Fall From Grace - a Jake Burbank Mystery in progress

The Fall

 

He sat on the edge of the creaky wooden porch, rocking back and forth in the scratched rockers that old lady Walden kept out there for her guests.  He wanted a cigarette, could almost taste it, but he gave up that habit ten years ago.  He wasn't about to start again.

"They're late," he said to no one in particular.

He was alone out here, except for the crickets, and lightening bugs winking in the thick, humid air.  He had been on the porch for over an hour, forty-five minutes longer than he was scheduled to wait.  He didn't mind. When he was a young man, what felt like a thousand years ago, he had crouched in a hollowed out tree stump barely three feet tall, and half that deep for nine hours.  He was on a mission to shoot a North Vietnamese Army General that intelligence said would pass by with a convoy.  He did, Bog sniped him, and had to be folded out of the stump by a Green Beret patrol.  They carried him for three miles before he got the feelings back in his legs.

            They still pained him in the rain.  He'd never had to do anything like that again, though he would have.  That one shot had promoted him out of the field and into a command track.

            Which led him all the way here, to a tiny town, a village really, on the Atlantic Coast of Florida, sitting on a run-down porch at a run-down bed and breakfast waiting to be picked up by them.

            Them was the Agency, he was pretty sure, though it could be NSA or any of the other psuedo secret organizations that handled intelligence operations these days.  He had worked for or with one or the other several times over the past three decades.  No one spent that long in the military and not encounter them.

            They had called him after dinner, asked him to meet them outside at 8:45.  It was nine o'clock now, he could tell without looking.  Another gift of his was time.  He was very aware of it's passing, and hadn't needed a watch in over ten years.  He wore one out of habit, a gift from one of his long term girlfriends who wasn't around anymore.  They never stayed that long.

            They all wanted marriage, but he had a wife, and her name was the Corp.  She was a jealous bitch, but she had stuck by his side and made him the man he was.  The girlfriends couldn't handle being mistresses, and left, sooner or later.

            A car pulled up at the edge of the driveway, blinked it's lights.

            At that same time, a voice whispered out of the darkness at the other end of the porch.

            "General?"

            He almost jumped, but caught himself just in time.  Good thing he didn’t have a gun, or there would be one less spook in the world.  Or one more spook of a different kind.

            "I'm ready," he said, rising out of the rocking chair and flicking his imaginary cigarette out into the yard.

            He ambled down the steps and fell in line behind the tall man in the dark.  They marched toward the waiting car, and Bog was surprised to hear a second soldier fall in step behind him.

            Damn, they were good.  Who were they with?

            He didn't ask the question aloud.  They wouldn't answer, and he might lose face in whatever poker game they would play next, with information as chits.  He played it close, pretending to know who they were and why they wanted him, knowing all the while that they knew he was wondering.

            "Watch your head," said the tall one as they reached the car.  He opened the back door to the sedan and Bog ducked in the back.  The tall man got in with him, and the other slid into the front seat beside the silent driver.

More to follow in the Jake Burbank Mystery series. Get your copy today.