A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  “I’m not doubting that. But this is a big country, and these guys had everything they needed to stay hidden for years. They were all living right where they said they would to be. They didn’t decide to run for governor and get recognized.”

  “I’m not sure that proves they did everything right.”

  “Reggie thinks somebody got our new names and addresses.”

  “Didn’t you say her workshop got hit this week? How does she explain Weiss? He disappeared before then.”

  “She doesn’t explain it,” said Bysantski. “She was doing us a favor by calling to tell us there’s a problem. That’s all.”

  “What are you trying to get me to do?”

  “I think we’ve got to get ready for some people to show up in California.”

  20

  Martin Ortega located the special cell phone after it had rung several times. After two years he had gotten used to the idea that it was never going to ring, just sit there plugged into the wall until he died. He was sure this would be one of those calls from people offering him a vacation at a special low price as a reward for having stayed at one of their hotels. He never stayed at hotels.

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “This is Paul.”

  Ortega paused. “I’m surprised. You told me this phone was only for an emergency.”

  “We think we’ve got one.”

  “What kind?”

  “Somebody has been taking our people off the count. Weiss, then Panko, and Becker so far. Reggie Varga says that when they killed Panko, they also killed her two brothers and another cousin and burned their bodies in their shop. She thinks that they somehow got a list of the new names and addresses.”

  “From the shop?”

  “I don’t think so. They got to Weiss before they found the shop, and killed Panko in the shop.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Bysantski thinks we should pick a place—one of our addresses—and get together there to wait for them.”

  “Wait for who? To do what?” asked Ortega. “Is this Colorado state cops who don’t want to bother with a trial? FBI? If any of them had us sighted in like that, why wouldn’t they just call the California cops and have a hundred of them roll in and scoop us up? And if it’s not cops, who is it?”

  “Look, I only heard about this from Matt about ten minutes ago. I haven’t thought it through. I’m just helping Matt make sure everybody finds out. I started with you because of where you live. Give yourself and me some time to think about it. Take a look around in your life to see if somebody seems to be watching you or anything else has changed. I’ll call you again tomorrow. Is this a good time to call?”

  “Yeah. I’ll talk to you then.”

  Brian Summers hit the screen to disconnect. He set the phone down and the phone assistant took a step toward it, but Summers held up his hand and the man stopped. “I’m going to make another call on that line. No more than two. Then you can get rid of it.”

  “Yes, Mr. Summers.”

  The phone assistant turned.

  Summers said, “Wait. Get the others. We’re going to have a little meeting in the living room.”

  When the others assembled in the living room, Summers was sitting in an armchair facing the long couch. He still had the pen and pad in one hand. He used the other to show he wanted them to sit on the couch.

  “It’s time for a little honesty. I had nothing to do with selecting or hiring you guys, and I don’t know much about what you’ve been told or what your qualifications are. I give you orders, and my company pays you, but you don’t work for me. All three of you look like you might have been cops at one time, or military, but looks are deceptive. I also don’t know how much you know about me.”

  The three stared at him like so many trained dogs. Their unblinking eyes were focused and attentive, but no more than that.

  “It doesn’t matter. I have strong reasons to believe that trouble is coming for me soon. It’s not going to be something that you or I will be able to prevent, and to keep up my honesty, you won’t be of much use in getting me through it. If I do make it through, I’ll probably need your help at that time, but not so much until then. Any questions so far?”

  The three remained silent.

  “I’m in the process of making a list.” He held up the pad, where a few lines had been written. “I’d like to have you three pick some things up for me. After you’ve done that, I want you to take a couple of weeks off. If you’re here in the house during that time, it will put you in very serious danger.” He looked at each of them in turn, studying their eyes. It was as though he were speaking to men who couldn’t hear him or see him.

  “I’ll be more explicit. People are coming here to kill me. They’ve already killed three of my former associates living in different states. I don’t know yet who the killers are, or what they look like, or even how many. I do know that so far there haven’t been any instances of them trying to kill one of my friends and failing. If they find you here, they’ll consider killing you a necessary step to get me.”

  The car assistant raised his hand about six inches.

  “A question?”

  The man said, “When will the list be ready?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  The three assistants got up and dispersed, either because he had summoned them from chores they’d been doing and they wanted to finish or to keep him from thinking that they were discussing his revelations where he couldn’t hear them.

  Summers turned to the notepad and wrote:

  6 Glock 17 pistols, 9 mm with two magazines each

  3 AR15 rifles with 10-power scopes

  500 rounds 5.56 x 45 mm rifle ammunition

  300 rounds 9 x 19 mm pistol ammunition

  $200,000 in $100 bills

  When the assistants returned, Summers handed the car assistant the list. The assistant read through the list and said, “When will you need these items, Mr. Summers?”

  “I guess I’ve needed them for the past two years. I just didn’t know it until now. As soon as it’s done, you can go someplace safe.”

  Three days later Brian Summers turned off the long, winding highway onto a wide, flat, dusty space that had been covered with gravel numerous times over the years. It looked as though the gravel wasn’t keeping the dust down this summer, and wouldn’t help much with the mud next winter either unless more gravel was added.

  A steel cattle stile was set into the ground at the boundary between the turnaround space and the ranch road, and above it a wide steel gate was held shut by a thick chain and a heavy combination padlock the size of a man’s wallet. Summers waited while the cloud of dust he had kicked up floated over his navy blue BMW and away.

  Then he got out of the car and stepped to the padlock, worked the combination he’d been given, and swung the gate open. A flock of quail just beyond the gate ran away from the incursion to disappear into the tall crop of dry weeds to the side. He drove in onto the ranch road and locked the gate again.

  The dirt and gravel road went along a sturdy fence with five strands of barbed wire between the steel posts. He could not see exactly where the ranch road went because it climbed to a ridge with a flattened mound on it and then curved around behind the mound.

  He began to drive along the road and glanced into his rearview mirror and confirmed what he’d expected: that he was trailing a cloud of dust that stretched a hundred feet and rose into the air about twenty. His arrival would not be a surprise. When his BMW reached the last part of the road and swung up the steep incline to the top of the ridge, the road turned and he found he was almost at the house. He studied it.

  The building at first struck him as adobe-inspired, a plain structure with narrow windows on the side facing the highway. As he came closer, they reminded him of the arrow ports of a castle. The walls sloped outward from the flat roof, so they were thicker near the bottom. He noticed two low structures that looked a bit like unfinished water wells—just ri
ngs of stone about three feet high—at a distance from the sides of the house.

  Summers drove his car slowly up onto the flat area surrounding the house, parked between a van and a pickup truck, and then got out. Ortega was already striding toward him with his right hand held out. They shook hands without speaking. Then Summers pointed toward the house. “It looks a little like where we came from.”

  Ortega laughed. “I’ve been working on this place for two years. I decided at that time that I wasn’t going to let them put me back in a cage. I bought this ranch, got some guys together, and started building.”

  “What guys? People you can trust?”

  “Relax. They’re La Eme, all of them. They know if they talk, the guy who just ate lunch with them will kill them.”

  Summers took a breath and let it out, and noticed himself becoming Paul Duquesne again. He felt reassured. He had picked Ortega two years ago because Ortega was a respected shot caller in the biggest and most important gang in the prison system. Since the gang had alliances for various purposes with some other powerful gangs, Ortega had been invaluable in getting past the resistance of the prisoners who were in gangs and those who weren’t.

  “If you trust them, so do I,” said Duquesne. “Is Matt here yet?”

  “He got in last night in that white pickup with the hard cover on it. It holds a lot of supplies.”

  “I hear the hint. I brought some things with me too. I brought a new AR15 and two new Glocks for each of us, a lot of ammo, and some cash. I also brought food and water to cover up that stuff in my trunk.” He clicked the fob on his key chain and the trunk popped open. Visible were four cases of water and four cases of beer. There were also boxes of canned goods and bags of nuts, dried fruit, flour, sugar, potatoes, and rice.

  Ortega said, “Good, Paul. Really good. There’s a big water tank up above the house, but if they come, they’ll probably cut that off or blow holes in it. The guns and ammo will help a lot if the fight comes this close. I’ve always kept a few long guns up here in case I need to reach out to tap somebody, but close-up you win by firepower. I watched you all the way from the highway through a rifle scope.”

  “You could recognize me that far away?”

  “You made it up here, didn’t you?” He slapped him on the back. “I had the crosshairs on you all the way, and yet here you are, looking good. Let’s unload your stuff and take a look at it.”

  21

  Leah Hawkins drove toward the evening sun. Driving across the country was a good way to drop out of sight for a while. Summer afternoons lasted longer than winter ones, and the sun’s angle wasn’t as low and blinding so early, so this hadn’t been a bad driving shift. And driving on the plains that used to be the southern part of the Great Lakes was easy, except when there was road construction.

  Leah was an expert driver because of her years as a state police officer and then as a local cop. She had no idea how many days she had spent behind the wheel of a car before she was promoted to homicide detective, but it was at least a few thousand. Even then she had spent long stretches of time in a car, using it as a mobile office while she went from place to place talking to witnesses and technicians, or going to see victims. In homicide the victims were past talking, but she had visited all of them. By now, if she was sitting upright, driving took so little additional effort that being a passenger didn’t relax her much.

  She was going to have to stop somewhere to sleep soon, and the idea of sleeping in hotels along the highway made her think about Mark. He had been one of those men whose faces assumed a smooth, innocent expression while they slept, like they were children. There were plenty of people, both men and women, who while sleeping looked like they were dead, with jaws slack and mouths—and sometimes eyes—open, their facial muscles devoid of tension so the skin sagged. Mark Ballard’s face had looked smooth and happy.

  The first time she had slept with Mark Ballard was also the first time she had ever stayed all night with any man, with both of them still lying side by side in the same bed in the morning. Other times when she’d been with men, either she or they would go home after waiting a long enough interval so that it wouldn’t seem as though the sex was all that was going on between them, even if it was.

  She had tried to keep things that way with Mark too, but he simply wouldn’t let her. They’d had exciting, wonderful sex, and they were both relaxed and tired. She had thought of it as feeling like a warm, wet noodle. They were in his hotel room a few miles outside Weldonville, off the highway, because they had not dared meet in Denver, where they both lived and worked in those days. She decided it was best to go, but it was very late—too late to go to her parents’ house in Weldonville, and too late to get a room somewhere else without being memorable to anyone who saw her.

  She’d tried to get up anyway, but he had held her and made her want to lie there some more. She thought about the fact that it was the first time he’d see her when she didn’t have makeup on, and had questionable breath, and wasn’t a graceful, tall creature painted in romantic dim light, but an awkward, bony person with big feet and with hair sticking out from her head like straw, and blond eyelashes that made her eyes look like two holes poked in an uncooked pie crust.

  What if she snored? Or drooled in her sleep? He was married to Marcia, who was beautiful and small-boned and tiny, like a rare bird. But that night, Mark was falling asleep with, literally, a basketball player. She lay there in his arms fretting about the way she would seem to him until she fell asleep.

  She remembered waking up in a panic. The light seemed horribly bright. But at least he wasn’t up and walking around. She carefully rolled to the side of the bed and raised her torso so her feet would be planted on the ground. She stepped to the chair where she had left her clothes and purse, and slipped into the bathroom. When she had locked the door, she began to feel safe.

  She used the toilet, brushed her teeth, showered quickly, fixed her hair, and applied makeup without yielding to the temptation to put the eye makeup on as thickly as she had in the evening. She opened the door and came out, and realized he was not in the bed. She took a painful indrawn breath. He was gone. No, he wasn’t. His suitcase was still there, open on that folding stand.

  She heard heavy footsteps outside the door, heard the lock click, and turned to see him coming into the room. He was wearing gym shorts and sneakers and a T-shirt with a dark triangle of sweat on the chest, and there was a thin coating of sweat on his forehead and arms. “Hey, how long have you been up?”

  “Not long,” she said. Her relief had helped her make her voice sound relaxed and a little amused.

  “I woke up early and went for my run. I would have woken you up, but I didn’t think you had your running stuff with you. But you’re all dressed. If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get a shower and take you to breakfast.”

  “Can’t,” she said. “I’ve got to have breakfast with my parents in a little while. If I don’t eat a lot, they get worried about me and say I’m not taking care of myself.” She went up to him and kissed him.

  “I’m sorry. I’m all sweaty and you’re so beautiful. I was looking at you while you were asleep and you looked amazing. I almost woke you up, but not for a run.”

  “I would have swatted you. But the sweat is okay—good, respectable sweat. In fact, it’s kind of erotic in a cave-dweller sort of way. But I’m off. Don’t forget to call Marcia. She’s probably awake already.” And Leah was out, walking fast to her car in the morning sunshine.

  She had gotten through their first morning, not honestly, but successfully. Soon they had begun sleeping overnight regularly, and she became confident enough to stop hiding what she looked like, because she found that he still loved her, and loved her more as time passed.

  Leah tried not to let her sequence of thoughts about Mark Ballard complete itself, but it did, as it always did. She saw him lying beside her in the night of July 19. She heard the first shots and got out of bed and listened, and as she did, she looked back
at him. That image had been taken into her memory, unchanging and unmoving, and it was still there.

  Later, when she was with the other police officers preparing to make their stand on the west side of Main Street, he showed up, pretending he hadn’t been sleeping with her, just a city employee who had heard shots and come to volunteer to help to preserve order. He took a shotgun he had barely known how to use, intending to fight by her and protect her. She had seen the moment when the bullet punched through his head, and left him only a cluster of memories in the heads of two sad women.

  She was on the Ohio Turnpike. The map on her phone said there was a service plaza ahead a few miles, so she began to watch for it. A few minutes later, Leah saw the sign and then the sprawling building and vast lots, the gas pumps on the far end, and the long-haul trucks parked in their special area away from the cars, their motors idling. Leah coasted onto the exit drive and parked.

  She got out and went to the restroom, and then walked through the arch leading into the food court. She loaded a hamburger, french fries, and a soft drink onto her tray, and added a big cup of coffee with a lid to take with her.

  As she sat down to eat, she looked at the big clock on the opposite wall. She had been driving for four hours. She should start looking for a hotel soon. Six hours was a sensible limit. Any more and she might start getting lazy-eyed and stupid. Driving across the country was something to be done with a partner, not alone. It occurred to her that everything she was doing would have been better with a partner. She ate and drank and took her coffee out to the SUV. She arranged everything—coffee cup, jacket, purse, sunglasses—the way she wanted them, started the engine, and eased ahead.

  She stopped to refill the gas tank at the station on the far end of the parking lot, and then accelerated up the long entrance lane and launched the SUV onto the turnpike. During her stop the sun had disappeared beyond the horizon. The sky ahead had an orange-red tinge, and the sky she saw in the rearview mirror was already deepening to indigo.