The Shut Mouth Society (The Best Thrillers Book 1)

by Unknown

  “I … I thought cops could trace a taxi.” She continued to look straight ahead.

  “They can … and at this hour, they’d probably get a tag on it before we even made it to that long-term parking lot. Smart girl. Smart and brave.”

  “Right now, I just want to get to the car so I can have a nervous breakdown.”

  Just as she spoke, a subway car rattled into the station. A transit cop emerged from an office at the end of the platform, but he didn’t look alert. They stepped into the car, and Evarts directed them to a seat on the opposite side so he could keep an eye on the cop. Evarts looked at his watch, startled that only ten minutes had passed since they had sprinted across the Public Gardens.

  When the car doors closed with no sign of interest from the cop, Evarts felt himself exhale deeply. In less than three minutes, they were at the second stop. Baldwin grabbed his arm and said, “Hurry. That’s the car we want and they’re few and far between at this hour.”

  They raced across platforms and jumped on the Green Line just before a monotone voice announced that the doors were about to close. After they had taken seats, a rough-looking vagrant walked over and grabbed the pole above their heads to steady himself. With a shit-eating grin aimed at Baldwin, he said, “Hey buddy, can you spare ten dollars?”

  Evarts immediately went on high alert. A bum asks for a dollar. Only a petty criminal who thought they looked vulnerable would ask for ten dollars. He wanted to hurt the guy. In fact, he desperately wanted to hurt the guy badly. Despite his need to release some tension, Evarts didn’t want to draw attention. “We’re cops, asshole, and you’re going to blow our cover. Go find someone else.”

  He looked dubious. “You ain’t cops.”

  “Karen, darling, shoot this son of a bitch, please.”

  Without missing a beat, Baldwin opened her purse and half extracted her .45. “With pleasure.”

  The perpetrator jumped back and went to the furthest seat away from them. In a few minutes they were at Government Station. This time their luck wasn’t as good. They had to wait on the platform for nearly ten minutes for a Blue Line car. The ride to the airport seemed to take forever, but his watch said it took only a little over eight minutes. When they found the shuttle area outside the terminal, Evarts smiled as he saw a minibus painted with the long-term parking logo. His relief evaporated, however, after they boarded the van, and the driver showed no inclination to leave the terminal.

  “When do we leave?” Evarts asked.

  “Few minutes. You’re the first to arrive.”

  “First? What are you talking about?”

  He caught Evarts’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Didn’t you just arrive on flight 617?”

  Evarts first impulse was to offer him twenty dollars to go now, but he realized that would make him memorable. “Yeah. First class, no luggage, so we made it out quick. I guess you need to wait for the rest.”

  “Yup. Only bus at this hour.” He turned and gave them a questioning look. “Why no luggage?”

  Evidently flight 617 didn’t just fly in from New York or some other short commuter route. “Lost at an international connection. Pissed me off, but what can you do?” Evarts put on a tired face. It wasn’t hard. “This was our last leg. We had three connections, and we’ve been traveling for almost twenty-four hours. Now we just want to get home.”

  The driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror showed that he had absolutely no interest in listening to another traveler’s tale of woe. Evarts felt relief when he saw people exit the terminal. “Here they come.” He closed his eyes. “Wake us at the lot.”

  “Sure thing, bud.” Evarts heard him leap out of the bus to help people with their baggage. Good. That conversation had gone deeper than he wanted.

  It took almost a half hour to load people, drive over to the lot, start the Explorer, and pay the parking fee.

  As they pulled out of the lot, Baldwin asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m still on the ‘away from here’ agenda.”

  “Then follow the signs to the Ted Williams Tunnel, and we’ll get on the Mass Pike.”

  “Is there any other way out of town? It’s been over an hour since the shooting, and the cops should be on full alert.”

  “Let me think. Yeah. When we get through the tunnel, I’ll tell you how to get to old Route 9.”

  “Surface street?”

  “Yes, but it should be pretty quick at this hour.”

  “Sounds perfect. Your feint to South Station will put a lot of attention on the trains. Next priority will be the airport and turnpikes. If we can get outside Boston city limits in the next thirty minutes, we should be clear. I can’t think of a reason for state troopers to pull over a generic Explorer with Colorado plates.”

  “Because it contains a couple killers on the lam.” Her voice didn’t sound as light as her words.

  Evarts threw her a look. She had been exceptionally capable in as tough a situation as he could imagine. Perhaps he should make up a list of questions about her. After a few moments of silence, he tried to mimic an airline attendant’s announcement voice. “You’re now free to mope about the cabin.”

  “What?”

  “Bad joke. Sorry. You said you couldn’t wait to get to the car so you could have a nervous breakdown.”

  “I’m thinking,” she said distractedly. Evarts decided to leave her to her thoughts. After a few moments, she said, “Greg, I owe you an enormous apology. I never should’ve doubted you. Can you forgive me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I ah—” She started crying. “You can’t know how scared and miserable I’ve been since my parents were killed.”

  ““It’s alright. I can imagine how I’d feel if it had been my parents.”

  She started crying harder, and it took a few minutes for her to get enough control to continue. “I’ve been miserable thinking bad thoughts about you.” She pulled a tissue and dried her leaking eyes. “I fell for you and it hurt because I was afraid I had made another huge mistake. Men have had a way of disappointing me.”

  “I may disappoint you, but I promise, not in the way you suspected.”

  After he had driven several miles, she asked quietly, “Greg, is it possible for our relationship to go back to the way it was?”

  Evarts grinned to show that he was kidding. “That can only be healed with time and events.”

  “Hell.” She smiled weakly. “I sure don’t want to repeat an event like that.”

  “Me either, so we’ll have to rely on time.” He looked at his watch for a few beats. “Wow, they’re right. Time does heal all.” He gave her a tug on the shoulder, and she leaned over the console and hugged his arm.

  They stayed in that position for several hours. With the break of dawn and more traffic on the road, Evarts began to feel comfortable that that they had escaped. After he had driven away from Boston on the surface street, they had caught the Massachusetts Turnpike heading west. When Baldwin moved in a way that told Evarts she wasn’t asleep, he said, “We need to figure out where we’re going.”

  “Omaha,” she said.

  “Trish, we don’t know for sure that the Greenes actually went to Omaha.”

  “Maybe we do.” She sat up straight in her own seat. “Last Thanksgiving, my father downloaded onto my laptop all the trusts and financial records for the family. That’s what I didn’t want you to see when I was being an idiot.”

  “Are you telling me there’s a safe house in Omaha?”

  “I think so. At least there’s an asset entry that looks suspiciously like the Boston apartment.”

  “Meaning no address?”

  “I’m afraid so. Only an asset number.” She gave him a genuine smile. “But, Commander, I’m sure you can find it.”

  This time Evarts liked the way she said “commander.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but Omaha might be a blind alley, and it’ll take two days of hard driving just to get there.”

  “Yes,
but we can stop at Hoyt Sherman Place on the way.”

  Evarts looked at her. “What’s Hoyt Sherman Place?”

  “Lincoln appointed Major Hoyt Sherman paymaster for the Union army. After the war, he left Washington and moved to Des Moines, where he founded Equitable of Iowa, among other businesses. Hoyt Sherman Place, his former home, now serves as a cultural center for Des Moines.”

  “And why do you think we should stop there?”

  “I did some web research at the Athenaeum. If the Strategic Air Command hid their headquarters outside Omaha, maybe the Shut Mouth Society thought the heartland would be a safe place to hide Lincoln’s papers.”

  Chapter 29

  “You think Hoyt Sherman took the documents to Des Moines?” he asked.

  “Someone took them somewhere. It looks like there’s a safe house in Omaha, which would be a convenient base for accessing the records. We said a secret society probably wouldn’t kill merely to protect an ancestor’s reputation, but what if the Sherman family formed this society to protect a huge illicit fortune?” Her voice started to rise. “Hoyt could’ve embezzled large sums of money while serving as paymaster for the Union army, and he may have had help from all those other Sherman descendants in Washington during the war.”

  “How closely was Hoyt related to the rest of the family?”

  She smiled. “Close. He had two older brothers you’ve probably heard about: General William T. Sherman of Georgia fame and Senator John Sherman, the same senator who later wrote the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. I’m not sure about his relationship with Simon Cameron. As Lincoln’s first secretary of war, Cameron adopted corruption as a way of life. We know Hoyt had money when he left the capital. After he retreated to Des Moines, he built a mansion that cost nearly one hundred thousand dollars—a huge sum in those days.”

  “So why do you think he had control of the documents?”

  “I’m not sure he did, but maybe he took the Lincoln papers for protection. He could’ve threatened to disclose some dark, ugly secret if they came after him for embezzlement.”

  “That’s it? That’s your whole theory?”

  “You have anything better?”

  Evarts thought. “No … I guess we’ve got to go somewhere.”

  “Seems like an unlikely place for them to look for us.”

  “Unless they discovered that the Greenes went to Omaha.”

  “I’m open to other suggestions.”

  “Well, I don’t have any, so Omaha it is.”

  “Good.” Baldwin folded her arms across her chest in a way that conveyed a sense of purpose. “The further we get away from Boston, the better I’ll feel.”

  “No remorse?”

  “About what?”

  “You seem pretty blasé about killing a man.”

  “If you’re waiting for me to break down, you’ll have a long wait. Those men killed my parents or were associated with the men that did. Fuck ‘em. It was self-defense. They meant to kill us and I’m happy we killed them first.”

  “Trish, I don’t want you to feel bad. I agree. I just wanted to give you a chance to vent if you needed to get anything off your chest. You acted like a professional and it just surprised me.”

  “I guess my pent-up anger helped me do what needed to be done. I have no regrets.” She grew sullen and leaned against the passenger door. Finally, she asked, “What about you? Have you ever killed someone before?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  She straightened up in her seat. “Why not?”

  “Because I signed a secrecy oath in the army.”

  “That means you have.”

  “That means I can’t talk about it.”

  “Then let’s talk about something else.”

  “Sure.” But instead they rode silent for many miles. Eventually Evarts said, “If you don’t mind, I would like to look at the files your father downloaded.”

  “Of course. I … I just felt confused for a while.”

  Evarts continued to watch the road ahead, but he felt relief. Perhaps their relationship could get back to the way it was before the cryptic note from Mrs. Greene. He doubted that he loved Patricia Baldwin, but he certainly knew he wanted to find out how far this relationship could go.

  After a moment she said, “I have a question about what just happened.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?” Her voice sounded irritated.

  “No. Poor choice of words. Sorry.”

  Evarts felt her move in the passenger seat. “This is uncomfortable for me, and I’m not harboring new doubts, but back there in the apartment you acted like you knew what you were doing.”

  “Training.”

  “SWAT?”

  “Some of that … and other.”

  “You weren’t always behind a desk in the army, were you?”

  “No, but I told you I can’t talk about it.”

  Baldwin took her glasses off and cleaned them with a lens cloth from her purse. After fidgeting a moment more, she said, “I went on a drug bust once.”

  “What?”

  “My DEA boyfriend talked me into it. He needed a decoy.”

  “Was he crazy? No professional would drag a civilian into an operation.” Evarts hesitated. “Were you on drugs?”

  “I told you, I had a few rebellious years in college.” She spent more time than necessary to finish cleaning her glasses. She put them back on before adding, “He said all I had to do was walk by in a bikini. I thought it would be exciting.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Under the Santa Cruz pier.”

  “He was running his own operation, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, and things went wrong in a big way. Two people were killed, and my boyfriend got shot in the leg and arrested. It was gruesome. Seems that he and a few of his buddies intended to rip off the dealers for their own gain.”

  “He didn’t need your help. He was recruiting you.”

  “For what?” She hesitated. “No, you’re wrong. He—”

  “I’m right, Trish. He supplied you with drugs, taught you how to use firearms, and then asked you to do something that looked simple on the surface. He intended to drag you in one baby step at a time.” He stole a glance at her. “Listen, the Tijuana drug cartel recruits young people by the dozens to do high-risk work. They all have the same profile: upper-middle-class or rich families, recreational drug users, club groupies desperate to be cool, and eager for excitement. They’re called “juniors” and they generally end up dead or in jail. You’re lucky that meet went sour.”

  “Are you suggesting he was part of a drug cartel? He was ripping them off, for god’s sake.”

  “Trish, your boyfriend was taking payoffs. That means a cartel had him in their pocket. He was probably stealing from a different organization, a competing gang or start-up. His own cartel probably encouraged him. Happens all the time.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know and I don’t care anymore. I’m only happy I escaped indictment. That’s when I started pulling myself together.”

  “Why did you tell me all of this?”

  “I’m not sure. I just wanted you to know I had been around shooting before, and maybe I’m trying to figure something out about myself.”

  “Like what?”

  “I used to crave adventure, the riskier the better. In high school, riding fast on the back of a boyfriend’s motorcycle was enough, but I kept pushing further out on the edge. I’ve skydived, bungee jumped, bodysurfed the Wedge, and—”

  “You bodysurfed the Wedge?”

  “Several times.”

  “How big?”

  “Six, eight feet.”

  “Good god, that’s the most dangerous surf on the California coast … maybe on any coast. You are a druggie.”

  “No, I’m not.” She seemed indignant. “I haven’t taken drugs in over ten years.”

  “Adrenaline, girl. You’re addicted to adrenaline.”

  She sat silent
a long time. “Maybe that’s it. I do feel like I’m still on a high.” Now she looked embarrassed. “Greg, I hope this doesn’t sound awful, but I’m horny as hell. Can we find a place to stop?”

  Evarts accelerated to the next off-ramp.

  Chapter 30

  Evarts found a cheap motel where, at seven in the morning, the innkeeper obviously thought they had stopped at his tawdry roadside establishment for a prework quickie. The stop hadn’t been quick. In fact, Evarts had a hard time convincing her around noon that they needed to get back on the road. They drove late into the night, got a few hours’ rest at another motel, and then drove all the next day, arriving in Des Moines after the Hoyt Sherman Place tours had closed for the day. Evarts found another cheap motel within a few miles and they got a solid night’s sleep.

  In the morning, Evarts rolled out of bed spent and famished.

  “Let’s eat.”

  Baldwin put on her glasses and looked him over appreciatively. “Shower together first?”

  Evarts didn’t hesitate. “Eat first, shower after. I need fuel.”

  Baldwin bounded out of bed nude and gave him a passionate kiss. Her body pressed close to his bare chest almost changed his mind, but he said, “I’ll be better after I eat.”

  “Better’s better.” She squeezed past him and charged into the bathroom first.

  To Evarts, this was starting to become more than sex, but he wondered if it meant anything more for her. He had never enjoyed being around a woman so much. He liked to listen to her talk, and he certainly enjoyed looking at her. In truth, he had been attracted first by her cute face and athletic body, but now he knew that underneath that apparently naïve facade ran a ruttish streak that belied her innocent features.

  She never ceased to surprise. Smart and driven to compete in her profession, she also had interests far afield from history. She could be tart-tongued at times and playful at others, but whatever her mood, she always kept him interested. Interested? That was the difference. He needed to have a serious talk with her before things went any further, but not today. He didn’t want to scare her away. She was too good to look at, too fun to talk to, and too exciting to make love to. Besides, she was good in a fight.