Donovan Creed 11 - Because We Can! (6 page)

“Mr. Creed?”

“What?”

“We don’t have any agents in Memphis.”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t recruited any.”

“We’ve got drivers there, right?”

“Several.”

“Good. Get the biggest, toughest, most intimidating guy we’ve got, and tell him to get there immediately. Tell him she can’t leave the room under any circumstances. When everything’s in place, give me a call.”

“What if she’s already gone?”

“Keep an eye on the tracer. If the phone moves, I want the driver close behind.”

7.

CALLIE, JOE, AND I make our way to the roadblock, south of the blast site, where 20 men have gathered around the sheriff. I don’t know if they came to protect him, or the crime scene, or if they just wanted to be here when the FBI taskforce shows up. But whatever their reason, it’s been forgotten, now that Callie’s in their presence.

All eyes are on her like maggots on a corpse.

I flash my badge at Sheriff Cox, but he says that’s not good enough. It could be a fake. I won’t argue the point, because in fact, it
is
a fake. Sensory Resources doesn’t issue badges. But we
do
have valid credentials, and Callie produces them. Sheriff Cox pretends to study them carefully before answering my questions, but what he’s really studying is the lower half of Callie’s anatomy.

Now that we’re dating, and planning to live together, I need to ask her to stop wearing camel-toe jean tights, or leggings, or whatever the hell they’re called.

When he’s done ogling her, I ask, “Was a woman staying at Jack’s house?”

“How’d you know?”

“We’ve got a top-flight research team.”

“You’ve seen her picture?”

“No.”

“She’s damn good-looking.” He gives Callie another quick mental undressing and adds, “Not compared to you, Miss Carpenter.”

Callie shows him a smile so radiant it catches him off-guard. His knees buckle. He nearly goes down.

I get it.

She’s dazzling.

Normally I’d let Callie’s flirting work its magic, but right now I’m not in the mood.

I’m pissed.

Not only that, but I’m pissed that I’m pissed. What I’m saying, I’m shocked to realize it matters to me that this jackass is molesting my girlfriend with his eyes. And I’m furious at myself for having this weakness. When you’re in my business, playing at my level, the thing that kills you is your soft spot. Your weakness. You simply can’t survive long when they learn about your weakness.

“The woman’s name?” I say, making an effort to hold my temper.

He answers me while staring at Callie. “She was going by Emma Wilson, but when I ran her ID it came up identity theft. The real Emma died twenty-one years ago in a car crash. I don’t know if the phony Emma killed Jack Russell, or was just using him, but she had his house key, credit card, and a stack of cash that likely belonged to him. She took off shortly before the blast.”

“Who saw her last?”

“Millie Reston.”

“Where’s she?”

“In there with the others,” he says, pointing to a nearby tent.

“What others?”

“The BWC’s.”

Callie looks at me, then says, “We’re not familiar with that term.”

“Normally I’d keep this confidential,” Sheriff Cox says. “But we’re a small town, and I’m not the one who found them. So basically, the whole town knows the story.”

“Except for us,” Callie says.

His eyes go straight to the swell of Callie’s breasts, and eventually her face. “You’re that movie star, right?”

“You know I’m not. You’ve seen my papers. But thanks for the compliment. What’s a BWC?”

“We don’t know. It was written on the asses—pardon my French—of the three victims.”

“Victims?” I say. “We were told there were no casualties.”

“You were told right. No one died. But a young man and two women were in the general blast area. They were knocked down, disoriented. Some fella came running up from the lake, pulled their pants down, and wrote BWC on their asses with a grease pen.”

“Makes sense.”

“It
does
?”

“No, of course not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Let’s just say comedy ain’t easy, and leave it at that. So what does BWC stand for?”

“We don’t know.”

“You’ve had hours to think about it.”

“Maybe it’s the bomber’s initials.”

“That’d be pretty stupid, don’t you think?”

He shrugs.

Callie says. “What else can you tell us?”

“There was a homicide a few hours before the blast. Local guy named Darryl Rhodes. Jack Russell had been banging Darryl’s wife, Abbey.”

“Abbey Roads?” Callie says. “Like the Beatles?”

“What beetles?”

Callie stares at him blankly.

He says, “Emma was staying at Jack’s house, posing as his fiancée. Darryl came over with the intention of raping her.”

“Why?”

“Because of Jack’s affair with Abbey.”

“Charming.”

“Darryl was about to get violent when someone—not Emma—shot him from the hill across the street.”

I try to piece it together. “The bombing occurred several hours
after
the homicide?”

“That’s right. We spent hours working the Darryl Rhodes homicide. When we’d done all we could, we cordoned off the area and everyone went home. Moments later, the bombs went off. It was like he was waiting for everyone to leave.”

“The grease pen guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone get a good look at him?”

“No. It was dark, and like I said, the three that may have seen him were disoriented.”

“You think the grease pen guy had something to do with the bombs?”

“I do. But he wasn’t flying the crop duster.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Witnesses saw a crop duster flying over the lake, heading toward Leeds Road. That’s rare for nighttime, so they kept watching and saw the pilot drop some sort of dust bomb. Then a missile of some kind flew up from the lake and exploded in the middle of the first bomb.”

“Then what happened?”

“All hell broke loose.”

“Anyone seen Jack?”

“We haven’t been able to locate him, but it turns out he was using an alias, too. His real name is—”

“Jack Tallow. I know. Thanks, Sheriff.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the tent.”

“The FBI told us to wait till they get here before questioning the BWC’s.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

Callie and I show our credentials to the deputy guarding the tent, and he goes through the process of pretending to study them while scoping out Callie’s crotch. I swear, her pants are annoying the shit out of me, even though I’m enjoying the view as much as anyone.

The three of us go in the tent and I tell Joe to remove everyone except the cute twenty-year-old girl.

“Where should I take them?”

“Stand with them outside the tent. We’ll call you in a minute.”

Joe escorts five people out, leaving Callie and me with the young lady.

“What’s your name?”

“Abbey Rhodes.” She, too, checks out Callie’s lower half. Then says, “You ain’t from around here.”

“Sadly, no,” Callie says.

“Where’d you get them pants?”

“They’re not pants,” Callie says. “It’s spray paint.”

“No shit? You just sprayed paint on your legs?”

Abbey practically puts her face in Callie’s crotch to get a closer look. As she does so, Callie smiles at me to prove how easy it is for her to get female attention. Trying to make the point if I want her to be faithful I need to stay on my toes.

Callie says, “You’re not related to the Rhodes Scholarship folks, are you?”

“No ma’am.”

“What a shock.”

I say, “Abbey, I understand someone wrote some letters on your backside.”

“Some asshole, you mean. What about it?”

“Show us.”

“Fuck you!”

Callie’s body and hands become a blur. She drops into a crouch and jabs her thumb and forefinger deep into Abbey’s stomach. As Abbey starts to double over in pain, Callie unbuttons her jeans, pulls them down to her knees, along with her panties. By then, Abbey’s torso has fallen onto Callie’s shoulder. Callie stands, and holds Abbey over her shoulder like a fireman rescuing a woman from a burning building.

The entire procedure took less than two seconds!

The fact that Abbey’s quite pretty has nothing to do with how carefully I inspect her ass. And the longer I stare, the harder she kicks. She’s seconds away from getting her breath back, at which point she’ll probably scream.

“Getting an eye full?” Callie says, with great annoyance.

“Let’s change places.”

We do, and Callie sees what I saw: a helluva nice ass with no writing on it.

No initials, no grease residue, no marks of any kind.

I can’t blame Abbey for being mad. On the other hand, I did ask her nicely to show us her ass. Even Callie would admit that.

I lower her from my shoulder so she can stand comfortably, and sidestep her attempt to kick my shin. She takes a deep breath, preparing to scream, but just before the sound comes, I say, “If you’re about to scream, pull your pants back up so the others won’t see you naked.”

It takes her a second to realize her pants are still around her knees. She pulls them up. Then—without so much as a thank you for protecting her modesty—she screams bloody murder. Callie grabs her throat and gives it a pinch.

The screaming stops.

As people come pouring into the tent, Callie whispers something into Abbey’s ear. I frown at Joe for letting the deputies and others get past him, but he’s just a kid. A bomb-builder, not an assassin. If they
knew
he was a bomb-builder they’d fear him. But you know what they say about “if.” —If your aunt had wings and a nut sack she’d be your uncle, in heaven.

“What the hell’s going on here?” the deputy yells.

Abbey tries to speak, but her voice won’t cooperate. Finally she squeaks, “Everything’s fine. I just had a flashback to when Darryl got shot.”

I ask, “Who else had grease marks on their butts?”

A woman and a young man raise their hands.

“You’re Millie Reston?”

She nods.

I look at the kid. “Who are
you
?”

“Ellwood Fillmore. My parents own Fillmore’s Grocery.”

“Abbey washed the evidence off her backside,” I say. “What about you guys?”

“I did too,” Millie says. “No one told us it was evidence.”

I look at Ellwood. “And you?”

“Hey, if it ain’t Saturday, I don’t bathe.”

“Well, hey, Ellwood,” I say, pointing at his pants. “Since it ain’t Saturday, shuck ’em.”

“What? Right here? In front of everyone?”

“No. Just me and the blonde. Everyone else out. Now!”

When they leave, Ellwood asks what right we have to make him strip. Callie takes care of it by telling him he’s a hero. Says his ass could save the country from terrorism. He reluctantly removes his pants, and sure enough, the letters BWC are written on his ass. Callie and I take pictures with our cell phones. Then mine rings, and Larry the dwarf tells me a woman named Emma Wilson checked into the airport hotel in Memphis just after 3:00 a.m. She’s in Room 232, and so is her phone.

“Our driver will be there in ten minutes,” Larry says.

I hang up and tell Callie and Joe we need to hustle back to the chopper.

“We’re going to Memphis?” Callie says.

“We are.”

“I had plans for this afternoon.”

“What time?”

“Two o’clock, give or take.”

“You might need to postpone.”

“I’d rather not.”

I know better than to ask Callie about her plans. We’re determined not to have that type of relationship. So I say, “I’ll have the chopper drop me off in Memphis, then you and Joe can take it back to New York City.”

“I’d like to get back to Vegas,” Joe says.

“Fine. You can catch a commercial flight out of Memphis.”

He says, “You want to hear my take on the explosion?”

“Of course.”

The crop duster was equipped with a conventional explosive. Probably a canister that fit in the cargo bay. They rigged a trap door, pressed a button, dropped the payload. Then used a scatter charge to detonate it.”

“Sheriff said it was a dust bomb.”

“The canister was filled with powdered aluminum.”

“Why?”

“The first explosion created a mushroom cloud of aluminum powder. Then the grease guy fired a thermobaric warhead from the ground into the cloud.”

“To enhance the explosion?”

“Right.”

Callie says, “Why not just drop a bigger bomb from the crop duster?”

Joe says, “They probably just had the one crop duster, and needed the two-step process to do enough damage.”

“But they didn’t kill anyone.”

“Only because they didn’t want to.”

“So it’s not a terrorist attack,” Callie says.

“I think it was,” I say. “Just not a conventional one.”

She stops walking a moment, so Joe and I stop. Then she says, “You should be relieved, but you’re not. You look concerned. Why?”

“I’m getting a really bad feeling about this.”

“Why?”

“The writing.”

“BWC?”

I nod.

Joe’s look says he thinks I’m crazy. “Someone detonated an FAE over a civilian neighborhood and the part that bothers you is three people got grease on their asses?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

Callie looks at me, then Joe, and says, “It’s a Monty Python.”

Joe says, “What’s a Monty Python?”

“Something completely different.”

“It fits no profile,” I explain. “This was a test of some sort. An attention-getter.”

“Which means?”

“Something big’s about to happen. And the letters are a clue.”

We start moving again. After a few minutes we pass Agent Phillips, who’s rolling around on the ground, glaring at us. Joe nods at him, as if apologizing.

Callie says, “There were three people with writing on their asses.”

“What about it?”

“What made you pick the young, pretty one?”

“I planned to photograph all three asses.”

“But you started with hers. Why?”

“Of the three, I figured Abbey would make the biggest fuss about stripping. If we saved her for third, she would’ve known what was coming. She would’ve thrown a fit. You know how cops are with locals. They would have insisted we didn’t have the right to pull her pants down.”

Joe says, “They’d have been right.”

“For a bomb builder, you’re an odd duck,” I say.

No one responds or comments, so we walk quietly for several minutes. As we near the chopper I ask, “What did you whisper to Abbey to make her stop screaming?”

“I told her if she kept her mouth shut I’d kill Emma Wilson for her.’”