Randy White - Dead of Night

I knew what was inside the closet without looking.

I stood there feeling a gauzy sense of unreality as, behind me, the girl said it again: “Oh dear God!” Then she made a snorting noise, followed by a low hissing wail that was mostly air. It was the shadow scream we experience in dreams. The dream where we open our mouths to cry out but there’s no sound.

I spun and threw my arms around her, trying to shield her vision by holding her close. Then I steered her away. She was shivering, the earliest stage of shock.

Jobe Applebee, the preeminent field biologist, was in the closet. He was hanging from a galvanized crossbar. There was a section of nylon rope tied to the bar, and also knotted around his neck.

The bar wasn’t high enough to hold him off the floor, so he was squatting, bulging eyes wide, arms dangling. It was as if he’d been in the process of seating himself in a chair only to be pulled up short like a running dog startled by the limits of his leash.

The girl was crying now; crying and babbling: “Oh, this can’t be happening… he’s dead. Is he really dead? I knew him, since I was a little girl. But that’s not Mr. Applebee. It can’t be him. He doesn’t look anything like him.”

True. I’d seen Jobe only briefly, but the combination of strangulation and gravity had transformed him. His head was now oversized on a shrunken body, his skin the color of potter’s clay, black hands engorged, lips blue, dark eyes protruding.

The most striking change was the facial expression. The man had been much tormented. Not now. But before leading the girl outside I took another look to confirm I wasn’t imagining it.

No.

Applebee’s eyes had a glazed, dreamy look, as if he were enjoying himself. His pale lips were contracted into a slight smile. It was the mild, secure smile that you see on the faces of children as they retreat into the arms of a parent. It’s the smile that forms when they realize they’re safe from all harm.

Applebee had retreated to some far, safe place; vanished somewhere inside himself. If the man’s expression mirrored his last, fading sensibilities, then he’d experienced something that pleased him, but also surprised him a little. Maybe it was peace… or just an absence of turmoil, which is another form of liberation.

Later, when I made the dreaded call to Frieda, that’s the way I would describe her dead brother: peaceful.

I talked with her after first speaking confidentially to her husband, telling him what had happened, seeking his advice and permission. I said to Frieda that Jobe looked as if he’d died peacefully, set free in a way that couldn’t have been painful.

I evaded details, and tried my best to comfort her.

But the girl was right. Jobe Applebee looked nothing like the person she said she’d known since childhood. Nothing at all like the terrified man I’d left alone to die.

Serpiente

Whenever Solaris asked Dasha where she lived-“Maybe I can visit you one day!”-she would shrink him with a withering look and reply: “I live on the islands. That’s all you need to know, because it’s all you can understand.”

Dr. Desmond Stokes and his staff lived on two islands in the southern Bahamas, part of the Ragged Island and Cays chain near Cuba. A couple hundred acres each, shores separated by a passage so narrow that tidal current roared between the islands like rapids down a river.

The main island had buildings, staff housing, a small, modem manufacturing facility that converted blocks of coral, cut from reefs, into holistic calcium tablets. The island was manicured, planted with citrus, avocado, and bananas.

On the second island, there was an airstrip, storage facilities, a few huts, a small lab equipped for extracting and preserving reptile poisons, a crane for stacking blocks of coral. Mostly, the second island was jungle. Wild things lived there. Wild things were kept for research. People on neighboring islands who practiced Obeah, a complicated religion similar to voodoo, wore special charms to protect them from the evil they believed existed there.

The first time Dasha saw Dr. Stokes’s islands was on the laptop screen of his personal assistant, Mr. Luther T. Earl. A tall, dried-up, Lincoln-looking man who wore bow ties and smelled of lavender, big white teeth when he smiled, skin the color of a black pearl. That’s what he claimed, anyway.

“Earl the Pearl,” he told her. “You can call me that, if you like.”

This was long before she found out Earl the Pearl was also Dr. Stokes’s organizational brains, and his front man.

Mr. Earl told Dasha they were actively recruiting someone “with unusual qualities” to take charge of security at his boss’s retreat in the Bahamas. There might be some personal work involved, too.

The woman had a pretty good idea what that meant, or they wouldn’t be recruiting staff at an executive security trade show at the Bellagio Hotel, Vegas. A couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types-fakes, guns freaks, and skinheads-paying money to attend lectures on how to survive the coming revolution, the ghetto monsters, and watching firepower demonstrations, rocking to the latest weaponry, out there in the desert, when they weren’t getting shit-faced on cheap booze.

Mr. Earl had rented a three-bedroom suite. Interviewed forty-seven candidates, he told Dasha later, but only three made it far enough to see pictures of the rich man’s tropical estate. The manufacturing plant was smaller than she’d expected, neon lighting inside, where employees wore masks and plastic gloves. They turned raw coral and seashells into vitamin pills that cured all kinds of diseases.

“We have thirteen employees, ferried in and out every day,” Mr. Earl said, “Dr. Stokes has a personal staff of three, counting me. If I find a top security person, we can hire more people. Your call.”

Dasha barely heard, she was so focused on what she was seeing. They were digital photos set to music; scenes from two green islands rimmed with sand beneath vodka-clear water that darkened incrementally as the bottom dropped away, jade green, forest green, turquoise, then purple, showing that the islands were actually mountain peaks, anchored solid and alone in a blue tropic ocean.

Golden beach and rain forest. Heat. Jesus. No wonder Dasha had to wait so long for an interview. She sat there in a hotel suite with a dozen tough-guy strangers, some wearing their black berets and camo, others dressed the way they imagined secret agent types would dress-black sport coats, black shades-all applying for the same job, but none wanting it more than Dasha.

Jungle waterfalls. A jungle river, steam rising…

Dasha had grown up outside Chernovo near the Volga River, which flowed south toward the Chechen border when the stinking ditch wasn’t frozen. She was one of five children born to a single mother who couldn’t afford to buy coal in a slum so cold that, between October and May, Dasha learned to identify neighbors by their eyes and whatever bit of nose their scarves left unprotected. Months went by, she saw only bits and pieces of her own body. Never naked all at once.

Sitting in the Vegas hotel room, seeing photos of the island-palm trees, coral mesas beneath blue water, sun-bright sand-she thought to herself, I’d kill to get his job.

Turned out, that was part of the deal.

Dasha, the ideal choice.

Of the couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types strutting around Vegas, she saw two, maybe three, people who had the look. Who’d been places, done some jobs. If you served in the military on the Chechen border, you learned to know the real ones at a glance. Operators. The others did their Hollywood hero impersonations. “When I shoot a man, he stays shot,” she heard some guy say one night, sitting, drinking martinis with Aleski at the pool bar.