Measure of Darkness

by Chris Jordan

  Adding, in my own mind, and let’s hope Shane is here by then, he’ll know what to do.

  “Bring him to us,” Kathy repeats, as if mulling it over. “Okay, that makes sense.”

  Kidder gets off the tractor, opens the rear door of the van, blocking our view. When he gets back on the tractor he has something with him. As he emerges from behind the van he’s towing a little low-bed trailer, the kind they use to transport luggage. On the trailer is a crate, of the size that might be suitable for a medium-size dog.

  The whine of the tractor begins to sound like a high-pitched scream, but still we wait. I’m keenly aware that we have to choose our moment, that our timing has to be perfect and that Kidder is quite possibly armed.

  Kathy Mancero, with that oddly cool breath, whispers, “I’ve got this,” and slips away on all fours, crawling around the back of the tool chest.

  I’ve got this? What does that mean?

  Before I have time to explore the thought, it happens. As Kidder swings the tractor around the wing of the aircraft, Kathy explodes from behind the tool chest, launching herself into the air, a missile aimed at a monster. As she collides with the muscled hardness of his body, her arms tighten around his neck, pulling him off the seat with the forward momentum of her hundred pounds of bone and grief.

  They land on the concrete, a tangle of limbs, Kidder spitting curses.

  “Stop right there! I’ve got a gun!”

  That’s me, holding the .38 in both hands and trying to look like I know what I’m doing.

  Kidder takes one look at me, grins like a lunatic and flips over so that Kathy’s skinny body is between him and the gun.

  “Take your shot, sweetheart!” he chortles.

  Giggling. Like he thinks this is fun. But the crazed giggle abruptly stops as Kathy rips off his wool cap and grabs a fistful of clotted hair. The back of his head is one big scab. She slams his head down with all her might and his nose smacks into the concrete.

  Kidder yelps, an animal howl of rage. He outweighs her by about a hundred pounds and in an instant she’s bucked away by his vastly superior strength. She flies through the air for several yards and lands flat on her back with her left arm behind her, stunned or worse.

  Measuring my distance carefully—deathly afraid he’ll find a way to take the gun away from me—I shuffle closer, bellowing, “Hands in the air! I’ll do it, I’ll pull the trigger!”

  Kidder, up on his knees, gives me a sly grin, like he’d been hoping it would come to this. “I know you,” he says. “My friend in the bedroom. Bet I made you wet your little pants.”

  “Put your hands behind your head and lace your fingers together!” I demand, borrowing a familiar, if amalgamated, line from just about every cop show ever seen on TV.

  “Anything you say,” he says, feigning agreement. His hands remain in front of him and his smile is taunting, daring me to fire.

  “Uh,” says Kathy. “Uh.”

  The poor woman has had the breath knocked out of her, at the very least. Her eyes are unfocused and her left arm looks wrong, as if maybe the landing jarred it out of its socket at the shoulder. Despite what has to be excruciating pain she smiles oddly and with her good arm she points upward. Something flits through the air high above us, something that emits a soft, sad cooing.

  Mourning doves in the great steel rafters, under the curving roof of the hangar. When I glance back again Kidder has halved the distance between us. Still on his knees but much, much closer.

  “Stop!” I scream, tightening my crouch, re-aiming the .38. “Not another inch!”

  He grins and actually backs up a foot or so. “Have you ever fired that thing?” he asks conversationally. “It takes like a two-pound pull on the trigger. Harder than you might think. And the barrel is going to jump, that’s guaranteed. I’ve seen people miss from three feet away and we’re like, what, six whole feet?”

  “Shut up.”

  Kathy has managed to get to her feet, her bad arm dangling. Her eyes have started to clear and it looks to me like she’s going to be okay, assuming we can get her to a hospital in the very near future.

  Her mouth starts to open, but before she can get a word out a deep male voice booms through the hangar.

  “Kathy! Alice! I’ve got him! You did it!”

  Keeping one eye on Kidder, I turn my stance slightly and find Shane, the big man himself. Panting from his efforts but with an immense grin on his face. He’s ripped open the dog crate and has a small boy in his arms, unconscious but clearly alive.

  Joey.

  Kathy cries out with joy, her whole face glistening with tears. She limps toward Shane and the boy, wounded but unvanquished. It’s a beautiful sight, and I’m close to tears myself. But I can’t quit now. The gun, even grasped in both hands, is starting to get heavy.

  Kidder, humming to himself, shuffles closer, marching on his knees with his arms swinging, tick tock, like a child playing at soldier.

  “No,” I say, finger squeezing. “No!”

  Grinning, Kidder says, “You know what’s funny?”

  “Shut up and grab the floor.”

  Kidder looks like he’s going to comply, and then his eyes roll up and his body convulses and he grabs at his chest. It’s a convincing move, he sells it, and for just that one moment I almost believe he’s going into cardiac arrest. Until, a millisecond later, his right hand emerges from a fold in his orange overalls, holding a shiny pistol. Which swings not toward me, but toward Shane and Kathy and the unconscious boy.

  “Screw it,” Kidder announces. “The little brat is coming with me.”

  Several things happen all at once. I pull the trigger. The gun jumps in my hand like something alive, and a red splat emerges from the side of Kidder’s neck.

  He grimaces, as if shrugging it off. He extends his arm and fires at Shane and the boy.

  In the exploding confusion that follows, one thing remains clear in my mind: a vision of Kathy Mancero throwing herself at Kidder, cutting off his angle and taking a bullet in the center of her chest.

  So fast I can’t react, can’t stop it, can’t change what happens.

  Next thing, a flat, metallic snap coming from behind me. Another shooter heard from. And then Kidder is down with a round red hole in the center of his forehead and a death grin imprinted on his collapsing face, and Jack Delancey is racing up to say, “Sorry I’m late,” and taking the gun from my shaking hand and making me sit on my butt because he thinks I’m going to faint, which is ridiculous.

  I do faint, but only for a moment. And when my vision clears Shane and Jack are crouching over Kathy. Two tough guys looking as tender as angels. Shane with the little boy in his arms, assuring her that Joey is okay, he’ll be fine as soon as he wakes up, and his mother is on the way, and she did it, she did a great good thing.

  “You took the bullet, love,” he says, “so that he might live.”

  The other thing I’m absolutely positive about: as the light faded from her eyes Kathy Mancero looked up at the cooing doves and smiled.

  Chapter Sixty

  Best Done Alone

  Whatever moral complexities may have been exposed by recent unfortunate events, Taylor Gatling, Jr., remains a man of principle. He still empties his own spittoon, and that’s exactly what he’s doing one fine evening in August, a couple of months after that mess at the hangar, the one he was adroit enough to avoid. He tips the brass spittoon over the railing, hears the fine, satisfying flush of it galumphing into the river below and thinks not for the first time that he’s the luckiest man in the world. Not that he hasn’t made his own luck, not that he doesn’t deserve to enjoy all the wealth, all the toys, but still. One must make time to smell the roses. Or in this case a salty whiff of the white-capped sea. Best done alone, which is why he’s closed the boathouse to his little circle of handpicked members. Much as he enjoys the company of his card-playing cronies, he’s decided that for the rest of the month he’ll have the place to himself. Getting his thoughts in order,
recharging his batteries, planning his next move. Because for sure he hasn’t given up on the business of keeping the country safe for right-thinking patriots like, well, himself and a few select others, worthy and vetted.

  He’s smiling, content with his situation, his mission, as he returns to the relative darkness of the boathouse. The thing about being here alone, he doesn’t have to turn on any lights, he can enjoy the passing evening by looking out at the harbor with eyes unpolluted by unnatural light.

  He puts his spittoon in the appropriate place by the card table and is about to help himself to a little something at the bar when he jumps about a foot in the air.

  “Where the hell did you come from!”

  “Oh, sorry, our bad.”

  Bart and Bert, better known as the B brothers, the fraternal twins who work on the domestic drone program. Couple of local woodchucks, like to put on their countrified Down East accents. Ayuh, bubba, flannel shirts and logger boots, the whole bit. Normally Gatling finds the brothers amusing company, but this is beyond the pale, walking into the boss’s private club, his personal refuge, it just isn’t done. He’s about to say so, striking the right tone of executive aggrievement, when he recalls locking and bolting the door to the boathouse. Of course he did, so his pals, his posse, wouldn’t be tempted to drop by, despite his admonition not to. Which means the brothers must have jimmied the lock somehow, and that means—

  Gatling feels the tip of a blade against his sternum and looks down to see the glint of a deer-gutting knife. “Bart? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing to worry about, boss. By the way, it’s Bert.”

  “Fine. Bert. What’s that your brother’s got?”

  The other brother has a bulky black velvet sack slung from his shoulder. It’s not so dark that he can’t see they’re both smiling at his predicament, the damned ignorant woodchucks. Gatling has a small but distinct sense of what might have brought them here, and he’s confident he can work things to his advantage, given his powers of persuasion and his unlimited checkbook.

  “Sorry about the interruption,” Bert says. “Me and Bart, we’re here to give you notice.”

  “Give me notice?”

  “We got signed by another club, just like ballplayers,” Bart says proudly, speaking up for the first time. He shifts the sack on his shoulder, at ease with himself and whatever it is he’s doing.

  “Supposed to be a secret,” Bert confides. “But it can’t hurt to tell a guy like you, with all your connections. The DIA, and they gave us a signing bonus, too.”

  “Defense Intelligence? What unit?”

  “One you never heard of, because it’s like ultra-ultra secret and brand-new.”

  “Oh, I seriously doubt that. Not that you’ve been offered jobs, no, no, that makes sense, a couple of talented boys like you, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts I know the unit.”

  “He’s betting us donuts, Bert.”

  “Ayuh. We like donuts.”

  The lightness of the exchange convinces Gatling that he can turn them, and he’s deciding what, exactly, to offer the brothers when Bert bumps a chair into the back of his knees, forcing him to sit down.

  “Sorry, Mr. Gatling, you’re a cool guy and everything, but you messed up wicked, that’s what they told us.”

  Gatling’s spit has dried up but he manages to ask, “How so?”

  “We don’t know exactly. Above our pay grade. But something Kidder did. Some files he sent to this certain web address at the Pentagon? Got a lot of very powerful folks all agitated. Decisions got made. And the result is, we got signed by the new unit.”

  “Boys, I’ve got more money than God. You can have it all. Most of it.”

  Bert grins. “Keep back just a tiny little for yourself, huh?”

  His brother Bart unslings the sack from his shoulder, loosens the drawstring and removes a shotgun. Even in the dark Gatling recognizes the weapon and knows what it means. A little squirt of urine wets his underpants and he clenches, telling himself he’s better than this, he won’t soil himself.

  “This is the exact same Purdey your dad used,” Bart says. “Kind of sad.”

  “You really expect me to shoot myself?”

  “No,” says Bart. “But we can make it look that way.”

  They do.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Almost Perfect

  Okay, here’s how I feel about what went down. If only I’d pulled the trigger a heartbeat sooner and a little more to the right. Jack says I shouldn’t let myself think that way, but I can’t help it. Just because Kathy Mancero died doing a great good thing doesn’t make it right that she’s no longer in the world. I mean, it’s a miracle that she managed to save both Joey and Shane, and maybe me, too, because it turns out that Robert James Killdeer had been trained as a sniper, and was notably adept with a pistol, and as you know, I’m not and probably never will be.

  That was Kidder’s real name, Robert James Killdeer, and there’s ample indication that he was employed by Gatling Security Group, although no direct evidence, none that we can find, proving that Taylor Gatling, Jr., personally knew what Killdeer was up to within the company. Before he took his own life, apparently out of shame for what he’d allowed to happen, Gatling claimed that both the kidnapping of Joey Keener and the execution of Jonny Bing were parts of a rogue operation directed by Killdeer alone. Everything in the records points that way. That’s the maddening thing. Gatling may be gone, but the company lives on, doing pretty much what they’ve been doing all along. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that. The Pentagon is the Pentagon and money is money, and Naomi says I just have to accept the fact that some things can’t be fixed, because justice, like humanity itself, is never perfect.

  All we can do, she says, is the best we can. Which brings me back to me missing my shot and Kathy sacrificing herself. Shane thinks it means something that she died with a smile on her lips, secure in the knowledge that Joey was safe, but I’m not convinced. Dead is dead. I wish I believed in heaven the way Kathy Mancero obviously did, but I don’t. If God wants to pay me a visit, explain how all the bad and terrible things in the world are part of the cosmic plan, the door is always open, and I’m willing to listen. Until then, I’ll stick with believing the greatest miracle of all is life itself, and hope that will be enough to sustain me.

  Just so you know, Kathy had made her wishes known to an estate lawyer in Olathe, Kansas, and her ashes are to be scattered over a playground in Kansas City, where she and little Stacy had happy times. Shane has promised to make it happen, even though there’s some ordinance about remains being dispensed in public places. We all figure any kid that comes in contact with a molecule of Kathy Mancero will be the better for it, no matter what the rules say.

  As to the Randall Shane legal situation, that gets a little more complicated every day. He’s been released, no longer an active suspect in Professor Keener’s murder, but may eventually face charges for escaping from custody, should D.A. Tommy Costello be willing to endure the bad publicity for punishing a genuine American hero. For the moment, the million-dollar bond remains in effect, which, as Dane Porter says, tends to concentrate the mind, meaning we have to tie up the loose ends.

  It’s great—fabulous—that Joey has been reunited with Ming-Mei—believe me, there wasn’t a dry eye when that little scene unfolded, but the question of who killed who, and why, is still up for grabs. Naomi has strong views on the matter, but the D.A. has yet to sign off on the theory that the man who ordered the hit on Professor Joseph Keener was, in all probability, the late Jonny Bing himself. Turns out—and this was well hidden, so deep that even Teddy had trouble finding it—Mr. Bing’s entire fortune was in peril. On paper he was still a billionaire twice over, but it turns out Jonny was obsessed with chasing higher-than-normal interest rates and had invested hundreds of millions in offshore certificates of deposit with Sir Allen Stanford, the Texas swindler and cricketer, and when all the phony dust settled, Jonny Bing came
up close to empty. For the last year or so the lucrative development contracts for QuantaGate had been his only source of revenue, and the prospect of the company admitting defeat and closing up shop may have been more than he could face. Maybe he was desperate enough to kill a man he undoubtedly had once called a friend. Or maybe his fellow travelers in the Chinese espionage business, who had helped him snare Keener in the first place, decided to end his involvement in single-gated photon communication, the impossible-to-hack quantum computers that are the current Holy Grail of cybernetics.

  Whatever happened, we know from the anonymous surveillance tape that the man coming out of Keener’s house minutes after his murder was a thug and trigger-man well-known to Jonny Bing. Did Bing really order the hit? Apparently that’s one of the sordid little details that will never be known to civilians like us.

  Forget it, Alice, it’s Chinatown. Jack actually said that to me. He loves those old movies, does dapper Jack.

  And what about Taylor Gatling, Jr.? Did he really kill himself or did he have help? It may not make any difference to the late Mr. Gatling, but I really want to know, Chinatown or not. I’m the chief factotum around here and would like to set the record straight. Call it housekeeping if you like.

  Naomi says, in her maddeningly remote way, that I need to develop more patience, and that despite our best intentions, sometimes the bad guys get away with it, even after they’re dead and buried.

  Oh, speaking of bad guys getting away with it, consider the case of that snake-in-the-grass Glenn Tolliver. At this point I can barely stand to write the creep’s name, so I’m just going to include a transcript of Piggy’s last interview with Jack Delancey, duly recorded at Cigar Masters without the Pigster’s knowledge. Such undisclosed recordings may be against the privacy laws, but as Piggy himself might say, in his ever-charming way, tough titty.

  JACK: Hey. Looks like you started without me.