Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (50 page)

Another assumption shot to hell. When I turned on the lights in the kitchen, there she was, my favorite redheaded harpy complete with a nasty-looking, nickel-plated handgun and her computer bags. She’d cut her lovely red hair down to a skullcap that only a lesbian could love, and she appeared to be dressed for travel. Through the back window I could see Tony’s vehicle.

“Hey, cellmate,” she said. “Why don’t you just relax and sit down for a minute.”

“You know there’s Bureau in the neighborhood, don’t you?” I said, sitting down, and regretting that the kitchen could not be seen from the street. How in the hell did she get Tony’s car?

“Oh, them,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “I have some friends taking care of that problem.”

“You have friends?” I asked.

She slid into a chair opposite me and gave me that fire-eyed grin. “Believe it or not, Lieutenant. Not only friends but like-minded citizens who are more than willing to help me on my little crusade. We’re not done, not by a long shot.”

“What are you doing here, Moira? You’re not mad at me, are you?”

She barked a laugh. “Do you think?” she said. “But actually, this”—she waved the purse gun—“this is for my protection. I just wanted to tell you face-to-face that we’ll never stop until America regains its freedom and the rest of the world is safe from our grievously aggressive government and our runaway military-industrial complex. We intend to show them that the people are the real weapons of mass destruction when it comes to tyranny.”

I almost said
blah-blah-blah
. I hadn’t heard this bullshit since watching some of those sixties movies, but it was coming from the same quarter it usually did: arrogantly overeducated people who’d never been out there on life’s front lines. I said nothing, and just waited. I wondered if there was any way I could activate that pager in my pocket without her noticing.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked, frustrated at my silence.

“Don’t you think, Moira,” I said, “that creating incidents of terror will only strengthen the government’s resolve? Make it grab even more authority? If Trask was right, and the country’s become dangerously complacent, what you guys tried was exactly the wrong thing to do, wasn’t it?”

She shook her head. “What we’ll create is doubt—doubt about the government’s ability to protect the masses of citizens in this country who already feel powerless. Doubt about the moral underpinning of this so-called war on terror. Doubt about who the bad guys really are: them or maybe us. And from doubt springs true revolution.”

I’d finally had it, even if she did have a gun. “Oh, c’mon, Moira,” I said. “Masses and classes? That bullshit went out with Karl Marx caps and granny glasses. Communism is dead, or hadn’t you heard?”

“Don’t tell Comrade Putin that,” she replied. “Or better, visit Russia and see for yourself. I have.”

“The Russians can’t help themselves,” I said. “They
like
their tyrants. You, on the other hand, sound like a one-woman propaganda machine. What other Americans are going for revolution? None.”

“You think?” she said. “Have you asked yourself
why
Carl Trask told your boys where you were? It wasn’t to get you out, big guy—it was to get
me
out. That’s why you changed rooms. Our thing is a lot bigger than you know.”

“You’re telling me the major was part of this?”

“No, but he’s devoted to Carl Trask and his ideas about the decay in this country.”

“You and the military guys are on different sides, Moira.”

“They think so, and you think so. The difference is that my side is using them.” She glanced at her watch and got up. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” She pointed at our portable computer on the kitchen table. “You might want to get rid of that. That’s the computer that actually hacked into Helios. It’s a slave to the ones I have in here.”

I blinked. I was impressed and said so. Then I asked her where she was going.

She laughed. “As if I would tell you?” she said. “Oh, let’s see, then—how about, I don’t know, Mexico?”

“Mexico.”

“It doesn’t matter where I go,” she said, pointing at her computer bags. “As long as there’s one or two of these around.” She zipped up her jacket and headed for the back door. She saw the water bottle. “May I?” she said.

“Be my guest,” I said, keeping my voice absolutely neutral. She grabbed the bottle, stuck it in her jacket pocket, and pushed open the back screen door.

“Moira?” I called. “If you actually do go down to Margaritaville?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Don’t drink the water.”

The next morning, Tony and I went back to the hospital to be there when Pardee surfaced. We were too late. Alicia was beaming at his bedside. Pardee had come out of it on his own and announced he was hungry, damned hungry. The doctors were very pleased and yet equally adamant that there would not be a party just yet. They asked us if we would mind very much just going away and coming back later. We slunk away
to find some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. I told Tony about what had happened last night, and he looked at me with new respect. I told him that he’d eventually get his vehicle back if he’d just be patient, and that, no, I didn’t intend to share the news of Moira’s departure call with Creeps and company.

We had our coffee and then went down to see Bernie Price to close the loop on the Thomason case. He had been in touch with the reluctant sister, who was now on her way home to the U.S. to see about her brother, and possibly even her sister, Allie. She had told Bernie that there had been an inheritance from their parents, but Allie’s revolt and subsequent enlistment with the sheriff’s office had provoked their father to verbally disown her. When the second parent died several years later, the money had been much larger than they’d known, and the older brother, acting as executor, had divided it between himself and Allie’s sister, even though the trust had specified a three-way split. Allie had apparently just found out, and had gone to Helios to confront Dr. Thomason. Whether she threatened to expose him wasn’t known, but when I had made that call to the sister in Turkey, she had known that the chickens might be coming home to roost. I suspected Thomason had admitted to Allie what he’d done, and when she threatened to expose him, he poisoned her with moonpool water. The loving sister would probably never admit that, but Bernie said she was in for some pointed questioning.

Alicia took Tony back to Triboro when she went back for a day with the kids. The docs would not let Pardee go until he’d been observed operating normally for forty-eight hours. I drove back over to Southport. I decided to stay at the beach house as long as Pardee was still stuck in the hospital, even though Alicia said she’d be back down in a day or so. That evening, Sergeant McMichaels stopped by the house again. He had a rustic-looking individual with him. I thought he’d come for his bottle of radioactive water, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. He introduced the other man as a local fisherman, who had some news for me.

“Think mebbe I got your dogs,” the man said. “One German shepherd, one black wolf-lookin’ one?”

My heart jumped. “Where?”

“My place,” he said. “On the river. They wandered in yesterday mornin’, I called the sergeant here. He’d had word out, you was lookin’.”

“Are they hurt?”

The man shuffled his feet and looked warily at McMichaels. “You can tell him,” the sergeant said.

“The black one? He’s done lost him a back leg. Looks like somebody shot it off. Got him a hurt eye, too. Bad hurt, I reckon. The other one’s okay, but she won’t eat nothin’ and she keeps makin’ teeth at me.”

That would be Frick
, I thought. “Let’s go,” I said.
Frack’s lost a leg?
The thought of that almost made me wish it wasn’t them. Almost.

The man turned out to be an inshore fisherman. He ran a one-man-band operation and plied his trade in the Cape Fear estuary for the Wilmington restaurant markets. His riverside place was in a small community of riverbank places whose yards were cluttered with boat gear, junked cars, wobbly-looking piers and boats, and weathered mobile homes. He took us out back to a makeshift dog kennel, where I heard a familiar bark.

Hallelujah. It was them. Frick was thin and a bit tattered, but she perked right up the moment she saw me coming across the backyard. I heard a couple of other cars pulling up out front but concentrated on greeting Frick and then examining Frack. I could tell immediately that his right eye was a total loss. His left rear leg was gone from the elbow down. The fisherman had put some kind of horrible goo on it that stank of fish, but I didn’t see any swelling or other signs of infection. He couldn’t stand up, but he was very glad to see me, and his tail worked just fine. I sat down in the pen between them and just talked to them, trying to keep a dry eye and not really succeeding as I watched Frack try to get closer to me. It was such a relief to see them alive, battered as they were.

“Y’all gonna put that one down?” the fisherman asked. McMichaels studied his shoes, as if already knowing the answer to that one.

“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s going to be like me—retired.”

“Well,” Sergeant McMichaels said, “there’s one more thing. Lots of folks in town appreciated what you did. We talked about what happened to the shepherds. So, well, over there.”

I looked through the pen wire to see a dozen or so locals standing by the corner of the fisherman’s trailer. I recognized some faces from the Southport diner.

“Seems that some of the folks in town wanted to do something, pay you back,” McMichaels said, pointing to my dogs with his chin. “Your partners here getting hurt and all. We got together. We have something for you. Some
one
, actually.”

He signaled to the small crowd by the trailer, and a man came around the corner with a very large sable shepherd on a leash. No one spoke as he walked over to where I was sitting in the pen. Frick got up and stared, but the big dog ignored her and simply sat down and looked at me through the wire. I don’t think I’d ever seen a shepherd with as much gravitas as this one. She turned out to be a female. Calm, amber eyes, erect ears, broad chest, and an aura of complete superiority.

“This here,” the man said, “is Kitty. She’s yours, you want her. Folks here were trying to think of some way of repaying you. I bred her, but she’s yours, if you can use her.”

“Kitty.”

The man smiled. “My wife’s idea of a joke, before we knew how big she was gonna get. Should Carol ever get herself into trouble, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty,’ and have a big-ass ol’ German shepherd come around the corner. The bigger she got, the funnier that got. What do you think?”

I got up, patted my two pals on the head, and went out to meet Kitty. I sat down on the ground in front of her, and she examined me gravely. I let her smell my hands and the big bandage on my right forearm. Frick gave a jealous woof.
Frack, on the other hand, put his head down between his paws. I think he knew that his replacement was on deck. I realized I’d have to work on that.

Kitty stood up, walked around me once, and went to the pen to touch noses with Frick, who wagged her tail, before coming back to me. She sat down again.

“Shake on it, Kitty,” the man said.

Damned if she didn’t put out a big old paw. The people over by the trailer started to applaud.

And me?

Well.

Read on for an excerpt from the next book
by P. T. Deutermann

NIGHTWALKERS

Coming soon in hardcover from
St. Martin’s Press

They came out of the darkness, riding lean, hungry horses. The engineer put down his unlit pipe and reached for the shotgun in the cab, but then relaxed. The riders were Reb cavalry, not goddamned bluecoats. He could tell by their slouch hats, the mish-mash of uniforms and weapons, and those big CS buckles gleaming in the engine’s headlight. The officer who appeared to be in charge rode right up to the locomotive. The others slowed to a walk and spread out in a fan around the train’s guard detail, who were lounging in the grass beside the tracks while the engine took on water. The riders were greeting the men with soft drawls and questions about what was going on up there in Richmond City.

The officer wore the insignia of a major, and he tipped his hat to the engineer with his left hand while holding the reins close down to the saddle with his right. He was wearing a dirty white duster that concealed the lower half of his body.

“Major Prentice Lambert, at your service, suh,” he declared. He had a hard, hatchet-shaped face with black eyes and fierce eyebrows. “This the documents train?”

The engineer said yes, a little surprised that the major knew. There were only four cars behind the engine and its tender, three of them passenger cars stuffed to the windows with boxes of official records from the various government departments up in Richmond. The twenty-man guard detail rode in the fourth car, but they were all disembarked for a smoke break and calls of nature. The guards, who were an
odd mixture of old men, teenagers, and even some walking wounded from the trenches at Petersburg, seemed relieved to see Confederate cavalry.

The major nodded, as if the engineer’s answer was hugely significant. The engine puffed a shot of steam from the driver cylinder, spooking the major’s horse sideways, but his rider held him firmly.