Spectre Black (9 page)

But there was coffee.

He was grateful for the coffee.

The guard was a big guy, possibly a high school football star a few years before. He had that corn-fed Nation’s Breadbasket look—a crew cut and wide blue eyes. He could have been a farm boy from the 1950s.

As Landry accepted the tray, the guy leaned in to him. Broad face, plenty of muscle in his arms and chest. He whispered, “I don’t know what your game is, but stay away from her. Got that?”

“Stay away from whom?”

“You know who. My fiancée.”

“You know
whom.
”

“What?”

“You know whom. Not who. Who’s your fiancée, so I’ll know to stay away from her?”

“You know
whom
it is, but I’ll spell it out for you. Carla.”

Landry ignored the kid’s mangled grammar, and decided to play dumb. “Carla who?”

The kid’s face turned murderous. “Carla, the
lady
you’ve been harassing.”

“I haven’t harassed anyone, that I know of.”

“Think again.”

“Are we going to play twenty questions?”

“You know
whom
,” the kid said again. “Carla Vitelli. She’s with the FBI, so you’d
better
leave her alone.”

Landry looked at the kid. Maybe he was connected in this town. Maybe his father was a big deal. Or his mother was a big deal—Landry didn’t want to be sexist about it. “The FBI agent? She’s your fiancée?”

“That’s right. So don’t go sniffing around, okay?”

“Okay.” Landry wondered how much the boy knew. He must be in his early twenties, although he looked eighteen. Did he know about the marathon at The Satellite INN?

No. If he did, he might have got to Landry in his sleep—and Landry might never have awakened to find out about it. The kid looked like he had a short fuse, and Landry suspected he had the potential to kill. He knew that much about him.

Corn-fed tried to stare a hole in him. His eyes were the color of faded blue denim. He could have been just a kid, but he would be the kind who would cross the line without very much thought at all.

Landry wondered why he hadn’t been assaulted. Perhaps the kid was just a jailer, and had no power, despite being affianced to an FBI agent.

Or maybe the kid was waiting for a better chance.

But it wasn’t the kid who moved him to the deeper recesses of the county jail. This guard was male, plump, and feminine, built like one of those punch clowns, the kind you’d hit in the face and they would come bobbing back at you. All his weight was below his waist. This time Landry’s hands were cuffed, the manacles threaded through a waist chain that went well with the leg chains. They shuffled him through many corridors that grew successively darker, until he reached dungeon status—this must be where they kept the hard cases.

There were several cells lining the walls, but only one was occupied.

“Why am I here?” Landry asked the punch-clown guard.

Unsurprisingly, the guard’s voice was on the high side. “You’ll see,” he said.

He sounded nervous. He looked nervous, too, glancing around often and then averting his eyes from the cells on either side.

“Is this some kind of punishment?” Landry asked.

The guard hit the button and the door to the occupied cell slid open partway. Inside was one big guy. He must have been six-four, six-five.

The guard brandished his stick. “You stay back now, Earl!”

Landry took Earl in at one glance. Shaved head, tats all over, including a rather fetching banner across his forehead that spelled SATIN. Landry almost made a remark, something to the effect that he should ask the tattoo artist for his money back, but he didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. His new cellmate grinned. He had meth teeth; the bottom row looked like a half-eaten cob of corn.

The Incredible Tattooed Man. He had the full sleeves and art climbing up his neck like a thick vine. Landry was betting full-body suit, and wondered if he’d get the opportunity to see for himself. (Not that he wanted to.) Earl had jailhouse muscles, which in Landry’s opinion were about as useless as no muscles at all.

Besides, it wasn’t about muscles. It was about leverage.

Landry was betting, though, the guy had something else to back it up—something sharp. In addition, he probably had a pretty slim grip on reality.

“Why am I here?” Landry asked again.

“This is just temporary,” the guard said. “Overcrowding.”

Landry remembered most of the cells around him in the last pod had been empty.

Landry’s new cellmate started toward them. It made him think of wolves coming after the weakest lamb. The guard brandished his club and yelled, “Stay back, Earl! You know what happened last time.”

Earl seemed to sink back, like an animal putting weight on its haunches, ready to spring. He made a noise somewhere deep down in his throat. All of it was way over the top, and Landry wondered if perhaps this was some kind of a joke.

The guard removed the extraneous hardware. Landry stood quietly while he did so. He ignored Earl.

Earl continued to make the sound in his throat. Half growl, half whine.

The guard backed out hastily, hit the switch, and the gate rattled shut. “Play nice,” he said, before walking away, leaving the two of them alone.

Landry went to the bunk that had been made up and sat down, facing Earl. “Hello, Earl. I’m Cyril. This is how it’s going to be. I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone. How’s that?”

Earl just stared at him with his shiny, bat-shit-crazy eyes. He literally
was
a mouth-breather.

“Let me rephrase this, Earl. We can do this the hard way or the easy way. Let’s make it the easy way, okay? I leave you alone, and you leave me alone.”

Landry gave him a look that would be as strong as a handshake. A look that said, “We have a deal.”

Then he lay back on the bunk and waited.

Earl behaved himself for the most part. He lay on his bunk and hummed tunelessly—Landry thought he recognized some of the songs, most of them from the seventies. The time when disco was king.

But Landry also knew that at some point Earl would stop humming disco and come for him.

It was a kind of stalemate. Landry lay on the bunk, arms cradling the back of his head on the flat and spongy pillow they’d provided. The pillow and the sheets smelled bad. Maybe it was mold; maybe it was something deeper, like desperation. Earl didn’t help. He was the kind of guy who sweated a lot. The stink clung to him, and more than once Landry had to turn away and breathe through his mouth. It was a metallic stink, a vaccination stink. With just a hint of brimstone.

The hours went by. All of it seemed pointless. Landry didn’t know why he was being held, but he assumed it was because somebody wanted him held.

He also assumed somebody wanted him dead. If that was true, Earl was the guy for it. Earl was perfect for it.

Landry listened. All of him was on guard. It was like being back in Afghanistan—every sense heightened. He knew it was coming. He knew this was a setup, and as strong as he was, he needed to be ready. Earl might be a meth head, but he’d probably been offered a nice reward to maim or kill Landry. That would make him extremely goal-oriented.

Landry got all this just from the way Earl looked at him. As if Landry was a big Thanksgiving turkey on a platter with all the fixings.

Like now. Earl caught his eye and grinned, as if he knew what Landry was thinking.

Time went by. Nothing happened.

The tension grew. It had weight. Landry thought perhaps he should just get it over with and kick Earl’s ass. There were a number of ways he could do it. A chokehold. He could kill him instantly, but he thought that would only put him in more hot water.

Still, in war, you always took the advantage. And you went all the way if there was any doubt—

He heard Earl stir. Pretending to be asleep, Landry let one eye open a slit. Earl was sitting up. It had been swift and quiet. He heard the soft rustle of the meth head’s jumpsuit rasp across the made-up cot. Heard the light stamp of his feet onto the floor: one, two.

Landry closed his eyes.

When Earl came for him, Landry was ready. He lay still on the bunk, but opened his right hand, stretching it as hard and straight as he could make it, fingers and thumb far apart. Landry slid off the bunk, and did his best to look confused and frightened. Let the guy advance until he was half a foot away. That was the moment Landry had been waiting for. He struck fast at the man’s trachea, snapped his hand out so quickly Earl didn’t know what happened. Landry made sure not to hit him too hard; he wasn’t about to kill the guy. Earl raised both hands to his throat, and that was when Landry followed up with the second blow. Hands cupped, he stepped into the guy and smacked both ears at once. Again, he didn’t put much force behind it, but clapping the man’s ears did the trick.

It was over in seconds. Earl stumbled like a drunk stepping into a pothole and went down, his shiv hitting the floor with a clatter. Out cold.

His eardrums broken.

Landry walked over, raised him to a sitting position against the wall of the cell, and made sure his breathing passageway was clear. It was the least he could do.

“Buck up,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

Doubtful the guy could hear him.

Chapter
8

Landry lay in his bunk, waiting patiently for the racket to recede. There had been quite a commotion: jailers yelling, Earl coming to and trying to stand up. His inner ears all shot to hell. He’d fallen down twice now. His panic started low in his throat before revving up into a loud but eerie siren. Landry didn’t dwell on Earl’s punctured eardrums.

After Earl was carted away, Landry sat on his bunk and thought things through.

Earl had a shiv. He had been bent on killing him. In fact, he seemed almost desperate to get the job done. Still, Landry thought it was a flat performance. Earl might have done an adequate job, if he were dealing with someone who didn’t know how to fight back, but he had been hopelessly overmatched.

Someone wanted him dead, or at the very least, out of commission. And the easiest way to get to someone was inside a jail. It was an enclosed space. There was nowhere to run. And all you needed were for the guards to look the other way. You couldn’t beat the talent pool inside. There were all sorts of crooks in jail, many of them homicidal. Mental illness was the order of the day. There were people who would kill for a pack of cigarettes. There were people who were happy to maim and kill just for the hell of it, like Earl.

But Earl had been . . . rusty, and so it had not worked. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try again. Landry had been locked in a place where he couldn’t escape.

So who would want him dead, or at least discouraged? He went through the list. At the top was whoever had taken Jolie. Next would be someone he’d rubbed the wrong way.

He knew the perfect candidate: the FBI agent, Carla Vitelli. She and her fiancé, the corn-fed boy who had been dumb enough—or prescient enough—to threaten him.

He blamed himself for a blatant lack of chivalry. He’d left the motel room while she slept—he’d been rude. He regretted that. There was a certain etiquette in sleeping with someone you didn’t know, and he should have stuck around.

In his defense, he could not stand to spend one more minute in that room with her. She was obsessive. She reminded him of a horse soldier who ran his horse over broken ground for miles and miles, whipping him all the way. It was almost as if she wanted to kill him as much as she wanted to fuck him. Maybe she wanted to kill him
more
than she wanted to fuck him.

He figured she’d picked him up because she thought he’d lead her to Jolie.

Remember the hunt cam stunt
.

Why did she do that? To let him know she was looking for Jolie Burke, or let him know she knew where Jolie was?

Or maybe she was just a lunatic.

Generally speaking, most people who rose through the ranks to be FBI agents weren’t lunatics. But Carla Vitelli certainly brought the average down.

Earlier today, the punch-clown prison guard had come to check on them. Landry could tell from the man’s expression that he’d been expecting something other than what he’d seen. What he’d seen was Earl lying on the floor, bloody and unconscious. Landry got the feeling the punch-clown prison guard had planned to call for paramedics. It was just that he’d called the paramedics for the wrong person.

The shock on the guard’s face, though: priceless.

After the paramedics came and removed Earl from the cell, after
the punch-clown prison guard asked if Landry knew what had happened (Landry said he had no idea; he’d slept right through it), he was left alone. He thought at the time that the prison guard was afraid of him, that he would get reinforcements, but none came. And so he lay on the bunk, doing math problems in his head. He let his mind
wander to see if there was some place he had not looked for Jolie.

He knew that soon he would have another prison mate.

So he waited, and saved his strength.

He would be ready when they tried again.

But it turned out, they didn’t.

Three hours later another guard showed up, consulted his clipboard, and said, “Chris Keeley?”

Landry hopped down from his bunk and walked to the cage door. “Do I have a lawyer yet? I asked for one yesterday.”

“You don’t need a lawyer,” the guard said. He opened up the door and stood back. Landry walked out. His legs felt a little shaky, and he didn’t know why.

Maybe it was the aftereffects of sleeping with Carla Vitelli.

The guard handed him over to a sheriff’s deputy, who took him out a loading dock ramp into the blinding sunlight and ordered him to get into the back of a sheriff’s unit. He pushed Landry’s head downward as he climbed in. SOP.

“Where are we going?” Landry asked when they were rolling.

“You’ll see.”

They didn’t go far. The sheriff’s office was across the large parking lot from the jail.

“You going to try anything?” the guard said.

“No.”

“When we get inside, I’ll see if I can get the handcuffs off you.”

Inside, the air conditioning smacked him in the face. The sheriff’s office was a showplace, different from your average city building—especially in a city this small. For one thing, it was five stories tall. In the foyer, one wall was all glass and looked out on a fountain. It had a modern industrial look that you see in glossy magazines, lots of browns and tans in the palette, walls of mottled granite, metal tarnished an artful coppery-gold. They took the elevator up to the fifth floor, which was all one big suite: the sheriff’s office. Landry had been in governors’ offices a few times in his life, but this office put anything he’d seen to shame. Including one wall dedicated to an aquarium.

Sheriff Ronald Waldrup sat at a massive desk in front of a polished black granite wall with the “Tobosa County, New Mexico” seal emblazoned upon it. Waldrup’s desk was flanked by a New Mexico state flag on one side and a United States flag on the other. On the desk was a small microphone, the kind that city council members used in their chambers.

The whole effect seemed counterproductive—the stage set dwarfed the man.

The sheriff studied Landry. Landry thought of a little kid sitting at his father’s desk. That was, if the kid was wizened and resembled a stoop-shouldered monkey.

“So, are you the one-man crime wave people say you are? Mr. er . . .” He looked down through his reading glasses. “Keeley?”

“I haven’t committed any crime.”

Waldrup assessed Landry. He pulled off his large glasses and rubbed them with a cloth. “We have reason to suspect you in the disappearance of one of our detectives.”

“Who would that be?”

“Detective Burke. Jolie Burke.”

“Can’t say the name rings a bell.”

“Is that so?” The sheriff leaned to the side and consulted with the deputy in a low whisper. Ending with, “Is she here?”

“Yes sir, she’s waiting in the anteroom.”

“Show her in.”

Landry knew who it would be.

Carla Vitelli entered. She wore a dark blue suit that flattered every curve. Her hair was pulled back into an economical bun. She held a folder at her side. She stopped beside the desk and set it down before the sheriff, then stood beside the desk with her hands folded in front of her, eyes on Landry.

Sheriff Waldrup dipped his head toward the tiny microphone, which Landry suspected doubled as a recording device.

“Go ahead, Agent Vitelli.”

She cleared her throat and gave them a summary of Cyril Landry’s crime. He had set up a hunt cam on Jolie Burke’s property after she had gone missing.

“And what does this signify?” The sheriff spoke into his microphone. “What is your conclusion?”

“My conclusion is that he was stalking Detective Burke.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Landry said.

“Probable cause,” said Sheriff Waldrup. “If you indeed set up a camera to watch Detective Burke, it appears evident that you
were
stalking her.” He leaned forward a little more. “How did you come to cross paths with Detective Burke?”

“I met her at a conference,” Landry said.

“What kind of conference?”

“Comic books.”

“Comic books?”

“Yes.”

Vitelli stared daggers at him. “He’s lying,” she said.

“You don’t have enough evidence to charge me, so why don’t we just go our separate ways?”

“You seem to be a transient.”

“No, I’m just passing through.”

“You set up those cameras.”

“I’m sure somebody did. But it wasn’t me.”

“He’s lying,” Agent Vitelli said.

“I have been told I have an unmemorable face. I get mistaken for other people all the time.”

Sheriff Waldrup covered the microphone with his hand and said something to Vitelli, who knitted her brow and looked stony. Landry guessed he was asking her if she had seen Landry setting up the hunt cam.

Waldrup nodded to the deputy. “He can go. Process him out.”

The deputy nodded.

“I hope you’ll at least validate my parking,” Landry said.

Vitelli glared at him, but said nothing.

“It’s a shame,” Landry said to Carla as he was walked to the door. “We could have been something.”

The guard took him back to the intake desk at the jail. Only it must have been the output desk, still inside the inner shell of the jail.

A man sat at the desk. He looked fastidious—the only person in the place who looked that way. His hair was combed neatly to the side. He had a neatly trimmed beard. He was youngish, and wore stylish clothes—at least for a jail—and wire-rimmed glasses. “Mr. Keeley?” he said, looking up from an open folder on his desk. “Chris, correct?”

“That’s my name.”

“You probably know this by now, but we have decided not to extend your stay.”

“Good, because there was too much chlorine in the spa.”

The man laughed. It was a tiny laugh, mirthless. “Very funny.”

“Can you tell me again why I was held?”

The man twiddled a pen in his fingers. “It says here . . . vagrancy. But it turns out that someone made a mistake—not one of ours, of course. I’m terribly sorry for your inconvenience.”

“So I’m free to go.”

“Yes.”

“How’s Earl?”

“Earl?”

“The guy I bunked with.”

“He had a bad reaction, I heard. Had to go to the hospital. . . . Why?”

“No reason. So I’m free to go?”

“Absolutely.” He pushed Landry’s folded clothes and shoes across the desk toward him. “There is a restroom down the hall.” He gestured in the direction with his chin.

“So this was a mistake.”

“Yes. A mistake. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.”

Landry thought that the person who was truly sorry was Carla Vitelli.