Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between

by Myers, Brendan P.

  The two looked to the starboard rail, where the boy now lay stretched out beneath blankets, catching a few winks under the stars. Seeing him, Dugan recalled Richards stooping low to offer the boy a heartfelt hello. It was perhaps the most sincere Dugan had ever seen him. But he remembered too the hailstorm of heavy weapons Richards was responsible for dropping from the sky onto the young boy’s troubled homeland. How many Arturo’s had those weapons and others like them already killed?

  “So,” Dugan said, the words coming from his mouth before he considered them, “do you think you’re making his life better, or worse?”

  Richards turned a jaundiced eye in his direction.

  “It’s complicated, kid,” he said.

  Dugan smiled and shook his head. It wasn’t complicated at all. But that was a conversation they could perhaps save for another day. Instead, he asked, “Have I been a good little soldier?”

  Richards brow furrowed before he remembered. He thought deeply and at some length before he began to speak.

  “Yeah, Dugan, I gotta admit, you have. You surely have. More than that, you’ve managed to surprise me at just about every turn, and I’m not a man who surprises easily. So yes, you have been a very good soldier indeed.”

  Pausing, he caught Dugan’s eye.

  “You know, it’s funny, but I never dreamed there were people like you out there, people who . . . well, you know. Outside of midnight creature features and drive-ins and horror novels, that is. Fast forward a couple of years, and voila. There you are, in the flesh. It’s strange, isn’t it, how something can be going on all around you, but you don’t see it, until you do? Then, when you finally do see it, you realize it’s been there all along and you were just blind to it, though I suppose in your case, that’s understandable. The world is so messed up, it’s no wonder nobody sees it. I mean, just look at the place: serial killings, mass murder, animal mutilation. And that’s just us humans. So it’s no surprise nobody believes in you. I sure didn’t. Hell, you could probably hide in plain sight.”

  “How is John Arthur?” Dugan asked pointedly, putting prompt lie to the notion that any of his kind could hide, much less in plain sight. John Arthur was the other man on the balcony with Richards that Arizona night. And John Arthur wanted him dead.

  Richards did a quick double take before smiling and looking away.

  “There you go again. More surprises. Well, let’s see. John Arthur. You may or may not be happy to learn that Mr. Arthur has received his long sought promotion to the corner office, and is now president of Atlas Worldwide. Still, he hasn’t recovered from pissing off the DCI – that’s the Director of Central Intelligence – a man who took a special interest in your case, by the way. Anyhow, Arthur continues his important work but is seeking to diversify, with the goal of becoming less dependent on the largess of the U.S. Government.”

  Dugan took that in. He recalled Atlas was a father and son operation, so John Arthur must have taken over the reins from his father. Of course, Atlas had lots of cover businesses: security services, oil and gas, transatlantic shipping, but their core business activity was responding to the occasional vampire outbreak. They were very good at it too. Their tentacles ran so deep, they could make you believe that it never even happened. They had in Dugan’s hometown.

  That the Director of Central Intelligence had taken an interest in his case came as no surprise either. I mean, here he was, alive and well and now working on their behalf. He guessed that may have been their goal all along, which brought to mind another topic.

  “What the hell was that all about anyway?” Dugan asked, covering a Texas-sized plot of land with that single question, but phrasing it in such a way that allowed Richards to take it any direction he chose.

  The CIA agent went pensive before responding.

  “Well, let’s just say this: it was an inter-governmental shitshow from the very start, with lots of senior people taking a more than passing interest. I’m talking at the highest levels, mind you, the very tippy top. That’s what probably made it FUBAR from the get go. I never thought it was a good idea, and John Arthur certainly didn’t. But I’ll say this too, that what they had cooked up for you wasn’t such a bad deal. You might even have ended up liking it, or at least, abiding it. It would have been preferable to . . .” Richards swept his hand across the boat. “This. But again, I have to give you credit. You fell completely off the radar. And believe you me, the U.S. government has some pretty good radar.”

  With a twinge of bitter memory, Dugan recalled what he had done after falling off that radar: working as a carnival freak followed by months of schoolwork and learning until ultimately, his final transformation to vampire.

  Still, another sour memory surfaced. “You found my uncle though, didn’t you?” he asked with some bite, remembering the shrunk and broken man he had encountered in the desert after the government got through with him.

  Richards graced him with a withering stare.

  “He’s alive, isn’t he?” he asked coldly. In answer, Dugan could only look away. “That’s right. He’s alive.” In warmer tones, he added, “And I tell you what, Scott, sometimes in this life, that’s the best you can hope for.”

  They sat in silence for a while, with Dugan trying to absorb some of what he’d been told, and Richards taking another swig of wine. Manuel was at the wheel, negotiating yet another tortuous swing around a bend of the winding river. The engines continued to thrum beneath their feet. The boy slept on beneath glimmering starlight. The frogs croaked and the night birds called and the fireflies glowed in their redoubts. The pearly glint of the near full moon cast everything around them in a ghostly luster.

  Richards broke their silence. “The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black.”

  After a moment, in a quiet voice, Dugan finished the quote.

  “. . . fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far, away along blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.”

  Richards turned to Dugan with astonishment.

  “You know your Conrad.”

  Dugan smiled sheepishly. “I had a good teacher,” he conceded, though grudgingly.

  He hadn’t yet forgotten the man in Colorado. Dugan had a deadly score to settle with him as well. Even so, he had to admit that Julian had been a very good teacher, one who made Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness part of his required reading.

  The two listened a while to the sounds of the night: croaking frogs and cooing birds and water streaming past the hull.

  “Tell me about my friends,” Dugan requested, recalling Richards teasing him about Jimmy, and intimating there was more. It was one of the reasons he had come.

  He could tell immediately by Richards smile there was more. Curiously, he also got the impression the man was eager to share.

  “Well, I already told you about Jimmy,” he said readily. “He’s the only one I got to meet. Real smartass, that kid. Found him on the basketball court. Man, he’s a tenacious one, I’ll give him that, if not very good.”

  Dugan knew as much. Though Jimmy had been the jock of their small group, his older brother was the golden boy athlete of the family, the one who quarterbacked the football team and won all the trophies. But something happened to him in college, a mental breakdown of some sort, and the weighty mantle of his prison guard father’s vicarious athletic dreams landed squarely on Jimmy’s too small shoulders.

  “Jimmy graduated Dutton High,” Richards went on, “if just by the skin of his teeth. Went to UMass Amherst in the fall and struggled through his first year. Not much of a student. No, if I had to guess, I’d say he has a few years in the military in his future.”

  That wouldn’t surprise Dugan, and might be for the best. Anything that got Jimmy out of that house and away from his father sooner rather than later was for the best.

  “In terms of the others,” Richards continued, “your friend Moon Lombard went off to community college for criminal justice. Mike Dolloff j
ust finished high school. He’s on to college in the fall. Looks like Babson for him. He’s a real wiz with computers, but I think he’s eventually gonna take over the family business.”

  Dugan nodded. Mike’s family ran the funeral home in his town. They had lovingly cared for Dugan’s mother when her time came, and for his friend Larry as well. No, the world could drown in computer millionaires, he knew, but they’d never be as important as the service Mike and his family provided.

  Meanwhile, he waited for the rest. He knew it was coming. He had prepared himself for it. Eventually, it did.

  “Now, Andrea,” Richards said. “She’s the smartest of the bunch. Heading off to her second year at Smith College. She’s involved in just about every extracurricular activity there is. Works a teen crisis hotline a few nights a week, that is when she’s not waiting tables at a coffee shop. I think she is going to go a long way.”

  Given his earlier trepidation, Dugan’s reaction to hearing it surprised him. He even caught himself smiling, and didn’t at all feel the stabbing pain he thought he might to hear his girlfriend’s life had gone on without him.

  Then again, he knew what they’d had was just a silly teenage thing. They’d never even gone all the way, though it wasn’t from his lack of trying. It’s not like they were going to get married or anything. No, he discovered he was happy for her. Truly happy. He was glad she had moved on.

  Still, there was one last question that left him scratching his head.

  “How the fuck do you people know so goddamned much about me?” he asked, incredulous.

  Richards issued a mischievous smile. Raising his eyebrows, he sat up and reached beside him for his bag. Unzipping it, he put his hand inside and fished around through stacks of bundled hundreds until he found what he was looking for. After he did, he kept his hand in the bag and offered a few explanatory words.

  “First of all, I did tell you they had quite a dossier on you long before I came along. I said they had big plans for you. So of course, they wanted to know as much about you as they could. Matter of fact, that’s how I came to meet Jimmy. He loves you, by the way. That much shined through. Anyhow, I just want you to know it wasn’t me poking around in your things. Not that I wouldn’t have, mind you. It’s just that I didn’t. Now, all that being said,” pausing, he removed his hand from the bag, “I read your book.”

  It took a long moment for Dugan to recognize the item in Richards’ hand. It was a beat up, leather bound volume of what looked to be a few hundred pages, with the typical scratches and worn spots you’d find on any such thing. But in a single burst of memory, he recalled where and how every single scratch and spot and even the round coffee mug stain on the front cover came to be on the thing. It was his journal.

  “The Official Scott Dugan Handbook,” Richards said with a wry smile as he handed it over.

  Dugan took the book from his hand. Strangely, he was embarrassed, at first, to learn Richards had read his innermost thoughts. However, flipping through it, stopping now and again at his lame attempts at poetry, song lyrics that had once meant the world to him, brief diary entries, and amateurish attempts at pencil sketches, he realized how silly that was. These were the writings of someone else, not him. They were the thoughts and ruminations of an old acquaintance, at best, and a somewhat goofy, romantic, sleepy, often stoned acquaintance at that. Even so, Dugan smiled, because he could finally say it now, if only to himself: the kid hadn’t been all that bad.

  However, while holding the book, via sense memory imprinted on it, he gleaned something else. Richards had indeed been the one who rifled his things. In his mind’s eye, Dugan watched him tossing his bedroom in the since abandoned house, rummaging through his drawers, going through his closet, stopping to eye the posters on the wall, even lifting his mattress and discovering his porn stash. Oddly, he broke out in an inner grin to learn that after all they had put him through, and what they were putting him through now, that Richards would lie about such a trifling matter. He found it almost endearing.

  He was bothered to think in that moment he might be starting to like the man. Certainly, he had developed a kind of grudging respect for him, and for the ruthless determination he displayed in furthering his cause. In their travels, the CIA agent demonstrated he was not above killing as cold-bloodedly as Dugan ever had. Maybe, it was just that the two had more in common than might appear on the surface. But Dugan understood as well he had to guard against those sorts of feelings. They were just the type of thing that could get a man killed. Thanking Richards for the gift, he placed the journal inside his own bag.

  The two lapsed into silence a few minutes, until Richards asked, “So what happens to you in the daytime? If you get exposed to the sun, I mean.”

  Though thinking it an odd question, Dugan couldn’t help but flash back to that long ago morning in the sands of the Arizona desert, and the searing pain of the sun’s rays just barely falling on his skin.

  “Nothing good,” he replied.

  Richards cocked his head, but their discussion ended seconds later when both got their first glimpse of soldiers, an unremitting stream of moonlit specters marching along a muddy berm a few hundred yards from them. The men trudged ploddingly, weighted down by heavy packs and guns and bandoliers of ammunition, fatigued from the miles they had already put behind them, laden further by the miles still left to go. The occasional firefly glow of a furtively smoked cigarette was the procession’s only illumination. Periodic barked laughter and muted conversation wafted over the river toward them.

  On whose side they fought, only God and the soldiers knew, but Dugan watched entranced as the phantom column floated by, imagining the soldiers treading the very same path worn by Spanish conquistadors centuries earlier, and before them, warriors from any one of the long forgotten ancient tribes who once dominated the region.

  After the soldiers passed on, the two spent the remainder of that evening in virtual, though companionable silence, each adrift in their own thoughts.

  2

  As he had so often since arriving in the guest house behind the Esquinaldo estate, with so much time to kill, Dan found himself again peering through the telescope. He had become somewhat expert at tuning the knobs and dials to ensure the sharpest view. He had even taken to pointing it toward the stars, putting his half forgotten celestial knowledge to good use. He spent time exploring Mars, imagining himself scaling Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the known galaxy, whose upper reaches soared into space itself. He watched the moons of Saturn dance around her lovely rings. He lost hours staring at the hothouse that was Venus. He thought one late evening he might even have glimpsed Jupiter’s big red spot.

  However, on this morning, unlike those other occasions, he wasn’t observing the passage of planets through millions of miles of empty space, or observing the hustle and bustle of the megalopolis that was Mexico City in the nearer distance. No, he had since opted to move the telescope into the front room, and what he was observing at that moment was the far more mundane sight of his ever so cosmopolitan host swimming his morning laps.

  A man of firm habit, Esquinaldo was out there every morning by six a.m., and Dan had to admit he was in good shape for a man his age, which he estimated to be somewhere in his seventies. Hell, the truth of it was, he was in far better shape than Dan. Well tanned and fairly muscular, with only a minor paunch, he had a a thick mane of gray hair on his chest and more than his share of scars on his body, the nastiest of which Dan deduced could only have come from a bullet passing through his upper left shoulder.

  His preferred bathing attire were dark blue trunks of a thong-like, European fashion that Dan himself wouldn’t be caught dead in. Their snug fit left very little to the imagination. But it wasn’t Esquinaldo’s manhood he was interested in. It was the tattoo he had chanced to see on the inside of the man’s upper left arm. At least, Dan thought it was a tattoo. The jury was still out.

  He had dismissed it, at first, as simply a birthmark or a mole or any on
e of those naturally occurring imperfections in the skin’s pigment. A second look revealed it was far too dark for that. He went on to think it might be a benign tumor of some sort, perhaps resulting from too much sun, though his own experience was that the underside of the arm didn’t get much of that. Hell, maybe it was a less than benign tumor, a cancer of some variety. He might even be doing Esquinaldo a favor by pointing it out, he told himself, to justify that curiosity had overridden his better instincts when he moved the telescope to the front room. Alas, by then, it was the end of Esquinaldo’s morning workout, and he’d have to wait another day to perform this important medical examination.

  However, he discovered by happenstance that the new placement of the telescope allowed him to see a big chunk of Esquinaldo’s office, specifically, that corner which contained a couch and three of the chairs surrounding the conference table. He couldn’t see Esquinaldo’s desk or the outer door, so what restricted view he did have would have to suffice. He had already peered in that direction a few times and saw nothing and no one, not even the missing man the DEA agent said had disappeared behind the walls of this very estate.

  In his heart, he understood that was the real reason he had moved the telescope. His peculiar encounters the other day with both Agent Winthrop and the reporter’s friend had been weighing heavily on his mind. Thinking it through, it was perhaps obvious why the DEA man ended up seeking him out. He or someone else had been watching the estate, and Dan had been observed coming or going from it. After that, who knows? A photograph of him gets circulated, they match it up with his passport photo, and before you can say Jack Robinson, a computer in Mexico City is talking to a computer in Washington D.C. and bingo, Horace Winthrop knows that Dan is current on his taxes. His own experience at the hands of the U.S. government had schooled him that there was practically no capability they didn’t have.

  The reporter’s researcher was a harder nut to crack. He now regretted the sullen, though he thought defensible at the time, attitude he had adopted with her, because that state of mind had muddled some of the obvious questions he should have asked. That, and her note had come so quickly on the heels of his meeting with the DEA agent, he had just assumed the meetings were connected. But he couldn’t know that for certain without having asked.