Cotton

by Paul Heald

  James took his eye off the road long enough to look at both Melanie and Stanley, who returned his look with a simultaneous shake of their heads.

  “What the fuck?” Stanley blurted out. Then he paused and thought for a moment. “I guess the guy’s face was pretty much caved in.”

  “He was really dark,” James added, “but someone out there is really letting their imagination fly.”

  “And thank God for that,” Melanie exclaimed, as she reached forward and grabbed their shoulders. “It bought us the time we needed in Little Rock.” She leaned back in her seat and pulled out her cell phone. “I’m going to call Thor and let him know when we should be getting in. Maybe he knows more about the North Carolina story.”

  The priest did not answer his phone, so she sent him a text with an approximate time of arrival in Clarkeston and a link to the story she had just heard on the radio. Fifteen minutes later she received back a text that filled the car with shrieks of laughter: Your arrival time is fine. You’re welcome for the story. Yours truly, Mohammed Akbar Sanchez.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight when the trio pulled onto a rocky path off a country road west of Clarkeston. The driveway to the abandoned mill ran parallel to the river, and years of erosion and disuse had rendered the entryway nearly impassable for the low-slung sedan. James crept the car slowly over the ruts until they were stopped by a cedar tree that had fallen where the driveway connected to the parking area behind the crumbling building. They had driven past the old mill twice, shining the car’s headlights into the parking lot from the high ground of the road and assuring themselves that no carload of assassins awaited them. Even so, their senses were on full alert as they surveyed the scene.

  As the engine cut off and they opened the doors, they were assailed by the roar of water rushing over the rock-choked mill race and the piercing whine of thousands of tree frogs and cicadas. The massive red-brick structure leaned over them to their left, the peak of its roof silhouetted against a nearly full moon. James switched the car lights off, and after a moment of adjustment to the darkness, they were able to see a way to squeeze around the foliage to the back of the building. Stanley carried a flashlight purchased twenty minutes earlier at a Walmart off the Clarkeston bypass.

  Shattered glass crunched under their feet as they skirted the edge of the building and emerged on the other side of the fallen tree. The side of the mill had dozens of windows, all in rectangular series of fist-sized panes, almost all broken by storms and stone throwers over the years. Stanley went first, shining the light onto the parking lot and then scanning the far edge of the mill, looking for the exterior shed described in the affidavit. He wanted to locate their goal and get out as quickly as possible before anyone could pull in behind their car and block them in. Any sign of trouble, and he was ready to run for the river and lose himself in the woods.

  “That must be it,” he said, bouncing the beam of light on a corrugated-tin roof jutting from the far side of the building. He moved ahead and improved his angle. “Yeah, I think that I can even see a barrel.”

  He waited for the others to catch up, and together they made their way across the weed-choked pavement toward the shed. When they reached the center of the open space, Melanie heard a pane of glass break on the asphalt behind her and then a man’s voice cut through the buzzing of the north Georgia woods.

  “Stay right there and don’t move.”

  Melanie instinctively put her hands on her head even though the voice had not asked her to do so. The men seemed to contemplate fleeing but then followed suit and turned around with their hands held high. Hoping to see a night watchman or a curious county sheriff, she instead encountered the rigid form of a man holding a semiautomatic assault rifle. Sharon Williams stood at his side, arms crossed over her chest and looking anxiously from her companion to the three people who had disrupted her life in Little Rock.

  “Mr. Swinton, I presume—”

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch!” Swinton yelled. “I’m doing the talking here, not you goddamn left-wing pieces of shit.” He raised the rifle and sighted it in the middle of Melanie’s forehead. When James took a step forward, he swung the weapon toward the journalist. “Do it,” Swinton said in an even voice, redirecting his aim but keeping an eye on Melanie. “Be a hero.”

  James stepped back and Melanie thought that she could see Swinton smile. “That’s what I thought. You’re more comfortable in front of a computer than a gun, aren’t you?”

  Swinton lowered the heavy firearm, but kept it pointed at his three captives. A self-satisfied grin pasted on his face, he tilted his head toward his girlfriend. “Put the duct tape on ’em. Arms behind. Start with the newspaper prick.”

  A moment later, Melanie felt her wrists being tightly bound behind her back. When Williams finished with their arms, Swinton ordered her to wrap the tape several times around their ankles. There was nowhere to run. The parking lot was large and offered no cover. Swinton’s attention never wavered from his prey. Trying to escape would be suicidal.

  When they were finally bound, Swinton swaggered behind them and gave each a vicious kick behind the knees, dropping them to the ground. Stanley fell awkwardly and cut his face on a piece of glass. Melanie entertained a fantasy of him secretly grabbing a shard and freeing himself, but Swinton hovered closely overhead and yanked the professor up to a kneeling position as his face bled profusely from a long gash in his forehead.

  “Any last words before I send you all to hell?” Swinton said, the tone of his voice suggesting, strangely, that he expected a response.

  She considered asking how the Arkansas couple knew that they would be coming directly to the mill, when she remembered her own promise made in the senator’s office to Sharon Williams: You must find out the location of the bodies, and as soon as we know, we’ll confirm their location.

  James made the first effort at distraction. “Cameron, are you a Baptist?”

  Melanie could see the cotton planter lay the barrel of his rifle against the former deacon’s temple and smile. Williams stood behind him, eyes wide open, fascinated by her lover’s exhibition of power. “Good guess, comrade, although it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that about a farmer from Arkansas.”

  The reporter spoke quietly. “What would your pastor think about this?”

  Swinton gouged the gun sight slowly into James’s cheek, leaving a jagged and bloody line running across the right side of his face. The reporter took the punishment silently and managed to look up into his antagonist’s eyes. “And what would Jesus do? Isn’t that what we’re always supposed to ask ourselves?”

  Swinton grabbed the rifle barrel, pivoted and brought the stock down, striking a glancing blow on the head of the speculative theologian. “Jesus would fuckin’ kill your ass! All three of you! You think he’s on your side? Trying to rip down the United States and hand it over to the World-Fucking Trade Organization? You’d like to see every one of our freedoms handed over to those left-wing pinheads in Geneva, wouldn’t you? Cheer while they fuck the American farmer right in the ass, wouldn’t you?” He raised the rifle butt again and smashed it down on the journalist’s right cheekbone. If James had been conscious for Swinton’s tirade, he wasn’t any longer.

  The cotton planter brought the weapon quickly to his shoulder and pointed it at James’s head. “And you can be the first to go.”

  “Wait!” Melanie shouted and ripped her knees up as she scuffled across the asphalt toward Swinton. “I don’t give a fuck what Jesus would do, but I do care what a rational Cameron Swinton would do, and you need some more information before you fuck yourself in the ass.”

  He turned to her and gave her a curious look. “What you got, sweetie? Do you think your begging is going to save him?”

  “No.” She kneeled as straight as she could and looked him unflinchingly in the eye. “But it might save you.” She paused to make sure that she had his full attention. “Reach into my back pocket and pull out my smart pho
ne. There’s something you need to see before you do anything stupid.”

  He trained the rifle on her chest. “Is this some kind of trick?”

  “Yeah,” she managed an impressive level of sarcasm, despite the shards of glass chewing at her kneecaps, “I’m about to leap up and drop-kick your balls.” She rolled her eyes at him and spat. “Just pull out my fucking phone and watch a little video that you star in.”

  Swinton looked first at his companion. Williams shrugged and accepted the gun from him as he reached behind the attorney and grabbed her phone. He swiped the screen. Melanie told him her access password and directed him to the email she had received two days earlier from Thorsten Carter.

  “Click on the link in the message and watch the video. If anything happens to us, what you see will be immediately posted on YouTube, with an alert to every major media outlet in the country. We’re not idiots.” For a wild moment, she thought that she had overplayed her hand. If Carter’s email address made his identity obvious, then all four of them might soon be dead. As Swinton accessed the video and started watching, her shoulders slumped with relief as she remembered his account name, an obscure homage to ancient Saturday Night Live episodes that would not identify him: joeepiscopo@gmail.com.

  After a minute of watching, Swinton turned and wandered away, eyes glued to the phone, muttering under his breath. She could barely see him in the corner of the parking lot, but she imagined that Thorsten and Miriam’s go-for-the-throat exposé was engendering both dread and rage. The young couple had named the senator, Swinton, and Zingales as deliberate coconspirators in bribery and murder plots, laying out the inexorable logic of their findings. The priest hadn’t labeled it the nuclear option for nothing.

  When the clip was done, Cameron walked to the far edge of the parking lot, threw the phone in the river and took the gun from Williams. He walked purposefully to Melanie.

  “Getting rid of the phone won’t make the video go away,” she said as calmly as she could manage into the barrel of the gun.

  “No, but it makes me feel better.” And with that, he back-handed the attorney across the face and kicked Stanley in the stomach, leaving both of them prostrate on the pavement. He pulled his leg back to kick the professor in the face, but he restrained himself with an effort and swore loudly. He kicked a broken bottle and cursed again as it skittered across the parking lot. “Fuck me!” he yelled as his foot lashed out at a clot of crumbled asphalt. “Fuck me!”

  He suddenly turned and took three quick steps away from his inert antagonists and then stopped with an abrupt crunch of gravel and glass. He breathed audibly, controlling himself with an effort. “Remember to keep your side of the bargain in the reporter’s story. He doesn’t identify me or Sharon. If he does, then we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose and I swear to God this won’t be the last time you see me. You got it?”

  Both Melanie and Stanley grunted their assent and Swinton once again began walking away. Sharon Williams stood staring at the three people lying unmoving on the pavement, until her lover called without a glance backward: “Are you comin’ or not?”

  XXXIV.

  COLUMN-BARIUMS

  Stanley sat at his kitchen table, checking his email and wondering what to do for supper. The refrigerator hummed noisily in the corner, and he saw that its vibrations had rotated the vase containing the remains of Angela and Carrie slightly to the right. Since his return from Georgia, he had moved them from the laundry room to the top of the fridge, where they oversaw his evening’s activities: cooking, drinking wine, and listening to random French songs from the forties and fifties on YouTube. A ping drew his attention back to his laptop, and he saw that James Murphy had sent him an email with an attachment. Five days after the attack at the old mill, the reporter had finally finished his story.

  James had remained unconscious while his two companions managed to scrape away the duct-tape bindings that held their hands behind their backs. Once free, they lifted the journalist by the armpits, dragged him back to the rental car, and drove directly to the hospital. By the time he was admitted, he had regained consciousness and was complaining of a massive headache. They had all been treated for cuts and bruises, but James’s concussion and fractured cheekbone had proven to be the only serious injuries. The next morning, he convinced a skeptical doctor to discharge him, and he was ready to write. Thor and Miriam picked him up at the hospital entrance, and Stanley, exhausted from sleeping in a chair in the journalist’s room, gave his friend and the priest each a warm hug, kissed Melanie Spanish-style on both cheeks, and headed to Hartsfield Airport for a flight back to Los Angeles.

  The professor clicked on the attachment without paying much attention to the contents of the email itself. He read the draft of the newspaper article slowly, savoring every twist and turn of the story, marveling at how James managed to indict the entire US legislature without mentioning Senator Randolph specifically or implying that he was part of the plot to bribe the WTO in the cotton case. An anonymous cotton planter and legislative aide were clearly implicated in the bribery plot and the murderous cover-up, but no member of the reading public would be able to guess the identities of Swinton and Williams. Stanley was glad. He had little doubt about the sincerity of the Arkansan’s final threat in the mill parking lot. Swinton truly would have nothing to lose if he were exposed. In an ideal world, he and the senator’s former chief of staff would be spending the rest of their lives in prison, but Melanie, aware of the ridiculous liberties she had taken in the investigation, was not willing to chance a prosecution based only on the encounter in the parking lot. Williams’s affidavit was inadmissible in court, and although the cell phone was hard evidence, the numbers contained in it were merely circumstantial proof of unrecorded conversations.

  Nonetheless, Melanie seemed confident that justice would be done, although she was short on details.

  Stanley smiled when he saw that he was mentioned by name and laughed when James described his exploits in Europe and the North Carolina mountains as if he were some kind of megaspy. Melanie was written up as daring, brilliant, and innovative, but her identity was cloaked in the guise of an overweight, middle-aged male prosecutor from an unnamed midwestern state. James would have been happy to turn her into a media sensation, but she had no interest in returning to the spotlight. Her star turn as runner-up Miss Georgia twenty-five years earlier had satisfied her desire for fame, not to mention that no one in the Justice Department would be very happy with her creative approach to criminal problem solving. She preferred to keep her job rather than become the next cookie-cutter blond “expert” on Fox News.

  After a moment’s thought, he realized that he shared her desire to avoid publicity. He had no classes to teach until August, still two months away, and California still felt weird. He clicked off the story and returned to James’s email. After reading it carefully and clicking on the link his friend had included, a plan began to form in his head. By the time he closed his laptop and looked back up at the vase, he knew what he was going to do.

  * * *

  Timing is everything, James thought to himself with a shake of his head. Sondra had just left his office, having explained tearfully that her relationship with Brother Armstrong was over and she no longer had any desire to be parted from her husband. She claimed that the revelation of her renewed affection had come suddenly, romantically, like a love bomb dropped by the enormous hand of God out of a clear blue sky. Unfortunately for her, the revelation arrived two days after his story of the cotton case had gone viral in the national media and two weeks after she had not-so-tearfully announced that her lawyer had drawn up divorce papers. Had she arrived before the story had broken, he might well have taken her back. As it was, he had seldom seen a more transparently insincere conversion. Oddly, the encounter left him feeling cheered. He realized that at some point during the last few weeks, he had ceased noticing the dull ache of her absence and betrayal. With a pleasant sense of surprise, he found himself looking forward to si
gning whatever papers her lawyer had prepared.

  Since the story had been published and the media firestorm had begun, he had also gotten a call from Melanie. She announced that she was paying a visit to Clarkeston and wanted to introduce him to an old friend. She would be arriving within the hour. He looked at his watch and turned off his cell phone. Interviews were occupying nearly all his free time, and the next request could wait for a while. He walked to the coffee shop where he was to meet her, ordered a latte, and graciously accepted the congratulations of the occasional customer who had seen him on television answering questions about the sensational murders of Diana Cavendish and Jacob Granville.

  The attorney arrived fifteen minutes later, elegant as ever, a slightly nervous smile tracing her generous red lips.

  “Hiya.” She kissed him on the cheek as he stood up. “How does it feel to be a media darling?”

  He tossed his cup into the garbage, and he put his arm lightly on her back as they walked out of the café and into the bright June sunlight. “I don’t know. It’s pretty weird. Have you seen any of the interviews?”

  She nodded as they got into her car. “Yeah. A couple.”

  “I feel more like a professor than a reporter. No one seems to understand the importance of the subsidies part of the story. They want to hear about the details of the murders and attempted murders, mountain adventures, and all that stuff. I have to force the conversation back to US cotton planters, congressional subsidies, and the downward pressure on international cotton prices. Two dead bodies in an abandoned mill seem to be way more important to CNBC than millions of impoverished farmers in Chad and Mali. I end up sounding like an econ professor, not an investigative reporter.”