by Nick Petrie
“When we talked on the phone earlier, you said you didn’t have a gun,” Gantry said. “So where did this one come from? I’m just asking because it’ll go through ballistics. You seem like you’re trying to do the right thing here, but I don’t want any surprises.”
The young uniformed officer, directing traffic the day before, now stood a few steps away, listening in. Or maybe ready to step in if needed.
“I borrowed it,” Peter said. “I don’t know where else it’s been.”
“Well, who’d you borrow it from?” Gantry asked.
The Memphis detective really did sound like Elvis. The disconnect was a little disconcerting, as if the rest of Peter’s day hadn’t been weird enough. But he saw an opportunity in this conversation.
“You know, I never got her name,” Peter said. “She was wearing a red-and-white-seersucker jacket, driving with a guy named Robert Kingston. They were giving me a ride back here after my truck got stolen.”
Gantry’s eyebrows shot up. He shared a glance with the officer, whose name tag said R. MCCARTER.
“You hitched a ride with King Robbie? And took this weapon off Charlene Scott?”
Peter shrugged, innocent as a baby. “Like I said, I never got her name. Who’s King Robbie?”
Peter knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. Gantry, for all his charm and nice clothes, had those flat cop eyes that could see down deep into your secret soul. But it was Officer McCarter who answered.
“King Robbie’s the man who runs Memphis like his personal ATM,” he said. “Drugs, human trafficking, extortion, armed robbery, you name it. Anything bad happens in the city, King Robbie either started it, runs it, or gets a piece. And that’s just his side gig. Memphis is a transit hub, right? That’s why FedEx has its headquarters here. King makes his real money, serious money, moving weight.”
Gantry said, “That nobody Vinny Charles, who used to own Ms. Wyatt’s house? He was almost certainly working for King. Even if he didn’t know it.”
“So how much is serious money?” Peter asked.
“Before King, a guy named Isaac Bell ran the show,” Gantry said. “When we put him away six years ago, we found about ten million dollars in various offshore bank accounts. We rolled up as much of his operation as we could. King Robbie was a smaller fish back then, but he stepped up hard, took out anybody who might have been a competitor, then built a new organization on the foundation of the old one. He’s been the man to beat ever since.”
“He’s not real stable,” added McCarter. “There’s been a lot more killing since he took over.”
“Huh,” said Peter. “What about this Charlene Scott?”
“She’s his shooter,” said McCarter. “Allegedly, because witnesses change their minds or disappear. Was there a big guy behind the wheel? Like the size of an elephant?”
Peter nodded. “Kingston called him Brody.”
“He’s the muscle,” said McCarter. “If your legs need breaking, or maybe your arm pulled out of the socket, he’s the man for the job.”
Gantry looked at McCarter curiously. “You’re a beat cop?”
The uniformed officer shrugged. “I came up in this neighborhood,” he said. “Got some local knowledge.”
Gantry nodded, filing that information away for future exploitation, then turned back to Peter. “And they just happened to be driving by. Offered you a lift.”
Peter shrugged. “My truck was stolen. They were very nice. I thought it was some of that famous Southern hospitality.”
“And you’re just a carpenter, here to fix up the house.” Gantry stared at Peter. “But that wasn’t always your job, was it.” He wasn’t asking.
Peter smiled. “I think of myself as a problem solver.”
“Solve any problems overseas?”
“Not many,” Peter said. “Maybe caused more than we solved, looks like now.”
Gantry shook his head. “I don’t know what your game is, but you should take your ball and go home. These are serious people.”
“Somebody’s got to get Wanda’s place fixed up,” said Peter. “And keep an eye out for Wanda. I’m fairly serious about that myself.”
Gantry looked at the building, the dump truck lodged in the living room and the brick walls all shot to shit. “That house might be past saving.”
Peter looked at Wanda, still sitting in the open back door of the ambulance. He thought about the man with the machine gun. Then he thought about the look on the face of the kid who’d taken his truck, and the hard people chasing him.
“I don’t believe there’s anything past saving, long as you put in the work.”
Gantry looked at McCarter. “That’s just what we need. A goddamn idealist.”
* * *
• • •
Peter asked Wanda to go inside and collect as much of her work stuff as she could. He offered to help, but she just shook her head, so Peter waited in the yard and listened to the uniformed cops reporting back to Gantry from their neighborhood door-knocks.
Miraculously, no immediate neighbors had been hit, although there were a few minor injuries from exploding lamps and shattered windows as the machine-gun rounds pierced houses in the block behind Wanda’s, and the block behind that. Peter knew the effective range of the weapon was a hell of a lot farther, so it was still possible someone had been hurt and the police hadn’t connected the dots just yet.
Regardless, everyone was lucky that Wanda’s walls were twelve inches of solid masonry, red brick three layers thick. Soft, old brick, but still brick, and they soaked up a lot of rounds. The house was a big enough target that even a lunatic asshole with a firehose weapon hadn’t managed to miss it too often. Wanda’s old blue Toyota Land Cruiser was parked directly behind her house and remained somehow intact.
If Peter’s truck had been in the driveway, like it had the night before, it would probably look like a truck-shaped sieve. So maybe the kid who’d stolen it had actually done him a favor. If Peter ever got it back.
A man with an aluminum construction clipboard walked up the drive, staring intently at the house. He wore work boots and cargo pants and a wrinkled button-down shirt with a pair of mechanical pencils in the breast pocket. He hesitated at the cluster of cops, but Gantry waved him forward.
“I’m supposed to do a structural assessment on this property,” the man said, handing Gantry and Peter business cards for a building consulting business. “I’m Mark. But maybe now isn’t a good time?”
Peter looked at Gantry, who shrugged and passed the card to Peter. “Crime scene techs are done,” he said. “Might as well. I hope you’ve got workman’s comp.”
“Oh, I work all over,” said the engineer. “You wouldn’t believe the crap I see. Although this place is pretty damn old. I went to the city and this address showed up on the tax rolls in 1894. But it looks a lot older’n that to me.”
“Me too,” Peter said.
“In this part of town?” Gantry asked. “Isn’t it too small?”
“You’d be surprised how many historic houses are scattered around,” said the engineer. “They’re not all grand homes. This here was probably a farmhouse, from back when the land was taken from the Indians. It’s smaller, but all brick. The farmer was probably fairly prosperous. The city just grew up around it.”
“The crawl space entry’s around back,” Peter said. “Come find me when you’re done. I’m going to need drawings for temporary structural reinforcement to get the dump truck out. And probably more drawings for the city, when we rebuild.”
The engineer looked at Peter. “Are you kidding? I could tell driving up, this place should be condemned. History or not, the repair cost will be two or three times what the house is worth.”
“Tell that to the woman who calls it home,” Peter said. “Sometimes it’s not about the money.”
The engineer shook his head. �
��It’s your money. You want drawings, I’ll do drawings.” He walked toward the house.
Peter turned to Gantry. “What are the chances we can get a patrol car here overnight?”
“You’ll get a car,” Gantry said. “If I can spare them, I’ll put an unmarked at each end of the block, and a few officers in the house overnight. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll try again. Probably use artillery or something. But you’re not staying here, you know that, right? You’re getting Ms. Wyatt to a hotel or a friend’s house, something.”
“I tried that last night,” said Peter. “Maybe now she’ll listen to me.”
A white truck from EBOX slowed to a stop on the street with a hiss of its air brakes, carrying the Dumpster Peter had ordered that morning. The can on the back wasn’t anywhere near new, but it was six feet tall and twenty-two feet long and made of heavy steel. When the driver got out, Peter walked over and told him exactly where he wanted it.
When the driver finally unhooked his greasy cable, the big Dumpster sat parallel to the street with the back corner snugged up to the rear bumper of the dump truck. Combined, they made a steel wall in front of the house almost thirty-two feet wide.
Gantry looked at Peter. “Are you fortifying this building?”
Peter smiled. “Whatever gives you that idea?”
While the EBOX driver was dropping the can, the Eubanks Lumber truck arrived with a full unit of plywood and a stack of framing lumber. After EBOX was clear, Peter directed the lumber man into the driveway. When the hydraulic bed tipped up, the load slid down, angled along the side porch, making a wooden barrier four feet high, twenty-four feet long, and four feet thick.
Gantry shook his head. “If I see a sniper’s nest, you’re in trouble.”
Peter changed the subject. “What was going on when we talked this morning? Seemed like a lot of sirens in the background.”
“Some baby gangsters robbed a jewelry store out at the mall. It got pretty ugly.” Gantry looked at Peter. “What’s your interest?”
“No reason,” said Peter. “Just curious. Seems like a lot of major crime in Memphis.”
Gantry looked harder. Still not fooled. “It was pretty quiet until you got here. Now it’s like bees in a bottle, all shook up.”
Peter couldn’t resist. “Anybody ever tell you that you sound like Elvis Presley?”
“Thank you,” said Gantry. “Thank you very much.”
“Now you’re doing it on purpose.”
Gantry’s phone rang. He put it to his ear and walked away.
17
Peter found Wanda circling the dining room, with her 9-by-12 prints spread out on the table, all scattered from their neat stacks.
“I thought you were packing,” he said. Broken window glass crackled under her sneakers.
She still had the paramedic’s silvery rescue blanket wrapped around her, loose ends bunched in one fist. “Yeah, no.” Her eyes drifted from one print to the next. “I still can’t decide what images to use in this show. I’m running out of time.”
“Wanda, you need to get your things. We’re moving you to a hotel, remember? A nice quiet place where you can work.”
“I can’t afford a hotel.” She kept circling. “This is my home.”
Peter wasn’t crazy about hotels himself. “What about family or friends?” he asked. “Anyone with a spare bedroom?”
She shook her head. “Those bridges got burned a long time ago.”
Peter looked at the ruination of the house, at the half-empty bottle of Tito’s vodka on the coffee table, the chipped cereal bowl filled with orange prescription bottles. He imagined Wanda wasn’t easy to live with, especially not like this.
“The hotel’s on me,” he said. “We’ll find you a nice place with room service. What’s that big old place downtown?” She didn’t answer. “Wanda?”
She just made another circuit of the table, touching the corners of the rough prints with a fingertip. All those images of bloodshed and carnage.
“Wanda.” Peter spoke more quietly now. “You know we have a problem, right?”
“I know.” She didn’t take her eyes from the prints. “I’m on deadline. Will you just leave me be so I can work?”
Peter hoped the paramedic had given her something to calm her down. Either that or she was in worse shape than he’d thought.
Whatever challenges Wanda had carried home from her work as a conflict photographer, the dump truck and machine-gun attacks had brought them forward again. Peter was familiar with that.
Now she was trying to focus on something specific, something she could control even if it didn’t make sense. Anything to keep her from reliving what she’d just gone through. Peter knew Recon Marines, warriors all, who’d lay out their gear on their rack after each brutal contact with the enemy, each item set in a particular place, cleaned and oiled and adjusted and readjusted to some millimeter-scale plan only they could see.
The back of Peter’s truck was pretty goddamn organized, too. At least, the last time he saw it.
“Sure,” he told Wanda. “You do what you need to do.”
He went into the family room and surveyed the chaos. Wanda’s obsession did not extend to housekeeping. Dirty clothes in a heap, the kitchen a mess, fruit flies circling over the trash can. Debris from her ruined home office spread out all over.
Behind him, he heard Wanda pacing around the dining table, muttering to herself.
She was so deep in the weeds she couldn’t see her way out.
Peter knew how that felt, too.
So he washed and dried her dishes, put away the food that was salvageable, and threw out the rest. He filled a pair of garbage bags with her dirty laundry. He had no idea how long it would be until she could come back to the house. If she ever would.
There was no decent container for her office computer gear, so he pulled out the biggest kitchen drawer he could find, stacked its contents neatly on the countertop, then filled the drawer with a wide monitor that looked like it might still work, along with the disassembled desktop computer, and the leftover parts tucked gently into Ziploc bags.
With some regrets, he added the vodka bottle and her collection of pills.
The surprise came when he went into the bathroom. Her toiletry kit, fully stocked, hung from a nail pounded into the back of the door.
He pulled back the shower curtain. Inside the ancient bathtub, he found a compact rolling duffel, a battered black waterproof messenger bag, and a high-end camera pack.
In a conflict-area hotel, in case of a mortar or machine-gun attack, the safest place was often either under the bed or inside a cast-iron tub.
Her house was a mess, but her work gear was in perfect order. He opened the duffel and found hardworking travel clothes, so she’d be ready to get on a plane at any time. The messenger bag was her portable office, neatly stocked with a high-end laptop, spare storage drives, a stack of neatly rubber-banded reporter’s notebooks, a satellite phone, and an expensive pair of noise-canceling headphones. Her camera pack carried multiple lenses and camera bodies wrapped in scraps from old flannel shirts and tucked into padded compartments. Chargers and spare batteries, memory cards snapped into plastic cases.
Either she’d known she could be ready to go at a moment’s notice, or she was so far gone she’d forgotten.
Like any number of guys he’d known, including maybe himself, it was possible that Wanda was better in the fight than out of it.
He found her keys and carried everything out to her blue Land Cruiser. It only took him three trips. Then he dusted off an empty brown accordion file, went into the dining room, and walked along behind her, gathering her prints into neat stacks and tucking them into the pockets.
It wasn’t until she’d made a complete circuit of the table and found it empty that she realized what he’d done.
She looked at hi
m with utter outrage. Her short dreadlocks quivering, her sharp-featured face ran rapidly through every emotion known to humankind. She struck his chest hard with her narrow fists, and opened her mouth to howl.
He opened his arms and gathered her gently in. Held her like a sister while she screamed and moaned and stomped her shoes on the broken glass. Her tears soaked the collar of his shirt.
Finally she calmed enough to take a deep, shuddering breath, leaned into him, and became still.
After a few moments, he felt her come back to herself. He opened his arms and took her by the shoulders and looked into her face. “Better?”
A tired smile. “I wish you were a woman. Then we could do the full treatment.”
He smiled back. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Now can we get the hell out of here?”
* * *
• • •
In the backyard, the engineer was stepping out of his coveralls. “I was just getting ready to come look at the inside. This house is a lot older than I thought. I love that old tree stump holding up the center of the house, and those cast-off bricks in the dirt around it. If you really want to rebuild this place, we’re going to have to talk.”
“No problem,” said Peter. “I have your card.” He took the man’s pencil and wrote Wanda’s cell number on his pad of graph paper. “Call when you’re ready.”
Peter had a few things to take care of before he could start house repairs.
Figure out who was trying to destroy it, for one thing.
For another, get his truck and tools back.
What was it about that skinny kid?
18
Eli Bell sat on the three-legged couch, guitar on his lap, fingers frozen on the strings.
He’d wanted to sleep, but every time he closed his eyes he could see it in his mind, the startled look on Skinny B’s face as those three red splotches showed on his white painter’s suit.
Eli had long ago lost count of the number of people gone missing from his life. Some had got caught up fighting each other, young boys trying to prove to themselves and everyone else that they could stand up like a man in this world. Others had stepped into the drug trade, the only real way ahead they could see. Most of those had been taken by the police, like Eli’s father, or cut down by rival sets, like his brother Baldwin. Still others, like his mother, had picked up a pipe or a needle. The needle had killed her. Others it turned into walking ghosts.