Judas Horse

by April Smith

  “What’s going on right now, Ana? Take your time.”

  “I don’t know why I should be upset. I did a really good job. Does it say in there—Do you know my history?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does it say that I once shot a police detective at point-blank range?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Okay. That’s all.”

  “Do you think about that incident a lot, Ana?”

  “All the time.”

  “Can you describe your thoughts?”

  “Like a track playing in the background.”

  “Do specific images and ideas intrude into your daily activities?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often?”

  “All the time.”

  “How’s your mood lately?”

  “Sad.”

  “Ever since this second shooting?”

  “No, because I’m bored! The case is going nowhere; there’s nothing to do. We’re waiting for the harvest—we grow hazelnuts—and for the leader of the group to make another move, but all he does is read the fish reports.”

  “He’s a fisherman?”

  “No, he reads the fish counts in the paper. Out loud, every morning. How many salmon went through the fishways at the Bonneville Dam. It’s nuts.”

  “Well, they’re spawning. Some people think it’s a big deal.”

  “Like I care.”

  “Are you more irritable lately?”

  “Obviously. More like numbed out.”

  “Remind me—how long ago did you go through critical incident training at the FBI?”

  “A couple of months after the shooting incident. It’s standard before they let you back to work.”

  “Did you receive a diagnosis at that time of PTSD?”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder? Yeah, we all had it; that’s why we were there.”

  “I’m curious—”

  “You’re curious about a lot of things.”

  “Did you have follow-up with a psychologist? PTSD usually takes more than a few sessions to improve. But it can improve. Dramatically.”

  “Well, a woman doctor in Los Angeles evaluated me—I forget her name, but she’s the one who approved me for duty.”

  “I’m not sure that she did.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Let me try to clear up the confusion. You fit every criterion for a diagnosis of PTSD. You’ve had life-threatening trauma, resulting in intense fear and horror. Your current symptoms include mental replay of the trauma, numbing, avoidance, intrusive thoughts…. And all of this has been going on since your evaluation, months ago. Frankly, I can’t see why they put you on this case.”

  “I fit the profile.”

  “Hundreds of other young female FBI agents fit the profile, too. Let me explain. I’m retired from private practice, Ana. I own an office building in downtown Portland and property in Seattle. I have a very nice life and I don’t need the money. I’m an old lefty, and I don’t give a damn if I’m fired by the FBI or if they screw with my tax returns, or whatever. You’re smiling.”

  “We don’t do that, but go ahead.”

  “I do this to keep my hand in, and because I want to be of service. So I can be objective, and say, objectively, that there’s been an egregious error.”

  “You think they know about the PTSD?”

  “Any examining doctor would have recommended that you not serve undercover.”

  “The SAC and the assistant director approved me.”

  “Then somewhere along the line, the doctor was overruled.”

  “Are you saying they put me on this case on purpose? Hoping I would crack?”

  “I’m strongly suggesting that there has been an error—error, not malice—because I would like to believe that no ethical commander would intentionally send a disabled soldier back into battle.”

  “Unless he wanted you to fail.”

  “That has not been my experience of the Bureau.”

  “Do you know Peter Abbott?”

  “The son of the congressman from Oregon?”

  “Yes, well, now Peter Abbott is a deputy director of the FBI. My boss believes he is trying to undermine this case. Or at least bend it his way. We don’t know why. It all started out so crystal clear, but now I couldn’t tell you who is running their game on whom. This is exactly where you’re not supposed to be, and it’s pissing me off.”

  “You’re an excellent foot soldier, Ana, and you have extraordinary qualities of persistence and dedication, but you’re still coping with long-term effects of the shooting incident. It’s like telling someone with pneumonia, ‘Go swim the Atlantic.’ I’m going to recommend that you’re removed from this case.”

  “No! You can’t do that! I’m fine. I’ll take back everything I said!”

  “I am deeply concerned about your safety. What would you like me to do?”

  “I need to talk to my contact agent, Mike Donnato. He’s the only one I trust.”

  “What do you mean, the only one you can trust?”

  “I wasn’t feeling crazy before I came here, but I’m sure feeling crazy now. Do all your patients say that? Doctor? That was a joke. Look, I have to go. My partner is meeting me downstairs. I’ll talk to him, and then—can I call you?”

  “Please.”

  “As I said, it will probably be from a hazelnut tree.”

  “I’ve had stranger phone conferences. Are you okay to wait alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me hear from you.”

  The dusky street smells of falafel and pigeons. The city has a faraway look as seen through a fishbowl. Disoriented by the flash-bang of cars and urban walkers, I realize my perceptions are confused. I am trying to understand what the psychiatrist said, but it is hard to think clearly. I am waiting for Donnato. When he arrives, it will make some kind of sense.

  “Get in the car,” Mr. Terminate says.

  The biker’s wrenchlike fingers close around my arm. A gun presses my ribs. We are in an alley and I don’t know how we got there, but with the full force of his body, he twists my shoulder and pops me like a cork into the open door of the car, where Mountain Man is waiting behind the wheel.

  Thirty-seven

  When we arrive at the farm, the thermometer on the barn reads 110 degrees—candy-apple red and about to burst. Unlike the dry heat of Los Angeles, a sultry fever rises from the earth, with a smell like roasting barley and manure. It hangs there, baking you to a stupor. The coolest spot in the valley is the hazelnut orchard. When Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man deliver me from Portland, Dick Stone is sitting on a beach chair set in its oasis of shade.

  Old-timers say the first nut drops on the first of September. Those late-summer days, each of us on the farm seemed suspended in a kind of waiting. Sara and I would climb the ladders in 106-degree heat to count the dried-up moths in the traps, then spend the rest of the day reading fashion magazines. Nobody cooked anymore. The vegetables were sold, allegedly to help pay for the Big One. Despite the abundance of the garden, we were living on pancakes.

  Slammer was so creepily polite to Megan and Stone, I thought one day he’d go berserk and kill them with an ax. But Mom and Dad kept him busy, preparing for the harvest. Inside the steamy shed, Slammer and Stone labored over the homemade nut sorter, a ludicrous contraption of green scrap metal, gas motors and exhaust pipes, rusty conveyor belts, and plywood hammered together with no apparent logic. I was really looking forward to what happened when they turned it on.

  In the heat, brushfires kept breaking out among the troops.

  “He’s lying,” I heard Slammer whispering to Sara. “He’s flat-out lying when he says the Big One’s coming. It’s just to keep us here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s him. He’s a liar. Don’t defend him, ’ho.”

  “I’m not defending him, and don’t you dare call me that. It’s like nobody cares what I’m going through. Nobody cares if I walk out
the door into the middle of the freeway.”

  “If nobody gives a shit, why don’t you do it?”

  Megan and I weren’t getting along, either. To prepare for brittle making, she had me disassemble and clean every part of the industrial stove in the sweltering basement. She kept hauling out giant spoons and candy thermometers, and I dreaded the hellish days and nights when we would have to keep pots of scalding sugar syrup boiling around the clock.

  Indications are the harvest will be good, and standing in the full-blown orchard, I can’t help feeling pride in our fake little farming family. Stone’s prudent trimming has created thick new growth. Underneath the leafy canopy is an Alice-in-Wonderland world of cool shadows and secret whisperings. The cries of blue jays pierce the murky gloom, and the smooth orchard floor is chilly as marble.

  “You wanted to talk to me?”

  Stone avoids my eyes. Instead, he rises, turns his back, and wanders toward a tree, fingering the sprouts at the end of a twig. I wait in silence while he inspects the new green buds.

  “How much do you know about the sex life of filberts?” he asks at last.

  “Got to be more interesting than mine.”

  “It’s one of the stranger perversities of nature. Filberts require cross-pollination from two different plants. Their sexual fulfillment depends on the wind.”

  “I can identify.”

  “That’s why we cultivate both the Ennis and the Butler variety.” He indicates two trees, which look the same. “The Ennis is the germinator and the Butler is the pollinator.”

  “Let me guess: male and female.”

  “Yes, but which is which?”

  I squeeze a little green bean hanging off a shoot.

  “Male. The flower is called a catkin.”

  This is the value of high school biology.

  Stone nods in a distracted way, the weary science teacher.

  “Despite the lateness of the season, some of the female flowers are still rudimentary. This is the ovary.” He rolls a bud between his fingers and then crushes it beneath a thumbnail. “It hasn’t developed and it never will.”

  “I see that.”

  “I know who you are,” says Stone.

  Very slowly, he turns his face. The seething rage echoes the time at the traffic light when the rock ’n’ roll commandos were on our way to off Herbert Laumann the first time. Stone’s half-bearded cheeks glazed in the red stop light. Three measured words to Slammer when he honked at the Iranians in the van. “Don’t…do…that.” And Slammer didn’t.

  The hot breath of summer puffs against my clammy forehead. My palm goes involuntarily there, like a woman about to faint. Crows are barking in the far branches.

  “Which of us is more pathetic?” The pain in his eyes is like a hot flash of metal.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were duped by the Bureau, just like me. Skip the humiliating dance, Ana.”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “I like you, Ana. Don’t blow it by being stupid.” He sinks back into the beach chair, rubbing his meaty cheeks like Don Corleone.

  “You’ve been initiated into this group—kind of like being a ‘made man’ in the Mafia,” the psychiatrist said.

  “I’d play it the same way,” he says, “so you don’t have to. I have an excellent source. As you no doubt learned way back, there are different kinds of sources. There are longtime sources and open sources, both on the Bureau’s payroll, and ‘pocket sources’—personal connections who won’t take money because they think cooperating with the FBI is the American thing to do…. But this old friend of mine, he’s impeccable. He is an inside source. Someone who’s been ripped off by the Bureau culture and is only too happy to fuck someone else in return.

  “This impeccable source of mine, he tells me an agent named Mike Donnato is working the national security side of the house. He describes how Special Agent Ana Grey was outfitted with the cover of Darcy DeGuzman in order to penetrate FAN. We’re the terrorist cell and I’m the big bad guru.” He touches his chest softly. “I told you. I’m not the one who made me paranoid.”

  He hasn’t killed me yet, so maybe there still is a way.

  An image comes to mind from a documentary movie, in which a mountain climber falls through the snow into a bottomless crevasse and clings to an ice shelf 150 feet down. No way can he climb up. His only choice is to descend into the unknown—go deeper into the vertical shaft and hope to find a way out.

  Keep making decisions. Even if they’re wrong.

  Go deeper.

  “You’re right. I am an agent. And you’re a former agent who dropped out in the seventies.”

  “They’re still after me.” Stone allows a smug smile.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “More than thirty years later. The incompetence is really something. No wonder we’re losing the war on terror.”

  “This impeccable inside source you describe. We thought there was a leak, but that it came from higher up.”

  “Uh-uh. Bottom-feeder. Rooney Berwick is the name.”

  But you won’t live to tell.

  “What tipped you off to me?”

  Dick Stone fishes around in the pocket of his shorts and shows me the five shell casings he picked up in Laumann’s driveway.

  “Never leave your brass at the shooting scene. I made that mistake with the cop on the roof. Otherwise, I’m a pretty good sniper, because I’m a tight-ass finicky bastard. I always use the same brand—Remington. But there was only one Remington on the ground, the live round I loaded into the gun. The other four are Winchester. See?”

  The tiny etching on each copper jacket says WIN-45.

  “You switched the magazine for blanks, didn’t you, darlin’? Very slick, but the Bureau screwed up. The dummy bullets should have been Remington.”

  Jason Ripley secured the blanks.

  “A rookie,” I say bitterly. “He wasn’t thinking.”

  “What do you expect?” Stone claps my shoulder sympathetically. “They’re not all as good as you and me.”

  “I wasn’t that good, apparently.”

  “You were doing fine. Until I talked to Berwick. The arrows started lining up.”

  “Frankly, Dick, it’s a relief. I couldn’t have kept it going.”

  “Enlighten me, Ana Grey. What were they thinking?” He removes the Colt from a holster under a loose guayabera shirt and holds it in both hands. “They already sent one of their clowns.”

  Indignation flares and I don’t try to stop it.

  “If you’re talking about the agent you murdered with a bomb, he had a name—Steve Crawford. He left a wife and children, and he was a friend of mine.”

  “You think he was a together guy? He came across to me as a real asshole.”

  “That was his cover,” I say angrily.

  “Nope, sorry, that was him. He’s supposed to be dealing methamphetamine, but he’s wearing a Harvard University ring, for Christ’s sake. And nice-looking boots.”

  Stone is busy unscrewing the top of a water bottle, then soaks a red bandanna inside. He ties it tightly over his head, gangsta-style. Water drips along the pink flush in his neck.

  “Your buddy Steve was pushing too hard. He comes in way too fast and fancy. You’re thinking, Man, what is this? You know what was the tell? He’s cheap. He acts like a high roller, but he doesn’t tip well, like a person on an expense account trying to shave a little. Working people know that barmaids have to make a living. That was paltry.”

  “So you lure him into the woods and blow him up?”

  “Why do that? Why off an agent and send the whole world up here? He blew himself up. He hears a rumor I’ve got a buried fortune in stolen turquoise and silver, and he decides, I’m going to do something about this kingpin. I’m going to take the turquoise. Because I’m the government, and the government can do anything. He out-and-out threatens me, just like any crooked scumbag cop. He says, ‘I’m going to take the goods off you. I’m gonna ste
al it because it’s stolen anyway. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have you arrested.’ So I told him where it was.”

  Then it collapses, like a sand castle undercut by waves. “That’s not the guy I knew.”

  “I’m amazed you didn’t see through the act.”

  “Did you tell him what the turquoise is? Don’t say Indian jewelry.”

  Dick Stone smiles. “I like symbols. I like the great western myths—like preserving the freedom of the wild mustangs—it stirs people’s loyalty. There’s an open secret—one I’ve cultivated for years, like the orchard—that I have the means to finance operations. Otherwise, nobody would pay attention.

  “No, it’s for real. Back in the day, I was working a deal we had going in Arizona, called Turquoise. Case closed, bad guys in jail, and Berwick the techie and I find ourselves alone in a garage, disabling the crap he’d installed on this armored car, and sweet Jesus, there is a bag with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bottom of the trunk. It was nowhere on our inventory. Nobody knew it existed. The Bureau was acting like I was an orphan child they’d disowned, so screw it. We took the cash. Berwick was scared, so I kept his share for him. Then some dudes from the Paiute Nation got ripped off of a load of semi-precious gems, and thus a legend was born.

  “Don’t lose sleep over your buddy. He was just another insignificant, corrupt little Bureau shit, who only made my life that much harder. And then there was you.”

  He shakes his head, then pulls out a joint and lights it, carefully extinguishing the match against the sole of his sandal. Despite the coolness beneath the trees, heat is shooting through my body.

  “Ana, I cannot express to you the depth of my disappointment and sorrow. I would never have said it to him, your friend, the father of two—‘Prove your loyalty and I will share my treasure.’” His eyes bulge as he holds the smoke. “But I would have said it to you.”

  “I can help you out.”

  “How is that?” asks Stone.

  “I feel you, brother.”

  Stone doubles up laughing, spewing fragrant smoke.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I’m speed-talking, careening into street jive.

  “No, dig it, look. You come into the FBI all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a well-educated attorney, a patriot like your brother, who made the sacrifice in Vietnam, and all you want is to follow the rules and do your duty, and look how you were treated. Sent undercover with no protection, no support. So here’s me. Female, biracial, and it’s the same tune. They throw me into this situation here and walk away. My supervisor is a jerk. He doesn’t care about my safety; he’s just worried about his career. I’m the way he’s going to advance, no matter how the case turns out with Dick Stone.”