by JJ Pike
“Then get going,” said his Aggie apparition. “Because it’s not going to get better. In fact, I’d put a ginormous chunk of money on things getting a lot worse. You’re reacting, Daddy. You need to up your game. You need to act. Where would Mom have gone? What would she have been doing when the sh…” He paused in the imagined tirade. His adult brain wanted to use all the swear words in his vocabulary, but he was ascribing this to his beloved Aggie, and she would never swear. Not even if Manhattan was dissolving around her. “Fine, so we use family-safe language even when the stuff is hitting the fan. I hear you, daughter of mine. Loud and clear.”
“Then get with it, Daddio, because time’s a-wasting.”
He retraced his steps, mentally. He’d been on 38th Street headed towards 11th Avenue, but once he’d made it to 11th, all visual cues were null and void. He had no clue where he was. The cute little coffee shop nestled in the first floor of Alice’s building wasn’t there. The sweet raised garden where they sometimes sat with their coffees—frappe for him, straight black with no cream or sugar for her—was nowhere to be seen. He’d been running on instinct, allowing his inner compass to lead him. He had a great sense of direction.
“Like a bird with magnetite in your beak.” Aggie was her old, happy self again. Not reprimanding him. All would be well. He’d find a way to Alice. He always had.
The rubble shifted to the left. He planted his feet as wide as he could. He needed to keep his center of gravity low. He couldn’t crawl like he had been doing because he didn’t want to touch whatever corrosive agents lived in the pile, but he couldn’t walk normally either. He needed to do his best impersonation of Pippy and pretend he was a mountain goat. Those suckers could balance on a pinhead. Aggie would be proud of him. Step, pause, step, pause. Light and nimble and scaling that impossible mountain. He had this in the bag.
His foot slipped out from under him, leaving the bottom of his sneaker behind.
Chapter Six
Jo swerved to avoid Michael Rayton, who was jogging down the unpaved road towards her, a rifle slung over his shoulder. She turned hard to avoid running him down and skidded to a halt, gravel churning under her wheels. She backed onto the road as Michael sprinted to the Jeep. “Get in.”
“I heard gunfire. What’s going on? I came as soon as I could.” He gripped the passenger side window, his knuckles white.
“Climb in the back and check on those two.” She didn’t want to let him out of her sight. She’d been given permission to interrogate him in the field. She couldn’t foul it up.
Rayton climbed in the back. He sighed, stashed his rifle, and hunched down over Midge.
Jo turned onto the main road. Asphalt had never felt so good. She needed to step on it, cops and their radar be damned. She pressed her foot down on the accelerator, praying for a clear shot to the hospital.
The rhythm of the road calmed her nerves and gave her a minute to reflect. Rayton was almost convincing, with the big eyes and the breathless assurance that he’d been on his way to help. But even if he hadn’t been on her list of industrial saboteurs, his “concerned good guy” charade didn’t quite wash. It didn’t help that he was carrying a Nosler M48 TGR. She’d never seen that particular rifle at Jim’s or Alice and Bill’s place. That meant he’d brought it out to the compound himself. He’d told them he had no weapons experience. Which added up to one thing: trouble. All liars were liars for a reason, so what was his? Why would he flat out say he’d never fired a gun if he had a Nosler stashed in his truck? Those suckers weren’t cheap. No, it was worse than a simple lie. He’d been on the firing range with Aggie when the firefight with Arthur had kicked off, but rather than grabbing whatever was to hand, he’d gone back to his own vehicle to retrieve his weapon of choice. All her alarm bells were going off at once. She had a bad, bad, super-bad feeling about this dude.
She adjusted her rearview mirror so she had a clear picture of the back of the Jeep. Rayton had stashed his weapon so it was in arm’s reach. Smart. Perhaps he was their guy? Klean & Pure Industries had manufactured a compound, dubbed MELT, which had taken down an entire city block in a matter of days. The Bureau had intel that there had been a saboteur, or plural saboteurs, inside K&P. Of the ten people on that list, two had been flagged as “known associates” of her friend and neighbor, Alice Everlee.
Even though Jo was trained for precisely this kind of analysis and knew she had to reserve judgment, she had a hard time believing Alice knew anything about what had gone down at K&P. The woman was a Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing. Not that senior personnel didn’t go rogue, but Alice was a straight shooter. Scared: yes. Suffering from PTSD: undoubtedly. Ambitious, driven, determined not to be defined by the bad things that had happened to her: 100% on the nose. She and Alice were cut from the same cloth. They were hell bent on proving the past hadn’t broken them. Jo would have eaten her own hat—no, her entire wardrobe—if she thought Alice even had knowledge of this op.
Michael Rayton on the other hand was a whole different kettle of fish. She needed to assume he was their guy and move outwards from there. What did she know about him?
He was on the Bureau’s “potential saboteur” list. Check.
He’d invited himself into Alice and Bill’s house in New Paltz. Check.
He said he had an open invitation from Alice. Unconfirmed.
Aggie said that last statement had to be a lie, that her mom didn’t have “friends,” that the guy was a creeper and they should tie him up and interrogate him. She’d followed Jo around and around the paddock as they exercised the horses, demanding she do something about the “traitorous turncoat in our midst.” But Aggie was 15, not 40. She was forgiven for being a hothead. Jo had to weigh all the facts at hand and operate accordingly. The lock box in Bill’s study had been tampered with. Fact. Michael denied all knowledge, but his body language was hinky. It wasn’t that he had clear tells—in spite of the common belief that these were easy to spot few people genuinely had those—but rather she had the sneaking suspicion that he knew how to lie.
She needed to get him talking, catch him out, find the real inconsistencies in his story. When they’d “chatted” back at Jim’s house, she’d dropped questions into the narrative:
What were you doing at Alice’s place before we got there?
How was Paul when you last saw him?
When did you last see Alice?
She’d specifically stuck to questions that wouldn’t raise red flags in his mind but would give her a base line. The plan was to ask those same questions again later and see whether he could keep his “facts” straight. But the whole exercise had been a bust. He’d deflected, answering with short sentences and no embellishment.
That fact in itself told her something crucial.
There were a million guys who communicated almost exclusively in monosyllabic grunts and curt nods. Michael Rayton wasn’t one of them. She’d seen him chatting away at Bill and Alice’s dining room table down in New Paltz before Aggie had accused him of trying to break into her dad’s lock box. He’d clammed up after that and cut his answers down to the bare minimum. Only someone who’d been coached would know how to do that. He’d either been a defendant in a high-profile court case and had been taught to “only answer the question as asked” by a stupendously good attorney, or he was connected to the biz and had been trained by some of the same people who’d trained her. It wasn’t only the fact that he answered her questions with little or no data, it was that he did it consistently. That was the key. He did it consistently. If that wasn’t enough to raise the smell-test to ‘stink’ levels, Jo had already caught him in a lie. He had an expensive sporting rifle but claimed he didn’t know how to shoot.
How to spot a lie was at the heart of her training. Even as a kid, she’d had a gut feeling she could sniff out a liar, so she was thrilled when she was given proven tools to do just that. She had been fascinated by her psych courses. She remembered the first words her professor had uttered. “Lying—o
r rather, lying convincingly—is an art form.” No, she corrected the memory, being able to lie and not get caught is a learnable skill. “The artists, those for whom lying comes naturally, are the psychopaths of the world. For the rest of us, lying so that people believe your every word is a chore unless you have training.” Her professor had beaten that fact into them. “You can be taught how to lie and get away with it.”
For Jo, the PSYOP training courses at Fort Bragg were like being gifted a lifetime of Christmas and birthday presents, all at once. She couldn’t get enough. If there had been a way to mainline the data her professors and instructors laid out for her, she’d have rolled up her sleeve and injected it right into her bloodstream. She ate, she slept, she lived for it. Finally, she had a way to make sense of the world around her, get a grip on what made people tick, grasp the tools to put her one step ahead of the bad guys. It was like crack and heroin and PCP, all rolled into one. She was high on learning.
One of the most interesting things she’d discovered about world-class liars was that they weaved their lies into the truth, so it was seamless cloth. Most people didn’t know how to sort the wheat from the chaff. Jo did. But she was getting ahead of herself. She would have to wait until they got to the hospital before she started peppering him with questions. She needed to be able to see him—watch his hands, listen to his speech patterns, keep an ear out for repeated, emphatic declarations—in order to determine whether he was telling the truth.
In the meantime, she could soften him up with some low impact questions. Just get him talking. That’s all she needed to do for now. The hardball questions would come later. “How is it back there?” Start with an open-ended question rather than a yes-no question. You want your subject to be talking in story, not checking a multiple-choice box and moving on.
Michael grunted. She tried to catch a glimpse of him in her rearview mirror, but all she could see was the top of his head. Did she trust him to tend to Betsy or was she getting sloppy? If he was “the enemy,” she shouldn’t let him anywhere near her patients.
“Betsy’s heart rate is erratic,” he said.
That snapped her right back from her theoretical musings and into the car. “I’m doing my best,” she said. Jim would never forgive her if Betsy died before he had the chance to say goodbye. She needed to pretend she was on the autobahn with no speed limits. She let the speedometer ease up to 80 mph and resolved not to look at it again.
“She could have a pulmonary contusion.” Michael had dispensed with the STOMP kit’s stethoscope and was tapping Betsy’s chest, his ear pressed to her ribs. The man certainly looked like he knew his stuff.
Jo needed to keep her eyes on the road, but not being able to see what this “person of interest” was doing back there was killing her. “What do you hear?”
“No breath sounds on the left. Persistent tachycardia. Possible pneumothorax.” He met Jo’s eyes in the mirror. “Her heart is racing and she has air around her lungs. No way to know exactly what’s going on in there without a scan, but she could go into shock if we don’t treat this now.”
Jo checked the clock on the dashboard. They were at least 15 minutes from the hospital.
“Best guess? The bullet took a shard of rib on its way past and that bone is now lodged in the pericardium.” He delivered the news without drama. Another sign he’d had specialized training? She couldn’t think about that now. She had to concentrate all her energy on Betsy.
She knew the drill. They needed to drain the air that had accumulated around Betsy’s lungs in order to get them to inflate properly. Michael had the medical jargon down. Did that mean he had field skills, too? Shoot. Let it go. This was Betsy’s life they were talking about. She had to act, not think. She pulled over to the side of the road and got as close to the trees as possible. Didn’t need some random truck driver taking them out because they were too close to the highway.
She slammed the door and hot-footed it to the back of the Jeep. “Do they have a 14-gauge angiocatheter in the kit?”
Michael shrugged. “Nope. Needles only. Someone has replaced the standard issue ones with these.” He held up a clutch of needles. “I’ve prepped the site.”
Jo pulled on her latex gloves. He’d already shifted Betsy into the lateral recumbent position, removed her bra, slathered povidone-iodine around the gunshot wound, but then gone one step further and draped her with some heavy-duty gauze for modesty. Jo was impressed. She wouldn’t have thought of that, but she knew without a single doubt that Betsy would. Betsy was the quintessential respecter of modesty. She’d shown that in her handling of Sean. She could give a man an all-body sponge bath in her own front room and show so little skin you’d think he was dressed.
Michael handed her the needle, drawing an imaginary line from Betsy’s covered nipple to her clavicle. That gesture right there meant he was civilian trained. He wasn’t wrong. They could go in through the second intercostal space and along the mid-clavicular line, but if Afghanistan and Iraq had taught them anything, it was how to prevent deaths in the field and, in the case of a potential tension pneumothorax, that meant going in lower.
“Identify the fourth or fifth intercostal space in the anterior axillary line,” she said. Might as well treat him like a pro and train him as she went. That and the possibility of gaining his trust. Didn’t matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t simply switch her training off. The man was a suspect, she needed to keep one eye on that ball while the other was concentrated on the surgical procedure at hand. “Place the needle above the rib, perpendicular to the skin.” She pressed the needle into Betsy’s chest, feeling the skin, then muscle, then pleura give way. There it was, the distinctive rush of air. “Right. Can I leave you to seal the site?” She snapped off the gloves.
Michael searched the med bag.
“Use Vaseline on some Israeli gauze but then keep your hand over the site, just to be safe,” she said. “We don’t want air getting sucked back into the wound.”
He went right to it. He knew what Israeli gauze was, how much Vaseline to apply, what kind of margins to allow around the wound before affixing the tape.
“Good man. Now, keep that sealed, you hear me?”
Rayton nodded. No doubt in her mind, the man was trained. By whom? To what end? She’d have asked, but they weren’t out of the woods. Betsy was still clinging to life by the slenderest of threads and Midge hadn’t made a squeak since she’d been shot. She got back in the driver’s seat and floored it.
She dismissed all thoughts that the hospital security staff would be waiting for her when she pulled up. There was no way they’d be able to connect her to the pharmacy heist she’d pulled off with the Everlee girls a day earlier. Seriously, was that only a day ago? Madness. She wove through the traffic, leaning on her horn. Hospital security hadn’t had enough time to review the tapes or interview staff. Even if they had their suspicions, she could talk her way out of that mess. There was enough blood in the Jeep to keep them distracted for a very long time.
When they hit the ambulance bay, she did exactly what she’d done when they’d brought Sean in with his groin injury: talked her way up the chain, giving them chapter and verse on what had happened and what they’d done in the field, with one exception. When it came time for the hospital authorities to call the police and report the gunshot wounds, she pulled rank.
These were special circumstances. An ongoing investigation. Leads that couldn’t be blown. Interested parties at the highest level. Local law enforcement would be brought in at the appropriate time. Yes, here’s my boss’ number. No, I don’t recommend you call. Fine, on your head be it.
She saw the information rippling out in front of her like a sneaker wave as news that they weren’t to call this one in spread. She didn’t like it because it shone a spotlight on her, singling her out, but it was better that no one went to the compound and found Arthur’s body. They’d deal with that themselves.
No one said a single word about the pharmacy break in. She
was in the clear.
Michael stood by the Family Room doors, arms crossed, head cocked to one side. “That was impressive. Care to tell me how you did it?”
Jo didn’t blink, flinch, or raise an eyebrow. Let him think what he might. “We need to get back to the compound.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on.” He stood firm, letting the automatic doors open and close behind him, drawing even more attention to the two of them. He thought he could force her hand by refusing to move. He couldn’t. She’d bluffed her way through many a better man than this one. Yes, “through.” She wouldn’t go around the problem, she would bulldoze her way right down the middle. Fearlessness, that was one of the many tools in her toolbox.
“Fine by me. You stay here and wait on news from the surgical teams. I’ll be back.”
She saw his face relax, right around the eyes and in the jawline. He would yield.
“Damn,” she kept her face completely impassive at the realization “I can’t leave.” She had to at least stay and wait for Jim and Aggie to arrive. She checked the time on her phone. Give them ten minutes and get them settled, then go take care of the body situation.