At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  “That doesn’t work out either, of course, because he’s a worthless loser. Seems to me, he got caught sleeping on the job, or some such thing, and he got fired. It’s like this his whole life. He can’t hold a job, Rebecca’s miserable, and in the middle of it all, Carolyn is born.” Thorne allowed himself a smile as he looked back to Jake. “Now, I gotta tell you, I’m not much into kids, but Carolyn was a cutie. Big eyes, always smiling. And for the first time, Rebecca begins to think good thoughts about herself, you know?” The smile went away. “Until the Polack starts knocking her around just for the hell of it. Rebecca never said a word to anybody. Instead, she got heavy into drugs and booze and shit.”

  He fell quiet for a moment, clearly girding himself for the rest of the story. “So I get a phone call one day that scares me. Rebecca’s not right, you know? And she wants to talk to her brother. I think that’s the first time I got clued in to the drinking. Well, Mr. Sinclair talks on the phone and comes out breathing fire. He grabs me, and we go driving all the way up to Milwaukee. He wouldn’t say why we were going up there, but I couldn’t drive fast enough to suit him.

  “We pull up to their crappy little house about six at night, and as we get outa the car, we hear these screams. Not like angry screams, you know? Like terrified screams. Little-girl screams. We go inside and run upstairs, and there they are, all three of them in little Carolyn’s bedroom. She’s maybe nine, ten years old now.”

  His voice trailed off. Another deep breath, and he recrossed his legs. “The Polack is drunk off his ass, beating the living shit out of both of them. Little Carolyn was screaming for him to stop, crying and crying while he just beat her with his fists.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jake moaned. He felt ill.

  “Rebecca was out of it,” Thorne went on, his voice growing thicker. “She’d already been pounded numb. Maybe it was the drugs, but she was never the same.” He paused. “Mr. Sinclair took the girls to the hospital, and I took care of the Polack.”

  The tone and the body language told Jake that Thorne was done, but he couldn’t let it end there. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Thorne said, shrugging. “But Mr. Sinclair made sure that Rebecca and Sunshine had everything they needed.” He locked his gaze on Jake and scowled.

  “What did you do with her father?”

  Thorne’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set. His position sort of uncoiled as he leaned back and placed his palms on the arms of the chair. “You ask a lot of questions, Jake. Are you sure you want to know the answers?”

  Jake paused just long enough to convey his uneasiness. “Yes,” he said at length, “I want to know. I think I ought to know.”

  “Okay,” Thorne said, leaning his elbows on his knees. “This is just between you and me, right? Mikey and I went for a little drive in the country. We talked for a little while, and then I blew his fucking head off.” He smiled, still pleased with himself after all these years. “He’s fertilizer now, and as far as I know, no one even reported the bastard missing.”

  The words hung in the air like a bad odor, churning Jake’s stomach. At the same time, they left him feeling oddly fulfilled. “You murdered him?”

  Thorne responded silently, with one of his humorless smiles.

  “Does Harry know? I mean, did he tell you to kill him?”

  “Of course not,” Thorne scoffed quickly, unequivocally; like it was the most ridiculous question in the world. “Mr. Sinclair doesn’t operate that way. He thinks I put the Polack on a plane to anyplace two thousand miles away, with instructions never to be seen again. He assumed I did what he told me, and I never bothered to correct him.”

  Jake didn’t buy it. “Come on, Thorne! Do you expect me to believe-”

  Thorne cut him off with a raised hand. “You still don’t get it, do you? My job is to make problems go away. Ninety percent of the time, Mr. Sinclair has no idea what I do. In fact, he pays me a lot of money not to keep him informed.”

  “But if he knew-”

  “He’d be upset-oh, yeah,” Thorne said. “But like I said, Carolyn-she was a cutie. And myself, I’ve always been partial to permanent solutions.”

  Travis had been in this tunnel once before, and like last time, he wasn’t alone. Those same faceless voices floated all around him in the dark, saying things he couldn’t quite make out.

  The snake was still down his throat, but it seemed to have settled down. It wasn’t biting him anymore. Jesus, though, his mouth was dry. He tried to swallow, but the snake wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t hissing at him anymore, either-at least, not unless he wanted it to. The snake had given him back control of his breathing. That was nice of him.

  Something was dragging him toward a light, and as he got closer, he gradually realized that he wasn’t in a tunnel at all. He was asleep. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t get himself all the way awake. The voices kept getting louder and louder. If he wasn’t mistaken, someone was saying his name.

  What nightmares he’d had! Chases and chemicals and screaming and fighting. Whatever he’d had to eat before bed last night, he hoped he’d never make that mistake again.

  What was last night, anyway? The light grew brighter still.

  But he wasn’t floating anymore. In fact, he felt anchored down, as if glued to the floor. He tried to move, but his chest hurt like hell. Like he’d been beaten with something. Was that what this was all about? Maybe he was still in the dirt recovering from his fight with Terry Lampier, and the rest had all been a wild dream.

  The light rushed toward him now, with frightening speed. The voices grew louder and clearer, and sure enough, someone was saying his name.

  Travis opened his eyes, yet he still didn’t know where he was. He tried to talk, but something in his mouth wouldn’t let him. His old friend the snake.

  A face appeared above him, a lady he didn’t know, with a smile that trimmed the edges off his fear. “Hi there, Travis,” she said. “Welcome back. You had us worried for a while.”

  Hours had passed, she was sure, but there was no way for her to know what time it was. Clocks weren’t the only human niceties denied to residents of the isolation wing. So was any view of the outdoors. The only reality residents were allowed was the one provided by their jailers. How easy it was, she’d thought at one point during the night, to manipulate people’s thoughts and fears. Her light had stayed on all night, but she supposed it would have been just as easy to keep it off. Days and days without a restful sleep, followed by days and days of darkness, were pretty much guaranteed to alter a body’s sense of reality. And to what end? Any end they chose, she assumed.

  She hadn’t moved in a very long time. She just sat there on her concrete cot, fingering the rope that Wiggins had left behind and trying to make peace with God. Was there a God? Despite everything that had happened to her over the years, she couldn’t help but feel that there was another place, better than this one, and a presence-a force — that wanted her and Jake and her little boy to be together. If not here, then there.

  What was she to do? What options did she have? She could kill herself or kill her son. That part was clear, but what then? What guarantees were there that Wiggins wouldn’t kill her little boy, anyway? Maybe this was all bluff to begin with…

  No, she told herself quickly. He was dead serious. He’ll kill my baby.

  For a long while, she debated the option of reporting all of this to the matron, but ultimately, she rejected it as unworkable. They’d never believe her, and in the questioning that followed, she’d miss her deadline to die.

  Roll call. She didn’t even know when that was. It had to be in the morning, she figured, but what time? Judging by the rhythms of the place, the critical hour was approaching. Late, late that night, the noise had died down to just a few rude conversations as inmates dropped off to sleep. Now the noise was picking up again; nothing like it was before, but it wouldn’t be long.

  The slipknot was the first thing she tied. Nothing fancy-nothing like th
e looped nooses that Travis liked to tie in every piece of rope he ever got his hands on. Just a simple slipknot, tied the same way she’d learned years ago, in Brownies.

  Memories of her childhood-the most horrible ones-tried to sneak their way into her consciousness, but she ran them off. For the last time, she realized with some measure of relief. Perhaps that was the silver lining within this darkest of clouds. She’d never have to face the nightmares again.

  It was time to think about Jake. And about Travis. About the good times.

  Snagging the light fixture with the running end of the rope turned out to be quite the challenge. She fashioned a lasso of sorts in the middle of the clothesline and tried to rope the fixture, much like a cowboy would rope a horse. With the fixture well out of reach overhead, there could be no screwups, no second chances; no way to loosen a fouled knot.

  It helped if she stood on the cot. After four or five flubs, she finally got it and in so doing, felt inexplicably elated. The next challenge would be to lean out far enough to actually extend her neck into the dangling loop of rope.

  A bell rang somewhere, startling the hell out of her. “Roll call!” someone yelled. “All right, ladies, rise and shine!”

  Carolyn’s heart raced now as she heard footsteps approaching down the hall.

  “Front and center, Mrs. Donovan!”

  Standing on tiptoes and straining like a kid trying to see over the fence at a ballpark, she just barely hooked the noose with the point of her chin and opened her jaw wide to drag her head in further. She filled her brain with images of Jake and Travis. The images she wanted to take with her. She whispered that she loved them.

  “It’s a new day…”

  That’s when she lost her balance. The noose came tight-impossibly tight-as she swung away from the cot in a wide arc, her toes straining instinctively to touch the floor, which remained just an inch out of reach. For an instant, she wondered if the thin clothesline might actually pop her head right off her body, and she clawed at the spot where the rope dug into her flesh.

  Then her vision flashed red, and there was nothing more.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The Orion News Database was available to everyone who could afford the subscription fee, which was easily high enough to keep the riffraff from jamming the server. Such concerns were not a problem, of course, for the FBI, and once inside the database, Irene could locate every article written on any subject within the last fifty years, as compiled from over a thousand daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.

  Somewhere, buried among all those words, she figured there had to be an item or two about the Grant Plant’s past. Never much of a computer whiz, she was walking blind here, having always depended on staffers to take care of this kind of research. She learned right off the bat that success and failure lay in the selection of well-defined search parameters. Underestimating the scope and power of the database, she tried Newark+Arkansas in her first attempt and was greeted with an invitation to scroll through 627,838 items.

  Yikes!

  Her second attempt cut the number of hits in half by setting date parameters between 1980 and the present.

  “Getting closer,” she told herself. She leaned back in the impossibly hard desk chair. There had to be a way to get a handle on this. Problem was, the 1983 explosion and its aftermath had dominated every news outlet for so long that those were the only references she could find. She needed to filter out that information somehow.

  She concentrated her next search on a year-by-year examination of articles up to, but excluding, the date of the explosion, and even then, she was pulling up more than a hundred articles at a time, mostly from hunting and recreation magazines.

  Finally, she surrendered to the inevitable. “Okay, Irene,” she’d grumbled, about forty-five minutes into the exercise. “Why don’t you ask it what you’re really looking for?”

  She entered, “Newark+Arkansas+Frankel/1-1-80 thru 8-21-83.”

  In her heart, she’d hoped the screen would flash an error message. Instead, she got seventeen hits, sixteen of which dealt with the same story: the apparent murder/suicide of an Army general named Dallas Albemarle and his wife, up in suburban Virginia. She decided to go back to those later and concentrated instead on the seventeenth hit, from a periodical called The Freedom Report: A Journal Dedicated to Preserving Democracy. The article quoted highly placed, unnamed sources in reporting that Special Agent Peter Frankel was actively investigating a plot to sell chemical weapons out of a “secret location” in Newark, Arkansas. The article went on to say that the investigation had been fruitful but that no arrests had been made, and from there, launched into a blathering tirade about the looming threat posed by Third World powers.

  “Well, there’s his hard evidence,” Irene told herself. Frankly, she’d been hoping for something more concrete.

  After a giant yawn, and yet another battle with the chair over control of her spine, she turned her attention to the list of suicide stories. As she read through them, they rang a distant bell. Seems that the kindly General Albemarle was the man responsible for overseeing the shutdown of the Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant, back in 1964.

  That’s why the name rings a bell. He’s the guy the EPA wanted to crucify, back when the hazardous waste site was first discovered.

  Inexplicably, the general had shot his wife to death in the bedroom of their home in Clifton, Virginia, and had then driven all the way out to Manassas Battlefield Park, to blow his own brains out at the base of a statue paying tribute to Stonewall Jackson. Each of the articles quoted the same source-Special Agent Peter Frankel of the FBI-in reporting that General Albemarle had been distraught over the recent death of his daughter and by his likely implication in the then-developing chemical weapons scandal in Newark. According to Frankel, the general had made his intentions clear in a suicide note found in the couple’s bedroom.

  “First in line with a quote even then, eh, Peter?” Irene mumbled, clicking on through the stories. The coincidence of the note was not lost on her.

  Odd, she thought. Some guy nobody knows blows his brains out, and the story is picked up all over the country. Yet an investigation into illegal weapons sales pops up only once. What a telling tribute to the credibility given The Freedom Report by its journalistic brethren. Probably devoted the rest of the issue to flying saucers and Elvis sightings.

  On a whim, she compared the dates on the weapons article to the one on the dead general. The story from The Freedom Report ran just three weeks before the general did the big nasty.

  How about that?

  Truth be told, Irene believed in mere coincidence. They happened all the time-sometimes so wild they defied logic. As a matter of fact, in a very real sense, most violent crime against innocent people boiled down to just that: a tragic coincidence for the victims involved.

  She understood better than most, then, that the presence of two people in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily reflect intent on anyone’s part. There comes a point, though, when coincidences stack up so high that it takes more effort to justify their randomness than to accept them as something more complicated. This business with Frankel was rapidly approaching that point.

  It was time to stop being an investigator for a little while and become a casual observer. If she were to accept only Donovan’s side, she could place Frankel with at least one other dead party, and she could place him at the Little Rock field office with the opportunity to pull a fast one with his investigatory prerogative; all within the time frame when weapons could have been sold out of his backyard. Wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, after all. Sadly, it wasn’t uncommon at all for a cop to get involved with the very crime he’s investigating.

  Hmm…

  She clicked back to the beginning and initiated another search, this one running permutations of dates, places, and names, but all with the common denominator of “chemical+weapons.” After half a dozen tries, the list became manageable, and
within an hour, she’d found what she was looking for.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. The coincidences just went over the top.

  When the phone rang a minute later, she didn’t even jump. It was nearly six o’clock, and she’d been waiting for the switchboard to get around to their promised five forty-five wake-up call.

  “I’m up, thank you,” she said as she lifted the receiver from the desk.

  “Irene?” Hearing her name stopped her from hanging up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi. This is George Sparks,” the voice said. “I just got a call from the county lockup. Carolyn Donovan hanged herself in her cell.”

  The matron peeked in through the observation window and went right to work. As she worked her master key with one hand, she pushed the transmit button on her portable radio with the other. “Unit Four to Central, we got a swinger in Isolation Two.” Her voice sounded hurried but not panicked.

  “Fresh or stale?” a voice came back.

  “Still swingin’! Get Medical down here quick!”

  The prisoner’s face was purple from the increased pressure in her head, and her hands and feet were still twitching. The matron knew from her rookie training five years ago that as long as the victim’s neck wasn’t broken, and she hadn’t burst something in her brain, this one was salvageable. Kind of a waste, though. Hardly seemed worth the effort to save somebody, just so the government could later issue her a termination slip.

  Working alone-although she could hear the pounding of running feet in the hallway-the matron locked her arms around Carolyn’s waist and lifted, hoping to take some of the strain off her neck. No matter how high she lifted the body, though, its torso flopped over to take up the slack. Burying her face in the victim’s clothes like this made the matron’s skin crawl. If the approaching footsteps hadn’t been so close, she might have let her sway for a while longer.