No Man's Land by G. M. Ford Read Free Book Online

She rubbed her hands together as she made her way to the
refrigerator and opened the door. The usual. A fresh carton of
half-andhalf for her coffee, lots of bottled water and not much else.
She grabbed a bottle of water and walked over to the dinette, where
she sat down in one of the deep, upholstered chairs flanking the
table. She blew on her hands before lifting the phone from the
cradle. Memory Dial 1. Home. She listened through several clicks,
then through half a dozen rings before her own voice instructed her
how to leave a message. She followed the recorded instructions.
Wasn’t until the beep sounded that she realized she had no idea
what she was going to say. “Brian . . . er . . . it’s me . . . I
just wanted to . . . Anyway I’m here. Hope you had a good day. You
can get me on my cell. Okay . . . see ya.”
    She sat back in the chair and took a
deep breath. She couldn’t remember anytime in the past thirteen
years when she and Brian had left so much unsaid. When so many words
had hung in the air at one time, so many confessions, admissions and
epithets left to fester on the vine like overripe fruit. Her stomach
felt like it had a hole in it. Her breath tasted of metal.
    Brian had been gone by the time she
set her bag by the door and returned to the back of the house to tell
him she was leaving. She’d just begun to ponder the significance of
his absence when the cab blew its horn from out front. She’d
snapped off the TV on her way out. On the way to LAX she’d tried
Brian’s cell, but got nothing but voice mail.
    She was halfway through the bottle of
water when a knock sounded on the door.
    “Come in,” Melanie said.
    Martin Wells poked his head in the
door, then mounted the steps and came inside. “Fifteen minutes,”
he said.
    “What’s in fifteen minutes?”
    “They shoot another hostage in
fifteen minutes.”
    “I thought we were meeting with the
prison people.”
    “They’ve got problems.”
    “What kind of problems?”
    “National Guard problems.”
    “Such as?”
    “Such as the fact that very nearly
every combat-trained member of their National Guard is somewhere in
the Middle East. They’ve still got a bunch of cooks and drivers and
clerks here stateside, but that’s about it.”
    “What are they going to do?”
    “They’ve been trying to borrow
soldiers from Nevada, but the governor of Nevada doesn’t seem to be
in a hurry to send his soldiers into anything where the opposition is
as armed to the teeth as this.”
    “Are we set up and ready?”
    Martin shook his head. “We’re all
sharing a CNN feed. Right now that’s as close as we can get.”
    Melanie swallowed a mouthful of
water. “Nobody’s gonna tune in to see what they already saw on
the news, Marty. We need something of our own.”
    “I got my people working on the
Driver angle. He’s the one shooting the hostages. Seems to be the
leader of this thing. We’re working on a full profile.”
    “So is everybody else. What else?”

    “Rumor has it they’ve got tape of the moment when this Timothy
Driver guy took over the prison’s control module, which is like the macher of this whole prison. We’re working on maybe getting
a copy.”
    Martin liked to throw in occasional Yiddish words. Melanie figured
it made him somehow feel more ethnic. Whatever.
    “Working?”
    “We’re pushing on both ends. Freedom of Information Act on the
front and we’ve got somebody who might be willing to cooperate on
the back side.”
    “This somebody gonna come through?”
    “Too early to tell.” He made a conspiratorial face. “Source’s
got big-time money problems. We could be manna.”
    “Any idea what this Driver guy wanted with Frank Corso?”
    “Nothing other than the obvious fact that Corso wrote a book
about him.”
    Martin ran a hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair.
    “You remember when we had him on the show . . . what was that .
. . five, six years ago?”
    “Women don’t forget men who look like Frank