Chaingang

30

MAYSBURG

Royce felt Mary snuggle against him and put her head on his shoulder. His heart went out to her. He was beat, and he could imagine how she felt. She suddenly seemed cold and vulnerable and very small. Her body shivered, or perhaps he only imagined it.

He'd been driving aimlessly for miles, realized suddenly that he'd crossed the bridge to Waterton. Pulled in to the first paved road that ran parallel to the river, stopped, backed up, turned around, and headed back across the bridge to the Tennessee side.

He's seen the billboard and it registered subconsciously, but he was too tired to say anything or do anything about it at first.

“Let's take a motel room here. Just for the night.” She didn't protest, and he pulled in and registered, but when he came back to the car, it was nagging him.

A billboard by the river road, advertising “Inexpensive, safe, year-round cold storage” had gnawed its way through to his brain.

“When we were at the cabin, you said something about putting Sam's grandfather's gun in cold storage."

“Sam did. I didn't."

“Do you have other things in cold storage?” She just sat there looking like she was twelve years old. Blinking in the sunlight. “Anything else that you all stored? You didn't ever mention cold storage when we were talking about Sam's papers and things."

She came alive. “I don't know what else is in there. If you want to look, it's over in that little shopping area near the bank and the drugstore."

“Let's go,” he said, and started the car.

Back over the bridge they drove a second time, heading down Jefferson in the direction of North Main, but stopping when they came to the cold storage facility, two doors down from his old buddy at Drexel Commodity Futures.

“I'd like to open 421, please,” she told the woman at the counter, who admitted them to a huge, dimly lit room full of locked vaults and screened partitions. Sam had rented one of the partitions. They didn't spend long inside—it was about the temperature of a meat locker—and the old gun, wrapped in a blanket and then fastened with wire, was the solitary occupant of the partition.

Mary teared up a little but made it okay, and they took the long package with them and returned to the motel.

She was sound asleep before Royce had the wire off the blanket. He had to bite his tongue to keep from waking her when he found the roll of paper.

Sam Perkins had taken the Ramparts material and his notes, laid all the correspondence and documentation in a pile, and rolled it into a tight cylinder, with a plastic sheet around the outside of the papers so that it would slide in and out of the old musket.

Royce worked on the papers and the notes for three hours, finally waking Mary about the time it was getting dark. He was scared shitless, and had to talk to her about it. For the first time he had some glimmer of a notion as to just how much trouble they were in.

“Hi,” she said, her pretty face wreathed in a silky tangle of hair, still half-asleep. “How long—what time is it?” He told her. “Did you sleep?” she asked.

“No. I found out why...” He started over. “I think I know what happened to Sam."

He told her about the roll of papers hidden away inside the big barrel of the old rifle.

“Do you remember someone named Leonard Schuette or Lenny Schuette—someone Sam knew?"

“He went to school with him. Lenny Schuette—I heard him mention the name. He called him ‘Lenny the Spook.’ He was supposed to be with the State Department or something—a political strategist or, you know, that kind of thing."

“He was the one Sam kept calling. All those calls were to him. He was in military intelligence. They'd been in college together—right?"

“Yeah.” Some of the haze cleared. “He ... uh, called Sam once ... I forget—"

“Sam apparently had stayed in touch with him, or at least he knew how to track him down. He was suspicious of the deal—the land thing. It was a hush-hush operation with code names and stuff, and he thought there was something very fishy about it. He had Lenny Schuette check it out, and the word was it was a U.S. government training center for covert operations. Schuette said it was supposed to be a school for assassination. Sam wanted to blow the whistle on it, and either he had talked a few of the landowners out of the deal, telling them what their land was going to be used for, or they were people who had not agreed to sell.

“I've tried to put it all together, and my guess is that they had Sam and Luther and the others killed."

“The government did?"

“Not the government, a faction of total crazies within the intelligence community—fanatics who thought having a force of trained killers would protect us against other countries, against terrorists, against traitors—"

“You mean Ecoworld isn't about drugs at all?"

“I don't know. Who the hell knows?"

“Who can we go to about this?"

“I don't know that either."

“My God."

“Yeah. Exactly."

“Could we contact Lenny Schuette—tell him about what happened to Sam?"

“How? The number's a dead end. Who's to say they didn't get that guy as well? Everyone who's stood up to them has vanished. These are people who look at assassination as the logical solution to every problem."

“But those chemicals—” She couldn't sort it all out in her mind, and he wasn't much help.

“For all I know, making drugs was going to be a sideline. I still say it looked like they were putting together a crack lab. But let's say it is going to be a training school for government assassins. That implies that the Feds, the DEA, ATF, the CIA, the DIA—the damn Sheriff's Benevolent Society of Greater Podunk—everybody could be part of the cover-up."

Her hands tightened on a piece of paper. One of Sam's notes. He could read the word “Ramparts."

“We'd better go back to the cabin. It's too dangerous to stay here.” She nodded numbly, and they got in the old car and started back in the direction of Whitetail.