The Shadow Priest

by D. C. Alexander

  "Diane is coming over."

  "I'm not leaving you. You might need help. You might need someone to get you a glass of water or walk you to the bathroom."

  "Diane can do all that."

  "No."

  "Listen, having you moping around all stressed out doesn't help me. If anything, it makes it worse. Diane and I are going to lie on the couches and watch chick flicks all day. It's just what I need. It'll help me get my mind off the nausea. And then I'll feel better, okay? It's just chemo. It'll get better. Go fishing. Have fun. Drink some cold beers with the guys and relax. You have to relax. I'll be okay."

  I'll be okay. That was exactly what she'd said to him after he'd broken the news that he was being, in effect, banished from Washington, D.C., to Durango. She'd been a partner in a major law firm. Highly respected. A big gun. Yet she'd given it all up without a hint of regret—the career she'd worked so hard for—to follow him to this remote Colorado mountain town where she had no connections, status, or power. Where hardly anyone knew anything about her.

  I'll be okay, she'd said. Let's focus on you, being the unspoken part of her message. And she had focused on him. She'd held his hand through the whole thing. The derailment of his career. The smoldering anger. The humiliation. She'd helped him de-emphasize his career, appreciate the beauty of what they had, and find a new sense of purpose in life. She'd helped him forget the city and open his eyes to the grandeur of nature—the mountains, rivers, woods, and high desert—in the Four Corners. Over time, though he'd always said as much, the focal point of his life honestly and truly became her. She became his main reason for living, and he wondered what he'd ever done to deserve her.

  "By the time you get home with all your fish, I'll probably be feeling better and we can take a nice walk down along the river."

  He took a huge breath. "Okay."

  *****

  Hannah eventually fell back to sleep, but Arkin remained wide awake, unable to unwind. He thought about what fishing gear he'd need to assemble in the morning. Fly fishing always reminded Arkin of Roland Sheffield, not only because it was something Sheffield taught him to do, but more so because it had come to stand as a sort of symbol of the part Sheffield had once played in his life. And right on cue, Arkin's memory wandered back to a windowless government conference room in Washington, D.C., where a skeptical intelligence oversight panel sat listening to Sheffield's emphatic plea that Arkin, a junior agent sitting just behind him at the long table, be named lead agent of a major investigation involving a terrorist cell that was plotting a machine-gun attack on commuting employees queued up at the front gate of the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  "I'll remind you that it was Agent Arkin who did all the footwork, found and recruited our key informant, and developed the intelligence that put us onto this group in the first place," Sheffield said. "Add to that the fact that he's a Naval Academy grad, a lawyer, a decorated recon marine, and, by the way, has enough brains in his skull to be a bona fide chess master. What the hell more could you people possibly want?"

  "Investigative experience," one of the others muttered in a tone that suggested he was near surrender.

  "Well, believe me, this is one of those times when brains, fire in the belly, and sheer ability trump experience," Sheffield answered. "Speaking of experience, in my experience, experience often equates to complacency. Come count the number of rotund specimens around the conference table at the two o'clock case managers meeting this afternoon." The panel was silent. "Look, I believe in him. That should be good enough for you."

  Five weeks later, a day after Arkin's team rolled up the entire cell, disrupting a major terrorist plot and chalking up seven federal indictments in the process, Arkin stood in Sheffield's corner office with its peek-a-boo view of the Washington Monument. Sheffield had just spent five minutes gushing about how proud he was of Arkin. How he'd taken a gamble on him, and his gamble had paid off beyond his wildest dreams. "So what do you want?" Sheffield asked.

  "What do I want?"

  "You just broke the biggest case our fledgling outfit has ever seen. You get a reward. What do you want? A bonus? A choice assignment? Some time off?"

  Arkin thought for a moment. "I'd like to try fishing."

  "Try fishing?" Sheffield said with a smile. "You've never been fishing? And you call yourself an American?"

  Despite himself, Arkin had winced. "My father. . . ." He'd held his tongue. But his mind had kept going. Never took me fishing. Never played catch with me. Never came to watch my baseball games or chess matches or piano recitals. Not once. He was always too busy growing his empire, of which I was nothing more than a subsidiary, only valued to the extent that I made the emperor look good.

  Sheffield had stared, his expression changing from teasing to sympathetic. Even to understanding. "I'll take you myself."

  And he did. Well before dawn on the very next Saturday, he picked Arkin up from his apartment—the back of his SUV loaded with fly fishing gear, bags of salami sandwiches, and a cooler of beer—and drove him out to a tributary of the Shenandoah River that flowed off the Blue Ridge. Two hours later, they stood, each in a pair of Sheffield's hip waders, in shin-deep water.

  "This is a blue-ribbon trout stream," Sheffield said. "Or so they say. Fishing tackle shop owners are a bit like political appointees. They tend to tell you whatever they think you want to hear."

  "So which of these do I use?" Arkin asked, picking through a small box of artificial flies.

  "Get that little tan-colored one in the lower-left corner. That's a caddis. I've had good luck with those out here this time of year. You know how to tie an improved clinch knot?"

  "Remember, Roland, I was deprived of a normal American boyhood. I don't even know how to tie an unimproved clinch knot."

  Before long, Arkin, with Sheffield's close supervision and constant instruction, was casting out into the creek.

  "An easy way to start is with what they call the ten o'clock to two o'clock casting arc. But really, the key to a tight loop and accurate casting is to make sure your rod tip is traveling straight, and that you're patient and let the line roll out behind you before you cast forward."

  Despite Sheffield's simple instruction, Arkin kept starting his forward casts prematurely.

  "Patience, Nathaniel. And a lighter touch wouldn't hurt. We aren't whipping the bulls of Pamplona here."

  Arkin tried again, his cast landing short, his line falling from the air in random curves.

  "You're jerking. Again, smooth acceleration to an abrupt stop."

  Eventually, Sheffield rigged another rod and began fishing himself, just downstream from Arkin. They fished for two hours, twice pausing to change flies, Sheffield landing half a dozen fish, Arkin not getting so much as a nibble. Finally, as Arkin began to get into the groove, began to feel as though his casts were landing where he wanted them to, his fly disappeared from the surface with a small splash. He raised his rod tip as Sheffield had instructed, only to see it bend downward from the pull of a fighting fish.

  "I have one!"

  "You're supposed to say 'fish on.'"

  "Fish on!"

  "Good. Take it slow."

  "I think it's big. Look how the pole is bending!" Arkin half laughed, grinning from ear to ear, feeling every bit of the fight through the light three-weight rod.

  He reeled in and brought his rod tip over to where Sheffield waited with a net. Sheffield scooped into the water below his fishing line and pulled out what Arkin first took to be a small stick. He missed him, Arkin thought.

  "A whopper!" Sheffield said, pulling the fish out of the net by the shaft of the tiny hook caught in its lip. He held out an olive-colored trout, with distinctive red and yellow spots, that couldn't have been more than four inches long. Arkin wondered how the thing had even fit the hook in its mouth.

  "That, young Nathaniel, is a beautiful specimen of Salvelinus fontinalis, better known as the eastern brook trout."

  "It's sm
aller than I expected."

  "Well, now. You could do worse for a first fish. Mine was nothing but a damned grass carp. Be proud."

  "Proud?"

  "Let's have a celebratory beer and salami sandwich."

  They'd spent the next hour sitting on boulders next to the stream, trading Naval Academy stories. Trading war stories. Talking about favorite movies, restaurants, wines, and bourbons. They even touched on the fact that they'd each, as children, been more or less ignored by semi-absentee fathers who largely neglected their emotional needs. Arkin was surprised at how much they had in common. To his astonishment, Sheffield was even an avid chess player, and, like Arkin, essentially idolized Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. They pledged to play each other at least once a week, perhaps over lunch on Fridays.

  They fished more, drank more beer, and eventually got back in Sheffield's car and drove up onto Skyline Drive to watch the sun set from a nearby viewpoint just inside Shenandoah National Park.

  *****

  The sound of distant thunder brought Arkin back to the present. He got out of bed, slipped on a robe, and went down to the desk in the finished section of their basement. There, he pulled a large leather-bound photo album off a high shelf. He clicked on his reading lamp, sat down at the desk, and began flipping pages until he found what he was looking for—a spread of pictures he and Hannah took during a weekend trip to the Sheffields' beach house in North Carolina's Outer Banks. There they all were, in happier times—Arkin, Hannah with a full head of beautiful hair and glowing skin, and the late Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield, she in white linen, he in a seersucker suit—grazing over a large silver platter of clams casino and oysters on the half shell, strolling a sandy Nag's Head beach at sunset, standing on the balcony with the Atlantic surf crashing across the beach behind them, raising their wine glasses in a toast, all smiles. The wine, Arkin recalled, had been a Haut-Brion '82—a superb vintage from one of the Premiers Crus of Bordeaux—that Sheffield brought out of his cellar to celebrate Arkin having just rolled up the terrorist cell planning the MANPADS attack at Andrews Air Force Base. It had paired perfectly with Claudia Sheffield's beef Wellington—a dish that Roland confided was her signature.

  It all couldn't have been more than seven years ago. But so much had changed since. What he wouldn't give to go back. To have everyone back, happy and healthy.

  He stared at one shot in particular—a close-up of Sheffield, taken by Hannah—that he always thought really captured his old boss's essence. It was the expression on his face. One of deep intelligence, compassion, empathy. He was one of those rare birds who could see things in you that you couldn't even see for yourself. He got people. Understood what made them tick. Saw their hidden strengths and weaknesses. Knew how to help them heal their wounds.

  Hannah had taken the photo just before he and Sheffield had a long discussion in the study while the ladies cleaned up from dinner. In the photo, Sheffield sat smoking a Dominican cigar at his teak desk with an original Brinkman oil painting of the frigate U.S.S. Constitution hanging on the wall behind him. Arkin remembered sitting on the brown leather couch, a 20-year-old Islay Scotch with three ice cubes in a crystal tumbler in his hand. They'd ended up discussing their relationships with their late fathers—Sheffield's a rear-admiral, Arkin's a federal judge. Sheffield was surprisingly forthcoming about his tumultuous relationship with his own father. But what really stuck in Arkin's memory was Sheffield's certainty that the late Judge Hon. David Arkin—however hard, however demeaning he might have been, however warped and driven to cruelty by his own self-esteem issues—had been very proud of his son. Arkin could rest assured that, deep down in his heart, his father had loved him. "Trust me on this," Sheffield had said, though he'd never met Arkin's father. "You're as much as anyone could ever want in a son. If I'd had a son, I'd want him to be you."

  Arkin remembered that his abdomen had clenched as he tried to stifle its convulsion—tried to stifle the cathartic sob that wanted, so badly, to come out. It was as close as he'd come to crying in many years. Sheffield's words had filled him with both great, body-warming joy and heavy, dark sadness. He didn't know which way the surge of emotion would take him, and he found the lack of control profoundly disconcerting. "I love that painting of the Constitution," he'd said, gesturing toward the wall behind Sheffield, desperate to change the subject, his voice tight.

  Sheffield, no doubt knowing exactly what Arkin was thinking, had nodded. "Why don't you pair that scotch with a nice cigar from the humidor on the shelf there while I go tie down the kayaks for the night?"

  EIGHT

  Arkin was just emerging from the front door, fishing tackle in hand, when Pratt pulled into the driveway in his truck. Hannah came out onto the porch to see them off. She was wearing her brunette wig, which wasn't too far off her pre-chemo hairstyle. But Arkin still didn't think it looked right, probably because her eyebrows were almost gone.

  "John, you tell that little princess of yours that we loved her ladybug cookie," she shouted down to them.

  Pratt smiled and tipped his hat. Arkin threw his gear in the bed and they set off for Morrison's house, deep in the forest, several miles up Florida Road.

  "Why doesn't the ape meet us down in town?" Arkin asked. "We're just going to have to double back."

  "No big deal. It's my turn to drive anyway."

  Morrison lived in an honest-to-goodness log cabin that he'd built himself. A simple affair of rough-hewn logs, thick chinking, a few square windows and a simple tin roof. It was only four finished rooms and a basement, but he'd built a separate garage at the top of his driveway, set back 100 feet from the road. Around the back, he'd built a corral for his two horses—one Arabian, one mustang caught by the Bureau of Land Management and auctioned off. It was isolated, but that was how he liked it.

  Pratt and Arkin parked the truck and followed the sound of Morrison talking to his horses around back to find him working with his Arabian, a beautiful dark brown stallion. A magnificent horse of a quality Arkin had rarely seen. On its flank was an odd, swooping brand that looked to Arkin like a modified character from the Persian alphabet. Morrison was standing on the lowest board of his four-board fence, brushing the stallion's mane with one hand, feeding it a carrot with the other.

  "That's a beautiful horse," Pratt said.

  "Thank you," Morrison said after spitting what looked like half a cup of tobacco juice out of the corner of his mouth.

  "Where did you get it?"

  "Texas."

  Pratt stepped forward for a closer examination. He ran his palm down the animal's impressive shoulder, then along its body until his hand came to the brand which he partially traced with his index finger. He grinned. "Texas, my ass."

  Morrison grinned too. "You're not half as dumb as you look, Spanky."

  "Are you ever going to plant anything in this weed patch of yard?" Arkin asked. "Couple of rose bushes? Anything?"

  "Rome wasn't built in a day."

  As they made their way to the front of the house, Arkin spotted a powder blue toilet lying on its side in the back of Morrison's old pickup, strapped down with yellow nylon cargo webbing.

  "What's with the toilet?"

  "That's no mere toilet, sir."

  "No?"

  "It's a 1975 American Standard Cadet with a 3.4-gallon flush. Made in the U.S. of A."

  "Do I even need to ask?"

  "I take it you aren't privy to the dirty little secret of the 1992 Energy Policy Act."

  "Enlighten me."

  "It made it unlawful to install toilets using any more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. And that, sir, simply will not do."

  "For some of us."

  "The Act forced normally upstanding but large-coloned people to literally smuggle new toilets in from Canada."

  "So it's contraband."

  "It's the Cuban cigar of shitters. And the law is unconstitutional on its face, since it discriminates against the large-coloned."

  "So now the large-coloned are a constitutionall
y protected class."

  "As the founding fathers intended. Benjamin Franklin had a huge colon."

  "Really?" Pratt asked.

  "It's time we came out of the shadows and held our heads high."

  "Good for you," Arkin said.

  "You're being sarcastic."

  "Me?"

  "You're mathematically inclined. Let me ask you something. If you can flush a 3.4-gallon toilet once, but have to flush a 1.6-gallon toilet three times, who's winning if we go with the 1.6? Mother Nature or the robber barons of the toilet water industry?"

  "An excellent question. Did you go to Canada for this?"

  "Some 34-year-old retired Microsoft millionaire from Seattle is remodeling a Victorian down on 3rd. I salvaged it."

  "A decades-old used toilet."

  "That's right."

  "You're a very strange man, Morrison."

  "Compared to you?"

  "Can we go fishing?" Pratt said.

  *****

  They put in at the end of a dirt road a few miles south of the New Mexico-Colorado border, dragging Pratt's river dory down to the left bank of the Animas, loading their fishing tackle and a cooler of food and beverages, then shoving off. The river ran swift in this stretch, but Pratt was an experienced boatman and guided them around several hazards before the water widened and slowed. They floated past a handful of small, dusty, fenced-in pastures, then pulled off at a right bank sandbar under a rocky ridge a quarter mile downriver from the put-in. There, they popped open some beers and fished a riffle after tying small blue-wing olive flies to the ends of their lines. The water was cold and clear, and the air smelled of dried wild grasses. Before long, they'd each landed a rainbow trout—Morrison's a whopping 22 inches long. As it was another unseasonably warm day, they were soon wearing nothing but T-shirts under their chest waders. At one point, Morrison lost his footing and fell in. After that, he wore nothing but the waders while waiting for his shirt to dry on a convenient tree branch. Pratt spotted a tattoo on his left shoulder. It was a small dagger with the number "86" written next to it.