boast about the successes, you can’t help but have all those failures working away at you. They’re a closed bunch. They can talk about it together, because they know what it’s l
ike—to get the bad guys, and to lose the good ones.”
Squeaker nodded. “Chuck’s always been like that. Always quiet. He comes from a loud family. Brothers. All of them around here.”
“Have they seen him?”
“Nope. Maybe. I doubt it.”
“You asked them?”
She nodded.
Walker sipped his coffee. It wasn’t great, some generic blend bought in ten-pound packs for roadside motels, but it was strong.
“What’s his trouble?” she asked. “Seriously.”
Walker looked at her slowly, carefully. “Someone wants to kill him.”
She leaned back a little from the table.
“Not me,” Walker said. “I want him to know that he’s in danger.”
“He can take care of himself.”
“I’m sure he can,” Walker said. “All the SEALs can, right? But the thing is, eight have already been killed.”
“Eight SEALS dead?”
“From that mission.”
“How? In Afghanistan?”
“All over. Murdered.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“Terrorists?”
“Of some sort.”
Squeaker leaned forward, said, “Who are you?”
“I told you.”
“I mean, why you? Why aren’t the police here? Or the Navy’s police?”
“They will be. I’m ahead of them. There’re others working this. There’re others who are protecting the rest of the SEALs from that op.”
“How is it that you’re ahead of them?”
“Because . . .” Walker looked into his coffee cup. “This is a part of something that I’ve been working on for a while. And there’s a good team behind me.”
“Working on, with a team? So, you’re still in the military?”
“No. It’s complicated.”
“Try me. I went to school.”
“And read newspapers.”
She nodded.
“I’m here as part of a special UN investigations team.”
“UN?”
Walker nodded.
“Cool.”
Walker asked, “What can you tell me about your cousin?”
Susan took her time replying. “Angry. As a kid. He’s older than me—I’m twenty-three. He’s, what, thirty-four? Yeah, that’d be right. He and his sister used to babysit me sometimes, when Mum used to have to work. It was just her—her and me. And Chuck, he used to . . . he’d always be fighting, with the other kids around. Always bigger than him—he’s not a big guy, nothing like you, and even as a kid he was small. But his anger . . . I saw him once—I would have been five or six—I saw him beat two grown men, big guys, like you and then some, near to death, for saying something about his sister.”
“Where’s his sister?”
“Albuquerque, last I heard,” she replied.
Walker nodded. That was the information he had too; she was listed in DoD records as Murphy’s next of kin. But she’d been a dead end. As soon as Walker had called her and started to explain things, she’d hung up on him. As soon as Walker had shown up at her door and started to talk, she’d closed it on him.
Walker asked, “What about parents?”
“His?”
Walker nodded.
“His father’s dead. His mother’s in a state place, in Jonesboro. Lost her mind at least ten years ago. They were old parents when they had Charles—unexpected, my ma used to say about it. Anyway, Marg Murphy, his mother, must be near-on eighty now. Alzheimer’s got her brain all rewired.”
Then came a knock at Squeaker’s front door. Urgent. Incessant. Then the door was flung open.
20
“Really?” NCIS Special Agent Levine said, turning the volume down. The highway stretched out ahead, and there was plenty of listening time between now and their destination.
“It’s James Levine returning at the Met for Cosi Fan Tutte,” her partner, Tom Woods, said. “Don’t suppose he’s a relative of yours?”
“No. And I don’t like it.”
“It’s Mozart. Who doesn’t like Mozart?”
“Mozart? I thought that was beneath you.”
“He’s a little tame. A genius, sure, but give me a Russian any day.”
“I worry about you.”
“Hmph,” he replied, looking out his window. “I suppose I should listen to that LA soft-rock stuff you like.”
“It sounds like this singer is strangling a cat,” Levine said. “Did Mozart hate cats?”
“It’s a soprano, singing the role of Despina,” he said, turning it back up. “This is her main aria.”
Levine moved to turn it down again, saying, “She can stick her aria up her—”
The phone cut in over the Bluetooth and Levine hit answer. “Special Agent Levine.”
“It’s Grant,” the Assistant Director for Investigations said from his San Diego office. “We have a complication.”
“What is it?” Levine asked.
“Someone else is looking into this.”
Levine said, “Who?”
“A former Air Force guy. Jed Walker.”
“Air Force?” Levine said, pulling onto the shoulder so that she could give the call her undivided attention. “What do they want with this?”
Her boss was silent on the phone. Levine looked to Woods, who merely shrugged. They sat there, on the side of the interstate, just the hum of the Taurus ticking over.
“We’re still waiting on details on this guy,” Assistant Director Grant said.
“Will it be a problem?”
“I’ll keep you posted,” Grant replied. “In the meantime, you have to get to Murphy as quickly as you can.”
“We’re working on it,” Levine said. She checked her mirrors and then over her shoulder and pulled back onto the dark highway. “Anything else on the other SEALs?”
“I can confirm that they are all now in protection,” her boss said. “The last couple didn’t want it, but they got it, courtesy of the Secretary of the Navy. Get to Murphy. Debrief him just as we’re doing with the others.”
The line went dead. Mozart resumed over the sound system.
Levine looked to Woods and then concentrated on the road ahead as he placed a call to the San Diego office.
Brewster, the tech wizard, answered on the first ring.
“Working late?” Levine said.
“No rest around here,” Brewster replied. “Grant’s got everyone he can find tasked on this SEAL thing—and here was I thinking they rounded them all up quick and easy.”
“Well, this last guy, Murphy, has no fixed address,” Woods said, “so it’s not that easy.”
Levine said, “In this day and age, they could get a cell-phone fix or facial recognition image.”
“Nope.” They could hear Brewster’s fingers tapping at a keyboard. “This guy’s off the grid.”
Levine said, “Define off the grid.”
“In the boonies, in the stowage,” Brewster said. “This guy ain’t just a SEAL who don’t want to be found. He’s a born-and-bred mountain man from the Ozarks. He could be anywhere there. Probably has solar cells for power, a sat phone tucked away somewhere for emergency, gas by the bottle, water from the sky or nearby stream. I’m talking Off. The. Grid.”
Woods said, “You’re talking thousands of square miles of forest.”
“Yep,” Brewster said, “’Fraid so.”
“Narrow it,” Levine ordered.
“On it,” Brewster replied. “Got a whole team working on it.”
“Keep on it. We’ll contact you again in an hour.”
Woods waited until the call disconnected and then asked, “Why do you suppose this ex-Air Force guy is looking for Murphy?”
“Jed Walker?” Levine said. “No idea. But I want to know. I want to know who he is and why he’s doing this. Then I’m going to arrest him for getting in the way of Federal Agents.”
“Badass.” Woods turn
ed up the Mozart. Levine turned it off and drove faster.
•
“You gotta get!” the woman said, standing in Squeaker’s open doorway. “Seabass is at the turn-off, his car and another, and they’re planning somethin’. We just heard what happened in town. Now get!”
Squeaker didn’t need to be told again. She darted into her room and out again, a backpack over her shoulder, a scoped rifle in her hands, and said to Walker, “Come on!”
He followed her outside to the clearing.
The neighbor said to Walker, “You a cop?”
“No,” Walker replied. She’d come from the trailer opposite, her door wide open, the light and heat spilling out. She was in her nightclothes and mud-splattered rubber boots.
“You look like a cop,” she said. “Cut him loose, Squeak. Let this thing be. Before those boys get up here and do somethin’.”
“He’s my worry, Deb,” Squeaker said, tossing the pack in the back of her pick-up and putting the rifle into a holder inside the cab. “I took him on. I’ll get him out.”
Deb didn’t push it. Just watched. There were other faces about, all of them inside their trailers, not dumb enough to go outside and get involved. Walker got that. Then Deb got it too—headlights were coming up the drive, down at the twist through the trees. Deb was at her trailer before the first car made it to the clearing.
21
By the time the second car pulled up, Squeaker had her rifle out. Marlin, 30–30 Winchester. Cheap—less than four hundred bucks at Walmart the last Walker checked—but reliable. It looked well maintained for an amateur’s weapon.
As Seabass stepped out of his car, Squeaker had the rifle cocked and aimed at his chest. He raised his hands.
“No,” he said to her. “Uh-uh. Think about it now, girl.”
Walker noted two guys behind Seabass—older guys, from the bar, nothing of note. He looked over to the other car, another pick-up, this one a new black Chevy Tahoe that Walker had seen back at the bar. Barb’s husband was at the wheel. He stayed inside, but two men, unfamiliar, climbed out.
