by Jude Hardin
“I don’t know. But I’ve been following him around for a few days, and he hasn’t met with anyone.”
“So what has he been doing?”
“Mostly just behaving strangely,” Max said. “He talks to himself a lot, and he drives around in circles sometimes with no apparent destination. Like he’s driving just to be driving.”
“What do you mean he talks to himself? What does he say?”
“I won’t know that until you give me the go-ahead to put a surveillance camera in his teaching studio. Or at least an audio bug. All I can tell you right now is that his lips move a lot when nobody else is there.”
The waitress brought my coffee and ice water. She asked if we were ready to order. I chose the turkey club, and Max ordered three eggs with bacon and some hash browns and pancakes. The waitress wrote it all down and walked away.
“I’ve never noticed Nicholas talking to himself at home,” I said.
“He probably only does it when he’s alone. When you’re around, he talks to you. When you’re not around, he talks to his imaginary friends. Make sense?”
“I guess. But I would still like to know what he’s saying. And, I’m still not totally convinced there isn’t another woman. So go ahead and put the nanny cam in his studio. Whatever he’s up to, I want to get to the bottom of it.”
“I’ll need some more money,” he said.
“Of course. Whatever it takes.”
Our food came, and we ate and talked some more. Before we left, I handed him enough cash to stay on the case a few more days. I gave him the key to the studio and told him the code to the alarm. He said it might be useful to put a bug in the Airstream as well, so I went ahead and gave him a key to that and told him how to get there.
The phone’s ringing, so I’ll sign off for now.
FRIDAY, APRIL 20, PART TWO
Hello. It’s me again. I answered the phone, and the caller hung up without saying anything. That’s been happening a lot lately. Our landline will ring, and then there’s nobody there. Seems like it happens only when I answer it. Another sign of a cheating husband. Seems like the stupid whore would have enough sense not to call him at home.
Now where was I…
After my breakfast with Max Marlin, I dropped by Jet’s house to see how she was doing. It wasn’t one of my days for her dressings, but sometimes I drop by just to say hello. Her face was puffy and her eyes were red and glassy. She’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the matter?” I said. “Maybe I can help you.”
“Can you get me a gun?”
That caught me off guard. I stood there and looked at her for a few seconds.
“Jet, what are you talking about?”
“He’s out of jail,” she said.
“Your husband? How—”
“The social worker called a while ago. His lawyer finally got him a bail bond hearing, and his mother took out a loan on her house to get him out. Can you get me a gun or not?”
“He won’t come here, will he? There’s the restraining order and everything. He’ll get in big trouble if he comes anywhere near you.”
“The restraining order won’t stop him. He’ll kill me this time. That’s what he said when I had him locked up. He said he would run me through the wood chipper feet first.”
“Do you know how to use a gun?” I said.
“How hard could it be? You just point and pull the trigger. I’m not going to need it until he comes in here after me. It’s not like I’ll have to aim a far distance or anything.”
“I have a revolver at home,” I said. “I’ll let you borrow it.”
“Can you let me borrow it today?”
I drove home and got the .357 magnum that Nicholas keeps strapped under our bed frame. It’s the only gun I let him keep in the house. If he asks about it, I’ll just tell him the truth. That I loaned it to Jet. He won’t like it, but that’s OK. I don’t like what he’s been doing lately either.
I didn’t hear from Di again until Monday. I picked up the mail when I got to the studio, and there was another package from her. It was in an envelope disguised as a life insurance offer this time. I took it inside and stood at the counter and opened it.
She wanted me to bring the briefcase and the cell phone and all the Perry Wendell Davis credentials to the safe house. To the little concrete block bungalow where she’d tricked me into thinking I was going to be tortured and killed. Tonight at nine o’clock, she said. She made it clear how crucial it was for her to get those things back, along with Von Lepstein’s wallet.
Friday evening I had set the briefcase on the floor behind the counter.
I turned, reached with my right hand, expecting it to be there, where I’d left it, but it was not.
The briefcase was gone.
I started looking around, wondering if I’d moved it at some point. I looked everywhere. I combed the front counter and the waiting area and the studio room, but it was nowhere to be found. Someone had stolen it. That was the only explanation.
My stomach tightened, and I started having a little trouble breathing. For a minute I thought I might be having a heart attack. Di had stressed the importance of getting the briefcase and its contents back to her. If any of that Perry Wendell Davis stuff fell into the wrong hands, it could possibly jeopardize the secrecy of her organization. And secrecy, she said, was everything. The security of our country depended on it.
I’d screwed up. Royally. I’d carelessly left the case at the studio, right there behind the counter where anyone could have walked back and snatched it. I’d practically invited someone to take it. Look! Here! Free Briefcase!
Now I needed to get it back. Somehow.
I tried to construct a list of suspects. Friday evening I’d locked everything up, and then I’d delivered the padded envelope containing the lipstick camera to the attorney’s office. I’d stopped for chicken at Publix on the way home, and I hadn’t gone back to the studio until the next morning. I hadn’t gone back until I went in and opened up in time for my first Saturday student.
Saturday is my busiest day of the week. I have twelve students, all in a row. Six solid hours of guitar lessons. Had the briefcase been there Saturday morning when I unlocked the door and disabled the alarm? I didn’t know. I hadn’t really thought about the damn thing since I set it behind the counter Friday.
I went down the list of my Saturday students. Two of them had cancelled, so that left ten. Of those, seven were too young to drive and depended on one of their parents or someone else for a ride. That meant at least seventeen people had walked in and out of my business on Saturday.
But I had been right there with them most of the time. The counter only went unattended while I was in the studio room with a student, and from there the light over the door alerted me when anyone came through the front entrance. I couldn’t think of a single instance where anyone would have been alone in front long enough to steal the briefcase.
And then it came to me.
Nobody had stolen the briefcase Saturday, because it hadn’t been there Saturday.
If it had been behind the counter Saturday morning, I would have noticed it. Seeing it would have reminded me to lock it in my car, or at least to hide it somewhere in the studio.
Since the time I set it on the floor behind the counter, only one person had been out of my sight long enough to have made a grab for it.
That one person had been there Friday, not Saturday.
That one person was Terry Vine.
I couldn’t believe it. Terry was such a good kid. Why would he have stolen my briefcase? I’d said something that upset him, so maybe taking it was his way of retaliating. The case was locked, so he probably never even opened it. I couldn’t imagine him cracking into it with a sledgehammer or something. He would have known it wasn’t full of hundred dollar bill
s.
I couldn’t believe Terry had done such a thing, but there was no other explanation. I felt like an idiot. The briefcase was gone, and the guy who’d taken it was three thousand miles away in California.
I doubted he’d taken it with him. Hell, he might have just whizzed it into a dumpster somewhere. I hoped he hadn’t done anything like that, but it was always a possibility. I needed to know, and I needed to know before my nine o’clock meeting with Diana Dawkins.
Terry was the only kid I knew who didn’t have a cell phone. Darrel, his stepfather, refused to put Terry on his plan, and Terry wasn’t old enough to open his own account. Not that he had enough money to pay the bill anyway, not after Darrel commandeered most of his paycheck.
Darrel had legally adopted Terry. That’s why Terry’s last name was Vine and not something else. I had no idea what Terry’s real dad’s name was, but maybe Darrel would help me out. I found his address and phone number on the information sheet Terry had filled out before starting lessons with me. Terry had listed Darrel as his emergency contact. I gave him a call. No answer. I left a message.
My first student walked in, a young bartender named Chris Hennessy, but I was too ruffled to give anyone a guitar lesson. A thousand fire ants marched through my nervous system, digging and gnawing and doing the watusi in a continuous loop. If I didn’t get that briefcase back, it was going to be my ass.
I apologized to Chris for having to cancel, and then left a note on the door for my other students before heading over to Darrel Vine’s house.
It wasn’t far, less than a mile. Terry usually walked to his guitar lesson from there. I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. There weren’t any other cars around, and the blinds were closed on all the windows. Not good signs. I walked up to the porch and knocked, but as I suspected there was nobody home.
“Looking for somebody?”
I turned to my left and saw an elderly gentleman next door retrieving a newspaper from his front steps. He wore a burgundy bathrobe over a T-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms. Faux leather slippers. He hadn’t combed his stringy white hair yet, even though it was past eleven o’clock.
“Darrel Vine,” I said. “You know where I might find him?”
“They moved a while back. Not sure where to.”
“How long they been gone?” I said.
“A few months, I reckon. Nobody’s living there now. The place is in foreclosure.”
“All right. Thanks.”
He said something about the neighborhood going to hell in a handbasket as I walked back toward my car.
Terry never told me they had moved. He was probably embarrassed about it. Now I didn’t know what to do.
I was anxious, feeling a little shaky, and I thought some food might help. I stopped at McDonald’s and ordered two Big Macs and a small order of fries. Juliet was always harping on me about eating healthier, so I skipped the soda and chose some spring water. It came in a bottle that would outlive my great-great-great-grandchildren, but at least it didn’t contain any high fructose corn syrup. At least I had that going for me.
I opened my netbook and tried to find Darrel Vine’s new address. No luck. He and Terry were probably staying with a friend or relative. That was my guess.
As far as I knew, Darrel didn’t have a job, so there was no way for me to track him through an employer. Terry did have a job, and he went to school, but it would have taken a court order for me to get his current address through either of those places, and that just wasn’t going to happen.
I was out of ideas. I needed to know Terry’s father’s name. I needed to contact Terry and talk to him about the missing briefcase. There was no way I could wait until a week from Thursday, when he would come back in for his regular lesson. According to Di, national security was at stake. No telling what kind of damage might be done by then.
I decided to try the information line at Edwards Air Force Base. It was my last hope. It was a long shot, but I had nothing to lose.
“Edwards. Staff Sergeant Baker speaking, advising you that this is an unsecure line. How may I help you today?”
“My name’s Nicholas Colt, and I’m looking for a young man named Terry Vine. His father is stationed there at Edwards.”
“Vine, you say?”
“Yeah. That’s the kid. But his dad has a different last name.”
“What’s his father’s name?” Sergeant Baker said.
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
“Is he officer or enlisted?”
I remembered Terry telling me his dad had recently been promoted to E-something or another. Some kind of supervisory position among the lower ranks.
“Enlisted,” I said.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you, unless you can come up with a last name.”
“It’s urgent. He took something of mine, and it’s important that I get it back. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“There’s really nothing I can do, sir.”
I wondered if Staff Sergeant Baker would have been more helpful if Terry was an officer’s kid.
“There must be something,” I said. “How many enlisted guys are stationed there?”
“I don’t know exactly. A few thousand, I suppose. How old is the kid you’re looking for?”
“Fifteen.”
“If he has a Facebook account, you might try that. Maybe his dad’s on his list of family members.”
Shit. Why didn’t I think of that?
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Sergeant.”
I hung up, logged onto Facebook, searched for Terry Vine and found him right away. His information was blocked, so I sent him a friend request and a message:
Terry, I know about the briefcase. I need it back as soon as possible. Please call me on my cell phone. If you have it with you, I’ll wire you the money to ship it back here overnight. If you don’t have it with you, please call me and tell me where I can find it. No hard feelings. I promise. Thanks.
—NC
Now all I could do was wait.
I met Diana at the safe house at nine o’clock. She was sitting at the table I’d been strapped to, doing something on a laptop and drinking a cup of coffee. I poured myself a cup, sat across from her and handed her Von Lepstein’s wallet, along with the Perry Wendell Davis social security card and birth certificate I’d retrieved from the gun locker in the Airstream.
“Where’s the rest of the stuff?” she said.
“I don’t have it.”
“What do you mean you don’t have it?”
“I put it all in the briefcase, and then the briefcase was stolen.”
She looked at me in disbelief for a few seconds, and then she got up and started pacing.
“This is not good, Nicholas. This is not good at all. I thought I could trust you. I thought you knew how important it was to safeguard those credentials.”
“I’m sorry. I am trying to get them back.”
“How?”
I told her about suspecting Terry Vine, and about leaving him a message on Facebook.
“I’m sure he’ll call me soon,” I said. “Maybe any minute now.”
“You’re sure he’ll call you soon? Well I’m not sure he’ll call you soon, or ever, and I can’t sit around waiting on a maybe. Did you forget my core mission here? To find out who’s trying to frame me, and to thwart an assassination attempt on the president? I don’t have time for fuckups.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” I said. “But I would like to know some things. Like what the hell happened with Von Lepstein. He chases me down, and I’m standing there talking to him, and the next thing I know he’s on the ground with a wooden stake in his back.”
“He was onto you. Or at least he thought he was. He had to be eliminated.”
“How was he onto me? How is that possible? The inspection went like clockwork.”
“The maintenance man called Von Lepstein and told him you were screwing around wi
th the ceiling tile in the bathroom. I was listening in on the bug you planted by then. Von Lepstein called one of his contacts at the DOD and found out that Perry Wendell Davis—the real Perry Wendell Davis—was transferred to an office in North Dakota. Von Lepstein thought you were a corporate spy. If he’d just reported the suspected fraud to the police, everything would have been OK. You would have turned the rental car in and disappeared, and there would have been no way to trace you. But he had to try to be a hero. He had to play the big bad cowboy CEO, large and in charge, and chase you down himself. His fat ego got him killed.”
“So who killed Von Lepstein?” I said.
“That’s not important. We made it look like he was robbed by a homeless person.”
“That’s what I thought. But how did you get the grocery cart full of clothes there so quickly?”
“You’ve got it backwards, Nicholas. The cart just happened to be there, so we used it to our advantage. We used it to create the scenario. If it had been an ice cream truck, we would have used that. We’re good at improvising with the materials at hand. I thought you would have figured that out by now.”
“I’m finding it hard to figure anything out, Di. Whenever it seems like I might be getting a handle on it, there’s a new twist. Von Lepstein was one of our suspects, right? One of the four with access to the safe. Now that he’s dead—”
“He didn’t plant the coded schematic,” Di said. “You should have known that as soon as you found it still in the binder. If Von Lepstein had planted it, he would have removed it before allowing you to do the inspection. It has to be one or more of the other four. The CPSO, the project manager, one of the engineers, or a combination. I’ll need your help again, to take a closer look at them, and we’ll need to get started right away. The bug you planted will still be useful, because the project manager will serve as the interim CEO until they hire someone to replace Von Lepstein.”
“Won’t they be looking for things like that, now that they know someone infiltrated the plant?”
“It has the latest antidetection circuitry. I doubt they’ll ever find it. If they do, they do. I’m already working on some other surveillance ideas.”