by Mike Lawson
Yesterday, just like the day before, he saw the crip in his wheelchair, sitting on the edge of the exercise yard, his back to the other inmates, staring off into space. When he’d first arrived at Wallens Ridge, he did laps around the yard in his chair like he was training for something, and then he’d lift weights like everybody else. But the last couple of days … well, he just sat there like he was moping about something.
Okay. If the guy did the same thing today, Clancy was going to take him out—and he thought he had a way to do it so he wouldn’t get caught. He’d tell two of his short friends to start a fight with the niggers over by the weight-lifting area. While the fight was going on and everybody, guards included, was watching it, he’d get four of his tallest friends to walk out with him to where the crip was sitting. They’d form a half-circle around him, their backs to the guard up in the tower, and while his friends stood there, blocking the tower guard’s view, he’d choke Nelson and then just leave him sitting there in his wheelchair.
Yeah, that would work, but he still had a problem: he’d have to give his friends something to make them help him, because they weren’t really friends, just assholes he hung with for his own protection. Shit, what could he give them? Hell, the only thing he could think to give them was Carly. Goddamnit, he’d have to let each of them spend a couple hours with her if he wanted their help. Well, there was nothing that could be done about that.
Albert Morehouse watched as Clancy talked to a group of his Aryan Nations asshole buddies, then saw two of the men Clancy had been speaking to walk in the direction of the weight-lifting benches. Clancy and four other guys, guys almost as tall as Clancy, started walking in Nelson’s direction—and Morehouse knew exactly what was going to happen next. Any minute now, a fight would break out in the weight-lifting area, and while everybody was watching the fight, Clancy, surrounded by his buddies, would kill Nelson. For a moment, Morehouse thought about stopping Clancy—he still could. Then he thought again about his wife’s medical bills.
And that’s when the warden stepped into the exercise yard—and with him were two tall Virginia State Police troopers. The troopers were in uniform—blue short-sleeved shirts, gray pants, and those black Smokey the Bear hats that added three inches to their height. They had on their equipment belts, which contained radios and Mace and handcuffs, but they weren’t wearing their sidearms, as no one was allowed to bring a gun into the prison. What the hell were troopers doing here? Morehouse wondered. For that matter, what the hell was the warden doing in the exercise yard? He hardly ever left his office—he was terrified of being taken hostage.
The warden stood there for a moment looking at the cons like he was searching for somebody—the troopers standing next to him were so tall they made him look like a dwarf—and then the warden walked right up to him, Morehouse being the nearest guard.
“Where’s the prisoner in the wheelchair?” the warden asked.
Before Morehouse could answer, one of the troopers said, “I see him.”
The troopers started to walk toward Nelson, but before they took two steps, a con in the weight-lifting area roared out in pain or anger, and Morehouse glanced over in that direction. Two guys, one black, one white, were whaling the shit out of each other. Then another white guy jumped in, and then another black guy joined the fray. Morehouse glanced over to see where Clancy was and could see that he and his four buddies had formed a semicircle around Nelson’s wheelchair and that Nelson was no longer visible. And that’s when the two troopers started running.
The troopers ignored the fight going on near the bench presses and ran as fast as they could toward Nelson, then plowed right into all the convicts surrounding him, flinging prisoners out of their way until they reached Nelson, who was lying on the ground with Ike Clancy on top of him. Morehouse couldn’t see what Clancy was doing to Nelson; what he did see was one of the troopers take a leather sap out of his back pocket and swing it at Clancy’s head. Morehouse, standing two hundred feet away, actually heard the sap hit Clancy. It sounded like a bat smacking a watermelon.
The exercise yard was bedlam. The fight in the weight-lifting area had turned into a gang fight—with twenty black and white inmates throwing punches at one another—and prison guards had joined the melee, trying to pull them apart. And both state troopers now had saps in their hands, and they were swinging them at Clancy’s friends, who were throwing punches at them in return. In two minutes, two of Clancy’s buddies had joined Nelson and Clancy on the ground.
Morehouse realized that the warden was yelling at him. “Go help them!” the warden shouted, pointing his finger at the troopers, who didn’t appear to really need any help. But Morehouse jogged over to join the troopers, not in any hurry, and by the time he got there, Clancy’s two remaining friends—the ones not on the ground—were backing away from the sap-swinging troopers. One of the troopers was missing his hat and bleeding from the mouth, but the other man appeared untouched, his Smokey the Bear hat still on his head.
“Are you guys okay?” Morehouse asked the troopers, but they ignored him. The trooper with the bloody mouth knelt down next to Nelson and felt for a pulse in his throat.
“Is he alive?” Morehouse asked. Please, Lord, let him be dead.
The trooper again ignored him. He stood up, looked around for his hat, found it, and put it back on. “Give me a hand,” he said to his partner, and they picked Nelson up and carried him away from the exercise yard.
“Is he dead?” Morehouse asked again, speaking to the troopers’ backs.
52
Mahoney called while DeMarco was beating up his punching bag.
The eighty-pound bag was on the second floor of DeMarco’s house and it hung from an exposed rafter like a headless fat man. The only other thing on the second floor of his home was a secondhand upright piano that he’d bought on impulse at an estate sale and now rarely played. At one time his second floor had contained chairs, beds, rugs, and paintings—but all those things had disappeared when his wife divorced him and took practically everything he owned. He often thought of his ex-wife as he hit the bag, and pretended he was pounding on the asshole she’d had an affair with before she divorced him. An asshole who also happened to be his cousin.
DeMarco was punching the heavy bag because after Nelson—a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair—nearly killed him, he figured he should get back in shape. He had put on a little weight—his pants were becoming noticeably harder to button—and pounding on the bag was a great workout. When Mahoney called, he and the bag had gone six rounds and DeMarco figured he was ahead on points, but he was drenched with sweat and his hands felt like two bags of concrete mix at the end of his arms.
Mahoney told him how Nelson had almost been killed by another inmate at Wallens Ridge and that he was now being protected by Virginia staties. “You need to get this fuckin’ thing wrapped up,” Mahoney said.
“Well, if you could get somebody with a badge investigating it would be a hell of a lot easier,” DeMarco shot back. If Mahoney had been there he would have hit him instead of his punching bag.
“The FBI isn’t going to investigate,” Mahoney said, “unless they think Mulray’s committed a crime, and right now you can’t prove he’s done anything illegal. But if you can get Nelson to talk, then maybe I can convince them to wade in on this thing.”
DeMarco hated to admit it, but he knew Mahoney was right.
He called Emma and told her what had happened to Nelson. “I’m gonna go see him again.”
“I’m going with you,” Emma said.
“Good,” DeMarco said.
While waiting for DeMarco, Emma called Celia Montoya at the Washington Post. “I’d like you to do me a favor.”
“What sort of favor?” Montoya said. She sounded guarded, and not all that happy to hear from Emma. The articles she’d written about Mulray Pharma hadn’t turned out at all the way she’d hoped
. No one in the U.S. government—or any other government—was trying to find out if Mulray Pharma had done anything illegal and, of course, Mulray had decided to sue the Washington Post. The Post’s lawyers said that Mulray couldn’t possibly win his lawsuit, but since he had a two-hundred-person law firm at his disposal and money to burn, he was going to make life miserable for the Post’s lawyers for months, if not years, to come—and the Post’s lawyers were all blaming Celia Montoya for this increase in their workload.
“I want you to print an article that says that Nelson’s dead,” Emma said.
“Is he?”
“No.”
Emma then gave Montoya the most recent news about Nelson. She concluded by saying, “He’s in hiding now and being protected, but as soon as Mulray learns Nelson’s still alive he’ll try again, and maybe succeed next time.”
“And you expect me,” Montoya said, “to put my credibility on the line by writing a story I know to be false?”
“You can leave yourself some wiggle room,” Emma said. “Say you got the story from an anonymous source at Wallens Ridge and—”
“I don’t think so,” Montoya said.
“Celia, listen to me. Nelson is the only witness we have against Mulray. Right now his head is messed up because of Kelly’s death and he’s not thinking straight, and I need some time to work on him. And maybe since they tried to kill him he’ll cooperate, and if he does, you may still have a shot at that Pulitzer.”
“Pulitzer! Right now I’ll be happy just to keep my job.”
“Will you help? Please. You know what Mulray’s done. You know we can’t let him get away with this. And we owe it to Lizzie Warwick to make this right.”
“All right,” Montoya finally said. “But the story won’t have my byline on it. I’ll feed it to the crime beat guy, the one who reported Kelly’s death.”
“Thank you,” Emma said.
Before going to see Nelson, Emma wanted to learn more about him and his relationship to Kelly. She found it odd that a cold-blooded killer like Kelly would be willing to sacrifice himself for another person. She knew that Nelson had saved Kelly’s life—Kelly had told DeMarco this—and she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Kelly had saved Nelson’s life, too. And she knew about the bonds formed between men who were in combat together, bonds that were sometimes stronger than blood. But Kelly’s willingness to sacrifice himself—considering what Kelly had done—still puzzled her.
Then there was the fact that they owned a home together in Montana. That was somewhat odd, but maybe not too odd. For all she knew, they bought the place together as a business opportunity and were planning to flip it. Or maybe the simple answer was that they could stand each other and couldn’t stand a lot of other people and simply preferred to live together in a beautiful, isolated setting. And there was, of course, a third possibility.
From Neil’s research, she had the basic facts about the two men. That is, she’d seen their military files and knew where they’d served and knew they’d performed in an exceptional manner. But the files didn’t really give her a sense of either man’s personality and certainly didn’t give her any sense of the relationship they had with each other. She wanted to talk to someone who had served with them, and preferably someone who served with them in Delta Force.
Because she’d worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency—and worked at a very high level—Emma knew several officers who’d been in Delta Force. She had, in fact, helped plan some of Delta’s missions. It took her half an hour to get to the right general—a man who owed her politically and personally—and she told him, “I want to talk to a guy who was on the ground with them on some of their missions. Someone who went into combat with them.”
The general called back half an hour later and said the man she wanted to talk to was in Afghanistan and he’d call her in a couple of hours.
“Ma’am, this is Major John Howard. General Curtis told me to call you.”
“Thank you for calling, Major.”
“It’s a privilege to be talking to you, ma’am. I know who you are. I’m sure you don’t remember me—I was just a butter-bar lieutenant at the time—but you briefed my team once on a job we did in Iran. I can’t say anything about the job on an unsecure line but—”
“I remember the mission, Major. Your team did well on that one.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thanks to the plan you put together. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
“The general may have told you, but I want to talk to you about two guys you served with.”
“Yes, ma’am. Kelly and Nelson. What would you like to know?”
“I want to know what you thought about them, what they were like, that sort of thing. I want more than the dry facts I can get from personnel files.”
“The first thing I’ll say is that they were two of the finest soldiers I’ve ever known. There was no one I’d rather have with me if we were going into a hot zone. Having said that, they were strange.”
“Strange how?”
“Well, it’s not unusual to have a loner in the unit, some guy who just keeps apart from the rest of the guys. You know, the guy who stays in the barracks when everybody else heads for the bar to let off some steam. The loner can be a perfectly good guy to go with on a mission, but he’s just not a mixer, not a social animal.”
“I know what you mean, Major,” Emma said. Emma had been that loner in every unit she served with.
“But what was unusual about Kelly and Nelson was that they were this loner couple. They always hung together; they even took leave together. They were both fly-fishing fanatics and when they got some time off, that’s what they’d do. One time they took a fishing trip to New Zealand together.”
“But why were they a couple, Major?”
“I heard a story that when they were in basic training, Nelson was in some bar and some black guys—gang guys—started hassling him and Kelly came to his aid and they wiped up the bar with the guys. I don’t know if the story’s true but that was the rumor about how they met.” The captain paused, then said, “I always had the impression that neither of them ever had a close friend growing up, and I know they weren’t close to their families; I don’t remember them ever getting a letter or a package from home. I think they became friends in boot camp and from that point forward figured they never needed another friend. All I know is that they were tight. They always had each other’s back, they stuck together, and they didn’t mingle with the rest of the unit.”
“Were they gay?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, ma’am.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Major. Soldiers always know when they’re serving with someone gay. And in a unit as tight as a Delta team, you’d know.”
“Well, ma’am, the fact is I wondered about that but I don’t know. And that’s the God’s honest truth. Like I said, they stuck together, but they didn’t act … well, they didn’t act gay. And frankly, I didn’t care, because they were two of the toughest bastards you ever saw in a firefight.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?”
“Just that they were, I don’t know, cold. What I mean is, these weren’t the kind of guys you see on TV passing out chocolate bars to kids. If someone in the unit got shipped out, they didn’t usually attend the going-away thing. If someone got hurt, they didn’t visit him in the hospital.”
“Why’d they quit the army?”
“All they told me was that it was time to move on and they decided to go private because that’s where the money was. In case I’m not being clear here, these guys didn’t open up to anybody but each other. They just turned in their papers and mustered out. Can you tell me why you’re asking about them, ma’am?”
“Major, Kelly’s dead and Nelson’s in prison.”
“Jesus.”
“And they did some very
bad things that I don’t have the time to go into. I’m going to be meeting with Nelson pretty soon to see if I can convince him to talk about something, and I’m just trying to get a handle on him.”
“Well, good luck with that, ma’am. I never could.”
53
Nelson was being kept in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, protected around the clock by four Virginia state troopers. DeMarco and Emma met him in the great room of the cabin, a room dominated by the head of a twelve-point buck mounted over the fireplace mantel. Because of the mid-July heat, Nelson was wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, and DeMarco was again impressed by how powerful Nelson looked—and realized he was lucky to have survived his last encounter with the man.
Nelson had changed since DeMarco first met him. In those early meetings in the hospital, Nelson refused to even look at DeMarco and had remained completely aloof and unwavering in his commitment not to cooperate. And the last time he’d seen Nelson, all he’d seen was the fury on his face as Nelson did his best to strangle him. The man was different today. He seemed calm, almost peaceful, as if he’d come to terms with his condition and his situation. But maybe not.
“I was wondering when you’d be back,” he said to DeMarco, but before DeMarco could respond he turned to Emma. “You’re the lady who almost killed Kelly in Peru.”
“Yes,” Emma said.
Nelson made a hat-tipping gesture. “Well, you must be something else.”
Emma ignored what she assumed was a compliment. “Mr. Nelson,” she said, “first, let me say that I’m sorry your friend Kelly was killed.”
Nelson nodded, accepting the lie.
“But we need your help. We need you to testify against Mulray Pharma. If you don’t, you’re going to prison and someone will kill you eventually.”
“I’m not sure dying bothers me all that much,” Nelson said. “Spending the rest of my life in this chair isn’t my idea of living.”
