Binder - 02

by David Vinjamuri

  A second man, shorter and leaner than Little Boy, came flying around the corner. He was pulling a gun from his pocket, an old police model Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver with a long barrel. I grabbed the wrench from Little Boy’s limp hand and swung it quickly, bringing it down hard on the second man’s wrist before he could level the gun at me. He screamed in pain and the revolver dropped but did not discharge. I grabbed the broken wrist, and the thin man screamed again. While he was distracted, I pulled him forward by that wrist and slammed my fist into his solar plexus. He doubled over, gagging. Then I hit him hard at the base of the skull with the side of my fist and he dropped.

  I waited for a few seconds to see if anyone else would join Little Boy and his friend, but nobody came. I picked up the .38, swung out the cylinder, ejected five rounds into my palm and tossed them into a bush, then dropped it.

  “Let’s start again,” I said as I turned back to Ethan. “I know you’re Little Boy Wright.”

  “So?”

  “So why did you try to put me in a ditch this morning?” I asked, kneeling over him. He was holding a greasy rag to his nose, stemming the flow of bright red blood. His head was tilted back against the brick wall and his leg was extended out stiffly away from him.

  “Come a little closer and I’ll tell you,” he said, clenching his free hand. Little Boy had seen his share of fights. He was the kind of guy who clocks you with a beer bottle before you notice he’s getting angry. Even if I’d broken his nose and hobbled him, he was not defeated. He was no more likely to talk to me than he had been a minute earlier. Sometimes with amateurs, you can put them down hard and they’ll open up while they’re still in shock. Not true for Little Boy.

  I did lean in toward him, but as he raised his fist, I tapped it with the cro-moly wrench and it dropped. Then I pressed the wrench against his knee and he moaned, tried to stand up and failed.

  “Who told you to follow me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I pressed harder with the wrench and smacked Little Boy’s fist with the flat of my left hand as he lashed out at me. He shook the injured hand as if it had been stung.

  “That fucking hurts,” he said.

  “Not nearly as much as getting run off the road,” I pointed out.

  “You ran me off the road, dipshit.”

  “Only because you’re not a very good driver, Little Boy. Who sent you?” I poked him again.

  “I don’t know. Fuck off.”

  I saw that I wouldn’t get anything out of him. I patted him on the chest gently and straightened the lapel of his quilted jacket.

  “Maybe you should stick to body work,” I suggested.

  * * *

  I pulled the GTO over on the shoulder of the road, under the bony limbs of a beech tree a quarter mile from the body shop. I stopped just around the first bend, just out of sight of the brick building. I opened the glove box and pulled out a small AM/FM radio, the kind that can be hand-cranked if the batteries are gone. This particular radio received an extra channel. I popped open the battery case to toggle an unmarked switch, then fooled with the antenna a bit and suddenly I was listening to Little Boy as he swore while trying to revive his friend. The device I planted on him did not record and only broadcast a short distance, but it looked exactly like the type of RFID security tag that retail stores place inside clothing. When he discovered the bug, Little Boy probably wouldn’t know it for what it was.

  Three minutes later, Little Boy made the call I’d been waiting for. I heard him flip open his cell phone, dial and wait. He spoke and I knew immediately that he was talking to an answering machine or a voicemail box. “It’s me. We tried to do what you asked, but you didn’t tell us the guy was some kind of stunt driver. He totaled my fucking truck. Then he found my shop and broke my fucking knee. So I’m keeping your damn money and I’m damn well done now. Don’t fucking call me again.”

  * * *

  “Someone down here is nervous about what I might uncover, but I have no idea if it has anything to do with Heather Hernandez,” I said to Alpha.

  “Yes?”

  I filled him in on my visit to the Reclaim camp and CC Farm, ending with a description of my encounter with Little Boy Wright.

  “I trust you left him alive?”

  “Yes, but he won’t be walking soon. I don’t think he or his friend will cause a fuss, though. Wright made a call from his mobile phone to the person who hired him at 21:17 Zulu. Do you want me to work through the Sheriff to get the number?” There’s a fairly significant federal law called posse comitatus that prevents the military from acting on U.S. soil, but there are also ways to get around it.

  “We’ll handle it on this end,” he replied without hesitation.

  “Could you also see if you can find any information on Anton Harmon?”

  “The boyfriend?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. Why do you think you were interfered with?”

  “Someone wants me to stop poking around, but I don’t know if it has to do with Heather or the mine protest. I was leaving the Reclaim camp when I picked up the tail. On the other hand, I’d bet there were a lot of angry parents visiting that camp today and it’s hard to imagine all of them getting the same treatment. So it’s possible that whoever set this up drew a bead on me yesterday—at the hospital or when I was drinking with the miners.”

  “I was under the impression that you don’t drink,” Alpha observed. The barest hint of amusement colored his tone.

  “Not much, sir. I wanted to see if I could get an idea of why the Reclaim activists were attacked. It hasn’t done the mine any good at all. My initial thought was that some of the miners took their own initiative, but I’m not so sure.”

  “And now you wonder why someone would try to discourage your efforts?”

  “Right. The Sheriff asked me for help with his investigation, by the way,” I added.

  “He did?” Alpha sounded surprised, and he had a great deal of experience dealing with local authorities.

  “He’s a little out of his depth.”

  “Given what you’ve seen so far, it might be a good idea to assist the Sheriff, to ensure his cooperation if nothing else. We’ll arrange an appointment for you to meet with Mr. Paul, the director of the mine, tomorrow.” I imagined Alpha with his reading glasses again and found myself torn. Part of me wanted to discover why someone would beat up a bunch of naïve kids, but another part of me just needed to find the girl and get the hell out of West Virginia.

  “Right. I asked for that, didn’t I? Let’s see if we can get a bead on Anton Harmon first, though, sir. If we can’t locate Heather through him, I’ll visit the mine.”

  9

  “Shouldn’t you be a vegetarian?” I asked Roxanne as she bit into a hot dog with unconcealed glee.

  “Ha!” She slammed her hand down on a cornucopia of fruit illustrated on the vinyl tablecloth. We sat in a booth at the M&R restaurant on the outskirts of Hamlin. “The environment may be worth saving, Mr. Herne, but this cow was a fair sacrifice.” She chuckled again at her own joke, repeating it under her breath before turning serious. “We do try to eat organic and locally grown foods at Reclaim, but it’s difficult. The staple of the West Virginia diet is junk food. Diabetes in this part of the state is rampant. This is a guilty pleasure, but it’s justified. The West Virginia hotdog is as valuable a contribution to our national gastronomy as Po Boys or Baltimore Crabs with Old Bay.”

  I e-mailed Roxanne after stopping back at Sheriff Casto’s office to ask him for information on Anton Harmon. I was still trying to solidify a picture of Heather in my mind. On the drive to West Virginia, I’d imagined a sheltered suburban girl looking to rebel and find meaning in a noble struggle. But the real woman I was learning about was more practical and sturdier than my caricature. She took to the routine of both the camp and the commune, and had no problem with hard work, though there was also a flaw, a weakness. I believed Christina at CC Farms when she talked about the c
haracter of Anton Harmon. The fact that Heather’s two friends and Roxanne had left Harmon out of the conversation when we’d discussed Heather had to be significant.

  Roxanne may not have known Harmon well, but in so small a camp she surely knew something useful. And as it was looking more likely that I was going to need to visit the mine, I thought I would ask her about that, too.

  “You’ve been demonstrating in front of this mine for months now,” I said. “Have you ever met the guy who runs it?”

  Roxanne smiled. “Jason Paul is an interesting fellow. He has red hair and freckles, and he’ll look like he’s eighteen until his hair is grey. He’s not from around here, you know,” she continued. “He grew up in Ohio and went to the Colorado School of Mines. Then he worked on a big mine site in Wyoming—North Antelope I think—and skip-hopped his way up the corporate ladder out west. When Transnational Coal bought Hobart, they brought him in to run things. He was a dark horse pick. Hobart is the largest mountaintop removal site in West Virginia and it’s the first complete operation he’s ever managed.”

  “You know an awful lot about him,” I remarked, surprised.

  “Determine the enemy’s plans and you will know which strategy will be successful and which will not,” Roxanne intoned.

  “Many intelligence reports are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain,” I countered.

  Roxanne laughed. “Mine was from Sun Tzu—what about yours?”

  “Carl von Clausewitz.” I smiled.

  “The problem with environmentalists,” Roxanne observed, “is that we don’t think like generals.”

  “I’m going to guess you haven’t met very many generals.”

  “Ha. True, true. My point is that most of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things these conglomerates are doing and how we can thwart them. We’re not very good at anticipating how they’ll respond to our actions. I made that mistake with Jason Paul.”

  “How so?”

  “Well he was very gallant at first. The day after we set up in front of the mine entrance, I got a note with an invitation to have lunch with him in the company dining room. He was exceptionally polite, almost courtly,” she said.

  “That’s interesting. Why did he ask you to lunch?”

  “It was a show of power. He wanted me to see his expensive suit, his Caribbean tan and the china he eats off every day. When a barracuda flashes its teeth, you don’t mistake that for a smile. Paul flattered me. Then he asked a lot of questions and acted very interested and compassionate. He fed me a bunch of platitudes, half-truths and outright lies about mining. Told me that we were an important part of the democratic process and that he’d defend our right to express our opinion.”

  “And then?”

  “As he was escorting me out, he asked me very carefully not to break the law. He said that he had a fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders and as long as we didn’t stage any illegal protests, he’d make sure we were treated well.”

  “Was there an implied threat?”

  “I didn’t think so right then. He said it regretfully, as if it was something he had to put out there because of his position. As if he’d never act on it.” Roxanne stopped and turned her gaze to a mural on the wall by our booth. It showed a kitchen counter jammed with cooking tools.

  “But there was some trouble this summer, wasn’t there?” I prompted.

  Roxanne nodded. “We arrived here not long before Paul, so we’d barely gotten established before he started running things. I have pretty good media contacts, so I figured I could get some press down here. I knew once they got a look at the mine, we’d get coverage. But nobody came. A friend told me some high-level pressure was being applied. So we changed tactics and planned a passive resistance event for July. We blocked the path for those enormous dump trucks they use to haul away the backfill from the mountaintops. When they stopped, we took over two of them. We held work up for about a half day at the site until they arrested us and hauled us off.”

  “Isn’t it normal for protestors to be arrested in that situation?” I asked.

  “Arrested yes, but the companies don’t often press charges. Local cops usually let protesters plea bargain for nominal fines. This time, though, they pressured the locals to go full bore. They targeted the college kids. A bunch of our volunteers spent the last month of their summer vacation in jail.”

  “That seems pretty harsh.”

  “You betcha. After the sentences were handed down, Paul brought me in again. This time it was to his office and he didn’t offer me a seat. He was still all smiles, but he asked me not to interrupt ‘the important work of our enterprise again.’ Then he turned his back and two security people escorted me out. He brought me in there to show me who was boss. It was a typical male power thing,” she said, shaking her head. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Did you stage an event like that again?”

  “Several. But we got very little press—just a single national article—and the toll on morale was high. Some quit. It’s normal to have some turnover at the end of the summer because of the college schedule. But we lost more than we expected and it shook a lot of people up.”

  “Is that why Josh and Amy quit Reclaim?” I asked, remembering that Heather left when they did.

  “Partly,” she replied. “There were some other issues among us. But the biggest thing was that we had different ideas about how to stop the mine.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m an environmentalist. They’re protesters. There’s a difference. That’s all I’ll say.”

  “So what did you do when your co-founders quit?”

  Roxanne’s shoulders dropped. “Whatever I could to keep the movement from folding,” she said with a trace of sadness.

  “If you weren’t hurting the mine, why do you think your people were attacked?”

  She shook her head. “It was a senseless, terrible thing to do. I spent most of the day yesterday and today in a hospital in Charleston talking to angry family members. I feel like I’ve let my people down. So many of them are so young. And John and Marcus—they were two of the brightest.” Her hand formed a fist and she banged it on the table in slow motion. Then she composed herself.

  I changed the subject. “I went to the Creative Collective Farm commune this afternoon,” I said. This made her smile.

  “They’re a hoot, aren’t they? I always wonder how many of them are related.”

  “They were...enthusiastic. It seems like Heather left there a couple of weeks ago with a guy she was dating.”

  “Harmon.” Roxanne said the name with distaste.

  “Everyone seems to have that reaction,” I observed.

  “No doubt. I think it’s because he makes such a strong first impression. You meet this guy and you think: holy buckets, could he be this nice? I mean he’s a tall, blond sweet-talker with great manners. Half the girls in our camp were swooning the day he arrived. But it didn’t take long to find him out. You can’t keep up an act like that for long in a working camp. People get cold and hungry and then you see what they’re really made of. Anton got mean when he got tired. He nearly put one of the other volunteers in the hospital because of an argument over chores. I put him on notice and I’d likely have kicked him out if he hadn’t left first.”

  “So why was Heather with him?”

  “I don’t know. Some gals think they can fix the bad ones. Some look for the wounded birds. She latched onto Anton right away. He was old enough to like ’em young. And she would have believed him if he told her the moon was made of cotton candy.”

  “Can you think of anything that might help me find him?”

  Roxanne shook her head. “Just don’t turn your back on him when you do.”

  10

  Four men were waiting for me in the parking lot of my motel. They sat in an old Jeep Cherokee with a bad paint job and a rusted out panel on the driver’s side. I spotted them from half a block away as I approached the motel in my GT
O. I drove past them without looking, so I could plausibly feign surprise when they jumped me, and parked in the middle of the lot rather than directly in front of my room door. I might have done that anyway, out of habit, but it seemed prudent as the four men piled out of the Cherokee.

  I popped open the glove box and pulled out a small metal rod. Then I stepped out of the GTO and marched straight toward the door to the motel room next to mine, showing my back to the men emerging from the Cherokee. My eyes darted toward the picture window of the room I was approaching. The blinds were closed and the window reflected enough light from a street lamppost to make it a full-sized mirror. The four men moved awkwardly, more like nervous schoolboys than professionals. I saw chains wrapped around a fist, a baseball bat and a heavy length of pipe. Then the fourth man—the biggest, fittest looking one of them—slid an enormous Bowie knife from a sheath and tossed the sheath back into the Cherokee. Without hesitating, he started trotting toward me well ahead of the other three men, moving as silently as he could manage.

  It was a blitz attack of the kind that a serial killer might use to abduct a teenage girl. It might even have worked on a soccer mom or a jet-lagged tourist, but I wasn’t either of those. I didn’t turn as the man crossed the parking lot, pretending instead to fumble with keys as I stood in front of my neighbor’s door. I got a clearer look at my attacker from his reflection as he drew closer. He was an inch or two taller than me, with straight, spiky brown hair and a short, uneven beard. His nose was too large for his face and it looked like he’d grown the beard to compensate. He was wearing thick, black-framed glasses that might have been manufactured in the 1950s.