Dead Watch

I—say Watchmen, we’re not really talking about the guy on the corner in a jacket helping an old lady across the street. We’re not talking about the Boy Scouts. When Goodman was still a prosecutor, he put together a group to do intelligence work. Half dozen guys, maybe. John Patricia was the first guy . . .”
    “I’ve met him.”
    “Patricia was air force intelligence. He brought military interrogation to Norfolk. And Darrell Goodman joined up. He’s Arlo’s brother and he’s a crazy mother. He’d take a guy apart with a pair of wire cutters if he needed some information. There are stories down in Norfolk about Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up some people pretty bad. Of course, they cut way down on prostitution and street crime about disappeared, and drugs went away. Everybody was happy to look the other way, ’cept the druggies and the stickup men.”
    “Okay . . .”
    “The thing is, Arlo carried those same guys over to his campaign for governor. Dirty tricks, spies, disinformation, the whole works. Intelligence operations, in other words.”
    “I saw a guy outside the governor’s mansion,” Jake said. “He had a special forces look about him—he was wearing a raincoat and one of those floppy-brim tennis hats, black tennis shoes. Looks like he had some kind of complexion problem, like really bad acne . . . but then I thought, maybe a burn, maybe service-connected.”
    “That’s Darrell Goodman,” Barber said, snapping his fingers, then pointing his index finger at Jake. “Always that raincoat. You ought to look him up. Take a look at his military records. I mean, there’s nobody in the Pentagon who really wants to know what those guys did in Syria. They might think it needed to be done, but they don’t want to know about it.”
    “So. An asshole.” Jake made a note.
    “Yes. A major asshole.”
    “You said you thought two things about the Watchmen. What’s the other one?”
    Barber nodded. “Okay. From what Maddy told you, you know that I’m a gay black man. The Watchmen are a proto-fascist group, with their own little charismatic führer. What should I think about them? I’d like to see them run out of the country.”
    “They don’t seem to have a problem with blacks,” Jake said. “Or gays, for that matter. Not that I’ve read about.”
    “Give them a while,” Barber said. “Being antiblack or antigay or anti-Jew isn’t useful to them yet. But they’ll get to it. Right now, they’re against immigrants. That’s not going to be enough, not when Goodman runs for national office. You know that thing he says, about how he never met a Commandment he didn’t like? Well, do not fuck your brother is in there somewhere.”
    “You’re a pessimist, Mr. Barber.”
    Barber smiled and spread his hands: “Hey. I’m a gay black guy. Pessimism keeps me alive.”
    “Last question, then,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to come at it obliquely—because if you don’t know, I don’t want you to guess.”
    Barber studied him for a moment, then: “Okay.”
    “Did you know that your friend Lincoln Bowe was involved in an effort to . . .” Jake hesitated, hoping he’d leave the impression that he was groping for the right word, though he’d spit at Barber exactly what the unknown man had told him on the phone, “. . . that he was, uh, what shall we call it: examining nonconventional means of destabilizing this administration. Does that mean anything to you?”
    Barber’s eyes went opaque: “No. What the hell does it mean?”
    Jake thought: He knows. “All right. I really can’t tell you . . .”
    They talked for a few more minutes, and Barber, as he was leaving, promised to get back on the question of Bowe’s ongoing love affairs. At the door, Barber said, “When is the gay thing going to hit the streets?”
    Jake shrugged: “I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m afraid it’d derail the investigation. You want a call before I do it?”
    “I’d appreciate it . . . and if you could take it a little easy?”
    “I’ll try. But it’s going to be out of my hands at that point.”

    Jake let Barber out the back door, then spent an hour making notes of the conversation and listing questions. He’d noticed how Barber’s language switched easily back and forth from a street-flavored lingo to postgraduate sophistication. From Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up people at one moment to proto-fascist charismatic