by Chuck Dixon
“It is not showing up on our system,” Larry said with sorrow.
“I pay you every month for this service. You’re telling me it doesn’t work? Where’s my car?”
“It is no longer in the coverage area. Or possibly your transmitter is malfunctioning.” Again he was reading. Probably from a troubleshooter screen.
“This is GloboTrac, right? Global tracking. Global. That means the whole world.”
“Yes?”
“So how can my car be out of the coverage area? Is my car on the Moon?”
“No?”
“Where’s my car, Larry?”
Two days later her Buick Lacrosse was found at the ass-end of a Walmart lot in Carbondale, Illinois and reported back to the VSP auto theft division. The car was on a watch list for vehicles recently stolen in the state. The recovery was passed on from state CID to the FBI who told Carbondale PD to keep their greasy hands off the Buick until crime scene techs arrived.
Bill Marquez was dispatched to Carbondale on follow-up. No luxury jet this time. Just a lonely drive in a bureau car.
From the dash speaker Nancy Valdez said, “Admit it, you called me because you’re bored.”
“It’s business,” he said. The four-lane stretched empty before him but for the red lights of a truck in the right lane far ahead.
“Nothing on the radio? You’re bored.”
“Maybe it’s because I miss you.”
“It was only dinner, Agent Marquez,” she said with a dry chuckle.
“I enjoyed it. I want to see you again when I get back,” he said.
“But I pick the place this time. Chain restaurant pasta ne’er won fair lady.”
“I promise. Someplace with tablecloths and a wine list.”
“So, is there really any business here? You called on a bureau number. Make it good, agent.”
“I’m checking on a car stolen in Roanoke. Wound up in Illinois. Feels right. Sounds like a getaway to me,” he said.
“Think he reached his destination?” she said.
“This guy’s no thug. If he was at the end of his run we’d never have found the stolen ride. How in the loop are you on this?”
“Treasury is working the currency angle. I’m lead on that. Another suspect bill showed up in Lexington. Trail goes dead after that.”
“As lead you must be getting general updates. You have a better seat than me. I’m just running errands here. A rat in the maze.”
“The updates bring no joy, Bill. They’re sorting through video surveillance along his probable route. Nothing’s come up on facial recognition but there’s like a million hours of video to go through. Fingerprint and DNA evidence up in Maine at the Waltham motel came up nada.”
“No fingerprints? Nothing? The guy was living in the house for months with the little girl.”
“There’s plenty of evidence. Only no matches. The guy’s not in the system.”
“Bullshit. Homeland is sending out tweets on their fuck-ups now? That doesn’t sound like something they’d include on a cross-agency update,” he said.
“I know a guy who knows a guy at DHS.”
“Does he pick better restaurants?”
“Silly. Look, I have other calls. Ring me when you get where you’re going.” Nancy broke the connection. Bill touched the screen on the dash to end the call.
He was telling her the truth. This Buick was taken by the guy they were all looking for. There was no way to explain how he knew. It was a feeling. And he’d learned to trust those feelings.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“If you know the enemy can see you then make damn sure they see what you want them to see.”
17
He bought a pack of razors at a Target and shaved the beard off in the men’s room. Then a stop at a Home Depot in Brentwood before driving to Lambert-St. Louis International. At Delta arrivals he pulled up to the curb and left the Chrysler there, motor running.
Levon found lockers where he secured the gym bag. He walked through to departures and tried to buy round trip tickets to Phoenix at the Southwest counter on a flight leaving in the next three hours. He wanted to use cash which caused the girl at the counter to take a closer than usual look at his phony license. She glanced toward a supervisor who stepped to the counter to find Levon counting out hundreds on the counter.
"Mister . . . Bruckman?" the super said, glancing at the wrong license with a jaundiced gaze. The super was a middle-aged woman with the air of someone who's seen it all and heard every excuse.
“You don’t have a credit card?” she said, studying him hard. There were at least three cameras trained on the counter. Three that he could see, anyway.
“I kind of had to leave the house in a hurry this morning,” Levon said with a conspiratorial squint.
“Without your wallet?”
“Marie and me, that’s my wife, had a little blow-up over some charges on the cards. I gave them up to her, proving a point, you know? I want to get the hell out of here before she hooks up with the Visa and finds out what some of those charges were for.” He grinned, eyes darting away.
“We can’t take cash payment for flights leaving today. That’s Southwest policy.” The super’s tone went from skeptical to icy.
“Okay, okay. Can I book for tomorrow? I can stay at a hotel, I guess.”
“Do you have any other form of identification, Mr. Bruckman?” she said.
“Sure. Sure,” Levon said, patting his coat pockets until he came up with a folded electric bill made out to Oscar L. Bruckman.
The bill was from IGS Energy at an Illinois address. The super’s eyes moved to the Oklahoma driver’s license. She handed both back and nodded to the counter girl who took Levon’s cash payment for an afternoon flight to Phoenix the following day. He received a receipt and was told to report to this same counter for a boarding pass at least two hours before take-off.
Levon walked the length of the arrivals area passing counters for a half dozen airlines. Through the window wall at the front of Delta he could see the Chrysler being secured to the hook of a tow truck. He turned back to the lockers to retrieve the gym bag then on to exit through the departures lounge. An airport bus took him to long range parking.
He chose a clean Chevy Tahoe parked less than an hour before. He paid for parking using the ticket he found atop the dash. From there it was off the lot onto a surface road that took him to I-70 where he powered up a westbound ramp.
Merry woke to find the train was not moving. She wondered if that was what woke her up after the gentle pitching of the car caused her to doze off. She looked through the window. Trees grew close to the tracks. She heard a rapping on the door of her compartment.
She undid the latch and pulled the door aside creating an eight-inch gap.
It was the man from the dining car. Axel. He smiled, looking down at her through thick lenses. He was close enough for her to smell the cloying chemical scent of his aftershave. He leaned his head through the door, eyes sweeping the tiny compartment.
“I thought maybe you’d like to talk some more,” he said, planting a foot in the compartment, forcing Merry to back away. The backs of her legs touched one of the two seats facing one another in the closet-sized space.
“I was asleep,” she said.
“I see that. You have sleepers in your eyes,” he said, looming closer, reaching out a hand for her face.
She jerked back, dropping back into the seat. He was fully within the compartment now, head bent to speak to her, shaking his head.
“I only wanted to clear your eyes,” he said, stooping toward her as, with his other hand, he began to pull the steel door closed.
Reaching down between the seat cushion and the chair arm, Merry’s fingers found the handle of the butter knife she’d taken from the dining car. Her fist tightened on the handle. It seemed like such a small and pitiful weapon now.
“There’s been a delay. I don’t get off in Memphis for another hour. Lots of time to talk,” the ma
n said, twisting to slide the door home.
The door was yanked from his grip and rolled open with a sharp squeal. Daneeta stood in the aisle.
“Can I help you, sir?” she said, a thin veil of politeness over a well of menace.
“Just visiting,” he said turning to her.
Daneeta looked into Merry’s pleading eyes.
“No coach passengers allowed in the sleeping cars, sir,” she said.
“I was only . . .” the man began, a fresh sheen of sweat on his face.
“No coach passengers allowed in the sleeping cars, sir,” she repeated with all the authority of an Amtrak employee and an Old Testament prophet.
She stood aside to allow him into the aisle and watched him shuffle down the narrow corridor back toward the dining car and the coach seats beyond.
“You all right, sweetheart?” Daneeta said.
Merry was shivering. Her fingers ached where she clutched the narrow handle of the butter knife. She made her hand relax. The knife clattered to the compartment’s tiled floor.
Merry and Daneeta looked at it lying there at their feet. The attendant stooped and picked up the knife. She looked at Merry and her smile returned. She placed the knife in the pocket of her windbreaker.
“We’ll be in Memphis soon. Why don’t you come with me up to the dining car and have some hot chocolate until we get there?”
Merry shook her head, eyes welling above a tight smile. “I’d rather stay here.”
18
The car revealed nothing. The crime scene guys went over it in situ. Walmart shoppers slowed down to stare at men in bunny suits moving as if they were playing astronaut around the Buick parked in a far corner of the lot near the garden center. It was dusted, vacuumed, scanned and sealed up for towing to a garage behind the Carbondale police building.
It was there that Bill Marquez caught up with it after a wearying drive from Virginia. The two CSI guys gave him the sad news. Lots of prints. Some matched the owner. The rest was anyone's guess. Best guess was an adult male and minor child, possibly female.
“Well, that confirms that we know jack shit,” Bill said, eyeing the car with a baleful expression.
“All those hours on the road, the driver had to stop for gas,” one tech said.
“And if he had a little girl along they stopped for her to pee a half dozen times,” the other tech, father to three daughters, said with deep conviction.
“Yeah, we’re pulling in surveillance video from rest stops, traffic cams and gas stations.” Bill took a sip of bitter cop shop coffee. Just what his roiling belly needed after the push from DC.
“He could still be in Carbondale,” a local cop offered. “We have a description, such as it is.”
“Thanks. But I don’t think he’s here. He chose a car that would give him a jump on us. One that he knew wouldn’t be missed for a long time. My guess is that he’s heading far away from here.”
“Who is this guy? Did he abduct this kid?” the tech with kids asked.
“Damned if I know. A ghost with all the world to run in and all the money to take him there. And the girl looks like she’s along for the ride,” Bill said, and tossed the half full cup of coffee into a trash bin.
He found a hotel with rates within bureau standards and checked in. During a long, broiling shower he ran over and over what little he knew. It was like a song he couldn’t get out of his head, coming back over and over again to the chorus.
Why Carbondale? Why here? Why leave the car for them to find?
Nancy didn’t answer at the office or on her cell. Probably in a meeting.
He lay back on the covers, wrapped in towels and worked forward from what he saw up in Maine days before to the abandoned Buick this morning.
That hooded figure on the convenience store surveillance. The snow still pink with blood where the home invasion crew died. That mother he questioned at Lake Bellevue, what was her name? Danielle Fenton. She wasn't giving up shit. And the ex-wife of Courtland Blanco. There was nothing more she could tell them. He was convinced of that. That bitch would turn in everyone from her grandmother to her first-grade teacher to keep her ass out of a cell.
He drifted off seeing that figure standing at the counter of the Xtra Mart in New Haven. Head bowed, eyes down. Bill dreamt of that man and, in his dreams, the man raised his head to look straight into the camera and his face wasn't the face of a man.
It was the face of a beast.
He came awake chilled to the bone, the damp towels cold over him and the covers beneath him soaked. The room phone was buzzing. His cell was vibrating across the glass top of the nightstand. He picked up the cell.
“Marquez.”
"Wysocki, Homeland. You're in the field on this runner, right?" The gravelly voice of a heavy smoker. Bit of a drawl. Marquez pictured Gary Busey.
“Yeah,” Bill said and looked with crusty eyes at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. Was it the same day or had he slept through the night?
“We have a hit in St. Louis. Clear picture eye-dee. Seventy percent match through Perseus.”
“Purse-see-us?” Bill said, not sure of what he heard.
“Latest facial recognition program. Got him clear as the cover of People magazine trying to buy tickets to Phoenix using cash. Hundred dollar bills that dinged at Treasury. You need to get that?”
Bill realized the room phone was still buzzing. Probably Nancy to fill him in. It stopped buzzing.
"It's okay. What do you need me to do?" Bill climbed out of bed to enter the bathroom and start the shower. Anything to warm up.
“St. Louis is covering that end for now, canvassing hotels and waiting for the guy to show up for his flight. I need you to get there to take lead. Can you do that?”
“Soon as I get some clothes on, I’m on the road,” Bill assured him. The line went dead and he stepped into the warm, steamy embrace of the shower.
He was still asking himself questions as he tooled along Washington for IL-13. He had a bag of Burger King takeout on the seat by him and a pair of large coffees in the cup holders. It was just after five o'clock. He was running on less than six hours of sleep. Better than nothing.
Getting to St. Louis was going to involve making his way along three different state highways before he reached an interstate far north of Carbondale. The town was isolated, an hour between major highways in any direction. It was as if life, and the interstate highway system, were passing this place by.
So, again, why did Tex, the runner, pick Carbondale to run to?
Watching for signs to lead him to his onramp, he saw one for a train station. He passed the Amtrak station on his left. A couple of hundred yards along he was in the left-hand lane for IL-13. The light turned green and he made a U-turn, pissing off commuters coming off the southbound exit ramp. Horns blared behind him as he pressed the accelerator down to take him back to the train station and the only direct path to anywhere out of Carbondale.
19
A lot of passengers got off the train at Memphis. Daneeta was busy helping an elderly lady with a walker. Merry was able to slip unnoticed back into the coach cars and step off into the platform well away from the sleeper cars at the head of the train.
Merry stood on the open platform with her backpack over her shoulder and her coat in her arms. It was warmer here than in Carbondale. Two men in blue caps and reflective vests were unloading luggage onto carts. People were shuffling toward the station from the coach cars with bags in their hands or rolling cases behind them. One clutch of probably college kids were greeted by friends or relatives. They hugged and laughed. Most passengers just looked tired, grateful the train ride was over.
As she watched and waited for Joyce the crowd on the platform thinned. Only one figure remained, standing by one of the long wooden benches four cars further back.
The man who called himself Axel. He was looking at, watching, Merry.
A conductor spoke into a two-way radio. He held a hand up as Daneeta helped an
old couple down out of the car. They were the same ones Merry had seen earlier in the dining car. The woman with the walker. Her husband helped her toward the station.
Daneeta re-entered the car and then exited again to stand looking up and down the platform. Merry stepped behind a concrete support, out of sight of the attendant. She slid to the other side of the column, hugging it.
“Now boarding!” the conductor called. Passengers were filing into the coach cars in a straggling line from the station, lumbering with bags or pulling wheeled cases behind them.
“Now boarding, track three, City of New Orleans,” the PA system crackled.
She risked a glance around the corner of the column to see Daneeta speaking to the attendant from another car. The other attendant nodded and shrugged his shoulders. He took tickets from a young couple wearing hiking packs.
Merry looked to where Axel had been standing. He was gone. She looked back to Daneeta who was already up on the steps to the car. She was looking back and forth along the platform. The train started with a jerk and she steadied herself.
Merry felt a pang at the thought of Daneeta eventually finding her gone from her cabin. She imagined the frantic search aboard the train; a sick feeling twisted her stomach. It felt wrong. So many things felt wrong since she’d left Huntsville with her father last year. She tried to think of it all as an adventure, like she was a spy on a mission in a hostile country. Only none of it felt like pretend play. It felt like lying and mean tricks. She almost ran back onto the platform to let Daneeta see her but remembered her father’s trust in her to follow his instructions.
As the train rumbled back to life to move from the station, Merry hurried away from the platform, following the old couple toward the ramp leading into the station. The old man was holding a door open for the woman. The door swung shut as Merry reached it and shouldered inside.
A hand touched her arm. She made to pull away and the touch became a grip.