“You need to back off,” Ed says.
“Did he tell you I beat his head in?”
“You did what?”
“I beat the shit out of the guy.”
“Why the hell would you beat up a federal agent? Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, Ed. I actually think I am. You know how some things set me off. Like when a guy walks in on a woman in the shower with bad intent. Like in that movie Psycho. You ever see that, Ed?” I don’t tell him I’ve had Leon tailing Lomax too.
“What are you doing back in Texas, Freddy?”
“This place keeps sucking me in.”
“Stay away from Lomax.”
“No, Ed. I can’t back off of this one.”
“You have to,” he says.
“Why?”
“Don’t ask that question. The airline is paying your salary so stick to the case. It has nothing to do with Lomax.”
“Listen, Ed—”
“Sorry, Freddy, this one’s not negotiable. Back off. You hear me?”
I say nothing.
“You hear me, Freddy?”
“Yeah, Ed. I hear you. Call me back when you find out about that credit card purchase.”
36
The drive up to Dime Box doesn’t go as I had hoped. Traffic on Route 10 west of Houston sets me back an hour and a half. In Columbus, I make the mistake of turning onto the part of Route 90 that runs through town, where Patty Rice is holding a rally in front of the Santa Claus Museum. The road is choked with security vehicles and either I’m not following the cues right, or the cops are directing people in circles. That costs me another hour.
I do enjoy the irony, though, of listening to Rice’s address on local radio live from the Santa Claus Museum. Patty the promiser, with her platform of handouts for everyone. I picture her in a bright red suit, throwing candy canes to the crowd.
A big chunk of her speech is about numbers: how many dollars the state allocates per student in the public schools, the projected rise in health-care costs, the number of bonds the state will need to float to cover infrastructure improvements. After a while, it starts to sound like an accounting presentation. But every number comes with the promise that she’ll increase it.
Jumbo Throckmorton, meanwhile, is live on the other end of the AM dial. He’s up in Amarillo, telling the locals how he’s been sticking it to the bad guys throughout his career and how he’s going to keep sticking it to them.
“Can we talk about something voters care about?” Throckmorton says to the cheering crowd. “Can we talk about how every major industry in the state of Texas supports my campaign? Do you know why that is? It’s because I understand how organizations run. Not Patty Rice. Businesses don’t want a tax-and-spend liberal who’s going to regulate the legals to death and turn a blind eye to the illegals. She’s a Californian posing as a Texan, and we don’t need any more of her.”
One thing I’ll give the guy: he knows how to connect with his audience.
By the time I get to Dime Box, it’s dark. From the end of Travis’s gravel drive, I can see the porch light burning, but there’s no light coming from inside the big front window. I want to check up on my witness, but I haven’t heard a thing from her in days, and I have no idea what state of mind she’s in. If I walk in on her in the dark, she might shoot me.
So I head to The Buckaroo, where I find Travis on his stool, talking to one of the locals about when it’s going to rain. He does a double take when he sees me. The local takes the opportunity to excuse himself and avoid more of Travis’s drunk talk.
“How’s Anna?” I ask.
He eyes me kind of funny, and then I remember what state he was in the night I drove him home. He might not remember I was at his house.
“Who?” he says.
“You don’t have to protect her. I already talked to her. How’s she doing?”
He’s a little bleary, but not as drunk as he was the first time we talked.
“She ain’t so good,” he says.
“Is she eating?”
“Yeah, she eats. She’s nervous all the time.”
“If I stop by to see her—”
“I wouldn’t,” he says. “Not till daylight. She’s like to snap.”
“Has she been talking to anyone?”
“Just me. And the shit she says don’t make no sense. The cops are out to get her. The FBI’s out to get her. Only one who loves her is Jesus.”
“Well, that’s something,” I say. “I’ll stop by tomorrow. You tell her, OK?”
“What’s your name again, mister?”
“Freddy. Tell her Freddy’s gonna stop by.”
As I walk out, I hear him order a shot of Jack Daniels. He’s going to forget. I know it.
37
I check into a motel in Elgin after a late dinner—the same motel I stayed in the night I met Anna Brook. It’s about thirty miles west of Travis’s house, still in the flatlands. The hill country is farther to the south and west.
The news channels are all running stories on the missing TSA agent, Timothy Welcher. Fox says he died of drug and alcohol poisoning. He was thirty-two years old, unmarried but had a steady girlfriend. He grew up in San Diego. Same age as Lomax. Same neighborhood, in fact. I do some digging online and find that he and Lomax played baseball together in high school.
Both Fox and CNN are calling Welcher’s death a suicide. Then CNN shows a photo of a face I haven’t seen in a while. It’s the garbage collector from San Francisco International with the big ears. The Feds are asking for help in locating him.
I give Ed a call.
“How are you holding up?” I ask.
“I’d be doing better if I could get out of here.”
“You didn’t make it to the army surplus store?”
“No. They open at eight tomorrow. It’s crazy out here. I’m having trouble connecting with my sources.”
“What’s going on?”
“Internal problems. The Bureau’s all bent out of shape about something.”
“I see they got the Cambodian guy up on TV now.”
“Yeah” he says. “TSA didn’t like those videos of him in the terminal. They would have released his photo earlier, but they thought they had him. By the way, I told them that tip came from you.”
“Thanks, Ed. They still don’t know who he called? Right before the flight took off?”
“No. Like I told you before, it was a burner phone out in one of the long-term parking lots.”
“That phone spend any time in Texas?”
Ed’s quiet for a couple of seconds. “How’d you know that?”
“Dallas area?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you ask me to stay away from Lomax, Ed?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“What was it you told me when you first mentioned Lomax and Rollins? You said something about them being on a nowhere case, with cops ratting on cops?”
“So?”
“So, Ed. Go down to that surplus store first thing tomorrow and let me know what you find.”
I don’t usually tell Ed what to do, but I can see he doesn’t get what’s going on. Why would he tell me to stay away from Lomax? And why are his contacts in the Bureau all bent out of shape? I’m thinking about that painter at the house in Silver Spring who wasn’t really a painter. And the blue Dodge Dart that, when given the choice to follow me or Lomax, followed Lomax. I’m thinking about Timothy Welcher, the dead TSA agent, and how his girlfriend said she overheard him talking to someone outside the apartment the night of the crash. She didn’t recognize the voice, but Welcher seemed comfortable with the guy, like he knew him. And then he never returned.
What kinds of things get the FBI bent out of shape? One is when some private eye starts following the same guy they’re following. They don’t want the amateurs messing up their work. Another is when an agent brings shame upon the Bureau. When he comes i
nto the Hoover Building all jittery, with dilated pupils. Or even worse, when he’s somehow wrapped up in a crime they’re busting their asses to sort out. They don’t like that kind of situation one bit.
While I’m mulling all this over, I get a call from Chester Dixon. It’s well past midnight.
“Ferguson!”
“Hey, Chester. How’d you know I’d be awake?”
“If you weren’t, I would have woken you up.”
“You sound excited.”
“I just had a long talk with your friend Alfonso Jiménez in Dallas. Did you know the State Patrol up there was protecting Sheldon Brown?”
“Yeah. I had a talk with a girl at Brown’s house. She told me they used to come by to tell Brown to quiet down. I also had a little run-in with them myself. They seemed to be watching the place.”
“Well,” Dixon says, “Jiménez didn’t like that. And remember what I told you about those two drug busts? How there was a lot more money involved than was reported in the news?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, guess where that went?”
“I’m guessing Midland-Odessa Custom Hauling. Green Grass Septic. Taylor Automotive. What kind of evidence do you have?”
“Jiménez has been working on a couple of cops in Dallas, and they’re ready to talk. And I got another little tidbit for you, though I’m not sure how it fits in. Remember our friend Ramón?”
“How could I forget?”
“All that stuff edited out of his records, or just plain missing?”
“He was an informant, right?”
“Yeah. For the state. But when his associates figured out he was the one leaking information, he begged the cops to get him out of Texas. So they passed him off to some Fed who took him somewhere else.”
“Why’d he come back to Texas?”
“I don’t know,” Dixon says. “Why do criminals do half the shit they do? Because they’re fucking dumbasses. If the guy knew how to make an honest living, he’d have done that and saved himself a life of trouble.”
* * *
After I hang up with Dixon, I give Anna a call. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message telling her I’ll stop by tomorrow.
But my nerves are on edge and I can’t sleep, so I turn on the news. CNN is reporting that a source inside the FBI says the Bureau may be releasing Rashad Obasanjo soon. There are already protesters outside his parents’ house in Oakland, and Obasanjo’s family is under protection. The threats against his family have increased since the alt-right news sites started reporting earlier in the day that “the terrorist” would be freed.
CNN has a reporter embedded in the crowd of protesters at the Obasanjo house. He keeps looking behind him as he describes the scene and the general air of tension. “This crowd feels like it could turn at any moment,” he says. On the right edge of the screen, someone is waving a burning t-shirt on a stick, and farther back, the cops are moving in on three people fighting beside a burning garbage can.
I turn the TV off. What a state we’re in…
* * *
I don’t remember falling asleep, but around three a.m. I wake up in a sweat. This time, it’s the other dream. The one that’s haunted me for years.
I’m eight years old, and I walk into the living room of our apartment in Philadelphia. Mom is lying dead on the floor. She’s on her side, facing away from me, with her head resting on her arm, while Dad sits on the couch watching the baseball game and drinking beer like she’s not even there.
That’s not how it really went down, but I’ve had this dream a thousand times, and it always leaves me with a heavy feeling of dread that saps my strength for days.
I finally told Ed about this a few weeks ago. After all these years, he’s the first person I’ve ever told. He could see the weariness and sickness on my face on the mornings I woke up from that dream. He had seen it for a long time. A few weeks ago, at the beginning of the Smithsonian case—the case that took me out to San Francisco—he finally pulled me aside and asked me straight-up if I had a drinking problem. “I’ve seen you come in to work too many times looking like that.”
“I don’t have a drinking problem, Ed. I have a problem with a past that will never change.”
I didn’t go into detail. I just told him I had this dream, and it upset me.
“You want to talk to someone about that?”
“That’s the thing, Ed. I can’t.”
“Well then, you’re stuck.”
“Yeah, Ed, I’m fucking stuck. And it cost me a career, and it cost me a marriage, and it’s going to keep on costing me forever and ever.”
I can’t get those images out of my head. My mother crumpled on the floor. My father on the couch, utterly indifferent.
I can’t stop sweating, and I feel trapped. It’s 3:16 a.m., and the whirlpool is pulling me down.
In a panic, I call Miriam.
“What is it?” she says. “What’s wrong?” The fear in her voice wakes her husband, who says something in a groggy voice with a thick Serbian accent.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Calm down.”
“It’s nothing,” she says to her husband. “Go back to sleep.” Then she says to me, in a quiet voice, “What’s the matter, Freddy? Why are you calling me in the middle of the night?”
“Were you ever afraid of me?” I ask.
“What?”
“Were you ever afraid of me?”
“Well,” she says, “you can be moody. That’s not easy to live with.”
“No, I mean, were you ever afraid I would hurt you?”
“No, Freddy. Never.”
“My temper didn’t scare you?”
“It scared me all right, but I never feared for my safety.”
“You never thought I’d hit you?”
“No!” She says it like the question is shocking and offensive. “Freddy, if you didn’t hit me after all the things I did—after Lenny in particular—I couldn’t see you ever hitting any woman. What brought this up?”
“I had a little run-in the other day.”
“With a woman?”
“Yeah. She said some things that got to me, and I said some things I regret. I swear I was going to hit her. I don’t know what stopped me.”
“You did, Freddy. You stopped you.”
“It scared the shit out of me.”
“Well that’s a good thing,” she says. “It means your moral compass is working. You’re not your father, Freddy. Don’t you understand that? You’re not him.”
“I don’t know that for sure.” My mouth is dry. I can’t stop shaking, and I can’t stop sweating.
“Well I do. Your father was an alcoholic. You don’t drink more than two beers a week. Have you ever been drunk?”
“A couple times,” I say. “But I have his temper too.”
“And you have restraint. He didn’t.”
“I didn’t have restraint with Chuck DiLeo.”
“Well maybe he didn’t deserve it. Freddy…” I hear her shift the phone to her other ear. “I antagonized you from the beginning of our relationship to the end because I just wanted you to open up. You are the most frustrating, exasperating person I have ever met. Ever! Some of the things I said to you—well, if anyone had said those things to me, I would have hit them. I would have punched them right in the face. And I know you loved me, Freddy. I know you did.”
“Yeah, well… How’s little Lenny doing?”
“Good,” she says. “I cleared up the birthday party, so we’re back on. Sorry for the confusion.”
“Thanks.”
“He’s really excited,” she whispers, and I can hear the happiness in her voice. “And I love your idea of having all the zoo animals. While you’re comparing yourself to your father, you should ask if he ever would have done anything like that for you. Give yourself some credit, will you?”
“Yeah, I know. This job just gets me bent out of shape sometimes.”
>
“Freddy?”
“Huh?”
“You gonna talk to someone?”
I’m not sure if that’s a dig or real concern. “I’m talking to you,” I say.
“I know you are. It’s a few years too late, but it’s a start. Maybe all that work I put into you will pay off someday for somebody else.”
“Yeah, maybe. Hey, um… good night, Miriam. Thanks for listening.”
“Good night, Freddy.”
I don’t really hate her. I could never hate her. I just don’t like to admit how much she hurt me, or how badly I let it all go wrong.
38
October 10
I had so much buzzing through my head last night, I was up till dawn.
I slept till eleven and could have gone on sleeping if I didn’t force myself to get up. According to the mirror, I look like shit, even for me. Five days without shaving, and there are dark, puffy bags under my bleary eyes.
After I wash up and get the coffeemaker going, I turn on the TV and flip to ESPN. I can’t stand any more news. Beach volleyball is a much nicer way to ease into the morning. Four good-looking women enjoying a day of sport. Though I never could figure out why the sand doesn’t stick to them when they fall.
My phone vibrates with a text from Ed. The damn thing’s been in silent mode since I hung up with Chester Dixon. Ed’s text says to call him ASAP.
When I call, the first thing out of his mouth is, “Who the hell is Charles Johnston?”
“No one,” I say. “Why?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Freddy. Who is he?”
“He’s no one. Literally. He does not exist.”
“I went to the army surplus store this morning. The purchase on that Visa card, you know what it was?”
“An ammo box. And I bet it was a metal one, with a metal clasp, just like the one that held the explosives on the plane.”
“You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? And you know what else? That photo you sent me the day after the crash? The tall guy in the security line? He’s the one who made the purchase. The clerk described him exactly.”
“Pretty convenient he’s dead, huh?”
“He’s dead?”
“Yeah, look up Ramón Ramírez in Texas. He was all over the news for a couple of days.” I can hear Ed tapping on the keyboard of his laptop.
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