For the Trees

by Brett Baker

  “You’re full of shit,” I said. “This whole fucking story is a mirage. There’s nothing here. You’re completely making this up in the hopes that I’ll believe you and tell you something that you don’t already know. This ain’t my first fucking rodeo, Lloyd.”

  “I’m not making up anything.”

  “Yes you are. If she told you where I was, then how come you didn’t come after me before this? You want to kill me now, but before this started you wanted to marry me. Why didn’t you act on what she told you and come see me?”

  “I couldn’t. You’re a ghost. If I came to find you I’d have to explain how I found you. And that would ruin you.”

  “What would ruin me?”

  “Knowing how I found you.”

  “Why would it ruin me?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Logan said. “It’s best if you don’t know. Be satisfied knowing that I knew you were in Chicago. And when this came up, I didn’t want to kill you, but I knew that I had to. Breaks my heart.”

  “Golly fuck. Are you kidding me? You make no fucking sense. You couldn’t come find me because you didn’t want to ruin me, but then you send someone to kill me. How does that make any sense at all?”

  “We all have things that are important to us, Mia.”

  “Enough!” I yelled. “You’re talking but you’re not saying anything. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” I walked away toward the garage, which instantly reminded Logan of my promise to incinerate him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

  “Stop Mia! Come back here. If you want to know, I’ll tell you. Just come back.” I kept walking and opened the door to the garage. Logan’s screams became more urgent, and he said, “I know all about The Summit.”

  I stopped, closed the door, and walked calmly back to him.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “First, let me explain why I didn’t want to ruin you.” I looked up at him, but said nothing. Few people had ever come right out and mentioned The Summit to me, and when it happened we were trained to remain calm, and listen to every single word the person wanted to say. With no objection from me, Logan continued. “At some point you decided to give up living your life. Instead you do some fucked up work. So obviously the work you do is more important to you than your life. So then it makes complete sense that I’d rather end your life than ruin your perception of your work. You’d rather die than find out that your work is a lie.”

  “It’s not a lie,” I said. “Just because something isn’t acknowledged doesn’t make it a lie. I’ve been at this long enough to know that what I do is real. It’s serious, it matters, and the world is a better place because I do what I do.”

  Logan laughed and shook his head. “Keep telling yourself that, Mia. It sounds like a coping skill to me, but if that’s what you need to get through the day, then go ahead.”

  “Ruin me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Ruin me. Tell me whatever you have to tell me that you thought would ruin me. There’s nothing you can say that will change how I feel about what I’ve done for The Summit.”

  “When I offered half a million for information about you, I got more than I paid for. Not only did I found out everything about you that I wanted to know, but in the process she told me all about The Summit. How it operates, how it’s organized, how it’s funded. Everything. She’d been in for a long time and had become so jaded she felt no loyalty any more. Dollars are worth more than loyalty is how she put it.”

  “You’re saying someone betrayed The Summit? Your source is someone from the inside?”

  “Exactly,” Logan said.

  “Who?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me or you’ll be ashes in five minutes.”

  “Migsy Pendleton.”

  I felt the blood leave my head, and the room began to spin. My chest felt heavy and I couldn’t catch my breath. I heard a pounding in my ears, and felt pressure building in my sinus cavity. I thought my entire body might explode at once, sending bloody biological shrapnel throughout Logan’s house. I massaged my temples, and became lightheaded so I reached out for the floor, and lowered myself down. I felt sick, like an intense stomach bug had just made itself known. I thought I might vomit at any second, and looked down at the floor, waiting for it to happen.

  “I told you it would ruin you,” Logan said. “I tried to warn you. Fuck.”

  No one in this world knew more about my involvement in The Summit than Migsy Pendleton. She’d convinced me to give it a chance, she’d sustained me during the first early, difficult years, and she’s the only one who understood what I’d endured for almost two decades. Although she was more than half a century older than me, I felt a special kinship with her. On more than one occasion I had extricated myself from trouble by asking a simple question, “What would Migsy do right now?”

  Nothing is worse than betrayal, and its pain is only intensified by the fact that it’s almost always committed by someone with whom the victim is intimately attached. Knowing that Migsy gave up not only me, but The Summit as a whole, shook me like nothing else in the world could have. Up had become down, left had become right, hot had become cold. Nothing made sense any more, and the world suddenly felt much lonelier. I flashed back to the previous two decades of encounters and interactions with Migsy, and I wondered how many of those were real, and how many she’d just been trying to obtain information to peddle elsewhere. She’d grown old, and I admired her feistiness, her intelligence, her attitude and her strength. Now I questioned it all.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Money,” Logan said. “It all seemed to be about the money with her. She was definitely burnt out, and seemed tired of dealing with people in general, but money was the driving force. Her motivation. The half million got her started, and then she held back information until I offered more. That’s how I found out about The Summit’s operational template, its recruitment activities, its finances. All of it.”

  “And she told you all of this?” Logan nodded. “And about me?”

  “She told me how she recruited you from Eutaw. About some of the missions you worked on. Any news she had about you, she shared with me.”

  “Like when my parents were murdered,” I said.

  Logan didn’t respond. He stared at me and showed no reaction at all. I looked back at him and waited for him to say something, but he remained silent.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked. “Don’t you fucking hold anything back, Lloyd. I need to know it all.”

  “When this bill came around and it became clear that it would pass, the urgency to find you became even greater. I’d asked Green to sit on the bill for a while, maybe even pull it until next session so I could find you and take you out. But he insisted on pushing it through now. That meant I had to find you. I checked in with Migsy and told her that I needed to find you, and she said you were still in Chicago. So we came up with a few different plans to take you out. You killed our first guy on the lakefront. Then we had a group of guys who I’d used for ransom kidnappings when I was expanding in South Africa, and we brought them in. They were great. Efficient, subtle, real experts. Somehow you end up getting one of them run over by a bus, and the other two freaked out and quit. We haven’t heard from them since. Both of these incidents attracted some coverage in Chicago, and the last thing we wanted was a spotlight on any of this bullshit. So I called Migsy.”

  “To kill me?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

  Logan paused before speaking. “We had no choice, Mia. You know too much, and there’s too much money involved, and I’m not willing to gamble with my future.”

  “And what did Migsy say?”

  “She asked how much was in it for her. I offered half a million again, and she said it wasn’t enough. I told her to fuck off and I hung up. I didn’t sleep at all that night, my stomach was in knots, I was sweating my ass off. We had to kill you. We couldn’t keep trying and
failing. Eventually we’d run out of luck and you’d track it back to us. So I thought about it, and I offered Migsy two million if she’d find someone who could take care of it for me. Twice I thought I’d taken care of you, and twice you escaped. I was so fucking frustrated I just wanted to wash my hands of the whole thing. I just wanted you gone. I don’t care how. Just gone.”

  “Did she hesitate?” I asked

  “Not a bit. She heard the offer and accepted right away. Guaranteed that she’d take care of you. Said that we’d never have to worry about hearing from you again.”

  “Did she say what she planned to do?”

  “No. I told her the same thing I just told you, that I didn’t care what happened, I just didn’t want to have to think about you any more.”

  “And then?” I began to feel a surging sickness in my stomach. A distant ping in the back of my brain acted as an alarm, warning me of what Lloyd might say next. I hoped the pinging stopped, the thoughts went away, the horror remained unproven, but Lloyd had more to say.

  “Well, of course I couldn’t just forget about you. You were too important to me in many ways. Good and bad. But I didn’t hear from her for a few days. I checked the Chicago newspapers to see if they had any stories about your death, but I couldn’t find anything. She didn’t answer my calls when I got tired of waiting. Then, two days ago, I’m sitting outside on my patio, eating dinner, and she calls. She failed. But I guess you know that since you’re still alive.”

  “I know she failed,” I said. “How did she fail? Did she send the woman in Chicago? To my apartment? If not for a Diet Coke can she would have succeeded. I have no idea how I came out of that alive.”

  “You’re resourceful, Mia. If it’s any consolation, it’s driving us fucking crazy. I wanted to pull out my hair after you got away the second time, and Migsy hates you. Says she hasn’t slept in days because she’s so fired up. You’ve made her feel like a complete failure. She said it’s never taken her this long to take someone out. You keep slipping away, and you fucked up her plans by leaving early after the funeral. That was the day it was supposed to happen.”

  “What was supposed to happen? She was supposed to have me killed?”

  “She was going to do it herself. After the funeral she planned on having you come over to her house, and she’d be waiting for you there. She said she could do it in a single shot. According to her she’d never met a better shot than herself, and since no one else could take you out, she’d have to do it.”

  “But then I left at the lunch.”

  “Exactly. Fucked up her plans again. So she scrambled to have some woman in Chicago greet you in your apartment, but she never heard from her again, so she assumed that she failed, too.”

  “She assumed right,” I said. “I can’t believe this. Migsy Pendleton? We’re talking about the same person, right? An elderly woman? Tiny, loud, obnoxious.”

  “Stubborn, lively, adamant. Yes, that’s her. She’s cold-hearted. Like a machine. Completely focused on what she wants. Nothing’s off-limits. She needed you, so instead of inconveniencing herself she made sure you’d come to her.”

  “What?” I asked. “What the fuck does that mean?” I felt panic fill my voice as I spoke. A shrill, abrasive shriek replaced my normal calm, soothing tone. “What the fuck does that mean, Lloyd? What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying anything,” he said. “It’s a simple fact, so I won’t beat around the bush. Migsy had your parents killed.”

  I fell to my knees and wailed. My body lurched forward and my forehead hit the floor as I brought my knees to my chest, as close to fetal position as I could manage. Logan called my name, but I ignored him. A tremendous pressure threatened to crush my chest, and my heart seemed to stop. I wanted to puke, and scream, and cry, and die all at once. I was living the death of my parents for the second time, but in a way more intense and destructive than I’d previously experienced. Before I could even process the betrayal, the deception, the absolutely despicable treachery committed by the non-relative I trusted most in this world, I could feel anger wash over me. It felt as if someone had flipped a switch and every other emotion in my body turned off, and a furious, relentless, venomous anger ignited and threatened to break free.

  I stood up, wiped my tears, and asked Logan, “Why did she kill my parents?”

  “To get you to Eutaw. She planned to do it herself and she’s too damn old to travel. She thought you’d brush her off if she asked you to come visit her, so she knew she had to give you a reason to come.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “A few days ago. After you’d already left to return to Chicago.”

  “Is she still sending people after me?”

  “Yes. She said she knows other people who can do the job. She’s supposed to call me when it’s done. When I talked to her she’d suspected that you’d leave Chicago and wouldn’t return for a while, but as soon as she finds you she’s got another plan in place.”

  “What else do you know?” I asked. “Tell me something else before I cut you down.”

  “That’s all I know, Mia. We were just waiting to find you. She was going to check in with some department within The Summit to see if they knew where you were. She thought you’d have to resurface soon, and she’d let me know when it was done.”

  I nodded. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “You know some of the stuff I told you is the truth because you lived it. The rest of it you’re just going to have to take my word for. It’s not bullshit, Mia.”

  I believed him. The story came too easily to him. He didn’t stammer, he didn’t backtrack, he didn’t stop to think. He just spoke. And he was right, I could verify the truth of some of what he said. He knew I’d killed Aviator Man. He knew about The Summit. He knew I’d left the funeral lunch early. I had no choice but to believe him.

  I was five steps up the staircase when Logan said, “I’m going to ask Green to pull this bill. It’s not worth it.” When I got to the top of the steps he said, “Thanks for getting me down. I’m sorry things worked out like this. Are you going after Migsy?”

  He kept talking, and if he worried as I approached the catwalk, he didn’t show it. As I lit the candle lighter he suggested that I go to Eutaw to talk to Migsy face-to-face. He didn’t mention the sound of the ignition clicks, and he continued talking. I stopped listening as I held the flame to the last rope. Logan didn’t look up at me until the very last second, just in time to see the flame engulf the last small fibers. As the rope popped and he fell away from me, his mouth gaped open for a brief second until the force of the noose against his jaw snapped it closed.

  I stood up and leaned over the baluster and waited until he stopped swinging back and forth. Then I went down the steps, and left through the back door. Twenty minutes later I got in my car and headed back toward Tucson.

  I hadn’t planned to return to Eutaw so soon, but I had no choice.

  37

  Chapter 37

  Before sunrise the next morning I boarded a flight from Tucson to Birmingham. The spectacular light show that the rising sun provided did nothing to alleviate the sickness in my soul. It felt as if I’d entered another world where nothing made sense and I had to question everything I thought I knew. The ticket agent wished me a good flight, and my first instinct was to snap at her and tell her to go to hell. Although The Summit prevented me from establishing personal relationships with people, I always prided myself on my friendliness and geniality. But exposing the truth about Migsy and the way her betrayal stung me to the core seemed to rob me of that. I felt nothing but anger.

  We landed in Dallas, where I had to switch planes to continue on to Birmingham. As I exited the jet bridge into the airline terminal, I quickly scanned my surroundings to evaluate any threats. Although DFW was one of the busiest airports in the world, the nearby gates were mostly empty. I walked to the gate for the next leg of my flight, found a spot in a chair that backed up against a w
all, and kept my eye on my surroundings. A young boy sat across me with his mother, and crawled on the floor racing his toy truck back and forth. He drove it up my legs, and instead of engaging the boy and playing with him as I usually would, I ignored him and his pleas to play until he finally gave up and left me alone.

  After landing in Birmingham just after noon, I drove seventy-five minutes to Eutaw. I’d barely slept the previous night, hadn’t eaten at all, and thought non-stop about Migsy and my parents. Against my better judgment I decided to stop for lunch. If anyone recognized me and tried to talk I pitied them for the verbal assault they’d have to endure. I wanted to shovel food into my mouth and get on with the point of my journey back home.