Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [85]
“We have to leave in fifteen minutes,” I told my grandfather, and left him in the gift shop.
Outside, the sounds were vivid—the call of birds and children’s voices shouting “Eee-ha!” as they scrambled over the barrels of the cannons. Fat black gnats flew in my ears and up my nose. And there was the slow, mysterious grinding of cicadas, like a mechanical toy winding and unwinding. Winding and unwinding, like an old lady rocking on a porch.
In the white house in the center of the green battlefield, there had, in fact, lived a lady named Mrs. Judith Carter Henry. Her pretty china dishes were preserved in the museum. Eighty-five years old, a widow, she refused to leave the safety of her bed, even when Union sharpshooters took over the house. The Confederates fired back with howitzers and Mrs. Henry was mortally wounded. Some say she took more than twenty hits. Sources vary.
By then I knew enough about the movement of the battle to see it play out vividly in the still, hot fields. I thought of Poppy, traveling all over the map, California to Colonial Virginia, in search of a hero to heal his wounded heart. Would I ever be that hero in his eyes?
In a few hours, I would become a federal agent of the United States government, bound to carry the shield of core values upon which I, good soldier, was about to swear. Us and them. Black and white. Law and order. It was the defining moment. I was about to become Special Agent Ana Grey, for good. I wonder now, Would Darcy have let Steve Crawford go?
A tractor slowly rolled the hay. The fields fell off toward the north, toward the glittering haze of Washington, D.C., from whose alabaster domes I would receive my orders.
I heard the cicadas singing. Their musical clicks went up and down.
Far away, in the white house, Mrs. Henry was rocking.
This had been her property. It had been a farm.
Twenty-eight
Special Supervisory Agents Angelo Gomez and Mike Donnato are waiting at a rest stop on the I-5 when I pull up in Darcy DeGuzman’s Civic. My cover is an appointment with a local dentist at a phony number manned by an FBI agent in L.A.
“Guys? This was bad.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
Donnato indicates a picnic area behind the brick restrooms, not visible from the freeway.
“Let’s go around back.”
They have dressed down for Oregon—polo shirts and jeans—but I’ve been up here long enough to make them for out-of-staters, by their clean shoes and precision haircuts. We swing our legs over the seats as they set their supersize coffee cups on the weathered redwood table.
“Dick Stone just about buried the kid alive!” I am still incredulous. “And he sets it up, the bastard, so I almost run over the kid’s head.”
“Was Megan part of this?”
“No, she was in the car with us. Sara and I were just bringing her back from the airport. Mom leaves, and Stone runs amok. She was panicked. Even she couldn’t calm him down. I’m feeling completely degraded by this guy. No matter how much backup and surveillance you provide, I still have to live in that house and play by his rules, and he keeps changing them.”
Donnato: “No control.”
“Over what Dick Stone is going to do? You can’t predict his crazy shit.”
“Okay, hold it.” Angelo leans forward on the picnic table, Mr. Stability and Reason. “Remember the scenarios in undercover school, where they kept on changing the framework, so you didn’t know if it was day or night, or what was real and who was on your side?”
“Yes, the counterfeiters turned into drug dealers, shot a couple of their own—very convincingly—and held a gun to my head.”
“What’d you do?”
“I did the cocaine. Just like I smoked the weed when we were out having some fun with a Colt .45 at Herbert Laumann’s in-laws’ house.”
“You survived and Laumann survived,” Angelo says. “That was the lesson learned.”
“Living inside the criminal