The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (9 page)

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I like the direction this is taking. I like you, MacIan. You’re a good man. I’m glad it’s you in the big chair.”

“I won’t let you down, sir.”

“You couldn’t let me down if you tried, son. We’re past that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Who’s the casualty?”

“Arthur Gager. Lives in Guttenburg.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What about this Commander Konopasek? Is he going to be a problem?”

MacIan looked straight into the camera. “Commander Konopasek is an excellent man, sir. He’s just a little . . . odd.”

“I’ve heard that. What’s the short and skinny?”

“Missing gamer genius. Levi Tuke. Suits are after him. He’s gone to ground.”

“The Nobel Prize, nine-time TED speaker, beware the Corporate State Levi Tuke? I’m told he thinks highly of me. Gave me a five. Whatever that is.” Carson let that hang in a boastful silence. “I hear people quoting his Nobel speech all the time, ‘A society free from the oppression of big government and big business.’ He’s the turd in their swimming pool, my boy.”

“I’m sure he is, sir.”

“Well done, MacIan. With your instincts and my wishful thinking, we might really be onto something.”

Boink . . . Carson was gone.

M
acIan returned
to the barracks and slept a little better than he had of late, but was glad to see the sunrise.

Shit. Shower. Shave.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Commander Konopasek looked up hopefully. “Enter!” MacIan entered and began the same formal shuffle as last time, which seemed to annoy the Commander this time. He cut it short with a spastic gesture at the aluminum chair. “Went to New York, did ya?” he said, eager for a dicey tale.

“No, sir. Guttenburg, New Jersey.”

The red in the Commander’s cheeks faded to a veiny pink. “Where’s that?”

“Up on the Hudson River Palisades. A white sandstone bluff that goes straight out and drops into the river right there. New York’s straight across. It’s incredible.”

“How big is that river? It’s not like these piss-traps around here, is it?”

“The Hudson is big and I guess the current there, where it goes into the ocean, is fast and strong. It’s even bigger than the rivers in Pittsburgh. I don’t know how big, but it’s big. A mile wide? Maybe more? Very long bridges.”

The Commander imagined the scene, delighting in MacIan’s enthusiastic telling. “What about the dead body?”

MacIan plucked a folder from his armpit and slapped it onto the Commander’s desk. “Notified next of kin. A daughter. She signed off. It’s in the folder.” MacIan remained officious.

The Commander reached, then stopped just short of the folder. “Is there anything in here I need to deal with?”

“Not sure. I’m the new guy.”

“Did anything funny happen?” He took the folder. “They complain about anything?” He slid the folder across his desk back toward MacIan.

“The daughter didn’t buy the hiking accident cause-of-death.”

“A conspiracy?” mused the Commander. “I love a good conspiracy.”

“The daughter says it’s all connected to a job they were working on.”

“A job?”

“They run a security business out of their condo in Guttenburg.”

“You can run a security business out of a condo? I can hardly run one out of this wigwam.”

“They manage the setup from there. Hire freelancers to do the wet-work.”

“Catch somebody they shouldn’ta?”

“Just the opposite. He didn’t find the guy he was looking for. According to the daughter. She’s convinced the people that hired them have got something to do with his death.”

“What people?”

“Harbinger International. It’s a civil thing. Something about sales rights to a game.”

“Good, good, good. I’d hate to see this getting more complicated than it already is. Can put this one out on the margin, until they claim the body? Looks like you had a good time up there?”

“Wasn’t fun.”

“Never is,” said the Commander, as his phone rang. “Yeah.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and made an
anything else?
face?

MacIan shrugged and turned his palms toward the ceiling. The Commander dismissed him with a nod toward the door and went back to his phone call, but upon hearing the door close put his hand over the phone again, and yelled, “Hey! MacIan!”

MacIan’s head popped back in, feet still in the hall.

“Who was the guy?”

“What guy?”

“The guy they were looking for.”

“Levi Tuke.”

Commander Konopasek turned bright red. The phone dropped from his hand and fell on the floor. “You’re shittin’ me!”

MacIan stepped back into the office.

The Commander leaned against his desk, shuddering in disbelief. “Tuke? Levi Tuke!” he muttered, and gave himself a wicked bang-check.

MacIan was stunned.

The Commander slammed his palms on his desk. “This is huge! Huge! So that’s what this is about. That’s how the guy — the dead guy, got up there, on the mountain.”

Doubt stroked MacIan’s face thick as a Mullah’s beard.

“Tuke! Levi Tuke!” shouted the Commander, hoping to shatter MacIan’s nonchalance with sheer volume. “Everybody knows who he is. Nobel Prize! The crazy speech! He’s from here. My school played his school,” he pleaded with ham-handed insistence. “Tuke! This is big. Tuke! You been living under a rock?”

The Commander cringed, foot in mouth up to his knee. “Look! I know I say stupid things at inappropriate times. I get that. I’ve been that way all my life.” He pointed toward the squad room. “Those three idiots out there — I’ve pissed them off a thousand times. Each! But I didn’t get to command this barracks because I’m stupid. I’m just, I don’t know, like my wife says, clumsy.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir.” MacIan leaned over the desk a little. “There’s nothing you could say that would offend me. You’re a good man. People are weird about POWs. That’s the way it is. But I know you don’t mean anything by it.”

The Commander’s voice came low and contrite. “I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t mean anything by it. Nothing at all. That’s the pathetic part. I just open my mouth and shit comes out that I spend months wishing I’d never said. Years. But I can’t un-ring those bells.”

“Who is this Tuke guy?”

The Commander grabbed the lifeline. “He’s big,” he said, struggling to keep a lid on his enthusiasm. “The whole family is big. They own lots of property around here. Big tracts. They’re historical big. Like the Mayflower big. They say the Tukes were the first Quaker family to settle this far west. Hundreds of years ago.” He leaned back in his chair. “Pennsylvania Dutch — best friends with William Penn, himself. Old money. Oooold money. Got Roman numerals on it.”

MacIan scooted the aluminum chair up to the desk. “I’m from Pittsburgh.”

“So you know the story. King what-the-fuck-it gave William Penn all this land from the Atlantic Ocean to Ohio. Penn made it a sanctuary for Quakers. Not those whacko cults with the nature-boy beards and straw hats. Quakers. Real Quakers.”

“What’s the difference?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. Quakers are normal people. Educated. Business people. Levi won the goddamn Nobel Prize!”

“You think Tuke’s hiding out with them?”

“First of all, he’s not hiding out like some criminal. That’s ridiculous. But the Tukes have faded from prominence. People still talk about them. I knew Levi’s sister. But, they . . . they just aren’t so prominent anymore. I didn’t know Levi was in my school district until someone told me, after he’d become rich and famous.”

“For what?”

The Commander seemed unsure. “Forty, fifty years ago, he invented some game. Maybe I’m wrong? I don’t know anything about games. It wasn’t like a regular game, like football.”

MacIan’s interest piqued. “A social game?”

“Maybe. I don’t think there’s opponents and stuff, maybe, maybe not. I never really paid attention. It’s not important. Damn it! Last year Levi got the Nobel Prize, in economics. Obviously a genius, and certainly one of the richest men in the world.” The Commander perched on the edge of the desk. “Then, he disappeared. And I don’t mean he became a lot less prominent. He actually disappeared.”

“Not a crime to disappear,” said MacIan, fondly remembering using that line with Camille.

“No it’s not, but failure to answer a subpoena is. As soon as it was clear Tuke wasn’t going to release this version of his game in the normal way, a flood of civil suits were filed claiming criminal intent to violate the new Interstate Commerce Laws. He might as well have strangled an orphan.”

MacIan got the picture.

“And here’s the kicker.” The Commander closed the distance between them. “There’s only one reason we’d find some washed-up, fat-cat security contractor up on that mountain.” The Commander was beaming. “Yeah,” he said. “Tuke is up there.”

C
amille stood
in front of her living room window wall staring at Manhattan. She had done this every morning for as long as she could remember, but rarely this early. The city emerged as a faint silhouette in a powder-blue haze, until her reflection frightened her. She’d slept in her clothes and her hair was matted and sticking out in spikes. She tried pushing it into a shape, but gave up quickly and staggered off to the kitchen in a pre-coffee funk.

In the cupboard, she found a reminder of her father. Two types of coffee, his dark roast and a vanilla flavored one. She sniffed both packages and chose her father’s high-octane mud. She hoped to blunt her memories by breaking routine. Minor fail. She could hear him asking the eternal question, ‘How can you drink that swill? Tastes like varnish remover.’ She put two slices of bread in the toaster and went to the office to start her computer.

As the computer chimed on, she shuffled to her little bathroom, brushed her hair, washed her face, and pulled a white terry-cloth robe around the wrinkled outfit she’d slept in. On the way back to the office she could smell the toast burning; that was how she liked it. She grabbed both slices and clapped them together over the sink, picked up her coffee and went to her desk.

She swiveled into her seat, took a bite of toast and a sip of coffee, and immediately felt better. She scrolled through her email, hoping it would distract her from the events of the last twenty-four hours. Sip sip. This dark roast really was satisfying, but she missed that subtle envelope of vanilla. There were a dozen or so new emails, some from current clients, some from potential clients. It was easy to make a good living if you ran in the right circles, and her father did.

Had.

She gazed at the screen, wondering if she could keep it together without him. She knew all of the operatives. Freelancers. Certainly enough to deliver their core services: private security, surveillance, ransom recovery — always a big seller in a bad economy. She knew she could do it. But she also knew her father had done many things she was unaware of. There was no way to estimate, or manage, what she didn’t know.

What was he doing in those mountains? In the best of times that part of the country was virtually unpopulated. That she was absolutely sure of.

Once, when she was around eleven, she and her father had made a wrong turn coming home from a weekend in the Poconos, about a hundred miles west of the city. They had somehow gotten onto route #80 heading the wrong way and were forced to continue on to the next exit in order to turn around. They’d been driving for a while when they spotted a sign, too far away to read, but it promised an end to the interminable double-back. They stared at the sign, until both faces fell: Next Services 40 Miles.

“Well, Dad, I told you I’d never forget that drive, and here we are.” Camille had assumed all the land west of Mt. Pocono was nothing but mountains and trees. The thought of it gave her the sensation of standing on the edge of the world.

She clicked through the emails and found an urgent one from the phone company with the subject: Payment Due. How strange. She paid all the bills and they were always up to date. She opened it and saw that she was listed as the alternate contact, Arthur Gager the primary. This was extremely odd. Arthur hated to pay for anything. He avoided it by having Camille write all the checks. But it seemed he had a number of secret cell phones. She scanned the email and soon found the assigned phone numbers.
Oh, Dad
, she thought, you
couldn’t even be straight with me
. She dialed the first number, just to see who might answer.

She heard the ring tone, that was good, but then something sounded out of sync. She pulled the phone away from her ear and was shocked to feel a muffled buzzing somewhere in the office. She scanned the room. The buzz was coming from her father’s desk. The buzz grew louder as she opened the bottom drawer. She removed a stack of files and found a phone buried under them. She tapped the screen. The buzzing stopped — she was the caller. The display went dark. Dead battery. Damn it!

She ran to the shelf where they kept their chargers and looked for one with the right plug. Nothing matched. Her frustration red-lining, she popped open the back of the phone and removed the data card. It looked exactly like the one in her phone. She swapped them out and opened her phone. Lo and behold — a whole new orbit of planet Dad was stored right there.

T
he wind
in Western Pennsylvania blows up from the Gulf of Mexico, until it collides with the jet stream coming down out of Canada. The warm air turns to rain or snow depending on the season. Occasionally, a winter storm in the Gulf tosses a few days of heat into the Alleghenies, causing what they call an Indian Summer. During these reprieves the creeks and streams overflow with snow-melt, and it’s a great time to be outdoors. Two days ago, Max and Fred had flown in a Peregrine, and now such a lucky day was upon them. But Max still wore his new red coat. “Where we headin’, Dad?” he joked, and made an overly toothy grin.

Fred feigned a professorial attitude. “What’s the most important line of dialog in all of movies for all time?”

“Why. . . I’m sure I don’t know.” They’d been doing this routine since Max was little.

Fred bellowed, “Which — way — did — he — go!?”

“He went that’a way!” yelled Max, and trotted off down the hill.

Nothing tickled Fred more than connecting to Max through one of their long-standing, intentionally bad jokes. These jokes belonged to them, and only them. This was important to Fred. He hated dancing around dull people who didn’t get his jokes.

Max bottomed out on Main Street and gave Fred a chance to catch up. “Snow’s melting like crazy.”

Fred wondered why the mountains looked so much closer this morning.

“Let’s get a move on, dad. I’m growin’ a beard here.” He twisted the ends of his peach-fuzz mustache.

Fred tilted his bristly chin at the spires. “I could grow a better beard on a banana.”

Trooper MacIan’s visit had an amazing effect on these two. In his absence, Max fed his young imagination with heroic visions that made him feel powerful and engaged. Fred simply felt lighter. They walked and talked for several hours, keeping a gauge of the weather, which might change on them at any minute and make things miserable.

After a long silence, Max said, “You know, there might be something to that old, ‘In like a lion out like a lamb,’ thing they say about March.”

Fred stopped to stare at Max. “Yeah, maybe,” he said pensively. Something wasn’t right. Fred sensed an intruder.

They arrived on the plateau of toppled boulders far sooner than they’d predicted. The fear of changing weather and the excitement of searching for clues in a real-life crime investigation had put a spring in their step. They had unceremoniously deputized themselves under the law of virtuous intention.

Max imagined himself handing MacIan the clue that broke the case wide open. The pivotal piece of the puzzle. The linchpin. The MacGuffin. Nothing was more beguiling than imagining Trooper MacIan as his friend. If he could prove his worth, MacIan was the kind of guy who’d stand up for him. Max was sure of that.

They came to a point where the boulder in question beckoned and Max sprinted ahead. Fred was left standing there with a proud smile on his face. He smiled a lot. He would smile at Max in his sleep for hours. But, after so many years, it was now he who was the tag-along. Second banana in Max’s peach-fuzz adventure. Yes indeed, something was definitely different. He didn’t know exactly what, but he could feel it.

Max studied the great rock so intently it appeared to be talking to him. It was highly eroded where it met the ground, forming a snow-filled trough around the base. Max moved to the spot where the body had been and began to reenact the death scene, as he now imagined it.

Fred observed as Max crawled onto the boulder and put his hands and feet where he thought Arthur’s had been. He slipped, but landed cat-like. From this low position he looked straight up the boulder, then down again, and said in a calculating tone, “Maybe he did fall off the mountain. That would be some crawl.”

“Maybe your fancy-ass coat doubles as a glider,” said Fred, angling for a laugh.

Max leapt back onto the boulder and stretched his right hand up as high as he could, just like the dead body. “We thought he was reaching up. Trying to get out of the snow.”

Fred concurred.

“Of course we did,” said Max. “That’s what it looked like when everything was covered in snow.” He wiggled his left hand down the side of the boulder and pointed at the snow around its base. “He wasn’t climbing up, he was reaching down. Look!” Max sprang from the boulder. “See! Look! Look at that.”

A small hump in the thawing snow at the base was now plain as day. Max jammed his hand into it, and voila! He pulled out a canvas courier’s pouch. Max leapt to his feet, dangling the pouch like a dead squirrel. He put it to his forehead to shade his eyes and looked straight up the cliff face. “He could have crawled from over there. It’s possible, but highly unlikely.”

“So maybe he did fall off the mountain.” Fred said, gauging the distance from the boulder to the cliff face. “One helluva crawl.”

They looked at each other, agog. A few days ago they had scoffed at that very idea. Max said, “He couldn’t hold onto the pouch, it fell down there.”

Fred looked at Max, skeptically. “What’s in the pouch?”

Max clutched it like a lost puppy. “That’s not for us to determine. We might contaminate the evidence if we open it. We gotta get back and call him.” Max headed straight toward Lily without a moment’s hesitation or discussion.

Fred tagged along, then drifted to a stop. The intruder had revealed himself.

The man whom Max was destined to become had arrived.