Worse Angels

by Laird Barron

  “These cosplay dudes see you coming and figure once was nice, why not do it twice?” Lionel said. “Their mistake was not running you over with the truck. And then backing up.”

  Bellow studied his phone with a deepening frown.

  “One piece of trivia, and I don’t know if it signifies anything: the Redlick Group attracts a disproportionate number of ex-intelligence personnel. CIA, NASA, FBI, DoD. The occasional disgruntled Treasury agent or disenfranchised police detective. A few of the candidates are homegrown, western New York stock. The rest aren’t.”

  “In-house security? Corporate espionage?” I said.

  “We don’t track them and they don’t advertise.”

  “As far as the case is concerned, I can only go on what I have. Which amounts to a disinterested police report, semi-hysterical family testimony including the hunches of the most corrupt ex-cop in New York, and the cryptic behavior of local fetishists and their creepy patron.” I paused to let my colleagues process. “Does your scuttlebutt pipeline lead you to suspect there’s something to Mama Pruitt’s claim her son’s death warrants an investigation?”

  “No,” Bellow said. “A minute ago, I’m chilling with a glass of above-average OJ, convinced the young brother ate a few too many ingredients, was overcome with melancholy, and took a permanent vacation. Occam’s razor says look at the available evidence and Occam is seldom wrong. The ME wasn’t stellar. Corporations fast-talk and appear sneaky by default. Sprinkle in Mama’s tears, and presto—instant conspiracy.” He tipped his cup and found it empty.

  “A faultless assessment,” I said.

  * * *

  ■■■

  We were out in the cold, deciding how to proceed. Bellow shifted from foot to foot in obvious discomfort.

  “Isaiah, that business in the Redlick house. The unusual things you experienced.” He struggled to find the right phrasing. “It’s dangerous. And the professional community doesn’t understand it fully.”

  I wanted to mention, but didn’t, how my nightmares were somewhat tangentially congruent with unfolding events, if not prophetic. The dream imagery of Sean Pruitt in a Mare uniform; Whiro’s mention of kaleidoscopes. This is how the subconscious does its job—it filters a million disparate details like a sourdough panning for gold. The inner mind occasionally speaks with the mystical authority of an oracle.

  “Easy, there. I don’t buy into hoodoo. Ventriloquism, sleight of hand, yes. Elaborate mind games, yes.”

  “Actually, that’s what I’m getting at,” he said. “Your disorientation and the illusory sounds . . . Someone, maybe your old man, affiliated with the clandestine elements would be more qualified. I’ve had a peek at classified files moldering in locked basement cells. Toe-curling.”

  Lionel, slumped against a mailbox, raised his hand.

  “Amigo, the CIA and the KGB didn’t spend hundreds of millions of Cold War dollars on research into mind control, remote viewing, psychokinesis, and the rest for shits and giggles.”

  “Borderline swamp-dweller hoodoo territory,” I said. “No offense, boys. Brainwashing requires a drawn-out process.”

  “A pro can mindfuck you in short order,” Lionel said.

  “Coleridge is right,” Bellow said. “Suggestion is a short-term possibility. Deep conditioning is labor and time intensive. Depends on a person’s nascent susceptibility, receptiveness, whether he’s suffered psychological trauma—”

  “Thanks, Agent Bellow,” I said. “If I start clucking like a chicken, I’ll seek assistance. Tell me again what you’re doing here?”

  “Figured I may as well tag along and hog the glory if there’s any to be had.”

  “Impulsive in your dotage.”

  “Burning vacation days. If I stay home, my kids and their kids will descend like harpies and I’ll never be rid of them. What’s the agenda today?”

  “I’m going to drop in on a fellow with keys to the kingdom.”

  “I have no idea why I’m here,” Lionel said.

  “Baby, I told you,” Bellow said. “You can drive the car.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We boarded the SUV. Always roll with a rental in unknown, possibly unfriendly territory, given the choice. Bellow had rented a sedan at JFK. He agreed the SUV was a superior vehicle for trolling the back roads. Lionel punched in Lenny Herzog’s address and studied the coordinates. The GPS calmly dictated the turns in a dry, professorial tone. He lit a cigarette and lowered the volume.

  “As if I’m gonna trust you, you smooth-talking sonofabitch.”

  Bellow sat in back. He met my eye in the rearview.

  “Want me to make a call? Possibly save you a day tramping in the boonies.”

  “Can’t save a man from doing what he loves.” Tempting as it was to avail myself of his not inconsiderable resources, he’d come to New York on his own time at his own discretion and not by Bureau mandate. Maintaining a low profile was the smart move. There were worse fates than “tramping in the boonies.”

  Hanging my shingle in the mid–Hudson Valley didn’t mean simply cruising the hot spots and alleys of Kingston, New Paltz, and Newburgh. Much as I relished nursing drinks in the finer bars, I spent plenty of days in the hills, dales, and byways of the Rondout Valley and environs running to ground deadbeats and low-rent criminals who hoped going off the grid would save their hides. Mosquitos and deer ticks were my mortal enemies. I composed odes to the joys of poison ivy and seasonal allergies. Now at least the bugs were asleep.

  The directions led west, then north. We skirted the edge of the Jeffers Project into thickly wooded hills. Our computer navigator uttered a series of increasingly conflicted directions, then fell silent. I’d confirmed our destination with an online satellite image, thus the lack of GPS or reliable cell-phone signal only mildly concerned me. In any event, the excursion was on Adeyemi’s tab and I got paid by the hour.

  “The AI knows she’s not wanted in Luddite Ville,” Lionel said.

  Bellow wasn’t having it.

  “Outsiders paint Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Everglades, and related cultural regions with a broad brush. ‘Hill country’ usually means ‘poor people live here.’ And even that is a suspect conclusion. You can’t nail down the culture to a single tradition or a single influence.” It was apparent from his delivery, he’d rehearsed the monologue.

  Lionel lit another cigarette.

  “Special Agent Bellow, you ever see a documentary called The Hills Have Eyes, or The Hills Have Eyes Two and Three?”

  “I’ve heard the saying, ‘Fields have eyes, woods have ears.’ Wise counsel.”

  Lionel abandoned the two-lane highway and hummed along narrow, lumpen back roads. The roads got sketchier and the forest deeper and darker by the second. Soon, there were few roads and fewer houses. We hooked right at a billboard that used to say something before its paint peeled and locals shot the letters off. This neighborhood embodied a theme I thought of as Libertarian Hell. Decrepit trailers flew American flags in overgrown yards. One enterprising resident had mounted the skulls of animals on a tree in a vaguely occult pattern. I kept an eye out for a Pentecostal church with an inverted crucifix.

  “Satanic panic.” Lionel nodded sagely.

  “It completely missed this street,” I said.

  “Satanic panic. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” Bellow said.

  “Yep.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  Lionel drove past a trailer boasting a partly charred Dixie banner stretched across the frame. He cleared his throat.

  “Well, there may be more.”

  Bellow pressed his forehead against the window.

  “Hey, what about that shutdown?” I said. “Did it affect Bureau affairs?”

  Earlier that year, disagreements between Congress and the president led to a month
-long freeze of federal budgets. This had included wages and discretionary funds for FBI operations. Snitches and undercover cops relied on government cash to play make-believe high rollers, drug dealers, and the like. Bellow said it had been hellish. He told a brief anecdote about an asset a colleague in the DEA deployed to infiltrate a high-value narcotics ring. Names changed to protect the guilty, of course.

  The asset, “Tito Boniface,” called up his handler and related a tale of woe. As the government shutdown went on, the DEA said everybody on the ground was shit out of luck and basically ghosted its operatives. No moola for coke deals, no moola for lavish druggy lifestyles of the rich and infamous. Over cards with the other hard cases, somebody asked Tito why he’d reneged on a promise to acquire a hefty payload of primo dope. And why was Tito so cheap lately with paying for a few rounds? How come they hadn’t seen him at the clubs? It ain’t the shutdown, is it? one chortled. Tito ran a finger under his collar, Rodney Dangerfield style, and laughed it off. But he was sweating bullets.

  “That’s the inside baseball John Q. Public never sees,” Lionel said.

  “Pull a thread and the whole hair suit unravels.”

  “Dude must’ve been relieved when the freeze ended.”

  “They fished Tito out of the Potomac forty-eight hours after that conversation,” Bellow said. “Evidently, his poker buddies weren’t joking.”

  We parked near a culvert and walked in along a muddy track. Whatever direction I turned, trees and more trees. Pine and hemlock blocked out the hazy sky. Something I’d learned in the Northeast: Five steps into the pines and you’re on the dark side of the moon.

  Ted’s file on Lenny Herzog was thin—lifelong resident, attended trade school. Employed in numerous custodial and handyman roles, including a hitch with the Jeffers Project. The latter-day Herzogs were descended from a moonshining dynasty and, once upon a time, owned a chunk of the ridge. Lenny Herzog attended Valley High with that generation of Redlicks. I surmised that Gerald R threw him a bone when it came time to recruit allies for the supercollider construction. Another variation on the odd couple phenomenon that wasn’t as weird as it seemed. Scheming rich dudes can always find use for a blue-collar man with underworld connections.

  Herzog dwelled in a trailer with an A-frame addition. Tar-paper roof, hand-pumped well, deer bones scattered among busted axles and weeds. Smaller bones were strung on wire and dangled from low-hanging branches like macabre wind chimes. His chariot was a rusty Datsun quarter-ton pickup with no hood and plastic sheeting over the passenger window. An aging blue heeler woofed from the porch to announce our arrival. I expected her master to emerge in suspenders, clutching a scatter gun. Wrong—he looked and dressed like a drab family-size garden gnome. Soft white hair flowed from beneath a sock hat to his waist; clean and ironed plaid coat and canvas pants. His glasses were dense enough to burn a hole in paper. The brand-spanking-new Crocs threw me, I’ll admit.

  “As I live and breathe, it’s Tom-fucking-Bombadil,” Lionel said to Bellow.

  Bellow fake-smiled and told him to shut up. He continued to exude cheer as he scanned the bushes like a scout expecting an ambush.

  I introduced my party (discreetly declining to mention Bellow was a G-man) and briefly explained the investigation. Herzog stroked his beard, listening politely. When I apologized for not phoning ahead, he laughed and said the power company cut him off ages ago. He owned a fancy cell that he strategically monitored, answering messages once or twice a week, if it was really important. It was good to keep people guessing, see? Woodstove, kerosene, and a portable radio did him fine.

  He sat on a cinder-block step and patted his dog and changed the subject to the weather (Bellow raised his eyebrows at me), geography, and the moribund state of the world. Appearances notwithstanding, he considered his piece of land practically suburbia—neighbors occupied surrounding ridges and a pop-fifty town hunkered in a basin not five miles west.

  His ancestral home had burned to the ground. The ruins were farther up the hill and already covered in moss and vines. Nature moves quickly to reclaim her own.

  “My divorce was the best thing that ever happened to my dog. Wife almost died in the fire. I snatched up the dog and booked it. Figured it’s what the missus woulda wanted. But no, sir. She made it, damn her luck. Covered in charcoal except for her eyeballs trained on me with no small amount of rage.” While he monologued, he filled a pipe and got it going. Pipes are supposed to smell pleasant—that and the professorial aura they imbue on regular stiffs are their whole draw. This load reeked of burning moss and cat piss. A cloud of smoke settled above his head and gradually slithered down his collar and the sleeves of his coat. Watching him inhale and luxuriate, I had an unsettling thought born of years touring rural Alaska. Live too long in isolation, and eventually cat-piss-soaked moss set on fire becomes a fragrant treat.

  He asked how I was getting along with Horseheads, and I said fine. He said terrific, because the Valley didn’t necessarily treat folks well, especially outsiders intent on upsetting the cart, so to speak.

  “She’s a curious soul, our piece of heaven,” he said. “Can be a patch of hell, depending on her mood.”

  Pleasantries dispensed with, sure, he’d seen Sean Pruitt at the construction site and camp, exchanged perhaps a dozen words. Of course, the Pruitt boy’s death weighed on him. He didn’t wish an untimely meeting with the Reaper on anybody. The family had his sympathies.

  How sympathetic? I asked. My friends and I needed to have a peek at Sean’s old quarters and he was the man with the keys.

  Herzog said he could see his way clear to providing the information we sought. There was a price, which he enjoyed enumerating, then haggling over. He received a quarterly stipend from Diogenes Security to inspect Jeffers Colony, perform minor maintenance tasks, and report trespassers, be they vandals, thieves, or mere looky-loos. We had to make the admittedly small danger of losing that trickle of revenue worth his while. He figured four bills would square us away. Oh, and a case of Blue Light, a pound of tobacco he favored, and dog snacks. I could fetch his list at a general store on the main road near the junction. He suggested I take my sweet-ass time since digging up the records would be a lengthy, tedious chore. On second thought, since suppertime would come along before he finished, I was welcome to wrangle barbecue fixings—white hots and pop—and he’d do the ceremonial honors.

  I agreed to the request. Even Hercules bowed to the inevitable and ran an occasional errand or spit-shined a stable.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Obtaining the list of goodies wasn’t an onerous quest. The store appeared rustic until we went inside and it was mirrored floor tiles, modern coolers, and fluorescent strips, overseen by a college-age girl who didn’t bother unplugging her earphones to ring me up.

  Since we had time to kill, we visited the Jeffers Project site and admired the double fence and deserted gatehouse. In the course of the forty-five minutes we spent kicking rocks and shooting the breeze, neither security personnel nor caretakers materialized to shoo us away. We drove a circuitous route back to Herzog’s cabin.

  Herzog unhurriedly performed several routine tasks (pumping water into jerry cans, fueling his portable generator, and gathering armloads of firewood, as the weatherman said it would drop below freezing that night). The day had grown long in the tooth before he lugged several cartons of records from somewhere in the bowels of his shack and got serious. As twilight deepened into full darkness, Lionel made a fire in the barbecue pit and roasted hot dogs, or white hots, as our host called them. Herzog lit a kerosene lantern and hung it from a hook on the eave of the porch. He squinted at the cramped font of what struck me as a jillion and one identical papers, and arranged them in piles on the rickety steps. He refused our offers to assist combing through the stacks.

  Upon glimpsing the documents, Bellow asked how he happened to be in custody of sensitive personal information: addresses, social se
curity numbers, and references to medical histories.

  “Yah, I stole them,” Herzog said.

  “No shit,” Lionel said, beer in one hand, skewer in the other.

  “Pardon?” Bellow said.

  I stifled a laugh.

  “These are photocopies I made,” Herzog said with pride. “At first, I collected documents willy-nilly, no system to speak of. None of it means spit to me, nohow. Don’t you worry, though. I’ll suss out the address you want.”

  “What use are these to you?” Bellow said.

  “I’d say my foresight is paying me back.” Herzog winked and patted his coat pocket where he’d folded my cash bribe. “Knowledge is a big stick.”

  Lionel added hot dogs to the pile on a paper plate. Bellow stalked to the edge of the yard and turned his back on us. Grandad’s patented I’m-counting-to-ten pose.

  “I opened mail and wrote it down,” Herzog said blithely. “Private doctor stuff, sex stuff too. Carried a camera under my coat. People get up to embarrassing things when they don’t realize Lenny is standing outside their window, watching the whole shebang.” He laughed breezily and kicked back with a beer. “Shebang!”

  Bellow sidled over, abruptly interested in the conversation. His expression was dangerously neutral. I feared he contemplated reaching for his cuffs. Too many law enforcement agents possessed a carefree disregard for citizens’ private information. He stood firmly on the opposite side of that line in the sand—constitutional rights were sacred trusts.

  It was an inopportune moment for Bellow’s elevated moral standards to be triggered by our hayseed pal. I adroitly changed the subject and asked Herzog what he meant about the Valley being heaven one minute, hell the next, and instantly rued the question. A breeze whispered in the branches and the lantern wavered. I’d instinctively edged nearer the lantern as the woods and everything in them merged into a colossal black shape at the uncertain boundary of light.