by Chuck Dixon
“Fifty thousand dollars. Is that a lot of money here?” She goggled at the well-thumbed stacks.
“It’s enough to give you a good start wherever you wind up,” he said.
“I cannot go with you?”
“No. You’ll forget you ever met me. That’s all you owe me.”
She nodded.
He handed her a smaller stack of very clean, crisp bills that looked new. “Use this money to buy your bus ticket to Cleveland, Ohio.”
“Cleveland?”
“There’s a bus leaving at nine-thirty. You’ll be in Cleveland by tonight. You use this money to buy your ticket. The drug store is open. Buy anything you need there but use this cash, right?”
“Right.”
“Any money from this stack that’s left over you throw away in a trash bin before you get on the bus. You understand?”
“Throw away?” she said in disbelief.
“This is bad money. It’s not real money. You don’t want the government finding you, do you?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“There are a lot of Russians in Cleveland, Sonata. Find a church and ask them to help you.”
She nodded, eyes welling with tears.
“You have three hours until the bus leaves. See the drug store over there?” He pointed at a Walgreen’s on the corner across the street. Yellow light glowed from inside.
“They’ll have stuff you need. Buy a bag for travel. A sweatshirt, toothbrush and all that. Stuff for breakfast. Use the bad money. You understand?”
“I understand.” She snuffled.
“You’ll be okay now, Sonata.”
With a sob, she leapt over the console to hug him about the neck, holding him tight until he pried her thin arms from him. His neck was wet with her tears.
“Where are you going? Say it,” he said, his hands still gentle on her arms.
“Cleve-uh-land. Oh hi yo,” she said, eyes gleaming.
She stood on the lot and watched him pull onto an empty street and drive out of sight. She hugged the jacket he’d given her tight about her. The thick bundles of cash in the pockets were pressed against her belly. She shivered in the bitter wind blowing along Jones Street. The smell of hot coffee reached her and she turned, stomach rumbling, for the lights of the coffee shop.
49
“Spring is on the way,” Gunny Leffertz said, his face raised to a beam of sunlight coming through the trees.
“All I see is snow,” Merry said.
They were on their after-breakfast morning walk through the woods. Today they followed a game trail north. There was fresh sign that deer had come this way.
“You have to smell it, girl. Take a deep breath in through your nose. You can smell the trees coming back to life.”
Merry sniffed the air until her sinuses stung with cold.
“I don’t smell anything, Gunny.”
“That’s because your nose is dumb. Pretty but dumb.”
They walked on farther, the cabin lost in the trees behind them. Merry led the way, watching ahead for the deer that had made the tracks visible on the trail. Gunny followed behind her, moving easily along the familiar trail he’d walked countless times. The old Marine walked with such a sure foot it was easy to forget he was sightless.
“Gunny,” she whispered, cautious not to alert any deer that might be near, “spring is on the way.”
“Do you smell it now?” he said in a hushed voice.
“I can see it,” she said and knelt in the snow of a clearing where the green shoots of plants poked through the white cover.
“Crocuses? Thought I smelled them,” he said with an open smile.
She squinted with skepticism as he stepped closer. “You smelled them?”
“They haven’t bloomed yet, have they?” He crouched down by her.
“No.”
“They’ll be purple when they do.”
“How do you know?” she said.
“They smell purple.” He nodded gravely.
She giggled.
Gunny touched her arm and squeezed. His head canted.
“You hear something? The deer?” she asked, her voice low.
“Not deer. Something else.” His blind eyes narrowed under a furrowed brow.
Merry listened too. She closed her eyes the way Gunny taught her and let the world in through her ears. The tiniest shift in sound ahead and to the left of the trail. A crunch of a boot sole on snow. The brush of cloth on cloth.
She opened her eyes to see her father standing among the trees watching her. A smile creased his face.
“Sorry. I think I scared the herd off,” Levon said.
Merry raced to his arms and crushed herself against him, a smile on her face so big that it hurt.
50
The perky little redhead from the fifth floor stuck her head in his door for the eighth time that morning.
“This isn’t going away,” she said, all teeth.
“I only want you to go away,” Brett Tsukuda said from his desk. He brushed at her in the vain hope that she might vanish.
"The Bureau. Treasury. They keep requesting background. Your silence speaks volumes." She was all the way into his office now.
“My silence screams itself hoarse.” He lifted a coffee mug to his lips. Stone cold. He sipped it anyway in hopes the caffeine would take the edge off his migraine.
“And Homeland. They’re worried about this hitting the news. I could warm that for you,” she said and reached for the mug.
“Cold coffee is my penance. Can’t you back them down? Does no one fear the NSA anymore?” He rubbed the heel of his hand into one eye until all he could see was white static.
"Not since we got our skirts dirty with PRISM. Until then most American thought 'NSA' was a typo for NASA."
“What do they want from us?”
“Positive eye-dee on a guy they’re calling AKA Mitchell Roeder for lack of a better option. They have fingerprints, high-res pictures and DNA. And they swear we know more than we’re saying.”
“Quantico passes on this?”
“They’re pleading ignorance,” she said and moved a stack of files from his guest chair to the floor. She plopped into the seat.
“Those papers were there for a reason,” Brett said with a wince. Another gulp of cold hazelnut blend.
“Homeland is going to press the president,” she said. “The director has a golf date with him tomorrow afternoon.”
“If I’m lucky he’ll have a good game and forget to call me.”
“With his swing? He’ll probably call you from the ninth green just to take his mind off his score.”
“Yeah. I’m never that lucky,” Brett said and tapped the sharkskin hilt of the tanto knife he used as a letter opener.
Her eyes were alight like a child expecting a bedtime story. “Who is this guy? Why can’t we either bring him in or hand him up?”
“I must say, at the risk of being charged with insensitive remarks, that curiosity is unattractive on you.”
“You’re deflecting.”
“Damn right I am. Look, give me until tee-off tomorrow to come up with something that works.”
“Works for who? The agency? The country? This asset you’re protecting?”
“Works for everyone, smartass,” he said and shooed her with more vigor than before. She rose from the chair with reluctance, but paused at the door.
“I’ll buzz you when Marine One is in the air,” she said and departed.
Brett sat tapping the hilt of the tanto. He grimaced at his reflection in the dark monitor on his desk.
"Damn you, Cade," he growled, saying a name he'd vowed long ago never to speak aloud again.
Levon’s Kin
Chuck Dixon
Kindle edition
© Copyright 2019 (as revised) Chuck Dixon
Wolfpack Publishing
6032 Wheat Penny Avenue
Las Vegas, NV 89122
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprod
uced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.
1
The dogs were silent.
They usually started barking once they heard Kaylee walking up the gravel drive. The two dogs, a yappy poodle mix and big yellow Lab, were still unheard even as the double-wide came in sight through the trees.
The pair of dogs were the reason Kaylee woke up before dawn every morning. She dressed in the dark and slipped silently from the trailer she and her mother shared. She'd be the only kid walking on the county road toward her school a mile away where the road crossed Branch Pike. The Pettits lived at the end of a long gravel drive halfway to school. Mr. Pettit was kind of scary with his arms and neck covered in tattoos. He had a nice smile though. Mrs. Pettit, "call me Tandy," was a sweet woman who dressed like a lady on one of those shopping channels on TV. Tandy told Kaylee to come by anytime she liked to play with the dogs.
“They do look forward to it,” she assured Kaylee. Mr. Pettit grunted in agreement, allowing that the pair of dogs did enjoy the time Kaylee spent with them each day.
Kaylee dearly desired to own a dog of her own, a dog she could hug and love and give a name of her own choosing. But her mother complained that dogs were too much work even though Kaylee’s mother did little else but spend days in the trailer, smoking and watching television.
She crunched over the gravel past the pair of carports. Mr. Pettit’s bass boat and his motorcycle were under one with tarps thrown over them. Tandy’s Camaro, polished to a mirror shine, rested under the other. Mr. Pettit’s big pickup squatted on fat tires on the turnaround before the front entrance of the double-wide. The truck shone like glass in the streaks of liquid shimmers coming through the birches. The siding on the double-wide was spotted with yellow mold. The white shingles of the roof were streaked with black. A window at the front had been repaired with duct tape now all puckered at the edges.
The screen door lay partly open. It was crooked on a busted hinge. The house door was open as well. Kaylee stood at the foot of the wooden deck and squinted into the gloom within the house.
“Peanut? Honey?” she whispered.
There was no frantic scrabble of claws on tile. No eager yelps. The dark beyond the open doorway was undisturbed.
She stepped to the deck, repeating the names of the poodle and Lab. Braced in the door, she allowed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the deeper dimness inside the house. A humped figure lay on the tile of the family room. A smaller heap was nearby. Kaylee took a cautious step inside the house, wincing as her sneakered foot caused the floorboards to creak.
Honey, the big dopey, friendly Labrador, lay on her side in a black pool. Peanut, the little poodle, was unmoving at the edge of the lake. Dark boot prints were spotted over the linoleum from someone who stepped into the black spill toward the bedrooms at the back of the house. Kaylee looked down at her own feet to see she stood atop sticky boot prints. Turning, she saw fainter prints beneath the dew of condensation on the boards of the deck. The departing steps of someone who left the house not long ago.
Her breath held tight in her lungs; Kaylee moved deeper into the house. She skirted along the walls, avoiding the dark boot prints.
Her voice soft, she called for the Pettits. The answer was a silence greater than the absence of sound. The silence was a thing apart, as if the air was occupied by an alien element altering the atmosphere within the house.
At the door to the main bedroom, Kaylee stopped and placed her hands on the doorframe to steady herself. The Pettits lay side by side on the king-sized bed that dominated the room. They lay flat on their backs, fully dressed but for shoes. Their hands were joined between them. They might have been sleeping peacefully. Or perhaps lying together under an open sky to gaze upward at the stars.
Except the mattress under them was stained a deep crimson. And their heads, sightless and staring, sat atop Mrs. Pettit’s vanity table.
Kaylee’s scream rose to a piercing tone startling to flight a herd of whitetails who had been grazing on shoots a mile from the Pettit house.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Nothing harder than leaving home except for going home.”
2
They drove down the two-lane through woods crowding in either side of the curving road. The bare branches of trees created a cathedral above them. Sunlight flashed on snow still clinging in the hollows. The road followed the high valley along a path of least resistance. Dropping down into the shadowed bellies of divides dark and cold. It drifted along ridgelines where the land dropped away to reveal waves of forested hills rolling toward the horizon.
Levon piloted a Toyota SUV bearing Arkansas plates with the ease of a man on a road well-traveled in the past. Each new turn and landmark recalled moments from a history so long ago it seemed like the memory of a stranger.
In the seat beside him, Merry, his daughter, stirred from her own thoughts.
“Will they like me?” she said.
“Who’s that, honey?” he said.
“Your family.”
“They’re your family too, Merry.”
“I never met them. I never even knew about them.”
“That’s going to change starting today.”
“But will they like me?”
“They’ll love you.”
Out the window, she could see homes nestled in the woods at the ends of driveways. The trees gave way to more homes along either side of the road. They paused at a four-way stop. Around the intersection was a gas station with a food mart, a car repair place, a brick building with a flag out front, and an ice cream stand with a marquee sign announcing it was ‘CL SED TIL SUM ER.' The only sign of life was a man pumping gas into an ATV on a trailer behind a primer-shot pickup.
They left the crossing behind. The houses thinned out again. The woods closed in once more.
“Are we almost to Uncle Fern’s?” Merry asked.
“Almost,” Levon said.
“You said it was just past Colby.”
“That’s Colby we just drove through.”
“That was a town? A gas station and an ice cream place?”
“Out here that is a town, honey.”
“Where’s the nearest real town?”
“You mean with a Walmart?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding.
“That would be Haley down off the state road. It’s about an hour away from where we’ll be.”
“Is there a Wendy’s there?”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been there. Might be a Wendy’s there by now. We’ll ride down after we’re settled at Uncle Fern’s.”
Merry sat watching the woods go by, imagining the animals living there just out of sight in the shadows between the trees.
“I can’t believe you really have an Uncle Fern,” she said after a bit.
“I tell you about him all the time.”
“I thought he was made up. Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”
“He’s real all right. He’s your uncle, too, honey. Your great uncle. My dad’s brother.”
“What kind of name is Fern?”
“A made-up name. Like a nickname. Uncle Fern’s real name is George Martin Cade.”
“Then why’s he called Fern?”
“Just something people do around here. For some reason they started calling him Fern and it stuck.”
“They come up with a made-up name for you, Daddy?”
“Nope. I was always just Levon.”
The road divided ahead into a ‘Y’ fork with a surface of rutted asphalt veering away to the right. Levon turned onto the broken road. A shelf of white-washed wood formed a rest for a row of steel mailboxes, seven in all. A faded wooden plaque at the fork sign promised local honey and free-range eggs in neat hand-painted letters. The busted road surface gave way to a rutted lane of packed gravel that climbed along the base of a hill. Other lanes came off the road either side. Merry saw some rooftops way out in the t
rees. Satellite dishes perched atop the ridge lines. She could smell wood smoke coming from somewhere.
Levon turned the wheel to take them onto a dirt track nearly invisible in the brush along the shoulder. Branches scraped along the sides of the Toyota before the bushes opened up into the white boles of beeches. After a while, the road went level and the trees thinned out. A farmhouse with wood siding and a deep, screened porch sat at the edge of a clearing. A steel frame barn and a carport were set either side in a sort of courtyard. Some kind of car was under a pile of tarps under the carport. A carefully preserved International Harvester pickup was parked on the crushed gravel lot before the house.
The screen door of the porch banged open. Dogs raced over the ground toward the Toyota. Three redbone hounds baying and leaping. And a ridgeback with mottled fur barked, head ducking, as it trotted around the strange car.
A man marched from the house in their wake. He moved with a limp, swinging one leg wide. A big man with hunched shoulders and a paunch pushing out the bib of his overalls. White Elvis sideburns streaked yellow, a white bristle of hair under a crushed Ford ball cap. He whistled once then growled wordless commands, waving his hands to part the howling dogs. They shushed and milled about his legs as he neared the car. The ridgeback slumped away across the yard toward the barn.
“Levon?” the man said, eyes narrowed.
Levon stood by the open door of the Toyota, allowing his uncle to study him.
“It’s me, Uncle Fern,” he said.
“And your little girl?” Fern said. He leaned forward, trying peer through the sunlight reflection on the windshield.
“The dogs have her spooked.”
“Get her on out here. Those dumb hounds won’t hurt her unless she’s a raccoon. You aren’t a raccoon, are you, honey?”
Merry stepped out on the driver's side to stand close by her father. The hounds trotted around to sniff at her legs and hands. The ridgeback kept its distance. Blue eyes fixed on Levon.