by Archer Mayor
Joe honestly didn’t know. “No idea,” he answered. “I’m just asking. Was there anything else about all this that stood out?”
“Besides why it would happen in the first place? Nope. In fact, that’s what had us going—we couldn’t see the sense in it. You want to build a dirty bomb, for example, this isn’t a bad place to come to. We have some real hot stuff here. But it’s wrapped in lead, weighs a ton, and is harder than hell to move, even without security, which—not to brag—is pretty good.”
“I’m sure it is,” Joe said appeasingly, not that Neelor seemed to care. “Was there anything else—maybe not connected to the bag—that occurred around the same time?”
Neelor frowned. “Probably is connected, not that anything can be made of it, but one of the nurses got into a jam over her key. It was found dangling from the door lock where she left it. We’re assuming that’s how the bag grew feet—somebody took advantage of finding the key sticking out of the lock. She had no idea she’d left the damn thing behind—kind of thing that can happen to anyone.”
“This is the same door where the bag was locked?” Joe asked, intrigued.
“Yeah, there is only one, at least for the low-level stuff. The fry-your-nuts waste is kept elsewhere.”
“Is that nurse around today?” he asked.
Neelor reared back in his chair and checked one of the charts on his wall. “She should be,” he said, and gave Joe directions on how to find her.
Ten minutes later, Joe was introducing himself to Ann Coleman, who instantly struck him as the no-nonsense type of professional he most liked to deal with.
He told her why he was there.
She groaned and shook her head. “I caught hell for that,” she admitted. “Sad part is, I have no idea how it happened. I don’t do things like that. I’m a supervisor, for crying out loud. It’s my job to make sure other people don’t screw up in just those ways.”
“So you have no memory of leaving the key behind?” Joe asked.
“I have no memory of using it at all,” she said. “Disposing of trash is not one of the things I do anymore, unless there’s a shortage of people, and there hasn’t been in ages.”
They were chatting at the nurses’ station on one of the hospital’s lower levels. It was quiet and largely empty. Joe swept his hand around vaguely. “Where do you keep it?”
She patted her pocket. “Here, now. I used to keep it in that drawer.” She pointed to a section of the semicircular counter.
Joe crossed over and pulled at the drawer. It slid open without a sound, revealing a typical rabble of paper clips, rubber bands, pens, and pencils.
“Unlocked?” he asked.
She sighed. “I know, I know. But give me a break. What’re the chances, right?”
Joe held up both hands. “No argument from me. But if you didn’t use it, and you’ve ruled out all your colleagues . . . I’m assuming you have, right?”
“Absolutely,” she said emphatically.
“Then,” he continued, “it had to be somebody else—somebody out of the blue. Do people loiter around here at all, so they can see what you’re doing and mark your habits?”
As he spoke, he saw her face transform with enlightenment. “Oh, shoot,” she said. “The goddamn pendant.”
He merely raised his eyebrows.
“We had a thyroid patient—a terminal. She had a pendant that got thrown away by mistake. Her son asked me what we could do about retrieving it, and I bent the rules and took him downstairs to the low-level waste room. Found it right off. I gave it back to him, and that was the end of it. I’d completely forgotten about it.”
“Did he handle the key?” Joe asked, a little confused.
“No, but he saw where I kept it.” She waved her arm around. “You see how deserted this place is. He could’ve come in later and swiped it anytime. That’s why I didn’t connect the two events. They happened days and days apart.”
Joe smiled. “Do you remember the son’s name?”
She held up a finger. “Hang on.”
She moved to a computer console and quickly typed in a few commands. “I remember he was listed as next of kin. The mom’s name was Doris Doyle—or still is, I should say. She’s upstairs, hanging on by a thread. But the son had a different last name.” She straightened suddenly. “Here we are—Ellis Robbinson.”
It meant nothing to Joe.
“Too bad,” Ann Coleman added.
“What is?”
“I liked him,” she said sadly. “He was really nice to his mother.”
Ellis stood morosely beside Nancy in the dark shadows by one of the smaller metal outbuildings of Bennington’s municipal airport. Just ahead of them, Mel was pointing out the layout and talking in a hushed but excited voice. Both Ellis and Nancy had been here before, metaphorically speaking, more times than they could count—they’d even come to dub it “Mel’s pep rally,” where he briefed them on the next great adventure.
But whereas they’d once been as adrenalized as he, not to mention as careless of any consequences, now they felt only dread. Like hapless kids led by a dominant bully, they were reduced to finding solace solely in holding hands whenever Mel turned his back.
“Pay attention,” he was telling them, “I don’t want you fucking this one up.”
With a last squeeze of Nancy’s fingers, Ellis moved up alongside his erstwhile friend. So far, neither he nor Nancy had the slightest idea what he had cooked up, although Ellis was gloomily confident that it tied into the death of High Top the other night.
Mel pointed into the darkness north of them. “The runway’s out there. Anything that lands has to take one of the taxiways over to this side, where they park the planes. See there?”
They shifted their attention to the large rectangular apron boxed in by the parallel taxiways, the landing strip, and the buildings. As if to prove Mel’s point, several planes, including an old, hulking DC–3, were sitting there like oversize toys abandoned by a giant child after bedtime. Other planes were scattered elsewhere as well. The night was clear and warm, sparkling with stars. On the far side of the strip, the floodlit Bennington Monument shone eerily in the distance, a misplaced museum piece from an Egyptian exhibition, surrounded by the soft glow of the town’s lights behind and slightly below it. The utter peacefulness of the scene, as much as his yearning to be elsewhere, distracted Ellis from focusing on what Mel was telling him.
“It won’t matter what road they use to get off the runway, since they’re not all that far apart. My guess is, it’ll be the eastern one, ’cause it’s closer to the parking lot. Anyhow, the key isn’t the place; it’s the time—we have to hit ’em just as they’re unloading. That’s when they’ll be the most distracted.”
“Won’t it be when they’re most on the lookout?” Ellis asked, his attention suddenly drawn.
“You watch too much TV,” Mel countered. “This isn’t Miami Vice, for Chrissake. We’re going to be the ones with the machine guns, not those losers. They probably won’t even be armed.”
Ellis frowned in the darkness. Everybody had guns in Vermont. It was the only state in the Union with virtually no gun laws of its own. And a bunch of drug dealers weren’t going to be packing?
“We’re talking about drugs, right?”
Mel sighed. “No, stupid. We’re talking about illegal squirrels. No shit.”
Ellis ignored him in favor of more pressing concerns. “Why don’t we wait till they’re in the car, halfway down Airport Road?” he countered. “That way, they’ll be contained. The road is dark and isolated. We could ram them, maybe, and be on them before they knew what hit them.”
Ellis could just make out Mel’s scowl in the ambient light. “You are so full of it. Ram them? With what? And how do we get away after we’ve trashed our car?” He reached out and smacked the back of Ellis’s head with his open hand. “Moron. Leave the planning to me, all right?”
Ellis nodded, the familiar shrinking sensation he always felt around Mel set
ting in. He decided, as always, merely to listen instead of question. For all that Mel could sometimes seem foolhardy to the point of craziness, he hadn’t gotten them killed yet.
“See how those two buildings come together, sort of?” Mel was saying now, pointing again. “They’ll stop the plane there, where there’s some cover. That’ll allow the pilot to finish the loop and end up back on the strip, so he can take off.”
“How do you know that?” Nancy asked, having moved up beside them.
Mel laughed. “I have my sources, babe, and believe me, I trust ’em. Not to worry.”
He turned back to their surveillance. “They’ll be expecting an attack from either corner, maybe even from across the open, so that’s where they’ll be looking. What they won’t be watching is that hangar—right there. See it?”
They followed the line of his extended finger, nodding silently. Ellis resisted mentioning the unlikeliness of people expecting an attack also being unarmed.
Mel resumed, “That’s where we’ll be—inside, waiting. There are two doors about twenty yards apart. You and me’ll come out at the same time. We’ll box ’em in.”
“How many are there?” Nancy asked.
“Four, not counting the pilot,” her husband answered. “Pussies, every one of ’em.” He turned back to Ellis, as if reading his mind. “Which is why, genius, you don’t need to worry about firepower, ’cause even if they’re packin’, they won’t have the balls to use it. And the same’s true if the plane parks somewhere different. Everything stays the same—we box ’em in; we drive ’em to the ground. Total power.”
Ellis saw an opportunity perhaps to learn a bit more about what they were getting into. “These the cousins that guy told us about down near the river?” he asked, keeping his wording vague.
“Yeah,” Mel conceded. “The Niemiec boys. They think they got easy pickin’s here among the local yokels. Won’t they be surprised?”
He suddenly faced them both, the distant light making his widened eyes gleam pale with enthusiasm. “No screwing around, either, boys and girls. This’ll be the big one for us. We get this done, and there’ll be no more trailer parks or ripping off bingo games or any of that bullshit. We’re talking serious money here.”
Nancy and Ellis exchanged glances.
“What d’you mean, hon?” Nancy asked.
Mel laughed. “I thought that might twist your panties. I mean those crazy bastards have a deal goin’ where they’re taking in pounds of coke and heroin both. Pounds. You sell what they’re talkin’ about and it means a million bucks, probably more.”
“So we have to sell it,” Ellis said softly.
Mel made a face. “Oh, for Chrissake. You are such a fucking drag. What the hell happened to you, El? You used to eat this shit up. Now, it’s all ‘Golly-gee, it sounds a little hairy.’ Yeah, we’ll have to sell it, and we’ll be able to do that anywhere we want—keep on the move, cut down the chances of getting caught. That ought to satisfy you, right?”
He punched Ellis in the arm. “Think of it. It’s a fortune—more than we’ve ever seen. We’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything. When I caught wind of this deal, I thought we’d maybe grab a few thou. But this is a home run.”
Along with the wash of Mel’s mounting excitement, Ellis felt the trembling light touch of his lover’s fingers against the small of his back, and understood what she was thinking: What was good news for three people would be even better for two in need of a fresh start.
“Sorry, Mel,” he said with a laugh. “You just caught me by surprise.”
Mel smiled broadly. “Now you got it, Buckwheat—surprise is the name of the game. Let me show you the rest of the setup.”
The next morning, as was his habit, Ellis phoned his mother at the hospital to find out how she was doing. He was alone—after their midnight field trip with Mel, they’d gone their separate ways, and from Mel’s punchy mood, Ellis could only imagine how things would play out for Nancy.
Nevertheless, he was feeling good. As they’d crept from spot to spot at the airport, and the plan had been rehearsed, he couldn’t repress the hope that he and Nancy might turn the tables after the Niemiecs had been dealt with and get away with enough dope to finance them forever. There was some irony worked into it, too—it was Mel’s trap, after all, with the dope as the cheese, except that he and the Niemiecs both would end up as the losers . . . somehow. And with Canada so close, Ellis had no trouble imagining it as the stepping-off place to an island beach far away, where he envisioned them taking in the sun and catching up on the good life.
His mother, as if infected by his mood, sounded sharper and more upbeat than recently, when the lethality of her disease had been visibly marking its progress.
“Ellis, I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” she said in her weak voice, “but I want you to know how happy you make me feel.”
“No problem, Ma. How’re you doin’ today?”
“Pretty chipper. Is Nancy okay?”
“She’s good. You sleep all right last night?”
“Oh, yes. After all the excitement, I was pretty tuckered out.”
Ellis made himself more comfortable on the couch. He could never tell how long these conversations might last, they were so dependent on her energy. But she seemed to be riding high.
“Yeah? You guys win big at bingo or something?”
“No, no,” she said. “The police were here. It was all very mysterious.”
Ellis froze. “What?”
“The police. Well, one of them. A real nice man. He kept telling me to call him Joe.”
“What did he want?” Ellis asked, trying to keep his voice calm, his optimism of moments earlier vaporized.
“It was pretty silly—even he admitted that. Remember the pendant I lost?”
“Yeah.”
“It turns out that nurse who helped you get it back got in a heap of trouble. You might want to write her and thank her again.”
“What happened, Ma?”
“Nothing much, really. Joe was saying it was just routine but that every little bit of garbage, no matter how small, is tracked. He seemed pretty embarrassed by it, but he had to do his job.”
Ellis was standing up, his hand tight on the receiver. “I don’t understand. What did he want?”
“Are you okay?”
He rolled his eyes, angry at himself for revealing his anxiety. “I’m fine. Just a little tired. Why would the police be interested in your garbage, Ma? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s the Homeland Security thing, Ellis. You know that. Everybody’s so cautious nowadays. According to Joe, the pendant being returned must have been picked up by the system somehow, so they sent somebody to check it out. It was just a conversation. You could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I mean, we talked more about you than the pendant.”
Ellis dropped his hand with the phone to his side and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, still hearing his mother’s voice going cheerily on. He felt as if the floor had given way beneath him.
Slowly, he brought the phone back up to his ear. “Ma,” he interrupted her, “did you get this guy’s last name, or what department he was from?”
His mother paused. “I’m not sure. I know he was from Vermont. There was something about a bureau when he introduced himself—at least I think so.”
“The Vermont Bureau of Investigation?”
“Yes. That was it. I’d never heard of them before.”
“I have,” her son admitted sadly, and did his best to wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible.
Afterward he sat on his couch, where he’d first made love to Nancy, and stared out the window. A row of old and battered parked cars littered the lot in the middle of the day as if in testimony of their owners’ success rate at finding employment.
Damn, he thought. What was coming down the tracks at him? He knew goddamned well no cop was interested in a dime-store pendant being extracted from the trash. Especially a cop from the s
tate’s major-crimes squad. They had to have tumbled to the bag he’d stolen to frame Mel, which was still stuffed in his car trunk. But how the hell had they gotten from the bag to his mother’s pendant?
He rubbed his temples with the heels of both hands. He hated sorting out things like this. He felt trapped back in eighth grade math class.
He tried to think clearly. Maybe he was being paranoid. His mother had said the guy was bored and apologetic, that he’d said his investigation was purely routine. Wasn’t it possible that the VBI was given this kind of job just because of the national mood—purely routinely? Everyone was so cautious nowadays, like she said.
Maybe that’s all there was to it.
But he didn’t really believe that. Not really.
Joe stared at Willy. “You are kidding me.”
Willy smirked with satisfaction. They were in a borrowed conference room at the Bennington PD, along with Sam, Lester, and the ever-affable Johnny Massucco, now assigned to them as official liaison.
“Nope,” Willy said. “Ellis Robbinson and Mel Martin are joined at the hip.”
“I can vouch for that,” Massucco said. “They pop up in each other’s files all the time. At one point they even lived together, the wife and the two guys, before Robbinson found his own place.”
Sam laughed. “Well, apparently that part’s gotten complicated, unless it always was.”
Joe raised his eyebrows at her. “Oh?”
“We poked around Ellis’s apartment complex, under the radar. Willy fits in really well over there . . .”
“You should know,” Willy threw in.
“. . . and we found a neighbor,” Sam kept going, “who saw Nancy Martin more than once go inside for a few hours at a time. The neighbor had no doubt what they were doing.”
“Does Mel ever come over?” Joe asked.
“Not with her, and not in a long time.”
“Do you have a timeline for this affair?”
