The Great Leader

Fortunately the feeling of being smeared gave way to the light-headedness of the morning before on the way to the cult property. He had become nothing but he was free. He would no longer break into a dilapidated house trailer and find three ounces of marijuana, three grams of meth, and the usual needleworks. He had once been cited for breaking a perp’s arm but the young man was so skinny from meth that when Sunderson grabbed his arm when he was trying to crawl out the back window of a third-story apartment the snap was audible. What was he going to do, fly? Unlike most in his profession Sunderson did not see the dire threat of narcotics as a societal rot that must be expunged or society would be imperiled. When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot intent on selling the silly weed to other dipshits you have a justice problem. It was easy in the current economy to have fantasies about being a member of a secret cabal of detectives who travel through the world assassinating the world’s most destructive criminals who, obviously, were all members of the financial community next to which a Mexican drug cartel seemed murderous but childishly simple. Drug cartels didn’t destroy the world economy, but then what were his conclusions worth? Hadn’t he been put out to pasture? His mind had become a Ping-Pong table.

In the Tucson landing pattern he came near to euphoria over the idea that with his extensive historical preparation he was just the man to study the crime of religion. Sometimes you had to get out of town to see things clearly. Prosecution was as childish as the profession he had left. At least Dwight hadn’t swindled widows by giving them a hope of heaven where they might rejoin their mates who had worked themselves to death. As the plane jolted to the ground he felt a momentary loss at not being able to find any of the cult’s tree costumes. How grand it would be to stand beside a brook trout stream masquerading as a tree though there was the alarming thought that a bear would rub against your bark. Several years before their divorce Diane had pushed him into attending a reading by a U.P. author who had found a stump, mammoth in size, in a gulley in the back country south of Grand Marais. The man claimed that he often sat within this huge, hollow stump. Sunderson had been envious to the point that he totally ignored the contents of the man’s reading of his fiction and poetry. Sunderson had no interest in fiction sensing that his room full of historical texts were fiction enough. The writer had said that the stump was his church.

Because of the time change it was only noon when he found himself in his room at the Arizona Inn, which was an extravagant mistake. Sunderson had remembered the name because Diane used to stay there when visiting her parents in their retirement home in north Tucson. She and her petulant mother didn’t get along well enough for Diane to bunk with her parents. His room at the Arizona Inn reminded him uncomfortably of Diane’s parents’ home near Battle Creek. Everything was immaculate, the furniture old and expensive. The toilets were fluffy and you weren’t confident it was a proper place to take a crap.

There was an urge for another nap, which troubled him. He wasn’t ordinarily a napper but it was his consciousness that was tired rather than his body. He checked the pricey room service menu then walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Miss Saigon he had noted in the car. He had a splendid bowl of Vietnamese pho with tripe, meatballs, pork, hot chopped peppers, lime, and cilantro. The irony about Vietnam is that the war closed down and Sunderson was in a medical detail in Frankfurt helping to take care of the thousands of burn victims. The Frankfurt hospital fed pho to the veterans. Sunderson worried for a year about being transferred to a field hospital in an area of action. He was also afraid of snakes and had heard many stories. The grotesque thing was how much burned flesh stunk and how many times he vomited. He returned to MSU with a glad heart and the U.P. with actual joy.

His morale was high on his walk back to the hotel. A good meal would do that. In the room there was a call from Mona on his voice mail and he was startled to hear that she had tracked Dwight from Choteau, Montana, to Albuquerque to a location about thirty miles south of Willcox, Arizona, near a village named Sun City where Dwight was currently looking for the bones of Cochise with a group of six followers all of whom had dark hair. Dwight would no longer accept disciples who looked decidedly Aryan.

“Jesus, how did you get all this info?”

“Three hours of hacking. I got it from credit card records. Your secretary Roxie didn’t know shit. Want a MapQuest of where Dwight is staying, also an aerial photo?” Mona had met Roxie only once but thought of her as a lowlife.