Dead Simple

by Jon Land

  “Ghosts got the sub too?”

  “Legend says they were Union soldiers stranded here in a storm during the Civil War. They froze and then were buried forever when Bull Run flooded.”

  Blaine gazed over at the lake. “And you think that’s what I’m going to find down there tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see.”

  TWENTY

  “The thing is, Jack, well, I thought we had a deal,” Othell Vance said across the table, summoning his courage.

  “How’s your boy, Othell?”

  “Fine.”

  “I kept my word, didn’t I? Gave you the pills he needed, as soon as you said you’d help me.”

  “And I did. I did help you.”

  “And now I’m doing you a favor, letting you tag along. Rediscover your youth, the fire that was your very defining essence.” Jack Tyrell shoved the Big Mac into his mouth as far as it would go, talking as he chewed. “How’s your burger, Othell?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your burger. You’re not eating it. It’s what you asked me to get you.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  They had the table to themselves. Jack had asked Mary, the Yost brothers, and Lem Trumble to give them a little space. So they had taken a table on the other side of the McDonald’s; at this time of night, the six of them were the only ones inside, though the drive-through was still doing a brisk business.

  Tyrell checked out Othell’s supply of fries. “Can I have those?”

  Othell shoved them across the table.

  “I eat in places like this a lot.”

  Othell looked at him quizzically.

  “Oh yeah. Fast-food joints. Places where nobody pays much attention to anyone else and mostly keep to themselves. The kind of people who would know my face aren’t likely to come in. Most important, it doesn’t take long to eat. You follow me?”

  “Doesn’t take long to eat, yes.”

  “There’s another reason why I like McDonald’s especially. Can you guess what?”

  Othell Vance tried futilely for comfort in the stiff chair, desperately wanting to go back to being Harrison Conroy. “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “Yes,” Tyrell said, and chomped off some more of the Big Mac. “Yes, we do. The past is all I’ve got, Othell. I like talking about it. Come on … McDonald’s, remember? What was it, ’70?”

  “No, ’71.”

  Jack Tyrell looked pleased with him. “See, you do remember. Okay, help me out here. We go in at lunch hour, busiest time of the day. Place is packed. We’re carrying those bags with us. What do you call them?”

  “Backpacks.”

  “Yeah, backpacks. I see kids carrying them all the time now. We had your homemade C-4 packed inside them, as I recall. That shit was the work of genius, right down to the way we just peeled back the tape and stuck the mounds under the tables. Gobble up our food so we could get out of there and the next people could take our place. I was holding the detonator. We move ourselves to a safe distance, everything ready to go. Then the school bus showed up.”

  Othell Vance felt suddenly sick.

  “Where were they coming from, again?”

  “A museum,” Othell said. “The Smithsonian, I think.”

  Vance looked around him, and suddenly the McDonald’s seemed to change. Golden arches sprouted where they’d been missing for years. The prices on the menu board lowered dramatically.

  “You freaked,” Jack Tyrell continued. “You tried to get the detonator from me, and when you couldn’t you made a run for the restaurant. Am I remembering this correctly?”

  Othell Vance couldn’t even manage a nod, he was shaking so hard. Right before him, the man on the other side of the booth was changing too, morphing into someone else. Jack’s hair was suddenly held back by a bandanna, his face tanned instead of almost sickly pale. It was ’71, alive and well and totally fucked up. An acid trip that wouldn’t end.

  A bad flashback, that’s what today felt like.

  “Remember what happened next, Othell?”

  More silence.

  “Come on, give it a try. We’re playing here.”

  “You …”

  “Yeah?”

  “You made me press the detonator.”

  Jackie Terror glowed with pride across from him. “Not before the bus emptied out, I didn’t. It was your indoctrination into the world of Midnight Run, man. I helped you define your essence. And over the years you proved me right. Don’t prove me wrong now, Othell. I came back to do a job, but this is the nineties. Everything’s bigger. People are used to buildings blowing up, big jets dropping out of the sky. So my job’s got to be appropriate for the times, big enough to make my point. And to do that I need you.” He settled back again. “Hey, thanks for the fries.”

  Othell Vance figured he might as well get it over with. “You remember I told you we lost the stuff, a whole shipment of what was called Devil’s Brew?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I thought the story was bullshit. A hoax so we could keep the stuff while everybody thinks we lost it. I figure I dig around a little, I find where we’re really hiding it.”

  “You telling me you figured wrong, Othell?”

  “The story wasn’t bullshit at all, Jack, it’s the truth. A tanker carrying the Devil’s Brew up and vanished into thin air about seven months ago, just like I told you.”

  “Somebody beat us to it, that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s a possibility. But I don’t think so. See, the tanker had a built-in transponder so it could be located easily if something like this happened. The thing is the signal died right around the time the tanker vanished. Search teams scoured the area fifty miles in all directions, then expanded it to a hundred. Didn’t leave an inch uncovered.”

  “But nobody found it.”

  “No.”

  “You bring a map?”

  “What’s the difference? I checked and double-checked, did everything I could. The Devil’s Brew is gone.”

  Tyrell glanced across the restaurant at Mary, picking at her chef’s salad. “Just give me that map.”

  They rented four rooms in a cheap motel from a clerk in a bathrobe who didn’t ask questions. Jack was looking forward to his first night with Mary in longer than he cared to think about. Busting her out the night before had gotten the old juices flowing, and they celebrated in their room with more blasts from the past. Toked on some great hashish, which made them cough, and did some hits of acid, which made them dizzy. It almost felt like their bodies had forgotten what it was supposed to feel like. Jack shrugged it off and blamed the age thing again, those missing twenty-five years.

  The Yost twins, meanwhile, had found a couple of college girls fixing a flat tire and brought them along for the ride. Had them in their room three doors down now, Tyrell certain they’d be done with them well before morning. He wasn’t a squeamish man, far from it, but he was glad the Yosts’ room wasn’t next to his.

  Jack Tyrell got out the map Othell had come up with, creased by lines made by numerous refoldings, and spread it over the bed for Mary to look at.

  “It’s no good, Jackie. I haven’t got the feeling yet,” Mary said, snuggling up to him and wrapping her arm around his shoulder.

  Jack cradled her against him. “You will, baby. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever.”

  “You know how the vision thing is with me. The quickenings come and go. Always have, since I was a little girl.”

  “You weren’t much more than that when I first met you.”

  “And you always appreciated me.”

  “You had the right answers, more often than not.”

  Mary looked sad. “Less so as I’ve gotten older. Like the gift dries up with time. Makes me worry.”

  “About what?”

  She looked at him with those dark puppy-dog eyes that hadn’t changed since she was seventeen. A few wrinkles, the first toes of crow’s-feet, and a few strands of hair starting to go gray—that was al
l Queen Mary had to show for the twenty-five years they’d been apart.

  “That when it dries up altogether there’ll be nothing to appreciate about me anymore.”

  “You think the gift is the only reason I came back for you?”

  Mary shrugged. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Not that long.”

  She cuddled tighter against him. “I know why you came back, Jackie.” Mary felt him stiffen. “I saw it one of my good days a few weeks back. The whole thing.”

  “It hurt.”

  “I saw that too. I can feel it now.”

  “You remember what I told you about pain?”

  “It’s a good thing, you said.”

  “Why?”

  “You keep going until the ache goes away. You turn it around and make other people hurt just as bad.”

  “I never had this much pain before, baby. Passion but not pain. Difference being I never knew who I was doing it all for. Now I do.”

  “I understand, Jackie.”

  He eased her away from him. “We got to do this, Mary. We got to do this because the world got so fucked up so slowly that nobody seemed to notice. They let it happen and look what we got. Twelve-year-old kids with machine guns. Old ladies’ skulls bashed in for their grocery money.” Tyrell felt his emotions wobbling and summoned the pain back. “They hunted us like dogs twenty-five years ago, because we were fighting what they were and all the shit they stood for. Beating them was all we ever wanted, and we came lots closer than most realize. Control—that’s what it comes down to. Control and power. They were afraid of losing it, of us taking it away from them.”

  He paused and stared into space. His face hardened.

  “Now, all these years later, they’ve lost control and don’t realize it. Difference is they’ve lost it to people who don’t give a shit. I look out there and see everything we worked for doing a slow crash and burn. The old enemies are too pathetic to hate. They’re just going through the motions. They’re not gonna be ready for us this time. We’re a whole new species, far as they’re concerned.”

  “You’re angry, Jackie,” Mary said, and hugged him tighter. “You were never angry the last time we went to war.”

  “Maybe that’s why we lost. But this time’s gonna be different. Find Othell’s missing shit—that’s all it’s gonna take. This time we’re gonna win.”

  Mary took a deep breath. Jack Tyrell felt her stiffen in his arms briefly before she began to shake. He was sure she was having a seizure, ready for the eyeballs to roll up in her head. He cursed the drugs they’d bought on the street.

  Mary started to slump. Jack tried to bring her against him, but she slipped away and reached for his spread-out map with an index finger. He watched the finger plop down and quickly replaced his over it before he lost the spot.

  “Well, I’ll be damned … .”

  Then Mary was hugging him again, tighter than before, tighter than ever. Jack kept his finger glued to a point in the Valley and Ridge region of central Pennsylvania she had marked.

  “Did I do good, Jackie, did I do good?”

  “You did fine, baby,” he replied. “You did just fine.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “I don’t know exactly what I can tell you that I didn’t tell the other fellas who were here,” the head groundskeeper at Crest Haven Memorial Park told Will Thatch.

  “You were the only one who got a look at the killer,” Will said. “Am I right?”

  “Apparently. But that was over a month ago now. I don’t see why I got to go through it again,” the man said impatiently. His name was Sunderwick, and his gaze kept drifting over the grave sites, eager to get to the day’s work. Will wondered if funerals were being held up on his account.

  “Just routine.”

  “I see your ID again?”

  Will produced it from his pocket and forced himself not to look away, not to do anything that might betray the sham that had started when he retrieved his old FBI identification and badge from a dresser drawer in his hotel room.

  The picture inside had made him gasp. He’d forgotten what he looked like all those years before when he still believed in hope and justice. Losing that belief was what had torn him away from his career and deposited him in a bottle. And the bottle had conspired with the years to turn his face into a patchwork quilt, slabs of flesh separated from each other by valleys deep enough for birds to roost in. His face had the lived-in look of a man about to move.

  He’d had a passport-size picture of that face taken at the Kinko’s around the corner from his hotel. Then he trimmed it to the proper specifications and glued it over the face of the man he’d forgotten a long time ago. He worked on the ID’s issue date next with a Bic fine-line marker, trembling hands preventing him from getting the job done as fast as he would have liked, but it looked decent when he was finished. Good enough to fool anyone who didn’t take a second look, like Sunderwick. The only thing the disguise lacked was a gun; Will thought it a good idea to leave his old .38 under the mattress, where it wouldn’t do anyone any harm.

  The groundskeeper handed the ID back to him. “Not the same as the other guys who were here.”

  “Well, the FBI’s got lots of departments.”

  “I say they were from the FBI?”

  “No. I just assumed … Who were they from?”

  “Somewhere I never heard of. Don’t remember the initials. They were official enough, though.”

  “Sure,” Will said, his curiosity piqued. “And they wanted to know about the killings?”

  “They came for the bodies. I practically had to force them to listen to what I knew.”

  Will pulled a copy of the composite sketch from the newspaper out of his jacket. “You told them this was the man you saw do the killing.”

  “No. I saw the man. Saw the bodies. I made the connection for myself later on.”

  “Get a good look at the bodies?”

  Sunderwick almost laughed. “You kidding?”

  “How’d you know they were dead?”

  Sunderwick looked at Will as if he had missed the punch line of a joke. “They were dead, all right.”

  “And the killer …”

  “I wouldn’t have given him a second look if he wasn’t holding one of my shovels. Since he doesn’t work here, that’s a problem. I’m about to head over and make my point, when I get called away. I check to see if he’s still hanging around later, I find the bodies.”

  “And these men who came to pick the bodies up, they didn’t ask you anything?”

  “Didn’t care what I had to say, either. Just wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  “The man you saw,” Will started. “What do you think he was doing?”

  “Doing?”

  “With the shovel.”

  “Leaning on it.”

  “Besides that.”

  “You mean, in the cemetery?”

  “Yes.”

  Sunderwick frowned. “What do people come to cemeteries for?”

  Will nodded, the man’s point taken. “How many funerals were there that morning?”

  “Seven or eight, I think. We were busy. The murders really messed up the afternoon schedule. We had to hold the Masterson funeral at a temporary site.”

  “Why?”

  Sunderwick leaned in closer to Will. “Because that man with the shovel, he buried the four men he killed in their plot.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “You come very well recommended, Mr. Dobbler,” Rentz greeted.

  The man whom Donovan had escorted into his office first thing that morning was built like a fireplug and looked extremely uncomfortable in a suit. He was sweating heavily, and Rentz could see the material straining as he shifted his shoulders.

  “Thank you, sir,” Dobbler responded.

  “I have a problem.”

  “You wouldn’t have called me if you didn’t, sir.”

  “A different one than that which led me to seek out your services initially
.”

  Dobbler cocked his square head to the side like a confused dog.

  Rentz cleared his throat. “This is a very delicate matter. Last night some men I retained failed completely to perform what should have been a simple task—”

  “I understand.”

  “I haven’t finished explaining.”

  “It’s not necessary, sir. There’s usually only one thing I’m called on to do. Normally I don’t work for strangers and almost never involve myself in personal squabbles.” Dobbler leaned forward. “But, sir, you come very well recommended too.”

  Rentz nodded. “Someone else showed up on the farm yesterday, someone my information leads me to believe will require someone of your … expertise to deal with,” he explained, thinking of the man Chief Lanning had run into twice the day before, who on both occasions thwarted Rentz’s plans for Liz Halprin.

  Dobbler removed a thick, folded wad of papers from his inside suit pocket and rose stiffly to hand it across the desk. “My complete file, sir.”

  Rentz started reading. “You were dishonorably discharged from the army?”

  “Yes, sir, I was. The only officer to be so disciplined after the Gulf War. I served eighteen months in the stockade.”

  Rentz flipped one page, then another, looking up as he read. “You turned a flamethrower on the inhabitants of an Iraqi village?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rentz just skimmed the rest. “Why do you want me to know all this?”

  “I like my potential employers to be aware of exactly what they’re getting.”

  Rentz considered the prospects. “I’ll need a few bodyguards as well; say, three. The best men you can get on short notice. Price is not an object.”

  “Not a problem, sir.”

  “And you can start right away?”

  “I always carry everything I need with me.”

  Rentz stood up. “Then I’ll let Mr. Donovan fill you in on the specifics of the assignment.”

  Dobbler stood up, almost to attention.

  “One more thing,” Rentz said, as Dobbler started to turn around.

  “Sir?”