by Kip Cassino
The man’s eyes widened. He scurried off without regard for his partner, who still lay on the floor, bleeding and moaning softly. The Captain kicked the fallen hoodlum solidly in the back of his head, stepped over him and found another place to sit. A smile flashed across his face. Suddenly, he felt much better. No one else bothered him after that.
A raised, well lit area in the front of the room held a podium. Now, a uniformed cop walked to it and began calling names through its microphone. A couple of the telemarketers rose, and were escorted from the room. The Captain knew his turn would come soon.
They called for Vernon Taws an hour later. The Captain rose from his seat and followed the man in plain clothes who beckoned him. They went down a hallway to a small windowless room holding a table and two chairs. The man sat in one, and directed him to the other.
The man was tall, heavy-waisted, and balding. He wore chinos, a short-sleeved shirt, and a clip-on tie. He carried a side-arm, a revolver in an underarm holster, and smelled strongly of cigarettes. “My name is Brickell,” he said in a raspy voice. “I’m a detective. It says here your name is Taws. Vernon Taws. That correct?” He was reading from a thin file.
The Captain nodded. “That’s my name,” he said. He looked around the room, attempting to find the video camera which was surely mounted on its walls somewhere.
His seeming lack of attention angered Brickell. “Stop looking all over the place,” the detective said. “Look at me, goddammit. Now, you’re in trouble. Bad trouble! Do you understand that?”
“What have I done?” the Captain asked in a mild voice. “What are the charges against me?”
“Wire fraud,” Brickell said, his face beginning to redden. “Didn’t they tell you that? Wire fraud! Trying to swindle our visitors, that’s what!”
The Captain slowly shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I’m nothing but a telemarketer. All I do is ask people to walk through time-share condos. That’s all I do. There’s nothing illegal about it.”
“Ever sell one?” Brickell asked.
“Not very often,” the Captain said. “Mostly, I just set up appointments.”
“Ever sell the same one? More than once?”
The Captain shook his head. “No, I haven’t,” he said. Now matters were becoming clear. Mountain Orchard Marketing had more customers than it had time shared condos to sell from time to time―and everybody wanted the same dates. The swindle had been selling the same reservations for the same condos more than once. The cops had probably been watching them for months. Someone must have tipped off the people in charge, the ones who were really to blame for all of this. That was why that fat piece of shit Sweeney had been missing this morning. He and the rest of his crew hadn’t been warned. The telemarketers had been left to suffer the consequences.
“I think you’re lying,” Brickell said. His face had flushed even more. This guy is headed for a heart attack, the Captain thought.
“I’m not,” he said. “Nobody in that room, none of the seven you picked up today, had any idea what was going on.” The Captain kept his voice low and even. He didn’t want to arouse his interrogator further.
Brickell laughed and leaned forward, pushing his face closer to the Captain. “So who is to blame? Santy Claus?” he asked.
“You could start with a guy named Sweeney,” the Captain said. “I think his first name is Del. I can give you a full description. The others can, too. He didn’t show up for work today. I think somebody tipped him off. There was a man and a woman, I only saw them once. I think the woman’s name was Vaughn …”
“Lies,” said Brickell, interrupting. “Lies and more lies. Tell me the truth, Taws. Things will go easier for you if you do.”
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” the Captain said. “Give me a polygraph. I’ll pass.” He could imagine what was happening. There had been complaints, maybe one from somebody with political pull. The police needed quick arrests, to satisfy local big-wigs and calm the waters. They would press him and the others until someone broke and confessed to anything, probably for a promise of release afterward. That would be a lie, of course. Police were allowed to lie during interrogations. He figured the slight, nervous woman who’d worked next to him was a good target for them. She was weak, and not very smart―easy to bully and confuse. She wouldn’t take long to fold.
“You’re nothing but a low-life drifter,” Brickell said. “You slide through town, infect us like bedbugs. You going to stick to your story?”
The Captain nodded.
“Then we’ll book you and stick you in a cell,” Brickell said, his face now beet-red. “Put you between some steel. Maybe a few days of that will soften you up.”
They both stood. Without speaking further, the detective led him down the hall, where he was searched once again, formally booked, stripped of his clothing and belongings, issued an orange jumpsuit and some sneakers, and led to his cell. It was late afternoon. Pauley would be waking up about now, he guessed.
The trailer was dark and silent. Pauley rolled over in his sleeping bag and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t hear the Captain. Where was he? Pauley wondered. He should be home by now, preparing meds for him. Pauley sat up in bed, swung his long legs to the floor, and sat for a while holding his head in his hands. His left hand was rough, scaled with deep, vicious scars that extended up his arm. His unscarred right hand was thickly calloused from the hard work he’d performed most of his life. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, stood, and padded to the dingy adjoining bathroom. “You get the penthouse suite,” the Captain had told him when they rented this place.
Pauley Abbott stood well over six feet tall, even without shoes. He was thin and gangly, with big shoulders, long arms, and slim hips. His unkempt brown hair was curly, his eyes deep blue. His right profile was that of an even-featured man in his thirties. The other side of his face was that of a demon. Prominent, sweeping scars flowed from the top of his head down. His left ear was a charred stump, his left eye partially obstructed by the seemingly melted flesh around it. The scars continued down his neck and covered most of the left side of his body. The shaving mirror in the bathroom he walked to had been carefully covered over with newspaper. Even under the heavy dosage of lithium carbonate Pauley took every day, a long look at what he’d become would upset him.
Pauley Abbott’s scars weren’t new. He’d had them since the day in 2004 when Taliban fighters overran his forward observation post in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Memories of that day were seared into his mind. He could never forget them, no matter how hard he tried. The sky had been cloudless bright blue that morning. There was no hint of trouble until the mortar rounds began to hit. Lance Corporal Abbott―a label he’d had then―had been outside the bunker, refueling a generator. He’d been holding a ten-gallon cannister just about shoulder high when shrapnel from an exploding shell punctured it and sprayed him with gasoline. Another explosion followed quickly, wounding him and knocking him off his feet. He lost consciousness then.
Terrible pain revived him. He was burning, on fire. He rolled to his right, trying to put out the flames. Over and over he rolled, dust flying around him. He tried to get up, but failed. He lost consciousness again, for a while. When he awoke, it was night. The terrible pain remained. He could feel wounds in his back and side. He tried to look around, using his right eye, the only one that worked. The dark shapes around him were incomprehensible. He tried moving, pushing himself forward with his right leg. The pain intensified. He blacked out again.
In the blurred, quasi-awareness that followed some time later, he felt himself being moved, then lifted. His pain was an enormous beast, devouring him. He tried to scream but couldn’t. He felt high wind, then motion. A chopper, he thought. I’m in a chopper. He slept.
For what seemed to him like a long time, Pauley could make little sense of the world around him. He sensed movement from time to time. There w
ere parts of his body that throbbed with pain, and these were probed once in a while. A large part of his body―most of his left side―was numb and lifeless. He saw lights. He saw faces in front of him. He heard sounds he could not decipher. Sometimes he thought he heard people speaking, but they seemed far away. He could not comprehend what they said.
He regained full consciousness in a bed, surrounded by other beds and busy people. He realized this was a hospital. He was alive. He had survived. That realization filled Pauley with joy, but only momentarily. Where were the other guys? He tried to move around to look, and realized he was immobile. The left side of his body wouldn’t move at all. It was in some kind of cast or sheath.
A man in blue scrubs stepped around his bed. “Welcome home, lance corporal,” he said. The name tag on his chest read “Jory.”
“Where am I?” Pauley asked.
“You’re at Brooke Army Medical Center,” Jory said. “You have serious burns over fifty percent of your body. That’s why you can’t feel much on your left side. I’m one of your nurses. Your war is over, Marine. You’ll be going home from here.”
“How bad is it?” Pauley asked. He looked around and noticed several intravenous drips flowing into him from a Christmas tree-like metal pole beside his bed.
“I won’t lie to you,” Jory said. “It’s bad. Your whole left side is pretty chewed up. Plus, you’ve got shrapnel wounds in your back and side. Look, this hospital is the best in the world at dealing with burns. I’ve seen them work miracles. We’ll fix you up.”
They took him to surgery the next day. Jory told him this would be “debridement”―the removal of dead tissue from his burns so that healing could begin. They worked on him for several hours that day, and several more the next. They gave him anti-pain medication, but the sense of what was happening still drove him wild. He was grateful for the anesthesia.
The surgeries continued for days. The doctors who stopped by his bed told Pauley he was lucky. No amputations would be required. He would regain full use of his left arm and leg. “What about my face?” he asked. “We’ll see about that a little later,” they answered.
Three weeks after he woke up at Brooke, they let Pauley see himself in a mirror. He recognized immediately that he had become a monster. “They should have left me out there,” he said, weeping. “I should have died.” That night, he went missing from his bed. When he was discovered hiding in a linen closet, he was carefully subdued and sedated.
In another week, the excisions of his burnt, dead flesh were completed. Skin grafting and physical therapy would normally have begun, but Pauley’s quickly deteriorating mental condition would not allow it. For the most part, he displayed symptoms of profound depression and lethargy, but these quickly transformed to active mania when he was confronted by his doctors and nurses. Pauley was potentially dangerous to himself and those around him, they decided. Various cocktails of medication were tried to soothe his overheated mind. Eventually, lithium carbonate proved to be most effective.
Lithium is a powerful drug. A person given large amounts thinks, moves, and speaks slowly. Dosage must be carefully controlled, to minimize its many side effects. Pauley was calmed and his treatment could proceed, but only as long as his mind was shackled with medication. He was a young man when he was wounded, only twenty-two. When he was released from Brooke, Pauley had the stumbling, hesitant gait of an aged pensioner.
Physical therapy began, along with two minor surgeries on his left arm to improve his use of it. Three months later, all that could be done for him had been completed. Pauley was released from military service and granted a full disability pension by the Veteran’s Administration. His mother drove from Arkansas to take him home with her.
For three months, Pauley lived with his mother in West Memphis―just beyond the Mississippi River from Tennessee. The situation made neither of them happy. Raeann, his mother, had long ago divorced Pauley’s father, and hadn’t seen her son for ten years. Her last memory of him was his big blue eyes, watching her from the back window of Cal’s truck as they drove away. Raeann had been a young, pretty redhead then. She still retained the red hair, but little else from her youth.
Life had not been kind to Raeann. She got by doing housecleaning under the table and depended on welfare for most of her steady income. Until two years ago, she’d been a heavy drinker and a pack-a-day smoker. Then she stumbled into Find Your Savior with Merle and Maribel. A woman she knew, another maid, told her about it on a day when both were busy caring for a mansion in midtown Memphis. “Just come with me next week,” she said. “They will put your soul on the track to heaven.” Plus, she explained, there was lots of free food. That last was enough to convince Raeann. She was there on Sunday evening, in her best dress and shoes. It had been difficult, but she’d abstained from alcohol all day―though she had continued to smoke. The evening changed her life.
Once Merle touched her head with his soft, well-manicured hand, Raeann knew she had been saved. She quit smoking and drinking altogether, right then and there. She opened her meager pocketbook to the couple who would lead her and scores like her to redemption, step by step, dollar by dollar. “When the rapture comes, we’ll ascend to Heaven,” silver-haired Merle said in his booming voice, Maribel clutched to his side. “Those we’ve saved will be with us. It’s coming! Great God, it’s coming fast! Be quick to get yourself right!”
Still, even without the drain of cigarettes and vodka, Raeann’s income was not enough to get herself right with Merle and Maribel. The notices she got in the mail every week admonished her. The work of the Lord was expensive, and she was not contributing her share. “Your place by us when the rapture comes is closing,” the messages said. “Don’t hold a few dollars back and get left behind!”
Raeann had almost lost hope of ever making up her share, when news came of her son. Pauley was about to be released from a military hospital in San Antonio, she was told. His father could not be found. She was his next of kin. He had been badly burned and wounded in Afghanistan, and needed time to rest and recover fully. Her first reaction to this news was anger. “How am I supposed to take care of him?” she asked shrilly. “You people think I’m made of money?”
Her attitude softened when it was explained that Pauley would be getting a substantial disability pension, and that all of his medical care would be free through the Veteran’s Administration. “I’ll be there to pick up my poor boy directly,” she told them.
Even after she grew used to what had happened to her son, it was hard for Raeann to look at Pauley. His burns had consumed one entire side of his body. She was sure he had become possessed by a devil from hell. She put him in the back room of her little flat, and kept the windows drawn. She drove him to the V.A. hospital in Memphis twice every week, where they examined his terrible injuries, gave him therapy, and issued him meds. He kept to himself most of the time, slept for days on end, or so it seemed to her. He didn’t eat much, and gave her his whole pension check. She was right with Merle and Maribel in no time!
Day followed day without much change for the next three months, until the afternoon came when Raeann drove to pick Pauley up from the V.A. hospital and he wasn’t there. She looked around the front lobby, and then waited in her parking spot for more than an hour. The shambling hulk her son had become did not appear. She went inside and asked a very old man at the front desk for help. He made some calls, then told her there was no one named Abbott being treated at any of his scheduled clinics. Everybody had left for the day. With nothing left to do, Raeann drove home. She sat close to the phone all evening, waiting for some kind of news. None came.
There was no news the next day either, nor the day after that. Raeann became upset and bitter. They’d find him dead somewhere, she supposed, and take away the pension she had grown to depend upon for her earthly needs as well as her salvation. Merle and Maribel would leave her in the dust. After another week of silence, she had given
up all hope. She was about to walk up the block to buy a fifth of vodka when a truly miraculous event occurred: the mailman came by. When she checked what he’d left, there was Pauley’s pension check, just as though nothing had happened. She cashed it immediately, of course―and decided to pick up the vodka anyhow. A celebration was in order.
In the months that followed, the checks kept coming, as regular as clockwork. Raeann decided it was God’s way of paying her back, for having to put up with Pauley and his father all those years.
Chapter 7
Grand Junction, Colorado
The Evening After the Mountain Orchard Raid
Alone in a holding cell, The Captain waited for arraignment. He hoped that he and the other telemarketers would be released on their own recognizance. Almost any bail would fall beyond his scanty resources right now. He worried about Pauley, but realized there was nothing he could do to improve the situation. Neither had access to a phone, so he could not even contact his friend. He laid back on the thin, lumpy mattress and tried to relax. He had to remain patient. A long time ago, his grandfather had told him, “When there’s nothing that can be done, a man does nothing.”
He finally drifted from drowsiness into sleep after about an hour: sleep but not rest. Behind his closed eyes, one of his worst dreams coalesced. He stood beside a road that wound past him through a desolate, arid landscape. To his front sat a series of low grey hills. The sky was a bright, pitiless blue. Though he couldn’t see himself, he knew that he was in military combat gear. As he watched, big trucks began slowly moving by. Then dogs appeared, as if out of nowhere. One, several more, then dozens of big, black beasts with long legs and jaws filled with large, sharp fangs. They howled and snapped as they sprinted along the side of the road, beside the trucks. The ears on their narrow heads were triangular and pointed, and pink tongues lolled from their gaping muzzles. He shouted at the trucks to warn them, but no one heard him. He shot at the dogs himself, but for each one he dispatched two more appeared. Meanwhile, the beasts attacked the lumbering trucks, leaping on their cabs and biting at their tires. He looked forward, toward the grey hills, and screamed as an enormous dog―like the others but bigger than the hills themselves―bounded forward to straddle the road in front of him. The monster lowered its huge head, picked up a truck in its colossal jaws, and shook it like a toy. Men fell from the truck as it was flung to the earth, broken and burning. The giant dog saw the Captain, howled, and sprang toward him. He could not move. He was frozen in place. All he could do was shoot at the monster, emptying his gun, while it gazed at him through blood-red eyes. Standing above him, it howled again, then lowered its vast jaws to tear him to pieces.