Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  As if sensing him, Hector looked up and waved.

  “Why is he doing that?” Jace said.

  Carla was leaning into the mirror to attach her earring. “Why is who doing what?”

  “The grounds guy. He was staring at me.”

  “Paranoid much?”

  “No. I’m not paranoid. There are people looking for me.”

  Carla turned her face to him. She wore her sad expression. “You’re taking your meds, aren’t you?” Her expression got sadder, like she was bereaved, as if she was already looking into his grave and planning to shovel the first clod of earth onto his upturned face.

  That was exactly what it felt like. What it was. Like he were in the grave, lying in the coffin, smelling the earth, his face tickled by cobwebs, staring up at her. He’d often wondered what “dead” was like. Lying there, eyes wide open. Or maybe they were closed. It was all up to the mortician. If you got a practical joker, you would be staring up at the roof of your coffin for eternity.

  He caught Carla’s fake-sad expression and knew that inside, she was laughing at him.

  She wanted to suck his soul into herself. He was sure of that.

  “Oh, you have such an imagination!” his mother used to tell him when he was little. “You are the brightest little boy!”

  She lived in Cancun now.

  “What did you say? You’re the brightest little boy?” Carla stared at him.

  “None of your business what I said, you stupid bird.”

  Carla laughed. She laughed loud and long. Like a clown, and then, all of a sudden, she was a clown. She’d morphed into the Amazing Santarini, the clown who’d performed for his eighth birthday party. Same hair, same body, same lips, that wide smile, that toothy smile and bright red lips, expanding and expanding and expanding—

  He shut his eyes. Drummed his fists against his knees. He knew she would keep laughing at him, she always did, and why he slept with her he didn’t know. His mother (if she’d had enough guts to stick around) would say it was a sin against God. But he knew there was no God.

  Carla’s lips widened, cracked open, and he saw squirming yellow teeth and boll weevils.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, but knew it would do no good, so he opened them again. Luck was on his side. Just like that, she was his beautiful sister again. His beautiful, hot, sex-starved, half sister.

  She scrutinized him. It was like she was looking at a specimen in a jar. Cocked her head. “You’re not taking your meds, are you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hey, suit yourself,” she said. “You’re not on your meds, that’s a fact, and you know Daddy will notice. You want to be committed? You want to go to the scary place with the dungeon walls and chains? Over in Albuquerque?”

  “Stop that shit. There’s no place like that.”

  “No?” She walked over to him and tapped her finger on his forehead. “You have no idea.”

  He knew Carla was messing with him. As she pushed through the French doors, she looked back and winked at him. He heard her high-heeled boots rap hard against the flagstone patio, smack, smack, smack.

  The smell of sickly sweet potted flowers and rich dark earth trailed behind her. Someone had watered the plants on the patio. He knew they were for decoration, but that wasn’t all. The flowerpots were bugged. His dad did it to spy on him. And to keep him from sifting through the potting soil, he’d filled the dark earth with worms.

  Like the worms in that deputy’s skull, poking and wriggling through his eye sockets. Pushing through the loose dark earth of the bean field. That was pretty cool.

  You killed him, remember? His dad’s voice. But you’re not going to jail. I’ll make sure of that. You’re the one who’s responsible for this, and I’m the one who will protect you, as long as you keep your mouth shut. You killed him.

  He remembered. Once he remembered, once he knew what he’d done, he’d gone back three times to check. (He wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to forget it.) He always went at night. He drove with no lights except for the infrared on the Camaro’s windshield, and even though sound carried, no one was way out there at the farm at night.

  The deputy was always there—he wasn’t buried all that deep. Jace hadn’t been back since the sheriff announced they’d found him. There had been stories on the news and stories in the paper and stories on the Internet, but he’d ignored that, because he knew the deputy was still in the grave, despite what his dad said, despite what he’d seen on the local news or read online. He knew he was still there.

  Carla had shown him the front page of the newspaper. There was a photograph of heavy equipment, some guy bending over an empty grave. But that was a lie.

  People made things up all the time. You could make anything look real—they did it all the time. Faked things. Especially online. All sorts of crap that wasn’t real.

  The body was still there—he knew it.

  And that was what scared him. The corpse might reanimate, and come after him.

  It was like those horror stories he’d read as a kid. Maybe the corpse would be washed up by the spring rains that filled the irrigation ditches like chocolate milk, or maybe it would just worm its way up out of the earth.

  The stench!

  He knew at some point, Atwood would come for him. The corpse would reanimate. And the only way he could escape was to pile his stuff in the Camaro and take off.

  The good thing about the Camaro, it was fast. Another good thing about the Camaro:

  You couldn’t see it.

  He had the best car in the world.

  But he wondered . . .

  He wondered if the deputy’s corpse had X-ray eyes.

  He’d noticed, these days, a lot of people did.

  Chapter 16

  Landry reached his neighbor Louise late in the day. He nodded at Jolie and gave her the thumbs-up. Handed the phone to Jolie. They talked for a bit, mostly about the dog and cat and their adjustment to a new place. The Rottie had settled in fine and was playing with Louise’s schnauzer. Rudy was another story. He’d stayed in the cat carrier for a couple of hours, before slinking out to hide under the couch. “He’s still there, but I’m not worried,” Louise said. “He’ll get hungry eventually.”

  When Jolie disconnected, her relief was palpable. “Thank God. Thank you.”

  Landry gave her a nod. He didn’t like to be thanked for something he would have done, anyway—SOP. Compliments were superfluous. But having been married for many years, having raised a daughter, he knew that women liked to bestow compliments and it was best to accept them with grace.

  Then she launched into his arms and held him so tight and for so long, he got a crick in his neck. But he didn’t complain. He had learned to love the way Jolie pressed her body to his.

  Rand ducked outside to watch the sunset.

  They could not stand another moment apart. Pulling at each other’s clothes, casting them away, kissing and molding hands to every place they could think of. First time through was a brush fire. Second time was slower, a long and flowing river with interesting things to see on both banks. It had been a long time, and now they were rediscovering what they already knew about each other. She tucked in against him and fell asleep, and he could see that everything that had weighed her down over the last few months had vanished, at least in sleep.

  Jolie awoke an hour later. He was still holding her, stroking her dyed-black hair, thinking that she looked good with that color. With any color. She opened her eyes, tipped her solemn face up to him. “I don’t know where we go from here, and I don’t care. But. I need to be part of this.”

  As much as it pained him, Landry told Jolie about his assignation with Carla Vitelli. He didn’t make excuses because excuses wouldn’t wash. She was there, he was interested, it happened. Regretting it didn’t change the story.

  “I do
n’t own you.”

  Landry sensed, though, that she was hurt. If not hurt, offended. Landry had adopted one way of dealing with both. “It happened and I can’t change it now. We good?”

  “Of course we are. I have a friend, Vicki Dodd, a detective in sex crimes. Sometimes our cases overlap, and sometimes she or I, we get territorial. We end up making the case bigger than it is. So we have this saying: ‘How big is King Kong?’”

  Landry wasn’t following.

  “Think about it. King Kong was on the big screen throwing airplanes around like javelins, but what was he, really? He was a puppet. A puppet that was moved this way and that. Yeah, he climbed up a miniature Empire State Building, but how big was that? So whenever one or the other of us ran into a seemingly impossible case, we’d cheer each other up by saying, ‘How big is King Kong?’”

  “Interesting,” Landry said. “Do you know Carla?”

  “I know of her.”

  “She was the FBI agent assigned to your case. Your disappearance.”

  “Didn’t do a very good job, did she? Except for interrogating you at length.”

  Jolie could nail you to the wall when she wanted to. He couldn’t help but smile at that. “So what do you know about her?”

  “Just the common knowledge stuff. She’s Jace’s sister from another mother. There’s a rumor going on that she’s banging her own half brother. How’d she latch on to you?”

  Landry told her about his arrest and subsequent grilling by Sheriff Waldrup and Carla Vitelli. He thought she had targeted him from the beginning: a stranger in town who spent his time hanging out in a cop shop.

  “Not a lot to go on,” Jolie said.

  “No, but her instincts were good. She was right about me. Either that, or she really did have the hots for me and stalked me because I’m so good-looking.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”

  “That hurt.”

  Jolie thought about it. “She must have had some idea about you, maybe put it together that you were looking for me.”

  “Probably.”

  “What happened in the jail? You think it was her trying to get you killed?”

  “It was a damn good imitation of it if she wasn’t.”

  “But then you were released, no charges.”

  “Someone else got me out.”

  “Why?”

  “To make it look like I shot Rick Connor at the checkpoint, and then went after the two witnesses.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “The sheriff.”

  “For a man who’s used to staying under the radar,” Jolie said, “you could give a billboard competition. So they wanted to frame you for the deaths of those militia members, but lacked evidence? And maybe throw in Rick Connor? They set you up.”

  “They did. Carla thought she found the perfect suspect.”

  “Why do you think Rick Connor was killed?” Jolie asked.

  “I don’t know. But everything they did since was to cover it up, including killing the witnesses.”

  “Maybe we should check out Connor.”

  Jolie still had a few tricks. She still had access to databases. She looked for Rick Connor in wants and warrants. Found seven of them. “That could be our guy,” she said. But there were plenty of Rick Connors in the southwest. Hundreds of them. Expand it out to half the country and you had thousands of them. A needle in a haystack.

  “It could be an assumed name,” Jolie said. “Rick Connor. It even sounds made-up.”

  “It’s a common name, too. You could tie yourself in knots looking for him.”

  “Let’s look up his buddies. ‘The Right Hand of God Freemen’s Militia.’”

  A click or two and there it was.

  “Jesus,” Jolie said. “All these groups have names like that. It’s like they sit in a circle and toss out words that sound good. God, Freemen, Patriot. It helps with credibility—at least for the people who join up. What they are to law enforcement—might just as well call them ‘The Pain in the Ass Militia.’” She thought about it. “But maybe that’s not true. The worst thing for the sheriff is the Feds. He probably likes having the militia around. I bet from his standpoint, they inoculate the sheriff’s office against the Feds.”

  “You mean the Feds don’t want to come around here? Because they’re worried about a range war?”

  “Never start a fight you can’t win,” Jolie said. “You saw what happened in Nevada. The photo that went viral, right? A guy on a bridge with a sniper rifle, drawing down on federal agents. Guy should have been tossed into a prison hole so deep he would never be able to crawl out, but there were no arrests. They won that one.”

  “Where’d the sheriff come from? Before he was here?”

  “Albuquerque. He’s been here seven or eight years.”

  “Ever wonder why they hired you?”

  “I think it’s because of the bank robbery—when I shot those guys. That should have been a warning bell right there. It says something about the sheriff if he wants headlines and a hard-ass cop. Back then I was his flavor of the month. He called me Little Miss Sure Shot.”

  “Annie Oakley.”

  “What?”

  “That was what they called Annie Oakley.”

  “By the first week I knew I was just window dressing. By the second week, I knew this department had its fair share of thugs. Some of the bad apples who were fired out of Albuquerque came down here. What does that tell you?”

  “The car seizures,” Landry said. “Sounds like a free-for-all.”

  “Not just cars. Boats, houses, real estate. Some of the higher-ups have some nice stuff.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  “Good question. I don’t know the answer to that. Except I want to stay a cop.”

  “Why didn’t someone tell Dan Atwood not to confiscate the kid’s Camaro?”

  Jolie shrugged. “Another good question. I’ve asked it myself on a few occasions. I’ve been thinking. What if one of us went undercover?”

  “As what?”

  “A militia member. Not you—everyone on God’s green earth knows about you by now . . .”

  “The only militia members who saw me are dead.”

  “You said even your own mother won’t recognize you. Can you do that for me?”

  “For you?”

  “Yes. I think it’s more believable if we go as a pair.”

  “No. You’re a known quantity. People are still looking for you.”

  Jolie looked like she was about to argue, but then gave up on it. She saw the logic. “What about ID?” she asked.

  “I have plenty. The best money can buy.”

  “You know, even though I make fun of them, these guys are the real deal. They have a network—they will check you out in a New York minute.”

  “The reason you can’t come.”

  “I get that. You don’t have to rub it in. I’m saying don’t underestimate them just because a few of them look like all they do is eat MoonPies and watch reruns of Honey Boo Boo. You know how to disguise yourself, and so do they.” She added, “I belittle them—I have to, for my own sanity. But every time I see one of these guys on the street I’m back to being the little girl who’s afraid of the monster under the bed. Some of these militias’ networks, their tentacles are even into government—it’s enough to freeze your blood.”

  Landry nodded. “I’ll watch my back, stick as close to the truth as possible. I’m former military—elite. You can’t fake that. I’ve worked security for a company that’s now defunct. All that’s true. I can even give them a name. Whitbread Associates.”

  Jolie smiled but her smile was thin. “You haven’t exactly been keeping a low profile. The whole thing about the white car.”

  “That was bad luck.”

  “Yes, b
ut—”

  Just then Rand ducked in and Landry said, “I need to get back. Would you drive me?” He said to Jolie, “I can arrange for Tom to fly you to San Clemente. He’s under the radar and he’s good. That way you can be far away if it hits the fan. You can stay in my house.”

  “I’m staying,” she said. “You never know when you might need me.”

  Landry and Rand left the lake and drove to the Big 5 sports store in Las Cruces. Landry bought a couple of pairs of camo pants, three extra-large black-and-Army-green tees, some jeans, a couple of dark knit shirts, and desert boots. He went next door to Walgreens and bought a packet of razors, a cheap pair of earrings shaped like a cross, and some aviator shades.

  He excused himself and went outside to call his friend Eric the Red.

  Eric answered on the first ring.

  “Hey. You want to do some damage?” Landry said.

  “What’s the op?”

  Landry told him.

  “Be there with bells on—where do we meet?”

  Landry gave him the name of a motel in Lunaria, the neighboring town to Branch, where he’d bought the red Forenza.

  “You gonna pay me? I wouldn’t bring it up, but things are a little tight.”

  Landry sympathized. Since the recession, personal protection and special op training businesses had taken a big hit. Combat training for personal security was at its lowest ebb. The recession had made it tough for expert combat instructors—police forces decided that money couldn’t go two ways, so they scrapped the tactical training and just took all the military surplus goodies from the Feds—free stuff that a lot of them had no clue how to use, like the MRAP he’s seen driving down the main drag in town.

  Eric ran a training center specializing in tactics, SWAT training, hand-to-hand combat, and a side business in personal security, but his clientele had slowed to a trickle.

  Now the big worry was cybersecurity.

  “Sure, I’ll pay you,” Landry said. He was okay for the foreseeable future, but the small fortune he’d amassed wouldn’t last forever. He hadn’t been able to invest it, so his money sat in a few banks and many more drop spots throughout California. Because he relied mostly on cash, his personal wealth was beginning to look a little skimpy.