by Robert White
Kidnap, robbery, bombs and guns.
Then it all went wrong...
Jack Trichaud only wanted a quiet life in small town Ohio. But when you’re in possession of nearly a million dollars from a bank robbery gone wrong, life is anything but quiet. On the one hand, Agent Pippin is searching for the evidence that will pin the robbery on Jack and send him away for a good long time. On the other hand, violent White Power thug Calderone – aided by his merciless girlfriend and Jack’s own long lost brother – wants the money and he doesn’t care who he has to hurt to get it. In fact, the more pain Jack suffers the happier Calderone will be.
Jack has more than a few cards up his sleeve, but blood will be spilled and he’s going to need every trick in the book to make sure it’s not his.
Or not too much of it, anyway.
Praise for Robert White
“Grabs you by the soul and doesn’t let go!” -Simon Woods, author of The Fall Guy
“White writes beautiful, wrenching prose. Haftmann’s Rules is stark and unsentimental. It’s White at his best.” -Cindy Rosmus, author & publisher of Yellow Mama
“White’s stories are gritty and intense.” -Douglas Rhodes, editor, Sex and Murder Magazine
“Robert White knows the subconscious well and tells an immensely gripping tale on numerous levels!” -HorrorNews.net
“[White’s characters] are experiencing the ultimate horror of being deeply alone. Yet there is more to the collection than its abandoned characters; it is also the subtle workings of White's hard-boiled style that often lures the reader into experiencing the same loneliness.” -Joe Zingaro
#4
When You Run with Wolves
Robert White
#13 Press
ntp-13A04
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Copyright Robert White, 2015
Cover design copyright Number Thirteen Press, 2015
All characters and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published by Number Thirteen Press
Kindle Version 1.1
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For Lindy Lindell
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You can choose many things in this life, but you can’t pick the egg and sperm that designed you. My brother and I were lucky in one respect because our mother lived long enough to insist to our father that he not name us Castor and Pollux as he had informed her many times he had every intention of doing. I have no memory of her but it must have been one of the few times she ever stood up to him. He wasn’t an easy man to live with.
My mother disappeared from my life when my brother was born. She died of an infection contracted in the hospital. My father later told me I walked around our Montreal apartment muttering “no-so-com-i-al” for days afterward. I must have overheard him talking to the doctor on the phone. But I don’t remember. I remember that my father was proud I knew such a big word at my young age. He would become much prouder of my younger brother. Carlos not only looked like him with his wheat-colored hair and ice-blue eyes, but also had my father’s gift for languages.
For years after my mother’s death, my brother and I sat at the supper table learning various tongues in a kind of surcharged Berlioz. My father told us these were replicas of the same courses he himself had taken for his assignments abroad. My brother responded to my father’s prompts with a mastery I never could attain. I carry around a sharp memory of them carrying on an intense conversation in German. I could barely follow, missing every other word as if those pesky irregular verbs were vines tripping me up.
What I didn’t learn until years later is that we weren’t speaking German at all, just a pidgin form of it my father learned and taught from flashcards he had bought in some decrepit bookshop in Old Montreal. In fact, the only language we did pick up was a smattering of Quebeçois French – and that mostly obscenities – from hanging around with older boys down by the river. My father said he worked for the C.I.A., but when he left the house it was for menial jobs like short-order cook, shoe salesman, a glassware plant on the St. Lawrence. These, he said, were his “cover” while on assignment. My brother and I believed him. Maybe you would have too.
My father disappeared from our lives forever on August 22, although I’m never sure if it was 1988 or 1989. The date I recall because it is on August 22 that the last Imam disappeared and will reappear. It’s also the day in 1187 when Saladdin conquered Jerusalem. Our father loved trivia like that.
My memory of him the week before he flew the coop is vague like so much else in the intervening years. He must have been preparing to leave, but I don’t recall that he acted any differently. He treated my brother and me the same, except that he wasn’t talking to himself so much as muttering or making comments to an invisible audience. It sticks in my mind for some reason that he quoted Réne Levèsque: ‘There are moments when courage and daring are the only acceptable forms of caution.’
I still have a fuzzy recollection of him walking from room to room in our small flat. He was moving things around, looking for something, maybe a passport, setting stacks of books aside where they had been growing upwards like models of multicolored skyscrapers, each with a patina of dust on whichever book had been added last. He rummaged among files (his ‘declassified’ ones) we had been ordered never to disturb. He was muttering to himself in his unique polyglot of Russian, Pashtun (he said), and Creole, which he claimed to have picked up years before during a posting in the Lesser Antilles before he met my mother.
My brother learned how to use a computer during his time in Dannemora for armed robbery. I’m not surprised he never bothered to try to locate the old man. He had it much worse. When I ran off at seventeen, he had our father all to himself. But this is not a story about our running father or a prodigal son. It’s a story of what happened two weeks after my brother discovered I was living in Northtown, Ohio, a quiet, working-class burg on the shores of Lake Erie...
Tuesday, September 7
7:05 a.m.
#1
The cops walked in while I was drinking coffee in a rumpsprung wicker chair on my back porch. Chickadees and yard sparrows darted in and out of the big Rose-of-Sharon bush by the fence out back.
I had just come out of the deepest sleep I can remember in months. I remember only a tiny part of the last dream: I was climbing a huge pole with iron rungs, high up into the clouds. I was delivering mail bags for the airplanes, which would fly past and catch them by their tailhooks. Jack and the Beanstalk – except this Jack was returning the bags.
Five of them, to be precise. Moneybags. All stolen from the Fifth Third Bank of Northtown, Ohio. A place I had called home for the last ten years of my life until my ex-con brother and Randall J. Calderone showed up at my doorstep and insisted I help them rob it.
For his own amusement, the Roller of Dice in the Sky carves out a few of his subjects for a special kind of mockery. My brother’s criminal life was proof enough. Many times my brother Carlos and I would regret that our father wasn’t your average kind of nut who believes in little green space aliens. My father’s dementia kept his past a secret from us and our mother back in Montreal. He had that kind of knowledge so that, if you tried to discover anything about who he was or where he came from, he’d be there to confront you, and the last thing you wanted was to get caught spying on a spy who was acutely paranoid. I don’t know that he would have turned on us and killed us in our beds, but it was a thought that justified my desertion.
I asked the detectives if I was under arrest and one said “not at this time” but my cooperation would be “appreciated.” The man in charge was short and squat, fair-complected, had thin sandy hair in fa
st retreat, and a nose full of busted capillaries that showed he liked a drink now and then. He said he was a Special Investigator from the BCI in Columbus. He didn’t look as if he expected to be disappointed by my refusal to cooperate.
The cop who opened the cruiser door for me said, “Watch your head” out of habit. It was one of those unmarked ones in front of the street and had old food smells in it. I was surprised that I didn’t have much appetite and wondered about my lack of interest in eating. I moved my belt over another notch that morning, which made three in the last ten days. My body still trusted me even if, lately, my mind wasn’t so sure about things.
If it weren’t for the cop cars all over the parking lot, you’d think it was a small-town library. I asked one officer if the lineup was supposed to take a long time. He said he didn’t know because he was using the facility courtesy of the locals. He didn’t want to inconvenience me by driving all the way to Lake County. Normally, he said, they did this kind of thing with photos. They took me into a side door beneath the main reception center. A few cops and dispatchers were chatting and drinking coffee. No one paid me any attention. A cop put me in a small interview room and asked me to wait there for a few minutes. He said he had to get some information from me before they could start the lineup. He asked me if I wanted any coffee, and I said no thanks.
He shut the door and left me there. The room, like the building, was new. I remembered the groundbreaking ceremony in the paper, and the blond wood had a wax shine to it. There wasn’t any desperate graffiti scratched into the walls or the wood surface. It felt like waiting to be summoned for a job interview. The only thing that gave the room a Mickey Spillane feel was the small mirror opposite me. I sat there for ten minutes before the BCI investigator and a detective named Narducci came in. A nattily dressed, tall black man who identified himself as Agent Pippin of the FBI entered last and closed the door behind him. It wasn’t just his haberdashery that impressed me. He had an air about him that said he was alpha male in this room. It was Narducci, however, who apologized for the delay. They were having a little trouble with the arrangements this morning, he said, “just one of those things,” but he expected to get it fixed soon. He was sorry and asked me again if I wanted any coffee and I said no. He said he didn’t blame me. It was the worst coffee he had ever had except for what his wife made. I smiled, all three left the room, and I sat there for another twenty minutes. I heard noises from time to time beyond the door but nothing distinguishable.
Det. Narducci, looking flustered, came back alone this time. He had a form he said he needed to fill out for their records and asked me some questions – my name, and age, and how long I lived in town. Where I went to school, and my last place of employment. He wrote everything down and then said a detective would be coming to get me very soon.
Instead the BCI investigator came back, his face was flushed and he was out of breath. He told me the lineup was canceled and he apologized again for wasting my time. He said an officer would drive me back to my house.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see Agent Pippin himself sitting on my front porch. He was as nattily dressed as before but this time it was a navy blue pinstripe suit with a powder blue shirt and red tie. He liked to make a good second impression. He smiled at me as the officer opened the door for us.
“You’re coming up in the world, Jack,” he said. “Chauffeured service right to your doorstep, my-oh-my.”
“What do you want, Agent Pippin?”
“Oh, let’s see, just a few minutes of your time.”
“You had an hour of staring at me through a two-way mirror. Isn’t that enough for you?”
I had no doubt it was he who had arranged that little dog-and-pony show back at the station. I walked past him but he followed me right through the open doorway.
I walked into the kitchen and drank some water from the tap.
“That’s one of the major causes of germ spreading, Jack. If you were to see some microscopic slides of what’s on one of those grotty faucets, you’d never do that again.”
“Don’t you have to be invited into a person’s house before you’re permitted to interrogate them?” I said.
“You’re thinking of Satan,” he said. “The soul has to succumb before the devil may be permitted to walk in, so to speak.”
“You’re a theologian, too,” I said.
“Just a Roman Catholic,” he said. “Do you believe in God?”
“No,” I said. “I refuse to believe in any intelligent designer who isn’t himself an out-and-out maniac. Only a sadist could have made a cesspool of a world like this.”
“You’re confusing creationism with Darwinian evolution, Jack.”
“Am I?”
“Faith is about belief. Belief in goodness, in the immortality of the soul, in life everlasting.”
“By your terms, then, I have no faith,” I said.
“That’s a pity,” he said. “It means you have nothing to look forward to.”
“That’s right. Good old nothingness. The inanimate, eternal void.”
“How did you do it? Just tell me that much and I’ll go.”
“Do what?”
“Every one of them picked your brother and Calderone out of the photo lineup before I got done putting them down on the table. But none of the family could positively identify you. They didn’t recognize you without that nylon stocking you wore and they didn’t remember ever hearing you speak above a whisper in the house the whole day they were held captive.” Pippin laughed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Isn’t there a lot of literature in your field about the unreliability of eyewitness identification?”
He leaned against my kitchen counter and rested a hand on his hip. He glittered with gold accoutrement. I remembered a waterlogged paperback of old poems my father once brought home. One was about a man who glittered when he walked. He committed suicide.
“Your size, your build, your hair color. But nobody could agree on how you walked or how deep your voice was.” He jabbed a finger at my chest. “You are the third man, Trichaud – if that’s even your name.”
I shrugged and walked out to the porch. I saw a ruby-throated hummingbird at the feeder. I wondered how much more life it packed into a second than a human being.
“Then prove it,” I said. I thought he was going to hit me right then and there.
“Oh, I’ll prove it, all right. Don’t you worry about that, Perry fucking Mason.”
“Maybe you should be out looking for Calderone,” I said.
“We’ll get them. We’ve got choppers coming up from Columbus with heat-seeking and infrared cameras. The dogs’ll track them before then or they’ll come stumbling out the woods full of ticks. They do what boneheads like them on the run always do.”
“Best of luck, Agent Pippin.”
“These local cops underestimate you. That BCI agent with the cheap cologne thinks you’ll roll over on your brother and Calderone as soon as we bag them. He says you’re just some pussy landscaper, not a master criminal lured into a heist by his convict brother and a real bad ass.
“I consider Carlos more a sibling than a brother,” I said. “We’re not close.”
“What was your father thinking, giving him a Mex name?”
“You’re a black man and you ask me about non-Caucasian kids’ names?”
“Racist,” said Pippin.
“You mean ‘bigot,’ don’t you?”
“Whatever, if the shoe or the shit fits, Trichaud.”
“No, not really. I just know what it’s like to be a foreigner and have kids gang up on you because you aren’t one of them.”
“Speaking of your past, I got a question for you. I checked you out. I go back ten years and you disappear from the databases. Why is that, Trichaud? There’s no paper on you older than ten years.”
“It must have burned in a fire.”
“I’d say that’s a lot of fires in a lot of record departments.”
; “Is that illegal?”
“Robbing banks is illegal, Jack. Kidnapping and holding hostages, terrorist threats – why, those are illegal, believe it or not. Strapping a live bomb to her husband’s back – that’s really illegal. The penal code frowns on such activities among its citizenry. You do what we call ‘the hard forty’ for that stuff in Ohio, Jack.”
“Why tell me, Agent Pippin?”
“The bomb disposal unit said that thing should have gone off in something like ten seconds and there was enough Semtec to knock the whole structure of the house down.”
My knees wobbled. I hadn’t thought my brother capable of anything like that. But he had to be the designer of the bomb. That moron he showed up with couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the directions on the heel.
“Now why would anyone build a bomb that sophisticated, arm it, and then shut it down?”
“You really should find this Calderone if you want an answer to that one,” I said.
“Yeah, I forgot. You just plant flowers. That’s what the cops here can’t understand. Calderone and your brother didn’t bother to disguise themselves. Your brother’s quite the chatterbox, though. He talked and smoked dope all night long. They didn’t care about those people’s lives, Jack. That little girl. Her boyfriend, the father – all of them could’ve been vaporized for five bags of money. Makes you feel proud, doesn’t it? To be the brother of a lowlife worm who can take life so easily.”
“You’ll have to ask my brother that one,” I said.
“Oh I will. Be sure of that. Just before we throw the key away on his worthless ass, I’ll be sure to write down his answer to that one. I don’t know how you got round that woman. I don’t know what you did or said to her that she won’t identify you when she was close enough to spit into your eye. But I am going to make that question the focus of my life’s work from now on.”