America Rising (29 page)

But first there would be a little tune-up, nothing too difficult, a civilian who’d asked too many questions, stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. Take care of that quickly, cleanly, and when the client pays up there will be a fat wad of extra cash in your pockets. With the kind of money he’d be making, Leland Elliott could afford it. And the satisfaction would be well worth the price.

* * *

It was the end of a long week. I was tired, burnt out, a little tipsy from too much red wine. I’d worked late and wasn’t in the mood to go out so I made myself a sandwich for dinner, streamed a movie to my TV and settled in on the couch in my office to numb a few brain cells. The movie did its job, and before it was half over I started nodding off. Every once in awhile the sound of another car chase or explosion would cause me to crack an eye, but long before the hero dispatched the last of the villains I was down for the count, snoring peacefully.

Then I couldn’t breathe.

There was a claw around my windpipe. Like an iron band. Am I dreaming? Am I awake? I wasn’t dreaming. The claw belonged to a man. A big man, dressed all in black, face hidden behind a ski mask, just like the men who rousted me and Julie Teichner from her home in Ohio. I struggled against the claw, kicked out, threw flailing punches. He blocked my strikes, lifted me off the couch, bounced me off the wall. He was choking me. He was incredibly strong.

My vision was blurring, my punches were like a child’s. The man still wouldn’t let go. He held me for thirty seconds. Forty. Sixty. The room revolved. I was starting to blacking out. I had no more fight in me. Finally, he let go and dropped me on the couch. I gasped for air, pulling in huge drafts, coughing them back up. My neck still felt like it was in a vise. Then the man grabbed my hair, yanked my head back, pushed something cold and hard into my mouth. I gagged. The man laughed, withdrew the pistol barrel, keeping it inches from my face.

“The file on Tutis,” he growled. “Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

I couldn’t think, could barely breathe. He put the barrel in my right eye. “Don’t know. . .” I stammered. “Someone. . . On my desk. . .”

“Maybe he needs some encouragement.”

Another voice, higher pitched. Leland Elliott’s men. Had to be. I never imagined it would come to this. I tried to breathe, to get the words out, but the second man jammed a soft, furry ball into my mouth. One of my old socks, I thought idly. I haven’t worn socks in years.

The first man pinned my arms to my side, lifted me up, set me on my desk chair. The second man unfurled a roll of duct tape. Wrapped it around my chest and arms, pinned me to the chair. I wasn’t going without a fight. I kicked out, my foot hitting the tender spot right beneath the kneecap. The man grunted, stepped back, hit me in the face with his open hand. Hard. Once, twice, three times. The room started spinning again. Cautious now, he bound my legs, rasped, “Dining room.”

They wheeled me out of my office and into the dining room. I could hear the uneven, limping footfalls of the man I’d kicked. The second man grabbed my wrist and slapped my hand on the table, pinned it there, splayed my fingers. The man with the gun now held something else. Tinsnips. Big and silver and looking very sharp. He waved them in my face, his eyes dancing.

“I’ll start with the tip of the little one and work up from there,” he said.

I knew what was coming and was powerless to stop it. I strained and bucked and wriggled. The men laughed at my struggles. I wasn’t brave, I was terrified. The one with the tinsnips fitted my little finger between the blades and leered. Said, “This is going to hurt.” I could smell the pheromones coming off him. For a man like him, this was better than sex.

I tried to throw myself into the void, where fear and pain and death are only concepts that can be acknowledged or discarded, but then something exploded and my body filled with white-hot ice, warm lava flowed beneath my hand, pain like I’d never experienced jerked me around in an epileptic’s fits. But before I passed out some hazy, remnant consciousness noted two very odd things: a tiny red dot at my torturer’s temple and a calm, lethal voice saying, “I don’t think so.”

* * *

I came to in a cold, white, sterile room, all scrubbed Formica and stainless steel. It smelled of medicine and disinfectant. I thought it was heaven. Through a haze of drugs I recognized a room at Mariner’s Hospital, a few miles down the road in Tavernier. A bag of fluids hung from a rack at my side. My head ached, my throat hurt, my hand wore a bandage the size of a softball. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here, who brought me, what had happened since I’d arrived. I could remember other things, though. The claw around my throat. The tape binding me to the chair. The sock. The tinsnips. The blood. The writhing agony. The red dot and the calm, lethal voice.

The memories left me exhausted, or maybe it was just the drugs, and I dozed off again. This time when I woke up I felt better. After awhile a nurse came in, took my temperature, fussed with my IV, helped me buzz the bed into sitting position. She bustled out and a few minutes later the doctor arrived. He was pleasant but impersonal, the way busy professionals get when they have things to do, people to see and you’re just one of many. And I was probably that way in my job too.

He asked how I was feeling, looked over my chart and made some notes, said I had a slight concussion, that my finger hadn’t been completely severed and the surgeons there had sewn it back together with no complications. That I’d need some doctor visits and a lot of antibiotics but it should be okay. Then he left. I was surprised he didn’t ask me anything about how I’d managed to almost part company with an inch-long piece of my digit, but my surprise vanished when Andy Stevens walked in.

I knew Andy a little—if you live in the Keys long enough, you know a lot of people a little. I’d run into him at the bar at Pilot House, shopping for hurricane supplies at KLI, even bobbing in his boat watching the Fourth of July fireworks on Blackwater Sound. So I knew he was a detective with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. I knew too that he was basically a nice guy, about my age, easygoing and athletic. Unlike some of his colleagues, he had no hard-on to bust a big case and move up to Miami. The Keys lifestyle suited him just fine, so he had no incentive to go around acting like a tough guy.

“How ya’ doing, Josh,” he said, pulling a chair up to the bed and plopping down.

I smiled weakly. “I’ll never play the violin again but, other than that, okay.”

“Glad to hear it.” He eyeballed my bandaged hand, like he was waiting for me to explain something. I didn’t. Finally, he nodded at the big gauze softball and said, “So how’d you get that?”

I was still too groggy to come up with a believable excuse so I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “I was up on a ladder with a machete, hacking off some palm fronds. I felt a little light-headed and then. . . then I woke up here. I really don’t remember.”

Andy pursed his lips thoughtfully, like he hadn’t just heard the biggest load of bullshit south of the Miami-Dade County line. “Seems kind of convenient, doesn’t it? Falling off a ladder, hacking off your pinkie, hitting your head. I suppose the tree grabbed you and made those bruises on your throat. And then somehow you were magically transported to the hospital.”

The drugs were making me too tired to appreciate his sarcasm. I yawned and said, “I guess. What can I tell you, Andy?”

“How ‘bout the truth?” he said. “That had to have hurt like hell, and you’re going to be dealing with it for a long time. If someone did that to me I think I’d like to hurt him back a little too.”

Maybe I should have coughed it up right then. Told Andy about Leland Elliott, Tutis International, the two guys in black. The laser sight painted on the grinning man’s face, the voice of the man who saved my life. Probably wrapped up my finger and dropped me off at the hospital too.

And I did consider it. But I also considered that anyone capable of killing two of Leland Elliott’s goons wouldn’t exactly relish the attentions of law enforcement, even a well-intentioned, small-town detective who was only trying to help. So I shrugged and said, “It was an accident. I wish I could blame it on someone else, but you’re looking at the only culprit right here. Guess I’m not cut out to be a tree-trimmer.”

Andy pursed his lips again. He didn’t appear thoughtful this time.

“I’d like to see that machete, Josh,” he said pointedly. “The ladder. The tree where this ‘accident’ supposedly happened.”

I pretended to think about it. Then I said, “I don’t know, Andy. I’m not sure that’s really necessary.”

“I could get a warrant.”

“You could.”

“But you still aren’t going to tell me anything, right?”

“Sorry. There’s nothing more to tell.”

“There is. But you’re not going to tell it.”

I shrugged and looked at him with what I hoped was innocence.

“Okay, then,” he said. “That’s the way you want to play it.” He stood up and placed his business card on the tray table at my side. “You decide there’s something more to this, you’ve got my number. Take care of yourself, Josh.”

I mumbled, “Thanks, Andy” at his departing back and promptly fell asleep.

They kept me in the hospital another day, just to make sure there were no aftereffects of the concussion and surgery. I still got a little dizzy occasionally and had a bucketful of pills to take. And trying to type with a mangled finger was going to be a bitch. But when I walked through Mariner’s sliding glass doors the sun was shining and a cooling breeze had the palm fronds swaying lazily against a brilliant-blue sky. And I was alive to enjoy them both.

For now, at least, that was plenty.

I
t took the FBI less than twenty-four hours to find John Doe’s erstwhile residence in the Lower Ninth Ward. Once agents started asking around they quickly picked up stories about the crazy white boy with the skills of a carpenter and the unearthly calm of a Zen monk who came out of nowhere and started rebuilding a neighborhood in the Lower Nine.

Not long after that they had kicked in the front door of the partially rehabbed house off St. Claude Avenue. But John Doe and any trace of him were gone. The feebs roped off the house with yellow crime scene tape and gave a brief check of the rusty red truck that was still parked out front, then had it towed away to let the techs go over it with a microscope.

They ran dozens of fingerprints from both through the bureau’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, took strands of hair found in the bathroom for DNA analysis and ran that against the agency’s DNA database, took the video of John Doe at the park entrance and ran his facial characteristics through its biometric ID system. They spread out over town, interviewing people at shops and clubs and restaurants where he might have been.

An entire task force was on the case. They traced the truck’s registration to a retired postal clerk in Philo, a tiny town near the ocean in Mendocino County. He was eighty-seven years old, mostly senile and couldn’t remember when he’d sold the truck or who he’d sold it to. The task force checked DMV records in California and surrounding states.

All of this yielded nothing. In all fifty states, there were hundreds of John Doe birth certificates for abandoned babies who would now be men somewhere between thirty and forty years of age. The John Doe they were looking for could be any of them. Or none of them. If that was even his birth name.

The face of the John Doe they were looking for matched none on any U.S. driver’s license, nor in any mug shot, local, state or federal. There was nothing to tie him to the Social Security card, bank account, credit cards, telephone or utility bill, Internet address, email account or Facebook page of any of the hundreds of John Does across the country. In fact, by every modern method of identifying and tracking more than three hundred million Americans, John Doe simply did not exist. He had come out of nowhere. And, it seemed, to nowhere he had returned.

* * *

As terrifying as my encounter with Leland Elliott’s men was, it was almost as frightening to go back to where it happened. I called one of my drinking buddies at Pilot House and he picked me up at the hospital and took me home. I gave him the same story I’d given Andy Stevens and he seemed to buy, though I didn’t much care. After he dropped me off I stood at the front door, waiting until he left, trying to work up the courage to go in.

My heart was pounding when I put the key into the lock. What would I find inside? A pair of decaying bodies in a sea of dried blood? Another team of Leland Elliott’s thugs? A note from my rescuer explaining what had happened? Any sign at all that I’d been attacked and mutilated just thirty-six hours earlier?

I steeled myself and stepped across the threshold. The house was immaculate. There were no bodies, no blood. The table and terrazzo floor had been wiped clean. My office had been straightened up, desk chair put back. I went through the rest of the house, going from room to room, muscles tensed, like a man walking through a field of poisonous snakes. I checked the closets and under the bed, checked under the couch. Checked the pantry and the laundry room, pushed back the shower curtains. Nothing. It was as if nothing had ever happened.