The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  Prehost stopped his Suburban. “Here we go, Hoppy.”

  “You want the shotgun?”

  “Put it on the seat so we can reach it easily. We’ll say hello first. But let’s take a look inside that car before we do.”

  Hoppy approached the Pathfinder with the barrel of his handgun pointing skyward. “Some supplies in the back, Fred. Boxes and shit. I don’t see any weapons or anything.”

  Thunder shook the sky. First a sharp crack, but the rumble that followed was long and low. Raindrops dotted the dusty metal on the hood of the green Pathfinder.

  Prehost said, “Good. Pop the hood.”

  “Doors are locked.”

  Prehost walked over to the driver’s door and slammed the butt of his handgun through the glass. “Not anymore. Pop the hood.”

  Hoppy did.

  As thunder roared and echoed off the mountains, Prehost yanked at some wires in the engine compartment, eased the hood of the Pathfinder shut, then took long strides toward the cabin. He didn’t hesitate at the door. With his handgun at waist height he walked right into the cabin. Hoppy stayed a few steps behind.

  A fancy little red enamel woodstove dominated the single room. On one side was a full-size bed in an iron frame, and a rocking chair. On the other side was an oak table with two chairs, a hot plate, and a small microwave.

  “Guy’s a neat freak,” Prehost said as he lowered his gun.

  Hoppy poked his head in the door. “This ain’t no meth lab, Fred.”

  “Nope, it’s not. But there might be another building someplace where they keep the equipment, you know? Damn stuff stinks. What’s this?” He kicked at a heavy canvas suit that was folded on the floor near the door. A helmet with a mesh front topped the pile.

  Hoppy took two steps into the cabin and focused his attention on the canvas suit. He said, “I don’t know.”

  Prehost said, “Where do you think our two guys are?”

  A fresh burst of lightning lit the inside of the cabin, and thunder boomed off the log walls. Both men glanced toward the windows.

  Hoppy shook his head. “We could wait for them. Darkness might be our friend. You know they’ll be back by dark, right? Maybe even sooner if this thunderstorm sticks around. I wouldn’t want to be outside up here in a lightning storm like this.”

  “I would think that’s the case. But let’s take a closer look outside again first. Make sure our friends don’t have another way out of here.”

  “Wait, Fred. What’s this?” Hoppy walked over to a small portable television that sat on the oak table.

  “It’s a TV, Hoppy. You don’t have one at home?”

  “Fred, it has a cable attached to the back. There’s no cable up here. You’re telling me that this Oliver guy went to the trouble of installing a satellite dish just to feed this crappy little nine-inch set?”

  Prehost stepped back and waved his hand at the TV. He said, “Wait, wait, wait. This isn’t from a satellite dish. There’s no receiver here. Those dishes require that you have a receiver. You know, to process the signal. You see a receiver?”

  “Fred, screw the receiver. There’s no power here. This cabin doesn’t even have electricity. This TV must be running on batteries or a generator or something. Something’s fishy.”

  “Did you see a generator outside? There has to be a generator for the TV and the microwave.”

  “No, I didn’t see a generator.”

  “Solar?”

  “Did you see panels on the roof? I didn’t.”

  Hoppy lifted the thin black cable from the TV and tracked it out the nearest window. Even in the dying light of dusk he could tell that the cable snaked along the dusty path that disappeared into the pine woods behind the cabin to the north. He cringed as a bolt of lightning flashed on the Divide.

  Prehost looked over Hoppy’s shoulder and said, “I think this might be some kind of closed-circuit feed, Hoppy. That’s why there’s no receiver.”

  “What the hell?”

  Prehost said, “Turn it on, Hoppy. Turn on that set.”

  Hoppy moved to the front of the television and pushed the tiny button marked “Power.”

  An image flickered to life on the screen. Hoppy said, “This thing must be using batteries. Has to be.”

  The two cops immediately lowered themselves onto the wooden chairs that were beside the table and leaned toward the little appliance while they tried to make sense of what they were seeing on the TV. The colors of the image were muted to tinted grays and pastels.

  “What is that? Is that a fence? What’s that fence for? Is that like a corral or something?” Hoppy asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. That’s a person outside there, closest to the camera, with his back to us. He’s wearing like a . . . helmet or something. And over there, see, that’s a person inside crouching on the far side, inside the fence. See that, right there. That’s a person.”

  “Is that Clone?”

  “Which one?”

  “Inside.”

  “I can’t tell,” Prehost said. “Maybe.”

  “Me neither. But I think it might be.”

  “Whoa! What was that flash? Turn up the sound.”

  The screen momentarily went almost totally white before the flash narrowed to a spot that was close to the human who was crouching inside the fence.

  Hoppy asked, “Was that lightning that did that, Fred? What made the TV do that?” He kept his fingertip pressed to the “Volume ^” button, but he heard nothing come from the speaker of the TV set.

  “No, I don’t think so, Hoppy.”

  “It looks like fire.”

  “Is this live? What are we watching?” asked Fred.

  “I can think of one good way to find out.” Hoppy stood from the table and moved toward the door.

  Prehost watched the screen as the guy outside the enclosure underhanded something over the fence. Whatever he threw landed within feet of the person inside the enclosure and seemed to deflate. Prehost said, “Wait! Look!”

  “You go ahead. I’m going to follow that cable, Fred, see where it goes. This is too weird for me.”

  Prehost watched until another flash turned the screen white. He wasted a moment trying to figure out what he had just seen before he took off after Hoppy. Once he was outside he stopped at the Suburban to grab the shotgun.

  Hoppy already had it. Fred snagged his big flashlight out of the backseat and jogged out behind the cabin to find the cable so he could follow his partner into the woods.

  Rain had started falling steadily. Prehost decided it was a really shitty time for the arrival of the monsoons.

  CHAPTER 45

  Kelda waited until Bill Graves got in his car and drove away before she returned to Maria Alija’s car. Graves’s words echoed in her head.“Are you trying to be a hero again, Kelda?”

  Maybe I am,she thought as she recalled how it all started.

  It was that the-shock-is-wearing-off-and-I’ve-never-been-so-tired-in-my-life week after the jetliners crashed into the buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C.

  She was with Ira for the first time since that morning. He was sitting on the sofa in Kelda’s living room, and she was on the floor, her legs resting on a carefully arranged array of bags of frozen peas. She’d worked almost nonstop for over a week as part of a task force of FBI accounting specialists that was trying to follow the money trail the hijackers had left behind.

  She considered it the equivalent of tracking scat.

  After a week of relentless activity and almost no sleep, the pain in her lower legs was close to intolerable. She silently compared it to the suffering of strangers in New York and Washington, knew that her pain was nothing, and shifted her weight on the peas.

  Ira shook a copy of theDenver Post at her and said, “No, no! It’s too good for him.”

  “What is?” Kelda said. Her attention was focused on CNN. Jeff Greenberg was talking to Gary Hart. She still wasn’t sure why.

  “Bush said he wants bin Laden de
ad or alive. That’s too good for him. Killing him is too easy a way out for him after what he did to us. Putting him on trial or putting him in jail? What good does that do?”

  “What?” She lowered the volume on the television. Jeff Greenberg’s lips kept moving. “I’m sorry. What?”

  He repeated his argument.

  She reached out and caressed the long muscles of his calf. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  Ira didn’t want to be comforted. “No, Kelda. Don’t put me off about this. I mean it.”

  She turned her head to face him. “Okay. I believe you mean it. But we don’t even know where bin Laden is yet.”

  Ira dropped the paper onto his lap. His eyes were bleak. “We can’t do anything about him, can we? Can we even find him?” She knew he was asking her the questions as an FBI agent, not as a girlfriend.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not easy.” On the screen across the room, a wall in a firehouse in New York City was covered with photographs of young men holding small children, of young women hugging their families. Even without any commentary, Kelda knew that the pictures were of those who had never made it home from the World Trade Center.

  She started to weep.

  What about Tom Clone?” Ira whispered a couple of hours later as he lay beside her in bed.

  “What about him?” Kelda said.

  “Is ‘dead or alive’ good enough for him?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “He terrorized Joan,” Ira argued. “What did we do? All we did was put him in prison. Whatever happened to ‘an eye for an eye’? Where’s the retribution? Where’s the justice?”

  When she replied, she spoke into the darkness. He was taking her someplace she didn’t want to go, and her voice was as tired as she was. “He’s on death row, Ira. He’s eventually going to die for what he did to Ivy Campbell.”

  “Is that enough? He thinks we don’t even know about Joan.”

  She counted to three. “He can only die once no matter how many women he killed.”

  “He terrorized her. Imagine her fear at the end. When he was stalking her. When she was on that cliff. Imagine what she felt. He’ll die not even knowing that he’s being punished for what he did to Joan. He’ll die not knowing what she felt when she died.”

  Kelda thought about Jones. About that moment on the cliff in Maui.

  Ira pulled himself up on his elbows. “Wouldn’t you like a week alone in a room with bin Laden?”

  What?“Yeah. Of course I would. I’d take an hour alone with him. Hell, give me ten minutes.”

  “I can’t give you that. I wish to God I could. But maybe I can get you ten minutes alone in a room with Tom Clone. We could force-feed him some of the agony that Joan felt. We could force-feed him some of Joan’s fear. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “Ira, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think I have an idea.”

  She swung her legs to the floor. “I have to pee.”

  Ira called after her as she crossed the room. “We could get even, Kelda. We could get even. How many times can people say that they really, really got even?”

  The next morning, Kelda was up and ready to leave the house before dawn. She had dreamed about Jones. Jones was the woman in the chasing pictures. In Kelda’s dreams the paintings came to life and Jones was the one running, running, running.

  Kelda shook Ira awake before she left. He’d been sleeping on his back and he woke up without moving. Only his open eyelids betrayed the fact that he’d abandoned his dreams.

  “What would I have to do?” she asked him, her lips inches from his. She could taste his sour breath.

  His heart rate quickened. “All you have to do is get into the property room in Park County and get some of Ivy Campbell’s blood. A piece of the clothing she was wearing the day she was killed, something like that. I don’t need much. Some, a scrap, but it has to have her blood on it. There was lots of blood. We only need a little. We’ll do it together.”

  She thought about the implications of his words. She thought about her dreams the night before. About Jones’s nightmare on the cliff’s edge. “I can do that,” she said.

  “I know you can,” he said.

  He kissed her. “I’ll do the lab work. That’s my thing. But we’ll do the time alone in the room with Clone together.”

  “I’ll get my ten minutes?”

  “Minimum.”

  She stared into his eyes trying to detect bravado or hesitation or doubt. “Once I go to Park County and . . . you know, there won’t be any turning back, Ira.”

  “No turning back, Kelda.”

  She pulled the covers from his naked body and straddled him. He reached below her skirt but didn’t take his eyes from her face.

  Kelda literally jumped when her cell phone rang. She took her hands from the wheel of Maria Alija’s car, fumbled for her phone, not Maria’s, and checked the number on the screen. The call had originated from a Boulder exchange, and although the number seemed vaguely familiar she wasn’t sure who it was.

  “Hello,” she said.

  A male voice said, “I’m looking for an FBI agent named James. Is she at this number?”

  She recognized the voice. “Hello, Detective Purdy. You’ve found her.”

  “I figured that. I’ve also found a red Vespa. You interested in taking a look at it with us?”

  “Absolutely. Yes, yes. Where are you?”

  “You know Boulder?”

  “Well enough.”

  “I’m in the parking lot of the Mental Health Center at Iris and Broadway. Know where that is?”

  “I know where Iris is and I know where Broadway is. The Mental Health Center is right on the corner?”

  “Yeah. Northeast corner. Red brick building. One story. You’ll see us. We’re the ones with the police cruisers and the yellow crime-scene tape.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head at his sarcasm before she regained her composure and said, “It turns out that I’m in Boulder right now, Detective. I’ll be there within minutes.”

  “Why am I not surprised to hear that you’re in town? You’re where exactly? Like the vicinity of Walnut Street maybe? Up by the Mall?”

  She thought,How the hell does he know that? “Ten minutes, Detective Purdy. Ten minutes.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Prehost caught up with Hoppy about a hundred feet into the woods. Hoppy was standing still, straddling the black cable that led from the log cabin window. A second cable, bright yellow, and fatter than the video feed, came from the other direction and disappeared into the boarded-up entrance of an old mine. Thick timbers that were deeply creviced from a century of exposure to the elements outlined the mine entrance. From somewhere deep inside the mine, they could hear a muted, rhythmic rumble.

  The rain was still falling in intermittent fat drops. Occasional thunder shook the trees.

  Hoppy whispered, “Fred, that there’s a power cable.” He pointed at the entrance to the mine. “And that’s a generator running inside there, I bet. He has the entrance insulated for sound.”

  Prehost nodded. “Let’s go. I want to see what the hell is going on with that fence.”

  Hoppy moved the shotgun into his right hand and stepped back. “You first, Fred. This one’s yours.”

  They walked another hundred feet into the aspen trees and lodge-pole pines before they saw an eruption of flames through the trees and heard someone wail, “I know a’out ’ear! I know a’out ’ear! No ’ire! No ’ore ’ire!”

  “Then tell me about the girl.”

  “I didn’t kill any girl. I didn’t. You ha’e to ’elieve ’e!”

  “I know who killed the girl, Tom.”

  Hoppy whispered, “What the hell is he talking about? He knows who killed what girl?”

  Prehost looked back and glared at him while he raised an index finger to his lips. He mouthed, “Quiet, we may learn something.”

  “He knows
who killed what girl? What’s he saying, Fred?”

  “Shut up.”

  The light was more dusk than day but Prehost could see the man with the motorcycle helmet standing between the forest and the fence. On the far side of the enclosure another man crouched in the corner.

  A crack of lightning lit the sky all around them. The person in the motorcycle helmet spun at the rumble from the storm, then dropped to his hands and knees.

  Hoppy hissed, “Shit, he saw us.”

  Prehost shook his head. “Stay still.”

  The rain accelerated. The drops grew smaller and dozens were multiplied by thousands. Around them the aspen leaves flickered from their impact. In the enclosure, the dirt began to turn dark.

  The person in the helmet continued to stare into the forest.

  His voice as quiet as he could make it, Hoppy told his partner, “He has something in his hand.”

  “Shhh.”

  Inside the enclosure, the flames that had erupted moments before became smaller, mostly licking the ground.

  “Watch it, Fred,” Hoppy whispered. “He has something in his hand.”

  The person in the helmet suddenly underhanded whatever he was holding in his hand. The object hit a spindly aspen tree twenty feet or so in front of the Park County cops and immediately burst apart.

  Both men dropped to the ground.

  Seconds passed and Hoppy felt a bitter tingle in his nose. He said, “Shit. That’s gas. Run, Fred, run.”

  As they scrambled to their feet they could see that the person in the helmet was trying to light matches in the rain.

  The two cops sprinted in opposite directions.

  Prehost yelled, “Police! Drop your weapons! Raise your hands!”

  From the enclosure came the unbelieving cry of a reply. “ ’olice? ’olice? Really? ’olice?”

  The person in the helmet stopped fumbling with the matches. Instead, he reached down and grabbed something out of a cooler on the ground. He spotted Hoppy running away through the woods and immediately threw the object at him.