by James Phelan
“Charming lady.”
“Yep. Some people here reckon she’s an outlaw, but others think she’s a generous and hard-working churchgoer. But one thing is certain, she wants to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, and she won’t stand for any form of progress or change.
“And then there’s Derek Copper, who heads up the Copper household; these days they run the meth business this side of the border. Funny, all these hundreds of years the state borders meant jack, and now that there’s drug money on the table, they’re respected.”
“Money changes things.”
“Yep. I’ve seen it change plenty of people. But not Murphy. He could have been an enforcer for Copper—or a sergeant-at-arms on either side, I suppose, earning crazy drug money—but he chose to go get lost instead.”
“He sounds like a decent guy.”
“The best.”
“But it sounds like he’s going to be hard to turn around.”
“No,” Squeaker said, “not really.”
“How’d you figure that?”
“You’ve got me.”
Walker looked sideways at her, said, “I’ve got you?”
“I’m coming with you.”
Walker paused. “It could be dangerous.”
“Oh, please.”
Walker smiled. “You’re a good egg, kiddo.”
“Kiddo?”
“Yep.”
“Hmph. Don’t know about ‘kiddo.’” Squeaker leaned back in her seat. “The last thing Murphy said to me, before he disappeared, was that he was going to bug out, to the forest someplace. He said that not a hundred years ago you could live self-sufficiently off the land and it was a good life, but with all the taxes and rules and regulations nowadays, it’s all but impossible. You can live off the land if you have someone else subsidizing it for you. He said that’s what’s wrong with America today.”
“That we don’t take care of ourselves anymore?” Walker said.
Squeaker nodded. “Instead, we expect others to.”
“I hear you,” Walker said. “But sometimes, even smart and hard guys like your cousin need a helping hand.”
27
“Makes you wonder, right?” Woods said, sitting back, flicking through Murphy’s file as Levine drove north. “How is it that eight SEALs get themselves murdered, all within a few days? How’s that happen? I mean, these guys are the best, right?”
Levine replied in a flat tone, “Best fighters in the Navy.”
“What—you think there’s better, in another service?”
“Sure. Delta. They’re the pinnacle. The benchmark.”
“Says who?”
“Says people who know.” Levine looked to him. “Says me.”
“You think? You really believe that? Have you seen Black Hawk Down?”
“Shit, Tom, you’re clutching now. And how weren’t they the best in that engagement?”
“Yeah, well, is this just because your dad and pappy were Army?”
“Nope. But the SEALs? They’re only as good as the individual. Yeah, they’re good, and yeah, they’ve seen plenty of action for a good decade. But who’s to say that they’re the best of what we’ve got in the armory? I mean, think of Delta—they’re the best the Army has. And how many soldiers does the Army have?”
“A lot.”
“I do believe that’s the technical amount. And how many shooters does the Navy have?”
“A handful?”
“Compared to the Army, yes. So, okay, call it, what, two hundred thousand full-time fighting troops in the Army at any given time—out of over a million Army serving, guard and reservists? That’s a pool of two hundred thousand men and women trained in the art of killing for our country.”
“The art of defending the country.”
“Perspective. They’re trained to kill, not defend, right?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Right. So, Delta? They’re the best of all those. It’s like saying that the Army represents every kid playing football across the country in any given year—they’re training to play. Right? And the NFL, they’re Delta—training to decimate. Got it?”
Woods looked out his window, said, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Hell, for all we know,” she said, “there’s better than Delta out there. The best of the best of the best. Guys pulled out because they’re so good, they’re needed in areas that no one even knows exists.”
“Government,” Woods said, still looking out his side window and rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Can’t trust them. Can’t . . . whatever.”
•
The garbage dump was just a few miles up the road, a corrugated gravel track worn into disrepair by heavy trucks driving fast.
Walker heard the gunfire before he saw the shooter. He looked at the Ruger revolver in the door pocket, loaded with six semi-wadcutters, a box of fifty rounds in the center console.
“That’s him,” Squeaker said. “That’s Casey. Loves shooting trash and talking about government conspiracies that come through our TVs and are put into our chicken nuggets.”
“Nuggets, you say?”
“He says. He’s smart, too. One of the smartest in the family, my mammy always used to say.”
“This is Casey, I take it,” Walker said, letting the engine idle, watching the scene in comic disbelief. “Not Murphy, your skilled-up Navy SEAL cousin.”
“Yep. That’s Casey all right.”
“You sure your ma didn’t say he was special in a different kind of way?”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing . . .” Walker watched the guy shoot with a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. He was obliterating televisions and washing machines and fridges and microwaves. He had what Walker regarded as an impressive mullet hairdo: all business up front, with shoulder-length tails out back, covered with a well-worn trucker’s hat. He wore an open flannel shirt with a stained tank-top underneath. He was seated in a cast-iron bathtub in the middle of the junkyard, as though it offered him ballistic protection from ricochets and at the same time would shield him from the evil government agents broadcasting from the TVs he was blasting to smithereens. “What did white goods and electronics ever do to him?”
“Well,” Squeaker said, watching her cousin pump and shoot and laugh and pump and shoot and laugh. “Ma did say that he used to sit too close to the television.”
“Maybe the government agents tinkered with his brain.”
Squeaker laughed, said, “Maybe . . .”
“And he can help us how?”
“He’s the most northerly family Murphy and I’ve got in common,” Squeaker said. “Come on, let’s get our weird on.”
•
It took Levine and Woods twenty minutes to find the clearing in the woods. Susan’s trailer door was open. They entered, wary, Sig pistols drawn. Empty; nothing showing inside but two mugs on the coffee table.
Outside, Levine looked around at the faces at the windows of the other trailers.
“They probably think we’re FBI,” Woods said. “In their eyes we’re worse than cops; we’re the government, here to interfere.”
Levine crouched down in the mud, picked up a broken side mirror. “Big,” she said, examining it. “From a pick-up or SUV. Modern. A fancy vehicle. And it didn’t fall off by accident. See?”
Levine pointed at the entry point of the bullet, a large jagged hole in shiny black plastic.
She looked back toward Susan’s trailer and pointed at the ground. Woods went over to the spot, crouched and used his pen to pick up a brass object.
“Shell casing,” Woods said. “Rifle. 30–30 Winchester.”
“Short-range shot.”
“A shootout? Susan or Walker defending themselves—from who?”
“There was more than one car here,” Levine said, looking at the tracks in the gravel and mud.
“Everyone here has a car.” Woods went to the old Dodge. “This one’s Susan’s. And its gun rack in th
e back’s empty. There’s a couple of 30–30 shells in the side pocket of the door.”
“Is she registered for a firearm?”
“No one’s registered for a firearm around here.”
“Then we should talk to everyone.”
Woods looked doubtful.
Levine walked to the nearest trailer, then turned and pointed to the far one. “You start over there,” she said. “Tell them we’re here to check firearm licenses, that if they don’t comply, we’ll come back with paperwork and fifty agents. Tell them that if they tell us what went down, and who was here last night, we’ll go away in the next five minutes.”
28
Walker killed the engine and followed Squeaker out. Casey let fly with what was left in the 12-gauge, and a 1980s television set was reduced to shards of plastic and glass. He climbed out of the bathtub and eyeballed the arrivals. First the car, which seemed to impress him, and then the two of them, standing there, not twenty yards away. His eyes were drawn first to Walker, the bigger of the two, and then to Squeaker. He stared at her awhile, then tilted his hat back and whooped.
“Pipsqueak! That you?”
Squeaker smiled. “It’s me.”
“Damn, girl, as I live and breathe!” He loped over. The two of them hugged it out, then spoke some rapid-fire catch-up about however long it’d been and who’d been doing what and what life had been up to.
Walker remained silent for the couple of minutes it took. He learned that Casey was the owner and manager of the part of the junkyard that collated all the electrical appliances and white goods and broke them down to their constituent parts to then on-sell for repairs and scrap materials. What was near-on worthless became fodder for his hobby: shoot’n’ shit.
“I call her my recycler,” Casey said, hefting the sawed-off shotgun. “Good for disposing of varmints and junk all the same.”
Squeaker said, “We’re passing through here to see about Murphy.”
“Murphy?”
“Our cousin. Chuck?”
“I know who you mean. But damn, ain’t seen him in a year or more. What’s up?”
Squeaker said, “You been hearing anything about him?”
“Nothing more than you would have.” Casey eyed Walker suspiciously. “You government?”
He said it like gov-mint.
“Nope,” Walker said.
“Fooled me.”
“I need to help Murphy out,” Walker said. “Soldier to soldier. He’s got trouble headed his way, if it hasn’t caught up with him already.”
“Hmph,” Casey said, then started guffawing. “Trouble—headed Murphy’s way? Shit, man. That trouble will be damned—damned to hell! Murphy is the toughest customer any place he’s at. Devil himself couldn’t rattle Murph’s bones. Even the sun’s afraid to shine on him. Right, Squeak?”
Squeaker was silent, long enough for the smile to start to fade on Casey’s face as he watched her.
“This trouble ain’t like what’s around here,” she said to Casey. “This isn’t anything to do with what went down back home, the drugs and all. This is terrorist stuff.”
“Terrorists?”
He said it like terr-ists.
“Yep. It’s bad, Casey, real bad. And we gotta at least warn him about it.”
“Shit. Shit. Okay. Right. Let us think now.” Casey walked around, the shotgun over his shoulder as he paced, looking at the mud and detritus underfoot. “Okay. Okay. You know, I did hear that he had some help getting logs out there.”
“Out where?” Squeaker asked.
Casey gave a vague wave to the north. “Way up in the hills someplace. The forests.”
Walker looked in that direction. He’d call them mountains but supposed hills would do. Forest, rocks, fog and cloud. And height.
Walker asked, “Who helped him?”
“Yeah, right . . .” Casey paced, looked up as though he’d got it, then down again and paced some more. “Nope. Never did hear that much. Just that someone who knows someone went up there and delivered it with a truck. Full load. That’s maybe thirty trees. Call it at least a ton a tree. Had it hauled and dropped and he did the rest himself, the guy supposed. That’s why I heard about it—some crazy guy getting trees dropped off in the forest someplace the end of the road. And some roofin’ iron too. That’s right. Roofin’ iron. Shit, darn nearly forgot that. Well, gotta be to build a house, right? Ain’t no other need for so much lumber and iron.”
“Where was this?” Walker asked.
Casey thumbed in the general direction over his shoulder to the north again.
“That it?” Squeaker asked.
“’Fraid so. Sorry, Pipsqueak.”
Squeaker nodded.
“Where’d you hear it from?” Walker asked, and frowned as he found himself starting to talk like this guy. “Think.”
“General talk. You know, chatter. Nothing doing. Just in conversation. Can’t for my life remember who said it. One of them truckers, I s’pose.”
“These conversations,” Walker said, looking at Casey. “Where’d you have them?”
“Ah, um . . .” He scratched his head and looked at his hut—one of those temporary buildings sometimes used as school classrooms, but this one had sat here for decades—then at his yard, then down the empty road leading into town and then to the east. “Yeah—yeah. It was in town. That’s where. Some trucker bar, in town.”
“Trucker bar?” Walker said.
“Yeah, trucker bar. You know,” Casey said, “one of them ones on the highway, no good for nothing but gassing up nearby and drinkin’.”
“This place have a name?”
Casey scratched his head again, said, “They was talking about some crazy man in the forest . . .”
“Where?” Walker asked. “Where in town was this trucker place?”
“The only place to drink,” Casey said, leaning back on his boots and grinning with tobacco-stained teeth. “O’Halloran’s.”
29
O’Halloran’s wasn’t an Irish bar—there was nothing Irish about it, Walker saw, inside or out. It was made of cinder blocks, unpainted, the only window being the one set into the plain front door. Inside wasn’t much more decorated, the tables adding a little color with their dull red tops and the bulbs in the bar lighting the place not much beyond dark. A jukebox played classic rock. It was just on ten o’clock in the morning, yet the place was already half full with heavy drinkers. Walker liked it.
“Chester’s track is down. Mudslide. No work for none of us next two days,” Walker heard one of the patrons say as he and Squeaker made their way to a table near one of two open fires that heated the space.
“What’s the go?” Squeaker asked, her voice barely audible over the hubbub and background music.
“I’ll talk to the barman.”
There were two people behind the bar, an older guy, presumably the owner, and a young woman in a short skirt and tattooed suspenders on pale legs who was kept busy reaching up for the top shelf by the clientele.
“Drink?”
“Coke.”
Walker headed for the bar. The barman was the other side of sixty. Short and squat, arms bulging at the biceps in a T-shirt branded with an American beer. His beard was one of dedication.
“Coke,” Walker said. “And a beer.”
The barman served the drinks, both in bottles. Walker paid with a fifty, left the change on the bar and said, “If I was looking for someone, would you be the right guy to ask?”
The barman looked at the change, shrugged.
“Someone I used to serve with.” Walker nodded to the anchor on the guy’s arm, a pretty 1950s-style pin-up perched upon it. “Navy?”
“Nam. Forrestal and Leary. Five tours.”
Walker nodded. Five tours was a lot. Both ships saw plenty of action, especially the Forrestal, notorious for its 1967 fire that killed or wounded near-on 300 sailors on board.
“You in Iraq?” the barman said.
“And Afghanistan,” W
alker said. “And some other places.”
The barman smiled. “New world, right? Different wars nowadays.”
“It’s still just as hard to see the enemy,” Walker said, leaning on the bar. “Not like those before us had, all those Germans and Japanese ahead of them. Point and shoot. Or duck and cover because the Russians have hit the button.”
“Right. Who’s your friend?” He motioned to Squeaker who was approaching.
“Local guide,” Walker said, then he paused so that the barman would look at him. “I’m looking for a Charles Murphy. Known probably just as Murphy, or Murph. Maybe even Chuck. Ex-Navy. SEAL. He’s somewhere north of here. He needs my help.”
“Yeah? And why’d that be?”
“Someone out there’s going to hunt him down.”
The barman was stoic in his silence.
“I’m Murphy’s cousin,” Squeaker said. “He don’t know it yet, but he really does need our help, and fast.”
Finally, the barman said, “Sorry. Never heard of him.” He walked away to the crisps section and turned his back and busied himself with restocking the rack.
Walker took the drinks over to Squeaker.
“We’re getting attention,” Squeaker said, sipping at her bottle and giving the slightest gesture to the far wall, near the back, where a group of big guys sat by what must have been the rear exit.
“They must be wondering how an old warhorse like me got a hot young babe like you out on a date,” Walker said, sipping his beer and eyeballing the guys.
Squeaker smiled.
The bar owner came over to their table and dropped off a basket full of crisps and left without a word.
“Thanks,” Squeaker said to Walker, munching through a mouthful.
“I didn’t order them,” Walker said, seeing that the lining was a white napkin with something on it. Words, written in thick pen.
Old Pelts Road. See Dylan.
•
Menzil was in the passenger seat of the Jeep.
“This Murphy,” said the driver, one of the ex-Army guys. “He doesn’t want to be found. So, what are we gonna do?”