Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  That would make almost three hours, Blaine calculated. He slid into his chair, careful not to disturb Harry’s house of Marlboros. The bar was old-fashioned, Key West-style enough to make Hemingway proud, featuring typical island fare such as Key lime pie, fish specialties and an assortment of tropical drinks, attractions that were lost on the other patrons who were in the bar when McCracken entered. He’d felt their eyes upon him, tightening either with recognition or concern as he approached Harry. He knew the kind of men they were from those eyes and stares, at least the kind of men they used to be.

  “Recognize any of them?” Harry asked, realizing Blaine’s gaze had strayed toward his friends again.

  “Should I?”

  “The Nam was a bigger country than people realize.” Harry gestured at a Hemingway look-alike sitting at the bar next to a pitcher of Cuba Libre. “That’s Papa. Can’t tell you his real name. He was in White Star out of Cambodia.” He turned his gaze on three men seated at a table waiting for their dinners to come, all their chairs cocked so they could watch McCracken. “Them there are Jim Beam, Captain Jack and Johnny Walker—we call him Red for short. Traded in their real names for what they drink.”

  Only then did Blaine notice that each had a bottle of his namesake waiting expectantly near the glasses they were cradling. He’d known lots of men who had drowned themselves in booze since the war, but these were swimming in it. He hoped they knew how far they could venture out before they went under.

  “And that guy,” Harry continued, eyeing a man in a bathrobe standing against one of the exposed beams as if he were part of the structure, “we call him the Sandman.”

  “Because of the bathrobe?”

  “Because that’s what he did in the Nam, Captain: put people to sleep. Something like you. Only he crashed a little harder. Six of us, the original Key West Irregulars. That’s what the locals call us, anyway. We take care of each other, look out for one another. Sometimes that means making sure a man’s got his booze.” Harry’s voice started to drift. “Sometimes it means a lot more. I told ’em you were coming. They thought I was making it up.

  “And don’t let the fancy menu worry you,” Harry continued, noticing Blaine’s eyes straying to the blackboard listing tonight’s specials. “This place is all right. Serve good food, pour a good drink and leave you alone. So do the tourists, ’cept in the real busy season.” Harry pushed his chair in a little closer to the table. “Thing is, any place worth drinking in’s gotta cater a little to tourists or they can forget about making the rent.”

  “How have you been making the rent?”

  “Got my commercial pilot’s license—you believe that?”

  McCracken tried not to let the shock show through on his features. The thought of Crazy Harry flying a plane full of people was enough to chill his blood.

  “Don’t worry, Captain.” Harry smiled, reading his mind. “I don’t carry no passengers. Zantop Airlines has an exclusive contract with me.”

  “Oh,” Blaine said.

  Zantop might have been duly registered as a commercial airline, but it had never carried a single passenger. Instead it functioned as the offspring of the old Air America, ferrying drugs and weapons from Florida’s Patrick Airforce Base to various locations in Central and South America. Once again there were important people to be won over. Certain countries in that area were powder kegs waiting to burn and the right people in the United States wanted the right people on their side when the matches lit. The argument went, according to those of the old school, that these countries were a hell of a lot closer to home than Southeast Asia.

  “Lucky for you I was laid over today. Got the word you were down there and hauled ass,” Harry said, and plucked a Marlboro off the top of his cigarette house’s roof. He stuck it in his mouth and began working it from side to side. “Was like old times today, wasn’t it, Captain?”

  “It was at that, Harry.”

  “You and me, we been there and back, ain’t we? Wasn’t for me hearing you needed a pickup, you’d still be wasting away in that shithole of a country.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Lime was playing with his house, not sure how to proceed. He fidgeted and twitched, turning about suddenly as if he’d forgotten where he was. Relaxed when he remembered and sat back.

  “Hey, you want something to drink? I got a tab here.”

  “Let’s talk first.”

  “Sure.”

  “On the plane you said something had happened.”

  Harry’s face was blank. “I told you …”

  “Yes.”

  “I shouldn’t have. It’s my problem.”

  “We’re friends. That makes it mine, too.”

  “You mean that?”

  “I mean it.”

  “What did I tell you?” Harry asked, with his head angled slightly to the side.

  “Not much else. Just that something had happened. I got the idea you needed my help.”

  Lime shook his head and looked down, chin cradled on his chest. When he looked up again, his eyes were watery.

  “It’s a sad thing. And wrong. What they done.”

  “What’d they do? What was wrong?”

  “My son,” said Harry. “Josh.”

  Blaine looked up at that.

  “He’s gone. They took him.”

  Blaine just sat there, listening.

  “Tough thing raising a kid by yourself. You remember when Maggie died. You came to the funeral.”

  “Funeral …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sad day.”

  “The worst. Kid needed me, so I came out of it. What the fuck you gonna do, right, Captain? You go on. You get over it, least past it, and you go on.”

  “That’s all you can do.”

  A smile flirted with Harry’s lips but tears continued to shadow his expression. “Everyone came to the funeral, all the old guard. It was like fucking goddamn Ton Sun Nyut all over again. A regular reunion. Coulda served Khe Sanh pie instead of Key lime. Was a better occasion, we woulda had a ass-kicking shithouse of a time.”

  “The kid,” Blaine said.

  “Smart bastard, lot smarter than his old dad, lemme tell ya.” His eyes shook suddenly, mind veering. “I need another beer.” A waitress saw Harry’s upraised hand and came over. He ordered two Rolling Rocks. “I like the color of the bottle,” he explained to McCracken. “Green. Drink the beer out of it and you can think it’s green, too.”

  “Sure.” Blaine uneasy now.

  “I miss Maggie, Captain, but I was used to that. I’m not used to missing Josh.”

  “What happened?”

  “They came and took him. Stole him. Happened a few months back, ’fore I came down here.”

  McCracken took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Look, Harry, I, I …” His voice trailed off.

  “What is it, Captain?” asked Lime, looking hopeful.

  Blaine sighed. “Who took him, the kid, I mean?”

  “Don’t know. He was just … gone. You should come to my house, see his room. I taught him video games. Then he kicks my ass ’til I start getting pissed off. Then he lets me win and I get more pissed off. You never got married?”

  “No.”

  “You missed out.” Harry’s expression was changing every second now, like he couldn’t decide how he wanted to feel. “Not too late. Gotta help me find Josh first, though. Gotta help me get him back.”

  Blaine nodded enough to reassure his old friend. “I’ll make some calls, ask some questions.”

  “You will?”

  “Just said I would.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Soon as I can get to a phone.”

  The tears in Harry’s eyes were happy ones now. He could barely contain his smile. “You’re the man, Captain. You always were the man. You’ll meet me tomorrow, first thing. Let me know what you find out.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did I give you my address? I don’t remember if I did.”

&n
bsp; “Not yet.”

  “I’ll write it down.” Lime felt his pockets for a pen, his mind drifting. “Hey, be something if we got the old gang together to go after him, wouldn’t it? You, me, your giant Indian friend … er …”

  “Johnny Wareagle,” Blaine completed for him.

  “Right. Johnny.” Lime looked agitated now. “I can get us a plane.”

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

  “Yeah, times is different.”

  Harry struck the table hard enough to collapse the walls of his Marlboro house. He spit the cigarette in his mouth onto the pile.

  “You can have the shirt off my back and the balls from my sack, Captain. Harry Lime goes where no man has gone before and you’re gonna go there one more time with me.”

  “That’s a fact,” Blaine said, hoping Harry didn’t pick up the uneasy edge in his voice.

  “What the fuck you want?”

  “Nice greeting, Sal,” Blaine said to Sal Belamo.

  “That you, Boss?”

  “Good to hear your voice, too.”

  “Hey, boss, it goes like this. Got four movie stations on my cable box now and access to those pay movies, too. You ask me, that’s fucking progress. Trouble is I haven’t been able to watch one all the way through yet, ’cause the fucking phone keeps ringing. I had more time to kill when I was inside the fucking loop. What am I paying—maybe fifty bucks a month for all this shit?—and I ain’t seen a flick from beginning to end.”

  “Don’t want to spoil your average tonight, now, do you?”

  “Try me.”

  “Need you to run something down.”

  “What the fuck … shoot.”

  “Ever hear me talk about Harry Lime?”

  “Sure. Old Air America pilot saved your ass more times than even I have.”

  “He just saved it again today. Get the file on him, much as you can and as recent as they got it.”

  “Anything specific in mind, boss?”

  “Psychiatric reports and evaluations. Recommended treatments and therapy.”

  “What gives, boss?”

  “I just left Crazy Harry in a bar down here in Key West. Told me somebody stole his kid, the one he had with his wife, Maggie. Said he hadn’t seen me since the funeral.”

  “So?”

  “So, Sal, there was no funeral. There couldn’t have been a kidnapping. Harry Lime’s never been married and he doesn’t have any kids.”

  FOUR

  “I think I got this nailed,” Alan Killebrew reported Tuesday morning when Susan stepped into the trailer that had become Firewatch’s on-scene command center, parked in Charles Park across from the Cambridgeside Galleria.

  Killebrew was Susan’s lead technician on the Firewatch team. He had arrived here just hours after her on Sunday and hadn’t left since. Nor would he until their leads, clues and theories began to firm into fact.

  Killebrew backed his wheelchair up and aimed it for the computer monitor; his mussed hair and tired voice indicated he had spent Monday night working behind it. “I’m talking about the way our organism made its way through the mall. I think I got it figured.” He paused. “That and how it got in to begin with.”

  Before Susan could prod him further, Killebrew worked the keyboard and a computer-generated, animated graphic of the Galleria appeared in simulated 3-D. It was not unlike a video game; he controlled the flow of action by manipulating the computer’s mouse.

  “By analyzing the pictures from the mall’s security cameras and studying the placement of the bodies on all three levels, we were able to determine that not all the victims were affected at once. Whatever killed them had to travel, the time difference minor but present and crucial. What you are about to see is a model of the progression.”

  The action began on the third level, the mall patrons denoted by flashing white dots. As the cursor swept past them, they stopped flashing and turned to red. The sequence was repeated on the second floor and then the first.

  “Third to first floor, traveling downward, with a slight lag,” Killebrew elaborated. “Then there’s the dog. That storeroom he was locked in wasn’t in the original plans for the mall. The temperature inside it was over a hundred and ten degrees, while the air temperature outside at the time of the event was ninety-four. Now, doors must have been open at some points after the organism’s release. So it’s virtually inconceivable that at least some of the contagion would not have slipped out, and yet all those afflicted were confined solely to the interior of the mall. Because something stopped it, literally, at the door.”

  “Temperature,” Susan said, realizing. “My God …”

  “The mall was a comfortable seventy-two degrees,” Killebrew acknowledged, looking up at her from his chair, “thanks to the air-conditioning system. My computer-generated model of the invading organism’s spread conforms perfectly with the flow of air through the Galleria’s air ducts. Since the storeroom the dog escaped from wasn’t built at the same time as the rest of the mall, it possessed no duct work for air-conditioning.”

  “Good work.”

  “There’s more. The compressors which power the system are located in the mall’s boiler room, which can be found here.” Killebrew scrolled down his computerized schema of the Galleria until he came to the basement and a small square that was flashing red. “That’s where the organism gained entry.”

  “Then let’s go take a look at it.”

  McCracken had arranged to meet Harry Lime first thing Tuesday morning, which for Harry meant nine A.M. He lived in a first-floor apartment inside one of Southpark Condominium’s six buildings. The buildings were similar to many others in the area, pseudo Spanish Colonial, and they had the advantage of being only three blocks from the ocean. Blaine figured Harry found the sounds and breezes calming.

  When Harry’s buzzer brought no response, McCracken hit two others and, as expected, was buzzed in without inquiry. He was carrying his SIG-Sauer under a baggy linen shirt worn out at the waist; not his preferred method of concealment, but a compromise to Key West’s expected nearhundred-degree temperatures.

  Once inside Blaine tried the doorbell and then knocked repeatedly with no response. He could picture Harry inside Apartment 1A, passed out drunk or lost in the earphones of some video game. Blaine sighed and went to work on the locks with the picks he always carried with him. The dead bolt took thirty seconds to work open, the knob lock barely half that. Both Schlage—top of the line—though requiring a mere few additional seconds’ inconvenience for the professional.

  “Harry,” McCracken called, stepping in. “Harry?”

  No response came and Blaine moved farther forward. The living room was neat and well kept, a surprise considering Harry’s typically unkempt appearance. More surprising was the stark nakedness of the walls. McCracken had expected them to be cluttered with various posters, pictures and memorabilia, just as Harry Lime’s mind always seemed so cluttered.

  The kitchen yielded no sign of Harry, and Blaine checked the fax machine resting on the counter. Not surprisingly, it was out of paper. He moved on to the apartment’s two bedrooms. He came to Harry’s first and gazed at the neatly made, unslept-in bed. The room was plain and traditional, again not what he had expected. The drawers were neatly packed and arrayed, the twin closets leaving plenty of room after Harry’s meager supply of clothes—floral shirts and baggy trousers, mostly—were hung.

  McCracken checked the bathroom and then moved on to the second bedroom. Save for a few stray pieces of miscellaneous furniture, it was empty. If Harry really had a son, this would have been his room. There would be posters plastering the walls, a kid’s bedroom set and workstation. Place for a computer.

  There was nothing. Just the excess furniture and boxes Harry had never gotten around to unpacking. How long had he been down here in the Keys flying for Air America’s offspring? That question had not come up last night.

  Blaine retraced his steps through the apartment, something edgy scratching at his spi
ne. He didn’t like the feeling in the rooms, found it too sterile. Even the carpets were neatly vacuumed, the lines against the grain still obvious.

  To wipe out the telltale wash of footprints and signs of a struggle, perhaps.

  Why am I thinking that?

  There was clearly no reason to; probably many nights when Crazy Harry Lime didn’t quite make it home no matter where home was.

  McCracken sat down on the white couch in the living room and pulled from his pocket the four-page psych report on Harry Sal Belamo had faxed to Blaine’s hotel that morning. It said pretty much what he had assumed: Harry Lime was crazy as a loon, except when he was flying. His grasp on reality seldom extended beyond the cockpit, where he was still as good a pilot as there was.

  Blaine read on but that was the nuts and bolts of it. They probably would have put Harry away if his flying hadn’t been such a damnable asset. That made him the ideal patsy for the new Air America. Skillful and unfalteringly reliable when working. Easily denounceable and forgettable if caught.

  Then again, McCracken also knew the door swung both ways. They weren’t asking Harry to do anything he didn’t want to. Flying was all he had, the only thing in his life that provided some measure of reality and balance.

  That brought him to Harry’s latest government file. Up until a decade before, 1985 say, the information jibed pretty much with what Blaine knew or expected. For the decade following, though, the information on the lines was strictly boilerplate, detailing Harry’s reassignment to details and venues he couldn’t have stomached for more than an hour. Humdrum stuff and transport missions. Some resupply to the Special Forces active behind enemy lines in the Gulf War. Advance missions to Panama and Grenada. Everything you’d expect.

  And none of it in keeping with Harry’s style. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t take on the more regular stuff; it was that the brass didn’t trust him with it. He was too prone to turn creative on them, make things up as he went along. Just tell him where, when and what and he’d handle the rest. Anything that came down through official channels was jobbed to someone else.