Upside Down

by John Ramsey Miller

  After snagging the shells, the man straightened. He went around the desk, aimed the gun down, and to Faith Ann's horror fired one more time. As he bent down to collect the final casing, she glimpsed the manila envelope curled up in his coat pocket. He came into the conference room and stopped at the edge of the table—opening and slamming the top of the copy machine. Faith Ann focused on the hem of his long coat, on his gray pants with sharp creases and cuffs and his shiny two-tone shoes. He went through the things on the table above her; scattered papers fluttered to the floor.

  Faith Ann pushed away the thought of what his gun might have done.

  You can't find me.

  I'm not here.

  Go away.

  Don't look for me.

  I'm invisible.

  As if commanded by her thoughts, the man left the room.

  She listened to his footsteps as he checked the other rooms down the hall. After he looked in both the vacant office and the kitchen, he hurried back up the hall and left through the front door.

  Faith Ann lay there trembling in silence for a very long while, afraid his closing the door was a trick designed to flush her out. Then she slipped down onto the floor and came out from under the table on all fours. “Mama?” she said, testing the sound of her voice.

  The only sound inside the office was the steady beeping of the telephone, off its hook behind the desk. The smell of cordite, which reminded her of shooting cans with Uncle Hank, mixed with Amber's gardenia perfume.

  Faith Ann could hardly see through her tears. She had never seen a real dead person before, and it was terrifying. Amber was sprawled out on the threadbare Oriental carpet where the chair had dumped her. Her face was bloody, but Faith Ann didn't focus on that—didn't want to look at the person who had brought this horror to the Porters.

  Slowly Faith Ann rounded the desk and stared down at the ruined woman she loved more than anyone on earth. The terrible reality of it slammed into her, giving her the sensation of being hollowed out and filled with superheated air. Scared she would faint, Faith Ann inhaled sharply, fighting to remain conscious.

  Cold-blooded murder. This is how it comes—all of a sudden, out of the blue. Nobody warns you. A door opens and there it is. Mama, this is exactly what your death row men did—those friendly-looking men on the corkboard who can smile at your camera like saints, even though one day they did something just like this to people just like you. Faith Ann knew she shouldn't be hysterical.

  The large red stain on her mother's white blouse was so bright and wet it seemed to glitter. The pearl, run through with a thin gold chain—a Mother's Day gift from Faith Ann—rested in the hollow of Kimberly's throat.

  Faith Ann dropped to her knees, placed her hands on her mother's chest, and pressed down hard. Air hissed, and bubbles rose from her chest. Her face was so pale. . . .

  Faith Ann put her mouth on her mother's and blew in, trying to make her all right. That made more bubbles, and Faith Ann was crying so hard she couldn't see. She tried to wipe away the tears, but she wiped blood across her face, tasting it.

  She screamed.

  Faith Ann reached up to the desk and found the box of tissue there, pulled several out and wiped her eyes and face.

  No lifesaving effort would matter. After she had wiped her eyes, Faith Ann studied Kimberly's face. It was slack, her mouth open the way it did when she slept on her back, her eyes partly open, the irises rolled back.

  Faith Ann knew her mother wasn't ever going to say anything—never again tell Faith Ann that she loved her, or scold her for goofing off. Faith Ann ignored the hole in her mother's forehead and, closing her own eyes, kissed her warm cheek, inhaling the familiar, comforting scent of her. She could almost pretend that her mother was sleeping. Faith Ann understood that she was now suddenly all alone, and she didn't care if the man came back and killed her too while she was kneeling there.

  When she became aware of a wet warmth and saw to her horror that she was kneeling in a growing pool of her mother's blood, Faith Ann shrieked and jumped back. And she knew that she really did not want to die.

  Tell me what to do, Mama.

  She alone knew why the man had killed her mother and Amber. Kimberly's client, Horace Pond, was being executed at ten P.M. on Saturday night for two murders the man in the pictures did.

  Today is Friday. Tell me what to do, Mama. Please.

  Faith Ann felt herself growing lighter, the fog in her mind clearing. It was almost seven o'clock. Later, Napo, the law student from Tulane who was helping her mother on the Pond case, would come.

  Faith Ann's mind locked on something else. The killer took those pictures! He stole the Pond evidence!

  The negatives! Faith Ann straightened and hurried into the conference room. She looked at the corkboard, meeting the basset hound eyes of Horace Pond, an aging, narrow-shouldered man who actually was that one innocent man in a hundred. She pulled a chair over to stand on, opened the corkboard door, and rolled the numbered dial. Three times around to thirty-one. Left to sixteen and right passing ten once and stopping at it next time.

  She heard the snap as she twisted the lever and eased the heavy door open. She opened the cigar box, gathered up the remaining currency, and stuffed the wad into her jeans pocket before closing the door and replacing the corkboard. She reached to her hiding place, pulled her backpack up onto the table, took out the textbooks, and slipped the sealed envelope into it. The plastic bag containing her mother's rain poncho was in there, as was the lunch her mother had made her and a bottle of water. Then Faith Ann went to the bathroom.

  She screamed at the sight in the mirror of her blood-smeared face. She used a bar of soap to scrub her hands and face. As she washed, the water running to the drain turned red. Faith Ann started crying, and she slumped over the sink and let the grief enclose her. Only when the tears stopped flowing did she dry her hands and blow her nose into a paper towel.

  I can't call the police.

  Jerry owns the police.

  Tell me what to do, Mama.

  Faith Ann went into the conference room, grabbed her backpack from the table, and went out into the hallway. She paused at the door to her mother's office to take one last look. When she did, she noticed a faint reflection from a steadily blinking red light. She hurried to the desk and moved the loose papers covering her mother's cassette recorder, which was still running.

  The killer missed it! When she recorded interviews, Kimberly liked to cover the machine up so people would forget it was sitting there. That way they'd be less self-conscious, she'd told Faith Ann.

  Faith Ann couldn't believe her luck. She pressed the Stop button once, then pressed it down again to eject the tape, which she put inside her backpack next to the sealed envelope containing the photocopies and the negatives. Everything her mother and Amber had said was on that tape.

  Faith Ann leaned over and touched her mother gently on the cheek. “I love you, Mama.”

  That said, Faith Ann went straight out through the front door and was gone.

  3

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  Often when Winter Massey sat still for a period of time, his right foot would grow numb and tingle. In order to restore the feeling to it he had to get up and walk. The lingering nerve damage was the only thing left over from being shot a year earlier. The entrance and exit scars were islands of white scar tissue on the front and back of his right thigh. He had been on crutches for six weeks after he was shot and had used a cane for another three. The injury made sitting at a desk to fill out reports, and stakeouts conducted while sitting in cramped spaces, rather unpleasant. Few things blew a surveillance more effectively than for a watcher to get out of a parked vehicle every thirty minutes or so to walk around in circles before getting back in. He still participated in his favorite activity, fugitive recovery, but no matter how many fugitives he apprehended, Winter Massey would always be best known for his ability with a handgun.

  Over a year had passed since Winter had been w
ounded. At that time his reputation had been such that he could have chosen to head up any marshals office in the country or have any position near the top of the United States Marshals Service organizational chart he wanted. The name Winter Massey had been golden, but now he was burned out on playing cops and robbers.

  Doctors said the dead spots in his leg and foot would regain sensation and his circulation would vastly improve in time. At thirty-seven, he could still run ten miles without breaking a sweat, but he would never again compete in an Ironman contest. Considering all he had been through in his career as a deputy U.S. marshal, just being alive put him among the luckiest people on earth.

  He had left I-85 and was on I-77 negotiating the sweeping left-hand turn when his cellular rang. As he straightened the Explorer's path, and with the Charlotte, North Carolina, skyline looming before him, he looked down at the displayed name and number.

  “Hey, old man,” he said, after opening the phone.

  “Just a courtesy call to remind you about lunch,” Hank said.

  “Sean said she'd be finished at her doctor's in the BB&T building by eleven,” Winter replied. “I'm about six minutes out on I-77.”

  As he hung up, his cellular phone rang again. He didn't check the caller I.D. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah what, Massey?”

  Winter smiled at the sound of his wife's voice.

  “So, what did Dr. Wanda say?” he asked. Sean hadn't been feeling well for a couple of weeks, and Winter had finally convinced her to visit his doctor, a youthful blonde with an enthusiasm, an infectious smile, and a talent for making everybody feel like they were her only patient.

  “Dr. Wanda said, ‘Get dressed, you perfectly healthy young lady,' and she wrote me a prescription to head over to the café for lunch with my favorite man.”

  “What about the—?”

  “Jesus, Massey. I'm fine. Okay? Did you finish the letter?”

  “I did.” He glanced at the console to the letter addressed to the director of the United States Marshals Service—a letter he had spent a week drafting to make sure the tone was perfectly pitched, respectful, and that the resignation it announced was clearly stated. Everybody understood his decision and there were no hard feelings or regrets. The letter was a formality, because he had already told the director, Richard Shapiro, that he was going to accept the offer from Guardian International Security. The company had offered him an enormous salary, yearly stock options, and about a hundred attractive perquisites they figured were necessary to close the deal. Winter would have been insane not to take the executive position that would allow him to lock his carry weapon away in his gun safe. Sean, who knew how dangerous his job had become, had been deliriously happy when he made the decision.

  “I can't wait to get you on the slopes and teach you how to ski,” she said. “You're gonna love it.”

  “I know how to ski,” he said.

  “Water skiing isn't the same thing as snow skiing, Massey.”

  “You teach me to snow ski and I'll teach you a thing or two in the chalet.”

  Her laughter was glorious.

  Although Sean and Winter had only been married for eight months, he felt as though he had known her his entire life. They had met when Winter joined a witness protection detail and was charged with protecting a professional killer who was going to testify against an aging mobster. Sean had been married to the killer, and when the operation turned deadly and went as wrong as things can go, it had been Sean Devlin whose life needed protecting and only Winter who had been in a position to save her. That had happened a little over a year before. After their shared experiences—each having trusted the other and after each had saved the other's life—neither of them wanted to be apart from the other.

  Winter believed that he had twice been married to perfect women, who had both been his closest friends. His first wife, Eleanor, had been killed in an airplane crash four years earlier. For three years he had lived with a deep grief that was only made bearable because of his love for their son, Rush. After Eleanor's death Winter's mother, Lydia, had moved into his home to help him raise his son and both of them took immediately to Sean.

  After a short formal courtship, Winter had asked Sean to marry him, and she had accepted. Winter still thought daily about Eleanor, but he knew that Eleanor would have wanted for him to love someone and to again be loved by them. Someone who would be a good and nurturing mother to her son. And Winter knew that she would have approved of Sean.

  “Hey, Massey, you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “You know what,” she said, hanging up.

  “I love you too,” he said before he put the phone in his pocket.

  He hoped mailing the letter would lift a great weight from his shoulders—that leaving the badge behind might somehow cause the ghosts of the people he had killed to vacate his mind.

  He repeated a familiar prayer. God, please release me from my guilt and give them peace. In return, I promise that if there is any possible way to avoid doing so, I will never take another human life.

  Winter Massey had asked God for favors before. He understood that although He had the power to do so, God might not take the deal.

  Until 1802, Charlotte had been a sleepy community founded in the 1750s by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German Lutheran farmers. That year, a farmer named John Reed discovered that a yellow rock the size of a shoe, which he had unearthed years earlier with his plow blade and had been using as a doorstop, was in fact a gold nugget. Until the California strike at Sutter's Mill in 1848, the mines in North Carolina supplied all of the gold used for coinage by the United States. The railroads made Charlotte a commercial hub. After the mines played out, textile and tobacco barons like the Cannons and the Reynolds turned the area into an industrial center. As a consequence of enterprising individuals, the banks filled up with money and began an expansion that had never stopped.

  When Winter arrived at 10:55, the City Grill was nearly empty. He took a corner table near a front window. Five minutes later, Hank Trammel, who had been Winter's boss until he'd retired six months earlier, had been his superior officer, his mentor, and had become his closest friend, swaggered into the room like a sheriff in a Western movie, replete with a charcoal-gray handlebar mustache and gold eyeglasses with small round lenses and wraparound earpieces.

  Hank Trammel was walking proof that being from south Texas wasn't something you could easily scrape off your boots. Although he hadn't lived there in over thirty years, Hank dressed like he still ranched in south Texas. Rain, shine, hell or high water, he wore cowboy shirts, khaki pants, sharp-toe boots, a hand-tooled belt with a turquoise-laden buckle the size of a man's fist, and a string tie. On formal occasions, he wore patent leather boots with his tuxedo. He had given up golf but had in his closet a pair of fire-engine-red Tony Lamas with metal spikes.

  Hank was a substantial man who, at fifty-eight, still wore his hair in the same flattop he'd had in high school. Both his grandfather and father had died from gunshots. His grandfather had been ambushed by cattle rustlers, and his father, a Texas Ranger, had been shot in the back by a teenager on a thrill-killing spree. On duty, Hank had always carried his father's gun in the same hand-tooled high-rise hip holster. Trammels were stone-tough people who lived hard lives because they didn't know any other way.

  Hank crossed to Winter's table, dropped his “Lyndon Johnson” Stetson on the wide window ledge next to a potted plant, and sat with his back to the glass.

  “We ran into Sean outside, and she and Millie went to go powder their noses,” Hank said. “She's smoking a cigarette.”

  Millie Trammel was a secret smoker. Hank had quit, and he acted like he didn't know his wife still did, and she acted like she didn't do it. It was sort of a sanctioned denial game.

  A waitress with curly black hair and a silver bead on one side of her nose swept up and stopped in front of the men. “Our wives are joining us,” Hank told the young woman. “We'll all have tea.”

&
nbsp; “Sweet tea?”

  “What, darlin', don't I look sweet enough to you?”

  “Don't pay my grampy any mind,” Winter told her. “Sweet tea.”

  The waitress walked away.

  “So you're really doing it?” Hank asked Winter.

  “Yep.”

  “I'd hoped you would change your mind.”

  “No way. You're retired now, so why the hell do you care whether I'm still on the job? Ain't like there aren't fifty to take my slot.”

  “I was looking forward to having you nearby in my golden years. In case I have a stroke and need somebody to bathe me, change my diapers.” Hank wiped his head as though there was some hair over his ears that needed pushing back. “I suppose Virginia or Maryland is close enough. You're going to miss the job.”

  “I owe Rush and Sean my nights and weekends. And I've just been plain lucky for just too long. The odds of me walking away from another scrape like the last couple is slim. I've seen enough action to last me awhile.”

  “My old daddy always said the only man you can't ever walk away from is one you kill.”

  Without any words to add, Winter just shrugged. He didn't want to talk about the weight of the dead men perched on his shoulders. It was something no amount of churchgoing, psychiatry, or emptying bottles could lessen. Neither self-defense nor heat of battle made the slightest difference in the anguish that killing brought a normal man.

  “Massey, I have to say that the idea of you teaching ex-football players how to protect executives whose biggest threat is not hitting a green in regulation gives me some pause.”

  “It's done. I stuffed my resignation letter into that blue box right out there before I walked in. As of November the fifteenth, I will be a civilian.”

  “Then congratulations,” Hank said, extending his hand across the table. “Those security guys want the best, that's what they're getting. I told them so back when they called me.”