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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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B
laine watched as a ghost world appeared before his eyes. The high-tech underwater mask not only gave the scene an eerie backlight but also eliminated the distortion normally caused by water, creating the illusion that he wasn’t diving so much as floating over land.
The remains of a farm had appeared directly beneath him. He could see enough wood frame to recognize a barn long collapsed by the weight of the water, a pair of ancient rusted plows resting in the berths they’d occupied the day the land was flooded. Well beyond the barn’s remnants stood the remains of a split-rail fence: just a few posts set a dozen feet apart in the lake’s bottom. Lying near the posts were the skeletons of what must have been livestock, horses or cows, probably; Blaine was too far away to be sure.
“Blaine,” Liz said, her voice sounding strong and resonant through his headset. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s down there? What do you see?”
“Parts of somebody’s farm that got swallowed up in the flood. What was the year again?”
“Early 1863. Winter.”
One hundred and thirty-five years, Blaine calculated. The degree of decomposition and decay fit perfectly.
“I’m heading down,” he reported.
“Be careful.”
“Don’t worry, boss,” Sal Belamo reported from the outboard. “You still got the lake to yourself.”
Blaine reached the bottom and tested it with his gloved hand. His hand plunged through the black grainy silt, the bottom firm but false. The water table must have fluctuated in these parts, changing the lake’s depth by the year, or even the month, and shifting its secrets about.
“Anything, Sal?” he asked.
“All clear, boss.”
“You there, Liz?”
“What is it?” she returned eagerly.
“Been a stormy spring, has it?”
“Worst in years, decades. How’d you know?”
“I think a lot of what’s down here has been stirred up in the relatively recent past. That would explain why no one would have charted any of this stuff before.”
Blaine freed the air bazooka from his shoulder and switched it on, aiming its barrel at the black bottom. The silt fled from the stream of air, creating deep furrows that widened as he shifted the bazooka slowly from side to side, watching for anything that was uncovered. He grew impatient quickly and switched the bazooka’s power up a notch.
The furrows deepened, became caverns forged out of the bottom amidst black clouds of disturbed silt. He could see a pale object sharpening into view, thought it was a rock until the bazooka coughed it up into the current.
It was a human skull.
Blaine snatched at it with his free hand, caught the skull on the third try and drew it to him. It grinned toothily back at him, remarkably well preserved by the silt and the frigid aquifer that must have passed beneath the property. Blaine recalled the legend of Civil War soldiers lost here in a storm. Defending their last patch of land from all interlopers—that’s how Liz said her grandfather explained the legend of this lake.
Blaine gave the bazooka’s trigger pressure again, and more bones floated up from the bottom. He kicked his flippers to move out deeper, toward the center of the lake, aiming the barrel down and ahead as he swept it from side to side.
“Check your air, boss,” Sal Belamo warned.
“I’m okay for now.”
The water grew noticeably colder and blacker as Blaine approached the center. But his slow, angular sweeps with the bazooka yielded nothing but black funnel bursts kicked up from the bottom. Based on the water table, Blaine figured there were probably pockets and chambers down here hidden by the silt and holding the true, ever shifting secrets of the lake.
The bazooka coughed another wave of silt from the bottom, but this time a solid object was pushed out with it. Blaine groped for it with his hand, watched it flee with the currents the bazooka had kicked up. He swam after the object fast, afraid of losing it again to the darkness, closing on the lake’s center.
He managed to snatch the object when it dropped back to the bottom, stowed it in the diving pouch secured on his belt after shaking the silt from his glove. Something else came free of the glove, floated down through the water. Blaine caught it and drew it up to his mask, eyes widening at the sight:
It was a gold coin.
Half expecting the lake’s legendary ghosts to pop up and snatch it from him, he dropped back to the bottom and worked his air bazooka about. Several more coins, identical to the first, fluttered upward, rousted from their resting place. Blaine tried to catch them, but the currents steered the coins away from him.
Treasure
, he thought.
No wonder Rentz had equipped his dive team with a spectron magnometer …
“Boss,” Sal Belamo said suddenly, filling his ears. “I think we got something.”
“What?” Blaine responded, still swimming after the elusive coins.
On the surface, Belamo watched a white mass flashing on the motion grid, picked up by the machine’s sensors. “There’s something moving, coming straight for you.”
Blaine, swimming slowly toward the escaping coins, rotated his gaze on the black waters dead ahead. “There’s nothing there.”
Belamo worked some knobs. “According to this, there is.”
“Come up, Blaine!” Liz called. “Now!”
But the coins were almost within his grasp. One last surge and he caught some of them. Blaine managed to snare five in all, stowing them in his diving pouch as well.
“It’s right on top of you, boss!” Sal Belamo warned.
Blaine unsnapped the sheath and drew his knife into his hand. The waters before him had all at once turned utterly black, the silt floating everywhere. His high-tech goggles could give him only a yard or so. The silt crept toward him in a dark cloud.
“Boss, can’t you see it? Jesus Christ,” Belamo resumed, panic edging into his voice.
“Blaine!” Liz cried desperately.
McCracken had started back-kicking with his flippers when the thick cloud of silt enveloped him like nightfall. He had let himself think that Sal Belamo’s machine had registered nothing more dangerous than this mud-thick shroud, when a set of gleaming teeth burst out of the darkness.
 
 
 
“
B
laine!
” Liz’s scream buckled her own eardrums.
“Blaine, can you hear me?”
When there was still no reply, she grabbed the spare air tank. She pulled her arms through the straps, then fished another high-tech mask from the dive bag Sal had brought along.
Liz barely had time to tighten her regulator into place and bite down on the rubber mouth guard before charging into the water and dropping under the surface.
 
B
laine felt claws raking at him, digging ever deeper the harder he tried to pull free. Barely any of the air from his tank was reaching his lungs, indicating his hose had been nicked, even punctured. An impact a moment before had cracked his mask and it had begun to leak, his vision stolen. The resulting blackness kept him from seeing what had grabbed hold of him. Blaine felt as though he were being reeled in, imagined some great mouth open behind him. He tried to twist around but felt something dig into his shoulders, agony seering through him, while all his air bubbled away.
 
L
iz swam downward, the SEAL night-vision mask giving life to this underwater world. She bypassed the area where Blaine had sighted his initial finds and continued rapidly on. She felt the pressure of the deepening waters in her head, spreading from ear to ear. It had been a long time since she had dived; thirty feet felt like three hundred.
She came up on what looked like a black empty hole at the lake’s bottom. She dropped closer toward it and felt the water suddenly begin to shift angrily about. Her foot snared on something and she yanked it free, had stretched herself forward again when a shape lunged out of the black. Liz backed off, screaming into her mask.
The thing veered, then came to a complete halt, as if drawn back by a leash. Liz stopped and held her position, recognizing twin sets of flippers first and then a second, almost identical shape just behind the first. She hadn’t gotten a good look at the two of them that night over a week before, but she was certain these were Rentz’s divers, caught and sliced apart by what looked like a thick tangle of barbed wire. Rentz’s expensive robotic submersible lay on its side not too far away, trapped as well. It looked almost like a spider’s web, everything that ventured near caught in its traces.
Liz pushed herself backward and twisted her mask about the churning mess, swimming on, searching for McCracken.
A hand grasped her ankle. Panicked, Liz kicked away desperately, then looked down. Blaine was directly beneath her, bubbles from his severed hose churning up the muck and stirring the blackness. Another section of the barbed wire that had killed Rentz’s divers had snared him as well.
Liz dropped down and pushed her regulator into his mouth. He drank the air in gratefully, his breathing returning to normal as she began carefully to extract him from the tangle of steel. Her eyes wandered slightly and made out the remains of more bodies, some little more than skeletons, caught by the wire and blanketed by silt. The barbed wire waited like a great basking monster. Once snared, there was almost nothing a diver could do to free himself, especially if his air hose was punctured. Panic, inevitably, would follow, and a legend was born. She imagined what a person would feel dying that way and shuddered, as she worked Blaine free of the final prongs.
When McCracken was finally freed, he and Liz started upward, steering over the deadly entrapment of wire that seemed to occupy the whole center of the lake’s floor. Only a few feet beyond it, and already the tangle of silt and rusted metal was invisible again, ready to sink back into the bottom to await the next unlucky victim.
They exchanged breaths from her mouthpiece on the way up and broke the surface together ten yards from Sal Belamo’s outboard.
“I guess this makes us even,” Liz told him as they treaded water facing each other.
“Not exactly,” Blaine corrected. “You haven’t given me mouth-to-mouth yet.”
“I saw Rentz’s divers down there,” she said, recalling their severed air hoses and wet suits marred by puncture wounds. “Some of the others too. It was the barbed wire that killed them, not a monster.”
“You sound relieved.”
“I am.”
“Don’t be,” Blaine warned. “That barbed wire was sprung off some kind of trap.”
“A trap?”
“Pretty simple process: just a few springs and pulleys, and very easy to disguise with all the silt down there.”
“Sprung by trip wires?”
“You know your stuff.”
“Not really; I thought I felt one just before the barbed wire snapped out at me.”
“There you go.” Blaine nodded.
“The question is why. What’s down there that somebody doesn’t want found?”
Blaine fingered the diving pouch on his waist. “I’ll show you when we get inside.”
They had barely reached shore when Liz happened to look up and caught a glimpse of a figure in the swirling mist on the rise on the western side of the lake. A broad-shouldered man with very strong features that included a gaunt face and what looked like a thick handlebar mustache
visible under a wide-brimmed hat. Liz glanced down to get her footing, and when she looked up again the figure had disappeared.
“What is it?” Blaine asked, noticing her stiffen.
“I thought I saw a man watching us from up there.”
“A man?”
“Well, not exactly. More like a …”
Blaine followed her line of vision with no result. “A what?” he prodded.
“A ghost.” Liz shrugged and started on again.
W
ill Thatch left Crest Haven Memorial Park with a list of the eight funerals that had taken place the morning Jack Tyrell paid his visit. He took a New Jersey Transit local back to the city and walked to the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue to find the obituaries.
Some of the newspapers were being transferred onto microfilm and took a while to track down, lengthening what should have been a short process. Normally Will wouldn’t have minded, having nothing but time. But today he was impatient, because he had a job to do. And why not? He’d waited twenty-five years for this opportunity and couldn’t even be sure the obituaries would provide any clue at all. Maybe Jack Tyrell had come to the cemetery just to meet with the four men he had ultimately murdered.
No, Will decided, meeting in the open didn’t fit his style at all, even if it was in a cemetery. Tyrell hadn’t been expecting the four men to appear any more than they had been expecting to die.
The setting was convenient, if nothing else.
The thing that kept nagging at Will was the men with official-looking IDs who had shown up at Crest Haven later the day of the murders and left with the bodies in tow. They didn’t care what Sunderwick had to say because there was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t already know. That much was clear.
What wasn’t clear was who they were and what their connection to Jack
Tyrell was. If they had been on his trail, if those were their men he had buried, why did the whole incident suddenly become hands-off to the media?
Will didn’t know what was going on here, but it had to lie somewhere in the obituaries for those buried that morning just over a month ago. He made photostats and studied them in the library for what seemed like and then became hours. None of the three women and five men had been members of Midnight Run; Will felt certain of that much. Four had died of old age, two from illness; one had been in a car accident and one had been shot to death.
What was he missing?
Will checked their ages again, remembering a picture that hung on his memory wall, as faded and curled as all the rest of them.
What if …
The thought had crossed his mind a long time ago, dismissed because it had no foundation. Now he started to wonder.
Will gathered up the photostats and rushed for the exit. Get back to his room, tear the picture from the wall, and see if his suspicions had any foundation. If they did, oh boy, things were going to be even worse than he originally thought.
 
H
e jogged almost the whole way back to the hotel, panting and sweating as he pounded up the stairs. Opened up his door intending to head straight to his memory wall.
There was a man already hovering before it, another standing by the window. Both well dressed, with holster bulges just inside their hips.
“Close the door, please,” the one by the window said.
Will did as he was told, trying to remember if Sunderwick had described the men who had come for the bodies.
“Nice collection,” the man near his memory wall said.
“Mean anything to you?” Will wondered.
“Should it?” the one near the window, the bigger one, asked him.
Will shrugged. “It’s just that if you’re thieves, I think you’re going to be disappointed.”
“We want to talk to you about Jack Tyrell,” said the smaller man.
“Go ahead.”
“You seem to have quite an interest in him.”
“With good reason.”
“Really?”
“I let him get away.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Third row from the right, fourth picture down,” Will said.
The man at the wall shuffled sideways and looked closely at the yellowed tear sheet. “This is you?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“Had him right in my hand and let him get away.” Will tried to make himself laugh. “You boys come all this way without knowing who I am?”
“We knew you were FBI,” the bigger one said.
“We didn’t know you had a connection to Tyrell,” added the smaller one. “Your interest in him makes sense now.”
“So now that you know my connection, how about telling me yours?”
The man by the wall moved toward Will. “What we want to know is where you went after you left the cemetery this morning.”
“It really matter to you?”
“Who else you might have spoken with on this subject,” elaborated the larger man.
Will looked past the smaller man toward the picture he had been thinking of at the library. Couldn’t get a close enough look at it from this far away. He turned toward the bed, the blue-steel .38 tucked neatly beneath the mattress.
“You mind if I sit down first? I’m a little tired.”
“Go ahead,” the smaller man said.
Will moved to the bed and sat down with his legs straddling the .38’s position. “I’ve got to figure we’re colleagues on this. I mean, you guys must be looking for Tyrell too, right?”
“Sure.”
“The four guys he buried in Crest Haven were your people. They got close but must have underestimated him. Easy mistake to make. Am I figuring this right?”
“Who else did you speak to after you left the cemetery?” the smaller one asked.
“You boys mind telling me who you work for?”
“We’re colleagues, remember?”
“But you’re not Bureau. Hell, if you were Bureau you probably would have knocked instead of letting yourselves in.”
Will knew they were going to kill him. Find out everything he knew and then make it look like an accident. He inched his hand toward the mattress.
“Thing is, if you’re looking for Tyrell, I can help you. I can help you find him.”
“What makes you think we’re trying to find him?” the bigger man asked.
“How’d you find me?”
“It wasn’t hard. We can find anyone.”
“Nice to be good at something.”
The smaller man came a little closer. “Who else knows you went to the cemetery?”
“Maybe the Bureau’s on the case now.”
“You haven’t been there.”
“Maybe I called. One of those anonymous tips. Give up the man who left four bodies in the ground. Tell them Jackie Terror’s back.”
“It’s not their jurisdiction.”
“Making it yours,” Will said, just a snatch and grab from the .38 now. “What I’m still wondering is who you are.”
The smaller man poured some scotch into a dirty glass and brought it over to Will. “Why don’t you have a drink?”
Will took the glass. It wasn’t hard to make his hands tremble.
“Thanks.”
He guzzled it down, but it tasted terrible. Last thing in the world he wanted in his gut right now, for the first time in longer than he could remember.
Will held the empty glass upward. “’Nother be nice.”
The smaller man took it. “Who else knows Tyrell was in that cemetery?”
“You’re protecting him, aren’t you?”
“You’re making this hard,” said the bigger man. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“We want to find him as much as you.”
“In that case, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here with me now.”
The smaller man poured Will some more scotch and started to bring it over, the bigger man following his movements. One not watching, the other with a hand tied up with a glass.
Will went for the .38.
He yanked it from under the mattress in a motion too awkward to be threatening. The men didn’t realize what was happening until he brought it up, intending to do no more than hold them at bay. But the larger man went for his gun and the smaller man let the glass crash to the hotel room floor to go for his.
Will started firing. There was no real discretion to his aim, but at this distance there didn’t have to be. Instinct took over, and before he could think or breathe, both men were going down, blood spurting in all directions. They hit the floor as the .38’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Will realized only then that he was still sitting on the bed. He rose with considerable effort, backed away, and moved to his memory wall. He stripped off the picture he’d remembered in the library and stuffed it into his pocket with the photocopied obituaries, as pushpins clattered across the floor.
The two men had stopped moving altogether by the time he started for the door. Blood spread in pools beneath them, mixing with the scotch near the smaller one. Will saw it had splattered against the wall behind the bigger man, barely visible amidst the mold and mildew.
 
 
 
O
utside, Will didn’t leave the area, not right away. Dressed as he was in nondescript clothes, it was easy for him to blend into the scene, walk about the block without anyone giving him a second look.
From a corner pay phone, he made an anonymous call about hearing gunshots coming out of the National Hotel. The police were on the scene five minutes later, but that’s not who Will was waiting for.
They didn’t appear for another hour: a pair of well-dressed men in a sedan much shinier than police issue. They flashed their IDs to the officers who had cordoned off the scene and were passed straight through.
Will thought of Sunderwick telling his story to similar men at Crest Haven Memorial Park, only to have it ignored. He ventured close enough to copy down the license plate on their sedan. He still had friends, acquaintances at least, in law enforcement. The kind of people who could trace a plate for him. Maybe help Will figure out who was trying so hard to make sure Jackie Terror wasn’t caught at all.

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