The night he rescued me from Ford’s men, it wasn’t home base Jeff brought me to, not his refuge. He brought me to his killing ground, his carefully appointed torture chamber, then spun a story so he could gauge my reaction and determine how much I knew. I’d felt so grateful to him for the unexpected deliverance that I wasn’t really on my guard. Not psychologically, and certainly not physically. If he’d wanted to, if he’d decided I could be of more value to him down in the pit than up here on the surface, I have no doubt Jeff would have killed me. After seeing him standing over Ford with the glistening knife, I have no doubt at all.
I spin and stumble, reaching for something to steady myself on. My hand rests on the edge of the table where Jeff stacked his many books. His books. I’d imagined him reclining on the army cot, reading his paranoid literature until the wee hours of the morning, unable to sleep. Now I can picture him coming up out of the hole for a break, a little rest and relaxation, leaving his victim down below to linger in agony. I see him reading while a moan ascends from the abyss, a private smile on his lips.
I don’t rip the books apart or even lash out at them. All I do is push them one by one, with the slightest pressure of my fingers, over the edge and onto the floor. Each one drops with a satisfying impact that sends a thud reverberating through the garage. I move the books over the edge like so many beads across the wire of an abacus, counting an arithmetic of hidden shame. The whole place should burn. It should be razed to the ground. But it’s not up to me to see this done. None of it is up to me anymore. I was not born to set this right. Not this.
The last book left is a thick old paperback with a creased black spine. The pages curl upward from repeated reading, their edges brown with age. On the cover is a detail from a medieval painting, a horned demon with serpents projecting from his head, the bare legs of a half-consumed man dangling from his mouth. All around him, naked bodies writhe in bubbling oil vats. They are stoked by pitchforks, their bone-white faces twisted in pain. This is a thousand-year-old vision of the depths of hell, affixed to the front of Dante’s Inferno, a place Jeff didn’t believe in but brought to life.
I snatch the book up, the same copy Magnum was reading the morning I jogged past him at the picnic table. Can you keep a secret? And to my surprise, in blue ballpoint just inside the cover is written the name ANDREW NESBITT.
That confident trickster and talent spotter, grooming future dictators for the good of democracy, a would-be puppet master whose own paranoia became his undoing, who never settled the debts he owed to justice and didn’t live to see the red harvest his deeds put in motion. Like a jeweler gazing through his loupe, he had seen something in me all those years ago, some flaw of character that led him to believe I would go along with concealing a woman’s murder. And then he’d seen something else and, after a lifetime, sent me a message by way of his torturer, hoping to put that second flaw to use, my willingness to travel on the other side of the line that keeps good men on the path and bad ones in check, to balance his sheet while avenging the death of a nameless woman in 1986, and every woman who came after her, and all the rest. I look in vain for a place to set the book down. Finding none, I take it with me. Full circle and a fitting end to a story I never intended to be a part of, let alone to tell.
Author’s Note
Life imitates art, and vice versa. Nothing to Hide was inspired by a true story. Houston police really did pull over a man who claimed to be a retired CIA agent, the man really was shot and killed by the officers who stopped him, and a bit of a mystery ensued when the government denied all knowledge of him—despite the fact that he’d been active in the city’s network of former intelligence officers for years. Andrew Nesbitt, of course, is pure fiction. When I decided it was time to send Roland March into the murky waters of the paranoid thriller, the true story served as inspiration. What do I make of the real mystery? I have no idea what to think.
Books are written long before their publication date. When I completed the manuscript for Nothing to Hide, I had no idea that Bea Kuykendahl’s reckless gunrunning operation would prove so prescient. Though it was inspired by my research into the ATF’s Operation Gunrunner, which Reg Keller mentions just before the bloodbath in Matamoros, I worried that plot would strain credibility. Then reality came along and lent a hand. Throughout 2011, following the death of a DEA agent in a cartel-related shooting in Mexico, details emerged of Operation Fast and Furious, a Gunrunner-related sting that supplied American arms to the cartels. The fallout from the resulting controversy is just beginning.
Throughout the Roland March novels, details from real life have been woven into the fictional world March inhabits, starting with the crime lab scandals that plagued Houston law enforcement for so many years. Television crime fighters have it so easy. From their slick accommodations to their up-to-the-minute technology, the flawed reality of modern law enforcement rarely intrudes. For March, by contrast, homicide has always been a hard slog. He is, to borrow Henry V’s phrase, a warrior for the working day. I like him all the more for it, and I hope you will, too.
J. Mark Bertrand
Autumn, 2011
J. Mark Bertrand has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. After one hurricane too many, he left Houston and relocated with his wife, Laurie, to the plains of South Dakota. Find out more about Mark and the ROLAND MARCH series at jmarkbertrand.com.
Books by J. Mark Bertrand
* * *
THE ROLAND MARCH NOVELS
Back on Murder
Pattern of Wounds
Nothing to Hide
Beguiled *
*with Deeanne Gist
Resources: bethanyhouse.com/AnOpenBook
Website: www.bethanyhouse.com
Facebook: Bethany House
Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) Page 33