Fast Friends

by Susan Dunlap

  Ellen nodded. “A black sheep.”

  A moment passed before Wes said, “Illegal weapons! What are you two involved in? How are you going to—”

  “Jay and Bentec figured out how to orchestrate their sale. There’s nothing to stop Ellen and me finding a better deal. We’ll figure out how to get the money, and worry about the shipment after.”

  Fifty

  LIZA NODDED WHEN WES said, “If you ladies are going to steal a fortune, are you going to cut me in?”

  “We’re dealing with killers. Our odds of survival are miniscule.”

  “I know.” He smiled down at Ellen. “I’m in.”

  For a moment they all stood there in the kitchen watching the rain drops meandering down the window. It had been cold when she took Felton out earlier, but it was toasty in here now. The bowl she’d stirred the biscuits in was soaking in the sink and the everything’s-okay aroma of hot biscuits still filled the air. When she’d first seen Wes, with his El Grecoesque body and his angular face she’d been afraid he’d be stoic. But he sure wasn’t.

  Ellen said, “Let’s start with what we know.” Her voice was crisp and shaky, like an overcooked biscuit in danger of crumbling. “Liza, how do you think this scheme started? Did Jay know Bentec? Did he—”

  Liza fingered her coffee cup. She’d already had way too much coffee but the buzz seemed appropriate now. “Jay insisted on coming to Portland for that reunion. A St. Enid’s reunion was the last place I wanted to be. It made me real uncomfortable. Oh, sorry, Ellen.”

  Ellen shrugged.

  “And any reunion is the last place you want to bring a husband. I mean, either you spend the whole time making sure he’s not bored, or if he isn’t bored it’s because he’s hearing something about you you don’t want him to know. So, I pulled out all stops to derail this plan. I suggested Banff. Too far, he said. I got a special on a weekend in San Francisco. Too close. Finally, he said he had some business up here and I gave up. I don’t think he planned to connect with Harry; that was just luck for him.”

  Wes refilled cups and said, “So, lady-now-in-the-know, what was he coming for?”

  “Trolling for a buyer for his shipment, that’s my guess. We were only there for the weekend. Friday night we checked into the Benson Hotel, had dinner and walked around town. Saturday we went to a gun show in Idaho. It was so unlike Jay I thought it was a joke. But there we were, looking as out of place as two buffalo on the Venice boardwalk. We’d both made an effort to dress down, but still our jeans were creased, Jay’s jacket was new black leather, and the sweater I had on was about half the size of what any child in the building was wearing. We couldn’t possibly have stood out more. We were like Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visiting the colonials, except that colonials always seem pleased to see them. At the gun show people weren’t rude, just wary.” She sipped the hot coffee; it was bitter now this fourth or fifth cup, but she didn’t care. “At the time I thought Jay didn’t notice how L.A. we were; but he did, of course. Jay never overlooked appearances. No, he intended to play the hotshot Angeleno, and me in tight jeans and skimpy sweater, I was part of the show. He strolled around the whole show, stopping at each booth, picking up the biggest weapon he could find and shrugging as if it were nothing. I thought he was behaving like an ass, and doing it in the worst possible place. I’ll tell you, I was relieved when we made it back to the door. I was already figuring how long before we’d be back in Portland. Then he said he wanted to ask a couple of guys a couple of questions and would I get him the map out of the car so he could ask about the best route back to Portland.”

  “So you left?” Wes asked.

  “Not hardly. I knew Jay was getting rid of me—and normally I would have gone along with his plan, but I was worried that without me there he would provoke some local and get himself killed. So I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible—no small task—and keep an eye on Jay. He didn’t meet a couple of guys; he walked directly over to one guy, a tall sandy-haired man in a sports jacket, the one I would have called the most normal-looking person in the place.”

  “Would have called?” Wes prompted.

  “Until I saw him outside later. It was on the road out, a narrow two-lane job with cars and trucks parked on the bank on either side. His truck was behind a rust-splotched blue Chevette. Both were on the edge of a ditch. The bumper of the Chevette was against his. He had about eighteen inches free behind him. He could have squiggled out—it would have been an effort, but doable. Instead he went forward, and slowly, as if he were cleaning off his windshield, he pushed the little car into the ditch. Then he backed up again and left. The little old car sank farther in the mud than I could have imagined, up past the doors. Even if the engine was in the rear and it wasn’t a total loss, the seats were on their way to being soaked and the poor person who owned it—and it had to be a poor person, miserable vehicle that it was—was looking at towing out a smelly heap, spending money he didn’t have, hitching rides, and who knew what all inconvenience. All because it was in this jerk’s path. I saw his expression again, cool, righteous, consumed, like he would crush a man and it’d all be in a day’s work.”

  Ellen slipped her hand into Wes’s. “And that,” she said in a stunned voice, “is who you think is Jay’s buyer?”

  Liza nodded, keeping her eyes lowered to avoid Ellen’s gaze. “Because he was the one person Jay didn’t want to joke about after.”

  Ellen started for the sofa but Wes caught her, put both their coffees on the flatcar and sent it ahead. His arm was tight around her waist as they walked to the sofa and sat so close together Liza could almost have stretched out on the remaining cushions. She hunkered down next to Felton by the fire.

  Ellen set her cup down. “Harry was shot because he was routing Jay’s shipment, right Liza? Because the killer, this guy, got what he needed—” she swallowed and for a moment Liza didn’t think she’d be able to force herself to go on—“and then he shoved him into the ditch.”

  Liza nodded. It was all she could do.

  Wes rubbed Ellen’s shoulder and said softly, “The only thing his killer would want would be the ‘when and where’ of the shipment arriving. Would Harry have that?”

  “Of course. If Jay’s shipment left L.A. say, uh…”

  “Friday,” Liza offered.

  “Friday, why Friday?”

  “Because Jay died Friday night. Bentec wouldn’t have had him shot before the shipment left. There’d have been no point. It had to be after the shipment was beyond Bentec’s control that he panicked and…” Liza stiffened against the memory of the loft and Jay staggering back against her. Even if she survived all this, she knew that scene would never fade. “So the shipment left no later than Friday—”

  Ellen nodded. “And going along at nineteen miles per hour—”

  “Ellen, I think Jay would have sent it express.”

  Ellen caught her eye and smiled. “Nineteen miles per hour is express, freight express. That’s the average speed of a freight train, in good times. Admittedly, it’s counting in stops at weigh stations and regular stations, at crossings and the occasional shunting off onto the wrong track.”

  “But if it didn’t—”

  “Liza, you’re missing the point! All that stuff happens. With Harry’s best-laid plans, routing cargoes through the best-run transfer points, avoiding the black hole hubs of the freight world, still cargoes got shunted off onto side rails and there they sat full of rotting melons while their computer tracker clicked on with the rest of the train.”

  Wes leaned forward. “Computer tracking?”

  “Oh, yeah. All the engines have numbers, all the cars, all the containers. A.E.I…Automated…Equipment…Identification, I think. And there are sensors along the way. Still, if a container is shunted off into a siding at the rail yard in Eugene, chances are the loss won’t register till Salem, maybe even Portland.”

  “Register on?” Wes was almost out of his seat.

  “The sender c
an check the carrier’s website and track his cargo, just like Harry could.”

  “So Silvestri could have done that?”

  “I guess so. No reason why not. But my point—”

  Wes was just about shaking her. “So both the sender and the recipient can check on the cargo’s progress?”

  “Sure.”

  “But Silvestri didn’t trust the recipient, so he didn’t give him the key to check on the shipment, maybe not the shipment numbers or something—”

  Liza smacked down her empty cup. “Because the recipient hasn’t paid up yet.”

  “Yeah. Good, Liza. And then he hears that Silvestri’s been eliminated and he figures he’ll just grab his shipment for free, that is, if he can get enough data to find it—”

  “Which means we can feed him whatever data we want, right? We can off-load our shipment somewhere in Washington, and give the buyer the number of a container of corn.”

  “For six million dollars he just might want a peek first.”

  “So we’ll get half before and let him think we’ll wait around for the rest. Harry wouldn’t have given him the right data, would he, Ellen?”

  “No! I know Harry. He’d the before…”

  An icy cold shot down Liza’s back. She looked up at the two of them sitting so close a germ couldn’t squeeze in. “Wouldn’t everything the buyer needs be on the web page? Wouldn’t he just have to have gotten Harry to pull it up?”

  Ellen nodded stiffly. “Poor Harry, to the in the midst of his corruption.”

  “Ellen, I am so sorry that Jay—”

  “Forget it. You’re not responsible for your husband, not anymore. So, the shipment. It left L.A., say, forty-eight hours ago, at nineteen miles per hour.”

  “C’est tout, mes femmes. Let me find that web page on the ol’ computer.” He circled his arms behind Ellen’s back and pulled her closer, planting a goodbye kiss worthy of heading off in a space capsule.

  It was almost an hour before Wes rushed back in, his expression an uncoalesced mixture of delight and shock. “Here’s the scoop: the Los Angeles Police Department is missing all the weapons that were being sent to be melted down. Six million dollars worth. The kind of weaponry the Marines use to storm buildings.”

  Liza sank onto the sofa. “Six million dollars of weapons worthy of a Marine invasion. All of it headed to the jerk who pushed the rusting Chevette into the ditch. I don’t want to think of him waiting up there in Richland, Washington, ready to unload—”

  “Richland?” Wes was staring open-mouthed.

  “Yeah, Richland. So?”

  “Liza! Do you know what’s there?”

  “No.”

  “Richland is the home of the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant. Or the remains thereof. We’re not talking about grabbing six million dollars now, we’re talking about blowing up the world. Liza, this is way bigger than us. We don’t have any choice. We’ve got to call the police.”

  Fifty-One

  FRANK BENTEC HAD GOTTEN enough sleep during the night and he was all wound up and there was nowhere to go to. Rain pounded the tin roof of the outbuilding Zeron had chosen for command. Zeron’s men and women kept running in and out the door, slamming it, sending waves of soggy air all the hell over. The whole room reeked of mud and coffee. Little towns like Eugene didn’t get big-time manhunts like this and these guys were pumped so tight they were bouncing off each other. The young ones were barely controlling their excitement; the old ones were eager to see years of training sessions pan out into something. Serious business, they kept saying to each other, but it didn’t take a mind reader to see to them it was a fox hunt.

  Rain sheeted windows and even he had to admit heading up in the copter would be a waste of time. He couldn’t commandeer a patrol car because he didn’t know where the hell to go.

  Railroad computer records, the idea teased him. If only he could have gotten Liza Silvestri to find Jay’s shipping papers. If he had a support unit. If only—shit. But he didn’t and there was nothing to do but down coffee, study the map, pace and wait for the Feds to arrive. And search his memory for some clue, some slip on Silvestri’s part that would tell him what train his container was on.

  The door smacked open. A drenched Fed in a sopping suit burst into the office, grinning like a normal guy.

  “Kryczalski?” Zeron asked.

  “Got it! The address!” Kryczalski shouted. “Forty-two eighty-seven, Route three-sixteen. Road’s just this side of the freeway.” He was waving the soggy paper he’d just read off, like a final lap flag.

  “That where Silvestri is?” Bentec asked with forced calm. He needed to keep the situation under control here.

  “I ran the friend, Ellen Baines, the one from Kansas City. Seems she just moved to K.C. three months ago. Want to guess from where?”

  He stared at Kryczalski, who had to be right out of the academy. This was one Fed who never would have passed J. Edgar’s sweaty palm test. “Where?”

  “Portland. And what did she do in Portland?”

  “What?”

  “She belonged to a bicycle club. One of the members then was a guy who lives in Eugene now.”

  “At the Route three-sixteen address?”

  “Right.”

  Bentec sighed. “Worth a check, but—”

  “Wait, wait! The two of them were hospitalized at the same time, in the same crash.”

  “Still, that’s not even circumstantial evidence.”

  “It’s darned well worth following up.” The kid looked positively outraged. “Are you saying you can’t be bothered?”

  “Not hardly, man,” a local insisted. “Here’s what we do—”

  “Look, we need—”

  “Hey, just a minute there, all of you, this is a federal case, a federal collar.”

  The bubble of Kryczalski’s youthful trust had burst. He was frightened he’d blown it, and now he was all rules and regulations. Bentec could have played the rest of the argument from memory of his own encounters with the Feds. He stepped back, leaving it to Zeron. Map in one hand, keys to the patrol car in the other, he slipped outside.

  He eased the car away and didn’t hit the lights and siren till he was into traffic. Zeron knew his own town way better than a stranger from L.A. could hope to. Even allowing time for Zeron and Kryczalski to fight it out back there, Bentec knew he wouldn’t get much of a lead.

  But he didn’t need much time, just long enough alone with Silvestri, to get her to spill which train the shipment was on and when it was due in Portland. That was the easy part. The hard part would be disposing of her, and her friend, and the guy in the house before they tripped him up. The hard part would be doing it with a different MO than he’d used with Heron, something that would keep Zeron and the Feds off his tail for twelve hours—enough time for him to get the money and clear the border.

  He sped past the Seventh Day Adventist Church, swinging the car into oncoming traffic or onto the sidewalk when the siren didn’t clear the road. He hung a left on Route 316 and flicked off the lights and sirens. The silence smacked him. The rain muffled his movements.

  It wasn’t till he saw the wood piled outside the house, so well protected from the rain, that he realized how easy things would be.

  Fifty-Two

  LIZA SAT ON THE floor. The fire threw out heat that merely pricked her skin; it didn’t warm her. Have to go to the police. She couldn’t chance the police. Neither could she let the guy who pushed the Chevette in the ditch steal a carload of weapons and head for a nuclear power dump. There was no good answer, only wrong choices. She sat, shivering, watching Ellen, waiting.

  Ellen didn’t move. Her eyes were open but Liza could tell she was seeing only what was inside her head, aware of Wes next to her, aware that once she spoke the safety of this moment would be gone.

  Finally, Ellen shifted away from Wes. “It’s too late,” she said. “The police aren’t going to believe us. We could come up with facts and speculations till we turned to stone and
they’d still think we were two crazy broads making up a bizarre tale to cover a crime spree. If the train left L.A. forty-eight hours ago, it’s almost here now.” She leaned forward, holding up a finger as if she was about to explain a math theorem. “Best possible scenario: We convince the cops. But that convincing would take hours. And by that time the weapons would be off the train at Richland and pointed at the nuclear waste site. And the radioactive waste would be all over Washington, Oregon and Idaho.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Wes demanded.

  Liza and Ellen looked at each other but neither spoke. They both knew the answer, Liza realized, but neither of them could bring herself to say, “We’ll derail a carload of assault weapons while battalions of police and terrorists look on.” She asked, “Can we find out exactly when the shipment is due in Richland? And who it’s going to?”

  Wes shook his head, a motion of disbelief, but he was pushing up from the sofa and his eager expression belied the seriousness of their plight. “Let’s just see where that shipment is. Ellen, do you know what we’re looking for?”

  She followed him toward a room next to the bedroom. “Harry showed me a sample form with all the info, including container numbers, train numbers, shipper data and destination. Once you’ve got that you can call up the location.”

  “Anyone can call it up?”

  “Harry could. The shipper or receiver can if they’ve got the password.”

  “And the guy who killed Harry could have taken that info off Harry’s screen?”

  Ellen had that stricken look she’d gotten each time Harry’s name came up, but she nodded. “The bastard could have seen everything on Harry’s screen, but he wouldn’t know how to call it up again.”