Read the Excerpt: Hard Town by Adam Plantinga
PROLOGUE
Fenton, Arizona. One Year Ago.
The man with the silver hair shielded his eyes from the dust kicked up by a steady wind, took a drag of his cigarette, and went in the bar, which was called Connor’s. There were a few people inside, all drinking alone. The man with the silver hair did not allow alcohol into his system and as such, would not be frequenting this place. But taverns were an acknowledged way to get a sense of a locale and those who lived there, even if he had no plans to regularly interact with them.
The bartender was a bland-looking man wearing a bolo tie. He stood slightly bowed forward.
“Not in here, buddy,” the bartender said. He pointed to the sign behind him that said No Smoking.
The man took another pull of his cigarette. He had started smoking as a teenager to make friends, although it had not been successful. His classmates made a habit of mocking him. Laughed at his high voice and his precision with language. Pointed out his long neck. Like an ostrich, they’d said. He’d taken to wearing custom shirts with high collars to hide it. But he hadn’t quit smoking. It remained his sole vice. He allowed himself two cigarettes a week.
“Your sign should say Smoking Prohibited and list the applicable ordinance. Otherwise it’s merely a suggestion.”
The bartender stared at him. Still bowed forward. “It’s against town code. No smoking inside any business here in Fenton.”
“Which code?”
“I’d have to look it up. Maybe we need a new sign. Now, you gonna put that cigarette out or not?”
The man with the silver hair stubbed the cigarette out in an empty tumbler glass. Then he reached into his shirt pocket, took out a second cigarette and lit it with a bronze lighter from the same pocket. He knew that the cigarette weighed exactly one gram.
By now, everyone in the bar was looking at him.
“If you don’t put that out, mister, you’re going to have to leave.” The bartender shifted from foot to foot. He didn’t seem particularly used to confrontation, but he wasn’t a pushover either.
The man with the silver hair could appreciate that. People ought to take a stand for something, even if they didn’t always understand what it was. “And if I don’t?” he said.
“I’ll call the sheriff.”
“You wouldn’t throw me out yourself?”
“Nope.”
“Because of your compromised lower back?”
The bartender was silent for a moment. Then he said, “How do you know about my back?”
“It’s in your posture. How you keep shifting around. Likely incessant pain, on-and-off sciatica. You probably can’t lift anything heavier than a soup bowl off the floor.”
“Won’t stop me from picking up the phone.”
“So if you call the sheriff, what steps will he take?”
“He’ll make you leave.”
“He has deputies who will facilitate this?”
“Facilitate?” The bartender squinted at the word. “I guess so.”
“How many?”
The bartender thought about that. The man with the silver hair wondered if he was going to count on his fingers. “Three or four.”
“I’ll talk with your sheriff later. We have some matters to discuss.”
“Mister, who are you?”
The man with the silver hair nodded as if the bartender hadn’t asked him any question at all. He stood to leave. “I may be residing in town for a time. There is a substantial chance the dry air will alleviate my allergies.”
The bartender shrugged and went to the other end of the bar.
The man with the silver hair silently chided himself for bringing up his allergies. He tended to reveal too much to people, even strangers. The clock in his head told him he’d had sufficient human contact in the tavern for the day, so he exited Connor’s and went across the street and sat on a bench.
The sky had taken on an orangish tinge and the wind hadn’t subsided. He drew in a long breath of warm air. His handlers were watching him from close by with their guns and radios. They would be interested in the information about the sheriff and his deputies. And if anyone had hassled him inside the bar, they would have moved in force. Shot the bartender between the eyes if the man with the silver hair gave the order. Set the bar on fire. They didn’t like it when he went into places alone, for he was an irreplaceable asset. But for his next project, he had to find just the right setting, and that meant performing some of his own reconnaissance. His next stop would be the diner down the street where he’d seen one of the waitresses through the window. Red hair and the kind of full figure that intrigued him. He had more of Fenton to see, but thus far he favored it for relocation. The citizenry didn’t seem as inane as he’d suspected they’d be. The home they showed him where he would set up his lab was more than sufficient. And the climate agreed with him. Plus, no one knew him here.
No one knew him anywhere.
Out on the street, a Mexican day laborer approached, head down against the wind. He was five feet seven inches tall and moving at exactly three and a half feet per second. The man with the silver hair was good with numbers.
The Mexican gazed at the tangerine sky and looked at him as he passed by. “Change in the weather’s coming, my friend.” He said it in broken English, but the man with the silver hair would have understood him in Spanish. Or Russian, Cantonese, Gaelic.
“Yes indeed,” said the man with the silver hair.
CHAPTER 1
Braylo, Arizona. Present Day.
There was one real sit-down café in Braylo, a place called Powell’s, and Kurt Argento was there about every morning. There were two reasons for this. The first was the steak and eggs special for $6.99, a reasonable price. The second was the fresh pastries, especially the apple fritters. They usually came out after nine o’clock. The first two batches of dough were used for the glazed and chocolate donuts. Customers had to wait for the third batch before they made the fritters because, as the baker explained to him, the dough in the first two batches was too thin for the fritters. That was okay with Argento. He had time to wait.
He’d gone home to Detroit to some fanfare after the bad business at Whitehall Correctional Institute in Missouri where the prison’s security system had broken down and some people had died because of it. He’d helped get some folks out of Whitehall, including the governor of Missouri’s daughter, a touring student named Julie Wake- field. He’d turned down multiple news outlets who’d wanted to interview him about what happened in the prison. Picked up some work as a handyman. Attended church at Trinity Lutheran, where he’d reconnected with his pastor and spent his off-hours fishing and hunting. When a retired Detroit SWAT buddy named Trapsi invited him to visit in Braylo, Arizona, he’d agreed. When Trapsi got called to active military service for a six-month deployment and asked Argento to housesit, he’d agreed again.
He’d been in Braylo for a month. He had no short-term plans other than picking up some side jobs while he waited for his friend’s return. He’d put Trapsi’s home number on the corkboard at the town’s main grocery store and had gotten a gig dismantling a dilapidated tool shed and building a new one out of pine. It had been an easy job. Take the roof off the shed first, remove the trim, and knock the walls down with a sledge. Then a run to the lumberyard to drop off the old wood and pick up the new. He was glad the homeowner hadn’t stuck around to watch him work. Argento didn’t always care for talking. Most of the folks in town were friendly but not overly chatty. He had even gotten to know a few of their names when he’d been on walks with his chow-shepherd, Hudson. He didn’t initiate many conversations, but he’d say just enough to be polite.
The bell on the front door to Powell’s chimed. Argento looked up from his seat in the back out of habit. Twenty-one years as a Detroit street cop had taught him to pay attention to everyone entering the space he occupied. Argento had no firearm at the moment because he hadn’t gotten around to filling out the paperwork for a concealed carry permit, although it would be a light lift for a retired cop in Arizona. But if someone came in shooting, the heavy wood table he sat at would serve as a ballistic shield. The steak knife he was using to cut his breakfast would function as an adequate missile weapon at close range—Argento figured he could throw it with enough velocity to penetrate his target up to the hilt. The chances that someone might come in this particular diner at this particular time to do him or the other customers harm were low. But they weren’t zero.
However, the woman who’d entered did not rate particularly high on his threat meter, in part because she was carrying a toddler in her right arm. She was about forty, was plainly dressed and looked fatigued. She had a diaper bag over her shoulder and a cast on her left arm. She glanced around the restaurant, and her eyes settled on Argento for a moment. Then she sat down two tables away from him, and the waitress brought her a menu and high chair.
The toddler was a boy, probably one or two years old. Argento didn’t have children, so the age was a rough guess. The kid was facing away from Argento in the high chair but he twisted his small torso and craned his neck to peer back at him. Then he waved. Socially speaking, it was probably par for the course to wave back. But Argento kept eating his steak. The waitress would know to bring the apple fritter when he was done. They had an understanding. Dessert for breakfast was highly underrated.
The woman ordered. The boy squirmed in his chair. He was wearing a Denver Broncos T-shirt that had food stains near the neck. He kept looking back at Argento. Maybe he found something interesting about him. Or maybe the kid would have been just as content staring at a traffic cone.
Now the woman was looking at Argento as well. He was used to that given the ugly circular scars on both sides of his face, which he’d picked up at Whitehall when a crazed Armenian inmate had shoved a ballpoint pen through his cheeks. History written into flesh. When people saw them, he could see the question in their eyes. Surgery? Injury? Defect? The scars told people to keep away. Argento was fine with that message. Even before his face was marred, a fellow cop had once told him he looked like a bouncer at a post-apocalyptic bar. But she was looking longer than most. He sensed that she was going to come over and ask if she could sit.
Then she did just that. Her voice was quiet. Tired.
Argento gave it a second’s assessment before he said, “Suit yourself.” Maybe she was looking for a laborer to replace a rotting deck or rewire a kitchen.
The woman moved her child’s high chair over to Argento’s table. Then she sat herself. The kid hiccuped, looking pleased with himself. Argento kept eating. If the woman had a point, she’d get to it.
She brushed her longish hair behind her ears with her good arm and locked eyes with him. She hadn’t asked him about a job yet, which made Argento think she was after something else. Money, maybe, or a ride. Argento wasn’t in the habit of giving out either. He held her gaze. Despite her obvious weariness, she had an unlined, kind face. But there was the arm cast. Plus, her clothes looked wrinkled. As if she had been wearing them a few days. Argento instinctively checked her right arm for track marks and saw none. When she set her water glass down, he cast a glance at her fingertips. No scorch marks from a drug pipe. No sniffles, no red-rimmed eyes. She didn’t smell. If she was a user, she hid it well.
The child hiccupped again and grinned.
“My name is Kristin Reed,” the woman said. “This is my son, Ethan. We need your help.”
Argento cut off a square of scrambled egg and ate it. “Have you ever heard of a place called Fenton, Arizona?” Argento shook his head.
“It’s a town about forty miles west of here.”
“What about it?”
“My husband went missing in Fenton. His name is Warren Reed. I believe something happened to him there.” There was no emotion in Kristin’s voice. Flat and measured. She had said this before. She handed Argento a homemade missing person flyer with a picture of Warren, his date of birth, description, and contact info for Kristin if found. Argento glanced at it. Warren was smiling in the picture. He was a man of about thirty-five with a shock of thick dark hair and the beginnings of a beard. He wore thick, old-fashioned glasses, and resembled a church elder.
Argento looked at Kristin’s shoes. The footwear often gave it away. But hers were in decent shape. Not the torn, stained shoes of an addict. He cut off another square of egg. He had maybe two more forkfuls left and one more wedge of steak followed by the fritter. Then breakfast would be over and he could look forward to breakfast the next day. He’d dropped weight since coming to the desert, from daily workouts and long walks with Hudson, and he now tipped the scale at an even two hundred. He needed Powell’s breakfast calories to keep his strength up.
“What makes you think something happened to your husband?”
“He went to Fenton for the weekend. Didn’t say why. Then he sent me a text that something strange was going on there and he’d tell me about it later. After that, he stopped communicating. And he wouldn’t do that. Not to me. Or his son.” Kristin put her palm lightly on top of Ethan’s head. “Warren is a smart, stable man. We’ve been married fifteen years. There’s no way.”
“Sounds like something the Fenton cops should hear about.”
“I tried. I said he was missing. Maybe dead. They took a report. But after that, they ignored me. They could be in on it for all I know.”
“Big jump from missing to dead.”
“No other reason for him not to call me. Something happened. I know it.”
Argento flagged the waitress down and ordered a cup of coffee to go.
“He didn’t run out on us. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
Ethan said something that sounded like “Wa-wa.” Kristin reached into the diaper bag and took out a child’s plastic cup and gave it to him. Ethan gulped from it greedily.
Argento wasn’t a cop anymore and he was no kind of private investigator. People disappeared all the time, for reasons that made sense and reasons that didn’t. They nearly always turned back up. But the woman in front of him was road-weary with a bad arm and had a child with her, which made telling her to buzz off bad form. Plus his late wife, Emily, wouldn’t have liked it, and whenever possible, Argento tried not to do things that Emily would disapprove of. Civilized, Argento thought. I’m getting civilized.
“So is this what you do? You go from town to town looking for someone to help you find your lost husband?”
“I have to. Otherwise I’m just giving up.”
“There are some folks out there who say they’ll help and then do the opposite.”
“A week ago, there was a man in Phoenix,” Kristin said, her level voice now taking on a huskier quality. “His name was Wayne Ellerbee. Cowboy-type. He worked for a private investigator. Showed me his business card. He said he’d find Warren. When he came to my hotel, he was drunk and I knew what he wanted. He put his hands on me and when I pushed him, he broke my arm. I stabbed him with a fork to get away.”
Argento wondered if any of that was true. Was she trying to win him over with a sad story? A you have to help me or I’ll be forced to go to more men who will assault me approach? His time as a cop had made him pick apart every tale he was told.
“How do you know I’m any different than the cowboy?”
“I know who you are. You were a police officer. You protected the governor’s daughter at that prison in Missouri. It was on the news. People in town said you came to this diner. And now I’ve found you.” The rumor mill of a small town. Argento had been in Braylo long enough for someone to recognize him from his picture in the media and told someone and that someone told someone else and now here they were. Argento set down his utensils. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere productive. But Argento would give her this much— in addition to his threat meter, he had a crazy meter and she wasn’t setting that off either. She was weary, but entirely coherent.
The breakfast crowd had faded and the diner had the after-the-crowd, settled calm where you could hear voices in the kitchen, the clink of silverware, the whir of the overhead fans. Kristin watched him closely.
“Will you help us?”
Us, Argento thought. Not just her. Ethan too. She was banking that he would be less inclined to turn away both a mother and a child in need. But no matter how civilized Argento might become, there was still a problem with appealing to his emotional side.
He didn’t much have one.
“You don’t need me. You needed Richard Boone about forty years ago.”
“Who’s that?”
“He was on a TV show.”
The waitress returned with Kristin’s breakfast and Argento’s to-go cup of coffee and apple fritter. Argento took them and stood. Kristin put one hand on his forearm. Argento looked down at her hand and she removed it. But she held his gaze.
“I can tell what kind of man you are. You’ll do this for me. You’ll find out what happened to my husband.”
Argento thought that was a lot to figure over one breakfast but he didn’t say as much. “Follow up with the local cops.” He paid his bill, and left a twenty on Kristin’s table to cover her tab.
“You’ll help me,” Kristin said. Her voice had gone up an octave. Her arms were folded across her chest, her face set in stubborn repose. Next to her, Ethan sipped from his water cup.
“I’d just be in the way.”
Kristin closed her eyes. Something that might have been a shudder went through her. She put her hand on top of Ethan’s head again. Argento guessed she hadn’t slept in a while. “I expected more from you.” There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so Argento left the diner. He cast one more look at Kristin and Ethan before walking away. Kristin was watching him intently, like if she tried hard enough, she could look straight through him.
Discover the Book
Argento starts to notice that Fenton, Arizona is more than meets the eye. First there’s the large, overly equipped public safety team complete with specialized tactics and sophisticated weaponry. Then there’s the unusual financial boosting of failing small businesses by the U.S. government. Finally, there’s a man with no name with unprecedented control over the town. Argento finds himself unraveling not just the truth behind the disappearance of a family, but a conspiracy that’s taken a whole town to cover up.
Fenton, Arizona is going to push him further than he’s ever had to go. And along the way, he may just lose a part of himself. Because justice isn’t as black and white as Argento would like to believe.
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