The Knowland Retribution (6 page)

St. John

“Five hits by the
Harptones,” Ike crowed as Walter walked into Billy's. “Billy don't know no more than three.” He laughed through his big lemon teeth. Smoke came out of his nostrils.

“‘Sunday Kind of Love,' ‘My Memories of You,' ‘The Masquerade Is Over.' I can't remember no more,” said Billy.

“Walter?” asked Ike.

“The Harptones are okay,” said Billy, eager to put the subject behind them. “But they ain't the best. Not even close.”

“I agree with that,'” said Walter.

“Five of 'em. Can you?” Ike persisted, now apparently blowing smoke through every bodily orifice. Walter admitted his bankruptcy with a shrug. Ike took on Billy, “Who you think's better?”

“The Paragons,” Billy said. “I'll take them on ‘Florence' alone.”

“I heard that,” said Ike. “You may have got me there.” He threw his head back and launched a mangled falsetto, “
Fah-lah-ho-rance—hoooo weeee
. . .”

Billy turned to Walter at the end of the bar. “What beats ‘Florence'? Nothing does. Even Ike knows that.”

He put Walter's usual beverage on a new Billy's coaster. But he kept his thin, white fingers around the bottle. Walter had to speak up for his drink.

“‘Gloria,'” Walter said.

“The Cadillacs,” Ike nodded his approval, and his tortured falsetto took off again,
“Glaw-haw-ree-ha oh oh—it's not Mah-ree-hee-hee—Glaw-haw-ree-ha—it's not Sher-ee-hee.”

“The best,” said Walter. “You ever have a girlfriend named Gloria?”

Billy shook his head.

“Me neither,” said Ike in a very soft, strained voice. He knew the name of Walter's ex-wife.

“I did once,” Walter said. “I think of her when I hear that song. It's been a long time. But even that brought it back.” He raised his bottle to Ike in salute.

Ike said, “You know Enchantment?”

Billy said, “I know the word, but you mean something else?”

Ike lit another cigarette. “The group Enchantment. One of them one-hit groups. They did a cover of ‘Gloria' in, I don't know, mid-eighties. Damn good too.”

“Enchantment,” said Billy. “You want me to write it down?”

Walter said, “Write down Cadillacs and also Paragons. Ike, you still need to give us one. Just one.” The old man mulled it over. Walter sipped contentedly. Ike chuckled and dragged on the evil stick he was smoking. “Close as you boys are to me, I feel better the closer you are. Gentlemen, I offer you The Channels.” Billy picked up the chalk and wrote it all down: Cadillacs/Paragons/Channels
.
All three of them took special pleasure watching Billy's regulars, as well as the tourists, mull over their choices and cast their votes. The delight was all the greater since nobody had any idea why they were voting at all. Someone would yell out their selection and Billy dutifully lifted his chalk and made a slash mark beneath it.

“The Channels,” said Ike. “That's nice. Very, very nice.”

Atlanta

Leonard showered, shaved, and
found clean clothes. He raised the blinds and opened all the windows. The kitchen doors leading to the deck were thrown wide open for the first time since . . . since that terrible day in June. The winter air blew through the house and out again, taking with it the stink of Leonard's isolation that had settled in over eight months. He cleaned everything. He rubbed and scrubbed and vacuumed, washed the dirty toilets, and wiped the dust from the furniture. It took him all day and most of the evening. It made him feel good again. The next morning he got a haircut, and before he returned home he shopped for fruits and vegetables and fresh-baked bread. He tossed out all the liquor still in the house. That night he couldn't sleep, so instead he began taking inventory of his belongings.

Leonard Martin sold everything. Everything.

His contacts in the real estate community connected him with the right agent to sell his house in Alpharetta, for which he got top dollar. The same agent was able to refer Leonard to a realtor on Hilton Head. He did better with the Hilton Head condo than he thought he would. Before he closed on his house he disposed of his personal property—furniture, art, and Nina's jewelry—for which he sought help from a diamond dealer with whom he had worked on a series of rental property purchases.

“You want to sell everything?” the diamond dealer asked him. “You might want to keep something. This was your wife's.”

Leonard replied, “All of it.”

“I can help you. I know someone who can handle the jewelry. I will take the diamonds myself, if that's alright with you. The art work too?”

“Yes.”

“And the books, the music, the furniture?”

“All of it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Sell it all,” Leonard said.

“I understand. I'm sorry Mr. Martin. I'm so sorry.”

Leonard nodded, but said nothing more.

He went to cash with his portfolio and then moved the cash and closed his brokerage account. He called Nick Stevenson and told him he wished to exercise his option to sell his interest in the firm. He insisted on accepting only twice his best year's salary.

“Lenny, your share is worth much more. Much more. You must know that.”

“It's okay Nick. That's what I want.”

“What do you say we just keep you as a partner—inactive—but still a partner? You don't have to sell.”

“I know, Nick. Thanks, but this is what I want.” Arrangements were made. The money was transferred to Leonard's bank.

It all came to just about twelve million dollars, including the money from the Knowland settlement. He told Nick and Harvey that he was moving to the Bahamas, that he planned to buy a boat, that he would write when he settled himself. He said goodbye to Carter and Carter's family, telling them the same story. He didn't bother calling his sister. And then, he was gone.

He bought a house in Jamaica that was little more than a hut. He bought a boat not much bigger than a dinghy. He also bought a vacant lot in Raleigh, North Carolina, and 270 acres in the high desert north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. These properties were titled in the name of a corporation he set up in North Dakota. After the closing, each was quitclaimed twice until the property belonged to Evangelical Missions Inc., a North Carolina entity with an address that was the empty lot. Leonard bought an SUV in North Carolina. He drove to New Mexico, and as soon as he arrived there, the vehicle was titled to Evangelical Missions Inc. In New Mexico, his nearest neighbor was eight miles away, an Indian ninety years old and half blind. He never went near the Bahamas.

By mid-April he had settled into his new home, a renovated hillside hunting cabin hunched into a thicket of brush, at the end of a winding dirt road miles off the main road into his own property. The cabin had electricity, but no phone. The front porch stood above a clearing that marked the end of the dirt road. Inside, made entirely of logs, he had a living room with a vaulted ceiling and a large fireplace, a small kitchen area, and, down a short hall, a small bedroom and a toilet and shower. He had a radio, plus the one in his SUV, but no television. His laptop computer connected to the Internet via the cell phone belonging to Evangelical Missions Inc. In nearby Taos, he bought simple, wooden furniture, a table and some chairs, a small couch, a couple of lamps. He did not buy a bed. For months Leonard had been having nightmares, awful dreams where strange creatures reached out for him only to grab Nina, Ellie, and the boys instead. The monsters savaged them while Leonard watched helplessly. One night, while still in Alpharetta, he awoke suddenly, disoriented, shaking, and tearful, and tumbled out of bed onto the floor. He didn't get up. He stayed on the floor and fell back to sleep. He slept the rest of that night without further attack by the demons. He hadn't slept in a bed since. Each night he climbed into a sleeping bag on the hard wooden floor of his small bedroom, zipped himself in, and waited for the bad dreams. They came, but not every night, and he credited this partial success to his new sleeping arrangement.

Leonard had a single goal in mind, a simple objective, but one
he knew would take time. It didn't matter. Time had no meaning. He had infinite patience. He established a vigorous program of physical exercise—rehabilitation for his abused and obese body. He limited his diet to a thousand calories a day, mainly eating vegetables, fruit, and soups. He drank enormous amounts of water. He stopped eating meat altogether. Once a week he allowed himself the small joy of a can of tuna fish. Although just an hour from Taos, after buying his furniture and initial supplies he never went back to town. For new supplies he drove all the way to Albuquerque, three hours each way, and he bought in bulk.

During the first year Leonard dropped eighty pounds, scaling back to 210. He cut his hair stubble-short, grew a full beard, then cut it short and guessed that the cold winter turned it gray. He pretty much ignored the natural beauty around him. He spent his early days in relentless exertion. He awoke at first light each morning through the spring and summer. When the colder months brought shorter days, Leonard was always awake and starting his day before the sun. He chopped wood and ran up and down the hills comprising his land. He bought gym equipment in Albuquerque, trucked it back in his SUV, and assembled it in the living room of his cabin. Each morning while his coffee brewed, Leonard did thirty minutes on the treadmill and thirty more on the complicated calisthenics apparatus. He believed, and it seemed to be true, that the constant effort helped him control his dreams. They had elements in common and were always extremely unpleasant; some tore him from sleep, some tortured him within it. Those that did not involve his family had Dahlonaga in them, Barbara, and others he left behind.

After the first four months, Leonard began collecting and learning to use an assortment of guns. In time, this occupied most of his time. Many days he rose with the early light, worked out, ate a simple breakfast, and fired his rifles until dark. At night, with a small fire going and the sounds of classical music coming from his radio, he disassembled, cleaned, and polished his weapons. He took enormous pride in this. Each piece of each weapon was cleaned and shined and laid out on the table in front of him. When the rifle had been completely stripped, he patiently put it back together again. He bought all of his rifles on the Internet. He spent hours researching sniper rifles and shotguns, scopes and ammunition. He liked it. He began to see these weapons as his tools, and he studied them with something akin to parental sensitivity. He had his favorites. He became a fan of firearms designers like Dr. Nehemiah Sirkis, with his Israeli conversions of the US M-14. Sirkis's models became known as the M89s, with the M89SR one of the world's outstanding long-range rifles, complete with a sound suppressor. Leonard envisioned the day when he could hold one to his shoulder and hit a target no bigger than a baseball at a thousand yards. He knew that day would be his. For the shorter-range targets he leaned toward the Yugoslavian Zastava M76, a challenging weapon because of its reduced ammunition loadout. It demanded a first-shot strike.

Every weapon he found could be bought somewhere on the Internet. Many were very expensive. A Holland and Holland double rifle can be had, but only for twenty-five thousand dollars or more. Some of the extremely rare guns brought prices well above that—when they were available at all. Leonard spent months seeking a Walther WA2000, a semiautomatic rifle made in Germany. For accuracy, power, handling, and recoil, Leonard considered the Walther to be the finest gun ever built. Like the Sirkis M89SR, the Walther had only a six-shot load, but with its exceptional accuracy, Leonard did not see that as a drawback. Only a few of them had been built. He badly wanted to own one. When one of them became available, Leonard rushed to buy it. The Internet was his schoolroom; just the place for a single-minded student. He had no interest in price. Money meant nothing to him. Everything he bought was eventually shipped to Evangelical Missions Inc. at a private mailbox drop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he picked them up.

Leonard had always heard that shooting comes naturally to some. When he first moved south he was not surprised to learn that so many sons of Dixie found it so. At Nina's suggestion he found excuses to leave the room when talk turned to shooting doves. Of course, he never accepted an invitation to go hunting. He would say, “The only hunting I do is for lost golf balls.”

But he found that he too had a knack for guns, and from the start he had a deeply comfortable sense that they belonged together. He liked the feel of the stock against his shoulder, the touch of the cold, metal barrel in his hand. His finger felt good gripping the trigger.
He quickly mastered the pulling, smooth and even. He liked the smell of guns when they fired, and when they had to be taken apart and cleaned with oil and rags, and when he held them reassembled, ready for use.

He started slowly, took his time, mastered each phase before moving on. He spent months shooting simple and basic rifles, without scopes, at short distances. Ten yards at first, then thirty, then fifty. From August through Thanksgiving he fired thousands of rounds. Always, he studied and evaluated his efforts, learned about windage and elevation, the effects of temperature, humidity, distance. “Imagine the path of the bullet,” he told himself, “calculate the factors; at a thousand yards in a twenty mile-per-hour wind a bullet can veer ten inches off course. Even the round makes a difference; some ammunition is more accurate than others; some more powerful. Make choices. Make allowances.” When he could put enough shots into a twelve-inch target at fifty yards to disintegrate it, he moved on. Then he installed the scopes that allowed him to hit targets up to fifteen hundred yards away. He spent many weeks utilizing the scopes at shorter distances—two hundred yards; three hundred yards; five hundred yards. Finally, he set himself up and began firing at targets as distant as a thousand and fifteen hundred yards. He took aim slowly, adjusted his scope, corrected for the wind, elevation, all the conditions subject to change, and then squeezed the trigger and watched the bullet strike the target so far away. Time after time after time.

As his skill increased, he swapped bulls-eye paper targets for life-sized cardboard humans. A year's work and tens of thousands of rounds took him from hitting the center of a man's chest at fifty feet to doing it from a half mile or more. By then he could take apart and reassemble every rifle he owned in less than sixty seconds. He learned the specs on every type of round: who manufactured it, what it could do; what kind of weapon and which particular ammunition was best for every possible circumstance.

During the second year, Leonard's weight leveled off at 170 pounds. The stubble-short hair on his head now matched his beard, steel gray with patchy reminders of darker days. At fifty-six years old he'd never felt nearly so powerful. He was also certain that few individuals had ever attained comparable accuracy with so varied a group of long guns. He'd put thousands of hours into his shotguns and rifles. He'd perfected his skills in the heat of the desert's summer sun, in the driving rain, the cold and snow, and all this at morning light, high noon, and twilight. He had total confidence he could hit any target in any circumstance. He'd even achieved a high degree of mastery while practicing by standing on a small trampoline. The target and the shooter move, and then the moment arrives, the trigger is pulled, the bullet flies, and the target is hit.

Two years alone can do strange things to a man, even a man so resolved in his purpose as Leonard Martin. He had stretches of time as long as a month or more when he didn't speak a single word to another human being, not to anyone. He began speaking to himself, not out loud, but still they were conversations with himself. He had long talks about the weather—how to spot the movement of a storm, what the changing shapes of the clouds meant for the next day—and about the creatures he shared the New Mexico wilderness with. “The rabbits,” he'd say to himself, “they run four or five jumps and then change direction. Why do they do that?” He studied them closely, sometimes sitting on a chair in front of his cabin for many hours without moving. There was a method to their movement, he realized. At least three-quarters of the time when a rabbit jumped in another direction it was to his right. “If I were a coyote,” he said, “I'd chase to the right and I'd have rabbit for dinner.” Leonard watched all the living things around him: the birds, the deer, and the prairie dogs; even the insects, the beetles, the spiders and butterflies. They all had a purpose, and they all had a pattern to their lives. He'd never given a thought to any of them before. Now he felt he knew them, knew them in a way other men did not. Some of the larger animals he came to recognize by sight. One rabbit in particular became his favorite. He was scruffy like all the others, but he had a dark spot on his hindquarters and a piece missing from one ear that made him easy to identify. Leonard named him Henry, after Frogman Henry. There were no frogs around, so the rabbit would do. He often sang, out loud, “Ain't Got No Home” in his best Frogman Henry voice. One day Henry didn't show up. Leonard never saw him again. “It's a cruel world,” he said to himself. Leonard could not hurt any of the animals that lived around him. In fact, he couldn't even stomp on a pesky insect. They all had complicated lives, he told himself, and he had no business disturbing them. They respected him. He respected them. Many times he could have shot any one of a multitude of living creatures racing, jumping, or crawling about his personal firing range. In truth, it would have been very helpful to do so, but he never fired a bullet in anger at any living thing in New Mexico.