by Beau Johnson
“Detective,” I said as we hit the mountain parkway, leaving Jackson, Hazard, and the rest of Eastern Kentucky behind for the city where I’d begun my larcenous learnings. “Detective, I only know what I know.” I spoke in a lilt that I’d drop when going through the motions with the cops, affecting the lisped tone of a lower registered Truman Capote. I could say anything to the puppy and she’d invariably wag her at the strange sound of this inflection. “Irina, she had so much life left. Detective, she…I loved her so fucking much. I’m a lesser man without her in my life.” Saying her name caused me a hard, bitter swallow, the image of my beloved with half a head, crumpled like a drunkard’s suitcoat in the trunk of a muscle car. “Irina, listen, wherever you are.” I stopped talking to the fictional cops and spoke instead to the bitterest of my many dead. “I’m sorry.”
“Irina,” I said to the dog.
Then I realized, I had finally provided the mutt with a name.
“Irina. That’s it. The prefect name for a little angel. She would have been your mother, you know, and it stands to reason that you should have her name, by God. She would have adored you too, you vexing little minx.” I patted the passenger seat and Irina hopped up for me to scratch behind her ears.
At least I knew now what to call the precocious little creature. I think even she was tired of hearing me yell, “Little doggy” or “Hey, shithead.” I’d have to be sure not to call her by name around the investigators lest they question my soundness of mind. I wasn’t in the mood to fight a mental inquest warrant.
As I exited off Route 15 and hit the Mountain Parkway, phone reception returned and my cell began ringing. After leaving Louisville, I’d tossed every burner but one, the number to which I’d texted a few old Louisville friends, in case someone died or the city sank into the Ohio River.
“Fuck you, Scotty,” I answered.
“Surprised this number still works.” Scott Morgan cackled like a consumptive brothel keeper. He had once considered himself a proud addition to the shiftless procession of dope fiends and inebriants wandering the streets of Louisville seeking truth and misadventure. We together enjoyed the low life of modern boulevardiers until the day Scott’s marine general daddy ordered him to straighten up or expect a complete and swift severance from the family and the millions papa had accumulated leading poor young men to their violent deaths.
Scott, despite his juvenile criminal record—strictly misdemeanors—and his near religious adherence to anarchy, applied to the state police. He passed all the physicals and psychological exams and begun pursuing a career in law enforcement, abandoning his rowdy friends to settle down with a pretty wife and a picket fence and, hopefully, some tow-headed children to complete the perfect American family portrait. For two years, he’d been working plain clothes with the KSP. He was assigned to cover any armed robbery or murder that fell within the jurisdiction of a county that couldn’t handle the case’s scope and magnitude. If an investigation involved multiple related homicides spanning across the state, the boys in Frankfort would call in Scott and his team. For all I knew, he’d been one of the staties assigned to make sense of Dog Hill.
“I’m surprised you’re calling me,” I said. “I texted you my number in case you needed an alibi for some police shooting, you know, if you blew away an unarmed black kid or and needed me to bring you some crack to sprinkle on the poor little bastard before IAD arrived. Should I purloin you some grade-A freebase and a decent drop gun to place at the feet of some unsuspecting and underprivileged housing project resident?”
“Thanks anyway,” he said, “but the worst projects are out of my jurisdiction. But you might want to consult the LMPD, if you think you have a knack for those services. Those Louisville cops are always shooting unarmed suspects.”
If only he knew, I thought.
“What can I do for you, then, Corporal?” I asked.
“I’ll be in town next week. We need to talk.”
Shit. I wondered if he knew. I mean, he knew I was a junkie. That was why he’d cut me out of his life years ago. Even when I called and told him I’d quit—a lie, I had just snorted a fat line of China white before I dialed his number—he said, “That’s nice,” and found an excuse to get off the line. Kentucky State Police detectives couldn’t afford to be associated with drug addicts.
“Last time I talked to you, you couldn’t be seen with a known junkie. It’d be bad for a statie’s career,” I said to Scott.
I doubted he suspected my involvement in the Dog Hill killings. He was probably in the middle of a divorce or an alcoholic nervous breakdown, a third-life crisis. Scott could drink on duty and pop prescription painkillers with impunity, but introduce needles and his repressed scruples reared their smug, self-righteous heads.
“You said you’d cleaned up. You told me that, remember? You said so in the message. Was that another lie, Jon?”
“I’m clean.” It was the truth. I hadn’t used in months. I’d just killed a lot of people. “Now that I’m not a liability, what can I do for you?”
“I’m at work right now,” Scott said. “I don’t have a lot of time to talk.”
“Then why are we talking?”
“I’m just making sure I can come to you. That you’re straight.”
“I’m straight, Scott. I swear. Haven’t had anything in months. I know that’s not exactly long-term sobriety, but it’s the truth. Do with it what you like.”
“Then expect a call mid-week.” He hung up.
The sun winked above the Appalachians and spread a ruddy glow over the mountaintops and again, for a K-9 audience of one, I recited the version of events I would confess to the two irksome Louisville detectives who had ordered Paul to find me and rein me into the investigation.
Now I had an answer for any inquiry regarding all the missing and murdered people with whom I’d been publicly associated.
The detectives’ first round of questioning had been in a tiny interrogation bowl on the third floor of LMPD headquarters on Jefferson Street, across from the courthouse and the city jail. The police were investigating each of my alibis. I’d told them that James O’ Hearn, whose execution was authorized solely to assuage Luther Longmire’s bottomless bloodthirst, had not contacted me for nearly two months prior to his death. Jimmy was a friend, but a shameless drug addict from whom I’d distanced myself over the years. I said I’d heard he was involved with some undesirable sorts and that—it was just my opinion—he may have been the one to drag my ex-girlfriend Irina back into the drug life. I played the victim well, always have. After the initial inquisition, the detectives, a dipshit pair by the names of Longbow and Hertz, had ordered me not to leave town until I heard from them again. Longbow, the old one, grizzled, bald with a clown helmet of white hair at the sides of his temple, cussed frequently and awkwardly, mixing expletives in nonsensical couplets—cockfag, shitfuck, and my personal favorite, the painfully redundant, pussy cunt—and verbally flailed random accusations, most unrelated to the matter at hand.
“Tell me you’ve never sunk so low you turned to eating Chinese food for breakfast, you little dickfag.” While Longbow asked me if my taxes were in order and how many grams of cocaine I ingested daily, his younger partner sat across the short, narrow steel table, attempting to incite a staring contest. I couldn’t get a read on Detective Hertz. He resembled a young Robert Redford, a handsome, stoic ginger, more collected than most boys of his generation.
I refused to make eye contact with either of them unless asked a direct, pertinent question, keeping my gaze affixed to the two-way mirror, wondering who was watching. A DA? A fed? Probably just a menial higher-up, some sort of city police sergeant or lieutenant making sure these idiots didn’t molest me or beat me stupid with a phone book.
Finally, I they said I could leave. The afterbirth brothers seemed to find my ignorance believable.
They had more questions and declared that they may, in their background check on me, discover cause for at least one more line of inquiry. M
y mandate to remain in Louisville for any prolonged period left me crushed and sobered. One lesson I’d learned from my recent and tragic misadventures: the longer you’re in one place, the harder it is to leave.
Click here to learn more about South of Cincinnati by Jonathan Ashley.
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Here is a preview from The Black Kachina by Jack Getze…
ONE
United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Maggie Black had been surrounded by men since her freshman year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She’d been seventeen years old. By twenty-four, she’d been flying F-15C Eagles over Iraq, one of a handful of female American combat fighter pilots. These years of experience with men had taught her a few things, too, including some guys didn’t like women flying fighter jets and a few didn’t like women doing anything except baking cakes and spreading their legs. But most men, especially those in the service, cared only how you performed on the job. Another lesson of her male-dominated environment, Maggie could easily read when men excluded her, or left her out of an information loop, and right that second, checking out this El Centro, California aircraft control tower, all eyes on her, all eyes male, Maggie’s mild concern for her silent B-52 test plane converted to serious worry.
“Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy,” the tower radio officer said. “How copy, over?”
Again, there was no answer but static.
Through the Naval Air Facility’s floor-to-ceiling wraparound glass, Maggie had watched in awe as inky thunder clouds blossomed above this desert-based air gunnery range near California’s Salton Sea. Multiple streaks of copper lightning sliced between the darkest clouds she’d ever seen. There had been no storm warning from the flight station’s weather people. Clear skies had been predicted.
“Where are they?” Maggie said.
“Radar says forty miles to the northwest, turning for a run down the gunnery range.”
Maggie’s assigned radio officer sounded nervous. Zuniga, she thought his name was. She side-stepped closer to him. “You’re telling me our B-52 lost radio contact when she flew near that God-awful black thunderstorm?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maggie placed her paper coffee cup out of the way, then gently knocked her artificial left hand—a twelve-thousand-dollar BeBionic she’d purchased herself—into the non-opposed thumb position. Aligned with her individually motorized fingers, the jointed thumb could now tuck neatly into the pocket of her khakis. “Well, let’s keep trying.”
“Yes, ma’am. Of course. Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. Please respond. You need to increase altitude, over.”
Silicone gloves were mandatory to keep moisture and dirt from her prosthetic hand’s parts and electrical connections. Although her BeBionic came with many flesh-colored, life-like covers—even separate male and female versions—Maggie preferred the plain, jet black glove as a reminder to herself and others. She didn’t want her prosthetic mitt looking too real.
“How low are they?” she said.
“Two thousand feet.”
“What?”
“Yes, ma’am. Two thousand.”
Maggie told herself to stay calm. The bomber’s pilot, Air Force Major Anthony Pinella, had been flying B-52 Stratofortresses for seven years, and while there was truth in the joke the sixty-year-old bombers flew like eight locomotives pulling ten thousand garbage cans, Maggie knew Tony Pinella. Rain and lightning wouldn’t put a man like Tony off his game. He could fly the Stratofortress through a car wash. Still, he was operating close to the Pinyon, Vallecito, and southern Santa Rosa mountain ranges—peaks that reached over four thousand feet.
The radio officer gasped. His fingers reached for the radar screen. “Shit!”
Maggie frowned. “What’s the matter?”
Her friend Pinella’s cold war era B-52 jet bomber carried a crew of five, men and women with spouses and children and brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Also on board was an expensive piece of experimental weaponry Maggie and her team had designed, plus whatever remained of Maggie’s Air Force career.
“Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy.” The radio officer’s voice had jumped half an octave. Sweat beaded his forehead. His fingers reset controls and dials that Maggie didn’t understand. “Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. Please respond. Over.”
“I said what’s the matter?” Maggie pressed the radio man’s shoulder with her right hand, her real hand. His tan uniform slid smoothly under her fingers, like polished wood. Maggie liked her uniforms stiff, too, but Zuniga’s contained more starch than a truckload of potatoes.
“They’re gone.” Zuniga lurched forward. “They—” His voice warbled. “They dropped off radar.”
Maggie groaned. She’d seen cemeteries full of death during her military action in Iraq. But non-experimental aircraft weren’t supposed to crash on this wide open, Southern California desert test range. These training facilities were known worldwide for their year-round good weather.
“Eagle Six Four, this is Hard Candy. How copy, over?” Zuniga’s voice begged for an answer, but nothing came back but static.
Maggie faced a room of anxious gazes. She bumped the volume on her voice. “Let’s get two rescue teams ready. Right now.”
The Chinook throbbed, hissed, and thrashed, poking Maggie’s senses every second of the flight. She fought the distractions by monitoring the topography below the chopper on her BlackBerry, glancing only occasionally at the young men and women beside her. The Naval Air Facility emergency crews wore orange jumpsuits and blue helmets. Their black boots, sacks, and bundles of equipment jammed the chopper’s cabin.
Maggie fought an old feeling. Sinking despair. What the hell had happened to her simple, fairly common weapons test? She tried to push the negative voices from her head but couldn’t. You lost your mother, you lost your hand, you lost your F-15. Now you lose the Air Force’s experimental weapon with two hundred pounds of explosives? You lose everything! You’re a loser! Did everybody go through this mental crap when life went badly, or was it only her? Right this second she felt like she’d never done a damn thing right in her whole life.
Maggie sucked in a slow breath and let the air go at an even slower pace. She needed to get a grip, do her job. Maggie Black was no loser. She’d earned Burbank High School’s highest grades her senior year. Class valedictorian. She’d entered the U.S. Air Force Academy when she was barely seventeen. She’d been a naturally great pilot, too, earning the second-best scores in her class of cadets and then later, easily meriting a slot in Ace Billy Payton’s squadron during the Iraq War. Many years after that, when her plane’s hydraulics had taken a fluke, small-weapons hit, she’d flown the F-15C hundreds of miles upside-down and survived a nasty bailout.
Maggie Black was no loser.
Above the Carrizo Badlands, the two helicopters maybe ten minutes out of their El Centro Naval Air Facility, one copilot spotted a tower of black smoke to the north. Maggie’s phone caught the attention of the rescuers on each side of her, especially after the helicopter banked hard right toward the Fish Creek Mountains.
Maggie and the brightly clad Navy search and rescue crew jumped from the chopper onto a sparse and rugged desert landscape one hundred yards below a still-smoking crash scene. Tony Pinella and his B-52 had plowed directly into the side of a desert mountain—pale, sulfur-colored rocks piled to the height of a skyscraper.
Maggie saw no piece of wreckage bigger than a couch, nor any sign of the air-to-ground cruise missile carrying her experimental weapon. The plane’s devastation was jaw-dropping and complete. One hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds of rolled steel, plastic, rubber, aluminum, and other sundry elements, plus forty thousand gallons of fuel. What had been a massive subsonic bomber, forty feet high, one hundred and fifty-nine feet long and one hundred and eighty feet across, was now a junkyard in the blackened V of intersecting rock formations.
Maggie’s phone buzzed as she joined the search. It was her commanding officer, Brigadie
r General William Payton, his call a reminder there were nonhuman consequences to the crash of her B-52, consequences like her selfish career problems she’d dismissed earlier.
Maggie left a group of rescuers and hurried to a lonely spot where she could speak without being overheard. The house-sized boulder at her back contained long-embedded ancient shells inside a darker layer of stone. Two buzzards circled in a dark sky.
“Hello, Billy,” she said. “I was going to call you when I knew more.”
“The NAF flight chief called me, said our plane crashed. Any survivors?”
“We just arrived at the crash site, but I can’t imagine anybody survived,” she said. “They don’t get any worse. Right into the side of a mountain. Our borrowed B-52 is blackened scrap.”
She heard her old friend curse. They’d met at the Air Force Academy and under Billy’s leadership years later, Maggie had joined the large, second wave of female fighter pilots trained when women were approved for combat. With Billy as her wing commander, she’d piloted an F-15C Eagle on forty-seven combat missions over Iraq.