Whorl

by James Tarr

  After watching him, he understood how Anderson had not just won a gunfight against SWAT cops, but expected to win. He didn’t understand that kind of bravery, or physical confidence, or whatever you wanted to call it, but he recognized it. Mickey was confident in his abilities when it came to technical expertise, but knew that was an entirely different animal than what cops needed to charge into dangerous situations.

  “We need to talk,” Mickey said to him, when it looked like he was done for the morning. Mickey was on his second cup of coffee, and checked his watch. Only half an hour this time. Dave looked flushed, and he was massaging his right shoulder with his left hand.

  “About what?”

  “About what?” Mickey waved a hand around. “About this. About what we’re doing. We’ve been here for three days, three and a half, doing nothing. We need to have some sort of plan, we can’t hide out here forever, you know. The problem is not going to go away. I’ve been thinking about this a lot—as I’m sure you have—and I think our best bet is a press conference. Contact as many media outlets as possible to announce what’s going on. But—they just can’t take our word for it on your fingerprints, they’re going to have to print you, probably by one of their on-call experts. Because we’re going to need a station or three that has those kind of resources, plus wanting to make as much noise as possible as fast as possible, we’re going to need to head to a major city. Major news outlets. I don’t know if Phoenix is big enough. Dallas, maybe? What’s the closest really big city to here?”

  “A press conference?” Dave said, looking at him. His expression was hard to read. “That’s how you think we’re going to solve this problem?”

  “Sure. Why, do you have a better idea?”

  Crossing his arms, Dave said, “Jerome Beiers only had one offending fingerprint tying him to this whole mess. They snipped that off, and that’s all they needed to do. Instead, they took his finger and fucking killed him. Your boss, the head of the damn FBI Crime Lab, shot you, what, six times? And they’ve made two attempts on my life, near as I can figure, the second because the first one got so fucked up. That sound like people who are going to give a shit about a little tiny press conference we give?”

  “What alternative do we have? Unless you’re willing to cut off your fingers—and heck, I can’t do that, they tried to kill me because of what I know. But what else can we do? We have to do something that makes them realize killing us will no longer solve their problem. If everyone knows about your fingerprints killing us will just bring them under more suspicion.”

  “Don’t you know how this government works? The way all governments seem to work these days? They will paint us as nuts, as kooks. If we trot out a fingerprint expert, they’ll trot out ten that say the exact opposite. Then find kiddie porn on our computers to completely discredit us.” He pulled out his cell phone from somewhere. Mickey hadn’t seen Dave use a cell phone since they’d left on the trip. He fiddled with it as they talked.

  “But I worked for the FBI Lab!”

  “When they killed you, nobody ever found your body. I’m guessing that has them a little concerned, and on the off-chance that you do show up again, I bet that you’ll find out you embezzled some money, forged some checks, faked evidence in some cases you worked, downloaded donkey porn on your office computer, something. Something that will completely ruin your credibility, and put you in handcuffs, under their control. And you’ll commit suicide in your jail cell. Me too. Or one of us will get murdered by our cell mates. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or clean, they just need us out of the picture.” He set the cell phone in a kitchen drawer and closed it. Mickey could hear the phone beeping inside as it turned on.

  “If you think they’re going to do that, they don’t need to kill us then, they just need to destroy our credibility.”

  “Destroying our credibility doesn’t destroy my fingerprints. Even if they have experts from around the world saying my prints don’t match anything, someone else can always print me and see for themselves. They could have just framed you for something, and instead they drove you out to the hood and shot the shit out of you.”

  Mickey was starting to get irritated. “Okay, so you don’t like my idea, what’s yours? How are we going to get out of this?”

  Dave stared at him. “We’re not,” he said, in a tone that indicated he couldn’t believe Mickey hadn’t realized that already.

  That shut Mickey up for a few seconds. “What do you mean, we’re not?”

  “We have the whole fucking weight of the U.S. government coming down on us,” Dave told him. “Didn’t you ever hear the phrase, ‘You can’t fight city hall’? These guys are a lot bigger than city hall. They have a lot more resources.”

  “I don’t think the whole government knows about us.”

  Dave made a face. “No, just the parts of it that are in the business of killing people.”

  Mickey shook his head. Anderson wasn’t making any sense. “So you’re just going to, what? Give up? Why don’t you just turn yourself over to the FBI then? Why did we come out here?”

  “If I was going to give up I wouldn’t have brought all my guns,” Dave told him. “I wouldn’t be practicing my draw, and planting Turnerite around the property.”

  Dave drawing his gun over and over again had been annoying, but it was the Turnerite that had unnerved Mickey. Anderson had mixed the binary explosive, poured it into buckets with lids, then wrapped each one in layer after layer of drywall screws and duct tape, then two layers of white plastic bags to keep moisture and bugs out. He’d planted them around the property, just sitting out in the open. Even close up it wasn’t obvious what they were. “I thought you just said that you can’t fight city hall.”

  Dave smiled grimly. “Well, you can fight it. You just can’t win.”

  “What the hell are you even saying? That you came out here to die?”

  “Why do you think I was such a dickhead in the car on the way out here? You think I’m happy about this? It’s not easy to come to grips with your impending death. I’m fucking depressed as hell, dude. Jogging and working out and practicing my draw and painting the flagpole and putting the flag up and taking it down are what I’m doing to keep me from thinking about things.”

  Mickey shook his head rapidly. “Wait wait wait, what are you talking about? That you did come out here to die?”

  “I came out here to fight. I can’t sing, I can’t dance, and I can’t paint, but I can shoot. I can fucking shoot, that I can do. I’ve got no illusions about winning. Of living through it. Shit, for all I know they’re going to fly a drone out of White Sands and put a missile through the window. Training accident, that missile wasn’t supposed to have a live warhead. Oops, sorry, GPS error. We’re nothing but a crater, no fingerprints to worry about. The local sheriff’s department might get a hot tip about domestic terrorists from the feds and roll up here in armored personnel carriers and burn the place down with us inside. The people who are out to get us can do that, they can do all of those. They’ve just got to pick one. I’m just hoping to take a few of them with me before I go.”

  Mickey didn’t accept that, he’d never been a defeatist. “Come on. You’re young. You’re the same age as me, and I know I’m too young to die. Don’t you have anything to live for? Girlfriend, family, parents?”

  “Well, I’ve got a girlfriend, sort of,” Dave admitted.

  “What’s a ‘sort of’ girlfriend?”

  Mickey saw him smile ruefully. “It’s a long story. And you said you’d read my file, you know my parents are dead. Shit, for the last ten years, all I’ve wanted to be was an FBI agent. And now it’s the FBI that wants to kill me. Talk about irony.”

  “I don’t accept that. I didn’t come out here to give up. I don’t understand how you can feel that way. You’ve got fingerprints that match two other people. We can go to the press. We can raise so much of a ruckus that the government won’t dare to do anything.”

  “Two dead people, my prints matc
h two dead people, and they’re still trying to kill me. And who are we? You’re a rookie FBI fingerprint examiner, not even an agent, who walked away from his job, so you have no credibility. And I’m a cop killer. A racist cop killer. No matter what, both of us will end up dead, sooner or later. Accident, homicide, whatever. I don’t like it, goddammit, but I’m looking at the facts. I’m not giving up, I’m going out on my own terms.”

  Dave collapsed into a chair, looked around the small house, which was barely more than a cabin. “I’ve always loved coming out here. As a kid, the desert’s cool. After my parents died, I came out here for a couple weeks. To think. It’s quiet.”

  Mickey slumped against the refrigerator. “I’m sorry about your parents,” he said.

  Dave glanced up at him, then looked down at the floor between his feet. “I…..really, I’ve felt lost since they died. Just going through the motions. Like the FBI thing, it wasn’t nearly as important to me after they were gone. But….what else was I going to do?” He sighed. “Criminal justice degree, looking toward that career in law enforcement…and the guy who kills them is able to walk away, just walk away. Because of the law.” He frowned and shook his head angrily. He stared out of the window for a minute.

  “I like coming out here because it reminds me of them. Especially my dad. He would always find all sorts of make-work projects for us to do, so we could spend time together. Just us guys. His dad, my grandpa, built this house, and he worked on it as a kid. I remember, my mom would smile as we geared up. Dad would usually have me carry all the tools. I felt like such a grownup, swinging the hammer, helping to pour concrete. And you never know what you’re going to find outside. We found scorpions, saw a few rattlers, lizards. Scary, but cool. And he pulled more than a few cactus thorns out of my hands and butt.”

  Mickey saw a potential opening for Dave to see reason. “Your parents. You think they’d want you to give up? Want you to just wait for the end?”

  “You trying to guilt me with my dead parents? Dude, you have no idea….” He shook his head as if to clear it. “No, what I want doesn’t matter. Shit, what I want is for this to be over, one way or the other. Why do you think I put the battery back in my phone and turned it on?”

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “To make it easier for them to find out exactly where we are. And if that phone rings, don’t answer it. Just leave it in there.”

  Mickey huffed, stared at the drawer where the phone was, and stomped out of the house. He stood on the small concrete porch, staring at nothing. The sun was off to his left, warming that side of his face, and he turned to it and closed his eyes. It felt comforting, the heat. Eventually he turned his head and opened his eyes, scanning the cloudless pale blue sky. Would he even be able to see a drone? Would he even hear the missile before it hit? He had no idea at what elevation they flew, or how big the ones the government used domestically might be. Scanning for drones in the sky….it felt paranoid, but then again he still had pain in his ribs from where the Director of the FBI Lab, his boss, had shot him six times. This couldn’t be the end of his life, could it?

  “Come on,” he sobbed, long pent-up emotion suddenly overcoming him. It was ridiculous There had to be a way out of this, for both of them, him and his semi-suicidal partner. He went back inside.

  “Okay, Death Wish,” he said to Dave. “I don’t know anything about guns, but they can’t be harder to work than a microscope. Show me how to use that rifle you brought, and the shotgun. You’ve brought enough ammo with us, maybe we can do some shooting out back.” If he played along, maybe Dave wouldn’t be so confrontational with him, and they’d be able to talk. Seriously talk, about life, death, and their future together. Mickey was very persuasive. He figured it wouldn’t take him more than a few days to convince Dave that going to the press was the best solution to their problem.

  “That’s the spirit,” Dave said.

  Smith walked into his office, but didn’t bother sitting down. He knew it wouldn’t be a long visit. Colman handed him a file. He opened it to see visible light spectrum satellite imagery.

  “Found your target. He’s in the middle of nowhere Arizona.”

  Smith was looking at what looked like a small, nearly square residence, with an SUV parked in front. “What’s there?”

  “Small house. He owns it, and we knew about it, but Arizona’s a long way from Michigan. His phone went active there four hours ago, and a satellite pass two hours ago puts his vehicle there as well.” Colman pointed at the photos in the file. “We’ve tried listening in on his phone, but so far no audio. He’s barely got a signal out there.”

  “Middle of nowhere?”

  “Pretty much. You’ll be flying into Vegas. Farther away than Phoenix, but it’s a bigger airport, much easier to not get noticed. Plus, more equipment in the area at our disposal. I’m arranging a vehicle there, all the gear you’ll need inside. You should be able to get eyes on before dawn.”

  “You want us to move that quick? I’d like to work up a plan with my team.”

  “Work it up on the flight down. I want this done tomorrow if at all possible.”

  “We’re not flying commercial?”

  “No. Like I said, I want this done ASAP.”

  Smith nodded. “Copy that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Ringo sat at his kitchen table, eight in the morning, a cup of coffee in front of him, and stared at nothing. He looked up. “What?” He belatedly realized that his wife had been talking.

  His wife frowned at him and repeated, “I said, whatever the hell has you in a funk, you need to get over it. You’ve been dragging around since yesterday. You have a mistress die in a car accident or something?”

  “What? Jeez, Mary.” He shook his head. Sometimes she just came out of left field with the things she said. Mistress? Like he needed more feminine headaches in his life on top of a menopausal wife and bitchy teenage daughter. He looked around the kitchen. It was filled with knick-knacks, candles, baskets, rosy-cheeked figurines…it was hideous. How had he never noticed that before? This was no way for a man to live. Idly he wondered why the hell gay male couples ever broke up—shit, there was no woman involved, so everything had to run pretty smoothly, right? Lot less drama?

  “Well, whatever it is, you need to get over it, or get on with it. Is it work?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Shit.” He’d been running on autopilot for a day and a half, completely shell-shocked by the recording that Diana Wilson had dumped on him. He hadn’t known what to do, but knew he had to do something. Even if that recorder hadn’t turned up, the discovery that David Anderson was probably the target in the Northfield murders, and that Pietro Bufonte was a potential suspect, had flipped a lot of switches. Bill Rochester had called the FBI, and they’d seemed very interested in the possibility that Detroit organized crime was involved. Yeahhhhhhh, no shit.

  Ringo assumed that Bufonte had bought Hartman and maybe a few other local FBI agents, and they were now trying to control the investigation. It seemed like Ringo’d made and received a hundred calls over the past two days, monitoring the progress of all the other detectives he’d met at that crime scene, but not doing much himself. Two things he learned—1. Nobody knew anything more than they had two days ago, and 2. Nobody had been able to track down Anderson. He wasn’t answering his cell phone, and three different detectives had made at least four trips to Anderson’s residence without finding anyone at home. His front door was stuffed with business cards. Both Bill Rochester and Cashman from Oakland County had expressed serious concern. Shit.

  With what he knew, Ringo was more than just seriously concerned. He wondered if maybe Anderson was already dead in a ditch somewhere. They wouldn’t need to make the body disappear; you kill three cops, even if they’re dirty, you automatically make a lot of enemies. Anderson showing up dead wouldn’t surprise anyone.

  Time to not just make phone calls but get off his ass. Actually do some detective work. He stood up, and handed the coffee
cup to Mary. “Here, drink up,” he said, and started looking for his shoes and gun.

  “What am I going to do with this? I don’t drink coffee.”

  “Maybe you should start,” he called back to her. “Give you the pep you need to do some cleaning.”

  Some quick phone calls from the car confirmed that Anderson hadn’t worked since the day of the shooting. He didn’t blame him for that, but he still felt a small wiggle of doubt. Dammit, he never should have sat there and done almost nothing on the case for two days, not when he knew the FBI had tried to kill the kid. That was unforgivable. Nobody knew he had the recording, and until they did he was free to work the case any way he wanted. He left a message on Anderson’s voicemail, then checked the file and called John Phault.

  “Mr. Phault? Detective John George with the Detroit Police Department.” They’d met at the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department substation in Rochester Hills right after the shooting, as the many and varied jurisdictions tried to figure out who was in charge, and whether or not Anderson was going to jail.

  It only took John half a second to place the voice. It belonged to the tired looking guy he remembered from the long meeting that ran until midnight. “Yes, detective?”

  “Have you talked to Mr. Anderson recently? I’m trying to get hold of him and getting voicemail.”