Killer Nashville Noir

by Clay Stafford

  Rex opened the rear door of the pickup and locked eyes with Snyder. “Then you must also know what Machiavelli said: ‘War cannot be avoided. It can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy.’”

  “We are the good guys, right?” I said.

  “‘Take not counsel of your fears,’” Rex replied. “And I believe it was General Patton who said that.”

  That was the only answer Snyder and I were going to get.

  • • •

  The quickest route to our destination took us north toward Waimea, where we cut over the middle of the island on the Saddle Road, a treacherous two-laner that wound through miles of lunar landscape that consisted of little more than black lava and dry scrub. The night was suffused by moonlight that blanched all but the brightest stars from the sky.

  The drive was a quiet one, each of us immersed in our own thoughts. I stared out the window and my mind drifted through the wreckage of my recollections as an L.A. cop, the twenty years I spent on those streets, and a creeping sense of futility: that the victims were still victims, the robbed were still robbed, the raped were still raped, and the dead were still dead. I had moved to these islands to make a change from all of that, but the images seeped unbidden into my consciousness like smoke through a crack in the door. It was Lani to whom it most often fell to remind me that life is filled with rocks and snags, sand shoals and currents; that it could be dangerous, painful, and life-threatening, even inside those intervals of stillness and calm; that there were unexplored traces that trailed off into unknowns, into wild and undiscovered territory. Ours was an imperfect map, with vast expanses left uncharted, obscured by clouds, and best to be thought of in those terms. But I had devoted my professional life to the antithesis of that notion, attempting to carve order out of mayhem. Here I was doing it all again.

  I rolled down the window to clear my head. The warm air smelled of damp soil and the wild ginger that grew along the roadside. I checked my watch and figured we were less than ten minutes from our destination.

  “Heads up,” I said. “We’re getting close.”

  “Roger that,” Snyder answered, slowing the truck so we could each keep an eye open for the abandoned vehicle.

  We did not have to search long, nor very hard.

  “Sonofabitch,” Rex said. “You seeing that?”

  In the near distance, beyond a shallow rise in the road, the sky pulsed with dull orange light. A moment later, the skeletal remains of a burning automobile came clearly into view.

  “Sonofabitch,” Rex repeated. “Pull over and stop the truck. Now.”

  Snyder killed the headlights, crossed the double yellow line, and slid to a stop on the unpaved shoulder on the opposite side of the road, a hundred yards away from the flaming vehicle. A cloud of red dust drifted up behind us and disappeared in the wind.

  “Not to be Mary Sunshine here,” Snyder said, “but do you think there’s any chance the kid torched his own car?”

  “No,” Blackwood answered. “Lock and load.”

  • • •

  It made zero tactical sense to split up, so we remained together, as planned.

  “Best guess,” I whispered as we knelt together in the dark, some distance from the road. “How many guys are out there?”

  “Two,” Rex said. “Maybe three. That’s how they roll.”

  We each checked our gear one final time, then set off into the dense canopy. I took point since I knew the general terrain, Rex came second, and Snyder went last, leaving three meter intervals between us. The ground beneath our feet was soft and smelled of loam and fallen leaves. The croak of a toad in the distance sounded like a rusted key in a mantel clock.

  We knew from the topo map that there were at least two lava tubes in this general area that would be large enough to accommodate a man, and had earlier agreed to try the one nearest the narrow falls, on the assumption that water would be a critical issue for our fugitive. If we found it empty, we’d try the other. Failing that, we were wandering in the dark, and we knew it.

  Barely a hundred yards in, a ribbon of sweat was already running down my back, and the MP7 was slick with moisture from my palms. It was slow-going. Ten cautious paces at a time…halt, kneel, and listen. Ten more paces…halt, kneel, and listen. The silence was oppressive, the darkness like a living thing, claustrophobic.

  Based on the length of time we’d been on the move, I judged that we should be very close to our first target, and something caught my eye. I pulled up short and raised a hand, and we all stopped in our tracks. I dropped into a crouch, and Blackwood and Snyder did the same.

  I turned to Blackwood and put a finger to my lips, then pointed off to my two o’clock.

  He turned and passed the signal down the line to Snyder. He nodded.

  Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. A minute grew into two, then three.

  The muscles in my calves and thighs burned from my unaccustomed static position, the silence inside the overgrowth a lethal one.

  Nothing moved, not even the wind.

  My eyes scanned the tree line on the far side of the clearing near the mouth of the cave. Wild hogs had churned up a large section of grass in the process of rooting for grubs. Their odor still lingered in the air.

  My knees popped as I began to unfold myself from my crouched position, and something cleaved the air beside my ear. Before I could process that I had nearly been taken off the board, Blackwood unshipped his weapon and fired three silenced shots into a heavy vine of philodendron. The reports were no louder than the intake of a breath. They were followed by the sound of what could only have been a body falling to the earth.

  Blackwood looked at me, pointing to his chin so I would lip-read his silent message. “You two stay here. I’m going inside.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll back you up.”

  “No. You wait for my signal. You see anyone but me, you shoot them.”

  He came out of his crouch, then turned to me one last time, and whispered. “If anyone kills me, you kill them back.” His smile looked like it belonged on someone else’s face.

  Before I could reply, he was gone into the dark, muddy water.

  Snyder moved forward and took up the space behind me, where Blackwood had been. Seconds later, the muffled sounds of a struggle rolled out from the mouth of the cave. We shouldered our MPs and covered the clearing. The sandpaper scrape of boot soles on dry soil echoed from within, but we held our positions. A moment after that, all hell broke loose. Not five feet away, the ground began to roil with the impact of high-velocity ordnance, tracing a path directly to where Snyder and I stood guard. We trained the muzzles of our guns in the direction of the incoming rounds and laid down a barrage that nearly emptied our clips, shredding a fissure through the overgrowth in an unearthly hiss of suppressed fire. The atmosphere bristled with the deadly whisper of copper-jacketed steel, and its hollow impact with flesh and bone.

  Then there was nothing.

  I locked eyes with Snyder, and he with me, our faces void of expression, and my hands began to tremble.

  A dim yellow light ticked on inside the cave, and a whistle that might have been a nightbird. Blackwood.

  Snyder nodded to me and we backed slowly toward the entrance, our weapons trained outward into the tangle of ferns and clinging vines. I ducked inside while Snyder took up a defensive position just under the lip of the overhang.

  Blackwood was standing in a far corner, his face half-lit by a cheap camping flashlight that lay in the dust beside a cowering figure whose upraised hands concealed his features. The stone walls inside wept with moisture.

  As I drew closer, I saw it was a young man who could not have been old enough to buy a legal drink. Blackwood had his .45 trained on the bridge of the young man’s nose…or would have been if his quivering palms hadn’t been blocking his face. Ten feet away, a body in black and grey camo lay on its back leaking blood from a slit in its throat that carved all the way to the spine.

  “Where is it, son?” Blackwo
od asked. His voice was steady, unnaturally calm.

  The kid gestured toward a backpack that had been kicked into a corner, presumably during Blackwood’s encounter with the guy in the camos. I grabbed it and set it beside the kid, who had now rolled himself into a terrified ball. He glanced up at me, then at Blackwood. His eyes were like shattered windows.

  “I want you to understand something,” Blackwood said. “You do not need to die tonight. But if you tell anyone about this, you will go to prison. Nod if you understand me.”

  He knew Blackwood meant it. He nodded. This was not idle chitchat.

  “Now, give them to me.”

  The kid reached into the backpack and handed over what looked to be a laminated security badge.

  Blackwood took it from him, and made a come-here gesture with his fingers. “Keep going.”

  He dipped into the bag again and came out with a thumb drive.

  Blackwood cocked the pistol and drilled it into the kid’s forehead.

  “Jesus, Rex,” I said.

  “Son,” he said, “you are making this much harder than it needs to be.”

  The kid looped his arm inside a strap, and slid the whole backpack over to me. “Take it. Just take the whole thing.” Tears spilled from his eyes, and a viscous thread of saliva trailed across his chin as he stifled the sobs welling in his chest.

  I opened the flap and looked inside: a thick sheaf of paper held together by a rubber band, a worn-out leather billfold, and a rock. I grabbed the bundle of papers and began to extract it from the backpack.

  “Leave it,” Blackwood said. “Gimme the rock.”

  What the fuck?

  Blackwood tucked the stone I handed him into a utility pocket and buttoned it.

  “I need you to listen to me, son. Are you listening?”

  “Y—yes.”

  “I’m going to walk out of here. But you need to be crystal clear about this: you can keep your old man’s manuscript. You can do what you want with it, I don’t give a shit. What you may not do is ever speak about what happened here tonight. If you text your girlfriend, write your memoirs, talk on the phone, or confess it all to Jesus, you had better do it where only Jesus can hear you. If you don’t, I will be extremely disappointed. Because I will have to hunt you down, tie a bag over your head, and put you on an unmarked transport plane to a country whose name can’t be pronounced in English, where you will be locked in a cell and vigorously interviewed, after which you will never again be physically capable of consuming nourishment that isn’t delivered through a straw. Understand?” Rex leaned in close, then whispered hoarsely in his ear. “All you have to do now, son, is walk away. Don’t talk to anyone; don’t visit anyone. Just leave. Simply live your life, and don’t make a ripple.”

  I followed Blackwood out of the cave and into the clearing, Snyder close behind me. Blackwood drew a cell phone from a pocket of his utility pants and switched it on. He tapped the screen, waited a few moments, and powered it off again. Only then did he acknowledge Snyder and me.

  “I just sent the GPS coordinates to the office. We need to go.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Snyder said.

  Blackwood cast his eyes around the clearing, landing finally on the entrance of the cave. “This will get cleaned up. There will be no burned-out car, no bodies, and nothing in the paper.”

  “What about the kid?” I asked.

  “He can get back to where he came from on his own. He got here; he can get back home. I don’t rescue cats from trees, either. Same principle.”

  • • •

  No one said a word during the long drive home.

  I leaned my head against the window and reminded myself that Rex Blackwood was a man whom I trusted, a man who had once saved my life. I told myself that he was one of the good guys, though I was no longer certain if such a thing existed.

  Clouds coated the sky like a layer of spilled milk in the false dawn, and I watched the pale light break across the tops of the trees as we turned onto the long dirt road that led up to my home.

  “Pull over,” I said, breaking the silence that had enveloped us all.

  “What?” Snyder said.

  “Pull the fuck over,” I said again.

  He did, and I climbed out of the truck, pacing slow, aimless circles in the rutted red dirt. I stepped into the weeds along the fence line, dropped to my knees, and puked my guts out. I heaved until I thought my ribs would break, and felt as if a fist had been thrust down my throat and was turning me inside out. I don’t recall the last time I felt a sickness so deep, or a grief so profound that I was reduced to cold, furious tears. After a time, I stood and gathered myself, drying my soiled lips on the sleeve of my shirt.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said.

  A sallow wind channeled inside the trees, and I heard the birds begin to stir.

  “Which one?” Rex said. “There are a number of truths about this situation.”

  I shook my head, bit back my anger. “The real one. People were killed.”

  “Travis, those men were born dead.”

  “Not good enough. That’s not an answer. What the fuck did we just do?”

  “You kept a monster in its cage.”

  “I swear to God, Rex…”

  “All right. I owe you this. The manuscript in that kid’s backpack? His father was a physicist. He wrote a book about a project. No one will believe it, it’s too far-fetched, so it’s not about the book.”

  “So it’s about a little plastic badge and a fucking rock?”

  “They are the proof that the monster exists.”

  “There better be a fast-forward on this story, goddammit.”

  “There is a military installation on the moon,” Rex said. His voice was so low it was nearly carried away on the breeze. “On the dark side of the moon.”

  “Aw, shit,” Snyder said and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “You told the kid you didn’t care about the book. They’re going to kill him if he publishes it, aren’t they?”

  “Aren’t you tired of thinking the worst of people, Travis?”

  “I’m tired of being right.”

  “The answer is ‘no’. If both the father and son turn up dead, the manuscript becomes a cause. It’s the cover-up that kills you. Ask Nixon.”

  “And when it does comes out?”

  “Then the late night radio shows will talk about it, the conspiracy theorists will run amok. But it’s easy to discredit the rantings of lunatics in the absence of evidence. The bigger the lie, the more easily it will be believed. But these other things—the security pass and the rock? They came from that installation—they put truth to the lie. And the monster gets loose.”

  “So, what then?” I asked. “This never happened?”

  Blackwood nodded, and I saw the hurt crowd his eyes. “This never happened.”

  THE HUNT FOR SKIPPY WALKER

  by Donald Bain

  A middle-aged, African-American gentleman with a kindly face and mellow voice sat behind the wheel of his trolley and collected tickets from that evening’s passengers. A family of four—father, mother, and two teenage daughters—came aboard. The father, who’d been cajoled by his daughters to take the Savannah, Georgia, ghost tour, handed the driver their tickets and asked, “So what’s this Skippy Walker thing all about?”

  The guide smiled and said, “I’ll be telling you all about it while we visit the places where Mr. Walker lived and died.”

  “Think we’ll actually see this Walker character?” asked the father.

  The guide laughed and started the engine. “You never know,” he said, “you never know.”

  • • •

  Willard and Deborah Walker had done what they always did on their anniversary: went to dinner at Savannah’s best restaurant, Duke’s Chateau, on River Street. It was the only night of the year that they patronized Duke’s. Willard considered the restaurant overpriced, although he did admit the service and food were
good.

  On this special night, albeit an oppressively hot and humid one, Willard pulled into a parking space a block away.

  “Use the valet parking,” Debbie ordered.

  “It’s only a block,” Willard said.

  “Use the valet,” she repeated. “I have these new shoes. Besides I don’t want to get all sweaty.”

  He sighed as he slipped the Camry’s transmission into gear, drove the block, and pulled into the circular driveway in front of the restaurant. A uniformed young man took Willard’s keys, opened Debbie’s door, and accepted her outstretched hand. The valet, a college student working weekends, fixed his eyes on her, which didn’t go unnoticed by her husband. She’d bought a new dress for the occasion, a shimmering gold sheath cut low, the short skirt of which rode up her thighs as she exited the car. The valet retreated to where a college buddy stood by a box in which the car keys were secured. Willard took Debbie’s elbow and led her to the restaurant’s entrance, imagining what the two young men were saying about his wife.

  He’d hated the dress when she’d tried it on for him earlier that day. “It’s really provocative,” he’d commented.

  “Don’t be silly,” she’d replied as she checked her freshly-dyed blonde hair in their hallway mirror. “You sound like an Arab in some Middle East country. What do you want me to do Willard, wear a veil and a damn burqa?”

  Willard followed her to the kitchen where she filled a glass with ice and poured vodka over the cubes. He checked his watch, concerned about their reservation.

  “Maybe you should wait until we’re at the restaurant,” he suggested softly, keeping criticism from his voice.

  “I want a drink now,” she said. “Hell, it’s my anniversary. I’m celebrating. Whoopee!”

  He dropped the subject and sat in a chair to wait; he didn’t need another argument.

  • • •

  Willard and Deborah had met in high school, although they’d had little to do with each other. Debbie was two years behind him. She was popular with the jock crowd, captained the cheerleading team her junior year, and dated a succession of athletes. Willard was aware of her reputation as what his generation called a “round heel”, a sexually promiscuous, inveterate flirt. He often fantasized what it would be like to be intimate with her. His own sexual experiences were limited, consisting of a few bouts of awkward necking in his father’s car, which he was occasionally allowed to use. None of those incidents had led to full-blown sex; he was a virgin when he went off to a university in a neighboring state to study business.