I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (26 page)

He lay down again and considered squats, knowing that he had to work the knees and ankles, but his mind drifted. All those cells. Solitary confinement. The waterboarding. The shock stick. No lawyers. No trial.
In America.
Twelve hours ago.
In the United States of America.

He tried remembering but could not be sure when Mercy last wrote to him. Everything was so vivid except the time. Mail had rarely come for him when he was abroad. He used to take her lengthy annual copied letter out to the rubble flatland between Bagram’s runways where he went to decompress. After missions, sometimes tears sometimes flowed out from him uncontrollably. A neurochemical reaction. It happened, nothing to be ashamed about, but something he worked out alone with his guitar. He stretched out in the dirt with the mountains looking so close he could reach out and touch them; the snow was nearly gone and the killing season was about to begin in earnest.

She had seventy acres; lush pasture with grass thigh-high, the creek running with trout, woods a thousand shades of green teeming with birds and raccoons. Even with all the hunters, there were black bear and deer, porcupines and red fox. Reading her words, he could hear her voice laughing as she related how she had bitten off more than she could chew, as usual, and couldn’t Uncle Sam spare him so he could come and help her?

It had sounded like a miracle, something so distant that it could hardly be real, as far away from his world as the name itself, “Glen Jean.” Coal country, played-out mines giving way to new life, still only half-ready for her to come in and shake things up just a little. The land was coming back, people too, a groundswell. One neighbor was starting a craft brewery; another was making jerky and selling it at farmer’s markets. She was completely off the grid; her own well, a wood stove... the bare basics. She was even trying her hand at making cheese, could he believe it?

He pictured her squatting down with that wild head of hair pressing into the side of a goat or a sheep, whichever it was she was raising. Her strong fingers pulling their udders, milking. Sweating and smiling that big grin of hers. Glen Jean, West Virginia.

He never even wrote back…

*****

“You weren’t there,” Curtis argued across the phone line. “We didn’t get positive ID because it wasn’t doable. I had a call to make and I made it. We had the car, we had a resident soldier with three tours in Afghanistan, and we had a voice match. You wanted this handled, we handled it.”

Bishop looked disgusted. Jonathan Spencer was dead, so the objective was met, but the team he hired, his private commandos, had destroyed an entire apartment building.
Get over it
, he told himself.
You’re a grown man. You know the score.
But first the dead detective. Now this, too.

Outside his glass office door, Bishop looked over to Stephen Nussbaum and his team. It seemed like they weren’t working at all, then they attacked their keyboards like pelicans diving on bait fish. They looked like babies; Stephen alone was old enough to rent a car. “I’m management,” Nussbaum had explained to him, “too old to be a real native.” All four of them glowed, bright with excitement at the technologies Jeffers had opened up to them.

“It’s about over boys,” Bishop muttered to himself. “All your shiny new Christmas presents are going away.”

He had to pick up the telephone to make his report to Jeffers. It was over too quickly.
You should have gotten the retainer agreement in writing,
he thought. Jeffers could conveniently forget the whole thing.

“Can’t say verbatim,” Bishop conceded over the phone. “No. The corpses were incinerated. That’s what over a hundred gallons of exploding liquid propane does to an apartment building and the people inside it. Virginia Department of Health has the remains. Medical Examiner/Coroner. You couldn’t recognize them as human. Dental impressions, I imagine. It was a hot fire, but teeth stand up to two thousand degrees. Could be that DNA can be pulled from the pulp at the center of the tooth, too. That, I can’t say. DOD has dental and DNA on him. Nussbaum is working on getting copies of the impressions after they’re taken. Virginia will have to process the impressions then send out for any match, whereas we have the DOD files already on hand. I should have positive ID at least a several days ahead of the ME.”

“Get the names and track the whereabouts of everyone in that apartment building,” Jeffers ordered.

“We’re already on it,” Bishop replied. Stephen’s team was pulling DOD duty records and matching them up with the dates of the attacks. One occupant was confirmed on leave during the timeframe. They were pulling credit card records and building a profile right now, looking for overlap starting in middle school.

Now there were two names, two faces. One times one is one. Two times two is four. The information set grows exponentially. But Bishop wasn’t as enthusiastic. He doubted if any of it would lead to Jeffers’ precious left-wing conspiracy. Spencer wasn’t taking anyone’s orders. Vision Partners might not like it, but there was no second gunman on the grassy knoll. There just wasn’t.

Life goes on, Bishop thought, just not for Jonathan Spencer. In the end, men like Jeffers always win and men like Jonathan Spencer always die.

Bishop knew the math. He was the original realist.

But grown men still buy lottery tickets every single day. Maybe they don’t expect to win, but they can still wish.

*****

Spencer’s eyes roved along the tree line, looking for shifting forms, anomalies, bird movements, any signs that the motel could be surrounded. He saw nothing, but still wasn’t satisfied. From inside the bathroom, he got up on the toilet and opened the awning window then looked both ways down the trash-strewn cinderblock wall ahead of pushing out the gym bag. He pressed his upper body through until his weight was balanced forward and carried his legs behind him. His right hand nearly pressed onto a broken beer bottle but he managed to sweep it aside before tumbling out.

The knees and ankles were more flexible, he noticed. Still weak, but he was able to make his way up the steep berm behind the motel without stretching out his arms to balance every step.

Thirty feet up in the trees he stopped and watched the parking lot and beyond. No large vans. Nothing that would conceal police. He cupped his hands over his eyes to mitigate the glare and surveyed the terrain on the far side of the highway. No broken limbs or obvious foliage crushed underfoot, no reflections off binoculars, rifle scopes.

Keeping low to the slope, he slowly made his way through the underbrush then stopped fifty feet along and again watched for anything that was altered, any bush that had moved with him, and any limb that was pushed aside to follow him to the new position. With both eyes concentrated outward, he almost walked into the poison oak straight ahead.
Pay attention!
The human enemy is only one opponent. Remember the three Ss: scorpions, spiders, and snakes.

Dehydration. Sunstroke. Infected feet.
You didn’t come this far to die of stupidity!

*****

“I’m not saying that we have stopped looking,” Bishop told Jeffers over the phone. “Cameras are in place looking straight at the father’s house in front and back. I have a tracking device on the van. We have his landline. We have his cell line. We’ve got a relay on the web going in and going out. We even have a filter on everything the dad watches on TV. Wouldn’t you think he’d be watching the news if his son had contacted him? The last thing the father watched was
Gilligan’s Island
! He went on AOL, skimmed some porn site, and then went to bed. We think he took a crap this morning. What more do you want to know?

“No, I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve been up all night long. He’s probably dead and pretty near cremated by that fire.” Bishop listened then jumped back in to confirm, “yes, we are inside the Virginia Coroner’s database; my guys piggybacked off one of their MEs and dialed into the case files starting yesterday.”

Bishop surprised himself by calling Stephen and the techs “my guys.” “No, not literally dialing,” he continued. “They followed the coroner’s online organizational tree and located the case file. Everything the Medical Examiner does we have in real-time the minute results get logged.

“We’re in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, AFMES, too. Yes, we have Spencer’s dental record. Stephen Nussbaum is searching for online tutorials to see if we can compare the molds to the records, but we’re not experts in dental matching.”

Jeffers rattled off a punch list so long that Bishop finally interrupted him mid-word.

“Yes, we definitely have the DNA information. The matching is a software piece. If they find usable dental pulp for DNA, according to Nussbaum we’ll have the match here before they ever have it in Richmond.”

Again, Jeffers went into his list.

“We’re following it online through the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
,” Bishop confirmed.

“No, we haven’t hacked the local desk or any other desk. No, we’re not tracking the fire marshal or the arson squad. I don’t even know whether they have an arson squad.

“Look, I’ve got four men plus me. You either get a low profile or you don’t, and if you don’t then we should have put out an Amber Alert the minute he broke out.”

“We can’t afford fallout on this,” Jeffers worried aloud.

“Then let me do my job. Let all of us do our jobs!” Bishop reassured Jeffers by telling him that Richmond FD was identifying the fire as a ruptured gas line.
You disgusting bastard.

At least three totally innocent people who were alive in Tuckahoe, Virginia, yesterday were dead now. For Jeffers, those people didn’t even register… just as long as there was no blowback on Carlton Jeffers.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He stopped the first person he saw in Glen Jean, a teenager who laughed as soon as he said, “Mercy, mid-forties, has goats.”

“Go on up past the Post Office to the next road where if you look over to the right you can see the Godfather’s Pizza. Don’t go that way. Go left and follow the creek on up Scarbro Road, maybe, I don’t know, four or five miles. If you get to the Whipple Company Store then you went too far. You go left there on the County Road, 21, yep, 21. You’re gonna see a big pond over on this side and then past that you kinda wind around a little lake. Keep on going. Just when the road turns sharp this way, look for a driveway that way. Follow that and you can’t go wrong.”

He took it in slowly, letting the tires creep ahead on the crushed rock driveway; pits and gaps two feet across threatened to punch holes through the rubber. Pretty land, seventy acres in lush meadow with grass three feet high, dense woods, creeks and hillside. She said she was a cheese maker now. She said there was too much work but she loved it, that there was a job for him any time he wanted it.

Spencer looked again around the grassy field and up the canyon. The stream he had ridden beside ran through steep granite slopes; between them was a tangled amalgam of deciduous trees, some growing, others dead and leaning. Plenty of firewood, but better for squirrels than for any livestock. A wisp of smoke drew his eye to a low-slung single-wide mobile home tucked into the trees.

Mercy was halfway back, walking from the mailbox toward the mobile home, when he drove up behind her. When she looked up from the flicking through the mail, Mercy looked into the eyes staring back through the open visor, did a double-take, pranced in place excitedly then rushed forward, knocking over the motorcycle to get at him.

“Jesus, Johnny, you look like shit.”

Those were the first words out of her mouth the minute she released him from Earth Momma hug. Her mouth and eyes looked the same, bright and joyful. She did a quick trot in place then put her hands on both hips and declared, “It’s about time you showed up!”

“Thanks, Mercy. Good to see you, too.”

“XMercy,” she corrected him, showing the giant blue X tattooed where her wedding ring had been, then shaking her head. “Long story. I’ll tell you later. We’re not into having lots of rules, but I’m XMercy. Get used to it. Legal name change and all. You’re staying for dinner.”

“If it’s ok, I’d like to stay a little longer.”

“Hell yeah!” Her arm swung around him again, a thick elbow coming through the worn-out sweater as she led him toward the freestanding porch in front of the faded canary-yellow single-wide. “
Mi casa es su casa
, brother.” She had added some inches, muscle, too, and piercings all along one ear.

Ahead of them, the metal-sheathed front door swung open when they mounted the first step. It felt staged, like the compact, short-haired woman inside the doorway intended it for dramatic effect. Bare, tattooed arms crossed tightly over her chest, which might have belonged to a young boy. Spencer was going to mention how she looked like Ellen DeGeneres, but decided to keep it to himself. Her lips pursed, her eyes squinting like she thought she was Clint Eastwood. Her body language was as different from XMercy’s as her body.

XMercy wore her hair long, with gray flecked through the wild black mop, her giant breasts swinging beneath a peasant blouse straight out of the Summer of Love. All that was missing was the beads. Spencer judged that this other woman could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds wet. Her sleeves were torn off, her blue jeans as faded as the metal siding. Well-worn, square-toed shit-kickers with two-inch heels and her stiff upright posture came off like a Chihuahua in a studded collar. It wasn’t like he watched
Ellen
; the TV was always playing talk shows; bored soldiers passing time and trying to gather in something they could talk about with wives and girlfriends and family, anything other than war.

Mercy walked straight up, tickled her partner’s flat belly, then wrapped her arms around the young woman and carried her backwards into the trailer. A medley of powerful stenches shocked Spencer’s senses. The sweet, pungent waft of marijuana quickly drew his eyes to a red plastic bong atop the fruit crates in front of a worn sofa. A cat lounged on the unmade bed at the end of the long narrow space, its overdue litter box sitting beneath the four-person, two-legged dining table lagged into the wall. The smoky, herbal scent of green firewood inside the woodstove layered on top of everything else.

“This here is Johnny Spencer,” XMercy told the woman “He’s family. Johnny, meet Mouse.”

The woman, Mouse, looked at XMercy like she expected a better introduction. She shifted her glare to Spencer before walking toward the bedroom, about as far away from both of them as she could go.

*****

Her annual holiday letters had tended to arrive just before Valentine’s Day, with at least one year in three missed altogether; pages long, an unedited stream-of-consciousness. Mercy was forever enthusiastically moving to the next exciting life plan immediately after her most recent life-changing epiphany turned out to be another siren’s song. She had been that way as far back as he could remember; painting giant imaginary canvases without ever getting around to filling in the details. At fourteen, she had started coming over to the house, telling him how cool he was and how he was going to do something amazing in his life.
She just knew it!
That was when his mom started on chemo. Mercy took him to his first concert. Just a free show down at the park, but, still, it was after dark. She showed him how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, too, with a hot iron.

Jack didn’t talk a whole lot so it was good to have Mercy around. Her mom didn’t mind the arrangement. Not then, anyhow, not when his mom was there and Mercy was just helping out. Her mom got mad sometimes, shouting across the between the houses how Mercy ought to be getting paid.

Her mom had a new boyfriend. She was a piece of work, Mercy’s mom. Her senior year, Mercy showed up with her guitar and her clothes and moved in, just like that. One time the mom came over, drunk, cussing one minute about how it wasn’t right for Jack to be fucking her seventeen-year-old kid and then a minute later getting mad because Jack never looked her way. “What the fuck is wrong with a real woman? Huh?” Then the boyfriend came over. That was when Jack had sorted him out. But Jack never touched Mercy. Spencer was sure of that.

*****

Mouse didn’t eat much and talked even less all through dinner. XMercy explained all about living off the grid, about how people can do with so much less, they just don’t know it, and how a chainsaw was a hell of a lot more important than TV. She’d been living there going on three years, one alone and the last two with Mouse. She had changed teams. Nothing against the penis; just had enough of the dicks that go with ’em. She and Robert divorced. They wanted a baby but her fibroids made that impossible so they found a surrogate and artificially inseminated the sweetest little nineteen-year-old. Darling girl. She was taking classes in early childhood education at the CC. Robert sure was apologetic, never meaning for it to happen. He just fell in love.

“So I traded a wedding ring for a permanent tattoo and I traded in Robert, the one billy goat, for twenty milkers.”

She set out with a plan to make cheese. Milking goats. Did he have any idea how hard it is to take care of twenty goats and make a living out of cheese? It’s fucking
hard
! You get a milking goat and you’ve had your last day off! She said she was talking too much about herself and wanted to know what the hell he had gotten up to, but then she took another bong hit and went into a story.

Did he know that goats eat upholstery? “Don’t ever let them in a car, let me tell you!”

Spencer passed on the weed but took a short glass of moonshine. XMercy said they bartered for it, but she didn’t say what they traded. The corn liquor would have made a good accelerant if the stove ever went cold. It was getting dark; he had already looked around the trailer—the one bed and the hard benches on both sides of the table. Besides the uneven kitchen floor, that was it.

“Show Johnny the guesthouse, Mouse,” XMercy said.

After a wordless contest of wills, Mouse jumped up, snatched the flashlight, and flung open the front door. She moved into the tall grass at a trot. “You’d best keep up,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s copperheads sometimes. You don’t want to step on no vipers.”

Spencer hobbled after the light, his legs shaking across the mushy pasture.
Scorpions, spiders, snakes.
More than just men can kill. He pushed himself, tripping over a rotten limb and coming up with wet knees and muddy palms. The motorcycle was where he moved it, behind the trailer and out of sight from the driveway, but now he wished that he had found something to use to cover it up.

“I said ‘keep up,’” she yelled back. “I ain’t got all night.” Not a star in the sky, but he could picture the scowl on her face.

“Doing my best,” he called to her. “Legs aren’t great.”

The light was barely visible; she kept moving away while he lost ground. He was used to setting the pace overland; falling behind was something new. He didn’t like it.

Finally the light stayed in a fixed position and grew brighter as he closed the distance. “There’s matches there, in the jar. Lantern’s full.” She shined the light into a camper shell minus the truck it ought to have sat upon. If anything, it looked older than the single-wide. The light swung over to the outline of a rough shed. “Pit toilet out there.” She flashed the open door. A roll of toilet paper was hanging on a makeshift holder.

“Thanks.”

“Uh huh.”

He waited until the light faded into the grass, unzipped and pissed right there, not trying for the thirty feet to the shed. Except for the dull glow coming off one of the solar-powered LEDs they used inside, there was no moon, no stars. So black he could have been anywhere.

The makeshift stairs weren’t attached to the camper. He tested them underfoot before committing his weight. At least they were stable. When he put one foot inside, the whole place shifted and he held on tight, expecting it to tumble. It tilted in reverse when he stepped inside with both feet, rocking like an uneven café table. He felt his way to the small sink and past that to the jar holding matches. The oil lamp lit instantly then spit and hissed water wicked out from the damp air before settling into a steady glow.

In five minutes, the burning wick had warmed up the cramped quarters. There were five layers of sleeping bags on the raised foam mattress, dry, but all smelling of mold. Yet where you are all depends on where you’re coming from, and compared to a solitary prison cell this could easily feel like home. Night birds and small animals moved through the forest outside; he heard an owl, too, after he crawled under the covers. Old food cans, baked beans, Sloppy Joe were stacked on the racks above the bed. Next to the bed were old magazines that he reached up and took down to look over.
Classics Illustrated
comic books.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, the doctor in a dinner jacket and bow tie holding the potion while the green specter of Mr. Hyde looked on.
The Count of Monte Cristo. Mutiny on the Bounty. Last of the Mohicans. The Invisible Man
.

Invisible.
I wish.
But he wasn’t invisible. He was somewhere up a West Virginia holler on a farm that wasn’t a farm with XMercy whom he hadn’t seen in fifteen years and her tattooed dike girlfriend Mouse.
Two bum legs and a stolen street bike and forty-six dollars
.
No idea of where you are, who is coming after you, or what comes next.

*****

MSJS,
he wrote with his index finger onto the wet windowpane. His breath steamed clouds into the chill morning air. The surroundings felt cozy after a good night’s sleep. Either the camper’s acrid stench had dissipated or he had become used to it. Even the tinnitus seemed milder. The comic lay open on top of the covers. Edmond Dantès should have broken out before they ever got him to Chateau d’If, Spencer thought.

They underestimated him, or else he would still be trapped inside the gray monotony of that cell. Dantès had had a plan when he escaped.
What comes next?
Spencer hadn’t planned beyond fighting past the medical room. How could he? Succeeding with the breakout was already too improbable; the variables if he succeeded in getting out were infinite. He could only react.
Reaction is not a mission in itself; a course of action built on reaction defines retreat.

Three raps on the camper door sparked him to jump up, ready to fight. His upper body and lower half responded like two separate beings; the legs never squared under him, leaving Spencer to grip at the window frame on the wall to keep himself from crashing down on the floor.

“Hope I didn’t interrupt some quality time with Rosy,” XMercy laughed as she swung the door open wide and caught Spencer holding up a pair of his underwear. “Emporio. Ooh.
Très chic
!”

Spencer looked down at the waistband then jerked the briefs behind his back.

XMercy disappeared then came back up with a tray in her hands. “Breakfast. Two eggs over easy, bacon crispy, toast, and coffee. You still take it black?”

He pulled on yesterday’s shirt, turned his back to the doorway and pulled jeans on. “Thanks, Mer, um XMercy. Thanks a lot.”

The camper rocked from side to side when she came inside. XMercy put the food tray on the bedcovers and backed out. The camper jolted again, stopped, rocked, and stopped again. Spencer’s coffee splashed side-to-side but stayed in the mug.

The camper shifted again far more, then settled down, off-kilter but firmly in place.

“Got a rock under the post now,” she yelled up to him. “Coming in!”

Mercy danced from one foot to the other, swaying her shoulders to an imaginary beat, then, satisfied, she pushed herself onto the foam mattress, crossed her unshaven legs, flipped her skirt over them and tore off half a piece of toast.

“So, tell me all about you,” she insisted. “Disappear for what, twelve years, fifteen, and here you are. I heard a few things here and there. Rose would ask after you. Jack still helps her with the house. You remember my Aunt Rose? My great-aunt, really. Seems like she’s been old forever, but she just keeps on going. Jesus! How the hell are you, Johnny? What are you doing in Glen Jean, West Virginia? I thought you were off someplace fighting wars, making the world safe for democracy. But here you are.”

“The army discharged me. Medical.”

“I see how you’re on shaky pins. You ok with that? Being discharged? Lots of guys are coming back fucked up. PTSD, depression. Glen Jean doesn’t have three hundred people and there’s been three suicides, vets, right here. Shit, you don’t need to hear about that. I’m sorry.”

Spencer slowly lifted a stiff piece of bacon, ran it under his nose like a fine cigar, and then touched his tongue against the edge, salty and fat.

“I could have stayed for physical therapy,” he told her, “but I wanted to be out of there.” He took a small bite, crunched it between his front teeth, and ran the bits around the inside of his mouth.
Man
. Probably the best thing he’d ever eaten.

“I can rehab myself better than they can,” he promised. “I’m already doing better. Being outside makes a difference.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” she agreed. “Why would anybody live in some shitty city apartment, go to work every day to pay for it, and call that living?” She looked him up and down, apprising, and then asked, “You feel up to some productive therapy?”

“What do you have in mind?” he asked her.

“I’ve got the cart hitched up, gas in the chainsaw. Take the Polaris up the creek and bring back all the rounds you can buck.”