But it was obvious that the Rifleman gang didn’t want to kill me. They wanted me to do the same thing Angela wanted me to do, which was go back to General Davidson and tell him a fairy tale about how his son was dead and there was nothing unusual about it. Nothing to see here, nothing to see here. To make sure I did that, they killed the Colonel and the General and made it look like I did it, so they could intimidate me into backing down. They were also probably scared that the two retired officers knew something about Robert Davidson. But who were these freaks working for? It had to be someone in power, someone who in an official capacity who could blackmail me about the murders, someone who had sent out the mysterious Mr. Barry Filer to employ me.
I turned and looked at PMA, who was pacing like a maniac on the sidewalk next to me while we waited for our brand new rental car. He was too young for all this, I was too old and we were both way too amped from what had just happened.
“What the hell do we do next?” he murmured.
“That depends on who Michael Winters is,” I answered.
That was when the guy brought my new rental around. A blue Toyota.
Huh.
Debrief
Houses actually blew up from gas leaks on a fairly regular basis, I remembered one happened in my neighborhood when I was a kid. So the death of an Army Colonel in Booneville wasn’t a big headline-generator. It was just a random accident. Nothing to see, nothing to see.
However, an Army General getting his chest shredded with twelve rifle shots in one of the biggest tourist destinations in the country?
Not much random about that.
Which is why the kid and me were watching CNN go wall-to-wall with the story, latching onto the shooting as if it were a missing Malaysian airliner. Sending the tabloid attraction-factor of the story through the roof was the rifle left behind at the Wild West Theatre by Not-Quite Connors. Everybody my age and over knew instantly what the left-behind Winchester was modelled after, as well as some younger peeps who couldn’t avoid the constant reruns. It was already being called “The Rifleman Massacre” – CNN’s cue to show a lot of violent clips from The Rifleman that had been uploaded to YouTube.
Boy, they loved themselves some crazy news shit.
But there were some other facts buried under all the hyperbole - such as the fact that they had been holding the General at gunpoint the day before. That explained why the meeting had ended up at the abandoned Wild West Theatre – Not-Quite Connors and his gang had determined the location of our rendezvous, not the General.
PMA and I had driven on to St. Louis and found a low-cost, low profile Super Comfort Days 8 Whatever Motel, where we checked in around four p.m. I was back to using cash and a phony name, because I didn’t know what shoe was going to drop next. Now we were listening to CNN’s nonstop repetition of the one minute’s worth of information that the network actually had about the shooting. But the kid and I did learn a few things we didn’t know – like that Willie Wilson had died a year ago and his Wild West Theatre had closed its doors six months ago. I couldn’t be sure how Not-Quite Connors and his buddies had gotten into the place, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t legally and so was CNN. Since the Wild West Theatre had gone bust, however, all security video systems in the theatre or its parking lot had been shut down, leaving the cops almost nothing to go on – except the Rifleman rifle replica found in the saloon, the murder weapon according to the ballistics.
The murder weapon with my prints on it.
The CIA had my fingerprints on file, but, as a policy, didn’t release those of any of its past or present personnel into the general law enforcement database. The Agency really didn’t want any of its agents getting caught being up to no good without it knowing about it first. That meant the cops or the FBI couldn’t make a match with me. First, someone would have to suspect me – and nobody knew who I was or where I was.
Well, I had to amend that. One person knew I was almost certainly at the scene of the crime. A person I was calling right now as I paced around the room.
“Yeah?” said the voice on the other end.
“David Muhlfelder here.”
One of those pauses you could drive a truck through.
“I…will have to call you back, David. I’m in the middle of a few things.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I was disconnected. I looked at the CIA-gifted phone Howard had provided me in my new identity package and wondered if I should go introduce it to the back tire of my new rental, like I had the others. But, just then, it rang again.
“Hello?” I said.
“Great. Now you’ve got me using burners,” he said very quietly.
Turned out Howard was worried about his phone, not mine. But that hardly made me feel better about things.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the fucking stairwell, like I’m in a bad deleted scene from fucking 24. What the fuck is happening?”
“The time has come, Howard. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Show you what?” he exploded. “I got nothing to show! You’re the one who sets up meetings with generals who get brutally murdered by old TV western stars! Say, was Chuck Connors ever the Mystery Guest on What’s My Line? I’m looking for a way to tie this all together!”
“Howard, you’ve been acting weird since I took this job. You know something and you haven’t been square with me about it. Now I’m in the shit and I have a guest along for the ride who shouldn’t be here.”
The kid was staring at me. He was shaking his head like it was full of hot lava.
“Guest? What? Who the fuck is with you?”
“You start, Howard.”
A pause you could fly an Airbus through.
“Look, it’s not much. It’s just…when they originally came asking for you, you know, to hire you for this job. It was…who was asking for you.”
“And who was asking for me, Howard?”
“You’re still on the safe phone, right?”
“Yeah. It’s still safe, right?”
“Who the hell knows.” Pause. Then very quietly, “You ever hear of the Underneath Secretary of Intelligence Oversight?”
“Yeah, Pentagon, right? One of the bullshit positions they put in after 9/11?”
“Bullshit, my ass. That guy has eighty billion to play with and a field squad of about one hundred twenty-five. Mostly overseas.”
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“Andrew Wright. He was a Green Beret and used to work for the Agency. He was involved in shit in Honduras, Nicaragua, Beirut, he even smuggled arms to the Afghans when they were battling the Russians. He’s still involved over there, but even we don’t know what the fuck he does and he’s not telling.”
“So what’s the point?”
“The point is this high-up motherfucker doesn’t personally call people like me looking for low-level people like you!”
“Is that a slam?”
“That’s a reality, we’re both low-level compared to this guy. He’s the government’s direct liaison to Dark Sky, you’ve heard of them?”
Another pause, this time on my end.
“Yeah. Yeah, I have. The DOD is still hiring that outfit?”
“Well, he is.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah.”
His turn to pause. This was the longest one yet.
“It’s this. After I gave him your information, he asked if you were…expendable.”
“Expendable???”
For some reason, my underwear suddenly felt too tight.
“I asked him what he meant by that…he said he just wanted to make sure you weren’t critical to any other operations. And then he hung up.”
I had been standing, but I felt a little dizzy, so I sat back down.
“Expendable.”
“Just tell me what the fuck he’s gotten you into.”
I told him the whole thing, starting with the General Davidson revelation and ending with t
he Not-Quite Connors confrontation. It was one of those stories that felt even weirder when you had to tell it somebody else. After I was done with the whole thing, I pictured Howard eyeing the empty stairwell, wondering if there was any way in the world anybody was listening in on him.
“Jesus. Jesus. What the fuck. Okay, you have to get back here.”
“I’m not feeling like that’s a good idea right now. I want to follow up on this name that Kraemer slipped me.”
“Are you crazy? That’s not a possibility. If they ever track down the fact that I gave you the new identity pack and…”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Howard?”
“Shit, I don’t even know anymore,” he said with an exhausted mumble. “But look. The General’s kid can’t be alive, that’s just ridiculous. If these people want you to quit, believe me, you should quit. Everybody wants you to quit, including me, so quit.”
“I’m kind of tired of quitting, Howard. I did it twelve years ago and I don’t think it’s been good for me.”
“Wait, you said you had company. Who’s with you?”
“General Davidson’s grandson.”
PMA shook his head again, even more violently than before.
“Turns out he was the courier your people sent. He’s working for the Agency. Summer job. Nice kid.”
“General Davidson’s grandson? And you’re dragging me into all this? Holy fuck, holy fuck. Listen to me, Max, listen to every fucking word I’m saying. This isn’t just your life on the line, this is mine. I’ve got over thirty years invested in this place and a nice fat pension waiting for me when I retire in a few years. You have no moves, Max. You’re almost sixty, you’re out of shape and you’re in no way equipped to deal with this fuckfest. I’m not saying all that to hurt your feelings…”
“You’re not. I give myself the same speech every morning.”
“Then you know I’m fucking right and you need to come fucking back here, tell the General what you’re supposed to tell him, get the kid back to his mother before she starts raising holy hell, then go back to Roosevelt Island and fuck that singer of yours.”
“Have I ever told you to go home and fuck Janet?”
“No, because I’d laugh in your face, I don’t want to fuck Janet, who does?”
“Don’t look at me.”
“Get the fuck back here, I’ll protect you and get Support to Mission on this.”
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Howard, but I don’t think you can protect me. I also have the feeling that Support to Mission won’t do anything about this. Plus there’s the fact that I’ve been set up as a double murderer.”
“I’ll vouch for you.”
“I don’t know if I can take that check to the bank, Howard. This is serious shit. A general and a colonel were brutally murdered. Right in front of me.”
“I get that.”
“Then get this – I’m going to at least track down Michael Winters. If I don’t get some idea of what’s going on, who knows what’s going to come back and bite us all in the ass? And here’s the most relevant issue to me personally. Even if I talk General Davidson into letting go of this – how can I be sure they’re not going to kill me afterwards? What would stop them then? They don’t know how much I know.”
“Jesus. Shit. Okay. Just…just do me one favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t do anything for a couple of days. Nothing. Don’t go looking for anyone, don’t poke any bears. Let shit cool off for a while. It’s Friday, right? Take the weekend off. You could probably use it.”
“What good will that do?”
“Maybe nothing, maybe something. I mean, I might find out something. If you’ve gone AWOL on the guy who hired you…”
“Mr. Barry Filer.”
“…then Mr. Barry Filer might come back to me, right? And he’ll have to at least have some kind of bullshit story to tell me. Maybe I can see what kind of room we have to maneuver here.”
“Well, at least I know who he’s working for now.”
“That’s not a good thing. Andrew Wright is the biggest spook there is. He’s the king of the spooks.”
I let out a blast of air. Going dark for the weekend wasn’t a bad idea, even if it was Howard’s.
“So, we good?” he asked.
“We’re something. I’m not sure ‘good’ is the word.”
I hung up.
“I can’t believe you told him.”
Now the kid was mad at me.
“Howard’s the only guy I have I can trust, I have to tell him everything.”
The kid threw a few furtive glances around the room and then finally accepted the situation.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Did a man named Andrew Wright ever come to see your grandfather since you’ve lived there?”
“Andrew? You mean Andy? The old guy?”
A few chills went through me.
“Probably.”
“He’s got a limp – right leg, I think. Always in a suit. Came over a couple of times. Told me he and my grandpa started out together on some overseas stuff. I spent hardly any time with the dude, just talked to him on his way in and out.”
That cinched that connection. Meanwhile, the kid was freaking.
“So what do we do? Are they going to send in a team to help us?”
“No. We’re in no immediate danger. We’re going to stay quiet until Monday.”
He blinked.
“What – here?”
“You don’t like outer St. Louis? We got here just in time for the beginning of the humidity season.”
He turned back to the TV screen and the hysterical news anchors with the giant rifle graphic behind their heads. He was getting as hysterical as they were.
“We need guns! They’re going to come for us!”
He turned back to me with burning eyes. PMA was turning his Power to be terrified into a Mental idea that he would have to shoot first and ask questions later, and that meant he wanted to commit the Action of buying some serious hardware.
“How often have you shot a gun?” I asked.
“A couple of times,” he mumbled.
“Me too,” I said. “We’ll just end up shooting each other instead of anybody who counts. No guns.”
“What the hell are we going to do?”
This was going to be the hard part.
“You should go home.”
“A soldier never leaves his unit. My grandfather taught me that much.”
I kept my eye roll on the inside of my skull.
“Look, Jeremy.” I used his real name, the way my father used my first and middle names together when I was in trouble. “We’ve just entered a brand new and very horrible world. One that you shouldn’t be anywhere near. We’re getting you on a flight tomorrow morning…”
PMA pulled out his wallet.
“Why?” I asked.
I soon got my answer. He took out his ID, his driver’s license, and he ran into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. This time, I allowed my eye roll its moment in the sun as he proudly came strolling out with a smirk firmly in place.
“You can’t put me on a flight, I don’t have ID. You can’t put me in a rental either. I’m sticking with you and on Monday, we’re going to track down that Michael Winters cocksucker.”
“That’s a premature assessment, we don’t know if he actually sucks cocks or not.”
“Ha ha.”
“I can tell you’re not really laughing.”
Was it dinner time yet? I was hungry and desperate to stop this goddamn conversation. I grabbed the empty ice bucket. It was at least time to start drinking.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yeah,” I said as I headed for the room door. “I figured that out. That’s why I’m going to get ice.”
When I came back with a full bucket, I found him practicing his MAU moves again. At least he kept his pants on this time. I poured myself the first drink and took o
ne of the pain pills. My jaw hurt like a son of a bitch from the punch I had received in the saloon and the rest of my body ached anew from my collision with the floor. Things hurt bad enough just from getting old, I didn’t need all this on top of it.
But I did need to try and find out who Michael Winters was.
I fired up the Chromebook and took a sip of Jack, feeling thankful that General Kraemer had found a way to get that name on paper before Not-Quite Connors used his chest for target practice.
The first Michael Winters that came up on Google was an actor who had been on the TV show Gilmore Girls. I wouldn’t mind a weekend with Lauren Graham, but that had little to do with the fact that this wasn’t the guy I was looking for. Nor did I believe the Michael Winters who was an orthodontist in Seattle had any relevance to the many, many, many issues at hand here.
The third Michael Winters I found was the one.
Michael Winters had been in the Army Rangers, just like Robert Davidson. He was in Afghanistan and served under General Kraemer and Colonel Allen, just like Robert Davidson. And unlike Robert Davidson, I knew where he was.
Corporal Michael Winters was discharged in 2007, according to army records. A medical discharge. A search on his full name, Michael Malcolm Winters, put him in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I paid the fee to the creepy online service that tells you where everybody including your grandma is and got the address. We’d have to do a little backtracking, but luckily, it would only take five or six hours of driving to get up there. Hopefully, he would actually be there – and not already dead like the other two guys I tried to talk to. In any event, I’d find out on Monday.
For now, nobody knew where I was, not even Howard - and there was no real way for anyone to track me down, thanks to my new David Muhlfelder identity. So I let myself relax a little. It had been a long day and I was just starting to realize how tight every muscle in my body had been for the last few days. The kid was still practicing his moves, but I thought he deserved an update.
“Monday, we go to Milwaukee.”
“That’s where this guy is? What’s his deal?” he asked in between pants.
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 11