“I say again, what is this place?”
“Welcome,” he said, sweeping his arm like Vanna White, “to the Beet Brothers’ compound.” Josh looked over his shoulder at the falling-down house, then leaned closer. “These guys are lunatics. Flat out fucking lunatics.”
I took a guess. “One of them a half-assed doctor, a medic in the army or some such?”
“How’d you know?”
I shrugged. It was an easy guess. I fished under the passenger seat and came up with the Browning P35 I’d taken from Ollie at Motorenwerk. Stuck it down the back of my pants, grabbed my Windbreaker as I stepped from the truck, tied the Windbreaker’s arms around my waist.
As we crossed sixty feet of dirt and weeds to the cinder-block steps, I told Josh to give me twenty seconds’ worth of info on this shithole.
“The brothers that own the place are gone right now,” he said. “Hunting or stealing or whatever. They’ve got fifty-sixty acres on either side of the old railroad tracks, they fuck around down there all day. One of them was a medic in Vietnam, just like you said. Ollie’s on a sofa in the front room, been there since I brought him.”
We stepped through the screen door. I about puked at the smell. I read somewhere that smell and sound are the senses that touch off memories. The Beet Brothers’ stench touched off a doozy:
In my worst time, maybe fifteen years ago, I spent a summer in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a half-assed camp a bunch of us bums set up behind an industrial park. One of the bums, a huffer whose face was always gold-flecked because that was his paint color of choice, passed the time prowling for house cats and skinning them. He kept the pelts in the shack he’d built from cardboard and pallets. The rest of us gave the shack a wide berth, knowing he was even crazier than we were.
But one night, the huffer stole two dollars from a pal of mine. A half dozen of us got brave on Mad Dog 20/20, waited until the huffer passed out, and flooded into his shack to kick the shit out of him. It was mid-August, a hundred degrees easy.
When we swarmed the shack, the cat-pelt stench hit us like a mallet. Every one of us puked or passed out or both. I remember seeing one guy’s eyes roll up as he fell forward. It was more than a smell in there, it was … an immersion. In death, hate, focused insanity.
This house smelled like that shack.
Ollie said, “You get used to it.”
Behind me Josh said, “I haven’t.” He said it real quiet.
I followed Ollie’s voice to my right. The front room was ten by twelve and had windows on two sides. The windows were wide open, thank God. An ancient console TV sat in the front corner of the room, set up with the first set of rabbit ears I’d seen in five years. On the tube: a court show, slightly fuzzy, a black woman saying her boyfriend had promised to split the rent but never did.
Opposite the TV was a couch, brown, older than the TV. Ollie Dufresne was propped up on it. He wore the same clothes I’d seen him in at his shop, his right pant leg split, that leg straight out on the couch. The leg itself looked much better than I expected, as if it’d been worked on by experts. A snow-white bandage wrapped the knee, an ice pack sat on top, and aluminum rods had been taped to hold everything straight.
Ollie wore half a smile as he watched me try to figure it all out. “Admirable field dressing, eh? One of the brothers did it, bless him. He’s a sort of medical savant. He can’t tell you who’s president, but during a tiff in one of your more despicable African countries, I once watched him stuff ten yards of intestine back inside a man and sew him up with a safety pin and dental floss. The man was on his feet two days later, couldn’t have gotten better care at Walter Reed.”
I sat at the end of the sofa and breathed through my mouth. “Chrissake, what is this place?”
Behind me on TV, the woman’s boyfriend said it was true he hadn’t paid any rent, but he had made four payments on his girlfriend’s car. Josh stepped to the TV and clicked it off.
From out back, maybe a mile off, we heard noise—a shotgun, at least two automatic weapons, a big-block motor, rebel yells.
Ollie and I locked eyes. At the exact same time we said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
CHAPTER TEN
Three wide on my truck’s bench seat isn’t bad. Three wide with Ollie’s leg sticking straight out was. Josh and I leaned him against the door, then set his leg across our laps. When I shifted into second and fourth, Josh had to pull the leg toward our bellies so the lever wouldn’t hit it.
Nobody said anything for a while. I wanted to put some miles and some turns between us and the brothers, whoever they were. I checked the rearview a lot.
After twenty minutes and a couple of east–north–east–south jogs, I relaxed. “Where to?” I said.
“Enosburg Falls, Vermont,” Ollie said. “Near the Canadian border.”
I looked at my watch. “Take all day.”
“Four hours.”
“How about I take you to his car?” I said, chinning at Josh.
“We can really use you,” Ollie said. “My Montreal guy is a tough bastard.”
“Why would he still be looking for you? Seems to me he sent his message already.”
“That he did,” Ollie said. “But with the message sent, he promised he was going to look very hard at our recent … transactions.”
“And once he looks them over?”
Ollie gritted his teeth as we hit a pothole. “He’ll be back.”
“What were you skimming?” I said. “Dope or cash?”
Ollie said nothing.
“Dope or cash?” I said.
Nothing.
I checked my mirrors, pulled over to the Armco barrier, killed the engine. “Get out,” I said.
Josh said, “Here?”
Ollie said, “Knock it off.”
“You want me to make an eight-hour round-trip, you’ll tell me every damn thing,” I said.
Ollie and Josh looked at each other. “It’s not an unreasonable request,” Ollie said.
Josh shrugged. “Your call.”
“Drive,” Ollie said.
I lit up the truck and pulled out.
Ollie said, “What do you want first?”
“How you knew those yahoos back there, the Beet Brothers. And that bit about seeing a man’s guts blown out in Africa.” I looked at his pain-white face. “You’re not just some guy runs a two-lift garage in Rourke, New Hampshire.”
“Believe it or not,” Ollie said, “I did a stint in the French Foreign Legion.”
I nodded. “Makes sense.”
Ollie said, “Most people don’t even realize it still exists.”
“I’ve known some mercs.”
“From the Legion?”
“No,” I said. “But they talk about it. With respect.”
Josh said, “He took an airport in Iraq in Gulf War One.”
I said, “All by himself?”
Ollie laughed. “We were with the French Sixth, a light-armor division.” Long pause. “You said you know a few mercs, so you probably understand that the world I used to inhabit was a small one. Nevertheless, try to imagine my shock when I ran into the Beets at Walmart a few years ago.”
“Beets,” I said. “Explain that. Nickname, or what?”
“Brothers,” Josh said. “Bret, Bobby, and Bert Beet.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“My mouth to God’s ear,” Ollie said. “Bert’s the medical savant I described. Anyway, they spotted me in Walmart and we reminisced about the two or three hellholes we’d cohabited, and so on. When they learned I lived fifteen miles away, they had a virtual circle jerk right there in the pain-relievers-and-cold-relief aisle. I’ve been dodging them ever since.”
“He has a standing invitation to ride around in four-by-fours with the brothers and shoot deer with machine guns,” Josh said.
“Big fun,” I said.
“For them,” Ollie said, and patted his knee. “Anyway, when this happened and I awoke with young Josh trying to get me
locked up by calling the gendarmerie, Bert Beet was the first man I thought of.”
We were quiet a while. If half of Ollie’s stories were true, he was one interesting dude. When we hit the on-ramp to I-89, I got us up to seventy-five, settled in, and said, “Tell me about Montreal.”
Ollie puffed his cheeks out. “Where to begin?”
“Start with your father,” Josh said.
“It always comes down to the father,” Ollie said. “Doesn’t it?”
Oliver Dufresne was born in Enosburg Falls. His mother was an American schoolteacher, his father a snowmobile tuner—a racer until he busted up his hips in a wreck—from Bedford, Quebec, thirty miles north of the border.
The father was a damn good tech and a damn lousy drinker. When things got tough in the marriage, he ditched his wife and kid and moved back to Bedford. He developed a pattern you could set your watch by. He would hook on with a snowmobile race team or tuner shop and be a model employee for six or eight months. Then he’d hit the bottle hard, would drink his way out of a job and onto the dole.
While growing up Ollie hated school, took his mother for granted, and daydreamed about how cool it’d be to live with his dad. I shook my head, thinking he was telling my story. Typical son, worshipping the bum who’d deserted him.
He spent as much time as he could in Bedford, wheedling visits though neither his mother nor his father wanted them. By the time his dad died of cirrhosis at age forty-four, Ollie had his legacy—a knack for working on engines and the ability to speak French.
“What about this?” I said, making the glug-glug drinking gesture. “You inherit it, too?”
“Never had a problem with it.”
“Lucky.”
“I know.”
Ollie had no interest in school, said the best day of his life was graduation. He skipped the ceremony, didn’t so much as leave his mother a note, and thumbed west because there was a Grand Prix race in Detroit that year.
“Formula One?” I said.
“Indeed. You a fan?”
“I know something about racing.”
“Then you may remember they ran an F1 race in Detroit for a few years. It was one of those Mickey Mouse affairs through streets lined with Jersey barriers and chain-link fences.”
I said I didn’t remember—wasn’t much of an F1 fan. Ollie said I hadn’t missed much, not in Detroit anyway.
Once there, he’d surprised himself by talking his way into Team Brabham’s garage, where he did scut work all weekend. When the race was over, Ollie got an even bigger surprise. The Brabham guys kind of adopted him, this short, round little guy who did all the shittiest jobs, never complained, and spoke French. They asked if he wanted to travel with the team awhile.
“You said, ‘Hell, yes.’”
“Precisely.” And away they went, once Ollie scrambled for a passport. He wound up spending a freebie summer in England, France, Germany, Portugal. Then the series doubled back to North America for races in Montreal and Mexico City.
Which was where Team Brabham dumped him. The F1 traveling circus was moving to Australia and Japan, and while the Brabham guys liked their mascot, they couldn’t afford to take him that far.
Before getting bounced, Ollie had spent dozens of long nights with the other low man on Brabham’s totem pole, a bashed-up Scot. The Scot had maybe three teeth left in his head, but he had plenty of stories. He’d been a coastal smuggler, had been one of the last men gang-pressed into the Merchant Marines, had joined the Royal Navy during the war. After, with no family to go home to, he’d done a long stint in the French Foreign Legion.
The guy told stories to impressionable Ollie that made his Foreign Legion years sound like a cross between time spent with the Hardy Boys and the Arabian Knights.
And so Oliver Dufresne, dumped in Mexico City, broke, barely eighteen, thumbed east to Veracruz, talked his way onto a cargo ship, rode to Norway, thumbed to Aubagne, France, and signed up for the Foreign Legion.
“You have to admit it’s a cool story,” Josh said.
“It is,” I said, popping into the fast lane and passing two semis as we crossed over I-91. I glanced at Ollie. “When was this?”
“’Eighty-seven,” he said, and smiled at nothing. After a long pause, he told some more.
The Legion turned him hard. He didn’t say much more than that. I thought I knew why. The guys I know who’ve seen combat, you need a crowbar to get stories out of them. Or a dozen beers. The guys itching to tell war stories are usually full of shit. They were desk jockeys, administrators, assistants’ assistants. They swipe stories told by line-of-fire grunts and make them their own.
Finally Ollie said, “I came back in ’ninety-one.”
“Why?”
“What else? A girl. The love of my life, et cetera et cetera.” He smiled to himself. “Egyptian girl. Very modern family, very wealthy. They sent her to Dartmouth. I followed her to the States.”
“And?”
“And I found myself in New Damn Hampshire with no dashing uniform and no devil-may-care twinkle in my eye. I took a job as a grease monkey in Rourke. Oh, the ignominy!” He laughed. “Meanwhile my girlfriend was attracting a fair bit of attention up in Hanover. She was an exotic beauty of a freshman, and it didn’t hurt when boys found out her father was a billionaire.”
“She dropped you,” I said.
“Like a hot potato.”
One thing about the story: It made the time pass. I-89 carved west. I hadn’t been this far north in years, but I remembered the road would cut north again pretty soon for the run to the border. Enosburg Falls couldn’t be far.
Ollie read my eyes, read my mind. “Forty minutes.”
“You haven’t even gotten to your Montreal guy,” I said.
“But I’ve laid the groundwork, as you’ll see. May I fast-forward two decades?”
He did, to 2006. Ollie explained why Motorenwerk was going nowhere. I let him tell it even though I already knew.
You can put a high-end restoration shop in the boonies. The loaded customers will actually think better of you if you’re in the middle of nowhere. They find it charming.
But to make it pay, you need a couple of high-profile projects to kick-start things. You need to build cars for TV stars or baseball players. Once those restos get written up in magazines, your phone rings off the hook.
Ollie never quite got his celebrity customer. He got plenty of nibbles—referrals and near-misses—but no takers. So Motorenwerk went sideways, doing thirty-thousand-dollar jobs instead of three-million-dollar jobs. Do that long enough and sideways turns into down.
Which is where Motorenwerk was in ’06 when the old friend of Ollie’s dad drove up in an Escalade and pitched his idea.
“What was his name?” I said.
“Call him Montreal.”
“Why?”
“For now.”
I shrugged.
Nine-eleven had put Montreal in a jam. Where his competitors relied on shipments to Atlantic ports, he preferred U.S. mules, and tight border security meant one out of every five mule-mobiles was getting busted. Montreal’s supply chain was unreliable, plus he was constantly recruiting mules to replace the ones in jail, plus he was playing Snitch Roulette—and the odds worsened with every bust.
Bottom line: Montreal was slipping fast.
“Just like you,” I said.
Ollie half smiled. “Fair enough. We both needed to get healthy.”
He said they experimented with plastics and sealing techniques until their system was foolproof. Then Montreal invested in a better class of mules: mostly whites, a few Asians, no criminal records. Sometimes they registered for business conferences. Sometimes they brought their kids, made a family vacation out of it.
“Nice touch,” I said.
“It worked,” Ollie said. “Next exit.”
We took a state road east through pretty hill country. Soon we hit Enosburg Falls, which looked like little Vermont towns are supposed to look. Ollie told
me where to turn. We soon cleared the downtown, such as it was, and pulled into a country-road driveway. I looked at a small white clapboard house. It had a stone foundation, a deep porch, window boxes everywhere. The lower four feet of the shingled roof was covered with stamped aluminum to prevent ice dams.
I killed the truck.
“Mom’s house,” Ollie said, flushing.
We all felt as stiff as Ollie’s leg. Josh and I stretched, worked Ollie out of the truck and helped him up the steps. Mom wasn’t home. Ollie had Josh reach under a flowerpot for the spare key.
Inside we took turns pissing, then helped Ollie to the front-room sofa. I looked through a picture window that faced front. “What mountain is that?”
Ollie laughed. “That’s no mountain at all,” he said. “That’s a hill.”
I said I was leaving. Ollie seemed surprised. He asked if I wanted to hear why things went bad between him and Montreal. I said it wasn’t my fault he couldn’t spit out the story in four hours, then opened the door to leave.
I wanted to hear the story, but I didn’t want to get stuck here overnight; there was too much going on at home. I told Ollie he could fill me in later. I hopped in my truck, found a gas station, filled up, grabbed a coffee, headed south.
Thought about Ollie, a guy I liked, a grease monkey like me.
A guy who helped smuggle heroin and didn’t seem bothered by it. A guy who maybe killed Tander Phigg. Who had a perfect little helper in Josh, who seemed ready to do whatever the hell Ollie told him to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Charlene was gone when I woke up the next morning. I had barreled down from Enosburg Falls, had gotten a snuggle and an “Mmm” when I climbed in bed beside her. She’d left a note on my bedside table: Office—GD paperwork! Special BB meeting tonite, Tander memorial.
I thought about the memorial while I drove to Framingham. These days, it seems a half dozen Barnburners die every year. The old joke: Dying sober is the only prize you get out of AA, and then you’re not around to enjoy it.
I stepped into my family room. Kieu and Tuan were watching a kids’ show. I pidgin-asked where Trey was. Kieu smiled and pointed past the living room. On TV, something green rode a unicycle. Tuan giggled and clapped.
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