Last Man Standing

by David Baldacci

  went down right before the guns started shooting. He had to know.”

  “Is that right, Twan? He had to know?”

  Peebles nodded. “You wanted my informed opinion, that’s it.”

  “Well, let me inform your damn opinion some more. You ever been shot at?”

  Peebles looked over at Macy and then back at Westbrook. “No. Thankfully.”

  “Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot to be thankful for. Well, see, I have. You too, right, Mace?”

  Macy nodded and put his pistol away as he followed this discussion.

  “See, folks don’t like to get shot at, Twan. It just ain’t natural to like something like getting your head blown off. Now, if London was in on it he coulda done lots of shit to stay away from that hit. He coulda shot himself in the foot during training, ate some bad food and put himself in the hospital, run into a wall and broke his arm, all sorts of shit so his ass not even been anywhere near that place. But he was, he hauling butt with all the rest of his crew. Then he can’t haul no more and his team gets shot up. Now, a man on the take, what’s he gonna do if he is stupid enough to go on the gig? He gonna sit back, maybe fire a few rounds in there and then go see the shrink saying his mind’s messed up. But what a guilty man ain’t gonna do is go out in that courtyard and mess with those machine guns. He gonna stay nice and safe and collect his money for setting everybody up. Now, this man, he went out there and did something even I ain’t got the balls to do.” He paused. “And he done something else just as crazy.”

  “What’s that?”

  Westbrook shook his head and decided it was really fortunate for Peebles that he was so good at the business end because he was surely lacking everywhere else. “Unless the whole world’s lying their asses off, that man saved Kevin. Ain’t no way a guilty man gonna bother with that shit.”

  Peebles sat back, looking thoroughly whipped. “But if you are right and he’s not involved, then he won’t know where Kevin is.”

  “That’s right. He ain’t. In fact, I ain’t know nothing, do I, except shit that don’t matter?” He said the last with a hard stare right at Peebles. “And I ain’t no closer to getting Kevin back than I was a week ago, am I? You happy about that, Twan? ’Cause I ain’t.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Peebles.

  “We keep a line on London and find out what shrink he’s seeing. And we wait. Them folks took Kevin didn’t do it for nothing. They’ll come to us, and then we see what happens. But let me tell you this: I find out somebody sold me and Kevin out, baby, they could run to the South Pole and I’d find ’em and feed ’em to the polar bears limb by limb, and folks think I’m shitting, they better hope they never find out.”

  Despite the severe chill in the room, a bead of sweat crept down Peebles’s brow as Westbrook adjourned the meeting.

  18

  The air here was not fresh, the smells noxious at times, yet at least it was warm. They fed him all the food he wanted and it was good. And he had books to read, though the light was fairly poor, but they had apologized for that. And they had even given him sketchpads and some charcoal pencils when he had asked for them. That had made his imprisonment easier. When things were going badly in his life, he could always turn to his drawings for a measure of solace. And yet despite everyone’s kindness, every time someone came to the room he was convinced that it would be the moment of his death, because why else would they have brought him here but to kill him?

  Kevin Westbrook looked around at a room that was far bigger than the one he had at home, yet it seemed close all around him, as though it were shrinking or he was growing larger. He had no idea how long he had been here. Without the rise and fall of the sun, telling time was not possible, he had found. He never thought about calling out anymore. He had tried that once and the man had come and told Kevin not to do that. He said it very politely and in a nonthreatening way, as though Kevin had merely walked across a prized flower bed. Yet Kevin could sense that this man would kill him if he yelled out again. It was always the soft-talking ones who were the most dangerous.

  The clanking sound was always there, that and the hissing and the sound of running water nearby. Collectively it would probably cover any noises he could make, but it was very irritating, and interrupted his sleep. They apologized for that too. They were much more polite than captors probably should be, thought Kevin.

  He had looked for ways to escape, yet there was only one door to the room, and it was locked. So he read his books and drew his pictures. He ate and he drank and he waited for the time when somebody would come and kill him.

  While he was sketching another drawing decipherable only to him, Kevin flinched when he heard the footsteps. As he listened to the door being unlocked, he wondered if that time had come.

  The man was the same one who had told him not to yell. Kevin had seen him before but didn’t know his name.

  He wanted to know if Kevin was comfortable, if he needed anything else.

  “Nope. You treating me real good. But my grandma be worried about me. Maybe I ought be getting on home now.”

  “Not right now,” was all the man said. He perched on the large table in the middle of the room and eyed the small bed in the corner. “You sleeping well?”

  “Okay.”

  Then the man wanted to know, one more time, exactly what happened between Kevin and the man in the alley, the one that had grabbed Kevin, given him the note, sent him on his way.

  “I didn’t tell him nothing, because I ain’t had nothing to tell him.” Kevin’s tone was more defiant than he would have liked, but the man had asked him these questions before and he had told him the same answers and he was growing weary of it.

  “Think,” said the man calmly. “He’s a trained investigator, he may have picked up on something you said, though it didn’t seem important when you said it. You’re a smart boy, you’ll be able to remember.”

  Kevin held the piece of charcoal pencil in his hand, squeezing it until his joints cracked. “I went down the alley like you told me to. I done what you told me to, and that’s all. And you say he ain’t gonna be moving or nothing. All messed up and stuff. Well, that ain’t happen. He scared the crap out of me. See, you were wrong about that.”

  The man put out a hand and Kevin flinched, but the man merely rubbed him gently on the shoulder. “We didn’t tell you to go near that courtyard, did we? We said to just sit tight and we’d come get you. See, we had everything timed out perfectly.” The man laughed. “You really made us jump through some hoops, son.”

  Kevin felt the hand tighten on his shoulder and despite the man’s laughing he could tell the fellow was upset so he decided to change the subject. “Why you have that other boy with you?”

  “Just something for him to do, just like you did. He made some nice money, just like you did. In fact, you weren’t supposed to see him, but we had to change things, see, because you weren’t where you were supposed to be. Cut it pretty darn tight.” The hand tightened some more.

  “So you already let him go?”

  “Go ahead with your story, Kevin, that boy’s no concern of yours. Tell me why you did what you did.”

  How did Kevin explain this? He had had no idea what would happen when he had done what they told him to. Then the guns started firing and he was scared, terrified, but it had been a terror rife with curiosity. It had been a curious dread, actually, to see what he had wrought; as though, say, you’d dropped a rock from a bridge onto a highway with no purpose other than to scare some motorists, only to see your handiwork result in a fifty-car pile-up and numerous deaths. And so when he should have run like hell, Kevin had gone farther down the alley to see what he had done. And the guns, instead of making him flee, had somehow drawn him closer, like both the horror and allure of a dead body. “And then that man yelled at me,” he now told his captor. Lord, how that had scared him. Rising up from all those bodies, that voice telling him to get back, stay back, warning him!

  Kevin looked at the man after

describing all this. He had done what they had told him for one of the oldest reasons in the world, money, enough to help his grandma and Jerome get into a nicer place. Money enough to allow Kevin to believe he was helping out, taking care of others, rather than always being taken care of. His grandma and Jerome had warned him about accepting offers of fast money from people who trolled his neighborhood looking for folks to do things they shouldn’t. Many of Kevin’s friends had been so taken in, now dead, crippled, imprisoned or disillusioned for life. And now he had been added to that miserable pile, at all of ten years old.

  “And then you heard the others coming from down the alley,” prompted the man smoothly.

  Kevin nodded as he thought back to that moment. He had been so scared. Guns in front of him, men with more guns cutting off his only avenue of escape. Except across that courtyard. At least he had thought so. That man had stopped him from doing that; had saved his life. Didn’t even know him and he had helped him. That was a new experience for Kevin. “What was the man’s name again?” he asked.

  “Web London,” the man said. “He’s the guy you talked to. He’s the one I’m really interested in.”

  “I told him I ain’t done nothing,” Kevin said again, hoping that the same answer once more would make this man leave and let him get back to his drawing. “He told me if I went out there I’d get killed too. He showed me his hand, where he been shot. I started to run the other way and he say if I do that, they kill me too. That’s when he give me the hat and the note. He shot that flare off and told me to go on. And that’s what I did.”

  “Good thing we had another boy lined up to take your place. You’d been through a lot.”

  Somehow Kevin didn’t think it was such a good thing for the other kid.

  “And London actually went back into the courtyard?”

  Kevin nodded. “I looked back once. He had that big-ass gun. He went back in there and I heard that gun go off. I was walking fast.” Yes, he had walked fast. Walked fast until some men had appeared out of a doorway and snatched him clean. Kevin had caught a glimpse of the other boy, roughly his age and size, yet who was a stranger to Kevin. He looked just as scared as Kevin. One of the men had quickly read the note, asked Kevin what had happened. And then the other boy had been given the cap and note and sent off to deliver it in Kevin’s stead.

  “Why you bring that other boy?” Kevin asked again, but the man didn’t answer. “How come you sent him with the note and not me?”

  The man ignored the question. “Did London seem at all out of it to you? Like he wasn’t thinking clearly?”

  “He tell me what to do. He thinking pretty good from where I be standing.”

  The man took a deep breath and shook his head, obviously pondering this. Then he smiled at Kevin. “You’ll never realize how extraordinary that is, Kevin. Web London must be truly special to have done that.”

  “You ain’t tell me all what was gonna happen.”

  The man continued to smile. “That’s because you didn’t need to know, Kevin.”

  “Where’s the other boy? Why you bring him?” he asked again. “You think of every contingency, then most times things turn out okay.”

  “Is that other boy dead?”

  The man rose. “Let us know if you need anything else. We’ll try and take care of you.”

  Kevin decided to toss out a threat of his own. “My brother be looking for me.” He hadn’t said this before, but he had been thinking it, every minute he had. Everybody knew Kevin’s brother. Just about everybody he knew feared his brother. Kevin prayed that this man feared him too. Kevin’s spirits sank when he could clearly tell from the man’s face that he didn’t. Maybe this man wasn’t afraid of anything.

  “You just rest up, Kevin.” The man looked at some of his drawings. “You know, you’ve got a lot of talent. Who knows, maybe you could’ve ended up not like your brother.” The man closed and locked the door behind him.

  Kevin tried to stop them, but the tears just came in a rush down his cheeks, dripped onto his blanket. He rubbed them away, but more took their place. Kevin sank into a corner and wept so hard he kept losing his breath. Then he pulled a blanket over his head and sat there in the darkness.

  19

  Web drove the Crown Vic down the street his mother used to live on. It was a neighborhood on its last legs, its potential never realized and its vitality long since exhausted. Yet the location, thirty years ago considered rural, was now smack in the middle of prime suburbia, what with the continued sprawl of the metropolitan area, where commuters rose from their beds at four to get to the office by eight. In five years’ time, a developer would probably buy up all the dilapidated properties, bulldoze them under and new homes costing too much would arise from the dust of old ones sacrificed for too little.

  Web got out of the Crown Vic and looked around. Charlotte London had been one of the older people living here, and her house, despite Web’s efforts, was about as run-down as the rest. The chain-link fence was a few rusting strands from collapse. The house’s metal awnings sagged with water and carried grime that could no longer be cleaned away. The lone maple in front was dead, with brown leaves on it from the year before scraping a sad tune in the breeze. The grass had not been cut for a while because Web had not been around to push the mower. He had fought a valiant effort over the years to keep it as it had once been but had finally given up because his mother had taken little interest in maintaining her home and yard. Now that she was dead, Web figured he would be selling the place at some point; he just didn’t want to deal with it right now, maybe never.

  Web went inside and looked around. Right after her death he had come here. The place had been a mess, exactly as his mother had left it. He had spent an entire day cleaning the house and ended up carrying ten thirty-gallon bags of trash to the curb. Then Web had kept the electricity, water and sewer going after his mother’s death. It wasn’t that he ever envisioned himself living here, but something just wouldn’t let him go. Now he surveyed the rooms, clean except for dust and the occasional cobweb. He settled down, checked his watch and flipped on the TV just as a soap opera was interrupted for a special news event. This was the promised FBI news conference. Web scooted forward and adjusted the picture and sound.

  Web gaped as Percy Bates appeared at the podium. Where the hell was Buck Winters? Web thought. He listened as Bates ran through Web’s distinguished career at the FBI and some feel-good film was shown of Web accepting various awards, medals and citations from the Bureau heads and one from the President himself. Bates spoke of the horror in the courtyard and Web’s bravery and grit in doing what he had done when confronted with such an overwhelming foe.

  One shot was of Web in the hospital with half his face bandaged. This made Web reach up and touch the old wound. He felt proud and cheap at the same time. He suddenly wished Bates had not done this. This “promo” wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind. It just made him seem defensive. The journalists would crucify him, probably accuse the Bureau of covering their ass by shielding one of their own. And maybe, in a way, they were. He let out a low moan. He didn’t think it could get any worse, yet it just had. He turned off the TV, sat there and closed his eyes. In his mind he felt a hand on his shoulder, but there was no one there. This seemed to always happen to him when he came here; his mother’s presence was everywhere.

  Charlotte London had kept until her death the shoulder-length hair that had over the years turned from glorious, sexy blond to elegant, luxurious silver. Her skin had been unwrinkled because she was allergic to the sun and had covered herself from it all her life. And her neck had been long and smooth with tight muscles set at the base. Web wondered how many men had been seduced by that delicate but overpowering curve. When he was a teenager Web had had dreams about his young, sexy mother that to this day he still felt shame for.

  Despite the drinking and less-than-healthy eating habits, his mother had not gained an ounce in forty years and the weight had remained pretty much in its original locations. When she really put herself together, she had been a knockout at age fifty-nine. It was too bad that her liver had given out. The rest of her could have kept going for a while longer.

  As beautiful as she had been, it was her intellect that attracted most people. Yet the conversations between mother and son had been downright bizarre. His mother did not watch TV. “They call it an idiot box for good reason,” she had often said. “I’d rather read Camus. Or Goethe. Or Jean Genet. Genet makes me laugh and cry at the same time, and I don’t really know why, for there is arguably nothing humorous about Genet. His subject matter was vile. Depraved. So much suffering. Mostly autobiographical.”

  “Right. Sure, Genet, Goethe,” Web had told her several years before. “G-men, like me, sort of.” His mother had never gotten the joke.

  “But they can be wonderfully compelling—erotic, even,” she had said.

  “What can?” he had asked.

  “Vileness and depravity.”

  Web had taken a deep breath. He had wanted to tell her that he’d seen some vileness and depravity in his time that would have made old Jean Genet barf up his lunch. He had wanted to unequivocally inform his mother that these evils were nothing to joke about, because one day somebody filled to the brim with vileness and depravity might appear on her doorstep and violently end her life. Instead he had remained silent. His mother had often had that effect on him.

  Charlotte London had been a child prodigy, astounding folks with her broad-ranging intellect. She had entered college at age fourteen and earned a degree in American literature from Amherst, graduating near the top of her class. She had spoken four foreign languages fluently. After college Charlotte had traveled the world alone for almost a year, Web knew, because he had seen the photos and read her journals. And that was back in the days when young women didn’t do that sort of thing. She had even written a book chronicling her adventures, and the book was still selling to this day. Its title was London Times; London had been her maiden name, -->