I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2

by Mike Bogin

  Curtis tapped his tablet to bring up sound files. Downloaded samples of Spencer’s voice were mapped to his cadences, his vocal ranges, even isolated clips of his most spoken words and analysis showing idiosyncratic phrasing.

  Profitt fanned open the pad until it changed shape into a disc the size of a large pot lid. At the center it held a four-inch rod capped by a black spongy material. The TL took hold of it while his assistant team leader removed the night vision goggles and put on the headphones, cupping each ear beneath the black pads. Crouching down on his right knee, he took back the listening device and held it in his left hand while resting his left elbow onto the bridge his position had formed with his left leg. Another laser blip showed red against the wall just below the front windows. Male voices, rough, angry. Southern accents.

  “Boss, we’ve got something,” he whispered, drawing Curtis’ attention back to the screen.

  The Team Leader reached out his hand to take the earphones; he was obviously annoyed about the outdated technology. The device should have been wireless and Bluetooth-enabled to play on multiple headphones. It should have been synched to the tablet, too. Curtis held the wired headset up to his ear.

  “Man, this is dumb. I’m leaving. If they’re not here in like two minutes, I’m gone.” Southern accent. Duuuhm.

  “And what am I supposed to tell ’em when y’all take off? Cool yer jets ’n show some patience.”

  Arriving or leaving. That spelled complications. Taking the shot was always easier outside at close range. But it might not be Spencer who was leaving. If it wasn’t Spencer, did he let the other guy walk out and not tip Spencer? Did they take the shot and go straight in there hot? Spencer, a Tower of Power—Rangers, Special Forces, Airborne—was no man he wanted to alert ahead of action. Every minute they waited meant the target might be getting closer to having additional assets. Trading shots with trained experts was a sure way to raise casualties on both sides.

  Matters got worse quickly.

  “Boss, I’ve got an angle on the side window,” Four called out. “Two men, late twenties, early thirties. There’s a weapon in view on the table, semi-automatic, looks like a 9mm.”

  “Do you have a sight on target?”

  “Negative boss. I have a visual on Three,” he told Curtis. “Three, you’ve got a window down your end looking directly into the room.”

  “Three, can you get a visual?” Curtis whispered into his jaw mic.

  “Can do, Boss, but I need to get on top of the LP tank to see in. It’s a two-hundred-gallon, thirty-six inch diameter. No way to squeeze between the tank and the wall and no way to reach it with a remote cam.”

  “Negative. Regroup on me. Now now now. Get over here. We’re switching gears.”

  Collateral damage saves lives, soldier’s lives. That’s one of the facts that regular army doesn’t like to talk about. The enemy doesn’t give two fucks when there is a civilian in the way, but thanks to polite rules of engagement, Americans die every day.

  The four black figures rushed from their positions like moving shadows, imageless outlines blocked against the lights inside apartments.

  “Billy,” he ordered, “you get out all the donuts and a radio-frequency cap.” As he pointed, his thinking came across clearly. “We’re not shooting our way into there in the blind. We’re going to leverage that LP tank.” Curtis pointed toward the tank and swept his hand over the entire structure. The explosion would take down the building and their target along with it. Billy nodded.

  “Matt, you string it from the gauge stem down to the center of the tank on the outside away from the building. The stem is the weak point. The rest of you, you know that big lawn we passed? The one with the big-assed plantation house with the white columns in front? Hump it over there with everything we’ve got. Cal, use your NV and ring the perimeter in red. Buck, bring in the transportation on a green line straight to you. Now get over there, and Bobby, you make damned sure there’s no power lines or obstructions. Once you confirm, you call in the chopper and let him know this is a hot run. As soon as I hear those rotors, it’s the Fourth of July,” he instructed.

  “Matt, you and I will travel light and hit that ‘copter hard and fast. The rest of you, move! Matt, you get to be Jim Brown on this one.”

  “Just cause I’m black doesn’t make me Jim Brown,” Matt said. “You be Jim Brown. I don’t want to be him. Jim Brown gets killed.”

  “Jesus Shenikwa,” Curtis griped. “Take the fucking donuts and get ’er done.”

  *****

  The motel clerk gave him a break, seeing as how she recognized him for a wounded veteran and all. Policy was no ID and no credit card, no room. Cash wasn’t enough. But the heavyset middle-aged lady behind the glass said how “I have three of my boys in uniform and to hell with rules. Let ’em fire me.”

  Under the front curtains, the room had an old electric heater. He stared at it, thinking that the room was chilly but not entirely making the connection that he could change that by standing up and putting on the heat. It was his to control. He reached up to the bedside lamp and switched it off then on then off again and on again. There were sixty or seventy channels; not one of them said a word about him. What does that mean? He stopped at the TV Land station and watched Gilligan’s Island. Gilligan had fallen into a cavern while he was caddying for Thurston Howell III’s golf game and discovered a gold mine that immediately belonged to Mr. Howell. Spencer smiled dully; he had no energy to think much about the message there. During the first commercials, he fell fast asleep.

  In the morning, the low water pressure matched the sagging mattress, but it was warm and dry and the room had two windows. Windows. He was smiling into the bathroom mirror, looking at the lather in his beard as he tugged again, scraping the flimsy plastic razor down his cheek then running his thumb across the blade to clear the bunching red-brown hair that was already clogging the rust-ringed drain.

  Ribbons of blood oozed from his clean-shaven face where the cheap razors left their marks. Spencer moistened a thin over-washed white towel smelling of bleach under the lukewarm water and dabbed at his face, intermittently removing it to look at the pink patterns. Afterward, he lay in the fancy underwear across the orange-and-blue-flower patterned bedspread and switched on the old television that hung on a shelf lagged into the brown paneling.

  He flipped past high school baseball, the stock market report, plus blazing footage of the “raging four-alarm fire in a Richmond suburb claiming the lives of five and seriously injuring one firefighter during the rescue of a mother and her infant who were trapped in the blaze. Mother and baby were transported to CJW Medical Center where they are reported to be in stable condition.” He failed to make the connection.

  White Sulfur Springs put him across the state line. He was into West Virginia, showered and shaved, wearing clean bright red underpants. The night before he had found ham sandwiches at the gas station mini-mart marked down, three for $2.25. Spencer unwrapped one, opened the white bread on a half for a look inside at wilted days-old lettuce and fizzy white spread that shined at the edges. Then he slapped it back together and ate most of it in a single bite.

  Afterward, he forced himself to rise up, flexed his weary legs, and shuffled in front of the flaking mirror. He looked more battered than the ancient dresser. Dots and lines of crusted blood were scabbing on pale sallow cheeks. The muscles in his upper body that he had managed to exercise were unnatural hard chunks rather than the balanced physique he expected to see looking back at him. Turning sideways, the nephrectomy scar looked like the wide tail end of a trail beginning between his shoulder blades and running bright-red down the white length of his back. There were more scars below his waist. He crawled on top of the bed and managed to stand, steadying himself with one arm pressing up to the ceiling so that he could get a better vantage point. A jagged, half-inch-thick red scar ran the full le
ngth of the femur down the back of his right thigh. He tried to tighten and flex the muscle; the feeble response was hardly perceptible. Down the outside of his left leg, below the knee, he could make out the crowned heads of four screws beneath the skin. Peeling down the stolen briefs, he looked over the narrow, careful scar from where bone was taken from the left hip for grafts along the right femur.

  He lay down again and considered squats, knowing that he had to work the knees and ankles, but his mind drifted. All those cells. Solitary confinement. The waterboarding. The shock stick. No lawyers. No trial. In America. Twelve hours ago. In the United States of America.

  He tried remembering but could not be sure when Mercy last wrote to him. Everything was so vivid except the time. Mail had rarely come for him when he was abroad. He used to take her lengthy annual copied letter out to the rubble flatland between Bagram’s runways where he went to decompress. After missions, sometimes tears sometimes flowed out from him uncontrollably. A neurochemical reaction. It happened, nothing to be ashamed about, but something he worked out alone with his guitar. He stretched out in the dirt with the mountains looking so close he could reach out and touch them; the snow was nearly gone and the killing season was about to begin in earnest.

  She had seventy acres; lush pasture with grass thigh-high, the creek running with trout, woods a thousand shades of green teeming with birds and raccoons. Even with all the hunters, there were black bear and deer, porcupines and red fox. Reading her words, he could hear her voice laughing as she related how she had bitten off more than she could chew, as usual, and couldn’t Uncle Sam spare him so he could come and help her?

  It had sounded like a miracle, something so distant that it could hardly be real, as far away from his world as the name itself, “Glen Jean.” Coal country, played-out mines giving way to new life, still only half-ready for her to come in and shake things up just a little. The land was coming back, people too, a groundswell. One neighbor was starting a craft brewery; another was making jerky and selling it at farmer’s markets. She was completely off the grid; her own well, a wood stove... the bare basics. She was even trying her hand at making cheese, could he believe it?

  He pictured her squatting down with that wild head of hair pressing into the side of a goat or a sheep, whichever it was she was raising. Her strong fingers pulling their udders, milking. Sweating and smiling that big grin of hers. Glen Jean, West Virginia.

  He never even wrote back…

  *****

  “You weren’t there,” Curtis argued across the phone line. “We didn’t get positive ID because it wasn’t doable. I had a call to make and I made it. We had the car, we had a resident soldier with three tours in Afghanistan, and we had a voice match. You wanted this handled, we handled it.”

  Bishop looked disgusted. Jonathan Spencer was dead, so the objective was met, but the team he hired, his private commandos, had destroyed an entire apartment building. Get over it, he told himself. You’re a grown man. You know the score. But first the dead detective. Now this, too.

  Outside his glass office door, Bishop looked over to Stephen Nussbaum and his team. It seemed like they weren’t working at all, then they attacked their keyboards like pelicans diving on bait fish. They looked like babies; Stephen alone was old enough to rent a car. “I’m management,” Nussbaum had explained to him, “too old to be a real native.” All four of them glowed, bright with excitement at the technologies Jeffers had opened up to them.

  “It’s about over boys,” Bishop muttered to himself. “All your shiny new Christmas presents are going away.”

  He had to pick up the telephone to make his report to Jeffers. It was over too quickly. You should have gotten the retainer agreement in writing, he thought. Jeffers could conveniently forget the whole thing.

  “Can’t say verbatim,” Bishop conceded over the phone. “No. The corpses were incinerated. That’s what over a hundred gallons of exploding liquid propane does to an apartment building and the people inside it. Virginia Department of Health has the remains. Medical Examiner/Coroner. You couldn’t recognize them as human. Dental impressions, I imagine. It was a hot fire, but teeth stand up to two thousand degrees. Could be that DNA can be pulled from the pulp at the center of the tooth, too. That, I can’t say. DOD has dental and DNA on him. Nussbaum is working on getting copies of the impressions after they’re taken. Virginia will have to process the impressions then send out for any match, whereas we have the DOD files already on hand. I should have positive ID at least a several days ahead of the ME.”

  “Get the names and track the whereabouts of everyone in that apartment building,” Jeffers ordered.

  “We’re already on it,” Bishop replied. Stephen’s team was pulling DOD duty records and matching them up with the dates of the attacks. One occupant was confirmed on leave during the timeframe. They were pulling credit card records and building a profile right now, looking for overlap starting in middle school.

  Now there were two names, two faces. One times one is one. Two times two is four. The information set grows exponentially. But Bishop wasn’t as enthusiastic. He doubted if any of it would lead to Jeffers’ precious left-wing conspiracy. Spencer wasn’t taking anyone’s orders. Vision Partners might not like it, but there was no second gunman on the grassy knoll. There just wasn’t.

  Life goes on, Bishop thought, just not for Jonathan Spencer. In the end, men like Jeffers always win and men like Jonathan Spencer always die.

  Bishop knew the math. He was the original realist.

  But grown men still buy lottery tickets every single day. Maybe they don’t expect to win, but they can still wish.

  *****

  Spencer’s eyes roved along the tree line, looking for shifting forms, anomalies, bird movements, any signs that the motel could be surrounded. He saw nothing, but still wasn’t satisfied. From inside the bathroom, he got up on the toilet and opened the awning window then looked both ways down the trash-strewn cinderblock wall ahead of pushing out the gym bag. He pressed his upper body through until his weight was balanced forward and carried his legs behind him. His right hand nearly pressed onto a broken beer bottle but he managed to sweep it aside before tumbling out.

  The knees and ankles were more flexible, he noticed. Still weak, but he was able to make his way up the steep berm behind the motel without stretching out his arms to balance every step.

  Thirty feet up in the trees he stopped and watched the parking lot and beyond. No large vans. Nothing that would conceal police. He cupped his hands over his eyes to mitigate the glare and surveyed the terrain on the far side of the highway. No broken limbs or obvious foliage crushed underfoot, no reflections off binoculars, rifle scopes.

  Keeping low to the slope, he slowly made his way through the underbrush then stopped fifty feet along and again watched for anything that was altered, any bush that had moved with him, and any limb that was pushed aside to follow him to the new position. With both eyes concentrated outward, he almost walked into the poison oak straight ahead. Pay attention! The human enemy is only one opponent. Remember the three Ss: scorpions, spiders, and snakes.

  Dehydration. Sunstroke. Infected feet. You didn’t come this far to die of stupidity!

  *****

  “I’m not saying that we have stopped looking,” Bishop told Jeffers over the phone. “Cameras are in place looking straight at the father’s house in front and back. I have a tracking device on the van. We have his landline. We have his cell line. We’ve got a relay on the web going in and going out. We even have a filter on everything the dad watches on TV. Wouldn’t you think he’d be watching the news if his son had contacted him? The last thing the father watched was Gilligan’s Island! He went on AOL, skimmed some porn site, and then went to bed. We think he took a crap this morning. What more do you want to know?

  “No, I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve been up all night long. He’s
probably dead and pretty near cremated by that fire.” Bishop listened then jumped back in to confirm, “yes, we are inside the Virginia Coroner’s database; my guys piggybacked off one of their MEs and dialed into the case files starting yesterday.”

  Bishop surprised himself by calling Stephen and the techs “my guys.” “No, not literally dialing,” he continued. “They followed the coroner’s online organizational tree and located the case file. Everything the Medical Examiner does we have in real-time the minute results get logged.

  “We’re in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, AFMES, too. Yes, we have Spencer’s dental record. Stephen Nussbaum is searching for online tutorials to see if we can compare the molds to the records, but we’re not experts in dental matching.”

  Jeffers rattled off a punch list so long that Bishop finally interrupted him mid-word.

  “Yes, we definitely have the DNA information. The matching is a software piece. If they find usable dental pulp for DNA, according to Nussbaum we’ll have the match here before they ever have it in Richmond.”

  Again, Jeffers went into his list.

  “We’re following it online through the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” Bishop confirmed.

  “No, we haven’t hacked the local desk or any other desk. No, we’re not tracking the fire marshal or the arson squad. I don’t even know whether they have an arson squad.