And — sometimes — he sees things in more than color, too. He sees what he thinks of as the world between worlds. He hears music that isn’t there, sees people who disappear moments later.
There is no explanation for it, but he knows it’s not common, so he keeps it to himself. What he can’t keep to himself, he says to the people in charge of the high school, to the student population. To anyone, really, who will listen. He is not quite a fanatic, yet, but he is verging on that.
Standing in the front lawn, though, under the heat of a burning cross, he can’t help but think maybe he’s bitten off more than he can chew.
Deuce says, “It scared my little brother. But I’m not afraid for my life. Cops are on the way.”
“Big John’s here now.”
Deuce blows exhales on the other side of the phone. “Old timers trying to make a point.”
With that talk, he sounds like he is trying on a coat that isn’t his. Rolson says, “You sound like my Aunt Birdie. But you can’t say this is just a cross in the yard.”
“Think we’re going to spend a few days with some family outside of town. Mama’s been talking about going back to Florida to be with her side of the family anyways.”
“Y’all don’t sound too freaked out,” Rolson says.
“If they’d wanted to do something, they would have. This is their way of trying to make everything like it used to be. But it ain’t. The toehold all the poor white trash used to have around here is slipping, and pretty soon won’t nobody care what backwards-ass people have to say.”
“Amen,” Rolson says. It’s not the last time he’ll ever utter anything religious, but in his heart the tide on God has already begun to recede.
7
We tracked Deuce’s cousin, Reginald, to a place outside town. I didn’t ask what Deuce wanted to do once we got there, but it also didn’t need explaining that he’d want to confront the man who had sold out his family to save his own skin.
The house was a ramshackle collection of sticks and bricks, though was dirtier than poorly constructed. Cigarette butts competed with dirty needles and broken beer bottles on the floor. Plastic bags lined the kitchen walls, half-deteriorated refuse spilling out onto the linoleum. It was a bona fide picture of Hell, the sort of thing you imagine when reading up on serial killers living at the edges of society.
“Well,” Deuce said, “Let’s get on with it.”
A quick one and a two and a three and—
The door opened. No resistance whatsoever.
The room was a sinister kind of dark, and the smell could have flipped a car. This was not what was coming from the kitchen. This was not rancid chicken or chummy whole milk.
This was flesh. Human flesh, going the way of the rest of the garbage in the house.
Deuce sniffed sharply and took a sideways glance back at me. I shrugged. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew what I imagined was in the room at the end of the hall, but there was no way I could have known that going in. We had been hoisting up dealers and junkies by the balls ever since landing in Jacksonville. How was I supposed to know this would be any different?
Long time since this place had been livable.
“You say this is a place where they filmed pornos?”
I shrugged. I didn’t open my mouth to speak because the smell was not something I wanted in my mouth. I couldn’t taste that for the rest of the day.
The whole house was possessed of a bizarre, otherworldly quality. Since the house was devoid of electricity, it was strange for it to be illuminated. Took me a second to realize it was, in fact, candles sending light into the house’s far corners. Truth be told, it looked more like a dumpster than a residence.
A stack of bones lay nearby, and the sound of the flies could have turned a mule’s stomach.
“Remind me to move to a big city as soon as possible,” I said. “I’m done digging around in backwoods hovels.”
The place was vile. Doors bowing on hinges as though stretched by a supernatural force. The summer heat and moisture had invaded every fiber of wood and caused it to swell and warp.
We searched through each open room in the place, and each was more bizarre than the last. They were all set up with tripods and stained, old beds. Not the sort of setup you’d imagine even for bargain basement porn, but here it was. How anyone could fuck for money in this place was desperate. Or forced.
And then we came upon what we were supposed to find. It wasn’t a gift or a present, but someone had certainly left it here for us.
Reginald was spread out like a billfold, split from sack to sternum. Nailed to the wall, not unlike Javvy, he was an homage to our crucified Lord & Savior. What the sickos responsible hadn’t accomplished, the wolves and flies had pretty much cleaned up.
He was a sad sight. Troubled me to look at him.
His body was ravaged, and the head had been sawed off and placed neatly next to the torso. Eyes opened. Mouth twisted in that pained way only the dead can manage. The slight tilt of the jaw. The lower rung of teeth protruding just above the bottom lip.
And the stare. The glassy, heavy lidded stare of the dead. It’s tough to look at, either way, but it’s especially bad on a person you know.
His eyes, they accused you. Whenever you happened to cross his line of sight, the eyes pronounced some kind of judgment on you. You did this to me, they said. I was moving along just fine, just doing my thing, until you came along. And now here I am, crucified to a fucking wall. Is that enough of a message for you?
His intestines hung in ropey strands from a gaping, open stomach wound, and a mound of what could only be his innards lay in a chewed heap beneath his feet. His torso was covered in stab wounds, and they’d desecrated every part of him, save for his face. His face, they’d left alone.
For recognition’s sake. They wanted us to know who was hanging up there.
“Poor bastard,” I said. I meant it, too. If I’d had a hat, I’d have covered my heart with it. One of the goddamnedest things I’d ever seen.
Deuce didn’t respond, but he sniffed once. Spat on the ground at our feet.
Reg was backlit for effect. Whoever had done Reg in possessed a dramatic streak. Gangland stuff. Not the usual inner city gang-banger nonsense. This looked old school. Colombian neckties and cement shoes snuffs.
We weren’t dealing with thugs carrying pistols. We weren’t even dealing with part-time hustlers. This was the real deal. If there was any real mob presence down here, it’s who I would imagine was involved here.
Deuce leaned out a nearby window and divested himself of his food. I followed suit shortly thereafter. The smell of a dead man is one thing. Somebody you know…that’s a whole ‘nother thing. The taste lingered for a long time afterward. I preferred the puke, but it was handily overmatched.
I checked out the scene, trying to glean something meaningful from this ghastly scene. Whoever had perpetrated this ghoulish scene wanted us to find it, so there was a chance they also left some other clues lying around.
Close examination of the body yielded nothing. It was dismaying to be so up close to the corpse of someone I had largely considered a friend, but like my father-in-law D.L. used to say: It is what it is. So, with that in mind, I poked around, looking from point to point on the wall for something out of the ordinary.
And then I found precisely what I was searching for. The corner of a piece of paper jutted from the container full of guts. It was small and nearly imperceptible, but I had somehow perceived it among the detritus of Reg’s remains.
I reached in. I forced my mind to contemplate other things. I fought the urge to scream.
“‘Scuse me, Rol, but what the fuck are you doing?”
“Found something,” I said, breathing through my mouth. Eyes closed. Mind racing.
“It’s a picture,” Deuce said, once I had wiped the human stain from the item.
“Correction: it’s a whole stack of pictures.”
I flipped through them. They depicted
Deuce’s cousin in various states of torment. Reg shirtless and beaten. Reg dribbling blood down his chin. And, finally, Reg blank-eyed, mouth slightly ajar. A dead man’s stare. My only positive takeaway: that version of him was still fully intact, unlike the figure dangling from the wall.
Flipping through the rest of the pictures, one in particular stuck out.
It was a picture of Taj snapped before his killers had forced him on the buzzsaw. He was dead but intact, and three men stood at ease in the background: Othello Dufour, Hector Dominguez, and my brother. From the images, I had no doubt who was the sawman of the group. If Hector Dominguez was the godhead and Othello Dufour was logistics, then Edrick was the muscle. The savage. The monster.
“They’re taunting us,” I said. “This is them telling us they’ve had enough of the underhanded bullshit. They’re daring us to come and find them. They’re laying down the gauntlet.”
No surprise, so far as I was concerned.
The question now remained: Who had taken the photograph? Who was behind the camera?
Beside me, Deuce didn’t say much. He was the picture of emotional constancy, but something burned deep and red behind his eyes.
“Get him down,” he said, at last.
Deuce went outside, and I performed the duty of cutting Reg free. He was held by ropes nailed to wall studs. I used a half-broken bar stool, and when I’d sawed through the last strand of rope, he dropped with a sadly human thud.
I found some unused garbage bags under the kitchen sink and cut one open to make a cover. There was a blood-stained sheet in the bedroom atop a mattress, and I placed that under Reg. Made it easier to drag him.
Deuce was waiting in the car. The dashboard lights threw a sickly green illumination over his face. Didn’t need to see it directly to know he was crying.
“Deuce,” I said, in that herky-jerky way people have of talking when they don’t quite know what’s supposed to come next. “You’ve been one hell of a friend to me, and not when I’ve deserved it.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Rol.”
“No, no,” I said. “I think I wear out the seat cushions in relationships. Tramp mud all over the welcome mats and so forth.”
“I think I see your point.”
“What I mean to say is, you’ve always given me a few more feet of rope. I owe you a hell of a lot, Darron.”
“Been awhile since you called me that,” he said.
“Been awhile since I’ve had cause to,” I responded.
“Well, I appreciate it,” he said. “I hope this isn’t just the looming pull of the gallows rope, so you can save your last minute wishes.”
“I don’t imagine I’ve got much saving grace left. I used it all up back in the Junction, and I survived by the skin of my ass back in Savannah. All that’s over with, and the way the devil’s been gnawing at your backside, I reckon the same is true of you.”
“Thank you, Rolson. For everything. You came down here and took on my brother’s murder like he was your own kin, and you know I’ll never forget that.”
I replied: “We’re going to put this in the ground. Whatever happens, you know? I don’t make it. You don’t make it. Either way, we let the dead sleep.”
With Javvy dead and Reginald gutted like a deer for processing, I lost all my contacts.
I set myself back on the streets, questioning the hookers and dopeheads who seemed likely to talk. They were reticent, at first — I reeked of cop — but eventually warmed up to me.
They gave me the same old details on Nikki: desperate girl in want of a way out of her current situation. She was an angel, a crack hoe, a bondage queen, a dead body. She was all the rumors of the streets packaged into a single person.
Something I didn’t want to tell Deuce was, I didn’t care much for Taj these days. He had become the fire alarm in the background, droning along as the building right in front of you burned to the ground. There was a foundation of humanity the kid seemed to have skipped out on, and I was now finding myself interested in who he had victimized instead of the man himself.
It was hard work, too, considering the line of dead bodies following me everywhere. They haunted me, but in a sense more metaphorical than literal these days. People on the streets seemed to know I was cursed. Like they could smell it on me, even if I couldn’t smell it on myself.
Dead women kept turning up. They were black, Hispanic, all prostitutes, so it went mostly unnoticed. Strangled and raped, tossed over a railing into the river, or dropped down an embankment and left there to rot, like bags of old fast food.
Whoever was responsible was peaking, reaching some height of paranoid frenzy, and I hoped it would lead to a major mistake.
Me, thinking I needed a break to uncover the murderer’s identity, while also secretly avoiding the fact that the name and the face were circling the drain of my memory, my conscious mind, the entire time.
It, the name, called to me. I woke up most nights with it hanging from my teeth like half-formed words.
Edrick.
Brother.
Murderer.
Monster.
And yet, the longer I didn’t find him, the more skittish the people around town grew about knowing who he was. The heat should have been up. If it were white girls, Jacksonville would have been a white-hot city, but the fact that people of color had ended up in the trash dumpsters of this town.
The news even failed to report on it, in most cases. Prostitutes go missing. They end up floating down river somewhere because of course they do.
But still I ventured into the low-hanging ceilings of the dilapidated tenement buildings and overgrown neighborhoods for the answers I knew wouldn’t come.
I kept a low profile, trying to establish a rounded perspective on the matter of the dead surrounding me. Deuce was involved, but he had let me take the lead, since his head was cloudy most of the time.
We’d be walking along, and he’d stop, look up at a neon sign or something, and then space out. I’d have to come back and pull him out of his funk, after which he’d utter some nonsense regarding dreams and wander on down the street.
He was a bulb without a current.
He had his moments, though. After some concrete beating, we managed to dig up the names of some girls who had “worked” with Nikki on the porn site she’d been forced to perform for. They were distant-eyed husks of their former selves. They twitched and shied away from us, even when we kept our distance. They thought they were playing sexy, but the truth was they were frightened and skittish in the most unfortunate ways. One of them threw herself at Deuce for a “favor” she needed. Dealer who wouldn’t leave her alone, though she threw the situation at us like he was an ex-boyfriend.
Deuce stared without emotion at these women as they sifted through tales of fucking for money. Fucking for drugs. Fucking on camera. Fucking in back alleyways. They were held down, strangled, beaten. Sometimes they were bound up and gagged. Johns held knives to their throats. Johns said they would kill them. Johns called them mother.
They gave us vague locations where this all happened, but nothing turned up a good lead.
I also made numerous pilgrimages to the site where we’d first encountered dead illegals huddled in a cabin in the swamp. It was a reminder of the potential we had squandered, of the bodies we had allowed to pile up around us. I pushed against my temples to get some spark of remembrance, some vague scent of a trail to the men who killed these people.
I got nothing.
The cops didn’t give a shit about that place. It was just another death trap for illegals, and if there was something that didn’t keep them up at nights, it was the lives of illegal immigrants.
They didn’t see it as a human rights issue. They didn’t see these people as people. They saw them as broken commodities, like shipments cracked on the way through customs. And once they discovered these people were being pimped out all across the U.S., their interest plummeted even further. Another situation where non-white
people were forgotten.
And it wasn’t like I was kicking down doors anymore. The thread had singed at the edge, and I was left with a blackened end I couldn’t follow.
We’d come close by invading the party at Hector’s place in the woods, but because we’d goofed it, he’d taken to the underground. And the mysterious figure I’d come to think of as my brother hovered somewhere in the mix.
The signal was growing more faint by the hour. Felt like we were running out of time, but Deuce didn’t seem concerned. He had devolved into a hibernating animal. He woke up to eat, but a few minutes later he was out again.
Sometimes I felt a slight jerk, like a fishing line going taut, but otherwise it was the big man pretty much on his own with that burden. The world of the dead was no longer my dominion, and part of me embraced the change. I need not cringe when passing cemeteries, or fear drifting off to sleep. Even my most decadent benders didn’t end with me traipsing through the weeds of someone’s broken past.
If his sleep was particularly troubled, the lights flickered. Old parlor tricks and poltergeist shenanigans.
He refused to contact his family, even though both of us had to deal with calls coming in from his mother at all hours of the day and night.
“It’s better off if she doesn’t know where we are,” he said, “because if she knows, then the people who want to know where we are will know, and it will be bad for them.”
“Don’t you think it’s already bad for them?” I asked.
“I can’t think of it in those terms.”
He said it like a man who knew more than he let on, but I let him walk away without arguing. He was now the mystic of the crew, and I was the muscle. Weird how life turns you around and forces you to deal with it.
8
And then it broke wide open for us.
Deuce was following one of his routes through the city when a bright purple Caddy slid through a red light without stopping. In it, sitting behind the wheel, was one Othello Dufour, and he looked cranked out of his fucking mind.
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