A Darker Justice

by Sallie Bissell

  Wurth’s heart sank as he watched two gulls skimming the surf beyond the windows. He’d come out here hoping for some kind of job, not for a political chat with a religious lunatic.

  Dunbar sat back and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “As you know, incumbents in this country have a huge, unfair advantage. It’s virtually impossible for little guys with little money to be heard, and I’m sure you’re aware of how the liberal media feels about anyone affiliated with a religious group.”

  “I sure do,” Wurth chummed Dunbar along, wishing he were down in the bar or even out on the beach with the sea gulls. Anywhere but here with this loony tune.

  Dunbar continued. “A few of us think that if we take certain steps now, LeClaire’s support will grow. Eventually, a great groundswell of people will anoint him their leader and carry him all the way to the highest office in the land. That’s where you come in.”

  Wurth sat up straighter. Apparently this conversation did have a point. “How do you mean?”

  “We want you to level the playing field.”

  “Level the playing field?” Wurth watched as a grin spread across Dunbar’s narrow face.

  Dunbar nodded. “We’re very impressed with your history, Sergeant. We know the name the Vietnamese gave you.”

  Wurth blinked, surprised. No one had mentioned that name in years.

  “Danh tu,” Dunbar whispered as he lifted one eyebrow. “Feather Man. The one who leaves no trace.”

  Wurth gazed at the white tablecloth that stretched between them. Once the Army had spent a lot of time and money turning him into Danh Tu, a Feather Man, a silent deliverer of death. He had performed admirably, but that war ended and no new war took its place. The Army had no use for Danh Tu then. In fact, the Army seemed embarrassed that Danh Tu had ever existed. “And how would I be leveling this field?” Wurth asked.

  “By doing just what the government has trained you to do. Eliminating certain candidates in certain races. Our organization has grown so solid that we can win any race we choose, as long as the candidates with the party machines behind them are out of the way.”

  “And this will get Gerald LeClaire elected President?” Wurth asked.

  “Not right away,” replied Dunbar, showing his rat terrier teeth. “You’ll start out on small races in key states. We figure by 2000, we’ll have a number of governors and senators. Then they, along with our people in the smaller offices, will work as the present parties do now. With your help, the 2004 presidential election will be a silent, nearly bloodless coup of historic proportions.”

  “But LeClaire’s supposedly a man of God. This doesn’t square with any of the gospels I grew up with.”

  “That’s the beauty of it.” Dunbar smiled. “Gerald LeClaire doesn’t know about any of this.”

  “He doesn’t know people are clamoring to elect him President?”

  “Of course he knows that. And he knows I’m helping FaithAmericans become politically active.” Dunbar winked. “He’s just unaware of some of the methods I’m employing.”

  “And you don’t think he’ll find out?”

  Dunbar shook his head. “Gerald LeClaire is a good man who believes that anyone sent to FaithAmerica is sent by God Himself. He has complete faith in the Book of Revelations, and the goodness of those God sends him.”

  “I see.” Wurth shifted in his chair. This man was more clever than he’d first thought.

  Dunbar picked up a dinner roll and swiped it in the pink blood that remained on his plate. “Sergeant Wurth, all your life you’ve either fought or trained others to fight honorably for the principles of democracy. We think you deserve far better than the treatment you received from this country. We would consider it an honor to have a man of your caliber join our FaithAmerica team.”

  Wurth listened, amazed. Though he knew he was being conned as profoundly as poor blind Gerald LeClaire, he enjoyed hearing Dunbar’s words. For once somebody was seeing his situation as he did. For once somebody was taking his side.

  “Does it pay anything?” he asked, wondering if Dunbar had any cold hard cash to back up his hot air.

  Smiling, Dunbar handed Wurth the small leather legal case he’d been carrying since they first met. Wurth glanced at him, then unzipped it. For an instant he thought his heart would stop. Inside was the deed to a property he knew well—an old abandoned sanitarium not far from where he grew up. Beneath that lay a thick, bank-bound stack of thousand-dollar bills. Both the deed and the paper band around the money had his name on them. This Richard Dunbar had just given him ninety-seven acres of pristine mountain property and a hundred thousand dollars in cash!

  “We’ll give you the money to turn this old sanitarium into a private training facility for the boys we send you,” said Dunbar. “As a cover, you’ll run a legitimate recreational camp in the summer, but the rest of the year you’ll be training operatives for us. We’ve already got the faculty lined up. You’ll have no more than two dozen boys, from age fourteen to eighteen. By the time they finish your curriculum, they should be well versed in the same skills Uncle Sam taught you.”

  “Is this for real?” Wurth flipped through the bills, listening to the soft thrish of the money. No more worrying about his lost pension now.

  “Absolutely, Sergeant Wurth,” said Dunbar. “Every July you’ll get at least this much money from us, in cash. There are only two things you have to remember.”

  “What?”

  “First, that not a wisp of this must ever, ever touch Gerald LeClaire. He must never suspect a thing.”

  “I understand.”

  “Second, don’t ever forget that I’m the one in charge. You take orders from me, and me alone.”

  Wurth looked back out over the ocean, where two surfers bobbed beyond the break line, their skin tawny in the setting sun. Right now, at this table, his life had just been resuscitated. Where the Army had tried to drown him like an unwanted cat, this Dunbar had pulled him back up into the bright, life-giving air.

  “Not a problem, Mr. Dunbar.” Wurth looked back at the strange little man and smiled. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re the number one guy.”

  A horn blasted behind him. Wurth blinked, jarred back to the present. The diversity-celebrating minivan had pulled away, leaving the gas pump free. Inching up, he got out of his car and lifted the nozzle from the pump, glaring at the old man who’d honked so loudly behind him.

  You’re not reliable anymore. Again Dunbar’s words echoed as gas fumes shimmered up into his face. Fuck that, thought Wurth. He’d show them precisely how reliable he was. Reliable like they’d never dreamed of.

  The old man behind him revved his engine as the gas bubbled up in the neck of the tank. Wurth topped it off, then glared at the guy as he walked into the gas station to pay. Inside, a tall Latino boy stood behind the cash register. He looked about eighteen. His dark hair curled around his face like David’s. Wurth handed the boy a twenty-dollar bill and again felt the rage rise inside him. He would teach them. He would show Dunbar that it was never wise to fuck with a Feather Man.

  The Latino boy gave him two dollars and three cents back. He crammed the bills in his wallet and left the three pennies on the counter. As he walked back to his car, he noticed the geezer hadn’t moved to another pump, but still waited behind him, his mud-covered Ford grinding like a barrel full of bolts.

  “Get a move on, mister,” the old man brayed out the window. “Some of us got jobs to get to.”

  Indeed we do, you old bastard, Wurth thought. I’ve got a real fine job to get to. He looked at the man and smiled. “Sorry to keep you waiting, buddy. I’m leaving right now.”

  He hopped in the car, started the motor. Grinning at the old man’s agitated expression in the rearview mirror, he pulled the gearshift into reverse, then floored the accelerator. As his Chevy’s bumper crashed into the rusted Ford, he watched the old man’s face bounce against the steering wheel. He repeated the procedure once, then twice, then he put the car in park and
sauntered back to the old man.

  “Sorry about that, buddy. I was in such a hurry to get out of your way that I just lost control.”

  The old man sat, slack-jawed, his glasses shattered. Blood streamed from his nose.

  “Here.” Wurth grabbed a blue paper towel from the dispenser. “Let me help you out. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.” He rubbed the rough towel all over the old fart’s face, smearing blood up into his eyebrows and hair.

  “Awrrrr,” the old man groaned, woozy in the seat.

  “You take it easy there, old-timer.” Wurth wadded up the paper towel and threw it on the passenger seat. “I hear there’s a lot of road rage out here in California.”

  With that, he got back in his car and turned toward the airport. He would have to show the rental agent what happened, but he didn’t care. The car had been charged to the FaithAmerica account; Dunbar could get it fixed. After all, what’s a busted bumper when you were out to rearrange the entire United States?

  CHAPTER 6

  “Good morning and Merry Christmas, Atlanta! We’re gonna start off this hour with a real blast from the past, Roy Orbison and ‘Sweet Dream Baby’!”

  Mary smiled at the disk jockey’s choice of tunes. According to her mother, “Dream Baby” was the first song her father ever sang to her. “He just got out his guitar,” Martha had told her daughter one evening long ago. “And suddenly Roy was right there in the store. Singing ‘Dream Baby,’ just to me.”

  “Could he really play the guitar?” Mary had asked, impressed that anyone related to her could play anything beyond the radio.

  “Oh, yes.” Martha smiled. “He was wonderful. He could play the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. Everybody.”

  Mary listened until Roy finished, then she switched off the radio. On workdays, the oldies station helped her wake up as she inched along in her tedious, bumper-to-bumper commute. But today, this early on Christmas Eve, the streets were empty. Downtown Atlanta looked like a ghost town.

  Impatiently, she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as two joggers wearing red elf hats loped across the street in front of her. Seven days. Surely she could talk Irene into being guarded by the FBI for that long. Irene. Where would she be without Irene, the infinitely kind, wise woman who’d taken Mary home with her the afternoon they’d loaded her mother up in the back of an ambulance, a black body bag zipped over her head. She’d taken her to Upsy Daisy and fed her soup with crusty bread. Then Irene had made a pallet on the leather couch in front of the big kitchen fireplace and held her while she’d cried from a well of tears that seemingly had no end. Two years later, when every picture Mary had painted in her art classes gave her nightmares, Irene had driven down to Emory and taken her to lunch, suggesting that perhaps art was not the course of study she should follow. Why not try the law? she’d said that day, gently squeezing Mary’s arm. Let the seeking of justice retool the workings of your heart.

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” Mary murmured, trying to shake away the image of Rosemary Klinefelter holding her own head.

  She turned her car into the courthouse parking lot, coming to a stop in space number twenty-nine. The lot was empty, except for a black Dodge pickup with a camper top, around which paced Agent Daniel Safer. Though he’d changed from his sleek Italian suit into worn jeans and a red flannel shirt, she could tell by the urgency of his stride that Safer was a city boy; concrete probably did feel better under his feet. She waved at him as she parked her car. He glared back.

  “Well, screw you,” Mary said as she shoved her car into park. Angrily she grabbed her backpack and walked toward the truck. If this Agent Safer was going to pout about being saddled with a “female civilian” all the way to Hartsville, North Carolina, she would just drive up there by herself.

  “Morning,” she called, her footsteps brisk on the damp pavement.

  “Morning.” Safer took her measure with his dark eyes, which were just as intense as they had been yesterday. “Glad to see you’re on time.”

  “Actually, I’m fifteen minutes early.” Mary dropped her backpack an inch away from Safer’s toe.

  He glanced at his watch. “So you are.” He looked at her single small bag. “What are you taking with you?”

  “A sketch pad. A paperback. A Christmas present for Irene.”

  “Didn’t forget your gun, did you?”

  Glaring at him, Mary allowed her down jacket to flop open. His eyes made a brief appraisal of her breasts before they noted the Beretta nestled in her shoulder holster. “Good,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

  He opened the back of the truck. Mary shoved her pack in beside Safer’s black briefcase, a battered camera bag, and two impressive-looking tripods.

  “You a photographer?” She couldn’t imagine Safer needing a camera to snap anything. His eyes alone seemed to etch everything permanently on his brain.

  “No.” He moved the tripods to one side. “These make a good cover up there.”

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked, stepping back as he slammed the tailgate shut.

  “I’ll drive you to Judge Hannah’s farm. If you can talk her into accepting our protection, I’ll work as a liaison between her and the rest of the team.”

  “And if I can’t talk her into it?”

  “Then we’ll do the best we can by ourselves. Either way, we’ll fly you back here.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ll be home in time for Christmas.”

  Mary buckled herself into the front seat. Safer kept a cell phone on the console, nestled beside a paperback Guide to the Eastern Night Sky. A glow-in-the-dark bookmark in the shape of an alien protruded from the pages of the book. Mary repressed a groan. Surely this guy wasn’t of the Mulder and Scully persuasion.

  “You into spacemen?” Mary gave Safer a dubious eye as he jammed his key into the ignition.

  “No.” He looked at her challengingly, not embarrassed to be caught with a luminous alien bookmark. “I like astronomy. My daughter gave me that bookmark.”

  “Oh.” For some reason, Mary could peg Safer as an obsessed astronomer far more readily than a contented family man. “You have children?”

  “Just one daughter.” He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Leah. She’s four. She lives with her mother in Montreal.”

  “That’s pretty far away.”

  “Yep.” He put the truck into gear. “My ex-wife made sure of that.”

  Mary heard the acid in Safer’s voice. The rest of the story was so common, she knew it without asking—a woman marries a cop, then she grows tired of the hours and the brutality and the alcoholism or any of the other thousand things that eat cops alive. So she leaves, and puts as much distance between them as she can. It was sad, but it was a fact of life, and everybody who went into law enforcement ought to be forewarned—abandon normalcy, all ye who enter here. Quickly she changed the subject.

  “Do you know the way to Hartsville?”

  “Like the back of my hand,” Safer replied, his dark brows drawing together so sternly that he reminded her of a Byzantine icon she’d seen once at the High Museum. “I’ve put in some hours up here before.”

  “Work the Eric Rudolph case?” The man who’d five years ago allegedly bombed a gay nightclub in Atlanta and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Birmingham had been spotted in the southern Appalachians. Battalions of federal agents had given furious chase, but ultimately came up empty-handed and humiliated.

  Safer nodded.

  “Too bad you couldn’t catch him. He would have landed on my docket.”

  Safer shrugged as they pulled out of the parking lot. “A couple of times we were five minutes behind him. Then the mountains just swallowed him up.”

  She thought of her own mother’s murder, years before. That killer had vanished into the mountains just like Rudolph. “Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “The mountains can do that.”

  They drove north in silence. Even though traffic was light, Safer tailgated the cars ahead of them as if they were intention
ally impeding his progress to North Carolina. Mary pulled her seat belt tighter, grateful that they weren’t driving in the everyday lethal, take-no-prisoners Atlanta traffic.

  Before they crossed into North Carolina, they stopped at a service station to get the less expensive Georgia gas. As Safer filled up his tank, Mary went into the little convenience store and bought black coffee and two peach fried pies, hopeful that sugar and caffeine might turn him into a less dour traveling companion.

  “Here.” She gave him a bright smile as she set the coffee and pastries on the hood of the truck. “Have some Appalachian cop food.”

  He looked at her strangely, as if nobody had ever given him anything before. Opening one end of the fried pie wrapper, he scrutinized the small, oblong tart, then folded the wrapper back up and returned the pie to Mary. “Thanks. But I don’t normally eat dessert for breakfast.”

  “Neither do I,” replied Mary. “But neither do I normally pack my gun to spend Christmas Eve twisting an old friend’s arm into being guarded by the FBI.”

  Safer just shrugged, so she ate both fried pies while he paid for the gas. By the time he’d climbed back in the truck, she’d pulled out the sketch pad she’d packed and was drawing large circles with a pastel pencil.

  “You an artist?” Safer glanced at her lap.

  “I’m a hobbyist,” Mary replied. “My mother was an artist.”

  “I understand she was quite gifted.”

  Mary looked over at him. “How would you know?”

  Amazingly, he blushed. Mary watched as his cheeks blossomed like crabapples above his dark beard. “They tell us these things when we enlist civilian aid,” he finally stammered.

  “You’ve read my jacket,” Mary snapped, suddenly sorry that she’d bought him anything to eat. “What else do you know about me, Agent Safer?”

  His look darkened. “That you’re half Cherokee. That you grew up here, in the Nantahala. That your artist mother was murdered when you were eighteen,” he said. “Then you went south, where your paternal grandmother enrolled you in Emory University. There you studied law and became a crackerjack DA. That you’re excellent in the woods and you’re like a daughter to Irene Hannah.”