Chaingang

28

WHITETAIL

Somebody was always uttering succinct aphorisms that stayed in the back of the mind and cooked. When you needed a profound thought, and you reached back in too far, you'd grab one of those all-purpose maxims instead. “Vigilance is the price of liberty.” Who said that?

The price of vigilance—that was something else. That price was up there in the stratosphere. It could cost you. The price of one's thrills could get up there, also. You do pay for your big chills—no question about it. There was another adage to live by.

Royce sipped at his wine, but it had gone bad. It was bitter. Nothing tastes so strong as raw truth, taken straight.

“World Ecosphere, Inc., presents ECOWORLD,” he read from the glossy brochure, “with a commitment to research for a better tomorrow.” Awkward. For a megabuck outfit, the copy sure was stilted, almost as if it had been translated into English from Cantonese or Taiwanese or Korean. That's what it was. Their hype read like the instructions on an imported battery-operated toy.

“Cleaning the air we breathe, greening the land we inhabit, and gleaning the sea's harvest” were among the parent company's prime concern. “Development of fossil fuels, solar power, and other low-cost energy sources for home and industry...” The thing had the feel of one of the old documentaries they used to show in school during civics and social studies class.

“The public will be a part of ECOWORLD, participating in a vast and innovative recycling complex based on new scientific principles that could literally change the world's face!” This read like VCR instructions translated from Japanese.

He took his pen and wrote the word “Japanese,” followed by a question mark. Then wrote another paragraph and stopped, reading the whole thing back to himself. What if they made copies of an “investigative report to the people of southeast Missouri” and circulated it everywhere? Not just media and law enforcement, but had it printed as a leaflet and dropped over the town.

“Hey,” he said to Mary, who was in bed, thinking. “You asleep?"

“Uh-uh."

“What if we ... uh...” His voice faded away.

“I'm awake. I'm listening. Go ahead."

“What if we had leaflets made. Who's the guy that drops those—the pilot?"

“Huh? Oh! The guy in Cape."

“Yeah.” He tuned out on whatever he was going to ask her, and resumed reading his notes. She was miles away, a few feet from him, with an old sheet clothespinned to a rope across the width of the cabin, for propriety, she supposed. She was in the bed but with her eyes wide open. Royce was at the trestle table. He reread the notes.

“The supposed ‘Community Communications Company’ that is building Ecoworld is not what it appears. The company exists only on paper, a front for something called World Ecosphere, Inc., a mysterious, well-funded corporation operating in Washington, D.C. and New York as a holding company. But the company—again—is more than it appears to be, just as Ecoworld is not what they claim it is. We have hard evidence that indicates Ecoworld may be a sophisticated cover operation for the largest clandestine drug laboratory ever built in North America!"

He read the details of their find—the itemized list of toxic and hazardous chemicals found on the property subsequent to the construction of the first concrete structures—a list that read like a recipe for cooking killer ice, the street name for the most deadly strain of freebase cocaine ever manufactured. How it might be possible for the people behind Ecoworld to distribute worldwide from their drug lab, under the noses—no pun intended—of the townfolk of Waterton. The amusement park aspect, with displays, tour participation, even circus-type rides tied to ecological themes, would work both as a physical cover and a money-laundering conduit. Even the foul stench of cooking narcotics down in the concrete bastion covering the central excavation might be explained by the research-and-development theme. They could be experimenting with toxic waste eradication, or pollution control—any number of plausible possibilities to choose from. It was the beginning of a perfect drug operation that could prove to be all but impenetrable.

Royce further posited that World Ecosphere was the start of a paper trail that would end in South America or Japan. The bad guys would prove to be “a consortium of politicians, drug enforcement officers, and top-level narcotics kingpins.” Perhaps an even more nefarious foreign power was providing the financial backing—who could say for certain?

The notes would be signed by Mary Perkins and Royce (whose signature would be less than worthless), and they would obtain other witnesses as soon as possible. Credible townspeople like Mary's friends and neighbors who would attest to what they'd seen at the Ecoworld constructions site. This would be augmented with a couple of clear photos, all of which would be legally documented and notarized. They'd run the thing off at some quickie printer and drop fifty thousand of the leaflets on Waterton, Maysburg, and the surrounding agri-community.

He wasn't pleased with the presentation. He tried to begin with the line about how all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. He started over:

"What is going on here?" he wrote. He liked that better. It was catchy.

A killer or killers wantonly murdering our families, friends, and neighbors? People vanishing without a trace? Yes! These are not just small-town rumors you've heard—Waterton, Missouri, is in serious trouble, and the law is doing nothing! Ask yourself, why?

We have hard evidence to indicate that “ECOWORLD” may be a sophisticated cover for the largest clandestine drug laboratory ever built in North America—and neither the police nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation is lifting a finger to stop it! These findings speak for themselves:

[WITNESSED, NOTARIZED PICTURES AND DOCUMENTATION]

These are hazardous chemicals used in the manufacture of a powerful and deadly type of “freebase” cocaine. World Ecosphere, Inc., is a front for a richly funded drug cartel, perhaps even a consortium in league with a foreign power. We believe that the murders occurring in this community may be directly linked to the clandestine drug lab's construction.

WE MUST ACT AS A COMMUNITY TO BRING THESE KILLERS AND DRUG PEOPLE TO JUSTICE. CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES, THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATIVE, THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, YOUR COUNTRY SHERIFF, OR ANYONE ELSE IN A POSITION OF AUTHORITY AND SEE THAT THIS INFORMATION IS ACTED UPON NOW—WHILE THERE'S STILL TIME!

Just awful. But he was too tired to work on it anymore. This would do. He read it to Mary and asked her what she thought.

“It's real good, Royce, but do you think people will do anything after they read it and see the pictures of the chemicals? Remember, this project has already made a lot of money for the town. They say old Gabe Augustine and his family are millionaires now from the concrete they've poured. And it's brought a lot of jobs just in construction work. What about all the money that they say will be coming into the area in tourism? Won't people around here just figure the chemicals deal is some kind of smear campaign, and choose to ignore it?"

“Maybe.” He shrugged.

“And if they did get up in arms about it and called Marty Kerns, imagine what would come of it. He'd give them some soft soap and pat them on the head, and that would be that. What can we realistically hope to accomplish? I'm not putting down the idea, I'm just asking."

“I don't know, hon. You may be right. But it's our shot—the way I see it. And it might even give us a bit of protection. You, anyway. Perhaps they'd realize it would make them look bad if anything were to happen to the person who accused them of being drug manufacturers. Also—I know sometimes you can have a lot of heat and no light, but maybe this will produce a little light along with the heat. Maybe some newspaper will get interested, or one of the TV channels, and—who knows—somebody who sees the leaflet might have some clout with a U.S. senator or the governor or—” He didn't really believe what he was saying. “Let's sleep on it,” he finally said, and collapsed into his sleeping bag in front of the fire.

“There's one thing in our favor,” he said, yawning. “Waterton! We're in a town where they actually report UFO sightings. There's people here buy those papers at the supermarket and will swear to you that Elvis is still alive. There's been how many Bigfoot sightings recently? I mean, we are talking Small Town America, right?"

“You'd better believe it,” Mary said. “Woman's place is in the home, and we pay wages to prove it."

“Exactly."

“The ERA wasn't even a rumor here."

“So you take my point. This is Redneckville. Hayseed, U.S.A. An NRA stronghold. Used to be a Klan stronghold not so long ago. If you ain't white and Christian, you know—like the song says, red, white, and Pabst Blue Ribbon—we don't want you. That's Waterton. Maybe the people around here won't be too thrilled about Japs buying up three hundred acres for their underground drug lab.” She ignored his heavy-handed irony.

“But you don't know that the Japanese are behind Ecoworld."

“You don't know they aren't, do you?” She just laughed in response. “The point is—whoever's behind it, Colombians, Little Green Saucer People, or—God forbid—the damn Democrats—they ain't one of us."

Mary smiled when she heard him lightly snore. He was so tired, but he'd done his best. She'd have to watch him when they had the handbill printed in the morning, she thought, or he'd have them out at the Ecoworld dump site searching for “Made in Japan” on the chemical containers.

Mary tried to go to sleep, but she was wide-eyed. There were feelings inside her that were growing stronger by the day, part of what she thought of as her “dark side.” She felt them coming to the surface.

The thoughts she was thinking were forbidden thoughts, and that made them all the more exciting. It was almost a turn-on to be near this man for whom she had such steamy feelings, like a kind of taboo sex act. He wanted her. She knew that. This was not the time or the place, of course. And that made it even more taboo, and even more of a turn-on.

She tried to isolate the title of a faintly recalled book or dimly recollected film in which the couple had just returned from a funeral, and there's a hot, raunchy bedroom scene. What was it that was so strong and undeniable that linked the death, or the metaphorical loss of someone close to you, with the act of making life?

The dark side of death-and-sex lust was yet another area Mary would have identified as thoroughly alien to her, yet here it was, running its fingers up and down her nude flesh, trying hard to get her attention, and succeeding in a big way.

Royce Hawthorne stirred, bones cracking, from the sleeping bag on the hard floor of the Perkins vacation abode. He'd “painted the ceiling” twice—once in his sleep, and again since first awakening—mulling over the many facets of the day ahead. He'd been up since before dawn, and was now readying Mary for the rigors of the morning.

“I've decided I definitely should not sign the thing,” he said. “It'd only give Kerns or the sheriff something to use to counter the statements we put forth in the circular. They could say—a known drug guy blah blah was part of it. It wouldn't stick as a charge, but the point is, it would take away from the impact of our documentation. Agree?"

“Sure,” Mary said through a yawn. “If you think so.” Whatever. Just do it and wake me when it's all over was the way she felt. She was not a morning person, and she wanted coffee and silence, not necessarily in that sequence.

Royce kept talking, going over ideas, content, where they could go to get their circular printed, details of the leaflet drop—all very real in his mind. He was acting, differently now, she thought. She knew he couldn't have done drugs in a while, and wondered how difficult it would be for him to stay clean.

“If we do all this,” she said, “and it doesn't work ... you know ... we can't let it throw us. We'll have taken our best shot, as you said.” He knew she meant him, not we, but he nodded—taking her meaning.

Mary talked about who she thought might accompany them as signatories to the documentation.

“Alberta and Owen will go with us—I know.” She was referring to her next-door neighbors. “Terry Considine, Faye, Mr. and Mrs. Dale, Kristi and Wilma, maybe—uh—Joe Threadgill...” She was making a list and checking it twice.

“One thing you have to stress, Mary, is the possible danger to anyone who goes out there. I—don't know how to handle it. We don't dare go to the cops. If we take any kind of guns, it might even be worse if something would happen. I think what you have to do is tell the folks the truth about there being armed guards, that we'll be careful as we can and—you know—take a surreptitious look at the evidence and leave quickly. But they need to know it is a potentially very dangerous thing we're asking of them."

She agreed, naturally. But as it turned out, the dangerous part wasn't the problem at all. In theory, everybody they spoke with was itching to go the moment they told them about chemicals, and the possible cover-up by the authorities. But if you ever want to find out what citizens are more afraid of than armed guards, just drop words like “witness,” “deposition,” or “affidavit.” They all ran like scared rabbits.

By midmorning, with a photographer meeting them, they had lined up a grand total of four persons, one of whom—Mrs. Lloyd—sounded so ill, Mary hated asking her to do it.

“Better have her go, hon,” Royce urged. “Everybody who sees the evidence gives that much more credence to what we say."

They left for the Ecoworld property, driving out the back way and down the road that edged the Poindexter property, all of it now in World Ecosphere's corporate claws. Royce realized, but didn't voice, the fact that in such a small town, the grapevine would have spread their comments about the incriminating chemical containers by the time they hung the phones up. Would the parent company be tapped into such a pipeline—perhaps through Marty Kerns? For that matter, would they care?

They met the photographer at a prearranged spot, and he followed them to the place where everyone agreed to meet. They waited till Mrs. Lloyd and the Rileys arrived, and Royce took them to where the containers were.

He was relieved, yet frightened at the same time, to find everything as before.

“I don't understand why they'd leave this stuff to be found,” the photographer said. “Talk about stupid.” He was taking some pictures with a flash attachment, some without. Every time the shutter clicked, Royce felt like he was having a small heart attack.

“Apparently a pack of wild dogs thought something smelled like buried bones and started digging. This is just the way Mary and I found it."

The Rileys and Mrs. Lloyd signed the statement that had been prepared, but when they were told that they needed them to go to Maysburg with Mary and Royce, and be present when the thing was notarized, Owen Riley said he didn't think it was a good idea.

“If they've got the gumption to do this, we've got the gumption to go with them,” Alberta Riley scolded him. He got a sort of caged animal look in his eyes, but to his credit, he went along.

There would be two sets of photos—35-mm shots, which would need developing, and the set of Polaroids they'd use for the notarizing and as a safety copy. The photographer would do them ASAP, and they'd pick them up after they went to the bank.

The caravan went on its way immediately, sans Mrs. Lloyd, and once again there was no problem getting the papers and photos notarized and witnessed, this time in front of bank personnel. They had to wait around for an hour before they could get the shots, and took the Rileys to lunch, Royce feeling like brown shoes with a tux the entire time.

Fifty miles and two hours later they were at PRINT-WHILE-U-WAIT, and they were doing as the sign said—they were waiting. Royce, meanwhile, was back on the phone, having his dream dashed by a crop duster pilot.

“I couldn't allow somebody in my two-seater like that. It's against the law.” Royce had never known what a richly lucrative profession crop dusting was until he started getting prices.

“Well, could you drop the leaflets?"

“Nope.” Eventually he found a man who owned an ancient Piper Cub that he kept tethered at the Charleston Emergency Airfield.

“I understand you drop leaflets?” Royce asked of the man.

“Sometimes. I have a time or two. What you want dropped?” Royce told him about the circulars.

“Do you have your license?"

“License?” Royce asked, and learned about an entirely new aspect of the circular-dropping biz. Apparently you had to get a license from the city. Where did one go to get it?

Marty Kerns's office. Couldn't they “work something out?” Royce wondered.

“This baby is a J5—one of the rarest Cubs in private hands, my friend. My father won it from ‘Wings of Destiny’ in 1940! It was Grand Champion Antique three years running at the aeroplane show. I could never do anything that might jeopardize—"

“I understand.” Royce said, thanking him. Royce's picture of himself dumping leaflets from two thousand feet, his white scarf streaming over the side of the cockpit, was in tatters.

By early evening, the ink barely drying on the print job, they were no longer trying to get the circular dropped, but were still shopping around for a way to get it into the Waterton homes. The Maysburg Weekly Dispatch was out. The Jackson Grove Star was out. There was one way they could get it into area homes tomorrow morning, and that was to give a great deal of cash to one Fred Finch, who put out something called the Tri-State Shopper. They would be an “insert,” sandwiched in between coupons for discounts on rump roast (USDA choice boneless: $1.99 a pound) and hog jowls (SPECIAL! Only 59 cents a pound!).

Fifty thousand leaflets, Mr. Finch assured them, would be tucked into his two-page, two-color throwaway.

“I ain't never done this for nobody before! Hope I ain't making no mistake,” he said. Not at these prices, he wasn't.

Royce was a worrier. He worried that Mr. Finch might just dump the leaflets, which he swore would be “tucked by high-speed insertion machine into each and every Tri-State Shopper” that went into the mailboxes. Who would be the wiser? Mary was even more worried than he was.

“This whole idea was lunacy, Royce,” she raged, using his name like a knife blade. “We didn't use our heads. I'm going to be sued from one end of the country to the other—we didn't think about that. I can't believe I've been such an idiot!” Wisely, he kept still and let it pour until she wound down.

After shed calmed down considerably, she picked up their mail.

“You got these,” she said, handing him a stack of envelopes, bills and junk mail. There was something with a Memphis postmark. He felt a surge of excitement as he ripped the envelope open and read the communication.

A clerk without a name, a faceless nonentity seated in his/her workspace area in front of a flickering green screen, had processed the number search he'd requested, and the search, trace, transfer procedure had imprinted the results, sending the data back to Memphis.

Another faceless bod at the Tennessee end of ELINT's daisy chain had punched up Hawthorne's code number, got an active clearance, retrieved his mail drop particulars when they couldn't find a telephone contact number, and the printout had been forwarded, in an unmarked (except for franking stamps) government envelope to Waterton, where it had in turn been forwarded to Mary Perkins's post office box in Maysburg. A no-no. Something that was never done without prior consent by the case handler. An error that could have put somebody's tit firmly in the wringer. But it hadn't.

The communication had come the day after Royce stopped near Waterworks Hill and called the phonemen to ID that frequently dialed D.C.-area disconnect showing on Sam Perkins's telephone bill.

The printout listed the number. Gave its status as having reverted to Intercept. The official user: North American Medical Research Consultants. ELINT's probe identified it as “Control cover for military counterintelligence operational unit. Parentheses CLASSIFIED OPERATIONS slash DOMESTIC end parentheses.

“What is it?” Mary asked, reading something in his face and long silence.

“I'm not—hell, I don't know. Who did Sam know in a military counterintelligence operational unit?"

“Nobody.” Her pretty face was blank of expression for a second, then began to appear more thoughtful. “Unless ... no. Nobody. Not that I ever heard about. Why?"

He showed her.

“It was probably Christopher Sinclair. Does this mean he was in a military counterintelligence unit?"

“This wasn't Christopher Sinclair. Those calls were to New York—remember? We figured those out. This was someone else. Somebody Sam had a lot of contact with."

“Mmm.” She shook her head. “I don't have a clue."

“If it was World Ecosphere, Inc., one of their dummy phone fronts, we're in a dilly of a mess. That would mean that Ecoworld is a U.S. government drug lab. Which makes no sense whatsoever."

“But it would explain one thing: why the FBI and the local cops haven't done anything. It would mean there was a government curtain of protection around it. As you said—it makes no sense."

The next morning Mary checked in with her neighbor Alberta, who informed her she'd already had calls from her sister, a friend of her son's, and two women she and Owen churched with—all of whom had seen her name on a certain “ad,” as her sister referred to it. The circulars had indeed been delivered. The rest of the day was as uneventful as Mary and Royce could keep it.

The following morning, Friday, the Maysburg Weekly Dispatch was delivered, and they were a tiny footnote to the big news—which was a story about area drug arrests.

“We have to buy a paper,” Mary said excitedly, coming out to the car after touching base with the Rileys.

“Yeah?"

“There was a big raid on drug dealers."

“You mean—"

“I don't know. Alberta said she hadn't had time to digest it all—something about a bunch of people arrested for dealing drugs yesterday—but the story mentions our circular by name."

“Does it mention you by name?"

“She said it didn't name any of us, but it told what ‘CRAC’ stood for.” CRAC was a name they'd made up to give them an official sound—Mary, Mrs. Lloyd, and her neighbors were the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. Royce thought “Coalition” sounded serious.

“I hope this isn't a game somebody's running on us. If the names Fabio Ruiz and Luis Londoño are in that story, I'll breathe a lot easier.” They spotted a newspaper dispenser, and he pulled over and jumped out, getting two papers. They perused them in silence.

Royce read the story twice, fuming. He knew some of the people arrested. Nobodies. People chipping. Happy, of course, was not among those under arrest. He read the words a third time:

MASSIVE DRUG BUST NETS 16

Maysburg—A major drug raid Thursday netted 16 arrests on nearly 50 counts of trafficking in illegal substances, according to authorities.

The raid was coordinated by the Tennessee Narcotics Task Force and utilized 12 law enforcement agencies operating on the municipal, state, and county levels, as well as supervisory personnel from federal agencies.

According to a statement issued by the task force director, Gene L. Niswonger, the massive raid was the “end result of a long and continuing investigation into area drug dealers.” He described the raid as “a major success. It just shows you how many different agencies can work well together when everyone coordinates their efforts."

Niswonger stated that property seized totaled in excess of thirty-five thousand dollars, and that the task force would use a “substantial portion” of the income derived from the sale of the property to help fund other drug-related operations.

The 16 defendants were arraigned in Maysburg Thursday afternoon. Those arrested were:

Beryl Crites, 27, three counts of sale of cocaine; Jimmy Frye, 31, two counts sale of methamphetamine; Thedra Jones, 24, four counts sale of cocaine, Bobby Tatum, 33, four counts manufacture of a controlled substance; Donny Ray Wagner, 29, two counts sale of marijuana..."

Royce skipped down to the last paragraph of the newspaper article.

Niswonger said the drug sweep was unrelated to rumors of a possible clandestine narcotics laboratory allegedly under construction in the Maysburg-Waterton area. “The idea that this community is the victim of some kind of a conspiracy is just plain ridiculous. It shows how people can act unwisely when they don't have any expertise and try to take the law into their own hands,” he stated, referring to leaflets which were mailed to homes throughout the Waterton area by a group calling itself CRAC, the Coalition Rallying Against the Conspiracy. The leaflets, sent inside supermarket shopping circulars, claimed that the group had found evidence of chemicals used in drug manufacture at a local construction site.

“Those lying fucking pricks!” He wadded the paper and flung it into the backseat. “It's all a big shuck. They have this kind of thing ready to go at any second. Anytime they think they're going to get any heat—they've always got X numbers of small-timers they can round up.” He shook his head, gritting his teeth in disgust. “This is their way of defusing the stuff about Ecoworld—see? The War on Drugs, Chapter 763. It's bullshit."

“What now?"

“You tell me.” He started the car and began driving aimlessly. Mary felt as lost as she'd been since Sam had vanished. She reached across and squeezed Royce's hand for comfort, and he caught hers and held it.

“Your hand is like ice,” he said. “Do you have any blood circulating in your body? You are ice cold."

There were a dozen reasons why she shouldn't put her head on his shoulder:

1. Men borrow money.

2. Men are trouble.

3. Men get jealous.

4. Men take drugs, and drink, and gamble, and get sick, and die, and sometimes they just up and disappear.

5. Men don't always smell good, and sometimes they have bad breath.

6. Men will tell you that they love you when they don't.

7. Men tell you they respect you when they don't.

8. Men promise they'll be true and sometimes they won't.

9. Men can be overcritical, ungrateful, sloppy, and mean.

10. Men interrupt you when you're talking, don't like your friends, leave their dirty socks on the floor, tell you you're gaining weight, and make a mess in the bathroom.

11. Men complain when you eat in bed.

12. Men don't take you out enough.

A dozen? There were a thousand reasons why she shouldn't put her head on his shoulder.

But she was too tired to think of them, and she was ice cold.