Liberty

CHAPTER THREE

“So are you going to be the good cop or the bad cop?” Bones failed to keep the grin off his face.

Dane looked at him. “In what universe could someone who looks like you play the good cop?”

Bones feigned hurt. “Hey man, I’m just a big teddy bear. Okay, so bears can kill you, but still.”

“Don’t worry Bones, I suspect we both get to be the bad cop on this one.”

“Works for me.”

The winter sun was setting and he and Bones stood on the sidewalk a block from the last known address of James Roberge. Roberge’s car had been one of the four chasing them, so this was their best lead. Assuming Roberge still owned the car and assuming he still lived here.

Bones said, “What’s the plan? Guy like this isn’t going to just open the door when we knock.”

“Who says we’re going to knock?”

Dane’s spine vibrated as Bones slapped him on the back. “All right, Maddock. You’ll be just like me in no time. So we going to bash the door in?”

Dane chuckled. “I was thinking I just open the door. Ex-con like this probably doesn’t bother locking it. And if it’s locked, I just take out my knife and perform surgery on the door jamb.”

Bones looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You keep using the word ‘I.’ What do you expect Tonto to do while you’re playing Lone Ranger?”

Bones liked to make jokes about his Native American heritage, seeming to enjoy the discomfort it caused for anyone within earshot, but Dane was getting used to it. “You’re going to cover the back. In fact, let’s check it out now.”

They rounded the corner of the five-story building and found a narrow dead-end alley. Rickety metal fire escape ladders rose from ten feet above the ground to the top of the building, one about every fifteen feet.

“So you want me to hang out here in the dark and pound him if he tries to leave by the back door?”

“You could just subdue him; we need him to talk, remember? Only thing is it would be good if we knew which fire escape was his.”

“Well he’s apartment 401, right? Means he’s gotta be one end or the other. The numbers on the street are going up the way we came, so I’ll bet it’s this one.” Bones approached the first ladder and easily tested a jump to reach it. Dane looked at him.

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then you’d better hope whoever you’re breaking in on is fully dressed. Unless it’s a hot chick. Then you ought to stay a while.” Bones scratched his chin. “Better yet, tell her to wait a minute and yell for me.”

Dane shook his head. “Just keep your eyes open.”

He walked around to the front door and went inside. The building didn’t look like a total dump, but it wasn’t the kind of place with a doorman or security, either. His nostrils picked up an aroma of lemon mixed with decay, the cleaning solution obviously not managing to stem the tide.

The stairs lay dead ahead and he made his way to the fourth floor, keeping his steps light and quiet. Once there, he established that Bones had been correct and apartment 401 was on the nearer end of the building. Despite what he had said earlier, Dane knocked on the door.

He thought he heard some sort of movement, but he couldn’t be sure. The door didn’t open. He knocked again after a few seconds; then he turned the handle and eased it open.

He took a step inside and caught a glimpse of something flying through the air towards his head. His dodge meant it struck him in the ear instead of the center of his face. The momentum of the object combined with his quick move sent him sideways onto his knees.

Snapping his head up, he noticed two things: First, the object that had struck him was an unopened bottle of Budweiser. He made a mental note not to tell Bones he got taken out by what his comrade considered “redneck beer.” Second was a figure dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt halfway out an open window on the far side of the apartment.

Dane sprang to his feet and moved towards the window. He heard a high pitched scream followed by a thud and the sound of creaking metal. He poked his head out the window, ready to pull it back in quickly if he was attacked. He needn’t have worried.

Bones stood with his arms crossed and one foot on the rusted fourth floor landing of the fire escape. The other foot rested on the neck of the man in the gray sweatshirt, a man about Dane’s height whose thin neck looked tiny under Bones’ size thirteen boot.

“Yo, does he look subdued?”

Dane grinned. “Yes. Yes he does. I hope you didn’t have to exert yourself too much.”

“Nah, it was almost too easy. The dude tripped over my leg, squealed like a girl and somehow managed to jump underneath my foot. What do we do with him?”

Dane looked at the man. “Are you James Roberge?”

The man turned his neck and Bones allowed him enough movement to meet Dane’s eye. He grunted something that Dane took as a yes.

“Okay, my friend here will let you up, and we’re going to go back in your apartment and have a little talk.”

Roberge’s eyes flared with anger for a moment, but then the reality of his situation seemed to take hold. He nodded as much as he could from his current position.

“Good. Let him up,” he said to Bones. “If he tries to run for it, feel free to subdue him a little harder. Or just throw him over the rail.”

They went back inside without incident, and the trembling, wide-eyed Roberge collapsed onto a black leather couch. Dane pulled in a wooden chair from the tiny kitchen and sat with the back in front, his elbows draped over it. Bones remained standing next to the couch, practicing a stare that would have shamed Medusa. Roberge looked up and uttered his first coherent words of the encounter.

“Whaddaya want with me?”

Dane almost asked him a question, but resistance had taken form in the man’s eyes. He needed some more softening up, but Dane didn’t like the idea of Bones hurting the guy too badly. He motioned Bones over to him.

Speaking just loudly enough for Roberge to hear, he said, “This idiot’s not ready to talk. I’ll search the place. You convince him he’ll suffer less if he answers our questions. But don’t hurt him too much. Not yet.”

Bones’ grin made Dane glad he wasn’t the target of his friend’s mischief. “I know just the thing.”

Bones returned to the couch and Dane moved into the next room, the bedroom. He could hear voices from the area of the couch, but he put them out of his mind, knowing he needed to trust Bones. He didn’t know what he was looking for, just anything that might shed some light on why this guy — or at least his car — was chasing them today.

The apartment only had the bedroom, living room and kitchen plus a small bathroom. He didn’t find anything unusual in the bedroom or bathroom. Roberge was a man of few possessions, though that small number included a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum in a bedside drawer. Dane’s experience was that men with that particular gun suffered from serious inferiority complexes; it was a fine weapon, but better options existed for almost every situation.

Moving back out to the living room, Dane had almost given up on finding anything. He had to work hard to suppress his laughter when he saw what Bones was up to. The big man had removed one of Roberge’s shoes and was playing “This Little Piggy.” Roberge looked confused and a little annoyed.

“What the hell do you think you’re…”

His question dissolved into a shriek of pain when Bones reached “Wee! Wee! Wee! All the way home.” With a deft twist, he snapped Roberge’s smallest toe.

Bones slapped the man across the face. “Shut up!”

Roberge didn’ t quite manage to silence his pained whimper, but he quieted down.

“You’ve got nine more toes and ten fingers, and I’ve got all the time in the world,” Bones said.

Sensing Roberge would crack soon, Dane hurried into the kitchen, his last hope for finding any clues. He tore through several stacks of papers and magazines and almost missed a small pamphlet tucked between a newspaper and a bill.

The pamphlet was titled “The Republic Almanac.” This stirred a memory, and Dane leafed through it. By page three, he knew that this was the clue he was looking for. He tucked it into his shirt and went back out to the living room.

Bones started back into the nursery rhyme and Roberge caved the moment the big Indian wiggled the broken toe. Bones turned and grinned at Dane.

“I just introduced our new friend here to an ancient Native American torture technique. He says he’ll tell us whatever we want to know.”

Dane decided not to waste time beating around the bush.

“Who hired you to try to kill us earlier today?”

Roberge’s eyes darted up and to the left, a sure sign he was preparing to lie. Before he could open his mouth, Dane said, “Don’t bother lying. We know your car was there. If you say it wasn’t you, we’ll teach you “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Maddock was improvising, but whatever image Roberge conjured up in his mind clearly terrified him.

“Christ, not that,” the man pleaded. “Look, I don’t know who hired me. A guy me and Carl knew in the joint arranged it. He said we just needed to provide backup for a little pressure with the cars. We were supposed to meet up with two guys who wanted your attention and just funnel you down to the river. Wasn’t supposed to be any shooting.”

“And you figured these guys would get us down by the river and, what, just talk to us?”

Roberge remained silent.

“Never mind, what’s the name of this guy you knew in prison?”

Roberge shook his head with vigor. “No way. My life is worth zip if I tell you that name. Your friend can break all my toes for all I care. At least I won’t be dead.”

Bones leaned over the frightened man. “That can be arranged.”

Dane stood up. “Forget about it. Let’s just go.”

Both Bones and Roberge looked surprised. Dane met Bones’ eye. “Trust me.”

Bones looked at Roberge and shrugged. “Have a nice life. Don’t try to kill me again, though. It puts me in a bad mood.” Before Roberge could reply, Bones struck him a hard right cross above his the left ear and the man went limp.

Bones saw Dane’s disapproving stare and shrugged. “You rather I choked him out? Either way, I don’t want him calling the cops on us.”

“A guy with his background doesn’t call the cops,” Dane argued.

“I don’t care. I’m not taking any chances. Besides, it felt good to cold-cock that jerk.”

Dane couldn’t argue. He took a moment to steal the cord from Roberge’s phone as an added precaution, and then the two of them made their way down the stairs.

Back on the street, Bones grabbed Dane’s shoulder. “You gonna tell me why we just walked out of there?”

Dane said, “In a minute. First we need to find a pay phone.”

“What for?”

“To call the police and report that James Roberge was seen leaving the zoo after the shootout this morning.”

“I saw one a block away when we came in. But an anonymous tip? Do those even work?”

“I don’t know. It’s just one of several things that could play out.”

“What are the others?”

“Another option is to hang out where we can see the building and follow Roberge when he comes out. One of us will have to go get the car while the other one watches, then we’ll have to wait. It could be a while. It’ll be a few minutes before he’s conscious again, and probably longer before he’s thinking clearly. The police may or may not come to talk to him, but if he leaves in the next couple hours, we’ll follow him and see if he leads us anywhere interesting.”

They reached the phone and Dane made the call, staying on for less than a minute but giving several details including Roberge’s license plate number. When he hung up, Bones frowned. “I dunno, hanging around waiting to follow him doesn’t seem like much of a plan.”

“There’s one more thing. The reason I told you we could leave when we did is that I found something in the kitchen. Other than dirty dishes and moldy bread that is.”

Bones’ face lit up. “Yeah?”

Dane took out the pamphlet. “‘The Republic Almanac.’ Does anything about that sound familiar?”

“Maybe.” Bones was clearly on the same page as Dane. “The word ‘Republic’ isn’t that uncommon, though. It doesn’t have to be the same guys.”

Bones was referring to a group called the Sons of the Republic, a group he and Dane had encountered a couple of months earlier. They had some pretty crazy ideas about the country and its history, and hadn’t been afraid to shoot at Dane and Bones when the two had interfered with the group’s plans. All the members of the group they’d seen in Boston had wound up dead, and Dane had assumed that would be the last they heard of them. This pamphlet suggested otherwise. He handed it to Bones.

“Take a look on page three. Also page six. See anything else that rings a bell.”

Bones face tightened as he looked. “It’s them. That crossed circle symbol is the same one we saw in Boston. Seems like every time we saw it we had just finished getting attacked or were about to be attacked.”

“Exactly.”

Bones’ normal wry expression returned. “Well at least we know it’s them. We have someone we can go after.”

“Not someone, exactly, but we do have an address. It’s right here in Philadelphia.”

“Yep. There’s something else here that seems important, but I don’t understand it. This phrase here on the second to last page.”

Dane looked over his shoulder. “Huh. You mean the last line of the article, in bold and in a larger font?”

“Yep.”

Dane couldn’t figure out what it meant, either. The line had only seven words.

Help rediscover the most basic state right.