Simple Simon

Chapter Twenty Three Hunt and Peck

A two year old Dodge pickup was Rothchild’s car of choice, though it wasn’t registered to him, or to anyone that actually existed for that matter. It was registered to a name. A silly name. How far one could get on a string of letters, he often thought.

In the afternoon, as the workday ended, and with the weekend just one more day away, Rothchild left his subterranean lair with a satisfaction that buoyed his step and actually made him smile at the main lobby receptionist and found his clean black pickup waiting in the close lot where he always parked it. He climbed in, started the throaty engine, and backed into the traffic aisle without looking. If he hit something, so what? Today was a day not for worries. It was a day to mark in his mental record books. His biggest challenge completed. His biggest scheme brought to a successful end.

There was a bottle of champagne he’d saved for something like this, he remembered as he moved past the guard posts, through the serpentine drive, and onto the roads of Fort Meade. Yes, a bottle of bubbly, as the ever so cosmopolitan characters in the movies used to call it. Bubbly and a babe. He had the former. The latter he could rent.

Leaving Meade proper, he thought of what kind of babe he’d like this night. One of the top heavy ones for some raucous titty fucking, or an A cup waif who he could maneuver around the bed like some female Gumby doll.

Choices, choices. Maybe both. Yeah. Both. He could handle that, and he could certainly arrange it.

Driving with one hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, Rothchild lost himself in a daydream of the possibilities, thinking of little else, and never noticing the four cars that took turns tailing him both back and front.

It was an old Royal that he’d dug out of a storage closet, something so archaic that he was surprised it was even allowed in the Chocolate Box. But it was, the glorious old machine that Brad Folger placed on the blotter on his desk after locking his door.

He drew a breath in, held it, and rolled a sheet of paper into the machine, exhaling as he pecked at the sticky keys with one finger of each hand. Yes, it was old, it was slow, it was an implement of inefficiency. But there was one thing it had over its modern counterparts: a total lack of wires.

Brad Folger wanted this last bit of information to be available to no one, until the time came. When he finished he put it in an envelope with instructions, and wrote Pedanski’s name on the outside.

It was not a suicide note. At least not his.

The amazing thing about being where one wasn’t supposed to be was that most people didn’t give a damn who was where as long as no one was making a fuss. Art knew that from years of having to pull information from witnesses like teeth, things that one would think the person must have seen, but, oh well, they didn’t think it too strange the man had a rifle in one hand as he walked down the street.

Getting on the service elevator in the maintenance garage had been exceedingly easy. It was after five, leaving just a few workers milling around, and all the effort it took was putting two hardhats on his and Simon’s heads and waiting until a few backs were turned to the corridor leading to the elevators.

Art never had any illusions about trying for the lobby elevators. They would be crowded with people. People who watched the news and might notice a big black guy and a scrawny white kid together, even if they didn’t match the photos, his from his Bureau file, Simon’s ripped from a frame in his dead parents’ home.

But a couple of hardhats, however odd, would be par for the course in a building where some renovation was being done. Although Simon’s less than macho posture, head dipped, could have drawn a curious eye, it did not. Luck? Timing? Art didn’t care. Once on the elevator, an express to the top twenty floors, he pressed 103 and let out a breath as the doors slid shut.

Trooper Wayne Dupar of the Indiana State Police lit up his rack as he pulled in behind the late model Taurus with three occupants, male it appeared from his vantage, following the vehicle as it glided to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate.

He gave his position to his dispatch center, knowing that if another unit was in the area they would have it do a roll-by as a matter of practice, and left his cruiser to approach the car from the driver’s side, hand on the top of his pistol.

“Gentlemen.” Dupar said. “Good evening.”

Georgie already had the window down, and his wallet out. “Officer. Was I speeding?” Just give me the ticket. Fast.

Dupar leaned low and looked across the front seat. Ralph looked back at him, smiling casually. In the back seat a stern man sat on the far right, a bag on the seat next to him. Dupar recognized it as a pilot’s bag. So, planning on doing some flying, are we—

“No, sir, you weren’t speeding, but we had a report of a vehicle matching this one driving recklessly about fifteen miles back that way on the interstate.”

“Reckless?” Georgie repeated with a sprinkling of shock. “I promise you, officer, that wasn’t me.”

“Well,” Dupar drawled, “I’m going to have to satisfy myself about that. I’m going to have to ask you some questions and give you a field sobriety test.” He looked to the other two men. “I’m going to have to give you field sobriety test also, gentlemen.”

“What?” Ralph protested, leaning toward the window.

“It happens that sometimes a passenger was driving, then someone switches off,” Dupar explained in a painfully slow, meticulous cadence. “Like I said, I’m going to have to satisfy myself that you all are all right to be operating a motor vehicle.”

Son of a bitch. Ralph looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. They had to be at the airfield in twenty minutes. “Officer, can we hurry this up, maybe? We’ve got someplace to be.”

Dupar scratched his square chin, once, twice, three times. “Sir, hurrying causes accidents. I’d hate to see you all hurt in an accident. I’d hate to see that.” Not… “I want you to drive away from here alive and in good shape tonight. All right.”

Fine. Fucking fine. Just do it. Do it. Ralph nodded and sat back in his seat.

Officer Dupar showed rows of bone-white teeth to the driver and asked, pronouncing every syllable as if talking to a foreigner, “Okay, sir. How about we get you done first?”

“What do you think?” the supervising FBI agent asked, showing the hours-old photo to two of his subordinates on the hastily arranged operation. “I think it looks like him.”

The other agents looked to the photo of the man driving the black Dodge pickup, then to an older mug shot of a man named Kirby Gant, a.k.a. Mr. Tag.

“If it ain’t him,” one of the agents commented, “it’s a twin.”

The supervising agent tapped the photos together on the edge of the fold-down desk in the back of the surveillance van and picked up the phone, dialing the number he’d been give.

“Yes?” a voice answered after just one ring.

“Mr. Breem…”

The lobby elevators were good enough for Keiko when she arrived a few minutes after eight, darkness having settled upon the city, and a quietness to the massive building that she found exciting. There was nothing like the shrill edge of a scream ripping an unsuspecting silence to shreds.

She imagined a cry resonating from Jefferson as the elevator began to move. Closed her eyes and made it real in her head.

Her stomach pressing low from the upward rise, the sound playing as if real, she felt a warmth trickle up her thighs and plant itself between her legs. Alone in the elevator, she pressed them together, surprised that thoughts of one so old could excite her.

Maybe pain was pain, and pleasure just pleasure, regardless of age. She would soon know. If so, it would mean a far broader horizon.