Noble Warrior

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  “I got a problem.”

  “It’s Sunday,” Puwolsky said, his beer gut sagging over his wet red bathing suit.

  “These kinds of dilemmas don’t wait.”

  Puwolsky rubbed his hands through his hair and stepped aside, his body language signaling for Stanzer to come in.

  “Didn’t mean to pull you out of the Jacuzzi.”

  “How’d you know I was in the Jacuzzi?”

  “Too chilly to swim in the regular pool, too cloudless not to want to be outside today. Nice place you got here.”

  “My wife,” Puwolsky said escorting them to chairs in the study. “She does well on the Internet.”

  “Oh, yeah. What’s she sell?”

  “You got a point to this visit?”

  “I do,” Stanzer said.

  “Daddy, Daddy, can I play on the iPad?” A seven-year-old girl in a yellow bathing suit rushed to her father’s side.

  “Can you get a towel please?” Puwolsky snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you about wet feet in the house?”

  “But I want to play on the iPad.”

  “You know the rules; it’s an analog weekend. No screens for the entire family.”

  “But it’s so bo-rrrring,” the little girl moaned.

  “You don’t see me checking my e-mail, do ya?”

  “But daddy…”

  “You have my answer; now scram. I have company.”

  “Hmmph.”

  After a stomp of her foot, the little girl turned and made her way back across the room to the sliding glass door at the rear of the house, a trail of wet pitter-patter footprints smattering the floor in her wake.

  “Kids,” Puwolsky said. “They’ll run all over you if they smell an inch of daylight.”

  “Kind of like United States senators,” Stanzer replied.

  Stanzer reached into his pocket, tapped the screen of his cell phone, and turned the device around so Puwolsky could see the images. After a moment of buffering, the video of his testimony began to play.

  “Colonel, could you please make sure you speak your answers into the microphone. Remember, we are filming this.”

  “I said, there are currently no active agents under the legal age of eighteen years old working under my authority.”

  Once Puwolsky had seen enough to get the gist of the tape, Stanzer tapped the face of his phone and the screen went black.

  “You do have a problem,” Puwolsky said. “What are you thinking?”

  “What do you think I am thinking?”

  “Hey, you came here,” Puwolsky replied. “Speak your mind, Colonel.”

  Stanzer scratched an itch at the back of his head, a resigned look on his face. “I’m boxed in,” he said. “There are no other plays.”

  “You could own it. Fall on the sword. Take it like a man.”

  “I could,” Stanzer said. “But they’ll ruin me. These glory-seeking gasbags will burn everything I’ve ever built to the ground.”

  “You got more of these kids in your unit?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the only one?”

  “Yes.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Puwolsky said.

  “He’s the prototype. Always a first, isn’t there?” Stanzer flicked some imaginary lint off of his shirt. “These paper pushers don’t know what it’s like out there. They don’t know what it means to be on the front lines like me and you. Sometimes people like us, good people, we have to do some very bad things. Do you understand where I am coming from on this one, Colonel?”

  Puwolsky leaned back in his chair and thought about how true these words were. How many times had he been forced to go past the edges of the law in order to enforce it?

  “Who ratted you out?”

  “Still working on confirming it,” Stanzer said.

  “How’d they pull it off?”

  “Internet tip. Pretty sure it was a fake Gmail address. Very hard to trace. Not optimistic at all we’ll ever find the person who sent it.”

  Puwolsky nodded. Whether it was a nod of admiration for the whistle-blower’s digital acumen or just approval of the overall circumstances, Stanzer couldn’t tell.

  “So what do you want from me?” Puwolsky asked.

  “I think you know,” Stanzer replied.

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  Stanzer leaned forward. “I need you to help me make the kid disappear once and for all.”

  Puwolsky narrowed his eyes, nodded his head and moved in for the kill.

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  Puwolsky knew federal guys like Stanzer owned pockets that ran deep. This Sunday visit, he began to think, might not turn out to be too bad after all.

  “And might I remind, you, Colonel Stanzer,” Puwolsky added with unabashed bluster, “based on what I see in that video, you’d better bring a beefy answer to the table right now. Something significant and concrete.”

  “Concrete?”

  “Like cement.”

  Stanzer took a moment before replying. “How about, as a reward for helping me out I save your fucking life.”

  Puwolsky chuckled. Then he stopped. Stanzer was entirely serious.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “That guard, Krewls?”

  “Yeah?” Puwolsky said.

  “Committed suicide.”

  Suicide? Puwolsky thought. That didn’t sound like Krewls at all.

  “You haven’t seen any of the news about the D.T. on television?” Stanzer asked.

  Puwolsky shook his head. “Analog weekend. No screens for any of us. Good for the kids’ brains.”

  “Well, bad for you,” Stanzer said. “’Cause I have more news, too. McCutcheon escaped.”

  “No chance. How do you know this?”

  “I don’t for sure. It’s an educated guess.”

  “Impossible. There’s only two ways out of the D.T.,” Puwolsky said. “Parole or the morgue truck.”

  “I don’t know how he did it, I don’t even know that he did it, but I’ve been doing this a long time,” Stanzer said. “This many coincidences this close together are not a coincidence at all. Someone is orchestrating something.”

  Puwolsky considered the angles. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the way things were adding up. Yes, he knew the High Priest was dead. That was good, real good, because he and Dickey Larson both knew that the death of D’Marcus Rose meant the death of their biggest problem. Yet, if McCutcheon had actually escaped from Jentles, a whole new set of issues now existed.

  “If what you’re saying is true, he’ll be coming for me,” Puwolsky said.

  “He will.”

  “And Larson, too.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Stanzer shrugged.

  “You don’t know?” Puwolsky said. “But you trained this animal.”

  “He’s not an animal, he’s a soldier.”

  “I tell you what he is,” Puwolsky said. “He’s a ghost. And how the fuck do you prevent being attacked by that?”

  “Easy,” Stanzer said as he confidently reclined in his chair. “You attack his greatest weakness.”

  Riding the bus allowed McCutcheon to get some much needed rest, but he didn’t doze easily because an itch still gnawed at him to pick up the pace. There was no way he could take the Greyhound all the way to Bellevue. That would be like gift-wrapping himself for Stanzer. The game of cat and mouse with the colonel was on, even if Stanzer didn’t yet realize M.D. was free. Though no news about a prison break had yet hit the Web, the large amount of media attention regarding all the corruption at Jentles State Penitentiary would surely catch Stanzer’s eye.

  M.D. knew he might be invisible for the moment, but his instincts told him it was best to operate as if his secret about having escaped was already out. Stanzer, he knew, possessed too much mental firepower to believe in coincidences.

  When it came to concern about Puwolsky and his Neanderthal thug Larson
, however, McCutcheon held a different point of view. Whether they knew he was out mattered little. They were fools, he thought. Just dirty cops and small time thinkers with an overinflated sense of their own abilities because they operated out of one of the most bankrupt and dysfunctional police departments in the nation. Sure, the crap they pulled might fly in Detroitistan, a city with a long and infamous history of guys with badges acting like crooks, but in the world of the F.B.I. these two clowns would be bagged, gagged, and smoked in a D.C. minute. Just a bunch of amateurs, M.D. thought. Showing McCutcheon the white Cadillac’s car registration on the ride into the D.T. had proven it, too.

  Ms. Madeline Vina. 13579 Sycamore Street. The address was almost too easy to remember. All odd numbers in order.

  Small details. How many times had Stanzer emphasized their significance? Gather enough small details and they always paid off.

  Puwolsky, M.D. felt, was anchored, arrogant, and sloppy. Larson, with his love for steroids and street brawls, might prove to be a formidable fistfight, but tracking him would be work any twelve-year-old with access to Wi-Fi could handle. Finding these two bozos would be easy, M.D. thought. But how to locate Stanzer was a nut McCutcheon still had not cracked.

  The colonel had no woman in his life. No kids or fixed address, either. He lived as a nomad, a wandering warrior protecting his nation by sacrificing his own personal desires for the greater good of the country. Yes, he’d been in love before. Told M.D. about a girl named Jamie in fairly extensive detail during one of his “You gotta slay that dragon” speeches, too. But Stanzer had walked away from her years ago.

  He walked away in order to serve his nation.

  “I loved the girl,” Stanzer said. “But my destiny was to make a different choice.”

  McCutcheon wasn’t so sure he bought what the colonel was selling. Maybe the girl had just dumped him and the colonel was too much of an egomaniac to own up to it. However Stanzer, when pressed, argued that there was another aspect to his thinking.

  “A reverse side to the reverse side,” as he put it.

  “What’s that mean?” McCutcheon asked.

  “About me being fair to her,” Stanzer said. “Forget my own wishes for a minute; think about Jamie, knowing that every time I walk out the door I might not come home for weeks on end. Or maybe when I do, it’s in a body bag. Sure, soldiers do it all the time, but don’t pretend it doesn’t eat the person on the other end of the door alive.”

  Stanzer explained that walking away from his was actually an expression of love for the lady who’d stolen his heart.

  “With the dark work I was being asked to do, I just couldn’t put her life at risk like that. To be with me meant she’d always be a target. To have a life together meant we’d have to have a home. A resting place. An address to call our own. Remember, these fuckers I hunt, they hunt me back.”

  It’s not that Stanzer didn’t want to be with her, he said; it’s that he felt that if he chose to be with her, chances were too high that she’d get hurt.

  Emotionally. Physically. Maybe both.

  “When I said good-bye I broke her heart,” Stanzer said. “But I did it while she still had a heart to spare.”

  “What’d you tell her?” M.D. asked.

  “I told her to go find an accountant or a professor, someone who’d come home at night. But a man like me, well…I just wasn’t right for her. Wasn’t right for anyone.”

  “How’d she take it?” M.D. asked.

  “She fucking hates me,” Stanzer said. “But to this day I am convinced I made the right decision.”

  “You never wanted kids?” McCutcheon asked.

  “I wanted them bad.”

  “You never wanted a relationship?”

  “I have plenty of them. Just not the romantic kind.”

  “What about sex?” M.D. asked.

  “Ladies love the uniform,” Stanzer replied. “I have no problems in that department whatsoever.”

  McCutcheon still didn’t buy it. He thought Stanzer was using his work as an excuse to protect himself from getting close to anyone. Everyone in the colonel’s life was at arm’s length, and to M.D. this seemed like a way Stanzer could keep this girl Jamie there as well. Yet, now that McCutcheon sought to stalk the colonel, and couldn’t find a string anywhere to grasp, he realized how smart Stanzer’s strategy turned out to be. There were no threads to his life anywhere.

  Unlike his own.

  “There can be only one lover for a guy like me,” Stanzer said. “And that’s Lady Liberty.”

  Even though he’d shown it to McCutcheon before, Stanzer extended his arm, rolled up his shirtsleeve, and let M.D. read the tattoo on his left forearm once again.

  People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

  “It’s not just ink,” Stanzer said. “It’s a code.”

  The more McCutcheon thought about it, the more he realized he had no leads with which to go after Stanzer. And he knew there wouldn’t be any, either. His only chance, he realized, would be to make the colonel come to him.

  But how? When the Greyhound stopped at the Trailways Depot in Davenport, Iowa, M.D. still did not know.

  He exited the bus and entered into the station’s large and open lobby. Linoleum floors, shined to the point of almost being too clean, reflected white lights bouncing off the ceiling. The optics of it made the whole space looked like an indoor ice skating rink, where one false move might cause a person to slip on the glistening floor.

  M.D. scanned the benches and saw his target. Dusty, six-foot two-inches, twenty-four years old, in weathered jeans and a shirt advertising a local bar named Shoobie’s. Dusty eagerly eyed all the passengers departing the bus, a look of hope and excitement beaming on his face.

  McCutcheon approached.

  “I’m Terry.”

  “You’re Terry?” Dusty said wrinkling his face. “I thought you was a girl.”

  “You sellin’ it to me or not?”

  Dusty deliberated what to do.

  “You already took my money,” M.D. added. “But I can easily cancel the transaction.” McCutcheon raised his cell phone. A few taps and the credit card payment M.D. had charged to Krewls’s Visa account would be reversed.

  Disappointed, Dusty rose to his feet.

  “Yeah. Come on.”

  Through Jeffrey’s phone M.D. found a guy on the Internet in Davenport who was selling what he wanted. Through Krewls’s phone and a PayPal account M.D. paid for the item. But McCutcheon needed a ride to go pick up the merchandise, so he made himself appear to be a buyer named Terry. A buyer named Terry who liked to party and might or might not have really large breasts. Dusty, who also liked to party—and most certainly liked really large breasts—volunteered to come pick Terry up from the bus station to, as Dusty said in his e-mail, Make it a right bit more convenient for ya.

  So nice of you to offer, Terry had replied.

  Good ol’ Dusty proved true to his word. Wore a Shoobie’s shirt just like he said he would, too. The guy from Iowa paused before opening the door to his white pickup truck.

  “You ain’t one of them Internet homos, are ya?”

  McCutcheon smiled. “Sex has nothing to do with why I’m here.”

  Dubious, Dusty opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Well, just so you know, I ain’t into that freaky-deaky stuff, and if you try some shit with me…” Dusty reached under the seat and flashed M.D. a set of black nunchucks. “I took karate in high school.”

  McCutcheon grinned and buckled his seat belt. “No freaky-deaky stuff, promise.”

  Fifteen minutes later the white pickup pulled into the driveway of a one-story house that had dirt instead of grass for a front lawn. Dusty opened the garage.

  “This thing move?”

  “Partner, this thing hauls ass.”

  “I prefer Harleys.”

  “Me, too,” Dusty said. “But these rice rockets ride
a lot quieter. I’m flipping it so I can get me an ATV.”

  “Sell me that gear, too?” M.D. asked.

  McCutcheon nodded at the black leather jacket, gloves and helmet sitting on the work bench.

  “Well, I wasn’t really planning on…”

  McCutcheon pulled out a fan of hundred-dollar bills. Dusty stopped talking midsentence.

  “A grand sound fair?”

  “Partner, you are my kind of customer.”

  M.D. set the money down on top of a red toolbox and used a wrench as a paperweight to make sure the bills didn’t fly away.

  “See, no freaky-deaky stuff.”

  After slipping into the black leather outfit, which perfectly matched the black two-wheel rocket he’d just bought with Krewls’s money, he fired up the bike’s engine.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” M.D. said as he slapped down the tinted flap of the helmet’s visor. McCutcheon screamed away. Behind him Dusty counted the stack of hundred-dollar bills in his hand, delighted with the idea of how he’d be drinking some mighty fine whiskey later on that night.

  The ride to Bellevue only took four and a quarter hours, but M.D. didn’t want to show up at his house until after sunset. It was true that he preferred Harleys, but McCutcheon wanted a Japanese engine because he knew it would allow him to cruise through the quiet neighborhoods of suburban Nebraska with more stealth. Hogs were great rides, but quietness wasn’t one of their top features.

  At 8:05 p.m. M.D. rode past the front of his townhouse. Then again at 9:20 p.m, 10:10, and again at 11:15. Each time he checked for surveillance vehicles, suspicious work crews, and open windows in neighbors’ homes across the street that might have scopes or cameras looking out.

  He discovered a good news–bad news scenario. The good news was that no surveillance existed. Perhaps he was wrong, but M.D. felt pretty confident he’d be able to identify any outlying elements on his home turf, and after four different passes from four different angles he felt fairly confident that he would not be walking into an ambush.