Jason Pinter - The Darkness

“So they killed him,” I said.

“Not immediately. Paz quickly realized that things were going to get out of hand, so he tried to run. But because the PDF had set up a legitimate roadblock, they felt they were justified in killing him. That’s the way

Noriega spun it. Have you heard of Franz Ferdinand?”

“Of course,” Jack said. “His assassination in Sarajevo was the primary catalyst for World War I.”

“That’s right. Well, Robert Paz was our Archduke Ferdinand. Until December sixteenth, nineteen eighty-nine, no members of the United States military had been killed by Panamanian forces. When Lieutenant Paz was killed, suddenly we had all the cause in the world. And on

December twentieth, the floodgates opened. We went into Panama with a vengeance, and we took Noriega out of power and that bastard has been rotting in prison ever since.”

“So how does this all play into Chester Malloy getting killed?”

Hollinsworth said, “Why are you so interested in this?

All of this happened almost twenty years ago and suddenly you want to know about it? I’m not buying it. What else are you looking for, Mr. Parker?”

I looked at Jack. He said to Hollinsworth, “We finish our interview, you can start interviewing us.”

He pursed his lips, said, “Fair enough.”

Morgan couldn’t believe how fast his heart was pounding. Even when he used to snort a few lines at a club then dance until his blood felt like lava, he couldn’t remember ever feeling quite like this. Those nights when he was high, there was always a sense of floating above the world, that the Morgan who was doing those things, saying those things, would wake up the next morning a different person.

The world didn’t really count when you were out of it. Everything you did could be explained. This, though, there was no explaining it. No justifying it. If he accepted what was being proposed right now, he would wake up tomorrow the same Morgan Isaacs, remembering every detail and never be able to wash it away.

Which is, perhaps, to his great surprise, the reason he didn’t feel the slightest hesitation.

The gun was heavier than he expected it to be. You always saw movies where guys swung guns around like they were made of tissue paper, aiming them sideways and backward and doing cool tricks. Not this gun, though.

He held it in his hand, and it felt just fine.

“This is a Glock 36,. 45 caliber handgun,” Chester said. He was looking at Morgan with dead seriousness in his face. Chester had been nice to him during the short time he’d known the man. A good conversationalist, even jokey at times, but right now Morgan got the feeling that if he even cracked a smile Chester would throw him out of the car.

They were driving uptown, passing by the glistening

Time Warner Center, the natural beauty of Central Park on the right as they drove up Central Park West. Morgan never spent a whole lot of time in the Park, or in any sort of nature. When he wasn’t behind a desk, he was at home with a beer or at a club throwing back martinis like they were iced tea. At first the idea of traveling all over the city to hawk his wares worried him. What if he didn’t like it? What if he couldn’t take all the time on the subway, didn’t want to deal with the asshole who often paid with crinkled twenties and smelled like dirty socks?

But when that money started rolling in, when he saw the smile on Chester’s face, Morgan knew he could hack it, and hack it quite easily.

“You sure you can do this?” Chester said. His eyes betrayed no sympathy; he was simply making sure that

Morgan was up to the task.

“Yes,” he said emphatically. “I am.”

“Well, all right then. Once we pull up to the building, the office is number A17. You’re going to walk straight past the receptionist. If she gives you a hard time, just tell her you’re going to the bathroom. Her name is Carolyn.

Don’t look at her, just walk right past and say, ‘Just going to the bathroom, Carolyn, thanks.’”

“Got it.”

“Once you enter the hallway past her desk, make a quick left, and it’s the third office on your right. You know who your target is.”

“I do. Why…”

“No whys,” Chester said. “Once it’s done, you run as fast as you can back here. The car will be idling in front of the entrance. The door will be open. You just climb in, hand me the gun, and we’re gone. The gun will be disposed of before the police arrive on the scene. And we want you to wear this,” he said.

Chester handed Morgan a baseball cap, underneath which and sewn in to the cap was a blond wig. Morgan put it on his head, and Chester adjusted it so that none of

Morgan’s black hair could be seen.

“Anything to throw them off a little bit. Carolyn will be the only witness, and she’s an old lady. They’ll be looking for a young blond guy wearing a baseball cap.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll drop you off near the subway after we ditch the car. Call your girlfriend. Have her come over, get her good and drunk and screw the shit out of her. She’ll be another layer of protection, so to speak. Then wake up tomorrow, come to work and act like this never happened.”

Chester handed Morgan a folded piece of paper. The young man opened it. It was a money order for $50,000, made out to him.

“Just in case anyone asks, you’ve been doing some contracting work on the side,” he said with a grin. “You’ll get the second half once it’s done. And Morgan?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure nobody asks.”

Morgan nodded, then folded the slip back up and slipped it into the inside of his coat pocket. It felt good to have it there, and it would feel even better tomorrow when he deposited a hundred thousand dollars into his bank account.

Those debts, the ones that had nearly crippled him for so long, would be wiped clean by the end of the month.

“You ready?” Chester said.

“Ready?” Morgan said with a smile. “I’m bored. Let’s do this.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Our troops invaded Panama because of Paz’s death, but because he ran from a PDF blockade the Panamanian government claimed they did nothing wrong. So folks back home in the States began to feel the same way, especially when more people started dying on both sides of the conflict. Two weeks after Paz’s death, a marine unit was supposed to infiltrate a Noriega drug lab, but instead they found themselves trapped in an alleyway where they were ambushed by the PDF. They all managed to get out alive, but there were some on our side that wondered if they were given the wrong directions on purpose.”

I said, “That they were led into a trap in the hopes they’d be killed to strengthen the cause for the invasion.”

“Exactly,” Hollinsworth said. “Nobody knew for sure.”

“That day in January,” Jack said, “when your squad was attacked…the same thing happened, didn’t it?”

I could see Hollinsworth struggling to remain passive, remain calm, but there was something behind those eyes that he was unable to hide. It wasn’t grief or sadness; it was rage.

“I know we were set up,” Hollinsworth said. “We were scheduled to join up with a Ranger regiment. I was given directions, instructions on when and where we’d meet. But by the time we got there, it was just us and the armed guard.

By the time the survivors got back to the base, Chester was dead. And the Rangers had no idea what the hell I was talking about. The military discharged me a month after that, and I went back to school to get my master’s degree.

I never saw anyone else from our squad again.”

“So Chester Malloy was killed that day,” Jack said,