Fallen Angel

by Chuck Logan

Jesse shrugs and peruses the other clientele who—standing or seated—hunch, heads bowed, over iPhone and iPad screens. Suddenly selfconscious about her damaged face and the scars on her bare right knee, she thinks out loud, “Gee, whaddaya suppose they make of us?”

  Davis rolls slightly feverish eyes. “For them, soldiers only exist in movies, and wounded soldiers don’t exist at all.” Then he taps one of the sketches. “How close can we get to the house using available cover?”

  “A hundred yards. But that’s academic if we run into Jump.”

  “We don’t run into anybody. This is a surveillance,” he insists. “We try to establish the granddaughter’s whereabouts, her pattern. If we can catch her alone, we try an approach to feel her out.”

  “Right. That’s why there’s a briefcase in the trunk stuffed with fifties and hundreds along with a first-aid kit and assorted rifles and ammunition.”

  ***

  Now it’s getting toward midnight, and Jesse finds herself back in upper Michigan, on U.S. 2, east of Escanaba. Davis slouches behind the wheel in a dogged zone beyond fatigue and pain and has the windows cranked open because he’s smoking. Like on her solo trip down this lonely stretch of road, the night air that flocks against Jesse’s face suddenly fills with demons.

  “I keep thinking,” she says, “that day in the desert, if I would have broke to the right instead of left none of this would have happened.”

  After a moment, Davis says, “Your dad was army infantry in Vietnam, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He talk about it?”

  “Not much.”

  “Maybe because he once committed an atrocity and an act of heroism in the same half hour. Don’t pay to mindfuck a war, Jesse.”

  “So what’s that say about the guy we’re after, Jump?”

  Davis has no answer and keeps his eyes fixed on where his high beams fade into the darkness.

  After a dozen more miles, the silence stacks up in the front seat until Jesse finally comes out and says it. “I gotta ask. Since you and Jump used to work out of the same shop—another time, another place—were you ever the man in the desert who couldn’t afford to be seen?”

  Davis squirms behind the wheel to reposition the ache in his side, very aware of Jesse’s measuring eyes. He’s thinking how once the rules were fairly straightforward, not unlike the center line on the two-lane blacktop that stretches into the gloomy furnace of the upper Michigan night. Right there is your basic compact of trust. Impulse balanced against control. You take it for granted the guy coming at you at sixty miles an hour will stay on his side of the white line.

  “First thing that went to hell in Baghdad was the rules of the road,” he says.

  His hand moves to the stalk on the steering wheel and twists off the lights. It’s an old road game he played when he was younger and more in thrall to a death wish. And when he had a much faster car. Once his eyes adjust to the moonlight it’s easy enough to track the blacktop, the shoulder, the fields on either side ticking with cicadas. So he eases the wheel a quarter turn and drifts across the line into the left lane. In the distance, perhaps half a mile, he sees the flair of oncoming headlights. As he steps on the accelerator, he reminds himself, High beams give you a hundred fifty yards of depth perception.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Jesse braces against the seat.

  “Educating you.” Leaning back, elbow resting out the window, one hand on the wheel, he calculates the approaching lights, watches them flicker and disappear in dips, come back on.

  He is aware of his breathing, which is normal. His pulse is barely elevated.

  Just yards from the forward edge of the onrushing lights he swings back into his lane. The other driver wobbles slightly toward the shoulder as Davis’ shadowy Ford appears out of nowhere and hurtles past.

  After he switches the lights back on, Jesse releases her grip on the seat cushion and twists to watch the other car’s taillights fade in the dark. “So it’s like we were never there.” She mutters as she turns back to Davis. “Like Jump wasn’t there in the desert or you weren’t there at the hospital. And if somebody killed Sam, he wasn’t there either.”

  “You catch on fast,” Davis says.

  After a few more minutes of cryptic silence, he asks, in a more relaxed tone, “So what got you interested in flying?”

  Jesse leans back and says, “Summer after my sophomore year in college. My dad got me on a road crew with public works; you know, the girl in the orange vest holding the stop-and-go sign directing one-lane traffic through a torn-up stretch of highway. We have a saying—North Dakota has two seasons: winter and road construction.

  “So I’m standing there in the hundred-degree heat with steaming asphalt and wheat fields all around, and a guy in one of the backed-up cars falls on his horn. Heart attack. So we’re trying to make him comfortable after we call emergency services, feeling pretty helpless, actually, out in the middle of nowhere, and I look up and see this helicopter coming in low and fast—a Eurocopter EC-145, with the twin tail booms. Life Flight out of Grand Forks.”

  She shrugs. “Just something about how the pilot brought that airframe in so cool and Johnny-on-the-spot, and I decided right there that’s what I wanted to do instead of winding up in some freaking cubicle.”

  Davis glances at her. “Big difference between flying a civilian air ambulance and Kiowa Warriors and Black Hawks in a war zone.”

  “No-brainer. The military has the best schools, the best hands-on; and by going through the Guard, I don’t have as much obligation as the regulars. Plus, as an officer I pick up management experience.”

  “So you never considered going regular army?” Davis asks.

  Jesse shakes her head. “In the Guard I could keep one foot in the civilian world, where the jobs are. And besides, the women in the regulars, flying cutting edge in Iraq and Afghanistan? They’re all divorced, getting divorced, or turning into military nuns.” She smiles tightly and says, “It tends to get hard on relationships. I’m willing to do my part, but I’m nobody’s martyr . . .”Jesse arches her back to work out the kinks. “I was headed for fixed wing. Up until this happened, I assumed I’d have a life.”

  “And do what?”

  Jesse takes a moment to reconstruct her dreams. Before this happened. “Get my pilot’s license, fly someplace big and open, where they don’t have deserts and where no one’s shooting at me.” Her eyes drift out the window into the black jack pine. “Alaska, maybe . . .”

  After a moment Davis asks, “You were engaged to that Terry guy. So how come you never got married?”

  “Lots of things, but it came down to this one night. I was making a list of potential bridesmaids sitting there in my trailer at Balad, and I couldn’t come up with a single close girlfriend. I mean from our quote-unquote ‘circle.’”

  “Tomboy?”

  “Hey, I was runner-up for homecoming queen my senior year in high school. Of course, it was a small high school. And I had a boyfriend. But we spent a lot of time working on his car. Some of the things I did just went better with guys, like my brothers.” Jesse holds up her palm to clarify. “But don’t overinterpret; I read more Jane Austin than Popular Mechanics.”

  “Give me an example of the ‘some’ things.”

  “Okay, once when I was fifteen I caught this big frog by the pond and tossed him in a pot of boiling water to see what’d happen.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It was a deep pot. The water won.”

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  They stand stark as crows in their black mourning clothes on the cobble beach in front of the big house—Amanda in a dark sleeveless dress, Morgon, Roger, and Brian Cawker, who cut his vacation short to attend the funeral. They are waiting for Roger’s pilot, who is taking the estate helicopter on a test flight. Before the pilot lands he will drop John’s ashes over the lake.

  The quiet ceremony was specified in John’s will; he wanted his ashes scattered in the surf in front of th
e house. Nothing fancy; he left it to Amanda to recruit the farewell party. Morgon shifts from one polished dress shoe to the other. In other words, in Amanda’s present mental state, it was up to Morgon to name the new inner circle that would stand witness.

  It is, in effect, a changing of the guard. He will explain this to Amanda in more detail later, when she is feeling better. He appraises her, standing stock-still staring to the north—pretty, of course, and as composed as the Zoloft can make her. Ambien gets her through the night. Considering the meds, she conducted herself with surprising aplomb during the memorial service at the Lakeside Episcopal Church, flanked by the family lawyer and the accountant. Morgon stayed in the background and could have been a deacon in his dark suit.

  But the lines of authority were made clear in a discreet comment by one of the CIA elders in attendance. A white-haired man in a tailored two-thousand-dollar suit took him aside briefly and commented that “they” were still interested in continuing their “special relationship” with the Rivard Foundation. When that old fucker hobbled away, he left Morgon privately feeling like the island of Britain.

  The next time there is a coded call to the Rivard mansion it will be Morgon, in John’s place, traveling to a face-to-face rendezvous. Brian Cawker will replace him on the sharp end. Cawker’s assessment of the Zetas as blunt instruments is borne out by the distressing news coming out of Minneapolis in fragments off the news reports. Apparently the pilot’s kidnapping has been accomplished during a ham-fisted shooting spree that included a raid on the hospital’s narcotics depository. And now Roger is getting nervous. His ace boy, Juarez, has not reported in and may have helped himself to a stash of class-A dope.

  Morgon tilts his head and watches the silvery-blue striped helicopter appear, flying about a hundred feet over the waves. It tips slightly to the side, and they see a mist trail briefly from the cockpit window and then scatter in the prop wash. He glances at Amanda. John’s death has hung over them like a dark cloud since he returned, like she blames him for precipitating the heart attack because of all the blowback from the Iraq fiasco.

  And now it’s a literal cloud, drifting down through the air.

  As the helicopter circles and flares toward the hangar, Amanda remains facing the beach, eyes closed, face upturned.

  A shift in the wind brings a dull powder—like soft gray sparks—that sprinkles over them and, as Morgon brushes the errant particles of John’s ashes off his sleeve, he notices that Amanda doesn’t move and some of the ashes melt into the tears on her cheek.

  Then she puts a hand on Morgon’s shoulder and lifts first one foot then the other and takes off her two-inch heels. She manages a vague smile and says, with her medicated, bored drawl verging on sarcasm, “It’s not that bringing in Roger to look over the chopper and the books is a bad idea; we don’t need an aircraft on the place anymore, and another set of eyes doesn’t hurt.” She raises her slim cool hand and pats his cheek. “But I’d like to be in the loop on the front end, not after the fact.” A genteel sneer peeks in her overdilated gray eyes as she says directly, “Don’t take me for granted, Morg. I’m not arm candy. We need to talk, you and me, about what we do around here, going forward. Things are going to change.” Then she brightens with a tight, possibly manic smile. “Now I’m going to change into something casual and unwind.”

  “Sounds like a good idea for all of us.” Morgon leans over to kiss her cheek, but she steps away, turns, and walks stiffly up the lawn.

  Roger joins him and asks, “Amanda’s sounding a tad scratchy?”

  “The strain, the heat.” The drugs, Morgon thinks but does not say. Then he and Roger and Cawker fall in line behind her and trod back to the Gothic house like a funeral-weary Addams Family.

  It’s turned into one of those overcast sultry early afternoons. Diffuse sunlight casts mossy shadows. Martha sets out a sweating beaker of iced lemonade on the veranda and retires to the kitchen to marinate steaks. Roger, nervously checking his phone for messages about his missing soldier, Juarez, excuses himself and takes the golf cart to the hangar to talk to his pilot. Cawker emerges from the house changed into a loose T-shirt and cargo shorts. Morgon joins him in a pair of faded jeans and a polo shirt.

  As they sit and sip lemonade, Cawker surveys the rolling lawn and says, “Nice here, quiet; out of the way. But no security? I thought you’d have some cameras, at least.”

  Morgon removes his shoes and socks and wiggles his toes, relaxing, letting it all unspool. “We take good care of the sheriff’s department, and they take good care of us. I make a call, and we’d have three cars on the road in five minutes.”

  Cawker nods and sips his lemonade, then inclines his head toward Roger, who paces back and forth by the helicopters, his cell phone still held to his ear. “Fuckin’ Juarez. All we get is scraps of information off the news reports.”

  “I already told Roger, no more Zetas. Next time out we’ll be talking to your Brit SAS alumni,” Morgon says.

  Cawker raises his glass in quiet agreement. Then they both look up when Amanda saunters out the front door in running shorts, a halter, and Nikes. Her face is rinsed clean of makeup and apparently any lingering funeral doldrums. As she twirls her hair into a ponytail and fixes it with a binder, she toes Morgon’s bare foot. “I’m going to run the road to work out the kinks before we eat. You interested?”

  “Pass.” Morgon leans back and holds up his lemonade. Then as she descends the steps, he calls out, “Stay close to the house.”

  Amanda throws him a mocking hand salute and sets off in a graceful warm-up trot down the driveway. As she nears the entrance to the estate, Morgon turns to Cawker and says, “Do me a favor. Trail along and keep an eye on her. Between the funeral, the meds, and now, with the heat, I’m a little worried about her.”

  Cawker nods, sets his drink aside, briefly tightens the laces on his cross-trainers, and adjusts the pistol in the hideout holster positioned under his shirt in the small of his back. As he comes down the steps, he marks Amanda’s left turn at the country road and then sets off in a comfortable lope across the lawn at a diagonal to cut through the stand of woods and come out on the blacktop behind her.

  Morgon watches Cawker thread his way into the trees and then fingers one of John’s blue-tip matches from his shirt pocket and inserts it in his mouth in lieu of a Camel. He gazes across the shimmering lawn in the direction of the hangar where he sees Roger and the pilot walking around the Bell that is parked next to Roger’s red fashion statement of an aircraft.

  Go easy on him, Morgon decides, rolling the matchstick across his lips. Show some forbearance. You still need his business acumen. Briefly he listens to the soft flop of Lake Huron behind the house and imagines John’s ashes and bits of bone moving in and out with the tide wash.

  It occurs to him that John probably never sat on this porch and thought of himself as lord of all he surveyed. But then John was to the manor born and didn’t hatch out of Jump Hollow near Greenwood, Mississippi.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Amanda Rivard has been running along this road since she was a little girl and can recognize the knots in the birch and oak trees and the pebbles on the soft shoulder that crunch beneath her shoes. It’s her road. Her county. She still detects the scent of the damp orchids and lilies that filled the church yesterday afternoon. They linger, twined in her hair like a garland of soft thorns. She still sees the stringy Christ spread-eagled above the altar in the nave window with a tortured face like Edvard Munch’s Scream in the red and purple stained glass along with assorted lambs, shepherds, and angels.

  She slows to a walk, looks up and down the road, and then eases a small baggie from the waistband of her shorts. It contains the last joint Kelly Ortiz rolled for her and a small Bic lighter. Fondly she remembers Kelly’s magic fingers rolling marijuana cigarettes as she fires up the number and the crackle moves through her lips, into her lungs. She exhales and expels a wave of tension in a long vibrato sigh. Patiently she waits for the boost f
rom blood to brain to smile. Not your daddy’s dope. Hydroponic GX13. This is some strong shit.

  She has no idea where to get the stuff in town with Kelly gone. And it’s doubtful Morgon will score dope for her. He’s a real handy guy to have around the house, but she’s never seen him get high on anything.

  Except lately, maybe ambition.

  Briefly she pictures the cannabis doing its deft, faintly illegal, softshoe into the plodding Zoloft in her bloodstream. Probably pushing it, but what the hell. Hit by hit she imbibes the numbing tactile glow, and by the time she lets the charred remnants drop from her fingers she’s back, softly remembering about the church service.

  “A man for the ages,” pronounced the reverend James Tindsdale. “A man who saw and accomplished great things. A man who was a generous friend to all gathered here.”

  And in the good reverend’s eulogy she understood the torch passing to carry on the foundation work in her county. The thoughts are delicate wind chimes in her head, echoing off into the steamy air. She breaks into a languid trot and finds that running when high is a dreamy, floating sensation. This is the first time she’s run the road when no one in the family is waiting for her to return. With John gone, she is alone.

  Alone. Alone. Alone. Like a tattoo, her shoes beat out on the gravel. But alone can also translate into freedom. And Morgon doesn’t seem to grasp the subtleties of transition and succession. A Rivard will always have the final word, here, on these grounds in Rivard County.

  A dusty, muddy, blue SUV with tinted windows passes slowly. A Ford she thinks, nothing special. So you are never really alone, are you? There are always other people, as Morgon relishes pointing out—reading to improve himself—in a quote from Sartre. Hell is basically other people. The Ford disappears around a bend two hundred yards up the road.

  She slows her pace as she admits that she misses Kelly, whom they drove away with their dark, mismanaged bullshit. He was someone more her age she could confide in about her mother’s suicide, her father’s cancer. Not like Morgon. You don’t confide in Morgon, you shelter in his powerful shadow.