Blown Away Read online

  BLOWN AWAY

  G.M. FORD

  To Betty

  for always being there

  Tell them I said something.

  —Last words of Pancho Villa

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  “The head landed over there.”

  2

  “I keep telling you, I don’t work this way,” Corso…

  3

  Corso flinched as the medical technician worked on the tear…

  4

  “That’s all,” she said. Corso took the clipping from her…

  5

  Despite law enforcement’s best attempts to control the flow of…

  6

  Snow was falling, coming straight down, thick and puffy like…

  7

  Corso sat on the edge of the bed and removed…

  8

  The snowflakes were smaller now. This morning’s flakes had turned…

  9

  The Bullseye Diner had one of those neon signs they…

  10

  Corso stood still and watched as she thought about slamming…

  11

  From the look of it, Charlie’s Bar and Grill had…

  12

  Corso sat in the seat revving the engine. He kept…

  13

  The SUV landed wheels down in the water, rocking back…

  14

  “They said it would be a week…at least,” Randy…

  15

  In flight, the little jet was nearly silent. Only the…

  16

  The overhead speaker hissed. Corso pushed himself upright in the…

  17

  Crisp black-and-white images. Split screen. Another bank. Much smaller than…

  18

  He gave Andriatta a polite nod and fixed his tinted…

  19

  “We can kick this thing around forever and it’s still…

  20

  Brown suit turned out to be Warren’s FBI equivalent. Special…

  21

  “Male. Thirty-five or so. Wearing a bulky red sweater and…

  22

  Morales tapped the microphone three times. The conversational buzz in…

  23

  Corso dropped his room key onto the nightstand and picked…

  24

  Corso wiped the hair from his eyes and tried, once…

  25

  “Cyanide? You gotta be shittin’ me,” Warren said. He caught…

  26

  The heavy breathing was over, the silence inside the van…

  27

  Corso pressed his face against the window and looked west.

  28

  Andriatta hugged heself. “It’s way past my bedtime,” she said.

  29

  At 180 miles an hour the sound of the engine…

  30

  By the time the van rolled to a halt at…

  31

  Corso pulled his head back behind the pillar, rested his…

  32

  Morales circled his former desk, slipping personal items into a…

  33

  “Of the original nineteen, two are dead and another two…

  34

  She was asleep, curled up on the narrow metal cot,…

  35

  “LAX always makes me feel like the circus must be…

  36

  The Hertz kid turned bright red. “There’s a…a bit…

  37

  Clad in a white courtesy hotel robe, Andriatta stepped through…

  38

  Corso brushed the bundle of paperwork from the chair seat,…

  39

  The frozen snow crunched under the SUV’s tires; it sounded…

  40

  Ruth Hadley made him the minute he walked in the…

  41

  The hotel lobby was jammed. Suitcases, backpacks and garment bags…

  42

  The smile was smug, the desk immaculate. Everything geometrically aligned…

  43

  Dirty gray clouds drifted overhead. The air was wet and…

  44

  He was ten years old when the soldier came to…

  45

  He walked gingerly, like a man recently recovered from an…

  About the Author

  Other Books by G.M. Ford

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “T he head landed over there.”

  Corso turned and watched the guy trace an arc in the sky with his finger.

  “Right where that red Honda is parked,” the guy said.

  “Where was Marino sitting when the bomb went off?” Corso asked.

  This time the guy pointed to the area in front of Corso’s boots. “Right there. See? There where the pavement’s been patched.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You have to look close,” the guy said. He pointed. “See the little rectangle there?”

  Corso bent at the waist. In the gathering gloom, he couldn’t make out the supposed patch in the pavement, so he dropped to one knee and used his hands. He found the outline with the tips of his fingers. Traced it. Maybe five feet by three. Done very neatly, as if by a landscaper rather than a road crew.

  “Didn’t even need to be fixed,” the guy said. “Didn’t have a mark on it.”

  Corso looked up. The guy was in his middle thirties, working on a potbelly. He needed a haircut almost as badly as the herringbone sport jacket needed a trip to the dry cleaners. Other than grooming problems, however, Carl Letzo seemed like a pretty nice fella…more or less what Corso had come to expect from small-town newspaper reporters. What he hadn’t come to expect, however, was for small-town newspaper guys to meet him at the airport. Especially when he hadn’t told anyone he was coming.

  “It was like the spot had cancer or something,” Carl said. “Something that needed to be cut out before it could spread. Something to be expunged…you know, so the body could get about its business.”

  Corso rose from the pavement. He dusted off his hands and looked around. Something about these places out on the edge. A sense of whiteness…a sense of the void…of something vast and impenetrable just beyond the horizon. He’d felt it before, many times, that sense of impermanence. Like the place was a line of demarcation rather than a home…a sentinel rather than a respite…like the only thing left to those who stayed behind was to witness the passing of the parade.

  “So, Carl,” Corso began, “I appreciate you bringing me down here and all, saved me a bunch of time, but ahhh…just for the record, how was it you knew I was flying into your fair hamlet here?”

  “Dorry.”

  “Who’s Dorry?”

  “Your publicist.”

  “Ahhhhh.” Corso exhaled. It all made sense now. He’d changed publishers since his last book. Taken more money than he once could have imagined and run like hell. Hadn’t occurred to him they’d assign him a publicist. He made a mental note to call his new editor…Greg was it?…yeah…at night…at home.

  “So…you were here when it happened?”

  Carl pointed at the Bank of Commerce, in whose parking lot they now stood. “Right there by the corner of the building. That was as close as they’d let me get.”

  The one-story rectangle of a bank was only slightly more adorned than the pavement had been. The lack of pizzazz seemed determined to convey a sense that these people were not wasting your money, or theirs either, for that matter.

  All that remained of the surrounding trees were the black trunks set in the frozen grass and, spread above the ground, the gnarly, arthritic remnants of branches, quivering in the early-evening breeze.

  To the west, the sky was leaden,
backlit, as if somewhere in the reaches of the heavens a long-shuttered window had been opened, announcing to the senses…before the first scent of salt air…before the first crab shack…announcing that terra firma was about to end and that, like it or not, Plan B was about to become the order of the day.

  Corso checked his watch. Four-ten and the late-fall light was already slipping into the lake for the night. Out on the road, streetlights sputtered to life as traffic crept along. It was cold enough to snow. Cold enough to keep people indoors for long periods of time. Suicide weather.

  Behind Carl, a forest green Acura slid across the lot, its studded tires snapping the bare pavement like castanets. Malingering remnants of dirty snow huddled beneath the shrubbery.

  “I figured there’d be a lot more snow.”

  Carl nodded. “Usually is. Up until a few weeks ago, we had it piled halfway up the fences. Then we got a warm spell. Rained like crazy for a whole week. Melted everything.”

  “What was the weather like last year?”

  Carl Letzo thought about it. “About like this. ’Cept snow on the ground. We got about six inches the night before.” He looked around, seeing it all again in his mind’s eye. “Pretty much business as usual. People around here don’t let a little snow get in their way.”

  Corso gestured toward the back door of the bank. “So he comes out that door with the money.”

  Letzo nodded. “He’s got the money in a white plastic bag,” he said. “He doesn’t get more than a coupla steps out the door and the cops grab him.”

  “He try to break away from the cops?”

  Letzo shook his head. “That was right before I got here, but I don’t think so. I’ve never heard anybody talk about him resisting.”

  “So what then?”

  “From what I hear, he’s wailing about how he’s going to blow up if he doesn’t follow the directions in the note. The cops are scared to be close to him, so they set him out in the parking lot and wait for the bomb squad to arrive.”

  “And?”

  “That’s when I got here.” He pointed at the pavement. “He was sitting here on the ground…cross-legged.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Crying. Begging for somebody to help him.”

  “And then?”

  Letzo’s eyes narrowed. “Kerblooie. The bomb went off. Blew parts of him all over the place.”

  “Where was the bomb squad while all this was going on?”

  He tried to control his tone but didn’t manage it. “On their way,” he said.

  “How late were they?”

  “Something like ten minutes,” Letzo said without hesitation.

  Corso looked him over. “Do I take it that their failure to arrive in time has been subject to some local debate?”

  “There was plenty of blame to go around.”

  “From the time somebody called for the bomb squad, how long did it take for them to arrive?”

  “Depends who you ask.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because there’s some debate as to exactly when they received the call.”

  Corso waited for him to continue. He did. “The folks in the bank claim it was twenty minutes or so before they got here. Bomb squad claims the call came later. They say they made it in nine minutes flat.”

  “That’s quite a discrepancy.”

  “A genuine bone of contention.”

  “And nobody ever followed up on it?”

  “On what?”

  “On the discrepancy. Last time I looked, that’s what the press does. They poke their collective noses into the nooks and crannies of dissension. They point fingers. They assign blame.”

  Letzo shrugged. “There’s still a lot of raw feelings around here.”

  “So?”

  Corso watched the man’s cheeks flood with color. “I guess you could say the town’s kinda closed ranks around the incident.”

  Corso stared in disbelief. “That mean they all tell the same story or they don’t tell the story at all?”

  Carl Letzo looked embarrassed. “Mostly both,” he joked.

  “Sounds to me like there’s an investigative report around here someplace.”

  “Be my last report,” Letzo said.

  “Really?”

  When he shrugged again, Corso sensed the gesture must have become habit, a way of lessening the sting of his journalistic ineffectiveness, a sad coming to grips with his personal and professional limitations. “And you’re hoping I’ll turn over rocks until something crawls out.” Corso barked out a dry laugh.

  “I didn’t say that,” the younger man said.

  “Because, I hate to tell you this, Carl, but coming up here wasn’t my idea. My new publisher thought the whole ‘bomb around the neck’ thing was cute. He insisted I come up here and nose around for a book. I usually pick my own subjects, but you know…” This time, Corso looked embarrassed. “…guy’d just given me enough money to buy my own jetliner…what was I going to do?…say no?” Corso didn’t wait for an answer. “Believe me, Carl, getting railroaded into writing somebody else’s idea of a story doesn’t appeal to me, so what I’m going to do is spend tomorrow seeing the local sights, then bright and early next a.m., I’m going to jump on the first flight out of here. No muss, no fuss, no bother. I’ll tell him there just wasn’t enough for a book, then get on with my life.”

  Letzo pulled a hand from the warmth of his jacket pocket and ran it down over his fleshy face. “You gotta understand,” he began. “This place…it just made it. Just missed joining the rest of the rust belt. We had just enough going on to avoid going under. Folks around here are proud of that. They don’t want to be hearing anything negative right now.”

  Corso made a rude noise with his lips. “That’s what newspapers do, Carl. They tell people things they don’t want to hear.”

  Corso watched Carl Letzo’s facial expression change from to sullen to resigned and back to sullen. The tick-tick of tires on pavement pulled Corso’s head around.

  A brown-and-white police cruiser nosed into the parking lot, wheeled left toward where they stood and stopped directly behind Corso. The low angle of the sun and the tinted windows made it difficult to see who was inside.

  After a moment the driver’s door swung open with a groan. The door was still bouncing on its hinges when she stepped out. Somewhere in her early forties, she was stocky without being fat. A beer keg of a woman. Maybe five-foot-ten and about half that wide. In the right light, in the right mood, the right person might have called her pretty. Not today though.

  Today she was all business, all hard cop eyes and hard cop attitude.

  “You peddling your papers down here, Carl?” she asked.

  Something in her tone set Corso’s teeth to gnashing.

  “Carl’s safeguarding the public’s right to know,” he said.

  She neither acknowledged Corso nor moved her eyes from Carl Letzo.

  “This your attorney, Carl?”

  Carl used his hand to gesture toward Corso. “Actually, Chief Cummings, this gentleman is a writer. His name is Frank Corso. He writes…”

  “I know what he writes,” she interrupted. Her words hung in the air like smoke. Carl folded his arms over his chest.

  “This has the feel of that old Rod Steiger movie,” Corso said. “You know where Sidney Poitier comes into town and gets warned off by the Southern sheriff…the old ‘you in a heapa trouble now, boy’ kind of thing.”

  She offered a thin insincere smile. “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Corso, we’re about as far north as we can get.”

  “Must explain the weather,” Corso said, matching her tooth for tooth.

  After an awkward moment, she relaxed her shoulders, softened her face, and very nearly managed to sound affable. “Come on, Mr. Corso. Jump in. I’ll give you a lift to your hotel.”

  Corso was shaking his head before she finished the sentence. “No thanks,” jumped from his mouth. “I try to stay out of police cars.”


  “Unofficially, of course,” she added with a warm smile.

  “I particularly try to stay out of unofficial police cars.”

  “Why don’t we…” she began.

  “Am I under arrest?” Corso countered.

  “Would you like to be?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “You and I have a few things to get straight.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the possibility that you may be guilty of withholding information vital to a murder investigation. Such as your stated intention to poke around in an ongoing felony investigation, which I’m here to tell you, isn’t gonna happen.”

  “Stated where? Where did I ever say anything like that?”

  She looked at him as if he must be kidding, ducked her upper torso back into the cruiser and came out holding a magazine that she flipped Corso’s way. The pages flopped open about halfway to Corso. He had to take a step forward and bend at the waist in order to keep it off the ground.

  The minute he got it turned right side up, he sucked in his breath and winced. This week’s People. He was on the cover. Standing on Saltheart with his shirt off. Liberal computer enhancement had produced a tightly muscled, Mr. Bad-ass look. The headline read: Cold Case. The bold white type suggested the bestselling author was going to solve a mystery that had baffled even the FBI. Bestselling book to follow. See page nine.

  He rolled the magazine tight, walked over, and handed it to the chief of police. Her narrow gray eyes demanded an explanation.

  Corso shrugged. “News to me,” he said.

  “How can that be?”

  “I’ve got a new publisher. Apparently he’s a bit more gung ho than I’m accustomed to.”