by J K Ellem
They arrived at the gas station and pulled into the parking lot next to the diner. It was mid-morning, much of the breakfast crowd had gone. So much had happened that Shaw couldn’t believe he was just here a few days ago minding his own business, waiting for the bus to get fixed so he could move on to Denver.
They went inside, but were told by another waitress that Callie hadn’t come in again today. She had texted that she was sick, she had missed two shifts already.
“Do you know where she lives?” Shaw asked. They sat in the Dodge drinking coffee in takeout paper cups.
“I do. She lives by herself in a one-bedroom place just off Main Street.” Daisy slid out her phone and texted with one hand, drinking her coffee with the other. Shaw smiled and shook his head as he took a swig, the coffee was hot, rich and freshly brewed.
“She still hasn’t replied to my other text from yesterday, or again this morning.” Daisy looked puzzled at her cell phone. “It’s not like her, she never has her phone off or goes anywhere without it.”
“Well, let’s just drive by and check in on her,” Shaw conceded.
They set off again and a short time later they pulled off Main Street and drove down a side street. Shaw had the window down and his arm resting on the sill, watching the streetscape. The houses were average-looking, small-sized on blocks with neat front yards, row after row of the same houses looking mass-produced in the fifties.
Daisy eased the Dodge to the curb outside a duplex and they both got out. The front yard was small, no flowerbeds or bushes, just a rectangle of patchy short grass with a plain concrete path down the middle. The duplex was almost all grey. Grey tiled roof, grey siding, grey trim, but with white-framed windows facing the street, and four concrete steps, poured rough, with white steel rails on either side leading up to a panel timber front door behind a screen door. A dirt driveway ran down the right side of the duplex to a small detached open garage at the rear that looked like a smaller version of the duplex itself.
The street was quiet. No cars out front, just an old sedan parked on the opposite side. Shaw automatically ticked off a mental checklist in his head. Angles behind cover, lines of sight, street and house geometry, access and exit points. It was just a typical street with affordable housing in a small country town. Maybe four or five hundred bucks a month in rent—and most houses in the street looked like cheap rentals. No pets allowed.
They walked down the path and up the steps to the front door. The screen door sagged to one side. Loose pop rivets and the hinges groaned from a lifetime of opening and then slamming. There was no doorbell, Daisy knocked, the sound hollow on the cheap front door.
They waited a few moments, then she knocked again.
No answer.
Somewhere over a fence a dog barked.
“Do you have a key?” Shaw asked, looking back at the street, feeling like he was being watched. Maybe just nosy neighbors, but he saw no telltale signs, no sudden movement behind curtains or blinds, no heads ducking back behind fence palings.
“No, but she usually leaves a key out around the back.”
She let the screen door slam and they made their way around the side of the duplex, following the driveway. The garage structure had no door and was empty. The back yard was fenced and had the same dry patchy grass as the front. Nothing ornamental, just a few ugly bushes styled low maintenance depressing.
There was a small paved area, dull and cracked, that led to the back door. Daisy moved to a cluster of dead plants in terracotta pots and removed a key from under one.
Shaw shook his head in disbelief, not expecting something so careless and so typical.
“Does anyone else know it’s there?”
“No, just me and Callie.”
Through the back door they found themselves in a small kitchen. Brown linoleum in a diamond pattern, grey laminate cupboards and benches, small steel sink, washer and dryer with hookups to one side. The place was clean and tidy, but all the curtains and blinds had been drawn. No prying eyes could look in.
They stood still, listening.
Nothing, just the sound of the refrigerator compressor rattling, a few more random barks from outside.
Shaw couldn’t help himself. He opened the refrigerator. No reason, just habit, search and assess mentality. A person’s fridge was a window into their personality. There was minimal food, but still fresh. Quality purchases, no junk food, small batches. No pretentious bottled water from some glacier in Iceland. The milk expired three days ago and he guessed that Callie ate most meals at the dinner, before, during or after her shift.
They searched the rest of the duplex. It was small, one bedroom, one toilet, brown carpet, cream walls with brown timber edging, cheap furniture, some nice feminine touches to make the best of a dull, gloomy existence. But they found nothing important. Shaw resisted the compelling urge to open every drawer and cupboard, and rifle through everything including personal possessions and clothing. He had to remind himself he was here as an uninvited guest by Daisy out of concern for her friend, not because the occupant was under suspicion of committing a federal offence.
There were no signs that anything malicious had happened. It had a lived-in look and feel, but was as though Callie had closed up and gone away for a few days.
Odd, but not overly odd enough to warrant calling the police.
They stood in the kitchen again.
“I don’t know,” Shaw said, looking at the worried look on Daisy’s face. “How does she get to work?”
“She has a car, but it’s not in the driveway. An old white hatchback. Maybe she’s gone to the doctor in Hays.”
Daisy pulled out her cell. This time she called Callie, but it went straight to voice mail.
They left, locking the back door behind them, and Daisy put the key under the same terracotta pot, and they walked back to the Dodge. Daisy got in, but Shaw turned and took one last look at the house half-expecting a face to appear in the window.
“Come on,” he said, as he slipped into the passenger side. “I want to take a look at that abandoned mine site on your property.”
Daisy kicked over the engine and they headed off.
31
A call was placed, the number untraceable. It was made from an encrypted cell phone that rerouted the call first through an exchange in the Netherlands, then on to a ghost-server in the basement of a non-descript building in Istanbul, before being recoded and rerouted to a phone that sat on a polished boardroom table forty-three floors up from the street in downtown Dallas, Texas in a sleek building of glass and polished steel.
“We don’t have a problem,” the caller insisted.
“Our research says otherwise. The file we sent you, did you read it in full?” the man from Dallas said.
The caller didn’t like being patronized. He was usually the one giving the orders, setting the agenda, telling people what to do. “Yes, I read the file, it was only mildly interesting. I don’t see the man as a threat. I have spoken to him.”
There was a pause on the line and the caller could sense the man from Dallas was not happy with the response.
“Our investors are concerned. There’s too much money at stake to take any risks, regardless of how minor a potential threat could be.”
“Your men took care of it. He won’t return and if he does, he’ll end up like the rest.” The caller didn’t like the security contractors on his property, there was no need. It seemed like overkill.
“I don’t care, we have sent someone to deal with him.”
The caller was starting to grow impatient, the hint of incompetence in the voice of the man from Dallas obvious. “I said we can deal with it, and we have.”
“We have sent someone to deal with it, we see otherwise.”
We. The faceless men from Texas who sat sheltered and protected in their ivory towers, looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, sitting in fat leather chairs and wearing five-thousand dollar suits. The caller had contempt for them, but he needed them.
Since the discovery, the caller knew this was bigger than anything he could manage on his own.
“When will he arrive?”
“She is already there.”
“She’s a woman?” the caller asked in disbelief.
“A she tends to be a woman,” the reply sarcastic.
“What do you mean she is already here?” The caller was getting annoyed. He didn’t like plans being made without being consulted first. He wanted to remain in control, remain the person calling all the shots.
“She’s been there on the ground for a while now. Just observing, reporting back to us. Like I said, we need to protect our investment. Our backers are getting nervous, they want to know why the delays? The land from the McAlister woman should have been secured by now. They don’t like delays.”
The caller’s head was spinning with the new information. Was he being spied on?
“What will she do?” the caller asked.
Another pause on the line, then, “Whatever is necessary. Just keep your sons in check. We don’t want any unnecessary attention because of their antics.”
The caller turned cold. He didn’t like what the man from Dallas was inferring. He knew his sons had their own way of dealing with things, he also knew of their other perversions, but he had turned a blind eye. It was better that way. The end justifies the means, as they say. He quickly changed the subject before he said something he was going to regret.
“Is she any good?” the caller asked, still unconvinced a woman was capable of anything except bleeding and childbirth. “Is she the best you have?” The caller didn’t want some amateur involved in the operation. He trusted his sons, but he didn’t trust the hired help the Dallas group had insisted on sending.
“No,” the man from Dallas said. “She’s not our best.”
The caller was growing impatient. “Why? What happened to your best man? You said this was important, a lot at stake. Why didn’t you send your best person?”
“He’s dead.”
“So who did you send?”
There was silence down the line for a moment.
Then he replied. “We sent you the person who killed him.”
The line went dead, the call ended.
The man from Dallas sat back in his chair, stared at the phone, contemplating, his fingers drumming on the polished boardroom table. He picked up the handset again then dialed another number, to a satellite phone this time. Again the call was rerouted, bounced around the globe, encrypted then sent to the recipient.
The man from Dallas was the only person who had the number, and he would be the only caller she would get.
There was no hello, greetings or pleasantries. It was all business from the woman on the end of the line. “Yes?” The voice, calm, self-assured, in control.
“Where are they?” the man from Dallas asked.
“I’m watching them now. They’ve just visited a house in town. Spent about twelve minutes inside, before coming out and leaving. They’re heading off somewhere else.”
The man from Dallas thought for a moment, his previous call left him with some doubts—not about the woman, but about the caller.
He finally spoke. “There may be another assignment after this one. Nothing major, just a quick clean-up job.”
“No problem. Just tell me whom and by when,” the woman replied.
“I’ll email you the file. This time I want the bodies to be found. Make it public, make it messy, make them suffer.”
If this had been a video call, the man from Dallas would have seen the smile on her face. She really didn’t do public, or messy. She much preferred private and clean assignments, her targets removed with no trace. They just disappeared.
But she did do suffering, on all of her assignments, even when she was told specifically not to.
“No problem,” she replied. “And the man? When can I complete that assignment?”
The man from Dallas considered this, making sure the strategy was still valid. There were a lot of moving parts to this, and he didn’t need the man who had appeared on the scene just a few days ago altering the schedule. Further observations by the woman had revealed that the new arrival had the potential to ruin everything. But his removal had to be just right.
The man from Dallas spoke again. “Remove him tomorrow night. No traces. Make it look like he just up and left town. Zero residual.”
“Done.”
“Do not forget. Under no circumstances is the McAlister woman to be harmed.” The man from Dallas knew he had to manage Daisy better than Jim Morgan had. She wouldn’t respond to threats nor violence. If she was harmed or even killed then lawyers would get involved and the estate could be locked up in the courts for years. Then all it would take is some smart- ass lawyer to do a little digging and uncover the real truth. The man from Dallas couldn’t take that risk.
“I understand. You do not have to keep reminding me,” the woman said curtly.
The man from Dallas ended the call.
32
Forty minutes later they were standing in a large clearing under the shadow of the ridge towering above them, a wall of forest pressing in all around.
They had continued along the road past the barn for two miles before cutting away from the boundary fence and heading through the forest, the track barely wide enough for the Dodge, so they parked it and went the rest of the way on foot with Daisy carrying the shotgun.
The track opened up into the clearing. To the left was a tumble of dilapidated sheds, rusted and falling apart, holes in the walls, roofs collapsed inwards, the interiors dark.
What cattle yards were once here had long been overgrown and covered by the wild vegetation. It was a mournful, desolate place and despite the afternoon sun, in the shadows where they stood the air was cold. It didn’t take long for Shaw to locate the entrance of the pit mine as he walked around the clearing.
The pit mine hole was covered with several sheets of old roofing iron, and a thin layer of dirt, leaves and forest debris. Shaw carefully slid the sheets aside. Underneath was a square hole about four feet wide. He stood back and stared into the depths. A musty, putrid odor wafted up out of the hole, a smell like stagnant water.
The inside edges and walls of the pit had been reinforced with a framework of timber planks on all four sides. There were rungs nailed to the framework on one side that dropped away into the dark. The whole structure looked unsecure and dangerous.
“You said it was flooded a while back?” Shaw said.
“I wouldn’t be going down there to check,” Daisy replied, staying a few steps further back from the edge than Shaw. Looking around, he found a large enough fragment of shale and dropped it into the hole. It seemed like an eternity until the hollow splash echoed back up.
“There’s nothing here, Ben, like I said.” Daisy looked around at the forest. There was something about the place she didn’t like and she felt a chill, her grip tightening on the shotgun.
Shaw kept looking into the pit, as if drawn to it. It seemed to swallow all light along with his thoughts.
It must be hundreds of feet deep judging from how long it had taken the rock to reach the bottom. Finally he broke his gaze and covered the pit back up with the sheets of iron. He did a quick search of the clearing and found a small trail on the opposite side that wound back through the trees, before vanishing into the shadows of the forest.
“That’s probably the trail leading up to the mountainside and ravine,” Daisy said, following his eyes.
“So you think your father spent time here?” he asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy replied.
Shaw looked around again, frustrated.
There was nothing here.
He began to walk back when his foot twisted and he almost fell. He recovered and looked down. He brushed aside a layer of scrub with his boot. There was a perfect cylindrical hole underneath, nothing large, four inches in diameter.
Shaw knelt down and felt the rim.
&nb
sp; The sides were smooth, the shale and earth cored out.
“What is it?” Daisy stood beside him.
“It’s a drill hole. Someone’s drilled into the ground, like taking a core sample.” He looked around. Everywhere was covered with weeds and scrub.
He started at one end of the clearing and followed a grid pattern. Daisy started at the other end and they went back and forth working from the edge of the clearing towards the center. The pace was slow and they were careful, making sure they covered the entire area.
Thirty minutes later they had found eight similar holes.
“Someone has been looking for something,” Shaw said.
“Looking for what?’ Daisy replied. “It’s just dry rock and scrub. There’s nothing here.”
“What about the pit mine? What was your grandfather mining for back then?”
Daisy shrugged. “I don’t know. Silver, I think. But my father wasn’t interested one bit in prospecting. He told me about this place and what my grandfather had done here all those years ago, but he wasn’t about to start the mine again or go digging up the countryside. His focus was on the ranch and the cattle. He didn’t have time for anything else.”
“Well, someone has been interested enough to drill some test holes. They look as though they were done by a machine, something recent not old. The shafts are smooth, not done by hand or by something old-fashioned.”
“Well, not by my father. He wasn’t interested, like I said.”
It was just another puzzle with no obvious answers. “Could someone have come onto your land without you knowing?” Shaw said.
“Impossible,” she said defiantly. “I would know.”
“Anyone could have come here and drilled the holes. You can’t see this place from the road, it’s completely hidden,” Shaw replied.
“But they would need machinery, tools, would have made noise. It would take a while to do. I would have noticed that. Certainly, if someone had driven a truck with a drill mounted on it, I would have seen them coming onto my land.”