Shoreline

by Carolyn Baugh

  Fat Porn Freaks Don’t Run.

  Pete glared at her. “What are you smirking about?”

  “I was thinking up bumper stickers.”

  Anna said, “Look, Pete, you know that he hates women. He’s resorted to a public defender, but she turned out to be a woman. Play the testosterone card. Be his bro. Win him over … and then dick him over.”

  Pete rubbed at his beard, a glint in his eye. “Did you seriously, and with a straight face, just ask me to go in there and use my gender as a tool to manipulate a subject?”

  Anna thought a moment. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Welcome to the Bureau. No one said you couldn’t teach third grade instead.”

  Pete looked at her, wide-eyed; then he looked at Nora, who shrugged.

  He sighed. “Jesus. Alright. Let’s do this.”

  He entered the room, most of which was swallowed by Burgess’s bulk. They watched him greet Maura Mason and then, as though he had forgotten something, suddenly excuse himself and return to the hall.

  His lips were pursed and his nose was flared. “Also,” he whispered loudly to Anna, “he smells really bad.”

  Both women gave him a sympathetic look and then burst out laughing as soon as he walked away.

  “Who knew he was such a whiner?” Anna asked.

  The monitor, however, showed that he was a whiner who was utterly charming under pressure.

  “Hi, Frank. It’s been a long day already … I apologize. Are you doing alright?”

  “Of course I’m not doing alright,” the man grumbled, frown lines creasing the soft flesh of his wide forehead. His accent, slow and thick, was immediately grating to Nora, who knew her own expression reflected the revulsion she felt. Anna had been wise not to send her in.

  “Now, I’ll be honest with you,” Pete said, his voice gentle, thoughtful. “There’s stuff I can do to help and stuff I can’t—tell me what you need. I know you had wanted a lawyer, and we made sure you had the best in town,” he said, with a wide smile at Maura Mason.

  Maura Mason gave him a dispassionate stare.

  “I could use a sandwich,” Burgess said.

  “Of course!” Pete said quickly. “Preferences? Ham? Roast beef?”

  “Ham,” the man answered.

  It figures, thought Nora.

  “Absolutely,” Pete was saying. “Ms. Mason, something for you?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I’m fine,” she practically spat.

  “Sure? Are you sure?” Pete asked, showing his dimples before he began walking toward the door.

  She nodded, and he exited and went straight back to Anna and Nora. “I’m not getting him a sandwich, obviously,” he said, his tone several registers lower, his words more rapid. He sighed, tapping his feet and killing time as though perhaps he were putting in an order somewhere.

  On the monitor, Nora heard Maura Mason hiss at Burgess, “That man is not getting you a sandwich, by the way.”

  “You’re a tease,” observed Anna. “That poor pervert in there…”

  Pete bared his teeth at her, then headed back toward the interrogation room.

  Nora and Anna looked at each other and laughed again.

  “See why we hate her?” asked Anna.

  Pete had entered, saying to Burgess, “My assistant Maggie was actually just ordering in for all of us so we added yours. Okay? So just fifteen minutes, man. Jimmy Johns is, like, insanely fast.”

  Burgess cast a glance over at his lawyer as if to say, See?

  Pete picked up the reins again. “Listen, Frank, I’m very sorry about this morning, man. I really am. That must have been difficult, having us all charge in there like that.”

  Mason jumped in. “My client is going to be bringing charges against you for unnecessary use of force.”

  “Unnecessary?” Pete responded, very slowly, very calmly. “Now Ms. Mason, your client was going for his gun. Guns, I should say.”

  Maura Mason’s face appeared impassive, but it looked to Nora that this information had been left out of the version of the story she’d encountered from Burgess.

  “That’s my Second Amendment right to self-defense,” intoned Burgess.

  Nora was sure she saw Pete roll his eyes at the camera at this characterization of the Second Amendment. His gaze returned to Frank Burgess quickly, though. Pete was even nodding sympathetically. “I get that, I do. And you have a lot worth defending. That’s an incredible computer system you have out there.”

  Now it was Maura Mason who rolled her eyes. “Were you planning on asking my client a question or just kissing his ass all day, because I seriously don’t have time, Pete.”

  Pete looked surprised and even slightly hurt at her words. Nora watched the expression on Frank Burgess’s face. He was actually frowning at his lawyer. “Oh my God,” whispered Nora. “He’s won him over.”

  Anna was smiling knowingly. “Pete’s a flirt, plain and simple.”

  They watched as he looked intently into Frank Burgess’s bloodshot eyes. “Frank, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to think I’m wasting your time, here. See, I think you’re important to us—I was just telling my colleagues that what we really need to be doing is asking you for help.”

  “Help?” Burgess asked.

  “Here we go,” Mason deadpanned.

  Pete sat on the edge of the table and began tugging at his tie as though utterly exhausted. “I know that you are a hardworking man, and that you do things in your leisure time that are your own business. I totally get that.”

  Burgess sat a little taller in his chair.

  “The thing is, some of the sources you’ve been using are pretty intense, pretty serious stuff. I think you can help us by helping us find the bastards who messed everything up for you, who set off our alarms, helping us dig a little deeper than we’re able to. You’re a victim, man. I know that—”

  Mason interrupted him. “McCormick, can you spare us? Are you offering my client something?”

  “I am explaining to him how much we would like his cooperation, ma’am.”

  “Don’t…”

  “But then again, you know, there’s no need if—”

  Burgess held up a fleshy hand. “What do you want?”

  “You really know your computer stuff, and I’m struggling to keep up, Frank. The faster I can get in there and access the information we need, the faster this nightmare will be over for you. The slower I have to take, decrypting your files and, you know, stumbling around in the dark, the longer you’ll have to stay in lockup.”

  “Are you offering him a lighter sentence, Special Agent McCormick?” she asked.

  “I am offering to advocate for him for a lighter sentence, certainly. If he makes my job easier, if he helps me access the bastards responsible for him being here, I will go to bat—”

  “He’s giving you nothing,” Mason said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  “It’s an app called Telegram,” Burgess blurted out.

  Nora’s jaw dropped.

  “Frank,” Mason objected. “You don’t have to—”

  “You can join groups. You can message people securely who are plugged in, but also see all the public conversations that are going down within the group itself. You can post things. They put a lot of exploding pictures up there, you know. Lotta stuff,” he was saying, his eyes seeming to look well beyond Pete and the walls of the interrogation room.

  Maura Mason looked green. “I encourage you to exercise your right to silence, Frank—”

  “There was a guy there. Claimed to have some live snuff, you know. So, yeah, I wanted to see that, always have. He couldn’t produce it but he had … other things.”

  He picked up his lawyer’s pen and scrawled something on her legal pad. Then he looked at Pete. “Whatever it takes to just move this shit along. I got high blood pressure.”

  Pete nodded, managing to look sympathetic and moved at the same time. Then he turned to Maura Mason. “May I?”
>
  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped, shoving the legal pad at him.

  Pete copied down what Burgess had written, then thanked them both. “Maggie will be in shortly with your sandwich, Frank,” he said.

  “There’s no fucking sandwich, Frank,” Mason said, standing to leave, as Pete slipped out of the room.

  “Nicely done, sir,” said Nora.

  “All in a day’s work, Miss Nora. That’s how we southern gentlemen fight crime. Through flattery and doublespeak.”

  She grinned at him. “But will it help you unravel the mysteries of the Dark Web?”

  “Well,” he said, looking at his watch. “We have done twice as much work today as we normally do, and so I am willing to continue masquerading as a federal agent until 5 P.M. If the secrets are not yet revealed, then I am willing to show up again tomorrow morning with my coffee and start afresh.”

  But it seemed that the password he had taken was all he’d needed. In no time, she heard Pete congratulating himself behind her. He shoved back from his desk, spinning around in the swivel chair.

  She paused to look at him. “Success?”

  “Why, yes,” he responded. “I believe that is the proper word. It’s a start anyway,” he said.

  “What did you find?”

  “The technology he was using was dark but pretty basic at the same time. There are ways of communicating with like-minded folks in order to have private conversations. These are encrypted so the good guys—you and me—can’t listen in or follow. Unless I can masquerade as Frank Burgess, I can’t see the stuff that comes to him, all of which is, like, tips to new kiddie porn sites or the infamous live snuff, exploding pics that disappear from the Web once they’ve been sent.”

  “So with the information you got today—”

  “I can find several other nasty fat men like Frank. And from them…”

  “Several more?”

  “Yes. Yes and no. But if they don’t know we’re following them, and we monitor closely, we’ll get several steps closer.”

  “Do we have enough to prosecute him with though?” asked Nora.

  Pete smiled. “Does Miss Scarlett wear a corset?”

  Nora frowned. “I’m—is that some kind of southern thing for ‘yes’?”

  Pete flared his nostrils. “Oh, you have much to learn, Miss Nora. Much to learn.”

  When five o’clock rolled around, she realized it had been the least boring workday she had yet spent in Erie, Pennsylvania.

  Pete was stretching. “Come on, Nora. Me and Anna’ll take you out. Your first official bust means we officially have to buy you a beer. Contractual obligation.”

  She shook her head automatically, searching for an out. “No, you know, I have to…”

  He looked at her sharply, his tone changing. “What’s your deal? Why don’t you ever want to go out with us?”

  Her eyes narrowed and she returned his gaze fiercely. “Seriously? Would you talk that way to—”

  But Anna stepped in to defuse. “Pete, you just bore the hell out of her. Time to own that. You and your dimples just bore us all to death. And in fact Nora doesn’t drink.” Anna smiled at Nora in a way that evoked John Wansbrough’s fatherly gazes. “But we will take her out this evening because she deserves it, and she’s still new in town, and we should spend some after-hours time together so that she learns to love us.”

  Nora realized she had been biting her lip as she slowly exhaled.

  Anna continued, “And you can eat and drink whatever you like. Okay? It’s on Pete.”

  “Hey!” he protested.

  “It’s on both of us. Come on. Commodore Perry’s?”

  Pete sighed. “Of course. That’s where all the boring people go.”

  They headed down State Street toward the landmark pub. Traffic was light, lazy even. The streets were swollen with people. There was a preponderance of black or faded T-shirts and jeans or black leather pants. Nora looked curiously at bushy beards adorned with beading or small braids. Some had scraps of ribbon woven into them. Merchants were hawking every imaginable motorcycle-related product, and bright yellow barriers had been erected to demarcate the areas where pedestrians should walk and browse and where cars could still pass. Neatly aligned motorcycles were reveling in the special dispensation to monopolize the city’s street parking during the Roar.

  Ten minutes after leaving the office, all three had settled into a tall, uncomfortable wooden booth, and Pete was dutifully explaining that the Commodore was not a dive bar. “It’s an after-work bar for the professional class,” he said. His shock upon discovering that Nora had never entered a bar before had now transformed into some sort of mandate to explain Erie’s bar culture. “Because Roar on the Shore is starting, there are slightly more biker-types than office-types.”

  Nora, on cue, looked about her, taking in the excess of leather and ink, facial hair and bandannas.

  “The altered atmosphere, however, does not affect the most important facet of the Commodore—the Giant Pretzel with the Outrageously Good Mustard Dipping Sauce.” Anna’s tone conveyed a childlike awe.

  Feeling it was expected of her, Nora said, “Well, bring it on. And let’s order me a Coke.”

  Anna ordered herself a mint julep. She then asked for a Coke for Nora, and, with what struck Nora as slightly more delight than the situation could possibly warrant, ordered the giant pretzel. Pete said to the server, “Eisernes Kreuz.” The server nodded as though they had shared just such an exchange several times before. She walked away, weaving in and out of the tables in the increasingly crowded bar.

  “Eisernes…” Nora started, then felt her tongue falter. “This is a beer?”

  “Eisernes Kreuz!” exclaimed Pete. “Not just any beer. You should always hold out for the best local brews. Very old German family. Perfected their approach in Holland before bringing their wisdom to these shores.”

  “Pete fancies himself a beer connoisseur,” Anna explained.

  “We all need talents,” Nora said.

  Anna laughed out loud.

  “It’s damn good beer,” he said, not flummoxed in the least. He regarded her curiously. “Can you just help me understand something about this not-drinking thing though?”

  Nora flared her nostrils slightly and looked at Anna. “The whole sensitivity training thing apparently didn’t wash with this one?”

  Anna shook her head. “He’s his own beast, Nora. It’s up to you, but I’d say educating him is actually to the collective benefit.”

  Pete had his hands up as though at gunpoint. “Look, I never met anyone that just didn’t ever drink. There are people who used to drink too much and then had to stop. I get that. But to never even try it … it doesn’t make sense.”

  Nora tilted her head to regard him. “Is there a question in all that?”

  “Yeah, I want to know why you never tried it. You aren’t even a little curious? You didn’t have any friends who drank in high school? College? How could you have been a Philly police officer and not drink?”

  Nora shifted in her seat. People didn’t usually press her on this. Ben just went with it—she’d always assumed he was relieved she didn’t drink because Sarah had been a drug addict. And though her cop friends had teased her, she’d been sure that most of them acknowledged it was for the better. It was too easy for cops to end up alcoholics at the end of a day full of brutality; she could name six of her cohort who’d had to leave already for that very reason.

  Pete was looking at her earnestly. She was still on the fence about him. Frat boy? Jerk? Or someone who genuinely didn’t understand and wanted to? She decided at last that his question wasn’t an attack. She took a breath, then said, “Okay, let’s think about it this way. In my house, alcohol might as well be crack cocaine.”

  She saw she had the attention of both her colleagues. They leaned in to hear her over the din. “Growing up, we never cooked with it, never splashed it into stew, never even bought cough syrup that had alcohol in it. My mom we
nt out of her way to buy powdered vanilla so that there was no alcohol in it. Everyone had a story about someone who had just, like, imploded because of drinking. ‘He drinks,’ was, like, the same as saying, ‘He’s headed straight to hell.’ Sitting in a bar—” she paused to gesture around her for effect, “—is only marginally less awful than sitting in a strip club.”

  Pete and Anna exchanged a look. Nora started to fidget, feeling uncomfortable.

  “Shall I keep going?” Nora asked. “Or have you lost interest yet?”

  “No, I’m with you,” Pete affirmed.

  “Okay. So, it’s in popular culture, too, right? In Egyptian movies, the worst people in the world were the people who drank. The abusive husbands, the scary dictators, the drug dealers, the rapists. My dad’s restaurant doesn’t serve alcohol, and when someone brings their own bottle he won’t touch it to open it. Just the servers do that. It’s just something we feel is…” She stopped and searched for the words. “Scary. If you start, you can’t stop, and it will make you a monster and wreck your life.”

  Pete seemed to be preparing a refutation, but Nora held up a hand. “I get that plenty of people are used to it. It’s absolutely normal for them. I’m just answering the question of why I don’t consider trying it. Because I guess I learned to be scared of it from early on.”

  But Peter clearly thought she was being ridiculous. “Nora, we got briefed on you. You shot some dude in the back of his head in the middle of downtown Philly. You got some kind of award at Quantico for Jiu-Jitsu. And you want to tell me you’re scared of beer?”

  Nora looked to Anna for help but got none as the mint julep had just arrived in a short tumbler. The drink therein was slightly murky looking. It immediately absorbed all of Anna’s attention.

  “I am scared of beer,” Nora confirmed, accepting her Coke gratefully from the server. “And it was Mixed Martial Arts, not Jiu-Jitsu.”

  The server set down a dark brown bottle before Pete.

  Pete happily received his drink, smirked as Nora took hers, then nodded at Anna’s. “She is at heart a Confederate princess.”

  Nora didn’t understand, but Anna’s next words to Pete clarified.

  “It is no dishonor to the Union to admit that you Southerners invented better cocktails.” She tugged a bit of the liquid up through the tiny brown straw, then uttered an audible sigh of contentment. Crushed mint leaves were suspended in the liquid; a sprig of fresh mint was perched atop its surface.