Fireteam Spectre: “Extraordinary Efforts”
His house was still a wreck from his meeting with John, most of that mess had been cleaned up, but there was still the matter of the black scorches on the stairs left over from the Paramedics. Rubber gloves on his hands he had been at work cleaning the bedroom from top to bottom. For whatever reason, the act of cleaning usually gave him time enough to think and sort things out; it was almost a similar exercise to his morning runs and workouts, except there was more to think about when he was not as active.
There was broken glass and the paper wrapping from numerous sterilized packages that were strewn about, it really took him a matter of minutes to fill the first trash bag to rid himself of the physical reminders of Friday night. With that part at least done, there were only a few things left to accomplish and he grabbed the cordless phone off its base and dialed a number he knew by heart by now. A woman’s voice he didn’t recognize answered the phone but it really didn’t matter too much as he was only scheduling a cleaning crew to remove the black marks and sterilize the house from the memory of Friday night and Emily’s episode.
Jackson spent most of the morning fixing the damage to the den from kicking in the door, it wasn’t too bad, he only had to patch the woodwork on the frame with a few metal brackets and some industrial glues. Walking through the house he started checking items off a to-do list he’d written for himself before he started with the house, the cleaning service would be there in about an hour and he had other things to attend. Jackson left the front door open, confident that the cleaning crew wouldn’t be nosey enough to venture into locked rooms and clean only what was asked of them in the bedroom and hallway and the living room.
He pulled open the garage; he hated the automatic door openers he never could find one that fit his garage door right. Checking the fuel and oil levels on the sport bike he kept in the garage for the summer months, he picked the helmet off the hanger on the wall and slid it over his head. It was a little more snug than he remembered, but no matter, it at least protected his ears from the sputtering engine that took four times to start to life and he was down the driveway and out of the neighborhood in less than two minutes.
The hospital pulled into his view and he swung his body weight to pull out of the far left lane and cutting off a number of cars the black sports bike barreled down the exit he needed and around a circular parking garage to park on the third floor of the hospital. The helmet under his arm, he walked inside and ignored Doctor Evans when he walked into Emily’s room.
“Where’ve you been?” Doctor Evans spoke up, “What am I supposed to tell her the next time she wakes up?”
“Did she ask for me?”
Evans mutters, “no, she was too delirious and feel back to sleep. It’s a marvel that her body is fighting off everything in its system now; I tried to call you last night.”
Jackson nods and sits at Emily’s bedside and cusps her hand in his. “I couldn’t answer, I had to take care of something, it helped center me, Doc.”
“Well I’m not one to suggest you not take care of your mental health along with all this junk you’re going through, but when I call you it’s important, you know that.”
“I know Doc, I’m sorry I just couldn’t answer.”
His arms were crossed over his chest but Jackson couldn’t see him, “Is she getting any better?”
“Its touch and go,” he spoke plainly, “the drug-induced coma is helping push the toxins out and give her body time to heal, but by keeping all these drugs in her system we’re still doing damage to her body. She needs a drug free environment to completely heal.”
He sighed, Jackson all ready knew what the doctor was getting at, “Rehab again?”
“Not again, she didn’t go the first time, remember?”
He nodded, “Yeah, it was just an excuse to get us off her back. What do you recommend?”
Evans breathed loudly, exhaling enough to be heard as he shut the door to give them more privacy. Prying eyes were kept at bay with a curtain over the large window able to look into the room. “There’s a new facility, it’s almost like a maximum security for severe addicts.”
“Where?” Jackson asked without waiting.
“Montana.”
For the first time since he walked in the room he turned to look Doc Evans in the face, “That’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s sort of the point. It has some crazy new age getting back to nature theme where addicts are taught to rely on themselves instead of their drugs to get them through pressures.”
“She’s going to go camping?”
Evans laughed a little, and to his credit so did Jackson. “That’s not it, but there’s work involved with therapy it’s supposed to be a pretty good program but it’s too new to read any conclusive studies about its results.”
The obvious questions sang through Jackson’s mind. There was the cost factor, the length, the distance, would he be able to see her. All valid questions but the most important was the question he vocalized, “Do you think it’ll work?”
“The best assumption is that she can’t go anywhere when she’s there, so she’s stuck. It has a better chance than any other place, in my opinion.”
He listened and turned back toward Emily, “There’s a ‘but’ in your voice Doc.”
“It’s expensive. Very expensive.”
Jacksons’ voice was hallowing as he replied: “I’ve been saving, since the last episode. I have the money tied up in mutual funds so she couldn’t find it.”
“You always were efficient Jackson.”
“Thanks doc, I like to think myself as thorough.”
The doctor chuckled slightly; I’ll get you some information about the facility and make a few calls. We can’t move her until she’s out of the chemical state but knowing her reaction we’re going to have to break a few rules.”
“She’s going to need to be sedated to get there, right?”
“Without a doubt in my mind,” Evans said and left the room, leaving the husband and wife alone to have a moment to themselves even if Emily couldn’t respond.
He stayed there for what seemed hours, just holding her hand and squeezing it tight. The thoughts in his mind any doubts or any negativity at all melted away as he looked at her face finally at such peace. But her face didn’t look up toward heaven; she wasn’t ready to die just yet.
* * *
He left the motorcycle in the driveway, without a car in his possession he would need to keep it easy to access instead of in the chaos pit of a garage that he kept telling himself he would organize some weekend. He walked through the door, a note was left by the cleaning crew thanking him for letting them in and assuring him they did their best to perform at the requests. It was a thoughtful process, but when he saw the black marks had been removed from the stairs he was happier to toss the door notice in the trash and give it no more thought.
Walking into the den, he saw that everything was in place. Shutting the door behind him he walked to the corner where he placed the stack of boxes after Dave dropped him off earlier in the morning. He checked his watch, it was just past two in the afternoon, too late to go for a run to make up for the loss of exercise he got this weekend, but his mind was on the contents of the boxes in the first place.
There was a sort of excitement that rushed through his head as he pulled the first box onto the table and used a pair of wire cutters to cut through the metal bands that kept it shut. His heart nearly skipped a beat, even though he partially expected to see what was inside.
Cash. A fifteen by fifteen by fifteen area cardboard box with a do it yourself moving company’s logo pasted all over the outer cover of the box filled to the rim of large bill cash. Stacked neatly bundled in deliberate groupings that he could only guess the purpose.
He walked over and cut off the metal bands off the rest of the boxes only to find more of the same. The amount inside was very obviously more than a single days worth of business, perhaps a week, he could only guess as much. But his heart raced at the possibilities, and plugging his laptop into the internet that moved through his entire house he checked the mutual funds that he told the doctor about. It was the majority of his life savings; it was all that he had left from his days in the Army and out of reach for the American government to seize when they took everything away from him and his friends. The good news was that if he emptied the accounts he would be able to cover the cost of the rehab center.
The bad news, he would have to empty all three funds. Though admittedly, the bad news didn’t seem so bad when he had three boxes of cash staring him in the face.
He dialed the Doctor on his personal line, waited for him to speak up. “Hey Doc, I have good news and I have bad news.”
“What do you have for me Jackson?”
“I can cover the cost of Montana. It’ll wipe my savings off the map, but it’s worth it, let’s get the ball rolling I’ll get the account closed and the checks on their way.”
“What about taxes?”
“I’ll worry about that in April.” He said, mostly lying as he kept his eyes on the boxes of cash sitting in front of him. “I’ll think of something.”
“Are you sure about this?”
Jackson paused, his voice was choked up a bit but he replied: “Deadly.”
It was all the doctor needed to hear, the phone went silent and the doctor vanished from the other end. Jackson threw the cordless phone on the ground and went through the measures to clear out the accounts. The thought occurred to him that he didn’t need to do it, but logic dictated that he give the appearance of depleting his savings to send Emily away, a place like this couldn’t be afforded by a person with a job like his without some reason of good investments backing them. He had to keep thinking of all those cop dramas that told him that the law wasn’t stupid, if he started spending like a fool any cop with half a brain could connect him to the scene of his crime. There were too many shows that told the tail of the idiot criminal, besides the villain said it best in Ocean’s Eleven, “Run and hide. Don’t get caught buying a $100,000 car just because you can.” He paraphrased of course, he never committed movies to memory, and there were precious better things to remember anyway.
Jackson collapsed in his recliner, in utter disbelief how the weekend had changed his position and disposition entirely. Friday night he had been at his wits end, ready to call it all quits on Saturday, but what was it about what he was feeling now, it was not guilt or admiration for anything he had accomplished, quite actually it was an almost numbness but at the same time he felt justified.
The money certainly didn’t hurt his position.
* * *
It was weird for Jackson, not having to work on a Tuesday morning. But he went through his morning ritual all the same as he would normally and thought nothing of the fact that he was able to cook himself a decent breakfast an hour after. He logged his exercise numbers down on the board in his den, showing a noticeable improvement from the week before. It was strange, but not a bad sort of strange. He was feeling better, Emily would be leaving in the afternoon to Montana and Doctor Evans was happy about that to say the least. The entire years worth of treatment had been paid in advance and the facility was kind enough to foot the travel bill. Jackson let the over pre-heat while he started the shower, he only needed to rinse off the sweat from his body shouldn’t take more than a minute or two and with nothing in the oven he wasn’t hurting anything.
The breakfast was a nice change of pace. Something more than a weekday pop tart and a fleeting glass of juice or coffee, it actually reminded him of the days after he came home after being away for a time. He would take a few days leave, spend them with Emily, cooking and cleaning, doing the sort of things that let her know that she wasn’t alone all the time. But the only thing that gave him pause this afternoon was knowing Emily would not be there with him for quite some time to come.
It was a thought that gave him a slight feeling of guilt in his gut. This was not the sort of thing Emily would have chosen for herself and he did feel bad for sending her so far away without really knowing it, but he couldn’t deal with another failed attempt again and fuck it if he was feeling a little selfish this time. He had been through this three times already, the third time better be the charm.
With breakfast in his stomach after a slow helping of potatoes and eggs, Jackson cleaned up the mess making sure the house didn’t smell of eggs or anything else and tidied up the rest of the lower level of the house. He went down the hall and marveled at the thought of keeping the door to his den opened, but knew the contents inside needed to be locked away and he chided himself for his momentary complacency. The day felt good, but that was no excuse to lose focus.
A knock at his door took him by surprise. He checked his watch and couldn’t remember to expect anyone, and ultimately twice as surprised to see John standing at his doorway. Not wearing a happy face, he pushed himself inside and tossed the day’s newspaper on the coffee table in the living room. “Tell me this shit wasn’t you.”
Jackson stood back and let the man walk into his home unchallenged and finally asked: “What the hell are you talking about?”
John glared into Jackson’s brown eyes and searched for the truth and repeated, “The police are stumped at the sort of violence that took place at 1408 Elm Saturday night. No witnesses and not a shred of evidence was uncovered at the scene of the crime. The police are sure this was no act of gang violence, and some of the rumors started to speculate are based around some form of vigilante justice acted on some one or a group of someone’s that are entirely too professional to do this sort of thing for free.”
John paused, reeling from the memorization of the article; he kept his eyes on Jackson’s face. “How much did it cost?”
“And you assume it was me, because the four of us are capable of doing shit like that?”
“Jack, the bullets were dug out of each victim, no fingerprints, no witnesses, and there were only two survivors. Elizabeth being among them.”
Jackson nodded and wordlessly shrugged it off, “So they pissed off the wrong person, it’s not like they were innocent. I’m sure the cops are just missing some details on purpose because someone did their job the way they wanted to do it.”
“This isn’t right Jack; you can’t do shit like this and expect to get away with it.”
He kept nodding his head, “You assume it was me.”
“I spoke with Dave; why else would you need a favor the same night?”
Jackson simply turned away from his old team leader and went to the Den and turned the key. Swinging the door open, John at least marveled at the clean up job he’d completed, even fixing the door. He led John into the room and shut the door, pointing at the three boxes in the corner. “What’re those?”
“Open one.”
John did was he was asked, and whistled loudly. “My silence is expensive.” He said, his tune changing almost on a dime. “How much money is this?”
“I have no idea other than ‘A lot’, it wasn’t about money but I wasn’t going to leave it there for the cops to pass around.”
John kept whistling, “What the hell are you going to do with this money?”
“It isn’t going to any bank, that’s for sure. I’m finally able to send Emily to a treatment facility that she can’t just up and leave from, it’s already paid for a year of treatment and I had to empty my savings to do that. I’ve my job, they forced me to take a week’s vacation and you know what, I feel good. I feel good for the first time in a long time.”
John had trouble looking away from the money in the box, “All three of these are filled like this?”
Jackson readily had an answer available, “The third one has less money in it, but not by much. It’s like they were saving up for a month or three.”
“Vigilante justice? So what are you, the fucking batman now?”
“Grow up, capes and gadgets don’t work in the real world and you know it. But it does have a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?”
John looked up and finally took his eyes away from the box of money. Inside his eyes were questions he wasn’t ready to form into words, but Jackson could tell the sorts of things he was thinking. “Think about it, the criminals aren’t going to take this laying down. They’ll eventually find me out and they don’t have miles of red tape to prove what they want to know. I can’t do this alone, John.”
“You certainly know how to put a man in a precarious position. Seriously, what were you thinking!”
John’s voice took Jackson aback, he expected more for John to ask for a share a cut in the money they seized, and for him to readily join up to form some sort of cause out of this action, not have a conscious about sending a few drug pushers to their maker. “I didn’t think this much out, alright. I went in, it was purely personal and I’m trying to make this right!”
“Don’t you get heavy handed on me, if you miss the life so much get with Dean and join one of those contractors he keeps pushing on us.”
Pulling a beer from the new minifridge he tosses it to John, a bud light something of a favorite American style that John wouldn’t refuse. “Take it easy John, I’m not talking about living that life again, I’m talking about being our own masters. Doing what we think is right, doing it how you think it should be done.”
The wheels in his brain start turning and the beer hitting his pallet helped lubricate the motions of thought. “What are you getting at?” He said, taking another look at the bills in the box.
“Fuck those other guys; I’m not talking about the business. I never put it in the words that reporter did, but don’t you think if the government wanted a real war on drugs, they would have sent out people like us to do what I did Saturday night?”
His attitude had certainly taken a turn for the better, “You’re talking about a partnership? Between the four of us?”
“Do you really think Dean will turn us down?”
John laughed, “But Dave might.”
“He’s going to be trickier to persuade than you, that’s for sure.”
Jackson pulled up a chair, asking John to take a seat and setting down a large three inch ring binder on the table top; he opened up and showed him all the clippings of drug related news in the past year, even going back as far as when they were forced out of the Army. Almost two years of backward looking intelligence gathering through history. “Drugs are a problem, not just to Emily and Elizabeth, but this entire city is being eaten alive by them. This isn’t like the Army sending us to Colombia to set fire to some fields and bomb a cocaine factory. We’re talking real supply and demand here.”
He continued, pulling out a map of the city circling thirteen areas strategically placed around the city, recently taken over by drugs and violence over the past year and a half. “These are strategic moves. It’s almost like the Wal-Mart of drug pushers; someone is driving smaller competition out of the area and forcing them to go in line with something new.”
John poured through the map; it was obviously a perimeter style defensive strategy. Someone knew exactly what they were doing, that was without question. “And you have a plan to do something about all this?”
“No sir I do not. I know I can’t go all willy-nilly and take on these assholes on my own though.”
John smiled; the same excitement he felt when he started in the Special Operations community filled his veins by looking at these sorts of maps. “To hell with the politicians and the red tape. We can do things the cops wouldn’t even dream of trying.”
“That’s what I’m looking for John.”
John flipped through all the information that Jackson collected, “This isn’t bad work kid, but we don’t have an Intel department to rely on, we’re going to need more than this.” John stopped speaking and continued to skim through numerous articles, “Look at this data, drug related deaths are sky high, it’s like they’re killing off their customers.”
Jackson flipped through the pages one more time, almost to the end of the binder, “Just the ones that run out of money. They either run afoul of the law and wind up in jail and die there, or have one massive overdose. It is deliberate.”
John and Jackson took a moment; they didn’t speak or move through the small records that Jackson collected. There was no doubt in Jackson’s mind that John had been swayed, but it would take a lot more work than just showing this sort of data to the others to get them on board. He needed John on his side, that much was clear, but more than that Jackson needed a solid plan of attack. It was a long-term strategy he needed that would point toward success and away from personal vendetta.
“I’m all over this,” John spoke up after a minute or two of silence, “give me a few days and keep yourself off the radar.”
Everything was finally looking up. After all this time of going through the motions of life, Jackson finally felt like he had a goal again, something worthwhile to do with himself instead of moving through the day doing something he felt was a pointless endeavor. He wished he could call his supervisor and just quit the job, but he knew there was going to be more troubles ahead than keeping things simple.
* * *