Jason Pinter - The Darkness

“I don’t see it,” I said. “What, is there an old earring hole or something?”

“Didn’t you ever wrestle?” Jack said.

“Uh, no. I watched a little WWF when I was growing up.”

“That’s as close to real wrestling as Harvey Hillerman’s hair plugs are to the real deal. No, look closely at

Chester Malloy’s ear in the earlier photo, and then compare it to the ear in this new one.”

I did, and while I couldn’t be sure, it looked like the ear in the recent shot was slightly puffy, slightly deformed.

“That’s called cauliflower ear,” Jack said. “Wrestlers get it all the time. It’s when fluid collects in the ear, causing the cartilage to die and harden. The result ain’t pretty, but it’s kind of a badge of honor for a lot of wrestlers. Unless you treat it right away, drain the fluid, it’s not going away.

Chester Malloy doesn’t have cauliflower ear in this new photo. But look who does in the earlier one.”

I stared intently at the military shot, and clear as day was the left ear of Rex Malloy. It was deformed, puffy, just like the ear in the later shot.

“This means that the person in this recent photo wasn’t

Chester Malloy,” Jack said, “but his brother Rex. My guess is Rex was a wrestler before joining the army, and he had the bad ear when this photo was taken.”

“And notice something else?” I said.

“And look at Rex’s hair in this photo,” Jack replied.

“It’s not blond.”

“That’d be a fine shade of black,” I said. “And it’s straight, not wavy at all.”

“That means that it wasn’t Chester Malloy who kidnapped Paulina,” Jack said. “It was Rex, all dolled up to look like his brother.”

“So if that’s Rex Malloy in the picture, and it was Rex who took Paulina, where is Chester Malloy?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, sport.”

“So we’re back to this again,” I said.

“Until further notice,” Jack replied. “So Rex Malloy grew out his hair, dyed it blond, gave himself a nice perm and is now going by his brother’s name.”

“Come on, who doesn’t do that?”

“I have a brother. Name is Roy. Man’s got a head balder than an eight ball and smells worse than Oscar the

Grouch. If I ever dressed like him, you’d have permission to throw me off the nearest suspension bridge.”

“That would make sense. Paulina told me the man who kidnapped her insinuated that he’d lost someone.

Maybe he was referring to his brother,” I said. “It looks like he’s purposefully dressing just like his brother Chester. And if the guy in Paulina’s photo isn’t Chester, but Rex, why call himself Chester? Why not make up some other completely random alias?”

“Some sort of psychotic tribute perhaps,” Jack said.

“Now look at the rest of this squad. Eleven men and women. The Department of Justice should have records on the rest of them. We need to know where the rest of this squad is, and get any more information about Malloy that we can. Maybe somebody who knew him can explain why a Green Beret seems to be armpit deep in some new drug epidemic.”

“Noriega was a massive drug trafficker,” I said. “If this

Bravo squad was flown in to help depose Noriega, they obviously had some part to play in the Panama drug war.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But the question remains. Whose side were they on?”

We split up the list, Jack taking five names and myself taking six. Our job was to track down the remaining members of Rex Malloy’s Detachment Bravo team and contact them to find out whatever information we could about the Malloy family.

The DOJ had every member of the squad on file, but to my surprise only three of my six were still alive.

And one of those was not Chester Malloy.

The surviving members on my list were Rex Malloy,

Eve Ramos and Frank Loughlin. There were no records of employment or housing for either Ramos or Loughlin, and according to the DOJ, Frank Loughlin was serving twenty years for the murder of a homeless man on the streets of Atlanta.

Researching the newspaper records, I discovered

Loughlin had pled insanity, his lawyer making the case that Loughlin still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the military, and that his client was better served under psychiatric supervision than under our federal prison system.

Loughlin had been returning home from a movie when a homeless man approached him on the street. After asking for change and being denied, the man placed his hand on Loughlin’s shoulder. The ex-Special Forces agent then threw the man to the ground and pressed his boot against the man’s neck until his larynx was crushed under the force.

Police testified that when they arrived on the scene,

Loughlin was sitting on the curb by the body, crying.

Nevertheless, the judge disagreed that Frank was missing his marbles, and now the man who once fought for the

United States was rotting in one of its very own jail cells.

Not the kind of irony that brings a smile to your face.

Seeing as how Frank Loughlin couldn’t be involved in this unless he somehow gained the ability to walk through walls, cross state borders and look like one of his former squad mates (a possibility considering the amount of drastic plastic surgery you see in New York), I went to find Jack to see if he had any more luck.

I found him at his desk, on the phone, writing on a notepad.

He didn’t pay me any attention, just kept nodding as though the person on the other line could be persuaded by his nonverbal approval. I took that moment to glance around Jack’s desk.

He’d been back for such a short amount of time, and since then he’d done nothing to make his desk more personal, nothing to show that a human being actually worked, breathed and dwelled there.

I wasn’t the most sensitive guy in the world and I had no need to plaster my workspace with pictures of every living relative, every birthday party and a child from every conceivable camera angle, but you could walk by my desk and know that somebody took the time to make it more habitable.

There was a photo of Amanda and me taken a few years ago at a concert at Jones Beach. I had a clipping of the first article I ever published in the Gazette, and the first piece I ever published in the Bend Bulletin from back in the day when I was cutting my teeth.

Those articles were steps to me. Chapters in a life and career. I wasn’t sure what the next clipping would be. I supposed I would only know when, well, I knew.

Finally Jack hung up the phone and turned to me.

“Whaddaya got?”

“Very little,” I said. “Three of my six are still alive.

One of them is in prison, one has no records of pretty much anything, and Rex Malloy hasn’t been heard from in almost fifteen years. The kicker, though, is that Chester

Malloy is dead.”

“I had a feeling,” Jack said.

“Turns out the older brother was killed in action in

Panama. He was in a transport vehicle with his brother Rex,

Eve Ramos and William Hollinsworth when they made a wrong turn and ended up on a street not far from Noriega’s headquarters. They were approached by members of the

PDF who tried to detain them, but when the squad resisted they opened fire. As far as I can tell Chester Malloy was the only casualty, but according to news reports, all four members of the team were seriously injured.”

Jack stroked his beard, thinking. Either that or he was ignoring me. But since I doubted that, he just continued to stroke his beard.

“That give you good luck?” I asked.

“Been doing this my whole adult life. So depending on your perspective, probably not.”

“What did you find out?”