Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  Daria watched the news clip, then turned to Johnser. He sat back, arms folded, a look of smug contentment on his square face.

  He looked at her and winked.

  Her fingers froze on a shiny black button. The blood rushed out of her head, leaving her feeling wobbly. “Oh, God.”

  Johnser’s smile turned predatory. “Shut it, woman.”

  “You did it,” she whispered. “You brought down that jet.”

  He sneered. “You think we’re a bunch of useless wankers, don’t you. You know shite, you do. Now I said shut it and go sit on that fucking bed, or so help me I’ll shut your mouth for you.”

  Daria turned back to the TV set just as the story ended. She caught one last glimpse of the words on the screen: 111 DEAD; 35 INJURED.

  She looked back at Johnser and thought about the long-shot message scripted in lip balm on the bathroom mirror.

  The fun in her grand little adventure turned sour in her stomach.

  MULTNOMAH COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, PORTLAND

  Tommy washed his hands and arms with unscented soap, then changed from scrubs to his comfortable street clothes. He stepped out of the changing room just as a big, athletically built man with a solid tan and short-chopped hair flashed a badge at the receptionist. Behind the newcomer, the exterior door opened and Susan Tanaka entered, folding an umbrella.

  Tommy glanced into the ME’s private office and caught a glimpse of his deputized Goth girl, Laura, poring over her geographic information system. Gothic affectations notwithstanding, the girl had proven to be a gem and had made easy work of mapping the shrapnel patterns in the cadavers.

  Tommy circled the receptionist’s counter. “You’re FBI?”

  The newcomer produced his ID. “Ray Calabrese, L.A. field office. You are . . . ?”

  “Dr. Leonard Tomzak,” said Susan, stepping up beside Ray. “He’s our IIC. I’m Susan Tanaka, intergovernmental liaison with Washington. To what do we owe—”

  Tommy held up a hand. “Wait a minute. I’ve been cutting for hours. I’d kill for some coffee and a sandwich.”

  The receptionist overheard and suggested a place half a block away.

  The diner, called the Deco Penguin, had been carved out of an old warehouse. The walls were stone, thick enough to make a fine bomb shelter, and the floor was badly poured concrete, uneven and rippling. The teak bar was massive and the tables were honed from thick, knotty timbers. Ray stared at the menu behind the bar and whistled. “What the hell’s this?”

  The menu featured no fewer than eighty-five varieties of independent-label beer from scores of microbreweries. Ray recognized about five of them.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “These people take their beer a little too seriously. Also their coffee. Plus, near as I can tell, every third person has one of them Mini Coopers. It’s kind of a weird town.”

  Ray looked at him. “You’re from the South?”

  “Texas, yeah. You’re from New York?”

  Ray said, “Queens.” Ray ordered a corned beef sandwich and a Diet Coke. Tommy got a large bowl of clam chowder with a thick slab of fresh-baked oat bread, plus a cup of coffee. Susan ordered a glass of water.

  They made with the small talk until the food arrived. “Here’s the situation,” Ray said, taking a mouthful of sandwich and swigging his cola. He was used to lunch meetings and didn’t bother separating the business from the food. “Four known, anti-Catholic Irish terrorists popped up this week in Los Angeles. We traced them to an abandoned apartment building but they booked, maybe thirty seconds before we took down the door.”

  He didn’t feel any particular need to mention Lucas Bell’s boneheaded play of entering solo. “What we found in their bivouac were clippings from every single newspaper sold in the city, each an article about your downed CascadeAir flight.”

  Tommy looked up from his soup and waited a moment, assuming more was to come. He said, “And?”

  Ray frowned. “And, they’re connected.”

  Tommy said, “How?”

  “We don’t know yet. The entire resources of the L.A. field office have been put on this. Police, sheriff’s office, and state police are helping out, too. We’ve got Homeland Security lending us personnel and time on their mainframes. We will reacquire these guys. But in the meantime—”

  “In the meantime what?” Tommy cut in. “These guys were reading newspapers? That’s the crime you’re investigating?”

  “No, Doc. We’re investigating a case of international terrorism and more than a hundred counts of homicide.”

  “Agent Calabrese,” Susan spoke up and smiled politely. “We have some good news for you. There was no bomb on board the Vermeer.”

  Ray munched on his sandwich. “You’re sure?”

  She said, “About ninety percent sure. We don’t have the chems back yet, but we’ve got the NTSB’s best fire-and-explosives man on the Go-Team. He says there’s no sign whatsoever of a bomb.”

  “And no bomb means no terrorism,” Tommy added. “Besides, my MEs have been studying the bodies, looking for chemical residue in the skin and hair, signs of inhaled carbon monoxide and soot, that sort of thing. So far: nothing.”

  Ray said, “So what? Lockerbie, the bomb was in the cargo hold. Nobody breathed in any carbon monoxide there, either.”

  He was right, and it annoyed Tommy that the FBI man knew his topic so well.

  “That doesn’t change the fact,” Susan replied softly. “Our bomb man says there’s no bomb. So I’m sorry you came all this way, but—”

  Ray said, “Don’t sweat it, Ms. Tanaka. I’ve been assigned to you as FBI consultant. And that’s what I’m going to be, until my people back in L.A. come up with the Irishmen.”

  “And then?” Tommy asked.

  Ray smiled. “Then, I’m taking your job, Doc.”

  Tommy groaned. “Ah, shit. It’ll be the amateur hour. Susan, call Del, tell—”

  Ray said, “Delevan Wildman? He’s been informed and he’s signed off on this.”

  Susan’s shoulders sagged.

  Tommy’s face turned red. “Am I not making myself understood, Agent? We got no bomb. That means you got no terrorists. Which means we got the FBI dicking around the scene, trying to interrogate survivors, muddying the waters for the real investigators. That’s against procedure and it’s contrary to the laws of this country, which say a plane crash is the domain of the NTSB until terrorism can be proven. Since it can’t, I want your people out of the hospitals and away from the survivors. And I want you as far away from the Go-Team as possible. It’s our job to figure out how one of the world’s most sophisticated pieces of aviation technology ended up as a fucking lawn ornament. Stand clear and let us do that job. All right?”

  Ray studied the man sitting opposite him for a while. He patted his lips with his paper napkin and pulled out his wallet, leaving a twenty on the table. “Doc,” he said, smiling. “The sun will rise. Children will disagree with their parents. Politicians will lie. And I’ll be your second shadow from here on out. That’s not a threat or a promise. It’s just physics. It’s the way the world works. You got a problem with that? File a protest. You got any other problems? Stick them up your ass. Now, what say we get to work?”

  COVINA, CALIFORNIA

  Daria stared at the smug Johnser Riley for maybe two minutes and felt something change in her gut. Her romp, her fantasy-camp version of her old life, evaporated the moment she realized Johnser was preening about killing 111 people on that airliner.

  Johnser, for his part, was dying to brag about their big caper, but he wasn’t stupid enough to actually tell her. O’Meara would gut him like a fish.

  Daria sat on the bed, willed herself to breathe normally. Dark skinned, she knew she didn’t blush visibly. She had that going for her. She inhaled quietly, through her mouth, filling her lungs, then exhaled, also quietly. Johnser grew bored with CNN and searched for a sports channel, any sports channel. Daria did the deep-breathing exercise again, felt her pulse slow down,
felt her fingers stop trembling.

  She put on the character of the glib, Lebanese gunrunner and said brightly, “Well, we better do something about that bathroom window.”

  The big, pink-faced man turned to her, his small, close-set eyes narrowing. “The what?”

  Daria said, “The escape route.”

  His frown deepened.

  “Mr. Riley,” she said, speaking slowly. “If the FBI shows up at our front door, you do want an escape route. Don’t you?”

  “Would you fucking shut your mouth, woman?”

  “What would O’Meara do? Would he have an escape route?” It was a rhetorical question: she’d seen the escape route at their apartment building. She stood. “Come on. There’s bound to be a large bin out back. We’ll move it under our window. If we have to scramble out, that’ll give us something bulletproof to hide behind. It’s what O’Meara’s probably doing right now.”

  Johnser Riley didn’t look particularly bright, but even Daria was a little surprised when he lumbered to his feet. “All right. But don’t you fucking try to get away.”

  She said, “Have I so far?”

  Outside, they circled the hotel and found themselves in a secluded alley that faced a cinder-block wall. Johnser and Daria shoved the freshly emptied Dumpster under the window of their bedroom, hearing the casters squeal. Daria shoved and Johnser pulled. “That’ll do,” Johnser said, standing between the Dumpster and the window.

  Daria came around to his side. “I hadn’t realized you and the others brought down an airliner.”

  He preened a bit, then remembered to look threatening. “Less of that. Let’s go.”

  “I need to get a message to someone,” she said.

  His glower turned electric. Johnser stepped up in front of her, crowding her space. “Thinking of running out?”

  Daria said, “No,” and raised both hands, lightning fast, palms inward and cupped. She clapped both of his ears, pulled her hands back quickly.

  Johnser was so angry, he decided to give the bitch a good beating. That thought lasted for all of a half second, until his body realized that she’d shattered both of his eardrums and shot tiny bits of his eustachian tubes, cochlea, and ampullae ricocheting into his brain. His equilibrium permanently ruined, Johnser collapsed to his knees.

  Daria gripped his head with both hands and shoved downward, bringing her knee up and connecting with his throat, crushing his windpipe. Johnser Riley’s body was still struggling to fight off its certain death as Daria took the room key from his pocket. She also took his wallet, then carefully turned out his pants pockets, as if he’d been searched. She stood and hurled the wallet over a tattered chain-link fence and into a dry gully. It landed out of sight.

  Daria hurried down the windswept street to the bigger hotel with the sports bar. The wind was hot and arid, stinging the eyes. Once there, she ducked into the bar, retrieved one paper napkin with the bar’s logo emblazoned on the front. Stepping back outside, she spied a pay phone in a grocery, halfway back to the hotel.

  MULTNOMAH COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, PORTLAND

  Ray Calabrese stood at the observation window and watched the snotty mortician from Texas remove and weigh a human kidney.

  “The guy’s a piece of work,” Ray said into his cell phone.

  “Do you blame him?” Lucas Bell sounded tired. He had called Lucas at the L.A. field office, to check on Daria. There was—Bell assured him—no good news, which equated to no bad news, either. Daria Gibron and the Irishmen had ghosted.

  “Yeah, I blame him. Guy’s a pathologist. He can’t run a criminal investigation.”

  Lucas sighed. “You’re trying to take his case from him. You’re undermining his authority.”

  “When’d you get all Mister Sensitive?”

  “Well, I’m gay, so . . .”

  Through the observation window, Ray could see that the Texan was wrist-deep in some guy’s chest now. Ray, who’d served in the marines and who’d seen his share of corpses, winced. “Oh. So that’s what you mean when you say Special Agent Bell.”

  Lucas said, “You’re a homophobe.”

  “Isn’t that two things, sound alike but are spelled different?”

  “Yes, Ray. That’s what homophobe means. I have to go do, like, investigative work now, okay? Bye-bye.”

  Click.

  Ray folded his cell phone in half, watched Tomzak remove something—metal, the size of his palm, what was that?—from the victim’s lung cavity. Ray squinted, almost recognizing the viscera-covered thing. Ray was standing in the doctors’ lounge, a cluttered cyclone of medical texts and trade publications and dirty coffee cups. Seated beside him was Morticia Addams’s kid sister, typing away madly at a keyboard and using a mouse to draw lines freehand through a three-dimensional representation of a human body. Charting entry and exit wounds, Ray figured.

  His cell chirped.

  “Calabrese.”

  “Hallo, Ray.”

  He damn near dropped the phone. “Daria! Jesus Christ, where are you?”

  “Ray. The Irishmen. Did they crash an airplane?”

  Ray’s knees buckled a little and he sat on an end table next to a stained, concave couch in the doctors’ lounge. “We . . . we think so. I’m up here now, in Oregon. Give me your exact address.”

  “They’re not done,” the tinny voice on his cell said. Ray’s fingers slid over the smooth surface of his cell phone, feeling its contours.

  “What?”

  “The Irish. They are not done.”

  “Daria, you’re not making sense. Look, Special Agent Lucas Bell is standing by at the L.A. headquarters with, like, an army of guys. Tell me where you are, he’ll land like an anvil on their asses.”

  “Ray. Please to listen,” she said, her voice preternaturally calm. “They do not move like men who have accomplished a mission. They do not plan an escape route. They are not lying low. They are moving into position.”

  “Into . . . what? What position?”

  “The aircraft that crashed? They treat it as . . . what is the English word? Not audition . . .”

  Ray’s heart trip-hammered. “Rehearsal?” He prayed he was wrong.

  “Yes. They had a good dress rehearsal. That is all.”

  He wet his lips. “Christ. All right. Okay. Tell me where you are?”

  “I’ve made them split up. Two have gone ahead. I don’t know where. I’m with the man they call Donal O’Meara, but it might not be his real name.”

  “It is.”

  “There was another. Johnser something.”

  “Riley,” Ray said.

  “Yes. He is dead.”

  “Where are you?”

  “No. We do not know where they are heading, or why. I will stay with them, will contact you.”

  “Daria, no! Do not—”

  “We need to know their staging area.” She rode over his shouting. “We need to know their target. They are soldiers, Ray. So am I. Trust me.”

  “Daria.” He rose now. “Do not do this! These guys are fucking butchers!”

  “I know.” She sounded more tired than Lucas had. “You never understood that.”

  “What? What don’t I understand?”

  “I am the butcher, too.”

  And she disconnected.

  Ray burst into the autopsy room. Four tables were set up. Three volunteers worked with the small-boned Texan with the unruly hank of hair in his eyes.

  “It’s New York,” Tomzak drawled.

  “Daria. My contact with the Irish bastards? She’s convinced they brought down this jet.”

  Tomzak was cleaning the object he’d removed from the victim’s chest, running a low stream of water over it, turning it this way and back to get it clean. Ray looked at it again, then looked down at his own hand. The foreign object in the vic’s chest cavity was a cell phone; same make and model as his own.

  Tomzak bagged it, wrote on the bag with a grease pen. “You got proof?”

  “Jesus, asshole
!” The other docs stopped working, stared at him. “Daria Gibron is working these guys! Any one of whom would gut her over lunch and think nothing of it! In order to get a message to me, she had to kill one of them, which just increased her chances of being blown by a factor of ten! She says they brought down this fucking liner. Are you listening to me?”

  Tomzak studied the larger man while drying his hands. “The rules ain’t, like, ambiguous. They’re written in goddamn stone. It’s not a criminal investigation. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Okay, and I understand that. But these assholes killed the guy whose chest you were just in. And they killed the next guy comes sloshing in here, and the next. What did that report from Tanaka say? How many laps on that plane?”

  The Texan stiff ened. The act of drying his already-dry hands slowed down. He stared into Ray’s eyes.

  “Three,” he said. “Three toddlers, small enough to fit on their mothers’ laps.”

  Ray waited, gripping his cell phone, his knuckles white.

  MARION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE

  “This is Susan Tanaka.”

  “Susan? Tommy.”

  Susan turned to the sheriff and said, “Can you excuse me a second?” She had been debriefing Alfredo Escobar and his top aides on the crash. Now she stepped into the corridor of the Marion County Courthouse. “Tommy?”

  “Calabrese has an agent running with the Irishmen. She says they downed the jetliner.”

  Susan pushed the voice wand aside and bent at the waist to sip from a water fountain, returned her comm gear to position. “The rules—”

  “I know the rules, crazy lady. And we’re keeping the goddamn case. I’m just saying. We’ve been keeping Calabrese at arm’s length. I think that’s gotta stop.”

  Susan considered it. Tommy wouldn’t recommend it without reason.

  “He’s there with you now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”