by Brett Adams
“A risk we didn’t have to take.” Another scuffing sound, then a metal ping somewhere further away. Was Hiero taking pot shots with stones at a sign? “It’s possible they know—” Another car swallowed the rest of the sentence and I swore under my breath in frustration.
When it passed, Ghost was speaking.
“Count on it. They were gone way too long at the stop before the last. Had to be twenty minutes, for a shit?”
“Livin’ on Coke and fries binds a man.” The humor fell flat.
“Why did you let them out together when we’re so close?”
So close? The sweat froze on my neck. I thrust my arms into the couch and managed to rise into a sitting position. Tracey slumbered on.
How close? What day was it? I groped through my memories, picking them up and putting them down as though my mind were a room full of objects from someone else’s life.
Something hard pressed against my stomach. With hands that weren’t quite following orders, I pulled a phone from where it was slotted into the top of my underwear, just below my belt.
Sight of that phone snapped my memories into place.
Of course. The phone.
Tracey had handed it to me in the toilet cubicle at a gas station. When? Yesterday evening.
I leaned to peer through a crack between the curtain and the top of the window, barely breathing lest I reveal I was awake. It was dark, the only light washing the curtains was the orange of high-pressure sodium lights.
If my timeline was right, Hiero had bought us the fries and Coke mid-afternoon. Sometime after that the lights had gone out. That made it evening of the 14th, unless I’d lost an entire day.
Almost zero hour.
I gripped the phone in my palm. So Hiero hadn’t taken the opportunity to frisk us. Or maybe he had, and was playing a double game.
Bloody phone.
After all the self-control Tracey had exerted to carry it, keep it hidden until an opportunity to use it arose. I’d got through to Marten, and was about to tell her what our best play was. The battery indicator was a healthy twenty-eight percent, and then—bang, dead. We were staring at it, incredulous, when Ghost banged on the cubicle door. “Time’s up, Jack.”
I’d made some joke about him wanting to come in and help me. He called me a name, and exited the restroom, leaving Tracey to run the gambit of getting out unseen.
I squeezed the power button, as that was about the measure of my impotency. And was shocked when the phone vibrated back to life.
This time I was watching as the battery indicator read first twenty-nine percent, then a flicker later, three percent with a helpful pixelized exclamation mark. Then it died again. There was no response to my repeated squeezing of the power button. The last squeeze produced a cracking noise, and popped the back off the phone.
More than the last battery level stood emblazoned in the semi-dark. The screen had told me the carrier was AT&T. It had also told me the cell tower region.
Holcomb.
Hiero and Ghost must have tag-team driven for four hours straight after we were drugged. They had driven us deep into Kansas. Right into the heartland where the Clutter family were murdered.
To the county.
On the date.
Finally, the cat scratching to get into my head pulled out a bowie knife and sliced the back of my head open: the key.
The spare key to the RV.
I stood in a rush that collected my head on the plastic light fitting, but didn’t feel the pain. My hands groped around my groin like a drunk. I felt a lurching sensation of loss. The key wasn’t there.
No. It was. It had slipped farther down and made a hammock of my underpants.
I delved into my pants and came up with the key.
Thirty seconds is what I’d asked for. Thirty seconds, the distance between here and eternity.
Swiveling on the spot I planted a kiss on Tracey’s forehead. Her face was still slack with the drug. I paused for a fraction of a second and stole that image of her, stowed it in my memory. Not pretty. Not something she would want for her social media. But to her father, beautiful.
The distance from the back of the van, where the twin bed lay, and the driver’s seat was a scant fourteen feet. But half-drugged, in the gloom, trying to move swiftly and silently, and all the time fearing the door latch’s rattle, it felt like a hundred meters.
I made it. Laid my shoulder against the driver’s seat’s leather, and slipped my bottom down its back like a hand into a glove. I swung my legs into the footwell, and froze, hearing the suspension creak.
From behind came the rumble of voices I hoped was Hiero and Ghost still in conversation. Body set like a statue, I looked askance, but caught no sight of motion. No way to tell if they’d seen me. No way to tell if Hiero wasn’t now leveling the gun at me from over my shoulder.
How many of my thirty seconds had I used?
My pulse hammered in my throat.
My hand darted forward. The key slotted into the ignition in one go. Practice makes perfect.
Have you ever wondered what a tenuous miracle is a car’s ignition system? That twitch of the wrist, the roar to life of the perpetual bomb that is the combustion engine? Tens of components chained together—at one end the key, a lump of metal and plastic shaped to fit your hand, at the other, smaller than the eye can see, solid state circuits, doped semi-conductor, operating between one microsecond and the next. This assembly takes the energy stored in the car’s battery, a mere fourteen volts, and compresses it, goads it, blasts it into a whopping 50 thousand volts—all for a tiny spark.
Our lives were hanging on the motion of less than a billionth of a gram of electrons.
Child’s play compared to the nerves that fire the human heart.
I pleaded for both miracles, just one more time, and turned the key.
The dashboard indicators lit, and the cabin filled with a noise that to my frayed nerves roared like a tempest. The floor vibrated as the starter motor strove to spin the engine into life. My right hand gripped the shift, ready to jam in into drive the moment the engine caught.
But instead of the normal, smooth ramp into vitality, the RV coughed, refusing to start. Did I pump the accelerator too hard? Had I flooded the engine?
Night pressed on the windshield. At any moment I expected Hiero or Ghost to appear.
Then, louder than the laboring starter—an explosion.
“Dad!” Tracey’s voice, fuzzy, alarmed. “What’s going on?” Her hand found my shoulder, and I felt her steady herself.
The RV continued to cough as I held the key clockwise, tight against its limits.
Headlights, not ours, swept the artificial twilight outside. It lit the asphalt, a trash can, a solitary light pole. A pull-off indistinguishable from a thousand others spotting US highways.
The world was fragmenting. I strained to hold my senses together.
At last, I saw the motion I’d expected from the corner of my eye. A shape approached the driver side window from behind.
“Tracey,” I hissed. “A car just pulled in. The cabin door. Go.”
“But Dad—”
“Get out, and GO!”
Her hand slipped from my shoulder, and I heard the latch on the door turn.
I had to trust that the darkened interior of the RV would hide her passage.
A moment later there came a tap on the window. I turned to find Hiero holding the gun. He tapped the window again with its barrel and gestured for me to stop the car, then pointed the gun at me.
A flicker of shadow moved across the headlight wash from the other car. If Hiero noticed it, he showed no reaction.
He prodded the window again with the gun, and I reluctantly killed the motor and withdrew the key. He opened the door and motioned for me to get out.
I did so. Glancing to my left, I saw Ghost appear, silhouetted by the yellow headlight pouring past the back of the RV. He hurried toward us.
Hiero turned to acknowledge his approach
for a moment.
But a moment was all I needed.
I grabbed the gun barrel with my left hand, pushing its aim wide, and punched Hiero on the broad side of his jaw.
He staggered back, but regained his balance quickly. The gun remained in my hand. I switched it to my right, and leveled it at him. To Ghost I said, “Stop.”
The crunch of his sneakers on the asphalt fell silent. I felt wetness spread beneath my grip on the gun handle. A split knuckle was weeping blood. But inwardly, I was ecstatic. Adrenaline coursed in my veins. I knew I could pop Hiero’s head from his shoulders. No doubt about it.
Without taking my eyes from him, I ordered Ghost to join him where I could see them both, and with a twitch of my wrist, shoot either.
One thought kept rolling around and around in my head. A mania. “Free. We are free.” I couldn’t believe it. The thought was too large to settle, to encompass.
Our two captors stood before me, and I held the gun.
And Tracey . . . What was she doing? I’d told her to go.
My peripheral vision registered shadow flicker again in the headlight wash. But my eyes didn’t leave the boys in front of me. Never take your eyes off the snake.
“Dad!” Tracey’s voice, only . . .
“Jack.”
I’d thought the idea of freedom too big a thing to grapple with, to understand.
That thought shattered and drifted away like a dandelion on the wind in the face of my realization.
Kim. My ex-wife, Kim. It was her voice I heard.
I looked away from the snake, compelled by an involuntary impulse.
My eyes saw; corroborated the evidence of my ears.
Kim. Wife of fifteen years. Wife no longer. Was here, stumbling across the tarmac of a crappy highway rest stop in the middle of Bloody Nowhere, Kansas, USA.
Behind her came another. A woman. A girl.
“Hi, Prof.” Rhianna Goldman. Hiero’s first victim.
I laughed. The third Fate had arrived, and she had red hair and big breasts.
Weeks ago, when I’d been trying to convince myself Hiero wasn’t a murderer, I’d reasoned that if he had meant to kill Rhianne, she’d be dead. I’d been right after all.
“You need to put that gun down,” she said. “Mine’s bigger, and it would make a real mess of the fruit of your loins here.”
81
“We had a deal, Marten. You broke it.”
Grover sat on the concourse bench. Behind him a security detail of two men hovered, ear pieces conspicuous. It was a typical reverse power play. “I’m very disappointed.”
“Cut the crap, Grover. You’re ecstatic,” said Marten. “Don’t ever play poker.”
“Now is not the time to get cute with me. I made your operating parameters very clear, but you seem to have taken particular delight in flouting them at every opportunity.”
“You’re just pissed about the meeting, admit it. How was I supposed to know ‘don’t embarrass Grover Jackson’ was a ‘parameter’.”
Grover paused as the departures concourse filled with the blare of a flight delay announcement. The smell of cinnamon and roasting coffee wafted from a takeaway counter. Marten knew she should be hungry—when had she last eaten? She also knew it was anxiety smothering her hunger.
The clock was ticking. Her American Airlines flight to Garden City, Kansas, via Fort Worth—the nearest airport to Holcomb—was already boarding. If she missed it, she missed the beginning of the 15th of November entirely.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” she said. “I have a plane to catch.”
Grover seemed to come to life.
“Yes, but not the plane you intend to catch.”
Marten’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”
In response, Grover spread his arms, the reluctant disciplinarian.
“I’m getting heat—”
“Huh,” said Marten. She leaned away from him, and appraised him afresh. “Grown man’s clothes, grown man’s voice.” She darted a glance at the two security officers hovering nearby. “But those are babysitters, Grover. You’re behaving like a child.”
In a flash, Grover pressed a finger to Marten’s chest bone.
“A child, Marten?” For a moment, she feared he would strike her.
“I told you: sniff around, but do it without official FBI sanction. Instead, you tried it on not once, but twice—first in Germanton, and then right here in New York, at the RV hire in Harlem. I could slap a charge of impersonating a federal agent on you for that alone.”
How on earth did he hear about that?
“And I asked you for a full and frank apology for your behavior nine years ago. But you couldn’t give it, could you? And do you know why? Because now, as then, you are the child, Marten. Your only concern is yourself.
“Look at me with all the disdain you like, but I’m busting your arse”—He emphasized the ‘r’—“back to the UK, and you can thank me for going easy.”
He turned. The two guards took the cue that the meeting was over, and moved to flank him.
Marten stood stunned, furious, helpless. The part of her mind playing out Jack Griffen’s movements raced into the next hours. Saw him shuttled to Holcomb. Felt the clutch of fear as he laid eyes on the lonely farmhouse, felt his daughter tremble beside him. She imagined the impotent rage he felt to be in the hands of a man missing some elusive ingredient of humanity.
While, in the movie in her mind, her future self sat useless, thirty thousand feet in the air. She was returning home to her family, but her thoughts remained on another family, a man and his daughter, and her own failure.
“Grover, wait.” She grasped his shoulder. “Please.”
Perhaps her tone made him hesitate. He raised an eyebrow. Marten hoped it was an invitation to petition.
“You’re not just angry because I made the FBI look like idiots. You pushed hard all those years ago to bring me in. It was a gift, and it exploded in your face. And I’m guessing it set your career back. And . . .” Dangerous ground. “You didn’t always look at me like that.”
Grover’s expression was unreadable.
“Say you’re right—” she said.
“Say?” He began to move again.
“Okay, okay.” Marten clenched her fists. She needed a reset or Grover was gone. “You’re right. But hear me out.”
The guards moved to intercept her, but Grover waved them off.
“You’ve got one minute. Then, if you’re not queuing at immigration, I’m slapping you with charges.”
“Jack Griffen—”
“Your bit on the side.”
Marten refused to rise to the bait, despite the smirks that rose on the guards’ lips.
“I know the place and time of his next murder.”
“So you finally admit he’s just a run-of-the-mill homicidal piece of trash?”
Crossing her fingers behind her back, Marten gave everything to the lie. Damn Jack to save him?
“There’s nothing run-of-the-mill about Jack Griffen. The reason I know his plan is he’s killing by the book.”
Grover’s chin dipped in disbelief. “By the book?”
“By a book, to be precise.”
“I’m listening.”
“Everything up to this point has been a dress rehearsal, support acts to the main event.”
“Which is?” Grover held his watch up pointedly.
“In Cold Blood.”
“Capote.”
Trust an FBI man to get it in one.
“He’s on route now to Holcomb, Kansas, to the house where fifty-six years ago—”
“November, wasn’t it,” said Grover. A gleam entered his eye.
“Tomorrow.” she said.
He glanced at his watch. Marten saw the gleam grow brighter.
“Think about it,” she said. “Hickock and Smith murdered the entire Clutter family in cold blood. Griffen’s collected two young men, and his own daughter.”
At this, G
rover’s brow creased.
“This is . . . This is . . .”
“Dynamite,” said Marten. “More cerebral than the Zodiac Killer, sexier than Paul John Knowles, more countries than, well, anyone.”
“And you wanted it for yourself,” said Grover. “Nothing if not true to form, Marten.”
For a moment she feared he would break the deal and send her packing.
“I’ve given him to you on a platter.”
“On a platter,” he repeated. His gaze abstracted.
Then it snapped back into focus. “Fine. Get on your plane, go to Kansas. I’ll have agents on the ground there before you.
“Oh, and Marten. You know what platters always make me think of? Turkeys. Happy thanksgiving. Or did you forget that Jack Griffen tried to kill a cop?”
82
The happiest day of my life?
I remember the happiest moment. It remains in my memory, stubborn as a diamond in the dust.
If you guessed my wedding day, you would be wrong. Nor was it the birth of the squirming, dribbling lump of flesh that turned out to be Tracey. My two girls never competed for my affection.
The moment welds both. I’m seated on a picnic blanket. Beside me, nestled into my side, sits Kim. The remains of a cold chicken lunch lies on our plates, and half-empty wine glasses of cleanskin shiraz sit in our hands. Above stretches the last electric blue of an early spring day, and the air carries a hint of clean chill. Before us a grassy bank dips down to meet Serpentine Dam. Wild oats sway in the breeze. The artificial lake’s surface glints like a billion diamonds in the fading light. From the far side comes the roar of excess water pouring through the overflow, and a wall of mist stands above its suicidal rush.
Capering across that dazzle is the silhouette of Tracey. Her stubby three-year-old midriff outpaces her feet. I can’t see her face, but I know she is breathless and smiling. It’s all too much for her senses to take in at once.
The happiest moment of my life. I had no words for it then either.
But you know what? It could have been burgers and Coke at the weedy playground down the street. What made it special wasn’t the where and the what. It was the who. For the first time in my life, I got it.
