Mickey Finn Volume 2, page 11
Davis drove west most of the afternoon, and the sun was blazing straight into his eyes by the time he reached Lou’s farm, a hardscrabble affair with a collapsing barn and rusting metal roofs. The truck was in a shed of half-rotted siding, but there was a good locked door on the front. Davis switched off the engine and touched the Glock in his ankle holster before tapping the horn. Lou appeared from behind the barn with two large dogs. Davis wished that the members of the Army were not so devoted to large and aggressive canines. He sat where he was and didn’t open the car door.
Lou looked him over. The farmer was tall and broad-shouldered with a marked list to his left. He had a stiff knee, too, and despite his jet hair, Davis pegged him as fifty. Maybe more, for his heavily lined features had settled into a sour and disapproving expression. “You the driver?” he asked, like this was some big mistake.
“Sig said you’d have the truck ready.” Davis made himself open the door and step out, even though the two wolf-like dogs immediately pressed up against him to get a closer sniff.
Lou gave a grunt to the dogs and unlocked the shed. Inside was a nondescript, green van with out-of-state plates that struck Davis as very big and real in an unexpected way. They exchanged keys, and Davis started the engine. When he heard a little stutter, it crossed his mind to point out a problem, but this was his one and only chance and he had to take it. He backed out smartly, scattering the dogs.
“She’s heavily loaded,” Lou warned.
Davis threw him a snappy salute. He was tempted to peel out of the driveway, until an awareness of the explosives just over his shoulder made him cautious. Though John, who knew about such things, had assured him everything was safe until detonated, Davis still felt uneasy. But because risk was necessary, he told himself. As Sig had said, no risk, no glory.
Just the same, he would have felt better with some company. Or even a working radio! Davis hadn’t anticipated silence, and he regretted leaving his charger. He could have plugged in his phone and had some music or caught Alec Jones, his favorite of all the talk jocks. Now he couldn’t risk running the battery down. Not when he was “under orders.” He had to do this right, take no chances and follow instructions.
Although Davis was sure he could manage, his nerves were jangling by the time he pulled off the interstate some hours later. He wasn’t used to so much time alone with his thoughts. When he could answer back and argue with some sports show or commentator, everything became clearer. And it was important to be thinking clearly today.
At a gas station, he bought a couple of energy drinks, a soda, and a hotdog from a rack rotating inside a heat unit. He was at the exit door when the girl stopped him. She was skinny and pale, with long, fair hair and a welt under a swollen right eye. Not exactly a looker but not bad, either. Davis sensed he wasn’t seeing her under the best circumstances.
“I need a ride,” she said.
Though the right answer was obvious, he hesitated just long enough to take a slug of his soda.
“I really do,” she said. And in a lower voice added, “He wants to kill me.”
Davis held the door for her and when they were outside, asked who.
“Guy I’ve been living with. I’m going to New York,” she said. “Soon as I can get my bag.”
“Where is it?”
She lifted her head. “Just up the road. He’ll kill me for sure if I go alone. But if I have a ride…” She put a thin, pale hand on his arm. He could see the blue veins in her wrist and her bitten fingernails.
Davis felt his gut contract. “I got a delivery I gotta make. Long way to go. See, I’m only paid for on-time delivery.”
“Half-a-mile. What’s an extra half-mile? And you’ll have company. Any trip goes faster with company.”
An echo of his own thoughts! Davis turned and walked to the van without answering but she was right behind him and somehow it happened that he clicked the key twice and she opened the passenger door and climbed in. “Left out of the station,” she said.
Of course, as Davis had expected, it was more than a half-mile. A state road, then a town road, then a dirt track with weeds that flapped against the sides of the van as if to bring him to his senses. The track stopped at a cottage with a swaybacked roof and missing clapboards. No dogs; that was the only positive.
“I’ll turn the van. Go get your bag,” he said.
Big maneuver between the lawn and the track before he got the van pointed back toward the interstate, the plan, the schedule. He turned off the engine to see her still standing to one side.
“I thought you wanted your bag,” he said.
“He’s got a rifle and he’s drunk.”
“Maybe he’s passed out. He ain’t deaf, is he?”
“You’ve got a gun,” she said.
So she’d noticed, an observer, a problem? Normally, no question that Davis would have gotten the hell out of there. But he was ferrying enough explosives to blow a bridge on the Connecticut River, and he had a Glock strapped to his ankle. He was a member of the Army and a dangerous guy. What was the point of being scared? He got out of the car and took the pistol from the holster.
She led him up to the house and opened the door directly into a dark, shuttered room. Davis stepped around a clutter of boxes and beer cans, bulging black plastic bags, dirty hunting boots, old jackets. The place smelled of cigarettes and garbage, and since the only light was from the afternoon ballgame on TV, it took a moment before he saw the man slouched in a big padded recliner.
“I’ve come for my stuff,” the girl said.
“Yeah? You and who else?” He reached down beside his chair for what Davis saw was a semi-automatic, and he felt himself step from what still could pass for normal life, normal life with the Citizen Army, anyway, to something else.
His heart was jumping. All his life Davis had had trouble coming up fast with the right words. Give him time and he could produce, but at that crucial moment, all he could find was, “Don’t! I have a gun.”
The man laughed. “Good for you.” He was sure drunk, but he had that rifle up and the barrel wiggling around and sweeping left and right, and once he got one of his thick fingers on the trigger there would be lead scattering everywhere. He, Davis, had a job to do. He lifted the Glock with both hands the way he’d practiced and squeezed off a shot, then another.
The man’s torso jumped and the semi sent a rattle of bullets into the ceiling and down the wall and how they weren’t all ripped to shit Davis didn’t know. The girl screamed and he did, too, but the man had been thrust back in the recliner with blood pouring from his neck, and when Davis and the girl finally shut up, it was clear to them both that he was dead.
It took Davis a minute to process this information. The girl was quicker off the mark. She disappeared and returned with a backpack and a tote bag. “What do we do with him?” she asked.
Davis took a breath and swallowed hard. Then he held up one hand and went to open the back of the van. He pretended that he didn’t know what the sacks and barrels were about, even though now he was counting on them.
Back inside, he gestured for her to take the legs. Course, it was nothing like on TV, just like actually shooting someone was not at all like target practice. Shooting was terrifying, and the results were awkward and heavy and stinking enough to make you lose your lunch. Fortunately, she didn’t ask what he was delivering or what he had in mind. If she had, just at that moment, Davis was afraid he might have shot her, too. That was an idea he didn’t want to revisit.
They washed their hands and wiped their clothes and left the house unlocked. Though Davis started the van right up, he had to put his head down on the steering wheel for a moment. A deep breath, two, three, then he put the van in gear, and they drove away. Well after dark, they stopped at a motel within easy reach of the morning’s target. He told himself that the girl was good cover, that having her along was somehow a plus instead of a massive screwup and totally bad ops.
In the morning, he knew it was a mistake. To take her along was impossible, but to drop her at one of the rest stops was potentially disastrous. She’d remember him for sure, and she was sharp; he’d realized that belatedly. She’d had a look at the barrels, and with all that was on TV lately, she might have figured out what they were and how he planned to dispose of Jackson. That was the man’s name. He’d killed a man without knowing his name. He guessed that was an Army thing and it made Davis deeply uneasy.
Round about seven a.m., when they were caught in the morning rush hour traffic and Davis was having to concentrate like mad because the clock was ticking and the van had no pickup on the hills, she told him she wanted him to drop her off.
He shook his head. “It’s complicated,” he said. That’s what people wrote on Facebook when they were in complex relationships and, boy, was it apt now.
“You gonna shoot me, too?”
He glanced away from the road, felt the van bear in toward the fast lane, and had to jerk the wheel to recover.
“You gonna put me in the back like Jackson?”
He denied it, though Sig’s voice somewhere in the back of his mind said that eliminating her was the obvious solution. Obvious solution was one of Sig’s phrases. Davis had once liked it a lot more.
“There’s a rest stop in ten miles. There will be truckers. I’ll get a lift.”
Davis glanced at her again and thought she probably would. There was something chilly and able beneath the waif-like exterior that had impelled him to help her. “I’m under orders,” he said, his voice little more than a mumble. “And you’re a security risk. Need to know,” he added, although that sounded fantastical to him now.
“You think I’m calling the cops? With Jackson’s blood all over the house? Please officer, it wasn’t my fault, this strange guy with a handgun walked in and shot him. You see that flying?”
He didn’t, if he was honest. “Jackson will be gone,” he said. “Jackson’s not the worry.”
She was silent then but maybe anxiety was making Davis sharp, too, because, clear as if she’d spoken, he knew she planned to jump out of the van. She’d put her backpack on her knees and stuffed some things from the tote bag into her pockets. Lucky they were rolling along at fifty miles an hour with streams of traffic on both sides.
“I don’t want to die,” she said finally. They were close to the exit Davis needed, and he began hoping to miss the traffic lights.
“Nobody’s going to die,” he said, and now he thought maybe it would be best if they were stopped at a light. If she jumped out like a crazy person, dodged the traffic, and got the hell out of his life, John and Sig would never need to know, would they? They’d come out of the “control” shack and shake his hand and the Citizen Army would get in Sig’s car and head out while behind them the sky turned black and red. They wouldn’t need to know, so now instead of hoping to miss the lights, he began looking for one. “Nobody’s going to die.”
“Huh, I know what you’ve got in the back,” she said. “I know the smell of fertilizer—any farm kid knows.”
“Yeah, it’s for this big commercial farm down the valley.”
“Bullshit. You’re setting off a bomb.”
Davis gripped the wheel, his nerves fried, his teeth chattering. He couldn’t speak for a minute and then he said the foolish thing, “Not me, it’s not me. On a timer. I just have to get the van there, that’s all. There by oh-nine hundred. Nine o’clock, not a minute later.”
He was slowing for the side road that led to river access. “We’re going to make it, we have five minutes,” he said, as if she might have been all worried about the success of the op.
“Idiot! We’ll all be killed, you, me, everyone! No witnesses! No evidence!” Her voice rose to a scream. “Slow the hell down and let me out!”
Not true, Davis told himself. He trusted Sig and John. She was just one of the haters, but in spite of himself, he must have let up on the gas because her door swung open and she tumbled off the seat. He snatched at her shirt, caught her, lost her and lunged again, sending the van wobbling across the track.
He regained the wheel but now it was too late. The numbers were turning over on the dial above the clapped-out radio, and his door was open and he was flung toward the gravel. Davis had to stop her, he just had to, so he’d have an explanation for Sig and everything could still go forward. He hit the ground with a tremendous thump, rolled over twice on the sharp gravel and emptied the air from his lungs.
He tried to shout, to warn, to explain, but he had no breath. The girl was stumbling up the track on her feet, on her hands and knees, on her feet again. Davis had time to wonder what Sig would do about her before the van accelerated toward the control shack and burst with a great roar.
The van heaved itself into the air. Like a cow struggling to its feet, Davis thought, and the problem of what to do about the girl was replaced by terror. He would not see her reach the roadway, her eyebrows singed, and her face blackened. He would not see her waving to startled drivers, sirens wailing in the distance. He would not see the TV clips or the screaming headlines. Davis was going to have a moment of fame, but his very last thought was of a tremendous cow-like something that leaped into the air. Then one of the metal sides blew out from the truck, crushing him as the fireball engulfed the shed, Sig and John and Davis, himself, and every living scrap all the way down to the rocks along the river.
Back to TOC
A Faster Way To Get There
Joseph S. Walker
Haden Stoker was in his second season as a promising defensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs when the final play of his career made him the most talked about NFL player of his generation. The Chiefs were playing their fourth game of the season at home, against the Seahawks. Seattle quarterback Paul Osterman was in the middle of the field, down on one knee, following a completely routine pass play that had gained four yards. The players on both teams were milling around, working their way back into their lines, when Stoker walked up behind Osterman, knocked off his helmet, and latched a giant forearm across his throat in a vicious chokehold, at the same time using his other hand to claw at Osterman’s eyes.
It took the other players a few seconds to realize what was happening, and a few more seconds to get to Stoker and pull him away. By that time Osterman was unconscious, his windpipe nearly crushed, one eyeball mangled. Paramedics saved his life, but he lost the eye and, thanks to the minutes his brain was without oxygen, his reflexes. He would never play football again.
Neither, obviously, would Haden Stoker.
A picture taken from the sidelines, showing him seeming to laugh with glee during the assault, was on the front page of every newspaper in the country the next morning. By nightfall he had been banned from the game for life, forbidden to set foot in a stadium—even if he bought a ticket. Weeks of stories followed, detailing Stoker’s childhood of poverty and deprivation in Appalachia, his mother dead of a meth overdose, his father killed in prison. Stern editorials made him a household name, framing him as the embodiment of everything from the drug epidemic, to the collapse of rural America, to the viciousness of the modern game, to the abuses inherent in white privilege. Stoker himself never said a word. He gave no interviews, issued no statements, and in due course became what every American celebrity becomes: a vaguely remembered footnote.
Three years later Stoker was leaning back against the wall in a poorly trafficked corner of a casino in Tennessee, sitting on a folding chair on the verge of collapsing under his considerable bulk. His arms were folded across his chest and his eyes were hidden behind jet-black shades, despite the dim lighting in the room. The banner hanging from the table in front of him read Meet Haden Stoker in giant red letters. Underneath this, smaller lines in black offered autographs for twenty dollars, personalized photos for forty, and “Osterman reenactment photos” for one-hundred. Cash only, please. In the twenty minutes I’d been watching him from my perch at a slot machine thirty feet away, he’d had no takers. One woman, clearly drunk, had staggered up to the table, but the man with her had grabbed her arm, whispered urgently into her ear, and she had turned away with a look of revulsion. Stoker gave no indication that he’d noticed her at all.
“This is boring as fuck,” Junebug said. “Let’s just go talk to him. That’s what Lester sent us to do.”
I stuck a quarter in the machine and pushed a button. I’d been doing this once every few minutes in case any casino employees got curious about our presence. I knew it was a wasted effort, because Junebug, genetically incapable of standing still for more than ten seconds and wearing a yellow shirt I was afraid to look at directly, had surely been a focus of attention for the eyes in the sky since he’d walked through the door. My suggestion that he wait in the car had not been well-received.
“That is the largest human being I have ever seen in real life,” I said, “and he is globally infamous for ripping a man’s eye out while attempting to squeeze his head off his body and nearly succeeding. I’m not going to go interrupt his effort to make a few bucks.”
“Christ, I hate the way you talk,” Junebug said. “Just say you’re scared of him.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m scared of him.”
Junebug snorted. “I’m gonna go hit the head.”
“He’s supposed to be done at three. That’s only a few minutes off.”
“Whatever. Try not to let him kill you before I get back.” He turned and practically bounced off the machines on either side of the aisle as he walked away. There was a better-than-even chance that his sudden urge for the facilities was more chemical than biological. If security decided to search him, we would be in a hell of a mess.
While I had been talking to Junebug, Stoker had gotten himself some actual customers, three clean-cut men in their early twenties. They were holding drinks and wearing matching T-shirts with Greek letters on the back. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the tallest one reached into his pocket and was counting out bills while his buddies laughed and punched his arms. He tossed a wad of cash on the table. Stoker took it and tucked it in his pocket. He put his sunglasses on the table, stepped out from behind it, and gestured.
