A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  “Baer was collateral damage,” said Anthony Kimbrell, Regional Director of Homeland Security. “This was Rightwing terrorism from what we believe to be the same anti-government band that lynched one of our people in the Akins’ cemetery. Baer just happened to get in the way.”

  The helicopter attack by machineguns occurred as an estimated 10,000 appeared to hear Baer’s usual harangue against the U.S. Government. The helicopter was later abandoned at privately-owned Riverside Airport; it had been reported stolen earlier that day.

  President Anastos issued a statement from the White House condemning the shooting and describing it as “abominable, a disgrace, proof that certain violent elements in our society who disagree with the progress we are implementing will stop at nothing... There must be recognition on the part of every American that change toward social justice and a more fair and equitable society will not be won without struggle. We are going to have to change our conversation, we are going to have to change our traditions, our history, we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.. .”

  The U.S. Congress is calling for increased gun control and further restrictions on hate speech, on large assemblies that might threaten the peace and stability of communities, and on inflammatory talk radio and TV. Senate Majority Leader Joe Wiedersham (D-Ill), a former Anastos campaign advisor and author of the Fairness of Airwaves Doctrine (FAD) Bill, said he and Speaker of the House Barbara Teague (D-CA) will support bills to temporarily restrict First Amendment guarantees during this crisis.

  “We have hard-core, Rightwing elements declaring war on the United States of America,” he warned. “It’s a crisis with which we must contend firmly before it erupts into anarchy.”

  Chapter Eight

  Tulsa

  Regaining consciousness, Detective James Nail opened his eyes to subdued lighting, lime-green walls, a muted TV on a stand, and the smell of hospital disinfectant. He attempted to sit up. Lacerating pain behind his eyes knocked him back in bed. He lay trying to blink away explosive star flashes of light.

  His eyesight returned after a few moments. Lieutenant Jack Ross approached the side of the bed. He was still in uniform and appeared thinner and even more solemn than usual.

  The bandages encasing Nail’s skull felt tight enough to restrict brain function. He attempted to speak. Nothing came out.

  “A bullet grazed your skull,” Ross explained, standing above the bed. “You’ll be all right in a couple of days.”

  “Jamie?” Nail finally croaked.

  Ross seemed unwilling to go there.

  “Jamie?”

  Another explosion of pain behind his eyes. Lieutenant Ross rested a hand against Nail’s chest. He slowly shook his head. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to.

  The detective turned his head away and lay staring at the ceiling until dawn. For many years he had seen survivors of murder victims fall apart, wounded beyond recovery, some even committing suicide, others living the rest of their lives as though they were also dead. Had Connie thought to check on him, she would have found a man more emotionless than ever. Long ago he had learned that the way to cope with tragedy was to not think about it. Blocking off the mind was an old cop’s trick learned from the mean streets of the city.

  Lieutenant Ross kept vigil from his chair across the room while cops came and went in ICU. They stepped up to Nail’s bedside and looked down at him. Most touched his arm or squeezed his shoulder. Nail barely noticed. The black cop known as Big C stood by his bedside for a long time.

  Nurses entered to examine the patency of his IVs and take vitals. A doctor making rounds looked over his chart on the computer monitor.

  “Does he know?” the doctor asked Ross.

  The lieutenant nodded. The doctor left.

  A sullen red sun rose out of a gray dawn to cast reluctant rays through the hospital windows. Lieutenant Ross jerked awake when sunlight touched his face. He got up to pull the shade.

  “Leave it,” Nail said.

  They were the first words he had spoken since he learned of his daughter’s fate. He continued to stare at the ceiling. Ross walked over.

  “I went by Connie’s house as soon as I could,” he said.

  Nail knew his ex-wife would blame him, irrationally.

  “What do we know about the perps?” he asked in a voice as hard as kerosene.

  Ross took a deep breath. “You want me to turn on the TV news?”

  “I want you to tell me what we know.”

  “I’ve seen more evidence at a drive-by shooting,” Ross said. “We found the helicopter and News Chopper Bob’s body abandoned at Riverside Airport, along with two SAWs and spare ammo. The chopper was apparently hijacked an hour before the incident. There aren’t any witnesses. The airport was closed for repairs and workers given the day off to go to the Tulsa County Fair. That’s about it. TPD is out of the loop. The Feds are conducting the investigation.”

  Nail’s eyes narrowed.

  “They’re already blaming Rightwing militia terrorists,” Ross said. “They’re saying the Defenders did it.”

  “Baer’s dead, right?”

  “Baer got in the way. At least that’s the spin.”

  “What do you think?”

  Ross shrugged. “I wouldn’t believe the earth is round if it came from Kimbrell.”

  “Can you get me the files?”

  “Tulsa Police has been ordered to stay out of it.”

  “Jack, they killed my daughter.”

  “Kimbrell wants to question you when you’re able.”

  “Screw him.”

  “James, you’re one tough old bird,” Ross said with feeling.

  Display of emotion made such men uncomfortable.

  An exchange of conversation outside in the hallway saved them further embarrassment. Officer Schwartz, the uniformed cop guarding the door, a courtesy and precaution extended all hospitalized policemen injured in the line of duty, stuck his head inside.

  “There’s a woman here says she needs to talk to James,” he announced.

  “He’s not talking to reporters,” Ross objected.

  “I’m not exactly a reporter,” intruded a woman’s voice. A slim young woman dressed in jeans and a red shirt squeezed past Schwartz in the doorway and entered the hospital room. She was rather swarthy with black, curly hair and dark eyes. Nail thought she looked familiar.

  “Detective Nail, I’m Sharon Lowenthal.”

  “Have we met?”

  “In a way.”

  She carried an arrangement of flowers in one hand and a Bible in the other. Lieutenant Ross shifted on his feet. “Well, uh, James, you obviously don’t need backup. I’m going home to crash. Just tell Schwartz if you need anything.”

  He started out with Schwartz in tow.

  “Jack, the files?”

  “You’ll get ’em.” He hesitated at the door. “You know Deputy Johnson in the county jail? He called the station saying they’ve got a prisoner wanting to talk to you. His name’s Logan. Joshua Logan.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Johnson says the guy won’t talk to anyone but you. The Homies have a hold order on him. He’s one of the Defenders.”

  That caught Nail’s attention.

  “Apparently he was at the McDonald’s shooting and saw you there,” Ross added. “That’s all I know.”

  He tipped his head to Nail’s visitor. “I’m outa here.”

  “Jack?”

  Ross looked back.

  “Jack, this is not over.”

  “Didn’t figure it was,” he said. Schwartz closed the door behind them.

  “Detective Nail,” the woman said when they were alone. “I came to thank you for saving my life.”

  Chapter Nine

  Tulsa

  A nurse popped in to Nail’s room to see what was going on. Sharon Lowenthal handed her the arrangement of flowers and asked her to find a vase. Nail nodded that it was okay. The nurse bustled out.

  “R
efresh me on how I saved your life,” Nail prompted. “I seem to have forgotten.”

  She approached his bedside. “I’m not surprised. I thought you were dead. You took a bullet meant for me.”

  He touched the bandage that helmeted his head, vaguely recalling having collided with someone in his desperation to reach Jamie when the shooting started.

  “That was you?” he asked.

  “If you hadn’t grabbed me and thrown me to the ground,” she explained, “I would have been killed along with Jerry and the bodyguard.”

  Tears brimmed her eyes.

  It also occurred to Nail that if he hadn’t crashed into this woman, he might have reached Jamie in time to save her instead.

  Sharon sat on the edge of his bed. She placed the Bible in her lap and took his hand in both of hers.

  “I’m so sorry about your daughter, Detective Nail. I’ve been praying for both of you.”

  Tears landed on his bare arm. He withdrew his hand and stuck it underneath the sheet. He looked away. He didn’t want this stranger seeing the raw anguish talking about Jamie wrung from the depths of his wounded soul.

  The nurse provided a welcome intercession by returning with the flowers in a vase. She smiled awkwardly while she placed the flowers on Nail’s bedside stand, then quickly departed. The interruption allowed Nail time to regain his detective’s composure. He felt hollow again. His face hardened. Sharon stood up with her Bible.

  “Thank you for what you did,” she said, looking rebuffed.

  She seemed so completely sincere and open that her very presence generated a certain peace and warmth. Unexpectedly, Nail didn’t want her to leave.

  “I’m...I’m sorry about your husband,” he offered.

  She looked at him. “My husband?”

  He noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring. Her eyelids squeezed tight. She opened them again.

  “Jerry isn’t...wasn’t my husband. I worked for him. Carl Patton and I produce The Jerry Baer Show on Zenergy Cable News. I also edit Jerry’s monthly magazine Truth.” She choked up. It took her a moment to recover. “Jerry was a good friend.”

  Neither spoke again for a long minute, each grieving in his own way. Grasping for something to say, Nail ventured, “They won’t get away with it.”

  She studied him. “From what I see in the drive-by media,” she said, “they’ve already gotten away with it.”

  “I will hunt them down.”

  Nail gingerly swung his bare legs over the side of the bed and sat up to face her. This time there was no sudden burst of pain. Sharon moved to steady him, but he waved her off. He felt a bit light-headed. She sat on the bed next to him.

  “Are all cops so independent?” she asked.

  He grimaced. “Only those who get shot in the head.”

  He noticed her eyes were red and swollen. She probably hadn’t slept. She stared at her Bible.

  “You don’t believe they were Rightwing terrorists like they’re saying, do you?” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “Jerry Baer received at least a hundred death threats every week from people wanting to shut him up. This goes deeper than you’d ever believe.”

  “I don’t give a damn if it goes to the threshold of Hell. Somebody is going to answer for it.”

  “I heard you were one stubborn man.”

  He stood up, weaving on his feet. Sharon rose and grabbed him around the waist.

  “What are you doing?” she cried in alarm.

  “I’m breaking out of this joint.”

  “You can’t even walk. There’s a policeman outside the door.”

  “Schwartz and I go back a long way.”

  “Where will you go? What will you do?”

  “Find who did this to my daughter.”

  She seemed to suddenly make up her mind. “I can help.”

  “I work alone.”

  “Don’t be pig-headed. Lean on me. I have a rental in the parking lot. I’ll drive while we talk.”

  He hesitated. She had almost as much at stake as he.

  “I feel a draft,” he said.

  “Hospital gowns don’t have backs.”

  “Jeez Louise!”

  “I won’t look. Wrap yourself in a sheet. I’ll take a peek out in the hallway. By the way, where are we going?”

  “I have to get some clothes from my apartment.”

  “And then?”

  He hesitated.

  “You have to talk to me if we’re going to be accomplices in The Great Escape.”

  He glanced at the Bible she carried. He nodded thoughtfully. She was serious.

  “Your average scumbag doesn’t steal a helicopter and bring along buddies armed like Marines,” he said. “My cop’s blue radar is pinging. The hanging in the cemetery, the shooting at McDonald’s, and now this... Cops don’t believe in coincidence.”

  Happy Meal Banished

  (Washington)—President Anastos’ administration is noted for its bold public health and environmental stance. A new bill making its way out of committee will ban McDonald’s from putting toys in Happy Meals as an enticement to children. The measure is designed to help fight obesity in young people.

  President Anastos is considering signing an executive order to ban sweetened beverages like Coca Cola from being sold or consumed on all federal, state and local government property...

  Chapter Ten

  Takoma Park, Maryland

  Dennis Trout was still peeved over last night’s Paul McCartney concert at the White House. His brother-in-law was an arrogant, pompous piece of work who fit right in with the Parliament of Whores in Washington. Joe Wiedersham would do anything in order to maintain power, no matter how shady, unethical or downright illegal. No man’s ass was too dirty for him to kiss if it furthered his personal ambitions.

  So what did that make him, Dennis Trout, who kissed the ass of the man who kissed dirty asses?

  Trout didn’t want to go there, not this early in the morning. He put on coffee in the kitchen and made his way to the downstairs bath where he brushed his teeth, shaved, splashed water on his face and finally studied himself in the mirror as he toweled off. There was little youthful idealism left in the face that looked back at him. He was already starting to bald, forcing him to let his sandy hair grow longer in a comb over to conceal it. You, sir, he self-mocked, are no John Kennedy.

  He swigged directly from a bottle of Maalox. Someone once observed how there were more sour stomachs in Washington, D.C. than in any other capital of the world.

  Marilyn had been waiting for him when he walked through the door yesterday evening after a longer-than-intended “Happy Hour” at The Fountains with Judy. She was already dressed to the nines. Still a handsome woman with her raven hair and green eyes. Gained a few pounds. Cultivated a dirty motor mouth, which only seemed to make her more acceptable to the politicians who made up the inner circle with which her brother Joe ran in Congress and at the White House.

  “Damn you, Trout.”

  She called him by his last name when she was pissed.

  “We’ll be late for the special Paul McCartney concert at the White House with President and First Lady Anastos,” she accused. “It’s the event of the season, an opportunity for the President to notice you. You’re behaving more like an insufferable little prick than a future U.S. congressman.”

  “I thought Paul McCartney was dead.”

  That set her off. He closed his ears and mind and let her rant, a skill he had learned over the years of their marriage.

  After the McCartney concert—apparently, he wasn’t dead—Senator Wiedersham and the President disappeared into the basement War Room with other senators, congressmen and White House “czars.” From across the room, Marilyn shot her husband a look that expressed her disappointment in him. The look suggested he wasn’t kissing enough ass to be included.

  A portly man in his sixties arrived late and was immediately ushered downstairs. Talk had it that multibillionaire George Zuniga, one of the
richest men in the world, and an avowed Marxist, had funded Anastos’ campaign for the presidency. Trout had run across him several times and found little about him to like.

  Not having been invited to the War Room reinforced in Trout’s mind his status as consummate outsider. No matter how long he put up with Wiedersham’s crap, he was never going to make the true inner circle of power, never be much more than a glorified gofer. Even if he were selected to run for the Illinois 9th District seat, he would still be holding down a brother-in-law job.

  “Somewhere, deep down, Dennis, you have a conscience,” Wiedersham once admonished him. “That’s a dangerous thing to have when you’re trying to do what’s best for the world.”

  His major fault was that he might have a conscience?

  He had drunk too much last night at the White House. Now, nursing a hangover, he burped at himself in the mirror and took another bolt of Maalox. On his return to the kitchen for a mug of coffee, he stopped and looked up the carpeted stairway to see if Marilyn was stirring. The hallway lights were still off. Good. He liked to have mornings to himself with his coffee and the cable news channels before he threw himself back into the rat race. He added honey and flavored creamer to his coffee and padded to his study.

  Politicians lived and died by the daily news cycle. Trout retrieved his notebook from its hiding place in one corner of the bookshelves that lined the walls, sank into his favorite easy chair, raised the leg rest, and turned on the wide-screen TV. Even if he wasn’t an inner circle guy, he could generally tell what was going on in the inner circle by the spin politicians fed the news media and the media dutifully regurgitated.

  This morning, there was some more brief handwringing over Judy’s cousin found hung in the cemetery, a recap or two about the terrorist attack at the ORU Convention Center in Oklahoma, and some heads talking about how the Tea Party Movement was producing extremist militias with the mindset of Timothy McVeigh. Most of the chatter this morning, however, was about the American Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that was pouring a couple of million gallons of crude into the Gulf every day and polluting the coastlines of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, killing pelicans and mucking up the fishing industry. An environmental disaster, no doubt, but why all the coverage today after the spill had been on-going for more than six weeks?