by Iain Levison
“Where he shot?”
Oh, that was good. She didn’t seem nearly as surprised as Elias was expecting her to be.
“Right here.” Elias pointed to his rib and bicep. “It’s been bleeding a lot and I think he needs some blood. He’s A positive. And he wants painkillers . . . and . . .” Now the cat was out of the bag, Elias realized he couldn’t stop talking. Nurse Davenport was staring at him. “He had a hunting accident,” Elias added, surprising even himself.
“No,” she shook her head. “He didn’t have no hunting accident. You lying.” She laughed.
Elias said nothing. OK, he wouldn’t try anymore bullshit.
“The blood’s no good. I can’t get you A positive blood. You need a hospital for that. He’ll just have to drink a lot of fluids. But I can come over and irrigate the wound, and clean it out for him. And put a bandage on. And give him painkillers.”
“OK,” Elias nodded, beaming. “When can you come?”
“After I get done here. An hour or two.”
“Thank you,” Elias said, relief pouring out of him. “Thank you so much. You’re a lifesaver . . .”
“Five thousand dollars, right?”
5
Agent Denise Lupo leaned back in her chair in her cramped cubicle and rubbed her eyes and groaned. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet and already she was sick of being at work. The ennui, as she called it, had started for her about three weeks ago, a few days after her latest request for a transfer had been turned down. Instead of assigning her to the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Program for the coveted job as a profiler, as she had hoped, they had told her no postings were available. Then, convinced that it was what every woman wanted, they had given her a handsome young male trainee to shut her up.
The FBI top brass didn’t know it, but Denise had found out through the grapevine that two men she knew from the Phoenix Field Office had indeed been assigned to the positions that supposedly weren’t available. Neither one of them possessed a masters in Criminal Psychology, as she did. Neither one had done as well on the test. Both had less time in than Denise’s twelve years. In fact, the sole qualification that had earned them the post rather than Denise was the usual one: they had penises.
It was around this time that Denise’s work began to suffer. She was beginning to realize that she was going to spend her entire career in the “temporary posting” they had given her right out of Quantico, a job checking the serial numbers on circulating cash to determine if the money had recently been involved in bank robberies. It had taken her a few months of looking around at her co-workers to realize that this was a career graveyard, the place where the FBI sent their least best and least bright, the Siberia of the New York Office. Denise spent most of her first year convinced that it was a training period for her, getting her accustomed to FBI procedure. The second and third years she spent replaying every moment of her training in her head, wondering who she had pissed off. Then she decided she had just been forgotten about, and started filing transfer requests.
And now she had just resigned herself to the fact that the FBI treated women like shit. It was an old boys’ club and she was never going anywhere and it was eight more years until she got a government pension – then she could take that and teach psychology somewhere. Actually use the master’s degree, because it wasn’t ever going to get any use around here.
Dick Yancey stuck his head into her cubicle. “Morning,” he said. He was holding his ever-present coffee cup in one hand and waving a handful of files with the other. “Just got something.”
Dick Yancey was the only person in her department Denise would willingly spend time with outside of work, primarily because he was every bit as sick of the FBI as she was. A fifty-eight-year-old Vietnam vet with a drinking problem, he had one year to go until retirement, and when he wasn’t pulling sick days, he was sitting in his cubicle drinking coffee, staring at his screensaver with bleary red eyes. He was prone to going off on long monologues about the good old days, which made him the butt of jokes all around the office, but Denise often found a moral or some good advice in his stories, some of which she had put to practical use. Still, despite her respect for the man, it was his transfer to her department that had served as Denise’s wake-up call that her job assignment was a ticket to nowhere.
She patted the bare corner of her desk, motioning for him to sit. “Whatcha got?”
Dick Yancey sat on the desk, put his coffee down, and opened a file. “It seems a bank in a town named Wilford, New Jersey got robbed on Friday. Five guys, all parolees. Locals got four of them. A statie shot the fifth at a gas station, but he got away.”
“Oooh, violence.”
“And plenty of it.” Dick Yancey plopped the first file down on her desk.
“So, a fugitive. Do we know who he is?”
“That we do. I talked to the locals, then ran him for everything on the database. He’s had quite a career.” He plopped the second file down.
It wasn’t even ten yet and already Dick Yancey had been working this case, collecting three files’ worth of information. Denise had noticed before that Dick, who had a reputation for lobotomized laziness, would, on occasion, become diligent and aggressive if he was the first person to happen on a case. And he always handed the good ones off to her, rather than finish it.
She opened the file. “Philip Turner Dixon. Born 1964, Texline, Texas.” She flipped past a few pages, the fingerprints and the personal info, and looked at the arrest record, whistled at the length of it. “This guy doesn’t like to stay out of trouble, does he?”
“The locals think he had his own plan. He didn’t have much confidence in his partners. Seems he planned all along to steal the bank manager’s car as a getaway vehicle and he left out the back door.”
Denise was looking at one of Dixon’s psychological evaluations from a prison in Texas. “Says here he’s above average intelligence.”
“There are about five of those that say that.”
“So we’re dealing with some kind of criminal genius here?”
Dick Yancey laughed and held up the thick file of information on Dixon. “I wouldn’t go that far. If he was a genius we wouldn’t have all this.”
“So how did we wind up with this?”
“Now to the good part.” Dick Yancey held up the third file. “A Flying J truck stop in Kansas turned over its deposits to a bank on Sunday night, and they did a random check on the bills. One of the bills was from the robbery.”
Denise tapped a pen against her chin thoughtfully. “Kansas. That would be on the way back to Texas, wouldn’t it? You think Dixon’s going home?”
“It gets better. A travel agent in a town called Tiburn, New Hampshire, called the locals on Monday, yesterday, because a woman bought a plane ticket with hundred dollar bills that appeared to have blood on them. They were from the robbery, too.”
“So we’ve got the bills turning up in New Hampshire and Kansas. Weird. What do you think?”
Yancey shrugged, sighed. “I dunno. That’s why I gave it to you. I’m going to knock off early today. Dental appointment.”
Dick Yancey’s dental appointments were famous all over the office. If he really had as many dental appointments as he claimed, he would have more teeth than an alligator, each one capped and polished. Denise nodded, suppressing a smile. “OK. Me and Wonder Boy’ll take care of it.”
“Why don’t you go up to New Hampshire? Get out of the city for a few days? On the taxpayer.”
“With Wonder Boy? I don’t think so.” If Denise went on an investigation, she was supposed to take her young trainee with her. Being alone in a car with him for a six-hour drive each way was not her idea of a vacation.
Dick Yancey winked. “I think he’s got a crush on you.”
Denise rolled her eyes. “Thanks for the case, Dick.”
“Have fun with it. Take a break. New Hampshire’s beautiful this time of year.”
Denise detected a trace of concern in his voice. “Why?
What’s up?”
Dick shrugged. “You just haven’t been yourself lately. I think you need . . . you know, a trip or something. Maybe a little excitement.”
“Great. You think I need to go and spend some time with Wonder Boy in a motel in New Hampshire?”
Dick Yancey shrugged. “Hey, whatever works. You just seem kind of down, lately, that’s all.”
Denise smiled at him, squeezed his hand. “Thanks, Dick.” She held up the file. “We’ve got this, you go to the dentist.”
Denise had a lot of nicknames for her trainee, but the only one that didn’t contain the word “fucking” was Wonder Boy, which was why she used it around the office. If spoken with the correct tone, it actually could be interpreted as a compliment, rather than the derisive put-down that Denise intended, and it was in this manner she found she could insult any number of her co-workers to their faces with a reciprocated smile.
Wonder Boy, or Agent Kohl, as everyone else called him, was a pleasant and intelligent young man who was going to shoot up the ladder of success at the FBI because he was gifted with charm, patience, an excellent resume and a penis. Denise, who lacked only one of those career attributes, would be working for him before her eight years to retirement were up, she knew. For this reason she was occasionally pleasant to him, on those days where she still imagined herself an FBI agent eight years in the future, but such days were getting scarcer with each passing month.
“What’ve you got going on, Denise?” Agent Carver, the squad supervisor, asked her as he leaned back in his chair, his head touching the wall in the cramped little conference room. Denise hated New York City offices, with everybody pressed up against each other and the conference table barely large enough to accommodate the opened files of six agents discussing their cases. She bumped Wonder Boy’s elbows as she tried to find Dixon’s file. If she’d gotten her transfer, it would have been the last time she’d ever have to deal with the elbow bumping and the squeezing past people in the narrow halls. More than just a change of assignment, she needed an office with some freakin’ space. Even the trainee agents in Phoenix had offices with doors.
As usual, Carver discussed her case last, as if it were the least significant. Now everyone else’s work was put to rest we could find out what Little Denise has been up to. And what was up with Carver calling her Denise? Everyone else in the room was Agent this-or-that. She decided, as she was pulling Dixon’s sheet out of his file, that maybe Dick Yancey had been right. Maybe she did need to get out of the city for a few days. “We’ve got a fugitive from a robbery in South Jersey who is turning up bills in New Hampshire and Kansas,” she said. “One Philip Turner Dixon. Lifetime criminal, armed and dangerous, and so on.”
“New Hampshire and Kansas,” Carver said. “They’re not next to each other.”
“No, sir, they’re not.”
“How’d he manage that?”
“My theory,” said Denise, as if she’d researched Dixon thoroughly, rather than listened to Dick Yancey talk about him for five minutes, “is that he’s in New Hampshire. I think he handed the money off to a truck driver who was going west, to spread the bills out and deaden the scent a little.”
“That’s pretty sharp,” said Carver, shaking his head. “I doubt one of those garden variety broad-daylight robbery guys would have the sense to do that.”
“This guy’s been robbing banks since the eighties,” Denise said. “I’ve got Corrections info on him from several different prisons which have scored him very high on intelligence tests.” She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it across the table to Carver. “He seems to be the valedictorian of the Falstaff Correctional Facility. He also had a getaway plan from the bank robbery itself that worked. Everyone else in the robbery got shot or apprehended.”
Carver looked briefly at the paper and shrugged. “Did you contact the New Hampshire locals?”
“Actually, I was thinking it would be a good idea to go up there myself.” She waited a few seconds to let the statement settle. Carver was famous for letting his agents do all their work from their desks, hated the budget and paperwork nightmare of actually sending his agents out to do something. And when he did send people on assignments, it was always his favorites, Walker and Toney, his golfing buddies, the two guys flanking him at the conference table. Denise hadn’t been out of the office in years. “It’d be a good experience for . . . Agent Kohl,” she added, “an opportunity to get a little field work.”
Carver winced. “I don’t know, Denise,” he said. “This guy’s armed and dangerous.” Apparently aware that he might have been overtly sexist, he added, “I don’t want to lose an agent . . . any agent . . . over something the locals could handle.”
Denise’s brain was whirring, trying to think of a way to insult Carver to his face in such a manner that the insult would go over his head, when Kohl eagerly broke in.
“I think it would be an excellent opportunity to get involved with a field investigation, sir,” he said. “I mean, I think my training would be more effective if I got a chance to get some hands-on work.”
Carver nodded thoughtfully, now acknowledging only the young trainee. “You might be right, Agent Kohl. This might kill two birds with one stone. We could get you out into the field for a few days. OK, that’s settled.” He tapped the table, adjourning the meeting, and as he stood up, he said to Kohl, “Have Leslie draw up the paperwork and let’s send you guys out into the field.”
Dixon started awake because it was so quiet. After nine years at Falstaff and three months in the halfway house, he found it eerie sleeping in a house so still. He was used to the clanging of metal as guards slammed heavy steel doors and yelled short, clipped phrases to one another. “Block D check.” “Open gate four.” The shrieks of a late-night beating. After time, these rituals had become associated with sleep, as calming as the ocean.
The only noises he could hear in the darkness of Elias White’s chilly basement were an occasional grunt and whir as the refrigerator kicked to life in the kitchen above him, and sometimes the faint dripping of the kitchen faucet when Elias failed to shut it off completely before he left for work. But today even those noises were absent. Dixon sat in the cot for a few moments and listened to the silence.
It would be like this when he bought himself a farm in Edmonton, Alberta, he thought. Silent. He needed to get used to silence, to normalcy. Maybe there’d be cows mooing in the fields, or chickens squawking, or alpacas making whatever noise alpacas made. They were all the rage now, in farming, supposedly. Their fur sold for a bundle. Fat Bill Guyerson had talked a lot about alpacas, before he had squealed on his mobster buddies and joined Witness Protection. Screw it. He was going with chickens. He didn’t want to start out with heavy cattle; too much work and too little profit. Maybe some layer chickens to start, and see how that went. He’d wait to get cattle and alpacas, perhaps a few years.
He sat up, careful not to bump his head on the low alcove ceiling, and was surprised by how little the wound hurt. Those painkillers were sure doing their job. The nurse had given him three bottles of them, warned him never to take more than two pills at a time. She had been particularly unimpressed by the severity of the wound, which Dixon had found encouraging. “Have me come all the way out here for this little scratch,” she had scoffed playfully. Scratch or not, she had taken the five grand.
“Don’t spend it for at least a week,” Dixon had warned.
“Don’t worry, man,” she had said, and Dixon had liked the way she said “man” not like an American, who just tossed off the word as if it was meaningless. From her, it meant she was acknowledging he was a human being.
She had done an excellent job of cleaning and wrapping the wound, and while she was working, Dixon had sensed that she missed treating injuries such as his, and was bored with her easy work at the college. By the time she left, leaving him with all the disinfectants and tubes and Latex gloves, the little alcove looked and smelled like an emergency room at a neighborhood clinic.<
br />
Through a tiny crack in the floorboards above him Dixon could see a sliver of light, and knew that it was daytime. From the silence, he figured that Elias had already gone to work. He groaned, rubbed his eyes, hopped off the cot and clambered up the basement stairs into the kitchen.
In the refrigerator, Dixon found a packet of sausages, which he had told Elias to buy the day before. There were two new cartons of eggs, and bags upon bags of cheese. For the last two days he had done nothing except sleep, drink water and cook a huge cheese omelet with a side of sausages. Then he’d wolf them down, and, patting his full belly, stare out the window for a few hours at Elias’s backyard, then stumble back down the stairs to his dark alcove and fall asleep again.
Today was Wednesday, Dixon figured. He and Elias had been housemates for five days already. Since Elias had gone to the college and summoned the nurse, they had hardly seen each other, because Dixon had been whacked out on painkillers and recovering from his injury. But today, as he tossed some sausages in the frying pan, he was starting to feel a little bit better. Some of his energy was returning, the pain was lessening, the bleeding had stopped. He felt confident that in another week, as he had promised, he would be able to get the hell out of here, head for the Canadian border, and leave this weird little pussy hound of a professor behind forever.
After he had scoffed down his meal, he looked out the window at Elias’s backyard, admiring the tranquility of the scene. A neighborhood cat was off in the distance, looking up at a squirrel in the tree where Dixon had nearly passed out the night he first came here. It was like a painting. He wondered if Elias appreciated the life he had, decided probably not. People like him were always pushing, manipulating, trying to get something better, never grateful for what they had.
Suddenly bored, Dixon decided to wander around the house. He went up the stairs, something he had never done since the night he had surprised Elias in his bedroom. He peered into the same bedroom, where the sun was gleaming across the unmade bed, a book opened, face down, on the bedside table. Dixon went into the room and looked at the book. It was about a thousand pages long, and called The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Republic. He turned it over, flipped a page or two, trying to find something in it he might relate to. Just a lot of German names. He shrugged and put the book back exactly as he had found it.
