The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Each man regarded the other. Eskridge’s ties to Lombard went back decades. George hadn’t liked him then, and nothing he’d heard in the intervening years had caused him to reconsider.

  Cold Harbor was a midsize private military contractor based east of Mechanicsville, Virginia. It was named for a particularly nasty one-sided battle of the Civil War that had inflicted terrible casualties on Ulysses S. Grant’s forces. Never able to compete with the big boys for the major contracts, Cold Harbor did well for itself by fostering a reputation as an outfit that got the job—any job—done.

  Sometimes ruthlessness trumped size.

  Titus broke into a grin. “All right, I gotta know. How’d you know I was back there? You spooked my team, Obi-Wan. Was it one of my boys? Were they talking when they should have been listening?”

  “No,” George said. “Just a lucky guess.”

  “Where are my manners? You must be thirsty,” Titus said and poured a cup of water. He pushed it within inches of George’s fingers. “Was it one of my boys?”

  “No. Surprisingly, I just don’t have a lot of enemies.”

  “I’m not your enemy,” Titus said.

  “Weren’t,” George corrected.

  “Weren’t.”

  “Who was the largest donor to Lombard’s Senate campaigns?”

  Titus didn’t answer.

  “Who championed Cold Harbor for defense contracts over the big PMCs like Blackwater and KBR? It’s not rocket science. If Lombard needs someone snatched, whom else is he going to call?”

  “Guess that’s what I’m here for.” Titus smiled his affable good-old-boy grin. Just a couple of pals shooting the breeze. “Not bad, George. You always were a sharp guy. Not real practical but sharp. You put my boy in the hospital.”

  “I thought I missed.”

  “Nope, he’s going to be talking funny for a long time. You haven’t lost your touch sitting behind a desk.”

  “That’s generous of you, but since only one of your boys is in the hospital, and I’m chained to this table, I’d say my touch is very much in question.”

  “I admire a man who takes stock of his failings.”

  Titus pushed the cup of water closer. George didn’t ask for the shackles to be removed so he could drink it. Nor was he about to lap at it like some dog.

  “Have you thought about what it means that Lombard called you and not the FBI?”

  “Don’t care,” Titus shrugged. “Man’s going to be president.”

  “In which case, you stand to make a fortune.”

  “Another fortune,” Titus said with a crooked smile. “First one’s getting lonely.”

  “Is he here?”

  “The VP? Surrounded by Secret Service? Come on.”

  “Being a public servant can be inconvenient,” George said.

  “Never saw the appeal myself.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants to be president. But right now he very much wants to know what you did with Abe Consulting Group.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t,” Titus said wearily. “Don’t play that game with me, George. I mean, where did it go?”

  Mike Rilling had been unemployed for twelve hours. He, along with everyone at ACG, had been terminated via e-mail at eleven p.m. Thursday night. No warning. No exit interview. Nothing. A massacre—the entire company laid off without warning. His coworkers had all received the same e-mail explaining that unforeseen financial setbacks were forcing ACG to close its doors permanently.

  It was a betrayal. Not of the company—Mike didn’t give a damn about any of them—but of him personally. What about all their man-to-man talks about integrity, about doing things the right way? To be stepped on this way? It just proved that George Abe was as big a hypocrite as anyone.

  It validated Mike’s decision to funnel information to the vice president. After all, it was the man’s daughter. In Mike’s mind, Benjamin Lombard had a right to be kept informed. He didn’t really see the need for all this secrecy. Finding the creep that snatched his daughter was a good thing. The vice president would be grateful.

  Jenn Charles would be pissed. Well, she would just have to wait her turn. He had a few things to say to George Abe himself.

  The ferocity of his emotions surprised him. Mike wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but he felt a certain gratitude and loyalty to George. He looked up to George. So after seven or eight beers, he’d screwed up his courage and called George to give him a piece of his mind. George hadn’t answered then or any of the subsequent times Mike had called back.

  Coward.

  Well, George wasn’t getting off that easy. Mike appreciated the severance package—it was generous—but this wasn’t about the money. It was the principle of the thing. He’d been there since the start, and you didn’t fire a guy after seven years. Not without some kind of explanation.

  Mike rode the elevator up to their floor, his resolve wavering. Last night, he’d had a hellfire sermon prepared for Saint George Abe, but now the idea of facing his ex-boss seemed daunting. George had that unflappable calm thing down to a science, which tended to fluster Mike pretty quick.

  Mike came off the elevator and walked down the hall to Abe Consulting Group. The doors were propped open with doorstops, which was unusual.

  Reception was empty. Mike stopped in his tracks. Not empty as in no people. Empty as in empty empty. Everything was gone: couches, chairs, tables, lamps, artwork… everything. Right down to the carpet tacks and nameplates. Mike went room by room but found the same thing everywhere. Even George’s office had been stripped bare. It was unbelievable. He’d left last night at seven p.m. and everything had been normal. And now it was as if Abe Consulting, like a band of gypsies, had pulled up stakes and moved camp in the night, leaving no trace that it had ever been here.

  Mike’s cell rang. He checked for the number but there was none. It wasn’t blocked; the screen was just blank. These calls always freaked him out a little. As if they came from nowhere at all. A familiar voice came on the line, flinty and mechanical.

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “I don’t. It’s gone… Yeah, I’m standing right here. The place is empty… I don’t know! What can I tell you? He doesn’t exactly confide in me.”

  There was a pause at the other end. When the voice came back it rattled off instructions. Mike hung up and realized he was sweating. He was afraid to say no and wasn’t sure what would happen if he did.

  He wished George were here to tell him what he should do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Gibson slept until the morning sunlight crept across the floor and found his eyes. He rolled into a sitting position on the couch. Billy was upstairs in one of the bedrooms. They’d talked themselves out without reaching any conclusions and called it a night. His phone said it was after ten. When was the last time he’d slept this late? On a couch. But after four days in the back of a car, an old couch felt pretty damn good.

  There was no doubting Billy’s story. Not now.

  Billy hadn’t been kidding when he said the attic was a shrine to Terrance Musgrove’s family. He’d shown it to Gibson last night. Rows of neatly stacked boxes lined the walls, each labeled—“Living Room Pictures,” “Office 1,” “Office 2,” “Master Bathroom Sundries,” etc. As if the Musgroves were expected back and would need easy access to their shampoo.

  Billy had gone straight for a row of boxes labeled “Ginny’s Room.”

  “Suzanne stayed in Ginny’s room. It was still filled with girl’s stuff, so I guess she just felt more comfortable. I thought she’d be a little creeped out, sleeping in a dead girl’s bed, but she said it didn’t bother her.”

  Billy had dug into the box, pulled the pink Hello Kitty backpack out, and handed it to him.

  “Are you kidding me?” Gibson asked.

 
“Told you I had something to show you.”

  “Musgrove’s sister didn’t notice it?”

  “A girl’s backpack in a girl’s bedroom? Not really. There’s something to be said for hiding in plain sight.”

  “And it’s just been here this whole time?”

  “Tell me a better place for a single guy in his twenties to keep a kid’s backpack?”

  They’d brought it downstairs, and Billy watched while Gibson unpacked it and laid everything out on the coffee table—compact, hairbrush, a jewelry box, an old first-gen iPod, earphones, a couple of T-shirts and pairs of underwear, jeans. The hardcover edition of The Fellowship of the Ring that Gibson had read to her all those years ago. And a beat-up Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap.

  Gibson rubbed the sleep out of his face and reached for the cap, handling it delicately, as if it were an heirloom from another era. Even more than the backpack, it gave him the chills. He flipped it over and, for what seemed like the hundredth time since last night, looked at the lining. In faded black marker were the initials “S. D. L.”—Suzanne Davis Lombard. The L written with Suzanne’s distinctive swoosh. This was her cap. The cap.

  What did it mean?

  Now, in the bright sunshine of morning, something struck him about the lining. Usually, sweat discolored the lining of a baseball cap over time, especially along the forehead. But Bear’s looked hardly worn, despite the rest of the cap being beat to hell. The Phillies logo was scuffed and frayed. The stitching was coming loose from around the six eyelets, and the smartie—the button on top—was missing altogether. How do you do this kind of damage to a cap without wearing it?

  Then there was the Polaroid picture. Billy had shown it to him last night, but it still didn’t look real. Maybe he just didn’t want it to be real. In the picture, Bear lay on the couch Gibson had slept on. Wrapped up in a fuzzy blue bathrobe, a book open across her belly. And it was a belly, because in the picture Bear was very pregnant. She looked tired but happier than in the picture Billy had taken the night she’d arrived. Gibson found it hard to look at for long. Seeing her pregnancy for himself made it real.

  Billy shuffled sleepily downstairs and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  “I’m going back to bed,” Billy said upon his return.

  “Hey. Question. You ever see Suzanne wear this thing?”

  “Other than the night I picked her up? No. Never. She wasn’t really a baseball cap kinda girl.”

  “Then any idea how it got this beat up?”

  “Oh, that was Suze. She’d sit and yank the stitching out like it was her job. You ever see a dog go to town on a stuffed toy? That was Suze with that hat.”

  Billy left him alone with his thoughts.

  Gibson furrowed his brow. What’s the story, Bear? What was a girl who, according to her parents, hated baseball doing with a Phillies cap that they both swore she didn’t own? Supposedly she’d bought the cap on the road to hide her face. That made sense, given it looked like it had never been worn. But if she only wore it that one time, why bother to write her initials into the brim? You did that to things you cared about losing.

  What had Billy said about the security tape at the gas station? The way Bear had stared at the camera… a fuck-you to someone? Was the cap part of the message? It had been bothering Gibson for so long that he’d hoped seeing it, touching it, would jog something loose. But he was still drawing a blank.

  With those questions swarming his mind, he wrestled himself to his feet, snatched up the cap and the book, and set off to raid the kitchen. There wasn’t much to choose from, and he was forced to settle for two old cans of peaches. He sat on the back porch with Bear’s book, the fruit, and a fork. The lake was choppy this morning, and he watched the waves drive diagonally toward the shore, thinking about Bear.

  Bear on her banquette, reading. The way she drank tea like her mom, cup in both hands, blowing on it gently as she gazed out her window. He held the book to his nose, hoping for a smell that would pull him deeper into his childhood, but it was just an old book. He flipped through it and ate peaches out of the can.

  From beginning to end, the margins were crammed with notes that had been written since he’d finished reading it to her. Billy had shown him the margin notes last night; he admitted he’d gotten drunk one night and vowed to read the book and her notes cover to cover in the hopes that he’d find some clue as to what happened to her. He’d given up on page fifty. It was just kid stuff, he’d said.

  “Some are addressed to outer space and shit. I don’t know. Too deep for me.”

  Gibson flipped to the beginning and started reading.

  Suzanne’s notes were written in a precise, microscopic hand and arranged in no particular order and with no discernible chronology. From what he could tell, they appeared to have been written over several years—in different colored inks, with some entries more faded than others. A few were actually about The Fellowship of the Ring, but those were distinctly in the minority. Most were snippets of song lyrics, movie quotes, lists of likes and dislikes, stray observations. It was the brightly colored musings of a precocious young girl. He could imagine Ellie doing something similar in a few years, although given her handwriting she would need much bigger margins.

  He read slowly for a few pages, then, becoming restless, began turning pages quickly, letting his eyes trawl for anything significant. He flipped ahead ten pages, then twenty. Until it was just fields of ink: blue, pink, green, red. He stopped.

  Orange.

  It brought to mind a memory that made his stomach pitch. Something Bear had asked him long ago. He’d been in the kitchen at Pamsrest. Mrs. Lombard was making him a grilled cheese sandwich, and he was reading a comic book. Bear had appeared at his side, out of breath.

  “Gib-Son. Gib-Son.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said absently.

  “Son! I need to ask you something.”

  He stopped reading and looked at her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  He told her it was orange—because of the Orioles.

  “Okay,” she said with a serious face. “Orange is your color, okay?”

  Like he was supposed to know what that meant.

  “Yeah, okay, orange is my color.”

  “Don’t forget,” she half whispered.

  How old had they been? He couldn’t remember. He flipped back several pages, until he saw orange pen.

  “Sun.” Son. Orange was his color. He felt an awful welling of emotions. Regret. Guilt. Longing. He hung his head between his knees and cried. God, how he missed her.

  For the next hour, he went back through the novel and read all the entries he could find written in orange ink. Most were the thoughts of a little girl.

  Sun, do you like grape juice? I do.

  Sun, I wish everyone would go home but you.

  Sun, teach me to burp.

  They went on like that. Some funny. Some wistful. But then, buried in the middle of the book, he found a note different from the others addressed to him—longer and in a more mature handwriting.

  Sun, the funeral was today. I’m so sorry. I hope you’re okay. They wouldn’t let me go. I wanted to be there for you. Are we still friends? I understand if we can’t be but I miss you. (389)

  With something approaching dread, he flipped forward to page 389. The margins were blank except for a single note that had been written using two different orange pens, and if he wasn’t mistaken, some years apart. The first half read:

  Sun, sorry I ruined the game. Don’t be mad at me?

  Then, in the other pen, written God-knows-how-much later:

  I should have told you after the game. I should have told you a hundred times. I was so angry with you for not seeing. I’m sorry. I wish I co
uld tell you now. There’s a lake here. It’s not as pretty as Pamsrest, but we could go sit down by the water, and I could tell you everything. I want that more than anything. I wish you hadn’t gone away. I hope you won’t blame me.

  He snapped the book shut. Blame her for what? A memory swam up from the depths, its hideous, reptilian spine almost breaking the surface before it swam powerfully away from him. He closed his eyes, afraid to lure it back, but knowing he must.

  The game. What about it? Duke had taken him to a hundred games. Had Bear gone to one with them? Maybe? He had a hazy memory; the only thing he remembered was Bear being a huge brat the whole day, which wasn’t like her at all. No, there was more. The memory surfaced, eyes pitiless and vast. They stared into him, daring him to blink.

  It had been a day trip to see the Orioles. He couldn’t remember whom they were playing. The Red Sox? That sounded right. Originally just him and Duke, but the senator had gotten wind of it and invited himself and Bear along. Lombard’s wife was out of town, so it was just a couple of dads taking their kids to a ball game… with a security detail following at a discreet distance. Half family outing, half political theater. But then Bear had flipped out at the ballpark, and they’d missed most of the game.

  No, that wasn’t right. It had started earlier.

  When Gibson really thought about it, Bear had been out of sorts for some time. Withdrawn. And she’d been an absolute nightmare on the drive to Baltimore. Hostile toward all of them. Kicking the back of the passenger seat. Glaring at anyone who looked her way. Nothing like the chirpy little girl he’d grown up with. She wouldn’t answer him when he asked her what was wrong. That never happened. Duke, who could always bring a smile to her face, had gotten only sullen silence.

  Gibson remembered Lombard’s frustration and stubborn determination to have a good time. Duke had suggested calling it off halfway there, but the senator wasn’t having it. The drive had become a pantomime of upbeat banter, and they had all felt the false, strained tension that came from putting on a happy face.

  By the time they’d reached the ballpark, no one was much in the mood for baseball. Camden Yards had been bustling, so it wasn’t until they’d gotten to their seats that he’d realized Bear was crying. At the time, he’d just seen a bratty kid not getting her way, but now he saw that she’d been more than upset; she’d been frightened.