Sycamore Bluff

by Jude Hardin

  Lenny bought the guys pints of Guinness. They talked about old times for a while, and eventually the conversation turned to what each of them was doing now.

  Lenny told them about U-3, and the problems he’d had with the research.

  “You should think about marketing it as a nutritional supplement,” Vic said. “That way, you can circumvent all that FDA crap.”

  “I would still want to do human trials,” Lenny said. “For my own peace of mind.”

  The three men drank some more beers and ate some dinner and talked some more, and they parted ways around midnight. It was a wild coincidence that Lenny had run into the guys. He figured he would probably never see them again, but several days later Dave called with a proposition.

  It was like a dream come true. Dave and Vic had come up with a way for Lenny to test U-3 on humans with no FDA involvement and no out of pocket expense. The subjects for the trials were concentrated in a single location, and they were already required to take a daily vitamin created by NASA. Victor would simply arrange for the contents of those vitamin capsules to include an adult dose of Lenny’s breakthrough medication. All Lenny had to do was provide the U-3, and Vic and Dave would take care of the rest.

  And so a partnership was born, and a new name for Lenny’s miracle concoction: U-4rique.

  It was to be marketed as a mood enhancer, and a promoter of good neurological and psychological health. Victor had promised that it was going to make them all billionaires.

  But now, of course, it looked as though the new formula had the same glitch as the old one. And, this time, the human trials had been conducted without the knowledge of the participants. What Lenny and Dave and Vic had done was totally illegal, and it was imperative that nobody outside their circle ever found out about it.

  And what Dave had done just blew Lenny’s mind. He’d tried to cover up the problem, thinking he would take care of it himself. Thinking what Lenny didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He’d hidden the incident from Lenny, knowing that Lenny’s scientific reputation was at stake, and his freedom. What Dave had done was inexcusable.

  “I want you to meet us in Kokomo in three hours,” Tumac said. He told Lenny the exact location. “From there, you can ride with us to the helicopter.”

  “We’ll need to make a stop at Grissom Air Force Base,” Lenny said.

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because the executive officer is an old friend of mine, and I need to pay him a visit. I’ll fill you in on the details when I meet you in Kokomo.”

  “We really don’t have a lot of extra time,” Tumac said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lenny said. “It won’t take long.”

  He hung up and started getting ready for the trip.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A heartbeat before the strip of cloth sticking out of the jar caught fire, four earsplitting shots rang out in quick succession and four smoking holes appeared in Henry Parker’s sports coat.

  Nicholas Colt had grabbed Diana from behind and had forced her finger to squeeze the trigger. Henry fell forward stiffly, like a tree that had been struck by lightning. The butane lighter skittered across the floor. The jar of gasoline left Henry’s hand and rolled toward the railing. It teetered on the edge, and then followed Blondie to the first floor where, like her, it shattered impotently.

  Diana screamed.

  “No!” she said.

  She dropped her gun and ran to where Henry lay. She knelt down beside him, looked him over, felt for a pulse. All four bullets had exited through his back. He was gone, gone forever this time.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Colt said.

  “Help me turn him over.”

  With Colt’s help, Diana rolled Henry Parker onto his back.

  The man still looked like Henry, but not as much as he had from a distance. There was something wrong about the mouth. The lips were fuller than Diana remembered. Maybe his appearance had changed some because of his illness, she thought. Or maybe he’d already gotten some plastic surgery.

  She unbuttoned his sports coat and lifted his shirt, exposing his abdomen. Henry had a pink birthmark the size of a quarter on the left side if his belly button. This man did not. Could a plastic surgeon remove a birthmark without leaving a scar? Maybe, but Diana knew of one thing that a surgeon definitely couldn’t remove, not without a great deal of tissue loss and gross disfigurement.

  She reached into her backpack and pulled out a black and chrome disk that looked like an ordinary makeup compact. She thumbed open the latch and a light came on. She wrestled the dead man’s left shoe and sock off, separated his pinky toe from the one next to it, and shined the light into the space. No blood tattoo. No scar. This was definitely not Henry Parker.

  “What are you doing?” Colt said.

  Diana closed the compact and tossed it back into her backpack.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “I could have gotten us killed.”

  “No kidding. What happened, anyway? Why did you freeze up like that?”

  “I thought this was the operative I told you about,” Diana said. “Henry Parker. The one I shot and killed at the CIAO compound. I could have sworn it was him.”

  “You thought he came back to life?”

  “It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Do you remember when I contacted you about that first job, and then tested your loyalty by faking my own death?”

  “I remember. I was pretty angry about that for a while.”

  “I thought maybe Henry had done something similar. He’d been talking about wanting to leave the organization, and dying would have been the perfect solution.”

  “You didn’t attend his funeral?” Colt said.

  “No. He was cremated, and the memorial service was limited to family members and close friends. Of course none of them knew he was a secret agent. They thought he worked for the post office.”

  “But this isn’t him?”

  “No.”

  Colt sat on the floor, reached into his backpack and pulled out a handful of 9mm cartridges. He started loading them into his empty magazine.

  “You could have gotten us killed,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. Like I told you, I have no business being out in the field right now.”

  “But you are out in the field right now, and there’s no telling how many more of these monsters are going to come after us. Am I going to have to worry about you freezing up again?”

  “No,” Diana said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I hope not. Anyway, I guess we need to find a place to hole up until the supply helicopter gets here. Any ideas?”

  Diana stood, walked back toward the communications room and leaned against the railing. She could smell the gasoline fumes rising from the first floor.

  Colt walked over and stood beside her.

  “We could just stay here,” Diana said. “Since this is where the copter is going to land anyway, it would be the most logical place. We could lock ourselves into one of these offices.”

  “What if another one of these walking nightmares decides to soak another label off another jar of Skippy and make another firebomb? We would be trapped up here, and it’s a long jump to the ground.”

  “This is probably as safe a place as any. We certainly can’t stay outside. We’ll freeze to death. My toes are still numb from the walk over here. We’ll just barricade the front entrance. The back door is an emergency exit only, and there’s no access from outside, so that one shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “We have to stay here with the dead people?” Colt said.

  Diana sighed. “Are you going to whine about every little thing?”

  “Every little thing. Right. And speaking of every little thing, what are we going to do about food and water?”

  “There’s a water fountain downstairs by the restrooms. Food, I don’t know. Got any more granola bars?”

  “A couple, but that’s not going to cut it. I say we break into the diner, load up on grub and bring
it back here.”

  “That’s an idea,” Diana said. “But the grocery store’s closer. If we’re going to be looters, we might as well—”

  She paused.

  “What?” Colt said.

  “Something just came to me. I wonder if the man and woman who attacked us here are husband and wife.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “If they are, we might be able to figure out why they went nuts. I’m guessing there’s something about their living situation, or what they were eating or drinking or whatever, something that caused them to suddenly turn from ordinary folks into murderous fiends. This isn’t happening to all the residents, so there must be something that only a few of them have in common.”

  “So we’re back to investigating?” Colt said. “I thought we were in evacuation mode.”

  “Humor me. I’ll go downstairs and check the woman for ID while you take a look at the guy I thought was Henry Parker.”

  “I’ll go downstairs,” Colt said. “You still look a little shaky.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Colt headed downstairs. He looked weary. Rode hard and put up wet, as Diana’s father used to say. He needed sleep. Diana didn’t feel tired, but she knew she needed some as well. The physical and mental stress of this long demanding day was going to catch up with her eventually. Maybe a shot of Colt’s whiskey wouldn’t be such a bad idea. She thought about it, immediately decided against it. She’d never consumed alcohol on the job before, and she wasn’t going to start now. It was against The Circle’s rules, and it was against her own personal set of standards. Her daddy had another saying: never drink until the work is done, and get the work done fast. Hang in there, she told herself. We’ll get through this somehow.

  She walked back to the dead man and knelt down and went through his pockets. He had a comb and a pack of chewing gum and a set of keys and a ballpoint pen. No wallet. No identification of any kind.

  Colt returned just as Diana was finishing up with John Doe.

  “Any luck?” Colt said.

  “No. You?”

  “Not really. All she had on her were these.”

  Colt held up a white plastic pill bottle. He shook it, and it rattled. There was a yellow label on the bottle with Nutritional Supplement 14 generically printed on it in bold black lettering.

  “Those are the vitamins,” Diana said. “The special formula from NASA.”

  Colt opened the bottle and tapped out a shiny gray capsule.

  “You think these things are responsible for what’s happening to the residents?” he said.

  “They’re vitamins,” Diana said. “Nothing more.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the letter she’d opened earlier. “There’s a list of the ingredients right here.”

  She handed the letter to Colt, and he took a minute to look it over.

  “They have three thousand times the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C,” he said.

  “That’s not going to do anything except give you some really expensive urine. Trust me, there’s nothing in those pills that’s going to cause the Jeckle and Hyde reaction we’ve seen tonight. Anyway, everyone here is required to take the vitamins, and they’ve been taking them for over six years. If there was something wrong with those pills, it would have affected the entire population and it would have shown up a lot sooner than now.”

  Colt stuck the bottle in his pocket. “I know a guy who works in a lab,” he said. “I’m going to have these things analyzed when we get home. You never know about the government. They might have slipped the residents here a mickey.”

  Diana rolled her eyes. “We are the government,” she said.

  “Yeah. And do you trust us?”

  She sighed. “You want to go get something to eat?”

  “Best idea I’ve heard in a while. All this killing has made me hungry.”

  “Keep your gun out in case we run into any more of them,” Diana said.

  “You can count on it. And as long as we’re investigating again, there’s something else I want to check on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The unsmiling man.”

  “Who?” Diana said.

  “There was one guy at the church service who wasn’t grinning stupidly like everyone else. Maybe he knows something.”

  “Or maybe he had a bad case of gas.”

  “Humor me,” Colt said. “When we get back from the grocery store, I want to look for the directory you told me about. The one with photographs of all the residents. I think I’ll recognize this guy when I see him. Then I can give him a call. If he doesn’t want to talk to me, then no big deal. No harm, no foul.”

  “He might consider it a foul to get a phone call from a stranger at two in the morning,” Diana said.

  “I’ll wait till sunrise, catch him before he goes to work. That way you and I can go ahead and get some rest too.”

  They walked down the hallway and descended the stairs. They pulled their collars up and put their gloves on, pushed through the double set of doors and stepped back out into the cruel night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  At 06:04, Colonel David A. Davidson started his car and backed it out of the driveway. Lenny Daehl, his friend and business partner, had called and said he needed to talk to him right away. In person. Something urgent, he said, and he wanted Davidson to bring a copy of The Factory’s blueprints.

  Was it possible that Lenny had found out about what happened in Sycamore Bluff? About the Kyle Lofton incident, and the government agents sent to investigate? Davidson hoped not, but it didn’t really matter now anyway. The problem was being taken care of.

  Davidson had invited Lenny to come to his house for breakfast, but Lenny insisted on meeting off base. He said he had some people with him that might not be able to clear security at the front gate. Davidson was curious as to why Lenny would be hanging out with anyone who didn’t have the credentials to drive onto a United States military base, but he didn’t ask. He figured he would find out soon enough.

  Davidson drove into Kokomo and found the address Lenny had given him. It was a boarded-up gas station located along a strip of downtown homes that had been slated for demolition. The pumps were long gone, and the exterior walls of the small convenience store were covered with graffiti. Gang stuff, Davidson thought. He parked his car and waited. Apparently Lenny was running late.

  The place was deserted. There was nobody around, and very little traffic going by. Why Lenny would chose a place like this for a meeting was a mystery. In fact, Davidson was starting to think he must have gotten the address wrong. He started punching Lenny’s number in on his cell phone, but stopped when a black Ford Econoline pulled up beside him.

  The front passenger’s door opened and Lenny climbed out of the van. He was wearing a heavy blue ski jacket and a wool toboggan. He walked over to Davidson’s car.

  Davidson rolled his window down.

  “Good morning,” Lenny said.

  “What’s going on, man? Why did you want to meet here, of all places?”

  “Hey, great to see you too, brother.”

  Lenny extended his hand. Davidson took it, and the two discreetly executed the Phi Tau secret handshake. It was a manipulation that was obvious to the men doing it, but invisible to bystanders. Davidson handed Lenny the set of blueprints he’d requested, neatly rolled up and secured with a rubber band.

  “It’s good to see you,” Davidson said. “But this is a little ridiculous. A guy could get shot or stabbed around here, you know? Especially an Air Force officer in uniform. Can we go somewhere else? There’s a Denny’s just a few blocks away. I’ll buy you—”

  “I need to talk to you, Dave, and what I need to say needs to be said in private. Let’s go inside.”

  “In there?” Davidson said, gesturing toward the dilapidated CigsMart.

  “Yeah. The door’s not locked. Come on. It’ll only take a few minutes. Then we’ll drive over to Denny’s, and I’ll buy y
ou breakfast. How about that?”

  “I don’t think I’m even going to have time now. I need to be back to the base no later than eight. There’s an awards ceremony and a personnel inspection, and Blankenbaker’s still on leave. They’re expecting me to hand out ribbons and shake hands and all that, and make a little speech. Then I’ll have to walk through the ranks and make sure everyone got haircuts and—”

  “You’ll be back in time,” Lenny said.

  Davidson shut his engine off, got out of the car. He glanced over at the black van and caught a glimpse of the man in the driver’s seat. Brown skin, black hair and a mustache. Black leather jacket. His face looked puffy, as if he might have just climbed out of bed.

  Davidson followed Lenny inside. It was dark in there except for the early morning sunlight sifting through the bullet holes in the plywood. There was a counter where the cash register had been and some shelving units that had once held candy and chips and overpriced loaves of bread and boxes of cornflakes. Broken glass and insulin needles and homemade crack pipes littered the floor, and the glass display doors on the walk-in cooler were splattered with what appeared to be dried blood. The place reeked of tobacco smoke and urine.

  “Who’s the guy in the van?” Davidson said.

  “That’s Tumac. He’s a friend of mine.”

  Davidson laughed. “Tumac? What is he, some kind of rapper or something?”

  Lenny didn’t laugh, or even crack a smile.

  “Another friend called me on the phone last night,” he said. “A friend named Stedman.”

  “Stedman called?”

  Lenny’s shoes crunched on the broken glass as he made his way to a spot behind the cashier’s station. He leaned forward with his elbows on the wooden countertop.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about everything that’s going on in Sycamore Bluff?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me about Kyle Lofton, and about the government agents sent to investigate? This could ruin me, Dave. Do you realize that?”