by Chuck Logan
After the burial and the food and condolences at the old house, they took a drive to catch up. And it just started to happen right there in the front seat. Darlene busting out of her blouse and shaking out her strawberry red hair and coming on like a slow sexual tremor pent up and now unleashed, and she went for his crotch with a practiced precision that took his breath away.
Shit, man; looking into an open grave will do that to people, bring up the appetites real sharp!
With a mighty act of will, Morgon pushed her away, and she was hurt and blurted, “I Thought you always wanted this!” Morgon just shook his head and had two thoughts: Billy died for nothing, and people, women especially, will let you down every damn time.
So the way it worked out, Billy had been right. Darlene was a promiscuous cunt who did like it, and Morgon had killed his asshole brother out of a misguided sense of upholding the rules. Talk about a weird sensation, like he was back in the beginning of the Bible with Cain and Abel or some fucking equally desolate place. After the funeral he made two resolutions: He’d never see Darlene again. And he’d do something to make up for Billy’s death.
One thing was clear. He had a big problem when it came to deciding who gets to live and who needs to die. What he needed was some hard and fast rules that wouldn’t come back on him. Rules he could rely on, with hard-eyed men to back them up. So when the test came around for Special Forces, he was the first to sign up.
His eyes travel to the porch of the big house, where John and Amanda are engaged in lively conversation. Calmly, he looks over the grounds and the house and winds up staring into the future. The estate has the solidity of a feudal castle; the county is the Rivard’s benign fiefdom. And he is being groomed to be the big dog who stands guard in the night. So go with it, learn to whack a little white ball around and smoke an occasional cigar. Deputy Jump. First Deputy Jump. Rivard County Sheriff Morgon Jump. Do a little discreet Agency work on the side to keep his hand in and get the big paydays. His eyes drift back to the porch, to Amanda’s slender patrician profile.
Chapter Forty-Three
After Jesse puts in a fast kettle-bell circuit, she showers, gets dressed, pats hula boy on his charred head for good luck, and heads for the nurses’ station to sign out for a meeting with Janet. In a few minutes she’s walking easy in snug running shorts, a sports halter, and flip-flops through a crowd on the first floor that no longer intimidates her. She has her notebook tucked under her arm, and she’s talking on her cell to her mother.
“No, Mom, Terry is a sweet guy, and we’ll stay friends, but that’s as far as it goes. About the hospital stuff, I’m not out of the woods yet.” Pause. “The rooms are nice, better than a college dorm. It’s like a halfway house where you do your own laundry, cook.” Pause. “Hey. I can cook.” Then Jesse leans back and winds a finger in her hair that now curls over her ears for the first time in two years. “Well, at least I can go shopping on my own.” Another pause. “I don’t know for sure; maybe I’ll be living there in a month . . .”
Depending . . .
After ending the call, she shrugs off a few surreptitious stares because she’s showing lots of double-whammy leg—shapely and disfigured. Her face is animated with determination because she’s done her homework and, today, by agreement, she’s setting the agenda in her meeting with Janet.
Automatically, she catalogs wars in the foot parade in the hall. The Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan stride. Vietnam is a mixed bag—some walk, some shuffle. Korea uses a cane. The Big One rides in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank in tow. The amputations, brain injuries, and real bad combat-stress casualties are kept pretty much behind closed doors. Out the windows she sees a bright July sky. A light-rail line runs by the hospital, people come and go, rush hour hums on the freeway.
She meets Janet at the visitor’s entrance next to the diminutive bronze statue of Bob Hope commemorating his work on behalf of the USO. She wears loose denims and a casual blouse and tennis shoes. When she sees Jesse, she asks, “You sure you wanna go outside?”
“You got anything against fresh air?”
“It’s hot outside.”
Jesse scans the halls briefly, the people. “It’s more open outside.”
They exit the building and walk around the side to a quiet wooded area with old picnic tables. They sit down, and Jesse slaps her notebook on the table. “Okay, first the ground rules. How confidential is this conversation?”
“The bright line in the business is I have to report the risk of harm, to self or others.”
Jesse appraises Janet. “Which could put you in an interesting position job-wise—say—if the harm reported is to your employer, the government.”
“How do you mean, exactly,” Janet asks, watching Jesse carefully.
“I mean the guy who executed my crew chief wasn’t some drive-by insurgent. He was speaking English like an American.”
Now Janet nibbles her lower lip between her teeth, watching Jesse more closely. She narrows her eyes, and the nibble has become a slightly nervous bite. “The after-action report in your records was quite specific; your crew was ambushed by insurgents and killed in the initial explosion and the crash.”
“Total bullshit,” Jesse says, leaning across the table. “When you let Sam in to see me, he told me what really happened that day. That must have shocked the wheels to turning in my head, huh?”
“And he knows what really happened how?” Janet has crossed her arms across her chest.
“He did some checking around. He used to be a county deputy in Grand Forks. He talked to the mission commander that day, Major Colbert, who was flying the other Hawk, the person who got to the crash first. Greg, that’s Major Colbert, saw me bring my Hawk down. I rode it in. But then Greg had to stand off while he called in the medevac, for like five minutes—waiting for the dust from the explosion to clear. He couldn’t see anything through that cloud.”
Jesse pauses for emphasis. “Also, the after-action report doesn’t say it wasn’t your ordinary milk run. It was a classified mission, and Major Colbert was flying a special operator working with the Iraqi cops. A spook.”
“Now it’s spooks?”
“You bet.” Jesse nods. “Now Sam . . .”
“The old sergeant who used to be a cop,” Janet interjects.
“Correct.” Jesse flips open her notebook to a page on which the outline of a helicopter is sketched, dotted with Xs. “Sam drew this diagram to show me how it really went down.”
“Okaaay.” Janet shifts on the bench and listens while Jesse leads her step by step through Sam’s scenario.
In summation, Jesse says, “So Marge’s body winds up here, six feet to the left front of the cockpit. She couldn’t have been thrown out at that angle, not in her gunner harness. She had to get out on her own. That’s where she was killed.” Jesse takes a breath. “Where I saw her killed.”
“You’re in a little danger of spinning out here,” Janet says soberly.
“C’mon, think like a cop, remember. The asshole would have given me the same, except I was buried in debris, dirt . . . and Laura. See, the props came apart on impact and sliced through the cockpit . . .”
Janet stares at Jesse for a moment.
“Back off that look,” Jesse cautions. “Not like we were soccer moms getting mugged on the way to Starbucks. North Dakota Guard ain’t exactly Combat City, but we all knew this could happen, and it did. Clear?”
“Clear. Keep going . . .”
“So why do you kill the survivors?”
“So there’s no witnesses,” Janet says slowly. “But witnesses to what?” Then she shakes her head. “The report said the mission was on the way to busting a smuggling operation in a town miles from where you were hit.”
“I’m just telling you what it says here.” Jesse taps the notebook.
“If there’s an alternative to the official report, the logical solution has to be that the insurgents came in and did it.” Janet bites her lip. “Don’t you think?”
/> “If that’s the case, why change the facts on the report? Unless we flew into something we weren’t supposed to?”
In the ensuing silence Jesse takes a moment to study her counselor across the table, and what she sees is a woman who has reached an uncomfortable boundary. “This isn’t what you had in mind when you told me to get my head out of my ass, huh?” she asks carefully.
“This is beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory. My colleagues on the second floor might say you’re manufacturing false beliefs in the face of superior evidence, like, for instance, the after-action report,” Janet says.
“Sounds like the company line,” Jesse says.
“They’d say you’re flirting with delusions, and delusions typically occur in the context of neurological disorders . . .”
Jesse smiles, undeterred, and says, “Like embroidering around the edges of post-traumatic amnesia, huh?”
“It would come to mind,” Janet says. “You tell this to anyone else on two, and they might put you back on the Seroquel.”
Jesse shakes her head. “There are legitimate questions here,” she says, pointing to the notebook sketch. “Sam thinks something stinks about Marge’s death. He says no phones, no emails.”
“Now you are spiraling out,” Janet says slowly. “It’s good you’re motivated and taxing your memory to analyze the crash. The problem is—like I said—your conclusions sound delusional.”
“Yeah, well, Sam’s a lot of things, but delusional isn’t one of them.” Jesse is adamant. “So what do you think?” she asks.
Janet answers carefully. “I think anything that orients you, alert, in that crash site is helpful. But now you’ve brought they into the picture.”
Jesse smiles again. “You mean the conspiratorial they of tinfoil hats and little green men in the mailbox?”
“Exactly.”
“And now you’re a bit concerned if this gets around,” Jesse points at the notebook on the table, “like, your department head will chew your butt because it was your idea to take me off the meds, huh?”
“Let’s say you have my full attention,” Janet says, tapping the notebook page. “Can I make copies of this?” she asks.
“Sure.”
As she closes the notebook, Janet pauses to point to the star doodles all over the cover. “You ever figure out what these were about?”
“Dunno. Must have been the drugs, huh?”
Chapter Forty-Four
Davis has scared up a rod and some tackle from a basement closet and is casting a line off the dock when the cold cell rings at three in the afternoon.
“How’s it going, Mr. Lemmer?”
“Gone fishing. I just caught a fair-sized bass. Threw it back. How’s ’bout you?”
“Appert drew a blank on the two dead Zetas, which is no surprise. And nobody has a single hair out of place about your former persona dying in a car fire.”
“So nothing’s turned up?”
“It’s real quiet out there, nary a ripple.”
“So maybe I died for nothing.”
“Think positive. The North Atlantic was motionless as a millpond before the big ship hit the berg. And besides, I’m working my trap lines. So hang tight and enjoy your paid vacation. I’ll be in touch.”
And he was gone.
The days blended together, lazy hot. In the morning cool he’d tuck a magazine into the AR and run the trails around the lake, then finish up with a swim and shower. In the afternoons he put himself through intense interval sets on the free weights in a corner of the basement. He skipped rope. He shadow-boxed. He set up targets at 200, 300, and 400 yards down the lakeshore and burned a few rounds to check the zero on the scoped Remington.
Once he woke up at three in the morning with vivid images throbbing behind his eyes and literal sensations burning in his hands, of digging Jesse Kraig from the charnel pit of her helicopter cockpit. Unable to sleep, he‘d made a pot of coffee and sat out in the dark firing up cigarette after cigarette with the dead Mexican’s lighter.
Restless, he explored the house. Puttering in an upstairs bedroom closet he’d discovered a battered, peeling steamer trunk. Inside he found a bundle wrapped in oilcloth that contained three ancient books and two mildewed picture frames. The books were a King James Bible, an edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, and a ragged copy of Moby Dick. One of the frames showcased a darkish, wet plate photo circa 1875, according to the date scrawled in ink in the corner. It portrayed a bearded man with hooded eyes standing stiffly next to a cramped homestead cabin. The small lake in the background was clearly the body of water the current house was sited on.
Preserved under glass in the second frame he found an abbreviated, typed history of the original squatter who homesteaded this location. Jeremiah Moffet had served with the Wisconsin Regiment of the Iron Brigade until a Miné ball took his vocal cords the first day at Gettysburg. Hence the local name: Dummy Lake. Moffet lived out his days a recluse, with only the three books for companionship. A sentence was devoted to the Melville, noting that it had been published in 1851 and that Moffet had carried it in his pack the first two years of the war. Intrigued, Davis opened the musty cover and traced his fingers over translucent pages that were smudged with dirt and soot and gnawed by sparks.
Peering into the opaque depths of Moffet’s Gettysburg stare, Davis tried to imagine the man as a youth reading this very book, his lips moving by campfire light, as he drifted ever closer, not unlike the doomed crew of the Pequod on their ocean, to the big fight in Pennsylvania.
Which brought him to the current drift of his own life. He’d looked up into the bright summer sky and followed a hawk that floated on the thermals high above the lake. The hawk was not sightseeing. The hawk had one relentless forward gear and two ten-power scopes for eyes. As he tracked the gliding hawk, Davis mused, Quo Vadis, Buddy? What do you see waiting for me over the next hill? Where am I headed?
And a cool premonition had insinuated in the warm afternoon air, and then, icy as a finger bone, it scratched the certain knowledge on his heart: There are no old, tame hawks.
Chapter Forty-Five
Morgon wheels his 4Runner off the small Ford dealership at the north end of Lakeside, where he’s just put money down and signed a purchase agreement on a new Expedition EL with all the trimmings. Buy local. There’s no sense driving an import in this Michigan economy when he’s about to matriculate into the Rivard County Sheriff’s Department.
His next stop is a block off Main Street at the office of Danny Larsen, the architect who produced the Riverfront sketch that hangs on Amanda’s office wall. Danny gets up from his drafting table when he sees Morgon come through the door.
“Rattle the pots and pans. Amanda’s decided to throw John a party,” Morgon calls out, shaking Danny’s hand. “Last hurrah kind of thing. He’s been called to testify at a Senate committee, and when he returns, we want to give him a send-up. Be nice if we could reveal the riverfront project as a surprise. Can you pull out the stops and speed up work on the model?”
Danny takes Morgon into the office’s back room, where a cardboard three-dimensional scale model is in progress. Over coffee, they spend half an hour discussing the proposed renovation of the empty Rivard Lumber Mill that overlooks the Lakeside harbor. Amanda had been impressed when Morgon proposed rehabilitating the old post and beam structure into an airy galleria. Her interest increased when he suggested filling the building with boutiques, a dance studio, and an art gallery featuring summer artists. Morgon envisioned the mill connecting via a boardwalk to another Rivard Foundation property at the other end of the harbor—the former steamship line office. Morgon thought that the brick office would convert nicely into a restaurant.
After leaving the architect’s office, Morgon drives down to the actual waterfront and parks next to the steamship office. He gets out, walks over, and sits on the office steps to have a cigarette. Only two sailboats are moored inside the breakwater, and the entire waterfront has the shabby feel of a deserted
warehouse district. Most people shop and play at a strip of box stores a mile down the highway. Morgon envisions a carousel along the boardwalk, maybe some popcorn kiosks. Why not make it a friendly space for people to bring their kids? As long as he’s on the general subject, he tries to picture Amanda as wife and mother. Just as he’s considering the interesting prospect of being author of, and witness to, a happy childhood, his phone buzzes in his pocket. He brings it out, selects the message, and sees Brian Cawker’s number at the top of the queue. The encrypted message cuts his fantasy to ribbons: “You know a master sergeant Samuel Dillon from the North Dakota National Guard?” DILLON. Etched black camo letters on a tunic over master jump wings and a combat infantry badge with three stars. Balad. The hospital room. The old sergeant.
Morgon taps the slideshow function, and up pops a photo of a weather-worn face off a military ID, and Morgon almost drops the cigarette from his fingers in a shiver of confirming recognition. He hits the call icon and keeps his voice steady despite his accelerated heartbeat. “Don’t know him. Saw him once.”
“Well, he’s interested in getting to know you.”
“Tell me,” Morgon says tightly, between puffs on his cigarette.
“I got into that office we talked about, the one in the big city. Didn’t find anything on Davis. But there was an envelope in the desk that contained a brief note and a thumb drive. The letter was postmarked from LZ Anaconda, military APO return address from a chaplain Kurt Lundquist . . .”
“Who’s he?”
“Doesn’t matter; it’s disinformation. The anonymous note asks the nosey Pentagon colonel for a favor, to run a facial ID check off a photo grab on the thumb drive, to match it against military files going back ten years. I suspect these guys are in the game because there’s a hint of inside baseball; the anonymous sender requests that a response be sent to a home address otherwise not mentioned.”