Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (4 page)

"Not many secrets in this county, I take it."

"Not when it comes to big pieces of historical property, no," she said. "Especially one with the history of Glory's End. You know the story? Why there's a cemetery up there by the railroad bridge?"

I told her I did and said I thought that it needed some care. Then we talked a little business, made our arrangements, and agreed to meet out at the house the following day.

I drove back to Triboro. On the way I got a call from Pardee Bell.

"Alexander State called. They lied about the release date. They let your ghost out this morning."

"Terrific. Got a parole officer's name yet?"

"Yup. Already called her. Name's Arlanda Cole. I know her from before. Hard-core PO. She said he's already checked in by pay phone, and he's reporting to her office late this afternoon. I told her
what was up, and she says you ought to join them. Get that shit right out in the open so Little Boy Blue knows we know."

"Works for me."

At five thirty that afternoon I was having coffee with Parole Officer Arlanda Cole in her office down on Washington Street. Kitty was sitting in one corner of the room, and Frick was sitting right next to me. Arlanda was a chunky black woman with meat-cutter arms and intense, glaring black eyes. She'd welcomed me and the shepherds, speaking to each one in turn but knowing better than to pet them. She'd read the mope's record and apparently knew the arrest history.

"What we're gonna do," she said, "is try to get him to act out. Make a threat or two. I got people downstairs can have his evil young ass back in Alexander State before lockdown tonight."

My kind of PO,
I thought. Her phone rang. Security was escorting a "client" upstairs to see her.

Breen had aged a lot. He was still skinny as a rail, but his face had hardened into features that fairly shouted ex-con: ratty, slightly protuberant eyes, slicked-back hair, pasty white face, sneering mouth. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a red T-shirt underneath what looked like a pawnshop windbreaker. He looked slightly disgusted when he saw that his PO was a black woman. I spotted Aryan Nation tats on the backs of his hands. When he saw me and the shepherds, though, he stopped in his tracks.

"The fuck is this?" he asked, pointing with his chin at me. His voice was raspy and whiny at the same time.

"Mind your sewer mouth in my office," Arlanda said. "Sit your butt down and shut up until I've finished talkin', understand me, prisoner?"

He grunted when she called him prisoner, flopped down into the chair positioned right in front of her desk, and stared at the floor. Frick got up and growled low in her throat. He pretended not to hear
it, but Arlanda did. "Good doggy," she said. Breen grunted again, trying to make like he wasn't afraid of anyone or anything in the room. I gave Frick a sign, and she sat back down again.

Arlanda got out his file and read the terms of his parole out loud. She enumerated all the restrictions on his activities. There were lots of them. He continued to stare at the floor the entire time.

"You understand all that, boy?" she said.

His nostrils flared at her use of the word "boy." It was fun to watch her work, but so far, she hadn't provoked him to say anything. He just nodded.

"Look at me, boy. I'll ask it again: You understand what I've just read to you?"

"Yeah."

"Unh-unh, Mr. Billie Ray Breen. You answer me, it's 'yes, ma'am,' 'no, ma'am.' I ain't havin' none of that 'yeah' shit from the likes of some wife-beating piece of white trash like you. Try it again."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, but with an insolent sneer on his face.

"Much better. Here's your reporting rules. If you're late, I'll get a warrant to have them pick your ass up. Just like that, no warnings, no excuses. If you miss an appointment, I'll get a warrant. If you violate any of the other rules, I'll get a warrant. If you piss me off, I'll get a warrant. You hear me, boy?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said. Now he was trying to look bored.

"Now, then," she said. "Word from Alexander is that you been makin' threats, that you plan to get you some getback on the lieutenant here."

Breen looked over at me and then shrugged.

"Well?"

"Cons run their mouth, ain't nothin to do with me," he said. He was back to staring at the floor.

"Well, lemme tell you something, boy," Arlanda said. "It don't matter whether you put an ad in the damn paper or you just thinkin' about it: We know. It's in your record here, and, more importantly, it's in my
brain right here." She tapped a finger on her forehead. "This lieutenant even sees your ugly face on the street, he calls me, I get a warrant, and you're back on the red level before you can say love me tender."

His eyes flashed at her allusion to the prison sex scene, and he almost came back at her.

"I didn't hear it," she said, cupping one ear. Her expression said she wanted to come around the desk and whack him one. He was sitting there like a dog that was about to attack, eyes flitting sideways, his body tensed up in the chair. She was waiting for her "yes, ma'am." He wasn't going to say it.

"Here Kitty, Kitty," I said.

The big shepherd got up from the corner and walked over to where I was sitting at one side of Arlanda's desk. Frick joined her. I stood up and, together with the two shepherds, stepped over to where Breen was sitting.

"Find it," I said quietly, and both shepherds closed in on Breen and began to sniff his clothes. Standing over him I could see his fingers trembling and the pulse in his temple racing, but even this lowlife knew better than to move just now. Both dogs' hackles were up as they smelled his fear, but Breen still didn't move. He'd been inside long enough to know how to hold himself in readiness. He was tougher than I'd expected, and for the first time I wondered if I was really going to have a problem with this guy. I let the dogs get a good scent memory, and then I went back to my chair and snapped my fingers to recall them.

"I'm still waitin'," Arlanda said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said finally, his voice strangely neutral. He still wouldn't look at her. I stood up.

"I've got what I came for," I said.

She nodded. "You got my number, too, right?"

"Absolutely--and my friends here have his."

We left her office and went down to the parking lot. The cops at the security station admired the shepherds and wished me a pleasant
evening. My Suburban was parked right in front. When we went out to my ride, I got a surprise. My entire crew was standing out there in the lot, waiting for me to come out.

"What's this?" I asked, as if I didn't know. Tony gave me a disappointed look, and then Pardee pointed with his chin. One of the security officers was bringing Breen out through the front doors. He shrugged off the officer's helping hand from his shoulder and then saw us. He stopped, reached inside his jacket, popped a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it without taking his eyes off of us.

There were four of us looking back at him. Pardee Bell, a tall, rangy black man, Tony Martinelli, as short as Pardee was tall but with his game face on, with a hit man's cold-crazy eyes, and Horace, who looked like an aging schoolteacher in his birth-control glasses and rumpled clothes, until you realized just how big he was. Also, of course, my two furry buddies.

Breen took a single deep drag on his cigarette, burning down half its length, spat something onto the sidewalk, and then threw the cigarette in the gutter. He blew a plume of smoke up into the evening air, just to show us he could hold it, and then sauntered away without a word.

"At least now he knows," Pardee said.

"How often does he have to check in?" Horace asked.

"Daily for the first two weeks, then weekly after that if she allows it. It's up to her, and she hates the bastard already."

"One of us will be out here each day," Pardee said. "Remind him he'll be going up against a crowd, he tries some shit."

"Y'all don't have to do that," I said. "He's tough, but I don't think he's stupid."

Based on their expressions, they did not agree.

The next morning I went out early to have some time on the property before Carol Pollard showed up. Seven hundred acres makes for quite
a long walk, but I knew the only way I'd ever see the whole thing was by tromping around on foot. I parked my Suburban at the house so Carol would know I was around and then set out with the dogs for the river bottoms below the main house. It was cool enough but with a hint of humidity, and my boots and trousers were soon wet from morning dew on the grass.

The Dan River was some two hundred yards wide as it passed Glory's End. The Dan is a substantial, muscular river. From the looks of all the snags and debris along the banks, it was capable of rising up from time to time. Across the river were rocky bluffs but no houses or other signs of habitation. I walked upstream for half a mile until I came abreast of the Confederacy-era railroad bridge abutments. There was a notch visible in the trees across the river, and out in the river itself I could see swelling whirlpools where I assumed the crossing pillars had been. On my side the abutment was still intact, fifty, sixty feet high with two rust stripes running down the face from some long-decayed truss pins. The defensive fortifications were crumbling badly.

I climbed the bank awkwardly amid a small avalanche of weeds, rocks, and gravel and reminded myself to bring a walking stick the next time. The shepherds passed me easily, scrambling up through the bushes, tails wagging. They loved to go out and just run. At the top I stood on the stone floor of the bridge abutment and surveyed my new kingdom. To the northwest, upstream, there was a low ridge, which Mr. Oatley had told me marked the western edge of the property, from the river all the way in to the road. To the southeast I could see the big house on its hill, surrounded by large trees whose heads were already filling in green with the new leaves. The rest of the property was hidden behind that hill. Three crows protested my sudden appearance.

I looked around for the shepherds and saw them nosing through the grove of cedars that marked the burial ground. I walked along the overgrown right-of-way, down the embankment, and then up the knoll. It was a peaceful place, overlooking the big river and the sleeping plantation. Glory's End. I could almost picture it--a platoon hurriedly
drafted from the starving remnants of the gray armies, fleeing from Richmond as Grant tightened the vise, riding nervously behind a bottle-nosed steam engine. Coming into the watering station at dusk, feeling more secure now that they were across the river and safe from marauding Union cavalry, twenty-nine of them stepping down from the cars and their precious cargo to stack arms and go for a smoke or a water break of their own behind the trees.

Then the sound of hoofbeats in the nearby trees, a moment of terror as they scrambled for their guns only to stand down with a whistle of relief when the engine's headlight revealed graycoats on gaunt horses riding into the station. Even better--more protection. The engineer leaning out from the engine to greet the riders as they fanned out along the tracks, nodding to the soldiers who were restacking their rifles, and then the horrifying surprise as the riders pulled huge horse pistols and began firing, starting with the engineer, each rider calmly shooting down the man in front of him and then the one next to him, the scene dissolving into booming gouts of flame, plunging and rearing horses, and sulfurous puffs of gunsmoke until the train guard and the three-man crew were all on the ground and the last echoes of gunfire died out across the dark river.

Now all that remained was these rough stones, the weedy gravel, and the rusting bones of the water tank. It wasn't like some of the big Civil War battlefields I'd visited, like Antietam, where a walk at sundown would raise the hairs on the back of your neck as you contemplated the thousands upon thousands who had died there. This did not seem to be a haunted place, but rather more of a sad footnote to that tragic war, now sleeping comfortably in the morning sunlight. The shepherds were resting against the largest stone, which actually looked like a real tombstone. I bent down to read the badly weathered inscription.

Thomas Harper, 1845-1865
Gone to Glory for No Good Reason

Got that right,
I thought.
Glory's End indeed.
As I stood up I caught a flash of light in the distance up on that ridge that marked the western boundary. It was a bright flash, as if a beam of sunlight had bounced off a mirror. Or some binoculars?

The top of the ridge was heavily forested, and I hadn't brought my own binoculars. I need glasses to read comfortably, but my distance vision is just fine. The shepherds, attuned to my sudden alertness, saw me staring and got up to look around. I walked deeper into the cedar grove to the highest point on the knoll, where there was a treeless clearing caused by an exposed rock ledge.

I stood behind a tree, however, just in case I'd caught a glimpse of a rifle scope instead of plain old binoculars. I was, of course, thinking of Billie Ray Breen, even as my brain was saying,
No way.
Then I caught a brief glimpse of a horseman up there in the trees, moving away from me and disappearing down the backside of that ridge. At that distance I couldn't make out whether the rider was male or female. The figure was wearing a dark slouch hat and what looked like one of those long western duster coats.