Jon Evans - Dark Places

As I passed, the man with the shaved head and tattoos cried out: "Paul! Paul Wood!"

I turned and recognition hit me like a lightning bolt. Morgan Jackson. Wearing the world's biggest shit-eating grin.

I froze and just stared at him. He turned to his companions. "Paul's an old mate of mine. He was on that Africa truck I was telling you about." He turned back to me. "Come join us for a beer!"

And I did, too. I don't really know why. Maybe habit. God knows how many times I'd sat down and had a beer with Morgan Jackson in Africa. Maybe I was surprised that he was with friends. I'd never imagined The Bull not traveling alone. Maybe it was just the social pressure of the situation, stupid as that sounds. Whatever it was, I broke my promise to Talena, and I didn't turn and collect my things and head straight back to California. Instead I sat down next to Morgan. I even shook his hand and smiled.

"This is Kerri and Ulrika, they're Swedish," he said, pointing to the girls, and "and my mate Peter, he's Dutch. We just came down from the mountain." He gestured to Gunung Rinjani. His three friends smiled and said hi.

"So how you been?" he asked. "What are you doing here?" There was an edge to his voice. His body language told me he was uncomfortable; hunched up, defensive. He was one of those rare big men — and he was big, I'm not small but he had three inches and probably forty pounds of muscle on me — who usually seem totally comfortable in their skin. I looked into his eyes and realized he was as surprised and alarmed to see me as I was to see him.

"Just traveling," I heard myself say. My mouth seemed to be speaking without any direction from my brain. My brain was still in shock. "I got laid off a few days ago and figured, you know, why not the road?"

"Damn straight," he said, and took a long swig from his Bintang as mine arrived. I studied him for a moment. He was even more heavily muscled than he had been in Africa. The shaved head was new. So were the tattoos: a sinuous dragon around each bulging bicep, a complicated pattern of what looked like razor wire across much of his back, and a chain of Chinese characters down the front of his chest.

"How long have you been on the road?" I asked.

"Couple months," he said. "I was in Nepal for awhile, then a few days in Bangkok, and then down here."

"No kidding?" I said. "I was in Nepal last month. Did the Annapurna Circuit." Again I can't imagine why I said this.

"Is that so," he said. "Why, I was there myself. Surprised we didn't run into one another." We glanced briefly into each other's eyes and then both of us flinched away. What felt like a long silence followed. I think his friends could tell there was tension between us and didn't know what to say.

"How about the rest of the usual suspects?" I eventually came up with after desperately searching for a way to break the silence. "Still in touch?"

"I am," he said. "I'm based in Leeds these days, and they're mostly in London, but we stay in touch, saw Lawrence a few months ago. How about yourself?"

"Most of them, yeah," I said. "E-mail and so on."

"You still working in IT?" he asked.

"Was 'til they laid me off," I said.

"How long are you staying in country?"

"Don't know," I said. "Few weeks. You?"

"Not too long," he said. "Another week or two. Long as the money holds out. Don't start work up 'til January, but I'm pretty near dead skint as is."

Silence fell. We drank from our Bintangs. I tried to tell myself that I was sitting next to a serial killer, to the man who had murdered Laura, and I couldn't really believe it. That wasn't the sort of thing that really happened.

I realized that though it was only midafternoon it had grown much darker since I had sat down. When I looked up I saw that storm clouds were beginning to gather. The afternoon's monsoon was en route.

"I should get back to my lodge," I said, hastily getting up as the wind picked up and the first few fat raindrops smacked into the ground. "Don't want to get rained out."

"Well," Morgan said. "I'll see you around." His expression could have been a big smile. Or an animal baring its teeth.

My wooden hut's door and window could both be barred from the inside. I was grateful for it. I locked myself in, mind working furiously. It had to be him, absolutely had to be. Morgan was The Bull II. Morgan had gutted Laura on Mile Six Beach and crushed Stanley Goebel's skull in Gunsang. Morgan Jackson. Larger than life.

When the truck had first met, on the ferry to Gibraltar, Morgan had been an overwhelming presence, a big Australian who wore a Tilley hat decorated with shark's teeth, "tiger shark, caught him myself fishing offa Darwin," he'd explained. At first he was almost universally disliked. He was ridiculously competitive, and full of boast and bluster. "He's just so OTT," Emma had sniffed, as only aristocratic British women can sniff.

But he'd gradually won us over. He worked hard, and he was a terrific cook, and after awhile his arrogance and inability to laugh at himself were quirks instead of flaws. He told us later in the trip that he felt he was born in the wrong century, that he should have lived in the colonial era. We agreed. We took to calling him the Great White Hunter, and he adopted the nickname proudly.

I had a million memories of Morgan. Morgan next to the campfire with a can of San Miguel in each hand, one still full of beer, the other converted into a bong. Morgan losing his temper while we dug ourselves out in the Mauritanian thorn forest for the umpteenth time, withdrawing the axe from its sheath and taking out his frustration by singlehandledly hacking down a thorn tree in three minutes, chanting "mother fucker mother fucker mother fucker", as the rest of us stared in awe, and then giving us a toothy aw-shucks grin when it crashed to the ground. Morgan negotiating at the top of his lungs in a Mali village market, giving the man a belligerent shove to make him drop the price of green peppers by fifty CFA per kilo. Morgan constantly leering at the pretty girls on the truck — Emma, Laura, Carmel, Nicole, Michelle — in a manner so cartoonish it was somehow inoffensive. Morgan working the winch singlehandedly to pull the truck out of one of the craters on the Ekok-Mamfe road, stripped to his waist, every vein on his neck standing out with the effort. Morgan hunting for his misplaced hat on the beach at Big Milly's in Ghana, furious, biting everyone's head off until it turned up behind the bar. Morgan sick with malaria, crumpled into a fetal position at the back of the truck, groaning with every bump that we hit, until he raised a feeble arm to indicate that he needed a toilet stop, and Steve and Lawrence half-carried him behind a stand of trees by the side of the road. Morgan dragging himself up Mount Cameroon on sheer willpower, dripping sweat, just one week after that.

He was a good guy, the Great White Hunter. And yet. There was a reason why he'd made it onto my shortlist of three. He had an explosive temper. He had zero sympathy and zero empathy for anyone's weaknesses or shortcomings. He got along, he was friendly, he was socially adept… but you never felt any warmth talking to Morgan. Always the sense that he was perfectly capable of forgetting the rest of us and walking away at any moment, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. He'd left the truck a couple of times, in Burkina Faso and again in Ghana, for a few days. Mind you a lot of us had done that, when we needed a break from truck life… but he was the only one to leave alone.

But while I'd thought in the abstract that he was potential killer it was a total stomach-churning shock to realize that it was actually true. That he had killed people, friends and strangers alike… and then mutilated their bodies… It was so hard to reconcile this fact with the garrulous, gregarious Morgan we knew and loved despite his many faults. I tried to come up with reasons why I could be wrong, why it might not be him, how I could have misinterpreted everything. There weren't any. There was no other possibility. It was Morgan. He had hid it well, but he was sick in the head, like a rabid dog.