Shattered Shell

by Brendan DuBois

  Almost. Up with the binoculars again. There was a seductive feeling here, of watching someone without him knowing it, but after a while that feeling was replaced by boredom. I yawned and looked up at the branches again, trying to see if there were any stars.

  Nothing. Then the wind sighed past me, and a chunk of snow fell on my face.

  After sputtering and wiping my face, I decided the wayward chunk of snow was a sign from someone, and I packed up and slowly walked back through the snow, wondering how Antarctic explorers could put up with this every day. My hands trembled as I unlocked the door, and I got in the Rover and let the engine and heater run for a few minutes before I began to feel warm again, before I started to feel human.

  When I got back to Tyler I stopped off at a Sunoco gas station near the center of town. As I pumped the gas I was shivering again, and I also knew that I would be in bed soon enough, comfortable and cozy and deliciously asleep. After paying the attendant I went I back outside and a red Taurus drove up next to me, the window rolling down.

  "Hey," came a male voice. "Lewis." I looked over, quite surprised. Fire Inspector Mike looking up at me from inside his personal car, out of uniform. I tried to keep a poker face, knowing what I did about his history and his opinions of businesspeople, but still, here he was.

  I nodded over at him. "Hello, Mike. Pretty late to be up isn't it?"

  He shrugged. "Had some night business to catch up on. Hey, I've got some information to pass along. Interested?"

  I came over closer to the car. "Arson information?"

  A quick and friendly nod. "The same. Climb on in, I'll you an update, and maybe you'll have something you can help with."

  I looked longingly back at my Range Rover, which was to take me home, and then looked back at the expectant face of Mike and said, "Give me a minute just to move my wheels from the pumps."

  When I was done I climbed into the warm interior of' the Taurus. I snapped on the seatbelt and Mike drove out onto Route One and headed south. Traffic was light. The interior of the car comfortable and had a pleasant scent of old tobacco and that new car smell. I undid my coat and checked the dashboard clock. Well past eleven p.m. A late night for me. I was hoping this would only take a few minutes. I really needed the sleep.

  Mike turned right down Drakeside Road, and I was pushed back into my seat by the acceleration. He was moving fast.

  "Hey, Mike," I said, trying to keep my tone light. "Slow it down some. You don't know where the cops might be hiding tonight."

  He didn't look at me, but shifted the car up into fifth. "Yes but I do know. Here's a little secret. These small towns around here, after eleven o'clock, maybe there's one or two cruisers out here. That leaves a lot of open miles that you can do pretty much do what you want on. And there are a lot of back roads out here in Wentworth County."

  The road was empty, but it was a narrow country blacktop with high banks of snow. Farmhouses and the occasional trailers could be seen through the trees, the lights from the windows and porch lights illuminating the snow and ice around the buildings. Another sharp curve and there was the fierce squeal of the tires.

  “Mike, this is ridiculous," I said. "Slow it down."

  He glanced over at me. The look wasn't too friendly. "Looks like l’m the driver here, doesn't it?"

  "I don't care. Slow it down or bring me back."

  We went up a slight hill and crested, and the road tipped down and to the side. Mike downshifted and I could feel the rear wheels of the car sway as we hit a patch of ice, and I grabbed on to the door handle.

  "Mike, that's it. Take me back."

  He wasn't looking at me. "Thought you wanted to know more about the arsons."

  "Right now I don't care. You're making --- Jesus!"

  I blurted that out just as we rounded another corner. A pickup truck was in front of us, moving at least twenty miles or so lower, and Mike swore and downshifted, and then passed the truck. There was a loud scrape and a banging noise as the car bounced off a snowbank. Another swerve and a screech of brakes and the blaring of horns behind us, and I was grabbing the door handle even tighter, my hand slippery with sweat.

  He took a deep breath. "Well, I care about the arsons, probably more than you do. Here, listen to this."

  "What?" I asked, and his hand went forward to punch out something on the dashboard. The volume was up loud, and the sound was filled through with static, but I could make out the voices just fine. A male and a female.

  Her: "It was an 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."

  Him: "I suppose you've found out more about Allied Health Services?"

  Her: "I have."

  "So. What do you know?"

  And Paula's voice, one more time: "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."

  The acceleration increased. I had both hands on the door handle. We screamed through another tight corner, and Mike spared me another quick look.

  "Well?" he demanded.

  I didn't say a word, as we sped through the night.

  Chapter Twenty

  As terrifying as it was, I was also admiring Mike's skills. He was adding at least twenty to thirty miles per hour to the speed limit, which is fine for dry pavement in the middle of a July day. Nearing midnight in January on roads that were neither well-plowed nor well-sanded, in the backlands of Wentworth County, keeping in control and keeping that level of speed going was an amazing feat of driving ability.

  But I was still terrified. "Mike -- "

  "Hold on," he said, and he braked and downshifted as we went down another hill. Another patch of ice, and again, that sickening feeling in your gut when you realize you are about a foot or so away from an accident.

  "How does it feel, Lewis?" he asked, furiously shifting gears. '" How does it feel to be sitting beside a crazy man, hurtling through space like this? Pretty scary, right?"

  Another corner, and I reflexively closed my eyes, and my right foot tamped at the phantom brake pedal, wondering just how good the seatbelt was. "Yeah, it's pretty scary. Look, no one's calling you crazy."

  "Oh, but you were, you and that little snot reporter. Can't figure out what's going on so it must be the loony fire inspector. Right? It's not fun to pick on Vietnam vets anymore --- most of are getting too old. But us Gulf vets, we're fair game. We're pretty fresh. So check out the loony vet, he must be burning Tyler Beach."

  Thankfully, a relatively straight stretch of winter road. “We were looking at every possibility, Mike. That's all. We never thought of you as a loony vet."

  "No, just an arsonist." He turned to me, his face mottled. "You have any idea how insulting that is, to have you two ... you two civilians," and he made that word sound like an epithet, "think that I would put my brothers in danger? Do you? Do you have concept of loyalty, of brotherhood, of taking care of one another. Of course not!"

  The road deteriorated into a series of S-turns, and he flipped the steering wheel back and forth, speaking through each fierce motion. "No, you got a reporter who makes her living off misery and you got an ex-DoD weasel who's spent his entire life behind desk. You don't know what it's like to depend on your buddy for your goddamn life, whether it's in a burning building or in a desert with someone shooting at you."

  Then he made a sharp corner and went down another side road. There were more homes here, more lights, and then we burst out into a small parking lot, into a shopping plaza that had about four or five stores, all of them closed. Mike made a wide looping turn and said in a quiet tone, "You might want to hang on."

  "What ---" and then we were spinning, heading for a snow bank, and I closed my eyes again and there was a thump! as we struck something, followed almost immediately by another solid sound as my head snapped to the side and struck the passenger window.

  I wasn't
unconscious, just disorientated for a few moments. I blinked a few times and swallowed and Mike was calmly smoking a cigarette. "Look there," he said, motioning with his hand. "I've got you butt-up against a snowbank." I saw he was right. He had slid the car into the snowbank so my door was solid against the snow,

  "Nice driving."

  "Thanks. Learned how to do that when I was younger, racing up north on frozen lakes. Now. I put you in there for a reason. We’re gonna chat. The only way you're getting out of this car is by talking to me. Nothing else will work. You can't get out that door, and the only way through my door is through me. Think you can do that?"

  I rubbed my head. "No, but I might try, just for the hell of it. I don't appreciate the driving demo. One mistake could have put us into tree instead of a snowbank."

  “I wanted to get your attention."

  "Good job. What are you going to do next, start tugging at my fingernails? We could have talked anytime. I didn't need this macho demonstration to do it."

  Another puff of the cigarette. "Figured if I got your attention, might set a foundation for an interesting talk. About why you and your reporter friend think I'm burning down the beach."

  I touched my head again. Still sore. "The hell with you, then. After that little drive, I owe you nothing."

  He tapped the ash into an open ashtray. "Feel like another drive?"

  "Go ahead. Unless you've got rope in your back pocket to tie me up, the minute you move away from this bank this door's open and I'm out, and after a couple of phone calls, I'm home and you're hearing from your chief about this little excursion."

  A puff of the cigarette. "You're doing better than I thought. Anybody else would be blubbering and begging to be let out. You sure you've never served?"

  "Never in any places you've heard of."

  "All right, then, let's work something else out. Question to question. I'll answer anything you give me, and then you return the favor. How's that?"

  My head was starting to feel better. "Sounds okay, under the circumstances."

  "Fine. Show you how agreeable I am, I'll let you have the first question."

  I suppose I should have asked him the logical question, but my head was still a little fuzzy. "That taped conversation. How did you get it?"

  His look was direct. "Through illegal means, which doesn't bother me. I got a nut out there, and some night, he's going to burn a hotel that's full of people. Our investigation is stuck. It's not going anywhere. But before we get to dozens of bodies in the snow from another hotel fire, I decided to bend a few things."

  "Like surveillances," I said. "Shotgun mike, maybe? There were a couple of cars in the parking lot that day."

  "Good guess," Mike said. "I've got a private investigator friend of mine, up in Concord. He owes me a couple of favors and he agreed to follow that Paula Quinn around. I wanted to see who she was talking to, what kind of leads she might be tracking down.'

  He tapped out a little more ash again. "My turn. You and that reporter come up with anything besides me?"

  "No, nothing. She went pretty deep and couldn't find a single connection. No relations among the motel owners. Nobody shared a bank, law firm, or contractor."

  "Except for me," he said, his tone fairly even.

  "Except for you."

  "How did I come up, then? Someone drop a dime on the nutty fire inspector?"

  Except for a lonely pickup truck at the other side of the lot we were alone in the plaza. It looked like we were in Bretton, maybe East Warren.

  "No," I said. "Something unusual, that's all. I saw in the planning board minutes how you spoke against the Crescent Hill, the Rocks Road Motel, SeaView, Tyler Tower Motel, and the Still Harbor Inn. All of them were up for some sort of planning board approval. You spoke out against all of them. They all burned down.”

  He was smiling. "Little hobby of mine, and I can't tell how much fun it is, pissing people off like that."

  "But no fires, right?"

  "Nope." He took a drag, the ember giving his face a ruddy glow. "Look, I do my job and I do it well, but I'm also a taxpayer. There's too much damn construction going on and pretty soon everyone in Tyler will be selling each other motel rooms or T-shirts. Hell of a way to run a town. So I do what I can. I go to these meetings and raise objections and nothing happens, but at least I can sleep at night."

  “Still, it's a hell of a coincidence."

  "Sure it is," Mike said. "And here's another amazing coincidence. Go back in the records even more. Like a year or two ago. This is nothing new. I speak out against all types of construction work, not just motels, and not just the past few months."

  Ouch. Right then my head and ego were both aching, and it was hard to tell which one was more painful. "But there's got to be something there," I said. "What are the chances of all of those places coming before the planning board, and then burning down?"

  "Pretty slim," he said, and his voice grew in frustration as he twisted the cigarette butt into the ashtray. "Damn it, we've looked at everything. Just like you did. Even looked into the planning board members' backgrounds, and I'll thank you in advance for keeping that bit of information confidential. But there's nothing there. Nothing.”

  He swore and said, "Let's get back to town," and he started up the engine, and we moved away from the snowbank. Mike drove through the parking lot until he came to the road, and then came to a complete stop. He looked both ways before making a right hand turn and heading back to Tyler, a few miles under the posted speed limit.

  Later I said to him, "There's more to what drives you, isn't there?"

  "Hunh?"

  "Your explanation, of why you go to the meetings. You do talk about too much growth and protecting the town. But you also talked about big business, and how the board should stop cozying up to them. Hell, even at the Rocks Road Motel, you said something about 'screw 'em, that's why they got insurance.' So. What else is there?"

  He was quiet for a moment. "Let's say I had a bad firsthand experience, then."

  A thought. "The Gulf War?"

  "The same," he said. "Remember how we talked earlier, how I said it was a learning experience? Man, the things I learned over there is stuff that's still with me." He spared me a glance. "You were in the puzzle palace back then, right?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you do?"

  "Read and write."

  "For who?"

  Ah, that same question. "Can't say. Sorry."

  He shrugged. "Not trying to pry. Just establishing that you were there. So tell me. Were we fighting for freedom, for democracy, for human rights?"

  I looked out again at the lights. "No, we weren't."

  "That's right. We weren't. We were fighting to keep the oil fields and oil lanes open, open to the people who were our friends. Maybe they're real sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches. And those oil fields were pumped and produced and refined and sold by businesses. You come right down to it, me and my buddies and everybody else out there, we weren't fighting for Old Glory, We were fighting for Old Boardrooms."

  "Some people might say you're simplifying things," I said, knowing from my own times at my old job that there was sometimes more than just one answer. "Some people might say that keeping that oil flowing was in the national interest."

  "Maybe so, but I don't particular care about listening to what those people have to say, unless they were over there. That's probably not fair, but that's what counts."

  "So what happened?"

  He was silent for just a brief moment, and then he let the car slow down until we pulled over in a wide portion of the road, He switched on the hazard lights and Mike started to talk, and his words were low and intense and full of weight, and I knew why he had pulled off. He couldn't drive and tell the story at the same time.

  "It was just near the end, when my unit got into Kuwait," he said, looking out the windshield. "The war was over and we were still on edge. We had been stuck in that desert for months, training and preparing a
nd just being terrified. A lot of crazy stories were being tossed around, about what we could expect. Remember?"

  I remembered, all too well. "Sure. Bio and chemical warfare. Tens of thousands of allied casualties. Maybe even a wider war if Israel was brought in."

  "Yeah," Mike said. "That's right. Then the air war started and I waited and then the Scuds started dropping in. Ever try to sleep at night with your chem suit at your feet, waiting for the alarm to sound? Ever get woken up with that damn air-raid siren howling at you? If there's a scarier sound that's been invented, that's guaranteed to make your hands shake and your bowels turn to soup, it's those damn sirens."

  "You were in the military engineers?"

  "That I was," he said. "Supposedly not front line troops, but with Scuds coming in every night, where was the front line? It was everywhere. Then we moved up when the ground war started, and III loss than a week that part was done. But not for us."

  "Oil wells, right?"

  He took a deep breath. "Never in my life had I ever seen such utter and complete devastation. Not ever. I still have nightmares about it. It was like we were on a different planet. Just sand and dead things at your feet. Burned-out personnel carriers and Russian-made tanks. Some parts of the sand crusty with oil. And everywhere you looked, the oil wells on fire, like tremendous torches out of the ground, roaring and screaming. The sky just black, black, black, even at high noon. Some ways, it was worse than when we were back at Saudi, waiting for the Scuds to start dropping. It was hard to breathe and your eyes stung and your skin was filthy, and we had to work there."

  “What kind of work?"

  He still stared out at the winter landscape, though I knew in his mind's eye he was thousands of miles away, in a hot and destroyed land. "We shouldn't have been there. Man, we had done our tour and had put in our time. It was somebody else's turn. We wore tired and beat and we weren't as sharp. The major shouldn't have pushed us, but there was a schedule to be met, a plan to be worked on." He turned and looked at me, his face troubled. "Don't you agree? We shouldn't have been there. We were tired."