Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  She lay flat on the ground and squinted at the road. The car came closer, the shuddering engine loud—

  But still she couldn’t see it.

  She needed to make sense of this—now. Someone was looking for her.

  She was surprised, but not as surprised as she would have thought. Jolie disciplined herself to clamp down on the adrenaline, use her head. She knew the car. She knew the owner.

  The car was now right in front of her. Virtually invisible. But then she saw something—a diffused red glow, possibly the interior of the vehicle, barely there. She couldn’t see the car but she could see negative space: what resembled a cutout of the inside of the vehicle, dim but there. Just enough light to illuminate some of the driver inside.

  As the car came abreast of the Circle K she could see the ghost of the door strut, the shape of the window, one or two shapes reflected off the dash inside.

  But nothing else.

  Jolie was ninety percent sure the car belonged to the kid, but there were plenty of black muscle cars in this town. She could be wrong. She needed to expand her horizons, think of who else might have a car like that. She couldn’t assume anything at this point.

  Think! Who did she know who owned a muscle car? Plenty, at the sheriff’s office. It seemed every other guy she knew had bought into the muscle car dream: late model Mustangs, Chargers, Challengers, Camaros. Many of them black, silver, or charcoal gray. Mean machines.

  And the sheriff’s department was full of practical jokers. Their favorite victims were the women cops in the department, which was probably the way it was everywhere.

  Maybe that was it, one of the guys playing a practical joke on her, but she didn’t think so.

  Whoever had come to her house meant business.

  The car slid past like a shark cruising through murky water. No light delineated its shape except for the inner cherry glow, so faint she sometimes didn’t see it at all and the whole thing just . . . disappeared except for the noise. She could track it better with her ears than her eyes. Past the Circle K, the car picked up speed and hit the afterburners, the red glow turning into a thin trail as the car accelerated.

  Then it was gone, rumbling off into the distance.

  Now you see it, now you don’t.

  The moon had broken through the clouds; it was bright enough to see where she was going now. Jolie broke for the fallow field behind her, hoping for an undulation in the ground, a fold that would hide her—

  And found it. A quarter mile away, after a hard run, she landed stomach-down in a small ditch.

  Cold out here.

  Minutes dragged by.

  It seemed like hours.

  Just as her heart rate returned to normal, she heard the noise of the engine again.

  The muscle car cruised back the way it had come. Almost as if the thing were an entity unto itself, patiently stalking her. The loud engine reverberated. She knew from that sound that if push came to shove, it would scream like a catamount. She peered over the hump of earth and grass and looked.

  The ghost car turned in to the Circle K.

  At least she thought it did—

  Keep your head down!

  Jolie realized she’d squeezed her eyes shut. It took every trick she knew to open them. She was that scared.

  The driver cut the engine. Jolie heard the creak of a car door opening, then the stealthy click of the door latching shut. The sound of shoes on gravel. Sound carried out in the boonies.

  Voices. She couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  She recognized one of them, though—

  The man shouted, “Jolie! I know you’re out here. Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk?”

  Don’t move.

  “Jolie? I just want to talk to you. Don’t play games.”

  She heard someone else talking on a phone, but couldn’t hear what was being said. Then: “Where the hell did she go?”

  Another voice said, “She could be in the next county by now.”

  Jolie recognized this voice, too. For a moment she was stunned, but then she realized she’d been expecting it all along.

  “If she knows what’s good for her, she’s already gone.”

  The car door opened and clicked shut again. The engine gunned. The car pulled out onto the highway. Jolie couldn’t help but look at it—

  What she could see. Just the dark that was darker than the night, and in the center of it a faint infrared glow.

  Then the lights came on and the car arrowed down the highway, the taillights eventually swallowed by the dark.

  Chapter 2

  San Clemente, California

  “Tennis balls.”

  “Cool, huh?”

  Cyril Landry held the lime-green tennis ball, aware that he was not hefting it with confidence.

  Which was unlike him.

  “Don’t worry,” the cricket-like man in the gaudy Hawaiian shirt said. “It won’t go off on its own. Has to be activated by the racket.”

  “Not any kind of racket,” Landry said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  The man in the Hawaiian shirt nodded and his gray ponytail nodded right along with him. “That’s correct. You’re right as rain. Otherwise . . .”

  He left it open to conjecture.

  Landry had gone out for a day of paddleboarding, but as the sun dropped low over the water, he’d stowed the board and paddle into his Subaru and wandered into downtown San Clemente for a bite to eat.

  Even at this early hour the restaurants were crowded, so Landry ducked into this cubbyhole of an antique shop, with an eye on the Beachcomber Bar and Grille across the street, hoping a table would open up.

  A friend had told him about the old hippie. Landry wasn’t in the market for anything right now, but curiosity had finally gotten the better of him. His friend had said, “You won’t believe this guy. He was in Nam. Some elite squad, what I heard. He sells knickknacks and the occasional Hellfire missile.”

  His friend had been joking about the Hellfire missile. At least Landry thought he was.

  But once Cricket Man, aka Terrence Lark, knew he was for real, he’d shown him some nice stuff.

  Amazing stuff.

  “If you’re interested, let me know,” Lark said, before tucking the tennis ball reverently back into the box with its mates.

  After his solo dinner, Landry walked by the shops and restaurants down by the water. The whitewashed stucco buildings dated from the 1920s. Almost all of them had red tile roofs. The Spanish colonial-style look had been a requirement when the resort town was built and incorporated in 1928. At the time the town was called “San Clemente by the Sea.”

  San Clemente appealed to Landry. He liked that it felt like a small town tucked inside a large sprawling chain of cities and freeways—quickly accessible to airports and ways in and out of LA.

  He always looked up the celebrities and famous people in the towns he decided to live in, and San Clemente was no different. San Clemente didn’t have a lot of notable natives. Richard Nixon’s Western White House was here. But otherwise, the pickings were scarce: Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney, Jr., Cara Fawn—a porn star—and Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr. Such a beautiful place—idyllic. You’d think San Clemente could have done better than that.

  On Friday night, the street was a hive of locals and tourists. Every shop was open at night. Throngs of people bubbled along the sidewalks like packing peanuts on a conveyer belt, only these packing peanuts were dressed in T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops, and swim trunks. There were surfers, baby boomers, beach bums, working stiffs, Maserati owners, chefs, charter boat captains, and the younger families who came from the bland neighborhoods across the San Diego Freeway where houses were measured more in square feet than originality. Landry did not like the fact that there were more of these houses every day, perche
d on the buff and gray hills like Monopoly hotels. But who was he to judge? The millennials made good money. Landry saw them coming into town for dinner and shopping with their spacious SUVs and collapsible strollers and very cute offspring.

  Landry blended in, just another beach bum/surfer type. Every picture tells a story and he made his own. His longish brown hair had gold streaks in it, which he had applied himself. A goatee concealed the lower half of his face. Even the car he drove, the 2000 Subaru Outback, fit the mold. He rented a seventies-era bungalow on Avenida De La Estrella, a short walk up the hill from the main drag and the pier and the ocean.

  San Clemente was easygoing and forgiving. He had plenty of time for his new pastime-bordering-on-passion: paddleboarding.

  Del Mar was a short drive up the freeway. He could watch his brother’s racehorses run, although he missed being on the backside in the mornings. But he couldn’t drive in through the horsemen’s gate. He did not have a license. To apply for one, he would have to be fingerprinted.

  Worse, he would be recognized right away.

  Landry walked up the steps to his bungalow. He scanned the pocket yard, looking at every potential hiding place, his roof and the roof next door, his door and the door next door. Finally, he ducked under the banana tree and, key ready, eyeballed the small pebble he’d set on the middle of the doorstep. It was still in place. Only then did he unlock the door. He pushed the door open and stood to the side. SOP—Standard Operating Procedure.

  Inside the bungalow, Landry’s gaze made a visual sweep of the room—the configuration of the furnishings. Everything looked the same. He eyeballed the kitchen alcove. Nothing had been touched.

  He took the hallway to his bedroom, opened the walk-in closet and reached into the jacket pocket of his navy suit for his other cell phone. Walking back into the living room, he punched in the number for the answering service and entered the security code.

  As he waited, he stood inside the doorway looking out at the patch of ocean off to the north. The air, redolent of the ocean, blew past him, fluttering the banana tree leaves. The sky had turned the color of a red plum. It would be a nice night to sit out on the terrace with a beer.

  The message played.

  “It’s Jolie. I’m at an old Circle K outside Branch, New Mexico. Mile Marker 138. I need you to come. Hurry.”

  He made a note of the time, date, and number, so the phone company could track the location, then punched it in. The phone rang but there was no answer.

  Chapter 3

  Bill Cannaly, a former Special Forces helo pilot and one of the good guys, connected Landry with a pilot friend of his in LA who agreed to fly him in to the Las Cruces International Airport. The first thing he’d said when Landry contacted him was, “You have a pink sheet?’”

  After 9/11, passengers carrying a firearm on every plane in the United States, private or commercial, required a permission sheet also known as a “pink sheet.”

  A few months ago, when he’d had a little free time, Landry had devoted a day to producing a stack of twenty pink sheets. They had to look official, so he’d taken his time to do it right. He’d manufactured pink sheets for every occasion: military, paramilitary (mostly police), private security—you name it. It was intricate but mind-numbing work. By the end of the day he had twenty pink sheets, and all of them would pass muster as legitimate.

  The big problem was the hologram that appeared on every sheet. It wasn’t easy making a fake look like the real thing.

  The gold-leaf holograms were difficult to reproduce. Landry had fudged a little and used a combination of zinc and some pieces of gold leaf cut from one-hundred-dollar bills.

  For this flight, Landry chose the dummy company he had christened Secret Circle Security. He went through the security area, producing his H&K MP5, and a .32 Automatic Colt Pistol so small it could fit inside the span of his hand.

  Tom, the pilot, was a good guy—solid. He’d been in Iraq around the same time Landry had. All the way to Las Cruces he recounted harrowing stories of near misses and fellow pilots now dead.

  Landry said nothing of his own exploits.

  They arrived in Las Cruces just past eight o’clock in the morning.

  It was already a scorcher.

  Using the alias Chris Keeley, Landry rented a white Nissan Versa. No one would look twice at a modest compact rental like the Versa. There wasn’t much of a selection. He had a choice between a red and a white one, and chose the white. Red attracted attention. White was not only a generic color, but it deflected heat. In the summer, New Mexico was hot.

  Landry took a few photographs of the car with his phone. It was expected these days—no one in his right mind would rent a car without at least a cursory look. Landry wanted to be seen as a typical customer.

  “How you doing?” the rental car employee said, a hint of desperation in his tone. Four minutes under the hot sun and the guy was already wilting.

  “Almost through.” Landry wanted to be unmemorably memorable, like any other anal-retentive car renter who resented the idea of being charged an exorbitant fee for a pea-gravel dent.

  Landry drove west on Interstate 10. He passed the turnoff to Tejar, where Jolie Burke had worked previously as a sheriff’s deputy. She’d changed counties, although you wouldn’t know it from the terrain. This part of New Mexico looked like any other part of the Chihuahuan Desert. Miles and miles of greasewood, pale mountains like cardboard cutouts in the distance, and parched-looking grassland. Branch, New Mexico, was located on a state road northeast of Deming.

  Landry used to stop for lunch in Deming when he drove cross-country. Used to.

  Then he’d read about the cops there, a story about a man suspected of carrying drugs secreted in his person. He was subjected to two forced colonoscopies and various other invasive indignities. The police found no drugs and were slapped with a lawsuit for 1.6 million dollars. The man prevailed—eventually. Years later.

  Landry had always thought of New Mexico as a laid-back state, not as tightly wound as neighboring Arizona. But he’d been reading about bad cops in Albuquerque, the state capital.

  Maybe the cops in New Mexico had watched one too many episodes of Breaking Bad.

  He took the exit for Branch. The road looked just like most of the roads he’d driven through in this part of New Mexico.

  He used a burner phone to call the pay-phone number Jolie had given him. He didn’t expect an answer. He had tried her six times before. She had never called him back. Maybe she’d run out of change making the first long-distance call. Maybe she didn’t have her purse with her or a credit card. But he’d keep trying the number on the off chance she was in the vicinity and could answer.

  This time, though, someone picked up on the first ring.

  Landry squinted at the blue mountains in the distance. There was a mirage of gray water just underneath them, appearing and disappearing like quicksilver. He kept his eyes on the road and listened to the silence. Imagined he could hear breathing. Like the watery mirage in the distance, the silence stretched out.

  He listened but said nothing.

  The phone disconnected.

  He removed the burner phone’s battery and threw it out the window. Landry drove through a short mountain pass and was met with more grassland and fallow fields, the road a black ribbon to the next range of low mountains. The sunlight picked out a glint or two of metal at their base.

  Cars.

  Police?

  Landry knew the traffic laws in New Mexico. Unpaved dirt roads were forty-five miles per hour. Two-lane paved roads in New Mexico were fifty-five miles an hour. This was a two-lane paved road, so he kept to a steady fifty-eight mph. No one would pull him over for that, and if he stuck with the speed limit in this flat country he might actually draw attention.

  The mirage in the center of the road resolved itself into three vehicles.

&nb
sp; Three Chevy Suburbans, approximately two miles ahead. All of them dark in color, grouped near the road’s junction with a ranch road that wandered off to the right.

  The checkpoint looked official, but you never knew. He glanced at the H&K MP5 and the .32 Automatic Colt Pistol he’d brought on the plane. It lay on the seat beside him in plain sight. This was ranch country. The laws were lax, and the police wouldn’t look twice.

  If they were police.

  More likely, if it was a checkpoint, he would encounter Border Patrol. This area wasn’t that far from the Mexican border. The grouping of vehicles ahead didn’t look like Border Patrol, though.

  Orange traffic cones spread out across the road—one for each lane. But there were no temporary speed limit signs intended to bring the driver’s speed down to a crawl. Landry squinted against the glimmer of the road in the sunlight. Yes, two cones. One planted in the center of the right lane and one in the left. For all intents and purposes blocking the road.

  Something wrong here.

  Manhunt? Police action? But the Suburbans didn’t look right. One of them dated back to the nineties.

  Militias. He remembered reading an article about a group in Nevada. He knew that there were people just like them in a number of the western states, New Mexico in particular.

  There were two kinds of militias. One, a military force raised by the civilian population to supplement a regular army during an emergency.

  And two, a military force engaged in rebel or terrorist activities, often in direct opposition to a regular army.

  In Nevada people dressed up like their idea of soldiers, stopped people at “checkpoints” and asked them for ID. They were not police officers. They were not sheriff’s deputies. They were not U.S. marshals. They were not state police.

  Many of them were cop wannabes.

  Fakes.

  His mother would have said they had a “case of arrested development.”