Dark Web

by T. J. Brearton

  “Hiya Mike,” Linda said. “Been a long time.”

  Inside the Pathfinder the heat was blasting. And it smelled like lamb gyros and falafel sandwiches, odors which immediately called up in Mike a cascade of images and feelings; the hot rush of the subway tunnel, the streets around Washington Square Park, the warm linoleum of the third floor walk-up apartment kitchen where the afternoon sun hit it.

  Bull got in and snugged himself behind the wheel. His weight rocked the vehicle on its axles. He turned and looked back, and a second later Mike thought that Bull Camoine must have supernatural powers, as he seemed to read his thoughts.

  “The city misses you, Mikey. You woulda stayed? Oh man, we’d-ah had things wired.”

  Bull glanced at his wife. “I mean, me and Linda, we do alright. We do real good. We’ve got a couple of businesses, and we make a comfortable living.”

  “I thought you lived at home, Bull.”

  The husband and wife team exchanged another glance, and Linda seemed to shoot Bull a look of encouragement.

  “After Bull’s last incarceration,” Linda said in a soft voice, “he was on parole when he got out. The parole officer was on him every second. We decided to base operations at his home for a while. We got him a job at the dry cleaners on Hylan Boulevard. We laid low for a year, didn’t we, honey?”

  “We did.”

  “And we just got used to running operations from there. Katrina liked having us. A mother likes her son around, you know? To help out. So we turned Bull’s old bedroom into an office and we keep that, plus our space in the city.”

  Mike nodded “That’s good, you guys.”

  Now Bull twisted around further to face Mike directly. “Listen, Mikey. This is about the life of your kid that was taken from you.”

  “I know.”

  “But, you know, if you don’t want to do this, you say the word.”

  “You’re sure he’s there?”

  “Sure as the Pope wears a funny hat.”

  Linda’s hand darted out, quick as a snake bite, whacking Bull on the shoulder. “Hey. Ow.”

  “Watch the blasphemy.”

  “That ain’t blasphemy.”

  “Of course it is. Making fun of the papal wardrobe is the same thing as taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “No it ain’t.”

  “Remember? Remember the smoke watch? Remember how long we waited? What did you pray for during that time, Bull?”

  “Linda, come on . . ..”

  “What did you pray for?”

  “I prayed to be more kind. Okay? You happy?”

  Linda faced the back, looking at Mike with an apologetic smile. “We’ve been doing a lot of work on Bull’s anger, his social interactions. It’s the little things that matter most.”

  “Right,” said Bull, clearly eager to dismiss the subject. “Now, Mikey, what do you say? This son of a bitch pops up out of nowhere soon as you try to start a new life, starts trying to coerce your son to leave you, leave the family — he’s a home-wrecker. And when he can’t have the kid, he . . . So you tell me, Mikey. We gonna do this?”

  Mike sat in the middle of the backseat. The heat blasted in his face, and he liked it. He was so sick of the cold. He liked it hot. He ran hot. That was who he was.

  “Yes,” said Mike. “We’re going to kill him.”

  “Booya!” said Bull, and spun back around, dropped the gear shift in reverse, and started backing out of the driveway and into the night.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Swift made the drive to the Clinton County Sherriff’s Department in forty minutes. But the weather was worsening, it was going to be hard driving as the night came on and the temperature dropped.

  Tricia Eggleston was wearing the red and white fatigues worn by females at Clinton. Her face had a pinched, fuck-you quality that Swift could see even around the girth of Warren Eggleston. Eggleston, her uncle and lawyer, stood between Swift and the girl like he was her sovereign protector. Beside Swift stood the District Attorney, Elena Cobleskill. She was in her fifties, with short grey hair and a sharp navy blue pants suit. She dropped her briefcase on the table and invited Swift to sit down.

  Warren, his eyes on Swift, walked around the table and sat on the other side next to his client. Swift turned to Cobleskill and Warren, and gave them his most pleasant smile.

  “I’d like to sit with her alone, please.”

  Warren barked a laugh that wobbled his greasy double-chin. “I don’t think so, John.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Swift said, his smile gone. “I’ll reverse my claim in the Frank Duso case. I’ll go on record and say that I was a party to unwarranted use of force against Duso. You can appeal the court’s decision to throw out your claim.”

  Eggleston’s lips and cheeks sagged in disbelief. Beside him, Tricia wrinkled her nose in a scowl, her upper lip peeling back to reveal her stained and rotting teeth. She would have been pretty if it weren’t for the ravages of the drug, Swift thought. “What is he talking about?” she said.

  Swift watched Eggleston work it through. There was no way the man was going to be able to resist. He’d taken a pounding in court over the excessive force claim. It had sullied his reputation and humiliated him. The chance of vindication was too enticing to pass up. Swift could see his decision already forming. Then he turned and whispered into his niece’s ear. Swift took the opportunity to look at Cobleskill. Her eyes widened and her thin lips curved into a grin.

  “Alright,” Eggleston said getting to his feet. It took some effort. “You have fifteen minutes. But I’ve advised my client not to say anything. So you’re going to sit here and gaze lovingly at one another for the duration.” His eyes darted towards Cobleskill, his expression urgent. “And you’ve got paperwork for me?”

  Cobleskill opened her briefcase and pulled out a document. “I had to do it quickly,” she said. “The detective didn’t allow much time. But here is his sworn statement.” She gave Swift a pen and he signed. Eggleston leaned in, his belly pressing into the table, and snatched up the paper. Swift watched his eyes work it over. Then he glanced across, a glimmer of triumph in his eyes, and left.

  Cobleskill stood up.

  “Good luck,” she said, a hand on Swift’s shoulder. The door closed behind her, and he and Tricia were alone.

  “I’d offer you a smoke, but, you know how that goes,” Swift said. She looked away from him. Her hands were on the table, fingers drumming. She kept tonguing her teeth. He wondered how bad her withdrawal symptoms were. She seemed to be holding up well enough. When an inmate first came in, they wore solid colors until they had been medically evaluated. She was wearing the stripes, so she had already been seen by a doctor. Maybe she’d been given something.

  He thought of Callie Simpkins, also sedated. It seemed so long ago, Swift thought, but it was just a few days. The wreckage caused by that one body in the snow. He looked at Tricia and waited until she met his gaze.

  “You know where your boyfriend is,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “And you’re going to tell me.”

  “I am?”

  “Not because Cobleskill out there and your Uncle will bid back and forth for how much less time you get in prison, because you probably don’t care.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that. She looked down.

  “But because,” Swift continued, “I’m the one you’re supposed to tell.”

  Her eyes came back up. Swift leaned back from the table. “Tell me about Robert Darring.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever called you. Set this whole thing up. Whoever told you the cops would be coming, and to ready explosives, be prepared to run, whoever gave Tori the address of a safe place to hide out.”

  She ran a tongue across her mottled front teeth again. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re pretty cocky. But, you’re a cop. Not surprising.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me because your boyfriend is supposed to look guilty of murdering his biol
ogical son, Braxton Simpkins. The person who’s doing this isn’t looking out for his interests, or for yours. So whatever you were promised, it’s a lie.”

  Her face changed dramatically. Her tongue fell away from her teeth, and she reached up and hugged her thin frame.

  “Somebody called, yeah. Said our place was going to be raided. Task force; all that shit. State Police, DEA working together. Told us if we wanted out, we had to blow the place soon as the cops showed. There was a place for Tori. Me too, but I didn’t want it.”

  “What place?”

  “I got told an address.”

  “An address.” Swift leaned forward again, slipping his notebook from his pocket and clicking a pen.

  “Some old farm.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “I just wanted to cook, you know? I just wanted to fucking get small. I didn’t love Tori no more. He’s an asshole.”

  “Give me the address, Tricia.”

  “You gonna do this right? With the lawyers?”

  He stared at her. “Now, or you get nothing.”

  She told him, and Swift started to write, and then his hand stopped, and he set the pen down, and he just looked at her again.

  A moment later Swift got up and banged out of the room, leaving his pen and notebook behind.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Bull’s Pathfinder sat parked at the mouth of a driveway that wound its way down to a dark house. A mailbox on a stake listed to one side with a frosting of snow. The driveway had been freshly plowed, scraped down to a glassy compaction of snow and ice, the banks piled high.

  Mike looked out the windshield from the backseat. Something didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t the idea that he was here to kill Tori McAfferty; that felt fine. Any lingering doubts about that had passed through him and splattered onto the toilet bowl half an hour ago. This was something different. He was new to the area, didn’t know one place from another, and there were many places like this, broken down farms amid rolling hills, with dilapidated barns and unused foaling sheds, but something here tolled familiar. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what.

  Then he peered through the darkness at the mailbox beside the road. He suddenly got out of the back of the vehicle.

  “Hey, Mike, what the fuck?”

  He shut the door on Bull and stepped into the cold, feeling the wind and snow sting his face. He walked briskly to the mailbox and swished away the snow. He read the name.

  SWIFT.

  Bull came around the car all hunched up in the frigid temperature, scowling.

  “What’s going on?”

  Mike felt hollow. Confused, betrayed, but mostly hollow. Like nothing mattered. Like nothing was sacred.

  “This is the detective’s place.” He turned and looked through the night at the dark buildings strewn across the land.

  “The detective? You mean the statie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ho-lee-shit,” Bull said. Mike wasn’t sure whether Bull was going to want to back up and get the hell out of there, or if he was going to stay with it. It didn’t matter. Bull had given him the support he’d needed, but now Mike was ready to go it alone if that was what had to happen. Nothing else mattered anymore. Nothing.

  Bull looked off into the dark. He seemed to relax. “That’s pretty fucking smart, man. Guy hides right there at the statie’s house. Ballsy. Who’s going to look for you there? Right?”

  “I guess,” said Mike. He turned to the vehicle. Time to get moving.

  “Or,” Bull said following, “the detective is in on it somehow. You say McAfferty had a meth lab, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the way they operate,” Bull said. The two men got back in the car and Bull continued talking. “That’s the way it shakes out of the bag, Mikey, every time.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Linda.

  “That detective is probably on the take. For all you know, he’s abetting McAfferty.”

  It rang true. Or, at least, possible. What else made sense?

  “Whose place is this?” She was looking back and forth between the two of them.

  “There’s this guy,” Mike said, “Frank Duso. I think Duso was buying from McAfferty, maybe selling a little for him. Duso was the one that called the press on the detective, Swift. The one you told me to have a look at. That video.”

  Bull had been nodding his head vigorously, but then stopped. “The one I who-and-what now?”

  “You texted me,” Mike said.

  “I don’t text nobody.”

  “He doesn’t text,” added Linda.

  Mike looked at Bull, his thick neck and square jaw, limned yellow in the dashboard lights. “You didn’t send me that text, the link to the video?”

  “Nope.”

  Then who sent it? Mike sat back in the rear seat. He wondered if it could’ve been this Frank Duso kid. If he had called the press, which seemed likely, then he might’ve somehow gotten Mike’s number in order to tip him to watch the video. Make Swift look like an unreliable investigator.

  Wherever it came from, Mike had already begun questioning Swift’s abilities. And his motives. And now this.

  “There’s a massive manhunt on for this guy . . .” Mike said quietly, as much to himself as to the others. “But Swift never said anything to me about McAfferty being into a meth operation. Not even when I mentioned the emails and practically handed the cops the son of a bitch on a sliver plate did they say, ‘Yeah, we know this guy, we’ve been closing in on his operation for months.’ Nothing. It was like they’d never heard of him. And now this guy’s at the detective’s house?”

  “Yep,” confirmed Bull. His eyes gleamed in the rear view mirror. “S’what I’m telling you, Mikey.”

  Mike looked down. His head was in a fog again. There were too many questions. But did they matter? He could sit here all night debating whether or not to call the cops and tell them about McAfferty’s email, about the money taken out in Jack’s name. But he’d been warned that the girls could get hurt. And Bull was already here. Things were beyond fucked up — too fucked up to trust the cops, who’d done nothing so far anyway.

  And, if John Swift really was working secretly with McAfferty, or at least caught up in backdoor deal with Frank Duso, how would Mike know how deep the corruption spread? Who could be trusted?

  Swift had seemed like an upright enough investigator. But then, he’d been busted while drinking on duty. He had a tarnished record. He lived alone, did what he wanted when he wanted, a kind of maverick cop with few people to answer to.

  Plus, he knew about the 529 account. Swift and his team had been the ones to commandeer Braxton’s laptop and lift all its information. It sounded too sinister to be true — cops complicit in the death of a minor so as to cash in — but Mike knew that worse things had happened. He and Bull were both raised in a pre-Giuliani New York, they were on the streets in the 1980s when police corruption was a plague and the criminals ran the show.

  Still. This was a nice small town in the North Country. There were government buildings here — a mental health clinic, a hospital, a DMV. It just didn’t seem like the type of place to harbor dirty cops, not the best place for criminals and corruption to get a real foothold. It was too policed.

  Unless, of course, that was what made it work.

  “Mikey, you alright back there?”

  He still felt the effects of the vodka. His stomach had hardened, however, his nerves had steadied. Being with Bull, hearing the accent again, smelling the smells of the car, seeing Linda after all these years, it was doing something to him. It was making him feel stronger. More confident. More like his old self before fiber-teching and marriage and kids and domesticity. Like a man again.

  “I’m good.”

  The car sat with the engine idling and the headlights turned off. If McAfferty was here, he would be hyper vigilant and on the lookout. Surely he would have seen them by now; Bull had just boldly pulled into the driveway, for God’s sak
e. Now he was checking the firearm. Linda had one too — Bull had said it was a SIG, very compact, mean-looking. Mike felt the hard shape of his own handgun pressed against his abdomen where he’d tucked it into his pants.

  “Then let’s go,” Linda said.

  It was now or never.

  The SUV rolled forward. The wind buffeted the vehicle, hitting against it from one side. Mike looked out over the large property at the shapes of other buildings, mere charcoal sketches in the dark. Tori McAfferty was hiding in one of those. The man who had killed Mike’s son. Hanging out. Protected by a cop, maybe multiple cops. Somehow connected to Mike’s own father. Threatening the lives of his wife and children, right now, right at this very moment.

  His phone buzzed. Mike took it out and looked at the incoming number. “Speak of the Devil,” he said. He rolled down the window and threw the phone into the freezing night.

  You couldn’t trust anyone. He looked at Bull and Linda, who were both turned around in their seats to face him. Not like you could trust old friends.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Swift had taken his emergency light and placed it on the dashboard where it flashed red. He careened along the highway, snow smacking against the windshield, the back of the car occasionally fishtailing in the greasy covering of snow over the road. Mike Simpkins wasn’t answering his phone. Frustrated, Swift tossed his on onto the passenger seat.

  It made sense now. It all made sense if you thought like Robert Darring. If you had a reason to want to make someone else’s life a hell, to manipulate them, to choreograph a series of events that would have them right where you wanted them, thinking what you wanted them to think.

  Robert Darring didn’t just want to frame Tori McAfferty for the teenage boy’s murder. Above all he wanted Mike Simpkins to think McAfferty was guilty. And then he wanted Simpkins to kill McAfferty, and so spend a life in prison. Darring had interfered with everything — he knew about the 529 account, somehow, knew the cops would look at Mike for that. He knew about the deadbeat bio dad McAfferty. That McAfferty was into cooking and distributing methamphetamines.