The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Jenn sat at a small table by the window, several handguns and ammunition laid out before her, fieldstripping a Steyr M-A1. He was fairly sure Jenn could do it in the dark, because she never took her eyes off the tiny gap between the curtains that gave her a view of the approach.

  “Done lying around?” she asked without looking up.

  “Good to see you too.”

  She glanced his way and smiled. “You look taller.”

  “I don’t feel it. Where are we?”

  “North Carolina. Outside Greensboro.”

  “Greensboro?”

  Jenn and Hendricks caught him up. From the chaos of the lake house shootout to the tracker sewn into his messenger bag that had led them south to Charlottesville and the Cherokee parked outside his childhood home.

  “How’d you find us?” she asked.

  “Hacked Hendricks’s phone.”

  She looked almost impressed; Hendricks not so much.

  “Guess that makes us even,” she said.

  “Guess it does.”

  His assailant had gone out the exterior basement steps and fled through the backyard. A neighbor must have called 911, because they’d only just got out of there before police swarmed the area. Outside Roanoke, they’d dumped their vehicles in a grocery-store parking lot and paid cash for a 1995 Ford Probe.

  “Drove it right off the guy’s lawn,” Hendricks said. He was awake and was sitting up on the couch, stretching and yawning.

  From there, they’d driven south until they found a cheap rental cabin. They’d stashed Gibson in the trunk and passed themselves off as newlyweds celebrating their first anniversary. The cabin was rented for the month of August. It was isolated. Paid up front in cash, and the landlord lived in Raleigh so was unlikely to stop by unannounced. All in all, it was about as off the grid as one could hope on short notice while transporting an injured person.

  “Cell phones?” Gibson asked.

  “Duct-taped to the underside of two different eighteen-wheelers,” Hendricks said.

  “We’re on burners.” Jenn held up a disposable flip phone. “So now you know our story. Mind telling us how you came to be hanging from a rope?”

  “What do we have to eat? I’m starving,” Gibson asked.

  “Strained peas? Creamy carrots?”

  “Besides baby food.”

  “They grow up so fast,” Hendricks said.

  Hendricks turned out to be a fine cook. Either that or Gibson was hungrier than he’d ever been in his life. He polished off the eggs, bacon, and hash browns and went back for seconds. And thirds. Jenn came in from the living room and stood in the doorway.

  “What was in Charlottesville?” she asked.

  Gibson looked at each of them. Where to begin? Without the paternity test or Duke’s thumb drive, there was no proof. How could he ask them to take it on faith? Until the paternity test had been waved in his face, he’d feared that it was his father. How to convince them that Benjamin Lombard was the real enemy? Might as well start at the beginning, he decided, and opened The Fellowship of the Ring to show them Bear’s notes. At least it was something tangible.

  “What should she have told you?” Jenn asked, looking up from the book. “What happened at the game?”

  He told them about the trip to the baseball game and Bear’s meltdown in the stadium. “I went to Charlottesville for my dad’s diary. I thought maybe it would have the rest of the story.”

  “Did it?”

  He told them about his dad’s account. The decision to take Suzanne home early. Buying the two Phillies caps.

  “Duke bought the cap?” Jenn asked.

  Hendricks whistled. “That’s a mind-bender right there.”

  He explained the origin of Tom Bombadil and why she’d invented the boyfriend. “It was Lombard,” Gibson said. “That was why she ran. It was Lombard’s baby.”

  Jenn and Hendricks sat in silence, digesting his bombshell. Then Jenn glanced at her partner and they came to a silent conclusion.

  “What?” Gibson asked.

  “There’s something we need to show you,” Jenn said.

  She went out and came back with her laptop and a manila folder. From the file, she handed him a crime-scene photograph of a man who had hanged himself in his garage.

  Gibson studied it. “Who is it?”

  “Terrance Musgrove.”

  “The guy who owned the lake house?”

  “The same. Now I have to show you another photograph. But…” She paused, hesitant to go on. “It’s your father.”

  “Duke?” Gibson asked stupidly. “Is it what I think it is?”

  “I wouldn’t ask, but you need to see it for yourself.”

  He swallowed hard and nodded. She pulled up the photograph on the laptop and turned it around for Gibson to see. For the longest time, he stared away at the edges of the photograph, hoping it would soak into his mind through his peripheral vision. Dull the impact a little. Gibson realized he was breathing fast.

  He looked.

  What surprised him was how much he remembered wrong. In his mind, his father had been right next to the stairs when he’d discovered him that afternoon, looming over him, close enough to touch. But in the photograph, Duke was on the far side of the room. It was a chair, not a stool, that was kicked over under his feet. His father’s eyes were closed, not open.

  “Why am I looking at this?” he asked, looking back and forth between the two photographs. They had everything in common that two dead men could. They were even in their socks. The shoes. Wait. He went back to the other photograph. The shoes were the same.

  “The shoes?”

  Jenn nodded.

  He looked again. In both photographs, the shoes were placed carefully together and pointed away from the body at an angle. The same angle. A man, hanging, would naturally convulse; the rope would twist and spin. It would take time before the rope came to its final rest. The position of the shoes was an impossible coincidence.

  “He killed them both.”

  “And now he’s reappeared ten years later to kill you.”

  “It’s insane,” Gibson said.

  “Out of curiosity, was the guy’s nose broken?” Hendricks asked.

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Fiftyish? White. Thin. Short brown hair, balding. Kind of nondescript?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

  Hendricks shook his head. “Same son of a bitch who shot Billy Casper. And I can’t prove it, but I’d throw Kirby Tate in there too.”

  “It gets weirder,” Jenn said. “I saw that same guy shoot one of the tactical guys in the back.”

  “Friendly fire?” Hendricks asked.

  “Nothing friendly about it.”

  Hendricks chewed that over. “So Lombard gets wind that we’ve been in contact with WR8TH and calls in his old hitter to tie up loose ends. He’s been on us from day one. Follows us to Pennsylvania, waiting to see if we find WR8TH before making his move.”

  “But he jumps the gun and kills Kirby Tate in the storage locker instead,” Jenn said.

  “Right.”

  “And sends in that tac team to mop us up at the lake house,” Hendricks added.

  “Yeah, because like a fucking idiot I gave Mike Rilling our twenty.”

  “You think Rilling gave us up?” Hendricks asked.

  Jenn shrugged. “How long after we talked did they show up?”

  “Son of a goddamn bitch.”

  “Who were they?” Gibson asked.

  “Don’t know. Lombard has ties to an outfit called Cold Harbor. I wouldn’t bet against it being them.”

  “Then why would he send in his hitter?” Hendricks asked.

  “Get him out of the way too? No reason to leave him breathing, now that it’s all over.”

 
“Lombard isn’t screwing around,” Hendricks said.

  “Would you?” Jenn asked. “With what’s at stake in Atlanta? Lombard is the chosen one at this point. If Gibson is right, and he was molesting his own daughter, got her pregnant… Good God, there are powerful interests with a lot riding on him winning in November. How far would you go to keep it a secret?”

  “As far as Suzanne?” Gibson said.

  “You think he killed his own daughter?”

  “I don’t know. Billy said something like that, and I thought he was crazy. But is he? Where is Suzanne? Her baby? If she’s alive, and if Lombard’s guy got to Musgrove ten years ago, then that means he got to Suzanne as well. Tell me I’m wrong. Where is Suzanne?”

  Jenn put her face in her hands. Hendricks looked like he’d unlearned the art of breathing. As Gibson saw it, they only had one play left to make, and it needed to be made soon. If they weren’t in Lombard’s crosshairs at this very moment, they soon would be. But even if they somehow survived until the convention was over, the nomination secured, Lombard would never call off his dogs. The three of them represented too great a threat. He would hunt them. He would find them. He would kill them. It was inevitable. They simply lacked the resources to stay hidden from a man destined for the White House.

  “Well, this is a hell of a ghost story, but can we prove any of it?” Hendricks asked.

  “We can prove she was pregnant.”

  “But we can’t connect it to Lombard?”

  Gibson shook his head.

  “So what’s our move?” Jenn asked.

  “We go to Atlanta.”

  “To the convention?” Hendricks said. “How long did you lose oxygen to your brain?”

  “It’s the only way,” Gibson said and explained his plan. It wasn’t without risk. It meant walking into the lion’s den. It meant turning to the one person who might, just possibly, be innocent in all this. It meant getting to Grace Lombard and proving the unprovable—that her husband had raped her daughter and was involved with her disappearance.

  When he was done, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said. One by one, Jenn and then Hendricks left the kitchen. Like boxers retreating to their corners to regroup after getting their bells rung. Gibson went to the fridge to see what else there was to eat.

  A hanging did wonders for a man’s appetite.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  When they pulled into Atlanta a week later, the city was humming and the convention in full swing. Atlanta was also, quite literally, sold out. Conventioneers were buoyant and optimistic about their man and his chances come the general election. They were feeling no pain; it was as close to Mardi Gras as politics got. The streets surrounding the convention center were a complex warren of security checkpoints and media encampments. The sidewalks, thick with pedestrians at all hours, were cumbersome to navigate. Atlanta accepted the intrusion with good old-fashioned southern hospitality. Certainly the bars and restaurants around the convention center weren’t complaining.

  Gibson watched Grace Lombard’s personal assistant, Denise Greenspan, come around the corner toward him. History and political science double major at Hamilton College. Master’s in public policy from Georgetown. The sidewalk was overflowing with conventioneers, but there was no danger of losing sight of her. At five foot eleven, she had a distinctive, gorgeous Afro with just a hint of red to it. Today it was tied back with a yellow-and-green head scarf and swayed regally above the sea of heads as she walked. She’d run cross-country and track at Hamilton, and the previous fall had finished the Marine Corps Marathon in 3:28—an impressive pace for a first timer. Back in Washington, Denise ran with Grace most mornings, which insiders claimed was the core of their close working relationship. Denise had been with Grace for four years and by all accounts was fiercely protective of her boss.

  She was also a creature of habit. Each of the last three evenings at six p.m., she had taken an hour for herself to have dinner at the same sushi restaurant some eight or nine blocks from the convention center. She favored the same table in the front window, surfing news and political blogs on her laptop while she ate.

  Yesterday, Hendricks had taken the table beside her. It was a small restaurant, and the tables were narrow and packed tight together. It had made it easy to get the two fairly clear recordings of her entering her laptop password—once when she arrived, and once when she returned from the restroom. Later, Hendricks slowed the recording down and the three of them sat around a monitor going backward and forward over the tape, arguing over whether it was a K or an L. Because of the camera angle, her left hand partially obscured the right side of the keyboard. But they were reasonably certain her password was DG5kjc790GD. Or possibly DG5kjl790GD. Jenn favored DG5lhj790GD. Definitely one of those.

  When Denise sat down today, it was Gibson waiting for her at the next table. He apologized and moved his bag off her seat. She smiled thanks and made herself comfortable. She set up her laptop but didn’t comment on the fact they had the same computer. It was a pretty popular model after all.

  Gibson went back to his work on his new laptop, which he’d bought only yesterday. Denise placed her order and proceeded to read a succession of blogs about the newly announced Lombard-Fleming ticket.

  Overhead, Gibson could see Jenn’s reflection in the large mirror by the door. She was at the small sushi bar with her back to him. When the waitress picked up Denise’s food to take to the table, Jenn rose and went down the back hallway to the unisex bathroom. The waitress presented Denise with her food and asked them each in turn if they wanted anything else. Denise asked for a tea. Gibson asked for his check.

  The past three nights, Denise had waited until her food arrived to wash her hands. Gibson held his breath until she shut her laptop and slipped out between the two tables. In the mirror, he watched her disappear around the corner. He switched laptops without looking up. Better to do something fast and with confidence than draw attention by looking around like a thief.

  In his earpiece: “She’s knocked. Ninety seconds.”

  He opened Denise’s laptop and entered the first password. The log-in window shook, rejecting it. Gibson blew air up his face in frustration. Always the last one you try, he thought darkly. He tried the second… same thing. The third—the log-in window shook disapprovingly again.

  “How are you doing out there?” Jenn asked.

  “I need a minute,” he muttered into his mic.

  “Define a minute.”

  “Look it up. I’m busy.”

  He stared at his list of three probable passwords. The D and G were obviously her initials backward and forward. So she wasn’t averse to using personal mnemonics. D—Denise. G—Greenspan. 5k—like the race? So what were those two lowercase letters? He looked back at the three possibles they’d come up with. A lot of j’s, l’s, h’s and a c. What was she trying to spell with that alphabet soup?

  He saw Jenn come out of the hallway and sit back down at the bar. hc—Hamilton College. Could it be as simple as that? he thought. He typed, “DG5khcG790GD.” The computer logged him in. People loved their alma maters. He plugged in the thumb drive and began to download the file from it to her laptop. Denise Greenspan kept an immaculate desktop, so she would see the folder the first time she went to open something.

  It was still downloading when Denise came out of the bathroom. He saw her in the mirror but kept his head down. What was a believable reason for being on her laptop? Other than being a thief, of course.

  “Stop her,” he whispered.

  Jenn turned sharply and said something to Denise. Denise paused and then slowly turned her back on Gibson. The two women chatted amicably. He offered a prayer of thanks at the altar of Jenn Charles, unplugged the thumb drive, and traded the laptops back. He was packing up to pay his bill when Denise got back to her table.

  “What did you say to her?” Gibson asked.

 
“I asked where she bought her head scarf. Said my girlfriend had similar hair, and I was looking for a gift.”

  They leaned forward and clinked the necks of their beer bottles over the coffee table.

  “Maybe a little premature on the celebration, huh?” Hendricks was sitting by the window, looking out the gap in the curtains. They’d found a single vacant room at a motel about forty-five minutes out of Atlanta and slept in shifts, with one of them always stationed at the window.

  Gibson was doing a lousy job of not staring at the burner cell phone on the coffee table between them. Was a phone the electronic equivalent of a watched pot?

  Come on, Grace. Just call, already.

  Hendricks snatched up the keys, saying he was hungry. He was gone thirty minutes and surprised them by bringing back food for everyone. Pretty decent Chinese. Hendricks spread the plastic dishes out on the small Formica table, and they all tucked in to eat. Hendricks only ate egg rolls. He would cut the ends off them, empty the filling out onto the table, and mix it with orange sauce. Then, laboriously, he would repack the egg rolls with a fork and finally eat them.

  The phone sat in the middle of the table like a centerpiece. They talked about nothing in particular. Keeping it light. Certainly not the call they were all waiting on. For his part, Gibson kept up the pretense that he felt confident about his plan.

  The contents of the message to Grace Lombard had been relatively simple. First was the photograph of Suzanne and her backpack at the kitchen table that Billy had taken all those years ago. Gibson remembered how he’d reacted to it the first time he saw it back at ACG and knew it would knock the wind out of Grace. They also included photos of Suzanne’s book. The only thing they held back was the picture of Suzanne pregnant. It was his hole card, and Gibson planned to show it to Grace in person.