Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  Redmond didn’t care to let the deputy know about his ignorance, so he smiled. “That’s something, huh? Having someone like that living in the area.”

  Jacy nodded his head. “Yeah, sure, but the general doesn’t get into the area much. Lets us know when he does. His wife hates the beach. She’s a real hoity-toity number, if you know what I mean. Her kaka don’t smell. Jeez, she don’t even go out on the beach to walk, just to the house and the country club, like there ain’t nothing else around here that’s good enough for her. But not the general. He’s a great guy. Friendly. You’d never know he was the head of NSA.”

  “Bishop Lee,” stated Gower, comprehending the situation. The Director of the National Security Agency. Lieutenant General Bishop A. Lee, United States Army, reputedly a man with icy acumen, with his hand in a great deal of intelligence pies. He was also a man who held the reins of Washington, D.C., behind the scenes and not a name that was typically in the newspapers, nor on Sixty Minutes. “And Fitch Lee is his son.”

  “Yeah, sure,” agreed Jacy. “Kid’s a real pisser. The trouble he gets into, you should hear what he did over in Salem, of course, he never murdered anyone before. I mean, you think he’s responsible for the security guard and the other guy, right? After all, how could a little girl like that break somebody’s...”

  Gower interrupted, “There is something we need.” He was running down statistics in his mind. Theodora wasn’t stupid, but she was on the run. She had to know that he would check Lee’s house first. She also knew that anywhere she’d lived or worked would be second. In the past, she’d never made that kind of mistake before. She had called previous employers, however, to see how hot she was, to see what kind of trail she’d left. She’d been clever about that, using cloned cellular phones that checked out to be belonging to dentists or stockbrokers or even dockworkers. But she didn’t do it often, he could count the times on one hand, and she’d always been so careful. She never hinted where she’d gone or where she was planning on going. She never called where sound could be heard in the background. She never stayed on the phone longer than a minute. Devious, composed, intelligent.

  Counting on her being scared, Gower deduced that the whale watching business would be her destination. Getting on a ship that was accessible would be easier for her. She’d had several months experience on the vessels in question, and the ship could go a hundred miles or more before she would have to come to ground. And when she tried to board that ship, he wanted to be there. But he needed Redmond to cover the Lee place, and as long as they had a deputy who knew exactly where to go, they might as well use him to their benefit.

  “You go with the deputy, Redmond. Check out the Lee home. I don’t think she would have taken him there, but we can’t take the chance that she hasn’t.”

  Jacy started to balk. “Sheriff said to take care of the scene until he...”

  “I was told that the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department would be fully cooperative with the Bureau,” said Gower coldly.

  Jacy swallowed convulsively. “Well, of course we will.” He couldn’t, for the life of him, think of what else to say to a man like this Fed. “I’ll take him out there. We’ll call Sheriff Bird on the way.”

  •

  Redmond watched Gower leave and went with the deputy to his cruiser. The deputy wanted to talk but Redmond was having none of it. When he was asked, “What’s the FBI’s interest in all of this?” he answered curtly, “I think you know the answer to that, Deputy.”

  They reached the Lee home some thirty minutes later, traveling on a two-lane road that twisted and curved and with the deputy muttering in response to Redmond’s complaints about timeliness, “There ain’t no other way out to the place. It sits right on the damned ocean.”

  The gate was closed and the lights were on, but Jacy murmured that this was always the case. The younger man started to press the call button at the side of the gate but Redmond stopped him. “If they’re inside you’re just alerting them to our presence.”

  “Sure, yeah, right,” said Jacy, yanking his hand away from the button. “But how’re we getting inside, then?” The large, ornamental gate was beautifully constructed of wrought iron, but it was more than decorative. It would take a tank to mow it down and the stone walls went up some twelve feet on each side. “I don’t feel like mountain climbing tonight, there, Agent. Say, what’d you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” said Redmond and removed a special tool from inside his coat. It resembled a Leatherman Tool. However, this wasn’t a standard tool. It had been made especially for black operations and Redmond kept it with him religiously. He popped open the electrical box of the gate within sixty seconds, which had stupidly been left on this side of the fence, with only steel rivets protecting its components. Then he pulled out some of the wiring and got to work. Three minutes later the gate opened with a creaking noise.

  “Jeez, that’s like watching a crook hot-wire a car. Damn, you opened that like you do it every day of the week,” said Jacy.

  “The security system is still connected,” Redmond said. “Try not to trip it. If they’re inside they’ll know we’re here, if you do that. That means you don’t open doors or windows, unless I tell you to do just that.”

  They drove the cruiser down the curving driveway, almost up to the house, leaving the lights off. At the direction of the federal officer, Jacy stopped the vehicle about fifty feet away, just behind a mound of vegetation and trees that blocked the view from the house.

  Redmond exited the vehicle and started putting together his gun. It wasn’t a Glock. Jacy watched fascinatedly, mentally comparing it to his own Beretta. The Fed checked the clip, turned on a laser sight so the red beam of light bounced on the ground before them, and tersely ordered the deputy to stay in the front.

  Jacy shrugged, sure that some kind of mistake had been made. He knew the general’s kid, Fitch. He was a fuck-up, all right. But he didn’t rob, he didn’t steal, and he certainly didn’t murder anyone in the basement of the hospital. And if that was true then a little girl who had gone over the bay bridge at Sullivan’s Bay to save a little kid, wasn’t behaving to type if she did the dirties herself. She certainly didn’t break the other vic’s neck with her tiny hands. But hey, these are fibbies, and they gotta know something I don’t. Besides, why come back here, anyway. They gotta know it’s the first place to check. Maybe they’re counting on us being late.

  As the agent went around the side of the house, Jacy withdrew a pack of Marlboros and extracted a cigarette. He’d been dying all day long for a smoke, and the sheriff didn’t want the troops smoking in the cruisers. He took a few steps to get out of the wind and found himself on the opposite side of the house, where the front door was located. With a little sigh he cupped his hand over his Bic lighter and lit the cigarette, taking a much-awaited drag of pure tobacco flavor. When it hit his bloodstream he sighed with sheer enjoyment and only then, saw that another vehicle was parked along the front of the building.

  Jacy took another puff and threw the cigarette away, flicking it with his thumb and index finger. It was almost a certainty that the Fed had seen the vehicle as he passed by this way on his way into the house. Jacy withdrew his service pistol, and followed in the tracks of the agent. His judgment was that the agent had surmised that the pair was not in the house and that he didn’t need the deputy to back him up. But that situation changed dramatically with the telling presence of the rusting Jeep.

  The lights on the exterior of the huge beach house went out, cut out like someone had turned a switch, and Jacy speculated that the Fed was responsible. He had gotten them through the gate like a warm knife cutting through butter and the naive young deputy didn’t doubt that he did pretty much the same thing with the house’s security systems. As he raised his head, he could see figures moving around upstairs. The huge window on the second floor was some kind of bedroom, he knew. He’d been in the house on a security check about two years before, going through it with one of t
he private security. As it turned out it was a faulty wire in the system, causing false alarms. Then he saw the Fed’s laser targeting pointer that indicated that he was upstairs. It flickered back and forth for a few seconds and then disappeared as it lined up on a potential target.

  Jacy was indecisive. On one hand he wanted to rush in and back up the agent because that was what police officers did. It was why they showed up in groups and tended to go in pairs whenever possible. It was why they called for back-up. On the other hand he didn’t want that scary bastard to shoot him by mistake. He had told Jacy to stay down here. And since his vest gave him such a heat rash he didn’t wear it all the time. He waffled for about ten seconds between decisions and he was in a perfect position to see the rapid muzzle flashes and to hear the low thumps that came from a weapon being fired. If he hadn’t seen the lightning-like flashes of lights he didn’t think he would have thought it was gunfire.

  The decision had been taken out of his hands.

  •

  While she was rising up from the bed, Teddy saw a laser point of light flicker across the room. For an instant she didn’t know what it was. It was simply a light bouncing and dancing through the dim bedroom. It only competed deferentially with refractive light from the hallway that illuminated the contours of the area. She watched it like she was watching a doctor with a penlight, shining his light into her eyes, moving it back and forth while her head stayed still, checking her for concussion, seeing if all of her facilities were intact. As her eyes followed the light, her mouth was dry and there was a lump in her throat.

  Then abruptly she knew what it was, why it was here, and what it was going to do. It didn’t come from outside the window as she first thought but from somewhere outside the room, in the hall, inside the house. Teddy couldn’t bring herself to look away as it traveled from place to place, seeking, searching, determined to find what it sought.

  The tiny dot of light settled on the young man’s head, making the rest of his features seemingly pink from the diffusing illumination, and Teddy saw the red point stop there, going for the head shot, the killing shot. The no-hesitation, he’s-going-down-for-the-count-shot, the no-witnesses shot. She raised up the Glock in both hands, the way she had been taught by Justo Silvestre in Ciudad Juarez, and steadied her grip. She aimed quickly, without vacillation, as if she had done this very thing a thousand times.

  Fitch had turned toward her and was speaking, his hands placatingly out at his side.

  He was saying something to Teddy, and she couldn’t quite get it because the gun had already gone up, hunting out her own target. The blood was roaring in her ears again, obscuring everything else. There wasn’t time to listen to him, only time to whisper what she’d been thinking, “I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry.”

  The young man’s mouth dropped open as he saw what she was doing and she could tell by the alacritous look in his golden eyes that he knew she was going to kill him. All in a moment the thoughts rampaged through his mind: A mistake. She’s crazy. What the hell did I do? Why kill me? Oh, Christ... And in the mirror that he faced, a full-length mirror on a bedroom vanity beside the bed, he saw what she was seeing and he sought comprehension. What the hell is that on my face? His hand twitched for a moment, as if he could bring it up and wipe the spastic dot of red light from his face. Then he saw the source of the dot, the man who was a silhouette in the doorway, with a crooked smile on his face, a patch of white teeth in a darkened shape.

  Teddy fired the Glock. She was surprised at the recoil. She fired and before she could take her finger off the trigger, half the clip was gone, a roar and din of sound that overwhelmed everything but its own. The gun was set in the fully auto option. The ratchet of the bolt was thunderingly loud. The first shot was muffled like a pistol held into a pillow. Each progressive shot became louder and Teddy flinched with each one.

  When the noise stopped she realized that she had shut her eyes, an amazingly stupid thing to do. Teddy opened them and saw she had hit her target, right in the center of mass, right through the door that had blocked her from the view of the man with the laser-sighted weapon. She had done exactly what she had intended to do. She couldn’t tell about the shot grouping, but the objective had been met. The man who had taught her how to shoot a pistol would have been proud if he could have seen her accomplishment.

  The corpse lay half inside the door, falling there immediately after she’d shot him, one hand stretching out, the other under his body. His dead eyes stared up at her.

  “He’s dead,” said Fitch, astonished. “Holy shit. Is he really dead?” He had raised a hand over his head in helpless self-protection, and was slowly lowering the same arm.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” declared Teddy, but her voice choked, belying the fierce words. The other man had had another type of weapon with a laser sight on the end, something that clearly showed where the bullet was going to go, once shot. The large handgun lay just beside his outstretched hand where it had fallen. Blood started to flow down his arm and touched the weapon with crimson tendrils. A SIG-Sauer with a Night Stalker, a laser sight that attaches to the front of the gun. It was a pitiless weapon, a nine-millimeter introduced in the seventies with nine rounds that went into its magazine. Not as deadly as the Glock, but to some men, a remorseless favorite. She knew what it was but she had never fired one with a laser sight before.

  The young man she’d kidnapped was staring at the dead man. Her own eyes went to the corpse, and for a rational moment she gauged the man she’d shot. Black hair and suit. Once a compact man with an intense look, even on his inanimate face. This was the same man who had been chasing her outside the hospital. For a moment, neither one of them said anything.

  Fitch couldn’t even think for a longer moment. He’d looked outside the window and seen a silent vehicle with their lights dimmed moving up the driveway. Something that disappeared behind the mounds of brush and vegetation that the road wound through. A dark shadow moved through marginally dimmer shadows. The outside lights had been disabled, leaving blackness. They must have pried the gates open. He’d reset the elaborate security measures, after coming inside with Teddy. So why didn’t the alarm systems go off?

  •

  Without hesitation, Jacy took his handheld radio set and alerted the county of the deteriorated situation. Then he rushed the door and kicked it open. Then the alarm systems commenced their static peal that indicated the perimeters had been breached.

  Chapter Ten

  August 15th

  Excerpt from Boudraux’s Big Book of Birding for Beginners, written by Boudraux Gille, Smith and Sons Publishing, 1987, pg. 98: The Cliff Swallow, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota, is a captivating example of how the age of industry has affected Mother Nature. Once these birds would have nested exclusively on the leeward side of cliffs inspiring their name, but now these animals tend to create their gourd-shaped nests on bridges, buildings, dams, culverts, and other constructions that appeal to the bird’s instinctual habits, structures which are now more convenient and accessible to them as a species. The swallow constructs their nests out of mud pellets carried in their mouths to their chosen site. The male begins the building of the nest by adhering a shelf to the vertical surface, often protected by an overhang, defying the laws of gravity, the elements, and other swallows. Then the mated pair of swallows builds up the sides of the nest, bringing them together to form a roof, leaving a small hole at the bottom of the nest for entry and exiting...

  Fitch pulled himself together long before his kidnaper did. The security system went off with a deafening peal of whistling bells, and he moved deliberately and quickly toward the door of the bedroom. He didn’t seem like he was running, but merely striding away, intent on traveling from the room. He was leaving and no one would stop him.

  Teddy watched with numb detachment. She truly thought the young man was going to run. Considering that she had just shot a man more than five or six times in the chest with a Glock, right in front of him, she would have run,
too. And it wasn’t like she was going to shoot him. He didn’t have a laser-sighted SIG-Sauer aimed at her forehead, going for the exploding-cantaloupe shot. For some reason she couldn’t bring herself to care. She supposed he could reach down and scoop up the gun the black-haired man had dropped, but then hadn’t she brought him into this, and she didn’t even know his name, much less could she blame him?

  The young man with his sun-streaked hair turned his head to look at her as he moved toward the door, but Teddy dropped the barrel of the weapon, so that it didn’t threaten anyone, much less him. He paused for a moment and then carefully rolled the dead man so that he was outside the door, using his hands to guide the body. Then he slammed the door, with himself on the inside of the room with her.

  Teddy watched in disbelief. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Fitch snagged a chair from beside the vanity and tucked it under the doorknob. The door was going to have to be kicked in. Since it was solid oak, he thought that maybe would slow down whoever had just entered the house via some method that had set off the alarms. Finally. Dad is going to have to hear about poor security. Man, oh, man, is he going to be pissed. And Edana isn’t going to like the bloodstains in the carpet. “I’m blocking the door,” he stated, patiently. “What does it look like? I’m doing Swan Lake with the Bolshoi Ballet?”

  “That’s a Thomas Chippendale chair,” she protested.

  “Huh,” said Fitch, looking at the chair. “After they kick down the door, it’s going to be high end kindling.” He paused, hearing movement outside the room. “We don’t have a lot of time, here. Come on.” He moved toward the bathroom, leaving the SIG-Sauer on the floor, and then turned back to her. “Wake up, Teddy. It’s time to leave.”