An Echo of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  Bolewski and Quinn showed up a half-hour later. “What the hell happened back there?” Bolewski asked.

  I stood up, advanced toward him, and gave him a look which would have stopped a herd of rampaging elephants.

  He took a step back.

  I said, “I saved my lover. Not you two. Not any police. Not anybody. I did.” Then I began to shake. Even though I’d been in the marines, it had been twenty years, and lots of memories get buried very deep. But I had nearly been killed, and several evil people were dead at my hand, and I didn’t know if Scott would live.

  I sat down and clutched my arms around myself to quell the shaking, but I wasn’t through with my belligerence. “Anybody wants to dispute what I say, wants to tell a different side of the story, I don’t care! I care about one thing: that Scott lives.”

  I couldn’t stop shaking. My voice was rising and breaking like a puberty-stricken adolescent. I knew I was beginning to lose it.

  Quinn sat next to me. “Tom,” he said, “we’d like you to take everything real slow. Just talk to us about what happened. We need to move as quickly as possible to try to catch any people who may have gotten away.”

  “A helicopter,” I said. “They used one to arrive. Must have been somebody important. I heard it starting up as I took Scott to the train.”

  Quinn barked several orders to a nearby uniformed cop, who flew out of the room to call the FAA to check on all helicopter reports.

  “How did you find them?” Quinn asked.

  “Bill Proctor and I found the list of safe houses for Frederico Torres around the world. This was the one in Chicago.”

  “Why didn’t you bring the information to us?” Quinn asked.

  “Bill Proctor was going to. He never got to you guys?”

  “No,” Quinn said.

  “What happened to my lawyer and the Mexican authorities?”

  “Whoever grabbed them was more worried about Scott. They tried to move everybody to different cars near the Cabrini Green housing project this morning. The guards your lawyer hired managed to get everyone away except Scott. They didn’t give us a lot to go on. The kidnappers seemed content with having Scott and didn’t pursue the rest of them. They’re lucky to be alive.”

  Quinn asked for more details about our discovery of the materials.

  I told him about the post office and the packaging of the relics. I handed him the list, which I’d used to uncover the safe house on the South Side.

  Quinn held the list more carefully than a scholar holding a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bolewski looked over his shoulder. After a few seconds’ reading, Quinn whistled. “This is incredible,” he said. “How did you know he would be there?”

  “I didn’t.” I explained about the relics, the computer disks, and the materials on Mr. and Mrs. Proctor. “That stuff on the parents could be very important. When I left him, Bill was supposed to be taking all that material to the authorities. I’m worried about him.”

  “Why didn’t you bring it to us?” Bolewski asked.

  “Because I wasn’t going to waste a second waiting for the cops, whether it was warrants, or due process, or assembling SWAT teams to attack. They might have used Scott as a hostage. You people haven’t been the most helpful.”

  A uniformed cop trundled his bulk into the room. He spoke to Quinn. “Lots of press outside. The Scott Carpenter baseball thing is on the radio. They want information.”

  Quinn said, “Maybe a statement later. They’ll want to stampede to the crime scene when they get word of that. Gonna be a hell of a day.”

  The doctor came out of the emergency room. I rose to my feet. My trembling, which had eased somewhat during the questioning, returned.

  “Are you Tom?” the doctor asked.

  I nodded.

  “He’s asking for you. We usually only let family in, but he insisted.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “He should be all right,” the doctor said. “We want to keep him here for observation at least overnight. Besides the obvious external injuries, he’s got a concussion and may have other internal injuries. He was beat up pretty bad. You can see him now.”

  Quinn and Bolewski left.

  The doctor led me through the emergency-room doors to where he pulled back a sliding curtain. Scott’s eyes were open. The last quarter-inch of his mouth on the right—the only part not puffed and bruised—rose in a slight grin. He lifted two fingers in greeting. The doctor left.

  I took his hand and with the other caressed his brow, moving his hair back.

  “I don’t feel good,” he whispered.

  “I love you,” I said. “I love you more than anything in the world.”

  His hand gripped tighter in mine. “Am I going to be okay?”

  “The doctor said yes.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I told him everything that I’d done since he’d been taken, then asked, “What did they do to you?”

  He breathed quietly for a minute. He had two small hoses running to his nostrils. They had him hooked up to a couple of machines. One I figured had to be heart rate and one blood pressure but I wasn’t sure. A few shelves carried medical paraphernalia of use to someone, but incomprehensible to me.

  “Mostly I was at that house, I think,” Scott said. “My arm hurts.”

  I looked at the bandages where I’d seen his left arm burned deep with cigarettes.

  “Do you want me to get them to give you more painkillers?” I asked.

  “I want you to stay close,” he said.

  “Do you want anything, need anything?”

  He shook his head slightly. His eyelids nodded, closed, then opened abruptly, then began to shut again. While still holding his hand, I gently caressed his arm, shoulder, forehead.

  His eyes fought with his brain to drift into sleep.

  “Everything’s okay now,” I said. “You’re safe now.”

  He shut his eyes. I felt his body relax, and in a few minutes, the grip on my hand began to loosen. I leaned over and gently kissed his forehead.

  Without opening his eyes, he murmured, “I love you.”

  I stayed with him for several hours. I found out later that time limits on visiting were pretty flexible. Mostly he slept. During Scott’s transfer to intensive care, I had to wait in the hall, but Quinn and Bolewski were back, and they gave me answers to questions that I had. Quinn was actually pretty nice about the whole thing.

  I was exhausted from lack of sleep and the physical and emotional exertion. I’d gotten several cans of orange juice from the cafeteria, and so far that had sustained me.

  “What did you find on the South Side?” I asked.

  “The scene was a mess,” Quinn said. “The crime-lab guys have been at it for hours. We’ve got five dead bodies, including Frederico and his brother Pedro Torres. One of the ones you shot is dead. The other one will probably live. The helicopter never got off the ground. Three of the survivors have begun to talk.”

  “Who kidnapped Scott?” I asked.

  “Pedro. It seems that the people chasing you got conflicting orders. Pedro’s the one who wanted you alive. That’s probably why the people with you when Scott was kidnapped didn’t get chased. If it had been Frederico, they’d probably all be dead.”

  “Why torture Scott?” I asked.

  “They wanted information.”

  “Which he couldn’t possibly give them,” I said.

  “Glen Proctor really screwed things up,” Quinn said. “He must have been awful busy in Mexico to accomplish all this in just a couple of weeks.”

  “I bet he’d been planning his schemes for a while,” I said. “Have you found Bill?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do his parents know anything?” I asked.

  “Neither mother nor father claims to have seen him,” Quinn said.

  “Liars!”

  “Glen was playing a dangerous game,” Quinn said. “I hope Bill’s not caught up in it.”
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br />   “What was the big fight about on the South Side?” I asked.

  “You started that.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. That helicopter you heard was the arrival of Frederico Torres himself. He was set to have a big meeting with his brother. Negotiations had been going on since Glen Proctor, posing as Scott Carpenter, had managed to steal the information about all the safe houses, plus other shipments, dealers, and major distributors. Pedro had thought Glen was just after his brother, but it seems Glen was trying to double-cross him, too. Glen had some information on Pedro, too. Glen was trying to either double-cross both of them or extort money from both. Everybody was after Glen. Frederico just wanted him dead because he’d ruined their plans. He wanted vengeance. He knew he’d have to move his entire operation. He figured that Pedro would have the information in a short time, and probably all the international police jurisdictions. Even somebody that rich has to worry at that point. Pedro wanted Glen alive long enough to talk to him.”

  “So the ones after us who wanted to kill—”

  “Were Frederico’s men,” Quinn finished for me. “They just wanted you dead.”

  “There were two groups of guys trying to chase us outside our place that morning,” I said. “They came from different sides of the building. One crowd didn’t shoot because they wanted to talk. The other wanted to kill us.”

  “That sounds right,” Quinn said.

  “So, if they were shooting, they were Frederico’s guys, and if not, they were Pedro’s?”

  “Sort of,” Quinn said. “Let me finish about the battle,” Quinn said.

  I was silent.

  “The meeting between them was all set. Negotiations had been delicate because neither side trusted the other, but they knew they had to confront each other. When you started firing while you were rescuing Scott, the bodyguards on both sides figured that the truce was being broken. An enormous firefight broke out.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what those houses look like,” Bolewski said.

  “Combat zone hardly describes it. Those guys have incredible firepower. Think of how much damage you did with the few weapons you had in that room. They let loose at each other with everything they had.”

  “We walked through the houses,” Bolewski said. “Walls sagged because they’d been riddled with so many bullets. Stairways collapsed from having so much lumber shot away. These guys used big guns.” Bolewski seemed to relish the whole concept. “Made the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre look like the peanut gallery having a spat.”

  Quinn said, “It wasn’t pretty. Five dead, like I said. A few wounded, and the three who are talking to us. The fight was winding down when the cops started arriving. Fortunately, the first cops who showed up had the sense not to approach. They knew this wasn’t some simple gang war.”

  “How did the police put a stop to it?” I asked.

  “We didn’t,” Quinn said. “By the time we had the area secured, the El trains stopped, the streets blocked, and whatever else was needed, the shooting had stopped. They weren’t firing at us to begin with, and what was the point? So many of them were dead, and we had half the cops in the city outside there after a while. Those left alive inside knew it was pointless to try to shoot their way out.”

  “Are Scott and I still going to be in danger?” I asked.

  “With both Frederico and Pedro dead,” Quinn said, “I doubt it.”

  “Frederico looked like Swiss cheese,” Bolewski said. “I made sure I got up close to see him. I wanted to be able to tell my grandkids.”

  “There isn’t much of an organization left to chase you,” Quinn said. “Those three gave us all this information. All of them are going to be in jail in this country forever, and if enough time ever passes for them to be out of jail, then they’ll be sent back to South America for more trials. They don’t care about Scott Carpenter or Tom Mason anymore. Nobody cares anymore.”

  “So Frederico’s guys killed Glen Proctor,” I said.

  “That none of the three knew for sure or would admit at this point,” Quinn said. “Probably some of the dead guys executed him.”

  We’d been sitting in a small conference room with modern fixtures and comfortable chairs. I was tired from lack of sleep and spent emotions. Someone knocked on the door and a young cop stuck his head in the room. He whispered briefly to Quinn, then left.

  Quinn said, “Your lawyer’s here.” It was nearly noon. We met Todd, who was dressed impeccably, as always. A woman named Debra McKenna was with him. We trudged to the cafeteria where I guzzled more orange juice and wolfed down an omelet. We exchanged stories about our adventures, then Todd said, “Debra is my accountant. She has found more information. She and I have been working together since I got her out of bed at five this morning.” She wore a beige skirt, white blouse, and a blue blazer. Her briefcase was five inches thick and solid black. She opened it and pulled out three folders.

  “I have more information on the Proctors. The government has been watching both people for some time,” Debra said. “Each has been under investigation. Mr. Proctor is thought to have been bribing a slew of Mexican government employees. It is highly illegal to bribe foreign officials. It cost one company nearly ten million in fines not more than a few years ago, and they lost a great deal of their business. So that kind of evidence is going to hurt him. He’ll have to go to trial, of course, and it will take years. While the fines he’ll have to pay aren’t as critical as they would be to ordinary mortals, the loss of business will at least cramp his style. We’ve also been tracking down rumors of Mrs. Proctor being involved in an illegal banking scheme that would make the BCCI mess look like the local five-and-dime. The whole labyrinthine scheme is complicated even more because both Proctors spent huge amounts of time, money, and resources obfuscating their own and each other’s work.”

  “Mother and Father are fierce competitors,” I said. “They hate each other. They are desperate to hurt one another. They’d have sold a nursing home full of grandparents to get their way. Maybe Glen was double-crossing both of them too.” I explained about the information Bill Proctor had.

  “The data he has could probably really hurt them,” she said.

  “Won’t the Mexican government want to do something about the relics we found?” I asked.

  “If the Proctors were involved, the Mexican government is not in the business of offending fabulously wealthy American businesspeople who might invest millions in their country. They are happy to get the relics back, fake or real. They are more happy to get the jobs. Remember, they aren’t that eager to prosecute for bribing their officials. It is against American laws, and they’ll be prosecuted in American courts.”

  “Bill Proctor said his mother and father were supposed to have had some kind of big powwow,” I said. “If they’re going to get together here, I’d like to get an invitation to that.”

  “Don’t do something illegal,” Todd warned.

  I told him I wouldn’t.

  Debra and Todd left.

  I asked the cops, “If Glen was using an alias and they killed him, why did they chase us after they found the body in the penthouse?”

  “We don’t know if whoever got there first thought they were killing Scott Carpenter or Glen Proctor. The second group saw you run. Did they know who killed Glen? If they looked at identification and saw Glen Proctor and they were after Scott Carpenter, would that change what they did? We’ll probably never be sure. A lot depends on who could recognize Proctor. We just don’t know who got there first. The second group was probably Pedro’s men, and they hadn’t killed the dead guy, and they didn’t know who you were. You didn’t stay to answer questions. They may have chased you simply to talk to you, or they may have thought you had specific knowledge and they wanted to kill you. The guys who are talking are being helpful, but very careful. Their lawyers are with them, so it’s a very touchy situation.”

  “Who came and got the body, and why?” I asked. “And if it wasn’t the
killers, how did whoever came know it was there?”

  Even with these unanswered questions, none of the official folks wanted to pursue Glen’s death. They had buckets full of suspects on the South Side, all dead. Without a body, there wasn’t a lot to work with. Besides, they had a perfect explanation with the biggest drug kingpins on two continents dead in the city morgue. “The Proctor murder was a case of mistaken identity,” Bolewski said. “Be glad it wasn’t you, and forget it.”

  The cops left.

  I visited with Scott. He was awake, and I gave him all the news. But he was tired and I was exhausted. After a while, he pressed the button on the side of the bed to lower it. When it reached a comfortable spot he took his finger off the control, leaned back, and shut his eyes.

  I thought I’d sit in the chair for a while before going home. After a few minutes, I’d begun to nod off when a nurse came in. She had a puzzled expression on her face.

  “This just came for Scott Carpenter or Tom Mason,” she said. She looked at Scott. “I know who he is, but who’s Mason?”

  “I am,” I said.

  She gave me the envelope.

  “Where’d this come from?” I asked.

  “One of those messenger services,” she said. She left.

  Inside the envelope was a message from Bill Proctor. It didn’t say where he was, but it did say that he had a meeting with his parents at the North Shore mansion late this afternoon. He asked me to be there. I realized he couldn’t have called. Because of the multitude of media, we’d had the phone turned off in Scott’s room.

  The cops had brought my pickup truck to the hospital. I stopped in the cafeteria and drank three more cans of orange juice, which revived me enough for the moment.

  Lake Shore Drive, Sheridan Road, all the wealth of the north suburbs were a blur as I sped to the Proctors’. It was late afternoon, and the rush-hour traffic was heavy.

  When I got there, I wasn’t about to knock and ask permission to enter. I drove to a hundred feet from the front entrance. I set the truck in gear and jumped out. I then climbed the wall, jumped down to the other side, and strolled to the front door. I figured they had some kind of surveillance on the grounds, but I hoped the diversion of the truck smashing into the gate and my determination would get me through.