"Chopper?"
She nodded, staring up too. "Going to Dead Rock. Prisoner transport."
"Why not just drive them?"
"Most of the prisoners spending the rest of their lives up there come from pretty far away, lot of urban areas. Roads are pretty crappy around here and lots of places for ambush. Hard to bust your buddy out of jail thousands of feet up there."
"I can see that."
She turned to face him. "So what were you doing when you ran into Danny?"
Stone stared over at Willie's pickup truck where his bag was in the back. "I was heading out of town," he said a bit guiltily.
"Okay. Does this have something to do with Trimble wanting to write a story about you?"
Stone tried hard to look surprised. "What are you talking about?"
"Danny told me that you came along with him because a government car pulled into the town where you two got off the train."
"I think he made a mistake."
"If you're in some kind of trouble-"
"I'm in no trouble, Abby."
"I was going to say if you are in trouble, I want to help you."
"Why? You barely know me."
"You saved my son. And I can't explain exactly why, but I feel like I've known you all my life."
Stone looked down, stubbed the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe. "I appreciate the offer, Abby, I really do."
"But you're leaving anyway?"
He shot her a glance. "I didn't say that."
"But you didn't not say it either. Everybody's got problems. You have no obligation to stay here and help us. Hell, it's not your battle."
"Why don't you just leave here? You've got plenty of money."
"Run out of my hometown? No thank you. I'm not built that way."
"But Danny left."
"He didn't want to go. I made him."
Stone looked stunned. "What, why?"
"This is no place for him. What's he got here? Work in the mines or the prison?"
"Is that all? Or how about the strange things happening here you mentioned?"
"It's not your fight, Ben. If you need to move on, you move on." She hesitated. Stone thought she was going to say something else. "I better go back and check on Danny. And I'll look in on Willie too."
She left him there. Stone sat down on a low brick wall. An hour later he was still there, trying desperately to make sense of what he should do.
As he watched, the miner brigade began pulling in for their methadone pop. He checked his watch. Not even five in the morning yet. He continued to watch as the bone-thin men climbed out of their rides and straggled into the clinic before leaving to pull twelve hours in the pits of hell, contorting their bodies way past all sane levels. That only led to more pain, and more painkillers, and the cycle just kept on spinning.
All so the lights remain on in this country.
He looked on a few minutes later as the zombie-eyed men headed out in their dusty Chevys and Fords.
I'm going to start using candles and cook my food over a fire.
He was still sitting there when Tyree came out and reported that Danny had refused to say anything about who had attacked him.
"Sheriff, I think I've seen one of the men before. But I just can't remember where."
"Soon as you do remember, call me."
An hour after Tyree left, Abby finally came out, bleary-eyed and hunched over.
"Danny's going to be fine. They're moving him to a room pretty soon. I think the one next to Willie's."
"That's great, Abby."
"He said you beat those men up pretty good."
"I got lucky."
"Lucky once, maybe. Lucky twice, I don't think so."
"I guess the army did teach me a thing or two. Do you want me to drive you home?"
"No, but you can follow me there. I'll make us both some breakfast."
"Abby, you've been up all night. You don't have to do that."
"Just follow me home, Ben, unless you want to head on out of town right now."
They eyed one another.
Stone finally said, "I'll be staying, at least for now."
CHAPTER 37
AFTER HE FINISHED UP in Charlottesville Knox made a quick trip to downtown D.C., his mind spinning from all that he'd learned. John Carr had been a member of Triple Six. Three members of his team had been killed about six months ago. The case had not only remained unsolved but apparently abandoned too. Knox wondered if Harry Finn's immunity was connected to that outcome somehow. However, he didn't wonder about that for long. It was not his problem. He had enough of his own.
There was nothing in the official record about Carr wanting out of Triple Six. Knox didn't expect that there would be. Personal feelings, and certainly hostile personal feelings, would never be officially acknowledged. Carr had had a family, though. That sort of information had been duly noted in the records, if only for security and threat assessment purposes. Carr had been technically listed as MIA on a certain date over thirty years ago. Cross-referencing these records with other info he'd collected previously, Knox was able to piece together that only a few days later Sergeant John Carr somehow miraculously reenlisted in the army. He then quickly died under mysterious circumstances and had been laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery. It was amazing, really, how history could be effectively rewritten on both large and personal scales.
Stone and Carr were one and the same. Long suspected, it was nice to have confirmation. Stone had fled Triple Six. A short time later an empty coffin had been put into the ground at Arlington with Carr's name on the white marker.
Later that morning Knox poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it at his kitchen counter as his gaze ran over the personal items in the room that had been his wife's. He hadn't changed it much after her death. The home had been both of theirs, but it had really been Patty's. Knox had spent more time in other countries than he had his own. It just came with the job. This was her space. In a sense, after her passing, Knox felt he was merely renting it.
The place he'd gone to in downtown D.C. was a news archive center maintained by the federal government. The feds burned a lot of money, without doubt, but some of what they purchased was actually useful. In his last days at Triple Six Carr had been assigned to a post in the Brunswick, Georgia, area with his official cover being that of an instructor at the then relatively new FLETC, or the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. From the daily logs that Knox had found, Carr was gone a lot from his post. On several occasions Knox had discovered that when Carr had been missing from FLETC, somewhere else in the world, a person of interest to the United States had died or disappeared.
Knox had canvassed the archives looking for one item in particular. After an hours-long search, but aided by his knowing the week span he was looking for, he found it. An obscure item in the local Brunswick paper detailed the disappearance of a local couple and their two-year-old daughter. A grainy photo of a woman was identified as Claire Michaels. Her husband, John, and their daughter, Elizabeth, had also vanished. John Michaels had been employed as an instructor at FLETC, the article said. There were rumors that some local federal cop-haters might have been involved and had targeted the Michaelses because of John's occupation. Knox searched for additional stories or any possible break in the case, but found none. The CIA had effectively buried it all, deflecting suspicion onto a logical if bogus source.
Knox stared at the old black-and-white image of Claire Michaels that he had taken a copy of from the archives. He wondered if the fragments of another picture of the woman currently resided inside the ballistics entry in the chest of a senator from Alabama. If he were a betting man, he would've laid down a stack of hundred-dollar chips that the photo taped to Senator Simpson's newspaper the morning he died was of Claire, John Carr's wife.
Okay, Finn had been telling the truth. They'd killed the man's family because he wanted out. Knox didn't want to believe that his government would treat a man who'd served them faithfully for many years in such a way, but the reality was it certainly could've gone down like that.