This Darkness Got To Give Read online

  “Nice night.”

  Pete jolted, looked to his left. There was the man in the fedora, hands in pockets, admiring the orange sky in the distance.

  “Yeah,” Pete said. He stood.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Vanderberg,” the man said. “If you don’t mind, I mean. I’d like to talk a bit, if you have some time. And I think you have some time.”

  “How do you know my name?” Pete said. “Are you from the bank? The trust. It doesn’t have a clause for graduation, I know that.”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” the guy said. He handed Pete a card. “Carl Nutter. United States Department of Defense, Invasive Species Division. I believe you may be in the market for a job, and unless we’re wrong about a number of things, which is frankly, unlikely, I believe we may have just the thing for you.”

  Chapter 3

  June 25, 1995. Washington, DC. Robert F. Kennedy Stadium

  Jenkins pushed at the corpse with his foot. “Same as the others,” he said. “Motherfucker.”

  Crabtree looked around the periphery. He picked up a beer can, sniffed it, set it back down into the mud. “Fucking smells terrible around here. What the fuck are they doing to that river?”

  “The river?” Jenkins said. “Really?”

  “That’s not how rivers are supposed to smell, man.”

  “We have another hippie corpse here. What is this, fourteen? Dead white male, two puncture wounds on the side of the neck. Severe loss of blood—how did they put it in the report? ‘Lack of corresponding evidence at the scene of the crime.’ Fucking Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt. Birkenstocks. I don’t even know what these pants are called. Like genie pants? Hippie pants? Anyway, the point is we have a fucking serial killer out here somewhere and you’re worried about the Potomac River?”

  “The river is not supposed to be like this. The other thing, whoever’s doing this, at least I understand it, you know? I mean, these things have to eat, right? It’s nature. I look at it like, a lion got loose or something. You get these things out in the world and, fuck, man, of course it’s going to feed. Get them out into the world and things are gonna end bad. We never should have…”

  “Should have what?” Jenkins said.

  “Never mind,” Crabtree said. He picked up a rock and threw it into the river with a thunk. “Some other time.”

  Jenkins turned the corpse over. He fished in the pockets and pulled out a small baggie of white powder. “Another junkie. I don’t know, this is starting to feel different to me. I mean, this is an unregistered, obviously, but it’s not following the usual patterns, even. You think it’s a junkie?”

  “They can’t even feel it, though,” Crabtree said. “We know this.”

  “But why stick to junkies? I mean, look at this guy. This guy does not look like something I’d want to eat. Why not do like in the old movies, find some hot young thing and suck her blood? Does this thing have, like, a Birkenstock thing?”

  “It’s just eating, man. We’re food. You’re thinking too hard.”

  “I don’t know,” Jenkins said. He looked out toward the river. They would need to get the uniforms down here, get the body out before these hippies started coming down to piss or shit or get high, whatever it was they did to start their day. They would have to tell them the usual bullshit story, give them a reason for the FBI to be snooping around a Grateful Dead show. It was amazing what people would believe if you flashed them a federal badge and didn’t smile.

  He could feel the gears moving, the first almost imperceptible pieces locking into place. The junkie thing—there was something there. He watched Crabtree wandering around picking up beer cans and sniffing them, poking at cigarette butts, lifting up branches. What he expected to find was anybody’s guess. Crabtree was a good agent, but limited. Point him in a direction and he’d walk through walls, but he wasn’t going to come up with any new information on his own. He wasn’t going to be much help until they could get a profile of whatever was doing this.

  “This is fourteen,” Crabtree said. “Grateful Dead John Doe number four-fucking-teen.”

  “I’m gonna call in the uniforms,” Jenkins said. He reached into his messenger bag, took out a large bandage, and put it over the puncture wounds. They were tiny, and mostly obscured by the victim’s awful beard, but there was no upside to local officers making the connection between the bodies and the puncture wounds and what was referred to in their training as “the folklore.”

  “Fourteen bodies of junkies on the wall,” Crabtree sang, “fourteen bodies of junkies…”

  Jenkins looked out at the river. Behind them, the sounds of people waking. Doors slamming, music starting up. He could hear the uniforms coming, quick bursts of siren as they made their way through the parking lot. These hippies must be terrified, he thought, and his mind flashed on a thousand drug boxes being stored in tire wells, glove compartments, stuffed into panties and bras and backpacks. There were a million little secrets, he thought, and hundreds of big ones, stashed all across this lot, and they would be here for a few days and then move on to the next place, and then the next. If the FBI didn’t switch up, get some kind of leverage, they might never get in front of this, would be chasing the Grateful Dead like some kind of morbid, federally funded cleanup crew for the next decade.

  “Let’s get this poor motherfucker into the freezer with the rest,” he said. “I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to get ahead of this thing.”

  Crabtree picked up a stick and threw it into the river. He stretched. “How would we do that?”

  “I know a guy,” Jenkins said.

  “Anything I need to know about?” Crabtree said. “Anybody?”

  Crabtree’s posture had changed. There was a look of concern on his face. So he did know, Jenkins thought. Interesting. “Just need to touch base with an old friend,” Jenkins said

  .

  Chapter 4

  June 25, 1995. Washington, DC. Robert F. Kennedy Stadium

  Cain had a system. He thought he could tell the opening encore song based on how long a break they took in between. This tour, they were playing some of his favorites: “Iko Iko,” “Women are Smarter,” the much maligned “Shakedown Street,” even the too obvious but still joyful “Sugar Magnolia.” For these, the break was short, businesslike. They came onto the stage confident, expectant, ready to shake the stadium to the rafters. Break was maybe eight minutes, ten tops, and he pictured them back there, sucking bottles of water and cigarettes and bowls, Garcia doing whatever Garcia needed to do to last another half hour or more. Other times, they took longer, and Cain could almost feel the drag in the energy level: they shuffled onto stage, looking like the aging men they were, waving sheepishly, Garcia trailing behind or even coming on a few seconds late. This is when they were more likely to play something lazy and obvious: “Dancing in the Streets” or “Good Lovin’,” and Cain would slip along the back of the crowd, make his way to the exits and the safe passage of the van.

  He watched the stage and waited. Roadies tinkling away at the piano, tuning guitars. All around him, the usual: a group of kids who he guessed were in college sat in a semi-circle, discussing the general merits of Bruce Hornsby, who had been sitting in on keyboards since Brent Mydland’s death five years earlier. “I’m telling you,” said a kid with short cropped hair in a tie-dye and cutoff jeans, who might be able to pass for a real Deadhead if not for his expensive watch and belt, “as long as they don’t play fucking ‘The Way It Is,’ the dude is fucking great.”

  “No way, man,” said a shorter kid with long hair and dirt under his fingernails, “as long as that guy is on keys, everything sounds like ‘The Way It Is.’ Fucking ‘Rider’ sounds like I’m in the fucking supermarket.”

  Behind them, another group entertained themselves by placing half-full beers on the torso of a kid who had passed out on his back, hands folded protectively over his privates. They giggled and high-fived.

  To Cain’s left, a couple sat cross-legged, foreheads touc
hing. They held hands. “I’m just so sorry,” the man said.

  “I’m so sorry, too,” the woman said back to him. They both wept openly.

  A hippie passed by with two beers in his hands and a lit joint. He did a double take at the couple, paused, watched. “I didn’t mean it,” the man said.

  “I didn’t either,” said the woman.

  The old hippie sat down. His beard was gray and his eyes were youthful and live. Cain guessed him at sixty. “I have a shot of that, man?” he said, indicating the joint.

  The hippie handed over the joint and the man took a long draw and then handed it to the woman. “What were we talking about again?” the man said.

  The woman exhaled. Her eyes went dark and she wiped at her face.

  “Exactly!” the hippie said. “Right?”

  The woman exhaled, took another hit. Cain watched something in her eyes change—sadness to anger to resignation.

  These scenes were playing out all over the infield, across the stands, twenty thousand Deadheads in maybe ten basic scenarios: high, drunk, asleep, dancing, singing, fighting, loving, scheming, tripping, and coming down. He had seen everything, had seen the same thing, again and again and again, all through the U.S. and even Europe, back in the seventies. At times, he wondered why he did it anymore. But then he wondered what other life was out there for him—what would he do? Register with the feds and live on Plasmatrol? Report weekly to an agent? Pee in a cup so they could make sure he was sticking to the government dole and not even supplementing with animals?

  It was no way to live. At least he had travel. He had the sights and the sounds of life on the road. More than that, he had his decisions made for him. Where to next? Wherever the tour took him. It was better to have a structure, some kind of outside force driving his coming and going, than to be left to his own devices. He had seen too many people, after the change, not able to handle the possibilities. If you could do anything you wanted, without fear of dying, what would you do? The question could drive even the best of them crazy.

  He felt the energy before it started, the way a fish might feel the tide coming in—a low tingle in his fingertips, a swelling in the crowd. Then he saw Bobby come onstage and the roar followed. How long had they been? Eight minutes. This could be good. Garcia came on next, then Billy and Phil and Mickey. Hornsby had snuck onstage somehow and was seated at the keyboards, fiddling with a microphone. That may not be a good thing, Cain thought. They had been playing “The Valley Road,” a Hornsby song that sounded like the rest of the Hornsby songs, and Cain agreed with the dirty fingernails kid that all twenty thousand of them might as well be shopping in a mall the minute Hornsby opened his mouth.

  After a while the band came back onstage. A few bumps from Phil’s bass, some noodling by Garcia, Hornsby pecking out a run on the keyboard. They started up with the piano—thankfully it wasn’t a Hornsby song—and Garcia began singing. One of the newer songs, one of the prettier ones. Cain wasn’t always as up to speed on the new ones, but he liked this one, connected to it in a way that he knew was almost too obvious, and he reached his arms up over his head and pointed toward the sky, opened his hands and let his fingers splay as Garcia sang of death: I will walk alone, by the black muddy river, and sing me a song of my own…

  Garcia sang, “I don’t care how deep or wide, if you got another side,” and the sea of people sang along. Cain relaxed, breathed in and out, in and out. He focused on pushing everything up through his fingertips. For a few glorious seconds, he felt absolutely nothing, just the vibration of thousands of people in the same place, the thump of the drums, the heartbeat of the crowd as one living, breathing organism. It was as close as he’d been since the day he took his dose, as close to oblivion, or a higher plane, as he could get. He heard voices and music and a deep white noise that was playing just under the surface. And then he felt a thin break in the perfection of the show, like a static in his head. He didn’t know how he knew but he knew as sure as he was standing there: the man who sold him his dose was here, in the crowd, somewhere close.

  He was up ahead, Cain knew. Somewhere. He followed this sense through the infield and up into the second level of the stadium, then back down through the bowels and out as the band finished up the encore and the lights signaled the show’s end. It was almost as if he had no choice but to keep on moving, like a hound on the trail of a dog in heat. His legs churned and he followed. People were in the way and he pushed, strode forward, edged past them in whatever way necessary.

  Now they were making their way out to the parking lot, where the guy could go anywhere, could get in a car and drive, or walk right into a police station. Cain needed to catch up right now. Add to everything the feeling in his spine, in his fingertips: it was coming tonight and it was coming soon.

  Cain pushed through the crowd that had gathered in the tunnel between the stadium and the parking lot. There were a lot of drummers tonight, a fair amount of dancers spinning through the puddles, fanning around the edges of the crowd that shuffled by on either side. Still, Cain could see the rough spots on the edges: junkies crouched against the wall, looking for a spilled dollar or a “miracle” hit, hustlers scouting out a fragile teen or an oblivious frat kid. The scene had always been like this, he knew, ever since San Francisco, and long before Altamont. Find ten people handing out flowers, really seeming to believe in peace, love, and understanding, and chances were at least one of them was scheming, selling, manipulating, cheating right behind them, hiding in plain sight in their tie-dyes and sandals, wrapping themselves in the cloak of the revolution only to advance their own cause. Now, of course, it was worse. Now, the revolution had failed. Now peace, love, and happiness sounded as quaint and old-fashioned as a sock hop or a soda fountain. Even the true believers weren’t in it for the long haul. They had degrees, trust funds, parents to fall back on. They were biding time until the call of IPOs and startups and internships became too strong, experimenting with life on the road in a controlled, safe kind of way, day tripping.

  He remembered what that was like, the ability to change, to try a life on and then swap it out for another, to switch back to what you always were all along. But that was long ago, and he had made his peace with the change, had chosen to embrace those silly concepts, peace and love, as much as the change allowed. Until the Dealer and his dose.

  He followed the trail through the tunnel and out along the walkway that went along the edges of the parking lot. For a moment, Cain wondered if the guy was making a break for it, and what he would do. It was what, eleven at night? He had six hours until sunup, seven if he was lucky. Getting stuck somewhere in the District of Columbia was not an option. He’d learned long ago that the best escape plan was to never put your sleeping or transportation situation at risk. The best plan was to rely on yourself and yourself alone. He turned into the parking lot and followed the trail along a random series of twists and turns. Was he even following a trail? He was following a…feeling. A gut instinct that the man who sold him his dose was up ahead, somewhere.

  He paused, searched for the man in a crowd waiting for nitrous hits, Day-Glo balloons filling up with a steady hiss. A line of people were waiting for their balloons, standing about in various states of sobriety. Two girls sat on the ground, one of them crying into her palm while the other picked at a scab on her knee. A kid wandered out of line and another moved up. Tomorrow, most of them would be back at their lives, hungover, with a T-shirt and a story to tell. Would they remember the way “So Many Roads” gently segued into “Promised Land?” Would they even wonder where the band would be the next night, or the night after that?

  The Dealer was getting farther away. Cain still wasn’t sure what he was following—less a trail than a scent—but he knew it was diminishing, that whatever thin connection bound him to his quarry was moving further away.

  And then it got stronger. Stronger still. It was like a vibration, a sound he could only hear with his inner ear. It was like the momentum of sitting in a moving
car, knowing he was hurtling toward a horizon, but everything around him was still: the kid selling goo balls, the T-shirt stand behind him, the sound of Garcia’s Run for the Roses album streaming out from somewhere. The feeling grew so steady that Cain was frozen in place. His arms trembled, fingertips tremored, softly at first and then increasing until his fingers were shimmering like hummingbirds. He stuffed them in his pockets.

  Around him the parking lot whirled as usual. The sensation got more and more intense until finally Cain was frozen, his mouth set in a grimace, hands stuffed in his cargo shorts.

  “Dude,” a kid walking by with a dancing bears T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts elbowed his friend, pointed his chin at Cain. “Bad trip.”

  “Oh man,” the friend said. He put a hand on Cain’s bicep and the feeling was like a hot tea kettle on his skin. Cain shivered and shook with pain, and then surprise: he had been so obsessed with the Dealer, with the sensation of the man growing ever closer, that he had forgotten completely about the hunger. The kid was in his early twenties, clean shaven, with short hair and kind eyes.

  “Dude,” he said. There was real empathy in his voice, and Cain wondered for a moment if the guy knew what was happening to him. But how could he? Cain himself wasn’t sure what the strange feeling in his chest was, why he was suddenly unable to move.

  The kid produced a joint from his hip pocket, waved it in front of Cain’s eyes. “Stay cool, man,” he said. “You’re having a bad trip, but if you stay in the moment, think good thoughts, it’ll all be cool.” He slipped the joint into Cain’s back pocket. “When you’re ready,” he said. “This will help.”

  Cain tried to whisper a thank you, more for the gesture, for those empathetic eyes and the tone of real concern, a sound Cain hadn’t heard in years, than for the joint itself. Other than the dose, his dose, drugs hadn’t had any effect on him since he’d gone through the change. But he remained frozen, hands stuffed in pockets, twitching uncontrollably.