J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“I’m not armed,” a familiar voice calls. “I’m coming out now.”

He slides his feet down onto the blacktop, lifting his hands high. My muzzle is trained on the center of his chest, but he comes toward me, smiling.

“That was a pretty close call,” he says. “I wasn’t sure what to do exactly. Four to one isn’t great odds, not in the real world, and I didn’t know if you were in any condition to help after they ran you off the road.”

“Stop right there.”

He stops. He raises his hands a little higher, showing off.

“Are you gonna shoot me, March, or say thank you? ’Cause I’m pretty sure I just saved your life back there.”

I lower my gun, then put it away. He extends his hand for me to shake.

“Thank you, Jeff,” I say. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think you’d better start explaining.”

I don’t know where I expected Jeff to take me.

Not here.

Not to a run-down auto repair lot wrapped in eight-foot hurricane fence and topped with concertina wire, where a line of rusted beaters sit rotting in the heat, and hand-painted signage on the side of the garage is sun-faded and semiliterate.

This is his birthright, he says, the sum total of his inheritance.

“And don’t get your hopes up, seeing it’s a car repair joint. It hasn’t been open for years.” The damage to my car will have to be fixed elsewhere.

He gets out to unlock the chain threaded through the gate, reattaching the padlocks once I’ve driven onto the lot. I swing the car into a space near the garage entrance, but that’s not what Jeff has in mind. He directs me around back, where a channel of gravel runs between the back of the building and another row of dismembered Detroit muscle cars. When I switch off the engine, we’re sitting in darkness.

“I don’t want to be visible from the road,” he says. “Come on.”

The back entry has three dead bolts, shiny in the light of Jeff’s key ring LED. Newly installed, from the look of them. Judging from the outside, I wouldn’t have thought there was much in here to secure.

He tells me to wait just over the threshold while he flicks on shop lights strung throughout the garage. The windows all seem to be blacked out for privacy. Inside, a small corner of the space has been reclaimed from the chaos of scattered tools and abandoned auto parts, all of it covered in a film of old grease, to make room for an Army surplus cot, some folding tables-one for dining, the other for cooking-and a desktop computer rigged to surveillance cameras with a view of the property outside.

“You don’t live here,” I say.

“If you can call it living.”

There’s a restroom door with an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign still affixed to it, a sink, a washing machine, and some drying lines hung with Jeff’s clothes. There’s even an ironing board and iron set up on the edge of a gaping hole in the concrete floor where a lift must once have been installed. The iron gets to me for some reason and I feel pity for the young man who’s just saved my life. Despite an oscillating fan at the foot of the cot, the whole garage is infernally hot.

“It’s my base of operations,” he says, sounding a little embarrassed.

“Makes sense.”

It doesn’t, but I feel bad for having shamed him with my initial reaction. On the table, there’s an interesting mix of books and magazines. Back issues of Skeptic and Combat Handguns mixed together. A fat, dog-eared paperback whose title declares You Are Being Lied To .

“I know it looks strange, but everything I need is here. And compared to where I was-over there-this is luxurious, believe me. To you, this looks like roughing it. But you’ve never lived off the grid. Which is fine. It makes you easy to find.” He drags over an incongruous-looking wooden dining room chair for me to sit in. “Me, I can’t afford to be easy to find. Not anymore.”

I ease myself down, making sure the chair can take my weight. Absentmindedly I take up another of his books and flip through its pages. The Foxhole Atheist , it’s called, the content divided into daily readings like one of Charlotte’s devotional books.

“And why is that?” I ask.

“Well,” he says, “I used to have something for you, something I was supposed to give you. .”

I put the book down. “To give me ?”

“But I don’t have it anymore because they found where I lived and they took it. If I still had it, this would have been a whole lot easier.”

“What was it?”

He draws a rectangle in the air with his fingertip. “An envelope. I can’t tell you what was in there, but it was thick. I never looked because he told me not to. My job was just to hand it over in the event that anything happened.”

“Did something happen?”

His eyes widen. “Of course. And I should have given that envelope to you right then and there. But under the circumstances, I didn’t know what to do. It was you people who killed him. I wasn’t sure who could be trusted. That’s why I waited, and as it turned out, I waited too long.”

“You’re talking about Andrew Nesbitt?” I ask.

He nods. “Mr. Nesbitt. He said you’d know what to do with the contents of the envelope. He said you were one of the good guys. I should have just done what he told me, but-”

“How did you know him?”

“I worked for him.”

“So all those nights at the shooting range. .?”

“Partly I was trying to get a read on you. Partly I was looking for an opening. It’s not like I could’ve just walked up and told you any of this. You would’ve thought I was crazy. Without that envelope I figured I had to bide my time.”

“Until tonight.”

He smiles. “I had an idea something like this would happen.”

The only thing he’d tell me back in the parking lot was this: the men in the Hummer weren’t out to kill me. They would if they had to, but the mission was more likely a snatch. If all had gone according to plan, I’d have been run off the road, pulled from the wreckage, and whisked away to an undisclosed location. The Hummers, stolen earlier in the day for one use, would be recovered far away, their interiors scrubbed clean. And as for me, once they’d found out everything I knew, then a decision would be made as to my final disposition. Based on the fact that I’d snuffed one of their number, chances are my body would never have been found. These guys think nothing of killing cops, he tells me, something I know already firsthand. They think nothing of killing anyone.

“But who are they ?”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“You didn’t recognize any of them?”

“I didn’t get real close.”

I hand him the photo I’ve been carrying of Brandon Ford, the one I took from the box in the garage. “Do you recognize him? What about the other two?”

He shakes his head and starts to hand it back. Then he pauses.

“I do know her .”

Hilda.

“She worked for Mr. Nesbitt, same as me. When I was hired, he sent me to her. She snapped my picture and asked me all kinds of questions, and a couple of days later I went back and there was a driver’s license, a passport, the whole nine yards.”

“A new identity?”

“Like the witness protection program. That’s what she does. Mr. Nesbitt said there was nobody better in the business. But I couldn’t even tell you her name. He believed in doling out information on a need-to-know basis. He believed in cell structures. If one goes down, the fact that its members only know their own role means the others can continue to function.”

“Her name is Hilda,” I say. He seems impressed. “Do you know how to get back in touch with her?”