Our Man in the Dark (34 page)

I still don't know what to do, but I don't have to worry about that as my door opens slowly and two dark figures appear. Mathis and Strobe walk in with their guns drawn. They must have heard everything.

“You really fucked up now,” Mathis says while staring at Candice's body. “At least cover her up with a sheet, for Christ's sake.”

I grab the blanket off my bed and do as instructed. I think about that recording device I found. I had destroyed it, but of course, there were others.

“Get the stuff out of the car,” Mathis tells Strobe.

Strobe walks out and then returns a few moments later with peroxide, towels, and gloves. Mathis pours the peroxide wherever he sees blood. Pink, hissing foam appears, and the air is fouled by a putrid-sweet metallic smell. The agents put on gloves, get on their knees, and begin to wipe frantically with the towels. I stand there marveling at the image of the two of them cleaning my floor.

They finish minutes later, covered in sweat.

“Got to get rid of that carpet,” Strobe says, out of breath.

“I know,” says Mathis. “We'll roll her up in it. Let's get her in the trunk.”

Mathis looks at his watch then looks at Strobe. “We've been monitoring them all day. It'll fit. We can still make it,” Mathis says to Strobe. “We've got plenty of time.”

Strobe furrows his brow, “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what you're saying?”

“Yes,” answers Mathis to both questions.

Strobe looks as if he were deciding whether or not to draw his pistol, but it soon passes, and they wrap up Candy in my rug and carry her out to their car.

I look around my apartment. The agents did a good job. It's as if nothing has happened—as if the only crime committed was that my rug was stolen. I can get over losing the rug. I can move on like none of this ever happened. I think about my new life, and I decide to start now, but then Mathis returns. He startles me. For some reason when he walked out, I thought I'd never see him again. “Get yourself together,” he says. “Let's go.”

As the city lights recede behind us, I know that we are headed for the woods. It's the perfect place to get rid of Candice—and me—but I don't panic. I know that I am outmatched, and I have accepted it. I'll accept whatever else this night has to offer. Everything that's happened has brought about a hypervigilance, and I notice Mathis struggling to speak softly to Strobe.

“Strobe, you can't get soft on me now,” Mathis says as he drives. “We have to do this. This isn't about him, it's about
us.
If it ever got out that one of our informants had a dead girl found in his apartment, we'd be lucky if Hoover let us clean the toilets in a field office in Alaska.”

“I get it, Mathis. Stop trying to sell it, for Christ's sake.”

“If you get it, then act like it and stop sulking.”

Mathis takes a dirt road that leads us through a densely wooded area that gives way to an open field. There is nothing but field, night sky, and a large but decaying old house.

“Don't want to get too close. Now, we just wait,” Mathis says, staring through the windshield. Strobe turns to him and slowly shakes his head with a sigh.

I think of Candice in the trunk, wrapped in a rug stained with her blood. I tremble and sob softly.

“There they are,” Mathis says. Two white men leave the house. “Just on time. They're headed for the rally. The tall one's Billingsley. We've got to be quick. I don't know when they'll be back.”

Tall and gaunt, Billingsley is all sinew, like a wiry scarecrow come to
life. Even though he's short, Cullworth is all rounded muscle. My bet is that he inflicted most of the damage to that couple.

“Let's just bury her in the woods,” Strobe says. “What's the fucking difference at this point?”

“No. We have to try to make this right. Take a good look at their faces, boys. Think about that couple they killed, and how Billingsley and Cullworth would have hurt that girl in the trunk.”

“Candice,” I say. “Her name is Candice.”

“Candice,” Mathis says. “Think about how much they would have loved hurting her.”

With Candice in the trunk and the ominous silence of the woods, my mind is unraveling. I can't stand waiting in the car any longer. The agents have already broken into the home of Billingsley and Cullworth, so I get out and find them. Inside, there are copies of the “If I Go to Jail” speech by L. G. Maddox and other segregationist pamphlets, scattered on a hand-me-down chest of drawers, too old and weathered to be considered antique. License tags with the Confederate flag and several “Goldwater '64” bumper stickers adorn the walls. Their idea of decorating, I guess. Even cans of the novelty Gold-Water soft drink rest in a milk crate. Strobe mutters “Goddamnit” as he trips over an axe handle with no axe: the defiant symbol of segregation made popular, once again, by L. G. Maddox.

Mathis tears the place apart, throwing clothes and knocking pictures of horse-mounted Confederates and old white people of the Grant Wood variety off the wall.

“I don't see anything incriminating, at least not any evidence,” Strobe says, peeking under a shirt with his foot. “What are we looking for, exactly?”

Mathis turns to him. “Don't do this to me now. Not right now. Do you need me to tell you how to be an agent? We've got two murderers on our hands. They killed two people—a couple—and that poor girl in our trunk. Do you really need me to tell you what we're looking for? We need the guitar that Pete said Cullworth couldn't part with,” says Mathis.

“Mathis, what the hell is happening to you? We've got a dead colored
girl in our trunk and you're looking for a goddamn guitar? He probably pawned the fucking thing already.”

A calm washes over his face. Mathis becomes still. “Man, you are one dimwitted bastard. I've been listening to him try and play that thing for weeks now. If he sold it, I would know. It's in here somewhere. I already took pictures of it when I miked the place.”

That's when I realize I've been in this room before, or at least seen this room before—in photographs—the night I broke into the agents' office, but my flashlight was only to able to reveal so much.

“So that's why you need the guitar?” I ask. “Because it will be easier to pin one murder on them if you can pin two?”

“Who's
really
the agent in here?” Mathis asks as he turns his back on Strobe and begins to search the closets.

Strobe watches Mathis, down on his knees and banging at the baseboards, “Funny,” Strobe says, “I was thinking the same thing.”

Mathis's frenzied movements stop abruptly. “Got it,” he says.

The guitar: a blues man's weapon and companion. This one looks like it could have belonged to Robert Johnson—like it can summon the devil and make him long for heaven. “Look at that,” he says as he carelessly plucks a string. “Like the hunter who keeps the antlers of a deer.” Again, he plucks a string, this time with intent. There's a look on his face, frustration, I guess, like there's a song in him that he wishes he had the talent and skill to express.

“Careful, Mathis,” says Strobe. “Haven't you ever heard that it's bad luck to play a dead man's instrument?”

“Well, somebody should've told Cullworth,” Mathis says.

“Shouldn't that have been in a dusty evidence room already?” I ask.

“It will be. Soon enough.” His eyes wander up to the tuners and then to the fret board and puts it upright. “You see that?” he asks, pointing to the neck. I look closer at the faux-pearl chord marks and then I see it—a haze of rust brown splattering. Dried blood.

“I know I'm not much of an agent,” Strobe says, “but the guitar doesn't connect to the girl in our trunk.”

Mathis goes over to the dresser and opens a cigar box filled with tarnished medals and old coins. After searching through it for a while, he withdraws a horseshoe-shaped ring—faded gold, and an empty
setting where the fake diamonds used to be. He walks it outside. I hear the trunk squeak open like a steel casket. When he returns, the ring has blood on it. He places it in the cigar box and gently closes the top. “Let's go,” Mathis says.

“My God,” says Strobe.

The crowd is full of white men, sun-punished and sweaty. Someone holds up a Confederate flag. Another man waves a sign:

Senator, we DEMAND

that WHITE people

keep THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS!

There is a man on stage in a black suit, speaking with the menace and warning of a tent pole revivalist. “If Lucifer Coon Jr. thinks he can stir up the niggers, then I promise we can stir up the white race to defend what's rightfully ours.”

They clap. The few women who are here chew gum and kiss their mates on the cheek. Mathis slams the door behind us. They all turn and stare silently. Pete, sitting in a corner, sees us and begins to stand. Mathis subtly shakes his head.

“Listen up everyone. My friend here,” Mathis places a hand on my shoulder, “says he saw two white men kill a colored girl.” Mathis scans the crowd. Billingsley and Cullworth sit up front. “Do you see them?” Mathis asks me.

I pause, conflicted, relishing the opportunity to issue a death sentence on these maniacs, but regretting my proximity to the deed. There must be a better way than bloodying my own hand.
There must be a better way.
I actually repeat those words to myself over Mathis's question.

“Do you see them?” he asks again.

“That's them,” I shout, pointing at Billingsley and Cullworth.

Cullworth springs to his feet. “That nigger's lying,” he pleads. “We ain't got nothin' to do with no colored girl.”

The crowd watches, sweaty and silent. Mathis looks at Cullworth and
smiles. “You see, that's a lie. Don't say you don't have anything to do with a colored girl, because I know that you do. I know you do.” Mathis casually reaches into his jacket, as if going for his lighter, but reveals his pistol.

The weathered, desiccated orator interrupts, “What kind of white man are you? You come into our gathering with your nigger, pointing fingers. Where is your loyalty?”

“You can shove your loyalty right up your ass. My grandfather was a Jew.”

“Who here can vouch for the whereabouts of these two men tonight?” asks the orator. Almost in unison, pleas of “
I will!”
and “
I can!”
come from the crowd.

Mathis raises his hand above the shouts. “Billingsley, Cullworth, say good-bye to your friends. You boys are under arrest.”

“Goddamnit,” Billingsley stands and kicks over the chair he was sitting in. “We didn't do nothin'!”

Mathis puts the pistol to his own head and scratches at his temple with the barrel. “Now, that's another lie. We found the guitar, boys.”

Billingsley throws a hateful look at Cullworth. Then they look at the door behind the podium and make a run for it.

“You see that,” Mathis says addressing the crowd. “They're running. You saw with your own eyes. I suggested evidence and they ran.” He motions Strobe and me toward the door. “Let's go.”

I slow down the pursuit, but we get in the car and quickly catch up to them on the dirt road.

“Stop,” Strobe screams to them out of the window. They keep running. Lit by the headlights, they appear to be running in place against a backdrop of blackness.

“Freeze, goddamnit,” Mathis shoots at them with one hand on the steering wheel. “Start shooting,” he says to Strobe.

Strobe just looks at him.

“Strobe, shoot, for Christ's sake. We're in this together.”

Strobe is still silent, but then starts to aim his pistol out the window.

Nothing but the roaring engine, the clamor of gunfire, and the two men trying to run away from it.

Billingsley, constantly looking over his shoulder to gauge our proximity, looks one last time before his skull pops open like a squeezed
plum.

A black geyser spews from Cullworth's leg.

Mathis stops the car, gets out, and walks over to Cullworth with his pistol cocked. Bleeding and sobbing, Cullworth attempts to crawl to his escape. On his belly, legs kicking in the red dirt, clawing and scratching toward the black night, he shouts, “Please.”

“Please,” he says once more as Mathis fires two shots into his back.