People need to know about this.
What exactly did Ned think people need to know about?
If I phone Bentley now, I have exactly an hour and a half—the time it will take to drive to his Napa home—to produce the tape before he grows suspicious.
And then answers to any questions will be lost to me.
I stare long and hard at the tape.
I can’t believe they still sell these fucking things, but thank God they do.
I push the tape into the machine and cross my fingers that the cables the department store sales guy said would work on this shitbox motel television actually do. At first, all I see is static and I curse the idiot for being wrong. But after jogging the wires a few times, the screen wobbles, then clears, and the inside of the tattoo shop appears.
At the bottom of the screen is a time stamp of 4:00 p.m., October 21 of this year. About three weeks ago now. A Willie Nelson wannabe—Ivy’s uncle, from the pictures that I’ve seen—is hunched over a woman’s arm with his tattoo gun, working away quietly.
I grin as Ivy saunters past the camera with her case in hand, her narrow hips swinging casually. “You want me to come by with dinner for you later, Ned?”
“Nah. I’ll call Fez.” He has a deep, guttural voice. Not the most friendly-sounding guy.
“I thought he drove you nuts.”
“Ya see . . . Me and Fez, we have an understandin’.” Now he glances over his shoulder at her, and I can just make out the crinkles around his eyes, telling me he’s smiling at her. “He don’t talk and I like ’im.”
She laughs. “I wish I could figure out how to get him to do that for me.”
“You gonna be home later tonight, girl?”
“At some point.”
With a sigh and shake of his head, he mutters, “Stay out of trouble,” as she pushes through the front door.
He continues working in silence. There’s nothing valuable here, from what I can see, so I begin fast-forwarding through, watching the customer pay and leave, Ivy’s uncle clean up his area and reset it, the pizza delivery guy to show up—I slow down for that, to see that the uncle’s not lying; Fez says nothing but hello and goodbye and “That’ll be six forty-two, sir.” There’s a good two-hour time lapse of Ned Marshall sitting in his desk chair with his feet up as the sun goes down outside. I’m beginning to wonder if this is the right tape after all.
Finally, the door pushes open and Dylan Royce marches through. I recognize him immediately from the newspaper clipping.
This is definitely what Bentley is after.
I slow the tape in time to see Ned reach out and shake his hand. “Royce! How’s the arm?” he asks.
Royce holds out his arm to display the partially finished sleeve. Some parts are outlined, others are completely filled in. I’m guessing Ivy’s uncle had been working on it over a few sessions. He and Royce had probably gotten pretty chummy.
I watch the screen as the two men go through the usual bullshit niceties and paperwork. It’s nice to have audio. A lot of surveillance videos that I’ve watched don’t have it. Then again, Bentley did say that it’s the conversation he’s after.
“Okay, we’re all set.” Ivy’s uncle pulls out a transfer he must have prepared earlier. Royce pulls his shirt off to reveal a hardened body that’s seen plenty of hours in the gym, and likely some war-inflicted injuries, from the small scars across his rib cage. He’s a big guy, bigger than Scalero. But Scalero had a gun and I’m guessing he didn’t waste time using it on his former comrade’s head.
Royce settles into the chair that I just helped pitch the other day and positions his arm. I turn the volume up to catch their words, which are surprisingly clear for that retro surveillance system. He tips his head back, giving the camera a good angle of his eyes, glossed over. He’s high, I’m guessing. Bentley did say he had a problem with both Vicodin and smoking pot. It would make sense that he’d do it before sitting under a needle for hours.
I sip away on my coffee—caffeine is one of my few vices, and a godsend at the moment, given how tired I am—and listen to them talk. All this Medal of Honor recipient seems to do is complain: about his asshole neighbor’s annoying dog that he wants to poison because it keeps shitting on the sidewalk in front of his house; about his mother, who won’t let up on him about his breakup with his cheating cunt of a girlfriend who was fucking some guy on the side while he was away. About the Marine Corps, and how he misses those years and wishes he had stayed, hadn’t been swayed by the opportunity to make more money.
About the private military company where he worked until four months ago, and how they’re a bunch of money-hungry dicks who should be bowing down to him for what he’s done for them, but instead fired him for some lame-ass excuse about violating company policy with drug use.
The Vicodin is legit, he swears. To help manage the ongoing pain in his shoulder from a bullet wound that never healed properly. And it’s the stress of that job that made him start smoking. Never touched the stuff before and then he goes into Afghanistan as contracted arms for Alliance and comes out needing a spliff every night just to fall asleep, and sometimes to get through the day, when he’s especially anxious. That’s another aftereffect of the job, he says. Severe anxiety. But if he violated company policy, why’d they also make him sign a gag order and give him a bunch of money to make sure he kept his mouth shut? And why’d all this happen a month after he put a formal complaint in about his coworkers?
They paid him off to keep quiet about things, but not nearly fucking enough, according to him.
“Alliance, you say?” Ned murmurs, his head down and focused on the new outline on Royce’s forearm. “I think I heard of ’em.”
“Probably.” Royce tips his head back and closes his eyes, his voice nasally and annoying. “They were big in the news two months ago over a civilian shooting near Kandahar.”
“Thought that war was over.”
The expression that takes over Royce’s face is one I recognize well. In his mind, he’s drifting back into it. He can’t help himself. It happens to the best of us. “As long as American troops are there, that war will never be over. And bad shit will keep happening to good people.”
“I guess that’s war, though, right?” I can’t tell if Ned is actually interested in this conversation or just going through the motions because Royce is his customer.
Royce chuckles—a wicked, bitter sound. “Have you ever been in a war, Ned?”
“Nope. Glad to say I was too young for Nam.”
“Well, let me tell you something about war. It can last forever, if there’s enough money to keep it going. As long as war is profitable for companies like Alliance, they’ll be there, front and center. You know our government gave Alliance a billion dollars in contracts to go over there?”
Ned lets out a low whistle.
“Exactly. They handed them that much money and sent them over to basically govern themselves. It’s a privately owned company. No one knows what’s going on inside because nothing’s released. No one’s checking on them. No one’s telling them what they can and can’t do. There’s an actual legit immunity law that protects them. With that kind of money, they’re above the law over there. Or at least they act like they are. They’re a bunch of fucking mercenaries is what they are.”