Spectre Black (11 page)

He found a place where he could watch the activity. It wasn’t perfect, just a sorry-looking tree at the edge of the back lot. He lay in the dirt and watched. One thing bothered him. Would the police know he had another vehicle?

As time went by, he realized they didn’t. All their attention was on the Nissan Versa. In their excitement to bird-dog the vehicle used in the shooting at the checkpoint, as well as the shooting of the two other militia members, they had ignored every other car in the parking lot. They inspected the car. The tow truck showed. Officers went up the stairs to his room. Four cops on the walkway, weapons leveled, creeping alongside the wall. The two cops in front closed to either side of the door. One cop going high, one cop going low. Another cop stepped forward and banged hard on the door and stepped quickly back out of range. “Police!” he shouted. Of course there was no answer. Landry wondered if they would get the battering ram, but decided that would be overkill. One of them would just get the manager. And as he predicted, a cop took off down the steps and around the motel toward the office, and came back with the key moments later.

Back to one cop high, one cop low. A crowd was beginning to gather in the dirt lot—people from the neighborhood and some of the guests.

Landry noticed the SWAT team sniper, if things got out of hand. All they needed now was the big fat MRAP to come lumbering in.

Another knot of law enforcement watched as the white Nissan was winched onto the bed of the tow truck.

He glanced back at the open doorway of his former motel room. SWAT in black. Cops taking the rear. All of the cops were with the sheriff’s department. It seemed to Landry that a whole lot of nothing was happening, although everyone was quick about it.

They would see the car rental agreement for Chris Keeley, but that would be as far as it went.

Cops stood around the white car. Peering in the windows. Talking about it to one another.

They knew what they had: this was the white car used in the shooting at the checkpoint. You could almost see the wheels turning in their heads. If this was the car driven by the shooter of the militia members who’d witnessed the shooting at the checkpoint, then it stood to reason that it might also belong to the checkpoint shooter, who had killed the other two to cover up his crime.

Everything nice and neat.

Easy peasy.

There couldn’t be two white subcompact cars coming through the checkpoint around the same time. Too much of a coincidence. This had to be the car, and Chris Keeley had to be the shooter. And so they would look for Chris Keeley, even if they didn’t know who he was or why he had gone on a crime spree.

Their theory: Chris Keeley had come back to eliminate the witnesses.

Landry thought about his own alibi—his stay in jail—and realized he didn’t have one—not for this afternoon. The two militia members in the house were killed after he was released.

The news said the shots had been fired at three thirty. And he had been out of jail since three p.m., give or take five minutes.

He had a white car fitting the description. He had been seen around town. He had slept with the FBI agent. He had been arrested and detained for no plausible reason. Then he had been put into an empty cell pod with a psychopath.

For a guy who flew under the radar, Landry realized he’d made plenty of enemies already.

Starting and ending with Agent Vitelli.

By two in the morning, the cops were done. Everyone cleared out except for one unlucky cop stuck with guard duty. He stood on the walkway outside the room, slapping his nightstick against his palm and watching the moths play ring-around-the-rosie near the light by the door.

They must have thought Landry was long gone. If he was smart, he would be.

But Jolie was still missing. She’d called him for help and he wouldn’t abandon her now.

He still had the van. Everything he’d brought with him other than the clothes he’d changed out of had been moved to the storage bay.

The white car had done its job. Now it was time for the blue van to shine. First, though, he would wait to see how this played out. He wouldn’t go to the van for a while.

And so he walked.

He found another motel, this one on a side street off the main drag on the other side of town, one of those old motor courts that was even older than The Satellite INN. This one had survived the forties and fifties. There was a sleepy quality to the place. He liked it. The rail-thin man at the desk had a Middle Eastern accent. He also had very white teeth and an engaging smile. He gave Landry the key to the unit at the back of the courtyard.

An oval expanse of lawn sat in the center of the lot, units on either side and two additional units at the end, which formed a “U.” Croquet hoops were set up inside the grassy oval.

Inside his room it was dark and smelled old. The bed was made with a white chenille bedspread, a yarn saguaro cactus in the center. Quaint. Landry had a feeling that this was a place where people minded their own business. There might be a sex trade going on here, or other nefarious dealings, or it might just be the kind of place where the well heeled would never go.

Landry sat on the lumpy bed. He speculated about Carla Vitelli’s motive for targeting him. Maybe she wanted to sleep with him, but
maybe she didn’t. Maybe she just wanted to check him out. A sex marathon was a funny way to check someone out, but stranger things had happened to him. She’d seemed insatiable at the time, but Landry wasn’t so invested in his sexual prowess that he couldn’t discard that theory. Maybe she’d faked her passion.

But could she fake her anger?

Maybe.

What did Agent Vitelli want from him? He thought back to the donut shop. He knew she was FBI and he’d gone out of his way to interact with her.

He had hoped she would tell him something about her investigation, but instead there had been the sex marathon.

Followed by her mugging for the hunt cam.

Landry didn’t know what to make of this. She was smart enough to figure out he was looking for Jolie. She was smart enough to find the hunt cam, and she was rash enough to show him that she’d found it. But after all that, there had been nothing.

Except for his arrest. Except for the fact he had been put into that cell pod with Earl—
alone
with Earl.

Which was it, though? Did she want Earl to kill him or at least beat him up badly, or did she want to set him up for the shooting deaths of three people?

Landry got up and washed his face. The idea that she’d kill two people to link him to the checkpoint shooting, just to get back at him, was outlandish. Crazy.

But the Nissan was a generic type of subcompact, similar to many other subcompacts from the same year. Landry had thought it out the day he’d driven into town. He’d decided the chances of anyone noticing one white subcompact in a parking lot full of similar cars would be minimal—statistically.

He’d been wrong about that.

He looked at himself in the mirror. The eyes in the mirror met him dead-on.

His Nissan Versa had been in pristine condition yesterday.

So when did it sustain front-end damage?

Chapter
10

The crunch of car tires on gravel outside awakened him. He glanced at his watch: just past ten a.m. The sun would be up, but the cheap motel room was still dark.

He peered out between the drapes. A police car drove through, without stopping.

Last night Landry had parked the blue van in front of an empty motel room on the west side of the motel’s U-shaped drive-around. The police car drove right past it and followed the gravel lane back out the other leg of the U, waited for traffic to clear, and drove back out onto the street.

They were looking for him. They were looking for Chris Keeley, to be exact. The guy who had almost killed a fellow county jail inmate.

The guy who had been set up to take the fall for the deaths of the two militia members.

Landry stepped into the shower and was disappointed that the water was tepid and stayed that way. He was pretty sure he had the whole picture now. Someone shot the one guy at the checkpoint. That same someone boosted Landry’s rental car and shot the other two militia members—the man and woman who had witnessed the shooting. He must have worried that they would talk to the police.

After the second shooting, he’d returned Landry’s car to the motel parking lot and called in the tip.

There was only one person he’d spent any time with here in Branch: the FBI agent. Only one person who knew about him—

Their time together had ended badly. He’d thought he had seen the last of her, but then she’d shown up on the hunt cam at Jolie’s place and taunted him.

Had she been watching him before they met?

He remembered her saying: “How long will it take for me to find out what you’re up to?”

Not long after that, he was arrested.

And not long after
that
, he was moved deeper into the jail to share a cell pod with a psychopath bent on killing him.

Did someone
want
to kill him?

Did
she
want to kill him?

He’d managed to turn the tables, putting Earl in the hospital.

Instead of further punishment, he was released. He was arrested for no reason, moved deeper into the county jail for no reason, and released for no reason he could see.

His rental car had been damaged and used in a drive-by shooting. If he hadn’t been on his game, he would be back in jail right now. He would be charged with first-degree murder.

It had to be Carla Vitelli.

He wondered if she’d really been assigned to Jolie’s case. He had assumed she was the FBI agent sent to investigate Jolie’s disappearance, but maybe she wasn’t.

If Earl had beaten him to a pulp, he would be in the hospital now. In the hospital, or dead.

Vitelli couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t have him beaten up to teach him a lesson, but then try to pin the militia members’ shooting on him.

That made no sense. If he was injured badly, or killed, he would not be around to take the fall for the militia members’ deaths.

She pulled strings in this corrupt little city to get him thrown into jail with Earl to teach him a lesson or out and out kill him.

When they couldn’t kill him, they decided to release him and frame him for the deaths of the militia members. This accomplished two things: get rid of Landry, and kill the witnesses.

He dried off from his shower and pulled on the shorts he’d worn a couple of days ago.

Something was wadded up in the right pocket.

Landry pulled out the crumpled leaflet, “Choose Jesus!”

He chucked the religious tract into the wastepaper basket—three points—and sat on the bed facing the mirror, listening to the faint breath of traffic out on the street. Thinking about the FBI agent, wherever she might be. Thinking about her fiancé. Thinking about Earl.

Jerry Boam
. The name intruded. Landry knew himself well enough to know there was a reason why it did.

Landry pictured the Circle K and the tree and the shade that concealed his Nissan Versa.

How had Boam known he was there?

He saw in his mind’s eye the police cars speeding past, heading to the site of the shooting, and later, driving much slower on the way back. They had driven straight past the Circle K. Landry thought this was because they’d expect the shooter to put as much distance between himself and the scene as possible.

Probably twenty cars had driven past. Landry had decided to stay put there for two reasons: one, he was waiting for Jolie, and two, his car could not be seen. He’d even walked out onto the road and looked for it from both directions, and had satisfied himself on that point.

But one car
did
pull into the parking lot—the truck belonging to the old rancher, Jerry Boam.

Why?

Landry couldn’t think of a reason. Boam’s truck was fine—no flat tire, no problem with the engine. The convenience store was abandoned. There was nothing to stop for.

Something else bothered him.

The name “Jerry Boam,” sounded made-up—a play on words.
Jeroboam
was another word for a double magnum of wine.

Landry wondered if Boam had come up with the name on the spur of the moment, or if he’d thought it up ahead of time. He looked down at the thin, glossy paper, a minimagazine like
Awake
, the tract Jehovah’s Witnesses left stuck into the screen door when the inhabitant inevitably didn’t answer.

If anyone would have the persistence to find someone, it would be the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If Landry was to be found, it stood to reason the one person most likely to find him would be a Jehovah’s Witness. Or the next best thing: a religious person. Landry wasn’t sure what sect Jerry Boam belonged to, but the man had sure enough figured out there was someone parked behind that tree.

Landry flicked through the four paper-thin pages, mostly illustrations and one Bible story. The story was a familiar one: Jesus turning water into wine.

When he was a boy, he’d attended an informal Bible school at Santa Anita, mainly because his mother wanted to keep him out of trouble and there was no church nearby that had a catechism class he could attend. The school, started by the racetrack chaplain, was an informal gathering. He attended with the other children who grew up on the backstretch—the children of grooms, exercise riders, trainers, the people who worked the grandstand and the gates—a community built around the racetrack.

Landry knew his Bible stories well enough.

He read the passage in the magazine.

“
When the wine was gone, Jesus’s mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’
Nearby stood six stone water jars . . .”

“
‘Fill the jars with water,’ He said, and so they filled them to the brim.”

“And Jesus turned the water into wine.”

Landry could hear Jerry Boam’s voice, soft and measured, like voices were in the west.
“You be sure to read it, now, there’s nothing like God’s Word to set you straight on the path.”

Boam spoke to him, but Landry recalled that he had actually been looking
beyond
him, squinting against the sunlight, peering into the desert.

Landry had seen that look before. Not in the pale blue eyes of an old rancher, but in the eyes of his buddies in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were always horizons to scan, and eyes to scan them. Fighters were constantly looking for trouble, constantly taking in data—a sweep of desert here, a palm grove there. Looking for something out of the ordinary: a movement where there should
be
no movement. A shadow where there should
be
no shadow.

Landry had waited by the Circle K for a day and a half, but Jolie’d never appeared. The only person who
did
appear was the old rancher, who had shown up on the first day.

Be sure to read that now, there’s nothing like God’s Word to set you straight on the path
.

Landry could hear his voice. Yes, it was a voice of the west, but it also sounded like the voice of a man who was trying to be quiet. Trying to keep his voice down. Landry pictured Boam. The way he looked around, the way he looked into the desert, the way he kept his voice down. Conversational, yes, but quiet.

Maybe he was worried that someone was listening in. Maybe he was worried about a parabolic mic.

It was time to change vehicles again. Although Landry had ditched the landscaper sign, the van had spent some time in The Satellite INN parking lot, long enough for someone to remember it. Better safe than sorry; he couldn’t take the chance that someone might link the van to him. He drove out of Branch to the next town, Lunaria, New Mexico, which was smaller and poorer but still had car dealers. He decided on another car no one would look at twice, a 2004 crimson Suzuki Forenza with a three-thousand-dollar price tag. He traded the blue van—sans the Landscaping legend on the sides—and made three hundred bucks on the deal.

Landry was still dressed like a guy on vacation: the long shorts, a T-shirt, running shoes, sunglasses. He’d dyed his hair reddish-blond. He’d also grown some stubble, which he shaped into a goatee-in-training. Landry did the “Dad on vacation” very well.

He was a dad who was just scraping by, driving an eleven-year-old Suzuki Forenza. Everything about him said white bread—your average Joe.

He’d paid cash for the Forenza, told the car salesman he’d got the cash from his credit union. He showed one of his false IDs, a driver’s license for Barry Westerlin. He’d retired Chris Keeley, buried him in a little patch of desert out on a lonesome dirt road between the two towns, toasting him with a bottle of Fat Tire beer.

After that he drove back the way he had come and looked for the winery on the outskirts of Branch. He’d driven past it on the way out of town. The Wildcat Red Winery was a one-story territorial-style building facing the road. Burnt-adobe brick, arches in the front. Probably built in the 1970s. Beyond it sprawled acres of staked vines on the yellow-brown land.

There were no cars out front. Landry wondered if a winery in these parts could succeed. He parked the Forenza, got out, and walked inside. A bell rang as the glass door opened.

The place simulated a wine cellar. Dark and dank-smelling, plenty of wine barrels with display glasses and bottles on top, walls of cubbyholes for wines to lie flat, and a counter in the back. There was also a cooler for white wines, beer, and sandwiches.

Landry looked around, picked out a nice pinot noir, and walked to the counter. No one else was in the store, so he had the full attention of the guy manning the cash register.

“Nice choice,” the man said, peering at Landry over rectangular half-glasses: far-sighted. He was tall and lanky. Anglo, but his skin was dark as caramel—probably from spending time outdoors. About fifty. He wore a graying ponytail caught up by a leather thong, a work shirt, and jeans. He could have mirrored Landry’s landscaping clothes.

“That’s a nice red. Would you like to try one of ours?” the man asked, wrapping the bottle in butcher paper.

“That would be nice.”

The man poured a sample into a wineglass from the rack behind him.

Landry swished it around in his mouth and looked up at the ceiling, as if weighing a great problem. Then he looked into the man’s eyes and said,
“Tres jolie.”

He pushed Jerry Boam’s religious tract across the desk in the man’s direction to gauge his reaction.

The man didn’t react at all. He seemed contemplative.

Landry said, “I’m looking for something a little bit more full-bodied. Slightly impudent, with a penchant for hand-to-hand combat.”

The man still did not react, but continued to stare at him over his half-glasses. No shock, no disgust, no fear or nervousness, no delight. Finally, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“You
can
ask me a question, sure. It’s a free country.” Landry knew he sounded schoolmarmish—he just couldn’t stand poor grammar.

But the man smiled, clearly pleased. “Yes, you’re right on that count.
May
I ask a question. Who’s your favorite saint?”

“Saint?”

“Saint. You know, like Saint Nick. Saint Paul. Saint Peter, Saint—”

Landry smiled. “I’ll take ‘Cyril’ for five hundred, Alex.”