Out of Time

by David Klass

  “Paul brought her out here once. And I met her at the funeral.” As Willa spoke the word “funeral,” her clasped hands trembled.

  Tom followed up softly: “Paul’s funeral in Oakland?”

  She choked back words and just nodded.

  “Have you spoken to Ellen Douglas since then? She lives nearby in New York.”

  “Why would I speak to her?” She was incredulous at the suggestion.

  “To remember your son with somebody else who loved him,” Tom suggested.

  “I don’t need anyone’s help to remember my son,” Willa told him indignantly, and fell into a stony silence. As if sensing her agitation, the cat jumped off the footstool and, with a contemptuous look at Tom, padded away.

  Tom looked down at his notes to give her a few seconds to recover. He was coming to the most difficult questions, and he reminded himself not to push too hard. “So if you don’t think Paul would have started the fire at the lumber plant, why do you think he participated in the attack at the gas company a few months later?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Good people get dragged into trouble. Since my son died in that attack, I guess he wasn’t very good at attacking things. Was he?”

  “I see your point,” Tom said. His eyes were still on his pad, but he slowly lifted them to her face and studied her carefully as he asked, “So you’re sure that Paul died in that fire?”

  Her confusion and anger were evident as she snapped, “What kind of a question is that? I just told you I went to his funeral.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But . . . his body was badly burned. You never had any doubts about the identification by the coroner or anything like that?”

  “You will please have some respect for the dead,” she hissed, “or I’ll ask you to leave.” A charged silence followed, and while Tom had serious doubts about whether Ellen had been telling him the full truth in her Harlem apartment, he completely trusted the outrage of this high-strung and still-grieving mother in Cape May. Somewhere to the back of the house wind chimes tinkled faintly.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” Tom said. “I hate this part of my job. I’ll be leaving very soon, and I appreciate your time. Could I ask you about the money you inherited? Paul left you a million dollars. Yet you never moved. . . .”

  ‘‘Why would I move? This house is where I raised my children. It’s where my husband died. And it’s where I will die.”

  “Sure,” Tom said, “but you don’t seem to have spent any of that million dollars. . . .”

  “Most of the money has been divided into college funds for my grandchildren. Paul liked education, and I think he would have been pleased with that use of the fruits of his hard work.”

  “I think he would have,” Tom agreed. “Mrs. Sayers, this is a strange question, but when I was growing up in small towns there were a few faraway places I used to fantasize about traveling to and even living in one day. Was there a place like that for Paul, when he was a boy, that he talked about one day moving to that would give him a whole new life?”

  “Paul was happy here in Cape May,” she answered resentfully. “He didn’t need to dream about other places.”

  “Has there ever been a time when a member of your family was in trouble or maybe there was a money problem, and somehow it disappeared or got taken care of in a way that you didn’t quite understand, and it seemed like a miracle? Like someone was watching over you?”

  “Someone is watching over us,” she told him with certainty. “We’re a churchgoing family, and we pray, but we don’t need miracles. We can take care of our own. And I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough of this.”

  “Okay, here’s my very last question. Besides Ellen in New York, was there anyone Paul was very close with, who you think might shed light on some of what we’ve talked about?” She looked back at him and didn’t answer, so he tried again. “Someone who, if Paul had lived, he would have remained lifelong friends with? A boyhood friend or maybe a college roommate who I should talk to next?”

  Her head twitched anxiously from side to side, but she remained silent, as if she had run out of answers to his endless foolish questions.

  Tom stood up. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Sayers. You’ve been incredibly patient and helpful. Oh, just one more thing—I believe your son was a bit of an artist growing up. Do you still have anything that Paul drew?”

  She glanced over at a nearby wall where a framed pencil sketch of a seascape hung near a window. Tom stepped over to it and studied the wave rising toward a rocky shore, above which three gulls circled. It was skillful and minimalist. A few pencil strokes captured the torque and energy of the cresting breaker, and the gulls with their wings extended were single squiggly lines yet unmistakably seabirds hanging above pounding surf. “It’s really very good,” Tom said.

  “My son was gifted, and it was a great shame he died so young,” she said with finality, as if twisting closed the clasp on a treasured locket. It clearly signaled an end to a conversation that had upset her. She was standing to see Tom out, her palms smoothing down her blue housedress. “Where are you off to now?”

  He took the hint and headed for the front door. “DC,” he told her. “I’m taking the afternoon ferry.”

  “There’s one in forty minutes,” Willa Sayers told him, opening the door for him. “If you hurry you can catch it. Mind the rain.” The screen door swung shut behind him.

  FORTY-THREE

  Drizzle was stiffening into hard rain when Tom drove his rented car onto the ferry, bought a ticket, and parked in a numbered space on the first level. Anticipating a rough ride, workers were chaining the cars together. Tom headed up to the second and third levels, where there was passenger seating. The outside deck spaces were drenched and deserted, so Tom walked into the covered section and found a seat by a window. He sat by himself looking out at the Atlantic as rain pelted the glass. Just before the ferry departed, there was an announcement that the ride would be rough and anyone who wanted to leave could still get off. Those who stayed on board were advised to remain seated.

  The ferry pulled away from the Cape May dock and chugged off on its seventeen-mile crossing to Lewes, Delaware. The boat was only half full, and the passenger section was calm till they left the shelter of the shore and the first waves hit. The ferry was soon rocking wildly as it plowed forward, and a little boy began screaming while a teenaged girl in the row ahead of Tom puked into a bag.

  Tom tried to ignore the rising din in the pitching boat and focus on what he would do in DC. He couldn’t directly disobey Grant, so he would have to type up some sort of report that described his theory about Paul Sayers surviving the gas company explosion and Tom’s subsequent meetings with Ellen Douglas and Willa Sayers. But he didn’t trust Carnes to follow up correctly, so he decided to write a report that—while accurate—underplayed the evidence that Paul Sayers had become Green Man. He could easily make it seem like a far-fetched theory that still lacked hard evidence.

  Tom felt someone’s eyes on him. Alarmed, he turned and quickly scanned the large seating area. He had always had a keen sense for when he was being watched, but no one seemed to be staring at him. Then he spotted a middle-aged female ferry worker in boots and a wet rain jacket who was passing out free bottles of water. She had walked by his row, but when she saw him looking around she stomped over in her boots and grinned: “I thought maybe you were sleeping.”

  “Not in this,” Tom said, as the ferry rode a wave and juddered down into a trough.

  She tossed him a bottle. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen us cross in worse.”

  “Does it delay the trip much?”

  “It slows us a bit, but we’ll be fine,” she promised. “Want a second bottle?”

  “One will do. Thanks.”

  The girls in front of him had gotten their sick friend onto her feet and were leading her toward a bathroom.

  To
m glanced back out the window. The ferry’s ads claimed that dolphins could often be seen during the crossing, but visibility was low on this stormy afternoon, and there was nothing to see except angry sky and tumultuous ocean. He returned to his thoughts about the investigation. He would turn in a report to Grant and DHS that was factually accurate but that soft-pedaled the secret he’d uncovered. Then he would seek out Brennan, whom he trusted and who had first gotten him into this. Brennan would know what to do with his discovery, or at least whom to take it to. Tom still held a faint hope that what he’d found might be a big enough break in the case to vindicate Brennan and allow the old commander to take an active role in the final phase of the Green Man investigation.

  Sitting in the wildly pitching ferry, Tom knew that he had unearthed a nugget of pure gold. He wasn’t sure how quickly the secret would lead authorities to Green Man, but he understood its intrinsic value. No one else knew it, and Tom had to be wise and careful in figuring out what to do with it. There were chain-of-command considerations and there was also considerable time pressure—he couldn’t dare keep the discovery to himself for too long. But one thing was certain—he knew he was right. Green Man was Paul Sayers, and Paul Sayers was alive and living somewhere in Michigan. Ellen had skillfully tried to parry his questions, and Willa hadn’t known the truth about her son, which was a testament to Green Man’s iron will and sense of purpose. But the two conversations had convinced Tom that he was absolutely right and also given him a much fuller picture of the man he was chasing.

  Green Man had grown up as Paul Sayers in that unassuming white house in Cape May, a brilliant boy who’d never quite fit in. He’d left it behind, the way Tom had escaped his own stifling childhood, and had become a successful engineer on the West Coast. He’d fallen in love with Ellen and moved into radical environmentalism till the FBI had closed in on him. He’d faked his death with an explosion, paid off a coroner to misidentify a burned corpse, and vanished. With his wealth, brilliance, and meticulousness, he’d probably had all the documents for a new and very different identity prepared and waiting like a fresh set of clothes. He’d skipped his own funeral, climbed into his new skin, and started fresh—at least until the same radical call to action that had nearly doomed him in San Francisco had been too strong to resist in Michigan two decades later. . . .

  “Excuse me, mister.” It was a nervous scrawny kid, maybe fourteen years old. “You’re in seventy-two, right?”

  Tom blinked and tried to focus. He glanced down at his seat, but there was no number. “What?”

  “You’re driving the Dodge Charger parked in space seventy-two, aren’t you? There’s a problem with your car. You’d better come.”

  Tom stood. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Make sure to bring your ticket,” the kid said, and headed for a nearby exit.

  Tom followed him. Soon he was trailing the kid down dimly lit concrete stairs toward the parking deck. They emerged onto a dark landing at the stern of the ferry, and Tom glimpsed the outlines of dozens of parked cars and trucks. The vehicles were chained together, and when the ferry listed, their chains rattled. “So what’s wrong with my car?” Tom turned to ask, but the kid was no longer next to him. “Hey, where is my car? Where’d you go?” Tom’s questions were swallowed by the howling wind and the drone of the ship’s engines. The kid was nowhere to be seen. Tom spun back toward the stairway, and a powerful blow hit him in the side of the face and nearly knocked him out cold.

  He landed hard and almost blanked. He was vaguely aware of being dragged over a rough surface. Hands searched his pockets. His wallet was taken, and something was being tugged away from inside his shirt—his father’s Colt from its shoulder holster. That realization got Tom going again. His hands moved to his chest and tried to hold on to the gun, but it was ripped free by the strong man who was now kneeling above him, aiming his own gun at Tom’s head.

  Tom’s vision cleared. The man had a thick black beard and mustache and was wearing a dark cap tilted low over his forehead. Tom opened his mouth to scream, but the man rammed the pistol barrel in hard enough to chip teeth. “No one can hear you. But if you make a sound or struggle in any way, I’ll blow your brains out.”

  Tom looked into the man’s hazel eyes and nodded. The Colt was withdrawn so that he could breathe and answer. “You know who I am,” the man said. It was not a question. “I was afraid that someone would be dumb enough to be smart enough to find me, and unfortunately that person is you.”

  “The FBI knows I’m taking this ferry,” Tom gasped. “If you kill me, they’ll come looking. That kid’ll come forward and talk. . . .”

  “That kid will take the two hundred bucks I paid him to get you and keep his mouth shut and stay out of trouble. But even if he does come forward, he knows nothing.”

  “He knows the way you look.”

  “This is not the way I look.”

  “They’ll find my car on board.”

  “I have your parking ticket. I’ll drive your car off the ferry in Delaware. No one will miss you, and by the time they do, you could be anywhere. And I’ll be long gone. You must realize that we’re both almost out of time.”

  “What do you want?” Tom asked.

  “Your life is over,” the man said simply. “All you can do now is tell me the truth and save yourself pain. I would prefer to kill you with one shot. You will feel nothing. But that depends on your telling me the truth.”

  Tom looked up at him, still trying to clear his head. “Everything I’ve learned about you tells me that you kill for a cause but you don’t execute in cold blood. And I don’t think you could deliberately make someone suffer.”

  Tom saw a flicker of annoyance in the man’s grim eyes. Was it anger at Tom for challenging him? Or was he aware of his own humanity and worried that they both knew it? “You’re smart, and in order to find me, you must have learned a great deal about me. So you should know that I will do whatever I need to for my cause. Unfortunately for both of us, pain is the only leverage I have over you now.”

  Tom believed him and glanced at the Colt. The barrel was pointed right at the center of Tom’s forehead, and the hand holding the gun was rock steady.

  “Stand up,” Green Man ordered, getting off him.

  Tom got to his knees and then climbed to his feet. The cold rain was helping to clear his mind. He understood why Green Man wanted him to stand. It would look much less suspicious if anyone happened to see them. They might be two friends having a private conversation. But Tom saw that they were in a totally deserted corner of the rain-swept parking deck, and he doubted anyone would spot them. If Green Man fired, the roar of the engines and the crashing of waves against the ferry would mask the sound of the shot.

  “How did you find out about Paul Sayers?”

  “I profiled Green Man’s engineering skills and ran a search for graduates from top schools. Four names came up. The most qualified one happened to be dead.”

  “Who helped you create that profile and run the search?”

  “Nobody. I went to Stanford and Caltech, and I know how to do things like that.”

  “When you found out about Paul Sayers, who did you tell?”

  “I didn’t talk to anyone yet. My boss, Brennan, is off the case.”

  “You’re lying. I warned you not to do that. You’ve made a very important discovery. You would have told someone. Who?”

  Tom started to repeat: “I didn’t tell anyone—”

  The gun tilted down and fired, and Tom gasped in pain. It was a leg shot—his left knee. He staggered and almost went down.

  “Tell me the truth,” the man said.

  “I talked to an FBI agent named Grant,” Tom gasped, in agony. “This morning. He called me. . . .”

  “You’re still lying. The FBI is no longer running the investigation.”

  “Grant’s helping Homeland Security take
over the case,” Tom said quickly. “I don’t trust him, so I didn’t tell him about Paul Sayers. I was going to find Brennan when I got back to DC and let him advise me. I swear, I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I believe you,” Green Man said. “Last question. Did you find out where I live now or anything about my family?”

  “All I know is that you’re in Michigan and you’ve started over.” Then Tom said very quickly and desperately, “And you may want to kill me, but you can’t just execute me. It goes against who you are. I’ve been learning all about you, and I understand you. I’m the one who found that cop in Nebraska who stopped you, and you didn’t kill him, even though you could have and should have. I’ve read all your letters and your manifesto, and I know you struggle with guilt, and I believe in your cause—”

  “Then you know what’s at stake and that I have no choice now,” Green Man said, cutting him off. “Close your eyes.”

  Tom kept his eyes wide-open, maintaining the link between them. “There’s something I need to tell you first.”

  “What is that?”

  “Your mother is still in great pain. Poor woman, mourning you for twenty years.”

  Tom saw a reaction in the hazel eyes, and he followed up quickly: “Ellen still loves you, and she lied to me to protect you. She’d do anything for you, wouldn’t she?”

  Green Man tried to keep his face an opaque mask, but the decades of self-doubt were now evident. “Enough.”

  The ferry was riding up a large wave, and Tom knew he had to buy himself just a few more seconds. “She still loves you even though you wrecked her life, and her daughter’s life, too. You’ve destroyed the people you love just as you’ve killed innocent victims in each of your attacks, and you have to live with that. And I know what it’s doing to you. If you kill me in cold blood, you’ll just be making it worse.”

  Green Man clearly wanted to shoot, but still he hesitated.