In Absentia

by Melissa F. Miller

  “I don’t care about Youssef,” she snapped. “Where is Bloch?”

  “The woman freed him. He and his cousin ran.”

  “She’s not his cousin, you blooming moron, she’s his lawyer. And now he’s going to appear in court and enter into his deal with the government, which means he’ll walk free and disappear with my money.”

  Omar struggled to make sense of Aliviyah’s ramblings. She was nearly incoherent with rage.

  “I’m not understanding. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to understand. What you need to do is find Clive and make sure he doesn’t make it back to Pittsburgh on Monday. You have one day.”

  “Wait—don’t hang up. What about Youssef?”

  “What about him?”

  “He may have internal bleeding. He could die.”

  “Wouldn’t that be fitting? That dinosaur dying at the hands of a woman. And not just any woman, an unclean infidel woman. Bet there’ll be no paradise for him.”

  She laughed, and the hair on Omar’s arms stood on end.

  19

  8:00 p.m.

  * * *

  Leo careened through the mountains, pushing the SUV to its limits as he raced toward Tannerville and, he hoped, his wife.

  Under other circumstances, in the daylight, on a vacation, this would be a pleasant drive. Lush green trees soaring into the clouds, breathtaking bridges over clear blue waters, and winding ribbons of pavement weaving through the dense forests.

  But under these circumstances, in the gathering darkness, his worry growing with every passing moment, with no cell phone service, against a backdrop of drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and missing people and murder, there was nothing remotely pleasant about the drive.

  As he burrowed ever deeper into the heart of the forest, driving ever faster, the road seemed to skitter away from him with increasing regularity. More than once, he took a curve in the road too fast or too soon or too something and the SUV slid across the center line and he had to yank it back.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of swarming insects slammed against the windshield as he sped on. So many squished bugs that he couldn’t see the road. He hit the sprayer and turned on the wipers. They weren’t up to the job. Now, the smeared windshield reflected light from his high beams, distorting and diffusing it.

  Because he had no choice, he drove faster still, drove by instinct, feeling his way out of the dark, cavernous wall of trees. By the time he emerged from the national forest, the steering wheel was damp with sweat and his hands were cramped from gripping the wheel so tightly.

  He hunched forward, staring down the road as if it were his adversary. Maybe it was.

  He drove past endless rolling hills, tiny farmhouses set back from the road, and then he came upon it: A vast cornfield, the stalks waving and rustling in unison. And in the middle, an enormous, white metal bowl that filled the sky. The structure pulled his eyes away from the road, it whispered to him in the secret language of the stars.

  He jerked his attention back to the road. He wasn’t sure what that little reverie had meant, but he needed to focus on real things, concrete things. Like how he intended to find Sasha when he finally reached the hamlet of Tannerville.

  He thought it through as the miles rolled by underneath the car. Despite Agent Dill’s insistence that the local police department was worthless, the starting point had to be the PD, didn’t it? If he could gain access to the crime scene, he’d be able to confirm whether the murder Dill had mentioned was tied to Sasha and her missing client. And as far as Leo knew, all roads to a murder scene went through the chief of police, no matter how small the town might be. In fact, the smaller the town, the more critical it would be to insinuate himself into local law enforcement’s investigation if he wanted to know what was happening in real time.

  Something Dill had said came back to him: the DEA was in no hurry for the local police to open their investigation. Was it possible that it wasn’t just Al Sharqi who wanted to keep a lid on the murder of a local drug dealer? Could Dill and the TDS have their own reasons for being hush-hush? And if so, would he be stirring up a hornet’s nest if he wandered into the police station and started asking questions?

  He growled in frustration. This would all be so much easier if he could just call Sasha and talk to her. He couldn’t believe that just a few decades ago, as late as his college years and his time training with the U.S. Marshal Service, nobody—nobody!—carried cell phones.

  How had anyone ever managed to solve crimes back then? He laughed aloud at his own question, but for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine doing it now.

  20

  The Steam Rocket Scenic Railway Depot

  Tannerville, West Virginia

  Sasha and Clive stood on the train platform; they were shielded from the view of passersby by the shelter overhead. Not that there was anyone out walking around in this ghost town.

  They debated their options, with Sasha pushing hard for a hospital visit to have Clive checked over. At a minimum, she was certain his nose was broken. And she was, in general, concerned about both his physical and mental well-being.

  “No, no, no. I want to go home,” he repeated on a loop. Which did nothing to ease her concerns about his mental state.

  After several futile attempts at reasoning with him, she decided to treat him like a toddler and distract him with something (metaphorically) shiny instead.

  “Clive, you’re in no condition to drive, and I’m too tired to go all the way back to Pittsburgh tonight. Why don’t we drive up to your cabin? It’s close by, it’s cozy, and absolutely nobody in the world will come looking for us there. We’ll be safe there until we can get help.”

  It was brilliant if she said so herself, and she did.

  He scrunched up his face as if he were concentrating furiously. Long seconds ticked by.

  Finally, just as she was about to give up hope on an answer, he nodded. “Okay. We should take your car because … well, I don’t have my keys.”

  “That’s a good reason.” It was one of many good reasons.

  That decided, they crossed the train yard, hopping over the tracks, and entered the parking lot. With a scene out of ‘Cape Fear’ playing in her imagination, Sasha checked the undercarriage of her Volvo wagon to ensure a vengeance-bent Youssef wasn’t clinging to the bottom of her car.

  “All clear,” she announced, laughing a bit at her paranoia. In her defense, it had been a monstrously long day.

  She unlocked the doors, and they hurried into the car. She peeled out from the lot as if demons were chasing her. She was pretty sure they were, and they’d catch up with her when she closed her eyes to sleep tonight.

  21

  The Hi-Life Club

  Saturday night

  * * *

  “Hey, Miles,” Police Chief Jason Clinton drained his beer, slammed the mug down on the bar, and waved to get the bartender’s attention.

  Miles gave him an ‘I’ll be over in a minute’ nod but made no move to extricate himself from the corner where he was engaged in a red hot argument with the Gunter brothers over whether meal worms or wax worms were the superior bait choice for trout fishing. So Jason tossed a ten on the bar and grabbed his jacket from the back of the stool.

  As he strode across the small room, his senior (and only) detective, Chelsea Jones, raised her head from her pool game and met his eyes. “Leaving, chief?”

  He touched two fingers to his hat. “Yeah. I want to take a walk through the far end of town and check something out. But I don’t want to miss the start of the hockey game. So I gotta go now.”

  He’d heard some gossip about shots fired in the shantytown earlier in the day. He hadn’t mentioned it to Chelsea, and she hadn’t mentioned it to him.

  She had ambition, and lots of it. Sometimes he got the feeling she was angling for his job. Every once in a while, he liked to remind the people that he was their chief of police.

  She frowned, her cue stick hovering ove
r the table. “The far end of town? Are you up-to-date on your vaccines?”

  “No kidding. Sometimes I think it would’ve been better if the tannery fire of ’84 had burned the whole neighborhood down.”

  “It’s a miracle it didn’t. Those shacks are mostly wood.”

  Chelsea’s opponent, a volunteer firefighter Jason recognized as one of the sprawling McKirk brood, nodded knowingly at her assessment. It was either Ian or Cole. Or maybe Pat. The strong family resemblance made it difficult to tell them apart—a fact that had worked to their benefit in more than one lineup, where a witness had thrown up their hands and shrugged, saying, ‘I know it’s one of them.’

  “Night, all.” Jason pushed open the door and walked out into the dusk as Chelsea took her shot and the sound of pool balls smacking against each other rose over the music.

  He pulled up short just outside the bar to avoid running straight into Chelsea’s cousin, Jamie Kuski, who was speed-walking, head down, toward the door.

  “Whoa, watch where you’re going, Jamie.” He stretched out his arm in front of him, and Jamie’s chest bounced right off his palm.

  Jamie jerked his head up to look at Jason. Something flashed in his eyes, but, in the dim light, Jason couldn’t be sure if it was surprise, fear, or guilt.

  “Uh, sorry, chief. Didn’t see you there.”

  “No crap.”

  Jamie forced out a chuckle. “Just need a drink to settle my nerves.”

  Jason cocked his head and considered him. “Miles is unlikely to run out of Bud Light.”

  Another strained laugh.

  Jason scanned the sidewalk, but they were the only two on the quiet street. “Where’s your sidekick?”

  “Huh?”

  “Donny Anderson. You two are joined at the hip these days, aren’t you?”

  Jamie licked his lips, his eyes darting from Jason’s face to the door and back. “Uh … we’ve picked up a couple … jobs … together, that’s all. He’s not here.”

  “I can see that.” He lifted one eyebrow and waited, making Jamie sweat the silence. “These jobs of yours, they wouldn’t happen to be for Zayed Al Sharqi. Would they?”

  Jamie shook his head, fast, forcefully. “Nuh-uh, no way.”

  Jason considered him for a long moment, his eyes pinned on Jamie’s face. Jamie looked back at him blankly.

  After a moment, Jason nodded. Donny and Jamie were known drug runners, but they were freelancers, picking up the drug enterprise equivalent of odd jobs or piecework whenever their beer money ran low. During busy seasons, they raked in the dough, then they laid low for weeks or months at a time, until they ran out of cash. The pair of bozos lacked the work ethic that Al Sharqi’s men embraced with almost as much fervor as his crew embraced their religion.

  “Can I go?” He jerked his head toward the bar.

  Jason lowered his palm. “Yeah. Tell your cousin to make sure you don’t drive off the road tonight. I don’t want to have to come pull your sorry behind out of another ditch.”

  Jamie blanched and froze, his hand stretched out toward the door. “Chelsea’s in there?”

  “Yeah. Why? You owe her money or something?”

  Jamie didn’t laugh. Instead, he backed away from the door and ran across the deserted street on a diagonal, headed for the dark and silent train depot on the other side of the road.

  Jason sighed, all he wanted to do was walk along one sketchy cluster of mostly abandoned homes then go home and kick back with a six-pack of Bud Light and the hockey game.

  And now he was playing hide-and-seek with one of Tannerville’s most hapless souls.

  He loped around the perimeter of the train station, making a fast circle. Three hulking vehicles sat at the end of the parking lot, tucked behind a rusted-out train car that had been abandoned long before he’d become the chief of police.

  Once Dorothea Berry had complained about ‘the hunk of junk,’ insisting it was driving away customers to her overpriced art gallery, but Jason had told her it was part of Tannerville’s authentic ambience and she should learn to love it. Sure enough, the next time he stopped into her gallery, she had a middling watercolor of the junked car for sale for a cool three hundred dollars. He nearly choked when he heard she’d sold it to a tourist from Miami. There truly was no accounting for taste.

  Lost in thought about the old railroad car, he arced his flashlight over the vehicles parked at the edge of the lot—blue, gray, white. Then he stepped up to the train car and aimed the light down inside.

  “Peekaboo.”

  Jamie had himself wedged into the corner of the car with his knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around his legs. He blinked up at the light.

  “Chief, I think I’m in trouble.”

  “I figured as much.” He trained the flashlight on the guy’s face. “You didn’t shoot anybody today, did you?”

  “No! But … I saw something. I know things. And I’m scared.”

  Jason glanced down at the illuminated numbers on his wristwatch: the puck drop was in fifteen minutes. If he went home right this second, he’d be in his recliner with a cracked beer and a sandwich when the game started.

  He almost told Jamie to go see his cousin. Instead, he sighed and reached a hand into the car.

  “You like hockey?”

  “What? Sure.”

  “Come on, then. You can stay at my place tonight and tell me your tale of woe—on commercial breaks and timeouts only.”

  Jamie gave him a worried look. Then he nodded and grabbed Jason’s arm. Jason hauled him out of the train car and deposited him on the ground.

  “Let’s go.” He headed for his truck at a good clip. Jamie’s sneakers pounded against the pavement, as the kid ran to keep up with him.

  22

  When Sasha parked her station wagon outside Clive’s cabin, he had a moment of sheer panic. He realized that Jamie and Donny had taken not only his car keys, but the keys to his cabin as well. He insisted it wasn’t safe to stay there, but Sasha prevailed.

  She used her calmest voice to soothe his worry, but in truth she was simply too tired, too thirsty, and too hungry to care if someone tried to get in. As far as she was concerned, let them try.

  They used the basement door key hidden in the fake rock to let themselves into the cabin, and then Sasha cleared the house while Clive waited on the bottom step, slumped against the basement wall. When she was satisfied that they were alone in the house, she helped him up the stairs and into his bed.

  She rummaged around in his medicine cabinet until she found some extra-strength Tylenol, shook two out of the bottle and then added a third for good measure. She handed him the pills and a glass of water.

  “Sleep. I’m going to barricade the doors and make some food. Once those painkillers kick in, we’ll get your face cleaned up.”

  Clive nodded sleepily.

  She turned off the lamp on her way out of the room, but he moaned. “Please, leave it on.” She clicked it back on, and she left the door ajar as well in case he woke up disoriented and panicked.

  She upended Clive’s heavy oak coffee table from the living area and shoved it in front of the main door. Then she returned to the basement, where she considered unplugging the freezer and pushing it in front of the door. But when she peeked inside, she saw that it was stacked high with thick white butcher paper-wrapped packages. She didn’t want Clive’s meat to spoil, so instead she hauled the rows of storage boxes from their spot against the wall to block the basement door. She worked quickly—and as quietly as she could, although she suspected Clive was out cold and would sleep through just about any noise she might create.

  Satisfied, if sweaty, she checked that all the windows were locked. Then she washed her hands and inventoried Clive’s pantry in an effort to find the makings of a fast, easy meal. She dug up a box of pasta, a can of crushed tomatoes, and a bottle of red wine in the pantry. Good enough, and right at her culinary skill level.

  She wished Connelly and the twins could see h
er now, wielding a can opener like a boss. To her horror, when she laughed at the thought, her laughter morphed into a strangled sob in her throat. She’d been so busy surviving that she only now realized that she had missed Finn and Fiona’s soccer game.

  She swallowed her wail and dumped an indeterminate amount of jarred garlic into the pan with the tomatoes.

  She missed her family. She missed home. Being in a home rather than a hovel out of a horror movie made it worse. The routine domestic task of cooking, even though it wasn’t routine for her personally, made it worse.

  Get it together.

  She stared down at the tomatoes simmering in the pan through tear-blurred eyes until she wrested control of her emotions and her vision cleared.

  She heard Clive shuffling out from his bedroom and turned.

  “What are you doing up?”

  “I thought I needed sleep the most, but my stomach disagreed. I smelled something delicious.”

  She dumped the pasta into the boiling water and set a timer. “It won’t be long.”

  She poured herself a glass of wine and studied him. “I don’t know if you should drink.”

  “I’m sure I shouldn’t. But I’m going to.”

  Fair enough. She poured a shorter glass for him and handed it over.

  “Should we call someone?” he asked, after taking a sip.

  “They trashed your phone when they grabbed you up yesterday morning,” she informed him.

  He shook his head. “There’s another phone around here somewhere.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. You can’t live in the NRQZ without a backup phone to plug into your landline.”

  “Clive, that reminds me, what is the deal with the cell service around here? Is NRQZ some kind of regional carrier?”

  “No. It’s the National Radio Quiet Zone. There are no cell phone transmitters here, as a matter of federal regulation.” He gave her a curious look. “You really didn’t know?”