Mercy River

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  While the road had only climbed halfway up the butte, about two hundred feet from the floor of the ghost town, the ravine fell another hundred feet or more below that. Its bottom was not the flat pastureland that Pronghorn had been built upon, but a jagged reach of black volcanic rock, its sharp pillars and mounds like rotted teeth in a primeval maw. I wondered how many wagons and horses and miners had been lost to the chasm over the decades that the mine had been operating. If I poked around down there, I might find rusted bits of barrels and old horseshoes. And likely some bones to go with them.

  Moulson had joked about the suddenness of that brand of death. Not fast enough, Booker had insisted.

  I had to side with Booker on that one. Spare me that horrible moment of realization, before the end.

  I’d kept very busy since last night. Since Luce. Staying in motion had spared me from having to think much about her engagement, and what if anything I was supposed to do about it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Luce had wanted me to say something, share something, more than simple congratulations. Because despite our breaking up, there was still chemistry. I wasn’t imagining that. Had she wondered if I was changing my ways? Or was she proving to herself that she’d made the right choice?

  I took the toggle switch I’d pickpocketed from Mohawk and tossed it into the ravine, like a coin into a well. Make a wish. Luce and me. Maybe a quick and final end was best for our relationship, too.

  Twenty-Three

  My phone beeped as I neared Mercy River. I’d missed a call while the phone had been out of range, from a Northern Virginia area code. I grinned as I tapped the number to call back.

  “Shaw?” Armando Ochoa answered.

  “Hey, Armando. Are you one of the Joint Chiefs yet?”

  “How the hell are you?” he said. “Scratch that, where the hell are you?”

  “Right now I’m in a town called Mercy River. Oregon.”

  “The Rally.”

  I should have expected Ochoa would be clued in.

  “Armando, I have to call in my marker.”

  He paused. “What’s so serious?”

  I didn’t want to tell Ochoa the whole story. Besides incriminating myself, it would make him an accessory after the fact, and maybe worse, if things in Mercy River escalated. And while I trusted Armando, our friendship had been a long time ago.

  “I’m trying to help a brother out of a jam,” I said. “I need background checks on some former Rangers. Service records, VA, whatever the regiment can provide.”

  “You’re joking, I know.”

  “Plus color commentary, if anyone is willing to talk off the record. I need to know the story on these guys.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. You know I can’t call up SOC and ask nicely for the files, right?”

  “It’s important.”

  Another pause. Ochoa sighed. “And I gave you a promise. Dammit.”

  In the sixty-one days of Ranger School, food had been nearly as scarce as sleep. We ate once or twice each day, wolfing down a meal in seconds. It wasn’t nearly enough. Constant stress and exercise burned four times the calories we ravenously consumed. Already-fit soldiers would lose twenty or thirty pounds. It was all part of the Army’s gauntlet, pushing us past our assumed limits, mentally, physically, and emotionally. The drop rate was staggering. Our class had started with three hundred and twenty men. One hundred and nine remained by the third and final phase. It came down to who wanted it badly enough to keep moving forward when everything you had was spent.

  As a big kid pumped up from my initial cycles of training, I at least had some muscle to spare. Ochoa did not. He was small and lean and one of the fastest runners over long distances I’d ever seen outside watching the Olympics. He could beat thirty minutes in our five-mile tests like he was strolling on the beach. But in the middle of our final phase, Ochoa’s reserves of endurance finally found their limit.

  We were in the swamp, outside of Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, our unit wading hip-deep in brackish water, when Ochoa stopped dead in front of me. It was two hours before dawn would even start to paint the horizon. Only the glow of his cat eyes—the reflective tabs on his helmet—kept me from knocking him over. Thinking he was stuck in the mud, I started to give him a pull, then felt his arm shaking under my hand.

  “Mando?” I’d said.

  “Can’t catch my breath.” He leaned, and I tightened my grip to keep him from keeling face-first into the icy water.

  “Move your asses,” I heard Whitlock say behind us. Whitlock had the platoon leader role for this exercise, and he was enough of a dickweed even before the pressure got to him.

  “Mudhole. We’ll catch up,” I said. Whitlock moved on without offering to help, as I’d known he would.

  I scrabbled at my arm pouch. I had sugar packs and a few bites of jerky that I’d been holding on to, watertight in a Ziploc.

  “Eat these,” I said, practically stuffing the food into Ochoa’s mouth. “No time to wait.”

  “I can’t—”

  “We have to move. Move or die. Come on.”

  I hauled at him, practically lifting the skinny cat and his forty pounds of gear into something resembling forward motion. He stepped, stumbled, stepped again.

  “Less than a mile to the extraction,” I said. I wasn’t positive of that. They sometimes moved the finish line on us. But Ochoa didn’t need to be reminded of the truth right that minute. I poured a packet of sugar into his hand so he could wash it down with sips from his canteen.

  Switching arms every hundred yards or so, I pushed and threatened and half carried Ochoa to the inflatable Zodiac. My shoulders felt like they were made of molten lava. Whitlock was mad enough to scream, our team was so far behind the pace. By the time we reached the camp and the blessed three-hour nap that awaited, I’d badgered a powdered sport drink and a precious hoarded candy bar off a buddy and gotten a few bites of it down Ochoa’s throat. He told me later that he didn’t remember hiking from the boat to the camp.

  Three weeks later, on the day before graduation, Ochoa walked up and crashed down next to me on the couch in the lounge. I had my leg propped on ice packs, nursing swollen ligaments in my knee. The back of my neck was coated in ointment. Something in the swamp had given me dermatitis harsh enough to blister my skin.

  A reality show had been playing on the TV, Jersey meatheads sharing a house with Malibu blondes. Watching television after two months of torture was a surreal experience. Even the dumbest shows were entertaining in their insanity.

  “I owe you,” Ochoa had said.

  “For what?” I’d muttered, still looped from the unfamiliar full night of sleep, and a natural epinephrine high that came and went at odd times, like jet lag without ever boarding a plane. My brain found the right groove a second later, and the memory of the swamp came back. “That’s the job. Forget it.”

  “I was going to give up. I would have been dropped, or at least recycled.” Recycling meant a Ranger candidate was sent to the purgatory of the Gulag, to do crap work like post beautification or shaking out parachutes while waiting for a chance to start the phase all over again with the next class. “You’d be there right along with me, if we’d fucked the mission.”

  “So buy me a Baby Ruth. And a beer. Two beers—I’ll pour one on my neck.”

  “You aren’t that stupid.” Ochoa’s expression belonged on someone a lot older than nineteen. “The world runs on favors. Take it.”

  I grinned at his grave face. “Fine. You owe me. When they name you Don Corleone, I want the New York sports book.”

  Ochoa had shaken his head and bounced off. I hadn’t given the incident another thought. But years after, when I learned Armando had been assigned to the Defense Department, I mentally filed that favor under Someday.

  “Can you help?” I said to him over the phone.

  “Gimme the names,” Ochoa said.

  “John Fain, captain. Zeke Caton, I don’t know what Zeke is short for. And two others that probably served in
Fain’s platoon. Daryll Abernathy, and Rigoberto. I don’t have a last name on him yet, but I’ll get that.”

  “No, don’t, it’ll make this too easy for me,” Ochoa said, as dry as parchment.

  “One more. General Charles Macomber.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You know him?”

  “God, do you live with horse blinders on? Did you pay any attention to the regiment news during your enlistment? Or did you spend all your time learning new ways to rappel onto your head?”

  I didn’t bother interrupting.

  “Macomber was talked up to run the regiment after Kosovo, when he was a colonel. But he chose a political track into the Department of Defense. I assume he was gunning for higher command in SOCOM. He made brigadier general and then MG. He worked on the Hill for a few years. By the end he was a regular fixture in front of Congress, arguing the Army’s case for better equipment, better benefits.”

  “So far he sounds ready-made for a statue in the park. What happened?”

  “If I remember right, it was more about his method than the motive. He got religion. He singed the ass of more than one ally by pushing instead of compromising. I think finally there was some sort of scandal or fight behind closed doors. Before the dust settled they had put him out to pasture.”

  Literally. There was no shortage of fields here in central Oregon.

  “Why the hell are you looking into General Macomber?” asked Ochoa.

  “Because someone with a lot of influence pressured the local sheriff into letting Fain walk right into the jail and talk to my buddy. A prime suspect in a murder case. And Fain claimed he called a friend and got the complete file on me. Unless Fain’s got somebody with connections owing him a favor—”

  “Like me,” Ochoa broke in.

  “Like you. I don’t buy it. I think the general made that call.”

  “He could get your record in a heartbeat,” Ochoa agreed. “Probably arrange to have you drafted and both of us posted to Antarctica, too.”

  “Too much?” I asked.

  There was a pause.

  “I know someone who might get us records for the enlisted men on the quiet,” he said. “I can say it’s some sort of private background check, job placement or something. Fain will be tougher. And Macomber . . .”

  “We can’t pretend like we’re recruiting a former general,” I said.

  “Yeah. And you know I can’t go poking into mission specs, right? Not if we want to stay out of Leavenworth.”

  “Not needed. Just the personal records. Thanks, Armando.”

  “Hey, you know how much I miss lapping you on the track at Benning.”

  The deputy manning the front desk at the sheriff’s station laid it out for me: Leo would be allowed no visitors other than his attorney, and no communication except through same. By orders of Lieutenant Yerby. If I wanted to leave a message at the desk, Ganz could pick it up later. I declined.

  Shit. Leo would be isolated until his sentencing, and undoubtedly shipped out to the pen in Deer Ridge or Salem immediately after. I couldn’t even set his mind at ease by telling him Dez was innocent of Erle’s murder.

  The county SUV was gone from Erle Sharples’s house. I peered through the fence that bordered the backyard, under the beware of dog sign, and pounded hard enough to rattle the gate on its hinges. There was no eruption of furious barking. Maybe the cops had taken the dogs away. Good. I didn’t know what kind of mutts Erle had owned, but I doubted they were Pomeranians. I let myself in through the gate, and through the locked back door.

  I was the third interested party to examine the house. Slim pickings left. Anything that might have offered a clue to Erle’s recent activity had been removed—no cell phones old or new, no address books or desk calendars. There was a clean rectangle on the coffee-spotted desk where his computer had been. The cops had left the monitor and mouse and keyboard, like borders of a puzzle with the center missing.

  I searched anyway. Under drawers, behind headboards. All I found were enough dust bunnies to fill a country mile, and a lot of crap that wouldn’t fetch ten cents at a garage sale. After an hour I gave up hunting for hollow places in the cabinets and unlocked the kitchen door that led to the attached garage.

  A two-car garage, complete with two cars. Or one car, hidden under a tarp, and one canopied Ford pickup truck, not much newer than my Dodge. The truck was obviously Erle’s day ride. The interior was as messy as his house, although he’d made a half-hearted attempt to keep it under control by stuffing trash into an overflowing plastic grocery sack. I went through the sack. Food wrappers from the handful of restaurants in town, mainly. A couple of gas receipts from the town’s Shell station.

  And a crumpled piece of baby-blue paper that held a big wad of chewed gum. Spearmint, by the smell. The paper was a flyer advertising a pawnshop called Monarch Loan in Prairie City, Oregon. It had a dirty black streak from where it had been tucked under Erle’s windshield wiper. I checked a map online. Prairie City was in the next county, a couple of hours of serpentine driving south and then east out of Mercy River.

  The wad of gum still had enough elasticity to stretch when I’d unfolded the flyer. So it was new, if nauseating. The flyer might be new as well, or it may have been floating around the trash pile inside Erle’s shabby truck for weeks. Still, it was the closest thing I had to a clue, and after peeling off the last of the gum, I pocketed the flyer.

  Before I left the garage, I surrendered to curiosity and drew back the canvas concealing the car. I let out a low whistle, and pulled the tarp the rest of the way off to admire the whole machine. A Plymouth Barracuda. Early 1970s, I guessed. The color of a polished penny with a black vinyl top. The ’Cuda wasn’t in display shape, carrying a few dents on the body and alligator mottling of the copper paint job. It didn’t matter. The car radiated malevolent intent, from the slanted air intakes on the hood to the broad Goodrich tires.

  I wasn’t a gearhead, normally. But I couldn’t help but wonder how the Barracuda would handle the corners, out on the winding highway toward home.

  Back in the heart of town, the volunteer booths were buzzing on Main Street. A final recruitment push on the Rally’s last full day. A Redcap handed me a printed card that ran down the events for the grand finale. To accommodate the crowd, the bonfire field would serve as the central location. There would be a DogEx—hot dog cookout—following the conclusion of the combatives competition in late afternoon. An awards ceremony hosted by General Macomber would close things out. At least for the official program. It was a fair bet that the carousing would continue far into Sunday, or at least until Mercy River ran out of booze.

  I’d have to miss the festivities. If Jaeger and his skinheads were still in Oregon, they wouldn’t stay forever. The pawnshop flyer was my best lead, and I needed every hour before nightfall to chase it down.

  Twenty-Four

  Prairie City appeared as wholesome as its name. On my circles through town, I passed a schoolhouse that had been converted to a bed-and-breakfast, and a barn-red railway depot that the sign lauded as being on the national register. The picturesque little town didn’t strike me as an easy place for a white power gang to go unnoticed. I’d had time on the drive to put myself in the skinheads’ place, as sickening as that sounded.

  Fain had refused to tell me any details about the lab from where the Trumo had been stolen, including the location. How far away had it been? I had to guess that the Riders had driven their cargo at least across state, maybe even across the country. Twenty-three boxes like the one I’d found wouldn’t fit in a regular car. Jaeger would also want safety in numbers, some muscle around for the deal. An RV would be large enough. Or a pickup truck with a camper. Two vehicles, maybe. One car to haul the goods and one to haul the gorillas.

  And I doubted the skinheads were roughing it in the Northwest wilderness for days on end. They’d want a motel or an RV park, something out of the way where they could keep an eye on the cargo and not have to worry about the
management getting curious. I pulled over to hunt for likely prospects on my phone.

  Prairie City had a couple of motels, in addition to the schoolhouse B&B. Plenty of Best Westerns and Super 8s and KOA campgrounds in the surrounding area served tourists hiking the Umatilla and Malheur forests. I crossed anything too quaint or too public off the list, leaving a dozen possibilities. There was nothing for it but to keep driving.

  Four hours later, I’d seen enough trailer parks and motels that they had begun to blur together. None of the vehicles in the lots had looked right. I’d eaten lunch on the run, downed a half gallon of orange juice for the sugar rush, and watered enough of the roadside with recycled coffee to grow a garden. Maybe I was too late, and the skinheads had given up.

  The sun was going down. I decided to go a little farther north and check places at this edge of the forest before calling it a lost day.

  My phone flashed an incoming call with Ochoa’s area code. I had to unplug it from the charger with one hand, and got it to my ear on the fifth ring.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I said before he hung up.

  “Hey. I’ve got some papers for you. Is this phone secure?”

  “It is. But I’m on the road. Can you run through the headlines?”

  “You gave me four names. Or parts of names. I had to dig up the rest. John Fain, captain. Rigoberto Rivas. Daryll Abernathy. Zeke Caton. That’s Caton’s full name, by the way, not short for Ezekiel. All four of them knew each other in the regiment.”

  “I guessed that much.”

  “Abernathy and Caton were in the same Ranger class, and the same company for their first three rotations. Rivas was a year ahead of them. He was a platoon leader under Captain Fain in Afghanistan. Caton took some family leave to care for a sick relative, and when he came back he was posted to a different company. Fain’s.”

  I heard Ochoa banging away on a keyboard.

  “Solid records for the three enlisted men. All made staff sergeant within five years. Not that they earned themselves shiny medals like you did.”