A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller (3 page)

Trout listened in on his brother-in-law’s phone conversation while pretending to be absorbed in the scene playing out on the Mall and in front of the Capitol. Protesters were starting to push close to the security line.

“A bunch of ignorant Homer Simpsons, a bewildered herd!” the Majority Leader spat into his cell phone. “T-shirts and baseball caps,” he mocked. “Sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arms. Fuchsia bandannas and American flags wrapped around their heads. Jerry Baer’s Tea Baggers. You half expect to see them wearing face paint and foam fingers and shouting, ‘Hook ’em, Horns!’ They’ll leave a ring around Washington that even Mr. Clean can’t wash out.”

He laughed at his wit. A short, quick bark of disgust.

“Jerry Baer is beginning to look like Mr. Big out of a James Bond movie,” he continued to the person on the other end of the phone. “Somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet gun up his ass and he’ll explode like a fat blimp.”

He barked again and hung up.

“Dennis, move away from that fucking window,” he snapped. “Get me the Director on the hook.”

Dutifully, Trout moved to the end of the Senator’s desk and used the land line to dial Vladimir Gonzalez. The Director of Homeland Security answered on the first ring. Trout handed the receiver to Wiedersham and returned to the window. Outside, leaders of the Tea Party protest halted at the security defense line on Third Street. The rest of the march piled up behind. Trout saw some people breaking out thermoses of coffee to pass around.

“What the fuck’s the holdup?” he overheard Wiedersham demand of Gonzalez.

Wiedersham was one of the most powerful men in Washington, a Beltway mover and shaker, an important figure in the larger global community. “Nobody fucks with me,” was how he liked to put it.

“Demonstrations are outlawed in Washington,” Wiedersham shouted into the phone, hauling the Director’s ass over the coals. “What part of ‘outlawed’ don’t you understand, Gonzalez...? It’s Southern populist terror... Fuck it.
Make
an incident.”

Wiedersham’s face was so red it looked about to explode.

“They’re rioting in the streets,” he raged. “These Tea Baggers have to be stopped before we have people hanging in cemeteries all over the country.... Gonzalez , quit your stalling, man. We
own
the fucking media. They’re with us. They won’t print shit unless we tell them to.”

He hung up and swiveled in his chair to face Trout across the office. “Get away from the window,” he ordered again, impatiently.

Trout turned away from the blind to face his brother-in-law. He had a bad feeling in his gut. Wiedersham and he simply looked at each other, not speaking, waiting. They didn’t have long to wait. Trout flinched when he heard a sudden roar from the distant crowd, followed by popping sounds. Like firecrackers, but which Trout knew were not firecrackers.

He closed his eyes and dropped his chin on his chest. He felt sick.

Tea Party Riots in Washington

(Washington)—
A Tea Party march protesting high government deficits and the National Health Care Act erupted in violence in front of the U.S. Capitol this morning when gunshots rang out from several points in a crowd estimated to number at least ten thousand. In self-defense and out of fear for their lives, Capitol Police and Homeland Security Police returned fire. Three Tea Party members were reportedly killed and four wounded. One Homeland Security officer suffered a sprained ankle. Fifteen leaders of the march were arrested and charged with inciting to riot...

Chapter Five

Tulsa

Detective James Nail’s daughter, Jamie, 19, lived in a modest second-floor apartment on Cherry Street, the closest thing Tulsa had to Greenwich Village or the French Quarter. Off-duty after the abortion at Mickey D’s, James Nail limped up the outside stairway to his daughter’s door. He wore his Glock-22 strapped butt forward underneath his jacket and his shield on his belt. He let himself into the apartment using his key. He walked through the kitchenette—dirty dishes in the sink—to the cluttered living room. Messy, like her mother. He heard the shower running.

“Girl, you
know
how I hate to wait!” he sang out.

“Oh, Daddy!” came the cheery, gurgling-water response.

“It’s your mother’s birthday. We only have a couple of hours to shop before I go on duty.”

“Daddy, you’re divorced. You don’t have to remember Mama’s birthday.”

“If
she
hadn’t been born, we wouldn’t have
you.”

“You old silly. You’re such a romantic. Even if you buy her a present, she won’t let you come in the house.”

“You can say it’s from the milkman.”

Jamie giggled. “There’s coffee on. Pour cups. I’ll be just a minute.”

Nail returned to the kitchenette. The pot was on the stove. He poured a cup and looked in the frig for cream. Leftovers from days before, a banana turned black... Again, the mess made him think of Connie. She divorced him three years ago after Jamie turned sixteen and started driving.

“You’ve changed, James. You’re not the man I married.”

No shit, Dick Tracy.
For God’s sake, he wasn’t toting up numbers on a spread sheet or calling on clients to sell widgets and gadgets.
His
clients were generally dead, shot or stabbed or ground up in a wood chipper, dumped in old septic tanks, boiled, burned, dissected...

“You come home smelling like death. I can’t stand it anymore. I don’t think you feel
anything
.”

He located evaporated milk still in a can. He scraped crust from around the opening and made his coffee blond. Before carrying the cup to the table, he opened a closet door and looked inside. Ragged men’s jeans and political-slogan T-shirts cool with campus radicals. One had the likeness of Che Guevara wearing his revolutionary black beret. Another displayed President Patrick Wayne Anastos’ campaign slogan:
Hope and Change.

“What are you doing, Daddy?”

He hadn’t heard the shower turn off. She wore a terrycloth robe with a towel wrapped around her long black hair. Her face glistened with diamond water droplets. Amazing how much she looked like her mother when Connie was nineteen. Except for the seawater blue eyes; they were like her father’s.

“I was making sure he wasn’t hiding in here,” Nail said.

“Rupert’s afraid of you, Daddy.”

“Because I compared him to a rare bird?”

“I don’t think a yellow-bellied scum sucker is actually a bird.”

“You think?” He fanned through the other T-shirts. “I’m still not convinced his skinny butt isn’t hiding in here.”

“Rupert is not skinny. He’s—”

“—scrawny?”

“I was going to say revolutionary
lithe.”

She dried her hair. He poured another cup of coffee and slid it across the table to her place. She took a hurried sip and dashed back to the bedroom. Nail heard her getting dressed.

“You’re so old-fashioned, Daddy,” she called out from behind the door. “People like Rupert with courage and foresight are helping President Anastos bring social justice to America.”

“We should have sent you to Oral Roberts University instead of TU.”

“The capitalist system is broken, Daddy. We must change the future in order to restore hope.”

Nail sighed. Like a lot of Americans, he was too busy with a job and day-to-day life to pay a lot of attention to politics. On election day, he had had two dead bodies in a northside Kentucky Fried Chicken and a suspect exchanging bullets with cops. The polls were closed by the time he took the perp into custody.

He sipped his coffee. “Damn, daughter. This oil spill you call coffee would melt a ten-penny nail.”

“It’ll put hair on your chest,” she teased back.

“Then what happened to Rupert?”

She laughed, refusing the bait, and came out in jeans and a blue low-necked T-shirt. At least it didn’t have a slogan on it.

“Rupert won’t drink it either,” she said.

Nail pushed his cup aside. “That’s one thing we have in common.”

“You have to give him a chance, Daddy.”

“I will—as soon as he gets a job.”

She sat down and smiled patiently across the table. “He has a job.”

“Community organizer is not a job.”

“Daddy, let’s call a truce and go shopping?”

* * *

Jamie purchased a bracelet for her mother’s birthday, Nail a sweater he thought she might like, as long as she didn’t know it came from him. Jamie hooked her arm through his elbow and they strolled to the Food Court for cold drinks while she rambled on about an event at school during which a student got his nose ring caught in his girlfriend’s earring.

“Daddy? Earth calling Dad. You’re not listening.”

“Of course I am, kiddo. You know how transfixed I am over dudes wearing nose rings and high heels.”

She giggled. She was accustomed to his sarcasm. They purchased Cokes and found a table next to one of the TVs turned to a news channel. The screen showed protesters at the U.S. Capitol Building being dispersed with tear gas and gunfire. An elderly woman overturned her wheelchair in the panic and people stampeded over her. The crawl at the bottom of the screen listed the death toll at three.

“Kiddo, about Saturday?” Nail ventured.

She looked up at him, a soda straw between her lips. “What about Saturday?”

They’d had these conversations before, he the over-protective parent, she the newly-emancipated daughter guarding her independence.

“I suppose Rupert will be out at the ORU Center with all the other crazies waving their signs?”

“Daddy, Rupert is not crazy. People are justifiably outraged. Jerry Baer is the reason the rednecks hung that census worker in the cemetery.”

“I suppose Baer put the noose around the guy’s neck?”

“He’s
responsible
with his hate rhetoric. We have to let him know he’s not welcome to spread his venom in Tulsa.”

Jerry Baer: They’ll Destroy Me

(New York)—
Jerry Baer, the most-listened-to personality on U.S. TV, said he feared for his life and expects to eventually be destroyed, one way or the other. He became a media sensation through Zenergy News Cable and a popular TV program that placed him at the top of his enemies’ list. Senator Joe Wiedersham’s (D-Ill) introduction of the FAD (Fairness of Airwaves Doctrine) Bill was initiated in response to widespread fear over hate-speech and Baer’s unfounded allegations that President Patrick Wayne Anastos’ White House is full of Marxists and communists.

“It’s unpatriotic at this time of war and economic crisis to criticize the government,” Wiedersham said. “We’re simply not going to tolerate those who stand in the way of national security and progress...”

Baer follows a long tradition of paranoia-peddling dating back to the Great Depression. Like “Lonesome Rhodes” in A Face in The Crowd (1957), Baer has a special loud-mouthed, alarmist knack for keeping riled up the uneducated, God-fearing, flag-waving, NASCAR-loving, country music-listening trailer trash in more backward regions of the nation.

“Everything in Washington is all screwed up,” Baer railed on a recent show. “The pot is boiling with political correctness, economic takeover by the government of private businesses, abuse of civil rights, corruption and an administration determined to trample the Constitution in order to ‘fundamentally transform’ our country. We’re under attack by our own government. A witch hunt has already started for dissenters, seditionists and obstructionists. And I’m not going to shut up about it. They can ban me from the airwaves, outlaw what I say, slander me and charge me with sedition—and I’ll still speak out. From prison or on street corners if I have to. The only way they can destroy me is with a bullet to the head...”

Chapter Six

Washington, D.C.

Dennis Trout paused inside the doorway to
The Fountains
on 6
^th
Street to let his eyes adjust to the club’s low light. His boss, Majority Leader Wiedersham, would rather be caught in a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s than in a place like this.
The Fountains
was tucked back in a strip mall behind a camera store and a bail bondsman. Bail bonding thrived in D.C. Not because of politicians, who were rarely ever brought to task for their misdeeds, but instead because the city was about seventy percent poor African-Americans.

It was “Happy Hour” and the place was jumping. Trout spotted Judy at the far end of the bar. She waved. He dodged through the crowd of working class stiffs toward her. It was a joint with eats, a honky-tonk, as Judy called it, but he didn’t have to worry about being recognized here. He had removed his coat and tie and left them in his BMW to avoid looking too much out of place.

“Darling,” he muttered to the Lady Clairol blonde as he pecked her lips and collapsed on the stool she had reserved for him. He slumped with his elbows on the bar and ordered a Whiskey Sour from a barmaid wearing a short skirt and apron and in her red hair a blue ribbon that looked as bedraggled and unwound as he felt.

“What’s wrong, dumpling?” the blonde asked.

Trout sighed. “I guess you heard what happened in front of the Capitol?”

A blank look on her face.

“Maybe not,” he said. Her TV tastes ran more toward
Oprah
and
As The World Turns
. “The Tea Party people?”

“Oh. You were at the riot?” she said, squeezing his hand in sympathy.

“It wasn’t really a riot.”

“It wasn’t?”

Her unawareness of current events astounded him. It shouldn’t have. After all, her innocence was part of what attracted him to her—other than her spectacular boobs and good legs. She was about thirty, a few years younger than Trout. Tonight, she wore faded fisherman’s jeans frayed at the thighs and cuffs, a low-cut lace blouse that revealed a lot of cleavage, and the gold-plated locket on a neck chain that Trout gave her. Her mouth was too wide, her nose and her brain too small. She wore too much makeup. Trout’s wife Marilyn, had she known about Judy, would have described her as low class.