Dan Simmons - Hardcase

There was no explosion. No fire.

Charlie had been planning to gas up on the American side, where the fuel was cheaper.

"I didn't really expect to see you again, Mr. Kurtz," said Peg O'Toole.

"The feeling was mutual," said Kurtz. He had left the office phone as his contact number, and Parole Officer Peg O'Toole had called saying that he was required to come in to finish his first appointment. Arlene had said that O'Toole had sounded a bit surprised that Kurtz had a real, live secretary.

"Shall we pick up where we left off?" said O'Toole. "We were discussing the fact that you needed a permanent address within the next week or so."

"Sure," said Kurtz, "but can I ask a question?"

The parole officer removed her tortoiseshell glasses and waited. Her eyes were green and cool.

"When they dragged me out of here," said Kurtz, "they wanted to pin a murder rap on me when they knew I wasn't involved. During the arraignment, the charge was changed to illegal possession of a firearm and violating parole. Now that's been dropped."

"What is your question, Mr. Kurtz?"

"I'd like to know what you had to do with the charge being dropped."

O'Toole tapped her lower lip with the stem of her glasses. "Why do you think I had something to do with the charges being dropped?"

"Because I think Hathaway… the homicide cop who dragged me out of here…"

"I know Detective Hathaway," said O'Toole. There was the slightest hint of revulsion in her tone.

"… I think he would have gone ahead with the illegal-carry parole-violation charge," finished Kurtz. "During the interrogation at the city jail, he showed me a throwdown he was ready to plant on me, and I know that he wants me in County for his own reasons."

"I don't know about any of that," O'Toole said curtly. "But I did check into your arraignment" — she hesitated a few seconds—"and I did let the district attorney know that I was present during your arrest and watched the detectives frisk you. You weren't armed when they arrested you."

"You told the D.A. that ?" said Kurtz, amazed. When O'Toole said nothing more, he said, "What if Hathaway testified that I had an ankle holster or something?"

"I watched them frisk you," she said coolly. "There was no ankle holster."

Kurtz shook his head, truly surprised. He had never heard of a cop going out of his or her way to keep another cop from railroading someone.

"Can we get back to your interview?" she asked.

"Sure."

"Someone answered the phone number you gave me and identified herself as your secretary…"

"Arlene," said Kurtz.

"… but anyone can claim to be anyone on the phone," finished O'Toole. "I'd like to visit your business office. Did I say something amusing, Mr. Kurtz?"

"Not at all, Officer O'Toole." He gave her the address. "If you call ahead, Arlene will let you in the back way. It might be preferable to coming in the front."

"And why is that?" Her tone was suspicious.

Kurtz told her.

This time it was the P.O. who smiled. "I worked Vice for three years, Mr. Kurtz. I can probably take a transit through a porno shop."

Kurtz was surprised for the second time. He didn't know of many parole officers who had been real cops.

"I saw you on the Channel Seven WKBW Eyewitness News yesterday evening," she said and waited.

Kurtz also waited.

"Is there any special reason," she said at last, "that you happened to be at the site where a truck had gone into the gorge the night before?"

"Just rubbernecking," said Kurtz. "I was driving along the expressway up there, saw the TV trucks, and pulled into the turnout to see what all the commotion was."

O'Toole made a note on her pad. "Were you on the American side or the Canadian side?" Her tone was casual.

Kurtz actually grinned. "If it had been the Canadian side, Parole Officer O'Toole, I would have been in violation of my parole, and you'd be sending me to County within the hour. No, I think you could tell from the angle that they were shooting video from the American side. I guess they couldn't get a clear shot from where the truck actually went over."

O'Toole made another note. "You seemed almost eager to be seen in the cutaway shots to the crowd," she said.

Kurtz shrugged. "Isn't everyone eager to get on TV?"

"I don't think you are, Mr. Kurtz. At least, not unless you had a specific reason to be seen there."

Kurtz looked blandly at her and thought, Christ, I'm glad Hathaway isn't as smart as she is .

She checked something else off her list. "All right, about your place of residence. Are you settled yet?"

"Not really," said Kurtz, "but I'm getting closer to finding a permanent place to live."

"What are your plans?"

"Eventually," said Kurtz, "I'd like one of those big houses on the bluffs up toward Youngstown, not far from Fort Niagara."

O'Toole glanced at her watch and waited.

"In the immediate future," said Kurtz, "I'm hoping to find an apartment."

"Week after next," said O'Toole, putting down her pen and removing her glasses to let him know that the interview was over. "That's when I'll make the official visit."

The Alabama Beagle Boys—back when there were five of them, there were only four living now—came by their name via an unfortunate photograph picked up by the wire services in the mid-1990s when an Alabama Department of Corrections official, exhilarated by his popular press after bringing back chain gangs, issued horizontally striped prison uniforms to all state inmates. The photographer from the Dothan, Alabama, newspaper had gone out to one of the prison-striped chain gangs working along State Highway 84 not far from the Boll Weevil Monument and photographed five men pulled from the work detail apparently at random.

It had not been random. It had amused the gang bull to line up five dim-witted brothers for the shot, the five overweight young men all serving three years for a completely botched Wal-Mart robbery in Dothan during which thirty-five legally armed Wal-Mart shoppers—the majority of them senior citizens—and the seventy-four-year-old "Wal-Mart Greeter," who had been carrying a.357 Magnum, all had drawn down on the boys, putting four of them in the hospital for gunshot wounds and sending all of them to the Babbie State Prison just outside of Opp. The five were known then just as the Beugel brothers—Warren, Darren, Douglas, Andrew, and Oliver—but a combination of a Dothan Journal misprint that went out to UPI and the comic image of the five in their striped coveralls changed their name forever to the Alabama Beagle Boys.

Six months after the photograph was taken, four of them escaped—Oliver, the youngest, had crawled back through the wire to rescue his pet crayfish and had been shot twenty-four times by guards. The first thing the Beagle Boys did after eluding the "Largest Manhunt in Southern Alabama History" was to visit the Department of Corrections' Chiefs farm outside of Montgomery, where they killed the man, burned down his house, raped his wife into a coma, and nailed the family's dog to the barn door (although those still in prison in the South maintain that it was the dog who was raped and the wife who was nailed to the barn door).

Warren, Darren, Douglas, and Andrew then headed for Canada but, stymied by the difficulty of crossing the border under the delusion that they needed passports, went to ground in Buffalo, where they became lay ministers and soldiers in the White Aryan Army of the Lord, headquartered in the suburb of West Seneca.

This night, at a warehouse near the State University of New York campus, they were shopping.

"Full auto with laser shit is what we want," said Warren, the oldest.