Crosshairs

by Harry Hunsicker

The last time I had seen Mike Baxter was about ten years ago, at the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Greenville Avenue. He’d been his usual jovial self, a burly, fun-loving guy, laughing, drinking green beer from a plastic cup. He’d told me about his new wife and his new job, selling cars at a Chevy dealership in Garland. Life was good for Mike Baxter. We’d made the usual promises to keep in touch.

  Now only his eyes were the same, a pale blue like the spring sky after a good hard rain.

  The rest of his body belonged to a different person, gaunt as a death camp inmate, skin splotchy and pale. He smiled wanly when I said hello, lifting one skinny arm in a wave. His other limb was tethered to a grove of IV bags.

  “Good to see you, Hank.” He pointed to a chair by his bed. “Have a seat, why don’t you?”

  I sat. Looked at his thin legs underneath the blankets. Figured he couldn’t weigh more than 120 or 130, tops. We were about the same height, six-three or so. I clocked in at an even 200.

  Olson moved to the window and stared out over the parking lot.

  “Mike,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  He raised one eyebrow and looked around the room but didn’t say anything.

  “What’s, uh…wrong?” As I remembered, he was three or four years older than I was, but he looked like he was seventy.

  “Cancer is the latest thing.” Mike closed his eyes. “But it started when we got back. I had migraines like you wouldn’t believe.”

  I nodded. A lot of vets had come back from Iraq and Kuwait with headaches and other symptoms. The docs had given it a name, the so-called Gulf War Syndrome, though the Pentagon and the VA insisted the problem was mental. Any physical issues were an aberration, kind of like the effects of Agent Orange on an earlier generation of American warriors.

  “I need your help,” Mike said.

  I leaned forward in the chair. A stale, metallic odor emanated from his wasted body.

  “My daughter.” He grabbed my hand. “I haven’t seen her since she was in the first grade.”

  “How old would she be now?”

  “Turned twenty-one last month.” He coughed, phlegm rattling deep in lungs. “I-I want to see her before I die.”

  “Here’s the situation.” I nodded slowly. “I’m not doing the PI thing right now.”

  Mike stared at the ceiling. His breathing was shallow and ragged. After a few minutes he looked at me again.

  “You remember January 1991?” he said. “A Monday morning.”

  I didn’t reply. I looked over at Olson, who was studiously ignoring me.

  “The oil field fire?” Mike said.

  “I remember.” I kept my tone even.

  “They’d rigged the wells to blow when we got close.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Mike grabbed an oxygen tube hanging on the railing of his bed and put the apparatus around his head. “The smoke was purple.”

  “It looked like a black cloud from base,” I said.

  “It wasn’t.” He shook his head. “Not if you were there. It was a purple haze.”

  No one spoke for a few minutes. Olson wandered out to the hallway, leaving us alone.

  Mike coughed again. “But you didn’t see it up close, did you?”

  “No.” My voice was a whisper.

  “The smoke was everywhere, like a fog.”

  I got up and walked to the window.

  “You didn’t go that day, remember?” Mike sat up in bed. “I went in your place.”

  I turned back around.

  “Her name is Susan Baxter. I’ve written down her particulars.” He held out a slip of paper. “Find her. Bring her to me.”

  I walked to his bed, took the information, and left.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Professor shot the man in the back of the head. The metallic clank of the slide was the only sound that emanated from the silenced Ruger. He dragged the body behind the Ford Five Hundred, opened the trunk, and saw that the compartment was packed with boxes and blister packs containing capsules.

  Pharmaceutical samples. Giveaway containers of a popular allergy medicine. The man had been a drug rep.

  The Professor shook his head at the irony of it all and wrestled the corpse inside the trunk before shutting it.

  The alley was empty.

  He hurried to the driver’s seat. He had waited a long forty minutes behind the Starbucks on Greenville Avenue for the right person to come along, someone in a late-model car, a professional type traveling alone.

  He’d disposed of the pickup from yesterday, and new transportation wasn’t due to arrive until tomorrow. He could have rented a car using the set of fake credentials he’d been provided, but his employer would know as soon as the credit card data hit the information grid. He could have stolen a parked car, but the theft would have been reported, maybe not for a while, but still an unacceptable risk. Thus, logic dictated the action he took.

  Because he had to get back to Plano and begin the process of finding the second contractor.

  The witness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I found Olson by the nurses’ station, talking on his cell phone, something about a pallet of M1 carbines. He held up one finger, motioning for me to wait.

  I leaned against the wall next to a fire extinguisher and looked at the piece of paper Mike had given me.

  Susan Baxter. Last known address was her mother’s home in Fort Worth. A scribbled note at the bottom that she’d been a sophomore at TCU last year. Finding her would take fifteen minutes using a couple of databases. Getting her to the Dallas VA might be a different matter.

  A moan from a room next door to Mike Baxter’s. I tried not to shudder, envisioning myself as a patient here, dependent on the sometimes-adequate, sometimes-not care of Uncle Sam.

  A small group of people in white lab coats emerged from the room. An Indian male spoke in a thick accent to a woman as he scribbled on a clipboard. They moved in the way doctors do, imperious, trailing subordinates like celebrities with an entourage. The male doctor appeared to be seeking the approval of the woman, glancing at her every few steps as they approached Mike Baxter’s room.

  The group stopped at the entrance to Mike’s room, where my friend lay dying. The woman pulled a beeper from her hip and walked away, dodging the traffic in the hallway. The Indian doctor watched her go. After a few moments, he shrugged and entered the room.

  The woman ended up on the other side of the fire extinguisher from me, a cell phone in one hand, beeper in the other. She was tall, at least six feet in her heeled boots, and attractive, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones under skin the color of coffee ice cream.

  But her eyes were puffy, ringed in dark circles like the eyes of an intern suffering from lack of sleep, out of place with her age, which I put at around forty.

  She snapped her phone shut and turned to me. “Why do men think it’s acceptable to openly stare at a woman?”

  I shrugged. “Beats watching guys die.” Olson was still by the nurses’ station, jabbering on his phone.

  “Why are you here?” She had a faint accent I couldn’t quite place. “You don’t look sick.”

  “I’m visiting someone.”

  “Oh.” She sounded confused, as if the concept were foreign. “Who?”

  “An old army buddy.” I pointed to Mike Baxter’s room.

  “He’s going to die,” she said. “You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know?” I tried not to get angry at her matter-of-fact attitude.

  “Gulf War vet. Cancer complicated by ALS.” She shook her head.

  “Nice talking to you.” I pushed away from the wall with one hand. “You might want to work on the bedside manner, though.”

  “What?”

  I ignored her and walked up to Olson.

  He snapped his phone shut. “Well, did you take the job?” He headed toward the elevator.

  “How could I say no?” I followed him.

  �
��Stop.”

  We both turned around, as did everyone else in the hall. The doctor I’d been talking to stood there, finger pointing at my chest.

  Olson shook his head. “Why do you piss off people everywhere you go?”

  The woman approached. Her dark brown eyes were no longer tired, anger replacing the fatigue. Two burly orderlies stood behind her, arms crossed, doing the tough-guy thing.

  “Do you know who I am?” She stopped a foot away from us. Her face was flushed.

  “Marcus Welby’s love child?” I turned to Olson. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait.” The woman grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t touch me.” I kept my voice low.

  One of the orderlies moved closer. “The doctor’s not done talking to you.”

  “Shouldn’t you be cleaning out a bedpan or something?” Olson’s smile was tight across his face. The orderly took a step back.

  I placed my hand over the woman’s and removed it from my arm.

  “I am trying to help these people,” she said, “and you dare accuse me of being insensitive.”

  “I’m trying to help, too.” I turned and pressed the down button. “One in particular. The guy you said is gonna die.”

  “I…I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” I got on the elevator with Olson.

  The woman opened her mouth, but the doors closed before she could reply.

  Let me guess,” Olson said. “Somebody you used to date? Maybe did the old hump-and-dump on her?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me what he looked like?” I punched the button for the lobby.

  The elevator stopped on the third floor, and he didn’t reply. Two elderly men wheeled themselves on. They smelled like Listerine and hair tonic. On the ground floor, I held the door open as they exited. When they had rolled off I said, “Told you I don’t want to get back in the life.”

  “What are you gonna do, then?” He stopped in the middle of the lobby and put his hand on my shoulder, a stream of invalid soldiers coursing around us. “Tend bar at Hooters? Sell used cars?”

  “Maybe.” I looked at the tile floor.

  “Right.” He walked away, headed to the front door. After a few moments, I followed him outside. The humidity had gotten worse, the sky gray with thunderclouds.

  We stood together at the entrance, looking over the sweep of lawn leading toward Lancaster Street, each blade of grass perfectly manicured courtesy of the American people’s tax dollars.

  “You need to snap out of this, Hank.” Olson pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit it. “Get your act together.”

  “I had it all working before and look what happened,” I said. “How are your headaches these days?”

  “That wasn’t your fault.” He headed down the sidewalk but stopped and turned after a few feet. “You coming with me?”

  “I’ll catch the bus.”

  He raised one eyebrow.

  “Leave me alone, willya?”

  “Suit yourself.” My friend shook his head. “It’s a missing person case, take you a day or so. Quit acting like a bitch.” He walked away.

  I sat down on a bench and stared at a cigarette butt on the ground. Geezers wheeled past. After a few minutes, I became aware of someone standing in front of me.

  “I was talking to you.” The woman from the fifth floor stood there, arms crossed.

  “It’s not been the best of days. Why don’t you leave me alone.”

  “My name is Anita Nazari.” She sat down next to me.

  “Shouldn’t you be doctoring or something?”

  “Your friend told me you are an investigator.” She crossed her legs and stared at the traffic on Lancaster. “A very good one even though you are named for an assassin.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.” I ignored the Lee Harvey reference; that got easier to do with age.

  “He said you can do what others can’t.”

  I stood up and walked down the sidewalk toward the street. The woman followed, the heels of her boots clicking on the concrete.

  “Please stop.”

  I turned around and faced her.

  “I need someone to help me.” Her eyes were filled with tears, the anger gone.

  “I’m not in the helping business anymore.” I could feel the panic coming off her in waves.

  “Please, at least listen to me?”

  I closed my eyes. A trickle of sweat slid down my forehead. I thought about how much I didn’t want to ride the bus. I had nowhere to go anyway.

  “Can you give me a ride?”

  “What?”

  “You can tell me what your problem is while you drive.”

  “Of course.” She nodded once, all businesslike. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Not sure right now.” I headed toward the parking lot. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Professor ignored the blare of the rap music coming from the open windows of the Lincoln Navigator stopped next to him at the light. He did not return the stares of the two young African American males sitting low in the seats of the luxury SUV.

  He kept his eyes straight ahead, hands gripped on the steering wheel of the stolen Ford Five Hundred, trying to convey the image of a scared, midlevel, middle-aged managerial type who had taken a wrong turn. He’d spent the last ten minutes looking for a tail—”dry cleaning,” the Agency spooks used to call it. Driving in random loops, alternating his speed, making sudden turns, standard automobile protocol designed to reveal if anyone was following. His trip to the cleaners had been successful; no one was tailing him.

  The light changed.

  The Lincoln didn’t move.

  The Professor accelerated slowly and headed south on Parry Avenue. A few seconds later, the Navigator pulled away from the intersection and slid in behind him.

  He shook his head and wished that the young men in the SUV would not follow. They weren’t professionals, most probably just bored youths looking for someone to mess with, and he didn’t want to hurt them. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. He just wanted to do his job and be left alone.

  He was on the northern fringes of the Fair Park area, a pie-shaped wedge of clapboard houses and weed-infested lots a few miles east of downtown Dallas, the area named for the Art Deco-styled fairgrounds to his left, according to his research.

  An operative in a strange city always has two places from which to work. A main base, in this instance the rented duplex in the bohemian yet still middle-class neighborhood near Greenville Avenue.

  And a safe house.

  A smart operative doesn’t tell his employer about the second site, the backup location, in case something goes wrong or carefully arranged plans suddenly become fluid for whatever reason. Even though his employer had no reason to doubt that he would follow her orders, nor the Opposition any reason to be aware of his presence, the Professor had learned over the years to trust his instincts.

  Right now, his instincts told him to avoid his main base for the time being.

  The Professor’s safe house was a rented room above a bar a few blocks from the Texas state fairgrounds. The immediate area was full of rusting warehouses and machine shops sitting next to tattoo parlors and taverns favored by edgy young people looking for an urban experience in a quintessential suburban city.

  This section of Dallas was also where the black and white populations came together, sort of a no-man’s-land offering unique opportunities to remain out of sight while hidden in plain view.

  He turned right on Exposition Avenue, a street lined with ancient brick buildings, some faded and battered like a forgotten old uncle, others glossy with fresh paint that did little to hide the true age and condition of the underlying structure.

  The Navigator and its thumping bass passed him as he parked in an empty spot on the street. A building, which apparently had been newly renovated into loft apartments, was to his right. It didn’t look very apartmentlike or inviting, with the steel roll-up door b
locking the garage entrance and the razor wire topping the brick wall.

  The Professor turned off the ignition and looked at the snapshot taped to the dashboard. The picture had been taken at a restaurant: a man and a woman in their midthirties and two young girls, maybe five or six years old.

  Twins, he surmised from their near-identical resemblance as well as the pair of packages covered in pink birthday wrapping in the backseat addressed to Holly and Hailey.

  In a moment of uncharacteristic indulgence, he allowed himself to feel a vague sense of distaste at the bottom of his stomach, a few milliliters of compassion or grief for the family fabric he had ripped to shreds because of circumstances beyond his control.

  The Professor slipped a finger under his sunglasses and wiped his cheeks before ripping the picture from the dashboard, his eyes watery, probably the formaldehyde seeping from the interior material of the newish car. He stepped outside and tossed the photo into the gutter.

  The Navigator drove by again, going the opposite direction. Both young men stared at him with flat eyes that swiveled in their sockets as their heads stayed forward.

  He ignored them and jogged across the greasy asphalt of Exposition Avenue.

  The bar occupied the ground floor of a three-story building. A rusted fire escape ran along the side of the structure, the stairs ending a dozen feet above the parking lot of a transmission shop.

  He pushed open the door and let the peculiar odor from a combination of alcohol, stale smoke, and commercial disinfectant wash over him. He tried not to cough.

  The drinking establishment was one big room. Mismatched furniture, darkened wood floors, signs advertising obscure central European ales dotting bone-colored walls. The ceiling was older than the women’s suffrage movement, made from hammered tin grimy with dirt.

  It was near midday, and the only person in the room was a woman by the cash register wearing a black T-shirt with ANARCHY emblazoned in red across the front. Her skin was albino white.

  “Hey,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  A retro-style Wurlitzer jukebox sitting by the mahogany bar clicked on and a Buck Owens song began to play.

  “A beer would be nice.” The Professor didn’t drink alcohol but sat down on a stool anyway. Bartenders knew the comings and goings in a neighborhood. A few moments of conversation might be beneficial.