Killer Dust (22 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Killer Dust
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I heard a sound behind me. The front door of Nancy’s house opened, and Faye walked out. Her eyes were puffy from crying. She moved forward at a slow, angry stroll, the motion causing her roundness to sway luxuriously. Tom looked on her with longing, but did not get out of the car. Instead, he opened the window and held out his hand.
“Glad to hear from you,” she said icily. She did not take his hand. Instead, she swung her pregnancy toward him, all but stuffing it in his face.
This
is your priority, she was telling him.
Tom dropped his arm to the side of the car. “Sorry, hon. I should have called.”
Faye ran a hand through his grizzled hair, grabbed the back of his head, and gave it a nasty yank. “That is
such
an understatement.”
I thought,
You didn’t call
.
Tom said, “And I’m only here to drop Em with you.”
Faye’s fingers stiffened into claws. She dug them into the back of his neck.
Tom took her hand from his neck and brought it around to his face. There he spread it between his own, sadly smoothing the tension from it, kissing it gently, stroking each finger separately with his own. He said, “This is where you get out, Em.”
“Why?”
“I’m going back and you’re staying here.”
Faye yanked her hand away. She spun on her heel and stormed into the house and slammed the door.
I said, “You stay. I’ll go. I’m the one with the sand samples. I’m the one who can find out which island.”
“Get out, Em. Now. Brad can find him.”
“Then
let
Brad find him. What do
you
need to go for?” His voice tightened. “To help Brad and the others. To make goddamned sure you’re not right about this guy having friends.”
I was ready to kick the dashboard again. Jack was out there playing macho-boy games when I wanted him here and in my bed. He was out there helping someone else, some other
woman
when I needed to be able to dream about a life that had him in it, safe and sound. But I also wanted to be able to dream about tomorrow without dreading it. I felt selfish and infantile, because I knew he was doing something noble, even if I was jealous as hell that it might be for another woman. Because there was a woman astronaut going up on this flight, and it was women who were usually stalked by crazy men. I was willing to bet dollars for doughnuts that the young woman in the photograph in Orlando and the woman astronaut were one and the same.
And I wanted to know if Jack was indeed the friend I thought he was or some kind of monster. My guts writhed, trying to reconcile the tender man who had lain beside me with the gun-toting men in black who had melted in and out of the shadows near Cocoa Beach. These were trained killers who went home at night and cooed at their kids and made love to their women, and when someone called them, they left those kids and those women behind and went and did dangerous things. I said, “You had to help Jack. Now you have to help Brad, whom you only just met. What
is
it with you guys?”
Tom stared at his hands. He spoke very softly. “Men who fight together become brothers in a very deep sense. If one of them is in trouble, there are no questions asked.”
I glanced over at the house. Faye had returned to the doorway, and stood with her arms curled in against her body, her fists crammed against her eyes. Even from this distance, I could see that she was trembling with fear.
Tom said, “Get out of the car, Em. I have to go now.
Please. If I stay any longer, I won’t be able to do what I have to do.”
“Let me go in your place.”
“You don’t have the training.”
Tom started the Mercedes. He gave me an angry push. “Go!”
I opened my door and got out.
Faye’s voice rose over the sound of the engine like an injured bird, swooping, begging for him to stay, but Tom was gone.
I sat by Nancy’s pool in the strange inside-out room defined by screening, my head back, eyes to the sky, watching the little chameleons run around upside down between me and the afternoon clouds, which were building again into big woolly black things. “They think they know which island group the thing came from,” I told Faye, “but not which island of the group.”
Faye lay flat on a chaise lounge, shaking with tears. “I keep telling you, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I understand that. But I need to talk about it.”
“
You
need to talk about it.
I
have to figure out how to raise a child without a husband.”
“Tom will be fine,” I said, not at all sure I believed it myself. I was in fact beyond worry over the whole thing. I was so scared that I was flattened against the deck chair as if something extremely heavy lay against my chest. The great weight even pushed my head back, training my eyes on the sky, the province of the strange African dust. And yet if asked, I could not have named exactly what it was that so frightened me.
“Okay, damn you,” she said through her tears. “Say it.”
“There’s something very wrong.”
“No shit.”
“I mean something beyond all this. Something about Jack. A piece of the puzzle missing.”
Faye was silent except for a steady sniffling.
“I’m sorry, Faye. This is the last thing you need right now, but it feels critically important.”
Fay took in a long, shuddering breath. “Fix the problem in time,” she suggested, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Maybe that will help.”
“The thing is …” The thing was what? “It’s like I’m digging, going down layer after layer, but I can’t find the trapdoor that keeps the dark things hidden. There’s something about Jack down there, something he’s not telling me. It’s all locked up, and I can’t reach it.”
“Something from before you.” She turned her head and looked at me. She was a portrait of grief, and yet she was rallying for me, turning her excellent mind to the game of helping Em one more time, fighting her despair by taking action.
I loved her so much right then that I began to cry myself. I said, “I’ve never really known much about him. No facts, really. Now I’ve seen where he grew up, but still there were huge holes in the picture. It’s like whatever he’s not telling me isn’t even really there.”
“Describe the holes.”
“The holes. There were pictures all over that house but … not a single photograph of his father. Where’s his father ?”
“Dead, maybe? Your father’s dead. These things … happen.”
“Yeah, but if he was only dead, there would be pictures. There are pictures of my dad all over the place at the ranch.”
“Maybe his parents are divorced. A bad divorce, and his mother doesn’t want to be reminded of it.”
“There’s more. His mother had a bag all packed, and it looked really old, like she’d had it ready for a long time. What does that tell you?”
“She likes to travel?”
“Now you’re being flip. This is serious.”
Faye picked up a leaf that had fallen onto the pool deck
and used it to touch my hand. “You know Jack is abnormally attached to Tom. He’s like a big brother to him, or more so. It’s like Tom’s a father figure.”
“Yes …” Fatherhood seemed woven all through this puzzle.
Faye rolled onto her back and stared up at the chameleons. “And there’s something in their relationship that goes beyond that. You know and I know that Tom’s kind of a paranoiac. He’s more than careful whom he tells much of anything, and there’s almost no one he’ll rely on. Except Jack.”
“I know. He keeps saying, ‘I’d trust him with my life.’ Where’s
that
at?”
“Well, on the face of it, he trusts him that much. Em, don’t normal people have friends they can rely on?”
“Don’t ask me about normal. I’m the beat-up cowgirl from Wyoming with the deceased father and drowned brother and the alcoholic mother who kicked me out. I’m the unemployed geologist who keeps getting mixed up in crimes that nobody pays me to solve. I’m the thirty-five-year-old single woman who’s infatuated with an FBI agent who ran off tilting at some other woman’s windmills the morning after she fucked him for the first time.”
“Don’t say it that way. He loves you. You made love together.”
Tears at last began to roll down my cheeks, hot and thick. “And I want to do it again. But I don’t know where he is. And he doesn’t tell me things, not anything about himself, not really.”
“He tells you that he loves you. Can’t you believe that?”
“But then he leaves a map showing where he buried a fucking Chinese surface-to-air missile.”
Faye sat up abruptly. “He
what
? Em, did I hear you say that? You think
Jack
put that thing there?”
I slapped my hands over my mouth as if eels were coming out of it. I wanted to run and scream, beat the words into the earth where they couldn’t hurt me. “I didn’t mean
it! I just—he’s trained in the art of killing, Faye! I’m supposed to trust him?”
“Yes, Em. I always used to think that police dogs must be terribly vicious. Then someone explained to me that they’re actually very calm and big-hearted, because you need a really stable animal for that training. You have to be able to teach them to attack, yes, but also to let go the instant you command it. I think it’s the same with these warrior men.”
“Jack’s not a German Shepherd.”
“You’re scared out of your wits that Jack’s not as good and stable and trustworthy as you hope he is. Well, let me tell you, Em, you don’t ever get to know somebody until you open yourself up to them and do it the hard way, just like the rest of us poor fools. You think I knew Tom when I married him? Bullshit. You think I know him now? Every woman gets to know her man the same way, by living with him. That’s when you get to see inside the shell, sweetie, not before. Up until then it’s all chocolates and roses, and that’s all very nice, but it’s crap. You only get to know if they’re good for it by putting it to the test.”
“Alright!” I yelled. “Alright! I put it to the test. I slept with him. I opened my body and my soul to him, and it was beautiful, and it scared me silly, and he ran away! Where’s
that
at?”
“I don’t think he ran away. I heard him that morning, talking to Tom. He was in anguish. He was afraid you’d leave him, but this was something he had to do. He felt he had no choice. He had some kind of promise to a friend, Em. I think that argues well for him.”
“
What
friend?”
“We don’t know. I don’t think Tom even knows. Or maybe he does and he can’t say.”
“This brotherhood thing! I just don’t get it!”
“They have a bond. I think you want something like that for yourself. But you’re not built that way.”
“What kind of paranoiacs can’t call the police when there’s a crime going down?”
“These guys are paranoid, Em, you’re quite right, but for good reason. There are things out there they deal with every day that scare them shitless. Call it posttraumatic stress if you must, but they band together, and bond, and they do their guy thing, and this is what it looks like. I don’t like it either. If Tom was here right now, I’d be kicking him in the nuts, I’m so angry. Hell, I wanted to be the millennial woman whose man built a new alliance with her. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted every day to be a new day, no strings. And then I got pregnant, and all the old tribal stuff came home to roost. Now the baby has the priority, and I’m just the vehicle for it, and Tom’s gone off to slay the dragon that he feels is threatening it. God help me, Em, I didn’t ask for
any
of this!”
I said, “Where was Jack’s dad?”
“Maybe she had him out of wedlock. Got knocked up. These things
happen,
” Faye said, looking down at her own belly. “Or maybe she’s gay, and had a turkey-baster job. It’s nobody’s business, Em.”
“She’s as heterosexual as you or I. She’s middle-of-the-road white bread Americana at heart. And she’s keeping a secret.”
“And Em, the great sleuth, can smell a secret,” she said sarcastically.
“I don’t know this pattern. It’s a new one. I just know there’s a pattern to it. It’s staring me in the face, and I can’t figure it out.”
Faye closed her eyes and sighed. “Describe what you see.”
“I see … a man who has a strong—no, overweening—sense of loyalty and secrecy. And he’s the man with a thousand faces, an actor. Those two parts of him fly at each other. Where’d he learn to morph like that? And he’s forty years old and didn’t tell me it was his birthday. And he’s never been married, or if he has, he’s sure covered it well. No kids, or does he have a love child stuffed away somewhere?”
Faye stuck out a hand. “Hold it. Stop. You’re really
around the bend here. And you said a moment ago that you thought he put that thing in the sand himself. And you’re calling Tom paranoid?”
I pulled my shoulders up around me, my skin beginning to crawl. “I don’t know. It’s a feeling. Jack’s loyal all right, but it’s as if … he molds easily. Parts of him are like putty.”
Faye laughed derisively. “So you’re saying that you think he might be some kind of double agent maybe, who doesn’t have control over what he’s doing?”
“No … that’s not it.”
“You think he’s evil.”
“No!”
“Make up your mind. You think he’s capable of bringing a weapon onto American soil that can bringing down a space shuttle.”
“No, I don’t think he’d do that. Not the Jack I know. But the Jack who was here two days ago was not the Jack I know.”
“Ah. Now we’re getting down to it.”
“What in hell’s name had him so upset, Faye? He wouldn’t even respond to me, and then he grabbed me so roughly it scared me. It
hurt
. Since then, I’ve had to think through everything I know about him, and I’ve realized that it’s a pretty short list of facts.”
“Do you think he’s capable of firing a rocket at a space shuttle, or not?”
I was pulled up with my knees under my chin now, like a little girl. “I don’t think so. But
someone
put it there.”
Faye leaned toward me and stroked my hair. “Yes, someone put it there. Someone pretty crazy. But I don’t think Jack’s crazy. Do you?”
I could not answer her question.
 
 
I borrowed a Mercedes and drove back over to the USGS. At the desk, I asked for Miles Guffey. I was going on raw
instinct now, homing in on the path—any path—that might yield information.
“He’s gone on a trip,” said the receptionist.
“Oh. Well, how about Waltrine Sweet?”
“Left with him.”
“Oh. Is Dr. Rodríguez in?”
“She went home. It’s her daughter’s birthday. She told me to tell you you should drop by if you wanted to.” She handed me a slip of paper with an address and a little map.
 
 
Olivia Rodríguez Garcia was making rice fritters stuffed with cheese (
granitos
) and a sort of fried coconut dough (
arepas de coco
) for her ten-year-old daughter and half a dozen of her girlfriends. The girls laughed and cooed over the crunchy treats, licking the oil from their fingers, threatening to rub it on each other’s party clothes.
Olivia offered me some. “Try. You’ve got to love them,” she said, pursing her dark lips into a rosebud of culinary ecstasy.
I bit into a rice fritter. My teeth broke through the crust and into the hidden cheese. My mouth watered. I suddenly realized I had not had lunch.
“Good, hmm?”
“Good.”
She fixed her dark eyes on me. “So, Miles and Waltrine have gone on a little trip, eh?”
There was something in her tone I didn’t like. If I’d had hackles on the back of my neck, they would have stood up. “Yes. Is that why you invited me to your daughter’s party?”
“Try
unas arepas
. Some people like them with honey. Miles has taken an unexpected leave. Sorry. This must be an inconvenience for you.” She raised her eyebrows and shoulders, as if to say,
What can you expect?
“Do you know where he went? Or how long he will be gone?”
“I have a suspicion he is going somewhere on his boat. That sample you brought him seemed to excite him.” She
shrugged her shoulders. “I am not privy to his plans. This is how it is with him. He is not a team player. I have a center to run. Our projections for the coming year are due tomorrow, and he has given me nothing.”
I stared at her, wondering if I was looking at someone stirring up trouble, or just a very, very frustrated administrator trying to deal with a very, very loose cannon. “I think I’ll drive over to his house and see if he’s left yet,” I said, and excused myself.

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