And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “Oui, it’s terrifying. Being alone,” Juliette says. “Terrifying.” She reaches across the table and touches Ethan’s hand. “But you are not alone. You can help Alex a little, if you’d like.”

  Ethan looks up. “How?”

  “We should not talk business today. But you understand currency exchange. And Alex will soon have a million rubles stuck in a Crimean bank. It was the deal I made with Sergei.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Nevada

  Voigt has an airman in trouble. Sanders is a good drone operator, reliable, superior at his tasks. But he has an issue with stress.

  The passivity of UAV duty has likely caused part of the strain showing on Sanders. But also, many in the force disrespect the job. People join up for the romance of actual flight, for a chance to pilot incredible machines at unimaginable speeds. What glamour is to be had sitting at a stationary console . . . even though this is the future. Soon the newest fighters and bombers will no longer carry flesh and blood pilots—the g-forces of tomorrow’s aerial combat would turn the human brain to mush. Remote operators, Voigt knows, represent not just progress but the end of a marvelous era. Being harbingers of this loss, his people take a lot of flak from the manned aircraft squadrons.

  For Sanders, the stress has manifested in a lack of self discipline. He eats too much, doesn’t exercise enough, has been warned and written up and demoted and warned again that he must lose double digits in pounds. There is nothing more left to do with him.

  “Have a seat,” Voigt says when Sanders enters. It’s hard to look at the man. Pressed and tucked in though his uniform is, the flesh beneath it is unruly. Sander’s neck, which merges with his chin, is ready to pop off the top button of his shirt.

  “So your separation is going forward.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be contacting that company we talked about with your letter of introduction. They need a man of your experience.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, do you have somewhere to stay down there in Arizona while you get your new employment straightened out?”

  “I’ll find a place, sir.”

  Voigt studies Sanders one last time. “Good man. Dismissed.”

  ANOTHER GOOD AIRMAN lost due to issues beyond pure job performance. How many have there been? Voigt thinks. “Hell,” he whispers. He is standing in the commissary checkout.

  “Would you like to go ahead, sir?” asks the second lieutenant in line before him.

  “I’m good, son,” the colonel says firmly. He could use his rank to jump the line, and he probably should in order to maintain that necessary aura of military authority. But Voigt is chilling for a minute, enjoying the break and the air-conditioning before crossing the various sun-blasted tarmacs between here and his office. His wife likes the organics here, the tomatoes and squash. It’s the kind of food, Voigt thinks, that Sanders ought to have been eating. But an airman will handle the stress of drone duty in his or her own way—most commonly through junk food or nicotine. Voigt would ban the vending machines dispensing edible garbage if this wasn’t likely to incite insurrection. He’d certainly crack down on the open-air smoking. Now, out under the hot sun, he remembers once scolding Jessica Aldridge, despite her taking her cigarette in a designated area. Wasn’t she Sanders’ drone partner? She had been the smartest candidate in his program to convert enlisted personnel into drone pilots. Dammit, she must have known that writing her father could lead to a security breach, that his mail would be opened.

  Not long after Jessica went off the grid, Sloan from DHS told Voigt about Donald Alan Aldridge, who was serving a twenty-year sentence in a South Florida prison. Over the ten months since he’s been reading the man’s correspondence, Jessica has colonized a part of the colonel’s mind—so much so that a few months ago he’d contacted the warden at the prison. Aldridge kept sending letters to his daughter even though all till then had been returned undelivered. Why?

  “Is the man crazy?” Voigt had asked Warden Wagner.

  “Probably. But he’s not stupid,” said Wagner.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Repeat offender. First got into trouble selling drugs in the eighties. His cellmate, Ramirez, says it had to do with some runaway he’d holed up with. Apparently when Aldridge got out of prison he tracked her down up north. Turns out she’d had a kid by him, a daughter.”

  “You mean, Jessica,” Voigt said.

  “No, no,” said the warden. “These lowlifes can have complicated family histories. Anyway, this young girlfriend of his died in a car crash. Aldridge blamed himself for it. Meanwhile his actual wife was bringing up Jessica in Pompano Beach, that is, before she dumped the kid on her sister.”

  No surprises there; Voigt had seen that a lot of enlistees came from unstable backgrounds, looking for a solid place to land. “You seem to have a lot of good intel on your prisoner,” Voigt said.

  “I do,” replied Wagner, acknowledging the compliment. “I swapped out Aldridge’s cellmate for a body I can work with.” Wagner told Voigt about Hector Ramirez, a Mariel boatlift refugee who had worked his way into a position teaching Shakespeare at a Miami university before committing a murder himself. “I haven’t completely converted this Ramirez to the cause yet. But so far he’s given up a few details on Aldridge that aren’t in the record.”

  “Tell me more about the murder,” Voigt said. “Aldridge’s, I mean.”

  “Aldridge was an addict. To pay for it he dealt in oxycodone prescriptions that a doctor wrote for him. One morning the doc was found floating in his pool up in Fort Lauderdale. He’d been strangled not drowned. All the DNA pointed to Aldridge.”

  “DNA usually doesn’t lie,” Voigt said, yet he’d been thinking not about Don Aldridge but al-Yarisi. They were just getting back the first intelligence that al-Yarisi might be playing dead, that a bag of his blood carried by his double had provided false DNA proof of death.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after writing a job recommendation for Sanders, Voigt goes to the Florida prisons website and looks at Don’s picture on the inmate database. He is big, this Don Aldridge, a little sloppy looking but with large, penitent eyes. Nevertheless, he is not a man to gamble your secrets with.

  CHAPTER 37

  New York City

  Detective Chen is wrapping up the paperwork on the Leston drowning. With the coroner’s report open ended, she is leaning her assessment toward the accidental rather than the deliberate. But an unrelated factor is also weighing in. The stories her grandmother told her as a child: Chinese ghosts can be very vengeful to the living who have betrayed them. And though Chen believes in spirits as little as she expects Martians to land in Central Park, her rationality does not block twinges of childhood sentiment. Because of her grandmother’s stories, Chen carries an aversion to maligning the dead. If Zoe Leston’s death was an accident and she deemed it a suicide, this would haunt her more than the opposite error.

  “Crap, Eddie. Make some noise,” she says as Banco appears behind her.

  “Finishing up the Leston suicide,” he says.

  “How is it a suicide?” she asks.

  “The ritual of the candles.”

  Ethan Winter had made the same observation. “A woman doesn’t need a special occasion to light candles for a bath,” Chen says.

  Eddie hardly lets her finish. “I saw only enough melted wax in the room to account for the candles lit that night. The candles were a onetime occasion, like killing herself was.”

  “DO YOU KNOW much about Ms. Leston’s family history?” Chen asks Winter. She has called him to the station again.

  Knotted in her guest chair, Ethan’s hair is askew, his clothing slept in. A man letting himself go. Chen, perching on the corner of her desk, tries to appear sympathetic. If Zoe Leston’s ex-fiancé was not in Washington, she would have called him in instead of Winter. Chen’s goal is simple—to clear her desk and her conscience. She wants to put this ghost to rest, or at least send it to haunt someone else.

>   Winter’s eyes display the bloodshot sclera of a hangover. Perhaps he’s coming off a binge.

  “What do you mean by family history?” Winter finally says, reminding Chen of his tendency to answer questions with questions. But this is not an interrogation, not really, so she allows his quirk.

  “Did you know, for instance, that her grandparents adopted Zoe after her mother died?”

  Chen watches Winter debate with himself about how much he should admit. “I knew it before Zoe did,” he confesses.

  Which means, Chen realizes, that Zoe Leston must have been ignorant about her background until adulthood. For her to have learned in her twenties that she was not who she thought she was . . . this fact weighs toward her being a suicide. Such a revelation would shake anyone’s sense of self. “How did you learn about Ms. Leston’s background?” Chen asks.

  “Zoe’s grandfather gave me some documents before he . . . died.”

  “But that was almost a year ago,” Chen says, assuming these must be the documents that she found near Zoe’s body and are now in the evidence room. “Wasn’t Ms. Leston living in Washington by then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were having a long-distance relationship?”

  “No.”

  “No? Then why did her grandfather give these private papers to you and not to his granddaughter?”

  Ethan stares at Detective Chen, then grudgingly responds. “The man was dying. He had a fantasy that Zoe and I would get back together. That I could help her deal with . . . everything.”

  “By everything, you mean not just the news about her adoption but what her grandfather was planning to do to himself and his wife?”

  “I suppose,” Winter says, looking down again.

  “So Dr. Leston trusted you.”

  Winter grimaces at the floor. “Only I didn’t want his trust. Zoe had left me that summer. I didn’t even look at the documents for weeks. Then Zoe called me about . . . the deaths.”

  “I see,” Chen says, pondering what Winter must be thinking: if he had immediately contacted Zoe about the documents she would have spoken with her grandfather before he acted. Possibly, then, the fatal sequence of events might have been averted—including Zoe Leston’s final bath.

  Winter’s eyes well. “Exactly,” he says.

  Chen has opened doors that should have stayed shut. But now she knows—in part from Dr. Leston’s trust in Ethan, in part from the emotions he’s displaying—that he has a right to know what she knows about Zoe Leston. “I’m sorry, Mr. Winter. I didn’t call you in to ask questions but to provide you with answers about Ms. Leston’s background—”

  Ethan rises. “May I go?” Chen opens her mouth but Ethan cuts her off. “I know that Walter Leston and his wife were her grandparents. I know that their daughter, Zoe’s mother, was a runaway who died in a car crash. I know they never told Zoe. And I know that Zoe died alone. That’s enough knowledge.” He looks down at Detective Chen as she stands up from her desk.

  “Do you know why Dr. Leston never spoke to Zoe about her mother?” Chen asks.

  “Why else? To bury the tragedy.”

  Chen considers. “Your answer tells me you don’t know. That the papers Dr. Leston gave you contained only half the story.”

  “Does it make a difference? They’re all dead. The whole twisted family is dead and buried. Or cremated.”

  Winter turns and walks away, but like a predator Chen follows him through the maze of desks in the station house. Does he suspect what she wishes to do—free herself of a burden by putting it on him?

  “No, Mr. Winter. They are not all dead. There is Zoe’s father.”

  This stops Ethan. “What?” he says.

  “I’ve located Zoe’s biological father. I’ve even spoken with him.”

  Ethan massages his neck. “The family had a lot of secrets.”

  “They can be dangerous,” Chen says.

  “What do you mean?”

  It’s too complicated for Chen to explain that if Zoe knew of her father, had through his example been aware of her own weaknesses, that she might not have taken those pills and stepped into a bath. “I mean nothing. What’s important is that Zoe Leston’s drowning was an accident.”

  Ethan’s reddened eyes meet hers. “You’re certain of that, detective?”

  But there is no certainty here. Chen knows that with very little difficulty she could bend her evidence toward suicide. No one but Zoe can know what she did.

  “Yes, I’m certain,” she says. And with this half lie, she exorcises her grandmother’s stories and, for her at least, the ghost of Zoe Leston. But Winter’s tormented expression shows that he remains haunted.

  She cannot absolve Winter of his pain or his guilt, but perhaps she can make him feel less alone in his misery. She takes a leather-bound notepad from her back pocket and tears from it a scrap with writing—Donald Alan Aldridge, Inmate 82747L, Seminole City Correctional Institution. “Zoe’s father,” she says, pressing the scrap into Winter’s hand.

  CHAPTER 38

  Florida

  Descending into Miami the change in altitude causes Daugherty’s heart to race, to ineffectually flutter. The agent closes his eyes and visualizes a lake, the gentle lapping of waves against a floating dock from which he has cast a fishing line. He visualizes a striped perch underwater as it eyes a baited hook. This exercise usually slows Daugherty’s pulse, allows his mitral valve to close sufficiently to pump blood and feed his limbs with oxygen.

  “Boss, you’re looking pale,” Pyle tells him. Pyle has been keeping an eye on his partner since he passed out on their fugitive’s hotel bed three days ago.

  “Fear of flying.”

  “Right,” Pyle says.

  In the meantime Daugherty tells himself that a desk job would kill him faster than the heart attack he’s headed for as he chases Jessica Aldridge around the country. That he’s kept his official health record clean is due to his choice of doctor—a sympathetic smoker who runs him through his EKG until it has flicked out a satisfactory length of graph paper. With luck, though, he’ll be able to maintain this charade of health for three more years and attain the two decades allotted to a field agent before forced retirement. In Daugherty’s fantasies, he receives a gold service award key from the director and keels over.

  But for now Daugherty’s heart is pumping happily again. So much so that he almost leaps up to grab the heavy case in the overhead bin. Giddy is how Daugherty gets whenever he manages to return his pulse to a viable rate—giddy with a sense of defeated mortality.

  “I can carry that,” Pyle says.

  “Do I look like your grandmother?” Daugherty says. Besides, Daugherty is the one who insisted on bringing the box—the polygraph kit.

  He and Pyle don’t speak again to each other until they’re examining their rental in the Hertz lot. It’s an Impala, anonymous except for the color. Candy apple red. They’re out of black, white, and silver.

  “It’s a goddamn fire truck,” Pyle says.

  “In Miami red is as invisible as gray,” Daugherty tells him. “Anyway, we’re not tailing anyone. Just paying a visit.”

  “Want me to take it?” Pyle asks, moving toward the driver’s door.

  But Daugherty keeps the keys. “I’ve been to where we’re going.”

  This is Daugherty’s biggest advantage over young agents like Pyle—he has covered more territory. Unfortunately his memories don’t snap back like they once did. He almost misses the exit ramp for the Palmetto Expressway. “Gonna pull a little Mario Andretti here,” he warns Pyle before gunning the engine and cutting the wheel.

  The Impala swerves between a pair of cement trucks and dives onto the Palmetto. Peripherally, Daugherty senses Pyle’s eyes burning holes through his face. “Smooth,” Pyle says, sarcastic. “And who the hell is Mario Andretti?”

  For the next forty minutes, Daugherty concentrates on not making any wrong turns. And he doesn’t. But the effort of keeping his senior moments at bay turns t
he trip into less than the laid-back jaunt he’d planned. Despite the frigid air-conditioning, he’s sweating through his shirt and jacket, his underwear and pants. Meanwhile, Pyle, partly reclined in the passenger’s seat, looks as relaxed as a sunning panther.

  “You’ve done seventeen years as a field agent, right?” Pyle asks.

  “Three more until they boot me,” Daugherty replies because that is the drift of his thoughts. But Pyle is going somewhere else.

  “So how many times has the head office left you out to dry like this?”

  “You’re talking about the need-to-know status of field agents?”

  “I’m talking about DC not giving us the father-daughter connection until yesterday. You and your ex-partner might have nailed Aldridge ten months ago with that intel.”

  “Knowledge is power. People in Washington don’t share power,” Daugherty says.

  “Makes us look bad. I mean this is not intra-agency cooperation with the CIA or DHS we’re talking about. For our own people to hold back information from us, that blows.”

  Pyle’s federal expectations seem drawn from old G-man movies in which the Bureau functions like a single-purpose machine for apprehending criminals. In actuality, an agent’s primary job is the same as any bureaucrat’s—to protect his or her turf. Daugherty takes the opportunity to instruct Pyle. “Field agents like us are errand boys. You either get used to being a tool or you get a desk in Washington and pull strings.”

  A one-lane ramp funnels them off the turnpike. They pass below a sign with a cruciform indicator that points to Key West straight ahead and to Biscayne Park and the Everglades to the left and right, respectively. They’re going to none of those places. At the first traffic light instinct tugs Daugherty’s steering hand right and a mile later, after they’ve left behind the palmy medians of Seminole City and are passing fields recently stripped of some summer crop, Daugherty gets his next directional clue—an old fireworks stand. He’s a detective tracing his own past, though just barely, and he hesitates making the turn.

  “Forget the way?” Pyle asks and before Daugherty can say “nah,” Pyle is studying a map on his phone. “We’re good,” Pyle says, sounding disappointed.