The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (6 page)

MacIan tried to explain. “I’m just a pilot. A glorified bus driver.”

Konopasek tossed him a cynical wink that said,
I knew you were going to say that.
“Um hum. Why do you think Bedford was spared?”

“No idea, sir. Just got here.”

“The NPF chose Bedford for a very strategic reason. There’s something here they need. And I know what that is.”

“What would that be, sir?”

The Commander’s eyes flared. “Nothing!”

MacIan shifted uneasily in his seat.

“There’s nothing here. Nothing! Absolutely nothing. So they can do whatever they want and no one will see them do it.”

“Who?”

“Your bosses. The guys who run the NPF. Admiral Carson and that bunch! The only ones with autonomy. The only ones not bought and paid for. The independent operators. The only fuckin’ men left.”

MacIan had never considered what ulterior motives his superiors, especially the vaunted Admiral Carson, might have. Maybe he should. He looked to Commander Konopasek with sincere interest.

Commander Konopasek seemed to sparkle. “And now they send me . . . you.”

* * *

M
acIan followed
the smell of alcohol and chlorine through the lower floor’s gas-chamber green corridors and soon found the morgue. He stepped through its double doors and heard, “Yo! Too Tall. Over here!” A small man with coffee and cream skin and a rim of gray hair warming his ears waved from a large porcelain table, his movements restricted by a huge rubberized apron. The man pulled a latex glove from his right hand and stretched the hand out to MacIan. “Otis,” he said, stepping back and looking MacIan up and down. “You one big stack of pancakes.”

MacIan released the hand, which floated to the top of Otis’s head and bobbed up and down, gauging MacIan’s height. There was at least a foot between them. “Where you find this guy?” He pointed to the naked body on the porcelain table and pinged MacIan’s metal nameplate with the heel of his scalpel. “Trooper Mac.”

“In the mountains. Up by Lily. Know where that is?”

“Lily? North on #53 Lily? Something about a whorehouse, or something. Right?”

MacIan frowned. He had a very high opinion of Lily. “Two hunters found him about ten miles north of Lily, frozen to a rock.”

“Ten miles north — there ain’t nothin’ ten miles north of Lily.” He waved the scalpel over the deceased.

MacIan winced. “You gonna cut him open?”

Otis spread his arms over the body. “Ain’t no reason to open this poor bastard. He froze to death. I seen it a hundred times. No holes. Nothin’ like that.” Otis pushed his glasses into place on his nose. “Died of natural causes. Cause nothin’ more natural than stupid.”

MacIan moved closer.

Otis lifted the dead man’s arm away from his body and pointed with the scalpel. “See how the skin is pale and grayish-yellow? Right there. Under the arm where the sun can’t affect its true color. And it feels hard, like wax. And here’s some blisters filled with blood and turned all blackish-bluish-purple.” Otis stared at MacIan solemnly. “They die in peace, them that freeze to death.”

“Can you tell what happened?”

“First, I gotta ask why a guy was out in the weather with no coat and no shoes.” He cranked his head to a skeptical angle, puffing out two questioning lips.

“They’re still stuck in the ice,” MacIan lied.

Otis grinned. “Bet they was. How high that rock he froze to?”

“Fifty, sixty feet, maybe more.”

“I ask because, his leg . . . bag-a-bones. Broke, crushed, smashed. Knee joint pulverized. This guy fell from way up high, way more than sixty feet, and crashed several times before he hit bottom.” Otis illustrated with a hand-puppet version of a man ricocheting down a mountain, adding several disturbing sound effects. He lifted the dead man’s pants from the back of a chair and held them from a belt loop, aiming the scalpel at a spot on the leg. “See these long tears and scratches here, from above the knees all the way down to the bottom?”

MacIan bent to study the pants.

Otis screwed up one eye and thwacked MacIan with his index finger on his metal nameplate. “This sorry sonnova-bitch fell off that mountain and disintegrated the bottom half of himself. Then! he crawled to that big rock to pull himself up outta the snow. Then! he froze dead.” Otis folded his arms over his chest with great finality.

MacIan thought Otis was probably right, but there was something about this little guy that didn’t sort with the situation. “So you do cut people open?”

Otis dumped a cup of strong disinfectant into a tray. “Not officially. Not like I get paid for it. I started here back when people still had people. Went to school right down the road. In my school the coolest guy was the one who made the biggest fool of himself, so I was definitely the coolest. Ended up with a kid and his sixteen-year-old mama. Came here, knocked on the door, hat in hand, begging for any work I could get. The Commander hooked me up.” He paused to shake his head in amazement. “A black teenager, off the street! To this day I do not know why. But I do know this! I’m all about Commander Konopasek. Bit of a, well I don’t know how to say it, but you, you giant-ass mutherfuckka . . . you-will-not-trifle-with that man. Don’t make no difference how big you are. You hear me?”

MacIan bowed his head and put his hand on his heart.

Otis made a face that promised he’d hold MacIan to it and went on with his work. “The doctor we had got fired in a budget thing. Sometimes weeks’d go by and bodies piled up. But I just kept sweepin’ up. Kept my mouth shut. I had a good thing and I wasn’t going to put my foot in it.

“One day, they sent a medical school student up from Pitt who did really good autopsies; he was really good. We were the only ones down here, same age, same sense of humor. So he taught me medical stuff. How a body works made sense to me right away. He said I had — the hands.” He made jazz hands, and continued. “I did a little doctoring on the side. Friends and family. Beer money.

“Then they started them consolidations and nobody came to do the autopsies. And when the guards walked out of the Prison over in Somerset, them psychos came and took everything, including my wife. Me and my boy moved into a room in the back there, used to be a storage. He joined up like everybody else. He’s dead, somewhere over there in the desert.”

MacIan winced.

“I owe what little I still got to the Commander. So when he asked me to carve one up, I start carvin’. Been twenty years. In the bad times I’d do four, sometimes eight, a day. Farmers. Marauders. Grandmas and babies. I seen some shit. Brother.”

Otis could tell that MacIan understood. He stared down at the floor, and mumbled, “I-have-seen-some-shit! Brotherman. And this, this right here,” he pointed to Arthur Gager’s body . . . “this is trouble.”

* * *

A
hundred harsh
winters had failed to diminish the stark beauty of the Bedford Barracks’ space-age lobby, where MacIan stopped to examine a row of black and white portraits of former Barracks Commanders. Black and white made them less real, but more human. He pushed through the glass doors and into the reception area, which was still fitted with all the original, highly simplified furniture. Cassandra, the barracks’ middle-aged Office Manager, pointed a halting finger at him. “You talk to that nice preacher’s wife, Gina, up there in Lily?”

“No,” he said, apologetically.

She waved it off then aimed her palms at the squad room’s cubicle farm. “You’re down there, in the corner with a window. Take any dorm room you want. Downstairs. They’re all available. Just like you? I guess?”

MacIan joined her pretense. “And you? I hope.”

“Ahhh,” said Cassandra. “If only I were thirty years younger.”

MacIan gave her a silly, one-eyed once-over. Her hair was dyed a fiery red and she had extraordinarily penetrating eyes, which she credited to being part Akwesasne Mohawk. “Or I thirty years older,” he offered.

She flicked a wrist at him. “I already got that deal, but who knows? I could trade up, if he ran off with the upstairs maid.” They both laughed, which sealed the deal on their relationship for Cassandra. “Someday you’re gonna be thirty years older and you should hope to have someone like me around to wipe your ass.”

MacIan started off toward his corner. “Live in hope . . .”

“. . . die in despair, sweetheart.”

MacIan walked through the eerily silent squad room, wondering how things worked here. He and three much older Troopers were the only police for approximately six percent of the entire state. Luckily, there were few people living in these inhospitable mountains. In areas like this, the Peregrine made all the difference. It was not the number of bad guys that made policing difficult here, it was the distances. And crime had become somewhat scarce, at least the kind of crime people wouldn’t put up with.

The three older Troopers observed MacIan as he went to his cubicle, distancing themselves with lukewarm nods.

With only four Troopers to occupy the enormous squad room, everyone got a corner office marked out by eye-level dividers the same grey-blue as the old Trooper uniforms. MacIan entered his cubicle, pulling off his topcoat and tossing it across a chair. It blended into the decor.

He tossed the dead man’s wallet onto his desk, plopped down, and prodded its various pockets and hiding places. He took the driver’s license out of its see-through sleeve and inspected it. “Arthur Gager,” he mused, fanning out several credit cards like a poker hand. “Arthur Gager, Arthur Gager, Arthur Gager. Must be Arthur Gager.”

The dead man’s name was the only thing on these. Those who could afford driver’s licenses and credit cards were often the focus of kidnappers. Privacy laws prevented anyone from disclosing the addresses of the — protected class. Arthur was obviously one of them. MacIan picked up the desk phone and pressed the first button.

Cassandra’s voice came back, crackling clear. “You’ve got to stop calling me here.”

“I have this guy’s credit cards. Can I find out where he lives?”

“You can’t,” she said, “but ya never know about these things. What’s the name?”

MacIan gave her what he had and they hung up. He picked up the wallet again. It was obviously expensive. Fairly new. Made of indestructible rip-stop nylon, trimmed in genuine alligator, polished to a deep, oxblood-red, and hand-worked tightly enough to take some wear and tear. It had lots of room and hidden compartments.

The speaker phone crackled. “Arthur Gager, 7301 Farragut Place, Guttenburg, New Jersey,” she said. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

He smiled ear to ear.

* * *

M
acIan’s Peregrine rocketed
out of Bedford Barracks into the eastern sky. He leveled off, and said, “7301 Farragut Place, Guttenburg, New Jersey.” A heads-up display splashed across the wind-dome. He’d never heard of Guttenburg, NJ and now knew why. It sat on a magnificent, white limestone bluff straight across the Hudson River from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Lincoln Center used to be. He flew out of the mountains, across the Susquehanna Valley, over a series of foothills, and there it was, the New York skyline. It was far more impressive than Arthur’s fancy wallet and looked even more expensive. As he got closer, dashboard alarms sounded. He was being tracked.