No Woods So Dark as These Read online

  But that was twenty years ago. Now, as she lay with the comforter pulled to her neck, she was able to hold back the tears only until “I Dreamed There Was No War.” Then she let them flow. Let the sobs rack her body, let the grief excoriate her throat. Because that was okay too. A good cry now would give her strength to hide the tears when Ryan came home again and kissed her cheek, looked at her for any signs of collapse, and asked, in his own voice wearied by too much dire news, his own voice steadied only for her, always for her, “How was your day, baby?”

  Twenty-Five

  Joe Loughner was staring at his last swallow of beer from a twenty-ounce schooner when DeMarco came up to the bar. “Good timing,” Loughner said, and motioned for the bartender. “What are you having?”

  DeMarco smiled at the young woman tending bar. “Water with lemon, please.”

  “Are you sick?” Loughner asked. “You can’t even join me for a beer?”

  “Maybe later, Joe. After I get some food in my stomach.”

  “Beer is food.” Loughner drained his glass, waited until the new one was set before him, then took a long drink. “It’s not healthy to eat on an empty stomach,” he said.

  DeMarco swung a leg over the adjacent stool, looked over the eight other patrons at the bar, made a half turn and surveyed the dining room. Most of the tables were occupied. “This place never changes,” he said.

  “The prices do. Eight dollars for a draft beer now. Can you believe that?”

  DeMarco turned a few degrees back toward Joe. “Did you get us on the list for a table?”

  “What’s wrong with here? I always eat at the bar.”

  DeMarco winced a little at this reminder of his own drinking days. Though he had never been a public drinker. And never a happy drunk. Thank God those days were in the past.

  “Would you gentlemen care to see a menu?” the bartender asked.

  Joe said, “He might. I know what I want. Steak Milanese, rare. French fries, no salad.”

  “Would you care to choose another side dish in place of the salad?”

  “Extra fries,” he said.

  Whoa, too familiar, DeMarco thought. “I’ll have the bruschetta,” he said. “Plus one pasta Michelangelo dinner, and one tortiglioni all’arrabbiata to go. No dressing on the salads. Please ask the chef to have them ready in…forty-five minutes or so, Joe?”

  “Suit yourself, pal. I have nothing else to do today.”

  “I promised Jayme I’d bring home dinner.”

  The bartender moved away from them to enter the order in her point of sale terminal.

  “Both of you take your rabbit food without any dressing?” Joe asked. “I don’t know how you do that.”

  “We’ll put dressing on it at home. Otherwise it gets too soggy.”

  “Aren’t you the domesticated one.”

  DeMarco smiled. Wondered how long Joe had been sitting at the bar, how many schooners had sailed by. He said, “So Luthor Reddick.”

  Joe nodded. “Thomas Reddick Jr., spawn of Thomas Reddick Sr., lowest rat bastard I ever had the pleasure of arresting. May he rest in pieces.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Blunt trauma to the punkin. We never could catch a break on who did it. Found a few grams of coke sprayed all over the floor, like he and somebody else had a wrestling match over it. Couldn’t lift any prints but his, unfortunately. Not that anybody was going to shed any tears over it.”

  “So it’s still an open case?”

  Loughner waggled his hand. “Officially, sure. I doubt a single man-hour has been wasted on solving it, though. It’s all about heroin up there now.”

  “Up there and everywhere,” DeMarco said.

  “My old troop seized thirty-eight bricks in St. Marys last week. Plus I don’t know how many kilos of meth. If it was up to me I’d dig a fifty-foot-deep moat from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific, fill it with monster crocs and sharks and welcome anybody who wanted to cross to come on over. Except that they have to swim.”

  “That would slow down the drugs, wouldn’t it?”

  “Would slow down a lot of things.”

  The bartender set place mats, cutlery and napkins in front of them.

  “So Reddick Jr.,” DeMarco said after she moved away. “Was he involved in his father’s business?”

  Joe shook his head, took a sip of beer. He talked slowly, with frequent pauses and sips. Both men kept their voices low, though as the conversation progressed, Joe seemed less aware of the other customers.

  “The kid dropped out of school at sixteen or so,” he said. “Was pretty much a punching bag for the old man till then. His mother was glad to sign the papers to get him into the army.”

  “Trooper Boyd said he received a less than honorable discharge.”

  “Yeah, but later. Sapper Leader Course. He’d only just got started with it.”

  “He was in training to be a combat engineer?”

  “Till he came back from his old man’s funeral. Actually the army had to track him down. He went AWOL, something like two and a half weeks. They found him with a couple of women—girls, really—in an old cabin in the eastern part of the Quehanna Wild Area. Army took him back to Fort Leonard Wood, where he sobered up and begged them not to discharge him. Claimed he’d gone crazy with grief. Some of the people who knew him well claimed he’d been celebrating.”

  “Getting welcomed back after being AWOL wouldn’t have flown in my day,” DeMarco said.

  “Nor in mine. But it’s not the army it used to be. Thing is, he came back wanting out of sapper school. Shaved his head completely bald and told everybody to call him Luthor. Said he was the anti-Superman. Anybody who laughed or made some kind of remark got the shit beat out of him. He bloodied something like nine of his buddies before they tossed him with the discharge.”

  “For homicidal tendencies, Boyd said.”

  “Yep. Far as I’m concerned, his old man’s genes finally kicked in.”

  Their lunches, carried by the bartender and a male server, arrived. Joe picked up a knife and fork and sawed into his steak. DeMarco, on the other hand, found himself no longer hungry. He had a hard time tuning out the ambient noise, the other patrons’ chatter, the movement of chairs and the clink of silverware, the annoying Muzak drifting down from the ceiling. When had all this started to bother him? His bruschetta plate held a six-inch baguette sliced in half, each half toasted and covered with tomato chunks, olive oil, spices, and Romano cheese. Were Jayme there, each would take half. He was keenly aware of her absence. Hoped she and the mutt had made up.

  Only because he didn’t want the bartender inquiring if something was wrong with his meal, he picked up one piece of the bruschetta and took a bite, careful to keep the tenuous layering of ingredients on the level. The tomatoes tasted bitter.

  “After the discharge,” he said, “did Reddick go back to Elk County to live?”

  Joe jabbed his fork into the pile of french fries, which he had doused with ketchup. “Not back to Benezette, no. Thank God for little favors. Last I heard before retiring was that he was living with some woman up in Potter County. Never once heard his name mentioned after that until Trooper Boyd said it this morning.”

  For a while, then, they ate without talking, DeMarco taking one bite to every four by Joe, one sip of water to every three gulps of beer. He wished there were a way to gently broach the subject of Joe’s drinking. But where did DeMarco get off thinking he had the right to do so? He heard his father’s voice in his head then: The only thing worse than a priest is a reformed drunk.

  When had his father said that? He couldn’t remember. Maybe during one of those times when his mother started attending church. She would go to Mass two or three times a week, always during the day when Ryan was at school, but then, after a month or so, would stop altogether, and he would come home to find her not nicely dressed a
nd made-up and filled with kind words and smiles, but still lying on her bed in her house robe, often with an open wine bottle on the headboard. This back-and-forth from churchgoing teetotaler to wino, how many times had he seen it play out?

  He shook away the memory, saw that Joe’s plate was nearly empty. DeMarco took two quick bites from his bruschetta. Thought about texting Jayme. He could ask, How’s the pup? Then decided against it. “So when did Reddick Sr. die?” he asked.

  “That was…let’s see. Honestly, I can’t remember. Too long ago to give a shit.”

  DeMarco considered what else he might ask. “And you have no idea where Reddick Jr. spent those years? Between his discharge and now?”

  “Like I said, somewhere in Potter County. Not my jurisdiction, not my concern.”

  “Other than the discharge, he has no criminal record. Maybe he straightened himself out.”

  Joe shook his head. “Sometimes the absence of evidence is the evidence.”

  “How does that work?”

  “You’d have to have known the old man. Scum of the earth. Doper, dealer, thief, liar—if it was dirty, he was doing it. But he was smart too, knew how to cover his tracks. He’d beat up his wife and kid on a regular basis, but there was always an excuse for the marks he left on them. Now imagine all that seeping down to the boy. And I remember him at sixteen—scrawny piece of work. Tall but skinny as a rail. Looked like he’d been put together with twigs and string. He goes into the army weighing maybe one-fifty soaking wet, and within a year he’s all bulked up and three inches taller. We had a unit there when the army picked him up in Quehanna. Two-thirty minimum, every ounce of it muscle. And if that wasn’t steroid muscle, I don’t know what is. Plus nobody gets into sapper school without plenty of brain power under the lid. He’s his old man’s son, all right, rotten to the core. Just a medically enhanced version of it.”

  DeMarco pressed his lips together, sucked air through his teeth.

  Loughner said, “You talked to the guy. He make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?”

  Joe was right. Reddick’s smile had radiated vibes that both Flores and he had felt. So okay, he was worth more time. What could it hurt? DeMarco wasn’t about to make the same mistake with Reddick that he had made with Khatri. Maybe a total lack of evidence could be the evidence. At least enough to get the ball rolling.

  DeMarco caught the bartender’s eye and signaled with a nod. When she came over, he said, “Could you put in my takeout order now? And I’ll need a box for this bruschetta, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll need another beer,” Loughner told her.

  To DeMarco, the server said, “Was there something wrong with the bruschetta, sir?”

  “Not a thing,” he told her, “or I wouldn’t be taking it home with me.” She smiled and turned away.

  When she was gone, Loughner said, “Your girl’s got you pretty well trained, I see. According to Boyd, it’s a fairly recent development.”

  “Best thing that ever happened to me.” DeMarco sensed the opening he had been waiting for. “I’d been on a downhill slide for a long time, Joe. Drank myself to sleep every night, gulped coffee all day just to stay awake. Hated myself and life in general. Thanks to Jayme, I’m as healthy now as I was at thirty. Wake up every morning grateful to be alive.”

  “Whoopee for you,” Loughner said, and clinked his empty schooner against DeMarco’s water glass. “Let’s hope it lasts.”

  Time to wrap this up, DeMarco told himself. He wasn’t going to hold the older man’s insensitivity against him. Knew from whence it came. Loughner was a painful reminder of where DeMarco had been headed. He said, “So you’re convinced Reddick Jr. could be involved with what happened in Otter Creek Township?”

  “Could be?” Loughner said. With the tip of his fork he speared the last french fry, dragged it through the last smear of meat juice and ketchup, and said, before shoving the fry into his mouth, “That crime has Reddick written all over it. If you don’t make him suspect numero uno, you’re a bigger fool than I think you are.”

  Twenty-Six

  Over dinner, warmed in the oven while DeMarco took a quick cold shower in hopes of waking himself up, he and Jayme filled each other in on information gleaned from their afternoon’s work. Jayme admitted that her time reading Miller’s tweets and blogs had worn her out too, just as DeMarco’s time with Loughner had depleted him.

  “He’s passionate,” she said of the young journalist. “But geez. I wish I’d seen a little more compassion and empathy in what he writes.”

  “What I’m wondering is why we’re even considering taking him on. Since when have we needed an assistant of any kind?”

  “We do have a tendency to work ourselves to the bone, don’t we? And to get a little myopic at times?” She refilled his glass of iced tea from the glass pitcher. “And I guess I just want to help him out a little. He wants to be useful, do something meaningful. Doesn’t that appeal to you at all?”

  He thought of Flores and of how satisfying it had been to watch the light in her eyes when they parked along the road looking at the shadowy straw bison asleep on the hill. He never would have admitted it to anybody, but he’d felt like a kind of Zen master then, a Morpheus to Flores’s Neo.

  “But what kind of work would he do for us?” he asked.

  “The least we can do is to talk with him, right? Let’s not just dismiss him out of hand. That wouldn’t be very compassionate of us.”

  Instead of replying, he nodded at her plate. He had filled each of their plates with a serving from both dishes. “Which do you prefer?”

  “Well, my first bite was the fettuccine. And I thought to myself, this is wonderful. But then I tasted the tortiglioni. Its flavor is so much stronger, in a good way, that it sort of wiped out the Alfredo sauce.”

  He reached for her plate. “I’ll take the fettucine. You can have my—”

  “No,” she said. “I want them both. Keep your greedy hands to yourself.”

  He smiled and lifted his hand away.

  “So Joe,” she said. “Do you think he’s right about Reddick Jr.?”

  “I plan to find out. We can start digging in the morning.”

  “Sounds like a plan. And what about the kid?”

  He gave her a long look. Before he could speak, she asked, “Didn’t you ever have a mentor?”

  “No,” he said. Then allowed himself to remember. “Kyle’s dad, I guess.”

  “Our Captain Kyle?”

  DeMarco nodded. “William, but he went by Will. He was always a rank or two ahead of me. Cut me a lot of breaks when he was station commander. Breaks I didn’t deserve. Especially after I got kicked back down to sergeant.”

  She hesitated before asking, “Why did you get kicked back down?”

  He forced himself to return her gaze. “Dereliction of duty, basically. Though he never really called it that. This was right after the baby died. I was a zombie. Hated everybody and everything, most of all myself. And I refused to talk to anybody about it. Just wanted to stew in my misery, I guess.”

  “You wanted to punish yourself.”

  “Later on, before Will retired, he tried to promote me again, but I declined. I never wanted to be in charge of anybody else. Not ever again.”

  “I always wondered about that,” she said.

  “You never asked any of the guys?”

  “Oh, I asked. But nobody would ever say a word against you.”

  “Hmm,” he said, but allowed himself a smile, and returned to eating.

  After a while, she stood and recovered the foam boxes that had held their dinners, and returned the remainder of hers to a box. “Are you going to finish yours?” she asked.

  “Naw, too much food.” He reached for the other box.

  Just then the dog came shuffling into the kitchen, paused at the threshold to look at them, then lay
down without moving any closer.

  DeMarco said, “When was the last time he peed?”

  “Just a little tinkle before you got home.”

  He pushed back his chair. “You need to go out, mutt?”

  One ear twitched. Then nothing.

  “We really need to decide on a name,” Jayme said.

  “Harvey is a name.”

  “Not for him it’s not. And Rambo isn’t completely right either. The right name is important.”

  DeMarco said, “Native Americans used to change their names to reflect significant experiences in their lives. Some of them also had secret sacred names.”

  “The truth is, we don’t really know much about him. Except for the last couple of days. And we’re not going to name him for that.” She pushed back her chair. “I’ll put the food away. If you want to grab the leash, maybe we can coax him into a walk.”

  He regarded the dog. Then stood, but did not yet move toward the doorway. He said, “I don’t care how useful and so-called responsible neutering is. There’s something barbaric about cutting off an animal’s testicles.”

  Jayme frowned. “Poor puppy. We have a lot to make up for, don’t we?”

  “Seems like that’s pretty much what life is, doesn’t it? An endless process of making up for our mistakes.”

  “Hey,” Jayme said. “Don’t go all maudlin and melancholy on me, DeMarco.”

  He shrugged. “What are we going to call him until he has a better experience?”

  “How about Buddy?” she asked after a few moments. “That’s what he is right now, right? He’s our buddy.”

  DeMarco looked into the dog’s soulful eyes. He remembered the puppy he’d brought home for a few hours as a boy. He had called it Buddy. Then his father had found the pup and killed it.

  DeMarco crossed to the doorway. The big brown eyes followed him and looked up from the floor. “Let’s go, Buddy,” DeMarco said. “Time for a walk.”

  Twenty-Seven

  In the morning, DeMarco was awakened by wet, warm breath on his face. With eyes closed, he reached out for Jayme…and touched fur. He was lying on the edge of the bed, his back to Jayme, the dog standing with his nose only six inches from DeMarco’s.