Everybody Dies - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 3) Page 15

  “You know that guy with Harry?” Jack asked.

  “His name is Parviz. Remember the trouble Pasha had, a few months ago? He and his boss helped out.”

  “That guy is ripped.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “I mean, he’s almost unreal. He looks like he should be on the cover of romance novels.”

  “He knows his way around a gym.”

  Apparently Jack hadn’t been impressed by my biceps flexing when I had my shirt off.

  McGlade parked, and we got out of the truck and into his van. It was a cargo van, a two seater with storage in back. It was currently empty, except for Packer, on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him, and an enormous backpack, the kind meant to take on a three week hike through Alaska.

  “General Pecker, we have a few questions,” Harry said.

  “It’s Packer.”

  “Really?” McGlade raised his eyebrows and took out his iPhone. “Nope, I’ve got it right here. Hector Julius Pecker. Born in Springfield, Illinois, June 13, 1957, to parents Norma and William. Had a 1.9 GPA at Eisenhower High School. No wonder you didn’t go to college. What is that, a D plus? So you joined the Army in ’79… and left the Army in ’80. OTH Discharge. What’s that?”

  “How did you find all of this?”

  “Computers, Pecker. Welcome to the twenty-first century. All your shit is online, if you know where to look. Oh, here we go. OTH is a Less Than Honorable Discharge. Let’s see what your court martial said. Huh. Malingering. Isn’t that where you fake being ill to get out of duty?”

  “I had health issues,” he said.

  “Hmmm. Nope, you had a clean bill of health. This clearly says malingering. But I’m sure your seven months in the Army were a huge benefit to our country, when you weren’t shirking your duties. Let’s see what heights you reached after that. There was a series of dead end jobs after Uncle Sam booted you, never making more than minimum wage. Then you met the missus in ’86. A nurse. Wow, she was making triple your shitty income. I bet that bugged you.”

  “Keep my wife out of this.”

  Harry shrugged. “Let’s skip ahead. You’re currently teaching gym at the local junior high school. How did you get a teaching job without going to college, Pecker? Falsified some credentials, I bet. Easy enough to do. But let’s get down to it. We have questions. If you don’t answer these questions, you’ll force me to get nasty. And trust me; I’m one of the nastiest people on the planet.”

  “I’m not telling you shit,” he said. Then he spat on the floor of the van.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” McGlade crouched down next to his backpack, unzipped the top, and began to remove items.

  First thing out was a large, silver plastic bag.

  “You know what this is, don’t you, Pecker?”

  “A faraday bag,” he stated.

  “Right. If they drop the big one, the electromagnetic pulse won’t fry my two thousand dollar laptop.”

  McGlade took out said laptop, turned it on, and set it next to him. Then he removed a tent, a first aid kit, a gas mask, a camera bag, binoculars, a flashlight, some glowsticks, a metal asp, a hunting knife, a fishing tackle box, duct tape, several boxes of bullets…

  “What is all this?” Jack asked. “Are you packing for World War Three?”

  “Exactly,” McGlade pointed at her. “I’m a prepper. This is my bug-out bag. Everything you need to survive any state of emergency. Floods, fires, dirty bombs, earthquakes, riots; you name it, I’m prepared for it. I’m also prepared to interrogate someone, if the need arises.” He winked at Packer. “And the need has arisen.”

  “Harry…” Jack warned.

  McGlade beckoned her over, and whispered in her ear for a moment. Jack’s face contorted in utter disgust, and she said, “I can’t be a part of this,” and left the van.

  That was all I needed. I squatted next to Packer and smiled mean. “The only thing saving you from unimaginable pain is telling me where she is.”

  “Where who is?” he countered, eyes defiant.

  I raised my fist, and Harry grabbed my hand. “I got this, buddy. Trust me. Parviz? Would you mind helping Pecker remove his shirt?”

  Parviz tore off the garment like it was made of paper towels.

  Then McGlade reached into his backpack—

  —and removed a can of rice pudding.

  “I know I’ve got a spork in here somewhere,” he said, rooting around in the bag. “Here we go. Parviz, will you do the honors?”

  Harry began to snap pictures with his fancy digital camera. Parviz opened up the can, and then used the spork to flick pudding on Packer’s face, neck, and chest.

  “What in the hell are you idiots doing?” Packer said, turning bright red. “What the hell is this?”

  Harry took one last pic, then removed the SD card from his camera. “It’s been proven, time and again, that torture doesn’t work. People will say anything and everything to make the pain stop. It doesn’t result in reliable intel, and it pretty much is bad for humanity in general. I’ve found that extortion, and blackmail, are far more effective.”

  He pushed the card into a slot on his laptop, and then hummed tunelessly to himself as he uploaded the pictures he took.

  “The trick,” McGlade said, “is getting the size right. Then you have to do some blending, correct for hue and contrast, add some fake lighting effects. I already made the templates, and I know the angles to shoot to match, so this is pretty easy for me. I don’t want to downplay my art, here. I’m just saying the final versions will look even better. But here’s the basic idea.”

  Parviz laughed over Harry’s shoulder. McGlade turned the laptop around so we could see what he’d been doing. On the screen was a naked man’s lower body, in what would be called a state of full arousal. And next to his erection, his mouth open in what looked like a state of passion, was Packer’s face.

  “That’s disgusting!” the Nazi said.

  “Looks real though, doesn’t it? Or maybe this one.”

  Harry pressed a key, and it showed a pic of Packer, on his knees, surrounded by some naked African American men who were actively showing how attractive they found him to be.

  “The rice pudding really stands out in this one,” Harry marveled.

  Packer turned even redder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I know. Your head doesn’t quite match your body on that one. I’ll play with the diffuse glow filter. Here’s one that shows you can give as well as you take.”

  This time, Packer’s face was superimposed over a man having sex with another man. Packer was also wearing a yarmulke, with Jewish sidelocks.

  “I can stick a Torah under your arm, too,” Harry said. “Or would that look silly?”

  “You think you can scare me by showing me these fag pictures?”

  “First of all, Parviz is queer. Do you take offense at that, Parviz?”

  He shrugged. “Not at all. We fags call each other fag all the time.”

  “Good to know. Second, I’m not trying to scare you, Pecker. I’m trying to blackmail you. See, once I make the images a bit more realistic, I’m going to send them to your wife. Then to every member on staff at the school where you work.”

  Packer looked devastated. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m nasty, remember? We went through this earlier. Then I’m sending them to your church mailing list. You attend the First Presbyterian on Mountain View Road, correct? Won’t Pastor Rob be surprised? Well, maybe not. But the choir probably will. And that’s just the first salvo. My main target will be the Internet. Every white nationalist website. Every racist message board. Every KKK Grand Dragon and Grand Wizard. And on the sites that don’t accept pornography, I’ll post other pictures. You at a gay rights march. You lighting a menorah during Hanukkah. And, of course, you in full Nazi regalia, something you’ve been very careful to keep private.”

  “That would… ruin me,” Packer said.

  “Ruin?�
� McGlade laughed. “That’s the least of it. What do you think Phin’s brother will do to you when he sees these?”

  Packer was silent. He’d broken out in a severe case of the flop sweats.

  “Are you an honorable man, Hector?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “I give you my word that I won’t release any of these offensive—yet intriguingly erotic—pictures. But if you don’t tell us everything we want to know, I guarantee that you can kiss your job, your marriage, your racist little hobby, and your life, goodbye. Do we understand each other?”

  Packer gave a small nod.

  “Good,” said Harry McGlade. “Let’s start with where Pasha is.”

  PASHA

  Pasha sat on the inflatable float that served as a bed in her makeshift prison, thinking about the outdoors. By her calculation she’d been captive for three days. Being without a clock or a window to watch the rising and setting of the sun, she’d made her assumption based on her meals. Her captors regularly alternated pancakes and sausage with turkey sandwiches. She’d been served both entrees three times, and reasoned that she was being fed twice a day.

  At first she lived in constant fear. While not physically harmed since her last encounter with Hugo—it had been horrible setting her broken finger herself without any anesthetic and using only the masking tape she’d been given—her idle time was filled with the dread that the giant would soon return. Gradually, as the hours passed, her fear became tedium, and then anger at her predicament.

  She was pissed off.

  Not only by her imprisonment, but by the humiliations and indignities she suffered. Pasha had no toilet or water in her cell. She went to the bathroom in a bucket, and another bucket was given to her once a day with soapy water and a rag to wash up. They’d refused her request for a toothbrush, or a comb, and she’d been in the same clothing since her kidnapping; clothing that was getting funky. Hygiene played a bigger part in self-respect than she’d ever thought before.

  Not that it mattered too much, because she hadn’t seen herself in a mirror for as long as she’d been here. Strange, some of the things you take for granted. Being unable to see her reflection was almost like having herself taken from her.

  Even more distressing was not being able to go outside. This was the longest Pasha had ever gone without seeing the sun. It was a demoralizing experience, made even worse by the lack of things to do in her cell.

  Boredom was making her crazy. Yoga helped kill some of the long hours. So did playing memory games, singing songs, and reviewing her life and the things she’d done and wanted to do. But she’d lapsed into daydreaming several times, and the daydreams were becoming more and more frequent. Once she’d imagined, and believed, that there was a secret door in her wall she could go through at any time. She caught herself gazing at the wall, looking for the pretend door for minutes on end until she realized it was just a fantasy.

  Reality was becoming more and more tenuous.

  Once she’d asked one of her guards for something to read. He shocked Pasha by giving her a book, a well-worn paperback called The Turner Diaries, penned in 1978 by an avid racist who began one of the nation’s largest white-supremacist organizations. She’d been familiar with the controversial work, which had been linked to the Oklahoma City bombing, and almost threw it back in the guard’s face. But boredom trumped indignation and she wound up reading it for lack of anything else to do.

  It was a short novel, finished in about three hours. As expected, the book was a thinly veiled propaganda pamphlet damning Jews, blacks, homosexuals, liberals, the government, and pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white Nazi.

  Pasha was surprised, however, at the literacy of the book. Rather than a poorly written screed filled with racial slurs and pointless scenes, it was a semi-competent adventure story that had Jews and blacks as the villains, much like novels by Jack Higgins or Fredrick Forsythe had the Nazis as the villains. The ideology wasn’t screamed at the reader, it was revealed subtly, step-by-step, taking the eponymous hero, Turner, from blank slate to fully realized race-warrior terrorist, ending with him flying a plane, equipped with a nuke, into the Pentagon.

  When Pasha finished the novel, which ended after the White Race had slaughtered about a billion people and assumed its place as the wise and benevolent leader of the world, she dropped it in her toilet bucket. Since then she’d been given no further reading material.

  She thought of Phin a lot.

  She also thought of Hugo. Had Hugo killed Phin, and was going to come for her at his leisure? Or had Phin killed Hugo, which was the reason Hugo hadn’t paid a visit?

  And if Phin had murdered his own brother, could Pasha continue a relationship with him?

  That last part was troubling. She loved him, and longed to be rescued, but at the same time her relationship with Phin wasn’t healthy. He was addicted to several drugs, beat up people for a living, killed people (how many, Pasha didn’t know, and was afraid to ask) and would likely die of cancer, very soon. Not a lot there to stake a long term relationship on.

  At the same time, she’d never felt so deeply for a man. She was in love, no doubt about it.

  But was love enough?

  So she sat with her thoughts and daydreams and worries, in her underground cell, cold and damp and bored and angry, with no feasible means of escape. Her walls were concrete. The door was steel. The guards always entered in pairs with guns drawn, and they never laxed in their routine.

  She would be here until she was moved or rescued.

  Or until I die, Pasha thought.

  Three days were debilitating enough to her spirit.

  She couldn’t imagine spending a week, a month, a year here. Pasha would lose hope. Then there would be nothing left to kill or save, because her mind would be gone.

  Pasha already worried she was losing her grip. Through the walls, she thought she could hear, so faintly that it almost seemed like a thought, Phin screaming her name.

  And then the door to her cell opened, and she yelled, loud as she could, “Phin!”

  PHIN

  “This is a shit plan,” said Jack Daniels, from inside the dressing room.

  According to General Packer (actually, I preferred McGlade’s malapropism, Pecker), Pasha was being kept beneath an old football stadium that the CN bought years ago. Known as The Bunker, it was where the Midwest chapter held rallies and did training drills a few times a year. A rally was on for tomorrow, so there were likely a few white nationalists camping there. There were also a series of tunnels, expanded from the original locker rooms, underneath the field, where Pasha was held.

  During their rallies and training, they purposely used replica weapons to stay out of legal trouble. But these were a bunch of good ole boys, and Pecker had no idea of how many were actually armed.

  And it was an emphasis on boys. Women weren’t allowed.

  Hence Jack’s objection to how we intended to get her inside. According to Pecker, there were two ways into the actual stadium, both of them fenced off. Armed guards let people in, and it required memorizing a litany longer than the Pledge of Allegiance. But Pecker himself could get us in, as guests, if we accompanied him.

  Unfortunately, to get around the no-females rule, Jack would have to be undercover. That required a trip to a nearby 24 hour department store to do a little shopping. We’d already bought some candy apple lip gloss, fake eyelashes, peacock blue eyeshadow, and enough rouge to paint a green light red. Now we were working on clothing, and Jack was balking at the quality, price, and scarcity of her outfit.

  “Jack, just buy the stuff.”

  “I look ridiculous.”

  “We need to save Pasha.”

  “I’m not going out in public in this.”

  “Then wait with Harry and Parviz.”

  Harry couldn’t go with us, because he was the insurance. If Pecker didn’t obey, Harry had to be offsite, ready to upload all the dirty pictures to the world. Parviz had too dark a complexion to pass as a whit
e supremacist. And Jack wouldn’t let me go in alone, fearing I’d kill everybody, which, honestly, was correct.

  That meant Jack had to dress as a sex worker to get in. And she wasn’t pleased.

  “You’ve been undercover before,” I said. “Working Vice.”

  “That was a decade ago. A woman’s body changes as she gets older.”

  “What are you worried about? My reaction?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Jack, I’ve been with a lot of women who were sex workers. All ages, shapes, and sizes. It’s a needed profession that should be legal and regulated. These ladies should be protected, and respected. The law shouldn’t tell any woman what she can do with her body, and the fact that society looks down on women who serve an essential need, when in fact those women should be valued, is disgusting. So no matter how you look, own it. You’re too strong, and too smart, to body shame yourself.”

  “I didn’t know you were a feminist, Phin.”

  “There are two kinds of people. Feminists, and assholes. Everyone is equal, and if you think otherwise you need meds, counseling, or a beat down.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then the door opened.

  Jack, whose expensive attire was always some combination of trendy style and feminine power, was wearing a neon green spandex micro-mini, knee-high fake leather boots with stiletto heels, and a black wonder bra that pushed and lifted in a very gravity-defying way.

  “Do I look whorish enough?” She asked.

  I cleared my throat. “You do.”

  “Do I look old?”

  I cleared my throat again. “You do not. Buy it and let’s get out of here.”

  Jack narrowed her eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Yes, there was. Her body was fit and lean, she had curves in all the right places, and all slutted up she looked hot as hell. Men were pigs, I was a man, and seeing a woman I liked and respected in tight, revealing, barely-there clothing was a turn-on. But I didn’t see how admitting that would do anyone any good, and in fact would open up a big can of worms about objectifying women, and how I sometimes thought of her in inappropriate ways, and I was trying to save my girl, not hit on a friend who was engaged and would be unattainable even if she weren’t.