Last Man Standing

25

The first thing Web noticed when he got back to the motel was that there was a fresh oil patch in the parking space he had been using. Nothing unusual, really, for another guest could have used that spot, though it was directly in front of Web’s unit. Before he unlocked the door, he checked out the doorknob while pretending to fumble for his room key. Unfortunately, even Web could not tell if the lock had been picked or not. It hadn’t been forced, but somebody who knew what he was doing could pop the simple lock in the time it took to sneeze and leave not a trace.

Web opened the door, his other hand on the butt of his gun. It took him about ten seconds to discover that no one was in the tiny room. Nothing was out of place, and even the box he had taken from his mother’s attic was there, each piece of paper exactly where he had left it. However, Web had five different types of tiny booby traps set up throughout his room and three of them had been tripped. Over the years, Web had developed this system whenever he was on the road. Well, whoever had searched his room was good but not perfect. That was comforting, like knowing the four-hundred-pound brute you were about to rumble with had a glass chin and occasionally wet his bed.

Ironic, that while he’d been meeting with Bates, someone had searched his room. Web had never been naive about life, because he had seen the worst of it, as both a child and an adult. Yet the one thing he had always thought he could count on was the Bureau and all the people who gave it life beyond the technical forms and guns. For the first time in his career, that faith had been shaken.

He packed his few belongings and was on the road within five minutes. He went to a restaurant near Old Town Alexandria, parked where he could see his car through the restaurant’s window, ate his lunch and made his way through Harry Sullivan’s life.

Bates had not been joking. Web’s old man had been a guest of some of the finest correctional facilities the country had to offer, most of them in the South, where Web knew they grew some exceptionally fine human cages. His father’s offenses were myriad yet had a common theme: They were typically low-level financial crimes, business scams, embezzlement and fraud. From some of the old court transcripts and arrest records in the file, Web could see his old man’s main weapon had been a smooth tongue and more chutzpah than any one human being should be toting around.

There were various photos of his father in the file, from the front, right and left sides, with the little line of prisoner identification numbers running underneath. Web had seen many mug shots of arrested people, and they all looked remarkably the same: stricken, terrified, ready to slice wrist or blow out temple. Yet in all his mug shots Harry Sullivan was smiling. The bastard was grinning, like he had put one over on the cops, even though he was the one busted. But his father had not aged well. He was no longer the handsome man he had been in the photos in the attic box. The last series of shots showed a very old man, though he was still smiling, albeit with fewer teeth. Web had no reason to care about him, yet it was difficult for him to witness the man’s decline in all its impersonal Kodak glory.

As Web read some of the trial testimony of his father, he couldn’t help but laugh in places. One slick operator emerged from the lines of dialogue as the cagey con battled with prosecutors determined to put him away.

“Mr. Sullivan,” asked one D.A., “is it not true that on the night in question you were—”

“Begging your pardon, lad, but what night would that be again? Me memory’s not what it was.”

Web could almost see the lawyer rolling his eyes as he answered, “The twenty-sixth of June, sir.”

“Ah, that’s right. Go on, now, lad, you’re doing fine. I’m sure ye mum’s proud of yer.”

In the transcript the court reporter had typed parenthetically, “Laughter in courtroom.”

“Mr. Sullivan, I am not your lad,” replied the lawyer.

“Well, forgive me, son, for I’m not quite experienced in such matters, and I surely meant nothing by it. Truth is, I don’t know what to be calling you. Though in the ride over from the jail to this fine courthouse I heard others call you names I wouldn’t be saying to me dearest enemy in the world. Words that woulda made me poor God-fearing mum roll over in her good Catholic grave. Attacking your honesty and integrity, and what man can be standing for mucha that?”

“I could care less what criminals say about me, sir.”

“Begging your pardon, son, but the worst of it be coming from the guards.”

“Laughter again,” the stenographer had typed. Huge thunders of laughter, Web concluded, judging from the regiment of exclamation points tacked on the end.

“Can we continue, Mr. Sullivan?” said the lawyer.

“Ah, now, you be calling me Harry. It’s been me name since me Irish arse came into this world.”

“Mr. Sullivan!” This came from the judge, Web read, and in those two words he seemed to sense a long laugh, though Web was probably wrong. But the judge’s last name was O’Malley, and perhaps he and Harry Sullivan shared a hatred of the English, if nothing else.

“I certainly won’t be calling you Harry,” said the lawyer, and Web could almost see the righteous indignation on the man’s features for having to carry on such a conversation with a common criminal and getting the worst of it.

“Well, now, lad, I know it’s your job to put me old, withered self into a cold, dark cell where men treat other men with no dignity atall. And all over a wee misunderstanding that might amount to nothing more than bad judgment, or perhaps a pint or two more than I should have had. But even so, you call me Harry, for though you’ve got to see this terrible deed through, there’s no reason we can’t be friends.”

As Web finished the file on that particular chapter in his father’s life, he had to note, with some satisfaction, that the jury had acquitted Harry Sullivan on all counts.

The last crime his father had been sent to prison for had gotten him twenty years, by far his longest sentence. So far he had punched fourteen years of the time in a prison in South Carolina that Web knew to be a sweat-hole one short step from hell, and he had six more years to go unless he got paroled or, more likely, died behind bars.

Web took the final bite of his pastrami and the last swallow of his Dominion Ale. There was one more file to check. It did not take long to read and left Web stunned and even more confused.

The Bureau was good; they left no stone unturned. When they checked somebody’s background out, damn it, man, you were checked out. If you were applying to work at the Bureau in any capacity, they talked to everybody you had any contact with in your entire life. Your first-grade schoolteacher, your paper route manager, even the pretty girl you had taken to the prom and subsequently slept with. And they had no doubt also spoken with her father, to whom you had to explain your miserable conduct afterward when the secret got out, even though it was his innocent little girl who had ripped off your pants and brought the extra-lubricated condoms. Your Boy Scout troop leader, your in-laws, the bank manager who had turned down your first car loan, the woman who cut your hair—nothing, absolutely nothing was sacred when the FBI was on the case. And damn if they hadn’t managed to track down old Harry Sullivan.

He had been newly ensconced in his little South Carolina retirement cell, and he had given the background-checking agents his two cents on Web London, his son. “My son.” It was a phrase Harry Sullivan had used thirty-four times during the meeting because Web took the time to count them.

Harry Sullivan gave “my son” the best damn recommendation anyone could give another person, though he had only known “my son” for the first six years of his life. But according to Harry Sullivan, a proper Irishman could tell if “my son” had what it took from nearly the day the diapers came off. And his son had what it took to be the finest FBI agent there ever was or ever would be and they could quote him on that. And if they wanted him to come up to Washington to tell the powers-that-be that very thing, he gladly would, though it would be with leg and arm shackles he’d be trooping in, yet his heart would still be bursting with pride. There was nothing on earth that was too good for “my son.”

Web continued reading and his head dropped lower and lower as he did so, and then finally it almost hit the table with Harry Sullivan’s last written statement: “And would the good agents, the fine agents,” he’d begun, mind telling “my son” that his father has thought about him every day over all these years, never once letting him out of his heart, and though it was not likely that they would ever hook up again, that Harry Sullivan wanted “my son” to know that he loved him and wanted the best for him? And to not think too badly of the old man for how things had turned out? Would the good agents mind telling “my son” that, for he’d be much in their debt if they did. And he would be proud to buy them each a pint or two if the opportunity ever arose, though the prospects did not look at all promising for that, given his current living arrangements, though one just never knew.

Well, they never had told Web anything. Web had never seen this report until right this minute. Damn the Bureau! Was there never any room to bend the rules? Did everything have to be lockstep, their way or the highway? And yet Web could have discovered this information years before if he had really wanted to. He just hadn’t wanted to.

The next thought that hit Web made his features turn grim. If the Bureau had sent Claire Daniels Web’s file, was she already privy to some or all of this information regarding Harry Sullivan? If so, why hadn’t she bothered to tell him that?

Web packed the file up, paid his bill and walked back to the Vic. He drove to one of the Bureau’s motor pools, switched vehicles and drove a late-model Grand Marquis out another gate not visible from the street he had come in on. The Bureau wasn’t exactly rolling in available Bucars, but the Grand had come in for a ten-thousand-miler, and Web had persuaded the supervisor that he deserved a nicer set of wheels than the twenty-year vet uptown at HQ the car was assigned to. If anyone had a problem with that, Web had added, go talk to Buck Winters, he’s my best friend.