Chaingang

by Rex Miller

  “Relevant? It seems very relevant to me. And why did you purposely withhold the information that you'd been in touch with somebody who had business dealings on the land sale and had been in contact with Sam? Wasn't that relevant either?"

  “I don't know what you mean. We never had contact with any ... Oh, you mean the guy with CCC? That didn't have a bearing on your husband's disappearance."

  “How can that be?"

  “He had never been in personal contact with Sam. Only with his representative, who was Mr. Sinclair, the one who had the dealings here in town. He knew nothing about Sam being gone."

  “Well, where is this Sinclair?"

  “He's out of the country, is what Mr. Fisher said."

  “Who's Mr. Fisher?"

  “He's the man putting together the park out there.” He gestured to the north of town. “If you want to talk with him, I'll be glad to set it up for you, but I promise you you'll be wasting your time."

  “Please give me his number. I certainly do want to talk to him.” She felt like this stupid slob had violated her, lying to her as he had about her husband.

  “I understand he'll be in town tomorrow. Why don't you get together with the gentleman if it will ease your mind?"

  “Fine."

  “I'll take you out to meet him myself, in the morning if you like."

  “That's all right,” she said. “I've got my own car."

  “Fine. I'll call him when he gets in town tonight and tell him you will be coming out sometime in the morning to talk with him. How's that?” She nodded. “He'll be somewhere out there with the construction crew, I imagine. Name is Joseph Fisher. Okay?"

  “I'll be there."

  “As I say—you won't learn anything about Sam. But feel free. I don't want you talking about the Poindexters and Mr. Ellis being missing, Mary. There's no reason to get people worried more than they are."

  “I won't say anything.” Her eyes hardened. “At least for a while. But I'm telling the FBI and the sheriff's office about it."

  “They already know,” he said, letting a smirk show on his face for the first time since she'd gotten on his case. “Speaking of the sheriff, you know this dope fiend you been talking to about the case, this Royce Hawthorne, I want you to tell him it's only out of deference to you that his tail isn't sittin’ back in my jail.” Mary felt a hard knot in the pit of her stomach. It was bad enough with Sam—she didn't want to cause anybody else problems.

  “He's been stickin’ his nose everywhere, asking questions where he has no business, and then he has the gall to pose as the county sheriff and interrogate my personal secretary. It took me exactly one minute with his good friend and fellow junkie Mr. Hite to know who had bothered Kelly."

  “He was trying to help me find out something. It was more than the police seemed willing to do. You would have never said a word to me, would you?"

  “Not until there was some reason to, no. But let me ask you—now that you know what you think you know, are you any more informed? Do you know anything more about Sam's disappearance? No, little lady. You don't really know anything more. It's just upset you, is all it's done."

  She wanted to spit in his ugly face. The “little lady” really brought the red back into her cheeks, but she remembered what Royce had said and forced herself to keep her mouth shut.

  “Do you know what Mr. Hawthorne is, Mary? This friend you seem so willing to confide in about a police investigation and whatnot?"

  “I know him very well."

  “He's a dope addict. He's a cocaine dealer, did you know that?"

  “No.” She shook her head. “He's a friend, is all I know."

  “We're watching him very closely. He's going to make a serious mistake one day, and he'll end up in the hoosegow for a long time. I'm telling you for your own good—not to help him. He's not about to change. He's been no good as long as I been knowin’ him. You'd be well advised to cut loose of him, Mary."

  “Please—” He'd thrown her off with this talk of Royce. She knew that what he was saying now was probably the truth. “Just help me find my husband,” she said, quietly. Then she turned and left. Empty and hurting in the hollowness of her stomach. She imagined that Marty Kerns would be pantomiming blowing a kiss to her parting back, and she imagined she could hear the laughter of the other officers.

  Royce had brought her a wealth of information. He'd caught the cops in lies—big lies—about a major missing-persons case. She'd thrown all of it in Kerns's face, and somehow it had all bounced off of him. He'd turned it around so that she and Royce had ended up looking like idiots, and he'd come off as the responsible public servant. If the FBI had all this information—and there were four persons gone, all connected in a land deal—what were the implications?

  She'd go home and ask her personal adviser, her junkie buddy.

  16

  MEMPHIS

  “Mark, I think we're about ready,” the daddy rabbit said in his command voice. The agent named Mark hit the lights.

  “Okay.” The conversations in the room subsided. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know only too well, the so-called war on drugs was never a war at all. It was a holding action. Not even that, really. It was a series of dog-and-pony shows.” Like this one, he thought.

  “The Medellin, Cali, Bogota, North Coast—” his pointer flicked across the background display “—and various other Colombian organizations have operated for years without fear of serious reprisal by law enforcement agencies. It's only in the past year we've been able to mount a real campaign against the active drug cartels.

  “As we're all aware, painfully aware, the U.S. government has done what it could to make the smuggling of drugs easy. We tell these Third World countries to give us their tired, their poor, their huddled masses. Give us your dope mules, in other words.” There was a murmur of agreement in the conference room.

  “From the blue-collar immigrant who loads it, to the ones who mule it in, to the street kids who act as lookout for the peddlers and pushers, our open society and open borders have made it impossible to control the flow—especially in states like Florida and Texas. And—let's give the rats credit: they've been very smart.

  “We've known for years there was little point in trying to stop the traffic once it hit the street. Our only hope in staving in the Colombian cartels’ machine has been to try to hit the second-level guys. The big boys have been all but untouchable, and the little guys are too numerous to do anything about. It has always been the secondary level where the Colombians have been their most vulnerable.

  “The cartels’ traffic managers, the bagmen, the bankers, the intermediary distributors, the money launderers—that's where the weaknesses could be found.

  “Purchases, transfer of funds, the actual shipment and so forth, these second-level activities—these were the primary areas where we've put our manpower, and it's really paid off.

  “Because of limitless funding, they were always able to provide their secondary-level personnel with the best security money could buy. But they made a big mistake. When the state-of-the-art electronics gave them access to DISA codes and such, they couldn't resist the temptation to use it as a communications mode. We were waiting for them.

  “How have the Colombian traffic managers communicated with their distribution links? Traditionally it has been by phone. Pay telephones or black boxes. Sometimes, in the more sophisticated operations, they've employed bounce systems and elaborate telephone-relay blinds.

  “But when the computer hackers learned how to obtain the security passwords for Direct Inward System Access on private branch exchange numbers, it was a new ball game. They had a way to set up blind two-way phone security, with the added benefit of beating the telephone companies out of the charges.

  “They bought the access codes from dumpster divers, or black and blue boxers, or from pirated voice mail bulletin boards, or pay phone taps—a dozen ways. Or used the second dial tone after accessing call-processing features. They'd get in—make
their blind call—and get out free. The call would show on some corporate bill—uncheckable at either end and, in theory, as secure as an unscrambled land line could get.

  “What our job was here at ELINT was to monitor all the DISA heavyweights in markets with abnormally high rates of DLD fraud. We'd had a ‘watch’ on the Romero family for a long time, for example. Papa Romero—” his pointer tapped an ugly face “—Midwestern traffic manager for the Medellin.

  “His MO has been to set up call pads with his distributors. Then initiate the calls at prearranged times to untraceable units, using DISA passwords. Even if you tapped the line, the calls were so structured that Papa Romero would never be implicated. The distributors used codes, and everything was by the numbers. Romero did not personally touch either end of transport or delivery—only the money itself—keeping him insulated from the narcotics.

  “We used an informant to begin a series of larger and larger buys. Establish his dealer credibility with the distributor. When we knew Romero had just muled in over four hundred keys of cocaine, we had our snitch set up a buy for real weight. Then—when the deal was down—go shy on the deal. It put the distributor, who works out of a small town called Waterton, Missouri, in one helluva bind. He then had to initiate a call for help to Papa Romero.

  “We kept tight surveillance on the distributor and put together a package to show sufficient PC for a Romero wiretap. It was a can't-lose deal, you see: Even if he ultimately beat the coke thing, we could go for complicity in a federal telephone scam. Bada bing, bada boom—we had him set to fall two ways. Any questions?"

  A DEA man spoke up.

  “How did you keep the snitch from getting whacked?"

  “Well...” the daddy rabbit said, “you know how it is. You got a user who's dealing to support his habit, you don't worry too much about taking him down, you concentrate on turning him. Putting him back to work for our side. And you hate to lose a good informant, but this operation had to look totally kosher every step of the way. We had to leave it up to him to survive.

  “Both the distributor and the dealer are still in place, by the way. If our man can stay alive until we get the other guy taken down, then fine. If he gets whacked—” he turned his palms up and shrugged “—then we'll take the distributor down on a homicide as well as a narcotics bust.

  “As I said, it's a can't-lose deal."

  17

  MAYSBURG

  When Chaingang pulled out from Jefferson Sandbar, which is where the local fishermen and boating enthusiasts “put in,” the beat-up brownish-yellow-orange Toyota was riding a mite low on the springs. The shocks were probably gone to begin with. And ... consider the weight load.

  He took the bridge across the river, flowing with the traffic about ten miles over the speed limit. In a matter of minutes he'd passed through the center of Maysburg, Tennessee, via its “business route,” and was pulling up behind a Big 7 Motel, whose rather spacious parking lot had precisely one vehicle in it.

  He parked beside the car, a Buick Regal belonging to one Conway Woodruff, Jr., a salesman out of Decatur, Georgia, who had been in his room for all of fifteen minutes, and was both surprised and annoyed to hear someone banging on his door.

  “Yes?"

  Inside his massive head Chaingang had his speech ready, and his friendliest shit-eating grin was plastered across his dimpled, beaming countenance. He had his usual line of confusing dialogue prepared. A bit of impromptu nonsense about how flat-out goddamn stupid he was for having left an envelope with some money in it taped to the bottom of the dresser drawer and how crazy it sounded but could he please come in and reezle frammen for a second?

  The words would rush out in a storm of hot blasting confusion, startling yet nonthreatening, a fat comic bear's windy rhetoric infused with a kind of topsy-turvy logic, and while the unsuspecting party tries to respond to this intrusion, there is that awful coil of heavy chain snaking out of the huge canvas pocket, and it would all be over in an eye-blink.

  The words stuck in his throat. Perhaps the cumulative effect of the powerful drugs had damaged his central nervous system. He'd been struck on the head at some point, because there was a place where his skull was tender to the touch, so perhaps that contributed to his inarticulateness. Or maybe it was just that he hadn't had much to say in the last couple of years.

  Whatever the problem, nothing came to his tongue, so he brought up a juicy regurgitation and belched an expulsion of death-breath into poor Mr. Woodruff's face, pushing him back into the room, slamming the door behind him, and chain-snapping him in a blur of quick moves.

  His computer was working well, if his speech center was not, and it notified him of the possibility of watchers to his flanks and rear. Tiny black marblelike eyes peered around the curtain. When he was satisfied that no one behind him was a potential threat, he took Mr. Woodruff into the bathroom and undressed both of them as if for intimacy, and—truly—what is more intimate than an organ donation?

  Chaingang, naked, took his big fighting bowie and made three deep, precise cuts: the “autopsy Y.” Blood was everywhere. Fingers like huge steel cigars reached, ripped and opened Mr. Woodruff. He sliced the steaming heart loose and fed. Finally the scarlet roar of hot desire had abated. The delicacy was unusually sweet and tender. It had been such a long time, he'd almost forgotten the rush.

  It didn't take long to exsanguinate the gentleman, and they took a nice shower together while he cleaned them both, pulling the gentleman back together with his all-purpose duct tape until he could get him loaded up for disposal. The bathtub and tile walls were easy to clean since he did not have to worry about traces in the trap.

  He got dressed, went out to the Toyota and got plastic sheeting, one of the poncho halves, cord, and his Utility Escapes material.

  The bed had not been slept in. He rumpled it, pressing in the indentation of a sleeping man. He wrapped his large bundle, which was somewhat lighter. The donor had given blood, for one thing, and there was the matter of a heart, which weighed approximately three quarters of a pound.

  From Mr. Woodruffs clothing he took the driver's license and turned to the pages where his master motor vehicle blanks were tipped in. He selected the appropriate state, double-checking coded prefixes and license style, and removed the one he wanted. Not only had the authorities returned all his survival items, they'd upgraded them in some cases. There were new license blanks with the same small photograph of Daniel Bunkowski already affixed to each coded ID for all the states.

  It was almost as if he were an employee of theirs. He expected that kind of arrogance from most monkeys, but not the sissy doctor, who purportedly understood that he had superior competency. What made them think he wasn't going to escape with this material, not to mention the munitions?

  His mind sorted possibles: Perhaps they knew that MVB blanks were easily available both from street people and subculture bookstores. They might have realized that mail-order publications and other materials required a shipping time of several weeks. Maybe there was a time consideration attached to whatever motivated them to set him loose.

  They'd inserted him into Vietnam in the 1960s, free to hunt and kill. He'd shown them that he could escape their plans to control or terminate him then, so what made them think he was under their thumb now?

  He tried to examine, as objectively as possible, his various points of contact with the monkeys, beginning with his first adult jail time; through escape, evasion, revenge, recapture, the period of quasi-mercenary service, the bungled “abortion” by friendly fire, escape and evasion, more retaliation, the hunt by a detective who had become devoted to his destruction—when he was shot and almost killed, his wonderful time of recuperation and vengeance, and the child he'd sired—all the history that had brought him to this moment.

  Where was the weak link? Had Dr. Norman learned something about him during their drugged sessions that had led to such arrogance on their part? What made them think that he would follow their agenda?

&nbs
p; Daniel chewed it over as he added GM keys and Conway Woodruffs money to his billfold. He loaded up, and without encountering further problems, he and Mr. Woodruff left the Big 7 Motel for the last time.

  He'd spotted the fairly deserted river access route on the Maysburg side of the bridge. Driving with tremendous concentration, he returned there next, the low-riding Toyota's camper filled with what appeared to be camping gear. Chaingang had almost no rear visibility, and he could hardly breathe cramped in behind the wheel, which he could barely steer for his huge gut and massive legs.

  There were a few trucks and a car or two on the access road, but it looked good to him, as it ran parallel to the blue feature, and was country enough to do the trick.

  He stopped and phoned a taxi from the nearest pay telephone, at a small auto repair place near the road. Found his voice and told them when and where to pick him up. Gave the motel as his destination. His name was Conway Woodruff. The salesman's keys and an appropriate ID were in his pocket.

  Luck, or the power of evil, led him directly to a suitable bluff. His weapons cases and duffel bag were safely ensconced in the trunk of that big, beautiful Buick back at the Big 7.

  He took pliers and wire and made certain the Toyota's crew were in for the duration, battened down the hatches, wiped prints out of force of habit, and ran the vehicle off the low bluff into the river. Nobody but the fish heard it sink.