Shift: A Novel (41 page)

“You think he’s going to kill us?”

“Me? Yes. You, I don’t know. Depends on whether he still thinks he can use you.” BC’s hand trembled as he reached for his glass. “It’s my fault. Jarrell told me I compromised him by going to his house, and then I kept going.” He looked up at Chandler. “But he was my only lead to you.”

“You can’t blame yourself, BC. Melchior dragged you into this. Melchior had him killed.” When BC didn’t say anything, Chandler said, “Why’s he here anyway, if he wasn’t bringing Naz to Ruby’s club?”

“He was sent here to bring in an operative called Caspar.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“Four, plus his work. The addresses are all in rooming houses, though, which means there are going to be other people around.”

“So?”

“Chandler, please. I know how anxious you are, but you have to be reasonable. In the first place, if we cause a disturbance, someone’s likely to call the police. And since you’re supposed to be in federal custody, that’s not going to look good—especially when they find out I’m carrying forged FBI credentials. And if Caspar’s armed, someone could get hurt.”

“I’m not worried—”

“Not
us
, Chandler. Other people. We can’t risk their lives to save Naz.”

Chandler slammed his fist into the bedside table.

“Look,” BC said. “I know you’re frustrated. But it’s two in the a.m. Melchior’s either already seen Caspar, or he’ll find him tomorrow. We’ll intercept them in the morning.”

Chandler was so jumpy his hands were twitching. He was afraid he was going to hit something again—he was afraid he was going to hit BC—so he got up and paced the tiny room, trying to stamp the nervous energy out of his body.

As he passed the bed, he saw the newspaper lying on top of the blanket.

He picked it up, stared at it a moment, then tossed it away.

“I meant to ask you. That picture in the paper.”

BC looked up in confusion. “The president?”

“The boy. The burning boy.” Chandler walked to the bottle, poured two more drinks. “How did you know that was me?”

“Oh.” BC’s eyes glazed over for a moment, then he snapped back into focus. “Because it came from my mind.”

“It’s—you?”

BC shook his head. “It’s my nightmare. You must have seen it when I came to Millbrook.”

“You were at Millbrook?”

“At the end. When Melchior took you and Naz.” He sipped at the drink Chandler handed him. “My father was in Korea. It was a horrible war, he said. Pointless. Millions of civilians killed on both sides, only to end up right where we were before the whole thing started. He said they used a new kind of weapon. It’s called napalm. A liquid, extremely flammable. The infantry was usually far away when the bombers went in, but my father told me one time they got the timing wrong. His unit was only half a mile outside the drop zone—a city of about fifty thousand. The flames were two, three hundred feet high. Entire buildings turned into ash in seconds. Most of the inhabitants died instantly, of
course, but the people on the outskirts of town weren’t so lucky. My father said he could see them. Dark shadows outlined against the flames. They’d jerk around like puppets and then fall down. But one boy got a little farther. Far enough for my father to see that he wasn’t dark at all. His entire body was consumed by flames. My father said he ran straight at them and they just watched him come. It was like, if he reached them, if he touched them and set them on fire, it was what they deserved.” BC shook his head slightly. “But he fell down before he reached them. Of course. It was a quarter mile. No one could’ve covered that distance. Not on fire.”

Chandler’s mouth hung open a moment.

“I’d say something about what a terrible world we live in, but what’s the point?”

BC shrugged. “I don’t know why it made such a big impression on me. I mean, it was my father’s memory, not mine. But I’ve dreamed of him for years. That boy. I don’t think he was going to attack them. I think he was going to tell them something.”

“Tell them what?”

“I don’t know. Warn them maybe.”

“Warn them?”

“That there are consequences. That no victory is ever clean, or total.” He looked up at Chandler. “We’ll find her, Chandler. I don’t care how long it takes.”

Chandler didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Do you have any acid?”

BC pulled a small rectangle of blotter paper from his pocket. “Courtesy of Richard Alpert. If you’d just waited for me—”

“Okay, okay,” Chandler said, laughing BC’s protest away. “At least we don’t have to worry about that.” He reached for the bottle and poured a couple of tall drinks. Six hours later, when BC woke up, thickheaded, dry-mouthed—and completely naked—Chandler was gone.

Giancana’d provided four men with the boat, and Ivelitsch
made them row the last mile to shore. The coastline was free of settlement as far as the eye could see, but Ivelitsch wasn’t taking any chances that someone might hear the motor.

Garza was waiting for them on the dock, his cane in his left hand, a shuttered lantern in his right.

“Comrade. It’s nice to meet you again.”

“Again?” Ivelitsch squinted in the moonlight. “It was you? In Camagüey? I take it the medicine worked.”

Garza smiled. “Sorry to send you on a wild-goose chase.”

“Water over the bridge, as the Americans say. Well, let’s do this. The sun will be up soon.”

“The fishing boats will be out before that.” Garza flashed his light behind him, illuminating an old pickup that seemed more rust than metal. “It’s in the back.”

Even with five men—Garza’s hip wasn’t strong enough to support that kind of weight—it was still almost an hour before the half-ton bomb was in the boat. Dawn glimmered on the horizon, and a bird had started to sing a loud, tuneless solo.

“I understand you have something for me,” Garza said when they were done.

Ivelitsch went below, came out a moment later with Naz’s unconscious body draped over his shoulder. He laid her on the dock, then handed Garza a brown glass bottle with an eyedropper built into the lid.

“Keep her out until you get to the safe house. Trust me, you’ll have a much easier time of it.”

“Uh, sure,” Garza said, looking at the wisp of a girl lying on the dock. “Is that all?”

“I think I can handle this last thing myself,” Ivelitsch said, pulling an automatic pistol from his jacket.

“Wha—” Garza said, but Ivelitsch was already firing. Ten seconds later, all four of Giancana’s men were dead. Ivelitsch got back in the boat. Garza expected him to toss the bodies overboard, but all he did was kick away the man slumped over the wheel.

“You’ve joined a very select group, Mr. Garza,” Ivelitsch said, starting the boat. He gunned the motor—something about having a nuclear bomb in the hold had apparently made him unconcerned about detection. “I’d advise you to remember just what the price of admission is. I’ll dump the bodies in the Straits,” he added. “Save you the trouble of having to bury them.”

“Uh, thanks. I must’ve missed that entry in Miss Manners.” Garza nudged the girl on the pier with his left foot. “Any other instructions?”

Ivelitsch was backing the boat from the dock. “Keep her alive. What happens to the kid is up to you.”

“The kid?”

Ivelitsch didn’t bother to look back. “Apparently she’s knocked up.”

The boat’s nose pointed seaward now; Ivelitsch opened the throttle and it roared out of the lagoon. When it was gone, Garza looked down at the beautiful sleeping face of the girl on the dock. Only then did he realize the Russian hadn’t told him her name. So much for Miss Manners.

He reached down for her—it was going to be awkward dragging her to the truck with his bum leg—but just as his hand touched hers, the girl’s eyes fluttered open. Despite himself, Garza jumped back.

The girl looked neither right nor left, but stared straight into Garza’s eyes.

“Where am I?”

The girl’s eyes seemed as deep as a lagoon as well, and the longer Garza stared into them, the deeper he fell. He suddenly realized he didn’t know if the girl had spoken to him in English or Spanish.

“Eres en Cuba,”
he said quietly, then added, “Miss Haverman.” It occurred to him again that Ivelitsch had never told him the girl’s name, but really, what else could it be?

Still Naz stared straight into his eyes. She didn’t speak—at any rate he didn’t see her lips move—but even so, Garza was sure she’d
asked him a question. Requested a favor. There was only one answer possible.

“No te preocupadas
, Miss Haverman,” he said, his voice more sincere than it had ever been in his life. He dropped his cane and hoisted her into his arms; if his leg hurt him, he didn’t feel it. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,
stupid!”
BC yelled at himself as
he ran onto the—
splash!
—wet balcony of his motel. This was the second time Chandler had given him the slip in three days. Why the
hell
hadn’t he handcuffed him to the bed?

The sky was clotted with clouds leaking gray drizzle; an oily puddle filled in the space where he’d parked last night, so Chandler’d been gone for a while. A young couple was loading suitcases into a pale bluish greenish Rambler and BC yelled down to them.

“Wait!”

“What’s the holdup?” The husband smiled brightly at BC as he ran up.

“FBI.” BC flashed a counterfeit badge he’d purchased for all of five dollars. “I’m commandeering this car for official business.” He’d backed out of the space before he noticed the baby in the seat beside him, handed it off to its startled-looking mother through the window.

There was no map in the car, so it took him the better part of an hour to find the first address Jarrell had written down. Thank God he’d committed them to memory—Chandler’d taken the list, even though he said his own memory had become virtually eidetic. The place was all the way out in north Dallas, a withered single-story ranch with a picture window veiled by wrinkled blinds. BC drove right past the house and parked the Rambler halfway down the block, then made his way to the house using a few stunted live oaks for cover. The rain had stopped by then, but the air was thick with moisture steaming off the ground in the rising heat. The brown lawn, though wet, was otherwise unwatered and unmown. Moreover, the strands of grass that had sprung from the cracks in the driveway were a good six inches long, which is to say: no one was using this driveway.

No one lived here.

Two scenarios sprang to BC’s mind. The first, unlikely, was that the house was a decoy to draw BC and Chandler away from Melchior’s real target. The second, more probable, was that it was a trap.

BC immediately ducked behind a straggly hedge that separated the house from its neighbor and made his way toward the back fence. He peered through a crack, saw nothing, vaulted the fence, and crept toward the corner of the house. The first window he came to was uncurtained, the room beyond empty save for a bare mattress and box spring, an open closet with a few bent hangers on the rod. He tried the sash. It was locked. He went to the second window. This one was narrow, opened onto a small bathroom. More to the point, the lock had been forced and the wet ground below was trampled with fresh footprints. Somehow BC knew: Chandler. His first thought was Thank God! and his second was I am going to
kill
you!

He had to take his jacket off to squeeze through the narrow aperture, and even so a button snapped off his shirt as he shimmied into the house. The little noise it made as it bounced off the linoleum sounded loud as a gunshot in BC’s ears, but the rest of the house remained quiet. The bathroom door stood open to the hall. Bedrooms to the left, living quarters to the right. It seemed unlikely that Melchior would be waiting in a bedroom. BC drew his gun and went right.

It was only three steps to the end of the hall—carpeted, so his feet made no sound. He peeked around the corner, and there he was. Not Chandler.

Melchior.

He sat with his back to BC in a wooden chair, facing the front door. Something lay across his lap, and in the shadows BC took it for a rifle at first, then realized it was just an umbrella. It seemed to be dry, which meant that he’d been here for a while. His breathing was slow and deep, but BC knew he wasn’t sleeping. He was waiting.

He leveled his gun at Melchior’s head and cocked it.

“Don’t move.”

Melchior didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch. He was so still that BC wondered if maybe he actually was sleeping, but then:

“Why, Beau-Christian Querrey. You got the drop on me. Congrats.”

“Put your hands in the air where I can see them.”

“Here?” Melchior extended his arms to either side like Christ on the cross. “Or here?” He pointed them straight up in the air like Superman.

“Get down on the floor. Keep your hands away from your body.”

“Stand up, sit down, lie down. I feel like I’m back in mass.” He stood
up, and the umbrella on his lap fell to the floor. He stepped over it, his arms still raised, sank to one knee, then both, then lowered his upper body to the floor. The whole time he never looked back at BC. “From all the rigamarole, I’m betting you don’t have any handcuffs on you, do you? What are you going to do, use your tie?”

In fact, BC had been wondering just that, and, angrily, he reached for the knot and pulled it sharply.

Melchior moved at exactly the same moment. BC didn’t even know what he’d done, but suddenly the chair was flying toward him. It smacked the gun and a shot went off, slanting into the wall and blowing out a piece of plaster the size of his thigh, but BC managed to keep hold of his weapon. Melchior, meanwhile, had rolled to his knees and grabbed his umbrella and was holding it out like a sword.

BC couldn’t help but smile.

“What is that, some kind of—”

There was a
pfft
and something that felt like a linebacker’s helmet smashed into BC’s gut and he staggered backward. His back hit the wall behind him and the gun fell from his hand and then he fell forward onto his face.