Perish the Day

by John Farrow

  “That love can take you into strange places, son.”

  He could admit to that, but he wouldn’t.

  “Sir, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh son.” He squeezed his knee again.

  Vernon didn’t know what he hated most, saying sir, being called son, or having his kneecap squeezed for no reason. None of that felt sexual, he couldn’t fight back at him on that, and yet the cop was trying to dominate him, to wear him down that way.

  He just wanted him off.

  He slept in a cell.

  Outside in the bright sunlight, he finds himself at a loss, wanting to run, hide, wanting to scream at passengers on a city bus who presumed to glance his way. He reaches out to a friend instead, calling Caroline, who texts Anastasia. One girl arranges to pick the other up, then the two girls drive over a few blocks to meet Vernon in the center of town. He calls back once to see where they are and when they say they’re nearby he departs the coffee shop to wait on the street. The girls are slowing down, looking to park, when a large black SUV ducks ahead of them and stops just past where Vernon’s standing. In the wink of an eye, a heavyset man emerges from the backseat, leaps onto the curb, and before Vernon can react grabs him by the front of his shirt and by his belt and half hurls, half squashes him into the backseat of the vehicle.

  The door slams shut on its own as the SUV speeds off.

  At the wheel of her car, Caroline goes comatose, shocked. The scene has been previewed a thousand times in movies she’s seen, but this is real, this is happening to someone she knows. She feels unable to breathe, her chest clogged.

  The moment falls to Anastasia to revive her.

  “Get after them! Caroline! Caro! Get after them!”

  The black SUV is speeding away.

  “Caro!”

  “He had a gun!”

  “What?”

  “He had a gun!”

  “Fucking go! Drive!”

  Traffic has already come between the two vehicles and Caroline can’t bring herself to drive that aggressively despite Anastasia’s protestations. Soon they’re leaving town on the highway and catching a glimpse of the vehicle as it outruns them and reappears and vanishes up and down hills and frequently around bends.

  “Hurry up!”

  “Oh my God oh my God!”

  “Get a hold of yourself!”

  Caroline does just that. “Call my uncle!”

  “What?”

  “Now!” She barks out the number as she careens around a corner.

  “Careful!”

  “Too late for that.”

  Anastasia calls the farmhouse. Caroline, one hand on the wheel, seizes the phone from her. When Sandra answers she falls back into being polite yet demands to speak to Émile immediately. Apparently, he’s doing his exercises and is slow to make it to the phone. She’s screaming into the phone to hurry, not knowing that Sandra has put the receiver down and wandered off.

  Finally, Émile answers. “Yes?”

  “Uncle Émile, for God’s sake, it’s me!”

  “Caro? What’s going on?”

  “He’s been abducted! Vernon! They grabbed him right off the street!”

  “The police?”

  “No! Not the police! Or maybe. I don’t know who! Two guys with a gun! He just called me to pick him up because the cops let him go. They released him. Somebody else grabbed him!”

  “What do you mean grabbed?”

  “They threw him into the back of this big van thingee.”

  “SUV!” Anastasia shouts out.

  “Did you see which way they went?”

  “Yes! Uncle Émile, we’re following them right now! Anastasia and me! We’re chasing them!”

  “Oh no. For God’s sake be careful. Who’s driving?”

  “I am!”

  “Then give the phone to Anastasia. Right now, Caro.”

  Partly to comply, more out of physical necessity, Caro flips the phone to her friend as she grips both hands tightly to the steering wheel. The other girl makes a miraculous catch before the phone falls between the seats, and shouts into the device, “What!”

  “Anastasia,” Émile calmly directs her, “tell me exactly where you are and what direction you’re headed. Be as precise as you can be.” He then shouts through the house, “Sandra!” Back to his caller, informing his wife at the same time, he explains, “Sandra will call the Hanover Police Department on my mobile. She’ll speak to Chief Till. We’ll get a patrol car out to you right away. Tell Caroline to keep her distance.”

  “No, I want her to hurry up, we’re falling behind!”

  “Fall behind! We don’t want an accident. Do they know you’re chasing them?”

  “I doubt it. Caroline doesn’t drive fast enough for them to think that.”

  “I’m glad she doesn’t. Good for her. Okay, Anastasia, we have Chief Till on the other line. Now where are you?”

  She knows the road. At that moment they happen to pass a highway sign and she doesn’t have to think twice. She spots a civic address and relays that number as well. “Add on, I don’t know, a quarter mile, maybe more, heading south, that’s where they are, ahead of us.”

  “Keep your distance,” Cinq-Mars instructs her, although Anastasia hears him talking to Chief Till as well. His voice is calm, directed, and she tries to emulate his tone in repeating the message to Caroline.

  “We haven’t seen them for a bit,” she gets back to him a moment later.

  “Steady on. Keep looking down side streets and driveways to see if they turned off.”

  “Vernon must be terrified.” Suddenly, Anastasia is excitable again. “What’re you doing! What’re you doing!”

  “What’s going on?” calmly, Émile is asking in her ear.

  All that Anastasia knows is that Caroline is pulling over to the side of the road for no reason of which she’s aware without slowing down and not in a good spot, either. The shoulder is hazardous and the ride violent. The old jalopy Ford bucks like a crazed bull. Anastasia prangs her head on the ceiling then hits her chin on her own kneecap. In the chaos she sees a Hanover police car, lights flashing, siren off, roaring past them at the speed of sound and by the time their car fights its way back onto the roadway, rocking from side to side, the patrol car has virtually vanished. They spot it around a curve through trees, at bullet speed.

  “My God, will you stay on the road, he would’ve gone around you, Caro!”

  “Just—” Caroline thinks of what to say. She’s staring straight ahead, driving as though she wants to choke someone the way she holds the wheel.

  “Just what?” her friend asks.

  “I don’t know. Just, shut the fuck up, I guess.”

  “Tell her I heard that,” Cinq-Mars says. “What’s going on?”

  “The police are here. They’re ahead of us. They’re after them.”

  She hears Émile convey the news to Chief Till, and she relays his message, then he advises the girls to pull over and come home. “Let the police take it from here.” He waits a moment.

  Caro asks her friend to use the speaker phone, then speaks to her uncle while she drives. “Uncle Émile, seriously, there’s no place to turn around here, it’s too dangerous to stop. We have no choice. We’ll go straight until it’s safe to turn.”

  He suspects that he’s being played, and knows there’s nothing he can do about that. “Stay on the line,” he advises her, “until you start heading back.”

  “If you don’t mind too much, no. I’ll call you if something happens.”

  A young person with a willfulness all her own.

  “Be safe,” Émile warns before the connection goes silent.

  * * *

  In the rear seat of the vehicle being pursued, Vernon Colchester resists. He knows what’s coming. The big man has the advantage of size and positioning and uses it to pummel him without mercy. In the limited confines they compete to a moment when the student submits, it’s useless to fight on. He answers their questions. Not
like they want him to. He’s wedged against the door with the heavy man almost entirely on top of him, still punching and demanding different answers, when the door is opened, his head falls back, and as they speed along the highway his scalp dangles a foot and a half above the pavement although it feels more like an inch, and he’s being shoved, incrementally, out the door. Toward, he believes, a certain death. Fiercely he kicks with his one free leg, grips whatever he can hold on to. Their stalemate persists until the heavy man squirms off his chest, yet still pins his hips, and the man yanks Vernon’s torso up by pulling him by the hair then aims a pistol between his eyeballs.

  That gun again.

  Vernon is looking at the man’s fat finger on the trigger.

  “Motherfucker, jump!” commands his attacker. He’s breathing heavily from the exertion of punching him, his voice succinct. “Jump or die for sure. You got that one fucking chance I give you here.”

  Not much of one. A fat chance, Vernon thinks, he doesn’t know why.

  The door keeps swinging open, then closes partway. The car careens down the highway in excess of seventy miles an hour. Vernon looks out. The shoulder of the road a blur. He’s permitted to slip out from under the heavier man and with a gun to his head Vernon Colchester tries to leap but in the end merely stumbles out of the car.

  He suffers a ferocious wallop as he hits the side of the road.

  * * *

  The officer in the gaining patrol car sees him bounce once, twice, lifting high off the ground, then hit the grass hard again before his limp form cartwheels down an embankment. The cop needs to make a choice in a hurry—and quits his pursuit to come to the aid of the injured boy.

  He hopes that he’s merely injured anyway. As opposed to dead.

  * * *

  Caroline sees the flashing lights of the squad car, now stopped by the side of the road. She pulls in behind. Anastasia can see down the embankment and puts both hands to her mouth. Caroline opens her car door.

  “Caro. No. Stay here with me.”

  The words, the look on her friend’s face, are too much for Caroline; they provide her with the necessary impetus to clamber out of her seat. This time it’s Anastasia who’s frozen in place. Caroline steps to the side of the embankment, sees the two cops, one next to Vernon, the other still working his way down the hill. The embankment is mostly shrub grass and gravel. There’s blood. There’s a limb akimbo. There’s a motionless boy. Way, way in the distance, she hears the initial wail of an ambulance, she hopes, or more cop cars. Or both. When she turns back to inform Anastasia of what she sees, both their faces are cracked and broken.

  * * *

  Before his surgery, Vernon Colchester’s friends are informed that his chances of survival are touch-and-go.

  The pressure on his brain must be relieved. A broken arm and leg are repaired and placed in protective removable casts although his broken ribs interfere with his ability to breathe. Three fingers are reset on the tip of the arm that’s not broken as has been the kneecap on his good leg. The broken leg has three pins embedded in the ankle now. They’re worried about a hip but can’t deal with it yet. His face has suffered a few serious lesions, one quite deep. He looks as though he had a bare-knuckle brawl as an amateur featherweight against the heavyweight champion of the world. They address his face with bandages.

  After surgery, one of the attending physicians calls him lucky. Even so, everyone can tell that the doctor remains worried.

  TWENTY

  Émile Cinq-Mars stays behind at the farmhouse. For a short while, he’s alone, as Sandra has chosen to include herself among the young women holding a vigil for Vernon Colchester at the hospital. He doesn’t tell her what he’s up to, and wouldn’t want anyone to know his own take on the matter. Essentially, he’s rummaging around the darker terrain of his thinking. Begging old grievances to rise from their fallow to fuel his emotions. To seize this day and kick the bad guys’ collective ass. Something. Anything. He needs to get churned up. He speaks to his God in his way, though with less passion than he’d prefer to summon, and wonders if this is an old-age thing, if time is sifting through the hourglass and with its passage go his better observations and sharper concentration.

  He stretches to keep his back limber, wishing he could do the same for his mind.

  During his brief time on the case, he believed he was merely investigating the arcane circumstances. He never suspected that further risk was in the offing, or that his real task should be to protect others. He feels shoddy and incompetent now. That a boy he doesn’t know has been severely injured is bad enough, and gives credence to the accusation that a young woman, his own niece, whom he idly sent off on a mission, is at risk of being victimized. That vexes him no end. Especially because he’s already thinking that he might do it again. He imagines that this may never have occurred if he was a younger man or merely in a workday groove, although he’s still cogent enough to doubt that excuse. Now, he awaits the top cops, the principals from various forces—having had to do something, he’s called a meeting—and blithely he grumbles to himself in a rehearsal of what he might say. They’ve been incompetent, too, yet how can he disparage their work when he’s been equally inept? Still, things need to be said. The matter has been plowed over and judged. Blame will lie where it falls. Hopefully, everybody gets that. Hopefully, they’re ready, as he is, to cooperate.

  As the headlights appear of a car turning onto his driveway, Émile acknowledges that he’s secretly playing favorites. He’s hoping that Chief Till shows up first, as being in his company may help him relax. He’s nudged, then, by disappointment, when left with no choice other than to invite Trooper Hammond into the house. Awkwardly, he offers him tea or coffee and a slice of the coffee cake a neighbor brought over to help ease Sandra through her bereavement.

  If Hammond prefers, he’s welcome to a shot of hard liquor.

  “I’m drinking scotch myself,” Émile admits.

  The drink a calculation. He figures he needs to loosen his synapses.

  Hammond has slumped through the door looking like a dog checking out which table leg to piss on. He seems his usual gruff self, with nothing to say at the outset, not even to answer if he’ll accept a beverage. The man peruses the front room with a thumb tucked in his gun belt as though expecting to draw his pistol in the next few seconds. He glances at Cinq-Mars, then says, “You got the governor’s ear.”

  “Me? Not really. Not directly, I wouldn’t say.”

  “Pretty straight-on direct to me. You ask me over. I say no. The governor phones and look where I am. I’m hearing that it’s not in one state, either, but two. You got two governors on the line. Fucking impressive for a retired foreigner.”

  “I’ve had a long career.”

  “Balls,” Hammond attests. Today, though, he’s inclined, and perhaps compelled, to rethink his response. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He keeps himself turned away.

  Lacking an audience, Cinq-Mars shrugs anyway. “Connections?”

  “That high the motherfuck up? With governors yet.”

  “With colleagues who have sway. I know who to call, let’s say, if the homeland requires a measure of security. Let’s put it that way.”

  “Sure, let’s put it that way. Why not? Don’t tell me it passes the sniff test. Not close up. I detect a whiff of bullshit in the air. Anyway, like I said,” Hammond grunts, “impressive. It’s like you’re holding on to the governor’s balls and asking him to cough. He coughs for you. I’m trying to compliment you here. Seriously, is it the homeland? You can spin that with any kind of sincerity?”

  “Trooper Hammond, I need you to be here today. It’s that simple. You said no, sir. I took measures.” The conversation needs to turn, Cinq-Mars believes. Among other issues, he senses that his personal outer limit for civility is fast approaching.

  “You made the arrangements.”

  “I did,” Cinq-Mars confirms.

  Hammond grunts once more. Possibly, in appreciation. Then he say
s, “Sure. Coffee. Thanks. Why not? I got caffeine seeping out the corners of my eyeballs, what’s another drop?”

  At least the request separates them into different rooms for a minute.

  By the time Émile emerges with two cups, having decided to forgo more whiskey for coffee himself, another cop car is on its way up the drive, with a third making the turn off the county highway.

  “Company’s coming,” Hammond mentions, an attempt at a joke that misfires. He’s as uncomfortable being alone in the room with Cinq-Mars as is the retired detective to be entertaining him.

  Putting the coffee down, the host tries to improve the situation. “I respect you,” Émile says. “I respect your authority in all this.”

  “That’s in major fucking doubt,” Hammond contends. His tone, though, seems friendly enough.

  “We’ve got a young woman killed and a young man badly injured. Not to mention the other murders. More forces are at play than we’re able to get a handle on. You’ve got to agree with me on that part. I’m not saying that it makes anything easier, but you’ve got to agree with me. We need to clear the air. Everybody has to start sharing what they know before more young men and young women get hurt or killed. That’s just a plain fact and nobody wants more deaths around here.”

  “I’d probably trust you more if I knew where your weight comes from,” Hammond points out. “Share that.”

  “The FBI will be here. They can share.”

  “The FB-fucking-I? Are you kidding me?”

  “Why would I? Three people are dead and a boy is in hospital. One of the dead was an intelligence agent. You thought the FBI would stand down?”

  “What? Who? Toomey? Intelligence?”

  “Yes. What. Who. Toomey. Intelligence. Don’t you think you need to know that sort of thing over the course of your investigation? Toomey might’ve described himself as a former agent to his friends. I’m not sure it applies. Not sure that that can ever be the case. Look at me—I’m supposed to be retired. Why am I standing tall in a heap of dung here?”

  “Not a professor?” Hammond is still stuck on this one gem of information.

  “Not entirely, anyway. What’s he been up to? Besides teaching? What’s been his purpose in being here, do you think?”