by Jon Land
Blaine swallowed hard, having wondered the same thing himself.
“So I come up with a way to find out.” He checked his watch for the third time that morning. “The time’s just about right.”
“For what?”
Torrey turned his gaze out over the swamp. “They’re just waking up now, hungry like you wouldn’t believe, and hungry makes them mean. Gator is mostly a lazy-ass creature. Sleep, shit, sun, and fuck’s about all he does. Most times you got to step on his snout to make him move. Couple times a day—now and ‘round dusk—they get ornery.” He stuck his finger out and moved it in a narrow arc. “You can see ’em if you look close, all across there.” He peered again at Blaine. “What I want you to do, son, is get to the other side of the swamp.”
Blaine’s reaction could have been one of many things, but what came surprised him as much as Buck: he smiled.
He let instinct fuel his pace. Started out slow as he cut into the heart of the swamp, leaving Torrey on the thin path. The water ranged from knee to waist deep, with islands of footing recognizable as slight splotches that reflected the sun differently. Blaine’s plan was to dance from one to the other, never even stir a gator if he planned things right.
A twelve-footer slithered by with its mouth opened as Blaine leaped atop the first land pod. For a time his leaps from one land pod to the next became a frantic game of connect the dots. Initially he hit the soft patches too hard, drawing the death jaws of several gators uncomfortably close. Once, a grayish one had him dead to rights, when another gator’s sudden leap knocked it aside. Then Blaine began to soften his landings, gliding through the air rather than lunging.
The problem was nature had not cooperated with his plan, putting increasing distance between the land patches the closer he got to the opposite shore. Blaine never once turned back toward Buck; this wasn’t about Buck. This was about him. This was about fear and conquering it. Not of the gators; they were just an exercise tool. The fear of real danger, as opposed to pain.
With a third of the distance left to cover, he ran out of land; only water separated him now from the opposite shore. Blaine slid off the final land patch into knee-deep black water that quickly rose to his waist, alert for the sudden shifts in current indicating a gator had him in its sights and was coming fast. He got used to the feel of the water lapping around him, and when it lapped wrong he lunged to one side, a few times narrowly avoiding eager jaws, which snapped closed on nothing.
Suddenly he realized he could feel the presence of the gators even when the water did nothing to betray their location. He began to move more subtly, mixing with the currents instead of disturbing them. His first thought had been to grab a branch, a rock—some sort of weapon. But thought gave way to instinct before he had a chance to think again.
He learned to blend with the gators’ movements, drift into the wakes left by their quick spurts through the water. Eventually they came to regard Blaine indifferently, or perhaps not regard him at all, even though they had him surrounded.
Blaine remembered other swamps, other jungles, in which the odds were the same and only the enemy was different, realizing then why Buck had waited until today to bring him here. Surviving required a mental edge as well as a physical one. This was Buck’s way of saying the latter had been regained and it was time to check on the former. Give him back not just his muscle but also his mind-set.
Dead Simple …
That was how walking through the gators had felt. That was how thriving in another jungle had been.
Reaching the other shore, where Buck Torrey was now waiting, Blaine could have sworn a few of the gators lifted their snouts out of the water to give him a last look. They seemed confused, glad the stranger in their midst had gone before the day grew hot and they slipped back into the waters for a nap.
“Wanna come back for dinner tonight?” Torrey asked him with a wink.
“I’m gonna be gone for a time,” Buck announced when Blaine got back from his distance swim that afternoon. “Some things I gotta attend to.”
His voice held a somber tone Blaine didn’t recognize from all the years they’d known each other. Torrey’s eyes drooped, wide with worry.
“What’s wrong?”
“Personal.”
“So was me coming down here.”
“This ain’t your concern.”
“You saying there’s nothing I can do to help?”
“Nope. You can stay here and keep putting yourself back together so when I get home I can finally get rid of you once and for all.” Torrey tried to force a smile, couldn’t manage it.
“Why don’t I come along?”
“Like I said—”
“I know: it’s personal. Nothing’s personal among old dogs like us. Sound familiar?”
“You’re out of order, Private.”
“I went out a captain, Sergeant Major.”
“You went out an asshole who didn’t know when to leave things be, and that’s what got you in the fix you’re in. I guess you’re back to your old self, after all.”
Blaine wasn’t ready to give in. “You headed north?”
“It matter?”
“How about I call Johnny? He’s a nice guy to have around.” Blaine held the thought. “For company.”
“I don’t need no spooky giant Indian hanging around. What I got to do is simple shit, nothing up your alley or his. Bore the two of you to death, as a matter of fact. Family stuff is all.”
“Family?”
Torrey’s eyes shifted a little, like those of a man who realized he’d said too much. Blaine looked into them and saw he wasn’t going to say any more.
“Something I got to do alone,” Torrey explained. “You okay with that, or do I have to make it an order? Just leave me be to make up for some lost time.”
“This about your daughter? Is she in trouble?”
Buck frowned. “Seems to be a run of it lately. I’m starting to feel like the Red Cross. I come down here to be alone, and now I’m helping people out left and right.”
“You never wanted me to meet her.”
“Never wanted anyone I trained to meet her. I know you boys too well.”
“Afraid I’ll break her heart or tear it out?”
A flash of pride showed in Torrey’s eyes. “Try either and she just might gut you first.”
“A true Torrey.”
“’Cept her name’s Halprin now. Liz Halprin.”
2
NEW TRICKS
TEN
Lem Trumble hoisted the gravestone from the ground and placed it gently across the front of the forklift. The night sky bled a little rain, but Lem didn’t feel it as he shifted his massive shoulders and squeezed back into the forklift’s cab. It was far too small to accommodate his vast bulk, and he had to sit sideways and shimmy himself around a little before driving off with one leg hanging outside.
Lem never complained about the size of the forklift cab, because he otherwise loved his work. This shift belonged to him and him alone. People didn’t like him very much and never had. Ever since he was a kid, they considered him big and dumb. Well, they were half right. Lem stood closer to seven feet than six and was blessed with an incredibly muscular frame even though he had never lifted a weight in his life.
He pulled the forklift to a halt in front of the caretaker’s workshop and carried the gravestone inside, laying it adroitly atop his table, ready with all the tools and supplies he would need to repair it. This Vermont cemetery was on the National Historic Register, which meant the stones had to be brought in for repair at the first sign of damage. The other workers could do the spot stuff themselves right at the grave site. But the larger, more complicated jobs were left for Lem. He would come in every night, check his board for the log of plot and grave numbers, then head the forklift out to the first one on the list.
He loved working with the marble and granite, took exquisite pride in making his patchwork meld perfectly with the structure as a whole. When finished,
he would draw a line through that item on the log, return it to its place, and drive out to fetch another. There was an easy, simple rhythm to it all that Lem embraced, mostly because he could handle everything alone and at night. He didn’t like the way people looked at him during the day, when he couldn’t go out without applying thick makeup to cover the burn scars that corroded his face. There wasn’t much the doctors had been able to do to put his face back together, but the important parts worked well enough. Only good thing was the face had kept everyone away from him in his twenty years hard time in a federal penitentiary. Bad thing was after the twenty were over he had to look at himself again.
In prison there weren’t a lot of mirrors or glass. It was easy to forget what the heat of the blast had done to his flesh and hair. Once he got out, the mirrors and glass were everywhere he looked. On the night shift, though, he never saw anyone and nobody saw him. Work his magic with the decaying tombstones and take the check out of his box every other Friday. His hands looked like swollen slabs of meat, yet were delicate and adroit all the same. He could work them into any groove or crack in the granite, smooth in a patch so perfect nobody could notice once it dried.
His secret was making believe he was working on his own face, doing for the stones what the doctors couldn’t do for him. Lost himself in the work, as now, smoothing out the inside of a chip so the patch would take better.
“Anybody I know?” a voice asked from the door.
Lem stiffened as he turned. A dark shape stood before him in the doorway, silhouetted against a shroud of light shed by the outdoor floods.
Lem squinted, couldn’t believe what he thought he was seeing. “Jack?” His eyes bulged. “Is that you?”
“Hello, Tremble,” Jack Tyrell greeted, using the pet name he always called Lem, since that’s what people who saw him always did, and he closed the door behind him.
Lem was across the floor in an instant too fast to record, incredible for a man his size. He captured Tyrell in a bear hug and hoisted him happily off the ground.
“I knew I’d see you again someday, Jack! I just knew it!”
Tyrell waited for Lem to set him back down. “That day has come.” He looked the giant over, not bothered by his ruined face.
Lem turned proudly to his worktable. “Got me a trade now. Wanna see?”
Jack followed him back to the gravestone. “And I prepared you well for it. Like your work, Lem?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“What if I was to say I needed you, Tremble, that it was time we went back to finish what we started?”
Lem stripped off his grubby work apron and dropped it to the floor. He couldn’t smile anymore, since a good portion of his upper lip was burned away, but the look he gave Jack Tyrell was as close as he could come.
“I’d say I’m ready. I’d say I can’t wait.”
Jack reached out to touch the big man’s shoulder, pet him like the loyal dog he was. “Neither can I.”
ELEVEN
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Liz Halprin found herself staring at her father through the screen door.
“Nice shotgun, by the way,” Buck Torrey continued, gazing down at the Mossberg dangling from her left hand. “I guess you were expecting somebody else.”
“Five years go by, I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Heard you had some trouble.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“With a shotgun?” Eyes on the Mossberg again.
“It’s cheaper to feed than a dog,” Liz said, as she finally eased open the screen door.
“Place looks pretty good,” Buck said, and he slid past her into the kitchen.
“It looks like shit. Old; you know.”
“The broken window in the living room’s new.”
“I see you’ve been looking around.”
Buck plopped the duffel bag he was carrying down to the floor. Its contents clanked noisily on impact with the tile. “Bullet holes are easy to spot. Why don’t we have a drink and you can tell me what’s going on.”
“If I wanted to tell you that, I’d have called.”
“A tough chore, considering you don’t have my phone number. Where are the glasses?” Buck asked, moving past his daughter to open a cupboard. “They used to be here.”
“Next one over. And how’d you know anything was going on?”
He selected two rocks glasses and turned back toward her. “I got sources.”
“You mean spies.”
“Where’s the whiskey?” Buck asked, working on another cabinet.
They talked for hours, bursts of conversation mixed with uneasy lapses of silence Buck Torrey filled with sips from the whiskey he had found on his own. Mostly, he wanted to know about the grandson he hadn’t seen in five years, letting Liz tell in her own time what had happened that day at William T. Harris Elementary School.
“I’m proud of you,” he said after she had finished. “The way you handled things: by the book, everything covered.”
“An innocent man got killed. My bullet went straight through his skull.”
“The way you tell it, if the suits at the J. Edgar Hoover Building knew a lick about combat, if any of them had ever seen a firefight, never mind been in one, they might realize you start your loss assessment by working backwards.”
“This is the FBI, Dad, not the army.”
“This is common sense, girl. That shooter, he was carrying …”
“A Mac-10,” Liz completed.
“Stone age weapon. Absolute piece of shit. Three extra clips he had on him?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, we say he manages to fire off two before somebody gets the balls to jump him. Sixty rounds in those kind of surroundings will give you twenty kills and twenty casualties. Twenty lives over and twenty fucked up forever minimum, instead of one. Makes your score a plus thirty-nine, which puts you at the top of my class. That’s the way loss assessment works.”
“Disciplinary board didn’t see things that way. Said I should have waited for backup before moving in.”
“How far away?”
“I could hear the sirens.”
“A question of timing.”
“That’s what they said. They also said my presence precipitated the action.”
“Precipitated?”
“That’s how they phrased it in the final report.”
Buck Torrey sneered. “Man goes into a school with a piece of shit Mac-10, and it’s your fault he opens fire with it?”
“From their perspective, after Waco and Ruby Ridge, yes.”
“They’re full of crap.”
Liz helped herself to a glass of whiskey, dulled it with a little ice and water. “You’re telling me.”
“Mac-10’s a killing weapon—that’s all it’s good for. Spray it around and see what drops.”
“It must have been a ricochet. I can account for all the bullets, while the perp was still holding the victim.”
That set Buck thinking. “What were you carrying?”
“Smith and Wesson .380.”
“Load?”
“Round-nosed hardball.”
Buck shook his head. “No way that bullet exits the skull on a ricochet. Nine-millimeter’s basically piss poor when it comes to stopping power.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Round-nosed hardball nines are standard ammo for the Mac-10.”
“You think the FBI crime lab doesn’t know that?”
“I’d like to take a look at the ballistics report. See how it was that crime lab was able to make a positive ID on your bullet based on what was left after a ricochet and a skull penetration.”
Liz’s superiors had shrugged that question off when she asked it, claiming the evidence was conclusive.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Buck took a hearty sip from his whiskey. “Army sent me some of the new 4.5 millis to check out.”
“The Beretta or the Heckler an
d Koch?”
Buck looked at his daughter with considerable surprise.
“I test-fired both of them last time I was down at Quantico,” she told him.
“What’d you think?”
“Those thirty-shot clips have something to be said for them.”
“My feeling is you accomplish the same thing by just training people to shoot twice as good with fifteen, know what I mean?”
“Where does it stop?”
“With people who score a plus thirty-nine.” Buck Torrey raised his glass in the semblance of a toast. “My daughter … who can serve in my outfit anytime.”
He took a sip. Liz joined him.
“Now tell me about this other problem we got before us.”
Liz saw the truck pull onto the farm from an upstairs window first thing the next morning, three men squeezed into the cab.
“Dad,” she said tensely, entering the kitchen to find Buck Torrey’s coffee cooling and a huge plate of scrambled eggs only half eaten. Of all the times to take a walk …
One of the men knocked on the screen door’s frame. Liz opened it casually.
“You must be Liz Halprin,” greeted the first man to come through the door, a used car salesman’s smile stitched from ear to ear. “I’m John Redding, head of the local Cattleman’s Association.” He extended his hand and Liz took it, squeezing only as hard as he did, then assessing the fat man and the short, barrel-chested one who had followed him inside. “Me and my fellow officers wanted to welcome you to the county. I knew your grandparents. Worked for them, in fact, for a couple summers.”
“I hope they treated you well.”
“That’s why I’m here; to repay the favor.” He looked to his two associates. “We heard you’ve been having some trouble, thought we might be able to help.”
“Very kind of you.”
“It’s the least we can do. Been a long time since you been back, hasn’t it?”