drove up in an SUV, pointed weapons at you, and you killed them both with the shotgun. Then, while you were examining the bodies, a third man jumped out of the SUV and disarmed you, threatening you with a submachine gun. Next, this person, while making a cell call, was stabbed in the back by a homeless man, who fled. You called for backup and later arrested two other men, who had been summoned by Mr. Submachine gun, who turned out to be behind both the Wilson killing and the al-Muwalid killing, a Siegfried W. Sonnenborg, aka Skeeter Sonnenborg, aka John Hardy, an arms merchant and international security consultant, also our long-sought criminal mastermind. Approximately how much of this is true?”
“Say half?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You’re sure? You lose deniability.”
“Oh, fuck that! I’m so fucking tired of deniability I could puke.”
“Okay, boss. First of all, we have Emmylou. They snatched her from a place I stashed her upstate after breaking her out of the hospital. They had her locked in a storage locker. She’s now at a secure, undisclosed location.”
“Along with the vice president. I’m sure they’ll have lots to talk about.”
“Right. Second, I didn’t shoot those guys. Cletis Barlow did. He was backing me and they drove up and jumped him. Both of them had federal fugitive warrants out. They were skinhead gunrunners and meth dealers, and probably won’t be missed.”
“No. And what about Sonnenborg being stabbed by a street person? You make that up too?”
“No, that’s true. Sonnenborg had the drop on us, I mean me, Emmylou, Barlow, and Dr. Lorna Wise…”
“Wise too? What, you didn’t bring the Hurricane Marching Band?”
“No, they had a game. Anyway, this guy came out of nowhere and put a big fish knife through his liver and ran away. Rigoberto’s real, a Marielista fruitcake. We’ll pick him up and put him away for good. He needs to be inside.”
“I guess. Still, pretty strange coincidence, him showing up like that, just when you needed him. Forty years of law enforcement work have taught me to be suspicious of coincidences like that.”
“What can I say, Major? That’s how it went down. But the fact is that weird coincidences pop out like mushrooms after the rain when Emmylou Dideroff is in play. It seems to be part of her M.O.”
“Mm. I guess there’s not much doubt that this Sonnenborg guy is the mastermind?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s our guy on al-Muwalid and Wilson and on the assault and kidnap upstate, him and his gang, also confirmed by the pair of mutts we grabbed later. Same kind of lowlifes, and they’re anxious to talk. On the mastermind thing, well, Sonnenborg officially worked for a fed named Wayne Semple, aka Floyd Mitchell, aka David Packer.”
“Who we don’t have.”
“No, but do we want him? My sense is that all the nasty stuff came directly from Sonnenborg, who was apparently quite a piece of work. Packer wrote the checks, but he’s not a player down here anymore. When me and Morales went by there at four-thirty this morning, there was no houseboat at all. Packer must’ve called his cleaners. He’s probably back in the ‘burbs outside Washington and the boat is somewhere out at sea, heading for a watery grave.”
Oliphant said nothing. He pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling. Paz had the strange feeling that he could see the man’s thoughts, like the news feed that runs along the bottom of the screen on CNN. Paz took a microrecorder cassette out of his pocket and laid it on Oliphant’s desk. “This is for you.”
“What is it?”
“A full confession from Packer, naming names. This whole thing is about Sudanese oil and the attempt by agents of the U.S. government to influence Sudanese oil policy and get information about a huge oil find. They committed God knows how many illegal acts both here and over there in furtherance of that goal, including ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, and torture, plus the two murders here in Florida. My thought was that if you had that in a safe place, and let people up in D.C. know about it, you’d be off the hook as far as any pressure from that end was concerned. I mean it’d be a Mexican standoff. Or am I missing some subtlety?”
Oliphant stared at the little rectangle for a good while and then slipped it into his shirt pocket. “No, I’d guess you were right. They won’t indict me. They might kill me, but they definitely won’t go the other route. I’d thank you…no, I do thank you, but by Christ, I hate all of it like poison!”
“You’re welcome,” said Paz. “Only two other items. One is the dangerous nutcase fugitive Emmylou Dideroff me and Dr. Wise illegally sprang from state custody. I vote for letting her disappear just like Mr. Packer.”
“Second the motion. You have a plan, I presume.”
“Sort of. Last night I put in a call to Rome a little after three-thirtyA.M. our time. I spoke to a very nice woman at the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. I told her who I was and I said that her prioress general might be interested to know the current situation of one of their ladies. They call her Emily Garigeau. Rome seemed pretty interested.”
“What are they going to do?”
“I haven’t got a clue. But they’re a resourceful outfit. I’m sure they’ll think of something.”
“Yes. What’s the other item?”
Paz took out his Glock and his shield wallet and placed them on Oliphant’s desk.
“I’m handing it in, Major. I suggest you put it out that you forced me to resign. It’ll cover you better if any of this stuff starts to work loose. Irresponsible cowboy resigns under pressure of squeaky clean new administration. I’ll take the pension in a lump sum.”
“Christ, Jimmy, you don’t have to do this.” Oliphant’s face showed real concern, but at a somewhat more veiled level, Paz observed, it showed relief as well.
“I do. I killed two guys already on the job, and I just realized last night I can’t do it again, and if I stay on the street, one day I’m going to choke and get someone killed.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Been a pleasure, Major,” he said. “Come by the restaurant sometime. I’ll buy you a dinner.”
Lorna abandons sleep with some reluctance and toddles naked into her bathroom. There is a wall-spanning mirror there, placed by the former owners, and she pauses to check herself out. Still a long way to go before she looks wasted, but it’s starting. There will be a brief phase, she thinks, when I will be fashionably thin, before collapsing into yellowing skeletal wreckage. On the other hand, I’m getting the best sex I ever had from the nicest man I ever went out with: what is this, a terrific dessert at the end of a crappy meal?What? She realizes she is addressing the Deity and recalls the last notebook, where Emmylou refers to the putative sense of humor of the putative Holy Spirit. What would it be like, she wonders, to believe in all that? She reaches briefly inside her mind and finds no handle for it; instead there’s something like a damper that muffles any exploration in that direction and sets up, like an interior PowerPoint slide show, a materialist explanation for everything that has recently befallen her.
Now she palps her glands, finding them swollen but unchanged. She is feverish and has, she now determines, an actual fever of 100.2 F. Still slightly nauseated, but not enough to chuck up. She feels like death, but not that soon. She showers, and as she swabs love’s ichors out of her, she wonders yet again how long it will last, how long before she becomes too sick or too unattractive to have it anymore, and thinks by then I’ll have pills enough to slip away. It hasn’t really kicked in yet, she thinks as she dresses, I should be more depressed and I’m not, I feel like I’m floating over it, like it’s happening to someone else. The famous Denial stage? Probably.
As she emerges, she notices the guest room door is open and she hears movement in her kitchen. The refrigerator door swishes closed. There is Emmylou, all dressed in her shorts and T-shirt, with a container of yogurt in her hand.
“Oh, you’re up!” she says and wiggles the yogurt. “I hope you don’t mind…I can’t remember the last time I ate.”
“No, don’t be silly. I could make you bacon and eggs if you want.”
“No, this’ll be fine.”
Lorna makes coffee, and they take it and the rest of their breakfast out to the back patio. It is cool now, and the neighboring air conditioners have entered their fall silence, and they can hear the mockingbirds singing in the overarching foliage. Lorna sips coffee, nibbles a corner of toast. She is never hungry anymore. But Emmylou sits cross-legged in a basket chair and consumes her yogurt and eats four slices of toast and jam with total
