Death Waits in the Dark

by Mark Edward Langley

  “You know what I don’t like?” Arthur said. “I don’t like assholes who get off on beating up women. So when I find your stepdaughter, if she tells me you’ve ever touched her, you’ll have more to worry about than Child Protective Services. You’ll have me coming back here and dragging your worthless ass out of that bed and separating you from your balls with my sheep shears!” Arthur’s hand tightened further around the fistful of brown hair. “Do you understand?”

  The stepfather made meager yet agonizing noises through his pain, muffled a bit by the tears he was shedding and the blood that was coming from his mouth. He still did not reply to Arthur’s question. So he asked again, this time using his other hand to put a vice grip on his genitals.

  “I said, do you understand? A simple ‘yes’ will do.”

  Jenifer Peshlakai’s mother watched attentively … smiling.

  “Yes!” the man cried out.

  Arthur released his grip and let the stepfather fall backward onto the hard ground. “Have a nice day.”

  Arthur stood and climbed back into the Bronco, quickly pulled the shifter into gear, and drove in a tight circle on the lot before heading back up 6400 wondering if had just made things worse. Probably not, Arthur grinned. Who was the guy going to tell? Besides, the whole trip may have been a dead end anyway. He wondered if perhaps Sharon knew anyone at Kirtland Central High. He decided to have her see if she could find out where Jason Aquino lived while he made the drive toward Counselor. It was about time he visited his old acquaintance and got some answers.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It only took a couple of hours for Arthur to drive south on Highway 550 to Counselor. The pavement that stretched out before him was a long black ribbon that had been transformed into gray by the unrelenting sun and heat of several summers. And he couldn’t help but notice how the New Mexican winters had already brought out the road crews to fill the jagged cracks in its smooth surface with ribbons of black tar that seemed to snake their way south like so many keloid scars. He had rolled down all the windows in the truck in an effort to keep the dry air moving through it, but his efforts still failed to keep him from overheating. He slowed and turned right onto BIA 537 across from the Apache Nugget Casino and headed southwest, past the scarred remnants of the barrow pit, and drove toward Deer Mesa. It was close to six o’clock in the evening, and Arthur could see that the moon had joined the sun in its dance across the sky. Three more hours and night would take over. Maybe things would cool down then.

  The Desert Patriots compound sat on a portion of ground higher than the desert landscape that surrounded it, but far less than the 7,509 feet of Deer Mesa, which loomed imposingly in the near distance. As Arthur approached, he made a note of the security cameras strategically placed at intervals on the high chain-link fence and nestled among the shining razor wire that surrounded the forty-acre property. Guards dressed in desert camo and assault rifles walked the perimeter with Doberman Pinschers on taut leashes, their black-and-blue coats shimmering in the sunlight like muscled silk. Arthur drove toward the gate. One guard stood motionless, a red Doberman sitting at alert at his side, waiting for the command to strike. Another guard approached the Bronco confidently but slowly, his Bushwhacker EX-15 angled across his chest at a downward slope with the neck strap.

  The burly guard stopped a few feet away from Arthur’s open window, right hand wrapped around the grip of his rifle, his index finger positioned at the ready just above the trigger. Arthur noticed the safety was off. “Looks like you’re lost, Indian. You lost?” Looking back at the other guard, he remarked, “I think he’s lost.”

  Arthur looked at the stubbled face below the dark sunglasses and desert camo floppy hat and said calmly, “I’m here to see Elias Dayton.” While making sure to keep an eye on the other guard through the dusty windshield, Arthur noticed one of the security cameras panning in his direction. The camera stopped to allow the viewer to watch the scene unfold. “I have some questions for him.”

  The guard huffed and smiled. “What makes you think he wants to talk to you, Indian?” He glanced back at the other guard who was grinning and then back at Arthur. “Fucking wagon burner.”

  Arthur inhaled deeply and let it out slowly before saying, “I bet you played Cowboys and Indians when you were a kid. And I bet you were always the cowboy.” He watched as the smile disappeared from the guard’s face. “Well, I played that game too. And you know what? I always ended up kicking the cowboy’s ass.”

  The guard pursed his lips at the same time his left hand gripped the EX’s handguard, but he stopped short of moving his finger through the trigger guard. Arthur watched the stubbled guard’s head tilt as someone spoke to him through the earpiece that pigtailed out of his left ear. He saw a hand move to the push-to-talk button on his fatigues. “Yes, sir,” the guard said. “Of course, sir,” the guard said. The guard then turned to the second man stationed by the fence. “Let him through!”

  The second guard reached inside the guard hut and the chain-link gate slowly slid open.

  “Go straight ahead until to you come to a V,” the burly guard instructed. “Take the left fork. You’ll see a tan cinder-block building on your right. That’s where you’ll be met.” He smirked. “Have a good day … Indian.”

  Arthur had grown up knowing people with hatred in their hearts. Some were Bilagáana and some were Native, and some were members of other types of people who inhabited the planet, but all held within them a prejudice that had festered throughout their lives. Anger and hatred run deep, he reasoned, even today with those too young to understand where it comes from or why it is proliferated by shallow minds. The anger seems to vary by age and education, but one can choose to either let the anger build up within them until it becomes all that they are, absorbing their soul so that all they can see is the hatred committed against them or their race by others, or one can choose to let it exist in history and not become the reason for their own present discontent.

  As he drove slowly through the gate and into the compound, he could feel every eye watching him. Never mind them, he told himself, his people and the other nations of the land now called the United States were older than America itself. They had always had people looking at them. Never mind that the Europeans had claimed all the land as their own through a series of violent eradications and broken treaties. Never mind that the great push westward for the settlers was nothing more than their way to create a so-called civilized world—a colonized world. A false world.

  When Arthur pulled up and parked at the tan building, he was met by two more guards dressed the same as the two at the gate, the same as everyone else he had seen in the compound. Turning off the engine, he climbed out and shut the door and was greeted immediately by a guard who spun him around and began patting him down. The other guard stood watch, assault rifle at the ready. Arthur could see the sweat running down their faces and the staining in their armpits and on their chests and backs. He smirked to himself, remembering the ungodly heat of the Registan Desert of Afghanistan. The Bilagáana couldn’t stand it there either.

  The pat down completed, the two men guided him into the building and down a long, empty corridor, one in front and one behind. It had been years since Arthur had sat across from Elias Dayton, and he wondered if he was still the cocky little prick he remembered him to be. Short on brains and long on arrogance. When the men stopped at a gray metal door, the guard who had done the patting down knocked three times hard with a fist.

  “Enter!” the recognizable voice barked.

  Tweedledee opened the door while Tweedledum pushed him inside then looked to the man behind the desk for further instructions.

  The man was Elias Dayton himself, and he simply motioned in the guards’ direction with his chin. “Leave us.”

  Arthur heard the door close behind him. The figure sitting behind the large desk had put on some weight in the years since they had last met, and his face h
ad now taken on a more mature look. His hair appeared to be a little thinner but not much, Arthur figuring it was probably the haircut. The formerly longish, unkempt hair of Elias Dayton had now become the finely coiffed look of a businessman. But there was something else Arthur noticed: this time Elias Dayton’s eyes held a more knowledgeable and measured gaze.

  “Come and sit down, Mr. Nakai,” Dayton said, waving a hand toward two tufted leather chairs in front of his desk. “Would you like something to drink? A whiskey perhaps?”

  Arthur walked toward the chairs positioned in front of the massive desk at forty-five-degree angles. The room itself was decorated a little too much on the dark side for his taste, but it had all the trappings of acquired power. An American flag stood draped on a pole to the left of the desk and a Desert Patriots flag with an eagle clutching two snakes dangled from a pole to the right. Arthur refused the offer of a drink with a shake of his head and sat.

  Dayton tossed his pen onto some papers in front of him and looked at the man sitting before him. “It’s been, what, eight, ten years since you sent us packing at the border?”

  “Ten,” Arthur said.

  Dayton nodded, clasped his hands in front of him, elbows on the desktop. “You and your lot didn’t want any real help did you? You didn’t want to handle the problem, you just wanted to pacify it.”

  Arthur balanced the side of his right boot on his left knee and used his left hand to keep it from moving. “You were welcomed down there along with the rest of the civilian observers as long as you played by the rules that were set down.” Arthur cocked his head. “You didn’t. What part of observe and report did you have trouble with?”

  Elias Dayton chuckled. “You guys were simply a Band-Aid on a gushing wound. A wound that keeps pumping illegals into this country like holes in a garden soaker. Hell, man, Mexicans are renting their own children for border crossings for as much as eighty bucks a head! We’ve got CBP agents scouring train yards looking at the bellies of trains for UDAs hiding underneath them. And we’ve got over a hundred thousand pounds of marijuana and thousands of illegals moving through fucking drain pipes every year, or did you forget about that?”

  Arthur picked up on the soft ticking of a mantel clock somewhere in the room off to his left. He heard the click and then the whirring of its mechanism as its small hammers began striking the chimes in Westminster fashion.

  “I didn’t come here to discuss immigration problems with you,” Arthur said. “I came here to ask you if you or your men had anything to do with two boys who were shot and killed out by Flat Iron Rock yesterday.”

  No reaction. The clock’s chimes faded.

  “I heard about that,” Dayton said finally. “Very unfortunate. I was saddened to read about it in this morning’s paper. But why should you think we would have had anything to do with that?”

  “Because of the way they were killed,” Arthur told him. “It took skill. It took someone with a steady hand and a sniper rifle. Something I’m sure most of your people here have had a lot of range-time practice with.”

  “I see.” Dayton sat back and drummed his fingertips on the desktop. “And why would I have done this? I see no advantage in killing two Indian boys.”

  “You tell me,” Arthur said. “Maybe you want to keep the fire burning in the bellies of the people who see us as less than human, as pests that still need to be exterminated. Maybe you want to push your agenda to gain more recruits. Or maybe there’s a connection between you providing security to NMX for its wells and drilling rigs and their need to acquire more land.”

  Dayton scoffed audibly, stopped drumming his fingers. “There have always been people in this country hating other people for no other reason than that they have been told that those people are the root of all their problems. And people are always joining my company, but not because of hate. And, yes, we do provide security for NMX because of all the Water Keepers running around protesting and keeping their workers—honest men and women with families—from making a living.” He paused, a disgusted look on his face. “Do you know how much time and money would be lost if we allowed those Water Keepers to fuck things up by protesting here for almost a year like they did in Standing Rock over the DAPL?” He smirked. “ ‘Defend the Sacred,’ my ass. All they did was cause trouble and delay the inevitable and leave a fucking mess behind.”

  “But they were right,” Arthur said. “Water is life. The Dakota Access Pipelines were, and are, threatening the water table up there just like they are here and everywhere else they get buried. Already there have been some underground gas lines across the country that have ruptured. All you have to do is google it to find out. What people like you don’t understand is that what little water we have out here is precious to us. Your friends come in here with empty promises of prosperity for those who lease their land so that they can shove a hundred more needles in the ground over the next five years and continue to poison the aquifer with their chemical fracking. People like you will never understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “That once you carry your own water, you learn the value of every drop.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those water assholes now?” Dayton shook his head. “It’s not my job to worry about any of that shit. What is my job is protecting those workers and those drilling rigs and those wells.”

  “I get it,” Arthur said. “And when all is said and done, and the land is poisoned and we’re left with nothing but worthless ground, they’ll simply take their profits and leave us with soil that is no good to anyone because they had no intension of cleaning up their mess correctly in the first place.”

  “Well, it’s your fucking people that have been snapping at the chance to earn some cash,” Dayton countered. “Now they finally have some money in their pockets and can improve their third-world lives.”

  “Not all of them,” Arthur stressed. “Only the ones who went through the allotment process managed by the federal government and own their land can lease it. The rest of the land is owned by the BLM and other groups. And the rest of my people that don’t get lease payments just get to sit back and watch the dust rise into the air and hear the groan of big rigs hauling away the benefits of raping our land.” Arthur crossed his arms. “There are over twenty-four hundred oil and gas wells sucking all they can get from underground from Bloomfield down to Cuba, while the rest of the country doesn’t even understand what the hell is going on out here.”

  “The rest of the country,” Dayton said arrogantly, “doesn’t really care what the hell’s going on out here. They only care about what the media tells them to care about. And right now, that happens to be something entirely different. What I care about is keeping your people away from those wells and drilling platforms in the corridor so that my employer’s people can do what they’re being paid to do.”

  “I didn’t realize beating the hell out of Natives was part of their job description.”

  Dayton smirked. “I’ll admit there have been some … altercations involving some of the workers from the man-camps, but that’s because your people have been causing trouble for the workers by protesting the worksites, blocking roadways, that kind of shit.”

  Arthur decided to push a button and see what type of reaction he would get. “I heard one attack took place at gas station, far from a rig or any camp. I heard a man was beaten severely. I also heard that no one has seen him since.”

  Dayton shrugged. “Well, I haven’t heard of any such incident.” Then he grinned and added, “And they probably haven’t been seen because they went out and tied one on and are still fucking drunk, or they’re off somewhere with some broad they shacked up with. They’ll show up when whoever it is kicks them out of the hogan.”

  Arthur felt the muscles of his jaw bunch, but before he could respond, Dayton’s cell phone rang on his desk. “Excuse me,” he said as he fisted it with his right hand and held it to h
is ear. “What?”

  A muffled voice on the other end muttered something Arthur couldn’t understand. Dayton’s face remained a blanket of controlled indifference. “Well, make sure it’s mounted securely and ready to go. We don’t need these people making any more trouble and hurting production.” He ended the call, tossed the phone onto the desk, and looked at Arthur. “I think we’re done here, Nakai.” He stood. “I can assure you that none of my people beat anyone up or killed anyone, and NMX knows everything that’s going on with its workers and its installations. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  Arthur stood. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  Dayton’s eyes followed him as he walked across the quiet carpeting of the office. Once the office door closed behind Arthur, Dayton reached for his cell phone again and tapped a contact as he worked through the maze of possibilities now running through his calculating mind. He continued to stare at the closed office door as the call rang through.

  The voice that spilled into Dayton’s ear was calm and precisely metered. “Yes?”

  “I have a special job for you,” Dayton said. “We have a problem.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So what time do you expect to be home?” Sharon asked.

  The Bronco was bouncing and swaying its way down the graded dirt road from the Desert Patriots compound toward Highway 550. “Probably late,” Arthur said. “Did your contact at the school give you Jason Aquino’s address?”

  “Yes, I have it. What’s it worth to ya?” Sharon was talking over the usual newsroom clamor around her that Arthur had come to expect over the years. It never seemed to decrease, only intensify as the world became a more divided and political and ever so complicated place to live.