A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  “Are you?”

  Carmen opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came. Her hands fluttered about—nervous birds looking for a perch. She touched a strand of hair and pushed it away from her face. That was familiar too. Although, after Iraq, I touched the scar that ran out from under my eyebrow.

  Before she could find her words, I added, “And I don’t think you want to start any conversation about deserving.”

  “Katrina. . .”

  I waited.

  Her hands fluttered more. “It’s been such a long time,” she finally said.

  “Yes, it has.”

  “You’re not going to give an inch are you?” There was a low fire under the question.

  “Where were you?”

  Carmen looked as though I had slapped her. When she recovered, she said simply, “Life.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “Then you should go.”

  “Do we have to do this here? Like this? Standing on your doorstep. Inside and outside? Can’t we be on the same side of the door? Katrina?”

  I pulled the door closer to myself, narrowing the gap. “Too many doors between us, Carmen.”

  “You used to call me—”

  “Don’t.”

  She didn’t look surprised or hurt. Something in her eyes shifted—the color or the cast—something that didn’t have an exact definition, changed. It was pale smoke in a soft breeze. After that, Carmen’s face opened into an evangelical smile. Her expression dressed up—becoming the kind that knocked on your door early Saturday morning to tell you everything you believe is wrong, but there’s good news. “This is a moment,” she said explaining. “Let’s not waste it on the past.”

  “Is my past such a waste to you?” The question was as rough as a grindstone in my throat.

  “You know that’s not what I’m trying to say.”

  “Don’t try to tell me what I know.”

  Her lips kept smiling without showing teeth. Her eyes had that glaze of curling smoke. She saw something I couldn’t. “It happened,” Carmen said. “Things. . . Happen. In a life. . . A long, living time. But you’re looking at it from the child’s end of the line. Try looking from mine.”

  “You’re not making a bit of sense.”

  “Moments,” she said again. “Everything is a moment. This one, the next one, and the one before. When you’re young, you look at the tiny segments and think you see everything. When you look from this end, you see the whole thing was one moment. Time and the errors you make smear into one thing.”

  “Is that your way of asking for forgiveness or of telling me my life was a momentary mistake made in yours?”

  “I’m saying we only have this moment. This time. It shapes everything before it and after. Think about now. Not then. Not later.”

  “I don’t think about you at all. Too many silent moments have gone by.”

  “You were such a sweet young girl. You’ve become a hard woman.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Katrina. . . I want to be a part of your life. I want you in mine—”

  “Tell me this—did you come back for me or for something else and I’m just—” I waved my hands in front of me, then recognized the gesture. I put them to my side and said, “A moment’s worth of unfinished business?”

  Over her shoulder, from around the corner of the house, a face with two dark eyes peeked out. Cherry Dando.

  “Get out of here.” I aimed the command at the both of them.

  He ducked back. She tried to speak.

  I backed into the house and returned with my baton.

  Carmen didn’t move until I pushed the door wide and let the metal weapon drop to full extension. She walked backward along the path to the driveway. Dando was standing beside an old beater of a car.

  “Did you ask her?” He called when we came around the corner. As soon as he saw the baton in my hand he came forward with his palms showing. “We’re sorry,” he insisted. “It was a bad idea. My idea. No reason to be taking anything out on your mother.”

  “I haven’t had a mother since I was six years old.” I stopped advancing when I said it.

  Carmen continued retreating to Dando. “We needed help,” he explained. “That’s all. You know. To do things the right way. There’s a fortune in silver in that ground. There’s no reason for it to just sit and do no good to no one.”

  “That’s why you came?” I asked Carmen.

  For the first time I saw shame painted across her face. Then it was gone. “No.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Now hold on,” Dando implored.

  I never looked away from Carmen. “You didn’t come when my heart was broken. You never showed when my body was ravaged. You were absent for my father’s murder. When I drank to oblivion. When I fought for my sanity and my life. Those are the moment you talked about. My moments. All moments you missed.”

  “Katrina—”

  “You came for money.”

  “No—”

  “Is that why you left? You loaded up the car and dropped me off at Uncle Orson’s dock. Do you remember that? You didn’t even walk me in.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What was waiting for you? What payday was so important you that had to leave me standing in a parking lot?”

  “Freedom. I had to get free.”

  “From what?”

  “Everything.”

  “You’re still free,” I said.

  “What about my truck?” Dando yelled the question from behind the fender of the old car. “I want it back.”

  “That’s Earl Turner’s truck.” I answered. “It’s one more thing you and me have to talk about. Why don’t you be at my office tomorrow morning?” I looked back at Carmen. “We can talk there.”

  “I got nothing to say to you,” he called over.

  “I have plenty to say to you.” I was still looking at my mother. “Don’t make me come looking.”

  Then I turned and returned to my house—locking the door behind me.

  * * * *

  Showered and dressed in jeans with a jacket and my service weapon tucked into the small of my back, I showed up at Uncle Orson’s boat dock just as the sun was burning the horizon. The sky was red-dark—and getting darker—like blood cooking black on hot concrete. The night sounds were rising from the lake and shore. Cicadas, frogs, an owl from across the water, and the flop of a fish all printed the evening with living presence.

  Uncle Orson had purchased the dock after retiring from the Marines. It was old when he got it—and it still looked like a mistake in time. As I stood in the parking lot at the end of the gangway, the lights came on. They were clear bulbs strung from one end of the dock to the other. In their light, colors popped with an otherworldly glow. The electric yellow burn of twisted filaments birthed tiny stars in the black lake water.

  I was standing in the exact spot my mother had left me when I was six. My father was out of town on one of his consulting jobs. Carmen had loaded up the car with her belongings and brought me to the dock. She was gone and out of sight before I went to find my uncle.

  Watching it again in memory, I understood it no better than I had as a girl.

  “I saw you out there,” Uncle Orson said as I came in the door. “I put some brats on the grill.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “But you want to talk.”

  “Not anymore.”

  He slid aside the top of an ancient chugging cooler and pulled out a pair of sodas. “Orange or grape?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Orange it is.” He popped the top off in the machine’s opener and handed it over.

  The bottle was crusted with pellets of ice and almost painfully cold. I took a
long drink that left me gasping.

  “You sounded pretty firm about wanting to talk,” he said, after I’d caught my breath.

  “Sometimes even I figure things out for myself.”

  “What things are that?”

  “You were trying to protect me. That was obvious. Who from and why I needed protecting wasn’t. Until I talked to her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We never talked about it. Dad. You. I don’t think I heard her name more than a half-dozen times between when she left and when I went to college.”

  “Well. . .” Orson opened his grape soda and took a quick swallow. “Carmen kind of kicked your dad’s ass. In the way only a younger, pretty woman, can.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “How much younger than you is Billy Blevins?”

  “That’s not the same. And it’s not the subject at hand.” I tilted the bottle high up and took another deep pull, but I kept my gaze fixed on my uncle.

  “No. I guess it’s not.” He waited for me to lower the bottle from my lips before he continued. “She didn’t just run off that day. She ran off with him. Cherry Dando. It wasn’t bad enough that he was Navy. He was a dishonorable discharge. You know how much pride your father took in his service.”

  I nodded, staring into the half-empty bottle in my hands. My mind was filled with the pain of missing my father and the secret wish that the soda was whiskey.

  “Proud of yours too,” Uncle Orson added.

  “I know.”

  “Drink your soda. It helps. Part of craving is the habit.”

  My wish wasn’t as secret as I thought. I should have known better. Orson has his own issues with drinking. As far as I know he’s never tried to stop, but he informally counsels other vets. He understands a lot.

  “So. . . They ran off—and have been gone all this time?”

  He shook his head, put the grape soda to his mouth, and walked at the same time. Pushing through the screen door to the lake side of the shack he said, “Time to turn the brats. I had the butcher make them special. Jalapeno, cheddar, and jack with cilantro and lime zest.”

  “I don’t know if that sounds horrifying or delicious.” I followed behind him.

  “Don’t listen to the recipe. Smell what’s cookin’.”

  Outside, the scent of the cooking meat and spices made my mouth water. Suddenly I was hungry. I suspected that Orson knew the effect the sausages would have. But I wouldn’t be deterred. “They didn’t disappear?”

  He picked up tongs and turned the brats with a lot more concentration than the task required. “No. They didn’t.”

  “And?”

  “For years I’m pretty sure your father knew exactly where they were. He was angry and hurt.”

  “And a trained intelligence officer.”

  “His Phoenix Program training stayed with him all his life. To his credit, he only kept track so far as I know.” One of the sausage casings leaked grease causing a flare of flame in the grill. In that light, I saw a sadness on Orson’s face. “I’m not sure I could have maintained such restraint. But your father was always stronger than I was.”

  His expression was deeper than sadness. Like me, he occasionally saw things that were there only in the past. I saw sand and swirling dust. I relived the betrayal of my superior officers and watched myself bleed into the featureless brown of Iraq. Uncle Orson went to another place, and another time. He’d told me before about the flash of fire when a Zippo catches the dry thatch of village hooches. From him, I knew the terror of a nighttime ambush in the jungle, and the rippling waves of helicopter wash in elephant grass.

  “Uncle Orson.” I pulled at him only with my voice. “Orson.”

  “Some of us are different after. . . All of us really.”

  “I know.”

  “But your father held it all back and lived a good life.” Orson moved the brats around absently. “I suspect that he had rage in him. I imagine also that the tabs he kept on them was part of it. But he never did what I might have. And I know that was because of you.”

  I nodded and put my hand on his arm.

  “I miss him,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  Uncle Orson keeps a houseboat tied to the dock. It’s a perfect little home for a hermit—or for a sheriff’s detective who didn’t want to go home late at night. There was a time it served as my floating apartment—whenever I was too drunk to drive. I’m ashamed to say, there were times I was in that condition—but still took to the roads. That night, with only amazing brats and another soda weighing me down, the bunk seemed smaller.

  My dreams were a jumble, more sensation than image. Anger. That’s often the centerpiece of my sleeping world. I could feel it the way an epileptic feels an aura of impending seizure. It snaked under my skin and curled around my heart—then it whispered something new.

  There were no words. The soft voice carried only feeling. It was as if I was the innocent in the garden and the fruit was held out to me. All I had to do was take it. It was not the serpent’s voice. I sensed no menace. The voice that urged me on was kind. But I was rejecting the kindness. I rejected the offer retreating again into the comfort of anger.

  When I woke, cold water was already sending tendrils of vapor into the heat of a rising sun. The dream voices faded, leaving me adrift in wakefulness. Whatever they wanted to tell me was lost.

  Awakening, I was certain I had sorted out my conflict. Smug, under clean sheets and years of distance, I congratulated myself at understanding. What I had to do was not personal. Cherry Dando had killed Tyrell Turner. I was convinced. If Carmen wasn’t involved, she knew.

  There would be consequences.

  I cleaned up and dressed. Once again I put on jeans. It was choice and necessity. There was nothing else on the boat. Grabbing coffee from the dock shack, I set out to begin my day with a rare sense of purpose. Either I would find the evidence I needed—or I would get a confession.

  * * * *

  I skipped the breakfast stop at the Taneycomo Café, afraid of running into Duck. That was sure to be an uncomfortable conversation—and I wanted to put it off as long as I could. I should have had a good breakfast—because Donald Duques was sitting in my office when I arrived.

  “Duck,” I said.

  “Hurricane,” he responded.

  Already there was gambler’s tension between us. We both had cards to play, but neither one liked the game.

  Duck started. “You could have given me a head’s up. Professional courtesy.”

  “I would have if you had told me your son was a Nightrider right off.”

  “You know I couldn’t say anything.”

  “You know you should have. I would have asked you to bring him in.”

  “Roland wouldn’t have come.”

  “You should have tried.” I said it hard. I set my mouth and eyes like they were in cement and stared at him. “You should have done something—because he looks involved. If not in murder in the cover up.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “It’s worse than you think.”

  “You have evidence?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “What can you say?”

  “I can say he needs to get in front. This thing is bigger and messier. . .” I thought about what I could and should say to Duck. He was, if not a friend, a colleague. And a father. “Look. No matter what he feels about you—or what he thinks about cops in general—you need to make him see that there are two sides. No matter what, we’ll treat him fair. But.” I looked harder and leaned in to make my point. “You need to convince him that he doesn’t have friends on the other side.”

  “You mean the club.”

  “I mean the low man carries the weight, Duck. You know how it works.”

  “Who?” His question was ur
gent and hopeful.

  “I can’t tell you anything that’s part or product of my investigation.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe I can tell you something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Ro told me why they were trying to keep that boy’s body from going to the medical examiner.”

  I didn’t say anything. The poor value of the hand Duck had been dealt showed in his eyes and the slump of his body. He needed to put them on the table. He simply didn’t know how without failing his son. “DNA.” He laid the phrase out like a last chance gambler folding.

  “What about it?”

  “That’s all I know. That’s all he said. It has something to do with DNA.”

  “Whose?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “He’s not telling you much, Duck.”

  “He’s afraid. I can tell that. They’ve got him into something that he can’t get out of. I tried to tell him—I tried to tell him a lot of things.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that—or to the hurt in his eyes. Luckily I didn’t have to. Footsteps scraped the tiles and stopped. Someone passed my door then came back. Earl Turner was there holding a cell phone in his hand.

  It was a strange triangle. Duck looked at the man and turned pale. Earl Turner saw him. He tried to ignore Duck, and looked at me. For my part, I was caught looking from one to the other.

  “I want my truck.” Earl was the first to break the silence.

  “It’s in your garage,” I told him.

  “You know it ain’t true.”

  I looked at Duck—who was staring at Earl. He made no movement. I’m not sure he was even breathing. “Duck?”

  “Duck?” Earl startled slightly.

  “Are you alright, Duck?”

  He turned to face me. I could see his eyes angled over at Turner though. “Yeah,” Duck answered. “You gave me a lot to think about.”

  “They call you Duck?” Turner asked.

  Duck nodded and touched his head. It was an awkward movement, and I couldn’t tell if he was hiding his face or touching the brim of an imaginary hat. “Yes, sir. And I’m headed back to work.”

  Turner backed up to let Duck through the door then stayed in the hall watching the other man go.