J.D. Trafford - Michael Collins 03 - No Time To Hide (12 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The conference room jumped with activity. The team of FBI agents, attorneys, forensic accountants, and support staff were giddy with the news: Michael John Collins was turning himself in.

“Don’t trust him,” Vatch tried to dampen their enthusiasm. “This guy has been running for years, and now all of a sudden he’s got a change of heart? I don’t think so,” Vatch rolled his eyes at Armstrong’s
naiveté. “You’re being suckered.”

“He knows he’s going to get caught sometime, and all he wants to do is go to the priest’s funeral.” Armstrong wasn’t going to allow Vatch to belittle his accomplishment. Armstrong wanted the credit for getting Collins. “I think it’s fair. His attorney said that he’ll arrive in the front. I can meet his car and I will personally walk him inside for the service. When the service is done, Collins wants me to walk him out the back to a car to be processed.”

“You’re a fool.” Vatch’s tongue flicked. “Collins wants to make us look bad, again. He’s wants to embarrass us.”

“He doesn’t want a show,” Armstrong said. “That’s what his attorney told me. Collins just wants me. No SWAT team. Nothing else. If anybody but me shows up, the attorney said that Collins isn’t going to show.”

Vatch shook his head and looked at Brenda Gadd at the head of the conference table.

“You believe this? You’re actually going to go along with this?”

“Well, your tactics haven’t exactly been successful.” Gadd paused, and the room was silent. Nobody was going to say anything until United States Attorney Brenda Gadd had finished her thought. “Perhaps there might be a middle ground.”
 

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

The news had to be false. Brent Krane opened the bottle of prescription pain killers, got two pills, crushed them, and then put the crushed powder in a small glass of water. “Down the hatch.” He picked up the glass and drank the clouded liquid in one gulp.

He’d seen Michael Collins and Andie Larone burn. He’d lit the fire himself.

A few drops of water rolled down the side of his mouth, but he didn’t care. He’d gotten the hit he’d needed. Brent took a breath, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t true. He told the crowd that Collins was dead, but they wouldn’t stop yelling at him. They reminded him that they had wanted to go back, but he had kept driving away. He was a coward.

Brent Krane felt a wave of nausea, then a rush of pleasure that muted the crowd. The pills were twenty-four-hour time-release tablets, but crushing them meant that the full drug wouldn’t slowly enter the system as designed. Instead, he got all the power at once.

Brent stood straighter in front
of a full-length mirror in his bedroom.

“You’ll see,” he scolded the crowd and puffed out his chest. “The cripple cop is a liar.” Brent Krane tried to make himself look bigger. I am getting bigger, he thought. He flexed his skinny bicep. I’m getting stronger, too.

Brent flexed, again. The crowd said nothing.

“That’s what I thought. You’re all the ones who are truly afraid.” He flexed his muscles a final time. Brent took a moment to examine a new outbreak of acne on his neck, and then he went over to the closet and found a dress shirt.

The shirt was wrinkled, but unlike the other clothes in his studio apartment, it was clean. He put the shirt on, and then buttoned up.

He walked back over to the mirror and took a look. Brent didn’t like what he saw. He looked like he was back at Saint Mark’s Boarding School. All he had to do was add a blue and green striped tie and blue blazer.

Memories of boarding school flashed past him, uncontrolled. The drugs pulsed through his body and his head spun. Brent thought about his fall. It all came back to his fall.

He was never a popular kid, but he was feared. He was respected. Teachers coddled him. Why? Because of who he was, Joshua Krane’s son — the wealthiest boy in a school filled with wealthy boys. Then along came Michael Collins.

Brent attacked the image in the mirror. He kicked it. He punched it. Glass cut into his feet and hands, but he didn’t stop. He was numb to the pain and blood. Brent kept going, kicking and punching until he collapsed on the floor.

The voices returned, and he started to cry.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Mourners began to arrive at Saint Thomas the Compassionate at four o’clock. Agent Armstrong stood in the balcony under the church’s Rose Window, titled, “Formless Creation.” It was comprised of various shards of mysterious blue glass, some big and some small, radiating from a cluster of five hundred diamonds at its core. The window cast the balcony and most of the church in a peaceful aqua light, but Armstrong was not at peace. He was furious.

Although Brenda Gadd had told him that she wasn’t going to follow Vatch’s advice, Armstrong had already spotted five FBI agents in the sanctuary and he saw two agents in a blue van outside on the street. And then there were two cops in an unmarked Dodge Charger.  If Armstrong looked hard enough, he figured that he could spot a half-dozen more.

He took his phone out of his pocket. Armstrong checked the screen to see if Michael Collins or his attorney had called and he had missed it. 

Armstrong pressed a button. There was nothing.

He shook his head. It’s bad enough that he had to put up with Vatch, now Gadd was bringing in every goon with a badge that she could find.

Armstrong walked down the stone spiral staircase to the main level.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Armstrong stepped into the narthex. He turned his head to the right, looking for Collins. Instead of finding him, however, Armstrong bumped into a woman coming through the front door.

“Excuse me,” Armstrong said, then he realized who it was.

“It’s okay,” Brea Krane smiled. “You’re working.”

Armstrong was stunned. He looked at Brea Krane, and then realized that her brother was also there. Brent Krane stood behind her.

Armstrong lowered his voice.

“What are you two doing here?”

“We were invited to see the show,” Brea said. “Brenda Gadd told us that there might be some media here, and that they’ll probably want to interview us.”

Armstrong’s fists clenched into tight balls.

“This is a man’s funeral.”

“A man who aided and abetted the murder of my father and the theft of our inheritance,” Brea’s perfect lips curled into a perfect smirk. Armstrong had no control over her.

“I’ve got work to do.” Armstrong started to turn away, but then he noticed Brent Krane’s waxy complexion and the white gauze bandages wrapped around his hands. “And you might want to keep your brother away from the cameras.”

Armstrong put his hand on Brea’s shoulder, and whispered, “The kid needs to sober up.”

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

The truth was that Father Stiles never wanted a funeral. As a priest, he understood the need for grieving and a human being’s need for ritual. He didn’t, however, like the idea of people staring at his dead body laying in an open coffin. He didn’t like the idea of people being sad at his death.

“I’m a priest,” Father Stiles had told Michael. “I’ve led a life of sacrifice. Death should be celebrated with a party, not a funeral. I’m going to meet Saint Peter and spend eternity in the presence of our Lord and dancing with the greatest musicians in the world. How cool is that?”

Michael thought about those late-night philosophical conversations with Father Stiles. They’d occur in Father Stiles’ personal office and library, which filled the upper floor of the rectory. Michael wasn’t as convinced about heaven and hell as Father Stiles. He certainly liked the idea of a better place. He liked the idea of a grand plan to provide boundaries and purpose for a chaotic world, but Michael had never heard a good explanation for the cruelty that existed around him, especially among the people who claimed to be acting on behalf of God.

“If there is a God,” Michael would say, “then that God is ambivalent and spiteful. Why would I worship that? The absence of God makes more sense. We should do good for the sake of doing good, not because we think we’ll get a big reward someday, not to curry favor with a deity that set a flawed people on a path toward destroying themselves for fun and profit.”

At that (or something similar), Father Stiles would always smile. “Perfect,” he’d pat Michael on the shoulder. “Doubt is the foundation of faith. Absolutism is the opposite of faith, and absolutism really has no place in religion.”

###

Michael knelt down on a patch of grass on the edge of the open grave. He was still a doubter, but if anyone deserved to go to heaven, it was Father Stiles.

Michael stared down into the empty hole. It was where Father Stiles would be buried after the church’s formal mass. A vault had already been placed in the grave in which a pine casket would be lowered. For a tombstone, Father Stiles had requested a simple white wooden cross.

It was a beautiful site on a small rolling hill deep within the grounds of New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery.  

The large garden cemetery was over one hundred and fifty years old. It had served the urban community as a spiritual oasis as well as a natural refuge for plants and wildlife. It wasn’t uncommon to see a fox, turkey, or deer roaming the grounds in the early evening, despite the cemetery’s location in the heart of the Bronx.

Kermit and Andie knelt beside Michael, one on each side. They all stared into the hole in silence, and then finally Michael spoke. He had promised Father Stiles a private ceremony, and Michael was going to keep his promise.

“Father Stiles.” Michael began, looking up at the sky. “I don’t know if you’re watching me. I don’t know if you’re looking out for me, but I remembered my promise made long ago.”  Michael paused as a tear rolled down his face. He wiped it away.

“Sorry,” Michael said. “You told me no tears, but you know me — always have to break the rules.” Michael laughed, and then wiped another tear away. “You wanted me to do a dance and celebrate, but I don’t think I can. I know you weren’t afraid of death. I know you didn’t want to be a burden on anyone, but you need to be thanked.”

Michael looked at Andie. He held her hand and squeezed. Then he started again. “And Father, I want you to know that I love you, and that Saint Thomas is full of people right now who are suffering through a boring mass on a beautiful sunny afternoon because they also love you. …” Michael lost his train of thought. He closed his eyes, and then recovered. He went back to the list. He went back to Father Stiles’ instructions. He circled back to the beginning.

“I remember what you wanted me to do,” Michael nodded. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

He looked at Kermit, signaling that it was time and Kermit got up. Kermit walked over to his backpack, and then he brought his backpack to Michael.

Michael unzipped it. He found a plastic grocery bag. “I got the stuff you wanted.” He removed the plastic bag from the backpack, smiling and crying at the same time. “One box of frozen pizza rolls. Your favorite.”

Michael took the box of pizza rolls out of the plastic grocery bag and opened the box. “You should know that it’ll take years to get the pizza roll smell out of your office. That smell is going to haunt whatever priest replaces you at St. Thomas.” Michael, poured the individual miracles of modern processed food onto the ground. Then he looked at the gravesite. There was about a four inch opening between the vault and the edge of the hole.

“On television there isn’t a concrete vaul
t, so I’m just going to slip these suckers in between here.” Michael knelt down and pushed the pizza rolls into the crack. “That way our friends at the cemetery don’t mistake them for garbage, which in a sense they are, and clean them out before they put you in there.”

Michael handed the empty box to Kermit, and then he took a CD out of the bag.

“I know you wanted the original 45 record from your collection, but I didn’t have access to your things at the moment.” Michael looked down at the Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits album that he had bought on the way to the cemetery. “So this is going to have to do. You and the King, buried together.” Michael slipped the CD into the same crack where he had put the pizza rolls.

Michael opened a carton of eggs. He took one out of the carton and held it up in the sunlight. “And finally, a perfect egg, just like you.” Michael smiled, and allowed a few tears to fall. “You wanted me to do this, to remind me of Easter, to remind me of forgiveness and resurrection.”

Michael looked at the egg in his hand, and then slipped it through the crack.

“Always trying to convince me, even in your death. Although this time, you aren’t even that subtle.”

###

Michael, Andie, and Kermit met Quentin at the car. Quentin had been watching the private funeral service from afar, as his cell phone repeatedly vibrated with incoming calls from Agent Armstrong. Quentin had no obligation to answer his phone, and he perversely enjoyed witnessing the mighty FBI panic and squirm.

“You ready?” Quentin opened the back door of his rusted Toyota Camry.

“Ready.” Michael shook Quentin’s hand, and then climbed inside. 

Andie followed Michael. She got in the back, while Kermit got into the front.

“Shotgun, baby.” Kermit clapped his hands and closed the door. “Me and the Q, a new dynamic duo sprung upon the scene. Up front, loud and proud.”

Kermit tapped on the dashboard, and Quentin pulled away.