Chaingang

by Rex Miller

  “I apologize. A matter that couldn't wait. Now—how can I help you?” Mary explained. Told him about her husband's disappearance.

  “My husband and I were friends with the Luther Lloyd family. Both Mrs. Lloyd and I had the same reaction, that something wasn't quite right about the large-scale land sale involving the World Ecosphere company. She told me in conversation that you'd advised her there might be a way to prove that the land deal wasn't completely on the up and up—that it had been done when Mr. Lloyd was under duress, perhaps."

  “I mentioned that as one theoretical possibility, not as a serious suggestion."

  “But you suggested Mrs. Lloyd should not pursue any legal action, is that correct?” Mary hadn't liked his curt tone, and her own took on a sharp, inquisitive edge. He fielded it easily.

  “True.” So?

  “I ask because I was considering retaining an attorney to pursue a similar matter on my—and on my husband's—behalf. And Mrs. Lloyd gave us the impression you thought World Ecosphere was too big. And that they were involved with the government and could tie any litigation up for years and years."

  “Are you asking me to represent you in a legal matter, Mrs. Perkins?” he said, rather frostily.

  “I want to know if you think ... such an inquiry, you know ... could be...” It was getting too much for her, Royce sensed, and he jumped in.

  “We wondered if they're actually involved with the U.S. government. If so, in what way? Obviously Mrs. Perkins can't sue the government.” He figured the lawyer would ask what his part was in this, but he didn't. Instead he simply finessed him.

  “I haven't any notion, offhand, not having studied what Mrs. Perkins's particular situation is. As I understand it—” he waved a beringed hand in the air “—Mr. Perkins was an intermediary, representing the purchasing agent—so to speak—and I don't see what possible relation that would have to Mrs. Lloyd's situation. She thought her husband would have said no to the offer, which—again, I'm just guessing here, but—which your husband tendered. Is that about the way it was?"

  “Yes."

  “As I say, there's no relation, other than the fact that each of you has had a tragic thing occur—but that has no provable basis for an action against the land developers. None that I see, anyway."

  “Are they a U.S. government-related company? Could you tell us if you have any knowledge about that?” Royce wasn't letting go.

  “I have no knowledge, other than my own casual surmises which I made to Mrs. Lloyd. They're dealing in a massive amount of development on behalf of a holding company, and as I understand the project in question, it's some sort of environmental center, which, of course, suggests at least a working relationship with...” He droned on in a lawyerly, boring tone, and Royce let his mind relax. They were learning nothing here.

  “A case with contingency fees ... limited when you're taking on the government ... twenty-five percent recovery ... lots of property work around this area ... trust lawyer ... be glad to recommend someone with a better...” Slick mumbo-jumbo legalese.

  As soon as they could, they thanked him and left the law offices, once again going forward three paces and going back four.

  “The more we learn about this thing, the less we know,” Royce said.

  “You're not just realizing that, are you?” They laughed mirthlessly. “Let's hear some good ideas."

  Royce shook his head. “Um..."

  “Me too.” They went to a phone and did their thing. Mary was first. It seemed to Royce as if she'd been on the telephone for a very long time, and most of it was listening.

  “Listen,” she began, as soon as they were back in his vehicle, “you know Jimmie and Lurene Gallagher, don't you?"

  “Uh-uh."

  “She's with the welfare office here, and Jimmie works on the county road crews. They live out by the land project. Alberta Riley heard that they had a run-in with the Ecoworld people. Jimmie Gallagher's dog was rolling around in some garbage they dumped out by the construction site, and the dog died. They got all crazy about it because they were afraid Jimmie's little boy might have played with the dog and got some of it on him."

  “What kind of stuff—something radioactive?"

  “Pardon?"

  “What kind of garbage?"

  “Oh! I don't know—poisons, I think. Anyway, they went to Marty Kerns, and he said he couldn't do anything—naturally. They were supposed to go to the EPA about it. And they had an inspector come look at it, but he wouldn't do anything either. He said it was the Gallaghers’ fault for letting their dog run loose. Apparently the little boy is okay, but they're really mad about it."

  “Where was this garbage?"

  “It was at the edge of the Poindexter farm—just over the property line on Ecoworld's ground. They're throwing chemicals and stuff out there, I guess."

  “Let's go look at it."

  “Okay. We could try. If it's still there. I don't know what we'd learn that the EPA guy doesn't already know, but—"

  “Where did Alberta hear all this stuff, did she say?"

  “Her hairdresser."

  “That figures.” In a small town the local hairdresser is the rough equivalent of “60 Minutes.” He should have known.

  “Royce, wouldn't we have a chance of finding out a lot more by concentrating on getting inside that office out there? Couldn't we create some kind of a diversion and try to get it while—"

  “Mary, those guys aren't doughnut-gobbling rent-a-cops we saw. I recognized the weapons they were carrying. The riflelike thing is called a Steyr AUG. It's a specialized assault weapon. This one was silenced and had a night-action scope on it. That's the sort of modification they use on a countersniper rifle. The other guy had what looked like a Heckler & Koch MP 5. This is serious, major-league armament. They've probably got another team asleep nearby—maybe in the office or the tool trailer. Two on, two off—revolving shifts, maybe—so they don't get tired. Working ‘em four out of eight hours and then a new set of teams comes in.

  “We could create a diversion. Let's say we'd rent the services of a crop duster and he'd make believe like he was strafing the office—okay? Make a whole gang of noise. The guy with the Steyr would pop a 40-mm MECAR rifle grenade attachment over the muzzle, and if that didn't work, they've probably got a Stinger missile in the office. It'd be a diversion, all right."

  “What are we gonna do?” she asked in helpless tone.

  “Whatever we can. Come on, kid. Let's go see if we can figure out what Jimmie Gallagher's dog got into.” He turned the ignition key and they headed across the river, behind an old clunker with “UT” and “Go Vols!” stickers on the bumper, replete with a fake license plate in the rear window reading, “I M 1. R U 1 2? O, I C, U 1 2 B 1!"

  Royce realized it had been a good while since he'd packed his sinuses with nose candy. He passed the UT car on the Missouri side, getting in back of a dirty truck whose mud flaps warned about his wide turns. On the back of the filthy truck the moving finger had writ: “FUQ IRAQ.” Everywhere you looked, there was a joker waiting.

  The vista was bleak and cold, with wintry tendrils of cirrocumulus woven through the pale gray sky. Intermittently clinquant glitters of sunlight flashed on the grimy windshield. There was corn stubble to the left, remnants of milo stalks to the right, and a muddy brown stretch of tractor and combine turnrow between.

  They saw the garbage dump and the newly erected concrete construction work at about the same time. The concrete foundations were now complete over the three-hundred-acre building site, and many walls were already up. Near the southeastern edge of the property there were areas that already wore thick ceilings of reinforced concrete. The interiors of these sections appeared to have had their doors and passage entrances boarded up. A pair of guards could be seen in the distance.

  Here, far away from the new construction, impedimenta and refuse from Ecoworld had been dumped unceremoniously into a kind of landfill hole, and hastily covered with earth. Here, it seemed, a pack o
f dogs had decided to dig for buried treasure, and Jimmie Gallagher's dog had been one of them. He'd been one dumb pup to wallow here.

  Royce parked and they walked to the center of the unearthed garbage and trash pit, shaking their heads the minute they got out of the vehicle. The smell was incredible.

  “My God!” Mary whispered.

  “Yeah.” The guards could not see them where they'd parked, and the landfill was below the slope of a bordering tree line. “You know what I keep thinking?” he said to her, sotto voce.

  “Hnn?"

  “Jeezus!” He saw the first of the containers. A group of colorful outer shells giving a tessellated, almost coherent pattern to the mosaic of industrial trash.

  “What is it?"

  “Hazardous materials—see?” He swallowed. Everything he saw only confirmed what he'd been about to say to her.

  “I—” She was fighting to make sense out of this. The lettering was government-style yellow stenciling.

  “When I said toxic waste—” It stuck in his throat. His mind was racing. Hydriodic acid. Potassium compounds. Sulfuric acid.

  “Come on. Let's go.” He had to pull her away from the landfill.

  “Toxic waste. You mean radioactive stuff? Plutonium and—” She had partially shut down. Too much information. Sam. Ecoworld. Poisons. Her system had reached Data Overload.

  “Come on, Mary, move,” he said, in a voice that was several decibels louder than he meant it to be.

  He was more scared than the night Happy had braced him, just easing into the ride, not slamming the door, waiting for Mary to get in, waiting for the dude to come around the nearest trees with his Steyr AUG, waiting to learn what the first 5.56-mm round would do when it tore through the door, the bullet tumbling from the expanding gasses and the punch through metal. He had a shotgun in the pawnshop—talk about being prepared! The car sounded as loud as a jet engine when he started it, and no time was wasted getting in the wind.

  “What?” She demanded.

  “It's a fucking drug lab!"

  “Why—what makes you think that?"

  “Believe me. I know. That's what those bastards are doing out here in Nowheresville—they're fixing to cook up ice."

  She was trying to re-join the conscious. She felt as if her brain had fallen asleep.

  “Schmeck. Crank. Crack. Ice. Something very potent, maybe.” He shook his head as he drove. “I could never figure it out. I could never see it. It's a fucking lab! Probably the biggest ever built. Imagine—the scale of the thing. And they've brought in all the chemicals and stuff and walled it in, see, so later there's no problem starting to cook the junk. You've got guys unloading tools, pouring concrete, taking supplies off trucks every day—who's going to suspect anything if you go ahead and fill your lab? No wonder they've got armed guards."

  “But who would do it? ... What would be the point?"

  “The point. What's the point every time? Money, of course."

  “I don't—"

  “Mafia maybe, or the Latino families or—hell, what's the difference who? Somebody got a few business guys to front for ‘em. Found this pure virgin—” he meant the town “—carved a place out in the middle of the boonies—with nobody around to know from bupkes. Very fucking smart."

  “Why come out here?"

  “Cause the people are stupid around here. Because it's a damn ghost town full of greedy business pricks and farmers. Because crank is a smelly, dangerous mess to cook—and so's some of the other stuff. Because—they came, they saw, they built. Now they can cook all the dope they want and call it chemical research and development. Probably charge tickets to watch them wash the by-products down into the water table. Jeezus fucking shit I should have known!"

  “What should we do, Royce?"

  “Listen. Listen to me: There's a lot I haven't told you. But this is too much. We're in too deep. You have to know. I got jammed up on a drug thing. I'll tell you the details later, when we have time. I promise. They ... the assholes I was involved with—they turned me. I had to set up a guy who was a big drug dealer, act like I was the same thing. Engineer a deal to bring down a major supplier—you follow?"

  “No. I haven't followed any of this since we saw the chemicals. And what kind of drug people bury their incriminating—you know—containers in their own backyard?"

  “The kind who don't really give a shit. The kind who have so much clout and such ironclad protection, they can thumb their nose at local law, for one thing."

  “But, Royce—I don't get this. You say you were setting up a drug dealer. Kerns said they were watching you—that you were a drug dealer and—"

  “That fat shit doesn't know dick, okay? I'm a half-assed undercover narc, a former fuck-up who's getting over a bad cocaine dependency, and finally seeing a way to pull himself clear from a terrible situation. Just help me, baby, and don't bail. I need you. The people I work for—they gotta know about this. We got to tell them about it and get serious outside help. This could be so big—” He fell silent. Literally speechless. He began again.

  “This Fisher guy—whatever his name is. Sinclair—the famous and elusive Christopher Sinclair. Fisher said he was in the Orient. What if the Japanese are behind this? Some megazillion Godzilla Megilla Gorilla consortium, backed by the Yakuza or somebody?"

  “I don't see how you can know this is going to be a drug thing from finding some cans and things. Are you sure you—"

  “It's what I do. This is what I do, dig?! I'm a fucking—” He could not quite bring himself to put a name on the sign he was wearing around his neck. He stopped and got coins and dialed a Memphis number.

  “I'd like to talk with somebody about buying insurance please,” he whispered into the phone.

  “Who's calling, sir?” A voice resonated into the other end of the line.

  “A man who's insurance-poor.” He waited for the beep and gave his work number and read the dial tone off into the recording unit, hanging up. Within thirty seconds it pinged and he picked it up.

  “I need to talk to Wilcox."

  “This is an insecure line, sir. Please use proper procedure,” the agent on the phones scolded him.

  “I don't give a rat fuck how insecure this line is,” he seethed, “put that prick on the phone.” His poison threatened to melt the phone.

  “Problems?” A familiar voice crackled in his ear.

  “You'd better pray not. You got the makings of a three-hundred-acre processing lab in Waterton, Missouri. Don't say anything yet. Just get this down. Ecoworld, they call it. A construction project supposedly funded by a D.C.-area or New York-based company called World Ecosphere, Inc. Guy named Joseph Fisher. Probably bullshit front guy. Major money behind it. There's all kind of PC to bring in the Feds, a CLET and a HAMR unit—the whole works. Armed guards with H&Ks and silenced Steyrs, missing people, dead people—they—"

  “Whoa. Whoa. Hold it! Take it easy. Slow down. What's this about missing people?"

  Royce forced himself to slow down and run it down—every last nasty tidbit that he could remember, from the setup with Sam Perkins to the rumored serial killer.

  “What about Happy and his biker pukes?” Royce asked.

  “All under control."

  “You got Papa then?"

  “Nailed and mailed, man. You did great."

  “What the hell was he doing with a scumball like Happy? I could never see how this punk got a rating."

  “Ruiz? He and the old man did a bit together in the joint. Happy did some chump time in ATC and Booneville, little felony-assault priors and crap—coupla voluntaries that got pled down and whatnot, and he fell on a technicality and ended up in the bucket again. Just a puke, but him and Papa became big buds, and the man set the little weenie up with some bikers. He's nothing. He's shit."

  “But have you busted him yet? He's gonna be jazzed to get me, man. What's the story?"

  “I'll get right back to you on that, but I gotta go get on this. We'll send a team in—you say it's that ri
ghteous. You're gonna be out from under the brown blanket.” The daddy rabbit broke the connection.

  “But...” Yeah. That's what it was gonna be, all right. Butt!

  26

  NEAR WHITETAIL POND

  They drove back the long way around, so as not to have to get near the Waterworks Road area, or the more-traveled Cotton Avenue. Royce went down the county gravel to Farm-to-Market, and cut through Bill Wise's place to Market Road, driving all the way out past Slabtown on North Market. He was fighting serious seizures of fear. They'd written him off.

  He tried a dozen times to begin telling Mary, who was visibly confused and frightened.

  “Are you gonna talk to me?” she finally asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, forcing a smile. “I'm gonna talk to you.” They passed a pizza joint and he slowed down. “You hungry?"

  “No."

  He pulled up and stopped in front of a small packaged goods store. “I'll be right back.” She didn't say anything. He went in and bought some chilled wine and snack foods. He had to have something in there to help soak up the acid that was threatening to eat its way through the lining of his stomach.

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh, getting back in the vehicle and starting the motor, putting the sack behind the seat and pulling out onto the blacktop. “I'll start at the beginning. It's a long story."

  “I've got lots of time, Royce,” she said. It was all he could do not to say, I hope so."

  “You know what it's like here. Not exactly your cosmopolitan big city. Two Jews and one black guy, and they don't like to admit it. Nothing to do but get high and gossip. I hated this place then. Remember?” He meant when they broke up. She remembered only too well.

  “There wasn't an ounce of sophistication or excitement here. You were the only thing good about it, and you wanted to be married so desperately, it was your entire focus. You were in love with the idea of settling down. It was like a—” he edited himself and didn't say the words bear trap “—thing I couldn't come to terms with. I thought we'd get stuck in the marriage, like so many others had, and we'd both come to hate each other.” He looked over. She was listening, without any expression.