Cape Disappointment (47 page)

“What were we supposed to do?”

“I don't know. I don't know if I can stand to be this anxious for the rest of my life, either. I want my old life back, the one where I wasn't worried about getting arrested, just murdered.”

“It could be worse.”

“How? How could it be worse?”

“We could be the ones floating toward Japan.”

“Hold me.”

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN
I heard a tapping on our patio door. Kathy was still in bed trying to catch a few winks after a sleepless night. Shoeless and shirtless, I was in the kitchenette rummaging through our bags in search of breakfast. The patio slider opened to a plot of tall beach grasses, which gave way to a hundred yards of dry, soft sand and beyond that, although unseen, the foamy white line where the ocean had run
up during the night to finger the hard-packed sand. The tapping came again.

I couldn't think of anybody it might be except the motel manager or maybe the local police. For a moment a shiver of trepidation ran through my bones. I was still trying to get used to the idea that I'd been involved in the deaths of two men and had disposed of their bodies, had been trying to wrap my brain around it all night. Eventually I would deal with it, but I knew it was going to take at least a few weeks to accept that it had happened and maybe even a few months to stop reliving every second of the event every hour on the hour.

Our visitor turned out to be Bert. “What the hell?” I asked, pulling the slider open four inches.

“You gotta let me in.”

“Why?”

“He's coming for you.”

“Who?”

“Timothy Hoagland and whoever else he's working with.”

“Hoagland's dead.”

“No, he's not. He's been alive all along. He was just pretending to be dead. I don't know why he did it, but it's just his kind of stunt. Maybe he needs to disappear for some other reason. I don't know.”

“You're only saying he's alive so I won't think you killed him.”

“I swear to God he's alive.”

“What makes you think he's coming for me?”

“I have an inside source.”

“Inside what?”

“Inside his organization.”

“Have you had this inside source the whole time?”

“Yeah, but I didn't know he was trustworthy until just this last day or two. I'm telling you, they're coming for you. They know Kathy's alive, and they want you both out of the picture.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because of your association with me. But he's going to kill you.”

“Why would this so-called inside source be friendly to you?”

“We used to work together.”

“Who is it?” Kathy asked, from the other room.

“Your favorite client.” I turned back to the patio slider. “How did you find us?”

“My friend said they'd traced you to the coast, but they were waiting for you to turn on a cellphone or some fool thing. They were tracking you by your phone. I've been driving past motels for two days looking for your car. I'm guessing they're doing the same thing. You don't have much time.”

Wrapped in a cotton gown she'd purchased on one of our day trips into Hoquiam, Kathy stepped around me, let Bert in as if he were a long-lost cousin, kissed his cheek, and said, “That's for saving my life.”

If there had been any doubt he was in love with my wife, it was eliminated when I witnessed him turn into Dopey after the kiss from Snow White: all glowing and pink cheeked, like a giant dumpling. Just as it began to wear off, she hauled back and slapped him across the opposite cheek. She hit him hard. The impact made a sound like a slammed door.

“Gawd! What's that for?” he yelled.

“For drugging me with that bottle of water and telling me Thomas was dead.”

“I had to do that. I had—”

She slapped him again, this blow even harder than the first. “All you had to do was tell me the plane crashed.”

“Jesus, Kathy … I just—”

“From now on you can call me Ms. Birchfield.”

“Yes, ma'am. Christ almighty.”

I'd been pretty sure all along he wanted her to think I was dead because he had some screwy pipe dream that if I was out of the picture the path would be clear for him.

Kathy stomped across the small room, gathered up some clothes in the bedroom, and headed into the bathroom to change. Bert kept his eyes on her until the door closed, hoping, I think, to catch a glimpse of forgiveness. When that failed, he turned to me. “Did you know she was going to do that?”

I bobbled my eyebrows in amusement. “Think you were followed?” I asked.

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Relatively sure. I got here a couple hours ago and waited down the road until I thought you'd be awake. They caught some dude with your phone and killed him. That's what my friend told me. For about a day there I thought it was you. Come on, man. We have to move.”

Kathy came out dressed for an early-morning walk and said, “Let's talk about this on the beach.” In the yard, Snake was waiting-standing guard, actually, armed and grim. I noticed a large pistol in Bert's waistband, too.

From our motel you could walk maybe three miles on the beach in either direction before finding an impediment to your progress; to the south it was the small river running into the ocean, where I'd ditched Hoagland's car. The ocean was creeping inland every year, reclaiming land, so the car was only going to burrow deeper and deeper.

“You don't seem to get it,” Bert said, when we were a quarter mile down the beach. “They could be training an M-82 on us right now.” For effect, he glanced around, but there was nothing except windblown ocean on one side and sand dunes and bluffs on the other; not even any boats on the water, at least none that I could see. “They're coming to kill you two. And me. And my brother. And anybody who knows us. They're going to place drugs all over hell to make it look like a cocaine deal gone crazy.” It made sense. When I'd searched Hoagland's car, there had been some suspicious-looking packages in the trunk. And it matched the spirit of what Hoagland told us. But I didn't say anything to either brother. Kathy and I had made a pact never to talk about what had happened yesterday.

“You have a friend who's part of this?” I asked.

“A support member. He doesn't know much.”

“And you're not going to tell us his name?”

“So they can torture it out of you when they find you and then kill him? I don't think so. All this is on a need-to-know basis. He swears Hoagland is planning to kill you. Taking some FBI guy along or maybe a political operative. He's promised this guy a high-paying job in Homeland Security after they do the deed. No arrest, man. Just a plain old assassination.” He turned and looked at his brother, who was fifty yards away and out of earshot, standing sentry duty. “Elmer and I are going to see if we can't find a safe place to hide out until this blows
over. I would advise you two do the same. Me? I'm going to keep after these bums.”

“What does that mean?” Kathy asked.

“It means I'm going to find out who was responsible and rectify things.”

“How?”

“I don't know how I'll find them, but there's only one way to rectify.”

“For godsake, don't go on a rampage,” Kathy said, glancing at me for confirmation. Bert was a government-trained sniper. He knew these people. He'd worked with them or others like them. He knew their mind-set and their tactics. If he thought some of them needed to be wiped off the map— after what had happened last night, after the plane crash, after Deborah's murder and Ponzi's husband's and now Tommy's— I wasn't so sure I wanted to rein him in. In fact, unleashing Bert on these people seemed almost like a reasonable solution. Immoral, illegal, and just plain wrong, but somehow viscerally satisfying.

“Tell me what happened those last minutes you had with Hoagland,” I said.

“Up there in the woods after you left? I won't mince words. I thought about killing him. I cut him loose thinking he was unconscious, but he wasn't. He started to rip the duct tape off his eyes, and I ran, man.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I didn't think so at the time, but he must have, because somebody blew my trailer all to hell.”

“And he's after me because he knows we were hanging together?”

“That'd be my guess. I doubt his superiors have authorized any of it. He's gone rogue, Thomas.”

“Because you tortured him.”

“He deserved it.”

“Nobody deserves it.”

“And now he's on a killing spree. Anybody he can get his hands on who might have been involved. Me. You. He's going to get away with it. Hell, the FBI's backing him up.”

“What about Deborah Driscoll? Anybody talking about who killed her?”

“These guys don't talk about stuff after it happens. They just say
we've got a problem, and a day later the problem is missing or dead or in a plane wreck.”

“The driver who killed Ponzi's husband?”

“They'll never find him. Come on. You two need to start running.”

Bert headed up the beach, where he and his brother walked side-by-side, twenty yards of sand between them, treating this as if it were a military operation. I peered down the beach in the direction of the Cape. The mist on the beach kept visibility to less than half a mile, but I kept looking anyway.

“You think they're going to find the bodies?” Kathy asked in a low voice.

“I think that storm last night is carrying them straight to Tokyo.”

“It's a creepy feeling to know somebody could knock on your door and …”

“It is, indeed.”

As they drove away, it occurred to me that we might not see either Bert or Elmer again. Ever. Or, that they might be the survivors and that they might not see us again. Ever.

KATHY AND I WERE IN
her office when two FBI agents came to visit— the tall one and the weird one, as we later dubbed them. It had been almost five weeks since we bid adios to Bert and Elmer, and to date we hadn't heard a peep from either of them. Whether they were dead or still in hiding or spending the last of their pesos in a Mexican whorehouse was anybody's guess. We'd come to the slow conclusion that Hoagland and Kalpesh hadn't told anyone where they were going the day they disappeared. Once his disappearance became public knowledge, it was stated in the papers that Kalpesh's last known interaction was when he bought gas at a south Seattle Arco station. A month later his car was found in a Costco parking lot. After our stay on the coast, one storm after another pounded the Washington shoreline, so I had a feeling anything that was going to be found would have been found by now.

The FBI visitors wore nondescript suits. The tall one introduced himself as Agent Miller and did all the talking. His hair was clipped short to deaccentuate his bald spots, and he had the soft, pink skin of somebody who rarely spent time outdoors. The weird partner had bulging eyes, pretended to be bored, and stroked his chin as if enjoying the touch of his own smooth skin, as if he'd just shaved off a beard. It wasn't until weeks later that I began to wonder if they were authentic. When I phoned the local FBI office, they wouldn't tell me anything.

There had been surprisingly little public hoopla concerning the disappearance of one of the key figures in the Maddox campaign. I could only guess that Maddox and company had squelched what might have turned into an uproar.
The Seattle Times
ran an article about Kalpesh Gupta on the front page, but after that he was relegated to the back of the paper. A severe winter storm had struck the day we came back from the ocean, raking the coast and taking out power for thousands of Washingtonians, blotting up most of the headlines for the next few days. As soon as we'd recovered from the storm, the state held the elections, and they took up most of the headline space. To everyone's astonishment, James Maddox won the race and became a U.S. senator from Washington State. I was both flummoxed and heartbroken, and for half a day Kathy didn't speak to me.

Some of the behind-the-scenes speculation about Kalpesh's disappearance ranged from suicide, to carjacking and murder, to some sort of freak automobile accident. As far as we could tell, nobody was officially looking for Hoagland. After all, he'd been reported dead before our contretemps at the Cape.

When we got back to Seattle we announced publicly that Kathy had missed the Sheffield flight and immediately afterward was involved in an automobile accident that had rendered her incommunicado for weeks. Our story wasn't far off the truth and seemed to satisfy most of her friends, even if a few of them looked at us askance when we told it. We were patiently waiting to see what the FBI would think of it.

Agent Miller sat down in the closet I used for an office while his bug-eyed pal blocked the doorway. I was at my computer. It turned out Kathy was the last thing he was interested in. “We understand you are acquainted with a Bert Slezak,” Miller said, his delivery so droll and deadpan it was comical.

“He was a client of my wife's.”

“But you were friends?”

“Acquaintances.”

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

“A month or so, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“You want me to look at my calendar and figure it out?”

The agents exchanged looks. “You know what Slezak was involved in?”