“Apparently I’m off the mark. How would you describe yourselves, then?”
The smile vanished off Ferriss’s face and he said, “If you want to live to find out, hand over that weapon. I’m not going to ask again.”
Cooper leaned forward and pressed the muzzle of his weapon against Mike’s forehead. Mike thought if he moved fast enough, he might be able to snatch it out of the man’s hand, but that left the problem of Ferriss. There was no way he could disarm both men before taking a bullet.
He sighed softly. Then eased his hand to his holster and unsnapped it. He lifted the Glock 9mm and in one slow, smooth motion handed it to Ferriss, feeling certain he had just signed two death warrants, his own as well as the prisoner’s.
“Okay,” he said, watching closely as Ferriss slid the weapon into his waistband at the small of his back. “I’m unarmed. What now?”
“Now you sit down in that chair,” Ferriss pointed to the empty chair placed directly across the table, “and don’t make a single goddamned move unless you’re told to.”
Mike moved around the table, thinking hard. “So, you two are brothers? I should have guessed.”
Ferriss shrugged. “Yep. You might say we go way back.” He grinned and turned to the prisoner. “Ain’t that right, Jackson, old pal?”
Healy was no longer stretched out across the table in a pointless attempt to escape. While Mike was surrendering his weapon, he had sat back down and was once again hunched over the well-worn stainless steel tabletop. He refused to acknowledge the taunt.
Mike studied the interaction between the rogue FBI agents and the prisoner closely. It was obvious the key to defusing the situation and getting out alive would lie in understanding their relationship. The three men shared some kind of history beyond what was apparent here; that much was abundantly clear.
What was also clear was that Ferriss and Cooper, while maybe the worst, most corrupt FBI men in the history of the bureau, actually were legitimate Feds – Mike had checked them out personally after their arrival in town – and the fact that they were choosing now to abandon their careers meant this fiasco was unlikely to end well. They had nothing to lose.
“So,” Mike said. He needed to regain control of the conversation and keep these men talking. “Mr. Healy here is obviously very important to you two on a personal level. How long have you been chasing him?”
Ferriss and Cooper shared a glance. Then Ferriss said, “What year is this again?”
“You know what year it is. It’s 2013.”
The mischievous grin returned. “Just funnin’ ya,” Ferriss said. “We been chasing this piece of human shit for…let’s see…”
Cooper cut in, his voice harsh and deadly. “A hundred and fifty-seven years.”
30
Sharon made it as far as Main Street and the Katahdin Diner before turning around. Her misgivings had been building steadily since leaving the station, as had the sense that something was amiss. Now, without any conscious thought, she knew she had to get back there.
She wheeled the cruiser into the diner’s parking lot, barely slowing. Loose gravel scattered from under her tires as she spun the steering wheel sharply and accelerated back onto Main Street in the direction of the Paskagankee Police Station.
Mike was probably right. If she stepped between the FBI and the murder suspect now by accusing the two agents of conspiring to execute the man, she would effectively end any chance of promotion.
Ever.
Hell, it was entirely possible she would lose her job. She didn’t doubt the federal government’s ability to get people sacked at the local level if doing so was important enough to them.
But she was one hundred percent certain about what she had seen this morning. Something was off about those two agents, and she knew in her heart if she had been just two minutes later arriving at the Ridge Runner, the prime suspect in the murder of Chief Kendall and Bronson Choate would have been summarily executed, his body buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the vast expanse of wilderness surrounding Paskagankee.
There was no doubt in her mind.
She recalled something her mother used to tell her. It was one of her mom’s favorite sayings, and when the twelve-year-old Sharon asked her what it meant, she smiled and said, “You’ll understand when you need to understand.” Then her mother had succumbed to cancer, and her father had started drinking, and the words had vanished from her mind, forced out by many other more pressing life events.
But now she remembered, and she understood with a clarity that brought tears to her eyes that her mother had been right all those years ago. The expression was, “It’s more important to do the right thing than the prudent thing.” She said a quick prayer of thanks, hoping more than knowing that her mother would be there to hear it.
For the second time today, she entered the police station lot at a rate of speed she would have ticketed a citizen for. She screeched to a stop directly in front of the entrance – another no-no – and leaped out of the car. Now that she had made up her mind, she felt driven, like every second mattered, like she might already be too late.
Leaving the cruiser’s front door hanging open, Sharon rushed up the steps, banging through the front door and into the lobby. Gordie Rheaume looked up from the dispatcher’s console with a smile and said, “Whoa, where’s the fire, young lady?”
She ignored him, trotting as fast as she was able through the maze of chairs and desks to the rear stairway. She registered Gordie saying something else to her as she ran but ignored that as well.
She hit the stairway and took the steps three at a time. She knew it was a bad idea, that she was risking injury, but by now she was no more able to slow herself down than she would have been to lift the building off its foundation. She was being driven by an almost pathological need to stop whatever was happening in that interrogation room. And she knew something was happening in the interrogation room.
She leaped off the last four steps, landing in the hallway with a bone-jarring thud. Then she straightened out and sprinted the length of the hallway to the closed door.
31
Mike did his best to keep any hint of ridicule or skepticism out of his voice. “A hundred and fifty-seven years, huh? That would make you fellas close to two hundred years old. You’re holding up amazingly well, under the circumstances.”
Cooper glanced at him scornfully, but Ferriss looked almost introspective at his words. Then the FBI man seemed to come to a decision and he said, “What do you know about the Fountain of Youth?”
Mike tried to cover his surprise. This was an unexpected turn, but since his goal was to keep the two armed men talking until he could figure out his next move, he considered any subject they decided to explore to be a productive one. “What do I know about the Fountain of Youth? I know the legend says that if you drink from its water, you receive the gift of eternal youth. I know that people have been searching for this fountain for thousands of years. I know that it’s nothing more than a myth.”
Ferriss smiled. “Yeah? What if I told you you’re wrong about that last part? What if I told you—”
A suddenly agitated Jackson Healy blurted out, “I took that liquid out of Peru after I shot you. I took it, and then drank it after you tried to burn me to death in the Paskagankee Tavern! I took it,” he repeated, “so how could you be standing here?”
As if a switch had been flipped, the introspective look vanished from Ferriss’s face. He turned to Healy with a snarl. “You shot us, but you never finished the job,” he spat. “You never checked to see that we were dead. But you didn’t care about that, anyway, did you? We were miles out in the wilderness, with nowhere to go for help and no one to save us, even if we were still alive.”
Mike watched, open-mouthed, as Healy nodded a mute confirmation of Ferriss’s impossible words.
“Well, here’s what you didn’t take into consideration,” the FBI man continued, his words dripping with venom. “I’m sure you remember the sacred
ceremony we crashed that night, right? When we killed everyone and stole the disk and the Fountain water? Remember? And then you gut-shot Amos and me? You remember all that, right?”
Healy nodded wordlessly, his eyes haunted.
“Well, here’s the thing, Mr. Genius Outlaw: The ceremony wasn’t over at that point. It was at some kind of halftime or something, like at a fucking football game.”
Mike watched the exchange closely. Healy gaped at the FBI man as if not fully understanding his words. Then comprehension started to dawn as Ferriss continued speaking. “After you rode off into the sunset, leaving Amos and me to bleed to death and end up as a meal for some small animal, more of those goddamn shaman priests started to show up.
“They discovered all of their compadres slaughtered and then they found us, cursing and bleeding in the scrub brush. They carried us across the wilderness on the backs of goddamn donkeys to a village who the fuck knows how far away. It felt like forever, thanks to your lead injections in our bellies. And then they interrogated us. They asked us just how badly we wanted to live. Understanding them wasn’t easy, either,” Ferriss said, “and not just because Amos and I was just about delirious by then from pain and infection. None of them jungle-living bastards spoke a word of English, and of course our Spanish wasn’t exactly up to snuff, neither.
“But eventually, them shaman guys managed to make their intentions clear. We agree to their terms, and they save our dying asses. We don’t agree to their terms, and we can just crawl off into the jungle and finish dying all alone in the middle of nowhere, with not a single goddamn soul to ever know what happened to us or how we were double-crossed by one traitorous, cheating bastard!” The volume of Ferriss’s words had gradually been increasing as he talked, until now he was just shy of a full-out scream.
He took a moment to regain control of himself before continuing. When he did, his tone was once again icy, his words hard as diamonds. “Well, as you might imagine, ol’ Amos and I felt we had quite a bit to live for, what with the way things ended between you and us that night back in Bumfuck, South America. The thought of dying in the jungles of Peru was bad enough, but we had a score to settle.” He gazed at Healy, flat-eyed and cold, and Mike saw that Agent Cooper was doing the same.
Jackson Healy looked from Ferriss to Cooper and back again. Nobody spoke. Finally Healy said, “A-an understanding?”
Ferriss grinned. “I thought you might focus on that part of our little story. Yep. We reached an understanding with them godless shaman guys. As I mentioned, it was an easy decision for us.”
He stood across the table, keeping his flat-eyed stare trained on Healy, making the man squirm. “Wondering what the understanding was, ain’t ya?”
Healy nodded, the rigid set to his body indicating to Mike he already had a pretty good idea what the answer might be.
Ferriss said, “The agreement was a simple one, really. In exchange for them shamans nursing us back to health, we would agree to spend the rest of our lives hunting down the murderous scum who slaughtered their fellow heathens at that cursed rock. It was a no-brainer, really. Shamans or no shamans, that would have been our intention, ain’t that right, brother?”
“Goddamn right,” Cooper agreed with a growl, his weapon still held rock-steady and trained on Mike. For his part, Mike had nearly forgotten all about the Glock, so intensely was he trying to follow Ferriss’s bizarre narrative. He noticed the two FBI men slipping into more rural speech patterns. The transition was jarring, but somehow made perfect sense at the same time.
“But that ain’t to say them Peruvian medicine men didn’t sweeten the pot a little,” Ferriss/Wesley Krupp continued. “Once they learned you had made off with the Youth Juice that unearthly demon gave them during the ceremony, they realized the hunt for you would likely be a long and difficult one. They had to assume you would eventually drink it – which you obviously did – and they knew it would take decades, maybe centuries, to even the score with you.”
Ferriss paused, either for dramatic effect or to take a deep breath, Mike wasn’t sure which. Maybe it was both. With his flat gaze still directed at Healy, Ferriss/Wesley said, “I’m thinking you might be able to guess how they sweetened the pot for us.”
Healy’s eyes widened and he said, with almost no hesitation, “They had more liquid, didn’t they?”
“Give the man a cigar,” Ferriss/Wesley Krupp crowed. “They had more Youth Juice. And they were so pissed off at the slaughter of their buddies back at the magical rock that they were more than happy to forgive us our little role in the confrontation, if only we were willing to follow you to the ends of the earth to extract revenge, on their behalf as well as ours.”
He looked around, as if taking in the massive forest of Paskagankee, rather than the dingy off-white walls of the windowless interrogation room. “It looks like we’ve done exactly that.”
Healy sat shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he said not just with fear but also with genuine curiosity. “How did you know I was inside that damned tavern when you burned it down a century-and-a-half ago?”
“We didn’t know,” Ferriss/Wesley Krupp replied. “Not for sure. But we was only minutes behind you when we tracked you down that night. Where else would you have gone? Once the tavern burned and you never showed up, we thought maybe we had killed you after all.”
“But how could you have killed me if I had drunk the ‘Youth Juice,’ as you call it?”
“Drinking that stuff don’t make you invincible,” Ferriss/Wesley said. “It simply stops the aging process. If you hadn’t been nice and cozy in that goddamned secret underground room, you would have died. You could have drank a gallon of magic juice and it wouldn’t have mad a damned bit of difference. But when the body of the tavern owner was the only one found in there after the fire burned itself out, we suspected you might somehow have escaped.”
Healy shook his head in wonder. “So you’ve been waiting more than a century and a half for me to show up?”
“That’s the curse,” Ferriss/Wesley said, nodding. His eyes were still flat and hard but Mike thought his face looked rueful. “Until we knew you were gone, until we knew you had paid for what you did, we had to continue slogging along, watching and waiting for you to show your traitorous face.”
“But…” Jackson Healy hesitated, working it out in his head. “The FBI? How did you manage that?”
Ferriss/Wesley shrugged. “Wasn’t that hard,” he said with a thin smile. “After we was back at full strength in Peru, we snuck across the border and started searching. I’m sure you recall we almost caught up to you a few times before we finally ran you down in Paskagankee.”
“I remember,” Healy nodded.
“Thought you might,” Ferriss/Wesley said. “But after we burned down the tavern and you never showed up, we feared you might have somehow given us the slip again. So, within a year, we had transformed ourselves from Wesley and Amos Krupp into James and Hardy Frey. We hired on as law enforcement in the surrounding states, always keeping an eye on news and arrest reports, just waiting for you to poke your head out of your hidey-hole.”
Healy looked stunned. “You’ve been working in law enforcement for the past one hundred and fifty years?”
“A hundred and fifty-three, to be exact,” Ferriss/Wesley said drily. “I think it’s fair to say we now have seniority over just about every cop and FBI agent who’s ever worked in the country. Ironic, when you think about it.”
Ferriss’s sardonic remark went right over Healy’s head. He was otherwise occupied, clearly thinking things through. “But if you never aged…”
“We would work in a town or federal agency for a while, then quit, or resign, or just disappear when everyone else started getting older and we became concerned they might take notice of the fact that we weren’t. We would lay low, then turn up elsewhere with new identities and start the whole process over again. It wasn’t all that hard, especially years ago.”
“A hundred and fi
fty years of waiting,” Healy said, as if he just couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah,” Cooper/Amos Krupp grunted. “It’s been fucking forever. So let’s get this over with.”
Ferriss/Wesley turned his glare on his brother. “I’ve been waiting just as long as you have,” he said, pointing an accusing finger. “Now that the moment we’ve waited for is here, I ain’t going to rush things. We’ll do what we’re here to do, don’t worry about that, but there’s no goddamned hurry. We have this nice, private room, no one’s going to bother us, so we can just take as much time as we damn well please.”
Cooper/Amos looked like he was going to argue, but he didn’t. He clamped his jaw shut, his perpetually angry look still firmly in place. Mike could see his teeth grinding from all the way across the table.
He took note of the man’s expression as his concern at being held at gunpoint began morphing into outright alarm. He didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken, or what it seemed the two time-traveling FBI men were about to do. He needed to keep the men talking. He quickly said, “So when you saw the reports of a secret underground room being uncovered next to the Ridge Runner, complete with skeletal human remains, you came running.”
“Yep. We’re actually on emergency leave from our bureau jobs down in Portland,” Ferriss/Wesley said with a sly wink. “Deaths in both of our families, don’t ya know. It probably stretched the limits of believability, but it’s soon to be a moot point. And besides,” he grinned evilly and turned his own gun on Healy. “It’ll soon be true, more or less.”
Ferriss/Wesley then cut a look at Mike. “I know you called down to Portland to check up on us. I’m surprised Special Agent in Charge Griffin didn’t tell you that.”
Mike shook his head. “He never said a word about it. Just verified your employment and hung up. He probably felt it was none of my business where you guys were, and I don’t really blame him. I wouldn’t go giving out my employees’ whereabouts to some random phone caller, either, even if he was in law enforcement.”
Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) Page 21