Indefensible

by Lee Goodman

  Tonight is different. Now the darkness is an unbounded landscape for the anxiety and sorrow at play in my head. The crimes have mostly resolved themselves, but I don’t like all the answers. Scud Illman and Seth Coen buried Zander Phippin, of course: Zander’s blood in Seth’s boat gives us proof. But with Seth and Scud both dead, we have no evidence that they were the ones who tortured and killed him, and no leads to whomever else might have done it. As for the other crimes, I thought Upton was our snitch, and I thought he killed Scud. But now there’s Maxy. He is the key. His prints in Scud’s car tie it all together. Maxy is no doubt Maxfield Parrish of the mysterious calls Scud made on Kendall’s cell phone. Maxy, who has had a decade to work his contacts and build his organization. A decade to whack anyone who got in his way. I’m sure Maxy was the go-between for the hit on Zander. The most significant thing about Maxy is that ten years ago, back before he disappeared, he was undercover for the troopers. He knows who’s who; he knows who’s dirty. He worked both sides. Who better than Maxy to recruit a snitch from within the troopers? Maxy is the key. With Scud and Seth dead, he’s the last thread for us to bring the whole thing down. We need to find him.

  I’m wide awake. Falling back to sleep is out of the question, so I get up and grope for a sleeping bag, get a beer from the cooler, and slip outside as quietly as possible. It’s very dark, but I find my way to the dock and walk haltingly out to the end, feeling along the edge with one foot so I don’t get disoriented and walk right off into the lake. I settle into my Adirondack chair, arrange the sleeping bag over me, open my beer, and surrender to the sorrows, regrets, and self-recriminations dished out by my unleashed angst.

  It is late Saturday night. Just yesterday I searched Kenny’s apartment, though nobody knows I was there. Just yesterday I found Colin’s picture on the exploited-child database. Just yesterday Dorsey told me they found traces of Zander Phippin in Seth Coen’s boat. Just yesterday he told me that the new suspect in Scud Illman’s murder is a ghost named Maxy; yesterday Chip told me that a professional killer, whose specialty is making high-profile deaths look accidental, wants to kill me. Just yesterday Chip told me I was never a suspect in Scud’s death.

  It is quiet on the lake but not silent. I hear occasional watery plinks when fish surface or bugs submerge. An owl hoots, but it is far away, and the sound has only now separated itself from all the subliminal things you hear without hearing. A deer or a skunk or a raccoon moves through leaves over near the driveway.

  My Volvo is spending its weekend in a garage at a rural retreat a hundred miles from here, which, the Bureau believes, is just the sort of place the killer likes. An agent in sunglasses, a guy my size and hair color, and accompanied by an unmarked escort, drove the Volvo there directly from the FBI building. I last spoke with Chip at about four this afternoon; the killer hadn’t struck yet, they hadn’t found the transponder, and the guy, Spawner, who planted the device, seems to have vanished.

  Something huge splashes across the lake.

  The Bureau loaned me a car. It has tinted windows with reinforced everything. I drove it out the gate of the FBI garage and straight to the lake. I spent last night here alone, then this morning, Kendall and Kaylee picked Lizzy up in Turner and drove up to spend the day.

  The girls did great. Kendall and I did okay. Our relationship has gone, in quick order, from that of wary opposing counsels, to attorney and client, and now to two guys whose daughters are friends. The haughty Kendall, whose sanctimony is reassuring when discussing my legal woes, is pretty irksome as a social companion. Kendall remains, alas, Kendall. I like him better than I did before, but I still can’t say I enjoy his company outside the office. He adores his daughter, Kaylee, though, and is obviously enchanted with Lizzy for befriending her. So long as Kendall and I focused on the girls today, we got along fine.

  Kendall and Kaylee were planning to leave after dinner, but the girls were writing an adventure story. Lizzy would feed ideas to Kaylee, who’d add a twist of her own, and Lizzy would write it down.

  Maybe the sisters entered the dragon’s cave, Lizzy suggested.

  Yes, Kaylee yells. They went into the cave, and there were mushrooms everywhere.

  Edible mushrooms?

  No! Poisonous mushrooms. You die from just even touching them.

  So Lizzy wrote: Hand in hand, the sisters tiptoed into the cave where Goreyclaw the dragon lovingly dusted off the skulls of everyone who ever brushed against the beautiful turquoise caps of his deadly mushrooms.

  Perfect, Kaylee said, and she tipped over sideways, laughing.

  Kaylee didn’t want to leave. Lizzy suggested Kendall and Kaylee stay in Flora’s cabin for the night. It was agreed. I set them up with bedding.

  Thinking of Kendall and Kaylee reminds me of Platypus, for some reason: how bereaved he is for his granddaughter. If Dorsey’s people find any trace of Brittany in Seth Coen’s boat, I’d like to tell Platty myself. Give it the personal touch. If Scud was pimping his own stepson for kiddie porn, and if he also shot pics of Brittany, that makes him a pretty compelling suspect in Brittany’s disappearance. I think of Mrs. Illman’s answer when I asked if she killed Scud: I wish I had. Right now that’s how I feel, too.

  I wonder if the Bureau has sprung their trap on my would-be assassin.

  The animal in the leaves is moving across the gravel of the driveway.

  Criminals are such assholes. I’m thinking about whoever hired someone to try and kill me. Sheer stupidity. I remember Platty telling me, Nobody’s going to mess with you, federal agent. Don’t none of us need that kind of grief.

  How come someone is willing to take that on?

  What was it Spawner said in that transcript? Gotta assume Scud spilled everything . . . Uptown ain’t running it . . . Davis is the one, Nick Davis . . .

  And later:

  . . . blow his lawyer ass away . . .

  It sounded like they were talking about the possibility of applying pressure to Upton, but since he wasn’t running the case, and he never played ball anyway, he was an unlikely prospect.

  It’s chilly. I pull the sleeping bag tighter. The woods are getting noisier. This happens; the rustling sounds of my walking from the cabin out to the dock suspended all dramas of nature playing out around the cabin. The predators froze in place; unsuspecting prey got a stay. But the tiny dramas have resumed. I hear things.

  . . . he does good work . . .

  . . . saved your ass ten years . . .

  . . . okay, but then he goes all Boy Scout . . .

  Wait. This doesn’t sound like it’s about me. It doesn’t make sense.

  . . . keep the rest of the cats in the fucking bag . . .

  They’re not worried about what I know.

  . . . assume Scud spilled everything . . .

  They don’t care what Scud spilled to me; those cats are out. The concern is what someone might know that hasn’t yet come out.

  . . . he does good work . . .

  They’re worried about what Scud spilled to someone else.

  . . . saved your ass ten years . . .

  The only other person Scud might have spilled to.

  . . . he does good work . . .

  The person who, when Scud got whacked, was left with all this inside information and no client to be loyal to.

  . . . he goes all Boy Scout . . .

  Kendall Vance.

  It makes sense. Scud’s death has left an unknown. Whether it’s accurate or not, some of the players fear that Scud got overly talkative, and now Kendall, with no client to protect and too much information in his head, creates an unacceptable hazard.

  . . . blow his lawyer ass away . . .

  Kendall is the target.

  . . . transponded him, is all I had to do . . .

  And Kendall’s car is parked a few hundred feet away, beside the cabin where Lizzy is sound asleep.

  I might not have figured this out so quickly another time. But here I sit in the blackness of night, no moon, no city lights.
It is the blackest of nights, and the absence of anything to see has left my mind free. The blackness of night may also make my hearing more acute, and what I hear, I realize, doesn’t fit in. The noises—crunching gravel, crackling leaves—don’t sound quite right. There is no deer. No raccoon. The footsteps continue, suspending the tiny dramas. Everything is on alert. Someone is walking down my driveway.

  Ridiculous, I think. I’m getting paranoid.

  Then I hear, ever so faintly, a throat being cleared. Or did I imagine it?

  My breathing becomes jagged. I try to hold my breath to listen.

  More footsteps.

  Someone is approaching, there’s no question. I almost moan aloud. I am paralyzed. This is terror.

  The footsteps keep coming.

  There are two cabins, Flora’s and mine. The driveway is between them. Flora’s is less visible, but maybe he’ll see it and choose that one. Lizzy will escape. Kendall and Kaylee will die, but Lizzy will escape.

  Kaylee will die.

  Dr. Wallis would like that.

  Kaylee: How happily she laughed this evening, working on the story with Lizzy. We all laughed.

  I overcome my paralysis. I am on hands and knees, feeling along the edge of the dock toward shore.

  I reach the shore. The grass is wet, but I stay on all fours and crawl toward the cars. Certainly by now he’s heard the thunder of my breathing, and any moment he’ll walk up and put a bullet in my head. I go down on my stomach in the grass and try to get control. I feel cold from the dew in my shirt.

  I lie still. My breathing slows. Lifting my head from the grass, a tiny window opens in the blackness. It is bluish, whitish, a light that spreads out to reveal a man. The light is his GPS screen, I realize. He’s checking to see that he has traced the electronic blip to its source. Kendall’s car. The light goes off, and the darkness is blacker than before.

  In my cabin, in my briefcase, there is a gun. My Glock service handgun. If the assassin goes first toward Flora’s, I can crawl inside and get it. I’ve hardly ever fired the thing. It isn’t loaded, but there’s a clip in the briefcase. I think of trying to do all this: getting to the cabin, finding the briefcase, loading the gun. Aiming. Shooting. It’s too much. Impossible.

  The man moves. It sounds as though he has stopped a few feet in front of Kendall’s car. I hear him set something down in the gravel. He is rummaging. Then I see another light, this time a red beam. It plays across the lawn and out along the dock into the woods. It finds my cabin. It fails to find Flora’s cabin, which is hidden in the trees from where he stands. If the man were standing a few feet one way or the other, it would have found me, and I’d be dead, but it leaves me flattened into the grass between the alleys of its thin red glow.

  There are two cars: Kendall’s car, which, with its hidden transponder, has lured this man to us; and to the left, “my” car. The Bureau’s. The assassin is doing something, preparing something, just in front of Kendall’s car. I rise up on all fours and crawl until I’m hidden behind my car, then I move alongside it so I’ll be shielded as I head toward the cabin. But there, on the far side of my car, I stop. There is something. Blackness within blackness. It blocks my path. Another car. The killer’s? Probably. But he walked down the driveway; I heard him. An accomplice? Maybe. Wherever it came from, it is one obstacle too many.

  The man clears his throat. “Blow them fucking up,” he whispers. He laughs. Putting my head to the ground, looking under the car, I see the glow of a lamp he’s using to illuminate his work.

  Now he’s moving. I press myself into the grass alongside this mystery car. He walks a few steps and stops where, if he looked, he would see me. If I had hidden in a crouch instead of flat on the grass, I could lunge from here. My breathing is so ragged, it will give me away, so I’m holding my breath, but I can’t hold it long. If I have to gasp, I’m done for, so I might as well try a lunge, though I’ll probably be dead before I make it to my feet. He’s a trained killer; I’m an administrator.

  No. I’m a father. I’m a father. I’m a father. I feel this idea spread through me. It is a drug. It settles the clamp on my throat and the tension in my chest, so I can take a silent breath, and I feel the blessed air feed muscles in my back and legs and arms. I’m a father, and this man will hurt my Lizzy if I let him. I am electric. I will spring.

  But he steps away before I move. In my ears, I hear the pounding of my heart, and with him farther away, the swishing of his steps on the grass. I get a huge intake of breath, and all my muscles quiver with expectancy.

  He walks toward my cabin. Toward Lizzy. I have to move now. I charge around the back of the mystery car, full speed, rage coming up from my throat in a scream; a scream to wake Lizzy so maybe she’ll escape even though I will die. A scream to wake Kendall—Kendall the warrior—so he can come out and slay my slayer. It is a scream of death, of predator and prey, of fury and sorrow. It is me. It is instinct.

  I catch him in the open. I’m aware of something wrong, an anomaly, but I catch him, taking him down from behind; taking him down as he’s turning toward my scream. In a rage unhinged, I go all at once for eyes and throat and mouth and ears. The intruder doesn’t fight. I don’t give up my grasp on him.

  Now, in brilliant light, I can see him: the man I sit astride. One eye is opened and unmoving, the other is a pool of slime and blood. His hair is dark and short. His neck is held in my hands, head twisted around to lie cheek down on the grass. My hands are red and shiny. And the anomaly I felt—the sense of something wrong—as I slammed into this man: It is the intruder’s partner, and he stands above us, his mouth twisted in rage. I see his foot come at me in a pendulum arc, ending its travel where it meets my face. I roll backward and then I’m sitting in the grass. For a moment I curiously eye the white light shining at me from the direction of the mystery car. The man who kicked me is silhouetted in the beam. He holds a gun at me. I hear the shot. But it is he who falls. He sinks to his knees and tips forward, lying across my lap.

  And now I lie down, too.

  CHAPTER 48

  The doctor removes the gauze from my unaffected eye. I had heard that there were flowers in my hospital room, but geez, there are really flowers. Lizzy sits beside the bed reading.

  “Whatcha reading, Liz?”

  “Mansfield Park.”

  “Haven’t you read that already?”

  “Only about eighteen times, Daddy.”

  “Why—”

  “It’s comforting,” she says in her irritated voice.

  She reads. I stare at the ceiling with one eye.

  I say, “So, I’ve been out of it for a couple of days.”

  “Duh.”

  “. . . but have you gone to school at all this week?”

  “I’m a traumatized child, Daddy. I don’t go to school.”

  “Oh. Who’s been here, Liz?”

  “I already told you. If I tell you again, you’ll just forget again.”

  “No. I’m clearer now.”

  “Yeah, right. Mom has been here a lot. A real lot. Captain Dorsey came once, and Chip came, and Kaylee and her mom and dad. And Kenny, and—”

  “How’d Kenny seem?”

  “I left while he was here. And Tina came. You know she’s in love with you, Daddy, right?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Fine, have it your way. And Upton came.” She goes back to reading her book.

  TMU comes in. I lift a hand, and he grabs it and gives a squeeze. I say, “How you doing, boss?”

  “How you doing? Jesus, have you looked in a mirror?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t.”

  TMU looks terrible, too, but I can’t put a finger on it. “This ought to be good,” he says, tipping his head at the TV, which is on a bracket bolted to the wall.

  “What oughta be good?”

  “Daddy, I told you,” Lizzy says, and she explains again that C-SPAN is covering Leslie Herstgood’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee
.

  “Harold,” I say to TMU, “I don’t remember much of what happened the other night.”

  Lizzy slams her book and leaves the room without a word.

  “What happened,” TMU says, “is you killed a trained assassin with your bare hands. Snapped his neck, gouged an eye, tore his cheek half off, and generally left him looking like he walked into a meat grinder. But there were two of them, and the other kicked you in the head.”

  “How’d I get here?”

  “Your hillbilly hospital up north took one look and had you medevac’ed. Apparently, you had a shattered eye socket, and they were worried about brain swelling.”

  I have a memory of a man falling onto my lap and the crimson blossom of his shirt. “The one who kicked me,” I say. “Kendall shot him?”

  “Kendall? Not hardly. Agent d’Villafranca shot him.”

  “Chip,” I whisper. Chip. Now I remember someone telling me. Chip was there. He got concerned when they couldn’t find the transponder in my Volvo. It didn’t settle right. So he drove to the lake to watch over us for the night. He dozed in his car. This is a side of Chip I’ve never seen. The hunch-playing, lightning-reflexed, vigilant agent. My excellent protector.

  “Chip,” I say again, and this time my voice cracks at the idea of the quirky new-agey guardian angel—or guardian agent—watching over me.

  TMU spots the threatening tsunami of my emotion and wants none of it. “Professionals,” he says loudly, “paid assassins from out of town.”

  “But who—”

  Lizzy comes back. Then Tina and Upton walk in. They’re here to watch the hearing. It is all professional. Everybody sits upright on folding chairs; nobody sits on the bed. I watch Upton. He’s pretending to be normal. He sits there looking at me with the kind of grin a guy like Upton gives you when you’ve had a brush with death. He has his usual jaw-thrusted, stubbly-chin look, and his eyes glow with affection. I know it’s all bullshit because I remember from before my injury that Upton killed Scud and was trying to pin it on me. I can see it in him. He looks terrible. The stress is getting to him.