KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  HE WAS FULLY RESTRAINED but to make sure he wouldn’t get loose we planned to take turns watching him through the keyhole, with plugs in our ears and her noise-cancelling headphones on top of them.

  Having seen much violence I abhor it, and was determined to learn from this guy without physically hurting him. Even though he was a multiple murderer.

  As the US, the UK, the French and Israelis have all demonstrated, it’s possible to learn a lot from someone without doing physical harm. And afterwards they can return to their prior lives not realizing how much they’ve told you.

  One could argue we were doing him violence this way too, but he was a lethal prick and I wanted him Inside forever, before he could kill anyone else. And this was the only way I could learn enough to make sure that happened. Plus I wanted his bosses Inside too.

  At 01:23 I went in, checked all his restraints, and used the spray attachment to wash his pee down the drain. He kept shaking his head and mumbling, so I ungagged him.

  “Christ I’m thirsty.”

  When like Jesús you’re scared and out of your element you tend to hyperventilate, exhale and sweat lots of H2O. Up to a quart an hour, so you get thirsty fast. This was a good tool for encouraging conversation. The other tool being sleeplessness.

  Anyway I needed him thirsty for another reason. “I’m not giving you water till I get something real.”

  “Fuck you.” He tried to shrug. “Have it your way.”

  I wanted to say “I am”, but no time is more dangerous than when you think your enemy is down.

  Never exult.

  Never feel safe. It’s too dangerous.

  AN HOUR LATER he asked again for water. He’d been yanking his restraints and his wrists were scraped red. “You got to stop doing this,” I said after I’d checked each one.

  “Gonna give me water?”

  “What you got to tell me?”

  He clamped his teeth over his lower lip as if to shut himself up. I bent down to re gag him.

  “What you want?” he whispered.

  “You know what I want. You can tell me now or tell me later, it’s up to you.” I started to tie the gag across his mouth but he shook his head. “Give me some fuckin water I tell you something.”

  He was stalling in the hopes backup would arrive. This worried me but there was no way to deflect that except to move him, which was infeasible.

  I re-gagged him over his protests. “Water when you talk.”

  “I FOUND MORE CONNECTIONS,” Mitchell said.

  “Yeah what?” I was very sleepy from watching Jesús through the keyhole. Abigail was snoring lightly on the bed and I spoke low to not wake her. Though I’d been waking Jesús every time he dozed, and that was exhausting me too.

  “The morning after Ronnie was shot?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “What?”

  Ice cubes rattled on Mitchell’s end. “You asked me check all the WindPower exec phone calls?”

  I glanced through the keyhole at Jesús. He was doing his silent twist and shout. “Yeah?”

  “Morning after Ronnie died there was an absolute blizzard of calls between WindPower, three state Democratic Senators and a Portland law firm called Gleason and Falz.”

  “That’s the bitch been harassing me. Name’s Ursula Heap but I call her Cruella.”

  “Well, back on December 30, she was worried about something.”

  “Mitchell,” I sighed, “you’re marvelous. Maybe I will marry you after all.”

  “You should be so lucky.”

  “Love to know, what they all talked about.”

  “That’s what discovery’s for.”

  “Think we can get there?”

  “Yeah,” he took a drink, licked his lips. “Maybe we can.”

  MOST BRUTAL MEN are not courageous. Like these Muslim scumbags beheading people, raping and selling women and children, torturing and murdering. In my three tours in Islamic countries I learned many times that they’re brave when they’re many and you’re few, when your hands are tied and they have a knife at your throat, or when they have their finger on a detonator and a school bus of children is about to get blown away.

  So I didn’t anticipate too much courage from Jesús.

  “I was working for Mass Hauling,” he croaked.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  He thought about it. His face was drawn, pasty and dry, lips cracked. I started to feel sorry for him then remembered what he’d done.

  “You’ll give me water?”

  “All you want.”

  “How do I know?”

  I smiled, shook my head. “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Okay.” He licked his lips, a leathery sound. “I was supposed to come here, get the copy of some damn book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “The original was green, medium size, hard cover… Full of numbers. That’s all I know.”

  “You find it?”

  “Shit no.”

  “Who asked you to find it?”

  He flinched. “Gimme my water.”

  I took the Seadogs mug from the mirror shelf and filled it from the tap, so he could see, and sat down in front of him, beyond reach. “You fuckhead,” he said.

  “Who sent you for the green book?”

  He shrugged. “You know it.”

  “Say it.”

  “Mass fucking Hauling.”

  I leaned the mug down. He raised his head sideways and drank till it was empty. He collapsed back. “Tastes like shit.”

  “Lots of sewage treatment plants upriver.”

  He drank two more mugs before I cut him off, not wanting him to chuck. He fell back in his bounds. I plugged in his rat rap and psychedelic light and departed.

  For the next hour I watched Jesús through the keyhole. He was about to depart for a brand new universe but didn’t yet know it.

  A universe where your only hope is another human being.

  To whom you’ll gratefully tell everything.

  Nada Màs

  NO TWO OCEAN WAVES are ever the same. I’ve sat for years on my surfboard waiting for the next good one, and never have two been the same. Nothing’s ever the same: no two same faces, voices, universes or grains of sand.

  And no two interrogations are the same. Plus it’s rare to debrief a prisoner who’s personally tried to kill you. And a woman you love. And has killed her husband. Lends the discussion a personal intensity that’s hard to resist.

  By itself, LSD can be fun, and a learning experience. But not knowing he’d taken it, and mixed with the others, it had completely dislocated him from normal “reality”: habitual neural pathways are blocked, allowing stimuli that in normal life we disregard to take over our worldview. He didn’t see or feel or know his “normal reality”; it had never existed. There was only now, each instant of pitiless cascading universes, worms in his heart and vampires in his brain, his body afire and freezing as he fell through unknown dimensions and smashed into death after death, tormented by memories that never were, grueling tortures, lost love, the death of every victim from the start of time… Over and over, every instant.

  That was the easy part.

  Then came the Adderall. In large quantities it drives your heart faster and faster, burns your life at both ends, screams you through exponentially accelerating time, puts you on a motorcycle at three hundred miles an hour and you can’t slow down, get off, you’re going to die. But that’s still the beginning…

  Ecstasy is just what it says. I recommend it to everyone, but not combined with either of the others. Ecstasy knocks down emotional walls, creates warm connections between us, elevates everyone to friend and spiritual lover…

  And inspires an aching need to confide…

  HE WAS PRETTY CRAZY for a while, writhing and moaning. Wide-eyed, terrorized, not understanding who he was or what was happening.

  Hell is other people, Sartre said, and this certainly applied to Jesús. The people who must have made his early lif
e Hell, and then the other Hell-soaked victims and victimizers who since then had been his daily bread. Evil’s a disease; we pass it to each other and down the generations, the way each war generates the next.

  Now every time I got up to leave the bathroom he’d beg me not to.

  “WHAT IS THIS?” he whined. “What am I?”

  “We’re cops and good guys.”

  “What’s cops?”

  “People you tell the truth to.” Knowing that saying this, like a hypnotic prompt, might actually stimulate him to do so.

  “Can you stop them? Can you?” he writhed, “can you please?”

  “Stop what?”

  “The lizards… oh God the snakes… The fire’s so hot, so cold… Please help me!”

  “We’re cops and good guys,” I repeated. “I’ll be the cop and you’re the good guy, and you do the Miranda…”

  “Miranda?” He tried to remember. “I don’t do Miranda.”

  “Not you, silly. This guy you’re playing….”

  “How many times I hear that damn thing. Can say it by heart.”

  “Let’s play you doing the Miranda and I’ll help with the snakes.”

  Jesús did his Miranda. Not that it counted for anything. But I wanted it to seem right to him when Hart & Co asked him to do it. And he eagerly added that really it was true, what he was saying. He’d show you his phone logs and travel itineraries to prove it. And he’d taken the first half up front, ten grand straight to Security International Bank in Jakarta.

  “You get a deposit receipt?” I said. “Be good to have, prove the money’s yours.”

  “I printed it out and taped it to the underside of a drawer in my bathroom then deleted the file.”

  “You’re a smart guy, Jesús.” I wasn’t going to explain him that even most four-year-olds could saunter into his computer and restore that file, or that taping stuff to the underside of drawers is to guarantee the cops will find it. Instead I gave him more water.

  He’d explained me already how this guy would call when he wanted Jesús to do something, but Jesús never knew who it was because it said No Caller ID.

  I gave him one more sip.

  If you’ve ever been Inside you’ve known lots of guys like Jesús – paid by cash in a drop envelope, or, like some Legislators by untraceable wires to foreign accounts. But being careful, Jesús also tracked his client back, finally, to Mass Hauling.

  “They’re in all kinda shit,” his voice like a jet’s engines powering down at the end of each sentence. “So even when I figure it’s them I don’t say. Better they don’t know I know.”

  “You were telling me about your dream, about what Mass Hauling made you do.”

  “They’re coming back –”

  “Who?”

  “The salamanders, the snakes…” He twisted and writhed, trying to escape them.

  “Dannon told me they only paid you five grand to kill Ronnie Dalt –”

  “Ziller? He did?” Jesús spit. “Fuckin liar.”

  “He told me all your conversations, the price, when to do it.”

  “Was twenty grand, not five.” He couldn’t keep still, head flipping back and forth. “Keeps… More bad…” He tightened up, fists clenched, almost sprang out of the tub. “You’re supposed to keep them away!”

  I let him ride it out. What else could I do?

  EVERYTHING HE SAID got recorded on Abigail’s iPad on the sink counter where he couldn’t see it. But would never be admissible. Plus delivered under duress.

  Duress means you have to tell the truth.

  Which Jesús finally did. And proud of it. Luxuriating in the warmth of my approval.

  “But why,” he said, “kill this guy on their own side?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  For a second he looked almost rueful. “They never do.”

  “But they told you what gun to use…”

  “It was the Winchester I took from where that guy Bucky hid it.”

  “What ammo you use?”

  “Same as him. There was a box of ammo in the gun case. That ASYM load with a solid copper bullet. I got another box too, just to make sure, from Gun Palace in Waltham.”

  ASYM was what Bucky had used to shoot at the turbines. High velocity match grade accuracy, and as their specs boast, “fight-stopping terminal performance”. Which means it knocks down whoever might be attacking you. With the Barnes Tipped Triple Shock solid copper bullet for deep penetration, and no separation of the copper jacket from the lead core because there is no lead core – the entire bullet is copper. Deadly for turbines, deadly for people.

  “Were you already in the trees,” I said, “when Dannon Ziller called?”

  “Shit no, I was at the Senator. Fucking this Vietnamese hooker when my phone rings.”

  “Wow, so you had to jump out of bed, get dressed, and race over to Ronnie’s office?”

  “Shit no. Ziller was just calling to tell me they’d decided.”

  “Decided?”

  “To take this guy out. I had time to finish fucking that chick first.”

  “How you know her?”

  “We keep her on call.”

  “We?”

  “Hell, not me. Green Dividends. For when them Legislators is in session.”

  “Why couldn’t WindPower decide sooner, about killing Ronnie?”

  He tried to shrug. “Ask them.”

  “Did you shoot out the four turbines at Paradise Lakes?”

  He thought. “Paradise Lakes, never hear of it.”

  “Who told you to set Don and Viv’s house on fire?”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Don’t know no Don and… Who?”

  “I told you: the Woodridges. The house you burned.”

  “Oh that? That was an accident.”

  “You said you did it, to burn those signed papers.”

  “Was an accident they died. Dumb fucks, why didn’t they go out?”

  “They were asleep.”

  “See, I didn’t know this.” He tried to lift his hands in protest. “How can I be blame’, if I didn’t know?”

  I looked at him. “How’d you know I was coming?”

  “They tol’ me.”

  “Green Dividends? How’d they know?”

  “Her phone, they listen to it. They listen to everybody. They didn’t like it, you coming here. They say if I can get you up there, dump you somewhere, maybe years before somebody find you. So I rent a snowmobile and go up there.”

  I stood by the bedroom window awaiting the feeble dawn. Abigail dragged herself awake, hugged me on her way to the other bathroom, went downstairs and came up ten minutes later with two huge cups of Italian Roast and a box of Country Kitchen chocolate powdered doughnuts.

  “I DON’T WANT TO KNOW about this,” Erica said when I called her.

  “Off the record, like, what should I do?”

  “It’s too late for what should you do! You shouldn’t have done any of this.”

  “He’s nearly through it now. Doesn’t remember much.”

  “How long since he broke in?”

  “That was last night about nine and now, it’s what, almost seven a.m.?”

  “I suppose you can still claim it was later when you hit him –”

  “Abigail hit him –”

  “Whatever. And then you waited for him to come round, to ask him questions, before you called the cops.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you’d assured yourself his head wound wasn’t severe enough to require immediate care…”

  “What’s the downside?”

  “Of what?”

  “Giving them Jesús?”

  “Probably everything.” She thought a moment. “I’m coming up. Do nothing till I get there.”

  WHILE WAITING FOR ERICA we wormed Jesús into his clothes and gave him a coffee to spruce him up. He was still half in another world, eyes like a deer in a trap. I’d untied his ankles from the tub and retied them together and t
hen his wrists behind his back and sat him on the floor. He was remarkably accommodating, still under the impression I’d saved him from something, though he wasn’t sure what it was and who, if anything, he was.

  When Erica came in she gave Abigail a hug. “I was worried about you, girl!” She looked down at Jesús on the floor. “So this is it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

  Erica put her phone on speaker and called C. Hart. He was not overly friendly.

  “My client has been speaking with the man who killed Ronnie Dalt,” she said, “and has recorded him saying so.”

  For a moment Hart said nothing, then, “You what?”

  “And who tried to kill Abigail Dalt. And my client. He’s a hired gun from Boston. It’s all recorded and therefore not admissible as is, so you’ll have to figure how to make him say it again. That’s your problem…”

  “So where you got this guy?”

  JESÚS WAS STILL HALLUCINATING when Hart & Co arrived, didn’t seem to understand who they were and why they were there. But since it was a clear case of B & E – Breaking and Entering – they cuffed him, read him his rights, which may have given him a flashback of our drug-induced game, and he was off to Augusta jail before he knew it.

  After the other cops took Jesús, and Erica raced back to Portland for a meeting, C. Hart sat at Abigail’s kitchen table with his hands clasped before him, looking at his thumbs. “This is all pretty incriminating.”

  “You said it,” Abigail said.

  “Although most of it’s off the table as testimony, our DA, Randy Solomon, will find a way to get it in. And we’re going to have a good talk with Jesús.”

  “So where’s the little green book?” Abigail put in.

  He pretended like he’d never heard of it, then nodded. “We took it. As an exhibit.”

  “Of what?”

  “Motive. Of why they may have wanted to kill your husband.”

  “It’s also evidence of political fraud,” I said.

  He shrugged. “That ain’t my jurisdiction.”

  “And that letter,” I said, “with the red letters that said Read This Now?”