The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (22 page)

“Who the flaming fuck is the Milkman?” the leader asked.

“Oddly enough, that’s what I’m here to learn.”

“You’re big, lady,” he said, “just not big on answers.” He laughed. Two of the others laughed. The man with the chain, and another, to the far right. “I should be doin’ stand up. Really. In fact, I should stand up.” The man stood and stepped forward. “Ha. Ha. You get that.” He raised his voice, though it seemed to pain him. “Emory Leveski. I got your wife and your kid and there’s no way you should be comfortable with that.”

“How far away do think this man is?” Sylvia asked. “You’re not projecting.”

“You got a mouth on you. Why don’t you give it a try.”

Sylvia stood and made a megaphone with her hands. “Emory Leveski. Come out, come out wherever you are.”

The guy could surface, she figured. All she had to capture it all were her glasses. For the tiny, concealed cameras, the light was pitiful, even with the campfire, and she needed to get close to collect any decent sound. She couldn’t tell Samjahnee to break out the spheres. The shit-bags would spin out. Still, she could salvage something from this. So long as nobody killed anyone. That would taint the film. If she could just get some ghostly image of the Milkman, in the early nightfall. That could be very, very effective.

Sylvia watched the man at the far right, the one wearing hair for three. He had a pipe across his lap. The four were some kind of group, but were smattered through the crowd like concert security. Only they weren’t exactly making things more secure. At least not for her.

That woman and baby didn’t belong here. She was all put together in a catchment style. She belonged on a sidewalk, passing homes with shutters and porches. Sylvia wanted to plop down next to her and ask about breastfeeding and when you start cereal and how long before that little doll started sleeping through the night.

“He’s not coming,” she said to the leader.

“Oh, he’ll be here,” he snarled. “That’s why his woman drove out. Why else would she bring a baby to this pile of crap? Really? Would you bring your baby to this pile of crap unless you thought your husband’s life depended on it?”

The woman with the baby might snap her own bones if she didn’t loosen up. Raston wasn’t much better. The op had pulled his brow so far down she wondered if he saw anything. She knew the look. She had it herself, when a shoot’s gone wrong. When you still had to get the scene even though everything’s gone to shit. As in right now.

The leader rounded the fire and stopped in front of the mom.

“No,” she said.

“Don’t touch them,” the op added.

“Forgot you were still alive,” the leader said. “Why’s this guy still alive?”

“Because I can help you.”

“Yeah.” He pushed an open hand into the mom’s face and ripped the baby free with the other. “You get back to me on that.”

The baby squealed. The crowd grumbled. The leader stood and held the girl high over his head.

Sylvia skipped next to him, arms out. “What are you doing?”

“I ain’t got all night.” He turned to the baby dangling high over the fire.

“Oh my God.” Sylvia said. No one heard her over the chorus of screams.“Put her down, man. Put her down.’

“Em-or-ee!” he shouted. “EEMM-OOOR-EEE!”

This was nuts. She walked over to Samjahnee, put her arms around him and leaned in to speak directly in his ear. “This guy’s a psychopath. I don’t want him in my movie.” She lifted a multi-tool out of the side pocket of the backpack. She moved it to her coat pocket as she walked back to the fire.

“EEMM-OOOR-EEE! EEMM-OOOR-EEE!”

Sylvia dropped the tool at Raston’s feet. He watched it hit the ground, too stunned to realize what happened.

A rumbling noise started behind Sylvia. It reminded her of vehicles in old movies. She turned as headlights came on, glaring their way into the circle. It was an old vehicle. The lights burned her eyes. She refused to look away. She needed the glasses to take it all in.

A man-shape stepped into the beam of the driver’s side headlight. “Set her down, Clark. Now!”

“Or what?” The leader laughed.

Sylvia didn’t think the man heard him over the engine and the fire and the crying toddler roasting above it. He certainly hadn’t noticed Raston cutting the op loose. She shouted, “He said, ‘or what?’”

“Set her down!” he screamed. “It’s me you want. So come and get me.”

“He’s right about that,” he said to his men. “Go fetch him. We’ll do him so his woman can watch, then get back to the city. Hate to miss bed check.”

Two high grades rose, the one with the chain and the one with the pipe. They walked through the circle picking up the big man at the edge. They marched three abreast into the twin blasts of light and the black cutout Sylvia took to be The Milkman.

“Samjahnee,” she chirped. “Light up the eyes.”

“Roger that, boss.” He dropped to a knee and threw his backpack to the ground. Sylvia turned slowly — her eyes velcroed to the Milkman and the thugs — back to the leader, still holding that baby high, her own camera recording.

“Hey, op.” She angled her mouth to her left, not averting her eyes from the child. “I’ve got that baby if I have to fucking stand in the middle of that mother fucking fire, I’ve got that baby.”

“All right then.”

The op stood.

* * *

Emory stood. He saw Lizzie, dangling from the hand of a monster. The other three approached with no sense of urgency. He wanted them closer, faster, now. They couldn’t see him too well, he knew that. Counted on that. He put his heel on the front bumper of the Jeep. He grasped the edge of the hood. They walked at the same pace. Conner on the left, taking a chain down from his shoulder. Teddy on the right, held a bar in both hands. Gem stomped up the middle, cocky as ever. They always sent fear surging through his body, the sight of any one of them, any time. Until today. No fear today. That gland dried up, he thought. No fear to pump. Get Lizzie, get Lilly, get out.

Timing, balance, the way things work. Everything had an optimal setting, a right moment. This system required velocity greater than reaction time. Force came from velocity. There was a moment at which the speed of cars and brains signaling muscles met.

Now.

He used his heel to vault onto the hood. He grabbed the edge as tight as he could. The Jeep lurched forward. It raced at the three men. Emory loved their faces, wide and dumb. They paused for a moment, completely confused. Emory let the momentum push him back. He cocked up his legs. Conner dove left, Teddy right. Gem couldn’t decide. He jerked one way, then the other, and the Jeep plowed into him. It didn’t have much speed, but the mass hit him sideways, mid dive. The truck ran over him, its left front wheel snapping his back, bringing out a horrific wail. The bump shook Emory’s grip loose. The back left wheel silenced the man. The force of the Jeep coming down from the bump rolled Emory off the passenger side of the hood. He hit the soft ground hard.

* * *

“What the…” Clark brought the baby down. He fit her under his arm, preparing to walk off.

“I’ll take her.” Lillian lunged for the girl. He swung her back out of the way. Waiting behind him, Sylvia plucked the baby from his hands, spinning to put her back between the man and the child.

“I don’t think so.” Clark half-laughed.

McCallum dropped and whirled his right leg around, sweeping Clark’s legs off the ground. Clark fell backward into the fire. Lillian ran around it. She and Sylvia disappeared into the darkness outside the circle. All of the ollies stood and backed away and Clark howled and rolled and rolled, smashing out the flames clinging to his back.

“Stay down!” McCallum hollered.

Clark bounced up, flung his arms out like a smoking bird and screamed.

McCallum stared at him as the sadness set in. The guy had gone over. A wild beast now, a demon of pain and rage. He regretted not bringing a stunner or a dart pen or one of the other non-lethal arms they’d invented to prevent this, the total liquidation of an asset. He’d come here to punish a killer, not to be one.

Clark charged him, arms out for a grapple. McCallum took Clark’s left arm, spun and flipped the man over his shoulder. Flat on his back, he torqued the arm, as if attempting to unscrew it from its shoulder. McCallum placed his foot between Clark’s chin and collarbone and applied all his weight. The man gurgled and twitched and slapped at his ankle. McCallum brought his foot up and down fast and ended him.

“That baby OK?” he asked out into the dark.

Lillian came closer, pulling the baby into her chest like she wanted to melt the child right back into her. The lady director came up from behind, holding her glasses in one hand, wiping her eyes with the back of the other.

Emory Leveski brushed past him, adding himself to the spire of wife and baby. McCallum moved in the direction Emory had come from. Two figures in the light of the Jeep crept forward. McCallum took three more steps and stopped.

They stood facing each other across a couple of yards of darkness and mist. The sounds of the fire and baby and chattering ollies diminished in McCallum’s ears. He focused everything outward, at the tense, uneasy young men. At the drooping chain and the dull pipe, spotted orange and black in the firelight. The big one was missing. He thought maybe the Jeep got him. Couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t let this go on.

“What were you thinking?” he said. “You need to avenge the death of a piece of garbage? He tried to cook a baby. You gonna risk it all for someone like that?”

The silhouettes didn’t move. McCallum saw the chain and the pipe jitter.

“‘Cuz let me tell you, he will not be appreciating the effort.”

They stood for a while. Longer than McCallum might have guessed, had he thought about guessing, had he not been thinking, do I have it in me? Is that big guy dead or recovering? Do they know they’ve got the advantage from the blinding lights? And youth.
Man, there is no second wind in my sails
.

The Jeep engine revved up. The figures ran right, in the direction of the front gate. The Jeep’s lights faded and the engine coughed to silence. The Jeep squeaked and another figure approached. McCallum waited. This one had half the profile of the other two and moved like a cat.

“Thought you’d left,” McCallum said.

“Ran into one of John’s old friends,” Snyder replied. “He has a story more pathetic than mine.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

There could be no better wine. No better drink, Emory thought. In all of existence, no one had ever enjoyed a beverage as much as he loved this white, fruity, sugary vino. He wanted to pour the wine into his eyes and ears and throat. He’d have a headache tomorrow. He’d be all contorted from the lack of food and water, from the way he treated all his muscles, like meat in a grinder, and from the come-down. The withdrawal from the chemicals his brain had made to get him from point A as in asshole to point B as in bliss.

He sat by the campfire. Lillian took the baby up to a warm room in the castle, as they called it. Snyder’s room, he understood. Kindness from a stranger. He found it a tough concept to remember. Kindness of any kind cowered pretty far back in his head. The fact that he used to be kind to strangers himself hadn’t even occurred to him until he told the security operative about being the Milkman. How once upon a time he had a team of people that tested local dairy products for safety and published their findings in anonymous posts. He helped people he didn’t — wouldn’t ever — know.

“That’s a severe breach of policy,” McCallum said, slugging back his own mug of wine.

“The company looked the other way,” he explained. “They have kids, too, you know? Everyone wants milk that’s free of dysentery, even if the company doesn’t want to make the investment to ensure it.”

“Not everyone, it would appear.” McCallum poured more wine. “Who’d you tick off so bad they framed you for murder?”

“No one,” John Raston jumped in. “We never reported much. A couple of tanks of overdue, a few dirty lines. The farms keep their stuff cleaned, mostly.”

“Somebody hated you two.”

“Then why not kill the site?” Emory asked. “That’s the part that never made any sense.”

“Maybe they couldn’t,” John said. “We took precautions.”

Emory shrugged. “Then why not get rid of me instead of that poor girl?”

McCallum shook his head. All the elements floating in his brain had no form or shape. He had a mobile with no center rod bringing the parts into orbit, into a pattern that made art out of junk. Unification. Theme.

“How’d you do it,” Sylvia asked Emory. “How’d you keep the site from being shut down?”

“It’s a rolling site,” John answered. “We set it up to move periodically. To find it you had to search key terms any time you wanted to visit.”

“So even if it got shut down, it would simply pop up someplace else.”

“You catch on quick.”

McCallum said, partly to himself, “the best way to kill the site was from the source.”

“They should’ve killed me,” Emory said.

All art was the same, McCallum always thought. Sculpture, painting, video, dance, even mime. Emotion, edification, narrative, held in balance. Insubordination was an art. Not a nice art, not a worthy art, but a blend of craft and desire, forethought and abandon, the wish to perform, achieve and touch a state of contentment, regardless of how fleeting. It was all the same.

“Why the girl?” Emory mumbled, slumping on the log. McCallum saw the wine taking effect.

Every policy breach he’d ever investigated hung like a mobile in which one couldn’t see the wires. His job, at its core, was to see those wires binding the seemingly separate parts together. Most of the time it proved fairly easy. Greed, sex, anger and the feeling — he couldn’t believe there wasn’t a word for it, being so common and so critical to the human condition — the sense that someone was getting the best of you. Those were the cables drawing most people from the clean to the dirty column. Once you ferreted out which tied your suspect, victims, opportunities and rewards together, it usually made sense. It usually turned out to make common sense. Most indiscretions were, in the end, trite.

“We’re all insubordinate,” Emory said into the fire. “Everybody trades a rake for a shovel or has a buddy cover for you while you nap, because you were up all night playing the guitar in some pub. Or… or… uses the company equipment to see if their milk’s clean. Everybody breaks policy, it’s just a matter of degree.”

“You’re OK, Emory.” McCallum took the man’s mug. “You were smart back there. That thing with the Jeep was very smart.”

“It wasn’t original.” He put his face in his hands. “Saw something similar today. Shit. Was that today? Twelve years ago? Did it happen?”

McCallum motioned for Snyder. She padded over the ground and helped Emory up.

“Come on,” she said softly.

“Good night, Em,” John said.

McCallum watched Snyder lead Emory, his wife and his little girl up to her room and he felt a pain in his eyes. In his temples. A happy, brutal, piercing relief. It had a temperature. The feeling had heat. A thin, buttery emotion churning through his head and heart. He took another sip of wine. Tonight he’d sleep in his tent, with Snyder pulled up so close no inch of his skin would be out of contact with hers.

“So John,” Sylvia said. “How difficult is it to start a site rolling?”

“Depends who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“The Milkman site took me a couple of days.”

“Now tell me if you’re in the market for any new friends.”

“I, uh, hadn’t thought—”

“Smashing. I think we could be the best of friends. Don’t you think so, Samjahnee?”

He addressed John. “It works best if she’s your only friend.”

“Sylvia,” McCallum interrupted. “You started this documentary in October? Around the time of the murder?”

“Yes,” she huffed. “I imagine I caused it. Not that I could’ve known.”

McCallum dropped his head, peering at her from under a fat, furrowed brow.

“The Milkman is an embarrassment to somebody, I don’t know who.” Sylvia said. “Somebody else wanted to exploit the embarrassment. I don’t know the identity of this person, either. I am coming to terms with the fact that I never will. They’re grade fours, each vying for a chance to be a three. Can you name a grade four? A five? I didn’t think so. At that level they become invisible. Sitting in high towers, mixing up clouds, throwing down lighting. We are the stones they stand on, or throw at each other, whatever it takes to get a step higher.”

McCallum didn’t care for this picture, but it worked. The form, the composition. Bleak, strangling, maddening, provocative it portrayed a sketchy truth. The paper notes, the op he fought in his apartment, the money to fund a movie all took resources beyond the average low grades he wrote up everyday.

“Why didn’t they kill Emory?” McCallum asked.

“Aren’t you the investigator?”

“Yeah,” McCallum said. “That’s what investigators do. Ask questions. I’m thinking our jobs aren’t that far apart.”

Sylvia titled her head and dropped the corners of her mouth. “If it were me, I’d tell one of my people to take care of the Milkman problem without making a big splash. You don’t want a problem brighter than the one you’re trying to snuff, get me? When I’m running the show, I make sure the right person is doing the right job. My $70 an hour guys are doing $70 an hour jobs. My $20 an hour guys are doing $20 an hour jobs. I don’t know if that helps, but somebody picked the least valuable person to kill in order to put an end to project Milkman. Does that help?”

“Every little bit does,” McCallum said.

“I caused all of this and I’m quite sorry.” Sylvia stood. “I’m also quite pregnant and quite tired. Samjahnee, do you think you can get us back to the hotel?”

“Nothing will stop me,” he proclaimed.

“Which hotel?” McCallum asked.

Sylvia started walking away from the fire, into the darkness.

“What?” she called back. “Are you going to tell me not to leave the catchment? That’s delicious.”

He smirked. She would be the easiest person to find on the planet.

* * *

Sylvia walked through the quaint alley of shacks and tents and leaning pieces of corrugated plastic. Samjahnee followed close behind. Most of the ollies were already asleep. Her eyes had become accustomed to the firelight, making the walk to the front gate overwhelmingly black. And cold.

“Samjahnee,” she said over her shoulder. “Do you have a torch?”

“We’re almost—”

Snyder stepped into the their path, arms across her chest.

Sylvia caught a tiny yelp in her throat. Actually gasping like a teenager in a horror movie would have been mortifying.

“There is a man looking for me,” Snyder said.

“I’m betting you don’t mean that op back there.” Sylvia smoothed back her hair.

“He runs Managua for the India Group.”

“Managua? Is that made with cilantro?”

“I can’t be in that movie. Do you understand?”

“Never having heard of Managua, I’m betting it’s more than a day’s drive.”

“It’s over 2,200 miles.” Samjahnee gazed into his cuff.

“It wouldn’t matter if I was on the moon,” Synder said.

“You have a high opinion of yourself. Nobody gets over your body, huh. Now I’m wishing I had more footage of you.”

Snyder pushed in, nearly touching Sylvia’s’s protruding belly.

“It’s a matter of pride with this man. No one defies him.”

“But you did.”

“I was a… plaything. I got sick of it.”

Sylvia leaned in, her face close enough for a kiss.

“No one interferes with my art.” She looked up and to the right. “No one who’s not paying the bills, anyway.” She ducked around Snyder, continuing to the gate. Samjahnee stood still. He lowered his eyes, his lips thinned out. Then he walked, trailing behind his boss.

“Of course,” Sylvia said without turning. “You can always talk to John Raston. Perhaps you could tell him to be my new friend for what did he say? Three days?”

The squeaks of the hinges cracked the night as they pushed through the tall wooden gates and left the fort.