Had he found the grassy knoll shooter?
He ran through the possibilities, the pain in his knees and elbows forgotten, his own predicament an afterthought.
Yes. The shooter had tried to escape down the tunnels—down to the Trinity. But he’d never made it. The shooter had probably come up against that same gate, had become lost, just as Don had, had wandered down the wrong fork, had fallen. But he hadn’t been caught halfway through the fall. He had died of his injuries. And so the shooter had lain here, all this time, in this abandoned, dry well under the streets of Dallas. Waiting, like the mummy of King Tut.
Waiting for me.
A great heaving sob convulsed Don’s lungs. He couldn’t help it. The tears came. The sobs became nausea. He fell onto one elbow and spat acid and cocoa onto the floor. He wiped his face and took a deep breath.
He scootched closer to the figure, the iPad raised for light. One of the corpse’s elbows was cocked outward at an odd angle. The corpse held something under its arm. Don reached out a trembling hand. A grey plastic cylinder. His fingers closed on the end of it and he pulled.
The corpse leapt at him, the head falling forward as if to bite Don’s neck. Don recoiled with a cry. The corpse fell still. An odor of dust rose. Not the chalk dust of homeroom, no, not a smell of youth, but of eternity—a smell of decay beyond rot. The ashes left when the fire of life has guttered.
The cylinder hung on a strap around the corpse’s neck. That is why it had leapt. That’s all. Don gathered his courage. He pulled the strap up, gently, guiding it over the head. The strap brushed the skull and wiped a swath of black hair away, revealing parietal bone, like the Harper fragment that young Billy had found in the grass. Don raised the corpse’s chicken-bone arm and removed the cylinder, then scrabbled away as quickly as he could.
He unscrewed it and peered inside. The cylinder contained documents. He pulled them out. A map of the plaza, marked with several excellent sniper locations. Don counted seven, including the storm drain on Elm. Sites of actual shooters, or prospective firing places?
The second sheet was written in code. Don couldn’t decipher it, but surely someone could. He found a bus station locker key, a claim ticket from a parking lot stamped 211163. A photo of Oswald’s house in Oak Cliff and the scrawled address on the back: 231 W. Jefferson. But that wasn’t Oswald’s address, no. That was the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested.
It was absurd and wonderful and impossible, but Don felt as if the Lost Library of Alexandria had fallen into his lap. The Rosetta Stone, the—hell, the everything!
He pushed the corpse back upright with the end of the cylinder and stared into the eye sockets of Kennedy’s killer. He had been hunting this man for fifty years, had stood on that manhole cover—on the very entrance to the killer’s tomb—for thirty.
“I see you,” Don whispered. “I know what you did. And I see you.”
The corpse looked sad, somehow, despite the grin.
On the iPad in Don’s lap, the funeral was playing again. John-John stepped forward and saluted his daddy’s passing coffin. Rage welled up in Don. His fist shot out and he punched the corpse in the jaw, hard enough to spin its head so it cracked against the wall, knocking the damn grin off its face. It was a blow struck for the doomed little boy in the picture.
He shook his head, pulling himself together.
Am I doomed too?
The thought blared in Don’s head now. He hadn’t thought things through. The body didn’t lay sprawled directly under the hole above. The man hadn’t died immediately. He’d lived. He’d died of hunger or thirst or—
Don saw and understood.
With the head of the corpse twisted to one side, he could see that part of the back of the head was missing. Not parietal bone. Lower down. Occipital bone. And the wall behind the corpse was stained black.
Don’s eyes trailed to the Fireball. The right index finger still lay on the trigger.
The man had put a bullet in his mouth. Had hunger driven him to it? Or thirst?
He couldn’t take the guilt, Don decided, with a stab of satisfaction.
But the point remained. The man had been trapped here, which meant Don was trapped, too. He stood and did three passes around the entire perimeter. No way out. The iPad played softly, as Jackie lit the eternal flame.
The iPad!
The damn thing had the Internet in it! He could call for help. Don snatched the thing up, turned off the media player, and searched for the web browser, feeling a surge of hope.
A small grey box appeared on screen:
You Have 5% Battery Power Remaining
Don’s heart stopped. Why had he let the thing run? Oh, God. He’d be in the dark soon. In the dark with this corpse. He had to move fast or he’d die and… and no one would ever know what had happened to him. And worse, they’d never know what he’d found. The documents, the body, the gun—all of it.
Don quickly arranged the pages on the floor, side by side, and took pictures of them with the iPad’s camera. He took pictures of the gun, the cylinder, the uniform of the corpse, the bus station key, the photo. He found a white card in the man’s front pocket. A business card from Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. With a phone number on the back.
He had to get these pictures out. He stood, turning the iPad in the air, searching. The screen read NO SIGNAL in one corner. He stood directly under the grate where he’d fallen, arms outstretched. Miraculously, NO SIGNAL disappeared, replaced by a little half-circle.
He could get through.
But… he’d never sent an email on this thing before. He didn’t know how. How could he get his pictures to the world? Unless—
Yeah. Yeah!
His daughter had shown him the device’s features on Christmas morning. She had called him. Just like a real phone call. What was it? On the Skype? The FaceTime? He had just found the button for the app when the tiny grey box appeared again.
You Have 2% Battery Power Remaining
Hurry. Hurry.
He couldn’t remember his daughter’s number at first. He was too panicky. He considered 9-1-1. But he must have hit something, because the thing beeped and started ringing.
“Hello?” came a tiny voice, echoing. It was Amy.
“Honey! I need to tell you—”
“Oh, hey, Dad,” she said, lackadaisically. “It’s not a good time. I’ve got Mom on the line and—”
“Listen to me! It’s an emergency! I need help!”
She sighed. “Okay! Okay! Two seconds.” Something clicked.
“Hello? Hello?” Don called. Had he lost her? Had the signal gone dead?
Amy’s voice returned. “Okay. What’s the emergency?”
“I’m trapped in a storm drain. I went down the storm drain at Dealey and I’m trapped down here!”
“You’re what? You’ve got to speak up. It sounds like you’re down a well.”
“I am down a well!”
“Bring the microphone closer.”
“I can’t. I’ll lose the signal.”
“Let me try to hang up and call you back.”
“No. No!”
Another long silence.
“Amy, are you there?”
“Sorry. Mikaya was having a fit.”
“Listen closely. I’m trapped in—”
The grey box returned.
You Have 1% Battery Power Remaining
This was it. He had to make a choice, either to try and explain his predicament and secure rescue or to send the photos out. Now, before he ran out of power.
His own life, or the truth about JFK.
It wasn’t much of a choice. Hell, he’d made his choice fifty years ago.
“Amy, I need to send an email.”
“God, Dad.”
“Walk me through it.”
She sighed. A long-suffering shoot-me-now sigh. “Open your mail app.”
“Which is that?”
“You see on the main screen? The box with the little envelope?”
“Got it. Now what?”
“Look on the right. It’s a box with a little pencil.”
“I just see a Happy Christmas message from you.”
“That’s the mail I sent on Christmas,” she said, exasperated.
“How do I send you something?’
“You see an arrow?”
“No. Wait. Yeah. Sorry. I can’t see the screen too good.”
“Two seconds. Mikaya! Put that down! You want to say hi to Grampy?”
“I can’t, honey. Just… just kiss her for me. ’Kay?”
“’Kay. Did you hit the arrow?”
“I hit the box with the pencil.”
“It’s easier to send to me if you just hit the arrow. Hit cancel.”
“Where’s cancel?”
“On the left.”
“Oh. Now I just see Happy Christmas again.”
“Dad, I’m cooking lunch. Can we—”
“I got it. I got the arrow.”
“Do you see ‘reply’?”
“Yeah! Do I hit it?”
“Hit ‘reply.’”
“I hit it. Now what?”
“Type your mail.”
“I don’t have time to type. I need to send pictures!”
“What are you sending me?”
“Just tell me.”
“I don’t have time for joke pictures today.”
“Amelia Petterman, you do not hang up on me!”
“Hold your finger on the screen.”
“I’m holding. I see it. Insert photo?”
“Now choose your library.”
“And choose photo?”
“Yes!”
“Hold up. I’m doing it.” Don attached the photos one by one. “Now hit send?”
“Now hit send.”
Don touched the button. The mail disappeared. “How do I know it went out?”
“You’ll hear a whoosh.”
“There’s no whoosh!”
“What? You’re breaking up.”
“There’s no whoosh!”
“I can’t hear you. It’s gone really bad.”
Don understood. The pictures were going out—trying to—and he didn’t have enough signal for the mail and the call both.
“I love you, honey.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. What’s going on?”
Don touched a button and ended the call. Amy vanished with a click. He stood with arms outstretched, holding his message high, to the distant glow of a dying flashlight, waiting, praying…
The screen went dark. The power gone.
But not before he heard…
… a whoosh.
Don Petterman sank to his knees, tears running down his cheeks.
He had done it.
He fell back to sit on the cold stone. He crossed his legs, folding his hands in his lap. Amy would understand what he’d sent. God knows he’d trained her in JFK lore. If no one ever rescued him… she’d be the one to spread the photos to the world. And… and she’d be rich. She’d give interviews, go on talk shows. Her dad had set her up for life, like a dad should. Enough to buy a hundred bikes for Mikaya, in every color. And maybe Amy would figure out where he was. Maybe they’d find his truck, his tracks. Maybe he’d be rescued. Maybe it would take a day or two. Or maybe no one would ever come.
What did that matter?
He’d done what he’d been put on Earth to do.
And that was everything.
“Ask not,” he whispered, wiping away a tear. He didn’t have the voice to quote the rest.
He felt young, here at the end—if it was the end. Young and invincible. Immortal. And maybe he would be immortal, now. His name in the history books. Don Petterman, who gave the world The Answer at last. Available in hardcover from Bantam Books. Twenty-nine ninety-nine plus tax.
And he had found The Answer. The final, conclusive proof. There was no more prospecting now. No more theorizing. No more futile howling at the moon.
It was… over.
All of it. The arguments, the chat groups, the conferences, the questions, the infighting, the pissing contests, the territory squabbles, the kooks, the frauds, the theories, the wondering…
Over.
He scooted over and sat against the wall, next to the man so many had searched so long to find. His great white whale. His mirage in the desert. The son of a bitch who had ended Camelot. The head of the corpse hung limply, staring at him. He turned its eyes away and patted its knee.
“From here on out it’s you and me, asshole. Just like it’s always been.”
Don smiled, closed his eyes, and waited to be found.
“Just you and me.”
They waited together, the killer and the conspiracy nut. They waited side by side for a long time. Peacefully, patiently. Snug as two bugs. There was no hurry. The work had concluded for both. All mysteries had been resolved, all riddles answered, all enigmas laid to rest. No. Put to bed. Put to bed at last. Below the streets of Dallas, down in the darkness…
… under the grassy knoll.
About the Conspiracy Theory:The JFK Assassination
Condensing the vast JFK Assassination conspiracy literature down to a few short paragraphs is as impossible as summarizing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion in the space of a haiku. No single event in western history has been so minutely scrutinized or endlessly magnified as the murder by gunshot of the thirty-sixth U.S. president, except perhaps the crucifixion of Christ.
Here are the facts that almost everyone agrees on. (I say “almost” because there’s probably someone out there who has written a thousand-page treatise to prove that John Kennedy never existed, is still alive, or that his murder was a mass hallucination sparked by fluorine or chem trails. The first thing you learn studying JFK is: There Is Always Some Guy.)
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy and his wife Jackie traveled through Dallas, Texas, in an open motorcade. When the presidential limousine reached Dealey Plaza [SOMETHING HAPPENED!] and the president was declared dead at Parkland Hospital roughly a half hour later.
That’s pretty much all that you can say everyone agrees on.
So what happened?
Here’s where it gets dicey. The official investigation—known as the Warren Commission—declared that three shots were fired, that one missed, and that the two remaining bullets produced all the reported injuries. One bullet, known as the “magic bullet” in the literature, was hypothesized to have passed through Kennedy and to have injured Governor John Connelly, who was also riding in the car. All bullets were said to have been fired from the window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, a sniper position above and behind, by former marine Lee Harvey Oswald, aged twenty-four. Oswald died two days after Kennedy, shot in the stomach by nightclub owner Jack Ruby who, at his own trial, claimed to have been distraught over Kennedy’s death.
In the fifty years since, every assertion of the official report has been questioned, every piece of evidence impeached, every witness interview dissected and re-dissected, and every fact re-contextualized. Like an endless game of Clue, the Dealey Plaza murder has been shuffled and reshuffled to produce endless alternate answers to the same basic mystery, and while most writers have been motivated by the search for truth, many have used the killing as the springboard to flights of fancy that can only be described as ludicrous. They will tell you that Kennedy was killed by his wife, as revenge for infidelity. Or that his body was snatched at Bethesda Hospital and surgically altered to distort the physical evidence. You might be cornered at the office Christmas party and told earnestly—if with a slight slur of speech—that JFK’s head intersected a microscopic black hole left over from the formation of the cosmos.
There Is Always Some Guy.
I’m a Texan myself, born in Dallas and raised on dinner-table Kennedy suppositions. I spent many years studying the assassination literature, and I found it fascinating. It’s like reading the greatest Agatha Christie m
ystery with the last page torn out. In truth, there’s much in the official record that is puzzling, potentially incriminating, and downright odd. I am completely sympathetic to anyone whose motive is the pursuit of truth.
I was delighted to be invited by David Gatewood to participate in this collection, and I knew immediately that I wanted to take on the JFK conspiracy. In “Under the Grassy Knoll,” I try to answer the question “What would it take?” What discovery would put the mystery to rest at this point? While researching in Dealey Plaza, I met a charming older man who sold assassination DVDs on the grassy knoll. I decided to tell his story and to see if someone so unassuming could ever be the hero who brought us the Final Truth.
I don’t know if he could—if anyone could at this point. No discovery, however definitive, would put the JFK assassination to bed. Even if some intrepid Don Petterman found the corpse of the real shooter—the murder weapon still in hand and a bag of incriminating documents slung over his shoulder—the conspiracy world would probably just absorb that discovery and carry on. Not just to make money, I think, but to keep the mystery alive. How disappointing would it be to find that missing last page with its banal answer about Colonel Mustard gripping a candlestick? Discovering a Final Truth would stop the JFK game, which fascinates armchair sleuths the world over, so I think it will continue regardless of any future discovery. We will remain endlessly, endlessly shuffling the deck. Forever.
There Is Always Some Guy.
Richard Gleaves is author of the epic Jason Crane series of Sleepy Hollow novels: Rise Headless and Ride and Bridge of Bones. His third novel, General of the Dead, debuts in October 2015. You can visit his Amazon page here.
The Long Slow Burn
by Ernie Lindsey
Two days ago, he’d been Alexander Voyanovich, a bond trader from Moscow. Yesterday he’d strolled the streets of London as Leaky Steve, a motorcycle mechanic from Dallas with a limp and a stutter that got hung on the letter D, so he was more from D-D-D-Dallas. And now, today, on the transatlantic flight back to New York, he was simply Bo Sheppard, the man he’d always been.
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 5