They drove off toward the café in style, anticipating a long line of plates piled with Southern goodness. When it was all said and done, there’d be pie tonight. It would be a crime to fly all the way to Mississippi and not eat pecan pie, possibly even a hanging offense.
38
Al sat back and groaned. He had said he was done no less than four times during the meal, but this time, it was all over but the weeping. He felt that if he were poked with a sharp object, like an ice pick, he would burst like Mr. Creosote from that Monte Python movie, The Meaning of Life.
The conversation had been robust. Al had started by recapping his time from his exit out of the Caribbean all the way through his Portland, Oregon, adventure, and back to the present day. Ted confessed he knew the big picture information. He hadn’t aggressively spied, but he had kept half an eye on Al.
“I gotta keep up on the news. How many bad guys are being racked up, how many damsels are being rescued, all that stuff,” Ted admitted.
Al turned to Edith and said, “In exchange for a good recommendation every once in a while, Ted gets to read about me doing things the old-fashioned…”
“…and not-so-politically-correct…”
“…and not-so-politically-correct way of getting the job done. Well said.”
“So this guy, Levko, had just lost his mind completely?”
“We’ll never know. Selly, my pal who donated half of his right arm to give the good guys a win, said they’d unearthed a ton of Levko’s journals. All the scribblings and ravings of someone who’s mad as a hatter.”
“You know where that expression ‘Mad as a Hatter’ comes from?” Edith chirped this in. She and Ted had hit it off in an immediate and deep way. They were fast friends and, rather than any sort of jealousy, Al felt welling pride, the welling pride that all males feel when they show up with a pretty face on a sexy woman and it turns out the sexiest thing about the woman in question is going on in the three pounds of grey matter sitting behind her eyes and guarded by a quarter-inch of delicate bone. Al and Ted did not know from whence the expression derived its meaning.
“I know that Lewis Carroll had the Mad Hatter in his stories, but beyond that, I’m stumped.” Al said this to Ted, who shrugged as if to say, “I didn’t even know the expression.”
“Back when one could be a hat maker as a trade, felt, the main hat material, was processed with mercury. Absorption of mercury through the skin, breathing, and accidental ingestion caused a build-up that led to cognitive disorders. I was just reading a few weeks ago that it might come from a time earlier than the time of hat makers.”
“So if it predates hat maker as a vocation or a title, where’d it come from?” Ted was asking this without realizing he was interested in the derivation of words. He’d also had three George Dickel Old Number 12 doubles on the rocks. His belly had been empty and his day had started at 5am, so he would be a cheap date until he started to metabolize some food.
“Seems that the Anglo-Saxon term ‘mad’ also meant poisonous and ‘hatter’ was a bastardization of the word ‘adder,’ like a snake—black adder and all that. So it was also like calling someone a deadly and unpredictable creature.” She gave a fanciful little shrug. “Sorry boys, you can solve all the crimes you want, but this girl’s gotta figure out where English went wrong.”
“Jesus, Al. Can I be you for just, like, one day? Even a half a day. Christ, four hours would do in a pinch.” This got them all guffawing heartily.
When they’d gotten to the café, they were met by the owner at the door. He’d had a cousin in his family go missing, and she had been retrieved by one of Ted’s crews from a place near Alexandria, Louisiana. She had some health problems and had to have part of a badly infected foot amputated. They had shipped her off to a small college in Nevada where she could get a fresh start and try to shut her past behind her like a monster in a child’s closet at the back of her mind. The restauranteur had been told that it was Al who had really broken the case open and thus had saved all of the young ladies. Reggie, the owner, had a large sign up that said “Private Party.” He had set up screens like folding Japanese screens across the windows so no one could look in. A burly man was sitting next to the front door; the meal would not be interrupted.
Ted had set them up in advance and set them up in style. When they sat down, there was a large drinking glass filled with “lacquered” bacon instead of breadsticks. This was made by cooking bacon on a rack in the oven and repeatedly painted with Steen’s Cane Syrup, flipped, baked, basted with more Steen’s, flipped, sprinkled with brown sugar and cayenne pepper, and on and on. It want on until you had unctuous strips of thick sliced bacon that seemed to be carved from mahogany. There was a dish of guacamole with “bacon chips” to dunk in, a queso dip with plenty crunchy goodness, and a few other bacon appetizers. In a brash act of culinary Russian roulette, the owner had made them chicken-fried steak with sausage gravy. He had used Boneless Rib Eye steak. It was a sin to do that to such a fine steak, but the result was beauty beyond compare. All finished with pecan pie topped with a dollop of hard sauce--butter, powdered sugar, and a strong booze, paddled into submission and served on warm pie or warm British puddings. It was one of the few foods Al would eat that contained “raw” alcohol, but he’d have to eat several cups of it to catch even the smallest buzz, and eating more than a few tablespoons was running the risk of a diabetic coma. Everything was insanely good in that over-the-top, made-with-love, Southern cooking way. After they had finished their meals and were waiting for pie, Edith excused herself to use the bathroom.
“You trust her enough to have her in on a secret? It’s the real reason I trotted your ass down here. That, and I wanted to see you to thank you again. I suppose I also wanted to meet Edith, although I didn’t know that till I met her. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a thirty-five.”
“Amen, brother.” They clinked glasses. “You can talk freely in front of her. I trust her implicitly.”
“Good enough for me, Al.”
When she returned, Ted filled them in on all the details of how things had gone down after Al had departed and left such a “God-awful” mess for Ted to clean up.
“Which brings me to the only real order of business we have to take care of tonight. I understand you’re going to keep doing your business as you see fit. That’s a much longer and much more in-depth conversation than I’m prepared to have with you right now. Suffice it to say that, when that dirty little slave-trading, drug-dealing, piece of human excrement was sent into the next life, there were a ton of assets that simply disappeared. We don’t have any proof that those resources existed, because the man’s house was burnt to a crisp, as well as blown up and dumped into the beautifully clear water off the coast of Anguilla.”
Edith was looking at Al with a combination of wonder and horror. He looked at her briefly and said, “Later tonight, or anytime for that matter, if you want to quiz me about that stuff, feel free. I won’t rely on the Fifth Amendment to protect you, but you may want to keep a little...”
“Plausible deniability?” She said this with big eyes and a smile that could be described as nothing short of juicy on her lips.
“You may not want to know some of the things that I have done to ‘get right with God,’ for lack of a better phrase.”
“Get right with God?” Ted was smiling his own little smile now; at the least, his caterpillar had grown to almost double its length. “I think the Man in the Sky might just give you a medal, if you two ever cross paths.”
“Yeah. IF…” Al said.
The three of them enjoyed a companionable silence. Then Ted rose and asked the kitchen staff to come out for a moment. They came out. It was the owner, a young Hispanic man, and a college-aged girl who was still wearing a dusting of powdered sugar on parts of her upper arms.
“I have a little business to do in here with Al and Ms. Edith, and I think it’s best you all be out of the building while I do it. It’s not bad, I just don’t want
anyone but the three of us in on it. If you aren’t in here, why then, there are no worries. Deal?”
“Deal. Whattya think, Ted? This a two-cigarette break?”
“Two smokes should do it. Pour yourself each a shot. I bought three bottles of the good stuff, so there should be plenty. Al’s one of the best men I know, and I’ve almost gotten over the fact he doesn’t drink…almost.” They all laughed.
The three restaurant folks started out, and Ted instructed the two Marshals and the burly guy by the door to join them. “It’s an order. I won’t order you to smoke or drink on the job, but I sure as shit guarantee no one will check your breath or write a report about it.”
After everyone left the room, Ted looked at Al, pulled in a deep breath, let it out, took a sip of Mr. Dickel’s finest, then started to speak slowly. “Long time ago, way before any of us were on the planet, sometimes the US Marshal Service needed a hand or two. A Marshal would walk up to a likely soul, or souls, and say ‘Hey, I’m gonna swear you in, cuz I need help nabbing someone.’ Well that was all well and good, and damned necessary, until the country started settling down and people wanted a little more of some kind of legal procedure to hang their hats on. People started feeling like lawlessness was a state that went hand in hand with a lack of dedicated paperwork. I may be oversimplifying…”
“I don’t think you are, Ted. Not one little bit.” Edith looked a little annoyed at this. “I don’t know if Al told you, but I’m pre-law and I find that 80%...shit, 90%, of what I study seems to be there because someone wanted to talk to hear their own head make noise. They wanted to sound official, so they made up laws. Sorry to interrupt. Go right ahead.”
“Perfectly fine, Edith. I think you summed up what I was trying to say very succinctly. Nowadays, it’s still legal to deputize anyone we want, but there’s an established SOP. People are supposed to already be police officers before they are sworn as Marshals. That is until there is an extenuating circumstance.” He trailed off and let his eyes settle on Al.
“Lemme guess.” He started, running his finger through some hard sauce and licking it off. “If I was a deputy US Marshal, I might be able to do you a thing or two without the entire legal community totally going bananas.”
“Al, I’m gonna put it as bluntly as I can. You’re doing great work out there. You are doing shit we can’t do anymore. We’ve gotten so politically correct, we can’t even keep people safe. I’ve never been very fond of vigilantism, but I’d never dealt with someone who was out to do it for the good. Not for a thrill, or for a quick buck, but someone who had a clear idea of right and wrong and was willing to stake a claim on what was the right thing to do.” He reached into his inside coat pocket and grabbed a little leather wallet. It was small. It looked about big enough to accommodate a deck of cards. “Al? Would you consider being a special agent of the US Marshal Service? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to use you, but you wouldn’t have to call for a reference anymore, at least not to me. We wouldn’t pay you, and I don’t expect making money is real high on your list of things to do right now anyway. You can carry a gun along with your badge. I can file some paperwork, and the Feds will keep their nose out of your taxes, at least for a while. And there’s a chance, albeit very small, that I may need you to transport a person in our custody from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. And the last part just formalizes something I’ve felt since the first time you did your magic here in Hattiesburg.”
“Which is?” Al asked this, but he thought he knew the answer.
“I’ve not seen you more than a couple of times, maybe talked to you five times that amount on the phone, but Alistair McNair, you are a stellar example of what it means to be a member, a by-God, absolute personification of the simple idea that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the right to be treated with some dignity and some goddamned respect in this life. It happens so rarely that when someone gets a fair shake or, better yet, a helping hand from a perfect stranger, it restores my faith in humanity and makes me think that maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing as a noble savage. There is such a thing as an embodiment, an ideal, of the idea that there are outsiders walking among us today that haven’t been corrupted by our civilization. If you accept this, we solidify some shit tomorrow, get the boring stuff done, and skedaddle back to our own private little wars.”
“If I say no?”
“There’s a quote I love by Dean Koontz of all people…Dean fucking Koontz. ‘In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.’ That quote just about sums you up to the letter, brother. I don’t think I’ll ask you to do anything you won’t already be doing. I won’t enlist you to break the code that makes you who you are. If I did, you’d just walk away. If you say yes, I’ll have a chance to help you out. I might be able to throw a stuck case your way, and more than anything else, I think I may be able to help vanquish one of the only sins still haunting us today. Not forever and not completely, but I think we can increase the number of times people, after going through a black, malignant, shitty time can say, ‘What do you know? The good guys won today. How do you like that?’ That’s why I got involved, and I think that’s why you got involved. So, you think you can find a place to carry that thing?”
Al looked at the little leather wallet for a short time. He flipped it open and looked at the Silver Star inside. It was simple, elegant, and clean. It said SPECIAL DEPUTY across the top of the circle and UNITED STATES MARSHAL around the bottom part of the circle. The circle went around the cutout of a star. In the middle of the star was an eagle with an American flag shield in its chest. The eagle was carrying an olive branch in one talon and a quiver of arrows in the other. It was one of the sharpest-looking badges Al had ever seen. There were a million reasons why it was so sharp-looking.
The most compelling reason was the simplest. It was his.
39
The morning was cold. Eric woke up before first light and turned off his unused watch alarm. He didn’t think he’d need it. His internal clock had always been pretty accurate. He heard some sounds in the distance: trucks, cars, voices, and machines. Eric figured they were going to try for first full light to get things going.
He got up and broke camp, taking and stowing all of his equipment. He planned on dumping everything but his one change of clothes on the way back to Salt Lake City. He made sure everything was stacked together on the passenger seat, so he could stop and toss items in random locations with a minimum amount of time fumbling with the stuff. Be prepared. It was still dark when he made his way over to the little shooting nest he had picked out the day before.
As he was heading over, he took an inventory of things that were important for the task at hand. He noted it was a clear and calm day. There was almost no wind. It would be a straight shot. He’d have to cope with any wind, but the scope and distance finder would take care of gravity. He just wanted to make sure he got it right on the first shot. He would try a second shot if the first shot didn’t work, but there would be no third shot. He wasn’t going to get caught and arrested for an assassination attempt on a half-assed, B-list action star. Even Eric Bannerman had some pride.
He tested his joints out for stiffness. He felt pretty good, but his back was a little tight. While he was still over a hundred yards away from where the hill started to drop off toward the film location, Eric leaned his rifle against a tree and did a series of stretches and slow calisthenics. He wasn’t that concerned about a little tightness. He was concerned that he might get an unforeseen muscle cramp. It had happened to him once at the range. He’d been doing a lot of stair-climbing for cardio work, hadn’t been stretching, and had been low on both potassium and hydration. He went to the range and was lying in a prone position for forty-five minutes one day before shooting. He had his watch alarm set. When it went off, he would take his shot. Twenty-three seconds before he was going to take his shot, he got a massive calf cramp. It wasn’t some little involuntary pointing of the foot or spreading out o
f the toes. It felt like a small hedgehog had suddenly appeared inside his calf muscle and had started to burrow its way out through the muscle on the back of Eric’s leg. The pain was as sudden and as excruciating as being hit in the back of the leg with a sledge hammer. He’d lain on the ground, writhing back and forth, and when his watch went off, signaling the time to take his shot, Eric could do nothing but lay holding his leg trying to coax the muscle into relaxing its death-grip.
Eric had learned that three factors tended to lead to calf cramping. Excessive calf exercising before a long period of stillness, being deprived of potassium, and being dehydrated. He had walked around a ton yesterday and his calves were fatigued. He could do nothing about that. He had, however, made sure to keep his potassium levels up by eating plenty of bananas, and he was hydrated. He had brought several gallons of water with him and had been drinking freely since he landed in Utah yesterday. It was making him pee a lot, but he just kept pouring in water and eating bananas. He wasn’t going to miss this opportunity for anything, especially not for a fucking cramp.
Light exercise and stretching were the final line of defense against getting an unwanted muscle seizure, and the little routine he’d just finished left him feeling warm, pliable, and ready for action. He jogged a little in one place, then dropped from standing into a pushup position, did five pushups, and sprang back up. He did this ten times. They were called “burpees” and it was how you got in shape while you were doing hard time. He’d done thousands and thousands of burpees over the years, and their familiar feeling still had a calming effect. He walked over and grabbed his gun, binoculars, water, and the other gear, and he headed into his place.
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