The Stickmen (7 page)

Smith sputtered, then directed his
associate, “Put him back on the floor. Break some ribs this
time.”

The giant meat-hook hands were instantly
forcing Garrett back down, as Garrett wailed, “No, please! Jesus
Christ! Can’t you Air Force guys take a joke!”

Instantly, the hands let go, and Smith and
Jones were exchanging the oddest of looks.

“What, uh, makes you think we’re in the Air
Force, Mr. Garrett?” Smith asked.

Garrett laughed out loud. “Come on, the Air
Force has been using that hokey Jinko’s Printing cover for more
than three years. It’s
common knowledge
now, boys. Christ,
novelists are starting to put that stuff in spy novels. You need to
change those logos, like, at least every six months. And while
you’re at it, tell the FBI to lose those ridiculous H.R. Tires
signs on their Hostage Rescue Team vans. The skinheads and nazi
militias have that one printed in their damn training manuals.
Everybody under the sun knows that one.”

Smith stalled, narrow-eyed. “I’m impressed,
Mr. Garrett. You know a lot about a lot of things.”

“Great. And lose the Beretta 92s. You want
to keep your kidnap victims guessing, don’t you? Any sap with a
sliver of brain sees a 92F-model and he knows right off the bat
he’s dealing with the Military. Pack a Glock or a Sig—then
people’ll think you’re Interpol or GSG-9. Pack a .25 and they’ll
think you’re Russian GRU or the Israelis…”

“Hey, boss,” Jones said, “how’s this punk
know this kind of—”

“Shut up, Carson!” Smith shot back, and then
was instantly biting his lip.

Garrett beamed. “Hey, great! Carson, huh?
You guys are something, you know that? Real pros. You haven’t had
me in this damn Big Brother meat-box for five minutes and I already
know who you work for and one of your names.”

Smith was shaking his head, wincing.

“So what’s this all about?” Garrett went on.
“Why the shake, and why me? And what the
hell
are
Air
Force
ops doing making a daylight grab in D.C.? Usually it’s
the Field Intel Branch from the Washington Navy Yard that pulls
these capers in the district, isn’t it?”

“Hey, boss,” Carson cut in again, “how’s
this punk—”

“Would you SHUT UP!” Smith yelled back at
his man. “You’re verifying everything he says!”

“Sorry, Captain Morran—er, I mean—SHIT!”

Garrett was laughing in spite of himself.
“Man, you guys are priceless. If you’re the best shake team the Air
Force has got, then God help us. Step on your dicks any harder and
you’ll fall over.”

Smith was rubbing his temples.

“What’s the scoop, fellas?” Garrett went on.
“If I gotta miss the Teletubbies today, I damn sure have the right
to know why.”

“We’re just taking you for a little ride,”
Captain Morran aka Mr. Smith said. “That’s all.”

Garrett didn’t like the sound of that; it
was almost a cliché. “Great. I’ve always wanted to meet Jimmy
Hoffa. So how long’s it take to get to Yankee Stadium? I mean, that
is
where you guys buried Hoffa, right? Under the west
bleachers, fourth tier?”

Now, even Morran spared a smile. “You’re a
real hoot, Mr. Garrett.”

««—»»

Two more days,
Ellie Romesch thought.
Bring it on!

In two more days, school let out, and that
meant that Ellie Romesch—”Miss Romesch,” to her third-grade
students (though most of them pronounced it “Romp-sh”)—would be
blowing this cement pop stand called J. Exner Campbell Elementary
School and not coming back until the last day of August. Three
months of fun in the sun, at least that’s what she hoped. Sandy
Point Beach was only a thirty-five minute drive, plus she had a
week’s time-share at Ocean City second week of July.
I’m going
to work on my tan, work on my body, and work on finding a man who
will actually call me back after the first time we go to bed.
Ellie had the tan and the body covered—year-round membership at the
tanning salon and some meaningful numbers to the tune of 38-24-36.
No, it was that third component of the formula that she’d never
quite gotten a grasp on. She was twenty-eight years old; she wasn’t
getting any younger, as her mother liked to remind her
every
time
they talked on the phone, and most of her friends from
Shepard College were all married and either had kids or were
halfway there with stomachs sticking out till next Tuesday. Ellie
wasn’t sure how she felt about the kid-thing (she taught six
roomfuls of the little buggers five days a week, nine months a
year—but…

It’d be nice to have a husband,
she
sullenly thought. Until then, though:
I’ve got two more days
with these crumb-snatchers, so do your job!

Her last creative assignment to her
fourth-period class was for the pupils to paint their most
interesting dream. With kids this young, of course, she needn’t
expect much, but on the other hand these pre-adolescent years could
spell a lot of a child’s future interests. This was just basic
brush-work with tempera paint on 30-grade paper. No Picassos yet
but Ellie could see that a few of her floor-monkeys were exhibiting
a genuine aesthetic interest—the unbidden urge to
create.
She truly felt that this was a wonderful thing…and she supposed
that it also might mean she was a good teacher. Art, after all, was
release. Children needed to be taught to do that, to
release
themselves (except in their pants, which happened on occasion,
too).

One day they would all find their inner
drives and their passions. Ellie saw herself as someone helping
them along. She was one of the directors of this intricate play
called Childhood.

She never had much trouble, nothing like the
schools in the city. Most of these kids here were from the Army
base, well-mannered, well-disciplined, not a lot of riff-raff. If
anything, a fair share of them seemed a little
too
well-mannered—products, perhaps, of any overbearing home
environment.

Like Danny Vander, for example.

A good kid, bright, but lately it seemed
that something was stifling him. He brooded a lot; he seemed tired
as if he wasn’t getting enough sleep. Ellie could only guess that
Danny’s father—a high-ranking officer—ran the household like a boot
camp. An environment like that could drain a kid’s vitality
fast.

As her class painted quietly, Ellie walked
down the aisles between their desks. She stopped at Danny Vander’s
and looked down over his shoulder.

For a change, he seemed focused as he
painted his picture; he didn’t even notice that Ellie was standing
behind him.

Wow,
she thought when she examined
his picture. “That’s very imaginative, Danny.”

The choppy tempera painting depicted the
outline of a houseframe; in the houseframe there was a little boy
in bed, but beside the bed stood several stick-figures. There was
something scary about the way he’d painted the figures: black
shapes with a white-slit where one would expect eyes. Outside the
houseframe he’d drawn a long black cylindrical object in the sky,
with a trapezoidal-shaped window toward the front of the
cylinder.

Spacemen, she guessed, or monsters from some
video game. “What are you going to call it?” she asked.

Danny looked up from his desk, his face is
sullen, tired. “It’s called The Stickmen.”

“That must’ve been some dream.”

“It’s a nightmare, Miss Romesch. I have it
all the time.” He sighed frustratedly. “My dad makes me go see this
special doctor. He thinks there’s something wrong with me.”

Poor kid,
Ellie thought.
Sounds to
me like the problem isn’t with you, it’s with your father.
She’d seen it too many times: these spit-and-polish West Point
officers forced their kids to be duplicates of themselves, had them
marching around the house like little soldiers. It was no way to
raise a kid. “Well, that’s very good work,” she said in
after-thought.

“Thank you, Miss Romesch.”

“Maybe you’d like to be an artist when you
grow up.”

Danny shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I
want to be in the Army, like my dad. I want him to be proud of
me.”

Ellie ground her teeth at the comment. “I’m
sure he’s
very
proud of you already, Danny. Just because
he’s in the Army doesn’t mean you have to be. You can be whatever
you want.”

Chuckie Murrett, the boy sitting right
behind, nudged Danny’s shoulder. “Hey, Danny, show Miss Romp-sh the
other one you painted. The other one’s even cooler.”

“Oh, you’ve done another painting?” Ellie
asked.

Danny nodded sullenly. “Yes, Miss
Romesch…”

“Well let’s see it. Is it from another
dream.”

“Another nightmare, Miss Romesch.”

Danny lifted up his blotter and from
beneath, he removed a second tempera painting.

“Isn’t that cool, Miss Romp-sh?” Chuckie
Murrett enthused.

This one left nothing to be interpreted.
Oranges, reds, and yellows curved up into a blossoming billow.
Danny had painted the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

“They don’t understand, Miss Romesch,” Danny
said.

But Ellie was still off-guard from the
impact of the second painting. Someone was polluting this kid’s
head in a big way.
The father,
she decided.
It must
be.
Where else could a child this age get such brutal images.
“I’m sorry, Danny. What did you say?”

“They don’t understand.”

“Who, Danny?”

“My mom and dad,” the little boy went on.
“And Dr. Harolds.”

Now the kid was really sounding weird. “What
is it they don’t understand, Danny?”

Danny glumly pointed to the painting: the
nuclear mushroom cloud. “This is going to happen,” he said.

Ellie’s face drew up in total lack of
comprehension. “
What?
”

“But nobody believes me, Miss Romesch. The
Stickmen aren’t really from a nightmare.” Then the little boy
gulped. “The Stickmen are real…”

««—»»

As the strange ride drew on, Garrett
fidgeted in the back of the windowless van. Obviously his kidnapers
didn’t want him to know where they were taking him—further
indication that they didn’t intend to kill him—so Garrett
discretely tried to keep time. So far, they’d been on the road for
forty minutes. Within that he considered rush-hour and the fact
that the van never seemed to accelerate to a highway speed. His gut
and his equilibrium told him they were heading north-east of the
city. If he was lucky he might later be able to come up with a
rough map radius.

“Come on, fellas. This whole thing smells
worse than Waco. If you wanted to do an e-action on me, you’d just
put prussic acid on my doorknob or aflatoxin on my postage
stamps.”

“We’re just delivery men, Mr. Garrett,”
Morran replied, his gun put away. “We don’t do things like
that.”

“Yeah, and I’m Aldrich Ames. Everybody knows
it was Air Force field ops who went undercover in Panama and
poisoned the flight-controllers and radar men at the main the night
of the invasion. You turned someone in the chow hall and put
shellfish toxin in the chile con carne, so these guys were all
either throwing up or dying when Seal Team Six came in.”

Morran was rubbing his temples again,
shaking his head.

“And let’s not forget Colonel Loa in Phan
Thiet,” Garrett added. “That was—what? 71, 72? The guy was
funneling Military Assistant Group money out of Vietnam to his
villa in the south of France. You ask me, you should have
assassinated
all
those corrupt sons of bitches.”

Wearied now, Morran said, “Believe me, Mr.
Garrett, our little trip today is nothing so dramatic. You wouldn’t
have come if asked, so that’s why we—”

“Abducted me,” Garrett finished. “Without my
consent and with malice and clear threats of deadly force, not to
mention torture, snatched me off the street and violated my
Constitutional right to be protected from false arrest.”

“Maybe he needs more floor time,” Carson
said.

“Yeah, and maybe you need a lobotomy,
Lurch,” Garrett replied.

“Yeah, and maybe you need—”

“Shut up!” Morran insisted. “Both of you.
You want to know where you’re going, Mr. Garrett? Let’s just say
that one of your…admirers wants to have a little talk.”

Just then the van slowed, seemed to pull up
a slight incline, and stopped.
Driveway,
Garrett immediately
thought.
They’re taking me to a house?
Morran popped the
back doors, and when he shoved Garrett out, that’s exactly what he
was looking at: a nice two story house in a quiet
upper-middle-class neighborhood. Garrett looked around as he was
escorted away from the van.

“No bag over my head?” Garrett asked. “I
thought you guys didn’t want me to know where we’re at.”

“You
don’t
know, Mr. Garrett,” Morran
said. “All you know is we’re about to take you into an ordinary
house.”

Garrett stopped, closed his eyes and touched
his chin. “I’m psychic, didn’t you know that? Uhhhhh, let me guess.
Bethesda, Maryland.”

Morran grabbed Garrett’s shoulder hard and
shook him. “How the
hell
did you know that?”

Garrett spun around and pointed. “Because it
says so on that For Sale sign right across the street, you
no-black-op non-tailing surveillance-bungling
moron!
”

In front of the house directly across from
them stood a sign that read: FOR SALE: LONG, FOSTER & SONS -
BETHESDA’S #1 REALTOR!

“Just get in the house, smart guy,” Carson
said with a stiff shove.

Garrett stumbled forward, and looked around
some more. Several powder-blue U.S. Government cars were parked at
the curb, and inside the home’s front bay window, he could see
several uniformed Air Force SPs glancing out.

Carson knocked with his huge fist, then
opened the door.