by G. M. Ford
“Which brings us to the two of you,” he said.
18
H e gave Andriatta a polite nod and fixed his tinted lenses on Corso. He was pushing sixty. Nearly as tall as Corso, but with a little more bulk. He pinched the sharp creases in his trousers as he settled himself into the chair. He tilted the chair up onto two legs and laced his fingers behind his head with an air of cordial informality.
“I don’t guess I have to tell you why you’re here,” he said with a distinct Southern drawl. Like they were just a pair of good ol’ boys on the porch.
“I’m guessing Nathan Marino.”
Another nod and a boyish scratch of the head. He smiled. “Must be why you’re getting the big bucks, Mr. Corso.”
Corso found it difficult to maintain eye contact with the guy. A quick flick told him Andriatta was having the same problem The approach of the ghastly apparition in the wheelchair was sufficiently compelling as to hijack even the best intentioned gaze.
He picked up on their dilemma. “My name is David Warren. I’m the assistant deputy director for the ATF for this region.” He gestured toward the approaching wheelchair with a well-manicured hand. “This gentleman is Mr. Paul Short.”
“Hoping not to get any shorter,” the guy said from the wheelchair.
The quip broke the tension. Everybody chuckled. Warren went on. “Mr. Short consults, on the matter of bombs, with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms as well as the FBI and probably a number of agencies with whose association he would be loath to admit.”
Paul Short held up the arm without a hand. The cuff of his suit jacket had been folded once and pinned to the sleeve. “Firsthand experience,” he said.
This time the laughs were paper thin, the smiles insincere. Short caught the drift and motored away, over to a knot of ATF personnel on the far side of the room. Warren followed him with his eyes, then turned to Corso and Andriatta. “Don’t be fooled by the bad jokes. That there, folks, is a genuine American hero of the first order.”
“Really?” Andriatta said.
“The government found itself short of ordnance experts during the first Gulf War. Had personnel getting blown up left and right. Put out a request to all government agencies for help.” He cocked his head Short’s way. “Short was running the lab at Quantico. He’d already completed two full tours of duty. Won damn near everything. Silver Star, Purple Heart, the whole shootin’ match.” He let the words sink in. “But he volunteered anyway. Said his country needed him. Took a leave from the Bureau and shipped out.”
An unplanned moment of silence surrounded them until Warren regained his composure. “The ATF is charged with investigating all aspects of the bombs themselves. The FBI is working on the matter of the bank robberies. We believe these two separate lines of investigation are likely to bear the most fruit.”
“I’ll be glad to be help in any way I can,” said Corso. “Ms. Andriatta here is just the hired help. Why don’t you let her go on her way, so we can get started at whatever you’ve got in mind.”
Warren was shaking his head before Corso finished talking. “Ms. Andriatta poked her nose into a number of sensitive areas and contacted a far greater number of people than you did, Mr. Corso. I’m afraid…despite your noble gesture…I’m afraid that, for the present, at least, we’re going to require her assistance.”
Corso got to his feet. Warren followed suit. A couple of the G-men in the back of the room started forward. When Corso merely stretched and rolled his neck, Warren held up a hand. The suits retreated.
Corso touched the screen. “Look…” he began. “I’ll admit the bombs in the pictures looked a lot like the one Nathan Marino was wearing, but…”
“Made by the same hands,” Warren said.
Corso collected his lower jaw. “You’re sure?”
“Quantico says it’s a match. Short agrees. One’s a more sophisticated version of the other, but they say the signature is identical.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“How can that be?” Andriatta wanted to know.
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, now isn’t it?” said Warren. “How can crimes separated by over a year and twenty-five hundred miles be the work of the same person.” The question settled over them like a pall.
“Excuse me for a second,” Warren said. He turned and walked to the back of the room. Corso looked over at Chris Andriatta. She shrugged…as if to say she was at a loss for words. The whir of electronics picked up the slack in the conversation as Paul Short used the joystick to urge his wheelchair back in their direction. Freed of narrow confines, the chair was remarkably agile. Short rolled along the front of the screen, then spun the chair in a circle so that his good side was facing the others.
From his good side the wheelchair was neo space age. The joystick was surrounded by half a dozen color-coded buttons. An aerodynamic stainless-steel storage compartment covered the top half of the wheel.
Corso wondered if, in similar circumstances, he’d do that. If he’d always try to keep the undamaged side of his face pointing at strangers, or whether, after a time he’d cease to care, or maybe even come to find the discomfort of others amusing.
“That’s some wheelchair you’ve got there,” Corso said.
Short gave him a crooked smile. “That’s kind of like praising a guy’s wooden leg, isn’t it?”
Corso laughed. “Yeah…I guess it is.”
“It’s an iBot,” Short offered. “Guy namea Schenet invented it about five years ago. Stair climbing, four-wheel drive, telescoping seat, gyroscopes that can sense my center of gravity and make adjustments accordingly.”
“Government issue?”
“Hell no,” Short spit. “You must be thinking of some other government, or maybe back to the thrilling days of the GI Bill and all that shit. Those days are long over, man. Post-Reagan, the only kind of chair our government will provide you is one of those nifty collapsible models.” He patted the arm of the chair. “Between this thing and my van, I had to sell everything I owned just so’s I could be equipped to get around. It was either that or line up for breakfast with the droolers and the goners in some veterans’ hospital.”
Warren returned. He clapped a friendly hand on Corso’s shoulder, took a look in Corso’s eyes and removed it. He swallowed the smile. “Unless and until somebody shows me different, I’m going to have to assume something one of you did touched this thing off.” He held up a restraining hand. “I’m not saying it was necessarily your fault or anything. Or that you had any idea what you were doing. But you gotta look at it from my end…we’ve got this Marino case sitting around for over a year. Nothing going on. All of a sudden Frank Corso’s on the cover of People magazine saying how he’s going to clear the matter up and…bingo…we start getting similar crimes all the way on the other side of the country.” He spread his hands and tilted his head. “Coincidence?”
“You’d have a real hard time convincing me,” Corso said.
“Me too,” said Short.
Corso gestured toward Chris Andriatta. “I’ll let her speak for herself, but as nearly as I can tell, we didn’t come up with a damn thing back there.”
“Me neither,” she piped in. “Our line of inquiry was dry as a bone.”
“The only thing I can think of that might be of interest was the amount of attention I seemed to be attracting,” Corso said.
“Such as?”
Corso told the story of the two guys with the needle, then segued into his near drowning. The story engendered several exchanged looks between Warren and Short.
“That’s not how the local authorities tell the story,” Warren said when Corso finished his recitation.
“I know.” Warren looked to Andriatta, but got only the shake of her head.
“All that was before we met up,” she said.
He turned his attention back to Corso. “So why do you suppose the local authorities would tell such a completely
different tale?”
“I’m guessing they wanted me out of town as quickly as possible. The simpler the explanation for what happened, the faster they could send me on my way.”
“Why did they want you gone?”
“That’s a good question,” Corso said. “If I’d hung around longer, that’s exactly what I was going to find out.”
“You seem to have touched a nerve.”
Corso agreed. “Yeah…problem is I don’t think it’s the same nerve you guys are looking for. Their nerve has something to do with the response time the local PD managed after they got the call about Nathan Marino. There’s a serious discrepancy as to how long it took the bomb squad to get under way.”
“Places like that don’t have bomb squads,” Short scoffed. “They’ve got a couple guys who went to a seminar together. That’s all.”
“Whoever was supposed to show up…didn’t,” said Corso.
“Seemed like people were ashamed of the incident,” Andriatta said. “Like somehow they all felt a little responsible for what happened to Nathan Marino.”
“Why would that be?”
She thought it over. “Like maybe they felt like they could have done a better job of…” She searched for a phrase. “…of embracing him maybe. Of making him part of the community. Like they’ve all been too busy with their lives to notice one of their own had fallen by the wayside until it was too late.”
Warren and Short exchanged another set of glances. A question hung in the air.
Warren checked his watch. “Might as well tell them,” he said.
Short hesitated and then said, “We have reason to believe the incidents of the past two days will not be the last of it.”
“What reason?” Andriatta asked.
“Good reason,” Warren added.
Another brief silence ensued. After a moment, Warren broke the spell.
“Thus far we’ve managed to keep Monday’s episode out of the media glare. They’ve been reporting it as a gas leak and we haven’t bothered to correct them.” He made a rueful face. “That’s all over when the morning papers hit the stands in about forty-five minutes.”
“The media will put it together for sure,” Short said. “Bank bombings are pretty rare. Two in as many days is gonna raise antennaes.”
“Three is going to cause a panic,” Warren added.
“What are you guys doing about it?” Corso wanted to know.
Warren spread his hands in resignation. “We’ve done what we can. We’ve notified every bank in a hundred-mile radius. Told them to just do as they’re told. Not to give the perps any excuse to blow anybody up. Other than that…” He paused for effect. “…there’s not a whole heck of a lot we can do except try to trace the bomb material and wait to see what happens next.”
“Let’s wait somewhere else,” Corso said through a yawn.
Warren nodded his agreement. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ve got some rooms over at the Glasgow…”
Corso waved him off. “Glasgow’s a dump,” he said. “You guys can stay wherever you want.” He looked from one to the other. “We’re over by Westwood Village, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Take us to the Beverly Wilshire.”
“I’m afraid the government doesn’t…”
“I’ve got an account there. It’s on me,” Corso said.
Andriatta got to her feet and slipped an arm through Corso’s.
“I’m with him,” she said.
19
“W e can kick this thing around forever and it’s still gonna be a mystery,” she said around a mouthful of dinner roll. “But I will say this for you, Corso, you’ve got great taste in hotels.”
Corso swallowed a bite of steak. Looked around the room. Very nice. Very chic. “Yeah…this place is right in line with my new approach to just about everything,”
“What’s that?”
“When in doubt, throw money at it.”
“It seems to be working,” she said before biting another roll in half.
Corso sat back in his chair. “Yeah. That’s the problem. It works every time. It’s the curse of our society, isn’t it? We spend our whole lives collecting things that turn out not to matter to us. So we go out and buy something else, as if bigger houses and cars and boats are going to cure the malaise of the soul.”
“‘The malaise of the soul’? Oooow,” she teased. “You always wax this prosaic after a near-death experience?”
“I don’t generally wax at all.”
“Somebody I know once described you as an ‘artist in reticence.’”
Corso followed another bite of steak with a mouthful of wine. “That’s as close as anything, I guess,” he said. “I’ve certainly been called worse.”
“Yep.”
Corso stopped chewing. Swallowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She batted her eyes and smiled at him. “I was just agreeing with you.”
“Yeah…well don’t be too agreeable.”
“I mean…” She waved her fork at him. “It’s not news to you is it that people mostly think you’re a pain in the ass?”
“They can think whatever they want.”
“They say you’re arrogant, opinionated, reckless…” She stopped talking and leaned across the table. “First time Greg asked me to fly out to God’s country and work with you, I turned him down flat.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Turned out my condo needed a bunch of plumbing work. I figured I might as well make some money as sit around and listen to a bunch of fat-ass plumbers making noise.”
“Now there’s a vote of confidence if I ever heard one.”
“Awww…don’t worry about it, Corso. You’re not nearly as bad as they say you are. Hell…you’ve actually got a little streak of chivalry in you somewhere. It’s childish as hell, but you know…kinda touching.”
Corso used his napkin to hide the sneer on his lips. “You got any ideas?” he wanted to know.
“About you?”
“About this whole bank robbery thing,” he snapped. “About how Nathan Marino and what happened back East last year could be connected to the things happened around here today.”
“It’s a great idea.”
“What’s a great idea?”
“Robbing banks with a hostage. Puts the bankers at an enormous disadvantage. I mean, what in hell are they gonna do…let the perps…”
“You’ve been watching way too many police videos,” he interrupted.
“…let the perps blow up a perfectly innocent citizen so’s they can hang onto some money that’s insured by the Feds anyway.”
“We just watched one who did.”
She dismissed the idea with a wave. “He was Vietnamese. No way a Vietnamese banker is going to give anybody anything. Not a Cambodian either. Or a Laotian. It’s just not part of Southeast Asian culture to become separated from folding money.
“Also…I fail to see how anything we might have done back on the East Coast could possibly have been the catalyst for what happened here in the past couple of days.” She used the second half of the roll to wipe up the remaining béarnaise sauce in her plate. “You gottta admit…the timing’s a bit suspect.”
“More than a bit,” he admitted.
“You said it yourself. It’s been over a year…right? The case is colder than the proverbial well digger’s ass. Nobody’s paying the least attention to this loser chicken delivery guy who got blown to pieces in a bank parking lot way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, then all of a sudden your cherubic countenance is all over the media claiming you’re gonna solve this thing…and next thing you know, the local federales are trying to force you out of town and persons unknown are trying to force you into the grave.” She spread her hands in wonder. “Gotta be a connection somewhere.”
Corso finished his wine, reached for the bottle and found it empty. “You want another,” he asked. “I could call…”
She shook her head. “I’m gonna to
ddle off to bed here real soon.”
“And…you know…” Corso began. “…if this whole bank-robbing thing had started up again back East…well maybe I could believe that we’d inadvertently stepped on somebody’s grave…but, you know…what in hell does any of that have to do with any of this?”
“Beats me.”
“And I’m still not sure what we’re doing here,” Corso groused.
“It’s simple. They think we know something we don’t.”
Corso ran a hand through his hair. “This whole thing is straight out of some Franz Kafka novel.”
“Story of my life.” She said it wistfully, but a sadness appeared behind her eyes. She felt its presence and looked away.
Corso leaned in closer. “Tell me about your life,” he said in a low voice.
“Which one?” she asked with a laugh.
“You choose.”
Silence settled in. The sound of a distant car horn reached their ears, rhythmically bleating its one-note song, over and over before finally stopping.
“I never wanted any of this,” she said after a moment. “All I ever wanted was a husband, a couple of kids, a house in the ’burbs, summers down the shore…”
“You’re from New Jersey.”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “How’d you know?” she asked. “I don’t sound like Jersey anymore. I know I don’t.”
Corso put on an accent. “Summers down the shore,” he mocked. “Only in Jersey do they call it that. Over to the ocean. Over to the coast. Maybe even traipsing to the seashore.” He wave a hand. “But only in Jersey do they refer to it as down the shore.”
She looked around the room and then over at Corso. “This is a long way from New Jersey,” she said.
“Where in Jersey?”
“Freehold. It’s…”
“I know where it is.”
“Funny thing is…I’ve got no idea how I got from there to here. Not only didn’t I see it coming, but…you know…I don’t see any trail behind me either. It’s like I’ve been about ten different people in my life and, every time, all I did was blink my eyes, and I turned up someplace else doing something new.”