HANK DUNPHY REVEALED HIMSELF TO BE A MAN WHO could evacuate a building with stunning alacrity. No sooner had Mike Fulton—full time fireman and retired military bomb disposer—clamped off and cut the trigger wire, than good ole Hank was gone like last week’s paycheck.
I called after him on the stairs, “Hank, you forgot your briefcase!” He didn’t look back. I bounded after him, trundling the briefcase in front of me like a tea caddy.
“Excuse me,” I told a pair of matrons as they stepped aside to make way. “Man forgot his briefcase.” They had a shopping bag full of Campbell’s Soup labels for the office down the hall from mine and could not conceal their disgust for Hank and I playing tag on the stairs.
“I should say,” said the lady in the black straw hat with matching bag.
“Well, I never,” said her friend, demure in a white blouse and brown pleated skirt.
“Hold this, toots, and tell me what you never,” I couldn’t give it to her, even though she did put her hands out—I had to catch the door with my shoulder before it fell completely shut. When I got out onto the porch Dunphy was already in the middle of the lot and dodging parked cars like they were trying to tackle him. A dozen steps and half as many seconds would put Dunphy in the middle of an open field and I could lob him the “Hail Mary.”
Flashing brakelights caught the corner of my eye. The green Taurus crept down the apron toward the street, surrounded by FBI agents in black wind-breakers, Matty among them. She wore a black skirt and hose. A sling carried her left arm. She pointed her Beretta at the driver’s window with her right.
“Stop! Turn off the ignition! You’re under arrest!” they all chanted in madrigal, while the Taurus slowly plowed agents into the street.
I abandoned Dunphy—wasn’t really his briefcase anyway—and scooted down the stairs to run after the Taurus. Through the rear window I could see the driver holding the detonator in view—threatening with it in his right hand.
I ran along the passenger side of the vehicle, past agents who took me in their sights, their faces first angry, then ashen. I dived onto the hood and held the briefcase to the windshield.
“Pop it now, asshole!” I yelled and peeked over the case to look the driver in the eyes. Jack Anders. I wish I had been surprised. He never saw me. His eyes fixed on the briefcase and his face became mostly open mouth. He bailed out of the driver’s door and ran.
Left to its own devices, the Taurus rolled into the street with me still on the hood. Lucky for me, the ride carried me wide of the of gunfire directed at the fleeing Jack Anders.
Jack slowed to a quickmarch, then stopped. He turned to face the gaggle formation of agents with his arms spread and showing his empty palms. The firing stopped. Jack wore a tan windbreaker unzipped over a white knit shirt. A half-dozen small cones of fabric stood out from his shirt, each with a small hole at the tip. A cloud of astonishment wafted across his face as his eyes engaged each of his pursuers. He glanced at his shirt and wiped it flat with his hand. Red circles spread around the holes. He turned and, making precise steps, walked into the street like a mime descending an imaginary stairway.
The curb on the far side of the street stopped the Taurus. I left the briefcase racked on the windshield and slid off the hood to try the passenger door. Locked. The driver’s door stood open. I ran around and threw the shift lever into park without climbing in. The detonator—a garage door opener—lay on the passenger seat.
A yellow taxi rounded the corner. The driver seemed to be studying something in his right hand. I waved my hands and yelled. If he looked up, I didn’t wait to see. I ran for the circle of agents who stood staring down their gunsights into the vacant eyes of the pile of meat that had been Jack Anders.
Behind me brakes locked up and tires squawked. An angry voice called after me, “What the fuck are you doing?” Matty looked up and fixed me in flaming arrow eyes.
“That was stupid,” she said. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“I didn’t think he would pop the bomb if it was in his lap,” I said, in favor of what I was thinking: Trying to improve on your circular firing squad strategy, Matty! “Why’d you shoot him?”
“Because he had the detonator,” said a Washington dinosaur agent, who probably knew J. Edgar personally. He had at least a decade on me and a full head of gray hair with a laser-straight part on the left and hair swept back on the right. The only one without an FBI stenciled jacket, he wore a charcoal suit over a pinstriped blue shirt with a red tie on a lithe and lean body. He holstered a chrome .357 and walked off.
I said, “Who was that?”
“Your best friend,” Matty said.
“I shouldn’t tell him the detonator was on the passenger seat?”
“Go ahead and roll him over,” Matty said to nobody in particular. She gave me a sidelong glance. “No. I wouldn’t mention that.”
“Hey, Mack,” said an angry voice. I turned to see the taxi driver. An extra day of whiskers put more hair on his face than on his head. A hammock of soiled yellow T-shirt captured a belly that fell over his belt like an apron. “You can’t just stop your car and leave it in the street.”
A battered pick-up truck loaded with lawn equipment rounded the corner. Its front bumper dived for the pavement and tires squealed, but it still tagged the back bumper of the taxi cab.
“Why not?” I said. “You did.”
“Oh, shit,” said the cabby as he turned and speed-waddled for his vehicle. “Jesus Christ, what else?”
“There’s a bomb in the Taurus,” I told him. He cut a hard right and headed for the open field behind my office.
“So, who is this?” said Matty. She holstered her weapon.
“Cab driver,” I said.
“On the ground,” said Matty, definitely not amused.
“On the ground is what remains of Jacob Anderson, AKA Jack Anders,” I said. “He worked for the late Mr. Dixon—was doing an undercover at Light and Energy Applications in Wisconsin when he disappeared. I found him in Brandonport, wearing a ski mask and pointing a revolver at my head.”
“Why didn’t you report him to the police?”
“He convinced me that it was my fault.”
Matty showed me narrow eyes and tight lips.
“I guess you had to be there,” I said.
“I’ve got something for you in the car.” Matty started for the parking lot.
“Bust a flipper?”
“Dislocated shoulder,” she said. “Your playmates hosed the tires on the Blazer and it rolled like a red rubber ball.”
“So you didn’t get them?”
“Not something I can discuss,” she said.
A man decked out like the Michelin man, rolling one heavily padded leg around the other, carried Dunphy’s briefcase toward a sandbagged steel tub loaded on a trailer. A county rescue truck squeaked to a stop near the steps to my office. Two FBI agents walked by—bookends for Hank Dunphy, his hands cuffed behind him. They marched him to the rescue truck. He implored all who could hear to send help to his wife and daughter.
I asked, “Somebody is doing that, right?”
“He tried to blow you up,” said Matty.
“Sins of the father.”
“Your best friend is on the way to catch up with the SWAT team we sent while you were still in the office with Dunphy,” said Matty.
“So who is this man who is supposed to be my best friend?”
“Did he ask you any questions?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Return the favor,” Matty said. “He flew in last night, and if we roll up the third man in twenty-four hours he’ll be able to walk on the Potomac with a bag of congressional funding under each arm.”
“The guy you just ventilated wasn’t Jacob Anderson?”
“No, but he does make two down and one to go.” She unlocked the door of a tan government sedan and nodded at the passenger door. I pulled the door shut after me and Matty told me to look under the seat. I fished out a green and white football-shaped leatherette shoe bag with a black cord handle. Inside, four packets of hundred dollar bills in bank wrappers made twenty thousand dollars. It didn’t make much of a pile.
“I don’t suppose this really matters now,” I said. “Dunphy admitted the plan to frame Scott Lambert.”
“I wouldn’t look for Lambert to be on the street any time soon,” said Matty. “You can count on Dunphy to clam up as soon as he stops begging for help. The prosecutor will be playing heavy defense. He took Lambert for a half million in cash and twiddled his thumbs while Lambert took a beating.”
“Guess I better count this,” I said.
“Count it or don’t,” said Matty. “I don’t care. There’s a receipt. You don’t sign the receipt, the money stays here. Sign it, and I want to see the money once a day. You lose any of the money and the Bureau will be all over you like ants on a jelly bean.”
I started counting cadence for Franklin and Matty started working her pockets. She searched her purse.
“Out of smokes?” I asked.
Matty patted the shoulder of the arm in the sling. “The patch,” she said. “Damn thing itches like mad and I’m still looking for a cigarette.”
“What brought this on?”
“The doctor who set my shoulder.”
“You didn’t fall for that, did you?” I said. “They’d tell you to quit smoking to cure a hangnail.”
“I was injured in the line of duty. The bastard wrote it on my chart.”
“Christ,” I said, “the world is turning to shit. Now I gotta buy my own cigarettes.” I finished counting the bills, signed the receipt, and left Matty sucking her thumb.
• • •
Marg sat at her desk posting a ledger with her “leave me the hell alone” half glasses perched on the end of her nose. As I opened the door she said, “Am I going to blow up, or can I get some work done?”
I patted the top of my head and said, “You kind of flattened out your hairdo while you were under the desk.”
Marg drilled a finger into a pink message slip. “The landlord called and said he’d let us out of our lease and return our deposit if we were out of here by the end of the month.”
“Not happening,” I said. “I’ll give him a call.”
“No need,” Marg said. “They’ll have a door on your office and measure for carpet today.”
I skulked past Marg, locked the money in the equipment closet, and retreated to my desk. Marg went out the front door and down the hall. I heard every step. Searching my desk for smokes produced no joy, so I rifled my suit. In the hanky pocket of my suit coat I found a note from Wendy that read, “I said cruel things. I didn’t mean them. Sorry—I love you.”
“’Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’” I said to my empty office. I snatched up the telephone, but found my hand shaking. I could hear myself ranting at Wendy, “You wanted to believe them. You said what you thought. You wanted to be, ‘poor Wendy.’ You spent months looking out the window watching our marriage dissolve into the night. Now it could be my fault. ‘Poor Wendy. Art was such an asshole. How could she have known.’” I banged the handset back in the cradle.
I’d passed two party stores before I thought to stop for smokes. The next opportunity was the strip mall on Breton. The window of the “Buck-a-Piece” store displayed Detroit Red Wing Stanley Cup T-shirts. They didn’t have any Red Wing hats, so I went with a white golf hat and a Red Wings bumper sticker—probably work just fine in the dark tunnel where I was told to deliver the money. A roll of duct tape and a heavy rubber mallet with a wooden handle ran the tab up to a fin.
The cashier at the drugstore said that cigarettes were four and-a-half a pack.
“Cigars?” I said.
“Aisle seven on the left,” she told me.
I found a “special,” buy one get one free, and stopped at the greeting card aisle on the way back. How come the cards never say what’s on your mind? “I love you, but I feel like a stranger in our house … in our bed … loved not wisely but too well,” and lines about casting away pearls of great value—but that shoe had been on the other foot.
“Maybe it still is,” I told the rack of cards and felt air rush into the void in my chest that I had been fighting for days. I read them all. It took an hour, maybe longer. I don’t know. Long enough for the store dick to get cross eyed trying to watch out of the corner of his eye while he tried to appear really interested in disposable douches.
I settled on a card with a little girl and boy on the cover. They wore “dress up” clothes from an attic trunk in the background; him in suspenders with an old pipe, her with a string of pearls, a scarf, and an acre of hat. Inside it read, “When you’re young at heart/Life is forever new.”
I don’t know what it cost. It needed another line—I sat in the car with my pen poised to strike. Nothing came to mind. I turned on the radio to find inspiration from some minstrel but got the news instead.
Lead story: A gas explosion destroyed a home in Ada. A woman was dead, a little girl in intensive care. Names withheld. Then sports, weather, and a little humor to wrap up: Two members of a local motorcycle club had been arrested after getting liquored up and dumping a trash receptacle into the lap of the desk sergeant at the Grand Rapids Police Department.
I stashed the card in the breast pocket of my jacket and drove back to the office. A man in a blue serge suit sat on my sofa and passed the breeze with Marg. As I opened the door he waved. His forehead lasted all the way to the crown of his head. The rest of his brown hair lay brushed back from his face along the sides of his head and formed fender skirts over his ears.
“I didn’t know if I should wait,” the man said in Ken Ayers’s voice.
“Harley Davidson on the big board now?” I said.
Ken climbed off the sofa trenching his shirt collar with a finger. “Yeah. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”
“I know,” said Marg, “and I’m not telling either one of you.”
Ken followed me into my office and took the wingback chair. I opened the closet and unzipped the bag that Matty had given me.
“You missed all the fun,” said Ken.
“Had all the fun I could stand this morning,” I said and liberated a packet of Franklins.
Marg stepped into the doorway and pointed at the wall behind my desk. The agency license was back in the frame and covering the unfaded paint square that had marked its absence.
“That cop that was here when Billy Clements came by to lend you his car?” said Ken.
“Archer Flynt,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Ken. “He walked in and flopped that piece of paper on Marg’s desk.”
“I told him that wasn’t where he found it,” said Marg.
“Man, you shoulda seen his puss,” said Ken. “Marg reached in her drawer and gave him the frame. You woulda thought she fixed him a shit sandwich.”
“Sorry I missed it,” I said.
“Wait,” Ken waved a hand and laughed. “He comes in, bangs it up on the wall, and turns around—Marg is standing in the doorway and makes him hang it straight.”
Marg aimed a finger at me and said, “And you make sure it stays there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Marg went back to her desk. I dropped the bundle of currency in Ken’s lap on the way to my chair. Ken riffled the end pack of Franklins under a tent of approving eyebrows. I rocked my chair back and stacked my heels on the corner of my desktop.
Ken stuffed the fifty yards into the breast pocket of his suit coat and said, “What’s the plan, boss?”
I let my head fall to one side and passed my hand over the top of my head.
“A weave, man,” said Ken. “I sent it out to be dry cleaned.”
“I was afraid you went Wall Street on me.”
“This is what I wear to court.”
I folded my hands on my chest, fingers interlaced, and said, “Heard any gossip lately?”
“Friends of mine had lunch with your client,” said Ken.
“Gourmet?”
“Fried bologna and macaroni with a breath of cheese sauce.”
“I know that place,” I said. “I was there yesterday but they canceled my reservation.”
“Heard you had lunch at The Rabbit.”
“Earthy ambiance, but I’d hardly call a wedge of lime lunch.”
“I heard somebody was serving hickory,” said Ken.
“Special order,” I said. “How was my client when your friends talked to him?”
“Scared shitless when they sat next to him,” said Ken. He laughed. “But they said your client found a bunk and had a quiet night.”
“Fancy that.”
“Ain’t nobody going to have a quiet night if we don’t take care of business,” said Ken.
I put my feet on the floor, hauled a can of oil out of my desk drawer, and lubed the rails of my lead launcher. “Guess we ought to go for a ride,” I said.
• • •
The revolving sign atop The Rabbit was already lit—turning relentlessly in the evening twilight like a radar antenna, searching for customers long on libido and short on prospects.
“You got to be shittin’ me,” said Ken.
“Nope,” I said. “That’s where we’re going.”
“I can’t think of anything Luis would like better than a big chunk of your ass.”
“How about a big chunk of my ass and twenty thousand dollars?”
“Well?” said Ken with a twist of his head. “Yeah.”
I pulled up to the curb two blocks short of The Rabbit and dug the matchbook out of my pocket. On Billy Clements’s car phone I dialed the “private party” number.
Half a dozen rings and the bartender answered. “Rabbit,” he yelled into my ear. The din of the crowd and a quarter’s worth of “Smoke on the Water” nearly drowned him out.
“I’m looking for a private party,” I yelled back into the telephone.
A smile usurped the doubt from Ken’s face. He said, “Much better idea.”
“Hang on a sec,” said the bartender. I heard a clunk, he must have set the handset on the bar. Halfway through “Magic Carpet Ride” Luis interrupted Steppenwolf.
“Private party starts at a thousand dollars,” he said.
“Art Hardin,” I said.
Ken did a double take.
“Fuck you want, asshole?” said Luis.
“Thought I’d stop by for a beer.”
“Stop by any time you want, man. Your friend Rudy’s here. He was just sayin’ how much he’d like to see you. Maybe buy you a beer. Shoot the shit.”
“Scott Lambert got a good night’s sleep.”
“What’s it to me?” Luis said.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “Thought I’d just bring it by.”
Ken searched the glove box and worried his gaze around the car. I nodded at the “Buck-a-Piece” bag on the package shelf.
“Just a minute,” said Luis. The telephone clicked onto hold and I got salsa music while Ken snatched the bag into the front seat.
Luis picked up the line. The background noise was gone. “You can bring me all the money you want, but if you got business with somebody maybe you better do that first.”
“Just seems like a waste of time,” I said.
“You forget where you supposed to go?”
“Hampton Street?” I said. “The tunnel under the expressway.”
“Maybe it was Milwaukee Street,” he said. “Maybe there’s a secret handshake you got to remember.”
“Nah. Detroit Red Wings T-shirt and hat.”
Ken pulled the rubber mallet out of the bag and looked at me with his face screwed into a question mark. I nodded. He dropped the mallet on the floor and plumbed his hand through the contents of the bag.
“Well? See! You got it figured, man. Go and do your business, and ah—come by here, and ah. … Rudy have a nice cold beer waiting for you.”
“Corona with a wedge of lime,” I said.
Luis banged the phone in my ear.
I started the Jag, pulled into traffic, and took the first right. At the alley I turned left. Most of a block down I found an empty cement slab behind a plumbing shop and backed in.
I had an excellent view of The Rabbit—the brightly lit parking lot as well as the side and back doors.
“There ain’t no money in here,” Ken said into the bag.
“Let me see it,” I said.
Ken shrugged and handed the bag to me with concern hung from his eyebrows like a curtain.
I looked into the bag and then stuck my hand in to search around. The tape, the hat, the shirt, and the bumper sticker were all there.
“Ain’t this a bitch,” I said. “I must have told the dumb bastard a fib.”