The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Again there was an eternal, breathless pause. Help me, please . . . he thought, over and over again.

  “What’s this about?” the man asked.

  “I’m sitting in a dark room,” he whispered. “I’ve been kidnapped, and they’re threatening to kill me if I don’t pay a ransom by tonight.”

  “We can’t help you with money; why don’t you call the police?”

  “The kidnappers are sitting right next to me, so that won’t work. I have the money myself, that’s no problem, but I need my lawyer’s number so he can take care of the transaction. Help me with his phone number and you’ve saved my life.”

  “Who’s holding you prisoner? Do these people know my number?”

  “No, no, I just called your number at random. I’m sitting in the dark. I can’t talk anymore. Help me. My lawyer’s name is Erland Martin, and his office is in Virginia Beach. He’s in the phone book.”

  “Ernie Martin?”

  “No, Erland.”

  “Erland? Strange name.”

  “What’d the man say, honey? Did he say ’Erland Martin’?” he heard from the woman in the background.

  “Erland, yeah.”

  “He’s the one who got Vivian her divorce. A real dumb bastard, if you ask me. I was in his office on Bendix Road together with her.”

  The man’s voice sounded tired now. “Does your lawyer have his office on Bendix Road?” he asked.

  Bud swallowed hard. “Yes, that’s him.”

  “Just a second.”

  He heard the man sigh and grudgingly get out of bed, open the door, and leave the room—vocalizing his misgivings as he went—and then everything was quiet. Even his wife.

  Bud stared woodenly at the cell phone’s display. It was hard to see how much battery was left.

  Don’t beam up the menu, Bud, it’ll use too much juice, he instructed himself, as his palms got more and more clammy.

  All of a sudden, crying could be heard from Reamur Duke’s cell. Reamur quickly recited a couple of number codes, but the crying got louder. That’s how Reamur Duke was. In spite of his limited mental capacity he was the most tortured soul on death row.

  Bud covered the receiver. “Shhh, Reamur, it’s okay,” he whispered, but Reamur was not okay. Even though he couldn’t comprehend the fact that in four days he’d be lying stiff in a coffin, Reamur understood that his number codes weren’t working out and that there no longer was anyone in this world who could give him comfort and help him understand. The cell wasn’t what imprisoned Reamur; it was the sum total of not being capable of connecting life’s dots. Whatever they were.

  “I think the man’s crying,” the woman whispered on the other end of the line. Bud pressed the receiver tight against his ear.

  “Well, I’ve got the number here. Do you have something to write with?” The man cleared his throat and waited. “No, I suppose you don’t.” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway, listen, here’s the number . . .”

  The telephone number started with 757-340, as it should. This was the Virginia Beach area. He knew it by heart, but he didn’t recognize the last four digits.

  “Is this Martin’s private number?”

  “I don’t know. It was the only one in the phone book,” said the man.

  “How about looking under ‘Erland V. Martin’?”

  “V?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are no others with that name. Maybe it’s in the yellow pages.”

  Bud gave a sigh of relief. Of course! The man had looked in the white pages. He should have thought of that himself. This had to be Erland’s home number—what could be better? He must be in bed this time of night. “Give me those last four digits again.”

  Suddenly, Reamur Duke took a deep breath and began chanting new codes so loudly that Bud had a hard time hearing what was being said on the phone.

  “What’s going on?” asked the man at the other end.

  “It’s the kidnappers. They’re insane. What was the number? I couldn’t hear it.” The man said it again. Bud thanked him and hung up.

  He said the number to himself a couple of times and then punched it in. Please let this be your private number, Erland, he prayed, with all his heart.

  * * *

  —

  It was difficult for Erland Martin to conceal his irritation. His private life clearly was not something to be disturbed. Not even by a client who was condemned to death and about to die. But they’d never been such great pals, the two of them, in spite of the fact that Bud had made him a prosperous man and had even named him executor of his estate. It was all just business.

  “I can’t make a transaction tonight,” he said. “Your Internet banking code is at the office, and you’re not getting me in there at this time of night.”

  He asked no questions. Not about how Bud was coping, and definitely not about what else he might be able to do for him. He was cold and calculating, as always, completely devoid of empathy or compassion. Exactly as a top lawyer was supposed to be—when he was on your side, that is. Right now, Bud wasn’t sure he was.

  “Write down the account number I’m about to give you and transfer the five million dollars immediately.”

  “How?”

  “Take it out of my customers’ account.”

  “That’s illegal, Bud, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can, goddammit. If the client himself asks for it.”

  “I need to have it in writing.”

  “Listen, Erland. It won’t be long before you won’t have to hear from me anymore. But if you don’t do this now, my next phone call will assure that you don’t cash in on my estate—you get what I’m saying? If you help me, I’ll give you a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus, but this has got to happen in the next five minutes, understand?”

  A sigh came from the other end of the line. If Bud ever got out of this alive—even if he were given one extra week—he’d make life so difficult for Erland V. Martin that he’d really have something to sigh about.

  “A man will be calling you in ten minutes, Erland. His name is Pete—that’s all you need to know. You confirm to him that you’ve done as I’ve told you. Do we understand each other? And one more thing: Give me Doggie’s phone number and the number of a certain Sheriff T. Perkins from Highland County.”

  * * *

  —

  Pete left the prison twenty minutes before they fetched the man who was next in line to be executed. Pete had suddenly collapsed outside cell number five and vomited all over the floor. Bud didn’t know how he’d done it—maybe by sticking a finger down his throat. In any case he succeeded in incurring the wrath of the militiaman in cell five, who damned him to hell and back. But Pete didn’t care.

  His mission was finished. He’d left the cell phone with Bud, along with precise instructions as to when to expect inspections by the guards and how to hide the phone. In return, Pete had personally been given Erland V. Martin’s solemn assurance that his bank account was now bulging with cash.

  One of the other guards took over the shift, and Pete was gone. The execution was delayed a little because the doctor had to come all the way from Staunton, and several of the militiamen were screaming their displeasure over the stink of Pete’s vomit, but none of the prison officers paid any attention. They were busy preparing the execution.

  Peace didn’t return to death row for some time. Bud hadn’t slept a wink. He’d just lain there, hugging his cell phone and trying to figure out how he could say things in the shortest time possible—and to whom he should say them—before the battery went dead.

  A little after six, Saturday morning, when the prisoner’s body had been driven away and Pete’s replacement was nodding off at his post, he called the Highland County Sheriff’s Office.

  Bud had rehearsed what he had to say, knowing he had to keep it short. He knew
how he’d explain the life of luxury T. Perkins could look forward to if he’d just help him the next couple of days, and he knew exactly what information he wanted to impart that would give Perkins something to work with on Bud’s behalf.

  He could hear the switchboard lady at the sheriff’s office crying when she answered the phone. Someone had just shot and killed two deputies, she sobbed. All she could tell him was that Sheriff Perkins was out at the scene of the shootings.

  Bud asked who’d been shot, his voice trembling, trying to sound as upset as possible.

  “It was Willie, Willie Riverdale. And Stanley Kennedy,” she snuffled.

  “God, not Stanley!” His orchestrated outburst was so loud, he was afraid he’d been overheard.

  “Oh, no. Did you know him?”

  He pressed the receiver to his lips and tried to sound grief-stricken. “Not Stanley! Is Stanley dead?” Then he got to the point: “You’ve got to give me T. Perkins’s cell phone number. Please!”

  CHAPTER 24

  Three men lay out in the middle of a flat, gray-green fallow field where corn had once grown. It was early Saturday morning, and T had been late in arriving. His men had been shooting at the house for more than an hour. Two of them were dead, and fifty yards ahead the weather-beaten wooden building was riddled like a sieve. T. Perkins stood by his patrol car a small distance away, looking at his deputy sheriff who lay twisted around with surprised eyes staring into eternity. Leo Mulligan had shot him through the throat—a fatal wound. Behind T stood officers Janusz Kovacs and Dody Hall with grim expressions, ready to fire if the old bastard Mulligan was dumb enough to expose so much as an eyebrow. T told them to stay by the car and ordered Officer Arredondo, who’d managed to sneak up behind a worn-out plow, to start firing when T began running towards the house.

  It took a very long second of yelling and shooting from both ahead and behind before T made his way up to a rusty trailer. Ages ago it had been Leo Mulligan’s pride and joy; now it served as T. Perkins’s cover. He could see everything from here: his dead deputy Stanley Kennedy, lying in the field, Gonzales Arredondo emptying clip after clip from behind the plow, the naked landscape and the flat terrain behind the house, and the department’s young mascot, Willie Riverdale, lying halfway up the stairs in a pool of blood.

  “I’m thinking Willie’s still alive, Dody,” he said over his walkie-talkie. “Have you sent for an ambulance?”

  He heard a gasp at the other end. It was answer enough. T stared at the perforated house. If Leo Mulligan was still uninjured after a bombardment like that, he must possess some kind of superhuman capacity no one had seen before.

  “Arredondo, look over here,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “I’m standing behind a pile of iron.” The officer nodded. “I can’t see if the trailer’s drawbar is up or down. Can you?”

  “It’s pointing straight up in the air,” he replied.

  “Kovacs!” barked T to the officer back by the patrol car. “Listen: You come up to me while Dody and Arredondo cover you. Everybody got that? I’ll keep the walkie-talkie on from now on.” He gave a signal, and the inferno of noise and smoke and muzzle fire resumed. Clods of earth sprang into the air in front of Arredondo’s plow. Officer Kovacs’s face was bathed in sweat as he dove in behind T.

  “We’re going to push this trailer up to the house, okay?”

  “It’s gonna be hard, boss. All the tires are flat. This thing’s stood here as long as I can remember. I don’t think it’ll budge.”

  “Yes, it will. It has to. Willie’s still alive. I can see him breathing.”

  T leaned forward and braced his arms against the tailgate. Then, with one leg back, he gave a shove. The trailer didn’t move, but it rocked a bit. “Come on, Kovacs,” he grunted.

  Rapid shots banged into the front of the trailer the second they shoved it the first inch over the weedy ground. It sounded like a blacksmith pounding iron. T. Perkins hated automatic weapons—he really, really did. The life expectancy of a peace officer was bound to rise if Jansen’s ban on firearms turned out to be effective.

  “I can’t . . .” Kovacs kept groaning as they inched forward. What a whiner. T clenched his teeth and felt his back protesting in every joint, but there was no stopping now. “Dody, do you read me?”

  “Yes, I’ve sent for an ambulance, T. I have. I’m sorry!”

  “Now send for Daniel Smith’s backhoe digger. Fast! We’re going to need some help, or else I’m afraid we’ll stay pinned down here in the field.”

  They kept pushing the trailer forward as well as they could, but got stuck in front of a slight ridge of earth and had to stop. T cursed silently as he looked at Willie staring at them, twenty yards away.

  “Leo!” he yelled as loud as his tar-lined lungs would possibly allow. “Leo, come out now! This is T. Perkins speaking! You’ll be safe if you come out now. Are you able to come out, Leo? You have to, Leo, because Willie’s in very bad shape, and he’ll never make it unless you give us a chance to get him out of here. Did you hear that, Willie? We’ll stop our shooting for five minutes.”

  He waited a moment, and when Leo didn’t answer he gave Kovacs the sign to start pushing again. Then his cell phone rang. Shit! he thought, and considered throwing it as far away as he could. T had been the last one at the station to cave in to the trend and finally buy his own cell phone. It had been an abomination ever since, just like he’d figured.

  “Maybe it’s the guy with the backhoe digger, boss. You better answer.”

  T tried to remember the shortest route from Daniel Smith’s development firm to Mulligan’s house.

  “Yes,” he said quickly into the phone, and then his jaw dropped. No, it wasn’t Daniel Smith, it was the last person in the world he’d expected to hear from: Bud Curtis.

  Curtis sounded completely alienated and abject at the other end. He explained he was speaking from an illegal cell phone and there wasn’t much time before the battery would run out. Fine, thought Perkins as he watched Dody Hall take the phone in the police car and with clear gestures explain she had Daniel Smith on the line and was trying to direct the backhoe digger along the back roads south of town.

  But Bud Curtis kept talking, and he made T. Perkins listen. It was a totally schizophrenic experience. Half of him was standing there as chief law enforcer, administering the law of the land with one foot in the lion’s mouth and a dead colleague lying before him with birds chirping in the thick creepers on the fence, while the other half was talking to a condemned man from a world where justice and reason had no meaning—a human being before his maker, begging for mercy in the name of innocence. And Perkins believed the man because he’d seen the circumstantial evidence on the videos. He believed Bud Curtis just as he believed the whole horrible situation with Leo Mulligan was a misunderstanding that had gotten completely out of control.

  A series of dull blows could be heard from the house that sounded like Leo Mulligan was hammering on the wall from inside. So apparently, there was still plenty of life in the deranged old brute, thought T, as the window frames vibrated and one of the panes suddenly fell out. The shattering glass proved too much in the tense atmosphere. The wounded deputy, Willie Riverdale, flinched and tried to move, and a volley of shots erupted from Arredondo’s plow, which was immediately returned from the house with a weapon T. Perkins couldn’t immediately identify. He’d be damned if he’d get in the way of it, though.

  “I have to sign off now, Bud. Put your cell phone on vibrate, and I’ll get back to you when the situation out here is under control.”

  Bud protested, but T assured him that he’d contact him, that he had something to tell him, and that his cell phone had registered Curtis’s number. He’d call him back in about an hour’s time.

  Then he hung up and signaled Kovacs that the break was over.

  The tendons in their necks were tight as violin strings, and every fiber of their
shoulder muscles strained with overexertion as they resumed nudging the trailer over the bumpy terrain.

  “We’re not pushing in a straight line,” Kovacs gasped.

  T peeped around the corner of the trailer and got a glimpse of the old man, less than ten yards away, poised in the empty window frame with blood trickling down his face. If they kept pushing in the same direction, they’d be heading directly alongside the house, forcing Mulligan to change his line of vision so he couldn’t avoid seeing the unsuspecting Willie lying on the stairs.

  “We’re stopping,” he whispered to Kovacs. Then he shouted, “Leo, can you hear me?” He was promptly answered with a volley of bullets.

  T grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Dody, do you know if Leo Mulligan has a telephone?”

  “Sorry, boss, there’s none registered at his address. But Arredondo’s seen him talking on a cell phone in town.”

  “Leo,” yelled T, “do you have a cell phone in there?” This time there was no shooting.

  “Look!” He took his cell phone in his fingertips and waved it cautiously around the corner of the trailer. “Tell me your number, and I’ll call you. You need to talk with someone, you really do. Leo, are you listening?”

  T heard a shot and felt the projectile practically flay the phone out of his hand. His partner twisted around with a look of confusion as T saw his hand was bleeding. Shit, that hurts, he said to himself. He stuck all his fingers in his mouth and felt around with his tongue. They all seemed to be there, except for a little portion of skin on his index finger that had landed in a bush, along with half his new cell phone.

  Dody whistled to him and pointed down the gravel road where an extremely tired backhoe digger was chugging towards them with its excavating shovel raised. Leo Mulligan responded with yet another round of well-aimed fire. From where they crouched they could clearly hear the shells clonking against the machine.