by Andy Straka
“Frank, good to see you. Where’s Jake?”
“He and I had what you might term a tête-à-tête with the FBI last night and they decided they’d like him to keep them company for a while.”
“Oh, Jesus.” His touched his forehead momentarily before reaching out to the railing to steady himself.
“You all right, old man?”
“I’m okay … I’m okay. I didn’t think it would come to this.”
It would come to this? He still seemed wobbly so I took hold of his arm. He leaned heavily on me.
“Isn’t that Damon Farraday’s Scout?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sure is.”
“What’s he doing way up here?”
“Came up with that bird of his to do some hunting a couple of hours ago. He’s been up here a few times before. They went away over the edge of the ridge and I haven’t seen them since. But I expect he’ll be headed back this way before too long.”
The wind blew a cold swirl up the mountain and it swept across the porch. Felipe wore nothing but faded jeans and a T-shirt covered by a tattered bathrobe. His hair was greasy and disheveled and he smelled of stale bourbon.
“Why don’t we get you inside?” I said.
He nodded.
I helped him back across the threshold. Inside there was only one large living space that served as living room, kitchen, and dining room rolled into one. Two small bedrooms and a bath were connected off the back of the cabin. The whole place was warmed by nothing but a woodstove.
“You want to sit down?” I asked.
“That would be good.” We moved together toward the wall, where he sat down heavily in a recliner between the stove and a nineteen-inch color television that looked like it had been propped temporarily on a couple of weathered crates, which then by default had become part of the permanent decor. There was a walker with a cane leaning against it propped beside the chair.
I smelled coffee and looked around at the kitchen area. “Can I find you something to eat? You had breakfast?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Too early for me. If it weren’t for that Farraday character showing up I’d have stayed in bed.”
“I heard you had visitors after Jake and I left yesterday too.”
“Oh, you know about that, do you?”
I nodded.
“Bastards. Comin’ up here in those vans with the dark windows. Acted like the damned secret police or something.” He sighed heavily, his oversized gut pulling down his skinny arms and shoulders. “I suppose you came because of the rifle they took.”
“That, and to find out what else you know.”
“What else I know.” He laughed, but it turned into a dry hacking cough. For a moment he seemed to have difficulty catching his breath. After a few seconds I stood, but he raised his hand to stop me. A couple more coughs and he was able to breathe.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“Sure.” His voice cracked like dry sandpaper.
I went to the sink across the room, found a clean glass on the shelf above and filled it with cold water from the tap. I brought it back over and handed it to him. He took a long sip.
“Best damned water on the planet,” he said. “Right out of my own well.”
I waited.
“Okay, let’s see. You were asking what I know. One thing I’ll say, just like I told those FBI bastards, is that I’m a proud father. I don’t care what happens. Jake and me, well … you know how he found me and all, and it sure as hell wasn’t like I was deserving of it or anything. But that Jake, he’s relentless when he puts his mind to something … but I guess you must know all that.”
I said I did.
“There’s something going on here,” he said, “and it’s got something to do with Jake’s work.”
“His work?”
“Yeah, you know. That security business and stuff. People he goes to work for—clients I suppose you’d call them.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Yesterday before you got here, Jake gave me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. He said you fellas still didn’t know who shot Chester or why, but he had a pretty good idea that you and he were going to find out for sure, and he said that if anything happened, like you or he got into trouble with the police or something, I should find a telephone, preferably a pay phone, and call this number. He said a man would answer and I should give him a message.”
It had to be the operative whose name Toronto had refused to divulge, the one who was supposedly working with the Feds, but who—it looked like now—was the one attempting to frame him for the bombings and Chester’s murder.
“What was the message?” I asked.
“He said to just tell the man ‘The wind blows high.’ “
“The wind blows high?”
“Yeah.”
It sounded familiar. I thought I remembered the phrase came from an old Scottish tune or something.
“He say to tell the man anything else?”
“Nope. That was it. Just say ‘The wind blows high,’ and hang up. So that’s what I did. After those FBI characters stormed through the place yesterday, I waited a few hours to see if you or Jake came by. When you didn’t, I climbed in the Chevy and drove on down to Beckley with a roll of quarters—I figured it was a big enough place and far enough away from here—and I called the number he gave me, told the man what I was supposed to say and just hung up.”
“So it was yesterday. About what time?”
“Evening. About six, seven o’clock.”
“You didn’t tell the man who you were?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t stay on the phone long enough for him to have traced the call. You still have the phone number with you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “After I got back here, I stuffed it in between the pages of an old cookbook I have on the shelf so nobody else would find it.”
There was a shelf full of books in the corner next to the woodstove. “Over here?” I asked, rising and walking to it.
“That’s right. The book’s about cooking venison and such.”
There were a few novels on the shelf, mostly action adventure and crime fiction, another section of books about WWII, and then in the middle of that shelf a book on cooking wild game.
“Preparing Wild Game, is that it?”
“That’s it. Page one twenty-four. That’s the month I was born—January 1924.”
I opened the book and turned to the page he’d indicated. A slip of folded notebook paper lay between the pages. I unfolded it and read the number: 202 area code, Washington, D.C.
I dug out my brand-new cell phone, hoping it would work way up here. It did. The screen showed a strong signal, probably from a tower a few mountains away.
“Ah—you got a phone with you,” Felipe said. “You going to call him too?”
“I don’t know.”
What else had Toronto decided not to tell me? What if this wasn’t the man he’d talked to me about? For all I knew, I could be calling the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. But I decided to punch in the number anyway.
“You may have to let it ring a few times. Jake told me that.”
He was right. The phone rang exactly ten times before someone picked it up. I pressed the handset closer to my ear.
“Yes?” The deep male voice sounded agitated.
“What does ‘The wind blows high’ mean?”
“What? Who is this?”
“Who is this?“
“You’re tying up a secure line.”
“So I gathered.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Jake Toronto’s.”
I heard him fumble with the phone for a moment. “What do you want?”.
Something about the voice was eerily familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “I want to know who’s trying to set up my friend for a murder he didn’t commit, not to mention a conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism rap,” 1 said. “And I want t
o know who really did kill Chester Carew. And I want to know why.”
“You want to know a lot.”
“Maybe that’s my nature.”
“How’d you get this number?”
“Immaterial.”
There was a long pause, during which I thought I heard the man on the phone sigh.
“You’re on a cell phone, aren’t you?” he finally said. “I’ll know in just a minute who you are.”
“So you’ve got a fast trace … what are you, NSA, CIA? Why would Jake want me to contact you?”
“You’re not the same person who called yesterday.”
“No?” I paused just long enough to maybe make him wonder.
“I’d really like to know who gave you this number,” he said.
“You’re the one who killed Chester, aren’t you?”
No answer.
“And you’re the one who set Jake up for all this.”
Still no answer.
“But Jake thinks you’re a friendly.”
“Frank Pavlicek … of course.”
“Took you long enough. Your high-tech spy equipment must be slipping.”
“Mr. Pavlicek, your questions are amusing, but I’m afraid the sport you’re playing now is a bit over your head.”
“Really? I play a mean game of pickup basketball.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Numbers can be traced both ways, you know.”
He laughed. “Not this one. But please, feel free to talk all you like.”
“So you’re in D.C. somewhere.”
“Is that the number you called? Well, that’s reassuring.”
“I’m guessing this is about money. Because if it were about revenge or betrayal or something else, you probably would’ve already tried to kill Jake by now.”
“Who says I haven’t?”
“Why Chester though? He seemed pretty harmless to me.”
He said nothing.
“Well, that land of his certainly started becoming valuable to a lot of people for some reason. Maybe some of these Stonewall Ranger people can tell me. But you don’t seem like one of them.”
Another chuckle. “No. I put people like that out of business. And I’m sorry, Frank, I know you’re a professional and all, and I respect that up to a point, but you really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Did Jake do some kind of salvage work for you or something?”
“You might say that.”
“You paid him some money.”
“Peanuts.”
“Compared to what? To the money you’re about to make now?”
“You really know how to be entertaining, Frank.”
“Well, let’s see now, maybe I can do even better. Dr. Winston, the veterinarian? He must represent some other kind of problem. That one was pretty sloppy, by the way. Was that why you decided to betray Toronto? No, wait a minute … you must’ve decided that sooner, much sooner. You’ve been sitting there waiting to set him up all along.”
“Incidental expenditures,” he said.
Definitely money.
“How long have you known Jake?” I asked.
“Long enough to know what he’s capable of.”
I smiled. Here I was most likely talking to Chester’s murderer, or at least the man who had ordered it done, only to find that whatever his motivation—revenge or money had to be the top two possibilities—he and I shared something in common. Jake Toronto was his wild card, as he was mine. The difference was he’d kept Toronto in the dark about something, and that something had now come under risk, which made Toronto expendable, or maybe even dangerous to him. I wondered if he knew I’d become Agent Grooms’s wild card. Or at least I was making a pretty good bid for the position.
“Guess what I’m thinking,” I said.
“What?”
“You have cause to worry.”
“Yes? And why is that?”
“Because I’m not even sure I know what Toronto is really capable of.”
I broke the connection, hoping it was true.
Felipe and I watched through the dusty window as Damon Farraday made his way up the hill below the cabin carrying his redtail, Tawny. The plumber moved with an easy grace, like someone long accustomed to moving outdoors over uneven ground. The wind was blowing the trees back and forth up here and the temperature must’ve been in the high thirties, but the hawk rested comfortably on his gloved fist.
I’d cooked up some eggs for Felipe and he was sitting at his kitchen table eating them slowly with some buttered toast.
“Sounds like I made a mistake, talking to that guy you just talked to,” Felipe said.
I shook my head. “No mistake. My guess is Jake’s still got a few more tricks up his sleeve.”
“Think the Feds’ll let you talk to him? Don’t he have rights or something?”
I shook my head. “Not at the moment.”
“Maybe we should be talking to a lawyer. I got this guy in New York I could call.”
“Not yet. I need to get a clearer picture of what exactly is going on.”
“Okay, Frank. Whatever you say. But I still say I made a mistake calling that guy.”
“You were only following Jake’s instructions, right? Besides, what’s done is done.”
“I suppose.”
I stared at him. “Felipe, when I told you about Jake, you said you didn’t think it would ever come to this. What did you mean? What is if?”
He scraped his plate with his fork. “I … I don’t know. Jake, he’s always into something.”
“What about you, Felipe. You ever been into something?”
“Ahh.” He waved his hand at me. “I’m just an old man who doesn’t always know what’s good for himself.”
Farraday had reached his Scout and was opening the back door to put Tawny inside. When the big bird was settled, he turned and pulled a fat rabbit from his game bag, set the catch on the grass beside the Scout, and kneeled down over it to begin skinning it. If he’d noticed the extra car next to the cabin or it made any difference to him, he didn’t seem to show it. I watched as he gutted the creature and removed the organs, discarding most of them except the liver. He then took his bird to the glove again and fed her some more. Felipe took a long sip of hot coffee and bent over the last of his eggs.
A few minutes later, Farraday’s boots clomped on the front porch to the cabin. He knocked on the door.
“Hey, Felipe, you in there?”
I went to the door and pulled it open. Farraday stood on the wooden decking, his muddy boots having made a trail from the front of the porch to the stoop. The wind blew cold air in through the opening. His face was red with cold and the exertion of working.
“Frank. What are you doing way out here? Man, you just missed some great hunting. If I’d have known you were going to be here, I’d have given you and Jake a call.”
“It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” I said.
“Sure.”
“Saw you bagged a nice bunny.”
“Yeah, the thing busted out into the open and Tawny was all over that. Where’s Jake?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He was taken into custody last night. FBI.”
“No shit.”
“Apparently they’re investigating the Stonewall Rangers and they somehow got it into their minds that Jake is the one who shot Chester.”
Felipe had edged up behind me with his walker and was crossing to the other side of the room.
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I were.”
“Jesus, that sucks.”
I said nothing.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’ve just been talking with Felipe here. The Feds were here yesterday serving a search warrant and they claim to have found the rifle that killed Chester.”
“Here?”
; I nodded.
“Wow. I guess you never know. I mean, what’re they gonna do, charge him or something?”
“At this point I have no idea.”
He looked over my shoulder at Felipe, who’d now made it back to his recliner to sit down. “You doing okay, old man?”
Felipe waved his hand in agreement. “Fine,” he said.
Farraday turned back to me. “Well, I’m sorry, man. Anything more I can do?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“You let me know if there is, okay?”
“Thanks, Damon.”
“Thanks for the hunting too, old man,” he called over my shoulder. “I had a good morning.”
Felipe waved at him.
Farraday turned and walked back out to his vehicle, climbed in, and started it up. The engine backfired. He needed a new muffler. He backed the Scout in a circle, and I watched as he burbled off down the mountain.
28
Hercules, Toronto’s big retriever, bounded out to meet my car as I topped the rise to pull up to his house trailer. The place looked the same as the last time I’d been there a couple of months before, except that the foliage had disappeared from the trees, and the grass fields, in their winter dress of camel and bloodred clay, had lost any remnants of green. I didn’t see Nicole’s Subaru wagon, but there was a white Firebird next to the trailer belonging to Priscilla Thomasen, Toronto’s sometime girlfriend who also happened to be the local commonwealth’s attorney. I climbed out and patted Herk, who jumped around to the passenger door wondering where his master was.
I heard a baby cry and looked up to see Priscilla Thomasen standing on the deck with a dark-skinned infant cradled in her arms.
“Hello, Priscilla. How are you?”
“Long time no see, Frank.”
“Yeah, it’s been awhile.”
“New car?” she asked.
“Borrowed. You here looking after Jake’s birds?”
She nodded.
“Any sign of my daughter, Nicole?”
“No, why?”
“I asked her to meet me here. Thought she might get here before I did.”
She shook her head.
“Cute baby … yours?”
“Um-hmmm.”
“What’s her name?”
“Kameesha.”
“Pretty.” Jake had never said anything about a child. “Not Jake’s too?”