Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  Rosemont finished his tea and offered to take the garbage bags down the stairs to the back of the building. Elliott said he’d take them down later, but Rosemont assured the older couple it was no trouble and hauled the bags out of the kitchen. He left Mavis chiding Wolf Blitzer about his critique on foreign policy, and Elliott commented how the Praetorian Guard had been the primary catalyst of the Roman Empire’s eventual collapse.

  On the second floor Rosemont turned the corner, dragging the garbage bags behind him, and almost ran into Linda Hathaway. Gemma was in the doorway of the apartment waving to her mother.

  “Close the door, honey!” Linda Hathaway said. “Eat your dinner and you can watch television until seven thirty.”

  The babysitter closed the door and Linda jogged ahead of Rosemont.

  “Hi there, sorry to be rude, I’m late for work.”

  “Your daughter’s bites seem to be fading.”

  “Yeah, until she gets bitten by another rat.”

  “I’m going to bring in fumigators for the whole apartment building.”

  “I’ve been trying to get the super to bring them in for months. I won’t hold my breath. Thanks for the offer of the lift the other day. Gotta go!”

  She was down the stairs to the first floor, and Rosemont heard the front door slam. He hadn’t called the fumigators yet, but he was going to talk to the fat-fuck super about it. Rosemont hauled the garbage bags to the back door to the apartment building. Outside he ran into the young black student, who was dropping his garbage bags beside the overflowing bins.

  “From the Weinbergers’ apartment,” Rosemont said, as if embarrassed about his good deed.

  “Sure, I know them. A real nice couple.”

  “You a college student?”

  “NYU.”

  “You don’t live on campus?”

  “This is my aunt’s apartment.”

  “The Weinbergers have got a lot of mold in their kitchen. No wonder they’re suffering from emphysema.”

  “Yeah, it’s all through my apartment, too. I’m Jesse Driscoll, by the way.”

  Rosemont didn’t want any of the tenants to know his real name, so he just said, “Norman,” and shook hands. “How do you like living here?”

  “It’s a shithole, but I can’t afford anywhere else. You want to help me take the rest of these garbage bags out to the front?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  It took Rosemont and Jesse about ten minutes, but they finally got all of the black garbage bags lined up at the curb in front of the apartment building. The physical exercise made Rosemont feel good. Like he’d accomplished something.

  “I’m going to make sure the Sanitation Department is going to clear this block,” Rosemont said. “I’ve got a call in to the city.”

  Jesse nodded. Whatever. “I’m meeting some friends at the Blind Barber, it’s a little speakeasy in Tompkins Square Park, a cool spot. You’re welcome to join us.”

  Norman Rosemont couldn’t remember when such a casual and friendly offer had been made to him, but he couldn’t accept it. He was in the apartment building under false pretences.

  “Not tonight. But thank you.”

  “Sure, no problem. Say hi to the Weinbergers for me.”

  Jesse jogged down Tenth Street. Rosemont entered the apartment building and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The door to the Weinbergers’ apartment was closed. Rosemont debated whether he should knock, but what did he have in common with some old couple who watched the news and read books?

  Except memories that they were prepared to share.

  He could give them nothing.

  Rosemont climbed to the fourth floor and was surprised to see a young man coming out of Sam Kinney’s apartment. He almost barreled right into Rosemont. He was dressed in jeans, wearing a Windbreaker with a hoodie and Adidas.

  “Hey, man, sorry!”

  “Is Sam home?”

  “No, he’s at work. He manages a hotel up on the West Side. I’m his son, by the way.”

  Rosemont noted the young man didn’t give him a name. “I didn’t know Sam had a son.”

  “Oh, yeah, the bad penny turns up when he needs money! You a friend of his?”

  “No, I’m his neighbor: Four-B.”

  “Nice to meet ya. I’ll tell my dad you came over.”

  The young man closed the door to Sam Kinney’s apartment and walked briskly to the staircase. Something about his attitude bothered Rosemont. But it was none of his business. None of his new neighbors were any of his business. He would soon be gone, and he’d never see any of them again.

  Then why was he going to miss old Sam and the Weinbergers and that NYU student?

  Rosemont opened the door to apartment 4B.

  On the stairs, the Equalizer thought he had had a close call there. He didn’t want to run into any more of Sam Kinney’s neighbors who might remember him. But that was okay.

  Sam would be dead within forty-eight hours.

  CHAPTER 34

  McCall stood in Brahms’s cluttered office while the old spymaster brought up various images of Virginia on his computer screen. He also had the states of West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Pennsylvania in boxes around the perimeter. Mary arrived after twenty minutes. Her eyes were red rimmed from crying, but she was keeping a tight rein on her emotions. She had brought them plastic Starbucks containers, one filled with Eastern D.R. Congo Lake Kivu for her boss, the other containing Sulawesi whole-bean roast for McCall. She put a Mr. Coffee eight-cup black-and-chrome carafe on the counter to start brewing in the darkened store. She moved back into the office to where McCall was watching the computer screen but staying out of Brahms’s peripheral vision.

  “I can’t believe you asked him to come here,” Mary said tersely.

  “He needs to find someone for me. Better he’s here than sitting in his apartment with all of Hilda’s memories around him.”

  “Is that how you justify it to yourself? He needs to do one more job for you and then you’ll allow him to grieve? You don’t have much of a conscience, do you, Mr. McCall?”

  McCall didn’t answer.

  Control’s story to Emma Marshall could have just been a fond reminiscence of a childhood outing one summer. Or he could have made it up on the spot. Control was good at fabricating scenarios. Captain Josh Coleman had known Control’s real name: James Thurgood Cameron. He had been taken out of existence because he had stumbled upon a sinister plot that had been unfolding at The Company. One that had dire consequences that McCall was not privy to. All he knew was that the stakes were high.

  “Brahms is talking about closing the store,” Mary said. “What is he going to do then?”

  “What will you do then?”

  “I’ll have to look for a new job. I’ve loved being here with him, just the two of us against the world. My dad left my mother four weeks after I was born. I could have found him. Hell, I’m working for a onetime spy, he could have found him, but I never wanted to do that. I have three younger sisters that I raised with my mom, and I love them all to pieces, but they live out in the countryside in Connecticut, and I don’t think my mom has ever even walked down Broadway. This was our little piece of the city, and now with Hilda gone, I don’t think it means anything to Brahms anymore.”

  “He’s more resilient than you think.”

  Mary looked at her boss, shrouded by shadows, his full attention on his computer screen. “I’ve always worried that someone from your world will find him one night in his lonely apartment with his trains running and put a bullet in his head.”

  “I wouldn’t allow that to happen.”

  “He has no one else to turn to.”

  “He has you,” McCall said quietly. “You’re the daughter he and Hilda had always wanted. He won’t abandon you. You’ll see him through this.”

  “If you’re going to comfort me,” Brahms said without looking up from his laptop, “I’ll take a hug and another cup of coffee.”

  “One
hug and another cup of coffee coming up.” Mary kissed her boss on the top of his balding head and moved into the store to where the Mr. Coffee percolator was ready. McCall leaned over Brahms’s laptop. Brahms was putting images onto the computer screen in rapid succession.

  “I don’t have much here for you, McCall. I found some old mining towns in Virginia and Pennsylvania buried in forests that might have been attractive to a young child. Here’s one, Curtain Village, Pennsylvania, no residents, about three miles from Milesburg. An old mill, a 1830 plantation house, a couple of old houses. Then there’s Portuguese Road in Virginia. The US Army were worried that the Germans would bomb the airport, so they built a fake town just east of the Richmond International Airport, then called Byrd Airport. Roads, sidewalks, driveways leading nowhere, mailboxes, streets signs, even the occasional park bench. A boy of Control’s age might soon have grown tired of it, even if it did look like something out of the Twilight Zone. I found this abandoned Bethlehem steel mill, Pennsylvania, lots of connecting walkways and big rooms and rusting iron ladders, a great spooky place for a kid to play, but there’s no forests around it.”

  Mary came back with a cup of Maxwell House, which she set beside Brahms’s laptop. “I grew up with forests all around our little house in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Where’d you sneak off to play?” McCall asked.

  “There was an abandoned trolley graveyard were my sisters and I used to go.”

  “Like this?” Brahms moved to another panel, which depicted rusting and dilapidated trolley cars on tracks surrounded by forest. “There must be a dozen pictures, but this is in West Virginia.”

  “Emma Marshall thought Control had talked about this location being in Virginia, but she couldn’t say for certain,” McCall said. “She said it had ‘old rotting buildings and high-up towers and dangerous curves.’”

  “Maybe an abandoned fairground?” Mary suggested.

  Brahms’s fingers flew around the keyboard, producing multiple images of old abandoned fairgrounds. “Here’s one in Virginia. The Renaissance Fair in Fredericksburg. Forests bordering it, laid out on a lake, abandoned buildings, pointed turrets, gingerbread cottages, high towers, all decaying, lots of NO TRESPASSING signs. You might have snuck in there when you were a kid forty years ago, but now you’d get caught.”

  “But maybe you’re on the right track,” McCall said. “Maybe some smaller fairgrounds in Virginia, long forgotten, hemmed in by forests.”

  “I’ll have to search it by Google Earth quadrants.”

  “You also have to look for a set of stairs,” McCall said. “Maybe cut in the rock face around some caves. Or boat stairs leading down to a dock by a lake. Control said the stairs didn’t lead anywhere, but that might have been an exaggeration.”

  “We’re clutching at straws,” Brahms said. “All of it might have just been in Control’s head.”

  Two hours later McCall was pouring himself the last Maxwell House cup of coffee and Brahms had taken a break to rest his eyes. Mary was sitting at Brahms’s computer searching the next quadrant of forest when she said, “I might have found something.”

  Brahms immediately took her place at his desk chair. McCall came back from the darkened store. Mary pointed to what looked like vague shapes through the trees. Brahms scrolled and magnified the images until he came to what looked like an abandoned fairground buried in the forest. There was a wooden fence to keep people out, but it was in bad need of repair with several pieces of it rotting away. A set of rusting swings was in tall grass with a jungle gym. A tall, skeletal structure had at one time held some kind of ride that went in a circle, but all of the seats had been removed, so what was left were just the struts and hanging steel lines. Several wooden structures in a maze pattern, most of them collapsed, had been arcade stalls. Brahms descended the view and rotated the forest to show more of the fairground. McCall noted a wooden enclosure with bright bumper cars painted on it, but only one car was left. There were the remains of a Kamikaze pendulum ride and a partially demolished structure that had two rainbow-colored cars on two levels.

  “What would that have been?” Mary wondered.

  “A Tilt-A-Whirl,” McCall said. “Seven freely spinning cars that held four riders, all attached at fixed points on a rotating platform. As the platform revolves, parts of the platform are raised and lowered, and the resulting centrifugal and gravitational forces on the cars cause them to spin in different directions and at variable speeds. When the fairground was dismantled, most of the rides were taken away.”

  “The Ferris wheel is still standing,” Brahms said. “You can see it from this angle through the trees. All of the passenger cars are still attached, but I doubt there’d be any electricity to power it.”

  Mary looked at McCall. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  “It could be.”

  “There may be more destroyed fairgrounds or playgrounds or fenced-off recreational areas all through these Virginia woods,” Brahms said. “You can’t check all of them, McCall. It was forty years ago.”

  “I have to start somewhere. Can you print out the GPS coordinates for this abandoned fairground?”

  “Coming right up.”

  Brahms moved over to an old HP printer and jabbed at a button.

  “And after that, your search is over,” Mary said, softer. “You’re going to leave my boss alone to mourn Hilda the way he should have been doing tonight.”

  Brahms came back over and put a gentle hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Hilda would have said, ‘So, Chaim’—she never called me Brahms—‘are you happy now that you’ve done one last favor for your old friend Robert McCall?’”

  “How long does the debt to Mr. McCall have to be paid off?” Mary asked.

  “Not after tonight,” McCall said.

  Brahms handed the two printed pages to McCall.

  “Tell Hilda I say good-bye, Brahms.”

  Brahms nodded. He followed McCall out into the darkened store. Behind them, from inside Brahms’s office, they both heard Mary sobbing.

  Brahms touched McCall’s arm, turning him around. “You’ve got no backup. Mickey Kostmayer is gone and he’s not coming back. Sam’s intel is that Granny was killed in that raid on the North Korean prison camp. No one from The Company would come anywhere near you.” As if ironic: “So who you gonna call?”

  “There’s one person I might be able to reach out to.”

  McCall opened the front door to Manhattan Electronics. They could still hear Mary softly crying.

  “She loves you very much,” McCall said. “She’ll be there for you.”

  “Will you be?”

  “Always.”

  McCall walked out of the store, and Brahms closed the door gently behind him.

  * * *

  McCall drove a rental Venetian-red Hyundai into Petersburg, Virginia, past the old train station, the Siege Museum, the courthouse on East Tabb, through Old Towne with its historic buildings, to the Destiny Inn Bed and Breakfast building, circa 1894. He met her on the colonial front porch overlooking High Street. She was dressed in a Tahari pin-striped pantsuit with a Ralph Lauren silk kimono shirt and Andiamo Latosha birdcage sandals. She rose to her feet.

  Cassie said, “You know there’s a statewide manhunt out for you.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Have you found this wannabe vigilante yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why did you want to meet me on the veranda of this very charming colonial inn?”

  “You’ve heard me mention a man named Control. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth as far as anyone at The Company is concerned.”

  “But you’ve got an idea where he is?”

  “Maybe in an old house somewhere in the forests here around Petersburg. It may be two miles from this veranda, or it may be several miles, or it may not be here at all.”

  There was a pause while Cassie looked out at the picturesque streets around the Destiny Inn. “You still have friends within Th
e Company, but for some reason you couldn’t contact them. That would only leave your enemies there. So you reached out to your ex-wife, who also happens to be an ADA in New York City, which is a long way from Petersburg with no jurisdiction. Did you really believe I would help you in some covert mission?”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Cassie looked up at McCall, shading out the glare that fell across the veranda. “How dangerous is this on a scale of one to ten?”

  “If I find Control, if he’s alive, it will depend on how many men are guarding him and what kind of advantage I’ll have. You would be a diversionary measure. You wouldn’t look like a threat. You’re elegant, sophisticated, visiting friends in Petersburg, but you got lost in the forest. You won’t have to be outside this house long, maybe three or four minutes.”

  “So while I keep these guards busy, you sneak into this house and rescue your friend. I make that an eight or a nine on the danger scale.” McCall waited. There was no irony in his ex-wife’s voice. “How are my chances of equalizing the odds you’ve stacked up against me?”

  “I won’t know until I find the house. You can turn me down.”

  Cassie sighed. “And give up a chance to help you out for once?” She moved closed to him. “Do you have a map of Petersburg in your car?”

  McCall handed her a folded map. “For the time being, stay right here.”

  “How long should I wait?”

  “I’ll call you before two hours.”

  “Unless you can’t.”

  “That’s right. Then you drive back to New York.”

  Cassie looked up into McCall’s face, and her voice took on a husky quality. “I hated you for leaving me and our son all those years ago. That doesn’t mean I don’t care. I remember this man—what did you call him again? Control? He meant a lot to you once. But the odds won’t always be the way you want them to be.”

  “I’ll call you with the GPS coordinates if I find the house.”

  McCall stepped down from the veranda, fired up the rental car, and pulled away.

  Cassie looked after him with sad eyes.