Drift (38 page)

“What was that?” Moose asked, staring at my face as I put away my phone.

“Squirrel,” I said with a sad sigh. “I asked them to look into it. He was murdered.”

Moose nodded like he already knew. Then he looked out the window and wiped his eyes.

*   *   *

When we got back to the house, Moose got out of the car, but I kept the engine running. I told him I had another stop to make.

The heart of town looked the same, but no one was walking on the street, and only a few cars were parked on the side of the road. The quiet didn’t seem ominous like it did before; the town seemed tired, like it was resting. As I pulled open the door to Branson’s, I wondered if this was the kind of catastrophe that could kill a town entirely, turn it into a ghost town, like Centralia with its underground fires.

The few people inside were mostly sitting by themselves, grim-faced, reading the newspaper. At some point, I’d have to read about it, too, learn the official story.

Two old guys were at the bar, but there was no sign of Bert Squires behind it. As I was turning to leave, one of the old guys reached over the bar for a bottle and I realized it was him.

He looked withered and old, his hand shaking as he filled his double shot glass. When I sat on the stool next to him, he turned and looked at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t say a word, but he reached over and grabbed another glass and poured me one, too.

We drank them down, and he refilled the glasses. Then he sighed and reached down the bar, refilling the other guy’s glass as well.

“Thanks, Bert,” the other guy rasped.

“So I guess you’re stuck here for a while,” Squires said. “What with the quarantine and everything.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I told him. “But the place is kind of growing on me. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn to love it as much as Frank did.”

Bert laughed—a short, boozy cackle that couldn’t sustain itself. “Are you kidding me? Frank hated it out here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Frank Menlow? Frank was a great guy, but he was a city boy, through and through. He missed the city, he missed his friends. He missed you.”

I hadn’t really thought about it, but it never quite made sense to me that Frank wanted to be out here. “Then why did he want to come out here?”

Bert swallowed his shot and shrugged. “Because of your mom. She loved it out here, and the thing that mattered most to Frank was making your mom happy.”

He smiled and shook his head, thinking about it.

I blinked a few times, thinking about what he had said. Then I shook my head to clear it.

“Look, I don’t know if this helps or not,” I told him, “but I figured you’d want to know. Carl wasn’t an overdose. He was murdered.”

Bert turned and looked at me, trembling, with a look in his eyes like anger and sorrow had somehow combined into fear. “But they said he had enough drugs in him, he would’ve been dead even without the fall.”

“They murdered him, Bert. They hit him over the head, and they put that stuff in him. Then they tossed him off the bridge. He never took any drugs, not intentionally.”

He stared at me. “How do you know?”

“I know, Bert. Believe me. He saw something they didn’t want him to see, and they murdered him.”

“You sure?”

I nodded.

He stared at me for another second. Then I guess he decided he did believe me. “Who did it?”

“They’re dead,” I told him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Bert. I killed them.”

His eyes got redder, and he put his hand on my arm. “Thanks, Doyle,” he said. “Frank was right about you.”

He gave my arm a firm squeeze as he stood up. Then he turned and hurried out of the bar.

*   *   *

It may have been the whiskey, or it could have been everything else, but by the time I got home I was ready to go back to bed. I figured it would be another twenty hours before I was ready to get up again. But when I pulled into the driveway, the Michelin man was sitting on my porch. For a moment, I thought one of the feds in the hazmat suits who had been chasing me finally caught up with me. But as I got out of the car, I saw it was actually Danny Tennison.

“Nice outfit,” I said as I climbed the steps. “Very slimming.”

He laughed. “Well, apparently, this town of yours has cooties. I had to go through decontamination before they let me leave the first time. Very
thorough
decontamination. I don’t ever want to go through that again.” He leaned forward and whispered loudly. “And some of us still have to go to work.”

“You want some time off, I can tell you how to get it.”

“That’s okay. I said I was getting along better with the wife; I don’t want to jeopardize that by actually being around her all the time.”

“So that’s your secret.”

He smiled. “You’re looking a little better. You get some rest?”

“A little. Another couple hundred hours and maybe I’ll be caught up.”

“Stan Bowers sends his regards. Wanted you to know he won’t be pressing charges for impersonating a federal officer. You got anything to say about that?”

I had to say something, but I didn’t want to incriminate myself. “Good?”

“You’re goddamn right, good.” Danny laughed, shaking his head. “Your buddy Pruitt’s on unpaid leave, pending the outcome of an investigation into the way he handled your arrest.”

I snorted. “Okay.”

He craned his neck to see the lump on the side of my head. “Got you pretty good, didn’t he?”

“If he’d gotten there a couple minutes earlier, my girlfriend would be dead.”

“But he didn’t, did he?”

“What are you getting at?”

“The Berks County D.A. wants me to ask if you’re planning on pressing charges.”

“Hadn’t thought about that.” I sighed. “The guy can be a pretty big asshole.”

He nodded. “Yes, that does seem to be the case.”

“And he was way out of line.”

“Not the first cop to cross a line, though, is he?”

“No, but still, something needs to happen.”

“Well, I think the D.A. wants this to go away. And he wants to know what it would take for you to let it.”

I thought for a moment. Then it hit me. “Anger management training,” I said. “
Mandatory
anger management training.”

Danny laughed. We both did. “You’re a real prick, you know that?”

“If I was a prick, I’d enroll in it alongside him, just so I could exercise my right to drop out.” I smiled. “See? I am getting better.”

He laughed again. “Well, thank God for that.”

77

When I got inside, I started up the stairs, but looking down the hallway, I saw the mess of papers I had left on the floor in Frank’s office. I smiled, thinking about all Frank’s files and folders, everything exactly in its place. I thought about how, if I died, it would take a forensic accountant weeks to find the documents Frank had neatly filed away. And I’d never bought a house, or life insurance. I barely filed taxes.

I didn’t want to find any more surprises, but leaving the room a mess felt disrespectful. So, before I went to bed, I started piling everything back into the boxes. As I did, one of the envelopes came open, and a sheaf of photos slid out across the floor. The ones on top were fairly recent, pictures of my mom on the front porch or in the garden, wearing the lilac print cardigan she always wore. Underneath were older photos of her when she was younger. Seeing them was sad, but they made me smile.

It struck me that I had never really appreciated how beautiful she was. I remembered some of the photos: the two of us on a roller coaster, at the top of a lighthouse.

They were happy photos, and I needed that. Frank was in some of them, staged shots of the three of us smiling awkwardly: Williamsburg, the Franklin Institute, a Phillies game. The rest were of my mom and me, playing, laughing, snuggling, just walking down the street.

There was one photo in particular that caught my eye, one that I remembered. The two of us laughing, eating ice-cream cones in front of Bredenbeck’s ice-cream parlor, in Chestnut Hill. She’s about to wipe my chin with a napkin. I’m about twelve years old, giving her this look, like I’m too old for her to be wiping my chin, and she’s giving me this look like, no you’re not. As I stared at the photo, I felt myself smiling, too, a bittersweet smile, along with the faces in the picture. Then I noticed Frank, reflected in the window behind us.

He was young, and I could see him laughing along with us as he took the picture.

I looked back at all the other photos of my mother and me, and I realized they were all taken by Frank. The only reason he wasn’t in them was that he was the one taking them.

I spent the rest of the afternoon going through those boxes, looking through hundreds of pictures. In most of them, my mom is looking right at me, and I could see how much she loved me. But in many, she’s looking right into the camera, and in those, I could see how much she loved Frank, too.

78

Dunston was declared quarantined for another two weeks, and that was fine with me. I had no place to go anyway. I wasn’t even in much of a hurry to get back to work. Like I had told Bert Squires, the town was growing on me.

Nola got dramatically better over the next couple of days, and our visits got longer. Each time I visited her, the little sunroom was more populated, as more victims of Rupp’s pathogen recovered. The doctors were concerned about the possibility of liver damage from the Mycozene, but so far everyone was fine.

At first, Nola was happy just to be alive, and to be with me. But after a couple of days, I noticed a melancholy setting in.

We were sitting in the sunroom, speaking in hushed tones since the room was now full. “My farm,” she said, when I asked her what was wrong. “I put everything I had into it. Now it’s gone. My little organic farm is a toxic waste site.” When she sighed, it was deep and sad, but free of rasps or wheezing. “Maybe your friend Jordan Rothe will reconsider.”

I didn’t tell her that Jordan Rothe had probably lost everything and wouldn’t be buying anything for a long, long time. Instead I put my arm around her and told her everything would be all right.

The next day, when I came to visit, she still seemed down. But I brought her a present. It was an apple, the one I had seen through the fence, half-buried in mud. It was bruised and withered, and Nola looked at me funny when I gave it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, putting it aside. “I’ll eat it later.”

“No, you won’t.”

I told her about what Sorenson had said, about how they couldn’t find Rupp’s apples, and how badly they wanted to get hold of them. How badly the drug companies would want to get hold of them as well. How the feds would offer a big reward.

“And that?” she said.

I nodded. “There’s ninety cases of them out there somewhere, and the trees themselves are out there, too. They’re bound to turn up sooner or later. But this is the only one to turn up so far. It’s up to you what you want to do with it. The pharmaceutical companies would probably make you pretty rich.” I shrugged. “But Sorenson could probably come up with enough to pay off your mortgage and buy a few acres and a house in a town at least as nice as Dunston.”

She smiled and picked up the apple. “And you’re giving this to me?”

I nodded.

“You know, I … I don’t really approve of profiting off genetically modified crops.”

I put my hand on her knee. “Someone’s going to find them, and someone is going to get paid. You might as well get paid first.”

She thought about it for a moment. Then she smiled. “You’re a heck of a guy, Doyle Carrick.”

I smiled back. “I keep saying.”

She put her arms around me and gave me the kind of long, lingering kiss that let me know she was feeling better.

She was released the next day with a clean bill of health. She was a little weak, but her color was back and she looked beautiful. I took her home, and I took good care of her until she got her strength back. And after that, she took care of me.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

JON M
C
GORAN is one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Liars Club, a group of authors dedicated to promotion, networking, and service work. McGoran’s short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, with three stories set to be released this year, including two in IDW’s “Zombies vs. Robots” franchise. In
Drift,
he combines his interest in the increasingly bizarre world of food production with his love of the thriller. Visit him on the Web at
www.jmcgoran.com
.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

DRIFT

Copyright © 2013 by Jon McGoran

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Daniel Cullen

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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