by Chuck Logan
Immediately he takes his cell from his pocket, taps in a predial setting, and hopes the encrypted software is as good as advertised. Morgon answers on the second ring.
“It’s ugly. He has your face off an old army ID. The rest of the place is clean. So what’s the play?”
Morgon answers calmly, “I’m thinking this guy is not going to cooperate or be turned by money, and no way he goes gentle into a capture situation. A whole operation is riding on this, so you have to make him go away. If we have to, we’ll backfill with his Pentagon contact in D.C. So be creative . . .”
Cawker pauses to read between the lines. “Got it.”
Morgon, standing behind his Expedition in the driveway beneath the carriage house lights, slips his phone back in his pocket and savors his first executive decision. As he reaches into the cargo compartment to remove his suitcase, Amanda comes around from the passenger side and cocks her head.
“Roger,” Morgon shrugs. “Just some leftover housekeeping.”
Cawker puts his phone away and takes a moment to center down. It’s not his call and way above his pay grade; the people behind Morgon, for politically sensitive reasons emanating from the mission in Iraq, have relegated Sam Dillon to the wrong side of the Old Fickle Fuckin’ Inshallah Factor. Don’t overthink it, mate. Go to work.
Immediately Cawker folds the photocopy of Morgon’s ID and slips it in his pocket. Then he goes to the spare bedroom and retrieves the Colt and sticks it in his waistband. Practical, he goes to the kitchen and checks the refrigerator to see what’s on hand to eat. No telling how long he’ll be here waiting for Dillon to return. He’s eyeing a plastic deli container of meatballs when he learns that he won’t be waiting that long.
First he hears the truck pull up to the front curb. He flips off the flashlight, and by the time the truck door slams, he’s at the front door watching through the peephole as Sam Dillon walks up the sidewalk. The Colt is out. A slow metal clash sounds as a round jacks into the chamber. His eye never moves from the peephole. In the porch light the lean, hangdog-faced Dillon, at sixty, looks like he can still trade body blows and barely break a sweat. The house key comes out. Right-handed. Cawker exhales; he’s got maybe four seconds. Then he squints in the spill light off the porch coming through the living-room curtains. There’s this heart-shaped pillow on the couch, the embroidered letters barely discernable, but he makes out: Anna Grace. All speed and stealth, and past mere thinking, he crosses the room, seizes the pillow, and darts back to behind the door as the key turns in the lock.
Cawker has never been through the U.S. Army’s Survival School to be tested for resilience. So he’s never paid much attention to the research about Special Forces types, like Morgon, who produce highly elevated levels of neuropeptide Y. NPY is an amino acid that, among other things, your brain employs to quash fear and keep you thinking clearly when people around you are paralyzed by stress.
Freud joked that the Irish were immune to psychoanalysis. Cawker accepts as his birthright that Australians have the same unfussy response to fear.
Sam Dillon steps through the door into his darkened house and Cawker kicks the door shut and then, feet perfectly planted, slams the pillow into Sam’s face, smothering his startled cry. Almost simultaneously he hammers the butt of the Colt into the center of the pillow with tremendous force. Sam staggers back, knees buckling, flailing his hands up defensively. Cawker follows him down, left hand maintaining heavy pressure on the pillow. Keeping control of the trigger, he jams the butt of the Colt into Sam’s groping right palm. The semiconscious man’s fingers seize, explore, struggle as Cawker’s sturdy, iron-bending fingers close over Sam’s weaker grip. Now Cawker has pinned Sam’s right arm between his knees—firmly but not overly so—and, using his knees as fulcrum, he leverages the pistol up and mashes the muzzle into the pillow that gags Sam’s face. For a second Sam attempts a feeble rally, to steer the weapon away, but Cawker, grunting with the effort, plunges the barrel deep into the pillow, overcomes the resistance of Sam’s frantic right hand, and presses the trigger.
Sam’s body jerks rigid with the impact and then slumps back against the wall. Cordite sequins sparkle briefly in the close air, splattered bits of skull and brains dot the door along with skeins of burned thread and pillow stuffing. The shot was muffled—no louder than a car backfiring down the block—but Cawker stays crouched over his kill for several seconds, listening, as his heartbeat returns to normal. Then, slowly, he releases his grip on Dillon’s limp hand and lets it fall, fingers uncurling around the pistol. The hand flops into the dead man’s lap, and his shattered face effects a slightly tarred-and-feathered aspect, bearded in bloody tufts of the ruptured cushion.
Cawker presses the still-twitching index finger into the trigger guard and stands up to study the scene. The corpse is attired in faded jeans, an ancient gray T-shirt with an Air Cav patch, and tennis shoes. Cawker inspects the right arm and hand for signs of bruising or swelling and sees none. He spends a moment evaluating the angle of the entry wound just below the nose. The extensive soft-tissue and bone damage effectively disguises any evidence of a stunning blow to the face, and the shot angle is consistent with a self-inflicted wound administered by a right-handed man. The expended cartridge casing lays on the carpet. A forensic team will find gunshot residue on Sam Dillon’s fingers. And something else. Cawker gets up, pads down the hall to the master bedroom, and returns carrying the framed photo of Anna Grace Dillon with the memorial card insert. He leans over and places the framed photo at Dillon’s feet.
Five minutes later, pedaling his stolen bike through the dark, headed back to his motel, he recalls reading that an American veteran commits suicide every eighty minutes.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Late afternoon, after taking some sign-off tests in speech therapy, Jesse’s back in her room during a free period before lunch. The Post-It notes have long vanished from the walls and doorway to the bathroom. She plugs in her iPod headset and flicks on “Not Ready to Make Nice” by the Dixie Chicks. Then she takes a seat, cross-legged on the floor, and starts paging through her childish notebook. Exploring the scribbles and the clumsy words is like backtracking a staggering zombie. No brain damage. Slight concussion. Trauma, sure. It had to be the damn drugs.
At first, her ventures into memory retrieval were like sinking into murky water to locate debris, not unlike the video last summer as British Petroleum fumbled to repair its busted pipe in the Gulf—sending robotic submersibles down into the dark, where the pressure is a thousand pounds per square inch.
Then . . .
Huh? She looks up and sees Tony leaning over, shaking her arm. She removes the headset as he nods toward the hall. “Call at the desk from your mom; you didn’t answer your cell.”
A moment later she takes the phone the nurse hands over the desk. “Mom, it’s me. What’s up?”
Tony watches the blood drain from Jesse’s face as she drops the receiver. He steps in, deftly catches the phone, raises it, and says, “Captain Kraig will call you back directly. She needs a minute.” Then he turns to Jesse.
“Sam—the old sergeant who was my crew chief, who came to visit—he’s dead,” she whispers.
After composing herself, she calls her mother back to get the sketchy details. Then she goes to the computer station and brings up the front page of this morning’s Grand Forks Herald. It reads: Retired Grand Forks deputy Samuel Dillon was found in his Seward Ave. home last night by his daughter. Unconfirmed sources close to the Sheriff’s Office speculated the death appeared to be self-inflicted. A picture of Dillon’s wife, who succumbed to cancer last year, was found at his feet.
Jesse walks aimlessly. Tony shadows her as she wanders down the stairs, and when the stairs end, she comes out in the basement corridor. Most of the people she passes are older patients, a lot of big bellies stretching the flags and eagles on their T-shirts. She blinks and stares and then focuses her gaze at a phone on the wall. A panel on the phone offers the helpful tip: LOST
? CALL 2025.
Never really thought about it. Didn’t even take all the army lectures seriously. Now she contemplates the black vacuum that is really all the way off the map. Momentary Depression? All-consuming world-weary melancholy? Sam could be cranky but dark?
No memory problems now. This one night over the desert, flying with a Kiowa escort, the crews got into an ’80s sing-along to break the tedium: Culture Club, daring the Iraqi night with joking lyrics about people who want to hurt you and make you cry. And Sam bitching on the comms: Anybody know any Hank Williams?
Just before the tears start, Tony is there. “You want to go upstairs? Janet cleared her schedule.”
Janet sits and listens quietly. Her drawn facial expression suggests she is in the presence of her profession’s most hated enemy as Jesse emits a sardonic laugh. “You pick up the phone to call the VA, and the first thing the recording says is, ‘If you’re thinking of harming yourself call 911.’” She shrugs. “My mom told me that. I didn’t know . . .”
Janet passes a card with her cell phone number. “Anything. Later tonight? If you want to talk?”
Jesse accepts the card and scrutinizes the type: Psychological Assessment. Psychotherapy. Consultation. Forensic Evaluation. An enervating wave beats down her thoughts, like a black wind in the wheat. “Something I never told you. Maybe should have. That day we went down? Sam was scheduled to fly crew chief. Marge subbed in for him . . .”
Jesse shakes it off, stands up, and squares her shoulders. “I’ll be okay.” She turns and leaves the room. The sadness is palpable on Janet’s face when she sees that Jesse left her card behind, on the desk.
***
Workout. Work it out.
The next day Jesse stays in her room and skips her appointments. Dripping sweat, she picks up the kettle bell for the third muscle-burning circuit and takes a stance, feet spread, with the weight hanging in her hands between her knees. She starts by hiking the bell back, two-handed, between her legs. Deep squat, piston the legs straight and thrust with the hips on the upswing and fix on the point where the kettle bell reaches its apex at about her bra line. The bell comes up, hangs briefly on the momentum, and, as it starts to swing down, Tony walks in. He holds up his hand. It’s an envelope, a letter.
Boom!
The kettle bell crashes to the linoleum floor like a thirty-five-pound cannonball—which it basically is. The flash of recognition is instant when she sees the return address in angular printing she remembers from army paperwork. Sam Dillon, Seward Ave. Grand Forks.
“You want me to stay?” Tony asks.
“No, I have to do this alone.” She wipes sweat from her palms on a towel, casts the towel aside, and opens the letter.
If you can ID this prick . . .
Half an hour later, with Sam’s words echoing behind the cold fury in her eyes, Jesse stalks to the computer station, opens Sam’s letter, and puts it beside the keyboard. Then she brings up the net, selects the C-SPAN website, and finds the hearing Sam mentioned right on the front page. She starts the video, and the usual C-SPAN–type picture fills the screen like paint drying. Old guys sit at a green table in front of an audience. Steampunk wallpaper and draperies. Boring. Droning testimony.
Then . . .
An elderly man sits in a wheelchair at the witness table. Another man comes off his chair in the first row of chairs behind the wheelchair. He stoops, picks something up, and hands a pair of glasses to the old man. This man is lean, ruggedly handsome, with short-cropped reddish hair. Jesse’s eyes drop to the ID card reproduced at the top of Sam’s letter. Same guy in a nice suit but no tie. Casual. As he bends forward, the camera happens to zoom in, and Jesse sees the small star-shaped scar peek from his open collar, on the right side of his neck . . .
Our father Red Screen of Death motherfucker!
Two months of scrawled stars burst out of storage and fall in a shower that ignites a meteor storm. That’s what Sam meant. I saw you washing off the dirt, didn’t see all your face because it was turned away.But I saw the fucking scar!
Crazy.
No, I’m not.
That’s the sonofabitch who killed Marge and probably Toby! Christ, and what about Sam?
That’s where it gets crazy . . .
Janet’s voice comes back, dismissive, saying, “So now it’s spooks?” Can’t take this to her; she already thinks I’m nuts.
Gotta do this on my own.
She hunches back to the computer and Googles John Rivard and reads that he’s a former intelligence bigwig, who, along with Brent Snowcroft, had been an early critic of the Iraq invasion. Yeah, yeah . . .
What I need is to confirm his location. Sam’s letter mentioned Michigan.
Then she finds a YouTube promo for a TV interview and views the taped segment with Rivard by WPBN, an NBC affiliate in Traverse City, Michigan, that was recorded July 18th.. That’s last week.
The reporter stands beside Rivard, who sits in a wheelchair with a flat gray horizon line in the background. The reporter mentions he is talking to Rivard at his home in Lakeside, Michigan, about his upcoming Senate testimony.
Bingo.
But just as quickly, the tsunami of doubt is back, slamming her, and it’s like the whole weight of the hospital, this government labyrinth stacked with credentialed health providers, not to mention cops with guns, is pressing down on her. Watching her even. She glances around nervously. No phones, no emails, Sam said. Shit. Immediately she deletes her search history from the computer.
You’re reaching, Jesse. What Janet would call “spiraling out.”
Am not.
Crazy.
Am not. Gonna look this fucker in the eye!
And she knows she’s going to go for it.
Chapter Forty-Eight
In the morning Jesse eats a hearty breakfast to fuel up. Then she sits in the flag atrium and takes an inventory of her resources. When she deployed, she set up a direct-deposit schedule with her bank in Grand Forks. Figuring she wouldn’t need a lot of spare change in the Sandbox, she put 90 percent of her pay in a CD that’s locked for a year. So cash on hand until her next payday is eighty-seven dollars. Worse, her Visa card is maxed and has an available balance of 196 dollars. Enough to eat on and buy gas maybe, but not enough for a rental car.
How serious are you?
Serious.
How serious?
Steal-a-car serious.
Just before lunch she drops by Janet’s office when she probably doesn’t have a client. She knocks.
“Yeah, who is it?”
“Me,” Jesse says, entering the room. She hooks her thumbs in her sweatpants waistband and sort of cants her hips in a hem-haw gesture. “I just wanted to say I mean to talk to you about . . . stuff. But I’m not there yet.”
“Sure. Take your time,” Janet says, leaning back in her chair.
“Well . . .” Jesse drops her eye to the carpet briefly, then she looks up and points to the tall bookcase in back of the desk. “You have Blackhawk Down; I never got around to reading that. I saw the movie—all except the crash parts.”
“Take it.”
Jesse comes around the desk and fingers the book from the shelf. As she opens it and browses the opening pages, she watches Janet open the left bottom desk drawer and dig in her purse. She removes her wallet then shoves the drawer closed.
But does not lock it.
“Thanks,” Jesse says, holding up the book. On the way out, she asks the receptionist what Janet’s schedule is tomorrow morning.
“There’s a staff meeting at nine, then she’s booked until, lessee, 2:30,” the receptionist says, looking up from a schedule.
“Nah, thanks; I got rehab for my knee at two.”
Back at the computer, Jesse prints highway maps of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. She locates Lakeside, up on the western shore of Lake Huron, and considers a route. Interstate 94 cuts across Wisconsin, then angles down around Chicago into a tangle of interstate and toll roads. Then you have to drive
up the whole length of Michigan. Gotta be a better way. So she works out a quieter route: Highway 8 across Wisconsin into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula then over the Mackinac Bridge and straight down into the Mitten State.
At five p.m. she shadows Janet as she leaves the second floor, exits the building, and walks to the staff parking lot. From the cover of a hedge, she sees Janet get into a blue Subaru Forester and can’t help but grin. Minnesota’s a blue state, right. Her dad always said that Foresters were the SUV of choice for the “Olympic lesbian ski team.”
***
The FedEx van pulls away down the driveway to the Rivard estate as Morgon opens the just-delivered mailer. It has the return address of a men’s clothing store located on the concourse of the Minneapolis International Airport. Inside he finds a red handkerchief monogrammed with the letters MJ. Tucked inside the hanky is the front page of the Grand Forks newspaper, which displays the story of Sam Dillon’s death above the fold: . . . probably suicide according to an unconfirmed source in the Sheriff’s Department.
Morgon crumples the newsprint and allows a smile. Cawker’s light, even elegant, touch isn’t lost on him. He’s good and he’s applying for a job and he comes with his own crew of ex-SAS boys—a package deal. Morgon sticks the hanky in his pocket and then takes out his lighter and ignites the crushed ball of paper. As he watches it burn to ash on the driveway, he surmises there will be rumors in the wake of Dillon’s death. But rumors don’t generate retaliation in the form of, say, oversight subpoenas. For that you need a witness.
And like every Sopranos/Godfather groupie knows, without no witness, you ain’t got no crime.
Chapter Forty-Nine
In the morning Jesse bolts a fast breakfast, puts on her sweatsuit and her running shoes, and signs out for the exercise room. She has her wallet, cell phone, and a pair of shorts and her flip-flops in her fanny pack. The copy of Blackhawk Down is tucked under her arm as she enters the psychology suite at five minutes to nine. She lingers in the hall until she sees Janet come out of her office. She’s carrying a laptop. No purse.