And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  Pyle, adjusting his position on Ethan’s bench, eliminates the air gap between them. Ethan feels a beefy right biceps pressing into his narrower left one.

  “But there are some things we are sure about,” says Daugherty, recapturing Ethan’s attention. “For example, we know you rented a car on Miami Beach today. We know that Don Aldridge talked to you about Jessica today. We know that just after you two talked you did not return your car to Miami Beach but drove forty miles north out of your way. Can you explain the trip?”

  “Am I obligated to?”

  “Not unless you want an obstruction of justice charge,” Pyle tells Ethan’s left ear.

  Turning from Daugherty to Pyle, Ethan releases his irritation. “Don’t think you’re intimidating me, asshole.”

  Pyle’s eyes go flat. A millisecond later Ethan sees, peripherally, the big agent’s far hand arc over the tabletop. But Daugherty, with a smack, stops the open-handed slap before it reaches Ethan’s face. “That’s enough,” the older man says, and Pyle withdraws the hand. Ethan momentarily considers whether this is all just part of their good cop, bad cop game. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” Daugherty says. “You will have to come with us.”

  “What’s the charge?” Ethan says. He has his rights . . . he thinks.

  Daugherty gives Ethan a questioning look. “There’s no charge. Oh, that’s right. You probably don’t know that we can hold you without charges for forty-eight hours.”

  Before Ethan can reply Pyle yanks him out of the booth—Pyle must outweigh him by forty pounds of muscle—and slams Ethan facedown onto the tabletop. Ethan’s mouth cracks the edge of the serving tray, and behind his back he feels metal cut tightly into his wrists. When Ethan realizes that he’s handcuffed and being frisked, he remembers Don Aldridge’s last words to him—This ain’t no game.

  “It’s okay, people. We’re FBI,” Daugherty says generally. From the corner of an eye Ethan can see the frightened onlookers. “Let’s move it,” he tells Pyle.

  Propelling Ethan into the parking lot, Pyle manhandles him the way UIB security did on the day Ethan was fired. Ethan stumbles but the big man’s grip keeps him upright, until he shoves Ethan headfirst into the backseat of an overheated car, a red car. Agent Pyle slams the door, locking him in the swelter.

  Ethan pushes himself upright and twists around to look out the car’s back window. The two agents are heatedly but quietly talking behind the trunk. Daugherty is wearing a sour look and after a minute Pyle gets in on the driver’s side.

  “Where are you taking me?” Ethan asks—and tastes metal. Wiping his mouth on the shoulder of his shirt, he smears it with blood. “I’m hurt,” he says.

  “Quiet,” Pyle says, then starts the engine.

  Minutes pass. The car’s climate control exhausts the swelter. Then Daugherty joins them. He rests an elbow on the front seat back and half turns to Ethan. His face, in profile, is gray. “You could have made things easier on yourself.”

  Aware that he will spout gibberish if he replies, Ethan bites his tongue. But his hands are tingling from lack of blood and his desire to be unhandcuffed is immense. Already his decision to be silent about Jessica has weakened. What, after all, does he know about her situation . . . about any situation? Less and less it seems. Jessica might be a threat to herself. It might be wrong of him not to help these men.

  Pyle twists the car out of its parking space and Ethan topples onto the floor between the front and rear seats.

  “Because if you think,” Daugherty says, looking down at him and apparently continuing a thought Ethan has missed, “that I’ve spent the last year in pursuit of this woman for no good reason”—the agent reaches over the seat back and presses an index finger against a vein in Ethan’s neck—“then, my friend, you are dangerously mistaken.” Daugherty is breathing hard.

  “You okay?” Pyle asks his partner.

  “Drive,” Daugherty says, releasing his finger. “Someplace secluded.”

  “The Everglades?”

  “Gator land it is.”

  “This is bullshit,” Ethan mumbles.

  “Bullshit?” Daugherty says. “I’ll show you bullshit.” He turns to Pyle. “Bring up that picture on your phone. Let’s show our guest some of the enhanced interrogation you applied in Afghanistan, just so he knows where his noncooperation is taking him.”

  “You’re the boss,” Pyle says.

  What Ethan sees on the BlackBerry, looking up at it from the car’s rear floor, is not an image he can easily absorb. Daugherty is showing him a naked, bearded man with his arms bound behind his back. The man is standing crouched and has a bit of a belly. Beneath the belly, a penis, a rather small penis but one that is quite erect, pokes from a matted nest of pubic hair.

  “So here’s how this will go,” Pyle, at the wheel, says. “We work on a person’s weak spots. Muslims, for example, are particularly attuned to personal shame. If, say, you have a Haji in custody who is not well endowed, you offer him some green tea laced with Viagra, strip him bare ass, and then get a female interrogator with a superb Afghani accent to comment on his shortcomings in Pashto. It’s a process.”

  “Bullshit,” Ethan manages to whisper.

  “What’s your weak spot, Winter?” Pyle asks him. “That dead girlfriend of yours. Oh, yeah, we know all about her. But don’t worry, I doubt she killed herself because of you. I mean she was a real babe, and man, did you ever look at yourself in a mirror?”

  “That’s enough,” Daugherty says. Pyle’s BlackBerry is buzzing and Daugherty studies its screen.

  “Like hell that’s enough,” says Pyle. “We’re finishing this today.”

  “Have you been communicating with Wagner behind my back?” Daugherty asks his partner unhappily.

  “Yeah. So what? He likes me,” Pyle says. “More than you.”

  “He sent you an address. Aldridge’s cellmate just gave it up.” Daugherty looks over his seat back and down at Ethan. “Your lucky day, isn’t it?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” says Pyle hitting the brakes. The car skids a little and then Pyle bounces it over the landscaped median. The vehicle stops sideways in the oncoming lane. Fortunately there’s a break in traffic.

  “That was dramatic,” Daugherty says.

  “End of the line, shithead,” Pyle says exiting the car. Then he is pulling Ethan off the backseat floor. The cuffs come off and blood rushes like nettles into Ethan’s hands.

  Pyle gets back in the car without shutting either side door. When he hits the gas the doors slam by themselves. Ethan, standing in the road, wonders how much he could have taken before telling the agents Jessica’s address. He hopes it would have been a lot.

  A BUS, LIKE a trained elephant, kneels to take him aboard. Seated by a window Ethan gazes at the gated communities and sun-bleached strip malls, the plots of land cleared for storm drainage or imminent development. The bus passes over the Florida Turnpike and glides down below the tree line. Ethan presses a yellow strip bordering his window and makes his ride pull over. It can’t be twenty minutes since Daugherty and Pyle released him. There might still be time. He crosses the street and gets into his leased Hyundai.

  His phone’s GPS steers him into a neighborhood of cinderblock homes with tar-paper roofs. Ahead, above in the treetops, a red glow hiccoughs off palm fronds.

  You don’t have to do this, he tells himself. You can just turn around.

  But he doesn’t. Ethan pulls up a few houses from where the emergency vehicles flicker. A senior in a quilt robe glares as he crosses her gravel. Then the flashing fire truck, leaving, eases through the spectators. Ethan goes into the small crowd, which stands back from a stationary ambulance that silently winks its various lights.

  “What’s up?” asks a shirtless twenty-something in Bermudas. The man’s not talking to Ethan but to his companion.

  “There were these guys looked like detectives.” The companion, barefoot and in jeans, points his chin toward a pink, two-story apartment building with an exterior staircase.


  “They come for that chick?” asks Bermudas.

  “What chick?”

  “Lives upstairs. Lotta tats. Seen her walking a dog.”

  “Never saw any chick.”

  “Skinny. But doable.”

  Ethan looks up at the staircase landing. A man in a blue shirt is slowly backing out of an open door there. He’s supporting one end of a stretcher.

  You are part of this, Ethan’s conscience says. She’s Zoe’s sister.

  Straps hold a draped body as the paramedic angles the stretcher to get it onto the narrow staircase. Then the other lifting paramedic appears—but Ethan cannot see the victim’s face, only the breathing mask that hides it. Pyle appears at the landing’s door and follows the stretcher bearers downstairs.

  Ethan feels, then, what he felt when he first saw Zoe, crossing in front of that cab—a longing, a desire to save her. He can save Jessica. He will. This time and from now on, he will do the right thing.

  But as the stretcher comes closer he sees that the hair and eyes of the victim are not female. It’s a man lying on the stretcher. Daugherty. Ethan is standing only two feet away as the paramedics pass with their burden. But Daugherty’s dark coffee eyes don’t see him. They are staring up at the sky without blinking.

  “What happened?” Ethan asks Pyle, who is still following the stretcher.

  “Back off.”

  “Where’s Jessica?” Ethan steps in front of Pyle, and Pyle shoulders him out of the way.

  Seconds later a siren blip warns the bystanders and chunks of lawn fly as the ambulance spins onto the tarmac. Pyle follows fast behind in the red car. Ethan looks back to the second-floor landing, at the open door there, and heads for the staircase.

  “You looking for Jessica?’ someone says.

  Ethan turns around. It’s a heavyset man in a guayabera.

  “THANKS,” ETHAN SAYS. He takes the iced tea from Kelso’s wife. She is slender and wearing a blue dress that exposes her tanned knees. Ethan is in her kitchen seated at a table covered by a plastic cloth.

  “Have you known Jessica a long time?” the woman asks.

  “I was a friend of her sister’s.”

  “Was a friend?”

  “She passed away.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” says the woman.

  The sound of a toilet flush comes through the drywall. Kelso, who had introduced himself to Ethan as Jessica’s landlord, rejoins them.

  “So you think they were real FBI?” Kelso asks. “They showed me ID, but you can fake documents at Kinko’s. I know that much from renting apartments.”

  “Does that mean you didn’t tell them where to find Jessica?” Ethan asks.

  “I made out like she was home and brought them to her door.”

  “Even though you knew she’d left?”

  “Once you start lying there’s no turning back. I pretended a little surprise when I knocked and got no answer. That’s when the big one kicked in the door. I don’t know what he was trying to prove since I had my key out. Well, once we were inside anyone could see no one’s living there anymore—there’s no personal stuff, no dishes in the sink. Jessica left it neat as a pin. That was when the other guy . . .”

  “Daugherty.”

  “He kind of drifts over to a wall, gets real close to it. His back’s to me and I can’t figure out what he’s looking at. But then his partner helps him lie down on the floor. The man’s face had turned blue.” Kelso shakes his head. “Paramedics when they came called in a cardiac.”

  “Teddy,” Kelso’s wife says. “Show him the note.”

  Kelso studies her before reaching into his back pocket. “Found this under our door earlier. I’m going to burn it.”

  “But suppose it’s evidence?” asks Kelso’s wife. “You could get in trouble.”

  He hands Ethan the sheet. It’s torn from a restaurant pad. The handwriting on it is cursive, precise.

  Mr. and Mrs. Kelso,

  I am afraid I have two pieces of bad news. One is about Skittles. She got hit by a car yesterday. It was my fault since I tied her up outside of a grocery store so I could shop. She got free somehow. You know she was a good dog. You don’t know how much I’m going to miss her.

  My second news is about betraying your trust. Though I did sign a lease I cannot uphold my end of our agreement. I must give up your nice apartment. Knowing your generosity I expect you will want to return my deposit. But please do not worry about the money. I am moving on to another phase in my life and will not need it.

  Best wishes,

  Jessica Aldridge

  “So tell me. Who doesn’t need money wherever they’re going?” Kelso asks. “She must be in a lot of trouble.”

  “I think her note sounds depressed,” says Mrs. Kelso. “Maybe we should tell the police.”

  Kelso slips Jessica’s note from Ethan’s fingers. “I don’t know,” he says, staring at it.

  After a moment, “Burn it,” Ethan says. He is channeling Don Aldridge. “Let her stay free.”

  Getting a nod from his wife Kelso takes the letter to the sink and strikes a match. Ethan watches as Jessica’s words, the only thing of hers he’s touched, become ash.

  CHAPTER 58

  Homestead Air Force Base, Reeger Air Force Base

  There is no clock on the wall and an officer has taken Jessica’s phone so she doesn’t know how long she’s been in here. The room has a conference table surrounded by plush high-backed chairs. On the walls hang framed photographs of aircraft. It’s a windowless room, but Jessica is not exactly a prisoner. The door is unlocked and she is free to roam to the restroom, water fountain, and vending machines in the corridor. Whenever she does, a lieutenant, stationed at a pass desk farther up the hallway, looks up from his Airman magazine. But since Jessica keeps to her end of the building he’s not too interested in her activities, perhaps because she’s come in on her own volition.

  Surprisingly, sirens did not go off when Jessica presented herself at the airbase’s gatehouse. The airman on duty, after Jessica told him of being chased across the country by the FBI and of wanting to turn herself in to her own people, looked her up and down and figured her for a nutcase. Jessica told him how she had piloted the UAV on the botched al-Yarisi strike.

  “Yeah,” he’d said. “Tell me about the aircraft.”

  “A Reaper. A 950-horsepower turboprop. Flies like a hawk compared to the Predator. Goes twice as fast, twice as high, and almost twice as far.”

  Her knowledge had little effect on the airman, even after she described the Reaper’s Hellfire payload—missiles they’d called angels, as in angels of God and all the wrath that suggests. Finally, though, the guard made a call that brought a staff sergeant, Briggs, in a long blue pickup bearing the Air Force security forces logo. “Climb aboard, Sergeant,” he’d said.

  Briggs drove her past a baseball diamond and a parking lot filled with RVs and small boats on trailers, amusements of off-duty airmen.

  “There’s my Whaler,” Briggs said, indicating a fifteen footer with a Merc outboard.

  “Nice,” said Jessica.

  A longing grabbed her, a homesickness for the life she had built in the Air Force and then lost. By the time she swallowed the ache, Briggs had pulled up to a building next to an airstrip. Here he handed Jessica off to the lieutenant, who has been her uncommunicative monitor for the past hours.

  Clearly there have been orders to quarantine her. So Jessica waits patiently. She will not hurry whatever decisions are being made about her future. She will live quietly on vending machine food—three Milky Ways so far—for as long as the powers that be want to keep her here. Her only problem is that she’s crashing from the sugar and has an urge to rest her lolling head in her arms on the conference table—will it end up being her interrogator’s interview table? she wonders. She lays her head down and shuts her eyes, planning to do so for only a few seconds.

  In her dreams, Skittles runs away from her into the ocean. When she goes in to rescue her,
a lifeguard pushes her under the waves, where she discovers she can breathe. This bit of illogic makes Jessica aware that she is dreaming.

  “Sergeant Aldridge,” a soft dream voice says. And then again, “Sergeant Aldridge.” The voice is real.

  Groggy, Jessica blinks coming out of her nap and quickly stands and snaps a salute—a reflex that’s apparently still in place when she’s addressed by a superior to her former rank. “Yes, ma’am,” Jessica says to a young blonde woman with pulled-back hair and a sun-reddened face. Her uniform carries captain’s bars.

  “At ease.”

  Jessica relaxes, or tries to. But her salute has hiked her sleeve and now the scabbed tats on her wrist show—seven more laserings until they’re gone. Even if she’s no longer an airman, being on base with nonregulation ink feels wrong.

  “Someone wants to speak with you,” the captain says. She has brought in a landline phone and finds a place to plug it in. “Sir,” she says to the receiver, “Sergeant Aldridge is available now. . . . Yes, sir.”

  The captain gives Jessica the receiver. “Hello,” she speaks into the electronic void.

  “Jessica,” a familiar voice comes back. Its owner, however, has never before called her by her first name.

  “Colonel Voigt?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you, Sergeant. Glad you’re back with us.”

  “Yes, sir. I . . . I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve caused you.”

  “Trouble? Well, you did blow a hole in the noncom UAV pilot program. But you haven’t caused me any trouble, not on a personal level.”

  “Sir?”

  “That’s enough of the sirs.”

  “Yes—” Jessica says, though she continues to stand at attention.

  “Are you alone yet?”

  Jessica looks around and sees that the captain has slipped from the room. “I’m alone.”

  “You’re in a wing conference room with encrypted phone lines. Not even the NSA can unscramble what we’re saying. We can talk freely, so let’s. I hear you’ve been on the run.”