“Duly noted,” says the concerned citizen. “I have a question for you, Elroy.”
“Yes?”
“Why did you really make that call to your fixer? We were taking care of everything.”
“I have no idea who you are or what you really want.”
“Your father has vouched for us—you’re saying you don’t trust him?”
“Let’s just say it’s hard to trust the ground under your feet sometimes, especially when you’re sitting in a room full of retired army guys with guns.”
“So you don’t trust me.”
“I don’t think I have any choice right now but to trust you.”
Dad leans close to me, almost whispering. “Son, you have to believe me. These guys are on the level. They can help us get our lives back.”
“It’ll be more complicated now that this has happened,” says the lady in black. “I’ll have to do a deal with someone to pull you both off the grid in a more permanent way. Once you’re officially dead on the books, we can set you up somewhere. Of course, that’s after you fulfill our original agreement.”
I look her right in the eye. “Of course.”
She looks me right back. “I’m dead serious.”
And, finally, I see it.
The thing she never gave me time to notice before, back in the joint.
The killer behind her eyes.
She speaks at a low, hypnotizing lull:
“Elroy, I understand your need for revenge. Your need to take matters into your own hands. You had a window of opportunity and you took it. Under the circumstances, I might have done the same thing. But you must understand that’s the kind of rash thinking that put you in prison to begin with. You might never have seen your wife again.”
“I was never completely convinced she was still alive. I’m still not.”
“I showed you the picture. I thought it was clear to you.”
“Pictures can be faked.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And if she was alive, I was going to find her myself. My way. I wasn’t going to wait around to find out why I was working in a goddamn toy store.”
“That’s dangerous thinking,” says the Sarge. “Kinda makes me feel like you’re not much of a team player there, son.”
“Think what you want. I did some sniffing around. Nobody I was able to talk to online has seen or heard from Toni Coffin inside of three years. Not since she went with Hartman, and that was before I went inside.”
“And I say she’s still alive,” says the lady in black. “That’s why you’re here. To help me find her, and my daughter. This is our primary objective, Elroy. But as you can no doubt surmise, full disclosure of everything we know about Hartman’s operation is something I have had to seriously reevaluate in the past several hours.”
She’s still doing it. Using my name to make it seem like the universe revolves around me. But can I really trust them?
More importantly . . . can they trust me?
“Okay,” I finally say. “So I messed up.”
She looks me right in the eye again. “We’ll put it down to a few simple questions.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Elroy, if you’d had the opportunity, if Hartman had threatened you personally and not been just a voice on the phone . . . would you have killed him?”
“Yes.”
“You realize that killing Hartman would have jeopardized our operation, maybe destroyed it?”
“Yes.”
“You realize that you would have been a liability at that point and no longer of any use to me?”
“Yes.”
“And I might have killed you, just to watch you die?”
My father looks at the lady real seriously when she says that.
I give her a little grin and say: “Hey, you can’t win ’em all.”
The lady doesn’t grin back.
I stop smiling. Then say, very evenly, with as much respect as I can come up with: “Yes. I understand.”
Sometimes you just have to play it cool.
Even when they’re calling you by name.
Another long silence in the room. The air force redhead across from me downshifts her gaze again, not saying a word, but I can see something that might be vague contempt and puzzlement flash in her eyes. She turns her look inward. Keeping it to herself. For now.
The boss lady stands from her chair. Offers me her hand.
“Mister Coffin, I think we finally do understand each other. My name is Jayne Jenison. It’s good to make your acquaintance.”
I shake her hand.
Her flesh is cold, like the devil’s.
The killer inside her glows just beneath the surface.
• • •
That night, I stash my getaway money under the bed in my room upstairs in the farmhouse. I don’t tell my father about it. I sit on the bed staring at the key to my safe deposit box. It might be useless now. I put it back in my pocket.
I can’t sleep. Toni’s keeping me awake, as usual. She’s pissed off at me. She’s screaming that I’m her only hope, that she’s still alive, that I’ve messed everything up. That my plots have failed me, failed us. That I’m too smart for my own good. Too good at too many things. Tricking computers, stealing cars, breaking people’s legs with my bare hands, it all has a price, and I’ve been paying it for years . . . but now my smart self has painted me into a very dark corner. I want to cry. The tears almost come.
No.
Keep it under control, kid.
Keep your game face on.
Keep it under control . . .
My wife screams at me that I’m a diaper-wagging baby. The same cruel way she used to when my back was against the wall, when I had something to prove, those white-hot moments when I knew she was right and I was wrong and I was fighting just to hear the sound of my own arrogant pride.
But her voice is not her voice in my memory.
Not at all.
I know it’s her, I can hear the words . . . but it sounds like someone else.
Something abstract.
Like in a dream I can’t bring back.
My head burns white-hot and ice-cold when I strain to hear her. I rub the plate under my thick hair and all the scar tissue. My whole skull itches. The smell of rose petals, canceling out the dampness of the room, overriding everything. Ammonia and a razor blade, the sharp smell of blood, somewhere way back among the important things that are washed out.
The doctors could never give me a straight answer on what it was, the way she was blocked from me, her face and her voice gone, but the memories still there, the details scrawled in abstract. Some kind of regression, self-punishment. A couple of guys told me it was a no-brainer. They actually said that to me. Someone shot you in the head, Mister Coffin. What’s the big mystery?
It never mattered to give my condition a name, but they threw around a lot of highbrow terms in the hospital. Cognitive dissonance. Prosopagnosia, face blindness. My favorite was transregressional selective doorway amnesia.
I don’t even think “transregressional” is a real word.
I started realizing they make this shit up as they go in some hospitals.
My wife would have laughed at those doctors.
I see my father telling me Toni’s no good, that I settled for something because I had nothing better, that she finally left me because she was a survivor, not because she was trying to save my life.
Love cannot stay, kid. She was just an illusion.
I know that can’t be true. I don’t want to believe that’s true.
But I see her in Hartman’s arms. The sweat dripping off his fat face, into her mouth, which is the mouth of a china doll—a smooth, blank face like porcelain, shattered into pieces. Not her at all. Her face shattered and lost to me forever. Until I can make forever go away. Until I can find her.
I get out of the bed and sit in the center of the floor.
Concentrate hard and take myself out.
Out of the room.
Yes . . .
I see the leads laid from end to end, but I don’t trust them now. My so-called plot got ten innocent people murdered by a psychopath who thinks he can play with everyone’s life and get away with it. And he’s right, isn’t he?
I don’t trust my own plans.
I have to trust these people.
Toni, I just might have killed you again.
Please forgive me.
Please be alive when I find you.
Please.
• • •
The next morning, we all meet again in the war room under the barn.
Jenison tells me I’m now officially dead.
She works fast.
There were two unidentified Caucasian males blown away in front of the toy store during the drive-by, probably homeless guys. One of them roughly fit my description. They pulled prints off the body and guess what. Matched with mine, spot on. Really tragic, a kid that young, out on good behavior, looking to make his life right again, cut down in a senseless random eruption of wholesale violence that’s still shocking the nation. My father will die soon, too, but not like this. They have to wait for another opportunity. Dad suggests at the table that he kill himself the next time an old man washes up somewhere in Texas with a shotgun in his mouth. Suicide makes sense. A lot of remorseful fathers do that after their kids check out.
They’ve decided on the Sarge’s acceleration plan. The run is in just three days. It’s an old-school sweep-and-clear, just like the kind me and Dad used to pull when we were the kings of the world. A seven-man team, led by him and the Sarge.
I was right about the quiet redhead—she turns out to be a hotshot air force computer specialist. She’ll be my right arm during the job.
Her name is Alex Bennett.
She’s an airman first class, just three years younger than me.
The flyboys press buttons, the marines blow shit up.
I only know all that because Jenison hands me a folder with some highlights from the lady’s service record in it. It’s an impressive résumé, but Bennett still never says a word to me. Now that I realize she’s so much older than I thought she was, I notice she’s a lot more beautiful. But the hard lines that encase her amber eyes tell tales of bad business, all confirmed by the papers in front of me: a fairly recent rotation in Baghdad, during the last years of the war, a couple of black ops before that, all classified. Her job was to deactivate bombs—the high-tech kind. Not pipe explosives rigged to primitive detonators and car batteries in the street. No, we’re talking about major works of art, crafted by well-paid professionals. Labyrinthine deadfall canyons ruled by computers and time locks—the kind I bust in my sleep. She has twenty-seven commendations for shutting down that kind of death trap. She’s an expensive commodity on a job like this.
Her cold expression steels the air, as Jenison makes some pictures come up on the flat-screen. Photographs of young women.
“Elroy, how much do you know about the business of human trafficking in the United States?” She stops on a photo of the blonde I saw before with Toni. The blonde is standing in front of a church in a schoolgirl uniform, shot from a block away with a telescopic lens, digital camera, probably an XL Canon. Toni had one of those. She was in my dad’s face with it all the time, even though she never took pictures of any of us. It was an oddball family joke because they never got along. Can I shoot you with my Canon, Dad?
“Not much,” I tell Jenison as she folds her hands, finding some Zen. “I know in some other countries child prostitution is legal.”
“It’s practically legal here, too,” the Sarge says. “You just ain’t allowed to advertise.”
Jenison lets out a grim breath. “What Sergeant Rainone means to say is that this sort of trafficking has reached epidemic proportions just below the radar in the past two decades. Texas has one of the worst concentrations, mostly because of the senators and high-ranking businessmen who grease the wheel. Not to mention well-placed criminal types who are in it up to their eyeballs. Most of these men have stock in major corporations and use their leverage in very bad ways.”
“You’re talking about David Hartman?”
“Of course I am.”
“So you figure your daughter was abducted into some kind of trafficking network for sick richies?”
“It’s a little more complicated . . . but, yes, that’s the essential truth.”
The Sarge chimes in again. “These photos were stolen by our man from a high-security database out of Houston. An encrypted series of sub-files hidden real well in the records of a corporate branch of Texas Data Concepts.”
Jenison goes into her briefcase and removes a cigarette from somewhere in there. She doesn’t light it. “The IRS was conducting an investigation of David Hartman’s assets about a year and a half ago, in collaboration with the FBI. What they came up with was an elaborate money-laundering scam that involved Hartman using his stock in Texas Data Concepts as leverage over some of the CEOs. That was what they knew . . . but they could never prove it officially, because people started disappearing, along with certain documentation.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“It shouldn’t. What should surprise you is that the FBI backed off and never came at Hartman or TDC ever again.”
“The Feds never do that,” says the Sarge. “They’re like fuckin’ bulldogs most of the time. They hold on to a dream or a nightmare.”
Jenison makes a disgusted noise. “Sad, isn’t it? A fat gangster waves his hand and it all goes away. The case was never even handed off to the Agency. They buried it. Meaning something very big was happening.”
“You’re saying to me that Texas Data Concepts has been fronting for a goddamn white slavery ring?”
“Not the company itself,” Jenison says. “Just some of the executives. We’re pretty sure Hartman’s still in bed with them. He’s been kidnapping people, sending them underground, probably selling them to the highest bidder. Mostly young women. Top-dollar merchandise, so to speak. My people got very close to him, delivered some specific details about the operation. Our last solid connection was these photographs.”
“Who stole them for you?”
“The same man who photographed Hartman four months ago with your wife. He got in pretty deep. Undercover as an assassin for Hartman’s crew. But he was dangerous, unstable. Had a drug problem.”
“So your man leaked some tidbits and got himself killed.”
“For starters.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“After Hartman plugged the leak, they burned everything that could lead anyone back to their trafficking ring. We knew a lot by then. I was following up on the investigation privately. I had all the files from the FBI, but we never found anything new that gave locations where people were being held. We just found little crumbs. Photos mostly. Disgusting stuff. Most of it was pulled off private databases. Laptops and PCs owned by key executive officers of the company. You’d be amazed at how indiscreet some of those people were in their own offices.”
“No, actually, I wouldn’t.”
“My undercover man was good, in spite of his personal problems. He found files that had been deleted. Things we were able to reconstruct. There were a few e-mails that implicated Hartman directly. But it all dried up after my man went away. They locked everything up tight. That was four months ago.”
“So what we have here is a bunch of well-connected pervs with stashes of young female flesh all over the state—maybe even the country. You’ve lost the trail and they torched the leads. You need me to come back at them.”
“You’re still batting a thousand, Elroy.”
“What makes you think I can find something they missed?”
“That’s just it—they didn’t miss anything. My men have investigated Hartman with a microscope. He’s virtually sterilized himself. There’s one database at a certain TDC facility we haven’t been able to crack. It’s on a private circuit
, completely separated from the network inside the building. A vault. Protected by the most advanced multi-layered security profile any of my people have ever seen.”
“You think he’s keeping his women in there?”
“Your attempts at humor are wearing thin, Mister Coffin.”
“We know he’s keeping something in there,” the Sarge barks. “The objective of this operation is to get inside that vault and remove everything in it.”
I rub my chin. “That’s a long shot you’re talking about. Hartman was into all sorts of nasty business before I went in the can. I had his whole network circled. A lot of that was above-the-radar government contracting. Things like dirty bombs and smart missiles.”
“I know all about that,” Jenison says. “But missiles do not concern me.”
“Well, maybe they should.”
“That’s not what I’m focused on right now. We do know for sure that Hartman is using the Texas Data Concepts facility as his own private fortress. That’s how much leverage he has over these people. If he’s keeping something sensitive— anything sensitive—inside that vault, then we gain leverage over him and that puts me one step closer to getting my daughter back. If she’s gone underground with the others, we may be able to obtain her location from any encrypted data we recover. You’ll help us with that, also.”
“The photo you showed me back in the joint wasn’t taken that long ago,” I say. “Your girl could be in his bed right now.”
“And my grandma could be doing his dishes and your wife could be washing his car,” the Sarge hisses in my ear. “You startin’ to get the picture, boy?”
“Please calm down,” Jenison says softly. “Hartman hasn’t exactly been quiet about his own private harem. He supplies himself and his friends with a revolving inventory of fresh stock. But Hartman mostly sticks to his own stomping grounds. Nightclubs he owns, things like that. He had a rash of bad publicity about a year ago over a Senate hearing he helped to buy, and that’s made him gun-shy of public places. The word was that Toni Coffin was looking out for my daughter, making sure she didn’t get hurt too badly. Hartman likes to hurt his women.”
“I know.”
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