by Chuck Logan
Morgon has changed into his work clothes and is two dusty hours into his stone project when Roger Torres appears in the eastern sky, coming in low over the lake. His new helicopter is, as Kelly predicted, quite a machine, painted red with yellow pin-striping flowing from the ASTECH pyramid logo like flames. Then the pilot flares and brings it down on the lawn a hundred yards from Morgon’s wall.
Roger operates out of El Paso, where he was born into his extended family’s drug business that spanned both sides of the border. By the time he was twenty-two he’d graduated from precocious DEA informant to being a trained counterintelligence operative infiltrating and playing the drug kingpins against each other.
The Feds were so pleased with the access he provides into the cartels that they tolerated his own low-key drug empire. In keeping with the practice of the region, he hatched plans in prosperous El Paso and worked them out on the dark and bloody streets of Juarez.
He invested his profits into ASTECH—American Security Technologies—and got in on the ground floor of the R&D that created the Predator Drone. On the executive-security side, Roger courts an exclusive market, providing bodyguards to the new international mega-rich. If Bill Gates’ father goes for a latte in Davos, the chances are one of Roger’s impeccably dressed, well-mannered thugs is on escort duty.
More germane to this morning’s business, Roger makes stone killers available to the bottom end of black ops deemed too dirty for God-fearing Navy SEALS and Delta commandoes.
All smiles, Rogers gets out of his helicopter and removes his sunglasses. Morgon takes the smile as a positive sign. A husky bullet-headed dude built like a rugby player learning to wear a sports jacket walks at his side. Roger, by contrast, wears a two-hundred-dollar haircut and five-hundred-dollar shoes and a soft gray Kiton suit with his collar open to display the gold chain around his neck. As he approaches, his alert brown eyes assess Morgon and the wall in progress. Then he reaches up and grips him fraternally by both shoulders.
“Morgon, it’s been too long.”
“Almost a year, since Juarez.”
Roger looks up toward the house, where John sits on the front porch with Kelly, who is unstrapping a blood-pressure cuff from his arm. “So how’s His Eminence doing?” he asks.
“Advanced atherosclerosis. So far he’s beating the odds with meds and all . . .”
Roger nods respectfully. “We are all standing in line, my friend. John is just a bit in front of us . . .” Then, switching up the mood, he peruses Morgon’s work clothes and the courses of fitted stone. “Really, Morgon? Is this your idea of being a country gentleman?” He winks. “Dontcha know we have Mexicans do to this sort of thing?”
Encouraged by Roger’s buoyant demeanor—the news is obviously good—Morgon plays along and arches an eyebrow.
Just as playfully Rogers holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I apologize. I understand; you’re evolving. Miss Amanda Rivard has taught you how to use the proper fork and—when the old man passes—she will inherit.” He casts around. “So where is the pretty lady?”
Diplomatically Morgon answers, ”She’s around somewhere.” In fact Amanda has retreated into the house. She finds Roger distasteful and sees him as a dark reminder of Morgon’s profession.
Former profession, he corrects himself. Now I delegate.
Only then does Roger turn to the man next to him, who has stood by polite and patient as a loyal wrecking machine. “Meet Brian Cawker, my current number one. He’ll bring you up to speed while I go up and pay my respects to John.” After the introduction, Roger turns and walks up toward the house.
“Pleased to meet you,” Cawker says, extending a hard, square, callused hand that is also manicured.
Morgon smiles, now certain that if it was bad news, Roger would feel bound by etiquette to deliver it himself. So he can observe the amenities. “Where’d Roger round you up from?” he asks, but he can tell by the man’s nasal drawl.
“Second commando out of Sydney. Six years. Being a spear-carrier got old after a couple turns in the two way rifle range. Met Roger in Baghdad in ’07. And, face it, the money in this game is too good to pass up.”
“So where did we come out on this thing?”
“Done deal. Got a bit too messy for my liking, but it’s done.” He removes a DVD from his jacket pocket. “Recorded this off of NBC4 ten o’clock news, last night in D.C. A spokesman for the Maryland State Patrol went on air with a report that one of the three men killed at the shootout in the Patuxent wildlife area was an FBI informant identified as Joseph Davis. They ran a picture of Davis off a Maine driver’s license. A rather singed driver’s license, I might add. There’s video of the Jacks extracting the body from a still-smoking car wreck. The other two fatalities, the alleged shooters, haven’t been identified. The state patrol suspects drug involvement. That explanation is consistent with the disinformation that was spread about Davis, correct?”
Morgon nods. “That’s right. How messy?”
“The FBI was there in force. As usual, Roger’s boys were long on machismo and short on due diligence. The one who made it out saw the car go up. Musta hit the petrol tank.”
Morgon now measures Cawker’s bluff expression. “So you think it could have been handled better?”
Cawker shrugs. His blue eyes engage Morgon’s steady gaze without blinking. “I keep telling Roger I know some SAS lads I worked with in the Sandbox who have a lighter touch. But Roger has a weakness for these Zeta dudes he came up with down south.”
“It’s Cawker, right,” Morgon reappraises this muscular, no-nonsense man with his head tonsured like a monk’s.
Smoothly, sensing an opening, Cawker nods and then casually lowers his voice a decibel. “There’s a minor detail that popped up during our research.” Pause. Again their eyes meet. “Roger didn’t think it was much, but I decided to run it out.”
“Go on.”
“Someone else was pulling files on Davis, so we tracked him, this senior colonel in Pentagon CID.” Cawker shrugs. “Roger thought it was just some legal loose end from Davis’ prior service. I thought it might be a good idea to get a guy inside and quietly toss the colonel’s office. Check his desk and computer.”
“You have this due-diligence hangup, eh, Cawker?” Morgon chides, revising his opinion of the man upward.
“Can’t hurt. Smelly pot like this.”
“You have a point,” Morgon agrees softly, under his breath. “This thing with Davis is tied to a bullshit op in Iraq we never should have agreed to. Once John would have seen that . . .”
“Kenny Rogers’ theory of executive longevity—gotta know when to fold ’em and walk away.”
“And when to run. John got old. How’s Roger doing in the executive department?”
“Off the record, he’s acquiring a taste for the softer stuff. Executive security and the like,” Cawker says quietly.
“So we’ll keep this little fishing expedition with your CID colonel between you and me,” Morgon says.
Cawker nods and the conspiratorial moment passes because, after taking leave of John, Roger gallantly accepts a tray of frosted bottles of Dos Equis from Martha and carries them down to Morgon and Cawker. Kelly has drifted off to talk to Roger’s pilot. Amanda does not put in an appearance. John stays on the porch, attended by the housekeeper.
After the beer is distributed, Morgon tips his bottle and says, “Sorry about your loss, compadre.”
“They were big boys; they knew the risks. And there’s a lot more where they came from.”
“Any chance they’ll trace them back to you?”
Roger smiles. “Not likely. They had no priors in the States, and their military and criminal records were expunged down south. It’s a time-honored ritual all Mexican clerks understand—silver or lead, eh?”
“Price of doing business,” Morgon says.
“Exactly. So this is the end of the project? As per your request, nothing written down, no insecure electronic communication, and now the repor
t is strictly face-to-face.”
Morgon nods. “And the pilot’s condition is unchanged?”
“Ft. Snelling in Minneapolis has her diagnosed with traumatic amnesia and aphasia. We have a computer overwatch on her chart. My guy scrubs her blood and urine labs so nothing weird turns up. I wouldn’t worry. She’s in for the long haul, and even if she pulls out of it, how much credibility would she have?”
“So that’s it.” Morgon raises his beer.
“Congratulations. John tells me you’ll be managing the jobs from now on. He’s stepping down. Salud y amor sin suegral.” Roger clinks his bottle against Morgon’s. Then for Cawker’s benefit, he translates, “Health and love without a mother-in-law.”
Pleased with his toast, Roger Torres misses the quick eye contact between the two other men.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Three days after they totally take her off the Seroquel, Jesse’s eyes pop open at three in the morning and, trembling, she raises her hand to her face, and it comes away slick and wet. Awakening in slow rolling stages, her tongue tastes the moisture on her lips and determines that it’s not sweat. It’s tears.
In an unjarring way the thought settles in. Sonofagun. I just had an almost-normal dream.
Her face isn’t the only thing that’s damp as she discovers in embarrassed awe that she’s touching herself in places she thought were dead. For a long moment she stretches out and savors the afterglow that hovers in the dark.
An erotic dream, yes, but so very modest.
Tentatively she explores the fading sensations in an attempt to recreate them in the blacked-out hospital room. Memory is a weak sister to the dream itself, and she can only salvage fleeting impressions. A time, a place, a boy, and a single kiss like a tiny, almost forgotten four-leaf clover pressed between the pages of remembrance.
His name was Johnny Merrill, and he’d been two years ahead of her in high school—a dangerously good-looking daredevil who straightened up on the rodeo circuit and then went to work as a roughneck in the oil patch to save up for school. Then 9/11 happened. That spring night in 2002 he was a Marine on leave headed for Afghanistan, and she was eighteen. They’d parked out on the prairie not far from Langdon, and Johnny had barrowed his dad’s “James Dean car,” a classic 1949 Mercury Coupe that he left running with the lights off and the tape deck playing “Someday Soon” by Judy Collins . . .
As a pilot, she’d describe the moon that night at 100 percent illumination, but to an eighteen-year-old girl, it was a moon full of self-dramatic romance, and it illuminated the old Nacoma Radar Pyramid that rose out of the flat like a fantasy temple. So there was youthful magic loose under the big sky and circulating in the heady scent of early blooming alfalfa, and she remembered how the moonlight half-cupped his face and left the other half filled with the close shadow of death, and the fact was she was ready to give it up right there on a blanket spread out on the buffalo grass.
But Johnny, who was half-noble and half scared of her dad, said, “No, let’s wait.” So she didn’t lose her virginity that night, and Johnny didn’t come all the way back from Afghanistan, because he left one of his brown eyes there, along with an arm and both legs. She never had girlish thoughts about a young man ever again.
On the practical side, Jesse deduces that the dream is a positive sign that parts of her brain—and apparently all of her libido—are working just fine, but as to where it came from and what it means, she’s initially confused. Which is not exactly a big deal, because she understands that dreams, along with other little things—like the origin of life and the creation of the universe—are mysteries.
But there are some theories, like she recalls from a psychology course that Freud thought that dreams were symbols of anxiety.
So she gets out of bed and paces her room and speculates how and why this erotic snapshot managed to squeeze up sideways through the roadblocks in her head.
And that’s when she stops and looks at the vague shape of the bouquet of flowers that sits on her night table and was delivered yesterday with a low-key note from her former fiancé, Terry Sherman, announcing he’ll be coming to see her tomorrow, with Janet’s permission. So he sent wildflowers, prairie flowers, that fill the room with the scent of home: rosemary, sage, dusty miller, veronica, and blue delphinium.
That’s Terry for you—a master of the double entendre, always working the angles. The bouquet is a thoughtful and appropriate gesture. But it’s also the kind of posey a girl from North Dakota might hold at her wedding.
She worries her lower lip between her teeth and considers that he’s the second non-family member to come to see her, and she has no difficulty remembering everything about him: how he’s pleasant to look at and charming and an expert at projecting empathy for others.
And how, beneath his social skills, he’s basically all about Terry.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Takes an Apache to catch an Apache.
It has a nice ring, except Mouse left out the part about after they caught Geronimo—how the Chiricahua Apache scouts were shipped to prison in Florida with the rest of the renegades . . .
After clearing the shooting scene, Davis decided to drive south into Virginia and booked a room in a Comfort Inn. He spent most of the night scanning TV and radio for reports of his death. And early in the morning, after checking out, he was driving aimlessly when he heard the confirming broadcast on a D.C. radio station linking the word deceased and his name. Which still left him tooling around in circles, working an edge, and trying to pick a direction.
Mouse must be hitting on all eight psychic cylinders, because in the midst of Davis’ quandary, the cold cell rings—or rather, the whole car rings, because Mouse has paired the phone to Bluetooth. Davis taps the off-hook icon on the steering wheel, and Mouse’s voice fills the interior of the Escape.
“You catch the news?”
“Yeah, WTOP outta D.C. on satellite,” Davis answers.
“Joe Davis, FBI informant deader than shit in the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. And here you thought Appert was an old Elmer Fudd.”
“I was suitably shocked and amazed. But you could have let me know they had it wired.”
“Less is more where communication is concerned in this thing. But they did it up large. Gotta hand it to the Bureau; right or wrong, they’re thorough fellows.”
“Any word on the two Hispanic brethren who went down?”
“Nada. The trail’s as cold as they are. Suffice it to say, they were pros.”
“So what’s your next bright idea? Where am I going?”
“Hayward, Wisconsin.”
“Huh?” Davis’ right foot involuntarily jerks on the accelerator. “What’s in Hayward, Wisconsin?”
“They got a park in town with the biggest muskie in the world.”
“Outstanding. I say again, what the fuck is the big deal about Hayward?”
“Because it’s there—duh. Because I have resources in the area.”
“That why you worked up the new ID?”
“Correct. You’re gonna hide in plain sight while I beat the bushes for a lead on who targeted you. My department runs a retreat house outside Hayward. It’s unbooked for the next month. It’s remote, stocked with goodies, and it’s three hours from the Minneapolis airport. Just clean up after yourself. So drive west, and when you stop tonight, check the laptop; there’ll be a map to guide you in.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, I’m getting one of my hunches . . .”
“Great. Does it involve me getting shot at?”
“Very funny. I’m putting together a capture program to find who’s talking about what happened at Turmar, like everywhere in the whole friggin’ world. Now, ground rules. This phone is secure long’s we don’t talk for more than sixty seconds a pop. You watch yourself, Joey. Gotta go.”
Davis expels a long breath and shifts the road atlas in his right hand and studies the page showing the Eastern United States that looks like an odd, sk
inned animal, a llama maybe, with Florida for a foot, New Brunswick for a head, Michigan on its back, and blue interstate highways for veins.
Okay. You been to Kabul and Ramadi and Fallujah and all over Anbar and made stops in Yemen, the Philippines, Mexico, and Colombia, but Wisconsin is a first.
Interstate 80 looks like the straightest shot, so work up through Maryland and Pennsylvania, hop on it, and head west. Then he thumbs to the state maps and locates Hayward in the upper western section of Wisconsin. Does he really want to hit that rat’s nest of toll roads around Chicago at rush hour tomorrow morning? So stay on 80, bypass Chi-town, and make his turn north on 39.
An hour after he heads northwest, he hits the leading edge of three statewide thunderstorm, so he settles into the road grind and searches the radio channels for suitable sounds to run with. He turns the knob and hits a classical station, Itzhak Perlman playing the theme from Shindler’s List. With a triple-espresso Black Eye for company, he watches the windshield wipers beat against the dreary rain in solemn tempo to Perlman’s strings, and the combination inevitably draws him into a meditation on a girl with golden hair who sits staring at a wall in a government hospital, and as he lights the last of the dead Mexican’s Gauloises, he wonders what she was like . . . before.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The day after Roger Torres’ visit, John’s blood pressure spiked and he complained about severe chest pains. Amanda thought it serious enough to bundle him into the chopper and fly him to the Hurley Medical Center in Flint, the nearest level-one trauma center. Upon his return from intensive care, and over his objections, Amanda confiscated his pipe and tobacco and called in a local carpenter to add a wheelchair ramp next to the porch steps. Then an outfit came in from Traverse City to install a stairway lift to ride him back and forth to his bedroom.
