The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (12 page)

"You know who Joseph Welch is?"

Jake thought for a second, the name familiar but not quite at the front of his brain.
Joseph Welch, Joseph Welch. Joe Welch.
"Brand killed his wife and father."

"Yup, the same," Art said as he made his way to the window and pulled the curtains back. "Well, his brother is a fucking genius apparently—Larry Welch. Joe has turned into a coke head and been searching for Brand for at least a couple years, and then three days ago, calls Larry Fucking Welch and tells him that he's going to find Brand within a week. Larry's brain cells don't do much connecting and so he didn't tell anyone. At all. I only called him because I spent the first half of the day having the Brand records lugged to my office and the second half reading them. Anyway—hey, you listening?"

Jake had taken his pants off and was pulling out a hanger holding another pair of slacks. "To every word."

"Anyway, I basically backed out the number he called from and it's a house in Pennsylvania. There's a plane ready and we should be out there in two hours. I was about to leave your ass but I figured I'd at least see if you had quit on me."

Jake zipped up the front of his pants. "Let me put on a shirt and let's go."

A
rt and Jake's
guns rested on their hips, not drawn. No police, ready to barge in and lock the place down, stood behind them. That's what Jake had wanted, what he argued for the entire plane ride, but it wasn't going to happen. They'd need a warrant, and as of right now, they had no way of getting one. The house belonged to a Charles Manning, bequeathed to him from his deceased mother, but he lived in California. The house should have been empty, and more, Joseph Welch had no warrants on him, so getting a judge to allow them to break down the door and take over wouldn’t happen. They needed to speak with whoever was in the house and hope either the person cooperated or they saw something that could gain them a warrant. Art didn't think it would be hard to find something like that, not with these circumstances. They at least had to show up, though. Convince the judge they'd done their due diligence.

Art knocked on the door again.

"What if no one answers?" Jake asked.

Art didn't turn to look at him, but rapped his knuckles on the door again. He hadn't shown up here just to turn around and go home. He didn’t try for the warrant up front they wouldn’t get it, but he certainly would not let someone just hide inside this house either.

He stood for another minute on the doorstep of the old house, knocking every few seconds.

"Hey. Art. No one's coming," Jake said finally.

Art nodded, more to himself than to Jake.
Fine.
He took a step back and looked at the door.
Fine.
He raised his leg, slow like a train just starting to move, slow enough for Jake to ask—"What are you doing?"—and then launched his leg forward, the train finally up and running, aimed right at the door knob.

The wood splintered, cracking like a whip, and the door bounced open revealing a man standing in the foyer ten feet from them, holding a gun.

Art's leg spasmed as he reached for his own weapon, simultaneously trying to put his leg down and unholster his piece. His leg screamed signals at his brain, saying that whatever he had just tried to do was not in the plan and should not have been attempted, nor should it ever be again in the future. Art would have listened to it, listened and massaged his leg the best he could, except for the man—the massively fat man, standing just a few feet away, the barrel of his gun facing the floor.

"PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN!" Jake yelled, moving forward, entering the house with his gun up and leveled at the man's face. "PUT IT DOWN!"

Art hadn't moved, but his piece was out and pointing in the right direction, which was more than nothing.

"I don't think I have to put anything down," the fat man said. "You guys broke in here. I didn't come break into your houses."

No. It wasn't a fat man; it was Charles Manning. Art had pulled some police reports on him from ten years ago, seen his pictures, and this was the same guy just with fifty pounds or so added. He hadn't been thin back then, but he was approaching morbidity now.

"FBI, PUT THE FUCKING GUN DOWN!" Jake screamed again.

Manning hadn't raised his weapon. It still pointed at the ground and Art saw how calm he looked. Collected. He wasn't shocked, maybe a bit surprised, but there was no fear in this man. No great question about why his house's door had just been kicked in and two FBI agents stood with guns pointed at him. Had he expected them? And if not expecting them, per se, had he thought that this was a possibility?

"Jake!" Art hollered. The kid didn't look over. "Hey, JAKE! Listen to me! Lower your weapon! Lower it!" Art was already moving the barrel of his own to the floor. This guy wasn't going to shoot them, and if he did, the law was on his side. Still, he had to know that he might be able to shoot one of them, but wouldn’t kill both—he would end up lying on his hallway floor with his own blood leaking out of newly made holes. Charles Manning had been standing in this same position for the past five minutes, listening to them pound on the door, yelling FBI and telling him to open up. He stood here, listening, and not opening up. Stood and waited for them to come on in, like he probably knew they would.

Art watched Jake lower his weapon, slowly, but didn't turn his head from Manning. Art didn't know if Jake was thinking the same thing, or if he was trusting Art's judgment, but Jake didn't argue.

He moved to the right of the hallway and Art limped inside, his gun down but not holstered.

"Goddamn that was a bad idea," he said as he reached down to his hamstring with his left hand and tried to massage it. That would hurt a hell of a lot later.

"Any reason you just kicked my door in?" Manning asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about. That thing was open and you were standing here with a gun drawn. We just walked in thinking something might be wrong, right, Jake?"

"That's what I saw," Jake said.

"I'm sure it is," Manning answered. "What the fuck do you two want?"

Art raised his left hand, putting his palm forward. "Just to talk. We only drew cause you're drawn. That's it. We just want to figure out a few things." Art knew this fat, tattooed man probably had no real love for police. He did a one year bid about a decade prior for intent to distribute and that was the last time law enforcement had seen him. Art didn't know if he was clean now or not, although most of the clean people he knew weren't walking around with tattoos across their neck.

"You two can get the fuck out of my house. I don't have any reason to talk to you at all, and if you sit here any longer yapping, I'm going to call the police."

Goddamn it.
Art holstered his weapon and looked down at the floor for a second. How were they going to get a warrant out of this? The man who owned the house wasn't a criminal, and there weren't any traces of Welch, nothing exceedingly strange about the house—just a man standing here with a gun staring at two people who unlawfully entered his dwelling. Art looked up at Manning. "Do you know Joseph Welch?"

Manning’s face gave nothing away. "Never heard of him. Now get the fuck out."

"We're looking for him," Art went on. "The last call he made was from this house. We think he's in real danger. If you know who he is, or where he is, we need you to tell us."

"I had a party last week with a lot of people over. I don't know who was here and who wasn't. Maybe he came with a friend and used the phone. I don't know and I don't care. You going to leave or am I calling the police?"

The man didn't sweat a drop. His answers were ready and nothing in this whole situation phased him. Clean people, people that didn't get in trouble with the police, they would have been a wreck, wondering what in the fucking world they had done to cause something this bad. Not this man. This man knew what he had done and also knew that Art could do nothing about it. Knew that Art made it here from luck and that he was here because he had planned it, knew the advantage rested with him.

"I'm calling the police then?"

Art pursed his lips and shook his head. "No. We're leaving." He looked at Jake, making sure he heard. Jake turned, not saying anything and walked out the doorway. Art followed.

* * *

"
W
hat are we doing
?" Jake asked.

"We're going to a hotel," Art answered, his hand on Lincoln’s steering wheel that had been waiting for them at the airport.

"A hotel? What are we going to do at a hotel?"

"I'm going to call the police and they're going to sit on this house. They're going to watch Manning and see where he goes and wherever that is, we'll be there too."

"You've got to be kidding me. That's all we've got?"

Art heard the anger in Jake's voice, heard the edge to it as if Jake was walking a cliff inside his head.

"Listen, calm down. Did you see what just happened?"

"Yeah. We just left the house where Joseph Welch was last seen because some fat ass told us to. He knows what's going on, Art. He knows. He didn't budge in the slightest when we were in there, wasn't scared, wasn't asking questions about Joseph Welch or why we wanted him. That guy was cool as a fucking ceiling fan," Jake spat out.

"You may have missed the part where two FBI agents were breaking and entering into a citizen's house. You may have also missed the part where he said he was going to call the local police and then you may or may not have thought through what that would mean for us when they showed up. They might go ahead and look the other way, but they might not, and either way they weren't going to be able to help us. We have to watch him. He'll lead us to Welch. I agree that he knows what's going on, that he knows Welch, and that he might have even been expecting us. So we just wait and we watch him; that's all we can do."

Jake propped his elbow up on the windowsill and his chin on his hand. He looked out the passenger window. "We don't have time for any of this," he whispered. "There's no time."

* * *

C
harles thought
something like that might happen. He figured it went back to the phone call Welch made before he left. The FBI traced it back to here and that wasn't exactly good. It wasn't the worst thing that could happen either—no, that would be Welch dying. Still, this would be a problem. The cops weren't going to let off him now, there would be someone outside his house twenty-four hours a day and they might tap his phones. He could deal with the tapped phone—his group and he communicated with radios—but cops sitting on his house could make things hard. He wanted to be there when Brand went down. He wanted to pull the trigger and hope that one of his bullets actually killed him.

If the cops were watching his house, that wouldn't be possible. He wouldn't be able to go anywhere near Welch, Brand, or his crew. That meant he would have to sit it out, to direct everything from this house.

Charles walked to front door, running his hands over the broken wood.

He'd been planning this for years, and these two fucking cops were going to make sure he didn’t kill Brand. They were going to put people outside of his house and if Charles went to the grocery store, they'd be right there next to him. He could, he supposed, walk outside once the patrol car showed up and fire a few shots into it. Kill whoever they sent and then hit the road, go to the hotel and try to wait it out there, try not to get caught before Brand arrived.

He considered it as he felt the splintered wood.

It wouldn't work. It was too big of a risk and this whole plan was already one big risk. He wanted to kill Brand, for sure, but more than that, he wanted Brand dead. So what did he do here? Was he going to fix this door and just wait it out? Listen for Welch's movement and then let his crew know what was going on? Would they end up killing Brand that way? Or could he hide out in the hotel, avoid the cops long enough to fill Brand with bullets?

Charles shut the door, giving it a hard shove to make sure that it sat in the frame. He'd see how long it took the cops to get here and then decide what to do.

* * *

"
H
ere
," Jake said.

The cab rolled to a slow stop. The neighborhood was dark except for the streetlights casting their yellow glow every fifty feet. Jake couldn't see Manning's house or the cop car that should be outside of it. He planned on walking the last two hundred yards and figuring out another way into the house, but he
would
get in.