The Spy's Little Zonbi Read online

  Limp paused, reaching behind his seat to rummage in his camera bag for a bottle of what had to be hot water. He took a long drink and offered it to Chase, who shook his head.

  “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  “Aside from the monitoring, the agents were left alone to sightsee and do a little whore-mongering, as long as they didn’t seem to be doing any real spying. Every once in a while, a spy would be picked up, interrogated, beaten a little, and have his camera and film analyzed. They’d stick him on a plane headed home, his face full of ice packs. That would require a swift and comparable response from the violated spy’s country, but nobody was really interested in turning these things into some kind of Hatfield and McCoy feud. The host countries would mostly tolerate the visits and use them as a chance to update the photographs in the enemy spy’s fat dossiers. You following?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Ingrid Bergman crazy, or Bette Davis crazy?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can’t deal with Mack right now,” Limp said, and his voice had returned to flaming gay mode, which was somehow comforting. “I could go for some fancy egg blossoms and hollandaise sauce. Maybe lime instead of lemon? How’s that sound to you, Pie? I know just the place.”

  “I wanna believe you aren’t screwing with me.”

  “Well, maybe I am trying to screw with you in a few different ways.” Limp reached across and squeezed Chase’s left thigh, just above the knee. “But lying to you, I am not. I knew you had all sorts of potential the minute I saw those blue eyes.”

  Limp steered them away from the boat launch and slips, over the river, then through busy traffic out onto Route 13. They slowly headed north, through a dozen traffic lights, toward the Delaware border.

  “You’ll be given photo or story assignments just like any foreign journalist,” Limp began over a huge, rank smelling plate of crab eggs benedict. The combined odors of Old Bay Seasoning, eggs, and dead body left Chase glad he’d stuck with coffee and a muffin. They sat in a booth at the Delmar Diner, a little brick building just below the Delaware state line. “Your work won’t be much different from any regular journalist’s.”

  “So what’s the spying part? Is there anything dangerous?”

  “Nah, you get the fluff. You just do the interviews and take the pictures, just like what’s on the assignment sheets at the Times.” Limp sopped up yellow hollandaise sauce with his muffin and stuffed it in his mouth.

  “Okay.” Chase still wasn’t clear what made it espionage. “So what happens to the stories and pictures I take?”

  “You might never know.” Limp dipped his napkin in water to dab sticky sauce and greasy flecks of crabmeat from his fingers and chin. “God this is so scrumptious but I can just feel my ass getting fatter. Honey, like any good woman, you just do what you’re told and you’ll get to travel to some exotic places. Do you know how many countries there are where you can buy actual living, breathing human beings?”

  “So why do you recruit people instead of doing these assignments yourself?”

  “Oh, gosh, I did, for years and years. But my stomach just couldn’t take the travel and God-awful food. I’d get the most terrible bouts of Montezuma’s revenge.” Limp sat back and polished his bulbous stomach with both hands. “It was absolute misery. Just imagine running down some third-world sidewalk with your belly churning and your butt cheeks clamped together, and not a single clean toilet within five miles. But you’re young and tough and are probably more careful about what you put inside your body, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “Look, you’ll work and have a regular job for AP doing local stories most of the time. That’ll be your cover. You’ll be a legitimate journalist and you’d survive the most thorough background check. But then you’ll get a special assignment and drop everything. Easy as that.”

  “But you asked if I could kill someone.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes plans don’t go perfectly. But don’t worry about it too much. We all have to kill one or two bad men here and there, but you can’t let it upset you. Ever hear of something called autoerotic asphyxiation?”

  Limp leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice. “We call it chokin’ off. You have to be careful not to go too far, though. Get right up to that special time and cut off the air. Makes me stir up just talking about it, Pie. You see stars and flashes of light, and you shoot off like there’s no tomorrow, oh my. It kinda gave me a head start in learnin’ how to kill a man.”

  “You were taught how to kill?”

  “Taught? Nah, somebody will show you how to cock a pistol if it might be needed. But I already know quite a bit about you.”

  “From my résumé?”

  “That’s a good one, Pie. I believe your daddy was regular Army and your sister lives with a lesbian activist in Syracuse, New York. I can name the seven years you had both bow and shotgun deer licenses. I know you’re an above average snow skier and can kick a soccer ball. I know your grade point average in Spanish class and that you did more than a little experimenting with various narcotics, mostly under the tutelage of your best friend Stoney.”

  “How’s my sister, by the way?”

  “Still a very strange young woman, judging by her photography shows. You think about it, Sugar. Sometimes we all gotta chase some wild geese here and there. That’s what wild geese are for.” Limp sat up and wiggled the fingers on his right hand for the waitress and pecan pie for two. “You have the summer to mull it over. In the meantime, Mack has been persuaded to give you a hard news assignment that might be worthy of some pretty boy capable of shooting a big front-page picture so early in his photojournalism career.”

  “I’d be dropping out of school?”

  “I believe a family just isn’t complete without skeletons. My dearest momma clean bit off my daddy’s nose right around the time they divorced.”

  “I can’t leave school,” Chase said, looking out the big diner window.

  “We aren’t still on that subject,” Limp said sharply. “Some time back, I was taking pictures of the writer Erica Jong when she was speaking over at the college. My goodness what a powerful specimen—with those huge, strong hands and that gravelly voice. I sat there practically forgettin’ where I was and what I was ’sposed to be doin’. Just watchin’ those big, delicious fingers all filled up with antique rings. I wanted to climb up on that stage and just bury my face in her gorgeous bosom while she talked all hard and deep in my ear.”

  Chase looked down at the brown pie. “Erica Jong?”

  “Okay, so then she says something real simple, which maybe you should carry around for a bit. Erica says in her deep voice, ‘If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more,’ ” Limp repeated in what Chase assumed was an imitation of Ms. Jong’s voice. “Think about it.”

  And it did give Chase something to think about in the coming weeks—those long, hot summer nights when there was nothing good on the radio while he ironed his new Klan sheets.

  Chapter 7

  Chicken crap was everywhere during Chase’s summer on the Delmarva Peninsula. Caught in the soles of farmers’ boots, little geometric shapes sprinkled in Hansel and Gretel-like trails up grocery store aisles and down dark-colored movie theater carpets. It was smeared into his car’s floor mats and was responsible for the main stink coming from the dirty laundry basket in his crammed downtown one-bedroom.

  Sunday night through Friday afternoon, most of what Chase listened to was cops going out of service for lunch and fire dispatchers making alarm checks.

  “Everybody, toss a shovel of dirt at me on three,” Chase would say by day and sometimes dream at night. Coverage of ground-breaking ceremonies and check-passing affairs kept advertisers and new business owners happy.

  But when the week ended and the bars opened, the possibilities became endless, as the city and county streets quickly filled with drunk drivers, jealous gun owners, and a host of others
whose decisions were fueled by alcohol.

  Chase counted on the eight little red light bulbs at the top of his Radio Shack portable scanner to make all the grip and grins tolerable. Each bulb was the indicator light for an emergency frequency, and they lit up, one after the other, in quick succession, searching for a transmission. Salisbury City Police on channel one, Salisbury Fire on two and three, Wicomico County PD on four, then the larger volunteer fire companies on the remaining channels.

  “Come check this out!” A youngish cop led Chase to the far side of a wrecked Chevy, oil and coolant seeping toward the darkness at the edge of the road.

  “My god, look at that.” The cop’s voice was hushed as he pointed down through the gutted remains of a customized ’72 Nova. Its polished intake manifold was spattered with blood and its twisted right front quarter-panel was torn back to expose an engine block clean enough to eat off. Except now there was gore splashed from the passenger’s upper torso.

  The call came in as a “ten forty-two” (traffic accident) “and ten thirty-eight” (ambulance needed), “Route 50 at Powellville Road, all units respond.” The first officer had arrived a few minutes later and the call came in to “slow the ten thirty-eight and please ten twenty-one” (call by landline). Chase had learned that meant the accident was fatal and the details would be shared by telephone, depriving the civilians with scanners the macabre details.

  It was a certain detail the young cop wanted to share with Chase in the glare of the emergency spotlight along Route 50, just east of Salisbury, the road he and his friends traveled to reach the ocean.

  “I never seen anything like this.” The cop squatted just above the black pavement. “Ain’t that something?”

  Chase leaned over the cop’s broad shoulder and squinted into the maze of car parts to follow his line of sight. Next to a wiper blade and a large chunk of windshield was the steering wheel, still connected to a foot-long piece of steering column. Propped up by the spidery remains of glass, it still had both of the driver’s hands attached, neatly sliced away just below each wrist. The white-knuckled appendages gripped the wheel at the proper ten and two o’clock positions.

  “Talk about a death grip.” The officer stood to stretch his legs and start writing his report. In what seemed like an afterthought, the cop asked for a favor. “Get a picture of that, would ya? But don’t show nobody, all right?”

  An hour later, both lanes were open, the wreck had been towed on a flatbed and the glass swept away, leaving the scene as if nothing had happened. As if a car hadn’t lost control at a hundred or so miles per hour chasing a friend’s Camaro, glancing off a tree just a few feet from the shoulder, then bouncing and rolling down the slow lane until it came to a stop, hissing, with a turn signal blinking and one tire still spinning.

  Alive one minute and dead the next could have been the official Delmarva bumper sticker on summer weekends.

  Chase was scrubbing the developing trays and preparing to mix fresh chemicals when Limp barged through the large revolving door that kept the darkroom light-safe. An old radio was wired to a rooftop antenna to pull in an Ocean City station that played decent music at night. Eurythmics, Boy George, and Eddie Grant were big that summer. Prince and the dispatcher from the Salisbury City Police kept Chase company as he performed his own cleaning up after a car wreck.

  “We gotta talk, Pie.” Limp sat with hands clasped behind his head and legs stretched out in front.

  “What brings you out in the dark?” Chase rinsed his hands with warm water and grabbed an old dishtowel.

  “Mack and I have been talking ’bout you finally gettin’ your crack at a special story,” he said in his extra slow Southern way. “You been chasin’ ambulances and robbers and gettin’ along just fine. He agrees with my line of thought that all the noise those crazy Klan boys been makin’ deserves a little more notice from the likes of our news pages.”

  “An investigative story on the Klan? Really?”

  Limp pursed his lips and nodded.

  Over the previous weeks, local chapters of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan had a public relations battle heating up. It began when Klan members broke up their weekly Saturday night meeting in a marshy field near Princess Anne, climbing fully hooded and robed into the backs of Ford F-150 pickup trucks, loaded with six-packs and softball bats.

  Not one of the half dozen pickups made it out of the field without ejecting at least one fat man in a white sheet, but the trucks eventually hit the pavement with bald tires screaming. Information came from press room workers who didn’t mind shooting their mouths off unless it was to a cop or some dipshit reporter. Most didn’t give a darn about the news, didn’t care about the stories folded and wrapped up inside the thick bundles. They only gave a damn that there were bundles to be made and shipped out.

  The Klan group was big on softball bats as weapons because they also fielded a fast pitch team that traveled to tournaments around the Eastern Shore. They were not so cryptically named the White Knights and were tolerated as long as they kept their language in check around the women and children. Their record was just four wins and thirteen losses so far this season, but they expected to pick things up when their clean-up hitter was paroled in early-August.

  The first night Chase showed up decked out in a crisply ironed cotton bed sheet—which Limp had helped sew together—he was welcomed without any questions. His only immediate regret was not reinforcing the hood with some sort of cardboard cone, since it kept leaning way over to one side. The point could easily have put someone’s eye out.

  Chase pulled his Mustang right up to the regular spots they used in a field outside Princess Anne and joined the activities.

  “Take a six-pack,” had been Limp’s advice. “None of those boys ever turned away anybody cartin’ suds. That’s all the greetin’ card y’all be needing.”

  Limp had been right about that.

  Chase was welcomed with pats on the back of his sheet and then mostly ignored by the sixty or so beer-gutted revelers in their own dirty robes. All went about their business of lighting burn-barrels and hoisting a cross made from two by fours cinched with nylon rope. The wood stank of gasoline and was set ablaze after two kegs were tapped and bottle rockets were ceremonially fired up into the mosquito-infested night sky. Short speeches were offered by two officers, but most of what they said was impossible to understand because of their hoods and thick watermen accents.

  Chase discovered that the only things separating a KKK meeting and a night at the local bowling alley were the robes and the ten pins. There was lots of swearing and racist jokes, and plenty of griping about politics and Jew bosses. The night’s activities culminated in some mailbox baseball, where the boys all headed off in different directions to destroy mailboxes owned by black and probably Jewish families. The caravan of old pickups, belching thick exhaust and having to rev engines hard with the heavy payloads weighing them down, streamed out into the steamy hot July air. It was the driver’s job to zero in on mailboxes with the names Lincoln and Sapp, Washington and Blades.

  “We’re huntin’ Katz!” someone shouted and everyone in the pickup laughed.

  They took their chances with Bozmans and Bivens and Perkins, since they could have been white, but decided it didn’t really matter; they were drunk as shit.

  Chase had climbed up into the back of a rusty Dodge Ram with an ominous wide grill and one headlight. Stuffed with some of the fattest Klansmen, it couldn’t go fast enough to flip over—or so he figured—but their tires were spinning as they hit dry pavement, a one-eyed roaring monster careening into the darkness.

  “Cliffy, up on yer left!”

  “I see it!”

  Amos held the Louisville Slugger in his left hand while using his right to battle wind that was trying to rip his hood off. A lefty hitter, Amos wasn’t getting as much action as righty Tiny Simms. Chase sat with his back to the cab, thumping up and down on his rear, trying to hang on in a churning ocean of half crushed beer cans.

&
nbsp; “Cliffy, heads up on the right!” shrieked the four-hundred pound Tiny Simms, who’d already lost his hood a dozen mailboxes back. Simms, a right-handed hitter who was three-for-three tonight and hitting a respectable .400 in the league games the Times sometimes covered, took a few practice cuts, then got ready for the next mailbox coming at him at fifty miles per hour. With a slight uppercut, Simms sent the green metal box soaring into the front yard of a double-wide.

  “Home run!”

  “C’mon, Cliffy, you shit!” Amos complained from the opposite side of the truck bed, as they barreled on, coughing smoke and shedding empty beer cans. “It’s my turn to hit!”

  The party went on like that until the gas tank got down toward empty and nobody had the guts to work the pump in a Klan sheet. They headed back to the field in Princess Anne and everyone drove off with the look of impending hangovers.

  Late the next morning, the phone in Chase’s apartment rang with a tip about an arrest. Jimmy Ray Jones had been hauled in after being overheard bragging to one of the girls behind the Salisbury Dunkin Donuts counter. Chase was allowed to sit in on the interrogation as Jones confessed to the mailbox bashings, as well as a few other crimes they’d committed. Jimmy Ray had been driving one of the other trucks that had been responsible for five smashed car windows and a dumpster fire behind the elementary school. The group obviously had no respect for the rules of mailbox baseball.

  When both the Times and the Delaware State News up in Dover ran front page photos of the mailbox and property destruction, a Delaware neo-Nazi chapter didn’t take it too well. In fact, it turned out they were jealous of all the Klan’s attention, according to one of the Times delivery drivers who had friends in both groups. These little crime sprees were good for attracting new members, and new members meant more guys pitching in for beer, Leon Tooman had told Chase in exchange for a pack of smokes.