Light It Up

by Nick Petrie

  There were advantages to driving a police car—or pretending to be driving a police car.

  When you behaved badly, nobody called the cops.

  Maybe Peter should think about that strategy.

  But first he needed his own wheels. He wasn’t sure his libido would survive another close encounter with Miranda Howe.

  His truck was parked on Henry’s block. They’d taken Henry’s pickup that morning for the day’s rounds. Fourteen hours ago, but it seemed like a week.

  Henry’s house in Cap Hill was too far to walk barefoot.

  He pulled out Henry’s phone and looked for a shoe store, figuring he’d break in, steal some sneakers, leave some money.

  Found nothing but women’s shoe stores.

  They probably wouldn’t stock men’s twelves, extra wide.

  He looked back. Miranda’s car hadn’t moved. He’d give her a few minutes to cool down.

  Unless she was sufficiently pissed to simply leave. At least then he wouldn’t have to worry about her safety. He was pretty sure he was the bullet magnet, not Miranda.

  He pulled up the text app, moved his thumbs. Pls call when free.

  Ten seconds later Henry’s phone vibrated in his hand.

  “Jarhead.” Lewis stretched the word out. His voice was like motor oil, slippery and dark, latent with combustion. Peter could hear his friend’s tilted smile in that single word. “How was the cavity search?”

  “Close call,” Peter said, smiling himself. “Thanks for finding me a lawyer. She’s really something.”

  Lewis still thought he owed Peter for something that had happened in Milwaukee a few years back. As far as Peter was concerned, the debt went the other way.

  “So catch me up,” Lewis said. “You some kinda gunslinger now?”

  Briefly, Peter told him about the hijacking. About the dead. About the maybe-police car that had found them on the streets of Denver ten minutes ago.

  Lewis said, “Did some work in Denver a few years back. Might still know some people out there.” Peter heard the clicking of a keyboard. “Be there first flight out.”

  “You’re not coming out,” Peter said. “You’re getting married in a few months. You have those boys to raise.”

  “You got it backward.” Lewis was a career criminal and one of the most dangerous men Peter had ever met. “Dinah getting ready to kill me, I don’t get outta her hair. She told me, ‘You just show up on the day. Other than that, you’d best stay out of my way.’”

  Peter could hear her saying it, too. Both because he knew Dinah, and because Lewis had caught the cadence of her voice just right.

  Lewis kept talking. “You’d be doing me a favor, Jarhead. ’Sides, I already bought the ticket. Nonrefundable. I know you’re the cheapest living white man. Think of it like my bachelor party.”

  “Well,” Peter said, “you’re the CEO.”

  He heard a long, deep chuckle before the connection went silent.

  He took Henry’s phone down from his ear and pulled June’s number from his memory. They’d written pages of letters, but he hadn’t actually spoken to her since the end of March. She deserved a real-time update. And he really wanted to hear her voice.

  “Who was that?”

  Peter turned, the phone still in his hand. Miranda stood tall on her heels, clothing immaculate, hair brushed and fluffed, makeup perfect.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here when I got off the phone,” he said.

  She looked at him, her face neutral, composed. Peter had no idea what was going on behind that implacable mask. She didn’t answer him.

  Then he noticed that she’d left an extra button undone on her blouse. He was certain it was not an accident. She saw his eyes drop down and back up. It was involuntary. He was a man, she was a woman. A flicker of triumph crossed her face for the briefest moment. Then she was back to her calm, professional self.

  “My client is at risk,” she said. “Someone shot up my car. We need a strategy. And I’m your attorney, so you need to tell me everything. Starting with who you were just talking to.”

  Peter shook his head. “Better for you to have limited knowledge,” he said. “You want some level of deniability.”

  “Deniability of what?” she demanded.

  He wanted to get to his truck, to get into his own clothes. To get some boots on his damn feet.

  He looked at her with more calm than he felt. “Of what’s coming.”

  14

  Daniel Clay Dixon stood at the window of his darkened hotel room and stared out across the naked rooftops and parking lots of Denver. The television was on with the sound off, a reporter standing on the side of a rural highway with a microphone, red and blue flashing lights in the background.

  It was after midnight and Dixon badly wanted a drink. Tequila, straight from the neck of the bottle. It was the sin he allowed himself from time to time, strong liquor providing a kind of anesthesia against his other, more profound sins, the finely ground wreckage he’d made of his life. But he wouldn’t allow himself anything stronger than coffee until this was over.

  Dixon carried a secure smartphone in the pocket of his crisp tan summer-weight suit, registered to a company he didn’t really own, and two disposable phones laid out on the desk, registered to nobody at all.

  Beside the phones stood a half-empty paper cup holding the special kind of bad coffee that only cheap hotel-room machines produced.

  One of the burner phones was for incoming, the other for outgoing.

  He replaced them at irregular intervals.

  His whole life was irregular.

  It always had been, despite all his efforts to the contrary.

  Daniel Clay Dixon was waiting for a call from a man who didn’t exist, about a series of events that had never occurred.

  He had a lot riding on this.

  The man who didn’t employ him had made that quite clear.

  —

  The coffee was gone and Dixon was still thinking about tequila when his incoming phone buzzed with a text. A solicitation for a time-share in Florida, with an 800 number.

  Not what Dixon was waiting for, but important enough.

  A night message from this person was unusual, but these were unusual circumstances.

  On his outgoing phone, he touched in the number, but changed to a Maryland area code, with 2 added to each of the first two digits of the last four numbers. It was the twenty-second of the month. Best to keep these things simple.

  “Yes,” Dixon said.

  “You know that name on your watch list?”

  The man on the other end of the line was an Army major who worked in personnel at the Pentagon. Part vacuum cleaner, part town pump. Part of the team, for a price. A price that kept climbing.

  Dixon didn’t much like the major, how he kept massaging the price upward. No integrity. Dixon didn’t mind the money, it wasn’t his anyway. It was the principle of the thing, a matter of honor.

  Not that Dixon had much honor left himself.

  But what he had, he was holding on to hard.

  The Army major said, “We got another request, this time from the Denver PD. Your guy’s definitely surfaced.”

  “Context?”

  “This was through regular channels, so they just asked for the file. But I asked for details, told them it would facilitate cooperation. They said it was in connection with an attempted hijacking and multiple homicides.”

  Which would be that mess in the mountains, thought Dixon. Bad news.

  The major said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Keep stalling,” Dixon said. “They’re used to it.” The federal government had a long history of poor cooperation with local government.

  “What if they come back with a higher authority?” the major said. “Not the chief or the mayor, but like a senator or governor? Or somebody here?” Meaning the Pentagon.

  “Cross that bridge when we get there,” Dixon said. “Keep in touch.”

  He figure
d the police wouldn’t care so much if the guy ended up dead.

  At least, that was the plan.

  Plans didn’t always work out.

  Dixon had known Peter Ash as a lieutenant in Iraq. He’d followed the lieutenant’s work, seen him get shit done. The guy was the real deal. Persistent, talented, and once he got his teeth into something, pretty much impossible to discourage. Dixon had been looking for the man, hoping to hire him, but he’d gone underground.

  If he’d surfaced now, and had staked a claim to the wrong side of this particular problem, things were serious.

  They had to take him out of the picture, and fast.

  His incoming phone buzzed again, another text.

  who dis.

  The call Dixon had been waiting for.

  This one from the operator who called himself Big Dog.

  A textbook sociopath, according to the psychological testing, but extremely talented in the field.

  Dixon pulled the operator’s number from his fractured memory and plugged it into the outgoing phone.

  “You ain’t gonna like this.” Big Dog’s voice had a Western twang that always made Dixon think of cowboys. But not in a good way.

  “I already don’t like it,” Dixon said. “You lost four men. What now?”

  “I tried again, but it didn’t take. You know, with that bad apple? Turned out to be a really bad apple.”

  Dixon missed being a Marine colonel, where you could talk about killing people right out in the open. It was the whole job, when you boiled it down. When all else fails, call in an air strike, make some craters. Simpler days.

  But he’d learned to speak obliquely a long time ago. About a great many things.

  “Keep after it,” he said. “One bad apple can spoil a whole barrel.”

  “How far you want me to go?”

  “I thought you were a precision instrument,” said Dixon. “Get rid of the apple. Keep the barrel.”

  “Yeah, that might be harder than you think.”

  Dixon knew how hard it would be.

  But not impossible.

  Big Dog was no slouch, either.

  Dixon said, “I don’t mind a few extra apples. Just make sure you get it done. But be discreet, understand? We don’t need any more attention. There’s already too much as it is.”

  “Roger that.”

  —

  Daniel Clay Dixon had spent almost twenty-five years as a United States Marine. A veteran of two wars, he’d been awarded the Bronze Star for Combat Valor in Gulf I. As a young infantry lieutenant, he and his fire team had captured an Iraqi tank. He was a lieutenant colonel by the end, if only for a few weeks.

  He was proud of that.

  But he’d lost it all because of his own weakness, his own sinful and degenerate nature. Lost his wife and daughters and everyone else he loved. Lost his rank and command and pension. Lost his own self-respect, too, although that had happened long before.

  Dixon considered himself a Southerner, a devout Christian, a lifelong patriot, and an irredeemable homosexual. Not “gay,” definitely not that, because to be gay implied a lightness of heart that Dixon had never felt, not since the summer he turned fourteen, when he spent those summer afternoons in Brad Spangler’s rec room, damning his immortal soul to the flames of hell.

  He’d not told anyone, of course. Not his friends on the football team or at his church. Not his pastor, who swayed at the rough pulpit, eyes rolled back in his head while God’s tangled words spoke with his tongue. And definitely not Dixon’s family.

  His father might well have beaten him to death. If Dixon survived the beating, his mother would have banished him from her house. If the news got out, he’d have had to leave his school, his church, the town where he was born and raised. Abandon his whole life like a sinking ship. To be someone he despised? No.

  To Dixon’s surprise, God somehow remained a presence in his life, although Dixon only felt Him occasionally, peering over Dixon’s shoulder from a great distance, rather than standing by Dixon’s side each day. Dixon never heard His voice again, not after that summer.

  Dixon knew he would surely be punished in the end.

  He had done his best to redeem his sinful soul, to resist the temptations of the flesh. He became a warrior, joined the Marines, tested himself in combat, found a wife. He did his duty in the marital bed and tried not to drink himself to death, for the sake of his family.

  He’d never accepted his hidden self, only burned with shame when his doomed homosexual soul forced itself to the surface for a few secret hours or days or, once, for two weeks in South Carolina ten years before, when he’d gone for a conference and a handsome bartender had winked at him on the second night.

  The conference was a week of secret sinful bliss, but the bartender, whose name was Billy, invited Dixon to a little rented house on the ocean for the following week. Dixon, unable to resist, had called his wife and lied. It hadn’t seemed like much, one more lie after so many.

  He’d thought it would be like Billy’s little apartment, just the two of them. But Billy had failed to mention that he’d also invited dozens of his friends. All men.

  That first night’s party had made Dixon supremely uncomfortable.

  Until someone offered Dixon some white powder on a tiny silver spoon.

  Dixon knew what it was, and what would happen, and he did it anyway.

  They were so kind.

  His soul was on vacation, too, he told himself. Just for this week. He was free.

  And the world was changing, wasn’t it? It was no longer illegal, to be what he was. In the eyes of his church, Dixon was still a sinner, destined for hell. But could it really be wrong in the eyes of God to feel this good? To feel like himself? He wondered, maybe, if he was strong enough to face himself, to become someone new.

  When he went back to work at Camp Pendleton, he received a letter. Not from Billy the bartender, from someone else, someone he’d never met.

  With photographs. Dixon with the silver spoon. Dixon naked with men. And a demand for payment.

  That was how Dixon discovered that he wasn’t strong after all.

  He was the worst kind of sinner.

  The kind that covered his sins with more sins.

  He’d paid. And paid. And paid.

  When he realized he could no longer spend his own money without his wife’s knowledge, he arranged for the sale of a shrapnel-damaged Humvee to a collector. Then several cases of used M16s.

  After that, they owned him.

  Dixon learned it was possible to be in hell while still on earth.

  After that, he got caught.

  —

  He narrowly escaped federal prison through some legal sleight of hand from his expensive private attorneys that seemed somehow shameful. But his debts were enormous beyond reckoning.

  The legal fees had taken everything Dixon owned and would ever own for some time to come, it seemed. Early on, he’d told the attorneys there was no money left to pay them, but they’d kept working, racking up the billable hours. They told him there would be a colossal civil suit, he would pay them out of the proceeds. But the settlement that kept him out of prison also disallowed any civil action on his part. In the end, his own attorneys sued him for nonpayment.

  He’d protected his wife from the debt through the divorce, but her losing his government medical benefits was far worse. She had a chronic immune disorder and couldn’t work. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed. Her treatments were frequent, painful, and expensive. Not to mention Dixon’s youngest daughter applying to private colleges, his middle daughter at Notre Dame, and his eldest planning an elaborate wedding.

  He owed his attorneys, but he owed his family more.

  Daniel Clay Dixon was a man who paid his debts. He would do his duty.

  Regardless of his many other failings before God, his family, and his country, Dixon could at least do that.

  He’d only been an ex-Marine for two months when the call came.

&n
bsp; Dixon had jumped at the opportunity.

  He’d done far worse in the name of his country.

  How could he not do this for his family?

  15

  The little red BMW was definitely the worse for wear, with a shattered rear windshield and two parallel creases across the hood where the rounds had made contact but not punched through.

  Miranda took pictures with her phone. “For the insurance company,” she said.

  “You’re going to need a police report, too.”

  “Paul Sykes will do it,” she said. “He owes me.”

  Peter could only imagine.

  He directed Miranda on an indirect route to his truck, which was parked down the block from Henry’s place in Cap Hill. Miranda drove only slightly slower than she had before the shooting, barefoot again, her skirt hiked up to mid-thigh. But she kept checking her mirrors.

  “How did they find us before?”

  “Two possibilities,” Peter said. “Either someone gave them a description of your car and told them when we left the hospital. Or they followed me down the mountain to the ER, waited in the parking lot, and tracked us from there.”

  “If it’s the first, they might be real police.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They took a big risk tonight. I didn’t know anything. All I had was the back of the guy’s head and a license plate. Which they didn’t even know I had, and which might not even mean anything. To come after us like that, on the street? Willing to make such a public mess?” He shook his head. “Somebody fucked up,” he said. “Fucked up big-time. And it looks like they’ll do pretty much anything to make it go away.”

  “What you said before,” she said. “About finding them. How will you do it?”

  “How well do you know Steinburger and Sykes?”

  She glanced at him. “I used to be a defense attorney, before I took this position with my current firm. So I know a lot of cops. I only had one case involving Steinburger, and he was very good at his job. A smart cop. That thing with the biker crew I told you about, that’s how he made detective, and he’s moved up the food chain pretty fast. But I can look into him a little more, make some calls.”

  She turned off Colfax by Voodoo Doughnut. Peter hadn’t been inside. Maybe tomorrow, he thought. A heathy breakfast is the foundation of a productive day.