Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  He parked around the corner and walked past. It was getting dark. He wished he’d been closer and at an angle where he could see if there was another car parked inside.

  Jolie had chosen the right person to look after her place while she was gone. But she didn’t know the danger. Landry did.

  He punched in a number he knew by heart. His neighbor, Louise, the sixty-seven-year-old transplant from Washington, DC, where she’d worked in the State Department.

  She answered immediately.

  “How’s Barkley?” he asked. “Is he still with us?”

  “He died two days ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Landry said. The wolfhound was old and sick, and even though it had been coming for a long time, he knew Louise was heartbroken.

  But it did clear the path for him. “Will you do me a favor?”

  Landry made the arrangements. It would entail another break-in at Jolie’s, but he knew she’d thank him later.

  If she was still alive.

  He firmed it up with Tom, the pilot who’d flown him out here. Gave him instructions where to go and when would be the best time.

  “I’ve done extractions before,” Tom said.

  “Just do it soon. I have a bad feeling.”

  He sat alone in a booth in Dina’s Diner with his own image beside him in the mirror. Wondering if Jolie was still in communication with her fellow detective and pet-sitter. Maybe she’d left for parts unknown. If Jolie was alive, if the detective passed on his message, she would text him—unless she thought it was a trap.

  If Jolie was on the run, she’d confided in this woman. Or at least, trusted her fellow detective to take care of her animals.

  Landry felt good about that—but he knew that the enemy was much more dangerous than Jolie’s pal could imagine.

  He felt it—felt it in his jaw. An electric feeling: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

  Back at the motel, he turned on the television.

  The evening news came on—local, not national. Canned music blared like trumpets at a medieval fair. It was the same canned music he’d heard on several local news shows throughout the west. He thought they must all go to the same canned-news-music provider.

  Behind the boyish-looking anchor and the female anchor in the blue suit, words flashed large on the screen: “Midtown Shooting.”

  Ted Landigran, the boyish anchor, adopted a grave expression. “We now bring you live to the scene of a shooting in midtown where three people are dead. We have a reporter on the scene. Gary, tell me what you know.”

  They went live to Gary, who looked a lot like Ted Landigran, except his hair was brown and Landigran’s was blond. He gripped the microphone hard, his voice strained. Still, he did a decent job.

  There had been shots fired and a man screaming.

  A jogger who lived in the neighborhood heard shots around three thirty in the afternoon and called the police.

  The door to what looked like a duplex was open and in the garish light of the camera Landry saw what might or might not be a small section of a blue-jeaned leg. According to the news report, there were two bodies in the front room, and one in the back bedroom.

  Back to Ted Landigran. He looked deadly serious. His handsome face had been transformed into a full frown, his eyes large and sad. When he spoke, he didn’t have the bantering tone he’d used for the Street Fair story. His voice was now measured and sad.

  Footage ran of a police officer unspooling crime scene tape from a wheel, walking carefully around the edge of the house. The duplex was probably built in the seventies—fired-brick adobe painted over with white. The camera panned to a car in the driveway, then to a couple of people inside the doorway, barely visible, wearing what looked to be hazmat suits. One big guy stood there, his latex-gloved arms hanging out from his side, ignoring the camera.

  Ted Landigran did not give the names of the three people in the duplex. But Landry could guess who they were.

  He would know soon enough if he was right.

  A knot of people stood nearby. One of them was being interviewed by the reporter. They’d all heard shots fired. They’d all heard a car drive away at a high rate of speed.

  Ten minutes later, the victims were identified. Landry didn’t recognize the names: Gary Short, James Berk, and Amy Diehl. But he recognized the photos that flashed on the screen not long after.

  Two of them—one of the men and the woman—had manned the checkpoint the day Landry had driven through, right before the third member of the group was shot to death.

  More information came in. One witness described the car, a late-model white subcompact. The car had sideswiped a pole with the right front fender.

  Landry got up, turned the TV off and the light out and stood back five feet from the window. He could see his rental car from here, the white Nissan Versa.

  It was still nose-in to the other car. But now he could see that there was a difference to the shape of the hood. Now that he looked. The hood looked bent up just a little on the right side.

  Something had changed. He didn’t know what, but he trusted his instincts. The dull electric feeling in his jaw was back.

  He grabbed the few things he’d left out in the room, once again glad he’d taken the time to leave the run bag and its contents in the storage facility. He left the TV on, and the bathroom light, and pocketed the key. He’d throw it in the nearest Dumpster he could find. He wiped down everything with a towel from the bathroom just to be on the safe side. Made sure no one saw him before walking around the end of the top floor and down the steps past the pool. It was full dark now, but there were plenty of lights. He kept to the shadows and started walking.

  Sure enough, two city police cars swooped by—no sirens but they had their flashers going and the light bars on. They slowed and turned into The Satellite INN parking lot, and gunned around the back.

  He found a place where he could watch the activity. It wasn’t perfect, just a sorry-looking tree at the edge of the back lot. He lay in the dirt and watched. One thing bothered him. Would the police know he had another vehicle?

  As time went by, he realized they didn’t. All their attention was on the Nissan Versa. In their excitement to bird-dog the vehicle used in the shooting at the checkpoint, as well as the shooting of the two other militia members, they had ignored every other car in the parking lot. They inspected the car. The tow truck showed. Officers went up the stairs to his room. Four cops on the walkway, weapons leveled, creeping alongside the wall. The two cops in front closed to either side of the door. One cop going high, one cop going low. Another cop stepped forward and banged hard on the door and stepped quickly back out of range. “Police!” he shouted. Of course there was no answer. Landry wondered if they would get the battering ram, but decided that would be overkill. One of them would just get the manager. And as he predicted, a cop took off down the steps and around the motel toward the office, and came back with the key moments later.

  Back to one cop high, one cop low. A crowd was beginning to gather in the dirt lot—people from the neighborhood and some of the guests.

  Landry noticed the SWAT team sniper, if things got out of hand. All they needed now was the big fat MRAP to come lumbering in.

  Another knot of law enforcement watched as the white Nissan was winched onto the bed of the tow truck.

  He glanced back at the open doorway of his former motel room. SWAT in black. Cops taking the rear. All of the cops were with the sheriff’s department. It seemed to Landry that a whole lot of nothing was happening, although everyone was quick about it.

  They would see the car rental agreement for Chris Keeley, but that would be as far as it went.

  Cops stood around the white car. Peering in the windows. Talking about it to one another.

  They knew what they had: this was the white car used in the shooting at t
he checkpoint. You could almost see the wheels turning in their heads. If this was the car driven by the shooter of the militia members who’d witnessed the shooting at the checkpoint, then it stood to reason that it might also belong to the checkpoint shooter, who had killed the other two to cover up his crime.

  Everything nice and neat.

  Easy peasy.

  There couldn’t be two white subcompact cars coming through the checkpoint around the same time. Too much of a coincidence. This had to be the car, and Chris Keeley had to be the shooter. And so they would look for Chris Keeley, even if they didn’t know who he was or why he had gone on a crime spree.

  Their theory: Chris Keeley had come back to eliminate the witnesses.

  Landry thought about his own alibi—his stay in jail—and realized he didn’t have one—not for this afternoon. The two militia members in the house were killed after he was released.

  The news said the shots had been fired at three thirty. And he had been out of jail since three p.m., give or take five minutes.

  He had a white car fitting the description. He had been seen around town. He had slept with the FBI agent. He had been arrested and detained for no plausible reason. Then he had been put into an empty cell pod with a psychopath.

  For a guy who flew under the radar, Landry realized he’d made plenty of enemies already.

  Starting and ending with Agent Vitelli.

  By two in the morning, the cops were done. Everyone cleared out except for one unlucky cop stuck with guard duty. He stood on the walkway outside the room, slapping his nightstick against his palm and watching the moths play ring-around-the-rosie near the light by the door.

  They must have thought Landry was long gone. If he was smart, he would be.

  But Jolie was still missing. She’d called him for help and he wouldn’t abandon her now.

  He still had the van. Everything he’d brought with him other than the clothes he’d changed out of had been moved to the storage bay.

  The white car had done its job. Now it was time for the blue van to shine. First, though, he would wait to see how this played out. He wouldn’t go to the van for a while.

  And so he walked.

  He found another motel, this one on a side street off the main drag on the other side of town, one of those old motor courts that was even older than The Satellite INN. This one had survived the forties and fifties. There was a sleepy quality to the place. He liked it. The rail-thin man at the desk had a Middle Eastern accent. He also had very white teeth and an engaging smile. He gave Landry the key to the unit at the back of the courtyard.

  An oval expanse of lawn sat in the center of the lot, units on either side and two additional units at the end, which formed a “U.” Croquet hoops were set up inside the grassy oval.

  Inside his room it was dark and smelled old. The bed was made with a white chenille bedspread, a yarn saguaro cactus in the center. Quaint. Landry had a feeling that this was a place where people minded their own business. There might be a sex trade going on here, or other nefarious dealings, or it might just be the kind of place where the well heeled would never go.

  Landry sat on the lumpy bed. He speculated about Carla Vitelli’s motive for targeting him. Maybe she wanted to sleep with him, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she just wanted to check him out. A sex marathon was a funny way to check someone out, but stranger things had happened to him. She’d seemed insatiable at the time, but Landry wasn’t so invested in his sexual prowess that he couldn’t discard that theory. Maybe she’d faked her passion.

  But could she fake her anger?

  Maybe.

  What did Agent Vitelli want from him? He thought back to the donut shop. He knew she was FBI and he’d gone out of his way to interact with her.

  He had hoped she would tell him something about her investigation, but instead there had been the sex marathon.

  Followed by her mugging for the hunt cam.

  Landry didn’t know what to make of this. She was smart enough to figure out he was looking for Jolie. She was smart enough to find the hunt cam, and she was rash enough to show him that she’d found it. But after all that, there had been nothing.

  Except for his arrest. Except for the fact he had been put into that cell pod with Earl—alone with Earl.

  Which was it, though? Did she want Earl to kill him or at least beat him up badly, or did she want to set him up for the shooting deaths of three people?

  Landry got up and washed his face. The idea that she’d kill two people to link him to the checkpoint shooting, just to get back at him, was outlandish. Crazy.

  But the Nissan was a generic type of subcompact, similar to many other subcompacts from the same year. Landry had thought it out the day he’d driven into town. He’d decided the chances of anyone noticing one white subcompact in a parking lot full of similar cars would be minimal—statistically.

  He’d been wrong about that.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. The eyes in the mirror met him dead-on.

  His Nissan Versa had been in pristine condition yesterday.

  So when did it sustain front-end damage?

  Chapter 10

  The crunch of car tires on gravel outside awakened him. He glanced at his watch: just past ten a.m. The sun would be up, but the cheap motel room was still dark.

  He peered out between the drapes. A police car drove through, without stopping.

  Last night Landry had parked the blue van in front of an empty motel room on the west side of the motel’s U-shaped drive-around. The police car drove right past it and followed the gravel lane back out the other leg of the U, waited for traffic to clear, and drove back out onto the street.

  They were looking for him. They were looking for Chris Keeley, to be exact. The guy who had almost killed a fellow county jail inmate.

  The guy who had been set up to take the fall for the deaths of the two militia members.

  Landry stepped into the shower and was disappointed that the water was tepid and stayed that way. He was pretty sure he had the whole picture now. Someone shot the one guy at the checkpoint. That same someone boosted Landry’s rental car and shot the other two militia members—the man and woman who had witnessed the shooting. He must have worried that they would talk to the police.

  After the second shooting, he’d returned Landry’s car to the motel parking lot and called in the tip.

  There was only one person he’d spent any time with here in Branch: the FBI agent. Only one person who knew about him—

  Their time together had ended badly. He’d thought he had seen the last of her, but then she’d shown up on the hunt cam at Jolie’s place and taunted him.

  Had she been watching him before they met?

  He remembered her saying: “How long will it take for me to find out what you’re up to?”

  Not long after that, he was arrested.

  And not long after that, he was moved deeper into the jail to share a cell pod with a psychopath bent on killing him.

  Did someone want to kill him?

  Did she want to kill him?

  He’d managed to turn the tables, putting Earl in the hospital.

  Instead of further punishment, he was released. He was arrested for no reason, moved deeper into the county jail for no reason, and released for no reason he could see.

  His rental car had been damaged and used in a drive-by shooting. If he hadn’t been on his game, he would be back in jail right now. He would be charged with first-degree murder.

  It had to be Carla Vitelli.

  He wondered if she’d really been assigned to Jolie’s case. He had assumed she was the FBI agent sent to investigate Jolie’s disappearance, but maybe she wasn’t.

  If Earl had beaten him to a pulp, he would be in the hospital now. In the hospital, or dead.

  Vitelli couldn’t have it bot
h ways. She couldn’t have him beaten up to teach him a lesson, but then try to pin the militia members’ shooting on him.

  That made no sense. If he was injured badly, or killed, he would not be around to take the fall for the militia members’ deaths.

  She pulled strings in this corrupt little city to get him thrown into jail with Earl to teach him a lesson or out and out kill him.

  When they couldn’t kill him, they decided to release him and frame him for the deaths of the militia members. This accomplished two things: get rid of Landry, and kill the witnesses.

  He dried off from his shower and pulled on the shorts he’d worn a couple of days ago.

  Something was wadded up in the right pocket.

  Landry pulled out the crumpled leaflet, “Choose Jesus!”

  He chucked the religious tract into the wastepaper basket—three points—and sat on the bed facing the mirror, listening to the faint breath of traffic out on the street. Thinking about the FBI agent, wherever she might be. Thinking about her fiancé. Thinking about Earl.

  Jerry Boam. The name intruded. Landry knew himself well enough to know there was a reason why it did.

  Landry pictured the Circle K and the tree and the shade that concealed his Nissan Versa.

  How had Boam known he was there?

  He saw in his mind’s eye the police cars speeding past, heading to the site of the shooting, and later, driving much slower on the way back. They had driven straight past the Circle K. Landry thought this was because they’d expect the shooter to put as much distance between himself and the scene as possible.

  Probably twenty cars had driven past. Landry had decided to stay put there for two reasons: one, he was waiting for Jolie, and two, his car could not be seen. He’d even walked out onto the road and looked for it from both directions, and had satisfied himself on that point.