Nighttime Ride
Many many thanks to Andy for doing this with me. Thanks, Andy!--Maer
Friday, 24 Jun 2011
Somewhere in Louisiana
2155hrs, local time
Ray's car was a dark blue convertible and he drove it with the top down to the night. AC wasn't in the offing but the slipstream made the muggy ride to Natchez bearable. Irina propped her arm on door frame for air flow and tipped her head against the seat to look at the stars. Alexandria quickly fell away and the dark Louisiana night took over. The stars shone down through the humidity and this far out there were a lot of them. One of the disadvantages to being a city girl, Irina thought. Too much city glow. She rolled her head on the seat back to look at the driver.
Ray's face was lit from below by the dashboard lights, lending his features a feral look. More than that, a lethal look. The Doberman she'd glimpsed in the lobby was back. Right now she was glad that the Doberman wasn’t growling at her, but was still leashed and under control.
Duh, DiSanti. Ex-Marine. Hello. Besides, his records came up light. Too much not-there. He's probably Force Recon. Or was. Retired now. But you know what they say. You can take the man out of the Marines, but you can't take the Marine out of the man. Shit. He’s seen you staring. Say something.
"Ever get tired of them? The stars?"
He glanced briefly up at the stars and then at her before turning his attention back to the mostly empty road. "No, ma'am, can't say that I do. Most of my time these days is spent during the night and they keep me good company."
"Ever since he was a little child, Ray had been filled with wonder every time he looked at the stars. And despite all that he had seen, both in service and out, those twinkling lights still made him feel that way. They were his one connection to the childhood he long since had left behind."
Irina tipped her face back to the sky and stifled a smile, thinking she could use Walker's narrative quirk to her advantage. Start with something obvious, then take it from there.
"I noticed your ring. A few of Dad's friends were in the service. Where were you stationed?" Irina rolled her head back to watch Walker, keeping a conversational tone even as she sharpened her focus to memorize everything.
"Originally Camp Pendleton, but I did some overseas time during the war."
"That overseas time was what had ended up putting Ray here, out of the service. But sitting in a fast car next to a beautiful woman wasn’t a bad way to end up."
He glanced over at her again and grinned slightly, "How about you? Been a New Yorker your entire life?"
"Pretty much," she said, surprised by the compliment. She kept it from her expression, irked that she had to. Must be that Southern charm, the ma'ams and the manners getting under your skin. It was a measure how rusty she'd gotten. Had Walker been a suspect in front of her in the interrogation room, she would have noted it as attempted manipulation and turned the tables on him. But this isn't an interrogation and he's not some scumbag you've collared. Not yet, anyway. "Did a stint away during college, a semester abroad. Scholarship," she added, knowing it might seem odd given her apparent background. "Europe was interesting. What about you? I didn't catch the war you were in, but what did you think of the world when you got to see it?"
He thought about it for a moment before replying, his tone serious. "What I saw then was pretty ugly, but I've gotten to travel some since then and I've seen the nice places too. But the one constant is people. They're the same no matter where you go."
"That's the truth," she said. And you haven't answered my question. Why? She looked back at him and continued. "Human nature is the same everywhere. Greed. Aggression. Territorialism. Us versus Them. The First Gulf War was nasty, if short. The current one nastier, for length. I'd always thought the Russians were fools for engaging Afghanistan and I wasn't entirely happy to see we've taken their place, even though we're there for entirely different reasons. Anyone steps foot in that country had better settle in for the long haul. Ten years is nothing. The only way you'll win the war is by outlasting it. Is that where you were injured? Afghanistan? Iraq? It must be hard to be mustered out and leave your brothers behind to finish the job."
You should know. You've done it, too. Slacker ….
She'd hated leaving the force, leaving her brothers and sisters in uniform to face the beast without her. It was a war she'd fought tooth and nail, something she loved and believed in, something larger than herself. The past few years had been a search for something similar, something that would still contribute toward victory, if from a different flank, along a different vector. Irina looked at the stars again and said softly to the sky:
"It's hell leaving others behind when you want to stay, but can't."
There was a pause and the car was briefly left quiet except for the sound of the wind whistling past them. Then he spoke softly as he continued steering them down the long road to Natchez. "But sometimes, the Good Lord has plans for us. I didn't want to be trapped in that bunker in Iraq, but it happened and it led me to a place I wouldn't have gone otherwise."
While his regular voice had grown thoughtful, his narrative voice remained the same, quiet, even, almost no emotion. "And Ray had seen things too that he wouldn't have gotten see otherwise. Things beautiful, things scary, things he wouldn't have believed existed before hooking up with Marcus. But in the end, he was doing good and that was all that mattered."
"So, how did you and Marcus meet?" Irina could feel that familiar tickle start up in the back of her mind, the one that said follow the thread. Careful, DiSanti. You don't know what's at the end of it. "What can you tell me about him? He sounds like a nice guy."
"We were both working a case, but at the opposite ends of it. I was looking for a missing girl for a friend of mine and Marcus was looking into dark cultists who believed that they could sacrifice their way to real power." He shook his head in disbelief. "As if power could be had that easy."
"Not the best of endings, mind you. The girl was dead by the time we found her, but we stopped the cult. We both realized our strengths were good complements to each other and we've been working together ever since."
Her ear for his narrative shift was getting better, Irina was glad to hear, and she caught the comment about power in the context meant. She filed that away with the rest of the facts she'd gathered so far and thought back to the various cult-related crimes she'd investigated while in homicide. Some of it really was religiously motivated, but a lot were murders made to look like cult activity, using the weird and outré to mislead the investigation. Either way, she didn't get involved until someone went missing and turned up dead and—Wait a minute …
"You said you were both working opposite ends of the same case. You weren't law enforcement and it doesn't seem from your statement that Marcus was either. So … were the police involved at any point?" The cop in her hoped Ray would answer in the affirmative. "Or did you take justice into your own hands? How did you stop the cult and how did the girl die? Was it here in Natchez or elsewhere?"
"Elsewhere," he said calmly. "And the girl was unfortunately dead well before we found where the cult had hidden her away. The police were involved, as they would be in any kidnapping case, ma'am, but no offense to your previous position, but they're not really interested in tales of dark magic and human sacrifice. Complicates their world set too much."
"Ray understood. He hadn't expected what he had found either." He shrugged as he reached down into the cup holder on the door and retrieved a mint. The wrapper came loose with a twist of his fingers in just a sec, the smooth motion of a practiced habit. As he popped the mint in his mouth, he said, "This job isn't your normal private detective job, ma'am. Irina." He paused. "If you don't mind being on a first name basis with me."
"No offense taken." Irina knew a quite a few on the force who hated the 'weird' cases. However, there were just as many who didn't let the weird get in the way of finding the facts and using them to solve the case. Irina's pursuit of justice didn't give a good goddamn whether a person had been killed by esoteric or mundane means—she gave a good goddamn that a person was dead who didn't have to be, that the person left behind people who would grieve their absence and their loss, that innocents suffered in addition to the victim. While the occult added a little extra color to the case, for Irina it mattered little beyond insight it gave her into the mind of the killer, a clue as to motivation and MO, a way to predict when and how the killer might strike again. Aware that she'd fallen silent a beat too long, she said, "It doesn't sound like the normal sort of job and, no, I don't mind being on a first name basis. So the case was elsewhere and the police were involved. Did you stop the cult before or after they'd closed the file?"
Because Ray had said the police weren't terribly interested in the occult aspects of the case, possibly leaving the cult active to kill again; because Ray had said he and Marcus, and not law enforcement, had put an end to it; because her gut was telling her that there was more to hear.
"We put them down, Irina, like the rabid dogs they were." His voice was firm, the tone of a man comfortable in his decisions. "They were well armed, fanatical, and stupid. A combination that when combined with selling their souls to the dark powers they worshipped...." He let the mint roll around in his mouth. "War calls for ugliness in the name of the greater good. We did what had to be done, what the authorities couldn't have done without serious loss of innocent life. No regrets." And there was a loud crack in the quiet night air as he crunched the mint into small pieces.
"Serious loss of innocent life," she iterated. "So it was a matter of a smaller team being more effective than a large one?" She was careful to keep skepticism from her tone. Irina was quite aware that the military trained their Special Forces teams to be lethal in small numbers and stealth often required working without a large group of people. "Did you get their leader?" Because all cults had someone manning the reins, pulling the strings, and if they got the slip on the law, they'd only set up shop somewhere else and start the whole mess over again.
"More along the lines of being better prepared for what we were getting into." "Although it was true he worked better in a small group, Ray would've happily welcomed more bodies that time. But unprepared teammates meant dead teammates and that he didn't want."
"But enough about me. I'm sure Marcus will fill you in on job details. I want to know what it was like in the NYC trenches."
But you didn't answer my question, Ray. Before or after the cops closed the case? Irina noted the evasion and set it aside to review later even as she listened to Ray's response. Some of it lined up with what he'd already told her, some of it was new. All of it was useful in making up her mental file with Ray's name on it.
"I'm looking forward to it," she promised, accepting the abrupt change of subject. She wasn't done with it but she knew when to back off in an interrogation. "As for the trenches, as you put it, it's pretty much like everywhere else, except there's more of it. New York's a big city. More people means more victims of more crimes, but even so, humans are human. There's a baseline to human behavior no matter where you go and murder can usually be solved by understanding the baseline and the perp's deviations from it. Of course, it isn't only about the head-shrinking. There's a lot of hard physical evidence that needs to be gathered, too, because the system needs something a bit more concrete than psychobabble to nail a murder conviction. And that means a lot of hard work, at the scene and off it. Canvassing for witnesses, going through records for a paper trail before and after, asking a lot of questions that end up going nowhere … or asking the one question that will crack it wide open. The trick is to keep asking and not stop until you’ve got it. As a detective, I had a duty to preserve the integrity of the evidentiary chain, to follow procedure to avoid getting the bastards off on a technicality, and to build a case that's solid enough to convict. Because the victim and the people who mourn him deserve nothing less than justice. Society deserves nothing less. And … maybe I should stop here," Irina added with a self-deprecating grimace. Whoa, tiger. Enthused much? "It's not like I'm the one doing the recruiting, is it?"
Ray smiled, a simple smile that gave his face a brief look of innocence. "I like someone who enjoys what they do. Must have made it that much harder though."
Irina caught the smile and then the words and had to look away. She stared through the windshield without seeing beyond it, thinking how that drive of hers had ultimately been her undoing.
"Enjoyed it? No, Ray. I loved it. I ate, I breathed, and I slept it. I hated every second off the clock and I counted the seconds until I got back on again. It didn't matter if I'd left the files back at the precinct. I’d carry them in my head, every single one of them, all the way home and back. About the only times I could tolerate it were when I was in the shower and when I was finally tipping over into sleep—and that's because I'd make connections then that I couldn't otherwise. Not a white board made could do what that moment could do. And when it came, I'd know I had something solid. But I can't tell you how many oceans went down the drain or how many nights I'd come up empty before a moment like that hit me. I know it sounds crazy, and maybe it is a form of insanity, but once my head takes on a case, it's damned impossible to let go of it." She flicked a glance at Ray and then quietly spoke to the windshield. "I'd always thought I'd never retire but would get taken off the job in a box, because I never wanted to quit. I loved it that much and I very nearly got my wish."
"Ray understood. Being in the Marines had been his life and he hadn't planned to leave either. Most of the time Ray thought he was better off for it, for having had the decision taken out of his hands. And the days where he didn't? He had a new job to focus on."
"Well, we only have about 20 minutes or so," he said, glancing down at the odometer and making the mental calculations on how far they had gone. "You okay with being set up at a bed and breakfast? They normally prefer you check in earlier, but we've done some business for the owner before."
Irina caught the narrative tone and wondered if it was an offering of sympathy without being direct about it. Though how Ray couldn't be directly involved when the words came directly from his mouth, well ... she'd puzzle that one out later. Back away from the subject, ma'am, and come out with your hands up. She breathed a soft laugh at the thought and shook her head.
"I'm okay with that," she said, trying not to think how many levels her response could be applied to, and not all of them satisfactorily. "It's cozier than a hotel and right now, I could use some cozy." Preferably with a long hot shower and a nightcap. Damn. I should have swiped one of those little bottles from first class when I had the chance. "What sort of business?"
If she couldn't curl up with a vodka or a scotch, maybe she could console herself with an account of Ray's case involving the bed and breakfast.
"Nothing dark and mysterious. We tend to do favors for the people in Natchez when possible. Part of being good neighbors. This one started off with a little lost dog, but it got complicated pretty quickly..." And Ray went on to spend the rest of the ride to Natchez telling a surprisingly funny story about a kidnapped Pomeranian and how it ended up leading the agency to an elaborate con job being run on several prominent Natchez citizens. Ray's dry wit suited the material and he finished up just as they pulled into the small bed and breakfast parking lot next to a shiny red Toyota Corolla. He stopped the car and put the keys in his own pocket. As he did so, he pulled out another set and handed it to Irina, motioning with his head towards the Corolla. "Your rental ride. Looks they haven't even worn the new car squeak off of yet."
Irina took the keys and eyed the car. Probably hasn't had the new car smell worn off it either. As for the color ... So much for touring the town discreetly. I'll have to ditch it and go on foot if I can. How big can Natchez be? What little she'd seen on the ride in had the downtown compressed into a relatively few blocks along the riverfront. Lights twinkled through the trees in the quiet neighborhood surrounding them, however, hinting at acres and acres of suburbs. Still, it had been years since Irina had had the privilege of driving a spanking brand new car and tomorrow promised some fun doing it. She made a point of looking around as Ray fetched her single bag from the backseat of the convertible.
"Is the Pomeranian still here? Or did it go to doggie heaven?"
He shrugged a little. "As far as I know. How long do dogs live anyway?" "Ray had never exactly had a real close and friendly relationship with animals. They left him alone and he left them alone."
Irina raised a brow at that, but only said, "Well, considering the career you've described that dog having, it would be a miracle if it were still alive. As for the rest of it, a human year equals seven for a dog. So in dog years, I'm dead," she added, reciting a tee shirt she'd seen once.
He chuckled out of politeness more than anything. "Enjoy your time in Natchez tomorrow, Irina. Get a feel for it. Do what you do best, I'm sure. Investigate. And Marcus will see you at eight. I'd arrive hungry."
"Will you be there?" she asked, curious to see how he'd answer.
He shook his head curtly. "Besides the fact that I'd just get in the way, I've got some casework that needs to be done. But if you really like my company that much, I'll be driving you back to the airport on Sunday night." And he gave her a slow smile. "Ray knew that he certainly wouldn't mind spending more time with her."
“I'd like that,” she said with a slow smile of her own. She did, really. Ray had a sense of humor she appreciated and they both had a history of being in a particularly demanding service before leaving it. And the compliment, indirect though it was, pleased her more than it annoyed. Something she’d examine later over that shower and nightcap, if she could arrange it. And since the man had carried her bag to the car, nothing would satisfy but to carry it inside for her. The proprietor was waiting for them and checking in was handled with efficiency and charm. As the ink was drying on the paperwork, Irina turned and offered her hand for a shake. “I'll see you Sunday, then. Thanks for everything, Ray.”
He gave her a smile and a nod and a brief firm shake before stepping out into the night. It wasn’t until Irina had her shower and a cold (non-alcoholic) drink in her hand when she realized Ray's touch had been unnaturally cool.
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