“Nope.” Macovich climbed down and shook hundreds of dead bugs out of the rag. “It ain’t gonna happen, not right this minute.”
Smoke was aware of the hard pistol in the small of his back. He was smart enough to realize that a skyjacking might be a little more involved than hijacking a Peterbilt, so maybe he needed to be patient and put a little more thought into this. If he shot the trooper, chances were he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to fly the helicopter before someone saw him and his road dogs out here in front of the state police hangar reading instruction books and looking under the many hoods.
“You give lessons?” Smoke tried another approach.
“Yeah, I’m an instructor.” Macovich popped open the luggage compartment and tossed the filthy rag inside.
“Tell you what, you give one of my guys lessons, I’ll make it worth your while, as long as nobody, and I mean nobody, knows.”
Smoke had already decided that Possum would take the lessons. Then, if Possum got caught, Smoke would just hire somebody else and carry on with business as usual. Possum was Smoke’s least favorite road dog, anyway, and Smoke really didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to him and sometimes regretted kidnapping him from the ATM machine. Smoke gave the trooper his pager number and said to give him a beep if he was interested, but he had better do it soon because Smoke was a busy man. Furthermore, Smoke said, if the trooper was bored with his low-paying, mindless job, Smoke could probably use him on his pit crew.
“You got a pit crew?” Macovich was so impressed he stopped locking up the helicopter and stared at Smoke in open admiration.
“Fuckin’ A.”
“Woooooo! NASCAR?”
“A driver,” Smoke said, thinking fast and sounding impatient. “That’s why I’ve got to be so secretive. Just one mention of my name and I got more fans coming at me than you got bugs hitting your window. It’s like being a prisoner if you’re as famous as I am.”
“Wooo! What’s the number of your car?” Macovich knew of no NASCAR driver with dreadlocks, but he could understand the young man’s being in disguise off the track to escape his frantic groupies.
“Can’t tell you, asshole,” Smoke bullied him. “But you want to be on my pit crew,” he added as he stalked off, “you give me a fucking call. Soon.”
WHILE Macovich was considering the opportunity that had suddenly presented itself, Andy was drinking beer and sitting listlessly inside his tiny row house on the fringes of the Fan District, where marginal people lived in denial of their surroundings.
No matter what the neighbors reiterated when they rocked on their porches at the end of long, hard days, the only thing of historical value about Andy’s neighborhood was that it was old. Beyond that, the area was run-down with no place to park, and sometimes people recently released from area halfway houses and clinics decided to come into the neighbors’ lives without being invited. Andy’s one-bedroom brownstone was neither air-conditioned nor properly heated, and it wasn’t unusual for him to get power surges and spikes that were threatening to his computer.
At the moment, he didn’t care if his power went off completely. A deranged killer had left evidence on his porch, and he wished Slipper would hurry up and e-mail Trooper Truth. Andy got up and shoved a chair halfway across the dining room. He angrily snatched another beer out of the kitchen refrigerator and returned to his computer.
Words began to flow through his fingers as he composed a pithy essay and posted it on the website. Slipper e-mailed Trooper Truth, and Andy answered and then fell asleep at the keyboard. When the telephone woke him up, he was slumped over with his head on the dining-room table.
“Oh shit,” he groaned, looking around, dazed and stiff as the phone continued to ring.
“Hello?” he answered, hoping it was Hammer, and that she’d already read his new essay and liked it.
“Is there somebody there named Andy Brazil?” a vaguely familiar female voice inquired over the line.
“Who wants to know?”
“This is First Lady Crimm.”
“Yes, First Lady!” Andy said, startled. “What an unexpected surprise . . .”
“You’re to report to the mansion at six for drinks and a light supper. That’s six tonight.”
“Thursday?” Andy asked, confused about what day of the week it was.
“Why, I guess it is Thursday. I don’t know where the weeks go. We’re in the big pale yellow house in the middle of Capitol Square on Ninth Street, right before you get to Broad. I know you’re relatively new to the city and were suspended for a year and therefore might not know your way around.”
First Lady Crimm handed the phone back to Pony and smiled with satisfaction as her daughters looked on from the antebellum breakfast table.
“I still think you should have discussed this with Papa first.” Grace nodded at Pony to please add more butter to her grits as wind gusted in from the north and a hard rain began to fall.
“He liked the young man. I could tell,” Mrs. Crimm replied. “Your father has a lot on his mind. My goodness! One minute the sun’s out, and it’s raining the next!”
“He notices more than you think he does. And if he’s suddenly flying around with some blond-haired former city cop who’s now a trooper who’s been suspended before, Papa might remember he had nothing to do with it,” Faith said as rain pummeled the old slate roof.
“Do with what?” the First Lady asked.
“With him suddenly flying us.”
“Nonsense. We need more pilots. I don’t know what’s happened to all our pilots unless they’re busy with the speed traps and don’t have time for us anymore. And you heard what the young man said. He has something important to discuss with your papa, and I, at least, want to know what it is.”
Pony was searching for the portable phone base unit. He could never find anything in the mansion and its guest houses when the Crimms lived here, and on especially trying days, he wasn’t sure the prison officials had done him a favor by assigning him to the mansion’s domestic staff. Other inmates who worked for the First Family were outside repairing things, doing the gardening, raking leaves, and polishing the state cars.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” Pony said without looking anyone in the eye. “I can’t seem to find the base unit for the phone.”
Constance, Grace, Faith, and the First Lady were momentarily distracted, just as they always were when someone couldn’t find something. Regina was the only member of the First Family who preferred to eat unassisted. If Pony served her, it took too long. She helped herself to toast, grits, eggs over easy, another banana, and sourwood honey that the governor of North Carolina had sent last Christmas to slyly remind the Crimms that the Tar Heel state was far superior to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
“It was here a minute ago.” Faith was getting frustrated, her horse-shaped face pale and scarcely visible because she had not colorized it with heavy makeup yet.
The First Family had learned the art of searching all over the house without ever moving from their chairs. Pony had never understood how people could pull this off, but then if he were so special and smart, he wouldn’t be wearing a white jacket and waiting on the Crimms morning, noon, and night.
“Excuse me, Miss Faith, but where was here?” Pony politely questioned her. “When you saw it last, I mean.”
“Just call the number.” Regina said with a mouth full. “When it rings, you’ll hear where it is.”
“That only works if you’ve lost the phone, not when you lose the base unit,” Constance snapped, impatient that phones, base units, and other things did not stay in their proper places.
“The base unit does ring, actually, as you so wisely pointed out yesterday,” Pony reminded the First Lady, although she had never pointed out anything to him directly in all the terms he had worked for the Crimm family.
A solution was at hand, but the same problem persisted: Inmates were not allowed to have the First Family’s private phone number. So if the base
unit were to be located, a member of the First Family would have to dial the number herself, and this was strictly against protocol. The task fell into the job description of personal or administrative assistants, or grade sixes, and at this early hour, no grade sixes were at work yet.
The breakfast table turned into a tableau of the First Family’s females frozen in indecision, except for Regina, who was still piling food on her plate and unmindful of protocols.
“Here.” She stuck out her hand. “Give it to me, Pony.”
He came around behind her and carefully set the phone by her placemat, giving her plenty of body space as if he were serving a flaming dessert. She stabbed out the secret number with honey-coated fingers and immediately the base unit rang under Regina’s wadded-up housecoat on top of the mahogany sideboard.
“Hello?” Regina said into the phone, making sure she was the one who was calling. “Hello?” she tried again, crossing pajama-covered legs that reminded Pony of felt-covered tree stumps wearing filthy furry slippers. “Maybe I should sign on with the EPU.” She returned the phone to Pony. “I’m bored to death of official duties.”
“You couldn’t be assigned to us.” The First Lady was opposed to the idea and intended to discourage her daughter. “Unless you had yet another EPU trooper assigned to protect you while you were protecting your sisters, Papa, and me.”
“Show me that in the Code of Virginia,” Regina argued. “Bet it’s not in there.”
“If I may speak,” Pony spoke up as he wiped off the phone and returned it to the base unit. “It’s not in there—not anywhere in any section of the Code about the First Family needing to protect itself and be protected at the same time.”
“Maybe you can discuss it with that handsome Trooper Brazil, and I’ll let him be the one who talks you out of it,” the First Lady said to Regina. “Being a trooper is very dangerous and unrewarding, and speaking of troopers, did any of you happen to read Trooper Truth this morning?”
“We just got up,” Constance reminded her mother.
“Well, he told the most interesting and mysterious story about who shot J.R.”
“Why’s he writing about Dallas?” Faith puzzled. “That’s been off the air forever.”
“This is a different J.R.,” the First Lady informed her daughters. “But it’s a shame Dallas was canceled. Your papa never got over it and was just furious when the network took that show off the air. You know, there’s nothing good on TV anymore except for the shopping channel.”
A WORD ABOUT EATING EAGLES
by Trooper Truth
Quite possibly, a young man the Jamestown archaeologists nicknamed J.R. was America’s first white-on-white homicide—loosely speaking, since America wasn’t called America back when Jamestown was settled.
But if you visit the excavation site and take a look at the fiberglass cast of J.R.’s skeleton, you can’t help but be moved by the plight of a young man dying so far from home and then lying in hard Virginia clay for four centuries before a trowel discovered the stain of his unmarked grave. J.R., by the way, means Jamestown Rediscovery and is the prefix given to every artifact and feature found on the site, which includes graves and the dead people in them. We don’t know who shot J.R. At this writing, we aren’t even sure who J.R. is.
But through science, J.R. has managed to tell us a thing or two. Results from radio-carbon dating confirm that he died in 1607, possibly just months after the first settlers arrived at Jamestown, so we can assume he was one of the 108 English men and boys who sailed from the Isle of Dogs and got stalled in the Thames. Anthropology pinpoints that he was a five-foot-five robust male with a rounded chin and small jaw, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, had no signs of arthritis and relatively good teeth, indicating his diet did not include sugar. Tests for lead, strontium, and oxygen isotopes show that he grew up in the United Kingdom, possibly in southwest London or Wales.
J.R. was fatally wounded in the leg with a sixty-caliber musket ball and twenty-some shot, which back in those days would be considered a combat load. Forensic testing shows the matchlock rifle that killed him was fired from too far away for the injury to have been self-inflicted. He bled to death quickly and was buried without a shroud in a hexagonal-shaped coffin with his feet turned to the east, according to proper Christian tradition.
If J.R. was, in fact, shot by another settler, and I have a feeling he was, then that leads to theories about motive, which can easily be inferred from historical documentation. A stroll through centuries-old writings and a subsequent commingling of words with excavated artifacts and bones could lead to the following possibilities for why J.R. might have been murdered.
Perhaps he was involved in political intrigue or domestic difficulties, or didn’t work and play well with others, or was a thief, or took more than his share of food. Maybe he engaged in cannibalism, like a later settler who was executed after being caught salting down his dead wife. Or perhaps J.R. squabbled with a Natural who somehow got hold of a firearm and figured out how to use it. Or more likely, J.R. got into an altercation with another armed settler who decided the best place to shoot him was in the leg because maybe J.R. was wearing a helmet and upper-body armor at the time. Maybe the settler shot him after discovering that J.R. was spying for the Spanish or was a pirate.
I suspect J.R. was a spy or a pirate or both. Whatever the truth really is, J.R.’s death was not a pleasant one, because quite likely, he was conscious long enough to know he was dying. I envision him lying inside the fort and slipping into shock as he watched himself bleed to death from a severed artery behind his knee, and I can imagine the uproar inside the fort as settlers scurried about with rags and river water and whatever medicinal aids they could muster. Perhaps they were trying to comfort J.R. or perhaps everyone was fighting and shouting and questioning the shooter.
Who knows? But as you imagine this tragic drama, my faithful readers, then certainly you must be asking the same glaring question that I am: Why is there no mention of J.R.’s death in John Smith’s writings? Why, to date, is there no reference found in any record of a young first settler being shot to death, either by accident or on purpose?
It just goes to show that history is nothing more than what certain people decide that future generations ought to know. I suppose when John Smith was writing his accounts and telling tales for the benefit of King James and people back home, Smith was savvy and shrewd enough to figure that financial backers and prospective settlers might be a bit turned off to hear that people in Jamestown were mutinous, murderous, mad from drinking bad water, constantly under siege by the Naturals, and forced by starvation to eat snakes, turtles, and at least one eagle, based on the trash the settlers left behind.
The beginning of America wasn’t exciting, fun, honorable, or even patriotic, but could certainly serve as a model for a reality television show that would make Survivor seem like Fantasy Island. And sadly, nothing has changed much. Just look at the recent, sadistic murder of Trish Thrash! We don’t know who killed her, either, but I ask you, my community-minded readers, to please e-mail me if you happen to have known Trish or knew anything about her life, including her hobbies, interests, what she read, if she used the Internet, and if she might have mentioned anything or anyone new in her life of late.
Be careful out there!
Fourteen
Governor Crimm had been studying the latest Trooper Truth printout for an entire hour, and was fascinated, appalled, and disgusted by it. He repeatedly moved his magnifying glass over every word as Major Trader briefed him on matters of state and offered him a homemade chocolate-covered cherry.
“General Assembly will start up before we know it,” Trader was saying. “And we’re simply not prepared.”
“You always say that,” the governor replied as he absently ate the candy. “Who did shoot J.R., anyway? Has anybody pressed the archaeologists about this? And if not, why not? How do you think it makes us look if we can’t solve a crime that was committed four hundr
ed years ago and was certainly witnessed? I want you to call Jamestown and demand that the J.R. case be solved immediately, and we’ll issue a big press release and show the citizens of Virginia that I will not tolerate crime.”
“Juvenile crime,” Trader added a helpful spin.
“Yes, yes,” the governor agreed.
“And I think we can safely suggest he was shot by a pirate—or it might be in our best interest to claim as much, at any rate,” Trader added. “We could say it was any pirate—doesn’t matter, don’t you see? All pirates were bad then and are bad now, so it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever if we propose that J.R. wandered outside the fort to get a bucket of water from the river, and all of a sudden he spied a Spanish ship flying a Jolly Roger flag, and next thing he was shot.”
“I thought we were avoiding drawing attention to our pirate problems.”
“Highway pirates are another matter,” Trader replied as he gloated over his secret pirate activities that would soon enough make him rich from booty.
Crimm stopped the magnifying glass on the word cannibal. “Imagine some settler salting down his dead wife and eating her,” he said in revulsion as he envisioned himself dying of starvation, only to discover his voluptuous wife had passed away.
He thought of her nude, fleshy body and wondered how anybody could eat his wife without at least cooking her first, but he supposed if he cooked Maude, the other settlers would see the smoke and smell the odor of roasting human flesh and would hang him from a tree. Oh, what a hideous scenario, and the governor’s submarine lurched and banged into something, sending a painful jolt through his hollow organs.
“That was a capital crime back then,” Trader observed as if he were reading Crimm’s mind. “The tour guides at Jamestown will tell you that anyone caught eating his wife or anybody else was immediately dragged off and hanged. Then they’d bury him very quickly and in a secret location so another settler didn’t salt and eat him, too.”