Jon Evans - Dark Places

I wished some of the other truckers were with me. Seeing Morgan again gave me the irrational feeling that all the rest of them were just around the corner, camping next to the Big Yellow Truck. Maybe I should have contacted Hallam and Nicole and Steve after all, should have told them what I suspected. They might have come to Indonesia with me. They would have known what to do. They were good at that. But there would be no help, no advice. In some ways I was more alone than I had ever been. The nearest person who knew me was Carmel in Sydney, a good two thousand miles away. Unless you counted Morgan Jackson himself.

The rain fell so fast and strong that it sounded different from rain back home, not a pattering but a load roar on the roof. I decided to go e-mail the news to Talena. I rolled out of my bed and approached the door. Then I froze. It occurred to me for the first time in a way that actually meant something that I was in great personal danger. That Morgan had already come after me up on the Himalayan trail, and that it would be no great matter to find out where I was staying. And that mid-monsoon would be the perfect time to kill me, with zero visibility, everyone staying inside, another hour to hide my body before the monsoon ended. He could have followed me to my cabin, he could be standing outside with a parang right now, patiently waiting in the rain for me like the Great White Hunter he was.

I stood there, my hand outstretched towards the bar that guarded the door, sweating heavily, and not from the humidity. Maybe he wouldn't try anything. He was with friends. That helped. But then he was with friends, a truckful of them, when he had killed Laura.

I thought of Laura, dying on the beach trying to hold her belly together, and I began to grow angry. I had a name and a target for my fury, and it grew inside me like a fire that has found dry wood, physically warming me, blotting out the cold icy fear. She was the only woman I had ever loved, and he had gagged her and probably raped her and gutted her like an animal.

What am I supposed to do, stay in here all day? I thought, and I yanked the bar off the door and pulled it open with unnecessary violence. The rain poured into my cabin in what felt like sheets of solid water. I stepped outside, looking quickly around, ready for a fight, parang or no parang. There was no one there.

It was only twenty steps to Mekar Sari's covered patio, but by the time I got there I looked as if I had swum the distance. Femke was sitting on her hammock chair, breastfeeding her baby. Through the window I could see her Indonesian husband working to repair a broken chair.

"Hello, Mr. Wood, are you enjoying our rainy season?"

"Very much," I said. "I need to use the computer…?"

"Sure thing." She stood up gracefully, without interfering with her baby's meal, led me over to the corner of the patio where the computer stood, clicked on the connection icon on the desktop. I watched the connection window open, with the little icon of the telephone and wires. But instead of disappearing after a little while, a tiny red X appeared at the end of the wire.

"Scheisser," she said. "Sorry, Mr. Wood. The storm has damaged the phone lines."

"Oh," I said. "Shit."

"Maybe tomorrow," she said, "it usually takes them a day or two… "

"All right. Thank you anyways," I said.

"Wait," I said as she stood up, "could I write an email and put it in your outbox? So it would go out the next time you connected?"

"Certainly," she said, and opened up Outlook for me. "Just close it when you're finished."

"Thank you," I said, and sent a quick message to Talena:

Subject: To be opened in the event of my death or disappearance

His name is Morgan Jackson. He was on the Africa truck.

I thought the Subject: line was kind of funny. I was in that kind of mood.

When I was finished I saw that Femke had gone inside to check on her husband instead of returning to her hammock chair. I padded back across the wooden patio, dripping with every step. And just inside the patio screen I saw one of her husband's parangs, protruding from a wooden block.

I stopped and looked over my shoulder. Neither of them was looking. I reached down and took the cold wooden handle of the parang and pulled it free. It took a surprising amount of force. Her husband was much smaller than me but very strong. But I worked it free with a second violent jerk and walked back to my cabin.

Once inside I quickly dried the iron blade with a T-shirt and I examined it carefully. Like a machete, but curved like a scimitar. A blade maybe two feet long. The handle was well worn hardwood. It felt good to have a weapon. A sword. I imagined swinging it at Morgan Jackson. It was a pleasing image.

The rain lasted longer today, three and a half hours instead of two, and the sun was already sinking into the horizon when it let up, sudden as a thunderclap. I knew what I should do. What I should do was pack up and find a horsecart (cedak in local parlance) willing to drag my sorry ass down the muddy smear that was the road to Kotoraya. Then I should take a bemo back to Mataran and email Talena. And the next day I should ferry it back to Bali, head for Denpasar airport, and fly back to the good old U S of A, mission complete, Laura and Stanley Goebel's murderer identified.

But that is not what I did.

I had an early dinner at Mekar Sari.

"Mr. Wood," Femke asked me, after serving a superb dish of gado-gado, "have you by any chance seen a parang anywhere near here today?"

"No," I said, affecting surprise.

She shook her head. "These people. They're terribly racist, did you know that? Because I am white, they think it is perfectly all right to steal from us anything that they can."

I made sympathetic sounds, feeling a little guilty, and went to bed before the sun had sunk into darkness.

Hypothetical question. Suppose you have identified to your own satisfaction, beyond any reasonable doubt, a serial killer who has murdered at least two people for sure, one them a woman you loved, and will probably kill again. Suppose you know that there is no chance of the authorities ever catching up with him, because you have no hard evidence and furthermore he was smart enough to commit his murders beyond the jurisdiction of competent authorities. Suppose further that you and the killer know each other well. Suppose even further that he must also know that you know, or at least be very deeply suspicious. And finally suppose that you encounter one another in a remote Third World village.

The question is… no. There are three questions. One, what is the right thing to do? Two, what is the smart thing to do? And three, what do you actually do? Those were the questions that ached in my brain that night as I lay behind a locked door and window and stared at the ceiling, listening to the unnerving keening noise, just at the edge of hearing, that radiated from the rice paddies. Some local critter, I guessed, like a cricket but more disturbing.

The smart thing to do, that was easy. Run like hell.

The right thing to do — well, never mind right in the moral sense. We were way past morals here. Try right as in what I wanted to happen. I wanted Morgan Jackson dead. Of that I was certain. I was as opposed to capital punishment as the next guy. Amnesty International was my favourite charity. But I wanted him dead. It wasn't even the threat he posed to future victims. I wanted him dead for what he had done to Laura.

Could I kill him? Almost certainly not. He was the Great White Hunter, he was bigger than me, and stronger, and he had killed before, and overall was about a hundred times as dangerous as yours truly. But could I as in could I bring myself to do it? Would I kill him? I didn't know. In the heat of action, maybe, but in cold blood… I didn't know. Talena had said I wasn't a killer. But I didn't think she knew me as well as all that.