Frag Box (19 page)

Chapter 27

Shots in the Dark

Anne showed up an hour or so later, just as promised, with a staff photographer, a sort of angular young woman named Chris. She wore jeans and a lumberjack shirt and vest and had a brown ponytail poking out of the back of a baseball cap. She made me think of the skipper of a swordfish boat.

“Anne tells me good things about you,” she said as she shook my hand.

“How nice of her. Maybe some time you’ll share them with me.”

“Maybe not,” said Anne. Then she looked at the still-open door to the cavern and gave me an arched eyebrow and a very hard look.

“You said you were going to wait for us, Herman. If the scene isn’t original, I can’t—-”

“I think somebody else got here ahead of us,” I said. It wasn’t
quite
a lie, but it wasn’t really an answer, either.

“You think it’s safe to go in?”

“If we’re careful. There was an explosion about an hour ago, and nobody has come out since then. I think somebody walked into one of Charlie’s booby traps.”

“Maybe we should wait for some police or fire people. The Bomb Squad. Chris, do you want a vote?”

“You know me, Anne. If there’s a picture in there, I’m going. And if the authorities go in ahead of us, they’ll shut us out, for sure.” She started fooling with some of the gear that she carried in her vest, which seemed to be all pockets.

“Then we’re off,” said Anne.

“Just a little,” I said, “and it hardly shows.”

“Video cam for openers, I think,” said Chris. “Mr. Jackson, it would be best if you went first, so there’s someone in the picture for scale. Here’s an extra battle lantern for you.”

She handed me the biggest flashlight I have ever seen, and we set off to find the Wizard.

***

I was just as glad the others were behind my back, since I couldn’t tell how good a job I was doing of pretending I hadn’t been there before. When we came to the branch cavern that had smoke and dust still drifting back into it, I explained to them about the string and the white powder.

“Let the Bomb Squad go down that passage,” I said. “Later, though. Charlie wanted us to go the other way.”

And when we finally came to Charlie’s squat, I managed to be as surprised and delighted as everybody else. Chris switched to a digital SLR with a big flash and photographed me pointing at the frag box, then checking the lid for wires or other trip devices, and finally opening it and holding up the hand-written note that was on top of the money, then some of the money itself.

“Do we dare take it outside?” said Chris. “I mean, it could be like a crime scene or something.”

“I’ll worry about that, if you don’t mind.” Agent Krause, right on cue.

“Would you identify yourself, for the record?” said Chris, switching back to her video camera and swinging it around.

“I am Special Agent Krause, of the United States Secret Service.”

“Nice to meet you. We are—”

“You are the person who is shutting off her camera. This site and that box are evidence in an ongoing official investigation, and they are strictly classified. Shut it off now, unless you want to lose it.”

“Nice to see you again, too,” I said. “Where’s your partner?”

“He’s chasing what he foolishly thinks is a hot lead, down in Swede Hollow. Seems he had an anonymous phone call.” She went over to the box and peered inside it.

“But you came here instead?” said Anne.

“Apparently my anonymous phone calls are better than his.”

Good old Agnes.

Kraus pulled out the note and read it in the light of her own flashlight. She smirked. Seeing her do so, I stifled the urge to follow suit.

“Good stuff, Agent?”

“None of your business, Jackson. Tell you what, though: you can carry it outside for me. We’re leaving this place, people. Now. You over there, is your camera off?”

Chris pointed it at her and said, “The little red light is off. See?”

I thought the little red light looked as if it had a piece of black electrical tape over it, but I saw no reason to tell Krause that.

“Let’s go,” said Krause.

And we did. I led the parade back to the real world, carrying the frag box, with Agent Smug close behind and Chris and Anne bringing up the rear. About halfway back, there was another problem with the light at the end of the tunnel. It didn’t get shut this time, but somebody stepped in front of it. I recognized the silhouette of the man I now knew to be Sergeant Major Robert Dunne. He had his phony cop uniform on again, and both it and he were looking burnt and bloodied.

You think you used enough explosive, Charlie?

There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the submachine gun Dunne was holding, though.

There was no way I could jump out of his field of fire, so I did what I hoped was the next best thing: I shone my light in his face and tried to close the distance between us. I didn’t get very far.

“Point that light someplace else, or I’ll blow you and it both to hell.”

I pointed the light at the floor. Behind me, Krause did the same. But she, too, was moving up.

“I thought I told you to shut your operation down and get out of town,” said Krause.

“As a matter of fact, Agent, you did not. In your typical arrogant manner, you ordered us to take our operation out of the public eye, quote-unquote. And I would say this is about as far out of it as we could get. I believe you’re holding what I came here for, Jackson. Bring it here. Krause, you stay where you are.”

“Where’s the Colonel?” I said.

“Say again?”

“Colonel Rappolt, your boss.”

“You know about him, do you? Impressive, for a dipshit civilian. But you obviously don’t know much about the Army.”

“How’s that?”

“Colonels do not go on treasure hunting ops. And they do not do their own killing. He watched it, but he didn’t get any licks in. He just spat on the guy afterward. And once the bum was dead, the colonel was done with it all. He didn’t care about the box the guy told us about when we were beating on him. But I do. I just lost four good men looking for it. So give it up, now, and don’t get cute.”

“Me? I wouldn’t think of it.” I took a last step toward him and pretended to trip on a conveyor frame, dropping the box and falling on top of it. I was hoping to make a play for his gun, but Krause was too fast for me. The momentary distraction was all she needed to get her skinny automatic out of its secret hiding place and put about a dozen rounds into the sergeant major. Personally, I thought she was overreacting, but I can’t honestly say I didn’t approve.

I did wonder, though, if I would ever get my hearing back again.

Chapter 28

Aftershock

When we got back out to the daylight, Anne called 911 before Krause could think to tell her not to. Soon we had a mob of police and fire people to contend with, including the Bomb Squad and a crime scene team. I even got to meet the elusive homicide cop, Detective Erickson, who turned out to be a fairly likeable guy. He and Krause were old buddies, it seemed, and he did nothing to stop her from leaving with Charlie’s box. She also got to keep her weapon, and she confiscated the memory card from Chris’ video cam.

“How can they do that?” said Chris.

“It’s evidence in a conspiracy case,” I said. “The Secret Service has had the power to seize that for as long as there has been a Secret Service.”

“I bet we never see any of it again,” she said.

“She promised I could have the money back, as soon as it’s done being evidence,” I said, “since I’m Charlie’s legal heir.”

“What will that be, a year or two?” said Anne.

“If ever,” I said, thinking about the black hole that Krause had threatened to have me thrown into. Other things could be thrown into it, too. “And even if I get the money back, I’d bet the video and the note are permanently gone.”

“Good thing nobody thought to take the memory card out of my SLR.”

“Don’t say that too loud,” I said, “until we get clear of this place.”

***

Eventually we did get clear, finally running out of people who wanted to debrief and/or intimidate us. We all went down to Lefty’s then, to do a bit of debriefing of our own. Anne stopped by her office on the way and got a laptop, and soon we were looking at an enlargement of the paper from Charlie’s box. Chris had done a perfect job of shooting it. It was written on the back of a copy of Charlie’s will, with some kind of fairly blunt felt-tip pen, printed all in caps.

“Who’s Hobart?” said Chris.

“That’s me,” I said. “Charlie always called me something that started with H and had two syllables, but that’s as close as he ever came to remembering my real name.”

“How much money was there in the box?”

“I didn’t have time to count it, but I thought it looked like about five thousand.”

“And who’s this Bardot person?”

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “Maybe a real assassin, maybe just a con artist. Krause won’t care.”

“So that’s it, then,” said Anne. “Agent Krause gets her big bust—”

“She could use one,” said Chris.

“Oh, nasty,” I said. “Correct, but nasty.”

“She gets her big
collar
,” said Anne, “and the guys who killed Charlie are all dead.”

“Except for Rappolt,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Him. Did you mention him to the police?”

“No. I figured there was no point. He’s back in wherever he’s officially supposed to be by now, with a ton of plausible deniability in front of him. And no way the Army investigates a full colonel on the say so of a mere civilian.”

“You’re probably right. I don’t have enough hard data to use him in my write-up, so how much less is anybody in authority going to pursue it? Oh, well.”

“I trust it’s a usable story anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a hell of a story, Herman.”

***

Anne’s story ran two days later. The Secret Service, of course, pressured her editor about the need for secrecy in the assassination case, and he partially agreed. She was not allowed to say anything about the hit man named in the note, nor about any hit man, period. She was allowed to tell about the tunnel and the box, but only as a secret stash of money from unknown sources.

But that was enough. She wrote a very solid piece about Charlie’s and his father’s murders and their connection to the Vietnam War. It had sensational crime reporting, human interest, history, and just a hint of conspiracy, and it ran on the front page. She also did a sidebar on the lives of homeless people, with a picture of Glenda. That ran in an interior section of the same issue. She wanted to do another one on the abuses of power by the Department of Homeland Security, if only to get back at Agent Krause for stealing her video, but her editor wouldn’t buy it.

We celebrated the printing by going out to dinner at a sports bar that superficially resembled the dance hall in Eveleth. They didn’t have a band, though. For dancing and other activity, we had to go back to my townhouse. Later, we sat on the big couch in front of the fireplace, watching the gas log pretend to burn itself up and working on a bottle of my best Scotch.

“Seems like it was a long way for you to go, just for a story in one issue of the newspaper,” I said.

“Sometimes it happens that way.”

“Was it worth it?”

“False modesty does not become you, Jackson. What you mean is were
you
worth it. I shouldn’t have to tell you so, but yes. But the story? Of course it was. There’s always a bit of a letdown after a big story, though. It feels as if you never really quite knew as much as you would have liked before you wrote it.”

“Maybe you’d have written it the same way anyway.”

“Maybe. I’ll never know. The thing about Rappolt bothers me.”

“You mean that you couldn’t include him in the piece?”

“No, that he gets off scot-free and nobody can do a thing about it. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Actually, he didn’t quite get off. I had my hacker friend send an email to him, with a cc to his superior, telling him that his operation is blown and all his people dead.”

“So, what will happen?”

“I don’t know. His hometown is Kansas City. I thought I’d watch the local newspaper for a while at the Central Library, see if there’s anything about him.”

“You can do that online, you know.”

“You can do a lot of things online, Anne, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any better. I like tactile events. I like touching something besides a mouse.”

“I noticed.” She gave me a sly smile.

“Is that a complaint?”

“Not on your life.”

“Anyway, whatever happens with Rappolt, Charlie wouldn’t have cared, one way or the other.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

I let out a huge sigh, took my arm back from where it had been wrapped around her shoulders, and stood up. I had just made a very risky decision, one that was most unlike me.

“I’m about to give you a gift, Anne. It’s a hell of a gift, and I’m betting a lot on your not taking advantage of it.”

“You’re talking like a soap opera, Herman. What are you giving me that is so precious?”

“The truth.”

I went to my desk in the corner of the dining room, unlocked the center drawer, and took out a stained and crumpled sheet of paper. As I handed it to her, I said, “This is what was really on top of the money in Charlie’s box.”

“What was
really
there? But how could you have changed it? I mean, I saw you pick the other one up.”

“A lot of things are possible in a dark tunnel, Anne. Did you wonder at all why Charlie would have written the note on the back of a copy of his will?”

“I guess I didn’t think about it. Maybe that was the only paper he had.”

“Wrong. It was the only paper
I
had with
his
fingerprints on it. So that’s what I had to use for the forgery. This, however, is the McCoy.”

She put down her glass of Scotch and read:

***

“You’re right,” she said. “He wouldn’t have cared about Rappolt. In fact, it sounds as if he knew about him and still didn’t care.”

“And by not caring, he may have finally found his way out of the jungle.”

“That’s nice, Herman. I wish I could write it. What are you going to do with the money, assuming you ever get it back?”

“Actually, I didn’t wait. I gave a free bond to a guy named Vitrol Wilson, who is a guaranteed skip. The question is what are you going to do with that piece of paper?”

She looked at it again. Then she got up, walked across the room, and threw it into the fire.

“Would you like to dance, Herman?”

“I’d love to.”

***

The next day we held a memorial service for Charlie, down in Connemara Gulch. As his only heir, I had donated his remains to the med school at the University of Minnesota, but we solemnly buried his fatigue jacket and dog tags in a place by some small trees and marked the spot with a cross of baking powder. It took a while for the word to spread, but we eventually drew about twenty raggedy people for the event.

I had brought six bottles of wine with screw tops and a huge bag of White Castle hamburgers, but nobody was allowed to have anything without first standing over the grave and saying a few words. Some of them were actually quite moving. Apparently Charlie was well liked, even though he himself never admitted to liking anybody. The guy named Mingus, whose neck I had stood on only a few nights earlier, produced a harmonica and played “Amazing Grace” while each of the homeless people threw a handful of dirt into the hole and said “ashes to ashes,” or something like that. One of them actually knew the Twenty-third Psalm, which he recited with some passion. One said, “Home is the soldier, home from the sea,” and then got a look of major confusion and consternation. Another said, “There’s a lot more of us laying down than there is up a-walking around.” I shot him a quick glance to see if it might have been the Prophet.

Anne, true to her word, had brought a dozen copies of the newspaper with Glenda’s picture in it. She gave them to her and showed her where to find the article.

As she looked at it, her eyes started to tear up.

“That ain’t me! Why you printing somebody else’s picture with my name? Dear, sweet suffering Jesus, I don’t look like that!”

She looked again, squinting. “I don’t, do I?”

“I’m sorry, Glenda. I thought you’d be happy to see—”

“Oh my God. I was never really beautiful, but I was at least… My God amighty. Where the hell have I got to?”

The tears were streaming freely down her face now, and soon her body was racked with sobs. Mingus put his harmonica back in his pocket and opened a bottle for her.

“Here you go, babe. Have a drink and forget about it.”

She looked at the extended bottle for a long time, her crying subsiding a bit. Finally she said, “I don’t think so.”

“Sure, you do. It’ll make everything okay. Don’t it always?”

“I gotta go,” was all she said, shaking her head vehemently. She gathered up her newspapers, clutched them to her bosom, and walked away.

I guessed it was a day for atonement and rebirth. I hoped so, anyway.