by Jon Jackson
The Durango was not Joe’s car. It belonged to Helen. He’d left with the Durango because it seemed more useful for the driving he anticipated, leaving his pickup truck for Helen to use. But by the time he’d gotten to the end of the road his mind had changed, and by the time he reached Helena he knew he didn’t want the Durango. He wanted something more nondescript. He’d found the vehicle he wanted in a used-car lot.
Joe wasn’t in the least concerned about the Colonel, standing out on the lonely highway. In the mirror Joe could see a couple of vehicles far back, perhaps two miles behind him. The figure of the Colonel had almost dwindled from sight. Whatever the Colonel was up to out there, Joe was sure he was in no need of help.
It struck Joe now with renewed clarity: he was making one of those turns on the road. Something new was in the offing. He didn’t know what it was, but it was bound to be interesting. A quiet wave of relief swept over him. He’d wanted to do this for a long time, he realized. It was gratifying that it felt so . . . right.
He scanned the skies as he sped on. Sure enough, he saw a helicopter, way off to the south, skimming along the horizon. That would be the Colonel’s ride. It irritated him. Ever since he had first encountered the Colonel, a couple of years ago in Salt Lake City, Joe had felt observed, manipulated. Joe didn’t like that. He was a lone wolf, he felt . . . well, no, that sounded pretentious. He’d heard another person described, once, as “a cat who walked by himself.” Joe liked the sound of that. He was an outside cat . . . or maybe an outside dog; he wasn’t a cat person. He’d never been an inside guy. He didn’t want to be part of anyone’s network, someone else’s program. Well, cats, he thought, were said to be like that. Dogs . . . well, he wasn’t against dogs, but he was no man’s dog.
The thing to do, he thought, was to take the next road south . . . or north . . . or back to the west. Get off this interstate—it was a trap—and get on with his own life. He took the next exit north. It was a two-lane highway, a perfectly good, empty road, running north through the badlands, headed toward the Missouri River. No more sign of the chopper skimming the horizon.
He breathed a little freer, but he had no illusions. There was still that nagging business of Echeverria. What to do about that? The trouble was, he had no idea what it was all about. Echeverria was dead. Joe had killed him with a missile from an RPG launcher at the airport in Salt Lake City. Or had he?
He’d certainly launched the rocket at the airplane. The ambulance that was carrying Echeverria had drawn up under the wing of the plane, almost instantly engulfed in flames. The attendants had fled. The newspapers had reported the death. But he had never seen Echeverria, who was presumably trapped inside, incapacitated on a gurney. To be honest, he had little idea what Echeverria even looked like. He’d never seen the man.
“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud. Maybe that was the moment when he’d begun to slip into this dependent role, believing what he’d been told. He thought there was a good chance that Echeverria had never been in that ambulance.
And what was all this stuff about him being connected with a bombing in Detroit? As he drove on, quite alert now, keeping his eye out for choppers, Joe ran back over his contacts with people in Detroit, or people with Detroit connections. He’d known a few, almost all of them people involved in the mob. He couldn’t think of a one who fiddled about with bombs.
Mile after lonely mile ticked off. He saw no further sign of the chopper, nor of the Colonel. No connection came to mind, however remote, with bombers, especially bombers who seemed political rather than criminal.
The highway came to a tee at a small town. Watford City. Just another western town. You could head west or east. Joe turned right. A little while later he crossed over the broad Missouri River, climbed up out of the river valley, and drove on, out into the plains of the Dakotas. Another long, straight stretch of highway, across gently rising and falling plains, with distant silos, barns. Minot was coming up, a large town. Joe considered his next step.
By now, of course, the Colonel knew that Joe wasn’t on the interstate. Some time back Joe had concluded that the Colonel must have had a reason to intercept him before he reached Bismarck, the state capital now some 115 miles south. It might have been a good reason, but Joe didn’t care. He wanted nothing to do with the Colonel.
The Colonel would be aware that there were not a lot of route options. Doubtless back in the chopper by now, he may have decided to check out that brown Ford that had passed him. Joe bought a used pickup truck in Minot, a four-year-old Toyota with the extended cab and with a canopy over the bed, in which he could stow the gear he’d taken with him, mostly guns, but also a box or two of important papers and money. At a sporting goods store he picked up an air mattress and a sleeping bag and some interesting camping gear, including a cooler. At a supermarket he bought ice and groceries.
It was time to make some phone calls. Joe had several safe phone systems, telephone exchanges that would pass on messages. He requested the operators to pass on messages to three different numbers, asking that if possible he should be called back at the number of this pay phone in Minot. On one of the exchanges—this one located in Fort Smith, Arkansas—he also recorded a message that would be passed on to Helen. The message didn’t reveal his location but it warned her to beware of visitors. “Don’t talk to the Colonel,” he’d said. “Your Durango is in the parking lot behind the Holiday Inn Hotel, on Last Chance Gulch, in downtown Helena.” He did not say anything about missing her, or coming back.
By the time he’d finished with that message and hung up it was just a short wait until one of his contacts called back. He spent the time sitting in his newly acquired pickup truck, next to the phone, with the truck door open, eating a sandwich. The caller was an old pal from Philadelphia. Joe asked him to check out a few things for him. One was the whereabouts of Caspar Darnay. Also, whatever information could be gathered about this bombing in Detroit, and if his name was really associated with it. And finally, what was Mulheisen’s address and phone number? The caller said he’d do his best. Joe thanked him and said he’d call him again, in a few hours, using a different network.
Minot did not interest Joe. He wasn’t staying. He finished his meal and, when he didn’t hear from his other contacts, he took off. He drove north again for a while, then resumed his eastward movement, sticking to small roads. It was slower than traveling the interstate, or the main trunk lines, but as there was no traffic, few towns, it wasn’t much slower. The main thing slowing him was that he continued to take alternate routes rather than direct routes. The little Toyota pleased him. It drove comfortably, was compact, and got very good gas mileage.
It was quite dark when he stopped at a crossroads service station near the Minnesota border. He fueled up and called his contacts. This time he had only a short time to wait before they called back. The Philadelphia guy informed him of what he already knew, that Caspar was out of the pen. Apparently, he was in Chicago, but the Philly connection didn’t have a contact for him. He’d keep working on it. He informed Joe that Mulheisen had retired from the Detroit police force. He also filled him in on the fact of Mulheisen’s mother having been injured in the bombing, the same one Joe had asked about. As for that, so far he hadn’t come up with any mention on the grapevine of Joe’s name in connection. He’d keep on that too. He provided Mulheisen’s phone number and address.
Joe thanked him and turned to his other sources. One of them, in Los Angeles, had heard that Echeverria was, indeed, still alive. He was said to be looking for Joe. If Joe liked, L. A. would make further inquiries. Joe liked.
Where was Caspar? L.A. had heard he was still in the pen, in Illinois. Joe asked about a few other old friends, chatted a bit, and said he’d call back . . . tomorrow, possibly.
The third contact was a deep mob insider, now living in Miami. Joe’s message had been passed on from his old contact number in Brooklyn. “How do you like Miami?” Joe asked. The guy said he liked it, but it wasn’t Brooklyn. You had a
feeling, he said, that you weren’t in the middle of things, you were in some place that didn’t matter. Joe knew the feeling, he said, and asked: “You ever run into the Yak?”
“Oh, yeah,” Miami said, “Alia time. I din’t know you knew the Yak.”
Joe said he knew of him, mostly. “What do you know about this bombing in Detroit, a while back?”
Miami didn’t know much. It was nothing to do with the mob, the old mob, as far as he knew—maybe the Colombians, or one of them. He’d never heard Joe’s name mentioned in that context. He knew nothing about the investigation. He was retired. He said he’d say hi to the Yak when he saw him. Joe told him not to bother; the Yak wouldn’t remember him.
Joe could hardly wait for the guy to hang up so he could call Roman Yakovich, onetime back watcher, gun bearer, and all-around henchman to the late Big Sid Sedlacek, Helen’s father. The Yak, too, was retired, but he and Joe had collaborated successfully on a few occasions of late. Joe couldn’t think why he hadn’t called the Yak in the first place.
“Roman,” he said, when he got through, “I’m kind of in a jam. Can you meet me in Detroit?”
The Yak could. He said he’d leave Miami that evening. But Joe calmed him. There was no great hurry. And no, this had nothing to do with Helen. It was a problem strictly relating to Joe. Better not to mention it to Helen. They agreed to meet in three days, at a bar in Grosse Pointe, Cupid’s.
Joe was pleased with his day’s work. He’d planned to find a state park, or maybe just a lonely country road, and sack out under the stars. But he didn’t feel in the least tired. He’d spent the previous night in a motel in Glendive, near the Montana line. It was from there that he’d called the Colonel and arranged to meet him in Bismarck. Clearly, the Colonel had attempted to jump the gun and had calculated about when Joe would be in western North Dakota. Joe was glad that the Colonel had gotten a little too cute; it had jarred Joe awake.
He decided to drive on through the night. It had been years since he’d done anything like this. He used to love driving through the night when he was a kid. This would be enjoyable, he felt.
It was a quiet night of small towns, few and far between at first, under the huge black sky. Usually, drifting through on the main street, his was the only vehicle. A gas station might be open, but little else. The one traffic light was a blinker. Joe liked, for some reason, the lighted clocks in the windows of closed gas stations—they looked nice and lonely, archaic.
Toward dawn, when he found himself edging down through the Minnesota north country, the towns began to pop up more frequently. Still, the rare traffic was usually a lone pickup dragging a fishing boat on a trailer, eager to be first on one of the many lakes—whether fishing or getting out to set the decoys for duck hunting, Joe didn’t know. The sun came hobbling over the pines and not long after he saw the first yellow school bus. Joe stopped for coffee and gas and studied his road maps.
Did he really want to go down to Chicago to look up Caspar? He didn’t feel like it. Caspar could wait. So now the choice was to either drive to Manitowoc, on Lake Michigan, and take the ferry across to Michigan, or head across the Upper Peninsula. Either way, he was sure, would be safe. If the Colonel was still looking for him he’d need a lot of resources to cover all the possible routes.
Another possibility occurred to him. He had a contact in Green Bay, a strange guy who spent a lot of time on the Internet. Brooker Moos was a conspiracy junkie, a poop dump, a place where information went to die. Joe had met him in a tavern, in Chicago, and they’d hit it off for some reason. They had played bumper pool, then some other machine games. Brooker was a whiz at games. But most of all he liked to get his teeth into a story, a myth, particularly a conspiracy theory, and run it down to the last shred of credibility.
Moos (he pronounced it “Mooz,” and said the unusual first name was an old family name—“generations of Brookers . . . we’re Dutch”) was a slender, handsome young man who wore photosensitive lenses mounted in genuine tortoiseshell frames. He was always meticulously shaven, with a fresh haircut, given to wearing neat slacks and a tattersall shirt, with a knit tie and a corduroy sport coat. He would have been an ordinary, nice-looking fellow, but there was something amiss, some vagueness in his expression, a shadow of weakness, or it might have been a half-obscured cruelty. It was that ambiguous face that had attracted Joe’s attention: the man could be your friendly dentist or a mass murderer . . . perhaps both. At first, he’d wondered if Brooker was gay, but he had yet to find any real sign of it. Still, something was a bit wrong. Joe liked him, though. He was bright, amusing, and even charming, in a way.
Brooker had moved from Chicago to Green Bay a while back. Joe wasn’t sure why, but Brooker had said that it was because there was “too much to do” in Chicago. It was distracting. It was much quieter in Green Bay, presumably. There may have been other reasons, Joe reckoned, possibly legal reasons.
Brooker didn’t seem to have a regular source of income, or if he did it wasn’t enough. And yet he kept up appearances. “People respect a man who is dressed nicely. They answer your questions, tell you just about anything, really, at least if you’re not too pressing or trying to throw your weight around. Why wouldn’t I wear a tie? Should I go out in baggy, dirty jeans and an old shirt with a sports logo on it?” Joe saw his point.
Moos had won a nice chunk of cash from Joe playing the games. That didn’t bother Joe, but he noticed that Brooker seemed truly delighted. Obviously, the money was sorely needed. Joe also noticed that Brooker was a guy who possessed unusual information, of a vaguely suspect nature, about people who didn’t care for information about them being made public.
They were watching a fellow on the television news being arraigned. The man had posted a bond for $250,000. “He can afford it,” Brooker had said. “He lives out in Briarwood, a million-dollar house. His income just from the limo companies runs a couple of hundred thou a year, and that’s only one of his businesses.”
Brooker had tossed this off with confidence. He’d noticed that Joe was interested. He smiled. “His wife is an ex-airline hostess. She runs the hair parlor biz. That’s worth a couple of million. You know how many hair parlors there are in Chicago? Close to two thousand. They all have to pay to stay in business.”
“How do you know?” Joe said skeptically.
“It’s based on their income,” Brooker said. “That runs to something like fifty million. It’s a matter of record.” He went on to outline it in terms of number of clients, the cost of a perm, a tint, a whole host of other services. Anyone could figure it out. “Plus, of course, I know a few people, who tell me things.”
Joe was impressed. Later, Brooker had provided him with some interesting information on a client. After that, Joe sent him money, from time to time, just to keep the connection alive.
Joe was still in Minnesota. He had just crossed the Mississippi River. It wasn’t far to the Wisconsin border. He figured he could make it to Green Bay in a few more hours. It was more or less on his way, regardless of what route he took from there to Detroit. He could go north, to the U.P., or take the ferry across the lake, or even go down to Chicago.
It was now full morning. Joe called Brooker. The phone rang four times and then Brooker’s recorded voice said, “I gotta sleep some time. Leave a message.” Joe left a message: he’d be in Green Bay around noon, he thought. In the meantime, Brooker might want to investigate what was available on the Net concerning the bombing in Detroit. Especially, Joe suggested, he should look for any connection with Joe, any mention of his name. Joe would call when he got there.
“Don’t call here,” a voice broke in.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Joe said.
“I never actually sleep,” Brooker said. “But don’t call here. I’m pretty sure this line is bugged.”
“So where do I call?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. And don’t come here. We’ll figure something out. I’ll get going on this stuff.” He hun
g up.
Now what? Joe shrugged and got into the truck. Wisconsin was a different place, all rolling hills, farms, trees still in their autumn colors. Very beautiful, but too crowded for a guy who had gotten used to Montana—you couldn’t even see to the next hill because the trees were in the way. Small towns, one after another, with odd new industries in the middle of nowhere, all with grandly landscaped grounds—the electronics industry, insurance companies. It was a strange countryside; silicon valley among the cheesemakers.
By the time he got to Green Bay Joe had a plan. He didn’t feel tired, but he knew he should rest. Brooker lived in a small house on the edge of the city, all but surrounded by industrial works of a generally maritime nature, structures for loading lake boats, huge parking lots for semitrailers, small manufacturers of maritime gear. There were only a couple of houses on the block. The paving of the street was broken up by the passage of heavy equipment. Joe cruised past.
The house was a little square clapboard affair with a four-sided roof, probably four rooms, at the most. It had a stout, industrial-strength mesh wire fence around it. The yard was bare of all but tufts of grass and weeds. An old Pontiac was parked in front, the tires a little low. Joe noticed a couple of satellite dishes mounted on the roof. He didn’t see any other vehicles around.
Joe drove out on a county road toward the lake. It was only a mile or so to the shore road. He turned south. From this road he could occasionally glimpse the lake through trees, cottages, and the sparsely grassed dunes, a narrow view, gray-blue and cold as the North Sea, but without significant surf. Eventually, he came to a small town and found a Bide-A-Wee motel with worn and shabby cottage units. He went to bed and slept for several hours, until well after dark.
After he’d showered and shaved he dressed in dark clothes and went out to eat. An hour later he slipped into the back door of Brooker’s house and found him hunched over one of his computers in the living room. There were three other computers, all displaying either Web sites or screen savers.
