During breaks, he made an effort to learn about her, for lack of anything better to do. She gave up information slowly at first, like she was talking with a career counselor at college. She’d been a sophomore at the University of Colorado, heading home to Iowa for spring break when the Plague took off and the CDC finally admitted it wasn’t like the bird flu, but was more like the Black Death. Around Hays, on I-70, confusion had reigned where National Guard troops halted traffic and the CDC began checking drivers and quarantining those with the Plague. Ashley—her last name was Duncan—had passed. Her roommate and friend hadn’t, and they got separated, the roommate/friend disappearing into a white van to Christ-knew-where, and likely moldering in a mass grave by now or wafting about in the atmosphere in little cinders. The car got vandalized as the casualties mounted, and order rapidly broke down. She finally got a ride from a trucker headed south on U.S. 83 who tried to rape her in the middle of nowhere. A quick Doc Marten to the nuts had cured that problem and let her hoof it for a few miles before a farmer had given her a ride into Jetmore and promptly died. In a strange, small town that was rapidly emptying from disease and exodus, she found Dewayne Decker knocking over a liquor store, and sort of glommed onto him by default, lack of better options—hell, any options.
Girlfriend?
Snort. “God, no way. Decker’s a freak, a doper, I could see it a mile away. No way I’d fuck him. He tried to one night. I told him what I did to the trucker. And showed him a knife I lifted out of a hardware store here.” It was a big case, locking blade, good for gutting and skinning a deer. Or a skinny doper. A knife like that, though, required some skill, and he didn’t think she had it, and her continued survival was a matter of Decker being wasted and a basic coward. She had been tired of traveling alone, but now longed for it.
“So you’re gonna give Decker and me the money and let us loose, huh?” They were taking a break, resting against the Crown Vic after cleaning out five houses of maybe two grand in cash and three ounces of gold and ten of silver jewelry, plus a spaghetti jar full of silver coins taken from change over the years.
“Yep.”
“I don’t have to stay with him, do I?” she almost whined.
“Not if you don’t want to,” Peters said. “Any ideas?”
“I couldn’t stand Northwood,” she said. “I guess it’s like these towns here, empty or mostly so.”
“Family there?”
“They were,” she said glumly. “My mom and sister lived there. My dad left when I was ten, he was in San Diego. I haven’t been able to talk to them since the cell networks went down.” She sighed back tears. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”
“Neither do I,” Peters said, fighting images of his ex-wife suiciding along with their ten-year old daughter, and Mona outside an emergency room choking on her own blood while a couple dozen other people did the same, and the orderlies looking on in stunned shock not knowing where to start. It should have brought them together, but didn’t.
***
“Your partner strikes me as a dangerous dude,” Decker told Foster. They were casing the houses closest to the motel, along the highway. The take was disappointing so far, a couple of rings and necklaces was all.
“You don’t say,” Foster replied deadpan, opening a door to a small house, 3 ADULTS MMM. The interior was stifling, the smell of rotting food from the defunct refrigerator overpowering, making her nearly gag. Decker turned and bolted out the door, and she heard retching noises. It took five minutes to case the house; one story and one bedroom, nothing in the dressers save for a half-dozen handguns, no silverware or jewelry, but lots of religious trinkets and icons, probably migrant workers from Mexico.
“I mean, he comes up with this thing he knows got to be illegal,” Decker continued as she shut the door. “He’s splitting a million in cash four ways, and gonna be happy with it? Shit, he’s gonna skip the country with all of it. Are you going with him?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Foster said, but she had, and Peters hadn’t made an offer, but he was counting on splitting the gold with her and calling it quits. It sounded almost feasible, but a tiny nagging voice in her brain tugged at her.
How much, after all, did she really know about him? He’d shown up at the squad room one day, orders from Treasury in his hands, no personnel file, no nothing, just official ID, and she’d seen how easy it was to fake that. He could’ve been about to be canned for embezzlement or sexual harassment or incompetence for all she knew, or he was a complete psycho who’d killed the real Peters and was impersonating him just to get to all this loot. She knew nothing about the man she’d been working alongside for three weeks now.
“How you know he’s not gonna just shoot you and take it all himself?”
“He wouldn’t.” Maybe.
“You sure?”
A beat, then two. “No.”
“Then you gotta do something about that.”
“Any ideas?”
***
The payout came not in the form of the neatly stacked bills that they’d turned in, confirming to Foster that the confiscation was not just Peters spinning some conspiracy yarn, but in the form of a booklet of payment certificates, in denominations of one hundred and one thousand dollars. Decker took the booklet from another bored polyester-clad middle-aged plumper clerk and left the office.
The plan was that he would then meet with Peters and Foster, who had turned in another haul to the Asset Recovery Office, and were waiting along with Ashley at a deserted gas station a mile away from the mall. Decker was to join them there. Peters stumbled on an ‘07 Honda, low miles, which had been stashed at an empty house on the edge of town, hidden back from the road behind a thick shelterbelt of cedars.
Decker was maybe a mile away and Ashley was listening to an iPod bought at the local superstore, pre-programmed with a cache of a thousand tunes, the thumpity-thumpity porno-disco beat tinnily buzzing from the ear-buds, making Peters wince.
“Decker’s a problem,” he told Foster.
“In general, or right now?”
“Both. In general’s not my concern. Right now is. He’s got the cool mil, soon to be split four ways, but he’s hit the lotto and got enough money for all the drugs and pussy he’s ever gonna need.”
“So?”
“So how do we know he’s gonna keep quiet?” Peters said quietly.
“You were the one who said to trust him.”
“Don’t recall that. I said he wasn’t gonna run if you kept an eye on him doing smash-and-grabs for Uncle Sam. I didn’t lay any odds on his long-term loyalty. And I’m not about to now.”
Foster felt herself go cold inside. She’d gone along with this in the beginning because she couldn’t think of a reason not to. The country and world had gone to hell, might still yet tip over into some freaky Darwinian Mad Max scene, and it made sense to grab a little while you could. Peters had started off with asset fraud, already a rendition-and-disappear offense, but was now talking about—if she read it right—murder. Four years in the Army and four on the local sheriff’s department and nothing like this had ever come up. The local warlords and poobahs over in Iraq screwed each other over like this, but Peters was one of the good guys. So was she. So what to do?
“Okay,” she said, hiding the tremor in her voice. “So what do you plan to do about it?”
“I think you know,” Peters said. “We get rid of Decker. More likely, you get rid of him.”
“And what about her?” she nodded at Ashley, who was lip-synching to some fuck-me dance music.
“I’ll take her and get the Toyota. We come back, Decker’s taken care of, we don’t mention it to her, and we divide up the loot and split.”
“You taking her with you?”
“Might. Damned if I know. Ain’t asked. You’re welcome to come along.”
“I’ll think on it,” Foster said cagily. Perfect, now he’s doing the old three-way fantasy bit, probably wanted her and Ashley to go lesbo and let him watch for
a larger cut. “Just do him, shot to the head, grab the money?”
“Yeah. That’s about it. You were in Iraq for two tours. Don’t tell me you’ve never shot anyone.”
“I did. It’s just that they were usually pointing a gun at me, or had their fingers on a cell phone to trigger an IED. Cold blood’s another thing.”
“Look,” Peters said, impatient, “You know guys like Decker. He’s loyal to no one but himself. He’ll rat us out just to get a reward, a million’s not enough for him. Or he’ll try to get it all, the gold and silver and platinum, and be too stupid to keep from getting busted with it, and then he’ll turn us in. Or, three years down the road he gets busted for dealing drugs, tries to cut a plea deal by giving the feds some juicy info on crooked cops, then comes the knock in the middle of the night and you and I get sent off to a detainment camp. Decker’s a fucking loaded gun at our heads. He was a means to an end, we’ve got the ends, he’s outlived his usefulness.”
The hell of it was, it sounded reasonable to her. Four years in law enforcement and part of that dealing with the Deckers of the world told her that Peters read it right. Decker probably would run his mouth to the first badge that got within twenty feet, but to snuff him out—unless there was a way to use it to her advantage.
“You’re right. Fine,” she told Peters in her best stone cold voice. “I’ll take care of it. Go get the car.” She watched Peters as he got into the Crown Vic, saw Ashley’s nonchalance, and figured maybe he was going to take her along as a sex doll. And when he got tired of screwing the fresh twenty-year old flesh, would she end up in a ditch like he wanted for Decker? There weren’t any good outs here, but she had one that might cause less moral queasiness.
***
Peters watched Foster, driving the Toyota, in the rear view mirror as the Crown Vic swung onto the road towards the safe house. Ashley kept the ear-buds in, mouthing the words to some goodtime party-all-night holla audio sewage. Lady Gaga, JLo, Britney, Miley fucking Cyrus, Katy Perry and the other one-name blow-up dolls on the thumb-sized device; a thousand highway miles listening to that drove a gut punch into his psyche. Might be tolerable if he could be sure he’d be fucking her brains out once he took care of Decker and Foster, but that wasn’t a given. Thirty-five years old to twenty is creepy. And to be honest, Ashley Duncan was no prize, a typical arrested adolescent who’d had her sexual awakening and made the first tentative probings of her loins to visions of Heath Ledger or Ben Affleck or Justin Timberlake, grown up in a culture so sexed that it devalued to zero, a replaceable cog in the machine of youth, unexceptional down to the obligatory tribal tattoo over her ass and the rose on her left shoulder. And if she did show interest, then what? The most overrated thing in the world, Peters had found out long ago, was teenage pussy. They can watch all the softcore music videos and listen to the just-do-me lyrics but a girl that age has no idea what to do with it. She’s worrying about other stuff while she’s on her back feet in the air, moaning the obligatory oh-gods and checking her cell phone.
So...
Three more brain-drilling songs later they found the safe house. He pulled the Crown Vic into the drive, parked where it couldn’t be seen from the road.
“Okay,” Peters said, digging in his pocket and handing Ashley the keys to the Toyota. “Follow me back.”
“So you’re giving Dewayne the car,” she said peevishly.
“Yeah.”
“And you expect me to go with him?”
“Makes no difference what you do,” he said.
Ashley crossed her arms. “So how come I don’t get a car?” Like she was pouting at her daddy for getting a lousy card with no money for graduation. Spoiled bitch.
“Look around,” Peters said. “There’s a whole country full of ‘em.”
“That’s stealing.”
“Cops got better things to do now than run down auto thefts, believe me.”
“Where would I get the keys?”
“Scrounge around in the house. Find a dealership, check the board.”
“So how come you got a car for Dewayne?”
“Cause he helped us out, I figured we owed him a set of wheels that we knew ran, didn’t have any problems. And had a legal tag so he doesn’t get pulled over.”
“And snitch on you to whatever cop pulls him over, right?”
“Something like that.”
“And you’re sure I won’t?”
“You’re getting your cut from the cash,” Peters said, stomach in his feet. Not now...
“Fuck that,” Ashley said, tipping her jaw up. “Paper’s worthless. I had a teacher in economics class call it fiat money, it’s worth something only because we say it is. And I learned about Germany in the 1920s, carrying a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread. That’s what’s happening here. I want my cut in something more solid.”
“If you heard about Weimar, Germany, you probably figured out what’s coming in America,” Peters said.
“Maybe. I figure I have enough gold, I can ride it out.”
“Well, just how much you reckon is enough?”
“You, me, your partner there, three ways.”
“What about Dewayne?”
“Fuck him.” She smiled. “Besides, I figured out what you’re planning for him. The car’s not for Dewayne. It’s for you. Clean, tags in order. And I’ll bet the whole thing’s in your name.”
Peters smiled easily. “You’re folks got their money’s worth from your college. But are you just planning to take the money and hightail it out of here?”
“Yeah, I kinda thought so. Give me the gold, the keys, and I’m gone.”
“What if you get stopped, and the title’s in my name?”
“You’re my stepdaddy, gave me the car to use before I went off to college. Besides, I drive the speed limit and don’t sell dope. Cops got no reason to hassle me.”
Peters sat there, thought. “Okay,” he finally said. “You win.” He opened the door, went around back quickly to the trunk and opened it, bent over inside. He heard her off-brand flip-flops crunch gravel.
“I don’t really care what I get,” she said. “Gold’s good, but no silver. Maybe the—”
Peters straightened, and in one quick motion, dropped his arm to the side holster, unsnapping it and drawing the 9mm, flipping off the safety and raising it. He drew a bead on her chest and fired twice. Ashley had a surprised look on her face as he drew, started to scream, but it cut off suddenly as the slugs hit her and dropped her to the gravel.
Peters dropped his arm, ignored the hammering in his heart that sounded like a freight train with the temporary deafness from the concussion of the shots, and stood over Ashley. Her mouth was still moving, but her eyes were glazing gray, feet twitching and tortured breaths hissing from her throat. After thirty seconds it was over.
Stupid bitch, he thought. Had to go and get greedy, threaten a guy with a gun who had seen too much death already and was on a mission to save his hide with a pile of money. He might have taken her with him, used her and dumped her once they were safely non-extraditable on some white-sand beach resort in Mexico, where she could latch onto one of the idle rich whiling away the end of the world under a rain of margaritas.
He hauled her dead weight into the house, where 2 ADULTS MF had resided in rundown monthly-government-check fashion. He left her in the basement. Someday someone would either re-occupy the house or mostly likely tear it down, or maybe there wouldn’t be anyone around to care. He was still covered. He tried to feel bad about it, leaving this dull girl who once had hopes and dreams, however mundane, in a fucking basement with garden tools and disemboweled appliances as her only adornments. He tried, but couldn’t. What’s one more body?
***
“Where’s Ashley?” Foster asked Peters as he drove up.
“I let her go,” Peters said. “Figured once we took care of Dewayne, we didn’t need the car.”
“And she left without any of the cash?” Foster sounded suspicious, go
t a small twitch in her left eye.
“I gave her some of the gold,” Peters said. “Enough to get her west, set up there.” He got out, looked around. “Where’s Decker?”
“In the repair bay,” Foster said diffidently.
Peters looked at her a moment, shook his head. “You didn’t do it, did you? Didn’t kill him. What’d you do, let him loose?”
2013: The Aftermath Page 15