“What are you saying?”
“You know I’m with you. You know I’d go through Hell itself to help you, but this whole ordeal with the money…Listen, you know what happened to me in Jacksonville.”
“I do.”
“Half of that had to do with me taking some money wasn’t mine. I didn’t mean to take it, and I wasn’t planning on using it, but I knew what was going on. I knew what would happen. And when it smacked me in the face, I wasn’t ready to deal with it. I don’t want you to be put in the same position, because you know precisely what outcome you want from this whole campaign of yours. If you let that money sit for even one second longer than it takes for you to get rid of it, you’ll come to regret it.”
“I hear you, Rol. I just don’t agree. I’m-a keep this money. Way I see it, this belongs to nobody, and if I put it back out into the world, it gets used for evil. I can’t let that happen.”
“Are you thinking with the best parts of your brain, old friend, or the part that can’t help but call into a bookie with side bets every week?”
“Don’t you say that to me in this house.”
“I’m speaking my conscience, Deuce. I’m telling you what I think needs to happen. If you don’t want to hear it, that’s fine. But I can’t let my feelings on it just sit there.”
“Well, you can go your own way for a time. I need some space to think, and I don’t know that you’ll like where my mind will go.”
I backed out of the bedroom, and the last image I saw was Deuce’s face, tightening up and grimacing under the weight of whatever was in his head.
He was right: I wasn’t ready to chase down the source of his personal crusade.
Just before dawn, I dragged myself out of the house and watched the sun move groggily through the trees. My head felt like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. It pulsed with a constant, swell-and-contraction, like somebody playing an out-of-tune accordion. I hawked a good one and spat it into the neighboring yard, watching the wad arc perfectly in the direction of a rusty swingset.
Deuce and I hadn’t spoken in days, and I was lingering in the Gaines household like a long-forgotten painting, visible but somehow in the way.
Willie bounded between my legs and darted into the high grass by a cracked old bird fountain. It was his favorite spot to soil. He doused the unsuspecting gray column. He then proceeded to bounce back and forth in place, barking with the enthusiasm of a dog several years his junior. The high-pitched yap was almost enough to knock me flat, and when I bent to soothe the over-excited animal, I scarcely had time to recognize my mistake.
I pitched forward, hands on knees, and fertilized the front yard with last night’s liquid endeavor. Several canon-bursts later found me circling my temples with my fingertips, attempting to put some care into ironing out the vicious thud in my skull. Willie barked a few more times, as if taunting me, and then set himself to cleaning up my mess. I tried to nudge him away, but he was quicker than me, and half as stiff.
“Hope it tastes good, you bastard,” I said.
My hands were shaking uncontrollably. Mimicking my heart, I guess, which shivered weakly in my chest.
I fished a bottle of lukewarm MGD from a cooler of stagnant water, popped off the top. Smelled like a squishy fart, but it tasted just fine. I guessed. Fuck, I didn’t know anymore. It was a little flat, more skunky than even I liked, but at least it soothed my savage hands.
Leaning back on the porch and peering across the landscape, I saw one item that was not like the other. I flicked the top into a cracked flowerpot and swigged at my beer.
An unfamiliar car was parked in the driveway. Someone leaned back in the driver’s seat, the head barely visible above the dash.
Well, guess I have to walk into this minefield.
I poured the room temperature hooch into the grass and tossed the bottle among the refuse in a recycling bin. Sauntered out toward the vehicle. I raised my arms, a we-don’t-have-a-problem-do-we gesture.
The car wasn’t what I expected. A burgundy Buick. Brand new. Sparkling in the morning sun. Tinted windows. Rims. Not a junker, but also not a shooter’s car. The passenger side window rolled halfway down, and a familiar voice slipped out the opening.
“You gonna come over here, or is this your subtle way of telling me you want me to turn around and get the hell out of Florida?”
“Allison?” I said, inching closer.
“Who the hell else would it be?”
“Dunno,” I responded, honestly stunned. “What’s up?”
“Do you realize how many people are looking for you? You’d have thought General Sherman had made his return to Georgia’s oldest city.”
“Things got real fucked up,” I said.
“They sure did,” she replied. “I wonder myself why I was coming down here. Short drive, I guess, so I didn’t have much time to consider turning around. You’re lucky this wasn’t Miami or Nashville, or else I might have just taken a u-turn right back to my driveway.”
I leaned in, tried to kiss her, but she inched away from me. “We’re not there yet,” she said.
Fair enough. “How’s Savannah?”
“Like a demilitarized zone. You managed to slip through the cracks before they shut the whole city down. Turn on the TV, and all you saw is SWAT teams and guns. Only type of vehicle more prevalent than the police cars is the news vans. You’re a hot commodity, Rolson McKane.”
“It’s a wonder I haven’t been caught,” I said truthfully.
“It is a wonder,” she said. “I think you’ve got a horseshoe jammed up your ass.”
“Maybe I do,” I said. “I’ve been lucky. I think once they find Deuce is part of it, however, the world will close up to a tight, buttoned-up asshole.”
She nodded. “Money says they think you went back to Lumber Junction. I bet if you still had a phone, it’d be blowing up right now.”
“Burners only from now on,” I said. “I won’t have the luxury of a nice, new phone.”
“If you want to really get out of harm’s way, you’re going to have to go deep underground. All the rabbits’ feet in the world won’t keep you from an eventual showdown,” she said.
“I’m already in the swamp,” I replied. “How much more underground can I go?”
“It’s going to have to be somewhere remote. Somewhere small. And somewhere they won’t continue to look.”
I rubbed my eyes. “They have to know I wasn’t guilty,” I said.
“They might, but they’re making a mighty big racket right now. You’d be charged with something, something more serious than you’d expect. They’ve got dead bodies, no suspect, and a name to hang everything on. Unless you can find the guy who did this — Fitz, I presume — then you can kiss sweet freedom goodbye.”
It wouldn’t be hard for a half-assed DA to get me put away for an exceedingly long time, given the way things went down. Maybe not for murder, but I was sure they could drum up something.
A smarter man would have trapped Limba Fitz, ensnared him in some way or snitched him out, but I wasn’t that smarter man. It was my stupidity, one might argue, though, which had kept me on the warm side of the dirt.
“The weight of it sinking in for you at all?” she asked me.
“Yeah…shit,” I said.
“Shit is right,” she said. “Rolson, I wished there was some way for me to explain it away.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“There ain’t no way out, Rolson. Your only safe bet is to hide out until there’s some other big tragedy, and for that to work, you’re going to need to disappear. Make yourself as scarce as possible. And, judging by the pistol in your back pocket, I don’t imagine you have any such notion.”
“Business,” I said.
“Isn’t that the line you fed me back in Savannah?” she asked.
“Doesn’t make it any less true. Deuce, he helped me out of a bind — two, actually — and if there’s somebody I owe my life to, it’s that dude.”
“What about your life, Rol? What about the possibility that you just walk away. Live your own life, for once?”
“I did that for thirty-plus years, and all it got me was a drinking problem. I stopped off in Savannah to get perspective, and the nature of the universe sent me off in this direction. I didn’t ask for it, but I think I’m responding in the best possible way.”
“That sounds like self-pity to me, and I won’t stand for it.”
I reached out, clasped her hand. She pulled hers away.
Then she saw.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What happened to your hand?”
She was out of the car and peering at my missing knuckles before I could find a reasonable way of telling her.
“Your fingers, Rolson. You’re missing two fingers.”
I pulled away, slid the tender hand into one pocket. “Guess that’s something’s changed since last we spoke.”
“I’d say so,” she said. “You get these from Fitz?”
I shook my head. “Different monsters,” I said.
“Seem to have a lot of those in your life,” she replied.
“Anyone who’s not you or Deuce, at this point. Come here.”
I hugged her. At first, she wouldn’t allow herself to soften, but eventually she gave in.
“I’ve got three days, and I have to be back after that,” she said. “So, if you’re looking to make use of time, we should gather our rosebuds while we may.”
“Well, some things are…going on,” I said, leaving the rest to her imagination.
“So, fine, I just play damsel in distress for a few days while you go on with your grim business.”
“Sounds right,” I replied. “But I promise, I’ll—”
“Don’t you say you’ll make time for me.”
“I was going to say that I’d sweep you off your feet before you left, but you robbed me of the sentiment.”
“Something tells me you’re not sentimental.”
“You don't know me that well, then,” I replied.
“Before you get it in your mind that you are going to say hey to me and then go off on your dangerous investigation, just know that I didn’t come down here for moral support.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you are going to take some time off with me, and I don’t give a shit what your friend has to say.”
I was left speechless. I wasn’t going to argue — I knew when to fight my battles — but I couldn’t believe the luck.
Everything is connected.
“Grab your stuff,” she said. “I rented a hotel room for the week.”
“What stuff?”
She laughed. “I wondered what in the hell that was you were wearing.”
“This is Deuce’s,” I replied. “I feel like a hypocrite in a Saints tee. The Falcons have been looking up recently.”
“Well, since it’s a double-XL, I suppose you can be forgiven.”
As we drove, I felt that familiar heat rising in me. I leaned over, kissed her shoulder, noticing the visible freckles.
Despite the cold, she rode with the windows down. Her skin puckered with a chill. I ran one hand up her leg, and she hesitated before pushing it away. “Easy, tiger,” she said. “We’ve got the whole three days.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” she replied. “Your old friend can spare you for a few days, and I didn’t sneak away to play the second fiddle to you reliving your days as a cop.”
She’d sprung for a little place just off downtown. I paced the sidewalk at the front entrance, furiously smoking a cigarette as I tried to will my insides to stop shaking. I was weak with desire, and my mind was so focused on a single thought, it seemed to fill my head like a sheet reflecting a single image.
Allison led me to the elevator and then from there to the room.
I hobbled inside and collapsed onto the bed, my legs and my heart trading places. I shivered all over as if plagued by some extreme ailment, but it was no such thing which had driven me to convulse. As I looked on, Allison sashayed into the room, making a show of herself, and I took in every moment of it.
A crooked and treacherous road had brought me here, but in the end I was glad of the destination. She didn’t have to know about the woods or the tragic sisters Deuce and I had encountered. Though my conscience weighed on me, it was a burden I could shoulder.
Her body hovered on the edge of the king-sized bed, her eyes sloped gently at the corners, twinkling with a knowing expression. Desire burned a flush red on her cheeks, and when she slipped into the crook of my arm, I smelled her particular mixture of shampoo and perfume and her natural scent.
We lay in a kind of bemused silence, but just as with everything else, it didn’t last very long.
14
After, I had Allison pick me up a burner I used to make a special call.
I sat on the stone edge of a fountain honoring the Confederate dead and listened to the phone ring in my ear. With each passing buzz, I felt my heart flutter and dance like startled butterflies.
When he answered, Special Agent Ed Hunter sounded like an older, more exhausted version of himself.
“McKane, you have brass buttons to be calling me like this,” he said, once I’d introduced myself.
Detective Hunter had been involved in the investigation to solve a young man’s murder some months ago. Part of a task force on racial murders, he had kept my neck off the chopping a few times when it counted.
“I need your help,” I said.
“Seems like you need a whole hell of a lot more than my help.”
“I had nothing to do with those people’s deaths,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“A madman named Limba Fitz killed them. He thought I had something of his, or his boss’s. He drove a machete into the soft meat of everything I held holy, and my reputation, I guess, was one of those things. His beef with a group of drug dealers ended with a bloodbath beneath the grounds of the dealer’s place. He also killed the AA members in the church.”
I heard him scribbling notes onto a pad. He mmm-hmmed once as I delineated what I knew.
“It’s a practical war zone in that city,” he said. “Did you then — or do you now — have anything that would help this investigation?”
“You mean money?”
“I mean whatever he came looking for,” he responded.
“He was mistaken,” I responded. “He was looking for something that was long gone.”
A long pause on the other end. “Your ex-wife.”
“Fitz worked for a guy Vanessa used to know. When she took off, she must have taken off with the money, but it never made it to me.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” I lied.
The money now belonged to a girl named Yaelis. She had earned it more than I cared to explain, but she’d had to pay a blood price for it.
Truth be told, the money was cursed, if ever there was such a thing. She deserved it, needed it to see distant family, but I got a gurgly stomach every time it crossed my mind.
For what it was worth, I doubted she’d tell anyone.
Hunter said, “Well, it’s turned into a Superfund site of toxic nonsense down there. I hope you know that, whenever you step food in the sandlot, dirt gets kicked in everybody’s eyes.”
“It’s a distinction I take great pride in.”
“It’s a distinction you will regret after forty years in the clink.”
“They’ll have to catch me first.”
Hunter said, “It’s not the Harrison Ford Fugitive situation you imagine in your head.”
“If I’m innocent of the crime, I should have nothing to fear, right?”
“You can’t go taking my lines. What do I have without my law and order platitudes?”
“No chance of catching me,” I said.
“Fingers crossed,” he replied.
I heard him tapping his pen on his desk. He said, “Stay safe, McKane. If you go and g
et killed, I will be robbed of the opportunity to get this all down on tape.”
That night, I treated Allison to Dominican food in west Jacksonville. I had plantains for the first time in my life, and who knew I could dig on fried bananas?
I perused the booze menu, but Allison mean-mugged me until I put it away. We were sitting outside on this uncharacteristically warm evening, so I figured what the hell?
Over Mexican sodas, we got into a lengthy discussion over topics which had eluded us until now. Who we were. Who we thought we would be at this point in our lives. Where to go from here.
At some point, maybe my second bottle of Jarritos, Allison dug in and got philosophical.
She said, “It’s hard to keep in mind where we are, when we spend so much time going over and over in our heads where we’ve been.”
“It’s how we make decisions. Past information with current circumstances and all that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Inferences. I think that part of my brain is broken. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to steer out of the sharp curves—”
“And end up going off the side of a mountain,” I finished.
Allison said, “Man I dated had a propensity to come home and bait me into these conversations. We’d go round and round over nothing at all, really, and in the middle of the night, when I was exhausted and completely disinterested in this man, that’s when he’d pounce. It was his thing, I guess, to cajole me into sex where I was completely apathetic. Over time, that was the only way we ended up in bed together.”
“Am I the right audience, here?”
“Oh, Jesus, get off it. This is nothing like the seedy underworld you’ve involved yourself in. If all it takes is a little sex to get you thrown off your game, then you’ve got a long way to fall in my eyes, old man.”
“Aged. I consider myself aged, not old. And what’s it to you? We’re in the same ballpark, if not stuck in the same inning. I don’t think you’ve got much room to push back on this.”
“Anyway, that sort of thing fucks with your head after a while. It’s a subtle way to manipulate someone into staying with you, long after the warranty’s gone past its ninety days.”
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