The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Right, I forgot,” said Eric. “Okay, I’ve got it. Afterward I take the gun home and down to my dad’s workshop in the basement. He’s got everything down there, including a metal-cutting jigsaw laser. I’ll cut off the barrel and then slice it into washer-sized rings, so ballistics can never fire a test round and match the bullets that killed Flammus. Then I slice the weapon itself into four or five unrecognizable pieces, and scatter the pieces into different dumpsters all around town. It will take me almost all night, but my folks are used to my doing weird stuff down there at all hours. So that’s the gun gotten rid of.”

  “Check,” said Annette. “If you are going to be doing the shooting, you wear disposable gloves and a long sleeved shirt to catch any of the powder flash, so they can’t find powder residue on your hands with a paraffin test. The gloves and the shirt need to disappear as well.”

  “Check,” said Eric. “So with what we’ve got so far, looks like we need to lure Flammus out in the park or the woods someplace.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” said Annette.

  “You know I’m still not comfortable with that,” said Eric with a frown. “Okay, okay, we won’t go over it again. You get him out into some kind of outdoor woodsy type setting, I’m waiting, I shoot him, then we both beat feet in opposite directions and I get rid of the gun, my shirt, and the gloves I’m wearing. But look, you can’t be seen with him, because if you are then you’re the first one the cops are going to come after. They’ll probably interview you anyway, because of Jan, so you’ll need an alibi as well. If anyone does see you two together, that means we have to drop this plan and find another one.”

  “I agree,” said Annette. “I’ve decided I’m going to do this, Eric, but it would be so much nicer if I didn’t end up coming out of prison when my hair is white as snow, if ever. How do we catch him alone? It can’t just be any place, it has to be fairly near where we’re going to do it so I can give him the come-hither and get him to you, and do it all without getting into a car with him. Any time you get into a car you leave something of yourself behind that a sharp CSI unit can pick up on if they’re looking. For them, placing you in the victim’s car or placing him in your car is almost as good as catching you with the gun.”

  Eric sighed. “Yeah. That’s a poser. He almost never is alone, except when he’s in his dorm room at night, and even then half the time he’s not alone. You know he demanded a room to himself when he came here, no roommate, so that he could ‘bring in bitches’ as he put it? And Ashdown gave it to him without a quibble. You know, I think this damned school is almost as responsible for Jan’s death as Flammus is.”

  “This school and all it represents,” muttered Annette angrily.

  “Somehow we’ve got to catch Flammus alone, you lure him to me, then I kill him and we beat feet, which means both of us will need to have our cars nearby. We can’t approach him anywhere on the school grounds, because this place has got CCTV security cameras out the asshole. I can see one pointed at us right now. Also, we have to kill him at night. Doing him in daylight is simply too damned risky. Any casual witness will get too good a look at us.”

  “You should wear a ski mask like the NVA, especially if we’re going to blame it on them,” said Annette.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess you’re right, but . . .”

  “But what?” asked Annette.

  “You can’t very well walk up to this coon and hit on him wearing a ski mask, so that means you’re taking more of a risk than I am,” complained Eric.

  “That’s very sweet and chivalrous of you, dear, and very silly,” said Annette with a pleased giggle. “Screw your male macho, get a mask and wear it, and make it go the way of the shirt and the gloves and the gun afterward.”

  “Speaking of the NVA, how are we going to pin this on them so the cops go looking for spuckies instead of us?” asked Eric.

  “Oh, that’s easy.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a Bicycle deck of playing cards, still in the cellophane wrapper. “Once you get your gloves on so you won’t leave fingerprints, you cut open this pack of cards, and you carefully extract the Jack of Diamonds, and you put it in your pocket. You drop the Jack of Diamonds on his body, and the next day they’ll all be yelling on TV about how The Cat has struck again. The rest of the card deck goes the way of the other stuff.”

  “It’s Cat-Eyes, not The Cat, and he always uses a rifle,” objected Eric.

  “So they’ll figure he just decided to do things a little different and get up close and personal with Lucius,” said Annette with a shrug.

  “Do you want to make a call to KATU claiming credit for Lucius as an NVA hit?” asked Sellars. “Use a rag to muffle your voice or something?”

  Annette shook her head. “No, they shouldn’t have any recording at all of either of our voices, and besides, I know there’s a set form for those calls and there’s an authenticating code word the goots give ’em, which we don’t have. That’s needlessly complicating things. They’ll get the message if we leave the Jack of Diamonds.”

  “We still don’t know just when and where we’re going to do this,” pointed out Sellars.

  “Hmmm,” Annette mused. “We need some inside information about Lucius himself, what some of his habits are. We need to start clocking him, but very carefully, so he doesn’t notice either of us. Shouldn’t be too hard, since he stays on campus or in the immediate neighborhood all the time.”

  “He won’t admit it, but he’s scared to go into town,” said Eric. “He takes a couple of campus rent-a-cops with him in plain clothes when he does public appearances or he goes to the mall, for all the good they’d do him if the NVA decides to hit him.”

  “Getting him alone and outside is the problem!” said Annette. “Dammit, he can’t have his entourage with him all the time!”

  “What about the campus cops?” said Eric Sellars. “I wonder what kind of file they’ve got on Flammus? As much trouble as he’s caused around here, it must be pretty extensive.”

  “You’re good with computers. Can you hack into their system?” asked Annette eagerly.

  “Even a good hack always leaves a trace,” said Eric. “No, I just know this one rent-a-cop who likes to play Warrior World and he’s having trouble with his gaming software. I’ll offer to help him out, and see if I can’t get him talking about Flammus. Meanwhile, try to think of some way we can set that monkoid up for the kill without getting caught.”

  Eric took Annette out to lunch at a local Burger Barn the next day and told her his news. “I spent last night over at the apartment of that campus rent-a-cop I mentioned,” he told her. “His name’s Mark Moore, by the way.”

  “I think I may know him from around campus,” said Annette.

  “Yeah, he’s an interesting guy. Ex-military police, Iraq veteran, turned down for the police because of the affirmative action and also because he used to publish a blog when he was in Iraq saying nasty things about Bush Two. He hates it here at Ashdown riding herd on all us spoiled rich brats, but at least he gets partial medical for his mother, who’s real sick, which you don’t get much anymore in the private sector, so he sticks it out. He’s like a lot of white guys, in that after he puts in his eight hours he goes home and logs on to his own private fantasy world online. He’s actually pretty good at WW, up to level twenty-four with his latest character, Zoltan the Duel Master. He says it’s either that or the bottle, and if he turns into a drunk he’ll lose his job and his mom’s insurance, so it’s Warrior World. Anyway, we mostly talked computers for about four hours, I got his system fine tuned down to nanosecond response time on his function key and his mouse, and then he broke out the beers and we just started shooting the shit. Didn’t take much prodding to get him off onto the subject of Lucius Flammus. Every white campus cop and half the staff hate that nigger’s guts. I found out one thing: Flammus isn’t quite as puritanical with his dope as he lets on. He likes to smoke weed, and after practice he usually sneaks out back of the gym to smoke a joint or two
. Alone, since he doesn’t want the coach and his NBA handlers and his fan club to find out he’s a user. Did you know that damned coon already has his own web site and fanzine?”

  “The hill that slopes down behind the gym is kind of wooded,” pointed out Annette. “There’s a little path that goes down to some picnic tables they put down there a few years ago as a kind of outdoor lunch area, that most people seem to have forgotten about. This time of year, it will be dark by the time he gets out of ball practice, and nobody will be down there. That’s our kill zone.”

  “You’re getting good at this,” said Eric with a chuckle.

  “Bullshit, I’m scared out of my mind, and if you have any sense you should be too.”

  “What about the security cameras?” asked Eric.

  “I’m trying to remember what’s back there,” said Annette, resting her chin on her fist. “Seems to me there’s only one at the end of the parking lot, and my guess is that Lucius himself probably doesn’t want anyone in the control room watching him smoke his weed, so he probably just hangs out around the corner or behind the dumpster.”

  “We scout it out this afternoon,” said Eric. “In the open. Everybody knows we’re hooked up, and if anyone sees us poking around back there, they’ll figure we just went out there to snog in private.”

  After school the two of them took a long walk out behind the Ashdown gym. They saw one camera on a light post at the far end of the parking lot. “It’s panning,” said Eric. “That means you have intervals of about thirty seconds when part of the lot isn’t under surveillance. That’s going to be really tricky, you schmoozing Flammus and keeping an eye on the camera at the same time.”

  Annette looked around. They seemed to be alone in back of the building; they could hear whistles and bouncing balls and splashing from the swimming pool inside. “Okay, we need to check out the old break area, but I don’t want security to see us going down there. Let’s start walking back toward the quad.” They did so. Annette kept her eye on the camera, and when it was swinging the other way she said “Aaaaand . . . go!” The two of them scampered hand in hand across the parking lot and got down the embankment before the camera swung back. “That will look like we disappeared off camera, and if anybody’s watching, they’ll figure we went back into the campus.”

  A narrow gravel pathway sloped down between a stand of trees on the hillside, down to a small creek running parallel to Highway 212. There was a rustic-looking plank bridge and a few forlorn picnic tables, the wood damp and uninviting. “This is it,” she said.

  “You can get him down here in the dark, on a cold wet night?” asked Eric.

  “For what I’m going to offer him, yes,” she said coldly. “Don’t ask.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I mean it, Eric,” she said fiercely. “Don’t ask. Not ever!”

  “All right,” he said quietly. “Closed subject. This is perfect. On the day, I bring you to school in my car. We hang out in the library until about four thirty, which is when practice ends. Lucius will need to shower and scour his nasty black ass, so give him half an hour. If he feels like a nice relaxing joint, he may slip out back up there around five. I gather from Moore that’s his MO, so he can work up a nice case of munchies in time for dinner in the dining hall. I come down here first, with the gun . . . damn, those cameras everywhere! You know once they find his carcass they’re going to play back every disc and track everybody’s movements with a fine toothed comb!”

  “Plus, look at the ground here,” pointed out Annette. “It’s wet and muddy now and it will be wet and muddy when we do it. We’re already leaving footprints. See?” She indicated them. “Plus, if it’s past five o’clock it will be pitch black down here, and none of us will be able to see what the hell we’re doing.”

  “Shit,” said Eric with a sigh. “Okay, so it’s not perfect after all,” he conceded. “So what the hell do we do?”

  Annette sat down on one of the picnic tables, ignoring the wet seat that soaked through her wool skirt. “Look, you know, maybe we’re being too elaborate here,” she suggested. “This isn’t an Agatha Christie novel and we’re not setting up some complex plot for Miss Marple to unravel. This is more like a Mafia hit, and I saw on TV once that one reason they’re so seldom solved is their very simplicity. Some hood gets lured into the wrong car or walks into the wrong bar, badda bing badda boom, he’s dead, there’s no gun and nobody saw nuttin’, and that’s where it stays. I know what it said on CSI about trying to get the target outside, in the woods, but the parking lot is outside as well. Let’s go back up and have another look at that lot and that security camera. Suppose we just catch him outside, blast him, and melt back onto campus?”

  “What about the security cameras? Our little electronic trail of breadcrumbs?” asked Eric

  “Uh, maybe we could get some different parkas and hide our faces, and then throw them away afterwards . . .” Annette frowned and furrowed her brow. “Jeez, this is hard! How do those NVA guys do it all the time?”

  “I gather they mostly shoot down their targets on the street,” said Eric. “I’ve heard of a few cases where they went into people’s houses after them, but not many. Plus there’s bombing. You know, I am an engineering student, and I could build us a bomb if we needed it. The chem lab has got enough ingredients in stock. I could make up a pipe bomb with some super black powder, use potassium chlorate instead of sodium nitrate, and that will triple its kinetic energy. And a bomb would really make it look like the NVA.”

  “Mmmm, hold that thought, but I’d rather not risk hurting anyone else besides the son of a bitch who killed my sister,” said Annette, ruminating. “Look, I can’t help but think our window of opportunity is still Flammus’ alleged habit of stepping out back of the gym alone to smoke marijuana after practice. It seems to be the only time we know of when he’s not surrounded by people. I think it’s best we do it then and there, when we’ll have some light to see by from the lot and the building. Remember, it will be just gone dark. But those damned cameras, especially that one at the corner of the parking lot!”

  “Let’s get back up there,” said Eric. “I want to check something.” They hiked back up the path, peeped over the top of the grass and waited until the camera at the far corner of the lot swung away from them. Then they scampered up over the verge and onto the asphalt lot, and around the corner of the gym just as the camera was swinging back. They walked across campus hand in hand and swung a wide arc around, coming into the other leg of the L-shaped gym parking lot from the right side of the building. “Aha! That’s what I thought I remembered!” he exclaimed. “They wired this place on the cheap, admittedly back before things in the Northwest got this hairy, so they probably saw no need to go overboard on security. There’s only the one camera; it pans and covers both wings of the parking lot. Let’s see if we can get down there while it’s turned away . . . go!” They ran down the row of parked cars and were under the light pole that supported the camera about twelve feet off the ground, before it had panned back to the left. “Bingo!” he said softly. “We’ve got our plan of attack.”

  “Huh?” asked Annette, bewildered.

  He pointed to a small half-inch conduit cable leading down from the camera to a steel switcher box at shoulder height. “They put this system in before the days of wireless, as well,” he said. “Annette, look up. There’s the camera, we can see it, but it can’t see us, because we’re right under it. This is the blind spot!

  “On the morning of the day we decide to do this, we come in to school early,” Eric told her. “We come in my Volvo, so there’s nothing that actually points back to you, and that’s a bit of chivalry I insist on, Annie. We wait until the camera is pointing away, and then we slide in and park in this space right here. We have to make sure the camera’s pointing away so they will have no digital record of who parked in this spot that day. We get out, leaving the gun and two masks and my gloves and my old long sleeved shirt in the car. I’ll need to bring a special
shirt for the hit, so I can produce the clothing everybody saw me wearing on the day of the murder, if I have to. We dodge the camera and get onto campus without being recorded, at least not in this lot, and then we go on with our normal school day, hanging out late in the library like I said. About quarter to five, we leave together. When we get outside we walk down in front of the gym and as we turn the corner, we camera-dodge our way back to the car. Again, we have to make sure we’re not recorded in this area. The lot should be pretty well cleared out by then. I’ll back in park that morning, and so we should have a clear view of the back door of the gym. When we get in the car I will take off my jacket and shirt and I’ll put on the throwaway long-sleeve I brought, and the gloves. Then we sit and we wait. I’ll bring some binoculars from home. When we see Flammus step out the back door, we have to move fast. The first thing we do is we check this parking lot for any possible witnesses. There shouldn’t be any by then, since most of the residential kids will be in the dining hall chomping down.

  “If the coast looks clear, then we proceed to Step B,” Eric continued in a professorial tone. “I get out and I cut that electric conduit cover with a pair of bolt cutters, insulated handles so I don’t fry my ass. That will shut down the spy camera. That’s the point of no return. We will have to assume that security will immediately notice the loss of the camera and send somebody out, so we will have about five minutes, maybe a little less, before someone comes around that corner looking to find out what’s wrong. That should be enough time. I get back in the car. Did I mention that you will be driving?”

  “Thou art most gracious, my lord,” simpered Annette. “I wondered where I came into this plan of yours.”

  “I’m going to need my hands free, especially my gun hand, as the old cowpokes down on the range would say. Once that camera goes I get back in the car and pull on my mask. You need to get a mask of some kind too. Yeah, I know, if someone sees us they might get the license number of the car, so the masks might seem pointless, but we might as well give ourselves every bit of edge we can. You start the car and drive toward Flammus, not too fast, because we don’t want to alarm him. You pull up beside wherever he’s standing puffing his joint and feeling pleased with himself, most likely on the sidewalk there, or maybe sheltering in the doorway if it’s raining. If I can get a good clear shot from the passenger seat I’ll shoot him dead center, then I’ll get out of the car and put one in his head, close in. If we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives in prison or dying on a gurney with a needle in our arm for this, I want to make damned sure the black bastard’s dead. I put the Jack of Diamonds on him. Then I get back in the car and you drive off, around the gym, then out that exit there,” he pointed over his left shoulder “Then out onto the entrance drive, down onto 212, and home. We drop you off first in West Linn, and then after supper I’ll ask Dad for the keys to the jigsaw for some iron brackets and fittings I’m making for our new deck, and tear down the gun. I’ll also shred all the other stuff into rags and burn them in our waste furnace we use for sawdust and such. The next morning I’ll leave for school and take a tour of the scenic dumpsters of Portland.”