A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  I understood immediately why the sheriff didn’t want to tell me that part. Devon Birch is DEA. He comes with a lot more baggage than federal credentials. He’s a black man working the lily-white Ozarks. Every day, he deals with pot growers on federal lands, hillbilly meth peddlers, and the creeping intrusions of Mexican cartels. As if that wasn’t enough for anyone, he has to do his job within an armed and angry population that has a long frontier tradition. His attitude reflects his circumstance.

  He wasn’t the only one with baggage though. That was why the sheriff was being gentle in making his request. I had a long history of not getting along with the feds—for a lot of good reasons.

  “What do you want me to see him about?”

  “There may be crossover. Johnson is tied up with the AB and those bikers. He wants to rebuild his whole white separatist, end-of-the-world, welcome-home-Jesus compound. That takes money.”

  “Drug money.” It made sense. The initials AB were short for Aryan Brotherhood. They are a white prison gang, made up of avowed racists and known killers, who funded operations mostly through drug trafficking. Mostly. Their membership has been tied to every kind of criminal enterprise imaginable.

  “You told him to expect me?” I asked.

  “I haven’t talked to him about it.”

  After that we had a few choice words—that amounted to me refusing and him cursing. In the end, I would do my job—and we both knew it. I returned to the house and threw open the windows to spite the darkness.

  A shower and change of clothes later, and I felt almost human.

  * * * *

  Roy Finley was under an old Mustang when I found him. His shop was between his house and the private junkyard of car parts he kept on two acres just outside of town.

  “Hurricane,” he said from under the car before I had said a word.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “No six-foot man I know has feet that small.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  “Where’s Billy?”

  “What do you think, we’re attached at the hip or something?”

  “Or something.” He said it with a smirk. Before I could say anything, he added, “But that’s none of my business, is it?”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Roy rolled out from under the car then wiped his hands on a rag—which only seemed to make his hands grimier. Extending his greasy right he said, “Help me up. I’ve got something to show you.”

  “I don’t want to touch that.” I pointed at his hand.

  “When did you get so prissy?” He got to his feet without help and returned to working his hands in the rag.

  “I’m not prissy. I’m clean and want to stay that way.”

  “Come on.” He canted his head toward the back of the cavernous shop and started walking.

  “I’m not here to see your latest paint job,” I told him. “I have some questions you can help me out on.”

  “Questions? You mean like cop stuff?”

  “Yes. Exactly like cop stuff.”

  “Cool. I’ve never done that before. But you’ll want to see this first.”

  “See what? And why? You know I don’t care about your boy toys.”

  “You’ll care about this one.” He stopped beside a tarp-draped car. The only thing I could tell about it was that it had four tires and one of them was flat.

  “I’m working, Roy. We can do this another time.”

  He went to the back and pulled the canvas drape. It caught on the front bumper and he said, “Give me a hand.”

  “Really?”

  “Prissy.”

  “I’m not prissy,” I protested as I released the snag. “I’m just not interested.”

  The tarp slid away and the car was revealed like a snake shedding its skin—if the snake’s new skin looked like a faded old car with rust spots.

  Roy spread his hands and announced, “El Camino.”

  That’s when I got it. The car was one of those 1970’s Chevrolets that was half car and half pickup truck. It was exactly what Billy had been talking about.

  “What do you think?” Roy asked.

  “It looks like junk.”

  “You’re such a girl.”

  “This isn’t a gender thing. That car looks like recycling waiting to happen.”

  “That’s because you’re not looking past the obvious.”

  “There’s something past the obvious here?”

  “There’s so much here.” Roy’s enthusiasm was almost religious. “It has the original numbers matching 454. The frame is in great shape. That rust you see is all surface. This thing’s been in a barn for thirty years.”

  “It should have stayed there.”

  “Billy will love it.”

  “Is that why you have it? You want to sell it to Billy?”

  “I can sell this tomorrow for a good profit. But Billy is the guy for this car.”

  “Why?”

  Roy gave me a long look. His grin melted down. Enthusiasm became a kind of disappointed understanding. “I’m sorry,” he said—and he sounded like he meant it.

  “What for?”

  “I kind of jumped to a conclusion.”

  “What conclusion is that?”

  “I thought you and Deputy Blevins were a thing.”

  “You didn’t know? It’s Detective Blevins now.” I laughed. It might have sounded a little defensive. “What kind of thing?”

  “I thought you guys were together. You know, romantically.”

  Honestly, it had been something that I worked hard to keep quiet. I had my own issues and it was hard to build a relationship on the job. Still, the suggestion that there was nothing between us offended me slightly. “What makes you so sure there isn’t?” I tried injecting the question with more humor than confession.

  “I figure anyone close to Billy would know how much this means to him. He’s been saving all his pay for years to have the kind of car his father had.” Roy dragged the canvas back over the car. “Hell, I only met him the one time and I know about it.”

  It was something I’ve been accused of before. Billy himself showed me that I get wrapped up in my own issues and become blind to the people around me. Selfish is the word he didn’t use.

  “Were you going to make him a good deal on the car?” I asked Roy as he tugged the corners of the drape into place.

  “Sure. He can’t afford a top of the line restoration. For the twelve grand he has, I’ll sell him a car that runs and is road safe. He’ll do more as he has the money. I told him he can come help and do some of the work himself.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  Roy shrugged dismissively. “Money won’t ever be your pall bearer.” He wiped his dirty hands against themselves like he expected a miracle of cleanliness. “So what did you want to know from me?”

  I told him about the black custom Chevy pickup truck.

  “What year was it?”

  “How would you tell?”

  “What was distinctive about it?”

  “It was an old 1950s truck. It was black.”

  “Look, ‘50s trucks are popular. There are a lot of them running around out there. You need to give me more.”

  “Like what?”

  Roy shook his head like he was tired. I know he was thinking how much easier the conversation would be with a man. “Paint,” he said. “Black, but what kind of finish? Was it smooth and shiny or flat?”

  “Glossy. Like it was brand new.”

  “Did you see the wheels?”

  “What about them?”

  “Were they mag or chrome?”

  “Chrome with hubcaps I think. They were smooth and shiny.”

  “Moons.” He said. “Dual pipes or single?”

 
“I don’t know.” I was getting a little annoyed. It really would have been an easier conversation if a man, or at least an interested woman, had seen the truck.

  “How did the truck sound?”

  “Like a hot rod, loud and rumbly.”

  “Did you see the tail lights?”

  “They were red circles in the fenders.”

  “In? They were in the fenders and not stuck on the side of the truck bed?”

  “They were inset, just red circles in holes in the fenders.”

  “French.”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “That’s not a question. When you build a tunnel in the metal and put the light at the bottom of it, we call it Frenching.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughed. “We just do. Did you see the back window?”

  “Sure.”

  “Was it one big one, or a center one with smaller ones at the sides?”

  “It had three. There was the center one and smaller side windows that curved around the cab.”

  “You have a 1956 Chevy, five window pickup, with Frenched tail lights, and baby moons.”

  “You got all that from what I said?”

  “I’ve got more than that. I can tell you who owns it.”

  “Who and how?”

  “How is easy. I Frenched the lights and did the paint. I know the engine guy, the suspension guy, and the upholstery guy too. We were all surprised by the job. There just aren’t that many black guys that come to us for custom work on an old truck.”

  I had a long sinking feeling—like an avalanche of melting snow in my stomach. “His name?”

  “Earl Turner. Guy with a gamey arm and a chip on his shoulder. But he loves that truck.”

  * * * *

  I sat in my truck, under a ratty smoke tree, at the back edge of the pathology building. It wasn’t likely that the bikers would try anything there. I wasn’t going to take any chances though. They had already shown a willingness to do the unexpected. With the radio playing low on the oldies station, I settled in to watch.

  The worst part of solitude is the ghosts’ visitations. There are so many of them. In my mind is the ever-present shadow of the young woman I was before. She is another ghost.

  As if it anticipated the haunting, light seeped from the world. Night, weighty with humidity and heat, nestled in. The fall of the sun was long and slow. It burned down from red to orange. By the time it slipped under the horizon, it looked like embers of a dying fire. It left the heat behind when it went. All of it, the sinking of the sun and the rise of night, seemed to happen between instants of my thoughts.

  I’m a recovering alcoholic, a recovering trauma victim, a recovering widow; shades of grief, all of them. I’m not doing nearly as much recovering as it sounds. On the radio, Bruce Springsteen sang about Thunder Road in a voice filled with longing and regret. That pretty much sums up life, I thought.

  Air, hot, harsh, and rough, slipped through the open windows. It was a specter knocking at a door that was already half open. Trauma is like that. It breaks all the locks in your mind so they never set well again.

  I was afraid. I always was when I knew the past was coming to visit. It wasn’t the past I expected. It wasn’t fearful.

  The wind settled into a constant caress and it cooled. I turned to the right to face the breeze, and Nelson Solomon was sitting in my passenger seat. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my dead husband. Usually he came in my dreams, sleeping and decomposing in the bed next to me. That time he was whole and intact. He smiled.

  I cried.

  There was no helping it. He was the first man I loved—and I had only a year with him. He died at home, but he was killed in Iraq. He was on one of the teams that assaulted chemical weapons storehouses. His wounds were invisible and slow-acting.

  “I miss you.” I spoke in a whisper when I could manage the words. “I miss you so much.”

  Nelson smiled.

  More than anything, I wanted to touch him. But I didn’t want to break whatever spell allowed him to be there. I looked and sat as still as I could.

  Over Nelson’s shoulder, the window began to rise. He hadn’t moved to touch the button. My hands were gripping the wheel with white knuckles. The ghost of my dead husband turned and raised a finger to the glass. In life, after he had been a Marine, he was an artist. In death too, I thought, because his finger moved and left behind light on the darkness.

  The light he painted became bright ripples in black water. Over that he painted a boat. It was bright white with a bit of red rising up above the water line.

  Before he died, Nelson painted us as boats in the lake. It was my favorite work of his. The original still sat on his easel in my home.

  Ghost Nelson finished the boat. It looked lonely, empty, and adrift in dark water. Then he added another at the far edge. It had a dangling rope. I knew without words that it was him, drifting away and out of the frame.

  The image drove me to despair. I cried, a gut churning weeping, with fat tears rolling off my cheeks. But I didn’t reach for him.

  Nelson looked at me. He smiled again. It was an expression of care without sadness. There was no pity. His mouth opened and I thought he was going to speak. Instead, he turned again and began to paint.

  He worked on the other edge of the glass. That time he added another boat. It was emerging from shadow and moving toward my boat. On the bow of that second boat was a coiled rope.

  It was a beautiful image of broken light on rippled water, three boats drifting, one retreating and one advancing; all of it was in sunshine so mottled and expressive it was heartbreaking.

  Without my having seen him turn, Nelson was looking at me again. “You’re going to be all right.” Then he was gone—leaving behind the distant roar of hard Humvee tires on broken asphalt—and the sense that someone was working on my behalf.

  For what seemed like hours, I stared at the painting on my window. I might have stared forever if the reflections in the water didn’t get brighter and ripple away into the real darkness. A pair of headlights swept across the glass. Suddenly, I could hear the radio again. Bruce was still singing. I heard the rumble of the loud pipes too. The headlights belonged to the black truck. Before the real world flooded my senses again, I noticed one tiny aspect of the other reality remained: my passenger side window was up.

  Out past the glass, the black Chevy idled. The high beams fixed on me, staring eyes—old, yellow, and menacing. I opened my door and stepped out pulling my service weapon as I did. As soon as my foot touched the ground, the truck backed away. At the edge of the parking lot, the driver spun the wheel—whipping the truck to the side. The engine revved and the tires spun as the Chevy ran back to the road. It only went so far when it stopped.

  It was waiting for me. I didn’t take the bait.

  We stood like that for a few minutes, tempting and threatening each other. From behind me rose another thundering sound. Motorcycles. I kept my automatic in my hand as I pulled my phone with the other and called the local cops. Before they arrived, four bikes rolled into the lot and circled.

  It was a relief. In my life, violence often is. It was the reason I had an appointment the next day with a therapist. That was tomorrow. At that moment, I was in the perfect mood to shoot someone or to extend the telescoping baton I carried and break a knee.

  I shut the truck door and stepped out into the beams of jittering headlights. No one took my bait either. The bikers shouted and twisted their throttles—filling the parking lot with noise and fumes. Bravado evaporated and they ran when strobing lights approached. When I looked, the black truck was gone too. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not.

  The Nixa police put a car in the lot so I didn’t have to stay any longer. Driving back to my father’s place, I put in a call to Roy. After that I called Billy. We talked
until I fell asleep on the couch.

  Chapter 5

  I woke with the sun reborn and already heating the Ozarks. I had the feeling that I’d missed something important about the day behind me. It was one of those nagging feelings, an itch in the center of my brain. Usually a feeling like that would resolve itself when I concentrated on another task. Sometimes the mind works a problem best when you’re not paying attention. That time, the problem came to the front door and solved itself.

  Uncle Orson banged on the aluminum storm door, rattling it in the frame. He never used the bell. The moment I saw his face, I knew exactly what had been nagging at me. Orson had pulled Cherry Dando out of the car and started a fight with the handcuffed man. I never asked why.

  “We need to talk.” He pushed past me and went straight to the kitchen. “Is there coffee?”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  Uncle Orson checked the percolator on the stove. It was older than I was. My father had never transitioned to a coffee maker. Good thing, too. The old pot made the best coffee. “It’s almost there,” he pronounced.

  “What happened yesterday?”

  He pulled two cups down from the cupboard. “That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

  “So. Talk.”

  “Yeah. That’s the thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “The talk. What I wanted to talk about was that I didn’t want to have to talk about yesterday.”

  “Wait—what?”

  “You heard me.” He touched the sides of the coffee pot to gage its readiness to boil.

  “You know, when the pot starts to perk, you can see it in the glass top.”

  “Do you want me to make some grits?”

  “Did you think it would be that easy?”

  He held up the canister of grits and shook it at me as if it was the greatest temptation in the world.

  “Uncle Orson,” I warned.

  “I hoped it would be.”

  “It’s not. Nothing’s that easy.”

  “Grits are easy.”

  “Okay. You can make some grits, but you have to talk too.”

  “I’m not sure I can do both at the same time.”

  “I’m not sure either. You can give it a shot.”