Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

  I took the bumper sticker out of the bag and displayed it in both hands. “See, Detroit Red Wings. I know that’s familiar.”

  I watched his eye dart around the room.

  Luis said, “Ahh humm a hum-hum.”

  “Oh, I know, you’re thinking, ‘What can that lunatic do with a bumper sticker?’” I studied it and then showed it to him edge on. “Very sharp if you move it fast. Don’t you just hate paper cuts?” I showed him the backing. “Or maybe you peel off the backing and use it to pull out hairs. How do women do that? Wax, I mean.” I hunched my shoulders and shook my head. “Gives me the shivers.”

  “Humph-hoo,” said Luis.

  “You know,” said Ken, “I don’t think his mind’s getting right.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think he’d rather be with his friends.”

  I took the hat out of the bag, peeled the backing off the bumper sticker, and applied it to the hat. “What do you think, Luis?” I put the hat on my head. “In the dark tunnel where I was told to deliver the money—where your associates are waiting to cave in my skull—think this will work?”

  Luis’s eyes took on a cold stare. I took the shirt out of the bag, rolled it up like I was dressing an infant, and looked at Luis through the head hole.

  “Haa-haa-humph, hum.”

  “Don’t worry. I bought an extra-extra large.” I pulled it over his head and down his torso. I put the hat on his head. “What do you think, Ken?”

  “Looks just like you.”

  Luis’s eyes went wide, and his cheeks belled out from the scream held back by the gray strip across his mouth. He convulsed against his bindings, his feet running against the tape that held them together.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Luis,” I said. “You could have helped. Now we’re down to, ‘What comes around goes around.’ Ken, if you will do the honors, please.”

  Luis did not cooperate and earned a short straight right to the side of the head from Ken. “Don’t make me hit you again,” Ken told him. “I’m starting to like it.”

  I eased the edge of the curtain aside. Lights in the back room had been turned on. The bartender sorted empty longnecks into cardboard cases she’d spread out on the floor. She left and returned twice. I could hear Ken groaning. The lights went out and we eased down the stairwell and out the back door.

  I guess people who own Jag rag-tops don’t travel with much luggage. I had to put the top up before we could close the trunk lid over Luis. In any case he didn’t make the task an easy one and needed a couple of body blows before we could fold him into an amenable shape.

  We pulled out. Luis banged around in the boot. “Noisy bastard,” I said.

  “I think they’re supposed to be dead when you put them in the trunk.”

  “I bow to your experience.”

  “How the hell should I know?” said Ken. “There ain’t no trunk on a Harley.”

  We’d turned north onto Division when the red and blue rollers came on behind us. I looked in the mirror. Matty.

  “Oh, shit!” said Ken. He shot a hand into his pocket and threw the bundle of fifties in my lap. “Tell them that’s yours.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said.

  “Good, you can pay me tomorrow.”

  “If you insist,” I said.

  “Tell ‘em I’m a hitchhiker,” said Ken. “If they let me slide, I can get your bail posted.”

  I turned into the parking lot of a dry cleaning shop and stepped out of the car. Matty shut off the rollers and met me at the rear bumper. The Suburban pulled in behind her and killed its headlights.

  “Art, you put a man in the trunk of your car.”

  “Two-seater, Matty.” I shrugged and tried for the sound of confused innocence. “The package shelf is upholstered like a seat, but—”

  “Open the trunk, Art.”

  I fumbled the key out of my pocket. My nameless best friend—the one newly flown in from Washington—stepped up between us.

  “Luis Montalvo?” he said making the question sound like a statement. He unfolded a pair of glasses and hung them on his face.

  “Luis,” I said. “Street name Poco Loco, but that’s all I have.”

  “He ready to talk?” my nameless friend asked.

  “Ready as he is going to get,” I said.

  Matty looked from me to the man from Washington and back. I opened the trunk. The light came on. Luis lunged and struggled to yell against the tape. His eyes, beseeching, darted from my nameless friend to Matty. When no one moved to help him he lay very still and closed his eyes.

  “This is it, Luis,” I said. “Your shot. Don’t blow it. Your blond-haired pal and his friends. Where are they holed up?” I pulled the tape loose.

  He told.

  • • •

  “Sometimes all you can do is pray,” is a cliché that has never provided me with much comfort. I much prefer my grandmother’s oft-proffered, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

  “No one leaves or makes a phone call,” said my nameless Washington benefactor—by way of inviting me and Ken to accompany the surveillance team. His third man being my witness to the Anne Frampton murder, I held little faith in his administrations, given the “extreme prejudice” with which Fidel/Andy and Jacob Anderson/Andy had come to justice.

  “Tahiti Tanning,” Luis had been in a hurry to tell them, before being sent to share separate cells with Hank Dunphy in the fifth floor at the federal building. “In the upstairs apartment—four or five guys.”

  As the night progressed Luis and good ole Hank set about informing on one another. By morning Luis proved to be the rat with the longest whiskers and won the “material witness” cheese-eating contest. State and federal charges against Hank Dunphy took days to compile, but among them was conspiracy to murder for hire. The bag of cash he’d given Luis was to purchase a “suicide” for Scott Lambert.

  Ken slept loudly on the floor of the surveillance van, taking up most of the spare “foot space” and using his rolled-up suit jacket as a pillow. The van, a five-ton cargo box, had been done up as a telephone truck complete with boom and cherry picker. Inside, three technicians worked video, sound, and infrared consoles behind walls covered with black foam sound-absorbing insulation. Matty and I shared the precious little floor space not taken up by my itinerant hitchhiker’s slumber.

  At ten o’clock infrared cameras revealed three heat signatures—people—moving about the apartment above the tanning parlor, which had not a single customer despite tax returns that claimed monthly gross sales of ten to twelve thousand dollars.

  Around eleven the clerk—a teenager with school books—turned out the lights and locked the door. Two additional people had arrived at the apartment by a quarter after one. By three-thirty the warrants, police, and fire department were in place. Forty minutes passed with no movement from the “heat signatures” inside, and an FBI SWAT team took the doors down.

  On the back stairs one of the heat signatures presented itself as a hundred-and-twenty-pound mastiff with a spiked collar and a case of the ass. The boys in black counseled it with an MP5. The remaining occupants, roused by the gun fire, proved to be better armed than dressed and died in their undershorts.

  An M-60, two forty-millimeter grenade launchers, a half-dozen LAWS rockets, and nine pounds of plastic explosive were recovered. All in all, a fine night’s work, particularly if the third man—deliveryman/Andy—had been among the suspects dealt with. He was not, and upon that revelation one more cliché reared its ugly head: “The shit hit the fan.”

  27

  “WHAT IS IT WITH YOU PEOPLE and all this dog shooting? Jesus Christ!” I said, as I stepped down from the surveillance van into the cool morning dampness. My nameless friend loomed over Matty, talking, moving his hands around the big picture and using the leg of his glasses to make the fine points.

  “Ruby Ridge—you shot the kid’s dog. Waco, same horseshit. What did you think would happen? Come to my house. Shoot my dog. You’ll thi
nk Sherman’s march to the sea was a tea dance.”

  “Excuse me?” he said—no arch in the eyebrows, no raise in the voice—his face the placid plowed field of Godhood and focused solely on me.

  I took the moment to unwrap a cigar, clamp it between my bicuspids, and light it up. When his attention was spent and eyes swung back to Matty I said, “You just walked on your own banana, and it’s your fault.”

  He snapped his eyes back to me and said, “Fault’s hardly the point.”

  “Fault will be important when you park your ass at your desk to write your report,” I told him. “Somehow I don’t see you wrapping it up with, ‘Thanks to my trigger happy cowboys—”’

  “That’s about enough—”

  “The third man would be enough,” I said. “And you don’t have him. And you don’t have anyone to ask where he’s at.”

  Matty closed her eyes and gave one negative wag of her head. My anonymous friend folded his glasses and swept them into his coat pocket.

  He said, “I bow to your superior technique.”

  Matty’s chin hit her chest.

  “Pepper gas would have taken out the dog. The yip might have woken them up but it wouldn’t have sent them grappling for their firearms.”

  “We don’t train that way,” he said.

  “And that vindicates you in what way?”

  “The agent could have been shot while he was spraying the dog.”

  “Gas works on people,” I said.

  “Gas is a tactic we frequently employ.”

  “When you want to set the place on fire.”

  “That’s never the intent,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t find that answer credible.”

  “Thank you for your comment and criticism, Mr. Hardin,” he said—more like a growl—his lips revealing a lot of teeth. He turned. Walking away, he offered, “Should you have something constructive to add, I’m sure Agent Svensen would be pleased to discuss it with you.”

  “Okay, Matty,” I said, “you want to make it a hat trick?”

  My friend stopped. Without turning around he said, “You know where he is?”

  I looked at my watch—a quarter after five. “Just now, I haven’t the foggiest notion.” I took a drag on my cigar but it had gone out for want of attention. Turning, I leaned close to the side of the surveillance van to block the wind and lit my smoke. My nameless best friend turned about, his face a wry smile. I turned and exhaled a stream of smoke containing the words, “I know where he’ll be at about ten o’clock this morning.”

  “Have another one of those?” he asked.

  I plumbed the package out of my pocket and shook one loose. He took it. Matty tugged at my sleeve.

  “Hey,” she said, and took one when I turned the pack to her.

  I offered her my pocket lighter. She waved it off and stashed the cigar in her purse.

  “When I get home,” she said. “If I ever get home.”

  “Don’t inhale it,” I said.

  “I worked my way through law school as a Miami-Dade patrol officer” she said.

  Our Washington visitor took my offer of the light, lit the cigar, and blew a stream of smoke on the hot end so that it glowed cherry red. “God, that’s awful,” he said.

  “Same aged Chinese newsprint they used for the firecrackers we shot off as kids,” I said.

  “Agent Svenson, would you see to it that our guest, Mr. Ayers, is provided with transportation.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Matty shot me a hot glance and stashed the cigar in the pocket of her windbreaker as she turned to walk to the back of the van.

  “What is it you want?” he asked.

  I told him, “I want to know what’s going on.”

  He put the cigar to his mouth to take a toke, but thought better of it and held the cigar out to cast a discerning eye on the short brown shaft while he said, “It’s all in front of you. And you’re a professional. I’m surprised you care.”

  “Hey, I’m flattered,” I said. “Pretend I’m stupid.”

  “A man of the nineteen-sixties would ask what he could do for his country.”

  “Taking your refuge, wrapped in the flag?”

  He smiled and said, “Where do I find the man I’m looking for?”

  “So we’re back to, ‘What’s this about?’”

  “Scott Lambert.”

  “You’re right, I had that one,” I said. “Lambert holds several patents which are a sea-change in energy technology. BuzzBee battery is contesting his patents, but I doubt they have the money to front the operation we have been looking at.”

  “They were acquired by a Middle Eastern energy consortium. BuzzBee Battery Inc. now consists of twenty-two people occupying an office space in Hackensack, New Jersey. Their manufacturing facilities and research and development laboratories were sold off. BuzzBee batteries are now manufactured by a jobber in Indonesia and distributed, for a fee, through a discount store chain. The remaining staff in Hackensack doesn’t have the authority to run a petty cash fund and probably has no knowledge of the ongoing litigation.

  “The Middle East? As in oil?”

  My friend nodded and took a drag on the cigar.

  “Sounds like a fairy tale to me.”

  He watched me, smoke escaping his mouth around the cigar. Taking it out of his mouth and using it as a pointer, he said, “If you read the newspapers you know that the Middle East provides only thirty percent of our oil energy needs.” He flicked the ash off the end of his smoke. “What the newspapers don’t tell you is that there’s a whole generation of young men who grew up quite comfortably in the Middle East. They are now traveled, educated, and from families of dwindling fortune and no prospects.”

  “The people running against Lambert were not Middle Eastern types.”

  “Pogo,” he said.

  “Poco Loco?”

  “No. Pogo with a gee.”

  “Is that an acronym?”

  “Comic strip.”

  I asked, “So, who’s Andy?”

  “ANDI, is an acronym. Allied Nations Defense Intelligence—a private consulting firm that operates from a post box in Jakarta. Their assets are, for the most part, abandoned or fugitive American and British agency types.”

  “Mercenaries?”

  “We have been reaching out since nine-eleven, looking for sources whose placement was more important than their character. Until now their work has been clean, quick, and efficient, but at some point they decided to use our special relationship as a cover to run against U.S. interests.”

  “Great story,” I told him. “The post box in Jakarta was a nice touch.”

  “I assure you.”

  “Oh, I have little doubt. But that doesn’t explain what happened to me and Dixon. The IRS screwed Dixon.”

  My friend shrugged, “Dixon had tax problems long before this matter.”

  “The IRS screwed Dixon on cue.”

  “A coincidence.”

  “The post office provided the crap that was planted in my office.”

  “The way Cameran tells the story, you’ve been crowding his client list for years. The pornography was provided by a misguided friend.”

  “Cameran knew who Andy was.”

  “Cameran thought he was working a legitimate case for BuzzBee Battery.”

  “He thought working a legitimate case involved breaking and entering and planting evidence?”

  “Cameran’s retired, not an employee of any federal agency.”

  “Sheep-dipped?”

  “No, he’s really retired.”

  “So, that’s your story and your sticking to it.”

  “Basically.”

  “Probably work,” I said. “But it doesn’t explain why you are here. Personally, I mean. And doesn’t explain why you bothered to haul me out of the crapper.”

  “My work is,” he said and pursed his lips, closing his eyes to search the inside of his head for a word. “Oversight.” He looked at me al
most casually and said, “Dixon caught on to the fact that ANDI had been doubled back on us and wrote a report that was more accurately filed than read. Since he was a retired federal officer, an account of his suicide landed on my desk and I found the report. At that point we received your photo of a man we had stopped looking for because we thought he was dead.”

  “Seemed like an excellent patsy?”

  “With Dixon’s report and the shoot-out with the local police, here, the cat was pretty much out of the bag. Nothing to do but tidy up. To use your parlance, I hauled you out of the crapper and hosed you off because it was convenient.”

  “Now that I believe,” I said and clamped my molars on the end of my cigar. After all my work he still wasn’t surly—guess that’s why he was in charge of “oversight.” I exhaled the last palatable toke on my cigar. “The man you’re looking for,” I said, “is the only witness to a murder that my client has been charged with.”

  “That sword could cut both ways.”

  “I need him alive.”

  “Fine. You take ’em,” he said. He dropped his smoke on the ground and stepped on it. “But if he gets away from you, he won’t get away from me.”

  • • •

  To say that Bart Shephart lived somewhere is a dreadful stretch of the language. What he does is collide with the end of the day in a third floor walk-up above a hardware store near the corner of Alpine and Leonard.

  At a quarter to seven I tried the telephone—no answer. I bought him a twenty-ounce coffee at a party store, climbed the steep outside stairwell to his “loft,” and pounded on the door until his neighbors started yelling “shut up” out their windows. I found a key on the molding above the door.

  Yelling in the door yielded more ugly responses from the neighbors. I stepped into a living room decorated in the ancient forgotten warehouse motif—the room being taken up with dusty moving cartons taped shut. A battered recliner attended a TV with a tin-foil-and-coat hanger antenna. Scattered about the room was the truly definitive collection of empty Kessler’s bottles—ranging from pints to half gallons.

  In the bathroom I followed a path through towels and clothing to the commode where I poured off the top two and a half inches of coffee. In the medicine cabinet I found a pint of Kessler’s mouthwash and filled the coffee cup. Bart lay in his bed with his back to me, under a brown army blanket among about four loads of laundry. I shook him.