A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  “What?”

  “Don’t dismiss it—and don’t accept it thoughtlessly. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “Well, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying my choices affect you. At least I want them to, and you know I do. I want an honest reaction and an honest opinion.”

  “I don’t know how to react.” That felt like a lie in my mouth. Reactions come no matter how you think they should. The truth was that I stifled my impulse to say nothing—or to pretend. Honesty was the wrong thing. I knew that. Still. . . I looked up to meet his eyes. “The sheriff asked me what I thought about it when he first considered retiring.”

  “And?”

  “Things are changing around here.” I held back, hoping he would take the hint and let me off the hook.

  “I don’t know what that means. What things?”

  “Everything. The county. The people.”

  “You don’t think I can be sheriff?”

  At that moment I could have changed everything. I could have explained. I could have said what he needed to hear. Instead I saw a hair and I split it. “I think you would win the election in a walk.”

  “But?”

  There it was. He was asking for the real truth, and I had the feeling of a bluff being called. “Being sheriff—this place—this time—is kind of a hard ass job.”

  “You don’t think I’m a hard enough man.”

  “I’m not sure you’re willing to do some of the hard things.” I knew what I was saying and doing—and I did it anyway. There must be a word for the kind of fool I am. Maybe I just need a fight sometimes.

  I didn’t get it.

  He nodded and stopped leaning to walk around to the driver’s side door. The engine was running and the truck in gear before I was in my seat. Despite the heat, it was a chilly ride.

  * * * *

  Most people would be dismayed to see how much of a cop’s life is spent at a desk. After the highs and lows of the last couple of days, I was sitting at mine—staring at the pile of work. Staring wasn’t getting any of it done.

  I was burrowing into my own mind and obsessing about all the ways I was my own worst enemy. Dr. Kurtz said such thoughts were probably healthy, at least in my case, because of my tendency to lash out and blame others for the choices they made. I didn’t buy it. The people I lashed out at were not the cream of society, and I don’t feel very conflicted—thinking of them as deserving the trouble I bring into their life.

  This was different.

  Since the Sunday morning discovery of Tyrell Turner’s body, I had been in a turmoil of blame and anger and fear that left me circling the drain for most of Monday. It was Tuesday afternoon, and I was all but paralyzed by self-doubt and guilt.

  The doubt was no stranger, but guilt. . .

  What did I have to feel guilty about?

  It was a self-serving and defensive question. I felt terrible about what I had said to Billy. Feeling and thinking led me to a worrying fear that, in retrospect, should have been obvious. The latest cycle of anger and tears may have begun Sunday morning at the murder scene, but its roots were planted the night before—when I slipped into Billy’s bed and dared to think my life was normal. I’d thought also that love without rage and resentment was possible.

  I had married Nelson after only days of knowing him. It was like love in a panic. And no matter how much I told myself that it didn’t matter, he and I each knew his life expectancy boosted us over walls we might otherwise have never dared climb.

  The dictum, Know Thyself, is wise and terrifying advice. I did everything I could to ignore it. Literally, I shook the thoughts from my tired brain. When that didn’t help, I looked back at the pile on my desk. There’s another dictum, this one my own—hard work is good forgetting.

  I started with phone calls. Paperwork was too easy to skate over. Besides, the stack of case logs and incident reports was daunting. That’s the thing about a cop’s life—it’s all written down and filed away. It helps to keep things on the up—and it’s always necessary in court—but it’s terrifyingly dull.

  My first call was to our impound lot—to make sure that Turner’s truck was secured. Then I contacted our evidence tech and confirmed the old Chevy was on his list. That was the easy stuff. The hard things felt like two ends of the same, tangled string. Earl Turner and Johnson Rath. Along the twisting path were hard little knots—Tyrell, his mother Elaine, Cherry Dando, and the Ozarks Nightriders.

  I’m not deluded enough not to realize that I was ignoring my own mother. I was painfully aware that I had kept her behind a mental gate since discovering she was part of the mess. Being aware of the problems in my life has never been the issue.

  I called Earl Turner. We needed to have a harder talk about the truck. He was hiding something about it, or Tyrell, or both. No answer. No voice mail. Just a ringing phone. I moved on.

  Part of the paperwork sitting on my desk were the CDRs that I had requested. I started with Tyrell’s phone. Right at the top of the page was the first surprise. It was still active. Earl Turner had called his grandson at least once an hour—sometimes more often—that Saturday and into Sunday morning.

  A quick check on Earl’s record told me that he’d stopped trying after he received a call from the sheriff. Another cross check told me that Tyrell had been in frequent contact with Dando for the past couple of weeks. That, combined with the bone raking and his history with an avowed, violent, racist like Johnson Rath, put Dando at the top of the list. Suspicion doesn’t equal conviction though. There would be a lot of work to do.

  Since I started with Turner, I decided to stick with the theme. It was the last thing I wanted to read, but I needed to see the case work on Elaine Turner’s assault. The report was too old to be on our computer system. Our department had no digital case logging until 2001. I spent an hour digging into old file cabinets before I gave up. The report was missing or never existed.

  It was time to move from files to people. I decided to dig into the middle of the string. I called a woman I knew who thought it would be exciting and glamorous to be a part of the biker life. Twenty years later, she was still unable to completely untangle her life from the Nightriders. She led me to some new names—most were familiar, some new. First, I followed up with the ones I knew.

  It’s an awkward call anytime a cop reaches out to someone she’s arrested. It’s worse when the contact is a walking soup of testosterone and ignorance—who makes up your average one-percenter. At least the modern world was working in my favor. These days, even bikers had cell phones. A few years ago, you had to physically track them to whichever flop they called home.

  Between the personal insults and obscenities, a pattern began to show itself. The motorcycle club was an organization in flux. Before, it was always local boys content to deal local. A couple of years ago, they tried expanding into meth production and we had come down pretty hard on them. The group that rose back up was a mix of the hardcore old schoolers and the new blood. What they all had in common were ties to the AB.

  There was no point in cold calling bikers who didn’t know me and whom I had nothing on. I dug into the new names electronically. In twenty minutes I had jackets on half a dozen guys and found a nugget. There was a known associates notation on one of the new guys that sounded too familiar. The name was Roland Duques. I didn’t even know that Duck had a son.

  Secrets. Hidden guilt. Relationships. Sometimes thoughts are like tumblers in a lock—they fall into that empty space your mind leaves for connections. It’s always a revelation and a surprise to find your mind works unsupervised. Earl and Tyrell were carrying the burden of family secrets, Elaine, and her suicide. Duck was hiding, or at least trying to ignore, his son’s involvement with the Nightriders and possible involvement in Tyrell’s killing. I was hiding behind my desk hoping my mother, and the secrets she carried, w
ould simply disappear with the hot winds of summer.

  That little bit of knowing myself left me feeling like something between criminal and victim. Stuck in the middle with no solid balance. So I jumped. I called Uncle Orson. When he answered I said, “We need to talk.” That’s all. I disconnected before he could say anything. I chose to hear acceptance in his lack of a return call.

  Two minutes later I was logged out and on my way to the residence of Roland Duques.

  * * * *

  Duck’s son, Roland, lived in a rented single-wide—in the kind of trailer park that gave and demanded little. Lawns were ragged and untended. Children loitered, more than played, among dead cars and rusting propane tanks. The road was a meandering loop of dirt and gravel. I followed it almost all the way around before I parked—straddling beer bottles and fast food trash.

  I’m almost ashamed to say that I felt a little better about the mess of my life when I got out of my truck.

  The aluminum storm door rattled louder than my bare-knuckle knock.

  Someone inside yelled, “Yeah.”

  I knocked again.

  “What do you need, an invitation?” The same voice called. “Just come in.”

  The entry door opened with a push. The reek of old beer and weed crawled out to die on the burned lawn. Inside, the trailer was dark. All the windows were covered with foil. From around the fake wood paneling hallway the voice said, “Hang on. I’ll be right out.”

  I heard the toilet flush.

  Roland Duques stepped out still buckling his pants. “You’re not. . .” He seemed confused.

  “Not who?”

  “Hey. You can’t be in here.” Roland fumbled getting his belt buckle with the beer company logo closed.

  “And yet here I am.” I didn’t want to sound like the kind of cop everyone hates, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “You have no right.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “My dad’s a cop. I know what you can get away with.”

  “Is that so? Did Duck tell you we’re like vampires?”

  “You know my dad? Wait. What? What are you talking about? Is that a joke? How are you like vampires?”

  “Never invite us in.”

  Roland thought about it for a second. The connections worked behind his eyes and played on his lips. He smiled. “I get it.”

  “I need to talk with you, Roland”

  All the guile fell off his face as it firmed into a stone mask. “Nope.”

  “Were you there the other night?”

  “The other—” His mask cracked slightly. “I don’t. . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you and your buddies confronted me at a crime scene to tell me the Nightriders didn’t kill Tyrell Turner.”

  It looked as though relief and confusion were having a wrestling match on his face. The confusion, I thought, must come from the fact that he wasn’t at my parlay with the Nightriders. It begged the question, what was he relieved about?

  “I’m not dumb enough to talk to you.” He tried to re-mask his face.

  “You’re dumb enough to tie yourself to criminal organizations.”

  He glared. Roland didn’t like to be called dumb. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Worst of all, you’re dumb and unhygienic.”

  “I’m not dumb.” He didn’t like that at all. “And what do you mean, unhygienic?”

  I pointed at his fingers, which he was anxiously flexing. “You didn’t wash your hands.”

  He opened his hands then pulled them up to his chest, rubbing them together as if concerned about being caught in a social mistake. “Screw you.” There wasn’t much fire in the invective.

  “Don’t worry about it, Roland. Some things can’t be washed off. Maybe there’s something else you feel on your hands.”

  “What’re you talking about?” That didn’t sound like an honest reaction. His question was careful. Not dumb at all. “You talk a lot, but you don’t make much sense.”

  “I’m talking about what other people put on your hands. Blood. Guilt. That’s the real dirt. Choices you let other people make for you don’t wash away.”

  “And that’s what I’m talking about. Talk. Talk, talk, talk. It’s all noise. You got something to say, say it straight.”

  “Are you trying to say you’re dumb?”

  “Stop saying that. I’m not dumb.”

  “That tag on your cut says you are.” I looked right at the Prospect tab sewn over the pocket of his sleeveless jacket. “Prospect. That says you have to do what you’re told by the full members, doesn’t it? Anything you’re told.”

  He stared at me. His eyes were set and hard, but his mouth worked slightly. He was looking for words that were hiding behind his teeth.

  “What have you done to earn your way in?” I put the question out there without expecting an answer. No matter what he’d done, it would be nothing to be proud of or brag about to a cop.

  “You don’t want to know,” Roland told me. He sounded as though he was the one who didn’t want to know.

  His regret was so sincere my heart tripped. For an instant I thought he was going to unburden himself of something. But life, and my job, is never that easy.

  A loud motorcycle rumbled up the bad road and there was no doubt where it was headed.

  “That’s Charlie,” Roland announced with obvious relief. “That’s who I was waiting for.”

  “Is he going to pick you up at the door like a gentleman, or sit outside and honk?”

  “What? I don’t get you, lady.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself trying to figure it out.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  Outside, the sound of un-baffled pipes rose then dropped dead silent.

  “Your master’s voice,” I said.

  “You don’t know.”

  “I know a lot more than you think.”

  “Are you getting blown by the Hurricane, Ro?” The question was followed by an explosion of laughter without mirth. Charlie Lipscomb stood in the trailer door and lit a cheap cigar.

  He was part of the Nightriders old guard. I’d dealt with him before for a lot of reasons. But he’d changed since the last time I’d seen him. His long, wild hair was grayer. His beard was tied up in three little bands that pulled it to a point. One other big difference—his bloated, round gut. Different, but familiar. His vest had a new tab on it as well. Over his heart was a white patch with red stitching. It said Sgt. at Arms.

  “She was asking me questions,” Roland blurted. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Nope.” I agreed. “He’s a good soldier. He follows rules and does what he’s told. Living the free life of a biker.”

  “What do you know about freedom, cop?” Charlie puffed out a cloud of blue smoke, then folded his thick arms over the swelling of his belly. “We live for freedom and ride where we want. There’s nothing more important in our world. And there’s no freedom behind a badge for little piggies.” He laughed again—still without humor. The sound was more like score taking than expressing any pleasure.

  “Guys like you spend half your life behind bars, and always talk about freedom. You need to get a dictionary sometime.”

  “That’s what she does,” Roland chimed in. “Always saying we’re dumb.”

  “It wouldn’t bother you, if you didn’t believe it,” I told him.

  “Whatever,” Charlie said without laughing. He rolled the low budget cigar around his mouth—dropping ashes into his beard.

  “Where were you last night, Charlie?”

  “Riding.”

  “Just riding? Where?”

  “Riding with friends.” He puffed more smoke. It occurred to me that he was blowing smoke in more ways than one. “We went all the way
to Joplin for some barbeque. Didn’t get back until early morning.”

  “Convenient.”

  “We got places to be. Lock up on your way out.” He went out the door with Roland following quickly behind.

  I didn’t touch the door.

  Chapter 10

  The feeling I had walking in my own front door was one of isolation. Originally, it had been Nelson’s door. I still lived among his art, his house, his furniture. It was all beautiful, but a beautiful wall was still something to be climbed over if a woman is to become. . .

  What?

  And why did I feel it was so important for me to think of these things now?

  Stupid questions.

  The house was one of those prefabricated log homes that Nelson had placed on a sandstone cliff, looking over a finger of Table Rock Lake. Extending over the fifty foot drop, the glass front of the house looked like the prow of a ship—another voyage going nowhere.

  I regretted having stopped drinking—a thought that demanded honesty. I stared out of the windows at the burning world and admitted, I want to drink.

  Times like that I had support. Uncle Orson understood. He would help. Clare Bolin understood. He would be there for me. The sheriff. Even Billy. He’s seen me at my lowest—and protected me from myself more than once. Men. All the people in my life that I counted on were men. By any accounting, I had a troubling relationship with the other gender.

  That was another thought that made me crave a drink. It was a lie. I knew it even before the idea was fully formed. I didn’t want a drink. I wanted to be drunk.

  Someone knocked at the door. It was Billy coming to talk—I was sure of it. He was a good man for talk, and I was glad. Still, I took the time to kick off the sensible shoes and drop my gun and badge.

  I opened the door. It wasn’t Billy. Carmen Dando, my mother, stood there with a hopeful semi-smile on her face. It was a familiar look. I’d seen it in the mirror a million times.

  “What do you want?” I didn’t have any smile at all.

  “Don’t I deserve better than that?”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m your mother.”