Hard Return

by J. Carson Black

  She’d regretted talking to Justin about him. Justin thought she should send in the photo, but she didn’t.

  So when she saw his photo—her snap of him with the horse—on television, she aspirated the Coke she was drinking. Coughing and spluttering, she stared at the screen.

  She barely heard the newscaster. Something about a “person of interest” who might have been at the scene of the school shooting.

  How did this happen?

  (You know how it happened.)

  And why wasn’t she surprised?

  Her heart chugged, hard. She stepped out into the breezeway, rested a hand on the colt’s neck. He stepped on the toe of her boot, barely missing her actual toes, and she jerked his nose chain. “Quit!”

  Added, “I’m trying to think here.”

  The colt must have understood, because he raised his muzzle up to her ear and blew in and out of his nostrils. She pushed his head away and tightened her grip on the chain.

  Driving through the predawn light on the way to the airport, Landry and Jolie lapsed into silence. The sound emerged from the iPad. A woman anchor’s voice, babbling on about a second suspect in the shooting at Gordon C. Tuttle High School.

  Landry glanced over and saw the photo of himself and the horse. “Barbara Carey,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The woman who had the farm where I worked. That’s where this was taken.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Not at the time, but I recognize it. She must have sent it in.”

  “But why would you stick out? People must have been sending in thousands of pictures.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’d they plow through so many photos and find yours?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What now?”

  “The airport’s going to be problematic. They have to assume I saw myself on television and they’ll have cops there.”

  “Feds, too.”

  “You want me to drop you anywhere? They’re looking for me, not you.”

  Jolie was silent.

  “I want to ask you something,” Landry said.

  “Go ahead and ask.”

  “Do you think I am capable of shooting up that school?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not at the back of your mind? Even a little bit?”

  She said nothing for a moment. He thought she was second-guessing her answer. Then she said, “Because of the way you were on the island—how you saved my cousin’s daughter. You wouldn’t shoot your own child. You wouldn’t shoot in the direction of your own child—you wouldn’t take the chance.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  She paused. Finally said, “I am not sure of a lot of things. You’re a hired killer—”

  “Jolie—”

  “Hear me out. I know there’s a lot you would do, but you wouldn’t take a chance of killing Kristal. You wouldn’t kill kids. Warriors don’t kill kids.”

  First things first, Landry sent Jolie in to pick up his mail. To pick up his sniper rifle, Betsy, and whatever else was in the box.

  After that, they cruised a parking lot outside a movie theater and switched license plates with a car out in the hinterlands. From there, they went looking for a down-at-the-heels car dealership—one in a bad side of town where plenty of drug dealers plied their trade. She bought a van, quick and dirty, for $4,000 cash. She’d altered her appearance to biker chick, thanks to some of the stuff he had in the back of the van—including cotton balls in her mouth. She’d spent twenty minutes in a gas station bathroom chopping off her hair and dyeing it black.

  There had been no trade-in. She’d gone in on the Honda and loaded it up into the van and driven it off the lot.

  Landry had attached the ponytail and rolled up cloths and stuffed them in his pants so that he had a pretty good pair of love handles. Mirrored shades. Leather vest. Biker leathers and a bandana tied around his head, Apache style. Grizzled goatee.

  Everyone would see bikers. Everyone would see a whole subset of humanity in shorthand.

  “Now what?” Jolie asked.

  “I call my brother.”

  Barbara Carey thought: Justin. Her brother Justin must have got hold of her phone and sent the pic to his own phone, and then sent it to the FBI.

  She put the colt back in his stall and ran back to the house and called Justin, but he didn’t answer. She left a message, her voice shaking. “You had no right to send that photo. That was mine to send, not yours. My property. You went behind my back. I trusted you! What if he’s innocent? You just ruined . . .”

  She couldn’t continue. She was too angry, too embarrassed, betrayed. Her brothers had always been like that—paternalistic—even her younger brother Ben. Like she didn’t have a brain in her head.

  The day had gone by, slow as a traffic jam. She had the channel turned to one of the news channels and periodically the picture would go up along with a description. The man in the photo was “a person of interest.”

  She was jumpy as a feral cat.

  She knew she shouldn’t have shared her thoughts about Joe Till with her brothers. Just because they had been in the armed forces, did that mean they knew anything about something like this? No!

  Barb stared at the screen. The story had moved to something else—farm subsidies and the constant bickering in Washington. The last couple of days the tragedy had begun to fade, like a digital photograph of her daughter she’d framed and put on the tack room door. Only four months gone, and that picture had faded almost to white.

  The world had moved on. It was a tragedy, yes, but the argument had moved on to gun control and mental illness.

  But why did they pick out this photo of all the photos that had no doubt been sent in? Why Joe’s?

  That was the thing that worked on her mind. Could there be a grain of truth to it after all? Could Justin in all his sexist I-know-better-than-you-do self-righteousness be right?

  There must have been thousands of photos. Thousands of tips.

  So why was Joe Till’s photo on the television?

  Had she really been sleeping with a killer?

  She thought about the way his hand caressed her jaw, as if . . .

  As if he could snap her neck in two without half-thinking about it.

  CHAPTER 22

  - Iraq, 2005 -

  Cam looked down into the basement of the bombed-out farmhouse. The wind whistled through the doorway. Paper rattled under a brick on one of the steps leading down.

  The dead palm tree fronds clattered. The Aleppo pine’s branches stirred and were still.

  The basement floor was awash in trash and other debris—including large chunks from the ceiling and walls. He was about to turn away when his eye caught sight of the corner of something. No, not just one corner, but two precise corners connected by a straight line.

  A box?

  No—not one box. Several—he could see the lines intersecting, repeating themselves, under the collage of mortar and junk and diapers and congealed food and bricks.

  He thought he knew what they were: boxes of standard US-issued rifles, cached here by one side or the other—or more likely, left behind. The United States often left caches of rifles where they were—it was too expensive to transport them back.

  Either that was the case, or the rifles had been stolen.

  He bent down and pushed the top off one of the boxes—

  And got a huge surprise.

  There were not rifles in the box—there was money. US money. Millions—no, make that billions—of dollars in cash, if he was right.

  If this was what he thought it was.

  Like everyone else, Cam knew about the $6.6 billion in US dollars stolen from the Green Zone. Fucking jerks just left stacks of shrink-wrapped money on pallets in
plain view of everybody. Billions and billions of dollars to help rebuild Iraq. They’d used guards around the clock but $6.6 billion had turned up missing somewhere along the line. There were a lot of jokes about that.

  Everyone talked about the money. What they’d do with it if they had it. Because somebody did—somebody had it.

  Could this be the missing $6.6 billion?

  They were stacked in the box in bricks, each of them wrapped tightly in cellophane. Cam had heard that the bricks each held a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills.

  He picked up a brick and peered at the bill on top.

  One hundred dollars.

  And he thought: This is meant to be. It was his destiny.

  He opened the other boxes. They all contained stacks of bills the size of bricks. Each brick had been shrink-wrapped.

  His for the asking.

  Cam knew if he wanted to cash in, he’d have to act fast. No way he could take all of it out with him now. He needed to hide the money here, in plain sight, and come back for it as soon as he could. Today, or tomorrow at the latest.

  How would he transport the money? How much could he take? Was there really $6.6 billion here? He couldn’t take that much, but what if he could take even one-third? One-third would be what? If all the stolen money was stashed here, that one-third would come to $2.2 billion. Billion!

  A billion would do it. No need to be greedy. Two billion would seal the deal.

  He would need a lot of money to run for office. First he had to get a senator’s seat or a House seat. That would take money. And then the run itself.

  Cam walked through the rubble to the other side, peered out through a hole in the wall. He stared at the men and the one woman in the Humvee. They were having a smoke. He could hear them laughing and joking.

  He sat down on the debris-covered step to collect himself, had to shake off the shock. His extremities tingled and he felt light-headed, his brain snared into an incessant loop between what this money could do for him and his future, and how in God’s name he could work out the logistics of stealing it.

  He would need transport—soon—just in case whoever stashed it here came back.

  Move! his mind urged him. Make a decision. Like a sleepwalker, he reached down and picked up a kilo-sized bundle of money, opened his vest, and stuffed it in one side. Then he reached down for another bundle and snugged it into the other side. He zipped up his vest and patted it down. Too obvious? No—those assholes wouldn’t notice anything. He wished he’d brought a duffle, but if he came walking out holding a heavy duffle, dumb as they were, one of them might notice.

  Another thought. He didn’t want anyone thinking this place was special. He realized he’d have to treat the farmhouse like a piece of shit. Make a show of it. Explode the floor above, cover the basement in rubble.

  Blow the walls down on top of it.

  First, though, he needed to protect the money. If he did it the right way—and he was an expert at setting explosives—the money would be just fine where it was, in the rifle boxes.

  He set a C-4 charge and detonated the area right next to the house, watching as the rubble crashed down into the basement below. Then he trudged back to the Humvee.

  The female photog said, “What took you so long?”

  “I was having a wet dream about you.”

  She gave him a dirty look.

  “At least you got to see some fireworks.”

  There were a few more hours of patrol, and Cam counted the minutes until he could get back to the base. He could barely think, for all the white noise in his brain. He could feel the money pressed against his chest, and suppressed the desire to hug the bundle hard against his body like twin infants of his heart.

  Back at base, Cam went to his bunk. He had the place to himself—he usually did. He cleaned out his duffle and dumped the two bundles of cash inside. He tucked it underneath his bunk and stuffed miscellaneous stuff—jackets and such—around it. Then he opened his computer and searched for a business card program, his plan solidifying. He configured a sheet of business cards for a security contractor and made himself the CEO. Keep it simple; he typed in, “High Risk Protection Services.”

  He emptied another duffle and filled it with items he’d need for the task ahead. He’d be good to go in fifteen minutes, but he waited for the rest of the base to be at its calmest before he completed his tasks—to collect everything he needed for his own private op.

  The night patrol was out. The rest were sleeping. This was when he needed to be careful. He went to the munitions dump and scavenged as many .50-caliber ammo cans as he could. He couldn’t clean them all out—had to make sure they wouldn’t be missed. But he managed to take two dozen. He’d come back later if need be, since this mission, “Operation Windfall,” would take more than one trip. He dumped the ammo in a secluded area in the back of the camp and buried it, then loaded the empty cans onto his bunk. Now he was good to go for the next action.

  Cam knew he had to do this right—no mistakes. Fortunately, he came from a family of bullshitters.

  He drew the air in through his nostrils. Shook his hands and kicked his legs out, just to get loose. Time for the acting job—he needed to be in a panic.

  Panicked, but not crazy enough to get himself shot when he barged in on the CO.

  He went to his commander’s billet and stood in the doorway. The commanding officer was already sleeping.

  “Sir,” Cam said, sounding desperate but reluctant to wake his CO up. Feeling it in his gut, letting the nervousness spread throughout his body.

  Agitation.

  The CO stirred, turned on a light, and opened his eyes. Those eyes were a piercing deep blue in daylight—but now they were flat black. Cam spoke quickly. “Sir, I have an emergency I need to deal with.”

  “What kind?”

  “Family emergency, sir.”

  The CO sat up and rubbed his neck.

  Cam knew the CO trusted him. He’d worked from the beginning to win that trust, just in case. This was the time to collect. “May I requisition a vehicle? I want to get going ASAP.”

  “It’s serious?”

  Cam said gravely, “It is, sir.”

  A pause. Then, “I can give you five days.”

  “Thank you, sir!”

  Back at the barracks, making sure to sound panicked, he rousted his staff sergeant. He begged him to pull his paperwork for leave and travel as soon as possible. Then he trotted to the car pool and took his commandeered Humvee and returned to the barracks. He loaded the ammo cans into the rear of the vehicle, covered them with a tarp to keep them from rattling on the trip, and stuffed the duffle holding the rest of his money under the seat. He tossed a hastily packed bag into the passenger seat, added his M-4 (with grenade launcher and a few grenades), and put them all on the passenger-side floorboard. From there he drove cross-camp to pick up his leave papers, and was gone.

  He drove back to the bombed-out farmhouse and extinguished his lights about a half mile away. By now dawn lit up the horizon. He had a lot of work to do.

  He loaded twenty-five ammo cans with as many bricks of cash as he could fit into them, stacking the cans neatly across the backs of the Humvee seats, and covering them with the tarp. He stuffed as many of the remaining bricks of cash into the open rear of the Humvee, covered them as well, and drove away from the farmhouse.

  The sun was up now, and it was hot and humid. The river wasn’t far away, a sluggish brown rope fringed with green. There were more bombed-out houses strung out along what used to be a road, most of them just foundations. He found what he needed almost right away: blast craters in the sand, approximately a hundred meters away from a farm outbuilding that had been shredded to bits. He backed the truck up to one crater at a time and carpeted the bottom with bricks of cash. The flies buzzed around his lips, his nose, his eyes—seeking moisture. “Fuckers
,” he muttered, stacking in the bricks. “Even you can’t bother me.”

  It was eight a.m. by the time he was done placing the C-4 charges to the side of each crater of money and drove back to a safe detonation point. He took a GPS reading of the craters, scribbled the coordinates inside his wallet, and rummaged through the other duffle for his civilian clothing. He’d packed them neatly: a button-down long-sleeved shirt, chinos, belt, and loafers. He donned the clothing and voilà! He was transformed into a private security specialist. A handsome Rolex knockoff completed the outfit.

  He reached down to the floorboard of the Humvee, picked up the detonator, flipped off the safety, and ignited the C-4.

  Several blasts shook the area in quick succession—flames spouting up through the black smoke, sand and dirt and dust dissolving and falling back to earth, the debris settling down over the cache of money. It would also cover any tread marks and footprints he’d left behind.

  On to Kuwait.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jolie drove while Landry pulled the packaging off one of the new burner phones and texted a message to his brother Gary: “Chernobyl Ant,” which was code for wanting to talk. Chernobyl Ant was their one-time shot at the Kentucky Derby. The colt hadn’t been a Derby hopeful for long. He’d injured an ankle during the running of the Santa Anita Derby and was retired to stud. But what might have been.

  Landry got Gary’s voice mail and left a message. “Call me.”

  Ten minutes later, Gary did. “What happened? You’re all over the TV!”

  “Do they have my name?”

  “You haven’t been watching?”