Thirty-three
Sunday morning at dawn, Deputy Jimmy Langton pulled
his car off the highway beneath the Ridge and killed the lights and
engine. Ben watched him approach from his position inside the
surveillance blind.
Jim kept looking around in search of witnesses to his
arrival, Ben noticed. The last time Jim had looked so nervous, he had just killed a
man.
The blind had been set up in a shallow erosion ditch
with a clear view of the rising slope. Covered over with camouflage
netting, it could not be seen for what it was fifty feet away. Jim came
down the wooden stairs and pretended to check out the light-sensitive
cameras. "Ben, we've got problems," he confessed.
Ben braced himself for more bad news. Nothing good
was going to come of the escalating scope of recent events. "Don't wanna
hear about it, Jim."
"That gunshot we heard. Roy took a potshot at
John Hartman. I just got word that Roy drove his rig off a cliff a few hours
ago. He's dead."
Ben tried to figure out on his own what it meant. He
needed to be able to think for himself.
"It wasn't like Roy to try to kill a man,” Jim said.
“Roy was nothing but bluff. Someone put him up to it."
"Orville Kahl," Ben said. That much was obvious. "I
told you we were getting in too deep."
"It's not Kahl I'm worried about. Roy would have
done us a major favor taking out that sick shit. It’s a shame he screwed
it up."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Jim."
"I’m talking about Hartman. I’m worrying about what
Hartman’s going to do about getting shot at like that. I know you like
the bastard, but he's not the same man you knew when he worked for Gene.
He killed Marlene, for Christ's sake. He crippled himself. And his kid
is dying. How much can a man take? He's cracked and he's taking it out
on innocent people.”
An unpleasant thought sprang to life. "Kahl's not
leaning on us, is he?" Ben said.
“He won’t do that. Roy screwed up. We’re out of
Hartman’s league. Kahl will need bigger guns to deal with Hartman.”
“Then what?”
"I told Callavier about the Davies girl asking too
many questions. We got a date in the morning to talk about it.”
Ben pressed in close, his worry deepening. "We're in
way too deep, Jim. I keep trying to tell you that. You won't listen."
"Way too deep, except John's not our fault, Ben.
Over the long haul, we're going to come out of this in better shape than
Gene, or even Kahl himself. The only one who won't make it out in one
piece is our old goody-two-shoes Marine badass with all the slick moves."
"Just don't tell me that we got to be the ones to do
it," Ben said. "We could still fry for what we've already got ourselves
into."
Jim gave Ben a chuckle of cold amusement. "You can
still go dig out that slug, if you think anyone's going to find Jake's
body."
Dig a bullet from the chest of a decomposing corpse?
"No way. It's your bullet."
"Don't worry about it. Nobody's going to find Jake,
and I'm not fool enough to try to take out John. But that bright eyed
bimbo had the balls to suggest that Kahl may have taken out his own kid
for whatever reason as an excuse to go after John. She scares me, Ben."
"Yeah, she scares me, too."
"I went to Kahl with it. He wants her looked into."
"It's sure as hell nothing I'll be involved in," Ben
said, and it surprised him that it had been that easy to draw a line
across which he would not step.
Jim glanced at him worriedly and gave a slight nod.
"But you're still with me with everything else, right?"
Ben thought about it. "Don't push too hard. You'll
take us both down."
"Yeah, well so might you, buddy. Sheila took the
call from your bank about that delinquent car payment. Six hundred bucks
a month. I told you to keep that shit away from your professional life.
Can you imagine what she’s thinking, like maybe you can't afford that car
on what you make with the sheriff's department? So I'd advise you to be a
little more willing to do what has to be done. We're in this together,
back to back. If we go down, we go down together."
In the cool of the night, Ben wiped a sheen of sweat
from his brow.
Hours later, well after the sun had come up, Jim
Langton sat in his patrol car on a fire road a half mile into the forest
below the Ridge highway and the surveillance blind. The sun glared above
the trees, the canopy below heavy with morning mist that broke shafts of
sunlight into lovely pastel rainbows. Deer galloping by on their way to
or from early morning grazing pastures served as his early warning
detection system. When they scattered and vanished from sight, he watched
his rear view mirror for the approach of a familiar Land Rover.
Callavier pulled off the road behind him, left his
vehicle, and took a seat on a fallen log behind the cover of surrounding
underbrush. Jim Langton left his car to join him, his head swimming with
fatigue. Another thirty hours had gone by without sleep.
"Do you know where the girl lives?" Callavier said.
Jim had followed her home on more than one occasion.
He knew where she lived.
"Could you get in without being seen?"
Sheila Davies lived in a rear apartment of an old
house that offered several easy means of gaining entry.
"A message will be left on her answering machine
offering information on Kahl," Callavier said. "A meeting with an unknown
party will be arranged. It will seem to be a public area. She'll not
suspect what we have planned."
"Are you going to take her out?" Jim said in mounting
excitement.
"She will be detained. You've probably heard about
that rape-date drug going around, a tranquilizer with a detrimental effect
on short-term memory? She'll not remember details of the detention. It
won't matter what she suspects might have happened once she recovers.
You'll have all the time you need to conduct a thorough search of her
personal property. Identify the girl for us. Can you do so discretely?"
"Not a problem," Jim said. "What if she's trouble?"
"One step at a time."
"When does this go down?"
"This evening from seven p.m. to about midnight."
Callavier handed him a cell phone. "Use this to relay information from
the scene. Use no other phone.""
Jim pocketed the phone and gave an eager nod of agreement. The mission
Callavier had given him was right up his alley. Sheila Davies reminded
him of a brightly colored snake, quick and sharp-tongued. He needed to
know whether or not she was venomous.
He didn't bother to ask Callavier what would happen
if he discovered her to be poisonous. It didn't seem likely that
Callavier would release an undercover agent unharmed, but possibilities of
that magnitude would have to wait. He needed a few hours sleep under his
belt before he could hope to think straight.
Callavier got up and left without further word,
without looking back. Jim went home and slept for a solid six hours, then
dressed in civilian clothes and took a bus to within three blocks of
Sheila's apartment.
Entering the back yard from the alley, he stayed in
the open and moved at a purposeful, casual pace and had no trouble picking
the lock of the porch door.
He noticed something wrong from the very first. The
apartment was sparsely furnished with cheap, brand-new furniture. The
appliances had come with the apartment. The refrigerator was bare and the
cupboards empty. He saw no knickknacks sitting on window sills, no
pictures on the walls, and little more than soap and deodorant and a few
towels and wash clothes in the bathroom. The apartment reminded him of a
motel room. Sheila Davies slept here. She did not live here.
He found clothes in the bedroom dressers adequate for
a week, no dirty clothes anywhere, no evidence of a clothes hamper even.
He had been counting on rifling through bills and personal correspondence
for the background information he needed on the woman. He found nothing
of that nature at all.
He almost missed the metal box under the dresser.
Had she slipped it another few inches out of sight, he would not have
kicked it with the toe of his shoe. Dropping to his knees, he retrieved a locked box the size of a ream of
typing paper. Only after he had ruined the lock with the blade of a pen
knife did he realize that he had left behind incontrovertible evidence of
his visit and should not have done so.
The box contained all the personal effects Sheila
Davies possessed, identification, correspondence, extra cash and credit
cards, and a ring and necklace. With a seriously trembling hand, Jim sat
on the edge of the bed and extracted a plastic-covered identification
card.
"Oh, God, no."
He tried to close the ruined box. He set it on the
rug at his feet and sat with clenched fists. A few hard sobs wracked his
body. He closed his eyes and tried to block out reality itself and the
consequences he would suffer. He had no way to apologize for what he had
done, no way to back away from his association with Orville Kahl. They'd
find out everything, including Jake's death. He and Ben would go to jail,
or be executed.
He remembered the cell phone clipped to its belt and
dialed the only number in its memory, as instructed. Callavier murmured a
cold greeting in an instant.
"CIA," Jim said, his voice trembling. "The bitch is
CIA."
"Unfortunate," Callavier said.
"What the hell am I supposed to do now? She'll
damned well know someone's been here. They'll nail me by the end of the
damned day, and your ass, too. Damn it, Callavier, why didn't you know?"
"We suspected," Callavier said softly.
And they let him blunder his way into a hornet's
nest. Jim tried to slow his spinning head down. A sudden thought dropped
home like a hammer. "You haven't let her go, have you?"
"She's still on ice and resting comfortably, deputy.
Where would you like to have her delivered?"
Jim shot to his feet. "What?"
"Remember Katie McQuire?"
Katie McQuire had been a body dumped outside Eagle
Junction. He had found sand in her shoe and had combed the popular haunts
along the nearby Pacific beach in search of the murder site. By chance
alone, he had found it and cracked the case.
Callavier's voice was a seductive growl on the tiny
phone. "Reverse the process, my friend. Leave no clues for others to
follow."
"No." Offered the opportunity to indulge every sick
fantasy he had ever entertained in the darkest recesses of his
imagination, he didn't want to do it.
Callavier remained deathly
silent.
"No," he said again, unable to
explain to Callavier what he would want to do with the body to make sure
it was never found and the floodgate of twisted passion that would be
released if he so much as touched her at all. "I can't do that."
"How many have disappeared in this area in the past
few days?"
Callavier was implying that John would take the
heat. Maybe. Maybe not. His heart pounded furiously. His head roared.
He clutched the phone so hard, he thought he might crush it. "Please, you
don't understand."
"Oh, but I do, Deputy Langton, but I would not think
of taking it upon myself to harm the woman. Now that her cover is lost,
she poses no threat to Orville Kahl. We’re just providing you the
opportunity to cover for yourself. And your partner."
Jim closed his eyes. She'd know in an instant that
her cover had been blown, who had found out, and how. She'd read it in
their eyes, their expression, and their behavior. Neither he nor Ben
would be able to hide it from her. And when that happened, she would
begin to unravel their world.
It had gone too far to let that happen. "Don't let
her go," he said. "Don't let her wake up. Please."
"Where shall she be delivered?"
Jim folded at the waist, his guts knotted with
unbearable tension. "I don't know."
"Below the Ridge," Callavier said. "Where we last
met. When? When do you wish the delivery made?"
Jim couldn’t think straight. "I don't know."
"Bright and early in the morning, deputy. Say around
nine, three hours after your shift ends. She will be unconscious, but
unrestrained. If you have a change of heart, she will regain
consciousness of her own accord around noon and catch a ride back to
town."
"We can't let that happen," Jim said in a whisper.
"You know damned well."
"Can we trust you to do a thorough job?"
"Oh, yeah,” Jim said in despair. “I'll do a thorough
job."
"I envy you, Deputy Langton. Have fun."
The phone clicked and went dead.
