Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  In the center of the photo, a baby-faced young man, shorter than the others, with a thick head of black hair to match his black eyebrows, stands with hands clasped behind his back, looking like a man who would belong at the center of every photo that ever captured him. The afterimage of a smile plays across his face as if someone—probably him—has just cracked wise. Erin Drelick knows his type from the Academy. Different eras may come and go, different styles of clothing and music, different presidents and different wars, but if there is one thing that America produces with consistency, it is cocky young men. The caption identifies him as Col. Paul Tibbets.

  Drelick felt a sensation of groundlessness, as if she were already on her flight, rising against a headwind. She had to work fast now, had to open as many browser windows as possible and load them with information she could read in flight when she would be unable to connect. She had found the photo of Tibbets and Parsons by searching for images only, knowing that it could save time to find two people with those names in the same photo for starters. Now she would need to copy the full names into Wikipedia, but first another image search for “Carmichael + Parsons.”

  There it was. A tingle passed through her stomach, a sensation that told her she had just connected enough dots to see the big picture when she widened her field of view. Here was a photo from a science fiction and fantasy magazine called Teletrope. She clicked on it and found that it was from an interview the magazine had done with Desmond Carmichael in 2006 at his home. The caption read, “Desmond Carmichael in his home office with wife Sandy Parsons, whose photography illustrates their forthcoming children’s book, The Forest Queen.”

  Desmond was seated at his desk, his swivel chair angled toward a slim, pretty woman who sat at the end of a couch with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap. Two objects were mounted on the wall behind the couple: a large framed print of a mushroom encircled by what looked like an aura of wispy fairies, and a Japanese katana.

  The frisson of pattern recognition flushed through Erin Drelick’s synapses—an infusion of truth riding a wave of neuropeptides. It was a tenuous connection, she knew. It was anything but legally admissible evidence, but she recognized the familiar, if rare, sensation for what it was: the conjunction of disparate elements into a form that would be absolutely concrete when the waters of intuition receded—the solution to a puzzle.

  The killer had seen this photograph. Maybe he had stumbled upon it by chance or maybe he had been searching like she had for the name Parsons, but when the killer saw the sword and recognized it as a Japanese infantry blade, a puzzle had been solved for him as well. Something had slotted into place like a detonation cap into a bomb.

  She looked up. The line for boarding had run down to its end, and the uniformed lady behind the microphone was looking at her with a raised eyebrow that said, Do I really need to turn this thing on just to tell you it’s last call? Drelick stood up to show that she was coming and took a tentative step toward the gate, toward the portable corridor through which she would soon walk with the noise of aircraft machinery rushing in through the gaps, toward the flight crew that would greet her at the end and look at her boarding pass.

  Flight crew. She tapped a tab on the screen in her hand as she walked.

  The plane that Tibbets and Parsons and the others were standing in front of was the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress. And not just any B-29. This was the plane that had dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Tibbets, the pilot, had named the plane after his mother. The bomb had a name too: Little Boy. Drelick imagined that bomb dropping out of the behemoth aircraft like a baby out of a mother’s womb.

  The birth of an apocalypse.

  She clicked again. If there was a midwife for that birth it was Deak Parsons of the Manhattan Project, he who had spent a sleepless night on August 5th in the cramped munitions bay of the bomber, practicing the maneuver he would execute in flight the following day: loading the mammoth shell with powder charges and arming the mechanism that would drive the uranium slugs together with divine velocity like the sound of one hand clapping.

  She could read the rest on the plane. She raised a finger to turn the tablet off, and froze. Looking at the corner of the screen to check the time and confirm that she wasn’t getting her ass in gear quite as late as the woman at the desk was implying with that expression, she saw the date: August 6th.

  * * *

  Chuck Fournier decided that making a sandwich while watching his wife get interrogated by the FBI would be in poor taste. Instead, he grabbed a jar of peanuts from the cabinet, screwed the lid off, and tossed a handful into his mouth, dropping a few on the kitchen tiles. He bent over and plucked the runaways from under the bottom cabinets; he didn’t want Pasco to think he was a slob or something. His knees popped on the way back up, and he had an embarrassing moment when he thought he might not be able to get fully upright again.

  Pasco was looking at him with a funny expression on his face. What did you call that, bemused? More like fascination. What was with this guy? Pasco slowly swiveled his attention back to Ginny. Chuck tossed the dropped nuts into the trash under the sink and brushed his hands together over the steel basin to knock the crumbs off. He wasn’t really tuned in to the line of questioning. He was thinking that the nuts he’d just tossed weren’t really dirty; Ginny kept the place spotless. He wondered if Pasco was a two-second-rule kind of guy. Would the fact that Chuck had tossed the nuts in the trash instead of tossing them back make Pasco think the floor was dirty? Who would know the cleanliness of the floor better than the man who lived here? Chuck was deciding to get a fucking grip and forget about the nuts, it wasn’t like Pasco was from Child Services or something. Get a fucking grip, Chuck, and start acting like a man because this is your turf, your territory. And not just the house but the whole goddamn town.

  Running his foul mental-mouth off was already helping him feel more like himself. He’d tried to clean the language up a bit while Lucas was in the house, but it put a strain on the brain. Maybe censoring himself was what had knocked him out of his groove so that somewhere along the line he’d let this Mexican desk jockey, this cocksucker—there you go, feelin’ better already—get the upper hand.

  Having a little something for the ol’ blood sugar was also helping. Maybe he could focus now and stop feeling like everything was sliding into the shitter off a table with a broken leg. One mistake was all it took sometimes. One good mistake, and like a broken table leg or a blown-out tire, the three good ones didn’t matter anymore.

  Pasco was yammering about the “child’s disposition.” Ginny was making noncommittal vocalizations that weren’t even words, but maybe that was good. Maybe she was thinking right after all. If he had a nickel for every time he’d told her about a dumbass who could have got away with something if the dumbass had enough sense to keep his trap shut, he could buy a decent cigar. So maybe she knew that. Hell, she watched enough TV she ought to know it by heart.

  “Did Lucas seem anxious about being here? Was he withdrawn? Did he have an appetite? You were watching him, weren’t you?”

  “I…I don’t know, that was like five different questions. He um, he seemed okay.”

  “Do you think he might have run away? Was he afraid of you and your husband?”

  “That was two again.”

  Hot damn, she was doing all right.

  Pasco’s phone rang. Saved by the bell.

  “Pasco,” he said and listened. Fournier watched him take a ballpoint and a flip pad from his breast pocket. “Yup. Go.” Pasco jotted two names in an impeccable, feminine cursive that filled Fournier with contempt: Paul Tibbets and William Parsons. The last names Fournier already knew, but the first names were unfamiliar.

  “Both are dead?” Pasco asked.

  So these are new vics? Fournier wondered.

  “What am I looking for in the obits?”

  Fournier strained to hear the faint metallic chatter emanating from Pasco’s phone. The guy’s hair
was too shaggy to let it through.

  “Okay, that it...? What else…? Could be a lot of convenience stores and gas stations. It could take a while. You don’t sound like we have that kind of time.”

  Pasco listened with a frown. “What anniversary?”

  An unnerving silence passed in the kitchen while Chuck Fournier longed for a louder phone, better ears, a sandwich.

  “Alright, I’m on it.” Pasco pressed END. His next question for Ginny was, “Can I borrow your yellow pages?”

  “Of course,” Ginny said, opening the drawer below their wall-mounted landline. She produced the floppy, seldom-used volume—so much thinner than the one Chuck had grown up with in this same town—and placed it in his hands.

  “What are we looking for?” Fournier ventured, glancing over the agent’s shoulder at the Cs, and wondering when Pasco would make it explicit that he was being cut out of the loop.

  “Convenience stores,” Pasco said, flipping his spiral notepad closed and tucking it back in his pocket. In Fournier’s experience, if you were hunting through a phone book, you usually kept your pad out, and he figured Pasco had stowed it just to keep it from prying eyes.

  “Why convenience stores?”

  “And tobacco shops. You want to stay involved in this case?”

  “Which case?” Fournier asked with trepidation.

  “Let’s say the kidnapping case. Wanna stay on the investigating side for a little while longer, maybe redeem your ass?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Good, because I have other research to do and I’m short a partner. I want you to call every shop in town that sells smokes and ask if they sell clove cigarettes. Make a list of the ones that do and tell them you’re looking for a suspect who smokes them, a Japanese man. Ask if they know who you’re talking about. Let me know if you get a hit.”

  “So we have a suspect?”

  “Not really. It’s a long shot. Something Carmichael asked Agent Drelick to look into. But you can let the shop clerks think you have more to go on so it doesn’t come off as ethnic profiling.”

  Fournier smiled. Maybe, just maybe, he could get to like this Pasco, if the wind started to change direction. “What does this have to do with those names you wrote down?”

  Pasco looked out the window at the back yard. “It’s just a theory.”

  Fournier nodded and tried to suck a piece of peanut skin from under his gum line. It wouldn’t come.

  “You sure Lucas couldn’t reach that latch?” Pasco asked, turning to look him in the eye.

  Fournier sighed. “Pretty sure. You think he ran away?”

  “No. But I hope he did.” Pasco headed for the door. “I want to hear from you soon, Chuck,” he said, swinging it shut behind him.

  Fournier seized the marker from the magnetic dry erase board on the fridge. Below where Ginny had written LIGHT BULBS, and EXT 237, he scrawled: PAUL T. / WILLIAM P. He would Google them later, find out what Pasco had his nose in.

  Then he looked at Ginny, and solemnly shook his head. “Babe. How the hell did you lose him?”

  She was shaking her head too, and he saw that tears were spilling out of her eyes. “I don’t know. I was right here at the window, I swear, Chuck, I didn’t look away for more than a minute. He just…he was gone…so fast. So fast.” He knew he should embrace her. He knew, but he chose not to. Let that be enough. He wasn’t going to rip her a new one. He didn’t have time for that, and what would be the point? He had put this on her. She hadn’t asked for it, not exactly. He’d wanted to make her happy. She had always wanted kids, but he’d never been able to give her any. Her shoulders collapsed inward like the support beams of a burning house, and she lifted her folded hands as if in the gesture of prayer, covered her nose and mouth with them, and breathed into her folded palms, looking at him as if over a mask.

  He closed the phone book and tapped his pocket to make sure his car keys were still there. He didn’t need a damn book to figure out where to start asking questions in this town. Sherry down at Tradewinds would have clove cigs, and she’d be able to tell him every other shop in town that carried them. Sherry wouldn’t be shy about gossiping on customers, either. Tradewinds was right across the street from the station, and Chuck stopped in most mornings to grab a ham-and-egg sandwich before hitting his desk. He decided to leave the ‘vette at the house and take Ginny’s car. Pasco might head to the station, and Fournier wouldn’t mind if that guy didn’t know his exact whereabouts just yet.

  “Chuck?” Ginny said, looking a lot older than she had yesterday, when having a boy in the house, even a boy who looked like he wanted to pee in a corner like a frightened puppy, had flushed her with vigor. In time she would have coaxed Lucas out of his shell, would have nurtured him and made him smile. He knew she would have been good for him, and he for her. Now she was a frail bird of a woman, clutching her teacup in both hands like she needed to draw every unit of warmth it could offer, even in the middle of a hot summer day. “What that agent said about a suspect, someone who smokes the cigarettes you’re supposed to be looking for...”—she shot a glance at the names on the whiteboard—“does that mean that Desmond isn’t crazy, that he didn’t kill Phil?”

  He almost said something noncommittal about not having all of the facts yet, the kind of bullshit he could reel off without thinking when someone from WBZ put a microphone in his face. Instead, he found that it felt better to just tell her. “Yeah. Probably. Des tried to tell me about the cigarette thing before, and I thought it was a red herring. I fucked up, babe.” He sucked on his teeth, and the peanut skin came free. “But I’m gonna fix it.”

  She absorbed this, staring into her teacup as if it were an oracle.

  * * *

  Sherry sold cloves but didn’t know of any Asians who bought them. She sent him to two other vendors she thought might have them: a cigar shop in nearby Sayville and a gas station/convenience store at the western edge of Port Mavis. He knew the second place—it used to be an auto-repair shop run by one of his old high-school football buddies. The minimart had been added when Mike sold it to a Pakistani guy and moved to Connecticut. It was off the beaten path, out by the firehouse and the big playground with the wooden castles.

  He aimed the car west and readied himself for the unhappy prospect of squeezing a Pakistani shopkeeper for information about his customers based on ethnicity. As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem.

  “I special order them for him,” Mr. Sharif said. “His name is Hashimoto, he live in the neighborhood. This old man is criminal suspect?”

  “I’m afraid so. You know where he lives?”

  Now Sharif looked slightly uncomfortable, but it had still been a big win, and in the first five minutes. “I couldn’t tell you his address, but it must be nearby because he walks. No car.”

  “What direction does he come from when he walks?”

  Sharif waved his hand at the road. “That way.”

  “Alrighty, thank you, Mr. Sharif. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Fournier took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned back to face the counter. “That’s a nice American flag you have out front. Big one. You buy that before or after 9/11?”

  Sharif suddenly appeared to take a keen interest in examining the scratches in his glass countertop. “What does that have to do with your case?” Sharif said in a quiet but steady voice.

  “I only ask because I saw some small business owners like yourself having to deal with unfortunate acts of vandalism after 9/11. Just because some ignorant townies questioned your loyalty. So I can see why a man in your shoes might buy a big flag. Biggest one you could find, right? Profiting off the high price of a barrel of oil…you want people to know which team you’re on. Am I right?”

  Sharif nodded.

  Fournier approached Sharif again and, in a conspiratorial tone, said, “Now this Hashimoto, he’s a person of interest in what may turn out to be a terrorism case.”

  Sharif looked up from the counter. “Does
this have anything to do with the murder of the policeman whose daughter was killed last year?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Because the papers are talking about a serial killer.”

  “Let’s stay focused here, Mr. Sharif. I need you to think carefully before you answer my question. Did Mr. Hashimoto ever pay you with a credit card? Maybe sometimes he bought more than cigarettes, maybe he gassed up his car one day. Think about it.”

  Sharif looked Fournier in the eye and said, “No. Cash only.”

  Fournier tapped his meaty palm two times on the counter and said, “Thank you for your time.”

  He left Ginny’s car in the gas-station lot and headed down the sidewalk on foot. He knew he could use a walk, both for the exercise and to get his brain working on a different wavelength. On foot he’d be more apt to notice details in the neighborhood. Since he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for—other than an old Japanese man or an unlikely mailbox with the name on it—he wanted to just take it all in, see what caught his eye. If Hashimoto really was an old man, he probably wasn’t walking more than a mile. But if this cigarette thing was leading him to an old‐timer, Japanese or not, what were the chances he had successfully murdered all of those people with a sword? A gun, maybe, but swinging steel and butchering people without getting caught? That was a young man’s work.

  The day was hot and humid, with gathering curtains of black clouds threatening in the north. Maybe evening thundershowers would break the stifling heat. His shirt was already wet with perspiration by the time he reached the first stop sign…and the first decision: keep going straight on the main route or branch off into the residential streets? He was regretting not taking the car and considered going back for it. In the car he would have air conditioning and shelter if the sky decided to open up. In the car he could also have a bag of Fritos and a Coke.