by Chuck Logan
“I know, give him my Social Security number,” Dale said. “I’ll call him when we’re through talking.”
“Good,” George said. “An hour.”
Dale got off with George, then dutifully reached Irv Fuller, on his cell.
“Yeah?” Irv said, guarded.
Dale smiled. Old Irv was nervous, worried that Dale would harass him for the balance owed on the machines. Instead Dale said, “Just checking if that Deere is giving you any trouble.”
“Well, one of the boys says that loader is riding kind of hard.”
“Tell you what,” Dale said reasonably, “I’m passing your way later today, thought I might drop by and give her a look. Maybe see the job. Say around four or five this afternoon.”
“No problem,” Irv said, sounding relieved that Dale didn’t mention money. “Just need your Social Security number. They’ll run a quick background check to get you by the gate.”
“Sure thing,” Dale said. He gave Irv his Social Security number and said goodbye. He turned to Joe. “See. Easy.”
Joe seemed a bit relieved. He thrust out his hands, palms up, fingers spread in a plea.
Dale stood his ground and continued staring across the road.
“Forget it,” Joe said. “Like Ace told you last night. She’s gone.”
Gone. Dale shook his head. He had not told Joe about Gordy and the information was a source of power. But he wasn’t strong enough to get what he wanted alone, not just yet. He needed Joe and his gun. “Just before the sun came up we took a drive through town and saw her husband’s car at the motel, remember? She could be there,” Dale said.
Joe was adamant. He shook his head. “Even if she’s at the motel, there’s too many people around. Can’t be done. Let it go. Dale, we’re too close. Let’s not fuck it up.”
Dale stared at him hard. Joe was different from him. Joe’s gifts were practical, tactical. He was not inspired. Dale, who was inspired, couldn’t let it go. He’d prepared a place for her. It was meant to be. He knew it.
And then he knew it for sure.
“Look! Look!” he shouted, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Joe rushed to the window and actually slapped his hand to his forehead. How had they allowed themselves to become so dependent on this nutcase?
The answer came easily. For the money. For the access.
So Joe watched it come together like a swarming nightmare he was powerless to escape. He watched the red Volvo pull off the highway and come to a stop in front of the bar. He watched the woman with the red hair get out from the passenger side. The one Dale wanted. He watched her walk to the front door of the bar.
“Now we’re cooking with gas!” Dale shouted as he went toward the door.
Joe watched his spreading nightmare crowd out the day as Dale grabbed his yellow backpack-that little kid’s pack with the butterfly on it-and headed out the door.
Joe shifted from foot to foot at the window as Dale strode confidently across the road. “There goes my life,” he said, shaking his head. “My whole fucking life…” He had no choice. He was chained to the nightmare rails and could only follow and make Dale’s fantasy come true. Everything depended on it.
“Zarba.”
He grabbed the compact gym bag at his feet and walked stiffly out the door.
Chapter Thirty-two
Jane stayed in the car as Nina went to the front door and tried the doorknob. Locked. So she banged on it. Once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. She turned to Jane and shrugged. But then, as she was starting to think about going around the back and trying the warehouse entrance, she heard someone cough inside, then a shuffle of feet. The doorknob turned.
The Ace Shuster who opened the door was badly in need of a shave; eyes red, his breath smelled like a whiskey blowtorch. He stared at her without expression, blinked, looked up and down the empty highway, and then said, “Don’t know where Gordy is. That’s why the door was locked.” He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and managed a wasted wolfish grin.
“What?” she said.
“Never had a look at you in real daylight, as it were,” he said.
God, she thought, even now, the guy can’t help trying to connect. “Look. I’ll make this quick,” she said. “I can’t give you an explanation. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions. But this whole mess could have been a lot uglier. The other thing is, some of what you said made a difference.”
“Oh yeah?” He cocked his head.
“Yeah. I’ll be going back to spend some time with Broker and Kit.”
Nina stopped talking when she saw Ace’s eyes move off her face and look behind her. She turned as he asked, “Now what do they want?”
At the same time Jane picked them up in her rearview mirror: two men, one big and sloppy but moving at a fast shuffle, the other darker, his face all wrong, and he walked with a slight limp. The way they moved got her attention. Her hand snapped to her face and tossed off the sunglasses. So much for a leisurely morning. They were coming across the road into the parking lot at a brisk pace. The big one carried some kind of yellow backpack, but tiny. The darker one had a gym bag in his hand. That would be Ace’s brother and the brother’s sidekick, the Indian, Joe Reed, the guy Nina had noticed.
Dale climbed the porch steps. Ace moved to block him and said firmly. “Can’t this wait? I’m busy.”
“You seen Gordy?” Dale asked with a broad smile. Then, not waiting for an answer, he said, “Aw, fuck Gordy, he was just one of the little people.” He grinned at Nina. “See? I knew you’d be back. I just knew.” He shouldered on past Ace, went through the door and into the dark interior of the bar.
Ace had never seen his brother so positive, so happy, so pushy and sure of himself. A little amazed and curious, he was dragged into Dale’s gravity field and followed him inside. Nina, too, was swept along. She had been interrupted and was not quite finished. Jane was out of the car now, fully alert. And irritated. She’d thought that this drive-by farewell was a lapse of common sense on Nina’s part, and now it was getting complicated. At first she picked up no hostile vibes off Joe; he just stood at the door, shifting from foot to foot, waiting. But when she came closer she felt his cold eyes.
I’m gonna watch you, fella, Jane thought as she went through the door and stepped to the side so her back was to the wall. Her right hand shook out, just in case. A Beretta nine in a breakaway hideout holster lay across the small of her back, under her shirt. But Joe stayed out on the porch. She moved deeper into the room, where her back was secure and she could monitor him through the window. Her eyes tracked from Joe on the porch to the awkward scene percolating between Ace, Nina, and Dale.
Finally Ace said, gently, “Whatever it is, Dale, this is not the time.”
Dale’s round face was swelling up, about to burst, like a kid at the Christmas pageant getting set to deliver his one big line. “Ain’t it funny, Ace? My whole life, people always notice you and never me.” He bared his teeth to his handsome brother.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ace said, his patience worn hangover-thin.
“What I’m talking about is-It’s me!”
Ace stared at Dale, slowly shaking his head.
Dale went on triumphantly. “She didn’t come to town to look for you, she came for me.” He was speaking to Ace, but he was looking at Nina.
And Nina saw enough resentment and malevolence surface in Dale’s eyes to kill a whole high school. Along with a leer of sheer physical lust that made her skin crawl. But then she realized that Dale wasn’t speaking in some kind of sibling code to his brother…
Jesus. That means…
Oh shit!
And she got caught in one of those expanding fractions of a second that inform enlightenment-except this was gonna be very bad.
Like Broker, she was a natural fighter. Physically and psychologically, she adapted to conflict. The Pentagon spent a lot of time and money trying to train people to acquire the sort of reflexes she had natural
ly. She could anticipate a threat and move to disrupt it, step inside other people’s physical time, second-guess their intentions. She did this without thinking.
“Janey.” Her voice rose to a dangerous treble.
“I’m here, girl,” Janey said, tensed forward, her right hand sweeping behind her back, her left hand reaching out, sensing like a rangefinder. Then she spun to check the porch, to locate Joe. Her Beretta coming up, her free hand meeting it to form a two-handed brace on the grip.
“What the hell?” Ace said, starting to react himself. And Dale just went on grinning except now his hand was reaching into his foolish little pack.
And that’s when Nina got stuck on the slo-mo glide path. Powerless, all she could do was watch. A fraction of a second stretched out long like a colonnade, pillars going on and on, endless. She distinctly saw her.45 in its holster-on the table in the motel room where Broker lay peacefully sleeping. The note next to it with her lipstick smear…
She was moving now, toward Dale. Good. Janey bringing the Beretta up as she came around from looking out the window.
Then not so good.
Janey’s eyes ran wild because Joe Reed appeared at the other end of the room, in the doorway to the stairs, the one that led to the rear entry. And she was still coming around in the turn.
Fucker came in through the back.
Came in hot with a big Browning held rigid in a professional two-handed grip, arms extended, on target, taking small quartering steps. Both eyes open. Not aiming like an amateur. Pointing like a pro.
Jesus! Rashid had not lied.
They had gone after the wrong Shuster.
Nina stretched out for Dale, pushing past Ace, who had jumped in front of her, his arms spread protectively. Had to stop Dale’s hand in the pack. If she got her hands on him she could disable him. Bet on it. And if Janey could…
But it was like competitive swimming. Hundredths of a second decided…
Joe squeezed the trigger while Janey was still cementing her grip around the nine and-crack crack-Joe Reed shot her twice in the chest at a distance of ten yards. Janey Singer went down and Joe came on another two steps-crack-and put that one in her head.
Nina saw Janey jerk with each impact but all that registered in the moment was the need to dive across the floor and get her hands on Janey’s gun. As she hit the floor, seizing the pistol from Janey’s motionless hand and rolling over, Joe Reed wheeled the Browning on her.
“No!” Dale yelled. “She’s mine!”
But Joe was on automatic, operating on pure survival reflexes as his pistol centered on Nina’s chest.
Ace was in midair. And Nina would have occasion to remember his remark about playing ball: You stand around a lot, but then sometimes you gotta move fast to make a play.
Like now.
He dived as Joe fired and put his body between the bullets and Nina’s heart and took two in the back. She felt his body collide with her, still alive, bounce once, and what he’d lived in flopped on top of her in a messy lifeless embrace.
Dale’s boot stomped down on Nina’s right hand and she lost the Beretta. His hand came around, held something-yellow, a knife? No, more like a stubby pen. There was a needle in the end. He plunged it into her thigh.
Calmer now, more in control, Joe came forward, covering her as Dale grabbed the body of his brother by a limp arm and dragged it aside. “Now look what you went and did,” Dale said. Not to Joe, but to the corpse. And Nina, who felt the first lift of a rearing narcotic wave, noted the homicidal marker of not owning the motivation of one’s violence, of assigning it to others.
She was being swept away. Out of herself completely. She’d mourn Ace and Janey later. Right now gotta work on having a later.
Deadly efficient, Joe covered her.
“No need,” Dale said. “She going in the K-hole. Be a couple minutes.”
Nina going slack, shook words from the fog enveloping her: “Not Ojibwa…” Joe just smiled. She tried again. “Where did you train?”
The smile broadened. He shrugged. “In the Bekaa Valley.”
“Not Afghanistan?”
“Fuck Afghanistan and their religious bullshit,” Joe said.
That was all. The last thing she saw was the contempt in Joe’s chilly eyes. And blood, Ace’s blood, on her chest. Then Dale roughly grabbed her hair and jerked her head back in a gesture of acquisition.
The thought that she’d never see her daughter again…
Her eyes rolled up. A soft nothing rose up on a flutter of euphoric wings and banished the dread.
Chapter Thirty-three
Joe stood at the window talking on his cell to George as he nervously kept checking the road and motioning with his free hand for Dale to be quiet. But Dale had a very different reaction to the shootings, and the capture of Nina. He couldn’t keep still. Stepping in the blood, tracking it around. “Look,” he said, “it’s okay. Nobody heard. We can just leave the bodies. We plan to disappear, right? We won’t be coming back.”
Joe spun furiously, yanked the pistol from his waistband, and waved it in Dale’s face, then at the floor. “Just shut up, okay? And clean up your shoes and the tracks on the floor.” He turned back to the window and the phone.
Dale didn’t care for that, Joe pointing a gun at him. But he removed his work shoes and washed them thoroughly in the bathroom sink. Then he took Gordy’s mop and pail from the closet and removed all trace of his footprints. Dale was thinking as he worked, and the more he thought about it, the more he decided Joe should be punished for sticking a gun in his face. Uh-huh.
By the time Joe ended his phone conversation and approached Dale, stepping carefully around the bodies and the remaining blood on the floor, he’d settled down. “George and I think it’s best to change the plan. After this, what happened here.”
Dale shrugged. He didn’t care. He had the woman to be with all the way to Florida. “Sure,” he said.
“Good, so I’ll get you over to Camp’s Corner to hook up with George. Then I’ll split back over the border. George will go with you to the target.”
“Fine,” Dale said, “let’s get going.”
While Joe went across the road to the equipment shed for his van, Dale dragged Nina’s unconscious body to the back storeroom and lay her down next to the door. He returned to the barroom and picked up her purse. It did not particularly surprise him that he could look at the dark-haired woman’s body and Ace’s without feeling anything, other than a certain satisfaction that he was finally succeeding in life, despite all the obstacles he had to overcome-while Ace, who was gifted from birth in every way, who had always squandered his potential, had failed.
“You lose, asshole,” Dale said.
He stooped down and rubbed Nina’s purse in the pool of blood that spread around Janey Singer’s torso. Then he came back and studied Nina, watched her labored breathing. But he wasn’t real worried. He’d given her 100 mg. Usually enough to put even him into a K-hole for an hour. And he outweighed Nina by almost a hundred pounds.
He couldn’t resist removing her wallet from the purse and carefully fingering out the Minnesota driver’s license. Holding it by the edge, he took the Sharpie from his chest pocket and blackened out the eyes on the photo. Then he inserted the ID back in the wallet and put the wallet back in the purse.
He heard Joe’s van pulling around the building. “Asshole,” he said under his breath. “Pointing a gun at me…” Like Gordy, trying to boss him.
Joe backed up to the loading dock, got out, and then checked to make sure there were no cars on the highway, no one in the fields. Then they lifted her off the dock and put her on the cargo floor in the back of the van. Dale folded her arms across her stomach and put her purse on her chest. He stayed with her, in the back, out of sight, as Joe drove west on Highway 5, took a turn to the south.
Right through town. That took some balls.
Yeah, well, so does this.
Dale hunkered down behind the driver’s seat so Joe
couldn’t see him in the rearview. Okay. He removed his pocketknife and studied his open left hand. The crisscross lines in his palm were supposed to predict things about his life. Damned if he knew what.
What the hell.
Keeping his hands low, he drew the sharp blade along the heel of his left hand and watched the blood drip onto the floor of the van. He flexed his hand so the blood made a small pool in his palm and then he grabbed at the spare tire mount, then the back door latch, leaving a red spongy pattern of his hand and fingerprints. He searched in his back pack, took out some Kleenex and a surgical glove. He wadded the tissue over the cut, applied pressure. Not the greatest, but it would do for now. Then he pulled on the Latex glove, one he’d worn last night.
With Gordy.
“How you doing?” Joe called back.
“Fine. Just drive.”
“We’re really going to do this,” Joe said.
“Drive,” Dale said as he sat back and watched Nina’s chest rise and fall. Later, when they were alone together, she’d be awake and he could watch her eyes when he told her what he was going to do. Watch her think about it.
He looked up, at the back of Joe’s head. Joe was relieved to think he would soon be free of Dale. He’d head north, cross into Canada. Joe Reed would vanish. He’d be Joseph Khari again. Smiling all the way, a rich man. A big man in Winnipeg.
They came to Camp’s Corner. Immediately one of the doors on the garage bay opened and George stepped out and waved them in. Dale got out, looked around, saw nothing but flat green and the anomalous bulge of the Nekoma pyramid floating in a blur of ground thermal.
George looked haggard, dressed in a dirty shirt and shorts, unshaven, and blinking in the sun. He and Joe made quite a pair, both looking so grim and nervous. Joe shifted from his good foot to his bad foot and licked at the scars around his lips. Dale wasn’t sweating drop one. They were just foot soldiers in a war, same as Nina. He felt more like Truman-cool, calling the shots.