View source for Talk:III: MacDonald’s Farm

III: MacDonald’s Farm



Stating merely that there is no conflict between human rights and property rights surrenders half the argument to the enemies of liberty. All human rights are property rights, beginning with the right to own your own life, the right to own and control the body that houses it, and on, to every feeling and thought, every opinion and idea, every good and service that life and body are capable of creating.

—Mary Ross-Byrd

Toward a New Liberty





I didn’t make it home until after they’d turned off the electricity. First, paperwork: the Meiss killing and the thing in the garage. Then I phoned downstairs to see how the lab reports were coming, and started blocking out investigation schedules. At five, I had a call to go see the division chief, Captain Roger MacDonald, the only man on Homicide shorter than me. But where I’m wide, he was round, with hair like a coat of wet paint and palms that were always damp. Naturally, he was the type who insisted on shaking hands.

“Want to see me, Mac?” I sat down, covertly wiping my hand on a pant leg. His office was the same peeling olive drab as mine, but lacked the homey comfort of other flatfeet sloshing coffee. His window was still broken, the masking tape beginning to get brittle.

“Yes, Win. I wanted to know how these two cases—the machine-gun murder and the, uh, skinning—are going.”

“I’ve decided to hand the garage thing over to James,” I said, wishing I had a cigar. “We always get a couple like this whenever they reduce the meat ration. I’ll concentrate on Meiss—it has some interesting angles, and my desk is clear since we got that tax-assessor dismemberment straightened out—told you it was the sheriff’s jurisdiction, just like the others …” He looked uncomfortable. I raised my eyebrows invitingly. “Come on, Mac, what’s eating you? Sorry, make that ‘What’s on your mind?’”

“Well, I … , it’s stuffy in here. What do you say we take a walk?”

“You’re the chief, Chief.” I got out of the way as he waddled through the door and into the main office, where my colleagues were noisily generating red tape. My own typewriter had broken down again halfway into the investigation schedules. I’d have to wait until James was done with his.

Mac didn’t say a word as we passed through little knots of clerks and stenos whom overcrowding had stacked up in the hall. He kept looking nervously over his shoulder, starting at every clatter, and turned right at the Men’s. I stood outside, waiting.

The door swung open a crack. “Psst!” It was MacDonald, peeking out at me. “Win—come in here, will you?” I shrugged, and pushed the door into the usual haze of tobacco and marijuana smoke. Mac was down on his knees, peering under the stalls. He rose embarrassedly and strode to the sink, turning the water on full. He let it run.

“Water Board’s gonna love you, Mac.” I reached into my sock, extracted the two-inch butt I’d been thinking about all day, and lit up, exulting in my contribution to the nicotinic atmosphere.

He lit a cigarette, Mexican by the papers. “I know this seems ridiculous”—he puffed nervously—“but my office is bugged!”

I gasped, more from anoxia than surprise. “What?”

“You heard me. The telephone, too!”

“Mac, we do the bugging and tapping—we’re the cops, remember?”

“Someone’s doing it to us, Win. To me! And I think I know who!”

“And who will bug these selfsame buggers?” I misquoted, mainly to myself. “Turn off that stupid water. They’ve got filters that’ll take it right off the tape, anyway.”

He stood groping in the haze for something to dry his hands on, finally settled for his tie. “Win, I’ve got another problem, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Something else bugging you?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. Someday I’d do that, when I was making captain’s pay “Will you be serious? This isn’t funny!”

“You need a vacation, Mac. Five days a year just isn’t—”

“Win, listen! I’ve got to take you off the Meiss thing. I’m not supposed to tell you why, but I’ll be damned if—what can they threaten me with? Losing my devalued pension?”

I nodded grimly. “Especially since you have to put in forty years, now. Times are tough all over. Go on.”

“The word’s been passed down the line, from god knows how high. There’s more to this than I can tell you, more than I know myself … or want to! Anyway, you’re off the case.” He looked relieved.

I sat in the pollution, thinking. I’d had hints to lay off before, but seldom anything this arbitrary and senseless. I leaned against the grimy wall, arms folded across my chest, and said so, around my cigar.

“You’ve got to understand …” MacDonald pleaded. “There’s something big—”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the shiny golden coin in my pocket. “Who is it, Mac, the local Mafiosi—the government, maybe?”

Mac’s piggish little eyes widened a fraction. “My God, Win, what makes you think there’s a difference? Where have you been the last thirty years?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Well, you can’t fight City Hall. Want me back on the garage killing?”

“Thanks, Win. I don’t think that’ll be necessary. One thing you can count on, tomorrow there’ll be another dozen for you to work on. See you in the morning?”

“Bright and early. Let’s get out of here and find some oxygen!” I flipped the last half-inch of my cigar into the urinal and swung out into the hall, a billow of smoke preceding me.





BY 6:30, I was sitting in a coffee shop across from the City and County Building, waiting for my bus. The place was full of familiar faces, almost all of them city employees—one reason there wasn’t a gray CLOSED BY ORDER sign on the door. I turned my face to the window, not wanting to talk, idly watching the street. Behind the counter a radio recited body counts from our latest victory in New Guinea. The Papuans should have run out of people three years ago.

Mac hadn’t mentioned what seemed to me the first order of business: federal preemption. Burgess had been more than happy to mention it. Now I was blackballed without so much as a memo—much to my superior’s relief—by vague pressure “from god knows how high.” Mac’s office was bugged, if you believed him, and his telephone tapped. An ex-security-cleared scientist who rated his own car and a government-issue handgun had been mortally afraid of the very agency he once worked for. The maraschino cherry on top was the fact that said professor had been gunned down with a .380 Ingram—a favorite item of hardware for covert SecPol operations.

So what was really going on? I’d probably never find out. Tomorrow morning I’d be back on ordinary Capitol Hill muggings.

Through the window I watched Mac emerge from the City and County Building, briefcase in hand. He paused to straighten his tie and stepped into the street. Suddenly there was a screech as a parked car accelerated violently. Mac turned, annoyance, incomprehension, sudden terror racing each other across his face. He ran, trying to make the median. Too late. The front bumper hit him at knee level—a sickening whump of hollow metal on solid flesh. His body flopped like a rag doll, head and arms draped over the hood, legs disappearing underneath. The car never slowed. I heard the engine race as the pedal was floored. Mac whipped to the pavement, his head smashing into the asphalt as the car devoured him, his outflung hand still visible, gripping the briefcase.

I was through the door, forty-one in hand, as the rear tires rolled over him and squealed away—a muddy white station wagon, road dirt covering the license tag. I leveled the S & W, but they were gone. Others who’d followed me out or charged from the building opposite helped me get the body inside. A bus wheezed to a stop over the bloodstains and opened its doors. Nobody got on.

Procedural rituals took a writhing three hours, yet somehow, not enough, not fitting. They stuffed him into a steel drawer and shoved it in the wall, the catch clanging shut on a friend of half my lifetime. There was no record of Mac’s decision to take me off the case. I kept my mouth shut, and also failed to mention what I thought were broken windows on the station wagon. Maybe I’d just wanted them to be there.

I made the last bus home. Mac had been a born administrator, and I was just a gumshoe, but we’d grunted and strained together through CLETA, gotten bawled out over imaginary grime in our revolvers, stood proud while his folks snapped us in our first real uniforms. The bus stank of alcohol and human bodies. It seemed odd to miss the traffic I used to curse—the city was seamy, deserted, and Mac was dead.

“God knows who” had murdered Vaughn Meiss and Roger MacDonald. I didn’t relish finding out where I stood. When the bus reached my stop, I stayed with the group, managing half the eight blocks to my apartment in the relative safety of numbers.

It’s basically a place to hang my other suit: a high-rise at Twelfth and Vine allocated to City and County people and the odd Federal Finance worker. Lights were still on in the lobby, but the power would be off by now in the apartments. I didn’t rate elevator service, but I was in no mood for good citizenship. I rode the machine upstairs and let myself in.

For once I was ahead of the game: more room than I really needed—but jealously accepted nevertheless. Two bedrooms, bath and a half when the water was running, and a Coleman camp stove perched atop the useless gas range. I drew the curtain and switched on the lanterns.

The bedroom door was ajar!

A wave of fear went through me. It hadn’t been closed since Evelyn had decided she’d rather be a cop’s ex than a cop’s widow. That’s the way she’d looked at it. When I finally picked up my one and only slug, she served papers on me right in my hospital bed, and died five weeks later in a smashup on I-70. I never figured out if I’m widowed or divorced, and haven’t been so much as scratched in the line of duty since.

Now might be different. I stretched out on the floor, feeling silly in my own apartment, and slowly levered out the S & W. They should have hit me coming in. They were going to pay for that mistake. I planned to punch several soft, custom-loaded 240-grain slugs into whoever was behind that door. Crawling painfully on knees and elbows, I tried to remember to keep my butt down.

A damned good thing I didn’t pull the trigger. Creeping closer, I noticed a fine, shiny wire stretching from the doorknob. I’d always cursed that streetlight shining in my window; now it had saved my life. I laid the forty-one on the carpet and carefully traced the wire to a menacing shape attached to the frame inside. It looked vaguely like a striped whiskey bottle, but I knew those “stripes” were cut deeply into the casing to assure proper fragmentation. The wire led to a ring, one of four clustered at the top. An easy pull would raise and fire the striker.

A Belgian PRB-43: common in New Guinea, a favorite with domestic terrorists, too. I felt grateful they’d left something I was familiar with. Three or four ounces of plastique—the neighbors would think I was only moving furniture.

Pretty subtle, for SecPol.

Groping for my keychain, I reached around carefully and slid a key into the safety slot, blocking the striker. I used nail clippers to cut the wire, and ran nervous fingers up and down, feeling for others. Nothing. I eased the door open to face the mine, its little stand hammered into the woodwork. Ruining my clippers forever, I removed all four tripwire rings and retrieved my housekey. The neck unscrewed, separating firing device from explosive container. I levered the stand out of the wall and looked down inside—enough bread-doughish explosive to make my pension even more academic than it was already

I sat for a long time cradling the harmless bomb in my lap.





WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 1987


I skipped breakfast, a little paranoid about what I might find in a cupboard or box of cereal. LSD? Spanish Fly? I ached all over from sleeping on the living room floor: there’d been a second antipersonnel mine under the bed and a thin copper lead running from a bathroom outlet to the shower stall. I slept well away from the furniture and didn’t touch anything.

When I got up, I treated the place like the minefield it was, doing nothing casually. First, I called in sick—I’d try to get in later. Plausible, considering Mac and all. Next I hung a note out for the cleaning lady, hoping my pidgin Vietnamese was up to warning her away from the deathtrap my apartment had become. All that took forty-five minutes of carefully lifting things like telephone receivers with a bent coat hanger, ducking and flinching.

I unwired the shower, then thought better of being caught there, naked and defenseless. Showers have never seemed the same to me since Psycho, anyway. I changed clothes and put on my flak jacket, three pounds of multilayered Kevlar back-and-breast, guaranteed to stop a .44 Magnum. As usual, I skipped the crotch piece. Even if it worked, I’d be screaming in a voice only dogs could hear. Six fresh rounds for the Smith & Wesson, and an eighteen-round case of spares. With twelve from the plastic speed-loaders in my jacket, I was prepared for a short war.

Department policy is against carrying extra guns since there are hardly enough to go around—one reason carrying your own is winked at—and they figure it’s too easy to plant a weapon on someone you’ve blown away in a fit of grouchiness. This wasn’t my day for regulations. My handmade one-shot derringer is also chambered in .41 Magnum—and practically certain to break at least two fingers going off. Under the circumstances, that might be a bargain.

Late for the bus, I decided to splurge on a cab. An hour later, I jammed myself in with five other passengers, and rode all the way to work with a hand on the firm rubber grip of my revolver. No one was taking me for any rides I hadn’t planned.

At the office, I didn’t mention the interesting way I’d spent the night; it just might lead to being taken off the Meiss case, now the MacDonald case as far as I was concerned. I ran into a snag at the motor pool—they wanted to know where I was going. I couldn’t just say “here and there” as usual—they’d get upset when they couldn’t reach me by radio. But I didn’t want to end up being tailgated by a dirty white Brazilian station wagon, either.

I climbed back upstairs to think, and found the day’s reports on my desk. Nothing I didn’t expect—except that Meiss had a mother in Manitou Springs. It was longer than the journey I had in mind, and would cover my ass nicely: Manitou Springs is south on I-25.

Fort Collins, and Colorado State University, are north.