Last Man Standing

  Kevin Westbrook had filled up all his sketchbooks and was now sitting and staring at the walls. He wondered if he would ever stand under sunlight again. He had grown used to the sounds of the machinery and the water running. It no longer affected his sleep, though he regretted growing used to this condition of his imprisonment, as though it were an omen that those conditions would become permanent.

  The footsteps reached his ears over the other sounds and he retreated to his bed like an animal in a zoo cage as visitors approached.

  The door opened and the same man who’d visited him earlier came in. Kevin didn’t know who he was and the man had never bothered to tell Kevin his name.

  “How you doing, Kevin?”

  “Got a headache.”

  The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol. “In my line of work, I always got some of this handy.” He gave two pills to the boy and poured him out a glass of water from the bottle on the table.

  “Probably lack of sunlight,” added Kevin.

  The man smiled at this. “Well, we’ll see if we can do something about that soon.”

  “That mean I be getting out of here soon?”

  “It might mean just that. Things are rolling along.”

  “So you won’t be needing me no more.” As soon as Kevin said this he regretted it. That statement could certainly cut both ways.

  The man stared at him. “You did a pretty good job, Kev. Real good, considering you’re just a kid. We’ll remember that.”

  “Can I go home soon?”

  “Not up to me, actually.”

  “I ain’t say nothing to nobody.”

  “Nobody like Francis?”

  “Nobody means nobody.”

  “Well, it won’t matter, really.”

  Kevin instantly looked suspicious. “You ain’t hurting my brother.”

  The man held up his hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t say we were. In fact, if things go okay, only people who need to get hurt are going to get hurt, okay?”

  “You hurt all them men in that courtyard. You hurt them dead.”

  The fellow perched on the table and crossed his arms over his chest. Though the man’s movements weren’t threatening, Kevin drew back a bit.

  “Like I said, the people who deserve to be hurt are the ones who get hurt. It’s not always that way, you know that, lots of innocent people get hurt all the time. I had me enough lessons on that, and looks like you have too.” He eyed the wounds on the boy’s face.

  Kevin had nothing to say to this. The man opened one of the sketchbooks and looked at some of the drawings.

  “This the Last Supper?” he asked.

  “Yep. Jesus. Before they crucified him. He’s the one in the middle,” said Kevin.

  “I went to Sunday school,” the man said with another big smile. “I know all about Jesus, son.”

  Kevin had drawn the painting from memory. He had done it for two reasons: to pass the time and for the sheer comfort of having the Son of God close right now. Maybe the Lord would get the message and send some guardian angels down to help one Kevin Westbrook, who desperately needed some type of intervention, divine or otherwise.

  “This is good stuff, Kevin. You’re real talented.”

  He looked at another picture and held it up. “What’s this of?”

  “My brother reading to me.”

  His pistol on the nightstand, his men outside the room with their own guns, his brother Francis would put a big arm around Kevin and draw him close to his massive chest and they would sit and read far into the night, until Kevin would fall asleep. He would awake in the morning and all the men would be gone and so would his brother. But the place they had stopped in the book would be marked; it was a sure sign that his brother intended to come back and finish reading it to him.

  The man looked surprised. “He’d read to you?”

  Kevin nodded. “Yeah, why not? Ain’t nobody ever read to you when you was little?”

  “No,” he replied. He put the sketchbook back on the table. “How old are you, Kevin?”

  “Ten.”

  “That’s a good age, your whole life ahead of you. Wish I had me that.”

  “You ever gonna let me go?” asked Kevin.

  The man’s look managed to cut Kevin’s hopes right to nothing. “I like you, Kevin. You kind of remind me of me when I was little. I didn’t really have any family to speak of neither.”

  “I got my brother!”

  “I know you do. But I’m talking about a normal life, you know, Mommy and Daddy and sisters and brothers living in the same place.”

  “What’s normal for some folks ain’t normal for everybody.”

  The man grinned and shook his head. “You got a lot of wisdom in that little head. I guess nothing about life is normal when you get down to it.”

  “You know my brother. He ain’t somebody you fool around with.”

  “I don’t know him personally, but me and him do some business together. And I’m sure he ain’t somebody you want to fool around with, and thank you for the advice. But the thing is, we’re working together right now, sort of. I asked him real nicely to do something for me having to do with that Web London fellow, and he did it.”

  “I bet he done it ’cause you told him you had me. He doing it ’cause he don’t want nothing to happen to me.”

  “I’m sure he did, Kevin. But just so you know, we’re going to return the favor. Some folks real close to your brother want to cut in on his business. We’re going to help him out there.”

  “Why you gonna help him?” Kevin asked suspiciously. “What’s in it for you?”

  He laughed. “Man, if you were just a little bit older, I’d make you my partner. Well, let’s just put it this way, it’s a win-win for everybody.”

  “So you ain’t answered my question. You gonna let me go?”

  The man rose and went over to the door. “You just hang in there, Kev. Good things tend to happen to patient folks.”

  36

  When he got back to the carriage house, Web called Bates at home, waking him up, and told him about his violent encounter with Big F. He also told him about his meeting with Cove. He rendezvoused with Bates and a team of agents at the courtyard in southeast D.C. an hour later. The sun was just starting its rise and Web could only shake his head. He hadn’t even been to sleep yet and it was time to start a new workday. Bates gave him another phone to replace the one Westbrook’s guy had smashed; same phone number, so that was convenient.

  Web thanked Bates, who didn’t comment on the fresh injuries to Web’s face, though Bates clearly was not in a good mood.

  “You keep going through government equipment like that, it’s coming out of your damn paycheck. And I left you messages on your old phone that you never returned.”

  “Well, damn, Perce. I get voice-mail messages popping up on my screen sometimes a day after I get them.”

  “I never had a problem.”

  “Well, that really helps me, doesn’t it?”

  They had left one agent to watch their cars. In this neighborhood, nothing was safe or sacred, least of all Uncle Sam’s property. In fact, some enterprising young fellows would like nothing better than to chop-shop a Bucar and make a tidy profit in the bargain.

  As they walked, Bates’s temper seemed to grow. “You’re lucky you’re alive, Web,” he snapped, not seeming happy at all that Web had been so lucky. “That’s what you get for going off on your own.

  I can’t believe you went into that with no backup. You disobeyed my orders. I could have your ass, all of it.”

  “But you won’t because I’m giving you what you need. A break.” Bates finally calmed down and shook his head. “Did he really blow the guy away right in front of you for being a snitch?”

  “That’s not something one tends to get wrong.”

  “Jesus, the balls the guy must have.”

  “Bowling balls, if they fit the rest of him.”

  They all went inside the
target building and down to the basement level. It was dark and damp, and it stank. Going from a stone mansion in Virginia horse country to a dungeon in Anacostia made Web want to laugh. Yet he really had to concede that he was more of a dungeon guy.

  “Tunnels, the man said,” commented Bates, looking around. There were no working lights down here, so each agent had brought a searchlight. “See, the thing is, we checked for things like that, Web.”

  “Well, we need to check again, because he seemed to know what he was talking about, and there’s really no other way those guns could have been brought in with no one seeing anything. Don’t they have plans down at the Department of Public Works that would show the location of the tunnels?”

  “This is D.C., okay? If you want to go and try and find anything at a city agency, be my guest. Stuff from yesterday is hard enough to track down, much less from half a century ago.”

  They searched everywhere until Web came to a large collection of fifty-gallon oil drums in a far corner. They were ten abreast and ten deep. “What’s with all this?”

  “Furnace system was oil-based. Supply just got left when the place was shut down. Too costly to move it.”

  “Anybody check under them?”

  In answer, one of the agents went over to the pile and pushed against one of the drums. It didn’t budge. “Nothing’s under here, Web. You wouldn’t park a million tons of oil on top of a tunnel you had to get in and out of.”

  “Is that right?” Web eyed the drum the man had tried to move. He put his foot against it and it was indeed full. Web pushed the one next to it and the one next to that. Then he pushed against drums in the second row. All full.

  “Okay, are you convinced?” asked Bates.

  “Humor me.”

  As Bates and the other agents watched, Web climbed on top of the drums and started stepping from one to another. With each one he would stop and rock his weight back and forth. When he reached the middle of the cluster of oil drums, he rocked on top of one can and almost fell over. “This one’s empty.” He stepped over to the drum next to it. “This one too.” He marched out a four-drum-by-four-drum grid. “These are all empty. Give me a hand.”

  The other agents scampered up to help and very quickly they had cleared away the empty drums and their lights shone on a door in the floor.

  Bates stared at it and then looked at Web. “Son of a bitch. How’d you figure that one out?”

  “I did a case when I worked in the Kansas City Field Office. Guy scammed a bunch of bankers by filling up a warehouse with drums that were supposed to contain heating oil the guy was using for collateral for this huge loan. The bankers sent their inspectors out and sure enough, they opened a few drums and they were all filled with heating oil. But they only checked the front fringes because guys in suits don’t like to climb over dirty oil drums. Turns out ninety percent of the drums were empty. I know because I checked every damn one after we were called in when the guy skipped town.”

  Bates looked chagrined. “I owe you one, Web.”

  “And believe me I’ll hold you to that.”

  Guns drawn, they opened the door, climbed down into the tunnel and followed its straight and then sharply angled path.

  Web flashed his light on the floor. “Somebody’s been through here recently. Look at all those tracks.”

  The tunnel ended in a stairwell. They headed quietly up, every man alert and ready to fire. They eased the unlocked door open and found themselves in another building much like the one they had just left. The area they were in had a lot of abandoned property. They moved stealthily upstairs. The room they found there was large and empty. They moved back downstairs, exited the building and looked around.

  “I figure we went west about two blocks,” said one of the agents, and Web agreed with that. They all looked at the building where the tunnel had led. Faded lettering on one wall identified it as once having been a food distribution company, and it came complete with a loading dock where trucks could deliver bananas. Or machine guns. At the loading dock were a couple of abandoned trucks, tires gone, doors missing.

  “In the middle of the night you pull up with a truck and squeeze it right between these two, off-load your crates, take ’em through the tunnel and that’s it,” said Web. His gaze swept the area. “And there are no residences around here, no one to see anything, that’s probably why they used it.”

  “Okay, but we got Big F on murder one. With your testimony he goes away forever.”

  “You have to find him first, and from what I’ve seen he’s pretty good at what he does.”

  “We’re going to need to put you in protective custody.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m good on that.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you’re good on that? This guy has every incentive to blow you away.”

  “If he had wanted to do that, he would’ve done it last night. I was just a tad helpless then. Besides, I’ve got a job to do—protect Billy and Gwen Canfield—and I’m going to finish that job.”

  “That’s what I don’t get. He murders a guy right in front of you and lets you walk.”

  “So I could deliver the message about the tunnels.”

  “What, he’s never heard of a damn phone? I’m not kidding, Web, I want you in protection.”

  “You said you owed me, I’m calling in my chit.”

  “What the hell is more important than staying alive?”

  “I don’t know, Perce, in my line of work I’ve never really thought about it very much. And I’m not going in.”

  “I’m your superior, I can make you.”

  “Yeah, I guess you can,” said Web, looking at the man evenly. “Aw, shit, you’re more trouble than you’re worth, London.”

  “Figured you learned that a long time ago.”

  Bates looked around the loading dock. “The thing is, there’s nothing tying the Frees to this warehouse or those guns. Without something to go on, we can’t hit them. Right now they’re being little angels, giving us no excuse to pay a visit.”

  “Nothing has turned up with the killings in Richmond to connect them to the Frees? That’s a lot of tracks to cover.”

  “From the angle of the shot on Judge Leadbetter we traced it to a building across the street that’s under construction. Hundreds of people work there all the time, laborers who come and go.”

  “What about the phone call he got?”

  “Pay phone in southside Richmond. No trace.”

  “But the judge was downtown. So at least two people were involved and they had communication links so the timing of the call was right.”

  “That’s right. I never thought we were dealing with amateurs here.”

  “What about Watkins and Wingo?”

  “All the people in Wingo’s office have been checked out.”

  “Cleaning people? One of them could have applied the atropine to the phone receiver.”

  “Again, we checked. Those people come and go, but we found no leads.”

  “Watkins?”

  “Gas leak. It was an old house.”

  “Come on, he gets a phone call right as he walks in. Again, it’s split-second timing. And by somebody who knew all three men’s routines. And he just happened to have a solenoid in his phone that would make the spark necessary to blow him to heaven?”

  “I know, Web, but these guys also had lots of other people with incentives to kill them. One or two of the murders might be related, but maybe all of them aren’t. At least right now all we have to link them are the phones and the Ernest Free case.”