Also by Steve Anderson
The Losing Role
Under False Flags: A Novel
Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945
Copyright © 2015 by Steve Anderson
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Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-045-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-055-0
Printed in the United States of America
THE OTHER OREGON
1
Duct tape had sealed the mouths of the three men. The three were left facing each other, standing in a tight triangle, their wrists bound together to a pole, first crouching, then standing again, two of them shaking their wrists and heads in panic. Their newer sedan was still there, just feet away, parked at the old gas station that stood alone at this rural junction, closed long ago. The car doors were ajar and all the tires flat. The plates read Oregon: Publicly Owned. On the ground, their three wallets lay in a pile. Their business cards had scattered. Whiffs of smoke shifted in the air.
The two men in a panic were state officials, wearing button-downs. Neither would continue in their jobs after a traumatic experience like this. The third man, FBI Special Agent Rich Torres, knew that much just by seeing them quiver and groan under all that duct tape.
All three of them had their pants yanked down, and branded on their buttocks were two Xs, like so: X X.
Their burns were red, though not too deep. Their captors had used a handheld propane torch to get the branding iron hot, but it wasn’t heated enough—Torres had noticed that from the iron’s weak glow. Yet the state officials had only seen that branding iron coming at them, heard their captors cackling, smelled the smoke. Now their eyes showed more fear of having the bare skin of their asses branded than of any lasting pain.
Agent Torres stopped looking at them. He breathed through his nose to better regulate his breathing, to keep his heart steady and calm. He was wearing a new khaki suit to show these state guys the FBI always meant business no matter where they were. His angular face was crowned with thick black hair. Colleagues and criminals alike said Rich Torres was handsome in a casual way, like a pro golfer, and he made sure he kept his composure like any pro did, even here with his pants down and his ass raw. He scanned the far-off countryside with eyes that did not blink. The two-lane highway they drove in on ran parallel to a dry and rocky riverbed, a long gray line through the low, rolling landscape of scrubby brown grass and knotty shrubs, well east of the Cascades mountain range—still Central Oregon by name, but it might as well be Eastern from the vast and faded desolation of it all. Beyond, Torres tracked a cloud of gritty Indian summer dust kicked up by the six masked men who had branded them and run off, now just a wisp on the horizon.
2
Greg Simmons loved this cemetery. He hated most of them. Graveyards only reminded him of all that he had buried. He had helped bury a corpse, years ago. Lone Fir Cemetery was different, however. It filled a small old forest in Portland, Oregon, far enough from the Cascade Mountains where they had murdered the man. Greg loved this cemetery because its eternal residents were Portland’s first settlers. Pioneers. These people had tried to start over. How many had succeeded? He wished he could ask them. Most of the tombstones were pocked and weathered, dating back to the 1840s. Yet their names and dates and hometowns stood as reminders of what was possible. They had come here, to the Pacific Northwest. They had made a better place.
The pioneer ideal appealed to him. He had helped commit a gruesome act, but he had strived to bury his grim secret forever by becoming a person seemingly incapable of such a deed. He had returned to Portland after ten years as a reporter around the US and abroad, a wannabe vagabond stringer in Eastern Europe and South America, mostly. He had been a journalist, a nonfiction writer, an observer of nasty truths. This had taken his blinders off. This had humbled him. It left him wanting more humbling and gave him some kind of hope. Since returning to Portland, he had made himself into a known authority on the dream of Cascadia—on the prospects of the Pacific Northwest bioregion seceding from the US, what would be called Cascadia if he had anything to do with it.
Earlier, Greg had gotten a phone call while riding his bike on SE Seventh. He had slowed to the curb and pulled his phone from his pocket as cars and trucks rushed by the bike lane. He’d dropped his phone. Picked it out of the wet gravel, wiped it off. Missed his call. But it rang again. Unknown Caller, it read. Usually he ignored unknown callers, but something made him answer.
“Good afternoon,” a male voice said. “Are you Greg Simmons?”
“Yes?”
“My name’s Rich Torres. I’m with the FBI. I’d like to meet with you.”
The FBI? Greg recoiled inside, his stomach churning.
“Is that all right?” Torres added.
“Sure, okay. Why?”
“It’s nothing to worry about.”
Greg laughed, had made himself laugh. “No, I didn’t think it was. Just curious—not every day you get a call from the FBI.”
“It’s about Donny Wilkie.”
The name Donny Wilkie had always weighed on Greg’s memory like some deep dark water keeping him under, but hearing it spoken was like filling his lungs with the stuff. He wanted to cough on it and vomit it up. He managed a little chuckle instead. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” he said.
Torres didn’t comment.
“So, where and when?” Greg said.
“Somewhere discreet. As soon as it’s convenient.”
Greg might love Lone Fir Cemetery, as cemeteries go, but he had picked it because it was secluded and perfect for his discreet meeting. The long block of woods stood between SE Morrison and Stark in the twenties’ streets, on what once was the crest of a grand forested hill. He chose the oldest corner. Looking out from this hill long ago, one probably would have been able to see far up the Willamette River south toward Oregon City or even the tall masts of ships traveling the Columbia River up north. Across the Willamette back then, downtown Portland was only a muddy, scrappy little settlement down low along the water’s edge. Around Greg the oldest tombstones had faces chiseled on them, likenesses of hardened settlers who glared at him with matted down hair, thick mustaches hiding toothless mouths, and tightly pulled buns as if to say, I fought and scraped my way across this brutal continent to remake myself—you understand that, Greg. You only get one shot at this.
Rich Torres from the FBI would spot him easily. Greg was in his late thirties and still working his half-nerd, half-rebel look with vintage horn-rimmed glasses and western shirt, black tee underneath. His beard growth not too long or short but with some gray creeping in. As he waited inside the cemetery woods, clouds the color of gunmetal passed over the tops of the trees. A mini-mausoleum loomed behind him, its stonework cracking and stained glass windows dulled, the gargoyles all pitted, and a coat of arms illegible. It
was no bigger than a backyard shed but had the grandeur of fallen empires. Did his forebears mean for this mock Romantic-Gothic to end up looking so decayed, as a warning to those who dared to think as big as they? Or was it simply from all the rain and sap and pollution dripping down through the branches, from the occasional shifting of the earth below?
Greg heard a shuffle of feet—from inside the mini-mausoleum. A man filled the arched entrance.
“Jesus,” Greg muttered, startled. He stepped back.
The man came out, ducking for the archway. “Thanks for coming,” he said and held out his hand. “Special Agent Rich Torres.”
“Ah, right,” Greg said and shook the hand. Special Agent Torres had a helmet of dark hair and was almost good-looking in the way a tennis coach might be, Greg thought. Torres wore a simple hooded rain jacket and those all-purpose shoes made for rain, hiking, and city. He was about fifty, Greg guessed. The gray outdoor light shadowed his features though and lent them bulk, making him look more like a jaded private detective or some stressed-out property developer.
“I didn’t expect you here before me,” Greg said, as any innocent person with his personality and demographic would in such a situation. He used to have to work at sounding this way, trying out various steady responses, but it had been years since he felt real pressure. Now he felt a little squishy in his knees. His chest tightened. He added a smile for Torres.
“What did you expect?” Torres said.
Greg just shrugged. “I hate to ask, but can I see some ID? It’s not like I get a call from the FBI everyday and, well, there are a lot of scammers out there.”
“Certainly. You’d be a fool not to ask.” Torres produced an FBI ID card, balancing it between fingertips as if ready to do a magic trick with it.
Greg looked at the official FBI photo and words but a slight rattle of panic fogged his eyes and he couldn’t have repeated what he saw if asked. He turned the ID card over, then handed it back.
“I’d give you this card but suddenly I’m all out,” Torres said.
“That’s okay. What can I do for you?”
“Tell me about Donny Wilkie. When did you hear about his death?”
Hearing the name again made Greg straighten up inside like someone shot a hot liquid metal up his ass. This hit him in a half-second blur, in the time it took him to twitch. He wondered if a guy like Torres could notice. He masked it by taking a deep breath, as if having to think about the question. “Oh, years ago. Around the time it happened.”
“You sound relieved. Like you were relieved.”
“Really? It was so long ago.”
“Word is, it happened in Mexico.”
“It was a robbery, right?—another robbery. Probably drugs involved, I’m guessing. There was some sort of explosion, I remember. What an idiot. I wasn’t relieved or unrelieved. I hadn’t seen the guy in years.”
“Who told you about it?” Torres said.
Greg cocked his head at Torres in a way that said: Should I be answering these questions? Do I need a lawyer or something?
“We’re just talking here,” Torres added. “It’s okay. You’ve been a journalist, right? It’s like an interview. Off the record.”
“All right, let me think.” Greg stared at his feet and focused on his retro New Balance runners, using their artifice as his time machine. It must have been ten years ago when he found out, but how much should he say?
“Ten years ago,” Torres said for him.
“Right, right. Ten years. I must have looked it up. It must have been the state database. The old LexisNexis maybe? That was when I was a reporter. Is that how you found me? From a database—from the logs?”
“You hadn’t returned to Oregon yet.”
“No. I was in New York City probably. I traveled a lot.”
“You two were friends.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. We had been friends years earlier. I hadn’t seen him in years when he died.”
“So, fifteen years?” Torres said. “Maybe more. Wilkie moved here in high school. A country kid, fish out of water. He gets on the wrong path. You don’t. Later, you got curious about him. Maybe you saw a little story in it—one of those sad pieces about dumb criminals but with a name you know.”
“That’s probably it. I wasn’t the best reporter ever, but I was good at following stuff deeper. I would go on these tangents.”
“There you go. It’s completely natural,” Torres said. He turned away a moment, looking in each direction as if on a boulevard heavy with traffic.
That rush of hot liquid metal tightening Greg inside had subsided, and Torres’ pause to check their environs helped. Greg only hoped it wasn’t some kind of tactic to lull him.
Torres turned back to him. “How we doing so far?”
“Doing? Fine. I’m fine,” Greg said.
“Do you know where he’s buried?” Torres said.
“Who, Donny? No. That I do not know.”
“It was not Mexico. We do know that.”
Greg held out his hands, palms out. “Okay, you know what? Let’s stop a sec here. This is the part where I have to ask you what you want exactly. No offense.”
“No, of course not,” Torres said. “Let me ask you something—how’s this for a book idea: the true story of a chronic criminal, torn between country and city?”
“’Chronic?’ Not the best word choice, but …” Greg let his words trail off. He was intrigued and didn’t like the feeling, because this was no subject to be liking. He stopped. “Wait, just wait. I just don’t understand what this is about. This is all because I kinda knew a guy almost twenty years ago who’s been dead for ten?”
Torres and Greg had a staring contest for a good five seconds, but Torres was winning as if Greg was one of these tombstones and Torres was reading it. Cars whooshed by beyond the tree line.
“Come on,” Torres said. He walked Greg over to the doorway of the mausoleum, his eyes searching the grounds again even though they were still alone and certainly didn’t look suspicious; if anything, they were keeping this cemetery less weird, populated as it could be by various LARPers and mushroom-trippers and wannabe Wiccans.
Torres pulled a few photos from his rain jacket and arranged them like a hand of cards, faces down. Greg’s jitters returned and he blurted out a giggle, which only made him feel like some perv seeking dirty photos in the park.
Torres turned one photo over, showing it to Greg.
The man in the photo was wearing a casual suit and a cowboy hat. His lean face had those faint acne scars but also the dimples, and he was still smiling that great smile he’d had. It was definitely Donny Wilkie. The photo was a little grainy, like a blown-up surveillance photo. It was difficult to tell how old Donny was, but Greg figured it must have been right before he died—well after he knew Donny.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Greg said. “He looks so normal.”
Torres showed Greg another photo. Donny was wearing paramilitary clothing with many pockets. The matching camouflage was vibrant and the fabric crisp as if new, less like a hunter and more like a military contractor. Donny grinned in this photo, his teeth clenched in a way Greg didn’t recognize, his already dark eyes punctuating the photo like ink blots.
The very ground beneath Greg felt squishy now, though it was an all-concrete path. The jitters had settled low in his stomach, and he needed to say something to fight the sick feeling—to distance himself from this Donny that he may have had a hand in creating.
“He was … what, in the Army? I didn’t know that.”
“No, that he was not,” Torres said.
“All I know is, violence was never his deal,” Greg said.
“I thought you didn’t know him that well.”
“I’m just saying, not from what I remember. Not the Donny I knew. Maybe he was hunting in that one photo. He is from rural Oregon. They all hunt out there, don’t they?”
“You really don’t know what they do, do you? Just so you know: I’m a Special
Agent, Field Agent, whatever you want to call it. Also, what they call a Resident Agent. I’m not in Portland much. Been out in Central, Eastern Oregon for years.”
“That’s your territory.”
“It is. I get to do my own thing. Can it get boring? Yes. Then? Something happens and it’s all you.”
“Not sure if I’d like that,” Greg said.
Torres shrugged. He made the photos disappear inside his rain jacket. “We know one thing for certain. Prison got him connected to militia types.”
“Militia? You mean like Timothy McVeigh, homegrown terrorist stuff?”
“It doesn’t always go that far,” Torres said. “A lot of militias out there just run around in the desert with guns and rave about how great the Constitution is, like it’s some pastor’s daughter who’s been raped and they will avenge her, restore her good name so they can finally have her.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” Greg said, keeping calm. A militia was the last thing he expected. A militia just didn’t fit into any concept of Cascadia he could imagine. Even the word sounded awkward, as if he was saying it for the first time.
“No, it doesn’t work like that. The Constitution is still a living document, one that could leave them hanging any time.”
“Okay, but the database I saw didn’t have any of this on Donny.”
“True. Back then it didn’t. His felonies were for robbery, drugs, mail fraud. After, though, Donny had contact with certain people.”
And what about well before? Years before? What did this Torres know exactly? Greg had been around long enough to know a guy like Torres always knew more than he let on. It was all about finding leverage and knowing how to tap the power of that leverage.
“So, you want me to write something?” Greg said. “Why you brought up a book idea. That is what we’re talking about, right?”
Torres nodded. “What you do with it is up to you. I, we, are looking for someone to look into Donny’s last steps, see what he was up to, what he helped create, but someone who doesn’t seem like us. Someone who could have their own reasons completely. See what I mean? You’ll have to go certain places. The where and who will be what I tell you.”
The Other Oregon Page 1