The Compound: A Thriller

by Ben Follows

  That was all right. He had a big enough lead to be comfortable.

  Carl took a sip of his beer and placed it on the table behind him. He grabbed the chalk and dusted his cue. He bent down over the table, his posture more serious and deliberate than before. He spread out his legs and bent down over the cue, looking down it like a sniper looking down a rifle. He took one smooth shot and sank one ball. He moved around the table and did the same. Then again, and again, until he was tied with Jake. He never looked up from the table once as he destroyed the lead Jake had been so proud of. Carl didn't even pause as he set up behind the cue ball and sunk the black ball, the path having been cleared by Jake’s previous lead.

  As the white ball bounced around the table before coming to a stop at almost the dead center of the table, there was silence. Jake stared at the table.

  “Next,” said Carl, turning away from Jake as though his challenge had been nothing.

  “You tricked me,” said Jake as someone took the cue out of his hand.

  Carl shrugged as he was handed another beer. “Don’t worry about it, kid, I do it to everyone. I wanted to gauge you. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to winning, even more than you can about losing. As soon as you had that godawful break, I wasn’t too worried.”

  “Thanks,” said Jake, not paying attention, his mind elsewhere. He heard some of the crowd calling him over to an empty seat and holding out a beer. He took it and thought of his promise to the chief, but there was a bigger problem. He had gotten distracted and hadn’t noticed something as simple as the fact that Carl wasn’t trying.

  The chief seemed to have forgotten about Jake. Soon Jake and the locals were joking with him as though they’d always been friends. He needed to remain focused on the task at hand, gathering information for his purpose here, to find and—if necessary—kill Frank Frederickson, a.k.a. Frank Tanners.

  That was how it went for most of the night. Jake kept part of his promise to the chief and did pace himself. He wasn’t going to allow any more lapses of judgment.

  Considering how he’d done so far, someone from The Compound might be getting dispatched at that moment to relieve him. He’d be sent him back to go through his final field exams again, or he’d be put into the office section of The Compound, the place where the failures and rejects were sent to work the desk jobs like planning and scheduling.

  It was a Sunday night, and the bar began emptying around nine thirty. Most of the bar was vacant by eleven. The working folk had left, including a good percentage of Carl’s crowd, and the chief seemed to have completely forgotten about him when he left.

  It was around that time that Carl stopped playing pool and fell into the chair beside Jake.

  “Guess you don’t have any work tomorrow, either?” said Carl. He laughed. “I should be getting home soon. Got a little baby girl at home, and the wife will be getting annoyed that I’m leaving all the work to her.”

  “Understandable,” said Jake.

  Carl laughed, and the conversation lagged.

  “So,” said Jake, breaching a topic of conversation, “I heard that some guy in Crescent Point vanished a few weeks ago. Frank something…you know anything about that?”

  “Frank Frederickson,” said Carl, gripping his bottle a little harder. Jake had stopped drinking almost an hour earlier, and his mind had become clear while everyone else continued becoming more intoxicated. “I know him. What of it?”

  “What do you think happened? Ran off with some bimbo or other to Vegas?”

  “No,” he said without a glimmer of doubt.

  “Why?”

  “Jake, I like you, okay?” said Carl. “Don’t go down a road you don’t want to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Carl hesitated for a long time, but there was no doubt he would answer. “He didn’t run off. I would testify in front of a court, hand on a stack of Bibles, that he wouldn’t do it. No matter what anyone said about him, he was a good man and he loved his family. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t run out on them. It wasn’t in his nature.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m fucking sure, Jake. I don’t want you to think I’m soft or something. He was a good friend.”

  “No, I don’t think that.”

  “He was my friend, Jake. I knew him. He wouldn’t do this. I think that’s why there’s so much media attention about this. They know—the media, I mean—that something else is going on. I don’t know how, but the police department and the incompetent chief need to get their act together and start a search.”

  Jake didn’t say anything, letting Carl’s certainty speak for itself. Carl was thankful and showed Jake a picture of his daughter, six months old, and his son, thirteen, from his wallet, and began speaking about them. He spoke about how he was angry that he couldn’t provide for them as well as they deserved and hoped that the rumors about the factory reopening were true so he could get back to working full-time.

  Jake didn’t ask anything else about Frank Frederickson, knowing there was nothing else Carl would tell him tonight.

  It was near the end of the night when things began going south.

  A man wearing an orange long-sleeved shirt who was a few beers past buzzed lost a game of pool to Carl, just like everyone else. Carl had been drinking all night but showed no signs of any effect.

  The orange-shirted man stared at the table after his loss for a few moments before turning to Carl.

  “You son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You cheated me.”

  Carl shook his head and placed the triangle in the center of the table, setting up for the next game, hoping to extend his winning streak to the end of the night. “Don’t be a poor loser.”

  “No,” said the man, raising his voice and not registering the entire bar was watching him. He stepped forward and poked Carl in the chest. “I didn’t lose,” he said, jabbing Carl in the chest a few times with the same finger. “You cheated me. I’ve been watching you. You have a pattern.”

  Carl grabbed the man’s finger, not hard, but enough that the man was unable to get it free. Jake set his feet on the ground, preparing to intervene if a fight broke out.

  He had already weighed getting involved with the suspicion of the police, Obrasey in particular, but he had decided having friends among the locals outweighed any suspicions they had that they wouldn’t be able to prove.

  “If you want to keep this finger,” said Carl, his eyes narrowing, “then you’ll take your loss and leave us alone. Don’t come looking for a rematch.”

  “I don’t need a rematch,” said the man as Carl released his finger. “I won that one.” He took the same finger and jabbed it up into Carl’s face, making him lean backward. He teetered back and forth. “I want a rematch right now.”

  A hand fell on the man’s shoulder, and he spun to see who had done it, shrugging off the hand. The newcomer put his hand on Orange Shirt’s shoulder. “Richard,” he said, “Leave it, let’s get out of here.”

  Richard seemed to consider what he was saying and calmed down just a little. There were a few more guys behind Richard. About a dozen friends, many dressed in the same single-colored shirts, stood there. They looked like the sideline at a ten-year-old’s soccer game. Even so, they looked ready to fight.

  Richard looked back and forth, trying to make a decision.

  “Yeah,” said one of the bikers, dressed like Carl but shorter and fatter, “just leave and don’t come back.”

  Richard spun and punched the fat biker as hard as he could. The fat biker didn’t react except to open his eyes wide and take the punch to his cheek. He fell, hard, and hit his head on the edge of the pool table, falling to the ground unconscious.

  There was a moment of silence in the bar as everyone stared at Richard.

  Jake reacted a few thousandths of a second after the silence had begun. He knew this because his reaction time had been trained and clocked once a week, training his ability to assess a situ
ation and jump into it before anyone else was aware what was happening. He leaped up from the chair. Jake took two long strides toward the center of the action before anyone else had reacted, and when they did react it was all at once.

  The bikers jumped from their seats and jumped at the “soccer dads”—as Jake had begun calling them—not caring whether they’d been involved. The soccer dads seemed like they had been coiled up like serpents about to strike. The two calmest people in the crowd were Carl and Richard, standing beside the pool table in a flurry of chaos, staring at one another.

  The two groups began to fight, looking as though they had chosen their uniforms planning for a fight. Jake saw everything, his peripheral vision taking in just as much information as his frontal vision. His ears, touch, and even his sense of smell combined in his mind and visualized the fight, suggesting and discarding ideas for ending the fight quickly thousands of times before he ever made it the ten feet between his chair and the edge of the fight.

  The social aspect of fieldwork was hard, dependent on a million different factors that only experience could teach, but fighting? Fighting was always the same, and Jake had won hundreds—and lost more—fights to trained fighters. He could do this in his sleep.

  Bouncers and bartenders began running toward the fight. He needed to end this quickly enough that no one would be able to understand what had happened.

  His first casualty was a biker feeding punches into the gut of Richard’s blue-shirted friend. Jake grabbed the side of his head and threw him to the ground, his head hitting first with such force that he flipped over and fell onto his stomach, grabbing the back of his head. He would be incapacitated long enough to keep him out of the rest of the fight.

  He left blue shirt on the ground gasping for breath.

  Jake used the pool table as a springboard and jumped through the air, landed his right foot in the back of a biker, sending him careening through a table and several of the other fighters.

  Jake landed in a crouched position and grabbed a chair. Using only a single step on the ground, he spun, hurling the chair toward the only remaining fight taking place. There were a few minor skirmishes happening around them, but Jake knew that taking out the big fights would defuse the others.

  The chair hit one of the soccer dads in the center of his back, and he stumbled forward, trying to still connect his punch, tackling one of the bikers to the ground.

  The other fighters in that group jumped away from the sprawling two bodies just as the bouncers and bartenders arrived to break up the fight. They fell onto the bodies piled on the ground and stepped between the skirmishes on the edges, now just barely enough to be considered fights at all. Karen was there, helping one of the bouncers pull the blue-shirted friend off the ground. He was still clutching his gut.

  Richard rushed over to check on him. The music was still playing, and the rest of the bar was staring at them. Few, if any, were focused on Jake, but even a few was too many. There was blood coating the floor. There were several broken noses and some ripped clothing, but as the combatants were pulled apart, their wits returning as the adrenaline wore off, the most common expression on their faces was embarrassment that they'd been pulled into the fight.

  “You should get out of here.”

  Jake looked up. Carl was looking at him, his eyes wide.

  “You need to get out of here before the cops show up,” he said again. “I know what they arrested you for. I heard Obrasey’s suspicious.”

  Jake nodded. “I don’t have a drive.”

  “I’ll take you,” said Carl, nodding. “Follow me.”

  Carl turned and walked toward the exit to the bar. They got a few looks from bystanders, but most were interested in the fight, and their attention shifted back.

  As they exited the bar, Jake looked back at Karen. She had one arm of a biker slung around her neck, carrying him to a table to sit him down and examine his injuries. He wondered if she had gotten his note about going to the beach that night. Maybe she'd thrown it out. Maybe she would forget all about him in the chaos of the night.

  Maybe he didn’t deserve what that couple on the beach had.

  He scanned the bar one last time. One person was ignoring the aftermath of the fight and watching him. Dirk stood at the bar, leaning back on his elbows, sipping a beer.

  He raised the beer to Jake when their eyes met.

  Jake looked away from him and followed Carl out of the bar.

  Chapter 5

  Officer Amanda Obrasey stood on the shoulder of the road, hands in her pockets. She had replaced her police uniform with a green t-shirt and khaki cargo pants over hiking boots.

  Her car—the car that had been her fiancé’s but since his accident left him unable to drive and had become hers by default—was parked about fifty feet up the road, beside the Crescent Point population sign.

  “Jake, Jake, Jake,” she whispered under her breath, scanning the area of the crash with her flashlight lifted over her shoulder. “What were you doing out here?”

  She had come back to the scene of Jake’s crash and found the tread marks along the shoulder of the road leading into the ditch. Around them were empty fields for miles, the perfect spot to do something if you wanted no one to see. It was too heavily trafficked during the day—being the only road in and out of Crescent Point—but drug deals had happened quite a few times at this point during the night. Mostly newcomers to the game; the smarter or more experienced members of the trade had long ago discovered that this location was known. The fields had fences lining the property on the opposite side of the ditch, but beyond that fence line was the same long grass that occupied the ditch itself.

  Obrasey stepped into the ditch. The grass came up to her waist. Her boots squished into the mud hidden by the grass. She walked along the ditch to the area where Jake’s car had fallen, where it had crushed the grass into the mud below. Obrasey had been the one to find Jake’s car and Jake himself, so she had been in a situation the rest of the police hadn’t seen. She had seen the immediate aftermath of the crash. She had been doing a routine search, not expecting to find anything.

  She'd always trusted her gut ever since the morning of Zach’s accident. He’d been leaving the house for work, and she had reminded him to grab milk on his way home, and he’d said he would and opened the door. Just then, grabbed by some unclear fear that she'd never been able to understand, she had been gripped by a fear that those might be the last words she would ever say to him.

  “Wait!” she'd screamed.

  Zach had paused in the door, the gusts from the cold winter day coming into the house, the last time she had seen him walking solely under his own power and without heavy breathing or an oxygen tank. “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

  “I love you,” said Obrasey.

  Zach smiled. “I love you too," he said, blowing her a kiss before stepping out the door.

  All through that day, she had reproached herself for being ridiculous, for being scared of near impossible outcomes, laughing at herself whenever she thought of the fear that had gripped her. The moment she heard about Zach’s accident, however, her mind shot back to that moment of fear, of somehow knowing something was wrong, that she should have stopped him from leaving. She felt awful for thinking that, knowing that the Lewises would be dead if he had stayed, but she also knew that she would be happier, that their relationship would be stable, that the Lewises would never have come to figure prominently in her life.

  Did that make her a bad person? For wishing the people who had been so gracious and thankful for Zach’s intervention were dead instead of him being injured and in constant pain? She didn’t like to think about it. However, sometimes it forced its way into her head, uninvited and unwanted, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  She'd been thinking about that question the previous night as she drove down the main road out of Crescent Point, lazily steering with one hand, not scanning the edges of the streets, knowing that the chances were she
was missing nothing.

  She'd seen the flickering tail lights on the side of the road and pulled over beside the crashed car. As she got closer she had been able to assess the wreckage. There were no skid marks behind the car, no attempt by the driver to brake as they swerved into the ditch. The car had almost cleared the ditch, the bottom of the grill taking the brunt of the damage, stopping suddenly, the rest of the car falling into the ditch under the weight of gravity. It had fallen, bouncing several times and causing major ruptures in the back wheels and trunk of the vehicle. The airbag had deployed at some point during the event. A man was lying there, his head to one side, unconscious.

  She'd approached the car from the side, flashlight raised, until she was certain there was no one and nothing else in the vehicle. She approached hesitantly from behind the car, worried that someone might try to jump out at her.

  As she approached, she had climbed down into the ditch beside the car and stood, her neck only barely looking over the window-ledge because of the way the car was suspended on either side of the ditch. She looked in and saw that the car was occupied by a single male who looked to be in his early twenties and was clearly intoxicated. Other than that, the car was ridiculously clean, as though it had just been through a thorough wash.

  In all her time as a cop, she had pulled over hundreds—perhaps thousands—of young drivers who had made bad decisions. The one thing she had never seen was a completely clean car, as if he had just driven it off the lot, save for the splashes of mud and crushed grill from the crash.

  The man groaned when she shined the flashlight on him, raising his hands to block the light.

  “It’s too bright,” he muttered. “Come on.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man groaned again.

  “Who are you?” Obrasey repeated.

  “I’m Jake, for god’s sake,” he said. “Who are you?”