Burning Heat

by David Burnsworth

  “No.”

  Not knowing how to respond to that, I kept my mouth shut and prepared two plates for us with buns, lettuce, tomato slices, and jalapeños. A hunt in the shelves netted bottles of ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce, and some packs of mayo if she went that way.

  The fries and burgers got done at the same time and I loaded our plates and slid one across the table to her. It occurred to me she didn’t have anything to drink so I left the kitchen and came back with two cups of ice and a quart of spicy V-8. “Hope this’ll do.”

  She looked at me, the cups of ice, and the plate of food in front of her.

  Her expression made me uneasy. I said, “Is everything okay?”

  After a pause, she said, “It’s been a long time since anyone cooked for me.”

  I set the glasses on the counter and poured the juice. “Well, you better eat before it gets cold.”

  Afterwards, we took a walk on the beach. Detective Warrez removed her shoes and socks and walked barefoot. It was still way before ten A.M. so the few people on the beach were mostly retirees getting their exercise. We didn’t speak to each other during the walk, just took it all in.

  When we returned to the Cove she left. I felt that more had happened during our silence than in all the conversations we’d had.

  After heading home for a long nap, I returned to the Pirate’s Cove with my dog. With no leads on Willa Mae or Camilla, and my bar now in jeopardy, I thought I’d lay low. At least until later. Besides, it wasn’t as if Paige didn’t have things under as much control as possible.

  Two regulars sat at the bar, Jim and Tony. I had no doubt they’d been amongst the crowd the night before.

  “Didn’t get enough last night, huh?” I asked.

  Since they weren’t female, Shelby ignored Jim and Tony, trotted behind the bar, and curled up on his mat.

  Jim waved a half-eaten chicken wing in the air. “Ha.” He was fifty but looked sixty with his sun-weathered skin and gray hair. His T-shirt said “Hollywood Hot Rods.”

  Tony said, “So when we gonna be able to drink in here again, Brack? You got the best bar on the island except for the no-liquor part.”

  I said, “You New York guys got more money than the Port Authority. Why don’t you see what you can do to help?”

  Jim was involved in some pharmaceutical breakthrough that earned him something like three hundred million dollars, so the story goes. Tony had owned night clubs but sold out before the economy tanked. Rumor had it he was connected with the mafia. His bright green Lamborghini was the only car I’d ever seen distract men to the same extent as the women walking around in bikinis.

  “I tried,” Tony said. His New York accent had him enunciating every letter. “I don’t know how anything gets done around here. This state moves slower than my mother-in-law and she’s dead ten years.” He threw another picked-clean bone on the dish between him and Jim.

  Thinking the state had moved pretty darn quick on suspending my license, I went behind the bar and pulled out two Corona long necks from the cooler. I popped the tops and set them on coasters in front of my regulars. “On the house. I can’t sell it, but I’m not above giving it away.” Which was another violation, but I didn’t care.

  Jim picked up his bottle. “I always said you was okay.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Tony said. “Before he walked in here, you was telling me what a schmuck he was for losing his license.”

  “Jim is right,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “but I can be bought with beer. All is forgiven, Brack.”

  “I just hope Chauncey can fix this,” I said. “Or we’re in trouble.”

  I opened up an IBC Cream Soda for myself and we toasted the future demise of all state inspectors.

  At the entrance to the bar, the chief of police for the Isle of Palms was entering as a family that had eaten dinner was leaving. He held the door for them, then came over and nodded at me and took a stool next to Jim. Chief Bates noticed the beers on the bar.

  I asked, “You on the job or off?”

  Dressed in his summer uniform of a gray short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, Chief Bates looked up at me. “Just got off.”

  I pulled another beer out of the cooler and placed it on a coaster in front of the chief.

  Tony said, “He can’t sell it, but he’s not above giving it away. Right Brack?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  The chief’s eyes went from his beer to Tony, to me, to Jim cleaning his hands with a wet wipe, and back to his beer. While he was deciding his next move, I cut up a lime and gave each of them a wedge.

  I said, “You want some wings or something, Chief?”

  He pushed the piece of lime into the bottle, put his thumb over the top, and gently turned it upside down so the lime went up to the bottom of the bottle. After right-siding the bottle, he eased his thumb off slowly, releasing the built-up pressure. Then he drained half of it down his throat before saying, “Yeah. Make ’em hot. None of that pansy stuff like the last time.”

  “You got it.” I put in his order.

  The chief said, “Gardner’s got me running ragged with security for that fundraiser he’s got at his house Saturday night.”

  Tony said, “Gardner’s a putz.”

  “Which one?” Jim asked.

  “Both,” said the Chief. “Senior and his brat-of-a-son.”

  “I wouldn’t vote for him,” Tony said.

  “Me either.” The Chief looked at me. “But the reason I’m here is I heard you been interfering with a CPD investigation.”

  “You could say that.”

  Tony said, “You holding out on us?”

  “And,” the Chief said, “been shot at by some gangbangers.”

  “You like how the city soft-pedaled that one through the media?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t that hot Channel Nine chick spill the beans?” Jim asked. “Aren’t you and her an item or something?”

  I’d love to hear Darcy’s reaction to that comment.

  From the doorway, we heard, “No, we’re not an item, as you so eloquently put it.”

  We all looked in the direction of the voice.

  Shelby jumped up and ran to Darcy.

  “Wow,” Jim said. “Wow.”

  Darcy scratched behind Shelby’s ears, then strode with him to the bar, the pink sundress she wore accentuating her moves, her hair tied up to keep her neck cool in the lowcountry heat.

  Wow, I thought and almost said.

  The chief stood and pulled out his stool for her between himself and Jim.

  “You on the clock or off?” I asked her.

  “Does it matter?”

  I guessed not and poured her a Grey Goose screwdriver.

  “And to answer your question, Jim,” she said, “we soft-pedaled the drive-by story because neither Brack nor Detective Warrez, nor the mayor, I might add, wanted the headline.”

  “That’s right.” I handed her the drink. “On the house.”

  She said, “Of course, I know why the mayor wouldn’t want it turning into a media circus. And I can figure out why the detective might not want the exposure.”

  All the men were silent. Captivated was more like it.

  “But,” she continued, “I’ll give you guys one guess as to why Mr. Brack here wanted it hush-hush.”

  The chief said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think he wanted to get even.”

  Darcy said, “Bingo.”

  “He’s not the brightest bulb in the fixture, is he?” the chief asked.

  “No, he isn’t,” she said.

  I said nothing because defending myself would only prove them right, which they were.

  After locking the doors at ten P.M. and saying goodnight to the staff, I took Shelby home. With the focus the Marines had drilled into me, I put on a black shirt and black jeans and laced up an old pair of my uncle’s boots I’d found in the closet. It was time for some payback.

  In Afghanistan, I’d gone on miss
ions where the chance of success was less than fifty percent. I was actually told that. Still, I went. Tonight was one of those missions. I got in the Korean rental car and drove downtown to the edge of the projects. Behind a dumpster at a closed-down gas station, I parked and used shoe polish to darken my exposed skin. With my wallet locked in the car, I hid the keys in the driver’s side wheel well and took off through a back alley.

  Keeping to the shadows, every so often I pulled out my iPhone to guide me to my target—the garage behind D-Go’s grandmother’s residence that Brother Thomas had told me about. Lucky for me, the house was dark. It was now past midnight so I figured the grandmother was in dreamland. I eased past her house as silently as I could. Light escaped from the cracks around the door to the building in the backyard. As I got closer, the beat of rap music vibrated the ground beneath my feet. I kept away from the closed door and circled the building. The smell of marijuana grew strong as I got closer. Around the corner I found a window unit air conditioner protruding from a makeshift hole in the wall. Whoever had installed the unit had not deemed it necessary to seal around it. A nice inch gap gave me a good view of the interior.

  D-Go and three of his buddies huddled around a ratty folding table playing some kind of card game. A pile of money lay in the center. Beer bottles and pills and opened clear plastic bags of marijuana littered the edges.

  The kids were arguing over some rule and who should have won. Behind them, much to my delight, a late-model Crown Victoria sat, its metallic purple paint glimmering under the exposed lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

  Ten minutes later, I was back at my rental car, using a disposable cell phone called a burner to drop the dime on the delinquents. Feeling good I didn’t have to shoot it out with them, I wiped off as much as I could of the shoe polish from my face and hands and drove home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next morning after a jog around the island with Shelby, I stretched out in a chair on the back patio of Uncle Reggie’s place and realized I missed the view at my old house. The little oasis of two palmetto trees and a small fountain I’d added to my uncle’s backyard was not as calming as the intracoastal waterway had been out my previous front door. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I needed to move. I needed to see the water.

  The morning paper had a small story about a police raid of a house in the poor section of town. In addition to the arrest of four men with outstanding warrants, drugs were found on the site as well as several weapons linked to other crimes. The men, alleged members of a local gang, were being arraigned today.

  Mission accomplished. D-Go and his buddies wouldn’t be a bother for a while.

  My cell phone sitting on the small table next to me vibrated, making a terrible racket. Shelby, who had been fast asleep on the ground beside me, jolted awake and almost knocked the table over. I grabbed the phone and a bottle of water before they fell off.

  The number in the caller I.D. was not familiar. I answered anyway. “Pelton.”

  “Yeah, hi. This is Camilla. Megan gave me your card and said you wanted to talk to me again.”

  “Camilla?” I said, “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m still clean if that’s what you mean.”

  “How are you fixed for money? I mean, you got a place to stay?”

  “Why? You wanna pay me to come over?”

  I cleared my throat. “Sorry. Not like that. I mean …” Think, Brack. “I mean, I only want to make sure you are okay.”

  She laughed. “I know. I just wanted to hear you squirm over the phone. Pretty good, huh?”

  “Yeah. Real funny. Anyway, we heard you checked yourself out of the center.”

  “We?”

  “Darcy and I. We stopped by to see if we could ask you some more questions.”

  “You can ask me anything you want.”

  My ears started heating up again. “Come on, Camilla. You know I really want to find out who killed Willa Mae.”

  The lightness in her voice changed when she said, “Me, too. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just been quite a week.”

  She didn’t reply.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Coffee and cigarettes.”

  “How about I take you to lunch?” I said. “It’s the least I can do.”

  I found Camilla sitting on a bench in Battery Park. Her beauty seemed at home amongst some of the most expensive houses in the country. She wore a lavender T-shirt and white shorts and she’d gotten some coloring from the sun. Her hair was pulled back and her eyes were bright and clear behind black-framed eyeglasses.

  She said, “Where’s your sidekick?”

  “You told me not to tell anyone,” I said. “So I didn’t.”

  She stood and tucked her arm in mine. “You think we can behave ourselves without a chaperone?”

  “For the past couple of years I haven’t been too good at the whole self-discipline thing. I was banking on you being the responsible one.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “You’re the one trying to be funny, now. Maybe a little payback for my phone call?”

  “Maybe a little.” I escorted her to my rental car and held the door while she tucked in.

  When I got into the driver’s seat she said, “I figured you for something like a muscle car.”

  I smiled. “I’ve got an old one tucked away in a garage. This is a rental.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “I’ll bet you like classic rock, too.”

  She was right.

  With a chuckle, she said, “What can I say? Men are my specialty.”

  If she hadn’t been a prostitute, and if I hadn’t already developed an interest in a woman who legally carried a gun for a living, as well as a news reporter supposedly heading to Atlanta to get married, I’d have driven off into the sunset with Camilla and never looked back. But some things were not meant to be, and sometimes even I knew when to keep my pants and my libido zipped.

  After lunch, which was awkward because I wasn’t sure what to say to her, especially in the restaurant, we meandered along Market Street. She put her arm in mine again. With the tourist season ramping up, people were everywhere.

  “You can at least pretend like you’re having a good time,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She hooked her free arm across her stomach and over my arm, connecting her hands together. “I know men. It was my job for way too long. You have a big problem with what I am, don’t you?”

  My eyes stayed straight ahead but I felt her looking at me.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand. It’s just nice to be out with someone who didn’t pay me for sex.”

  A woman walking in front of us with two toddlers stopped and turned around, her mouth contorted into the shape of a question with more than a little bit of edge to it.

  I held up my hand as a peace offering and said, “Please excuse my sister. She’s out on bail for murder.”

  The woman grabbed her kids and stormed away.

  Camilla watched the woman’s exit. “I’m much too pretty to share genes with you, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “It was the best I could come up with on short notice.”

  “We’ll have to work on that,” she said.

  “In the meantime, why don’t we move on from playing this game and tell me what you wanted to tell me.”

  Her smile could slice through the Red Forest. “My, my.”

  I waited her out.

  “Okay,” she said and we kept walking. “I knew Willa Mae was trying to get straight.”

  “You know why?”

  “Yeah. She was pregnant.”

  “She know who the father was?”

  “Yep.”

  “How?”

  “You want the Disney version or triple X?”

  “Whichever one gives me what I need to know.”

  “We always use condoms. Every time. No
exceptions.”

  “Okay.”

  “If one breaks, it is a big deal on a lot of levels.”

  “Who’d it break on?”

  A crowd waited for the light to change at the corner of Market and Meeting Streets as we turned right and headed up Meeting. Once we were alone, Camilla said, “Jonathan Langston Gardner.”

  “Junior or Senior?”

  “Junior, I guess. What do people call him? Jon-Jon? That one. But both of them have a history with Caroline’s girls. At least up until last summer. Something happened and I seem to remember Caroline thinking she was going to be arrested.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. But then, it was like it all went away.”

  “And you knew this before when Darcy and I talked with you but pretended like you didn’t.” Something occurred to me. “You sent Darcy the diary, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “So why all the games? Why not just tell us when we visited you?”

  “I was going to tell you over the phone,” she said, her face turning red. “You were the one who asked me if I wanted to go out. Why? You didn’t have to do that. Was it some sort of warped fantasy? Going out with a pro without actually going out with one?” She stopped and tapped me in the chest with her fist. “Are you going to go brag to all the boys, now? Tell them how you rode in on your white horse and saved the poor defenseless hooker from the mean streets?” She wiped tears from her eyes. “All you men ever do is use. But you’re worse. At least the johns didn’t lie about what they wanted. They paid me. You take me out. Treat me nice, make me feel almost normal again. Then you jerk the rug out and the real reason comes out. You’re pathetic.”

  “I am,” I said, facing her, keeping my voice neutral. “But do you expect me to believe you aren’t playing your own little game?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  “Sure you do. You dropped Jon-Jon’s name without too much coaxing. Either it’s the truth and you want something, or you got something against him. If you tell me he screwed you over, I can buy that. He’s a real piece of work. The dentist mistakes his silver spoon for a filling.” I grabbed her arms and looked into her eyes. “Just don’t tell me you’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart.”