Chapter Thirty-three: Unraveling ties.

Mina was a different person walking into Geography. She laughed, chattered and hugged friends like they had been apart for months rather than a weekend. The dark circles under her eyes were eclipsed by rosy cheeks. She sat in the back next to Logan and me. But this time it was not because she was afraid of what Dulles would say about farming in California, but because she didn’t care what he had to say about farming in California.

I studied the teacher. Something was off about his appearance.

It was the bowtie that gave him away.

His hair was combed slick as usual. He was clean shaven as usual. His suit and shirt were pressed and his shoes were shined – as usual. But the bow tie was not right. I stared at the end of the orange polka-dotted yellow silk strip that extended a quarter inch beyond the left bow. He was never sloppy about his tie. Measuring and manufacturing that complicated wardrobe affect was how Dulles set himself apart from the other teachers and everyone else in Chatham.

There were other giveaways. He avoided looking at or anywhere near Mina. His nostrils flared and his jaw remained rigid, even more than usual. His index finger kept pulling the shirt collar away from his neck. He was the right height to have been the shorter man in the shadows who gave Redman permission to kill us in the science lab.

I kept my phone in my jacket pocket as I typed, “tectonic plates.” Then I sent the text message to my father. He and I had prearranged code names for each of the teachers and students at Oxford High. Teachers were linked to their subjects, kids to some physical feature. Pretty simple, but sometimes simple was good enough.

As we shuffled out at period end, I spotted the Pater sweeping spotless floor just outside the classroom door. For a brief moment, doubt slid across my conscience. What if I was wrong? What if Dulles’ dislike of farmers was because he hated vegetables? What if his tie was wrong because he overslept this morning?

I gave a mental shrug. The Pater would find out, one way or another.

I went home before meeting Logan for dinner at Chatham’s only mall. I needed to create a hair style that would not only test Logan’s l – l – love for me, but which would also obscure my face from CCTV cameras deployed by the shopping center’s security. I was thinking thick skull cap of nobbly, sparkly wool over a curtain of downward pointing hair spikes along both sides of my charming face.

Daydreaming almost got me a black eye when I entered the house from the garage. The aluminum bat moved the tiny hairs on my cheek as I bent backwards at the last milli-second. The door jamb splintered and bits of plaster flew off the wall. I twisted and landed in plank position on my hands and toes. I pushed into a runner’s lunge and swiped at the back of my assailant’s knees with my straight leg as I brought it forward.

He avoided the maneuver with a simple jump while whipping the bat at me again.

I let it swing past me before following its arc with my arm. My hand closed on the cold metal, twisted and yanked backward as I pushed away from the floor and wall with my legs. As my back landed on the kitchen table, I spun the bat until its neck slipped into my grip. Then onto the floor with the table between us before leaping over the kitchen table – just before the tip of a hunting knife dug into the drywall where my femoral artery had been.

Planted back on the floor, my feet gripped the tile through thin-soled sneakers. I swiveled my hips, the torque adding force as the bat made contact with our rice-cooker. The ten pound, plastic and aluminum machine traveled through the air, straight at his head. It was the distraction I needed to spring the hidden drawer under the sink and remove a fully loaded Glok.

The gun was pointed with safety off by the time my father caught the rice cooker just before it hit his nose.

He flipped the round machine over in his hands before putting it down on the kitchen table. “We didn’t get much use out of that.”

I rested a middle finger against the base of my neck. After ten seconds, I reported, “Forty beats per minute.”

He shook his head. “You’re out of shape.”

“I’ve been working on a few other skills.”

“Handholding and – that other stuff won’t ensure your survival.”

“Survival don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got the sanity to appreciate it,” I countered by massacring an old song lyric.

“That tune’s getting old,” he said.

I stuck my tongue out at him and blew a raspberry.

“Do you kiss Logan with that mouth?” he said, TOTALLY GIVING ME THE CREEPS.

I put my hands to my ears and shouted, “STOP TALKING! STOP TALKING!”

When there was silence, I opened one eye and then the other. He was eating a Fudgesicle, chewing each one-inch bite into submission. My molars twinged and I almost winced. It was the oral equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

“If you’re going to be social, you need to get over the squeamishness. Otherwise, all the combat training in the world won’t prevent someone from manipulating your feelings.”

My grip tightened on the Glok’s trigger before I caught myself. He shook his head in disgust.

“Rookie. Very rookie.”

I turned the gun and showed him back of the grip. “I put the safety on when you started talking, just in case the urge to shoot you overcame any faint feelings of daughterly obligation.”

He pointed to a small silver box on the kitchen counter. “A present for an ungrateful child.”

I picked up the machine reluctantly and asked, “Photo or video?”

He confirmed my suspicions by saying, “It’s your former geography teacher.”

I pressed play. The video was clear and its subject well lit. Drops of sweat reflected a strong spotlight and made Dulles’ pale face shimmer.

“My family. You don’t know who they are or you wouldn’t have done this.” Dulles’ voice expressed both cowardice and pride. “Let me go and I won’t tell them about you. Hurt me and there isn’t a place you can hide.”

Ten seconds of silence followed his threat. The irony was too obvious to point out to my father. There were always places a person could hide. If you didn’t need companionship, culture or decent food, the options were many. If any one of those things mattered, if you had a child who needed to be socialized, then a little creativity was required. But there are ways to stay hidden from even motivated killers, I was living proof of that.

I imagined the Pater presenting his poker face to Dulles. It’s a look so devoid of expression, it acts like a mirror for your worst nightmares. Beads became rivulets of sweat on Dulles’ face. His bow tie was long gone and the collar of his shirt had turned from snow white to the yellow of urine, from perfectly ironed to accordion creases. Panic sweat grew dark ellipses in the fabric under his arms.

“That peasant Reyes family doesn’t have anything. My family – we can pay you beyond your wildest dreams. Just don’t hurt me.” His voice sharpened and weakened with each word until the plea ended in a whine.

Like grief over someone else’s death, facing your own involves several stages. There was (1) shock, (2) fear, (3) denial, (4) bargaining, (5) anger and, for a lucky few, (6) acceptance. Dulles had reached stage four at that point in the video. I hit pause.

“I hate gory. Does this get messy? Could you just tell me the ending?”

The Pater gave me one of those long considering looks. I imagined he was wondering why his only child was so gutless. Perhaps he was recalculating downwards my odds of survival against the really BIG Big Bad.

Finally, he shook his head and said, “One day you will need to do this yourself – probably quite soon. Choosing to fraternize with people targeted by contract killers and dating boys protected by the FBI means you no longer have the luxury of waiting to learn enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“Enhanced interrogation techniques” is the spy-government contractor-special forces euphemism for torture. In the Pater’s eyes, I was sixteen and ready to start waterboarding. If you don’t know what waterboarding means, look it up you lucky bastard.

I pressed play again and Dulles resumed bargaining for his life. In short time, the man visibly shriveled from false bravado to abject pleading. The Pater had to do nothing more than give him The Look.

You don’t have to actually have sex with someone to bend them to your will. You don’t actually have to give a person drugs to make him think he’s drugged. You don’t actually have to shoot someone to convince you’re him that you’re capable of killing. Sometimes, all it takes is a look, a bit of cleavage, the sound of a cattle prod discharging a thousand volts. The promise or the threat is usually enough. This also helps to reduce gore clean up for the junior member of our fugitive team.

But they have to believe you. My father punched through Dulles’ forearm with the heel of his boot. I covered the camera’s tiny speakers, afraid his screams could be heard through the sound-proofed walls of our house.

The Pater must have turned the camera off for a while as the image suddenly cut to a subdued Dulles. He was still sitting, but the wood frame arm chair had been replaced by one made of aluminum and he was no longer tied down. The broken arm was splinted and bandaged, but blood continued to seep from where bone had pierced skin. Since the man wasn’t whimpering from pain, I assumed he had been given a dose of morphine.

The spotlight was turned back on, making Dulles jerk his head away. Even drugged, the sudden movement was a bad idea and the man cried out in agony. The coating of dried tears, snot and saliva cracked across his cheeks and flakes peeled away illuminated by the harsh light.

“You work for my brother, don’t you? It’s no worse than what he did to me when we were kids.” Dulles’ voice was flat and his southern accent was out in the open.

When the Pater didn’t respond he continued, “Carl was always bigger, meaner, and better at getting what he wanted. I was the oldest but they put him at the head of the company when Daddy died.” Dulles shook his head in disgust and projected a bloody wad of thick spittle to the floor by his side. “I thought I had him with this one. There’s enough oil under that ridiculous organic farm to make Carl’s last four finds look like an automobile’s oil change in comparison. My family wouldn’t have been able to ignore me any longer after I handed it to them on a platter. Now they’re out millions. The Reyeses will put the drilling rights up for competitive bid and we’ll have to pay fair market price. Those peasants will get hundreds of millions for being nothing more than stubborn wetbacks.”

He wiped his face with the sleeve on his uninjured arm and leaned forward. The movement made him bare his teeth back to yellow canines. The pain of bone grinding against bone can be felt even through a morphine-Percocet cocktail.

“You can’t trust Carl. He’ll exterminate you after you kill me. He can’t have the elders find out about his penchant for fratricide. Join me and you can name your price. You’ll be top man on my team.”

Even if I hadn’t been trained to detect liars lying from a hundred feet away, I would never have believed Dulles.

Prescott Dulles’ body was found a month later. He was hanging from the ceiling fan of an apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The only clothing on his bloated body was a yellow bow tie with green polka dots. The coroner put the cause of death as accidental – asphyxiation resulting from auto-eroticism gone wrong.

My father didn’t kill Dulles. He didn’t have to. Dulles already had an expiration date put on him by his own brother.

When my father released him, Dulles should have gotten on the next plane, train, or bicycle to another county. Instead, he had gone home to shower and dress himself in another suit and bow tie. His brother Carl’s men took it from there. Oil companies already had enough public relations strikes against them. Attempted murder of teenagers might get enough people demanding that the government nationalize the country’s most important natural resource. Prescott Dulles was silenced before he could implicate his family or the industry that fed them.