Cold Harbor (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 3)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  At first glance, Hammond Birk’s retirement home looked like a college campus. The white stone façades lent the main building a magisterial, academic pedigree, and Gibson imagined it would be a beautiful spot in the springtime. He parked the Yukon in a side parking lot and tucked the keys above the visor. He signed in at the front desk and had his picture taken. A nurse issued him a visitor’s pass and escorted him to Jefferson Hall, the pretentiously named south wing.

  As they walked, the nurse explained that Judge Birk slept most of the time now. His dementia had entered stage six, which made completing even simple tasks now a challenge. Speaking had become increasingly difficult over the last twelve months. The last time they’d seen each other, the judge had emerged from his haze long enough for a conversation. There would be no such reunion today.

  Sure enough, they found Hammond Birk sleeping peacefully. The brochure from the lobby described it as a suite, but the judge’s room felt like a hybrid between an economy hotel and a hospital. The air freshener couldn’t mask the smell of antiseptic any more than the handmade throw could disguise the hospital bed. Still, it was a vast improvement on the broken-down trailer where Gibson had found Birk eighteen months ago. Gone were the matted beard and filthy clothes. The judge looked clean, comfortable, and well cared for.

  Dementia had stolen the judge’s mind while still on the bench, and Charles Merrick had stolen his retirement. Gibson had stolen a piece of it back for him. It wasn’t much, but it comforted Gibson knowing the judge would see out his days with some dignity, despite the enormous cost. Here, at last, he could point to something decent that he had done.

  Gibson sat in an armchair beside the bed and opened two of the RC Colas that he’d brought—the judge’s favorite—placed one on the nightstand even though the judge wouldn’t drink it, and clinked the glass necks together. He sat watching the judge sleep.

  “Did I ever write you about the accident?” Gibson asked the judge. Gibson and the judge had traded letters for years, but Gibson couldn’t remember if he’d ever mentioned it. He hadn’t thought of the accident in almost ten years, but it had been on his mind the last few days. “I had a forty-eight-hour leave, but a hurricane had made landfall in North Carolina and was dumping rain up and down the seaboard. Authorities were telling people to stay off the roads, but I hadn’t seen Nicole in months, and there was no way in hell I was spending it on base. So I borrow a buddy’s car—a little Corolla—and I haul ass home. Funny thing was, because of the warnings, the roads were deserted, so I made great time. I remember being in the outside lane, going too fast. Stupid, but I just want to get home and see my girl.” Gibson paused, picturing the moment. “Coming around this slight bend, the car hydroplaned. Started spinning. I took my hands off the steering wheel because I didn’t want to be holding anything when this piece-of-crap Corolla slammed into the trees at eighty miles an hour. It was like being on one of those Tilt-A-Whirl rides at the fair. Three perfect revolutions across the highway. Everything slowed down the way it does. I remember this moment when I knew I was going to die and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. It was weirdly peaceful.”

  The judge slumbered, oblivious. In a way, Gibson envied him.

  “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. How lucky I got. One second, I’m spinning, the next I’m sitting on the side of the highway facing the wrong way. They’d lined the side of the highway with these big rocks that had stopped the car like a ship running aground. I was fine. Airbags didn’t even deploy. Bottom of my buddy’s car was chewed all to hell, though.”

  Gibson opened another bottle of RC and sat in silence, thinking. He felt like he was in that car again, spinning out of control.

  “Sometimes I think you should have sent me to prison like the senator wanted. Better for everyone.”

  The judge had offered Gibson the Marine Corps instead of prison. It had been the greatest kindness anyone had ever done him, and it felt dishonest and self-pitying to wish it away. He might not be wanted in his daughter’s life, but going to prison would also have meant that Ellie would not have been born. Wishing he’d gone to prison was selfish, pure and simple, and absolutely typical. Like the fact that visiting the judge was just one more piece of his alibi, should anyone come asking for it.

  The room was warm, and Gibson dozed off in the armchair. He woke late in the afternoon, groggy and stiff. He yawned and sat up to stretch. Across the bed, Deja Noble sat lazily shelling pistachios. He recoiled at the sight of her, unsure if she was real or another figment. Either way, he felt the calm return that had abandoned him when he’d locked Damon Ogden into his cell. She looked up at him under the wild mane of her Mohawk and carried on prying open pistachios one at a time.

  “Thought you was going to sleep all day,” she said.

  “Could’ve used it.”

  “I hear that.” She came to a pistachio that wouldn’t open and held it up, looking for a seam. “Don’t you hate that shit? Moving along, got a rhythm going on, and then, bam, a nut won’t crack. Look at this stubborn little bitch here. What to do, right? Do I work this mother over until it gives it up?” Deja held open her jacket to show Gibson the gun holstered under her arm. “I know I smash it with Roscoe here, it’ll sure enough open right quick, but for what? Everything inside be smashed too. Seems foolish. Got me thinking—Deja, there got to be a better option.”

  “You could let it go. You have a whole bag there. Why get hung up on one?”

  “The pragmatic choice. One way to go.” Deja contemplated the pistachio. “‘Americans don’t want to think. They want to know.’ My man John Dewey said that. Me? I think Americans don’t want to know. They want to believe. Want to feel. That’s why I can’t be throwing away no stubborn pistachio. ’Cause then I gotta be thinking about it. Wondering what’s inside that make it be that way. Afraid if I don’t find out, when I pull the next one out of the bag that I make the same mistake again. My people gotta believe that won’t happen. You understand what I’m saying?”

  A nurse stuck her head in the door to say that visiting hours were ending in fifteen minutes. They acknowledged her without breaking eye contact with each other. Judge Hammond Birk snored softly between them.

  “I think you made that point loud and clear already,” Gibson said.

  “Weren’t nobody home. Ain’t nobody got dead. Can’t say the same for my crew in West Virginia, you feel me?”

  “So what now?”

  “Your house . . . that what the government call a proportional response.”

  “Is that what that was?” Gibson said.

  “That’s what it is. And that’s the way it can stay.”

  “If . . . ?”

  “If I think we understand each other. See here, the danger of a proportional response is it embolden the ahistorical motherfucker. You ahistorical, Gibson Vaughn? You think you an innocent who been wronged? Thinking on revenge? Or you know your history? Admit hostilities began with you and recognize the proportionality herein?”

  “If I do, then I get to walk out of here?”

  “Your boy Swonger alive, ain’t he?”

  “Yeah, but you needed the farm. He works for you.”

  “Why? You want to come work for old Deja?” she said with a sly smile.

  “I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”

  Deja tossed the keys to his Yukon over the bed. “Yeah, inspiring how you gone straight.”

  The keys bounced off his hand, and he bent to pick them up. When he sat back up, Deja was standing and sweeping a pile of pistachio shells into a trash can.

  “So what’s it to be, Gibson Vaughn?” Deja asked.

  It was funny. While he’d been busy plotting revenge on Damon Ogden, Deja Noble had been doing the same to him. He supposed Duke would make the case for retaliation. But Gibson didn’t see what good it would do. It wasn’t as if taking Ogden had fixed anything.

  But he was avoiding the issue at hand. He’d made a promise to Gavin Swonger to leave Deja be
. “Proportional,” he said. “It was proportional.”

  “And I won’t see you down VA Beach without an invitation.”

  “I don’t even like the beach.”

  Deja nodded. “Yeah, it ain’t healthy down there for pale white boys. All right, be cool now. Drive safe.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You can ask one.”

  “Did it make you feel better?”

  Deja considered it. “No. Felt worse. But feeling better ain’t even the point.”

  “So what is?” Gibson asked.

  “Moving forward. Only reason to do anything.”

  When Deja was gone, Gibson gathered up his empties but left the last bottle of RC Cola on the nightstand on the off chance that the judge remembered himself long enough to drink it. He squeezed the judge’s shoulder and promised that he’d be back. At the front desk, Gibson signed out of the logbook. Missing from the parking lot was the blue Yukon, but, two spots up, his silver Yukon had magically returned.

  He slid behind the wheel. On the dashboard sat a threadbare Phillies baseball cap. Gibson turned it over in his hands and looked at the faded initials written into the red brim. “SDL”—Suzanne Davis Lombard. Bear’s cap. He’d given it to Swonger for safekeeping before driving Merrick to the airfield that night in West Virginia. Had some part of him known then that he wouldn’t be coming back? He didn’t have much connecting him to his old life, and this old cap was an important reminder of where he’d come from. He tossed it in the backseat. That didn’t mean he deserved to wear it anymore.

  “Of course you do,” Bear said. “That hat belongs to you. Put it on.”

  Gibson started the Yukon without answering.

  “So you feel like taking Ogden ‘moved you forward’?” Bear asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what Deja Noble said.”

  “Were you eavesdropping?”

  Bear ignored the question. “You don’t feel better, do you? You’re getting worse again.”

  “I’m just being tested.”

  “Tested?” Bear said, incredulous. “That’s not how mental illness works.”

  “How would you know? You are mental illness.”

  “You’re being mean.”

  “Everything will be better on Tuesday.”

  “Why? Because your dad says so? Where is he anyway? Notice how I’m the only one here these days? He abandoned you. That’s what he does.”

  Gibson was instantly angry. “That’s not fair.”

  Bear raised her hands, admitting she’d gone too far.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he asked.

  “I’ll see you at home.”

  “Bear, come on. Don’t be like that.”

  “You still have the steering wheel,” Bear said. “You’re not spinning yet. There’s still time.”

  She left him with that to chew over. Gibson took it slow on the way home, the memory of the spinout causing him to ease off the accelerator. He still arrived home in time for the second half of the Packers game. He’d never had any interest in football, but he rooted for Mrs. Nakamura’s team to be a good guest. He fell asleep during the fourth quarter and woke around ten to the amused expression of his landlady. Hungry but too tired to do anything about it, Gibson excused himself and stumbled downstairs to sleep. He had another double at the diner in the morning. One more day until he knew if the plan had been for nothing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On Tuesday morning, Gibson loaded the industrial dishwasher but kept one eye on the clock. 11:07. By now, Ogden’s absence from work would have been noticed and logged. No panic at first. Even employees of the CIA had car trouble. But in the next hour they would begin making calls. When they couldn’t reach him directly, Ogden’s superiors would work their way down his emergency contact list. Someone would be dispatched to check his home. But it wouldn’t be until Ogden’s girlfriend revealed the texts from Friday night about being called back to the office that the Agency would hit the panic button. That’s when Gibson would find how good the CIA really was.

  Gibson had never held an especially high opinion of the CIA. During his time in the Marines, he’d always found Agency people insufferable and undeservedly arrogant. Much of that, he recognized, was sibling rivalry. The CIA wasn’t held in the highest regard by the men and women of the Marine Corps Intelligence Support Activity. The CIA, hatched from the Office of Strategic Services after World War II, had for a time enjoyed being the only show in town. But in the modern era, the United States had an ever-expanding intelligence community with often overlapping responsibilities that required justifying their existence to Congress. It made for a competitive, jealous family. The Activity had been founded precisely because the military viewed the CIA as selfish—a former only child that had never learned to play or share well with others.

  None of that meant Gibson underestimated how seriously the CIA would treat the disappearance of one of their own. They had the resources to move heaven and earth to find Ogden. The only question was whether an abandoned power plant in Northern Virginia was in either one of those places.

  Gibson threw on his coat and went out back to take his break. The fresh air felt good. He did not. Dreams of his revenge had sustained him during his ordeal, but it was time to admit the truth. He’d done what he and Duke had set out to do; it hadn’t fixed him. If anything, he’d been getting worse all weekend, the symptoms of his madness returning with a vengeance. Like ants swarming over a discarded scrap of meat, the edge of his vision had been overrun and clouded. His thoughts were again becoming murky and indecipherable. The only time he felt decent was when the noise from the dishwasher drowned out his thoughts.

  He’d been making excuses since throwing the dead bolts on Ogden’s cell. Stalling. But if he’d beaten Damon Ogden, if he’d won like he kept telling himself he had, then why didn’t it feel like a victory? He expected Bear to say she’d told him so, but, like Duke, she had disappeared. He called her name quietly, hoping she might hear him and come talk it over with him. But that had never been how it had worked; he was on his own. Gibson went back inside and got back to work. He still had a lot of dirty dishes to clean.

  No longer concerned with establishing an alibi, Gibson shifted into the next phase of his operation: act natural, do nothing, and don’t go anywhere near Ogden. Gibson performed his one-man show about a normal guy just trying to put his life back together, unsure if he had an audience but assuming he was playing to a packed house. He divested himself of anything that connected back to Ogden—burner phones and laptop were all scrubbed and discarded. He went to work. He went home. He applied for jobs that he’d never get. In the afternoons, he went to the movies—it would look odd if his routine changed immediately after Ogden vanished. Externally, his act looked compelling enough, but internally, doubts continued to fester and multiply. As did the feeling that his tenuous grasp on sanity was slipping once more.

  The days dragged past.

  He got it in his head that his food was being drugged and stopped eating. He took to sleeping on the floor of his bathroom with the door locked. The white walls reminded him of the cell, and it humiliated him to admit how safe it made him feel. He was desperate to know what was happening and how Ogden’s disappearance was being investigated, but he resisted the urge to type his name into a search engine. By now, the NSA’s computers would have added “Damon Ogden” to their index of keywords and would be scanning Internet traffic worldwide. If Ogden’s name started popping up in searches originating from a coffee shop in Northern Virginia, that would change the focus of the investigation immediately. All of Gibson’s misdirection would be for naught. So in the evenings, he was reduced to watching the local news and reading the papers, hoping for any mention of Ogden’s disappearance.

  On Thursday, almost a week after taking Ogden, Gibson found a brief article in the Washington Post Metro section about a missing Vienna, Virginia, man named Damon Ogden. It was short
on specifics and more interesting for what it left out than for what it included. No mention of Ogden’s employer. No suspicions of foul play. Only that his car had been found at an airport near Dulles. The low-key story was a long way from the breathless coverage a missing CIA officer would get splashed across cable news networks. Obviously, the CIA was playing the disappearance close to the vest and weren’t ready to involve the media in any meaningful way. Gibson couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not. He just had to wait and wonder if he’d pulled it off. Wait for them to come at him . . . then he would know.

  As it turned out, he had to wait only one more day. Friday afternoon after the lunch rush, Toby whistled sharply over the throb of the dishwasher. He did not look happy.

  “That policeman is back.”

  Gibson snapped to attention. “What does he want?”

  “He ordered pie, but that’s not what he came for.”

  “Great.”

  Gibson frowned, hoping it concealed his delight. The appearance of Detective Bachmann represented the best-case scenario. The CIA would handle the bulk of the investigation internally, but they would need help sorting through secondary leads. For those, Langley would tap the FBI for assistance. Then there were the mutts. The leads that no one expected to pan out but that needed to be chased down anyway. Those would be tasked to local PDs. Gibson had expected that he’d wind up in one of those three baskets. It was inevitable, given his history with Ogden. The only question had been which basket. And now he had his answer.

  Gibson found the detective sitting in a booth, enjoying a slice of apple pie. He took a seat opposite. Bachmann ignored him and continued savoring his pie. Gibson waited patiently for the games to begin and thought over what he thought he knew.