Dead Simple

by Jon Land

  Blaine felt lonely the moment Buck Torrey pulled away from the stilt house in his skiff. He was used to being alone; his whole life was based on solitude. He may not have moved to the woods like Johnny Wareagle, but he had left the regular world in spirit a long time ago. This, though, was different. The sounds along the water were suddenly magnified, the lack of anyone within shouting distance or simply passing casually by adding to his sense of isolation.

  Two days passed, and he threw himself more and more into his training, hoping exhaustion would make him sleep every time he sat down to think. But he was worried about Buck; the feeling of unease nagged at him like an itch he couldn’t reach.

  As soon as he heard the outboard chugging his way, Blaine sensed something bad had happened. He saw a small motorboat coming and in the fading light recognized the sheriff who had driven him to Condor Key a month earlier, being ferried through the water. A local deposited him on Torrey’s dock and tipped a sweat-soaked cap up to Blaine.

  The sheriff climbed the ladder leading to the porch, his face like sundried paper ready to rip. Blaine didn’t like the look on the man’s face when he swung off the top rung.

  “What’s wrong?” Blaine asked him.

  “It’s about Buck,” the sheriff said, holding his hat in his hands. “He’s missing.”

  Blaine sat on the porch well into the evening, the birds and crickets making welcome company, Buck’s cell phone never far from his reach. He fingered the ring on his hand and let himself hope that this was only his next exercise, another game Buck was playing with him to make sure he was ready for the world again.

  But he knew it wasn’t. Buck had gone up to Virginia to help his daughter, and something had happened to him there. The sheriff had given him the number of a man who was expecting Blaine’s call.

  Expecting his call …

  Because Buck had provided Blaine’s name for the man to contact if something went wrong. And Buck never would have involved Blaine unless he was certain Blaine was ready to handle whatever was waiting. Trusting him with the safety of his daughter. Trusting him with uncovering whatever had happened.

  Blaine drew the cellular phone to him, pressed out a number different from the one belonging to the man up in Preston, Virginia, who was waiting for his call.

  “Yeah?” a raspy, cranky voice greeted.

  “It’s me, Sal.”

  The voice perked up instantly. “You still enjoying all that fun in the sun, boss?”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “’Bout fucking time,” said Sal Belamo.

  “Buck Torrey’s missing.”

  “Uh-oh …”

  “I’ll give you what I know. Details need to be sorted out.”

  “Already on it. Anything else?”

  “Yes.” Blaine gazed down at the ring again, the essence of the Dead Simple motto hitting him hard and fast. “Call Johnny. Tell him to pack his bags.”

  FIFTEEN

  Queen Mary concentrated on the card the woman was holding tight against her chest.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “A heart,” Mary answered.

  The woman with whom she was sharing the lockup shook her head as she flung another dollar toward her. “That’s eight in a row right. How you do that?”

  “What card is it?” another woman in the cell, with bad teeth and a rank smell, yelled out, grabbing Mary’s wrist before she could snatch the bill from the floor.

  “I said I could tell the suit, not the card.”

  The woman wasn’t letting up. “Come on, bitch, show us what you really got. What card she holding?”

  “Eight of hearts,” Mary answered.

  The inmate holding the card dropped it faceup on the floor: ten of hearts.

  “Pay up,” the one with bad teeth ordered.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You’ve got enough problems.”

  “I do?”

  “Killed your own kid, didn’t you?”

  The woman with bad teeth froze up. “What the fu—”

  “He OD’d on your drugs. Little ten-year-old going into the bathroom to shoot up like his mama.”

  The woman let go of Mary’s wrist and started to move away, but Mary followed her across the floor.

  “You found him, the needle was still in his arm. Was he already dead or did he die later? That’s the one thing I can’t see.”

  The woman screamed.

  Jack Tyrell walked into the Akron, Ohio, police department looking fresh and neat in his newly pressed clothes, his hair combed and clubbed back with a rubber band.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the clerk inside the thick glass directly before him.

  Another man was in there with the clerk, manning the radio. Four more cops were milling about within; two of them had just sat down at their desks after refilling their coffee mugs.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I understand you’re holding a prisoner here for transfer …” Jack checked the man’s name tag. “Sergeant. Friend of mine named Mary Raffa.”

  “Transfer?”

  “To county jail tomorrow. Thirty-day stretch for petty larceny, I think it was. She was sentenced yesterday.”

  “That all?”

  “Well, like I said, she’s a friend of mine, and I’d like to see if I can pay the fine on her behalf, set things right.”

  “Now? It’s almost midnight.”

  “No better time than the present.”

  The sergeant didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not. “Look, this is something you need to take up in court with a judge.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked a disappointed Jack Tyrell.

  “Best I can do.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sorry.”

  Tyrell turned and walked back through the door dejectedly. The sergeant had gone back to his paperwork when the roar of an engine made him look up.

  The Winnebago’s lights were off, so he didn’t actually see anything until Lem Trumble crashed the vehicle through the entrance and slammed into the glass security wall, collapsing it. Earl Yost was the first one out, quickly followed by Weeb, both of them wielding submachine guns they fired nonstop until none of the six cops inside was moving.

  “You’ve lost your mind, Jackie! This time you’ve really gone and done it!” Mary yelled at him as he led her down the hall just beyond the lockup.

  They had met during the Second Battle of Chicago, in the fall of 1969, a Weatherman action that had deeply disappointed Tyrell when the twenty thousand expected to show up turned out to be less than a tenth of that. Then, even worse, the leadership had distributed clubs instead of guns. Mary was with the movement’s women’s militia, and at one point during the second night of rioting she and Jack found themselves fighting, quite literally, back-to-back against the Chicago police. The first time Tyrell looked into her eyes, he could tell she was enjoying it as much as he was. They slept out together that night in a park, nursing their wounds and dreaming about the way things could be.

  The first time he saw her gift in action, what she called a “quickening,” was a few days later when they prepared to board a bus out of the city. Mary had clamped a hand onto his arm the instant he was starting up the steps.

  “Don’t get on,” she ordered in a voice that left no room for argument.

  Jack looked into her eyes, which had suddenly glassed over, and figured there was something wrong with her. It was only later, after a pair of Illinois State Police cruisers had run the bus off the road, killing two and injuring thirty, that he realized what Mary’s gift was all about.

  He didn’t make a single move without consulting Mary from that point on. And to this day Tyrell believed that if she had been around for the Mercantile Bank action, it would have gone off altogether differently. He often played it out, pretending she’d been there. Wondered how his life would have been.

  Tyrell stopped when they came to the main floor of
the building, where the Yost brothers stood guard over a half-dozen dead cops, and smiled at her. “I rescue you out of jail and that’s what you say to me? After twenty-five years you can’t come up with a nicer greeting?”

  Mary looked around and shuddered. “Oh God, Jackie, what have you gone and done?”

  “Nothing, compared to what I’m going to do.”

  “You went through all this to get me out? You did this for me?”

  “Thing is, babe,” Jack told her, “I need you to find something for me.”

  SIXTEEN

  Will Thatch poured himself another scotch, hand trembling so much he spilled some on the newspaper that lay atop his table, open to page five. A headline halfway down the page, next to an underwear ad, jumped out at him again:

  SIX DIE IN JAIL BREAK

  The article had an Akron, Ohio, log line. According to the account, last night four men had driven a stolen Winnebago into a police station and killed all officers present, to free a single female prisoner slated to be transferred to the county jail today. On his first read, Will hadn’t gotten any further than the grainy still shot salvaged from a damaged security camera that pictured a pair of shapes moving toward a wall pockmarked with bullet holes. The blurriness didn’t prevent Will from recognizing who they were; he’d know them anywhere, could almost smell them through the newsprint.

  The Yost brothers.

  Thatch had their pictures hanging right here on his memory wall, among two dozen others who formed the nucleus of Midnight Run. He lifted his eyes to that wall now, past his eight-by-tens of Jack Tyrell and Lem Trumble and the Yost brothers, to those of Othell Vance and Mary Raffa, better known as “Queen Mary,” or “Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” since she was responsible for planting six men in their graves, half of them cops. That’s how her garden grew.

  Will had started on the scotch right about then, dipped into an alcohol-induced fog, hoping things would settle in his mind. Kept drinking but couldn’t stop shaking, even after putting on his thick bathrobe, with the threads hanging down from the bottom.

  For twenty-five years he’d known this day would come. A piece of the past reaching out to drag him from the present. He sat now with his scotch, gazing at the article until his vision blurred, trying to remember where he had left his glasses.

  As well as pictures, his memory wall was lined with newspaper articles, some of them of the FBI agents assigned to track down Jack Tyrell and Midnight Run. One of these agents was a handsome young man identified as Special Agent William Thatch. The last article in the row included pictures shot in the aftermath of Midnight Run’s final act of terrorism, one of which showed William Thatch administering CPR to a wounded man on a smoky New York City street.

  That was the day an FBI plant in Midnight Run had finally provided the opportunity to nail the entire gang at the Mercantile Bank building. The task force showed up along with a heavy complement of New York police and shot it out with gang members in the minutes before the bomb exploded.

  Despite killing a number of the gang, the FBI task force had let Jack Tyrell and several of his soldiers, including the Yost brothers and Othell Vance, slip from their clutches that day. But Will bore the dubious distinction of having had Tyrell himself dead in his sights, only to look away.

  A father covered in blood, grieving over his dying son …

  Will had actually comforted the man, given him a towel, and brought him to a priest, who was found dead in his underwear twenty minutes later.

  Jack Tyrell had disappeared after that, avoiding all attempts by Will and others to track him down. The difference between Will and those others was that he never gave up, not even after it cost him his job and his family. By the time it was clear Tyrell was gone for good, each day began and ended for Will the same way, the middle not much different. After being fired, he spent another three years squandering his pension on his own personal pursuit of his quarry.

  When that failed he fell into the bottle, and he hadn’t come up much since, except to study newspapers. At the New York Public Library mostly, as many out-of-town papers as he could scrutinize page by page until his eyes got blurry. If Jackie Terror ever came back, Will knew that’s where he would find him. He kept his now ancient .38-caliber Smith & Wesson snub-nosed hidden under the mattress in case that day should come, tempted on numerous occasions to use it on himself in the meantime.

  How ironic that when he saw Jack Tyrell again for the first time in twenty-five years, it wasn’t in the library but at a newsstand, on the back page of the New York Post a month before. A black-and-white composite sketch of a man wanted for questioning in the murders of four unidentified men at Crest Haven Memorial Park, a cemetery in Clifton, New Jersey. Will bought the paper and stood there on the sidewalk studying the sketch for a very long time, the Post trembling in his liver-spotted hands.

  The more he looked at the face, though, the less convinced he became it belonged to Jackie Tyrell. He brought it back to his room and studied it until his head throbbed. Before long the face could have been anyone’s.

  He’d been reading all the New York papers every day ever since. But strangely, that one edition of the Post contained the only mention of the cemetery murders. There wasn’t a single follow-up story anywhere to be found, and if he hadn’t tacked the article to his memory wall, Will might have doubted they ever happened.

  Then the article about the Akron killings had run in the late edition of today’s New York Times, along with the shot of the Yost brothers lifted off the surveillance camera and picturing a third figure in dim view from the side. The dim view was enough for Will.

  He could recognize Jack Tyrell from any angle, and as it turned out, the composite sketch reproduced in the Post a month earlier wasn’t such a bad likeness, after all.

  Will poured the last of his scotch into the glass and guzzled it down. His throat burned and his stomach felt as if somebody was stoking logs inside it. He ran his eyes along the various pictures tacked to his memory wall, wondering how many other Midnight Run members old Jack had managed to contact. Tyrell never did anything without a firm purpose behind it, and now something had triggered him into rallying the troops again. What exactly that was Will didn’t yet know, but there were a few things he was sure of:

  Jackie Terror was back in business.

  And, this time, Will was going to stop him.

  SEVENTEEN

  “When was the last time you saw your father, Ms. Halprin?” Chief Lanning asked Liz.

  “Day before yesterday.”

  Lanning noted that on the report form in front of him. “And you have no idea where he was going?”

  “He had some business with Maxwell Rentz.”

  Lanning glanced up at that. “What kind of business?”

  “He wanted to discuss Mr. Rentz’s last offer for the family farm.”

  “What does your father do for a living?”

  “He’s retired.”

  “Retired from what?”

  “Is that important?”

  “Routine.”

  “Does the routine include questioning Mr. Rentz?”

  “What was your father retired from, ma’am?”

  “The army.”

  Lanning’s eyebrows flickered. “And he went to see Mr. Rentz to discuss an offer for your farm.”

  “Why don’t you ask Mr. Rentz, Chief?”

  “I’d like to know first why your father came here to Virginia.”

  Liz felt her frustration begin to simmer over. “And I’d like to know what two of your officers were doing in the company of Maxwell Rentz last week.”

  “I thought we’d been over this before. On the phone.”

  “Not to my satisfaction.”

  “They were off duty at the time. Mr. Rentz retained them on a perhire basis to secure a work area.”

  “What’s there to secure around a lake, Chief? Was Mr. Rentz expecting them to direct traffic a half mile from the nearest road?”

  “I don’t know, Ms.
Halprin. What I do know is if I’d’ve been the one at the lake that night, I would have arrested you for unlawful discharge of a weapon and maybe felonious assault.” Lanning dropped his pen and leaned forward. “The thing is, you come in here asking me to do something about Mr. Rentz, when he has a hell of a lot more call to come in and ask me to do something about you.”

  “Then why hasn’t he?”

  Lanning looked unmoved by her comment. “Maybe he’s trying to handle things in a gentlemanly fashion.”

  “Rentz doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  “Don’t ask me to take sides, Ms. Halprin.”

  “I’m asking you to do what’s right.”

  “Right now, in the eyes of the town, that would be to arrest you. Maxwell Rentz is a powerful man, and he’s planning to build a theme park that will bring this town to life again, put people back to work.”

  “Like the ones from the Cattleman’s Association who paid me a visit, Chief?”

  “This county hasn’t had a Cattleman’s Association in a long time, Ms. Halprin.”

  “Man named John Redding?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Then he must have been one of those people who are looking for work.”

  Liz hadn’t come to the police station expecting help so much as to put the town and county on notice that she wasn’t going to give in easily. If they wanted a fight, she intended to give it to them; in fact, that was what she wanted now too. She would never have called her father, would never have involved him in this after so many years of estrangement. He hadn’t even told her exactly how he had found out what was going on; Liz guessed it was his old army network, someone keeping an eye on her, with orders to call if there was a problem.

  She didn’t believe for one second that Maxwell Rentz, and any number of goons he could muster, were any match for her father. Buck Torrey was like a wall of granite it had taken the first twenty-six years of her life to find a crack in. That had been five years ago, when Buck discharged himself from the world and his family, along with the army. Moved to some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere you couldn’t reach, if you could find it. Liz didn’t even have his address for almost a year, sent letters care of Fort Bragg and had no evidence he ever received them.