Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  When Jarrett turned around, Linda was sitting beside the older man holding his hand. The man seemed to be paying no attention. He stared fixedly at something far, far away.

  Civilization had reached Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I decided as I cruised slowly through, checking out the scene. The Wal-Mart was huge, spanking new, and had a couple of acres of parking lot. Inside would be 9 mm and .38 Special ammo, not to mention underwear and jeans, socks and shirts. All the necessities for classy, with-it guys like me.

  The house I was looking for was about a mile south of downtown on the beach side of the highway, on a dead-end street. It looked about as I remembered it, a medium-sized two-story bungalow with a large screened-in porch and a crushed-seashell parking area big enough for four cars. I wheeled in, killed the engine, sat looking it over. Only two of the other bungalows on this street that dead-ended at the dune had cars parked beside them.

  “Whose house is this?” Dorsey O’Shea asked from the back seat.

  “Guy I know.”

  “One of your friends you are about to curse with your presence. Do you have permission to stay here?”

  “Uh, he won’t mind.”

  “So the answer is no.” She harrumped. “I thought not.”

  I turned in my seat to face her. “I’ve had about enough of your lip. I’m sorry you had to shoot that bastard this morning, but I’m not real damn sorry. He came to kill all three of us. It was him or us. He was a rotten cop and he fell in with rotten people.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I know his name, yes.”

  “Jesus, Tommy, I don’t want to have to kill people, for any reason at all. Ever again.” Her voice had a hard, brittle edge to it. “Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “What kind of man are you, anyway? You kill a man at my house, watch another die before your eyes, and you drive all afternoon with your arm out the window and the radio playing, like you don’t give a good goddamn.” The pitch and volume of her voice were rising. “What kind of animal are you, anyway?”

  “I can answer that,” Kelly Erlanger said calmly. “Yesterday morning Tommy Carmellini ran into a burning building and dragged me out, saving my life. Men like the ones this morning went through that building shooting everyone they could find, then set the place on fire to burn the bodies. Last night he went to my house and got me out of it just before more men arrived to kill me.”

  She turned in her seat so that she, too, could see Dorsey. She held up a handful of paper. “These are copies the KGB archivist made of the files in his custody. He spent twenty years copying these files and smuggled them out of Russia after he retired. Never in my life have I read such a chronicle of evil. Tommy Carmellini? He’s one of the good guys.”

  She got out of the car and closed the door behind her, leaving me alone with Dorsey.

  Dorsey wouldn’t look at me. After a bit she said, “I know there is evil in the world, but I don’t want to live with it. I don’t want to fight it. I don’t want it bleeding to death in my foyer. What’s so wrong with that? Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” I told her. “But you’d better keep that pistol handy. You may need it again if you want to keep breathing.”

  It only took me a couple of minutes to pick the lock on the front door of the bungalow. I opened the door, went through turning on lights, then went back to the car to carry in the weapons and baggage. The women came inside. After they used the facilities, they walked through the house examining everything.

  “You really do know the owners?” Dorsey asked sharply.

  “Yes.”

  “They won’t mind you using this place?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you call them and ask? There’s the phone.”

  “I would rather not. The fewer people who know we’re here the better. If there’s a problem, I’ll make it right with the owners later on.”

  Kelly took a deep breath and announced, “I’ll take the bedroom on the left, upstairs. I saw a swimsuit up there that looks like it might fit me. Dorsey, would you like to go for a walk on the beach?”

  Dorsey’s shoulders sagged. “Yes,” she said. “I guess I would.”

  While they were changing clothes I rooted through the kitchen drawers until I found a spare house key. I gave it to Kelly as they trooped past on their way out, with borrowed towels over their shoulders.

  I stood beside the car watching them walk down the street. After they disappeared across the dune, I got in the car and headed for Wal-Mart, which even had groceries.

  That Kelly … she had her share of guts. I liked that.

  The sheriff was a man in his fifties, balding, with a modest pot gut and a quiet voice. He stood in front of the cabin listening to Basil Jarrett explain about the man they had found when they arrived midday, the man who had spent most of the afternoon asleep near the woodpile.

  When he had told him everything he could think of, Jarrett led the sheriff inside. He sat down beside Mikhail Goncharov, asked him his name, where he was from, all the usual questions. For his troubles he received a blank stare.

  The sheriff took the pad, wrote his name upon it, and held it up so the man could see the similarity between the name on the pad and the sheriff’s name tag above his left pocket, just below his badge. Then he offered the man the pad and pen.

  Goncharov took them, examined the pen, stared at the white paper, and finally laid them in his lap. The sheriff rescued the pad and pen and wrote out two questions. What is your name? Where do you live? Goncharov didn’t appear to even read them when they were held in front of him.

  The sheriff sat for a bit more, chatting with Goncharov and receiving no response, then finally arose from his chair and motioned to Jarrett and Fiocchi to follow. Standing in front of his cruiser, he said, “He’s not from around here. Never saw him before.”

  “Do you want to take him with you?”

  “Well, about all I could do would be take him to the county lockup for transport to the regional jail. We could get some prints, send them to the FBI, see if they can figure out who he is. Gonna take a while, I suspect.”

  “You’d leave him in jail while the bureaucrats are piddling along?”

  The sheriff settled his hat onto his head and looked searchingly at each of their faces. “Seeing as how he’s apparently incompetent, the mental health commissioner will have him examined by a psychologist or psychiatrist, hold a hearing. If the commissioner finds he’s incompetent, regardless of who he is, he’ll send him to the state mental institution for treatment.”

  “I see,” Basil Jarrett said, glancing at Fiocchi. “So you’re saying he’ll probably wind up in the nut house?”

  “I sorta suspect so,” the sheriff admitted. “This fella doesn’t have a wallet or money on him—you told me that. It’s been my experience that there are very few people without some kind of identification on their person unless they are running from something.” He shrugged, then continued, “He doesn’t appear to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He won’t talk to me in any language, won’t write down his name or tell us where he lives—he seems unresponsive. Abnormally so.”

  The sheriff got out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, taking his time. When he had it going he said, “He appears to me to be unable to take care of himself. I call that incompetent. What do you think ?”

  While the sheriff smoked, Jarrett and Fiocchi walked out of earshot and talked the situation over. In a moment they came back. “Is there any way you could fingerprint him and send the prints to the FBI? And leave him here until you hear something?”

  “You don’t know who this man is,” the sheriff pointed out. “He could be a fugitive, a killer, or an escapee from a prison or asylum. He could be bedbug crazy. He could be any damn body. Do you really want the responsibility of caring for this man for a while? Might be as long as a week ?”

  They went away and discussed it animatedly. Finally they returned. “Yes,�
� Jarrett said. “He’s sick, having severe nightmares, and we think he has amnesia. We don’t think jail is the place for him. I have to go to work on Monday, but Linda could stay here with him if necessary.”

  “I’ve got some office supplies in the trunk,” the sheriff said. “Seem to remember an ink pad in that bag.” He made no move to open the trunk but stood smoking. When he finished the weed, he dropped it and ground it out beneath his shoe. “This guy seems pretty harmless. Let’s hope he is.”

  When I got back from Wal-Mart that afternoon, I did some sit-ups and push-ups to get the kinks out, then went for a run. I stood on the dune looking until I saw the women—they seemed deep in conversation—then I ran the other way along the beach.

  That night I fixed steaks and potatoes for dinner on the charcoal grill that sat beside the house in the small yard. While the food was cooking I made a salad. I had even remembered to buy a six-pack on my shopping expedition, so we washed our meal down with beer.

  The women didn’t have much to say that night. Kelly dove back into the Goncharov treasure and Dorsey selected a book from the shelves. She read on it a while, then put it back on the shelf and went upstairs. I heard the shower running, then nothing. I figured she went to bed.

  I sat on the screened-in porch and thought about the last two days. Bullets, blood, fire, murder … it was like we were in the middle of a war.

  Me, I was just a thief who liked breaking into places I wasn’t supposed to be. The agency kept me busy cracking safes, planting bugs, photographing documents in private offices, and the like. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job—I got paid adequately and regularly, although I wasn’t getting rich, and presumably someday I would retire on a comfortable pension if someone didn’t shoot me or I didn’t open a booby-trapped filing cabinet. Or a rope didn’t break while I climbed the side of a building. Or I didn’t get thrown into some third-world dungeon to rot. Or I didn’t pick up a fatal intestinal parasite somewhere or other. Or these hired killers who were chasing me and Kelly—and now Dorsey—didn’t catch me.

  What was there to worry about?

  Truth be told, I thought about quitting the government off and on for years. Tell the CIA to shove it and go out on my own, burglary for fun and profit. Then I would think about guys I had known, guys like Sal Pulzelli, who didn’t live to retire, and I would think, what the heck, I’ll hang in there. Keep on keeping on. So I’d been hanging in, keeping on. Now Sal was dead and Willie carved up and …

  I knew exactly how Dorsey felt.

  Why me?

  There were some blankets neatly folded on a chair in the living room, so I carried them out to the covered porch and bedded down on a couch. Kelly was still curled up reading.

  It must have been about midnight when I awoke to find a woman crawling under the blankets with me. At first I thought it was Dorsey, but it wasn’t. It was Kelly. She was wearing cotton pajamas and she wasn’t interested in anything but sleeping. She snuggled up against me and promptly dropped off.

  I wrapped an arm around her and went back to sleep myself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When I awoke Thursday morning I found myself alone on the couch with the breeze whipping through the screens. I opened an eye, looked out. The day was here, but the sun had not yet risen. Or maybe it had. There were a lot of clouds up there.

  I heaved myself out, put on shorts and my tennis shoes, and went outside. No one sitting in cars, no one peering out a window. Only a few folks out and about at this hour, joggers and dog walkers. I trotted down the street and thundered over the boardwalk across the dune. Birds probed the surf runout, and a garbage truck with balloon tires drove along emptying trash barrels. Here and there people combed the beach for treasures that might have washed up during the night. There was more trash than treasures. Amazing how many plastic milk jugs find their way into the ocean, to drift for months until they wash up somewhere.

  I puffed along watching the gulls and the solid gray clouds racing overhead. On the way back I stopped running and walked to cool down.

  So what was next? Where should I go from here?

  The only leads I had were the contents of the wallets and cell phones I had taken from the dead and injured thugs. Of necessity, the trail must start with those since there was nowhere else.

  Should I leave the women here and hunt these people alone?

  The women seemed to be sleeping when I got back, so I got a pot of coffee going and went out for doughnuts and a copy of every newspaper sold in this town. When I returned to the house thirty minutes later, I took a quick shower, then settled at the kitchen table drinking coffee, munching doughnuts, and scanning the papers. I could not find a single word about the massacre in West Virginia or the shootings yesterday in Washington. Nada.

  I was on my second cup of coffee when Kelly came downstairs. She was dressed in shorts and one of my T-shirts. She poured herself coffee, snagged a doughnut, and sat down beside me to look at the paper.

  “Good morning,” I ventured.

  She grunted. Well, some women are like that B.C. Before Coffee.

  I decided I wasn’t going to mention sharing the couch until she did.

  “There’s nothing in here on the shootings yesterday,” she said when she finished with the Washington Post. She put that paper down and picked up the next one.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I agreed.

  “So it didn’t happen?”

  “Apparently.”

  When she had scanned the lot, she helped herself to more coffee. She took her time examining the doughnut possibilities before selecting her second victim.

  “I’ve read about two-thirds of the files,” she said, “scanned them, anyway. Every one is on political double-crosses and murders and hounding dissidents and faking evidence for show trials of state enemies. The names are coded, but as near as I can tell, every person mentioned is a Soviet citizen or a prominent American or British traitor. I just can’t see anything there that would make anyone in Europe or America feel threatened.”

  “Were all the files Goncharov copied about Soviet internal matters ?”

  “My understanding was that only some of them were. Apparently the only surviving files are on KGB dirty tricks.”

  I finished my coffee and frowned into the cup. Put it on top of the newspapers and stretched.

  “Can you finish the rest of the files today?”

  “I think so.”

  I took the magazine from the automatic and checked that the column of shells was full, then pushed it back in place.

  “Where do we go from here?” Kelly asked. She was leaning against the counter, watching my face.

  “I’ve got a couple wallets and cell phones.”

  “What does it mean that none of this mess made the newspapers?”

  I eyed her. She wasn’t innocent, naive, or ignorant. Or scared. She was smart and tough. And pretty decent looking. She had been a nice armful last night, but I suppose I shouldn’t be thinking things like that.

  “It means that some really big weenie is keeping it out,” I said sourly. “That’s why the cops were cooperating with the killers. We are up to our eyes in a very large pile of shit.”

  “I figured that out Tuesday.”

  “We’re going to have to be very careful if we hope to keep breathing. No telephone calls, no e-mails, no nothing. We make the slightest noise, they’ll be after us like hounds after a rabbit. What we have to do is figure out who the hounds are.”

  I broke the antennas off the two cell phones, then turned them on—neither had voice messages queued up, which was a shame—then got into the stored numbers. I wrote them down on a sheet of scratch paper and sat staring at the phones. Technology scares me. If the cops were cooperating with the killers, perhaps the cell phone people and the folks at the National Security Agency were, too. I turned the phones off, took out the batteries, and stored them in my overnight bag. The wizards were going to have to rewrite the laws of physics to find those cell phone
s without batteries in them.

  I sat studying the numbers. Three numbers appeared on both phones. I made a tick beside them.

  The contents of the wallets didn’t even cover the kitchen table when I spread them out. One guy had a hundred fifty-three dollars in currency, the other had forty-two. I examined each bill for notes or numbers and put them back in their respective wallets.

  Driver’s licenses and credit cards made up the bulk of the remainder. Both guys had credit cards that looked as if they doubled as ATM cards. One of the guys had a bunch of dry-cleaning receipts. One of the guys belonged to AAA; one was a card-carrying member of the Harley Owners Group. In one wallet there were a few scraps of paper with telephone numbers on them—this was the dude who habitually didn’t let his main squeeze know his whereabouts. Women’s telephone numbers, I figured, but maybe I was being uncharitable. I added these numbers to my list.

  That was the crop. I made sure I got the proper stuff back into the proper wallet.

  The rain started about the time Dorsey O’Shea came downstairs. She looked disdainfully at the doughnuts and rooted through the pantry. She found a box of healthy cereal and ate a couple of dry handfuls between sips of coffee.

  “That stuff has a lot of sugar in it,” I said, just to be nasty. She ignored my comment.

  Kelly was out on the screened-in porch reading. Dorsey joined me at the kitchen table. “How long is this going to go on?” she asked.

  I didn’t like that tone of voice, and we weren’t even living together. “What’s going to go on?”

  “Hiding out like criminals?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’ve been waiting for Kelley to finish reading the files, hoping something promising would turn up.”

  “We must go back to Washington, talk to the authorities.”

  “What if they arrest us, accuse us of espionage and murder? Won’t be any bail for that. My main concern is that we’ll be killed before we can tell what we know. The people that tried to murder everyone in a CIA safe house can certainly reach into a city or county lockup.”

  She helped herself to another handful of dry cereal, which she ate as she thought about the problem. I could tell from the expression on her face that she was remembering the fear as Johnson Dunlap came at her with a gun in his hand. Memories like that remain with you all your life. She was still scared. Hell, I was still scared. Which in a way was good. If you’re scared enough, maybe you’ll be careful enough to stay alive.