D Carpenter - Infertile Grounds

She looked up slowly, as if her puzzle was at least as important to her as he was and asked, “Can I help you?”

“I need to talk to an agent.”

“What’s this regarding?”

“Nothing personal,” he glanced at the nameplate on her desk, “…Margaret, but I’d rather not say anything until I speak to an agent.”

“Do you want to report a federal crime, or do you want to talk to someone about an existing investigation?” She replied pulling out a form and a pen.

“I need to report a federal crime,” Chris explained. “But I don’t want to give any further information until I see an agent.”

“They’re all out in the field right now. Take a seat over there and I’ll find out when someone will be back.”

After a few minutes, Margaret informed him that agent Paul Pelletier would return in about an hour.

“Thanks,” Chris said.

She nodded cordially and returned to her Sudoku. He tried to sit in a reception room chair but kept fidgeting so he got up and paced. Margaret glanced at him, maybe he was making her a little nervous but he didn’t really care.

After a little more than fifty minutes, an overweight man in a rumpled brown suit came through the door. He and Margaret exchanged curt greetings and she pointed him toward Chris.

“I’m agent Paul Pelletier,” he said as he approached Chris, his hand out in introduction.

“Chris Foster.”

“Pleased to meet you, Chris. Margaret tells me that you want to report a federal crime.”

Chris nodded, he was wired from coffee and adrenaline but his brain felt a little fuzzy from having missed a night’s sleep. As he released the agent’s hand, he caught a faint whiff of liquor. He glanced at his watch, 11:37. Too early for boozing, he must have been mistaken.

“What can I do for you?”

“Can we talk in private, sir?”

“Sure. Follow me.”

He turned and lumbered down the hallway with Chris in tow.

“You can start by calling me Pell,” agent Pelletier said over his broad yet hunched shoulders as he turned into a doorway. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Sure.”

Pell grabbed a couple of sodas from a small refrigerator in the corner and returned to the table.

“So what’s up?” He asked as he sat down on the opposite side of the table and took a swig.

Chris chewed his lower lip and stared at the ceiling for a minute. Just over twenty-four hours ago, he had been enjoying a relaxing fishing trip – the only thing on his mind was trying to catch his breakfast. Today he was in an FBI office after spending the night running for his life. Everything was happening too fast. He hadn’t had time to digest any of this.

He tore his gaze from the ceiling and stared into Pell’s pink rimmed, blue eyes. Where to start? How to not sound like a lunatic? He drummed his fingers on the table, searching for the words.

“I’m not from Maine, I live in Quincy, Mass, just south of Boston,” Chris said.

“I know where it is,” Pell said. “I spent my first two years in the Boston office before I got transferred up here.”

Pell’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth as if he was going to say something else but he didn’t. Instead, he started twisting the kinky hair of one of his long, graying sideburns between his thumb and forefinger.

“Great,” Chris replied, not that it mattered. “I run a small web development company.”

“Web development?”

“We help build websites. Not the pages you see on your browser but the back end stuff – database access, secure store fronts, stuff like that.”

“Is it good business?”

Chris nodded. “Business has boomed in the past three years. We’ve got a couple hundred customers now. It’s become much more successful – much more work – than I ever imagined.”

“Congratulations,” Pell said with a nod as he threw his empty can across the room into the trashcan in the corner. Drips of leftover soda dribbled onto the table and he swept them away with his hairy hand, which he wiped on his pants. “I bought some dot com stocks in August 2000. I should have just burned my money, at least I would have got some heat out of it.”

“Well, anyway, back to why I’m here,” Chris said and he proceeded to describe his camp.

“Sounds nice,” Pell said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Now has this all got something to do with a crime you want to report?”

“It’s my little slice of heaven,” Chris replied. “At least it was until yesterday morning.”

“What happened?”

“I was fishing…”

He told Pell everything from the initial crash to being snuck out of The Wild Bear by a gold-toothed Frenchman and making his way ultimately to this chair.

“…and that’s why I decided to come to the FBI. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Pell looked at him from across the table. His thick eyebrows arched, causing wrinkles of flesh to roll up his forehead like the planted rows of a furrowed field and his mouth puckered, as if he had just licked a lemon wedge. He skimmed the yellow legal pad that he had scribbled notes on.

After a moment, he shook his head and let out a low, slow whistle. “So what do you want me to do?”

“What do you mean? You need to figure out if this guy, David Rose, was telling the truth, and if he was, you need to stop them. At the very least the guy was murdered. That’s got to be worth an investigation of its own, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Pell grunted.

“Look, I know that it sounds unbelievable, but why would I make it up? What would be my motivation? Run a check on me – I’ve got nothing to hide. There’s absolutely no reason for me to lie.”

“I’ll be right back.”

His absence gave Chris the opportunity to look around. This place was actually a dump. The rug was worn and stained. The well-used conference room table and chairs were of the office-furniture-bargain-store variety.

He stretched, trying to shake the throbbing in his lower back that had been haunting him on and off for the past few years. He was carrying a little too much weight and spent most of his time sitting in front of a computer screen. His body was starting to rebel.

Pell walked back into the room carrying a notebook computer.

“We’re going to go over your story again but before we do that, I just need to take a few more details about you, Chris,” Pell said, booting up the machine and handing Chris a form to complete. “Just fill out your personal details on here for me.”

Chris sat at the corner of the table completing the form, watching Pell open a terminal session and sign into a mainframe computer somewhere. A text-only screen of the FBI logo came up.

“That’s throwback,” Chris said.

Pell grinned. “We’re just happy that they remember to send us our pay.”

“How many agents are in this office?”

“Three of us.”

“You been here long?”

He stopped typing, looked over at Chris, and said solemnly, “Since ’88.”

“That’s a long time,” Chris replied sliding the paperwork across the desk to Pell. Pell typed in his name and social security number, hit a few function keys, and the word ‘Searching…’ appeared at the bottom of the screen.

He turned back and said, “It’s not so bad up here. I’ve gotten used to the slow pace. I’m too old for the shoot-em-up stuff anymore, anyway.”

Once again, Pell’s mouth opened, as if he was going to say more – something important – but his eyes clouded over and he grimaced at some unseen pain before sheepishly looking back at the static computer screen. He closed his mouth without uttering a word. He had a story to tell – probably a depressing one – and since they were waiting for the archaic computer, “So how’d you end up here, Pell?” Chris asked. He wondered whether this was where they sent the burnt out agents who couldn’t operate effectively anymore. That would be just his luck, reporting all this to some incompetent, has-been agent who was going to do diddly squat with it.