by Ray Daniel
I said, “I’m—”
Bobby stood quickly, elbowing me square in the balls on the way up. Twice in one day.
I covered my crotch. This was a bad one. “What the fuck, Bobby?”
Bobby said, “Oh Jesus, dude. Did I get you? I’m sorry.”
The new guy said, “I have a warrant to arrest Aloysius Tucker.”
Bobby said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Lance Jacobson, Wayland Police. I need to arrest Aloysius Tucker.”
It takes about ten seconds to feel the wave of pain from a good strike to the balls. Mine hadn’t come yet. Still, I wasn’t talking. I was standing, hands on knees, waiting.
Lee reached for the envelope and said, “Let me see that.” He read off, “Trespassing, assault, assault with a deadly weapon? What was the deadly weapon?”
Jacobson said, “A cultivator.”
Bobby said, “A cultivator? What the fuck is a cultivator?”
The pain hit. I said, “Urrggg.”
Jacobson said, “It’s a gardening tool. It has claws.”
Bobby took the envelope from Lee and said, “Give me that.”
Lee said, “A cultivator is a deadly weapon?”
“Cultivator my ass,” said Bobby.
Jacobson said, “Plus, this Tucker guy closed a car door on the GDS security guard’s arm. That’s another deadly weapon.”
I sank to my knees, “Uhhhhhhnnnng.”
Bobby asked, “Did he break the guard’s fucking arm?”
“It caused a contusion. A severe contusion. Is Mr. Tucker around here? This is his street.”
“Ohhhhh,” I moaned.
Jacobson asked, “Is that guy okay?”
Bobby took Jacobson by the arm and led him away. “He’ll be fine. Listen, let me keep this warrant.”
“Who are you?”
“Bobby Miller. FBI.” I imagine that Bobby showed Jacobson some ID, but I didn’t see it. I was crawling across the brick sidewalk.
Lee followed them and said, “We are looking for Mr. Tucker. When we find him, we’ll serve him.”
“Hey, I need that warrant,” said Jacobson.
Bobby said, “Don’t worry about it. If I can’t serve it, I’ll get it back to you. We should catch him today, and it would be good to have a warrant ready to go.”
I heard Jacobson’s car door open, then close.
Bobby said, “Here’s my card. Give me a call.”
The cop’s GPS lady said, “If possible, make a U turn.” Then he was gone.
Lee said to Bobby, “Do not betray my faith in you, Agent Miller.” He left us in front of my house.
I rolled onto my back on the sidewalk and reached into my pocket. My mother’s unpaid bill was still there. If I was right, I was going to be able to get some answers about my father. I hoped it would be enough to save Lucy.
Sixty-Eight
My injured ankle crackled as I limped toward St. Botolph Street to grab another Zipcar. A Honda Civic named Buford waited for me on West Newton Street. Bobby caught up with me. “Hold up a minute.”
I limped on. “Can’t stop. I need to save Lucy.”
Bobby grabbed my arm. “Will you wait a second?”
“No.” I kept moving.
“Don’t make me arrest you.”
That stopped me. “You’re gonna arrest me now? After crushing my balls and lying to that guy from Wayland?”
“You committed a fucking crime, Tucker. What are we going to do about that?”
“I’m not going to do anything about it. You are going to do something about it.”
“What am I going to do about it?”
“You’re going to make it go away.”
“Bullshit on that!” said Bobby.
“Fuck you then, Bobby. Arrest me.”
We stood, facing off, my bad ankle complaining about the uneven bricks that made up the sidewalk. Bobby turned away from me and walked in a little circle uttering a mantra of profanity. “Goddammit, motherfucker, shit!”
I crossed my arms, spat my words. “Do you know how happy I was when you called me?”
Bobby stopped swearing. “What?”
“Do you know how happy I was, at that ball game, with Lucy? I was fucking happy.”
Bobby said nothing.
“It was our third date, the Sox were winning, I was with a hot girl who I really liked and who seemed to like me. I was probably even going to go home with her.”
“What’s this—”
“I’ll bet that she would have been my girlfriend. We’d be spending the fall watching the Sox, having dinners. She would probably have had some of her stuff in my house by now.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that you fucked that all up. You, my friend, destroyed it. If you hadn’t called me, I was going to spend the night at Lucy’s house. You guys would have cleaned up my street and the next day I would have never known about JT.”
“I don’t—”
I pulled out my Droid and flipped to Bobby’s picture of JT. “But you had to send me this. You know what I thought this was? A picture of my dad.”
“I know.”
“I thought this was a picture of my dad. My old dad. The guy who was faithful to his wife, who didn’t have another family, and who didn’t have another son who got his name and who was his favorite.”
“Look—”
“That was back when I had a mother—”
“It’s not—”
“So you fucking owe me, Bobby. You fucking owe it to me to go out there and do whatever it is you people fucking do to make these things go away.”
Bobby opened his palms. “It’s not so easy.”
I stepped close to him. Crushing pain radiated from my ankle. “That’s your problem. Not my problem. Go figure it out, because I’m going to try to save my girlfriend before Talevi hacks some other part off of her and sends it to me in a box.”
I turned and limped down the street.
Bobby called out, “Let me help you. We can get him.”
“I’ll call you.”
I rustled the handwritten bill in my pocket, making sure that I had kept this last ticket to saving Lucy. It was a long shot, but it was all I had.
Sixty-Nine
YouStoreIt Self-Storage in Framingham had been hiding in plain sight just off the Mass Pike. I had driven past it dozens of times on the way to visit my mother. I never knew she had a unit here. The building matched the drawing on the handwritten bill. A tall lobby faced customers, while a phalanx of garage doors, entryways to storage, ran down the side of the low building.
I pushed through the glass doors into the office. An older woman sat behind the desk, wearing a red YouStoreIt collared shirt and jeans. She had crinkly eyes and weathered skin. She watched a large HDTV that was mounted on the wall as talking heads blabbed on the screen and words scrolled across the bottom: Iranian Saber Rattling.
I asked, “How’s the news?”
She answered with a husky smoker’s voice. “The world’s ending tomorrow. It has been for years.”
I placed the bill on her desk. “I’m here to pay Angelina Tucker’s bill. I’m closing the account.”
The woman picked up the bill. “I’d been expecting this. Poor Angelina. Are you her son? Are you Aloysius?”
I nodded.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I nodded again. “Thanks. I’m surprised she mentioned me.”
She held out her hand. “She talked about you all the time. I’m C.C.”
We shook. “Did you know my mother well?”
“She used to come here every week. Usually on Sundays, but sometimes she’d come if the world’s news got especially bad.”
“Really? What’s here?”
; C.C. peered at me. “You don’t know?”
“No. I never knew my mother had this place.”
“That’s so sad. I would have expected her to share this with you. You’re John’s son, after all.”
“Shared what?”
“I’ll show you.”
We left the office and walked through the cool September air. Summer was definitely over. YouStoreIt consisted of three long buildings with wide white doors spaced along the sides. C.C. led me to the closest building and we walked down its length.
“Your mother had a ten by ten unit,” C.C. said. “About the size of a small office. That’s obvious considering how she used it.”
“Used it?”
“You’ll see.”
We reached a unit. C.C. consulted a strip of paper and entered an access code. “The code is 0723,” she said.
“My parents’ anniversary,” I said.
“That’s sweet. I never knew that.” She pushed a button. The door rattled open, and I dropped through a hole in time.
Seventy
I was twelve. A thin gold strip demarcated the blue hallway rug from the rust-orange rug in my father’s office. My father’s shag was holy ground, not to be touched by twelve-year-old feet. I stood on the edge of that gold strip and looked in at my father’s desk, easy chair, and filing cabinet. My foot itched to touch the rusty carpet. I inched it forward.
“Aloysius, what are you doing?” my mother called out, poking her head out of the kitchen.
“Nothin’,” I said, drawing my foot back.
“Don’t you go in there. That’s your father’s office.”
“I know.”
“He’s got secrets in there. You can’t see them.”
I wondered at my father’s secrets.
“Ma,” I called to my mother. She was back in the kitchen. “Why does Dad have the secrets in his office?”
My mother called back, “It’s his work. He does work for the government.”
“Why do they tell him secrets?”
My mother’s head appeared from the kitchen, looking at me down the hall. “Because they trust him. They know he’s a good man. Come away from there and take out the trash.”
Now the adult me was standing next to C.C. expecting to find the golden border to my father’s office. There was none, just as there was no rust carpet. The floor was concrete, but the office was set up just as he had it: desk facing the door, his chair behind it opposite a Barcalounger. A two-drawer filing cabinet completed the triangle.
C.C. said, “You can go in.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I can.”
The taboo washed over me as I stepped into the office. C.C. switched on a lamp next to the easy chair. “Your mother didn’t like the overhead fluorescent.”
I edged around the desk and pulled my father’s chair out. The desktop was empty but for a green blotter with leather down the sides, a GDS mug filled with mechanical pencils, and an ashtray made out of a hunk of twisted metal, a souvenir of a missile test. I considered sitting in my dad’s chair but remained standing.
“What did she do in here?” I asked.
“When I saw her, she was sitting in the easy chair. I think she talked to your father when I wasn’t around.”
I remembered now. I’d find my parents in the office when I got home from school. My father sitting in the desk chair, and my mother in the Barcalounger. The desk chair stood as solid as ever, made of sturdy wood with leather on the seat and back. Dust grayed the brown leather. The chair beckoned, but I’d never sat on it before and I couldn’t now. It was my father’s.
I ran my hands over the desk, feeling the depth of the dust, and opened the top drawer. It held an engineering notebook dated from the November before my father’s death with a dash for the ending date. It was his last notebook.
My mother had never had the notebooks in her house. I could have saved her if I’d known about this room. I could have saved her if I’d been the kind of son she trusted. Too bad I wasn’t.
I opened the large desk file drawer and saw other notebooks lying flat in it. The top notebook had an ending date that matched the beginning date on the current notebook. Judging by the size of the pile, decades of notebooks were stacked in there.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” said C.C.
“Thanks. I’ll be clearing this place out soon.” I imagined taking the heavy desk home and replacing the Ikea thing I had today. That would have to wait. I moved to the filing cabinet. A small metal frame looked out from the top drawer. It held a slip of paper that said A-L. The bottom drawer said M-Z. The P’s would be in there.
I slid the drawer open. Ran my finger down to the P’s and pulled out a folder. My father’s precise lettering labeled the folder with Sharpie permanence. It said Paladin. I lifted the Paladin folder out, put it on the desk, and opened it. My old crayon drawing looked back at me: the secret plans to the original Paladin.
The old leather of the Barcalounger crunched as I sat in the big chair and laid the plans across my lap. The cover was the same one that JT must have pulled out of the archives. He had gotten to see my father’s secrets. Another win for him. I opened the front page and read the introduction. It was written in the stilted engineering-speak that was popular today on Wikipedia. It described the architecture of the Paladin missile.
Paladin had two pieces: a ground unit and a missile. The missile used a data downlink to send radar information to the ground computer; the ground computer sent instructions back to the missile. I flipped to the table of contents and found the downlink frequencies. These were the numbers that could save Lucy’s life. They’d be obsolete now, but Talevi wouldn’t know that until Lucy was safe.
I flipped open my cell phone and called Talevi.
“I have what you want,” I said.
“I doubt that,” said Talevi. “I heard that you failed completely.”
“Who told you that?”
“It does not matter.”
“Well, they were wrong. I’ve got your Paladin specs right here. I’m looking at the downlink information. I want to talk to Lucy.”
There was silence over the line. I wondered if the call had been dropped.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Talevi. “I will set up an email drop where you can send the file. Then I will tell you where to pick up your friend.”
“Bullshit. I’ve got a paper copy and I’m going to trade it for Lucy, assuming she’s still alive. I want to talk to her.”
Talevi sighed into the phone, then said, “Here.”
Lucy said, “Tucker?”
I said, “Yeah. It’s me. I’m going to get you out of there.”
“Oh God! Please listen to me, don’t trust—”
I heard a slapping sound, and the phone clattered in my ear. Lucy cried out. Then Talevi’s voice.
“You see. Your friend is still alive.”
“If you hurt her again, I will fucking kill you, Talevi.”
“Let us not be dramatic. How shall we trade?”
“Some place public. You give me her, I give you the plans.”
“Yes, I assumed you would want to meet in a place public. Go to Dalton Street in front of the red bar. We will make the exchange. You will give me the information, and I will give you Lucy.”
“Okay.” My mind was cranking on how to get Jael involved.
“You should know one thing before we meet,” said Talevi.
“What’s that?”
“If I see any sign of that Jew sniper or your fat FBI friend, I will kill you and your lover before I become a martyr. Meet me in one hour.”
Seventy-One
Jael Navas, that Jew sniper, leaned over her rifle and considered the sight lines.
“This is an impossible angle,” she said. “I cann
ot defend you.”
We were standing on the sixth floor of the Hilton’s parking garage trying to see the sidewalk in front of Bukowski Tavern. A wide concrete barrier, five feet tall, blocked our view.
Jael continued, “I would have to climb this wall and lean over it. He would see me.”
We walked through the empty garage to another wall that faced the Mass Pike. The concrete here formed a set of Venetian blind louvers. Jael crouched against the wall and poked her rifle through.
“I still cannot see the tavern,” she said. “I can only cover you if you stand away from the tavern entrance.” She pointed to the bridge where the Mass Pike ran under Dalton Street. It was twenty yards from the rendezvous point.
“Okay.” My fingers tapped against my leg, burning off nervousness.
“If they move to the spot in front of the tavern, then you must run away from them down Boylston.”
I looked out at the spot. It was across the street from the Capital Grille. Tall windows overlooked the meeting. I wondered if Talevi would be willing to conduct business there.
Jael said, “This is a very bad idea.”
“Yeah?”
“I see no way that Talevi lets either of you live.”
“If he kills me, you’d tell Bobby about him. That should be enough insurance.”
“We could tell Agent Miller about Talevi right now. It is not too late.”
I fitted a Bluetooth headset into my ear. “He’ll kill Lucy.”
Jael took a small sip of air and almost whispered, “He will not let her live, regardless.”
“I have to try.”
“He will kill you both.”
“Not if you can get a shot. I’ll stay on the bridge.”
Jael fitted her own Bluetooth headset. “Yes. Please.”
“Please?”
“Please do not make me watch a friend die.”
I entered the narrow elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. “Nobody’s going to die today.”
The doors closed. I don’t think Jael believed me.
My cell phone played “Extreme Ways.” I activated my headset.
Jael’s voice filled my ear. “I am here.”