Death Waits in the Dark

by Mark Edward Langley

  As the man from NMX ended his opening speech, Jake moved toward Dayton, stopping periodically to recognize a concerned chapter member and speak to them understandingly about whatever currently concerned them. The council speaker opened up the listening session to residents and recognized a middle-aged woman in a loose-fitting blue dress standing up in the middle of the crowd. Jake watched her make her way to the front of the hall and pick up the microphone from one of the folding tables. After making sure it was on, she began by introducing herself in Navajo, then spoke her mind.

  “My house sits on the main road, the only way in or out of the drilling sites in my area,” she began. “It used to be a quiet and peaceful place, now it’s just filled with noise. Noise that wasn’t there before.” She adjusted the glasses on her chubby face and went on. “These trucks of yours, they create so much dust and contribute to the noise. I sat in front of my house one afternoon and counted at least eleven of them roaring up and down the road in less than thirty minutes. Not to mention some of my neighbors have your black snakes—your pipelines—running across their driveways and along the roads near them.”

  The crowd showed their agreement with a collective disgruntled murmur.

  “Some of those roads were here long before you got here. They’re school bus routes, and there are children waiting for the buses at the sides of these roads. Your drivers need to show respect for our children and drive more carefully.” She paused to adjust her glasses again. “Your people, it’s true, have paid us for the use of our land, but what have we suffered? We live with the drilling and the pumping and your compressors making noise all the time. They are always humming. They never stop!”

  Another collective groan echoed throughout the hall as Jake continued to slowly advance through the standing crowd in the direction of Elias Dayton.

  “Maybe you should come out and live with us to see how your equipment is affecting our lives.” She looked at the man from NMX, but he didn’t respond. All he did was stare at her. “I’m finished now. Someone else can speak.”

  She laid the microphone down and returned to her seat. Just as quickly a man stood up and took her place. Jake noticed that Dayton had become aware of him moving closer and took note of it as he watched the new disgruntled citizen. It felt good seeing someone else get the brunt of complaints for a change, Jake thought to himself, since it was usually him who was always on the receiving end. He continued to move casually in Dayton’s direction. Jake saw him momentarily list to the right and whisper something into one henchman’s ear. He smiled as he saw the henchman glare at him.

  The middle-aged man stood before the assembled crowd in a brown shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, and seemed to hold the microphone with purpose. “Some of us here are not allotees,” he said. “You have to remember that. And we live with the noise and the dust and the trouble your men cause too. What is in it for those of us who don’t receive any money? The drilling on BLM land and state lands we cannot control, but what happens to the money given for the wells on Indian lands? What do we see of it? Nothing!”

  The crowd became more enthused. The NMX man raised his hand and spoke confidently into the perched microphone sitting on the table in front of him like a metal bird. “So far NMX has paid out over thirty-six million dollars in royalties for our wells in the San Juan Basin on federal, state, and Indian lands.” He turned his attention to the council members who were hanging on his every word. “Twenty-two million in severance and taxes, and almost eleven million to private landowners.” He turned his attention back to the man speaking. “I don’t know how the tribe disperses its money; that’s something you all need to take up with them.” He tugged absently at his tie. “And our employees on these sites have a strict code of conduct to adhere to; rest assured that we will terminate anyone who does not follow company policy. And as far as the noise—this is not an eight-to-five job. It doesn’t stop just because the clock dictates or the sun goes down.”

  Suddenly, a large man in the second row wearing a loose red shirt wrapped by a silver concha belt stood up and shouted, “You people have crude oil storage tanks clustered together all over our land! What if there’s another explosion like there was a few years ago? You guys were fracking and six wells went up! There was a huge fireball in the night sky—I could see it from my backyard!”

  The crowd was becoming even more galvanized, and the environmental activists began chanting like rhythmic druids with rhyming phrases of resistance.

  “That shit burned for over three days! Oh, sure, you blamed it on some equipment malfunction, but what was the real reason? I think we all have a right to know!”

  Jake slid up next to Elias Dayton with his arms crossed and leaned his head in close to Dayton’s right shoulder. “Looks like your boss is gonna be up shit’s creek tonight.”

  Dayton didn’t respond. He just kept scanning the crowd. Jake’s eyes did the same.

  “You expecting trouble?” Jake asked.

  Dayton snorted a laugh. “Not with these people. And not with you here.” His eyes shifted to Bilagody. “But you can’t be too careful these days. Someone may have a few eggs in their pockets, just waiting for their moment to heave them.”

  The Navajo council speaker called the man to order. He sat down unimpressed and unsatisfied.

  “Sure, people who lease their land have benefited from it,” the next man who took up the microphone stated. He was an elder wearing a flat, wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a silver hat band, a rhubarb-colored shirt covered in a small mass of turquoise necklaces and anchored by a matching concha belt above his worn jeans and boots. “Someone I know used that money to help put their daughter through school. And there were others that were able to send their sons to college. But all of that—all of that—does not outweigh the safety risks we suffer as a community. I think the Nation should address these public health issues for us. That’s why we voted them in. They are supposed to be looking out for us. Fracking is not good for the land, no matter what you people tell us. The chemicals you use are poisoning the earth and water table during your time here, and long after you have taken all you can from us and seal these wells up with your poison trapped inside, it will still be here poisoning us!”

  “Look, you all are welcome to take a tour of our fracking sites whenever you wish,” the NMX man said. “I’ll even allow you to take water samples, if you like—”

  “And what good will that do?” another woman who needed no microphone stood and shouted. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t understand the effects their needles would have on our families and our land.” Her voice rose an octave when she spoke, and everyone could hear her clearly when she said, “Yes, I get money from these oil people. Hell, my grandma does too! And it feels good to have it! But we were never warned that the drilling was going to cause health problems and damage our water!”

  The entire crowd was on its collective feet now. The activists began waving their signs and chanting their resistance more forcefully. The Navajo council speaker hammered his gavel and ordered them to be quiet. They reluctantly did.

  “You people have drilled more than a hundred wells,” the woman went on, “in the last three years, and during that time a number of our children have been diagnosed with cancer! What do you say to that?”

  Just then, the large man from the second row rose up again and charged the tables. Elias Dayton sprang into action. He moved quickly from the wall, ran what looked to Jake to be about twenty feet of distance between them, and lunged for the man with both arms outstretched. Jake followed quickly behind. The two mountains of muscle Dayton had brought followed Jake.

  The shot came quickly and silently due to the throng of chaos and the escalating noise filling the hall. Jake saw the blood explode from Elias Dayton’s back and watched as all of his forward momentum was instantly misdirected from the impact of the round as his body fell into the charging man’s legs, brin
ging him to the floor hard along with the weight of Dayton’s lifeless body.

  Jake looked up briefly to see that the folding tables had emptied and Dayton’s hired muscle was quickly leading the NMX man to a safe place. The rest of the council had already escaped behind the imagined safety of the faux-stone dais. Jake’s eyes instinctively moved to where all the people had been standing near the exits. He could see that most of them who could had decided to immediately hit the floor, while others had exited the building and could be seen running off into the failing light of day as the doors slowly closed behind them.

  As Jake reached Dayton, he touched his fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse. Finding none, he radioed in while he glanced at each of the windows at the back of the hall. When dispatch answered, he barked his commands as his eyes settled on a window with a spiderwebbed pane of glass in the lower center.

  A .338, was Jake’s first thought. It had to be. John Sykes had just taken Dayton out with a single shot from somewhere outside the chapter house from God knows where. That detail alone was enough to keep his brain busy telling him to stay put inside the hall until the other units arrived and provided backup. But the question now twisting through his mind as he watched the floor turn a deep shade of red was why? What could have soured between the two men that made Sykes take such drastic action? One didn’t normally kill the golden goose.

  Jake sat on the floor watching Elias Dayton bleed out across the vinyl tile. It always amazed him how much blood the human body could hold. A mere one and a half gallons, but when you watched it progressively spread out on a hard surface it always seemed like much, much more.

  It was far beyond Dayton’s caring now, Jake realized, that they had traced the tracking device attached to Arthur’s Bronco to the vendor, to the retail supplier, right to Dayton’s front door. The next thing he would have to do is have a talk with Mr. NMX and see if he or anyone connected with the company knew about Dayton’s actions or if anyone had sanctioned them. However, he also knew he was sure to hit a stone wall with that. NMX would clam up tight and politely refer any and all questions to their firm of highly paid lawyers.

  And then there was the fact about Margaret’s land. Was it actually in play, or had he and Arthur been wrong about its significance? When he had shared his information with the feds, they had agreed because what else could have been the motive to have the two boys killed? Somehow, Margaret’s land had become the prize people were dying for—her two sons, and now Dayton, were proof of that.

  It was a good thing Jake had done some digging after he made sure Margaret had a comfortable place to sleep it off. He had let his fingers do the walking though screens of computer files and discovered that due to illness, war, violence, and acts of fate, Margaret was now the only leaf left clinging to her proverbial family tree. And if NMX, or Dayton for that matter, had known that little fact they could have tried to pressure her into leasing. And if that didn’t work, scare her into selling. Jake pondered that thought for a moment, then got to his feet and stepped away from the expanding pool of blood. It didn’t matter what Margaret knew now. All that mattered was locating Sykes before he killed anyone else.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Dayton’s dead.” Jake’s voice boomed through the JBL speakers of the banana on wheels.

  “What!” Arthur exclaimed. “When?”

  “About an hour ago. He took a bullet in the back at the Angel Peak chapter house meeting.”

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “Looks like your boy Sykes is taking care of loose ends.”

  “C’mon, Jake, if John was working for Dayton, why would he kill him?”

  “Maybe whatever deal they had turned to shit. Wouldn’t be the first time that kind of thing happened. Maybe Dayton pushed him too far by telling him to kill you.”

  “And when Dayton found out that John didn’t kill me, he did something stupid to push him over the edge.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Arthur exhaled. “John had an ex-wife and a son—maybe Dayton threatened them.”

  “Then it was a pretty costly move.” Arthur heard someone ask Jake something in the background and heard the big man quickly give his approval. “You find anything at the trailer? The feds should be there by now with my liaison officer.”

  “I found some numbers stashed in a book,” Arthur said. “Long story short, I dropped Sharon at home, grabbed my hunting GPS, and right now I’m heading out to see where they take me. The numbers turned out to be coordinates.”

  “Be very careful,” Jake said. “I’d offer go with you, but I’m going to be tied up here for a while.” The line went still for a moment. “You know, if the feds find him before you do, he’ll force whatever kind of outcome he wants.”

  The tightness Arthur felt in his chest was like someone squeezing his heart with an iron fist. The thought of Sykes forcing the issue with a suicide-by-cop scenario, or worse—execution by commanding officer—was something he knew he had to stop from happening.

  “I knew something was up with him at the wake,” Arthur confided. “I felt it in my gut. And you know what? No matter who finds him first, the outcome will always be up to him.”

  Jake paused. “I’ve got Margaret back at the station. One of my officers picked her up on a DUI.”

  “Jesus …”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake reassured him. “I took care of her. She’s resting and sleeping it off. She doesn’t need anything more on top of what she’s already been through.” Jake responded to another question from the background noise again. “I had her car towed to the station and was going to have a talk with her in the morning when she sobered up, but I guess there’ll be no need for that since my suspect is layin’ here dead.”

  “Thanks, Jake.”

  “Don’t mention it. I just couldn’t see causing her any more pain.” The line went silent again for a few seconds. “How close are you to where you are going?”

  “Just left Aztec on Navajo Dam Road, heading southeast of Aztec Ditch. I’m probably about twenty miles out.”

  “That’s right in the middle of some gas wells,” the Navajo cop warned. “Nothing but dirt roads, cold nights, coyotes, and knocking compressors.”

  “Did you ever stop to think,” Arthur said, “that when the Europeans came over here all they tried to do was kill us off. And when they discovered they couldn’t do that, they imprisoned our leaders and stuck what was left of us on what was left of our land that they stole, so that a hundred years later they could come back and try to finish the job by poisoning our water with these wells?”

  “The politicians refer to those wells and pipelines as ‘critical infrastructure,’ ” Jake acknowledged. “Just be careful out there. If you go near some of those sites, it’s considered a felony. Not to mention what a stray bullet might do.”

  Arthur followed Navajo Dam Road to where it veered off to the east just north of Tiger Park and the baseball field across from Tiger Pond. “I’ll be fine. And when is safe drinking water going to be considered critical infrastructure? Why isn’t it a felony to poison the air or the land or the water?”

  “If you’re asking Jake Bilagody, duly sworn officer of the Navajo Division of Public Safety, that’s above my pay grade. If you’re asking Jake Bilagody, respected elder of the Bitter Water clan, until we have someone like us in government, those things will never be discussed, and legislation will never be written.”

  “The government would never let it happen,” Arthur said, continuing on the asphalt two-lane past the Kart Kanyon Speedway. The sun was now sharing the sky with the moon as it began its downward slide toward the horizon. Arthur had been counting the wells as he passed them in the high desert east of Aztec. He had noticed three already in the span of only a few miles, stationed just off the road and painted to match their surroundings so as not to be an eyesore. “At least there are a couple of Nat
ive women in Congress now. That’s a first. But thanks for the heads-up,” he said. “If you hear from me after this, well, it means I’m not dead.”

  He thumbed the big red button at the bottom of the screen and slid the phone back into the lined denim jacket that now hid his two Glock 19Cs, one cradled in the shoulder sling under his left arm and the other clipped to his right hip in the tactical holster. The bucket seat of the banana on wheels wasn’t so comfortable with the addition of the Compact Colt Mustang .380 tucked into the small of his back. Each Glock carried fifteen rounds, the Colt only seven. But that was a fact Arthur knew didn’t really matter in the long run. What counted was accuracy—always accuracy. As the banana’s headlights turned themselves on to navigate the road before him in the twilight, the thought occurred to him that this could all be a waste of time and would prove to be nothing more than a small box canyon John Sykes had visited somewhere in the past. But he was counting on it being something more. He had no way of knowing how old the scrap of paper he had found was, but nevertheless, it was something that he had to check out.

  As he topped the short rise by a telephone pole, the string of fat round bushes on his left did nothing to mitigate the roar of racing engines that reverberated from the clay oval track of the speedway. He glanced over at the lights and heard the announcer’s voice calling the race with an overzealous anxiety that echoed in the evening air. Farther past the track, in a sunken area surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and excavated earth, was another well, its olive drab piping and storage tank surrounded by a protective gravel retaining berm. He shook his head and wondered why it had taken him so long to notice these intrusions before. Had he grown jaded and indifferent as he crept closer toward middle age? Why had these things not mattered to him like they did to others? That was a question that he needed to answer. But now was not the time.

  He continued past the vacant Aztec Motocross track and headed toward the weathered butte ahead, noting that every graded exit he saw departing the roadway led to another well. The sweet smell of sage that filled the evening air helped his mind to run calmly and logically though the many scenarios that might play out once he located Sykes. Given John’s state of mind, if there was a way to get through to him, he would try to take it. But if there was no way of reasoning with him, he would be facing the inevitable choice he didn’t want to have to make. If John forced him, then he knew what he would have to do. But that was a thought he chose not to dwell on. John Sykes had been a member of his team. He was a brother, as close, or in some ways closer, than any brother of flesh and blood could have been. And if there was a chance to somehow reach through whatever cloud had fogged his mind and pull him back into reality, Arthur knew he had to try it. Because if he couldn’t, he would be attending yet another wake.