A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  “Too much of what?”

  “I’d ask if I thought she could tell me.”

  “Could or would?”

  “She would if she could. Now.” I turned into myself thinking about my father and his relationship that had been a secret from me. Finally I said, “She doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That’s the thing. She doesn’t know the end game anymore than we do. But my father said something about a finance operation. What do you know about Iran-Contra?”

  Keene shrugged. “Before my time.”

  “Mine too. But my father said the CIA sold arms to Iran and used the profits to fund the Contra rebels.”

  “I don’t think there are Contra rebels anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m sure there are plenty of other groups we might want to fund quietly.”

  “But why use an old Army chaplain and mercenaries to do it?”

  “Army chaplain?” I had the sickening feeling that I’d missed something important.

  “Roscoe Bolin was a divisional chaplain with the Army. He was deployed into Iraq to help the local command with religious issues as the new Iraqi government was forming.”

  “Wait. Religious issues?” My mind was swimming around something that wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get ahold of. “But he’s not Muslim.”

  “He wrote a doctoral thesis that got him the job. Something about the common source of fundamental beliefs and how they can unify the big three religions.”

  “Religious fundamentalism as a moderating force?” I asked incredulously.

  “Hard to believe I know.”

  “Impossible,” I pronounced. “Wait—” It was a fortuitous pause. The car rounded a curve out of the valley between two steep rock cuts and into a cleared hilltop. As soon as it did, we were hit by a hard blast of rushing wind and the gritty tick of carried dirt against the metal.

  “Whoa.” Keene sounded like he was calming a startled horse. “Are you sure that storm isn’t here yet?”

  At that moment his voice was lost in a different wind. So was I.

  “Hurricane? Hey—are you in there?”

  I don’t know how long Keene had been trying to call me back, but the car was moving a lot slower by the time I left the blowing dirt of Iraq behind.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped a bit, but didn’t feel the least bit bad. “Just keep going.”

  “What happened?” He ignored my tone, but did speed up. “Flashbacks?”

  “Forget about it.”

  “You’re sure a hard girl to be friends with.”

  “I’ve got all the friends I need,” I said ignoring the fact that my life seemed to have acquired a theme. Being annoyed with Keene was actually a blessing. If I was alone, or with anyone else, I think I would have melted down into a mass of pain and tears. Everything about me, but that spark of anger, wanted to dwell on my father and Billy. It was good to fan the flames. But there was an even better target.

  “Reverend Bolin,” I said, dragging him to the front of my mind. “How many of the contractors did he have contact with in Iraq?”

  “I don’t know. Most of those files are black ink. All of those guys were involved in some pretty bad stuff. Givens knew things, but he didn’t share.”

  “We have to find Damon.”

  “Damon Tarique? Givens was worked up when you mentioned him but would never tell me why.”

  “Because he knows things,” I said, guessing. “He hasn’t shared it yet. But all these guys are connected somehow.”

  “Okay. We have a target. Where do we find him? Hopefully before the storm breaks.”

  “That’s not the storm you have to worry about.” I pulled my phone and called the sheriff. I asked him to contact the Department of Conservation and find out where Mike Resnick could be found.

  I expected a long wait, but Sheriff Benson called back in a few minutes with the news that Mike had not reported to work that morning.

  “I know where we’re going,” I said as I put the phone away.

  * * *

  All the light of morning had faded to a heavy murk under oppressive clouds by the time we pulled up to Mike’s place. Mike’s truck was in the drive, hitched to his boat with the driver’s door standing open. That wasn’t a good sign.

  I pulled my weapon and looked over at Keene to be sure he was ready. I needn’t have bothered. His pistol was out and in a two-handed ready position. His dark eyes were scanning the house, moving quickly from door to window to the corners and back. I couldn’t help thinking that if Damon wanted us hurt we’d already be on the ground. I didn’t share the thought.

  Keene moved carefully to the truck and checked the cab before moving on to the bed. Both were empty. From where I was I could see the inside of the boat. It was still cluttered with all the gear that Mike always seemed to fill it with.

  “Ow—goddammit.” Keene’s exclamation was a breathy stage whisper of pain.

  Keeping his eye on the house, he’d walked right into the tines of the long handled gig protruding over the bow of the boat.

  It was one of those moments of understanding that take you entirely by surprise. Little things that had no meaning fell like tumblers in a lock to open a door. Behind it was a sickening shock.

  I bolted past Keene and up the few steps to the house’s front porch. Without stopping I pushed through the gaping entrance and inside. Mike Resnick was dead on the floor. Damon was sitting nearby with a gun in one hand and a sheaf of photos in the other. The warrior I had seen the night before was once again the gentle, damaged soul I had taken to my uncle for help.

  Keene rushed in behind me, moving fast but carefully—professionally. I heard him shuffling and his breathing as he cleared corners and checked the other rooms. There was no point, I knew.

  “He killed Daniel Boone,” I said quietly. I kept my weapon ready, but pointed at the floor.

  “Yes,” Damon said. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t until Keene walked into the gig sticking out of Mike’s boat. Daniel had three holes in his abdomen about two inches apart. Exactly like the three tines of a fish gig. It was in front of me from that first night.”

  “It was in front of me too,” Damon said, sounding both horribly sad and disgusted. “I thought he—” The rest of that thought was unexpressed but obvious.

  “Why?” I asked as gently as was possible.

  Keene sidled up behind me with his weapon ready and trained on Damon. He had questions in his eyes but didn’t speak.

  “Fish.” Damon expelled the word like a curse. “It was all about fish.” He started crying. “The Russian told me when you were outside the cabin. I worked it out of him. How Mike was poaching the fish he was supposed to protect and selling caviar to the Russian.”

  “And Daniel started doing the same thing.”

  “That’s right. Mike didn’t want to share so he killed him. I thought he cared about me, but he only wanted to be sure I didn’t know anything.”

  Damon’s tears seemed to come from a deeper place then. His back shook with the effort of wrenching the sound and pain out into the world. He gasped like he was taking a last breath, then howled the word again, “Fish.”

  “Damon try to—” I never finished. Soothing words are no salve for the kind of hurt he was suffering. He had his own comfort in mind.

  “Fish,” he said sounding almost surprised as he raised the pistol.

  I put up my hands, one of them empty with spread fingers the other gripping my weapon without aiming. Once again I was coming too late to understanding, but still following the motions.

  “No,” I said speaking to Keene more than to Damon.

  Neither man listened. Keene shot and killed Damon with two closely spaced rounds in his chest.

  It was more for confirmation than investigation when I checked Mike Resnick’s service weapon still in Damon’s hand. The safety
was on.

  Chapter 18

  It would be a lie and a disservice to Damon to say I didn’t understand why he would want to die. When I saw the guilty second-guessing of himself in Keene’s eyes, I wished that Damon had found another way. Still, I was glad it wasn’t me who had pulled the trigger.

  This was another of those, if-I’d-been-alone, situations. What would have happened? I never targeted Damon. Would I have shot him? Would I have passively allowed him to kill me? It was a scary thought that I couldn’t find a true answer in my head or my heart. I’ve thought the same thoughts that must have been haunting Damon.

  Tears were filling my eyes. So much death. I wanted to cry, to break down and give in. I wanted to sit in the darkness with Billy and tell him about the ghosts and the fear I lived with. But at times like that, we’re each alone in our own skins.

  At the same time, Keene and I secured our weapons neither looking at the other or at the dead men on the floor or couch.

  “He wanted me to . . .” Keene couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” The question was feeble, grasping at straws. “There has to be a pretty big reason someone would do that.”

  “No big reason. Tiny ones that stack up and weigh you down. A million of them. A million-million. Reasons are like sand—or stars. Uncountable.”

  “You sound like maybe you—”

  “He had pictures in his hand.” I pointed at the scattering of photos that had fallen when Damon died. “Memories. Old ones or new?” Using my fingertips on the edges, I lifted and examined the images one by one. They were the same ones I’d seen in the bottom of his tackle box that first night.

  “You’re one shoe-leather tough woman, ain’t you?”

  “You have no idea.”

  I refused to let Keene see me wipe my eyes.

  “Look at this.” Without looking at him I handed over a photo.

  It was a real photograph, not a print of something digital. I knew a few guys who would get disposable cameras in the mail and send them to family when they were full. No one cared if one of those got lost and for someone on deployment, there is still something about snapshots.

  “Do they look familiar?”

  In the photo, a group of men in desert camo were lined up and grinning in two rows, one crouched and one standing. Despite many of them wearing sunglasses you could still recognize Silas Boone and several other faces I’d seen recently. On the end and noticeably apart from the others, Damon and Daniel Boone stood together. In the back, wearing a shemagh around his neck and under a bushy beard was the Reverend Roscoe Bolin. Next to him, in an Iraqi military uniform bearing stars, was Massoud.

  Keene flipped the photo over. On the back was an inscription in pencil, ALL OF US WITH THE REVEREND AND GENERAL MASSOUD—STARTING SOMETHING BIG.

  “Starting something big?” he read and questioned. “What?”

  “Massoud’s a general.” I said. “I didn’t expect that.”

  “Why not? He’s the one footing the bill for the mercenaries.”

  “That’s what Banjo said.”

  “Banjo?” Keene sounded surprised. “The guy from the revival show?”

  “Yeah, the hippie.” I answered thinking of Banjo’s John Denver look. “He said the Gagarin was in charge of the girls and Massoud had the reins of the mercenaries.

  “Givens spent a lot of time with Massoud. Cash changed hands. I don’t know anything about your Russian.”

  “What do you know about Massoud?”

  “I just told you everything.”

  “Now that you know he was an Iraqi general, can you find out more?”

  Keene hesitated long enough to let me know that he wasn’t following my orders then said, “Give me a minute.” He went to another room with his phone.

  As he talked I stared at the picture. Something about it bothered me. It was nothing obvious. There were no big clues or secret weapons. The background was blue sky and dirt.

  I turned it over and reread the inscription.

  ALL OF US WITH THE REVEREND AND GENERAL MASSOUD—STARTING SOMETHING BIG.

  What was so big, I wondered. There was no answer to that. Not yet anyway. I ran through the rest of the notation. General Massoud and the Reverend were clear. Nothing there. Then I got stuck on the phrase, All of us.

  Once more I flipped it over and examined the picture. That time I really looked, moving carefully from face to face looking for ones I recognized. Many I did. They were the contractors I’d become familiar with the last few days.

  That was what I expected. Maybe that was also what was bothering me. Sometimes when you expect things to look a certain way, they fit perfectly or they perfectly don’t fit. Context can be like a straightjacket. You see what you expect to see the way you expect to see it. You see a man in uniform and you see a soldier. Take him out of uniform—

  There he was, front row center, crouched with a cradled weapon and sunglasses up on his head, Connor Banjo Watson.

  I couldn’t help it, the opening few notes of “Dueling Banjos” from Deliverance tinked in my reeling brain. “This time you did get into the wrong van,” I muttered.

  At that time, I felt pretty smug. I’d caught the lie and another tiny piece fell into place. That feeling disappeared when I reran the conversation I’d had with him in the hardware store. He kept pointing me toward the Russian. Distraction. Disinformation. When I took the words out of the memory though, I caught what he’d really been hiding in plain sight. Chains. Banjo Watson had been measuring out lengths of chain as we talked. Looking back at that moment, I knew without any doubt that the chains were to hold a dozen girls in bondage and in secret.

  “Have you ever heard of Rojava?” Keene asked from the doorway.

  I must have looked as blank as I felt.

  “Syrian Kurdistan,” he clarified. It was still mud.

  “I’m not sure I care anymore.” I spoke the words. The feeling behind them was more like a sigh. Resignation and acceptance. The world is a terrible place.

  I held up the photo with my middle finger perched above Connor Watson’s face. “Do you know this guy?”

  “He’s the one you were talking about, Banjo.”

  “Right. What do you know about him?”

  “I never liked him. Two-faced. He worked for Givens I think.”

  “What? How?”

  “Givens never told me. But we met him several times away from the tent show.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “I never knew. I waited outside when Givens went into the trailer.”

  “What trailer,” I asked, and I felt the fire blooming in my eyes.

  * * *

  “You really do need to hear about Massoud,” Keene explained as he drove.

  I was dialing my phone and nodding, not exactly ignoring but not giving him much attention either.

  Using the phone to point, I indicated the intersection ahead. “Take the left. Go three miles and we’ll turn right. And get on it. We’re in a hurry.”

  Once I pressed the phone back to my face it connected to Sheriff Benson. Without wasting any small talk, I told him where we were heading and that I believed we would find the girls and Billy held there. The sheriff had questions. I didn’t have a lot of answers so I disconnected.

  By my silence and angry staring out the window, I’d hoped to hold off any more conversation. Keene wouldn’t shut up though. He kept trying to engage me. Finally he said, “It really is a big thing.”

  That caught my attention. I lifted up the photo I’d set on the dashboard and read the back again. ALL OF US WITH THE REVEREND AND GENERAL MASSOUD - STARTING SOMETHING BIG.

  “Yeah, that’s the big we’re talking about,” he said.

  “Okay,” I relented. “Tell me.”

  “Rojava, is the name of a part of Kurdistan. The western region that encompasses northern Syria.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, Massoud is General Massoud Masum, an Iraqi Ku
rd and Kurdish nationalist.”

  “You said, Syria.”

  “That’s part of the big thing. Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a home state. Historic Kurdistan is a region that includes huge sections of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.”

  I don’t need a history lesson.” I pointed again. “Turn there and get on the highway.”

  “Everyone needs a history lesson on this. It’s one of the reasons the Middle East is constantly at war. And it turns out, some people think it might be a path to peace. Or at least, some peace, for the region.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The Kurds are one of our strongest allies in fighting Daesh.” He pronounced it Da-ish not Dash.

  “He’s an Iraqi Kurd. Two reasons to fight the Islamic State insurgency, not necessarily to have any loyalty to the United States,” I said.

  “He’s not loyal to anyone but Kurdistan. And since Kurdistan is little more than an idea on a map, he’s willing to make himself valuable to anyone who might help make the idea a real state.”

  “I can’t claim to know a lot about US foreign policy as it relates to Kurdistan. I won’t even claim to care. How does it fit into what we have going on here?”

  “I don’t know.” Captain Keene steered into a long curve.

  I caught him stealing a glance into the sky. The clouds had lowered and darkened. It was the middle of the day, but the only light that reached the ground was a filtered twilight. Branches on trees, both the evergreen junipers and the budding sticks of oak and cottonwood bent in a hard wind. Old leaves, the cast off of the previous fall, skittered across the road.

  As if we’d driven past an invisible boundary, the tone of the gloom changed.

  “Is the sky getting green?” Keene asked.

  His unease and the blue-gray mist crawling toward us caused a prickle to rise over my back and shoulders.

  “That’s just rain,” I reassured.

  On cue, the water rolled like an unfurling wave across the windshield. With it went even more of the day’s light.

  “I don’t like this.” He stated the obvious.

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Portland.”

  “Oregon gets a lot of rain.”