Hell Hole

by Chris Grabenstein

“The senator needs to speak to you.”

  “Tell him to call during normal business hours and we’ll set something up.”

  Another step, another block.

  “He needs to speak with you now.”

  “Now doesn’t work for me.”

  “Me, neither,” I chime in.

  “Get in the car.”

  It’s my turn to take a step to my left and the other tough guy’s turn to block me.

  Then I hear Graves’s earpiece cackle.

  “Target acquired” leaks out of it.

  I look over at Ceepak. There’s a red dot holding steady in the center of his forehead—somebody playing with a laser pointer or a sniper lining up a shot from yet another SUV.

  “Maybe we should go with them,” I suggest.

  Grudgingly, Ceepak agrees.

  They confiscate our weapons, promising that we’ll get them back after we have our little meeting with the senator.

  “Sorry we need to do it this way,” says Graves from the front seat. He’s on the passenger side. Gigantor is behind the wheel. A GMC Denali with tinted windows is tailing us. My guess? Parker. The liar who lied about not tolerating liars.

  We’re headed south. Down to the golden tip of Sea Haven where the rich folk live.

  “Where are you taking us?” asks Ceepak.

  “The radio lady’s mansion. The senator thinks her house will afford the privacy required to discuss pressing matters of national security.”

  I see. Wiping out the village of Al Hahmudiyah? A very important part of the ongoing war against global terrorism.

  We’re escorted into Crazy Janey’s mansion. The living room, I guess. The ceilings are at least thirty feet high. The walls at the far end are actually windows looking out on the pool and the ocean beyond. The furniture is all white.

  Our two escorts bar the front door behind us.

  The guys in the other SUV? They didn’t get out of their vehicle when we pulled into the driveway. Like good executioners everywhere, they’re remaining anonymous. Instead of putting on black hoods, they’ve rolled around to the backyard where they can cover our asses through Crazy Janey’s big plate glass windows. I expect to see the red light of a sniper sight dancing over my heart any second now.

  Senator Worthington sweeps in from the kitchen. He’s sipping something brown out of a crystal tumbler. He swirls it casually. Ice cubes clink.

  “Officers! Good to see you.” He says this as if we’re all in the clubhouse at his country club. “Thank you so much for coming down today.”

  “Did we have a choice?” I say because I’m the wise ass on the team.

  Worthington ignores me. “Please take a seat, take a seat.”

  Ceepak stands where he is. Me too.

  “Fine,” says Worthington. “We can stand if you like. Where are your sidearms?”

  “We removed them, sir,” says Graves from behind me.

  “Really? That wasn’t necessary. Officer Ceepak is ex-military. He knows what’s at stake here.”

  “No,” says Ceepak, who never likes it when somebody makes up his mind for him. “I do not.”

  “I’m referring to the incident in Al Hahmudiyah,” Senator Worthington continues, crinkling his brow, playing the wise grandfather to Ceepak’s petulant child. “A military action that might be misconstrued if viewed out of context by the wrong individuals.”

  Yeah—people with at least one functioning eyeball.

  “Is it a concern? Of course it is. Do these things happen in the fog of war? Heavens, yes. As you know, Lieutenant Ceepak, they are a necessary part of war, especially when dealing with a brutal counterinsurgency—shadowy dead-enders and suicide bombers with no respect for human life.”

  “The same might be said about the men of Echo Company,” says Ceepak.

  “No. Not really. But then again, there are extenuating circumstances that I, unfortunately, am not at liberty to discuss. But, surely, as a former student of strategy and tactics, you know it has always been necessary to present the locals in an occupied land with a choice: we can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s up to them.”

  “These people were not presented with a choice,” Ceepak says back. “They were brutally slain to avenge the death of John Sullivan, a member of Echo Company killed by an insurgent’s roadside bomb.”

  “If what you say is true, the military authorities will mete out the appropriate punishment. However, we must not let this incident become fodder for public debate, where it has the power to deplete already sagging morale.”

  Or ruin somebody’s presidential campaign.

  “So you had Shareef Smith murdered?” asks Ceepak. “To cover up the truth?”

  “Heavens no. That young man committed suicide. I’m afraid it was a clear case of post-traumatic stress disorder aggravated by an unfortunate intake of narcotics. Something that, as you now know, has plagued my own family.”

  Now Worthington is giving us his noble father look, artificial concern for his junkie son ridging his furrowed brow.

  “My son is a good man,” Worthington continues. “Up until the incident today, he had been clean and sober for nearly a year. Was it easy for him? Of course not. Did he reach out to other addicts still in the grip of their addictions? You bet he did. That’s what brought him down to that rest area off the Garden State Parkway on Friday night. To tell the truth, it’s the whole reason I rented the beach house in Sea Haven for the boys: to help facilitate Corporal Smith’s recovery.”

  Ceepak arches an eyebrow higher than I’ve ever seen him arch one.

  “You rented the house on Kipper Street last Wednesday,” Ceepak says. “One day after Shareef Smith text-messaged images from the Al Hahmudiyah massacre from his cell phone to your e-mail address.”

  “Exactly,” says Worthington. “When I received that photograph, I realized just how much mental anguish this brave young soldier was battling.”

  Geeze-o, man. No wonder the guy made it all the way to senator. He lies better than anyone in Washington, and that’s saying something.

  “Did you bring the photographs with you?” he asks

  Ceepak slowly unclasps the envelope. Lays the contact sheets on Crazy Janey’s very classy glass-topped table. Surrounded by all this clean whiteness, the pictures look even bloodier.

  “And the originals? Were they on a disk of some sort?”

  “Yes.”

  Senator Worthington motions for the envelope, like Ceepak should hand it over.

  So he does.

  Because there ain’t no disk in it.

  “Where is the disk?”

  “In a secure location.”

  “I suppose you made a backup?”

  “It’s our standard protocol,” I say because I can make it sound more sarcastic than Ceepak could.

  “We’ll need to go back to police headquarters,” Worthington says. “We’ll retrieve the original, as well as any and all copies you may have made.”

  “We can’t do that,” says Ceepak.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The disk contains evidence pertinent to an ongoing investigation.”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” the senator asks the universe. “We need to turn the evidence over to the appropriate military authorities so they can investigate this incident without causing undue collateral damage to our brave troops still on the battlefield.”

  “The Burlington County prosecutor’s office needs the evidence as well,” says Ceepak.

  “Who? For Heaven’s sake—I’m talking about the Department of Defense and the global war on terrorism … .”

  “The Burlington County prosecutor is the woman who will represent the State of New Jersey and Shareef Smith in the murder trial of Dale Dixon, Andrew Prescott, Stephen Rutledge, Miguel Hernandez, and your son, Woodrow G. Worthington.”

  “Jesus,” says a voice behind us. “Once an MP, always an MP.”

  It’s Dixon and everybody from Echo Company except the senator’s son.

&
nbsp; They’re all cradling beers. They don’t look armed; guess the senator’s bodyguards have that angle covered. They do, however, look totally tanked.

  “You want to arrest all of us?” Dixon scoffs. “You know what that tells me, Ceepak?”

  “No.”

  “You’re on a fishing expedition. You don’t know jack shit.”

  Ceepak grins back at him. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sergeant Dixon. I know everything.”

  40

  There’s a red dot dancing on Ceepak’s chest.

  I look down at my own shirt. Looks like they’re targeting the bottom button on my polo’s two-button collar.

  Now the pink cell phone clipped to Ceepak’s belt starts to chirp. Starky has a pretty obnoxious ringtone: Keith Urban’s “Tonight I Wanna Cry.”

  “Don’t answer that!” snaps Senator Worthington.

  Ceepak reaches for the belt. I hear Graves behind us lever back the trigger on whatever kind of hand cannon he is currently aiming at our heads. For good measure, the laser dot swings up to a spot right between Ceepak’s eyes. I look down again. No dot on the button. I can’t see between my eyes but I’m guessing my executioner has adjusted his aim too.

  The phone keeps plunking out its mellow bass line while some kind of synthesized trumpet takes the melancholy melody.

  “Do not answer that!” the senator reiterates his position.

  “Don’t even fucking touch it!” adds Dixon, slurring a few of the words, then taking another long pull off his beer.

  Ceepak raises both hands. He will remain in full compliance with the senator’s request. Another bar of bad electronic mush blares from his belt. As requested, he does not answer it.

  The senator looks annoyed, but he lets the ringtone do its thing.

  Of course, this annoying cell phone interruption tells me something: the senator didn’t do the GPS-chip cellular-phone-tracking stuff on the Smith sisters himself because he doesn’t realize that somebody might be tracking Starky’s phone right now and the longer it rings, the better his or her chances of pinpointing our current position.

  I’m betting on Tech Officer Denise Diego. She saw the slide show and knows what kind of people we’re dealing with. She also knows people over at Verizon. Maybe she guessed why we’re not currently responding to any and all radio calls. Maybe, when she ran to the store for a quick Doritos refill, she noticed that our vehicle was still parked in the lot.

  Yes, I’m hoping it’s Diego pinging us for a GPS location. I’m also praying it’s not one of Starky’s girlfriends calling for makeup tips.

  The synthetic song finally stops.

  “So, Officer Ceepak,” says Dixon, “tell us what you think happened to the poor little pussy. Tell us how we killed Shareef Smith.”

  The other men surrounding Dixon swig their beers. Prescott. Rutledge.

  But not Hernandez. He looks sick to his stomach.

  “Come on!” Now I know for sure Dixon has been drinking all day. He’s in one of those pissy troughs that come between beer buzzes. “I want to hear what this hot shit cop from a two-bit tourist trap thinks happened in that goddamn crapper.”

  “What you are requesting will serve no purpose, Sergeant,” says Senator Worthington. “We need to go retrieve that disk.”

  “That can wait.”

  “No, Dale. It can not wait.”

  “Relax, Winny. You’re not president yet. I want to hear Ceepak’s theories. Might provide us with just cause. Always a good thing for a soldier to have before he kills a man.”

  “It may take some time,” says Ceepak, unfazed by Dixon’s threat. “You orchestrated quite a plan, Sergeant. Your men moved as they did in Al Hahmudiyah. Employed the same combat team tactics.”

  “Hey, take your fucking time. The fridge is fully stocked. Tell us what you think you know. But, choose your words carefully. If we don’t like what you say, we’ll ask those two gentlemen outside to blow your fucking brains all over Crazy Janey’s clean white carpet.”

  “Honestly, Dale,” the senator protests.

  “Shut the fuck up, Winny, and sit down.”

  “Might I remind you that my men are the ones with weapons?”

  “Corporal Graves wants to hear this too,” says Dixon. “Right, Graves?”

  “Roger that,” says Graves. I turn my head just enough to see him swing his weapon over to Senator Worthington’s general vicinity.

  “Graves was Navy,” says Dixon. “He, like me, will gladly kill anybody you order us to, provided, of course, you give us a justifiable reason to do so!”

  So it’s the senator’s turn to throw up his hands in defeat. He sits on the sofa.

  “Fine,” he says. “Hurry up.”

  “It’s a long story,” says Ceepak. “A complex plan. Ingenious, actually.” He’s taking his time. I think he figured out that potential cellphone-tracking deal six synthesized trumpet bleats before me. He’s buying the cavalry riding to our rescue a little more riding time.

  “Come on, Ceepak,” says Dixon. “Show me what you got!” He settles back into that chair like he’s ready to watch a good baseball game.

  And so Ceepak begins.

  “For some time, Shareef Smith felt remorse over the actions of Echo Company on nineteen November in the Iraqi village of Al Hahmudiyah. The rape and murder of the locals was, in my estimation, undertaken as an act of revenge for the death of John Sullivan, a member of Echo Company who was a casualty of an insurgent’s roadside bomb.”

  “The fucking cowards blew his legs off!” snarls Dixon. “Set it off with a cell phone.”

  Ceepak nods. He’s been there. Seen that.

  “Months earlier,” he continues and turns to face the senator, “your own son had been the target of an Iraqi sniper. A wound that deservedly earned him the Purple Heart and should’ve warranted him a ticket home. However, I sense that you, sir, had other priorities and requested that he remain in country to shore up your political ambitions.”

  “Come on, Ceepak,” says Dixon. “This is ancient history. Get to the good stuff so the men outside can kill you with a clean conscience.”

  Ceepak nods again. He’s being very amiable.

  Buying more time.

  “Last week, while on leave in Baltimore, Corporal Smith attempted to make contact with Senator Worthington. He called your office several times because he believed what you say on TV: that you’re the American soldier’s best friend in Washington.”

  “Hernandez?” Dixon yells. “I need another beer here.”

  Hernandez slogs off to the kitchen to fetch it.

  “Go on, Ceepak. I’m enjoying this.”

  Ceepak faces Senator Worthington. “Frustrated by your refusal to accept his calls, Smith sent you an e-mail with evidence of the atrocities attached.”

  “Watch your choice of words, son,” warns the senator. “Atrocity is an inappropriate descriptor for the execution of a time-honored counterinsurgency tactic.”

  “When you still refused to talk to him, Smith decided to come see me.”

  Funny. No one’s disputing this.

  “Meanwhile,” Ceepak continues, “you ordered your son to call Smith and find out what he intended to do with his photographs. When he mentioned my name, your son volunteered to help Smith deliver the evidence. I suspect you forced your son into performing this task, Senator. I believe your son to be an honorable man.”

  Meaning, of course, the father isn’t.

  “You then had your staff use their contacts within the D.O.D. to locate me. Easy enough to accomplish. I keep current on any and all requests for personal data that come in from the Army.”

  Of course he does.

  “When you discovered that I was currently employed by the Sea Haven police department, you had your office rent one of the few beach houses still available on the island. The house at twenty-two Kipper Street where my partner first met Sergeant Dixon and the others.”

  Ceepak gestures in my general direction. Doesn’t matter. My out
door sniper already knows who I am.

  “Your son was apparently quite persuasive. He convinced Smith to delay contacting me until after they had both attended an Echo Company party at the Jersey shore. Maybe your son further enticed Smith with an invitation to the gala to be held here on Saturday night. Maybe he promised Smith that he would finally get to meet you. Have a face-to-face conversation about his concerns. I’m not sure how he persuaded Smith; I just know he was successful. Otherwise, I’m certain, Smith would’ve called to tell me he was coming.”

  Hernandez returns to the living room with a whole six-pack of beer. He yanks a can out of the plastic rings and tosses it to Dixon. Handy Andy and Rutledge reach out and grab cans too. Ceepak presses on.

  “Smith and your son made arrangements to meet at the exit fifty-two rest area where they’d further discuss their plans for bringing the Al Hahmudiyah massacre to your attention. Smith promised to bring his photographic evidence. Lieutenant Worthington would then escort Shareef to the party house because, as he no doubt explained, all the beach houses up and down our island look pretty similar. A map wouldn’t do Smith much good.”

  “So why the hell did he have one in his damn pocket?” asks a very drunk Dixon.

  “Because you put it there where the police could easily find it.”

  “You found fingerprints?”

  “No.”

  “Like I said, soldier: you got shit.”

  Ceepak continues: “Sergeant Dixon and private Hernandez arrived in Sea Haven on Thursday—a day earlier than the others so they could do reconnaissance work at the rest area. In fact, when we subpoena Thursday’s tapes from the indoor security camera, I’m quite confident we’ll see you two.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Several things. First, of course, locating the interior camera, noting its coverage area. You also paid special attention to the men’s room, where I’m certain you examined the posted cleaning schedule. You also observed the night janitor, Mr. Osvaldo Vargas, and noted that he was a close physical match for your man, Mr. Miguel Hernandez. They’re both Hispanic. They’re both short. What are you? Five-one? Five-two?”

  Hernandez doesn’t answer. But his eye twitches.