Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

  “No!” said a familiar voice from behind Mama Rosa’s. Max. My assailant let go of his gun. I took my finger out of the trigger guard.

  “Back up,” I told the man in the mask. He did. Max stood at the rear of the building, at the edge of my field of vision.

  “Holy-shit-goddamit, don’t shoot!” Max said, and stepped toward me waving his open palms at chest level. His empty holster flapped on his hip.

  “What the hell is this?” I said.

  My assailant ripped the ski mask off his head to reveal a full shock of black hair over a drained face. “My name is Jack Anders,” he said, “and I’ve never met you in my life.”

  “So you come and stick a gun in my face! Are you nuts!?”

  “I just wanted to scare you enough for you to tell me who you are and why you’re asking about me.”

  “Silk City!” I said. “You remember Wendy Hardin? I’m Art Hardin.”

  Anders clenched his eyes and rolled his head in a slow circle while he said, “Oh.” On the second revolution he said, “Shit!”

  “I came here to find you. You disappeared in the middle of an undercover job. We wondered if you were dead.”

  I looked at Max and shook the revolver. “This is yours?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and made a long face.

  “What is this? Euchre on the short bus?”

  Anders closed his eyes and twisted his head.

  “I went to see Dixon this morning to tell him about you asking for Jack,” said Max, “The cops were all over his office. They said he ate his gun last night. They asked me to identify him.”

  I handed Max the gun. “Try not to shoot me,” I said. “I’m on your side.”

  Max put the gun in his holster. I kept mine in my hand.

  Anders’s eyes fixed on the muzzle of my Detonics, which I kept focused on his ten-ring.

  “I knew you had a gun,” said Max. “I heard you rack it up in the shitter. Dixon and I were friends since the Bureau.”

  “You were an agent?”

  “I was kind of a go-between on the reservation, you know, at Menominee up on the Wolf River,” said Max.

  “You were CI for the government in the AIM movement?”

  “Not like that,” said Max, and looked at the ground. “Someone needed to explain—like a diplomat—both ways, both sides. That’s all.” He shook his head, “I was never a rat.”

  Anders started a side step to his right. I put my finger back into the triggerguard. He froze.

  “You took the money?”

  “I took the money,” said Max, eyes hot, looking straight at me. “I had to take the money. It wasn’t about the money!”

  I shrugged, “So?”

  “So, I know a lot of cops,” said Max. “Indian cops, white cops—all kinda cops—and most of them are assholes but they aren’t stupid. They don’t shoot themselves in the head. They know what kind of mess it makes. If they get drunk and do it anyway, they do it outside or in the basement or the garage—someplace you can hose the floor.”

  Anders shrugged and showed me his open hands. I made one negative wag of my head.

  “I didn’t shoot him,” I said. “I was playing cards with you and the brain trust all night. You remember the bus station. The guy you and your pals were trying to hustle.”

  “That wasn’t personal, we were just being social,” said Max. “Jerry can’t play anymore because of his wife.”

  “Sticking a gun in my face is pretty personal.”

  “Sorry, but who the hell are you?” said Jack Anders. “Ain’t like you were up front. All I know is, Dixon is dead, and you’re asking about me.”

  “Lieutenant Ross, with the sheriff,” said Max. “He—”

  “I know Ross,” I said. “I talked to him yesterday and asked him to help me find our friend, Jack here.”

  “Ross asked where I was last night,” said Max. “I mentioned your name and he said bring you over.”

  “He said come over here and stick a gun in my face?”

  “No,” said Max. “But, like Jack said, you was maybe too slick—saying Jack sent you. A lot of strange shit is happening. We thought maybe you could give us some answers if we asked the questions right.”

  I pointed the Detonics at the ground and eased down the hammer. “Come on in.” Anders exhaled. “I’ll buy you breakfast and tell you whatever I know. You can tell me how strange things are. I gotta get my change from Mama Rosa.”

  “I don’t have much appetite,” said Max.

  “Coffee,” I said. I put the pistol back in my waistband and pulled my shirt down over it.

  “Ross said he wanted to see you,” said Jack.

  “Ross can wait. He’s paid by the hour,” I said. “I’m sorry about Dixon, but he’s not in a hurry anymore.”

  “I guess if you gotta get your change,” said Max, “Ross can’t bitch about that.”

  “Mama Rosa promised me a steak,” I said. Max and Jack snapped their heads to look at me. “I’m hungry.”

  “That ain’t the question,” said Max.

  “Question is how much do you like Mama Rosa,” said Jack.

  “Depends on the steak,” I said.

  The steak—a T-bone, big as a roast, with the fat grilled crisp—occupied its own plate on a placemat. Coffee, tomato juice, and a pile of home fries on a separate plate finished the setting. Folks had cleared away and gave it space as if it were radioactive.

  We sat, and I cut into the steak—purple and cool in the middle. “Just right.”

  “Jesus,” said Jack. “I’ve seen cows hurt worse than that recover.”

  Mama Rosa strolled up, draped an arm across my shoulder, and put my change on the table. “Man knows what’s good,” said Mama Rosa. “Try the tomato juice.”

  I took a drink and found it included a shot of vodka. “Just right.”

  “We got some steak sauce, if you want.”

  “A little salt,” I said.

  Mama Rosa clamped a vice hold on my shoulder and gave me a side to side shake, kind of the friendly version of a terrier with a rat.

  “See,” she said, looking at Max and Jack, “Man knows what’s good. You gonna stand these two to breakfast, too?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Mama Rosa took four dollars off the table. “You’re a good man. Enjoy your breakfast. I like to see a man eat.”

  Jack shambled off after a tray.

  “Just coffee,” said Max. I pushed my mug over to him. He shrugged, took a sip, and arched his eyebrows. “Just right.”

  “Whiskey?”

  “Bourbon, I think.” He smiled and let the steam bathe his face. “Good Bourbon, maybe Wild Turkey.”

  I worked on the steak. “You said things have been strange.”

  “Well, you got to know the whole story.”

  “This is a big steak.”

  Max took a good pull on his coffee and set the cup down. He leaned back and measured me with his eyes. After he swallowed, he said, “About a year ago the mill went to contract security. They did an open bid, but everybody knew that Dixon would get it, him being retired FBI and all. He spent a lot of money on radios and equipment. We had an old Ford Escort we painted and put a light bar on to patrol around the parking lot and along the fences. Then some West Coast outfit came in and bid ten cents over minimum wage, just to get the contract. So we’re out on our ass, and they run in a bunch of guys that make Greg and Ralph look like Einstein, wearing ball caps and T-shirts for uniforms.”

  “That’s the contract security business. People don’t want good security; they want cheap security.”

  “The deal is, Dixon spent so much money on the equipment that he was right on the edge with the withholding and social security. When we lost the account he couldn’t pay, so he went down and worked out a payment schedule with the feds. He got the contract to clean the restrooms out on the toll road and he did that job himself. He used the money to pay the government and everything was hunky-dory. Then last week the feds
seized his bank account, and some guy from the IRS dreamed up this big fine. No court, no lawyer, no judge. They said Dixon just had to pay or they’d seize his house and his pension. Then he got a letter from the state police. They said they might cancel his license.”

  “Maybe he did go out sideways,” I said.

  “Dixon was a deacon in his church,” said Max, “and one tough cookie, too.” Max stared into the steam rising from his cup and shook his head. “No chance he ate his gun.”

  Jack sat down with a tray full of flapjacks, scrambled eggs, bacon, and biscuits.

  “All this for two bucks?” I asked.

  “And you can go back for more if you want,” said Jack. “Some people, all they get to eat is what they get here. You just can’t take any food out. Mama Rosa gets some kind of federal grant.”

  I sliced a piece of steak and raised the fork like a symphony conductor with a baton. “So, you got tired of the undercover job? What?”

  “Dixon came up to Madison and left a note on my door to meet him for lunch. He told me the job was over.” Jack forked up a load of flapjacks dripping with syrup and chewed it thoughtfully. He swallowed and added, “Dixon let on like I’d done something wrong. He said there was a difference between getting next to the target and getting personally involved.”

  I swallowed. “He was getting copies of the reports?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to,” I said.

  “Well, he told me to do it anyway. I wasn’t supposed to tell. I don’t guess it matters—he’s gone now.”

  I stopped dissecting the steak to look Jack in the eye. “All that aside, I think Dixon had a point. You’re supposed to report the target’s activities, not make excuses for them. You don’t usher at a target’s daughter’s wedding, stand up as a godparent, or bang his wife. You’re looking to testify against the target, not join his family.”

  “The wedding is next week. I’m an usher. If I don’t go, maybe he’ll know something is up.”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “This case is so hot a guy followed me out here from Michigan. Some dumb bastard stole my bags at the airport, and they snapped his neck like a chicken, maybe because they thought he was me. Dixon turned up dead, maybe because they missed me. It didn’t make a lot of sense until you told me that he had copies of the reports.”

  Jack shrugged and shoveled in a forkload of scrambled eggs.

  “You know what Light and Energy is doing,” I said. “It’s a quantum leap in technology. I don’t think the buggy whip manufacturers are going to ‘go quietly into that good night.’ If you go up to that wedding, you’ll be the next one to have a fatal accident.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “I’m sure you can,” I said, thinking of the bonehead play he pulled out at the phone booth, “but these people are good, way good, Cold-War good—the kind of guys only the government could afford if they were still in the business.”

  I heard myself say that. It had been in the back of my mind since I got a load of the “Andy” that visited my office. But the people I’d worked with at the puzzle palace knew where I lived, and they wouldn’t have leaned on Lorna Kemp.

  “I don’t work for you or Dixon anymore,” said Jack.

  “Do whatever you want,” I said. “I’ll send flowers. But right now you’re on the clock. This is called a debriefing. What happened to the keys, the mail, and the computer discs?”

  “Dixon took the keys and the mail,” said Jack, using a strip of bacon as a pointer. “I met him in the parking lot at the post office. He put the stuff in his glove box.” He turned his head and laid a vacant gaze on his tray, but left the bacon at the ready. When he looked back he said, “I don’t know anything about computer discs.”

  “The discs from the hard drive in the plant manager’s office,” I said, “what was downloaded?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” said Jack. “I wasn’t allowed into the plant manager’s office. The plant manager’s office, the R&D office, and the room with the servers were card access only. They shredded the paper waste and left it in a burn bag outside the door at night.”

  “So what did you clean?”

  “The rest of the place.”

  “They have in-house or contract security?”

  “The place was locked down at night,” he said. “They had an alarm system and used some patrol outfit to shake the doors.”

  “Who had access to the plant manager’s office?”

  “He did. Nobody else went in there. He met with people in the conference room.”

  I said, “How about his secretary?”

  “He didn’t have one. He used the receptionist from the front door. She took his calls.”

  “What reason did Dixon give you for shutting down the job? How come you just disappeared?”

  “Dixon said there was some kind of big trouble. He told me to go home and lay low. I figured he touched all the bases. Sorry if you guys got excited.”

  “Ross wants to see you,” said Max. He looked at his watch. “I need you to vouch for me playing cards. Ross wouldn’t believe Greg or Ralph if they swore the sun came up in the morning.”

  “You gonna hurt my feelings,” Greg yelled from two tables down. “’Sides, Art and us is going over to the Crystal Palace.”

  “Sorry, Greg,” I said, “I’m kinda boxed in here. How about I spot you a sawbuck and I’ll catch up with you when I’m done with the cops?”

  “Works for me,” said Greg, all smiles.

  “Where’s Ralph?”

  “In the crapper.”

  We got up and side-stepped down the row of tables until we were standing next to Greg. I peeled him off two tens and said, “I’ll leave Ralph’s saw-buck with you. You guys can get the wake started.”

  “Sure,” said Greg. He folded the bills and put them in the bib pocket of his overalls. “You can trust me.”

  “Yeah,” said Max, “but Ralph can’t.”

  “You’re giving a bad impression here,” said Greg. “I’ll give Ralph the money, sure as hell, and tell him it’s a loan—won’t charge him no interest neither.”

  We laughed and worked our way up toward the door. Greg stood up and yelled, “Hey, Junior, Art’s fixing to leave.”

  Junior got to the door before we did. Three axe handles tall and an axe handle wide at the shoulders, he blocked the door—hell, he blocked out the sun.

  “We get cleaned up here around one-thirty or two,” he said. “Don’t be late ’cause Mama needs her rest. And better bring flowers, else you might need some.”

  I gave him a wink. “You can count on me.” We left.

  Jack followed me over to get my suitcase out of the back of Ralph’s truck. I asked him, “So how’d you land the undercover job? Dixon run an ad?”

  “Nah, I was just working as a guard, man. Dixon asked me to do the job because I had a computer and could file the reports.”

  I dog eyed Jack on the way to Max’s car and considered the things on my mind. A big thing: Greg and Ralph didn’t know him. And a strange thing: Dixon and Max went back a long way and they knew him.

  “You have to get in my door because the passenger’s won’t open,” Max said. Max’s blue Ford coupe had sun-faded to gray on the top parts. He opened the driver’s door and pulled the seat forward. Discarded fast food wrappers, at high tide in the back seat, tumbled out onto the parking lot.

  “Genuine Indian artifacts,” said Max.

  “Anything alive back here?”

  “Just what ate the burgers.”

  I threw my suitcase across the seat and pushed enough of the litter aside to make room to sit. Jack walked around to the passenger side of the vehicle. Max flopped the seat back in place and slid in behind the wheel. Jack stepped into the passenger seat through the open window. The old Ford left a blue smoke screen as we drove out.

  I said, “About your reports. There’s one more thing.”

  “What?” said Jack. “I wrot
e a report every day. Maybe I got to see them to answer your question.”

  “This should stick out in your mind. You’ll probably remember.” I waited for him to look at me. “If all the paper trash was shredded, why do you suppose the engineer asked you if the bags were inspected after you picked them up?”

  “We were drinking beer and half in the bag,” said Jack.

  “Who was working who?”

  Jack turned around in the seat to look at me directly. “I’ve never burned myself,” he said.

  “Burned?” I asked. “You were playing with matches?”

  “Burned, toasted—revealed, you know what the fuck I mean. I never heated the guy up.”

  “Oh, right. I don’t work the street very much anymore.” I shrugged. “Tell me about the engineer.”

  “He was talking about the BuzzBee battery suit and wondering how they got the information they used in their complaint.”

  “Maybe your target knew damn good and well,” I said.

  “He didn’t come to work until after the suit was filed.”

  “Who was there before him?”

  “Some guy. He mentioned the name. The guy didn’t leave the company; he went to Michigan. Something about sand—quartz, silica, mica—I don’t know. Funny name like Humpty Dumpty, I don’t remember.”

  “Dunphy?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy,” said Jack.

  “Look, if we send you a ticket, you think you can fly to Michigan for a couple of days? We’ll cover your expenses and you’ll be on the clock for a week.”

  “When? I got to find some work.”

  “Soon,” I said. “I need to review your reports again.”

  Max turned onto a narrow gravel drive guarded by scrub pine on both sides. After a curve to the left, the trees opened to reveal a white mobile home. A magnetic sign on the door announced, DIXON SECURITY AND INVESTIGATIONS. A black station wagon with tinted windows and chrome cabriolet fixtures had been backed up to the steps and shared the gravel parking area with a white Lincoln and a marked county sheriff patrol car.

  Leiutenant Ross, wearing jeans and a windbreaker over a yellow pullover shirt, stood at the open passenger door of the white Lincoln and watched us pull into the drive. Deputy Fairchild strode toward us from the cruiser and showed us the palm of his right hand. Max rolled down his window.