Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  “That’s not that bad,” Marie said quietly.

  The doctor put the thermometer in his medical bag and withdrew a small bottle of milky fluid. “What’s that?” Marie asked.

  “It’s a name you wouldn’t recognize,” the doctor said. “But it will settle your stomach, for one thing.” He emptied the bottle into the glass of milk. “Yes, you’ll be home for a few days, and sleeping, I’m sure.” Then he and his sister propped Marie up so she could drink.

  The milk tasted like peaches.

  “In fact, don’t be surprised if you sleep a lot,” her uncle said, speaking quietly again.

  “It won’t make me throw up?” Marie asked. “I feel like I might.”

  Her aunt reached for the glass. Marie handed it to her.

  “I would think you’re done throwing up,” the doctor said, now whispering and staring hard into her eyes.

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Just rest, dear,” her aunt said, bringing Marie’s sheet up to her waist. “You don’t worry now, about this, or school, or anything.”

  Her uncle helped her back down onto her pillow.

  “You’ll be fine, sweetheart,” he said.

  Her answer was weak. “I’m sure I will.”

  Her aunt pulled the sheet up to her chin.

  “I’m sure you will too,” the doctor said. His voice was confident, but seemed farther away.

  Marie’s eyes were half-closed.

  The doctor smiled.

  Aunt Leah smiled.

  Marie closed her eyes.

  Her aunt was saying something else.

  But was that her aunt?

  Someone’s voice. Only, this time, from very far away.

  12

  Not many years ago, Michael Connell had been hard as a tree, and lean. Now he was growing into a much different man. Just thirty-two-years-old and still generally solid, he had rounded out in recent years, top to bottom, but especially in the face, which was also growing more ruddy. He had rounded out so much, in fact, that looking in the mirror continued to take him by surprise. His belly was so pronounced that when his wife, Sherri, begged him not to spend the three weeks away from home on his mysterious business trip eating and drinking, he patted his paunch and remarked with a laugh, “Bein’ pregnant puts a glow in my eye, but it’s damned uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

  Sherri smiled at him now from the photograph he had pinned to the visor of his red Chevy pickup. Her long arms were spread wide in the picture. The Pacific Ocean churned behind her.

  Michael missed her whenever he left home for more than a few days.

  He raised his bottle of imported stout and drank to his blond-haired wife.

  He missed his son, Roddy, too, the proudest mark he would ever leave on the world, even if he lived to be a hundred. Now four years old, Michael’s dark-haired boy was laughing at him from the second photograph pinned to the visor, the lad dressed in a Disneyland T-shirt with his head leaning forward in mock surprise and his eyes as wide as searchlights.

  Another long drink. This one to the finest son God ever gave a man who sure didn’t deserve it.

  He glanced at his watch. One in the afternoon.

  He had left Arizona and was making his way past Gallup, New Mexico. More desert lay ahead—dry red land as far as the eye could see interrupted occasionally by little towns with Native American names. But I-40 was a good road to travel, and the Chevy was running fine. He would arrive in the Pecos Wilderness between five and six o’clock to join Crawl, Kieran and Brenna at the A-frame he had rented near Monastery River in the Sangre de Christo Mountains.

  The others, he knew, would be getting there before him.

  He reached up to pat the photos of his wife and son with his fist. With any luck, he thought, he would do them so fine in the next few days they would never have to worry about anything. “Not ever,” he whispered, thinking especially of Roddy. “Not in your whole sweet life.”

  The music on the radio was fading. He hit the scan button, listened through five stations, all of them with commercials, then turned off the radio and began to sing in a clear tenor voice “The Sash My Father Wore”.

  He had already spent the better part of the last three weeks in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe areas, he and his GPS, the first time he had ever been to that part of the country. He had paid some good money and made some good contacts and forwarded the others a full dossier on the doctor and his niece and sister, including details he had dug up on the mechanics and timelines of cloning, which he had found fascinating.

  He had also gotten detailed maps of Santa Fe and the whole northern wilderness area, and he had taken photographs of the doctor’s house and its surrounding roadways back where the mountains began in earnest, north of the city. He had even talked with real estate agents in the area. There were just a few private properties. Private land was scarce in the wilderness area, therefore expensive. The few permanent homes that existed, including the doctor’s, which had been built just a dozen years before, were powered with generators. Satellite was used for phones and the Internet.

  Michael had photographed the doctor’s entrance roads a hundred yards at a time, even visited and photographed a second house, which was down and around the bend at the southern end of Bruce Lake. It was the only other building from which anyone could see the doctor’s house, and then only as a sighting of lights at night. Situated at the base of the high hills at the south end of the lake, the other home was owned by a retired couple who were traveling in Europe, according to the men Michael had found putting the couple’s pontoon boat in the water for the approaching summer months. They wouldn’t be back, the workmen said, for another three weeks.

  Everything was working out better than fine.

  He had detailed the doctor’s work schedule. Three days a week in Albuquerque, the rest at home in the wilderness. He had a lab in his house, the real estate agent had mentioned. On the three days the doctor spent at his company, he left his house north of Santa Fe at 5:30 A.M.; he left Jerron-Nash to return home at 5:00 P.M. and arrived at about 6:15 or 6:30. When the traffic or the weather was bad, his drive was extended by anything from twenty to forty-five minutes.

  The doctor’s sister, Leah, had a lot less distance to cover, but she took her time. She dropped straight down to Santa Fe to pick up the girl from school at 3:45, but she often ran brief errands on the way back, sometimes not arriving at home until after 5:45. And on Mondays it was even later. On Mondays, she and the girl stopped at a shopping center on Farrell Avenue to spend an hour or so buying groceries. It was, Michael observed, their only shopping day, and it put off their Monday arrival until 7:00 P.M. on the first Monday he followed them, nearly 7:15 on the next two.

  Who could tell, something like that might make a difference.

  He had rented the A-frame for the whole month for him and the others, and he had forwarded them detailed driving directions.

  Finally, he had purchased a six-year-old Chevy Malibu from a Pentecostal minister’s wife in Albuquerque. He paid her cash, then gave her an extra hundred dollars to hold the car for his brother, who, he told her, would be showing up from Ireland for a visit on May 10.

  She had protested the extra hundred dollars, but he insisted. It was an Irish way of doing things, he assured her, but his brother would call her the day before arriving so she wouldn’t be worrying about when he would show up, and she could use the extra money for her and her husband’s ministry at their little church.

  How could she refuse?

  He had also insisted to Crawl, in the conversation they had when the first details of the plan were put together, that Kieran’s idea of bringing his girlfriend was a bad idea, that Michael would only accept her on two conditions: one, that Crawl was sure Brenna would actually help and not be there just as company to Kieran; and two, that her being part of the plan wouldn’t cut his full share of the three-way split they had originally discussed—no splitting four ways because of Kieran’s girl. If Kieran wanted a
soft body, let him buy one in Santa Fe.

  “It wasn’t Kieran’s idea,” Crawl had reassured him. “It was mine. Brenna’s got a sharp mind, which is always a help. And the aunt will stop for Brenna: sun going down, young girl with car trouble. She won’t stop as easy for one of us, and with this job we take no chances. That’s rule one.”

  The job that took no chances, as Crawl described it, would go like this: “You’re with Brenna,” he said to Michael. “You set up the grab on Monday, when the girl and her aunt are always late getting back home. Not night, but close enough, in a remote enough spot where the aunt won’t be able to pass up a scared young lady with car troubles, and where cell coverage runs out because of how the road cuts below the thick tree line of the mountains right there.”

  Michael agreed. It would be a good setup.

  “When Brenna gets her stopped,” Crawl continued, “you wave a weapon at them, tell them no one gets hurt and all that, but the girl leaves with you. It’s not only simple, it’s safe as a cradle. We don’t try and root her out of the house. Too many chances for hiding places, hidden satellite phones, guns lying around, other stuff we might not know about. The things you have to make sure of are, she doesn’t have a weapon and her car’s out of commission somehow so she has to hobble back to the house, which is close by, and which she’ll do as fast as she can on a bad leg. But Kieran and I will already have been at the house, making sure the doctor understands the rules of the game. He’ll keep the old lady from calling the police or anybody else. We get caught, he gets caught for the cathedral in Italy. Simple as that.”

  Crawl said the doctor wouldn’t risk being caught for the DNA heist for several good reasons. “One, he won’t last in jail. Two, he won’t be around to see his prize baby born; won’t get to take care of his niece and won’t get to play grandpa to his own private Jesus. Three, he’s disgraced on top of everything else. Even if he doesn’t go to jail or he outlives his sentence, his reputation is gone, and you think he doesn’t care about that? Four, the girl is hounded to hell and back by TV people, and they don’t stop comin’ down on her once nine months rolls around. It gets even worse then. And five, he can’t be sure we won’t kill the girl if the job gets screwed up. We know we won’t, but hell, for all he knows, we might have friends who would go after the girl and the kid just to even the score if he puts us all in jail.”

  Michael wondered at the time if so much money was making his head go soft, but it really did seem bulletproof. And he hadn’t seen anything to change his mind since.

  “No,” Crawl said, “he may be crazy, but he’s not crazy enough to let the old lady call the law. That’s why we have to let him know it’s us, and let him know exactly what’s going on, because that’s the only way there’s no police; the way he knows he has no choice but to pay us and get on with his Jesus deal in secret.”

  In the end, they all felt good about it. Even Brenna, who, according to Crawl, would be able to take care of the girl better than himself or Michael or Kieran by a long shot.

  Only the money changed. They were now going to hold out for seven and a half million U.S. dollars, and the three of them were going to split it evenly: two and a half million to Crawl, two and a half million to Michael, and two and a half million to Kieran. Almost two million pounds each, with Brenna dependent on Kieran for whatever he wanted to share with her.

  The one hitch so far had happened on the week before, when Michael’s wife, Sherri, tripped with a laundry basket and tore the cartilage in her right knee. She went into surgery the next day, so Michael had to do the two-day drive back to California and be there with her and his son for a few days, at least.

  While the interruption didn’t make any real difference to any of them, since their schedule could bend from one Monday to the next, it had bothered Michael. Like having a worm all of a sudden living in your brain and wiggling when you didn’t want it to. The worm kept reminding him: things can always go wrong. You can get all the information you need and make all the plans you want, but things can always go wrong.

  Not a good thing to keep popping into mind when you’re on your way to kidnap a teenage girl and hold her for seven and a half million dollars ransom, and you and Crawl and Kieran have histories in a group some people called terrorists.

  He drained his bottle of stout, lowered it to the floor, being careful not to break it on the others that were already there, looked again at the prized photos on his visor and began to sing another song.

  This time, without really thinking about it, he sang a sad one about a girl whose father wanted her to quit seeing the young man she loved, and so she did. But just for a few days. Then the guy got killed just as she was leaving home to find him again. All she had left of him was the old scarf she had borrowed from him in the rain the day she told him about her father, which, as Michael stopped to think about it, hardly seemed worth mentioning, even in a song.

  The deep-woods cottage that Crawl, Kieran and Brenna pulled up to at 3:40 on Sunday afternoon was nearly two hundred yards from Monastery River, and, according to Michael’s directions, exactly forty miles from the home of the doctor.

  “Forty miles,” Kieran said, as they stepped out of the car. “Maybe we should go and take a look at it tonight.”

  “We’ll see it tomorrow, early, just a pass-by to get a feel for the drive,” Crawl said. “When we go back serious, later, we’ll see it inside and out. Tonight, we’ll just make sure we got our act together.”

  Kieran agreed, as he had with every decision since that moment when he had told Crawl he was definitely in. He had been agreeing with Crawl for years before that, he realized suddenly, and he felt not only surprised but unhappy about it. He recalled when they were young and he followed Crawl as he broke into houses they knew would be empty because the obituaries in the papers said the family had a funeral going on someplace far from home. He remembered trying to be another Crawl Connell, a bad-ass paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force.

  All the time, Crawl was just trying to be another Michael, and Michael was just trying to be his father. Was everybody just trying to be somebody else?

  He circled to the back of the car and picked the drinks out of the open trunk. Then he placed his black athletic bag on top of the cooler and walked to the cabin. It was a pine-log two-level A-frame built for genuinely rustic living. A well in a small riverside clearing supplied the water. Butane supplied heat to the stove. A not-quite-erect outhouse stood thirty yards into the woods on the backside of the cabin, opposite the river.

  Inside, there were none of the carved bear statuettes or mounted antlers or framed paintings of leaping fish that invariably showed up in the typical hideaways where laughing men gathered to drink and play cards and trade half-true stories before and after they hunted down some of the area’s wildlife. There were simply a worn couch with a tan waterproof slipcover, two equally worn matching chairs (also with slipcovers) and two round throw rugs of browns and blues and the sandy color of the area’s soil. A circular metal fireplace sat almost in the center of the room, but there was no wood in sight. Three oil lamps were on the floor in the corner nearest the front door. The half-sized butane stove stood beside a small well-water sink against the back wall. An old oak table was covered with poly-urethane and surrounded by six wooden folding chairs. Plastic plates, cups and glasses hid in the cupboard above the sink. Two dull carving knives and four serving spoons were in the small drawer beside it, along with a can and bottle opener.

  On the loft level, five aluminum-tubing cots were lined up in a single row, with no wall or curtains to separate them.

  “This is perfect,” Crawl said with a grin, throwing his blue athletic bag on the floor next to the fireplace and moving around to study the room. “Out of the way. Perfect distance from Dr. Crazy. End of the bloody road, if you call that trail a road. No reason for anybody in the world to drive back here. And look around,” he said, sweeping his hand from left to right, “in the corners, especially—no spider webs.
”

  “That’s always good,” Kieran said, putting his bag down on the table. “What do you think, Bren?” Turning, and with a smile, he said to Crawl, “She hates spiders worse than you do.”

  Brenna put her black bag on one of the folding chairs and ran her palm over her hair, which was pulled back tight into a thick pony-tail held by a bright green hair band. “I hate anything that crawls on my body with more than two legs,” she said. She absentmindedly brushed the dark gray sweater that draped loosely over her worn jeans, checking it for crawling things, then put her hands on her hips and looked around more closely. “Reminds me a little of home,” she said. “Not lush, is it?”

  Kieran sat down, stretched out his legs and opened a bottle of stout. “The air’s sure better,” he said to Brenna.

  Crawl motioned to Brenna to grab him a bottle of stout, since she was near the cooler.

  He and Brenna joined Kieran at the table. “Spiders sneak around, though, like cats,” Crawl said. He took a long drink and let out an equally long, “Ahhh.”

  Kieran said, “Cats don’t tie you up and suck your blood, though, like spiders.”

  Crawl laughed, and Brenna did, too. She checked her sweater again.

  “Why are we sitting in here?” Crawl said. He got up, grabbed his folding chair and headed for the long grass in the clearing that stood between the cottage and riverside woods.

  Kieran and Brenna shrugged to one another and followed, Kieran carrying two chairs so that he could put his feet up.

  He thought again, as he came back in to grab his bottle of stout, about always doing what Crawl said. Even simple things, like going outside to talk. Simple things like saying you want tea when they offer you stout or you want stout when they offer you tea. The game was always on with him; he would move you a little so he could move you a lot.