“I need—I need my comics,” I answered, daring to take another two steps.
“It’s lights-out. Y’know that.”
“Not for reading. Just so . . .” I wasn’t sure what to say. But I was close enough now to lean forward and peer around the molding of the entrance. Granddad was seated in his red leather chair, a coffee mug in his hand. Hollis sat by the fire, an empty glass next to him. The room was warmer than upstairs and both men wore T-shirts. Hollis wore shorts, too, but he did that even when it was winter and raining.
“You drift off fine every night without comics. Get upstairs,” Granddad said. He meant right now. He always meant right now.
“I do know that feeling.” Hollis thumped his broad fist on the hearth. “Having your treasures around you. Makes you feel right in the world.” His face was pinker than usual, maybe from the fire. “S’why everything I own is on my boat. Take it all with me anywhere I sail.”
I nodded. I didn’t really understand but nodded anyway because Hollis seemed to be on my side.
“Can I sleep down here?” I said.
Granddad angled his head at the couch, the only logical place to bed down on the ground floor. No way I would be allowed to stay on the couch, not while they were talking here.
“I can stay in the kitchen,” I said hurriedly.
His dark brow furrowed. “On the floor? What’s the matter with you?” Then his eyes widened in realization and shifted from me to the fireplace mantel.
The green book. It was there. Like it had followed me downstairs.
“Ah,” Granddad said.
Hollis reached out a long arm and took the book down to read its cover. “Béaloideas Eireann. Folklore, eh? My.”
“I found that where you left it,” said Granddad. “In the hall.”
Another strike against me. I remembered now that I hadn’t wanted to touch the book after I’d read about the wailing ghost, in case I might accidentally see the picture again. I’d intended to come back to it soon. But I’d forgotten.
“Which of these caught your eye, lad?” Hollis said, leafing through the brittle pages.
“Bean sí,” I said. Pronouncing it a little like bean sigh.
“Banshee,” Granddad corrected. “Reading spook stories makes for long nights, Van.”
The wind, as if agreeing, rattled the shutters.
“Go on, now,” said Granddad.
I looked at the staircase, and the shadows at the top. My feet stayed frozen.
“Leaba,” Granddad said. Bed. A command in Irish left no room for further negotiations.
“I’ve a cure for the nighttime haunts,” said Hollis, rising swiftly to walk over to his coat, which he’d draped over the back of the couch. “Somewhere here . . .”
Granddad exhaled like a bull. I wouldn’t meet his eye.
“This,” Hollis said, holding up a bright blue stone. “Banishes all evil, bad dreams, and wickedness.”
He handed it to me. The stone was a translucent azure, with flecks of gold. Pretty, but more or less the same as crystals I’d seen in weird stores on Broadway, places that sold crocheted purses and offered to clean your aura for ten dollars.
Hollis may have read my face. “Ancient, that little rock is. My grandmother had it from hers, and now down to me. Works every time. You borrow it. I’ve got other charms and wards back on the boat.”
Hollis turned to Granddad. So did I. Was it real?
Granddad finally sighed.
“You look after that, now,” he said to me. “Magic that powerful is rare.”
“Okay.”
“Get.”
I got.
Back under the covers—all the way under—I used my tiny key-chain flashlight to examine the stone. I supposed it could be old. It had cracks in it. I held it tightly in my hand and turned off the light before Granddad caught me with it on.
From downstairs I heard Hollis and Granddad, their words muffled but loud enough for me to make out the happy spirit in their talk. I closed my eyes.
No banshee tonight. I’d lost my mother. But Granddad would be safe, no matter what I thought I heard on the wind.
“Hello, Van,” Hollis answered my call. “Your ears must have been burning. Do people say that, if it’s only thinking about someone and not talking about them?”
“You’re having a good night.” I pictured Hollis at home on his boat in Shilshole Marina in Seattle, lounging in the untidy cabin with a double shot glass of whiskey held in his thick paw.
“I’m a little in my cups, it’s true. I’ve just now put Gloria in one of those taxis that regular people drive now, off to home. A fine woman.”
Gloria was Hollis’s girlfriend of three months. It must be serious, with that kind of longevity.
“Hollis,” I said, “I need your expertise.”
“A professional matter, then. All right.”
“I have to move some items. And hide them, for at least a few days.”
“Dimensions?” he said.
“Twenty-three boxes, about twelve-by-twelve-by-ten. Four to five pounds each. Inside each box are one hundred and forty-four vials about three inches long. They’re fragile.”
“Vials? Not dangerous, I hope. Biohazards and whatnot.”
“No. But they are very hot.”
“Huh,” he said.
“I’m not selling the junk. Just keeping it out of circulation.”
“Never imagined anything else, lad. Is it only the vials you care about? Or the boxes, too?”
I thought about it. “I can sacrifice the boxes so long as I remove any papers from each one first.”
“Time frame?”
I gave Hollis the coordinates of my location in Oregon, just west of nowhere, and told him about the panel van I’d stolen from the First Riders. “So I can’t sit around for too long, and I can’t drive it into a town,” I concluded.
“Right.” There was a pause while he considered the problem and took a sip of whatever he was drinking. Irish whiskey, almost certainly. Hollis stuck to his roots. I could have used a belt myself.
“You’ve got a problem, boyo,” he said finally.
“You sound happy about that.”
“I should. By good chance, I think I’ve got a solution for you, if you don’t mind my taking a hand in it myself.”
“From all the way in Seattle?”
“Not so far, if you know the right people. Give me ten minutes and I’ll ring you back.” He hung up.
I’d known Hollis my whole life, minus the ten years I’d been soldiering. He could still surprise me. The phone buzzed in less than five minutes.
“Right,” Hollis said without preamble. “You’re a few miles south of the county line, I see. Can you find Quillmark Ranch?”
“Let’s say yes.”
“Good. Be there in about three hours.”
Three hours? Impossible, unless . . . “Hollis, I only wanted your opinion. The vials might burst at altitude.”
“We’ll see about that. I have to move quickly now. Call me if anything goes amiss.”
I was about to say the same, but Hollis had hung up again.
Quillmark Ranch was on the map, in the middle of the county, and only twenty miles’ drive from where I sat. A big spread. Large enough for a landing strip.
I hoped Hollis wasn’t exaggerating about our prospects. He was an optimist by nature, and practically boisterous on the sauce.
On the other hand, Hollis had been smuggling things since before I was born, and had never been arrested. Maybe I should have a little more faith.
I left the truck with its stolen payload in the hills above the ranch, wanting to recon Quillmark’s grounds without announcing my arrival. The ranch was an unfenced expanse of at least a mile square, all of it so unvaryingly flat the acreage had to have been graded by a small army of surveyors.
It was also as dark as the deepest Amazon jungle. Only the moon allowed me to discern one long stripe on the flat earth, where the texture differed fr
om its surroundings. The landing strip. Two single-story buildings sat offset from the strip, black boxes on a dark gray field. I watched the ranch. Nothing changed. After an hour I was satisfied, and returned to the truck.
With time to kill, I decided to have a closer look at the Trumo. I brought the box I’d opened to the passenger’s seat. Inside, tucked next to the stack of plastic trays, I found a single page—the box’s shipping invoice.
The invoice was identical to the one that Fain had shown me, his supposed proof that they’d been hired to find these same boxes. Except that on this copy, I could read the parts that had been carefully blacked out on Fain’s.
Two names. A company logo proudly emblazoned in blue and black at the top of the sheet. HAVERCORP NATIONAL. And on the same line. Last Updated By: AARON CONLEE.
HaverCorp was a security company. Professional guards, armed transport. I’d seen their armored trucks on the streets of Seattle. For some reason Fain hadn’t wanted me to read HaverCorp’s name on the page he’d shown me. Or to see Aaron Conlee’s.
In ten minutes I had the rest of the boxes open and had leafed through the rest of the invoices. All of them identical. HaverCorp, and Conlee, every time.
I could see a pharma lab hiring HaverCorp to safely convey a few hundred grand of legal heroin across state lines. So why would Fain hide that fact? Why not just tell me the drugs had been stolen from the armored car company? Perhaps HaverCorp was the client he was truly protecting, and the lab story was a smokescreen.
Another half hour until I expected Hollis. Time enough for some online research.
HaverCorp had made headlines during the past year, but not in any way they would want. An armored truck robbery in New Orleans, another three months later in Michigan, and a third four months after that in Ohio. The robbers had evaded all cameras. They’d left the HaverCorp guards bound and blindfolded. Reports varied on whether there had been three or four or five in the gang, even at the same score.
There were other similarities. All three of those jobs had been at night, after the armored car had finished collecting cash from businesses and banks in their daily route. The company and the Feds were silent on the amounts stolen—which probably meant the hauls had been sizable enough to cause HaverCorp serious embarrassment. In each case, no one had been hurt, no shots fired.
Jaeger and his First Riders had had a busy year, at HaverCorp’s expense and embarrassment. I had a better understanding now why Fain had concealed the company’s name.
Things had gone very wrong on their fourth score. Not an armored truck that time, but an unmarked HaverCorp van in Henderson, Nevada. A mere thirteen days ago. Both guards dead by GSW. The driver and the hopper, who completed each pickup while the driver remained in the truck, watching for trouble. Not closely enough this time.
One of the crime blogs had photographs. Full color, and too graphic for the news services. Police at the scene. The blanket-draped corpse of the hopper lying on the sidewalk, one foot hanging off the curb. Blood obscuring the driver’s-side window in pink whorls and streaks. The hopper had been gunned down as he stepped out of the van, the driver behind the wheel. Almost as an afterthought, the final paragraph noted that the van had been carrying pharmaceuticals. HaverCorp declined to comment on the type and amount.
The change in MO was ruthless. Maybe the guards had seen the face of Jaeger or one of his men, or maybe the white power leader had simply decided that killing guards was more efficient than tying them up.
Two dead. And I’d let Jaeger go, in favor of jacking his drugs out from under him. Goddamn.
I couldn’t help that now. If Fain had been straight with me yesterday, I might have acted differently tonight. Hindsight bought me nothing good. I pushed the mental image of the shrouded corpse on the sidewalk away.
The Feds were getting nowhere in solving the robberies, and HaverCorp had decided to give the private sector a try and hire Fain and his team to stop Jaeger before he hit another one of their trucks. I could buy that.
Aaron Conlee was the piece that didn’t fit. A quick search found a few men and one or two women with that name. The closest was a man. Very close, living in Portland. His online life was heavy on Instagrams of restaurant dinners with a woman I guessed was his wife, and retweets of baseball news and jokes. The selfies he’d posted showed a white guy about thirty, thickening and balding before his time, with thick-framed retro eyeglasses. He had a LinkedIn profile, too. Employed two years as a senior system administrator for HaverCorp National, in Hillsboro, west of Portland proper.
Conlee was a system administrator. I knew enough about IT jobs to know sys admins handled the care and feeding of big data centers, big networks. Everything that passed through the company’s computers might be available. Confidential email, proprietary documents, even financial transactions. A guy with the right security clearance, in a company like HaverCorp, could have an all-access pass to all kinds of potentially lucrative information. Especially if he knew how to cover his tracks.
Hell, the possibilities made my fingertips tingle, and I wasn’t even in that line of work anymore.
So if Aaron Conlee had been Jaeger’s inside man at HaverCorp, and the company and Fain knew it, Conlee was already caught dead to rights, an accessory to murder one and a lot more. Why keep that such a secret? And why hadn’t the Feds used Conlee to take down Jaeger’s crew?
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being played. It was something deeper than Fain protecting his client’s name.
But that didn’t matter. What counted was getting Leo out of jail. And the Trumo vials added up to nearly thirty-five hundred little bargaining chips.
Time to meet Hollis. I started the truck and let it coast at a walking pace down the black hill toward the airstrip.
Twenty minutes later, my engine idling near an access road onto the ranch, I saw the first hint of the plane. Its running lights glimmered like a star that had lost its way. A mere two thousand feet up and dropping fast. With a dark runway and an unreliable moon, the pilot must be trusting the instruments more than his eyes.
The single-prop craft came in straight and low. Its wheels touched the tarmac. A newer model of Cessna, I guessed. In the moonlight, the plane was a sleek dart, in spotless white over a maroon underbelly. I let the truck ease forward to meet it.
The propeller was still spinning when I saw the familiar shape of Hollis Brant emerge from the passenger’s side and practically slide off the wing to meet the ground. There was no mistaking those long arms and bowed legs, even if he lacked any hint of his usual simian grace in his first unsteady steps away from the plane.
“You good, Hollis?” I said through the truck’s open window. The plane continued forward, circling to face the open runway, ready for a quick takeoff.
“My Lord,” he said, inhaling great gulps of air.
“Okay, then.”
I got out of the van. The interior lights of the Cessna came on. The pilot was a woman, dressed for the cold at high altitude, in a light blue quilted coat and leather gloves and knit cap. Her broad face carried a few deep character lines and a deeper disapproving frown.
“You should be unloaded already,” she said to me as she stepped out of the plane. She had a slight accent. Quebecois? “We have to be back in the air in twenty-five minutes.”
Hollis nodded like he’d heard it before. I went to the back of the van and opened the doors to remove the first of the boxes. The pilot began walking around her aircraft, feeling the fasteners.
“What’s the plan, Hollis?” I said. No way all twenty-three boxes would fit inside that puddle-jumper.
“To never allow myself to do that again,” he said.
“I didn’t place you as a nervous flyer.”
“I love flying, but not with a big head. My mistake was forgetting a flask. Help me with these.”
He moved the passenger’s seat forward to reach inside and heft out a large metal drum, setting it on the ground with a clank. The drum shone bright si
lver under the plane’s lights. At the center of its rounded top was a small gauge. I leaned forward to see that it measured PSI.
“A pressure cooker?” I guessed. The drum must hold five gallons. That would make a lot of stew.
“Close. It’s for industrial adhesive, originally. But much the same idea.”
He lifted out a second drum and handed it to me. Its substantial weight reminded me that despite being near sixty years old, Hollis was still a strong son of a bitch. I set the drum aside while Hollis brought out an oxygen tank and, finally, a bright yellow five-gallon jerry jug, its contents sloshing.
“Salt water,” Hollis said, slapping the jug. “Straight out of the Sound. We’ll suspend your fragile little bottles in this, keep the pressure in the drums at sea level, and everybody’s happy.”
“Brilliant,” I said.
“Yes, I am. Now we’d best get to it, before Veronique there leaves us behind.”
I began unloading the red boxes, setting them into a line and flipping each one open for quick unpacking.
Hollis popped one of the vials out of its plastic tray. “Mind if I inquire?” he said, holding it between his thick fingers.
“Pharmaceutical heroin,” I said. “Hide it well.”
Hollis blinked. “I will certainly do that. And speaking of hazards, you owe Veronique thirty thousand dollars.”
I stopped in the middle of lifting four boxes out of the truck bed. “Really.”
“Not right this minute. I told her you were good for it.”
The fact that I could afford thirty grand made me happier, but only slightly.
Hollis filled the drums halfway with water from the jerry jug, while I began removing the thin plastic trays from the boxes, upending them over the drums to pop out the vials. Each glass tube fell into the water with a tiny splash, sinking quickly to the bottom. It became a rhythm, emptying the trays, replacing them in the box, throwing the box into the truck. Hollis joined me. Veronique continued her preflight check.
“Time to leave,” Veronique called as the last vials sank to join their fellows. We closed the drums, screwing each wing nut into place.
“I can handle this in the air,” Hollis said, holding up the oxygen tank he would use to pressure the containers.
Mercy River Page 18
