The Godless One by J. Clayton Rogers

Ari asked, as if
he didn’t know the two were part and parcel.
    "It had that screwy French motto on it:
Zhe My Souvenirs. I think it means ’Buy my souvenirs‘, if you can
believe it."
    ‘Je me
souviens ,’ you idiot, Ari thought, wanting
to smack the man. He was also cursing his bad luck. That plate
belonged to Abu Jasim, one of Saddam Hussein’s fedai , body doubles, until he
escaped to Montreal. He had worked with Ari in Iraq and was,
currently, the most valuable man in his life. How could his license
plate have been spotted? Out there, in the dark?
    "Did you get the number of the plate?"
he asked. "That would lead to a solution."
    "No. Stupid self-serve…"
    "He was spotted at a gas
station?"
    "The local Stop-N, and no
gas pump jockey. All we have is the girl selling 24-hour
barf-my-ass chicken in the mini-cafeteria. She went out for a smoke
and went gaga when she read the plate. I’ve heard of girls melting
when they hear French, but when they read it? She was a twit minus a
half, anyway. What was she doing smoking near the gas
pumps?"
    "Ah," said Ari, so relieved he almost
melted.
    "But there was something screwy going
on out there, something international."
    International. Screwy by
definition.
    Mangioni, silent up to now, was looking
at him earnestly. His expression said: ‘Well, go on…’
    Ari unzipped the pouch. He took out
several glossy photographs. Carrington, slumped over his steering
wheel, blood dribbling out the side of his head and from his
eyes.
    "Oh," Ari said, putting the pictures
aside.
    "I told you," Mangioni snarled at his
partner. "He can’t take it."
    Jackson pursed his lips. "Go fuck a
bunny. My guess is he’s seen worse."
    Ari took up the photocopy:

    Name: Louis B. Carrington
    Gender: Male
    Age: 48
    Race: White
    Location: Cumberland State Forest, Jim
Birch Fire Road
    Cause of Death: Gunshot

    There followed handwritten notes of the
Cumberland deputy who had responded first to the call from the
rangers from nearby Bear Creek Lake. He had found Carrington
slumped over the wheel of his car with an apparent gunshot wound to
the side of his head. The engine had run out of gas but the
headlights were still on. The ground around the car had been
disturbed, but nothing definite could be determined. It was
possible that footprints had been scuffed away
intentionally.
    "I know it’s not much," said Mangioni.
"But it’s what we’ve got. And we’re hoping you can come up with
more."
    "With your Fed contacts," Jackson
chimed in.
    "Really, gentlemen, I don’t see how I
can help."
    "Don’t ‘gentlemen’ us," said Jackson.
"Call us fucking assholes, and help. I bet you could, if you
wanted."
    "I’ll see what I can do," said Ari
wanly, like a maiden asked to sacrifice her virtue. "Could you let
me out, now?"
    "Since that’s all we’re going to get,"
said Jackson, getting out and opening the rear door.
    Ari’s sense of the absurd stumbled on
excess. He had just been asked to help solve the killing of the man
he had murdered.

CHAPTER TWO

    Ari decided to give Jack Daniels a rest
for a few days. While this helped his liver, it was catastrophic
for his psyche. Drinking heavily was not in his new job
description, but it certainly eased the pain.
    Ari had become a desk jockey. He was
tasked with reviewing images from Iraq, photographs that the news
networks, whenever they came across one, declined to broadcast.
Images that, in gory detail, documented the decline and fall of
civilization.
    In his past life, Ari had
committed mayhem on a fairly wide scale. But his victims had,
usually, been specific enemies of the state whom any honorable
soldier of any country would consider legitimate targets. True,
Saddam Hussein’s definition of ‘legitimate’ was broad in the
extreme. Ari considered himself fortunate not to have been present
when Ba’athist Loyalists used sarin against the rebels in Basra
during the 1991 uprising. He had seen survivors of Halabja and did
not consider them lucky. At the