Dead Simple (7 page)

Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple

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“Come in! Do you read me? Come in!”

The police officers were yanking the compressor hose up quickly now, falling into a desperate rhythm. Liz watched as a jagged, mangled end emerged from the water. The policemen drew it toward them in disbelief.

The thick rubber looked as though it had been bitten through.

The officers looked at each other and then at Rentz, whose gaze remained locked on the waters of the lake, which had gone calm once more.

EIGHT

H
arrison Conroy turned off the motor of his Mercedes and listened to the smooth engine settle back, bedded down for the evening. He snatched his briefcase from the passenger seat and walked into the house through the garage entrance. Instinctively he turned to the alarm, but it had already been deactivated, by his son, Damon, probably, since his wife would be in foundation board meetings for the better part of the evening.

Conroy took his briefcase with him into the kitchen, leaving his jacket on as he mixed himself a Beefeater and tonic. He paused briefly before starting to sip, a small moment’s pause to appreciate where he was, how far he’d come. A long, dark time buried behind him. Nothing but sunshine ahead in the beautiful town of Ridge, Long Island.

He heard splashing in the backyard pool and took a heftier gulp of his drink than he’d planned. His thirteen-year-old son was under strict instructions to stay out of the pool until his homework was done and not to swim alone. Conroy’s watch read five-fifteen; no way Damon could have been to baseball practice and gotten his homework done by now. Well, there was going to be hell to pay. Kid might have grown up in the lap of luxury, but Conroy wanted it to mean something, wanted him to appreciate it. He’d told Damon often enough how it had been for him, always in general terms, with the specific dates sketched broadly, since there was a big chunk
of years that Harrison Conroy had simply deleted from his life. They never happened, lost in a kind of willful amnesia.

He brought his drink with him out the French doors, across the lawn toward the pool.

“Damon, son, there better be a good reason why you’re—”

Conroy stopped cold. The glass slipped from his hand and shattered against the asphalt. A man he wished he didn’t recognize sat in an inflatable pool chair, his bulk making it sag into the water. The chlorinated water ran across his stomach, pooling near his navel. His shoulder-length hair was a wild, wet tangle, framing a face that looked too old for it. He was holding a tall glass full of something that looked like Hawaiian Punch, slurping it out of a party straw.

“You dropped your drink, Othell,” greeted Jack Tyrell.

“
I
don’t go by that name anymore.”

Tyrell laughed, same way he had twenty-five years before, except a little hoarser. “No, you’re Harrison Conroy now, assistant director of Special Projects at Brookhaven National Labs here on Long Island—what, maybe fifteen minutes away?”

Conroy stood there tensely, feeling a sudden chill in the late-afternoon breeze. “Ten,” he answered.

“Even better, Mr. Conroy. But you’ll always be Othell Vance to me. Hell of a job you’ve got for yourself.”

“Thanks. How’d you find me?”

“You mean, since you didn’t exactly bother to invite me over for Thanksgiving dinner and all. Answer is because I been keeping track. I take pleasure in an old friend making good. Was a time when a black man like yourself could only dream of snaring such a position. As I recall, that was of considerable concern to you once.”

Harrison Conroy, who was born Othell Vance III, swallowed hard and wished he had his drink back.

“You put the fact that you were once a Black Panther on your resume, Othell?”

“There were no questions about politics.”

“I was thinking in terms of education. I mean, that’s where you learned much of your trade, wasn’t it? You might even say that I was the one who gave you your real start. Think you’d have that cushy job ten minutes away at Brookhaven, if it wasn’t for me?”

“What do you want?”

“Have a swim and a drink, maybe that’s all.”

“Okay.”

Jack Tyrell paddled the chair closer to his old friend. “We got some old times to catch up on. Why don’t you change into some trunks and join me?”

“No, thanks.”

“Why put a pool in if you don’t use it?”

“It came with the house.”

“Cold day, but the water’s warm.”

“It’s heated.”

Tyrell shook his head admiringly. “I’m beyond impressed. Big house with a pool, thanks to the folks at Brookhaven paying you to blow things up. Only difference between them and me is I never had to pay you, because you didn’t do it for the money. I figure that’s worth something, like I was your agent or something.” He looked around him. “All this … I figure you owe me.”

“You need money?”

Jack Tyrell slurped up some more of his drink, vodka mixed with the punch, Othell Vance figured, or maybe gin. “I ask you a question, Othell?”

“Sure.”

“You go to restaurants a lot?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Big fancy places. Need a reservation to get you and your pretty wife, Jenny, a table, right?”

Othell nodded, a little uneasy that Jack Tyrell knew his wife’s name. Funny thing how he would have died for this man a generation before but couldn’t be more scared of anyone right now.

“How about movies? You like movies?”

“Once in a while.”

“In those new theaters with the sound that shakes the whole building.”

“Multiplexes,” Othall elaborated. “Where’s this going, Jack?” he asked, instantly regretting it.

Jack Tyrell flapped his arms through the water, coming right up to the side of the pool and hooking his legs over the edge to hold the inflatable chair in place. Water splashed onto Tyrell’s sodden pants.

“I don’t go to real restaurants much, haven’t since the last time you saw me, at the Mercantile Bank, Othell. I go to the movies, but I got to show up late, after the movie starts and it’s too dark for anyone to recognize me. I always miss the coming attractions. Used to be my favorite part.”

Jack’s gaze narrowed, his eyes seeming to darken. Othell knew the look well. So did the FBI: it was the expression they used on the poster when Jack Tyrell was America’s most wanted man, when he was Jackie Terror. Othell stood there looking down at him, his skin gone clammy. In the next instant Tyrell seemed to shake Jackie Terror off his face.

“You know what this is about, Othell? You want to know what I want? I want what I got coming to me. I want a little payback. I want your fucking help.”

Lots of comments ran through Othell’s mind, most of them the kinds
of things Harrison Conroy would say. Othell tried to keep who he was today front and center.

“I can’t do nothing for you.”
My God
, he thought,
I’m talking like I used to … .

Jack smiled, ran his free hand through his tangled hair. “That’s better. At least I recognize your voice now. But seriously, Othell, even though you didn’t use me as a reference for Brookhaven, you’re only here now ’cause of me.”

“Those days are over, Jack.”

“Not anymore. I decided to make a comeback. There’s something that needs doing, Othell. I won’t ask you to help me do it. I will ask for the required ordnance.”

“Ordnance?”

“I need to blow something up. Something big. All the things you’re into at Brookhaven, I figure there’s got to be one that can help me.”

“You want me to steal something from the lab?”

“I’d say borrow, but there’s not really much chance of it being returned intact.”

“You have any idea the kind of security we’re talking about here?”

And then Othell shuddered, because Jack Tyrell melted into the sun and he found himself staring into the cold eyes of Jackie Terror again, and this time it didn’t look like he was going away. “You have any idea where your son Damon is right now?”

Othell felt his knees wobble. “What, Jack,
what
?”

Tyrell took something from his shirt pocket and shook the water from it. “Let’s play hide-and-seek. I hide your son and you seek him.”

Othell came right up to the edge of the pool. He realized it was a prescription pill bottle that Tyrell was holding in his hand. “Where is he, Jack? What have you done?”

Tyrell popped the top off the pill bottle and it plopped into the pool. “I gave him some pills, Othell, quite a few pills. Shit, you might say I poisoned your boy.”

“No, Jack! No!”

“Calm down, old friend, ’cause these pills I got here will counteract the others, like an antidote, if you’re following me.”

Jackie Terror shook the topless bottle, and Othell Vance watched the tiny white spheres bounce dangerously close to the rim, clacking against each other.

“Please, Jack, tell me where he is.”

Jackie Terror took one of the pills out and flung it into the water. “I wouldn’t squander too many of these if I were you, Othell.”

“Jack, what you’re asking me—I
can’t
do it! I haven’t got that kind of security clearance!
Nobody
has that kind of security clearance!”

“Too bad,” Tyrell said, and dropped another pill into the pool.

Othell Vance snapped a hand out, as if trying to reach for it. “Hold on, there might be something … .”

“Now you’re talking, old friend.”

“But there’s a problem: it’s lost.”

Tyrell poured a pile of pills into his palm. “You’re trying my patience, Othell.” And he extended his hand over the water, stopping just short of dropping them in.

“No, wait! I can help you find it. Get you every scrap of information in existence, in the goddamn world!”

Tyrell brought his hand back. “This stuff you lost, it’s good?”

“If Satan sat down to shit, this is what would come out,” Othell Vance said, in a voice that sounded like somebody else’s, somebody he had done his best to forget.

Jackie Terror turned his palm sideways and let the bottle suck the pills back up. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me more.”

“The stuffs called Devil’s Brew … .”

NINE

“
W
hatcha think this is,” Buck Torrey said, a foot prodding Blaine’s shoulder, “a fucking hotel? Get your ass up!”

Blaine stirred and sat up in the first of the dawn light; Torrey’s porch had become his permanent sleeping place. Took all the hours he could steal from the night just to cool down from the long hot days of training. Going on four weeks now, and the differences were striking.

Years of religious weight lifting had added rippling slabs of muscle to Blaine’s frame. He had worked out obsessively, trying to cheat age and fool his muscles into thinking they were younger. But all those months in the hospital had taken both bulk and tone away, leaving soft layers of flab in their place. Now, after only a month with Buck, the flab was gone. He was thinner and leaner than he had been in years, trading muscle for speed while sacrificing only minimal strength in the process. The change was especially kind to his hip, since it was carrying twenty fewer pounds now than it had last year.

Blaine couldn’t pinch fat anywhere on his body, and best of all, he could pinch with
two
hands. The restricted motion of his shoulder had vanished, the mobility back. He could pivot and twist now almost as well as ever, no longer doubting his hip could take the strain.

Blaine ducked under the porch railing and dove into the water, a daily ritual. Every morning he’d swim under Buck Torrey’s stilt house and paddle
around underwater as long as he could, trying to stretch the seconds each day.

“How’d I do?” he asked, heaving for air as he splashed back above the surface.

Torrey looked up from his watch. “Minute forty-five. Best yet, you son of a bitch, your new fucking record. But don’t even think about leaving here until you top two minutes ten.”

“Why two minutes ten?”

“’Cause that’s
my
record.”

They had fallen into a routine that Torrey changed up or added to almost every day. Blaine hoped this morning they’d be taking to the trees that lay out in the swamp just beyond Torrey’s stretch of water, where knotty tangles of drooping vines formed umbrella-like canopies. Trees that grew more out than up.

It had been agony at first for Blaine to climb those vines. Afraid to put too much weight on his shoulder, he overcompensated and had his face scratched to hell by the prickly ends. Once the shoulder began to shape up, he climbed easily at arms’ distance, looking more like a monkey or a squirrel than a man.

Buck Torrey had him start moving from tree to tree up high, and when that became routine for Blaine, Buck outfitted him with a backpack a quarter full of rocks. Each visit to the swamp, Torrey added more, until Blaine was toting the equivalent of a fifty-pound army pack.

“Got a surprise for you today, son,” Torrey said this morning as Blaine drooped a towel over his dripping frame. “Your first big test, see how close you are to being ready to leave me be.” He checked his watch, then looked up at the sun. “We’d better get moving if we don’t want to lose our chance.”

T
hey headed out on foot. The fact that Torrey wasn’t carrying the backpack into which he stuffed rocks was a giveaway that climbing was not on the agenda today, even before they trekked deeper into the swamp than they had gone before. Nearing the shallows, Blaine became conscious of shapes shifting about, dark blurs of motion sliding through the black water.

“Gators,” Buck Torrey said softly, turning back to him.

“Oh.”

“Remember the obstacle course at Bragg?”

“Live fire?”

“That’s the one. You recall why we used live ammo, ’spite of the risks?”

Blaine continued to walk just behind Torrey along the thin trail of muck, careful to match his footprints as closely as possible. “Because if you know when and where the bullets are coming from and still can’t handle them, you sure as hell won’t be able to handle combat.”

“‘Handle them,’” Torrey repeated. “I like the way you put it, ’cause
that’s the way it is. You get your fix on the first one and make sure you’re somewhere else when the next one comes. Simple, but it keeps people alive.”

“Dead Simple.”

Torrey stopped and looked back at him. “My point exactly, son. The course was a prime way of cutting the fat off the bone. Every time through, we move the bullets a little closer. Take one on the course, you probably walk away wounded. Take one in the country somewhere, you don’t walk away at all. So I get to thinking ‘bout all we been doing this last month or so. I think I done everything you come down here for ’cept one, and that is to see if you’re really ready for live fire again.”

Blaine swallowed hard, having wondered the same thing himself.

“So I come up with a way to find out.” He checked his watch for the third time that morning. “The time’s just about right.”

“For what?”

Torrey turned his gaze out over the swamp. “They’re just waking up now, hungry like you wouldn’t believe, and hungry makes them mean. Gator is mostly a lazy-ass creature. Sleep, shit, sun, and fuck’s about all he does. Most times you got to step on his snout to make him move. Couple times a day—now and ‘round dusk—they get ornery.” He stuck his finger out and moved it in a narrow arc. “You can see ’em if you look close, all across there.” He peered again at Blaine. “What I want you to do, son, is get to the other side of the swamp.”

Blaine’s reaction could have been one of many things, but what came surprised him as much as Buck: he smiled.

He let instinct fuel his pace. Started out slow as he cut into the heart of the swamp, leaving Torrey on the thin path. The water ranged from knee to waist deep, with islands of footing recognizable as slight splotches that reflected the sun differently. Blaine’s plan was to dance from one to the other, never even stir a gator if he planned things right.

A twelve-footer slithered by with its mouth opened as Blaine leaped atop the first land pod. For a time his leaps from one land pod to the next became a frantic game of connect the dots. Initially he hit the soft patches too hard, drawing the death jaws of several gators uncomfortably close. Once, a grayish one had him dead to rights, when another gator’s sudden leap knocked it aside. Then Blaine began to soften his landings, gliding through the air rather than lunging.

The problem was nature had not cooperated with his plan, putting increasing distance between the land patches the closer he got to the opposite shore. Blaine never once turned back toward Buck; this wasn’t about Buck. This was about him. This was about fear and conquering it. Not of the gators; they were just an exercise tool. The fear of real danger, as opposed to pain.

With a third of the distance left to cover, he ran out of land; only water
separated him now from the opposite shore. Blaine slid off the final land patch into knee-deep black water that quickly rose to his waist, alert for the sudden shifts in current indicating a gator had him in its sights and was coming fast. He got used to the feel of the water lapping around him, and when it lapped wrong he lunged to one side, a few times narrowly avoiding eager jaws, which snapped closed on nothing.

Suddenly he realized he could feel the presence of the gators even when the water did nothing to betray their location. He began to move more subtly, mixing with the currents instead of disturbing them. His first thought had been to grab a branch, a rock—some sort of weapon. But thought gave way to instinct before he had a chance to think again.

He learned to blend with the gators’ movements, drift into the wakes left by their quick spurts through the water. Eventually they came to regard Blaine indifferently, or perhaps not regard him at all, even though they had him surrounded.

Blaine remembered other swamps, other jungles, in which the odds were the same and only the enemy was different, realizing then why Buck had waited until today to bring him here. Surviving required a mental edge as well as a physical one. This was Buck’s way of saying the latter had been regained and it was time to check on the former. Give him back not just his muscle but also his mind-set.

Dead Simple
…

That was how walking through the gators had felt. That was how thriving in another jungle had been.

Reaching the other shore, where Buck Torrey was now waiting, Blaine could have sworn a few of the gators lifted their snouts out of the water to give him a last look. They seemed confused, glad the stranger in their midst had gone before the day grew hot and they slipped back into the waters for a nap.

“Wanna come back for dinner tonight?” Torrey asked him with a wink.

“
I
’m gonna be gone for a time,” Buck announced when Blaine got back from his distance swim that afternoon. “Some things I gotta attend to.”

His voice held a somber tone Blaine didn’t recognize from all the years they’d known each other. Torrey’s eyes drooped, wide with worry.

“What’s wrong?”

“Personal.”

“So was me coming down here.”

“This ain’t your concern.”

“You saying there’s nothing I can do to help?”

“Nope. You can stay here and keep putting yourself back together so when I get home I can finally get rid of you once and for all.” Torrey tried to force a smile, couldn’t manage it.

“Why don’t I come along?”

“Like I said—”

“I know: it’s personal. Nothing’s personal among old dogs like us. Sound familiar?”

“You’re out of order, Private.”

“I went out a captain, Sergeant Major.”

“You went out an asshole who didn’t know when to leave things be, and that’s what got you in the fix you’re in. I guess you’re back to your old self, after all.”

Blaine wasn’t ready to give in. “You headed north?”

“It matter?”

“How about I call Johnny? He’s a nice guy to have around.” Blaine held the thought. “For company.”

“I don’t need no spooky giant Indian hanging around. What I got to do is simple shit, nothing up your alley or his. Bore the two of you to death, as a matter of fact. Family stuff is all.”

“Family?”

Torrey’s eyes shifted a little, like those of a man who realized he’d said too much. Blaine looked into them and saw he wasn’t going to say any more.

“Something I got to do alone,” Torrey explained. “You okay with that, or do I have to make it an order? Just leave me be to make up for some lost time.”

“This about your daughter? Is she in trouble?”

Buck frowned. “Seems to be a run of it lately. I’m starting to feel like the Red Cross. I come down here to be alone, and now I’m helping people out left and right.”

“You never wanted me to meet her.”

“Never wanted
anyone
I trained to meet her. I know you boys too well.”

“Afraid I’ll break her heart or tear it out?”

A flash of pride showed in Torrey’s eyes. “Try either and she just might gut you first.”

“A true Torrey.”

“’Cept her name’s Halprin now. Liz Halprin.”