A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  “Charities? Refugees?”

  “Or not. I don’t exactly know what those girls are. I think they’re in danger though. But any investigating I do may raise more alarms than answers.”

  “In that case,” he said with a new edge in his voice. “Do you think the phones are secure?”

  I was reminded of the first call my father had made to tell me about the connection between military weapons and the Salvation Show. He said he didn’t want to say much on the phone. “I never even thought about it. Assume they aren’t.”

  “You know the black ops stuff was your father’s bag. I’m just an old marine.”

  I told him, “You’re the most dangerous man I know.” Then I hung up.

  Chapter 15

  I started driving with no clear idea where I was headed. Sometimes the drive itself is the answer. At least it seems to help me think my way to one. After having warned Uncle Orson and gotten Whilomina on the track of the charity, I felt—not better—more prepared. The question was, how to turn feeling into reality?

  Billy was the start. He was my first and greatest concern. But he was a string with no pull. I had to find him by tracking the other people involved. As I twisted through Ozarks roads it was like splitting into two people. One part of my mind did the mechanical work of driving the truck. Another part did the heavy tasks of thinking through the connections. There were moments—there were fractions of thought and feeling that took me into the crevasse that I’d told Orson about on the phone. I’d lied to him. I think he knew that, although he was sensitive enough not to mention it. When I had told him I was standing on the edge of the crack and looking in, it was into nothing. It’s never nothing. When I stare into the abyss, it is always looking back in a swirl of brown dust.

  Memory is a dangerous thing when you can’t leave it behind. For the first time in a very long time, maybe for the first time ever, I saw my world occluded by the dead, dust of Iraq—experienced again my rape and mutilation by two superior officers—then came back with a clear mind and heart.

  I came back for Billy. But I needed Mike Resnick. Since he was already avoiding me, I knew Damon had to be my first step. I made a call to the SO to check with our impound lot. One of the few pieces of paperwork I’d accomplished was a release for Damon’s boat. Sure enough, when I talked to the gatekeeper he confirmed that Damon had signed for it that morning. He also told me he’d seen the boat hitched up to a Ram truck with a Conservation Department logo on the door.

  They could have put the boat in on Taneycomo or Table Rock, either one has hundreds of miles of fingers and coves to in which to hide. Below the Powersite Dam, Lake Taneycomo connects to Bull Shoals in Arkansas. Ozarks lakes were giant unmarked highways with a million secluded hiding places. But it was on Table Rock that Damon had found Daniel Boone. I was betting that he’d go back to that lake if not to that exact spot.

  That spot was the first place to look. The news that the body he’d found in the lake was his old partner, had hit Damon hard. People are drawn to places of meaning when they are on unsteady feet and turmoil seemed to define Damon’s life almost as much as mine.

  I flipped on the emergency strobes mounted behind the grill of my truck as I turned around. Driving with lights but no siren, I blasted through miles of blooming spring.

  In a few minutes I was parking again at the end of the failed development. Everything was back at the place where this whole thing began. Maybe it was time for a fresh start.

  I left my jacket in the truck. Before I closed the door I checked my weapon and reseated it in the holster making sure there were no obstructions. I trod carefully, picking my way through the rough trail headed for the little cove where Daniel Boone had been found wrapped in a net.

  Tape, tattered and torn, was still stretched from undergrowth that was sprouting new growth. I breached the perimeter with my hand resting on the butt of my service weapon. Once I pushed through the brush and got close to the lake, I found the boat. The bow was pulled up onto the mud shore and tethered to a tree. Other than Damon’s meager possessions, the boat was empty. From the water I worked in a broad half circle around the scene looking for anyone hiding behind the budding trees and greening ground cover. I was disappointed to find myself alone.

  As soon as I relaxed, and took my hand from the gun a voice said, “You’re about as stealthy as a skittish mare in a mirror shop.” It was Damon. Until he stood up, covered in limbs and leaves he was invisible. Once he did stand, I noticed something couched in both of his hands and it was disguised as well.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I thought you were a country girl. You don’t know horses?”

  “I’m not talking about horses. What have you got there in your hands?” I pointed.

  “.30-06,” he said, holding up the scoped rifle.

  “Are you expecting to need it?”

  He cradled the weapon in his arms. “Why are you here, Hurricane?”

  “I’m looking for you. I obviously misunderstood why you would be here.”

  “I’m going to do what you can’t.” He said it like you might say I’m going to the grocery store. If you expected the grocery store to shoot back.

  “What is it I can’t do?”

  “Not just you,” he explained with venom in his tone. “Regular cops. People with rules.”

  “You don’t have rules anymore?”

  “Daniel was my friend. He was a lot more than that. We owed each other our lives.”

  “And now you feel like you owe him revenge?”

  The termination of his stare was someplace behind my eyes. I could feel it looking at my hypocrisy and the roiling desire to hurt those who hurt my father and Billy. Sometimes though you have to protect people from the same mistakes you march happily into.

  “I need your help,” I said. “Billy needs help.”

  Damon kept staring, but didn’t say anything.

  “Who are you going after?” I asked, trying another tack that did nothing to break his gaze. Then I nodded at the rifle. “You get that from Mike?” That got a reaction. So I charged ahead. “You have a relationship with him. It’s not a stretch to figure he gave you the rifle.”

  “You don’t know as much as you think you do,” he said, but not as sure as before.

  “Maybe. But I know more than you think. I don’t know who you’re going after though. Silas Boone and the contractors? Or the Russian?”

  “You know about the Russian?”

  “I told you. I know more than you think.” I told him trying to keep the confidence in my voice. “Now, how about setting that rifle aside?”

  “I don’t want to have to fight you for it.”

  “How about if I promise you won’t have to. You stay there and I’ll stay here. We can work things through better if we’re not worried about things getting too hot.”

  Damon thought about it a moment, then sat on a pulpy log, leaning the rifle next to him.

  “Whose idea was it, yours or Mike’s?”

  He shrugged, an exaggerated gesture, and looked away.

  “Mike wanted you to do this?” I pushed. “Why?”

  “Nobody’s telling me to do anything. I’m not taking orders anymore.”

  “Then what are you doing? Because I’m hard-pressed to understand anything you could be planning.”

  “They killed Daniel because of what he was.”

  “Who?”

  “All of ’em. Silas. Reverend Bolin. They were always talking about perversions and cleaning the queers out of the world. But it was the Russian who did it.”

  “This seems like something bigger than homophobia, Damon.”

  “The only reason Daniel was fishing was to get away from them. He needed some money to break free.”

  “How do you know it was the Russian?”

  “Mike told me. He told me the Russian is after him too.” Damon looked at me with an expression all mixed up with worry and anger.

  For the first time I could re
ally see the warrior within the man. Damon had plans for the Russian.

  “Mike said we wouldn’t be safe until the Russian is gone because he knows who I am.”

  “Who you are? What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Damon pulled his rifle close and stood it between his knees. “None of it matters anymore.”

  “You’re not making any sense. This isn’t about praying the gay away or about killing homosexuals to make a point.”

  “You don’t know,” he said with angry certainty. The fingers of Damon’s hands curled hard around the stock of his weapon. “He’s already trying to force Mike out. The Russian is going to get him fired. He’s going to ruin everything for us if he doesn’t kill us. He’s got to be stopped.”

  Damon was getting worked up and angrier by the moment. I gave him a little space and time as I tried to understand. None of it made sense to me.

  “Damon,” I said as gently and still keeping my distance.

  Then I thought again about what I wanted to say to him. He was enraged and confused, but we had the same target, Gagarin. I didn’t know to what degree adding more information to his suspicions would rile Damon, but I was certain it would be fuel on the fire. The shame of it was I never thought if I should. I only considered how it would affect my plans.

  I’m not proud of it, but I said, “I think the Russian is holding Billy.” I had the entirety of Damon’s attention then. He was locked like a stalking cat on my face and my words. “He might have some girls, too. A lot of people are in trouble.”

  “That’s why you’re here.” It wasn’t a question.

  I shook my head anyway. “I wanted you to tell me where Mike is. The Russian is hiding. Mike might know where.”

  “He knows. He told me.”

  I realized that I was staring into that pit again. Inside it were choices, consequences, the difference between the right thing and the one with the result you need. I made my choice and asked an unstable man with a rifle, “What are we waiting for?”

  Sometimes you can fool yourself. You can make plans and pretend you don’t know where events will take you. We can talk about chance or pray for outcomes. Sometimes, some rare times, your feet are held over the fire by someone who won’t let you lie to yourself.

  Damon said, “This isn’t cop’s work.” He looked at me as he rose and lifted his rifle, staring, daring me to flinch from the truth. “No badges. No rule books. No forgiveness and no mercy.”

  When fate holds that mirror up to your face, you can either surrender to your better nature or do what I did.

  “That was my plan,” I admitted to my darkness.

  * * *

  Gagarin had a place on the lake, far off-road and secluded. It was also across the lake. That put it in Stone County. There was nothing legal about what I was thinking. I can’t imagine why the thought of a jurisdictional infraction bothered me, but it did.

  Even the way I drove it would have taken a couple of hours to make the loop around the north end of the lake and back around to the other side where Gagarin’s place was tucked in among the junipers and hedge apple trees. It has already been longer than that since I left the Starry Night Traveling Salvation Show and the day was wearing thin. We took Damon’s boat.

  Thirty-five minutes later he cut the engine and we coasted into an over grown finger of the lake about a half-mile from where Damon said Gagarin had a cabin. We hadn’t spoken the entire trip.

  When the outboard was quiet and we were tied up to a root, I pulled my phone and turned it off. The last thing you need when sneaking up on someone was your phone ringing. I didn’t even want it vibrating. No distractions. When I put it away I finally addressed another distraction by asking something that had been on my mind. “Why was your file redacted?”

  He didn’t answer, but he looked away so intentionally he had to have heard and understood the question.

  “I saw your file. Both the Boone cousins’ too. They were all redacted. Why?”

  “We have to be quiet getting through the undergrowth,” he told me. “Think you can manage that?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said, making sure he knew I was annoyed at the question. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you going to answer me about the redactions?”

  Damon stepped out of the boat a different man than the one I had known. The confusion and all sense of timidity was gone. In a thirty-minute lake crossing, the battered civilian had somehow been subsumed ng by the soldier. He stood on the shore, straighter in the back and harder of aspect.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked. “You know what kind of men they are, what kind of operations they would have been involved in, by knowing what they became after the service. Regular grunts might get corporate security work. But you said yourself, there’s something more going on.”

  “Yes. I did say that.”

  “So you know what kind of men they are—black ops contract workers. You know what kind I was. Files like ours end up with a lot of black ink on them.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What do you want me to say, Hurricane? That there is one simple secret that will make everything make sense? Has your life ever worked that way? Mine sure hasn’t. The secrets are just markers of places and times like points on a map with no boundaries and no legend. You can follow from point to point all your life and never know where you are.”

  “There have to be reasons,” I said, not even convincing myself.

  “Let’s go.”

  Damon started treading through the undergrowth. Even though the sun was sinking by that point he made almost no sound as he went.

  We came out of the woods into a clearing but remained screened from the house by an outbuilding and a stack of firewood. From where we were we could see the front yard and half the front porch of the cabin. It was a kit house, the kind you buy from the lumber store and have set up on your foundation. It was a step above a mobile home but not a huge step. At the back was a covered stoop that served as a back porch and past that was an empty carport. Any later in the day, any less light, and I would have bought it. But screened by a huge, widespread magnolia I saw the protruding bumper of a late-model pickup. I would have pointed it out to Damon but when I turned from it, my attention was stolen by the horizon.

  The sky, that had been nothing but shadows under the canopy of white oak and walnut, was a wall of ruby in the west. The contrails of jets made roads that disappeared when the travelers passed. It was an amazing sight but somehow full of portent that I was compelled to deny.

  When I was a girl, my uncle told me the day was a pig running through the sky. When we saw a beautiful sunset, he always said it was the curly tail of the pig jumping a fence. It was a thought, something normal and wonderful to take hold of and cling to. That was what I chose to do.

  I looked at Damon and he was staring at the house the way I think Ulysses must have looked at Ithaca after so many years. It wasn’t a good sign.

  “Damon?”

  “I’m ready,” he said without looking at me.

  “What exactly are you ready for?”

  “Anything,” he answered flatly. “Everything.” The addition was just as featureless.

  Nothing was right. I suddenly knew it as surely as I knew that western purple would soon be black. I had thought the need to get Billy was everything. I’d compromised my responsibilities and used Damon to get me where I was. When it came to it, I didn’t want to use him any further. Or maybe I didn’t want him using me for whatever was in his head. Either way it was all wrong.

  Damon stood and looked around the woodpile. The first shot came from a window and sent oak splinters flying. Some of them protruded from Damon’s cheek.

  A fire flared in his eyes, and I heard it crackle in his voice when he said, “Fuck, yeah.”

  “Damon—” I tried one last time and failed to stop the avalanche I’d set to falling on us.

  “Go that way,”
he said, pointing around the other end of the shed. “Run fast and low. I’ll make sure he keeps his head down.”

  He put his rifle between two quarters of wood and fired. Before the sound had stopped its echo, Damon had pulled the bolt and reseated the next cartridge. Feeling like I was caught in a strong current, I ducked and ran.

  He fired again and this time I heard the breaking of glass. His third bullet hit the unlighted window when I was half way to the cabin. By the time that sound had died I had my back to the wall and was creeping up under the window.

  When Damon didn’t fire a fourth shot, the barrel of what appeared to be an AR-15 poked from the broken pane and fired a triple shot. Damon wasn’t there. He was at the same corner of the shed I’d come around.

  I held up a hand for him to hold. Then I pointed my weapon up at the window before showing Damon three fingers. Once he nodded, I counted down dropping fingers as I went. On three, I fired into the window. My bullets went harmlessly into the cabin’s ceiling, but if the man inside had any sense he was not watching as Damon crouch-ran to the cabin.

  Once engaged there was certainly no turning back. But there was no chance I was going to let Damon be the first into that house either. Part of that was worry for his safety. Part of it was fear that he would kill whoever was inside before we had a chance to talk.

  So, as soon as Damon hit the wall next to me, I said, “Cover the window.” Then I went for the back door without waiting. I got to the small porch and nodded my readiness before taking position at the door.

  Damon, fired again into the window and as he did, I breached the back with my boot. Times like that I was glad I wasn’t a dainty girl. The door was flimsy and cheap. It buckled rather than the frame bursting. I had to kick two more times to sweep it aside. As I did so, dishes clattered and a key rack fell from the wall.

  I had come into a small kitchen that was exposed to a great room by open counter space and a wide arch. First I cleared the corners then ducked behind the lower cabinets. As I went low, the air above my head sizzled. Three metal-jacketed rounds punched through the sagging door and the wall behind it, probably without slowing.