Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)
Page 6
“I’m telling you. When he wouldn’t take it, they went after him. He and the Mick might have been the only honest guys in the district. Rhoads didn’t rat, but he wouldn’t give in either. But when the Mick died—they said it was suicide, but no way—Rhoads lost his shit. He went to his lieutenant’s house with a bat and jumpstarted the guy’s head. And then he went after two of the detectives running the racket.”
“So what’s he doing walking around?” Bellini said.
“They were going to put him away on felony assault, attempted murder, the whole thing, but Rhoads had files. Said he was going to go to the press. So they dropped the charges and gave him his pension and he walked away. This was like six years ago, so you guys would have been too young.”
“Shit,” one of the cops said, “I know what you’re talking about. My pop wouldn’t shut up about it. There was this article, something like ‘Hero cop fights corruption’ or something. That was Rhoads?”
“That was Rhoads,” the sergeant said. “The papers got hold of the story, but it was just a story. Without Rhoads’s files, there was no way to prosecute. Story goes that he’s just holding onto them so they don’t come after him or his family.”
“Jesus,” Bellini said.
“Yeah,” the sergeant said. “Not someone you want to piss off. One of those guys that don’t know how to stop once he gets going, is what I hear.”
Teddy had heard it all too and looked at Rhoads. “Come on,” Rhoads said.
14
American News Syndicate
Washington, D.C. Bureau
AMERICAN NEWS SYNDICATE
SLUG: CIGARETTES TAMPERING-ART
ALL MEDIA: MAJOR STORY UPDATE: MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 11:42 P.M. EST WASHINGTON BUREAU
ART AVAILABLE: 8 COLOR CRIME SCENE PIX. NATIONAL.
1: Crime scene. Tobacco shop in mall. Seattle, WA.
2: Crime scene. Tobacco shop taped off by FBI. Memphis, TN.
3: Victim’s distraught wife, children comforted by friends and police. Memphis, TN.
4: Antismoking protesters with signs at AmeriLeaf Tobacco, Co. distribution center. Long Island, NY.
5: Hospital spokesman, Fisher Memorial Hospital. San Bernardino, CA.
6: Close-up of Easy Lights package w/ arrow indicating point of tampering on cigarette pack. (Xmit FBI photo)
7: Crime scene. Victim under sheet in front of tobacco shop. Orlando, FL.
8: Massive media turnout at FBI press con. Washington, D.C.
309 DEAD, 132 HOSPITALIZED AS OF 9:00 P.M.
By Fred Bird
American News Syndicate Staff Reporter
____________________________________
Monday, October 2 – Washington, D.C.
The estimated death toll in today’s mass poisoning of Easy Light cigarettes has reached 309 as of this evening, FBI spokesman, Special Agent Herman Litts, said tonight.
Litts also told a packed press conference that 132 others have been hospitalized as a result of the tainted cigarettes.
“The investigation is intense and we are pursuing several promising leads,” Litts said. “Hundreds of FBI agents, augmented by state and local police and officials from state, local and federal agencies have been mobilized. The operation is being managed by the FBI’s Event Response Center here in Washington.”
In Philadelphia, a FedEx spokeswoman confirmed that the company delivered 697 of the suspect packages Monday. Exactly seven hundred packages were shipped from Philadelphia, but three had been inaccurately addressed or shipped to tobacco shops that had gone out of business.
Two FedEx employees who handled the transaction say a Caucasian male, age fifty to sixty, weighing 150 to 160 pounds and dressed as a deliveryman, dropped off the packages early Friday evening. Investigators say that although that individual is the focus of their search, he may have been an employee of a legitimate courier service that unwittingly delivered the deadly packages. Other sources speculate the man may have been the perpetrator who intentionally poisoned the cigarettes contained in the packages.
15
Atlantic City en route to Deer Mountain, Pennsylvania
The route Rhoads took wound him around upstate dairy farms and stands of pine trees and ranch houses with huge picture windows set way back on two-acre front lawns. Bleary-eyed, he took sharp turns too fast, tires crunching gravel and shooting it out into ditches like bullets. On the winding roads, his headlights illuminated everything but the asphalt. In Rhoads’s mind, the trip from A.C. to the redwood cabin was being made in one great careening sweep. He stopped only once to use the restroom at a rest stop.
Rhoads exited the Northeast Extension in Carbon County, trying to figure out how to salvage this. He had called Linda and told them he was going to dry Teddy out at their uncle’s cabin. He had called the office and said he had “family business,” and to hold down the fort. He heard Dale’s concern and suspicion over the line but didn’t say anything. They were wrong about him for maybe the first time, and if they thought he was on a bender, that wasn’t unreasonable. He hadn’t had a drink since he left Teddy’s house, and he knew that the next few days were going to be almost as hard on him as they would be on Teddy.
But he could handle that. He had done it before. The money, though, that was the thing. Teddy had lost it all. He pounded the wheel in frustration and looked over at his sleeping brother. Fifty-eight thousand dollars in a single night. Teddy had tried to tell him the story—he had been ahead at the tables, and then things had turned sour. Rhoads stared him into silence and told him to sleep it off.
How was he going to manage it? Chances were Teddy wouldn’t be able to get another job, at least not soon. Rhoads knew everything Teddy and Linda had was going to their mortgage. They had bought the house during one of Teddy’s years-long good spells, but they bought at the top of the market and there was no way to unload it now. Rhoads had his pension, but that was about it. The business was in the black, but just barely. He didn’t have enough to support Linda, Teddy and the kids.
Rhoads had done the math on the charter boat obsessively, and it all worked out. It would keep them employed and make more than the security business ever had. But for now, the boat was out of the picture.
He realized he was too tired to get any closer to a solution and just let himself ease into the drive. He followed his headlights through the dark and thought that Jan would have known what to do. She had always been smarter than he was, and she had the talent of seeing the bright side of things—something most cops lost in their first few years on the job.
Rhoads and Teddy made it to the cabin in one piece. Once inside, too weary to find the linens and throw them onto the bed, he helped Teddy to the bed and then collapsed onto a crummy sleeping bag a previous guest had left on the floor.
In the middle of the night, he awoke, half the sleeping bag wrapped around him. He unzipped it, got in, and pulled it up. The cabin door, ajar, inched back and forth, creaking in the cool, mountain wind.
Rhoads rolled around, semiconscious, both sweating under the thermo-lining of the sleeping bag and shivering where his skin was exposed to the cabin air.
He fell back asleep to half-dreams of warm sun and fishing boats and the thumping putt-putt-putt of a diesel engine.
16
Amherst, Massachusetts
City Desk, Amherst American
“Carney!” Geoff Gavin, the night editor, screamed. He chomped his cigar so tightly his teeth met. “Where in the hell is Carney?”
Carney came sprinting from the vending machine area, two minutes into her first break in six hours. “Yes sir?” she said. She was an intern from the University of Massachusetts working general assignment.
“Where’d you get these tobacco facts for the tampering story sidebar?”
The girl looked nervous. “From the current almanac and from a UPI story. Is that all right?”
She nodded.
“Let me see,” he said, scanning the story on the computer monitor. “Tobacco is a fifty-one-billion-dollar-a-year industry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Americans smoked four hundred and eighty-six billion cigarettes last year? You sure that’s not four hundred and eighty-six million?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ninety-two percent of all lung cancer cases result from cigarette smoking?”
“Yes, sir.”
The editor kept reading down the list she had prepared. “Now here’s one I can’t believe,” he said. “‘The cigarette industry continues to zealously dispute any scientific evidence that links smoking to health problems.’ That’s preposterous. What’s your source on that? MAD magazine?”
“UPI quoted that Pratt guy from Old Carolina who testified earlier this year before the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. And here’s another one I found in the New York Times. Just as absurd. Seconds after being told that users of snuff were fifty times more likely to develop oral cancer than abstainers, U.S. Tobacco’s CEO said, ‘Oral tobacco has not been established as a cause of mouth cancer.’ They asked another guy if he knew that cigarettes caused cancer, and he said, ‘I do not believe that.’”
“Who said that? Attributions!”
Carney flinched. “Um, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard.”
“Okay,” Gavin said, grinning. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” Gavin screamed for the front-page man. “Fisher! Get in here!” A man appeared. “Fisher, what do we have for the first edition headline?”
Fisher held up a banner that read, “300+ CIGARETTE DEATHS.”
“Good,” he said. “Now, make me up a nice big box with bold black mourning borders. Lead with the Tisch quote about cigarettes causing cancer. ‘I do not believe that.’ Then Carney’s cigarette facts beneath it—with the attributions. At the Amherst American, we always use attributions.”
17
Tuesday, October 3. Early, a.m.
Deer Mountain, Pennsylvania
Around dawn, Rhoads went outside to check on the day. He could already feel the need for a drink. He knew that once he had been off it for a few days he’d sleep better, but now he was wide awake. He could hear Teddy snoring through the open door of the cabin and thought, Yeah, sweet dreams, Teddy.
He went back inside and made coffee. There was always coffee at the cabin, but he knew he’d have to go into town for food later on. He looked in the fridge and found three lonely beer bottles. He took them outside and threw them as far into the woods as he could. He heard one smash and nodded in satisfaction. Teddy was still asleep at nine, and with the beers gone, he couldn’t get into any trouble, so Rhoads drove into town.
He bought enough supplies for three days. He planned on getting Teddy through the worst of the shakes and then checking him into a rehab clinic not far from where Teddy lived. He knew that a month there would wipe out a lot of the cash he had set aside for the boat, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. How he was going to keep the family in food and the mortgage paid in the long term was still a big, black question mark, but obviously things with Teddy were worse than Linda had told him, and family had to come first.
When he woke, Teddy was in turn sullen and ashamed. He tried to apologize a couple times, but Rhoads cut him off. “I don’t want to hear it. Let’s just get through this and then we can talk about all that idiocy.”
“Fine,” Teddy said and looked around for something to do. Rhoads knew that without the possibility of a drink, Teddy was suddenly faced with the long emptiness of the day and the days that would follow. Rhoads was feeling it too, but at least he had Teddy to worry about.
They made a big lunch, played cards, drank a lot of coffee and read the dog-eared paperbacks that had collected in the cabin over the years. They didn’t say much to each other. Every once in a while Teddy would get up walk around outside. Rhoads kept an eye on him from one of the porch chairs. He had the keys and Teddy’s wallet. Town was miles away, so he wasn’t worried Teddy would make a break for it, not without any money, at least.
Over dinner Teddy said, “Dad would have hated this.”
Rhoads swallowed. “Yes. But he would have understood. You know what he told me when I went to the academy? He said, “Watch out. It’s in the blood.”
He had said more than that, Rhoads remembered. You’re going to be a cop, so you’re going to have some beer with your partner, with your friends. But you watch yourself. This thing, it’s in our blood. You know what Uncle Mike is like. Man can’t help it. That don’t help his family, but it also don’t make it his fault. Just something we got stuck with.
“He said that?” Teddy asked.
“Yeah. Just like that. ‘It’s in the blood.’ He had his own troubles, you know.”
“What do you mean? Dad didn’t drink.”
“Not by the time you came. But before that, I think. I remember being four or five—you were a baby still—and him and mom fighting, really fighting. And then one day the fights stopped. And after that I never saw him take another drink.”
“God damn. I always figured he just thought I was a screw up.”
Rhoads snorted. “Well, maybe he thought that too. When you chucked your scholarship to spend two years crewing charters in Florida, he was pretty pissed. But I think he got it. Man worked hard his whole life to put food on the table, but you know dad. All he ever really wanted to do was go fishing and play the saxophone.”
Teddy smiled and did an impression of their dad’s voice: “Son, when your heart is right, the fish will come to you.”
Rhoads laughed. He was happy remembering his father, and that made him want a drink. “Seriously, he used to tell me that —”
“I know! All the time. What does that even mean?”
Rhoads shook his head. “I have no idea. Never did. Maybe it’s a metaphor. We get our hearts in the right place, things are going to work out.”
“Shit, Tommy, I hope so.”
The next day, Rhoads was outside trying to get the ancient riding lawnmower to start. He had left Teddy asleep in the bedroom, his breathing shallow and dark circles under his eyes. He looked up at the sound of a helicopter the way men always will and watched as it came closer. Soon enough he pushed the mower back into the shed. It was obvious the pilot was going to land it somewhere on the acres of tall grass at the front of the property.
The Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. Bell Ranger landed a hundred yards from Rhoads.
The pilot, Jack Fallscroft, shut down the helicopter, jumped out, and crouched to make his way beyond the still-whirling blades. He reached Rhoads and shook his hand.
“Well, well, well. What have we here? This certainly is not a fishing trawler. No, I think I recognize it though. Oh, yes. Now I have it. Thomas Rhoads, also known as T.R. Hi, Tommy! Where’s your boat?”
Rhoads had kept in touch with Jack when he quit working for Old Carolina. They had talked about the boat a few times, and Jack was all for the plan. “Sunk,” Rhoads said. “Off Atlantic City.”
“Sunk, huh? I think you projecting. You’re sunk, T.R. A moron who quit the easiest, highest-paying job he’ll ever have.”
“I don’t work for crooks. You know that. We’re different in that way.” He smiled. “I’m kind of busy here, Jack, so why don’t I just tell you no and you can take Pratt’s toy back to North Carolina or wherever you park it.”
Jack waved his hand at the helicopter. “It’s not right to make fun of my baby, T.R. It’s like telling jokes about your mom. Who,” he added, holding up a finger, “I banged last night.”
Rhoads pasted on a smile. “My mom’s dead. Anyway, it was great to see you, Jack. You can go away now. Actually, don’t just go away. Go away mad.”
“I would, except that Pratt su
mmoned you. Can’t go back empty-handed to the boss,” Fallscroft said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes in one of his aviator jacket’s zippered pockets.
“Why are you here? If I knew you’d come here looking for me I would have put a bag over your head last time you flew me up here.”
“Best fishing in the whole area. I’m not likely to forget where it is.” Fallscroft’s tone turned serious. “Something not good happened, TR. They wouldn’t tell me exactly what. Just said to dig you up, wring you out, and bring you back. Right away.”
“Huh? What could have happened so bad that they’d send you to find me?”
“They want to talk to you about it in Asheville, T.R. It’s big. It’s FBI.”
“If the FBI wants to talk to me, you tell them where I’m at. I’m kind of busy.”
“What are you doing here?”
Rhoads squinted at the horizon. Jack was a good friend. It was time to quit screwing around.
“My brother. I’m helping him get back on the wagon. Couple days up here and then he’s going to rehab.”
Jack nodded slowly. “What about you?”
“Yeah, I’m off the bottle too.” He held out his hand. It trembled. “See? Steady as a rock. So whatever Pratt wants, now’s not a good time.”
“What happened to the boat? You said you guys were finally going to do it.”
Rhoads sighed and poked his thumb over his shoulder. “Teddy went to A.C. and lost his half. No boat. But I have bigger things to worry about now. He’s in a bad way, Jack. I have to take care of him.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, man. But you know that was coming for a long time.”
Rhoads sighed again. “I know, but I thought the boat—you know. I’d be there with him all the time. We’d be doing something we always wanted to do, no shitty boss that makes you want a drink with lunch, you know? Well, no point in whining about it now. We’re on to Plan B.”