by DL Barbur
Then, like a bad edit in a movie, the scene shifted and I found myself beating the shit out of Lubbock. Only this time I didn’t stop, and his head deflated. Then in that cruel twist that dreams so often take, Lubbock’s curly black hair changed to be long and honey-colored, and I realized it was Alex’s face under all that blood, and not Lubbock.
I woke up with my pistol in my hand. It was pitch-dark in the trailer. I had the safety off, my finger on the trigger, and the green glowing dots of the night sights lined up on the front door.
“Dent? God, it’s dark in here.” It was Alex’s voice. I heard the front door creak shut.
My heart leaped into my throat. I gingerly took my finger off the trigger and pushed on the safety. I scrambled to put the gun back on the nightstand. I managed to get it there and pull my hand away before she found the light switch.
The trailer was flooded with light. I was sitting up in bed, my heart hammering in my throat, trying to shake the mental image of her lying on the floor of Lubbock’s bedroom with blood all over her face.
“Did I startle you? I called out a couple times, but you didn’t answer.” She looked at me, a little concerned.
“Bad dream,” I croaked.
She pulled some clothes out of a duffel bag and went into the bathroom to dress. Bad sign. She’d always dressed and undressed in front of me unselfconsciously before. I took some deep breaths and tried to get my heart rate to slow down. I tried to push how close I’d come to shooting her out of my mind. I took another look at the pistol to make sure the safety was on and got up for a drink of water. My throat felt parched and raw.
She came out of the bathroom wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt. She looked tired.
“How are you?” she asked.
I really didn’t know how to answer that. The only thing that had kept her from a bullet wound at my hands was a four-pound trigger pull. I felt keyed up and ready to fight at a moment’s notice like my nervous system was still jacked up and couldn’t come down. At the moment I felt both so bone tired that I could barely move, but at the same time I felt the urge to go run around the building. So I did what I usually did when women asked me that question.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Her nose wrinkled a little like she didn’t believe it, and I didn’t blame her. I probably looked like an absolute mess sitting up in bed wild-eyed and shaking.
“You scare me sometimes, Dent,” she said, without preamble.
“I’d never hurt you,” I said, the words out of my mouth before I had a chance to think. I wondered if she’d noticed the gun after all.
She shook her head. “I know you’ll never hurt me. It’s everybody else I’m worried about.”
Alex walked over to the sink, got her own drink of water, then looked at me over the rim of the glass.
“After my mom died, I was convinced I needed a dog. My dad wouldn’t say no to me about anything after mom killed herself. He would have spent thousands for one from a breeder, but I was convinced I needed to rescue one from the pound. So we went to the animal shelter and came home with the biggest damn dog they had there. Ringo was probably part German Shepherd and part Rottweiler. He’d been found wandering the streets in Los Angeles, probably escaped from a dog fighting ring, and shipped up to Oregon by one of those rescue outfits.”
She put her cup down and started brushing her hair. I always liked to watch her do that.
“Within days that dog bonded to me and would have taken a bullet for me. He was a teddy bear with me, but he was firmly convinced everybody else in the world was out to kill me. He barely tolerated my dad. He almost mauled the mailman and the cable guy.”
“The final straw was one night when Mike Fisher, one of dad’s guys from the police bureau, came by to get some paperwork signed. Ringo broke out of the bathroom and attacked him. I ran down into the living room to find Mike on his back with Ringo on top of him, biting his arm. Mike actually had his gun out and was getting ready to shoot Ringo when I called him off.”
She put the hairbrush away and kept talking as she took out her contacts.
“After we got Mike patched up, Dad wouldn’t even look me in the eye. He knew we couldn’t keep that dog. He just didn’t want to have to tell me. I was only a teenager, but I was smart enough to know it too. I’ll never forget how relieved he looked when I finally said I knew Ringo had to go.”
Alex pulled her glasses out of the bag and put them on.
“So I found an old guy up in the mountains who took Ringo. I’m sure after a while he was happy there, but I’ll never forget the look he gave me the day I got in the car and left him there.”
The trailer was silent for a minute while I processed all of that.
“Are you comparing me to a dog?” I asked finally.
She blinked, then winced.
“I’m sorry. I probably could have done that better.”
“Yeah,” I said. I realized the conversation we were having was significant, but I was way too tired to do a good job participating.
“What I’m trying to say is I’m worried about you. We’ve never really discussed what happened to Gibson Marshall, but I have some guesses.”
If her guesses involved me shooting him down in cold blood, so his body could be dumped into a river, she was right.
“What you did tonight was wrong,” she said. “You beat Lubbock after he wasn’t a threat to you anymore. You gave him a concussion and he might lose an eye. I think you would have killed him if Eddie hadn’t stopped you.”
She was right and I knew it. At that moment, I would have beaten Lubbock until his skull caved in or until my arm got too tired to swing the pistol.
“I don’t think my dad would have been ok with that,” she said softly.
I realized she was right again. Al had done some sketchy stuff in the name of justice, most notably joining Bolle’s little crusade. But he wouldn’t have beaten Lubbock like that, and he wouldn’t have let me do it either.
“What does this mean for us?” I asked. “Do you want me to leave?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to be separate from you, but I don’t want to be all that close to you either. Can we just go to bed? We’re both exhausted. Let’s just get some sleep and we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
I nodded. We both crawled into bed. She lay on her side with her back facing me. I wanted to touch her, to kiss her, but that didn’t seem like a good thing to try right now.
“Good night, Dent. I hope you sleep well,” she said.
I didn’t say anything back. Within minutes, her breathing was deep and regular. Despite my fatigue, I couldn’t sleep. For one thing, I was afraid of more nightmares. I didn’t want a repeat of the horror show I’d had in my head before she came in the trailer.
For another, I couldn’t stop thinking about Alex. The foot of space between us on the bed felt like a thousand miles. I was bad at relationships. I’d had only a handful of girlfriends over the years. Some of those relationships had been doomed from the start. Many times I’d known that from the beginning, others I’d realized it only in retrospect.
A couple of those relationships probably had a chance though, and I’d fucked them up every time. Usually by retreating the second things got hard. I’d clung to this fervent hope that things would be different with Alex, but in the back of my mind, there had always been that little voice telling me that there was no way this was going to work out. I wasn’t the type of guy who had happily ever after with women. I was just fooling myself to believe this was ever going to last.
A part of me resented her too. I resented how much of my own happiness depended on how she felt, and what she did. No matter how much I loved her, part of me would always chafe against how much she controlled my own mood. That part of me was telling me to cut and run right now. To accept the fact that Alex was going to be my next ex-girlfriend and stop betting on foolish hopes.
But I wanted her. I’d lost my job, my house, most of my money. Onc
e my quest for revenge was over, I’d have nothing left to live for if she was gone.
I lay there for a long time, listening to her breathe. I wanted to wake her up, just to get her to talk to me, but I had no idea what I wanted to say.
Finally, I slept, and thankfully, didn’t dream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I woke up with my gun in my hand again. This time I managed to catch myself before I flicked off the safety and put my finger on the trigger, so I guess that was progress. In the pale light filtering through the curtains of the trailer, I could see Alex sitting up in bed, staring at me.
“Hey Dent, Alex,” Eddie said and knocked again.
“We’re up!” I yelled, then slid the pistol back in the holster on the nightstand.
“Meeting in ten,” Eddie said, then I heard the sound of him walking off.
Alex got up, grabbed her duffel bag and went in the bathroom. I listened to her rustle around, getting ready. I debated saying something but didn’t. Instead, I just got dressed. I brushed my teeth in the trailer’s little sink and ran some wet fingers through my hair.
Alex stepped out of the bathroom and stood there with her arms folded across her chest.
I steeled myself. Here it comes, I thought.
“If you want me to sleep in the same bed with you, the gun needs to be unloaded, and out of reach. Put it in a drawer or something.”
My palms got sweaty at the very thought. For most of my adult life, I’d had a gun close by. For the last six months, I’d had at least one either on my body or within arm’s reach around the clock. Part of me wanted to tell her to go to hell, that I’d keep my gun wherever I damned well pleased. The more rational part of my mind realized that I was slipping a bit, that in the last several hours, I’d pointed guns at people that I cared about. Maybe she had a point.
I also felt a little pathetic at how relieved I’d been when she said she was willing to continue sharing a bed with me, even with conditions.
“Ok,” I said.
“I’m worried about you,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
She actually rolled her eyes at that, reminding me that I’d known her when she was a teenager. Without another word she pivoted and walked out the door. I followed her. She was wearing a pair of khaki cargo pants, and I found myself reflecting on how great her ass looked in them as I followed her across the factory floor. For some reason that made me feel both guilty and glad to have something occupying my thoughts besides an endless loop of death and destruction.
We walked through the inner door and were greeted with the smell of coffee. I filled a mug full of my favorite drug, and piled a plate high with fruit and pastries, hoping I could avoid a repeat of last night’s vomiting. I found a seat and felt a little thrill when Alex sat down next to me. I felt like I was back in high school, hoping to attract the attention of one of the girls.
Bolle had a spring in his step that I’d never seen before.
“We have a big day ahead of us. More on that in a minute. First, let’s hear from Henry.”
Henry had visible stubble on his chin, which meant he hadn’t shaved in a week. He was wearing his favorite “I see the Fnords!” t-shirt. It occurred to me that every time I’d been in the command center, he had too. Beneath his dopey, slacker exterior, Henry was pretty hardcore.
“I’ve been crunching numbers non-stop since the Cascade Aviation jet took off,” Henry said. “At first glance, there are thousands of potential landing places.”
There was a map of the Pacific Ocean and Asia on the display behind him, with thousands of little red dots.
“At some of these, we have good intelligence, and are reasonably sure the plane hasn’t landed.”
Some of the dots winked out.
“Also, it turns out the plane couldn’t have gone as far as we initially expected. That initial run to the coast at low altitude and high speed burned a tremendous amount of fuel. There was also some unstable weather moving across the Pacific in the hours after their departure which would have further decreased their range. With Jack’s help, I was able to do some decent calculations and eliminate even more possibilities.”
This time, a substantial number of dots winked out, leaving far fewer on the screen.
“As you can see, this eliminates all of Cascade Aviation’s facilities in the Middle East. It’s certainly possible they landed at one of the tiny airports still on the map, took on more fuel and proceeded somewhere else. We’re working on gathering as much intelligence as we can to eliminate even more possibilities. But Jack brought up another interesting possibility.”
This time, the map shifted, to cover a big chunk of the western United States. Instead of red dots, there was a red shaded half circle that took in most of the country as far east as the Rocky Mountains.
Jack set his coffee cup down and spoke up. “I’m wondering if that high-speed run to the west was a red herring. It would be pretty easy to bust radar coverage off the west coast, loiter at a low altitude for a while, then sneak your way back in.”
He gestured to Henry, who zoomed in the US. Now the screen was full of an eye wateringly complicated array of circles, lines, and shaded terrain.
“For the most part, we rely on transponders to keep track of aircraft. They are a transmitter that tells the air traffic control system where airplanes are over the US. The Cascade Gulfstream turned off its transponder, so that means the only way to track it is with radar. We’ve got a pretty comprehensive system in this country, but there are plenty of gaps due to terrain, particularly if you are willing to fly low, which further decreases fuel efficiency.”
Henry flipped to another graphic. This one showed a little icon of an airplane starting at a point over the ocean off Oregon, turning back east and weaving its way through the gaps in US air traffic radar coverage.
Now it was Henry’s turn to talk. “We have the radar data from the hours immediately following the escape from PDX. There’s plenty of aircraft on there that don’t have transponders. Most small general aviation aircraft don’t. But I can rule most of them out based on their flight characteristics and positions. So if we have a pretty good idea of where the Gulfstream wasn’t, we can start modeling where it might be, based on different courses, speeds, and altitudes.”
On the screen behind him, the computer started modeling different courses and destinations. Each time the little plane icon would start back at the point over the ocean, the place where the Cascade jet had disappeared off radar. Then it followed a course back over land, threading its way through gaps in radar coverage until it landed. Then the computer reset and tried it again, this time with a slightly different path. As I watched, the simulation sped up, walking through different scenarios at blinding speed.
“This is going to take a while,” Henry said. “I’m refining the model as we go, but I think eventually this will give us a list of places to check for the plane.”
It was easy to dismiss Henry as just another millennial slacker. I was a pretty good investigator, but nothing like this would have ever occurred to me. The movies always portrayed crimes being solved by a blinding flash of insight or a lucky break, but more often they were solved by hard work, grinding away at the possibilities until a solution was found.
“Excellent, Henry.” Bolle beamed. I’d never seen him look genuinely happy before.
“Right now, I need all of you to get ready to go to Portland. We have a meeting with the US Attorney for Oregon in two hours, for depositions and a grand jury hearing. We’re about to secure an indictment against Rickson Todd.”
That was a major shift in gears. Until now, we’d been on the border of operating as a quasi-legal hit squad. Now we were getting ready to testify. I felt more than a little apprehension, wondering what to do if questions regarding certain dead bodies would come up.
The next couple of hours passed in a blur of activity. Eddie had procured decent clothes for me. I showered and shaved, and walked out of th
e trailer looking halfway respectable. The drape of my suit coat over my gun wasn’t perfect, but you could only expect so much from off the rack.
I did a double take when I walked up to the knot of people milling around the roll-up doors at the back of the factory floor. There was a woman standing there I didn’t recognize. She was short, with dark brown hair, and wearing a conservative gray pantsuit and carrying a leather briefcase. She smiled at me and I realized it was Casey.
She laughed. “Eddie helped me dye my hair. Don’t get used to it, it’s temporary.”
“Huh,” I said. “Eddie never surprises me with his talents.”
Eddie buffed his fingernails on his stylish shark gray suit. Beside him, Dalton looked very much the Portland hipster, in a dark suit and skinny tie. We were turning out to be quite the mod squad.
There was a mood in the air that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Festive wasn’t the right word, but there was a feeling of victory that felt familiar. I recognized it from my days working homicides. There was a feeling of accomplishment that you’d caught the guy, but you couldn’t be too happy about it, because something had to happen to get you there.
I also realized we were starting to gel as a team. Together, we’d stopped a terrorist attack in a major American city. Dalton, Eddie, Casey, Alex, they’d all helped save my ass on one occasion or another, and I’d done things for them too.
Alex looked like a million bucks in a dark blue dress. She walked up, squeezed my hand for a second, then leaned in to whisper in my ear.
“I like that suit.”
She let go of my hand and gave me a wink. I wondered how this evening would go.
We split up into a pair of Suburbans. Everyone was quiet in our vehicle, pouring over reports we’d written hastily that morning. I’d testified in court often enough to do it in my sleep, except I’d never had to delicately sidestep my way through so many issues before.
