Thorazine Beach

by Bradley Harris

  Still, I walked that line of sight Mac had mapped for me. I’d think of something before I got there.

  It was right there before me. Hapag-Lloyd, right in line. Something-something-five-oh-six. Scrawled under the Lloyd name, in silver spray-paint, fresh enough it couldn’t have been there more than days, three-six-gamma.

  I stopped. Looked left. Squinted, wiped the wet out of my eyes. Way down the end. Trailer. Red letters across the rear doors. Crete.

  I had to look. I’d earned the right. Felt better going this way anyhow. I’d seen figures moving about here and there on the container lot, though it seemed they hadn’t seen me. Out on the trailer lot: Nothing. No one.

  The ground leveled as I neared, the footing not so bad, now, the light a little better. Maybe I’d find a gap in the fence. Maybe, I thought wildly, walk over to the south gate, pass myself off as a worker at quitting time, one who’d got into some especially dirty business. Which, no doubt, I had, in more ways than one.

  The Crete trailer neared. MacDonald’s instructions. I dug my cell phone out of a pants pocket with a tear big enough I could have lost it. Lucky.

  “MacDonald?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Crete.”

  That, he’d told me, was all I’d need to say.

  I heard some kind of sigh, some kind of letting-go of breath on the other end. Then: “Thank you, Jack. You can pack up and go home, now.”

  “Um…not exactly, Mac.”

  “Why not?”

  “Tell you when you get here.”

  MacDonald sighed. I hung up.

  I stood. Then heard. Movement, inside the trailer. Muffled sounds that couldn’t be voices. Could they?

  I closed my phone, found another pocket for it.

  And in that pocket, found my folding Gerber.

  I had to know. I flicked the Gerber open on my second try, discovering I’d lost some little piece of flesh from the end of my thumb. A little more blood, too. Got some on my face when I licked the thumb.

  At the back of the trailer, I reached up, foot on the step, grabbed for a door hinge, missed, grabbed again and succeeded. Had to saw through the damn plastic seal—why did I never remember to sharpen that knife? Jumped down. Reached for the door lever, jerked it, pulled the right-hand door open.

  The left opened by itself.

  Flashlight from inside. Eyes. Mexicans, by the look of them. A dozen or more, maybe two.

  Wildlife.

  The flashlight turned on me.

  Heavy accent, bit of a sneer: “You look like shit, mang”.

  17.

  01 August, late morning

  The Yellow-Breasted Corncrake

  I wasn’t going to just let that gear go. It wasn’t Eileen’s. Red Line didn’t even own surveillance gear. As hard-boiled as they got was a little internet sneakery. No, I’d bought and paid for that stuff myself. Or Lynette had.

  I made McDonald meet me at the grocery on Raines. To get even that much, I had to say You owe me. And Bring my gun.

  He complied. Beyond that, all I got for my trouble was You look even worse in the daylight, my piece and holster perfunctorily handed to me in a paper lunch bag, and his refusal to accompany me to my no-longer-private little corner of the CN yard. He just shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t risk being seen.”

  Then: “Look, I really am sorry. I owe you better, Jack. I’ll explain, I will. Not now, but…just go get your…”

  The look on my face told him there was little he could say. He sighed, turned, left.

  I went to the indent in the fence, found the gate still unlocked, drove all the way in, walked over the ditch to my dirt pile, mumbling something between bitching and prayer that I’d find my gear. There was none of it left. Not so much as a dropped lens cap. I’d have to tell Mac: A couple of trips to the Chinese buffet wasn’t going to cut it.

  I did see a dog, an old, yellow, snarling thing, nosing the dirtied remains of what looked like a Snickers bar. Prints from my own combat boots. Another set of prints—mismatched shoes, one smaller, one larger, and running alongside those, the repeated imprint of a cane. And, on the plank bridge across the reeking ditch, a great spat gob of what had to be chaw.

  That and two empty shotgun shells. Ten-gauge. Those I bagged and took away, figuring I’d give them to MacDonald.

  Not that I carry all that CSI stuff around with me. But I did find on the dirt pile the empty baggie from one of my tuna sandwiches, so I tweaked the shells into that, using a pencil, resealed the baggie.

  Evidence.

  Of what, I didn’t know.

  18.

  03 August, early afternoon

  Nikki’s Bedside Manner

  “Cut yourself shaving, Jack?”

  “Stuff it, toots.”

  “Free coffee and kiss it better?” Nikki said.

  “Your coffee’s crap. I’ll take the kiss and an orange juice,” I said.

  “The hell you will,” Nikki said. “Our orange juice has eight kilograms of sugar a serving.”

  “And the company thinks there’s forty-two servings in this,” I said, hoisting the OJ I’d grabbed, setting it back in the rack.

  “Sit your chubby little ass down,” she said. “You look a mite stove up. Eileen take you two falls out of three? Or did Miz McCorkle and you do some rasslin’ last night?”

  “I don’t know I can get up again,” I said. “Gonna bring me my coffee?”

  “That ‘n’ more,” she said.

  True to her word, is our Nikki. Cappuccino in a china cup, napkins, the works, all as she stood before me. Skinny, she said, but still…and last, a kiss. Bent down and planted it right on the mouth. There’s a first time for everything. I got a good look at the bruising. Still bad, a few more colours than the traditional black and blue. But she’d done a good job hiding the worst of it with some cream, blush, whatever all that stuff is. And the kiss wasn’t bad.

  “French cost extra, Nikki?”

  “We’re talking whole new tax bracket, bozo,” she said, and moved back to the counter.

  “Nikki,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about—”

  “No you don’t,” she said, reappearing. I thought I saw a subtle nod toward the door.

  A sudden appearance. MacDonald. New suit. Blazing white shirt, English spread collar. Turquoise paisley tie and chewing a toothpick, leaning hands-in-pockets against the wall. “I like to watch,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes of cruel banter. Score: MacDonald, fifteen… Minyard, zero.

  Then, seated, serious: “How much you know, Jack?”

  “By ‘wildlife,’ you meant Mexicans,” I said.

  “Kinda,” he said.

  “Park that,” I said. “We’ll clear that up later. Three-six gamma.”

  “Not gang graffiti, Jack.”

  “I knew that.” Which, sort of, I did. “Lining up, radio tower?”

  “Low-tech signaling. Ingenious. They didn’t touch cell phones,” he said. “Stopped that weeks and weeks ago.”

  “Couldn’t they have used burn phones?” I asked.

  “Burn phones?” he said. “You get all this lingo from TV, don’tcha.” He shook his head. “Caught two of them that way already. New technology. ‘Sides, we had two of them nailed on the Mexican end. We turned both. One of them died in prison. The other—well, whereabouts unknown, now,” he said. “But we got what we wanted out of him. So they turned to semaphore signals.”

  “Semaphore? Like in, Boy Scouts, waving flags?”

  “Something like,” he said. “They’d got hold of some guys from the trucking company—”

  “Crete,” you mean.

  “Yup. Perfectly legitimate company. The company itself was clean as a whistle. But the cartel had got hold of three guys, truckers and a dispatcher, plus a yard guy from CN, another guy at the container pool. All had rap sheets, here and there, and somehow they’d got past HR at Crete and CN. Blackmail—said they’d spill the beans to the companies if they didn’t go along. Some place
of origin for the container, they’d get one with one of the right numbers, spray the graffiti on. Deal was—if the yard crane happened to drop the container in that exact position—”

  “End of the row—”

  “Yup. Position 14101—fourteenth rank, row one, bottom—then that meant the next night there’d be a shipment of prime Mexican beef—”

  “That’s a little cruel, Mac.”

  “You should meet the people into this kinda thing, Jack.”

  “I wonder whether I haven’t.”

  “The guy who shot at you, Jack?” That wasn’t, as it happens, who I’d been thinking of. But I didn’t let on.

  “Yeah, Mac. I tied him to the old house, the one behind.”

  MacDonald smiled, sat back, arms folded. “Do, please. Detect on, old chum…”

  “So…” I leaned in. Got to filling in the rest of the story. No slouch of a P.I. here, no, sir. “That window on the top floor—that’s where they observed from—”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, smiling.

  “Then—” Things dawn on me slowly, sometimes. “Mac, you said, I see the container with the number and three-six-gamma, that’s a sign the trailer with the Mexican illegals will appear the next night. But I only saw it the…”

  MacDonald licked his finger, marked a ‘1’ in the air. “That’s because you skipped your duty the night of July thirtieth,” he said. “Slacker.”

  “So I just happened to bump into this container when I ran over—”

  “Yup,” he said. “Thing had been sitting there twenty-four hours or more.”

  “And the Mexicans?”

  “Been there about twenty minutes, Jack,” he said. “So Crete’s and the yard’s records told us.”

  “So I got myself winded and carved up for noth—”

  “No, no,” he said. “Yard records wouldn’t have picked out the container by number. What mattered was the combination of the container number and the graffiti. And that we could get only through visual observation.”

  “So I wasn’t useless at—”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’m grateful.”

  I went for broke. “Grateful enough to replace three thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment?”

  “Um…grateful enough to want to…”

  Sigh.

  “So. Mac. The old house. The gang used the upstairs window to make the same observations I was doing?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you caught—”

  “Red-handed,” he said. “Two guys.”

  “One of whom was the geezer with the cane and the shotgun.”

  “Um…no,” he said. “As it happens.”

  “Well, who the hell is he in this crazy plot?”

  “Best we can tell, Jack—the whole police force, I mean…he’s just…some old geezer with a cane and a shotgun. Comes up, does this kinda stuff every six months or so, been doing it for a couple of years. Reports from all over South Memphis.”

  “So he didn’t confess to—”

  “No, Jack, you don’t understand. We haven’t caught him. We haven’t any idea who he is.”

  “I did bag two of his shotgun shells for you, Mac.”

  “And thank you so much, sweetie, for helping Mommy make the cookies. Now go watch cartoons and Mommy clean up this mess.”

  “Couldn’t you get any prints off the casings?” I asked.

  “He’s real careful,” Mac said.

  “DNA, I don’t suppose?”

  “DNA would be pretty slight, to begin with, Jack. Second, might not survive the blast of firing very well. Third, his DNA wouldn’t get on the casings after firing—the shells’d likely just eject. Fourth…well, we did try to see what the lab could do, but…”

  “But what, Mac?”

  He reached into his suit jacket pocket. “Here’s your Super Duper Official Junior CSI Kit, Jack,” he said. Pair of latex gloves. Purpose-manufactured evidence bags with labels—not at all like the plastic sandwich baggie I’d improvised with. Official Memphis PD marker pen. “Next time,” he said, “try your best not to get mayonnaise and tuna all over your evidence.”

  “So this geriatric nutcase,” I said. “He’s still out there?”

  “Alive and not quite well, so far as we can tell,” Mac said. “Perhaps you two’ll meet one day.”

  “Christ, I hope—”

  “Might turn out to be a nice old guy,” he said. “I’m seeing the two of you together…rockers on the front porch…talkin’ old times.”

  I heaved a resentful sigh and broke a smile at the same time.

  “And if he’s still luggin’ the shotgun,” he said, “maybe you can still outrun him.”

  19.

  25 July, early afternoon

  Collierville

  If you think you’re too classy for Memphis, Cordova, or Bartlett, you live in Germantown. Think you’re too classy for Germantown, you live in Collierville, one burg farther out. Too classy for the planet, you live in Meadow Woods. Nominally, legally, administratively part of the city of Collierville, Meadow Woods drew a line, distinguishing itself. ‘Now Entering Meadow Woods’, said a brick-and-stone sign, ringed in meticulously maintained monkey-grass and blooming irises, a rig that couldn’t have cost less than my annual income. Fitting—some of those lots were large enough they’d be a chore to walk across, and some you’d be tempted to drive. If Germantown had “gated communities,” I thought, this one would have machine guns and concertina wire. All, of course, correctly landscaped.

  Somewhere back at city hall, these houses had street numbers. Out here, though, they had names. The Briars. Cotton Hill. Levee Reach. Clayton McCorkle’s Winter Bayou, I saw from the copied plat I’d scooped from Collierville’s planning department, was the only number on its street. A street I’d not be driving, I saw. The iron gate would have looked formidable if I’d been driving a tank. How he’d scooped private possession of a whole city street for his own was anyone’s guess. But, then, there’s a lot goes on in Memphis that has to do with extraordinary privilege.

  I hadn’t come to see Barbara Jean, wasn’t intending to go in. I just wanted to see the place for myself. And couldn’t quite. Not from the gate, which gave a view of a curving rock wall and another inner gate. And security cams, on poles and trees—moving cams, I noted. I backed Mitzi out, guessing my picture had already been taken at the outer gate, looked for another viewpoint, and found it, finally, on the north side of the property, where some horticulturally horrific disease had evidently struck a stretch of hedge and left its limbs bereft of leaves. I parked, struggled up a rise, clambered to the top of the stone wall and over the crest of the rise where the wall ran lower than elsewhere. And, through the hedge’s barren limbs, saw.

  The house loomed out of the hilltop, about the size of an aircraft carrier. A house built less for its style than for its brute visual weight. Not necessarily handsome, architecturally. And certainly not what you’d call beautiful. Impressive, yes—in the way a gigantic warehouse is impressive, when you see one for the first time. Imagine a McMansion—the kind you see in GeeTown and Collierville. You know how they assemble those. A French farmhouse roof here, white columns there, over here three dormers, there an eyebrow window, now a gable. A dog’s breakfast. “Architectonic,” you might say—a borrowing from every period, movement, regional style, and every bit of it faux. Like an ignorant, angry kid who stole every Lego piece in town and all he wanted was to make whatever he was building big.

  Clayton McCorkle had made it big. In construction, mostly—not surprising, given the acres of square-footage I was staring at. I’d scouted him out at the Crescent Club, on the say-so of a couple of buddies who hung about the fringes of local wealth. The fact McCorkle met people at the Crescent Club—three, four times a week, the bartender told me—said a lot. If you were old money, if you had pedigree, you’d more likely meet at the University Club in Midtown, where you’d still hear, straight-faced, the term respectability, in accents that harkened back t
o an imagined Old South. The kind of respectability, incidentally, that meant the only black people on the premises were “servants.” And called that.

  The Crescent Club, though, perched atop the building that lent its name, an elegantly anonymous late-eighties edifice that defined the east end of the Poplar-240 split. A building of vaguely styled “consultants,” a building of new-money brokers who’d made it on new-money clients and therefore could sport golf shirts and sockless, open-toed sandals in the office—the grown-up, monied equivalent of Memphis State frat boys sporting backwards ball caps and thinking themselves original, defiant, their own men. The Crescent Club took anyone who could write the cheque—more modest than the term private club might make you think—and didn’t actually smell. They’d even taken MacDonald, whose card I used at the door, my thumb over his picture.

  Three times that week, I’d sat near Clayton McCorkle and his buddies—a breakfast and two lunches. No need for disguises or subterfuge—in a club, you’d expect to see the same people. I heard laughter. A couple of dirty crony-jokes. And a guy deeply into construction, construction people, and not much else. One day, he came in brushing dust off his khakis, which bore another, darker stain. “Guy on a site,” he said to the trio who’d been waiting too long and decided they’d best get on with lunch. “Not mine—a subcontractor’s guy. Half cut his thumb off with a skill-saw. I hadda take him to Collierville Baptist. Poor bastard got no insurance, so we’re gonna take care of him.” He sat, wrote the name out three times on his own business cards, handed them around. “Put this old boy in your prayers, y’all. Grace a God, nerves in his hand won’t be all fucked up.”

  The Crescent Club was one thing. Clean. Air-conditioned. Safe. Out here at the house…I moved along the wall…

  20.

  27 July, afternoon

  Teatime

  “You buying?” MacDonald said through the phone.

  “Yep,” I said. “I’m expecting some money, so I thought I’d splurge. Big cheque from the Memphis PD for all that camera equipment.”

  “Sarcastic bastard,” he said. “It’s what? Four o’clock. Perfect for tea. Does Bucks have crumpets?”