by Chuck Dixon
“It’s okay to miss him. I do. It’s all right to feel sad.”
Merry said nothing for four mailboxes.
“He had to go,” she said. Quiet voice.
“He did, honey.”
When they arrived at the entry to Riverstone they were met by state troopers walking to them from a pair of cruisers parked in the grass by the end of the drive.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Take your friends where you find them. And watch your ass.”
14
“You went over the fence in a goddamn hurry,” Hector Ortiz said as he piloted them along the ribbon of concrete.
Levon watched the desert pass by, the sand silver in the moonlight.
“I said to myself, ‘fuck it.’ Get a good night’s sleep and a big breakfast before taking off after your ass.” Hector was enjoying himself.
“Why didn’t Duck tell me about you?” Levon said.
“ ’Cause he knew you’d run off just like you did. He said you’re some kind of lone wolf. But you’re going to need help.”
“And that’s you?”
“Mr. Withers doesn’t want any more direct contact with you. That’s my job. I’m your handler. I’m a cut-out.”
“Handler.”
“You’re going to need help. You really think you’re going to find this Kurd you’re looking for in this shitstorm?”
“He’s a Yazidi.”
"Yeah. Well, he's with a Kurd unit. Did you know that? Unh-uh. You didn't. That's what I'm here for. To keep you wired in. You know how many Bazît Hassans there are in Iraq? Like Chans in a Chinese phonebook, that's how many."
“Where is Bazît?”
“Right in the middle of the clusterfuck. Place called Gog Jallah, east of Mosul.”
“Gogjali.”
“You know it?”
“I spent some time there.”
Hector snorted and threw his head back to bark a laugh.
“Withers sketched you out for me. You’re some kind of shadow legend. I never heard him talk about anyone like he talks about you. Let’s just say he’s a fan. No details, sure. He says your whole life is classified. They bag your turds and lock them in a safe under the Pentagon.”
Levon sipped from a water bottle.
“What’s this guy to you? This Bazît,” Hector said.
“We fought alongside one another. I made him a promise. I’m here to keep it.”
“What was the promise?”
“That nothing would happen to his family.”
“Shit! That’s not your promise to keep. That’s the President’s promise.”
“It was my personal word.”
“Listen, you know better than me that the Kurds and Yazidis have been getting fucked over ever since oil was found here. Before that even. They can never catch a break. You think by now they’d know they’re being bullshitted.”
“I didn’t bullshit.”
“You are one Old Testament motherfucker, Levon Cade. But if you’re so set on getting to Mosul I’ll take you to Mosul,” Hector said.
“You figure three days to get there?” Levon said.
“Two if we share driving. What kind of music you like?” Hector leaned from the wheel to touch an iPod set in a dock on the dash.
“Old school country.”
“This is going to be a long drive.” Hector sighed.
15
“Do you need anything? Would you like another Coke?” Nancy Valdez said. She stepped into the interrogation room, a folder thick with papers in her arm.
“I’m fine. When can I go home?” Merry said.
She tapped a tattoo on the empty soda can held between her fingers. The room they were in was windowless, practically a cell. A vent in the ceiling hummed, a steady fall of chilled air dropping from it. Everyone had been nice to her. The police on the long ride to the State Police barracks. The older grandma type lady who took her name at one of the desks out front. And this pretty lady who told Merry that she came all the way from Washington to ask Merry some questions.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Nancy said. She introduced herself and showed Merry her badge and photo ID. She removed a digital recorder from the pocket of her jacket and set it in the middle of the table. She recited her name, the date, time and Merry’s full name and date of birth.
“Where is your father?” Nancy said.
“I don’t know,” Merry said. She looked the Treasury agent in the eyes as her father taught her. She wasn’t lying. She had no idea where Levon was.
“Do you mean you don’t know where he is right now or you have no idea where he was going when he left?”
“Either. Both. It’s both.”
“He didn’t tell you he was leaving or where he was going?”
“No, ma’am. I woke up one day and he was gone.” That was a lie. She kept her eyes steady.
“And you haven’t heard from him since.”
“No.” True.
“Where do you think he might be? Do you have any ideas?”
Merry shrugged.
“I need a spoken answer.” Nancy nodded at the recorder.
“My daddy was a Marine. He used to be gone a long time lots of times. I never asked him where he was going or when he would be back.”
“You think he’s been deployed?”
“Maybe.”
“He hasn’t been deployed. Your father has been discharged from service for years and currently holds no rank or any association with the Marines or any other branch of the military service or any government agency.”
“Might be a secret mission.”
“We’ll get back to that,” Nancy said. “We have evidence that your father is in possession of stolen property. Mostly a lot of money stolen from various places that both of you have visited together.”
“We only took from bad people. We only took what we needed,” Merry said.
“That still makes your father a thief.”
“My daddy’s not a thief.”
“What do you call someone who steals?”
“It wasn’t theirs to begin with. And we needed it more than them.”
“Is that something your father told you?”
“No, ma’am. That’s something I’m saying on my own.”
“So, we agree that your father came into possession of money that was not his own. Can you tell me where any of this money is?”
“No I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both, ma’am.”
“Have you see your father with a disc of some kind? Like a CD disc?”
“No, ma’am.”
"Do you know what a flash drive is? A thumb drive?"
“Yes.”
“Have you seen your father with anything like that?”
“No, ma’am.”
Nancy dropped that line of questioning to open the folder before her. She slid photographs across the table for Merry to look at. Some of them were morgue photos of men obviously dead. For the sake of the recorder, Nancy read off the names of the men as they were written on the backs of the photos.
“Delbert Mathers.”
“Louis Jennings Bragg.”
“Merle Lee Hogue.”
“James Roy Mathers.”
Merry did her best to make her face an unmoving mask as, one by one, the pictures were placed before her like a deck of cards.
“Gary Thomas Bush.”
“Nelson Clark Granger.”
“Donald MacKenzie Fenton.”
Merry wanted to look away at that one but held her eyes fixed on the table. That long Maine night in the snow. Poor Mr. Fenton. She felt sad for Carl and Giselle left without a dad.
“Wolodymyr Kolinsky.”
“Danya Kolisnyk.”
“Vanko Kolisnyk.”
“Calvin Douglas Shepherd.”
The last was a mug shot of another face she knew. The man was older when she saw him in the little diner on a rainy night somewhere in Virginia. Her father left her to foll
ow the man outside then returned alone. They drove away in a car owned by the man in the picture.
Nancy set down a new series of photos without providing a name for each. They were more morgue photos. Eyes glassy. Mouths slack. Merry recognized one. She saw him die in the snow on the lot of a general store on a lonely road far away in Maine.
Next Nancy laid down a high school picture of a pretty girl smiling, loose curls fell to the shoulders of a crisp white blouse.
“Jenna Marie Wiley.”
Then another photo. A smiling woman was squinting into the sunlight where she was seated on the bench at the rear of a pleasure boat. Diamonds of light coming off lake water behind her. At this one Merry clamped her lips tight to contain a gasp.
“Your grandmother.” Nancy was done with her little card show. Three rows of ten photos each lay neatly arranged before Merry.
Merry mutely eyed them. If this was a game, she didn’t know the rules.
“Do you know what all of these people have in common?”
“No, ma’am.”
“They all were, in one way or another, associated with your father and they are all dead.”
Merry said nothing.
Nancy sighed, closing her folder but allowing the photos to remain where they were.
“Your father has not been the best parent for you. Not a good father. He has made you part of his actions, his crimes. He has placed you in danger by these actions. Do you understand that?”
"My daddy loves me," Merry promised herself, her father and Jesus that she would not cry. She willed her heart to stone.
“I suppose that he does, in his way, love you. That doesn’t change that he has been negligent, even reckless, in your upbringing.”
Merry kept her eyes leveled on the Treasury agent’s face.
“You’re the one who can end this. You can tell me where your father is and we can resolve all of this.”
“You want the money.”
It was Nancy’s turn to be taken aback. Not only this little girl’s words but the way she stated them. Merry Cade’s tone was one of accusation. Nancy abandoned the pretense of a friendly tone. She put on the voice she used in court.
“There are federal funds involved here, money involved in criminal enterprise that needs to be confiscated.”
“Well, I don’t know where anything you want is. My daddy. The money. Or a disc. Or anything. I don’t know anything because my daddy didn’t tell me anything.”
“Then you will not cooperate.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. You can call that not cooperating if you like, ma’am.”
“I guess we’re done here,” Nancy said. She tabbed the recorder to off. She raked the photos back to her and began inserting them back into the folder.
“Can I go home then?” Merry said.
“No. You can’t. You’re a minor with an absent parent and without a legally assigned guardian.”
"What does that mean?" A thrill of panic shot through Merry's stomach, a pinching sensation that made her catch her breath.
“It means you have no family and will be remanded to foster care.”
“Uncle Fern is family,” Merry said. She stood as Nancy stood.
“That man is not a fit substitute for a parent. He’s currently under federal investigation himself and being held as a witness.”
“Witness? To what?”
“Wait here. Someone will be in for you.” Nancy breezed from the room, the file held tight to her chest.
Out in the CID squad room Nancy nodded to a woman with a lemony expression seated in the guest, or suspect, chair in front of a detective’s desk. The woman rose to enter the interrogation room, a file of her own in her hand.
Nancy Valdez joined Tony Marcoon and Laura Strand in a surveillance room. The two had been sharing a pizza and coffees gone cold now. They’d been watching Nancy at work with the Cade girl visible on a bank of monitors set on the wall.
"Did you notice her tell? Every time she was lying she called me ‘ma'am,'" Nancy said.
Laura looked at Nancy a second through her lollypop lenses before returning her gaze to the screens where the little girl was crying as the lemon faced woman read to her from a paper set atop the table.
“Jesus Christ, Nance,” Marcoon said.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat every day. Give a man a gun and he’ll make you fish for him.”
16
“Fucking heat,” Hector said. “My ball sack feels like it’s down around my knees.” He pulled himself up using the steering wheel to lift off the seat. He tugged the damp cloth of his pants out of his ass crack.
He waved away a cloud of biting flies that had invaded the truck cab. “Fucking bugs, man.”
Levon rode in silence by him.
“Don’t you ever bitch, Cade?” Hector said.
“Doesn’t do any good.”
“Sure, it does. It’s good to vent. Soldiers been bitchin’ and pukin’ since they were in sandals.”
“All it does is remind me how miserable I am. Better to talk about anything else.”
“Okay. You watch Game of Thrones?”
“Is that some kind of quiz show?” Levon said.
“You follow sports?”
“Not since high school.”
“You don’t know shit about music. We established that.”
Levon shrugged.
“How about women?” Hector said.
“My wife’s been dead three years now.”
“Fuck me.” Hector sighed. He sat back in a puddle of his own butt sweat and wished the day to be gone.
The farther west they drove the greater the military presence. The approach to Kirkuk was one roadblock stop after another. Every one of Allah’s children with a gun took it into their head to set up a toll booth along Highway 80. Sometimes an armored vehicle blocked the road. Sometimes a technical; a commercial pickup with a machine gun or triple-A gun bolted down into the bed. Once it was a bunch of kids with oil drums and duct tape. They all wore bits and pieces of uniforms. They all smiled like pirates.
Hector had papers that satisfied some and they were waved on. Some were unimpressed with the documentation. Or maybe they were illiterate. An American twenty-dollar bill got them past those checkpoints.
Levon let Hector do the negotiations. Some of the kids they ran into were no older than Merry. Orphans probably. The hard set of their eyes was real enough. So were their rifles.
The only official Iraqi army checkpoint was when they came closer to Kirkuk. They wanted forty bucks.
The Iraqi army presence was high in Kirkuk. Uniformed soldiers and vehicles everywhere. They loitered on corners and at crossroads showing off their weapons like kids with a new toy. And most of them were kids.
“Look at all these son-bitches in their shiny BDUs,” Hector said.
“I thought the fight was in Mosul,” Levon said.
“That’s why these heroes are two hundred klicks away. All the fighting is being done by your Peshmerga pals and the Iranians.”
They drove past a crowd of soldiers seated in the shade of a gas station awning. Levon noted that their uniforms weren’t new. They were patched and spotted with pink splotches where the blood of their previous owners had been bleached out. Their weapons were a mix of Russian and American make and most showed signs of neglect. They probably weren’t any older than the recruits he saw earlier. But they were harder.
Evidence of recent house-to-house fighting was everywhere. Bullet-scarred walls and fire-gutted buildings. Already the citizens were rebuilding. Everywhere block-long mountains of rubble were being stacked by hand and machine. Hector pulled them to a stop on a broad boulevard crowded with pedestrians. Cars and vans honked and swerved past them.
“I’m gonna pick up some stuff at the market,” he said. He nodded in the direction the majority of the crowd was walking.
“We park here and th
is ride will be stripped to the chassis when we get back,” Levon said.
“That’s why you’re going to circle the block until I get back,” Hector said, stepping from the cab. He made a stirring gesture with his finger.
“Pick up a few cartons of cigarettes.” Levon peeled some bills off the roll in his pocket.
“You smoke now?”
“Just buy them. American brands.” Levon slid over to get behind the wheel.
“Don’t even think of running off on me,” Hector said. He didn’t wait for a reply. He waded into the crowd and was gone.
Levon put the HiLux in gear and pulled into the moving tide of cars, trucks and mopeds. The feel of the streets was like any other cosmopolitan city at lunch hour. Street vendors crowded the walkways with carts. The busy hustle in contrast with the sorry state of the buildings and streets. Apartment towers scorched by the bombing stood like blackened skeletons against the sky. Every other business along the street was either burnt out or boarded up. Many were roofed with blue plastic tarps.
As prevalent as the blue tarps was the Kurdistan flag; a tri-color with a yellow sun. A flag for a country that didn't exist and would never exist if Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran had anything to say about it. The flag hung from street lamps and storefronts and flew from cars and trucks. Kids wore t-shirts with it silk-screened on the front. Women wore hijabs fashioned from it. Levon noted the absence of Iraqi soldiers in the center of town. Instead there were armed civilians everywhere. Men who looked more like they were dressed to play a few holes of golf but for the Kalashnikovs slung from their shoulders and the ammo vests belted over their polo shirts. A number of women were strapped with rifles as well — some of them in camouflaged BDUs.
The Kurds considered Kirkuk to be a Kurd city. They had been the majority of the population here before ISIS. They’d returned in even greater numbers when the city was retaken by the coalition. This whole caliphate insurrection stirred Kurdish nationalism. Even more dangerous, it put guns in their hands. Levon knew where his money was if it came to a showdown between the Kurds and the green Iraqi conscripts he saw earlier. And it would come to that.