“What is?” Arthur said.
“Remember what the Corps chaplain always used to tell us when we were at the FOB between missions? He said that death waits in the dark for all of us.” The two men watched as Bash’s arms rose and leveled each of the weapons at their chests. “I guess he was right. Till Valhalla, gentlemen.”
Suddenly, Bash’s attention shifted to John Sykes as Sykes’ big hand swung forward rapidly from behind his back. Arthur noticed something flash above the glow of the campfire and sail through the air in a horizontal path. Bash quickly read the movement and dodged the bowie knife Sykes had intended to lodge into the upper-left quadrant of his torso. Reflexively, Bash’s left hand twitched, and his finger made the Glock fire once. Sykes spun around instantly and fell to the ground.
Arthur made his move without giving it a conscious thought. Quickly he reached around his back and pulled the Colt Mustang .380 from the back of his waistband. He’d already chambered a round before tucking it away, and it only took a split second for him to thumb back the hammer and release the side safety before leveling it at James Basher’s chest. Instantly, Arthur heard the crack of the report and felt the lightweight pistol bucking consecutively in his hands. The muzzle flashed each of the four times in response to his finger pulling the trigger, leaving behind the smell of propellant floating in the night air.
Bash spun on impact from the four rounds hitting their target but managed to maintain his balance as he raised the 9 mm a second time. Arthur fired three more rounds, the slide kicking violently each time, forcing the weapon to buck hard again and again and again, before locking in the slide in the open position. Empty. The responding shot squeezed off by James Basher rocketed into the night sky as Arthur watched him stumble backward and topple onto the rocks behind him on the canyon floor.
Arthur thumbed the slide release of the .380 and heard it snap home. Shoving it into the waistband behind his back, he rushed to Basher, rescuing his Glocks from the dirt and rocks and holstering them both before grabbing Bash’s 9 mm and tossing it out of reach. Bash’s eyes were open wide but seeing nothing. They had been staring at the stars in the sky before he had succumbed to his own darkness, and it had taken hold of him. His nightmares had been finally put to rest along with his soul. In Arthur’s world, the Navajo world, James Basher’s spirit had already left his body with his last breath and was probably floating around them now, watching them, listening to them, cursing them. Arthur felt a chill move through him, and he shivered rigidly. It was a chill far colder than the air of a desert night and it made him uneasy. Arthur used the fingers of his right hand to close Basher’s eyes before checking on Sykes.
“How badly are you hit?” Arthur said. “Can you get up?”
“Bastard got me in the left shoulder,” Sykes complained. “Same place I took that shrapnel from that IED.” One of his big hands was gripping his shoulder and doing its best to suppress the flow of blood. “Fucker!”
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Arthur chided, smiling. “But it worked.”
“I figured you had a play of some kind in mind, sir.” Arthur helped Sykes to his feet. “Surprised the hell outta me you had a third weapon.”
“Adapt and overcome, brother,” Arthur said.
Sykes just smiled. “Oo-rah!”
“Let’s get you to a hospital.”
As the two men stumbled past the campfire, they paused briefly in order for Arthur to kick enough dirt on it to extinguish it. They had moved about twenty more paces when Sykes stopped him, stepped over a few feet, and squatted down. Arthur saw him pick up his knife, stand, and return it to the leather sheath that hung horizontally behind his back from his belt and snapped the band on it.
“I never saw that,” Arthur said.
Sykes grinned. “You never asked me to turn around.”
Arthur pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket, tapped it to life, and dialed a number.
“Jake,” he said in a hurried fashion. “I’ve got Sykes. I’m taking him to the hospital. He’s been shot.”
“You shoot him?”
“It’s a long story,” Arthur said. “And, boy, were we both wrong.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two hours after admitting John Sykes into San Juan Regional Medical Center, Arthur’s phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. “Where are you?” Bilagody asked.
“I’m on my way to Margaret’s,” Arthur said as he headed west past the illuminated facade of the Northern Edge Casino. The moon hung high and bright in the night sky, its radiant glow adding to the glare of the banana on wheels’ headlights. “I wanted to tell her it was over. I wanted her to know that her boys could rest in peace.”
“Uh-huh,” Jake acknowledged. “By the way, your boy Sykes is going to make it through surgery. The initial exploratory showed the bullet tore up some tissue and muscle before lodging in the bone. Good news is the slug missed any major nerves or arteries. He’ll be on antibiotics and have to do some rehab, but he shouldn’t lose any movement of the shoulder.”
The digital clock on the banana’s dash said it was 11:58 p.m. “Damn,” he said out loud, “I need to call Sharon. She’ll be wondering what the hell’s going on.”
“I can remember those days,” Jake remarked, a melancholy twinge to his voice. “Many years ago.”
“Speaking of that,” Arthur prodded, “I’ve been meaning to ask how you’re doing?”
Jake took a deep breath and exhaled. “Good, I guess. I’m good. It’s just sometimes I get thinking about things I shouldn’t be thinking about. Drags me down.”
“Have you spoken with Nizhoni?”
“No,” Jake said. “And she hasn’t bothered to contact me either. What would be the sense of it anyway? It’s over. It’s done.” He exhaled again, this time deeply, with all the weight of the emptiness he felt when he allowed himself to think of her crushing him. “If nothing changes, I’m just gonna be an old man with no one around to give a damn.”
Arthur smiled. “You’ve got me.”
“As gratifying as that sounds, it’s not quite the same, my friend.”
Arthur paused, unsure of how to continue, then brought the conversation back to the present. “You uncover anything more about this mess yet?”
“Mr. Sonori,” Jake explained, “the NMX executive at the chapter house meeting, was very forthcoming with me. It seems he had been contacted by one of his company’s drilling foremen who told him that the superintendent had been funneling money from the company accounts into the coffers of Patriot security, seemingly for security work that was later discovered to be falsified.”
“He was the target that night, you know,” Arthur said. “Basher said Dayton just got in the way.”
“That’s what Mr. Sonori thought,” Jake said. “His guess was that the superintendent told Dayton he’d been discovered, and that’s why Sonori figured it was just a matter of time before the whole thing escalated, and he’d move to the top of the list. Apparently, this whole thing started when Dayton got wind of the murder of Joseph Benally—that’s the man who was beaten up and tossed in Antelope canyon. He threatened to expose the workers, which, in turn, led the foreman to contact the superintendent who was more than willing to do whatever it took to shove it under the rug to cover his ass with the company. No press is good press, so to speak.”
“So Dayton was blackmailing him, and he was paying?”
“Every month. Only thing is,” Jake added, “they didn’t figure on the foreman’s conscience getting the better of him. He cracked under the pressure and went through a back channel to get hold of Sonori.”
Arthur saw the sign for Upper Fruitland come and go and watched the moonlight play against the cliffs to his left.
“I’m going to need a statement from you,” Jake said, “about what happened and why back in that canyon. Agent Thorne is pushing me to haul your ass in. I told him I
didn’t know where you were.”
Arthur passed over the top of Upper Fruitland Tunnel and headed up the guardrail-lined incline. The lanes had been split into three now, and he stayed in the fast lane and moved with it with high beams reaching out in front of him. He rattled off what James Basher had told him in the canyon about Dayton making a play for Margaret’s forty acres. “Dayton was running a game either way,” Arthur said. “He was using blackmail to strip more money from NMX, while using the murder to rob Margaret of her boys so she would have nothing left to lose if she sold the land to him. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ll tell you more after I see Margret.” He ended the call and shoved the phone back into his shirt pocket.
Just after cresting the hill, Arthur noticed the small power station off to his right and the white sign announcing the direction of Ojo Amarillo Elementary School. He slowed and turned left onto N3035. Soon the short white walls of the Navajo housing development rose in elevated increments to the entrance. He tapped the brakes and swung the Toyota through the entrance.
It was heartbreaking, Arthur reflected as he drove through the sparsely lit streets, that his people were living in such conditions. The Navajo Housing Authority was created to build affordable housing for its people, but all they had proved to be able to do was waste the funds they have been given. He remembered Sharon doing a report on how over the last ten years the NHA had received over eight hundred million dollars of federal funding and had only constructed eleven hundred homes, all while his people continued to live in previously built homes in need of renovating and full of overcrowded conditions, while still others had to find shelter in storage units throughout the reservation.
It was true, he acknowledged, that the level of financial incompetency, mismanagement, and fraud, coupled with the many construction delays that were rampant throughout the reservation’s twenty-seven thousand square miles, had brought the NHA’s fifty-five-year history to a tipping point. He shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair as he passed the abandoned and disheveled homes mixed among the occupied and neat homes. Maybe Margaret should sell her land, he thought, take the money and just get out. Or at the very least, agree to lease the land and reap some kind of benefit from doing so. He would have to talk to her about that. If she was awake and sober. If she was awake and drunk, he would still tell her that her sons’ murders had been solved. But Arthur sensed, even with that news, there was no absolution in this for him. He had failed the boys. He had failed their father. And, even worse, he had failed Margaret.
As Arthur turned the corner, he saw Margaret’s Dodge Diplomat parked on the concrete driveway underneath the carport. He noticed lights were on in the house and was at least glad that Jake had been as kind as he had been to her. He pulled the Toyota onto the concrete pad behind her car, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment, his mind drifting back to those teenage days when everything in life had seemed possible when they were both so young with the whole world ahead of them. He gathered in a deep breath and let it out, then got out and walked up to her front door. Knocking three times, he waited.
Nothing.
He knocked again.
More nothing.
His finger pushed the lighted doorbell, but there was no sound that followed the motion. He formed a fist and pounded three more times on the door. “Margaret!”
Still nothing but resounding quiet.
He looked to the left and right and back to the left again. His heart jumped in his chest and seemed to tighten, his legs moved quickly to the front windows, but the curtains were drawn, and his view of the inside was obstructed. Running between the vehicles, he trotted around to the rear of the house and looked through the kitchen window between the partially drawn curtains. His view was obstructed by the table they had sat at together only a few days ago, but he could make out her still figure on the floor, the chair she had been sitting on hastily pushed askew as if she had fallen. There was an almost-empty bottle of Honey Jack sitting on the table with a tipped-over glass lying next to it.
“Margaret!” he yelled again desperately, then ran back to the front door as quickly as his aching legs could take him. Without thinking, he tried ramming the door with his shoulder by putting all the weight and strength he could muster behind it. Pain coursed through his arm and right side and his left hand massaged his shoulder. Regrouping his thoughts, he kicked the door by the lock, his pulsating thigh muscles coiling like a kickboxer’s ratcheting up for the final knockout blow. To his amazement, the door held. He conjured up even more strength and kicked again. The door pushed in slightly as the jamb began to split. He summoned up a strength he hadn’t employed since he kicked in doors in Iraq and slammed his foot hard into the door, forcing it to break free and swing open violently, burying the doorknob in the drywall behind it.
“Margaret!” Arthur called out again, hurtling himself through the living room, then the hallway, past the bedrooms, and into the small kitchen. Dropping to his knees beside her, his fingers searched intently for a pulse, but located only a faint murmur of life through the soft skin of her throat. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he dialed 911. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of what the table and her body had hidden. An amber plastic bottle lay on the floor, its white cap close by. Arthur rolled the bottle into view. The label read, Lorazepam 2 mg, Qty 30. Filled only yesterday. And all thirty were missing.
The operator answered, “911, what is your emergency?”
Arthur rattled off the address and what he had found.
“I need someone here now!” he added before tossing his phone onto the kitchen table. The disembodied voice of the operator continued to squawk from the table as Arthur’s fingers searched again for the fading pulse. As he sat in the loud silence of the kitchen, he felt her life slowly slip away with each faint throb of her jugular … until the diminishing rhythm of her body’s dance faded completely.
Arthur sat on the floor, his legs twisted beneath him and his body shivering with every ounce of life in him that was urging him not to cry, for crying and other demonstrations of grief were not to be shown so that the spirit of the deceased could travel to the next world without interruption. But he couldn’t stop his lower lip from trembling and his face from contorting and growing wet with a flow of tears that ran down in anguish as his heart painfully beat in his chest with a sorrow that he fought back with every inch of his being. He reached out a hand carefully and gently brushed away some strands of hair that had fallen over her face—that sweet face, that affectionate face that had been floating through his memory ever since that day at Flat Iron Rock. Sharon had seen it. She had known it. But she never questioned it because a woman’s intuition always knew the difference between a fond memory and something more.
And then there were her eyes. Eyes that now appeared lifeless and yet seemed to have that wonder, that revelation of the what next that only the dying have the privilege of understanding. Arthur moved his legs from underneath himself and stretched them out before him. He laid her head gently upon his lap and closed her eyes like they do in films. His will had become the dam that had finally held his emotions in check. All for her. So that she might have a safe and meaningful journey. This death was so very different than that of James Basher that he had only just witnessed and taken part in. Arthur wondered if Margaret’s spirit was lingering, holding on for just one more minute with him, one more delicate second that would give them both solace.
After all, death was not the end of life but the beginning of the afterlife. It was a sacred part of the traditional Navajo belief system that birth and life and death are all part of an ongoing cycle. A cycle that is not to be feared but to be accepted as the progression of all things. The body was a blessed vessel. And Arthur gave no thought to fearing her death. He did not fear that her spirit would return to the land of the living and manifest itself in ways spoken of by the old ones. He did not fear any Chindi. For there was no e
vil in this woman. She would never hurt him. He had known that from the very day they had lain together in the tall grasses by the wash. He knew then that only good was to come from this woman. And all these years later only good had come from her. He was sure of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Arthur and Sharon sat together on the couch in Janet Peterson’s office in Santa Fe. It was the first week of September and the blistering days of August were over for another year. The low hundreds had been replaced by the mideighties and would soon be plummeting to the midforties by December. They were holding hands and smiling perfunctorily as Dr. Peterson brought Arthur up to speed on Sharon’s first session. There were two glasses of water on the coffee table in front of them on sandstone coasters, Kokopelli dancing on Sharon’s and the Zia symbol decorating Arthur’s. The short, fanned-out pile of Psychology Today magazines puzzled him. They looked askew. They looked as though someone had removed one and left a gap by not putting it back where it belonged.
It had been a few weeks since he had found Margaret on the floor of her kitchen. The thought of it was still fresh in his mind. Just one more ghost he would have to reconcile into a tiny box in his brain that would make it harder to haunt him in the days and weeks and years to come. But that was why he was here today, to find a way to open up all those hundreds of boxes he kept neatly stacked and organized and labeled and dated in his brain and let the ghosts he thought he had sealed up inside them out again to run free throughout the maze of his memory.
“I’m so glad you decided to join us today, Mr. Nakai,” Janet Peterson said. Her pantsuit was a shade of gray Arthur had not seen before and didn’t care to witness again. “I think it’s always best when couples that have gone through traumas such as yours, that you both can let go of any preconceived notions and speak freely and openly about whatever it is you’re feeling and what is affecting you both individually and collectively.” Janet Peterson gave them a conciliatory smile. “Shall we begin?”
Death Waits in the Dark Page 18
