Chapter 34

CHAPTER 34

P ike had his cellphone out as soon as we were outside, and he typed a quick message to someone. Done, he put the phone away and indicated for me to join him as he ambled east down State Street to the right of the blue line, which meant we were in North Carolina. There weren't many people about, just a handful of cars parked along the wide, blue-lined avenue.

"We don't get a lot of tourists," he told me. "Easier to take the interstates around the mountains. Off the beaten path is a big reason why Oz and I thought this would be a good place to retire."

"Hide," I said as we passed a storefront painted green, its windows full of book displays, a big sign above the window that read "Cover Stories . "

Pike nodded at the store. "That's Oxley Crothers' bookstore. Keeps to himself, not real friendly, does mostly mail order of antique books. Was a cryptologist. You know the type."

"Not real friendly, you say? Hard to believe here in wonderful Rocky Start."

He gave me the side eye. "You're staying with Rose and Poppy?"

"For a while," I said.

He nodded. "Good. "

Apparently, I was now welcome in Rocky Start. What a change a day makes.

Luke came out of a door ahead of us, looked right and left, then headed toward us, putting his phone away.

"Getting the tour?" he asked as he joined us.

"Pike is explaining things," I said.

"That's a first," Luke said.

Pike ignored Luke and kept walking. He jerked his head toward another storefront that had been painted gray and black with detailing picked out in gold, very fancy. "That's Melissa Merriweather's place," he told me. "Damn fine funeral director."

"What Pike is trying to say," Luke interpreted, "is that if there's a body that needs to be disappeared, she's your go-to."

There were two caskets inclined in the front window, and a small Black woman in a fine white suit stood between them. Until she nodded at Pike, I thought she might have been a mannequin. He nodded back. She looked ready for business. And anything else. She gave me a once-over, as if measuring me for one of the coffins.

The sign above the window was in Gothic print, of course, and read "Merriweather Funerals."

I wanted to ask what Melissa's turnover was, but Pike went on.

"Geoffrey Nice is the other mortician in town. He's your average citizen, no background in covert ops, family in the business for generations." Pike jerked his head across the street to another gray building, this one trimmed in white with a dignified sign that said "Nice Funerals." "That's his place and his ride."

There was a highly polished, very old black hearse parked in front of it. The windows were all dark-tinted. It had double sets of headlights, matched top and bottom for eight altogether.

"A classic," Pike said. "1959 Cadillac Fleetwood series. They don't make ‘em like that anymore. Normally, you don't want a hearse parked on your main drag, but we can make an exception for something like that."

"Melissa's hearse is probably parked out back of her place," Luke said .

"It's even older," Pike said. "1956 Miller Landau Cadillac Ambulance."

Great. Competing antique hearses. Rocky Start's ambience was a bit skewed.

"You don't take a body to Geoffrey Nice," Luke said, "unless they died of natural causes."

"I figured that," I told Luke, wondering how many brain cells Luke thought I was missing since last we met. "But I don't plan on having any bodies to tote around. Aren't two funeral homes for a small town a bit extreme?"

Pike kept walking and we followed, my question unanswered.

"It's a quiet town," Pike said. "We discourage any sort of touristy setup. No zip lines or whitewater rafting or even camping. People can do that in Bearton or somewhere else. Here it's just small businesses." He nodded toward a little hole-in-the-wall shop painted a soft green with a lot of fake plants in the window. "Like this one."

The shop had a sign that said "Green Teas" over the door, but there was a CLOSED sign on it.

"Betty Baumgarten's place," Pike said.

"Does a lot of business, does she?" I said, looking at the dusty plastic.

"She's mostly retired," Pike said.

"What was her previous profession?" I said, remembering Rose's description of her talent with a taser.

"Wet work," Pike said. "Doesn't look it, but she's one tough broad."

"Plus there's the llama," Luke added. "Three hundred pounds of furry attitude driven to protect Betty from everything, including Amazon deliveries."

Pike continued the tour. We passed an aluminum-fronted athletic shoe store called "Sneakers."

"Don Jones, marathoner and interrogator," Pike said.

"Don't get in an argument with him," Luke suggested. "He's worse than a shrink. He'll get you to tell the story of how you popped your cherry without you even realizing it. He wrote the book on interrogation. Literally." He shook his head. "If only they'd used it instead of that torture crap they pulled. Nice guy, not very talkative, not that he's someone you ever want to talk to."

We crossed what looked to be the only cross street in Rocky Start and went past the Tennessee Post Office, a dark storefront that said, "Handler and Handler: Assets," a vacant store, something called the "Tinker Tailor Thrift Shop", and a brightly painted ice cream shop called "Frozen Assets". At the end of the street was a large red building with a sign that said "Wok Inn."

That's where I stopped.

"Let's cut to the chase, Pike," I said. "You didn't text Luke to join us to tell him about the town he's spent the last decade living in. What doesn't he know that we both need to know? What's on this film Serena wants?" I noticed Luke got interested in that. "How much danger are Rose and Poppy in?"

"All good questions." He glanced at me, then Luke. "What Serena wants is a roll of microfilm Oz took from the Russians that proves she was a traitor thirty years ago."

"That's a death sentence," Luke said.

It might be decades later, but the one thing never forgiven in our business is betrayal. This explained why she wasn't on her game: She'd thought she'd been safe for thirty years, and now her past was rearing its ugly head and she was scrambling to get out from under it before somebody came for her.

Pike had his own question for me, which meant he was evading getting to the heart of the issue. "You think Herc really didn't know Oz was dead and Serena was in town?"

"Herc acted like he didn't know," I corrected. "He's a very good actor."

Luke nodded. "He's an excellent bullshitter. The first time he teamed me up with you, he told me you were competent."

"I'd forgotten all about your razor-sharp wit," I said, "and now I know why."

"Boys," Pike said.

I turned serious. "Why don't you tell us what happened from the start? "

I noticed that Luke was, indeed, paying attention now, which meant he didn't know Pike's backstory either, which jived with what Herc had said.

"Short version," Pike said. "Oz and I were in and out of Afghanistan a number of times between '87 and '89 near the end of the Russian occupation. Serena was our handler. On our last mission, the Stinger buy-back—which wasn't going well—Serena unexpectedly radioed an add-on mission. There was a convoy driving back to the Soviet Union under the command of this Russian KGB major, Dmitri. And the convoy had a truck-mounted SCIF. Serena wanted it."

I knew what that was: sensitive compartmented information facility. Where they send and receive classified messages. Grabbing the contents of one of those would be a great coup.

Pike continued. "The convoy was from their field office in Jalalabad, which was being shut down. The intel said they were taking the road to Kabul and from there to the Friendship Bridge."

That explained the print of the painting in Oz's room. The same route the British had taken. And the Friendship Bridge was in the north of the country, across a river into what was then the Soviet Union.

"With the help of some mujahideen, Oz and I ambushed the convoy. We grabbed the SCIF truck and hightailed it out of there. Got to our landing strip. Drove the truck right into a C-130. Ramp up and took off. Mission success."

Pike fell silent and nodded to an elderly man walking his dog past us. The man nodded at us, looking gentle, harmless. The dog sized me up. It was elderly, too, but not harmless. Two pros at the end of their careers. I got a flash of Maggs' and my future.

"If it was a success, why did things go sideways?" Luke asked.

"Normally," Pike said, "we'd fly the short hop into a secure Agency airfield in Pakistan. We'd meet Serena and debrief. Hand over the SCIF and what was left of the buy-back money."

I'd flown in and out of some of those airfields.

"But we were diverted," Pike said. "That meant Serena didn't want us landing where other official people were. We were going to make the hops all the way back to the States on the same plane. Never debark during refueling stops. Rig the SCIF and its contents to airdrop at a remote spot of her choosing in the States. The chutes and rigging gear were conveniently already in the cargo bay of the 130. Which meant Serena had planned ahead."

"She was going to fuck you over," Luke said. As I said: razor-sharp.

I pulled Pike back to the topic at hand. "So once you were on the plane, you checked what was in the SCIF." It was what I would have done. Every player would have. And Serena knew any player would have, thus Luke's deduction.

Pike nodded. "There was a file cabinet holding hard copies of all the messages the KGB field rep had sent and received. Decrypted. And there was a big fat file with Serena Stafford's name on it. That's when we found out she was a double-agent, selling information to the Soviets. That's why she wanted that SCIF." He looked at me. "She was pretty desperate for it."

"You took the file," I said.

Pike shook his head. "We left the hard copy. Oz took the microfilm of the file."

"And?" I prompted.

"We called Herc on the satellite uplink while refueling in Hawaii. Herc realized he was fucked if it got out that she was a double since she worked for him. He wanted it buried too. He told us to drop the SCIF and files to Serena so she wouldn't freak out and let her destroy them. But then he'd get Serena out of the Agency. That pissed Oz off. He wanted to put a bullet in her head. But we had to be realistic. Herc could bury us just as easily. We were screwed coming and going."

"And?"

"We made a deal with Herc. We dropped the SCIF where Serena told us to at a drop zone here in the States. She got there ahead of us, which was pretty easy as slow as we were going on the 130. Then, before the plane got to the airstrip where we figured she had some of her dogs waiting to kill us, we parachuted out. With the Stinger money. And Oz had the microfilm copies." He indicated the mountains around us. "We came down here. About a mile outside Rocky Start."

"Convenient," I said.

"Yeah, okay," Pike admitted. "Herc directed the plane to drop us here. We found this town as near to dead as could be, almost empty, in the middle of nowhere. Oz said we could make it whatever we wanted, so we told Herc we were staying, gave him the rest of the microfilm. Except Oz kept the roll about Serena. Herc came up with the cover story that the plane went down, no survivors. He leveraged Serena out of the Agency so she couldn't do any more harm. Ironically, given it was Herc, he used the loss of the plane and the team, Oz and me, as the lever. Failed mission."

We came to the end of the street, and Pike gestured to the red lacquered storefront next to the river that said "Wok Inn." "Great Chinese restaurant. Owner is former Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police. Had to get out after the changeover in '97." Pike pointed up to the second floor. "Barry Mason's law office is up there." He shook his head. "There's a story. We found Barry living up there, squatting, before Hugh came to town and opened the restaurant. Turns out he was in witness protection, except they'd lost track of him, possibly on purpose. Giving him Barry Mason as a new name was not a sign of respect. He was a mess. We made him our front and bought up most of the town."

I stopped walking. "You and Oz own the town? All of it?"

Pike shook his head. "There are a few businesses like Geoffrey Nice's funeral parlor that were already here; Geoffrey bought in and when the original owner died, he inherited. Melissa Merriweather bought her funeral parlor from us. Sid Quill inherited his pharmacy. We rented most of what we bought to our people dirt cheap. People we knew from the old life. The ones Herc sent this way are in places he bought for them." He indicated The Honey Pot across the street. "Bea Handler's place. The post offices. Lian's law office. He made sure they had the funds to get started."

We'd crossed the street while he'd been talking, and now he stopped in front of the yellow storefront across from the Wok. It had a hive pattern painted on the window that had "The Honey Pot" painted on it in gold script . "This is Bea's place. She and Coral don't get along, so watch yourself there."

Pike kept walking, faster now, and we passed Dead and Gone Exterminating next to The Honey Pot, and then Buns and Guns which was evidently a gym and armory, a beauty parlor named Dead Drop Gorgeous, another vacant storefront, and the North Carolina post office, directly across from the Tennessee PO.

All of the businesses were quiet.

"So you settled here happily ever after," I said as we hit the cross street again.

Pike nodded. "Rocky Start seemed like a fitting name for a town for us. People we knew, and some we didn't, started showing up, most sent by Herc. They all wanted to retire, find a haven. Everyone safe. Until now."

The first store after the cross street was vacant, too. Rocky Start was not thriving.

I had vacant places, too. Like what the hell Herc was doing. He hadn't been upset that Oz was dead when I'd called; he'd been bothered that Serena had shown up, blowing the cover off the three-decades-long deception. The problem with mutually assured destruction is that when it goes wrong, you have mutual destruction.

"How are the Ferrells running surveillance here?" I asked, nodding across the street to Lionel's place. "They were NSA?"

"Yeah," Pike said. "Got CCTV in a few public places. That's how we all knew about you and Junior and Rose that first day. That's how they knew to show up when Serena came into Coral's."

"Why are they here?"

"They heard something they weren't supposed to and had to ghost." Pike sounded philosophical about it: That's just the way the world worked. "They came with the clothes on their backs and some very nice equipment. Oz and I gave them a house to get them started, and Herc got them their jobs."

"So the post offices are real?"

"Oh, yeah. It's a good setup for them to monitor things and keep the town secure. They lost the house. Dottie has a gambling addiction. Lionel has a sex addiction. They blew through whatever they'd brought with them, so Herc gave them the post offices with the rooms up above to live and set them up as recon. Not much gets past them. Or Herc."

"Serena coming to town did," I said.

"Yeah," Pike said. "We need to take care of the person who told Serena."

"And who was that?"

"I don't think Herc would have."

"Then who?" I asked.

"I don't know." He looked at me sideways, "You taking an interest in this town, Max?"

"In the town, no. What now?"

Luke's woodcraft shop was right after the vacant store, and that's where Pike turned to face me. "We go up to Barry's over the Wok Inn at one and see what Oz put in that damn envelope. Maybe it tells us where the microfilm is. For all I know he forgot where he put it."

I glanced at Luke and he didn't seem to buy into that, either.

"And then?" I asked. "Give it to Serena?"

Pike shrugged. "I don't know. Might be for the best."

"You think she'll go away peacefully then?" I asked. I noticed Luke was also being unusually quiet.

"Maybe," Pike said. "The Serena I knew years ago was apt to fly off the handle. She's had thirty years' worth of resentment building up. But she's also had thirty years to mature. She might be willing to let it go." He looked at me. "But she might not. Good that you're here for Rose and Poppy."

"Oh, now you want me to stay."

He smiled. "You want to stay now. Rose has a good heart. We don't meet many people with one in the lives we've led."

Someone might consider that an implied insult, but it was more a harsh truth.

Pike checked his watch. "You best go find Rose. She's probably made something good for you for lunch. Very comfortable woman to have around, Rose." He smiled at me. "And now you know the story. Think on it."

He nodded at me and Luke and moved on down the street toward Ecstasy and his own comfortable woman, and I thought about hitting the road before Pike swore me in as a deputy and dragged Luke into this, too. It was a brief thought. I wasn't going to leave Rose and Poppy alone in Serena's path, and not even Pike would be insane enough to give me a badge.

Pike turned and called back to me. "Hey, Reddy," he said and tossed me something, metal flashing through the air, and I caught it automatically. "Welcome to the force."

It was a badge, metal and beat up and clearly used, and I had the sinking feeling that it had been Oz's. A dead man's badge.

"Well, howdy, Marshal Dillon," Luke said with a really bad drawl.

Pike was gone, back into Coral's Ecstasy , so I put it in my pocket to give back to him later. We stood there, shoulder to shoulder, in silence.

"What?" I finally said to Luke.

"Pike's a good man," Luke began.

"But?"

"I don't think he gave us the full story," Luke said.

"No," I agreed. "But if he's leaving something out, it's probably because it doesn't apply now."

"Let's hope so," Luke said, but I could tell he was troubled by something.

So was I. "What?" I asked.

Luke replied, "It seems he never considered the possibility that Herc kept a connection with Serena and sometimes passed her outfit the really dirty jobs. Ones that a player like us would turn down? You've said no to contracts, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah. And Herc never misses an opportunity to twist something to his advantage. I just don't see him deep-sixing Serena with no upside for him. But," I added, "I don't see why he'd alert her about Oz dying. This status quo has been good for him. No upside to upsetting that. "

"No, there wouldn't be," Luke agreed, but I could tell that the fact Pike hadn't considered a Herc-Serena connection after the fact troubled him. "But Ozzie dying upset things. And now we've got to put things right."

"We?" I said. "Are you Festus now?"

"I prefer Lawman Bass Reeves," Luke said.

"Who's that?"

"Look it up, Marshal."