“Listen here,” he says. “What’s going on back there, we’re crossing all the lines. We’re doing things we’ve got no business doing, taking risks we’ve got no business taking. She’s sucked you into it. Don’t argue with me now. I can see it. I can read the signs for myself. I know because I’ve been there myself.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“What I’m trying to do is warn you. She’s got her hooks in you good. She calls the tune and you put on your dancing shoes. But this is gonna end bad for everybody involved. I’m telling you right now to walk away.”
“This is sour grapes,” I say. “Bea somehow maneuvered herself into the job you wanted, and now you’re out for revenge. What’s the matter? Can’t handle having a woman for a boss?”
“What I can’t handle is having a snake for a boss. She’s not the victim here, partner. She’s calling the shots.”
“I’m not your partner.” I shrug myself free.
He throws his hands up. “Fine. You’ve been warned. And I won’t feel sorry for you when you take the fall.”
After he’s stalked away, I open my car door and sling the briefcase to the passenger side. It lands on the edge and falls over. The straps that hold down the top flap are buckled loosely, leaving enough play around the opening for some of the smaller items to spill onto the floor mat. Bending over, I retrieve my digital recorder, my beat-up little camera, and Jeff’s dog-eared copy of The Foxhole Atheist, which I’m still carrying around.
By the time everything’s packed away, my forehead’s beaded with sweat. I start the engine and adjust the air vents, pausing a couple of minutes just to cool down. Then I reach into the glove compartment for some pain pills.
I’m not sure what to make of that guy. He doesn’t like Bea, that much is obvious. As for the rest, I may be a fool to trust her, but what choice do I have?
I let the air-conditioner blow as I dial Wilcox.
“Have you made any progress?”
“If I had anything worth sharing, I would’ve already called.” He takes a breath. “Look, if Englewood was an investor in Keller’s business, there’s no paper trail I can find. Maybe that in itself says something. The man does what he wants and never leaves a trace. He knows how to keep invisible.”
“Speaking of invisibility, is it possible that Englewood made Keller disappear when we were hunting him? He’d have the connections, presumably.”
“Anything’s possible,” he says. “Proving it, though, that’s the problem. Can I be honest with you, March? Maybe we’re out of our depth. You’re over on the sideline, I’m coming up with nothing, and the idea that any of this is going to end up in court. .”
“What are we supposed to do? Ignore it?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I’m flailing around here,” I say, “but it’s better than doing nothing. So keep looking, okay?”
Silence on the line, which I interpret as consent. I’m about to say goodbye when he clears his throat. “I shouldn’t say anything,” he says, “but I’ve seen the preliminary report on your shooting.”
“And?”
“They’ve got nothing.”
“That’s good. I mean, I knew there was nothing, but still. . I’m relieved.”
“They’re sitting on it, though. Keeping their options open.”
“Still,” I say. “Thanks.”
When I turn off Justice Park Drive on my way to the Northwest Freeway ramp, the donut shop on W. 43rd calls out to me. I steer into the lot, putting the car in park and bringing my briefcase inside with me. Inside, a couple of sun-weathered old-timers are drinking black coffee across from each other, the morning paper scattered in sections on the table between them. One of them wears a white sleeveless T-shirt over cigar-wrapper skin, a flat cap low over his eyes. The other has one hand tucked into the waistband of his powder-blue stretch jeans. They look me over with indifference before resuming their conversation.
At the counter I line up behind a couple of refill-seeking seniors, then order coffee and a glazed donut, which I take to an empty table up front with a view of the parking lot and the feeder road beyond. The coffee is weak, but the donut tastes pretty good in a soft, sickly sweet sort of way. I have to give my fingertips a good scrub to get the glaze off, and even then, as I unpack my briefcase, spreading the papers out across the Formica tabletop, my touch seems to raise sticky welts on everything.
I sip some coffee and start flipping through The Foxhole Atheist. The marginal note with the safe house address isn’t the only annotation. In fact, many of the pages feature underlining and one- or two-word notes. Sometimes he’s written GOOD or EXACTLY next to a line from the day’s devotional reading. Sometimes he limits himself to an exclamation mark beside a telling passage. Clearly he’s spent some hours with this book, so it’s no surprise that when needing to write the address down, The Foxhole Atheist was at hand.
As I browse the little book, I notice pages where Jeff has underlined just a single letter in the middle of a word. On an entire page, there will be just one or two of these random lines underneath an I or an O or an F, reminding me of the way I used to mark up books as a kid first discovering cryptography, using a simple book cipher to write secret messages. The memory brings a smile to my lips.
The very first entry in the book is the most marked. It’s titled THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES, BUT THERE SHOULD BE. The first line in the second paragraph reads:
In these cases, the very same fear that prompts the theist to doubt his faith perversely motivated the atheist toward an artificial certainty in the existence of a spiritual world.
The letters he’s underlined-the I and N in the word in, the F and E in the word fear, the R in artificial, the N in certainty, and the O in world-they’re not a cipher code, but they do spell a word. Turning the pages with greater urgency, I find the pattern repeated, not all in one sentence as in the first instance, but stretching over the length of paragraphs and pages. Always the same sequence of letters, always spelling the same word.
INFERNO.
Jeff gave the impression that he didn’t know much about the inner workings of Nesbitt’s company, and when Hilda spilled her own version, she never alluded to Jeff by name, only mentioning that in the grip of paranoia Nesbitt had brought new people in from the outside, people she presumably didn’t know well. And yet, over and over in a strangely compulsive way, Jeff was picking out the sequence of letters that spell the code name of Nesbitt’s informer.
Why?
I pull out my phone and dial Jeff’s number. Evidently he knows more than he let on. Maybe giving me the book was his way of revealing this, knowing I would pick up on the underlining eventually. There’s no answer. The voicemail picks up and an electronically generated voice repeats the digits.
“Call me,” I say. “I’ve been reading your book.”
Then I wait. When he doesn’t call back right away, I pop the rings of my Filofax open, removing a couple of fresh sheets of lined notepaper. I make two lists side by side, the first column labeled NESBITT and the second ENGLEWOOD. Underneath the first I put Jeff and Hilda, Brandon Ford and the men in his paramilitary team. Then I relist Ford and his men under Englewood, drawing an arrow from left to right, since at some point they must have switched sides.
At the bottom of the page I write INFERNO, underlining the name.
What column should I put him in? I would write Inferno’s name under Nesbitt’s column, only it seems Ford is the only person in touch with the insider. If he’s switched sides, maybe Inferno belongs to Englewood’s team now. That’s where the power seems to be, after all. The way Wilcox was talking about him, there’s not much the man can’t do. The phony DNA results are proof of that. And if he has the power to manipulate the NCIC database, why maybe it’s not so implausible to think he could have arranged the traffic stop that led to Nesbitt’s death. Maybe Silvestri, the training officer, undid his thumb break for a reason; maybe he really did intend to shoot Nesbitt, j
ust as the conspiracy theorists online insist. The crooked cop angle strikes me as ridiculous, the stuff of Hollywood or bad television dramas, but after my face-to-face meeting with Englewood, when he dropped Reg Keller’s name, anything seems possible.
I write SILVESTRI under Englewood’s column, but with a question mark.
At the top of the page, above all the rest, I add KELLER in heavy block letters. Unfinished business. The way he disappeared so completely when we were hunting him, that suggests powerful interests working in his favor. Englewood again? By mentioning Big Reg’s name, he as good as confirmed it. If Englewood protected him before, clearing the way for him to kill Chad Macneil in Buenos Aires, is it possible Englewood also brought him back to Houston, where he murdered my John Doe, who may or may not be one of the paramilitaries by the name of Robert Johnson?
All the names. All the interconnections.
I check my phone for missed numbers, but Jeff hasn’t attempted to return my call.
Staring at the lists, going over them in black ink, making everything darker and darker, scoring deep lines into the page, I don’t know, I just don’t know how it all fits together.
But my sense of Reg Keller is this: he committed minor crimes for personal advantage, and when his back was to the wall, he went as far as homicide. Still, there’s a difference between putting a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger, and tying a person’s hands down and methodically skinning them.
Any of us, in the grip of desperation, with fear narrowing our options down, is capable of the first kind of evil. The second takes a special kind of sadist.
Is Keller one of them? I would have thought not.
Here’s the thing, though. Since we last met, Big Reg has been on an outlaw journey, traveling to darker regions of the mind, perhaps unlocking doors even he didn’t know were there before. The man I went up against two years ago might not have been capable of such brutality, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t today.
I’m flailing, just like I told Wilcox. But there’s one thing I’ve learned, and it’s this. Even when you don’t connect, even when your fist keeps slicing through air, if you keep punching, sooner or later, you’re bound to hit something.
On his way out, the old guy in the flat cap peers down at the mess I’ve made on the table. He tucks his paper under his arm, shaking his head.
I smile up at him. “You have a nice day.”
The gate outside Jeff’s auto garage is padlocked and there’s no sign of activity on the lot, just the row of picked-over car husks out front, the debris of tires and crushed glass, brown weeds pushing up through the cracks in the concrete. The blacked-out windows show a layer of baked-on grime, and the creases in the articulated garage doors are outlined in rust. I walk along the curb, inspecting the coils of barbed wire at the top of the fence, not relishing the prospect of making the climb.
A tall hedge separates the property from the undeveloped lot behind. I pick my way across the overgrown, potholed ground, looking for gaps in the bushes, hoping there’s a back way into the alley I parked inside during my first visit. There’s no opening in the fence, but the wire stops where the fence meets the hedge.
I glance around to see if anyone’s watching. Across a side street is a liquor store with burglar bars over the windows. Next to it, some itinerant workers are loitering in the Burger King parking lot, but they aren’t paying attention to what I’m up to-or if they are, they’re making a point of not showing it.
The hedge is inside the fence on Jeff’s property, so I have to shimmy up, pushing my shoes into the links for a toehold. The climb is awkward rather than difficult, and soon my leg is over the top, seeking purchase among the tree branches. It’s a pine hedge, prickly and too fragile to support my weight, so there’s no choice but to slide down the fence itself, scrubbing my back against the needles. Once I reach the ground, I’m sandwiched by the hedge on one side and the fence on the other, with only a pocket of space to move around in and no visible path through the foliage. Wandering again, but in a not-so-dark wood. Covering my face with my upraised arms, I push my way through.
Outside the hedge, I’m cut off by the bumper of an old Plymouth Barracuda with no glass and a stripped interior. In the dark, the old muscle cars had looked a little better than they do in the blazing daylight.
After brushing myself off, I go to the back door with its row of dead bolts, pounding out a beat with my fist. Nothing. I knock again, then try the handle. The door doesn’t budge.
I call out. “Jeff?”
Silence.
I walk around the garage, trying the big bay doors, which are firmly shut, looking for gaps in the blackout that covers all the glass. The old entrance, a metal-framed glass door, is missing its bottom panel, the gap covered in cardboard. I work the corner free with my foot, but there’s something blocking the other side. It feels like a heavy cart or shelf, maybe some kind of workbench. There’s no space to crawl through, even if I relished the thought of forcing my way in on hands and knees, ruining my clothes on the greasy concrete.
The workers at the Burger King are stealing glances my way. It doesn’t matter. They are not going to call the cops to report a suspicious prowler on a seemingly abandoned property. They’re just curious, that’s all.
I try Jeff’s number again, listening at the gap in the cardboard in case the phone rings inside the garage. There’s no sound in there and no answer on the line. I make up my mind to get inside, so I start scouring every car on the lot, peering into threadbare backseats and holed-out trunks for a stray crowbar or a length of pipe.
Then it happens.
The crowd at Burger King starts going “Oh” and “Ah,” like guys in front of a football game when the quarterback is sacked, and then I hear the metallic rattling of chains and the big gate heaving on its dry hinges. I step out from behind the trunk of a catercorner land yacht just in time to intercept Jeff with his arm cocked high in the air, some kind of vicious-looking club in his hand.
I raise my arm to block, clenching my teeth for impact.
“March,” he says, lowering the club. He takes a step backward.
“Where did you come from?” I ask. “Why aren’t you answering my calls?”
He glances at the club in his hand, a short, studded hardwood rod that swells toward the tip, the handle wrapped in tape, and smiles with embarrassment. “I’ve had some trouble with people trespassing, mostly vagrants, so I made them a little something to remember me by. If I’d have realized it was you. .”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
Through the open gate I see an old Camaro on the curb behind my car, its door hanging open, the finish dull enough that it could have been stored in a barn for the past decade. Parked on this lot, it would pretty much blend in, only it runs.
“Listen, let’s go inside,” he says. “People are watching.”
“Give me that,” I say, reaching for the club.
He surrenders it. “Can we go in now?”
I walk back to the garage while he retrieves his car and drives it inside the gate. We head around back, side by side and silent. He works some keys out of his jeans pocket and undoes the dead bolts. Inside, the air is stifling. He turns on the fan, then goes to a window unit air-conditioner I hadn’t noticed the first time. It shudders to life with a dull hum.
“I’ve been reading that book you gave me,” I tell him. “You made some interesting notes in there, and underlined some things.”
“That’s a great little book. I highly recommend it. Living down here in the Bible Belt, it doesn’t hurt to inoculate yourself against all the stupidity.”
“What I was particularly interested in was the word you kept spelling.”
Digging through the books on his folding table, he seizes on a floppy softback with a lurid cover. “That’s what I’m talking about. You ever read this one?” He fires the book across at me, forcing me to catch it against my chest. “Dante’s Inferno. It’s all in there, all the hy
steria. What he does is, he writes a poem about hell, and guess what? Everybody who crossed him in life happens to be down there in torment. I mean, yeah right. That’s why they invented hell, so they could send their enemies down there.”
“Don’t tell me you’re interested in poetry.”
The book is heavy in my hands. A memory surfaces. The same copy of Dante-the very same one-thumping down on a picnic table at Ft. Polk more than twenty years ago.
“Mr. Nesbitt, he gave me that book. He wanted me to read it.”
The pages are brown with age. I turn them slowly. “We both know the significance of Inferno, right? Let’s not make this harder than it has to be. You know more about Nesbitt’s operation than you led me to believe.” I put the book down. “Tell me what you know, Jeff.”
“If I didn’t give you everything,” he says, “maybe it was for a reason. Maybe I wanted to see if you were going to keep me in the loop or not. After all, I’ve been working on this longer than you have, and there’s more at stake for me.”
“Like what?”
“Like everything, man. They’re after me. Why do you think I holed up here? What do you think I’ve been doing ever since they killed Mr. Nesbitt? Twiddling my thumbs? Hardly. I’ve been getting on top of this thing, figuring out who they are and how they operate.”
“So tell me who they are. Tell me how they operate.”
“I could,” he says, wagging his finger. “Oh, believe me, I could. Only there’s nothing you could do about it, March. I realized that right off, even before I decided to bail you out that night. You can’t help me. You’re too tied up in the rules. You’ve got no room to maneuver.”
“Try me.”
His smile is halfway to a sneer. “What were you doing anyway, trying to break in here? If you wanted to rile me up, congratulations. I’m riled. I did you a favor-more than a favor-and this is what I get in return?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you ever since I saw the underlining in your Foxhole Atheist book. You gave me the book for a reason. You wanted me to make the connection.”
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