by James Tarr
Mickey stared at him. “But how are you? I mean….you killed three guys. Yeah, they were trying to kill you, but….you know…..” Mickey’d been shot, but that was entirely different from killing someone, much less three people.
Dave stared out at the passing road for a while. “You mean do I have PTSD or whatever? Sure. Maybe I’m in shock, I don’t know. I sure don’t feel normal, but then again my whole life’s been turned upside down. You want me to break down because I’ve got nightmares and the shakes and I’m freaking out and barely holding it together? I keep reliving the gunfight over and over, seeing it every time I close my eyes for more than two seconds. Want me to sit down and have a good cry?” He gave a little laugh. “I’d love to, if it would solve any of my problems.”
Boehmer’s phone beeped, and he saw it was the receptionist calling. “Yes?”
“Agent Boehmer, I have an Agent Colman from the CIA here to see you.” She knew better than to call him Mr. Boehmer, that pissed him off to no end.
Boehmer frowned, and looked at the appointment book on the desk. He didn’t have anything penciled in, and he probably would have remembered an appointment with someone from the CIA. “Did he have an appointment?”
There was a pause and he heard muffled conversation. “No.”
“Then what is this about?” Boehmer didn’t have time for more inter-agency political bullshit. That’s all he did all day, seemed like.
“He said he talked to Agent Hartman on the phone yesterday?” The receptionist didn’t sound like she knew exactly what the man wanted either, but Boehmer’s blood ran cold. The only conversations he’d had with Pete Hartman yesterday had been about the Detroit cops who had been killed. Hell, those were the only conversations he’d had with anyone yesterday. The damn news reporters, what were they thinking? The FBI had argued for no bail, it was the damn liberal woman judge that had not only set bail for the four Detroit cops, but set it so low they could afford to get out.
“Send him in. Uh….” he had to think for a second. “Nancy? Is he armed? Make sure whoever is out front runs him through the metal detector. If he’s not FBI I don’t want him carrying a gun in our offices. He can leave his gun in one of the lock boxes if he’s armed.”
“Yes sir.”
Boehmer didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t the unassuming man who poked his head in the door of his office. “Got a few minutes?” Boehmer pointed at one of the chairs in front of his desk, and frowned when the man closed his office door before taking a seat. Colman was maybe forty years old, medium build, brown hair, clean shaven, wearing a well-made but off-the-rack suit. He smiled as he sat down.
“What can I help you with…is it Agent Colman? Can I see your creds please?”
Colman dug into his jacket pocket and handed over his credentials. As Boehmer was looking at them, Colman pulled a small black box out of another pocket, activated a switch on it, and set it on the desk.
“What’s that?”
“We call it a jam box,” Colman told him. “It will disrupt any listening devices in the room.”
“There aren’t any bugs in my office,” Boehmer told him indignantly.
“Special Agent Boehmer, I don’t believe you’re that ignorant,” Colman told him, not trying to be insulting. “If there’s an active phone line in the room, a land line, we can listen through it. If there’s a cell phone with any power in the battery, we can turn the microphone on remotely and listen. The same goes for computer microphones, webcams….this has been public knowledge for years. I suppose the disconnect is that nobody thinks the government will ever listen to them. Did you think we wouldn’t do it to you because you’re the FBI? Please.”
Boehmer stared at the man, then looked down at his CIA identification. Over his eighteen years with the Bureau he had had occasion to work with the CIA on a handful of cases, and what he was holding in his hand looked like an authentic ID, but……”Are you with the CIA? Or the NSA? Is this an authentic ID?” Boehmer waved it at the man.
“It is a completely authentic CIA ID, made by them in Virginia where they produce all of their credentials.” Colman smiled. “They’re very useful. Everyone ought to have one. But I think you’re avoiding the subject.”
“I am? What subject?”
“Your unsuccessful attempts to have David Anderson killed.”
Mike Boehmer froze, then set the CIA credentials down on his desk. He stared at the blank leather on the exterior for a few seconds, then looked up at Colman. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
“I could, but you heard me quite well the first time I said it. I am here to tell you to cease and desist.”
A thousand thoughts raced through Boehmer’s head. The one that his mind kept circling back to was—Am I going to prison? He had a hard time getting past that one. It had been large on his mind from the first minute he’d learned about David Anderson’s unique predicament. He’d been eating Tums like they were candy, snapping at his wife and son, just waiting—expecting—it to all go sideways. And now it had. An entire career in the toilet because of one shit-ass kid with copycat fingerprints.
“I’m surprised they only sent one of you,” the FBI Special Agent in Charge said finally. “I would have thought everybody wanted to get in on the arrest.”
Colman blinked, and sat further back in the chair. “I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to me, Mr. Boehmer. I am here to tell you to stop, to not do anything else where David Anderson is concerned. Or at least anything else illegal, I know you have to investigate the shooting of your suspects, but I trust you can keep a lid on that. I am not here to arrest you.”
“You’re…..then what’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that the adults are going to handle this now,” Colman told him. “Your incompetence has gotten I don’t know how many cops killed. Leave this problem to the professionals. This is what we do, and we’re very good at it.” He stood up and dusted off his pants. With studied indifference he picked the black box off the desk and tucked it away in his pocket. Colman then leaned over the desk, picked up the CIA credentials and slid them inside his jacket. Boehmer just watched.
“What are you going to do?” Boehmer asked him.
Colman raised his eyebrows and pointed at the pocket where he’d put away the “jam box”, then lifted that same finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, then opened the door and walked out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mickey knew they had to be getting close when Dave pulled onto the shoulder of the road about an hour northwest of Phoenix. The road was two lanes of blacktop in each direction, and had been gradually climbing in elevation ever since they’d passed Phoenix.
“What’s wrong?” Mickey asked him. Dave didn’t answer, he just waited for the next car to pass, got out of the vehicle, and retrieved a red tennis racket case from the back of the Cherokee. He set it on the console between the two front seats.
Mickey wasn’t feeling nearly as sharp as he could’ve been, but still it didn’t seem the right time or place for a bit of exercise. “Feeling sporty?” he asked Dave.
Dave just gave him a dirty look as he climbed back in. “Yeah,” he said. He then proceeded to take the two broken-down halves of an AR-15 out of the racquet case and assemble them. He finished by slapping a loaded magazine into place and chambering a round. “That’s why I have a ‘modern sporting rifle’. Stick this between your legs, muzzle down,” he told Mickey.
Mickey did as instructed, but even so he asked, “Why?”
“Because a rifle’s better than two pistols,” Dave said, putting the car into gear and accelerating off the shoulder. Even though Mickey had next to no firearms training, Dave had given him his small Kahr that he wore while jogging and an inside-the-waistband holster. If something happened, it was probably better if the fingerprint tech was armed—although Dave reminded himself to try to stay behind him if at all possible. The one mistake most new shooters made was accident
ally pointing their guns at things they didn’t want to shoot.
They continued to go up and down hills. Mickey was pretty sure they were gradually climbing, but sometimes it was hard to tell. He glanced over at Anderson. He’d known thirty hours in a car wasn’t going to be pleasant, because it was, well, thirty hours in a car, but Anderson hadn’t done anything to make the trip enjoyable. Between Anderson sitting in sulking silence for hours at a time to being outright hostile, Mickey wasn’t at all happy about deciding to come along. Not that he could really blame Anderson for having mood swings. Then there were the music choices. Radio stations in the Midwest just plain sucked, and Anderson had 500 songs on his iPod, 475 of which didn’t qualify as music. Who the hell named their band Explosions For Charity?
Mickey thought they’d talk during the trip; talk about their plans, talk about what they’d do when they got to Arizona, hell, maybe just talk to talk, seeing as they were stuck in this together and close to the same age, but after their initial conversation Anderson had pulled inside himself. It had almost been worse than being in the car by himself, because then at least the guy in the other seat wasn’t making you feel guilty for ruining his life. Not that Anderson had really mentioned that again, but he didn’t need to; Mickey had long ago internalized that guilt. Apparently a Catholic upbringing was good for something.
Dave pulled off the main road onto a narrow blacktop road and followed that for a while. His original plan had been to drive straight through, one driving while the other slept, but after about eighteen hours in the car they’d found they were both so sleepy they had to stop. Dave found a mom-and-pop no-tell motel south of Tulsa and they’d slept there for six hours. After a quick breakfast at Denny’s they’d moved on, stopping only when the gas tank needed to be refilled.
From the narrow blacktop he turned off onto a gravel road and followed that for several miles, going up and down hills, each one of which was taller than anything in Michigan. The land here was rolling hills, thinly dotted with pine trees, mesquite bushes, and saguaro cacti. There were houses, usually low and earth-toned, every quarter to half mile. Not too far to the east was Skull Valley, which as a kid he thought was the coolest name he’d heard of or seen on a map, ever. The closest town of any size was Prescott. It was maybe thirty miles away to the east as the crow flew, but there was no quick way to get there. As a kid ‘stuck’ at the family cabin on vacation, wanting to go see a movie or the mall, the isolation sucked, but as an adult he’d come to enjoy it. For this visit, the isolation was preferred.
Dave loved the high desert, but realized he’d need to head to the store to get some supplies, especially lip balm. He could feel the dry air sucking the moisture out of his lips as he drove. The sun was getting low in the sky to his left as he spotted the end of his driveway. A narrow dirt track running off the dirt road, it was almost impossible to find in the dark if you didn’t know where to look. He turned onto the driveway and stopped.
The driveway was visible for about a hundred and fifty yards, making a gentle S before cutting through a low ridge and diving out of sight to the right. He looked around. There were no other houses visible here, and he knew from years of wandering around the land as a kid that the closest house belonged to Richard Henderson—“Old Mr. Henderson”—about half a mile further on. Henderson had died about a year before, and the tiny house there had passed to his son, Paul. Dave had no idea if Paul had sold the house, or if he ever visited.
Dave grabbed the rifle from between Mickey’s legs and climbed out of the Cherokee. He looked around, but there were no other vehicles visible, and no sound but for the wind and the faint cry of some sort of bird.
“Oh my God,” Mickey groaned as he climbed out of the car. He stretched. Strange and ominous clicks and pops emanated from random areas of his body. Two days in a car had not done him any good. He did a few squats to loosen up his legs. It felt like he’d landed on an alien planet, where the gravity was all wrong.
“Yeah, that last stretch was a bit long,” Dave agreed.
“You mean the stretch that started when we left Detroit?” Mickey grumbled. He worked the kinks out of his arms, then looked around. A lot more trees and green than there had been around Phoenix, and it wasn’t nearly as hot. Maybe eighty? It was hard to tell when the air was so dry. Dry air didn’t retain any of the heat from the sun, and he expected the temperature to plummet as soon as the sun finished setting.
“You should try doing surveillance some time,” Dave said. The only real difference between a long car trip and surveillance was that the car was moving.
“Are we parking here?” Mickey asked him, looking around. “Where’s the house? What’s with the rifle?”
‘Time to see if anybody’s here waiting for us,” Dave said. He bent down inside the car and pulled a second magazine for the rifle from the tennis racquet case, stuck it in his back pocket. “You have your pistol? Good. Don’t point it at or anywhere near me. Don’t slam the door, move when I move, and shut up.”
Muzzle at low ready, buttstock planted in his shoulder, Dave strode up the gravel driveway. His crunchy footsteps seemed loud to him, maybe because they were the only sound. His eyes constantly scanned left and right, then to the wide-notched V the driveway cut into the small brown ridge. The sun was angling across the front of the ridge, leaving the notch itself dark in comparison.
The ridge was a gentle lip that rose maybe half a dozen feet above the surrounding land. Once through, the driveway angled down into a hidden depression. As he reached the top of the slope, Mickey behind him, Dave paused. He could see half the small house his grandfather had built, and most of the oval depression in which it sat. Other than the house, there was nothing to see—no visitors, no cars, nothing. He’d been studying the driveway on the way up, and there was no sign anyone had driven or walked on it since the last time he had been there. Listening for a minute betrayed no noises, nothing out of the ordinary, so he continued on.
Down a gradual slope, the rest of the small house revealed itself to him, nestled at the west end of the oval depression. If it had been round the shallow formation would have looked like a crater from some extraterrestrial impact, but meteors didn’t make oval craters. The ridge was just higher than the top of the roof of the single-story house, and the bottom two-thirds of the house was already in shadow from the setting sun.
Soundlessly Dave gestured for Mickey to go around the right side of the house, while he went around to the left in the narrower gap between the house and the slope. There was nothing to see, and Dave cupped his hand and peered through the rear bedroom window. Nothing. He gestured for Mickey to follow him and walked around to the front.
The front door was still locked and showed no signs of tampering. Dave unlocked it and quickly checked the small house, which took about six seconds, seeing as there were only three rooms; the big main room which held a living area next to the open kitchen, a small bedroom in back, and a tiny bathroom in the corner.
“All right, go get the car and drive it down here,” he told Mickey, and handed him the keys. “I’m going to walk the perimeter.”
Mickey gave him a funny look, but headed out for the car. Dave walked back up the driveway and turned left. He followed the base of the small uneven ridge around the bowl, checking for any human footprints or vehicle tracks. On the north side of the oval bowl the ridge was cut by a deep gulley. On the rare occasions when the area saw rain, that was where it washed out of the bowl. It was completely dry now, hard-packed sand and white gravel.
Dave completed his circuit around the ridge just as the light was getting low enough that spotting any tracks would have been problematic. He found the car parked on the flat expanse of sandy dirt in front of the house. Mickey didn’t have any luggage, other than the clothes on his back, and he didn’t feel comfortable making himself at home in the cabin, so he was waiting outside, leaning against the fender of the SUV.
“Nice flagpole,” he said to Dave. “That you?” His foot touche
d the square of concrete at the base of the pole where he saw both an R.A. and D.A. scratched in.
Dave looked down. “Me and my dad. Put it in when I was….six? Something like that.” At the thought of his father a wave of sorrow hit Dave hard, and he shoved it back down out of sight. He’d had a lot of practice at that, and it was almost a reflex.
“How do you keep the pole upright when the concrete’s still wet?” Mickey asked him. The flagpole had to be twelve or fifteen feet tall.
“Guidelines, three rope guidelines attached to tent pegs.” Dave looked up the length of the pole. He’d last painted it white what, five years ago? Years of wind and sand had worn the paint nearly off the aluminum. “But it’s buried in two feet of dirt under the concrete.”
“You going to put a flag up?”
Dave shook his head. “Not right now. No spotlight, it’s not illuminated.” He saw the FBI fingerprint geek didn’t know what he was talking about, and shook his head. “Nobody knows flag etiquette anymore. If you’re going to fly an American flag at night, it is supposed to be illuminated. Otherwise, you take it down.” That was just one of the many things Dave had learned from his father as they’d put up the flagpole and repaired minor things around the small house.
“Oh.”
“There might be a few things to eat in there right now, but we’ll need to go out in the morning for supplies,” Dave told him. He grabbed his dufflebag out of the back of the Cherokee and headed into the house. He’d have to flip on the circuit breaker for power, light the pilot lights….making a list in his head. He needed to keep his mind busy, think of little things, think of other things. Thinking about why he’d driven out there, why he’d had to drive out to Arizona, twisted him all up.