John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

Harvey Rodriguez waited till daybreak before he ventured out to look at the body. He wanted to make sure that the men with the guns were long gone before he turned himself into a target, so he’d spent most of the night lying still in his tent among the trees, trying his best to remain invisible.

If he’d had a brain in his head, he’d have used the cover of darkness to scoot out of here, but every time he’d flexed his legs to move, he’d talked himself out of it. He’d used the time to plot his strategy.

On the one hand, he’d been living out here long enough to be running pretty low on everything, and even if the killer had stripped the dead man’s pockets clean, the corpse was likely to have something of value, if only a pair of socks that actually covered his whole foot. Or maybe a watch. Harvey’s ten-year-old Timex had crapped out a month ago.

On the other hand, when you’ve got no home and you make your living-such as it is-off the sometimes unwilling largesse of others, the last thing you need is to get yourself wrapped up in a murder case. It wasn’t as if he had people who could vouch for his alibi, you know? He could almost hear the interrogation in his head:

Where were you last night?

I was at home.

And where’s that?

Wherever I make it. Last night, it was in the woods out by Kinsale.

Right where a murder happened?

Yes, sir. That’s a hell of a coincidence, ain’t it? I was just lying there in my tent, and I heard somebody in the woods. I started to peek out, and then I heard a gunshot, and I ducked the hell back in.

Who would believe that? But running away would make it sound even worse. Harvey didn’t know many people, but nobody’s completely invisible. Sooner or later, somebody would find the body, and the homeless drifter would be the first suspect. Especially if the drifter was wearing the dead guy’s socks and watch.

Okay, stealing from the body was a bad idea. He wouldn’t do that.

If he were a better citizen, he’d have called for help, but in all fairness, he thought he deserved a break there. He’d chosen this spot as his camp precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere, which meant that “calling for help” had to be taken literally-as in, cupping his hands to his mouth and yelling, “Help!” Hardly compatible with his plan to remain invisible.

Bottom line, he was screwed no matter how it turned out, but after all this time, he was by God going to take a peek at the body. He owed himself that much. Hell, the dead guy owed him that much after costing him a whole night’s sleep.

Finally, it was time. Taking care to keep quiet, Harvey crawled out of his last-legs Coleman camping tent and scanned the scenery. It had been a cool night compared to some of the sweltering nightmares of the past couple of weeks, but even now, he could feel the sun doing its duty to deliver a blistering day. It’s the way it was in this part of the world. At least winter was long behind and long ahead.

Winter was the hardest part of being Harvey Rodriguez. People asked why he didn’t spend his summers walking to someplace where they didn’t have winters, but the truth was that he was now a Virginian through and through. In this part of the Commonwealth-along the Northern Neck on the Potomac River-winters were pretty mild. It rarely snowed, and nighttime ice almost always melted by midday. It was the rare day when he couldn’t pull something edible out of the river and rarer still when he couldn’t snare a squirrel or possum.

As he stretched to his full five feet eight inches, Harvey eyed his peeling Adidas but decided to leave them where they were. The rubber sole on the left shoe was about to give way to a hole, and he wanted it to last for at least one more rainy day. His eyes scanned the horizon as he adjusted the pull cord on the swim trunks he wore as shorts, hoping in vain to make them tighter. One thing about the hot weather: it was hard to keep weight on.

Making no sudden movements, Harvey turned a full 360 degrees, watching and listening for signs of danger. Satisfied that it was safe to move, he plucked his prized FBI T-shirt off the branch where he’d left it to air out overnight, and slipped it on.

Harvey walked carefully through the tall grass and scrubby bushes toward the water-toward the spot where he presumed the body to be. He watched his feet. Poking a bare toe into somebody’s guts would be a disgusting way to start the day.

Something caught his eye, off at his eleven o’clock. He stopped in midstep and squinted. Had something moved? He didn’t think so. It was one of those intuitive things that hit him from time to time, and he knew to wait it out until his brain could unscramble it. All around him, nothing stirred but the breeze, gently waving the top of the tall seed-tipped grasses in an undulating ripple that made land look like water.

So what was it?

A phrase popped into his head: background anomaly.

When someone’s lying in wait-or lying dead-they think they’re concealed by the tall grass that surrounds them, and they’d be right if it weren’t for the background anomaly. When everything is waving in the breeze, the anomaly is the patch of vegetation that stands still. In this case, it was far more obvious than that. Harvey saw a very definite hole in the rolling surface of the grass-exactly the kind of hole that a body would leave after it had been dumped.

As he closed the distance, he thought briefly about the footprints and other damning evidence he was leaving behind, but if it came to that, at least he could show that the path of footprints led directly to his tent. Plus, if footprints were an issue, there should be at least one other pair that would implicate the real killer.

He was still ten feet away when he caught the first glimpse of blue fabric through the moving blades of grass.

It was definitely a body.

He slowed as he approached the last couple of yards. “Hello?” he said. “Hey, are you okay?”

The dead guy didn’t move. If he had, Harvey may well have shit all over himself.

Nearly on top of it now, he could just make out the whole form. He gasped and clamped his hands over his mouth. Horror washed over him out of nowhere, gripping his insides and twisting them.

Without any thought or warning, Harvey Rodriguez did something he hadn’t done in too many years for him to remember. He started to cry.

July in Virginia.

Though the sun had set, the weather still hung like wet wool as the two men climbed out of their rented Chevrolet Caprice and closed the doors. They wore the standard uniforms of the FBI agents they pretended to be-white shirts and rep ties under unimaginative pinstriped suits. Blue for the smaller of the two, and gray for his massive companion.

The big man-Brian Van de Meulebroeke by birth, but Boxers to his friends-pulled at his collar like a boy in church. “I swear to god, Panama was cooler,” he grumbled.

Jonathan Grave smiled. “At least we’ve got autumn on the other end of it,” he said. Back in the day when discomfort was part of their patriotic sacrifice to God and country, the two men had logged dozens of months in fetid tropics, but today’s Brooks Brothers uniforms made Virginia way less comfortable. The latex facial prostheses didn’t help.

Their destination lay half a block away, remarkable for its ordinariness. Low rise, and constructed of red brick trimmed in white stone, the Basin Jail looked like the result of a student architectural lesson gone bad. It might have been mistaken for a small elementary school or even a recreation center.

“That’s the stupidest looking jail I’ve ever seen,” Boxers said, nailing Jonathan’s thoughts.