by Andrew Post
Brody could barely take a breath. He wasn’t even present enough to think about a retort, the pain in his belly so immense that it felt like he might break apart entirely, and left in his stead would be a Brody-shaped mass of nothing but agony.
“Nobody wants to see the hero go bad. So, let’s take our little eraser here.” Titian swiveled the knife. “And rub you, the mistake, out before it becomes too much of a sob story.”
A shot rang out—and Titian’s chin evaporated from his face in a burst of red. The knife withdrew and he stumbled back, clutching his partly broken face.
Brody threw a hand over the wound in his stomach, the blood hot against his palm.
Up the hall Thorp advanced, pistol in two hands. He moved into position over Titian, sitting up with the geyser of red pouring from the rat’s nest of his beard. Thorp aimed down at him. His mouth hardened, his lips tightening and then flattening over and over. He said he’d never kill again, and Brody wasn’t about to have him break that promise yet again.
Brody peeled his hand off his wound and struggled to his feet. He reached for the weapon.
Thorp glanced at Brody now standing next to him. “I can do it.”
“Give it to me.”
“I’ll do it. Just let me do it.”
Titian looked at the two men arguing over who was going to kill him. He seemed indifferent to what they decided. He closed his eyes, the realization that he’d been bested settling on his features. It was a bad wound—his bottom lip was gone and with it a few of his teeth—but he’d survive. Everyone present knew that.
A dry scuffle, bare feet on dirt. Nectar stood at the end of the hallway, draped in her soiled sheet, pulled tight and held at the neck. Nectar’s voice, bouncing off the metal walls, came like a song, so soft and delicate, barely a voice at all. “Thorp.”
Thorp glanced at his sister, then at Brody, then at Titian. The gun was handed over.
Brody took it in his hands, drew back the hammer, and extended the barrel down at Titian, who struggled to breathe, sputtering. When the barrel was on him, he didn’t close his eyes. Brody and Titian gazed at one another wordlessly for a few moments, the killing implement between them.
Titian’s hand fell away from the wreckage of his face. He drew a breath to say something, but it was cut short. The shot rang out, the flash, the bullet was propelled, and Titian was silent. The gun was thrown aside, and the hand holding it returned to tend the wound.
Every few miles Thorp asked Brody how Nectar was doing since the roads were too bad for him to steal a glance. Hubert Ward’s vehicle had a full tank, and once the engine warmed up, the heat was a blessed thing.
Groaning with the pain still screwed in deep in his belly, Brody put his arm over the seat and looked into the back, seeing Nectar sound asleep, coiled up on her side, knees pulled to her chest. The ping sent across her cheek displayed a peaked look about her, the sockets surrounding her heavy-lidded eyes concave, her wrists spindly. Her hair looked lifeless and hung in one greasy banner from her head. She had her brother’s nylon jacket folded and balled up under her head. The ribs, showing even through the thick material of her sweatshirt, rose and fell evenly.
He reached into the backseat and carefully adjusted the stretched out, billowing neck of her sweatshirt, looping it onto her bony shoulder. “She’s good,” Brody answered Thorp each time.
They drove out of Chicago and onto the highway toward the farmhouse.
Thorp swore under his breath.
Brody didn’t need to be able to see through the windshield to know what was going on; he could hear the gentle thrum of the police Darter hovering over the farmhouse.
They didn’t evade what was waiting for them, didn’t punch the gas and tear off farther into the frozen night. They were all hurt, and even if it meant going to the hospital and lying in bed cuffed to one of the rails, it was better than bleeding out in a field somewhere. Thorp parked in the driveway behind the collection of police cruisers. Brody noticed Thorp looking out the passenger window.
The passenger door was yanked open, and Brody’s sonar felt the person’s face and body standing there—and saw it to be wearing a duster and a fedora.
“Nathan,” Brody said, even managing a tired smile. “I guess you got my e-mail.”
“As well as an anonymous tip.” Nathan Pierce gestured to the side yard. The Fairlane and the Zäh were being towed out of the bog by chains, both letting loose a flood of water from their interiors. “Why don’t you do me a favor and step out? Let’s take a minute to get this all squared away. What do you say?”
Brody obliged and watched as paramedics rushed over to the vehicle, shoving Thorp aside, and helped Nectar onto a stretcher. Thorp went into the ambulance with them but not before looking back at Brody and searching his face.
Brody nodded.
The vehicle turned across the lawn, its shrieking siren sounding to the world ahead to make way, and began its charge toward the nearest emergency room.
When Brody turned around, Nathan had his cuffs out.
“Really?” Brody said.
“It isn’t me doing this.”
Brody smirked. “Chiffon.”
Nathan nodded. “When I started making calls about this thing you sent me, apparently word spread and she threatened to bring me up on charges if I didn’t arrest you. You missed your appointment.”
Brody watched the ambulance speed along the country road until the sonar could no longer detect it, the pixels jumping away, the ambulance seemingly dematerializing.
“She won’t come all the way out here to bust your balls. She’d likely miss choir practice. So, what do you say? Couple of days in Chicago’s lockup instead of in Minneapolis? A week behind bars in a jail that’s not so loaded with friends of yours? Call it even? Given the circumstances, it’s honestly the very best I can do.”
“Sure. But no cuffs this time, okay?” Brody said.
“Deal.” Nathan put the cuffs into the pouch on his belt. He guided Brody to his unmarked Lincoln parked at the edge of the property and opened the back door. Brody got in and let Nathan close the door.
Once inside, Nathan adjusted the mirror to get a look at his new passenger. “There’s going to be a lot of red tape to sort through, one big rigmarole.”
“Yeah,” Brody said. “Should I mark anything off my calendar for the rest of the month? Ask my landlord to call Goodwill to empty my apartment?”
Nathan removed a pack of cigarettes from his khaki duster and pushed one through the plastic-coated mesh dividing the front from the back. “For the road?”
Brody took the cigarette and cracked the back window as far as it would go: two inches. It was far enough to allow not only the smoke out but the signal of his sonar. It felt all around the property of Thorp’s farmstead. The barn where they had put the Darter back together, the craters left in the dirt from when they had been pulled back into unorthodox service, the house itself, where so much of the desperate search and planning, including the sleepless nights, for Nectar had been done.
And above all of it, even over the roof of Nathan’s Lincoln, the wires—thick as wrists—still hanging there. The low drone, detectable even beyond the hovering Darter’s gentle din—the wires still coursing with the frequency, searching for a host to sink its influence into.
Brody dropped his cigarette out the window and pressed the button to roll the window back up, shutting out all the noise. He sat back and listened instead to the electric engine of Nathan’s car hum as they tooled along the country road, a few miles behind the ambulance, back to Chicago.
36
Word had gotten to Chiffon as to what the detective had done, and she was none too pleased. She made a few calls, even going so far as to send Brody an e-mail explaining what was to happen. While everything that had come to pass with Hark Telecom was getting sorted out, he would remain in county after the day and a half he spent in the hospital being treated for his various injuries. He could write his statements behind bar
s, and if things matched his story, he would be transferred via prison bus back to Minneapolis where all his remaining community service hours would transfer directly, hour by hour, into prison time, with an additional three hundred for missing their scheduled appointment.
Brody could say nothing in protest; it was a fine deal. He was confident that everything with Hark would come to light—all the evidence was still in place at the shipyard, and the contents of Hubert Ward’s files contained the nefarious goings-on that the company had been behind. It was the Fairlane—which was full of evidence, even with some of Brody’s blood—and the Zäh that kept him behind bars.
“Things aren’t quite tallying up in a savory way in that particular department,” Chiffon wrote in her e-mail, complete with italicization.
For three weeks Brody remained in his cell, except for two hours a day to go to the gym or walk the chain-link cube in the courtyard. He navigated the world with his sonar, stared at the TV mounted to the wall behind metal grating in the cafeteria, unable to see its picture—but heard Hark Telecom stock was, no big surprise, plummeting.
What was happening to Hark was the talk of the entire country. The company was divided up and sold off in massive chunks. The endless cubicle farms were cleared out, the office furniture sold in the corporate equivalent of a sheriff’s sale, held in the employee parking lot. The number of jobless people was higher than it had ever been in Chicago. The more talented employees were hired at various companies the world over, once they had been determined to have not worked anywhere near research and development of course. Soon the Hark building that presided over downtown was empty and at night, all the other high-rises around it would be lit up here and there with late-night workers and cleaning crews, but that building became a stoic black monolith, wholly unlit and unoccupied.
The police chased as many leads as they could. The only one that had an easily sniffed trail was the one involving Hubert Ward, the shipyard, the six thousand miles of cable, the computers that pumped out endless streams of a broadcast-ready frequency that, once tested on laboratory rats, offered a plethora of results. Some rats became hostile to certain frequencies and exposure to the radiation within the wires—others more docile, tame. Some of them grew antisocial and never left their plastic hutch in the corner of their pen.
Stephen Marko, the CEO of Hark Telecom, made a public announcement claiming he had no idea what had been going on in his company. The man who had built up Hark from a telephone repair company started weeping on live television, telling the world that he was deeply remorseful for those affected. Since the company was essentially dead and all the funds were dried up, he couldn’t offer any compensation. All he could offer was an apology.
Brody heard footsteps enter the cafeteria that weren’t from prison-issue foam flip-flops. The sonar pinged the man standing in the back of the room searching the prisoners as they ate loose mashed potatoes and wheat toast, determining it was Nathan Pierce. Brody remained in his seat since getting up—or even so much as preparing to stand up—before they’d been excused by the guard wasn’t just frowned upon but often resulted in a broken rib.
Nathan found Brody at the table, gave him a nod. He met eyes with the nearest guard and pointed at Brody, then jutted a thumb over his shoulder.
The guard, not breaking his stoic stance at the end of the buffet line, gave him permission with a wave.
Nathan and Brody left the cafeteria for the reception center. He was given a cardboard box with his belongings—his ruined clothes and wallet and keys and even the knuckleduster.
When he was finished getting dressed, Nathan took Brody’s phone and replaced it with a small box.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“Go ahead,” Nathan said, flipping Brody’s phone around to open the panel on its reverse side.
Brody couldn’t see what was printed on the box, so he shook it next to his ear. By the sound of it, a new contact lens charger with a set of fresh batteries.
“On the house,” Nathan said, fiddling with Brody’s phone.
Brody and Nathan were alone in the locker room with benches and lots of yellow lines painted on the floor that prisoners, by no means, were to cross before being told to do so. They stood on either side of that line, Brody at the mirror and the row of sinks carefully putting the lenses into his eyes.
His reflection spiraled out ahead of him, the digits blinking: 29:59:59. He saw the detective behind him, looking at Brody’s dead cell phone. “What’s wrong?” Brody asked.
“I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m about to say,” Nathan said, giving Brody his slumbering cell, then going into his own pocket to do the same to his own. He glanced at the corners of the ceiling. Brody noticed that was where black domes were set up, just as they would be in any square inch of the prison.
Nathan sighed. “We’re releasing you today.”
Brody turned around. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“You kicked over a pretty big rock. Consider the can of worms officially opened. That e-mail was like the one piñata string that once pulled makes everything fall out.”
“That’s a lot of metaphors.”
“Bear with me. I haven’t slept. Just listen, okay? I’m trying to tell you, even though Hark has been splintered up and sold off, we couldn’t keep up with everything—stuff got away from us. When our tech guys tried to pry into certain sensitive files, they’d vanish. Self-destruct. Poof, gone. But we were able to chase it back out through the firewall and see that it was e-mailed in enormous chunks to an address, an overseas registry.”
“Any idea who it could be?” Brody said.
“We’re asking for a search warrant to get into that account and find out who was stockpiling Hubert Ward’s files. But it’s going to take a good deal of time and patience before we’re going to see any progress.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I want you to forget about all this once you’re released. You did your time. You won’t have to report to Chiffon anymore. The slate has been wiped clean. Take this as an opportunity for a fresh start.”
“What about January? The reform. Wasn’t that a week ago?” Brody had been keeping track of the time by moving a pile of matchsticks from one pile to another, but at some point his count got screwed up, and now he wasn’t sure if it was a week into January or New Year’s Eve.
“It was, and since you were out of state it didn’t apply.”
“What?”
“I pulled some strings for you. In exchange, I want you to tell me right now you’re going to leave it alone. That’s all I want.”
“Do you expect me to go after whoever is stockpiling Hubert’s files?” He shook his head. “Explain it to me again. Why the hell am I being released? You tell me I have a clean slate, but if I go walking out the door and get arrested the minute my jig gets scanned at a convenience store, I’m going to be kind of ticked.”
“You got a Get Out of Jail Free card. The judge ruled to change the adulterer’s law, but since there were so many cases, he took the unpopular route and had them all thrown out, claiming they were just misdemeanors anyway.”
“So I have a clean record now?” Brody laughed. “Haven’t had one of those in a while.”
“Don’t get too ahead of yourself. There’re still a few marks on there but nothing I can hold you for. The investigation with Hark is ongoing, and you can’t leave the state or much less break wind without my preapproval—so once you’re home: stay there.” Nathan stared at Brody, his mouth a single flat line cutting across his face like it had been scored there.
Brody scratched his beard. “There’s something else. Just go ahead and say it.”
“We don’t know what to do next,” Nathan said. “There’s no way to know. Until we get the clearance to chase this thing overseas, we’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled. But with you and Thorp being under this shit for years—I mean, I know you told me you don’t use a gun, but there was an awful lot of
dead bodies at that shipyard …”
“I did what I had to do.”
Nathan sighed. “I’m going to leave it at this. Make it a onetime thing. Keep all this under your hat and don’t consider this bullshit something for you to take care of. Put it behind you. Move on. Get a nine to five, meet a girl. Just don’t go round thinking that Hark is going to come and get you again because—trust me—they’re through.”
Brody thought about the shipyard and the violence he’d cut loose on those men. Titian Shandorf in particular. Hubert Ward. After replaying the scene over and over while lying in his cell, Brody determined the number of men was eleven. Twelve, if you included Rice—which Brody did. He thought about those lives he had ended, shoveled together in the same pile with the one man he had killed before that night, the man in Cairo. He’d ended thirteen lives. He considered what Hubert Ward had told him about self-control, about being a pugilistic misanthrope—and how that wasn’t by choice, just an unanticipated effect of the silver fox signal.
He shook his head as he put the rest of his belongings into his pockets. He held the last item, the knuckleduster, in his palm and thought about how many men he had hurt or maimed. It ranked into the hundreds. One or two a week for all those years since he got out of the Army. Hundreds of fractured collarbones, knocked-out teeth, flattened noses, broken arms. Same deal following: red and blue, flashing. Metal cuffs on the wrists, stale coffee and stale air of the interview room, Chiffon’s office with the horrible gospel music playing on an endless loop—all of it, none of it—was it him or was it an unconscious influence?
Brody put the knuckleduster in his pocket, shook Nathan Pierce’s hand.
“We’ll probably need to call you in to clarify a few things. Thorp volunteered information about Sebastian Calloway and his friend Anthony ‘Spanky’ Ellis.”
“And?”
“The courts are so backed up—trying to put away Hark’s people who knew what Ward was up to—that they’ve decided to look the other way. Calloway and Ellis were both pretty high on the DA’s list, and a few of the judges I mentioned their names to said they were practically on a first-name basis with them, and, well, as far as they were concerned, two less faces they have to see a dozen times a year is a good thing.”
