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THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL

Regis Duroc-Jersey is always affronted and angry when he has to meet with Galen Vector, the unsavory operator who has been installed in Belden Bead’s position by Horace and Katherine Bead following their son’s sudden disappearance eight months earlier. Vector’s management of illegal drug sales, human trafficking, loan-sharking, massive fraud perpetrated against the state disability fund, and murder for hire cannot be faulted for inefficiency. The man knows what he’s doing. However, his affectation of sunglasses at all times, even at night, his pencil-line mustache, and a broad gap between his upper incisors for which he has sought no periodontal fix render him too absurd to be even a rural crime boss. He has a fondness for plaid slacks and brightly colored polo shirts, and on the rare occasion when he wears a suit, it’s a cheap off-the-rack garment accompanied not by a proper necktie but by a bolo with a turquoise clasp. His degree is in money laundering or something, acquired from a state university with fewer ennobling traditions than any McDonald’s franchise. Galen Vector is manifestly not of Regis’s class, and Regis feels diminished every time he meets with the man. Regis Duroc-Jersey III is New World Technology’s junior vice president of community relations and Terrence Boschvark’s right-hand man, facilitator for the Kettleton project, an important position for which he has been schooled by Montessori, Pencey Prep, Harvard, and a family whose expectations are so high that Regis has suffered nosebleeds most of his life.

On this occasion, he and Vector, each having disabled the GPS in his SUV, arrive at the abandoned sawmill an hour after nightfall, Regis by way of the compacted-gravelstone lane that once served the enterprise, the crime boss by a forest-service road. As always, they park at opposite ends of the long-decaying mill.

Regis steps out of his company Lexus and locks it and stands listening to the wilderness. He is at least a mile from the nearest residence, six miles from town.

Affronted and angry, he is also deeply uneasy. The moon has not yet risen, and starlight fails to define either the buildings or the surrounding forest that lump together in a glob of imminent threat. The primeval darkness disturbs him less than the silence that seems as perfect as in the vacuum between the stars. This hush suggests the forest is a dead realm, but of course it teems with life even at night, perhaps especially at night. Therefore, the uncanny quiet feels conspiratorial, as if legions of sharp-toothed predators know he has arrived, wish to deceive him into thinking they don’t exist, and will pounce on him the moment he lets his guard down.

City-born and city-shaped, Regis isn’t just out of his element in Kettleton County; he’s deeply offended by the place. Instead of manicured parks and botanical gardens, there are meadows that have never been mowed and unkempt forests. Animals of infinite variety shit wherever they want, and no one ventures into the woods or fields to pick up the crap in plastic bags for proper disposal. Instead of a Starbucks, there are establishments like the hole-in-the-wall called Java Joe’s that also sells doughnuts and muffins with no respect for those who have problems with gluten. The only restaurant in town offering duck is Hazel’s Homestyle, where the menu trumpets “Quacker a la Orange”; instead of tablecloths, paper placemats feature a grotesque cartoon of Hazel in an apron and chef’s hat.

The people are the worst of it. Because they can grow their own food and hunt game for their meat and fix anything that breaks down, they think they know what life is about. However, they would have no idea how to conduct themselves in a private jet or how to get a good table in New York’s finest restaurant. They are stubborn people who don’t know what’s good for them, and most of them refuse to learn. They need to be put through a rigorous reeducation process to better program their minds, but because most of them are gun fanatics, that is not currently a viable resolution to the problem they pose.

Even when Regis Duroc-Jersey isn’t in an infuriating backwater like Kettleton County, he suffers constant anxiety. Because he is so perfectly put together and conscious of appearances, no one suspects his inner life is in turmoil. He lives with the constant fear that he’ll be a failure, that he might already be a failure. He is thirty years old and has not yet either founded a business grossing at least half a billion dollars per annum or become the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company. He makes a salary of nine hundred thousand dollars a year, with a long list of benefits, has four million of investments and six million in stock options, but he’s thirty years old . In a mere five years, he will potentially be seen as over the hill by the cruel standards of Silicon Valley or by the criteria of whatever pitiless engine of change comes after Silicon Valley. If by then he fails to accumulate at least three hundred million, he will be deemed out of sync with the times, old, elderly, an embarrassment to anyone seen with him. He has to gain momentum sooner than yesterday! America is being reshaped from democracy to oligarchy. Regis absolutely must be one of those oligarchs giving the orders, because he has spent his life taking orders, and he’s sick to death of it.

He switches on his flashlight and carves his way through the night and then through the age-skewed shadow-draped architecture of the sawmill that is being gradually deconstructed by gravity and the weather. Although the night is windless, a draft weaves among the massive posts that support the roof beams, softly rattling loose sheet metal somewhere. The littered concrete floor is puddled with foul-smelling water and no doubt copious quantities of rat urine. On his way to a previous meeting here, Regis once saw a rat as big as a dog. Although Vector, who hadn’t seen it, insisted it must have been a possum, Regis remains convinced it was a fifty-pound rat and that the moldering sawmill is a mutant womb gestating numerous monsters in preparation for some looming Armageddon.

Outside again, at the north end of the main building, he finds Galen Vector waiting for him on the plank-floored bridge spanning the river that tumbles from its origin high in the mountains. When the mill was in operation, water was diverted to the sorting chutes that carried logs of different sizes to the saws most appropriate for them. With no moonlight to silver its whorls and ripples, the rushing water slithers like an oil-black snake, infinite in length, either issuing from or returning to a pit at the core of the world.

Vector splays two fingers across the lens of his flashlight to dim it, and Regis does likewise as he approaches the rendezvous point, but enough light exists to reveal that the crime boss wears plaid pants with what appear to be snakeskin cowboy boots. As usual, dark glasses screen Vector’s eyes. Regis realizes he doesn’t know what color those eyes are or if they have any color at all.

The center of the bridge on this remote and abandoned property is the mutually preferred venue when Vector and Regis must meet, to ensure that no evidence is produced regarding the nexus where the interests of the Bead criminal enterprise, crooked politicians, and Terrence Boschvark meet. If Vector or Regis were ever followed by an agent with audio gear featuring a powerful directional microphone—or if one meant to betray the other by recording a conversation—the roar of water as it quickens into rapids under the span would foil the plot. They face each other—much too close for Regis’s taste—and speak as softly as possible while still being able to hear each other.

“Something has happened to Nash Deacon,” Regis reveals. “He might even be dead. If he is, we know where. We need your people to investigate—and urgently.”