The Darkness hp-5 Read online

  “This was for your own good. I’m just trying to help.

  Abby, please, let me stay.”

  “You did what you came here to do. I bet when all this is over you’ll have a hell of a story, and I can tell all my friends what a great reporter my mom is. But I don’t

  want to see you right now. So please, please leave. Don’t make me ask again. I don’t want to cry anymore.”

  Paulina felt her face grow hot, her eyes beginning to water as she stared at her daughter, hating every word she’d said but deep down, in some way, understanding it, too. She knew the night would come to this, that these revelations would destroy her daughter’s relationship. It had to be done, Paulina knew, and she’d have to deal with being the messenger.

  She would take the misplaced anger, and she would let her daughter cool down over time even though it would kill her every second she thought about what might have happened.

  And that, Paulina thought, walking out the door, dabbing at her eyes with a tailored sleeve, was what she supposed being a mother was all about.

  35

  “Major Chester A. Malloy,” Jack said. He was holding in his hand a printout of all the information we could find regarding Malloy. And it didn’t make us feel any better.

  Jack’s eyes were wide as he read, scanning the print.

  I wondered if he was as nervous as I was.

  “According to his file,” Jack said, “Chester A. Malloy was a member of the Special Operations Task Force assembled in 1989 to overthrow Manuel Noriega’s control of Panama. Along with ten other members of his unit, Operational Detachment Bravo, Major Malloy encountered a brigade of the Panama Defense Force, where several members of their squad were killed. The rest of the squad was returned to the U.S. after Noriega’s capture, and that’s where the trail ends.”

  “So what the hell is a goddamn Special Forces major doing kidnapping New York journalists?” I said.

  “Look at this,” Jack said. We huddled over his computer, where nearly a dozen Internet searches were pulled up. Jack pointed to one, a photograph of eleven young men and women, identified in a military photo as the

  Bravo unit. I read the names.

  Franklin K. Loughlin.

  Andros I. Browning.

  Roy Winnick.

  Eve S. Ramos.

  Chester A. Malloy.

  Rex M. Malloy.

  Wendy C. DiBonaventura.

  Harrison L. Daughterty.

  Shonda P. Williamson.

  Emmett R. Douglas.

  Bill E. Hollinsworth.

  Chester A. Malloy, along with the rest of his team, was wearing his Special Forces uniform. Green sport jacket over white shirt. Black tie. Nameplate on the right of his chest.

  All the uniforms were decorated with various medals and pins, and they all wore their Green Beret caps raised to the left, the signature of their division of the Special Forces.

  Standing to the left of Chester Malloy was a man named

  Rex Malloy. According to the documents, Rex Malloy was Chester’s younger brother by three years. They were both members of Special Forces, both Green Berets.

  And both had looks on their faces as serious and deadly as a man who threatens to kill a teenage girl.

  I pointed at Chester Malloy.

  “Nice and blond,” I said. “That’s our man.”

  “Hey, Mr. Cottontail,” Jack said, smiling.

  Just then I felt my cell phone vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out, saw I had a new message. Not a voice mail, but a text message. It was from Paulina, and it contained an attachment.

  I opened the note. It said: Taken one month ago by

  Pam Ruffalo. This is our guy.

  “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Jack said.

  “Wow. I haven’t heard anyone say that since the sixties.”

  “Oldie but a goodie.”

  “That one either. Hold on, I’ll enlarge it.”

  I plugged the phone into my computer and waited for the image to download. When it finished, I opened it up and enlarged the shot.

  It was a grainy image, taken with some sort of low-res camera or cell phone. The man could be seen from his left side. Only the left side of his body and face were visible. What was visible, though, was that shock of wavy blond hair.

  “Holy crap,” Jack said. “Look at this.”

  He pointed to the photo of Chester Malloy in the army photograph.

  “That’s not the same guy as in this photo,” Jack said.

  “Look at his ear.”

  “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?”

  “Well, not as much as you, but between the two of us

  I think we know exactly where to go.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Of my five squad members, four are dead. The only living Bravo Detachment member is Bill Hollinsworth.

  Hollinsworth was deployed as a Special Reconnaissance officer. His job was to gather intelligence on the enemy and their tactics.”

  “This is the guy who was in the car with the Malloys when they came under fire.”

  “Exactly right. And get this. Hollinsworth is a professor of American history, post-World War II at Columbia.”

  “What you learn in war you teach to future generations,” I said.

  “If he was in Panama, he probably knows Rex Malloy.

  I called over there. Hollinsworth has office hours today until six.”

  “We should meet with him right away,” I said.

  “No worries, Henry. I already called the history department and they said he never leaves until six on the dot. And apparently he’s not the easiest guy to get along with, because the lady who answered the phone seemed rather shocked that we wanted to meet with him. She said students steer clear of Hollinsworth like you do from matching clothes.”

  “Or you from denture cream,” I said.

  “Go screw yourself,” Jack said. “Come on, let’s see why this guy’s friend is poisoning our city.”

  36

  As soon as Morgan Isaacs got off the subway to head home, his cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but picked it up anyway, figuring after all the money he and Theo made that day everything in his life was taking a turn for the better.

  He couldn’t believe how well this new drug, these small black rocks called the Darkness, were selling. It seemed every customer had either bought recently and needed a refill, or heard about it from a friend and wanted a go. It thrilled Morgan to no end that he was carrying a product that was so desired. It made him feel powerful again, for the first time since everything was snatched from him so unfairly.

  To Morgan, he wouldn’t trade that feeling away for anything. And he would do anything to make sure it never left him.

  The sun was beginning to descend, and the Manhattan skyline looked a gorgeous dark blue in the evening sky.

  For months, Morgan wondered how long he would be able to look at that view, if his lack of employment would force him to relocate, take some job outside the city where he’d be a nobody, a nothing, working for a company that the Wall Street Journal barely knew existed, a company whose CEO wore a cowboy hat rather than a three-piece suit. Where the offices were decorated with shag carpeting and the secretaries were all fifty and overweight.

  That was a world Morgan refused to live in.

  So he took in the crisp air, and remembered why he fell in love with this city in the first place. And he thanked his benefactors for giving him the chance to stay.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Morgan, it’s Chester.”

  “Oh, hey, what’s up?”

  “Just wanted to let you know I talked to Leonard, and he told me you and Goggins cleared almost twenty grand today. That’s quite a haul.”

  Morgan smiled. He was well aware of how much money they were bringing in, but he’d learned one thing in business and that was never to brag to your boss about how well you were doing. At the end of the month, when all the receipts were tallied up, you’d get all the praise you needed. Braggarts were so nineties.

  So to hear this from Chester during his first week of work, to Morgan that was all the praise he’d need for a month.
r />   “I know you haven’t received a paycheck yet,” Chester said, “but you deserve a bonus.”

  Morgan’s jaw dropped. He stopped walking and leaned up against a mailbox. Then he had to move when a man asked him to move so he could deposit a letter.

  “I…I don’t know what to say… Thanks, I guess.”

  “You’ve earned it,” Chester said. “But you will need to do one thing for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. And if you do this for me, you’ll get a hundred grand on the spot. I’ll need you to sign one piece of paper, for tax purposes, but you’ll have six figures to play with by the time you’re hungry for dinner tonight.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Yes, I’m kidding you. In fact, we never want to see you again. Goodbye, Morgan.”

  “Wait! I was kidding, too!”

  “I know, stupid. Be on the corner of Thirteenth and

  Avenue A in half an hour.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “One more thing, Morgan.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Do you like the suit you’re wearing?”

  “I guess so. It was one of the first ones I bought when

  I got my job in banking.”

  “Too bad. Because you’re never going to wear it again after today.”

  37

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jack said. He was staring out the window of our cab as we sped uptown to meet William

  Hollinsworth.

  Rather than responding, I studied Jack’s face. For some reason it made me think about his clean desk, how for some reason there was something holding him back from returning fully to a normal life.

  We’d never had a chance to have a real talk about

  Paulina’s article and what it had done to him, and it was probably for the better. When a man’s reputation, and maybe his soul, is nearly destroyed, the last thing he wants to do is revisit it. But it was clear that Jack hadn’t quite gotten past it, that he was still between two worlds.

  The wistful look on his face confirmed my thoughts.