Light It Up

by Nick Petrie

  Dixon didn’t mind the chain of command. From his father to the church to the Marine Corps, there had always been a structure to his life that Dixon found reassuring. But that structure had also always told him, either silently or out loud, that there was something deeply wrong about him, that he would never fit into that world.

  Maybe it was just Dixon’s own inner voice, telling him.

  At least here, in this flying island of luxury, Dixon did not want to fit. Grace and honor and integrity, the things he valued most and had most fully lost, had no place here.

  “Status report,” Palmer barked as he strode from his private office. Today he wore a blue blazer over a white shirt and red pants, a variation on his usual outfit. He didn’t offer to shake hands. As if Dixon’s many sins and failures might be catching.

  “As you know, the first operation was successful,” Dixon said. “My lead operator got it done as planned. The second operation was also well planned and well executed, but there was a wild card. The fourth man.”

  “Yes, I saw something on the news,” Palmer said. He dipped a hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pair of individually wrapped candies, shucked them from their wrappers, and popped them in his mouth. “Unfortunate. I trust you got what you were after?”

  “No,” Dixon said. “My people didn’t get the money or the special package. We don’t even know where the hell it is. We lost the whole team except my lead operator. We’ve made two more attempts on that wild card, just to clear a path for the next steps, but we’ve been unsuccessful.”

  Palmer’s face was unreadable. “So you’re utterly incompetent, is that it?”

  “No, sir. This wild card is extremely resourceful. He’s already brought in another man who almost took out my remaining operator. The Denver Police and the state police now have teams investigating. The state attorney general’s office is involved. I have to tell you, this isn’t going to get any easier. We need to rethink our strategy.”

  “The strategy is simple,” Palmer said. “I only buy distressed assets. That’s where the value is. If it’s not distressed, it’s not a deal.” He gave his famous smile, the cat who swallowed the canary. “Sometimes, in order to get the deal, you have to distress the assets yourself.”

  “I know you believe there’s a great deal of upside here,” Dixon said, “but there’s more risk, too. And more people are going to die.”

  “You dumbfuck,” Palmer said, hard candies rattling against his teeth. “You can’t begin to imagine the upside. The risk is irrelevant. Be a professional. Get it done.”

  He didn’t complain about killing people, Dixon noted. That wasn’t a risk Palmer was considering. The only risks he concerned himself with were strategic. Financial. Legal.

  “I need more resources,” Dixon said. “I need to rebuild my team. We have time. The insurance company won’t pay off on the first operation, and the police are holding everything from the second operation as evidence. The financial effect is the same. The company is yours.”

  “You’re forgetting the package,” Palmer said. “And if it goes to court? American judges are so hard to buy, with their goddamned balanced scales, and when you do, they’re expensive. That grower is in clear breach of contract, but he might be able to argue force majeure and use the unpaid insurance claim and the money in police evidence to gain time. In fact, he’s likely to get his money before the case ever goes to court, so my position is screwed.”

  “You can use your influence to keep things bottled up,” Dixon said. “Have your lawyers reach out to the insurance company. Also to the police. These things can drag out a long time. Years, if you want them to. All while the legal expense builds, and the stress takes its toll.”

  “But we still won’t have the package,” Palmer said. “You need to stop making excuses and execute.” He let out a hard sigh. “Tell me more about the troublemaker, the one who stopped the second operation. What do we know about him?”

  “He’s a Marine,” Dixon said. “Combat veteran, highly decorated, elite unit. Years of service. I haven’t been able to find out anything about the new man he brought in.”

  Palmer smirked. “Are they nancy boys like you?”

  Dixon felt the self-loathing rise like bile in his throat. Palmer liked to remind Dixon of his sins. This humiliation was punishment for his failure. But he pushed his feelings down.

  “No,” he said. “There’s also a woman. She’s flying in today.”

  “Then it’s easy,” Palmer said, waving a hand. “Carrot and stick. Take the woman, put her someplace he can’t reach. Send him a few photos. Voilà, the troublemaker is working for us.”

  Dixon shook his head. “Sir, that’s a bad idea. This man was a lieutenant in my battalion. He and his platoon got more done than the rest of the company combined.”

  Palmer looked at Dixon. “It’s all about leverage,” he said. “Just get it done. Or are you completely useless?”

  For a moment, Dixon didn’t know what to say. It was one thing to threaten women and children in the heat of anger, as he himself had done earlier. It was another entirely to target a noncombatant in cold blood. It went against every idea of honor and integrity he’d ever had.

  The next circle of hell.

  He still needed the money. For his daughters. For his wife.

  “I’ll get it done,” he said.

  30

  June Cassidy grabbed her carry-on from the overhead, threw her faded old backpack over one shoulder, and walked down the aisle after the other passengers. Her stomach felt kind of fluttery, but she didn’t know if it was a good feeling or a bad feeling. Or both.

  It could have been a good feeling because she was going to see Peter again, something June, an independent goddamn woman, had been thinking about far too often since he left. She didn’t like that, having him on her mind.

  After he was gone—after she’d told him to leave, she reminded herself, it was her own decision—she kept telling herself that she’d worked too hard for too long to banish the ghosts of her horrible ex-boyfriends, a long list of assholes and control freaks and serial philanderers.

  She told herself again and again that there was no way she was going to dive into anything serious, not for a while, and definitely not with Peter Ash, a messed-up unemployed ex-military dharma fucking bum, no matter how he made her feel.

  But oh, how he made her feel.

  Not just in bed, although that was a factor, his exquisite attention, shall we say, to detail. Now she was blushing in the aisle of the goddamn airplane, and June did not blush.

  And was that a little tingle, down below?

  Christ, he could get her motor running long distance, just thinking about him.

  Some kind of fucking sexual telepathy is what it was.

  No, it wasn’t that at all.

  It was the way he looked at her.

  The way he listened to her.

  How he liked that she was smart and bossy and herself.

  How funny he could be, and how serious, and how kind. How unafraid he seemed of anything, especially her. And how safe she felt when she was with him.

  Despite the violence that lived inside him.

  Not that she needed Peter to make her fucking life complete or anything. She had her work and her friends, and she was making up for lost time with her dad, too. Her life was going great. Her attraction to Peter was just a reaction to the circumstances, what they’d been through together. That was what she’d told herself.

  Then he started sending those letters.

  Such a dirty trick.

  Letters? Fucking letters?

  With pressed wildflowers inside?

  That sonofabitch. Not fair at all.

  Reading those letters was like staying up all night with him on a long car drive, hearing the calm murmur of his voice from the seat beside her. Like they were the only two people in the world, the rolling road lit by their headlights, the darkened landscape passing by as if in a dream.

  He wrote a
t first about the Oregon backcountry, fixing trails and bridges, the people he worked with. He’d written a lot about Henry, a Vietnam vet, a real friend. Then he told her about Don, the therapist he was seeing on his days off, and the assignments Don gave him—go ride an elevator, go sit in the laundromat—to make progress with his claustrophobia. Eventually he began to tell her, in fits and starts, about his war. Not so much the horrible parts of it, although she knew those were there, lurking. He told her about his regrets. The mistakes he’d made. The friends he’d lost.

  She’d wipe her eyes and blow her nose and read the letter again, to make herself learn. How it had been for him, for all of them. She wanted to take him in her arms and hold him, to help him feel better.

  She wanted to take him to bed.

  Although, come to think of it, they’d never really been in bed, because of that goddamn claustrophobia. They’d never really been inside together at all, not for more than a few minutes at a time.

  And that was the question, wasn’t it?

  How would it be, her and Peter, in normal life?

  What would normal life even look like?

  Because that was the other reason for the fluttering in her stomach.

  It wasn’t just what he called the white static.

  Someone was trying to kill him. Again.

  And here she was, for no logical reason that she could claim, getting off this plane. Showing up to do whatever she could to help.

  He’d done the same for her, hadn’t he?

  She’d talked to Lewis about this once, about the strange pull she felt, being around Peter. Like he had his own peculiar gravity.

  Lewis had smiled at her. “Why you think all those men followed him into combat?” he asked. “Going door to door in Fallujah? His men went willingly. Not for God and country, not really. They went for each other, and for him.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” she’d asked.

  “No.” Lewis’s voice had been gentle. “I came because he’s my friend. He did something for me I could never have done for myself. And he needed me.”

  As if Lewis didn’t know those were the very same reasons.

  —

  She’d upgraded herself to business class and watched out the window as the plane climbed into the air, waiting for the Wi-Fi to go live. She’d done more research for Peter in the Portland airport, and wanted to keep at it.

  One of the benefits of her work with Public Investigations, a group of independent investigative journalists, was access to excellent subscription databases. Although they weren’t anywhere near as powerful as a certain invasive algorithm her mother had developed, June could still find out a lot about a person. Lewis’s source in the Department of Defense had helped, too.

  Take Leonard Wallis, for example. His Army record was stripped bare, not even a photograph after twenty years. June ran a deep credit check and learned that he’d worked for Heavy Metal Protection for three months after he got out of the Army. She also found records of payments from a company called Fidelis International Risk.

  So June ran Fidelis International Risk through her databases. She found an oddball little company based in Delaware, which was one of the easiest and cheapest places in the U.S. to incorporate, and also one of the best if you wanted to keep your corporate information private. Something like half of all U.S. corporations were registered in the state of Delaware.

  She started looking into Fidelis.

  But she could find no public presence. No company website, nothing on the business networking or employment sites. Not even mentions in online newspapers or blogs.

  Which was odd for a company doing business in the modern era.

  In fact, the only public mention of Fidelis was on the Delaware state website—God, she loved the Internet—where she found the basic corporate listing. But the owner of record was hidden.

  The papers had been filed by a registered agent with a physical Delaware address, as was required by the state. June paid the fee for the extended report. Delaware took Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.

  With the long-form report in hand, she dug around in her private databases and found credit reports for Fidelis. Bank accounts with large balances. Corporate credit cards with big borrowing limits. That didn’t just happen. There had to be a lot of money running through this invisible company. Fidelis was only a few years old.

  She took a longer look at the registered agent. Most registered agents were business entities set up for the sole purpose of registering corporations, with large, well-designed websites offering a wide array of services. Most of these entities registered hundreds, if not thousands, of corporations each year. Agents could also serve as the sole point of contact, which was handy if you wanted to conceal ownership or just make it difficult to obtain information.

  But Fidelis’s registered agent wasn’t one of those companies.

  There was no website offering to incorporate your business for $295 or register your yacht in tax-friendly Delaware. Just a company name and an address.

  The address was in Bethany Beach, on the ocean. Prime real estate.

  The owner of the house was an attorney, a partner in a small white-shoe New York firm.

  Not a very nice man, apparently.

  He was featured in a prominent article in the New York Times, noting that he’d been linked to several Justice Department lawsuits aimed at one Russell Palmer.

  June already knew who Russell Palmer was.

  An unabashedly aggressive investor often described in the financial papers as having a magic touch, Palmer had an uncanny knack for buying underpriced assets at exactly the right time, often reselling only a few months later at an enormous profit.

  A proud capitalist, a larger-than-life figure, a showman.

  Palmer tended to dress in combinations of red, white, and blue.

  For most of a decade, he’d been a regular on the Sunday-morning talk shows, and there’d been speculation about Palmer’s running for office until a string of scandals, lawsuits, and legal settlements had taken the wind from those sails.

  Despite that taint, Palmer was still considered a brilliant investor. He’d just flipped some African mining operation for nine hundred and seventy million dollars.

  She didn’t know why Palmer would be involved with a guy like Leonard Wallis.

  She certainly couldn’t prove Wallis’s connection to Palmer, not on a two-hour flight.

  But now she knew where to dig.

  There was a common flaw, she’d found, with a certain kind of person.

  After years of bad behavior without ever really getting caught, they began to feel untouchable.

  Sometimes they got lazy.

  By the time the flight attendant asked her to close her laptop, June was rubbing her hands together with glee.

  —

  Once off the plane, June put her arm through the other strap of her backpack and pulled her wheeled carry-on through the airport.

  After giving far too much thought to what she might take to Denver, she’d just thrown some shit in her suitcase, brushed her teeth, freshened up her deodorant, and driven to Portland wearing what she’d put on that morning, what she often wore in the little pocket valley where she lived and worked. Her favorite hiking pants, a T-shirt that fit her curves from the excellent Counterbalance Brewing Company in Seattle, and well-worn trail shoes.

  She might have spiced up the underwear a little, although she’d never admit it.

  She’d made sure to add a heavy fleece and a rain shell in her pack. Travel with Peter could be unpredictable. Who knew where she’d be by the end of the day?

  She’d be lying if she said that wasn’t part of the appeal.

  There was a little subway that took passengers from the gates to the main terminal. The layout funneled people toward the baggage claim area. At the bottom of the funnel, by a sign pointing the way toward a lightning shelter, she saw a middle-aged man with weather-beaten skin, cropped hair, and excellent posture standing by the w
all, talking on his phone, a crisp black business backpack at his feet.

  June had been a journalist for almost ten years, and she was always looking for the telling detail. The man wore a tan suit with a pale blue button-down shirt and no tie. The very picture of a modern man of business.

  But his shoes were wrong.

  They should have been sleek and polished with thin leather soles.

  Instead they were thick and solid with heavy lug soles.

  And he wasn’t staring vacantly at the floor or into space as he focused on his phone conversation, as most people did.

  Instead he watched the funnel as passengers spilled through, looking for their luggage or their relatives.

  His eyes flicked to June’s face for a long moment, then away.

  June had taken self-defense classes after a bad experience in college. She’d learned that the easiest part of self-defense was simply staying away from potentially dangerous situations. The most obvious of those was somebody paying more attention to her than he should.

  After what had happened last spring, when she first met Peter, she’d begun paying a little more attention herself.

  She’d also started carrying what looked like a pink lipstick. But under the cap, instead of lipstick, was the trigger for ten pressurized blasts of capsicum pepper spray. In her back pocket she kept a nice steel ballpoint pen that also happened to conceal a two-and-a-half-inch blade where the ink refill would normally be. It wasn’t a fantastic pen, but it was great for opening the mail.

  June often felt like she was being more than a little paranoid.

  But most days she also felt a little safer.

  She always carried the fake lipstick in her backpack, which basically served as a large purse. Putting the pen in her back pocket had become a habit, just like her phone. And she hadn’t gotten on a commercial flight in years. So she’d forgotten to disarm herself for the trip through airport security.

  But the nice TSA people in Portland had been thoroughly distracted by a large man who appeared to be hallucinating, seeing dragons instead of the luggage conveyors. She just dumped the pen in the plastic tray with her phone and her belt and her backpack and hadn’t realized she’d broken several laws until she went to the bathroom and found the fake lipstick in the pocket with her hairbrush.