Fatal (11 page)

Francis watched as the boy’s shoulders dropped. The waiter showed up with his coffee and they waited for him to leave. “Cassie was right. She said you wouldn’t be reasonable. I should have listened to her. Do you know what happened the last time someone tried to do this to us?”

“I know all about Thorne. He was a maniac. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. I do. I’ve taken every precaution here, Ronnie. Everything is in place. You come along quietly and your parents won’t be bothered. You can call them from the country house and make up a story. We’ll help you work it out so they won't suspect anything. Then we’ll figure out a way for you to see them. Defy me and you pay the price. But not just you.” Francis leaned forward over the table. “Your families will pay, Ronnie. And they’ll pay big time.”

Ronnie didn’t wait for the rest. Cassie had decided early on that Francis wouldn’t listen to reason. They had a backup plan of their own. He gripped the table with both hands and pushed, shoving the steel and glass directly into the chest of Francis, who went over backward, coffee and doughnuts and table on top of him. Powdered sugar dusted the air. The agent at the entrance stood up. Ronnie vaulted the low iron fence of the patio and took off down Decatur, heading towards the French Market. It was still early and traffic light, but he had a half block head start. He was also fifteen years younger than anyone he could see behind him.

A slow-moving produce truck provided some shelter. Ronnie ran alongside it for a few seconds before ducking across the street where Decatur and North Peters joined. A left down Dumaine slowed him up enough to catch sight of a running figure out of the corner of his eye. It was the man on the bench; Cassie had picked him out earlier. Ronnie took off again, straight down Dumaine. He started to slow enough to take the corner. The plan was to hook up with Cassie on Chartres Street where she waited in the car. She should be a block down, parked in an alley they had picked out before dawn. The Polaris could just squeeze in, and the building on the left was set back far enough to watch down the street. If Ronnie was running, Cassie could get the car started and they’d be gone in an instant.

Ronnie never made the corner. As he slowed, something hit him from behind, a blow that knocked him out into the street. He tried to roll away, but whoever it was had him around the chest and wouldn’t let go. He rolled over, managing to get his elbow back and drive it into the man’s gut. He was rewarded with a woof of air. The grip on his arms weakened. Another sharp jab and both arms were free. He got up and started down Chartres. Now there was yelling up and down the street. Ronnie could see the front of the Polaris a block away. He started toward it, hit the curb wrong, and his ankle gave way under him, a sickening pain shooting up his leg. He was still moving and he managed to hobble a few more feet when he went down hard again. Whoever was on top of him grabbed his hair and used it to crack his head against the sidewalk, once, twice. Ronnie saw stars and gave up, turned his head up the street one last time before he blacked out and saw the Polaris with Cassie at the wheel pull out, hook a right and move away down Chartres and out of his line of vision. A sharp sting in his arm was the last thing Ronnie felt before he left the planet.

*****

Clayton Beuhl was sitting on his front porch when the black Lincoln went rolling past. His note pad was on a table next to the rocking chair and he picked it up, made a note of the time, and went back to working on his bottle of Rolling Rock. The sun was just setting. He was on his third bottle, a nice buzz beginning to settle in. Sitting on the porch and steadily working away on his stock of beer had been Clayton’s major occupation for the past year. When his usual allotment of cases was gone, he simply called the store and had them deliver more.
The job suited his personality and he often thought fondly of his father, who had been kind enough to die, leaving him a fortune, and the means to do exactly what he wanted.

That father, Charles Beuhl, had been a prominent citizen of Clark County for well over five decades. Raised in prosperity, Charles had managed to take over a good chunk of local enterprise, consisting mainly of small farms, a feed store, a granary, and a shipping business. He packaged the whole thing up and sold it to a corporation based in New York for enough money to keep himself and his family in high cotton for the next few generations. Charles’ wife had thoughtfully passed away ten years before, leaving him and Clayton alone. Charles response was to send Clayton off to school and out of his hair. Clayton’s response had been to get a good education, a good job afterwards, and vow never to see his father again if he could manage it.

Things had worked out quite well for the both of them. Charles divided his time between harassing local politicians, supervising the upkeep of the fifty acres he had held on to for his homestead, and paying the occasional visit to the whorehouse in Gathrow thirty miles away. Clayton worked his way up the ladder with a law firm. He was making a nice living, not a great living but a nice living, when he got the call that made him rich. He returned home, claimed his title, and took to sitting on his front porch. He was tired of suits, so he usually wore only his jockey shorts when he was working.

Clayton’s new life was somewhat of a revelation to him. While he formerly believed himself to be a hard worker, he found it more than easy to adapt to doing very little. He watched the yard workers as they cut the grass in the fields around him. He tinkered around in his mother’s old rose garden and found he had something of a green thumb. Whereas before he had no interest in drinking, he now spent his nights mildly buzzed and enjoying the quiet. His needs were few and his resources were ample. Clayton looked forward to doing next to nothing for the next two or three decades.
At least he did until the black Lincolns invaded his life.

When his father’s fortune-sealing package deal went through, the bulk of the land fell under cultivation. Thousands of acres surrounded the homestead and produced corn and beans in abundance. Spring brought trucks moving back and forth between the silos and the shipper on a regular routine. The land behind the house, however, never saw a plow. That section of land was fenced off with a chain link construction almost ten feet high. Razor wire topped the fence and the dirt driveway leading into the enclosure was sealed off with a rolling gate. A manned booth sat astride the driveway. When Clayton asked about it at the settlement of his father’s estate, he got no real answer.

“It’s a government place,” his father’s lawyer told him. Chip Burns had been his father’s attorney since they went to Prep school together. He never lost the country in him. “They do some kind of crop research or something there. They won’t bother you though.”

“What kind of crop research?” Clayton had asked. At the time he didn’t really care. He was too busy thinking about money and freedom. He did think it would be nice to know what his neighbors were up to though.

“Who the hell knows?” Burns said. “They’re probably trying to invent beans that don’t make you fart or some such nonsense. The government don’t come to me and ask me questions, and if they want to research root rot or cotton worms that’s fine with me.”

“Huh. Maybe I’ll go over there and introduce myself one day,” Buehl said.

“I wouldn’t if I was you.” Burns was busy stuffing papers in his briefcase. He stopped long enough to look at Clayton. His face was a mask, and at first, Clayton thought the man was just trying to hide the fact that he didn’t know what was happening out there. Later, sitting on his porch, he thought the look came from the fact that Burns just didn’t want to know what was going on out there.

“Why?” he asked.

The lawyer sighed and put down his briefcase. He sat down again, leaned back and laced his fingers across his stomach. He sighed again. “Do you remember Chad Barr? He was a year or two behind you in school before you left. Big kid? Not much brains?”

“Sure. He used to run around with Peggy Finch.”

“Well, now he runs around with other women even though he married Peggy Finch. Anyway, he was out with one of his lady friends one night about two years ago. He had a snootful, and he run his truck into the ditch about a hundred yards down the road from that gate. He got out and stumbled down the road. Figured he’d call Scoot and get a pull before his old lady found out.” Burns rubbed his hand over his bald head, sighed again.

“’Except when he got to the gate they weren’t too happy to see him. He kind of surprised the guard, coming up on him in the dark like that. Before Chad could get the first word out of his drunken mouth, the guard had him on the ground with a gun at his head. Then two more showed up. Chad said they had guns too, nine millimeters. But, they also had M-16’s in their car, and Chad says there’s an M-16 behind the door in that booth. So maybe you want to think twice before just going over and introducing yourself. They roughed Chad up a bit and basically scared the shit out of him.”

“Oh, come on. At an agricultural research center? Why would they possibly need that kind of security?” Clayton was convinced Burns was screwing with him. Or that Chad Barr was full of shit.

Burns put his hands up in surrender. “I’m telling you what he told me. He got picked up for drunk driving that night after he walked into town and got the tow truck to pull him out. I’ve been a lawyer for almost forty years. You were a lawyer. You know that feeling you get when people are telling you something and you know it’s a lie?”

Clayton nodded.

“Well,” Burns said. “I never got that feeling when Chad Barr was telling me the story. I think he was telling me the truth.” With that, Burns got up, showed Clayton out the door, and shut it firmly behind him.

He didn’t forget that conversation with his father’s oldest friend and lawyer, but Clayton didn’t dwell on it either. It drifted to the back of his mind as he settled into the routine of rich landowner in a county where most people scratched from week to week. He kept his father’s people on to maintain the yard, gave the housekeeper a generous amount of money to retire, and picked up a younger girl to come in three times a week and do some cleaning and keep the refrigerator full. He did his own cooking, went to dinner three or four times a week at the diner on the highway a few miles away, and sometimes drove all the way into Gathrow to eat at the catfish restaurant. For the first few months, he read his father’s books and watched television when the mood struck. It was a far cry from the eighty-hour weeks he’d worked in the city. Time, and grain trucks, rolled by while he sat on the porch.

Clayton never knew whether it was boredom or intuition that set him to keeping track of what was going on in the fenced-off track that bordered his back acreage. Maybe he just got tired of seeing the black Lincolns. The first one he saw rolled past one afternoon when he was getting his mail. Too lazy to walk the three hundred yards to the mailbox, he had taken to driving the yardman’s four-wheeler down the dirt road that led to his front door. He was sitting on the torn plastic seat, shuffling through bills and exclusive offers, when he heard the car coming. He put the mail down and watched as the black sedan eased down the road. The driver was in no hurry. The car itself looked almost new. Red dirt spattered the wheel wells. There had been rain in the forecast further south and Clayton supposed it had come up from that direction. The vehicle pulled abreast of him and he raised his hand to wave before something made him pull it back down. The man at the wheel was wearing sunglasses and a suit. He didn’t look at Clayton, didn’t blow the horn in greeting. Clayton watched as the brake lights flashed at the intersection three hundred yards down. The Lincoln turned right, drove down the road and out of sight. The lawyer’s words came back to him. Clayton fired up the four-wheeler and headed for the back of his property. He wanted to take a closer look at his neighbors.

That first trip did nothing to answer any questions. The fence ran around the entire property from what Clayton could see. Sitting in the middle was a walled compound. The peaked roof of a building rose above the wall, a line of windows just visible. Anyone coming in through the gate would have to pass inside the wall to reach the building. The whole thing struck him as odd. A double line of security for a rural agricultural research facility seemed a stretch to him. There was also no sign to let passersby know what was in the building. Most government buildings carried a name, the Julius Peabody Building or Senator James Institute of Bullshit or something. This place sat alone and guarded in the middle of acres of farmland, a brick building with no identification. It must have been built after he had been sent off for school and before his father died, sometime in the last ten years. There were no signs of recent construction. No overturned earth, no wheelbarrows or machines or stacks of cement bags. For a moment, Clayton felt disconnected from his own land. It felt like driving to the soda shop and finding a Burger King in its place that wasn’t there yesterday. Clayton could see where his own landscaper cut the grass right up to the fence line. The other side was not as well tended, the blades six inches high. There was nothing much else to see. No movement, no cars came or went while he was watching. As he got ready to leave, out of the corner of his eye he caught a single flash of light at the window, a stray sunbeam. After another minute of watching, he turned and headed back to the house. He drove the four-wheeler thirty or forty yards down the road, stopped and turned around again. The peaked roof was there, the compound wall hadn’t moved, and for some reason it made him uneasy. He twisted the throttle and drove back to the house a little too fast. That night, sitting on his porch with a Rolling Rock, he saw his second black Lincoln and began to record them in his notebook.