by Jude Hardin
“Nuclear Emergency Support Team,” he said. “Department of Energy. Have you told anyone about the situation at the Capitol building in Los Angeles?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “The nurse told me I was combative. They had to restrain me. I don’t remember any of that. I guess I could have said a lot of things while I was in that state.”
“We’ll check it out. But to your knowledge, you haven’t told anybody?”
“Correct.”
“We have some papers you need to sign.”
“What papers?”
“It’s imperative that you never, as long as you live, utter a word of your knowledge of the nuclear event in Los Angeles to another living soul.”
“The bombs exploded?”
“No. The Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad got there in time, but it’s still what we call an event. It was a close call.” He told me about Arias and Faza and the safecracker named Fingers.
“Knowledge of such an event could cause widespread panic,” Gray Suit said. “One of our jobs is to prevent that. You’re going to be tempted at some point to tell a friend, or your wife, or someone else who doesn’t have the need to know. You’re going to be tempted to sell the story to a publisher for seven figures. Don’t do it.”
“And what happens if I do tell someone?” I said.
“You don’t want to know.”
Navy Blue snapped open the briefcase and handed me a clipboard with a single sheet of paper on it.
“I need my glasses,” I said.
“Is that them?” He pointed to the bedside table.
I put the reading glasses on and read the short contract. As a matter of national security, blah, blah, blah. He handed me a pen and I signed the paper.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Colt. Hopefully, this will be our first and last meeting. Here’s one of our business cards. Keep it in a safe place. If anyone besides a United States agent tries to communicate with you regarding this matter, or if you need to talk to us for any reason, call the number on the card. We’re available twenty-four-seven.”
He shut the briefcase and Gray Suit followed him out the door. I’d dealt with government agents before, but these two were the strangest ever. It was as if any semblance of personality had been completely erased. I wondered if they had been to one too many nuclear test sites.
A couple of minutes later, Juliet came in alone.
“Where’s Brittney?” I said.
“I sent her downstairs to get a soda. I figured we could use a few minutes to ourselves.”
“OK.”
“When you told me you had been with another woman, my initial reaction was anger. To me, that is the ultimate betrayal. Unforgivable. That’s why I hung up on you, and why I wouldn’t answer when you called back.”
“I understand,” I said. “But like I told you, I wasn’t myself at the time.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around that,” she said. “I find it hard to believe that you—”
“Don’t you trust me, Jules? I didn’t have to tell you about it at all.”
“So why did you? Are you in love with her?”
“Of course not. It meant nothing. I wasn’t myself, and it meant nothing. I told you because I thought I was on my deathbed. It was a dying man’s confession. I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”
“But you’re here, and I’m here, and now we have to deal with it.”
“We need to put it behind us,” I said.
Brittney walked in with two cans of Pepsi and a Mountain Dew. She set all three on the bedside table and popped the tops and handed me the Dew. She knew it was my favorite.
“Thanks,” I said. I took a sip and looked at my broken hand. “Hell, I guess I won’t be able to open my own soda for a while. I guess I won’t be able to do a lot of things for a while.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Brittney said. She smiled and looked at me with those big blue eyes and my heart melted and I knew everything was going to be all right.
I pushed the call button and asked Sharon if she’d gotten the order for the Dilaudid yet.
For the first time in my life, I remembered what The Potato Man had told me in my dream. The writing’s on the wall, he’d said.
Only the wall he was talking about was spelled W-A-H-L.
For whatever reason, Donna had purposely shoved me headfirst into an intricate maze of unimaginable horrors. I was almost sure of it. Maybe Derek and Brother John had threatened her. Maybe she thought betraying me was the only way to save herself. Or maybe I would never know her true motivation. Maybe she would take the secret to her grave. Maybe, but I was counting on that not being the case.
Six weeks after I left Nashville General, I drove to Gainesville and climbed the steps to her front porch and rang the doorbell. The .38 I call Little Bill was holstered on my right hip, hidden by the tails of my Hawaiian shirt. Donna answered the door with a plastic cup in her hand filled with ice and a clear liquid.
“Nicholas. What are you doing here?”
“Just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” I said.
“I’m really kind of busy. Maybe we could—”
“You’re not busy. That’s vodka in your cup, and I can hear the TV blaring. I need to talk to you about what happened at the Capitol Records building. Can I come in?”
She frowned and stepped aside. I walked into the foyer. I followed her to the living room and sat beside her on the faux suede sofa. She grabbed the remote and muted the television.
“What’s with the brace?” she said. She gestured toward my left hand.
“I had a little accident in Tennessee. Have the feds been to see you?”
“What?”
“The federal agents.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do know. But if they haven’t been to see you, then they don’t know you know. You know?”
“Nicholas—”
“Let me tell you something, Donna. I might not be able to prove it in court, but I know you were involved in all this. Somehow, you were involved. Everything was too much of a coincidence for you not to be. The murders at the Lambs’ residence on Thanksgiving Day. Your brother, Derek, being the only officer on duty and responding to the nine-one-one call. Brother John being the same Brother John I’d tangled with at Chain of Light three years ago. The tilted crucifixes. That was the kicker, wasn’t it? You knew about the Leitha Ryan case here in Florida, and you knew those forehead crosscuts would draw me in. But why, why in hell would a stealthy neo-Nazi group like the Harvest Angels want to draw attention to itself by using a calling card like that? That’s what I should have asked myself in the first place. That’s where I fucked up royally. I should have known it was a setup from the get-go. There were no other instances of murders with that MO other than Leitha Ryan. That was all for me, wasn’t it?”
She set her drink on the glass-and-chrome table beside the couch. Her eyes were bloodshot from the alcohol.
“What do you want me to do?” she said. “Give you a nice tidy confession like they do in the movies? Get the fuck out of my house.”
“I know you were involved, and I’m going to do everything I can to see that you’re punished for it.” I glanced at her laptop on the coffee table, and then back to her. “It’s all going to make a very interesting book, isn’t it? How much have you told your agent already?”
She swallowed hard. “Get the fuck out of my house,” she said again.
So I did. I got the fuck out of her house.
Before I left the driveway, I called the number on the card Navy Blue had given me.
Six months and three surgeries after I drove away from Donna Wahl’s house, I sat in the waiting room of a methadone clinic in Jacksonville feeling sorry for myself. My hand worked well enough to screw the top off a jar of peanut butter, but it didn’t work well enough to play the guitar and it never would. I tried to tell myself I was lucky to be alive
, and that in time I would learn to live with the loss and fill the void somehow, but something dear had been taken from me and I couldn’t help feeling a certain amount of rage every time I thought about it.
I couldn’t make money as a musician anymore, and my PI license had been suspended indefinitely pending some criminal charges I faced in Tennessee. I’d been cleared in the deaths of Lester and Earl, but the police had impounded my Ford Focus rental car and had found the two packets of black tar heroin and my slam kit. My attorney said I would get off with probation, no problem, but it was doubtful that I would ever be able to work as a private investigator again. Not legally, anyway.
My professional life was totally fucked up, and my private life wasn’t much better. Juliet and I were in counseling, but she wasn’t ready to stay in the same house with me yet. I was back living in the Airstream at Joe’s Fish Camp.
“Hey, you got a cigarette?”
The girl sitting three seats to my right in the methadone clinic waiting room had long blonde hair and blue eyes. She reminded me of Brittney, only way thinner. Brittney had gotten accepted to the University of Florida. She was in the middle of her first semester, living in one of the freshman dorms with a roommate named Cai. Cai was from China. Brittney helped Cai with English, and Cai helped Brittney with calculus. I was proud of my girl, and I told her so every chance I got.
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “I quit a long time ago.”
“Got a dollar I can borrow? I need to get some diapers for my baby.”
“Where’s your baby?”
“At home with his daddy.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed her a five. I knew it would probably go for a pack of smokes and a pint of beer, but I didn’t care. I knew there was no baby.
“Wow. Thanks. You know, I was just thinking. You don’t look like you belong here.”
“Funny,” I said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“I mean, you just don’t see many junkies your age. No offense or anything, but most hypes either kick young or die young.”
“None of them die young,” I said. “Only the good die young.”
“Hey, isn’t that a song?”
“Yeah.”
The girl at the clinic seemed interested in me for some reason. Maybe I was the only person who had ever given her five bucks without expecting something in return.
“What kind of work do you do?” she said.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said, just to be saying something. I didn’t want to admit I was a bum. “Insurance fraud, cheating spouses, deadbeat dads. Stuff like that.”
“Sounds boring.”
“It is.”
“Is this your first time here?” she said.
“How did you know?”
“Just never seen you around before. You going to do group and all?”
The thought of sitting in a circle trading stories with a bunch of strung-out hypes made my stomach churn.
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said.
“So how did you quit smoking? God, I think that’s even harder than smack. I mean, you don’t get dope-sick or anything, but it’s still hard as shit.”
The lady at the counter called my name. I told the girl I’d see her later.
On the way to the counter, I thought about the last question she asked me, about how I quit smoking. It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it a thousand times, Mark Twain once said. And it was true. I had quit a bunch of times myself. I had used nicotine patches and lozenges and gum, and drugs like Zyban and Chantix. I had tried hypnosis, and I had read every book published on the subject, but the last time I quit, the time that had stuck, I didn’t do any of that. The last time I quit, I went cold turkey. The last time I quit, I walked by a trash can and threw away half a pack and resolved to never buy another as long as I lived. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and four years after the fact I was still dreaming about the damn things sometimes. Once an addict, always an addict. It never leaves you. It’s like getting bitten by a vampire. It’s forever. What you have to do is recognize it for what it is, and then learn to live with it. You can never really defeat it. You can only keep it at bay.
The lady at the counter handed me a pill bottle with my name and social security number on it, and a paper cup half full of water. There was no lid on the pill bottle. It had one pill in it, a small round white tablet. I looked at it and rattled it around in the bottom of the bottle. I was supposed to swallow it while the lady watched. I handed the bottle back to her.
“This is not for me,” I said. I turned and walked away. I didn’t look at the girl I’d given the five dollars to on my way out. I kept my eyes on the exit door.
I drove back to my campsite at Lake Barkley. When I opened the door to get out of my ’96 GMC Jimmy, the sandy-haired dog we call Bud came running up wagging his tail. He had his piece of nylon rope in his mouth. He wanted to play tug-of-war.
“I’m not in the mood, Bud,” I said.
He dropped the rope and barked at me playfully. When I started inside, he nipped at my heels.
“You’re a persistent motherfucker, you know that? Kind of like me, I guess.”
I played tug-of-war with him for a few minutes and then gave him a nice long back scratch and belly rub. I opened the door to the Airstream and let him inside and gave him a Milk Bone. I had one foil packet of black tar heroin in the little cupboard over the sink. One more time, I thought, and that would be it. I sat down at the table with my kit and started to unwrap the foil. Bud sat on the floor and looked up at me curiously.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “One more time’s not going to be enough. It’s never enough. I’ll slam this one, and then I’ll hustle up enough money to get some more. Right?”
He started panting. I took it as a yes.
I got up and walked outside and tossed the packet into the rusty drum I use for burning trash. Bud had followed me out, and he had the piece of rope in his mouth again.
“I gotta go, Bud.”
I wanted to talk to Juliet before I started getting sick. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, and how much I wanted things to be right between us again.
I opened the door and started to climb into the Jimmy. Bud dropped the rope and wagged his tail, obviously hoping I might let him tag along.
“Maybe next time,” I said, scratching his ears. Then I thought what the hell. I opened the passenger’s side door and he jumped in and we drove away.
THE END
Photograph by Pete Helow, 2011
Jude Hardin holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Louisville. His debut thriller, Pocket-47, recently received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Hardin is also one of the authors for the Dead Man series of horror thrillers created by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin. When not pounding away at the computer keyboard, Hardin can be found at home in north Florida pounding on his drums, playing tennis, reading, or fishing in the pond with his son.
