by Chuck Logan
Wide-eyed, Appert tumbles over the tree trunk and lands in a hollow of rotted leaves and moss. He rolls up on his butt, and his first reaction is to brush dirt off his white shirt. Then, reaching for the .40-cal Glock in the holster on his hip, he blurts, “Well, no shit!”
“There’s three of them. Until you shot off your mouth, they didn’t know I was here,” Davis says calmly as he pulls the charging handle on the CAR, cedes a round in the chamber, and does not set the safety. In a crouch now, ready to move. “Your guy is in those birches across the road. Keep him occupied. I’d hold about a foot and a half high with that .40.”
“You would, huh?” Appert scoffs, cautiously peering through the muddy roots, across the road.
“And there’s two of them at the other end with automatics,” he nods at the clearing, then frowns as he grabs a fast glance through the foliage at the silhouette still slumped in the front seat of Appert’s Crown Vic. “Who’s in the car, and why’s he still there?”
“It’s a surprise.” Appert expands his adrenalized grin.
Davis cuffs his shoulder. “Hey—this ain’t no drug bust taking down a door with fifty guys—we’re fighting for our lives here . . .”
“Wrong.” Appert continues to grin.
It is only then that Davis notices the shoulder mic fixed under the collar of Appert’s shirt along with the bulk of a Kevlar vest. Appert leans into the mic. “The package also counts three. Let the one in the birches sky out of here when we take the other two.”
“What the fuck?” Davis mutters as Appert pops up and fires three quick shots toward the birches. Then he ducks as a burst of return fire slices through the trees. Instead of firing toward the birch trees, Appert turns his pistol on his car and methodically blasts five holes in the gas tank.
“What’s . . .” Davis is rotating from side to side, scanning the brush. The sweet stench of draining gasoline now seeps into the brush from the car twenty feet away.
“Trust me,” Appert says as he reloads. Then he reaches under his vest, takes out a highway flare, uncaps it, and punches the bottom to ignite it. As it fizzes into giddy flame, he fires a few more rounds toward the birch trees. After the shooter in the birches fires back, Appert tosses the flare under his car, turns to Davis, and grins, saying, “Fire in the hole!”
“Holy shit!” They dive and huddle behind a log as the ground shakes with the explosion and a gasoline fireball swells into the twilight.
To the whoosh and crackle of the flames, a scratchy voice calls out in Appert’s mic. “That got their attention. The two to the south are making their move.”
“Take ’em,” Appert replies.
“Roger that.”
A second later a voice bellows, “FBI. Drop your weapons!” A volley of automatic fire answers the command. Two crisp shots bark in the foliage along the open area to the south. Then silence.
“They opted to fight. Two down,” the laconic voice in the mic says.
“Copy two down, break; Jimmy what’s on your end?” Appert says into the mic.
“The guy in the birches is making a run for it.”
“Let him go.” Then Appert turns to Davis, grunts, and points his finger, casual-like. “You, ah, got this black streak running down your neck. And one of your eyes is green and the other’s brown.”
“Musta lost a contact,” Davis grumbles as he dabs at his neck and his fingers come away damp with black hair dye. “Cheap shit don’t stay fast when you sweat.”
“Perils of undercover cosmetics,” Appert quips, setting the safety on his pistol and returning it to his holster.
“Not to hit it with too big a hammer, but there’s a guy burning up in your car,” Davis says as he breaks down the CAR 15 and stows it in his pack.
“Uh-huh. You got your ID? Your old ID, not your new ID that goes with the hair-dye job?”
“Yeah.” Davis fingers his old wallet from a side compartment on the pack, remembering what Mouse said about hanging on to his plastic and old Maine driver’s license and thinking, Why am I not surprised?
“Where’s that fancy watch you used to wear? With your initials engraved on the back.”
“No way. Not my Rolex.”
“Gimme,” Appert insists. “And the Zippo.”
“Uh-uh. It was my dad’s.”
“And the Zippo.”
Reluctantly Davis digs the watch and lighter from his pack.
Appert takes the wallet, watch, and lighter, then steps from their hiding place and, crouching, gingerly approaches the burning car. Wincing against the heat, he tosses the stuff through a flaming window.
Then Davis sees two men approaching from the south and another coming up the access road. The two coming from the south carry a scoped rifle and spotting scope masked in burlap and look like Spec Op hobos trailing tatters of their guille suits. The third guy carries a wicked little bull-pup number that could be a French Famas G2. He also hauls an industrial-strength fire extinguisher that he unlimbers as he approaches the burning car. As Appert and Davis retreat from the flames, the third man commences to hose down the flaming wreck with fire-retardant foam.
“What?” Appert deadpans, “you think you were the only cowboy in town. They’re snipers on loan from hostage rescue. Consider your ass rescued.”
Davis points to the burning car.
“Unclaimed body from the Baltimore Morgue we diverted from the crematorium. Gruesome, huh? We’re still working on the statement, but basically it’ll say that Joe Davis, an informant in a drug case, died here in a car fire in the midst of a dramatic shootout . . .”
“Can you pull that off? What about fingerprints, dental . . . ?”
Appert, obviously pleased with himself, replies, “Due to the nature of the explosion, dental and fingerprints were compromised. We identified the deceased off fragments of a driver’s license retrieved from a burned wallet. And other personal items.”
Davis shakes his head.
“Somebody wanted you out of the way? Well, you’re out of the way,” Appert shrugs. “And, ah, we have an agent standing by to talk to your folks in Caribou, Maine. Let them in on this before they see a news report. They’ll have to sign an NDA . . .”
“Thanks. Still, you set me up?” he scans the park area. Keeping a respectful distance, the two snipers quietly light celebratory cigars. The third guy casts aside the spent extinguisher and takes out his cell phone and makes a call. Then he holds up his hand and opens and closes his fingers once.
Appert nods and turns to Davis. “We got five minutes before it gets official around here.”
Davis pokes a friendly finger into Appert’s vest. “I didn’t think uptight old guys like you did this kind of stuff.”
“Uptight old guys,” Appert repeats.
“Yeah, like, we used to argue in Iraq. You thought the problem was a few bad apples . . .”
“And you figured the whole apple cart had turned rotten.” Then more serious, he says, “Listen, Joey, for my money you’re still a smart-aleck risk-taker. But you ain’t dirty, and that’s the word someone is putting out on you. You always been solid. I just think your pal, Mouse, has you on too long a leash.”
“Answer the question.”
Appert shrugs. “Word’s getting out. What happened at Turmar smells, so some people, like these guys,” he nods at the snipers, “are willing to stick their necks out and choose a side.”
“So you don’t think Richard Noland disappeared in a drive-by insurgent ambush?”
Appert cocks his head. “That atropine injector you found and I sent to the Quantico lab? It went missing in transit. When I inquired, a guy I’ve known for years took me aside and warned me to steer clear of you—that you were a career-stopper.”
Davis wrinkles his nose as a wind shift carries smoke his way. Before he can speak Appert holds up his hand. “My take is somebody went too far, crossed the line. That crew chief on that chopper? Somebody faked the after-action report. Way I heard it, she would have survived her wounds
from the crash. She was executed, Joey.
“Somebody big doesn’t want it stirred up. So some of the boys decided to let you go stir it up. After you called me, our people picked up intruders hacking my phone and emails. Connect the dots.”
“So you lured me in as bait.” Davis doesn’t pose it like a question.
“Don’t get sentimental. We had them,” he nods at the snipers, “to cover us. Which they did.” Appert jerks his head and starts walking south. “Let’s go see who we got.”
Davis shoulders his pack and accompanies Appert down to the clearing. They pause when they see the two bodies; the nearest one sprawls on his back in the open, the other is curled under a cement picnic table. Davis pats his pockets and realizes he left his cigarettes back in the car. When they get to the bottom of the clearing he walks to the first body and hunkers down. It’s the guy who carried the Uzi. He ignores the stench of the corpse’s bowels that released in a fatal convulsion.
The snipers tag along. One of them wrinkles his nose, puffs on his cigar, and observes, “Working conditions are still lousy in the shooting profession.”
Davis watches a foraging ant scurry on the dilated pupil of the corpse’s right eye that has started to film over and looks like a brown and white grape with a black hole in the middle. The busy ant explores down the claying face, enters the gaping mouth, pauses on a gold molar, and then runs in circles on the protruding tongue. You unplug the electricity, and the food starts to get sticky and spoil.
Then he notices the yellow nicotine stains on the fingers of the dead man’s left hand. He stoops over and rifles through the trouser pockets. No ID. But he comes up with a blue pack of cigarettes. Gauloise. Then, in the other pocket, he finds a metal lighter, thumbs the wheel, lights a cigarette, and takes a drag as Appert joins him.
“Check it out,” Davis says.
He rips the smock and shirt away from the corpse’s torso. Next to the bullet hole in the sternum, an indigo tattoo, edged with blood, covers the left chest muscle: a grim reaper in a robe with a halo around the skull.
Then Davis holds the lighter up next to the tattoo. It’s embossed with a circular emblem, a diagonal flourish across a parachute canopy. “Mexican Special Forces,” he says weighing the lighter in his palm. Then he flicks ashes on the tattoo. “And that, my friend, is Santa Muerte.”
Appert gives an appreciative whistle and says, “The drug lord’s patron saint of crime.”
“Los Zetas—ex-Mex Special Forces working for the drug trade. They also hire out as hit men,” the first sniper says.
“Real tough hombres. Only problem is, they tend to have more balls than brains,” the second sniper adds.
To the west, toward the Parkway, a flurry of red and blue flashers slap the twilight. “We’ll start forensics to print these guys and run them in the system. But, thing like this, I doubt we’ll get any hits. So this any help?” Appert asks.
“Not sure, but I like the still-breathing part,” Davis says, looking in the direction of the approaching emergency vehicles. Then they hear the sirens.
Appert’s voice is now urgent. “Gotta ask. What yanked your chain at Turmar? The atropine? The ammo truck conveniently blowing up?”
Davis, gathering himself to leave in a hurry, gnaws his lip. It was a girl. A girl with blue toenails. But he can’t say that, so he remains silent.
“Whatever. Now take off before we’re all over in the Maryland State Patrol,” Appert says. “Me and Mouse have your back. The way I see it, people who kill American soldiers are terrorists. And my job is catching terrorists . . .”
Davis asks, “What about the culture of headquarters?”
“Let me tell you something, kid. I worked the New York office under John O’Neill before 9/11. Headquarters ignored him on bin Laden. Fuck the culture of headquarters. This time the bullshit is gonna fall where it falls. Find me a bad guy, Joey; then call me on my cell any time day or night. I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Bobby. I owe you.”
“Yeah, yeah; screw you. Now get outta here before I start worrying about my pension.”
As Davis sets off at a trot for the darkening forest, Appert calls out after him, “Whoever you are now, I hope you packed some mosquito repellent. And Joey, try not to break the friggin’ law.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The trouble with mental discipline is it’s not reliable when you’re asleep. Morgon lurches up on an elbow and paws his free hand to swipe away the image of the pilot stretched out on the bed in Balad like a statue reposing on a crypt. File it away under occupational hazard. Immediately he sorts the memory flashes into perspective. Army psychologists have rated him extremely high in the ability to disassociate and compartmentalize—to suspend empathy. He pretty much knew he was different by the time he was thirteen. By then he’d won enough fistfights to learn that while he didn’t especially like to hurt people it didn’t bother him when he did.
But he’s not a robot; he knows that all the deferred pain and fear and doubt have to go somewhere. So it accumulates in his sleep like compound interest, along with the faces of the people he’s killed and the weight of their unlived lives.
Mogadishu was far worse. After that deployment he evolved a strategy for shaking the ghost willies out of his nervous system. He’d get on his motorcycle, tear out of Ft. Bragg, and head for an eleven-mile stretch of Tennessee 129 known as “the Dragon” because of the road’s 318 curves. “Taming the Dragon,” the good old boys called it. Lean into those turns fast enough, and you could shake off all your hitchhiking demons . . .
He runs his hand across his chest, and his fingers come away tingling with the hallucinations that swim in his sweat. What next? Giant spiders capering on the wallpaper?
So he eases from the bed and goes into the bathroom, turns on the tap, and splashes water on his face. There’s a bad moment looking into the mirror. He’s read that a wild animal does not recognize it’s own reflection, only the threat of the other. Sometimes they attack the glass.
Disorientation is one effect of residual concussion. Along with sex drying up and inappropriate displays of emotion. He looks into the bedroom as Amanda shifts on the bed, slipping the sheet, and sprawls in a narrow stripe of light from the ajar bathroom door. The light skims the contour of a bare hip, touches thigh, bent knee, and calf, and falls across her cheek. Just watching her makes him ache, the way her hair tumbles loose and carefree as black ribbons against her smooth, unlined forehead.
More challenging for him, by far, than the visiting ghosts, is trusting this woman whose sleeping face is as cleanly formed as fine China. But nothing’s perfect. He knows that she had a hard time in high school after her mother committed suicide. Migraines forced her out of med school. If he’s a fugitive from the workaday world, so is she. Her porcelain complexion conceals invisible cracks of depression that have been glued back together with Prozac and Zoloft. The estate is her sanctuary, and John is her protector. Now her protector is aged and infirm, and Morgon has been trundled out as a replacement.
If they sanctify his guardian status through marriage, even having children, he can’t shake the premonition he’ll always be the hired hand on the Rivard planatation.
Whatever, right now he needs some coffee. So he pulls on a light robe, slips quietly from the carriage house, descends the stairs, and walks barefoot across the damp grass to the mansion. Entering the house always reminds him that he came up hardscrabble in Mississippi until his dad had a vision of a Chrysler plant and led his brood to Warren, Michigan, on the ragged edge of the 313—which is to say—Detroit City. He’s been all over the world, and he winds up here, upstate from where he grew up. The first time he entered this place the antiques, wallpaper, and swagged curtains had surrounded him like a three-dimensional Currier and Ives greeting card. Likeit’s always Christmas in here.
Morgon trails his fingers along the ledge of a hundred-fifty-year-old oak claw-foot pedestal then inspects them for dust. When John passes, he’ll be livi
ng here. He’ll have to gradually change levels. Rise through the Sheriff’s Department in easy stages. Trade in his 4Runner and upgrade . . .
Passing Amanda’s office, he stops and studies the architect’s drawing that takes up the whole end wall. The drawing is their shared vision to renovate the Lakeside waterfront into an arts/vacation destination, as a tribute to John.
It’s a big step, getting ready to contemplate a normal life with Amanda. The next time he leaves the continental U.S. in search of prey, it will be to hunt the four-legged variety. A Kodiak, he’s thinking, in Denali.
Martha, the housekeeper, is humming in the kitchen and points to a fresh pot of coffee on the counter, so he takes a cup out to the table on the back patio. Down the lawn, Kelly is a backlit shadow as he moves though the languid movements of a tai chi form. As the sun breaks the horizon of Lake Huron, he carries his coffee down toward the shore, where Kelly is finishing up his exercise. They are waiting on word from the latest twist in the operation from hell.
“Anything from Roger?” he asks.
Kelly points to the sat phone propped on the lawn with his towel. “He called an hour ago. He’s flying in special to talk to you. Probably wants to show off the fancy new Bell 412 he bought for his company.” Envy is palpable on the young man’s face. “The 412 is quite a machine, carries thirteen passsengers . . .”
Morgon reads between the lines. Kelly misses flying; more and more his duties here revolve around John’s health. The estate helicopter’s sole purpose now is to buy a few extra minutes in a medical emergency.
Morgon, Amanda, and Kelly do not talk about it directly. It’s a waiting game.
Morgon leaves Kelly to finish his exercise and takes his coffee across the lawn to the pile of limestone next to his stalled wall. Looks messy. Another loose end. Finishing this job is first on my list. It’s time to start squaring this place away. His eyes drift back to Kelly. When the inevitable happens, we should start cutting back on expenses. Like, do we really need the helicopter and a mechanic coming in once a week from Traverse City making house calls?