by George Wier
“I’m in favor of waiting in shadow until he walks up to the door,” Micah whispered. “Then we can get the drop on him from safety.”
“Hell,” Cueball said. “Something’s already gone wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look around you. Do you see any evidence whatsoever of Leland Morgan or any of his men?”
Micah scanned the area. Nothing.
“Follow me,” Cueball said. He stepped the length of the supply store front walkway and paused at the corner.
“That’s Vivian’s car,” Cueball said. “Aw hell. She’s early. But I don’t see anybody else here.” Cueball fumbled for his radio and keyed the mic.
“Morgan?”
Static came back at him.
“Morgan, if you don’t answer me in about ten seconds, we’re going in there. Viv’s car is here. She’s early.”
More static.
“It’s your call, boss,” Micah said, and pumped a round into the chamber of this shotgun.
“Hell,” Cueball said and threw down the radio. “I don’t like this one damned bit. Something’s bad wrong. Let’s go.”
Cueball stepped into the grass ditch between the lumber supply store and the motel parking lot, which was empty but for Vivian’s sedan.
“I’ll kick the door in,” Micah said.
The two men stopped fifty feet away from the motel room door. A bare bulb glared underneath the eaves above the door.
“You’ll kick it,” Cueball said, “but if it doesn’t cave, I’ll shoot the doorknob off.”
“There’ll be a chain on it at the top.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cueball said. “I’ll blow it off if I have to. Hand me that 12-gauge.”
Micah traded guns with Cueball.
• • •
Cueball stood to the side while Micah balanced on one leg like a karate master. He tucked the other leg up close to his torso, spun three-sixty and struck the door near the knob with the tip of his boot, bringing all his weight and muscle to bear. The door slammed open and Cueball rushed in ahead of Micah.
The light was on in the room and there were four men. All four looked up in alarm.
Cueball recognized Harrison Lynch, sitting in a chair away from a folding table, his hands behind him as if he were handcuffed. Lynch’s face wore a look of insane glee. His sandy blond hair swept back from his face sprouting from a distinct window’s peak. It was the same man Cueball had busted all those years ago in Dallas, but this man was in his early forties now. No longer a punk kid.
“Who the hell are you?” Cueball asked, raising the barrel of the shotgun and aiming it at one of the men who had begun to rise to his feet.
“Hello, Mr. Boland, Mr. Lanscomb. My name is Shane Robeling. FBI.”
“Bullshit,” Micah said.
All of the men at the table began to reach slowly for their identification. Cueball noticed the stenciled “FBI” on each of their jacket breasts.
“Not so fast, gentlemen,” Micah said. He had Cueball’s Mauser in his hand and from his stance and the way he trained it on the men he meant business. The FBI agents slowly withdrew their hands.
“I don’t know if I’d threaten a federal agent, Mr. Lanscomb,” Robeling said. “The penalties could be...severe.”
“What the hell is going on here?” Cueball asked.
“We’ve got the man everybody is after in custody,” Robeling said. “Without his knife I believe he’s quite harmless.” Robeling put his hand out to the table and picked up a knife and showed it to Cueball and Micah.”
“That looks like it could be the knife, alright,” Cueball said. “It’s the one he used on a young prostitute named Ivy Greene. So what’s your plan?”
“That’s none of your concern,” Robeling stated.
“Like hell,” Micah said. He took a step forward and swiveled the Mauser to cover Harrison Lynch.
“You can’t shoot him, Mr. Lanscomb. You can’t kill a man like that in cold blood.”
“You’d be surprised at what I can do,” Micah said.
“Micah,” Cueball said softly.
But Micah’s back was to Cueball and to the other men in the room now. From two feet away he centered the barrel of his gun on Lynch’s forehead.
Micah Lanscomb had reached a crossroads in his life. After a lifetime of wandering across the country from ocean to ocean, looking for something, he had finally found it. It was there in the mad eyes of Harrison Lynch. He looked into those eyes and saw the body of a young woman named Ivy Greene. The young prostitute faded from view to be replaced by the savaged form of Susan Glover, torn and bloody on a California night all those years ago. It may as well have been yesterday.
“Micah,” Cueball stated. “Don’t.”
Lynch grinned up at Micah.
Micah heard something else then. He heard the sound of the surf. It was far away at first, as if it was outside the open door and across the street, but then it grew loud in his ears. Waves crashed over him and his lungs felt deprived of air. He wanted to die, yet something inside him desperately wanted to live. His throat tightened into a ball.
Micah Lanscomb slowly closed the distance of his gun barrel to Harrison Lynch’s forehead until it made contact.
“This is how I live,” Micah said, and squeezed the trigger.
[ 41 ]
Big Bart was drunk, and it wasn’t a Friday night. He hadn’t been to work. He hadn’t even left the house. Instead he’d sent Jacky, his eldest son, two doors down to the grocery store with a note for Mr. Roddingham and a hundred-dollar bill. The kid returned with the package ten minutes later and Big Bart set to drinking.
The new kid cried a lot. He wailed. He shrieked. When Lorraine finally got up the nerve to demand Bart spill the story to her—the mystery of how the kid came to be with them, what was going on with his job, the whole works—he ignored her. Instead he went outside and took to breaking a row of sod with his hoe. He was finally going to put in the garden he had been promising her in their postage stamp of a back yard.
Bart’s head pulsed with streaks of pain like fingers of red lava flowing uphill and he thought about his father, who had dropped dead of a heart-attack at the age of thirty-nine. He felt something stinging at his ankle and looked down and realized he couldn’t see his feet because his gut was in the way.
“Maybe I oughta do somethin’ ‘bout that,” he said to himself.
“Just relax,” a voice said, “there ain’t a thing to worry about.”
It sounded like whoever had said it had been standing right there next to him, but there was positively no one around. A cold shiver took hold of him, made little needle-like prickles in his gut and on the nape of his neck.
The voice had been that of Lyle Fisher.
“Good sweet Lord, I’m goin’ plain goofy,” he said after half a minute of complete stillness and silence.
The image came full-blown over the rest of the world around him: Lyle’s lifeless eyes staring into his, as if he understood Bart even in death. The blood no longer oozed from his shoulder, neck and jaw. Instead it congealed there.
“I’m powerful sorry, boss,” Big Bart stated to the memory.
“It’s alright,” the voice said, and for just a moment the lips in the image moved along with the voice. “I was going to cheat you out of your fair share anyway.”
“I knew,” Bart said. “I knew it the minute I found that sack.”
Bart reached over to retrieve the bottle from the grass where he had hidden it from Lorraine’s prying eyes behind a patch of weeds. He scanned the back windows of the house for her accusative face. Finding her somehow less-pretty face absent, he uncorked the bottle and took a long pull of whiskey. It burned hard going down and after a moment took away the edge of the continuous throb going on in his head.
“That better?” Lyle asked.
“Yeah. Amen to that. Sure wish I could see you, boss.”
“You got a problem, Bart,” Lyle said.
“I don’t drink too much,” Bart said, growing slightly angry.
“I’m not talking about your drinking. I’m talking about the fact that half the State of Texas is looking for that little rich kid. You haven’t bought a newspaper lately, have you?”
“What in the hell would I need a newspaper for?” Bart asked. He put the bottle back down behind the weeds and commenced hoeing again. If he had bothered to look, he would have seen that his furrow was beginning to assume the shape of a horseshoe.
“If you had a newspaper, you’d know,” Lyle said. “Makes a fellow wonder whether any of your neighbors read the paper.”
Bart stopped, suddenly. Another set of shivers overcame him. His eyes did a little dance for a moment, as if following some unseen will-o-wisp, then, just as quickly he threw down the hoe and walked towards the house.
“Don’t bother to wait for me,” Bart said over his shoulder.
• • •
When the screen door to the kitchen slammed, Lorraine Dumas instinctively clutched the child to her hard. She waited for him to let out a wail as she overcame the shock.
“Give me the kid,” Bart snapped.
“You’re drunk! You can’t have no baby when you’re drunk. You get out of here Bartholomew. You git!”
“It ain’t safe havin’ him here, Lorraine. I got to do what Lyle was gonna do, whatever that was.”
“And just where is Lyle, Bartholomew? Huh? You answer me that?”
“Lor-RAINE! You better give me that baby. He ain’t safe, I tell you!”
“You tell me where you’re taking him and maybe I’ll go along and hold him. But I ain’t letting you touch him till you’re sober. And that’s the final word on it.”
Her voice had gone quiet. Soft, in fact, but she spoke through clenched teeth, and to Bart’s ears it was the most savage sound he had ever heard.
“Alright,” he said. “Alright already. You hold him. Send the kids to the neighbors or somethin’, but we got to get him outta here.”
“It’s been nearly two days and now you finally say it. This is the DeMour baby, ain’t he? Which means you’re going to prison.”
“I ain’t going to prison. What I did was the right thing. And if you knew why, you’d have gone along with it.”
Lorraine was through talking, this Bart could tell.
“Get your keys,” she hissed at him and he winced. “We’re taking him somewhere, all right. You mind what I tell you and maybe you won’t wind up in prison. Men! Always have to do their thinking for them.”
And with that Bart withdrew from the kitchen.
• • •
When Bart walked out of the house fifteen minutes later behind his wife who was holding the kidnapped child and had his own two children in tow, he looked back for a moment, almost expecting to see Lyle Fisher standing there on the porch. Instead all he saw was a cock-eyed porch and a house that needed a coat of paint.
“Maybe when we get back,” he said to Lorraine’s back, “I’ll do something to fix up the house. Or maybe we’ll get a new one.”
But Big Bart Dumas never came home again.
[ 42 ]
There was a sharp clicking sound and then Harrison Lynch’s head did not form a black hole.
An instant later the gun was wrenched from Micah’s hands.
Micah turned to look at the man who had taken the Mauser from him. It was Cueball Boland.
“I had to make sure, Micah,” Cueball said. He handed the Mauser to Robeling. “I’m sorry, but I made a promise.”
Micah looked down at his hands. He had never studied them before. He had always thought he had hard hands, but these strange appendages looked smooth and soft.
“I changed guns with you because I loaded mine with dummies. In fact every gun you brought was probably loaded with cartridges with no powder in them. I did it yesterday, as soon as the meeting was set up. I had to be sure, though.”
The shock on Micah Lanscomb’s face did not fade. His ears were still full of ocean water. His breath came in hitches.
“Fellahs,” Cueball said. “Get my friend a chair. And a glass of water.”
Micah Lanscomb found himself sitting and staring at an empty bed.
“It’s over,” Cueball said.
• • •
Micah was nearly back to reality by the time Harrison Lynch was led from the motel room by Robeling’s men. An FBI van pulled up in front of the open and permanently damaged motel room door and Lynch was placed inside. A moment later the van pulled away. Micah sat in silence and watched it go.
“One of my men took Ms. DeMour home right after Lynch arrived. So you can stop worrying about her,” Shane Robeling said.
“Why didn’t she drive?” Cueball asked.
“Because Lynch slit a couple of her tires before entering. We’re pretty sure he was going to kill her. And let me tell you, I never saw a woman who wanted to get herself killed more than that one. She had to be restrained when we put the cuffs on Lynch. I thought she was going to take us all on.”
“That must have been a sight,” Cueball said. “First things first: why didn’t you warn us that the FBI was swooping in to capture Lynch? We wouldn’t have busted down the door and very nearly gotten somebody, including ourselves, killed.”
“You were warned,” Robeling said. “I’m surprised you didn’t get your heads blown off for that stunt.”
“No,” Micah said. “Didn’t happen. We weren’t warned.” He had recovered, mostly, although there was still a faraway look in his eyes.
Robeling looked at the two men quizzically. Then he sighed and grinned.
“What?” Cueball said.
“Well, I’m hesitant to say.”
“You don’t have to,” Micah said. “I’ve already figured it out.”
“Morgan,” Cueball said, having arrived at the same conclusion.
“That’s right,” Robeling admitted. “We detained all of Morgan’s men a few blocks from here, took away their guns and their police radios, just so that no one could be tipped off. Morgan told me about you and Lanscomb, so I ordered Morgan to let you know we had taken over and call you off. I handed his cell phone back to him for a moment, he walked away to make the call, then came back and said it was all arranged.”
Cueball gritted his teeth.
“It changes nothing,” Robeling said. “Lynch is in custody, on his way to Virginia at the moment.”
“You mean,” Micah Lanscomb almost spat the words, “that you and the government are going to keep this cold-blooded killer?”
Robeling had asked the other agents to leave the motel room, and it was just the three of them now sitting at the card table. The light of day was coming up outside, and the men could see it leaking through around the pulled drapes.
“Mr. Boland,” Special Agent Robeling said, ignoring Lanscomb, “you know as well as me that’s what governments do.”
“There’s no need to preach to me,” Cueball said. He now seemed far calmer than Micah Lanscomb, for one, and himself, for another, would have believed. “But this man has no use.”
“I don’t know about that,” Robeling said. “But then again, I’m not the policymaker here.”
“Who is?” Micah asked. For a moment he was certain that Robeling was going to continue ignoring him, but instead he turned to face the perplexed man.
“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lanscomb,” Robeling began and put on his most patient and bored face. “Some men go through college and work all their lives to make one little breakthrough that will likely be completely unappreciated in their own time. For instance, there is a professor I know of down at Texas A&M—he’s a simple soul. A farmer. But man, can he grow things. Well, this guy has given the world crops that grow in soil that’s practically rock. He’s produced more strains of food than you or I could ever name. And you know what? Nobody knows his name. Hell, right now I can’t even think of it. But he’s the Einstein of the agricultural world.”
“You can’t be c
omparing your professor to Harrison Lynch,” Cueball stated, calmly.
“I’m not, as far as what Lynch has done. I am, though, as far as what he’s capable of.”
“Mr. Robeling,” Cueball said. “My friend and I are all ears right now. Why don’t you cut to the chase and tell us.”
“Alright then. Cryptanalysis is a very old science.”
“So?” Cueball said.
“No one has ever come up with a code that couldn’t be broken. A code, a cipher, as they call it, is a finite thing, and any finite thing has—”
“A pattern,” Micah interjected.
“Hush,” Cueball said.
“Parameters,” Robeling continued. “But there are some in the government who believe that a cipher without parameters could exist. Lynch is a mathematician. The best.”
“Please don’t tell us that you want him to create the unbreakable code,” Cueball said. “I don’t think I could live with this man walking for the sake of such a silly thing.”
“Silly?” Robeling said. “Maybe. But let me tell you, all governments and all banks daily totter on the brink because of men and women who can break their codes.”
“Computers,” Micah said. “You’re going to hook Lynch up to a computer?”
“Not hook up. But use him to program them, yes. Or better yet, he’ll give us the formulas to program them correctly. What they call in the business a new paradigm.”
“Unbelievable,” Micah Lanscomb said. He leaned back in his chair, making it creak. His long legs flopped out in front of him as if he were somehow disconnected from them.
“And Lynch can do this?” Cueball asked.
“Yes. From my review of the file—and let me tell you, I’m no slouch at higher math, myself—this guy—”
“Murderer,” Micah said. “Killer.” “Alright,” Robeling continued. “This murderer, this killer, can do exactly that. One day, he may save us all.”
“But not by choice,” Cueball said.
“But not by choice,” Robeling repeated.
Two minutes ticked by while the three men sat there. The light outside grew brighter.
“I’m hungry,” Cueball said.
“Huh?” Micah asked.
“I said I’m hungry. Let’s go get a bite to eat.”
