Shattered Shell

by Brendan DuBois

  With flashlight in hand I got out and crunched my way across the frozen lawn, cold air on my face, not seeing Felix but knowing he was out there just the same. A comforting thought.

  I went up to the front door, making a quick look around to unsure that Krypton or any friends of his weren't sniffing around, and I knocked a few times.

  No answer.

  "Doug? Doug Miles?"

  I rapped on the door with my flashlight, and I thought I heard something moving around inside, and then there was a loud thump. I moved off the doorstep and was going to move around to the side of the house when the door suddenly opened, and standing in the light, breathing heavily but smiling, was Felix, pistol in hand.

  "Selling something, young boy?" he asked.

  "Depends on what you're buying, I guess."

  I walked in and suddenly started breathing through my mouth. We were in a walkway that led off to the garage at our right, and to a living room to the left. A sour-looking man who looked to be Doug Miles was sitting on a couch, rubbing at his jaw. He had on jeans and a thick blue sweatshirt, and had one sneaker on. The room looked like someone had taken a Salvation Army drop-off bin and had tumbled it inside. Clothes were strewn around and were flowing out of torn green garbage bags. The room was thick with the smell of old grease and unwashed clothes. There were some newspapers crumpled up and some torn magazines, and a leaning bookshelf that held some paperbacks and a couple of souvenir sculptures or something. I looked quickly and saw one of the little statues was of a busty woman, holding up a beer stein, and on the base of the sculpture was "Beer and Broads: The Way Life Was Meant To Be." Toward the rear an open door led to the backyard, and next to the door was a counter that had a mini-fridge and two-burner hotplate. The walls were cheap paneling, bowing out from the wall studs, and a clock on the near wall was off by an hour.

  “What the hell is this?" Doug asked, looking sullenly up at us. His hair was brown and thick and combed back, and he had a two- or three-day-old growth of beard. His nose was red and runny, and his eyes were weepy.

  I said nothing and Felix poked through another door, which led to a bathroom that had a toilet and stand-up shower, and another thick mass of clothes on the floor. I walked through the mounds of trash and clothes to the rear door, which I closed, and Felix came back and stood next to me.

  "Any other rooms?" I asked.

  "This is it," Felix said, holstering his pistol. "Man must haw to sleep on the couch, which must be damn uncomfortable unless it's a fold-out. Is that what it is?"

  "Who are you guys?" Doug demanded, his voice quavering, I looked around the room again. No other chairs. Oh, well, I opened up my coat, making sure that Doug could see my own 9mm, and I reached into a side pocket and took out a thin piece of cardboard. I smiled at him as I tossed my business card into his lap.

  "We're your worst nightmare, Doug," I said.

  "Hunh?"

  I motioned to the card. "We're magazine writers, and we're here to talk."

  Chapter Eighteen

  He didn't seem impressed. Doug picked up the card and examined both sides and tossed it to the floor.

  "The hell you're from some freakin' magazine," he said. "What do you want?"

  Felix moved around so we were flanking him, and Felix had this odd little smile I've seen before on a few occasions, when he's in his working mode. Doug was looking at me, and I wished he was looking at Felix. He would definitely be more impressed.

  "Information," I said. "We're looking for some information."

  He sat back. "You should get the hell out of here, 'fore you get into trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?" I asked. "Word is, you're not friendly with the cops."

  By now he was smirking. "I didn't say anything about cops now, did I? But you still can get into the shits, if you don't watch yourself . So why don't you get out?"

  "We sure will," Felix said, and Doug turned and looked at him and the smirk wavered. "But after you tell us what we need. We want information about your sister."

  "Hunh?" and he looked back to me. "All this action, coming in here, wearing metal, and pulling me around, and you want to talk about Kara?"

  "That's right," I said. "Kara, You know what happened to her a couple of weeks ago, light? Well, we're working on an article about the whole matter. We've interviewed her, the cops, her neighbors, her landlord, the place where she works, and even your parents. You're the last one on the list, Doug, so tell us what you know."

  He rubbed at his nose, sniffled some. "You're whacked. I haven't seen her in months, and the only thing I know is something my dad said, about her being attacked or something." He smiled up at us. "Why don't you go talk to a detective up in Tyler? She probably knows a lot about Sis."

  "You said your dad told you about Kara?"

  He nodded. "Yeah, a week or two ago, when I was over there for a visit."

  "Funny thing," I said. "I saw your parents last week and your mother says she hasn't seen you in years."

  "That's right," he said. "Can't say you can blame her. Look at her two kids. One's a freak and the other turns out like me. So I stay away, but dear old Dad, he feels guilty. So we have a beer about once a month, and he slips me a Ben Franklin note, and that holds him for another month until he starts feeling guilty and he calls me up again." He shrugged. "No matter. I stay and talk and listen to him whine for an hour about his empty life, and I get II couple of free beers and a hundred bucks. Not a bad deal."

  Such a sport. I looked around the cluttered room and said, "So that's all you know, that she was attacked. Did you call her, write a note or something?"

  He laughed. "Man, Kara is a lot different from all of us, but she and the old lady share a common gene, one that has an intense dislike of males. Nope, haven't seen nor spoken to her in ages. Dad told me she was doing fine, and I said that was good, and then he got weepy about all the Red Sox games we took in when I was a kid and left it at that."

  Felix spoke up. "How are you keeping busy, Doug? Job market all right?"

  He crossed his arms. "I'm doing okay. I got a setup in Boston, working in the harbor. Off the books but the pay is all right."

  "Really?" Felix asked. "How's the pay in your extracurricular activities? Broken into any cottages on Plum Island or Tyler Beach lately?"

  Another gaze, back and forth. "You guys are from a magazine. The hell you say."

  "Let's just say we're thorough researchers," I said. "So, how's your career path? Staying on the straight and narrow?"

  "Piss off. And while you're at it, get the hell out before I call my lawyer."

  Felix said, "Gee, now I'm trembling."

  "Okay, piss off and get the hell out before I call some friends of mine, some friends that can put you two in a world of hurt."

  "These good friends of yours?" I asked.

  Another smirk. "No, not good, but tough."

  I looked over at Felix, and he gave me a half-shrug. Not much to go on. We could stay longer and beat up on Mr. Miles and see what else happened, but it didn't seem like much. I nodded to Felix and he surprised me by sticking out his hand, and Doug, surprised, too, I guess, shook Felix's outstretched hand.

  “Sorry to waste your time," Felix said. He motioned in my direction, "Lewis, there, he gets worked up on a story and he tends to go in pretty tough. Sorry again."

  He looked over at me and said, "Time to leave, right?"

  “Sure, why not?” I turned to leave, and then, for one searing moment, I wished I had done a better job of looking around earlier. I had missed something important, very important indeed, resting on the bookshelf with the paperbacks and souvenirs.

  It was a ceramic dragon, rearing up, talons extended and mouth opened, looking like it was seconds away from spewing death upon a knight.

  A knight, kneeling in terror and holding up his shield, in an apartment on the other side of the city.

  We were parked in the same store lot again, watching the plows do their night work, scraping and moving to
ns of snow into piles that were beginning to dwarf the surrounding buildings. I had the heater on and we had cups of coffee, taken from a drive-up window at a Dunkin' Donuts. The coffee tasted fine, but I was in a foul mood.

  "Well, we learned a lot tonight," Felix said, and I grunted in reply. He went on. "See the little scam I pulled with him, just before we left, when I shook his hand?"

  "Sure. What were you trying to do, see if he belonged to the same lodge?"

  "Hardly. The man says he has a job at the docks in Boston, working under the table. Those guys work hard in all weather, and even if you wear gloves, it does a number to your hands. The guy's hands are soft, soft as a virgin's butt. There's no way he does outside work. And did you notice the other thing about him?"

  Amber lights flashed from the growling plows. "No, what was that?"

  "Jesus, Lewis," Felix said. "The guy was coked up to the gills. Sniffling like that, his hands shaky, eyes watery. I bet you that's where his business interest lies, not with the docks. Our Doug was seriously strung out. Couldn't you see that?"

  I turned and looked over at him. He was being polite, but he could tell he was chiding me, and I said in return, "No, but I saw something else."

  "Oh? Like what? Like Doug doesn't do laundry?"

  I raised up my coffee cup. "No. Our Doug was lying. He's been to Kara's place."

  Felix shifted in his seat, to get a better look at me. "Say again?"

  "Doug's been there, and probably recently. When you and 1 were at Kara's, do you remember her living room? What was there, besides furniture and books?"

  He thought for a moment. "Tapestry hanging from one wall. Coffee table and such. Closed-off fireplace, some junk on the mantelpiece."

  "That junk was three ceramic sculptures, showing a fantasy world. Knights and trolls and horses. Two of the sculptures were a matched set. The other showed a knight, kneeling in fear, waiting to be attacked. But there was nothing attacking him. Nothing."

  "You saw it at Doug's place," he said, no more chiding in his voice.

  "That I did. A sculpture of a dragon, waiting to move down to kill something, and a perfect match to the knight sculpture. It belongs at Kara's place, but it's at her brother's dump. He says he doesn't know where she lives and he says he's never talked to her. Felix, the man's lying about the first and I'm sure he's lying about the second."

  Felix's voice sounded bleak. "Are you saying he raped his sister?"

  The coffee seemed to back up my throat. "I don't know. I do know he's been to her place. Look, we've tracked this one down pretty far. We talked to Kara, cops, neighbors, parents, employers, and the landlord, who later gets his throat slit. He was the closest thing we had to a witness, someone who said he heard two sets of voices that night. Now he's dead and, as someone once said, that's I hell of a coincidence."

  "That it is. Go on."

  "Now, here's another coincidence. Kara's brother has a record, and as you've pointed out, he's probably working something illegal with pharmaceuticals. I'm not saying he's a suspect. I just think for the first time in a long time, we've got someone we want to talk with again, someone with an interesting background."

  "Tonight? We could be back there again in ten minutes."

  A plow rumbled by, the driver up in his cab looking down at us, probably wondering what in hell we were doing out here on a cold January night.

  "No, not tonight," I said. "I want him to think about things, maybe get him nervous. If you got the time, maybe I can convince you to do some surveillance."

  "More money involved?"

  “Yes.”

  "Then I can get convinced, until it's travel time. Then what?"

  "Then we come back and ask him some more questions. Play good cop, bad cop."

  Felix yawned, rubbed at his face. "I don't know if I like that."

  "Why?"

  "Because I always have to play bad cop, that's why."

  I finished my coffee and shifted the Rover into drive, and we ambled out of the parking lot. "That's the curse you have, Felix. You have a gift. You should be proud."

  Felix muttered something about what I could do with the gift and I drove us both home. When I got back into my house I had a message on my answering machine, and it was from Paula Quinn, and she sounded out of breath.

  “Lewis? It's Paula. I have to see you tomorrow. I've got Mike Ahern's personnel file and there's something in there I've got to show you. Something very important."

  The next day Paula and I shared sandwiches in the front seat of my Rover, parked next to a crowded sub shop in Falconer on Route 286, looking out across the marsh and the snow and ice, leading all the way up to the concrete and steel structures of the Falconer nuclear power plant. As we ate she nodded in the direction of the' plant.

  "Story I'm working on now involves that place," she said, munching on a vegetarian sub. "Something about the siren poles."

  “What about them?" I said, picking out onions from a plain steak and cheese.

  "There's over a hundred utility poles set up around a ten-mile radius of the plant, each with a siren that can blast your eardrums if you're standing underneath them. Part of the emergency evacuation plan. Thing is, some radical anti-nuke group that no one's heard of before --- called the Nuclear Liberation Front --- they've started taking potshots at the poles, chopping them down."

  "Let me guess," I said, giving up on my now-cold sub. "They figure if they take out the poles, the federal government will say the emergency plan is flawed, and that the plant's operating license will be pulled. Right?"

  "Yep," she said, taking a swig of iced tea. "But our radical geniuses either don't know or don't care that each pole has been wired. You knock out the siren mechanism, the plant automatically gets notified by a radio signal, and they call the cops and roll a repair truck, and in about a half-hour, the pole's either back in business or they drive in a truck-mounted siren to fill the gap if the pole's been cut."

  "Demonstrating yet again the power of big business to over-come every obstacle in order to maintain operations," I said. "Look, enough of the nuke. What do you have?"

  She picked up a slim leather case and zipped it open, pulling out some documents.

  "You would not believe the heat I went through to get into his file," Paula said. "I had to remind Kristie how I saved her butt back in college. Still, she was scared, and I don't blame her. She could have gotten fired, letting me look at a personnel file."

  "But still you asked her, right?"

  She looked at me. "You feel so guilty about it, why don't you hand it back?"

  "I don't feel that guilty," I said, beginning to flip through the sheets. "At least not yet. Tell me, what am I looking for?"

  She leaned in a bit, a stray hair tickling my ear, which I enjoyed. "Our Mike Ahern has had an interesting career. Originally from Dover, up the coast. Joined the Army after high school and served his time, and then joined the Porter Fire Department. Also stayed with the Army Reserves. Stayed in Porter a couple of years, and from there went to Nashua, and stayed there a few years more. Then interesting things happen."

  "He gets called up and serves during the Persian Gulf War."

  Paula moved away, and so did the tickle of her hair. "How did you know that?"

  "He told me, week before last. All right, then what happens?"

  Her reporter's face then came up, one part joy at finding something out, one part determination in learning more. "That's the funny thing. Nothing happens, according to his file. He gets sent home when the war is over and then there's a blank spot of nearly two years. No employment record at all. Then he comes to Tyler, working as a fire inspector. When he left to go overseas he was a lieutenant in Nashua, and when he gets another firefighter job, he's an inspector."

  "That's important?"

  She nodded. "Damn important. Look, all of the firefighters I know, they consider themselves macho guys who eat smoke and save lives for a living. They try to get jobs in busy cities, like Nashua or Manchester, and
they hate sitting around the station house, polishing brass and doing drills. They love to go out and fight fires. And sitting behind a desk or becoming a fire inspector is something the real tough guys despise."

  I glanced through the file, confirming what Paula had said, seeing the odd two-year blank space between his Nashua and his Tyler jobs. "So our tough fire lieutenant leaves to go overseas, comes back and stays out of the line for two years, and when hhe does get work, it's doing something that some guys would consider a demotion."

  Her eyes were glittering. "That's not all. Kristie only photocopied the parts of the file that showed his job history. There was other paperwork she didn't copy, which I managed to poke through, I saw something that made me sit up and take notice. It was all insurance statement, from an outfit in Canterbury called Allied Health Services, for services rendered for Mike Ahern. And the dates of service were in that two-year gap, Lewis."

  She looked so proud of herself that I pretty much knew the answer to my next question. "I suppose you've found out more about Allied Health Services?"

  "I have," she said, smiling widely.

  "So," I said. "What do you know?"

  "They're a hospital, Lewis. A hospital for mental patients. And Mike Ahern was a patient there, right after he came back from the Gulf War."

  Later in the afternoon I was up in my office, leaning back in my chair, looking at the bookshelves, just thinking about what I was going to do. In some circles it's called lying, bearing false witness, or being a slime. In my own odd circle, I call it scamming. I try to make it quick and painless, and there's no malice on my part. Just the knowledge that this was the only way of getting information from people who have it and who otherwise wouldn't give it to me. I know in my heart of hearts that it's wrong, but I try to convince myself that I'm not seeking the information for purposes illegal or immoral. Most of the time, that takes care of my guilty feeling.