The Lightning Stones

8

By a quirk of fate, Philip Mercer still lived just outside of Washington, D.C., in the urbanized suburb of Arlington. He’d been there since soon after earning his PhD in geology from Penn State and accepting a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. That particular bit of employment hadn’t lasted long. He was too independent-minded for government work and soon branched out as a consulting geologist for private mining concerns. His first major contract netted him more money than he’d ever thought possible. He liked money as much as the next guy, but it had never been his prime motivator. Mercer thrived on the challenge rather than the reward, which explains why he had left the USGS so quickly. Not knowing what to do with his newfound wealth, he’d listened to the landlord in the brownstone where he rented a one-bedroom apartment. The man had convinced him that real estate was the only true measure of long-term wealth, and had sold Mercer the six-unit building at what truly was a very good price.

What the previous owner had failed to mention was that being a landlord, even to just five other families, was as thankless a job as a Mumbai sewer shoveler. His first 1:00 a.m. call about a leaky faucet convinced him to hire a management company, even though they sopped up 20 percent of the building’s revenue. It mattered little. The other tenants knew he owned the brownstone, which somehow gave them the right to bother him at all hours of the day or night, for repairs both big and small.

After six months of near-constant pestering, Mercer had finally had enough¸ and he converted the brownstone into a single-family dwelling, of which he was the sole occupant. His life had taken some wild turns since then, but the brownstone had remained his one safe harbor, and he had kept to a vow made all those years ago that he’d sleep on the streets before ever becoming a landlord again.

He steered the rental onto one of the few remaining original residential streets in Arlington, right across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. Mercer smiled when he saw the car parked in his customary spot at the end of the block. He’d just taken delivery of it the day before heading out west to teach the class in mine rescue techniques. It was a Jaguar F-type hard top in black with black interior and the hottest wheels he could find. This was the V8-powered S version with an eight-speed automatic transmission that could smoke any manual off the line and had the added bonus of not deadening a driver’s clutch leg in D.C.’s notorious traffic. He had been toying with a replacement for his venerable XJS for a while, testing Porsches, Maseratis, and some of the slinkier BMWs, before settling on another of England’s premier sports cars. This particular model was as sleek and beautiful as its namesake South American jungle cat and was a fitting tribute to its ancestor, the E-Type Jag, which set the standard in the 1960s for all supercars that followed.

Jordan Weismann had awoken several hours earlier but had been quiet, her head resting against her window, her gaze fixed on the nothing they had passed. Mercer could tell her pain was back and that she was resisting taking anything for it. Though he himself would have done the exact same thing, he thought her stubbornness especially pointless. There was no shame in taking a couple of painkillers.

“We’re here,” he announced. It was after rush hour, so the the block was relatively quiet. He found a spot for the rental behind an incongruously parked school bus.

What gave Mercer even more joy than the beautiful sports car was the three-story brownstone. It was a sanctuary from the world, a space he had created where outside pressures did not exist. Usually once he passed through the front door and into the towering foyer he could forget everything but finding his center once again. With Abe’s death so fresh on his mind and the questions swirling about the motive for his murder and the identity of the people behind it, he knew he would find little solace here — but it still felt good to be back.

He stepped out from the truck. The air in Washington was twenty degrees warmer than it had been in Ohio, and there wasn’t a bit of snow on the ground. Despite the proximity to the city and the high-rises that surrounded the little residential enclave, the evening smelled like spring. He helped Jordan from the SUV. Her mood, if anything, had soured further. It seemed as if it wasn’t just the physical pain of her broken bone, but the emotional toll of losing Abe as well as the adrenaline hangover of nearly being killed. Mercer predicted from his own experiences that she would not eat tonight and would sleep for the next twelve hours, but then wake up as ravenous as a bear coming out of hibernation.

He sensed something was wrong as soon as his fingers curled around the front doorknob. Mercer instantly regretted ditching the P-38 pistol for fear he and Jordan would be searched following their escape from the Lauder Science Center. There was a slight vibration coming through the door, and even as he realized what was happening, his wariness waned and anger flowed in.

The door was unlocked, most every light in the house was on, and the wireless speakers were belting out a raucous Gene Krupa drum solo from the 1938 Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert. There had to be twenty people dancing in the open-plan living room and around the billiards table that occupied what should have been the dining area. Others stood on the antique spiral staircase that corkscrewed up to the second- and third-floor balconies overlooking the atrium, their feet tapping in time to the primal drumbeat. And in the middle of it all was Harry White, resplendent in a zoot suit straight out of an old gangster movie. He twirled one elderly woman into the arms of a gentleman while a second blue-hair waited her turn in his studied embrace. He saw Mercer and mouthed, “Oh shit.”

Harry’s new dance partner must have sensed his consternation because she turned and saw the youngest man in the room by three full decades in the company of an even younger woman. They had just come in the front door, and while the pretty woman looked confused her handsome friend looked beyond mad.

Dev Hindle, who had been standing with his wife, Marta, at the second-floor library balcony, recognized the home’s rightful owner and quickly retreated to the stereo rack in the rec room to kill the throbbing big-band swing. Judging by the look on Mercer’s face, Dev realized that old Harry hadn’t gotten permission to invite the Oaklawn Retirement Community’s Saturday Socialistas over for a midweek dance. Dev knew Harry from when they both worked for Potomac Edison and had met his young friend Philip Mercer at a local bar called Tiny’s on a few occasions.

The silence crashed in on the party as soon as he muted the stereo. A few people muttered their surprise, but most looked at their watches and assumed it was time to return to the bright yellow bus for the ride back home. No more than a minute after Mercer opened the front door to find Harry re-creating scenes out of Cocoon, the last of his guests shuffled past a still-irate homeowner. And then a couple in their seventies who had been necking in an upstairs bedroom came down the stairs in a breathless huff.

Mercer glared at Harry when the trysting couple dashed past, the man’s collar smeared with lipstick and her knee-high support hose down around her ankles.

“In my defense,” Harry said when the door closed after his last guest, “you weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow.” His voice sounded like railroad spikes drawn across a rusted iron plate, a rasping sound earned through sixty-plus years of cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s.

“And you weren’t supposed to use my house as the venue for some golden years bacchanalia.”

“Bacchanalia?” Harry scoffed dismissively and rubbed a hand through his silvery crew cut. “Only a few of us had anything stronger than sugar-free diabetic punch, and there’s no way Betty Norris let Jim Peters get past second base.”

“Mercer, what’s going on?” Jordan asked peevishly. She was pale and trembled, and he realized she was spiking a fever. “Who is this?”

“Sorry. This is my, ah, my—” Mercer paused, trying to decide how to describe his best friend. “Harry White.”

The old lothario didn’t miss a beat. “I was his Harry White. From now on I will be your Harry White.”

“Harry,” Mercer continued. “This is Jordan Weismann. She grew up knowing Abe Jacobs.”

Despite the drinks he had doubtless consumed, Harry detected an undercurrent in Mercer’s voice. “What happened?”

“Abe’s dead,” Mercer said, exhaustion suddenly making his eyelids feel like stones. The shoulder he’d scraped leaping from the bucket loader suddenly started to ache too. “He was shot in Minnesota. His lab in Ohio was blown up and his house burned down. The shooters nearly got Jordan and me a couple of times.”

“Ah, Christ,” Harry spat. “I only met him once, but I liked the old guy.” It was lost on Harry that he was fully ten years older than Abe Jacobs had been. In fact he was twice Mercer’s age but somehow saw the two of them as contemporaries.

White pulled a half-crushed pack of Chesterfields from the pocket of his baggy suit pants and was about to light it when he caught Mercer’s disapproving glance. They’d both made sacrifices recently, and he was still getting used to it. He stuffed the pack and an old Zippo back into his pocket.

“Jordan,” Mercer said, turning to her, “give me a few minutes to make sure one of the guest rooms is done up and you can hit the sack. You need to take some meds for the pain or you’ll never sleep, and I’ll get some ibuprofen for that fever.”

She said nothing. Her eyes, usually bright and inquisitive, were dull and listless. She finally showed a spark of interest when movement caught her attention. It was coming from down a corridor that ran past the kitchen and Mercer’s home office to a set of back stairs. The movement was accompanied by the click of something hard against the marble floor. From the shadows of the dimmer part of the house emerged what appeared to be a parti-colored child’s golf bag laid on its side with four stumpy legs for support. At the rear end was a tail that flew at half-mast, while at the front was a blocky head with a silvered muzzle the length of a toucan’s bill and two enormous ears that swept the ground with each tottering pace.

“Is that a basset hound?” Jordan asked of the decrepit canine.

“That’s Drag — he’s half basset, half Hoover canister vacuum,” Harry said proudly. “Drag, come here, boy, and meet your future stepmother.”

Nearly twenty years earlier, Mercer had found Harry on a bar stool at Tiny’s the first night he’d moved into the neighborhood, when he had gone out as a distraction from unpacking. A decade later, Harry had found Drag rummaging around a Dumpster behind that same seedy dive. Mercer had always felt that he had drawn the short stick in this deal, while the mangy dog had won the damned lottery, especially since developers had recently bought Harry’s nearby apartment building, evicted all the tenants, and torn it down to make way for a secondary parking structure for a local mall’s expansion. For the past five months Drag and Harry had been Mercer’s houseguests, and since Harry had yet to start looking for a new place and Drag didn’t appear too eager to move either, he suspected the pair had now morphed into permanent roommates.

Drag ambled over to Jordan, who bent at the knee and extended a hand. Because of his sensitive nose, the dog had already determined she was okay though devoid of any decent food scents, so he ignored her proffered hand and flopped next to her like a walrus, exposing his ample belly for immediate attention.

“He’s adorable,” Jordan said despite her mounting misery, a chunky plastic bracelet jangling as she scratched Drag and the hound’s leg went into paroxysms of pleasure.

“Don’t let him hear you say that or he’ll never leave you alone,” Harry said. He turned to Mercer. “Don’t you have work to do, innkeeper?”

Mercer called Harry a bastard under his breath and climbed the antique corkscrew stairs to the second floor while his octogenarian friend and his broken-down dog helped Jordan forget the past fourteen hours. He had never been more grateful to the unlikely duo than he was right now.

Few people ever experience how truly ugly terrorism can be, and Jordan had just been given a very personal dose. People see it on the news or read about it in the paper, Mercer thought, but it’s different when it happens close by because it is no longer an abstraction happening to others. The guns are meant to kill you and the explosions are meant to tear into your body, and even if you survive you are forever changed. That is one of terrorism’s hidden aims — to mentally scar those left in its wake so that they never feel safe again and always fear the light. It is therefore up to the survivors to defy the killers and show that they will not be victimized. The old man and his equally ancient pooch were subliminally guiding Jordan on her journey back from the darkness, and Mercer knew she couldn’t have been in better hands; those two had done it for him on more occasions than he cared to remember.

The second-floor landing was Mercer’s library, and the shelves were lined with countless first-edition science books and texts. Collecting them had been a passion for many years, and while he enjoyed looking at them he admitted to himself that the desire for acquiring more had waned. Bifurcating the shelves was a set of French doors that led to the rec room, a large space decorated in oaks and brass, and brown leathers and forest greens. A well-stocked bar ran along the right wall, and a large flat-screen hung on the wall opposite the doors. This was the heart of Mercer’s home, where he spent the lion’s share of his time. The seat of one of the bar stools fit his butt like a glove, while to his chagrin another fit Harry’s even better. Long before losing his apartment, Harry considered Mercer’s place his own, and that went doubly for the ranks of liquor bottles behind the bar.

Mercer crossed the room, noting that Harry had stayed true to his word and not smoked in here since he’d been away. That was the aged letch’s price for room and, if not board, at least a half gallon of Jack Daniel’s per week — he had to smoke outside. Mercer really didn’t care about the smell. Harry had been smoking in his house for so long he was immune to it, but it was his way of urging his old friend to cut back on the cancer sticks.

He didn’t kid himself that he was adding years to Harry’s life by making his nicotine habit a little harder to feed, the guy was on the hard side of eighty-five after all, but it was a gesture of concern, a male way of showing he cared without actually admitting it.

Beyond the rec room were two guest rooms connected by a Jack-and-Jill bath. This was Mercer’s real concern. Jordan would be sharing a bathroom with an eighty-plus-year-old man with an enlarged prostate, poor eyesight, and shaky hands — also known as the filthy john trifecta. To his amazement, the bathroom sparkled and smelled of air freshener and a hint of vanilla from a recently snuffed candle.

Mercer’s natural suspicion rose, and he guessed that in a day or two he’d be getting a bill from the maid service Harry had hired in anticipation of tonight’s geriatric debauch. He double-checked the bedroom Harry wasn’t currently occupying. It was functional if a bit bland, but the sheets were clean and there were fresh towels in the closet. Mercer unplugged the telephone extension on the nightstand from Jordan’s room so in the morning it wouldn’t disturb her, and he dumped the phone in the hall closet where he kept spare linens and the wand and hose for the central vacuum cleaner.

He found some pills in the medicine cabinet and brought them with him back to the bar. Harry had coaxed her up the stairs, led her to a leather sofa, and pulled a wool lap robe up to her shoulders. She was shivering with the ague of her fever. Harry was behind the bar mixing himself a Jack and ginger.

“Get some water for Jordan, then make me a double,” Mercer ordered and crossed to her side. Drag had levered his tubular body onto the couch next to her and packed his considerable bulk against her to add warmth.

He sat near her and stroked a feather of damp hair off her forehead.

“I feel like crap,” she said without opening her eyes.

“You’ll be okay. It’s just your body telling you to stay still for a while and rest.”

“It could have just texted me and not given me the chills, aches, and general crappiness.”

“Yeah, well the human body can’t text just yet.”

She opened one eye to look at him. “Did I just say my body should text me?”

“You did.”

Jordan giggled. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I know what I am saying anymore. Sorry about all this.”

“No need to apologize. God knows what would have happened to us both if we hadn’t met.”

She gave him a queer look, as though she hadn’t considered their meeting being so providential, but she couldn’t maintain any level of concentration and her face relaxed once again. Harry handed Mercer a glass of water and went back behind the bar to mix a double vodka gimlet. Mercer woke Jordan and got her to sit upright so she would take the ibuprofen. He also got her to swallow two of the prescription pain tablets she’d been issued in Ohio.

He then slid one arm under her knees and another under her shoulders. Like many women, she hated being picked up lest her weight be judged, but Mercer had her up and against his chest so quickly and so effortlessly that she mewed softly, then rested her head against his shoulder while he carried her through to the bedroom.

He laid her on the bed and regarded her face. Her mouth was tight as she fought against the fever and her skin was pale, almost translucent. Though wet with perspiration, her hair was still thick and so dark it almost had sapphire highlights, like the wing of a raven. Her bone structure was flawless.

Looking down at Jordan Weismann as she once again sank into deep sleep, Mercer felt the stirrings of attraction, which he discounted quickly. What man wouldn’t be attracted to a smart, beautiful twentysomething woman who was fifteen years his junior? She was every guy’s fantasy girl…but Mercer wasn’t so hard up as to try to seduce her. He tucked the blanket tighter around her wan face and brushed her hair off her forehead again, then killed the light and shut the door behind him before making his way back to the bar.

“First of all,” Harry said and saluted him with a recharged Jack and ginger. “You have brought some beauties home over the years, but this one takes the cake. I thought the one from a few months ago, ah…”

“Cali.”

“Right. Cali. She was fine and all, but she didn’t have much up top and you know I like a woman with a little more blouse bounce. Even with her arm in a sling I can tell Jordan has a rack on her that’d shame a moose.”

Mercer wasn’t sure if he heard Harry correctly, but fearing that he had, didn’t ask for clarification.

“Of course,” White continued and handed Mercer his drink, a twinkle in his rheumy blue eyes, “she is a little old for my tastes.”

Mercer shook his head and slid onto his bar stool. He gave his old friend a reprieve from their roommate contract by saying, “The smoking light is on, go ahead and light ’em if you got ’em.”

“Much obliged,” Harry replied and pointed to the already smoldering butt in an ashtray. He knew Mercer needed to talk tonight and rightly assumed he didn’t want to wait for him to go outside for a smoke. Harry took his customary seat next to his best friend and affected a studied slouch. Where once he had been a tall, straight man, years had rounded his shoulders and put some thickness around his waist. His face was wrinkled by time and abuse, but there was a merriment and kindness to him, the type that children and women see intuitively. It was why Drag had followed him home after God knew how many others had tried to help the mangy beast. It was also what made these two men such great, if unlikely, friends — these were quiet traits both shared but never boasted about.

“So what’s her deal?” Harry finally asked, blowing a jet of smoke ceilingward.

Mercer told him everything that had happened since he first heard the shooters open up with their automatic weapons in the Leister Deep Mine, all the way to his phone call to Dick Henna, an old friend who had once been the director of the FBI. Mercer had been forced to leave a message — Henna had become withdrawn ever since his wife, Fay, had died of a sudden stroke. He had hoped to catch Dick and stave off a full FBI assault on his house.

His backup plan was to call the D.C. field office in the morning and explain who he was and what had been happening. Though he loathed government bureaucracies, the FBI was the agency best equipped to check the papers he had recovered from Abe Jacobs’s trash. That evidence was still sealed in the scrubs bag in order to prevent the fragile paper from drying out and disintegrating.

“Any idea who is behind all this?” Harry asked when the story and second pair of drinks were done.

“None,” Mercer conceded. He had hoped the retelling would give him some sort of insight. “With his office ruined by the sprinklers and his house more than likely leveled, looking into Abe’s connection is a dead end unless we get something from the papers we salvaged.”

“What about the scientist he was helping? Anything on her?”

“Susan Tunis was her name. I don’t know anything about her other than Abe agreed to assist in her research. And don’t ask me what that was, because he never told me. All he did was hint that it was something revolutionary.”

“Apparently revolutionary enough to kill for,” Harry added.

Mercer then realized the mistake he had made. He had figured the timing of the attack had coincided with Abe’s arrival at the mine, so he had concentrated his efforts on investigating his old friend. He hadn’t considered that another team of gunmen would have gone to wherever this Susan Tunis worked and sanitized her home and office as they had done to Jacobs’s. Mercer could chalk it up to exhaustion or the need to protect Jordan Weismann, but he knew the truth was he’d screwed up. He should have forced that state cop, Gerard, to use whatever pull he had to get the feds to Tunis’s known addresses as soon as possible.

Mercer knocked back the last of his drink so that the ice cubes rattled against his lip.

Maybe he was kidding himself. A Minnesota state policeman didn’t stand a chance of getting the FBI to change their entrenched procedures. The gunmen had a large window in which to operate before any real pursuit coalesced. Maybe he’d get lucky and some sharp agent would have added two and two and gotten four, but he wasn’t optimistic. Hell, they hadn’t even figured out his role in the attack at Hardt College.

Mercer debated having a third drink, won the debate, but only made it a small one. While he was sipping it, Harry shrugged into a blue windbreaker and unfurled Drag’s leash. The dog heard the leash’s rattle, cocked one ear, and lifted one sagging eyelid but otherwise didn’t show the slightest interest in moving from the couch.

“And this is why,” Harry said as he clipped the leash to Drag’s collar, “I didn’t name you ‘Walk.’ ” He had to skid the stubborn dog across the slick leather for a ways before Drag gained his feet and jumped off the sofa.

It took a full minute of cajoling and dragging to get the basset to the front door, Harry muttering good-natured curses the entire way.