Oath of Office

by Michael Palmer

  Crouching low, Lou moved ahead, pushing the densely packed rows of corn aside. George followed closely. They found the road again, and after a careful walk along the edge, saw George’s car. The overhead spotlights had been shut off. There was no sign of Cap or Notso.

  “Cap!” George cried out anxiously. “Where you at, man? Notso! Cap!”

  “George, keep it quiet!” Lou whispered harshly, but his warning came too late.

  Gunfire erupted from across the road, forcing them back into the corn. Bullets streaked past them from several directions, but their cover held. Sticking close together, they pressed deeper into the corn. At that instant, the silence was pierced by a low rumbling, coming from the direction in which they were headed. Shoulder to shoulder, they ducked down in a furrow. The noise built steadily until it seemed like a jet engine had fired up and was heading toward them.

  “What the hell is that?” George asked.

  Lou stood up on his tiptoes and peered over the corn.

  Instantly, his blood turned cold.

  CHAPTER 29

  Advancing rapidly toward them through the darkness, looking like an attacking spaceship, its bank of headlights blazing, engine roaring, was a massive combine harvester. Attached to the front end of the harvester, whirling at a blurring speed, was a cylindrical threshing reel, at least twenty feet wide. The machine, with tires taller than Lou, was shearing stalks off at ground level.

  Wind generated by the rotating blades sprayed dirt toward Lou and rushed ahead with enough force to throw him off balance. In the brightly lit cab, he could see the silhouette of the driver and wondered what George and he must have looked like to the man.

  Helpless was the only word that came to mind.

  Most frightening to him about the thresher was its speed. For several precious seconds, he was frozen—almost literally, a deer in the headlights of the powerful beast. The gap between him and the machine seemed to be closing rapidly. Finally, with no specific plan in mind, he whirled to his right. Nimbly, the combine responded. Moments later, Lou tripped and fell, pitching facefirst onto the rugged ground.

  “George! Run! Get out of here!” he shouted, stumbling to his feet.

  He could barely hear himself over the roaring engine, and knew there was no way George could hear him.

  The screech of the razorlike blades was deafening, and the skill of the driver had him persistently locked between the headlights. Slivered stalks flew out from the base of the apparatus like daggers. A shot rang out from the right, then another. Bullets sparked off the metal framework of the cab. A third shot seemed to spiderweb the windshield.

  Lou saw the muzzle flashes and located George, thrashing ahead through the corn, firing over his shoulder like a sharpshooter in a Wild West show. For the moment, at least, he seemed to be well beyond the far end of the screeching rotors.

  Lou was dead center.

  George got off three more rapid shots. Then, it seemed, he was out of ammunition. It didn’t matter. The bullets had done nothing to stop, or even slow the combine. Still, Lou was concerned that there was space for the thresher to swing from him to George.

  Still fixed between the headlights, he began jumping up and down, hollering and frantically waving his arms above his head. The move sealed his fate. The thresher made an adjustment, and he quickly became the chosen one.

  Fifteen feet.

  Ten.

  The noise was deafening now.

  In seconds, it would be over.

  Five.

  Lou spun to his left and tripped on a root, rolling his left ankle. He pitched forward like a baseball player diving headfirst into a base. Unlike the rest of the cornfield, the soil he landed on was muddy and dense. He flattened himself out, hands stretched over his head, jaws clenched, waiting for the blades to tear him apart.

  But there was no impact.

  He had fallen into a trough, he realized—not a furrow between rows, but something deeper, an irrigation ditch. The roar and wind as the harvester passed over him were like a tornado. The ground shook violently, and the blades actually swept across his back. A millimeter or two more, and he would have been shredded.

  As soon as the harvester had passed over him, Lou scrambled from the ditch and hobbled toward where he reckoned the road was, feeling every step in his ankle. Just as he was losing confidence in his sense of direction, the densely packed stalks fell away. He stumbled out into the roadway, torn and completely covered in blood and dirt. Some distance away, he could hear the combine, swinging about for another run at him. Headlights appeared up ahead, flashed twice and went out. A car came skidding toward him through the darkness. Lou tensed, ready to dive back into the corn. The headlights urgently flashed again and the approaching car slowed.

  Cap leaned out the driver’s-side window. “Quick, get in the car, Lou!” he cried.

  Lou clambered into the backseat, relieved to see George sitting up front, and immediately grasping the significance that there were only three of them. Cap spun the car 180 degrees, sending a pillar of dust swirling into the night sky. The car fishtailed several times on the dirt road before finally catching traction. Lou looked behind him and saw the bank of lights from the harvester fading in the distance.

  Unable to stop shaking now, he kept on looking until the machine had vanished from view.

  CHAPTER 30

  At one o’clock in the morning, beneath a densely overcast sky, the vast cornfields all looked the same.

  Each turn Lou directed Chief Gilbert Stone to take led them to another narrow dirt road that cut through another field. With a gentle breeze fanning the tall stalks, it all seemed so peaceful—so far removed from the guns … and the combine harvester … and the blood … and the death. But the nightmare had been real, and Notso Brite had apparently paid for someone’s paranoia with his life.

  It had taken most of an hour before the 911 call from Cap’s cell phone had directed a cruiser from the Kings Ridge police station to where the three of them were waiting in George’s car. The officer, on orders from Stone, had led Lou and the others to the station, and after photographing Lou, fixed him up with a shower and a set of clothes. Even after washing off the blood and caked soil, he looked beaten and totally spent. His face had half a dozen gouges, and his knuckles throbbed. Nasty crimson bruises encircled his neck like a cleric’s collar. Worst of all, his ankle was quite swollen and was monitoring every heartbeat.

  The small motorcade consisted of two cruisers. Stone drove lead with Lou riding shotgun and Cap and George seated quietly in back behind a wire mesh screen. Two officers occupied the second car. Even staying under fifteen, nothing Lou or the others described was of any help in leading Stone to the spot where they were ambushed. Thirty minutes passed. Then another thirty. Several times, Lou thought they were on the right track. His pulse spiked, only to quickly settle down at the sight of a road sign or a house or outbuilding that told him they were still in the wrong place.

  Stone was patient and understanding, but several times suggested that they might do better to suspend their search until daylight. Lou was adamant they continue.

  “Look at my neck!” he insisted. “I didn’t do this to myself. There are at least two bodies out there—one of the men who was trying to kill us, and our friend Anthony Brite. Cap saw him get shot.”

  He glanced back at his stoical friend and wondered what Gilbert Stone was thinking about him and George.

  “Turn here,” Cap said suddenly.

  “Turn here?”

  Lou nodded and Stone made the right. The other police car followed them onto yet another narrow dirt road. Both drivers cut to their fog lights and slowed to five. There were no distinctive tire tracks on the dirt road, but there was something about the interface between the road and the stalks that seemed familiar.

  “Cap, you sensing something?” Lou asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Duncan, do you really think you killed somebody, too?” Stone asked.

  “Well, fir
st of all, while one of them was shootin’ at me like Wild Bill Hickok, another one charged me. I hit him with a right cross to the throat that would have stopped an elephant. I didn’t have time to stick around and check the guy’s pulse, but he didn’t seem to be doin’ much moving.”

  “Three dead and no bodies,” Stone murmured thoughtfully. “Not your everyday case.”

  “They’re out there,” Lou said, gazing out the window and trying not to feel hopeless.

  “We should have left a breadcrumb trail,” George added.

  “We’ll find him, George,” Lou said, somewhat buoyed that they hadn’t seen anything that meant this could not be the road. “We’ll find him.… Wait! Stone, up there! Up ahead!”

  Stone slammed on the brakes. Twenty feet ahead on the right was a gnarl of tread marks.

  Lou clambered out of the cruiser, cringing when his ankle bore weight.

  “What do you have?” Stone asked as he and the others approached.

  Lou pointed at the disrupted ground ahead. “This is it. We were here.”

  “You sure? Could just be farm machinery,” Stone said, climbing out with the others and panning the area with his flashlight.

  “Mighty small machine,” George said. “I wish we had brought my car out here with us so we could compare, but these tracks are bald in the same places my tires are bald.” He got low to the ground and felt around the depressions in the road, then nodded authoritatively, as if he actually could tell.

  With renewed tension, the group climbed back into the cruisers. The fog lights were turned off, and they slowly rolled ahead. They had gone a quarter mile or so when Lou exclaimed, “Look! Look at the corn over there.”

  The fields on both sides of the road, for as far ahead as they could see, were mown flat. The six of them stepped out into the cool early morning and listened. Nothing but the heavy white noise of humming insects and swishing stalks of corn, where such stalks remained.

  “This has been threshed,” Lou said.

  “What does that mean?” Stone asked.

  “It means someone flattened these fields.”

  Stone scanned the area with his flashlight. It looked like the model of a nuclear winter.

  “This is where these gunmen attacked you?” he said.

  “I’d bet on it,” Lou said, excited at last. “We didn’t pass any other fields that had been cut down like this. It’s a huge cover-up.”

  “I agree,” Cap said.

  Lou limped into the field.

  Was it possible this wasn’t the place?

  He inhaled deeply, tasting the air, and then inspected a handful of chopped-up stalks and leaves. “This field looks like it was very recently cut,” he said. “These plants haven’t decayed any, and you can still smell diesel in the air.”

  Stone shook his head. “I want to believe you, Welcome,” he said. “I really do. But I still have trouble wrapping my brain around the extent these killers went to in order cover up what you say happened here.”

  He took his powerful flashlight out again and shone it at one of the overhead spotlights—then at another. None of them was lit, but all the bulbs appeared intact.

  “I thought you said you shot out the lights,” Stone said. For the first time, there was a note of cynicism in his voice.

  “They could have been replaced,” George said.

  “And we could be in the wrong place. You guys haven’t spent much time out here in corn country, if you’ve spent any at all. It’s sort of like another planet to you. You could be feeding off one another. We see that sort of group dynamic from time to time. It’s like a form of hysteria or mass hypnosis. You start following some suspicious thugs out of the city, and get yourselves double-crossed and ambushed. No one’s attention to details is all that sharp. The stories get twisted on one another.”

  Cap strode up to the police chief and, hands on hips, glared down at him. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had decided to confront the tourists who were gawking at him. “Do I look hysterical?” he asked.

  Lou, who was kneeling nearby, inspecting the soil, glanced back at his chisled friend and grinned.

  “Duncan, don’t get me wrong,” Stone was saying. “I just think we should go at this in the morning with a lot more men and some dogs.”

  Cap took a step back.

  “What about Notso?” George insisted.

  “Notso’s dead,” Cap said. “I saw him get shot.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you saw. I’m not leaving my cousin out here in this stinkin’ field to get eaten by animals.”

  “We don’t even know if this is the right field,” Stone said.

  Lou felt the situation getting tense. He did not know George well enough to predict his actions or whether Cap would be able to control him. He imagined him facedown in the dirt with his hands cuffed behind him and Gilbert Stone’s knee in the small of his back.

  At that moment, Lou’s hand brushed over another clump of dirt. This one had something hard embedded in it—something hard and sharp. So sharp that it took a few seconds for him to realize that he had been cut. He inspected the side of his palm. Blood was oozing out of a half-inch-long slice. Carefully, Lou worked his fingers around the edges of the object that had cut him. He scraped the dirt away and was left with a large shard of glass—thick, textured glass.

  “What’s that?” Stone asked, inspecting the object with his flashlight.

  “Broken spotlight glass, if I’m not mistaken,” Lou said. “I’d guarantee it.”

  “Told you!” George chirped.

  Stone fingered the glass.

  “Well?” Lou asked.

  Stone shrugged. “Well, I think it’s time we go pay a visit to William Chester.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Lou.

  “The guy who owns these fields, that’s who.”

  CHAPTER 31

  A twelve-foot-high vine-covered stone wall enclosed Cross Winds, the Chester estate. Stone left his two officers to continue patrolling the fields, and then drove Lou, Cap, and George to the far western part of Kings Ridge and up a broad circular drive lined with trees. A security guard posted at the gated entrance checked everyone’s ID before calling inside and granting the group passage. Mounted security cameras monitored their arrival.

  Ah, the joys of big bucks, Lou thought sardonically.

  Cross Winds was a resplendent two-story neoclassical mansion featuring large, gently arched windows, and stone chimneys. The windows were dark from within, save for one on the first floor.

  Even in the darkness, it was obvious the grounds were a source of pride to the owner. The grass, cut to the height of a putting green and tastefully illuminated by a series of in-ground lights, glowed the color of a polished emerald, while the hedges were pruned with a carpenter’s precision. Sprawling rock gardens and flower beds completed the remarkable landscape. Protruding past the corner of the main house was a portion of a large, dimly lit greenhouse.

  The odd quartet proceeded up a short flight of stairs and onto a wide veranda that featured a dozen classic rocking chairs. Lou’s ankle challenged him with every step. Stone used a huge bronze wolf’s-head knocker to confirm their arrival, and in seconds, a cast iron lantern dangling overhead bathed them in a diffuse incandescent glow.

  The massive front door opened, revealing a round-faced man in his mid-sixties—swarthy and fit in a weight lifter’s sort of way. He had narrow Eastern European eyes and thick silver hair combed in a sideways part as straight as the hedge trim outside. Despite the early hour, it seemed as if he had not been sleeping.

  “William Chester,” he said, shaking each man’s hand as he directed the group into the elegant foyer inside.

  His hands were thick and powerful, and Lou wondered if he might be putting something extra into each squeeze—an immediate message as to who was in charge and not to be trifled with. The gesture was understandable. On their drive over, Lou had used his smartphone to research the man. Chester’s rise to industry dominance woul
d have sent Horatio Alger scurrying for his typewriter.

  Chester, age five, along with his father, mother, and a sister, immigrated illegally to the United States from Poland as stowaways onboard a cargo ship. Having spent their life savings to secure safe passage, the family changed their name from Chudnofsky to Chester, and settled down in a single room in the heart of Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Chester would later say the run-down building where his family lived would have been condemned had it not been needed by the city to house the rats.

  Eventually, Bernard Chester found employment in the garment district. However, the family’s good fortune proved short-lived. Carlo Gambino, of the Gambino crime family, assumed control over the district, and Bernard became a leader among those opposed to him. William had just turned eleven when his father, along with several others, was gunned down.

  Penniless, Chester supported his family by sweeping floors in a plant wholesaler. Within a year, he had shown an unusual aptitude for stimulating plant health and growth, and was hired away by the Barlow Seed Company—first as a salesman, then as an assistant manager to Donald Barlow, who subsequently became his mentor. By the time William was thirty, he was managing the Barlow Company, which was by then among the twenty top-grossing operations of its kind.

  When Barlow died suddenly and without family, his company passed to Chester. The subsequent growth of Chester Seed and Fertilizer, soon to be Chester Enterprises, put the company among the top ten in the industry worldwide.

  Barlow died suddenly.

  The phrase, from the Wikipedia article on William Chester, resonated in Lou’s mind. Over the final mile to the Chester mansion, he searched Donald Barlow on Google, then Yahoo, and finally Bing.

  The third try was the charm.

  A small article in a thirty-three-year-old issue of the Miami Herald reported the accidental death of seed giant Donald Barlow, who was washed overboard during a surprise squall while sailing aboard his fifty-two-foot yacht, Green Thumb.