[Mark Taylor 01.0] No Good Deed

by M. P. McDonald

  He wasn’t even sure what had killed the people. Leaning forward, he peered at the photos looking for clues. Other than the blood and bodies, there didn’t seem to be much out of the ordinary. There was no debris or smoke, so a bomb wasn’t likely. For so many to die or be injured, it had to have been something quick. Automatic gunfire?

  As he studied the photos, he began seeing individuals. A blond woman still clutching a small child. Poking out from beneath a man was a tiny foot. A baby. Mark gagged and braced his hands on the counter, hanging his head. Several slow deep breaths later, he tried again, taking each photo down. They were dry enough.

  He didn’t want to see the faces, he only wanted to find clues, but his eye was drawn to the faces despite his attempts to look past them. It was no use. Everybody became a person. Every person became someone’s child, someone’s mother, someone’s best friend.

  Or someone’s torturer. Mark snapped the fourth picture from the clip. Shit! Jim Sheridan. What the hell was he doing at a Cub’s game? Not that it mattered. He was there in the picture. A victim just like the rest.

  He couldn’t look anymore. Not now.

  What the hell was he supposed to do with these pictures? Mark yanked open the door of the dark room and stalked to the kitchen. He could throw them out. The trash was right there. He could pretend he had never seen them. His shoulders slumped. No he couldn’t. As tempting as it was, the dream would come tonight no matter what. Tossing out the photos wouldn’t change that.

  What he needed was a shot of whiskey or a tumbler full of scotch, but he would have to make do with a lite beer.

  Half the beer went down in one long guzzle, then he grabbed a second out of the fridge, tucked the pictures under his arm, and trudged to the sofa. He dropped the stack of pictures on the coffee table. In a corner of his mind, he had an idea that if he got plastered, maybe the dream that finished off the photos would never materialize.

  He finished the beer and opened the second before flipping on the television, seeking distraction. His eyes kept straying to the pictures despite the baseball game playing on TV. Maybe because of it. The second beer went down almost as fast as the first, and he debated getting a third. Before he made up his mind, the phone rang, but he let it go three rings before he bothered to check the caller ID. It was Jessie. Part of him was glad, he hadn’t had a chance to talk to her yet today as she’d had an early meeting, but right at the moment, he wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  “Yeah?” There was a gaping silence on the other end and Mark winced, picturing Jessie’s surprise at his abrupt answer.

  “Well, aren’t you full of sunshine and light.” She was pissed.

  Mark closed his eyes and circled the heel of his hand on his forehead. “Sorry, Jess. I just developed my film.”

  Jessie’s voice lost its sarcasm. “It’s a bad one? What happens?”

  He nodded to the first question even though she couldn’t see it. “Yeah. Real bad. Something big. And...And there’s something else...”

  “Someone you know?”

  Sheridan’s final grimace, frozen on his face, shouldn’t bother him so much. The bastard had it coming. “Yeah, I know him, that’s for sure.” He flipped the picture over. “It’s Sheridan.” Mark stood and paced to the window.

  “Jim Sheridan?”

  “Yep.” That third beer called to him and he heeded the call. With the phone tucked between his chin and shoulder, he opened the fridge and retrieved two more bottles and returned to the sofa. “And hundreds of others.”

  “Shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” He laughed, but the sound died in his throat. “What do I do?” It wasn’t fair to ask her. It was his responsibility. He sucked in a breath. His responsibility. Had he answered his own question? Grabbing the third beer, he gave the top a savage twist.

  Jessie’s voice cut through his inner turmoil, “Listen, Mark. I’ll be home soon, I’m just leaving work. We’ll think of something. Have you eaten yet?”

  Mark lifted the beer; despite the calories, it wouldn’t count as food. “No, I’m having my own little cocktail party.”

  He heard her sigh. “I’ll grab some takeout. Don’t worry, we’ll work this out.”

  Mark nodded again. “Okay.”

  Jessie juggled the bags of Chinese food as she opened the door. “Hey, I’m here.”

  Silence greeted her announcement. Puzzled, she set the bags down on the counter and went to the living room. Mark sat on the edge of the sofa, the fingertips of one hand resting on the mouth of a beer bottle. His other held a photo.

  She walked to the back of the sofa and stopped behind him. Three empty bottles lined the right side of the coffee table. “Mark?”

  Mark started and the bottle teetered, but he steadied it before it toppled. He looked over his shoulder. “I didn’t hear you come in.” His voice sounded wooden and his eyes were dull.

  She leaned over and nuzzled his neck. “I brought food. Come and eat.”

  “Don’t you want to see the pictures?”

  “Not yet. I think we should eat first.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He stood, swayed for a second, and then ambled out to the kitchen.

  He sounded distant and he hadn’t even asked what she had brought. “I got Chinese.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I hope it tastes as good as it smells.” She had a feeling she could have brought him a plate of dog food and he would have had the same reaction.

  Mark loaded a plate with fried rice, cashew chicken, and egg rolls. Jessie filled a dish for herself as well, and poured glasses of ice water for the both of them. Mark didn’t seem to notice when she took his beer and set it on the counter. He had brought the pictures in with him, and they lay face down on the table beside his plate.

  “I wonder what he’s doing at a Cub’s game?”

  Mark stared at the end of an egg roll. “Yeah, I can’t picture him in that light.” He shrugged and took a bite. After chewing for a few seconds, he said, “I guess he’s a normal guy most of the time.”

  Jessie scooped up a forkful of fried rice. “Okay, so maybe we can get him to cancel his game plans.”

  Mark put the egg roll down. His mouth set in a hard line as he stared past her, his fingers drumming on the table. He didn’t speak, but bent his head and took a deep breath. After a lengthy silence, he met her gaze, his expression defiant. “What if I don’t want to save him?” He turned the pictures face up, and then pushed them across the table.

  She winced at the images and set her plate aside, no longer hungry. Even though she knew what the guy had done to Mark; had even seen the pictures of it, she couldn’t hate him. Jessie recalled the day she met Sheridan. Her first impression had been that he was cold, but then she saw something else. A dedication that she understood, and she couldn’t help admiring his attempt to seek the truth.

  Jessie searched his eyes, knowing that she had to word this just right. “I know that Sheridan isn’t high on your list of favorite people.” Ignoring his ‘ya think’ expression, she continued, “but he still doesn’t deserve to die.” She swallowed hard, shooting another glance at the picture. “None of these people deserve to die.”

  “Maybe it’s karma.” Mark pulled the picture in front of him and his arms rested on either side of it, his fingers still drumming. The table jiggled rhythmically and Jessie knew without looking that Mark’s leg would be bouncing.

  It would be so easy to agree. Jessie squared her shoulders. Easy was never the best option. “It probably is karma or payback or whatever the hell you want to call it, but there’s a reason you get these photos and dreams, Mark. You have this...gift—this power, to see the future.” He cringed at that, but Jessie forged on, “I don’t think you are supposed to pick and choose who you’ll save.”

  Mark glared at her before shoving away from the table. He snagged his beer off the counter and stormed into the living room.

  Jessie sighed, resting her forehead in her hands. What a mess. She stood and
began to put the food away, deciding to let Mark settle down a bit before approaching him again. Refilling her water glass, she took it out to the living room.

  Mark leaned a shoulder against the window frame, his back to Jessie as he stared out the window. Every so often, he tipped the bottle and took a swig.

  “I should hate the guy.” He sounded weary.

  Jessie muted the ball game.

  Mark tilted the bottle, draining it. He absently picked at the label, peeling it back. “The things he did to me...” He sighed, then crossed to the sofa and sat beside her. “I should have felt glad when I saw him in the picture.” He raised one shoulder in a half-shrug as he pulled the label completely off the bottle. “But I didn’t. All I felt was sick.”

  “Sick at what happens to him? Or...” She left unsaid the other option, that he felt sick that he would have to save Sheridan.

  “I’ve been thinking...what if he interrogates someone and they have information. Real information. Not...not like what I had.” His voice dropped and it sounded like he almost swallowed the last words. Mark set the bottle down on the coffee table and smoothed the label flat. He turned to look at her. “What if he learned something that would save other people’s lives?”

  Jessie hadn’t considered that, but now that he mentioned it, it made sense. “And if you don’t save him, then that information remains unknown.” The idea was mind boggling.

  Mark nodded. “Yeah. It would mean that, maybe, there was a purpose for...for everything.”

  “Like that was the reason you were locked up?”

  “Ya know, when I was gone, I thought about the camera a lot.” Mark slouched back against the arm of the couch, his legs splayed at an angle under the coffee table. “There wasn’t much else to do, and I must have gone over every picture that ever came out of it...and every dream I had.” He paused as though organizing his thoughts, his gaze flicking to hers. “I realized that I had a connection with at least one person in every single photo.”

  Jessie pulled her leg up under her and leaned against the other arm, facing him. “What do you mean? What kind of connection?”

  He took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight, I found connections in at least eighty percent of them, and I’m sure if I researched it, I could find some for the other twenty percent.” Mark sat up, his pose mirroring hers. “Some were people I’ve passed on the street in the neighborhood, or relatives of people I know...someone from college. Things like that.”

  “And you never realized this before?” She reached for her water and took a sip.

  Mark shook his head. “Nope. I guess I should have, but I didn’t. I mean, I realized some of them were familiar.” He lost the smile. “But most photos weren’t so obvious.”

  “I don’t understand how you could have all those pictures, and dreams, yet not know that you knew the people in them?”

  He stood and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I sound stupid, but think about it. How many people are you acquainted with? You know, faces you nod to as you pass them in the supermarket, or at the bank. When you see them out of context, you don’t know where you know them from. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

  Jessie pursed her lips. How many people did she come into contact with every day whose faces were a blur to her? Too many. “I see your point. You said most of your photos take place right around here, right?”

  Mark nodded and began pacing behind the couch. “So, Sheridan—he came to Chicago, right? If he hadn’t met me, the camera wouldn’t have produced his photo.”

  Jessie stared at the silver label lying crinkled on the table as she thought things through. She still had questions. “So...what about nine-eleven?”

  “What do you mean?” Mark stopped mid-pace, his brows knit in confusion.

  “It took place a thousand miles from here.”

  He nodded and bent his head for a moment. When he raised it, his eyes had a haunted expression. “Yeah. That occurred to me too, but I have a feeling I must’ve had a connection to someone who died that day.”

  “You knew someone who was in one of the Towers?”

  Mark shrugged. “Maybe, or maybe one of the planes. I don’t know for sure. For days afterwards, I avoided all the coverage. I—I couldn’t even look at a newspaper.”

  Jessie imagined that it would have been torture for Mark to watch all of that when he had tried to stop it. It had been hard for her, and she didn’t have the guilt factor. “I’ll bet you did know someone. I think just about everyone in the country knows someone who knows someone who died that day.”

  He was right. She felt it in her gut. “There were a lot of people from the Chicago-area killed.” There had been lists in the Chicago papers and she had recognized a few names. Nobody she knew personally, but she had felt saddened by even the small connection.

  She became lost in her thoughts and barely noticed when Mark wandered to the windows again. A woman she had gone to school with had lost her husband on one of the planes. And a guy from her precinct had lost a brother who had been a New York police officer caught when the towers collapsed.

  “So, I guess I had to meet Jim Sheridan so that I could save him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jim scrolled through his newest memos. In the last month, intelligence chatter had picked up clues to something big, but details were sketchy. The only intelligence they had said the plan was going to happen soon, and the code name for the operation was 'Cracker Jack'. He skimmed the memos again, jotting down anything that might be of importance.

  On the top of the legal pad, he’d written Cracker Jack, and then listed questions he wanted answered. Timing, location and target. He closed the memos and opened another file with older memos. Maybe there was something in them that didn’t mean anything at the time he’d read them, but might point to something now. He pulled up the notes from current investigations. A gun dealer in the suburbs had reported a couple of men trying to buy ammunition for automatic weapons. When told that wasn’t possible, they’d asked if the owner knew how they could get it. He’d declined to help them. Security tapes had provided pictures of the men, but without names, it didn’t help much.

  “Damn it.” He rolled his chair away from the desk and put his hands behind his head, elbows out as he searched his mind. If he were a terrorist, what would be an inviting target? It would have to be somewhere with lots of people, so that they could instill terror. That’s where the terror in terrorist originated. Blowing up a government warehouse out in the desert didn’t strike fear into the heart of the average person. Terrorists’ goal was to create fear in hopes that citizens of a country would blame their own government for whatever policies that the terrorist groups had issues with.

  Grabbing his pencil, he scooted up to the desk again. It was July but past the fourth, which would have been a likely date. He clicked through his calendar to see if anything stood out. Nothing major until the air show in mid-August. That was still a few weeks away. The Taste of Chicago had already passed. There were always music festivals and concerts. Other likely targets included important buildings, but measures taken in the last few years had made it more difficult to destroy them. Jim hoped that the newer security rules at airports and around likely targets made them less desirable. Trains and subways had been targets in the past, and hard to secure. The possibilities were endless. He glanced at his watch. Almost noon. He’d been in the office since seven, and had worked sixteen hours a day for the two weeks. His team had done the same. To show his gratitude, he’d bought tickets to tonight’s Cub game for all of them. They all needed a little break to clear their heads.

  “Excuse me, Jim?”

  He glanced at the door to his office. “Yes, Beth?”

  His administrative assistant leaned into the room. “There’s a guy on line two who’s called a few times for you while you were at your meeting earlier. I offered to transfer him to another analyst, but he insisted on talking to
you. He wouldn’t leave a message or a number. Said he was calling from a pay-phone.”

  Curious, Jim nodded. “Okay. Thanks.” He reached for the phone. “Sheridan speaking.”

  He could hear someone breathing rather hard and he almost made a smart comment about how unwise it was to prank phone call the FBI. He decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the person hadn’t heard him answer, so he tried again. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  The person on the other end cleared their throat. “Uh, yeah, I’m here.”

  The voice tugged at his memory but he couldn’t place it. “Who am I speaking with?” He put his hand over his other ear to block out the noise from some colleagues trooping past his door.

  “It’s…it’s Mark Taylor.”

  Jim’s grip on the phone slipped as the shock hit him. He recovered quickly. “Taylor. What can I do for you?”

  “I have to talk to you, Sir. It’s urgent.”

  “I’m listening, so talk.”

  “Not on the phone. It’s gotta be in person.”

  Suspicion piqued but so did his curiosity. “Why can’t you tell me now?”

  “I can’t take the chance. I know this call is probably recorded.”

  Taylor didn’t have to say anything more about recorded phone calls. Jim remembered that detail as the lynch-pin of their case against him. “Okay. Fine. I’ll meet you, but it has to be somewhere public.” It wouldn’t be wise to meet the guy in a back alley; that was for sure. Taylor probably wanted nothing more than to stick a blade in him.

  “Yeah, okay. You know where O’Leary’s Pub is. Can you meet me there in an hour?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how Taylor was sure that he knew where that pub was, but then he recalled seeing Jessie Bishop at the establishment. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. It might not be a bad idea to request her presence at the meeting. “I’ll talk with you on the condition that Detective Bishop is present. I think she’s someone we both trust.” He hadn’t thought of it before, but he did trust her. She was a straight shooter.