I took a few steps further into the darkness and looked behind me.
Despite their inefficiency, or maybe as a direct contributing cause to it, the ATF had better resources than I did. The trailer that I had stepped out of was one of six, including two motorhomes, organized in a rough quarter-circle. Spindly antennae sprouted above three and lights glowed behind curtains. At the far end of the line of trailers, I could see the outline of a truck looking a lot like a Chevy Suburban. Beyond that, it was hard to see in the dark, but I could make out the drooping blades of a two-seater chopper, settled in for the night.
I thought I caught the wink of a cigarette near the chopper. My eyesight still wasn’t a hundred percent so I couldn’t be sure.
I walked to the dark shape that Steve had identified. A trailer fitted out to be a bathroom-on-the-move. Toilet stalls and shower cubicles. I did what I needed to do and spent some time with a full sink and paper hand towels trying to rid my body of most of the crusted blood.
The chest was okay, just gravel rash.
The face was another story.
The mirror confirmed that my left eye was swollen mostly closed and would bruise up delightfully in the next few days, but what vision there was seemed okay. My nose was busted, but didn’t look as bad as it felt. I reached up and started to push it back towards centre. Sparks exploded on the fringes of my vision and my stomach churned. I stopped pushing and my body agreed to co-operate.
I rinsed my mouth out until blood stopped spattering the sink. I lifted my head and pulled my lips back. Blood oozed around three front teeth as I wobbled them.
All in all, I’d heal up alright, but it was a good thing that my male modeling days were behind me.
I stepped out of the bathroom trailer and walked around behind the convoy.
Other than the ATF caravan, there were no lights in any direction of the darkened desert. I could use the stars to work out which direction North was, but a fat lot of good that would do me, since I didn’t know where I was starting from.
I shivered again realizing how effective a location like this was to keep people contained. I could disappear into the darkness but, unless I got very lucky, I’d be dead inside three days. There’s a lot of open space between towns and roads in this part of Texas and with no landmarks to navigate by, it would be almost impossible not to get lost.
No wonder Steve had been relaxed about letting me loose.
I tried peeking into a couple of the other trailers on my way back from the head, but didn’t see anything useful.
The truck was a white Suburban and there were two of them. They were both locked. The chopper was the same type that had roared over me earlier in the day. It wasn’t locked, but I didn’t want to give Steve the satisfaction of watching me burn to death in a crash so I left it behind.
I pulled on the door latch and stepped back into the trailer where I’d spent most of the day chained up.
Steve was seated on one side of a desk covered with papers, reports and photographs. I was more interested in the mug of steaming black coffee on the desk in front of an empty chair. I lowered myself into the chair, grabbed the cup and sipped. It was bitter and ordinary by Don or Lisa’s standards, but I wasn’t about to complain.
“Thanks,” I said.
Steve raised his own cup and sipped.
“You have a good look around out there? Decide it’s not such a good idea to take off?” He asked these as if he was querying about a child or a family pet. No animosity, just a examination of the facts.
He might be a G-man but he wasn’t stupid.
“I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d tried to take one of the Chevys or even had a go at the chopper.” He shrugged. “Tony wasn’t gonna let you get further than getting one of them started.”
I sipped. Not much else to do.
“What happens now?”
“Unless you want to take your chances in the desert tonight, Rafferty, I’ll make sure you get fed and give you a bunk for the night. In the morning, Tony will drive you back to your car. And you will piss off back to Dallas and not show your face here again.”
I nodded—I understand the words you’re saying.
I wondered if Steve might have interpreted it as Okay, I agree.
Silly me, for not making myself clearer.
“You’ve told me about your girl, and I’ll get in touch with you if we find her. But …” He leaned forward and pointed a slim finger at me. “I’m here to nail Thof, not get bogged down with rescuing a dewy-eyed, religious teenager because Momma thinks she’s no longer having fun at camp. And I will not have you getting in the middle of this and fucking up the last year and a half of my work. You feel me?”
I sipped. He seemed to accept this as a suitable response. My stomach growled.
“You offered food. It’s going to need to be soft. While we eat, since I’m not going to be here tomorrow, I’ll listen to whatever you can tell me. And where’s my stuff? I’m dying for a pipe.”
Steve reached over, opened a locker in the corner of the room, and pulled out my sports bag, picked up a walkie-talkie and asked someone called Shane to bring food over.
While I rummaged through my bag to find the outdoorsman jacket, I couldn’t help notice my three guns.
More accurately, their absence. And that of the ammo I’d packed earlier that morning.
“Umm …” I started.
Without looking up from his reports, he said, “Your weapons and ammunition will be handed back to you when Tony dumps you at your car.” He looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t even think it, Rafferty. I’d be willing to bet that more than one of those pieces is hot, and don’t try to pretend that sawn-off is even close to legal. Only reason I’m gonna give them back is because the last thing I need right now is more of your shit distracting me from the reason I’m sleeping in a trailer in the middle of fucking nowhere, instead of home in my own bed in DC.”
I zipped the sports bag closed, shucked my jacket on, grabbed my pipe and tobacco pouch and stepped back out into the night.
There are memorable smokes.
With a good beer or a great meal, for example. After sex goes without saying.
The smoke I had that night, standing alone in the dark Texas desert after being beaten up, held prisoner, and then released by the US government, ranked right up there with the best ever.
I watched a figure step down from one of the motorhomes and carry a tray towards Steve’s trailer. He knocked, waited for a response, and when the door opened he stepped in. As he came back out, I saw Steve stand in the doorway looking out towards me.
I was starving but there was no way in hell I was gonna cut that pipe short.
I stayed out until I’d extracted every bit of smoke I could from that bowl, bashed the dead ashes out against the sole of my boot and walked back to the trailer.
A big bowl of soup and three pieces of white bread on a plate had been served up on my side of Steve’s desk, and he had added another mug of coffee. I nodded thanks and began to eat. I chewed the bread with the right side of my mouth to stay away from the loose teeth and the soup (chicken noodle and not too bad) slipped down easily.
Steve sipped from a white mug with an FBI logo.
He looked at me over the rim. I decided I’d try to get the conversation moving.
“You’ve been following this nut-job for the last year and a half?” I asked around a mouthful of bread.
He hesitated, then decided he couldn’t do any harm by confirming what I already knew.
“Yeah. ’bout that.”
“Why’d he first pop on to the radar? If you can say.”
I groveled. I hated doing it, but he might give me something I could use. He looked up to the corner of the ceiling, then let loose a little breath.
“The IRS has been tracking him for a while. The land purchases made with cash from a non-specific origin was the first trigger. Then they saw large donations coming in to this obscure church and decided to
keep a closer eye on him.”
“Why’d ATF come in?” I asked. “What’d he do, boost a couple of cigarette deliveries?”
Steve started to relax. He leaned back in his chair.
“Nothing that small time. I was brought in to look at the church donations about the time the Army found a whole bunch of weapons missing. They worked their side, I worked the IRS angle and we met in the middle.”
I whistled.
“You’d need to be Houdini to whisk stuff out from underneath the Army’s nose. How’d they get away with it?”
He looked at me like I was an impertinent child. Narrowed his eyes and appeared to be thinking it over. I finished the last of my soup, pushed the bowl away and reached for the coffee cup.
“I guess it can’t hurt to tell you. The Army’s plugged the leak.” He sighed. “It was too simple. An old buddy of Dariell’s from the seventies ended up as an Army supply sergeant. Whenever his CO gave him orders to supply armaments, he changed the order to include a few extra. When all the shit got delivered, he kept the extra aside, didn’t log them into inventory and shuffled them off to Dariell when he could. The CO got his shipment, Dariell got his, and no-one’s the wiser. Soon Dariell’s sitting on more than six thousand guns.”
There’s no way that the shed Cowboy and I saw in the rain-soaked darkness held that many weapons. Not even a quarter of what Steve thought, but I wasn’t going to disagree with him. Surely, if the government had a specific estimate, it had to be accurate, right?
And I wanted to keep him talking.
“How did no-one pick up the discrepancy between the base-request numbers and the supply numbers. Wouldn’t they have to match up?”
Steve shook his head.
“You can blame governmental thinking for that little fuck up.” He sipped again and pulled his lips back. “Armament supply is centralized. Army HQ tenders for suppliers and issues the approved contract, leaving each base responsible for its own inventory, so the payment side of it never gets reconciled back at base level.”
I must have looked confused, because he shook his head and slowed his voice.
“Say HQ contracts Colt for up to four hundred thousand M16s to be supplied over three years. Each base orders what they need direct from Colt and receives their shipment. Colt sends the bill to the pencil pushers at HQ and as long as all the bills, from all the bases, don’t exceed the original contracted amount, the bills get paid and everything looks fine. HQ knows they’re not paying for more weapons than they thought they would use, and each base knows they’re getting what they asked for. Any discrepancies slip through the cracks.”
It was my turn to shake my head. Every time I thought I was being too critical of the public service’s capacity for ineptitude, they came up with another way to reaffirm my initial beliefs.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Huh?”
“Why don’t you go grab him?”
Steve sat up straighter. “If I had my way, he’d already be in a cell. The higher-ups want to walk softly on this one. They believe all that end-of-the-world shit and don’t want to end up with a mass suicide, so they’re prepared to wait him out. Personally, I’d be happy to storm the place right now.” He shrugged. “Some of us have people to answer to, Rafferty.”
I took a final sip of coffee.
“When do you think—” I started.
“You know what?” Steve smiled. “I think that’s enough bedtime stories. You need to be up at sparrow fart to get back to your car, so it’s rack time. You know how much I care about your welfare.”
“You’re a real prince, Steve,” I said. “I hope you know that.”
He ignored me, stood up and walked back to the door to the gray room. It was open and a military-style cot, a pillow and a couple of blankets had been humped in.
“I’m not gonna lock the door, Rafferty. But, I will be outside for most of the night. And when I’m not, Tony will be.” He sighed. “Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got enough shit to clean up and I don’t want to add your blood or brains to the list.”
I’d already decided that sleep was the only thing I was going to do for the rest of the night.
Didn’t tell him that. Looked at the cot.
“I’ve got to make my own bed?” I said. “Shitty customer service, Steve. What ever happened to turn-down and a mint?”
“Fuck off, Rafferty.”
Chapter 29
I may have stayed awake after my head hit the pillow that night.
I doubt it.
Slept the sleep of the dead, and the recently beaten, and woke up feeling every inch of it, with Steve kicking the cot leg.
“Up and at ’em, Rafferty. If you want coffee before Tony hauls ass, your feet better hit the floor in the next sixty seconds.”
My head spun a little as I sat up, and even more as I bent over to lace up the boots. Things improved when Steve handed me a cup of coffee, steam rising in the morning chill. I stepped outside to stretch. The sun was just cresting the horizon behind the trailer line, throwing long, blocky shadows on the dirt.
Involuntarily, I classified east and started to categorize my surroundings. Small hills on the western horizon, no tall scrub in any direction, trailer antennas facing back towards Dallas, that type of thing.
What difference did any of that make; who gave a shit?
I was overcome with the desire to get the fuck out of there.
Drained the rest of my coffee and stalked back to the trailer. I was going through the sports bag again (in case Steve had rooted through it during the night) when I heard an engine rumble outside. By the time the Chevy had pulled to a stop in front of Steve’s trailer I was outside and waiting.
I jumped in.
Before I swung the door shut I said to Steve, standing in the trailer door, “See ya round, Steve.”
“Fuck I hope not, Rafferty. And I mean that.”
It felt good to be back in the Mustang and eating up the interstate as I headed home.
I stopped at a phone booth in Breckenridge and called Hilda.
“Rafferty?” Her voice was thick with sleep. “Where have you been? I got your message yesterday saying you’d call me later. By midnight I was getting worried. I called your house and got your machine, so I was up all night waiting for you to call. Where are you?”
“It’s a long story. I called as soon as I could.”
“As soon as you could? What does that mean? Why couldn’t you call?”
“Hil. Hon. It’s been a long night. I didn’t sleep much and I’ve still got a long drive to get home. Can we play twenty questions later? I’m okay and I’ll be home in a few hours. See you at your place?”
“Oh Rafferty, I’ve got to be at the store before then.” The flick of a lighter and a sharp inhale. “You can always come by.”
I had a vision of an old, rich person trying to purchase me in my newly configured state. “Ms Gardner, I didn’t know you had The Elephant Man for sale,” they would trill.
“Probably best if I don’t. I’ll head home for a shower and a nap.”
“Okay. I’ll get Ramon to close up so I can finish early. And Rafferty …”
“Yeah,” I sighed.
“I’m glad you’re okay. I was really worried.”
“Me too, hon.”
It was after I’d hung up that I realized my response covered both of her statements.
The drive home was a little hairy.
Outside Mineral Wells I snapped to with the nearside wheels in the dirt and a curve about two hundred yards away, closing fast. That woke me right up, but I still pulled over and walked up and down the shoulder for ten minutes.
On my fourth wake-up lap a couple of yokels in a faded blue-and-rust Dodge pickup slowed down, yelled something unintelligible and threw an empty Lone Star bottle at me.
They never throw full ones.
I stopped in Mineral Wells too, to load up on coffee at a no-name diner. I pulled the collar of my coat up and
the baseball cap down. I knew it made me look shady, but I preferred that than a do-gooder calling the police on my behalf and spending the day in a county sheriff’s office having to explain myself.
The stomach felt okay, so I tried the ham and eggs. Unusually for me, I quit before I was done. I wanted to get home before I threw up.
Rush hour traffic had come and gone by the time I hit the outskirts of Fort Worth so I kept a cool head on the last leg into Dallas.
I wheeled into my driveway at ten-thirty, feeling like I’d already done a month’s worth of work this morning. I peeled off my t-shirt, wincing as it pulled away from the larger grazes, and threw it in the trash as I walked through the garage. I dumped the sports bag in the hallway and left all the curtains closed. Coffee perked while I took a long, long, hot shower. I threw on a pair of sweatpants and a Rangers tee-shirt, chugged a scalding hot coffee, lay down on the couch and closed my eyes.
My last conscious thought; at least I wouldn’t wake up chained to the floor.
Kimberly came to me again in that darkness.
Or I went to her.
I’m still not sure which it was.
Kimberly’s cell.
“Tell him to hurry, Mom.”
Oswald. Wesson.
Weapons cache.
Open crates. Rifles. Bullets. Grenades.
Stacked to the ceiling.
Steve nods.
“I told you not to come back, Rafferty.”
Oswald raves.
“I am the Father, and the Way …”
“What can you do?”
“I am the Father, and the Way …”
“I have all your guns.”
“I am the Father, and the Way …”
“This is my fight, not yours.”
“I am the Father, and the Way …”
“Just doing my job.”
Kimberly pleads.
“I can’t hold on much longer. I can’t.”
Other voices.
A dozen more Kimberlys.
Semi-circle behind me.
False Gods Page 19