Envy the Night

by Michael Koryta

  “Deadly.”

  “I guess that’s the word.”

  “It’s the only word that counts right now. Whoever followed Vaughn up here made a clear statement today, and we’ve got to listen to it.”

  “Doesn’t that mean I should have told the FBI about the car?”

  “You were the one who chose not to,” he said. “I didn’t instruct you on that. So what’s your reasoning? Why didn’t you tell them?”

  She stopped walking, and he went a couple of paces ahead before turning back to her.

  “I didn’t tell them,” she said, “because I’m scared.”

  “You should be.”

  “And there was a moment in our conversation this morning when you seemed to suggest that it would better to distance myself from the whole thing.”

  “I did think that, but as of right now, you have no distance. I don’t think there’s much chance of getting any back, either.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Here’s what I can tell you—the police in this town, with or without Mr. Atkins of the Wausau office of the FBI, aren’t ready to deal with these guys. So I don’t think you made a poor decision. I don’t think that at all.”

  “So what do we do?” she repeated.

  He looked at her, then down, his eyes seeming to settle on the butt of his gun.

  “There are only two things I’m certain of right now. First one is that we should talk to Ezra.”

  “We should talk to a fishing guide?”

  “He’s a bit more than that, Nora.”

  “Okay. And the other thing you’re certain of?”

  He started to walk again, the gun bouncing a little with each step.

  “That you if go home tonight, you probably die.”

  20

  __________

  Grady hadn’t dated much since Adrian left. The occasional setup, or maybe somebody he’d meet at a party and see once or twice again, but nothing serious. He had a date for Saturday night, though, a woman who worked computers at one of the major Chicago banks and had been assigned to help Grady review hundreds of transactions. He was with a team that was trying to trace terrorism dollars now, the new concern, and Helen was the liaison the bank had offered up to the Bureau. They’d spent the better part of two weeks together, going over numbers that led nowhere, and Grady had enjoyed her very much. Good-looking, personable, and able to laugh at herself, which was certainly not a trait Adrian had possessed. He wouldn’t have asked her out; there was a professionalism issue as excuse, but the reality was that he’d never been good at that, getting around to the actual question. Two days after he’d broken off from the project, though, she called him at work and asked if he wanted to go to dinner. It was the first time a woman had ever done that with Grady.

  He was in a good mood as Saturday afternoon wore down, went for a long run along the lake and then spent an extra ten minutes stretching, felt the week’s tension leave his muscles and fade into the air. When he got back to the apartment he showered and—this was embarrassing—tried on three different shirt-and-pants combinations, feeling like a high school kid. He’d just decided on a black button-down with a dark green pair of gabardines, was still threading the belt around his waist, when the phone rang. Not the home number, but his cell, which meant it wasn’t a call that he could ignore. He fastened the belt and answered the phone.

  “Agent Morgan?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Ron Atkins calling from Wausau.”

  Wausau? Grady knew there was a field office up there, but what in the hell could Wausau have cooking on a Saturday evening that required his attention?

  “What can I do for you?” Grady said, standing before the full-length mirror and taking inventory, trying to ignore the gray hair.

  “I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday night like this, but I’ve been doing a little research, and it looks like you’re the foremost expert we’ve got on Frank Temple.”

  Grady watched his face change in the mirror, saw it drape with concern and alarm.

  “Which one?” he said. Please say the dead one, Atkins. Tell me it’s old, tell me it’s something very old.

  “The son,” Atkins said. “Frank the Third.”

  Grady turned away from the mirror and walked out to the living room, the sick taste of defeat rising in his mouth. Wausau. Shit, he should have remembered. That town was maybe fifty miles from the cabin, that infamous family cabin Frank had spoken of with such warmth, the one he wasn’t sure he could ever return to, the one his father had purchased with Matteson and the other soldier, Ballard.

  “What’s happening?” Grady said.

  “I’m still trying to figure that out. Right now here’s what I know: The Temple kid blew into town yesterday, with a couple of real bad boys from Miami on his heels, and we’ve already got one body in the morgue and a cop recovering in the hospital.”

  Real bad boys from Miami on his heels. The words spun through Grady’s brain like whirring blades, and he sank down onto the couch knowing that the kid had done it. He’d gone down to Miami to settle up, he’d put three bullets into Devin Matteson’s body, and Grady had sent him there.

  “I’ve been told,” Atkins said, “that you spent some time with the kid.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you brought his father down.”

  “He brought himself down.”

  “What? Oh, sure. Sure. The thing is, you know, it seems the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father like son and all that? You pick whatever cliché you want, because they all apply here.”

  “I wouldn’t rush to that judgment.”

  “What rush? He’s been adrift for damn near a decade now, floating all over the country without a job but with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cash.”

  The supply was exhaustible—probably getting close to exhausted by now, actually—and Grady was well aware of its source. Frank’s father had been clever with his banking, setting up some hidden trusts and offshore accounts that his son could use. Frank, though, actually told Grady about their existence. Explained his father’s final conversation with him, which included information on the money. By the time the kid disclosed this, Grady was beginning to feel overwhelmed by his guilt, and the sort of trust Frank was showing made it worse. So instead of shutting the money down, as he should have, Grady merely warned Frank that he ought to separate himself from a bloody slush fund like that.

  “I spent some time with him,” Grady said into the phone, “and he seemed to have his head on right.”

  “Did you not hear me say I’ve got one dead up here already?”

  “I heard that, and I understand what you’re looking at. But let’s not start painting Frank as the same as his father right away, all right? Not right away.”

  The disbelief, tinged with disgust, was clear in Atkins’s voice as he said, “Yeah, when a contract killer’s son floats into town, wearing a gun and leaving bodies in his wake, I suppose he really could just be on a fishing trip.”

  “He was wearing a gun?”

  “Uh-huh. Smith & Wesson with his father’s initials engraved on the stock.”

  Grady pressed his eyes shut. That was the suicide gun. “Tell me what you know, Atkins.”

  “These guys from Miami, they showed up yesterday and attacked a woman who owns a body shop here. The same body shop where Temple’s car ended up after an accident a few miles north of town. Temple interceded—and I’ll admit that the woman hasn’t claimed any sense of familiarity between Temple and the pricks who went after her. But by the end of the day the cops somehow lost both of these guys, which takes some doing.”

  “Why attack the body shop owner?”

  “I’m getting to that. They went after her yesterday, then killed one of her employees today. Hung him off the front end of a car and cut his throat. Nasty scene. The way it looks is that they’ve lost track of Temple and figured the people at the body shop were the last who’d seen him, y
ou know, the best chance of finding out where he went. There’s a guy named Vaughn Duncan involved, too, and supposedly these guys are interested in his car.”

  “Who is Duncan?”

  “A prison guard from Florida, part of this whole shit storm that’s come up north.”

  “Frank’s not from Florida.”

  “Maybe not, but his old man certainly had some ties down there. Duncan’s car was the one that had the tracking device. Allegedly.”

  “And he’s a prison guard in Florida.”

  “Was. Evidently he called in and quit a few days ago, no warning, no two-weeks notice, hasn’t even filled out the paperwork or met any of the usual requirements. The people down there are less than happy with Mr. Duncan. Seems he came into some serious cash about a year ago, too, source unknown. Guy’s working as a prison guard and driving a Lexus, you know something’s wrong.”

  “What prison?”

  “Coleman.”

  “Which part of Coleman? It’s a big complex.”

  There was a rustle of papers and then Atkins said, “Phase One. That mean something to you?”

  Yes, it certainly did. Manuel DeCaster was locked up in Coleman Phase One. He was the big boss, the ruthless bastard who’d employed Frank’s father, probably still employed Devin Matteson. This was not good news.

  “Well,” Atkins said. “You got any ideas? Anything I should be checking out?”

  As an FBI agent, as a law enforcement officer, Grady had to tell him. Had to drop that Matteson name and news of the recent shooting, fill Atkins in on the back story. He needed to draw connections for Atkins, get the investigation rolling in the direction it clearly needed to go in. But he couldn’t do it. Not yet. Not without talking to Frank. So for the second time in his Bureau career—and the second time involving Frank Temple III—Grady ignored those professional obligations, ignored his oath. In the end, he settled for a cop-out. Not a bold-faced lie, but a delay.

  “I’m not sure,” he told Atkins, “but I know some people I can ask. Let me call around a bit and get back to you.”

  Atkins seemed satisfied with that. Probably more so than he would have been if he’d known the first person Grady was going to call was Frank himself.

  He still had the number, but when he called, all he got was an error message saying it had been disconnected. One perk of working for the FBI, though—if the kid had a number, Grady could find it.

  He called Helen next, canceled the date with what he hoped she knew was a sincere apology, and then headed for the office. Another perk of working for the FBI—when you told a woman a work emergency had come up, she tended to believe you.

  He thought about Devin Matteson as he drove, about that blood debt he’d chosen not to mention to Atkins. Grady could remember a day, maybe two months after the suicide, when young Frank told him quite emphatically that his father had never killed a good man. The victims were all evil, he’d said, and I know you can say he was no better, but the question is, was he any worse?

  Grady had argued with him that day, told Frank that no one was entitled to make a character judgment that ended another man’s life—but what had he told himself, not long after that conversation, to justify the misconception he was allowing to flourish?

  Devin Matteson was a bad man. That’s what he told himself. Devin Matteson was an evil bastard of the first order, a killer and drug runner and thief, as corrupt as they got. So who cared if the kid thought Devin was the one who’d given up his father? Who cared if he thought Devin was the one who had, essentially, put the gun barrel into his father’s mouth?

  Nobody cared. Allowing him to think those things couldn’t do any harm, really, so long as Frank knew better than to take action, seek retribution.

  For a long time, Grady had been sure he knew better.

  It was a good thing, Ezra Ballard decided as he looked at the clock for the fifth time in ten minutes, that he’d never had children. He wouldn’t have done well with the constant worry.

  He’d left the note on Frank’s door at two that afternoon, stopping by the cabin to find that Frank was missing, which wasn’t a surprise until Ezra noticed the boat was on the beach. If he wasn’t fishing and he had no car, where’d he gone? A walk, maybe. That was the only answer. Ezra scrawled a note and used a fishhook to fasten it to the door, then left expecting to hear from his friend’s son within a few hours.

  It was dark now, had been for thirty minutes at least, and the phone hadn’t rung. Ezra actually lifted it from its handset a few times, just to check the dial tone. He wished the kid would call. There was something riding the air today that Ezra didn’t like, something that had taken his mind for most of the day, left him distracted, answering questions only after they’d been repeated. The woman had been in the water again this morning, that beautiful woman swimming alone in the cold lake. No sign of the gray-haired companion, no movement from the car hidden in the trees. Maybe that was good. Maybe they were nobodies, nothing to worry about.

  He couldn’t believe that anymore, though. Not after hearing Frank’s story about the attack on Nora Stafford, two men with guns arriving in pursuit of a car whose driver had now joined that woman.

  Whoever this gray-haired son of a bitch on the island was, he couldn’t be anyone Ezra wanted around. Now Temple’s boy was at risk, and that sweetheart of a girl who’d taken over Bud Stafford’s shop, and none of that was good.

  So what to do about it? Maybe nothing. Maybe it would be best to just wait it out, take his fishing parties after walleye and muskie and come home and smoke a pipe and read a book, and eventually the man and the woman would go away and things would be back to normal.

  That was one option. An option he favored until the headlights of a truck washed over his driveway and Frank Temple III arrived, not alone, but with young Nora from the body shop, and right then, even before they got out of the truck, Ezra understood that this thing was not going to be one he could wait out.

  They came onto the porch and sat with him and told him what had happened. He listened without speaking, as was his way. People commented on this often, as if it were strange behavior. Ezra didn’t understand any other way to listen. When somebody was telling you something, particularly something important, you shut up and listened and thought about what they were saying. If you were always opening your own mouth, or thinking about what you were going to say, how much did you really hear? Ezra heard it all. Heard it, and considered it.

  What he heard now, this description of a man with bound hands and a cut throat, took him back to a place he’d left long ago. Not Vietnam, either, no place so far away. Detroit was across a lake, not an ocean, but to Ezra it was home to more bad memories than Vietnam. He’d seen men die in both places, but the deaths in Detroit were a different sort of killing. In thirty years in Tomahawk, he hadn’t encountered anything like them again. A throat laid open in pursuit of a dollar gained, a bullet through the eye to avenge a dollar lost, those things did not happen here. Hadn’t happened here, at least.

  But now they’d come to him, Temple’s son and the girl had, and they were right to do so. He could see the doubt in Nora’s eyes, could see her taking in him and his cabin and wondering what Frank was thinking, why they were on this porch instead of in a police station somewhere. Frank understood, though. He’d learned some things from his father, some things he wished not to know. In this circumstance, at least, they would help him. Ezra hoped the kid appreciated that.

  “I didn’t think she should go home,” Frank concluded. “Am I wrong? Are these guys already out of town, trying to disappear?”

  “No,” Ezra said. “You weren’t wrong, and they aren’t gone yet.”

  He was sure of that, though he hadn’t seen the men personally, knew nothing of them. What he did know, just from Frank’s story, was that these two were professionals who’d come all the way up here to do a job. The job didn’t involve beating up Mowery or killing Jerry Dolson, and because these things were happening it was clear that the
job was not done. Also clear, then, was the notion that they would not leave until it was.

  The girl was tougher than he might have guessed. He could tell that in the way she stood and listened. Frightened, sure, but not panicked. Not frozen. There was a quality of disbelief to her at times, as if she hadn’t reconciled with everything that had happened yet, but that was reasonable. Expected.

  “So what’s your advice?” Frank said. “Should we go back to the cops?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to decide that until we find out exactly who the visitors are, and what they’re running from.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Well,” Ezra said, “I’d imagine asking them directly would be a good start.”

  Frank and Nora stood there and stared at him, no sound but the buzzing insects filling the air for a while.

  “We’re going there?” Frank said. “To the island?”

  “I think we should.”

  “Without the police.”

  “Son, you were the one telling me the risks with the police.”

  “I know, but . . . you’re saying we go out there now?”

  Ezra shook his head. “It were up to me, I’d wait till daylight. You go out there in the middle of the night, you’re gonna provoke a different sort of reaction.”

  Frank didn’t respond, and Nora Stafford looked unsettled. Ezra spread his hands and leaned forward, the chair creaking beneath him.

  “Listen—you two are worried. Scared. That makes sense. And you’re trying to decide what to do that will leave you the safest. Also makes sense. But you can’t do that until you understand the situation. That gray-haired guy and that woman, they aren’t the same cut as these men that rolled into town on their heels, but they’ve got some answers. Some things we need to hear.”

  Frank nodded slowly. “All right. So you and I go out there in the morning and try to get them to talk.”

  “It’s my recommendation, yes.”

  “No,” Nora said, and Ezra thought she was objecting to the whole idea until she said, “You’re not going to leave me sitting in some cabin while you go out there to talk to them. I won’t do it.”