In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

  “Jerry. Stop, just stop for a minute, okay?” Johnnie had to get the man back on track before he talked them both into a prison sentence.

  He caught hold of Jer’s arm, turned him around and squared off with those squinted gray eyes.

  “I’m not interested in making up a fake partial confession for Cinnamon or for the cops or anybody else that sticks their nose into Redemption business. Best thing for us is to stay clear of Cinnamon and Burro. They don’t know anything and they are not getting anywhere in this investigation.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re running scared. I say we move along and pay no attention to these two. Mirage hired them because she feels guilty, and Holly hired them because she’s afraid for little Clark. Those are nothing but feelings; they’ll pass. The cops don’t seem to care who killed Lonnie. We’re safe, man. Leave it alone.”

  “I don’t know Johnnie. There’s an aura about those two. Jake told me they work on clues from that guy Burro’s schizophrenic visions about a crime. Cinnamon puts the visions together with the facts and figures about what’s going on. Right now he has a vision about Redemption and cash and blood. It’s like they’ve got the spirit with them, man. I ‘m scared of that.”

  “Since when are you scared of the spirit, Jer? You need to be afraid of getting caught running a prostitution ring, going broke, and going to prison. That doesn’t include getting charged with murder. Those aren’t spirit wars man; those are legal wars. We’re free and clear – at least if we dump that house we’re free and clear. So I’m leaving here now, and I’m talking to a Real Estate agent, saying we want to sell that house. Then I’m going on a little vacation...maybe the Cayman Islands, if you get my meaning. I advise you to do the same.”

  “The Cayman Islands? I don’t get that.”

  “The money, Jer.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re saying stash the money there. Okay, man, okay. I’ll take Clark with me. It’ll be all right. I see it. Sure.”

  Johnnie noticed Jerry’s eyes twitching; even his hands seemed to respond in a spasm. Whatever. This whole game needed to stop.

  “Get your tickets, Jer. Hear what I’m saying to you.”

  “Yeah. I do, man. No gallery, no Cinnamon and Burro.”

  “Don’t meet those two.”

  “I got it.”

  Johnnie let him be. But he spun out of the parking lot in a hurry, ready to make his own commitment come true.

  ∆

  The Real World

  Tiny droplets of sterling silver fell silently on the windowpane, sheering off the outer layer of glass and turning the world into a fuzzy fairy tale played out in a frosty glaze. Lolo sat in her mother’s house, aglow in silver light, a wealth of warmth and love surrounding her. As she waited in calm for her mother, the droplets got larger, beating harder on the panes. Her ease dissolved as the glass cracked, followed by a loud snap of wood on metal.

  Lolo awoke from the dream, her cheek stuck to leather upholstery. The gallery re-appeared around her. The noise repeated, a sound that needed to be investigated because it was structural, a crack in the gallery roof, or a falling painting. She pushed up off the leather sofa, sighing at the real world, where there is very little frosted glass and silver light.

  Stepping quietly from the conference room to the high ceilings of the main gallery, Lolo tried to determine where the cracking sound originated, thinking one of the heavier artworks pulled away from the wall. The only sound was the soft whoosh of air conditioning as she passed Lonnie’s cubicle and approached her own.

  At the entrance to her own “L”, an arm touched her waist. Lolo’s breath came short. The arm pulled her roughly against a sweat-steeped chest.

  The smell of Johnny Walker Blue filled her nostrils: Blue Dog. She recognized his scent. Was this some kind of sex game he learned online? But her thoughts stopped as she felt and saw a thick steel kitchen knife pressed against her throat.

  ∆

  Paralyzed

  At the sound of breath, followed by the slice, Burro’s visions came back to me in a rush. Cash and scrambled brains. Confused thinking and money make for trouble. I am standing in the source of all that trouble, and I came alone.

  Willing my body to make no sound, not even a brush with the air around me, I leaned out of Lonnie’s L shaped cubicle, moving my eyes down the vast pine hallway. That was enough.

  A heavy man in a dark blue shirt held Lolo tight against his chest. The man’s face was turned away from Lonnie’s cubicle towards the conference room. Lolo was in his arms, but it was not a lover’s pose. I recognized the threat from my own experience yesterday. I knew this must be the man who tried to slice open my neck and was now slicing Lolo’s.

  “Hold Up!” I thought the words absurd, ridiculous even, as if I were asking a department store companion to wait while I sniffed the perfumes. But it worked.

  The big man looked around and loosened his grip on Lolo’s neck. She slipped out, blood running down her white linen shirt, and ran towards the door. She stopped with her hand on the knob, twisted her head back and locked eyes with me, paralyzed in indecision. As she stood there, the man pulled his arm back in a practiced movement and released the knife in a quick, forward throw. It flew towards Lolo, who dropped to the floor only a bare instant before the knife cut harshly into the treated pine, creating an unredeemed wound in the perfect surface of the wood.

  “We can both escape,” I thought, but my hope perished when I saw the burly assailant pull a second knife from a sheath at his waist.

  ∆

  Twin Witnesses

  Blue Dog planned carefully. No more living to impress his father or his wife or his fancy friends. Blue Dog was #1 now, infused with the power of destiny. No human being could stop him. He pulled open the pine door, knowing it was unlocked—no surprise to him. Lolo called and told him she was coming tonight to display new artwork. The woman honestly thought he cared. A fool for love and money, she was. He needed her gone, of course, because she could, eventually, find the damn knife, and Lolo will connect it to me. If Lolo’s gone, Mirage can take the fall for killing that idiot brother of hers, Blue Dog figured. And, then, Blue Dog would be free to pursue his destiny.

  Lolo didn’t call out or meet him at the door, which surprised him a little. Everything works for my good, he thought, and squeaked lightly across the floor, looking for a spot to launch his efforts, completely sure of his success and his ability to secure the simple future he wanted.

  He bought three – his lucky number—limited edition Henckel’s carving knives, each with their own leather sheaf – a special gift for his future. He purchased the knives during a California shopping trip with the wife, looking for kitchen gadgets. Blue Dog asked her to step out of the store, and Adele obliged with a smile, thinking it was to buy a present for her, as if the woman needed any more gadgets or presents. Still, he threw in a coffee grinder to keep up the fiction. The knives spoke to him in the store, telling Blue Dog he had special powers, special plans. He carried the knives with him everywhere after that, waiting for instructions on how and when to use them.

  One of these was the knife that called out to him to kill Lonnie. That knife was useless now, unless he could retrieve it from under the mattress at that apartment. The second knife insisted he fake that call to Cinnamon, who, according to her Internet website, was obsessed with finding her mother. In the Cactus Drive house, he took that knife out of its sheath and admired the heavy sharp steel as it spoke of threatening the woman detective. He had threatened her, but a sprite intervened, robbing him of his full mission.

  Last night, he slept with the two remaining knives under his pillow. In sleep, the knives transmitted their power to Blue Dog, helping him claim his re-invented future. He heard the weapons assure him of his power and guide him in how to slice the loose woman to bits.

  In the morning, he fastened each little man into his sheath and attached them to a special belt, heavy enough to hold the three pounds of wood and carbon steel
. The knives sat together, twin witnesses partnered on heavy brown leather.

  Once inside the gallery, he slipped into Lolo’s L shaped cubicle, swiping against her absurd silver creations. Jerry loved the damn things. Blue Dog thought they were a mishmash of toys made out of expensive metal. Lolo had a good figure, for sure, but, other than that, she was a silly fool, not an artist, in his opinion. He placed the first knife on one of the glass cases. This was the knife he used on Cinnamon and he feared the unsuccessful attempt to kill had robbed the knife of part of its mystical power. He searched the cubicle for a site to test the courage of the knife. His eyes spotted a piece of glazed pine molding attached to the painted metal wall of the cubicle. The perfect test, Blue Dog reasoned. If the knife pulled the wood away from the metal, it was bold enough to take the lives of his enemies, the enemies of his future and the life he finally had within his grasp. It was bold enough to kill Lolo.

  The knife blade slipped coolly under the wood. Blue Dog pried against the wall. The loud crack startled him, but he completed the task, using the strong blade as a lever to pry one more crack out of the pine before it pulled completely free of the wall. He laid the beam down outside the cubicle door. The knife was indemnified now, fearless in flight, prepared to inflict mortal wounds on his prey. Right then, attracted by the virile essence of his knife, his prey slipped from her borough, and Blue dog floated out of the L, a breeze on the tile surface, a spirit fighter who grabbed his victim by the waist as she passed and held the empowered knife to the pulsing amber skin of her throat. Ready to slice.

  “Hold Up!”

  In a split second, the human sound broke the spell, weakened Blue Dog’s concentration and nerve, he lost his grip once again, and his prey fled to the door. But Blue Dog clutched the knife to his heart in an effort to absorb extra power into his soul, and then flung it accurately towards his victim. He waited to hear the split of bone and flesh but retreated at the sound of metal on wood. What went wrong? He knew the power of his great future joined him here in the gallery. What diluted his power? Then, he saw her, the source, his other victim, Cinnamon, across the room, rushing by him, trying to escape. He unsheathed the new, unused Henckel, the weapon whose power was unchallenged, whose faith was strong. As the traitor passed, he grabbed for her, certain of his grip, and shoved the knife into the soft flesh of her side. He was certain this time, certain that the slice would send blood flying free into this room, bringing life back to Blue Dog, free up Molly and let the real Blue Dog escape his prison. But again, his power leaked away. A wall of force, far greater than the power of Blue Dog’s dreams, a force unleashed by the gods of Redemption, tore the knife from his hand, threw him to the floor and robbed him of his true destiny. Humiliation throbbed in his right shoulder, and he watched the ghosts of his future pass by and file quietly out into the street. Sobs welled up from his core, and he wept childishly into the uncaring coldness of the gallery floor.

  ∆

  We Waited

  “Go!” I shouted at Lolo, running, planning to outrun the knife or Blue Dog or both. The air rushed by my ears like spirits, but I encountered death in Blue Dog’s strong arms, which stopped my forward momentum and brought my body around in a stiff jerk. His knife punched into my side with a soft whoosh, followed by squealing pain.

  “Mmmph,” a solid beam fell on us both, releasing the man from his knife and throwing me down onto the tile floor. The beam pushed me off Blue Dog, and I faced an adrenalin-filled schizophrenic – Burro. He raised his arms, aiming the thick wood at the body beside me, his eyes a grey arctic sky.

  “No,” I squeaked out. “Stop.”

  “Burro. I called 911.” It was Lolo walking slowly towards us, holding her phone out like a talisman to ward off evil. “Burro,” her voice was a melody, a chorus of angels, “let him live.”

  Burro did stop, then, and looked at me with blue recognition returning to his eyes.

  “Scrambled brains,” he commented.

  “Yours or his?” I questioned.

  He smiled, and seemed to nod. The man beside me sobbed. Sirens seared the night air. We waited.

  Ω

  Answering Screams

  Pale cinder block walls rose up on each side of his iron cot, trapping him in an ivory hell. Blue Dog screamed, followed by answering screams and shouts from inside the jail.

  Lonnie. The damn kid screwed it all up with his ideas about decency and honesty and spirit. Blue Dog heard him go on about that stuff at the gallery a couple times, but never thought the kid would go so far as to shut down the whole operation. Until Jerry gave Blue Dog the low down.

  “Look, I’m getting rid of Lonnie – the one does the 3-D landscapes? He found out about Pleasingly Plump Paramours and he’s gone all boy scout on us, planning to close the whole operation down.”

  “You think firing him will stop all that?”

  “Sure, Blue, of course, I’ll give him a huge pay off, send him on his way. No biggie.”

  Jer. What an idiot. He heard the knives call out to him that afternoon. Kitchen knives struck him as the perfect weapon to wield the power that began to fill him up the minute the knives instructed him to he get rid of the kid. It went back to his mother, really, and the evenings as a toddler he spent watching her cut meat for the family. She used to swing around, brandish her kitchen knife at him, and laugh. Little Boy Blue felt the fear in a knife, and the knives in the store promised him that he could seize that power and destroy Lonnie and his good ideas.

  It was easy to find out where Johnnie kept those little keys, in that strange lacquer box at the bottom on his bedroom chest. Blue Dog slipped into the house while Johnnie was sousing at the bar, took the keys and made his own copy. Blue Dog jimmied a window in the back, no problem, so it was an easy job.

  The Saturday night party was perfect. The crowd got drunk – loud noises came from the house. Blue Dog and his power knife were patient. They waited together, Johnnie sharpened the Henckel, held it close to his heart, and listened to the voice tell of his destiny. After midnight, he donned a long raincoat, to cover any blood, and stepped boldly out the door, down the street and stopped at Lonnie’s doorstep. The nutty artist had locked his door before he passed out, or maybe Jerry did it for him. No matter. Nothing could stop his plan. He pried the lock loose with the blade, imagining the power of the weakened door lock leaping onto the knife, assuring his success. He removed his coat in the dining room and folded it over one of the faded chairs.

  Lonnie sat up when he entered the room and tilted his head to one side. Blue Dog plowed forward, a man at last, and, no hesitation, shoved the blade into Lonnie’s vitals, moved it out, shoved again. The warm flowing blood energized Blue Dog, so that he stabbed the artist two more times, filling his own veins with power, justice and the chance to be real. He left, donning the coat to cover his bloody clothes, and walked, renewed, empowered, and in luck out into the blue-black Gallup night.

  Meeting the girl was an unexpected benefit, brought to him by the sexual potency of his crime. He went right up to her and buried his nose in her hair. She wilted like a flower before the burning energy of a desert sun. He was free.

  That night, after the girl passed out, he slipped the first knife, the knife that gave him back his life, under Mirage’s mattress. He figured, any trouble about the Lonnie stabbing, one of those young women could take the fall. He had two more knives, full of power and vengeance, if he needed them. Blue Dog left the apartment, removed the bloody clothes he’d left in a closet while he had sex with her, and buried them behind the Cactus Drive house. He buried the raincoat, too. His power was so complete, now, he thought, there was very little danger. Burying the clothes was merely a sensible precaution.

  What went wrong? It started the knife he used to scare Cinnamon. Maybe the failed effort, the incomplete task, robbed that knife of the essence it needed. Mother. That was it, of course. Cinnamon was looking for her mother, and he got Molly to call and pretend to be Momma. And that brought the soul of his
own mother back from the dead. His mother came back into that knife, because the woman, Cinnamon, was longing for a mother.

  Why had he not seen that? Mother tricked him, she tricked him again, like of old, like when he was a child and, she offered him a taste of the food, then turned with the kitchen knife, held it to his throat, watched the tiny salt filled tears speckle his cheeks, and laughed, loud, fiercely, without pity. He heard her laugh now, filling the room, echoing off the ivory cinder block, burying Blue Dog in fear and humiliation.

  Ω

  Don’t Torture Yourself

  Lolo and Mirage took Route 602 south out of Gallup, heading for Black Rock, a dusty village on the edge of Zuni Pueblo, where her mom had a small adobe house at the end of a rutted lane. Out in this part of New Mexico, the sky is a canvas, drawn with the weather for half the state, underlined in orange and black ridges and small dots of insignificant green. Driving to her mom’s house, Lolo left behind the material world and headed to a place where she never felt comfortable, the place of the spirit. Not that her mom was religious. She never attended tribal ceremonies or Christian churches, but she was content with her life and serene in making jewelry and selling it at a shop run by Jordanians who lived in the pueblo.

  “Here’s the thing, Mirage,” Lolo explained. “I’ve got money now. I put money aside a little in cash that the Feds can’t find, so I can start my own business and sell my art to tourists. But I don’t want to end up like Mom, sitting in her dusty house, giving a portion of my income to a Middle Eastern family. I know the Jordanians have lived here for decades – but still. It isn’t right.”

  Mirage sighed. “Lolo. The money you got to keep came from a prostitution ring. Aren’t you missing the point?”