Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  He had been of a mind to hide the detective’s body inside the closet, but the building’s supervisor was already in there, and the air was going off fast.

  Mister Ridge remembered: There had been an argument in Rayne’s room; we’d made Frobisher unlock it the day after she’d disappeared.

  She hadn’t been in there.

  Frobisher hadn’t liked being told what to do. And he’d said some things about Rayne that would have been better off staying inside his head. He’d said he’d have liked to have gotten his hands all over her. He’d said specifically where.

  Mister Ridge remembered my brother and me at his neck. We had just about broken it. We had then dragged his body out of Rayne’s room and up to our floor; Carnaby’s secret closet had been the perfect hiding place for it.

  I gathered up some more of the sweet syrup for Mister Ridge and put it into my pocket.

  Two bodies inside the closet would smell it up even worse; they’d smell it down in the street. We put the wall panel back into place. There was a furnace down in the basement, which was an even better idea.

  It was daybreak; no one was awake in the building. We dragged the detective out of the room (Mister Ridge noticed the faint scuff marks his heels left behind). We dragged the body down the stairs and, on the way down, Mister Ridge began to remember that we had gone this way before.

  He thought of Rayne.

  It was the most logical thing to do to get rid of a body. Burn it. Why store it in a closet, when you could simply drag it down to the furnace and burn it from existence?

  Mister Ridge’s head throbbed: Why had we strangled her?

  We dragged the detective across the concrete of the basement and up to the boiler, and I opened the metal, soot-black furnace door.

  There was already a body inside. The smell of it was overpowering.

  It wasn’t Rayne.

  It was Carnaby.

  He and his nicotine-stained fingers had been in there for more than a week. Unburnt. Mister Ridge remembered that we had needed to buy some accelerant. He remembered there had been an argument with Carnaby about the sweet syrup and its price.

  The cops hadn’t looked in the furnace. They’d come down to the basement, found Frobisher’s photographic equipment and proof sheets of pretty little things and had quit. Anyway, they’d been looking for the man’s drugs, not his corpse. Or the corpse of a pretty little thing that could hold a note.

  Mister Ridge turned away. He slumped to the floor next to the dead detective and his brain burned.

  Why had we strangled her?

  What had we done with her body?

  Mister Ridge cried.

  I didn’t know the answers, either. The sweet syrup messes with the clock and the memory of us all.

  My brother reached into his pocket and brought out the needle and other tools. I reached into mine.

  We did the thing. We all loved the thing.

  None of us wanted to think about what might have happened to Rayne, the sweetest girl we had ever known. A girl we’d have given our life for.

  Why her?

  Mister Ridge took the hit.

  He was as far down as he could go.

  He lay on the cold concrete floor of the basement and dreamed of our angel.

  But he didn’t hear her singing. Instead, he heard a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack. And then old man Norwood telling his cat to get off the sofa. The sounds were faint, but distinguishable. They were from a room two floors above; traveling down through the plumbing, down through the guts of the building.

  The pipes!

  Mister Ridge sat up.

  Dreams didn’t sing wrong notes.

  We helped him climb to his feet. Raw instinct took him up the stairs, all the way up to the fifth floor, and I knocked on the woodpecker’s studio door.

  There was no answer. It was locked. My brother punched it open, and we went inside.

  There was no one in the studio.

  We went through into the adjoining room. There was no one there either; there wasn’t even a bed, just a table and chairs. Where did the woodpecker sleep?

  My brother gripped me. He was as desperate as I was. We could feel Mister Ridge’s blood pumping.

  The daybreak sun struck strong through the windows and cast streaks of yellow through the rooms.

  For a moment, all was still.

  Silent.

  And then the voice of the angel…“Summertime.”

  It wasn’t a dream. Rayne was singing, and she was somewhere on that floor. Mister Ridge walked about the two rooms, trying to work out where.

  He quickly determined her voice was coming from above. And supposedly only the roof was above floor five, but it didn’t sound at all like she was up there, outside. She sounded as though she was inside the building.

  The sunflower.

  There was no closet in the woodpecker’s studio. There was just a wall: green wallpaper and the sunflower. My brother and I found the grooves. It was the same score as down in Carnaby’s room: a wallpapered wooden panel on hinges. My brother and I pried it open, and Rayne’s voice became louder. Inside the closet lay a narrow staircase that went up to another floor.

  Mister Ridge climbed the stairs.

  The next floor up was a world of wood; a nonexistent floor between floor five and the roof. The windows were a series of slots of stained glass, architectural flourishes at the top of the building. They let in daylight and, caught in the shafts of the morning yellow, stood the angel. She was dressed in her red dress and red heels. Singing “Summertime.” And it was. And she was dirty, and her dress was dirty. And she was in a cage, a large wooden cage built into the room, floor, attic, or whatever the architect had labeled the place. And the woodpecker lay asleep in his bed in front of it, dreaming a contented sleep as his songbird greeted the new day, caught and kept in his perfect wooden frame.

  Rayne saw us. Her dirty hands gripped the wood of the cage’s bars. The wrong notes had been on purpose. She’d hoped we’d hear. She’d been waiting.

  We woke the woodpecker.

  We made him unlock the padlock keeping Rayne captive.

  She stepped out.

  There were no words; just two musicians and the unspoken knowing of where the song was going.

  Rayne’s hands tore strips from her dress, and she gagged the woodpecker. My brother and I led him into his cage, and we nailed his hands to the floor. He didn’t like that.

  We put the padlock back in place.

  We put the sunflower back on the wall.

  We left the building.

  Rayne was free; she was back on the wind. She flew from the city, and we flew with her.

  Security

  JEFFERY DEAVER

  I

  March 13

  “The meeting’s finished?”

  “It is,” Bil Sheering said into his mobile. He was sitting in his rental car, your basic Ford, though with a variation: He’d fried out the GPS so he couldn’t be tracked.

  “And you’re happy with the pro?”

  “I am,” Bil said. The man on the other end of the line was Victor Brown, but there was no way in hell either of these two would utter their names aloud, despite the encryption. “We talked for close to a half hour. We’re good.”

  “The payment terms acceptable?”

  “Hundred thousand now, one-fifty when it’s done. Hold on.”

  A customer walked out of Earl’s and headed to a dinged and dusty pickup, not glancing Bil’s way. The Silverado fired up and scattered gravel as it bounded onto the highway.

  Another scan of the parking lot, crowded with trucks and cars but empty of people. The club, billed as an “exotic dance emporium,” had been a good choice for the meeting. The client
ele tended to focus on the stage, not on serious, furtive discussions going on in a booth in the back.

  Another customer left, though he, too, turned away from Bil and vanished into the shadows.

  Bil, of medium build, was in his forties, with trim brown hair and a tanned complexion from hunting and fishing, mostly in a down-and-dirty part of West Virginia. “Bil” had nothing to do with “William.” It was a nickname that originated from where he was stationed in the service, near Biloxi, Mississippi. The moniker was only a problem when he wrote it down, “B-I-L,” and people wondered where the other L went.

  “Just checking the lot,” Bil said. “Clear now.”

  Victor: “So, the pro’s on board. That was the most important thing. What’re the next steps?”

  “The occurrence will be on May six. That’s two months for training, picking the equipment. A vehicle that’ll be helpful. Lotta homework.”

  They were deep into euphemism. What “equipment” meant was rifle and ammunition. What “vehicle” meant was a car that would be impossible to trace. And “occurrence” was a laughably tame name for what would happen on that date.

  There was silence for a moment. Victor broke it by asking, “You are having doubts?” A moment later the man’s slick voice continued, “You can back out, you want. But we take it a few steps further, we can’t.”

  But Bil hadn’t been hesitating because of concerns; he’d just been scanning the parking lot for prying eyes again. All was good. He said firmly, “No doubts at all.”

  Victor muttered, “I’m just saying we’re looking at a lotta shit and a really big fan.”

  “This is what I do, my friend. The plan stands. We take this son of a bitch out.”

  “Good, glad you feel that way. Just exercise extreme caution.”

  Bil hardly needed the warning; extreme caution was pretty much the order of the day when the son of a bitch you were being paid to take out was a candidate for president of the United States.

  II

  May 6

  The Gun Shack was on Route 57, just outside Haleyville.

  The owner of the well-worn establishment was a big man, tall and ruddy, plump with fat rolls, and he wore a .45 Glock 30 on his hip. He’d never been robbed, not in twenty-one years, but he was fully prepared—and half hoping—for the attempt.

  Now, at 9:10 A.M., the shop was empty and the owner was having a second breakfast of coffee and a bear claw, enjoying the almond flavor almost as much as he enjoyed the aroma of Hoppe’s Gun Cleaner and Pledge polish from the rifle stocks. He grabbed the remote and clicked on ESPN. Later in the day, when customers were present, hunting shows would be on. Which, he believed, goaded them into buying more ammunition than they ordinarily would have.

  The door opened, setting off a chime, and the owner looked up to see a man enter. He checked to see if the fellow was armed—no open carry was allowed in the store, and concealed weapons had to stay concealed. But it was clear the guy wasn’t carrying.

  The man wasn’t big, but his shaved head, bushy moustache—in a horseshoe shape, out of the Vietnam War era—and emotionless face made the owner wary. He wore camouflaged hunting gear—green and black—which was odd since no game was in season at the moment.

  The man looked around and then walked slowly to the counter behind which the owner stood. Unlike most patrons, he ignored the well-lit display case of dozens of beckoning sinister and shiny handguns. There wasn’t a man in the world that came in here who didn’t glance down with interest and admiration at a collection of firepower like this. Say a few words about the Sig, ask about the Desert Eagle.

  Not this guy.

  The owner’s hand dropped to his side, where his pistol was.

  The customer’s eyes dropped, too. Fast. He’d noted the gesture and wasn’t the least bit intimidated. He looked back at the owner, who looked away, angry with himself for doing so.

  “I called yesterday. You have Lapua rounds.” An eerie monotone.

  The owner hadn’t taken the call. Maybe it’d been Stony.

  “Yeah, we’ve got ’em.”

  “I’ll take two boxes of twenty. Three-three-eights.”

  Hm. Big sale for ammo. They were expensive, top of the line. The owner walked to the far end of the shelves and retrieved the heavy boxes. The .338 Lapua rounds weren’t the largest caliber rifle bullets, but they were among the most powerful. The load of powder in the long casing could propel the slug accurately for a mile. People shooting rifles loaded with Lapuas for the first time were often unprepared for the punishing recoil and sometimes ended up with a “scope eye” bruise on their foreheads from the telescopic sight, a rite of passage among young soldiers.

  Hunters tended not to shoot Lapuas—because they would blow most game to pieces. The highest-level competitive marksmen might fire them. But the main use was military; Lapua rounds were the bullet of choice for snipers. The owner believed the longest recorded sniper kill in history—more than a mile and a half—had been with a Lapua.

  As he rang up the purchase the owner asked, “What’s your rifle?” Lapuas are a type of bullet; they can be fired from a number of rifles.

  “Couple different,” he said.

  “You compete?”

  The man didn’t answer. He looked at the register screen and handed over a prepaid debit card, the kind you buy at Walmart or Target.

  The owner rang up the sale and handed the card back. “I never fired one. Hell of a kick, I hear.”

  Without a word, the sullen man grabbed his purchase and walked out.

  Well, good day to you, too, buddy. The owner looked after the customer, who turned to the right outside the store, disappearing into the parking lot.

  Funny, the owner thought. Why hadn’t he parked in front of the gun shop, where seven empty spaces beckoned? There’d be no reason to park to the right, in front of Ames Drugs, which’d closed two years ago.

  Odd duck…

  But then he forgot about the guy, noting that a rerun of a recent Brewers game was on the dusty TV. He waddled to a stool, sat down, and chewed more of the pastry as he silently cheered a team that he knew was going to lose, five to zip, in an hour and a half.

  * * *

  —

  Secret Service Special Agent Art Tomson eyed the entrance to the Pittstown Convention Center.

  He stood, in his typical ramrod posture, beside his black Suburban SUV and scanned the expansive entryway of the massive building, which had been constructed in the 1980s. The trim man, of pale skin, wore a gray suit and white shirt with a dark blue tie (which looked normal, but the portion behind the collar was cut in half and sewn together with a single piece of thread, so that if an attacker grabbed it in a fight, the tie would break away).

  Tomson took in the structure once more. It had been swept earlier and only authorized personnel were present, but the place was so huge and featured so many entrances that it would be a security challenge throughout the nine and a half hours Searcher would be at the center for the press conference and rally. You could never scan a National Special Security Event too much.

  Adding to the challenge was the matter that Searcher—former governor Paul Ebbett—was a minor candidate at this point, so the personal protection detail guarding him was relatively small. That would change, however, given his increasing groundswell of support. He was pulling ahead of the other three candidates in the primary contest. Tomson believed that the flamboyant, blunt, tell-it-like-it-is politician would, in fact, become the party’s nominee. When that happened, a full detail would be assigned to nest around him. But until then, Tomson would make do with his own federal staff of eight, supported by a number of officers from local law enforcement, as well as private security guards at the venues where Ebbett was speaking. In any case, whether there were a handful of men and women under him or sco
res, Tomson’s level of vigilance never flagged. In the eighteen years he’d been with the Secret Service, now part of Homeland Security, not a single person he’d been assigned to protect had been killed or injured.

  He tilted his head as he touched his earpiece and listened to a transmission. There was a belief that agents did this, the touching, which happened frequently, to activate the switch. Nope. The damn things—forever uncomfortable—just kept coming loose.

  The message was that Searcher and his three SUVs had left the airport and were ten minutes away.

  The candidate had just started to receive Secret Service protection, having only recently met the criteria for a security detail established by Homeland, Congress, and other government agencies. Among these standards were competing in primaries in at least ten states, running for a party that has garnered at least 10 percent of the popular vote, raising or committing at least $10 million in campaign funds, and, of course, publicly declaring your candidacy.

  Besides the normal standards, one of the more significant factors in assigning Ebbett a detail was the reality that the man’s brash statements and if-elected promises had made him extremely unpopular among certain groups. Social media was flooded with vicious verbal attacks and cruel comments, and the Secret Service had already responded to three assassination threats. None had turned out to be more than bluster. One woman had called for Ebbett to be drawn and quartered, apparently thinking that the phrase referred to a voodoo curse in which the governor’s likeness would be sketched on a sheet of paper, which was then cut into four pieces—not to an actual form of execution, and a very unpleasant one at that. Still, Tomson and his team had to take these threats, and the ones that he knew would be forthcoming, seriously. Adding to their burden was intel from the CIA that, more than any other primary candidate in history, Ebbett might be a target of foreign operatives, due to his firm stance against military buildups by countries in Europe and Asia.

  Another visual sweep of the convention center, outside of which both protesters and supporters were already queuing. Attendance would be huge; Ebbett’s campaign committee had booked large venues for his events months ago, optimistically—and correctly—thinking that he would draw increasingly large crowds.