by David Wood
Bones said, “What’s the plan? Guy like this isn’t going to just open the door when we knock.”
“Who says we’re going to knock?”
Dane’s spine vibrated as Bones slapped him on the back. “All right, Maddock. You’ll be just like me in no time. So we going to bash the door in?”
Dane chuckled. “I was thinking I just open the door. Ex-con like this probably doesn’t bother locking it. And if it’s locked, I just take out my knife and perform surgery on the door jamb.”
Bones looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You keep using the word ‘I.’ What do you expect Tonto to do while you’re playing Lone Ranger?”
Bones liked to make jokes about his Native American heritage, seeming to enjoy the discomfort it caused for anyone within earshot, but Dane was getting used to it. “You’re going to cover the back. In fact, let’s check it out now.”
They rounded the corner of the five-story building and found a narrow dead-end alley. Rickety metal fire escape ladders rose from ten feet above the ground to the top of the building, one about every fifteen feet.
“So you want me to hang out here in the dark and pound him if he tries to leave by the back door?”
“You could just subdue him; we need him to talk, remember? Only thing is it would be good if we knew which fire escape was his.”
“Well he’s apartment 401, right? Means he’s gotta be one end or the other. The numbers on the street are going up the way we came, so I’ll bet it’s this one.” Bones approached the first ladder and easily tested a jump to reach it. Dane looked at him.
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Then you’d better hope whoever you’re breaking in on is fully dressed. Unless it’s a hot chick. Then you ought to stay a while.” Bones scratched his chin. “Better yet, tell her to wait a minute and yell for me.”
Dane shook his head. “Just keep your eyes open.”
He walked around to the front door and went inside. The building didn’t look like a total dump, but it wasn’t the kind of place with a doorman or security, either. His nostrils picked up an aroma of lemon mixed with decay, the cleaning solution obviously not managing to stem the tide.
The stairs lay dead ahead and he made his way to the fourth floor, keeping his steps light and quiet. Once there, he established that Bones had been correct and apartment 401 was on the nearer end of the building. Despite what he had said earlier, Dane knocked on the door.
He thought he heard some sort of movement, but he couldn’t be sure. The door didn’t open. He knocked again after a few seconds; then he turned the handle and eased it open.
He took a step inside and caught a glimpse of something flying through the air towards his head. His dodge meant it struck him in the ear instead of the center of his face. The momentum of the object combined with his quick move sent him sideways onto his knees.
Snapping his head up, he noticed two things: First, the object that had struck him was an unopened bottle of Budweiser. He made a mental note not to tell Bones he got taken out by what his comrade considered “redneck beer.” Second was a figure dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt halfway out an open window on the far side of the apartment.
Dane sprang to his feet and moved towards the window. He heard a high pitched scream followed by a thud and the sound of creaking metal. He poked his head out the window, ready to pull it back in quickly if he was attacked. He needn’t have worried.
Bones stood with his arms crossed and one foot on the rusted fourth floor landing of the fire escape. The other foot rested on the neck of the man in the gray sweatshirt, a man about Dane’s height whose thin neck looked tiny under Bones’ size thirteen boot.
“Yo, does he look subdued?”
Dane grinned. “Yes. Yes he does. I hope you didn’t have to exert yourself too much.”
“Nah, it was almost too easy. The dude tripped over my leg, squealed like a girl and somehow managed to jump underneath my foot. What do we do with him?”
Dane looked at the man. “Are you James Roberge?”
The man turned his neck and Bones allowed him enough movement to meet Dane’s eye. He grunted something that Dane took as a yes.
“Okay, my friend here will let you up, and we’re going to go back in your apartment and have a little talk.”
Roberge’s eyes flared with anger for a moment, but then the reality of his situation seemed to take hold. He nodded as much as he could from his current position.
“Good. Let him up,” he said to Bones. “If he tries to run for it, feel free to subdue him a little harder. Or just throw him over the rail.”
They went back inside without incident, and the trembling, wide-eyed Roberge collapsed onto a black leather couch. Dane pulled in a wooden chair from the tiny kitchen and sat with the back in front, his elbows draped over it. Bones remained standing next to the couch, practicing a stare that would have shamed Medusa. Roberge looked up and uttered his first coherent words of the encounter.
“Whaddaya want with me?”
Dane almost asked him a question, but resistance had taken form in the man’s eyes. He needed some more softening up, but Dane didn’t like the idea of Bones hurting the guy too badly. He motioned Bones over to him.
Speaking just loudly enough for Roberge to hear, he said, “This idiot’s not ready to talk. I’ll search the place. You convince him he’ll suffer less if he answers our questions. But don’t hurt him too much. Not yet.”
Bones’ grin made Dane glad he wasn’t the target of his friend’s mischief. “I know just the thing.”
Bones returned to the couch and Dane moved into the next room, the bedroom. He could hear voices from the area of the couch, but he put them out of his mind, knowing he needed to trust Bones. He didn’t know what he was looking for, just anything that might shed some light on why this guy—or at least his car—was chasing them today.
The apartment only had the bedroom, living room and kitchen plus a small bathroom. He didn’t find anything unusual in the bedroom or bathroom. Roberge was a man of few possessions, though that small number included a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum in a bedside drawer. Dane’s experience was that men with that particular gun suffered from serious inferiority complexes; it was a fine weapon, but better options existed for almost every situation.
Moving back out to the living room, Dane had almost given up on finding anything. He had to work hard to suppress his laughter when he saw what Bones was up to. The big man had removed one of Roberge’s shoes and was playing “This Little Piggy.” Roberge looked confused and a little annoyed.
“What the hell do you think you’re…”
His question dissolved into a shriek of pain when Bones reached “Wee! Wee! Wee! All the way home.” With a deft twist, he snapped Roberge’s smallest toe.
Bones slapped the man across the face. “Shut up!”
Roberge didn’ t quite manage to silence his pained whimper, but he quieted down.
“You’ve got nine more toes and ten fingers, and I’ve got all the time in the world,” Bones said.
Sensing Roberge would crack soon, Dane hurried into the kitchen, his last hope for finding any clues. He tore through several stacks of papers and magazines and almost missed a small pamphlet tucked between a newspaper and a bill.
The pamphlet was titled “The Republic Almanac.” This stirred a memory, and Dane leafed through it. By page three, he knew that this was the clue he was looking for. He tucked it into his shirt and went back out to the living room.
Bones started back into the nursery rhyme and Roberge caved the moment the big Indian wiggled the broken toe. Bones turned and grinned at Dane.
“I just introduced our new friend here to an ancient Native American torture technique. He says he’ll tell us whatever we want to know.”
Dane decided not to waste time beating around the bush.
“Who hired you to try to kill us earlier today?”
Roberge’s eyes darted up and to the left, a sure sign he
was preparing to lie. Before he could open his mouth, Dane said, “Don’t bother lying. We know your car was there. If you say it wasn’t you, we’ll teach you “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Maddock was improvising, but whatever image Roberge conjured up in his mind clearly terrified him.
“Christ, not that,” the man pleaded. “Look, I don’t know who hired me. A guy me and Carl knew in the joint arranged it. He said we just needed to provide backup for a little pressure with the cars. We were supposed to meet up with two guys who wanted your attention and just funnel you down to the river. Wasn’t supposed to be any shooting.”
“And you figured these guys would get us down by the river and, what, just talk to us?”
Roberge remained silent.
“Never mind, what’s the name of this guy you knew in prison?”
Roberge shook his head with vigor. “No way. My life is worth zip if I tell you that name. Your friend can break all my toes for all I care. At least I won’t be dead.”
Bones leaned over the frightened man. “That can be arranged.”
Dane stood up. “Forget about it. Let’s just go.”
Both Bones and Roberge looked surprised. Dane met Bones’ eye. “Trust me.”
Bones looked at Roberge and shrugged. “Have a nice life. Don’t try to kill me again, though. It puts me in a bad mood.” Before Roberge could reply, Bones struck him a hard right cross above his the left ear and the man went limp.
Bones saw Dane’s disapproving stare and shrugged. “You rather I choked him out? Either way, I don’t want him calling the cops on us.”
“A guy with his background doesn’t call the cops,” Dane argued.
“I don’t care. I’m not taking any chances. Besides, it felt good to cold-cock that jerk.”
Dane couldn’t argue. He took a moment to steal the cord from Roberge’s phone as an added precaution, and then the two of them made their way down the stairs.
Back on the street, Bones grabbed Dane’s shoulder. “You gonna tell me why we just walked out of there?”
Dane said, “In a minute. First we need to find a pay phone.”
“What for?”
“To call the police and report that James Roberge was seen leaving the zoo after the shootout this morning.”
“I saw one a block away when we came in. But an anonymous tip? Do those even work?”
“I don’t know. It’s just one of several things that could play out.”
“What are the others?”
“Another option is to hang out where we can see the building and follow Roberge when he comes out. One of us will have to go get the car while the other one watches, then we’ll have to wait. It could be a while. It’ll be a few minutes before he’s conscious again, and probably longer before he’s thinking clearly. The police may or may not come to talk to him, but if he leaves in the next couple hours, we’ll follow him and see if he leads us anywhere interesting.”
They reached the phone and Dane made the call, staying on for less than a minute but giving several details including Roberge’s license plate number. When he hung up, Bones frowned. “I dunno, hanging around waiting to follow him doesn’t seem like much of a plan.”
“There’s one more thing. The reason I told you we could leave when we did is that I found something in the kitchen. Other than dirty dishes and moldy bread that is.”
Bones’ face lit up. “Yeah?”
Dane took out the pamphlet. “‘The Republic Almanac.’ Does anything about that sound familiar?”
“Maybe.” Bones was clearly on the same page as Dane. “The word ‘Republic’ isn’t that uncommon, though. It doesn’t have to be the same guys.”
Bones was referring to a group called the Sons of the Republic, a group he and Dane had encountered a couple of months earlier. They had some pretty crazy ideas about the country and its history, and hadn’t been afraid to shoot at Dane and Bones when the two had interfered with the group’s plans. All the members of the group they’d seen in Boston had wound up dead, and Dane had assumed that would be the last they heard of them. This pamphlet suggested otherwise. He handed it to Bones.
“Take a look on page three. Also page six. See anything else that rings a bell.”
Bones face tightened as he looked. “It’s them. That crossed circle symbol is the same one we saw in Boston. Seems like every time we saw it we had just finished getting attacked or were about to be attacked.”
“Exactly.”
Bones’ normal wry expression returned. “Well at least we know it’s them. We have someone we can go after.”
“Not someone, exactly, but we do have an address. It’s right here in Philadelphia.”
“Yep. There’s something else here that seems important, but I don’t understand it. This phrase here on the second to last page.”
Dane looked over his shoulder. “Huh. You mean the last line of the article, in bold and in a larger font?”
“Yep.”
Dane couldn’t figure out what it meant, either. The line had only seven words.
Help rediscover the most basic state right.
CHAPTER FOUR
Galen O’Meara swallowed his second Percocet of the day. The leg still hurt him, but at least he could walk without crutches. He’d been injured when a section of ceiling collapsed while trying to retrieve the bodies of two fallen comrades beneath the streets of Boston. He shook his head at the memory.
His organization, the Sons of the Republic, traced its roots all the way back to the eighteenth century. Always it had sought to protect America from the kind of internal weakness the founders warned against. In Boston, they’d been mere feet away from obtaining the Prophecy of George Washington, which foretold a final struggle to restore the United States to the grand vision of the founders. Only the interference of Maddock and Bonebrake had prevented it.
The Sons had lost several people in Boston, including his brother, Sean O’Meara, and his friend Jillian Andrews. They’d tried and failed to reach the chamber where their comrades had presumably been killed. Now he was on convalescent leave from the Boston police force, and recent discoveries had led him to spend most of it here in Philadelphia.
Graham Mason stood in front of him, raising his voice and gesturing with his right hand. The man was descended from George Mason himself, the father of the second amendment. While the original Mason had possessed a healthy dose of reason to go with his passion, Graham had inherited mostly the latter. Mason had organized the recent assault attempt on Maddock and Bonebrake.
“It would have worked fine, O’Meara, if they hadn’t set that balloon loose. Who could have predicted a stunt that crazy? By the time we realized it was a diversion, they were gone.”
O’Meara exhaled. “Graham, what the hell possessed you to attack them in the first place? Before yesterday, they thought we were some fringe group they’d never hear about again. Now they’re both pissed and perhaps motivated to find us.”
Mason’s face reddened. “They took several of us out in Boston. No one crosses the Sons of the Republic. When we found out they were coming here, we knew God was smiling on us.”
O’Meara suppressed the urge to roll his eyes at the clichéd pronouncement and instead limped around the front of the desk until he stared directly into Mason’s round face. He didn’t soften his tone.
“Give me a break. They killed my brother. If anyone has a reason for revenge, it’s me, and you don’t see me executing a hastily-planned and failed attempt at pointless violence. The founders prized reason, not impetuosity.”
He quickly changed the subject, not quite ready to head where he knew the conversation had to end. “What about Franklin’s Legacy?”
Mason looked at the floor. “Nothing new. All we have is the clue we’ve had for almost two hundred years: ‘Seek the creator of the five hundred.’”
“Did we even find out when this phrase first came to the Sons’ attention?”
“No. For sure, we knew it before the Civil War. But it
’s been passed down by word of mouth, and our research has come up dry.”
O’Meara paced to the left, still dragging the right leg. “Let’s face it, by the end Franklin didn’t trust anyone. Even back then, the country thrived in spite of, not because of, specific individuals. But maybe your lack of success won’t matter. I have it on good authority that we’ve made real progress on the other search. Cole will be here later today.”
“That’s great to hear.”
O’Meara took a deep breath. “So about Maddock and Bonebrake. You say they questioned Roberge and then let him go. He was just hired muscle, so there was nothing to find. Right?”
Mason paused and O’Meara raised his voice again. “Right?”
“Well. . .I gave him a pamphlet.”
“A pamphlet? What for?”
“I was talking to him about the state of the country and he really seemed to agree about how bad things are. He’d be a good guy to have on our side.”
O’Meara pressed his hands to his temples. “Mason, he’s an ex-con with multiple prison sentences behind him. Of course he hates the government. But giving out a pamphlet to someone who sounds sympathetic is not the problem. The problem is giving out a pamphlet to someone who you’ve just hired to kill two of the small number of individuals who know about us and what lengths we’re willing to go to. Someone who has no idea of the sensitivity of it. That puts us all at risk.”
“But there’s nothing illegal or even that unusual on the pamphlet.”
“It has the warehouse address. And it has the symbol. If they found it, you think Maddock and Bonebrake won’t follow up on those clues?”
“Maybe they didn’t find it,” Mason said.
“Think about it. They went after Roberge because they wanted information. They wouldn’t have left unless they found something.”
Mason put his palms up in front of him. “Okay, okay, I screwed up. I’m sorry. What more can I say?”