Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  He used human silhouette targets.

  That night he made love with Beth, cradled her in his arms as she gently slid back and forth on top of him. He called her name aloud and whispered the words in his heart. Sunday they rested, and she failed to talk him out of going.

  Monday morning he caught a taxi to the airport, refusing her offer of a ride so she couldn’t hug him after he’d strapped on the Sig in the airport bathroom; so she wouldn’t see him fill out the armed peace officer air-travel forms at the airline counter.

  San Francisco is America’s most beautiful city, with its bridges, roller-coaster hills, Chinatown and Coit Tower, Alcatraz, its flowers and cool blue skies and smiling people.

  San Francisco was where Mathew Hopkins lived, a Navy man who’d worked in the White House and died in the bull pen of an L.A. wino bar.

  The VA sent Hopkins’s 100-percent-disability checks to a house in Richmond, a quiet neighborhood of attached homes close enough to the ocean to hear foghorns. Wes landed in San Francisco midmorning and before noon, discovered the address was a basement apartment of a gray stucco house. The basement unit had elaborate iron grillwork over all the windows. The barred entrance was recessed under the concrete stairs leading up to the main unit. In the gap between Hopkins’s bars and his locked and curtained front door, Wes found a dirt-smudged business card for a San Francisco policeman who’d tried to relay the message from LAPD to anyone who lived there that Mathew Hopkins had died.

  “He ain’t home,” said a woman’s voice.

  Wes looked out from under the stairs, saw a pudgy woman staring back at him. She flinched at the bruises on his face.

  “Do you live in the upper unit?” asked Wes. His Gore-Tex briefcase was in his left hand.

  “Who wants to know?” She edged closer to the stairs.

  Wes showed her NIS credentials, wished he had a badge.

  “Cop, huh? Should have figured. You look like you caught a bad one.”

  “Yes,” said Wes.

  “Is Matt okay?”

  “Matt?”

  “Matt Hopkins, the guy whose door you’re poking ’round. I live upstairs, I’m his landlady. A widow.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Hell, who keeps track of time? Figure, well, he mailed his rent check, so … six, maybe seven weeks.”

  “He’s the quiet type,” she said. “Smokes too much, eats too much red meat and frozen dinners, but what’s a bachelor to do, huh? Cookin’ for one ain’t easy. You live alone?”

  “Yes,” said Wes, “what—”

  “You shouldn’t. Look at you: you need someone to take care of you. You want some coffee? I got sprout salad for lunch.”

  “I’ve got some bad news for you: Mr. Hopkins is dead.”

  She blinked, said, “Not … he wasn’t sick, was he?”

  “An accident,” said Wes. “In L.A.”

  “Shit. No wonder he ain’t been around.”

  “I’m with the federal government,” said Wes. “And—”

  “I thought you was a cop.”

  “I’m more than that, I’m a lawyer.”

  “Oh,” she said. And smiled.

  “We have to help process Mr. Hopkins estate. Do you have a key to his apartment?”

  “Sure. He never lets me go down there, though.”

  “He won’t mind.”

  “Oh. That’s right.” She winked. “You wait here.”

  Five minutes later she hurried back down the concrete steps. She had a ring of keys. She’d brushed her hair.

  “He put on all these locks,” she said, using three keys. “And you should see the back! Bars on all the windows. I made him pay for them and I insisted on getting copies of the keys.”

  “That was smart,” said Wes.

  She laughed. Opened the door.

  The air floating out of the basement apartment was stale and thick. Something rotten tingled their nostrils.

  The widow sniffed, opened her mouth to speak, but closed it. She put one foot inside the door, pulled it back.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like dead.” She shuddered. “Gives me the creeps.

  “Look,” she continued, “could you do this without me? I don’t want to … Not right away. I’ll wait upstairs. I been picking up his mail. Only junk stuff, but you might want it. Just ring the buzzer—Annie McLeod. I’ll make fresh coffee. Is that okay?”

  “That’ll be fine,” said Wes, and he gave her a smile that sent her scurrying back up the stairs, happy.

  He waited until he heard her door close, then he stepped inside and turned on the light.

  Books. Hundreds and hundreds of books, four crammed metal-tiered shelves jutting out from one wall that turned the living room into a library. Stacks of books on the floor. Quality books from New York publishers, green and brown and white paperbound congressional hearings, volumes from publishers Wes had never heard of. A few books in French, Spanish. The books had titles full of words like spooks, secret, spy, conspiracy, assassination, power, enemies, patriots, lie. They were dog-earred, yellow highlighted or underlined in ink, with notes jotted in the margins and page-referenced on the inside covers. Between the bookshelves were stacks of magazines and newspapers. Two file cabinets were full of clippings. There was a desk near the curtained bay window, but Wes passed it by to wander back through the apartment—and stare at the walls.

  No wonder Mathew Hopkins hadn’t let his landlady in here.

  Pictures torn from newspapers were taped on the walls next to pictures cut from books. Black-and-white photos of soldiers in jungles, men in front of government-looking buildings. Official portraits. American-looking men, Asians, Africans, swarthy Europeans, Hispanics. Group shots in the boonies or in crowded streets in which a keyhole-sized face would be circled in red ink. White House aides sitting tight-lipped in front of microphones while lawyers whispered in their ear. Defendants waving as they walked from courthouses, newsmen in tow. A shot of a smiling man in a topcoat standing in Red Square. A tall, twisted-frowned man in handcuffs being led past a jail door. Wes recognized a magazine photo of a Marine lieutenant colonel raising his hand to swear to tell the truth to Congress.

  But it was the charts that boggled Wes.

  Sketch-pad sheets covered with felt-penned notations and names, dates: SOG and CRP and JADE and Project 404. DELTA and B-56, FANK and Raven. White Star. TF/157. Team B. Nugan Hand. Mongoose. YELLOWFRUIT. Castle Bank. VEIL. Charts listed spy and covert warfare agencies, from the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity to the Navy’s SEALs. Dozens of businesses, foundations, political groups, and lobby associations had places on Mathew Hopkins’s wall. The charts listed hundreds of people’s names, some famous, some notorious, most unknown to Wes, some with stars or exclamation points inked beside them, some with question marks, some with death dates.

  Green and red and blue and black and yellow Magic Marker lines trailed off the charts, tracked across the white walls to connect to names on other charts, to photographs. To nowhere.

  The retired spy from Task Force 157 had told Wes how insanity sometimes infected those in the secret professions.

  “Who were you looking for?” Wes asked the walls.

  Nowhere did he see Jud Stuart’s name.

  Garbage stank in the kitchen, the refrigerator was icy.

  The bedroom was fastidious. Clothes hung symmetrically in the closet, stacked neatly in the bureau drawers. Wes was sure he could bounce a coin off the boot-camp taut bedspread.

  His leg and his ribs hurt. He sat on the bed. Heard a clunk by the headboard. Wes reached behind the pillows, ran his hand along the edge of the mattress.

  Found a hammerless, five-shot revolver. Loaded.

  The desk in the living room bay window was a beautiful old rolltop with dozens of pigeonholes. Wes found phone bills with no long-distance calls. He opened the middle drawer.

  Found a loaded .45 Colt automatic, the p
istol that until recently had been the sidearm for American armed forces.

  The L.A. police report noted that nothing had been found on Hopkins’s body but clothes. Did you have a gun with you when you died? wondered Wes. Why or why not?

  A thick scrapbook lay under the automatic. Wes put the gun on the desk, opened the scrapbook.

  He found an opened envelope addressed to Hopkins, no return address, a Maryland postmark dated a few weeks earlier. The envelope was empty, but paper-clipped to it was an astrology column from a tacky supermarket tabloid. The column had a January 1990 date. Its reverse side had a story about a priest who exploded while performing an exorcism. In the horoscope listing for Aries, the words lovesick heart were underlined repeatedly in red.

  Astrology columns from the same newspaper were glued to the pages of the scrapbook in chronological order dating back years. In some of the horoscopes, phrases or words were yellow highlighted or underlined, question marks or exclamation points inked in the margins.

  The big drawer on the left bottom side of the desk had three other scrapbooks of astrology columns.

  The big drawer on the right side of the desk held two thermite grenades, each one capable of turning a room into an exploding inferno.

  A framed photograph sat on top of the desk: an impossibly young man in a starched white sailor uniform stood beneath a tree, one arm on the shoulder of a solemn old man, his other arm draped around a plump, old woman in a flowered dress. The camera had caught the old woman with her hand moving, almost to her chest as it rose to cover her nervous laugh.

  Wes stared at the picture, the gun on the desk, the grenades in the drawer, the twisted history taped to the walls.

  “What were you afraid of?” asked Wes. “What were you doing? What were you looking for?”

  A loud buzz came from inside Wes’s briefcase. The buzz sounded again before Wes could unzip the briefcase and answer his portable cellular phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bingo!” said Seymour’s nasal voice, long distance from Los Angeles. “We spotted your motorcycle man outside an apartment building half an hour ago. Walked to a teller machine, went back inside. Got a backup team there before he came out with the sorriest-looking chick in the world. She gave him keys, he climbed in a black Trans Am, and off he went. We got two cars leapfrogging behind him, a third as a way-back rear guard.

  “Hennie followed the chick back into the building. Said the girl was happy to see the dude gone.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Wes.

  “Her mailbox matched up with the Trans Am registration I got out of DMV. The landlord said that the chick is a paralegal. Landlord don’t like the boyfriend. His motorcycle’s in the underground garage, in the girl’s space.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “He’s a rabbit with a suitcase and a shoulder duffel. Wearing an old canvas cowboy duster, driving a black Trans Am.”

  “I’ll call you from the airport!” Wes hung up.

  This place. He looked at the grenades: one tossed back inside as he slammed the door and ran would wipe out every trace of whatever was here, whatever Wes hadn’t seen that no one else should see. One pulled pin, and all of Mathew Hopkins’s life was history.

  Annie McLeod upstairs making coffee, waiting, wouldn’t fare too well either. But the sin of burning away the memories of the dead man was why he put the weapons and the scrapbook back in the desk, locked the apartment when he left to run to his car.

  He phoned Seymour from the airport rental-car return.

  “He’s headed north on U.S. Fifteen!” said Seymour. “We’re three deep behind him and we ain’t been spotted.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Damned if I know. He’s got about five hours of nothing between him and Las Vegas.”

  “Don’t lose him,” said Wes. He hung up.

  Across the parking lot from the car rental company’s window, he saw a sign: CORPORATE CHARTER AIR.

  Two men and a woman were laughing behind the counter at the charter air company when Wes barreled through the door, brandishing his NIS identification like a vampire hunter’s crucifix. He pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills out of his briefcase and said, “I need a charter jet to Las Vegas—now!”

  THE BLACK CAR

  Jud saw the black car coming as he stood inside the window of Nora’s Café. Like the man in the Oasis Bar, the black car didn’t belong where it was; like that killer, Jud knew the black car had come for him.

  At first the car was just a shimmer on the horizon at the end of the long highway, a dark core skimming out of a silver lake where the sky curved to touch the earth.

  “Nora,” whispered Jud softly.

  “Yeah, hon?” she answered from the till where she was counting the lunch take. Smoke curled up from her ashtray.

  Carmen was in the back, watching TV. Except for the three of them, the café was empty that afternoon.

  The black car emerged out of the mirage. Came closer. Closer.

  “Did you want something?” said Nora.

  Her Jeep was parked by her house. If he made her run now, if Carmen waddled out the kitchen as fast as she could, if there was no trouble with the Jeep’s keys or the starter, Nora might make it. Carmen, too. If he stayed behind. For the black car.

  In his trailer, a blue airline shoulder bag now held Jud’s gun and the money he’d stolen in L.A. so long/so short a time ago, plus the cash Nora had paid him. The blue bag hung on a hook just inside the trailer door. If they all ran now, they could probably make it before.

  The black car was only a half mile away.

  Jud’s hands trembled over the apron he wore for dishwashing; his guts churned. Maybe it was just demons taunting him.

  Nora shut the till. “What do you see out there?”

  Too late. The black car slowed down to forty, thirty miles per hour, cruised along the edge of the café parking lot.

  Cruised past it: stayed on the highway, rolled right on by Nora’s, right past the telephone booth on the side of the road. The black car picked up speed and roared down the highway, out of sight around a curve on the flat tumbleweed horizon.

  Jud laughed out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” said Nora, joining him at the window, looking out.

  Two dirty American sedans, one right after the other, whizzed by the café in the black car’s wake.

  “Looks like we lost some business.” Jud laughed again.

  “You got a peculiar sense of funny,” she told him.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning to her, wanting to kiss her.

  Her brow wrinkled, but she smiled back, said, “What?”

  He just shook his head, watched her. She blushed, turned her eyes to the outside.

  “Nope,” she said, “looks like we’re in luck.”

  The black car had driven past, circled back. Tires crunched on the pavement in front of the café as it pulled up to the door. The engine shut off. Sunlight bouncing on the windshield made the driver inside a blur of light. The door opened.

  And Dean stepped out. He wore a pale canvas duster and an ivory-toothed grin.

  “This is for me,” Jud said. He stepped outside, leaving her to stare through the glass.

  “You’re not supposed to be here!” Jud yelled to Dean.

  Dean raised his hands to the sky. “So sue me!” He jerked his thumb toward the pay phone. “You weren’t answering.”

  “Come around back,” said Jud.

  A dirty Japanese sedan slowly rolled past on the highway; its driver watched the two men circle around back of the café.

  As they headed toward Jud’s trailer, Dean nodded to where they’d last seen Nora. “So how much is that doggy in the window?”

  Jud threw a right jab at Dean’s face—but Dean caught the punch.

  Dean’s eyes widened. “Hell, what’s happened here?”

  Sinking his weight, twisting his waist, Jud jerked his fist free of Dean’s grasp.

  “Time was, I’d have neve
r seen that coming,” whispered Dean. “Time was, when you were the man and I was … Who was I?”

  Then he laughed.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What do you want?” Jud’s hands trembled at his sides.

  “What do I want?” Dean shook his head. “Well, right now—right now, I don’t know.

  “I came here ’specting to rock ’n’ roll, just like before, you the man and me … But looks like the old days are dead.”

  “I mean,” he said, “nice apron.

  “Is this where you been all these years?” asked Dean. “Is this what happened to you?”

  “Never mind me,” said Jud.

  “Minding you is why I’m here. You called me: I was waiting for that call, man, waiting years. You dropped me like I was dog shit, then you call me, and it’s all supposed to be okay, asshole buddies again. You say cover my tracks, bird-dog my trail, and you were right, there was a suit sniffing ’round after you—”

  “Who?”

  “—but Dean, he handled that, got the guy gone, no more looking-lawyer bullshit—”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I did what Dean does.”

  “You should have IDed him! Got back to me!”

  “He got to me, Jack! Way I figure it, somebody popped your writer buddy’s phone records and put Dean in the bull’s-eye.”

  There it is, thought Jud. The step that had been haunting him, the trail he’d left from the pay phone that first night. And now Nick …

  “Now what?” said Dean. “Now that you’re whoever you are.”

  “You know who I am,” said Jud.

  “Maybe I do,” said Dean. “Maybe I do.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You owe me,” said Dean. “Your trouble bounced me out of L.A. You owe me for that. You owe me for what I did. You owe me for all that waiting.”

  “I’ll give you all the cash I got,” said Jud.

  “You’ll give me?” Dean laughed, a dry cackle. He whirled around in a circle, his coat swirling around him.