Fallen Angel

by Chuck Logan

  John had started grooming Morgon from the first day he set foot on the place. Such a foolishly transparent gesture—Morgon was the strong son he never had and all that patriarchal crap. Now Morgon is presuming on his welcome and is taking the bit in his teeth. Now he’s brought in that slippery Roger Torres and Cawker, who is like a scary, diminutive Morgon in process.

  He expects me to marry him and have his children. She actually laughs when she flashes on the final scene in Rosemary’s Baby: Mia Farrow seeing past the cleft hooves and claws and fangs in the crib and cooing as she surrenders to maternal instinct.

  We’re not bad people, are we?

  Not anymore.

  “Yeah, well,” she thinks out loud. “How about never again.”

  A flare of sunlight breaks through the overcast and briefly drops a net of shadows across the road. The peek of sun flames out in the bronze hair of another runner, a young woman who approaches around the bend, coming toward her. Amanda notes that this runner has a syncopated gait, favoring her right leg when it strikes the road. The runner stops, kneels facing away from the road, and occupies herself with tying her shoe. Amanda knows most of the joggers she encounters on this stretch, near the house. This one’s new. She may be someone’s guest or a tourist. Amanda nods and strides past, and a few steps later, a clear, chiseled voice sounds behind her.

  “Amanda.”

  Turning, slowing to a stop, Amanda watches the young woman stand up and walk toward her. Something funny here. Amanda’s smile, meant to be polite and curious, twitches across her face, and she feels the Zoloft stability heave beneath her on a cannabis trampoline and, with a sudden chill, she regrets smoking the whole joint.

  The woman is attractive in what her New York friends would call a “Midwestern” way, meaning that her abbreviated hairdo could have been styled using a bowl for a guide and her shorts, sloppy untucked tank top, and shoes are strictly box store. In fact a slender plastic tie protrudes from the side of her shorts like a fishing leader, neglected after the price tag was torn off.

  “Yes?” Amanda cocks her head, and now she feels a trickle of ice water in her knees and the rational observer in the back of her head is saying, Yes, Zoloft is effective at smoothing out normal anxiety but not so good at buffering a walking nightmare because, hello, you’ve seen this apparition before . . .

  The woman is close enough now for Amanda to clearly see that something is seriously wrong with her pretty milkmaid face. These slender earthworms thread through her chin and pop out over her lips before burrowing into her cheek to emerge over her right eye. More of the slick purple worms are knitted into her bare right shoulder under her shirt strap, and there’s a whole glistening nest of them on her right knee, curling up into her quad and down into her shin.

  Amanda dry-swallows and teeters slightly. She recalls that, in some cases, Ambien and Zoloft can interact badly and produce hallucinations. Add a bale of marijuana, and you get this witches’ brew.

  “We were never properly introduced,” the woman says in a cordial voice. “Captain Jessica Kraig. I made a surprise visit to your house around a week ago. You were having a party.”

  “I . . . yes . . .” Amanda falters, momentarily stunned by the triumphal, barely restrained anger blazing in the girl’s intense blue eyes. But you’re dead. Morgon said so on the way to the memorial service. Amanda looks away from the burning blue eyes and casts her gaze up and down the road, but there’s no help in sight, and she truly is all alone out here with this ghost. She fights a surge of panic to bolt. The woman is suddenly very close and bristles with a physical presence that would easily overpower her, and Amanda recalls John’s words: Some farm girl from North Dakota.

  “You can call me Jesse,” she says.

  Striving to recover, Amanda’s fingers pluck at her own face, and she mutters, eyes lowered, “Now I remember the, ah, scars . . .”

  “Yeah, they’re a bother, but what are you gonna do?”

  Now Amanda’s knees have started to buckle. “I’m not well. I’m on medication. My grandfather just passed away . . .”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jesse says, stepping in closer, her hands hovering to catch Amanda if she falters.

  Now the blue Ford SUV is back, and a lean man with close-cropped, curly brown hair gets out and opens the rear door. He wears faded blue jeans and a loose gray T-shirt. Amanda’s association with the Morgons and Cawkers of the world have taught her that most guys with flat bellies tuck in their shirts unless they’re hiding something stuck in their waistband. Like a gun. He’s another of the Wormwood People with his face marked with diagonal scarring from cheek to cheek, and a tiny stipple of bright red blood has leaked through the right side of his shirt. He’s smiling, but his greenish eyes remind her of Morgon’s eyes, the eyes of a wild animal that has learned to pass for tame.

  “Why don’t you get in, Miss Rivard?” he says. “We’ll give you a lift home, because you don’t look so hot.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” Amanda says under her breath, playing for time, as she shuffles toward the open car door.

  ***

  Brian Cawker’s first impulse is to reach for his phone when, from the cover of the trees, he sees Amanda being intercepted first by the woman, then by the man, who pulls up in the blue Ford Escape. As he recalibrates from leisurely afternoon to all-hands-on-deck, he watches Amanda get in the car and drive away.

  As the SUV rolls past, he commits the Wisconsin license plate to memory and has his phone flipped open. But before he selects Morgon’s number he sees the brake lights flash as the car turns in toward the estate on an overgrown logging trail maybe 150 yards down the road. He’s thinking he should keep Amanda close and do a little recon before he calls.

  Falling into an easy rhythm, grateful that the shirt and shorts he pulled from his bag are green and tan and blend in, he backtracks through the woods and takes up a position a hundred yards from where the Ford has now pulled into a thicket. He’s always had the good bush eyes, so at this distance he easily recognizes these two interlopers who have detained Amanda Rivard and who now stand talking to her next to the car.

  He assembled the dossiers on them for Roger Torres.

  Now they leave the car and work their way cautiously to the tree line. The pilot, Kraig, raises a pair of binoculars to her eyes, then lowers them and continues to talk with Amanda. The man—Davis—joins them and takes the binoculars and studies the house across the rolling lawn, where Morgon sits in a chair on the veranda sipping lemonade.

  Cawker takes a deep breath, exhales, and eases the Beretta from under his shirt. Then he thumbs the cell phone, selects Morgon’s number, and hits send. Across the lawn he watches Morgon pick up his phone from the table next to his chair and raise it to his ear.

  “Stay absolutely cool, mate,” Cawker whispers. “Show no reaction. We have company, and everything we know is wrong.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Staying absolutely cool, Morgon fingers his chest pocket for his cigarettes as he listens to Cawker, and it’s like the tectonic plates are shifting beneath his feet as this massive, grimy glacier intrudes on the day, studded with skeletons, and plows under the manicured grass.

  His hand comes back empty. No cigarettes. Left them in the carriage house to please Amanda.

  When Cawker finishes running it down, Morgon plucks the matchstick from his lips and casually flips it away. Then he takes a few beats to look across the lawn at the tree line. Not good. Clearly he has fumbled his first management assignment. “Fucking Roger and his low-rent Zeta pukes,” he mutters. Then, quickly, he orients to work the problem. “Okay, so where are they?”

  “In the trees. Roughly at your eleven o’clock, a little over two hundred yards.”

  “And nobody’s talking on phones?”

  “No. They’re talking to Amanda. No sign of backup so far. Looks like they’re on their own.”

  “But they couldn’t put all this together on their own, could they?” Morgon states the ob
vious.

  “Not likely. The cover story in Maryland involved the FBI and the state patrol. Who knows what strings they pulled to skew the reporting from Minneapolis. I’d say we’re eyeball deep in crocs.”

  “And there’s Grand Forks,” Morgon thinks out loud. And that wasn’t sanctioned. You called that totally on your own. “Well, fuck it; that’s what lawyers are for. And maybe it’s a good thing they’re talking to Amanda. Right now talking to Amanda can drive you crazy. Okay, here’s what we do. First, is Roger’s pilot in the game?”

  “Nigel? Sure, ex-Rhodesian air defense. He’s merced his ass all over Africa.”

  “I’ll have Roger spin up the bird and stand by. Then it’ll take me three minutes to go in and grab something out of the gun safe. I’ll set up at the south end of the house in the junipers. Can you see where I’ll be?”

  “I can see it.”

  “You’re carrying, right?”

  Morg, I got a Beretta nine and one mag. Fifteen rounds. That’s it. I’m more than a hundred yards away. This Davis wouldn’t come in here light. I did the background on him. He’s real trouble.”

  “So are we.” Morgon, coldly furious, has already made his decision. “But for now they’re alone. Okay, here’s the drill. Keep a safe distance. They’re just inside the tree line, right?”

  “Roger that.”

  “So you throw a few rounds their way, they might bolt into the open . . .”

  “It’s possible, but what about Amanda?”

  “Yell for her to run for the house, that you’ll cover her.”

  “Yeah. But what if she doesn’t?” Then, “Maybe we should take a step back and think this through.”

  “Dammit, Cawker. Work with me here. If they don’t move, I’ll come in to you, and we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, won’t we?” He squints across the lawn. “First let’s see if you can get them moving.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “We finish it right here and now. Once they’re down, we dress them in logging chains, load them in the chopper, drop them in the fucking lake, and be back in time for supper. Let the people who give me my marching orders worry about the damage control.”

  “Like they were never even here. Sounds like a plan.” Cawker’s voice is rock steady on the phone, but as he tucks his cell away, he allows himself a long inward sigh.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  The initial panic has subsided. Now mere dread squeegees her raw nerves as Amanda strives to adjust to the prospect that these two people—one of whom she was assured was dead—have taken her hostage. As the Ford pulls into the logging trail, she notices that the weeds are beaten down and she surmises that they’ve been in here earlier; in fact, they’ve probably been watching the house.

  Staring straight ahead, she braces herself for what happens next. The man is obviously injured; they both have a hot fix to their eyes, a rankness to their clothing, and a flush to their scarred faces that signals extreme fatigue.

  As Jesse motions for her to get out of the car, Amanda attempts an opening gambit. “Look. I don’t know what this is all about, but I have access to a great deal of money if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “What I’m looking for is an explanation of why you freaked out when we first met.” Jesse says it cold but civil.

  Now the man has come around from the driver’s side and asks a series of question about the people at the house and the helicopter activity. Amanda patiently explains they are the last guests to depart from the funeral ceremony. One of them is test-flying the estate helicopter that is now for sale. In an effort to establish a touch of gravitas, she states, “If you know who my grandfather was, you understand that his friends are not to be trifled with.”

  “Right,” the man says. Then he hands Jesse a pair of binoculars. Amanda watches Jesse raise the glasses and lens Morgon sitting on the porch. “That’s him,” she says. “That’s the guy who shot my crew chief.”

  Then they both pause to observe the effect of Jesse’s words sinking in.

  “So,” the man says, “the question is, Miss Rivard, why did three guys come into the Minneapolis VA last Friday and try to kill Captain Kraig?” He adds, “And don’t tell me that comes as a surprise.”

  Amanda takes a jarring moment to experience her life turning upside down. “I misspoke. Obviously this isn’t a problem that money can solve.” As her words crash-land on their stone expressions, she adds, “So what’s going on here? Should I call my lawyer?”

  The man composes a nuanced smile on his face, scar by scar. “Let’s say there’s a ring tightening around you that involves several federal agencies. Let’s say you should check with your attorney about any exposure you might have—say to a federal grand jury—about having prior knowledge about a conspiracy to silence and then, that failing, to murder Captain Kraig. Not during some botched hush-hush operation in Iraq—but in a Minneapolis veteran’s hospital.”

  “Sounds serious. May I see a badge?” Amanda asks.

  The man continues to smile and points casually across the lawn at Morgon, doll-sized, sitting on the porch. “Does he carry a badge?”

  Despite the heat and the stress and her addled blood chemistry, Amanda fully grasps his meaning. “So that’s how we are,” she says.

  “That’s how we are,” Davis confirms. He jerks his head at Jesse. “You thought she died in Minnesota. You thought I died in Maryland two weeks ago. We are not making this shit up, alone.”

  Even after smoking a world-class doobie, Amanda has near-perfect recall for names. “Davis,” she says simply and doesn’t even attempt to follow all the weird pictures that start in her head: funeral flowers and stained-glass windows and the crumbling Zoloft-buffered edges and Iraq not staying inside the fucking TV where it’s suppose to. And now here’s this green-eyed killer with his crooked smile, back from the dead and wandering in across the lawn like another of Morgon’s loose ends.

  On a goddamned fishing expedition!

  It’s so patently absurd she puts her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

  Davis moves in closer, studying her eyes, then, gently, he takes her right hand, raises it, and sniffs her fingers. He releases her hand and turns to Jesse. “She’s stoned.”

  Amanda shrugs and addresses Jesse. “You should pick your men friends more carefully, honey, because, believe me, I know this type, and they’ll let you down every time.” She’s standing waist-deep in thistles and weeds, and gnats are swarming around her bare arms and legs and face, and she’s started to sweat, and she’s wondering if this is a multiple-choice test like the Lady or the Tiger. Open the wrong door, and you get eaten by several federal agencies. But maybe what’s behind the other door might solve all of her Morgon problems. “You appreciate my late grandfather’s line of work?” she begins. “Well, then you understand that it’s pretty ugly stuff that he was tasked with doing, and I guess you got caught up in it,” Amanda says, not faking the conflicted roll to her eyes.

  Davis and Jesse exchange measured glances.

  Amanda pauses until she has their full attention. Then she turns to Jesse. “Look. I know who you are, and yes, I was surprised at the way you keep coming back on us. For what it’s worth, I spoke up against what they did to you. When the Iraq job fell apart, I was in the room when my grandfather got the call about you surviving and being in the hospital. And I heard him make another call, to someone in Germany, about how to deal with you.”

  “It would be helpful to know what I flew into in Iraq.”

  “Sorry,” Amanda says. “I just make the travel arrangements around here. For that other you’d have to ask John, and we just sprinkled him along the beach. You could try the general information number at the CIA, but I suspect they’ll put you on hold.”

  Jesse looks directly into Amanda’s calculating gray eyes and asks, “So what did they decide to do about me?”

  “After they failed to get to you in the hospital . . .”

  “You mean him,” Jess
e interjects, pointing toward the house. “The guy on the porch with the scar. You know him, right?”

  “Sure. About 90 percent of the time he’s a perfect gentleman, and the other 10 percent he’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

  “Why’d he kill my crew?”

  “Let’s say you have to sink pretty far down to get to where Morgon works. There must have been an accident. You can understand that, being a pilot. Women and kids and GIs get blown away in Iraq by pilots all the time.”

  “We’re talking about my crew,” Jesse bites off the words.

  Amanda accepts Jesse’s incensed farm-girl stare as the price of doing business. “After they failed to get to you in the hospital,” she repeats, “John suggested that the operator in Germany slip you a maximum dose of PCP. They hit you again at Walter Reed. That way you’d present as psychotic and they’d medicate you accordingly. Which, I gather, they did.”

  Jesse shows gritted teeth in the rictus of a smile. “So I’m not crazy after all, how nice.”

  Amanda ignores her and turns to Davis. “For conversation’s sake, are you offering me a deal?”

  “For conversation’s sake, I can put you in touch with an FBI man who has that authority. You make travel arrangements; I’m just a messenger.”

  “I’m not saying we’re there yet, but I assume you have a name and a number?”

  Davis hands her a slip of paper. “Special agent Bobby Appert. It’s the smart move, Miss Rivard,” he says.

  After a quick glance at Appert’s number, she folds it and closes it tight in her sweaty fist. Her gaze drifts through the foliage to Morgon sitting on the porch. “There’s a few federal agencies that’ll circle the wagons around him, you know,” she says quietly.

  “Sometimes you have to pick a side.”

  Amanda weighs it. “And he’ll go away?” She nods toward the house.

  “That’s the idea,” Davis says.

  “So nothing’s for sure.”